When is a person not a person?
It’s a question that plagues Zatanna. Or, maybe not even that. When does a person become a different person? When does the helmet on your head twist and twist you into someone new and old and different who doesn’t have a daughter at all.
Zatanna wonders if the word orphan applies to her. She wonders if she’ll ever figure it out.
“I don’t know.” Robin says when she asks, because during one of their chats he let slip that he really is an orphan. Two whole parents buried in their graves, no waking up. The whole shebang.
“I want to know.” She answers. It feels like a big question, the kind you need someone to answer before you can move on and do anything with your life. “I want things to start making sense.”
The word orphan makes sense. She even looked it up in a dictionary, all very clear cut.
“Whatever the answer is, you have family.” He smiles and Zatanna thinks about how sweet he is.
“Wally’s a lucky guy.” she says, half because she wants the conversation to turn a little less serious, half because it’s the truth. Robin turns a bit red and Zatanna absent mindedly starts thinking about what colour bridesmaid dress she would like.
“Shut up.” he groans, before turning serious again. “I don’t know what the right thing to say is, Z, but you’ve got to know that you’re one of us.”
Zatanna’s heart breaks a little even as she smiles. She does love the team, really she does. They’re bright and fast and beautiful and kind. They’re strong and clever and righteous and she does love them. It’s just that before she didn’t only belong with them. She had two places. She had a room in the mountain and a place by her father’s side.
It had made her feel whole, the duality of it all.
Maybe that’s why she packs a bag the next morning and conjures up a means of escape.
Every day with the team her soul shatters again. Every time she sees her father’s body, reduced to a vessel for a being that isn’t even kind, her heart breaks in two. Staying so close to reminders of all the things she’s lost isn’t doing her any good so she decides to leave.
Where’s the line between running away and escaping? she thinks, and finally there’s a question she doesn’t want the answer to.