Imagine your favorite scent. Grandma's cookies. Maybe a citrus, like an orange. The pleasant acridness of gasoline or sharpies. Now take a white crayon and draw it with all its features. That’s what it’s like trying to explain death.

Words are enough. The English vernacular is far too small in comparison to the depth of what it felt to be interconnected.

Vic was right in a way, it was euphoria without emotion. All of the wisdom in the world without the impediment of morals or intelligence.

I was feeling very little in my physical body. The gurgling of my own blood wasn’t my problem. The pain I went through wasn’t my problem because my eyes were open.

I forgot a lot of things over the years. Other things I’ve tried to ignore. Grief does that. It makes you blind. You may stay aware but the bigger picture of your life is gone. All the strokes that make the picture of you become smooth. Like a river stone. The currents flow over you until all that’s left is a rock among others.

That didn’t mean I was unimportant though. We all are. Bruce loved that stone. He saw a lot more in it that stone than others. He saw a reflection. A broken mirror, one that he could fix.

Now he sits there dying. He was far too tired to save me. The patrol was awful today. For a good reason, Victor knew Batman was keeping an eye on me. He does it often for orphans. So he hired Joker promising a good joke and set aflame old rivalries on the docks to keep him busy. Bane did a number on him. More than he’d ever admit. Posing ivy nearly broke a good portion of his equipment leaving him with the bare minimum with little protection. Bruce did his best to stomp out the fires that others lit on the docks. After all of that, the greatest detective in the world still figured out it was a distraction.

Broken and tried he still didn’t want his mirror to break.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

He fought Victor viciously, breaking everything he could get his hands on. Victor got the upper hand. Opened up his side with his knife. Bruce kept fighting until too much blood was lost and his body had enough. To my horror, Victor unmasked him and giggled. He was excited to torture a savior.

Bruce is much like a metaphorical sheepdog. He has a bleeding heart like none other and will continue to give out pieces of himself to save the boy that was once him. Even when his son was killed. Every call text and dollar sent was him trying to fill a void. And I was the asshole who took but didn’t give.

Vic was right in a way, a zombie has to die. But it didn’t have to be in death. Vic is a broken man and a fraud, he always was. A faux liberator who only works off his sick pleasures. The sick fuck offered fools gold to a suicidal teenager and I ate it up. I drank the Kool-Aid like an idiot. Now I’m dead.

It’s hard to accept the emotions I've denied myself. It’s even harder trying to heal what you hide. I lied to Victor, not consciously, but because I just didn’t know at the time. I was always here.

I was just living for tomorrow. The mythological place where magically I became the Jonathan I once was and all of my trauma disappeared. I was never a zombie or a drone or an automation of flesh and bone. No one is, I was just a lost kid fighting to keep my shit together. Out of everyone Bruce tried his damn hardest. He hired an amazing therapist but I never shared my pain. I’ve just shared memories. The vulnerability of showing the ugly prevented me from trying to make that connection I needed.

It seems so easy now to look back at some things I’ve missed and ignored. The tomorrow I envisioned never existed. There’s only one more today to make better. It’d be arduous to expose myself, but Bruce needed it. He needs a friend. He almost has it with Tim. But everyone's better off with a village. We’re human, social creatures blessed and cursed with sentience.

Victor was right in a way, it was time to start living. Some pruning needs to be done and a mirror needs to be repaired. There’s no tomorrow and I need to move today.

So I do what my mom told me to and I asked for help. Whatever responded only told me to not become a zombie. So with the breath of my corpse spoke my defiance, “…not today Satan”