Words
She has words now. Too many words. He'd given her all the words he ever knew and a few he'd tried to forget. She wanted to forget them too, because there were too many of them. Too many things that shouldn't have had names, but suddenly, inexplicably, did. She had words for things, ideas, feelings, that she'd never had, never seen. Too many things that she had understood so well before suddenly had these clumsy things interrupting the smooth flow of knowledge from her gut to her mind. And too many things that she had tried not to notice in her gut were suddenly announcing themselves loudly, in words. Sometimes she thinks that her failure after he gave her the words wasn't because he changed her brain, but because he forced her to take in all those noisy, clumsy words, and so she became like them. And in becoming like them, big, noisy, clumsy things inside her came out.
Like love. And hope. And wanting. She had known them all before, went they were all just flickers and feelings inside her, but now that she could name them, they were bigger and smaller than before. Bigger, because when she could say that the feeling in her chest was love, the truth of it could hit her harder than any blow, even the ones from Shiva's fists. Smaller, because by giving a name to just one part of what she had known without words was love, it took away meaning from the rest of it. She wishes she had the rest of it now, instead of just the little part with the name; if she had the rest of it, the naming wouldn't be so hard.
The naming was hard, though, because everything she could name in herself, she could name in someone else. She had had a language before the clumsy one she had been given, and she still could understand it with ease. Even if now she had to use words to talk about it. So when she looked at them moving together, she could name the love between them. She could name the happiness that filled Nightwing, the easy comfort that filled Oracle. And she could name the coiling feeling in her stomach. Jealousy, it was called. She was jealous of him, moving with her. Jealous of him, for taking the love she felt and showing it. Jealous of him, for taking this word from her. Somehow having a word for what she felt didn't make her feel better.