Chapter 9

Author's Note: At this stage, my default note should say: "Sorry this is late". I'm sure you all expect it by now

Train you…cult…Triad…war…soldier…killed.

I know.

Kara didn't know how to process it all. There was a numbness that had been slugging its way through her body since the day she left The Watchtower. It receded, sometimes, in moments carved out between the pain. Moments forged in anger and in violence.

She had agreed. Oliver Queen had given her an opportunity and she had chosen to jump at it with both hands grabbing. All her life on Earth, everything she had seen and done, despite it all, Kara had needed something. For so much of her youth as Supergirl, she had allowed herself to be driven by an anger that she had done as much as she could to bury in recent years. Losing everything that she had fought for, everything she had trained herself to become, it broke down the walls she had put up around the anger and allowed it to come back.

Oliver Queen had been the first person to offer her a real outlet for that anger.

The moment that Kara had fled from The Watchtower she had known, somewhere inside, that she was searching for something. After the loss of Krypton, the anger and pain that she had suffered as a teenager, she had needed a focus. Thanks to Kal-El, she had turned that focus into Supergirl. The Last Daughter of Krypton. Hero of Earth. It was who Kal and The League had needed her to be. Kara had always known that it hadn't been the real her, just the version of her best adapted to her new world.

Stumbling across The Green Arrow in Star City had done something to her. At first, in a shock that was in equal measure that she had needed to be saved and the discovery of Oliver Queen's true identity, she had allowed herself to be secreted away back to his base of operations. Then they had talked and he had given her an option. No matter what had happened since, Kara agreed, she had agreed, and the consequences were hers.

From that very first moment, there had been a voice ringing in the back of her mind, a voice that took the sound of Kara Kent, of the personality that she had worked to project since her arrival on Earth. A voice that told her, no matter what she thought she was going to achieve, that she was making a mistake. That she was betraying the ideals that Kal had instilled in her during her time on Earth. That she was going against the goals of the Justice League. She had never given that voice too much sway in her choices.

It did allow her to agree to Oliver's offer with eyes open. She knew the risks, the potential fallout. She knew the reputation the illusive Green Arrow had among both the Justice League and the government of America. He was dangerous, a killer, a threat to everyone. That was what they had called him. Yet, when Kara first encountered him, he had been kind. Brutal against the men who had been trying to attack her, that was certainly true. But to her he had been kind. He took the time to patch her wound and then, on realising who she was and the reality of her situation, offered to take her in.

She had, of course, suspected that he had his own motivations of making that offer.

As she spent more time with him, Kara began to realise that any hidden agenda on Oliver's part wasn't clouding his training. The promise he had made to teach her to fight the way that he did was maintained every step of the way. He only made variations when she asked him to. And she often did. Oliver's approach to the world was different to anything she had seen on Earth before that it had made her desperate to learn from him.

The Justice League operated with a hand like a caretaker, guiding gently without much interference, they backed down whenever and wherever they were told to. Lex Luthor sought to control, to set himself up as an indelible figurehead who was the stalwart guardian against all threats. Vandal Savage saw himself as a conqueror, humanity's one true ruler. Countless other despots and megalomaniacs who thought they knew best.

Oliver looked on it all differently. He was ruthless, yes, but he was honest. He knew humanity. Knew the lengths to which they could sink and the heights that they could reach. He had seen both extremes and the people who could create them. Through it all, his only philosophy seemed to be to help the people who needed help, protect those who could not protect themselves, and damn those who deserved damming. He acted, not on some pre-determined philosophy based on legality or outmoded morality, but on what was right. He acted on what was needed. On the truth of the situation.

"Face the facts." He had told her, one night as they traded philosophy, wrapped in each other's limbs on the training floor. "That's the only way to view the world. It's the only truth you can hold yourself to. It's almost impossible, because human beings are hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don't act. Don't pray. Don't buy into centuries old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don't give in to your beliefs, or religion, or your visions, or your fucked up sense of…whatever. Face the facts, then you can act."

It was a strange thing. Oft times, it seemed as though Oliver gave her more of who he truly was in those moments. Post-coital he had offered her things that he never seemed to do on the training ground. Not in the books he gave her, or the intellectual sparing matches they had. It was a part of himself that Kara always suspected that he didn't know he was giving away. A facet of who he really was that he kept hidden even from his own conscious mind. The parts of him that operated on pure instinct leaking through.

The sex had been strange for her, at first. Kryptonian culture didn't lend itself to a view of casual sex. Add to that how young she had still been when leaving, and Kara had never really run up against the idea with any seriousness. On Earth, she had mostly been too afraid of her powers to engage in it. She had made a few attempts over her decade on the planet. Only a handful total, but though all of them she had been too afraid of her powers to truly let go and enjoy herself. Oliver had been the first person she had opened herself up to like that since her arrival on Earth and it had been so easy for her to give in. He had given her everything she had wanted, everything she had felt that she had been missing out on, sensations and experiences that she had never anticipated.

The first time they had been together, physically, Kara had told him that being on Earth gave her the ability to choose, a feeling that had been liberating for her. It was a feeling that Oliver had given her in abundance, whether he had meant to or not. Kara knew she had latched onto his offer of training with a dangerous vigour, but she had never felt obligated to stay. With Kal, she had been sent to Earth to protect him, so she had needed to stay near him, to train with and stay with the Justice League.

Yet, it was all wrapped up in the same thing. Oliver was teaching her. Just as Kal had done. Their philosophies could not have been more different. Kal had always taught her to respect and adhere to the human authorities, their governments and institutions. Oliver taught to her doubt them, to trust only her own experiences and the knowledge they gave her, to not buy into rhetoric and dogma. He taught her to doubt what Kal had taught her to trust.

So much of her had given into Oliver's world view. It was an outlook Kara found it easy to share. For all her time on Earth she had questioned the operations of human governance and the rules they chose to inflict upon the populous. The only reason she ever gave up questioning it was because Kal never allowed her any purchase, he always gave her the same retorts and excuses. So, she gave up asking. Oliver gave her that platform again, gave her answers to every question she had ever wanted to ask. Showed her a reality that she had never seen before.

It opened her eyes to the real world. To the version of humanity that she had never been able to see aboard The Watchtower. The side of humanity that The Justice League allowed themselves to be blinded to. In a few short months with Oliver, she had been able to look at the world anew, without any distance or filter. It had, for good or ill, changed the way she would look at Earth for the rest of her life. She had seen humanity, had experienced a reality that she otherwise never would have, and she would never get to give that experience back.

That voice that sounded like Kara Kent had told her that her vision was clouded, that she had allowed herself to be misled by both her anger at the loss of her powers and the affection she felt for Oliver. Maybe there was truth to it, but she had still volunteered.

Against Oliver's wishes she had gone undercover with the Triad. Had spent weeks with her own life immanently in danger, walking around the floor of a brothel with herself almost completely exposed, both literally and figuratively. There had been moments in those weeks, in the bone-chilling quiet as she lay awake in the meagre dormitory that she and the other girls had been provided, where she wondered about what she was doing. She wondered about her mother, about what she would have thought about her choices since leaving the Justice League.

Alura Zor-El believed in justice. She believed in punishing those who deserved it and making it so that they could never hurt anyone again. Krypton was lucky, in that regard, to have the Phantom Zone. It meant that criminals could be sent away with no hope of return. Earth had no such luxury. In lieu of that certainty, that guarantee that a criminal would never commit another crime, Kara wondered if her mother might have agreed with Oliver's way of thinking.

In the months that she had been with him, Kara certainly had done. So much so, that she had almost taken a life. She would have taken a life if Oliver hadn't stepped in. Part of her had hated him for that, for giving her the chance to cross a line that had been drawn in bedrock by Kal-El from the moment she became Supergirl. Kara had stood by and watched as Oliver used a knife that she had lodged into a man's chest to end his life just those few minutes sooner than it would have done anyway. Part of her had hated him because, for a reason Kara couldn't fully identify, the death didn't seem wrong to her.

She had heard stories from the women in the brothel, those forced into working for the Triad, about the brutality and ruthlessness that the boss showed them. The injuries he had caused, the threats he had made, the things he had indulged himself in because he claimed ownership over those women. Any one of them would have gladly seen him killed. So, when Kara watched him die, the part of her that ached for the plight of those women was soothed.

She had never even learnt his name. A man had died by her hand, directly or indirectly it didn't matter, and she had never known his name.

Kal-El had always told her that killing was a line that they could never cross because it would be too easy to give in to. Justify something once, he had told her, and it becomes easy to justify it again and again. Kara had always trusted him on that. Yet, in the days after, as the image of that death replayed in her mind over and over, Kara knew she could not use the actions she had taken in the brothel to justify taking another life. It was not the same.

Instead, she buried the virulent debate in the back of her mind. Allowed it to be pushed under by focusing on the task at hand. But it raged there, even unlooked for, and whispered in her mind whenever her concentration lapsed enough to allow it.

Finally going out into the field, with Oliver, as an equal sent a wave of something through her. Something that felt so much like how she felt when Kal-El gave Kara her first supersuit. It was vindication. Proof that everything she had been through was worth it. That, no matter what she had lost, she was Kara Zor-El and nothing could stop her.

Every piece of training Oliver had given her, ever lesson taught and learnt, every skill practiced and mastered. It all came together as she moved through steel corridors beneath the deck of a Triad ship, shutting down the last vestiges of a group of murders and profiteers that had plagued the innocents of Star City for far too long.

She hadn't held herself back. The anger that had fuelled her as a teenager, the rage at the loss of her powers and the loss of her identity, the misery that flowed between the women the Triad had bought and used in their brothels, it all came rushing up through her as she moved through the ship. Every arrow she strung was an outlet for it all. Every injury she dealt out was one step closer to it seeming worthwhile. She detailed every attack in her mind with mechanical precision. The exact damage of her shots, the pain it would cause, the time it would take to heal. Just the way Oliver had taught her.

It had felt just.

Almost as soon as she felt it though, Kara knew it was not a feeling that would last.

XXX

Night-time starscape, edges blurred with the pollution of a city.

Oliver stared up at it dully for a while, watching a curiously flickering red glow creep up over it from the left edge of his vision, then retreat again.

For a long moment, it seemed unconnected to anything he knew should be happening. A dull throbbing in the back of his head permeated any meaningful thought that stirred in his mind that tried to explain where he was and what had happened.

And then the weight of recall, of personality and past came crashing down on him, like a micrometeorite punching through the hull of a satellite.

Oliver jerked upright. Survival training decades deep forced him to his feet in a flurry of ingrained movements. His fingers groped around, looking on instinct for his bow before an image of it tumbling over the deck of the cargo ship flickered to life.

"Hey, easy."

It was a familiar voice.

He wheeled around, eyes landing on a blue and red suited figure stood a clear metre away. Kara's hood was down, mask removed. Her hair, even pulled up into the tight bun, was distinctly darkened the water from the bay. There was a small cut on her right cheek and a notable tear ripped through one arm of her suit.

Relief pounded through him.

Memories of the final few minutes aboard the deck of the cargo ship, of watching Kara tumble over the railing and into the dark water of the bay, the fear that rose with that sight. A part of him had almost been sure she had died. He had lost too many people, too many students, too many people that he cared about. He had lost so many that he almost expected it now.

Seeing her stood there, even with the visible injuries, it felt as though the pressure that was constantly pushing down on him had receded a fraction.

"Are you okay?" Oliver asked.

Automatically, he tried to take a step towards her to check her injuries, and instantly he was brought to a halt. Pain lanced up through his body indiscriminately from a point somewhere along his ribs and Oliver doubled over.

Kara was at his side in a second, hands on his body, guiding him. A few moments later, they were both sat on the rim of the shipping container that they were on, looking out from high over the port. Across the port, the fire on the ship seemed to have mostly died out. The flashing lights of the emergency response vehicles that had flooded in cast red and blue cascades across the night.

"You've got cracked ribs, and more cuts and scrapes than I could count." Kara said, distinctly looking out at the lightly smouldering cargo ship. "You were just about conscious enough to help me pull you out of the bay and drag you up here. I dosed you with some of the nanite gel, but I doubt it'll work well on cracked ribs."

Oliver tried to pull back any memories of that, but there was a firm blackness between his hitting the water and waking up a minute prior. A concussion was possible, but he'd suffered more than a few of those over the years, one more probably wouldn't do any more damage.

Kara's assessment of the nanite gel was accurate though, the version that Oliver had stolen from LuthorCorp was designed primarily for external injuries but if nothing else the pain killing compounds would kick in soon.

"And what else happened while I was out?"

Kara guiltily met his eyes. "The explosion drew some attention. Big attention."

Adrenaline soaked his system as if summoned on command. The Justice League. There was no other alternative. He hadn't arrived for an assault on the Triad with his anti-superhero artillery packed. If The League was there, with the order to take him out standing, he was in trouble.

"Who?" The word came out tightly strung.

"Kal-El." Kara's gaze dipped again. "He saw us."

Oliver pushed back to his feet, forcing the pain in his ribs away with combat-prep and adrenaline-soaked nerves. Periphery senses wired up with the same rush. Eyes scanning.

Nothing.

"He's not here, Oliver." Kara sounded weary.

He looked around, saw her stood by his side again.

"I'm the elder cousin," She continued, as if he had already spoken the question in his mind. "I ordered him to leave you alone. Kal might not have been raised on Krypton but he respects our traditions."

Recall brought back every conversation he had with Kara about Krypton, every detail from articles published by Lois Lane, data lifted from S.T.A.R Labs. profiles. Oliver's mind raked over every detail about the family houses, about tradition and loyalty, and made the intuitive leap that there was no way that Clark Kent would respect the wishes of a dead planet over orders from the American Government.

Love for his cousin, then? He was a naïve yes man, but Clark Kent was still raised on Earth and was a child of Krypton. Both worlds held reverence for family. Regardless of Oliver's low opinion of Clark's treatment and choices when it came to Kara, he knew that Clark loved her. There had never been any doubt of that. Even that though, Oliver couldn't see it being enough.

Superman had a pattern. He said yes to everyone with a flag or a badge. The Justice League began with him, and his choice to bend the knee followed them all. Followed them all until they all had to stop and wait for some bureaucrat to sign an order just to let them stop a mugger.

No, Clark Kent would not have walked away from orders to eliminate the Green Arrow just because his cousin asked him to.

"You're going back to them."

There was a moment where something that was almost surprised crossed Kara's face before she got it under control.

"Kal said they've found a way to fix the Gold Kryptonite poisoning. To give me my powers back."

You don't need them anymore, Kara. Don't you see that? He didn't say it, in the end he supposed it didn't need saying. If his training had sunk in, if she had accepted it in the way he knew that she had, then Kara knew she didn't need her powers. That the truth was she had never needed them. Being tactile, being on the ground where they were really needed, it was better the soaring, invulnerable, above the clouds. He didn't need to tell her what she already knew. Didn't need to have the same conversation he'd had with Dinah Laurel Lance all those years ago.

Kara walked back to the edge of the container, sat again on the ledge, and after a moment Oliver followed. His ribs creaked with the exertion.

"After everything that's happened," Her eyes were focused ahead. "I don't know if I can even really learn to be Supergirl again."

She couldn't. Not really. Supergirl, and Superman to that, existed on an ideal that didn't exist. Truth, Justice, and the American way. In the real world, those three things had nothing to do with each other. They couldn't exist together. Their meanings, redefined by those in power, were entirely paradoxical.

Clark was raised on old fashion Americana by a couple who were holdouts from a bygone era, he deluded himself into believing that there was good in everyone. He'd passed that onto Kara when she had arrived on Earth and she had believed it too, for a time.

That time was gone. Oliver had shown her the true nature of the world and Kara had lived it herself. She would never be the Supergirl she had been before again.

The first night she had come to him, Oliver had fought with his nature. With the voices of mentors past. With the monster within. He had told himself he wasn't training her because he wanted to bring Supergirl to his level.

Yet, here it was.

She was returning to The Justice League, but she wasn't theirs anymore, wasn't Clark Kent's.

She was his.

"You don't have to go back," He found himself saying. "You could stay here." With me.

She turned then, met his eyes. "I can't just walk away from the Justice League."

"Yeah, that whole cult thing."

Kara laughed a short exhale. It was the first time he had ever mentioned that word without inciting her wrath.

"I don't trust them, Kara. There's going to be a day when you realise that they aren't what you've built them up to be. Just come and find me when it happens."

She lowered her head for a moment, then looked back up with the wisp of a melancholy smile. "The League are the good guys, Oliver."

They both fell silent and Kara heaved out a heavy sigh. "You should get out of here before the SCPD move their search beyond the ship."

Oliver looked beyond Kara at the flashing police lights and the direction of his Ducati. The lights were moving closer, the red and blue began to flicker over them both.

Neither of them spoke again.

In the distance, the sirens were getting louder.

Another one lost.

It was almost as though Chien Na Wei was there in his ear, whispering it to him again. Or maybe it was the voice of the thing inside. He remembered how it had come to life that first time he had entered the brothel, how he had feared to look around, knowing that it was there with him.

Everyone he had trained, every student, every friend. Roy had been like a son to him, he had loved Dinah since they had been children, Mia was almost a daughter, Helena he had loved too, after a fashion. They had all left, one way or another. Kara had, in ways he had never expected, come to mean more to him than any of them.

Now, she was gone too, because Clark Kent had asked her to leave. Because she had promised to return to The League.

Oliver pushed himself to his feet. It was harder than he expected. The missing weight of his bow in his hand made him pause, habit telling him to look for the weapon before he moved on, but he knew that it was long sunk at the bottom of the bay.

He peered into the night on the opposite side of the container in the direction of his bike. The SCPD hadn't made it that far yet. But they'd get there sooner or later, to try and find the person who had sunk a Triad freighter.

Another one lost.

The whisper ghosted past his ear again, behind him in the dark. That time he heard it for sure. It lifted the hairs on the back of his neck. Oliver nodded and reached back with his left hand, supped the place on his neck where the voice had touched. He looked back at Kara, where she sat, still looking out at the slowly sinking ship.

Deep breath.

That time, his ribs didn't hurt, nothing did. The drugs in the gel were numbing him nicely.

The thing that had been let loose back on the deck of the ship had come to him, given life, and held out a hand.

Oliver walked away from her, away from everything that had happened since Kara Zor-El's arrival in Star City. Gave himself up to the spreading numbness within, and took it.

Author's Note: Well, this took longer than I expected.

This story was a whole journey for me. I started writing this at a point where I wasn't entirely pleased with the way certain things in my life were going, which made it easy for me to channel that into something darker, like this. Then, as time went on, things got better, which made it harder to me to tap into that part of myself that I was using to motivate this story. That being said, I really didn't want to leave this unfinished since I really loved the versions of Kara and Oliver that I'd created.

We've made it to the end of the road, more or less as close to my original plan as was ever going to happen, which I'm pretty happy about.

Until the next one though,

Stay safe, make good choices, and love each other.

JRW..