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The thing about winter that Helena has always loved was the quiet that came with snow. The almost unnatural hush accompanying snowfall was comforting. Peaceful. She appreciated the way it seemed to almost mute the world around her - and nowhere was that more welcome than when she visited Michael’s grave.
Michael loved winter. Loved Christmas and cold weather, loved seeing his breath steam in the air, loved to have a fire softly crackling while they burrowed in blankets. So it's comforting to visit him after a snowfall, when the cemetery is blanketed in white. This place of reverence even more somber and quiet, her breath curling out in tendrils of steam. It would make him happy - that's what she chooses to believe, has to, to dull the pain.
Helena supposes that with everything changed, if Oliver couldn’t - or didn’t think to - change the worst thing in her life, at least he didn’t take away the best things. There are some constants among the confusing haze of two different lives and the memories she’s still struggling to reconcile.
“Maybe I should pay Oliver a visit before we leave. I have a few choice words for him,” she exhales, words sharp and annoyed - and, more than anything, sad.
The woman beside her places a hand on her shoulder, gently squeezing. There’s an intimacy to it that her brain tells her she’s used to, but deep down her gut still knows it’s new, foreign, strange.
Not unwelcome though.
“Though maybe I’ll include a thank you in there, too,” she adds, looking over at the woman to her side, who is wearing a matching wedding band under the smooth, black gloves keeping her fingers warm. “It’s a surprise still. Waking up to you.” She reaches up, squeezing the hand on her shoulder, taking in the blonde hair, the sharper, older, wiser features. “Guess I wasn’t as subtle around you as I’d always thought.”
Laurel laughs - a light, gentle sound that reminds Helena of Michael. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Laurel has always reminded her of Michael, more than anyone else she’s known. “Maybe Oliver just saw something missing from our lives that we could give to the other.”
Snowflakes fall on her lashes, land on her golden hair, dust over her rosy cheeks only to melt away within seconds. She's beautiful.
Helena smiles, takes the hand from her shoulder and intertwines her fingers with her wife’s, let’s the unfamiliarity of that thought clash with how familiar this all strangely feels. She thinks Laurel might be onto something. Not that she thinks Oliver was the best people reader, but he picked up on things Helena often missed.
Or maybe he’d cared about her more than either of them had thought, even if giving into the itch between them had been a mistake.
Oliver was anger and adrenaline and danger and seeing something of herself that she wanted to know more intimately, wanted to feel validated, wanted to be seen. Oliver was just another bad decision among a slew of them, and maybe a little bit of self-hatred mingled in. He was all the things Michael had never been, and Helena had needed that at the time. Or least had thought so.
But that was another life, lost to the multiverse she’d only just learned about. Thanks to Oliver, she had a new one.
In this life, those memories are becoming more and more distant. In this life they never made that mistake, never set off that chain of events like flames chasing a trail of powder to a keg. In this life karma took her father out, left her with millions of money and nothing in closure. In this life, Helena used that inheritance to help fund CNRI and met the woman who’d become her wife and partner in fighting crime.
In this life, Laurel Lance didn’t die, and Helena didn’t fall so far she gave up trying to crawl her way back. In this life, The Huntress became something more than a murderer, and Black Canary wasn’t silenced by some asshole punishing her for other men’s choices.
“Yeah. Guess I really should say thank you before we leave,” she says before leaning in to kiss the woman she’d envied, threatened, resented, wanted in another life that she’s free of. A woman she’d grieved alone in prison when the news reached her that Laurel Lance had been killed, another bright light like Michael’s snuffed out because men wanted power and control.
A woman who in this new life, she’s married, works with, fights with, loves, who’s still there, flesh and pumping blood and breathing out hot puffs of air that curl into steam in the cold of winter.
Helena decides maybe she can forgive Oliver for not bringing Michael back. Maybe some things, as hard as they are to swallow, are meant to be.