the void

[bossymarmalade]

Kate has gotten into the hard cider and is writing a rant about Guy Fieri on her tablet that she is going to post to her anonymous Tumblr. She is occasionally saying it out loud as she writes, like she’s a kid.

Bruce ducks his head, behind Kate, and kisses along the nape of her neck.

Ollie looks over from the straight-backed chair he’s sitting in with his arms lashed behind it. He’s working away busily at a thick set of wrist restraints, keeping up the escape skills, but Kate’s little explosions of annoyance distract him.

"You okay there, babe?" Ollie asks. "Are we gonna get sued by Tex fuckin’ Wasabi?" He grins when Bruce kisses the back of her neck. "No chance soothing her when she’s hating on Guy Fieri, B," he says. "That’s a long-standing hatred.”

“Food Network must be contractually obliged to play shittons of reruns of this crap, but all it succeeds in doing is enabling us to stare into the void." Kate is trying to type more loudly on her tablet than is actually physically possible. She startles at Bruce’s kiss.

Ollie laughs, but then swears when he drops his lockpicking tool.

“The void stares back. It says ‘this is going all the way down to Flavortown.’ We scream but there is no mercy." Kate looks up at the curse, glances at Ollie, then smirks at Bruce. "Your work, I’m guessing?”

Bruce walks over to Ollie and kicks the tool away, before moving to the side table, for a blindfold. He glances back at Kate, making a low, harrumphing noise, and then bring the black material up to bind it around the archer’s eyes.

Ollie is still snortlaughing about “Flavourtown” but breaks off to complain when Bruce blindfolds him. “Aw, come /on/! I already lost the damn tool! What chance do I have blindfolded??”

Kate says, “They can’t sue me if I post it anonymously via a proxy. One of Bruce’s proxies. You look really hot like that, Ollie.”

Bruce is silent, and continues to knot the tie at the back of the man’s skull, before moving back over to Kate. Both of his hands—one is bandaged at the top of his palm, a deep laceration that had almost taken his pinky—move up to the mass of her hair, lifting it up as he kisses along the back of her hairline, around her ears.



Ollie is quiet for a while (because he liked that Kate called him hot) but then he starts to squirm, twisting his hands in the cuffs, scraping at them with his fingertips. “Kate?” he calls, louder than he needs to. “Bruce? What’re you two doing over there? It better not be anything sexy. Oh jesus it better not be.”

Kate makes a soft little noise as Bruce’s lips brush some sensitive nerves right behind her ear.

Bruce whispers, softly into the shell of her ear. “..that’s a good girl.” He continues to kiss, down over the bumps of her vertebrae, down to the base of her neck.

Ollie goes still as pondwater when he hears Kate make that little noise and Bruce murmur to her. “You assholes,” he says, in a strangled voice.

Kate hums a brief soft sound of pleasure, doing it partially to be an ass. “Call it incentive, cielo,” she says, amusement clear in her tone.

Kate stretches a little, giving Bruce more room. Reaching up, she catches his bandaged hand gently in hers, strokes her thumb down his wrist.

Bruce exhales and follows the sight of her hand moving up his arm and murmurs to Kate, the corners of his mouth curling up as he remembers, comments to her: “I’ve been carrying around a growing fondness for the stars and stripes.” It’s a hint, if there ever was one.

"I’m an all American kinda girl myself," Kate replies, voice low, and shifts a little on the sofa, in memory. "I could help you out with that fondness, if you find yourself looking for…assistance.”

Ollie mutters to himself as he pats the back of the chair with his fingertips. “Making out over there while I have to listen to the whole thing like a chump.”

There’s not much purchase to be had on the chair, no loose screws or staples — which stands to reason, they’re in Wayne frickin’ Manor, it’s all primo-quality sticks — so he gives up on that and concentrates on remembering something else. The sound the pick had made when Bruce kicked it away, the direction the tiny tinny clink had gone in.

Bruce makes sure his voice carries, just a touch, for Ollie to hear him.

"That might be best, Captain." Bruce moves both his hands to the woman’s hair, easing his fingers up and against her scalp, rubbing them in as he continues to drag his mouth against her skin, nipping now as he bends at the waist. One of his hands drops, to wind against the flatness of her sternum, down to her belly, avoiding her breasts.

”We’re not making out,” Kate notes, stretches a little into Bruce’s hands, and closes her eyes, her hand now firm against his arm, not letting go. “Promise we’re not. As for you, Mr. Wayne, I’m happy to assist you.”

“Bull fuckin’ shit,” Ollie barks. “You’re doing that Captain America voice! Bruce is a total slut for that damn Captain America voice and we all know it!” Ollie thumps his chair against the floor in frustration, then starts scooting it in the direction where the picks might be. If he’s wrong, well — from the squeal and skreee the chair is making as it moves, at least he’s putting a good dent in the hardwood to vent his feelings.

Kate’s definition of making out may vary from other people’s. Such as Ollie’s. Making out, to her, still implies sprawling in each other’s laps, hands everywhere, sucking face. And that is definitely not what is going on with her and Bruce.

"And you’re totally not a slut for it at all, Green Arrow," she rumbles, low and masculine, just to make her point.

Bruce growls low at Ollie. “Alfred won’t be happy with you.” He doesn’t move from where he is, behind Kate, moving his hand down her belly, bending at the waist so he can work his fingers against.. his crotch. Curious. Inspecting.

Ollie scowls, rocking back in the chair. “Alfred can—” he starts, but then lets that comment drop off. It would seem too blasphemous. Instead he swirls his bare feet around on the floor, feeling out a corner of a runner rug, the leg of a side table, and — ah, there we go, something small and thin and metal. Ollie crows to himself and starts turning the chair around, back towards the lockpick.

Bruce looks up when Ollie begins that comment, his eyes narrowing, but relaxes when the rest of it never comes. He turns his attention back to Kate.

Kate shifts a little—while she’s not packing heat (didn’t have time to plan it), she’s sitting as such so that her sex isn’t distinguishable through her jeans, and pushes her hips up a little into Bruce’s hand. A promise and a tease—she’ll do it, if he asks.

Bruce exhales, and moves his hand over the space between Kate’s thighs, no disappointment sifting through as he drags his hand over his thighs. His thumb presses into the musculature there, down to his ass, back up to his hips and he nods. Mouth suddenly dry, Bruce licks his lips slowly, his jaw feeling frozen as he utters, low: “..Captain.”

Ollie pauses in moving and frowns. “Talk louder,” he demands. “I can’t hear what you two are talking about. Be louder.”

"You have one job, Oliver, and that’s getting out of that," says Kate. "Not making demands." She turns back to Bruce, shifts and looks at him with dark dark eyes, making sure it’s the request she’s looking for.

Bruce meets the shadow and depth of Kate’s gaze, his brown eyes plaintive for a moment in need of clarification and Bruce bends at the waist, kissing his mouth, before he nods. Yes.

Kate nods, kisses Bruce briefly before letting go and standing up. She heads into the other room for a moment or two, loud enough in doing so that Ollie could likely hear her go, and returns, wearing a leather jacket and khakis, a minute or two later.

Ollie stops moving and sits where he is a stubborn set to his jaw. “Fine,” he says mulishly. “If I can’t hear interesting noises, I’m just gonna assume there ain’t nothing’ goin’ on but the rent, and this little archer’s just gonna sit his ass right here and not do a thing.”

Bruce feels his hunger deepen when he sees Kate reappear, in the jacket—his, one of the slimmer fitting Armani ones—and it sets his nerves on fire. He hears Ollie, almost answers him, but it comes out a low fervent and appreciative noise as he moves towards the chair kate had been in. He turns it around and takes a seat, watching Kate, how his body posture has changed.

Captain Kate Rogers lifts an ‘are you going to rise to his bait or should I?’ eyebrow at Bruce.

Kate shoves his hands in the pockets of his jacket, lightly, and strides over to Bruce—not overconfident, but not cautious, a man among friends. “You can do what you want,” he says, looking over his shoulder at Ollie. “But you get that problem of yours figured out and there might be room for you over here.”

Ollie calls out cheerfully. “Y’know what, Cap? I’ve always had a pretty fertile imagination. So I think instead of putting on a little one-dog one-pony show over here, I think I’ll just groove on the ambient sounds and what my own deviant perverse desires can come up with.” He juts his beard out, blowing upwards so the air ruffles his blindfold.

Bruce ignores Oliver for the most part, watching Kate as he walks over to him, the darkness in his gaze ravenous. It isn’t more or less, there is no preference for him: but this little game is new, hours old, and it is a sign, evenmoreso than the fact that Bruce is playing along, that he isn’t denying himself this, of how much he is opening up to them. To the idea of them. He reaches out when Kate is within reach, and pulls him close, palms bracketing the narrowness of his waist. Bruce’s voice finally quakes from behind his teeth, hard and aroused: “..your loss.”

Bruce tilts his head and bites at the edge of Kate’s hip, teeth crushing against leather.

Kate says, “You sure it’s not just sour grapes, GA?” in an amused, Brooklyn boy voice, but it’s cut short by a low moan in the back of his throat at the pressure of Bruce’s teeth, the hidden and tamed force of his jaw.

"No." Ollie’s grin turns a little feral as he leans his head back, listening to the sounds available to him. "Bruce is holding you. He’s got his teeth in you, that’s the sound the leather’s making. His fingers probably digging into your ass, or your hips, and you’re both getting hard. He wants to suck your cock, /Cap/." Ollie says the last word not with mockery, but with a joyous kind of audacity.

Bruce states, hard and cruel, as he brings his hands up to Kate’s jacket, unzipping it so he can get to the waistline of his khakis.

"Ignore him." He continues to bite, hard, demanding flinches of his teeth and jaw against cloth-covered flesh and bone, littering the other man’s abdomen with bitemarks. "He’s got his way out, if he doesn’t want it, let him sit."

In one, deft motion, Bruce rises and pushes the jacket off broader shoulders, the set of Kate’s hips and spine slightly different in the clothing, bolsterered—and Bruce thinks this with a purple-violet thrill of violencelacing up his arteries—by what he’s carrying between his legs.

"I’m not wrong, though." Ollie’s good at sounding like an arrogant motherfucker when he wants to, and right now he’s letting it roll off his tongue like wasted champagne. "Bruce wants to eat you /up/, Kate, wants to rough you up, ‘cause you — you’re a goddamn super soldier, healing factor and everything, and you can take it." He tilts his head till his neck cracks. "You can give it, too. I’d sure like to hear that in my little darkroom world.”

Kate gasps with each bite, some sharp enough even through the leather and fabric to leave bruises, and he grits his teeth, mutes a growl like the good soldier Ollie’s said he is, but the sound still comes through. “No, he’s right. You’re going to take it like a man,” he says, settling a determined look at Bruce, winding a hand into his hair and jerking his head back a little. “You don’t get to always call the shots.”

Bruce allows his head to jerk back, but he bares his teeth, growling at Kate.

Kate looks back at him, all stubborn and stern and it’s really as much Kate as it is the somewhat righteous and noble expression of the Captain. “If you don’t like the idea,” he points out, utterly reasonable even as his hips linger just shy of Bruce’s mouth, “I can go elsewhere.”

Ollie laughs, low and gasping. “Man, if I left it up to you two without some helpful exposition to move this show along, you’d /never/ get anywhere.” He’s goading them, but he’s also backed up closer to the end table and if he strains up enough, Ollie can move his fingers along the top of it. Smooth and dust-free and with a letter-tray on it, complete with long, thin, flexible letter opener. He grins to himself, in the dark.

Bruce growls again, lower, but relents to the hold of his hand on Kate’s body and moves his head, ducking it below the other man’s navel, to mouth at the front of his khakis. His tongue darts out to rub itself dry on the fly of the pants, even as he brings his finger tips to jerk open the button, lower the fly.

The jacket carries the scent of cologne, old and worn deep into the material, and naturally, it is his, Bruce’s. But, it mingles, with the cloying scent of Kate’s arousal—Bruce is close enough to smell it now, let it marinade in his senses— rendering the scent of it, suddenly his, the Captain’s own, masculine musk. Bruce’s shoulders tense and a genuine, shuddered noise of arousal seeps from the corners of his mouth, tongue no longer dry. He reaches inside for him, pulling the thick coil of his sex out and into the air, where Bruce promptly—and very nearly primly—sucks it down into his throat.

Kate groans, deep and low in the base of his throat, and can feel his cock throb in response, can feel himself throb inside in tandem. Much of it is Bruce, there, taking his cock out and taking him deep into his mouth and further (and somehow she’s convinced she can feel it), but part of it is the grin on Ollie’s face. Kate resolves to wipe it off him. Eventually. They have plenty of time.

—-

Bruce wakes from where he is, tangled in Ollie’s legs, Kate’s arm slung over his waist, on the rug in front of the fire, to the sound of soft beeping. His eyes snap open, and he disentangles himself from them both as gently as he can, covering them with the comforter that had somehow made its way out to them.

Utterly nude, he moves over to the panel, hidden in the wooden wall adjacent to the hearth, pressing the lower half of it so the square of wood slides out of place to reveal a screen.

Ollie wakes up when Bruce moves, but he for once stays quiet and observes, without saying anything or getting up right away. He’s deliciously worn out, muscles lax and loose, but their kind of people can get the adrenalin going like Pavlov’s dogs, tuned to a comm beep and a report screen. Ollie watches Bruce move to the wall, admiring the movements of his enormous frame, so quiet, padding like a panther.

Bruce exhales, and walks over to his slacks, shaking them out where they’d been strewn before stepping in, zipping up, buttoning. He moves to put another log in the low fire, before moving to the bed Ollie and Kate had been sleeping in, pulling another blanket from there.

He covers them with it, worried about the chill on the floor, and gently tucks one of the blankets around Kate’s exposed toes. Bruce stands again, and pulls his shirt over his shoulders, buttoning as he moves to the door. He pauses, and speaks over his shoulder, softly. “..Security breach at Arkham.”

Ollie pushes up onto his elbows. “Lemme grab my bow, I’ll come give you a hand—” he starts, but Bruce is looking at him and his blue eyes are starting to go narrow, mouth getting tight at the edges. Ollie snorts and throws the blanket off himself, getting to his feet and looking around for his own jeans. “Or hey, I could stay here and check on Talia.” He almost keeps the annoyance from his voice.

Bruce huffs a rough noise. “Idiot.” But he leaves the door open as he slides from the room and into the hallway, his steps silent but picking up in pace as he makes his way to the kitchen. He steps into the pantry, removing a bag of flour, a tin of raisins, and a can of chestnuts, before the wall in the back slides loose and out of the way. He pushes it open, and descends down into the Cave.

Ollie has been studying the Silent Communication Patterns of the Urban Bat at Rest for a while now, so he can tell that Bruce leaving a door open is as good as an embossed invitation. Dressed in just his jeans, he follows Bruce curiously, taking note of the items he moves in the pantry to open the door down to the Cave.

"Seriously, though," Ollie says as he takes the steps down in a loping, lub-dub gallop, "anything I can help with? The Arkham sitch. Even if it’s just manning the—" he looks at the enormous screens looming above, which somehow seem more daunting than the ones on either tower, "—uh, manning Skynet while you’re infiltrating the looney bin?”

Bruce is somehow out of the slacks and shirt, into the tight compression wear by the time he reaches the Cave—receptacles on the way down, perhaps, inlaid into the wall—and sliding into the rest of his gear as he steps in front of the Computer. A thin sliver of blue light zips over his body, before expanding into a matrix of even thinner lines, splaying over his body. It snags a copy of his retinas, and when the net retracts, back into the single line, the large screen lights up. Bruce speaks, as he slides a gauntlet into place, his voice flattening. “Computer, a list of all guards on duty.”

Ollie shivers in the chill of the Cave, wondering why he always, /always/ forgets how cold it is down here. Titus trots up to him, panting, and Ollie gratefully gathers the big dog next to him to soak up his body warmth as he fondles Titus’ floppy ears. The Bat’s building itself onto Bruce piece by piece, the thick black second skin and the stone growing through his vocal cords. It would be fascinating if it weren’t so unsettling.

"Dirty guard? That’s what you suspect?" Ollie squints at the screen, although he certainly doesn’t need to. "That’s the problem with incarceration as a punitive measure when it comes to gourmet nutbars and froot loops, B. Arkham’ll never be able to vet its guards well enough to prevent them from getting mindwormed by the inmates.”

Bruce ignores Ollie up until a certain point, as he slides into the chest piece: the mechanics of it seal, hermetically, across his torso. Then, when he begins to nitpick at the very system Bruce worked to uphold and maintain, he walks over to the main console and slams his palm down onto it, smashing a series of keys. To the side, with a mechanical whir, a drawer in a large cabinet opens, sliding out. When the lights inside of the drawer light up in the dark, Bruce pointedly ignores it. He bends at the waist to drag the bottom of his suit up, muscles kinking up as he exhales, roughly.

If Ollie’s thinking about the fact that Batman had a hand in the mechanics and security at Arkham, it’s not conscious. Right now he’s just watching the employment dossier ID photos stream past on the screen, leaning in closer, drawn in by the parade of faces.

"Look at ‘em," Ollie says, half to himself. "They all get the same thousand-yard stare, don’t they? Based on how long they’ve worked in the madhouse. You can see a fresh face here and there — there, that one, he’s new — but man, it gets to ‘em." He finally looks away from the screen, shaking his head. "But who could blame ‘em? Hearing what the likes of Zsasz and Scarecrow and Joker have to whisper in the dark, all day and all night." It’s only then that Ollie notices the lit drawer, the one Bruce hasn’t made a move towards. He moves over to it himself, peering inside.

The suit is in a dark green, beyond peridot, and into the depth of forests—redwood and secret pine, above the Arctic tree line—a green that doesn’t shine but ripples, seems to absorb the flourescent light lining the drawer. The design of it is in the same style as the suit he’d made for Roy, more than half a year past with the same arrow, but larger, nicked into the dip of the clavicle, where the mock turtleneck extends back into a wide-brimmed hood.

The tunic itself is sleeveless, but threaded through it, twin sleeves made of something meant to expand, just by the look of it. The material is strangely matte, the same color of the sloped lapels of the tunic; it is not light, but no where near as heavy as the full suit Bruce himself wears. The bottom of the suit is also made of the same stuff, that stuff that catches and then absorbs the light, padded down the outside of the thighs and into the shins, and at the bottom of the drawer, boots, slim at the ankles and reinforced at the shin and the narrow dip at the back, protection for the tendons there.

Ollie blinks into the light of the drawer for a beat, for two. “No feathered cap?” he asks, eventually.

It’s a cheap ploy, one that him and Roy are especially good at, the glib rejoinder for when even the notoriously passionate and voluble Arrows are at a loss for words. And this, this tangible touchable evidence of how far Bruce has accepted Ollie into his life, that qualifies. A fucking /drawer/ in his work desk with a specially designed costume, yards and yonks better than the one Ollie wears. He could almost laugh, in wondrous disbelief, but instead Ollie shucks out of his jeans and starts pulling it on, piece by piece, kitting up alongside Batman.]:

Bruce growls, in Batman’s low undertone: “Still in the works.” He looks up when the Computer spits out: Hart, Ignacio. “Personnel file,” he states, as the last of the components, the cowl, slides over his face. The small circumference of the electrodes slide against the contours of his temples, cheeks, and the material tenses, goes rigid against the slope of his jaw and throat.

When the Computer follows his command, bringing up the man’s file, he reads through it, quickly, and then moves towards another drawer, one that he depresses and allows to slide out, filled with various tools, held in place with foam inserts. He removes the top of the panel of his gauntlet, the computer there, and strikes a few keys on the screen; in the darkness, beyond them, the Batmobile purrs into life, the headlights flicking on.

Ollie glances over as the car wakes up. There’s a quiver full of arrows in the drawer too, of course, and as Ollie slings it onto his back he can tell from the heft of the bow and the tenseness of its string that it’s been made to match the specs of his usual preferred recurve. Putting it onto his shoulder, Ollie aims himself towards the Batmobile, moving swiftly in time with the excitement building in his chest. “Let’s get one thing outta the way, though,” he says, reaching for the door handle. “Under no circumstances should you expect me to make any puns while we’re on this mission.”

Bruce turns, and, without a trace of understanding what it means—that will come, later—he kisses the man’s mouth, teeth scraping against his bottom lip.

Ollie grunts softly when the nosepiece of Bruce’s cowl pushes his own bare nose aside, making room for that kiss. It’s like kissing somebody brand new. It is, in the strangest of ways, something that clicks in the very final piece of the puzzle when it comes to Ollie’s history with Batman, even before Batman knew he was involved in the design and implementation of a brash bow-slinging hero name of Green Arrow. It’s the fanboy fantasy. It clicks, completes, and ticks over in Ollie’s understanding of himself (never comprehensive even at the best of times), leaving him feeling calm and settled. “Let’s roll, B,” Ollie says, scratching his nails down one of those pointy ears and then getting into the car.

Bruce takes off towards Arkham at a break-neck speed, speaking as he drives.

"None of the sensors have registered any movement from the prisoners, but the error that set off the alarms have placed the prison on total lockdown, guards included." Batman exhales a hard, punishing breath as he takes a corner with force that makes the tires squeal. "If anyone got out, they should still be on the grounds." He reaches into one of the compartments on his belt, pulling out a leather packet of what looks like vials. "Tips for your arrows, they’ll create an electric field eight by seven feet above where they strike.”

Ollie rolls the vials in their leather casing between his fingers, corners of his mouth drawing down in an impressed expression. “Sounds good,” he says, tucking them into the side of the padded quiver. “Say, are these all sharp tips? Or did you manage to replicate some of my trick arrows too?” Ollie lifts one knee, scooting back in his streamlined bucket of a seat to get enough room to prop his foot up against the dashboard. “Never know when a knucklebomb glue arrow will getcha out of a mess.”

Bruce huffs. “Check them. You’ve got two minutes.”

Ollie investigates the quiver in his two minutes, finding an array of pointed arrows and trick arrows that lean more towards being packed full of explosives than quick glue. “Ah, I got the Bat Variety Pack,” he observes, getting it back on as Arkham looms into view. “Well, tailored for the job, I s’pose.” He screws his comm into his ear. “I’m ready to go a-hunting if you are.” AM

Bruce doesn’t have time to be grateful that the journey off the mainland onto the island that houses Arkham is a smooth one: he focuses on driving the mobile along the narrow strip of earth that connects the two landmasses. Grunting as he slams on the brakes, Batman stops the vehicle at the steel drawbridge that would have allowed him to practically drive up to the main gate. The deck had been raised, after the breach, and he does nothing to override this protocol. He slides from his seat like a shadow, the car powering down, his door locking shut, and walks to the edge of the terminal, where the—empty, not a good sign— guard house is, and peers across the choppy, angry sea at the island.

His gut churns at the sight of it. It isn’t raining, not yet, but Batman doesn’t say to the other man, that it will be the inevitable conclusion to the evening. It was always raining at Arkham. When Green Arrow joins him from the Batmobile, Batman points down at a narrow shadow below the bridge on the other side of where they are. “An entrance I built that will get us straight into the facility.” There’s no further explanation and he does not cast a line for the other man: removing his grappling gun, he measures the distance and angle he’ll need and shoots off a line. The line catches, the twang! sounding high and tinny in the night air, and he launches himself off where they are standing, a hundred feet above the sea, and swings himself under the bridge, to land on the incredible narrow ridge of rock, nothing but a shadow, then.

Ollie The whirr and spang of Bruce’s grapnel catching is followed only a few seconds later by the sound of Green Arrow’s own grapnel line landing. He doesn’t hesitate to follow Bruce across, over the dark choppy water. This is what they /do/. “Anything in particular you want me to know?” Ollie asks, voice low as he straightens from the crouch he landed in. This, they’re both aware, is the first time Green Arrow’s needed to go to Arkham. “I’ll take your advice now, ‘cause once we get in there, we’ll be covering separate ground.”

"Alonso Hart was the name of the meta who attacked our party at Santa Prisca, the one I was.. unable to secure." Batman states, as he begins to enter the codes into the prerequisite security panel. The rock crackles in the night, a metal door opening to reveal a long, barely lit hallway through the heart of the stone. He continues to speak even as he moves through it, the eyelets of his cowl lighting up the darkness as they move. "His cousin, Ignacio, is a guard here." He pauses for a heartbeat, before adding: "No record, not even a moving violation. A wife of seven years, three kids. They live in the suburbs."

This is all he’d been able to glean from the files before, all he’d needed before they’d left: there was a connection. He just needed the evidence to substantiate the answer, work his way back from that point to what was going on. “The breakout at Santa Prisca was carefully planned, and executed that night from a remote point, destroying the technological infrastructure, that I had, in part, put in place.” They’ve reached the end of the corridor, leading to a tall, narrow ventilation shaft, where there is a series of pipes and exhaust tubes to provide access to several levels of the building. Batman turns to look at Green Arrow, the eyes of his cowl still illuminated. “The only reason it wasn’t a complete systemic shut down then was because of the simplicity of the system. It wasn’t like Arkham.” It doesn’t sound, in that low scraping tumble of his, like that’s a good thing, either.

Bruce has said everything but what he needs to and grunts: “I have to make sure the prisoners have stayed in their place and that the backups I put into motion after Santa Prisca remainworking.”

Ollie blows out a long whistling breath.

"Well," he says dryly, "that’s a way bigger ball of fuckin’ wax than I was expecting."

The implications are nasty and troubling indeed; a network of people with the ability to compromise complex security systems that the Batman’s worked on. Or at least a network of people who can put into motion the breakout strategies devised by people higher up the ladder. Ollie’d thought that once they’d rescued the kids from Santa Prisca, that was pretty much the end of it, but those events keep coming up again, spiderwebbing out over all kinds of other events.

Ollie hefts his quiver, grabbing the fletchings to make sure his arrows are all stable in their self-healing foam for the climb up. “So locating Ignacio Hart is our prime goal here, and checking on containment of the inmates as we go, check?”

Bruce nods, and removing his gun once more, shoots a line to the highest point of the tall, narrow column, explaining: “I’ll be taking the highest floor, making sure that the cables haven’t been manually severed. Make your way along the third and fourth, where the guards are normally stationed.”

Ollie salutes. “Meetcha back at the campfire,” he says, flippantly.

Neither of them had been Scouts, neither of them had gone to summer camp. It’s utterly meaningless as far as their context goes. But it’s Ollie’s way of letting Bruce know that he’s expecting them both to do their jobs and get back to each other, big bad Arkham or not. He doesn’t waste any more time and as Bruce’s feet lift off the ground, Ollie’s already hoisting himself up an exhaust pipe to find entry to his assigned floors.