"theres a lady who knows
all that glitters is gold . . ."
in which a wannabe hero leaves the safety of her own life to help a girl
with a very strange problem.
...
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BRUCE WAS RIGHT.
The only place DJ could ever think such a thing was the dark of her apartment, where no other life form could ever hear her admit to such a terrible truth. God knows that Jason would die twice if he ever heard those words leave her mouth. But she couldn't deny the sad truth that Bruce Wayne was right when he said that revenge wouldn't change anything.
DJ, of course, knew that it wasn't going to make Jason magically rise from the dead or make her abundance of pain disappear. She was stuck with these feelings, this loneliness, for as long as she was still breathing without Jason next to her - but she failed to realize that once she got her revenge, that was it. Sure, it was satisfying and gratifying to know that the Joker wasn't giggling about her grief anymore; but there was this deep, dark emptiness that she was left with, after the capability to get revenge was gone. The only thing left in that empty space was a burning fire of rage that now had no place to go; it just sat in her core, burning the walls of her insides. She wanted to kill him again, and again, and again. Over and over when she started to think about how unfair this all was.
It wasn't fair that she had to be the one who got left behind. What did she ever fucking do to deserve this immeasurable, never-ending ache - stuck with this pain, in this moment, while watching the rest of her miserable life go by with less and less to show for it? Just a broken body with an even more broken heart, rotting away in a still half-empty apartment while Jason's pain was already over.
It wasn't fucking fair. Nothing about this, about Jason - about anything for that matter - was fair. As terrible of an idea it was, DJ couldn't help but mull over this sick little thought for what seemed like every five minutes; how fucked up it was that Jason got to make the dumbest decision of his entire life and only have to pay for it for ten minutes while she was going to slowly drown in this void for the rest of her life.
She didn't even fucking do anything other than what she was supposed to do - all nineteen years she had been on this earth, she did exactly what was expected of her. She went to school, got decent enough grades, tried her best to behave and stay a positive role model in the media for her family's reputation, trained as hard as possible, kicked ass with her family, saved lives - she had followed every single rule in the playbook. She tried, and tried, and tried her whole fucking life. So, so much effort, just for it to amount to jack shit.
She was just so fucking angry. It was like every second of every day was spent suffocating on the most seething rage she had ever experienced. Like there were constant thick clouds of ash sizzling up her throat and refusing to dissipate until it was either released, or DJ choked to death on the fumes. Now that there was no morally correct way to release it, there she was - getting asphyxiated by the smoke of her own endless fury.
DJ had been sitting in the dark of her apartment for the days leading up to the funeral, coping with this rage and pain by taking all her frustration out in wave upon wave of crying-screaming meltdowns that had gotten the cops called on her almost twice a day. A multitude of different people had attempted to be her voice of reason, but eventually, they had all given up and instead began to bribe whatever GCPD officers knocked on her door.
