Chapter 3

Training Kara had been every bit the challenge Oliver had hoped for.

She was fierce, determined, built to withstand more than the usual measures Oliver employed. The loss she had been through, the destruction of her whole world and holding onto that level of survivors guilt her whole life, had made her insensitive in ways Oliver hadn't fully anticipated. Cracking open her bedrock exterior to pick apart the lies and propaganda The League and her cousin had force fed her had proved far more challenging than he had thought.

In some people, it took little more than repeated beatdowns given under the guise of sparing to crack the surface. Others took more focus, sensory deprivation or isolation, insults or attacks based on their history, or a combination of it all. The psychological affecting them more than the physical. Some needed both. A vicious left hook and a barbed comment about them, or their family. Something to make them snap, to make them acknowledge the anger they were burning with.

Oliver knew fully well the kind of people he trained. Those who came to him came already broken, already damaged in ways that would never be fixed by most accounts. Never once did he make promises of fixing people, that wasn't what Oliver did. He didn't give them back their innocence, their belief that the world was good and that people were driven by more than just base, selfish desire. What he did do was show them everything else, the bitter darkness that ran the course of humanity. Then, when they knew it as well as they knew themselves, he built them back up to fight it.

He didn't fix people. No. He took the damaged and broken souls that came to him and showed them how to use the fractures within them to do good. Or, at the very least, if not good then justice. Justice of a kind.

It was the kind that Clark Kent and his cohorts looked down upon. The kind that they thought was somehow less just because it didn't fit into the petty constraints that corrupt groups of power hungry tyrants imposed on those beneath them. The only set of laws Oliver held to as gospel were those of physics. Everything else was more than just blank, they were never to be written.

Getting Kara to see that had been challenging. Unlike some of the others, she knew darkness. She had seen evil since the day her parents had stuffed her in a pod bound for Earth alongside a baby she was supposed to care for. She had known evil intimately as she watched her whole world collapse in on itself because the ruling classes refused to acknowledge that they were anything less than perfect. She had fought evil, in many ways, as Supergirl.

With The Justice League, it had always been sanitised evil. Killer robots, world ending threats, monstrous invading armies, everything nice and clean. They never got down into the mud like Oliver had. They didn't have to trapse through blood and filth at the very base levels of human degradation. Oliver highly doubted Superman had ever been at the Port of Starling and opened a shipping container to see dozens of rotting corpses that had died clambering over each other for a gulp fresh air. Or that Wonder Woman had been forced to analyse the dead body of a teenage girl to try and find the animal that had ripped her apart.

They rose above it. They let the governments of the world push them back and away into their orbiting space station because they didn't want to deal with the filth.

That had been how he got through to Kara.

The Triad had been the longest standing war Oliver had been waging. For every branch of their operations he severed, they built another. For every corrupt cop he ventilated they bribed two more. For every piece of shit rapist whose throat he shoved an arrow though, they hired another dozen. The latest thread of their operations he had been working to tear apart was their brothels, and by extension their people smuggling ring. The evidence was there, enough for him to see but not enough for the authorities to do anything about. The Triad were smuggling young women into the country and sending them to work in brothels. Not just in Star City but across the West Coast.

It took Oliver showing Kara the crime scene photos of what happened to the girls who stopped earning for her to really see it. Then, she had followed his training without pause, without question. He gave an order and she followed. The League, for all their faults, had made her quite the solider.

She took his mission on as her own. That had been the reason he chose the Triad to focus on with her. The depth of corruption in Star City ran deeper than the Chinese mob, but Oliver had needed something that would resonate with Kara. She was hardly into her twenties, objectively speaking. A decade younger than Oliver himself. He knew she would see it. That she would look at the mangled corpse of a woman no younger than herself and take it to heart.

It had been a callous move, Oliver knew that. Perhaps more so than his usual tactics, he had driven high her anger at losing her powers and picked the target that she could have easily herself become the victim of. It had worked. She was willing to learn, ready to train his way. And that, Oliver told himself, would have to be enough.

Picking away at The League's training had taken longer still. Maybe more so because it had been Superman himself, the cousin she had been sent to Earth to protect, who had taught it to her personally. Once they got started, she began to see it though. The futility of fighting with one hand tied behind her back.

Lethal force was rarely Oliver's first call. In spite of all his anger, the need he felt to make sure those who deserved it saw their punishment, he knew some people were capable of being reformed. There were lines for him, some types of people that Oliver would kill without hesitation, others that he would let live. Kara understood that concept quickly, and it left Oliver wondering if it had been because of some inherent difference in the way that Krypton looked at the value of life. Kara had never taken a life with her own hands, never come close, but still she understood that sometimes there was no other way.

The part of him that had thrilled at the idea of getting to rebuild Supergirl snarled greedily in the dark recesses of his mind as it wondered how far Oliver could push her. If there would be a scenario in which she could kill. If he could be the one to make her do it.

Over and over Oliver refused to give the voice room to shape his actions. He crushed it down with practiced will every time it crawled up out of the darkness, and tried to focus on the good.

More than just running him into an early grave, Oliver knew what wearing the hood meant. It meant drawing on the darkness. For all the good he did, every time he drew back his bow Oliver drew on the darkness within him. For every charitable foundation he set up as Oliver Queen, he took a dozen chunks out of his soul as The Green Arrow. From the very beginning Oliver had known it would happen. Talia explicitly told it to him, Anatoly warned him the danger of trying to live two lives, Slade had laughed at his insentience on trying to be more than the killer.

Training Kara brought it up in ways he hadn't expected. It gave the monster more and more ground with him. Regardless of The League's training, Kara had stayed hopeful at heart. She had believed in the goodness within all people, that everyone was worthy of redemption. Oliver hadn't just stolen her of that hope, he had crushed it into a fine dust and set it on fire right in front of her. And part of him had been thrilled at the look of hopelessness in her eyes.

The impulse wasn't one he was proud of, and he had buried it with the rest of the parts of himself that shamed him.

Teaching her to fight had been different, altogether easier than anyone he had taught before. Oliver had always been forced to teach his students how to build their strength, how to control it, before they could so much as hold a bow. Mia took months to learn how to draw a bow properly, and weeks more to aim with the kind of accuracy she needed in the field. Even Roy who had come to him after years of fighting on the streets had taken weeks of training to understand the principle.

It had taken Kara three days.

Three almost mundane days of teaching until Kara could hit a perfect bullseye in any scenario Oliver threw at her. Falling from a building, blindfolded, springing out of a front roll. She didn't fail. Kara was perfect. So willing to learn and effortless in her execution. None of his students had come close to performing the way she had.

There was something about watching her, the way she handled a bow as though she had always been destined to do so, the effortless grace in her skill, the righteous fury that seemed to radiate from Kara every time they trained. There was so much to her, so much more than the clean cut, all-American Supergirl that the public got to see. Astronomical units more than the tepid niceness of Kara Kent. Oliver had sensed it within her in those moments before offering to train her, had tasted it in the air every moment they had spent together since.

He had admired that in her, yes. Respected the hidden, crackling fire inside her that Kara had tried so hard to keep buried. Looked with thrilled anticipation at the warrior she could become with the right guiding hand, the force for real justice Kara had the potential to be if she could get over the bastardised vision of The League.

Something had started to change though. The respect and anticipation had blended into something else as Oliver watched her grow. With every bullseye, every dirty trick of his that she learnt to counter, every step she took towards his side of the fence, he felt it. Pulling, pulsing, buried and still screaming for attention.

Kara was an attractive woman, Oliver had no qualms admitting it. On the surface alone, even with the unflattering and deliberately neutral dressings of Kara Kent her physical beauty was undeniable. He had noticed it on their very first meeting in the alley. Once she had shed those initial habits, a different woman had emerged. The formfitting outfits they trained in were one thing, but Kara had changed beyond that. Gone were the pastel colours and unflattering wardrobe choices. In what limited downtime Oliver allowed them both, and the even more limited time they spent together outside of training, Kara picked out figure hugging jeans, tops that elegantly displayed the chiselled features of her shoulders and biceps. She knew how to draw out a frighteningly attractive balance of feminine curves and built definition, in a way that turned Oliver's head less infrequently than he would have liked. The first time he had seen her like that it became all the more obvious that Kara Kent wasn't her at all, that everything about her had been created by her cousin.

More than just the change in her wardrobe, her fire had risen. Oliver had stoked it, he knew that. He chose the Triad case to focus on with her to bait her empathy and use her grief at losing her powers to turn it into anger. Then the training regime on top forced more and more of the habits and personality her cousin had taught her to break away. The thin crust of Clark Kent's training collapsed. Oliver, all of him and not just the dark parts, had thrilled at being right about her. The walls that she had built, the Kara Kent she had become broke down and burnt away. Kara Zor-El had always been hidden under the surface, begging to be truly set free.

After the first two weeks the woman he trained with was almost wholly different from the one he had met. Her personality was almost entirely different, in ways that sometimes defied accurate description.

That did nothing to quell that feeling of attraction Oliver had felt volleying between them in training sessions. The physical alone had been bad enough, but Oliver had spent enough time around beautiful women in his reckless youth that he could control himself impeccably around that alone. Once he tapped into the real Kara though, once he brought out the warrior he had always suspected lurked underneath the Supergirl façade, it became more difficult to shut down.

The way she kept pace with his training, her quick and elegant mastery of a bow, the raw aggression behind each punch she threw. All of that was enough to lick the flames of the physical attraction Oliver felt for her. In their training sessions there were moments, where the two of them would get too close, lips inches apart, hands accidently brushing against sensitive flesh in attack and counterattack patterns. Too often did Oliver have Kara pinned and their faces would be increments too close for it to be platonic. From the way she reacted to him, Kara felt it too.

It was dangerous, Oliver knew that far too well. Helena had been the only time he had truly given into his attraction to a student, and he had let that attraction blind him to who she really had been. After that, Oliver had vowed never to make the mistake again, and he hadn't. With Mia it had been easy to lock down, her objective physical beauty aside, she had always been more of a little sister to him. With Dinah, there was enough lingering guilt around Tommy that Oliver had been completely able to disassociate himself with the lingering attraction there had been between them.

Kara tugged at him differently. A way that collided violently with the walls Oliver had spent so long erecting.

Beyond the training though, they fought.

In every lesson on fighting, or detective work, or the nuances of the criminal element, Kara listened. More than that, she learnt. She took things on board, rolled with the concepts of his training, and expanded on his ideas in ways Oliver hadn't anticipated. But outside of that, they clashed on one thing. The one thing that Oliver had known, from the second he considered offering to train her, would come up:

The Justice League.

Weaponry, the government, lethal force; not once did Kara argue back against Oliver's lessons. Even when he taught her about the most extreme scenarios, the worst possibilities, she understood. At the very least Kara engaged with him on a philosophical standpoint, if not always a literal one.

The Justice League was outside it all.

Oliver had never attempted to keep his distaste for them a secret, nor did he advertise it, but every lesson he taught Kara had a purpose.

With the amount of time he had been fighting his crusade, Oliver knew that his beliefs in the mission and his politics had become blurred at some point. At the beginning there had been clear lines. The Green Arrow and Oliver Queen had been distinct. The longer he fought for the mission, the more those lines blurred. Oliver Queen had ceased to be just a mask for the mission and instead had become another outlet for it. He used his money and influence to advocate for change in a way The Green Arrow never could. Oliver didn't delude himself. He knew he was human, that he had biases. That, as much as he wished it, he couldn't look at the world for a purely objective standpoint. His experiences, the loses he had suffered, and the things he had seen, they affected him on all levels of his life.

Ever aware of his own failings, Oliver kept his beliefs as detached as possible from the lessons he taught. He had disagreed on politics with many of his students, Mia and Dinah most of all. But that had never affected his ability to teach them. The skills they needed for the mission didn't totally overlap with the way he looked at the world. There was enough room in the grey areas sometimes.

That said, The League had never come up before. Dinah had been the closest, and only then because of her Canary Cry. As a meta-human, she was more likely to find her way onto The League's radar than he was once she went solo. Even with her power, she had been sceptical of them. Not hateful as Oliver was, but she had reservations. She saw the bureaucracy that held them back, though in a different way. Where Oliver saw the strings that corrupt politicians could use to manipulate the deadliest threats on planet Earth, Dinah, ever the lawyer, saw flaws in a system that could be fixed.

When it came to The League, Kara wasn't in a different ballpark. She was in a whole other continent.

Oliver was not above creating arguments with Kara, with any of his students, in order to promote tension, to get them to fight harder. It was a tactic he had employed often. Negative reinforcement, breeding conflict, in training they worked as tactics. From experience Oliver knew it wasn't enough to just give his students combat skills. They needed a level of scepticism, a level of knowing that the world was against them. When that was his goal, he picked his arguments, situations he knew he was playing 'Devil's Advocate' for alone.

With Kara, The League was different. No matter how much he tried to avoid the topic, it always seemed as though they ended up there. Multitasking was par for the course when it came to training. Oliver counterposed sparing with more nuanced lessons. He would quote Socrates at the same time as delivering a leg sweep, Nietzsche while teaching ecrisma, Marx as he demonstrated bow work. Everything in balance.

The lessons he taught in combat, sparring sessions, Oliver always saw them more as a dance than as a fight. It was why he sought to counterpoint them with philosophy and politics. That was always done as a lesson, explaining the philosophical while teaching the physical.

Though with Kara, the dance of combat training often turned into the aggression of a fight.

Try as he might, Oliver couldn't stop them from ending up discussing The League. Every discussion of politics, philosophy, anything; they always found themselves back at the same point. It drove them both to anger.

Uncompromising.

It was one of the first things Oliver had noticed about her. Kara wasn't willing to give an inch, and neither was he. When it came to The League, the very thing that her cousin had founded, that had been her pseudo-family her whole time on Earth, taught her everything she knew, Kara was even less relenting than usual. Oliver refused to give any ground either, he had seen first-hand the damage that The League had caused. The problems that they exemplified.

"The Justice League is not a cult!" Kara bit the words out, teeth bared, and steered Oliver's left jab wide.

The topic of cults hadn't been a direct spear thrown at The League. Cult mentality came up more frequently that Oliver had thought possible when he first donned his hood. In the time he had been back in Star City, he had come up against three distinctly identifiable cults, not to mention the times he had gone up against The League of Assassins. The techniques cults used to manipulate people came up even more often. The Triad used similar methods on some of the women and girls they forced into working for them, the point of the lesson was to educate Kara on their enemy. All it took was Oliver making a remark on cults who brought in children for Kara to snap.

"That's not what it looks like to me."

Oliver couldn't stop himself from rising to it. He should have let it slide, concede the point and focus on the lesson. It would have been easier to brush it aside, to tell her that he hadn't been trying to attack The League. There would have been enough truth in for her to believe him, and it wouldn't really need a lie from him. But he couldn't. Every time they disagreed on The League Oliver found himself drawn into the argument, his own fury rising just as Kara's did. They were locked into the routine, orbiting each other in a way neither could pin down.

"They take children. With powers, with gifts, and they train them into soldiers," Oliver continued. "Sounds like a cult to me."

"That isn't true."

Kara launched forward and wove a series of potentially lethal blows at Oliver. In any other sparring session, Oliver would have done little more than deflect them and push Kara back, but he didn't. Kara swung out a right handed strike, Oliver caught it, locked out her arm and snapped a flat-palm into her sternum. She staggered back a dozen paces, Oliver releasing her arm to allow the movement.

"Footwork." Oliver snapped the word out, and they both began to circle. Perfectly synchronised.

"The League protects the kids they take in." Kara's words were more measured that time.

Oliver grinned a little. "Snatching orphans from the streets, stealing children away from their parents. Sounds so magnanimous."

He loathed that they did it. Of all the things The League did, the children was what fuelled his hatred the most. Orphans, alone and lost, sometimes that made sense. Children with powers, aliens, they would have been shunned by most people on Earth. Oliver had no disillusions about the cruelty of mankind. But instead of finding them good homes, places where they would more than likely learn to use their natural abilities for mundane things, they were shipped to The Watchtower and trained up. Then there were the kids like Tim Drake, or Wally West, who had parents waiting at home. Parents either tortured with the knowledge that every time their child left the house they might never come home alive, or blind to the double life that they led. The League raised children into soldiers, manipulated them into risking their lives when it was the last thing they should have been doing.

"The League never takes anyone in against their will." Kara argued, and closed the gap between them by a step.

"And who would dare refuse when Superman turns up at your front door making demands." Before Kara could offer up a counter, Oliver continued. "They take children away to a satellite orbiting the Earth, disconnect them from humanity and turn them into weapons of mass destruction."

"The League trains them to control their powers, to use their powers for good." Kara took another step closer.

Oliver wasn't sure if Kara had done it on purpose, but every time she had referred to The League, she had never included herself. It wasn't 'we', it was 'they'.

"You can't judge them, you've trained soldiers too." Kara berated.

In their time together, Oliver told Kara a little more about his life as The Green Arrow. She had seen the mementos of his students that he kept in The Quiver; photos of him with Dinah and Tommy, the video Mia had left him when she had decided to strike out on her own, the shattered crossbow he took when he had handed Helena to the police, the tattered shreds of Roy Harper's armour. She asked for the stories behind those mementos and Oliver offered her just enough truth to sate her curiosity.

"Never children," Oliver snarled, the casual way she has compared him to The League poured gasoline onto the fire of the anger he had been trying to stop from spiralling. "Never children."

The rest of his thin control fractured. Oliver stepped into Kara's space, slamming a shoulder into her at chest height as he ducked low under punch. She rebounded quicker than Oliver expected and rabbit-punched him in the back before he could straighten up again. The pain of the blow washed out over the anger that had taken control his combat sense, and Oliver wove his counterattack. Kara went for another left-handed jab but Oliver saw the move coming. He batted the attack aside with a wing block and closed what little distance had opened up between them again. Oliver tangled one of his legs in with hers, pressed his weight forward and took Kara off balance. She stumbled, lost her footing, and went down hard onto the mat. The breath soared out of her lungs audibly.

There was a long silence, punctuated only by their heavy breaths. When Oliver turned and bent to help her up, she was already rising toward him. Their hands were on each other before either of them fully realised what was happening.

It was like resolution. The circling hostility between them collapsed inward, the release like a streak of fire through their nerves. They were both trying to kiss each other and laugh at the same time. Kara made excited little panting sounds as Oliver's hands brushed along her abdomen, the heat of her skin burning against his palms even through the material of the training top. Almost unconsciously, Oliver moved them until Kara's back was flush against one of the reinforced concrete pillars that ran along the training space.

Her top came off, jerked insistently free by eager hands desperate to get back to more tactile actions. Oliver shed his own shirt in one, and his hands returned to her skin, palms skidding over coarse nipples and breasts that fitted into his hands as though they had been designed to nestle there. Kara's own hands kept alternating between fisting in his hair to pull him closer into her lips, and raking nails up and down his spine. Both actions drove him on, heat rising in ways he hadn't felt in too long. Kara's hands dropped down to his hips, frantically tugging at the waist of his trousers and sliding one long fingered hand into the gap. Oliver felt the calluses that had begun to form on the base of each finger, rubbing.

Oliver's lips parted in a muted gasp for a moment and Kara's mouth leapt forward to meet his lips again. The kiss was almost feral, all teeth and soundless fury. His hands dropped from her breasts, grabbed the waistband of her skin tight training shorts, and pulled them down to mid-thigh. Kara did the rest, a fractional shake of her hips and legs to drop the material down the rest of the way and the toes of one foot flicking the fabric across the room.

In a different world, one where they had both been normal, Oliver would have dropped to his knees then. Glady spent hours between her legs revelling in all the different noises he could draw out of her with just his tongue and fingers.

It wasn't what either of them wanted. Not what they needed.

Kara hitched Oliver's trousers down enough to free him from the tight fabric, and he lifted her up off the ground. Oliver didn't understand the feeling that flooded through him, put it down to the overdrive of hormones, because he felt like a man coming home. Strong legs wrapped around his waist and Oliver watched himself slide into her up to the hilt, with a gasp because she was burning. She was burning inside, gripping him with the liquid entirety of hot bath water. Kara lifted and wove like a snake, and her hair cascaded down from her bent head in a chaotic elegance. Oliver's lips locked with her own, and he felt more than heard a moan rake through her. One hand was locked under the heated globes of her buttocks, holding her up, the other reached forward to cup her breasts, then the breadth of her ribs, the definition of her shoulders, and all the while she lifted and yawed like the ocean around a ship.

Oliver felt the first climax go through her, but it was the sight of her looking back at him, through the tumbled hair, lips parted, that slipped the final catches on his own control and moulded him against her front, hands gripping her ass until his spasms were all spent inside her. With care belonging to a much less orgasm-weary man, Oliver took them both to the floor until he was lying flat with Kara still astride him. Then, he felt himself slide out of her. He thought she was still coming.

Neither of them said anything for a long time. Both laid flat against the cool vinyl of the training mats, heavy breaths filling the room.

Oliver slid an arm around Kara's flank and tilted her gently to one side, so that they laid together like spoons.

"Where are we going?" She asked gently.

Oliver felt the tendrils of a smile curl on his lips. "That's a little philosophical, like asking me to acknowledge my own existential dread."

Against the odds, it brought a laugh out of her. She turned fully to face Oliver. Kara's hands rose to touch his face softly, as if she thought it might mark easily, or maybe disappear.

"Conscious thought doesn't have much to do with most of this stuff," Oliver offered, as though he could explain away what had just happened between. "Doesn't have much to do with the way most people live their lives full stop. A bit of rationalisation, most of it with hindsight. Put the rest down to hormonal drives."

Her finger followed a line down the side of his face. "I think it's sad that you see the world like that."

"Kara," Oliver took hold of her finger and squeezed gently. "You are a real fucking Luddite, aren't you?"

She shrugged. "Krypton wasn't like here. Sex for pleasure…well it wasn't something to be discussed. And kids, we had the birthing matrix for that. It's liberating, being able to choose."

It wasn't often Kara offered up information about Krypton. Everything Oliver knew about the planet came from Lois Lane's published interviews with Superman (something Oliver thought was hilarious coming from a reporter who loved to bawl people out for lacking integrity, all of her best stories involved her husband), or archives from STAR Labs that Overwatch had hacked into for him. Hearing about a whole different civilisation first hand was endlessly fascinating to him.

Oliver reached across the plain of her abdomen, and slid his hand along the length of thigh to her knee, levering her gently over and bringing his mouth to kiss gently at the shaved bar of hair where it descended into cleft. Kara resisted fractionally at first, maybe thinking on their animosity, or maybe just their mingled juices trickling from her body. Then she relented and spread herself under him. Oliver shifted her other thigh up over his shoulder and lowered his face onto her.

The second time she came, it was with escalating cries that she locked in her throat each time with powerful flexing of the muscles at the base of her stomach. Her whole body writhed back and forth across the bed and her hips bucked upward, grinding into the soft flesh of his mouth. At some point, she lapsed into uttered Kryptonese, whose tones stoked Oliver's own arousal. When she finally flopped into stillness, Oliver was able to slide up into her directly, gathering her under his the arms and sinking his tongue into her mouth in the first kiss they had shared since hitting the mat.

They moved slowly, trying for languid relaxation and the laughter of their first embrace. It seemed to last a long time, time for talking, up the scale from languid murmurs to excited gabbling, for shifts in posture and soft biting, the clasping of hands, and all the time a feeling of brimming to overflow that hurt Oliver's eyes. It was from that last, unbearable pressure as much as any that Oliver finally let go and came into her, feeling her chase the last of his fading hardness with her own shaking finish.

As they separated for the second time, the weight of everything they had done came down over them both like a heavy blanket and consciousness slipped gradually away from them in the increasing warmth. Oliver's last clear impression was of the body beside him rearranging itself with breasts pressed into his back, an arm draped over him, and a peculiarly comfortable clasping of feet, his in hers, like hands.

Oliver felt his thought processes slowing down.