She knew life and death as more than beginning and end. She knew Hell as something more than a construct of religion. She knew afterlife, and she knew that there were times when knowing there was a beyond didn't offer even a shred of consolation. She knew dying. She knew the feeling of having everything that she was end, and she knew the feeling of being brought back over and over, until she wasn't sure if the dying was worth the returning.
She knew these things, but she had not been prepared for what happened. She had been told that this new world was different, an intersection of paths, and the magi in her could appreciate that all life was simply a possibilities all running parallel. The intersection of such things was nothing new, nothing foreign. The fact that these paths could become jumbled messes, like strings caught up and tangled together was something she didn't question. The universe was not just the little life that each person lived in their own skin.
But no one had told her about a shopping center where she would be forced to walk in the emaciated skin of a woman who did not love herself. She'd not been prepared for death to come there, while she was too not-herself to sense it opening its door for her. She'd not been prepared to wake after, naked and used. But she'd survived worse, and she could survive this.
Zatanna flexed her fingers, and she could feel. She looked, and she could see. The memory of not being as she was clung to her skin, and hot water didn't wash it away. She'd had her magic all her life, and to have it stripped from her was worse than dying in that cadaverous flesh, was worse than the violation of whatever had happened to her own body while she was bleeding.
She scrubbed at her skin until the water went cold, and then "toh retaw," made it hot again. She called her robe to her when she stepped out, and she used magic to dry herself, and she did it all to prove that she could. She needed convincing that she was whole again.
Normally, in the absence of Brand or Holland, she would've reached out to Bruce. But Bruce had his own demons, and she took his retreat from Gotham to indicate he did not want to be bothered. She respected that, and she didn't take it as a personal slight from someone she had known since her girlhood.
There was Constantine. He would come. Even if this was not her version of the man left behind, he would come. Perhaps he would want to learn about the evening, the mechanics he so loved to taunt the universe with. Perhaps he would think there would be intimacy at the end of a few rubs to her shoulder, because they'd always been good together in bed.
But she needed moments alone with herself and the bigger picture. Thaumaton had taught her not to depend, and the need to stand on her own feet was a strange sensation in a woman that had always surrounded herself with men she trusted, a woman who had felt comfort in that security. But she needed that strength now, that belief in self, and it was that need that caused her to close her eyes and teleport.
"esuoH fo yretsyM," and there, as expected, the butler greeted her, and a room was waiting for meditation, incense burning and candles lit. The house always knew what she needed. That might seem strange to others, but little was strange to Zatanna. She would meditate and, when she was ready, she would contact John.
And perhaps, after, if fate illuminated that path during her meditation, she would see if the woman in the blue dress had eaten anything, or if the man with the boned claws in his hands was real or merely a figment of another man's skin.
But first, first she would find peace. She stripped down to the skin that had been appropriated for the evening, and she sat herself upon the plush rug made of cashmere and comfort, and she exhaled.