If the moon hadn't been shining so bright, he would've looked like part of the tree: a twisted root maybe, a fallen stump, a gnarled mess of branches. As it was, the cloudless sky caused him to glow like specter. A specter crumpled against a thick tree trunk, motionless save for a heaving chest.

He leaned over to his side and positioned himself to spit out the blood to the side.

It was showy, and he knew it. Ollie had told him on many occasions that it always worked, that chicks loved it and couldn't resist it, and that he'd done it during his first brawl against Dinah and won her over on the spot.

Fortunately, no one was around to see the mess dribble out and down his chin. Arms too worn out to wipe it off (not that they wouldn't have done any good: each was its own mess of blood and mud), he just bent forward and nuzzled his shoulder, mixing the blood in with the color of shirt.

He closed his eyes, felt the familiar taste of iron coming to his mouth, and sat peaceably, a lunatic smiling in the moonlight.

It wasn't the first time.

No... the first time had been in the jungle. There were no masks then, it was informal and impractical in the highest degree; the dank humidity and swarming gnats would have made it impossible to see clearly with anything over either of their faces. Ollie had taken him on the trip to Vietnam. He didn't know why, it certainly wasn't the best place to take a little boy his age. But then again, Oliver wasn't known for being the best parental figure in those days. Or ever.

She was holding an AK, blasting away at the American forces her group had ambushed with all the might in her nine-year-old body.

Coming up silently behind her, he sprung from the brush, kicking the automatic out of her hands and coming face-to-face with the same dark brown eyes that hid behind the cat-like mask that night in the forest...

He exhaled deeply, emptying his lungs of the shallow breaths he'd been collecting, and leaned his head on the splintered mess of a tree trunk against his back. He'd been pinned against the tree for several minutes, avoiding the clawed slashes that had reduced the Maple Leafed Oak behind him to its current miserable state.

Clearly, she'd held nothing back...

He hadn't either initially, matching her blow for blow and knocking her down his own share of times. Until he clipped off her mask with a swing of his bow and stared into her eyes again.

She knocked him back quickly after that. She was holding nothing back, and yet... she'd walked away after that. The teenaged assassin-prodigy walked away from his weakened state.

He looked up at the sky and smiled: they'd meet again. Just like they had the previous full moon.

Until then...

He leaned to the side and gathered the spit in his mouth.

...he'd keep practicing.

Lyrics by... Roy Harper