Amazon Days - Donna Interlude
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Donna Troy can categorize her life into two neat little parts without much effort.
Before Diana, and after.
And the time before Wonder Woman had swooped down from the sky had been, frankly, complete and total garbage.
For as long as she could remember, the only constants in her life back then were the foster system and the revolving door that was her entire experience of it in a nutshell.
She never spent more than six months in any one home before being bounced back to the system and into another, and the homes were only just that in the barest sense of the word.
If she was lucky, the couples that took her in just flat-out didn't care about her - she was either a paycheck to them, a way to show off how damn great they were for taking in the most difficult sort of stray, or both.
It took her a while longer than it should have to realize that those were the best homes she could have gotten.
So long as she kept her head down and pretended to play by the rules, she got a roof over her head and people who were easy to work around when she wanted to break said rules on the sly because when it came down to it, they just didn't give a crap, not really.
Eventually, she'd either mess up something fierce or they'd get bored, whichever came first, and she'd wind up right back where she started.
Rinse and repeat.
If she was unlucky, she'd get the people who actually cared.
The do-gooders who were in it for the kids and the bleeding hearts and wanna-be parents who genuinely wanted to look out for her.
She hated those.
Because no matter how well things started, eventually, like clockwork, she would have to watch that light in their eyes fade the longer they kept her around, getting dimmer and dimmer as she kept screwing up and trying to be better and screwing up harder while trying not to, all of it in an epic downwards spiral down to good old rock bottom.
And just like before, she'd also wind up right back where she started, only this time she'd do it feeling like a big bucket of dog turds no one would ever want to look at twice.
So, yeah.
Donna had never been of the success stories people heard about in the news or saw on billboards driving up on the freeway - for her, foster care had sucked ass.
And then her powers had kicked in, and boy, it got so much worse.
Not at first, though.
At first, it was fun.
Flying was amazing, being near-invulnerable was sweet, and getting strong enough to toss an RV down a street without breaking a sweat overnight - like she almost had, and hadn't that been a near miss - was awesome right up until Donna realized that from then on, she would be living in a world of cardboard and damn near everyone else around her might as well have been made of wet tissue paper.
It was a miracle that she hadn't managed to hurt anyone - and she'd managed to wreck plenty.
Having to explain snapped door handles and pulverized alarm clocks and a shattered wall or three with anything but the truth was a nightmare. She couldn't tell anyone about the powers, didn't know where they even came from, and so she just... didn't.
Surprise surprise, that went down about as well as curdled milk.
Suddenly, as far as anyone was concerned, she was a delinquent and a hot mess to boot - like her resume as one of those kids no one could ever place right wasn't glowing already.
Juggling it all got harder and harder after that - every part of her life felt like sand slipping through her fingers no matter how much she tried to get a grip on it, and on the worst days the rest of the world was a box with walls that kept closing in on her every time she blinked... until the day she happened to be back on her way from school, minding her own damn business as always, and the street she was walking across exploded.
Lo and behold, there was Diana, all spandex and glory, starring down and primed to go head to head and toe to toe with a snarling, half-rabid Cheetah.
And Donna was right smack dab in the middle of them.
The only thing missing was a neon sign over her head that read "The Universe Hates This Sucker" and she would have been set for life.
Things happened, hands went down, and when the dust settled there she sat, slumped on the sidewalk, dazed and still clenching the one fist she'd used to cold-cock Cheetah instead of running away like any sane person would have.
"That was rather impressive."
Diana stood above her, haloed in sunlight and smiling down at her. Completely unruffled and unphased by her wounds and bruises, like Donna hadn't just watched her kick nine different shades of crud out of Cheetah before manhandling her with her golden lasso.
"Could I trouble you for a name?"
One conversation, a visit, and a month later, Donna stepped foot onto Themyscira for the first time.
Life on the island wasn't like anything she'd ever had before, and that was a good thing.
The amazons were welcoming even if they spent the first few months without a single clue what to do with her - they separated from the world millennia ago. Donna was alien to them - and Diana herself was never away for more than a couple of days without a visit.
That Hippolyta had been and still is more open to her than anyone with that woman's history with outsiders probably worked wonders as well.
Donna likes it here.
Likes never having to hide her powers, likes never having to pretend to fit in, not when everyone was just as odd as she ever was - she even likes the lessons and the training Philipus had ardently forced on her, even if the captain of the royal guard was as unbending as a cinder block and liked to work her to the bone and quiz her till her brain as just about ready to melt out her ears.
It was good.
Is good. Not all rainbows and sunshine, duh, and the island had its hangups, but...
Themyscira is Home.
Capital "H" this time, or the closest thing to it she's likely to get.
So when the sky started raining monsters the size of SUVs like they were going out of season, Donna didn't need anyone to order her to leap into the fray.
Teeth, claws, and murderous bloodlust aside, they were just another target for her to hit.
... in theory.
Unfortunately, it was all a lot easier said than done when said problems could punch, bite, and chew back.
And that was before the literal witch-bitch sicced a monster on Mark and her big enough to use them both as toothpicks and flickered a way as all hell broke loose for the tenth time that night.
It goes like this:
Circe teleports away in a wave of crimson, the Hydra twitches, and suddenly there's ten thousand tons of scaled, screeching multi-headed lizard dragon bearing down on them at full terrifying throttle.
"Move!"
Mark roars and hurls himself back like a bat out of hell, already blasting away at it with beams of golden light and sizzling heat that pulse through the air with a thrum she can almost feel in her bones.
It works - Donna sees poison-green scales blacken and rupture in the seconds it takes her to fly up and away - but only technically. There's so much of the hydra's bulk surging down on them it's like trying to kill a living mountain with a particularly dangerous laser pointer.
Then the hydra slams down where Mark was standing and its heads surge. Nine sets of jaws snap open and unleash a collective warbling roar that's somehow both high-pitched and deep enough to match the grinding of stones in a rockslide.
The damaged scales visibly pop off, replaced by new growth and knitting flesh even as Mark keeps scoring lines and lines worth of the stuff from his position somewhere far beneath and away from her.
The hydra's roars reach a fever pitch when, on the third pass-by, he manages to carve a burning trench clear through the leftmost head's right eye. The entire organ bursts like jelly, viscous green goo steaming and slopping down its serpentine neck.
It's just about the most disgusting thing she's ever seen, and it gets worse as the wind changes and that exact head along with three others arcs up and focuses dead center on her, seven eyes filled with foreboding malice. The remaining five arc down instead, and she doesn't have to be a genius to realize immediately that they've locked on to Mark.
Then all nine jaws unhinge again, and this time, Donna sees baleful green light well up in their depths.
Her eyes go wide.
"Oh, s-"
Fwoosh.
Even as high up as she is, she can feel the air go bone dry and scorching before the ocean of fire that seems to span the entire freaking horizon wells up at her like an avalanche going the wrong way.
She turns and rockets away again, but not quite fast enough this time. She feels white hot pain lance up through her as the flames catch at her feet, burning her sandals and the bottom of her peplos to nothing and doing a hell of a job on her feet and the back of her legs before she manages to get out of range, and she bites through her lower lip trying to swallow a tortured scream.
The injury immediately turns out to be twice as costly as it looks, because in the moment of pain, she falters and loses both speed and height. Not nearly enough to drop to the ground, but enough that in the seconds it takes her to blink blurry eyes and flail over in mid-air, there's a maw full of spear-like fangs closing in on her
The good news is that she manages not to get shredded into bloody strips. In the time it takes for the teeth to snap shut savagely, she gets the sense to tug her knees up to her chest and kick out at the hydra's snout with as much force as she can bring to bear.
Which is a hell of a lot, even when suspended in midair.
Crack.
The bad news is that she's just kicked with her injured feet, and her vision goes white and blurry at the edges even as the hydra's head snaps back with a burst of air and a snarl.
The really bad news is instead of just staggering in flight this time, she loses control completely and ends up letting the force of her kick fling her the long way down to the forest floor.
Which is, coincidentally, also on fire.
Before she can react to that - probably by swearing until she goes blue in the face - something slams into her before she hits the ground. A pair of arms wrap around her in a vice grip, and the world blurs in a burst of speed.
The fires vanish, the acrid smell of smoke and scorching air gets left behind, and by the time the acceleration cuts off and she finds herself staggering onto her knees and glancing back, the hydra is only visible in the distance.
Still the size of a skyscraper with nine flailing heads that continue to belch flames in a devastating series of arcs around its surroundings, but there's enough space between them that she can breathe.
"Are you alright?"
She glances up.
She isn't sure what to make of Mark Milton. She'd spent the better part of a couple of hours talking to him - well, at him. He spent most of the time being about as expressive as a brick (and frustrated and sad, almost). - and it's only hindsight that she realizes she'd been so caught up in the excitement of meeting someone new on Themyscira, close to her age no less, that she really hasn't learned anything about him.
Well, besides the fact that he's strong and she's pretty sure that he can run faster than she can fly, which is just, like, offensive, but she can complain about that later.
"Are you alright?" He says again, words insistent.
Good question.
Donna glances down as she tries to rise up. Her legs from the knees down are lobster red, and the skin feels flayed and raw. Her feet ache something fierce and the feeling of dirt and rough earth against her soles stings like a bitch.
But it's not terrible. She'd always healed fast, and if she somehow didn't, there was always the purple healing ray.
"Fine." She grits out and rises to the air steadily, aiming an angry glare back at the hydra - the thing is still caught up eradicating the forest like the wildlife had personally offended it. "I'm going to shove a tree so far up that monster's ass all nine heads are going to taste the bark for the rest of its life."
Something passes over his face then, pulling at his lips. Like the ghost of a ghost of a smile. If things were any better, she'd crow in victory at finally getting a real reaction out of him.
"Won't be very long then. " He stares back at the hydra and his expression blanks and hardens again "Go."
Donna blinks. "What?"
"Go," Mark says again, blue eyes turning to bore into her with visible impatience. "I can't fight with you here. I don't know you, I don't what you can do, and I'm at my best alone."
He points in the opposite direction and turns her back to her.
"Go."
It takes her a long beat to parse through that, and then she clenches her fists in indignant shock and starts to swell up.
"Hey-!"
"She's going after your queen."
"Cerci." His face twists on the name like he's swallowing something foul. Which was fair enough, she gets that. "She said she wants to humble a queen. She's going after Hippolyta."
"One of us has to stay here. That thing is going to get bored of torching shrubbery soon enough and it's going to blast its way into the city proper. They barely survived the small ones, they're not going to survive that." He gestures to the Hydra. "Someone needs to warn and back up your Queen, and it'll be better coming from someone she actually knows and trusts."
That... made sense.
She feels the realization sink into her stomach, cold and ugly and infuriating. He can probably tell, too, because glances back at her one last time.
"It's up to you. Now, go."
And then he darts forward, breaks into a run that accelerates into a blur. A second later, there's a burst like muted thunder and in the distance, she sees the hydra stagger.
And then, again, the carnage begins.
For a moment, Donna just stares.
Then she howls, curses violently enough for the words themselves to be considered weapons and hurtles into flight toward the palace.
Behind her, the world lights up in hues of green and gold.
When she gets to doesn't bother going around the walls, she goes through them.
Better safe than sorry, she repeats fiercely as she smashes through wall after wall, marble shattering in her wake as drills straight towards the throne room and explodes into it with a shower of debris.
And then she freezes.
Literally.
"Tut tut, girl." Circe beams at her from her position on the throne, her smile wide with cruel delight as she takes her in. "Did you really think it would be that easy?"
Donna doesn't answer her.
She can't. There's an aura of red light wafting across the room, and it feels like she's trying to move through drying cement.
She can't even open her mouth to speak.
"Then again, I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything better given your... less than stellar role models" Circe turns to the side. "Isn't that right, old friend?"
She sees Hippolyta then. She's trapped, the same as Donna is, surrounded by a circle of fallen, bloodied guards. Her spear is still extended in a dead charge and her face is a picture of bitter, unyielding rage.
"Now, wherever did you hide-?" Circe's eyes widen. "Ah, there it is."
She extends a hand to the side, palm down, and the stonework by the base of the throne shatters as something large and heavy flies up to meet it.
It's a chest, cube-like and made of pale-white stone save for one face that Donna could see, etched with a simple mural.
A feathered helm painted deep night blue.
And Hippolyta's eyes flicker unmistakably at the sight of it, with sheer, horrible dread.
So much so that, for a moment, the Queen manages to lurch forward, the ground quaking with every heaving step.
One step, two, even three before the magic trapping her shimmers and pins her in place again.
"No!"
"Yes," Circe breathes rapturously, one hand held out to pin Hippolyta in place as her efforts to escape redouble whilst the other takes hold of her prize and makes it flicker away with a burst of red mist. "Now you're getting it. The age of my revenge is at hand, and before I'm done, I will utterly destroy-"
She's cut off when the throne room shakes.
"Already?" The witch seemed stunned. "However did he- No!"
Her hand snaps up and halts Donna in her charge, her mad-bull rush stopped dead in its tracks with her fist inches away from her.
"That was a mistake." There's something twisted and heady with evil promise in the words as Circe bears her fangs. "But again, it is one lies with your elders. They should have taught you better. But no matter."
She snaps her fingers, and this time Donna can't even think to stop herself from screaming in horror when the queen of the Amazon's head snaps back with a spray of blood and a howl of agony.
"A punishment for your ward's shortsightedness. Savor it, Hippolyta, for it is only the beginning." Circe grins wickedly when she turns back her, malevolent eyes shining crimson. "Till we meet again, little wonder girl."
She disappears in a burst of light right.
Not a second later, the roof caves in with a rain of pulverised stone and Mark crashes down into the pavilion.
He's alive, mottled in bruises and sporting a rather vicious-looking cut that runs down his shoulder and across his torso. His skin is also steaming, the air shimmering in heat haze as it wafts off of him, and he doesn't have a lick of clothing on him.
Donna doesn't spare him a second glance.
Not when she's too busy cradling Hippolyta's head in her lap and desperately trying to staunch the bleeding from the jagged pit that was once her left eye.
"I-" He looks around the ravaged throne room and then back down to himself with a sharp, muted scowl. "want my damn armour back. Where's-"
There's no warning.
His voice stutters, something urgent and stunned and fearful in his last words, and by the time she turns back to him, his eyes have already gone gold, his body's locked up, and he tumbles backward onto the floor and into dead unconsciousness.
Next Chapter: Answers at last!
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Before Diana, and after.
And the time before Wonder Woman had swooped down from the sky had been, frankly, complete and total garbage.
For as long as she could remember, the only constants in her life back then were the foster system and the revolving door that was her entire experience of it in a nutshell.
She never spent more than six months in any one home before being bounced back to the system and into another, and the homes were only just that in the barest sense of the word.
If she was lucky, the couples that took her in just flat-out didn't care about her - she was either a paycheck to them, a way to show off how damn great they were for taking in the most difficult sort of stray, or both.
It took her a while longer than it should have to realize that those were the best homes she could have gotten.
So long as she kept her head down and pretended to play by the rules, she got a roof over her head and people who were easy to work around when she wanted to break said rules on the sly because when it came down to it, they just didn't give a crap, not really.
Eventually, she'd either mess up something fierce or they'd get bored, whichever came first, and she'd wind up right back where she started.
Rinse and repeat.
If she was unlucky, she'd get the people who actually cared.
The do-gooders who were in it for the kids and the bleeding hearts and wanna-be parents who genuinely wanted to look out for her.
She hated those.
Because no matter how well things started, eventually, like clockwork, she would have to watch that light in their eyes fade the longer they kept her around, getting dimmer and dimmer as she kept screwing up and trying to be better and screwing up harder while trying not to, all of it in an epic downwards spiral down to good old rock bottom.
And just like before, she'd also wind up right back where she started, only this time she'd do it feeling like a big bucket of dog turds no one would ever want to look at twice.
So, yeah.
Donna had never been of the success stories people heard about in the news or saw on billboards driving up on the freeway - for her, foster care had sucked ass.
And then her powers had kicked in, and boy, it got so much worse.
Not at first, though.
At first, it was fun.
Flying was amazing, being near-invulnerable was sweet, and getting strong enough to toss an RV down a street without breaking a sweat overnight - like she almost had, and hadn't that been a near miss - was awesome right up until Donna realized that from then on, she would be living in a world of cardboard and damn near everyone else around her might as well have been made of wet tissue paper.
It was a miracle that she hadn't managed to hurt anyone - and she'd managed to wreck plenty.
Having to explain snapped door handles and pulverized alarm clocks and a shattered wall or three with anything but the truth was a nightmare. She couldn't tell anyone about the powers, didn't know where they even came from, and so she just... didn't.
Surprise surprise, that went down about as well as curdled milk.
Suddenly, as far as anyone was concerned, she was a delinquent and a hot mess to boot - like her resume as one of those kids no one could ever place right wasn't glowing already.
Juggling it all got harder and harder after that - every part of her life felt like sand slipping through her fingers no matter how much she tried to get a grip on it, and on the worst days the rest of the world was a box with walls that kept closing in on her every time she blinked... until the day she happened to be back on her way from school, minding her own damn business as always, and the street she was walking across exploded.
Lo and behold, there was Diana, all spandex and glory, starring down and primed to go head to head and toe to toe with a snarling, half-rabid Cheetah.
And Donna was right smack dab in the middle of them.
The only thing missing was a neon sign over her head that read "The Universe Hates This Sucker" and she would have been set for life.
Things happened, hands went down, and when the dust settled there she sat, slumped on the sidewalk, dazed and still clenching the one fist she'd used to cold-cock Cheetah instead of running away like any sane person would have.
"That was rather impressive."
Diana stood above her, haloed in sunlight and smiling down at her. Completely unruffled and unphased by her wounds and bruises, like Donna hadn't just watched her kick nine different shades of crud out of Cheetah before manhandling her with her golden lasso.
"Could I trouble you for a name?"
One conversation, a visit, and a month later, Donna stepped foot onto Themyscira for the first time.
...
Life on the island wasn't like anything she'd ever had before, and that was a good thing.
The amazons were welcoming even if they spent the first few months without a single clue what to do with her - they separated from the world millennia ago. Donna was alien to them - and Diana herself was never away for more than a couple of days without a visit.
That Hippolyta had been and still is more open to her than anyone with that woman's history with outsiders probably worked wonders as well.
Donna likes it here.
Likes never having to hide her powers, likes never having to pretend to fit in, not when everyone was just as odd as she ever was - she even likes the lessons and the training Philipus had ardently forced on her, even if the captain of the royal guard was as unbending as a cinder block and liked to work her to the bone and quiz her till her brain as just about ready to melt out her ears.
It was good.
Is good. Not all rainbows and sunshine, duh, and the island had its hangups, but...
Themyscira is Home.
Capital "H" this time, or the closest thing to it she's likely to get.
So when the sky started raining monsters the size of SUVs like they were going out of season, Donna didn't need anyone to order her to leap into the fray.
Teeth, claws, and murderous bloodlust aside, they were just another target for her to hit.
... in theory.
Unfortunately, it was all a lot easier said than done when said problems could punch, bite, and chew back.
And that was before the literal witch-bitch sicced a monster on Mark and her big enough to use them both as toothpicks and flickered a way as all hell broke loose for the tenth time that night.
It goes like this:
Circe teleports away in a wave of crimson, the Hydra twitches, and suddenly there's ten thousand tons of scaled, screeching multi-headed lizard dragon bearing down on them at full terrifying throttle.
"Move!"
Mark roars and hurls himself back like a bat out of hell, already blasting away at it with beams of golden light and sizzling heat that pulse through the air with a thrum she can almost feel in her bones.
It works - Donna sees poison-green scales blacken and rupture in the seconds it takes her to fly up and away - but only technically. There's so much of the hydra's bulk surging down on them it's like trying to kill a living mountain with a particularly dangerous laser pointer.
Then the hydra slams down where Mark was standing and its heads surge. Nine sets of jaws snap open and unleash a collective warbling roar that's somehow both high-pitched and deep enough to match the grinding of stones in a rockslide.
The damaged scales visibly pop off, replaced by new growth and knitting flesh even as Mark keeps scoring lines and lines worth of the stuff from his position somewhere far beneath and away from her.
The hydra's roars reach a fever pitch when, on the third pass-by, he manages to carve a burning trench clear through the leftmost head's right eye. The entire organ bursts like jelly, viscous green goo steaming and slopping down its serpentine neck.
It's just about the most disgusting thing she's ever seen, and it gets worse as the wind changes and that exact head along with three others arcs up and focuses dead center on her, seven eyes filled with foreboding malice. The remaining five arc down instead, and she doesn't have to be a genius to realize immediately that they've locked on to Mark.
Then all nine jaws unhinge again, and this time, Donna sees baleful green light well up in their depths.
Her eyes go wide.
"Oh, s-"
Fwoosh.
Even as high up as she is, she can feel the air go bone dry and scorching before the ocean of fire that seems to span the entire freaking horizon wells up at her like an avalanche going the wrong way.
She turns and rockets away again, but not quite fast enough this time. She feels white hot pain lance up through her as the flames catch at her feet, burning her sandals and the bottom of her peplos to nothing and doing a hell of a job on her feet and the back of her legs before she manages to get out of range, and she bites through her lower lip trying to swallow a tortured scream.
The injury immediately turns out to be twice as costly as it looks, because in the moment of pain, she falters and loses both speed and height. Not nearly enough to drop to the ground, but enough that in the seconds it takes her to blink blurry eyes and flail over in mid-air, there's a maw full of spear-like fangs closing in on her
The good news is that she manages not to get shredded into bloody strips. In the time it takes for the teeth to snap shut savagely, she gets the sense to tug her knees up to her chest and kick out at the hydra's snout with as much force as she can bring to bear.
Which is a hell of a lot, even when suspended in midair.
Crack.
The bad news is that she's just kicked with her injured feet, and her vision goes white and blurry at the edges even as the hydra's head snaps back with a burst of air and a snarl.
The really bad news is instead of just staggering in flight this time, she loses control completely and ends up letting the force of her kick fling her the long way down to the forest floor.
Which is, coincidentally, also on fire.
Before she can react to that - probably by swearing until she goes blue in the face - something slams into her before she hits the ground. A pair of arms wrap around her in a vice grip, and the world blurs in a burst of speed.
The fires vanish, the acrid smell of smoke and scorching air gets left behind, and by the time the acceleration cuts off and she finds herself staggering onto her knees and glancing back, the hydra is only visible in the distance.
Still the size of a skyscraper with nine flailing heads that continue to belch flames in a devastating series of arcs around its surroundings, but there's enough space between them that she can breathe.
"Are you alright?"
She glances up.
She isn't sure what to make of Mark Milton. She'd spent the better part of a couple of hours talking to him - well, at him. He spent most of the time being about as expressive as a brick (and frustrated and sad, almost). - and it's only hindsight that she realizes she'd been so caught up in the excitement of meeting someone new on Themyscira, close to her age no less, that she really hasn't learned anything about him.
Well, besides the fact that he's strong and she's pretty sure that he can run faster than she can fly, which is just, like, offensive, but she can complain about that later.
"Are you alright?" He says again, words insistent.
Good question.
Donna glances down as she tries to rise up. Her legs from the knees down are lobster red, and the skin feels flayed and raw. Her feet ache something fierce and the feeling of dirt and rough earth against her soles stings like a bitch.
But it's not terrible. She'd always healed fast, and if she somehow didn't, there was always the purple healing ray.
"Fine." She grits out and rises to the air steadily, aiming an angry glare back at the hydra - the thing is still caught up eradicating the forest like the wildlife had personally offended it. "I'm going to shove a tree so far up that monster's ass all nine heads are going to taste the bark for the rest of its life."
Something passes over his face then, pulling at his lips. Like the ghost of a ghost of a smile. If things were any better, she'd crow in victory at finally getting a real reaction out of him.
"Won't be very long then. " He stares back at the hydra and his expression blanks and hardens again "Go."
Donna blinks. "What?"
"Go," Mark says again, blue eyes turning to bore into her with visible impatience. "I can't fight with you here. I don't know you, I don't what you can do, and I'm at my best alone."
He points in the opposite direction and turns her back to her.
"Go."
It takes her a long beat to parse through that, and then she clenches her fists in indignant shock and starts to swell up.
"Hey-!"
"She's going after your queen."
"Cerci." His face twists on the name like he's swallowing something foul. Which was fair enough, she gets that. "She said she wants to humble a queen. She's going after Hippolyta."
"One of us has to stay here. That thing is going to get bored of torching shrubbery soon enough and it's going to blast its way into the city proper. They barely survived the small ones, they're not going to survive that." He gestures to the Hydra. "Someone needs to warn and back up your Queen, and it'll be better coming from someone she actually knows and trusts."
That... made sense.
She feels the realization sink into her stomach, cold and ugly and infuriating. He can probably tell, too, because glances back at her one last time.
"It's up to you. Now, go."
And then he darts forward, breaks into a run that accelerates into a blur. A second later, there's a burst like muted thunder and in the distance, she sees the hydra stagger.
And then, again, the carnage begins.
For a moment, Donna just stares.
Then she howls, curses violently enough for the words themselves to be considered weapons and hurtles into flight toward the palace.
Behind her, the world lights up in hues of green and gold.
...
When she gets to doesn't bother going around the walls, she goes through them.
Better safe than sorry, she repeats fiercely as she smashes through wall after wall, marble shattering in her wake as drills straight towards the throne room and explodes into it with a shower of debris.
And then she freezes.
Literally.
"Tut tut, girl." Circe beams at her from her position on the throne, her smile wide with cruel delight as she takes her in. "Did you really think it would be that easy?"
Donna doesn't answer her.
She can't. There's an aura of red light wafting across the room, and it feels like she's trying to move through drying cement.
She can't even open her mouth to speak.
"Then again, I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything better given your... less than stellar role models" Circe turns to the side. "Isn't that right, old friend?"
She sees Hippolyta then. She's trapped, the same as Donna is, surrounded by a circle of fallen, bloodied guards. Her spear is still extended in a dead charge and her face is a picture of bitter, unyielding rage.
"Now, wherever did you hide-?" Circe's eyes widen. "Ah, there it is."
She extends a hand to the side, palm down, and the stonework by the base of the throne shatters as something large and heavy flies up to meet it.
It's a chest, cube-like and made of pale-white stone save for one face that Donna could see, etched with a simple mural.
A feathered helm painted deep night blue.
And Hippolyta's eyes flicker unmistakably at the sight of it, with sheer, horrible dread.
So much so that, for a moment, the Queen manages to lurch forward, the ground quaking with every heaving step.
One step, two, even three before the magic trapping her shimmers and pins her in place again.
"No!"
"Yes," Circe breathes rapturously, one hand held out to pin Hippolyta in place as her efforts to escape redouble whilst the other takes hold of her prize and makes it flicker away with a burst of red mist. "Now you're getting it. The age of my revenge is at hand, and before I'm done, I will utterly destroy-"
She's cut off when the throne room shakes.
"Already?" The witch seemed stunned. "However did he- No!"
Her hand snaps up and halts Donna in her charge, her mad-bull rush stopped dead in its tracks with her fist inches away from her.
"That was a mistake." There's something twisted and heady with evil promise in the words as Circe bears her fangs. "But again, it is one lies with your elders. They should have taught you better. But no matter."
She snaps her fingers, and this time Donna can't even think to stop herself from screaming in horror when the queen of the Amazon's head snaps back with a spray of blood and a howl of agony.
"A punishment for your ward's shortsightedness. Savor it, Hippolyta, for it is only the beginning." Circe grins wickedly when she turns back her, malevolent eyes shining crimson. "Till we meet again, little wonder girl."
She disappears in a burst of light right.
Not a second later, the roof caves in with a rain of pulverised stone and Mark crashes down into the pavilion.
He's alive, mottled in bruises and sporting a rather vicious-looking cut that runs down his shoulder and across his torso. His skin is also steaming, the air shimmering in heat haze as it wafts off of him, and he doesn't have a lick of clothing on him.
Donna doesn't spare him a second glance.
Not when she's too busy cradling Hippolyta's head in her lap and desperately trying to staunch the bleeding from the jagged pit that was once her left eye.
"I-" He looks around the ravaged throne room and then back down to himself with a sharp, muted scowl. "want my damn armour back. Where's-"
{It Is Time}
There's no warning.
His voice stutters, something urgent and stunned and fearful in his last words, and by the time she turns back to him, his eyes have already gone gold, his body's locked up, and he tumbles backward onto the floor and into dead unconsciousness.
...
Next Chapter: Answers at last!
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