an expansion of these headcanons; for @coldwestallenweek day one historical au
The sour tang of stale parchment wrinkles Iris’ nose as she winds through row upon row of scrolls and tomes, footfalls muffled as she walks, sandals to stone. Barry is somewhere in the neatly ordered chaos, buried to the root of his sharp, heron-point nose in the latest text to catch his eye. Even when he isn’t focused on his studies, Iris has never seen him without a book, without some piece of knowledge at the ready to devour like Apophis and the sun.
Iris’ stomach flutters when she finally finds him, hair tousled, yet still fine as the silk traders bring to Alexandria from the East. The urge strikes her, rather violently, as it always has since their meeting eight months ago, to run her fingers through it and tug lightly at the strands. She knows that he’ll sigh deep and slide his honeyed-green eyes shut, the way he does when he’s wholly satisfied and content.
It’s not that Iris has never seen men the likes of Barry’s before – the pallor of his skin, the lightness of his eyes; none of it is especially foreign. Many profitable trade routes run through the West, and Djenné, the city of her childhood, thrives most notably of all. She’s seen many of his ilk, and others still with features as unique but wonderfully dissimilar. It was her longing for know more of the foreigners, her curiosity of what lay beyond the borders of her land, that lead her to Egypt.
Her curiosity, and the merchant with stormy blue eyes who’d offered her a dromedary from his caravan and safe passage across the Sahara in exchange for salt, and gold, and ultimately, though not either of their initial intentions, an inevitability, it seemed, her affection.
“Barry,” Iris says softly, shuffling her feet to call his attention as delicately as she can.
Still, Barry leaps, like a skittish rabbit, in his seat, and brings a hand to his chest even as a blinding smile of good-natured humour and rosy abashment colours his face. “Iris,” he says, her name like a song on his lips. His Roman accent makes the pronunciation wrong, but she knows she butchers his just as well, and there’s something special about hearing one’s name as only a loved one can say it.
“I hope you aren’t so absorbed in your studies you can’t take a walk with me,” Iris says, squaring her shoulders to assert her position, to pose the words less as an offer and more as a demand.
Barry rises, his books instantly forgotten, and a smile blooms at the corner or Iris’ mouth.
“The gardens are nearly as lovely as you this time of day,” he replies, matter-of-fact, and Iris flushes, even as she reaches out a hand for Barry to hold.
They keep an idle pace as they cross the Musaeum campus, Barry talking animatedly about his most recent learnings, and Iris keeping track as best she can between Barry’s quick tongue and three language barriers between them.
When they finally arrive, Iris leads them to a towering patch of bushes, flowering in vivid corals and pinks. A man stands before them, turned to hide his face. His shoulders are broad, and yet still slender, long arms like spindly branches that end in thin fingers adorned with rings of gold and fine stone. His hair is cropped short, grey streaking coarse, dark strands like craggy salt flats. Even from behind, he’s handsome.
Iris has to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from giving away the game. She wonders if Barry will need to be told, will need a reminder of the first day they spent together, when Barry, with all his gentle heart and wide-eyed optimism had taken them on a tour of the library, through the rows of writings, the cages of exotic wildlife, and finally the gardens, where he’d won Iris’ heart swift as the sprint of a gazelle with a rose, cut confidently yet presented with hesitance, from the thorny stem.
Barry, however, needs no prompting to recognize the figure at the bush.
“Leonard,” Barry greets, bright and exuberant, and Leonard does a quarter turn, throwing Barry and Iris a self-satisfied smirk over his shoulder. Barry’s eyes crinkle, and Iris knows she’s caught him in one of those moments of contentment. They both have.
“Barry,” Leonard offers back. His voice is dulcet and smooth.
How Iris has missed it.
“When did you arrive?” Barry asks. His hand slips from Iris’ as he hurries to Leonard side, but Iris doesn’t mind. She isn’t far behind.
“Last night,” Leonard replies. “You’ll forgive me for dragging my feet, but the trade routes aren’t kind to a traveller’s hygiene and I much rathered the thought of seeing you both at my best.”
“You went to Iris first,” Barry says, with a disaffected scoff. “Of course.”
“You spend so much of your time deep in Daedalus’ maw,” Leonard replies, gesturing to the library with his chin. “Consider Iris my ball of thread. She’s had months to learn her way around, after all, where I’ve been gone.”
“How was Persia?” Iris asks, excited to hear the heart-pounding tales of travel from Leonard and his assorted rogues that make up his caravan.
Barry, ever the moralist between them, frowns. “Do the nobility still have their gold?”
“Now, Barry,” Leonard tuts. He raises a hand to trail up the column of Barry’s throat and tilts his chin to bare blue branching veins. Barry melts under Leonard’s touch, and Iris softens too, watching as the tallest among them turns pliant as clay and in their company.
Leonard smiles, soft and amused in a way that wrinkles the skin of his lips, and Iris and Barry both shiver at once.
Mick Rory is just another petty criminal. He intends to remain that way for the rest of his miserable life, until one night while knocking over a seemingly-abandoned warehouse, Mick uncovers the grizzly murder of a reclusive engineer and a prototype for a suit of armour that fits him like a second skin. Among the engineers entrails are a series of coded notes exposing hidden evils at STAR Labs, and a desperate plea to stop The Fastest Man Alive at any cost. Mick never fancied himself a hero, but putting on the suit doesn’t feel so heroic when the man he’s facing down is clad head to toe in red spandex. Mick allows The Atom to take on the title of villain, and wears it like a badge of honour.
Ray Palmer is a good man was a good man. Educated in physics and engineering, he’s on track to become one of the richest, most successful men in the world, until a riot in Star City sees his fiancé murdered in front of his eyes with him powerless to stop it. Fueled by his fury and his grief, Ray uses his skills as an inventor to build a gun – a Heat Gun – that will scorch the Earth and bring every last soul responsible for Anna’s death to their grave. Rumour of a ruthless killer named Heatwave joins tales of a vigilante in green, and Star City suspends itself in a torrent of hope and fear at once.
When Rip Hunter assembles a team of fighters inconsequential to time, Mick and Ray are pulled into each other’s lives like magnets. Ray enhances the tech in Mick’s suit, while Mick tries bit by bit to coax the good back out in a man the rest of the team writes off as volatile and too far gone to change.
Paris, 1966. Iris West is undercover with MI6 when she meets Sara Lance at her family’s picturesque café in the city’s 8th arrondissement. Sara’s quit wit and well defined calves make Iris swoon from the moment she lays eyes on her. Sara, for her part, proves to have more secrets under her beret than her recipe for crème pâtissière when she pulls Iris into the pantry and kisses her dead on the mouth by the end of the week. The torrid affair that sparks between them leaves Iris struggling to balance the responsibility of her mission with the intense whirlwind of lust and dare she say genuine affection she feels for Sara.
Which is why it takes the wind from Iris’ lungs all the more when the agent from the Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage to finally discover and pull a gun on her in is none other than Sara herself.
requested by anonymous, inspired by bang bang by cher
Lily Stein is an atypical 24-year-old for all the expected reasons.
She’s a PhD candidate in biophysics with an IQ of 157 and an overprotective father who teaches Jewish theology at her very same alma mater – which doesn’t bug at all – and has her black belt in Krav Maga.
Lily Stein is an atypical 24-year-old for all the expected reasons...
Until a mysterious woman named Amaya Jiwe rolls into her picturesque university town, piques her father’s brain about a monster from the deepest recesses of Jewish folklore, and promptly gets him killed. When a furious, grieving Lily confronts Amaya and demands answers, Amaya welcomes her with some reluctance into a supernatural world Lily never knew existed.
Amaya is a hunter. She tracks monsters and demons and so, so much worse across the States, on a self-imposed mission to wipe them all out for good. And she wasn’t always alone. Two years ago, her fiancé, Rex Tyler, was killed on a hunt after delivering a fatal blow to the mate of the monster currently riding Amaya’s tail, the one responsible for Lily’s father’s death. As determined to avenge her father as Amaya is to avenge Rex, Lily joins the hunter on her quest, and together, they get their bloody, violent revenge.
When it’s over, Lily can’t go back.
So, she slides into the passenger seat of Amaya’s old Chevy Impala, and the hunter and her new protégé set out to their next monster-filled destination. Town after town, they rid the world of evil and abominations straight out of Lily’s childhood nightmares, all the while growing closer through months shared trauma and heightened adrenaline. They feel on the cusp of something, something electric and explosive, buzzing at the tips of their tongues every time their knives come away bloody in battle.
Then they meet Caitlin.
Even Amaya, seasoned hunter that she is, has never met a vampire quite like Cait. Puncture wounds ringed purple-black with frostbite in the sweltering heat of the Saint Louis summer draw Amaya and Lily south in search of a monster most foul.
And they find one... sort of. Caitlin is sharp and sultry and glacial when she talks, when she moves. She wears her villainy like a silk robe cut dangerously low, and when it becomes clear enough she isn’t killing her victims, just taking her fill then leaving them to shiver it out in an ER hooked up to an IV of warm saline, Amaya and Lily decide to leave her be, unwise as the decision could one day prove to be.
They don’t expect Caitlin to follow them, whether expressly to annoy them, or for some other reason entirely, the hunters aren’t quite sure. Yet, there she is. Louisiana, Georgia, New York. Everywhere they turn, Caitlin is one classic car behind them, until eventually, they add a third body to the Impala and take turns toughing it out in the back seat.
Which is good. Caitlin’s speed and strength and sharp teeth come in handy when Amaya and Lily get in over their mortal heads. Amaya and Lily’s blood comes in even handier when Caitlin gets tossed around like a rag doll to protect them. And if, after the chill of Caitlin’s bite has settled deep into their bones, they all three pile into one cheap motel bed to warm up again, can anyone really be faulted for it? Even if hands linger and lips skim skin and noses pull in greedy lungfuls of heaven-scented air.
And when Amaya and Lily stumble onto something huge, something apocalyptic, something much bigger than either of them is equipped to handle, Caitlin is there, all fangs and frost, to fight by their side, even without a dramatic declaration of love. Even without a night of desperate desire where limbs tangle with limbs and layers of denim and leather and flannel hit the floor in a pile. Even without a quick press of lips with tear-stained cheeks as the sky starts to fall.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Sara Lance has been in twenty-seven wedding parties – with the dresses to prove it – but has yet to find her own happy ending. Deeply in love with her boss, Nyssa al-Ghul, Sara hopes some day soon, the dress she wears down the aisle will be white.
When Sara’s older sister Laurel comes home from law school, Sara’s heart is broken when Laurel and Nyssa immediately hit it off and start dating. She could tell Laurel about her feelings, sure, but Sara is still harbouring enough guilt from stealing Laurel’s high school boyfriend to last a lifetime. Her sister deserves to be happy in love, and she and Nyssa are perfect for each other. If Sara has to put up and shut up, that’s what she’ll do. When Nyssa proposes to Laurel, Sara swallows her feelings and jumps into full wedding planner mode. It’s nothing she hasn’t done twenty-seven times before, after all.
But watching Laurel and Nyssa together hits harder than Sara knows how to handle. Unraveling at the seams, Sara finds solace in an unexpected source, a cynical, anti-wedding journalist named Amaya Jiwe.
Amaya works for the Star City Journal in Commitments, and for years, she’s been Sara’s favourite writer. Sara even has an embarrassing collection of Amaya’s articles in her bedside table clipped from the Sunday paper. Getting off on the wrong foot, Sara and Amaya first meet the night Sara spends hours – and hundreds of dollars – running back and forth between two wedding after an incident during the bouquet toss leaves Sara lightheaded and Amaya offers to help her home.
And steals Sara’s day planner in the process.
It’s an innocent mistake at first, Sara forgetting her day planner in the backseat of their shared cab. But once Amaya takes a look inside and sees just how much time and energy Sara puts into being a bridesmaid, an idea for a story that will finally get her out of Commitments and into more serious journalism hits her. Sara is the perfect subject for an exposé on society’s unhealthy obsession with the wedding industry. And when Amaya gets assigned to write a piece for Laurel and Nyssa’s wedding, she takes it as the perfect opportunity to learn more about Sara and her strange infatuation with weddings.
What Amaya doesn’t expect is to fall in love with Sara. But, the more time they spend together, the more Sara goes from strange wedding zombie to three-dimensional human being. Amaya gets cold feet about the article and asks her editor to hold off on printing it.
Sara and Amaya are both blindsided when Amaya’s article shows up on the front page of the Commitments section Sunday morning. Especially because, after a heated argument about Sara’s feelings for Nyssa and an ill-timed car accident in the middle of nowhere, Sara and Amaya ended the night before by sleeping together.
Sara’s trust betrayed, it’s up to Amaya to make amends for all the heartbreak she’s caused, and the wedding she’s inadvertently ruined with the truth of Sara’s feelings for Nyssa laid bare for all to see.
