Author's Note: Before we get started, this whole story was written while listening to the album Fever Ray. I first heard 'If I Had A Heart' in The Following way back in like 2013, and for some reason that popped into my head while I was working on my plan for this story. The whole album did a great job of setting the mood of this universe for me, as well as the follow-up album Plunge. So, I'd recommend listening to those while reading because I think it'll set the mood for you guys too.

Chapter 2

Of all the things Oliver had seen in his time, Supergirl appearing in Star City and ending up the victim of street-level muggers was certainly on the more surprising end of things. He kept tabs on most members of The Justice League though various means, but every time one of them made the news he got an alert. The last Supergirl sighting had seen her and a handful of other League members going up against Ultra-Humanite in Metropolis. Oliver had studied the footage of the fight intently, it wasn't often Supergirl was so easily taken down. With little to go on beyond some shaky cell phone camera footage, Oliver had given up trying to figure out what had happened.

That had been over a month ago.

Why Supergirl had turned up suddenly, and seemingly powerless, in Star City was certainly a question that he needed answering.

Before Lian Yu Oliver had seen the Justice League parade around the world with their self-righteous authority and thought little of them. After his time on the island, working for ARGUS, Oliver had come to realise that the world was a much more complicated place than he had ever thought. It had been a side-effect of living a privileged life that he had never considered until too late, that he had been sheltered from realising the shades of grey that plagued the real world. His time with Amanda Waller helped dispel his delusions and made him come to terms with how the world really worked. It hadn't taken much longer for those ideas to catch up to how he thought of the Justice League.

There was a danger in their existence. Individually, every member of the Justice League was powerful enough, but alone they had stayed humble to a degree. Mostly, they had kept to their own cities and only worked together when it was needed. A little more than fifteen years after Superman had first shown up in Metropolis and the Justice League was a disaster waiting to happen. A superpowered army stationed out of an orbiting space station that was invisible to almost every government and individual across the planet. Amanda Waller had been convinced that they would turn against the people one day and decide to rule over the rest of humanity, and that humanity wouldn't stand a chance.

It wasn't a fear that Oliver shared.

In The Quiver alone he had enough weaponry to fight off almost the entirety of the Justice League thanks to files carefully lifted from ARGUS, LuthorCorp. and Cadmus Labs. If they ever did turn, it was an eventuality that Oliver was ready for.

The real fear was how easily they could be swayed. In the last few years Oliver had watched as The Justice League found themselves tied up in more and more bureaucratic red tape. They had grown too large, too powerful, and the governments of the world had decided to rein in and control that power. Charters with the UN, individual nations refusing to sanction any actions committed by the Justice League in their territories. The Justice League had seized up, unable to so much as stop a mugging without signed approval from the United Nations. On more occasions than Oliver was happy to admit The League had been forced into acting against the people. Of course, it was always spun as being done in the name of keeping people safe. It never looked that way to him.

On top of everything else, the final nail in the coffin, was the children. He had noticed it even before becoming The Green Arrow. Almost every member of The League, at one time or another, toted around a child as a sidekick. It has only been one or two at first, hardly noticeable against the backdrop of destruction and violence left in the wake of The League. Over time it became more and more obvious, until the sidekicks were organised in their own teams. Children and teenagers, roped in to fight a war that they had no business being involved in.

Supergirl herself had been one of them. By Oliver's reckoning, she had been only fifteen the first time she suited up and fought alongside her cousin. It had been the same year Oliver returned from Lian Yu. He had still been in Russia at the time but even there the appearance of a new all American Superhero had made top billing.

It hadn't taken him long after getting home to Star City to figure out who she really was. Waller had a few solid guesses as to the secret identities of dozens of members of The League, though more than half of them had turned out to be wrong. Free of ARGUS and Waller's ever watchful eyes Oliver had doubled down on investigating each and every member of The League once he was in Star City. A few chance meetings had helped him to narrow down even more information to the point where there wasn't a single member of The Justice League who was unknown to him.

Maybe it was paranoia, a lot of people would certainly have said as much.

Supergirl turning up in his city was cause enough for Oliver to be assured that his investigation of The League was the right thing to do.

Oliver had never been entirely sure whether or not The League knew about him. In the eight years he had been operating as The Green Arrow they had never made a move to recruit him the way that they had every other vigilante and hero in America. Though a part of Oliver had always wondered if that was because they knew he would refuse. To the best of his knowledge, there wasn't a hero on the planet who had turned down the invitation to join The League or one of its subsidiary groups. It wouldn't have looked good for them to have him turn them down.

Even then, hardly anyone admitted to his existence. Ever since returning to Star City, Oliver had made it a cardinal sin of his mission to be noisy. He never wanted to become a symbol, an ideal to look up to. From the beginning he had been a scalpel, cutting out the criminal element from his city and fading back into the night. Thanks to a few well-hidden backdoors into certain government agencies, Oliver knew that there was a mandate to eliminate The Green Arrow being pushed by the White House. Despite the government's reluctance to acknowledge him, they wanted him dead. So long as they could do it without admitting he existed.

It wouldn't have surprised him if that was the reason that The League ignored him. They were under orders not to make a spectacle of him. It would legitimise his actions too much. That would cause embarrassment all around. So, they were forced to leave him alone until the right opportunity presented itself.

Just the thought of the anger that must have caused both parties brought a smile to Oliver's lips.

From Supergirl's reaction to him Oliver suspected she had, at the least, heard rumours of him. There was a look in her eyes at seeing him that was somewhere between disbelief and surprise, a thinly veiled irritation there too. That much made sense to him, it wasn't every day that Supergirl needed to be saved, certainly not from a group of would be muggers. And, if Oliver's guess was right, she didn't have her powers.

It had been complete chance that he had been in the right area of The Glades when she was attacked. She hadn't called out, hadn't tried to get help. Oliver had just happened to be on the right rooftop to overhear the threats the group of men made carried on the wind. She had done admirably before he arrived. One of the men had been clutching what looked to be a broken wrist, but the other three had continued to advance on her unperturbed. That alone had been enough for Oliver to suspect she didn't have her powers once he recognised who she was.

With the adrenaline spike of the fight waning and his surprise at seeing Supergirl stood in front of him faded, Oliver had clarity enough to confirm his suspicions. A small droplet of blood that dripped down from one of her fingers. At first glance Oliver wrote it off to the injury she had inflicted on her attacker, but when new droplets welled up in the seconds that passed he realised she was the one bleeding.

"Are you hurt?"

His question seemed to prompt something in her. With the muggers out cold, Oliver had turned off his voice modulator. Maybe it was the sound of a normal voice, maybe it was her shock wearing off at his cold statement that he knew her identity, maybe it was something else. Whatever it was, it kicked Supergirl into reacting.

"I-uh-I'm not…" She stumbled over her words.

"You're bleeding."

"I'm not Supergirl."

The lie was hardly told with enough conviction to persuade a child, but Oliver ignored it.

"Your wrist," Oliver fixed his bow to the magnetic hook on his quiver and reached out with one hand. "Let me see."

Oliver surprised himself with the care he was showing to her. From the glimpse of the wound he had seen it was little more than a small cut, nothing that would leave any serious damage behind. Unless the situation was dire, he never stayed behind to help patch people up. It went against his first rule, it left him exposed. Offering to help with such a minor wound was far from his usual actions.

It surprised him even more when Supergirl held out her arm to him.

Gently taking her arm in one hand, Oliver turned it over to look at the wound. There was a ragged line cut in the fabric of her sweater sleeve and a faint red trickly beneath it. Carefully, Oliver rolled up the sleeve to reveal the cut under it. He had been right. The wound wasn't substantial, a small nick in the flesh barely deep enough to draw blood, only the length of the slash caused blood to well up in it. With his free hand, Oliver reached into one of the pouches at his hip, produced a thin piece of tape and laid it over the wound.

The gel worked into the bandage was a propriety compound being designed in the labs at LuthorCorp. There was a nanite substance built into the gel that told any damaged cells it came into contact with what to do and, more to the point, how rapidly to do it, while at the same time damping down any signals sent from pain receptors. On minor wounds the substance could cut down healing time from a few days to a matter of hours. Oliver wasn't sure how effective it would be on Supergirl's alien DNA, but at the least it would stop the bleeding.

Supergirl flexed the fingers of her injured arm. The faint trembling Oliver had noticed there had subsided significantly. As gently as he had taken it, Oliver released his hold on her arm. For a moment, she held it where it had been, then slowly dropped it back to her side.

"Thank you." Her voice was quiet, her eyes still not looking to meet his own.

There was a stretch of silence between the two of them, only broken by the faint noises of the city.

"Why are you in Star City, Kara?"

The use of her name seemed to hit harder than when he had called her Supergirl. Instantly, her façade of fear and hesitation into herself dropped. Kara squared herself upright and fixed him with a piercing gaze that might have shaken loose feelings of fear in anyone with less conditioning than Oliver.

"How do you know who I am?"

Part of him wanted to laugh. How it was more people didn't figure out the identities of Earth's protectors was beyond Oliver. With a focused mind and enough time there were few members of The Justice League that could hide their identities well. Superman and his cousin were two of the worst. Clark Kent had been too easy to figure out, but Oliver did have the advantage of owning his own satellite system with which to track his flight patterns. From there the leap between Kara Kent, cousin of Clark, to Supergirl, cousin of Superman, was laughably easy.

That answer was not one he could give to her.

"I keep an eye on individuals with power like yours."

Internally, Oliver scolded himself. That answer had been none more helpful than if he had laughed. It was beyond evident in her stance that Kara did not trust him. She knew of The Green Arrow, that much was clear, but whatever she had heard would have come through dripped information and rumours of a system that loathed him.

Yet still there was something about her that gave Oliver the inkling she was unlike the others. There was an edge to her that he was unfamiliar with seeing in the members of The League that paraded around the planet. Something about her that told him she was different.

"You don't have your powers." Oliver observed when Kara said nothing. The silence between them continued to stretch out until Oliver tired. "Are you going to talk to me or just keep glaring?"

Kara's gaze hardened on him for a moment. "I don't see any reason to trust you."

The decision Oliver made in that moment was one that he would question as long as he lived.

Almost unconsciously, Oliver lifted up one hand and brushed back his hood. He felt the fabric pool around the back of his neck as he plucked off his mask.

"Oliver Queen?!"

XXX

When she had finished telling it, hands still wrapped around the empty mug of tea he had provided, Oliver found it a little hard to believe. Kryptonite had come up dozens of times in his research into Kryptonians, though only the green variant had held any interest to him. That there existed a gold variant that had the ability to strip a Kryptonian of their powers permanently was a surprise to him completely.

"Tailor made to stop me apparently," Kara said when Oliver questioned it. "Uniquely coded to my DNA to stop my powers."

That ruled out the possibility of gathering some for himself to add it to the collection of weapons that were tailored for used against members of The League. As wide as Oliver's reach was, he would be hard pressed to get a sample of Superman's DNA, and even if it was possible he was far from having the knowhow to successfully weaponize it into the Gold Kryptonite that Kara had told him about. Then again, he reasoned, if Supergirl had been exposed to it first it was likely to have been a trial run. It had clearly worked, the woman sat across from him was totally powerless. It made sense that Superman would be next.

Bringing Supergirl to The Quiver was something of a risk. Oliver had already given her his identity, something no member of The Justice League was privy to. Giving her the location of his main base of operations was an even greater risk. She had enough information to give to The League, or directly to the government, and they would have all that they would need to take him off the board quietly. Playing it mysterious was the reason Oliver had managed to go as long as he had done without making himself too big a target. His identity had been kept secret at many a great cost. Then he had given it away without hesitation to a woman he hardly knew.

The something he had seen in Kara which had given him ground enough to trust in her, had made itself more apparent the more time he spent with her. Kara was a lost soul. Without her powers she had lost her sense of identity. She had been Supergirl for near half of her life, certainly for almost all of the time she had been on Earth. Knowing that her powers were gone, and permanently if Ultra-Humanite was to be believed, had stolen away most of who she had been. There was a chasm in her sense of self that would be near impossible to fix.

It was a sentiment that Oliver understood, even if he had never felt it himself to that extent. Just the idea of giving up The Green Arrow, giving up the thing that allowed him to do so much good for the world, brought up an ache in his chest. For over a decade he had lived that life. Not all of it had been good. There was just as much tragedy blended in with the happiness. He had lost good friends in pursuit of justice. Seen people he had loved die or become corrupted by the very evil he had sworn to fight. Despite it all he had done more good for the world than harm, of that he was sure. Every day The Green Arrow helped fight crime and corruption on all levels. Leaving that behind wasn't something Oliver thought himself capable of.

He had been trying to. Rapidly approaching his forties, Oliver knew that he wouldn't always be able to be The Green Arrow. He had tried to make a difference as Oliver Queen too.

Selling off Queen Industries had been his first port of call. The company held too much damage, too much that had been tainted by the sins of the Queen family. As useful as it had been having access to the company labs and research, it had ultimately meant more that Oliver gave it a chance to outgrow the shadows of his family. Oliver was glad to relinquish the company to Ray Palmer. The man was one of a handful of fringe members of The League, mostly only brought in to consult when they needed his expertise. The only other serious competing offer had been from LuthorCorp, and Oliver would have gladly given up his own life before handing the keys to his family company to Lex Luthor.

With the frankly absurd amount of money Palmer had paid for the company, Oliver had set up a number of charitable foundations across the city. Each of them catered to different needs, each one to a group of people that his city was failing. He had campaigned for prison reform, trying to get focus pushed onto rehabilitation over punishment. On top of that he had funded dozens of grassroots campaigns across the country, all of them trying in one way or another to help make the world a better place.

Still though, no matter how hard he tried to help there was something lacking in it. Being The Green Arrow was different, more tactile. Hood on his head and bow in hand Oliver would see first-hand the difference he could make. He was always in the thick of it, not just throwing money at the problem from his penthouse apartment.

"How did you end up in Star City?" He asked her after a long pause.

Kara shrugged her shoulders. "There was a train here at the right time."

That sentiment hit frighteningly hard with Oliver. There had been a time when he had lost himself like that. Oliver had wandered the world for months after Roy Harper had been killed, unsure what his mission as a hero had meant if his friends were lost in the fighting. By chance alone he had stumbled onto an ashram in California and spent time with a holy man who had helped him to find his purpose and his soul. In Kara he could see all of the doubts and longing that he had remembered feeling back then. It had taken Oliver months to find his way back to the man that he had once been, to the man who came out the other end with a new mission and a different view of the world.

Could he give Kara what he had once been given?

"Kal-El said he'd find a cure." Kara mumbled to herself after the silence dragged out again.

Oliver studied her carefully before answering. "You don't believe him?"

"I don't know who I am if I can't help people," Kara paused for a moment, eyes shut as if forcing back tears. "If he can't cure me…"

The idea had been rattling around in the back of Oliver's mind from the moment he had seen how defeated Kara was. She had spent her whole life on Earth being raised as a solider for The Justice League. The civilian life that she had was there only to give her cover, to integrate her with humanity just enough that she could understand them, but not mistake herself for one of them. It was something that Oliver saw happen with dozens of young recruits into The League. Without Supergirl, without the fight, she had nothing, she had no self.

It didn't have to be the case. She could become more, something greater than superpowers directed in faux-righteous tones at the criminal element. It had been what happened to Oliver on Lian Yu, he had been made into something else, a weapon against the criminal and corrupt. But without the ideological justifications and rulebook that bound The Justice League.

It took more than just a need to help to become what Oliver had done. Roy, Mia, Dinah, Helena; everyone who had come to him had been broken by something first. They didn't just need to help, they needed his method. They needed to do something with the anger and fury that had consumed them. They needed something to make them whole again. Or, at least, something to distract them from the fact that they were broken.

Kara was right there. In that moment before the loss might consume her completely. The sadness at her loss, the anger at not having the only thing that made her who she was. It was the same thing Oliver had witnessed in every single one of his student.

He could do the same with her.

Or could he? Everyone else he had trained had been human, or close enough to. Dinah's Canary Cry had never distanced her from her humanity. Kara was different. She wasn't just someone who wanted to learn the way that Oliver had. She was Kryptonian, a whole different culture, a whole different planetary view to justice and fighting. More than that, she had been raised by The League from the moment she had arrived on Earth. They had been left with more than enough time to indoctrinate her into their way of thinking.

Even she agreed to let him train her, would she be able to overcome the way The League had taught her to think?

The League recruited children like a cult would. Brought them in during their adolescence and made them look down on the rest of humanity from their orbiting ivory tower. That kind of distance, that kind of insistence that they were the only people who had a right to protect humanity, and that anyone who refused them was the enemy, it was dangerous.

Unlike some of the others, Kara had the added weight of family. She and Superman were cousins, blood, and the last of their kind. To do things the way he did, Kara wouldn't just have to betray the teachings of The League, she would have to betray her cousin. Oliver had no idea if the woman sat across from him was capable of that.

Still, there was a part of him that felt a pull. Something that Oliver couldn't quite pin down was telling him to take the chance on her and make the offer. In a way, Oliver knew that it wouldn't make a difference one way or the other, if she refused or accepted. She already knew who he was, where his base of operations was. Kara had the power to destroy him no matter what.

"Just because you don't have your powers doesn't mean you can't help," Oliver said. Kara's attention lifted from staring morosely into her mug and she met his eyes. "I can train you. Teach you how to fight like I do."

Despite the silence the fell between them, Kara didn't avert her gaze from his eyes. He could see it all. The moment he posed the question he could see her processing it. There was a slight tilt in her neck, a glassy distance in her eyes that betrayed just how hard the proposition was for her to reconcile. Anyone who hadn't been expecting the question to have weighed so heavily might have taken it as instant rejection, but Oliver knew better.

In spite of all the reasons he knew Kara might have had for turning him down, he knew something else. She was Supergirl. League brainwashing or not, Superman's cousin or not, Kara was something great. Even with the legally restricting kid gloves The League were taught to fight in Kara had shown something the rest of them never had. A level of ferocity, of rage, of righteous fury at the world and how horribly fractured it was.

That was something that Oliver could understand. As far as his information went, while Clark Kent had arrived on Earth as a baby, Kara had been in her early teens. She remembered her planet, remembered what it was she was losing. It was tangible for her, it meant something. Whereas Clark never knew the place he came from, Kara had truly lost her home. By some accounts, she had watched it get destroyed.

Loss on that scale was something even Oliver couldn't comprehend. Even with all of his personal demons he had never encountered anything on that level. He could guess at what it might have done to her though. Going from that loss right into training to be a solider for The League, it would have damaged her even more. Regardless of all the propaganda and lies The League fed their indoctrinates, that kind of damage stood out.

He could use that. Oliver could tap into that unsolved rage and give Kara more.

If the steely determination building behind her eyes was any indication, she knew that too.

"Like you?"

He nodded, slowly, then waited a moment before speaking. "Without padded gloves. Without any limits. In the grime and the blood. Like a real warrior."

The rage Oliver had seen in her fighting style was back in droves. The Kara that he had brought back to The Quiver, lost, frightened, alone, she had melted away. Supergirl was creeping in again. Everything about her shifted over a few long seconds. She stopped hunching, straightening in the chair. Her hands stopped gripping the mug for the remaining warmth that was petering out of the ceramic and balled into fists on the tabletop. Without breaking eye contact, Kara's head raised up from the shallow angle it had taken.

He had been right. She was ready. If he trained her right, Kara could be greater than even him.

"Why?" She asked, voice almost iced over with the adrenaline soaked realisations she was no doubt coming to.

"Because I've seen that look in people before. You think you've lost your soul, who you are. You haven't. I want to show you how to find it again."

Kara's gaze finally broke from the eye contact they had been locked into. For the briefest moment, her eyes drifted shut and Oliver wondered if it was some form of prayer.

"Okay," She opened her eyes again. Everything he had wanted to see in her was right there, bared for the world to see. "Teach me."

He shouldn't, Oliver knew it, but all the years of his training couldn't stop those two words from bringing a cold grin over his lips.

It wasn't just about training her, giving her back the sense of self that she had lost along with her powers. There was more to it, something dark and deceitful. Something that Talia al Ghul would have lathered him with praises for knowing. Part of him knew that. The part that he didn't want to fully acknowledge. Everyone he had taught, everything he had done in the years since he had first arrived on Lian Yu, it all would pale in comparison to showing one of The Justice League's star examples of purity the truth of the world.

The idea flickered across his mind for a moment, a sickening glee at the idea clawing its way through him. The part of his mind that wanted to rejoice in the idea was the part he tried to keep locked down. It was the same part of him that had tortured General Shrieve in Hong Kong, Kovar's men in Russia, the part that enjoyed it. The part of him that thrilled at the feeling of warm blood on his hands. The part of him that wanted Supergirl to be his, not The League's.

Oliver grabbed at it, crushing down the impulse with everything he had in him. He couldn't train her thinking like that. The monster wasn't him, it didn't have control.

"We start at dawn," Oliver could hear the harshness in his own voice. Anger more at the dark parts of his own mind than anything else. He crossed the room, finding the lockbox where he kept spare keys to the various safehouses he maintained.

"Here." With no other warning he threw the keys across to her.

The shot was wide, intentionally so. Not far enough that she would have to get up to catch them, but off enough that she would have to react. Kara's left arm shot out and snatched them out of the air.

She was already good.

The training wouldn't phase her, he could see it already. If nothing else, Kara knew how to take a beating, and that put her one rung up on some of the people he had taught. There was still so much for him to teach her.

"The address is on the chain," He continued when Kara looked him curiously. "Go there, sleep. Do whatever it is you need to do to get ready. Tomorrow, I break you down and start from the ground up."

He didn't need to make her afraid, she was determined enough that Oliver had little doubt it would have any effect on her. The mind was where the truth of the fight was carried. The League just taught people how to rely on their powers to win a fight, not how to turn their body into a weapon. They taught the reasons why to hold back, not the reasons to let go. They taught unity in strength, not that trusting anyone else was lethal.

The truth of the fight was in the mind.

In Kara more than anyone he had ever trained, Oliver needed to pick apart years of indoctrination from The League and rebuild Kara in the right way.

Kara must have sense the finality in his voice. Without even so much as looking as though she wanted to reply, Kara rose to her feet and made for the elevator doors. As they slid open and she stepped inside, Oliver spoke.

"If I so much as smell a cape in my city, you're done."

His voice was even colder than it had been, and Oliver had made a point of not turning to face her. His back had been firmly facing the elevator when she had stepped in.

Another of his deductions of her rang true again as Kara remained wordless while the elevator doors snapped shut.