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This was the happiest Barbara Ann Minerva (also known as the supervillainess Cheetah) had been in years… which was another way of saying that she wasn't currently in abject misery.
She was sitting in the middle of Jade Nguyen's (also known as the supervillainess Cheshire) living room, constructing her very own Aletheia board.
It was a game that had been brought to the World of Men by the Amazons of Themyscira, so almost nobody knew the rules, and given how complex said rules were, even fewer people actively played it. While making the board wasn't such a challenge, she'd had to go to rather absurd lengths to create proxies of all the relevant pieces involved.
Barbara could survive a little absurdity at the moment, after all, she'd survived bribing morticians so that she could consume the corpses they'd been charged with looking after to briefly satisfy the cannibalistic curse placed on her by the god Urzkartaga. Thankfully, that wasn't an issue anymore. Urzkartaga had wanted to make Barbara into a predator… and so she'd proven just how successful he'd been, by killing him and consuming his divine power.
Now she was free of his curse and was even able to shift back and forth between her human and Cheetah forms at will. Those two changes to her life were a pair of blessings that she would have paid any price for… and now that she had them, Barbara was using them to sit around listening to show tunes while crafting herself a board for a game that she'd only ever be able to play against one opponent.
She didn't care.
Yesterday, under her recently forged "backup identity" as "Dr. Elizabeth Juno," she'd been invited over to a small house that a certain Amazon Princess liked to make use of when not handling more serious matters. The same way that Barbara Ann Minerva and Diana of Themyscira had once faced each other across that same board (and of course it was the exact same board, Amazons built things to last) back when… things had been different between them.
"Elizabeth" had claimed that after Diana had made her offer, she'd researched various online documents about the game so that her host wouldn't need to spend hours explaining the rules to a woman who already knew them by heart. Those documents did indeed exist… but Barbara hadn't been able to avoid noticing that the most comprehensive set of rules for Aletheia had only been posted online shortly after Diana had invited her "new friend" over to play.
It was absurd, insane, all of it. Two women who not so long ago would have been desperately trying to either rip the other's throat out or bind the other with a magical lasso, sitting down to play a board game like they weren't bitter enemies. Yet somehow… that was what had taken place. Half the Justice League hadn't teleported down from the Watchtower to try and capture Barbara; there hadn't even been any probing questions about Elizabeth Juno's past, the two had simply sat, played, and talked about Aletheia.
Barbara had even won two of the three games, which she'd desperately tried to insist was simply some combination of beginner's luck and the Amazon Princess taking it easy on her.
It certainly wasn't because a feline supervillainess had spent who knew how many nights trying desperately to fall asleep by distracting herself with thoughts of various Aletheia strategies while her stomach endlessly cried out for another serving of "long pig".
Barbara didn't want to think about those nights anymore.
It was part of why she'd put on some music to distract her. She was listening to the soundtrack of EPIC: The Musical, which retold the story of Odysseus' journey home after his brilliant mind had accomplished what Achilles' "invincible" body couldn't, winning the Trojan war.
Yet Odysseus, flush with this victory, had let his hubris get the better of him, and in doing so earned the ire of a bitter, vengeful god who had decided to do all in his power to separate the hero from the love of his life.
Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva had a PhD in Greek mythology (and another in archeology, though that one was less applicable at the moment); she knew how to compose an metaphor, and this one burned bitterly in her chest. Which raised the question, why was she still listening?
"I hate that I fell in love with you!
Why did I fall in love with you?
What do I do with this love for you?" Barbara idly sang along with Calypso as Odysseus prepared to leave the goddess behind so that he could make another attempt at rejoining his one true love.
"How is it going, B. A?" Asked Lian Harper, her host's daughter, and either one of the bravest or stupidest people Barbara had ever met.
The teenager's presence finally provided Cheetah with the additional motivation necessary to pause the music.
"I could be worse, a lot worse." Barbara answered, leaving unspoken that Lian had personally seen what 'a lot worse' looked like for Cheetah; it still hadn't been an entire month since she'd finally regained the ability to subsist on a normal diet without suffering divine punishment.
"I meant, how was your 'date' with Diana?" Barbara's tail shot up straight as an exclamation point in shock at the teenager's forthrightness.
"It wasn't a date! All we did was play Aletheia." Cheetah protested.
"For eight hours?" Lian needled her still further.
"Aletheia is a complex game; even the first few moves can have far-reaching effects that are still being felt during the last handful of turns," Barbara explained dispassionately.
"B.A., she chose to have you over for eight hours. At that point, it isn't about the game; she was interested in you." The teenager insisted with naivety that might have been charming if it hadn't been aimed in Cheetah's direction.
"If she was interested, if she was happy, it was only because she was seeing me the way I used to be, not the way I actually am! We're just putting on a pathetic little show where I pretend to be a good person, and she pretends not to notice that I'm nothing but a monster wearing her former friend's skin stretched over my fur. Of all the people I killed as Cheetah, Barbara Ann Minerva was the first!" The supervillainess snarled.
"She's happy because she's seeing you again. Because you were her friend once and you could be again." Lian countered.
"That's not true, she'd only be happy if I could go back to the safe, harmless, pathetic woman she used to be able to trust, she doesn't want..." Barbara would have continued to harangue the teenager further, but words from her and Diana's first meeting after Urzkartaga's death suddenly hit her harder than any blow Wonder Woman had ever dealt Cheetah.
"I don't expect Barbara to go back to being who she used to be; that'd be unreasonable, bordering on outright silly. All I want from her is the same thing that I want from everyone else, for tomorrow to find them a better version of whoever they are today."
Barbara couldn't go back to be who she used to be, but she could be a better version of who she was right now, that wasn't such an unreasonable thing to ask…
"I, I don't want to talk about this right now." Barbara sulked, reaching for the remote to turn the music back on, hoping to have some more time thinking about Aletheia strategies rather than what the future might hold for her and Diana.
The song she'd paused ended, and the next one started with Odysseus lamenting how many people had died for the sake of his desires, and yet even now, what he wanted still seemed impossibly far away.
Only to be visited by a messenger from the Gods.
"All you have to do is not follow your rage." Lian sang over Hermes' introductory line.
Barbara turned to glower at the young girl, but the supervillainess refused to dignify the interruption by stopping the music again.
Cheetah's orange eyes gazed intently into Lian's green ones. The two sat there in silence as Odysseus and Hermes talked, but then…
"You're being given a final option,
Consider this your one last chance,
To be at her side and abandon caution.
Wash it away like the blood your hands have known,
I know, if you dance with fate,
Then I know, I know, you'll enhance your state." Lian shamelessly continued signing.
Only a god or a child could think it would be that easy; there was so much blood on Barbara Ann Minerva's claws (and fangs) that she didn't even remember the names (and in some cases she'd never even bothered to learn) of everyone she'd harmed.
Besides taking grand risks never worked out well for Barbara Ann Minerva. Thinking she'd made a groundbreaking discovery when she left to inspect a small Island on the Black Sea, only for her hopes to be dashed. Thinking that she might expand humanity's knowledge of the divine, only for Urzkartaga to transform her into Cheetah. Countless schemes and plots over her career as a supervillainess, only for all of them to be thwarted by Diana or some other superhero. Thinking that she and Cheshire could put together a crew to rob the Watchtower, only for... well, that one had actually worked.
That, that had to be the exception, though. The equivalent of managing to roll double zeroes on a pair of D10 dice, a statistically unlikely event brought about only by the near countless failures that had come before.
"If your plan's so great, then why'd you wait to say it?" Barbara emphatically did not sing the words; she simply spoke them.
"Wеll, it's a little bit dangerous, B.A.
You need a mindsеt change for this,
You cannot get away with playing safe for this.
You wanna win her? Put it all on the line,
And put your whole brain in it!
Remember every trick in your domain for this,
You gotta treat it like it is the main event.
You wanna win her? Put it all on the line,
Be dangerous!" Lian encouraged her.
It was absurd, of course; telling Cheetah that she needed to stop "playing safe" when by this point the feline supervillainess had a rap sheet longer than her arm.
It was absurd, right up until it wasn't.
Barbara had been a supervillainess for so long, she'd utterly eradicated every trace of the life she used to lead. She'd spent time as a member of the Legion of Doom. She'd murdered Aphrodite and mocked Diana over how, in the process, Cheetah had done seemingly irreplaceable harm to the very concept of love. What grander crimes could she commit to make people hate her more? She'd already once been immured under Themyscira; what more dire fate was she risking when she fought superheroes too noble to end her life?
Her existence as a supervillainess was like Calypso's embrace: safe, confining, comforting, stagnant, relaxing, unfulfilling.
At this point in her life, the only thing that could be considered genuinely risky to Barbara…. was trying to be a better person.
"Alright, I'm in, what do I do?" The archeologist turned supervillainess turned minor goddess relented.
"First stop, uncharted waters!
When lost, look towards the sky,
Follow the Moon's light, no matter how bright,
Don't shut your eyes, don't fall for more lies.
When strangers lurk around the isle,
When danger greets you with a smile,
Fight your way through, do what you must do,
But no matter what, keep moving!" Lian cheerfully advised her.
Keep moving.
It should be a trivial task for a woman whose foremost superpower was her speed. Except, looking back at her past… how often had Barbara found herself trapped on some kind of divine treadmill, running extremely fast, and yet going nowhere?
She'd been Diana's enemy for so long, and what did she have to show for it?
Nothing.
It wasn't even that she hadn't been able to defeat Diana, because it was no easy thing to best an Amazon Princess so utterly that she could not find some way to turn the tables, but had Cheetah managed to leave even one lasting scar upon Wonder Woman's soul?
First and foremost, Aphrodite was alive again these days...
Cheetah hadn't even been able to accomplish something as simple as killing Steve Trevor or Etta Candy.
How hard could it be for a super-fast supervillainess with magical claws to cut one mortal life short?
Except Barbara had never wanted to kill Steve or Etta!
They were had been her friends, even to a monster like her, that had to count for something!
A woman who once blazed a path through the academic world, leading to her holding a pair of PhDs by the time she turned twenty-six, had been spending the last few years of her life caught in a pathetic, pointless loop. She could have gotten more done if she'd spent all that time pestering Circe until the sorceress had agreed to serve as a primary source for some new paper on the topic of how Greek history and mythology were inevitably intertwined.
Ultimately, Lian was right, Barbara Ann Minerva was tired of running in place, she was ready to start moving again…
"It's gonna be dangerous, B.A.
You need a mindsеt change for this,
You cannot get away with playing safe for this.
You wanna win her? Put it all on the line,
And put your whole brain in it!
Remember every trick in your domain for this,
You gotta treat it like it is the main event.
You wanna win her? Put it all on the line,
Be dangerous!"
Her curse had made it hard for Barbara to hold onto her memories at times, an inevitable side effect of having her thoughts constantly bombarded with hunger pangs. There was one thing that she'd never forgotten, though, and she still wasn't sure if being able to effortlessly recall this particular moment with crystal clarity was a great blessing or an especially cruel curse…
Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva had been summoned by the US Government to interview a prisoner who seemingly spoke a language that no one else could interpret. She'd still walked with a cane back then.
"And don't you go all the way to the top?" Barbara had greeted the tall black-haired woman standing forlornly in a prison cell, careful to make crass comments in English rather than a language the prisoner might actually understand.
Then, she'd switched to Amazon.
"My name is Dr. Barbara Ann Minerva. You are Diana?" The prisoner's theoretical name was one of the few things the government had been able to work out, so best to start there.
No sooner were the words out of Barbara's lips than the black-haired woman broke into the biggest, most beautiful smile that her "interrogator" had ever seen.
"You speak my language! Yes, yes, I am Diana, the daughter of Hippolyta, tenth queen of the Amazons, she who leads Themyscira!"
Diana had been so happy to see Barbara back then, to discover that maybe she wasn't as alone in the World of Men as she'd initially feared. And Barbara… had been so happy to see Diana, to discover living, breathing proof that her theory of the Amazons being more than fairy tales was now standing right in front of her.
The two had slid into one another's lives with the smoothness of a pair of puzzle pieces, like they'd each been made to fill the other's gaps.
Alas, Chronos, in an act of cruelty to rival any Urzkartaga had inflicted upon Barbara, had refused to simply stop time at that perfect moment. Instead, he'd allowed still more events to unfold, and where exactly had the passage of time taken the two of them?
Well, one obvious change was that Diana didn't need Barbara anymore; she had more friends than she knew what to do with, and spoke more languages than Cheetah could! She didn't need Barbara, and yet the supervillainess still wanted to be a part of Diana's life, wanted to be more than just her nemesis, more than just a monster the Amazon Princess hated.
Diana didn't need her… but what were the last few years if not event after event inevitably involving Barbara putting her own desires ahead of Wonder Woman's? Diana might not need or want her… but Cheetah was going to find a way to sneak into the Amazon Princess' heart as surely as she'd infiltrated the Watchtower!
"And lastly, your clear head,
We went through so much to get this...
Keep your rage checked if you wanna win her, B
You won't get another time to try!
That rage you feel isn't where you want your mind to be,
It was meant to stop you by design.
A curse to make sure you would fall apart
Follow your rage, and you'll never win her heart,
You'll never win her heart!" Lian concluded Hermes final section of the song.
The hunger for human flesh that Urzkartaga had cursed her with was gone… but that didn't mean her soul wasn't stained by his floral fingerprints. That, or maybe he'd only uncovered something that Barbara had always possessed but struggled to keep hidden, even from herself. Whatever the truth of the matter, it would take more than transforming Urzkartaga into mythological mulch to silence the fury that her time as his "bride" had awakened in Barbara Ann Minerva's chest.
That wild animalistic anger had been one more vice that she'd indulged in all too frequently to try and keep her mind off of her horrifying hunger. Today, though, she wasn't hungry anymore. Which meant she needed to be ready to resist her rage and instead find some way to trust her own intellect again, now that it was no longer chained by a cannibalistic curse.
Now that she was the only one who got to cast a vote on the matter... who was she? Was she Barbara Ann Minerva, whose family name invoked the Roman goddess of wisdom, or was she still only Cheetah?
The minor deity of fur and fang drew in a deep breath and gave Lian a long, appraising look.
I clearly need to start calling this little idiot 'Slick' ironically; the way she's gazing at me as if I'm going to start singing, like I'm some kind of Greek mythology nerd instead of one of the world's most powerful supervillains. Gods damn it, I miss when I was a Greek mythology nerd, there were moments, not many, but some moments, when I was genuinely happy... which is infinitely more moments than I've had as a supervillainess.
And so, with the same determination that Odysseus had shown when pushing his crude raft off from the sand of Ogygia, Barbara Ann Minerva pushed herself up off the couch. With the aid of her divine speed, she effortlessly slid around the table so that she'd have plenty of room to move without risk of accidentally damaging her Aletheia board.
As her tail swayed in time with the music, she began to sing.
"Don't you know that danger is my friend?
My whole life I've trained for this,
I cannot tell you how much I have paid for this!
I have to win her, put it all on the line!
I'm gonna use ruthlessness,
Every trick, every skill put to use for this.
I plan to put an end to all the foolishness,
I have to win her, put it all on the line!
I'll be dangerous!" Barbara vowed.
XXX XXX XXX
As she watched her daughter and her favorite (which was admittedly a bar so low it might as well be underground) supervillainess partner to work with sing and dance together, a single thought occurred to Jade Nguyen.
How the f**k was that crazy cheetah more 'normal' when she was still eating people?
The End
AN: If you're unfamiliar with the song Dangerous, here's a link... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZW2GnEcjpM
This story exists in part to serve as a foil to my other one, "I'll be Dangerous" https://archiveofourown.org/works/82821856 over in my other series, taking place in a different continuity that is home to the multiverse's luckiest version of Barbara Ann Minerva. Both stories involve someone else singing a variation of one of Hermes' songs from EPIC: The Musical to her, but this one is about her hearing "Dangerous" at what is effectively the tail end of her supervillainess career, while the other is about her hearing "Wouldn't You Like" at the start of it.
The board game Aletha is the invention of bathbombhater, and you can see the relevant story they wrote over here... https://archiveofourown.org/works/77710831. If you haven't already, consider taking some time to check out their various Dianerva/Wondercheetah (and a few CyberCale) fics out and leave kudos/comments, since without their inspiration, I probably would not have started writing these stories myself. Also, you can tell that Diana and Barbara have both gotten better/more in synch because it used to take them five hours to play one game.
The song that Barbara starts the fic out listening to, "Not Sorry For Loving You," is immediately followed by "Dangerous," so no dramatic liberties were taken on that front.
In Roman Mythology, Diana is a goddess of, among other things, the Moon. Hence, when Lian tells Barbara, "Follow the Moon's light, no matter how bright," the underlying subtext meaning is "Follow the example that Diana/Wonder Woman set, no matter how daunting a task it feels to you."
Barbara's memory of first meeting Diana while the Amazon Princess is being held prisoner by the government is a recreation of a scene from Wonder Woman Rebirth (Volume 5) issue 6.
"Ogygia" is the name of Calypso's island in Greek Mythology.
Also, you guys just know that this continuity's version of Bastet is watching these events play out and instantly thinking to herself, "I like this girl's style, and she already calls herself Cheshire Cat? Oh, I can't wait until she comes within blessing range of one of my artifacts..."