I know I find the cloning aspect of YJ irritating as hell, but believe me I have something fresh planned for this.
Ikaris : Rebirth (MCU/DCU)
- Thread starter Firewillreign
- Start date
I know I find the cloning aspect of YJ irritating as hell, but believe me I have something fresh planned for this.
Odd1todd89
The strange tightrope
- Pronouns
- It
Thank you for writing. I hope you have a pleasant day/night.
Frustratedbuffal
"I shaved my balls for this?!?"
I truly enjoy this story so I say this with the utmost respect,
WRITE FASTER DAMINT.
WRITE FASTER DAMINT.
Amazon Days - Part 3
His accommodations are… not unpleasant, if only from an aesthetic perspective.
A pair of conjoined rooms within the guest quarters of the royal palace, sparsely furnished but not lacking in quality, and pleasantly spacious while overlooking a view of the sloping wilderness that went out past the primitive city's boundaries and stretched onwards until it met the white sands that ringed the island and weathered the crashing ocean waves.
In the light of the morning sun, everything there was to see appeared to glow with a faint golden radiance. Ever so slight, but enough to noticeably alter everything in sight and make it appear… more.
Impressive. Many would even call it beautiful.
Mark, on the other hand, really doesn't care one way or the other.
As soon as the royal guards escort him to the rooms that will house him for the immediate future, he collapses into the nearest chair and proceeds to tune out everything.
He ignores the sounds of the guards taking up their posts outside of his chambers, ignores the traces of sound drifting in from the far edges of his sensory range (the crescendos of the living environment, the cacophony of wild animals, the humdrum whispers of Themyscira's other inhabitants milling about their daily lives), and tries to clear his mind and think.
There's something wrong with this situation and it burns at him fiercely.
After the unknown and as of yet unintroduced 'Donna' effectively body slammed the two of them through a wall, he had about five seconds to catch his bearings before he was hustled away at speed.
From the furious whispers he'd managed to pick up from the guards dragging the protesting girl away ("I said I was sorry, wait a second-!"), Queen Hippolyta likely intends for him to remain isolated from Themyscira's general population for the duration of his stay.
Which, honestly, was just fine.
He's never cared for any personal contact or even the most basic of social interactions with others past the bare minimum since day one, and that hasn't and almost certainly won't ever change.
If Hippolyta wants to gift him with a guarantee of peace and quiet while this mess is running its course, then he'll take it happily and consider it an absolute win on his end of the bargain. He's almost tempted to thank her for it, but whatever satisfaction the notion of blessed silence stirs in him is quickly smothered by the reminder that he's still very much a prisoner on this island. And willingly at that.
That's the part that has his eyes closing and his features scrunching in pronounced frustration, confusion clouding his thoughts like a heavy fog.
He still doesn't understand just what the hell he's even doing, agreeing to comply with the Themysciran monarch's demands. Still doesn't get why he's going along with any of this when he knows for a damn fact that he doesn't have to.
He's innocent and hadn't wanted to wind up in this speck of a nation halfway around the planet in the first place. That alone should be enough. Even if others thought that it wasn't, why should any opinion but his own even matter?
He doesn't need to humor the amazons. Doesn't need them to free him, not when he's more than capable of doing it himself. If push came to shove, he could very well swim off this island even with his powers as reduced as they currently were.
So why hasn't he?
Bowing to the Hippolyta's whims… it isn't him. It isn't who he is.
[Do you even know who you are in truth?]
His features twist further and he winces as his skull seems to throb, a headache building quickly and seemingly centering on a point just between his eyes.
He's so lost in the sensation and the grip of his musings that he fails to note that he's never had a headache of this sort before, not once in sixteen years.
There's an odd feeling that eats away at him as he continues to think, some unholy combination of confusion and bewilderment, of doubt and disquiet that pave the way for his spiraling thoughts.
As a general rule, he doesn't hesitate to do what he wants. Ability is never the problem with him, just the desire to act on it. More often than not he lacks the motivation to do much of anything past what was necessary to just… be, but he's always had the capability even if he never chose to exercise it.
In the present case, though, he's actually in a position where he'd prefer to do just that.
He can leave if he wants to, whenever he wants to. He knows this.
Yet every time he considers the thought, he's struck with an explicable sense of hesitation that stills him in place time and again.
[Patience. There could be more for you here.]
He can't explain it, and the longer he goes without understanding it, the more infuriating it grows.
It's not fear or wariness that holds him back. Hippolyta's unspoken threats are wind to him, and for all that the woman herself possesses a ruler's bearing, he's met hundreds her equal and almost as many who were superior.
Even if he hadn't, it wouldn't have mattered. Queen or not, she has no sway over him.
The only standard he holds himself to is his own.
[And that has forever been your greatest strength and your greatest curse]
It's… it's ridiculous.
There's nothing for him on this island. Nothing of note, of value, or even worth a moment's consideration or the slightest interest at all.
Certainly nothing for him to hesitate over, and yet here he was. Lost in his own thoughts and feeling more confused than he'd been in years.
[Confused and alone. Always alone. But you do not have to be.]
No matter how many times he turns the issue around in his mind, he gets nowhere.
Mark grits his teeth and closes his eyes, and that in and of itself is an admission of defeat.
He can't help but recline then, leaning back in his seat even as his hands tighten on the armrests and squeeze until the wood splinters and pulps in his unyielding grip.
Maybe it's better if he… clears his mind. Stops thinking altogether, if only for a little while.
For as long as he can remember, he's had an odd relationship with sleep. Human beings slept because the act was, by its very nature, a biological imperative. They needed the physiological and neurological rest just to function.
By contrast, he's fairly sure he can forgo it entirely, but he's never been keen to find out. No point in making the days even longer when he could hardly bear the dullness to begin with.
Still, this is the first time in a very long time that he actually wholly wants to sleep just for the calm it will bring.
However temporary that would be.
In the end, it's almost easy to close his eyes a final time and slip from nonsensical hesitance to blissful nothingness between one heartbeat and the next, doubts falling entirely if only for a little while.
[Rest now. Conserve your strength and your mind. You will need both if you are to finally choose.]
Elsewhere:
"You're certain you can control them?"
"You think I cannot command my own creations, Wotan?"
There's a dangerous undertone to the words, and the crimson-eyed sorcerer eyes his companion warily.
"They have been altered. They are not as they were before."
It's not an apology, but it seems to do the trick as Circe's silent anger abates somewhat in favor of her amusement.
"No, they are not," She agrees, smiling wildly. "Chaos magic. Terribly temperamental at the best of times but delightful in its effectiveness. Pass on my regards to your master."
This time, it's Wotan's eyes that narrow in fury.
"Klarion is not-!"
"Oh, spare me." She ignores his budding outrage in favor of observing the results of her preparation, "I haven't altered my little pets in thousands of years, did you know? Their arcane nature prevents me from changing them any further without considerable effort on my part, effort that I often have no reason to employ, but this alliance of ours has warranted an exception. Have no fear, they're still every bit as obedient as they ever were. So much so that I doubt I'll even have to direct them to do as I please."
Her smile grows as sharp as a blade with all the cruelty to match.
"They'll raze that accursed Island to the ground all on their own."
It's on his second day on Themyscira that things finally get… interesting.
That night, Mark's out on the terrace of his room, staring at the horizon beyond the ocean. The view is as scenic as it had ever been with the ocean waves glowing beneath the moonlight, but it still triggers little to no response in him past begrudging acknowledgment.
Even if he was the type to enjoy such a banal attraction, he's presently in no mood for it. He's still uncertain about… everything. Mentally speaking, he hasn't been quite this out of sorts in a long, long time. Is unused to the cloak of apathy that he'd become accustomed to being derailed by this mess of a situation and his own atypical response to it.
It's just as he's about to turn it over in his head for the twentieth time and counting that a familiar figure descends from the sky right above him and lands not two feet away, a dull thud announcing her presence.
It's the girl from before, Donna.
Mark doesn't startle, he has more control of himself than that, but he does stiffen and turn to stare at her with a wary look.
That had been fast. He hadn't clocked her approach until she was right above him, well within striking range.
Foolish.
For a second, neither of them speaks. He takes her in for that little while, absently noting that she was likely his age (His current age), dressed in white peplos that cut off just past her ankles and looked to be untouched by even a hint of dust or grime-
He blinked.
She'd flown down from above. That was… concerning.
What little he knew of Wonder Woman from his reading had made it clear that her abilities were an outlier among the Amazons, not the norm. Everything he's seen of Themyscira's people since he'd landed, from their primitive weapons and their uneasy wariness of him (He has noticed that) only served to prove the point.
Were there others, then, who stood above the rest? He needed to be on his guard in case things went south and-
That's about as far as his thoughts go before she thrusts out her hands and offers him a-
…
What?
"Hi! I'm Donna." She grins at him, two parts confidence and two parts cheer, and ignores his stunned look as she continues to offer him a plate half full of… pastries. "Want some dessert?"
…
Again, what?
"I know who you are." He shakes his head, utterly bewildered and choosing to ignore the pastries in front of him. "We've… met."
She flushes at that, lowering her hands and leaning back a touch.
"Right...that… Sorry?" She tilts her head and smiles sheepishly. "I heard you were awake, and I wanted to meet you, that's all."
She takes in his blank look and laughs awkwardly.
"Themyscira doesn't get visitors. Like, ever. You're probably the first new person since me to arrive here. It's been a long couple of years, believe me." There's a pause, and she shrugs. "Cool entrance, though. A Little terrifying, but ten out of ten for style."
Entrance-?
Oh.
"You saw me land on the island."
"Big ball of fire cutting through the sky and blowing up half the beach? A little hard to miss, dude."
He finds himself nodding slightly, faintly acknowledging the point out of sheer bewilderment and the gesture seems to embolden her.
He also belatedly realizes that she's speaking English, as opposed to the formal Greek he's predominant in Themyscira.
"So… Let's try this again. I'm Donna Troy. I didn't mean to, uh, knockyouthroughawall" She blurts the last few words out and smiles at him again. "So, to make up for that… desert?"
And once again she offers him the plate of square-shaped golden pastries, smile entirely too earnest all the while.
"They're really good."
He opens his mouth to respond and closes it again after it becomes clear he hasn't got a damn clue what to say.
Just...what even?
He was confused enough to begin with, and that was well before this girl had literally dropped from the sky and proceeded to stump him through sincerity and sheer ridiculousness.
Dessert? Really?
He's not sure where this new… experience was going, but the awkward silliness of it wasn't doing him any favors.
He's just about to try and speak again – to say what, he's entirely sure – when another thought occurs.
Wait, weren't the Amazons supposedly keeping him isolated-
Things happen very quickly after that.
The doors to his chambers burst open as the guards who were stationed beyond them finally realize that he's no longer alone. Donna Troy's eyes go wide and she lets out a panicked curse before she flings herself full force off the terrace as she flies off and disappears.
But not before she turns around, grins at him with the same earnest excitement he's beginning to suspect is an intrinsic part of her and beckons him forward, hand splayed out in open invitation for just a second before she blurs away.
And Mark...
There is no possible explanation for what he does next.
The decision is so far out of his norm that it's almost aggravatingly idiotic and he still does it anyway.
Maybe it was the uncertainty of the last day, the confusion and the uncharacteristic doubt, or even just the dull boredom of waiting for someone else to decide what to do with him.
[What have you to lose?]
Whatever the case, he finds himself leaping off the terrace in much the same way, unbothered by the oncoming drop or the roaring protests that follow him as he hits the ground and sprints in pursuit.
Donna Troy, he decides a little while later, is more than a little reckless.
And possibly slightly stupid, but given his own recent choices he's surprisingly prepared to withhold judgment on that one.
"That was awesome!" The girl cheers, blue eyes wild. "I mean, we're so in for it later, but still awesome!"
He doesn't know how to respond to that, so he sort of ends up just standing there, trying to figure out what he's gone and gotten himself into this time around.
They've long since left their pursuers behind. It wasn't even a challenge. Between Donna flying off at superhuman speeds and him following with an easy run, they'd pretty much left them in the dust right from the get-go.
"I'm Mark Milton." He says at last, and the look of surprise on her face mirrors his own feelings at the freely given admission.
"I know."
He frowns.
"Philipus told me all about you. You know, when she was chewing me out for not being careful."
She rolls her eyes at the memory and mutters something distinctly uncharitable, but he's more focused on what she's just admitted to than anything else.
"You know why I'm still on Themyscira?" He tilts his head back and regards her slowly. "You know that your Queen was keeping me prisoner?"
"Not a prisoner!" She protests. "Just a guest."
Mark stares at her flatly.
"…Alright, maybe a prisoner. But only to make sure you weren't around to hurt anyone, and only until Diana comes back to sort everything out." She shook her head. " I don't think you're to cause trouble if it makes you feel any better. I was there when you landed, and you were a mess."
"Thank you." He replies dryly, and her eyes widen in mortification.
"No-I-argh!" She groans in defeat and runs a hand through her hair. "My point is that you were hurt, and I don't think you could have faked that kind of pain on purpose. I figured since you were probably innocent. you could use some company."
"That's not very well thought out." He argues, and he's not sure why he's indulging in this conversation, but at this point, he's not sure of anything and he's working off of long-rusted social instincts anyway. "What If I really was a threat to Themyscira?"
She blinks at him and seems to pause, hesitating for just an instant before she plants her hands on her hips and smiles again, and this time there's a great deal more bravado and deliberate challenge laced within the expression.
"Then I'd stop you. I'm the strongest Amazon after Diana, and I wouldn't let you hurt anyone."
…
There's a confident quality to that declaration that has him standing straighter and appraising her with just a little more interest than before rather than dismissing the words outright.
And the way she uses Wonder Woman's name so freely, coupled with her abilities and their shared looks and coloring...
There's a theory he's starting to put together, but rather than give voice to it he chooses instead to offer her the slightest nod.
"I see." It's not an agreement, he'd never give her that much, but it works all the same. "It's a moot point regardless. The only thing I want to do is get off this Island. Which-"
He frowns and looks away in the direction of the Royal Palace.
"-is going to be that much harder now that I've slipped the leash."
"It's not that bad!" Donna protests, hovering closer to him as she waves her hands. "I've pulled worse off before and the worst I've gotten is a training session with Artemis."
"I do not know who that is, and our circumstances are very different." He resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. "You are a princess, the granddaughter of the Queen, and I am an illegal-"
"Waitwaitwait!" Her eyes go wide. "I'm a what?"
"I… had assumed that given your powers and how closely you resemble Wonder Woman…"
He trails off leadingly.
He's only seen a few images of the woman in question, but the similarities are unmistakable. Same facial structure, same pale skin and blue eyes, the same trailing hair… He thought the relation was obvious, but-
"No!"
-apparently he was wrong. Go figure.
"Diana isn't my…" there's a wobble to her tone that he would have missed had he not been paying attention. "We aren't related. I wasn't even born on Themyscira."
Donna Troy had been born in the States and spent her life in and out of the foster system, going from home to home before Wonder Woman had almost literally stumbled over her under circumstances the girl was visibly hesitant to share.
"It doesn't matter, alright?" There's a genuine force to her tone this time and a flash of something distressingly familiar beneath the words. "Just… Diana brought me to Themyscira a few years ago to teach me how to use my powers and I've been here ever since."
She turns and looks away just as soon as she finishes, and that likely would have been the end of this entire debacle. It should have been…
Except.
Mark suddenly finds himself in the horrifying situation of actually relating to another living bieng.
Because he recognizes the grief beneath her words, the longing and the ache.
Their situations are so very different (he steadfastly ignores the piling similarities) but the emotions… the emotions he knows all too well.
He decides to do something about them.
Clearly, Lobo had managed to permanently damage him in some way. It's the only thing that explains his current bouts of insanity.
"So." He grunts, nearly grinding his teeth at the fact that he was actually going out of his way to start a conversation, "What now?"
She turns back to him and blinks again.
"What?"
"What. Now?" He huffs the words out and refuses to hide his irritation. He's already compromising enough as it is. "Because I have no intention of going back to the palace and dealing with the mess we've stirred up, and I assume you had something in mind when you dragged me out here?"
…
For a moment, she's silent.
And then she smiles.
And so begins what can only be described as the oddest hour of his current life, as the pair of them hide away on a plateau that overlooks the city proper and the royal palace and talk.
Well, she talks, anyway.
In between him keeping an ear out for any stragglers (he can hear the utter pandemonium their escape has triggered even from this far out), and her own never-ending stream of speech, he can barely get a word in edgewise and he's more than fine with that.
And so is Donna, evidently, because the longer she goes on, the more she seems to radiate a viscerally, blinding kind of joy that stirs something best left forgotten in his own psyche.
She speaks about everything, from her life to the amazons all that lay in between, and he knows why she can't seem to stop.
She's lonely.
The kind of loneliness born of solitude so complete it becomes instinctual habit, and he recognizes it for what it is immediately.
[How could you not? You are just the same.]
He winces and shakes his head.
What an odd thought. They were nothing alike.
"Here."
He startles as he realizes that she's not only gone quiet but is offering him something, and he can't keep the surprised look on his face as he sees the same plate of pastries from earlier, still intact and unharmed despite their mad dash across the island.
"They really are great, you know." There's something softer about the way she looks at him now, less guarded and that much genuine for it. "You should try one."
The sincerity she directs his way makes him feel… honestly, he doesn't know what it is he's feeling in the present but he tries to distract himself from it all the same as he plucks one of the treats off the plate and crams half of it into his mouth in one go.
It's… not bad, actually.
He's no critic, but the exterior is flaky and there's an interesting crunch to it, and the flavor is both sweet and rich.
"It's good." He admits quietly, and Donna grins and slugs him on the shoulder.
"I told you!" She grabs her own piece and bites into it with gusto. "Polina's the best at making this stuff. Philipus says it's been three thousand years-"
He chokes.
-and there's still no one who… beats…her." She frowns. "Are you okay?"
He stares at her silently, eyes blown wide and previous bewildered calm utterly gone.
Three Thousand years?
He knew that Themyscira was ancient, knew that Wonder Woman was particularly long-lived, but somehow it's only now that he makes the connection and starts considering the implications.
If she was effectively immortal… why wouldn't the others be as well?
"The Amazons." His tone sounds unnaturally flat even to his ears, and Donna's eyes shift in confusion "They're immortal. They're all immortal."
"…Yeah?"
"…What do they do?" He doesn't turn to look at her as he asks. "They don't trade with the outside world, they're entirely isolationist and from the looks of it, they've achieved nothing on this island worthy of note."
He finally turns to look at her, and even that movement takes real effort to make.
"What, in three thousand years, have they actually done?"
"I-" She shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. They just live here, Mark. Why does there have to be any more to it than that?"
…
Not much-?
…
That didn't make any sense!
He doesn't move, doesn't speak, but Donna still leans back in alarm as his face scrunches in frenzied disbelief and honest fury.
The Eternals had been prisoners in all but name, chained to the will of the Celestials, and even one of them could have changed the world if they only had the freedom to act.
The people of Themyscira numbered in the thousands. The thousands.
And they were all immortal and unageing. With three thousand years of peace and unified rulership, they should have accomplished wonders. Instead, from the looks of it, their only positive contribution to the world was Wonder Woman. Even then, she had only become a hero after she'd abandoned the island against her people's wishes and joined a war that was not hers to fight in the first place.
The people of Themyscira had everything, and they squandered it. Spent millennia doing nothing but sitting idly by and, apparently, baking fucking pastries!
He's on his feet before he's even aware of the movement, enraged and all but frothing at the mouth as he sees the island and its wasted potential and suddenly loathes it beyond all rhyme or reason.
(They had everything he was never given, and they did nothing with it)
The very concept of it drives him past the point of sanity.
He's vaguely aware of Donna reaching for him, trying to call to him, but he's more rabid fury and undefined intent at that moment than he is a person and it has no effect on him.
He's just about to move, to do something unknowable but no doubt ugly when the air above them seems to detonate.
Both of them have just enough time to look up and see the streaks of light flickering across the clouds, coalescing into shapes with growing flashes of eldritch green light that even he can't make heads or tails of.
And then a roar rings out across the island and drowns out other sounds at once.
There's a final burst of light, and when he next looks up, the very sky is filled with plummeting monsters.
A pair of conjoined rooms within the guest quarters of the royal palace, sparsely furnished but not lacking in quality, and pleasantly spacious while overlooking a view of the sloping wilderness that went out past the primitive city's boundaries and stretched onwards until it met the white sands that ringed the island and weathered the crashing ocean waves.
In the light of the morning sun, everything there was to see appeared to glow with a faint golden radiance. Ever so slight, but enough to noticeably alter everything in sight and make it appear… more.
Impressive. Many would even call it beautiful.
Mark, on the other hand, really doesn't care one way or the other.
As soon as the royal guards escort him to the rooms that will house him for the immediate future, he collapses into the nearest chair and proceeds to tune out everything.
He ignores the sounds of the guards taking up their posts outside of his chambers, ignores the traces of sound drifting in from the far edges of his sensory range (the crescendos of the living environment, the cacophony of wild animals, the humdrum whispers of Themyscira's other inhabitants milling about their daily lives), and tries to clear his mind and think.
There's something wrong with this situation and it burns at him fiercely.
After the unknown and as of yet unintroduced 'Donna' effectively body slammed the two of them through a wall, he had about five seconds to catch his bearings before he was hustled away at speed.
From the furious whispers he'd managed to pick up from the guards dragging the protesting girl away ("I said I was sorry, wait a second-!"), Queen Hippolyta likely intends for him to remain isolated from Themyscira's general population for the duration of his stay.
Which, honestly, was just fine.
He's never cared for any personal contact or even the most basic of social interactions with others past the bare minimum since day one, and that hasn't and almost certainly won't ever change.
If Hippolyta wants to gift him with a guarantee of peace and quiet while this mess is running its course, then he'll take it happily and consider it an absolute win on his end of the bargain. He's almost tempted to thank her for it, but whatever satisfaction the notion of blessed silence stirs in him is quickly smothered by the reminder that he's still very much a prisoner on this island. And willingly at that.
That's the part that has his eyes closing and his features scrunching in pronounced frustration, confusion clouding his thoughts like a heavy fog.
He still doesn't understand just what the hell he's even doing, agreeing to comply with the Themysciran monarch's demands. Still doesn't get why he's going along with any of this when he knows for a damn fact that he doesn't have to.
He's innocent and hadn't wanted to wind up in this speck of a nation halfway around the planet in the first place. That alone should be enough. Even if others thought that it wasn't, why should any opinion but his own even matter?
He doesn't need to humor the amazons. Doesn't need them to free him, not when he's more than capable of doing it himself. If push came to shove, he could very well swim off this island even with his powers as reduced as they currently were.
So why hasn't he?
Bowing to the Hippolyta's whims… it isn't him. It isn't who he is.
""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡
[Do you even know who you are in truth?]
His features twist further and he winces as his skull seems to throb, a headache building quickly and seemingly centering on a point just between his eyes.
He's so lost in the sensation and the grip of his musings that he fails to note that he's never had a headache of this sort before, not once in sixteen years.
There's an odd feeling that eats away at him as he continues to think, some unholy combination of confusion and bewilderment, of doubt and disquiet that pave the way for his spiraling thoughts.
As a general rule, he doesn't hesitate to do what he wants. Ability is never the problem with him, just the desire to act on it. More often than not he lacks the motivation to do much of anything past what was necessary to just… be, but he's always had the capability even if he never chose to exercise it.
In the present case, though, he's actually in a position where he'd prefer to do just that.
He can leave if he wants to, whenever he wants to. He knows this.
Yet every time he considers the thought, he's struck with an explicable sense of hesitation that stills him in place time and again.
[Patience. There could be more for you here.]
He can't explain it, and the longer he goes without understanding it, the more infuriating it grows.
It's not fear or wariness that holds him back. Hippolyta's unspoken threats are wind to him, and for all that the woman herself possesses a ruler's bearing, he's met hundreds her equal and almost as many who were superior.
Even if he hadn't, it wouldn't have mattered. Queen or not, she has no sway over him.
The only standard he holds himself to is his own.
[And that has forever been your greatest strength and your greatest curse]
It's… it's ridiculous.
There's nothing for him on this island. Nothing of note, of value, or even worth a moment's consideration or the slightest interest at all.
Certainly nothing for him to hesitate over, and yet here he was. Lost in his own thoughts and feeling more confused than he'd been in years.
[Confused and alone. Always alone. But you do not have to be.]
No matter how many times he turns the issue around in his mind, he gets nowhere.
Mark grits his teeth and closes his eyes, and that in and of itself is an admission of defeat.
He can't help but recline then, leaning back in his seat even as his hands tighten on the armrests and squeeze until the wood splinters and pulps in his unyielding grip.
Maybe it's better if he… clears his mind. Stops thinking altogether, if only for a little while.
For as long as he can remember, he's had an odd relationship with sleep. Human beings slept because the act was, by its very nature, a biological imperative. They needed the physiological and neurological rest just to function.
By contrast, he's fairly sure he can forgo it entirely, but he's never been keen to find out. No point in making the days even longer when he could hardly bear the dullness to begin with.
Still, this is the first time in a very long time that he actually wholly wants to sleep just for the calm it will bring.
However temporary that would be.
In the end, it's almost easy to close his eyes a final time and slip from nonsensical hesitance to blissful nothingness between one heartbeat and the next, doubts falling entirely if only for a little while.
[Rest now. Conserve your strength and your mind. You will need both if you are to finally choose.]
…
Elsewhere:
"You're certain you can control them?"
"You think I cannot command my own creations, Wotan?"
There's a dangerous undertone to the words, and the crimson-eyed sorcerer eyes his companion warily.
"They have been altered. They are not as they were before."
It's not an apology, but it seems to do the trick as Circe's silent anger abates somewhat in favor of her amusement.
"No, they are not," She agrees, smiling wildly. "Chaos magic. Terribly temperamental at the best of times but delightful in its effectiveness. Pass on my regards to your master."
This time, it's Wotan's eyes that narrow in fury.
"Klarion is not-!"
"Oh, spare me." She ignores his budding outrage in favor of observing the results of her preparation, "I haven't altered my little pets in thousands of years, did you know? Their arcane nature prevents me from changing them any further without considerable effort on my part, effort that I often have no reason to employ, but this alliance of ours has warranted an exception. Have no fear, they're still every bit as obedient as they ever were. So much so that I doubt I'll even have to direct them to do as I please."
Her smile grows as sharp as a blade with all the cruelty to match.
"They'll raze that accursed Island to the ground all on their own."
…
It's on his second day on Themyscira that things finally get… interesting.
That night, Mark's out on the terrace of his room, staring at the horizon beyond the ocean. The view is as scenic as it had ever been with the ocean waves glowing beneath the moonlight, but it still triggers little to no response in him past begrudging acknowledgment.
Even if he was the type to enjoy such a banal attraction, he's presently in no mood for it. He's still uncertain about… everything. Mentally speaking, he hasn't been quite this out of sorts in a long, long time. Is unused to the cloak of apathy that he'd become accustomed to being derailed by this mess of a situation and his own atypical response to it.
It's just as he's about to turn it over in his head for the twentieth time and counting that a familiar figure descends from the sky right above him and lands not two feet away, a dull thud announcing her presence.
It's the girl from before, Donna.
Mark doesn't startle, he has more control of himself than that, but he does stiffen and turn to stare at her with a wary look.
That had been fast. He hadn't clocked her approach until she was right above him, well within striking range.
Foolish.
For a second, neither of them speaks. He takes her in for that little while, absently noting that she was likely his age (His current age), dressed in white peplos that cut off just past her ankles and looked to be untouched by even a hint of dust or grime-
He blinked.
She'd flown down from above. That was… concerning.
What little he knew of Wonder Woman from his reading had made it clear that her abilities were an outlier among the Amazons, not the norm. Everything he's seen of Themyscira's people since he'd landed, from their primitive weapons and their uneasy wariness of him (He has noticed that) only served to prove the point.
Were there others, then, who stood above the rest? He needed to be on his guard in case things went south and-
That's about as far as his thoughts go before she thrusts out her hands and offers him a-
…
What?
"Hi! I'm Donna." She grins at him, two parts confidence and two parts cheer, and ignores his stunned look as she continues to offer him a plate half full of… pastries. "Want some dessert?"
…
Again, what?
"I know who you are." He shakes his head, utterly bewildered and choosing to ignore the pastries in front of him. "We've… met."
She flushes at that, lowering her hands and leaning back a touch.
"Right...that… Sorry?" She tilts her head and smiles sheepishly. "I heard you were awake, and I wanted to meet you, that's all."
She takes in his blank look and laughs awkwardly.
"Themyscira doesn't get visitors. Like, ever. You're probably the first new person since me to arrive here. It's been a long couple of years, believe me." There's a pause, and she shrugs. "Cool entrance, though. A Little terrifying, but ten out of ten for style."
Entrance-?
Oh.
"You saw me land on the island."
"Big ball of fire cutting through the sky and blowing up half the beach? A little hard to miss, dude."
He finds himself nodding slightly, faintly acknowledging the point out of sheer bewilderment and the gesture seems to embolden her.
He also belatedly realizes that she's speaking English, as opposed to the formal Greek he's predominant in Themyscira.
"So… Let's try this again. I'm Donna Troy. I didn't mean to, uh, knockyouthroughawall" She blurts the last few words out and smiles at him again. "So, to make up for that… desert?"
And once again she offers him the plate of square-shaped golden pastries, smile entirely too earnest all the while.
"They're really good."
He opens his mouth to respond and closes it again after it becomes clear he hasn't got a damn clue what to say.
Just...what even?
He was confused enough to begin with, and that was well before this girl had literally dropped from the sky and proceeded to stump him through sincerity and sheer ridiculousness.
Dessert? Really?
He's not sure where this new… experience was going, but the awkward silliness of it wasn't doing him any favors.
He's just about to try and speak again – to say what, he's entirely sure – when another thought occurs.
Wait, weren't the Amazons supposedly keeping him isolated-
Things happen very quickly after that.
The doors to his chambers burst open as the guards who were stationed beyond them finally realize that he's no longer alone. Donna Troy's eyes go wide and she lets out a panicked curse before she flings herself full force off the terrace as she flies off and disappears.
But not before she turns around, grins at him with the same earnest excitement he's beginning to suspect is an intrinsic part of her and beckons him forward, hand splayed out in open invitation for just a second before she blurs away.
And Mark...
There is no possible explanation for what he does next.
The decision is so far out of his norm that it's almost aggravatingly idiotic and he still does it anyway.
Maybe it was the uncertainty of the last day, the confusion and the uncharacteristic doubt, or even just the dull boredom of waiting for someone else to decide what to do with him.
[What have you to lose?]
Whatever the case, he finds himself leaping off the terrace in much the same way, unbothered by the oncoming drop or the roaring protests that follow him as he hits the ground and sprints in pursuit.
…
Donna Troy, he decides a little while later, is more than a little reckless.
And possibly slightly stupid, but given his own recent choices he's surprisingly prepared to withhold judgment on that one.
"That was awesome!" The girl cheers, blue eyes wild. "I mean, we're so in for it later, but still awesome!"
He doesn't know how to respond to that, so he sort of ends up just standing there, trying to figure out what he's gone and gotten himself into this time around.
They've long since left their pursuers behind. It wasn't even a challenge. Between Donna flying off at superhuman speeds and him following with an easy run, they'd pretty much left them in the dust right from the get-go.
"I'm Mark Milton." He says at last, and the look of surprise on her face mirrors his own feelings at the freely given admission.
"I know."
He frowns.
"Philipus told me all about you. You know, when she was chewing me out for not being careful."
She rolls her eyes at the memory and mutters something distinctly uncharitable, but he's more focused on what she's just admitted to than anything else.
"You know why I'm still on Themyscira?" He tilts his head back and regards her slowly. "You know that your Queen was keeping me prisoner?"
"Not a prisoner!" She protests. "Just a guest."
Mark stares at her flatly.
"…Alright, maybe a prisoner. But only to make sure you weren't around to hurt anyone, and only until Diana comes back to sort everything out." She shook her head. " I don't think you're to cause trouble if it makes you feel any better. I was there when you landed, and you were a mess."
"Thank you." He replies dryly, and her eyes widen in mortification.
"No-I-argh!" She groans in defeat and runs a hand through her hair. "My point is that you were hurt, and I don't think you could have faked that kind of pain on purpose. I figured since you were probably innocent. you could use some company."
"That's not very well thought out." He argues, and he's not sure why he's indulging in this conversation, but at this point, he's not sure of anything and he's working off of long-rusted social instincts anyway. "What If I really was a threat to Themyscira?"
She blinks at him and seems to pause, hesitating for just an instant before she plants her hands on her hips and smiles again, and this time there's a great deal more bravado and deliberate challenge laced within the expression.
"Then I'd stop you. I'm the strongest Amazon after Diana, and I wouldn't let you hurt anyone."
…
There's a confident quality to that declaration that has him standing straighter and appraising her with just a little more interest than before rather than dismissing the words outright.
And the way she uses Wonder Woman's name so freely, coupled with her abilities and their shared looks and coloring...
There's a theory he's starting to put together, but rather than give voice to it he chooses instead to offer her the slightest nod.
"I see." It's not an agreement, he'd never give her that much, but it works all the same. "It's a moot point regardless. The only thing I want to do is get off this Island. Which-"
He frowns and looks away in the direction of the Royal Palace.
"-is going to be that much harder now that I've slipped the leash."
"It's not that bad!" Donna protests, hovering closer to him as she waves her hands. "I've pulled worse off before and the worst I've gotten is a training session with Artemis."
"I do not know who that is, and our circumstances are very different." He resists the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. "You are a princess, the granddaughter of the Queen, and I am an illegal-"
"Waitwaitwait!" Her eyes go wide. "I'm a what?"
"I… had assumed that given your powers and how closely you resemble Wonder Woman…"
He trails off leadingly.
He's only seen a few images of the woman in question, but the similarities are unmistakable. Same facial structure, same pale skin and blue eyes, the same trailing hair… He thought the relation was obvious, but-
"No!"
-apparently he was wrong. Go figure.
"Diana isn't my…" there's a wobble to her tone that he would have missed had he not been paying attention. "We aren't related. I wasn't even born on Themyscira."
Donna Troy had been born in the States and spent her life in and out of the foster system, going from home to home before Wonder Woman had almost literally stumbled over her under circumstances the girl was visibly hesitant to share.
"It doesn't matter, alright?" There's a genuine force to her tone this time and a flash of something distressingly familiar beneath the words. "Just… Diana brought me to Themyscira a few years ago to teach me how to use my powers and I've been here ever since."
She turns and looks away just as soon as she finishes, and that likely would have been the end of this entire debacle. It should have been…
Except.
Mark suddenly finds himself in the horrifying situation of actually relating to another living bieng.
Because he recognizes the grief beneath her words, the longing and the ache.
Their situations are so very different (he steadfastly ignores the piling similarities) but the emotions… the emotions he knows all too well.
He decides to do something about them.
Clearly, Lobo had managed to permanently damage him in some way. It's the only thing that explains his current bouts of insanity.
"So." He grunts, nearly grinding his teeth at the fact that he was actually going out of his way to start a conversation, "What now?"
She turns back to him and blinks again.
"What?"
"What. Now?" He huffs the words out and refuses to hide his irritation. He's already compromising enough as it is. "Because I have no intention of going back to the palace and dealing with the mess we've stirred up, and I assume you had something in mind when you dragged me out here?"
…
For a moment, she's silent.
And then she smiles.
And so begins what can only be described as the oddest hour of his current life, as the pair of them hide away on a plateau that overlooks the city proper and the royal palace and talk.
Well, she talks, anyway.
In between him keeping an ear out for any stragglers (he can hear the utter pandemonium their escape has triggered even from this far out), and her own never-ending stream of speech, he can barely get a word in edgewise and he's more than fine with that.
And so is Donna, evidently, because the longer she goes on, the more she seems to radiate a viscerally, blinding kind of joy that stirs something best left forgotten in his own psyche.
She speaks about everything, from her life to the amazons all that lay in between, and he knows why she can't seem to stop.
She's lonely.
The kind of loneliness born of solitude so complete it becomes instinctual habit, and he recognizes it for what it is immediately.
[How could you not? You are just the same.]
He winces and shakes his head.
What an odd thought. They were nothing alike.
"Here."
He startles as he realizes that she's not only gone quiet but is offering him something, and he can't keep the surprised look on his face as he sees the same plate of pastries from earlier, still intact and unharmed despite their mad dash across the island.
"They really are great, you know." There's something softer about the way she looks at him now, less guarded and that much genuine for it. "You should try one."
The sincerity she directs his way makes him feel… honestly, he doesn't know what it is he's feeling in the present but he tries to distract himself from it all the same as he plucks one of the treats off the plate and crams half of it into his mouth in one go.
It's… not bad, actually.
He's no critic, but the exterior is flaky and there's an interesting crunch to it, and the flavor is both sweet and rich.
"It's good." He admits quietly, and Donna grins and slugs him on the shoulder.
"I told you!" She grabs her own piece and bites into it with gusto. "Polina's the best at making this stuff. Philipus says it's been three thousand years-"
He chokes.
-and there's still no one who… beats…her." She frowns. "Are you okay?"
He stares at her silently, eyes blown wide and previous bewildered calm utterly gone.
Three Thousand years?
He knew that Themyscira was ancient, knew that Wonder Woman was particularly long-lived, but somehow it's only now that he makes the connection and starts considering the implications.
If she was effectively immortal… why wouldn't the others be as well?
"The Amazons." His tone sounds unnaturally flat even to his ears, and Donna's eyes shift in confusion "They're immortal. They're all immortal."
"…Yeah?"
"…What do they do?" He doesn't turn to look at her as he asks. "They don't trade with the outside world, they're entirely isolationist and from the looks of it, they've achieved nothing on this island worthy of note."
He finally turns to look at her, and even that movement takes real effort to make.
"What, in three thousand years, have they actually done?"
"I-" She shrugged helplessly. "I don't know. They just live here, Mark. Why does there have to be any more to it than that?"
…
Not much-?
…
That didn't make any sense!
He doesn't move, doesn't speak, but Donna still leans back in alarm as his face scrunches in frenzied disbelief and honest fury.
The Eternals had been prisoners in all but name, chained to the will of the Celestials, and even one of them could have changed the world if they only had the freedom to act.
The people of Themyscira numbered in the thousands. The thousands.
And they were all immortal and unageing. With three thousand years of peace and unified rulership, they should have accomplished wonders. Instead, from the looks of it, their only positive contribution to the world was Wonder Woman. Even then, she had only become a hero after she'd abandoned the island against her people's wishes and joined a war that was not hers to fight in the first place.
The people of Themyscira had everything, and they squandered it. Spent millennia doing nothing but sitting idly by and, apparently, baking fucking pastries!
He's on his feet before he's even aware of the movement, enraged and all but frothing at the mouth as he sees the island and its wasted potential and suddenly loathes it beyond all rhyme or reason.
(They had everything he was never given, and they did nothing with it)
The very concept of it drives him past the point of sanity.
He's vaguely aware of Donna reaching for him, trying to call to him, but he's more rabid fury and undefined intent at that moment than he is a person and it has no effect on him.
He's just about to move, to do something unknowable but no doubt ugly when the air above them seems to detonate.
Both of them have just enough time to look up and see the streaks of light flickering across the clouds, coalescing into shapes with growing flashes of eldritch green light that even he can't make heads or tails of.
And then a roar rings out across the island and drowns out other sounds at once.
"""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡Kill Them All!""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍}"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"
There's a final burst of light, and when he next looks up, the very sky is filled with plummeting monsters.
...
As always leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it please be courteous.
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- Location
- USA
Hmmm... the "dead-not dead-maybe dead" Celestial is starting to feel like your standard ROB in the "make things entertaining for me and dance monkey!" sort of way, what with the constant mind whammies to stick around so he gets caught up in DC shenanigans.
Though I should ask if it isn't a spoiler ofc. Is he actually being influenced? Just wondering if the whole spiel about Ikarus making a choice is actually bullshit since the voice seems to be making it for him.
Though I should ask if it isn't a spoiler ofc. Is he actually being influenced? Just wondering if the whole spiel about Ikarus making a choice is actually bullshit since the voice seems to be making it for him.
He's being influenced, bun not outright controlled.
The problem with our boy is that, if he's not given a nudge, he will literally do nothing until the end of time. Burn out and suffering from every flavour of depression and self loathing will do that to you. We're reaching a critical point in the story where he'll have to truly start a new journey on his own, and in that he'll have to walk alone entirely without any more helpful nudges from the SPOILER.
We're almost at the beginning XD
Is he being forced into a relationship
I really really tried to read, but oh my god how annoying is the whole mind control thing, because no matter what you say that is mind control, he's doing thing he would never have done against his will. You could have made some other plot to make him change, but it's seems to me you choose the worst way possibile. Everyone hates MC getting mind controlled, but you used that, and another hated trope, of the ROB conspiring event to make things more "interesting". A shame because it was interesting until the last two chapters. I guess good luck with your work, because really it's has been made unbearable
Amazon Days - Part 4
""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍[]"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"Kill Them All.""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍["͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡
There's a flash of green light, a sonorous (and entirely melodramatic, he thinks) cry that echoes across all of Themyscira, and then his night goes from bad to almost stupidly worse.
For a moment, Mark just stares.
Somewhat absently, a part of him recalls that it's been nearly three days since his brawl with Lobo. He's still not entirely sure of what happened towards the end to so thoroughly deplete him of his powers, but in the time since he's more or less regained most of what he'd lost.
There are times when the experiences of this new body make him feel so, so odd. He's been injured before, and more times than he can count at that, but the sensation of extreme physical exhaustion he's only just overcome, the inherent feeling of depletion and weakness that still lingers ever so slightly in his frame is almost entirely unprecedented.
But right now, that's beside the point. Whatever happened did, and even if he's not all that clear on the specifics, enough time has passed that he's almost entirely himself again
(physically, at least. Mentally … Yeah, no, he's not going to go there)
The good news is that his visual range has expanded back to its prime, or close enough that the difference is barely noticeable.
The bad news is that his restored vision guarantees that he gets a damn good view of the literal monsters tumbling through the air and descending towards the island at breakneck speeds, the darkness of the night doing absolutely nothing to hide them from his eyes.
(Why? What even-?!)
The details are a little blurry, but he can see the writhing, animalistic, and unmistakably inhuman shapes that screech and howl and wail in a vile cacophony so loud it felt like someone was trying to stab him in the ears. There are dozens and dozens at least, and those were only the ones in his immediate field of vision.
Beside him, Donna twitches. Violently.
"?!"
There's a strange noise clawing at the back of her throat, some combination of alarm and disbelief and words (what the hell?!) that he doesn't have the patience to sort through, but it's edging on hysterical. Which is a bit much, honestly, but she can probably be excused under the current circumstances.
Only she seems to snap out of whatever stupor she's fallen into the very next second after he decides that, expression twisting into one of genuine horror.
"The city!" she gasps, and oh. "They're going to the city!"
Mark's eyes go wide.
He hadn't even realized, too busy trying to process everything and missing the obvious implication. Right as soon as he does, he starts picking up on the rumbling reverberations of heavy landings, and the first screams begin cutting through the air and echoing in his ears.
Because of course, he couldn't be allowed to have a few moments to think.
He spares another fleeting instance to exchange a look with Donna.
"Catch up."
And then he leans forward and sprints, air tunneling around him as he charges directly into what he's certain are the beginnings of an unmitigated shit show.
"Hey! Wait for me!"
...
It hadn't taken him long to realize that calling Themyscira a city was a bit of a stretch. The 'city' had a population of some… six thousand themyscirans? If even that?
Please. It was barely a town by any legitimate metric, but he gained nothing from pointing the fallacy out.
Still, much as it pains him to admit it, there was clearly some thought put into its creation beforehand. The Royal Palace was technically beyond the settlement's limits, and most of the Themyscirans built their homes on the outskirts of Themyscira's heart and seemingly reserved that space for the most impressive architecture he's seen on the island, temples, and pavilions that snaked that dwarfed everything around them by a considerable margin. There was even a genuine coliseum, for whatever good that would do.
They may have been limited to timber and stone, but it's still the kind of construction that speaks of an impressive amount of forethought.
It was probably a shame, then, that a good chunk of it was currently on fire.
(And it wasn't his fault, which had been a legitimate risk with how furious he'd been just a little while ago.)
The scene he arrives in is chaos.
There are flames everywhere, smoke and ash are starting to clog the air in billowing waves as the beginnings of an out and out inferno continue to grow. People are screaming and fleeing in droves, heading deeper into the city - standardized evacuation procedures clearly haven't been needed for a long time with the island's ridiculous isolation, but from the bellows and cries for order that he's picking up, they at least still exist (and that's him being generous).
And speaking of running away-
He stands still for about a second. One second.
That's all the time it takes for something to leap at him through the clouds and smoke and convince him that expecting rationality and order from the feelings of civilians (or anything at all on this miserable island) is an exercise in futility.
Vaguely humanoid in shape, with gray leathery skin on a frame that was nauseatingly bulky, the proportions exaggerated to the point of obscenity. A human skull structure but intermixed with features that were almost bat-like. It was distinctly unnatural in a way that was obvious from the first glimpse, as though the two had been melded together. The curving wings that propel it forward in a mockery of graceful movement only further the point.
It's a…
Actually, he has no idea what he's looking at, but the thing screams at a pitch so high it could have likely shattered glass had there been any on hand. As it is, his eardrums aren't fairing too well, and he resists the urge to snarl back as it locks frenzied and pale, pupil-less white eyes on him and lunges. He curves his torso to the side just as it takes a swing at him with a massive taloned hand, the air brushing past his face from the force of the failed strike.
He winces as it screeches louder, and it sounds as though someone is trying to grind glass. It flaps its wings in a powerful burst, whirling on him and trying to press its feeble attempt of an attack, but he just clenches his fist and punches.
Once.
His blow strikes its center mass and he can hear its ribs shatter as its chest caves in, those pale eyes widening in visible and almost comical shock as the impact sends it tumbling away. It hits the ground hard, the force dragging in through soil and debris before its own bulk finally stills its motion, leaving it to lay there and gurgle weakly.
Mark blinks.
"That was disappointing."
And it was. He's not sure what he was expecting, but that was just pathetic.
Then again, there was far more than just the one, and he'd only just begun.
He can see them even now, as clear to him even through the ash and smoke and debris as they would be on a sunny day. They're not all the same, he realizes with a measure of surprise. They all vary, some of them wildly. All of them retain some form of humanoid shape, but it's as though each of them is a mockery of animal and human combined into one. An eight-foot tall bipedal lion features distended horrifically and crowned in a mane of serpents. Another winged man, but adorned with the head of a serpent. A hulking minotaur-like creature with the lower legs of a horse.
And others. Plenty of others, near and far, and they're rounding the outskirts of Themyscira with every passing second.
He realizes that he's somewhat torn. On the one hand, he wants to just stop and think despite how counterproductive that would be, because what the fuck?
On the other hand, he's spent the last three days in a perpetual state of frustration, and, coupled with his sheer outrage at… everything, he's suddenly desperate to break something. Or someone.
At this point, that distinction isn't all that important.
It's Lobo all over again, only not. There's no Superman dying at his feet here and forcing him to make a split-second decision he still can't explain. The Amazons are none of his concern. He's not a hero, or some naive samaritan willing to go out of his way to interfere in circumstances that've got nothing to do with him. He doesn't remotely care enough for anything of the sort.
And yet…
Mark smiles, and he's self-aware enough to realize that he probably looks quite deranged.
Abruptly, the winged beast at his feet jerks up and moves-
"Inhuman monsters threatening a settlement of primitive humans?"
-only to vanish beneath a burst of golden light that erupts out of his eyes with a negligent glance and reduces the weak little thing to ash.
It didn't have time to breathe.
His smile just grows wider. "This is just making me nostalgic."
They aren't Deviants, but he'll get some use out of them all the same.
...
Time passes. He's not sure how much.
The fighting begins. It doesn't stop.
He carves through beast-men like wet tissue paper. Some of them are stronger, but whether he breaks them to pieces or incinerates them wholesale, they die all the same.
He's fully aware that he's acting like a lunatic, but he also knows that he doesn't care. The only caution he spares is the attention needed to target the beast-men closest to the fleeing civilians.
He notices the armed warriors who've finally seemed to stage some kind of defense, but he doesn't spare them a second glance.
Target the threat. Eliminate the threat. Rinse and Repeat.
He's running on instincts so deeply ingrained he falls into the same with the same ease of breathing, and he ever so quickly finds himself drowning in the same euphoria he'd been drunk on during his fight with Lobo.
[Do not rely entirely on what you once were. You will never live as such]
Shut up. Don't tell me what to do!
(Later, he'll stop and try to figure out just who he's talking to.)
He lets himself sink further and further into the haze of carnage and delight and habit, so much so that he nearly takes off Donna's head when she descents from above and lands right in front of him.
Her eyes go wide and she barely avoids the hook he sends her way.
"Are you crazy!?"
She looks harried, bruised, and battered in a way that speaks of a similar battle, but he doesn't apologize. He's still running on whatever adrenaline-equivalent his body functions on and it takes sheer force of will not to press the attack.
"Took you long enough." He says, and her outrage takes a more indignant edge.
"People were getting hurt, jackass! I had to help. And I beat as many of the Beastiamorphs as you did!"
That, he doubts but does not say
"Beastiamorphs?" He grunts instead, both because he doesn't feel the need to argue the point and because the name sounds ridiculous enough to warrant his contempt. Ordinarily he wouldn't bother, but just as before the fight's making him feel alive in ways he can't quite put into words and he's in as good a mood as he's ever going to get. "That name is atrocious."
"I didn't name them!" She crossed her arms "Diana told me about them, and the Justice League has them listed under that name-"
"Are there any left?"
It's a redundant question. He can look for them himself if he wants to, but there's enough background noise filtering through his senses that parsing through it all would be an effort best preserved for another time.
"Probably."
She rises back up into the air (Why can't he fly? He misses flight.) and gestures off to the side
"Philipus wants us back. The amazons are setting up arming up in force and we need to make sure no one gets hurt if one of those things sneak up on the civilians."
There's a dark look in her eyes that he takes to mean that there have already been casualties. No surprise there.
He's somewhat impressed that she's made no comment of how utterly terrible he looks, what with the blood and the gore that's nearly caking him from head to toe, but it's either shock or pragmatism that's keeping her silent and he'll take what he can get regardless.
"Do you know how many there are left?"
"Don't know." She shakes her head. "But Philipus says that this might just be the first wave. The Beastie Morphs are servants of Circe, and she never plays all her cards - are you okay?"
His mind's gone eerily blank, and whatever she sees on his face has her backing away with her hackles raised.
"They're servants of who?"
""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍[]"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"Me.""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍["͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡
And then all hell breaks loose.
…
As always, leave your comments and ideas and If you don't like it, please be courteous
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Hmmm yeeeaahh? I don't really think you know how to articulate a story properly. But the premise had me interested so you at least have ideas that are good
- Location
- US
I really enjoy the premise but I don't know enough to understand why her name would make his face go blank? That probably makes the scene less impactful.
It's just the context. The name has a lot of baggage for him, and he's at a point where he's remembering his Eternal days at their peak (combat and all that) so the name just threw him off balance.
Cerci is obviously not mcu sersi, but the name is enough to raise his hackles.
Amazon Days - Part 5
""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍[]"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"Me""͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡!ͥ̀̔ͮ̍["͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡"͔̱͍͇̘͙͐̿͡
A woman appears in mid-air above them, a hazy glow of red light shimmering off of her skin in patterns that could make even his head spin, and Mark's mind almost blue screens from sheer relief.
It was just a second or two, but to someone with his sheer speed of motion and perception, it may as well have been a decade. He looked at her, processed the image in front of him, and came to a conclusion that sent a wave of relief roiling down his spine and all across the rest of his body.
It's not her
[Obviously]
He's fairly certain he's never assessed a situation so fast in either life - part of it had to be the adrenaline high he was still riding like a professional surfer at a high tide, but he'd be lying if he said that the rest didn't stem from the sheer 'fuck no' levels of instinctive terror that had spiked through his brain the second Donna had said her name.
It shouldn't have thrown him like that - Names were hardly exclusive, even to Eternals. There were half a dozen variations of Ikaris that he could think of off the top of his head, and that was just in one language. Connecting the name to her was a titanic leap. In hindsight, just the thought of it is absurd.
Hindsight is a bitch.
He scowls and looks up, meeting a pair of eyes that glittered like rubies.
The woman's features are strong, with high cheekbones and a sharp jawline that makes the contours of her face stand out more. Her skin is inhumanely pale and the color reminds him of dashboard chalk, the contrast between it and the fiery red of her shoulder-length hair is striking - The entire aesthetic is. The strapless black and red robes that cling to her torse and leave her shoulders bare shift and pulse, and something about them burns at his eyes.
Literally - they hurt to look at.
That part on its own is almost insulting in how ridiculous it is - he can see more of the electromagnetic spectrum than the majority of humans could ever even conceptualise, and somehow it's this newcomer's glorified get-up that trumps his vision.
"Well then," The woman says, red eyes gleaming as they flicker from him to Donna and back to him again. "What have we here?"
Her voice is low and melodious, and he's abruptly reminded of a venus fly trap - all pretty and appealing right until its prey gets too close, and then the jaws snap shut and start dissolving it in acrid acid
It isn't just the voice, either - the power he can almost taste as it wafts off of her is setting off all his alarm bells, and everything about her screams danger. Their proximity alone has the hairs on the back of his neck rising, and that's warning enough all by itself - it's been centuries since anyone or anything provoked this kind of instinctual reaction out of him.
[Threat]
No shit, he thinks sarcastically, before freezing
That hadn't been him - where the hell did that come from-?
"Circe!" Donna spits and derails that entire line of thought
That damn name. Why couldn't it have been literally anything else?
Stupid question - Obviously, it's because nothing could ever be easy.
Fuck.
"That is my name. I don't know yours, though." The glow in her eyes flares brighter when Donna clenches her fists and tenses as if to leap at her. "Oh, but I do know that look. That righteous fury - oh, that is very familiar.
I stand corrected, girl. I think I know full well who you are."
"You-!"
"And there is it is again. Barring an exceptionally foolish few, there isn't an Amazon on this island with the sheer nerve to stand before me alone - certainly not one who would dare be so bold as to address me directly without even a flimsy little weapon to defend herself with."
"I'm not scared of you, you evil bitch."
Circe doesn't lash out at the insult - if anything, she looks amused.
"No, I don't think you are. There are always the outliers, I suppose." Her lips curve upwards. "The brave, the valiant, the noble."
She snorts contemptuously
"The heroes. A dime a dozen, and they're always my favorites. All those lofty ideals, that vaunted courage - they always think it'll allow them to defeat me. They understand far too late that those petty banalities do them no good when they face me - No, they just make them all the more satisfying to break - and you'll be no different, Donna Troy."
Donna flinches ever so slightly, and that manages to sour Mark's mood even further.
"I must say, It's good to finally put a face to the name." There was nothing good about it if Circe's tone was any kind of an indicator. "I've heard all about you - anyone worth anything in the right circles has. Themyscira's latest ward. Diana's little charity project - the would-be wonder brat."
Her voice goes sharp on the last word, and this time there's no disguising the raw malice behind it. Donna seems to stutter, pale, and then her. expression twists in hurt before settling into raw rage. She takes half a step forward, and the forest floor quakes and tremors beneath her.
Circe doesn't miss it, she'd have to be blind to, and her delight seems to grow more blatant - and more unhinged.
"Oh, did I strike a nerve?" She presses a hand to her lips mockingly, and Donna makes a noise at the back of her throat that's half rasp, half growl. Mark doesn't blame her, he's halfway pissed off himself.
He doesn't know where this little tirade is going, nor does he particularly care. He's about five seconds away from treating her like the obvious combatant that she is, and the only thing keeping him still is the knowledge that enemies don't just show up to gloat unless they have another trick up their sleeve - that, or they're plain stupid.
He just needs to figure out which is which and soon because he's getting sick and tired of getting bitten in the ass when he least expects it.
"Call off your monsters," Donna says instead, and he knows she's about to leap into action. The tension in the clearing rockets so far up the scale somebody could have fingerpainted with the stuff. He crouches slightly and starts drawing his energy to the back of his eyes, letting the heat and pressure build up like an all too familiar fuse. "Leave the amazons alone. Now."
Circe's eyes flash dangerously.
"Careful, little girl. You do not command me. I have visited fates far worse than deaths on greater fools than you, and for far lesser insults at that. I have no qualms about giving a repeat performance."
Red light began to coalesce in her hands.
"None. At. All."
"I'm not afraid of you!" Donna yells again, and Circe bares her teeth viciously in answer.
"Let's fix that, shall we?"
The air surrounding them tunneled and burst explosively as Donna launches herself up, fist cocked. Part of him wants to scream at the outright mythical level of boneheadedness it took to charge an enemy you knew nothing about. Another part of him remembers the Lobo fiasco and promptly tells the rest of him to shut up and move his ass.
He doesn't get the chance to.
"No."
There's a burst of crimson that nearly blinds him, and then the red light that had pooled in Circe's hands lances out far faster than even he'd expected and strikes out at Donna a half second before her fist would have gone for the older woman's face.
"Augh!"
It hits her in the chest at point-blank range and... wraps around her, almost. Her momentum dies instantly and she drops like a stone - or maybe an anvil, because when she hits the ground below it almost craters around her. Dirt and rubble get blasted almost straight up past the tree line from the sheer force of it.
Mark tries to help - tries being the operative word, because the instant he leaped forward to help, the hazy red aura that was still grinding Donna into the forest floor surged up to meet him. A part of it breaks off, hazy and malleable like a cloud even as it propels itself up towards him, and he's so focused on Circe - the enemy combatant, the target - that he doesn't perceive it until it's already closing on him.
When the effect hits, it's easily the worst thing he'd ever felt in his life. Space distorts, his balance gets blown to hell, and the next thing he knows, he's driven straight down into the earth across from Donna.
Son of a bitch.
It's like having vertigo and a hangover at the same time, only multiplied by a thousand. Nausea bubbles up in his gut, and he closes his eyes. His balance is shot to hell - whatever this was, it was warping the physical space around to stop him from moving and distorting his perception of it to stop him even trying.
So much for helping. He can barely tell up from down, and Circe doesn't even deign to look at him.
"Attacking me directly with nothing but fists and fury. How inspired." She clucked her tongue at Donna's wordless howl of rage. "All brawn and not an ounce of wits. Diana's teaching through and through, no doubt. Disappointing, but perhaps the fault lies in me for expecting originality from an Amazon, especially the second-hand stray of my most hated enemy."
Donna didn't respond to that, possibly because she shouldn't - her prison and his were the same.
"Repulsively stagnant and pathetic, all of them."
If current circumstances were any different - meaning if he wasn't currently working out all the ways he could kick the woman so hard and so far out she wouldn't hit the ground until she passed over the horizon, Mark would have been inclined to agree. If wasted potential was a currency, this island Themyscira could tank the global economy a thousand times over.
A united community, immortality and free will, and all three were wasted without a care in the world.
The injustice of it burns.
Seeing everything he (they) wanted given so freely and squandered all the same... the irony isn't lost on him, and just thinking about it is enough to drive him to the edge of hysteria, present situation be damned - it makes him want to rip his hair out by the handfuls.
And that would be just for starters.
Maybe it's a coincidence, or maybe the woman can hear his thoughts - he won't discount it, anything is possible with preternatural abilities - either way, Circe finally tilts her head towards him in acknowledgment. The distortion and the pressure keeping him in place and six shades off-kilter lessens, going from debilitating to just massively irritating even as her gaze locks on to his.
"You, I've never heard off." She raised an eyebrow. "And a boy, too - Is Diana picking up every little beggar and urchin-"
The words die in her throat and her eyes go wide as his burn gold, and that's all the warning she gets before he fires his optic beams up and at her with enough heat and force to cleave through solid tungsten like a hot knife through butter. They catch her in the lower abdomen and catapult her back, and immediately the crimson-powered hold on them breaks. Mark wastes no time flinging them both back, shooting out a hand and yanking Donna with him until she regains the sense of mind to take to the air again on her own.
Distance is key, after all.
Circe looks particularly ferocious as she rockets back in under a heartbeat. He tries to cut her off with another blast (His consistency is shit, he hasn't finished regenerating yet) but this time she's ready for it. When the beams go for her, she's somehow fast enough to react and more than ready for them. She's pushed back some ten feet at most before she swipes her left hand furiously and twists her extended fingers, and the beams somehow refract off her body at an angle like light through a prism, rendered completely harmless.
He cuts them off with a scowl and backs up further.
The ease that she dismisses them with is a little offensive - No, it's extremely offensive. Exceedingly offensive.
Not even Lobo had shrugged them off that easily. Nothing in his entire history ever had, and that particular run was seven thousand years long and still counting (against his best efforts)
"That," She hisses frigidly as she towers above even Donna, high up in the air as she was. "Was rather rude."
The air around her flashes red for a split second, the color so stark and deep against the backdrop of the night that it looks like someone painted it there.
Donna doesn't even look at him before blurring forward, attacking head-on again, but she's forced to drop so low she nearly hits the ground as an arc of something that resembles coruscating plasma blasts out of Circe's extended palm and cleaves the forest behind her in a ruinously expansive arc. Half the vegetation is disintegrated instantly and anything not caught in the immediate blast radius detonates in an explosion of crimson flames a heartbeat later.
The resulting heat and gales of winds buffet all three of them are strong enough to fling ordinary humans away like rag dolls.
"I'll deal with you in a moment." Circe snarls at a wide-eyed and (finally) still Donna, her attention still locked on Mark. "I have manners to instill."
Yes, it was safe to say the woman was pissed.
"In my defense," He says dryly, and he shifts out of the way of a crackle of red light aimed for his head "You did attack this island first."
Which is only his problem because he was on the island at the time and isn't quite enough of a monster to stand aside and let events run their course, he thinks but doesn't say.
[You are better than that]
Debatable-
Mark goes cold all over.
He heard that - the same instinct that had kept him from leaving this unilateral disappointment of an island days ago, but stronger.
More pronounced.
Sentient.
He isn't imagining it. There's something in his head - And of course, he can't actually do a damn thing about it because he's in the middle of an island-spanning clusterfuck with a woman who's almost certainly about to try and kill him and everybody in the general vicinity with extreme prejudice.
"I do as I please."
"Good for you." Her eyes narrow, but she doesn't immediately attack again and he's not in any state to care about what else the gesture might mean beyond looking out for an attack. He's compartmentalizing so hard half his brain is getting shoved into a box and nailed shut just until he can deal with this. "That doesn't mean anything to me."
"Impudent hero."
She sneers and spits out the word like it's poison, and then rears back again when Mark immediately laughs in her face.
"I'm even less of a hero than you are." Donna makes a noise to his side that he doesn't bother acknowledging, focused as he is on Circe and the ripple of surprise that alters her expression. "I don't know who you are and I don't care, either. You cannot imagine how much I don't care. I'm not even supposed to be on this island, and the sole reason I'm a part of this... debacle isn't because I'm being heroic, it's because I've got nothing better to do with my life and you made it rain an army's worth of acceptable targets to take my frustrations out on."
[That's not entirely true]
Whatever you are, fuck off
[As you wish]
"If things were any different, I'd probably be thanking you. As it stands, though?" He shook his head. "This tirade of yours means jack and shit to me, and it's giving me a headache. So if you could kindly wrap it up?"
He angles himself forward, a plan to break her guard the moment he provokes her into attack already at the forefront of his thoughts.
"That'd be great."
...
"...You're not lying."
The way her face blanks out and. the way the anger in her voice turns into contemplation should, in theory, be a good thing. In reality, it makes him and Donna tense so hard it's a miracle their spines don't snap under the strain.
"Interesting. Very interesting - I can see you, girl." Donna freezes from where she'd been trying to get behind her for a surprise attack. "Don't try it, it won't end well for you. And as for you-"
He bites down on the inside of his cheek when she rounds on him again. It's about all he can do besides keeping his gaze pinned on her hands - he's seen how fast she could move when she wanted to.
"I'm curious, then. What do you want, if not to oppose me?"
He almost laughs at that one.
Finally, an easy answer.
"Honestly?" He bares his teeth. "I just want something to break."
"And you actually mean that, don't you? How novel." She purrs in delight. "I have business to attend to while I'm here - a few treasures to pick up, a queen to humble, but if it's a fight you want-"
She claps her hands - Mark and Donna both have the presence of mind to fling themselves halfway across the clearing before her hands even touch, but it's not enough to get clear of the shockwave of energy that chases after them.
Boom.
It's not the force that bothers him, but the lack of leverage. The ground shudders and displaces, blasted away like quicksand, and there's nothing to anchor himself to, so he goes tumbling with an undignified roll with a snarl that goes unheard over the explosive detonation of air.
Donna's flight means she can generate her own leverage and sort of hold herself in mid-air, but it's a near thing.
He misses his flight.
It's a petulant, downright childish thought, but he yearns for the ability to take the skies as he digs himself out from underneath a mountain of dislodged soil and dirt that had buried him under its bulk like an avalanche, and he yearns for it a hell of a lot more when he sees the gargantuan cloud of red-mist blotting out the sky overhead and the shapes that are coming out of it.
No, not shapes.
Shape. Singular.
"Oh, you have got to be kidding me." Donna blurts out as she lands next to him, and he's inclined to agree with the sentiment.
There's a cacophonous screech as the reptilian skyscraper of a beast fully manifests into reality in all its horrible glory, its long serpentine body trailing behind the shifting heads and ending into lengthy, sinuous tails.
That's right. Heads. Plural - as in more than one.
And every one of them is about the size of a camper van.
"Okay, I'll admit it." He admits as he eyes the monster, watching it as it stretches out above them... and keeps stretching, rising higher and higher with a heaving body - It was like it was just waking up. The sheer scale was ridiculous. "I may have been asking for this one."
Donna's glare is more than a little murderous. "You think!?"
"As I said, I have business to attend to, and I am nothing if not a woman of my word." Circe gave them a final smile, one that lingered when she turned to him in particular. "I don't care about the girl - Diana's despair at her death would be a lovely treat, but you? You, I find interesting. Try not to disappoint me and die too quickly, would you?"
Then she vanishes in another burst of red light, and all nine of the Hydra's snarling heads seem to finally awaken, snapping in their direction and belting out a battle cry that tears the night in two.
Then it charges.
...
I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaack!
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
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- Location
- US
Yes! Nice, love to see a good fight sometimes.
Thank you for the new chapter. 
Amazon Days - Donna Interlude
Donna Troy can categorize her life into two neat little parts without much effort.
Before Diana, and after.
And the time before Wonder Woman had swooped down from the sky had been, frankly, complete and total garbage.
For as long as she could remember, the only constants in her life back then were the foster system and the revolving door that was her entire experience of it in a nutshell.
She never spent more than six months in any one home before being bounced back to the system and into another, and the homes were only just that in the barest sense of the word.
If she was lucky, the couples that took her in just flat-out didn't care about her - she was either a paycheck to them, a way to show off how damn great they were for taking in the most difficult sort of stray, or both.
It took her a while longer than it should have to realize that those were the best homes she could have gotten.
So long as she kept her head down and pretended to play by the rules, she got a roof over her head and people who were easy to work around when she wanted to break said rules on the sly because when it came down to it, they just didn't give a crap, not really.
Eventually, she'd either mess up something fierce or they'd get bored, whichever came first, and she'd wind up right back where she started.
Rinse and repeat.
If she was unlucky, she'd get the people who actually cared.
The do-gooders who were in it for the kids and the bleeding hearts and wanna-be parents who genuinely wanted to look out for her.
She hated those.
Because no matter how well things started, eventually, like clockwork, she would have to watch that light in their eyes fade the longer they kept her around, getting dimmer and dimmer as she kept screwing up and trying to be better and screwing up harder while trying not to, all of it in an epic downwards spiral down to good old rock bottom.
And just like before, she'd also wind up right back where she started, only this time she'd do it feeling like a big bucket of dog turds no one would ever want to look at twice.
So, yeah.
Donna had never been of the success stories people heard about in the news or saw on billboards driving up on the freeway - for her, foster care had sucked ass.
And then her powers had kicked in, and boy, it got so much worse.
Not at first, though.
At first, it was fun.
Flying was amazing, being near-invulnerable was sweet, and getting strong enough to toss an RV down a street without breaking a sweat overnight - like she almost had, and hadn't that been a near miss - was awesome right up until Donna realized that from then on, she would be living in a world of cardboard and damn near everyone else around her might as well have been made of wet tissue paper.
It was a miracle that she hadn't managed to hurt anyone - and she'd managed to wreck plenty.
Having to explain snapped door handles and pulverized alarm clocks and a shattered wall or three with anything but the truth was a nightmare. She couldn't tell anyone about the powers, didn't know where they even came from, and so she just... didn't.
Surprise surprise, that went down about as well as curdled milk.
Suddenly, as far as anyone was concerned, she was a delinquent and a hot mess to boot - like her resume as one of those kids no one could ever place right wasn't glowing already.
Juggling it all got harder and harder after that - every part of her life felt like sand slipping through her fingers no matter how much she tried to get a grip on it, and on the worst days the rest of the world was a box with walls that kept closing in on her every time she blinked... until the day she happened to be back on her way from school, minding her own damn business as always, and the street she was walking across exploded.
Lo and behold, there was Diana, all spandex and glory, starring down and primed to go head to head and toe to toe with a snarling, half-rabid Cheetah.
And Donna was right smack dab in the middle of them.
The only thing missing was a neon sign over her head that read "The Universe Hates This Sucker" and she would have been set for life.
Things happened, hands went down, and when the dust settled there she sat, slumped on the sidewalk, dazed and still clenching the one fist she'd used to cold-cock Cheetah instead of running away like any sane person would have.
"That was rather impressive."
Diana stood above her, haloed in sunlight and smiling down at her. Completely unruffled and unphased by her wounds and bruises, like Donna hadn't just watched her kick nine different shades of crud out of Cheetah before manhandling her with her golden lasso.
"Could I trouble you for a name?"
One conversation, a visit, and a month later, Donna stepped foot onto Themyscira for the first time.
Life on the island wasn't like anything she'd ever had before, and that was a good thing.
The amazons were welcoming even if they spent the first few months without a single clue what to do with her - they separated from the world millennia ago. Donna was alien to them - and Diana herself was never away for more than a couple of days without a visit.
That Hippolyta had been and still is more open to her than anyone with that woman's history with outsiders probably worked wonders as well.
Donna likes it here.
Likes never having to hide her powers, likes never having to pretend to fit in, not when everyone was just as odd as she ever was - she even likes the lessons and the training Philipus had ardently forced on her, even if the captain of the royal guard was as unbending as a cinder block and liked to work her to the bone and quiz her till her brain as just about ready to melt out her ears.
It was good.
Is good. Not all rainbows and sunshine, duh, and the island had its hangups, but...
Themyscira is Home.
Capital "H" this time, or the closest thing to it she's likely to get.
So when the sky started raining monsters the size of SUVs like they were going out of season, Donna didn't need anyone to order her to leap into the fray.
Teeth, claws, and murderous bloodlust aside, they were just another target for her to hit.
... in theory.
Unfortunately, it was all a lot easier said than done when said problems could punch, bite, and chew back.
And that was before the literal witch-bitch sicced a monster on Mark and her big enough to use them both as toothpicks and flickered a way as all hell broke loose for the tenth time that night.
It goes like this:
Circe teleports away in a wave of crimson, the Hydra twitches, and suddenly there's ten thousand tons of scaled, screeching multi-headed lizard dragon bearing down on them at full terrifying throttle.
"Move!"
Mark roars and hurls himself back like a bat out of hell, already blasting away at it with beams of golden light and sizzling heat that pulse through the air with a thrum she can almost feel in her bones.
It works - Donna sees poison-green scales blacken and rupture in the seconds it takes her to fly up and away - but only technically. There's so much of the hydra's bulk surging down on them it's like trying to kill a living mountain with a particularly dangerous laser pointer.
Then the hydra slams down where Mark was standing and its heads surge. Nine sets of jaws snap open and unleash a collective warbling roar that's somehow both high-pitched and deep enough to match the grinding of stones in a rockslide.
The damaged scales visibly pop off, replaced by new growth and knitting flesh even as Mark keeps scoring lines and lines worth of the stuff from his position somewhere far beneath and away from her.
The hydra's roars reach a fever pitch when, on the third pass-by, he manages to carve a burning trench clear through the leftmost head's right eye. The entire organ bursts like jelly, viscous green goo steaming and slopping down its serpentine neck.
It's just about the most disgusting thing she's ever seen, and it gets worse as the wind changes and that exact head along with three others arcs up and focuses dead center on her, seven eyes filled with foreboding malice. The remaining five arc down instead, and she doesn't have to be a genius to realize immediately that they've locked on to Mark.
Then all nine jaws unhinge again, and this time, Donna sees baleful green light well up in their depths.
Her eyes go wide.
"Oh, s-"
Fwoosh.
Even as high up as she is, she can feel the air go bone dry and scorching before the ocean of fire that seems to span the entire freaking horizon wells up at her like an avalanche going the wrong way.
She turns and rockets away again, but not quite fast enough this time. She feels white hot pain lance up through her as the flames catch at her feet, burning her sandals and the bottom of her peplos to nothing and doing a hell of a job on her feet and the back of her legs before she manages to get out of range, and she bites through her lower lip trying to swallow a tortured scream.
The injury immediately turns out to be twice as costly as it looks, because in the moment of pain, she falters and loses both speed and height. Not nearly enough to drop to the ground, but enough that in the seconds it takes her to blink blurry eyes and flail over in mid-air, there's a maw full of spear-like fangs closing in on her
The good news is that she manages not to get shredded into bloody strips. In the time it takes for the teeth to snap shut savagely, she gets the sense to tug her knees up to her chest and kick out at the hydra's snout with as much force as she can bring to bear.
Which is a hell of a lot, even when suspended in midair.
Crack.
The bad news is that she's just kicked with her injured feet, and her vision goes white and blurry at the edges even as the hydra's head snaps back with a burst of air and a snarl.
The really bad news is instead of just staggering in flight this time, she loses control completely and ends up letting the force of her kick fling her the long way down to the forest floor.
Which is, coincidentally, also on fire.
Before she can react to that - probably by swearing until she goes blue in the face - something slams into her before she hits the ground. A pair of arms wrap around her in a vice grip, and the world blurs in a burst of speed.
The fires vanish, the acrid smell of smoke and scorching air gets left behind, and by the time the acceleration cuts off and she finds herself staggering onto her knees and glancing back, the hydra is only visible in the distance.
Still the size of a skyscraper with nine flailing heads that continue to belch flames in a devastating series of arcs around its surroundings, but there's enough space between them that she can breathe.
"Are you alright?"
She glances up.
She isn't sure what to make of Mark Milton. She'd spent the better part of a couple of hours talking to him - well, at him. He spent most of the time being about as expressive as a brick (and frustrated and sad, almost). - and it's only hindsight that she realizes she'd been so caught up in the excitement of meeting someone new on Themyscira, close to her age no less, that she really hasn't learned anything about him.
Well, besides the fact that he's strong and she's pretty sure that he can run faster than she can fly, which is just, like, offensive, but she can complain about that later.
"Are you alright?" He says again, words insistent.
Good question.
Donna glances down as she tries to rise up. Her legs from the knees down are lobster red, and the skin feels flayed and raw. Her feet ache something fierce and the feeling of dirt and rough earth against her soles stings like a bitch.
But it's not terrible. She'd always healed fast, and if she somehow didn't, there was always the purple healing ray.
"Fine." She grits out and rises to the air steadily, aiming an angry glare back at the hydra - the thing is still caught up eradicating the forest like the wildlife had personally offended it. "I'm going to shove a tree so far up that monster's ass all nine heads are going to taste the bark for the rest of its life."
Something passes over his face then, pulling at his lips. Like the ghost of a ghost of a smile. If things were any better, she'd crow in victory at finally getting a real reaction out of him.
"Won't be very long then. " He stares back at the hydra and his expression blanks and hardens again "Go."
Donna blinks. "What?"
"Go," Mark says again, blue eyes turning to bore into her with visible impatience. "I can't fight with you here. I don't know you, I don't what you can do, and I'm at my best alone."
He points in the opposite direction and turns her back to her.
"Go."
It takes her a long beat to parse through that, and then she clenches her fists in indignant shock and starts to swell up.
"Hey-!"
"She's going after your queen."
"Cerci." His face twists on the name like he's swallowing something foul. Which was fair enough, she gets that. "She said she wants to humble a queen. She's going after Hippolyta."
"One of us has to stay here. That thing is going to get bored of torching shrubbery soon enough and it's going to blast its way into the city proper. They barely survived the small ones, they're not going to survive that." He gestures to the Hydra. "Someone needs to warn and back up your Queen, and it'll be better coming from someone she actually knows and trusts."
That... made sense.
She feels the realization sink into her stomach, cold and ugly and infuriating. He can probably tell, too, because glances back at her one last time.
"It's up to you. Now, go."
And then he darts forward, breaks into a run that accelerates into a blur. A second later, there's a burst like muted thunder and in the distance, she sees the hydra stagger.
And then, again, the carnage begins.
For a moment, Donna just stares.
Then she howls, curses violently enough for the words themselves to be considered weapons and hurtles into flight toward the palace.
Behind her, the world lights up in hues of green and gold.
When she gets to doesn't bother going around the walls, she goes through them.
Better safe than sorry, she repeats fiercely as she smashes through wall after wall, marble shattering in her wake as drills straight towards the throne room and explodes into it with a shower of debris.
And then she freezes.
Literally.
"Tut tut, girl." Circe beams at her from her position on the throne, her smile wide with cruel delight as she takes her in. "Did you really think it would be that easy?"
Donna doesn't answer her.
She can't. There's an aura of red light wafting across the room, and it feels like she's trying to move through drying cement.
She can't even open her mouth to speak.
"Then again, I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything better given your... less than stellar role models" Circe turns to the side. "Isn't that right, old friend?"
She sees Hippolyta then. She's trapped, the same as Donna is, surrounded by a circle of fallen, bloodied guards. Her spear is still extended in a dead charge and her face is a picture of bitter, unyielding rage.
"Now, wherever did you hide-?" Circe's eyes widen. "Ah, there it is."
She extends a hand to the side, palm down, and the stonework by the base of the throne shatters as something large and heavy flies up to meet it.
It's a chest, cube-like and made of pale-white stone save for one face that Donna could see, etched with a simple mural.
A feathered helm painted deep night blue.
And Hippolyta's eyes flicker unmistakably at the sight of it, with sheer, horrible dread.
So much so that, for a moment, the Queen manages to lurch forward, the ground quaking with every heaving step.
One step, two, even three before the magic trapping her shimmers and pins her in place again.
"No!"
"Yes," Circe breathes rapturously, one hand held out to pin Hippolyta in place as her efforts to escape redouble whilst the other takes hold of her prize and makes it flicker away with a burst of red mist. "Now you're getting it. The age of my revenge is at hand, and before I'm done, I will utterly destroy-"
She's cut off when the throne room shakes.
"Already?" The witch seemed stunned. "However did he- No!"
Her hand snaps up and halts Donna in her charge, her mad-bull rush stopped dead in its tracks with her fist inches away from her.
"That was a mistake." There's something twisted and heady with evil promise in the words as Circe bears her fangs. "But again, it is one lies with your elders. They should have taught you better. But no matter."
She snaps her fingers, and this time Donna can't even think to stop herself from screaming in horror when the queen of the Amazon's head snaps back with a spray of blood and a howl of agony.
"A punishment for your ward's shortsightedness. Savor it, Hippolyta, for it is only the beginning." Circe grins wickedly when she turns back her, malevolent eyes shining crimson. "Till we meet again, little wonder girl."
She disappears in a burst of light right.
Not a second later, the roof caves in with a rain of pulverised stone and Mark crashes down into the pavilion.
He's alive, mottled in bruises and sporting a rather vicious-looking cut that runs down his shoulder and across his torso. His skin is also steaming, the air shimmering in heat haze as it wafts off of him, and he doesn't have a lick of clothing on him.
Donna doesn't spare him a second glance.
Not when she's too busy cradling Hippolyta's head in her lap and desperately trying to staunch the bleeding from the jagged pit that was once her left eye.
"I-" He looks around the ravaged throne room and then back down to himself with a sharp, muted scowl. "want my damn armour back. Where's-"
There's no warning.
His voice stutters, something urgent and stunned and fearful in his last words, and by the time she turns back to him, his eyes have already gone gold, his body's locked up, and he tumbles backward onto the floor and into dead unconsciousness.
Next Chapter: Answers at last!
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
If you feel like it, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi: Firewillreign
Before Diana, and after.
And the time before Wonder Woman had swooped down from the sky had been, frankly, complete and total garbage.
For as long as she could remember, the only constants in her life back then were the foster system and the revolving door that was her entire experience of it in a nutshell.
She never spent more than six months in any one home before being bounced back to the system and into another, and the homes were only just that in the barest sense of the word.
If she was lucky, the couples that took her in just flat-out didn't care about her - she was either a paycheck to them, a way to show off how damn great they were for taking in the most difficult sort of stray, or both.
It took her a while longer than it should have to realize that those were the best homes she could have gotten.
So long as she kept her head down and pretended to play by the rules, she got a roof over her head and people who were easy to work around when she wanted to break said rules on the sly because when it came down to it, they just didn't give a crap, not really.
Eventually, she'd either mess up something fierce or they'd get bored, whichever came first, and she'd wind up right back where she started.
Rinse and repeat.
If she was unlucky, she'd get the people who actually cared.
The do-gooders who were in it for the kids and the bleeding hearts and wanna-be parents who genuinely wanted to look out for her.
She hated those.
Because no matter how well things started, eventually, like clockwork, she would have to watch that light in their eyes fade the longer they kept her around, getting dimmer and dimmer as she kept screwing up and trying to be better and screwing up harder while trying not to, all of it in an epic downwards spiral down to good old rock bottom.
And just like before, she'd also wind up right back where she started, only this time she'd do it feeling like a big bucket of dog turds no one would ever want to look at twice.
So, yeah.
Donna had never been of the success stories people heard about in the news or saw on billboards driving up on the freeway - for her, foster care had sucked ass.
And then her powers had kicked in, and boy, it got so much worse.
Not at first, though.
At first, it was fun.
Flying was amazing, being near-invulnerable was sweet, and getting strong enough to toss an RV down a street without breaking a sweat overnight - like she almost had, and hadn't that been a near miss - was awesome right up until Donna realized that from then on, she would be living in a world of cardboard and damn near everyone else around her might as well have been made of wet tissue paper.
It was a miracle that she hadn't managed to hurt anyone - and she'd managed to wreck plenty.
Having to explain snapped door handles and pulverized alarm clocks and a shattered wall or three with anything but the truth was a nightmare. She couldn't tell anyone about the powers, didn't know where they even came from, and so she just... didn't.
Surprise surprise, that went down about as well as curdled milk.
Suddenly, as far as anyone was concerned, she was a delinquent and a hot mess to boot - like her resume as one of those kids no one could ever place right wasn't glowing already.
Juggling it all got harder and harder after that - every part of her life felt like sand slipping through her fingers no matter how much she tried to get a grip on it, and on the worst days the rest of the world was a box with walls that kept closing in on her every time she blinked... until the day she happened to be back on her way from school, minding her own damn business as always, and the street she was walking across exploded.
Lo and behold, there was Diana, all spandex and glory, starring down and primed to go head to head and toe to toe with a snarling, half-rabid Cheetah.
And Donna was right smack dab in the middle of them.
The only thing missing was a neon sign over her head that read "The Universe Hates This Sucker" and she would have been set for life.
Things happened, hands went down, and when the dust settled there she sat, slumped on the sidewalk, dazed and still clenching the one fist she'd used to cold-cock Cheetah instead of running away like any sane person would have.
"That was rather impressive."
Diana stood above her, haloed in sunlight and smiling down at her. Completely unruffled and unphased by her wounds and bruises, like Donna hadn't just watched her kick nine different shades of crud out of Cheetah before manhandling her with her golden lasso.
"Could I trouble you for a name?"
One conversation, a visit, and a month later, Donna stepped foot onto Themyscira for the first time.
...
Life on the island wasn't like anything she'd ever had before, and that was a good thing.
The amazons were welcoming even if they spent the first few months without a single clue what to do with her - they separated from the world millennia ago. Donna was alien to them - and Diana herself was never away for more than a couple of days without a visit.
That Hippolyta had been and still is more open to her than anyone with that woman's history with outsiders probably worked wonders as well.
Donna likes it here.
Likes never having to hide her powers, likes never having to pretend to fit in, not when everyone was just as odd as she ever was - she even likes the lessons and the training Philipus had ardently forced on her, even if the captain of the royal guard was as unbending as a cinder block and liked to work her to the bone and quiz her till her brain as just about ready to melt out her ears.
It was good.
Is good. Not all rainbows and sunshine, duh, and the island had its hangups, but...
Themyscira is Home.
Capital "H" this time, or the closest thing to it she's likely to get.
So when the sky started raining monsters the size of SUVs like they were going out of season, Donna didn't need anyone to order her to leap into the fray.
Teeth, claws, and murderous bloodlust aside, they were just another target for her to hit.
... in theory.
Unfortunately, it was all a lot easier said than done when said problems could punch, bite, and chew back.
And that was before the literal witch-bitch sicced a monster on Mark and her big enough to use them both as toothpicks and flickered a way as all hell broke loose for the tenth time that night.
It goes like this:
Circe teleports away in a wave of crimson, the Hydra twitches, and suddenly there's ten thousand tons of scaled, screeching multi-headed lizard dragon bearing down on them at full terrifying throttle.
"Move!"
Mark roars and hurls himself back like a bat out of hell, already blasting away at it with beams of golden light and sizzling heat that pulse through the air with a thrum she can almost feel in her bones.
It works - Donna sees poison-green scales blacken and rupture in the seconds it takes her to fly up and away - but only technically. There's so much of the hydra's bulk surging down on them it's like trying to kill a living mountain with a particularly dangerous laser pointer.
Then the hydra slams down where Mark was standing and its heads surge. Nine sets of jaws snap open and unleash a collective warbling roar that's somehow both high-pitched and deep enough to match the grinding of stones in a rockslide.
The damaged scales visibly pop off, replaced by new growth and knitting flesh even as Mark keeps scoring lines and lines worth of the stuff from his position somewhere far beneath and away from her.
The hydra's roars reach a fever pitch when, on the third pass-by, he manages to carve a burning trench clear through the leftmost head's right eye. The entire organ bursts like jelly, viscous green goo steaming and slopping down its serpentine neck.
It's just about the most disgusting thing she's ever seen, and it gets worse as the wind changes and that exact head along with three others arcs up and focuses dead center on her, seven eyes filled with foreboding malice. The remaining five arc down instead, and she doesn't have to be a genius to realize immediately that they've locked on to Mark.
Then all nine jaws unhinge again, and this time, Donna sees baleful green light well up in their depths.
Her eyes go wide.
"Oh, s-"
Fwoosh.
Even as high up as she is, she can feel the air go bone dry and scorching before the ocean of fire that seems to span the entire freaking horizon wells up at her like an avalanche going the wrong way.
She turns and rockets away again, but not quite fast enough this time. She feels white hot pain lance up through her as the flames catch at her feet, burning her sandals and the bottom of her peplos to nothing and doing a hell of a job on her feet and the back of her legs before she manages to get out of range, and she bites through her lower lip trying to swallow a tortured scream.
The injury immediately turns out to be twice as costly as it looks, because in the moment of pain, she falters and loses both speed and height. Not nearly enough to drop to the ground, but enough that in the seconds it takes her to blink blurry eyes and flail over in mid-air, there's a maw full of spear-like fangs closing in on her
The good news is that she manages not to get shredded into bloody strips. In the time it takes for the teeth to snap shut savagely, she gets the sense to tug her knees up to her chest and kick out at the hydra's snout with as much force as she can bring to bear.
Which is a hell of a lot, even when suspended in midair.
Crack.
The bad news is that she's just kicked with her injured feet, and her vision goes white and blurry at the edges even as the hydra's head snaps back with a burst of air and a snarl.
The really bad news is instead of just staggering in flight this time, she loses control completely and ends up letting the force of her kick fling her the long way down to the forest floor.
Which is, coincidentally, also on fire.
Before she can react to that - probably by swearing until she goes blue in the face - something slams into her before she hits the ground. A pair of arms wrap around her in a vice grip, and the world blurs in a burst of speed.
The fires vanish, the acrid smell of smoke and scorching air gets left behind, and by the time the acceleration cuts off and she finds herself staggering onto her knees and glancing back, the hydra is only visible in the distance.
Still the size of a skyscraper with nine flailing heads that continue to belch flames in a devastating series of arcs around its surroundings, but there's enough space between them that she can breathe.
"Are you alright?"
She glances up.
She isn't sure what to make of Mark Milton. She'd spent the better part of a couple of hours talking to him - well, at him. He spent most of the time being about as expressive as a brick (and frustrated and sad, almost). - and it's only hindsight that she realizes she'd been so caught up in the excitement of meeting someone new on Themyscira, close to her age no less, that she really hasn't learned anything about him.
Well, besides the fact that he's strong and she's pretty sure that he can run faster than she can fly, which is just, like, offensive, but she can complain about that later.
"Are you alright?" He says again, words insistent.
Good question.
Donna glances down as she tries to rise up. Her legs from the knees down are lobster red, and the skin feels flayed and raw. Her feet ache something fierce and the feeling of dirt and rough earth against her soles stings like a bitch.
But it's not terrible. She'd always healed fast, and if she somehow didn't, there was always the purple healing ray.
"Fine." She grits out and rises to the air steadily, aiming an angry glare back at the hydra - the thing is still caught up eradicating the forest like the wildlife had personally offended it. "I'm going to shove a tree so far up that monster's ass all nine heads are going to taste the bark for the rest of its life."
Something passes over his face then, pulling at his lips. Like the ghost of a ghost of a smile. If things were any better, she'd crow in victory at finally getting a real reaction out of him.
"Won't be very long then. " He stares back at the hydra and his expression blanks and hardens again "Go."
Donna blinks. "What?"
"Go," Mark says again, blue eyes turning to bore into her with visible impatience. "I can't fight with you here. I don't know you, I don't what you can do, and I'm at my best alone."
He points in the opposite direction and turns her back to her.
"Go."
It takes her a long beat to parse through that, and then she clenches her fists in indignant shock and starts to swell up.
"Hey-!"
"She's going after your queen."
"Cerci." His face twists on the name like he's swallowing something foul. Which was fair enough, she gets that. "She said she wants to humble a queen. She's going after Hippolyta."
"One of us has to stay here. That thing is going to get bored of torching shrubbery soon enough and it's going to blast its way into the city proper. They barely survived the small ones, they're not going to survive that." He gestures to the Hydra. "Someone needs to warn and back up your Queen, and it'll be better coming from someone she actually knows and trusts."
That... made sense.
She feels the realization sink into her stomach, cold and ugly and infuriating. He can probably tell, too, because glances back at her one last time.
"It's up to you. Now, go."
And then he darts forward, breaks into a run that accelerates into a blur. A second later, there's a burst like muted thunder and in the distance, she sees the hydra stagger.
And then, again, the carnage begins.
For a moment, Donna just stares.
Then she howls, curses violently enough for the words themselves to be considered weapons and hurtles into flight toward the palace.
Behind her, the world lights up in hues of green and gold.
...
When she gets to doesn't bother going around the walls, she goes through them.
Better safe than sorry, she repeats fiercely as she smashes through wall after wall, marble shattering in her wake as drills straight towards the throne room and explodes into it with a shower of debris.
And then she freezes.
Literally.
"Tut tut, girl." Circe beams at her from her position on the throne, her smile wide with cruel delight as she takes her in. "Did you really think it would be that easy?"
Donna doesn't answer her.
She can't. There's an aura of red light wafting across the room, and it feels like she's trying to move through drying cement.
She can't even open her mouth to speak.
"Then again, I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything better given your... less than stellar role models" Circe turns to the side. "Isn't that right, old friend?"
She sees Hippolyta then. She's trapped, the same as Donna is, surrounded by a circle of fallen, bloodied guards. Her spear is still extended in a dead charge and her face is a picture of bitter, unyielding rage.
"Now, wherever did you hide-?" Circe's eyes widen. "Ah, there it is."
She extends a hand to the side, palm down, and the stonework by the base of the throne shatters as something large and heavy flies up to meet it.
It's a chest, cube-like and made of pale-white stone save for one face that Donna could see, etched with a simple mural.
A feathered helm painted deep night blue.
And Hippolyta's eyes flicker unmistakably at the sight of it, with sheer, horrible dread.
So much so that, for a moment, the Queen manages to lurch forward, the ground quaking with every heaving step.
One step, two, even three before the magic trapping her shimmers and pins her in place again.
"No!"
"Yes," Circe breathes rapturously, one hand held out to pin Hippolyta in place as her efforts to escape redouble whilst the other takes hold of her prize and makes it flicker away with a burst of red mist. "Now you're getting it. The age of my revenge is at hand, and before I'm done, I will utterly destroy-"
She's cut off when the throne room shakes.
"Already?" The witch seemed stunned. "However did he- No!"
Her hand snaps up and halts Donna in her charge, her mad-bull rush stopped dead in its tracks with her fist inches away from her.
"That was a mistake." There's something twisted and heady with evil promise in the words as Circe bears her fangs. "But again, it is one lies with your elders. They should have taught you better. But no matter."
She snaps her fingers, and this time Donna can't even think to stop herself from screaming in horror when the queen of the Amazon's head snaps back with a spray of blood and a howl of agony.
"A punishment for your ward's shortsightedness. Savor it, Hippolyta, for it is only the beginning." Circe grins wickedly when she turns back her, malevolent eyes shining crimson. "Till we meet again, little wonder girl."
She disappears in a burst of light right.
Not a second later, the roof caves in with a rain of pulverised stone and Mark crashes down into the pavilion.
He's alive, mottled in bruises and sporting a rather vicious-looking cut that runs down his shoulder and across his torso. His skin is also steaming, the air shimmering in heat haze as it wafts off of him, and he doesn't have a lick of clothing on him.
Donna doesn't spare him a second glance.
Not when she's too busy cradling Hippolyta's head in her lap and desperately trying to staunch the bleeding from the jagged pit that was once her left eye.
"I-" He looks around the ravaged throne room and then back down to himself with a sharp, muted scowl. "want my damn armour back. Where's-"
{It Is Time}
There's no warning.
His voice stutters, something urgent and stunned and fearful in his last words, and by the time she turns back to him, his eyes have already gone gold, his body's locked up, and he tumbles backward onto the floor and into dead unconsciousness.
...
Next Chapter: Answers at last!
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
If you feel like it, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi: Firewillreign
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- Zug
My name is Mark Milton and I'm the slowest man alive.
Amazon Days - Part 6
Mark wakes up suspended over nothingness, in a space larger than he can grasp, empty of everything but himself and lit by a golden radiance two shades too sharp to be ordinary daylight.
When he looks up to find the source, slow and sluggish - wasn't he just in a fight? - he feels himself go very, very still.
Titanic. Gargantuan. So immeasurably large that trying to understand his size was An entirely useless effort. He could've been a million miles away and still seemed larger than the moon.
Slowly, Mark steps back and tries to stand on his feet beneath the golden god's gaze.
"Tiamut." He whispers dully, mind just about screaming with the implications.
The celestial doesn't answer.
But someone else does.
"Not quite."
The voice that comes from behind him has him tensing like iron and whirling on the spot, optic beams charging on instinct and on the verge of spilling out
"Easy."
-when he suddenly freezes, the light in his eyes sputtering and dying as they widen at the sight of the impossible.
Tall, with rich dark skin and warm, unmistakable features. Armored in the same blue and gold vibranium suit he'd held onto for millennia, engraved with the same Eternian script all of them had added to their own suits as time crawled by and left them all the same.
He stands there, completely and utterly unchanged as all Eternals ever were and would be, and Mark goggles hopelessly.
"Phastos?"
The Inventor Eternal smiles and folds his arms behind his back, unphased and unbothered by the ridiculous look on his face.
"Come on, old friend. Let's take a walk."
Then he turns and strides away into the void.
Mark stares after him, jaw unhinged, before scrambling to his feet and dashing in pursuit. His feet make strange reverberating thumps as he moves, as though he's running over glass but
He's never been out of shape, is literally biologically incapable of it even, but by the time he crosses the short distance between them and staggers to Phastos's side, he's gasping for breath like his lungs are on the verge of failure.
"How?"
The way he mouths the one word is the most pitiful, desperate thing he's ever heard throughout the entirety of his collective existence, but he can't bring himself to care.
He doesn't even acknowledge it.
Neither, for that matter, does Phastos.
"Do you remember the Uni-Mind?" The older eternal asks pointedly, in lieu of a real answer "The synergetic power flow we created when Sersi-"
Mark cringes at the name despite himself and his raging mind.
"-pooled our collective energies together and used them to stop the emergence of Tiamut?"
He doesn't trust himself to speak, so he nods instead.
Phastos nods back
"Yes, well, as it turns out, snuffing out a god in his planetary cradle isn't quite as easy as that. And what little we actually did do had unintended consequences."
"I don't understand."
And that's the truth, but he's not at all torn up about it.
Getting confused and feeling like an idiot when listening to Phastos speak is so achingly, nostalgically bitter-sweet that it has him forcing down lumps in his throat and suffering through stinging eyes, and he knows he's doing a shit job of hiding it.
Phastos either doesn't notice or decides to spare his dignity, for whatever good that would do.
"Celestials are more than just their corporeal forms, Ikaris."
Getting addressed by that name - by his name - after all this time is one step shy from a punch to the gut. He hisses out a breath - but nothing more than that as the words wash over him.
"They're beings beyond time and space. As close to omnipotent as you can get without being the real thing. We destroyed Tiamut's body and temporarily stunted his manifestation into the physical universe, but we didn't kill him. Not even close, and not even if we had a million years to try. You'd have better luck putting out the sun."
There's a lot to unpack there.
Temporarily.
Too much
"Then we didn't kill him. Is that-?" He turns back to the looming celestial behind them, breathing uneasily, but he feels more than sees Phastos shake his head.
"That's not him. Not entirely"
The words are relieving in the same way that being told the bomb you were sitting on wasn't likely to explode.
"Phastos."
"Right." Finally, the other eternal sighs and stops walking. A hand rises to pinch the bridge of his nose, the same way it always did whenever he struggled to dumb down a concept for the rest of them. "Better rip off the bandage, then."
He turns to Mark and looks him dead in the eye.
"When we initiated the uni-mind and connected to Tiamut's mind we opened ourselves up to him. That's why Sersi's gambit worked - the Sleeping Celestial understood what we were doing and why we were doing it and he allowed us to prevent the emergence."
Mark swallows. A pit of foreboding opens up in his stomach "But that isn't the end of it.
Phastos shakes his head gravely.
"When we broke apart the uni-mind, Tiamut stayed connected to us. To all of us. His body was unmade, but his consciousness is more than just energy and matter as we understand them, and it was still active and more than capable of influencing the universe, even if his capabilities were only a silver of what they should have been. But a sliver of the kind of power it takes to make galaxies - that's the power celestials operate with - is still beyond anything we could have ever understood."
"When you dove into the sun-"
It's said so flatly that Mark almost doesn't understand before Phastos continues, blind to his stunned recoil.
"Tiamut was still there - with you, in your mind. He understood you, then. Your pain, your guilt and shame and remorse, and above all else, your unyielding desire to give up everything that was ever a part of your life no matter how far you had to go to get rid of it in its entirety."
"And he decided to grant that wish in a way that only he could. To unmake Ikaris completely - wipe the slate clean, and give you room to start over somewhere you could never interact with anything of your past again." Slowly, Phastos raises a hand and gestures to him. "And here we are, Mark."
...
For a long beat, the silence stretches on.
All the while, he tries to think.
To muster up the will to say anything.
He finds that he can't.
Sixteen long years, and now answers at last.
And not one of them was worth a damned thing.
"He did this to me."
It's repetitive and worthless, but it's all he can say.
Phastos smiles sadly. "He gave you what you wanted.
"I didn't want this." The burst of fury ignites like a wildfire, quick and blazing and burns itself out even faster still. "I wanted an end!"
Mark wants to scream and howl and rage, but the very thought saps him of energy. The outburst takes nearly everything out of him as it is.
He can feel the sixteen year-long cloak of apathy that he'd only just banished away with the thrill of fighting creeping over his shoulders, threatening to smother him again.
Except, there's one last light left.
"He did this to me, but you're here too." He dares to look at Phastos.
The burgeoning hope is crushed swiftly when Phastos places both hands on his shoulders and gives him a pitying look.
"I'm not really here. Not truly." He carries on firmly even as Mark's face crumples. "I'm just a fragment - a temporary snapshot of the real Phastos that Tiamut wove into your psyche before he remade you. A final parting gift and an explanation for if... when you refused to take to this life as well as you could have."
He tries to speak through the tidal wave of misery that the answer brings him and finds that his tongue has turned to lead. His fists clench and unclench as he tries to move it despite that.
"The voice, then." The words taste like ash and dirt as he spits them out. "The pressure at the back of my skull, the reason I stuck around on this shit-hole of an island when I should have swam back to the States. That was you."
He gets a nod for his efforts.
"Yes. After all this time doing nothing, you needed the right nudge to move."
"Then why now?" He can't stop the bitter edge from seeping into his words. "Why now, when I've been living this ridiculous parody of a life-
The derision on the one word alone could have ended worlds.
"-for nearly two decades?"
"Because in the past sixteen years, Mark-"
"Don't call me that!"
He snaps before he's consciously aware of it, but Phastos ignores him placidly. It sparks another wave of rage in him, but he doesn't get to use it.
"-you have proven beyond all reasonable doubt that you are - and follow me on this one - a complete dumpster fire of an individual."
...
"W...What?"
"Did you expect me to be nice about it?" Phastos asks flatly. "I'm here to finally nudge you into getting off your ass, not to butter up that bottomless well of self-inflicted misery you call a soul."
"I-"
"You don't get to keep whining about both lives, past and present when you literally flew to your death in the most excessively dramatic way possible to escape the first and continuously insist on squandering the second because you still can't get over yourself. That's not how it damn well works, you idiot."
"Phastos-!"
"Do not interrupt me, because this has been a long time coming. It's time to cut the pity parade short, buddy, because it passed the point of being sympathetic a thousand years ago and now it's just downright pathetic."
"What the hell do you want from me?!"
"That!" Phastos roars back and Mark nearly chokes on his tongue. "Emotion! Signs of life! Actual engagement! You're alive, Mark. Act like it!"
"I don't want to be!" He yells helplessly, suddenly aware of the fact that he's been stumbling back as Phastos advances on him, a strangely terrifying expression on his face. "I never wanted any of this!"
"Tough. shit." The answer is merciless. "You are, you have it, and it's yours, so deal with it."
"I don't know how."
It sounds so pathetic he wants to disappear. He just wants to be gone.
But he's not.
There's still only Phastos, looking down on him.
Literally. He's on his knees now, and he's not entirely sure how he ended up there.
"I don't know how."
"Then learn."
Mark laughs at that.
Or sobs.
One or the other.
"That's not as easy as you make it sound. You were always the smart one."
"Not smart. Just well-learned. It's what happens when you live life the way you're supposed to." Phastos says softly. "You make mistakes. You learn from them. You make more and you learn from those too. Most of all, you grow up, like the rest of us did."
He hears the implication there loud and clear.
"Like I didn't."
"Like you didn't." Phastos agrees, though not unkindly. "For what it's worth, it wasn't all your fault. Not at the very beginning. Ajak should have never told you alone of the emergence."
Ajak.
Mark ducks his head to the empty nothingness beneath them both.
"I'm sorry." He whispers. "About her. About all of it."
"I know."
It's an acknowledgment and not forgiveness. And they both know it. Strangely, that makes him feel better. The sensation is so foreign he almost doesn't recognize it.
Then there's a hand being offered to him, and he finds himself looking up into Phastos's eyes.
"Get up."
There's an implication there too.
Phastos quirks a brow. "I don't have forever."
"We literally do."
"Very funny, smartass."
He sounds pleased, though, and his face shows it all the more when Mark takes his hand and allows himself to be pulled up.
"Now stay on your feet, Mark."
"It's Ikaris."
The protest rings hollow
"It was." Phastos allows. "And it always will be. Your life before will never not be a part of you, and no change in names will ever lessen that. But it's time you stopped letting it be all of you. Ikaris has had his go. It's time for Mark to take the wheel."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Yes, it does. You just have to put in the work to understand it."
Mark stares at him for a long minute.
"You're so full of shit."
He gets a grin for that one.
"And you're an asshole, and karma is a boomerang. Glad we got that out of the way. Now get out there and stop being useless."
He feels a frisson of alarm.
"Now-?"
"Damn straight. You're the only true Eternal here, Mark. I'm just a fragment that'll fade sooner or later, and you've wasted enough time as it is. Go live your life, and put your back into it this time. A second chance like this isn't meant to be wasted."
"Wait!" He snaps desperately and surges for him, but when he tries to grab at him his hands go right through his image and it shimmers like hazy smoke. "You haven't told me anything! You can't just leave-!"
"This won't be the last time we speak, and you're already waking up, Mark. Stay on your toes, because we'll be watching."
"Phas- wait" His eyes go so, so wide. "We?"
Phastos grins. "You didn't think I was the only one in here, did you?"
And then the world dissolves in a burst of brilliant gold.
Mark wakes up when a cool breeze ghosts over his skin.
He blearily takes in his surroundings - the room he'd been offered in the guest wing of the Royal Palace remains unchanged.
The company, however, doesn't.
"Good morning."
His gaze snaps to his bedside.
There's a woman there - dark hair, pale skin and blue eyes, dressed in a star-spangled leotard that anyone the world over could recognize on sight.
She looks remarkably Like Donna.
"Wonder Woman." He tips his head in something that might be considered a terse greeting.
"Diana," She says instead, a warm smile on her face. "And you are Marcus Milton-"
"Mark."
She pauses when he cuts her off, waiting for him to speak again, but he doesn't. Slowly, he turns back to stare up at the ceiling and just. .. breathes.
A second chance, then?
"I'm... Mark."
The name is still meaningless to him.
And yet...
He feels lighter.
Next Chapter: Arc Epilogue
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
If you feel like it, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi: Firewillreign
When he looks up to find the source, slow and sluggish - wasn't he just in a fight? - he feels himself go very, very still.
Titanic. Gargantuan. So immeasurably large that trying to understand his size was An entirely useless effort. He could've been a million miles away and still seemed larger than the moon.
Slowly, Mark steps back and tries to stand on his feet beneath the golden god's gaze.
"Tiamut." He whispers dully, mind just about screaming with the implications.
The celestial doesn't answer.
But someone else does.
"Not quite."
The voice that comes from behind him has him tensing like iron and whirling on the spot, optic beams charging on instinct and on the verge of spilling out
"Easy."
-when he suddenly freezes, the light in his eyes sputtering and dying as they widen at the sight of the impossible.
Tall, with rich dark skin and warm, unmistakable features. Armored in the same blue and gold vibranium suit he'd held onto for millennia, engraved with the same Eternian script all of them had added to their own suits as time crawled by and left them all the same.
He stands there, completely and utterly unchanged as all Eternals ever were and would be, and Mark goggles hopelessly.
"Phastos?"
The Inventor Eternal smiles and folds his arms behind his back, unphased and unbothered by the ridiculous look on his face.
"Come on, old friend. Let's take a walk."
Then he turns and strides away into the void.
Mark stares after him, jaw unhinged, before scrambling to his feet and dashing in pursuit. His feet make strange reverberating thumps as he moves, as though he's running over glass but
He's never been out of shape, is literally biologically incapable of it even, but by the time he crosses the short distance between them and staggers to Phastos's side, he's gasping for breath like his lungs are on the verge of failure.
"How?"
The way he mouths the one word is the most pitiful, desperate thing he's ever heard throughout the entirety of his collective existence, but he can't bring himself to care.
He doesn't even acknowledge it.
Neither, for that matter, does Phastos.
"Do you remember the Uni-Mind?" The older eternal asks pointedly, in lieu of a real answer "The synergetic power flow we created when Sersi-"
Mark cringes at the name despite himself and his raging mind.
"-pooled our collective energies together and used them to stop the emergence of Tiamut?"
He doesn't trust himself to speak, so he nods instead.
Phastos nods back
"Yes, well, as it turns out, snuffing out a god in his planetary cradle isn't quite as easy as that. And what little we actually did do had unintended consequences."
"I don't understand."
And that's the truth, but he's not at all torn up about it.
Getting confused and feeling like an idiot when listening to Phastos speak is so achingly, nostalgically bitter-sweet that it has him forcing down lumps in his throat and suffering through stinging eyes, and he knows he's doing a shit job of hiding it.
Phastos either doesn't notice or decides to spare his dignity, for whatever good that would do.
"Celestials are more than just their corporeal forms, Ikaris."
Getting addressed by that name - by his name - after all this time is one step shy from a punch to the gut. He hisses out a breath - but nothing more than that as the words wash over him.
"They're beings beyond time and space. As close to omnipotent as you can get without being the real thing. We destroyed Tiamut's body and temporarily stunted his manifestation into the physical universe, but we didn't kill him. Not even close, and not even if we had a million years to try. You'd have better luck putting out the sun."
There's a lot to unpack there.
Temporarily.
Too much
"Then we didn't kill him. Is that-?" He turns back to the looming celestial behind them, breathing uneasily, but he feels more than sees Phastos shake his head.
"That's not him. Not entirely"
The words are relieving in the same way that being told the bomb you were sitting on wasn't likely to explode.
"Phastos."
"Right." Finally, the other eternal sighs and stops walking. A hand rises to pinch the bridge of his nose, the same way it always did whenever he struggled to dumb down a concept for the rest of them. "Better rip off the bandage, then."
He turns to Mark and looks him dead in the eye.
"When we initiated the uni-mind and connected to Tiamut's mind we opened ourselves up to him. That's why Sersi's gambit worked - the Sleeping Celestial understood what we were doing and why we were doing it and he allowed us to prevent the emergence."
Mark swallows. A pit of foreboding opens up in his stomach "But that isn't the end of it.
Phastos shakes his head gravely.
"When we broke apart the uni-mind, Tiamut stayed connected to us. To all of us. His body was unmade, but his consciousness is more than just energy and matter as we understand them, and it was still active and more than capable of influencing the universe, even if his capabilities were only a silver of what they should have been. But a sliver of the kind of power it takes to make galaxies - that's the power celestials operate with - is still beyond anything we could have ever understood."
"When you dove into the sun-"
It's said so flatly that Mark almost doesn't understand before Phastos continues, blind to his stunned recoil.
"Tiamut was still there - with you, in your mind. He understood you, then. Your pain, your guilt and shame and remorse, and above all else, your unyielding desire to give up everything that was ever a part of your life no matter how far you had to go to get rid of it in its entirety."
"And he decided to grant that wish in a way that only he could. To unmake Ikaris completely - wipe the slate clean, and give you room to start over somewhere you could never interact with anything of your past again." Slowly, Phastos raises a hand and gestures to him. "And here we are, Mark."
...
For a long beat, the silence stretches on.
All the while, he tries to think.
To muster up the will to say anything.
He finds that he can't.
Sixteen long years, and now answers at last.
And not one of them was worth a damned thing.
"He did this to me."
It's repetitive and worthless, but it's all he can say.
Phastos smiles sadly. "He gave you what you wanted.
"I didn't want this." The burst of fury ignites like a wildfire, quick and blazing and burns itself out even faster still. "I wanted an end!"
Mark wants to scream and howl and rage, but the very thought saps him of energy. The outburst takes nearly everything out of him as it is.
He can feel the sixteen year-long cloak of apathy that he'd only just banished away with the thrill of fighting creeping over his shoulders, threatening to smother him again.
Except, there's one last light left.
"He did this to me, but you're here too." He dares to look at Phastos.
The burgeoning hope is crushed swiftly when Phastos places both hands on his shoulders and gives him a pitying look.
"I'm not really here. Not truly." He carries on firmly even as Mark's face crumples. "I'm just a fragment - a temporary snapshot of the real Phastos that Tiamut wove into your psyche before he remade you. A final parting gift and an explanation for if... when you refused to take to this life as well as you could have."
He tries to speak through the tidal wave of misery that the answer brings him and finds that his tongue has turned to lead. His fists clench and unclench as he tries to move it despite that.
"The voice, then." The words taste like ash and dirt as he spits them out. "The pressure at the back of my skull, the reason I stuck around on this shit-hole of an island when I should have swam back to the States. That was you."
He gets a nod for his efforts.
"Yes. After all this time doing nothing, you needed the right nudge to move."
"Then why now?" He can't stop the bitter edge from seeping into his words. "Why now, when I've been living this ridiculous parody of a life-
The derision on the one word alone could have ended worlds.
"-for nearly two decades?"
"Because in the past sixteen years, Mark-"
"Don't call me that!"
He snaps before he's consciously aware of it, but Phastos ignores him placidly. It sparks another wave of rage in him, but he doesn't get to use it.
"-you have proven beyond all reasonable doubt that you are - and follow me on this one - a complete dumpster fire of an individual."
...
"W...What?"
"Did you expect me to be nice about it?" Phastos asks flatly. "I'm here to finally nudge you into getting off your ass, not to butter up that bottomless well of self-inflicted misery you call a soul."
"I-"
"You don't get to keep whining about both lives, past and present when you literally flew to your death in the most excessively dramatic way possible to escape the first and continuously insist on squandering the second because you still can't get over yourself. That's not how it damn well works, you idiot."
"Phastos-!"
"Do not interrupt me, because this has been a long time coming. It's time to cut the pity parade short, buddy, because it passed the point of being sympathetic a thousand years ago and now it's just downright pathetic."
"What the hell do you want from me?!"
"That!" Phastos roars back and Mark nearly chokes on his tongue. "Emotion! Signs of life! Actual engagement! You're alive, Mark. Act like it!"
"I don't want to be!" He yells helplessly, suddenly aware of the fact that he's been stumbling back as Phastos advances on him, a strangely terrifying expression on his face. "I never wanted any of this!"
"Tough. shit." The answer is merciless. "You are, you have it, and it's yours, so deal with it."
"I don't know how."
It sounds so pathetic he wants to disappear. He just wants to be gone.
But he's not.
There's still only Phastos, looking down on him.
Literally. He's on his knees now, and he's not entirely sure how he ended up there.
"I don't know how."
"Then learn."
Mark laughs at that.
Or sobs.
One or the other.
"That's not as easy as you make it sound. You were always the smart one."
"Not smart. Just well-learned. It's what happens when you live life the way you're supposed to." Phastos says softly. "You make mistakes. You learn from them. You make more and you learn from those too. Most of all, you grow up, like the rest of us did."
He hears the implication there loud and clear.
"Like I didn't."
"Like you didn't." Phastos agrees, though not unkindly. "For what it's worth, it wasn't all your fault. Not at the very beginning. Ajak should have never told you alone of the emergence."
Ajak.
Mark ducks his head to the empty nothingness beneath them both.
"I'm sorry." He whispers. "About her. About all of it."
"I know."
It's an acknowledgment and not forgiveness. And they both know it. Strangely, that makes him feel better. The sensation is so foreign he almost doesn't recognize it.
Then there's a hand being offered to him, and he finds himself looking up into Phastos's eyes.
"Get up."
There's an implication there too.
Phastos quirks a brow. "I don't have forever."
"We literally do."
"Very funny, smartass."
He sounds pleased, though, and his face shows it all the more when Mark takes his hand and allows himself to be pulled up.
"Now stay on your feet, Mark."
"It's Ikaris."
The protest rings hollow
"It was." Phastos allows. "And it always will be. Your life before will never not be a part of you, and no change in names will ever lessen that. But it's time you stopped letting it be all of you. Ikaris has had his go. It's time for Mark to take the wheel."
"That doesn't make any sense."
"Yes, it does. You just have to put in the work to understand it."
Mark stares at him for a long minute.
"You're so full of shit."
He gets a grin for that one.
"And you're an asshole, and karma is a boomerang. Glad we got that out of the way. Now get out there and stop being useless."
He feels a frisson of alarm.
"Now-?"
"Damn straight. You're the only true Eternal here, Mark. I'm just a fragment that'll fade sooner or later, and you've wasted enough time as it is. Go live your life, and put your back into it this time. A second chance like this isn't meant to be wasted."
"Wait!" He snaps desperately and surges for him, but when he tries to grab at him his hands go right through his image and it shimmers like hazy smoke. "You haven't told me anything! You can't just leave-!"
"This won't be the last time we speak, and you're already waking up, Mark. Stay on your toes, because we'll be watching."
"Phas- wait" His eyes go so, so wide. "We?"
Phastos grins. "You didn't think I was the only one in here, did you?"
And then the world dissolves in a burst of brilliant gold.
...
Mark wakes up when a cool breeze ghosts over his skin.
He blearily takes in his surroundings - the room he'd been offered in the guest wing of the Royal Palace remains unchanged.
The company, however, doesn't.
"Good morning."
His gaze snaps to his bedside.
There's a woman there - dark hair, pale skin and blue eyes, dressed in a star-spangled leotard that anyone the world over could recognize on sight.
She looks remarkably Like Donna.
"Wonder Woman." He tips his head in something that might be considered a terse greeting.
"Diana," She says instead, a warm smile on her face. "And you are Marcus Milton-"
"Mark."
She pauses when he cuts her off, waiting for him to speak again, but he doesn't. Slowly, he turns back to stare up at the ceiling and just. .. breathes.
A second chance, then?
"I'm... Mark."
The name is still meaningless to him.
And yet...
He feels lighter.
...
Next Chapter: Arc Epilogue
As always, leave your comments and ideas and if you don't like it, please be courteous.
If you feel like it, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi: Firewillreign
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