Chapter Text
The late-night Haitian rain fell in suffocating, relentless sheets.
It hammered against the ruined excavation site, turning the trench into a sluggish river of mud and jagged limestone. A deafening crack of thunder rattled the earth, shaking the artifact tents and perimeter floodlights until the bulbs flickered, popped, and plunged the dig into blackness.
Janet Drake did not flinch.
She didn’t scream.
She calculated.
Pressed flush against the crumbling limestone, her green eyes darted from shadow to shadow. Her ruined blouse clung to her ribs, heavy with a miserable slurry of mud and her own blood. Shrapnel had torn through her side during the ambush, leaving a burning, ragged trail of shredded flesh.
But the bleeding wasn't what terrified her.
It was the ice.
Deep inside her chest… beneath her painfully mortal ribs, deep within the marrow of her soul… something ancient was thrashing. It felt like a glacier splintering. A scream frozen in liquid nitrogen, begging to shatter.
'Stay down,' Janet growled inwardly, forcing a mental iron clamp over the agonizing pressure in her chest. 'Do not let it out. If you let it out, they find HIM.'
"You are a surprisingly hard woman to kill, Mrs. Drake."
The voice slithered through the dark, slipping right between the cracks of the thunder.
The Obeah Man stalked through the debris of the camp with a terrifying, unhurried grace. Lightning flared. It illuminated his gaunt frame—stark white ash painted violently across his face. He walked right past the unconscious, bleeding form of Jack Drake slumped over a supply crate.
His eyes were locked squarely on her.
Janet’s fingers cramped around a jagged shard of ceramic pottery. The broken edge sliced deep into her palm. Warm blood welled up, dripping steadily into the cold mud at her boots.
Pain. Human. Pathetic.
It was exactly what she needed to be.
Her lip trembled. "My husband has money." The manufactured fear in her voice was pitch-perfect. "Whatever you want, he can pay double—triple. Just please... let us go."
A grating, hollow rasp tore from the Obeah Man's throat, slicing cleanly through the roar of the rain. He looked at his prey with sickening pity.
"Money?"
He stopped ten feet away. Lightning flared again. Janet’s eyes snapped to his hands.
No machete. No talisman. No ritual blade.
A machine.
It was a thick, rectangular device that defied the twenty-first century. Cased in polished wood and brass, it flipped open to reveal a glowing digital screen humming with a harsh, bureaucratic orange glare. It looked like a 1970s radio gutted and stuffed with alien tech.
"The spirits didn't tell me where to find you, Mrs. Drake," the Obeah Man murmured. His thumb slid heavily over the analog buttons. "I had a whisper from the stars. A Benefactor who tends the garden of time."
The blue ice in Janet’s chest violently spiked.
The sheer wrongness of the device scraped against her soul like glass on bone. It was an aberration, a diseased splinter of a timeline bleeding into the present. Her vision fractured. Sharp, agonizing pixels of static clawed at her retinas every time she tried to focus on the orange glow.
She dropped the act. Her spine straightened.
"Who are you?" Janet whispered. The manufactured tremble vanished. She raised the bloodied pottery shard with a terrifyingly steady hand.
"A harvester." He bared yellow teeth in the gloom, looking down at the screen. "The Benefactor told me you were a weed. He told me you tried to smother the fire under the ice."
He took a heavy step forward.
"He told me you changed your aura. You even changed your name."
Janet’s heart stuttered violently against the magical seal she had forged fourteen years ago.
Memory flared--
The League of Assassins tearing her family apart to steal her Red Chaos.
The Demon's Head staring at her with greedy, consuming eyes.
A young, dark-haired, green-eyed woman sliding the cell door open, whispering: ‘RUN.’
She remembered the sheer, agonizing force of will it took to compress the burning, red flames of Chaos. She crushed them, starved them, squeezed them until they froze into perfect, ice-blue Order. All to hide. All to be boringly, blissfully mundane.
She couldn't unleash it now. One spell. One spark of the blue frost, and that orange screen would register the anomaly. It would track the energy signature across the ocean.
Straight to Gotham.
Straight to the thirteen-year-old boy sleeping quietly in Wayne Manor.
"I don't know what you're talking about," she said flatly.
Her left hand drifted toward her pocket.
Not for a weapon.
For the endgame.
The Obeah Man sighed in mock disappointment. His thumb dragged over a brass dial. "A weed by any other name is still a weed." He looked up, naked hunger shining in his eyes. "The Benefactor told me to prune the branch… Wanda."
The name hit her like a physical blow to the sternum.
The roar of the rain vanished into white noise. The world tilted. For over a decade and a half, she was Janet Drake. She had buried Wanda Maximoff so deep the devil himself couldn't dig her up.
Yet here was a harvester with a brass toy.
The Obeah Man caught the microscopic widening of her eyes. He grinned.
"He calls it pruning," the sorcerer hissed, gesturing loosely to the sky above. "He pays well for the removal of pests. But I prefer to call it harvesting. Can't let all that power rot in the mud."
He raised his free hand. Dark, parasitic purple energy began to coil around his fingers, hungry and slick.
"Melt the ice, Wanda," he commanded, his voice dropping to a guttural threat. "Give me the harvest."
Janet stared. She calculated the distance. She calculated the physics.
If she fought, she might kill him. But the resulting magical spike would paint a multiversal target on her back forever. Worse, the machine would log the coordinates. But if she died... the power wouldn't just vanish. Magic demanded a vessel. It would flood into the closest compatible bloodline.
Her son.
'There is no winning,' the cold, unyielding logic whispered in her mind. 'There is only mitigation.'
"If you don't..." the Obeah Man warned. He tilted the glowing device northward.
Toward Gotham.
"If you don't give me what I want, I will use this to find your spawn. He may not have any magic, but I have no doubt he would make excellent leverage. Give me the harvest, Wanda, or I will prune him until not even the memory of Timothy Drake remains."
Grief ripped through her… hot, red, and jagged… threatening to melt the ice on the spot.
Then, Janet’s face hardened.
The fear evaporated. In its place settled the cold, crystalline resolve of a mother who had just run out of options, but had been handed one single, vital piece of tactical intelligence.
'He may not have any magic.'
The Benefactor was blind. They didn't know about the seal.
"You can tell your Benefactor something for me," Janet said softly.
Her fingers closed around the small glass vial in her pocket. The League contingency. A promise she made to herself the night she fled Nanda Parbat.
No magic. Just cyanide.
Quick. Brutal.
Human.
Janet smiled. It was a terrifying expression… sharp, jagged, entirely devoid of warmth.
"Tell him the lineage ends with me."
The Obeah Man’s eyes snapped wide. The realization hit him a second too late.
"No!" he roared, lunging.
She crushed the vial between her teeth.
The poison seized her nervous system instantly. Her heart locked. As her knees hit the mud, the physical pain was completely eclipsed by the agonizing sensation of her internal vault tearing open.
The seal broke.
The Red Chaos she had starved for decades roared to the surface, hitting the atmosphere as violent, freezing Blue Order. The power screamed, thrashing through her dying veins, desperate for an outlet. It reached out, tracking the only compatible anchor left in the universe.
Her bloodline.
The edges of her vision bled into black. Through the static of her dying mind, a melody surfaced. The lullaby she hummed fourteen years ago, weaving the lock and key into an infant's soul.
'Come, dream a dream with me,' she thought.
Her mind detached from the rain and the mud, drifting back to a warm nursery. The gentle sway of a rocking chair. Her precious boy nestled against her chest, swaddled and safe, as she wove the ice around his spark to keep him hidden from the monsters.
'That I might know your mind.'
She saw Tim’s face.
'And I’ll bring you hope when hope is hard to find.'
The biting cold was consuming her now, spreading from her fingertips to her chest. It wasn't terrifying anymore.
It was a promise.
'And I’ll bring a song of love… and a rose in the wintertime.'
'I’m sorry, Tim,' she thought.
The world faded to blinding white.
'I gave you the winter. I hope you find the rose.'
Her ice shattered.