A/N: I think I've decided, after months of trying to write theme 09: Figuring and nothing coming or working the way I want it to, that these Echoes just won't let me push them or prod them any way I see fit. I need to let the words come for these as they will. Case in point: This one.

Thanks: General thanks going on 'emsscraps' eventually. Probably not tonight, though. This one-shot, drabble-sort was a fluke, inspired in that 'hit-on-the-side-of-the-head-pay-attention-and-write-me-damnit' sort of way. I should be studying.

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Echoes
by Em

"Show me slowly what I only know the limits of..."
- Dance Me To the End of Love, Kate Gibson

Partings
(10: I'll Miss You)

"I'll miss you."

Three simple little words, deceptively simple and relatively shallow. How many times had he heard them spoken? From people in Gotham when he was Dick Grayson, on the street as he passed faceless strangers in the throes of goodbye. Countless. So countless they had lost their meaning and their strength somewhere along the way.

He stopped hearing them. They became a formality. They didn't mean what they should have.

They didn't signify a heart that would be empty and hollow until the other's return. In the off-hand, absent moments when the words and their speaker slipped into his consciousness, he didn't think about the immediate pang of panic at waking and not feeling the other near or the sensation that the air that did not contain the other would be thin and lacking leaving him breathless.

The words were a sweet, casual pleasantry.

He didn't imagine that saying "I'll miss you" might be synonymous with "I don't want to leave you", "don't leave me" or "I'll feel numb without you."

Eighteen years of life and experiences and he didn't know. Didn't even guess.

Until that day, he in the new dark blue and black uniform, she in the white (as if they had switched roles somehow), when she stopped him cold from the threshold of the door (without even entering the garage) with three words.

"I'll miss you."

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A/N: Short, I know. Sorry. I kept trying to make it longer, but it didn't seem to fit. Apparently, these Echoes have a set framework in mind and they resist any attempt by me to impose something else on them. ((shrug)) Hey, what do I know? I'm just the schmuck who writes down what the voices in my head tell me to.