Archive of Our Own ^beta

The night before, everything was normal and no one knew what Kaldur'ahm was about to do—no one save one. That one wasn't there as he sat alone in the Cave, long after those who resided there permanently had gone to sleep. He had once been among those who lived in the Cave the vast majority of the time, but no longer. He had a sense of foreboding as he looked around at the walls, found a small loose pebble that had escaped cleaning on the floor, and dropped it. He listened to the echo and wished it weren't so hollow inside him, too.

The night before he was to become a murderer to nearly everyone he'd ever known, he hated that he felt the faintest sliver of hope—not for the mission but for himself. There was always a hum aboard Black Manta's base of operations. He closed his eyes, arms folded behind his head against a bed temporarily assigned to him. It was so quiet and yet there was no quiet at all. Having someone with him that he knew would be a welcome relief. He drew his arms from behind his head, bared for the night from beneath the black uniform he was daily to wear. He studied the tattoos then their edges. His father had never mentioned them and he tried to recall each individual time Black Manta may have seen them.

The mission had been a success, but he wanted to feel it more. He didn't know what he had expected. A last minute turn around from his father? But his father was a man far too brilliant for that—stubborn, too, and he wondered if the same had been true of his mother, wondered what it was that had brought them together, wondered what he owed the man he was never likely to see again on such good terms as had been manufactured through his deception. He felt less than entitled to the melancholy that had settled within him during the first hours of his being reinstated as a member of the Team, successfully back home from his deep cover mission. As he had feared, there were no familiar caverns and halls to return to.

When he realized what had been lost for the success of this, the final mission of the Team—for it would never again be complete, the Team that had been before, that had built the legacy for those who were to come after—he felt the strange impulse to count. How long it took to watch the last vestiges of a practiced, nearly false resiliency crumble away from his friend as her knees met the Earth. How many hours it took her to return from being the bearer of bad news. One, two, and three, went those who had known where he was, who he was, what he had been doing while he had been away. And while he saw a girl with long blonde hair standing before him for a briefing, dressed in orange and black that had triggered his only sense of being Aqualad at all for such a long time, he knew that she was gone. After all, he had never been fooled by her disguise and she was gone, too. One, two, three. And now he was at the helm of something he did not know at all. He wondered how long it would take. Four. He flinched, privately. He wondered who it could be now, now that they were all gone, who could take his place.