Chapter 13

Author's Note: The next chapter is almost done, should be posted in less than a week.

At Maggie's insistence – as she was adamant that Kara was not finished drinking despite her wishes – the first port of call for the night was Al's Dive bar. J'onn had opted not to join them, stating that he felt as though he'd have been supervising them, and Winn had plans with his girlfriend, so it had just been the four of them. The night pushed on, and two rounds in Kara had informed Maggie, though rather slurred, that she was now certainly finished drinking. Oliver suspected that Maggie had been prying Kara with alcohol a little stronger than she was used to drinking, given how quickly she had spiralled from 'pleasantly tipsy' to 'definitely drunk'. The advantage, Alex had assured them, was that Kara would bounce back to sobriety fairly quickly once she stopped drinking. So as to not make her feel any worse about the situation, Oliver had opted to continue drinking himself, and – much to Alex and Maggie's approval – had been ordering top shelf scotch since their arrival.

Eventually, Maggie was dragged away by a challenge to a game of pool form someone she clearly knew, leaving Oliver alone with the two sisters. With his glass empty, and Kara opting to stop drinking, he decided to head back to the bar and collect the next round – since Kara wasn't in any state to offer. Despite the strange ease he and Alex had found in each other's company back at Kara apartment, with Kara sat alongside them – and the painfully curious looks she had been giving the two ever since her and Maggie had arrived to find them both shirtless – there was something akin to tension in the air.

He had shared things about his past with Alex that he hadn't to Kara. The difference being, the night he and Kara had shared their history while sat on her couch drinking wine, he had shared what he felt comfortable sharing, what felt relevant to their conversation. With Alex, he had shared what he had needed to, both because he felt as though he owed her something for his lies and because he needed to help her contextualize the situation. That had been why he'd spoken about Slade, because Alex needed to understand the impossibility of certain choices and the backhanded consequences of the life they lead. Though he supposed that things for Alex were a little more clean-cut, given that she worked for a government agency.

"Okay," Oliver knocked a fist on the table as he got to his feet. "I'm going to get some drinks in. A club soda for you." Oliver stated, pointing an accusing finger at Kara, and smiling at her slightly lethargic nodding. "Alex?"

"Just another beer," Alex nodded appreciatively, her hand on her neck of the bottle she had been drinking from as she swilled the dregs around. "Maggie will have the same."

Oliver turned the rest of the way and made towards the bar, hands rifling through his leather jacket for the credit card that Winn had provided him with. During the week-long search for Cadmus, Oliver had asked Winn to get the gold bar transferred into cash and to set up a bank account and identity for him on Earth-38. The whole process had taken less than a day and had left Oliver with a credit card and ID that he could use freely. Winn had scoured the planet and been unable to find him a doppelganger, but just to be safe the name "Oliver Jonas" appeared on the official documentation.

It was strangely liberating, even if no one else knew. He didn't have to be Oliver Queen, vigilante and mayor extraordinaire who had an entire city – hell apparently even multiple realities – depending on him. The air that surrounded the night seemed to be liberating. The stress of the mission, and tension that crackled between him and Kara was gone. With easy company, the lubrication of alcohol, and his arm slung loosely around Kara's shoulders, things seemed normal. Maybe it would only be while he spent time on Earth-38, with Kara and her strange bubble of found family. Maybe it wouldn't last long, maybe it would shatter as soon as things had to go back to the way they were supposed to be. It might only last one night, but even so, for that one night;

He was just Oliver.

And that was just fine by him.

XXX

Oliver had been goaded into a game of pool by Maggie, because of course he had. Kara couldn't help but to smile at the sight of the two circling around the table, sharing dry barbs and laughing as they played. Despite only having stopped drinking for less than an hour, Kara was feeling remarkably more in control of herself. The strange haze that came with the alcohol had mostly worn off and, at least to Kara herself, it seemed as though she had stopped slurring her words. With her usual clarity more or less restored Kara couldn't help but thinking on everything she had gone through in the two short weeks in which Oliver had been on her world.

It somehow felt like so much less and so much more at the same time. To Kara, it felt as though Oliver had only stepped through that breech and into the DEO days ago, but in that same time there was a strength of connection she had found with Oliver that she was wholly unfamiliar with. Whatever it was that drew her to him, she found herself both terrified and reverent to it in equal measure. All at once, Kara felt as though she knew everything she needed to know about Oliver and wanted to know everything she could know about him.

With that thought lingering in the front of her – still slightly alcohol washed – mind, Kara turned to her sister.

"So, what were you and Oliver talking about?" She asked pointedly. "Because Maggie was under the impression you were giving him a shovel talk?"

Alex's focus snapped from where she had been watching her girlfriend and onto Kara. She regarded her sister for a few moments, and then answered.

"I never actually told Maggie why I wanted to talk to him, she just assumed, and I didn't correct her." Alex defended. The look she received from Kara swiftly prompted her to continue. "We talked, and…well you know Oliver, he doesn't strike me as the type who likes having his conversations relayed to other people."

"Alex…" Kara whined.

"Look, I was wrong about Oliver." Alex confessed. "He's not what I expected and I've…apologised." Kara could stop the way her eyebrows shot up at Alex's begrudging admission that she had apologised. Alex pointed a threatening finger at Kara. "If you ever bring this up again, I will find a way to get my hands on some Kryptonite but…" Alex glanced over to Oliver. "You could do worse."

XXX

Kara and Oliver stood at a bar, both smiling comfortably as they watched Alex and Maggie dance sloppily hand-in-hand just across the room. The four had ended up in some club in downtown National City after Kara had elected to stop drinking, since they didn't need to be somewhere that catered to non-terrestrials. Oliver had decided to cut the alcohol himself, already having drunk more than he was used to, and not wanting to spoil what had proven to be an incredibly enjoyable night.

Alex had been right about Kara's enhanced recovery time when it came to alcohol. As soon as she had stopped drinking, she had processed the remaining alcohol in her system remarkably quickly and completely sobered up in little more than an hour. It would have taken most people several times that to come even close to sobriety, especially given that Kara was – unsurprisingly – not much of a drinker in her downtime. Oliver himself had moved closer to sobriety than most normal humans would have done. His years of conditioning clawed onto every piece of stability it could find and pushed down the alcohol induced sluggishness – add to that his various poisonings that had trained his body to just deal with it. It wasn't perfect sobriety by any stretch of the imagination, but he was fully aware of his surroundings and not slurring his words, which was a win in his books.

The two Superheroes stood, each with a soda in their hand, watching the rest of the room as easy conversation flowed between them.

"So, Batman is real?" Oliver asked, a little baffled.

"Oh yeah, big time." Kara answered with a tight smile. "He and Superman are like…frenemies or something, it's weird."

"There's been rumours of a Batman in Gotham back home since before I even left Starling City. I always thought it was just a myth the GCPD made up." He grumbled, not able to ignore the irritation of there being someone on his world who might outrank him in experience.

"Maybe he is just a myth on your world," Kara mused, taking a sip of her soda. "Infinite possibilities and all that."

Oliver hummed in agreement. Before he could open his mouth to answer Oliver's attention was snapped to a loud noise across the room. His eyes didn't land on the disturbance until after the fact, but even through the fairly crowed room he could see the glass and ice spilt over the floor, and the look of heartbreak that only the loss of alcohol could bring plastered across one of the faces in the crowed. Clearly, Maggie and Alex had heard the noise too, both turning to check where it had come from. Alex had the misfortune of being a fraction too close, her foot landing on one of the cubes of ice as she turned. Courtesy of all the alcohol she had consumed, Alex's sense of balance was gone entirely, and she toppled over in an instant, pulling Maggie with her as the detective tried to catch her.

XXX

There were murals of alien worlds, stars twinkling in the blackness of space twisting over a procession of vaguely humanoid figures. At one end of the room, where the figures on the wall seemed to blend with the denizens of the club in smoke and noise a girl danced on a rotating platform. A cupped petal of black glass slid around with the platform and each time it passed between the crowd and the dancer, she disappeared. It took Oliver a few moments to figure out that the girl was a projection, some kind of technology that must have been extra-terrestrial.

"One of the few mainstream places in National City that's open about letting aliens in!" Oliver turned to see Maggie coming to stand at his side, yelling above the noise.

"Where's Alex?!" He called back.

Maggie snorted in amusement. "Giving a lecture on how awful cigarettes are in the smoking area outside! I've given up on her!"

Oliver just nodded, not wanting to have to shout to let Maggie know he had understood. He turned his focus back to the bar he was leaning on and caught the bartender's eye. Once again opting to avoid having to shout Oliver simply tapped a finger on one of the menus strewn across the bar, pointing to what looked to be some kind of bottled craft beer, and then help up four fingers. The bartender nodded, placed a card reader on the bar, and set about collecting the drinks from the fridge behind him. Oliver quickly paid for the drinks before Maggie pulled his attention again.

"Speaking of which!" Shouted Maggie. "Have you seen what your alien is getting up to?"

Oliver almost scolded Maggie for her casual tone before realising it would be futile. She had told him the club openly catered to aliens and she hadn't mentioned Kara by name, on top of that the club was so ridiculously loud that Oliver had barely heard her himself. With what could have been a dangerous slip on Maggie's part filed away, Oliver's mind wandered to exactly what she had said. For a moment, he got lost in how much he liked the way Maggie had described Kara is his, but he quickly locked it down. Focusing, Oliver followed Maggie's gaze to see what she had been talking about.

Across the room, Oliver could just make out Kara, still sat at the booth they had been occupying but joined by someone that Oliver recognised. Someone who was definitely alien. Someone Oliver had been praying that he was going to be able to leave National City without having to see again.

"You know how close she came to actually agreeing to go out with him before you got here?" Maggie shouted with a smirk on her lips.

In a bout of irritation Oliver flipped Maggie off, and moved to head towards the booth before stopping himself. A large part of his brain – a part the felt strangely like it was still 21 – wanted him to march over to Kara and Mon-El, but the more rational part of him knew that;

He had no right at all.

It wouldn't end well if he got angry.

Oliver had noted a few times how much Mon-El reminded him of his younger self, and he knew exactly how his younger self worked. Despite Mon-El's attraction to Kara, Oliver hoped that she wouldn't respond to whatever flirtation he was attempting. If his own – albeit blurred by alcohol and time – memories served, his teenage-self had been far too easily distracted when it came to women.

"Oh, come on Ollie, you know it's more fun if they play hard to get before you finally score." A nineteen-year-old Tommy Merlyn laughed somewhere in his memories.

It didn't take Oliver more than a few seconds of scanning the room to make a selection. He turned back to the bar, grabbed two of the bottles of beer, and met Maggie's curious gaze with a cockily raised eyebrow.

XXX

The sun was almost rising when Alex and Maggie had finally drunk enough that their bodies refused to take any more in, crisp orange beams of light burst through the skyline in irregular fragments and cast long shadows in the streets. Kara had sternly told Alex and Maggie that they would be staying at her apartment, just so that she could keep an eye on them, and then told Oliver that he would be doing the same because she didn't want to have to deal with their hangovers alone.

He hadn't even at least managed to pretend that he wasn't thrilled with the idea of spending another night sleeping on her couch.

As they walked through the streets of National City – despite Kara's desire to fly the drunken couple back to the apartment Oliver had insisted the fresh air would help them – Kara turned to him.

"Thanks, by the way," She said, her attention quickly snapping forward again as Alex stumbled over a crooked paving slab. Once the agent had righted herself, Kara looked back to Oliver. "For distracting Mon-El earlier."

"How did you know?"

"Super hearing, Oliver." Kara blushed slightly.

Oliver slightly paled. "So, you heard…"

"Mmhm." Kara's attention went back to the couple stumbling along ahead of them.

Oliver did the same, not quite wanting to look at Kara. His crafty plan to get the slim ball the hell away from Kara distract Mon-El had been to gently nudge one of the women he had noticed eyeing Mon-El in his direction. Of course, he'd needed a convincing story as to why he was already sat in a booth with an incredibly attractive woman. So, he had told the redhead that Kara was his girlfriend and that Mon-El was indeed single. He had hoped that in the noise of the club Kara wouldn't have been paying attention to him. Swallowing hard, Oliver kept his gaze fixed dead ahead.

Complete avoidance was a totally viable coping strategy for the situation, right?