If I Had A Heart

Rating: M

Characters: Oliver Queen and Kara Danvers

Summary: At age thirteen Kara Zor-El arrived on Earth broken and damaged but was taken in and trained by her cousin and The Justice League. Oliver Queen came back from Lian Yu broken and damaged but with a mission; save his city, by any means necessary.

Both are souls marred with anger, Kara kept hers buried under the surface while Oliver's defined his mission. In the natural order of their respective words, they never should have met. The damage done when they do could change everything for good.

Author's Note: This one is going to be fairly dark. I don't want to say much of anything in this first note, since the real story doesn't begin until chapter two. Most of everything that goes on below is basically the establishing shot of this story. I will say this much, I'm stretching these two to their extremes. I was almost tempted to put this under my Dark Multiverse collection but I didn't think it went quite far enough to justify that.

While I have the key plot details for this nailed down, the ending is in flux right now. I have three potential options; one "hopeful", one neutral, and one straight up depressing. I think I'm going to judge which ending to give this story by the reactions I get as we progress through it. Which is my way of saying, if you're so inclined, take the time to drop me some comments so I know how everyone feels about this universe.

That all said, enjoy!

Chapter 1

Gold kryptonite . . . could be . . . permanent . . . promise . . . cure.

I'm sorry.

Kara hadn't really taken any of it in. There was a numbness slugging its way through her body in ways she hadn't felt since she had been a teenager. She had been on Earth for little over ten years, all that time she had known who she was.

Yes, the last daughter of a dead world, the last one who actually remembered it. She had watched her whole planet, everyone and everything she had ever so much as seen gone in a second. For most people that would have broken them, torn their mind apart and left them a wreck. Kara was fuelled by it. The anger at the loss of her world, at the bureaucrats who let it die, it drove her. When she trained with her cousin to learn her powers, knowing she could help protect the world, she let that anger give her everything she needed. Kal told her over and over to keep it buried, and Kara did that as best she could. She knew that if she became who she really was underneath, the humans would fear her.

Over time she became used to pretending. Kal could never understand the loss of their planet the same way she had. He didn't remember Krypton, everything he learnt about their home world came from Jor-El's data crystals. When Kara first arrived on Earth, Kal had been given twenty-six years to come to terms with being the last of his kind, he was thrilled to find another Kryptonian, one who was family. For Kara, the day she crashed on Earth was subjective minutes after she had watched her planet die. Part of her had been conscious while she had been in The Phantom Zone, but in no way meaningful enough for her to process what had happened.

So, she let Kal take her. The cousin she was sent to Earth to protect had grown up without her, and into mankind's greatest hero. He told her that they had incredible powers to use in service of the people of Earth, and she had leapt at every opportunity she was given to learn. It was no Krypton, but the strange group of family Kara found in the members of The Justice League, living in an orbital satellite high above planet Earth patched over some of the hole left by her world.

The anger fizzled down. What once had been the very thing that enabled her to adapt to her powers years faster than Kal-El did slowly lessened as Kara spent more and more time pretending that she wasn't outraged at the universe.

Even after a decade on the planet, she never did understand Earth's nuances. Kal told her that they could only go where the governing powers on Earth told them they could go, that their Super-Personas couldn't just sweep in to stop every mugger and common crook. At first, Kara hadn't minded. Fighting only powerful aliens or Lex Luthor's advanced robotics was better. She didn't have to hold back on those, she wasn't living in a world made of cardboard. As she got older, it made less sense that they couldn't act all the time.

There were hundreds of heroes in The Justice League, most of which lived on The Watchtower most of the time. Together, properly organised and deployed, crime would cease to exist. They could do so much for the world if only they were allowed to. She had stopped asking Kal why around the time of her twenty-first birthday. Every time she would, he offered her a placatory smile and the same words

"It's their world, Kara. They have taken us in, we have to let them do what makes them feel safe."

When Kara would point out that the whole point of The Justice League was to make people feel safe, Kal would smile and shake his head.

"They're only human."

It started to make sense to her when Project Cadmus were developing weapons to contain The League. When Lex Luthor hacked into the Binary Fusion Generator and used it to destroy a few city blocks in an attempt to turn the people against them. When even Batman questioned if they had gone too far.

By the time Kara had begun to question it, there was no room left for change. The Justice League was restrained by endless governmental legislation. They could only act when it was sanctioned. The more threats they defeated, the less threats seemed to come. With so few attacks delivered on a scale that The League was sanctioned to get involved in, most of their members saw no action for weeks at a time.

Kara had been spoiling for a fight when Green Lantern called her in to join them in Metropolis. She had been watching the fight on the news, but Kal had always insisted that she avoid jumping into combat unless called for. She had made it to Metropolis from National City in a little under three minutes. Kal had been offworld, and Green Lantern had decided they needed the muscle of a Super to give them an edge against Ultra-Humanite.

With little more thought than wanting to land a punch, Kara had barrelled towards Humanite. Then, she had blacked out and woken up with a broken arm and bruises all down one side of her body and most of her back.

She had been whammied.

That was how Barry explained it to her when she woke up in the Medical Bay onboard The Watchtower. Kal had been there too, nervously glancing between her and Barry. She had been comatose for nearly a week, and the yellow sun lamps hanging over her bed had done nothing for her.

Kal had sent Barry out of the room before telling her the truth.

Humanite had invited a new form of Kryptonite. Gold. Designed specifically to work on Kara's DNA and bind her cells from absorbing yellow sun radiation. Proximity to the mineral had completely destroyed her ability to process sunlight, her powers were gone. Nearly a week since the fight and there was no notable change. Once he had been captured and questioned, Humanite had insisted that the damage would be permanent, that nothing they could do would bring back Kara's powers.

The sickening numbness she had felt when Kal told her that hadn't subsided in the six weeks since she'd heard it.

Despite her cousin's promises that they would find a cure, Kara hadn't believed him, not really. Kara had lost everything that made her who she was once, a second time was enough to make her hope bleed away. So, she had run. Drained her bank account so that Kal wouldn't be able to easily trace her and gotten on train after train. Travelling all over the country in an attempt to find something, anything, to spark her soul again.

She had ended up, somehow, in Star City, walking through the claustrophobic streets in the dead of night. Then her anger at the world had led to her in an alley, with four knife-wielding men.

Without her powers, Kara knew she had only a slim chance to fight them all off. She had never learnt hand-to-hand combat in any seriousness, Kal had always taught her to reply on her abilities. Despite that, she as Kara Zor-El, last daughter of the great House of El. She wouldn't go down without a fight.

She broke the wrist of the first creep that had lunged at her with a faint sickening glee at being able to fight without her powers, but the bastard had nicked her wrist with his blade in the process. Kara had felt the droplets of blood welling up in the cut as the other three men advanced.

Then he appeared.

She had heard rumours of him; overheard comments during The Founders meetings that she wasn't supposed to listen in on, murmurs that he had been the one to train Black Canary, but never anything solid.

There was a brutal elegance to the way he fought. Vicious and cold, but beautiful in a way. It took him seconds to put the three remaining men on the floor, all of them unconscious and faintly bleeding.

Then, he was walking up to her, and Kara felt herself tensing in fear and anticipation.

And he spoke to her.

"So Supergirl, want to tell me what you're doing in my city?"