Work Text:
Roy Harper stood in front of the mirror in the apartment’s bathroom. In his reflection, he traced a finger over his chest and abdomen, playing connect the dots with invisible dots.
“Dad!” Lian yelled on the other side of the bathroom door. “Dad, I really need to use the bathroom and you’ve been in there for like an hour!”
“I’m coming out!” Roy replied, pulling on a t-shirt. “Keep your shirt on, kiddo.”
Roy opened the door and stepped out as Lian zoomed past him, shutting the door behind her. Roy leaned against the wall as he could hear his daughter loudly relieve herself.
“Dad, you still there?” Lian asked.
“Yeah.”
“Sorry for, you know, kicking you out. Were you doing some…uh, I lived with a bunch of boys for like three years and sometimes they hog the bathroom for, uh, private time.”
“Wasn’t doing that,” he chuckled. He sighed and looked at his right hand. “A lot of things changed when you weren’t there.”
“I know,” Lian said, over the sounds of the toiler flushing and turning on the facet. “I remember seeing you with a robot arm and the next time I saw you, you had both your arms and different tattoos and longer hair.”
“This guy-Hector Hammond- he told me that the universe resetting also reset me and pretty much everyone, alive or dead,” Roy recollected. “Still don’t know where I got those tattoos- not that I miss them that much- but Gnarrk- you’ve probably never met him- he said that they were a map for finding the Titans.”
Roy watched as the door opened, Lian shaking her hands dry.
“And then I died and I remember being a pretty gross zombie and then I woke up and I’m alive again, but there’s no scars, tattoos, nothing on me like I was a baby and yet I still remember the times I got hurt.”
“I remember this scene in this movie,” Lian mused. “A guy kills a zombie and chops him up, but the handle on the axe that he’s using breaks. He goes to the hardware store and replaces the handle. A little bit later, he then kills a bug monster and the axe’s head breaks. Goes back to the hardware store and gets a new axe head. He comes home and the zombie that he killed is in the kitchen after putting himself back together points at the axe and says ‘that’s the axe that killed me’. Is the zombie right?”
“Theseus’ Ship.”
Lian looked at her dad, quizzically. “The guy who killed the Minotaur? What about his ship?”
“It’s this thought experiment,” Roy explained. “The gist is whether or not something or someone is really the same if parts of them are replaced over time. Vic mentioned it once.”
Lian leaned up against the wall next to her dad, muttering a thoughtful “hmm”.
“Do you want ice cream?”
“For breakfast?”
Lian was excited for a moment until Roy quickly added-
“Not for breakfast, more like sometime today. It just feels like an ice cream day.”