Chapter 5

For all his professional detachment, for all the times that Oliver attempted to tell himself that he was above it, he cared. In ways and levels that escaped accurate description from his own trauma and violence dulled psyche, he cared. He cared for his city, he felt every death in her streets and wept in the recesses of his soul at the darkness that infected every corner. He cared for the waifs and strays that somehow always seemed to end up in Star City, as though his domain was refuge for all those lost and wandering. He cared for every life that was taken away too early by some criminal streak of scum that deserved nothing more than to be erased by the sharp tip of an arrow.

It was a feeling he tried to keep beneath the surface. Caring meant compromise. If he felt anything too deeply, let any connection run too strong, it could put the mission in danger. It could put the lives of the innocent at danger.

Yet, for every emotion Oliver buried under a heavy layer of denial and self-loathing, the opposite rose from the hate and bile in his gut. For every lost life he felt so connected to, the hungry desire to kill rose up. For each corrupt politician he watched wilfully harm his city, the urge rose to put the fear of…something, into them.

Not the fear of God. Better than anyone, Oliver knew that God wasn't watching. The fear Oliver stoked in his prey was more primal than God, more primal than the desire to fall back on belief in times of crisis.

The kind of fear that Oliver instilled in his prey was primal. The kind of fear the drove pre-historic humans to question whether it really was just the wind rustling the bushes. To him, it was like watching an animal chew its own leg off to escape a trap. If said animal was successful, it would stumble and die. So, what would drive it to do such a thing? Fear. True fear. The level of instinct beyond all conscious and rational thought. That kind of fear was the reason that Oliver got out of bed in the morning.

It made sense to him. Because, in his core, Oliver Queen was not a hero. He was a hunter.

Oliver was reluctant to admit it, but there was a thrill to it. Watching his prey cower and run and piss down their legs. It was a baser instinct that he wasn't proud of, but it was thrilling. And in times it was a feeling that he wanted to share with the world. He settled for sharing it with his students. One by one, he taught them true fear. Only Helena had understood it the way he had done. Where Roy had thrived in the violence, Helena had excelled in the mind games. She understood manipulation, understood the depravation of humanity and the way it could be exploited better than anyone. She understood why he lingered in the shadows, why he let his pretty run and lick their wounds, why he let them know how true fear tasted. Oliver supposed that was because she had lived it.

Kara was different. She recognised fear, to an extent she could understand it, but to her fear was a human emotion. In a way that Oliver knew he was incapable of ever understanding, Kara's upbringing on Krypton had locked away her capacity to acknowledge her own fear. On some base level, Oliver knew that Kara must have felt it, in many ways fear was an evolutionary advantage. After all, the caveman that heard a rustle in the bushes and grabbed a spear survived longer than the one who ignored it. But between Krypton's superiority issues as a civilisation and Kara's adolescence having been spent encountering things that would have produced decades worth of nightmares for any unconditioned human, she had numbed herself to her fear.

In equal measure Oliver had admired and loathed that trait in her. A complete rejection of fear had allowed Kara to keep pace with his training regimen, with the horrors he had forced her to bear witness to. But, at the same time, Oliver knew the importance of fear. He compressed it within himself, but he never locked it away. Fear had kept him alive. Fear had kept him awake during cold nights on Lian Yu and picked out the hissed breath of wolves on the wind. Fear had sharpened his senses beyond any level that his conditioning could take him to. Without fear, he would have been dead a thousand times over.

Lacking in fear, was lacking in self-preservation. And it was that mantra, as much as any other, that had kept Oliver alive for as long as he had managed.

"Absolutely fucking not."

The moment Kara had suggested the idea, it had been his only recourse as an answer. Quite why Kara had expected him to consent to her plan was beyond him.

"We've been at this for two months! This is the first chance we've got to get close to The Triad!" Kara exploded, and stalked the space of the training area towards him. "Why the hell shouldn't I?!"

It was like every time they fought. Oliver felt his own anger rise in levels disproportionate to what Kara, or he, had expressed before that point. It was an upwards spiral with them, every time. It was of no comfort to him knowing that particular argument had nothing to do with The Justice League, like all their others had been.

"This is The Triad, Kara! They will kill you," Oliver snarled the words out without much conscious thought. "I didn't waste two months training you so that you could go and commit suicide! Who do you think I am, Hirohito? You finish your training and I hand you a pair of pilot's googles?"

Suicide. That was the one word that accurately described Kara's "plan". That she was so willing to risk her life spoke volumes to her tutelage under The League. Reluctant as he was to admit it, Oliver knew that they trained good soldiers. Still, offering herself up as bait to The Triad, in the way she suggested, it made his skin crawl.

The idea of sending her undercover into The Triad had briefly crossed his mind. After all both Mia and Helena had done similar assignments with him, though they had been different. Helena had been raised by the Bertinelli crime syndicate, she knew what to expect. Mia had spent most of her life on the streets, had been abused by a man she had deluded herself into loving and seen the inside of more than a few brothels as a consequence.

Kara was different. Even with everything he had taught her, she was still far more removed from humanity than she could convincingly cover up. The kind of mannerisms, the aura of desperation she would need to fake in order to convincingly lie to the people she would need to lie to, it was beyond her.

For all his teachings about the nature of humanity, Oliver had taught her very little about what it was like to be human. He had loathed Clark for keeping Kara distant from humanity, for forcing her to spend her formative years locked in a cold, isolated space station. Yet, after he had taken her in, Oliver had done next to nothing to help her explore humanity. Instead, he had given her the darkness, the violence, the sadism, the selfishness, and the filth. For all their failings, Oliver knew there was more to humanity. At the end of the day, it was that sense of more that Oliver fought to protect. Still, he had done nothing to show it to Kara. He had been content to allow her to wallow in humanity's worst, to let her see nothing but the degradation and failings.

There were magnitudes of humanity that Kara hadn't seen. A range of emotion and culture that she had no idea about. To Oliver, those parts had never factored into his training. Himself, and all the people he had taught, they had all been human. They had experienced love, and joy, and hope, and sorrow. Had seen humanity's best as well as its worst. Kara hadn't. While Oliver had been scolding Clark Kent's failings in teaching Kara, Oliver had neglected to teach her too.

Humanity was more than their failings. But if Kara didn't know that hope, that human desire for more, then how could she convince others that she did?

Something twinged in the back of Olive's mind at the thought. He could feel it calling to him, mocking him. In the back of his mind there was more to his reasoning, more than he was willing to acknowledge. He cared. It was more than just his concern at putting Kara into the field with her admittedly limited human experience. He was worried for Kara, about what going out into the field without him to back her up might mean. In the two short months they had trained together, Oliver had felt the tension in the strange holding pattern they had developed. Keeping it buried under a thin haze of clinical detachment was all he could do to ignore it, but the idea of Kara putting her life so precariously on the line, without tools or backup, clawed at the glass walls of his façade. Oliver could feel it scratching under the surface.

"It's our best chance," Kara crossed her arms over her chest, her unbridled rage receding into a leashed tempest. "Last night a freighter bound for Star City was stopped by the Hong Kong P.D., a few dozen people were found hidden in the cargo containers, most of them young women," Oliver didn't need Kara to tell him that, he had seen the report himself that morning. "You and I both know that those women were being smuggled into the country to get sent to work in The Triad's brothels," Even then, Oliver remained pointedly silent. He had made his reservations clear, Kara giving him information he already knew wasn't going to make him change his mind. "It means that they're going to be looking for local women to fill up those places, I can use that to get in."

Oliver couldn't lie to himself and deny that that idea hadn't crossed his mind. When he had seen the report he had made the exact same connections that Kara had done, and then come to the exact same conclusions. Even with the thought in his mind, Oliver had pushed it away. Kara wasn't ready, that was what he told himself. But, was she? After two months he had started to take Roy out in the field with him, and Kara had picked up his lessons far quicker than Roy ever had. Helena had been undercover practically from the moment Oliver had offered to train her, for all the time she had spent with him she had spent the same amount pretending to be amicable with her father. Oliver knew that putting himself and his students in harm's way was necessary; for the sake of the mission, for the sake of protecting those who could not protect themselves. He had done it for over a decade, his students had followed him to that end, Roy had lost his life in doing so. Yet, he hesitated with Kara.

Her plan made sense. With Mia, Oliver wouldn't have hesitated before sending her in undercover, and the though dimly crossed his mind that Mia was hardly any older than Kara. Getting someone on the inside with The Triad, someone who could talk to the girls who were forced into working for them, who might be able to find hard evidence of criminal activity, it was an ideal. For all Oliver's groundwork, The Triad were too careful to leave anything compromising outside of their secure areas. As Oliver Queen, he had no doubt that he would be able to walk into any of The Triad's brothels with very little, if any, questioning, but that wouldn't get him close enough. Even with Oliver Queen's money and reputation, he would have no access to the backrooms or offices, and with the surveillance that The Triad used breaking in there undetected wasn't an option. If he wanted to go in as The Green Arrow, it meant frontal assault, and even if he could take down every Triad member there a different group would simply set up shop elsewhere. He needed hard evidence, documentation to shut down the higherups that were involved in the people smuggling and prostitution ring. That kind of information would only be accessible to a working girl, someone that the Triad bosses wouldn't even consider to be a threat.

Against every conscious thought he could muster, Oliver knew Kara would be perfect for it. At only twenty-three, her youthful looks allowed her to pass for a woman a fraction younger, something Oliver knew that The Triad valued highly. She was beautiful, that much was undeniable, even more so after she had cast of the trappings of Kara Kent. Those two factors alone would have made her an ideal candidate for the grunts that The Triad sent to patrol Star City's shadier clubs looking for girls that could be tricked into working for them.

They were the same reasons that Oliver had let Mia go undercover with Intergang when they had first pushed into Star City. With Mia's jagged past, her time spent being forced to work as a prostitute by a man who had proclaimed to love her, Oliver had been reserved to send her in at first. Mia had refused to back down, had insisted to him that she could handle it, that she could put her own damage aside for the good of the mission. And she had. Mia had been working in an Intergang owned brothel for little under a month when she had contacted him to say that she had found enough evidence on the regional bosses to chase them out of Star City for good. Though, she had never told him any meaningful detail about what had happened while she had been undercover, and Oliver had been content to leave the whole operation behind and marked as a job well done.

He didn't have the time or the luxury to worry about feelings.

Willing to acknowledge it or not, there was a part of Oliver that knew allowing Mia to go undercover with Intergang had been a pyrrhic victory. That for all the good that had come of it Mia had suffered even more than she already had. Mia had suffered, had known that she would suffer the moment she had decided to go undercover, and still she had gone through with it. She had come out the other side darker, jaded, and Oliver had simply embraced that change and moved on.

For as much there was a part of him that refused to put Kara in harm's way, there was a part of him that wondered. That wondered what that kind of experience could do to her. Like Mia, Kara had volunteered. Never once had Oliver forced his students into learning, into choosing to go on a mission. He wasn't like The League, he didn't recruit, people came to him. Kara had offered to go undercover with The Triad. Even his refusal had seemed to only make her more adamant. His rebuttal had been met with an immediate argument, she had been ready for it. Almost with foresight she had expected it and had arguments to fight him back. Those arguments alone gave rise to a different part of him. The part of him that ran deeper than his training. That part of him that wanted to know. That part of him that wanted to throw Kara into the deep end and see what would happen.

"Oliver..." Kara trailed off for a moment, and Oliver was almost thankful for acknowledging that he wasn't going to speak until she offered him something new.

There was more to his reasoning to waning to keep her away from the field, and with the experience of all of his years, Oliver crushed it.

"Fine." The word came out with an Arctic cold.

XXX

Even with his reluctant agreement to send her into the field, Oliver had refused to hold back on his criticisms of Kara's plan.

Despite it all, he respected her decision, if Kara wanted to go into the field, Oliver wouldn't stop her, it wasn't how he operated. That didn't mean he wouldn't try to convince her that he was right and into accepting that she wasn't ready. Beyond the simple fact that she was far from fully trained, there had been a list of reasons that Oliver had provided in the aim of trying to get Kara to stand down.

The one that really mattered though, he sent them spiralling into an argument that bordered on violence.

Oliver had dialled Kara's physical training back to a minimum as he tried to prepare her for undercover work. Where their debates on The League had been conducted on the winds of a sparring session, that particular argument about Kara's suitability for undercover work had started while they had been simply sat at a desk talking. Oliver had, factually so in his opinion, pointed out that Kara was far from practiced enough to be able to pull off the part of a working girl.

In the admittedly limited time Oliver had spent learning about Kara's personal life from the woman herself, he had learnt that he was only the second man she had been physically involved with. That left her in a position where she would undoubtedly be thrown into situations that she had no experience whatsoever to be able to deal with.

That particular line of argument had done less to convince Kara than Oliver had hoped for. She had shot back that there was no reason that she would be comfortable in those situations if The Triad did buy her cover story. All of the girls that The Triad brought into Star City from Hong Kong were innocents, young women who had no idea what was going to happen to them. They, undoubtedly, had even less practical experience than Kara did. As much as he never admitted it out aloud, Oliver knew Kara had been right on that point.

Until that moment, Oliver had been divided in two parts on the idea of Kara's innocence. The large, more conscious part, wanted to protect her, to keep her from having to so much as acknowledge that those parts of humanity existed, never mind be exposed to them first hand. Oliver had no doubt that Kara would be able to deal with it, that she would be able to keep up with whatever was thrown at her, but that didn't mean he was comfortable with her having to do so.

Then there was the part of him that asked. That wondered. The part of him that wanted to know exactly what that kind of exposure would do to Kara. In many ways, Oliver had seen the worst of humanity. Had borne witness to some of the most deplorable acts that a person could commit. The kind of things that went on behind the doors of a Triad run brothel were a mystery to him. Oliver had seen, as had Kara, the very worst end result that the girls forced to work in Star City had faced. But the things before that, Oliver had no idea of. And that left him wondering. Wondering what might become of Kara, of Supergirl, if she had to confront a darkness even he had never looked at long enough.

With no regard for his angels or his demons, Kara had set out to find her in.

Thanks to his contacts in Hong Kong, Oliver knew that The Triad had lost over thirty young women that they had been hoping to put to work after the HKPD had stopped that cargo freighter from leaving port. That meant that there was a deficit of working girls that The Triad could force into servitude.

It had happened before, and on those occasions Oliver had doubled down on dealing with the street level Triad enforcers. Without an inside connection, there had never been an opportunity for Oliver to dismantle The Triad's brothels short of killing everyone involved. The urge to go down that particular line had been overwhelming to him in certain moments, and it had taken every ounce of his years of conditioning not to give into that baser will to do violence. So, instead, his best response had been to stop The Triad from being able to recruit women from the streets of Star City.

Every time The Triad had found themselves short of young women illegally brought in from mainland China, they had prowled The Glades looking for others to exploit. Whenever that had happened, Oliver had run double his usual patrols, determined not to let the people of Star City, his people, from getting roped into the underworld.

Having Kara actively looking for a recruitment opportunity made that difficult. If he had suddenly stepped back, allowed The Triad to operate as normal, they would have seen, would have felt something wrong. Oliver had to do just enough, enough to convince them without disrupting them completely. It had felt wrong, on a level too deep for Oliver to vocalise. Something deep inside him had recoiled at it, at the idea of the deals and coercions he would have missed while looking deliberately busy elsewhere.

It had taken nothing more than a called in favour from Anatoly to arrange it. The Bratva had agreed to make noise, not enough to draw in the police but enough to justify a lack of interruption from The Green Arrow with regard to The Triad. Oliver had promised Anatoly he wouldn't harm any of his men, just put on enough of a show to distract, to confuse. And it had worked.

It felt wrong. One criminal act used to justify another. Oliver had made agreements with The Bratva before. Anatoly had always acted as close to the constraints of the law as possible, never doing anything to attract the attention of The Green Arrow had he been anyone else. Using that to allow The Triad free reign in his city had summoned up a sickness in Oliver's guts that was almost impossible to control.

And yet, it worked. It gave Kara the room she needed, and as far as Oliver could tell she had walked right through into their operations.

At first, his only confirmation had been Kara's lack of return to The Quiver. That night, she hadn't returned. She could have been dead, that Oliver knew well. If something had gone wrong, if she hadn't been able to sell her cover of desperation and need, they would have killed her. Trust, of the kind Oliver had put into Kara, it was unearned. Had no reason to believe that she would be able to convince them.

Still, he let her do it. He justified it. He wasn't an officer, he didn't give orders. He was a hunter. He was a teacher. Of his students he had no control. He gave them no orders, no speeches, no justifications. All he did was teach.

That whole night, the next day, he had wondered. Stressed. Feared. About what had happened to her. Then, forty-eight hours later he had his confirmation. Bratva sources, buried deep in The Triad's own operations. It had been thanks to Anatoly alone that Oliver had been given assurance that Kara had made it into The Triad's operations without being discovered.

It had been relief he hadn't expected to feel. Or, maybe, relief he hadn't wanted to feel.

Yet, Kara had made it. Had found her way through doubt and reservation, that a larger part of Oliver than he was willing to admit had never expected her to make it through. By experience of his own, Oliver knew The Triad. His time in Hong Kong, with Maseo and with Tatsu, had taught him a great many things about the way The Triad worked. From all of that, the knowledge he held of them, and the even greater lessons he had learnt back in Star City, part of him had never expected Kara to make it.

It was nearly another week before Oliver made a move to find her.

Despite his knowledge that, given Oliver Queen's public reputation, it would not be a total left-field move for him to appear in a Triad run brothel. It would certainly raise questions. Questions that would undoubtedly be more intense if he arrived mere hours after The Triad were forced to gather new working girls from the streets of Star City. It had taken measures of control that Oliver hadn't entirely known himself capable of to do so, but he had held back.

The level of repression, the need to bury his burgeoning feelings for Kara, that it had taken had come at a cost. One that Oliver had felt all too deeply.

In that week, even Oliver himself had been aware of his own increase in violence. In his lack of restraint. In his lack of personal inhibition when it came to dealing with the criminals he had come across. He had needed something. A distraction. That he had known, part of him had even expected it. Yet, the brutality it had drawn out had been almost a surprise to him. Instead of shock, instead of concern, instead of fear, Oliver had felt something else. He had a sense of something too far gone to be righteousness, too perverted to be justice. It was a feeling that boiled away in his guts, in his very soul.

It was joy.

The same thrill that he recalled in his torture of General Shreive, of Kovar's men, in countless others on the streets of Star City. The thrill that brought to life a part of him that Oliver hated to admit to. And it was a part of him that Oliver felt himself wishing he could carve out with the point of a blade. Oliver had felt it rising. Had known the feeling, the urge, growing within him from the moment he had taken Kara on. More of him than he had been willing to accept had known it.

With a will that surpassed anything that Oliver had felt himself using before, he had forced it down. Levels of control, of self-discipline that exceeded even his much vaunted ability, had been what Oliver had needed to keep that feeling in control.

There was one thing, and one thing alone, that Oliver knew could supress what he had been feeling. One thing that he knew could sate the violence that the darkness within him had been screaming to let loose.

So, he went to find her.