Drabbles Once Again

[masterofmidgets]

Another prompt from here, and this one came out...uh, really angsty? Sorry. And resemblance to a certain caped crusader and his alien boyfriend is merely accidental and caused by the length of time I've spent lately reading DCU fics.

 

It should have been him who died, that’s the bit that eats away at Jake, that’s what really gets him. Well, no, what really gets him is that Shane is dead. No more ridiculous, garish costume for Jake to pointedly look away from with a grimace, no more quiet little snickers when Shane was trying to pretend he wasn’t amused and failing miserably.

 No more dragging him off after battles to reaffirm, with eyes and hands and tongue, that he is still alive and whole and with him, because he isn’t – alive or whole or with him, and nothing will ever be alright again.

 But Jake knows that it should have been him who died.

 Motley City was his city after all, just like Sable was Shane’s city and Greenhaven was Steel’s; long before Shane had come to him with a dream and an offer he’d put on the mask and sworn to protect Motley’s citizens.

 But when the signal went out that Tempest had hijacked two passenger trains just outside Motley City and was going to crash them into each other, Jake had been on the other side of the world, fighting Nitroblast. And Shane – it is only weeks later that they piece together what happened, how he died – was the only one close enough to stop it. And he should never have been there, he had to have known as well as he knew his powers were enough to stop the trains that they weren’t enough to let him walk away after.

 But no one else was close enough, especially not Jake, and Shane was the kind of hero other heroes wished they could be, and so six hundred people went home that day who should have died, but Shane wasn’t one of them.

 Jake goes home after the funeral – a thousand people at Shane’s funeral, and did any of them understand he was gone and never coming back? – and burns his mask, and at night when he used to patrol he sits in his lair and looks at old pictures and thinks it should have been him under the train, and the world would be better if it had.

He knows Shane would be disgusted with him for thinking that, even more so for giving up, like his private pain was worth more than his duty. But Shane is dead, and it was all his fault for not being there, not being good enough, and when he'd said he was willing to give up everything to be a hero it had been a lie.

He doesn't believe in heroes any more, anyway.

Comments

[telyanofcelore.livejournal.com]

*sniffles* That's absurdly sad.