Teen Titans: Apocalypse

~Epilogue~

Three Months Later....

The rain poured heavily outside, hammering the windows as it was thrown against them by the wild, raging winds.

Above the sound of the pounding rain was a gentle crackling of wood within the fire place, slowly eating away at the dead wood hungrily. It filled the room with a smell that reminded me of camping; that burning wood smell. I used to smell it around those campgrounds a little ways beyond the city. The smell made me think of the woods. It was like an escape from everything. And I welcomed it.

In my arms, I clutched a warn out, black leather book tightly within my trembling grasp. My hands-now a blue sickly pale color, and scarred even more-shook violently as I held tightly to that book as if my very life depended on it. The words within it (just below each picture) had long since faded away. However, I didn't really need to read it to know what the words meant. The pictures were all I needed to guess what those blurry letters below actually said.

Those many pictures full of smiling, laughing, and the occasional grumpy or crying teens stared back up at me with such life that what they had become just didn't seem possible. Their expressions were so bright and full of such life I had almost forgotten what that even looked like within a person. The faded photographs blurred as my eyes watered and stung once more. A lump had formed within my throat that I tried desperately to swallow, but to no success. My breath came out in quick, shuddering gasps as I struggled to compose myself.

The rain outside had begun to fall harder. Trees whipped against the house from the strong gusts of wind that forced them to do so against their will. A low rumble of thunder could be heard in the distance. Through the windows lining the far wall of the room (Bruce Wayne's old study) flashes of light could be seen streaking across the sky. The lightning lit up the dark, wet world outside, and the many stones below that weeping willow tree a small distance from the mansion-like house.

I got shakily to my unsteady feet and stumbled to the window like a drunk. My bare feet-purple, scarred and dead looking-dragged across the once maroon carpeted floor (now stained dark in places) as I walked. Once I reached the window, I pressed my face against the cold glass and stared out at the rocks in the distance.

I could barely see the stones through the pouring rain, but I knew they were there. I knew what they looked like to the point of mentally picturing their flat, grey, mossy surfaces with the names carved jaggedly on them. Every day there seemed to be a new stone under that tree. Every day the mansion got smaller and smaller. It felt as if just yesterday I was within their presence. Now they were all gone, and there was a deafening silence from where they used to be within these halls.

Richard Grayson wasn't a quitter. That hella stubborn, but unusually smart boy wouldn't let anything stop him from doing what he promised to do. And even as our friends dropped dead around him, that boy continued to try. He pushed himself to the limits to find the cure. He kept at it even when his own body was shutting down. After Bruce had died Richard made a promise; he wasn't going to stop until he found that cure. Only, he never did. The last words he ever said weren't ones of a quitter. They were ones of someone who still had hope. "I may not have done it. But I paved the road for someone who will."

I sighed and turned away from the window to stare back at the chair I had previously been sitting in for hours pathetically crying over pictures in the album. Oxygen tanks—empty, half-empty, and full—lay around the chair on the floor. Clear masks, tubes, gloves, empty syringes, and other medical supplies that did gods knew what, were scattered everywhere. Cobwebs clung like Christmas lights to the walls and ceiling high above. Dust coated everything. The room was a mess and didn't feel like home as it once had. I guess it made more sense as a prison. Which had become appropriate. At least for myself.