A/N: Hello there my amazing readers!
Wow, it'd been so long that I've forgotten how to write an author's note. Let's hope that I haven't forgotten how to write a good enough story.
Anyway, my second attempt at a DC universe TV show fic, let's hope that I did better that the first time. This is set after "Eleven-Fifty-Nine" so SPOILER SLERT! if you haven't watched the Arrow and Flash episodes since then.
As usual, the reason why this isn't full of mistakes is because of my wonderful beta Quen who even though is crazy busy with work, found sime time to proofread this for me. Thank you for that.
This is dedicated to Lucypride over at AO3, most probably the best Blackvibe author out there.
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, I don't own Arrow nor The Flash nor their characters. What I do own are my mistakes and my terrible ideas.
Cisco drops on his worn leather brown couch with a groan. The superhero business keeps getting harder and harder as the months pass. Time traveling, finding out that your friend is an evil speedster who played you all and then kidnapped your friend. Trying to help your other friend regain his speed so that you can save her while simultaneously trying to understand your new powers without opening a time breach and that could potentially endanger the entire planet.
The loud growling of his stomach interrupts his thoughts and he raises himself off the couch and moves over to the kitchen to pure some water into a pot to boil. He uses the time until the water boils to take a quick shower. Putting on his favourite Batman pyjamas, he sets on preparing dinner.
Taking one beer in one hand, and a full plate of the pasta he prepared in the other, he sits back on the couch. Turning on the TV, he finds a marathon of The X Files. He watches a couple of episodes but when he can't keep his eyes open, he washes the dishes (so that he won't have to do it in the morning) and brushes his teeth. He's entering his bedroom when he accidentally steps into the first prototype of the "Canary Cry".
A strong tingling feeling spreads in his entire body, announcing another "vibe".
Cisco gasps when he sees Laurel getting stabbed in the stomach by a blond middle aged man. And then the scene before him changes and he's transported to a hospital room, Laurel flat lining on the bed, doctors working frantically over her, Felicity and Thea sobbing on the other side of her.
He's already got tears running down his cheeks, the word No playing on a loop on his head when the episode ends. He's numb for a few seconds but then he sends and SOS text to Barry and the scarlet speedster arrives before Cisco has made a step to exit his room.
"Are you okay?" Barry asks worried, clad in his costume.
Cisco doesn't reply. He can't because he doesn't know the answer. He knows that everything he "vibes" is true but for once he hopes that it's just his tired mind playing tricks on him (after all it's been a while since he last saw or spoke to Laurel. Texting doesn't count) or that it's an image from another Earth.
"Take me to Starling General Hospital," Cisco finally chokes out.
"Why?"
"No time."
Barry picks him up and when he opens his eyes again, he's standing before the ER of the hospital. The hospital that Felicity told him they go, in the rare instances they choose to go to a health centre to treat their wounds, instead of the good old med table in the Arrow Cave.
He rushes to a desk and asks for Laurel's room. He must look as terrified as he feels because the nurse immediately looks up the information and gives it to him. He's opened the door that leads to the staircase (he's too impatient to wait for the elevator) when he feels himself being picked up by Barry.
They reach the hallway outside the room and find Oliver looking lost and Captain Lance on the floor, sobbing.
No, the voice in his head continues, (it never stopped).
"I-Is she..." Cisco can't bring himself to finish the sentence. Saying it would make it more real than it already is.
Oliver gives him a faint nod before he too collapses on the floor, face buried into his hands. Cisco wills himself to put one foot in front of the other and enter the room. Felicity is still crying into Diggle's shoulder and Thea is clinging into the hand of a very pale Laurel.
Laurel. Gorgeous Laurel. The Laurel who won't be able to save the world as the ADA or as the Black Canary anymore. The same badass Laurel who accepted to take a picture with him in full vigilante costume after just meeting him, even allowing him put his arm around her.
The same Laurel who trusted him to modify her dead sister's (alive now, he reminds himself) sound device and even make a new one. The same Laurel who laughed at his lame jokes. The same Laurel who dropped everything, risking her life to protect Kendra just because he asked. (God, he needs to stop falling for lady birds).
All of these moments fly through his mind alongside some other moments, that could perhaps categorised as wishful thinking.
Them kicking some bad guys' ass together and stopping them from taking over the world. Them dancing and drinking at one of those clubs that Caitlin doesn't know that he knows that she likes to frequent.
Them taking a walk around Central City Park. Him offering her his jacket because the amazing dress that shows off all her curves does little to keep away the evening chill.
Him making breakfast, (omelette, his Abuela's recipe) and her emerging from his bedroom wearing his dress shirt from the night before, wrapping her lithe and lethal arms around his torso.
Returning to the present, he slowly approaches the hospital bed. Laurel is so still and so pale. In the end, it's her paleness that finally convinces him that's she's truly dead. Not Captain Lance's cries that are audible from outside or the flat line on the machine that's monitoring her heartbeat. Or lack of. It's the color missing from her cheeks, and the shine missing from her blond tresses.
From the corner of his eye he catches the younger Queen throwing a questioning gaze at him. He doesn't turn his head to look at her (can't, even if he wanted to. Even dead, Laurel still demands his full attention, just like she did whenever she entered a room when she was alive) because he has nothing to say to her or anyone else for that matter.
What bugs him the most (apart from the fact that she's not alive anymore) is that it seems she went down without a fight. From the little that he had gotten to know her, he knows that she's tough as nails, always fighting for those who can't do it themselves. The thought that she didn't get the chance to fight for her life or that she was surrounded by superheroes but none of them fought for her makes him angrier than it should.
He leaves the hospital with that anger, not even registering the questioning looks that everyone is sending his way or Barry picking him up and zipping back to Central City.
He can't bring himself to attend her funeral, instead spends the day working on a newer and more advanced "Canary Cry", just in case she calls him to ask for it. (She never does.) He spends the following month mourning her death, in the privacy of his home, simultaneously mourning whatever could have been between them had he had the courage to ask her out.
(He's convinced that it had all been in his head. Theslightly flirty texts they would change almost on an everyday basis meant nothing to her because why would she ever go for a guy like him?)
And then Earth-three Laurel shows up, and his entire world is turned upside down. She's Laurel but at the same time she's not. She's got the same blond hair and hazel eyes but she enjoys kicking Barry's ass every chance she gets and leaving a trail of dead bodies behind every time she steals something valuable. (They're always men and women who don't deserve to be free, who instead belong behind bars, and not even that is enough of a payment for all the horrible crimes that they've committed.)
So she's labeled as evil.
But he never believed that ("You're letting your judgement be clouded by your feelings", Caitlin will tell him on more than one occasion) because Earth-three Laurel (Dinah, he will have to remind himself time and time again) isn't evil. The people who can wear that title with pride are only Eobard Thawne and Hunter Zolomon (so far).
Dinah is simply a little battered and bruised just like himself, Caitlin, Barry, like every human being on any Earth. He realises that, the only time Barry manages to apprehend her. He spends all night outside her cell, sharing a bottle of tequila and talking. (He does most of the drinking so there wasn't much sharing taking place.)
He talks about his childhood, his relationship with his brother and with his Abuela, his college days. He talks movies and sports and tv shows. He talks about the particle accelerator explosion, Ronni's double death, helping Barry after the coma. Lastly, he tells her about what they do every day, saving the city and even the world on some occasions.
She doesn't say a word, just stares at the roof of the cell.
And when she breaks out, and is nowhere to be found the following day, he's not at all surprised. Maybe that's because he sort of left her cell unlocked and told her that no one was going to be there besides the other prisoners. (Harry was in New York looking for Jessie.)
He'll deny his intentional involvement in her escape and blame it on his intoxication. No one will believe him. He won't care.
What surprises him is that later that night, when he goes home, he finds her in his kitchen, wearing one of his hoodies and making pasta. The sense of deja vu is so strong that he nearly loses consciousness. He keeps it together though, because he's afraid that if he faints, she won't be there when he wakes up.
When he asks her why she's here, she replies with an "I got hungry waiting for you" and a flip of her hair over her left shoulder.
They eat their dinner in silence. He washes the dishes and when he's done, she's still there, on the newly upgraded hammok that he has set between the only two trees he has in his backyard. He grabs a bottle of tequila, two shot glasses and climbs in besides her.
This time around, she speaks and he listens.
She tells him about how during a cruise with her friends, celebrating their college graduation, they hit a storm and the ship sunk, resulting in her getting stranded on an island in the Pacific Ocean all by herself. Or so she thought.
"Of all the hundreds of thousands islands out there I had to get marooned on the one that doubled as a US Military base, which majored in experimenting on people, trying to make the perfect super soldier," she joked, or tried to, but he could see the pain in her eyes and hear it in her voice.
Merely the thought of all the tortures she must have gone through, make his blood boil and have him wishing that he could travel through the universes so that he could find those people and make them pay for it all.
He should have been more surprised when she tells him that she was the only successful experiment. He's even less surprised when she tells him that she escaped after five years but the price she had to pay after they found her was too high.
He doesn't judge her when she shares with him some of the most horrible things that they made her do, under the threat of them hurting her family if she didn't comply. He understands completely as he did the same thing for Snart when he kidnapped him and his brother.
They jump over to a happier topic when she starts describing the feeling of traveling from one universe to the other, courtesy of Barry Allen traveling there. She had been on the same field as him and 'Supergirl' (Cisco has to admit that it's a pretty dope name), dropping off a microchip to some rich guy. She was driving away when she was sucked into the breach and transported to Earth one.
Being on her own in another world meant stealing a few things here and there to survive. But when she figured out that stealing money from rich guys who would still have enough money for their great-great-grandchildren to live luxuriously, and giving them to those less fortunate, was so much easier than on her Earth, she focused on that. The first thing she did was pay back all the convenience and clothing stores from which she had stolen at the beginning.
And because she has nothing to occupy her nights with, no friends to hang out with, she hits the streets every night, stopping teens from buying drugs and ruining their lives, women from being murdered by jealous men or kidnapped by sex trafficers, young boys from being raped. Sometimes, when she finds herself in a your-death-is-my-life kind of situation, she chooses to live, even though she would prefer not to, because she's too proud to die in a fight with a deadbeat thug who has never accomplished anything great in their life.
She tells him about how things work on Earth three and he tells her about how things work on Earth one and as the days go on, he gets the others to trust her a bit more and vice versa. Soon, she's out there kicking ass and saving the world with Barry (and Barry on occasions), singing karaoke with Caitlin (and going viral on YouTube because turns out she's a great singer), training Wally (who also has the speedforce now), beating Harry at chess (he's always asking her for a rematch because only Jessie has been able to beat him before), and binge-watching TV shows and movies with Cisco because "how else are you going to understand any of the movie and tv show references I make?" he tells her every time she feigns complaint.
Soon, she becomes nearly as an important part of the team as she is an important part of his life. However, it takes a lot of encouragement and insistence from Caitlin for him to finally ask her out on a date (It only lasts half an hour because Felicity calls, asking for their help and Barry takes them all one by one to Star City. The meeting between Team Arrow and Dinah is eventful, to say the least).
Then he's too busy figuring out how exactly his other new powers work to think about and plan another date. Thankfully, she isn't.
Ironically, they're busy saving the world (again), when he asks her to marry him. She says yes. Cisco is so happy , he almost asks the bad guys they're fighting to stop while he kisses her senseless. (He does that afterwards when everyone is safe and they're all by themselves.)
Hopefully that wasn't a mess but actually enjoyable.
Just a little something about two characters that I believe should have interacted more during their crossover episodes.
None of that is never going to happen on the TV show but a girl has to write some ideas on paper from time to time, to get them out of her head.
Until next time
~F