Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cole has always known that people die. It’s an inevitability of his life—the sky is blue, water is wet, and everyone he has ever loved is a fucking corpse in the ground.

See, the thing about loss? It eats you alive. Cole thought, once, that he could outrun it. The same way he tries and tries and tries to outrun the guilt that eats him whole and tears out his heart but—

Loss is a thing with teeth. It’ll sooner tear his soul out than leave him with it and not even Pris could give it back to him if she tried. Cole has been around too long, lost too much for his fragile goddamn heart.

(He can hear his father in his ears, telling him that caring for others is a weakness. That he should only look out for himself. He wishes he’d listened, all those years ago. But Cole is his father’s son, only Cole could never remember the man’s reflection right and had turned it backwards until his father was a good man and not a cruel one.)

So Cole almost doesn’t care much that he’s staring down the barrel of a gun. It’s an odd thing, looking like something more out of a sci-fi novel or off an alien ship than anything from Earth. It’s not Kherubim though. Nor is it Daemonite. He’s seen more than enough off-world weaponry to know that this isn’t that.

“Mr. Cash, do you know what I have in my hands?” Cole didn’t even bother to remember the man’s name. Another nameless, faceless body on his next score.

“No,” Cole says flippantly. “And I don’t exactly care much. If you’re going to shoot me, I’m not exactly in the position to stop you, am I?” Cole tilts his head back, letting the barrel press against his chin.

Thing is? Despite everything—despite almost not caring—, Cole doesn’t really want to die. Zealot would kick him for taking it lying down and Max would try to strangle him. It’d be shit of him to spit on their graves, no matter how much it hurts to wake up some mornings.

The gunman frowns down at him, “I thought you’d had more fight than this. A pity, really, I thought my experiment was to be more exciting. You have quite the reputation, after all.”

Cole meets his eyes for only a second before kicking his leg out and knocking the man off his feet. He’s not very impressive. The fact that he managed to get a drop on Cole at all? It just shows how out of it he’s been. He’s better than this. Everyone who has ever trained him has made sure of it. Snipe, Zealot, Team 6. The list goes on and on.

Cole’s too good to get caught in a trap.

And yet, here he is. What does that say about him?

“Hasn’t anyone ever taught you to never let your guard down?” Cole asks the nameless man. He aims his VAD at him, set to stun rather than to kill. Either way, his babies hurt.

“Hasn’t anyone ever taught you to never leave your back exposed, Grifter?” asks a voice from behind him. “I guess you got to used to being a team act.”

He tenses, already knowing how this is going to go.

“Hands up,” the woman says. “Turn to face me. I want to get a good look at the famous Grifter before I kill him.”

Cole sighs, lifting his hands and turning slowly to face her. She’s pretty. Most women are to him. Her curtain of dark hair falls around her face, messy and wild. It only seems to intensify the almost feral look in her eyes.

“Look, lady, I don’t want trouble. I’ll get out of your hair. Even leave the money,” Cole promises. He doesn’t like his odds. Wonders, just for a second, if he should even try negotiating, before the images of Zealot and Max and Mike stutter through his mind like they’re on dying VHS film.

“I don’t care about money, Grifter,” she says. “Neither does my brother here.” She gestures behind him with her gun. The feral look never leaves her eyes. It’s as if she’s a hunter who has finally found her prey.

“You killed my father, Cole Cash,” she says.

And Cole—Cole can’t honestly say he didn’t. The things he did with I.O.? They haunt him, but he can’t remember every name, every face. Hell, half the time he was hopped up on experimental drugs he didn’t know the name of.

“Your Team 7, really,” she continues. “But you dealt the killing blow. Our father was a farmer who was caught up in one of your missions. Do you remember him, Cash? He was mowed down in a firefight.”

“I don’t,” Cole says honestly. “I’m sorry. What we did—”

“You were monsters. Puppets to your shadow government. You did not even think to do the right thing and take your own life,” she bites at him. “My father died because none of you were good men.”

It’s—it’s not as if Cole hasn’t thought the same things himself. He’s thought and thought and thought long and hard about his sins. Determined that living and doing good have to be atonement enough. They have to be.

But this woman thinks him a monster. And she isn’t wrong. Cole knows he’s done bad, but he tries to hope he’s done more good.

(Once, he’d feared his psionics making him a monster. He tried to ignore all the ways he already was. Tried to believe that all the innocents caught up in the I.O. were balanced by all the lives he’d saved. Thing is? He doesn’t think he was wrong. He’s saved more lives than he could ever count.)

“I’m sorry,” Cole says. He cannot say much else. He doesn’t want to die now, in spite of the monster he may have been. That he still might be.

“You will be,” she promises. “Now, you’ll let my brother tell you about his gun, won’t you? It is a lovely acquisition.”

Her brother has long moved to her side, his finger still snugly on the trigger of his gun. “I’m told this is supposed to vaporize the target on the spot, leaving no remains.” He says it as if he’s describing the weather. “Of course, if we had more time, we’d draw it out. But word on the street is you WildC.A.T.s are fiercely protective of each other and we’d rather not have anyone knocking down our walls.”

True, the WildC.A.T.s had been. When they were together, even when they seemed on the verge of falling apart, the team would pull through to get each other out of thick and thin. They all tried their best to keep each other somewhat safe. Because despite everything? They might’ve been as close to family as Cole has ever gotten, aside from Team 7.

“Say bye-bye, red,” the man says grimly. “We’ll tell your team that you’re in hell when they track us down.”

“Well,” Cole says, “I hear it’s nice this time of year. I’m not much for religion though, so you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t plan on going.”

In the next second, Cole lowers his gun and fires. It catches the man off-guard and knocks him off his feet. His sister cries out, her gun falling out of her hand and clattering to the floor with a sound that echoes throughout the cliché warehouse they’re in.

“You killed him,” she cries. She doesn’t even bother to check his pulse. Assumes the worst.

“He’s stunned,” Cole assures. He steps around them both, toward the door. “He’ll get up soon. Nothing that’ll hurt him permanently.”

He stops for a moment, turning back toward the woman. Her expression is teary and heartbroken. “Look. I’m sorry about your dad. I know what it’s like to lose a father. What I.O—what we did? It was fucked. The team all know it. There’s no excuse.”

She stares at him. “No, there isn’t,” she agrees. “Now leave, Grifter. I need to take care of my brother.”

Cole turns his back on her. And he shouldn’t have. That’s how they get you.

He feels the shot against his back and the world seems to flicker out of focus. It turns light and dark in turns.

“Give the devil my regards,” she says. “I hope you rot.”

The darkness finally settles in. Everything is dark, with nothing in sight, before color bursts back into life. But Cole isn’t awake long enough to take it all in. His sight goes dark again only seconds later.

Chapter Text

Waking up in strange alleys isn’t an oddity. Cole wishes he could say they were but his life has been enough of shitshow that he can’t really say they are. He’s even woken up with pounding headaches before. But they’re nothing compared to the way he only feels agony.

He feels like he just went a round with Maul. Or his dear old stepdad. That is to say: bruised all over.

Nonetheless, he sits his ass up and bites back the pain of even that movement. The alley looks like a normal alley. It tells him nothing. Memory flitters in and out and he cannot get a grasp on it. He thinks he can recall a gun, something alien looking, but not much else.

His memory has failed him before and it will again. All he can do is live with it and hope it comes back to him.

He pulls himself off the alley floor. The flaring pain in his head makes him actually cry out this time. Even he cannot help it, despite traveling half the country bleeding out being worse. It would be embarrassing, but after everything? He can’t muster it up. Embarrassment would mean he has a sense of shame and he’s spent too many nights drunk for that.

He presses his hand along the alley wall and shuffles forward, biting through the pain.

The bright lights of the city only makes the pounding in his head worse. He’s tempted to go back in the alley and sleep it off, but he knows that’s a bad idea. He needs to find out how he got here and why. Maybe beat the sense into the bastard that dragged him out here and—

Panic hits him. Frantically, he pats down his pockets, searching for the familiar and comforting weight of his VADs. They’re his and if they’re gone—

He sighs in relief when he finds them. Maybe it’s sad, but he finds comfort in them. No gun has ever felt the same in his hands. They’re made for him, one of the only things that have ever truly been his to have and keep.

“Fancy gun you got there,” a voice says from behind him.

Cole can’t move nearly as fast as he’d like to turn and face the voice. He comes face to face with a kid—kid, because he’s nineteen at best. The kid is wearing a domino mask, like the Green Lantern who’d come crashing through universal barriers. Cole doesn’t think he ever caught the Lantern’s name. Kevin, maybe? Though, he didn’t seem like a Kevin.

The kid is also wearing ridiculous spandex, the way too many of the heroes Cole knows does. Admittedly, the kid’s style is better than some of the people Cole knows. He wouldn’t be caught dead in Maul or Warblade’s get ups.

“Capes aren’t allowed in Gotham,” the kid says with narrowed eyes.

Cole tilts his head. Gotham. He’s heard that name before. It tugs at his thoughts. “Not a cape, kid,” Cole says, because he’s not. Cape implies a lot of things. Like heroism. Something Cole has never had.

Cole is a conman, a mercenary, a spy, a government agent. A lot of things. He’s no hero. He’s done too many bad things to ever claim to be one. He has too many regrets to think he could ever earn it.

The kid’s frown only deepens, his bow staff tapping quietly against the ground. “Are you my enemy, then?” the kid asks, probably more out of courtesy than anything.

“Enemy? Kid, I don’t even know who the hell you are,” Cole says. “Or where the hell Gotham is either. I woke up in the alley.”

The kid’s expression shifts to surprise for all of a second before dropping back into the hard look Cole has come to associate with practiced apathy. Zealot had worn it a lot, back when she was still… around.

“Where are you from?” the kid asks questions with practiced ease. Cole shudders to think how long the kid has been running around in spandex to get it. Cole has never been able to come to terms with the way children become soldiers.

It’s probably a byproduct of his own childhood. Of the hands that made Cole into the man he is today. He’s never forgotten the lessons his parents taught him.

“Chicago,” Cole answers without repentance, though he knows that isn’t what the kid is looking for.

The kid frowns, tilting his head like a bird as he stares at Cole. “I haven’t heard of any new masks popping up in Chicago. B likes to keep an eye on those things.”

“It’s a big world, kid,” Cole responds, wincing as he headache pulses in a particularly painful manner. “Now, if you don’t mind me, I’ve gotta find a place to nurse this killer headache. See you around. Or not.”

Cole turns away from the kid again, almost stumbling as the pain attempts to overwhelm him again.

He feels a hand on his arm. He tears it away from the kid, whipping around but resisting the urge to pull out his VAD and pistol-whip him.

“I can’t just let you wander around,” the kid says.

“Where are your parents?” Cole blurts out without thinking, like that would do anything. God, he sounds like one of those sitcom moms right now. The kind he’d sneak glances of on TV and imagine his mom would suddenly become. The kind that don’t let their husbands hit their kids.

The kid crosses his arms, staring at him. “You’re pathetic,” the kid decides after a moment of staring at Cole. Which is true, but wow. Ouch. He doesn’t even answer Cole’s question, the brat. “I can’t just let you wander around,” he repeats.

“Is this your way of offering to take me home, brat? Because you’re twelve,” Cole says, by way of rejection.

“Well, this twelve year old won’t be responsible for whatever trouble you cause,” the kid says, still decidedly not twelve but clearly not willing to take Cole’s bait.

Cole bites back a curse. Sometimes people really are too smart to fall for Cole’s shit and it’s always to Cole’s detriment. He’ll have to test the kid’s tolerance for bullshit on a later date.

Right now, Cole knows when he’s defeated. The next painful pulse of his head comes with more full-body pain, so he slumps and tries not to collapse on the disgusting looking concrete.

“Lead the way, birdie,” Cole says, closing his eyes to stave off the awful ache. “Can’t promise I’ll be quick, but I’ll be right behind you.”

The kid gives a light smile in self-satisfaction. “Don’t call me birdie,” he says. “I’m Red Robin.”