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A lesser woman would have greeted Barbara Ann Minerva (also known as the supervillainess Cheetah) with "How was your date?" the moment she stepped through the door.
Jade Nguyen (also known as the supervillainess Cheshire) didn't.
In part because she knew that she probably wouldn't like the answer.
If Barbara's interactions with her nemesis/rival/who the f**k knew how to properly describe whatever weird shit was constantly going down between the two of them, Diana of Themyscira, had gone the way that Jade had expected it to, she would have already known.
She'd been watching the news, constantly expecting that at any moment boring reports on weather, the stock market, or whatever else they were babbling about would be interrupted by breathless coverage of the latest battle between Cheetah and Wonder Woman, one doubtlessly more destructive than any of their previous confrontations given that Barbara had recently absorbed the divine power of Urzkartaga.
It should have happened… Jade felt certain of that in her heart of hearts, except somehow, it hadn't.
With Barbara having returned to Jade's home, it was evident that the battle of divine proportions was not only simply mildly delayed but actively postponed, leaving Cheshire feeling extremely confused as she tried to determine why her predicted pandemonium hadn't come to pass.
As if that wasn't strange enough, there was a new expression on Barbara Ann Minerva's face that Jade hadn't seen before. Cheshire had seen Cheetah looking: angry, hungry, upset, wrathful, smug, superior, condescending, and sad, but right now, it was as if the other woman looked… happy?
That couldn't be right.
Supervillains didn't get to be happy. If supervillains were fundamentally happy people, they wouldn't have felt the need to resort to supervillainy in the first place. Supervillains were broken people beset by all manner of tragedies and various forms of mental illnesses that left them incapable of following society's rules.
Jade didn't consider herself an exception to that description, though she did hate how the DSM had changed her relevant diagnoses to "Anti-Social Personality Disorder". To her ears, that sounded like someone who didn't like to leave their home or always acted like a wallflower at parties; "Sociopath" was a diagnosis with some bite to it, the kind of thing that would send shivers up a person’s spine.
So, why was Barbara Ann Minerva looking happy when that should have been a categorical impossibility?
"How was your date, B.A.?" Alas, Jade's daughter Lian Harper lacked her mother's sense of restraint and decorum.
Barbara made her way over to the couch Lian was sitting on and gently ruffled the young girl's hair.
"Pretty good, Slick. She either somehow didn't see through my disguise or she didn't care. Either way, she invited ‘Dr. Elizabeth Juno’ back next week for a chance to play Aletheia together." Barbara announced, her vocal tones having changed every bit as much as her facial expressions.
"Al-eth-e-ia?" Jade awkwardly sounded out the unfamiliar word.
"It's a board game from Paradise Island, she taught it to me before… things changed. We used to play it together for hours." Cheetah’s answer leaves Jade shuddering in revulsion.
The way that Barbara says the word "hours" sounds like how Jade imagined incredibly rich people would describe the length of time they'd spent eating caviar off one another's naked bodies.
"It's going to be a trap. You show up, and the entire Justice League is going to jump you." Jade predicted.
"You think I didn't realize that?" Barbara snapped back, her eyes somehow managing to briefly blaze orange despite the color-changing contacts she was wearing.
"I know it could be a trap, but Diana made the offer to me. She's not just a superheroine, she's an ambassador, a bringer of peace, the Spirit of Truth..." Barbara insists, her voice sounding pathetically hopeful.
"B.A., your precious 'Spirit of Truth' has lied to you before, remember Bwunda? That's how this entire mess started!" Jade tried desperately to warn her friend before she ended up repeating one of her previous mistakes all over again.
"Jade, now that I don't have Urzkartaga's hunger screwing with my head, I've thought it over, did some research, and ran some numbers..." Barbara insisted.
"What numbers are you talking about?" Jade demanded, unsure of how there could possibly be "numbers" that justified the Amazon Princess’ actions.
"On the average day, Wonder Woman has to stop roughly three crimes and or disasters. During my expedition to Bwunda, she was dealing with at least a dozen each day. I'm not talking about 'rescuing cats from trees' either. Oil refineries exploding, planes crashing, every bridge in Portland going up and down completely at random. Tabling the issue of why exactly so many things were suddenly going wrong all at once, though I will be looking into it later… knowing what she was dealing with helps me better understand why she made the choices she did.
"There's a line from a fantasy series I read growing up… 'Personal is not the same as important.' I was personal to her, but a crashing plane, with over a hundred people on board, that was important.
"Besides, in the end, she did come for me. Not as soon as I would have liked, not soon enough to save me from Urzkartaga, but she came. Maybe if I'd just handled things with a little more grace and tact, not tried to both figuratively and literally bite her head off first chance I got..." Barbara simply stopped talking at that point, her artificially blue eyes now rather obviously "looking" at things she considered more important than the room’s occupants.
"B.A., B.A., Earth to B.A! You've got to snap out of this before it's too late! Since you're a full on god now, rather than try to fight you directly, she probably went to Olympus and got some weird magical perfume from Venus that would make you fall in love with her!" Jade warned her fellow supervillainess.
"Venus is the Roman goddess; you mean Aphrodite," Barbara noted dryly.
"Seriously?!" Jade spluttered while slapping a hand against her forehead in exasperation.
"Am I supposed to apologize for being correct? You’re just lucky she eventually got brought back to life after I killed her, or else I would also needed to point out that her child Atlantiades was currently serving as the official Greek goddess of love." Barbara explained, clearly unaware that deicide was not the kind of topic you could just drop into the middle of an otherwise normal conversation.
Jade tilted her head to the side slightly and said nothing.
"Look, it wasn't exactly my proudest moment..." Barbara began, as if the morality of the act was what Jade found so outrageous about this particular discussion.
"You already gotten your hand scorched touching that particular stove… so now that you're finally out of the burn ward, why have you decided that it might be a good idea to try french kissing it instead?" Jade groaned in exasperation.
"Mom, don't be mean, I think it's sweet that Barbara wants to give Diana another chance." Jade’s daughter cooed.
"Lian, I hate to break it to you, but I think your father and I have given you unrealistic expectations about what interactions between a superhero and a supervillain look like. Sometimes people just hate each other." Jade insisted.
"Even you don't believe that I just hate Diana." Barbara hissed at the black-haired supervillainess.
Jade opened her mouth, but couldn't think of any way to refute Cheetah's comment.
She was going to have to do something about this, but clearly neither of these two would be of any use to her.
XXX XXX XXX
Roy Harper's green eyes shoot wide open as he's suddenly roused from slumber.
He can vaguely make out a mass of green and black in front of him, but before his vision can clear, he hears a familiar voice in his ears.
"Go back to sleep, Roy." Whispers Jade Nguyen.
Then he notices that there's a slight twinge of pain from his left cheek… and a sense of overwhelming weakness spreading outwards from it.
His eyes grow heavy, and he collapses unconscious.
XXX XXX XXX
Roy Harper woke up again.
He's no longer lying in his bed; now he's seated in a chair in his kitchen, with his arms and legs bound by ropes. As if that wasn't bad enough, the sensation that awakened him is Jade using her left pinkie finger to slice a small cut in his opposite cheek.
Not good.
"So… what did you just poison me with this time?" Roy did his best to keep his tone conversational while desperately trying not to imagine all the exploded rat corpses that the Watchtower’s janitorial staff had needed to deal with recently.
"Roy, if I wanted you dead, you wouldn't have woken up. Don't worry, that was just my newest mixture, 'A Brief History of Time'. It prevents all voluntary muscle movement below the neck and the dose I gave you should last for roughly an hour."
Sure enough, even as Jade talked, Arsenal could feel a sense of numbness spread across his body, but this time around his thoughts remained clear.
This was, once again, to put it mildly, not good.
Alas, Roy's options were rather limited, while he liked to think of himself as an extremely skillful superhero… escaping his bonds and subduing Cheshire with only his teeth was unquestionably more than he was capable of.
"If you're not going to kill me, what are you here for?" Roy inquired, trying to keep his tone far more polite than the situation genuinely called for.
"I wanted to talk." Jade insisted, planting her hands on her hips for emphasis.
"You know, normal couples can talk with each other without feeling the need to commit half a dozen different crimes first."
"We're not a normal couple." Jade simply shrugs, as if she doesn't care.
Roy is well acquainted with the fact that Jade Nguyen is very good at not caring about things, or people for that matter.
"Since I rather obviously don't have much of a choice in the matter, what exactly did you want to talk about?" This situation is far from ideal, but his and Jade's… is "relationship" even the right word for it?
Whatever the two of them are currently entangled in, it's always been far from ideal.
"I want to talk about Wonder Woman." Jade's proclamation leaves Roy blinking in stupefied surprise (it probably doesn't help that it's still some ungodly early hour in the morning) as he tries to make sense of why Cheshire might be suddenly interested in the Amazon Princess.
"Is someone hiring you to target her?" He eventually asks, as Jade wanting to extract information from a Justice League member she's familiar with in preparation for attacking the superheroine does make a certain twisted sort of sense.
"No. I need you to talk about Wonder Woman because of Cheetah." Jade clarifies.
"You two really need to stop working together." Roy groans; if he could move his arms, he'd be holding one to his forehead in exasperation.
"Leaving aside how I don't think a superhero has my best interests at heart when it comes to determining who I do and don't team up with as a supervillainess… why do you think I should stop working with her?" Jade crossed her arms disdainfully.
"Because I'm not exactly over the moon about how, thanks to you, our daughter is now well enough acquainted with a cannibalistic supervillainess to have acquired a nickname from her. Especially not when the supervillainess in question is so powerful that she has around a 25% chance of taking Superman in a fight." Roy admitted.
Jade's green eyes were suddenly alight with anger.
"Seriously? You of all people? Why are all you superheroes like this? First of all, a week ago, it was probably more like a 35% chance; these days, it's a lot higher. Secondly, B.A. isn't some mindless monster. You want to say that I'm a bad person because I kill people for money? Fair enough. But you know what Barbara Ann Minerva is? A woman with an addiction. I'd figure you of all people would be able to understand that."
Roy winced.
Not that Jade was willing to let the matter drop there either.
She advanced on him and placed her hands atop his wrists, though he could barely feel the added weight through the haze of numbness that her chemicals had inflicted on his limbs.
"Oh, and why don't we talk about how she got that addiction?" Cheshire added, her eyes not so much shooting daggers as full-on swords.
"She used to be a respected archeologist until she ran into some weird god who cursed her with a hunger for human flesh. Tell me, Roy, did some Afghan god of poppy flowers decide to lay a mystical curse on you… Or did you drive the needle into your own arm?" Jade taunted him.
And there it was.
It hurt, but pretty much everything involving Cheshire ended up hurting Roy one way or another; the toxins she'd just scratched him with weren't the only reason he'd started growing numb to the pain.
"I've been clean for a long time now." Roy glowered back at Jade.
"Well, B.A.'s finally gotten clean herself. So, if she ever presented a danger to Lian in the past, she doesn't anymore. Or to me, for that matter, though I probably don't rank very high on the list of people you care about." Jade reflected.
"You don't exactly make yourself an easy person to care about." Roy couldn't help but admit.
"Yeah, I don't." Cheshire sighed.
Whatever the Jade's other faults, at least she typically faced her flaws with blunt honesty rather than attempting to present herself as a put-upon innocent or merely a victim of circumstance. It's not much of a virtue, but it was better than nothing.
"Why do you expect me to know anything useful about Wonder Woman? She is an Amazon Princess with divine blessings, I'm some guy with a bow and arrow, she operates out of Gateway City, I'm in Star City. Yeah, we team up once in a blue moon as Justice League members, but we're work acquaintances at best. If you wanted to learn more about her, why are you doing this to me and not one of her three different sidekicks?" Roy asks, maybe just a little smugly.
"I hate dealing with Amazons. Can never get the dosages right for my poisons, and because I can never get the dosages right, I don't get enough chances to practice, which is exactly what I’d need to figure out how to adjust the dosages…" Cheshire huffed while shaking her head in exasperation.
"Sounds like a real catch-22." Roy chuckled.
"It is." Cheshire had either missed or chosen not to acknowledge the sardonic nature of his comment.
"Well, since I'm already here, and I'm obviously not going anywhere until your poison wears off, you might as well ask just on the off chance that I can answer." Roy offers.
"Does she actually love Barbara Ann Minerva?" Arsenal is honestly a little surprised that Jade hadn't forced him to take a big sip of water before asking that question, just so she could watch him half choke on it while spraying the rest of it clear across the room.
"How do you expect me to know that?" Roy demands.
"I don't, but I figured there was at least a chance, so I decided to play the odds." Jade was always a… unique conversation partner, but even compared to their past interactions, this one was pretty far out there.
"All I can be sure of right now is that to me it sure seems like the Amazon Princess doesn't. Because if she did, it wouldn't have been up to me to help B.A. get her hands on that plant she needed to kill Urzkartaga. It was already in the Watchtower, Wonder Woman could have handed it over any time she wanted, but she never did; we had to break in and steal it from you! Barbara was in trouble, and Wonder Woman is a superheroine; isn't it her job to help people in trouble?" The venom that emerged from Cheshire’s lips was far more metaphorical than normal, but no less potent.
"Didn't she already help her? From what I remember hearing, Diana once managed to lift the Cheetah curse, and then in no time flat Barbara brought it back on herself all over again." Roy countered.
"Oh, I, as a supervillainess, am clearly unfamiliar with this 'you only get one' clause to being a superhero. If you save someone's life from a car crash on Monday but then see their house is burning down on Tuesday, you get to tell them 'Hey, I helped you the first time around, figure this one out yourself'? If she really cared about Barbara as a friend, let alone loved her, then she'd keep helping her no matter how many times she needed it! The way you keep trying to help me, even though it's never going to make a difference because there's no fantastical flora that I could kill to suddenly stop being a sociopath!" Jade seemed torn between between appreciative and scornful of his efforts.
"And why does it matter to you who exactly Diana does and doesn't love?" Roy pressed.
"As I said before, Barbara Ann Minerva used to be a decent, normal person, something I never had a chance at being. But then Wonder Woman broke her heart, and she became a supervillainess. Right now, she has the power of a god. If that Amazon Princess breaks her heart a second time, the fallout is going to be measured in gigatons." Jade ranted.
"You, care about her." Roy wasn't sure if he should be happy to hear that there was a second crack in Jade's emotional armor, or jealous that it was one of her fellow supervillains rather than himself.
"No, I care about me. Did you miss the part where I talked about gigatons? I just don't want to get vaporized as collateral damage to their divine squabbles. That's why I need to know how Wonder Woman feels about her." Cheshire protested.
"Because Barbara loves her. Badly enough that I can notice it." Jade added a moment later.
"Ooph," Roy grunts out the word, unable to think of a more appropriate response.
"Yeah, 'ooph', did I ever tell you about how my and Barbara's first time working together went?"
"No. One of our rules is that we don't talk about what sort of stuff we get up to in costume." The only way that the two of them have been able to maintain their current unsteady back and forth “not quite a relationship” was because Roy and Jade had a lot of rules about what form their interactions should take.
They didn't always manage to follow those rules, but the act of coming together and discussing them was at least mildly helpful; it's one of the few things the two could successfully cooperate on.
"Well, if we didn't already have a rule against me breaking into your home and drugging you, then you're probably going to insist that we make one. So, now that we've established tonight is a night for breaking rules, I am going to tell you about it anyway.
"Me, Poison Ivy, and B.A. got hired to take down Wonder Woman. It was a good mixture of talents; Ivy and I put our heads together to create the world's most powerful anti-Amazon toxin, and Barbara's claws would be a dependable delivery vector. If everything had gone as planned, it should have added up to handing over one captive Amazon Princess to some nefarious crime lord and me being a lot richer. The first part of the job went smoothly as could be…" Jade recounted the story.
"Doesn't the first part always go smoothly?" Roy interjected.
Jade genuinely looked something close to affectionate for a few moments.
"Yes, it does, and it's nice that you noticed. Anyway, we took her captive… except then roughly thirty seconds after waking up, when she should have been so weakened by me and Ivy's mixture that she could barely blink, she snapped the restraints we put on her like they were nothing."
"Pretty much next thing I know, she's dragging me so high into the sky that if I do anything to disrupt her powers, I'm gonna have way too long to think about what a mistake it was before meeting a splattery end.
"Not much I could do in that situation, so I played along, acted all meek and submissive, like a good little captured supervillainess. Then I got lucky when she was distracted by a small army of rock golems that got summoned up to make an already complicated evening even more so. Since the golems were going to attack the crime boss who hired us, Wonder Woman foolishly thought that meant we were now on the same side and lowered me back to the ground.
"So, there I was, with a distracted Amazon Princess standing in front of me, her guard completely down, and I have a knife coated with an anti-Amazon mixture on my belt. All I had to do was bury it in her back, and I'd be laughing all the way to the bank," Jade recalled the event in a not quite wistful tone.
"Then what happened?" Roy knew something had doubtlessly gone wrong for Jade, but she seemed to be too out of sorts for it simply have been Diana successfully managing to defend herself.
"I draw the knife, I go for the stab, the entire time she's still as a statue, and then… it was like in the old timey movie theaters where things go wrong, and the projectionist can only put up a card reading 'Missing Reel, we apologize for the inconvenience'.
"Because the next thing I knew, I was face-first in the dirt, a fur-covered hand with the strength of a hydraulic press keeping me there, and having abruptly acquired a headache so bad I was nine-tenths of the way to falling unconscious. The last thing I heard before I passed out was 'If you'rrre going to be this trrrusting, you should think about grrranting me tenurrre, Prrrincess.'"
"No honor among thieves?" Roy quipped,
"'No honor among thieves' is her trying to kill me and Ivy after the job is done so she can have a bigger cut of the payout; Barbara Ann Minerva betrayed me halfway through a job, made an academia joke, and capped it off by calling our target ‘Princess’ in the kind of voice it should be illegal to use outside a Disney movie. Keeping in mind, that's just what I knew at the time, the actual truth of the situation was even worse."
"How exactly could it be worse?" Roy was man enough to admit that the spectacular mess that Cheetah and Cheshire's first team up had turned into was now leaving him genuinely invested in its retelling.
"After Ivy and I spent several days concocting a poison for Wonder Woman, B.A. secretly wiped it off her claws the first chance she got!" Jade fumed.
Roy laughed.
It was probably not the wisest choice at the moment, but he simply couldn't help himself.
"Wait, if that was your FIRST job together, why was there ever a second?" Roy couldn't help but wonder.
"When you're a supervillainess, you don't exactly have a lot of good options for who you can work with. I'm a normal woman whose good with weapons and poisons. Cheetah, can trade punches with Wonder Woman, but she has never once complained about the two of us being paid the exact same amount for any jobs we did together. Besides, most supervillains are crazy about everything, B.A. is just crazy about an Amazon Princess. So I made myself a rule: I would never ever do a job with her that would require hurting Wonder Woman to pull off. I've stuck to that rule, and after that, she's never betrayed me again.
"Granted, it helped that, after the first job went bad, I woke up in the same place I got knocked out, rather than in prison. Considering I got the job offer while cooling my heels in a jail cell, and it arrived with half my fee up front alongside a few tools to help me bust out, that means the entire fiasco was still technically a win in the grand scheme of things." Jade's story concluded.
"But when other villains aren't involved, isn't she always going at Wonder Woman with everything she has?" Roy probed, trying to figure out exactly what Cheetah's deal was.
"Don’t ask me! There's no way an ordinary assassin would ever be able to tell what 'everything she has' looks like for someone like B.A. Literally, in fact, because I'm pretty sure when Cheetah starts running at top speed, my eyes have trouble perceiving her as anything but a gold and black blur.
"For all I know, the two of them have secretly been f**king each other behind my back every chance they get, and now they've just decided to be more blatant about it. If I don't get how normal human emotions work, what chance do I have to understand a god's?" Jade sighs.
That's probably the main reason why Roy hasn't quite given up hope that Jade Nguyen might be a better person some day, why he doesn't do everything he can to keep her as far away as possible from their daughter… no matter what lies she may tell herself, Cheshire suffers from sociopathy; she does not revel in it.
"Jade, I know this is going to be sort of awkward for you, but still, I have to ask, how do you think you'd feel if it does actually work out between them?" Roy tries to take this gently and carefully; as much pain as Jade has brought into his life, it isn't the only emotion she's made him experience.
"Upset." Jade's answer comes instantly.
"Because?" Arsenal continues to try to lead the supervillainess to get in touch with her feelings, even if they're largely terra incognita to her.
"I'd lose my most dependable partner in crime." Cheshire once again doesn't even take a moment to think before answering.
"Just that?"
"Is there some other reason you think I should be upset?" Jade turns Roy's question back on him, leaving the hero with no choice but to be even more blatant.
"Well, Jade, from where I'm sitting. If Cheetah and Wonder Woman do actually make things work out between them, I'll be upset, because it would mean that the two of them now have a loving relationship, and all we've got is…. this." The superhero, currently bound to a chair and suffering from a paralytic poison, explained.
"We've got Lian." Alas, Jade still seems to be missing a truth that’s right in front of her face.
"Yeah, we've got Lian. If those two make it work, do you think she'd want us to be like them, or like this?" Roy honestly has no idea what 'making it work' would look like with Jade Nguyen, but it doesn't feel unreasonable to imagine there's a version of reality where the two can have a conversation without crimes and chemicals needing to be involved.
"Lian is a teenager; she's an idiot, just like you." Cheshire scoffed.
"Jade, I used to think 'Speedy' was a cool superhero name, you're not telling me anything I don't already know." Roy chuckles, wondering how he ever justified that particular title when he didn't have any kind of superpowers.
"Besides, being an idiot isn't the same thing as being wrong." He further reminded her.
"Lian would probably prefer we got along, I'm guessing." Jade somehow managed to sound both monotone and sorrowful at the same time.
"Since I can tell that this means a lot to you, probably more than you realize it does, I'll do my best. I can't exactly go up to Wonder Woman and ask her if she's secretly in love with one of her top three archenemies, but I can at least try to figure out if she's acting happier than normal. Whatever I find out, I'll pass it along to you through Lian." It wasn't exactly fair for Roy to be using his daughter as a go-between, but he knew Jade valued her privacy, so she was unlikely to leave him a phone number he could use to contact her anytime soon.
"You'd do that for me? Huh, I didn't even have to bring up the fact that our daughter is also absurdly invested in seeing how things play out between them to win you over!" Jade ruminated, once again showing a complete lack of remorse.
"Well, I'm a superhero, I help people. Speaking of which, if you want, you can have the bed or the sofa tonight, and I'll take the other; then you can leave in the morning." Roy offers.
"That's sweet, I'm almost tempted to kiss you, but..."
"You've currently got some kind of horrible poison mixed in with your lipstick?" Roy guessed.
"It really is a shame that you're not willing to become a supervillain. If you were, then this might genuinely work. I mean, you know me so well." It was the closest that Jade had come to complimenting him in quite a while.
"I could say the same thing to you about becoming a superheroine?" Arsenal offered, though maybe a touch less enthusiastically.
Jade forlornly shook her head and pulled away from him.
"In the end, we're not gonna make it work. Like, who knows, maybe those two can because they're a cat goddess and an Amazon Princess, their lives are bound to be some kind of fairy tale, even if it's a really weird and bloody one. The two of us, we’re normal people, we've got to live in reality. Enjoy the sofa." Cheshire lamented before leaving the kitchen.
"You could untie me first!" Arsenal shouted after her.
"I thought superheroes were always supposed to be on the lookout for new chances to train their skills? If you haven't figured out how slip free by morning, I'll let you go before I leave." Her voice calls back playfully.
Roy hangs his head and starts wondering exactly how much time is left before he can wiggle his toes again.
The End
AN: Since I'll admit this fic's title is a little obtuse I’ll take a moment to explain my reasoning, "Love In Paradise" is the name of a "duet" that Calypso and Odysseus sing in EPIC: the Musical https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWOpikivhbQ. I put "duet" in quotes because Odysseus' part largely consists of him insisting that he's a married man who has no attraction to Calypso. Indeed, Odysseus is too caught up in his own personal problems to care about anything Calypso has to offer him; the only things that matter to him at the moment are trauma he's suffered and the prospect of getting back to his wife Penelope.
Barbara Minerva, in this analogy, is our Odysseus, while Jade Nguyen is Calypso; Jade means well, but now that Barbara has recovered from her curse, the things Jade can offer aren't what Barbara wants or needs.
Fundamentally “Love in Paradise” (or at least Calypso’s portion of it) is a song about “Give up on your dreams, just take the easy path that’s right in front of you and make the best of it” a philosophy that Jade/Cheshire endorses throughout the entire fic in both the advice she gives to Barbara about her relationship with Diana, and also in how Jade conducts her own interactions with Roy Harper.
Also, my take on Jade Nguyen (not that I’ve read as many comics featuring her as I probably should have) is that while she would 100% obtain a clinical diagnosis for Anti-Social Personality Disorder... not being a mental health professional herself, she assumes (either out of ignorance or because it's convenient for her) that the condition is a lot more black and white than it really is. In reality, rather than being an emotionless monster who will always care for no one but herself, she's more like Sameen Shaw from Person of Interest, she can forge sincere emotional bonds with people if she's willing to make an effort (and even sometimes does so unintentionally), it just takes her a lot more effort than it would for your average person.
Alas, most of the time, Jade actively chooses not to care about people because she thinks it will make her life easier. She wraps her mental diagnosis around herself as shield to keep the rest of the world out/justify that she could never be a good person, so why bother making any kind of effort?
The reason why it’s an interesting idea to pair Barbara and Jade together as villains isn’t because they both have cat themed aliases, it’s because Barbara (for all her incredible intelligence) is largely beholden to her emotions when it comes to how she makes her big decisions, while Jade is extremely distant from her emotions (that’s one of the main symptoms of Anti-Social Personality Disorder). Both of them are dysfunctional, but in opposite ways. If Barbara could listen to her emotions a little less and Jade a little more, they’d both be living happier more productive lives and the tragedy is that while both of them do view the other as a friend they care about, neither of them have the tools needed to help the other turn their life around.
That said, in this fic Barbara is making a little progress, because previously she had to contend with not only her emotions, but also the constant hunger that Urzkartaga inflicted on her. On top of that, Barbara has a vague idea of what genuine happiness looks like to her (Diana, Barbara will keep throwing various roadblocks in her own path to happiness, but she knows Diana is the central figure who her life revolves around for better or worse) while Jade has never been truly happy so settling for contentment comes rather naturally to her.
“DSM” stands for “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (of Mental Disorders)”. It's basically the great big book for defining the names and symptoms for various forms of mental illness.
The fantasy series that Barbara talks about reading and recites a quote from is Discworld by Terry Pratchett; as a famous British series, it's a perfect fit for her background. “Small Gods” was probably her favorite book before she became Cheetah (because the setting is extremely Greek themed) but after becoming Cheetah she lost her ability to enjoy any of the books because of being distracted by hunger, if she starts reading them again as things stand she’ll probably end up picking “Going Postal” (a story about: redemption, mending fences with people you’ve harmed, and the importance of drawing a line in the sand regarding what kind of criminal you want to be) as her new favorite.
'A Brief History of Time' is the name of a book by Stephen Hawking, a physics professor who suffered from a degenerative nerve disease that weakened his voluntary muscle control; that’s why Jade chose that name for her poison after the book.
The Poison Ivy, Cheshire, and Cheetah team up, which Jade talks about based on one from Wonder Woman Volume 2 (AKA “Wonder Woman 1987”) issues 94 and 95. It isn't canon anymore in the DC Rebirth continuity, but I like to assume some version of it took place that is "broad strokes" accurate. You can completely excise the entire "Artemis is Wonder Woman" thing that was going on at the time, and likewise assume that since Rebirth Barbara Ann Minerva is a different beast (pun intended) to Post-Crisis Barbara Minerva, her sabotage of the other villainesses was motivated less because "you saved my life last time we crossed paths I want to wipe out that debt" and more the "I love hate love hate love hate love hate love hate love hate love hate love hate LOVE you" thing she has for Diana.