Chapter Text
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.
As Thea presses the jagged rock into the soft flesh of her palm, she can’t help but disagree.
She can’t quite remember when she started doing it. The rock is a piece of shale that had long since chipped off the stone walls surrounding her. She taps it against her hand again. The serrated edge almost draws blood, and leaves an angry red imprint. It feels like she’s being kissed.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
This can’t be insane. She’s not insane. She’s very rational. The Japanese believe that if you fold one thousand origami cranes, you’ll be granted a wish. Any wish. She read a book about that once. No one calls that crazy.
Who’s to say that she can’t replace a crane with a rock. Replace folding that crane with tapping that rock into her skin.
Tap.
The repetitive movement might grant her a wish. Eventually. If she does it enough.
It’s been awhile since she’s seen anyone. Thea used to hate being alone. Her childhood was lonely enough to last a lifetime. The summer after she turned eight, her parents got word of a newly discovered Egyptian tomb. They were gone within a day. Thea stayed.
She’d researched the tomb, so she’d have something to talk about with her parents when they returned. The mummy was a child, a boy king, no older than 14. Her parents ignored three of her calls before she realized that dead children were more important than living ones.
She’d spent that summer screaming. She blasted loud music, but not rock because her mother hated it and it wasn’t ladylike. She’d learned the entirety of Die Hard and performed it in an Australian accent to an audience of stuffed animals. Every noise she made echoed off the walls of the mansion, reaching no ears but her own. Thea used to hate being alone.
Now, being alone is a good thing. She only ever sees one person anyways. A monster. The Joker. His specific brand of humor doesn’t quite live up to his title. What a surprise.
Tap.
Tap.
Her eyes involuntarily glance up. The walls, dirty and crumbling, covered in her blood and covered in pictures that she does not want to see.
She looks away.
There’s someone new wearing the Robin costume. It’s a fact that the Joker has gleefully plastered over the room. Jet black hair. Eyes covered by a domino mask but Thea knows they’re probably blue. A boy, a pattern that Thea had broken. With her out of the way, the status quo had reset.
In some of the pictures, he’s with Nightwing. In fewer he’s with Red Hood. They both look happy. Happier than they ever did with her.
Tap.
Tap.
She keeps her eyes downcast. There’s no safe place to look. Looking up, the walls hold blood and memories. When the world is quiet, it’s amazing how loud memories become.
Looking to the side wasn’t safe either. All she’d see would be a mattress, stained with more blood. And other things.
The rock was safe. The tapping was safe. It was a feeling she could control. The only feeling she could control. Keeps her grounded.
She winces as she sucks in a particularly painful breath. She tries to adjust herself, and feels the chill of cold metal slide around on her neck. The collar connects to the wall with a linked chain. She has enough slack to move across half the room. To reach the mattress, and a bucket for a toilet. But moving hurts. Better to just stay where she is. She sinks further into the wall.
Tap.
It really is amazing how loud memories can be. When she lets her guard down, they slip into her mind. Images of what used to be, what she used to have. People, real people and not monsters. Laughter and safety.
Tap.
Tap tap.
She’s not sure how long she’s been here. Food isn’t on a regular schedule. Neither are the visits. The memories chatter. They remind her of how in the beginning, she had tried escaping (17 times). She never got all that far. Eventually, she decided to wait. Thea had people who cared about her. Who at the very least needed her. So she waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited .
The realization was painful, and slow. Her mother always said she had a silver tongue. She put it to use. She spent hours in that cold empty room, talking herself in circles, convincing herself that they would come. That they cared.
But empirical evidence trumps even the greatest hypothesis. Time crept by, photographs piled up. There was only one conclusion to draw.
And it hurt.
God, it hurt.
More than any physical pain she could experience, more than anything the monster could ever do to her.
It was the reopening of a congenital wound. Her parents leaving her for months at a time, jetting off to some obscure archaeological site for artifacts more precious than her.
It was the loneliness that had settled into her bones when she was just eight years old, so profound that it had driven her out into Gotham’s night with nothing but a camera, trying so desperately to capture and hoard the warmth of the heroes she saw.
It was the way that Bruce made her Robin, the way he held her when she cried, the way he promised he would never leave, and the way he did .
So she stopped waiting. She stopped waiting for Nightwing, for Red Hood, for Spoiler or Orphan or Oracle or the new Robin or even some sort of divine intervention.
Life without hope is certainly strange. It’s a lot of things, really. But it’s mostly just boring. Thea cycled through the usual emotions. Anger and depression took center stage. But without any way to funnel them, they tended to simply slip away.
She considered suicide, for a time. But ironically, in a room full of nothing but pain, access to death was hard to come by. Besides, the whole thing just sounded like too much work.
Tap.
Tap tap.
Tap.
When Thea was 11, she performed CPR for the first time. Batman had just lost Robin, and he was out of control. There was a man who tried robbing a liquor store. Batman stopped him. Dragged him into a nearby alley. Thea watched from a nearby rooftop in horror as her hero killed someone.
When Batman left, she brought the man back to life. She’d never learned CPR before, but you pick up on certain things when the only consistent figures in your childhood are Olivia Benson and Meredith Grey. The man survived as a paraplegic. She never quite found the nerve to ask Bruce about it.
Anyways. Tapping her rock reminds her of that. Of pushing down on that man’s chest. Nothing changed but she did it again. She wanted more than anything for him to live.
Push. Tap.
Push. Tap.
And when she did it enough times, the man started breathing. How’s that for insanity? She got a different result. The man lived. Her wish came true.
The only thing missing here is the snap. Little known fact, in order for CPR to work, you have to break ribs. It makes a louder noise than you’d think. You hurt to heal. It’s so on the nose that it’s basically insufferable.
But maybe something needs to break.
Tap.
Tap tap.
Stab.
She blinks, and pulls the rock away. What was once an angry red mark on her palm is a deep gash, blood welling up and spilling over. Hands bleed a lot, says a distant voice in her mind. Small slivers of her skin are caught in the crimson river. Pale and translucent, it looks almost like tissue paper.
Nothing changes.
The same distant voice makes a remark about how the wound is going to get infected. Thea goes to tap her hand again, because an infection really doesn’t matter that much anymore.
The world around her shatters in a burst of white light.