I am so very sorry that it took me two months to get this out! This chapter just would not cooperate. On the plus side, the next chapter is totally complete! (I actually wrote it before this one) That being said, reviews and kudos will make me post the next chapter faster!
Called Out in the Dark:
Lian glared at her father, "You're still an ass."
Red winced, "Yeah, I know. I've been fucking up everything since I was hatched out of my test tube."
Lian giggled, "You're so dramatic."
"You're a brat." He snapped back, secretly thrilled she seemed to not hate him anymore. Although with an empath for a daughter his excitement wasn't so secret. She let it slide though.
"I know. Just...lay off a bit. The whole League treats me like I'm a child, and it's gotten old. And they only do it because you still treat me like a kid." She told him firmly, holding one of his weathered hands in hers, "Lead by example, right? That's what Grandpa's always told me, and I think it's the best advice I've ever heard. Can you please try to let me forge my own way? I'm not as fragile as you think I am."
He sighed, "Oh, Li, no father is just going to stop protecting his daughter." She scowled, and he smiled back at her, holding his arms out to her, "I'll try to be less of an ass about it, promise."
Lian melted into his hug, arms tight around him, "They've hurt her."
He kissed the top of her head, "I know, Li, I know."
"We keep fighting the good fight though, don't we?" She said, pulling away as alerts sounded through the hallways, summoning League members to the nexus of the Tower.
Red held her hand, "Yes, we do."
Bart joined them at the briefing, sliding his hand into Lian's empty one. She leaned against him and he kissed the top of her head, "All good?"
"All good." Lian replied, grinning at him.
He grinned back, "Crash."
Her father made a disgruntled noise and pulled away when J'onn called Red Arrow up to the teleport pad. Really, he was getting older and she'd tried to convince him to hang up his mask, but her mother wasn't the only source of her stubbornness. Her mother... Was that her? That woman in that little room. Anger flared in her. Very deeply, she knew that, while she might not remember, the woman in that room was her mother. Feeding off the agitation and blood lust in the room, Lian was fighting every instinct telling her to hunt down the people who had destroyed her mother and turn it all back on them. They had taken the chance of her knowing her mother away. Yes, her family loved her, but what would life had been like if there hadn't been that lingering darkness in their eyes?
The darkness that was far too much like the one that was in everything her grandfather did. Lian had never seen any member of her family without that darkness. They'd done their best, but she'd been raised on that darkness, fed on it through her empathy. Bart was her light. For so long she'd done her best to fix the darkness in her family, but she'd never thought about the root it had taken in her, not until she'd first seen Bart smile at her.
Bart elbowed her.
"Sorry, what's going on?" Lian asked, having totally zoned out.
"A whole bunch of crazy shit." He said brightly, but his expression faltered. "The Light. They're back."
"The Light? I don't..." Lian trailed off, trying to remember everything associated with the name.
Bart interrupted her, "Before your time, babe. Last they were around, you were..."
"They're the ones that got my mother killed." She said, interrupting him for a change.
Bart faltered again, the look on his face telling her that he'd hoped she wouldn't make the connection. "Well, she's not really dead, but, yeah, I guess so."
"That's that, then." She said firmly, moving out of his grip. She approached J'onn with a fearlessness no one else could pull off. She'd known the Martian her whole life though. "Send me out."
His face showed no surprise, and he answered without hesitating, "No."
"Why not? I know you all voted to bring me into the League. Why not start now?" Lian questioned, staring into his eyes, filtering her challenge through her mind and body.
"You should keep your eyes off League files." J'onn said, a hint of approval coming through his mind to hers, "Very well, Huntress, tele-pad four. Stick with your group. No unnecessary risks until we fully understand the situation."
Lian took the instructions with a smile, kissing his cheek as she sprinted by him. "Thank you, Uncle J'onn!"
His deep voice called after her, "Lian, be careful. That's an order."
"Got it!" She called back, stepping onto tele-pad four with the others standing there.
She paired with some kid whose codename escaped her, but she remembered his name as something like Raul. Or maybe it was Paul. It had gotten hard to keep up with all of the new recruits. They were walking by an alleyway when Lian heard crying, "You guys keep going, I've got it." She said to the others, waving them on and ducking into the alley.
A little girl was huddled behind a smashed garbage can, sobbing. "You okay there?"
"No, I'm scared!" A tiny voice called.
Lian knelt next to the child, taking in the white-blonde hair and unnaturally dark tear-filled eyes. "I've got you, we're gonna get you someplace safe, okay?"
"Not safe!" The girl yelled, sobbing harder.
"Hey, kid, don't cry. I won't let anyone hurt you." Lian whispered, rubbing the little girl's shoulders.
The child sobbed again, scrunching her face up, "It's not me they're going to hurt!"
"Who, sweetie? Who's going to get hurt?" Lian asked, hauling the terrified girl onto her hip.
The girl's face was inches away from hers when she hiccuped and said, "You. They're going to hurt you."
Lian froze for an instant, a note of sincerity chilling her, but she put on a smile, "Oh, no, sweetie, that's not gonna happen. I'm not gonna get hurt."
"Yes you are." The girl insisted, "They're going to hurt you! They're going to hurt you and then they're going to kill you!"
Lian's chest felt tight, "Why would you say that?"
"I've seen it." The girl whispered, "I've seen it, and we all die. First you, then everyone. All gone. The Dark Side is coming. You have to stop what's coming, but you can't. First you, then everyone. All gone, all dead." She gripped Lian's suit with surprising strength, "The face changes, but it all stays the same. The future hasn't changed. Just delayed. Someone pressed pause, but it's all coming back. First you, then everyone. First you, then everyone. A domino. You."
"What are you?" Lian asked breathlessly, falling to her knees, letting the girl go.
The girl curled in on herself, holding her knees to her chest and rocking on the cement, jostling slightly from explosions blocks away."Time. Here, there, I am everywhere, and I always have been. I see the future, as it will be, as it has been. Things need to change, or we all die. First you, then everyone. First you, then everyone. A domino."
"Crazy, you have to be crazy." She was an empath, but the girl was talking crazy. No one knew everything. She'd met enough people with special abilities to know that that power couldn't possibly belong to one person.
"That's what they say, but I'm not." She said urgently, "We knew each other, in the different time. You weren't so nice then, but now, you're different. You have to be more different though. Change. First you, then everyone. You're the domino. A piece in time that's not like the others. You and Bart. Dominos. Placed just right or everything falls apart."
"How do I change?" Lian asked, remembering a little girl Bart had described as one of the future survivors, a little girl who had once just been able to see the future, but had been experimented on until her mind had shattered. Sometimes she had been right, but mostly she just talked crazy. If she was the same girl, Lian couldn't afford to ignore her. Her head ached. Why couldn't her life be simple? Oh, right, there was a Wayne tacked somewhere in her name. Simple was not a Wayne trait.
"You've never had your mother before. You need her, she needs you. Mother-Daughter, you never should have been apart. She has to remember. She must turn back from the Shadows and the Light. Otherwise, we all die. First you, then everyone." The girl told her, and Lian struggled to remember her name.
"Okay, I'll try talking to her again." Lian told the girl lamely.
She shook her head, "Talking won't work. Like me. Dark rooms. Pain. Sickness. Death. Never ending cycle. When someone breaks the loop, there's no bounds to the devotion that follows. You found me then, you showed me the path to Justice. They showed her the Shadows and the Light. The Dark is coming. First you, then everyone."
"Yeah, I get it, me first. You can stop saying that." Lian snapped. She didn't care about her mother's devotion to the Light. Her devotion to her daughter should have meant more.
"I can't." The girl said, and Lian saw tears in her eyes. "It's taking everything I have so this finds you at the right time. I'm out of time. Tell Bart he owes me an orange soda, and fix it, before everyone else dies."
Before Lian could say anything else, the girl vanished, and an unseen force knocked Lian on her ass, cracking her head against the brick wall behind her. Her vision blurred, and she lost consciousness. At least until she heard J'onn yelling in her head, "Lian! Lian?"
"Yeah, what's it?" She murmured, opening her eyes slowly and feeling the back of her head for the knot that had to be there.
"You separated from your group. Are you injured?" He asked firmly.
There was nothing wrong with the back of her head, not a bump, or a scratch, nothing to explain her loss of consciousness, "Uh...no...How long have I been gone from my group?"
"Approximately a minute, please rejoin them. You're a half block North. I explicitly told you to stay with them." J'onn was using his displeased voice, the one Lian had been able to discern by the time she was five, even though no one else could tell the difference.
"Okay, sorry. Got a stone caught in my boot." Lian lied, hoping he couldn't tell.
"Lian..." He said, dragging her name out in a way that let her know he was clenching his teeth against the urge to yank her back up to the Watchtower.
She steadied her mind, brushing the odd incident off as a result of her hitting her head or something. "Uncle J'onn. I'm fine. Tell the others I'm making a roof loop to them."
"Confirmed. We will speak when you return, Huntress." He said ominously, but she wasn't really listening, instead pulling herself up the ladder along the side of the building and onto the rooftop. She looked down, and the alley didn't look anything at all like she'd thought it had. It really must have been a hallucination brought on by her hitting her head, there was no where for the little girl to have been hiding.
"They were looking for someone." Bart said darkly, perched on the countertop next to her.
Everyone regarded him questioningly. Just like Lian, they sometimes forgot that he had grown up in a war zone. "Looking for someone, Ese?" Jaime Reyes asked his good friend from the sofa he'd crashed out on, nursing a bruised arm where someone had tried to take it off at the shoulder.
"A female. Did none of you notice that they were trying to get all of us guys out of the way? They nearly decapitated Batgirl." Bart glanced over at the girl in question, "You okay, Cassie?" Cassandra coughed when she tried to speak, but just nodded and gave a thumbs up, rubbing her throat. "Awesome, but they were definitely going through the girls and just batting us guys away."
The girls nodded, all tending to some sort of wound while Jaime was the only guy that had so much as a bruise. "Li, you seem okay." Red said, looking his daughter over.
Lian nodded, "Yeah, they must have missed me."
Bart grabbed her wrist, "Where did you get this?"
"Huh?" Lian gasped, looking down at her wrist where Bart was removing a little crocheted bracelet she hadn't noticed. "I don't know."
Bart held the piece of yarn up, staring at it like he was seeing a ghost. "This belonged to Mariah. She was a member of our group in the world I come from. She..."
"Saw the future." Lian finished for him, knowing now that she hadn't been hallucinating when she'd seen the little girl with white-blonde hair. "I saw her." Lian admitted slowly.
"That's impossible, Lian. Not only is there no one left to build another time machine, but Mariah died three weeks before I left." Bart told her, but he stared at the yarn bracelet, "But this was hers. She'd fidget with it all day long, creating it, unwinding it, starting over again. A thousand times a day. It's impossible, but we never really did figure out everything she could do."
"She vanished, just before I heard from J'onn who told me only a minute had passed, but it had to have been longer. A ghost maybe?" Lian postulated.
Bart regarded her critically, "What did she say to you, Lian?"
"End of time rambling. A bit about my mother." She said, and they continued talking as a group about the whole mission and incident with Mariah.
Lian slipped out the side of the room, nodding reassuringly at Conner Kent when she felt his eyes on her. She was at the room holding her mother in minutes. "Hey." She said lamely when she entered the room.
The older woman glared at her, "Can't you all just leave me alone in my own misery? If you're not going to let me go, you can at least let me die in peace."
"You haven't been eating." Lian stated, looking at the untouched tray by the door. "You should eat."
"Not in the mood." Kat snapped.
Lian shuffled a few steps closer, "You should eat, keep your strength up."
"Why do you even care?" She replied lashing out again.
"Because you're my mother." Lian said simply, leaving all of Mariah's end of days talk for another time.
Kat sighed in annoyance, "For the last time, I am not your mother. My daughter is dead!"
"I'm not dead." Lian whispered, voice cracking, wanting more than anything to feel her mother hold her.
Anger sparked through Kat, "Oh, stop that, you sniveling little girl. You aren't my daughter! You're all crazy, keeping me locked in here. I want out!"
Lian hardened herself, pushing the desire for a mother's touch out of her head, getting closer to the woman. "The only crazy person here is you. Mina doesn't exist. You are Katherine Harper, and you are loved."
Kat stood quickly, lunging at the girl. Lian squeaked in surprise, putting her arms up to defend herself but ending up in a choke hold. "I am not your mother." Kat hissed in her ear, fully prepared to kill the girl in her grasp.
Lian struggled to free herself, gasping for air, clawing the woman's arm far enough away to gasp out, "Stop it!"
Power jolted between them, fueled by Lian's pent up anger and frustration, and Kat went slack, falling to the floor with a sickening crack. Lian stood over her body for an instant before falling to her knees, "Oh, God. I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry!" Hysteria welled in her, "Somebody, help!"
Moments later the room was filled with people, and yet again, her father was pulling her from the room. "I didn't mean to! I didn't mean to hurt her!"
Red held his daughter to his chest, acutely aware of what was going on in the holding room, but also of the fact that his little girl's heart was about to beat out of her chest, "It's okay, Pumpkin head. Calm down. You need to calm down."
"I can't!" Lian screamed, the sound echoing through the metal hallways.
"It's like we just can't help ourselves
'Cause we don't know how to back down
We were called out to the streets
We were called in to the towns
And how the heavens, they opened up
Like arms of dazzling gold
With our rain washed histories
Well they do not need to be told
Show me now, show me the arms aloft
Every eye trained on a different star
This magic
This drunken semaphore
And I
We are listening
And we're not blind
This is your life
This is your time"
Called Out In The Dark
By: Snow Patrol
Let me know what you guys think! Again, sorry for the wait!
