"The past, boxed up and stacked out of sight. But never too far away" ― Megan Miranda, All the Missing Girls
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"Morning, sleepyhead." Ivy greeted Bird with a broad smile as she entered the kitchen. The redhead was standing at a counter, steeping a tea bag in a steaming mug.
"Morning."
Bird stepped a little closer and craned her neck to try and see what kind of tea Ivy was making.
"Want some?" Ivy asked.
"Ivy..." Bird's groggy voice cracked seeing the unappealing yellowish tint the water was taking on. "What the hell is that?"
"Ooh!" She exclaimed with sudden wide eyes, "It's this herbal blend I found at a little shop that grows-"
"Never mind," Bird cut her off.
She needed something stronger than whatever herbs Ivy was trying to blend into a tea to shake the grogginess draped over her like a heavy blanket.
There was a scowl on Ivy's face when she turned back to focus on her morning drink. If Bird had just let her explain what was in the tea along with the benefits of the plants, then she'd have been interested in it; she was sure of that.
Bird rolled her neck to the side, trying to ease the tension that had developed in her shoulders during the few hours she'd actually managed to sleep.
Images of Oswald filled her mind whenever she closed her eyes. Twisted visions of him, his hair impossibly black, caused a sickening contrast against his dull, pale skin.
Lifeless. A corpse with wide open, vacant eyes.
She thought about how close she'd been to killing him. Not during one of their arguments that had turned violent either, no - instead, she was about to put him down like a sick animal.
Her fingers folded into a fist at her side, memory bringing back to life the feeling of the vial of medicine the doctor had left her with, the leather case it was in, along with the syringe to administer the lethal dose.
How easy the idea of starting anew had seemed when he was missing as if he were the single thing holding her back from the changes she wanted to make and the person she thought herself capable of becoming.
Oswald wasn't going to let her go; she knew that.
And just like she'd said to Ivy, perhaps the scariest thought was that she couldn't let him go either.
He had been her best friend, her only real friend for a significant number of years, and they'd spent that time so twisted up with one another that it was impossible to see one ended and the other began.
She was trying to focus more on the present, more on the future and not get so caught up in the past.
Broken people break people, that was what she'd told Jim, followed by the raw admission that she didn't want to keep living like that.
More so, she couldn't keep living that way - spinning her wheels stuck in the same painful cycles.
If it weren't for Oswald, so many years ago, when she was just a teenager physically pulling her from the edge of the roof to safety, she'd be dead.
That was first, but far from the last time he'd been there to pull her back from the ledge, figuratively and literally speaking.
And she'd returned the favor countless times.
Bird felt like it should be easy to part ways with him, a clean break, knowing they were both alive today because of the other one.
No one owed a debt to the other.
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Devil's Playground • Gotham Fanfiction •
Fanfiction"Sometimes you have to just sit back and watch people destroy themselves." Bird's own words after watching her biological mother die. Little did she know that apparently it was something she'd inherited. Maybe that's just part of the madness of life...
