tw. mentions of main character deaths, suicide attempts, grieving. 

After the funerals. After the silence. After that, there's no one left to lose.

The world didn't end.

That was the worst part.

The sun still rose the next day. People still walked the streets like everything wasn't broken. Like Melina wasn't buried in the ground and Jason wasn't ashes scattered across a warehouse floor halfway across the world.

Maeve sat curled on the window seat of the spare room in Wayne Manor, staring at the garden she never walked in.

Melina's jacket was wrapped tight around her shoulders. Jason's scarf — the one he gave her that first winter — was folded in her lap.

She hadn't moved in hours.

Alfred brought food. Bruce checked in, once. Dick lingered in the hallway but didn't speak. None of them knew what to say. Maybe there was nothing to say.

She was seventeen and already drowning in the weight of two lives.

It happened a week later.

She was going through the drawer Melina used to keep her few precious things in. Most of it had been cleaned out by Bruce's people. Sanitized. Folded.

But there was one thing they missed.

A note.

Not the lipstick one on the mirror. A real note. Folded twice. Stuffed into the back of her favorite poetry book.

It read:

If I don't make it out — tell her I love her. That none of this was ever her fault. That she was always more than enough.

Maeve read it once.

Then again.

Then her knees gave out and she screamed.

Not a sob. Not a cry.

A scream that ripped the air apart, raw and broken.

She trashed the room — knocked over the desk, threw the lamp against the wall, tore the bedsheets into ribbons. She didn't stop until her hands were bloody and her throat was wrecked.

Dick found her curled in the wreckage an hour later.

She didn't speak.

He just knelt beside her, and for the first time since Melina's death, Maeve let someone touch her.

She started writing letters to both of them. Filling up notebooks she never intended to share.

Jason, I never said I love you back. You said it first, and I froze. I thought I had time to be brave. I didn't. You died thinking I didn't feel the same. But I did. I do. God, I do.

Melina, I should've stopped you. I should've known. You always took the hits so I wouldn't have to. Why didn't I ever learn how to take one for you?

She stopped going to the dining room. Ate from paper plates on her windowsill. Slept with the lights on. The silence became her roommate.

She tried to pretend she didn't hear Dick crying one night, down the hall.

She tried to forget Jason's voicemail. But she played it. Every. Single. Night.

"I'm sorry... I—"

That was it.

No goodbye. No last words. Just static and silence.

Maeve whispered her replies into the dark.

"I love you. Please come back."

But he never did.

A half a year later, she found herself standing in the Wayne Manor medicine cabinet. Her hands trembled as she held the bottle of sleeping pills.

She didn't want to die.

She just didn't want to wake up without them.

She poured the pills into her hand.

One. Two. Three.

Then she heard it.

Jason's voice — not in her head, but from memory. That night in the alley.

"You're stronger than they know. But you don't have to be alone."

Maeve's fingers shook.

She dropped the pills.

Collapsed to the floor.

And screamed again.