sashene

This is something I've talked about before (mainly in DMs), and it's probably something that'd only have crossover appeal to a handful of people (and at least one that might hate it to pieces xD). But I often think about writing the equivalent to Steferine's plot in season 5 of The Vampire Diaries for Dick and Catalina Flores. Some tags left on a recent post of mine prompted me to want to talk a bit about it here.

The explanation: Katherine and Stefan met over a century ago; Stefan was initially attracted and drawn to her, but she used compulsion (mind control) during their "relationship", to keep him docile and accepting of the fact that she was... well, a murderous monster. She fed on him, violated him, raped him.

The important part: season 5, over 150+ years later. Katherine has been stripped of her powers, turned human, and had what amounted to a terminal illness (her 500+ years were catching up to her). Stefan, who at the time had been feeling vulnerable and sought to grasp for control, ended up choosing to have a one night stand with Katherine. She took this as ~reconnecting, as another step in their grandiose love story. To him, this was closure.

Later, she's on her (supposed) deathbed and Stefan extends her some grace, using his own vampiric powers in order to offer her some closure in (what he thinks are) her last moments, conjuring images of a happier version of her human youth: with the newborn daughter that was taken from her for having a baby out of wedlock and the family that was brutally slaughtered when Katherine refused to be a sacrificial pawn in someone else's schemes.

This is not really the end of Katherine this season, because instead of going quietly in that good night (as if), she hijacks the body of her doppelganger (a younger vampire with her own romantic past with Stefan) and tries to ~seduce him back. She's found out, and Stefan gets to be the one to deliver the killing blow.

(She returns as the final boss in the very last season, and he stabs her + sacrifices himself in the process in order to save the world. They die together in a literal fiery embrace -one of his past victims summons hellfire, it's a long story-; this is not relevant to the point of this post, I just like it, for Reasons).

I don't know yet what the equivalent of this story would be for Dick and Catalina. The killing is (most likely) out, for obvious reasons; Dick wouldn't find closure in that, or in Catalina dying in an unrelated or different manner (and I don't want to kill her). Neither of them have vampiric power nor do I want to give it to them LOL (here we could draw some parallels between vampirism/vigilantism, though each of their relationships with it is basically inverted from Steferine's).

But I would want that same feeling of... Catalina being in a vulnerable, "lower" place than she once was [1], and this allowing Dick to approach her from a moral high ground, where he can... idk how to explain this. Afford? Being ~heroic and generous towards her in a way that makes him feel soooo good about himself, as opposed to how miserable he felt when he was actually with her in Devin Grayson's run, when he felt "stuck" with her and tried to find something sympathetic in her and clearly loathed every second together and used it as self-punishment. And then yeah, the part where Catalina manages to turn the tables on him, and he now must be proactive to stop her. We'll see.
 

[1] As I typed that I just had a great idea of how to do this 😈. This is why I love blabbing on tumblr dot com, thank you everyone.