Chapter 9
Over the past decade, one of the skills that Oliver Queen had mastered was keeping an absolute poker face, even under the most extreme threats to the ones who loved him. Looking in the eye of the woman who had done everything in her power to turn Oliver Queen into the Hood after four years was a challenge. Learning that that same woman was Nyssa's sister and therefore part of the League, that was more challenging. Thinking that might very well have been the very reason Ras Al Ghul had thought he would be his rightful heir was too much for even his iron control.
"Did he make you seek me out?" he said in as stern a voice as he could muster.
"My father sometimes thought he saw potential in people," Talia said casually. "It never occurred to him that same trait might be viable in his children."
"How do you know him?" Sara was trying to keep her tone level.
"Oliver never told you that we had a prior relationship. I'm not shocked," Talia said slyly. "Considering that he's always been an ungrateful bastard, why would he have a word of thanks for the woman who helped make him what he is today?"
"You helped turned me into a killer," Oliver was having similar troubles with his tone.
"Don't be so modest. You were always a killer. I just made you a useful one."
"Our father never had the best judgment." True to form, Nyssa hadn't reacted at all to this turn of his events. "But at least he had the common not to design a bomb and not bother to control where it went off."
"As he grew older, his judgment was clouded," Talia said calmly. "Considering whom he was letting join the League by the end."
Nyssa moved closer to her sister. "Why did you leave, Talia? And why are you here now?"
"To carry out our father's work. Something that a degenerate like you would never understand."
A guttural snarl seemed to emerge from both Nyssa and Sara at the same time. "I thought you left the League because you disagreed with how he did things."
"Our father was a monster. Always preferring the big picture before the happiness of anyone else." Talia looked at her sister. "But he was still our father. How can you work with the man who murdered him?"
"I think you just answered your own question." Sara moved closer to her lover. "Especially considering what 'his big picture' would entail."
"The League has always believed in restoring balance when a civilization reaches its peak of decadence," Talia said slowly. "That was easier in the past. Now it has become increasingly clear that was has been obstructing balance all this time is civilization itself. "
A great realization had just come to Oliver; one that restored his balance. "That's why you were in exile. You signed in with them."
"It became clear long ago that my father's methods were too much of the old world. Even to the last, he still believed that the League could prevail by simply laying waste to a single city or government. It became clear to me years ago that the only way to save the village was to destroy it."
She really has been hanging out with the Syndicate.
"And that's the method you've chosen?" Nyssa was finding a hard time accepting this. "Not to destroy the monsters but to join them?"
"If my travels around the world have taught me anything, it's that there are no innocents. Everyone is a monster to a degree. At least the people who I have sided with acknowledge as much." Talia didn't even flinch. "Earth is a garden. Humanity is the pest that inhabits it. The only way to save it is to exterminate all the insects."
Oliver had held a bleak view of humanity for years. Hearing it echoed this bluntly – especially from a family that, for its all flaws, had acted in what they thought were its best interests - floored him.
"What kind of reasoning is this?" Sara asked. "You hold your father with such low regard that you mock everything that he stood for but you still want to avenge his killer? That's especially rich, considering you helped train him in the first place."
"You oppose us which means your death is necessary." Talia said with what seemed to be a shrug. "I believe the term that you have in the so-called 'real world' is mixing business with pleasure."
"Why did you train me? Really?" Oliver demanded. "I know whatever reasoning you gave me five years ago was nonsense."
Talia looked at him. "I may have been exiled from the League, but my name still carried weight. I knew some of the people who had obtained membership over the years. I knew who Malcolm Merlyn was and how my father has foolishly trusted him. I knew the assassins had tried to find him for years but had failed. I knew that you'd go back to Star City someday and I thought when you went on your petty vengeance quest, you might do something useful and kill someone useful." Talia looked at him disdainfully. "You were always a disappointment to me."
"All of that just out of petty revenge," Sara said.
"Don't pretend anything he's ever done has been for some higher purpose," Talia said dismissively. "By the time he came back to Star City he knew the people responsible for the crimes and he had the resources to go after them in other ways. He always chose violence. He will always choose violence." She looked at Oliver. "You may have done some good the last few years cleaning up your image, but no matter how much scrubbing you do you'll never get all the blood off your hands. So stop trying."
"I know what I am. That doesn't mean there isn't good that can come out of it," Oliver seemed to be talking more to himself than to Talia.
"Still thinking you can be something more," Talia waved her hands dismissively. "It would have been better for everything if you actually had died in that shipwreck. Oliver Queen was a wastrel, but at least he was a harmless one. How many people have died since you came back from Hell? Or is the number so great you can't count that high any more?"
"Probably a fraction of the ones that have died for your stake in this project," Sara had no such qualms. "Now if you're done lecturing us, could we get on with this?"
Talia still hadn't acknowledged Sara. "I realize you think being trained by the League makes you somehow my equal. But you also know something about how the League does business."
She stepped to one side. "We never play on an equal footing if we can help it."
It was hard to imagine how none of them could have somehow not noticed the soldier behind them. He was massive, a balrog of a man. None of them were foolish enough to think an ounce of it was fat.
They'd all seen large fighters before. What gave them a moment of surprise was his face – or what they could see of it.
"You really expect us of all people to be put off by men in masks?" Sara asked with an eyebrow raised.
"I've been informed of your wit, Miss Lance." The man's voice was simultaneously muffled and magnified. "I understand your sister had a similar sharp tongue – before it was ripped out."
"Baiting your enemy by taunting them with the dead is an old tool, and one that stopped working years ago," Oliver had regained his balance now that the fight was before them. "Your former master would have known better."
"Bane has no reason to care for my father," Nyssa said slowly. "My father exiled him from the League years ago. He was languishing for years before I liberated him and gave him a new purpose."
"You trained another killer. I've heard of being a one-trick pony, but this is a tad ridiculous." Sara said. "We've faced worse individually and triumphed."
"Then this should be over quickly," Bane said in what seemed a mangled form of casual. "We have more pressing business anyway."
"So you intend to finish things this way, sister," Nyssa actually sounded remorseful.
"You chose to side with our enemy." Talia did not. "Come, sister."
Nyssa looked at Talia. "No matter how this ends, I now know a certainty. I have made the right choice. And for all your rejections of him, Father would be proud of you."
They all thought they saw a muscle in Talia's jaw twitch for the briefest of moments. "Enough babble. Come!"
CENTRAL CITY
BARRY ALLEN'S APARTMENT
1:32 AM
One of the advantages to dating the Girl of Steel, Barry had found, was that neither of them felt the need to hold back when it came to passion. One of them didn't get hurt, and the other healed very quickly.
Perhaps the biggest disadvantage to being involved with the Girl of Steel was that both of them could get very carried away when they were deeply in the throes of passion. By Barry's count, every encounter they'd had in the past month had ended with at least half the furniture in their apartments being demolished. On the plus side, it didn't take much work for them to repair the place when it was finished; on the negative side, there was a very real possibility that the secret identities of two of the biggest heroes in the world could end if a neighbor complained about how loud either Kara Danvers or Barry Allen's slumber parties ending up getting.
"We might want to consider getting our own place for our little rendezvous, " Kara said, as they surveyed the wreckage.
"Do you know how difficult it would be to get a security deposit for either of us?" Barry said with a small smile. "Central City has some of the highest rental prices in the country."
"Why? From what I understand, vacancies keep coming up all the time."
That was a pretty grim joke for Kara, which did a lot to alleviate the afterglow. On the other hand, it did remind him why he'd taken Kara away from Star Labs in the first place. Part of it was to provide a distraction, but the other part was to figure out how she was handling things. It was time to handle the second bit.
"Are you ready to talk about what happened in Canada?" he asked gently.
"Not particularly, but if I've learned one thing about being friends with Team Arrow, it's that you don't let things fester until it's too late." Kara said slowly.
"Which part of it got to you the most?" Barry asked simply.
Kara raised her head off Barry's chest. "They were just standing there. They were burning to death before my eyes and they didn't even scream. It's one thing to know that you can't save everybody – my cousin told me that much when I got into this – but I never dreamed I'd ever be in a situation where the victims didn't even seem to care that they were dying or that they'd been rescued."
"And that's why you did what you did," Barry said gently.
"I was so damn stupid," Kara said. "Hell, if I'd been smart I would have started a natural disaster or something rather than take it out on those soldiers."
"Everybody has a breaking point, Kara," Barry gently kissed the top of her head. "In that sense you just revealed that, despite what your enemies may have said, you have human feelings."
Kara shook her head. "Problem is, I also just gave Cadmus and all the other people inclined to hate me just for existing enough footage to give ample evidence that I and all the other aliens I help defend are as monstrous as they have painted them to be. And they won't have to doctor any footage or post fake videos to prove it this time."
Barry didn't disagree. Kara's words of warning to the contrary, they all knew that it would only be a matter of time before Lillian Luthor – or whoever had ever taken over leadership of Cadmus while she wormed her way through the justice system – made sure the Internet got a look of Supergirl about to drop two soldiers to their deaths. None of them had any doubt that those same soldiers most likely escaped death by Supergirl only to be executed soon after. Everyone who worked for the Syndicate was expendable, and what were the lives of two soldiers in the face of this kind of publicity?
"Oliver's had to deal with far worse baggage and come out on the other side," he reminded her. "And all efforts to the contrary, there are always going to be people who never like us. No matter what we do or how many lives we save, there are going to be people – and I'm not talking about the villains or the Syndicate – who fundamentally distrust us. They will always point to the worst aspects of us ahead of all the good we do. "
"I know," Kara heaved a sigh. "I just hoped it would be awhile before I provided them with one."
Just then, two very specific dials began to beep – DAO devices that every new member of the task force had been provided with about emergencies. (Kara didn't need one, for obvious reasons, but she figured this was more efficient than trying to separate one scream for assistance among many.)
Both of them walked to their devices which, for obvious reasons had been cast to different parts of the room half an hour ago. Barry picked it up first.
"I'm not sure whether I want to ask this next question but where are you?" There was the often tentative voice of Felicity.
"You know what's going on between us: it's okay to ask if she's here," Barry said preemptively.
"It's politeness. There have been a lot of times before Oliver and I were together when I was really afraid of how he was going to extract himself from the situation he was in," Felicity was rambling again. "Of course, when I was the woman in his life I can't tell you how many dinners I was pulled away from. Naturally I had to find him after half of them…"
Barry wasn't as skilled as the rest of Team Arrow at getting Felicity to regain her train of thought, but he wasn't that bad. "Felicity, please get to the point."
Felicity did. "We've lost the signal in Russia."
Kara's realization of what was going on trumped her desire to keep the rendezvous private. "Have you checked in with the DAO yet?"
It was a measure of how concerned Felicity was about what had happened to her friends that she skipped any awkward feelings she might have and got right to business. "Winn's in the process of redirecting the satellites over the area but given how messy it is even after the Iron Curtain was lifted, he thinks it'll take at least ten minutes to get it back. I don't have to tell either of you what a lifetime that can be."
"Do you have their last known coordinates?" Kara asked.
"The last known GPS has them in the Russian equivalent of the middle of nowhere. You know big that particular nowhere is."
"Do you think they've been taken or whether the signal's being jammed?" Barry asked the technical questions.
"I'm still trying to figure that out. Look, right now I don't want either of you running or, in Kara's case, flying out there with no intel. I know you can handle yourselves, but considering we don't have a clear picture what Oliver and Sara found out there, I don't want either of you running into either a Kryptonite-powered robot or whatever Cold War metahumans might be lurking there or whatever the hell the Russian equivalent of an alien is until we have a picture."
"So why'd you call?" Kara asked.
"To have you on high alert. Lest you forget, we took the precaution of going out there with air support." Felicity reminded them. "Ray Palmer was trailing them from a discreet distance for the last hour."
Kara hadn't been fully briefed on Ray's abilities. "Won't he stick out like a sore thumb in the middle of nowhere?"
"Over the last year Ray's found new ways of staying off people's radar," Barry explained. "How far out is he now?"
"Three minutes until he gets over their last known position. The second we know how many people had the misfortune to run into our friends, we'll know whether to send one or both of you." Felicity paused. "That is, if you're up for it, Kara."
"What, are you thinking they might have sent the entire Russian army after them?" Kara wasn't sure whether she was joking or not.
"Honestly if they had, I wouldn't bother to call you in the first place," Neither Barry or Kara was entirely sure Felicity was joking. That was the opinion everybody had of Oliver Queen and his friends.
LEAGUE HEADQUARTERS
"Ray, you got a visual yet?" John Diggle was asking.
"Just give me…yeah," Ray hesitated. "I'm counting about two dozen mercenaries. And based on their attire they may be in a League of their own, pun only slightly unintended. I'm sending you the visuals now."
Felicity had tapped into the images. "Guys, we may very well need one of you. We're still trying to decide whether it's to assist or extract."
"You want me to make an appearance yet?" Ray asked.
"Have they started fighting yet or is whoever's in charge doing his best Goldfinger impression?" Diggle asked.
"We've met our share of those types ourselves; let's not deny there's some reality to the cliché," Ray said. "But I think whatever talking they've been doing is just about over."
"I count twenty one soldiers against Nyssa, Oliver and Sara," Felicity said. "Assuming that they are some fringe group of our fringe group, get ready to show yourself."
"I'd ask where you want me to start, but I have a pretty good idea where they're going to need the most help," Ray said. "The guy I'm looking at is huge even from this distance."
Felicity shook her head. "Concentrate on an aerial assault. We'll let our secret weapon take them out."
She hesitated. "Barry, um, would you mind plugging your ears for a minute?"
Barry knew what she meant.
"I know Oliver and the rest can handle themselves for at least ten minutes without any problems and that's before Ray gets involved. I'm going to say that it took me a little longer to reach you than Barry because you were still shaking off an understandably traumatic event."
"Oliver knows about what's going on between Barry and me, and I'm pretty sure Mulder does too" Kara said cautiously. "Besides, I don't need anyone to protect my honor."
"No one needs to protect your honor, Kara," Felicity, in what was a rare moment for her, was picking her words carefully. "No matter how powerful or badass a woman you are in your own right, people are going to judge us based on who we choose to date. I knew exactly what I was getting into when I fell in love with Oliver, more than any other woman he's ever been with, and even though I thought it prepared me, it didn't. Certainly not from the outside world thought."
Kara considered this. "Are you trying to protect Barry too? I know how special he is to you."
"I'm honestly concerned about both of you. Honestly, I think the two of you are perfect for each other, and if you tell anybody I said that I will lace your Lucky Charms with kryptonite green clovers," Felicity said in that mock serious tone. "And if anyone tries to lecture you about this not being the time for romance, the impending alien apocalypse would argue that there may be no better time. You've been very discreet, which given your whole secret identities thing, I totally get. But I think, just for a little longer, you need to keep being discreet."
"Felicity, no offense, you're one of the least discreet people I know," Kara said with a smile.
"Absolutely none taken. You'll also acknowledge I'm one of the smartest people you know and that also, in this particular situation, I am more experienced than you." Now Felicity hesitated. "I really don't like I sounded on that remark."
"It's been three minutes. Now if you don't mind, I'd like to concentrate on less serious things, like saving your friends' lives," Kara said dryly.
"Who knows? Maybe by now they've saved themselves."
RUSSIA
They hadn't.
All three of them were using to dealing with fighters who were either more experienced then them or similarly trained. It was clear just by looking that these fighters were at level. It was also clear that Talia had clearly prepared for this by bringing out superior numbers – the half-dozen soldiers who had initially appeared had given way to three times the numbers, and Oliver was certain that Talia would call on reinforcements should they run low.
Oliver was disappointed – but not entire surprised – that when the battle proper had begun, Talia herself had vanished. He thought this was due less to bravado then prudence. Perhaps she had confidence that her soldiers would easily dispatch the three of them; perhaps she didn't and intended to fight them when she thought they were weakened substantially. In any case, Oliver was pretty sure right now he didn't miss her.
The warriors they were fighting were troubling enough. They had the training of an Al Ghul, which would be more than enough to make them deadly against almost anyone without superpowers. Oliver knew the three of them, along with the three fighters who had come with them could put up a more than suitable battle against these fighters; Nyssa alone had the ferocity to stand against any one who stood in her way.
But of course, none of them were truly worried about that. The one that concerned them the most was the mass of muscle standing in front of them: the one who Talia had referred to only as Bane. He didn't want to surrender the one advantage they might have – that this unknown quantity was not entirely unknown.
Sara had not revealed every detail of where she had been the past five years – given the secrets Oliver was still carrying at the time, he had not thrown stones. But she had told them of some of things she had seen and heard. One of those things had been of a mercenary known as Bane. No one knew where he came from – the clearest legend was that he had been raised in a prison - one known as a pit so deep the bottom might well be in Hell. How he had survived or emerged from no one knew. What was known was that he wasn't whole when he did.
From years of torture, he had been left in the kind of agony that would kill most men. But somehow he had survived it, and the mask he wore was responsible for keeping that agony at arms length. The technology that was used must have rivaled anything Queen Consolidated or Star Labs could have designed – assuming, of course, that there was technology involved.
There had been rumors that he had been a member of the League at one time, of course, but Sara had never believed them. One did not leave the League of Assassins in a vertical position. You stayed forever or you ran forever. The idea that someone could be exiled from it, as Talia seemed to be saying, was as foreign a concept to her as quantum physics. Sara had not said what had occurred to Oliver at the time: what could you possibly have done to end up being horrific enough for the League to wash their hands of you but let you live? That seemed, however, what they were facing.
Bane had not moved since the battle had begun. Perhaps he wanted to see who would be bold – or stupid – enough to try and attack him first. Oliver had no intention of making the first move, and neither did Sara. Nyssa was furious – quietly so, of course - but she was not a fool.
The three of them were busy enough handling the soldiers that they were fighting. So far five of them were on the ground, either dead or waiting to regain their strength.
"Is the cavalry coming?" Sara asked under her breath.
"Depends on whether Felicity still has our coordinates," Oliver said. "Then it's a matter of time."
"Do we hope to prevail or escape?" Sara asked.
"Right now, it's the same thing we always do. Try to survive."
Nyssa was another story. She was moving as efficiently and coldly as she ever did but both Oliver and Sara could tell that she was practically vibrating with rage. In all the time both of them had known her, Nyssa had never one done anything reckless. It was clear that might change very soon.
"Where is your honor?" she finally demanded. "You confront us and then hide like a coward. Face me, like a true Al Ghul."
"My mistress had more important things to attend too than a degenerate sibling."
Oliver and Sara never stopped moving, but inwardly both of them grew rigid. The last person to use that term in relationship to Nyssa had been Malcolm Merlyn and it frankly been a miracle that he had escaped with his life. Neither was naïve to believe that she would react any more positively coming from a total stranger.
"I'm not ashamed of who I am," Nyssa said calmly. "I can't say the same for you. What makes you believe you're worthy to carry on in the name of the League?"
"Our purpose is not to carry on the League. It is to end it." Bane said this so calmly it was more imposing than his size.
That got to Nyssa in a way the previous statement hadn't. "My sister would never go against everything our father taught us."
"The cause he taught was worthy. It was greater than any man or any group. Your colleagues should know that better than you."
Oliver and Sara looked around and saw something even scarier than what Bane was saying. The remaining mercenaries had fallen back. They knew it was not to surrender but because they were giving up the field to a superior force.
"There is no point in delaying the inevitable," Bane looked at them. "I realize that you are without your own mask and weapons, Mr. Queen, but from what I understand you've spent longer fighting without them than you have with them. At least it would give the illusion of a fair fight before you fall."
"I've already died in these mountains," Oliver reminded Bane. "I have no intention of doing so again."
"And I've been dead for longer. I have no intention of ever going back," Sara replied.
"There are few things more pitiful than those who fight for a lost cause," Bane said.
"I can think of one." Oliver said. "Those who fight for a wrong one. And you represent the latter."
"The two of you merely survived Hell. I was born in it." Bane said calmly. "The shadows have always belonged to me."
"The sun is out," Sara said. "And if you're going to keep moving your mouth, I think it's time I used mine."
With that, Sara let out the cry of the Canary. Oliver and Nyssa had figured it was coming and had held the ears. The mercenaries that had held their positions began to buckle and tilt slightly, some even toppling.
Bane stepped back a few inches. That was all. They were disappointed but not surprised. Besides, this hadn't been meant for him. The League might believe in the ideas of honor and fair fights, but that didn't mean the members wouldn't press their advantage whenever they could take one.
Before Bane could regain his position, Oliver and Nyssa had charged him, Sara a few steps behind. Individually, neither would have a chance, and they didn't think they've had much of one as a team, but they had no intention of letting him take them down one at a time.
Bane shut up the moment they approached - he clearly had no intention of talking them to death. As they had anticipated, there was a very real possibility he could do it with his fists. Hitting him was the equivalent was like trying to put your fist through concrete. And even given their training, a single punch from him was enough to nearly double Oliver over. Nyssa and Sara were able to evade them, but not easily – for a man who was so large, he moved with great fluidity – for all his dismissal of the League, he clearly had been trained by him.
Sara tried another cry, this time at point blank range. This time there was a greater effect on Bane: his knees actually buckled a little. Determined to press any advantage they could Oliver swung as hard as he could at the man's face.
Had Bane winced? It was hard to tell, because his response was lightning fast – while Oliver was still pulling his hand back, Bane connected with his jaw.
On a lesser man, his skull would have been fractured; as it was Oliver's reflexes were just fast enough for him to only take some of the blow. It was one still powerful enough for him to nearly black out. Another man would have never seen daylight again.
Nyssa seemed more intent on fighting him on her own: clearly, she was thinking because she was the only one who'd trained her entire life for this that she thought she had a chance. Silently, she told Oliver and Sara to hang back. Bane himself clearly seemed to be thinking in a similar fashion; where he had taken a fairly direct approach with Oliver and Sara, he held himself back clearly waiting to see what the Heir to the Demon would try.
Under other circumstances Sara might have been in awe: in all her years with Nyssa, she had never seen anything like this, two equally matched members of the League fighting each other. The fact that she happened to be pretty much in love with one of the fighters was dulling whatever buzz she might get from this quite a bit.
Nyssa and Bane maneuvered around each for nearly a minute: it was like watching combat where anyone thought the fighter who made the first move would surrender the advantage. Or perhaps each was looking for the place where they could inflict the most damage.
A phrase that Ras had drilled into their heads over and over occurred to Sara: Always remember to mind your surroundings. It didn't seem to apply here; the terrain was too flat and featureless. Still, she had a feeling that Nyssa knew it as well as Bane and was looking for something within it to gain an edge.
Nyssa ended up making the first move, one that Bane could not easily block. She threw a roundhouse kick at his legs. Bane's fluidity wasn't perfect; he clearly took a blow even though he remained standing.
Bane then used his advantage: his long and powerful arms and swung at her. Nyssa was barely able to dodge, but Sara could tell she had tasted a little pain.
It was dexterity versus brute strength. Oliver was briefly reminded of his first full on fight with Barry two years earlier. Except it didn't fit in with the Nyssa Al Ghul he knew. Was she trying to get the measure of her opponent? She'd had ample opportunity to do so already. Why wasn't she going for a direct attack?
A rapid succession of thoughts went through Oliver's head. She's stalling. Why? What does she know that Bane doesn't? This would followed by a different thought. Whatever it is, we can't give Bane a sign.
He kept his gaze fixed on the battle in front of him.
"My sister clearly trained you well," Nyssa said slowly. "But it's also apparent that my father never did."
"What makes you so certain of that?" Bane demanded.
"Because clearly you never learned the most important rule."
It was then that Oliver realized his attention had been so fixed on the fight in front of him that he had regulated everything else to the background. Including a slow but dull roar.
By now Bane was aware of it, but his reactions were too late. Before he could turn Ray Palmer ran into him with the full force of The Atom.
Bane's bulk would have been enough to push Ray back but all of his energy had been focused on Nyssa until Ray was practically on top of him. Bane didn't fly back far, but he'd been hit hard enough so that the wind had been knocked out of him, which was all the advantage Nyssa needed.
"The League usually believes in playing fair. In your case," Nyssa removed a knife and held it just above his mask. "I think an exception can be made for exiles."
"All members of the League are prepared to die before they talk," Bane had not yielded in his righteousness.
"There are different kinds of death," Nyssa lowered her knife to just above where the mouth would have been on a normal person. "And in your case, a long, lingering and painful one is what you're entitled too. The League is skilled in inflicting those kinds of deaths; I won't even have to do any of the work involved."
It was impossible to read Bane's expression considering only his eyes were visible. Even if the face had been present, the League was trained to keep their emotions hidden at all costs. But the fact that Bane blinked indicated two things: Nyssa knew his weakness and Bane knew she knew.
"Killing me will be meaningless," he said in the same mangled tone. "We have started the fire and nothing you do can stop it from rising."
"I never had any intention of killing you. That would be merciful. And the League shows no mercy to traitors."
With that, she cut one of the tubes connecting the mask to Bane's face.
Bane didn't scream, but it was a near thing.
"Your general has fallen, sister," Nyssa said calmly. "Come out and face me like a true Al Ghul."
Oliver did his best to ignore the cries of pain coming from the man who'd just tried to kill him. It was harder than he thought it would be, which he considered a good sign.
"Do you actually think she's even nearby?" he asked in as measured a tone as he could manage.
"I had hoped she was still holding on to a thread of the family honor," Nyssa said regretfully.
"She abandoned everything your father stood for; honor was part of the package," Sara put her hand on Nyssa's shoulder. "The question is, now what do we do?"
That was an excellent question. Oliver walked over to Ray, who was still looking at the mercenary he helped to KO. "You okay?" he asked.
Ray turned his attention away from Bane slowly. "Well, that's one great scientific question answered. At least in this case, the unstoppable force does beat the immovable object."
"And we're very grateful for that," Sara said comfortingly. "Though next time, Ray, maybe show your presence before the team of mercenaries descends on your friends."
"Hey, I only located you five minutes ago." Ray said defensively.
"And you waited three minutes because…"
Ray shrugged. "I've seen you in action before. I thought the three of you could handle it."
"And the reason you decided to intervene when you did?" Oliver asked.
"It was taking too long for you to handle it. We're on a deadline, remember? By the way, you're welcome."
Ray had clearly been hanging around Snart and Rory for far too long.
"By the way Oliver, you've gotten very sloppy the last year," Ray continued in that vein. "While you and your friends were strolling along with these minor inconveniences, our enemy managed to achieve their primary objective.
Sara raised an eyebrow at that. "Ray, you're kind of overstepping your bounds right now."
"Do you want Felicity pissed at you? I've been on the other side of that when we were dating; I'm not wild about what she'd do if I screwed up," Ray said in a more benevolent tone.
"Morons. I've got morons on my team." Felicity's voice, partially frustrated, partially affectionate, came in loud and clear over their headphones.
"Thank you too, Felicity," Oliver said slowly. "I'd be more grateful if I understood how you managed to lose our signal in the first place. I'm guessing that's why you sent the Atom to find us first."
"Admittedly I was too panicky for the past five minutes to wonder why it happened in the first place," Felicity conceded. "Considering that we've missed everything prior to the battle, I think we'd all like to know what happened the ten minutes before that."
"Well, the good news is Nyssa was right about her father's involvement, which means that some version of what Mulder saw twenty years ago is still going on." Sara told them. "There's some kind of gulag in the vicinity and for at least a dozen possible reasons, I can imagine the Russians want to make very sure that the outside world doesn't know it exists. I don't suppose there's anything in those files as to where exactly Mulder was being kept prisoner?"
"He didn't have a compass with him, much less Google Earth," Diggle reminded them. "I'm kind of amazed you found it at all."
"Mulder wasn't giving us directions; maybe that helped," Oliver said dryly.
"They could either be doing this extremely lo-fi or extremely high-fi," Felicity said thoughtfully. "Depends on whether the Syndicate or Russia is the dominant force behind this one."
"Assume for now it's the latter and see what you can come up with," Ray said. "John, I really hate to say, but you may have to talk to your wife about the next part. There probably will be less of a lag time from ARGUS then there will be with the DAO."
"She's going to kick my ass," John said reluctantly.
"There's already a line developing for that," Oliver figured. "And it's not going to get any shorter when they hear why we're going to need the intel."
"I've got Kara and Barry on standby," Felicity told them. "And before you ask for her help, you should know she's had a really bad couple of days already. Definitely worse than ours."
Oliver didn't know if he wanted to ask what it took for Supergirl to have a bad day. "Considering how narrowly we escaped the last battle, I wouldn't be shocked if we needed both of their help."
"You sure it's not worth living to fight another day?" John asked.
"Under other circumstances I might," Oliver admitted. "That was before I saw who one of the prisoners were."
"Someone you know?"
"Worse. Someone all of us know."
AUTHOR'S NOTES
A chapter where Mulder and Scully don't show up. Honestly didn't think this would happen.
I'm still trying to figure out what Talia's motivations were for training Oliver Queen in the Season 5 flashbacks. Considering how dysfunctional Nyssa's relationship with her father was, I decided to lean closer to the Nolan version of Talia to try and figure out her motivations.
Yes, it's another Dark Knight cameo, but considering the level of the involvement of the League in this story, I figured it was merited.
I like Barry and Kara together. I honestly wonder what might have happened to the two of them if Supergirl had started out on the CW. How much of this alternate universe talk was started just because on Berlanti series started out on CBS? Food for thought.
Felicity is protective of her female allies, even more so than her male ones. Hence the little exchange between the two.
Bane's origin in this fanfic is the Dark Knight version and I'm assuming that Sara might have heard at least some of the story. And no I couldn't resist the Batman Begins line. It just seemed so appropriate.
There's a Gilbert and Sullivan reference in this story that some fans might catch. Felicity's line about 'morons on her team' is actually a direct quote from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Somehow I think she'd have seen that film growing up.
Talia disappeared, but trust me she'll be back.
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