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Mallory spent the weekend at the cave after the memorial, but that Monday she had to go back to school. She'd gotten behind in all of her classes in the week she'd taken off after the incident. She went straight to the library when she got back on campus, spending a few hours catching up. It felt good, being surrounded by students doing exactly the same thing, preparing for finals, finishing projects, working on assignments. It helped her forget what had happened for a while, helped her feel a little more normal for those few hours. They feeling didn't last, though.

She trudged back to her dorm that night feeling heavy and tired, and when she finally got to her room, she didn't even know how to name the mixture of emotions that were swirling around inside of her. Anger was the only one she wanted to address. Hot tears started streaming down her face, and she shut them tight for a moment. It wasn't fair. Every time she thought about Robin, and what his last hours must have been, she was filled with rage. Now, she couldn't take it. She hurled her bag across the room with a muffled scream, barely hearing the thud when it hit her desk and fell to the floor. She slid down the wall, her head in her hands as she finally let herself go, finally let the tears come. Ever since it had happened, she'd forced herself to stay strong for Dick, but now there was no one around to comfort or hold together, which meant she didn't have a reason to stay together herself.

She didn't know how long she sat there, her tears rolling down her cheeks, her chest compressing until she felt strangled, when Jen opened the door and immediately dropped her bag and knelt down in front of her.

"Mallory, what's wrong?" she asked. Mallory hadn't told her what had happened when she told her that she was going to take some days, and Jen hadn't asked, being used to Mallory getting called away for missions and meetings. Now, she didn't want to tell her about what had happened, didn't want to repeat the horror of the reality. She shook her head and took a breath.

"The Joker killed Robin," she said quickly. Just four little words, but they nearly killed her to say them out loud.

Jen's face was sympathetic, but it hardly held the understanding it should have. "I'm sorry, that's horrible," she said quietly. Mallory didn't say anything, and after a beat Jen added, "but did you know him? I've never heard you talk about him before."

Mallory looked at her friend incredulously, for the first time resenting the fact that she didn't know what it was like to be involved with the League, didn't have the experience to really comprehend that a sixteen year old had been brutally murdered. "Yes, I knew him! And that's not even the point! He was just a kid, and he was murdered, tortured by a psycotic clown!" she snapped.

Jen recoiled a little, but she didn't say anything, and Mallory didn't apologize. She was filled with so much anger, and she had to send it somewhere. After a moment, her friend sighed and moved so that her back was against the wall, and she put an arm around Mallory, holding her in a side hug. The pyrokinetic took a shaky breath, trying to think, trying not to think, trying to do anything that would keep the anger away.

"Why did you come back so soon? You could have taken more time off," Jen said quietly.

Mallory shook her head. "No, I couldn't. I'm behind as it is, and this is finals week. I can't afford to skip my exams. It's fine, I just need to get through this week, then I'll be done."

The few days were filled with exams and catching up on assignments. Since Batman and Nightwing were usually the ones to come up with valid excuses for missing classes and work, all that Mallory had ready to tell them was a half-truth, which was that her friend's little brother died in an accident. All of her professors had been very understanding and willing to work with her, but there was a cutoff for entering grades that no excuse in the world would be able to change. On Wednesday, Mallory planned to meet Alex for their final project before they submitted it for their exam grade. She'd been able to do a good bit of the work before she took the week off, so she didn't feel too guilty as she pushed open the door to the lab where the mice and cages were being kept.

"Hey, stranger," Alex called from their station. They were the only ones there at the time, mainly because the project was due the next day and everyone else had finished writing their reports on it.

Mallory smiled and set her bag on the counter, pulling out her laptop and a notebook. "Hey, I'm really sorry about last week-" she started, but he was shaking his head. "It's fine, we did almost everything before you left, and the little guy basically just trained himself how to dispense the food," he said. Mallory nodded. "Yeah, I'm glad of that," she muttered.

They started writing their report detailing their end results, watching the test subject, whom they had named Flannegan, to see his reactions to the procedure.

"So, why were you gone for so long?" Alex asked after a moment.

Mallory sighed. "One of my best friends, really he's more like my brother, his little brother was in an-" she sighed and shook her head. She couldn't do it. For some reason, she couldn't tell the lie one more time. Not to Alex. "Uh, we've been telling people that he was in an accident and he didn't make it, but that's not true. It wasn't an accident. He was killed, murdered. He was sixteen, and he was murdered by a guy that's never going to pay the price because he'll just break out of jail again and kill someone else."

Her friend had stopped cold, his fingers hovering over his keyboard, and he was staring at her face in shock. "What- where- what happened?" he asked softly.

She laughed humorlessly. "They live in Gotham. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time." He was nodding with understanding as soon as she said where he was from. Her hands were in fists as she voiced what was at the root of all of her anger. The Joker would never pay for what he'd done. He wouldn't pay for what he'd done to Robin or anything else he'd done. All Batman would do was put him back in Arkham, where he would just break out again whenever he felt like it. In that split second, she realized what she wanted. She wanted him gone. Not just dead, but destroyed, nothing left of his body but ash, nothing marking his existence on the earth but the painful memories and the broken lives he'd left in his wake.

Her eyes widened and her hands went limp as she forced the thought from her mind, fear drumming in her chest at how vivid, how powerful the urge was. Tears came to her eyes, but this time they weren't just for Robin, they were for her fear, the realization that there was nothing she could do, the realization that it could have been Dick.

She felt herself pulled into a hug and stiffened for a moment, then relaxed in Alex's arms. She let herself be held for a few minutes, then she pushed away gently, wiping her eyes and forcing a small smile on her face. "Thanks, I'm fine. We really need to get this done."

He nodded and turned back to his computer, and so did she. They started writing again, but he looked over his computer at her and said, "if you ever want to talk, or, you know, if you just want to get your mind off it, you can call me whenever."

"Thanks," Mallory replied.

He nodded and smiled. "Of course. That's what friends are for."

The last few days of exams passed in a whirlwind, but finally it was all done, and Zatanna, Raquel, Megan, and Conner came up to the dorm to help Mallory move out. It was the first time they had met Jen, so it turned into an all day event as they packed up the room and then went to get lunch before moving all of the boxes to the cave.

When it was time to move the last of everything, Jen pulled Mallory into a hug, saying, "We'll have to get together one weekend when the world isn't falling apart."

Mallory chuckled, returning the hug. "That doesn't happen as often as you might think," she said.

Her friend laughed and shook her head. "Ok, I take it back. I don't care if the sky is falling, you better be there when we make plans."

Mallory shrugged. "I'll try," she said.

They said goodbye and Mallory and her former teammates gathered up her belongings to bring them back to the cave. When she shut the dorm door, Raquel said, "today was really nice. It's the first time since…well, you know, that I've felt normal."

Megan and Zatanna nodded in agreement, and the Martian said, "No matter what happens, life keeps going."

Mallory looked at her friends, nodded slowly. Life always went on. It wasn't good or bad, it was just the way it was. She sighed, leaning her head against the elevator wall as it carried them to the ground floor. She knew that Dick and Jessica wouldn't be ready to feel normal yet, but she hoped that time would help heal them, even if it would never heal the hole in their family.