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“Tara. Are you okay?”
It’s a stupid question, really, Tara knows it and she’s sure that Artemis knows as well. Of course she’s not okay, nothing about her is okay, but Artemis has asked her and she feels she must answer.
What would her answer even be, though? What words could encapsulate the past few years of her life? What was Artemis even referring to? Was it the fact that her own brother had just disavowed and banished her from her kingdom? Or that she watched her brother murder her uncle in a way so gruesome that not even a monster like the Baron deserved it? Or that she had betrayed the only person who had given her purpose after her kidnapping?
Or…
Or…
Or…
A million different possibilities, running back to her abduction and the awakening of her meta-gene. A million different reasons for her to absolutely not be okay.
“No.”
The easiest answer is the one that she settles on, falling from her lips like a drop of blood as she sits curled up on her bed in the Premiere Building, her knees hugged against her chest.
Artemis sighs and nods, looking at Tara with a deep pity in her eyes, something which Tara has decided she definitely hates. Tara doesn’t want to be pitied right now. She doesn’t know what she wants, but it certainly isn’t pity. Part of her wants Artemis to yell at her, to ridicule her for not betraying Slade sooner, for having ever followed his orders at all.
Or maybe she wants to be in Markovia, locked in a prison cell waiting for Brion to charge her as a criminal and traitor to her country. She wants people to be upset with her, she can handle anger or sadness, but not pity. Because if she accepts pity, then she accepts that something happened to her which is worth feeling pity for.
And she knows that something happened to her, but she also knows that she is still a traitor in all the ways that count.
Because really, she does not want to be pitied or hated or convicted. She really just wants to be hugged. And wanting that is the most traitorous thing she can imagine, because she does not want a hug from Artemis, or Halo, or either of her brothers.
She wants to run back to Santa Prisca and sob against Slade’s chest. She wants him to tell her that everything will be alright and that he’s proud of her. She wants to go back in time and let that boulder kill Beast Boy, if only it meant she would get to go back to Slade.
“A lot has happened to you, Tara, not being okay is completely understandable.”
Artemis is being nice to her, and now Tara is crying like some sort of weak idiot. Artemis places her hand on Tara’s shoulder and Tara flinches away, she always flinches away.
“No, it’s not, none of this is understandable, you should hate me right now.”
Her voice is quiet and choked. She sounds pathetic.
“Tara, you haven’t done anything wrong.”
“I tried to kill Garfield! How is that not wrong?”
“You were being manipulated, Tara, and you chose not to. You chose to do the right thing, that’s what’s important. Not anything else, just that.”
“I would have killed him if you hadn’t stopped me.”
“You didn’t think you had any other choice. All I did was show you that there was another option. Accepting that option was your decision, not mine or Deathstroke’s, yours .”
She has no reply, only more tears that track down her face, sobbing gasps that escape her lips, a body that flinches away when Artemis tries to comfort her. Tara is not okay. She doesn’t know if she ever will be.
Artemis leaves at some point, once Tara sobs out that she needs to be alone, and Tara is left in the dark of her room staring up at the grey ceiling, exhausted beyond reason but miles away from sleep or safety.
Her mind rests on Santa Prisca.
The cots provided by the League of Shadows had been uncomfortable.
It is a strange thing to focus on, and yet now she can think only of that. She slept on a cot, in a room filled with the sounds of twenty-ish other meta-human girls all sleeping in the same space. Each cot was stiff and each mattress was thin enough for them to have felt the metal frames beneath. Each day was full of brutal training, and each night the beds provided no comfort. They were all sore and tired. They learned to live with it.
Tara is rather good at learning to live with things. Princesses are often thought of as quite spoiled and demanding, unwilling to put up with even the slightest discomfort. Tara might have been like that, once, but any memories of such an attitude were stripped away long ago, disregarded as unnecessary for her survival.
That's the proper term for what it all was, what it still is.
Survival .
Failure was not tolerated in the League. The weak died, and the strong watched on as it happened.
And then she’d had a better bed, her own room even. An entire small space all to herself in the main compound, at the end of the same hall that all of the instructors slept in. She’d been special, picked out from the rest because she was better. Because she’d had a potential that all the others had lacked.
If she really thinks about it now, she’d probably only been chosen because Slade had known that Brion would end up with the team and that she could act as a mole. But she’d felt special at the time.
It had not mattered how many times Slade hit her or yelled, how many nights she had fallen asleep so exhausted that it was a struggle to remember her own name, it had been worth it to her. He had made her feel special, and so it was worth it. One kind word or brief touch was enough to make every broken bone and drop of spilled blood worth it in her mind. He’d gotten her wrapped around his finger, and he’d done it with ease.
It’s not hard to make a girl reliant on you if you make her think you care.
She’d loved him. She knew that much, though sometimes it was like how she loved her father and sometimes it had felt like something else. Something she wasn’t even sure she was old enough to understand. But she’d loved him, and he’d known that, and he’d used it.
She’d thought of Slade as a genius, but perhaps he really didn’t deserve that title. Because the truth was that if he had played his cards right when Artemis had confronted her, Tara still would have killed Beast Boy if he’d just used a few different words. If he’d been encouraging instead of forceful. A soft word would have been enough to make her kill her friend.
How could she be forgiven for that?
Part of her hopes that, after the chaos of the events in Markovia, everyone will forget about her role in it all. She wants to fade away, face whatever justice may come for her, and pretend it never happened, that she was always just a normal excited meta-teen, and that nothing bad ever happened to her.
But she is Tara Markov, she is a princess, an assassin, a hero, a traitor, and her wishes are never granted.