Death Is Not Forever

Chapter 5

  I apologize for making all of you wait so long for this update!

      She still hadn’t come home… Jason continued to stand by the window as he waited for Skye to come back. He hadn’t even bothered to change out of his suit and into some normal clothes. The small cuts and bruises he’d gotten during the fighting and chase between him, Batman, and Robin were still unattended but he wasn’t too concerned about it. Dawn light was coming over the buildings and piercing the polluted air, Skye should have come home by then and Jason cursed himself for not going out to look for her.

            She could be dead because of me… No Skye’s stronger than that, she knows how to survive, besides she’s the one who didn’t tell me about where the meeting was going to take place. He argued mentally with himself as he began to pace the floor again, after doing this for about ten minutes he finally gave in and left to go back out and find his partner. Jason drove out to where they had been fighting and slowly circled out and around the building, Skye wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Another thought occurred to him that Black Mask could have killed her and anger surged through him at the villain for what he might have done and, once again, at Skye for not telling him where she was meeting Black Mask. With that he followed the faint blood trail that he had finally managed to find and followed it through the back streets of Gotham, here and there the patches would grow larger where she had stopped to rest while the actual droplet of blood making the trail grew larger and more frequent… then it suddenly stopped in the largest puddle of blood yet.

            “Skye?” Jason shouted and looked around at the empty alley where the trail had finally ended, she wasn’t anywhere in sight. “Where are you?”

            He got back on his motorcycle and drove off as quickly as he could in the small back alleys, this time wandering the back streets he hadn’t checked yet at random, only hoping that he would come across her eventually. As it got later once more and the sun began to turn a bloody dying color through the pollution in the air he finally came upon new evidence that Skye had been in the area… more blood. This time it was splattered across the ground and there were deep puddles of it that still had not completely dry, as if this had been the place of another attack, and at the end, at the end was Skye herself, soaked in her own blood.

            “Skye!” Jason ran to her side and put a hand on her blood soaked side as he rolled her onto her back, feeling her flinch at the contact. “Speak to me…”

            Skye’s eyes fluttered open weakly a few minutes later as she looked up at him with an unfocused, confused, gaze. “…Red? I-is that…you?”

            “Come on, we have to get you home.” He dragged her to her feet only to stumble from the dead wait after a few steps. “Skye, don’t drag your feet you’re slowing me down. If you do that I can’t get you back to the apartment for treatment. Do you want to die… again?”

            Skye’s head stayed slumped down and blood continued to pour out of her life threatening injuries as Jason moved her. Seeing this he stopped and sat her back down to reduce the amount of blood loss for a few moments, how was he going to get her back like this? Jason gritted his teeth in defiance at letting her die and picked Skye up bridal style, which allowed blood to soak his suit, before walking back to his bike and carefully setting her on it.

            “Stay with me.” Jason ordered then added another part as a half joke considering it wasn’t as important as her survival. “I want to hear what happened.”

            Skye made a small, almost silent, whimpering noise before coughing some blood and going still again. He didn’t have to check for a pulse to know it was almost gone; he would have to hurry back, sneak Skye inside without being caught, and pray she lived. Jason could finish his revenge without her sure… it was just he’d grown so used her help that he didn’t know what he would do if she were no longer there to assist and support him throughout… she kept his demons away. With Skye alive and with him, his demons would not dare attack, like wise, he knew she needed him to keep her sane as well. They were two broken people held together in a broken world by the need to get revenge.