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“Please,” the man begs. “Please, let me go. I have family—kids, two kids. Please, it hurts, it hurts.” His body seizes up, muscles tensing against the restraints as his eyes widen. Droplets of sweat, round and crystallized in the electric lights, run into a dark stain at his collar. He screams until his voice cracks.
Sara watches a blonde teenager, gaunt and hollow-eyed, stare at him impassively.
The man pants, each fevered breath ripping itself from his raw throat. He looks up at her. Tears shine in his eyes, escaping at the creases and trailing down to mix with the sweat.
“Stop it,” Sara barks. She tries to stride forward but can’t move. “He hasn’t done anything. Stop.”
The girl reaches for a cart, bolted to the floor in the middle of the room. She takes a syringe from the top tray and steps towards him.
He shakes his head weakly, lip shuddering.
She finds the vein on his inner elbow. “Relax,” she mutters. The words, terse and unkind, fall from chapped, parted lips. “Or it’ll bruise.”
The man won’t relax—can’t relax. No one, in his shoes, could possibly relax.
The girl draws his blood anyway.
“Why?” he croaks. He looks up at her, sick with pain.
The girl makes eye contact. She glances down at her hands, the vial of the man’s blood in her bone-white fingers. The ease. The stillness. She sucks in a breath.
For a second, Sara imagines pity, guilt, and remorse curdling on her face, but it passes. She fits the vial into a box.
When she turns and stares at Sara, no care hides in her shadowed eyes. The man’s screams echo around her as she walks, box in hand, out into the dark hallway.
-
Sara lurches from her bed, soaked to the bone. As she sucks in gulps of air, she staggers across her dark quarters to her wall mirror. She stares at her reflection.
A nineteen-year-old girl with limp, dirty hair and dead eyes stares back.
Fuck.
“Captain Lance,” greets a cool British voice. “It is three AM, ship standard time. You are on the Waverider. I am Gideon, a—”
“I know you, Gideon,” Sara snarls.
No answer.
When Sara looks in the mirror again, though, she sees herself—thirty years old, wearing a white cotton shirt sweated transparent around the armpits. She releases one breath and then another, forcing the pounding of her heart to slow. She rests her head in her hands.
“Sorry.”
“Apology accepted, Captain. The shower is free, if you’d like to use it.”
“I’m fine.” She straightens, finding yesterday’s clothes thrown on the chair next to the hamper. She pulls them on and settles down on the floor, taking an ice cube out of her mini-fridge, and rubs it against the back of her neck. By the time dribbles of water trail down her spine, the edges of the room have sharpened, her panic dulled.
She drops the ice cube into the trash and stands, making her way out into the corridor. She walks to the library.
“Gideon?” she asks, sinking down into a chair.
“Yes, Captain?”
“Can you show me the footage from that Argus prison?”
Gideon pauses. “Are you sure that’s wise?”
“Show me. Sound on, too.”
Jax finds her there, an hour later. A glass of whiskey glints from her fingers. She sits unmoving, eyes glued to the screen. Screams, shrieks, and sobs mingle from a number of different cell feeds, playing at once. Children beg for their parents. Parents refuse to give up their children’s locations, bodies wracking with the consequences of their silence. Shock prods and blades flash, machines creak and wrench at joints, and water droplets spray up as heads dunk over and over into tubs of filthy water.
“Hey, Sara,” Jax says, rubbing sleep from his eyes. “Why you watching that?”
She runs a finger along the rim of her glass. “I almost gave her back to them.”
“Gave her…. Zari?”
She nods, a slight dip of the head. Her eyes don’t stray from the video.
“Gideon, turn that off, yeah?” Jax moves to stand between her and the screen, leaning on the desk. The screen winks black.
The stillness, after hours tracking motion and crackling screams, bottoms out Sara’s stomach as if the Waverider had abruptly lost altitude.
“Listen, Sara. You didn’t hand Zari over. You risked everybody on this ship to save her from the Bureau, and then you listened to Amaya’s judgment when she said Zari should stay onboard.”
“Because you talked me out of it, Jax. Without that….”
He crosses his arms.
She has to tip her head back to meet his eyes. “I try so hard, Jax. But I don’t have that moral center, that heart, that you have, and that… That scares me. After so many years….” Screams ring in her ears. She smells burning flesh and feels the cold metal of scientific instruments. The shame roiling in her stomach forces her to look away from Jax’s kind, concerned gaze. “I’m still that monster.”
“Hey.” Jax reaches out for her bicep with no fear. “No way. I know you. D’you make bad calls sometimes? Sure. You’re human. You mess up, just like the rest of us. But you’re tryna make the right call for the whole timeline.”
She takes a swig of whiskey and shakes her head.
“You’re not like these bureau bastards, Sara. They’re authoritarian pigs—they care about the status quo, not about people.” Jax pulls up another chair, moves it so she has no choice but to face him, and sits. “You look at the bigger picture, but you also try to listen when we say something’s not right. Sometimes you don’t listen as much as you should. But I know you gotta prioritize the team, otherwise there'd be nobody there to help anybody. I don’t think that makes you a monster.”
Sure, the ability to make tough calls does not a monster make. But it had been simple, too simple, to push Zari’s inevitable fate from her mind. Her inevitable torture.
Because the scars that had wrapped Sara’s body before the Lazarus pit weren’t all collateral League injuries. Some of them had been precisely, painstakingly burned and carved into her skin. To master pain, Nyssa had explained, it would be first necessary to learn it—and al Ghul’s men had taught her, with blades and steel and fire.
Worse, as her chest and back know how to take torture, her hands and feet know how to inflict it. She’s been striking out with steel-toed boots and wielding long, painful syringes since she was nineteen. With the roll of the sea beneath her feet, in those damp, metallic quarters, she’d stared her own death in the face and decided she would trade the lives of innocents to escape it. She’d stomached screams—screams louder than the staticky shrieks Gideon had looped for her—and the stink of blood and urine, hunting for an evil man’s answers.
Learning to kill quickly, after that, had almost been like learning kindness.
(Almost.)
Now, so many years later, lifetimes later, she’s meant to be better. She’s saved the world, multiple times, and she captains a group of people that includes heroes, actual heroes. She might never be good, but she’s been working so hard for better.
Yet she’d nearly consigned Zari to a lifetime of imprisonment and torture as efficiently as her teenage jailer-self would have done.
“You get me?” asks Jax. He searches her face for something—acceptance, relief, an end to the self-loathing.
She looks at him back. Kind, smart, solid Jax. He could never understand. She’s made sure he could never even begin to understand.
Some part of her aches to tell him anyway—to hear him wring absolution out of the technicalities, point out growth instead of cruelty. But the other possibility: his staring, his horror, his revulsion, makes her chest burn.
“Yeah,” she says.
A pause. He glances up, his forehead creasing. Finally: “Hey, you smell something? Oh, shit, smoke—cuz your pants just caught fire.”
She smiles, a tired grimace of a thing. She reaches out and shoves his shoulder lightly.
He grins, proud of himself.
“I hate you.”
“Nah, you love me.”
She looks at him. “I do,” she admits. “Don’t forget it.”
“Don’t forget what?”
It’s late, and she’s exhausted, and the only thing stopping horrors from boomeranging in front of her eyes is this wonderful six-foot stack of a mechanic. She sets down her whiskey, stands up, and says, “I love you, Jax, you do-gooder pain in my ass.”
He stands too and pulls her into a tight, solid hug. The soft fabric of his sweatshirt presses into her cheek. An ache builds in her throat; a buzz rushes through her ears.
“Never wanted a big sister,” he says. “Thought she’d be too bossy. Guess I was right.”
She rolls her eyes to the ceiling, something melting in her chest. “If you’d met my older sister, you wouldn’t call me bossy.”
“Uh-huh. But it’s cool. I love you anyway.”
They stay like that, wrapped in each other, for long enough for Sara to stop trembling and also realize that she had been at all.