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... )
“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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