Winter Widow AU (Winter Soldier/Black Widow). Angst. Assassins. Spies. Whole lot of trauma. Forbidden Love. Broken Babies.
Angst is here
Chapter 3 : I Loved, and I Loved and I Lost You
He tapped on the tags, smoothing her heart beats before adjusting the straps again, before taking her face in his hands and tapping over her lips three times, loving her, making her smile around the worries slipping out of her jar.
She tapped three times in response, her thumb softly pushing against his bottom lips, printing on its curve, tugging on it.
I love you more, she playfully said with a tug of his lip.
He smiled, she could feel his laugh hitting her face like a wave of hot air, like an explosion of too much love they were never able to contain. She looked at the stretched corner of his lips, at the little lines around his mouth and the corner of his eyes. She looked at the traces of happiness he was trying to push forward to submerge her concerns, to flood her.
“I’m scared,” she said anyway, summarizing the dread sinking in her gut, the cold sweat pooling in her suit. She had a bad feeling about this, about ever letting him be in danger, about ever letting their happiness be on the front line, be the shield for everyone else’s.
She was terrified of losing him, of losing whatever it was around the corner of his eyes, making smile lines, making airstrips for their falling stars to crash.
“I know,” she could read on his lips. He knew because of all the times she told him, of all the moments he could actually watch the fear take over her body. She was never the one being scared of anything, she was never the one to back down from any fight.
Except the one that could cost herself everything. If the price to pay was him… she would never be willing to pay.
“Everything will be fine,” he said in a tone of promise, with a certainty she didn’t have, with a certainty he was not allowed to pretend to have.
And if it wasn’t… It wouldn’t be the first promise he didn’t keep.
Thank you Hayl @targsdaenerys for the beta work and the amazingness that you are 🖤.
Thank you Erik @aenarsnow for being the most supportive friend and for making sure I make a minimum amount of sense 🖤.
The amazing Dany Edit is from the wonderfully talented Libra @libradoodle1. There is nothing this woman can’t do 🖤.
Set in the same-ish street-siblings universe as First Contact by @cryptids-and-muses and @a-sketchy-character @streetsiblings (they’re still awesome). I present to you... Angst.
Drizzle | AO3
Chapter 2: Deluge
Felipe Garzonas falls.
Jason cannot find it in himself to care. The man was human garbage at best-
A shriek of anguish rents the air, a woman's, while the stalking man pounces on her and bays with his manic glee.
-and they were just going to let him go? No dice. Jason did not push him off the edge, but it’s still satisfying enough for him to know the man is gone now.
It is here, on this rooftop, that Jason understands that the horrors of the world can never be contained, only controlled. In what ways, he isn’t sure yet, but when he thinks of killing, all he can imagine is a figure adorned in a red helmet, ruthless and proud.
When Bruce takes Jason away from the scene, long crimson snakes flow off Garzonas’ body with the deluge, painting the face of Gotham.
Cass believes Jay when he says he didn’t kill Garzonas. He can lie like the best of them, but he can never hide anything from her. Bruce still doesn’t believe him even when she says as much.
“You’re a danger to yourself and the people around you,” Bruce is saying. Cold is the only way that Cass can describe his body.
For as long as she has been with Bruce, Cass has not thought of David. But looking at him now, a small, insidious part of the man that projects the urge to control (something she had only seen from David) starts to slip through. She is so thrown about what to think that she almost misses him firing Jay as Robin.
“No.”
“But Cass-.”
“No.”
Jason resists the urge to groan at his sister. Above them, the three names of his potential mothers are displayed clearly and brightly.
“I get why you don’t want me to. But think of what will happen if we manage to bring one! We could- we could-.”
“My brother,” Cass says, with finality. She gestures to the names (although ‘Sandra Wu-san’ in particular catches both their eyes). “Not theirs.”
Cass makes that stance she always does when she wants him to stop, her back hunched and her eyes pleading. He hates it when she does that, which is why he bites back a sigh.
“Fine. I’ll leave it alone,” Cass has been trying harder to get her smile right. Her effort shows when she gives him a mega-watt grin when he relents.
“My family, love,” She says as she hugs him before leading him away to raid the freezer for Neapolitan.
Later that night, Jason leaves his copy of Huckleberry Finn on her nightstand. He has to make sure that she doesn't think he'd left her behind when he goes. As Jason leaves the window wide open, his sole companion is the rain for the first time in years.
Gotham feels it as it happens. As the madman clubs her boy over and over with his crowbar. She feels every bruise, every bone that fractures, every act of pure, unadulterated cruelty inflicted on Jason.
Her eldest cradles the body, surrounded by a field of debris and smoke left in the wake of the monster that is the Joker. She washes the blood away with her tears.
When Cassandra wakes to see her brother’s prized possession on her nightstand, she instantly knows and never lets it go, even as the sky opens up in time with her tears.
--
As the casket lowers into the earth, she absently notes no rain, not a cloud in sight. Somehow, in the void that is the Jason-shaped hole in her heart, she realises he would have hated it.
“I think… I want to have my burial when it rains. Gives a whole ‘nother meaning to bleary doesn’t it?” Jason had confessed that once, a slight chuckle drawing from his chest. It fades as fast as it came. He looked away, then. “I don’t think I’d rest in peace without it.”
Cassandra fills the silence with the hymns of her tears – droplets staining the well-loved pages of the last piece of her brother – and hopes that it will be enough.
In her mind, her efforts are for naught when they devolve into wails as the first shovelfuls of dirt encase the ebony coffin.
--
The first thing she sees when she enters the cave is- is the atrocious thing. All the noise in the cave seems to phase out. The squeaking of the bats. The banter between Dick and Babs. The low murmurs of Bruce and Alfred in the corner. All she can focus on is the caricature of her brother in full view of everyone in the Batcave. She looks at it, and the world becomes a sea of pink and brown and white. The uniform he died in still bloody and ragged; all her thoughts a cacophony of wailing; iron on her tongue; roaring in her ears; she feels nothing in her but pain.
Jason Peter Todd
A Good Soldier
She hates it. Hates it with a passion because Jason was so much more than a soldier. He was her Jay, her brother, everything; all she has left of him is a small paperback and this disgusting mockery of his memory.
But he’s Batman, and he grabs her by the arms and pins her, even as her legs kick out viciously. She headbutts him and manages to push him off, nailing him square in the jaw with her knee as she flips back.
“Cassandra-.” Batman starts.
“Mine,” She snarls, eyes blazing and her hand pushing Bruce away from her. Even with the pads of his armour, she knows it hurts. She turns to leave.
“Not Robin. My Jay. My Brother. My Jason.”
Standing in Jason’s room, Cassandra closes the window he left open. She notices a picture frame on his nightstand. It’s of them, Huckleberry Finn spread between their legs and their foreheads pressed together.
Cass curls into a ball and clutches his treasures to her chest, sobbing because there is no rain to fill the vacuum she’s found herself in.
--
Far, far away, a man between worlds shatters the dimensions. The ripple disturbs Gotham, but she cannot deny her love of the results.
Gotham watches as her prodigal son begins his dramatic return; rising from below to walk above once again.
--
“So, is it really true that you took down Troia when you were only thirteen? All on your own?” The new Robin, Tim, is okay. Really. Cassandra just can’t look him at and see someone else in the uniform. When she doesn’t answer, the boy seems to fidget nervously. She doesn’t even know what his eyes look like.
“I–I guess, since I’m here to be Batman’s new Robin, I was hoping I could be the Robin to –.”
Cassandra doesn’t even let the boy finish before she leaves.
--
Jason wakes up drowning. It’s not water that enters his lungs, but an unnatural, sickly green liquid that vexes and rots and makes his body feel like he’s on fire. Nandra Parbat is where he is when he’s calmed down from being dipped into the Lazarus Pit, trapped in a fortress of assassins that want to mould a Bat into one of them. It’s an entirely different League.
This time, Cass is not here to keep them away.
--
When she meets Steph, Cassandra is enamoured because the girl smiles and laughs (except she still isn’t the same, no one is), almost just like Jason. But there are slight differences between the girl and her brother. Her hugs are great, but they don’t feel right. She smells like lavender instead of the rain. Despite how much the girl likes to joke with her, not one of them manages to draw out her smile.
Cassandra holds onto the girl like a lifeline anyway.
What bone she can throw, Steph has an uncanny knack of finding things that others take ages to locate, which is helpful enough for right now since Tim is still missing. It doesn’t help when Steph reads that Tim is in a warehouse with none other than The Joker.
--
He’s practising his aim when she comes in, almost plucking the gun out of his hand. Jason grips the girl’s arm and flings her over his back. Rose Wilson, a wolfish grin plastered on her face and snowy hair fanning under them, doesn’t even look fazed.
“Wow Jace, if you wanted to pin me you could have just asked,” His only friend in this place is what keeps him sane; when the Joker of his nightmares haunts the edges of his mind, she is there to let him know it isn’t real. Despite how different they are, she’s a breath of fresh air in this hellhole they’re in. He should probably tell her how he feels.
“You’re such a fucking chicken-shit,” Is what comes out of his mouth instead. Rose only smirks at him, silver mane and eyes with almost the same mischief his sister had.
“Your aim still sucks balls by the way.”
He growls, raising his arm to let his gun do the barking.
--
Ranting and raving greet her as she sneaks in through a window, a litany of nonsense and stammers echoing around the warehouse. She drops from the catwalk as silently as she can, but the madman obviously still hears her as his head bends at an impossible angle to look right at her.
“Oh. Look who showed for quality time with Uncle Jay!” She doesn’t mean to, but Cassandra flinches, and the Joker’s twisted grin shifts. Big mistake. “Oh? Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” It takes every inch of willpower in her not to rasp the words, but Joker sees through it regardless.
“What? Don’t like my name?” The Joker pouts, but it looks more like a sneer. “It’s just me yaknow? Your Uncle Jay.”
Another flinch, and the Joker steps closer, a snake in the reeds.
“Mister Jay,” He’s stalking closer now; her body won’t move. “JayJay.”
“Jaybird,”
“Jay,” She is so still as the Joker seems to tower over her, his sick grin crueller and sharper (David flashes in her mind) than any other time she has ever seen it. Poison flows from his mouth like saliva as he croons.
“That’s what you called him, isn’t it? When he was still here, your precious Robin. Not this -,” He gestures to Tim, who is wide-eyed and struggling. “-phoney replacement. Want me to-? Let me tell-.” The Joker stops, frowning at the ground before continuing, his voice aberrantly low. “When I beat him over and over with that crowbar – pink with blood and brown with dirt over the white of his skin –, do you want to know what he was saying?
“The only thing that came out of that pretty little mouth of his was how sorry he was that he was for leaving ‘Cass’ behind.” The madman leers at her. “Was that you? Cass? I gotta tell you, the whole apology shtick got really boring after a while, but…
“I’ll tell you one thing. Something you can keep between just you and your Uncle Jay,” He leans in close to her ear. “I think that our Jay is almost just like me now!”
The madman cackles, his eyes sick and twisted, and his body is nothing but mania. Something in Cassandra, strained and twisted for the past three years, finally snaps.
She strikes him, harsher than she’s struck anyone ever before. So severely, she can feel his ribcage snap. His flesh becomes mince under her fists. He stumbles and contorts as she overwhelms him with every piece of her fury. The gale-force that is Cassandra Todd blows through the Joker, who laughs and laughs and laughs.
The monster scrambles for his gun, suddenly slick and focused. Cassandra snaps off the comic ‘Pow!’ that sticks out of the muzzle when he fires it at her. She backhands his face with the full force of her knuckles, knocking him down, and all he does is chortle. The Joker’s body twists and squirms as he is pinned in place. She raises the broken end of the comic and skewers his leg into the ground.
The Joker’s mouth froths. His eyes are bloodshot as he becomes more depraved and maunders yet, he’s still fucking laughing. Laughing as his spittle flecks onto every surface around them when he thrashes. Laughing even as she clenches the sides of his head and pulls. Laughing even as they both feel his flesh strain and shear as she tries to tear it off. The part of her that has so vehemently denied killing now cries for bloodlust. For this is justice, this is vengeance, this is for her, Jay. Cassandra, with all her might, prepares to wrench off the monster’s head and-.
And Batman pushes her off him. Batman blocks her assault on his body when Cassandra rebalances herself. Batman protects the god damn fucking Joker. She roars with her rage, her grief, and doesn’t even feel the sedative that Tim plunges into her side until it’s too late.
Glaring at Bruce, at Batman, all she sees from his body is fear and concern and all the latter is directed at the death-worshipping monster he cradles in his arms. Absently, before it all goes to black, she thinks she should leave. Leave without Batgirl, without Jason, without everything she has ever cared for.
She does, and like her brother, the tears of Gotham are the only family she has left.
Yang blinked as she walked through the halls and held the relic in hand. Thinking of what her mother did and what she just did.
Yang:(Sigh) After all this time looking for her. You just let her go...... Fuck... fuck....fuck this... fuck her.... FUCK ME!
She yelled and was going to throw the relic against the ground but restrained herself as she gritted her teeth.
Yang:I SPENT HALF MY FUCKING LIFE LOOKING FOR HER AND THE MOMENT I CAN BE WITH HER I GIVE IT UP! REAL SMART THERE BLONDIE!
She screamed at herself as she breathed loudly. She set the relic down and pressed a hand against her heart. Tears began to stream down her cheeks.
Yang:You gave up Yang.... on the one person you wanted to be with.....
She sobbed for a moment before she thought of something else.
Yang:... Who... I wanted to be with....
She moved her hand under her coat and then pulled out a picture. Of her, and her friends. Then another of her, her sister and her father with Zwei. Stray tear drops hit then pictures as Yang took a few deep breaths and put them away. Steeling herslef she picked up the relic with her one arm and kept walking towards the exit.
Yang:.... Your In it for them now.... Ruby, Dad, Blake, Weiss, Jaune, Nora, and Ren... them.... not her.... Forget her Yang...
She said to herself as she got to the elevator. And waited for it to take her up.
All while she didn’t notice the red eyes of a bird watching her and it certainly want her uncle, with a stray tear leaving its red eye it flew off after hearing Yang’s last words.
It had started as background noise. But each second the sound just seemed to drill more into her brain. Drawing her attention away. Not even remembering where she was. Making her remember...
There wasn’t much time. She was running out. She had precious seconds til... the end. Precious little time until she face an impossible enemy.
