Chapter Text
Carter Hall wants to scream.
He already had screamed. He’d cried. His throat hurt from crying.
It’s not fair. Shiera had come back. They’d had each other. Hell, they’d defeated Hath-Set.
Only to die again. It’s just not fair. The ring – that thing Deadman had brought – it had said that Carter and Shiera needed to learn to live apart from each other. To be stronger. But what is the point in living, if you spend that time alone? To love is to live and to live with a lack of love – a lack of Shiera – is as good as death.
Carter had come back. Again. The ring let him out. It’d given him back his life (after making Boston kill them. After taking Shiera’s life again.) But it hadn’t given Shiera back her life.
It was so unfair.
Carter tries to swallow his rage, but he can’t. Its stuck in his throat, choking him, like bile.
He paces around the remains of his former home in St Roch. Most of the furniture inside his living quarters had been destroyed - by him. All that remains is ruin.
He feels himself putting on his wing harness, unaware of having started the motion. He’s vaguely aware that he should not destroy – at the very least – other parts of the museum. Or the structural supports of the building. So he lets himself continue the motion, watches himself open the window, observes the night through his helmet’s goggles.
Passively, Carter thinks that he should have gone back to New York instead of St Roch. Maybe the cool night air there would snap him out of ...whatever was happening now. But if he’d gone back to New York, he’d have to face the rest of the JSA – whoever remained, at least. Face them without Shiera. And he can’t do that. Not now. Maybe not ever, he idlely thinks.
Hawkman circles the city from above. He’s aware he’s going too fast, he’s aware he’s not likely to see any crimes this way, but he just can’t slow down. His racing thoughts will not let him.
A shiver runs through Carter’s spine, and for a moment he feels paralyzed, despite the speed he’s going at.
Scratch that, he is paralyzed. His wings don’t obey him, and he starts dropping like a rock.
He should be panicking. If he hits the ground like this, it will definitely hurt. The morbid thought comes to him that that might actually get his body to obey him again. He’s not sure why, but it feels like something that could work.
The ground is fast approaching, and Hawkman opens his wings. He flaps a few times, trying to regain control, before hitting the ground at a more survivable speed and tumbling over.
Life in the city does not go to bed early, and Hawkman sees people gathering around him. Hell, three even come closer to him, one approaching faster than the other two.
Hawkman sees her mouth move, but can’t quite catch what she says over a gust of wind and the regular noises in the air.
“Do you need help?” Hawkman asks curtly.
“Do I need help?” Hawkman can hear her this time. “Do you need help? Are you okay?”
Hawkman blinks, disoriented. The woman sounds concerned. “Why would I need help?”
“...you nearly fell out of the sky,” the woman says, while a man behind her looks up, as if he excepts to see something there.
Hawkman shakes his head to clear it. He needs to get out of here. He’s causing a scene.
He flaps his wings again, to get lift, and starts flying at a slower speed at a lower altitude. Carter feels hesitant in the air all of a sudden, and he hates it. Hawkman shouldn’t be hesitant in his own area of expertise.
But what is Hawkman without Hawkgirl? A question he truly can’t answer. Divorced from love, Carter is nothing. He is worse than nothing. He is despair.
The night is passes. Carter is vaguely aware of doing some good as Hawkman – he stops an armed robbery, he helps firefighters evacuate a burning building – but he is still frozen in place, emotionally. He’s aware that he cannot sustain like this – he’s more shade than man at this point – but he knows nothing will change. Nothing can change.
The curse is lifted. Hath Set is dead. They were free. No more reincarnation. (No more second chances). Carter Hall is, for the first time ever, truly, deeply alone.
***
Night becomes day, and Hawkman still does not return home.
Intellectually, he knows he should rest. Sleep. Do … something to regenerate. But he can’t bring himself to do so. He can’t face any aspects of his old life right now. Not the JSA’s museum in New York with Shiera, not St Roch’s museum where he stayed while working with Kendra. If he goes back, he’ll start crying again – he can tell – and he doesn’t want to feel at all right now.
Whoever said that it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all was so full of shit. Things would be easier if…
If what? He never met Shiera? He can’t fathom what would have been; he can’t fathom a life without her. Would his life have had meaning without her? But what does that mean for his life’s meaning now? Any answer is full of pain, and Carter is sick of it. There are no right answers for him, only endless wrong ones.
Despite his intentions, he does find himself drawn back to St Roch museum when a shiver runs through him again. An acute longing. As if every other fucking feeling he’d had recently hadn’t been acute enough.
He needs Kendra’s passion, he needs Chayara’s wisdom, he needs Shiera’s tender touch.
Before he can continue the thought further, Hawkman sees a rope on the roof of the museum, entering through an open window. Someone had broken in. But why?
Hawkman squeezes through the window’s opening, and looks around carefully. Despite the rope, he sees nothing missing from the displays nearby. Hawkman walks forward tentatively, scanning for intruders, but seeing none.
As he walks, Hawkman hears a whizzing in the air. He turns instinctively, grabbing his mace, when an bolt pierces his shoulder. At least the pain can wake him from the daze he’s in, Carter thinks.
Another bolt comes, and Hawkman knocks it out of the way with his mace, though on the follow through his shoulder protests, and his right hand looses its grip on the weapon. He looks up, towards the second story’s balcony, to see a woman’s figure, hidden in shadow, but holding the distinct silhouette of a crossbow.
Tigress!
Tigress fires again, quickly, before Hawkman can regain control of his mace. Instead, he jumps out of the way of the arrow, crashing into a glass display holding ancient tools. Pain shots through his shoulder again, as glass embeds itself into his right shoulder and arm.
Hn.
Tigress keeps firing, and as she does its all Hawkman can do to try to weave and dodge the bolts while attempting to enter melee range. As she fires, she talks.
“Where’s you’re little friend?” Tigress asks bluntly. “I need to -”
Carter hears himself yelling, and charges Tigress. He swings his mace through where her head had just been, before she ducked into him, but he looses some control over the follow through again, with only one of his shoulders working well. Between the force of the attack and his lack of control, the mace flies into a nearby wall, embedding itself there. As Tigress tries to back up, Carter punches her in the gut with his good arm, doubling her over. She exhales, before jumping back, attempting to flee. She must have dropped her crossbow when he hit her, he thinks, because she is no longer holding it. Instead, she’s holding a knife. A bloody knife.
But who’s blood? Who did she kill?
Tigress keeps hold of the bloody knife, but cocks her head to the side, standing up straighter, less on the balls of her feet.
“You aren’t going to kill anyone else tonight,” Carter says, gesturing to her knife. The words don’t come out right, however. A small wheeze on the last one.
Carter feels woozy. He doesn’t understand why -
He feels his chest buckle. Hard to stand up. Something’s wrong with him.
“Silly bird,” Tigress says. Her words come slowly, over a long distance.
Carter looks down at his chest. Red. Red blood.
“The only person I’ve killed tonight is you.”
Something. She cut him. She must have cut him.
When?
Lots of blood. Can’t stay…
Crash!
Glass is falling. The floor rises up to meet Carter. He can’t stay…
He can’t see well. But he sees her. Hears her.
The beat of wings. Feathers silhouetted against the rising sun.
Hawkgirl.
Shiera. Shiera, I’m coming, he thinks.
And then everything goes black, and he doesn’t think anything else at all.
***
Beep. Beep. Beep.
Steady beep. Consistent. Slightly too loud.
Carter Hall opens his eyes. Surveys his surroundings. He’s in a hospital, he can tell that much. Bright lights, loud beeping machines, needle stuck in his arm. It’s definitely a hospital.
Which means he must be alive. He can’t help but feel a wave of disappointment wash over him. He was supposed to be dead. Tigress killed him. He was supposed to see Shiera.
The last time he’d been in a hospital like this it’d been for Kendra. When he’d nearly killed her, under the influence of a drug called delirium. She’d been trying to snap him out of it. Talk to him. And pain is how he repaid her kindness.
Carter wants to scream.
He should be dead by now. Someone saved him. It feels ironic and unforgivable all at once. He hadn’t really planned to almost die – there had been no intention to somehow commit suicide against Tigress – but he cannot shake the last thoughts he’d had before falling unconscious.
He wants to see Shiera again. He needs it, more than water, more than air. Otherwise he’s just a ghost, or half a person.
His thoughts are intruded upon when a doctor walks in the room. She’s a short woman, with dark brown eyes that remind him too much of Shiera’s eyes. Of Kendra’s eyes. Of every thing he’d give anything to forget, yet anything to have again. Of no right answers.
“I’m Dr Johnson,” the doctor says. “How are you feeling?”
Carter blinks slowly. The doctor’s – Dr Johnson’s – words sound thick and slow. Distorted.
Maybe something is still wrong with him. Something the doctor couldn’t fix.
Eventually, Carter realizes he should answer her question. “Like shit,” he says honestly.
Dr Johnson nods. “You’re lucky to be alive,” she says. “You lost a lot of blood.”
That’s not why he feels like shit, but Carter doesn’t bother clarifying.
“How am I alive?” he asks numbly. “I doubt Tigress took me to the hospital after cutting me up.”
The doctor shakes her head. “Tigress didn’t bring you in,” she says.
“Then who did?”
“Who else? Hawkgirl.”