Morningside Cuesta i'm coming home tonight, meet me in the valley where the kids collide

...to tell them Tegan was dead. Well, braindead. (Maybe that wasn't precisely the correct term but it wasn't like Bat was a medical doctor or anything.)

She slowed a little, one large ear cupping backward at those familiar dulcet tones behind her before Bat glanced over her shoulder. There was fondness written all over her face at her companion's blathering. There had been a time, not long after finding themselves somehow alive after being chewed up and spat out by the Pacific Ocean, when Tegan hadn't been capable of speech. It might've been funny, if it hadn't scared her half to death. Considering she'd been half dead already, well...

They'd both been in rough shape, to put it mildly. But slowly and surely, they'd recovered. So what if Tegan was a little scatterbrained these days? Bat didn't love him any less. And she'd never lost her patience with him, not even once, nor left his side. It was some kind of goddamn miracle that they were both alive and she didn't take that shit for granted for even one second. She still didn't know how they'd managed that. But Bat tried not too dwell on those final moments too much, nor what it had been like waking up in the aftermath of the wave.

They were together and, now, they were home. "Well, almost," she said to herself, facing forward again. Speaking a little louder, she added, "I said, who the fuck is Clover?" The corners of her mouth twitched up into a playful smirk as she picked up the pace. Nowadays, she could laugh (good-naturedly, of course!) over Tegan's brain damage.