Chapter Text
Robbie is dead, Garth knows that well.
Robbie is dead, Garth knows it in the shape of every new report he has to sign for the Titans, in every new strategy he has to create with Donna, in every too silent pizza night with her and Roy too, two places left vacant on either one of their sofas (in a silent wake for their fallen friends, at first, and then, later, as a memento to what coming back to your other half gone, your heart broken beyond the possibility of repair, can do to a person).
Robbie is dead, just like Wally was but, in stark contrast with Wally, she isn't gone.
Robbie isn't gone, and Garth finds her everytime he goes back to his true home, the sea.
She sleeps in the ocean.
She laughs in the tempest.
She jokes with him when the wind sweeps, unrestrained, free, wild, over the sea and she whispers secrets in his ears when the wind is nothing but a gentle, soothing, breeze.
She is in the embrace of the currents and in the briny smell of the ocean.
She dances in the rhythmic movements of the waves on the shore.
Sometimes Garth wonders if she ever left at all.
It brings him a strange kind of comfort.
It also makes him feel strange, almost guilty, the way he feels almost alright, the way their friends are all still floundering in their own grief.
Sometimes he too has bad days.
Days in which he misses Dixie so much it feels like he can't breathe.
Sometimes he, too, feels like drowning, as impossible as it might be for him.
When he misses her that way he makes the currents carry his body to where little, ephemeral, islands are born and die in the span of a handful of years.
Those islands that only exist because of volcanic activity and that disappear because of wave erosion (those islands, that are only temporary, only there for a brief visit to the surface, like Dixie herself always said she was, citing Bowie in ‘The man who fell on earth’).
When he reaches the island he choose that day he lays in its warm sand, his feet in the water, his eyes closed, his face towards the sun, his mind and his soul at peace, if only for a few hours.
And it's almost like she is still there.