This chapter is a shoutout to first responders, especially EMS. What you all do is amazing.
I got semi-addicted to British emergency medicine reality tv during the first few months of the pandemic. I recommend BBC's Ambulance, Inside the Ambulance, Air Ambulance ER, and Helicopter ER if anyone's interested in the genre. Also, Coast Guard Alaska. It's awesome.
The moment she saw Gar start to fall, Rachel realized her mistake.
All her mistakes.
The things she'd told herself, the reasons to stay away, shattered like glass baubles; she could almost see them bursting at the edges of her vision as she loosed a blood-curdling scream, letting out every bit of withheld emotion in her soul as her magic tried to reach him.
None of it had ever made him safer.
Her power poured out of her in all directions until Gar was the only thing she could see. He seemed to fall so slowly as she ran to him. She had no idea what her powers were doing to occupy her father, and she didn't care– not as long as they kept him at bay. All that mattered was Gar. The moment Trigon's magic hit him, he'd gone so pale. She reached him in time to catch him by the shoulders before his head hit the ground, but the second she touched him, her blood ran cold.
Rachel collapsed into a kneeling position with Gar's head cradled in her lap, feeling like all her blood was retracting from the hands that held him. Like it was running backward to escape the knowledge her powers granted her when they'd touched.
This boy who'd been the brightest light by far in the darkness of her life was dead.
The poison had started in his heart. In probably the single beat it had lasted, it pushed the poison through to his lungs. The veins in his chest were burned. His organs had been damaged beyond any surgeon's ability to repair, and while it was traveling slower without his pulse to aid it, her father's sorcery was still spreading through Gar's body. But, so far, his mind was still here.
And for all that her powers were the only thing she had to cure him, she hated them too because she could feel with absolute certainty that Gar was beginning to succumb more than just physically. She could feel his consciousness fading, just as she had in Ohio when a poison that had reached his mind pulled the life from him.
In an instant, she'd erected a barrier to all magic around his brain. The poisonous spell hadn't gotten there yet, and she wouldn't let it this time.
Still, she whimpered at the sudden loss.
Putting a barrier around Gar's mind also cut her off from feeling his consciousness, and for a second, she thought she'd lost him for good.
And now, if he did succumb mentally to this curse, Rachel would have no way of knowing. He could become brain-dead out here on the street, and she wouldn't be able to tell.
Rachel cupped her trembling hand, resting her fingertips and the base of her palm on Gar's motionless chest, and tried to draw the magic out of him. Wisps of black smoke started swirling into her palm from his chest. Eyes swimming with tears she wouldn't let fall, Rachel knew it was taking too long, but she couldn't risk cutting corners. If he had any of this magic still inside him, any attempt to resuscitate him would just make it worse.
But even though she could no longer feel it, she knew that with every shaking breath she took, every beat of her own pounding heart, Gar was getting farther away. She used her every bit of will and focus, and every shred of goddamn power she got from the jewel in her head to draw the jet-black magic out of him.
Darkness had no place inside Gar.
Finally, minutes later, the last of her father's power left Gar's chest and Rachel flinched at the sudden cacophony around her. She hadn't realized how quiet things had gotten; it felt like the world had held its breath, waiting for the last of the poison to leave him. Dick and Kori were suddenly by her side, and when Kori put a hand on her shoulder, she almost mechanically shuffled her knees from under Gar's head, tilting it back to open his airway.
They had trained for this.
Over and over.
Thank god Dick was so uptight.
"Not breathing," came her shaking voice as she drew in her first full breath in what had to have been at least four minutes. "No pulse."
"Tim, get the car," Dick shouted to their comrade, who was already running.
"Hold on," Rachel said as Dick pulled out his Escrima Sticks. She focused her power on Gar's heart, healing tissue damage the magic had left. "Go."
He used the electrified batons to shock Gar's chest as Rachel reached her magic inside his damaged lungs and made them pull in air, healing them as she went.
She had chosen her fear of losing him, of the person she would become if she lost him, over Gar so many times. Now that it could actually happen, all she could think about were the times they could have had if she hadn't chosen to withdraw from him after her first battle with Trigon.
Rachel held fast to Gar's hand as Dick moved on to chest compressions, roughly humming the BeeGee's "Stayin' Alive" to ensure he kept up the right tempo when Tim pulled up in the SUV. As Kory used a force field to lift Gar off the concrete and into the hatchback, Rachel experimentally reached out to him with her powers and sucked in a huge breath. Seeing Gar's chest rise, she exhaled with a shaky smile and watched his chest fall. "Dick, take his hand. I need someone with a heartbeat." As soon as they'd both climbed in the back of the car, she closed her eyes, willing her power to link them too, sighing with relief when it did.
While Kory drove like a bat out of hell on the way back to Titans Tower, some small, dark part of Rachel could appreciate the irony of the situation. When she first met her father, what she'd learned about the strength of her connection to Gar, the pain and guilt she'd experienced when she felt responsible for his death, and the thing it turned her into, were why she'd kept her distance, but it took Trigon coming back and trying again for her to realize it had all been so stupid.
Rachel had let her father convince her that she was the reason for Gar's death, but now that it happened again, she knew in her bones that it hadn't been her fault, then or now. Her mother had poisoned Gar to make him sick the first time; Trigon had manipulated and corrupted and controlled her family to kill him, but that wasn't on her—even though she'd invited him in.
At the time, it had been the only way to save Gar's life.
What was on her were the four years of missed chances; every time he'd been there for her and she'd pulled away. Every single time she should have been there for him but had kept her distance. She'd been haunted by the feeling of his loss, terrified of the demon she became. They'd barely known each other back then and, when she thought he'd died, he'd taken all her humanity with him.
But staying away hadn't made her any less likely to lose him in the end.
Whatever Dick saw on her face had him holding out his free hand over the body they were both sustaining. Holding it, she finally let the tears fall.
Fun Fact: Stayin' Alive is actually the perfect song to time CPR to since it has just over 100 bpm.
I'm following the example of the whole confusing AF Elko thing, and Rachel has no idea that she used her powers to slow time around her while she operated at normal speed to remove the poison from Gar.
I really hope they address the whole thing with Rachel's heart on the show. It would have been so traumatizing to see her still-beating heart ripped from her chest like that, not to mention the emotional implications of having completely abnormal physiology (she grew up thinking she was human and now all it takes is a chest x-ray to prove she's not). Plus, with the way we conflate the physical heart and emotions/love, there's a lot the show could do with it if they ever actually addressed it.
On an unrelated note, I think the soundtrack to these first two chapters is Kelly Clarkson's Because of You.
Only two days between chapters!
