“She had a history of killing herself,
I had a habit of dying.
I think she gave me something to live for.
I guess I helped her pass the time.”
-Hold On by Dashboard Confessional (Chris Carrabba)

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I remember her first smile. It had been in my arms, the selfish side of me says, but really it had been when she’d destroyed the monster we found her with. When she’d found control, it had been. In the end, that’s what had bought her out anyways. I’m so foolish for never seeing that. We had been so young.

I remember being in Africa, years and years ago. My mother was putting a gorilla to its death, the needle so simple and so cruel. I was probably five years old at the time, and my innocent mind couldn’t grasp it. She’d told me it suffered, that it was sick, that the disease was spreading. “I’m the only one who can stop it,” she’d said.

The only one…

The world was bitter in replaying those words to me. It seemed every few years I needed a tragedy to bring me back to humble quietness. Once Raven told me she’d felt it, that she was powerfully empathetic. The word is one of my favorites, explaining so much the English language seemed to have missed before. I’m happy I could share the pain without choosing to, but like knowing of my animal friend’s suffering, I knew Raven suffered similarly; just as the city had, just as Terra did, just as I am.

The parallels were so continuous and deepened as if chasms opened underneath each idea. I felt myself fall through each one to the next. It was liberating and took my mind from the fact that she was dead.

It’s interesting, but as calming as empathy’s beauty and promise of more to come was death’s final and chopping resonance. The word dead made my throat ache, a guillotine suddenly slicing me open in front of teeming crowds. Children would smile, parents would laugh. “Hooray!” they say. “He is dead, she is dead, and finally we are happy and safe! Thank you for the sacrifice, it was a great show!”

Right after we lost her, I almost gave up being a titan for that reason exactly.

Sometimes it hurts to know I only took a break, though, too logically aware to be so dramatic. I blame it on Robin.

Then sometimes…well, sometimes, I know it sounds strange, but when the entire tower is empty and no one is there to distract my thoughts, I’ll stare at the stillness. Those moments maybe are the most precious, and not only because I’ve learned to appreciate quiet like that. My hand will reach out into that wasteland of nothing, just air, molecules round my fingertips, and pull back a strand of something so tangible my skin shivers, teeth bite my lip, and my toes lift me just a little higher. I’m on the edge of the step, and the common room is in front of me but it isn’t, and I feel her face and am drinking everything she was all the freeness and caring and worry and all of the confidence she gained right at that last moment.

When I fall to my knees, my breathing is ragged. Arms limp. Eyes warm and sharp and I know what that bitter, self-indulgent sensation means. I cry like a child, but inside I am so clever, so wise to know that I long for something intangible to be tangible…like the glow when she shifted the earth or the love she seemed to feel for all of us, if only for that short amount of time. And I smile through a last bout of breaths, what people call sobs but I call reflexes and rushes of amplified emotion. I know and relish them, so familiar and so comforting that I can just feel them without being forced to, without the overwhelming gun of pain. That’s why they call it broken, because the emotion hits so hard it all cracks.

Now on all fours I hear them come in through the din of my consciousness. Their presence immediately shocks the room into an incongruous shape. It no longer fit the gentle almost heavenly quality I’d just experienced, the colors and furniture of the room reappearing in frighteningly stark reality. The feeling of touching the untouchable disappeared when I looked up, and it was Starfire who voiced her concern first.

I stood up and smiled, told her it was okay, I’d just been thinking. I wouldn’t be able to lie about this; it would distance me and the experience from the closest things to it. Cyborg helped me up. He followed Starfire and Robin down the hall, I sensed Robin lead them away, heard the soft tap of boots on the hall floors. The door rushed shut quickly, left the room silent.

I listened to her watch me until her words echoed softly in my head, absurdly noninvasive.

It’s alright. We’re all proud of you. So I thought back, knew she’d get it, knew it would come with strength and emotion and maybe a hint of hidden resentment. I think I’m growing, I’m learning to heal. And that feeling where I wasn’t broken but experiencing came back in the message, and she felt that too, and she smiled at me. So quiet, so simple, so patient and…happy. Everything I’d been learning, she’d known all along.

Hey, she said simply, out of character and purely full of emotion in an entirely different way than mine had been. She was feeling this now, and she said everything we needed to hear, all three of us.

It’s okay.

<3 and God bless,
Ryoko