She is wild. A merciless force of nature, ruthless and unforgiving. She exists as flashes of darkest purple against the inky night sky. Impulsive and blood thirsty to the end, she will forever be the one to overstep boundaries and shatter moral guidelines.
Or at least that was who she used to be.
She has changed. No matter how much she denies it, how much she fights it, how much she wills herself to maim and cripple without hesitation, she finds that she just can't. Every time her finger tightens around her crossbow trigger she thinks of butterflies. Flitting through her consciousness, they send her down a rabbit hole of painful memories.
'Was he a man who had been dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a man?'
She tries in vain to suppress those memories and swoops off into the night, clinging onto her cracked and broken façade.
A lone figure sits on a rooftop two blocks away. Despite the glacial temperatures of Gotham in January, he has been on this rooftop between the hours of 12am and 3am for the past four weeks. Helena's patterns are more repetitive than she would ever care to admit.
People underestimate the amount of effort it takes to appear stoic and heartless. To stand by your moral compass and walk away as your entire being screams at you to turn around and go back to the damaged, worn down piece of perfection you'd come dangerously close to building a life with.
He'd made the choice to leave. He convinced himself that he could never love her, not with her staunch belief in omerta and the blood that seemed ingrained into her very soul. He'd left her behind, disgusted.
Now he watches from a distance. His trench coat pulled tight against the cold and his fedora pulled down low over his eyes, inexplicably not blowing away in the bitter wind. He tells himself that he can't explain why but deep down he knows.
'Take care of her, Richard. I kinda like her.'
'Of course you do, she's your other half.'
As flowing black hair that blends into flowing black cape disappears from his line of sight, Vic Sage gets up. There are things to do, people to see, questions to answer. He tells himself that this will be the last time; he will cease this indulgent behaviour and return to a semblance of his normal life- what it had been before all this happened. It's a somewhat comforting lie that will tide him over only until midnight, when he will find himself once again rooted to the same spot, straining for a glimpse of purple against the gloomy Gotham skyline.
She knows he watches her. There's a reason her corpse isn't one of the many which decorate the filthy gutters of Gotham's alleyways- observation is kind of a crucial skill when you regularly moonlight as a vigilante and she really isn't as idiotic and incompetent as the Batfamily make her out to be.
She has to admit that she isn't exactly sure when he started this but she likes to think that she caught on quickly. Now, she makes a concerted effort to return to that rooftop every evening for a glimpse of fedora and trench coat. He's so close but at the same time, the distance between seems impossible to reconcile.
Seeing him fills her with relief. It's like shedding a weight off her back every night.
He hasn't given up on her yet. He still believes she can be redeemed.
(He hasn't forgotten her yet. He still believes she can be loved.)
He'll give up on this soon. One night, she'll look over at that rooftop and he won't be there. He'll have cast aside whatever sentiment or love or god forbid responsibility, he ever felt towards her. She'll be nothing but a memory, to be remembered late at night as a cringe-worthy bad decision made by his more idiot and more naïve former self.
She knows she should cross that endless divide. Salvage the remnants of what had been and move on with both their lives, but it's messy and painful and heartbreaking. And she doesn't have the strength to go wading back into the past. Cassamento is dead and her uncle is in prison. Vic damned her and walked away.
'But you don't have much luck left.'
So night after night, that's what she does too. She turns her back to him and leaves.
Tonight is different. As usual, she's haunted by the eternal question of 'what if?' and finds herself magnetically drawn back to the rooftop, but it's been a bad day and a terrible night. She's been virtually unable to function. She thinks of butterflies and hears his voice.
'We've come to know the world through violence and rage… you can learn a lot from him… how to live'
She's been cursed with his kindness and his help and his healing. Haunted by his face and his stupid obsessions with butterflies, he's dogged her every move as the Huntress. She should be furious. He's compromised her ability to be ruthless and bloody and go further than Batman, to be what Gotham needed her to be.
She'd surrendered herself as the martyr, with the tar black soul while everyone else got off scot free with their morals intact. He changed everything. She should be angry, but instead she is just defeated.
She's standing near the edge of the rooftop, hair and cape billowing, in full blown clichéd vigilante silhouette mode. She hasn't looked over at him yet. She doesn't dare. Something feels wrong about tonight. She dreads looking, dreads the impact of solid reality that she knows will leave her feeling hollow and worthless for weeks.
In the end it's like ripping off a bandaid. She forces herself to look.
He's there.
The relief is a tidal wave. She is drowning in it. She is revelling in it. She knows it can't last much longer.
His smile is sad. The charade isn't fooling anyone anymore. The power is technically in his hands. He knows where she lives, which areas of Gotham she frequents, where she teaches.
But he'll be damned if he has to take both steps back to reconciliation. He's here every night, the silent sentry broadcasting a message louder than the omnipresent cacophony of blaring horns.
I'm still here. I still care.
It's immature and petty but he can't help it and being stubborn is a defining trait of his.
So he sits and he waits.
The next night there is a butterfly in a box on the spot he usually occupies. Apatura iris. It's dead, soaked in carbolic acid and pressed between two panes of glass. It's beautiful in the most heartbreaking way possible. The purple pigment of its wings is achingly familiar. The painted on eyes, tucked down in the bottommost corner of the lower wings make it look fiercer, tougher, angrier. Beautiful but forever still. Trapped forever between two frames of glass, beneath a frame. Dead.
The message is loud and clear.
The next night, he doesn't go back.
1. This is heavily based on happenings from Batman: Cry for blood. Some quotes are lifted directly from it. Read it if you haven't (it's amazing).
2. My reading of comics is inconsistent and I'm pretty sure this fic doesn't fit at all into continuity for Vic or Helena but hey, it's fanfiction.
3. Apatura iris (the Purple Emperor) is a real butterfly. Its colouring matches the violet of Huntress' later costume (with the white cross on her chest) more than the mulberry purple/maroon of her costume in Cry for blood. This is pretty much because I like the later costume a lot more and it's what I associate with Huntress, having first seen her in that costume in the animated series. (Also by the time I realised my mistake I'd already spent a stupid amount of time googling purple butterflies.)