Chapter Text
Athanasia’s whole face stung, white powder almost masking the red of the impact site where her mother’s bandaged fist hit her cheek. The taste of old blood filled her mouth, and a soft metallic smell infused into the lining of her nose and throat, almost making her dizzy. Yet, she dragged herself up and spat the excess blood onto the ring’s floor, careful to reposition herself to cover the red pool with her feet. She shaped her hands into fists and braced herself for another attack, swaying like the bough of an olive tree.
It was this drowsed movement which caused her mother’s hands to fall to her side, not in defeat but in withdrawal. In an attempt of a flurried panic, Athanasia realised her mother’s concerns. Athanasia was slowing down. Every minute was another risk of concussion. Yet, Athanasia would not, could not, let this match end.
“AGAIn!” she screamed. The letters A-G-A-I were so loud that the stretched ropes of the fighting ring seemed to twist and tauten themselves, folding beneath her voice. But the N fell flat, cracking its corners in Athanasia’s exhaustion.
Her mother looked at her like she was a dying animal in need of pity, and spoke with the softness of a vet talking to a dog just about to be euthanised.
“Athanasia, rest. You are not ready, just rest,” Talia almost whispered, her stern brow furrowing and adding a set of forehead lines to her otherwise supple skin.
Her mother possessed an otherworldly beauty: her mocha brown skin was unaffected by blemishes or time, and her upturned eyes were the colour of pressed olives. Her nose was slightly crooked, hooking around to form what the assassins referred to as ‘a graceful schnog’. Even Talia had laughed when she heard the accolade, the soft chuckles masked by Athanasia, Mara and Damian’s hysterical giggles.
She laughed a lot when Damian was still around. Her eyes would scrunch up and form temporary crows feet, letting the joy rest on her face. Now all that Athanasia had to remember her mother’s laugh with, were the soft indents of her smile lines fading like the words from a yellowed book too delicate to preserve. And the photo.
Hidden in the labs, under her mother’s experiments was a photo of her mother and a man who Athanasia wished was a stranger. Bruce Wayne’s arms hung around her mother’s shoulders in a loose embrace, and her mother had her mouth wide open in a smile. He looked a bit like Snow White: dark hair, pale skin and a wide icy sea in place of his eyes. Yet in the epitome of beauty that was her father, it was possible to see which bits of him Damian been graciously gifted and which bits Athanasia had stolen to form her broken collage.
Where her brother’s emerald eyes and decently large nose complemented the square chin and low brow he inherited from “Bruce”, Athanasia was a Frankenstein of features strung together haphazardly in the test tube she had incubated in. As if she always got second pickings, she took her mother’s upturned eyes, which beautiful themselves, felt out of balance in the presence of bluebell pupils. Her nose was a buttoned blemish, a pinhead on her face which looked shrunken next to her full lips. But worst was her skin. Her brother’s was a consistent olive while hers was a patchwork of various shades of browns in large blobs, no structural logic to the light and dark regions.
Her grandfather told her it meant she was a perfect combination of Yin and Yang, a balance between passive contraction and active expansion. She was obedient enough to stay loyal to her cause, while still active enough to know when to use violence to get it. The perfect soldier.
However, Ra’s shower of praise fell to Athanasia’s feet rather than pile up around her in a warm hug. His disturbed eyes looking blankly over her head, as if he could not lie while seeing her, told her what he really thought: the black smeared marks around her eyes were a fungal colony of sin growing on the darkness inside her. There was no mistake that they formed a mask to the windows to the soul — they were hiding the heaviness of her internal being.
“Please,” she whispered, letting her breath obscure her voice, looping it in the air until it was lost in the humidity. She needed a win. Just once, she needed to win. But her mother was already at the door, leaving the room as quietly as a ghost.
And all Athanasia could do was watch the lights refract under her tears thinking how her grandfather would scowl at her in a way which conveyed the simple clear message "she is not ready to serve - she, like her father, is too sensitive to fight for true justice.”
And he’d be right. She was at best, a knight’s soft underbelly peaking out from the chink between armour plates, unshielded by chainmail. She was the weakness the world wanted her whole family to take on themselves. She was no demon, not even a soldier, just a failure.
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Talia Al Ghul was drawn to the Lazarus Pit like a moth to light: as if something innate sensed the distance between her and the shallow pool and pushed her feet towards its murky radium waters. She’d peer over the edge and sometimes watched as her hands slipped in, closing around flesh: the small foot of a child, or an even smaller hand of an infant. But as she fished her sacrificial hand back out of the water towards her, the image would flutter out of existence and she could only feel the dryness of the air on her arms.
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It was instinct at this point.
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She could not stop.
In desperation she’d let herself get pulled closer, bringing her face to the edge and peering deeper in. One wrong push and she’d tumble over, restarting her twenties while drowning in the forbidden pools. She’d watch the banks of the pit close in above her, cracking and retching as it tried to fit her into its all-nourishing womb. The clay would then form scabs and scars, filling the wounds of the pit’s banks with a sicklier green dirt.
In sickness comes health. In health comes sickness.
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“I am poison in the water and unhappy
Little girl who needs her daddy real bad"
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The temptation to start again would take over. She needed to see the walls again. She needed to touch the fleshy meat of them, let its blood slip across and redden her fingertips like henna. She needed them back.
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