Robin woke in the morning to the warmth of his bed partner and the trickle of sunlight streaming in from his parted curtains, which had been left ajar from Artemis' entry the night before. She was comfortable against his side, stretched out and asleep, and he hesitated to move, lest he wake her, but the pain of the morning drove him from her side.

He ached, in the way he did on the worst days: his ears rang loud enough to make him dizzy and drive nausea into his gut, his skin prickled, each careful breath, drawn slow to try and steady the nausea, burned. He squeezed his eyes closed, willing it to pass, a steady tremble running through him as he brought his hands up and pushed the palms against his eyes, blocking out all light. Artemis stirred from beside him but he ignored her, focused on the pain, focusing on not focusing on the pain in the hopes it would pass.

After a moment, when it didn't pass, he rolled over and fumbled for his nightstand and the bottle he kept in the drawer there. Artemis, from his side, called over to him, but her words came to him as if through a curtain of water, warped and drowned down by the steady ringing. A hand touched his shoulder and he started and almost sent the contents of his now open pill bottle flying onto the floor, but he managed, at last, to swallow one down dry, tossing the bottle aside.

He fell back over and lay still long enough that Artemis came and went, and when she returned, she pressed a cool, damp cloth against his head. It was enough of a shock that he opened his eyes to see her looming over him and he blinked back confusion, remembering Talia's face in the same way, looking over him as a mother might.

But Artemis' expression was pinched with concern, her lips drawn into a tight frown, and she swept his hair back gently. Hers was the face of a lover, of an old friend, and it was different but all the more comforting because of it.

"You're hot," she told him, and he forced a smile.

"I know," he croaked and she gave him a look, rolling her eyes.

"Not like that, idiot," she said. "You skin is burning. You're in pain."

The dizziness was slowly subsiding with his stillness and he drew in his deepest breath yet, flinching at the pain of it. Artemis sat beside him, still stroking his hair, eyes raking over him. "What's going on?" she asked. "Are you sick."

"Not sick," he murmured, closing his eyes. He scrubbed a hand across his face, sighing. The cool cloth helped his head, at least, and drove away the headache that would normally be coming on with the slow subsiding of the ringing in his ears.

Slowly, the pain withered enough that he could stomach speaking, and he gave it a shot, desperate for a conversation that might serve as a better distraction.

"You're asking all the wrong questions," he murmured and she turned to meet his eyes, her hand dropping from his forehead. She looked taken aback at his statement and she pursed her lips as if considering but didn't answer. Maybe she knew what he meant, maybe she didn't.

"Maybe, maybe you could start with 'how are you alive' or 'how are you not still dead?' Or, I don't know, any number of the other questions I know you've got for me right now."

She looked away for a moment, her gaze drifting to the open window. Noise from the street below filtered through, a steady backdrop. Finally she spoke, turning to meet his eyes. "After I ran into you last week, I called my sister."

Her sister, Cheshire, assassin in the League of Shadows. She didn't say anything else for a long pause and he had to ask. "How'd you make the connection? Between me and the League?" His mouth was dry as he spoke but the anxious pounding of his heart was a suitable distraction from the pain.

She shrugged. "I'm not sure," she said. "I needed answers and I have connections. My sister has hers. I figured she might know something, or- I'm not sure what I was thinking but she called me back last night, and she had the answers I was looking for."

Her eyes flickered down to him and he struggled upright and shifted so that he was against the headboard. She didn't try to help him, just watched as even that much effort nearly drained him.

"What did she tell you?" He asked. He refused to look at her, looked anywhere but at her and eventually settled his gaze on a dark spot on the ceiling.

"She said Ra's all Ghul brought someone back with the Lazarus pit that he shouldn't have," her voice was almost monotone as she said it and he had to fight the urge to look at her for some hint of the emotion she was feeling. But he couldn't face it, so his eyes stayed fixated on the ceiling. "Five years ago."

She let the statement hang in the air and he felt her eyes on him. "You'd been dead a while, when he brought you back," she said. "You came back crazy and murderous."

"Broken," he echoed aloud, thinking back to that first painful breath of cold air as he'd emerged from the Lazarus Pit. "I came back broken." Just saying the words made his throat tight and he squeezed his eyes closed, looking for a way to continue. She remained silent, leaving him with no out.

"I didn't remember anything, when he brought me back. I was— I was just this empty shell of rage, barely surviving, starving and freezing on the streets of an unfamiliar city." He ran a hand through his hair, trying to find a way to delay the inevitable, but he had nothing. This was the moment he had feared, looking his past in the eyes and telling the body count, the hard times, the pain, the trail of chaos he had blazed across the mountains of East Asia. "Then Talia found me. She helped me."

He looked over to Artemis, finally daring to meet her eyes. "Talia Al Ghul?" she asked, for the sake of clarity and he nodded. She reached out and caught his hand, twining her own fingers between his. It was no more comforting than her doing nothing, but her eyes stayed fixed on his, her face betraying no emotion one way or another as he continued, and that was enough.

"Talia said it was a side effect of the Pit," he told her, squeezing at her hand. "I sought vengeance against my killer, and so I sought out those who resembled—" He let himself trail off, closing his eyes briefly. He never really thought about his own death, though he dreamed of it often. It felt more real, now, speaking it out loud. "I killed a lot of people," he said at last. "And I didn't even know I had been doing it. By the time Talia found me, I was barely sane."

Artemis broke eye contact first, looking away, an unreadable expression crossing her face. He kept going, the words too much there in his head now to contain them. "She found a way to help me, to make my mind right again. And I remembered. I remembered all of it, even the innocent people I had killed, before I was myself again."

He felt suddenly empty, putting himself out there, finally saying it out loud. But it was more akin to being numb than it was to having a weight lifted off his shoulders. The weight was still there, even more so than before, with the absence of denial.

They sat there in silence for too long before he finally brought himself to speak again. His voice was a rasp, now, tired and anxious and worn. "Please, Artemis, say something."

She jerked her head up, meeting his eyes, and he saw that there were tears there, barely restrained. "Why not— Why not come back to us, why not tell us that you were—" she trailed off, her voice cracking, and she shook her head, unable to finish.

It was his turn to refuse her gaze. He looked down at their joined hands, instead, finally pulling his own from hers. "I couldn't bear the thought of coming back and having to face who I'd become, I couldn't—" He sighed, letting his head fall back against the headboard. "I stayed with the League of Shadows, with Talia." What he did for the League remained unspoken between them, but he knew she knew. He didn't need to voice it.

"But you did come back," she said quietly, and it was the most relieved she had sounded since the conversation had begun.

He nodded but couldn't quite bring himself to immediately speak. There were so many things he could say about why he'd returned, but none of them were really as close to the truth as what she wanted to hear. "I just couldn't stay away, in the end" was all he told her.

"And now, what's going on?" she asked, and she had come full circle, at last, back to his pain, which had finally dissipated enough that it barely existed on the edge of his periphery. "This pain you're in, are you ill?"

He shook his head. "Everything has a cost," he told her. "What Talia did to me, to return me to myself—" He paused, searching for the words, for the best way to tell her. "I remember dying," he decided on at last. "And I suffer the pain of my death."

Her stricken expression made him realize, a little too late, that perhaps he'd used the wrong words. Artemis looked almost as if she might cry and he reached for her, grabbing her shoulder and squeezing it.

"It's really not so bad, most of the time," he told her. "I barely notice it, it's just— Sometimes it's worse."

She reached up and placed her own hand over his, where it sat against her shoulder. He didn't immediately speak and he felt suddenly anxious in the face of the prolonged silence.

"You cry out in your sleep," she told him at last and she hurt for him, he could tell, which was the last thing he'd wanted for her. "In pain and— and fear."

"I remember dying," was all he said, echoing it aloud as if it would comfort her, as if elaborating on his nightmares would bring her some sort of calm.

"All of us, when you died, all we could think about was— was how painfully you had died, how much you suffered." Artemis' eyes were red ringed from her unshed tears and she let out a long, low breath, leaning back. "And you're back now, and you suffer anyway, still."

And he did, he did suffer, but it was nothing like he had suffered, when he'd really died, when he'd come back and spent his time hungry and cold and confused. He didn't want to tell her that, though, because somehow the thought of telling her all about that time, in any sort of detail, made him feel ill.

He let go of her and sat back and she leaned forward until she was curled up against him, head on his shoulder. He thought she might finally cry, but she didn't. It wasn't her. He couldn't bring to mind a time he had ever seen her cry, before.

"Did Batman ever tell you guys how I got captured to begin with? The circumstances leading to my death?" he asked after a bit of time had passed.

She shook her head against him mutely.

"I ran off on my own," he told her. He himself had hardly dwelled on it. He'd spent too long angry at himself for it, once he'd first remembered, but the League had been there and he'd cast that anger away with all of his other training. "Chasing a dumb lead that was an obvious trap." He wrapped an arm tight around Artemis. "My death was my own fault, no one else's. Certainly not yours or anyone else on the team. Certainly not Batman's."

They stayed that way, curled against each other in something maybe resembling a cuddle for a good long while. He didn't speak again for a long time, simply enjoying her presence, the distant hum of traffic from outside, the low hum of his heating unit turning on.

"Where is everyone now?" he asked after a while, when his curiosity could no longer be sated by the silence. He'd laid himself out and now he needed to know where the others were, what had become of them. Artemis' change was certainly a surprise, though not exactly out of left field. But the others—

"Scattered," she said, sitting up. She pulled herself from the bed and stalked over to the corner by the window, where a duffle bag had been tossed aside, hers, brought with her the night before. She was almost nude, still, draped only in his t shirt, which he suspected she must have thrown on during his bout of pain earlier, and he looked away as she bent over to rifle through the bag.

"Megan is still at Mount Justice," she continued, finally grabbing a the entire bag and coming back over. She tossed it onto the bed and settled onto it herself, next to him. She pulled from the bag a tablet and fiddled with it as she spoke. "She leads her own team now, a new generation of young heroes, like us. She's good at it. Kaldur's off the grid, on a hermitage of sorts. No one's heard from him in years."

"And Connor? Roy?" he asked, a lump forming in his throat. "Wally?" His best friend and Artemis' now ex, as far as he could tell. He was dying to know as much as he didn't want to know, scared to learn what could've happened in the wake of his death.

She paused for a moment, looking almost tired all of a sudden. She passed the tablet over to him and he took it wordlessly. "They're all fine," she said. "But there's really something a bit more pressing to talk about."

He looked down at the tablet and on it were projected images of known supervillains. He recognized only a few. "What is this?" he asked, selecting one of the images. It was a villain known as Calculator. He'd heard of him in passing, but he was newer to the scene.

"They call themselves the Secret Society of Super Villains," she told him and he chuckled, swiping to the next villain. Madhatter, Robin was familiar with him.

"That's a bit of a mouthful," he said and she shrugged.

"I didn't come up with it. But anyway, they've recently turned their attention onto Bludhaven. I think they intend to use it as a sort of testing ground for a major attack," She reached over and pulled another folder from the bag, flipping it open. He spared it a glance and had to do a double take. It was a police file, and the top one was gruesome, paper clipped together with crimescene photos showing a dead woman whose face was contorted in a gruesome scream, stretched out even beyond human ability. "They're making a bomb of some kind, chemical in nature. Large enough that the fallout could spread across the entire state."

"How have I never seen this?" he asked, abandoning the tablet briefly to look over as she flipped through the images for him. There were more bodies, maybe ten of them in total, all as equally gruesome as the next.

Artemis pursed her lips. "Corruption runs rampant in this city," she said after a moment. "It's being covered up. These are just early experiments for a later attack, a larger scale one."

Robin turned his attention back to the tablet, scrolling through the villains involved. "Madhatter, Calculator, Blockbuster—" he stopped at the last one, his blood running cold. "The Joker."

She was quick to jerk her head up from what she was involved in and look over at him. "He's involved, though I don't know how much. If you aren't ready, if you can't—"

"No, no. I can handle the Joker," he murmured, rubbing at his head. "But Artemis, this is bigger than us. Some of these are big name villains." He swiped over again and sighed. "Lex Luthor? We need to take this to the Justice League—"

"No," she cut him off. "I'm not exactly welcome with the League," she snapped. "And besides, I've been tracking this for months, working out the loose ends. I know where they're based, where they're working on this. I know exactly where to hit them to stop it before it starts."

He shook his head, tossing aside the tablet. "Artemis, we're just two people."

"I know," she said, flipping closed her own file. "I want to bring the team together." She let the statement speak for itself and he fell quiet, considering, suddenly hesitant.

"Artemis," he began, placing a hand on her knee. "You just said Kaldur is unreachable and Megan is doing her own thing. You didn't even want to tell me about the others, about Roy and Wally—"

"Not Roy," she interrupted, shaking her head, her expression going dark. She looked almost older than she was, all of a sudden. "Roy's no good to anyone right now. Not Roy."

He drew his hand away as if stung, a sudden hollowness filling him. "What happened to Roy?" he asked and it was another fear of his, born to life. Something had happened to someone he had once cared for, still cared for, in some way.

"Roy's no good to anyone, Robin," she said. "He's an addict, has been for years, and no one knows where he is. He could be dead by now, for all I know or care." It was cold but they'd never gotten along, even before.

Robin sucked in a sharp breath. "Oh," he said. "Oh. Because of—"

She shook her head furiously, stopping him. "No, unrelated to your death. He just— He went down the wrong path, would've happened either way." She stayed quiet for a moment. "Don't blame yourself for his mistakes."

He felt numb, despite her insistence. "But Wally and Conner, they're really fine, right?"

She smiled and it was almost wistful. "Yeah, they're really fine. Conner doesn't really do the hero thing anymore, he needed a change. Lives with Superman's parents on this really nice farm. He likes it there."

"And Wally?"

Her smiled dropped almost immediately and his stomach dropped with it. "His uncle died last year," she told him after an extended pause. "He's been the Flash ever since, so he's with the Justice League now, but—" She trailed off, laughing all of a sudden. "We aren't in touch, haven't been much since your death, really, but you know, I called him, when I ran into you. I wanted to tell someone, I had to say it out loud to make it real and—"

He reached out and caught her hand and she squeezed it.

"He told me to fuck off," she finished with a forced smile. "Can you believe it? Maybe you're right, maybe getting the team together for this— It's a bad idea."

He wanted to ask her what had happened between them that was so bad that he'd have that reaction to a phone call from her but it didn't seem the right time, not with the way she was squeezing his hand in turn, angry and tired.

"No," he said. "No, I think you were right to begin with. It could work and, anyway, what better options do we have?" They were both quiet for a moment. "Besides, maybe— Maybe it's time they know about me. I owe it to them. I can't keep existing, pretending the life I had before wasn't real, that the people my death impacted don't deserve the truth."

She looked almost choked up at his words. "Ok," she murmured. "Let's do it."