A Ghost of a Chance Chapter 5 - A Question of Balance: A Comics Retcon Story by Maggie Finson

I don’t know how long I screamed, railed at existence in general, or cried in that one place I could go without being disturbed. All I do know is that it felt like forever.

In my old life, I’d never accepted injuries to innocents, and had given more than a few people more grief than anyone needed when the ones in my employ had caused that. Now though, it was different. A lot different. I’d killed that girl. The rounds from my pistol had done the thing, not the Necromancer.

“I should never have fired those shots.” I told myself for about the hundredth time, and still couldn’t reconcile the idea that this new villain had killed the poor girl already. All I could see for awhile was the two very visible bullet wounds in the body.

“You didn’t kill her.” Voice interrupted my bout of self castigation with the calm, reasonable tones I should have been used to by then. “This Necromancer had already killed her. That was her soul he was waving in your face when you fired those shots. All you did was put an end to a body he could have used to harm others.”

“That might be true.” I shot back, still feeling the hot tracks of bitter tears on my cheeks while my eyes still burned with those that hadn’t been shed yet. “But he did it, all of it, to get to me. That girl died because of me!”

“All of which should tell you one important thing, Diana Spectre.” Voice responded. “You did not kill her. She was another victim that you could not help. Now stop this useless self flagellation and start thinking things through.”

I had to stop and think about that for a few minutes. It gets down to things like solipsism. If something you are, or stand for, causes a death without you being there, does that make it your fault? Can you be at fault for something that happens out of your purview? Should you blame yourself for things that happen to good, or at least innocent, people just because they were done to hurt you?

My self — loathing started to fade as I gave that some serious thought.

My rage, the incandescent anger that threatened to take me over didn’t even try to do that, though.

I was, after all, vengeance incarnate. And this Necromancer demanded my personal attention in a way that nothing, no one, ever had even when I was still human.

With a lot of willpower, I managed to get myself back into a mindset that would allow rational thought.

“Okay, so I’m not personally responsible for every death some asshole causes ‘because of me’ no matter how guilty I might feel.” I admitted. “But I can’t let something like this stand. If I do every super powered villain and some who aren’t super powered are going to try using that against me.”

“Now you begin to understand, Diana Spectre.” Voice held approval in its tone. “Now you begin to understand that no matter what you do, no matter how good your intentions, people are going to suffer and it is no fault of your own. You cannot save everyone, my child. Worrying about that will only drive you insane and we will lose the reason I made you.”

“So what does that leave me?” I questioned. “What can I do now?”

“As you have been doing, child.” The answer came without anything resembling censure, or disappointment. “Seek out the miscreants and do your best to make certain they will harm no one again.”

“Easier said than done, you know.” I grumbled.

“If this task was easy, I would have chosen someone else to do it.”

“Sometimes I think your faith in me is nothing more than wishful thinking.” I quietly answered.

“Everything in creation must put its faith into something, Diana Spectre. I have put mine in you.”

Crap. Make me feel like a slacking complainer why don’t you? What could I, or anyone, say to refute something like that?

Danny Esteves gave me a tight hug and kiss to the cheek when we passed in the hallway of the dingy apartment building we called home.

“What was that for?” I automatically returned the hug, but pulled back from reciprocating the kiss.

“I saw who pushed that envelope under our door, hermana.” He answered simply. “Thank you. Mi Diosa has helped us through you.”

“No one was supposed to see that.” I countered and found myself blushing much to my embarrassment. I didn’t blush over what some guy said to me, I made guys blush.

“You weren’t as sneaky as you thought.” He grinned. “I was in the stairwell when you did it. Gracias, mil Gracias, mi amiga.”

“You’re welcome, Danny.” I answered with a little sigh. “I had it, you guys needed it. Just give it back to someone else who needs it sometime. I can make that all back in a good night. Just don’t tell your mama where it came from, okay?”

“She already knows, chica.” He grinned but there were tears in his eyes. “I told her.”

“Blabbermouth.” I had to chuckle as I said that. “Just ask her not to ruin my reputation around here, will you? Two bit whores don’t do things like that, you know.”

“Hermana, I will not betray you.” He promised. That he called me sister was something I chose not to dwell on just then. “You do many good things around here that you have no wish for people to know of. I have been watching.”

Damn. No wonder the Necromancer had been able to hit me as hard as he did. If a street kid, even one as close to me as Danny was, could see that…

“Then don’t give it away, hermano.” I answered without worrying that I’d just called him brother. “Let me do what I can without everyone in the world knowing I do it. I don’t want gratitude, just to see that people who deserve help getting it. If I can give it, I do.”

“You are a good person, Deena.” He told me with a little smile. “Even if you don’t wish for everyone to know that.”

“Got a rep in the hood to uphold.” I grimaced. “I’m supposed to be a hard assed whore, if anyone else really finds out that I’m such a soft touch, I’m screwed. And not in the way my job would show people.”

“Si, Hermosa.” He nodded hard enough to qualify for entrance into the ‘bobble bird’ part of humanity. “Your secret is safe with me and mama. But Muchas Gracias!”

“I will always be here for you, and your family, hermano.” I whispered while giving him a hug that would have most males beyond the age of ten entertaining fantasies that I played out for a living. “Just remember that. You need, ask. If I have it, you have it. You, your sisters and mama have never given what I do for a living as an excuse to condemn me. I love you all more than I can say.”

“Our family, hermana.” He answered.

I found no argument to refute that one.

So I nodded, kissed his cheek, and walked away.

I passed a store that sold games and comic books as I was wandering, thinking things through, and just doing my best to avoid any confrontation at all. What I saw prominently displayed in the big window stopped me in my tracks.

And there on the cover was a really good representation of me. Bone white skin, glowing red eyes, skimpy clothing, all covering but not hiding anything, cloak with a billowing hood. If someone had taken a picture with a phone or a camera, they wouldn’t have caught the me that was so scary any better.

“Oh, shit.” I breathed before I just had to go into that store and buy the comic.

I read the introduction once I’d bought the thing. It was something I wasn’t at all prepared for.

This sounded serious, so I told him sure, come on by, we'll have lunch. Well True Believers, when he did come by, I was astounded. In a very short time, Kyle had done the storyboards for a brand-new comic: The Spectre!

Because sometimes, we have to walk in dark places to do what is right.

I had to go into an alley and cry once I’d read that much of the thing.

Damn, this girl thing could be hard at times.

It was close, so damned close, to the reality. Once I stopped crying, I read the rest of the comic while inanely thinking that I owned the number one issue of something that would be a collector’s item soon.

But it was wrong.

Probably just as well.

People who read comic books don’t really want to know the underside of what the characters in them go through. My underside was a doozy, too.

But I wasn’t angry. I noted the author’s name and recalled a very frightened young man sitting at a table in a Las Vegas convention center booth, who hadn’t flinched when he saw me. And I’d kissed him. I still don’t know what got into me to do that other than to use it as a distraction since there were people who could have found me searching just then and he could have been the focus they used to do that. Whether those people would have tried to hurt me, take me to the police, or whatever, didn’t matter at all.

I’d felt a connection with this man. Kyle Raynor.

And now, he’d started a comic book with me as the heroine.

And had he had rendered his drawings so well that I could have been looking into a mirror in my Spectre guise as I looked at the artwork in the comic book.

Now what could I do?

What could I do? Simple. I had a connection to him, after all. So I went to where he was.

Kyle was hunched over a table like architects worked on, with every light in the room aimed at the surface of the table. He was working on another issue of The Spectre, I noticed, and still had to admire how well he caught me in his artwork.

“You remember me.” I told him while still at the back of his studio. “A girl likes being remembered.”

He almost hit the ceiling and just about messed up the fine artwork he was doing. When he finally got his fright under control he looked around the room, and asked. “Who are you?”

“You should know.” I told him with a little chuckle. “You’re drawing me right now.”

“Spectre?” He questioned with real fear in his response.

“Yes, Kyle.” I very gently answered while becoming visible to him. “And I want another kiss.”

I don’t have clue one about why I said that, but it was true. I did want another kiss from him, and more. But those were things that Deena was better at than I would ever be.

“What did I do to you?” He asked.

“You started to show me how to be human again.” I told him. “Now show me, don’t tell, as the good writers say.”

“What do you want me to do?” He asked.

“I don’t really know.” I honestly told him. “Just talk for now, I think would be enough, if you can do that. I just need someone to talk to, Kyle. That’s all.”

He nodded, obviously at a loss but gamely trying to get something out that didn’t sound ridiculous. “Why me?”

“I saw the first comic you did of me.” I answered with a shrug. “You don’t have it quite right, and that’s just as well. There are things that normal people shouldn’t have to see, or even know about, and what I really am is one of those things. There are lots of times I wished I didn’t know them.”

“So why the visit then, if you don’t think people should really know about you?” He questioned.

“You’ve touched on the truth, you know.” I waved to the artwork on his table. “I mean the gist of it. I’m like a force of nature now, and it’s scary as Hell, let me tell you.”

“Well when it gets down to it, you are a pretty scary lady, you know.” He answered quietly. “It’s probably a good thing that I don’t have everything right in my story about you. But I do have to ask one thing about that if you wouldn’t mind?”

“I can’t promise an answer, or one that would make sense, but fire away.”

“Are you one of the good guys? Or...”

“Am I just a murderer hiding behind doing backhanded public services by killing low lifes who deserve to be dead?” I questioned with a little smile playing with the corners of my mouth like a kitten with a ball of yarn it was just deciding to unravel. “I don’t know, Kyle. I just don’t know.

I’m one of the good guys in the sense that I really do believe in justice, but my kind of justice is kind of old testament and isn’t exactly what the present powers that be think of as such.” I let out a little sigh as I formulated an answer to questions I’d been asking myself since I was resurrected. “I don’t really think I’m either good or bad when it comes down to the real gritty part of things. I do what needs doing, when it needs done, and if that happens to be illegal right now, that’s not my problem. I have to act. That’s all.”

“Then I take it you didn’t come to ‘punish’ me.” He grinned, actually grinned at me in a way that showed that his early fear was letting go of his hind brain and thought processes.

“If I had, you’d already know it.” I smiled back, a genuine, good feeling smile and the first I’d ever shown in this form. “No, I’m here because I think you actually have started to understand me, what I am, what I do, and some of the why about what I do. And that gives me a little hope that maybe I won’t have to spend eternity alone, with no one daring to approach me as anything but some terrible modern day Erinys, or fury. I was human once, you know, and I don’t want to lose that part of me.”

“For what it’s worth,” he gave me a long, careful look, “You haven’t, and I don’t think you ever will from what I’m seeing here. You ask too many questions to be anything but human.”

I laughed at that one. I actually laughed in pure amusement and pleasure. Oh, this man was good for me, if I could trust him not to betray me. “Thank you for that. I need to hear things like that once in awhile just to remind me of where I came from.”

“Happy to help.” He chuckled and I was pleasantly surprised at his attitude about this admittedly weird meeting. He was still a little afraid of me, I could feel that quite clearly, but he was insanely curious, too. Not to mention intrigued and wanting to know more. Ahh, humanity. Find something that puzzles or scares you and you just have to worry at it until either an answer comes or it kills you. Cats have nothing on humans when it comes to curiosity, or poking into places they shouldn’t be.

“My name is Diana.” I told him for some reason once that epiphany had finished with me.

“Diana.” He slowly spoke the name, let it roll around in his mind and nodded. “The Huntress. It fits you.”

You know, that one had never occurred to me?

“So what now, huntress?” He questioned with a little grin.

“No idea.” I returned and grinned back. “Except that I need a friend and I hope I’ve found one.”

“Maybe.” He answered honestly. “I may use some of what you tell me in my books if that won’t violate some law I don’t know about.”

“Use what you can.” I shrugged. “Somehow I think you’ll have enough sense to keep the darker, stranger things out of it. And if you hang out with me for long you’re going to not only hear about things like that, you’re probably going to see some. I can’t lie to you about that. Things, bad things, just show up on my doorstep, so to speak, and I have to clean them up when they do. It’s like taking out the trash or shoving things down the garbage disposal. You just get rid of the stuff that stinks up your home.”

“How do you do that?” He asked with wonder in his eyes. “I mean just compare what you do to such mundane things like taking out the trash?”

“When things get right down to basics,” I shrugged, “that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Good point.” He acknowledged. “I never really thought of it in those terms.”

After that we just talked. For hours. About nothing in particular, just talked.

I hadn’t known how badly my Diana form needed some human contact until then.