Memory meme // ALWAYS ACCEPTING
@fxllenwilson
Olive knew long before MacPherson's soft footsteps came down the dorm halls.
It wasn't unusual to wake up and have a hard time getting back to sleep. This time, the notifications pouring in at 4:17 am lit up her phone like warning flares. "Arkham Explosion." Grainy cell-phone videos of orange blooming against Gotham's perpetual gray. Casualties, escapees. Gothamites already betting who got out again this time in the comments: "Two-Face out again?" "Bet Joker's laughing somewhere." "Calamity finally finished what she started?"
Olive froze mid-scroll in the early dawn light. Spiraling at the headlines, the options cycling like a broken record in her head. Injuries, escapees, casualties. Pulling her mom into her head with every headline. Sybil's soft hands braiding Olive's hair before Calamity swallowed her whole. Before Batman dragged her away. Before Olive's life became a scholarship and a school that seemed to constantly brush against the heroes she hated.
She sat cross-legged on her narrow dorm bed, sheets twisted around her legs like restraints. The early dawn light sliced through the curtains in thin, cold bars, painting the room in sickly blue. Across from her, Maps slept on, face half-buried in the pillow, breathing slow and even. The steady rhythm of someone who still believed heroes weren't monsters. An optimism sometimes Olive envied. Part of her contemplated waking Maps up just to breathe the anxiety into something that wasn't her own head. But moving felt like making it real. Speaking it would summon the ending.
The knock came anyway- soft, almost apologetic, like MacPherson hated being the one to deliver it.
The door opened a careful inch. Professor MacPherson stepped inside, coat still dusted with early-morning frost, face drawn in the way of someone who'd already spent hours fielding calls, calming panicked parents, deciding how much truth an already fragile seventeen-year-old could bear.
Maps stirred, mumbling something incoherent about hidden passages, then settled again. Olive didn't move. She and MacPherson simply stared across the dim room.
Olive lowered the phone to her chest, screen still glowing against her shirt. The light caught the faint tremor in her fingers. Until she could make her voice work again.
"My mom?" The words came out small, cracked.
MacPherson's expression fractured- just a flicker of regret, raw and unguarded- before she schooled it back into calm. "I don't know yet, Olive." Her voice was gentle, but it carried the weight of everything she did know: the body count climbing, the uncertainty, the way Gotham always took more than it gave back. "We can go find out though."