Young Writers Society

Megara wandered with the general group for a little while, seeing Ciel head off toward the kitchens, presumably to see if she could offer some assistance, polite little noble that she was. Such a task wasn't something Megara was remotely qualified for, nor was it anything she wanted to be doing, so she left.

In her wanderings, which she told herself was just to familiarize herself with the layout of the manor and not just to find a place to cry unobserved and undisturbed, she came across a library.

It was a beautiful place, really, reminiscent of the room of the same purpose in her old home. Of course, she'd hated that library as much as she hated everything else in the manor, but here was different. The energy of the room as different, likely because it probably wasn't used to store journals detailing torture methods, among other distasteful texts. Anywhere with those kinds of books couldn't be quite as comforting as she was told libraries were supposed to be.

She wandered the shelves, running her fingers along the spines of unfamiliar titles. She didn't even realize she was crying until her vision was so blurred by the tears she had to cease her reading. She sank to her knees, buried her face in her hands, and sobbed quietly. Always quietly.

Even though the sobs were quiet, Jason heard them.

Rubbing away the little tears that had formed in his eyes with the palm of his hand, Jason emerged from the depths of the shelf to see who was doing the crying. It wasn't unusual to catch one of the manor's current occupants crying. They all had something that they missed from their old life, and it never took long for them to breakdown after being reminded of it.

But it wasn't one of the Gothamites.

And it wasn't Wally, either.

It was Megara.

"Megara?" Jason asked. He was standing a few feet away from her, not quite at the end of the aisle but close to it. He hesitated before taking a step towards her. "Is everything..."

He already knew the answer to the question.

"Do you..."

He faltered again, unsure of what to say.

Her head shot up the moment he spoke, a bolt of panic shooting through her as - for a split second - she was back in the manor, getting caught, about to be punished for it.

She tried and failed to gain some kind of composure as she searched frantically for something to say.

"I..." no words came to her. She leaned against the shelf next to her and gave up on covering up what was going on. It was pathetic to try.

"It was my fault," she said quietly, not exactly to him. And she realized it really was. Who was she to think she could care for a child in the midst of all of this? To think that she had the right to put him in danger like that? No matter what precautions she'd been taking, he was still at risk, and she was still the one putting him in that position. The whole time, it was her fault. Indisputably. If she'd cared about him, really cared about him, she'd have taken him to someone who wouldn't put him in danger like that. Someone who could handle it. And she didn't. Selfishly, egotistically, she didn't.

"It wasn't your fault," Jason said.

After a moment passed, he finally bridged the little distance left between the two of them. He didn't immediately look at her, but his gaze did eventually travel to her face. "You did your best. Back...back when I thought Alex was Damian, you and I were in the same shoes. I...I've heard that parenthood is a choice. I don't think we were parents, and I don't think it was a choice, either. You were the one who had to take care of Eddie. You are the one who has to take care of him. And I...I..."

He faltered again, gaze dropping down to the carpeted library floor.

"...I know you did your best," he said. "I-I could tell that a year ago when we first met."

The tears were silent now, constant streams to betray the emotion that didn't fully show on her face. There was no energy left in her. Nothing left to fuel her sobs or her expressions. She just stared into space, crying.

"You're wrong," she said after a pause, feeling like every syllable was a battle to get out, "I...I wasn't supposed to be taking care of him. I was putting him in harm's way."

Then it registered. A year ago. "...we met a few weeks ago," her eyebrows drew together as she looked at him. It was a detail. It didn't matter. But she couldn't help focusing on it. Clinging to it.

Jason shook his head, but he didn't know if it was because he was objecting to her objection or the time they had supposedly been apart.

"It's been a year here," he quietly said. "Time runs differently between realities, sometimes. I-I guess that explains why you thought to come here."

He wasn't someone she had thought of a year later. He was someone she had thought of a few weeks later. It wasn't a surprise that she would be thinking of him, then. A year would have been shocking when he really thought about it. Why would she come to him for help when they hadn't seen each other for months?

He looked up and over at her, one hand lingering over one of his wrists.

A year. It had been a year for him.

She closed her eyes.

"...why didn't you come back." Her voice broke, and she hated it for breaking.

He struggled to find his voice.

"A...A lot has happened since we met," he said. Those weren't the words he wanted to say, but they were the words leaving his mouth. He wanted to tell her that it was because she hadn't wanted him to come back. That he had jumped the gun and thought that there was a connection there that really wasn't, and that he had realized he was only going to be hurting himself if he came back.

He wanted to say that he couldn't survive losing another person in his life. That the last time he had lost the people close to him, he had gone teetering so far off the edge that he had ended up in another world.

But he couldn't.

"I found out things about the others," he said. "About Damian, about Dick, about my dad..."

His gaze dropped to the ground.

"I just...couldn't find the time to find a way back."

There was a way back. He was sitting in the kitchen watching Alfred cook with James, chatting up a storm like he always did. If he had just asked Wally, even before he knew that Wally was like the rest of them, he could have probably gotten back to Megara. And he had known that almost immediately after he returned to Gotham, but he hadn't even tried tracking Wally West down.

Megara's eyes squeezed shut tighter and tighter until she saw spots. She was stupid. Stupid, hopeful, egotistical, and selfish. How foolishly self-centered she'd been to think he'd come back. That he would defy her like everyone else did and come back. That he would want to.

"Oh."

A stupid answer. Because she was stupid. Thoughtless.

She swallowed the lump in her throat. "It...I understand," she lied. She didn't understand. Selfishly, she didn't want to understand. "I just...I let...I let them...and..." none of her thoughts left her mouth complete. She hated that. She hated him. She hated him for leaving. For not coming back. For having a life of his own that would eclipse her and Eddie and everything in her world. She hated and she hated and she hated and she cried.

He started rubbing his wrists almost methodically.

"It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be," he added, voice quiet. He knew he sounded like a liar right now, but he couldn't muster the strength to say the words that he really wanted to tell her. It wasn't his fault. He knew it wasn't. She was the one who hadn't wanted to see him again.

So why did he feel so guilty about not returning now, even though he had thought about her and Eddie every single day since he came back to Gotham?

Her eyes drifted down to his hands, drawn to them by the movement. She blinked the tears from her eyes and stared, absent, barely processing as she responded, "But you didn't come back." She was quiet at first. "You didn't come back."

She tried to reason with herself, It isn't his fault. You told him not to. But such arguments fell flat against the sudden flash of rage that filled her.

He went stiff.

"I-I didn't," he whispered. Even though the rest of his body wasn't moving, his hands just kept rubbing at his wrists. He wanted to dig his nails into his skin so the physical pain could distract him from the emotional pain bombarding him from all sides, but he knew that wouldn't help him.

"I...I guess you were right," he said. "I guess I...I..."

He faltered, biting the inside of his lip as he tried not to cry. "I guess I avoided making things tough for Eddie-"

His eyes widened as the words came out.

He had just been trying to repeat what she had told him, but hadn't realized how wrong it would be to mention Eddie now of all times. Eddie was the reason Megara had fled to the library. He looked over at her, eyes still wide and horrified, and tried to frantically get out an apology, "I'm sorry. I was thinking and I, I just was thinking of our last conversation and...and..."

Megara looked away from him, her eyes fixating on the floor. Eddie. He hated her by now.

She choked back another sob.

"Stop," she said, skating her head, "Just...stop explaining. Stop...stop." She couldn't stand it. The explaining. The desperation. It was so familiar. The kind of thing she heard when she had a knife to someone's neck. She didn't want to be hearing that. Not from him.

"I'm sorry." His hands were still on his wrists, rubbing them as though he wanted to claw off his own skin. She reached for him, placing her hands on his gently. "I'm sorry. I asked...I said...I told you not to come back. I didn't have the right to get angry. I'm sorry."

She could barely finish her apologies before she was crying again, too hard to speak. She didn't realize she was leaning into him as her body shook. She didn't realize she wanted his comfort until she was desperate for it.

When she put her hand on his and leaned into him, his tears finally spilled over in thick, ugly torrents.

"You didn't want me to come back," he confirmed. He wanted to comfort her, but he couldn't move his hands to give her a hug - he was still rubbing his own wrists, even as she seemingly tried to stop him.

"I-I figured out how to get back," he admitted. "I-I could have asked Wally. But I...I..."

He dug his fingernails into his skin.

"I didn't want to..." He took a big gulp of air - not because he was nervous and needed something to calm him down, but because he was crying so hard that he was struggling to get breaths in between the sobs. "Every-Everyone always leaves me. They might like me for awhile, but then someone else comes along or-or they realize that I'm not f-fun to hang out with. And it always hurts when I'm alone so I-I thought that I'd save myself the pain and stay here in Gotham. B-Because even if you liked Jason Todd, you'd never like me."

She took his hands, no longer just resting hers on top of his but forcing them away from his wrists. He was going to hurt himself.

"I didn't want you to leave," she said, "I never wanted you to leave. I wanted...I want you to come back. I...I wanted you to stay." She wanted to contradict him. She wanted him to know... whatever it was she was feeling. "I wanted you to stay. I wish I never told you to stay away. I wish...I wish you were around...more. Ever. I want you around..." she was losing her grasp on language. The words were slipping, simplifying. She couldn't think.

Her grip on his hands tightened.

Why did he do that with his wrists? Why would he rub and claw at his skin when he was distressed like that? She wanted to stop it. To stop him from hurting himself like he so clearly wanted to.