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Helena smiled as her daughter walked through the door of their home in Gateway city, the girl just flying in from that tower of her and her friends that they stay at when in Jump City. She wondered if she would ever get quite used to the world that her daughter was living within now… the world that she had unintentionally dragged her into when the world of mythos became real, long before Superman had ever taken to the skies or Batman had prowled the streets.
Long before Wonder Woman had been more than a legend from World War II.
Helena had never known when she had met the King of the Greek gods that there lives would come to this, but she supposed that there were always worse lives to live. After all, Cassie has lived much longer than a lot of the heroes from the stories, and much more untouched by the death of those tales as well.
She just hoped that it might stay that way.
(She didn't know if her daughter could survive losing any of her friends in the way that those on the Justice League have.
She knew that she couldn't survive losing Cassie)
"Whatch'a doing?" Cassie asked as she walked through the kitchen door, finding her mom rooting around in the cabinets in a way that usually only happened at dinner when the older woman decided to cook around four ish, not at about three in the afternoon on Christmas Eve.
They liked the save the fancy meals for Christmas Day.
(If they even see each other on those days
More than once they haven't)
Helena didn't answer until she had pulled her head out of the fridge a few moments later.
"I was looking to see if we had the stuff to make cookies from scratch," the archeologist answered, making Cassie raise a brow at her mother's words. It was even less often that they did something like this with her mother's work being what it is.
"And do we?" The demigod asked skeptically, trying, and failing, to remember if they even had eggs in the fridge the last time that she looked in it.
Helena shook her head, held up one hand after the other as she spoke, showing off the things within them. "Nope," the woman confirmed, "but we do have a half roll of cookie dough, and that bag of M & Ms that you managed to hide from your speedster friend when he ran over here to drag you to the Tower yesterday."
"We weren't even meeting for another ten minutes," Cassie grumbled under her breath, loud enough for her mother to still hear all the same, "he just wanted to steal food."
The hero pretended that she didn't hear her mother laughing at that.
They both knew that it was true.
"M & M chocolate chip cookies?" Helena asked, trying to remember where they put the round stone cooking slab.
"M & M chocolate chip cookies," Cassie agreed, already ducking down to open one of the cabinets below the counter to pull the cooking stone out.
Helena smiled at the easiness of that as she made the small step or two to the oven and went ahead and preheated it to 350 before taking out a bowl and pouring last of the candies into it.
"How many of those do you think we can fit into a cookie before it's too much?" Cassie asked as she placed the stone down on top of the stove, looking between the cookie dough that was left and the amount of chocolate candies.
Helena took her own glance as well before answering. "Mess around and find out?"
Story of my life, more or less, the demigod couldn't help but think, knowing that it was the truth. Too much random shit happened for their life to be anything but.
"Why not?" She agreed all the same, cutting off a chunk of the cookie dough roll and smashing it together with a small handful of the the candies, rolling them together until they were in a small ball and placing it on the stone slab as her mother did the same.
Everything was peaceful for a while after that, the pair working together as Helena played Christmas music in the background. It was nice. It was rare that they got to be like this. Which was why Cassie hated it when her mind wandered as she looked down at the unbaked dough.
As she thought of just how easy it would be to slip some sort of meta grade poison into the cookies right then, to leave them out for the jolly guy to find that night. She knew that it wouldn't take much work at all. Make a laced batch and set them to the side where her mother wouldn't touch them, put them out at night. Maybe poison the milk too. Wouldn't even have to deal with a corpse on their hands, because that was exactly what they were after right then.
Easy.
Done.
"What are you thinking about so hard over there?" Helena asked as she looked at her daughter who hadn't moved for a solid minute or so, the M & Ms most likely bleeding red and green into her skin, along with the cookie dough melting slowly as her daughter held it.
"Nothing that I don't blame Robin for," Cassie answers, knowing that it was the truth.
You could get away with a lot of things in their world by blaming it on a bat, a super, or a speedster. They're usually one of the culprits.
… sometimes an Amazonian as well.
… or those broken out of government facilities.
The list truly did go on.
"Alright," Helena said, not quite sure what else to.
The time that passed after that was nice, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows as they waited for the cookies to bake, and then watching old Christmas movies and making spaghetti for dinner.
It was so nice that Helena almost didn't notice when Cassie snuck out of the house at the very dregs of Christmas Eve.
Almost.