Prompt Post - Part Nine [CLOSED TO NEW PROMPTS]
THIS PART IS NOW CLOSED. YOU CAN CONTINUE POSTING FILLS, BUT PLEASE PROMPT ALL NEW THINGS HERE.
Part one here!
Part two here!
Part three here!
Part four here!
Part five here!
Part six here!
Part seven here!
Part eight here!
Feel free to reprompt posts from previous parts once. If you do so, I'd recommend leaving a link to your fill on the original prompt, ( Read more... )
“Not in a thousand years.”
Dick nods, satisfied. He thanks Canary, fires off a text to Wally, and heads for the showers.
Stage one complete.
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Data-Gather, Stage Two: Miss Martian
She’s not in the kitchen, which catches him off guard. She’s in there so often he’d pretty much assumed she’d at least be in the vicinity, trying out some new recipe or another, but as it turns out she’s outside on the beach, even though it’s kind of cold for that.
“Hey,” he says, quietly so as not to startle her. She turns, the wind stirring the ends of her hair, and smiles at his approach.
“Hey, Robin,” she greets. “What’s up?”
From her tone, he can tell she’s surprised to see him (he usually leaves after training on weekdays), but it’s not an unwelcome kind of surprise. She’s been a little sad since the encounter with Roy and he knows that she still doubts her judgment, so he deduces that she’s probably out here to think, and would be glad of the company.
“Can I talk to you about the whole memory thing?” he asks, cutting straight to the point.
M’gann nods.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” she confesses.
“Yeah?”
“I just don’t know what I should have done,” she continues, biting her lip. “He was so…just, so sad. I just wanted to help.”
“No one blames you,” Dick reassures her, laying a hand on her arm. “Things are just a little more complicated than we thought, I guess.”
“I know,” she sighs. “I…don’t know what to do.”
“You said it was like Bialya, right?” he asks, and she nods in confirmation. “You restored our memories then. Could you do it again? Just put the pieces back together the way you took them apart?”
“I…no,” M’gann says haltingly, and looks even more miserable, as if embarrassed by her own inability to undo what she has done. “I wish I could, but it’s not that simple this time.”
“How so?”
“Well…imagine that your memory is made up of thousands of threads,” she begins to explain, “all of them stretching back to the first time you experienced something, a person or a place or a feeling. When Psimon made us forget, he took everything, six months’ whole cloth, so you were left with a bunch of frayed ends, incomplete chains of memory that your mind really did want to fill in - that’s how you and Wally and Artemis knew you’d lost your memories.”
“Right,” says Dick, trying to follow.
“It was easy for me to go in and find those frayed places,” M’gann continues. “Then all I had to do was fix the severances, and you were linked back up with the rest of your memory. What Psimon did was a quick hack-off. But what I did to Kaldur…it’s…cleaner, because I was cutting off a specific thread, all the way back to its root. His mind doesn’t recognize that anything is wrong, because there’s no start or end or even a piece of that thread connected to anything else anymore, it’s been too neatly severed. Our telling him that he’s forgotten something won’t change that.”
“But they’re still there?” checks Dick. “The memories?”
“Theoretically,” M’gann says, biting her lip. “But realistically…they’re lost. I don’t know where to look. There’s no damage to mark the place where that thread was.”
“Right,” Dick frowns. He’s silent a moment, trying to navigate this new perspective on memory.
“I’m sorry,” M’gann says after a moment, her shoulders slumping. “I wish…I wish I could help.”
“You already have,” Dick says, shaking his head and giving her shoulder a squeeze. “Here’s another question, though. If we somehow managed to make Kaldur remember any part of that thread - of his past with Roy - could you use that to dig up the rest of it?”
“Well, yes,” replies M’gann hesitantly. “But it wouldn’t be enough just to tell him what he should be remembering.”
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“Memory is more than just remembering the facts,” he says. “I get that. But you saw that look on his face when Roy kissed him, right after he’d found out about the whole thing. There was still something there.”
“A trigger,” M’gann says suddenly, turning to him as her eyes light up in recognition. “A sufficiently powerful trigger could bring a subconscious memory to the surface, and make it conscious again.”
He nods - some good news, at last.
“And from there, you could do the rest?”
She nods, the hint of a hopeful smile lighting up her face.
“Excellent,” Dick says. “Thanks for the help, Megan.”
He claps her on the arm and heads for the Cave, already pulling out his phone.
(312): kf, when are you going to see roy next?
(217): prob tomorrow after school, y?
(312): got a job for you.
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Data-Gather, Stage Three: Aqualad
There’s only one thing left to do.
One thing Dick has learned from Batman is that having a good plan isn’t enough - you have to be certain it’s the best plan, because you could end up living with the consequences longer than you know, and nothing bites worse than realizing that a little more fact-checking could have saved you a world of trouble. So while it’s enough to him on one level that KF and Canary believe things shouldn’t have ended the way they did, that M’gann thinks it’s possible to restore Kaldur’s lost memories, he needs to see for himself that they’re doing the right thing in trying to reverse the events of the last few weeks. After all, Kaldur made his decision for a reason. If they’re going to overrule him, they’d better be damn sure it’s for the best.
He finds his team leader in the library, poring over a set of sorcery textbooks.
“Hey, Kaldur,” says Dick as he slides into the chair opposite him.
“Good evening,” Kaldur greets, looking up from his books and setting his pen aside. In front of him are notes and diagrams and charts, copied out in the meticulous hand of a scholar-soldier; it seems he’s been up here for many hours, studying.
“Haven’t had a chance to check in for a while,” says Dick. “How’re you doing?”
It’s an odd question, because of course to Kaldur this last week has been no different from any other, but it’s worth asking.
“I am well,” Kaldur replies evenly. “And yourself?”
“Fine,” Dick dismisses. He turns one of Kaldur’s books towards himself; he can’t read a word of the Atlantean, but the pictures are pretty cool, displaying the various stances needed for certain spells, or the different energy configurations that will boost the endurance or speed or strength of a construct. “Whatcha studying?”
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“Got it,” Dick nods, turning the page. “It’s review, then?”
“Mostly,” says Kaldur. “The later chapters are beyond my skill.”
“Fair enough.”
Dick flicks through a few more pages, mentally sorting through various ways of steering this conversation in a more personal direction. Ultimately he opts to lead the charge himself, though he can only say so much. Hopefully it will be enough.
“You know, when I first started working with Bats, he let me keep up with what I’d been doing before,” he says casually, keeping his eyes on the book. There’s an illustration of a woman using a wand to create a protective dome around herself, but Dick’s mind is elsewhere - he’s remembering the trapeze Bruce had installed in the Batcave a few weeks after he’d taken him in. It had taken him months to work up the courage to use it (too much baggage), but when he had, he’d found solace in the familiar, a comfort nothing else could have given him. He has a suspicion these books are like that trapeze.
He looks up to find that Kaldur is watching him, as if waiting for him to go on.
“You miss it, ever?” he asks. “Life before the hero gig?”
“No,” says Kaldur slowly. “Though…I am not without regrets.”
“Yeah?”
Kaldur shrugs, looking back down at his notes.
“It is of little consequence.”
“Then there’s no harm in saying it.”
Kaldur is silent a moment, thumb brushing over the corner of the paper.
“I do wonder, sometimes…” he begins hesitantly. “Of late, I find myself questioning my place on the surface world.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have great affection for the team,” Kaldur clarifies, looking up at Dick. “I count you all among my closest friends, without a doubt. But if I am honest with myself, I sometimes wonder if this is truly where I belong.”
Dick nods, remembering something.
“Are you homesick?” he asks.
“It is not quite that simple,” replies Kaldur, brow furrowing. “It is more that I find my days…empty, somehow. That when I am not with the team…I am unsure of my purpose.”
He stares at the books, and a strange look crosses his face, a frustrated sort of concentration. Kaldur isn’t usually so open with stuff like this, but Dick has a feeling it’s been on his mind, and since he’s been invited to share, he’s taking the opportunity.
“Well, you have a lot of spare time you didn’t used to have,” he points out softly.
“I am aware,” Kaldur frowns, and Dick recalls the Atlantean’s reaction when they’d explained his own actions to him - incredulity, confusion, then finally acceptance.
“Maybe you just need to find something else to do,” he suggests, playing devil’s advocate to his own purposes. “Something to fill the time, you know?”
“Perhaps,” Kaldur sighs, gathering his papers into a single stack. “Or perhaps…when the opportunity presents itself, after you have assumed leadership, I will…return home for a little while. A sojourn, to clear my head.”
As he listens, Dick knows what Kaldur is really saying, even if Kaldur himself doesn’t realize he’s saying it: if he goes home to Atlantis, he won’t be coming back. As much as the team respects and appreciates Kaldur (and they do, plenty), they can’t give him what Roy gave him: purpose, passion, a place to belong. Just as Kaldur is Roy’s anchor, grounding him through the chaos and pain of his own fucked-up life, Roy is Kaldur’s, the one who finally penetrated through all the distance and self-doubt and proved that he does belong here, and always can.
Without Roy, Kaldur is drifting, and he doesn’t even know it.
“Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do,” says Dick, rising from his chair. “Good luck.”
Kaldur returns to his studies, and probably never realizes that Dick was not speaking about Atlantis at all.
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