Chapter 4

The shift between them had gone unspoken. Even the agreement to do so had been nonverbal. Kara had woken the morning after the first time to find Oliver gone. Not knowing what exactly to do, she had gone about her day as usual until returning to The Quiver that afternoon for her training session. Oliver had, as always, been there before her and things had continued as normal.

Until they didn't.

The collapse into the same mutual gravity that they had felt when they had locked lips for the first time had returned with a vengeance in every moment they spent together. Both of them had known it was there. Both of them had tried to deny it. From the moment they had given in to it the first time, the moment they had crossed into something that wasn't just mentor and student, there had been no going back. Call it fate, karma, the hand of God. Both of them knew that the change showed more. Meant more. Was more. Than either of them wanted to acknowledge.

In the moment, that first time, it had been about need.

Kara was powerless for the first meaningful time in her adult life, she could let go and be with someone without having to concentrate on all the nuances of her body to stop herself from accidentally crushing her lover. She had never seen the chance before, certainly not with a man who knew all of her. And Oliver did. There wasn't a part of her that was hidden from him, and it had been too easy for her to give in.

Oliver had been alone for far too long. He had trained Roy, then Mia, Helena, and Dinah. After Helena's dive from sanity and Dinah joining The League, Oliver had resigned himself to isolation. As Oliver Queen, he had slept with a number of women after that, but it had never been more than surface level. Then Kara had been there, a woman who knew the truth of who had was, or at least as much as he was willing to give, and it had been too easy for him to give in.

That first moment had been easy to write off. They had been angry. At each other, at the world, at everything that had destroyed their lives over and over and lead them both to that moment. Sweaty from the fight, exhausted from the philosophy, ready and eager for something as simple as sex. So they had given in. Abandoned all the things that told them it was a terrible idea to sleep together and surrendered to pleasure and want.

Then they had sunk down to the training mat. Instead of moving on there and then, like both of them knew they should have done, they stayed. Oliver had held her close and Kara had spoken of her home. When talking had seemed too much, Oliver had buried his lips between her legs and eked out pleasures that Kara hadn't known herself capable of feeling. They had both fucked into a state of pure euphoria, and fallen asleep cuddled together. In the moment, it had felt right, like themselves against the whole of reality.

The next morning Oliver had run.

All the denial he had tried to talk himself into was futile. Helena had taught him that getting involved with a student would only lead to more harm than good, and so he had committed to stay detached. There was a difference, Oliver knew, between sex and emotion. They were two different processes and he could keep them separate. So, in his mind, he resigned what had happened between himself and Kara into the realm of the physical, never to touch the emotional. He could lock down the attraction between them before it had the opportunity to spiral into anything deeper. Anything that could compromise the mission or Kara's training.

His resolve had held for all of a week.

That was all it took before he found himself and Kara entangled in a mess of limbs on the training room floor. It hadn't been intentional, just another argument that had spiralled until he had Kara pinned against the mat, biting out a spiteful comment aimed at The League. Then Kara had jumped upward and kissed him.

Quite how it happened, neither of them were entirely certain, but it became a habit. They would train as usual, Oliver's brutal regime of combat skills and philosophy taught as one, and towards the end of nearly every session they would fall into each other's arms. After a week it became almost reflex and they stopped trying to fight it. They both decided to let it happen. It was easy, in far too many ways. The anger, the tension, the release, it all felt good. An invisible gravity drawing them together time and again beyond either of their abilities to comprehend.

They both marked it down as physical. It remained unspoken between them, no matter how many times it happened. Kara hadn't been running away from her life to find an easy fuck, and Oliver hadn't invited her to train under him as a guise to get her into his bed. They both marked the sex down as convenience, a way to vent all the stress of their lives, guilt free with someone who understood. It didn't mean anything more to either of them, it couldn't mean anything more to either of them. But that didn't change the fact that they both felt that the gravity between them was more than just skin deep.

Their conscious minds refused to accept it, but in many ways both of them could sense the deeper pull that ran between them. In the moments of the afterglow, when they held each other a little bit too close for their insistence there was nothing deeper between them, they felt it. The fizzling static of potential. Whining like energy through high voltage cables and begging to be let loose. They both buried it deep. Neither wanted it. Neither wanted to admit that there could be anything more.

Oliver was locked into the mission. He was a man who had long ago accepted that he was destined to die alone. More than likely at the hands of a criminal he would be trying to stop. Even with all of his efforts as Oliver Queen to improve Star City to a point where it would no longer need The Green Arrow, he had known since the moment he had arrived on Lian Yu that he would never live to see old age. He had come to terms with it. Dying alone, dying for the mission, it made sense. His city needed him, and he would give himself to it until he had nothing left to give. There was no room for him to feel another commitment, one that might mean more than the mission.

Kara was a woman lost. Supergirl or not, able to fight the criminal and corrupt or not, she had lost her whole world. There was no coming back from that. She was the last true survivor of Krypton. Yes, Kal-El had made it to Earth. Yes, he had tried to carry on Krypton's legacy through what he had learnt through Jor-El's data crystals. No, he wasn't a true Kryptonian. Kara was the last of her line. The last daughter of The House of El, the last person who remembered that doomed planet which had orbited a dying red star. Giving herself to a human, emotionally, and to the point where she could consider a life was a fallacy. She could never become anything more than she was; a living codex of Kryptonian history.

So, they both buried what emotional substance there was between them. Though it changed nothing. All the compartmentalisation, all the wilful ignorance. It did nothing to stop them from finding themselves collapsing into each other at frequencies that alarmed them both. Against their wills it had become common. Become habit. Become comfortable. What had started as a one off outlet to vent their tensions, as simple and easy sexual release had become something else. The moment it had happened for a second time they had both known, and consciously suppressed, that knowledge.

Instead they had trained. The first lessons that Oliver taught, Kara had exceeded at. Handling a bow, basic combat, investigative work, Kara had absorbed it all with ease. Oliver had been impressed, more so than he had been with any other student. Even Roy, his first pupil, his surrogate son, and the man who had understood the mission perhaps better than any other had taken months to learn what Kara had in weeks.

Which let Oliver turn to the more important lessons. Kara could draw a bow, fight with elegance, and pick apart a crime scene like a detective, but none of that came close to the standard Oliver held himself to. Everything that he had taught her up until the point they had started to sleep together had been the surface. Maybe he had chosen to accelerate her training beyond his usual regime because of that, to give them both something else to focus on, but it had made little difference. Kara's indomitable determination had seen to it.

Oliver had walked her through the speciality arrows that he used, each with a specific purpose. Stunner arrows, to divert and disable. Acidic, to weaken structures and breach covertly. Bola, to secure and subdue. And every other tool in his arsenal. Kara had diligently studied the use of all of them, asked focused questions about their deployment – how to know what arrows to pack for any given scenario. Every situation Oliver had thrown at her after that explanation, Kara had been meticulous in her response, in the arrows and weapons she suggested.

Then, he had given her the philosophy that had kept him alive. That had kept him grounded:

"These are just tools. Rely on them too much and they become a crutch."

For a time, Oliver had abandoned all of his trick arrows. Instead, all he had used had been the traditional broadhead. After Mia had struck out on her own, Dinah had joined The League, Helena had been arrested, and Roy had died, Oliver had needed to go back to his roots. For almost a year he had used nothing but broadhead arrows. He had needed to prove to himself that it was him not his tools that got the mission done. That had been when he developed his philosophy towards speciality arrows. They were part of his arsenal, but not a part of him. He could do the job with or without them. On any given night, he could go out into the field and serve the mission with a quiver full of broadhead arrows as well as he could with a quiver packed with speciality arrows. The tricks arrows were there to help him, not to control him. They were tools to help him get out of a fight, or to end one quickly. Not an alternative to getting into the mud and the blood. Of all things, Oliver refused to let himself get distanced from the fight. That had been The Justice League's mortal sin. They had allowed themselves to become detached from the very base of human degradation, the very thing that created the injustice they had sworn to fight. Keeping everything he did tangible was as central to the mission as anything else.

It had taken a little time to get that across to Kara. To her, with her training, it made sense to rely on tools as she once had done with her powers. Oliver hadn't taught her the lesson himself, not directly. Instead he had given her homework. Earth Abides. He had been forced to dig the novel out from under a pile of other, dusty tomes. He hadn't read it in years, but the words danced around in his mind as he had searched for it as thought he had only read it the day before. Kara had finished the whole book in little over an afternoon. The training session that evening, they had discussed the ideas as they had sparred, and for once they didn't descend into fighting over The League. They had talked of the philosophy of reducing human society to the fundamentals, about the tangible connection to nature and simplicity that came when one stripped away the claustrophobic tentacles of modernity.

And like that, Kara had understood it, in a way that none of his students before her ever could have done. More than anyone else, Kara had known what it felt like to be above that visceral sense of the mission. As Supergirl, a member of The Justice League, she had stayed totally disconnected from the human race. Her only meaningful human attachments were Martha and Jonathan Kent, the people who had raised Superman. The "friends" she had made following her cousin into journalism hardly counted for anything. Clark had allowed her only enough time around humanity for her to be confused by their contradictions and nuances. Oliver's first instinct had been to think Clark had done it on purpose, had left Kara slightly out of touch with humanity in order to make her a better soldier for The League. Then, as Kara had begun to tell him about her history one day, he had realised that Clark was just oblivious. To Oliver, it was clear that Clark had thought he was helping his cousin out by giving her time amongst humanity, but in the end it had done more harm than good. Clark's paranoia that Kara would be found out had resulted in her not spending any meaningful time in the company of humans. So, not only had Kara not been given time to integrate properly with them, she had been left with more questions than answers about humanity. Those questions that she had been left with had been answered by the members of the Justice League. People who lived aboard The Watchtower, ever distant, and looking down on humanity through windows into hard space. That kind of distance was something Oliver hoped he would never be able to contextualise.

On occasion, Oliver's mind would wander back to that first time with Kara. Before they had collapsed into the training mat, before his anger had truly flared, Kara had compared him to The League. In the moment, he had been driven to such anger by the comment that he hadn't really considered it. All he had thought about was how much he loathed the heroes the lived aboard The Watchtower and the corrupt, self-serving ideology they represented. The children. The thought of it drove a sickening numbness through him every time.

Mia was the closest he'd ever come to training a child, and even then it wasn't the same. He had taken the lost teenager under his wing when she had been just sixteen, he hadn't even met Roy then, only a year back from The Island. But Oliver Queen had been the one to take in Mia. He got her papers to become an emancipated minor, she got into school, she worked at Queen Industries, Oliver just gave her the tools to help herself. It didn't take her long to figure out Oliver was The Green Arrow. He had been in the middle of training Roy when she told him she knew the truth, demanding that he train her as well. He had kept her at arm's length, already cautious about training Roy and with no desire to drag a minor into the war. It was two years later, on the coattails of her HIV diagnosis at age nineteen that he finally agreed to give her his world.

He trained soldiers, that much was true. He didn't train them for an army. With The League, it was about adding number after number to their ranks, to shore up what little power and autonomy they still held onto. To Oliver, he trained his students into soldiers because it was what they had needed. They needed to be hardened to the world, to view it through the haze of scepticism and shades of grey that Oliver had learnt to. He made them more than they were, into warriors that could protect those who needed protecting. Not every trait he instilled in his students was inherently good, he knew that. Not for a moment did Oliver feign to be above the knowledge the ultimately his soul was as dark as the people he fought. It came down to math. Oliver might have traded away his soul, the parts of him that were good, but he had done it to save lives. On the whole, he was a force for good, even if he himself was anything but good.

"He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster, when you gaze long into the abyss the abyss also gazes into you."

Nietzsche.

It had been Anatoly, of all people, who had taught that sentiment to Oliver, even if he hadn't quoted it directly. His brother-in-arms approach to The Bratva had been to use a criminal and immoral force to fight against the corruption of his country's government and protect the people who no one else would. At the same time, Anatoly had known the risk, that it would be far too easy to lose himself into the darker, base, parts of his humanity. He had warned Oliver as much the first time he had seen the monster. Then, in Russia, at the beginning of The Green Arrow, before the monster truly had a hold on him, Anatoly had warned of the risk. He had known, even then, what Oliver had not. That giving the monster a persona didn't keep it further away, it brought it closer. By the time Oliver had realised that, he had been staring into the abyss for far too long, and he had blinked. The monster didn't control him, Oliver was aware of it enough to not fall completely into its deceptive embrace. It had hold on him enough though. Oliver had made too many trades, too many gashes in his soul to ever return to the man he had been.

But it didn't matter to him. If protecting the innocent meant becoming a monster to take on worse monsters, it was a trade Oliver was willing to make. One he had made time and again. Not only had he repeatedly made the trade, he had never once questioned making it. In his very core he had known that it had been the right thing to do. Part of him loathed how easy it had been every single time, simply knowing how willing he had been to trade his soul away drove another dagger through what remained of it. "For in much wisdom, there is much grief", Ecclesiastes 1:18. It had been one of the things that Master Jansen had taught Oliver during his time at the Ashram in California. With knowledge, came understanding. But with that understanding, awareness of the true nature of reality, of humanity. Human nature, the real truth of it, that was what justified the things Oliver did.

Kara had begun to understand it more and more.

Over a month into her training, into them both intently studying The Triad, and Kara had begun to see things like him. On her insistence, Oliver had taken her out into the field, never to engage in active combat, but to study crime scenes before the police arrived. Each time had been a lesson in two parts. For one, all the theory in the world did nothing to prove Kara could pick apart a crime scene in person. Her grasp on the skillset Oliver taught her had been solid when they were in The Quiver, but it was different in the field. He shouldn't have been surprised when Kara's theoretical understanding translated almost perfectly to the real world.

The second reason called out to the darkness inside him. With a twisted glee Oliver had shown Kara crime scene photos from various Triad cases, and that had let her see the reality of humanity. Putting that same image in front of her, without the safety net of looking at it through a computer screen had hammered it home to her. When Oliver had first shown Kara crime scene reports in The Quiver, he had seen the crushing hopelessness in her eyes and felt part of himself thrill at it. The first scene she saw with her own eyes did more than just pull out a sense of hopelessness, Oliver watched her resign herself to it. In that very moment, he knew that Kara had embraced it. Just like he had done, Kara found herself looking into the abyss for the second time in her life. And it had looked back at her.

They had been tightly on The Triad, and inched ever closer to finding an in. Oliver knew he could have moved on them before, but it would have been blunt force, picking a target and storming it with full lethality. He needed to be more careful than that. With the ever present force of the American government haunting his every step, Oliver had to stay ahead. Barrelling into a fight without properly picking his targets was a sure fire way to get dead. With Kara too, he knew the extra risk. She was still raw, unfocused. Dropped into an all-out firefight she would make too much noise, it would bring too much heat down on them, or worse she'd make a mistake that would get them killed.

So, they played the slow game. They worked all the angles, and studied all the intel that Oliver's various connections brought to them. While they did, while they were forced to wait, and watch, and plan, things between them had more time to spiral. The longer they took to find a strong point to take on The Triad with, the longer The Triad had to drop bodies.

A girl, barely eighteen, had been the final nail in the coffin for what remained of Kara's youthful hope.

It had been violence on a scale Kara had never borne witness to before. From what they had been able to tell at the scene, in the limited time before the SCPD made a mess of the evidence, the girl had been tortured before a single clean cut had ripped her jugular open. Slits had been cut in the skin of her thighs and then her killer had forced the wounds apart until they tore. Oliver had seen it before. Simple, crude, and very effective. Telling Kara as much had been a gut-swooping experience. She hadn't been able to see it at first, her mind couldn't quite comprehend the level of sadism that was needed to willingly inflict that level of suffering on another human. Oliver had known it, because he had lived it.

In Hong Kong, in Russia, and even on the streets of Star City, Oliver had used that exact same torture, or methods like it to get what he needed. Torture, it was a doubled edged sword. On levels beyond conscious thought, Oliver knew that he wouldn't have been able to save the lives that he had, done the things that he had, without resorting to torture when he needed to. But even so, a part of him knew that that he could have done as much good without resorting to the levels that he so often did. Never once had he needed to do so much harm to a person that they would never walk again. Never had he needed to cause so much pain to a person that it would be felt as long as they lived. Never had he needed to torture a person to death to extract information. But, part of him had wanted to do those things.

Before he had ever used his skills to inflict torture on someone, Amada Waller had told him that he had an aptitude for it. Like Anatoly, she had seen something in him that he wouldn't acknowledge until years later. There was a part of Oliver far larger than he was capable of admitting that enjoyed what he did, and that part of him couldn't help but to admire the skill in what had been done to that poor girl.

He told Kara that they would have kept the girl alive while they did it, would have made her watch, compounding the pain she must have felt with terror. When Kara had looked to him to tell her why anyone would have chosen to torture a girl like that before killing her, Oliver had no reasons to give.

After that Kara's rage, her unbridled fury at the world, her regret, her hatred at the institutions of The Justice League that stopped them from interfering, it all flared up in orders of magnitude more than Oliver had ever hoped for. Kara had become more determined in ways he hadn't seen in any of his students. Her fighting style became more aggressive as she started to emulate Oliver's own, not just using the moves he directly taught her. She began insisting on a shift in the philosophy he taught her, wanting to know better the sickness that infected humanity. Beyond all conscious thought, beyond all the barriers Oliver tired to put between himself and the darkness that infected him, he felt himself twist with a blood-soaked glee as it happened. As much as he had tried to supress the knowledge when he had made the offer, when he had started training her, Oliver had felt more than known the calculations that had occurred in the dark recess of his mind. For all his time crushing down that voice in his mind, Oliver could do nothing in those moments as it climbed to the top, as it cried out in sick pleasure at watching Supergirl sink to his level.

Even with that realisation, Oliver still changed his training regimen. At the start he had taught her Freud and Plato, how to disarm and disable an opponent, where to aim an arrow to deliver a knockout. As the weeks turned to months Oliver lectures were on Sun Tzu and military strategy, on Vlad Țepeș and torture, how to deliver lethal blows unarmed, and the precise points on the body to hit with an arrow to kill cleanly.

There were fleeting moments then, when Oliver questioned himself. He never hesitated in teaching those lessons to his other students. To him, it was all necessary, all invaluable in the name of context even if they would never apply it in the field. Roy and Helena had learnt the extremes because they wanted to use them, because they had needed to take control back from the world that had robbed them of it in the first place. Mia and Dinah had never gone that far. Both of them wanted to learn to understand the enemy, to know the minds of the people they wanted to fight, never to go to extremes themselves. Unlike the others, Kara had asked to be taught those lessons. For a while, Oliver found himself questioning not only her motives, but his own. There were times as he watched her weaving killing patterns into the air with her hands, or pacing the training room floor with a copy of The Art of War held between her hands, that he wondered if he had made the right decision.

The part of his mind that he had always supressed, the part that writhed and thrilled in violence and blood, rose up at those thoughts and crushed them. He didn't have time to be empathetic, to worry about Kara's motives.

"Reasons do not make you right, Mr Queen," The voice of Talia al Ghul crept in again, the same voice that had saved his life on a hundred different occasions. "Every pimp from here to Metropolis has a reason for every whore's face they carve up, but that doesn't make it right."

He offered to train Kara, and that was what he was going to do. Motives didn't matter, reasons didn't matter, actions mattered. Training Kara, giving her a new identity, and giving the world a member of The Justice League who truly knew the nature of humanity, that was his only goal. The voice laughed in the back of his mind, the voice that knew he had other goals, other reasons. For all Oliver's noble intentions, the part of him that he had tired to keep supress gained only another foothold in his mind as Kara became more and more like him. To make Kara like him as a vigilante, Oliver had to make her like him as a person, and that both terrified and excited different parts of him.

With the change in training, and Kara's change in outlook, things between them had changed too.

Even with, or maybe because of, their wilful ignorance at the deeper connection between them, the sex had never been much more than that. They would train, anger, and Oliver would pin Kara to the wall or floor and drive himself into her until they both collapsed in a trembling tangle of limbs. As Kara threw off what ties she had to her "humanity" things became more intense. She had started to initiate things between them; would bite and suck hungrily at his neck when she fought well enough to pin him, would intentionally brush against him during combat in ways she knew would arouse him, would trap him when he was sat reading and sink to her knees. The intensity of it became more than the fierce denial of emotional attraction that it had been at the beginning. And yet, somehow less. By some unspoken agreement, they had become more distant. Where at first they had kissed, languid and excitable, they fought for dominance with one another in a fury of teeth and tongues. Where they had first held each other in the afterglow, it had become almost a game of chicken to see who would move away first.

In their sightless fury at the world, in their own self-loathing and reluctance, Oliver and Kara had locked themselves into an orbital pattern. They had become a cometary, like planetary masses in deep space. They drifted close, collided together, and retreated into infinite darkness of their selves. Over and over again.

By the time either of them noticed it happening, the mission had become more important. Kara had been the one to close down any chance of them talking, as she marched into the training space one afternoon with the words:

"I've found our way in."