A/N: I was meant to start writing and posting these back in January, however life happened, and progress didn't happen, so now here I am, a little over two months late but finally kicking things off! This coming July, as I've done for the past two summers, I'll be leading a 100-day countdown story set across the Arrowverse (featuring Supergirl, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow). I decided to do things a little differently this year. For one thing, the entire 100 days will be a single story spread over 100 days, one chapter to every day. And for another, the more planning I did, I saw the possibility and the need to lay in some ground work in the form of preludes.

Twenty-four prelude one-shot stories, six each to the four series (again, it was meant so that each month from January to June would have one of each show, but now… yeah ;)), posted every 5 (or 6) days.

The story this will all be leading to, Once More Unto the Breach, is an alternate universe story (not another Earth, ha :D), which will soon become evident enough. It's very possible you do not watch all four of the shows, but I highly encourage you to seek out the other preludes, as they will help to fill in this world I'm very excited to share with you guys!

Alright, enough chit chat, let's go! If you have any questions, send them my way and I'll be happy to answer them!

THE ROAD TRAVELED
Prelude to ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH
(4 of 24)

Location:
BREACH EARTH, HAVEN QUARTER
(ARGUS designation)

There was something to be said for the quiet of a lab. Even nestled inside a busy police precinct, if you were just far enough, then everything could and would melt away until you could pretend it wasn't there at all. And that was what Lyla Michaels did, busying herself with the workload of a relatively calm day as a CSI. She didn't settle herself in that calm though, knowing from experience that there was such a thing as the calm before the storm. And with such a calm, she knew the storm was going to be something more akin to cyclone than a few thunderous clouds.

"Hello, Lyla."

And there it was.

"What can I do for you, John?" she asked, never looking up from her work, her voice remaining as unaffected as if she'd asked someone to pass her a pen. Someone who didn't know the man standing just inside the door might never have known he was her husband. On the hardest days, she would find herself wishing she didn't have to know it either. But she did know… She knew everything, whether she liked it or not. And it swept her on… like a cyclone.

Before all of that, back when their life together had not yet been touched by the slightest sort of disturbance, they had been happy. Truly, fully happy, but also… maybe… looking back on it now, knowing what they had become, it was impossible to think about those good days and not think to herself… A lot had happened between then and now, yes, some things that would categorically change a person no matter who they were before, but then that change had to be motivated by something more than incidents and terrible tragedies, didn't it? Was it not all guided by the person they had been already underneath all that? And if that was true, if they had always had at least a kernel of what they had become in them all along, then weren't they always just lying to themselves a little bit? Had they ever really been happy?

She had only ever known John Diggle as a soldier, but in those days of before, with none of the history built between them, he had been the kind of soldier she saw as beholden to the kind of values she would support completely. That was the man she'd fallen in love with, the man she had married. And for a while… they had their happy life.

That all ended the day Andy Diggle was murdered.

Knowing John had meant knowing Andy, because John had always cared so much for his younger brother that he was an immediate staple to hers and John's life together. And when he'd died it was as though a part of John had died with him. How could she know that sacrificial part of her husband had been the one that held him together, kept him from falling apart? It might have been one thing if Andy had been ill, or if he'd had an accident. It would have been terrible, but there would have been no one to pin the fault to. But to know that the reason his baby brother wasn't alive anymore was for the action of another person's decision, now that… that couldn't stand, not for John. It became his sole reason for living, to find out who was responsible. And she had stopped being that to him.

And what could she do about that? Tell him that it didn't matter that Andy had been killed, that he should forget about him and focus on her instead? She couldn't have, and if she had, well she would have only chased him away faster. It pained her to say, looking back on it now, that she might have been better off that way. Then she wouldn't have had to see how much further down he could go.

She still couldn't believe it at times, to see how easily he had thrown a shade over her eyes, letting her live on as though she understood how bad things were rather than letting her see that, oh, they were only getting worse and worse by the day. Two years. That was how long it took for her to see what he had become, and if not for the circumstances of that revelation, she had a feeling he could have gone on much, much longer without ever telling her. Except he'd made some enemies in the midst of his search, his quiet path of vengeance was growing louder, and those enemies of his they made noise, too. She had been captured, kept hostage, tortured, for days. And then he had come. She hadn't known it was him, not at first, and how could she, with that mask over his face, that helmet, two-toned and split right down the middle. Her captors, they had a name for him. Deathstroke.

And death was what he'd given them, every last one, with a bloodied frenzy. When it had all stopped, silence pressing on the room save for her own frightened gasping and somewhere near her the drip, drip, dripping of what she knew without turning was someone's blood. She'd been so traumatized, when he had come toward her, she'd been certain he would kill her, too. And to prove he wouldn't, he had pulled back his mask.

The face she had found there underneath might as well have been another mask, because it bore nothing of the warmth of her husband's face. There was no life in this face, only exhaustion… release… Now she knew.

He had saved her life, but in doing so he had killed their marriage. She couldn't do it, couldn't let herself remain caught up in what he had become. All she had to do was to recall what had happened that fatal day – she would remember to her last day, whether she liked it or not – and she would know there was no coming back for him. Her John was gone, and all that was left was… him.

That was ten years ago. He hadn't been completely gone from her life in that time, though the number of times she had seen him were few and far in between. Every now and then he would show up, as he did on this day, and more often than not, much as she tried not to get involved… It was an inescapable weakness in her, truly, that she would see him and she would feel something stir in her, like maybe… maybe she could pull him back from the dark, maybe things could be the way they'd been before. And when that happened, one of two things would happen. She would either come to her senses before she allowed anything more to happen, or she would get lulled in only to have reality come and smack her in the face, and then they'd be right back to where they'd been, with him gone and her alone.

Well, not so alone. One such visit nearly four years back now, one of those where she had slipped, had left its mark on her, in the form of the twins. Her daughter she had named Sara, and her son was called John Jr. She had given him the name of his father, because he would have had it, if only…

She had resolved herself, the day they were born, as she held them in the crook of each of her arms, that John couldn't know about them. It was a terrible, terrible choice to make, but what other one did she have? She had intimately lived the consequences of being connected to Deathstroke, and if anyone ever came for her babies… Their birth certificates listed under her name, and it did not identify their father. That John had not shown up once in the time of her pregnancy had both been halfway expected and feared, but he hadn't shown up since. Not until today. Did he know? Was this why he'd come?

"You look good," he told her, and she finally made herself turn to face him, betraying nothing.

"I have a lot of work to do, John," she told him, her way of telling him 'get on with it, whatever it is.' He looked around her lab for a few seconds before turning back to her.

"I hear you've been working for ARGUS."

And here they were. That was why he'd come. He needed something.

She had been hired as a CSI to the police department when the twins had still been newborns, had actually started working a few months later. To any and all it would have seemed as though she had taken the job for very obvious reasons. She had two growing babes to provide for, all on her own, and all in all it would not be too demanding as work went. It wasn't the true reason, but she let people out of the know believe it, because it cleared her from having to come up with a reason of her own. It was not only convenient, it also provided ample cover for why she had been brought on, and for the fact that she had been fast tracked through the involvement of ARGUS.

While John had been a soldier, she had been an archeologist. That was how they'd met. She'd been on an expedition, there had been trouble, and he had been one of those who'd gotten her and her team out of it. Years after that, after everything that had happened, Andy's murder, her capture, the divorce... she'd needed a distraction. She had gone headlong into her work, and it was in doing so that she'd gotten on to just the sort of thing she would want to learn about at a time like this, something so captivating that it would leave no space for anything that might burden her heart and mind.

It was a legend, sort of… a rumor, words on the wind, whispers in dark corners, whatever you might call it. But the thing with those whispers was that, as they multiplied, they became louder, until they weren't just whispers anymore, at least not once you accounted for who these whisperers were. No conspiracy theorists here, no tellers of tall tales. They didn't just believe, they knew: there were cracks in the world, cracks between worlds, and they could be crossed… if you knew how to do it.

It all sounded preposterous, and anyone with half an ounce of sense would probably write it off, but Lyla Michaels had been in desperate need of something to hold her mind, and so she had gone in search of some definitive answers. It wasn't entirely what would be expected of someone of her qualifications, but it didn't matter. She had wanted answers, and she had found them. It had taken her almost three years but she had done it, and in the two years after that she had learned a lot more. The most important thing she had discovered was a through line. It wasn't that these places were that different from one another, not at their roots, but still, each one of them was as individual as one person and the next stranger they might cross on the street. But this through line was the sort of thing where those two strangers, having not a single thing in common, each had imagined up the exact same made up creature when prompted to invent one. Except in this case it wasn't a made-up creature, but it was the same covert organization, in each iteration… in each quarter and on each Earth, she would eventually know the terminology… So similar that it was more likely that all its members, from one breach to the next, belonged to same, single, collective entity known everywhere as ARGUS.

She had proven her theory easily enough. Making a handful of crossings, she had tracked down one ARGUS agent in each of those quarters and left it with a message, the same message every time, and when she was done she had returned home and she had waited.

A week passed before someone came to escort her in to meet the director, a man called Henry Heywood.

She didn't know what she expected, a reprimand, accusations of some kind. She got none of that. But she did get a job. Technically speaking, it was the same job she had now, with the police, although when she did it for ARGUS no one was aware of what she did for a living. Even now, they only know part of it, the part about her being a CSI. For all the work she does that has to do with the crimes under investigation by her precinct, she is also in charge of recording and signalling evidence of any breachers involved. For the police department, it means keeping things quiet that need to be kept quiet, and for ARGUS, it means a liaison within the police who will keep them appraised if their involvement is required.

For the most part, Lyla is satisfied to just do her job, go home at the end of the day and be with her children. But then now and then it becomes harder not to listen to curiosity at the back of her mind, the same curiosity that had led her to become an archeologist. ARGUS referred to her home as the Haven Quarter, and that quarter was a part of what they called Breach Earth. Breach Earth was made up of all these quarters, woven together but separated all the same, and then standing opposite to that… Main Earth. One Earth unbroken, another made of pieces… Why? How? For all she knew, all she'd learned before and after she was hired by ARGUS, she still didn't understand what it was all about, what it meant. Whether or not ARGUS did know, she couldn't say, and she didn't see them telling her. Anyone outside of that organization never truly knew what they were, what they did.

Which now begged the question as to why her ex-husband was asking her about them.

"Hear from where?" she asked, turning back to her screen. There were no pictures of Sara and JJ in the lab. She called it professionalism; she could have called it protection for impromptu visits. It was a good thing he had decided to make his approach here of all places and not at her home. "For all I know of them, ARGUS isn't in the business of being… overt. But then when has that stopped you?" Did he know? About the breaches, and that other Earth? It wasn't as though it was a complete secret, though for the most part it was little more than what it had been to her in the beginning. Whispers, easily dismissible because who would believe it?

"The Green Arrow," he said, and much as her back being turned to him would guard much of her reaction, she knew her posture had shifted. He shouldn't know that name. Not here. Not of their Earth… She wasn't going to lie; he would see right through any story she concocted. It might have worked on the twins, but not on him.

"What do you expect me to tell you?" she asked instead. He was just behind her now, she could feel his presence, and it fixed her to the spot where she stood.

Maybe against her better judgment, she made herself turn to face him. She looked into his eyes, and it only made things worse. John Diggle, the one she had married, had been gone for so many years, but those times he had returned, the time their little boy and girl had been conceived, it had all started with those eyes, and a spark in them that made her believe maybe, just maybe, he was still in there. Oh, when he'd be gone again she would tell herself she had seen what she'd wanted to see, but could she ever really say if he was the one lying… or if she was.

Looking into his eyes on that day, it seemed the old spark had found kindling to ignite. Had he looked at her this way in the last decade? Had he… No... No… She couldn't do this to herself, to her children. If there was the flame of John Diggle in those eyes, it was only half of them. The other half was still dead, still that other thing he'd become…

"Deathstroke…" she made herself say it, even if it came out as nothing but a whisper, trembling at that. He kept staring at her, and she had to be very careful of her next words. "That's who you are. And so long as you are, then I can't be near you. So this time you need to leave for good, because the thing is… he's who you'll always be."

He said nothing. He kept looking at her for a few seconds more, so pointedly that she thought he might kiss her. She wouldn't let him, not this time. But he didn't do it. Instead, he turned and walked back toward the door out of her lab. She didn't let him out of her sight, telling herself she would make sure he left. Then he turned back to face her. He reached into his jacket, and she tensed. He pulled out an envelope, laid it on the nearest surface, and turned his parting words back to her, indicating the envelope.

"Make sure this gets to the Green Arrow."

THE END

Check out the next prelude, coming March 25th!