capeandcowllogs | here is the clavicle-snapped wish

WHO: Max Gibson (solo)
WHERE: her apartment, mostly.
WHEN: backdated to the 14th and Max's resurrection.
WARNINGS: deals with death, blood, etc.
SUMMARY: "If a body is what you want, / then here is bone and gristle and flesh."
FORMAT: para

So she dies.

And it's not the first time she's died, maybe that's what's throwing her. Maybe that death is something she can apparently become semi accustomed to is what's confusing her, that she can wake up on the floor of the porter room with blood on her clothes (and this time it's not all hers some of it's that girl's, Kyouko's, some of it's Jay's) and not panic. Shouldn't she be panicking? She should probably feel something rather than numb, do something rather than just stand up and swallow and wait until it's dark enough that the stains won't be too visible before she goes home.

Home, which isn't the right word for what this apartment is right now. Midii's not coming back, she's had to accept that for a while. Max boxed up her ward's things a few months ago, after Max came back to life the first time and needed something, anything to do. They're all in a neat stack in what had been Midii's room. Her puzzles are still on the couch, not moved since Max had taken them out and spent hours solving them the second day she'd had to stay home from work because there were protocols apparently, protocols about dying and coming back to work. She'd laughed until she'd cried about that.

Or maybe she'd just cried. She wasn't particularly clear on a lot of the day or two immediately after coming back from dying the first time.

This time she doesn't do anything mindless just to have something to do. She has a mission. She's already checked the network, tried to figure out what's known. Her next step is the internet. She finds the first streaming place she can and she watches the whole goddamn thing again, finals this time because she'd died before those happened, hadn't she, she'd watched her hand move while she tried to stop it. She's pretty sure if anyone knew she'd gone and watched it all they'd be worried about her general mental health, but she needed to. Plenty of them had watched it, anyways. She almost thinks she'd like to know the percentage. How many people on the network just couldn't resist, but she doesn't think a lot of them would feel like they could admit to having watch it.

She can get that. There's a lot of things right now she couldn't tell anyone if they asked. How she feels, for one. She could rattle off words, she guesses - lost, confused, tired, angry - but none of them would encompass the way her chest feels like there's a stone in it, the way her throat is closed and tight, how hard it is to speak and how hard it is to feel anything that's not that bleak crushing sense of failure and sorrow, that isn't a completely absence of positive emotion. What she wants to do, for another. Because she wants to kill him. That's - she's not supposed to think that. If she says it out loud that's bad enough. If she could, if she actually ever got the chance to kill him, she'd take it. She knows that. And then she couldn't be Batwoman anymore. She's not going to let him take that from her.

The nausea and tremors come when she'd ceased to expect them and she spends a while in the bathroom, forehead against the cool tile of the floor. Once she feels relatively back to normal she takes a shower, scrubs herself clean and cleaner until she feels raw and then burns her bloody clothes in the sink and tosses the remains out of a window into the alley.

It takes her a long time to go out the door, once she's dressed again, but eventually she does, because lying down and giving up isn't actually an option here. She refuses to let it be one. She's not going to give him any more victories. So she forces herself out the door, shuts and locks it behind her and moves step by step back into the world. Goes and gets coffee and sits in the tiny store for a long time until the sun comes up and she's still here for it, she's still alive in the corner of a dingy twenty four hour coffee shop watching the sun come up and in that moment it's such a goddamn gift the store owner hands her a tissue when she pays her bill and makes a sympathetic noise.

She takes the tissue and manages to smile her thanks and then she puts her hands in her pockets and faces the day. This isn't going to be easy. One moment of realization isn't going to make up for everything, but it's a start. That's all she needed, a starting point.

She's got this. One foot in front of the other, because she's good at that. Because what else is there to do?

She's going to win this one.

And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Here, Bullet - Brian Turner