Helloooo - one more day to 3.07...I cannot handle the suspense. Must. Know. What. Happens.
Ghosts
Oliver's breath stirred the dusty air. The tunnels had lost their chiseled smoothness, and were sloping upward, a climb that would end in a fall. He knew what was coming, knew it could only mean one thing — that Ra's didn't trust him.
Because he was being taken back to the pit.
"Initiates are food for the pit," Ra's said, not at all out of breath despite the steep climb. The gold in his robes caught the flickering torchlight, embroidered dragons slithering away into the folds of midnight silk. "You remember I told you once, that the earth holds a vast number of untapped wonders. A pit that grants your worst fears a physical form of their own is a wonder indeed."
"Everyone has their ghosts," Oliver agreed, and Ra's laughed, a sound that made the torches sputter momentarily.
"Your fears seem to be exclusively of the human kind," he said, and Oliver gritted his teeth against the memory of Ra's watching him from above as he dueled against the dead in his past, visible to nobody but him, fighting the realization that he was going crazy.
"I've always wondered if there was something about the pit's composition, the dust, for example, that flakes off the stone — or the sand — something alchemic, a compound that allows you to blur the limits of the Veil — to face the dead, to hear them speak back to you…"
Oliver knew how dangerous it was to believe that ghosts could speak, that they had a mind of their own, that they weren't resurrected in his consciousness and puppets to his unconscious will.
The dead don't speak to me. They tell me what I already know, but haven't accepted.
"Ah," Ra's said, his exhalation a low shiver that carried across the vast cavern.
Oliver stopped beside him. There was only a single light source, a swaying black lantern with a heart that glowed hellfire red, like the light of a dying sun, just barely lighting the first few feet of rough wall down the sides of the central pit.
"Come," said Ra's, touching Oliver's shoulder. He guided him to the edge of the pit, where their feet scattered bits of grit that tumbled unseen into the yawning darkness.
Oliver turned to look at Ra's, every muscle tensed and ready for an attack. But Ra's only looked thoughtfully into the pit, tapping his fingers lightly on the hilt of his sword.
"The pit symbolizes human fear. The first stage of your training was to immerse you in the darkness of your soul, until you learned not to struggle with the darkness, but accept it. And you did. The first months, you refused to fight them. You were passive, you hoped it would just pass like a bad dream."
And he had. Oliver faced the phantoms, sometimes together, all trying to kill him. He shut down, because as soon as they had what they wanted, they'd go. Being attacked by ghosts wearing the faces of his friends and family was just a test by the League, to psychologically condition them against the familiar faces of their past. To teach them to recoil from the loves of their past lives, and to instead trust the hand that pulled them out of the pit.
For months, Oliver let them kill him. He let them sear his brain with their rage and break his body using his own guilt as a weapon. Until he eventually began to forget their smiles and see instead their faces contorted with rage. Until he started to fight back and defeat his ghosts with his teeth bared in fury. When he first saw his friends after that year with the League, there'd been a part of him conditioned to see them as the ghostly apparitions in the pit, that they would only kill him like he killed them. Like he'd been trained to.
"Your fear gave way to rage. That will be your next step, as a blooded member of the League." Ra's turned to him with an unnerving smile. "But for today, I would like to know if your fears have changed."
The hairs on the back of Oliver's neck rose instinctively as the wind behind them picked up, building to a high, cold whistle that shrilled around the cavern like a ghost's scream.
He wondered if Ra's still meant to kill him, or did he mean for the pit to do it on his behalf? But precious seconds of hesitation would only make him look suspicious. Oliver knew there was no way out. He shed layers of his armor, leaving his bow behind. It would be too confined to use arrows in there, and the one thing they did provide him with, inside the pit, was weapons.
"Yes, master," Oliver said, and jumped.
Oliver closed his eyes to the darkness of the pit, scraping his bare back against the rough stone, his hands a mass of weeping cuts from feeling his way around the pit. It was configured like an old prison hole, rough walls leading down to a dusty well of volcanic sand and dirty shards of metal. No bones, because the pit devoured those too.
There was something in the air, a kind of powdery grit from the jet-black stone, like coal dust, that melted on his sweaty skin and disappeared into his system. The chemical substance that fascinated Ra's but terrified everyone else. There was no escaping it.
The formless gases rose around him like an agitated cloud of bees, and Oliver rested his head between his knees, waiting for the torture to begin. Maybe taking a life for the League would change what he saw — but he had no intention of finding out, just a morbid curiosity. He briefly wondered what story to tell Ra's — if he made it out again.
"Get up, kid." said Slade.
Oliver hefted the Bo staff, finding his footing on the uncertain ground. One hand on the stone at his back, the other holding out his weapon.
"You lied." Slade paced around his old student, scraping the wall with the tip of his sword, baiting him. His voice rasped with fury — the Slade he remembered. "About Shado. About yourself. About the blood on your hands."
The sword cleaved downward, and Oliver moved, staff meeting sword with a dull crunch. But when the sword withdrew, it wasn't Slade anymore, but Tommy. Oliver ignored the shiver of guilt.
"You said you'd honor me."
A chunk of wood split from the quarterstaff and sliced across the back of Oliver's hand. Slick with blood, his hand slipped, and Tommy tore the staff from him with a yell. Oliver ducked, and the blade clanged into the stone above his head. Oliver pitched his body forward and rolled across the razor-edged floor. His hand closed on an uneven piece of metal, and he flung it like a throwing star.
It slammed into the far wall, because Tommy wasn't there anymore. Oliver's shoulder burned, and he reached behind to dislodge a jagged piece of shrapnel from his back.
The shadows behind him thickened.
"Remember me?" said Isabel, and he turned just in time for a blade to graze his ribs.
On it went. Oliver fought each of them, whether they were his mother or his father or his sister, whether they were Roy or Diggle or Slade or Shado. Sara and Laurel he fought together. But he refused to die at their hands because he knew they weren't real. There was blood on his hands, and some of the faces he saw had the right to claim it from him, but not like this. In his mind, he turned them to masked League assassins instead of his loved ones, the people he'd wronged and loved in his old life — the people he'd have a chance to love again.
The hope went off like a burst of sunlight, and Oliver fought with renewed strength, taking down the hordes of League assassins. His family burned bright in his head, bright as the stars in the sky. Oliver was triumphant, powered by the mastery of his own mind. He heard a sound behind him and whirled—
Only to find the one ghost he could never kill.
When she appeared in the pit, her hair was always loose, curling around her shoulders in waves of brown and gold. It made her look young, so young. Oliver dropped his weapon, let it roll across the floor and out of reach. Felicity, he thought, because he couldn't trust himself to say it out loud. He'd never told her, but for some reason, while his drugged brain made everyone else into enemies, the reason why he bore the pit was because it seemed to make an exception for her. And every time he sank into the darkness, she was the light at the end of the tunnel, the sign that it was over. The deceiving haze of the pit allowed him this one torture at least — to speak to her, to see her, to touch her…
Small stones skittered into the shadow, scattered by her feet as she moved towards him. She cupped his face in her small hands, and their mouths found each other in the dark. She was warm and soft and kind, because that had never changed about her, real or imagined.
Oliver breathed the Arabic as Nyssa had taught him, the closest thing to a prayer he allowed himself. It steadied him, helped him to keep her with him for a little longer…
"Oliver," she said suddenly, and tore herself away.
Cold air rushed into the void, and Oliver opened his eyes. She was backing away unsteadily, her hands crossed over her chest. There was something wrong with her eyes, the spark that kept the fire inside him alight — missing. It suddenly dawned on him — why.
With a gasp, her legs buckled. Oliver lunged forward and caught her as she fell into his arms, her hair falling thick and loose over his arm, still warm from her neck. He touched her face and came away with his fingertips sticky with her blood. Her arms slid off her torso, baring an angry wound where her heart should have been.
Every time Oliver tried to stop the bleeding, it surged from under his hands, until the body in his arms was as cold as the stone imprisoning him.
No. This wasn't how it worked. They never — they never lingered to die. She never died. He was supposed to die. It was supposed to be him.
"I'm sorry," Oliver said, but she was already gone.
With trembling hands, he closed her wide-open eyes, and held her in his arms. This was a new torture from the pit — as though it sensed his betrayal to the League, as though it sensed that he'd lost his fear of it. So it'd given him something to dread.
Above him, the wind arched into a high cold scream and rushed to be free of the mountain hollow, chilling the sweat on his back to ice.
Cheesy, I know. But I couldn't resist. ;)