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Blood. There’s… so much blood. Pouring from his arm. From the stump where his elbow used to join his forearm.
“Hold him still.” Tense. Roped together with sheer grit, iron netted under every square inch of Robin’s skin. “Cyborg, I said hold him–”
Victor curses, hands floundering. Drowning in an attempt to find a hold beneath it. Beneath the blood. “I’m trying, man, I’m–”
Garfield screams.
The sound sends birds from the treetops. Squirrels across the crackling forest floor. Animals, everywhere, fleeing the screech of his pain.
It shudders through Raven’s bones. Up her arms. Rattling in her skull. Bouncing between red-fleshed walls of pain. It’s borrowed pain.
She bites into her tongue as Garfield’s back slams into the jagged ground. His head lolls. He moans. It’s almost a word. Almost a gasping, desperate name.
Raven lifts her head. Her eyes wander the wall of splintered trees. They fall on the gap between trunks, the figure standing at the entrance of the clearing. At the foot of the path that leads out of this little pocket of horror.
Tara hovers halfway between here and nowhere. Between falling to her knees at Gar’s side in chest-heaving sobs, and… Turning around. Fading into the woods.
Raven sees the thought cross her hazy eyes.
“Dangit, we’re losing him!”
Beneath Raven’s hands, Garfield’s limp body rocks with their effort. With the force of Robin wrenching the tourniquet until it cuts creases into green skin. With the thundering impact of Victor’s massive, wide spread hands pumping a shallow, narrow chest.
Raven closes her eyes.
“Dangit, dangit, no!”
She reaches into his mind. Plunging into an arboreal growth of a different kind: The jungles of a childhood in Africa.
“Come on, man, don’t do this to us, don’t you dare–”
Raven stops in front of a tree. You know you can’t stay here.
The boy nods. He swipes a soft brown hand at his nose. I know. But it hurts.
Raven holds out her hand. Leave that to me.
He reaches for it. And as her fingers close around his, she flips the switch.
Heal.
Garfield’s eyes fly open and his back arches, hips bucking and– A wet sound fills the air.
An awful, wet, squelching sound.
Victor flinches from the spray of blood, wordless, garbled horror escaping from his throat. His metal clangs as he scrambles across the ground.
Robin’s on his feet. Blood drips from his cheek. His chest heaves, his hands crimson and hanging still at his sides as he stares. At the end of the tourniquet, lying limp and torn. “Raven.”
She blinks. The carnage fades to black. Her hands are still on Garfield’s leg. Warm with blood. She opens her eyes. His shattered body reappears. “Richard.”
Robin’s words catch in his throat. “What did you do?”
Raven follows his gaze. From the midst of the blood, deep within a stump of shattered bone and crushed flesh… Something emerges.
Garfield’s body twists as he lets loose a sound that is not a scream, not a wail, not any sound that a human throat is capable of. Something animal and primal that mangles his throat and goes on and on and–
The alien heat of Kori’s arms snags Raven by the waist and drags her clear. Robin fumbles with his belt, shouting for the extra sedatives in the car. Horror drops Victor’s jaw and peels his eye back to the white. Sticks snap behind Raven.
These are quiet. Quieter than Raven’s heart beating steadily in her neck as her eyes trace the long, unfolding tendril whipping at the shattered tip of Garfield’s elbow. Growing. Thickening.
A spatter of blood hits Raven’s forehead. Kori’s arms tighten. Raven’s breath rushes in and out of her body in steady, tangible waves. She can picture the air in her lungs. In… Out…
Straightening. It’s straightening, now. Branching out, smaller tendrils sprouting from the end…
Crack.
His cry cuts out.
Raven’s eyes close. She sinks back into Kori’s grip as silence takes over.
Ten seconds before the crickets remember their mantra.
Twenty before Robin thinks about moving, the leaves shifting under his boots.
Thirty before–
Raven opens her eyes in time to see Garfield’s chest flood with breath like it’s his first.
A short, ragged, unmistakably human cry slips from his throat. He struggles to sit. Gasping for breath, as he digs his fingers into the soil. As he turns massive eyes to his lifted, quivering hand.
His right hand. The one Cinderblock just ripped off.
Crick-crick…
The back of Raven’s head vibrates as Kori clears her throat. “Friend Gar?”
His sideswept hair and the angle of his head shadow Garfield’s face. His hunched shoulders ripple as he turns his hand to check the other side.
It’s pale. A nearly translucent green. A bleached, hairless alien limb a dozen shades above normal, with deeply wrinkled fingers.
The hand quivers. Moves.
Every knuckle of every finger cracks in a cascade like gunshots as Garfield folds them into a fist.
“Are–” Kori draws in a breath. Preparing to plow ahead, even as Robin stares stock-still and revulsion flickers in Victor’s eyes. But not Kori. She peers directly at Garfield, head slightly cocked. “Are you well?”
Garfield laughs. Raven can’t help flinching as it breaks the air, thick and wet and choking. There is a purple-mottled bruise growing over the center of his throat.
Unfurling his fingers, Garfield watches them peel away from the wrinkled skin of his palm. A long string of clear mucus follows, clinging to his fingertips. Garfield doesn’t look up as he nods, slowly.
“And I was just going to ask someone to give me a hand.”
Raven closes her eyes. Opening them, she turns her head.
The path is empty.
~~~
“Hey–” Garfield holds up his hands and laughs. A splotchy, jigsawed line marks the connection of his right forearm to his elbow. His arm looks grotesque and stitched on. It seems to be functioning normally. “–I’m just glad I didn’t grow another head.”
“Indeed,” Kori agrees quickly. Robin and Victor exchange glances.
Tara stares at the floor and rubs the back of her neck. She hasn’t moved from the chair in the corner. Not when Garfield was lying limp and unconscious in the med-cot. Not when he woke up complaining and whining for a drink of water. Not a word, not a spark of interaction from her since she returned from her hours-long ‘run’, soaked to the bone and gasping for breath. The walls shake as the storm continues to rage overhead. Neither she nor Garfield have looked at each other once.
“I mean, this is a good thing.” Garfield twists his hand in front of his face, eyes darting across it. “I didn’t lose my hand! Okay, I lost it, but I got it back, anyway.” Something flickers behind his gaze, then vanishes.
Raven narrows hers.
“We’re glad you’re okay, too,” Robin finally says. He gestures vaguely and uncomfortably. “How does the… rest of you feel?”
Garfield blinks wide eyes. “Huh? Great!” He bubbles into another laugh. “Come on, you guys, this is good news! I didn’t die! My hand is literally good as new. Stop acting like it’s a funeral.”
Tara’s fingernails tug at the stitching in the hem of her t-shirt. The end of a thread slips loose. She latches onto it and pulls.
“Man.” Victor breaks the silence –and the mood– with a chuckle of his own. “How did you do that? Grow half an arm?”
“Dunno.” Garfield flashes his teeth. “Guess it’s just basic biology, huh?”
“No.” Raven can’t help herself. “It’s not.”
“Bones, muscle, organs. Blood.” Garfield ticks them off on his fingers. “Humans got ‘em, animals got ‘em. And I change my bones and muscles all the time. So why not grow them?”
He has no idea what images that brings to mind.
“It is truly renewed?” Kori drifts into the air, leaning forward to hover over the cot. “Returned and restored and operative?”
With a smirk, Garfield offers her a handshake.
A gleeful squeal bounces off the walls of the small room. “It is completely normal!” Kori jams her fingers between his and Garfield’s teeth snap into a smiling grimace.
“Uh, Star, it’s– it’s still new, y’know–”
“Excellent.” Kori spreads his fingers to align with her own slenderer, longer, and more elegant versions. “Most impressive.”
Garfield laughs awkwardly. Tara watches a spot on the tile.
~~~
“You, uh, think it will always be– splotchy, like this?”
“I don’t know.” Raven tosses the sleeping bag on the floor.
“Bet it’s just ‘cause it’s new.” Garfield’s teeth gleam and his eyes flick across the wall, seeing something distant. “In a week it’ll be good as new. Heck, it’s already good as new, it just doesn’t look good as new.”
He laughs, that hesitant half-chuckle everyone has been hearing constantly since the incident. Since he got his arm ripped off and grew a whole new one.
“Hey.”
Raven sighs and lifts her head to meet Garfield’s baffled gaze as he leans over the edge of the bed.
“What are you doing?” His eyebrows wiggle and furrow. Beneath them, he pointedly flicks green eyes from the books stacked beside the sleeping bag to the pillow in her hands.
Raven tosses the latter at the head of the sleeping bag. “Setting up camp. What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Well, duh.” Garfield rolls his eyes. “But, uh…” He refastens them on Raven. “Why?”
“You nearly died.” She sits back on her heels and reaches to detach her cloak. “We are not going to leave you alone all night.”
Garfield’s eyes wander away again. “Where’s Tara?”
Raven’s hands slow. Folding the cloak, she sets it aside and traces Garfield’s gaze to the window. It’s opened, inviting in the cool breeze of a quiet night on the bay. The sweet smell of after-rain seeps damply into skin and fabric alike.
The low hum of a passing motorboat fills the space between them.
“Out. She left for some fresh air.”
Garfield nods slowly. The lighthouse beam trolls across his blank expression. “And she’ll be back when…?”
“I don’t know.” Raven shakes her head. “She didn’t say.” She slides her feet into the sleeping bag. “But as soon as she gets here, you’re her problem.”
Is it mercy? Or just willing ignorance, dragging the lie out of its box time after time. Day after day. Ignoring the way Tara slows on every open road, turns her eyes to the sky at every plane. The way there is something in her smile. The catching, flickering expression every time Garfield reaches for her hand.
The way her every disappearance could be the last.
“Yeah.” Garfield smiles. He sits back against his pillow. “Dude, am I looking forward to that. Sleepover with Tare, getting rid of you.” He folds his arms behind his head and closes his eyes. The jigsaw gleams stark and glossy in the gray light. “Win-win.”
“Don’t make me change my mind.” Raven lifts her hand and across the room, the lamp’s colors invert. She closes her fist and the light vanishes. “Would you like to be alone when you grow your second head?”
The call of tired seagulls. Low and mournful. Garfield shifts in the hospital cot.
“No,” he doesn’t quite laugh, and Raven closes her eyes.
Breathing out, she lifts her hand and finds his waiting. His fingers lace between hers in half a heartbeat, tightening flush against the back of her hand.
Raven lowers her fingertips to rest against his knuckles and complete the grip.
Garfield curses softly. “Dude, you’re colder than death.”
“Shut up and go to sleep.”
“Y’know, maybe you should be the one hooked up to a heart monitor.”
Then he shuts up.
Their breath stays regular and shallow. The gulls keep crying outside.
“She loves me, you know. I– I know she does.”
Raven watches the spiral shadows of the ceiling fan.
“It’s not that.” Awkward laugh. “It’s not that she doesn’t love me, it’s– it’s something else, and–”
He trails off. Water swells in the pipes, then fades.
When Garfield speaks again, his voice whispers rough-edged with emotion.
“An arm. An arm, Raven, what’s wrong with me? What am I– what the heck am I made of?”
“Bones,” she answers. The fan keeps turning. “Muscle and blood. Same as the animals, same as the people.”
“Right.” He laughs. Bitterly. Raven closes her eyes and lets the honesty of it wash over her. “You’re the one who said it’s not basic biology, that this isn’t…”
There it is. There is, finally, the break.
“It isn’t normal.”
“No.” The slick polyester material squeaks under her hair as Raven shakes her head. “It’s not.”
“Gosh, Raven, you suck at pep talks.”
“And the rest of us are all so normal, too.” She sighs. “You’ll never fit in again.”
The shadows turn in twenty minute circles as the lighthouse peers in, then turns away. Garfield’s choking laugh turns ragged. Raven’s arm falls asleep.
“She loves me.” He sucks in a shuddering breath. “I thought she loved me.”
“She does.” Raven drops her gaze to the chair in the corner. Near invisible in the dark. “It’s something else.”
His sobs quiet, eventually. Around the same time his fingers slip from hers as he slips into the silence of sleep. Raven watches the black shift past midnight and, eventually, lighten toward gray dawn.
And somewhere, camped in a wooded mountainside, a girl with rain in her hair lifts her eyes to the distant, glimmering lights of a tower far away. And she thinks about not coming back.