InsaneJournal

dreams ; reveal
WHO The Magician's Daughter
WHAT A reveal.
WARNING Implied violence, dark thoughts.


She awoke with the blood still splattered across her cheek, with her hands still stained bright scarlet, with the ringing of gunshots in her ears.

Or, well, not awoke. It wasn’t a dream, after all. She knew that now.

Oh god.

Standing in the middle of her apartment, shaky hands rose to the front of her face where she stared in abject horror at the viscera caked underneath her fingernails, at the red smeared across her hands and down her arms. All those people had died, and she couldn’t help them. She didn’t save them. Another failure, another mistake, another loss. A growing body count to carry on her shoulders. Her loud sob rang out, echoing through the hall and bouncing off the walls, and she felt herself crumbling. She was shaking like a leaf, and she sobbed again, crying until she couldn’t breathe anymore, knees hitting the floor hard enough to bruise. Rolling right into a panic attack, that damaged magician’s daughter gasped for air that just wasn’t coming until she gagged and scrambled as quickly as she could to her sink to get sick.

Another thing she ruined.

Stephanie Brown laid on her kitchen floor, pressing her cheek to the cool wood while she tried to work through one anxiety attack that rolled into another. She didn’t break into the emergency box that Eddie had gifted her during her Arkham sufferings; she didn’t want the reminders of him at the moment. She didn’t scramble for her journal or phone to contact someone. Who would she reach out to anyway? Her ex-husband? The father figure that had just come back? One of the brothers that weren’t really there for her? She groaned, her lungs aching for air, for relief. Her head pounding, her heart racing, and her mind filled with the images of cotton candy pink and blood red that was still sticky on her fingertips.

A wet nose pressed to her ear, and she opened up an eye to see Matilda’s concerned brown eyes looking down at her. Stephanie hiccuped, and she groaned again, and she pushed herself up and away from the menagerie of animals poking out from their hidey holes throughout the loft. Stumbling into the bathroom, she turned up the shower hot, hot, hot, enough to scald her pale skin to pink. She stared down as red spun with water and slipped down the drain, as the hot water stung against her skin. Images of the pink sunrise and of the older man with the bullet hole in his head. The candy apple red that pooled next to his corpse as she tried to heal him. Why hadn’t she been able to save him? Why had she lost her powers, why hadn’t she sensed he was a bad man to begin with? Why was she such a worthless piece of shit? Why had she gotten to this point in her life?

She stared at the razor resting on the shelf in that steamed up shower.

She thought about doing it.

About a fresh red mixing with the old.

About saying forget it. About taking that pile of mistakes and doing something useful for once.

About ending it all….

The water turned cold, and her skin pruned as she sat on the tiles of her shower, letting the water beat down on the top of her head. She looked listlessly towards the faucet and down to the now white again tiles. That Arkham sharpness was sneaking back in. That feeling of ending it didn’t want to leave. She could feel those whispers in the back of her brain; she knew she was vulnerable. She needed to get out. She needed out.

She could have left Gotham entirely; honestly, she probably should have. But, she didn’t. As toxic as it was, this was her home. As many reminders of what she would never have, of what she lost, of what she fucked up, this was home. With damp, blonde hair pulled back into a bun and a pair of dark loose pants and a t-shirt, she wandered aimlessly through the apartment for a moment before letting her feet take her out of the door.

She could have wound up anywhere, and it would have been bad. There were memories etched into almost every inch of this city of things she wanted to forget at the moment. But, she zoned out, mind on a plethora of things: an eternally burning white flame, a demon whispering in the back of her mind, a home below the ground, a brother who’d gotten himself killed because of his anger, a man she hurt again and again and again. Suddenly, she came back into consciousness, and she found herself at the steps of St. Agnes. She mumbled an oh god and almost collapsed again. She could picture she and Eddie out in the mud and rain, a kiss like a punch to the mouth and tears up in that clocktower. She remembered the feeling of seeing him smiling at him at the end of the aisle inside. Isabella’s baptism flickered across her mind.

Numb, she walked up the steps and walked inside. There were only a few worshipers there at that time of the day, early afternoon, and none of them looked up from their hymnals or their head-bowed prayers. Stephanie shuffled towards the candles, lit one without much of a prayer in mind beyond salvation, and she shuffled to a pew towards the back of the church to be alone.

Stephanie wasn’t much of a religious person, but she felt soothed. Maybe Destin(y) was right; demons didn’t really like churches, even the ones that were ingrained in your brain before getting possessed.

Eventually, Father Mike caught the desolate blonde sitting in the back of his dominion, and he descended on her with that Irish warmth that always snuck through her walls. She hadn’t seen him in a long, long time. Years for her. But, one question with that brough -- Stephanie, my dear, are you okay? -- and she burst into tears again.