Continuity: takes place after Satisfaction.
The idea that all assassins are heartless monsters is a bit of a stereotype. Is she a monster? Yes. Is she heartless? Not yet. So she sobs out what little is left of her heart, until she is consumed with the bitter coldness of burning vengeance.
Once, seeking vengeance had been a relatively easy thing: leave, find, kill. Now, she had childcare to worry about. Lian was the product of two people that had used each other as a distraction to forget the real world. But the world is real and really dangerous, and although she's not a very good mother, she learned from her trip to Tibet that it was in Lian's best interest to not tag along on missions.
So she goes to Roy's apartment to suggest that if she doesn't come back from her revenge mission, maybe he should relinquish custody of Lian to Paula. Instead of Roy, however, she finds, well, Roy- still fifteen in appearance, with a gleaming metal weapon where his arm should be.
"My lovely wife and daughter," he says. "It's weird how I don't remember marrying a beautiful woman like you."
"Where's Red Arrow?" she asks tersely, not really wanting to discuss the messy tale of two Roys.
"Right here, of course. Don't tell me you don't recognize your dear husband?"
"Look, Speedy-"
"Arsenal," he interrupts. "Arsenal, much more interesting than Red Arrow, don't you think?"
"Well, I'm looking for the much less interesting Red Arrow, so tell me where he is."
"I'm right here," he insists, and kisses her.
She violently pushes him away and instinctively shields her daughter from him. "Know your place!" she yells. "I am not your wife, little boy!"
Lian, who always becomes excited in the most inconvenient of situations, chooses this moment to clap her hands and coo, "Dada!"
Arsenal smirks. "I think our daughter disagrees with you."
He reaches forward to touch Lian, and Jade retaliates by kicking him away. But Arsenal is surprisingly agile and soon he's crushing her neck in his mechanical hand and it's entirely inhuman and it hurts, and she's shocked because she's never been overpowered like this before. She's choking and clawing at the metal arm with one hand while clutching Lian with the other, and she can feel Lian slipping away... and then it's over, and as she gasps for breath, she can see Lian securely cradled in the metal arm while Arsenal gently strokes her auburn hair with his natural hand.
"It's my DNA in her cells, my blood in her veins. She's as much mine as she is yours or Red Arrow's," he says quietly, and as she watches Lian happily responding to her genetic father, Jade finds that she can't argue with that.
It's late, Roy's still not home, her neck is sore, and her daughter is sleeping on a weapon. Half of her head is suffering from a migraine and the other half is scheming to destroy her sister's murderer- but she can't do that until she talks with Roy about custody issues that may arise if she dies on the job. She's surprised and annoyed with herself that they haven't had this conversation already.
Arsenal is gazing at Lian with the same expression that Roy had had when he had first seen Lian- part wonder, part joy, and part dread at the burden and the magnitude of what it means to be a father. She briefly and bitterly imagines that Sportsmaster would have been wearing an expression of annoyance and disgust when he first saw her, but lets the thought drift away as she watches Arsenal and can't help but wish that he were Red Arrow instead.
He suddenly stands up without any warning, and she nearly knocks the chair over as she jumps up, ready to attack. He quirks an eyebrow at her. "Afraid that I'm going to kidnap my own daughter?" he whispers. "Maybe some other night. I'm just putting her to bed for now."
She follows him anyway as he walks over to the bedroom with the crib. As he gingerly lays Lian down and tucks her in, Jade can't tell the difference between Arsenal and Red Arrow. Both are undeniably the little girl's father- and she thought she had daddy issues.
After the bedroom door is closed, however, the difference is all too clear. He shoves her into the hallway and his eyes and his metal arm are both glinting dangerously. This Roy is alive, unlike the Roy she had known for the past five years. This Roy is like the one she had first become attracted to- the brash, headstrong, confident young man who had often engaged in brutal combat with her. Arsenal is looking at her hungrily as if she were his prey- who was the cat here?
"Why settle for the knock-off when you can have the original?" He forcefully grasps her shoulder with his new hand. "The enhanced original?"
She wrenches his hand off of her and tries to use it as a lever to throw him to the ground, but the arm just pivots 360 degrees at the elbow, and she makes the mistake of stopping to stare astonished at the inhuman thing, and he uses that moment to his advantage and throws her, instead. Arsenal is quite a bit healthier than he should be in his condition, and is actually a bit better at combat than Red Arrow had been, so she briefly wonders if the Light did any other experiments with him, but her wondering is cut short by an electrical shock delivered by the metal hand. The electricity interferes with her nervous system and she crumples to the ground. Arsenal straddles her and grins down at her with an expression somewhere between smug and predatory.
"You can't deny that we have electrifying chemistry," he says, and she rolls her eyes at how very teenager he is, then feels sorry for the Roy that never really experienced being a teenager because he was literally born with the objective of being mature and responsible and Justice League-worthy.
"Get off me, kid," she demands. "I have no time for your childish antics."
"Not a kid," he snaps. "I'm twenty-three as far the government is concerned."
"You're fifteen as far as I'm concerned."
"I'm not a kid," he snarls, then crushes his lips to hers in a most un-childlike manner. It's so very wrong, because he's technically underage and it makes her feel like a pedophile, but then again, he's technically her husband, and her body is responding to Arsenal as if he were Roy, because he is Roy. He looks, smells, and feels like Roy- well, except for the metal hand currently trying to rip her shirt off- but he's not her Roy, and so she rolls them both over and punches his face so hard that her knuckle cracks.
Either they really did something else to him, or he's on drugs, because he recovers in an instant and it takes all her concentration to fight this wiry boy while simultaneously trying not to wake up Lian in the other room. She's relishing the adrenaline rush of a good fight with a hot guy, and she's getting all nostalgic as she remembers her first few encounters with Roy, and thinks it's sadly amusing how her favorite memories of her husband involve extreme violence. Then the wall next to her explodes and she sees Arsenal staring at his mechanical hand with a stunned expression- apparently, he hadn't meant to shoot a projectile at her, but the moment passes and he smirks at her triumphantly.
"You can't beat me. I'm a living weapon. I can do anything I want, and I can make you do anything I want you to."
She involuntary takes a step back as he approaches her. She's losing the power struggle and it reminds her of her childhood with Sportsmaster, and she hates that she feels vulnerable, but some twisted part of her mind is excited because with Roy, she had always had the upper hand, and this sudden role-change is a little thrilling. She feels rather breathless and she swallows hard as Arsenal scrapes a cold metal finger down the side of her face.
He kisses with the sort of ferocity that you would expect from an angst-ridden teenager furious at the world. When she had been an angry teenager, she had vented by murdering quite a few people. He vents by seducing the wife of his clone. Why are they so messed up like that? She thinks that their situation is a little more messed up than is usual, because she's cheating on her husband with an underage version of him who's also technically her father-in-law, or at least brother-in-law. Their relationship is a bit more complicated than most other love triangles.
But it's hard to focus on anything, really, when he's touching her like that, caressing her with his human hand while tormenting her with his weaponized one, and the pleasure and pain both feel so good after the numbness left behind from the events of the past few days, or maybe the numbness is the aftermath of her entire life.
After a childhood like hers, and with a job like hers, she learned not to feel anymore, but her mind doesn't always listen to her reasoning, and she finds herself hating the father she never really had, mourning the sister she failed to protect, fearing for the child who she knew she wasn't going to be a good mother to, and loving a man who probably never loved her at all. She had kept all these emotions shut away, but now the floodgates are breaking open and she needs a release. It would be so easy to pretend that this Roy is her Roy, and the way he's clawing at her with his metal fingers is disturbingly erotic, and she's sick of being the neglected wife and it feels like she deserves to cheat on him, and she's never cared much for ethics, so the underage thing doesn't bother her too badly, so why is she still hung up over a man who was just supposed to be a temporary distraction?
She's shaken out of her thoughts by Arsenal gripping her throat again. "Kiss back," he orders, and she realizes she had stopped responding. "Kiss back!" he growls, frustrated, and she feels sorry for this anguished kid that had eight years ripped out of his life only to return to a world where he had been replaced and forgotten about. She also thinks that although he seems glad to have a weapon for an arm, it just wouldn't be the same as your own flesh and blood, especially for a boy to whom archery was life. She can see the exhilaration associated with his newfound power, but can also see the fear and insecurity and loss, and this is Roy, but not Roy, and she doesn't know what's what anymore, so she just shuts her eyes and loses herself in Arsenal as she had once lost herself in Red Arrow.
She finds him sitting on the rooftop of one of the cafes they had frequented early in their relationship. His head is bowed and his shoulders are slumped as if they're crushed by the weight of the world. "Hey, Chesh. Where's Lian?" he asks tiredly.
When she doesn't reply, he looks at her with weary eyes, the eyes of a boy that had been forced to grow up too quickly. And she thinks that maybe the reason why she likes him is because she understands what it's like to have to grow up too fast, because she knows what it's like to live in someone's shadow, to have to constantly prove yourself because you're your own worst critic.
As she stands there wordlessly, she can see concern growing in his eyes, and she also understands what it's like to care about someone but not want to show it, because showing love is a weakness and a terrible character flaw, and she realizes that flaws are what make humans human. Her flawed mind loves his flawed mind, and yes, she really does love him, weaknesses be damned, so she seizes him in a heated kiss, and he's kissing back, and she doesn't remember what was so flawed about them in the first place, because this moment right now is perfect.
But of course, he's Roy Harper, so he has to ruin the moment by pulling away and asking again where Lian was. "If you care so much, why not check up on her yourself?" she asks somewhat coldly.
He looks a bit embarrassed as he sighs and says, "Sorry. I got caught up in making sure Speedy- no, he goes by Arsenal now- was all right." That was Roy, with his one-track mind and a bad case of tunnel vision. Focus on one thing, and everything else, including your wife and daughter, become second priority, which is to say, completely negligible.
"Arsenal is doing just fine. He made himself quite at home in your apartment."
"Oh, so you've visited him?" She had more than 'visited' him. "I gave him my apartment and, well, everything else. I mean, all of my things were originally his, after all. I actually used up quite of his money searching for him, so I think the right thing to do would be to pay off my debt to him."
"Debt? What debt? You saved his life when the whole world gave up on him. Without you, he wouldn't be here."
"No, you have it backwards. Without him, I wouldn't be here. And we all know everyone would have been better off if that were true."
She is furious at his self-deprecation. "That's right. Because Lian is worthless, yes? Better off not having been born?"
"No, Lian would have been born," he says matter-of-factly, "because Arsenal would have still been around."
"But Arsenal isn't you," she says, and she suddenly feels enormously guilty for having done what she did just a few hours ago.
He smiles at her wryly. "I'm not sure that matters. Are you?"
She doesn't answer. Instead, she says, "It would have been nice if you had told me you were giving him our apartment. I went there expecting to find you."
"So is Lian there right now?"
"Yes. She is under the impression that she's with her father."
"Well, she is. He's her father as much as I am, if not more. She's better off with him than me."
"He's fifteen and nowhere near old enough-"
"He's twenty-three, as far as the government is concerned."
Damn DNA, she thinks. "Mentally, he is too young to be a father."
"But not too young for you?"
She stares.
"You have bite marks on your skin, Jade, and emotionally disturbed Roy Harpers seem to have a thing for you. Two plus two..."
He's dejected but not angry, and she's angry that he's not angry. "Well, what are you going to do about it?" she snaps, knowing she's being petulant, but not really caring.
"Leave. I'm going to go someplace where I won't interfere with his life or yours or Lian's."
She wants to slap him. "Lian and I are your family, whether you care to admit it or not!"
"No, you're his family. I never should have existed. I was a temporary placeholder. And I'm going to put everything back where they belong."
"And your arm? Are you going to cut it off and put it back where it belongs, too?" She had meant this sarcastically, and is appalled when he takes it at face-value.
"I've been considering it..."
She slaps him, horrified, and clutches at his arms, which are just as much hers as they are his- at least, in her opinion- and he has no right to do anything with them other than hold her. "Don't do that to yourself. And don't to that to us," she adds. "Lian and I aren't objects that you can just hand over to him against our will!"
"First of all, I'm not handing you over, just letting you go to do what you want to. And secondly, what do you mean against your will? Lian can't tell the difference, and apparently, neither can you. I know you never really liked me, just my face. And with my mind being little more than a computer program, I don't blame you. I'm barely human. The original is back now, the one that actually has a mind of his own. And he likes you, Jade. I would know. I am him, after all."
He gives her a soft kiss on the cheek before he walks away and out of her life. She doesn't know why she doesn't stop him. And although she thought she had cried her heart out after her sister died, she realizes that enough of it was left to break just now.
She returns to the apartment to find Arsenal asleep on the couch. Unconscious, he seems so young and vulnerable, and he's just a boy that was caught in the crossfire of something much bigger than himself, and if she's honest with herself, she, too, was just a girl that became a pawn in a game too big for her to understand.
She finds his arm a little fascinating and a little repulsive. It's cold and unyielding, just like Roy when he's hell-bent on accomplishing his latest objective. It's inhuman and dangerous, which Roy never was- at least, not to her- but Arsenal may be a different story. She doesn't know the extent to which the boy has become damaged by his ordeal, and an unknown enemy is the greatest threat of all.
She trails her fingers down the metal and wonders if he can feel it. He doesn't move. She intertwines her fingers with the mechanical ones, and ends up moving the entire arm. He winces and grasps the intersection where flesh met metal. He glares at her reproachfully and crushes her fingers in his. She pretends not to notice and strokes the metal with her thumb. "Can you feel this?" she asks.
He looks both angry and sad as he shakes his head. "No. I can control it, but I can't feel it." He frowns. "Does that make any sense?"
It does. Control, but not feel. It's the way she deals with her emotions- or at least, how she tries to deal with her emotions.
He grimaces as he rubs his upper arm. "Phantom limb pain. Who knew that something absent would cause you so much grief?"
"Sometimes, absence is grief," she says shortly, and she thinks of Artemis, but Arsenal must assume that she's thinking of Roy, because he scowls jealously.
"So, how's the clone doing?" he asks, but sounds uninterested.
"Fine." Everything but fine, actually.
"Does it really have the ability to know whether it's fine or not? I mean, can it think? Does it have a mind?"
She's indignant about the way he says 'it'- as if Roy were just some laboratory experiment, which was true and not true at the same time.
"It's not entirely human, is it?" he continues. "It's a lot like this arm- both are a part of me, yet not me; both were created to be weapons; both can't feel- can't feel you."
She knows he's just saying this out of jealousy and insecurity, but it stings nonetheless. And she can't help but wonder if Roy really didn't feel her at all. She's about to get lost in her own thoughts again, but Arsenal is hunched over in genuine pain, and she doesn't know what to do because she had always caused pain and never relieved it.
He's kissing her again, desperately, and part of her wants to help alleviate his torture, but another part is insulted that she is, yet again, just a distraction to another Roy Harper, and it's pathetic that that's all she'll ever be. She had been the greatest assassin in the world, and here she is now, reduced to some form of analgesic, so she pushes him away and slaps him. He's surprised and hurt, and she takes a sort of sick pleasure at watching him suffer, because she's suffering too and doesn't know who to blame, but he's vulnerable now and she wants to take advantage of that.
She ferociously grips his arm just above the metal and he cries out, and unlike before, the tables are turned and he's looking at her with trepidation and she's back in her element as an entity to be feared. Then he remembers what he's now capable of and shocks her with so much electricity she swears her heart has skipped a beat.
By the time she's gathered her bearings, he's in the bathroom and she can see him shooting a syringe into his arm. She can tell that it's a potent painkiller, and she knows too well what will happen to him if there isn't an intervention, so she deposits him at Green Arrow's doorstep. Oliver looks old and tired and broken, and he's the only other person who is just as embroiled as she is in this mess of two Roys and no Artemis, so there isn't a real need for words as they just nod at each other and understand.
She doesn't know how to tell Paula that her elder daughter is going on a potentially fatal mission to avenge the death of her younger daughter, so she nixes the idea altogether and goes searching for Roy instead. She hates being the one to have to crawl back to him, but it's better than having to deal with her mother's tears.
He isn't that difficult to find- he wasn't much for originality, so she finds him lodged in a cheap hotel in Taipei. She has fond memories of Taipei. She enters through the window, as she usually does, and without preamble, hands him the small bundle that is Lian.
"I'm going to avenge Artemis. Not sure if I'll come back." She speaks in a tone that most other people would have used to say something like, 'I'm going to work. See you at dinner.'
"Didn't we establish that Lian would be better without me in her life?"
"Don't be ridiculous. Lian needs her father."
"Arsenal-"
"Is in rehab. Drug abuse." Roy doesn't say it, but he has the words 'My fault' written all over his face. Jade sighs. "And can we forget about genetics for now? Lian needs a father who understands responsibility."
"Responsibility? I used you, you used me, and considering that you were a master of taking away lives, I forgot you were capable of creating life, too. Hence, the lack of protection and the subsequent surprise. Yeah, I'm so responsible."
That stings, but she doesn't argue. After all, she's leaving with the motive to take away a few more lives. So she simply says, "Lian needs you."
"She needs you, too."
"Not when I'm consumed by vengeance."
Roy knows her too well now, so he doesn't argue. He just kisses her on the cheek, more perfunctory than anything else, and says, "Come back?"
She shrugs. "Maybe. It's not exactly up to me."
She's in the middle of the street, trying to hail a taxi when he grabs her and pulls her into an alleyway. He's being rough but he's different from Arsenal, and this time, she's not a distraction but the focus. This is Roy- her Roy- and he's a damaged man who's about to lose his wife again, and he's kissing her, not to forget anything, but to remember her if she doesn't come back. It seems like he's trying to make up for all the times that they didn't have together, and for all the times that they might never have together in the future. It's hot and passionate and this is Roy, and she realizes that it's not just DNA that makes a person, but the experiences, and it's what they've been through together that makes them husband and wife. He's changed her, she's changed him, and Lian has changed the both of them, and this is something that she'll only ever share with her Roy, and no matter what anyone says, Roy is not Arsenal- never was and never will be- and that's just the way she likes him.
They're both out of breath when he kisses her cheek again and says, "Come back?"
Even though she knows that it's a difficult promise to keep, it's a promise that she wants to make. So she holds him tightly and whispers softly, "Yes, I'll come back."