Work Text:
There is darkness.
She feels…she feels cold.
She feels cold and lonely.
Hell isn’t how she pictured it being (because it can’t be Heaven, not when tati and dej and Wally, the sweetest, best people she ever met, aren't with her), like Father Janek so often described it at mass.
And Dixie doesn't even remember the last time she attended mass (it's a lie, she was eight, her parents were still alive and the church was cold and her sunday dress was a little too short and not blue enough after one too many washes and the wool of its collar itched her neck while humidity soaked her bones trough her heavy white tights), but she remembers Father Janek’s sermons about Hell.
Hell isn't crowded with demons that torn her already battered skin or that try to dunk her in a lake of boiling pitch.
Hell is cold, like the old church in Warsaw in winter, like the trailer in windy nights, and lonely, like her room at the Manor after tati and dej murders, like her penthouse after her rape or after Wally's death.
Hell is her own mind, her own wrongdoings (in actions, in words, in thoughts).
Her sins dance before her eyes, a twisted parade of every monstrosity she has ever committed.
They were all hers.
They were her.
Maybe she should have listened to Father Janek's sermons more closely.
Maybe, if she did, she wouldn't be trapped in Hell.
There is commotion, somewhere above.
Maybe the angels' trumpets are already playing.
Maybe the world has already ended.
Maybe it's time for the dead to rise from their graves.
And raising she does, albeit slowly, her body coming back to her, all her pain suddenly taken away from her, together with the freezing cold that has enveloped her for God knows how long.
And then…then the sky above opens (or maybe it departs as a scroll, like John wrote and Father Janek said it would) and it reveals itself as the lid to a casket (hers, the cold, unforgiving casket in which she was laid to rest).
There is an angel on the other side, or maybe even the Lamb Father Janek liked to cite so much (the memory of it tattered around the edges, like her suit after explosions).
The angel wears red, like the robes still unwashed in the blood of the Lamb.
The angel, or the lamb, wears her brother's face.
And she doesn’t know the angel and she remembers that God's name mustn't be told in vain, so she calls the apparition above her with the name of the face it wears, her brother's.
The lamb smiles, his smile all teeth, like hers.
Jason's hand In her feels real, and so she follows it, she follows him, because Dixie is dead and damned, but she is always gonna follow her brothers, to watch over them, to protect them from everything (like she always did with Damian and Timothy, like she wasn't able to do with Jason, and maybe that's why the Lamb chose his face, to remind her of the brother she didn't manage to save).
Jason is strong, Dixie knows.
Strong enough to drag her towards the Zetas (strong enough to come back to life without going crazy, strong enough to survive the LOA, strong enough to live without her and to be the perfect oldest sibling for their baby brothers she never was for Him).
Jason is alive, Dixie knows that too.
So Jason is just a projection of her brain, a futile attempt of her synapsis to take her out of the dark-cold-lonely limbo she has been trapped ever since…ever since the Joker strangled her.
Another cruel reminder of everything she left behind because she hasn't been strong enough to fight for it.
And Jason or maybe the Lamb wipe away her tears, like father Janek said he would, his calloused hands impossibly gentle on her face (tears she knows froze in her eyes too many times to count it, piercing them and making her even more blind than what absolute darkness already did).
And Jason or maybe the Lamb smears the Bat-glue on her face, before slapping over it a Domino.
And she doesn't know where they are going but she knows she loves her brother, and so she follows him.
She follows it (him), because Father Janek said that it would be the shepherd, that will lead the multitudes to springs of living water (she follows him, because he is her brother).
She wonders if this is the kind of guidance of the Lamb Father Janek talked so much about.