Work Text:
The worst part, Lian thinks, is that there is nothing to mourn.
The funeral is dry and somber, as most funerals tend to be. She stands in a black dress she's literally never seen before today, with her dad's hand on her shoulder, both of them fading into the background of the tiny crowd that had come to watch Jade Ngyuen's coffin be lowered into the ground. One second dad's walking her over to some secluded corner shielded by a ticket of leaves as the ceremony begins, the next she manages to register someone speaking through the haze of counting tens of seconds, cyclical, one after the other after two three four five six seven eight nine ten again one two again one-
And then it's over. And then what's left of her mother is lowered into the dirt and covered, separated from her six feet and counting and yet somehow the closest she's ever been to her in so, so long. And then the sky is still not rainy or grey but not blue, stuck in that odd limbo as if it can't decide which way to go, and the wind is still just on the brink of being chilly, and the clouds are still painted in white across the sky, and her mother is... gone.
Huh. Fascinating. What's changed?
People start to clear out, then, now that the ceremony is over. A lot of them, she notes dimly, carry weapons, handguns or switchblades or pocketknives, and a couple hide injuries. One of them spots her and her father over in their corner, hidden by the shadows of the tree behind them, and stares for all of five seconds before turning to leave with the rest. Maybe they're all people her mother worked with, then.
Maybe. They could be. She's never met any of her mother's colleagues. She barely ever met her mother.
"Wanna go say hi?" Her father's voice is quiet, rough in the way it is whenever he's trying to cover up whatever he's feeling, like he thinks he can hide it from her, like she hasn't spent nights talking through his door and crying on the phone and hearing him break too often for her to not notice. His hand on her shoulder is soft, grounding but not restraining, and when she breathes she can feel herself suck in the absence that the congregation have left behind in their wake, the cemetery now empty and deserted aside from her and her father and the rows and rows of grey headstones of varying shades, all cold and carved and oddly clinical. Wanna go say hi, he says. Ha.
"Like she can talk back." Lian snorts, and silently adds as if she ever talked back to begin with.
Her father chuckles and there's no joy in it. "Who knows, she might find a way." There's something fond in his tone and something equally sharp, angry, worn, tired. "Jade always did have to get the last word in, heh. Lord knows she sure as hell wouldn't let something like a few pounds of dirt and a corpse stop her."
Did she? Lian wonders. There's something sharp and cold forcing it's way up her throat and threatening to spill out if she opens her mouth, so she just shrugs, and they walk forward, out of their little fortress of shadow and into the open for the world to see, an old fling and a mistake, to stand in front of her gravestone.
It reads this: Jade Ngyuen. Beloved daughter and sister. RIP - Rest in Peace. It's simple. Short. Fitting.
It doesn't say "mother" anywhere on there.
Because mother was never beloved. For either of them.
The sharp thing in her throat is unsatisfied, and as she refuses to let it out, slamming against her teeth and her lips and cutting them open in tiny, bloody marks as her father speaks, a dull hum in the background, it crawls down instead, turns inward, carving out her chest until it's nothing more than a hole with a set of lungs that let her breathe in empty air in, out, in, out, over and over again, until the hand on her shoulder, suddenly just as heavy as the rest of the air, tugs her away from the cold stone of the mother who never wanted a daughter at all.
The worst part, Lian thinks, is that life goes on. She goes to school and sleeps through History and wakes up to find Mr MacMillian glaring at her through his caterpillar monobrow and thick-rimmed Harry Potter glasses and feels Ashwini nudge her afterwards as the bell rings, grinning, ranting about everything she has to study and prepare for to try and get into this forensic science camp for the summer - her goal since forever, she's been talking about this for years. She eats tasteless school cafeteria food and scrolls through her phone on the bus ride home. She trains in the gym with Emiko, with her hands clapped over her back and rubbed joking against her head, messing up her sweaty hair and making her extremely glad she got a pixie cut a few months ago, and she hits the bullseye nearly every time and cackles when she winds up beating Emi by just a bit.
Nothing changes, really. There's no real disruption to her routine or major outside disturbance or even an indication much as changed at all.
Not much at all, aside from her dad.
He's... mourning, maybe, in his own way. Her dad and mom weren't in love, were never in love, weren't really even friends by the end of it, but they were... something to each other, she supposes. Whatever they were, her dying is enough it shifts something in him, something enough to make it obvious to her he's sort-of grieving in some way that he'll probably get over soon.
Even then, none of his actions really change either. He still gets up and wakes her to the sound of eggs and toast sizzling on the stove and nearly stains her new sweatshirt with butter as he drops it onto her plate. He still comes home with callouses on his hands and a grin on his face and asks her the obligatory how was school questions that eventually get more and more unhinged until they're coming up with barely understandable answers to why is your science teacher secretly General Zod in disguise this time? It's not- it's nothing like how it was before, how it was when things got bad and she had to phone Uncle Dick with shaking hands, red from trying to close bleeding cuts on his arms, the screen blurring through her tears and her mind spinning and blanking in a haze of blood blood phone don't die don't die coming please come help me don't die h e l p-
Yeah, life goes on. Not a lot of people in the superhero community knew her mother, and she doesn't know enough about her civilian life to know how many people in that sea of monochrome were from it. No one else is really... affected.
She could talk to Aunt Artemis, maybe. She doesn't.
Her other aunts and uncles and grandfather all know the basics, she supposes, know Lian's mother's dead, hm, but that's it.
That's a lie. Lian's mother isn't dead. That would imply the grief is somehow linked to Lian, is something she's experiencing, which is a bald-faced, blatant lie. That would mean she knew enough of her to mourn, would imply they had a relationship between stilted phone calls and awkward conversations across diners and forced outings that always had them standing apart from each other, freezing when they touched to grab some sugar, always ending with smiles like plastic forced into their faces and fake platitudes about how fucking good of a time they'd had together.
Life goes on. Lian's life goes on.
Lian's mother isn't the one who's dead. Not even according to her gravestone.
Jade Ngyuen has been dead for six months and three days.
Her family and friends all stop asking if she's okay, if there's anything to talk about, and it's such a relief because it feels so awkward to say my mother might as well have been a stranger and I might as well have been one to her, so she dances around the questions anyway. Her dad eases off his own version of grief for this, whatever weight he's seemed to have slowly disappearing until she can barely feel it again, until he stops asking if he wants to 'go see her' like she's still alive like she would have ever wanted to see Lian even in death, and... stops talking about her at all, really. Like they used to before.
Lian finishes her sophomore year with a 98 in English Literature, a 92 in Advanced Biology, a 95 in Geometry, and a 72 in European History and Geography. Her father dryly asks her if saying that Europe "was the Lex Luthor of the world for a few hundred years" wasn't enough for a 100, and she laughs and accidentally snorts orange juice out of her nose.
Summer comes in a flurry of Ashwini inviting her one of the few arcades still up and running in Star City and both of them rushing around the different games, high on milkshakes and shitty greasy arcade food until late into the night. Ashwini's mom calls her to screech at her over the phone and Lian just grins at her friend's predicament and waves goodbye as the dark blue car finally shows up by the side of the road. There's the sun beating down on them through the shade of buildings and the abrupt thunderstorms that rumble through the city, soaking through her black leather jacket and making her join the crowds waving their fists at the sky and cursing as they rush through the streets.
With summer comes AP Chem work she's determined not to do until the last week and throwing in random clothes from her floor into a suitcase so her dad can drive them over to Grandpa's house for a weekend, a tradition they've had since both of them finally got their heads out of their asses when she turned six and decided to reconcile. Her dad barely grips the wheel too tight now as he turns into the driveway, and he laughs as he nearly crashes right into the wall - the car is rented and brown and takes a second too long to respond to everything, so Lian really hopes they don't crash on the way back.
Her Grandpa throws open the door the literal second Dad steps up to knock, hugging him and ruffling her hair which she spent all of five seconds throwing up into a ponytail that's half-undone by now anyway. She still yells at him anyway, because it makes her feel light inside and him laugh, and he sweeps them inside to Dinah's piano and plates of chicken rice and her own attempts at singing that mostly sound like a dying cat. Dinah's kind enough to only smile into her place of chicken and otherwise not comment.
Occasionally, one of them will look at her worriedly. Mainly Grandpa, since Dinah is usually a lot more subtle and good enough at hiding her glances, but it still grates on her in a way that leaves something in her scraped raw and angry and forces her to have to march her way to the bathroom to breathe into her hands for a few minutes before she comes back. They look at her dad that way too sometimes, she guesses, but for him she gets it - gets the scars still on his wrists and the days he can't get out of bed some days.
She gets the fact that he actually lost someone six months ago, a real, living person that he knew once, maybe even loved, could pin more than a name and a face to and who might have actually cared about him back.
So yes, there's a reason to be concerned about him. Not her. It kind of makes her want to hit something.
Instead she plasters a smile on her face and goes back into the living room, with Harry Potter playing on the TV and buttery microwave popcorn in bowls, and laughs through her smile like glass and her chest empty, on a couch that feels too soft in a house that feels too full.
Mid-July and the air is hot and kind of humid, the kind of hot that comes from repeated summer showers that usually don't even have the sense to properly cool everything down for too long. Her AP works sits unstarted on her wooden table, covered in eyeliner and glue and sewing supplies, and she hasn't slept properly in over six months.
Tonight is no different, and Lian stares at her phone in the dark, laying on her bed on top of her blankets. The screen is lit up with the image of her and Ashwini posing outside some graffiti Ashwini had put up on a whim the night before and somehow not gotten caught.
It takes her a second to realize what she's waiting for as the time on the screen turns from 11:59 to 0:00.
Her birthday was today. Yesterday, now.
Every year, without fail, her mom would always call her on her birthday. It could be just on the brink of midnight or at ass-o-clock in the morning, but she'd call. And sometimes it would be shitty and awkward and exhausting and sometimes it ended in her throwing her phone across the room and crying and sometimes - so rarely - it ended in them both laughing, hanging up and making false promises to be just as happy next time that always felt so real in the moment.
Her dad left the room after she turned ten, and she got her own phone when she was thirteen. But her mom would always call her.
She's not going to be calling now.
She won't get to be mad at her and cry about her or- or laugh, because that happened, sometimes. There were times she felt like a real person. Like she was someone she could have gotten along with, maybe. Like she was someone who had raised Lian for the first few months of her life and not just someone who'd gotten rid of her the second she had the chance.
She'll never get to have her chest cave in as they sat in a cafe and she pretended like she wanted to be there and- and did she? Was there any part of her, some small part of her left over from the first few months of Lian's life, the same part of her that made her keep calling every year, that cared?
She doesn't know. She doesn't know because the answers are six feet under and counting, locked away by a wooden coffin and a cold grey stone in a sea of death. She'll never get to ask what was so goddamned awful about her Mom had figured out somewhere in those months it was just them, she'll never get to ask if she could fix it, if there was something she could do or could have done and maybe there would be someone more than a vague outline of occasional outings or annual phone conversations and-
And-
Lian is the one six feet of dirt under, cold and heavy and blocked by a wooden coffin, and everything is so dark and heavy and cold she can't breathe and-
The pavement is hard under the soles of her now-wet grey sneakers. The sky is grey and drizzly and doesn't even have the nerve of properly rain. Her phone corner digs into the palm of her hand, cold and plastic, and the vibration from a few minutes ago when probably-Ashwini had texted her are long gone.
Shit, she thinks, and then wonders if someone can think hysterically. If someone can then she's probably doing that right now.
Her head kind of hurts. Her brain feels fuzzy in her skull, hazy and unclear, and when someone on the street brushes past her she flinches and nearly throws her phone into the sewer and her hands shake. Abruptly, her vision feels clear again, the fog receding, and she barely as time to think what the fuck before someone bumps into her again and her chest goes tight, like it's trying to smash itself together to fill the empty expanse.
Leave.
She's at Jade - her mother - Jade's gravestone.
Shit.
There's no one else here. This part of the cemetery is usually unoccupied, too hard to see into for anyone who doesn't care and secluded enough people visiting aren't usually there for any gravestones in it. She can see the tree, over in the corner, by a part of the now broken down almost black wall, where she and her dad had stood during and funeral, and almost wonders if that same shadow would protect her again.
She doesn't move.
She reads the grey, cold, smooth, hard, dead, dead, gone stone, over and over and over until she thinks she's memorized how they look like that, set permanently, sculpted against rock. Beloved daughter. Beloved sister. Beloved daughter. Beloved sister. Over and over.
No mother.
Her chest hurts.
Leave.
She swallows. It hurts.
"Nothing's changed," she tells the stone. "I- do you remember the last time I saw you? I don't."
Nothing happens. It's quiet. There's leaves rustling and rain dropping, slowly, a bit, and that's all. She doesn't talk for a bit.
"Would you have said something?" Her mouth asks before her brain thinks, interrogating a stranger who can never answer now. "If it were me. If I was the one six feet under and counting in wood and decaying. Would you- at my funeral. Would you have said something? Like, a speech? After? Fuck, what-" Shit, stop, her eyes are watering, shit, shit-
"What the fuck would you have said? What? Would you- I liked archery? Fan-fucking-tastic, you got the family resemblance down. Would you have said I have a bright future, or copied something else from the internet? I don't even know. You'd have been wrong. Because if you'd actually turned around any time you dragged me to one of those stupid arcades or malls or whatever the fuck you'd have seen I hated it because I- but you knew that all, didn't you, you knew and that's why we spent all our time dancing around each other and never touching and why you didn't look at me because you didn't want to end up like Dad but you're dead already, there's nothing left for me to-"
Her head hurts and her chest hurts and her phone is warm hot and uncomfortable against her foot- her foot?
Oh. She dropped it, she realizes, dimly, and when she finally manages to pick it up missed calls and messages one after the other flash onto the screen almost instantly. Fuck, how long has she been here for?
Another call comes through, the generic phone ringtone she's never changed because of how much she's always teased that it suits him ringing through the silence, and Lian lets it happen, the phone vibrating in her hands, until her thumb accidentally brushes the green 'answer' button.
"Lian?" The voice that comes out of the phone is surprising enough to nearly make her drop it again. She doesn't.
Her voice sounds croaky and hoarse, but she barely registers how embarrassing she must sound right now. It's too cold and dark and her head hurts and she's too empty and aching for something that's impossible.
"Hey, Aunt Artemis..."
"Christ, kid, you scared the shit out of everyone," says her aunt, tucking the worn brown bomber jacket securely over her shoulders, and it feels so safe Lian kind of wants to do something embarrassing like cry more.
"Didn't mean to," Lian mumbles, and can't get her eyes off the damp dead grass, yellow and rough, under her feet.
Artemis huffs out a laugh. "Yeah, I figured." She casts a glance back at what Lian guesses is her mother's grave as she walks her away, back towards where her white car is parked on the side of the road, where the path to the cemetery begins. As she's led into the passenger's side seat Lian considers doing the same, but doesn't. She's too tired.
Her aunt gets into the driver's seat and closes her phone from where she's been texting someone and turns to her. "You look like shit. Let's get some hot chocolate in you and hope it does its job, huh?"
Lian laughs as they pull into the road, and it's rough and painful and forces it's way out of her mouth and her throat hurts as soon as it's gone.
By the time they arrive at Aunt Artemis's apartment the rain has slowed to the drizzle and the sun is starting to emerge in splashes of pinks and oranges and blues. Lian stares out the window and hopes the image can burn onto her eyelids and block out the image of the grey stone and the blank phone and a plastic smile across an arcade table, unwanting and absent.
Her aunt leads her up the stairs and to stand outside a grey door with a silver 201 etched into it and digs around in the pocket of her jeans for her keys, which she pulls out with a grin and opens the door that she locks behind her after both of them are inside.
"It's kind of messy, but probably better than getting rained on with a bunch of dead people."
It is, actually. "Dead people make for shitty company."
Her aunt laughs, waves her hand in a vaguely 'eh' motion for her to "Sit down wherever, just not on the table because you'll break it, that thing's older than my mom," and walks to the kitchen to, apparently, actually make hot chocolate. Lian, too tired to make a decision on where to sit down and missing the reprieve that another person being there gives her, just follows her, and sits down on a stool by the granite island as her aunt gets out a box of hot chocolate powder and pours two mugs of milk.
"How did you know where I was?"
Artemis shrugs. "Your dad called me. He was freaking out, said he'd already called your friend's house and grandpa's place and you weren't there. I figured... well, it wasn't the first place I'd looked, but it made sense after a while."
"Did it?"
She shoves the two mugs into the microwave and hits the 'on' button, and the turns around to face her. Her eyes are a type of understanding that makes Lian want to jump out the three-story window and run.
Then again, that's kind of how she fucked up last night, isn't it?
"Moms are... complicated." Her aunt offers after a while. "I get that. It's not always simple what you feel for 'em."
"Fucking undersimplification," Lian says. Artemis shrugs and when the microwave beeps, she takes out both mugs and spoons in chocolate powder. The mixing looks methodical. Repetitive. It would be calming if Lian was someone who knew how to calm down.
Her mouth opens before she can think as it hits her that she might know. Artemis was her mom's sister, after all. They grew up together. She must have known her, right? So she'd- she'd know. Better than anyone else, at least. She'd know what she thought of felt and maybe they even talked about-
"Did she love me?"
Artemis keeps on mixing in the chocolate powder. She's moved on to the second mug by now. Lian's throat feels too tight to drink anything, much less the rich and sweet hot chocolate.
"My mom. Did she- you know. You have to. Did she?"
Artemis sighs. Stops mixing. Leans back against the counter and tilts her head up to look at the lights, bright yellow and artificial and headache-inducing. Lian would know because they've been making her own even worse since she got here. The pounding in her skull is like there's something trying to break open and escape.
"My sister," says Artemis, "wasn't good at love. Especially not with people. It- we never had many good examples, growing up. And she never got past it."
"But she loved you, right?" There's something desperate she can hear in her voice and she hates it but she needs to know. She needs to know if those phone calls and once-a-month outings and the months at the start of her life she doesn't even remember but clings to still meant anything.
"She did," Artemis agrees. "And when I was thirteen, she left. Left me alone with our dad who was- he wasn't the type you'd leave a kid with, I'll say."
She left me. She left me. She left-
"I don't think Jade knew how to love without running away," says Artemis, and she turns back to reach up to her cupboard, calling back "Want marshmallows? I've got those tiny ones that like, melt and make a foam at the top."
There's a foam over her thoughts and something stuck in her throat that makes her unable to breathe. The thought of hot chocolate and marshmallows doesn't have room to register through the repetitions of she left, she left, she left-
"She- she left because she loved me?"
"She loved you, but she left," says Artemis, sharply. She's still not looking at her. "That- it's fucked up, okay? It's fucked up to leave kids who rely on you like that. It doesn't matter why, Lian, honey, you need to understand that. She was- Jade was- she made a lot of a bad choices, okay? She- we were both messed up." She inhales sharply, like it's hurting her to say it, and selfishly, Lian doesn't stop her because she needs to understand why.
"Jade left any chances she had for- she left a lot, okay? She always left, in the end, and honey, I'm so sorry, because she loved you, she really did, and I think she moved you more than I ever thought she could leave anyone, but I'm so sorry."
She always left, in the end, but that can't be it. It can't just be she always left. Because- you don't leave things without reason, right? People don't just do things for no reason. There's always a motive, she remembers, a part of Dinah's training. There's a reason.
"Was your dad the reason she left before?" Artemis's face flashes with something cold and angry but before she can say anything Lian's mouth is spilling out with the thoughts she's turned over and over in her head, mulled over in the dead of night or the middle of the day or any time over the past fifteen-now-sixteen years she was so close to her mother and yet there was always a huge chasm between them, one that she didn't know how to fill and her mom never wanted to.
"And- and then, if he was, that's why. It wasn't just- and there's a why here too. You just don't tell me. What? Why- what was it? Why did she-" What was so wrong with me she left me?
Because there's always something, right? And the leaving is a result of that. There's always something wrong enough her mom could justify it and for all those months it was just them, just her and her mom and no one else, so what else could it be that was so wrong and who else could it be what why-
"No, no, stop," snarls Artemis, and she stops. Pauses. Takes in her aunt and ignores the guilt settling in her stomach like a stone at the stress in her face. Reminding her of her dad was a shitty idea. Shit. Fuck.
"Lian," Artemis starts, and then shakes her head, like she's shaking her anger away, and it falls from her face like tears. "Yeah, there was a reason. You're right."
Lian breathes in and waits for confirmation.
"But I- I'm sorry, but I don't know, for sure. I don't think anyone did. I last knew my sister when I was thirteen and even then it was only the parts of herself she hadn't managed to hide from me yet. I know she loved you, like I know she loved me, but I don't-" She steps around the counter. Away from the probably-cold mugs of hot chocolate and the open bag of mini-marshmallows. Towards Lian's seat.
She hugs her, and Lian can barely feel it. Can barely feel her arms or her back or her face. All she can feel is her heart, hammering inside an empty chest.
"It wasn't anything about you, okay?" But- "I know what you're thinking, and honey, you need to stop. Now. Jade's mistakes were her own fault, okay?" Artemis pulls back and looks like she hates herself for it. There's a hand on Lian's cheek now, and it's wiping away- oh, tears? She started crying? When? That's embarrassing. She kind of wants to yell at her to go away so she can wash her face and paste a smile on her face like she always does, but her mind feels foggy and tired and the hand on her face is so nice she can't get herself to make it stop.
"It has to be," says Lian into the silence. "Even when we were together, she didn't- she barely looked at me. She didn't like me. I didn't like her. I wanted to, but I didn't know how to like someone who-" Who reminded me every time exactly why I'm so wrong even if she'd never tell me why. Even if she'd never even tell me that.
"I don't know," Artemis says. She's hugging her again, and Lian buries her face into her green shirt that smells like chocolate powder. "Just- please, believe me on this. Okay? Even if Jade thought that it was something you did, even if she was so convinced her own actions had anything to do with you- that's wrong. Okay? There is nothing wrong with you. There never will be, okay? And nothing can justify what she did, either. She might have loved you and I know she did but it hurts, I know it hurts, I know because she left me too."
Artemis sighs and she can feel it through the fabric. "It doesn't matter. She was wrong, and you got hurt, and I'm so sorry."
In a few hours, her father will come bursting through the door, and Aunt Artemis will give him one look and take in his sleepless and terrified appearance before dragging them all to the old couch and putting on a kettle for tea instead. In a few hours, Lian and her dad will hug and cry and Lian will pretend like it's not secretly kind of cathartic, even as she's finally present enough to be embarrassed and deny any tears on her face even with her red, swollen eyes and her dad's matching face.
In a few hours, they will have a long talk, and her dad will phone Dinah to get recommendations for a therapist that Lian vehemently protests against. Then he says that he's also going and her mind will flash back to bloody bathtubs and frantic phone calls and ambulance rides and she will agree.
In a few hours, her aunt will hug her again and say It was never your fault, and Lian might not believe her. In a few hours, there will still be a part of her that feels empty, something carved out and hollow that feels like it can never be filled. But in a few hours, her Grandpa and Dinah will show up, and her dad will hug her to his side and her aunt will groan at needing to make even more tea, and the room will be filled with worried hugs and ruffled hair and Ashwini calling her from a place back to Star City with so much happiness in her tone it warms her up from the inside out.
In a few hours, Lian Harper will not be okay. She'll never get to ask her mother the things she wanted to ask or make the memories they might have had. She will never get the chance to wait for a birthday phone call, because no more will ever come.
Maybe she's mourning those things. Maybe that's all she has left to mourn.
Because there's this- There's her dad with his laughs and arms around her shoulders and asking about her day and batshit advice that's often unusable but never fails to make her grin. There's her grandpa, with his hand ruffling her hair and concerned glances and shoving plates of food at her. There's Dinah, dryly offering the singing lessons that have turned into a running joke between them and a soft whisper I'm always available, as a friend or otherwise, if you want to talk. There's Aunt Artemis with tea and rolling her eyes, with hugs and it was never you. In a few hours there will be Emiko and Connor and Mia and they'll all gather together, in this tiny apartment in the middle of Star City, and they'll bring stories and stealing food from each other's plates and home that welcomes her even as she steps back from pressing her palms to her eyes in the bathroom, the smile on her face finally real instead of plastic.
In a few hours, Lian Harper will always mourn the mother she never knew. But in a few hours, her family will be there to pick her back up.