#This might be terrible and ik the quadruple axel is overdone but I think it makes a sick parallel to Dick (who for context she never met) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

redpasserines · 8 months

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Helena, on mourning.

Car sirens. Blue, red, blue, red. The flashes of light reflecting on the beads of a broken necklace. A shadow standing on the balcony, lightly stepping around the broken shards of the window. The outline, glowing red and blue. And red again. A body, on the floor. The single pearl in her right hand. And Helena, under the table, with her mother’s blood splattered on her cheeks.

Did you come to kill me?

She skates like she’s running. She doesn’t feel like dancing right now, because right now, she exists twice. She’s eight and twelve years old. She can hear it, the fork clattering, the sirens, the way the wooden floor had creaked when she’d stood; can see the morning’s light, the blue and the red, Damian promising he’ll be back, a man who’d introduce himself as Jason, staring at her.

Everything always catches back to you, Helena. You’re allowed to be sad. Even if you think it doesn’t make sense.

The stands are empty. The rink is, too. It’s five in the morning, on a Tuesday. She expects to see her mother there, behind the glass panel. She turns, and she thinks she almost runs into her older brother, who’d never moved on from the shakiness he had in the beginning, but who’d always, stubbornly, tried to catch up to her.

Her dad holds her in his arms in front of a hole in the ground. He isn’t really her dad, because the dad-she-never-met is like they’d said her mother is, now, as in: laying down in a hole somewhere. It’s hot, maybe twenty four degrees or so, and the sun is shining bright. Helena doesn’t cry. This is all just a bad dream. On the side, she sees more of the stone memorials.

Her right skate cuts viscerally across the ice. Any other day, she would have felt bad for the people that’d come after her.

You remind me of my brother. Well, I guess he’d have been your brother too. I mean, I’m Todd’s brother, and yours, too, though, so I guess not necessarily. But he was really good. Not at skating, just. Well.

Helena is twelve years old. Her mother is never coming back. She didn’t leave for a day trip to scout another city. Don’t think that we’re leaving, baby, we’re just racing across the whole Earth. You love racing, I know that because when you were four and in kindergarten, you would make me bring you to school extra early so you could race with the boys. Helena had stopped complaining, at some point, probably around the time they went to Sweden and she’d learned about skating on black ice. Gosh, she had hoped they’d go back to Toronto, eventually.

Helena is eight years old. She’s running across the ice. She’s her mother’s daughter, because she’s running away, away from people that she would probably kill her if they’d ever caught up to her. Except, even though that’s all she’s been seeing, maybe because that’s all she wants, she can’t see them. She’ll never see them again.

She jumps. She knows she shouldn’t, not while she’s angry and falling apart and alone, but otherwise she’d remember. Remember the first time she’d seen Damian in that black and blue costume of his, explaining why he was wearing it. If she concentrated hard enough, she could remember her father’s old red helmet, too, the way it shone in the cave’s low lighting.

You remind me of him. He would have loved you.

She turns, four times. She lands it. She’s been trying that exact jump for years. It’s not supposed to be possible, technically. That’s what all of her coaches had told her. There are limits to everything, Helena. That’s okay. We just have to live with that. She screams.

#helena wayne #jason todd #damian wayne #dick grayson #<- implied #selina kyle #This might be terrible and ik the quadruple axel is overdone but I think it makes a sick parallel to Dick (who for context she never met)#Also blue and red which are Dick’s color (that Damian took up afterwards)#and Jason’s color.. not me explaining my whole writing lmfao #anyways. She means the world to me #oh and also idk if that’s clear or not but the shadow she sees is Jason (who adopts her) and the fork clattering morning light bit are when #she learned Damian died. Basically Selina was on the run from people she shouldn’t have crossed and they ended up killing her. Yeah. Sorry

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