Hello everyone!
Timing-wise, this probably would have been a better thing to post for the week leading up to Christmas day, however, the idea and the various mini-plots I have for this didn't strike me until just today, so I'll just have to settle for this being in the last week of December.
I will be posting seven different Christmas/holiday themed short stories for this final week of December, the first six of which will have a serious and sometimes dark edge to them, and each one will focus on one character of the main team in particular. The final seventh story will be more light and happy to ease heavy hearts from the first six one-shots.
Disclaimer: I of course don't own Young Justice.
Some SuperMartian in this part, and I should point out that there'll be different pairings for each oneshot, some of which might be slash, or in some cases, no pairings at all.
And without further ado, here's the first oneshot.
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Conner – Let It Snow
He supposed that he should at least consider himself lucky that it was a cold winter at Happy Harbor, and in the Northeast of the country for that matter as well, otherwise he'd likely be stuck in a freezer until the League found some kind of counter-spell, and that was too much like being back in a pod for his liking. He could do without all the snow though, as much as it helped. He was quickly finding himself growing sick of it.
"It's not the weirdest problem we've ever faced, but it's definitely in the top five," Wally commented, poking Conner in the side, and let out a flustered squawk when his finger sunk a little bit too deep into the compacted snow. He disappeared in a blur and reappeared a second later with a handful of fresh snow from outside, quickly but carefully packing the frozen crystals over the indent in the clone's side.
"I think it's kind of..." M'gann trailed off, and then finished with a smile, "Cool."
She giggled, and it warmed Conner's heart...
In the figurative sense, as he was very much the equivalent of a living snowman.
.
.
His teammates blasted the AC at Mount Justice, turned it into a verifiable icebox.
They endured cold noses and wearing thick, warm jackets inside – their breaths forming small cloudy puffs in the air – all so that he was comfortable, all so that he didn't have to constantly stay outside in the snowbanks.
He couldn't have asked for better friends.
.
.
They joked about it at first – Wally had wrapped a red and green scarf around his neck at one point and between the speedster, Robin, and Artemis, one of them was always offering him a carrot for some reason. It was just such a strange situation, him being made of snow, and how else were they suppose to react to it?
Except snow was weak. Snow could melt and even crumble from something as simple as him trying to open the fridge door.
And suddenly it wasn't funny anymore and they could only wait and wonder what was taking the League so long with finding a cure.
.
.
He stood off the the side and watched them spar. Training was out of the question for him, because he couldn't take a hit, because he was too... fragile.
Icy lips curled up into a sneer.
"I have a different sort of training for you," Black Canary said, drawing him out of his thoughts. "A test of strength."
Except it was different than the usual tests in strength. Whereas before, the consequences could mean him hurting someone else, now it could only mean harming himself, because if he punched the wall in a fit of rage, he could crumble his hand into nothing, and if he clumsily ran into the edge of a counter, rather than break the counter as he had before, he could accidentally cleave a gash into his side.
It was a sort of grace he'd never needed to know before, a kind of lightness on his feet, and moving as gently and as carefully as he could.
.
.
There was an emerald dusting to her cold cheeks and her eyes glimmered in the moonlight. He was standing in snow that came up past his knees, down near the base of the mountain, and she was hovering just nearby, not wanting to further disturb the freshly fallen blanket of white.
"Your eyes are still blue," she said quietly, hovering closer, "even though the rest of you is pure white, they're still very blue."
Her gloves melted away, exposing green fingers, and she reached down and grabbed handfuls of snow off the ground. Her eyes never leaving his, with a soft touch, she patted the snow against his sides, his arms, his chest. Smoothing over rough edges – nicks and dents he had gotten over the past several days from just moving around the mountain, from just trying to live while in this current form.
He stood, well, frozen in place under her ministrations, not really knowing what to do or say – the right way to react, because he liked her touch and if he did the wrong thing, she might stop.
She did stop eventually, her hands resting on his snowy shoulders, and there was a brief silence between them that wasn't at all awkward like in all of those movies that she liked to watch so much.
Then she leaned in close, her head lowering down to his neck, and her warm breath ghosting over him sent a small shiver up his spine.
And with one quick swipe of her tongue, she licked up the side of his neck.
He blinked as she drew back with a small laugh, light and airy, and an apologetic look on her face.
"Sorry, I just... have been wanting to do that since day one of this whole thing," she explained sheepishly, hugging her arms a bit tighter around herself as she drifted further away, "That was... that was weird, right?"
He pulled her down into a kiss.
.
.
The glow faded from Kaldur's water bearers as the Atlantean lowered them to his sides, and they all breathed a sigh of relief that their leader's reaction time had been so swift – all except for M'gann, who had tears streaming down her face.
Conner frowned. He didn't like it when she cried.
"I'm sorry," she said, "I'm so, so sorry!"
The hot cooking pot lay steaming on the ground in a puddle of once boiling water and cooked spaghetti noodles.
And Conner's left arm from the elbow down to his wrist was solid ice – having been reformed and frozen thanks to Kaldur's quick water work after it had been completely melted away.
"I just– just lost my concentration and I didn't see you there," she babbled tearfully, "And I'm so sorry! This is all my fault!"
"It's alright," he tried to tell her, but she was all too aware that he couldn't move his left hand at all now, and when he reached out to her, she just shook her head and quickly flew away, off down the halls to who knows where.
He stood there dumbly, not knowing what to do, what he could say.
Artemis patted a hand on his shoulder – gently – and offered him a half-hearted smile, "I'll go talk to her," and then disappeared from the kitchen as well.
.
.
The snow could be re-packed, could fill in the dings and dents and make him whole again.
But what about when summer came?
And what if there was nothing left to pack fresh snow on to?
.
.
They had small missions that winter, missions he had to sit out of, because what if the villain hit too hard? What then?
It had to happen eventually though.
A dangerous mission where he just couldn't stand on the sidelines any longer while his friends were hurt. He could have called for back-up, he realized that now, but in the heat of the moment when the ones he cared about were in danger, he just didn't think about it, was too busy hopping a zeta-beam to the mission site, and by the time the thought did occur to him, he knew there wasn't enough time to waste waiting for anyone else to show up.
Water puddled about his feet, running off of him in rivulets, and how ridiculous was it that his kryptonite now was central heating?
He pushed himself to keep moving forward though, despite the weakness he felt, despite his body growing thinner – because they were hurting, because she was hurting.
Snow crumbled off him in clumps as he shouldered his way through door after door to where they were being held. He was aware of her finding his mind, latching onto it and saying "No, no, turn back, it's too dangerous!"
She gave him a wide-eyed look of horror when he burst onto the scene, fear for his life, for his safety burning in her eyes, but he didn't care about himself, he only cared about them, about her, about the cage holding them in the center of the warehouse floor, about the blood covering them all, Wally and Robin on the ground not moving, and Kaldur, Artemis, and M'gann barely able to sit up.
And then Bane was there with a booming laugh, " –really think you're a match for me, Snow White?"
A first plowed straight through Conner's chest, but there were no organs there, just snow, and even though things got a little fuzzy around the edges, he was otherwise unfazed and struck back with a solid hand of ice, not caring about the way fingers chipped off from the strike, and he kept hitting until Bane stumbled back and fell to one knee, and his hand was gone by that point – nothing but a jagged edge.
It wasn't the hero way.
It wasn't what Superman would do.
But he wasn't Superman, and his friends were in trouble.
He stabbed out, blood slicking the ice and staining white snow red, and then Bane was down for the count. Not dead, because at the very least, he cared about what his friends thought, and he didn't want them to see him as a killer, but the man was injured enough.
From there, it was a lot easier. Dodging around henchmen grunts, not about to waste the time and energy. He retrieved his teammate's confiscated weapons – Kaldur's water bearers, Robin's belt, Artemis' bow and arrow – and slid it all through the bars of the cage, because at least if they had that, they had a fighting chance.
Per his instruction, Kaldur used the water on the ground, water that had been melting off of him, to cut through the lock to the cage. The action clearly didn't sit right with the Atlantean, but got the job done all the same, and Conner was grateful to see that Robin and Wally were beginning to come around at this point too.
He swept M'gann up into icy, wet arms – could feel her fingers sinking into the melting snow of his back as she pressed closed eyes against his shoulder and quietly scolded him for putting himself in so much danger. Around them, Artemis and Kaldur fought off the henchmen and Robin and Wally struggled to rise to their feet.
And then there was a click noise off to the side. Blue eyes snapped over to see not another henchman, but a villain, one he recognized as being from Gotham.
A team-up with Bane.
Firefly raised his flamethrower, and Conner realized that he wasn't the only one weak against such an attack.
He pushed M'gann out of the way.
He could hear her scream his name as flames consumed his vision, eating up the sight of Kaldur raising his water bearers in his direction.
Too late to matter though.
He'd forgotten what heat like this felt like.
.
.
All snow has to melt away at some point.
.
.
That's all for part one and Conner's story.
I feel I should point out that each oneshot is unrelated to the other.
Here's hoping that I can get the rest of these out this week.
As always, reviews are love, so let me know what you think.