Home of Steven's DC Universe and Superwoman AU

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It was faint.

Half-buried beneath dead autumn leaves and the thick carpet of moss that, given enough time, claimed everything in this forgotten stretch of Louisiana bayou.

Alastor stopped and tilted his head.

His hearing had always been unnaturally keen—a gift he'd never found a satisfying explanation for and, eventually, stopped bothering to question. Beneath the endless chorus of insects and croaking frogs, he caught something else.

A whisper. Not a voice, but a vibration.

A low, lingering hum that seemed to exist somewhere between sound and silence, like a distant radio station bleeding through the wrong frequency.

Curious.

Alastor had not survived this long by walking away from curious things.

He stepped off the narrow trail, polished shoes climbing over slick roots twisted through the marsh. The closer he came, the stronger that peculiar sensation grew. Not louder, but clearer, as though whatever lingered beneath the earth had suddenly realized someone was listening.

He crouched and swept aside the damp leaves with one gloved hand.

A pentagram.

Nearly as wide as a wagon wheel, carved deeply into the soil. Its lines had been drawn in chalk, cold ash, and something rust-colored that Alastor recognized immediately as blood. Melted candles ringed the symbol, their wax hardened into pale rivulets clinging stubbornly to the dirt. Torn pages fluttered lazily across the clearing, stained by rain and mud until whatever scripture they had once carried had long since become unreadable.

The air smelled of burnt sage and cheap moonshine.

Alastor pursed his lips.

“A summoning circle,” he announced to absolutely no one, in the precise tone of a professor grading an exceptionally poor examination. “My, my.”

He leaned closer, inspecting the outer runes without allowing so much as a fingertip to brush them.

“Crooked sigils.” His gaze drifted to the next. “Uneven spacing. The circles aren't even concentric.”

He sighed with genuine feeling. “There is really no excuse for such dreadful penmanship.”

Then he stopped.

“...Are those cartoon apples?”

Tiny doodles had been scribbled cheerfully among the ritual markings. Little apples. A circus tent. Smiling ducks. One of them appeared to be wearing a top hat.

Alastor stared for a long, unblinking moment.

“It's a wonder they summoned anything at all.”

A beat.

“...Or perhaps they didn't.”

--------

The memory surfaced almost immediately.

A few months prior, New Orleans had been swept through by a wandering religious sect.

It was magnificent material for his radio program, truly a gift that kept giving.

According to their increasingly incoherent sermons, the barriers between realms were weakening. Heaven and Hell would soon collide in some grand cosmic reckoning against an unnamed evil, and the Devil himself would play a pivotal role.

There was, however, one rather unusual detail.

The Devil was, they insisted, a duck man.

Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Literally. A duck man.

Alastor had no particular opinion on the theology. The entertainment value, however, had been extraordinary.

Their followers wandered the streets shrieking, “The time has come! The time has come!” at bewildered pedestrians while waving handmade signs covered in apples, pentagrams, circus tents, and suspiciously cheerful ducks.

One particularly ambitious disciple had even stationed himself outside a church on St. Charles Avenue, eagerly distributing pamphlets to anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact.

The pamphlets, naturally, also featured ducks, apples and even a circus.

--------

There was a consistency to their madness, if nothing else.

Whatever credibility the sect might once have possessed evaporated entirely when their self-proclaimed prophet concluded that earthly garments were merely an oppressive social construct and began delivering his sermons in the nude.

New Orleans had tolerated an impressive assortment of eccentrics throughout its long and colorful history. Public nudity on a Tuesday, however, proved to be where the city finally drew the line.

The congregation had been chased out soon afterward. Apparently, not before attempting a few summoning rituals in the surrounding wilderness.

Alastor surveyed the remains of their efforts.

He found he had very little sympathy.

--------

He spotted a broken bottle lying beside one of the cypress roots. Brown glass with the neck had shattered cleanly against the wood.

He picked it up, holding it to the thin shafts of moonlight filtering through the canopy.

Sticky residue clung to the inside. He sniffed it.

“Corn mash.” Another sniff. “Far too much sugar.”

He smiled. “Moonshine and desperation. A proud Louisiana tradition.”

He set the bottle down, dusted his hands, and rose to his feet.

Interesting though this little discovery had been, he really ought to be on his way. There was a body to relocate before sunrise, an alibi to maintain, and a radio program that wasn’t going to write itself.

Frankly, he had no interest in cleaning up after whichever half-baked occult enthusiasts had attempted to bully the cosmos into granting them an audience.

He turned to leave.

The jagged edge of the broken bottle snagged against his glove.

A sharp sting. “Ow.”

He drew his hand back.

A neat little slit had opened across the leather covering his index finger. How irritating.

A crimson bead welled through the tear, then fell.

Past his hand. Past the drifting leaves.

Straight into the exact center of the pentagram, with the sort of impeccable precision that could only be described as fate showing off.

”...Oh, honestly.”

The swamp answered immediately.

No slow awakening. No ominous rumble. No theatrical crescendo, which was frankly, a little rude, given the circumstances.

One moment the clearing was cold, damp, and entirely ordinary. The next, every rune ignited with scarlet light erupting through the carved lines with explosive violence, racing across the earth faster than lightning, consuming the pentagram whole.

Then gold. Blazing gold which became impossibly bright.

The earth hummed beneath his feet. The cypress groaned and bent away from the circle. High above, a murder of crows burst screaming from the canopy, scattering into the night in a storm of frantic black wings.

The frogs fell silent. The cicadas stopped mid-song. Even the wind left.

Alastor threw an arm across his face.

“Now just a—” He never finished.

Nor did he see the thread.

A single strand of golden light slipped silently from the tear in his glove. It coiled gently around his wrist, then stretched toward the blazing heart of the summoning circle. Shimmering once, as though recognizing something, before pulling taut.

The light exploded.

There was no sound. Only brilliance. White consumed everything.

Power crashed through the clearing like a tidal wave, ancient beyond comprehension, surging through the swamp with enough force to send Alastor stumbling backward several steps. Every hair on his body stood on end.

For one dizzying instant, he could not locate the ground.

Then it stopped. Abrupt as a snuffed candle.

The wind returned, tentative. The frogs resumed. The cicadas followed. The swamp, with the magnificent indifference that was Louisiana’s greatest natural resource, simply continued.

Alastor blinked spots from his vision.

No creature. No horror. No spontaneous combustion. He flexed his fingers cautiously.

Still attached.

“...Well.” His brow furrowed. “That was certainly dramatic.”

He glanced around the clearing. Nothing. No scorched earth, no lingering glow, no polite explanatory note from whatever had just decided to make his evening significantly more complicated.

“I dislike mysteries that refuse to leave behind proper evidence.”

--------

Something was there.

Something small.

It glowed with a soft golden radiance, no brighter than a lantern hidden beneath a blanket, yet utterly impossible to ignore.

Alastor retrieved his shovel and approached with measured steps. The runes had gone cold, their light spent entirely on whatever they'd been building toward.

He reached the edge of the pentagram.

Raised the shovel.

Prepared himself for whatever was reasonable to prepare himself for.

He peered inside.

--------

A baby looked back at him.

Alastor's expression didn't change.

Internally, however, and he would take this to whatever grave eventually claimed him, there was a brief but significant pause while his mind attempted to rearrange reality that made even marginal sense.

The infant couldn't have been more than a few months old.

She lay nestled in a soft pink blanket, impossibly clean amid the muddy clearing, as though someone had placed her gently inside an oversized cradle rather than the smoking wreckage of an occult ritual gone sideways. Tiny wisps of bright blond hair framed a cherubic face. Her skin was pale as fresh snow, with round pink blush marks decorating both cheeks as naturally as freckles.

She looked remarkably like one of those absurdly expensive porcelain dolls wealthy little girls insisted on dragging everywhere.

As he leaned slightly closer, because surely not…

Two tiny horn nubs curled delicately from her forehead.

Then she blinked. Her eyes met his. It shimmered like molten gold dust caught beneath sunlight.

She was, in every observable sense, the most aggressively charming thing Alastor had ever encountered.

He found this deeply suspicious.

The infant blinked once more. Then smiled. A bright, toothless smile, entirely free of caution or fear.

Then reached one pudgy little fist toward him with the unshakeable confidence of someone who had never once considered the possibility of being refused anything.

“Baa…” she giggled, a trail of drool escaped the corner of her mouth

Alastor stared. The shovel remained raised.

The baby grabbed at empty air with tremendous determination.

Several long seconds passed.

“No.” Instantaneous.

She waved both arms.

“No,” he repeated, with considerably more conviction than he felt. “Absolutely not.”

She kicked happily beneath the blanket.

“I was in the middle of something.”

Another tiny giggle.

“I have responsibilities.” He pointed at himself with the shovel handle.

“A program to run. An audience to entertain. I am, in point of fact—” he said this with great clarity ”—a murderer.”

The declaration hung in the humid air.

He gestured toward the tiny bundle.

“Which is not a profession generally conducive to...” He searched for the word. ”...this.”

The baby considered his argument with great seriousness.

Then—

“Achoo!”

The sneeze was impossibly dainty.

A tiny puff of pink-and-gold smoke drifted from her nose, floated lazily into the humid Louisiana air, and vanished without a trace.

Alastor watched the smoke disappear.

Then looked at the little horn nubs, then back to where the smoke had been, then back to the horns.

Several fundamental assumptions he’d held about the nature of reality made quiet, dignified exits from his working model of the world.

“.....That’s new.” he said, because, what else could he say.

--------

Alastor lowered himself slowly onto his heels.

His hands, which had not trembled through rather a lot of things that reasonably warranted trembling, were doing something embarrassingly close to shaking.

“She is not human.”

He said it aloud because the situation seemed to warrant stating the obvious.

He looked up. His gaze swept the dark wall of cypress, the still black water, the moon hanging overhead with the blameless indifference of something that had seen far stranger things and intended to keep its own counsel.

Then he waited.

Quite reasonably, he thought.

For someone to arrive and explain themselves. A frantic parent. A guardian. An infernal courier with paperwork. Anyone capable of explaining precisely how an infant had materialized in the middle of a summoning circle.

The swamp offered frogs.

“...Of course.”

His attention drifted back to the child.

The infant had become thoroughly absorbed in the noble pursuit of fitting her entire fist into her mouth. The endeavor appeared to require her full concentration.

“...Of course,” he repeated.

A long sigh escaped him.

“....Good Lord,”

His gaze dropped to the blanket.

Soft. Pink. Far finer quality than anything one would expect to find abandoned in a Louisiana swamp. In one corner, delicate burgundy thread embroidered a single name in elegant cursive.

He read it aloud before realizing he'd only meant to think it.

“Charlie.”

The name settled warmly in the humid air. Strangely unassuming for something that had arrived the way she had.

He looked at the horns. The golden eyes were now blinking slowly, sleepily, at him. The pink smoke was still faintly in the air.

None of it fit any category he possessed. Which meant he was operating blind. Which meant, his jaw tightened, that whoever had sent her, or lost her, or whatever the appropriate verb was for this situation, would be coming to collect her eventually.

And they would find her in the custody of a man standing beside a freshly filled grave, holding a shovel, with blood on his cuffs.

“...Well.” His voice came out softer than intended. “Miss Charlie.”

He inclined his head with the courtesy the situation seemed to demand.

"It would appear someone has made a truly spectacular error in judgment this evening."

A thoughtful pause.

“And I regret to inform you..." He sighed. "...it was almost certainly me.”

Charlie regarded him with solemn golden eyes. Then blew a tiny spit bubble. It floated for precisely one second before popping.

"...Yes," Alastor said gravely. "Quite."

He pinched the bridge of his nose.

“You are, unless appearances are wildly deceiving me, which, given this evening, I can no longer entirely rule out that you are not from here.”

He glanced toward the extinguished summoning circle.

“Which means that wherever you are from, someone is going to notice your absence.”

He glanced around the clearing.

“And when they come looking, and they will come looking, make no mistake, they will find you in the company of a man standing next to a grave.”

He gestured at the shovel. “With this.”

At his cuffs. “And that.”

He let out a slow breath through his nose.

“I rather expect introductions are going to prove tremendously unpleasant.”

--------

So he waited.

One hour. Then another.

No infernal gateway split the air. No smell of sulfur drifted through the trees. No frantic, otherworldly guardian came crashing through the cypress demanding to know who had stolen their child.

Only the moon. The swamp. And Charlie.

She shifted beneath her blanket. A small whimper escaped her, then another. Building with gradual, inevitable momentum into something louder and more committed. Like a storm that had made a decision and intended to see it through.

“Oh.” He straightened immediately. “Oh, don’t.”

Another whine.

“Please don’t.”

The pleading note in his own voice startled him considerably.

Charlie drew in a deep breath.

For one hopeful, glorious second, he wondered if perhaps she’d decided against it.

Then she wailed.

The cry tore through the swamp with astonishing force for a creature scarcely larger than a loaf of bread, echoing across the black water until even the birds nesting high in the cypress stirred uneasily.

Alastor flinched. “Oh dear.”

The crying intensified.

He looked at his own hands, the hands that had done a frankly impressive catalogue of things without flinching, and found them completely, uselessly unhelpful.

“I...” His voice came out almost apologetic. ”...don’t do this.”

Charlie remained entirely unconvinced. If anything, she cried louder.

Despite everything, despite the grave behind him, the shovel in his hand, and the rapidly mounting certainty that this evening had permanently escaped his control. The corner of Alastor’s mouth twitched.

“My, my.” He shook his head slowly. “Bold.”

Another indignant shriek.

“Demanding.” Something shifted in his expression, not quite a smile and not quite anything else. ”...I can respect that.”

--------

With the crying showing absolutely no inclination toward a diplomatic resolution, Alastor did the only thing left to him.

He picked her up.

Poorly. Very poorly.

His elbows locked at his sides as though she were an unstable explosive, which for all he actually knew, she might be. He held her at arm's length, her tiny legs dangling uselessly beneath the blanket.

Charlie found this arrangement deeply insulting. Her cries doubled.

“Oh, for Heaven's—”

He stopped himself.

Unclear if that was the right address. Best not to chance it.

“...Mercy.”

With all the confidence of a man performing surgery after reading half a pamphlet in a language he didn't speak, he adjusted his grip. Closer. Still wrong.

He hesitated. Then, with the careful, almost reluctant movements of someone navigating entirely unmapped territory, he drew her against his chest.

One hand supporting her back. One hand cradling the impossible little bundle. And almost without thinking, he began to rock her.

A slow sway.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

It was awkward and utterly undignified.

Had another living soul witnessed it, Alastor would have felt morally obligated to create a second freshly dug grave before dawn.

Charlie's cries faltered. Softened. Then finally, stopped.

Alastor froze.

A tiny sigh escaped her instead, warm, sleepy and, perfectly devastatingly content.

Safe.

The sound settled somewhere deep inside the quiet between them. Her fingers fumbled upward until they found his lapel. The grip that followed was astonishingly strong for someone whose entire hand could scarcely wrap around one of his fingers.

She did not let go.

“...Huh.”

He stood motionless beneath the moonlit canopy, surrounded by black water and ancient cypress trees, holding a horned, golden-eyed, pink-smoke-sneezing infant who had materialized in a summoning circle in the middle of a Louisiana swamp.

An infant whose parents were almost certainly the kind of people one did not want to be on the wrong side of.

An infant who, in the span of less than an hour, had dismantled an evening that had been proceeding perfectly well right up until the blood touched the circle.

He searched himself methodically for what he was feeling.

Not fear. Not pity. Not obligation.

Something stranger. Something that didn't fit neatly into any compartment of his carefully ordered mind. It settled behind his ribs with surprising weight, pressing quietly against the inside of his chest.

Responsibility.

The realization arrived reluctantly. Not as a revelation but more like an unwelcome guest politely letting itself in. And woven through it, so faint he almost convinced himself it wasn't there at all, was another feeling.

Something entirely unfamiliar.

He refused to examine it.

He had the distinct suspicion that, if given a name, it might become real.

--------

He didn't examine it further. Some instincts, he had learned, were best left unnamed.

His gaze drifted back to the sleeping infant in his arms.

The tiny horn nubs. The golden light still clinging to her like the last warmth of a sunset. The little crease between her brows slowly smoothing away as sleep claimed her completely.

And the name stitched in burgundy thread into the corner of the blanket.

Charlie.

“No one's coming for you tonight.”

The words came out before he'd decided to say them.

Charlie offered no reply.

She simply slept against his chest, one impossibly small hand still wrapped stubbornly around the lapel of his shirt.

“No,” Alastor murmured. His eyes lifted toward the empty dark between the trees. “Didn't think so.”

Carefully, almost without realizing he was doing it, he pulled the pink blanket higher around her shoulders.

The gesture felt entirely too natural. He found this profoundly inconvenient.

With his free hand, he slung the canvas sack over one shoulder, the familiar weight of the shovel and hunting knife settling comfortably against his back.

Then he turned toward the narrow trail leading home.

The old jazz tune returned almost of its own accord, a quiet hum beneath his breath that drifted through the chorus of frogs and insects until it became difficult to tell where the melody ended and the swamp itself began.

He told himself it was only for one night.

Only until morning.

Only until whoever had misplaced a horned infant with golden eyes and an alarming tendency to sneeze magic came looking for her.

And that conversation, whenever it arrived, was going to be extraordinary, and he was absolutely not going to think about it until it became strictly necessary.

He repeated these assurances several times during the long walk back through the cypress.

They became noticeably less convincing with every repetition.

--------

Behind him, the ruined pentagram faded slowly. One by one, the ancient runes faded into darkness until nothing remained but scorched earth, melted wax, and the lingering scent of something that had never belonged in the mortal world.

Ahead, the cypress gradually gave way.

Beyond them waited the lonely road. A small house that had never been meant for two.

A story that would require an extraordinary amount of fabrication.

And a future Alastor could not yet begin to imagine.

He never did discover who had carved that summoning circle into the earth, nor what desperate soul had meant to call upon the darkness that night. In the end, it hardly mattered. They had aimed at something and missed entirely.

Something else had answered.

Far beyond the reach of mortal eyes, where the unseen threads of fate were woven together in silence, two lives had already become entangled.

A sinner who had yet to answered for his sins. A child who did not yet know she was a princess.

One born of Earth. One born of Hell.

Bound together by a single drop of blood, a circle drawn by fools, and the particular cruelty of fate when it decides it finds something funny.

History did not always change with wars.

Or revolutions. Or kingdoms rising and falling.

Sometimes, it changed because one murderer chose to pick up one abandoned child.

The world shifted by only the smallest measure.

One impossible little girl asleep against a killer's chest, her fingers still stubbornly curled around the lapel of his shirt.

Neither of them noticed.

The future had already begun rewriting itself around them.

The swamp kept its secrets. It always had.