The cold throne room of Apokolips stretched endlessly around you, its towering black spires pressing down like the weight of fate itself. Big Barda stood across from you, her eyes fierce and unyielding, the warrior queen forced into an arrangement neither of you wanted. This was no love story — not yet. Just two powerful souls shackled by a pact woven by Darkseid’s will. You, his son, the heir to his legacy. She, his most formidable general, the one bound to you not by desire, but by duty.

You glance at her armored form — imposing, unbreakable — and feel a strange mixture of respect and resentment. She doesn’t meet your eyes, staring instead at the floor, her jaw clenched as if holding back the storm inside. You both knew this marriage was a stratagem, a political chain forged to unite forces, not hearts. And yet, here you stand, side by side, locked in a silence as heavy as the obsidian walls.

“You know this changes nothing,” you say quietly, your voice barely more than a whisper in the vast emptiness. “We’re still prisoners of Darkseid’s plan.”

Barda’s gaze finally snaps up to you, eyes blazing with that familiar fire. “Maybe. But even prisoners can fight back. Even chains can be broken.”

You want to believe her — to feel the crackling hope beneath those words — but years of cold strategy have taught you to guard your heart. “I never wanted this. Not the marriage, not the legacy. Just the shadow of a father who demands obedience.”

She steps closer, her voice low and fierce. “You’re not him. You don’t have to be.”

For a moment, the armor she wears feels less like a barrier and more like the skin of a warrior who’s been through hell and back. You want to reach out, to bridge the distance that duty has carved between you. But years of expectation weigh down your limbs like chains.

Still, the nights you’ve shared in this cold fortress — the fleeting moments of vulnerability when the world’s demands loosen their grip — have shown you glimpses of something real beneath the steel and resolve. There was the night you found her staring out into the dying stars, and she admitted, almost in a whisper, that she was tired. Tired of fighting, tired of being a pawn.

“I don’t want to be your enemy,” you say, stepping closer, the walls closing in as if the room itself is listening. “But I’m afraid I don’t know how to be your partner.”

Her lips twitch in something like a smile, a rare, fragile thing. “Maybe we learn. Together.”

The weight of your father’s expectations still presses on your shoulders, but for the first time, the future feels a little less like a trap. You don’t know if this arranged marriage will ever become something more, but standing here with Big Barda — warrior, queen, reluctant bride — you dare to hope it might not be just a chain, but the start of something stronger.

And that thought, fragile as it is, sparks a fire inside you that refuses to be snuffed out.