Born to Joseph Black, billionaire entrepreneur and owner of Black Industries, Maya's life is meant to be one of luxury. Instead, at twenty-five she finds herself a ghost haunting her own bones, a shadow walker with blood stained teeth and fingertips smudged with gunpowder. The irony of such a fate is not lost on her. Her fate, she believes, was meant to be that of her brother and father before her: a CEO, a philanthropist, a pioneer, a businesswoman. Sunless days and sleepless nights, marked only by the crack of bone, were not meant to be in her cards. She gets years of vengeance driven by hate and bloodlust where she should have had a slow life, a soft one.
But the cosmos disagrees. (Isn't that how all good stories start?) There is a seed buried deep in her, a cosmic gene that defies all normalcy she would thrust upon herself. Hidden in the crevices of her DNA lies power beyond the mortal coil — something of myth and legend that has laid dormant in her ancestry for centuries. A power that leads a Dark Knight and an Amazon to her; an unlikely duo searching for allies, for a team, for someone like her.
Whether an heiress forged into a weapon, or a girl coming into godhood, she is destined for greatness and destiny always comes to collect.
So it's inevitable, is it not? Because — however you frame it — the universe looks at Maya Black, when she is starry-eyed and young-blooded, and says: you.
She is running from a chiming clock.
Barry Allen meets Maya after those seven years, and he knows what the last toll of a clock entails. That is to say, he has been running his entire life. That is to say, he wants to help her. Because something about her, about the curve of her smile and the green of her eyes, stops him in his tracks. Moments where the light shines through, and the cracks in her armour make her look a little more human. Glimpses of who she used to be — who she still can be — which lead him to an inescapable conclusion: she has a potentiality for good. He can't help it, that warmth in his chest. That pressure in his ribcage that presses against his lungs until he can barely breathe.
He knows she is neither soft nor gentle; he knows her hands are rough and her teeth are sharp, that there are shadows beneath her skin and they can make her ruthless and cruel. He knows he could be wrong, and she may very well be past redemption, or absolution, or saving.
And he knows.
He knows.
He knows.
But faith is a powerful thing and Barry Allen holds it in abundance for Maya Black. It's only natural her ascension to heroism follows. It's indisputable, inevitable.
Does destiny not carve her ending into stone right then?
MAYA BLACK / ✨.
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