skymurdock asked: look I am sleepy and tired and I've got some school shit to attend to pre-enrollment tomorrow so HEY MORAN how would you write an AU where Steve Trevor ends up as the Winter Soldier figure. bc we need more of that trope always.
Okay so I’m real into Winter Soldier AUs where their identity is discovered in the WORST AVAILABLE WAY (well, all WS AUs tbh but like come on I like to see people break down), and also this morning @littlestartopaz suggested that the Waynes are basically the Starks but more humanitarian and less weapon designer (also please note that I generally adhere to Unpretty’s Batman personality because I like it).
So basically what I’m saying here is that Bruce, after the League has formed up and suffered a nasty battle that dredged up a lot of people’s old issues, returns to the unsolved case of his parents’ murder and mulls over the information . He has done this for most of his life when things go awry, not so much because he expects to solve the crime anymore or even because he’s still as emotionally locked in that moment as he once was, but just…it’s his parents and he doesn’t know and if there’s one thing the Batman hates, it’s not knowing.
This time he has actual people, though, and while Clark mostly goes home to Metropolis and his day job, Diana is formally speaking on leave from her day job and she knows who he is and he lets her stay in his mansion because she really loves his gardens. (This is what clinches it for Diana–the Batman is a marshmallow under that layer of body armor.) So she comes across this research and the two of them start poking around and they find a loose end that Bruce hasn’t seen before. They start pulling on it and at first they think that it goes nowhere, that it dead ends in a conglomerate of the wealthy and ethically deficient that dissolved decades ago and took all their records with it.
Two days later, Dick Grayson (probably around seventeen now) hears a quiet beep when he opens his car door and it’s only the years of practice that let him throw himself back fast enough to escape most of the shrapnel. Bruce shows up to the hospital where Dick is getting bandaged up (burns to his left forearm and lower leg, two cracked ribs, and a nasty bit of road rash on his right cheek and shoulder) like the wrath of God, and Diana is already on site, sifting through the debris for a clue. This is a warning, plain and simple, targeting the eldest son–death of the firstborn, Dick says like it’s at all funny, aren’t there supposed to be some other plagues before that?–but a critical mistake has been made. Bruce Wayne is rich and powerful and people know it, and feel threatened even by ‘eccentric playboy Brucie’ because, well, one time he found out someone was paying off a surveyor to build one of his buildings on a burial site, and he came down like the fist of an angry god.
Batman, defending his partner and adopted son, is going to rip these people to shreds.
“Huh,” Diana says with interest, tapping her comm so that Bruce can hear her. She’s picking over what’s left of the bomb itself, armored and disinterested in the police nervously milling about. “I haven’t seen a weight trigger like this since I was in the trenches.”
The manhunt that gets underway is subtle, at first, Diana and Bruce operating from the shadows or with the mild interest of superheros who happen to be in the area, while Clark calls in a few favors to look into the names that Bruce and Diana were pulling at. The rest of the League isn’t told, not yet, because Bruce is protective of his identity and even more so of his secrets and he’s still adjusting even just to Diana and Clark.
Diana does a lot of the legwork. Clark has a secret identity to keep up and Bruce has an injured kid to duct tape to a bed (the entire Wayne household redefines ‘bad patient’ to levels that frankly amaze Diana even now) so Diana is mostly the one quietly talking to people, pushing for information, searching, seeking, hunting.
It draws attention to her, because it looks like Bruce took the warning seriously while she did not.
It takes less than a month for someone to be sent to…deal with her.
Diana is just leaving the house of a woman whose dead husband’s brother’s boss might have had something to do with the whole mess–all of her leads have been like this, but Diana doesn’t mind because Bruce should see that people don’t always have darkness in their souls. She’s willing to work with his kids and Clark on proving the point. Also, she finds the concept of attacking children as horrific as she did a century ago at Veld, and Hades have mercy on anyone who did, because Diana certainly wouldn’t. (Dick had protested that he’s almost an adult and besides he’s been fighting crime since he was nine, and Tim sat on him. Carefully. With affection.) So yeah, she’s fine with digging through people who are at two or three removes from the situation on the off chance that they might have information. Also this particular woman makes lovely home-mixed tea with rosehips and lemon and honey, so there’s also that.
She’s not certain that she’s being followed until she turns into an alley and the figure drifts after her, and…he’s good, she almost missed him. Diana admits it at once–never underestimate your opponent, Antiope’s voice whispers through the years–and twists on her heel to face him. She believes he’s male, but he’s masked, hard plastic too pearly to be skin that covers his face from just below his eyes all the way down, hiding mouth and keeping his jaw closed like a muzzle. His hair was buzzed short at some point, but it’s growing out, as if no one tends to it, and his eyes are as cold and empty as the clear sky at midwinter.
Diana feels a little sick. She was ready to take him down, hard and fast, but the man following her looks more like a tormented hunting hound than anything else. Like he’s forgotten what it’s like to be treated as human.
“Why are you following me?” she asks, holding a hand out, palm down, as if gentling a nervous horse. “Can you tell me who sent you?”
He raises a gun and shoots twice without so much as batting an eye. Diana barely gets her bracers up in time, and then the alley is a melee battle, gun and blind determination against lasso and lifelong training.
Obviously, Diana wins, and the gun clatters away, followed by not one but three knives and a second small gun. Her opponent carries more weapons on him than Bruce does, which is no small feat, and finally she tackles him outright, bracing one knee on his left wrist and catching his right in her hand as she uses all her strength to deny his attempts to throw her off, already demanding answers.
“I said,” she snarls, hooking her nails under the mask and ripping it away, “who sent–” Her words strangle on her tongue as the mask drops from nerveless fingers. “Oh Hades,” she breathes, and reaches out, hand trembling. “Steve?”
He takes the moment of weakness to slam his head into her nose, and she rocks back as he rolls away. She lashes out on instinct with her lasso, catches his ankle and yanks him back down onto the asphalt.
“Steve,” she says again, getting a better look at his face this time.
He bares his teeth at her, as if threatening to tear her throat out if that’s what it takes. “Who the hell is Steve?”
