TOTALLY NOT WORTH POSTING. -BANG is shot and dies-

I was trying to work on Snapshots. I really was. But this exploded in my brain...and what can I say? I was half-delirious when I wrote it. But...make of it what you will. If you honestly have no idea what's going on, PM me and I'll try to explain. :)

Since no one will really get it without some help, let me try to give you some hints. Remember that episode when Star got sucked into the future with Dr. Light and met Nightwing? And she left to go back to her present? I wondered, what would happen if she got sent to the future again, and met Nightwing, and then got ripped back to the past and he had to live without her until she could find a way back to the future?

Wow. That makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.

Anyway...plot-less drabble-fic that I, strangely enough, kind of like. :) Enjoy. Because I really have to go work on Snapshots now.

See ya, chickadees!

--

I remember you.

Your teenaged self is a ghost of a memory—a shadow of a thought. Your golden years are a phantom from the dim memories of my past: you were a dark standalone figure in a field of white, a three-dimensional being in a city of cardboard cutouts.

Nightwing...So strong, in this future. Taller than even I, with a lean body that is toned past simple muscle. I remember your gangly teenaged self, and I smile. Even though Robin is no more. Even though Nightwing has taken his place, has stolen his body and mind.

Your present self is a tragic symbol of what we have lost—gray with age, ever-strong, but with a crippled mind that makes my stomach roil with sorrow. But you, in your present-day form, are more real than anything in my past, because you are my now. You are real. You are unlike the memories I cherish.

I remember how you used to be.

I remember you in your prime.

I remember your hair, long and sleek, tickling your sharp, jagged cheekbones. I remember your eyes, darker than tar, just as easy to get trapped in: a glue-edged web where thrashing does nothing but hurt and screaming does nothing but keep you from suffering in silence. I remember the way you slicked your mouth with honey at night, so if I lost control when I woke up and saw you, you tasted sweet to my lips. I remember you screaming at me, and I'd want to yell back and knock some logic into your head and kiss you senseless all at once.

In your prime, you were beautiful.

But your prime has come and gone. You are more real to me now—at more than eight decades old—than you ever were at twenty.

You're different, at this age. The way you walk: still confident, but weary, as if you will never be rested again. The way you breathe, more desperate now, as if each gasp is stolen from the jaws of the Devil and the next is never a cast-iron event. The way you talk: deeper, harsher, a steel-rimmed blend of strange and familiar that makes me hurt when I hear it.

Your hair is cropped close again, dusted with a fine layer of gray, and you've long-since forgotten to carefully gel it to perfection. Your skin is parchment-pale against the smooth orange of mine. Your eyes are quiet. I wonder if constant struggles for life and love stripped you of your inner fire, or if you simply forgot to tend to it after I was gone.

I remember the beginning of this tragedy, and the middle, though the end has not yet been determined. And you are lost in the center of it, drowning in your pain, and I press my lips to yours as if I could breathe love into you again.

I remember how it happened.

Time has always been fickle, but for us it is nothing less than cruel. We were united in our youth. We were ripped apart by the whim of a felon. We spiraled apart, met each other again—and were torn away just as we found something deeper.

You lost me once, and then again; and it was the second that was your undoing. I found my way to you again, and though it took decades in your time, it took only moments in mine. But the unnoticed years, the ones that tangled life-threads around my body as I tumbled though the vortex, were the ones of your undoing.

The bolt-hole is a snarling beast, snapping jaws full of dominance. I scream—high and keening—and clutch at your arms. Your face is twisted into a shocking snarl and I see the most excruciating stab of pain flash through your eyes.

"Starfire!" you bellow, the word torn from your throat, and I try to scream back, shaking and crying, but the vortex has sucked at my body in a ravenous fit of rage.

We had prepared for this moment—my parting would not be an act of choice, the result of being torn between worlds, as was the first. But we were not prepared for the sensation of our hearts being wrenched from our bodies as I am swallowed by the predatory mouth of the bolt-hole.

You are torn from my arms, from my heart; and I know as I plunge head over heels, heels over head from your embrace, that my heart has been ripped from my body as easily as I was ripped from your grasp.

And then a line of exquisite pain slashes across my mind, and I know no more.

You continued—growing older, spanning years, decades—yet I aged not a moment as I passed through the bolt-hole to the future. Ten years passed. Twenty years passed. Sixty years passed. I found you as you hovered on the brink of eighty-three, and loved you as I did when we were but teenagers kissing in the rain.

And now...Now you sit in the garden and stare at the roses, the ones with cruel-tipped thorns and choking vines that wind their way around matchstick boughs. It's these times that you're blank, and it's these times when I wonder if Death, at last, is clawing for your soul.

You succumb to the pain, and I forgive you for it. You suffered sixty years without me, while I knew only a moment of being torn from your arms.

And a moment made me question my reason for living.

You are strong, my love. So strong. Strong enough to make my heart flutter like the wings of a small bird, just as it did when we were young.

When we were young.

When you are lost in the ravaging memories of time, I remember how you used to be, how innocent we were: two teenagers, frantic in love, hungry for the scorch of our bare skin as it met. Perhaps we were not as innocent as we thought.

When you surrender to the glut of pain, I have to wonder.

I have to know.

Do you see me as I crouch by your feet? Do you hear me as I weep into your ear, as I beg for forgiveness for crimes I never knew I was committing? Do you feel the press of my lips as I kiss you wildly, searching for an escape from my frostbitten soul? Or are you feeling nothing but the years of anguish, the years of knowing I was lost in the past?

It's only when the glaze of your idle-ember eyes clears that I breathe freely once more. It's only when you awaken and speak with your sandpaper voice that I know I've saved you, again. And yet these moments are agony, because they do nothing but remind me that your next slip-away will be even more painful than the last.

In this time, in this future…You are both strange and familiar, harsh and soft, passive and bold. You are not the boy I long-ago knew, nor the man I once met in a whirlwind of jumbled futures. You are an entirely new man, one I have never seen the likes of before, but one I love fiercely despite your crippled soul.

In your hours of clarity, I see the forgotten ember in your eyes—the one that fueled you as a teenager, the one that made you burn with anger and glow with warmth.

It's dying now. The ember. I see it smoldering just before you wake from your fits of vacancy, and every flicker twists my stomach into a giddy whirl. This is the time he will wake up for good, I promise myself. This is the time, the final time, the last moment of blankness. He's lost time, too much time, but I love him still—and this is enough. We'll be proper lovers now, despite our differences. We'll love each other truly, like we want to, like we need to.

Then the ember fades into your black-as-pitch stare, and the only thing I can do is choke back the tears with my eyelids, simply because one of us has to stay strong. For the sake of the other.

And now as I find myself closing my eyes against regret, I find myself thinking.

If this is the end.

The clarity is harder to grasp now. You are old, my love, so old. Humans pass so quickly, fleeting as a firefly's glow, and your aging heart is struggling.

This aches like the end.

You are fading. The glow is bleaching from your skin, your frame withering upon itself. I lay my smooth hand against your shrunken cheek and weep over your mortality, each tear a living drop of rain.

This could be the end.

If this vacant spell is the last, the one that leads to your death, then know this.

When I wake in the morning, I see your faces—you face how it used to be, when you were young; the face of Nightwing, the brave, the strong; and finally, the face of you as you are now, with waterfall-lines cascading from your eyes and bars of gray in your tuxedo-black hair. I see your faces, and I love them all, no matter that two of them are lost in Time and the only one left is the one who recognizes me but a few hours of the day.

When I look at you, I see every shred of the girl I once was, the woman I am now, aged from sorrow and love and delight and distress. I feel the mortality that rushes through your veins and I think of the mortality that has never sung through mine.

When I look at you, I remember myself.

I remember myself.

And know this as well. If this is the end, I will be the strong one, the one that keens of your loss, just as you crooned of mine. I will take my turn at the yoke, bend my back to the lash of sorrow, humble myself as a slave to recollections of you, and I will sob tears of joy and despair, because you are at last free from the memories.

You will be free.

Know this above all.

No matter what has happened between us, no matter what has kept us apart, I will love you until Time rips you from my embrace and I experience what you suffered for decades. I will love you as the eons of my life stretch further than any mortal span. I will weep of your loss for all of my days, but I will rejoice in the knowledge that my love is one that did not die as you did; that our love rebelled the test of Time; that together, we were strong enough to find each other again.

And when I die, centuries after your last breath, I will join you again. And we will love each other the way we were never meant to, but the way that even Fate will not deny us...because we rejected separation, and we survived devastation...

And together, we endured the test of Time.