Chapter Text
Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.
—Ted Chiang, The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate
The Furies drag Cassie in at dawn.
Or rather, Greta’s pretty sure it’s what passes for dawn around these parts. In reality, the murky smog of the sky hangs just as low and rust-spattered as it always does. Apokalips has no central star to orbit around—all the planet’s light and heat comes from the churning, ever-volatile magma at the planet’s core.
But the Parademons are due to beat the first shift of Lowlies out of their beds and down into the Firepits just over half an hour from now, and Robin always said schedules were important in establishing a healthy routine, so Greta thinks it probably evens out to about the same thing.
Probably.
Granted, he never really managed to explain to her why schedules were important, or how Greta should go about maintaining one when none of them ever knew what they were supposed to be doing more than ten minutes in advance. But knowing what time of day it is is definitely part of it, so. She keeps track of the time of day anyways, even though it isn’t real.
Half-misted in the cooling vents above the onboarding hangar, she settles closer to the grate, allowing herself to solidify a bit more at the edges so she can see what’s happening better. It’s weird, but her vision always goes a bit fuzzy when she’s all misty like this. Doug says she needs to work on it. Greta thinks he should try turning his eyeballs to mist and see if his vision stays 20/20.
Down below, Stompa yanks Cassie the rest of the way through the Boom Tube, looks around the empty hangar, then immediately strides over to the sole Parademon guarding the entryway and kicks it in the shins. Forearm caught tight in her vice grip, Cassie stumbles a bit, feet catching on the rough-hewn basalt floor, then goes back to dangling pathetically. There’s a series of gashes across her lower back, clawed through the armor and into the flesh below like Cassie had all the invulnerability of an overripe tomato.
That’d be Mad Harriet’s work.
Oh, and speak of the devil. “Where’s our Granny, snip-bits?” Harriet simpers, stepping out of the Boom Tube. “We got a new recruit!” She leers over at the pair of them as the rest of the Furies file through behind her.
Greta mimes a gag.
Huddled in Stompa’s shadow, the Parademon just cowers. Fresh out of the Boom Tube, Bloody Mary examines her nails.
Of the six of them, only Gilotina and Bernadeth look worse for wear from their encounter with Cassie—the former holding her side in a way that hints at fractured ribs, while the latter sports a ring of bruises around her wrinkled throat. Still though, they stand tall. In Granny’s orphanage, weakness means death.
Mad Harriet bounds forward, skidding to a stop alongside Stompa as she grabs hold of Cassie’s face to tilt it up to the light. “I didn’t even slash her face up this time!” she coos, brushing the edge of one knife-tipped nail along Cassie’s cheek. “All fresh-faced and perky—ooh, Granny’ll have lots of fun with you.”
Cassie spits in her face. Or rather, she tries to. The angle isn’t quite right, and the big nasty gob of it goes up into the air and then falls right back down again, landing on her chin.
Nevertheless, the intent is clear. Still gripping Cassie’s face, Harriet’s grin sharpens into something murderous. Slowly, ever so slowly, she reaches out a knife-edged fingertip and smears the mess of saliva across Cassie’s cheek.
“Hera, save me the gloating, would you?” Cassie mutters weakly, jerking away. “You got what you wanted. I already said I’d go with you.” She tries to wipe the mess off her face with one armored shoulder, but Stompa slams a punch into her side before she can, holding her in place by the meaty hand still clamped tight around her wrist.
To her credit, Cassie doesn’t cry out. Just opens her mouth in a silent O of pain and goes limp in Stompa’s grip again.
It’s weird, seeing her like this. And not just because she’s older than she’d been the last time Greta saw her. Taller, face thinner, hair styled differently—it’s like the years had swished Cassie around and spat her out a different person altogether.
Contemplatively, Greta pushes more mass into her face, firming it up to as close to solid as she can. Being more corporeal (…corporeal-er?) makes the vent darker, her body blocking out even the small amount of reflected light the metal sides are capable of reflecting. It’s weird—you’d think you’d be able to use the metal in these things like a mirror, but air vents like these are always too scuffed and scratchy to get any clear image out of.
That’s okay though. She doesn’t need a mirror to know what she looks like.
When Greta pokes herself in the cheek, the mist-smoke flesh of her face is as baby-round and perpetually fourteen-years-old as it’d been the last time she checked. She frowns and pokes herself harder, momentarily distracted from the goings-on down below as she focuses on firming up her own corporeality. Her finger stutters for a second, caught on the barrier of her own flesh, then gives up and goes straight through her face and into her teeth.
Blech. Whatever.
Greta lets herself fade back into mist again and goes back to staring at Cassie.
It’s weird, her being older than her, even forced to her knees and captured like this. Her costume’s different than it’d been the last time Greta saw her too. More armored. More feminine. Less casual.
The silver bracelets are the same though. That’s nice.
Someone else clears his throat from behind the Furies—a man, tall and grown-up, with a deep voice, and for a second, a surge of hope flares in Greta’s stomach that it might be Robin, grown-up and strange like Cassie is—but then he steps out from behind Stompa and reveals the Greek armor and the torn, mud-brown cape that Robin would never wear because Robin’s cape is made of water-resistant Kevlar, and Greta loses interest again.
“What of our deal, Furies?” the man says. “I played my part in luring Cassandra to your side—what now of our new Pantheon?”
“Patience, Hound,” Bloody Mary purrs, sidling up beside him, her fangs glinting in the smog-red light filtered in from the entryway. She wraps an arm around his shoulders possessively, and he stiffens. “Or I might just make you my dog permanently, and cease this charade of equals.”
“Gross,” Cassie mutters.
“Quiet,” Bernadeth snaps, smacking her upside the head. The force of the blow makes Cassie’s face snap upwards towards the ceiling, before she slumps back down into Stompa’s grip again, head lolling.
Greta winces, then catches herself and forces her face back into disdainful neutrality.
Down below, the Furies remain unmoved.
“Pathetic,” Bernadeth says, surveying Cassie with distaste. She turns to Stompa. “Take the godling to the reeducation chamber. Something tells me she is not so…” she pauses, nose wrinkling slightly, “…compliant as she appears. Mary—” she turns to shoot the man in the Greek armor a disdainful glance, “—escort Heracles through the Boom Tube. I will find Granny myself. Soon, we add a new warrior to our ranks.”
Harriet snickers. “If she doesn’t kick it first, that is.”
And with that, the Furies disperse, leaving the Parademon guardsman smeared across the floor of the hangar, forgotten.
Still in the vents, Greta stays still for a moment. Then, once she’s sure they aren’t coming back, she seeps down through the filtration system, through the open hanger, and down into the floor below, molecules filtered through the vesicles in the stone like water through a kitchen sponge.
Basalt floors are great like that for lurking. So many holes.
She lets herself seep through until she’s directly underneath the Parademon. Then she reaches through the floor and wraps her hands around its neck.
“Which reeducation room?” she hisses, words coming long and snake-like from filtering through the floor. Under her grip, the Parademon whimpers. She sharpens her fingers into talons, and presses deeper.
It’s smaller than it’d looked from far away, the Parademon. It’d probably been the runt of the litter, way back when, back when it’d still just been a Lowly down in the Firepits, before Darkseid cut it up and turned it into something actually worthwhile.
Greta presses her fingers into the Parademon’s neck until she pierces through the iron plating and reaches the soft flesh underneath.
“You are weak and small,” she hisses into its ears, emanating from the earth itself like a thousand shifting vipers. “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll consider letting you live.”
The Parademon hesitates for a moment. Then it tells her.
If Greta were corporeal right now, and not broken up into a million disconnected molecules in the floor, she would’ve smiled. “Thanks,” she tells it. Then, because she’s nice, she seeps back down into the floor without stabbing her nails the rest of the way through its neck.
After all, a runt of the litter won’t last long on Apokalips either way. She can afford it the few days it has left before someone else gets annoyed enough to murder it.
And she has a former teammate to find.
It doesn’t take long to track down Cassie’s reeducation room. Still, Greta doesn’t enter immediately.
Instead, she hangs back, slouched, submerged in the last bit of basalt flooring before it switches to iron plating at the beginning of the hall, and she waits.
The reeducation chambers are part of the same closed air filtration system as the Furies’ private sleeping quarters and Granny’s personal office. On paper, they’d instituted it for security purposes; after all, a closed system makes it a whole lot harder to dump a boatload of mustard gas into the pipes in the dead of night and then murder all the people who end up stumbling half-blind out of their bedrooms.
In practice though, once you combine the closed filtration system with the airtight rooms and passcode protected deadlocks, it means all the rooms covered are functionally Greta-proofed.
It’s fine. It’s not like Greta would need to go into any of those rooms anyway—she doesn’t sleep, and she never needed to be reeducated like the others.
That’s why they’re jealous of her. Because they know deep down that while the Furies might play at being strong, at being cruel and vicious and evil, she and Doug are the real thing. They’re above. He told her so himself.
So, yeah. Greta’s not bothered by the fact that she doesn’t have access.
It does get a bit annoying when it comes to stuff like this though.
Sunk deep into the floor a hundred paces back, she can’t see what’s going on unless she chances sliding a few feelers out onto the surface. Doing that risks the chance of one of the Furies or Granny seeing her though.
“I mean,” Greta whispers to herself after a moment, “it’s not like I’m doing anything wrong. I’m just looking.”
She huffs petulantly, molecules scratching against the stony vesicles in the basalt as they slide along with the motion, then, after a few more seconds’ deliberation, she extends a thin smoky tendril out along the seam where the wall meets the floor, following it up until she reaches the tiny porthole window in the reeducation chamber door.
An airtight room is a soundproofed one, so she can’t exactly hear what’s going on, but her vision still works well enough through the feeler, even if it is a bit blurry.
The VR headset they’ve got Cassie in is an older setup—the same model as the ones Granny hooked the team into the first time Greta visited Apokalips. They’ve strapped her to a gurney, hands and feet all bound up and manacled in iron.
Stretched out and weightless, Greta watches as Stompa emerges from behind one of the towering pylon computers, flicking the last couple switches to finish setting up the simulation. As the program whirs to a start, dials flickering to life all up and down the pylons, Cassie’s whole body jerks, convulsing as though she’d just been shocked with a million volts of electricity.
Dispassionately, Stompa examines one of the dials nearest to her and flicks another switch. Immediately, Cassie’s seizing starts to taper off. As soon as she stabilizes, Stompa grabs the handles at the top end of her gurney, and, moving quickly and efficiently, wheels her into the center of the room.
Then she turns toward the door.
Greta barely has time to dissipate her feeler into the air around it before the door’s already sliding open with a dull ka-junk. Her molecules whirl as Stompa storms past, and if she’d had any breath to hold, she would’ve held it, the basalt around her buzzing with the reverberations of Stompa’s heavy footfalls as she strides past overhead.
It takes Greta a few seconds to collect herself enough to pull herself back together, but still, she waits a little while longer before she sends her feeler back up to the porthole.
Alone amidst the hulking machinery and gleaming steel medical equipment, strapped to the gurney as she is, Cassie looks very small. Held in place by the manacles, her fingers clench and unclench rhythmically, as if grasping for something only she can see. Her nose is red beneath the headset.
If Greta didn’t know any better, she’d say she was crying.
Hesitantly, she peers closer, half-solidifying an eyeball and half an optic nerve up against the glass.
Inside, limp against the restraints, Cassie’s cheeks are wet and shiny. Her lips move noiselessly, uselessly, shaping words only she can hear.
It takes Greta a moment to remember enough from Bart’s lip-reading guide to pick out what she’s saying, but once she does, it sends a sick bubble of contempt crawling up her throat. After a second or so, she yanks her feeler back in, and falls back to her hiding spot down the hall, huddling deeper into the stone as she does so.
“No, please, no,” Cassie’d been saying. Over and over again, like asking nicely ever did anything for anyone. “Please. Take me instead.”
God, it’s almost pathetic. She’s hardly been in there five minutes, and she’s already a mess. It isn’t even real. She hasn’t even been tortured yet. Lashina hasn’t even broken out her whips.
That sick little bubble swells in her throat, and Greta swallows it down, condensing herself along the veinlike channels in the basalt until she’s about as small as a baseball.
The last time Greta cried, it’d been real. She’d had a real reason.
After all, Cassie’s dad is still alive.
Or, well. Maybe he isn’t, actually, come to think of it—Greta doesn’t know exactly. But it doesn’t matter because Cassie doesn’t actually know her dad, and so he can’t say he loves her and try to hug her, only to pass through because she’s not good at going corporeal when she’s excited. Cassie’s dad can’t tell her he’s fine and talk about how happy he is to be alive and with her and then hop over the balcony railing as soon as her back is turned.
All Cassie’s got are images on a screen and a switched-off cerebral cortex.
Down in the floor, Greta huddles in on herself as that little bubble of anger in her chest gurgles and spits, and tries her best not to feel cold.
Idly, she wonders if Cassie’s started screaming yet.
Probably. It’d only taken her five minutes to start crying, after all.
Curled in on herself, Greta settles into the floor and waits.
It takes a good twelve hours before Stompa’s heavy footfalls rouse her from her stupor.
After that though, it’s child’s play to trail her through the hallways as she drags Cassie out of the reeducation chamber and down to the prison block below.
It’s not the real prison block. That one’s down in the sub-sub-basement.
No, Stompa brings Cassie to the nice prison block. The one Doug and Granny save for visiting warlords and political prisoners that they want to make a good impression on.
Greta pokes her head up out of the ground for a second to watch as Stompa tosses Cassie inside. “You lucky duck,” she whispers. Then she ducks back down again and flies up to her favorite vent L-curve to grab Cissie’s old med-kit.
When she returns a few minutes later, this time through the vents, Stompa’s already left, leaving only a pair of heavily armed Parademons guarding the door. Luckily for Greta though, political prisoners and visiting warlords aren’t important enough to merit putting them on Granny’s special air filtration circuit.
Hm. Are visiting warlords immune to mustard gas? Greta pauses for a moment, considering.
Maybe they’re just more likely to have mustard gas grenades hidden up their underwear, and Granny’s just minimizing risk.
After a beat, Greta nods to herself, satisfied. That explanation is as good as any.
And it doesn’t really matter either way; Cassie definitely doesn’t have any grenades on her, hidden in underwear or otherwise. It’s standard procedure to strip down any new recruits and relieve them of any weapons they may or may not have on their persons.
It’s why Cassie trudged down the basalt floors shoeless and dressed in a pair of brown woolen slacks, like some kind of Lowly.
Half-misted in the five-inch ceiling vent inside the cell, Greta watches her for a second. Apokalips doesn’t give political prisoners beds, even the important ones, and so Cassie lies slumped in one rock-cragged corner, legs all sprawled out on the floor in front of her as though that’ll make it more comfortable. The only illumination in here comes from the red emergency light overhead. It makes Greta’s head hurt.
Stompa took Cassie’s fancy new armor when she stripped her, leaving her in a threadbare woolen top that seems a bit too small in the shoulders. Already though, she’s started to sweat through it, the fabric dark around her neckline and under her arms.
Greta considers her for a moment, watching. Then, all at once, she forces her bag of stuff through the vent, popping the grating right off.
It falls to the floor with a clang. Immediately, Cassie yelps and scrabbles upright, wincing as she turns to look up at the ceiling.
Greta takes this as her cue to drop her bag down and coalesce into semi-corporeality.
For a moment, Cassie just stares at her, slack jawed. Her hands work at her sides, clenching, unclenching, just like they’d done back in the reeducation chamber. Then, after a second or so, she takes a tiny, stumbling step forward. “…Suzie?”
That sick, spiteful anger bubbles up in Greta’s throat again, unbidden. Her lips tighten. “It’s Greta now, actually,” she says shortly, bending down to unzip her bag.
Still half-hunched over herself, Cassie follows the movement mutely, brow creasing slightly as her eyes stutter over the red cross logo on the side of it.
“You’re… Hera, I can’t believe you’re alive,” she says finally. “Or, well—not alive, but. You know.” She doesn’t take another step forward. Doesn’t open her arms up to offer a hug like she did when Robin and Bart came back to the team after they quit that one time.
Instead, her eyes track up and down Greta warily, clearly registering the Apokoliptian iron-plate armor and the rough brown wool of her cloak—the same texture and material as the clothes Stompa’d given her.
None of it’s real, of course—not on Greta’s side at least. She just knows how to manipulate her body now, in a way she was never able to on Earth.
It’s something she’s proud of. Something she had to piece together all on her own.
Still though, the pressure of Cassie’s eyes on her now tickles in a way she doesn’t like, so she turns away as she continues rifling through her supplies. Her fingers stutter slightly as they slide past the boxy contours of the suture kit, and she pulls it out.
She bites her lip, staring down at it. Cassie’s eyes continue to bore holes into the back of her head. Her lips curls. “I’m doing great by the way,” she says loudly.
Cassie jerks, startled. “What?”
Greta fishes out a curved needle and a bit of thread from her kit and turns back to her with a smile that feels too sharp to be comforting and too genuine to be cutting all at the same time. “I said, I’m doing good,” she says. “I like it here. And you’ll like it too once you get some more time to settle in. Turn around?”
Cassie stares at her for a second. Her nose is still red from the reeducation, her eyes still this side of shiny. A trickle of sweat slides down her neck, into her clavicle, and she hunches, tucking her hands into her armpits. “Suz—Greta, I don’t think—I’m not going to stay here.”
“Just give it a little time,” Greta says. “Doug’s really nice. You’ll like him once you give him a chance.
Cassie keeps staring. Then, loudly: “Do you mean Darkseid?”
Greta points the needle at her. “Yes. You’re staining your new shirt. Turn around.”
Cassie, of course, pays her no attention whatsoever.
“I can’t believe this. Darkseid took you, and then you—you just—” she cuts herself off, swiping at a bit of sweat on her upper lip. “You’ve been missing for two years. We thought he’d killed you, or—or, I dunno, sucked out all your mojo to use in a giant space laser or something, and now you’re sitting here calling him Doug.”
Greta can’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. “Doug wouldn’t plug me into a space laser,” she says, deliberately patronizing, the way Bernadeth gets with Mad Harriet sometimes when she’s done something particularly stupid. “All the lasers get their power from the magma mines. Duh. Now, look, can you just—” she makes a twirling motion with the hand holding the suture kit and does her best to look Cassie up and down meaningfully.
It seems to take Cassie a second to realize that the curved needle in Greta’s hands is meant for her. “No, Suzie, look—” she starts.
And that’s when Greta loses her patience. In an instant, the temperature in the room drops thirty degrees as she flares wide, wide, wider, face shifting huge and horrible, half-mist fingers condensing into razor-sharp claws as the rest of her blacks out the red emergency light above, dropping the room into hazy, mildewed darkness.
“I’m not going to ask you again,” she says, voice coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. “Turn ǎ_̾ͥ̌̕͜r͝o̼ͬ͛u̘̫͍ͨ̆_n̩̠͢d_̗͕͍̂͜.”
Cassie stares at her for a second, face slack with something approaching fear.
Then she turns around.
Greta collapses back into herself with a sigh, and motions for her to lift up her shirt.
Granted, Greta isn’t the most experienced with stitches, since she doesn’t exactly need them herself, but she’s seen Robin do it a couple times, and Cissie showed her how to practice on a banana they’d found in Bart’s ship, so they turn out all right, all things considered.
The rhythm of the needle even gets to be kind of hypnotic after a while.
In, in, out. Tie it off. Snip. Repeat.
After a little while, Cassie clears her throat, still facing the wall. “Just… Secret, I’m—look, I’m not trying to start a fight. I’m just trying to understand. What—” her voice cracks a little, and she coughs, wiping at her upper lip again. “What happened?”
Greta pauses for a second, considering. “I found new friends. Better ones.”
Cassie doesn’t say anything for a second. Then: “I thought we were your friends.”
Despite herself, Greta’s mouth tightens, and she ends up pulling a stitch too tight by mistake. It tears through the thin lip of skin around the gash, making Cassie grunt and grab the wall for support. “Ah!” she yelps. “Gods—noted. Jeez. I won’t ask again.”
Greta’s lip tightens further. The little bubbles in her stomach go pop, pop, pop.
She can’t tell whether she’s mad that Cassie thought she did it on purpose, or if she’s mad because she wishes she had done.
Whatever it is though, this time, she threads the needle through more carefully, avoiding the torn skin. “You’ll understand once you’ve been here a little longer,” she says. Then, almost as an afterthought, she adds, “Your new costume looks pretty. I’m sorry Stompa took it.”
Cassie snorts, still gripping a rocky outcropping of the wall for support. “I’m not. Heracles only gave it to me as some kind of sick dowry thing.”
Greta blinks. “Oh. Well. Un-sorry then, I guess.” She pulls the stitch tight, gentler this time. “We’re probably going to give you new clothes anyways, once you’re done with your training. Lashina always says the first part of being evil is dressing the part.”
This time, Cassie turns to look at her, jerking the needle out of her hand, stitch half-finished. “Greta, I’m not here because I want to join your stupid Murder Girl Scouts, okay? I only came with them because they were going to kill my mom if I didn’t.”
Around the phantom of where the needle had rested in her hand moments before, Greta’s fingers tighten into a fist. Her head starts to buzz in that staticky way that means her face has begun to warp again, but she can’t bring herself to care. “What,” she says. “You think you’re the only one who cares about her parents?”
Cassie looks smaller than she did a moment ago. It takes Greta a moment to realize it’s because she’s risen off the floor.
To her credit, although Cassie’s eyes widen slightly, she doesn’t take a step back. All she does is raise her chin up higher and continue staring her down, needle dangling from the thread halfway stitched through her back. “Look,” she says, backtracking, “I’m sorry about your dad, Greta, but—”
“But nothing,” Greta hisses, fingers lengthening. She’s losing control, she knows she is, and she hasn’t lost control of her form like this in years, but she can’t seem to stop herself as the world falls away into blank, endless chill. “The government was going to kill him.”
“He committed a crime—”
“They were going to murder him,” Greta says, louder this time, and it rings longer than it should. “And you were all going to let them.”
Somewhere in the last thirty seconds, Cassie must’ve taken a step backwards, because now her back hits up against the wall. Still though, something in Greta’s accusation must hit home for her, because her face contracts into something ugly and defensive. “Great Hera, you always do this,” she says, staring Greta down. “You think you’re the only one who ever lost someone, and you think that gives you the right to be a total b—”
In an instant, Greta’s upon her, smoke flaring, knife-sharp fingers around her neck.
“Yo̕ͅu͟ tͩͮo̯l̬͞d m͎ë to͊͆͢ lͅe̮t̻̹ it happen!”
“But he didn’t!” Cassie shouts back, eyes blazing, even pinned to the wall. She writhes furiously in Greta’s grip. “You and Slobo broke him out of jail and smuggled him to friggin’ Apokalips—”
“And he still died!”
Cassie opens her mouth. Closes it again. And for a second, the only sound in the room are her ragged, wheezing breaths as Greta’s fingers tighten still further around her throat.
Then, all at once, Greta lets her go, and she collapses to the floor.
For a second, she just lies there, and Greta takes the moment to try to force her body back down to her normal shape and size again. Her teeth are knives in her mouth. Her fingernails are as long as her arm.
On the ground, Cassie lets out a long, rattling breath and looks up. Their eyes meet. Cassie’s mouth opens. “—” she starts.
But whatever she was going to say, Greta doesn’t stick around long enough to hear it. In the space between two breaths, she’s out of the cell and racing through the main air filtration system once more, her Red Cross bag forgotten on Cassie’s floor.
As soon as she reaches her favorite L-curve, Greta pulls her molecules in tight around herself and tries to think solid, corporeal thoughts.
It’s fine.
Cassie can stitch herself up. It’s not like a few claw marks’ll kill her.
And everyone comes around to Doug’s line of thinking eventually.