16537/No Longer a Secret

No Longer a Secret
Date of Scene:	10 December 2023
Location:	Donna's Office - Themysciran Embassy
Synopsis:	Irie visits Donna at the Themysciran Embassy to discuss the recent revelation of Irie's parenthood -- and the fact that makes her a Themysciran citizen.
Cast of Characters:	Donna Troy, Irie West

---

Donna Troy has posed:
    One of the things about travelling in time is that it can make long days /really/ long. In the case of the Titans, they'd just had a day that lasted a bit over thirty-six hours, and it had been a tired bunch that had arrived back at the tower, with barely the energy to process the great number of things that needed to be processes by pretty much everyone concerned. Processing would no doubt take a long time.

    Those Titans who had not been in that particular episode were already well aware that time travel had happened and that the Titans who had been to the future had seen a lot, but only a limited amount of detail has come out so far. In time all the Titans will probably know that Caitlin is Irie's mom, but it may be a while before either of them are fully comfortable talking about what exactly that means.

    It's only a couple of days later that Donna invited Irie to come and visit her at the Themysciran embassy in New York, and given the two have barely talked since the time mission, that was pretty inevitable. Donna has taken quite a shine to Irie since she arrived in the present a two and a half years previously, and wouldn't be likely to want to sit on the sidelines while Irie was going through the emotional wringer. The truth is that Donna has been doing her best to give both Caitlin and Irie some space to deal with things, but now that they've been back a couple of days the invitation is sent. It's an easy enough trip for a speedster to get to the Embassy, so once the invitation is out Donna goes pretty much immediately to the reception desk to sit with Galatea and await the young speedster's arrival.

Irie West has posed:
    Donna's not left waiting long. Only a minute or so before there's that flash of yellow and red Speedforce lightning that announces the speedster's arrival, and Irie is there, grinning. She's dressed warmly, with thick jeans, and fur lined boots. A yellow cable knit sweater over which the leather jacket with the Flash logo on the back that Donna had given her for her birthday.

    "Hey, Donna!" She says, sounding chipper. Whether or not she actually *is* remains to be seen. If anything these past couple of days is that Irie has proven to be a master at hiding parts of herself, while wearing the rest of her heart on her sleeve.

    "It's been ages since I've been here," she says, with a chuckle. "Been kinda avoiding it, really. I'd have to 'oooh' and 'aaah' all over again and, I mean, I could have totally managed it since this place is totally that cool to begin with, I'd be afraid of slipping up and, like, knowing where all the bathrooms were."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Revelations can change everything, and that's perhaps the scariest part of them. You don't know how they'll change the world around you, and you don't know how they'll change yourself. Some things never change though, and Donna's hugs are one of them. Always happy and enthusiastic, always a bit too strong but never strong enough to actually hurt, and frequently with a certain amount of picking up off the ground and twirling in the air included. Yes, Donna's happy to see Irie.

    "Yeah," Donna says with a grin at Irie's comment about it being ages since she's been there. "I kinda figured that." She gives Irie a wink, then gives Galatea a nod and a smile before leading Irie into her office. It has changed a fair bit in the negative decade and a half since she last saw it. Most of the decor is new to Irie, and the selection of Donna's own photos on the walls are all different from the ones Irie had seen in the future.

    Donna gestures in the direction of the sofas as she walks over to the drinks cabinet. "Grab a seat Irie, Want something to drink? I've got Mexican cola, some really good French hot chocolate, some of Raven's favorite blend of coffee. Or would you like a glass of wine? Gotta promise to not tell Cait or Wally that I gave it to you."

    "So... mostly this is just about checking up on you," Donna says with a smile. "This whole thing must have been rough on you. But before we get onto that, I just want to say how incredibly well you've handled this whole thing." She gives a shake of her head. "Not just these last couple of days, but I mean since you've got here. Honestly when I think about how well you've handled an incredibly difficult situation, it just... I'm sure Caitlin and Wally -- both versions of each -- must be incredibly proud of you. So am I."

    She leans against the drinks cabinet awaiting Irie's drinks order with an odd expression on her face. "I don't know how Caitlin, present day Caitlin I mean, is going to take this all. I mean I've known her virtually her whole life, but even I can't guess. This whole thing is new territory. But she's going to try. That much I do know about her for sure."

Irie West has posed:
    Irie can't help but giggle at getting a Donnahug. Nothing helps her mood more than that. She follows her along the halls of the Embassy, eyes darting here and there, noting how new everything looks compared to when she was here last. When they make it to Donna's office, she wastes no time settling in on one of the seats.

    "Ooh! Hot chocolate, please!" she says when given the choice. "I... don't really like alcohol," she says with a wrinkle of the nose. "I mean. Wine is fine. I've tasted wine before, and Themysciran wine even got me tipsy! For, like, a minute." She shrugs as if this is besides the point. "Somebody let me taste their beer and //that// was nasty. Got not interest in the harder stuff, really." She gives Donna a grin, "And besides. Why have wine when you can have fancy French hot chocolate?"

    She beans when she's given praise at how well she's handled this situation. "Thanks! Dad kind of drilled it into us the kinds of things that we'd have to do if we ever time traveled. He was so sure that it was going to happen to one of us... or all of us! ... one day. Maybe he knew it was going to be me. Or... maybe he just thought that giving relativity a raspberry was just kind of par for the course for speedsters, it was only going to be a matter of time."

    She lets out a deep breath, puffing out her cheeks when Caitlin is mentioned. "Yeah. We talked on the timeship about where we wanna go from here. I told her that it was okay if she wasn't ready to be my mom, and it wouldn't hurt my feelings if she wanted space. I told the same thing to Dad when I first came back. I didn't want her to feel obligated. But she wants to try. Bitty steps though, and I'm okay with that."

    "As for how I'm doing?" She lets out a nervous sort of laughter. "I'm confused as to what the hell that whole time thing we went through was. For the past couple of days I've tried to work it out, and I think I got the 'what' of what happened, but not the 'why' or the 'how' or... anything else, really. We just weren't given all the information and I'm gonna have to be content with that."

    "I'm relieved that I don't have to pretend that Caitlin's //not// my mother, but at the same time... kind of sad that she... isn't. I'm sad that the mother who knew me, saw me disappear a thousand years ago and all that time never knew what happened. Sad that she finally gets to see me, and find out, and we only get a few hours together, and not any longer." She falls silent as she rocks the chair back and forth and says in a small voice, "I'm going to find a way to spend some time with her and have it not break reality. She deserves that."

    She takes a deep breath and continues. "I'm worried that Wally and Cait will feel pressure to get together for my sake." She shakes her head, "This is a divergent timeline so they don't have to. I mean, yeah, it'd make me sad if they never did, but on the other hand I respect their autonomy in the situation. If they do get together I want it to happen organically, now because they feel obligated to, you know?"

    "But overall? I'm happy with the way things have turned out." She shakes her head, "When everybody found out it could have been disastrous. I mean, sure, it was emotionally turbulent, but I think everybody made it out okay in the end."

    

    

Donna Troy has posed:
    "We're all still trying to figure out what was actually going on," Donna agrees with Irie. She gets two cups ready and sets some milk in the coffee machine to steam as she adds fancy French hot chocolate to the two glasses. "My future self kept telling me about how we just don't understand time travel like they do in the future. I'm sure that's true but it was kind of annoying. Before this whole thing happened I would have said that in a situation like that, us being their past doesn't necessarily mean they are our future. What really confused me about the whole situation was that when they lived our lives, there was no time travelling Irie. Doesn't that mean that the divergence between them and us happened before 2021? In which case we weren't their former selves. Yet they seem convinced that doesn't necessarily matter. That the past can change as well as the future, and that doesn't entirely make sense to me. "

    Donna lets some hot milk into each cup and starts blending the chocolate as she talks. "But then that whole thing at the end with time loops happened, and you know what? I can't help wondering if what we did, what happened during that trip, ultimately leads in some way to you coming back in time. Like maybe you're more susceptible to time travel because you've done it already, something like that. That way because it hadn't happened for /them/ yet, you hadn't gone back in time for them. I really don't know if that makes sense, but then maybe hoping for time travel to make sense is a foolish idea." Donna flashes a grin over her shoulder at Irie.

    "When you first came back, Wally was... it was really hard for him to cope with," Donna says. "As much as he wanted to do the right thing, to be a father for you, he just didn't know where to start. And if I'm honest, I think he ran away from it a bit. I really can't blame him for that. He'd never have left you in the lurch. But knowing you were with us, that you were safe, with family, that gave him the freedom to try to come to terms with it at his own pace. You're not a stranger to Cait now, so I think she'll find it easier. She already loves you, after all. "

    Donna tops up the now blended chocolate with steamed milk, gives another stir, then tops up more with frothy milk and sprinkles a little more chocolate on top. She comes over with both cups of chocolate, handing one to Irie with a big smile before taking her own to the chair across from Irie. "Honestly, I did wonder if you'd decide to stay in the future with the Caitlin who thinks of you as her daughter. I guess you could have. Gods, we'd all have missed you terribly, you know. But there was something my future self said to Caitlin's future self at the end there. Kind of implied that the intervening thousand years for them are now separate than they are for us. So we're not bound to their fate. And perhaps that version of Irie will end up with that version of Caitlin. I hope so."

Irie West has posed:
    "I was under the impression that a timeline has a bit of give to it," Irie says, gratefully taking the hot chocolate. After blowing on the surface a couple of times she takes a sip of it and closes her eyes making a yummy sound. "This is really good. But, yeah. Like, the act of me going back in time didn't necessarily mean that I created a divergent timeline. It means that things have stretched a bit but if I was careful it would have bounced back. Like a rubber band, you know? But Mom didn't remember so it //has// to be a divergent timeline, right?"

    She gets a guilty look when it's mentioned that she's predisposed to time travel. "Yeah. Maybe you're right. I've got the feeling that that isn't going to be the last time I time travel, you know? I'm, like, a chrononaut. It's why I'm in school to study this kind of thing. There's so much we don't understand about the Speedforce and I want to know more about how it works so that things like.... rocketing into the past, or aging up, or whatever the next wonkiness is going to happen is isn't as much as a surprise as they are."

    She nods solemnly. "Yeah. Messing up out of the gate and kind of surprising Wally like that out of the blue was... it made it easier to be careful around Cait. I knew he was having a hard time adjusting and..." she shakes her head. "I never pushed him. At least, I don't think I did. I never wanted to. I made sure to give him the space he needed when he needed it."

    Another sip of the luxurious drink and she shifts gears. "A part of me wanted to," she says. "But it... it just didn't feel right. I'm right where I belong. I can //feel// that. In my spleen. That's where you feel those kinds of things, right? Your spleen never steers you wrong. It also tells me that I'm going to get to see her again, and that time actually get to spend some //time// with her."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Irie's spleen talk gets a big grin out of Donna, but no direct comment. She too blows on her hot chocolate before taking a sip and leaning back in her chair, getting comfortable. "You know Irie, I've got kind of a confession to make to you."

    Donna tilts her head to one side in a moment's silent thought before taking another sip of her chocolate. "Mmm. This is good chocolate. So, I've always been encouraging with you and Bart about not letting things slip. Always said I thought you were doing the right things, and never asked questions. But the truth is I can't really help myself. I kind of just have to know things."

    "It's my training, really. In combat, you need to know everything. If you've been watching your opponent before the fight even starts, you know how they move, and that gives you an advantage in combat. And when it's not just yourself, when you're... when you're responsible for other people, then... it just feels to me like I have a responsibility to know as much as possible about the situation we're all in, even if I don't act on that information. Because maybe at some point in the future I will. So I did a lot of observing. And a certain amount of testing."

    "That first time I saw you at the tower, remember how I made a comment about wondering if I'd be meeting someone who called me 'Auntie Donna'? That wasn't an off-the-cuff comment. It wasn't what I'd been wondering, either. Some part of me was busy thinking that whatever I was saying about spoilers, I needed more information, and I figured that observing your reaction when I said that would give me some information. I do things like that quite a lot."

    Donna gives a little shrug. "Your reaction did tell me a bit. You looked downcast, and you said something like 'I didn't think people would want me to do things like that.' From that I could tell how much of a brave face you were putting on things. But it also told me a little about how you saw us, and therefore what you knew about us. It made me pretty sure that I wasn't your mom for a start. And it was obvious that the idea of 'Auntie Donna', whether that's something you called me in the future or not, meant something to you. That made it very easy for me to know what I should do about your arrival. That I should be there for you as much as you wanted and needed me."

    "The funny thing about it is..." Donna grins at Irie over her cup. "It didn't occur to me at the time that it would be literally true. Even if I had suspected your mom was Caitlin back then, at that time she wasn't my sister. Now she is, so that means I actually am your aunt. That makes me... surprisingly happy."

    Donna's grin grows a little wider. "The other thing it means is that you are the daughter of an Amazon, and maybe that's something we should address." Donna switches language mid stride, to ask in Themysciran, "/How's your Themysciran Greek, Iris?/"

Irie West has posed:
    "Yeah, I kinda figured as much," Irie says with a shrug. "At least in hindsight. It's such a //you// thing to do. It's comforting in a way, seeing that, while some things change, other things don't, and a lot of the good things can be relied on."

    She purses her lips and waggles a hand. "/I understand it better than I speak it,/" she replies in heavily accented Thenysciran Greek. She laughs suddenly, "/This is the first time anybody's spoken it to me since I came back. I'm so rusty./"

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna grins wide at Irie and replies in English, thankfully. "We'll have to see to that, Irie! Extra homework for you!" Donna gives a wink. "Or maybe better than homework, we spend some time on Themyscira soon. Nothing better than speaking with the natives to help with a language, and you missed out last time. I suspect that was on purpose."

    "It's up to you and Caitlin how you manage all this but the way I see it, a daughter of Aikaterine is at least half Themysciran, whichever country you were born in. Who knows, one day you might become an Amazon like your mom did, but even so you're Themysciran. Maybe you don't want that generally known at this point, that's up to you to think about. But whichever way, that's a fact. You've got a whole other family on the island, and you will always be welcome there. Maybe there are some people there who you've been missing. Well if so, that no longer needs to be the case. When would you like to go?"

Irie West has posed:
    Irie giggles. "Oh boy! More homework!" A sip of hot chocolate and she says, "But, yeah. It'll be nice to see Themyscira again. I only got to go a couple of times in the future. We were always running around putting out one fire or another that we didn't have a lot of free time. You know how it is being a Titan."

    Her tone turns a bit more pensive. "I've been thinking about that," she says. "I mean, when I was growing up I wasn't too concerned about becoming an Amazon. Just being Wally and Cait's daughter was enough for me, you know? I was also still young... well, young/er/. But now I'm thinking... maybe that's how we'll connect? Me and today's Cait, that is. We start small like... she can take me Kanga riding! I was too small for it at the time but now I'm big enough, that's something we can do."

Donna Troy has posed:
    Donna gives a thoughtful nod, and takes another drink of her chocolate. "Not a bad idea. I know it's hard for you Irie, but... let it happen naturally rather than trying to push it. Cait will come around in time. She already saw you as part of the Titans family before she knew you were related, and that should make it easier. It's going to be strange. I mean you always hear about there being a unique bond between mother and child, that the first time a mother holds her child is this unique bonding experience. But that's not true really."

    "Cait is having to face up to being your mom without having given birth to you, and that makes things more complicated. But, you and me both. " Donna puts her cup down on the arm of her chair. "I mean my childhood was as weird as it gets. There were no examples for me of what a mother-daughter relationship should be like, because mine was the only one on the island for nine hundred years. Diana wasn't even around when I was young. I think it took a while for my mom to get used to her adopted daughter, and I understand that a little better now than I did as a kid. I mean she didn't even choose to adopt me, I was kind of dropped on her. She adopted me as a favor, and so how could she love me as a daughter? But she grew to. I'm sure it'll be the same with Cait and you."

    Donna gets out of the chair and steps over to crouch in front of Irie's seat, resting her hands on Irie's upper arms and grinning at her. "Yeah. Get Cait to introduce you to Themyscira. To finish up those Themysciran lessons her older self never finished. Take you riding Kangas, and exploring the Enchanted Forest. It's a natural way to spend time with her and for the two of you to grow closer." Donna breaks into a huge, amused grin. "I can't say I won't be a little jealous of her getting to introduce a Titan to /my/ home though!" she says with a wink.

Irie West has posed:
    "I mean, right. I'm going to let her come to me first," Irie says with a resolute nod. "I'm sure she still needs some time to work through it. Especially now that she //has// time to work through it. When we first talked it was on the timeship and everything was happening and it was all //so much at once//, right?"

    The mention of the Enchanted Forest causes her to light up. "Ooh! I never got to go into the Enchanted Forest when I was a kid! That'd be really cool, too! I mean. Not, like, something we should do immediately or anything. Build up to it. That kind of thing. But still!" She makes sparkly fingers as she breathes, "Enchaaaanted fooooorest!"

Donna Troy has posed:
    Irie's Enchanted Forest chant gets a big laugh out of Donna. Perhaps in other circumstances she might have given a little warning speech about how it's a dangerous place not to be taken lightly, but honestly that's Caitlin's job now.

    She goes back to her seat to sit down again and recover the rest of her chocolate.

    "I was kind of rooting for it to turn out that your mom was Caitlin you know," Donna says. "Don't tell her I said that, she'd probably kill me. But it was one of the possibilities I had considered. Had her down as the most likely candidate if it was someone we already knew. Who knows if it works out for them in future. Wally and Cait, I mean. It might not -- I think we know now that there's that much flexibility in the timelines. I hope there is, because I don't want to turn out to be that version of me we met." Donna gives a quick laugh.

    "But listen Irie. For all I said earlier about how much I admire the way you've dealt with all this, it's hard taking this all on your shoulders. I mean parents are meant to be the ones who we can rely on and lean on, right? And you're trying to be strong for Cait. That's tough."

    "So I just want to make sure you know that... well. It turns out that 'Auntie Donna' is a real thing. But I was already used to that and happy about it before I knew that. It may take a bit of time before today's Cait is ready to be Mom Cait, but you can always rely on today's Donna to be Auntie Donna, okay? Any time this gets tough for you, any time it feels like it might be too much, just come talk to me and I'll do my best to cheer you up. I'm fully expecting Caitlin to start demanding I give you less ice cream in future because it's bad for you or something like that, but that ain't happening. She should know by now that us Themyscirans just /love/ ice cream!"

Irie West has posed:
    "I mean..." Irie pulls at a ring of red hair, "It's kind of obvious if you think about it. I kept telling people that it was Jai who took after Mom, and that was only kinda the truth. He got her strength and stuff, yeah, but we're all obviously their kids when you get a good look at us. I was kind of hoping people wouldn't look too closely between Cait and I."

    "To be honest? I'm okay with today Cait being family the same way that the other Titans are family to me," she says, giving donna a soft grin. "She cares for me and she has my back and, really, who could ask for more? Everything else is just whipped cream on the ice cream."

    She sets the hot chocolate down on the end table and gets up to give Donna an Irie hug! Irie hugs are the sudden full contact type filled with enthusiasm and this one is no less. "I'm glad you're here for me. You've been here for me since the beginning, and you've made what could have been an awful situation for me to have been stuck in not awful at all."