Identity?

Chapter Two

     I felt a sickening downward pull, an awful sinking sensation, and I stopped abruptly, pain coursing through my back and legs. Robin had caught me, my body sore from the impact. I'd watched Kid Flash jump down, and Robin ran with me cradled safely against his chest a good forty feet or more before turning to look back at the house.
     Robin, Kid Flash, and I sat on the wet grass and watched the upper story burn, listening to the approaching sirens. I thought of my parents, but didn't cry. Not yet, at least. Shock, I thought numbly.
     I remembered the next half hour as a jumble of images: the pulsating lights of the trucks and smoke that kept pouring out when there were no more flames. I waited for the firefighters to remove my parents' remains, but with the effort now designated a recovery rather than rescue, and their bodies considered part of a crime scene, Robin told me it would be hours before that happened.
     Paramedics arrived shortly after we had escaped the old house. I was taken to the hospital and delivered to the trauma bay in the emergency room. Robin and Kid Flash, a.k.a. Dick and Wally, arrived wearing normal clothes, and I could make out their features in the bright fluorescent lights.
    Dick—Robin—had dark black hair and wore Levi's and converse, his red T-shirt concealed by a black leather jacket, though I couldn't see his eyes through the dark sunglasses he strangely wore inside at night. Wally wore a blue jacket and jeans, his red hair lining the edge of a baseball cap. His gentle green eyes were shining with worry.
     There was a lot of crying and screaming from me. I was struggling and thrashing out at the doctors whenever they came near me. I couldn't even begin to explain how I was feeling, or the pain that had come with the condition of my leg. It was a mess; it made me sick to look at it. I recalled a doctor saying the burns had been so severe that some portions of my leg was burned straight to the bone—no skin, no muscle. Just bone.
     Eventually a brave nurse approached me with a needle and stuck it into my arm after she'd finally gotten a hold of it, the syringe filled with some clear liquid. Almost instantly, the pain began to withdraw.
    Slowly, my crying, screaming, and awful vulgarity of obscenities had calmed as I grew more and more numb.
    I felt my consciousness slipping as the pain subsided. I watched with heavy eyes as the nurse slipped soft restraints onto my arms and one good leg. She began connecting me to monitors and slipped an IV needle into my left hand. I sighed contentedly. The burning in my leg was gone, the other pains dulled by a sleepiness seeping through my body.
     "It's time to move her to the O.R." the doctor said.
     "No, I wanna sleep..." I complained, my voice slurred and hardly a whisper.
     Robin stepped forward and took my hand. "You can sleep. You're going to be fine."
    Those were the last words I heard before I was pulled under the darkness of a heavy, well-deserved sleep.

                        *     *     *

     My first week in the hospital was sheer hell, full of pain, crying, tons of surgeries, and Robin. I guess the part with Robin wasn't bad, but the rest of it was awful. Everyday, in and out of consciousness for my surgeries, the only real feeling I had was numbness. All the medicine I had to take dulled all extremes of pain and emotion.
     But that first week, I was a mess. I would lie in bed and dream, seeing the flames... the blood.... and them. My parents.
     And then I would start to cry, quietly, though, because I didn't want to wake up the other patients. And I would go to my worst place, curled up like a baby, I would cry, and my tears felt numb. They were numb because of the drugs. I didn't know how to explain it. I cried my numb tears and at my absolute worst, I dreamed of him, dreamed of him saving me, rescuing me from that place, coming to me in his cape and tights and the R over his heart. My hero.
     In the light of the morning, the tear tracks dried on my cheeks, and he would always return. He'd be there in his normal clothes, his eyes a mystery behind those sunglasses, always smiling, always happy to see me.
     And every night as I cried, I'd be waiting for him.