(no subject)
Title: Snags in the timeline
Word Count: 3,601
Summary: Resilience can be a multi-part process.
a/n: This was originally a study break ficlet. It expanded and I debated even posting it -- of maybe editing things to make it more…‘tasteful’ I suppose -- but I decided not to. This means something to me as it is now, so I'm unprivating it. There may be rough edges and typos etc. since this was a pretty spontaneously written piece. Warning: References to the past occurrence of torture. As in the pointless torture certain kinds of children perform on insects and small animals -- the morbid curiosity and poking sensitive organs with sharpened sticks kind of torture.
---
She doesn’t get why the others tiptoe around her - well no. That’s a lie. She understands perfectly fine. From what Batman will tell her. From what M’gann’s uncle will tell her. From what Black Canary attempts to get at during their constant therapy sessions (and that’s a new development). She just doesn’t know why they’re bothered so much when she’s not.
It’s kind of funny: everyone’s afraid she’s going to suddenly freak out or something. Really she’s mostly just annoyed about the huge blank space in her memory. She looks at the scars all over and deep in her skin and doesn’t remember how they got there. The limp she didn’t earn on her own is slowly healing best it can, the sliced flesh and muscles are rebinding themselves with the help of a lot of expensive magic and science and technology she wouldn’t have been able to afford on her own.
Obviously she’s on medical leave, but Artemis thinks they might keep her benched past her physical wounds’ healing, past when she gets back in top condition. They’re worried about her brain, about the mental trauma, and M’gann and J’onn have scanned her memories and thoughts just about a million times to ensure things are as good as they can be expected to be. She knows they’re confounded by the cleanness of it all, everything is in order and then there is the concentrated strip of blank space. Nothing. They’ve checked into it and experimented and it’s that the memories have been lifted. She can’t remember because they aren’t in her head anymore.
“I’m sorry,” M’gann keeps saying. “I know of them. That race of aliens is…supremely violent. And I knew that, I shouldn’t have let - ”
Artemis grins at her. “What,” she jokes. “Let them find and capture me when I was supposed to be secretly collecting intel? I’m pretty sure that’s more on me not being sneaky enough, Meg.”
And M’gann breathes in quiet gasps as she tries to swallow her tears, so Artemis gathers their resident empath into her arms and shushes her. “I’m fine,” she reminds M’gann, again and again.
Apparently she wasn’t really brought back into consciousness, her mind suppressed by Zatara’s and Zatanna’s combined spells, until they could manage to piece her back together in enough ways so her body wouldn’t go into shock once it was self aware. Wally reluctantly acknowledges the existence of magic - in the most scientific ways possible, of course, only so much progress can be made with the likes of him after all - as he looks her, able to speak and walk and breathe and be alive. Their interaction has the odd and clunky quality of people attempting to pretend nothing’s changed when things indeed have, but she likes that he’s the only one with enough trust in her to recount some of the things that happened to her.
“I mean, your vocal chords alone, the shit they did to them - that the League put in the report, anyway. God,” Wally says, opening a bag of trail mix with shaky hands. She doesn’t point that out. “I mean, I don’t think you realize how lucky it is that you don’t remember. And that the League wouldn’t wake you until you were, you know. Not the human equivalence of ground beef.”
She laughs and nudges him, even as he explains the difficult procedure the League had to have performed in order to extract her reproductive organs (the aliens crushed her ovaries and severed the Fallopian tubes, sliced into her uterus before pulling it out and putting it inside her ripped open stomach just for the hell of it), and silently agrees that she’s glad she doesn’t remember.
It shouldn’t bother her then, she tells herself, right? It’s like it never happened, none of it, so she should be fine. But she can’t just do that when her body is a relic of the past, an artifact that she has to coerce into working correctly. They won’t even tell her the extent of damage, the extent of morbid shit the aliens did, because apparently it’s that bad. Apparently they don’t want her to go into shock over it, over self-association with such horrors. But she can’t self-associate. It didn’t happen as far as she’s concerned; though her wounds are collateral damage it didn’t happen to a her that she remembers.
“I can hear you lurking in the shadows,” Artemis calls out as she does her stretches on a yoga mat in the training room. She starts at the toes and has to work her way up through every muscle, so it always takes a while. It’s also always silent and intensive work, when her focus increases tenfold on her surroundings as she tries to ignore the way it sometimes hurts in really bad ways when certain muscles pull tight.
“I’m not trying to be subtle,” Roy replies flatly, stepping into view. “You don’t ever seem to get subtle. Just like Ollie, huh, little Miss ‘niece’?”
Artemis rolls her eyes at his not-ill-natured-but-not-exactly-in the best-of-spirits prodding, and he says nothing else.
Roy watches her as she runs through her daily regimented stretches for another hour, before he slips out without a word. She can hear the zeta platform being used as he leaves, and she thinks it’s funny. For someone who doesn’t believe she gets subtle, Artemis understands without words what has just transpired. He’s worried - she’s been used as some violent aliens’ plaything and he wants to check on her because they’re sort of reluctant family but family nonetheless - and they’re alike in such ways that mean they can’t outright say those kinds of things. But she hears his intent all the same.
But actually, interestingly enough, the more time Artemis has to think about intent, the more something crops up in her thoughts. That is, the more she thinks about it the more she doesn’t think that - on certain levels - the others have issues with the fact that these aliens tend to go about their entertainment the way they do (torture, poke and prod and pull apart, then take away the memories and leave the bodies as they move on to new places, new victims). As loathe as anyone might be to admit it, their bloody trail is easy to trace with the right tools and right people on the job. And after all, the League is currently working with the Green Lantern Corps to follow that trail to these aliens’ home planet to stop them.
And on that side of perception, Artemis mulls over, getting caught and used was maybe a really great thing, because though her mind holds nothing the rest of her body and injuries have told enough to incriminate, to give plenty of clues and leads.
Robin can’t look straight at her anymore, and she knows he always has issues with how efficient he can be versus how deep he feels. “I’m fine, idiot,” Artemis tells him, knocking him upside the head casually as he avoids her glance while they share the training space. “I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to remind everyone this - especially since you all know more about the whole ordeal than I do - but I literally can’t remember anything. I just assume the worst happened and move on. It’s like it was to another person. I'm not mad or anything, at anyone.”
Robin ducks his head for a fraction of a second before he looks up at her - or well, she assumes he does anyway, the sunglasses make it difficult to be sure. “The worst - the worst - ?” He suddenly sounds like he might take a swing at her.
Artemis isn’t entirely sure of what the protocol is here. With M’gann she knows there aren’t touching boundaries. With Wally, though it’s changing, she can gauge him easily enough. With Roy this sort of situation would never happen. With Robin…she’s not the least bit sure. She reaches out a little, like letting him know that if he freaks out on her she’ll put her hands on him, a pat on the shoulder or hug maybe or even a block-and-counter if he attacks - but he only skitters away and turns his back to her.
“They didn’t rape you, you know,” he informs her gruffly, nearly a non sequitur except, no yeah, that’s pretty much a ‘worst’ she’s vaguely been assuming.
So Artemis doesn’t wince, but she is surprised - no one likes to bring up the genital mutilation part of her injuries. Other than Batman letting her mother know they’ll cover any extra genital surgeries regardless if necessary (for proper functioning later down the road) or wanted (for aesthetic reasons, also for later down the road), not a word has been spoken of it.
Robin’s talking again, anger and grief muted, repressed to the best of his ability. “The aliens, they. That’s not how they roll, they get their kicks from the torture alone, and the things they did to your - your.” He pauses, unable to speak the exact words, but pushes onward. “It’s the same as what they did to all of you, with their instruments and - ”
And this is Robin’s limit on maintaining emotionless and clinical. His shoulders quiver and he shakes his head viciously and Artemis tries to help. “It’s okay Robin - ”
“No,” he says, voice strained and he’s out of her reach, he’s rejected her comfort. “God, they don’t even have a name, we just have to call them ‘aliens’ like they’re even in the same category as M’gann and Martian Manhunter, like there’s even any similarities - ”
And she won’t mention to him that she can hear the tears in his voice, just like he won’t tell her in fewer words that he’s sorry for using her misfortune to solve a case.
Life gives what it gives and doesn’t blink an eye at the hardships it causes - Artemis always has believed in that. Still believes in that. Especially believes in that. She watches the others go off on missions and be a team and she has to hang around and try to work back to their level. Try to work back to being whole. It used to not matter as much, but now she starts to resent.
She sort of has nothing to be angry at or with. It’s intangible, it’s nonexistent, the hows of her ending up here with the short end of the stick, and that’s almost just as bad as remembering her body being broken is a million horrible ways. Maybe it’s worse. If she had the memories she could focus on that, on overcoming those. If she had the memories there’d be an enemy. Almost like Robin’s frustration at the lack of name, she cannot come to terms with a ghost that leaves all the traces but nothing else. She scrubs at her scarred skin in the shower and avoids mirrors, because she sometimes can’t stand the leftover wounds from invisible monsters.
“…I…I don’t understand,” Conner says slowly, when he bumps into her wearing only a towel as she leaves the showers after one of her workouts. His eyes glance over the remnants of damage marring all the showing skin and his brow furrows. “Why would anyone…?”
She shrugs, and this is the first face to face conversation they’ve have since her surgeries and procedures and the start of her physical rehabilitation, but she tries not to dwell on that. “Why would anyone kill anyone else? Why do bad people exist? There’s not really an answer for it, Conner.”
His hands are opening and closing, into fists out of fists, on and on in an endless cycle. He doesn’t know how to react, how to feel, and his teeth grit in decisive anger. “I’ll kill ‘em,” he growls, such an earnest promise. “I’ll - ”
“The League and Green Lanterns are already on it,” Artemis reminds him, suddenly tired. “And anyway those aliens would love to get their hands on an interesting specimen like you to dissect as well. Don’t risk it.”
His eyes harden and he trembles with his rage. “They couldn’t,” he hisses as if it is a dare. “I wouldn’t let them.” And Artemis has to put a gentle hand on his arm before he calms and sobers and looks at her as though he still doesn’t understand.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and she can only shrug.
Artemis wonders if anyone realizes they’re pushing the responsibility of their healing on her. It’s not intentional, and it’s not exactly a problem because she can handle it. But they can’t get over how they found her bleeding and near death, with the very fibers of her flesh and muscle falling apart, in the aliens’ ship - and they can’t figure out what they should expect from her. They want to act normal and treat her the same but the team just…can’t. She understands why, too. Every time they watch her sweat from sheer amount of effort through simple drills, and watch her have the routine vitamins-minerals-steroids cocktail of an IV hooked up to her veins in order to help her body heal, they don’t know whether to look or to look away.
So Artemis does PT and does therapy sessions and does her school assignments at home while everyone in her civilian life is told that she was abducted and tortured by some criminal, taking bed rest to heal. Artemis would call Zatanna to check up with her, but she can’t. She can’t talk to Zatanna because her father is worried about Zatanna’s well-being: her safety from the aliens but, most of all, the state of Zatanna’s mental health. Zatara’s worried that being forced to have Zatanna help him magic Artemis back to the living means their friendship is a too painful thing for her right now. And Artemis wants to point at things like that and ask if it’s fair for the others to be afraid that she’s not healing from all the trauma and yet simultaneously blame her for things out of her control.
These are the bad days, of course, when Artemis is tired of the drama over something she has absolutely no recollection of and never will. Kaldur’s eyes hold enough apologies for the world twice over as he looks at her, but it doesn’t change much.
“I know you are insistent that you are fine,” he tells her as he supervises her water therapy, watching her struggle to complete the first lap. “But we are here for you.”
“No you aren’t,” Artemis snaps, panting as she clutches to the side of the pool, annoyed because it feels like they’re all more interested in wallowing in their own self-pity than in how she feels. Her naked fingers hurt, the chlorine stinging the skin where her fingernails are still missing and she kind of wants to cry at it all. At how things sometimes stack up inside of her, at how its times when she can’t even swim a single lap across a pool without getting tired (when once upon a time she was at the peak of her physical condition), and at how what happened to her really really affects her. “If you were you wouldn’t be focusing on the shit I can’t even remember.”
Kaldur frowns before slipping soundlessly into the water and wading towards her. “I don’t understand. What is it you want us to do, then?” He’s there, able to wade faster than she can swim when she’s really trying and she closes her eyes and bows her head.
“Forget it,” she grumbles, and the places where her hips had been fractured and dislocated are staring to ache and what happened to swimming being a zero impact exercise? “Forget it forget it forget it!” And she doesn’t realize she’s crying, out of frustration and weariness, until Kaldur silently pulls her into a hug.
“We are here for you,” he repeats and she just shakes in his arms and sobs a little bit harder.
It’s hard to understand everything that’s going to happen. There are days when Artemis just kind of wants someone to be on standby to shoot her and put her out of her misery one day in the future, because she knows getting old it going to be a horrifically painful thing. She’s young now, her body can cope with the healing and the scars that are left over, both inside and out. But she’ll have arthritis everywhere, lungs too messed up and overwrought to work right, and a million old wounds that will flare up on rainy and cold days. She’ll probably have to be in a wheelchair and she’ll grow up alone, because she can’t have children now, right? Not a huge problem right this instant, but when she’s old and unmarried (because who’s gonna marry her, scarred and barren and intent on being a superhero even if it kills her, those aren’t good selling points and she can’t change who she is, but really it’s more the fact that she refuses to, that she won’t for anybody) and crippled and childless -
Having kids was never a big thing in her plans, never something she’d sit around and think about. But Artemis starts thinking of her mom and thinking of her family: both the broken one she still clings to and the new one she fights crime and injustice with. And she realizes that she always wants that. She wants to be surrounded by people who care about her, for forever. Artemis loves her families and hates being alone, and now she’s afraid she has no choice but to be lonely in the future. Forever isn’t something to ask for and expect. She’s pragmatic, so she acknowledges that sad truth.
Her mom and her are always together right now in the present, though, and that softens the blow of these realizations. Mom won’t let her drive anymore (she’s only got a few more hours left in her driving log until she can get her permit, but everyone’s afraid she’ll have flashbacks and PTSD moments while driving - even though she won’t - and the risk of a car crash is unacceptable, that kind of impact would just about ruin if not outright kill her) so they take as much public transportation as possible to go anywhere together. And there’re a lot of instances of them going out to places together, because Mom won’t let Artemis out of her sight and she won’t let Artemis wallow or fall into pits of despair either, keeps the two of them busy with activities and outings.
It works out the best it can since Gotham has a good amount of handicapped-accessible public transit, but ‘handicapped-accessible’ does not automatically mean ‘handicapped-friendly’. It’s a struggle to get on and off the bus without getting pitying or dirty looks from the other passengers during the hold up, but that’s the hand they’ve been dealt.
“Mom, you don’t have to hold my hand, I’m not some - some mentally-regressed victim or anything,” Artemis hisses, suddenly angry at the whole entire world because some jerkwad mumbled cripple insults under his breath at them as he got off at his stop, and she snatches it away.
But Artemis catches herself, tries to inhale a deep breath and tell herself: don’t take things out on this one person who will always, always love you unconditionally.
She only has one kidney and half her liver left. She’s missing her fourth toe on her right foot and her left leg sets off metal detectors there’s so much metal splinting and anchoring the bone into something usable. Four of her ribs are still resetting, and her nails still won’t grow on any of her fingers - Batman’s personal doctor is looking into it and she wears protective gauze over the tender skin as prevention against getting another staph infection. Her eyes are only working and not punctured worthless things anymore because Superman went to one of the ends of the universe, or something equally enormous and impossible, to bring back the magic or medicine or whatever was she needed. She’s so scarred in so many places that she often gets second and third glances in public.
And these things are painful and unfair but not triggering, Artemis reminds herself. She won’t relive the experience from reminders brought on by a little refraction of light or the wrong innocuous sound. She doesn’t remember, it’s an actual blank space in the personal timeline of her life. And all that means is that it’s time for the rest of her timeline to move forward, onward, regardless of what it holds.
Mom hums the tune of some old song that Artemis kind of remembers from back when Jade and Dad were still around, softly and lightly as if unaffected. And she just takes Artemis’s hand again. Artemis is too nice, too forgiving, why must her mother always carry such burdens on her shoulders - and lets the link of their hands stay intact.
“Okay Mom,” she murmurs, and to hell with the people pretending not to stare out the side of their eyes at them as if they’re a freak show to be gaped out. This is the hand they’ve been dealt, and they’ve always been able to make the best out of that.
She can’t remember the moments when her life was supposed to either end or fall apart into shambles, and she never will. So Artemis can use that to her advantage. She’ll just keep going, onward and further and for forever. And that’s all there is to it.
Word Count: 3,601
Summary: Resilience can be a multi-part process.
a/n: This was originally a study break ficlet. It expanded and I debated even posting it -- of maybe editing things to make it more…‘tasteful’ I suppose -- but I decided not to. This means something to me as it is now, so I'm unprivating it. There may be rough edges and typos etc. since this was a pretty spontaneously written piece. Warning: References to the past occurrence of torture. As in the pointless torture certain kinds of children perform on insects and small animals -- the morbid curiosity and poking sensitive organs with sharpened sticks kind of torture.
---
She doesn’t get why the others tiptoe around her - well no. That’s a lie. She understands perfectly fine. From what Batman will tell her. From what M’gann’s uncle will tell her. From what Black Canary attempts to get at during their constant therapy sessions (and that’s a new development). She just doesn’t know why they’re bothered so much when she’s not.
It’s kind of funny: everyone’s afraid she’s going to suddenly freak out or something. Really she’s mostly just annoyed about the huge blank space in her memory. She looks at the scars all over and deep in her skin and doesn’t remember how they got there. The limp she didn’t earn on her own is slowly healing best it can, the sliced flesh and muscles are rebinding themselves with the help of a lot of expensive magic and science and technology she wouldn’t have been able to afford on her own.
Obviously she’s on medical leave, but Artemis thinks they might keep her benched past her physical wounds’ healing, past when she gets back in top condition. They’re worried about her brain, about the mental trauma, and M’gann and J’onn have scanned her memories and thoughts just about a million times to ensure things are as good as they can be expected to be. She knows they’re confounded by the cleanness of it all, everything is in order and then there is the concentrated strip of blank space. Nothing. They’ve checked into it and experimented and it’s that the memories have been lifted. She can’t remember because they aren’t in her head anymore.
“I’m sorry,” M’gann keeps saying. “I know of them. That race of aliens is…supremely violent. And I knew that, I shouldn’t have let - ”
Artemis grins at her. “What,” she jokes. “Let them find and capture me when I was supposed to be secretly collecting intel? I’m pretty sure that’s more on me not being sneaky enough, Meg.”
And M’gann breathes in quiet gasps as she tries to swallow her tears, so Artemis gathers their resident empath into her arms and shushes her. “I’m fine,” she reminds M’gann, again and again.
Apparently she wasn’t really brought back into consciousness, her mind suppressed by Zatara’s and Zatanna’s combined spells, until they could manage to piece her back together in enough ways so her body wouldn’t go into shock once it was self aware. Wally reluctantly acknowledges the existence of magic - in the most scientific ways possible, of course, only so much progress can be made with the likes of him after all - as he looks her, able to speak and walk and breathe and be alive. Their interaction has the odd and clunky quality of people attempting to pretend nothing’s changed when things indeed have, but she likes that he’s the only one with enough trust in her to recount some of the things that happened to her.
“I mean, your vocal chords alone, the shit they did to them - that the League put in the report, anyway. God,” Wally says, opening a bag of trail mix with shaky hands. She doesn’t point that out. “I mean, I don’t think you realize how lucky it is that you don’t remember. And that the League wouldn’t wake you until you were, you know. Not the human equivalence of ground beef.”
She laughs and nudges him, even as he explains the difficult procedure the League had to have performed in order to extract her reproductive organs (the aliens crushed her ovaries and severed the Fallopian tubes, sliced into her uterus before pulling it out and putting it inside her ripped open stomach just for the hell of it), and silently agrees that she’s glad she doesn’t remember.
It shouldn’t bother her then, she tells herself, right? It’s like it never happened, none of it, so she should be fine. But she can’t just do that when her body is a relic of the past, an artifact that she has to coerce into working correctly. They won’t even tell her the extent of damage, the extent of morbid shit the aliens did, because apparently it’s that bad. Apparently they don’t want her to go into shock over it, over self-association with such horrors. But she can’t self-associate. It didn’t happen as far as she’s concerned; though her wounds are collateral damage it didn’t happen to a her that she remembers.
“I can hear you lurking in the shadows,” Artemis calls out as she does her stretches on a yoga mat in the training room. She starts at the toes and has to work her way up through every muscle, so it always takes a while. It’s also always silent and intensive work, when her focus increases tenfold on her surroundings as she tries to ignore the way it sometimes hurts in really bad ways when certain muscles pull tight.
“I’m not trying to be subtle,” Roy replies flatly, stepping into view. “You don’t ever seem to get subtle. Just like Ollie, huh, little Miss ‘niece’?”
Artemis rolls her eyes at his not-ill-natured-but-not-exactly-in the best-of-spirits prodding, and he says nothing else.
Roy watches her as she runs through her daily regimented stretches for another hour, before he slips out without a word. She can hear the zeta platform being used as he leaves, and she thinks it’s funny. For someone who doesn’t believe she gets subtle, Artemis understands without words what has just transpired. He’s worried - she’s been used as some violent aliens’ plaything and he wants to check on her because they’re sort of reluctant family but family nonetheless - and they’re alike in such ways that mean they can’t outright say those kinds of things. But she hears his intent all the same.
But actually, interestingly enough, the more time Artemis has to think about intent, the more something crops up in her thoughts. That is, the more she thinks about it the more she doesn’t think that - on certain levels - the others have issues with the fact that these aliens tend to go about their entertainment the way they do (torture, poke and prod and pull apart, then take away the memories and leave the bodies as they move on to new places, new victims). As loathe as anyone might be to admit it, their bloody trail is easy to trace with the right tools and right people on the job. And after all, the League is currently working with the Green Lantern Corps to follow that trail to these aliens’ home planet to stop them.
And on that side of perception, Artemis mulls over, getting caught and used was maybe a really great thing, because though her mind holds nothing the rest of her body and injuries have told enough to incriminate, to give plenty of clues and leads.
Robin can’t look straight at her anymore, and she knows he always has issues with how efficient he can be versus how deep he feels. “I’m fine, idiot,” Artemis tells him, knocking him upside the head casually as he avoids her glance while they share the training space. “I don’t know how many times I’m going to have to remind everyone this - especially since you all know more about the whole ordeal than I do - but I literally can’t remember anything. I just assume the worst happened and move on. It’s like it was to another person. I'm not mad or anything, at anyone.”
Robin ducks his head for a fraction of a second before he looks up at her - or well, she assumes he does anyway, the sunglasses make it difficult to be sure. “The worst - the worst - ?” He suddenly sounds like he might take a swing at her.
Artemis isn’t entirely sure of what the protocol is here. With M’gann she knows there aren’t touching boundaries. With Wally, though it’s changing, she can gauge him easily enough. With Roy this sort of situation would never happen. With Robin…she’s not the least bit sure. She reaches out a little, like letting him know that if he freaks out on her she’ll put her hands on him, a pat on the shoulder or hug maybe or even a block-and-counter if he attacks - but he only skitters away and turns his back to her.
“They didn’t rape you, you know,” he informs her gruffly, nearly a non sequitur except, no yeah, that’s pretty much a ‘worst’ she’s vaguely been assuming.
So Artemis doesn’t wince, but she is surprised - no one likes to bring up the genital mutilation part of her injuries. Other than Batman letting her mother know they’ll cover any extra genital surgeries regardless if necessary (for proper functioning later down the road) or wanted (for aesthetic reasons, also for later down the road), not a word has been spoken of it.
Robin’s talking again, anger and grief muted, repressed to the best of his ability. “The aliens, they. That’s not how they roll, they get their kicks from the torture alone, and the things they did to your - your.” He pauses, unable to speak the exact words, but pushes onward. “It’s the same as what they did to all of you, with their instruments and - ”
And this is Robin’s limit on maintaining emotionless and clinical. His shoulders quiver and he shakes his head viciously and Artemis tries to help. “It’s okay Robin - ”
“No,” he says, voice strained and he’s out of her reach, he’s rejected her comfort. “God, they don’t even have a name, we just have to call them ‘aliens’ like they’re even in the same category as M’gann and Martian Manhunter, like there’s even any similarities - ”
And she won’t mention to him that she can hear the tears in his voice, just like he won’t tell her in fewer words that he’s sorry for using her misfortune to solve a case.
Life gives what it gives and doesn’t blink an eye at the hardships it causes - Artemis always has believed in that. Still believes in that. Especially believes in that. She watches the others go off on missions and be a team and she has to hang around and try to work back to their level. Try to work back to being whole. It used to not matter as much, but now she starts to resent.
She sort of has nothing to be angry at or with. It’s intangible, it’s nonexistent, the hows of her ending up here with the short end of the stick, and that’s almost just as bad as remembering her body being broken is a million horrible ways. Maybe it’s worse. If she had the memories she could focus on that, on overcoming those. If she had the memories there’d be an enemy. Almost like Robin’s frustration at the lack of name, she cannot come to terms with a ghost that leaves all the traces but nothing else. She scrubs at her scarred skin in the shower and avoids mirrors, because she sometimes can’t stand the leftover wounds from invisible monsters.
“…I…I don’t understand,” Conner says slowly, when he bumps into her wearing only a towel as she leaves the showers after one of her workouts. His eyes glance over the remnants of damage marring all the showing skin and his brow furrows. “Why would anyone…?”
She shrugs, and this is the first face to face conversation they’ve have since her surgeries and procedures and the start of her physical rehabilitation, but she tries not to dwell on that. “Why would anyone kill anyone else? Why do bad people exist? There’s not really an answer for it, Conner.”
His hands are opening and closing, into fists out of fists, on and on in an endless cycle. He doesn’t know how to react, how to feel, and his teeth grit in decisive anger. “I’ll kill ‘em,” he growls, such an earnest promise. “I’ll - ”
“The League and Green Lanterns are already on it,” Artemis reminds him, suddenly tired. “And anyway those aliens would love to get their hands on an interesting specimen like you to dissect as well. Don’t risk it.”
His eyes harden and he trembles with his rage. “They couldn’t,” he hisses as if it is a dare. “I wouldn’t let them.” And Artemis has to put a gentle hand on his arm before he calms and sobers and looks at her as though he still doesn’t understand.
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly, and she can only shrug.
Artemis wonders if anyone realizes they’re pushing the responsibility of their healing on her. It’s not intentional, and it’s not exactly a problem because she can handle it. But they can’t get over how they found her bleeding and near death, with the very fibers of her flesh and muscle falling apart, in the aliens’ ship - and they can’t figure out what they should expect from her. They want to act normal and treat her the same but the team just…can’t. She understands why, too. Every time they watch her sweat from sheer amount of effort through simple drills, and watch her have the routine vitamins-minerals-steroids cocktail of an IV hooked up to her veins in order to help her body heal, they don’t know whether to look or to look away.
So Artemis does PT and does therapy sessions and does her school assignments at home while everyone in her civilian life is told that she was abducted and tortured by some criminal, taking bed rest to heal. Artemis would call Zatanna to check up with her, but she can’t. She can’t talk to Zatanna because her father is worried about Zatanna’s well-being: her safety from the aliens but, most of all, the state of Zatanna’s mental health. Zatara’s worried that being forced to have Zatanna help him magic Artemis back to the living means their friendship is a too painful thing for her right now. And Artemis wants to point at things like that and ask if it’s fair for the others to be afraid that she’s not healing from all the trauma and yet simultaneously blame her for things out of her control.
These are the bad days, of course, when Artemis is tired of the drama over something she has absolutely no recollection of and never will. Kaldur’s eyes hold enough apologies for the world twice over as he looks at her, but it doesn’t change much.
“I know you are insistent that you are fine,” he tells her as he supervises her water therapy, watching her struggle to complete the first lap. “But we are here for you.”
“No you aren’t,” Artemis snaps, panting as she clutches to the side of the pool, annoyed because it feels like they’re all more interested in wallowing in their own self-pity than in how she feels. Her naked fingers hurt, the chlorine stinging the skin where her fingernails are still missing and she kind of wants to cry at it all. At how things sometimes stack up inside of her, at how its times when she can’t even swim a single lap across a pool without getting tired (when once upon a time she was at the peak of her physical condition), and at how what happened to her really really affects her. “If you were you wouldn’t be focusing on the shit I can’t even remember.”
Kaldur frowns before slipping soundlessly into the water and wading towards her. “I don’t understand. What is it you want us to do, then?” He’s there, able to wade faster than she can swim when she’s really trying and she closes her eyes and bows her head.
“Forget it,” she grumbles, and the places where her hips had been fractured and dislocated are staring to ache and what happened to swimming being a zero impact exercise? “Forget it forget it forget it!” And she doesn’t realize she’s crying, out of frustration and weariness, until Kaldur silently pulls her into a hug.
“We are here for you,” he repeats and she just shakes in his arms and sobs a little bit harder.
It’s hard to understand everything that’s going to happen. There are days when Artemis just kind of wants someone to be on standby to shoot her and put her out of her misery one day in the future, because she knows getting old it going to be a horrifically painful thing. She’s young now, her body can cope with the healing and the scars that are left over, both inside and out. But she’ll have arthritis everywhere, lungs too messed up and overwrought to work right, and a million old wounds that will flare up on rainy and cold days. She’ll probably have to be in a wheelchair and she’ll grow up alone, because she can’t have children now, right? Not a huge problem right this instant, but when she’s old and unmarried (because who’s gonna marry her, scarred and barren and intent on being a superhero even if it kills her, those aren’t good selling points and she can’t change who she is, but really it’s more the fact that she refuses to, that she won’t for anybody) and crippled and childless -
Having kids was never a big thing in her plans, never something she’d sit around and think about. But Artemis starts thinking of her mom and thinking of her family: both the broken one she still clings to and the new one she fights crime and injustice with. And she realizes that she always wants that. She wants to be surrounded by people who care about her, for forever. Artemis loves her families and hates being alone, and now she’s afraid she has no choice but to be lonely in the future. Forever isn’t something to ask for and expect. She’s pragmatic, so she acknowledges that sad truth.
Her mom and her are always together right now in the present, though, and that softens the blow of these realizations. Mom won’t let her drive anymore (she’s only got a few more hours left in her driving log until she can get her permit, but everyone’s afraid she’ll have flashbacks and PTSD moments while driving - even though she won’t - and the risk of a car crash is unacceptable, that kind of impact would just about ruin if not outright kill her) so they take as much public transportation as possible to go anywhere together. And there’re a lot of instances of them going out to places together, because Mom won’t let Artemis out of her sight and she won’t let Artemis wallow or fall into pits of despair either, keeps the two of them busy with activities and outings.
It works out the best it can since Gotham has a good amount of handicapped-accessible public transit, but ‘handicapped-accessible’ does not automatically mean ‘handicapped-friendly’. It’s a struggle to get on and off the bus without getting pitying or dirty looks from the other passengers during the hold up, but that’s the hand they’ve been dealt.
“Mom, you don’t have to hold my hand, I’m not some - some mentally-regressed victim or anything,” Artemis hisses, suddenly angry at the whole entire world because some jerkwad mumbled cripple insults under his breath at them as he got off at his stop, and she snatches it away.
But Artemis catches herself, tries to inhale a deep breath and tell herself: don’t take things out on this one person who will always, always love you unconditionally.
She only has one kidney and half her liver left. She’s missing her fourth toe on her right foot and her left leg sets off metal detectors there’s so much metal splinting and anchoring the bone into something usable. Four of her ribs are still resetting, and her nails still won’t grow on any of her fingers - Batman’s personal doctor is looking into it and she wears protective gauze over the tender skin as prevention against getting another staph infection. Her eyes are only working and not punctured worthless things anymore because Superman went to one of the ends of the universe, or something equally enormous and impossible, to bring back the magic or medicine or whatever was she needed. She’s so scarred in so many places that she often gets second and third glances in public.
And these things are painful and unfair but not triggering, Artemis reminds herself. She won’t relive the experience from reminders brought on by a little refraction of light or the wrong innocuous sound. She doesn’t remember, it’s an actual blank space in the personal timeline of her life. And all that means is that it’s time for the rest of her timeline to move forward, onward, regardless of what it holds.
Mom hums the tune of some old song that Artemis kind of remembers from back when Jade and Dad were still around, softly and lightly as if unaffected. And she just takes Artemis’s hand again. Artemis is too nice, too forgiving, why must her mother always carry such burdens on her shoulders - and lets the link of their hands stay intact.
“Okay Mom,” she murmurs, and to hell with the people pretending not to stare out the side of their eyes at them as if they’re a freak show to be gaped out. This is the hand they’ve been dealt, and they’ve always been able to make the best out of that.
She can’t remember the moments when her life was supposed to either end or fall apart into shambles, and she never will. So Artemis can use that to her advantage. She’ll just keep going, onward and further and for forever. And that’s all there is to it.