Work Text:
Cynthia Reynolds went to bed that night as she did every night before it. She went to bed warm and full, she went to bed surrounded by evidence of her passion, interests and life, she went to bed without questioning whether or not she was loved or even loveable. She went to bed, not desperate to see the next day at all, but excited for it and the plans she made with friends her age and the money she had saved from chores and birthdays. Cindy Reynolds went to bed happy.
She also went to bed aware it was all a lie.
It was the burden of a metahuman who specialised in illusions, she thought. She could see the flickers on the periphery of the world. She could hear how the voices of the people around her shake around certain words, how they don’t quite line up with how they were. She still dreams of reality. That’s what makes it so much harder, that she knows fully and without doubt how reality is, the cruelty of it. She knows that the truth is she has spent more nights cold and hungry than comfortable, she knows that she lost everything she had and loved much younger than anyone should, she knows that she wasn’t loved by her family in a way that she was safe with, in a way that made her know without doubt that it was unwaveringly there. She knows, even as she lays down and remembers how she laughed with her father and was allowed to plan to do something as simple and childish as a sleepover at her friend’s, that life would never be this kind.
It certainly hasn’t been this kind to any of her real friends. She knows that Paco has never lived a life where he had both a united family and any sense of financial stability but she sees him, laughing comfortably at a mall in a city he never even visited let alone grew up in. The same goes for Hank, who she saw attending a football game with a father he never got to know in a body that is still fully his, that had never been remade as a weapon for someone else, and J’onn, who she has heard is an elected ambassador from a planet she knows died, who lost everything with even greater totality than she did. Mari never got a thriving career, a happy father, and a stable home country nor did Zatanna know a life that was never threatened, even if she got to play at a happy home for longer than any of them.
Do any of them know what their real lives are, she wonders, or do they think their dreams, if they get them at all, are nothing more than simple nightmares? Is this her burden alone? She hopes not. She hopes it isn’t her that this relies on because she already knows what she’d choose.
It doesn’t matter what this fantasy is doing to reality, the cold and cruel reality she’s hiding from, because she cannot imagine a possibility that would make her leave this, that would make her give up these better and comfortable lives for all of them. There’s nothing she could learn that would make her reject this world where the grand cause of costumed heroics was only something they saw on the news rather than bore the brunt of.
She wants to pretend that she’s doing this for all of them, to let them live the life they all deserved, but she knows herself too well. She’s too selfish to let this go. She’s too selfish to relinquish a kind dream in favour of a hurtful reality.