Fly Away

Chapter 8

K P.O.V

This is so uncool. Conner and I turned up with zilch, scanners turned up nadda, Robin has mind barriers so nope there, and guess who decided to "borrow" a magic-blocking-thing-a-ma-jig from Bats, Robin, that's who. Why does he insist on making this so darn hard? Wait why is Zee yelling?

I run towards the sound of Zee's voice the rest of the team is dashing in her direction as well, "The item was removed, i'm getting something here". Says Zee.

I start to feel a pressure behind my eyes and a buzzing in my spine, suddenly I'm not in the cave anymore.

I'm now standing in a small room with old yellowing wallpaper peeling off its walls in long strips. I hear a metallic clatter behind me and I turn around.

A boy maybe about 16 years old, leans back on his hands then flops onto the rough wooden floor.

Beside the boy is a metal tray with what looks like a first aid kit plus some tweezers and sewing thread.

Then I notice the figure lying on the thin ratty mattress on the floor in front of the boy. "Robin!" I try to yell but my voice won't work.

I try yelling to the boy next, "Where are you?", "What did you do to him?" The boy goes to grab a jacket that lays crumpled at my feet, as he reaches for the cloth I try to grab him but his arm goes right through mine like I'm made only of the dust that's floating freely through the musty air. As the dark blue coat rises off the floor I recognize it as the coat Robin wore last time we had a covert mission in the cold.

The boy drapes the coat over Dick and the scene around me shatters like glass hit by the neighbor's kid's baseball, and I'm standing back in the cave surrounded by the rest of the team who are holding their heads and look like they are shaking off a kind of vertigo. Then I realize I'm not standing, I'm sitting on the floor if you can even call it sitting. No wonder everyone standing looked so tall.

"Did anyone see what I just saw?" asks Meg, I nod too confused to speak, what happened to Dick? Who was that boy? Where were they?

As the questions race through my head I realize finding Dick will be a lot harder than any of us thought it would be.

Something dark inside me whispers that we will never find him, that my last glimpse of his life would be him laying on an old tattered mattress in a decrepit apartment.

The voice whispers that he will never come home. That I don't matter enough to make him come back, I don't matter enough.

He doesn't need me.

Another part of me wants to curl up and die because I need him.