I'm so sorry it's been so long! I didn't mean for a whole month to go by without an update! On the plus side, the next chapter is mostly written, and the final chapter is just awaiting revision. It's a little bittersweet finishing this thing up, so you're reviews are everything to me!
Hang in there!
They all stood still when they entered the room. There was blood everywhere, bodies everywhere, and Kat and Lian were in the center of the gory mess.
Lian was on her back in Kat's arms, and the older woman was rocking back and forth, wracked by full body sobs. Bart fell to his knees with a gut wrenching whine. Lian was pale, and not moving. Dead. Again. He'd failed her again. He'd hoped that the emotional void he'd felt hadn't meant what he'd known it had meant. He'd felt it before, felt when Lian was gone. And she was dead again. He recognized that he was still whining, even as he heard the others behind him react to the room in front of them. It had only been seconds since they'd opened the door.
When they finally fell silent, they could hear Kat whispering, "Three hundred eighteen, three hundred nineteen..."
Red forced himself forward, sinking to the floor next to Kat and their daughter. He put a shaking hand on Kat's arm, "Kat?"
She shook hear head, and hissed at him, continuing her count. He said her name again, and she looked up at him, eyes feral, barring her teeth at him when she growled, "Wait."
Red looked at his daughter, bloody and limp, and nodded, wrapping an arm over Kat's shoulder. He'd given up on her once before, he wasn't going to give up on their daughter.
Kat had just whispered four hundred when Lian jerked in her arms, a loud rattling gasp ripping from her still cut throat. Bart joined them a split second later, his face mottled and tear stained.
"Li?" He whispered, and they all stared into her wide blue eyes.
Lian blinked slowly, and opened her mouth to speak. Kat shook her head, brushing Lian's blood slicked red hair out of her face, and keeping a hand firmly over the cut on her throat that was bleeding again now that her heart had restarted, although it had healed a great deal. "No, baby, don't talk. Just breathe."
Red looked at Kat in awe, "How did you know?"
Her eyes were dark, "The monster used us. Manipulated us." She was shaking, and he heard her teeth click together in anger, "He was going to eat her. Over and over until she stopped coming back." Her gaze moved from Lian's face to a large still form to the side of the room, "He'll never hurt her again."
None of them would. All across the room dead bodies littered the floor and overturned surfaces. Kat had taken no prisoners, and shown no mercy. Vandal Savage had been gutted, and his heart was resting on the blood splattered white tiles at Lian's feet like a macabre feline offering. That was when Red realized that Kat was drenched in blood that wasn't her own, and was completely unarmed. She had bits of flesh jammed under her fingernails though, and a pair of forceps lay ominously next to Savage's body.
Red didn't care, not one bit. She'd done it for their daughter, and for the first time in nearly twenty years, he was finally able to see his wife hold their daughter again. The others moved around the room, surveying the certainly dead bodies.
It was a few more minutes before Kat let Lian sit up, and she rubbed her daughter's back soothingly as she vomited up blood. "Let it out. You'll get sicker if you don't."
Red hated that Kat knew that, that she'd been through so much and he'd been unable to help her. She was being so tender with Lian though, ignoring everyone else completely in favor of coddling her weak daughter.
"Mom?" Lian croaked in confusion, the word garbled but unmistakable.
For the first time since her return from the dead, Kat smiled without shadows in her eyes, "I'm still here, baby. You're gonna be okay, I promise. Please try not to talk." Lian made a small whimper of a noise, and Kat pulled her even closer, tucking Lian's head under her chin.
Then she started humming.
Out of the corner of his eye, Red saw Damian stagger, stumbling to sit in a chair someone had righted. He didn't blame the younger man one bit.
Red recognized the tune she was humming. He'd heard it a thousand times when they'd first lived together in that little house. Kat had put Damian to sleep with it nearly every night, and she'd done the same when baby Lian had been fussy. The tune was unmistakable, even as broken as it was by Kat's stress and the fact that it had been nearly two decades since she'd hummed a song at all.
"I remember." Kat whispered, stroking Lian's hair. She cleared her throat, "I remember the day you were born. I didn't know it then, but I know now. You were dead, for five minutes. I was up in that tree alone, and I couldn't feel you moving. You were always moving then. I was terrified. I counted the seconds till you kicked, trying to keep myself calm, and I never thought about it again." She pinched her eyes closed, "I can't lose you, Lian, not when we've just found each other. I can't say I'll be any good, but I'm gonna try...to be your mother. Hopefully your dad will let me know when I screw up."
They locked gazes over Lian's head, and Red wiped a smear of blood off Kat's cheek, "I think you're doing a good job so far."
"Mmhmm." Lian hummed in agreement, nodding off.
The males looked panicked, but Kat just shook her head, "Coming back from the dead is hard work, particularly exsanguination. She'll be weak for a couple of days. She really shouldn't talk either, not until the flesh has healed fully. Major blood vessels heal before the heart starts beating, but everything else takes longer. He cut into her throat so deeply, the cartilage of her trachea will be fragile for a while. She could re-injure herself if she pushes too hard."
"How do you...?" Bart trailed off, grimacing. "Sorry."
Kat shrugged, "Don't apologize. When they want you to be a killer, they teach you anatomy, and they did the same thing to me a couple of times. First time, I screamed so much they had to trake me so I wouldn't suffocate. Pissed Crane off big time."
Red wished the man were still alive so he could kill him himself, but was interrupted when someone suggested they leave and detonate the explosives already in place by the Light to bury the underground lab. Kat stuck to Lian like glue as they went from the bloody pit in the ground to the Watchtower, pipping up every couple of minutes while the medics bandaged her daughter up. Then Red noticed the scalpel still in her leg.
"Why the hell didn't you say anything?" Red hissed.
She shrugged again, so blasé it made his teeth click together, "It doesn't hurt. Probably significant nerve damage. They match now. My other thigh is a jumbled mess too."
"I remember." He blurted, and they locked eyes over their daughter's sleeping form.
Kat avoided Red after that, for the rest of the day, until long after most people had either gone home or gone to sleep. He went to debrief and when he returned to Lian's room, his daughter was asleep, her husband holding her hand and fast asleep in the chair beside her. He went looking for Kat.
It wasn't hard to find her, with everyone else mostly cleared out and her highly limited security clearance. She was in one of the exterior hallways, teetering on her new crutches and staring hard down at the earth. She didn't look up as he approached.
"What're you up to?" Red said gently, touching the side of her face.
"Lian's asleep. Now that I know she gets my nightmares, I didn't want to fall asleep at the same time as her while she's still so weak." Kat said honestly, shying away from his touch and refusing to look at him.
Red didn't catch her reluctance, "Now that we know what's going on, I'm sure someone around here can devise a modified inhibitor collar for her to wear while she's sleeping." It was a ludicrous thought, neither one of them would ever force one of those things on Lian.
"I've made my choice, Red." Kat said softly, feeling an odd sense of guilt for what she was about to tell the man, what she'd been struggling with since their daughter had taken her second first breath.
Confusion washed across his handsome features, and he finally settled for shrugging, a frown sitting upon his lips, "Okay. What about?"
"I can't be your wife." She said evenly, hoping that being cold would help him accept her decision.
It didn't.
"Excuse me? We haven't even...for Christ's sake, Kat, I just got you back!" His hands waved in front of him, but he never made a move to touch her. They were both afraid of what would happen if they did make physical contact again. It likely wouldn't be pretty, either violent or wholly inappropriate for a public venue. Red tugged at his hair, and pinched his eyes closed, "Can't we at least see how things work without our daughter being in mortal danger?"
"I can't be your wife anymore, Red." She elaborated slightly, resisting the urge to put her hands on his chest to comfort him. She couldn't do that anymore.
"The hell you can't." He hissed, eyes dark, shoulders squared, "Til death do us part, Kat. I'm in this for the rest of my life."
Kat nodded, staring at the floor in front of his feet and folding her arms in to comfort herself, "I know, but you're forgetting that I've already died. Several times in fact. I'm not the same woman you married. I'm a killer, a violent killer, and I feel no remorse about any of it. I don't deserve you. And I can't..."
He took a half step closer, "Can't what?"
His voice made her resolve weaken ever so slightly, so she forced her eyes away from him to compensate, "I can't focus on being good enough to be your wife and focus on being a good mother to Lian. I don't have the emotional bandwidth to do that anymore, and it's not fair to you."
Silence stretched between them for longer than she was comfortable for, but he finally spoke, and put his large hands on her shoulders, "I understand, Kat." He kissed her temple, and left her standing in the hallway by herself.
His sudden departure had her reeling, and she stood there for a long time, staring out the window at the Earth spinning ceaselessly, blissfully unaware of how her world was cracking beneath her feet and nothing she did made it right because it hadn't ever been right. She didn't understand Red, couldn't understand him. He and the others claimed to be paragons of Good, but not a one of them had agreed earlier in the day when she'd offered to serve time for her numerous crimes and multiple murders. And he still loved her. She remembered loving him, but those memories were through the lens of a young woman with a heart of gold. The gold had weathered away a long time ago, and all that was left was a diamond, valuable and pretty, but ultimately cold.
Bart startled her out of her thoughts, appearing by her side, "Hey, Mama Kat. Li wants to see you. I promised her you hadn't left."
"I wouldn't leave." She whispered, and quirked a tiny smile at the crutches she was teetering upon, "Can't imagine I'd get very far anyway."
He laughed, and shrugged, "You're clever, I think you could figure out some other way to get around."
Kat stared at him for a heartbeat before shaking her head, "How did we end up here?"
Bart leaned forward to prop his elbows on the metal bar in front of them, looking down at the Earth before looking back over his shoulder at her, "Because she loves us. Lian has the greatest empathetic capacity anyone has ever seen, and I don't doubt that every person she meets is left with a part of her in their mind. But us, she loves. She's the wrong empath for the powers she's been given. She doesn't want to feel everyone, just the people she cares about, and you and I have a tendency to move around more than she'd like. Her powers have a life of their own, a temperament so to speak that's very childlike, petulant almost. We can't stay away. I couldn't through time, and you couldn't through lost memories and distance from Self."
"You make it sound as though we're her thralls." Kat commented.
"We are." He said, voice flat, "Me, you, her father. The three of us are wrapped up so tightly in her empathy we can never truly be ourselves again. Have to say I'm worse off than you two, but that's what happens when romantic love overlaps the platonic empathy bond. They're both ten times stronger."
"Is that so bad?" She asked, thinking about how her feelings for Lian were all that she had to hold on to at the moment.
Bart beamed at her, "No, it's not. It's the most wonderful thing in the world. Lian is my world." His expression changed to one she recognized distantly, one he had used as a young man when he let the jovial personality fail and spoke truthfully, "Red feels the same way about you. He's a good man, a good father, and he'll wait for you as long as you need him to."
Kat sighed, "I thought I heard you around here."
He smirked, "I didn't want to intrude."
"Of course not." She said wryly, adjusting her grip on the crutches to take a little weight off her old-bad leg. "I'm not sure I'll ever be ready for that, Bart. A physical relationship I can handle, but that romance you were talking about... I'm really not sure I'm capable of that anymore."
"You love Lian, right?"
"Yes." She answered instantly.
Bart smiled at her, "You'll get there, Kat. Don't think you're not capable, because you are. Romantic love is simply a physical relationship stemming from a platonic relationship. Have 'em separate for a while, they'll come together on their own."
Kat was silent for a few minutes, taking in his words. "Should it bother me that my son-in-law is giving me relationship advice?"
Bart chuckled, "Nah, but we should get back to Li before she gets herself into trouble."
Another unbidden smile came to her face, "She doesn't like hospitals anymore than I do, does she?"
"Like mother like daughter!" Bart agreed crisply, scooping her off her feet before she took her next breath. He put her crutches in her arms, "Hang tight, Mama Kat, it'll be faster this way!"
They both started when Lian wasn't alone. Selina stood over her granddaughter, running a comb through damp red curls. "She would always be out like a light when I started brushing her hair." Selina said without looking up at them. She gestured for them to stay in the doorway, and ran the comb one more time through Lian's hair before exiting the room. "Had to use water from a cup and a towel under her hair, but I think I got most of the blood out."
"I didn't think they were bringing you up here until tomorrow." Bart said, confused by her appearance.
Selina smiled, "Nothing has ever stopped me from being where I want to be. They couldn't keep me away if they tried. Bruce thinks I'm taking a bath." She took in her daughter's appearance and held out her arms, "Oh, come here, baby."
Kat practically threw herself from her crutches and into her mother's arms. They both fell to the floor, and Selina cooed to her daughter, resting her back against the wall. "I almost lost her!" Kat wailed, muffling her words in her mother's shoulder.
Bart slipped back into the room to keep Kat's panic from waking Lian from the sleep she so obviously needed. Selina ignored her aged protesting muscles and stayed on the floor until Kat calmed down. She knew how Kat felt, only she'd actually buried her daughter first. "She's going to be just fine, Katherine. You need to remember that. You're hurt, she's hurt, and you need to let me take care of both my girls. I know you're strong now, Katherine, but you need to let me help you. Will you do that? Let me bring you home."
Kat clung to her mother. It was an odd sensation, and only odd in how wonderful it felt. She had no memories of ever being so comforted by her mother's presence, and nodded, "I will."
Selina smiled, "Good girl. Your father will be thrilled to have you home. He'll pretend he's not, but I know he gets just as lonely as I am when all the kids are away. He'd be up here himself if Terry didn't insist he stay. Your little brother's excited to meet you."
Kat looked up at her mother with her father's blue eyes, "Wait a minute, who the fuck is Terry?"
Selina's giggles could be heard throughout the hallway.
"Know that when you leave,
Know that when you leave,
by blood and by me, you walk like a thief,
by blood and by me, I fall when you leave.
So tell me when you hear my heart stop.
You're the only one who knows.
Tell me when you hear my silence,
There's a possibility I wouldn't know.
So tell me when my sorrows over
You're the reason why I'm closed
Tell me when you hear me falling.
There's a possibility it wouldn't show."
Possibility
By: Lykke Li
Next chapter is called 'Flaws' inspired by the Bastille song, and there will be answers galore there! Also, Kat reuniting with her daddy! And meeting her new brother, with some other surprises too!
Thanks for reading guys!
-Jenn
