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The smell is what hits her first. The smell and the rain.
Rose Wilson grits her teeth as her face is planted on the road, her nostrils flaring even as the hands holding her—impossibly strong hands, with impossibly strong grips—force her mouth open and place her upper jaw over the rim of the curb. She had never noticed it before, but wet concrete had a faint smell to it—a kind of moist, dusty odor noticeable only thanks to her enhanced senses and current proximity to the material. It wasn’t a nice smell. Definitely not the kind of thing you wanted in your nostrils before you died.
She struggles, more for the sake of struggling than for any real hope at escaping, but the hands hold her there, tightly, their inhuman strength making it impossible for her to turn her face or even close her mouth in the same way the ropes wrapped around her wrists and ankles made it impossible to move. In the darkest corners of her mind, Rose feels glad. They had made her watch videos of heroes being executed via the electric chair without a sponge to direct the electricity, and while it hadn’t come close to breaking the white-haired ex-mercenary, it had reduced her resistance somewhat. Watching people be cooked alive for the crime of fighting for a movement you helped start was never gonna be fun for anyone, no matter how tough they were. At least this way it would be quick.
She could content herself with that.
Maybe she’d be a martyr, she thinks suddenly, finding herself not entirely opposed to the idea. She’d feared dying without anyone who actually gave a shit about her, but maybe it was in death that she’d find acceptance. She can almost see it, in that moment: crowds of people chanting her name as they tore the Tower down, waving orange and black banners with her skull-and-crossbones logo on them as they marched through the streets of San Francisco. It’s a nice image, and she lets herself indulge in the fantasy for a moment before the sharp mental reminder that she wouldn’t be around to see it spoils her sudden good mood.
Whatever, she thinks, scoffing at her own mind. I didn’t do this be a martyr anyway.
“If you’re going to kill me, then get on with it already,” she snarls into the concrete, feeling a sudden bitterness roil up in her stomach. For once, she’d done nothing to deserve this, absolutely nothing. All she’d wanted was love. Family. Someone who cared for her.
And instead, she got her.
“Someone’s getting ahead of themselves,” comes the smug, amused voice of Cassandra Sandsmark. Rose hears footsteps to her left as someone walks around her before they suddenly stop right in her blindspot, and Rose knows for a fact that she’s standing there on purpose. She knows Rose hates it when people talk to her from the side she can’t see. She knows, and she’s doing it anyway, because she’s that special kind of vicious bitch that gets off on doing things like that to people who had trusted her. “And here I thought you were supposed to be smart, Rose.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” she demands, trying unsuccessfully to turn her head so she might look at the woman who tore the country apart and stomped on its remains for good measure.
“It means I’m not going to kill you,” she says, and Rose doesn’t believe her until she hears the creak of fabric as she crouches down and feels the softness of her skin as she threads her fingers into her hair. “Oh, don’t pout at me like that. We both know you’re more useful to me alive, Rose.” There’s a pause, and Rose can hear the smile in Cassie’s suddenly husky voice as she gently lifts a few strands of Rose’s hair to her face and inhales deeply, letting out a content sigh a moment after that makes all the hairs on Rose’s arms stand on end. “A lot more useful.”
“You’re insane,” Rose growls, trying to pull her head away. “You can’t really believe I’d join you after everything you’ve done.”
Instead of responding, the new Wonder Woman takes another long sniff of Rose’s hair, ignoring the way Rose tries to move away at the invasive action. “Hera, I’ve missed you. Can you believe I lost the last of your old shirts during the earthquake a year ago? I swear, it’s like the universe doesn’t want me to have anything to remember you by.” She moves in closer, her breath tickling the strip of skin between Rose’s ear and her neck. “It’s been hell for me since I lost you. I want you to know that.”
“You didn’t ‘lose’ me,” Rose sneers, incensed by the presumption. “I left your sorry ass because of what you did!”
That does it. Rose lets out a pained grunt as a boot connects with her stomach, but she is kept in place by the hands holding her. “And now you’re gonna pay for it!” Cassie snarls in her ear, suddenly frothing at the mouth, so hysterical her spit is hitting Rose in the face with every word she says. “I-I can’t believe you—my mom, Donna, Diana, Kara, Cissie, Greta, Anita, all lost to me on the same damn day with no time to mourn them… drowning in stress and responsibilities for months and months without a word of help from you, and you’re b-bragging about the fact that you left me when I needed you the most even even though we were together!?? Bragging?!”
Rose doesn’t know who half those people are, but she doesn’t particularly care. “Oh, quit whining,” she sneers, voice scathing. “You’re not the only one who lost people in the crisis… and after what you did, you’re lucky I didn’t break Regulator out of jail and slice the lot of you to ribbons on my way out.”
For a moment, Rose thinks Cassie really will kill her, before she hears her take a deep breath and move back. “You can survive a broken neck thanks to your healing factor.” Her voice is utterly toneless, and something about it suddenly impresses upon Rose the true severity of the situation. “But it won’t be pleasant, and we won’t give you any medical aid. You’ll be in agony for weeks, unable to move, unable to feel the neck, unable to do anything but wallow in the consequences of your actions for as long as it takes for your body to heal itself. And I’ll do everything I can to make it even worse.” Rose hears footsteps, and suddenly Cassie is behind her, and Rose’s heart is beating hard in her chest. “You made my life a living hell, Rose. Now it’s my turn to return the favor.”
“I’d rather die,” Rose replies, and it’s not so much a challenging cry as it as a plea to the girl who had once loved her. “You don’t have to do this. Just kill me. I’d rather die.”
“Too bad that’s not up to you,” she says, and Rose can sense there’ll be no mercy from the golden-haired demigoddess. “But don’t fear… after your punishment is over, I’ll extend my offer again. Maybe then you’ll reconsider what you said about joining us.”
Rose thinks for a moment about saying something final and martyr-ish, like “The East Dies Free”, but she hadn’t done this to be a martyr, and she had never been the type to believe in the slogans.
“Go to hell,” she says instead, and she hears the crunch long before she feels it.
———
Rose’s eyes shoot open, and she sits up, panting hard, her heart running a mile a minute.
“So? What is it?” She hears someone ask, and her heart beats two more times before she recognizes the voice as Tim’s. “What’s in store for us, Rose? What did you see?”
She barely hears him over the sudden ringing in her ears. “Cassie.”
“What was that?” someone asks, louder than Tim had. He—Bart, she realizes—reaches out as if to grab her shoulder, but thinks better of it halfway and lets his hand drop. “Rose, you’re whispering. What did you just say?”
“Cassie,” she murmurs again, blinking several times in an effort to banish the strange spots floating over her gaze. “Cassie.”
“Did she just say…?”
“She did,” another voice says, and there’s movement, and suddenly Cassie’s face is right in front of her. “It’s okay. Whatever you saw in the future, we can deal with it as a team. As long as we stick together, there’s nothing we…”
The ringing in her ears gets louder, and Rose brushes aside the piles of empty epinephrine inhalers laid out on the cot and gets her feet under her, managing three steps before she has to fall on the wall, and then Cassie’s hand is on her shoulder, and she tenses, and the world lurches to the side, and her vision crystallizes, and Rose can breathe again, and…
“Easy.” Cassie sounds confused, but stern, insistent, terribly similar and not at all like the golden-haired apparition she can still hear in the back of her mind. “You’re disoriented. Whatever you saw in the future, we have time to…”
“You wanna lose that hand?” Rose sneers, the sound of her own voice chasing the shadows at the edges of her vision away enough for her to remember she doesn’t like being touched.
“Do I wanna…”
Rose moves, and Cassie’s suddenly against the wall, and people are crying out and grabbing at her, but Rose can’t see them, can’t hear them, can’t remember they exist in any way, and the shadows dance and a god laughs and it smells like wet concrete and everything is happening too fast, always too fast, and she doesn’t know who she is, who she was, who she will be, but she remembers the word ‘together’ and knows it cannot happen, knows it cannot be allowed to happen, so she presses her arm against Cassie’s throat and snarls, or whispers, or sneers, or moans, or grunts, or growls, or breathes—she isn’t sure which—in her face. “Don’t ever touch me without my permission, wonder bitch.” Her lip curls. “As a matter of fact, don’t ever lay a hand on me again.”
The words exit her mouth and then she’s out the hallway and futures keeps flashing before her eyes and they won’t stop and the world spins and she can’t breathe and someone keeps laughing at her and she’s not sure why and her father screams and screams and screams and there’s a needle in her arm and then in her neck and then she’s bleeding from her eye, from just beneath it, from just above it, and there’s a crunch, and then two, and then three, and then cheering, and fire, and people die, and the wall collapses inwards, and then none of these things happen and she’s left just standing in the hallway, alone save for the ringing in her ears.