Recovering from being thrown across the room, she went down on her knees next to Ethan’s nearly lifeless body. Darkchild was momentarily lost in his own thoughts and Cass hoped against hope that time would just freeze. The Mad Titan had finally gone well and truly insane if he thought that this act of horror would be met without vengeance. “Don’t do this to me, Ethan. Don’t do this, don’t do this. DON’T DO THIS!” There was a gaping hole in his chest and his own blood was pooling around him, the deep crimson a stark contrast to the alabaster floor of the Parthenon. The blood seeped into the edges of her wedding dress, permanently staining the white satin. She couldn’t care less. Her entire world was being torn apart in front of her very eyes. The man she loved was dying in front of her.
She didn’t even bother looking over to Darkchild; she trusted that Light would handle the situation if the need arose. She leaned down to her husband and placed a kiss on his forehead as a tear fell off the edge of her cheek and landed on his. Her chest rose and fell rapidly as she started hyperventilating, her lower lip trembling uncontrollably as tears streamed down her cheeks. Acting on instinct she placed her hands over his wounds and started mumbling to herself. “If I hold the pressure, you’ll be okay. We just have to wait for a healer or medical aid, it’ll be okay. You’re going to be okay Ethan, do you hear me?” She looked down at him to make sure that he was listening and was terrified when she saw the life fading from his eyes.
He took a deep breath as a trickle of blood escaped from between his lips. “Cass, my love. Nobody’s coming.” He paused for a moment to catch his breath before speaking again, the words rattling out from between his lips. “There’s not…” a cough escaped his lips, more blood flowing from between them. “Time.” Her heart sunk at the words and began circling the drain just as his life was. Everything she had fought for in her life, the rape, the murder of her parents, Donnie’s memory loss, it was all forgotten. Nothing was as monumentally life-shattering as this single moment in time.
Why was this happening? How the hell could this be happening? She had recovered from everything that life had thrown her way. Cass had grown past the loss of the man she had thought she loved, she had finally started healing the mental wounds from Darkchild's rape, the ones that had persistently stuck around long after the physical wounds. She had found her birth mother and had grown to love Sovereign Son as the father that she had never known. She had met Ethan, her true love. Her perfect match, her lifemate and now she carried his child and it was all ripped from her in the span of a minute. Her heart was breaking, she was breaking, she could barely breathe.
She grew frantic as she saw his eyelids start fluttering and his face turn a stark white, all color leaving it. “NO. You don’t get to do this! You don’t get to leave me! I fought for you, for us, to be whole for you. I fought so damn hard. Ethan, listen to me!” Her words were barely discernable at this point. She knew that Darkchild would soon be back on her heels and she did not have the ability to go up against him at this moment in time. How could Darkchild do this? Godammit, was this all her fault? She knew that he had always viewed her as a toy, as a possession. He was like a petulant child who realized that when he couldn’t have somebody else’s toy that he’d break it and that way, nobody would ever be happy. This was part of his year-long attempt at breaking those Cassidy loved in order to break her. This was her fault. Choking on her words at this point, she continued applying pressure to Ethan’s chest, his blood seeping between her fingers. “Please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me. I need you, baby.” The tears were evident in her voice and were obstructing her throat. There was a painful ache in her chest and she literally felt like her heart was breaking. “You can’t die! You can’t! Please don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me all alone. I never got to tell you…” her voice drifted off as she started begging with him, pleading with him. Cassidy Starks was literally out of her mind at this point.
He limply placed his hand on her still flat stomach, leaving a bloody red handprint on her dress. “You never could…hide…anything from…me.” Each word was a labor for him, each syllable taking more energy than he had to expend. “Tell them their daddy loved them.” With that last utterance his eyes closed for the final time and a death rattle reverberated throughout his chest. That was the moment of reckoning. He was well and truly dead and as that last breath left his lips, Cass felt something inside of her die. Where once her heart was filled with love and hope for a happy future, it was now immersed in hatred, fear and anger.
Suddenly, a voice broke through the moment of silence, interrupting her reverie. “CASSIDY! Move! Now!” It was the deep voice of Light Starks and there was no time to react, let alone heed his wishes before he came barreling through the air, his arms outstretched. As he made contact with her, he pulled her away from Ethan’s dead body and lifted her up into the air, expediently removing her from the situation.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?!” She screamed in his face as he placed her on the ground, having gotten her to the other side of the Parthenon and away from Darkchild’s escape route. “You let him take him! I was going to save him! I was going to save him, Light. You f*king idiot!” She was out of her mind with grief and quite evidently still in denial about the fact that Ethan, her husband, was dead and gone. “MOVE, now! Let me get to him, let me go after him! I can save him! I can get him back!” But Light wouldn’t listen to her pleas, he wouldn’t let go of her. He held tightly onto her upper arms, his strong fingers digging in just a little bit as he shook her lightly, attempting to literally shake some sense into the obstinate little assassin.
“You can’t go after him, Cassidy. He’s dead. Your husband is dead, my son is dead and he’s not coming back. Going after Darkchild in order to obtain his body at this point would be a life-threatening endeavor. You’re smarter than this, Cass, so start acting like it.” He was feeling everything inside just as deep as she was; he had just lost a son, his only son. But Light was clear-headed enough to realize that Cass was going to need somebody to lean on, somebody to take her anger out on and was willfully volunteering himself for the role. He looked down at her, his eyes meeting hers, a knowing look in them. “I’m a Kryptonian, Cass. I can hear their heartbeats, I can sense them. Surely you’re not so far gone that you would risk the lives of your unborn children…? They’re all that’s left of him; you need to keep them safe.”
Something snapped in her at the mention of children and a light bulb switched on. Ethan’s mother was Cellywyn, a goddess. She had been absent for ages, on another plane of existence or some such thing, but if there was any time that she was needed, it was now. “Get Cellywyn.”
“What?” Light looked somewhat surprised before a look of understanding graced his handsome dark features.
“GET HIS MOTHER.” This was a last-ditch effort, a desperate one at that, but she had to exhaust every option and idea possible, she didn’t know how not to. “She’s the Goddess of Creation and Rebirth, if anybody can fix this, she can.”
Heartbreak was evident in the heartbroken father’s eyes as he held back his emotions. “Cass…it doesn’t work like that. She doesn’t mess with stuff like this. There’s a life and death process, a circle. Its part of nature and it needs to be adhered to.” He spoke with a reason that he hoped would get through to the grieving widow, despite the fact that he didn’t quite believe himself.
“You’re an absent father. He loves…loved you, but he barely saw you. You were NEVER around. I’ve met you about three times and I’m his wife, for God’s sake. For once in your life, do something meaningful as a father and GO GET HIS MOTHER. What use is having power if you’re not going to use it to save the people you love? You were a Green Lantern, Light, you’re supposed to have willpower. So show a f*cking backbone and go find Cellywyn. You’re supposed to be a hero! So save somebody! From here on out, everybody I kill in order to make this right, every family I break, every person who meets an untimely death at my hands in order to make this right? Their blood is on your hands, just like Ethan’s is. I hope you can live with that!” She was lashing out, she new she was and yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“We’re not doing this right here and now…”
Before the Kryptonian could get another word out she broke down, she simply broke. Slumping down, Cass let her body go dead weight as she fell to her knees, her blood-stained dress fanning out around her on the ground. Light was momentarily on the ground beside her, pulling her into his arms and holding her as a parent would their child. She was a tiny little thing, barely making it past the five foot mark, and she now held the weight of the world on her shoulders. She let everything loose, absolutely everything, pounding her small fists against his muscled chest as she sobbed. Her shoulders were shaking with the effort it took to not melt into a puddle of sobs and the heartbreaking noise could be heard echoing throughout the Parthenon. It was not so much a cry as much as it was the wailing noise of a woman who had just lost everything. The sound of the cry itself would drive most grown men to tears.
She cried for what felt like hours, completely lost to whatever was happening all around her. All she knew was the inner torment, the excruciating pain. All her life she had been over-emotional and had used those emotions to her advantage. They fueled her, they made her stronger. But now...now they nearly killed her. It was time to become a grown up and to stop acting on her emotions as much and start factoring in a little more planning. She needed her family first, though. She needed her mom...who was in a coma. Pulling slightly away from Light, Cass brought her left hand up to her face and pushed her hair out of her eyes, her wedding band and engagement ring sparkling in the sun's rays as she accidentally smeared Ethan's blood across her cheek. Murmuring the words and tears slipped down her cheeks, cutting through the drying blood, Cass moved slightly away from Light. "Please find my dad, please get Sovereign Son. I need...I need my dad."
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