Absentmindedly, Rachel traced little circles on Gar's palm with her thumb as she watched his face for signs of life. Wistfully, she brought his hand up to her face and held her cheek in his hand, mimicking how he held her once when a roundhouse kick in a blindfolded training session had accidentally connected with her face. Now she smiled at the memory. It had taken a long time for them to do anything right in training.
They'd had years together but she hadn't used them, and now she had years of missed opportunities to dwell on while she kept vigil at his bedside.
After a full day of ticking to Dick's rhythm, his heart had begun to beat on its own again, though it took until the following morning before he was breathing without help. Now her chest tightened as she watched him, surrounded by the very best Wayne Enterprises' Medical Division had to offer. How long had it been? Three days? Four? She'd seen the sun rise and set a number of times through the wall-to-wall windows of the infirmary but hadn't bothered counting.
She hadn't bothered with much of anything.
Gar had to come out of this. But she'd blocked any and all magic from reaching his brain, including her own, and so far, the barrier didn't show any signs of degrading. Try as she might, she couldn't reach him. She'd once gotten Dick into Conner's consciousness, had healed Dawn from multiple states away, but she couldn't sense a single thing about the boy right in front of her. The scans they'd done had confirmed he still had brain activity and didn't have any damage severe enough to show up on an MRI, but he wouldn't wake up.
All she could do was hold his hand, that point of contact that had brought them back to each other so many times before, as Dick and Kori whispered behind the infirmary's door. They'd been doing that a lot. She hadn't bothered trying to eavesdrop. The only sound she cared about was Gar's breathing.
She tried breathing with him sometimes to feel closer to him, connecting them with her magic and having her lungs breathe with his. It helped when she'd be looking at Gar and all of a sudden feel like she was suffocating under the weight of everything that had gone wrong.
She still remembered Rose's disbelief a few months after they returned to San Francisco when she'd asked Rachel why she and Gar were still stuck in limbo. After everything went down with Jason while she (and Jericho) were out of the country with Jericho's mother, she'd been understandably frustrated with her friends not acting while they had the chance.
"When I met my father," Rachel had said, "I learned who I am at the darkest I can go." Rose understood that much implicitly. "And what could make me that person again." She'd winced at the memory. "I was born to bring the Destroyer of Worlds here. To be a Destroyer right alongside him. And when I thought I lost Gar, I was ready to be; to kill the world, conquer it with him, and then move on to the next, and the next, until all that was left was the darkness I felt inside."
Rose had been a bit shocked by that but, surprisingly, took it in stride. Rose had never seen what Rachel was like before the jewel in her head changed her, but she'd fallen victim to one of the rare moments since when her power just spilled out of her without control. She knew her friend had one hell of a dark side. Most of the time, Rachel thought Rose liked her all the more for it.
She still hadn't gotten why this meant Rachel and Gar couldn't happen, though.
"Everyone else, he put in situations in their minds where they did something terrible to release their darkest selves, but all it took for me was losing Gar and feeling like it was my fault. My dad had known me all of a few hours, and he knew whose death would affect me like that." She cringed, hurting at the idea of being that readable in the field. Dick had never brought it up, but she knew what a weakness that was tactically.
"We'd only known each other a matter of weeks, and if Gar had died, if he hadn't used his last breath to transform, none of us would be here. This world wouldn't be here. A lot of worlds might not be."
She would forever be haunted by what she could have been if Gar hadn't healed his body through the remaking of it. If she ever needed a reminder of how different they were, she'd remember how Gar was the only one her father couldn't make go dark. And there she was, having done so much less than her friends to release her darkest self, yet that version of her hadn't even needed her father's mind control to want to watch the world burn.
"So, what—if you let yourself get more attached, it would end even worse?" Rose had asked skeptically. "I'm not sure you could top ending the universe, so where's the harm in being happy?"
Rachel wasn't sure what she'd said in response, but she knew better now. She'd fooled herself into thinking putting distance between them would mean loving him less. That it meant she would never feel as empty as she had when she'd joined sides with her father.
She'd fooled herself into believing that waking up from that darkness had healed the wound in her soul Gar's death had caused. But it hadn't even sutured it. That wound had never closed. Maybe it never would.
But she was done trying to fill it with distance.
Hopefully this isn't too repetitive, but at this point, she's kind of trapped in one of the guilt/shame spirals she was in a lot during season 1. She can make all the resolutions about being better, but her mind is stuck because he just won't wake up. I haven't been rereading past chapters to ensure a cohesive story as much as I usually do, but I realized that may be part of why the shortest length of time between posting chapters of When It All Burns Down is like six months. I figure, since I can still do edits after I post these, I might as well just get it all out instead of spending loads of time obsessively editing.
