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eldabeTitle: Don't Tell Me Not to Fly
Fandom(s): DC Comics
Character(s): Lian Harper.
Rating: PG-13 for some creepiness.
Summary: Lian Harper came back to life in a world where heroes and villains never seem to stay dead. Now old enough to hold her own as a hero, Lian searches out the undisputed master of non-powered heroes in an age of superpowers. But Lian might not be the only one that has come back to life...
Acknowledgements:draconic_voices was the most fantastic beta ever, putting up with my absolute writer insanity. All remaining mistakes are completely mine. And thanks to iceshade, who shoved me back on track when I plateaued.
Complement:bliumchik put together an amazing mix to go along with this fic. It can be found here.
Flight Masterpost
Interlude: Safety and Freedom
Chapter Six
Lian dropped her bag next to the computer where Damian was sitting. “Cerdian’s coming in tomorrow. Where’s your dad so I can ask for permission?”
“He’s off-planet for the rest of the week.”
Lian blinked, surprised. “When did this happen?”
“While you were in class.” Damian said, dismissively. He had already expressed his disdain toward traditional education. Bobby agreed with him, but for completely different reasons.
“Oookay, I’m going to assume that the planet is in safe hands. Where’s Tim?”
“Upstairs.”
Lian went upstairs, and Tim said she could take off to hang out if she wanted to.
“Friends who actually know about your whole life are important.”
When she insisted that she was fine, Tim simply told her that she was assigned to the son of the ambassador from Atlantis, and he expected her to keep him safe.
So Lian planned a fun night. Cerdian had this weird taste for Thai food, so she started Googling restaurants. There weren’t any good movies out, but Lian could get them into this fancy club midtown.
Cerdian came to hang out with her on campus for a few hours, and she brought him to her English class. He flipped through her book and didn’t say very much. Lian got a text message from Tim that he’d been called out of the city for a JLA thing and brought Robin, so Damian would call her if there were any emergencies. Lian passed the information onto Cerdian, who confirmed that he brought his costume with him if he needed it.
The sun was just starting to set as they headed for dinner, when her cell phone buzzed. Damian.
“Yeah?”
“Cancel your plans, Lian. I’m two minutes away. There’s been a-“
BOOM
Lian spun around, catching sight of debris flying from the science building. In the back of her mind, she wondered what kind of moron gave students chemicals capable of creating C-4. In the front of her mind, she was frozen with fear. Flames began to lick along the edge of the hole left in the side of the building. She might not remember being dead, but she remembered dying, and this is how it started. Bombs and collapsing buildings and smoke and shattering glass.
"Lian?"
The whole world shrinking into little moments of wild fear.
BOOM.
"Lian!"
Lian turned to face Iris, suddenly standing next to Cerdian.
“Bobby’s coming, Lian.” Cerdian said, phone next to his ear.
People were screaming and running past them. Cerdian moved closer and squeezed her hand. Damian worked his way through the crowd of panicked students to them. He was wearing an oversized button-down shirt and sweatpants, which meant he had his gear on underneath.
“We have to stop this,” he said grimly. Lian agreed with him, of course, but buildings were on fire, and she remembered how this went. She didn’t want to die again. She’d promised her dad, she promised, and she couldn’t die now, and she didn’t want to die now besides.
Cerdian squeezed her hand again.
“Okay.” Lian took a deep breath.
“Damian, you get to coordinate. Everyone, grab people and start directing them out of here. It’s obvious that the GSU campus is the target here, so we need to move fast. College students aren’t great at coordination. Bobby can take North campus when he gets here, Iris has South. Cerdian, try to put some fires out at the science buildings, but don’t get too close. Damian can try to herd people away while you work.” Deep breath
“I’m going to the dorms to try and shove people out. They’re too close to the labs for comfort.”
“I…” Iris rocked on her heels. “I’m going to get Jai.” She was gone.
Lian did not want to drag Jai into this. He was completely human and he didn’t have enough training to hold his own in a fight. But this wasn’t a fight, was it? They just needed him to grab people and get them off campus while they figured out what was going on.
BOOM.
Fine, if he didn’t want to come, he wouldn’t. There was nothing she could do about it now.
Then she was running back to her dorm, fighting her way through the crowd of panicking students. Jess was up there, and Bailey and Keith and Haroon and Ashley and even Brian, who might be an ass, but he didn’t deserve to die.
She ran up the stairs, knowing that the risks of fire on the building were probably growing, and that students were clogging up the elevator anyway. When she burst into the room, there was no one there.
“JESS!” Lian yelled, going to her closet to pull out her bat-suit. When she slid back the false backing to her closet, a note fluttered to the ground. For a few precious seconds, Lian just stared at it dumbly. No one should be able to leave her notes there.
She snatched it up.
At the bottom was an invitation. “I’m tired of waiting. Want to play Hercules?” with a set of latitude and longitude coordinates neatly printed out. Lian grabbed her cell phone and input the data, checking her suit for any visible signs of tampering before pulling it on while her little machine spit out a satellite image of an abandoned warehouse by the docks. Zooming in, she could see a crude sign outside, “The Rock.” Funny.
She pulled sweats on over her bat-suit before she running out of her room, shutting her door behind her. She tapped the comm-link in her ear.
“Damian, I have a lead. I’m going to send the info to Oracle in a minute, just keep clearing students.” As she ran down the hall, she roared at anyone she found. “FIRE! GET OUT NOW!” but she was going to have to trust her friends – team – to finish the job here. She had an invitation to play hero, although she wasn’t exactly sure who she was supposed to be rescuing in this particular game.
She took to the streets, which were crowded with people abandoning their cars and running. The chaos made her feel claustrophobic, but she kept ignoring it, pushing toward the docks. She spotted a bicycle and with a mental apology to the owner, stole it.
Using her phone like a GPS, Lian ducked into alleys and side streets to avoid the stream of people. Two more bombs went off behind her as she made her way further and further from campus.
When she got to the warehouse, she put on her mask and pulled off the sweats. For the first time in weeks, she longed for a gun.
Lian pushed open the door to the warehouse, a batarang tight in one hand. It looked mostly empty, except for old-fashioned metal garbage cans filled with fire, casting flickering shadows on the wall.
Lian didn’t have the time or patience for caution. If the bombs had been set from here, she had to find out who and why. She pushed her way into the room, eyes scanning rapidly for any sign of movement. Six steps in, a figure stepped out from behind one of the fires.
He was brown haired and ordinary looking, still recognizable from his high school photos. He only looked a few years older than Lian herself.
Death always did play fast and loose with aging.
“Prometheus.” Lian said. He nodded.
“But maybe not the one your thinking of,” he offered, eyes dark.
“Chad Graham.” Lian agreed. The villain-sidekick-turned-traitor who never really had an MO to predict. He had just stolen tech that first time, and lucked out with it. He wasn’t wearing the Prometheus helmet now, but there was no way that he could have gotten this far on nothing but his own wits. Lian tried to activate her headset, but it wasn’t receiving a signal. She slid her hand down to her cell phone.
“He killed me too, you know. He killed both of us; me first, of course. We could have teamed up: the dead of Prometheus, the ones he didn’t even think were worthy enough to live in his world; but you never came to me..”
“But we’re both back.” Lian pointed out. Crazy people were not people she wanted to talk to. Crazy people were to be avoided, she knew that. She was living in Gotham City, for heaven’s sake. She glanced down at her cell phone in the palm of her hand. No reception. She touched her neck absently, wishing she had thought to wear a necklace or bracelet. A JLA emergency signal can punch through nearly anything.
“Yes” he laughed. “We’re both back. Lucky us.”
Lian didn’t laugh.
“Not everyone gets to come back.” He explained, ruining the punchline.
“I know.” It wasn’t funny anyway.
“So we’re so lucky.”
“Woo. Hoo.”
Lian was a little too distracted for this. Her tech was down, her team was out there without her, and she forgot to send the coordinates. Stupid. Hopefully someone would go back to her room and check. She was pretty sure she left the note on her bed. Damian knew the area best, but no one would listen to him because they didn’t know him. Jai didn’t like him and Iris once threw a pastry at him when she was visiting.
Out of everyone else, Bobby could probably lead decently. Jai was smart but he took too long on decisions, because he didn’t have enough field experience. Cerdian would only lead if he was forced to. Iris wasn’t good enough to handle a group dynamic, she was faster than human comprehension and too used to working alone.
And that’s why Damian couldn’t lead, after all. He didn’t know how to work in teams. Two-man groups were fine, but he had no ability to inspire other people to follow him, and he didn’t have the experience to work out which how personalities worked best together. Oh, god, she had just doomed the city.
“Pay attention to me!” Chad roared, and Lian snapped back. Monologuing gave the illusion of safety, because most people don’t want to interrupt themselves to kill you. But there was something crazy at the edges of Chad’s eyes, and Lian reminded herself of the danger.
Lian wondered if someone could go insane from coming back. And then she wondered how you could stay sane, after being dead and then being alive again.
“You have to pay attention to me.” Chad repeated.
“What do you want, Chad?” Lian asked, wary.
He spread his hands. “I have been given the power of life, how can I not want everything?” He laughed.
“That’s not a motivation, Chad. That’s not even possible.”
Chad frowned, and tapped his head in nervous tick. “I stole the tech again, you know. And then I downloaded everything. I went S.T.A.R. labs and I was smart enough to build my own helmet.” He pulled back his hairline to reveal a shiny metal plate above his left ear. “I can look at you fight and I can add you moves and styles. I can watch a baseball player and steal his technique. I already have enough knowledge to build bombs and trucks and planes and maybe cure cancer. Huh. That might be kinda cool. I could win some prizes.”
“That would be cool.” Lian agreed, wondering how she was going to get out of this.
“One of, well no, all of the scientists at S.T.A.R. labs dreamed about Nobel prizes. They wanted the recognition and the money.”
Lian looked at the door out of the corner of her eye. It was closed now, and she would put money down that it was locked. She had to get out of here.
“How do you know that?” she threw out, to keep him distracted.
“Oh, I can start picking up thoughts if I stay around someone enough. I don’t think it’s telepathy. It’s like the Prometheus tech starts adding together action and words and decides what makes sense. I can imitate lots of people now, Lian Harper.”
He knew her name. Of course he knew her name, he had been in her dorm room. It was still creepy.
“Why me?” Lian asked. She wasn’t sure she could take him in one-on-one combat. There was a point when he'd had Batman’s fighting moves in his helmet. And Lian could never take on Bruce.
“You and me, we’re like opposites.” Chad gestured between them, and Lian got the impression that this was his real voice for a minute. “Both killed by the same guy, but on other ends of the fight. And we both came back after he died. Like that kids game: Elimination.”
“I’m not sure I see it,” Lian said cautiously. She was edging closer to him.
“The coin!” he yelled. “You’re the hero and I’m the villain. And we share the same origin story. We should be a team, you know. Both of us dead, now alive. Both of us shadowed by the same man. Both of us-I see you. Stop that or I’ll blow up the rest of the campus.” He held up a remote control.
In the corner of her eye, Lian saw Iris stop. That meant that the team had found her, but it also probably meant Jai was on campus. Iris would never do anything to hurt him.
“You’re a Flash, aren’t you?” Chad said, as if the bright yellow lightning bold on her chest didn’t give her away. “You can’t die anymore, I’ve heard. You just join that speed force. You’re not really human anymore at all.”
Iris’s breath caught, but he didn’t even notice. “But we are. Me and Lian. Lian and me. Lian and I.”
Lian tried to figure out how far behind Iris the rest of the team would be. It depended.
“Can we still die, Lian? Or are we always going to come back?”
“We can die.” Lian answered firmly.
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been back that long, you know. I think I fell through. But I haven’t tested the theory out. You’re supposed to test out scientific theories. Do you think we need a control group?”
He was going to kill them. Iris could probably get out before the blast if she waited for him to push the button, but Iris wasn’t as fast as her dad and if-
Suddenly, he frowned. “My hand won’t move,” he complained, like a little kid. “It’s stuck.” He tried to lower his arm. “My arm too.”
Lian turned her head. Cerdian was standing in the door, his hands raised and glowing purple. The matching glow around his eyes was blinding.
“Cerdian, stop.” Lian said, the adrenaline pumping through her vains. Damian was behind him, but for once looked confused. He has never worked with an Atlantean mage before, Lian reminded herself.
“Cerdian, you’ll kill him and you’ll never be allowed back in Gotham. Stop.” Damian turned back, surprised.
“What’s happening to me!?”
Bobby ducked around them both and pulled the rope from his belt. He pried Chad’s frozen fingers apart, removing the remote carefully and passing it to Iris. Then, he looped the rope around Chad’s hands, but couldn’t pull them closed.
Cerdian took a step into the room, and the glow around his hands grew brighter. Lian ran to him, trying to make eye-contact through the glow.
“Cerdian, stop!” She didn’t want him to kill anyone. Dad still had nightmares about the things he did after she died.
Cerdian blinked, and suddenly she could look into his eyes.
“He was going to kill you,” Cerdian said, furious.
“It’s c-c-cold,” Chad moaned.
“He’s insane. Don’t kill him, Cerdian. Please.”
Cerdian opened his hands, and the glow disappeared. Bobby quickly pulled his ropes tight.
Damian grabbed Chad and hauled him upright. “Where are the rest of the bombs?” he growled.
“Oh, I don’t remember.” Chad babbled. “But they’re all tied to the detonator anyway. I was playing them to Beethoven’s fifth, didn’t you notice? But then Lian came and I stopped. Lian, what’s happening? Who are these people?”
Lian held up her and Cerdian’s joined hands to him.
“This is my team, Chad. I came back to life to be with the people who care about me. I would never squander that time on someone who just happened to get killed by the same person as me.”
She deliberately turned away from him, and looked at Damian. “Arkham?”
Damian looked at the man who'd torn apart his city. “Arkham,” he agreed.
Lian turned to Iris and Bobby and Cerdian. “Come on guys, we’ve got a city to save.”
Iris nodded and dashed off with the detonator – they should be able to use it to pinpoint the bombs' locations. Lian walked outside and put her headset back in so Jai could hear her too. “And maybe if we’re really good, Uncle Batman will buy us ice cream as a reward.”
It wasn’t a very good joke. But someone had to pick up the slack when the ones with the good jokes were gone.
Epilogue
Fandom(s): DC Comics
Character(s): Lian Harper.
Rating: PG-13 for some creepiness.
Summary: Lian Harper came back to life in a world where heroes and villains never seem to stay dead. Now old enough to hold her own as a hero, Lian searches out the undisputed master of non-powered heroes in an age of superpowers. But Lian might not be the only one that has come back to life...
Acknowledgements:
draconic_voices was the most fantastic beta ever, putting up with my absolute writer insanity. All remaining mistakes are completely mine. And thanks to iceshade, who shoved me back on track when I plateaued.Complement:
bliumchik put together an amazing mix to go along with this fic. It can be found here. Flight Masterpost
Interlude: Safety and Freedom
Chapter Six
Lian dropped her bag next to the computer where Damian was sitting. “Cerdian’s coming in tomorrow. Where’s your dad so I can ask for permission?”
“He’s off-planet for the rest of the week.”
Lian blinked, surprised. “When did this happen?”
“While you were in class.” Damian said, dismissively. He had already expressed his disdain toward traditional education. Bobby agreed with him, but for completely different reasons.
“Oookay, I’m going to assume that the planet is in safe hands. Where’s Tim?”
“Upstairs.”
Lian went upstairs, and Tim said she could take off to hang out if she wanted to.
“Friends who actually know about your whole life are important.”
When she insisted that she was fine, Tim simply told her that she was assigned to the son of the ambassador from Atlantis, and he expected her to keep him safe.
So Lian planned a fun night. Cerdian had this weird taste for Thai food, so she started Googling restaurants. There weren’t any good movies out, but Lian could get them into this fancy club midtown.
Cerdian came to hang out with her on campus for a few hours, and she brought him to her English class. He flipped through her book and didn’t say very much. Lian got a text message from Tim that he’d been called out of the city for a JLA thing and brought Robin, so Damian would call her if there were any emergencies. Lian passed the information onto Cerdian, who confirmed that he brought his costume with him if he needed it.
The sun was just starting to set as they headed for dinner, when her cell phone buzzed. Damian.
“Yeah?”
“Cancel your plans, Lian. I’m two minutes away. There’s been a-“
BOOM
Lian spun around, catching sight of debris flying from the science building. In the back of her mind, she wondered what kind of moron gave students chemicals capable of creating C-4. In the front of her mind, she was frozen with fear. Flames began to lick along the edge of the hole left in the side of the building. She might not remember being dead, but she remembered dying, and this is how it started. Bombs and collapsing buildings and smoke and shattering glass.
"Lian?"
The whole world shrinking into little moments of wild fear.
BOOM.
"Lian!"
Lian turned to face Iris, suddenly standing next to Cerdian.
“Bobby’s coming, Lian.” Cerdian said, phone next to his ear.
People were screaming and running past them. Cerdian moved closer and squeezed her hand. Damian worked his way through the crowd of panicked students to them. He was wearing an oversized button-down shirt and sweatpants, which meant he had his gear on underneath.
“We have to stop this,” he said grimly. Lian agreed with him, of course, but buildings were on fire, and she remembered how this went. She didn’t want to die again. She’d promised her dad, she promised, and she couldn’t die now, and she didn’t want to die now besides.
Cerdian squeezed her hand again.
“Okay.” Lian took a deep breath.
“Damian, you get to coordinate. Everyone, grab people and start directing them out of here. It’s obvious that the GSU campus is the target here, so we need to move fast. College students aren’t great at coordination. Bobby can take North campus when he gets here, Iris has South. Cerdian, try to put some fires out at the science buildings, but don’t get too close. Damian can try to herd people away while you work.” Deep breath
“I’m going to the dorms to try and shove people out. They’re too close to the labs for comfort.”
“I…” Iris rocked on her heels. “I’m going to get Jai.” She was gone.
Lian did not want to drag Jai into this. He was completely human and he didn’t have enough training to hold his own in a fight. But this wasn’t a fight, was it? They just needed him to grab people and get them off campus while they figured out what was going on.
BOOM.
Fine, if he didn’t want to come, he wouldn’t. There was nothing she could do about it now.
Then she was running back to her dorm, fighting her way through the crowd of panicking students. Jess was up there, and Bailey and Keith and Haroon and Ashley and even Brian, who might be an ass, but he didn’t deserve to die.
She ran up the stairs, knowing that the risks of fire on the building were probably growing, and that students were clogging up the elevator anyway. When she burst into the room, there was no one there.
“JESS!” Lian yelled, going to her closet to pull out her bat-suit. When she slid back the false backing to her closet, a note fluttered to the ground. For a few precious seconds, Lian just stared at it dumbly. No one should be able to leave her notes there.
She snatched it up.
At the bottom was an invitation. “I’m tired of waiting. Want to play Hercules?” with a set of latitude and longitude coordinates neatly printed out. Lian grabbed her cell phone and input the data, checking her suit for any visible signs of tampering before pulling it on while her little machine spit out a satellite image of an abandoned warehouse by the docks. Zooming in, she could see a crude sign outside, “The Rock.” Funny.
She pulled sweats on over her bat-suit before she running out of her room, shutting her door behind her. She tapped the comm-link in her ear.
“Damian, I have a lead. I’m going to send the info to Oracle in a minute, just keep clearing students.” As she ran down the hall, she roared at anyone she found. “FIRE! GET OUT NOW!” but she was going to have to trust her friends – team – to finish the job here. She had an invitation to play hero, although she wasn’t exactly sure who she was supposed to be rescuing in this particular game.
She took to the streets, which were crowded with people abandoning their cars and running. The chaos made her feel claustrophobic, but she kept ignoring it, pushing toward the docks. She spotted a bicycle and with a mental apology to the owner, stole it.
Using her phone like a GPS, Lian ducked into alleys and side streets to avoid the stream of people. Two more bombs went off behind her as she made her way further and further from campus.
When she got to the warehouse, she put on her mask and pulled off the sweats. For the first time in weeks, she longed for a gun.
Lian pushed open the door to the warehouse, a batarang tight in one hand. It looked mostly empty, except for old-fashioned metal garbage cans filled with fire, casting flickering shadows on the wall.
Lian didn’t have the time or patience for caution. If the bombs had been set from here, she had to find out who and why. She pushed her way into the room, eyes scanning rapidly for any sign of movement. Six steps in, a figure stepped out from behind one of the fires.
He was brown haired and ordinary looking, still recognizable from his high school photos. He only looked a few years older than Lian herself.
Death always did play fast and loose with aging.
“Prometheus.” Lian said. He nodded.
“But maybe not the one your thinking of,” he offered, eyes dark.
“Chad Graham.” Lian agreed. The villain-sidekick-turned-traitor who never really had an MO to predict. He had just stolen tech that first time, and lucked out with it. He wasn’t wearing the Prometheus helmet now, but there was no way that he could have gotten this far on nothing but his own wits. Lian tried to activate her headset, but it wasn’t receiving a signal. She slid her hand down to her cell phone.
“He killed me too, you know. He killed both of us; me first, of course. We could have teamed up: the dead of Prometheus, the ones he didn’t even think were worthy enough to live in his world; but you never came to me..”
“But we’re both back.” Lian pointed out. Crazy people were not people she wanted to talk to. Crazy people were to be avoided, she knew that. She was living in Gotham City, for heaven’s sake. She glanced down at her cell phone in the palm of her hand. No reception. She touched her neck absently, wishing she had thought to wear a necklace or bracelet. A JLA emergency signal can punch through nearly anything.
“Yes” he laughed. “We’re both back. Lucky us.”
Lian didn’t laugh.
“Not everyone gets to come back.” He explained, ruining the punchline.
“I know.” It wasn’t funny anyway.
“So we’re so lucky.”
“Woo. Hoo.”
Lian was a little too distracted for this. Her tech was down, her team was out there without her, and she forgot to send the coordinates. Stupid. Hopefully someone would go back to her room and check. She was pretty sure she left the note on her bed. Damian knew the area best, but no one would listen to him because they didn’t know him. Jai didn’t like him and Iris once threw a pastry at him when she was visiting.
Out of everyone else, Bobby could probably lead decently. Jai was smart but he took too long on decisions, because he didn’t have enough field experience. Cerdian would only lead if he was forced to. Iris wasn’t good enough to handle a group dynamic, she was faster than human comprehension and too used to working alone.
And that’s why Damian couldn’t lead, after all. He didn’t know how to work in teams. Two-man groups were fine, but he had no ability to inspire other people to follow him, and he didn’t have the experience to work out which how personalities worked best together. Oh, god, she had just doomed the city.
“Pay attention to me!” Chad roared, and Lian snapped back. Monologuing gave the illusion of safety, because most people don’t want to interrupt themselves to kill you. But there was something crazy at the edges of Chad’s eyes, and Lian reminded herself of the danger.
Lian wondered if someone could go insane from coming back. And then she wondered how you could stay sane, after being dead and then being alive again.
“You have to pay attention to me.” Chad repeated.
“What do you want, Chad?” Lian asked, wary.
He spread his hands. “I have been given the power of life, how can I not want everything?” He laughed.
“That’s not a motivation, Chad. That’s not even possible.”
Chad frowned, and tapped his head in nervous tick. “I stole the tech again, you know. And then I downloaded everything. I went S.T.A.R. labs and I was smart enough to build my own helmet.” He pulled back his hairline to reveal a shiny metal plate above his left ear. “I can look at you fight and I can add you moves and styles. I can watch a baseball player and steal his technique. I already have enough knowledge to build bombs and trucks and planes and maybe cure cancer. Huh. That might be kinda cool. I could win some prizes.”
“That would be cool.” Lian agreed, wondering how she was going to get out of this.
“One of, well no, all of the scientists at S.T.A.R. labs dreamed about Nobel prizes. They wanted the recognition and the money.”
Lian looked at the door out of the corner of her eye. It was closed now, and she would put money down that it was locked. She had to get out of here.
“How do you know that?” she threw out, to keep him distracted.
“Oh, I can start picking up thoughts if I stay around someone enough. I don’t think it’s telepathy. It’s like the Prometheus tech starts adding together action and words and decides what makes sense. I can imitate lots of people now, Lian Harper.”
He knew her name. Of course he knew her name, he had been in her dorm room. It was still creepy.
“Why me?” Lian asked. She wasn’t sure she could take him in one-on-one combat. There was a point when he'd had Batman’s fighting moves in his helmet. And Lian could never take on Bruce.
“You and me, we’re like opposites.” Chad gestured between them, and Lian got the impression that this was his real voice for a minute. “Both killed by the same guy, but on other ends of the fight. And we both came back after he died. Like that kids game: Elimination.”
“I’m not sure I see it,” Lian said cautiously. She was edging closer to him.
“The coin!” he yelled. “You’re the hero and I’m the villain. And we share the same origin story. We should be a team, you know. Both of us dead, now alive. Both of us shadowed by the same man. Both of us-I see you. Stop that or I’ll blow up the rest of the campus.” He held up a remote control.
In the corner of her eye, Lian saw Iris stop. That meant that the team had found her, but it also probably meant Jai was on campus. Iris would never do anything to hurt him.
“You’re a Flash, aren’t you?” Chad said, as if the bright yellow lightning bold on her chest didn’t give her away. “You can’t die anymore, I’ve heard. You just join that speed force. You’re not really human anymore at all.”
Iris’s breath caught, but he didn’t even notice. “But we are. Me and Lian. Lian and me. Lian and I.”
Lian tried to figure out how far behind Iris the rest of the team would be. It depended.
“Can we still die, Lian? Or are we always going to come back?”
“We can die.” Lian answered firmly.
“I’m not sure. I haven’t been back that long, you know. I think I fell through. But I haven’t tested the theory out. You’re supposed to test out scientific theories. Do you think we need a control group?”
He was going to kill them. Iris could probably get out before the blast if she waited for him to push the button, but Iris wasn’t as fast as her dad and if-
Suddenly, he frowned. “My hand won’t move,” he complained, like a little kid. “It’s stuck.” He tried to lower his arm. “My arm too.”
Lian turned her head. Cerdian was standing in the door, his hands raised and glowing purple. The matching glow around his eyes was blinding.
“Cerdian, stop.” Lian said, the adrenaline pumping through her vains. Damian was behind him, but for once looked confused. He has never worked with an Atlantean mage before, Lian reminded herself.
“Cerdian, you’ll kill him and you’ll never be allowed back in Gotham. Stop.” Damian turned back, surprised.
“What’s happening to me!?”
Bobby ducked around them both and pulled the rope from his belt. He pried Chad’s frozen fingers apart, removing the remote carefully and passing it to Iris. Then, he looped the rope around Chad’s hands, but couldn’t pull them closed.
Cerdian took a step into the room, and the glow around his hands grew brighter. Lian ran to him, trying to make eye-contact through the glow.
“Cerdian, stop!” She didn’t want him to kill anyone. Dad still had nightmares about the things he did after she died.
Cerdian blinked, and suddenly she could look into his eyes.
“He was going to kill you,” Cerdian said, furious.
“It’s c-c-cold,” Chad moaned.
“He’s insane. Don’t kill him, Cerdian. Please.”
Cerdian opened his hands, and the glow disappeared. Bobby quickly pulled his ropes tight.
Damian grabbed Chad and hauled him upright. “Where are the rest of the bombs?” he growled.
“Oh, I don’t remember.” Chad babbled. “But they’re all tied to the detonator anyway. I was playing them to Beethoven’s fifth, didn’t you notice? But then Lian came and I stopped. Lian, what’s happening? Who are these people?”
Lian held up her and Cerdian’s joined hands to him.
“This is my team, Chad. I came back to life to be with the people who care about me. I would never squander that time on someone who just happened to get killed by the same person as me.”
She deliberately turned away from him, and looked at Damian. “Arkham?”
Damian looked at the man who'd torn apart his city. “Arkham,” he agreed.
Lian turned to Iris and Bobby and Cerdian. “Come on guys, we’ve got a city to save.”
Iris nodded and dashed off with the detonator – they should be able to use it to pinpoint the bombs' locations. Lian walked outside and put her headset back in so Jai could hear her too. “And maybe if we’re really good, Uncle Batman will buy us ice cream as a reward.”
It wasn’t a very good joke. But someone had to pick up the slack when the ones with the good jokes were gone.
Epilogue
