Young Writers Society

She rolled her eyes and dragged herself to her feet, "Calm down, it'll spread quicker if your heart rate increases," she said as she limped over to the bed to retrieve her cane, "I've seen it work in as little as ten minutes that way. Just breathe slowly and you'll be fine." She got to the bed and sat down hard, propping up her newly injured leg and unscrewing the bulb at the end of the cane. Inside was a hollow she'd filled with the incomplete antidote.

Leaning over to undo some of the bandages on her leg, she continued, "The antidote can only be activated by AB-negative blood. Those of us with that blood type are also immune, so your assumption from earlier was incorrect." She held the container under the wound and let a few drops of her blood drip inside, then she quickly replaced the bandages and swirled the liquid, mixing it until it turned a deep violet shade.

She then returned to the intruder and offered the liquid to him, "You have to drink it all. I recommend doing it quickly." Then, after a beat, she added, "For the record, I'm only letting you survive this because Eddie seems to like you."

The glow in his eyes dulled slightly.

"Thanks," he said. His heart was still pounding in his ears, but he somehow managed to push past the crushing waves of terror and drank the concoction. It coated his throat as it went down. For just a single moment, part of him was clenched by the irrational fear that the poison was going to take effect before the antidote could.

But then his fear full subsided, and the glow in his eyes was gone.

"Here," he said, holding the empty container back out to her. He made his way back over to where his helmet was and slipped it back on without any rush, but the real reason for its return was to hide the tears that he knew were threatening to spill over. "I'm glad Eddie likes me."

Eddie appeared suddenly in the doorway with a crude stuffed giraffe in his hands and a deep frown. He marched over to Megara before she could respond to the intruder and shoved the stuffed animal in her hands, "He's ripping," he whined.

She knelt on the ground, setting aside her cane and its missing piece to examine the toy. the seam along its belly was, indeed, coming undone. She offered the upset Eddie a comforting smile and dug a needle and thread out of the medkit. It was a surgical thread, and a sterile needle, but she had more.

"I can fix him," she said soothingly, backstitching the first couple of stitches.

Eddie watched in fascination, grinning and seemingly oblivious to the wounds on the people around him. Oblivious or used to it.

She finished fixing his toy and handed it back with a smile, "There you go, all better."

"Kiss him! You have to kiss him better!" Eddie protested.

She obliged, quickly pecking the line of new stitched on the giraffe's belly. Eddie giggled and took it back, bouncing on the balls of his feet and hopping over to the intruder. He shoved the toy up to him, "Look! His name's Peter!"

Jason took his helmet off - despite just putting it back on - so Eddie could see how much he liked the giraffe's name.

"Peter is very cute," he said. He crouched down in front of Eddie, not caring in the slightest if Megara thought it was childish. "Does he have a last name?"

Eddie shook his head, "He doesn't need one!" he insisted.

Megara, meanwhile, got up, leaning more heavily than usual on her cane, and limped over to the intruder - no - guest. He was a guest now. She gently placed a hand on his uninjured shoulder, "You're going to want stitches on that wound of yours, it won't heal properly otherwise."

She said this quietly so as not to talk over the excitedly chattering Eddie, who's words, while sincere and energetic, were completely indistinguishable from gibberish. Megara knew this to be him unknowingly flipping between bits of other languages he'd picked up from being around her, but she didn't imagine their unexpected guest would realize that right away.

As Eddie excitedly talked with him, Jason's gaze traveled down to his injury. It hadn't seemed too bad, but he was still learning how to do all of this on his own - he didn't have Bruce, Alfred or Dick to patch him anymore.

"Thanks for the advice," he softly said, also not wanting to interrupt Eddie. He started to unravel the bandages around his arm - getting a feeling of deja vu from the last time he had been all wrapped up after narrowly escaping death - but stopped when he remembered that Eddie was there. He didn't want him to see the blood and the injury.

He turned to Megara. "Can I have some thread and a needle?" he asked, immediately looking back at Eddie once the question left his lips.

Before Megara could respond, Eddie piped up, "Oh! You have a red spot! Meggie can sew you up! Just like Peter!" He bounced on the balls of his feet and looked at Megara expectantly.

She glanced between them, her eyes lingering on the look on Eddie's face, and sighed. "I have to get off my feet," she said, gesturing to the bed, "Sit down. You shouldn't be stitching up your own wounds anyway." She stooped momentarily to pick up the medkit before limping to the bed and sitting down with a wince. Why did he have to hit her good leg? Of all the places to hit, he had to aim for the only thing keeping her from being nealy completely immobile.

It was that thought that had her disregarding the numbing solution at the bottom of the kit. If she had to patch him up, she wasn't going to make it comfortable for him.

"Oh," he managed to get out. "Thanks."

He sat down on the bed, undoing the last of his bandages before leaving them in a bloody pile at his feet - he didn't want to dirty the bed with his blood. He had already done enough damage. After a moment, he decided it would be easier if he took his jacket off. Careful not to get too much blood on it, Jason removed his jacket. He was only wearing a t-shirt (and a bulletproof vest, because he wasn't an idiot) underneath it, and he quickly realized how bad his body looked to someone who didn't know him.

He had numerous scars littering both of his arms. Some were relatively recent, but others were from the shrapnel hitting him after the explosion that had killed him - the Lazarus Pit wasn't perfect at bringing people back to life, and had left him with scars instead of healing them all together.

And from the sheer amount of them, Jason knew that it was obvious he had been through some bad stuff in the past.

Megara examined the scars, taking guesses at their origins in her head as she readied her needle.

"Eddie," she said to the boy just beofre she was ready to start stitching, "How about you get ready for bed, hm?"

Eddie got a distressed look on his face, "But I wanna-"

"Eddie," she said gently, "You've been up too late already."

Eddie pouted and trudged off to his room, dragging his feet the whole way.

Megara waited until he was gone to turn back to her work. She didn't ask about the scars as she started stitching, not bothering with a warning before she pierced his skin. As she sewed, her fingers brushed a collection of smaller scars near his wound.

"Where did you find Eddie?" she asked. Those were shrapnel scars, she knew it. She had enough of her own to tell.

He winced a little when she first put the needle in, but the pain soon faded from the forefront of his mind - after the explosion and the crowbar, nothing felt quite as painful. "He was in an alleyway near here," he said. "I...was passing by when I saw him. There were four men trying to take him away - I think they wanted to steal his money."

He looked in the direction that Eddie had gone. He might have regretted helping earlier when he thought he was going to die as a result, but now he was grateful for deciding to stop the four. Eddie had made it home safely to the person who seemed to care the most for him.

"...Is it just you and Eddie?" he asked, turning back to Megara.

She tugged the thread a little harder than necessary, "Yes," she said stiffly.

She'd told Eddie to leave the money behind while she was gone. She'd told him to stay here, and that if he absolutely had to leave, to leave the money behind. In his hands, it was more likely to get him hurt than to help him if he was alone, and she usually had a few coins on her or the skills to procure some.

She wished she'd never let him have any money at all. Stupid, she berated herself as she returned her focus entirely to her work, a stupid risk. She would have to take it away from him in the morning.

She'd have to find a way to get the guest out of here as well. Eddie would protest. She could tell him that he had to leave, that he had...she shook her head, made another stitch, arranging it carefully with the others. He had enough scars. She wondered, for half a second, if she had anything to do with any of them. She couldn't keep track of every victim of every bomb she planted, everyone she stabbed, slashed, snapped over the years. He could be...

She pushed the thought from her head.

He didn't flinch when she tugged.

"...You're doing good," he said. He wasn't sure if Megara and Eddie were related by blood, but he could see how much she cared about him - it reminded Jason of how much he cared about Damian. "With Eddie, I mean. I...I have someone like him, too. Sometimes you just can't stop kids from going out and doing stupid, dangerous things."

She froze. His words weren't processing. She resumed her work, finished it quietly.

As she clipped the excess thread and packed it away, she remembered to be mad at him, then she was mad at herself for forgetting. For allowing herself to be limited like this in the first place.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the kit on her lap, her cane beside her, and contemplated getting up. The amount of pain she would be in...She shook her head and simply placed the kit on the floor by the bed. She might need it to check on her wound in the morning anyway.

In the morning... she cursed under her breath.

She looked at her guest, "I hate you," she said bluntly.

The words took a second to register.

"...What?" he managed to get out. The three words were ones that he wasn't used to hearing. He was sure he would hear them more, eventually, but Megara was the first one to say it directly to him. And he never expected to hear it from someone like her in a situation like this. He wasn't asking for some great show of gratitude, but didn't he deserve a little more than hatred for helping Eddie?

But maybe the helping Eddie part wasn't the problem.

Maybe it was because he was here. Or, more likely, maybe it was because he had shot her.

"I'm sorry," he said. He didn't look her in the eye. He wasn't used to that - wasn't used to shooting other people, and wasn't used to apologizing for it. He wasn't even sure if the shooting was the actual problem, or if he was just trying to understand someone who operated out of the confines of Jason's story. Those people were predictable; he had broken their personalities down to a formula at this point.

Megara wasn't.

Was it cruel to get angry at an apology? That was the question she should have been asking when she squeezed her eyes shut, grit her teeth, and fisted her hands around the worn covers. When she opened her eyes, they locked on her legs. Useless. Cripple. Briar's voice in her head, stating facts in that detached way of hers. As if the word held no weight. As if it wasn't a death sentence.

One of her hands reached for her cane, latched onto it, squeezed it, as though trying to snap it.

"I'm lucky I can walk at all on a good day," she said evenly, "I only have one leg that functions how it should anymore, and I have Eddie to take care of. And then you come here and take away what little mobility I had." She turned her scathing gaze to him, "You have to stay here for the night. Eddie will ask a lot of questions if I have you leave now and I don't want to lie to him. Tomorrow morning, though, you're gone. Am I understood?"

She hasn't meant to reveal so much about her physical state, but in her rage she hardly noticed.