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thejusticelounge2014-03-30 10:33 pm
bossymarmalade) wrote in thejusticelounge2014-03-30 10:33 pm
time goes by [ficlets]
selina
"I waited for you for hours."
Ollie looks up from the jewellery case and blinks at the woman addressing him, diamond and ruby sparkles still in his eyes. The bright shine clears after a couple of seconds and shadowy, shifty violet-greys slink in, and Ollie smells orchids and gin when he says, “…Selina.”
That’s as far as he gets. She slaps him hard, openhanded, the sound of the smack resounding through the shop. All the clerks and guards are bored by high-society drama, though, and when Ollie doesn’t seem to be reacting with outrage, they keep their attention firmly on their own tasks.
"For hours," Selina hisses, the words making plump bows of her dark lips, and Ollie frowns at the level of volume she’s employing. "I got sidetracked," he offers, matching her pitch, and at the tiny impatient toss of her head that sets her silver-threaded curls to bobbing, Ollie follows the direction of the movement to see two men standing at the watch case, both of whom are wearing watches that cost considerably less than anything in this store. He takes a breath and settles his hand in the small of Selina’s back, resting on the swell of her ass, and uses his best cozzening tone to say, "How about you let me take you to lunch, and I’ll see about making it up to you."
The shift of her thick eyelashes tells him she’s pleased that he caught on, but the thief in her means that instead of taking the out he’s offering right away, instead Selina looks around the store. “Don’t you think an apology present is in order, petit? A token of your remorse for leaving me stranded among strange men with strange fantasies?” Her long-nailed hand scratches its way down the front of his suit jacket and Ollie gives a slanted grin as some of the clerks exchange looks, one guard ahems and readjusts his shirt collar, and the two hired hitmen listen even harder.
"Don’t push your luck, kitten."
Once they’re on the sidewalk it’s easy to lose the tails, especially in Gotham — they both know the city inside out, after all these years, know how to best use it to their advantage. “You didn’t have to come with me all this way,” Selina points out as Ollie peers over the edge of the rooftop where they’ve finally slowed down, making sure they’ve lost the hitmen good and proper.
"Think of it as a courtesy escort," Ollie replies. "For old times’ sake." When he turns, Selina has a shiny gold compact out and is freshening her lipstick in its mirror, and Ollie can’t help but shake his head with a smile. "Gotten vain in your old age, Selina."
She shuts the compact with a snap and returns it to her small purse. “Oh, mon chou,” she says, “at this point it’s not vanity, it’s maintenance.” Selina comes over and looks down at the road herself, scanning it thoroughly before giving a small purring mrr of satisfaction. “Good. Don’t be a stranger, Oliver,” she says, as she heads towards the stairwell entry with a practised sway of her hips and heels. “You always did prove useful in unexpected ways.”
The comment had been breezy and offhanded, but Ollie feels a cold, sick sweat sweep up his throat and face anyhow. It’s too much on the mark, for what’s happened between them. For how they left it the last time. “We’ve both been … useful to each other, haven’t we,” he says, bitterness lowering his voice.
Selina’s hand stills on the door for just a moment, but then she opens it and goes through.
---
mia
The first thing he says to her is, “You look really great.”
Mia rolls her eyes and hugs him, her thick blonde ponytail swinging against his face and getting tangled in his beard. “Nice, Ollie. That’s the first thing you comment on? How awesome I look? That’s pretty shallow, you know.” She sounds mildly sarcastic but Mia’s hands are balled up into small fists, digging into the muscles of his back on the hug. Knots of pressure telling him that she’s as close to being overwhelmed as he is, and that the moment means just as much to her. Even after all this time Ollie knows how his daughter works when it comes to this kind of thing.
Finally, Ollie pulls away — although he’s loathe to give up holding her entirely, so he keeps one hand on her arm, fingers registering the strength in it — and says, “It’s been too long, jesus. I never thought …” He takes a breath and smiles, so wide the corners of his mouth ache. “You been keeping everybody on their toes? Or lazing around and bitching with Rose?”
"Lazing around keeping everybody bitching with Rose." Mia laughs, and Ollie’s heart constricts at the sound of it, the bright clarity in Mia’s eyes, the roundness of her chin. "Come on, Ollie, you act like you’ve never been here before! Is this the new version of ‘how was your day at school/work/whatever’? Because I always thought that question was boring too." She links her arm with his and starts steering them in an amble along the path that runs through the green grass of the park. "Besides, if any of us should be asking questions it’s me. There’s a lot I need to get caught up on."
"It can wait." Ollie follows Mia’s lead, although his heart is still jittering and juddering at having her here, next to him again. "I kinda just wanna take this all in for now. We’ll have plenty of time for flashbacks and filling in later."
Mia shrugs noncommittally and points out across the field. “That’s where the others are. It’s been busy for the past few months. Which is good and bad in a way.”
"Well, I guess you can set your mind at ease when you consider that we’re a renewable resource." Ollie can hear the others now, familiar voices chatting and joking and teasing, and he stops on the path and holds Mia still. "Honeybunch," he says, "I just — I always worried — I mean, you being Speedy, and being in harm’s way every day of your life —"
"Are you really gonna do this now?" Mia sighs, but doesn’t move out of his grasp on her shoulders. "Ollie. /I/ chose to be Speedy, don’t pretend like you forgot that. I had to bug you for a whole year before you let me put on a costume. It was my decision to be in harm’s way all the time, and anyhow it’s not like my life didn’t involve being in harm’s way for ages before I even met you.” She scans his face intently, and then her eyes soften a little. “It’s not any better or worse that it happened from being sick instead of being killed facing down some supervillain.”
He nods, long brambles of sorrow scratching their way through his chest and throat as he strokes Mia’s hair. She’s still staring at him, watching his expression with a martinet steeliness in her eye; she wants to know he gets it. “I know,” Ollie manages finally, through clumsy lips and tongue. His hand grasps her horse tail of shiny, healthy hair, banishing the memory of it thin and falling out, her sunken eyes, the raw blotches on her skin. Those terrible final days and the way her breath had sounded like a question, high and imploring, on its last sigh. “I know, baby.”
"I’m not glad you’re here. Again,” Mia clarifies, voice firm. “But since you are, Ollie, don’t obsess over things that happened that you can’t do anything about. We all lived with what we went through, and now it’s over.”
It’s a peculiar bit of advice, but one particularly suited to both Mia’s and Ollie’s temperaments, and it siphons through the fog of remembered pain. Smiling, Ollie nods. “Lead the way,” he says, and she takes his hand as they go to join the group and the company, the conversation with the rest of the dead.
---
mar'i
She’s rounder than when he saw her last, the extra flesh padding her out in places where it looks good, at least to Ollie — hips, breasts, belly, arms, ass. It adds a softness to her that counterbalances the lines around her mouth, the lingering tightness gathered at the corners of her eyes and in the way she holds her thighs and shoulders. Mar’i has always been a story best read through the body, her spine cracking for the flip of the pages.
"Posy," Ollie says, hearing the weariness in his own voice, and opens his arms. Bruce behind him tuts and Ollie waves him away. "Go stand with Kate and grumble to yourselves," he instructs, pointing with his chin over to where Kate’s hovering under the garden veranda. "I’ll be fine for a few minutes with my own damn daughter-in-law." He grins at Mar’i as she watches Bruce move off, and hobbles forward to wrap his arms around her.
"Ollie," Mar’i says, and her voice is small and furled up like a rosebud. But she burrows her nose against him and her billows of hair are scented, some kind of herb and some kind of flower that he’s got no hope in hell of identifying except that they smell not only of Mar’i, but also of Roy, somehow. He lifts his hand to stroke her hair and strands of it instantly get caught in the bandages, yanking free of her head when he instinctively jerks away. "It’s all right," Mar’i says quickly, catching his wrist as he snatches his hand back. "That didn’t hurt me."
"There’s been a lot of other things, though, haven’t there?" Ollie lets her hold his diminished hand, her fingers smoothing the bandages back in place and easing out the long purple strands caught in the fabric of the gaps where his index, middle fingers should be. "That hurt you." Mar’i shrugs and pushes a heavy petal of her hair back behind her ear, but Ollie knows it to be true. Whenever she’d managed to get back into Star City, Kate had brought news of what was happening in Gotham, how Roy and Mar’i had ended up taking refuge there once the cities broke down one by one and the mobs took hold.
She has new scars, and her shrug had been in jerking jags, not the smooth roll it used to be. A part of one earlobe has been shorn away. They’ve none of them come out of this unscathed.
"I know about them," Ollie says, his voice catching. "I want — I’d love to see them. If you’ll let me."
Mar’i blows out a breath, her mouth puckering. “I didn’t know if they’d told you,” she confesses. “There was so much that we had to keep secret, especially when it came to…” She stops there, as if saying it would invite back luck. And maybe it would. Ollie nods and tells her, “I understand. It’s okay.” When he’d decided to stay behind in Star City, right to the bloody end, he’d learned the potency of superstition with every day that he managed to keep a patch of it safe.
Turning, Mar’i calls back to where the stable used to be, before everything went to hell. The Manor’s been attacked and invaded and reclaimed so many times that none of the outbuildings are the originals, anymore. There’s an enclosed garden on the stable grounds, and from the patch of hard-grown vegetables two children emerge. Twins, scribble-haired and sweet-cheeked, holding hands as they approach with caution but not fear. “This is your 할아버지,” she tells them. “Do you want to tell him your names and say hello?”
Clearly they do, because the children step forward and hug Ollie as a pair. “I’m Kit,” the boy in his left arm announces, with a nose-scrunch that looks exactly like Roy’s. Ollie looks at the little girl leaned into his right elbow. She pronounces her own name with careful articulation, the way people do when they’re accustomed to strangers mangling their names, but it’s one that Ollie would never get wrong. The little girl tells him, “My name is Moir’a.”
"Oliver," Bruce calls from the verandah, and although Ollie can tell he’s right from the weariness stealing through his body, still weak from blood loss and the severe beating he’d taken, he doesn’t let go of the twins just yet. Thanking Mar’i would seem insulting, somehow, so instead he looks at her over her babies’ heads and says, "I always knew you belonged in our family."
"Excuse me," Mar’i says with some of the old mischief in her voice, "But I think you joined mine first.” She gives a pointed look over at Bruce, and then Kit suddenly giggles and tugs Ollie’s beard. And just for a moment, everything seems … normal.
---
kate
It comes back piece by tiny piece.
The truly wretched thing is — this isn’t the first time Ollie’s had to excavate memories of what’s happened in his life. His whole childhood is like that, locked away in his mind in one of those school tuckboxes, his stupid initials on the lid. OJ Queen. He’d had to do it when Hal brought him back from the grave, everything he remembered of himself still buried six feet down as he wandered his own city for months, mind wiped clean.
Doing it this time makes those two look like playground games.
"You were there three years," Kate tells him, a charred and lingering pain in her dark brown eyes. When she blinks there’s a narrow pale stripe over one eyelid, where it had been almost split up the middle, and the line carries on to bisect her eyebrow and streak into her hairline. "We never stopped looking for you, Ollie, cielo. Not one day."
"I know," he says, and squeezes her bony hand. Kate’s knuckles grind together in his grip and she looks almost grateful, even though the only reason he knows is because she and Bruce have told him so, ever since they got him back. They don’t leave him alone, ever. Occasionally Ollie lies awake listening to their breathing and wonders if before, he would have found this stifling, to be constantly in their presence. He can’t imagine he would have.
Kate tells him little stories of their life together, the things that he enjoyed, the things they’d done. Those three years had made Ollie’s stress-induced tendency towards hypervigilance into a constant state, and he can tell that she’s working hard to create a cocoon of memory for him on multiple levels — with verbal stories about two beachhouses, one silver clean wind and the other sugar-salt gold; with her body as she strokes his shaggy hair and bites her lip and links their fingers together; with their surroundings as she sets out branches heavy with cherry blossom in a vase and cooks french toast and tamales and chili for them.
He tries, too. But every time he thinks he might be tugging a memory out from where it’s been buried, an avalanche of fresher, brighter pain slides down over it again, coal slag dark and impenetrable. Ollie doesn’t keep anything from Kate and she’s been there, most of the time, when he’s tried and failed to uncover something good. Been there with assurances that range from fierce to angry to tearful to comforting, never asking anything for herself, and it isn’t long before Ollie wants desperately to remember something for her, about her.
"Sweetie," Kate tells him with his face cupped in her hands (she can recognize all of his moods and mannerisms, and he finds it soothing and frustrating in equal measure), "Oliver, you were held prisoner and experimented on — tortured — for three years. Give yourself time to heal.”
"This is what’ll heal me," he says, watching her sharp white teeth worry at her bottom lip. "Remembering you." There are no scars for him to explain to her. His captors, intellectually amoral residents of a technologically advanced future, had all sorts of machines that healed him up flawlessly after each bout of abuse. Fresh for the next session. Kate and Bruce, Mar’i, Zee and Kyle, they’d razed the entire compound from top to bottom and destroyed it all, every single bit of medical equipment. "We’re not bringing the fruits of their fucking eugenics labour into our world," he remembers Mar’i saying in that solar flare voice of hers, as green Lantern energy tore through the compound so viciously that it screamed.
Ollie’s been back for five months now, and he hasn’t remembered anything other than facts. He knows these people, knows them like dossiers, but he can’t remember good things, happy things he’s shared with them. Sad or upsetting things, either, but he’s trying for the happy things first. The kids diligently keep him inundated with texts and photos, his friends and colleagues are all supportive and helpful, but it’s Bruce and Kate who are there twenty-four/seven and he still hasn’t managed to dredge up a damn thing.
"Ram’s coming by this morning to spend some time," Kate tells him as they’re in the Manor kitchen, and she’s drinking coffee with her hips leaned against the counter. She’s given him hot cocoa with chili. "I don’t know if he’ll ever warm up to using his meta abilities per se, but he’s determined to hone his skills with them, if he has to use them." Kate looks fond, tracing swirls along the side of her mug as her mouth curves into a smile, beautiful, so much that Ollie feels his stomach lurch.
"I don’t remember the ways we loved each other," he blurts, and when Kate looks over there’s such deep, heartbroken sorrow on her lovely face that he almost can’t continue. But he licks chili and chocolate from his lips and says, "…we can make more. Katie. We can always do that."
She doesn’t quite smile at that. She sets down her mug and comes over, cupping the back of his head and scratching a little, and says, “Yes, cielo. Let’s do that. I’ll do that with you forever.” When she kisses him, Ollie thinks that this is the point in a movie where he’d remember some tiny, poignant image and offer that hope up to her like a peony. Nothing comes. But Kate is warm and fits against him like they’d been constructed together and taken apart, and within her arms Ollie gently, quietly allows himself to stop trying to pick that lock, stop trying to exhume the lost, brittle bones of the past.
---
damian
heirtotheknight liked your post: time goes by
For a moment, Ollie finds it hard to breathe.
He’s not quite the same in build; the solidity of Bruce’s massive frame when he’d bulked to his heaviest is refined by a more whiplike temperament, Ollie can see it in the long muscles. He carries himself with more imperiousness than Bruce ever had. But there’s enough similarity — the plush lips he got from both his parents, the intensity of his eyes under that severely styled black hair, the pervasive sense of finely-leashed power — to make Ollie’s heart clench in a pain that never seems to diminish.
“I didn’t think you’d come back so soon, Damian,” he says. The observation is met by a sneer that Ollie remembers well, although it’s grown out of the tiny cub snarl and is now a real threat, gleam of incisor underlining the derision.
“Soon? Your dotage has made you even more foolish than before, Queen. Or perhaps the ability to gauge time becomes eroded the closer one gets to the end.” Damian looks for a moment as if he’s about to toss his head and sweep past Ollie entirely, but instead he pauses. “The symphony won’t start for a few minutes yet,” he says instead, and then ascends the stairs to the Wayne family box. Ollie follows. He’s not as decrepit as the young man would make him out to be, nowhere near that, but sorrow has put lead into his step and he’s faintly out of breath by the time he joins Damian in the curtained, ornate box.
“You knew I would return in time,” Damian points out immediately, a petulance that he still hasn’t outgrown lacing the words. Might /never/ outgrow if he takes after his father that way, Ollie thinks, and stifles a smile as Damian continues, “I have affairs in Gotham that require my attention. Especially now and after my prolonged absence.”
“Of course,” Ollie says. “Since you have two empires to manage.”
They stare at each other across the box, over the velvet-upholstered and gilded chairs, the heavy curtains making the enclosure stifling under the weight of all the bloodstained memory. Damian looks out over the rest of the audience below, every inch the young king, but when he speaks next there’s a cracking, secret pain in his voice. “She knew that she would be following them,” he says, words crumbling into his voice, and Ollie realizes with a shock that this is probably the first that Damian’s spoken of the whole affair.
“Yeah,” Ollie says. “She expected you.”
One angled shoulder raises in a shrug. “Mother always knew what I was capable of. Otherwise she would never have wasted her time and resources training me as Father’s heir.” He takes a breath and that mouth (so much like Bruce’s, so much like Talia’s) tugs downwards, cruelly. “When she killed Father and Spencer, she knew that I would come for her.”
There’s another breath that follows this sentence, a tiny one, full of pain. The cruelty had been meant for himself as well as Ollie. And Ollie doesn’t protest it, because taking revenge was worthless next to their failure to protect the people they loved, and murdering Talia didn’t bring either of them back or bring Damian and Ollie any peace at all. It just meant they lost one more person in the deal.
The tuning note sounds from the orchestra, round brass tones swelling until they fill the private box, press against the two men like so much memory. “The symphony is beginning,” Damian observes, underneath the plaintive strings that join the brass. “I must attend. It was written in memory of them.” Woodwinds shiver into the long note of music and Damian looks over at the orchestra in the pit, far below him. When he looks back, Ollie’s gone.
The disappearance - Batlike, there’s no doubt what Queen’s intention had been — makes Damian’s lips tug, faintly. The softness doesn’t last long. The conductor raises her baton and he takes his seat, mouth warm with the taste of his blood.
---
zatanna
The short blonde hair is the most visible change in her … but it’s not the only one. Ollie can tell that much from the darkened blue of Zatanna’s eyes, shadowed even as the choppy fringe of her pale hair leaves them too exposed. She looks like scorched lace, he thinks crazily as they embrace, Ollie’s arms cradling her gingerly while Zee digs hungry fingers into his sides.
"You smell different," is all he can think to say, trying to seek out sawdust and lily-of-the-valley in this uneven hair, these white feathers. It’s a foolish and useless thing for him to blurt out, considering this is the first foot she’s set on her home planet in just about ten years. Of course she would smell like this, alien and white light, fringes of electric green.
The look Zatanna gives him is sharper than he would have anticipated, from the worn and tired drag of her eyelashes when she blinks. “Is it that unexpected?” she inquires, and it’s there in her voice, too, that blade-edge note. “I know you never cared for space, Ollie, but I thought that was because you understood that it was too complex to grasp.” She shakes her head, lifting a hand to her mouth to gnaw at her thumbnail. “It’s because I haven’t been … earth-Zee for a long time. Even being in magical realms, pocket dimensions, it’s not the same as being off-planet. There’s so much I’ve …”
Zee looks up at him and pushes against Ollie’s chest with her fingertips, a tiny grin tugging a corner of her pink mouth. “I’ve been gone so long that you haven’t made one crack at Kyle /yet/! Are you holding back to be polite?”
Ollie grins back, letting it unfurl wide and welcoming over his teeth. “Polite? Me? It’s like you’ve totally forgotten who I am, Zee!” He laughs, rocking back on his heels, and adds, “Besides, he can’t annoy me if he’s not here. Where is he, anyhow? Filling up on pizza and tacos somewheres?”
The smile that had been curling Zee’s lips slackens instantly, as if it had been held by a buttonhook. “You think I’m not the same,” she says flatly, cupping her elbows. “Well, Ollie — you wouldn’t recognize him, not anymore. That’s why we’ve been gone so long. We were searching for a way to bring him all the way back from … what happened.” There’s a dark note, an ashen and smeared tone to her voice that stops Ollie from asking for any more details than that; he’s only heard Zee sound that way a scattered handful of times, and always when the fight looked most dire. She passes one thin hand over her face and Ollie could swear that he sees another face superimposed over Zee’s, a fluttering array of them, human and non-human and some of them so horrifying that he’s glad they don’t stay long enough for him to get a good look.
"You can see, now," Zee says, and although the words could be taken as bitter, the look on her face is one of determination. "I’m keeping him together — we both are, his willpower and my magic — but we can’t stop, Ollie. Not yet. Not till we find a way to fix him."
Ollie feels his heart sink, a little, a physical dunk in his ribcage. “You mean you’re not staying? You’re not back for good?”
Zee throws her arms back around him in an even fiercer hug. “Not yet,” she whispers, tiptoeing so she can kiss his cheek, then his mouth, like she’s drinking memories of her life here from him to take with her. ”Not until I can bring him back with me for good.”
Swallowing, Ollie holds her close. “We’ll be here,” he murmurs. “We’ll wait for you.”
For a moment, he can almost smell tiny white flowers, and see stars in midnight-dark hair.
---
steph
It was his own fault for not paying close enough attention to the windows of the office. An innocuous set of room features for other people, other cities, but here in Gotham, the rules were different. Always had been.
The bo staff is collapsed, but that makes no difference to Ollie’s larynx crushed beneath it. The person standing behind his office chair leans in closer, and her voice is ragged, harsh, when she says, “I can’t believe you still have the nerve to come here and act like everything’s okay, after what you did to this city.”
"Stephanie," Ollie rasps, not making a move to dislodge her, "you don’t know the full story."
He holds up his hands, spread with the palms out, and maybe the sight of his fingers gnarled where they’d been broken and left to heal bad and re-broken stirs some pity in her, because she backs down and comes around the desk, putting it between them. Her hair is scraped back so tight in a knot that her whole face looks tense, wounded, bleeding cracks at the sides of her mouth. She’s malnourished, the sunken eyes and high bumps of her knuckles tell him that much. Stephanie sees him taking this all in and gives a short, shattered laugh.
"Take a good look, Olliewood," she says, the old nickname salted with derision. "This is the Gotham you left in your wake, you and your friends at MIRA. And I’m one of the lucky ones.”
"There’s reasons I cooperated with the Meta Information and Registration Agency," Ollie says, scowling at the defensive note in his own voice. "Reasons that you weren’t party to and wouldn’t understand, Steph, because you don’t know how much worse it could’ve—"
"Shut up." Steph’s eyes flare in the dim light — he hadn’t turned on the overheads when he’d come in, more fool still — and she points her bo staff at him, the length extending out like some alien limb over the desk, forcing him to lean back in his chair. "Just … shut up, Ollie. I don’t wanna hear it. Not after what happened here and who got caught in the crossfire of your — your secret back room meetings and reasons that I wouldn’t understand.” Her expression turns sadder, more somber, but the staff doesn’t lower. “After what happened to the people of Gotham and to Cass. To Damian.”
Ollie breathes in and puts his hands down on the armrests of his chair. “That was never supposed to—”
But it seems like Steph’s fuse and patience have been worn down to the bone, because the tip of the staff comes up, under his chin, and she’s giving him that gimlet stare again. “No,” she says. “No. And I’m sorry that your good intentions got so colossally fucked up. But that doesn’t excuse the things you did and supported, Ollie, and what it meant for us. It’ll never excuse it.”
Steph lowers the staff and takes a step back from the desk as the weapon collapses, and there’s something — something sharp and merciless on her face that reminds him of Kate, so much his heart contracts — before the entire building goes dark and Stephanie says,
"You made your choice."
---
bruce
Lighter than you would think.
Back in the day, Ollie’d thought it was because Bruce was … well, flighty. He’d always been big-framed but gentle of step, and it only made sense when you learned that every night, his life depended on how quietly he could get the jump on the cowardly and superstitious lot. Even now, bigger and broader and heavier, that padding step stays the same, despite the way that everything else has changed. It’s enough to make Ollie smile, down in his cell, and lurch to his feet to move closer to the high barred grate that lets light and air into his subterranean pen.
"I’m not gonna waste time asking how you got in and where the guards are," Ollie says, and pretends the choked gruffness of his voice is from the chaff spread on the floor. Dust motes float in the air up to Bruce’s booted feet, and then he’s stooping, and then he’s looking at Ollie through the bars, the blue of the one good eye they’ve left him sharp as ever. Bruce licks his lips and Ollie says, "I’m glad we have a chance to say goodbye."
"That’s not why I came." Bruce’s voice is low and tempered, assured (just a touch haughty, to Ollie’s delight), and Ollie laughs slightly.
"You’re not thinking of a rescue, are you?" he asks. "Some plan you’ve hatched to ride in and snatch me up at the last moment, like Lancelot and Guinevere?" Ollie’s joking makes Bruce’s face spasm, just at the corner of his jaw, a mixture of pain and anger that quiets Ollie’s gentle mockery. "Bruce," he says. "Honey. They’re going to kill me tomorrow and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ll be damned if Star’s gonna end up like Keystone."
It’s a strange place they’ve found themselves, in an Earth hurtled back into its own history as a last-ditch effort to save it from … fuck, Ollie still wasn’t sure of the specifics of it, some interstellar science experiment run rampant and utilizing all technology capable of a certain stage of advancement in order to spread itself, to kill. So here they were, turned back to a time before transistors and circuitboards and sliced bread to escape that tech, and who could have predicted that capes and vigilantes would be blamed for it all? Who could’ve seen Godfrey and his ilk forming a government that would put Cromwell to shame, systematically hunting down and publicly executing all the crimefighting types?
Kid Flash and Nightwing had staged a rescue, when Wally’d been set for the chopping block — that was how they did it in the Midwest, stocks and axes — and Godfrey had retaliated through a lottery of Keystone citizens, killing four thousand and fifty-three innocent people and destroying a third of the city to make up for being cheated of one speedster.
"You should never have stayed here!" There’s a raw hiss to Bruce’s voice, now, and Ollie hasn’t been separated from him long enough to mistake it for anything other than the kind of anguish that only Bruce can suffer, can be susceptible to: a lasting, eviscerating pain, curling up through his psyche, green absinthe and cyanide.
"Are we gonna have this argument again?" Ollie tugs at the manacles around his bleeding wrists, trying to get closer to the window even though he knows the chain only extends so far. He’s about three feet from Bruce, craning closer, wanting to get just the scent of the man, the touch of his fingers. Bruce seems to be galvanized by the same desire; he reaches through the bars, far as he can manage, and Ollie pulls and leans as Bruce shoves and stretches and —
— there. The very tips of Bruce’s fingers catch a few strands of blond hair, brush faintly against Ollie’s fevered, damp forehead, and Ollie doesn’t know which one of them gives a gasping, frustrated sob but fuck, it might as well be both. Either. “She couldn’t come,” Bruce tells Ollie, and his words are getting more rapid. Time is running out, in the small space of now, in the bigger space of Ollie’s life drawing to its close. “I wanted her to. She said there was less chance of being caught or tipping off the guards if it was only one of us. She didn’t want to —”
"It’s all right," Ollie says, when Bruce’s voice finally falters and gives out. "I know. I love you both."
"Oliver," Bruce whispers. And that cracks any composure Ollie’s holding onto, here in this cell knowing that this is the end of it and tomorrow morning, he’s for the fire. That’s how they do it in California, stakes and kindling, billowing smoke carrying the wails of the condemned up high for everybody to hear and witness. It could be worse, he’s been telling himself. In Gotham they have the wheel.
"Don’t let me die alone." Ollie doesn’t plan to say it, but the words tumble out like broken teeth, sown with the fears of deaths gone by and the scars they’ve left. Bruce looks back at him with a fierceness on his face that’s almost palpable, almost shining through those bars, that long-ago searchlight in the night sky. His hands wrap around the black wrought iron and Bruce promises, "I won’t let the pyre take you." He glances behind him and says, "I — I have to go, baby."
"Go on. Don’t get caught. I’ll need you tomorrow."
Ollie expects that when he looks up again, Bruce will be gone — the oldest Batman trick in the book. But he’s not. He’s still there, and for one terrified moment Ollie thinks that Bruce has given up, means to be caught, will be mounted on the stake beside him and they’ll have to smell each other’s flesh blackening and melting. But instead he throws a little folded-up star of paper into the cell, to the back where Ollie can stoop and pick it up, and then, then he’s gone.
Unfolded, it’s a letter covered in tiny, deep black words, Kate and Bruce mingled on the page in places and taking turns in others. Everything and anything they never got the chance to tell him, laid bare in strokes and swoops so wounded that it could be their blood smeared across the paper.
Ollie sits cross-legged against the wall and reads it, over and over and word by word, until the light is completely gone.
"I waited for you for hours."
Ollie looks up from the jewellery case and blinks at the woman addressing him, diamond and ruby sparkles still in his eyes. The bright shine clears after a couple of seconds and shadowy, shifty violet-greys slink in, and Ollie smells orchids and gin when he says, “…Selina.”
That’s as far as he gets. She slaps him hard, openhanded, the sound of the smack resounding through the shop. All the clerks and guards are bored by high-society drama, though, and when Ollie doesn’t seem to be reacting with outrage, they keep their attention firmly on their own tasks.
"For hours," Selina hisses, the words making plump bows of her dark lips, and Ollie frowns at the level of volume she’s employing. "I got sidetracked," he offers, matching her pitch, and at the tiny impatient toss of her head that sets her silver-threaded curls to bobbing, Ollie follows the direction of the movement to see two men standing at the watch case, both of whom are wearing watches that cost considerably less than anything in this store. He takes a breath and settles his hand in the small of Selina’s back, resting on the swell of her ass, and uses his best cozzening tone to say, "How about you let me take you to lunch, and I’ll see about making it up to you."
The shift of her thick eyelashes tells him she’s pleased that he caught on, but the thief in her means that instead of taking the out he’s offering right away, instead Selina looks around the store. “Don’t you think an apology present is in order, petit? A token of your remorse for leaving me stranded among strange men with strange fantasies?” Her long-nailed hand scratches its way down the front of his suit jacket and Ollie gives a slanted grin as some of the clerks exchange looks, one guard ahems and readjusts his shirt collar, and the two hired hitmen listen even harder.
"Don’t push your luck, kitten."
Once they’re on the sidewalk it’s easy to lose the tails, especially in Gotham — they both know the city inside out, after all these years, know how to best use it to their advantage. “You didn’t have to come with me all this way,” Selina points out as Ollie peers over the edge of the rooftop where they’ve finally slowed down, making sure they’ve lost the hitmen good and proper.
"Think of it as a courtesy escort," Ollie replies. "For old times’ sake." When he turns, Selina has a shiny gold compact out and is freshening her lipstick in its mirror, and Ollie can’t help but shake his head with a smile. "Gotten vain in your old age, Selina."
She shuts the compact with a snap and returns it to her small purse. “Oh, mon chou,” she says, “at this point it’s not vanity, it’s maintenance.” Selina comes over and looks down at the road herself, scanning it thoroughly before giving a small purring mrr of satisfaction. “Good. Don’t be a stranger, Oliver,” she says, as she heads towards the stairwell entry with a practised sway of her hips and heels. “You always did prove useful in unexpected ways.”
The comment had been breezy and offhanded, but Ollie feels a cold, sick sweat sweep up his throat and face anyhow. It’s too much on the mark, for what’s happened between them. For how they left it the last time. “We’ve both been … useful to each other, haven’t we,” he says, bitterness lowering his voice.
Selina’s hand stills on the door for just a moment, but then she opens it and goes through.
---
mia
The first thing he says to her is, “You look really great.”
Mia rolls her eyes and hugs him, her thick blonde ponytail swinging against his face and getting tangled in his beard. “Nice, Ollie. That’s the first thing you comment on? How awesome I look? That’s pretty shallow, you know.” She sounds mildly sarcastic but Mia’s hands are balled up into small fists, digging into the muscles of his back on the hug. Knots of pressure telling him that she’s as close to being overwhelmed as he is, and that the moment means just as much to her. Even after all this time Ollie knows how his daughter works when it comes to this kind of thing.
Finally, Ollie pulls away — although he’s loathe to give up holding her entirely, so he keeps one hand on her arm, fingers registering the strength in it — and says, “It’s been too long, jesus. I never thought …” He takes a breath and smiles, so wide the corners of his mouth ache. “You been keeping everybody on their toes? Or lazing around and bitching with Rose?”
"Lazing around keeping everybody bitching with Rose." Mia laughs, and Ollie’s heart constricts at the sound of it, the bright clarity in Mia’s eyes, the roundness of her chin. "Come on, Ollie, you act like you’ve never been here before! Is this the new version of ‘how was your day at school/work/whatever’? Because I always thought that question was boring too." She links her arm with his and starts steering them in an amble along the path that runs through the green grass of the park. "Besides, if any of us should be asking questions it’s me. There’s a lot I need to get caught up on."
"It can wait." Ollie follows Mia’s lead, although his heart is still jittering and juddering at having her here, next to him again. "I kinda just wanna take this all in for now. We’ll have plenty of time for flashbacks and filling in later."
Mia shrugs noncommittally and points out across the field. “That’s where the others are. It’s been busy for the past few months. Which is good and bad in a way.”
"Well, I guess you can set your mind at ease when you consider that we’re a renewable resource." Ollie can hear the others now, familiar voices chatting and joking and teasing, and he stops on the path and holds Mia still. "Honeybunch," he says, "I just — I always worried — I mean, you being Speedy, and being in harm’s way every day of your life —"
"Are you really gonna do this now?" Mia sighs, but doesn’t move out of his grasp on her shoulders. "Ollie. /I/ chose to be Speedy, don’t pretend like you forgot that. I had to bug you for a whole year before you let me put on a costume. It was my decision to be in harm’s way all the time, and anyhow it’s not like my life didn’t involve being in harm’s way for ages before I even met you.” She scans his face intently, and then her eyes soften a little. “It’s not any better or worse that it happened from being sick instead of being killed facing down some supervillain.”
He nods, long brambles of sorrow scratching their way through his chest and throat as he strokes Mia’s hair. She’s still staring at him, watching his expression with a martinet steeliness in her eye; she wants to know he gets it. “I know,” Ollie manages finally, through clumsy lips and tongue. His hand grasps her horse tail of shiny, healthy hair, banishing the memory of it thin and falling out, her sunken eyes, the raw blotches on her skin. Those terrible final days and the way her breath had sounded like a question, high and imploring, on its last sigh. “I know, baby.”
"I’m not glad you’re here. Again,” Mia clarifies, voice firm. “But since you are, Ollie, don’t obsess over things that happened that you can’t do anything about. We all lived with what we went through, and now it’s over.”
It’s a peculiar bit of advice, but one particularly suited to both Mia’s and Ollie’s temperaments, and it siphons through the fog of remembered pain. Smiling, Ollie nods. “Lead the way,” he says, and she takes his hand as they go to join the group and the company, the conversation with the rest of the dead.
---
mar'i
She’s rounder than when he saw her last, the extra flesh padding her out in places where it looks good, at least to Ollie — hips, breasts, belly, arms, ass. It adds a softness to her that counterbalances the lines around her mouth, the lingering tightness gathered at the corners of her eyes and in the way she holds her thighs and shoulders. Mar’i has always been a story best read through the body, her spine cracking for the flip of the pages.
"Posy," Ollie says, hearing the weariness in his own voice, and opens his arms. Bruce behind him tuts and Ollie waves him away. "Go stand with Kate and grumble to yourselves," he instructs, pointing with his chin over to where Kate’s hovering under the garden veranda. "I’ll be fine for a few minutes with my own damn daughter-in-law." He grins at Mar’i as she watches Bruce move off, and hobbles forward to wrap his arms around her.
"Ollie," Mar’i says, and her voice is small and furled up like a rosebud. But she burrows her nose against him and her billows of hair are scented, some kind of herb and some kind of flower that he’s got no hope in hell of identifying except that they smell not only of Mar’i, but also of Roy, somehow. He lifts his hand to stroke her hair and strands of it instantly get caught in the bandages, yanking free of her head when he instinctively jerks away. "It’s all right," Mar’i says quickly, catching his wrist as he snatches his hand back. "That didn’t hurt me."
"There’s been a lot of other things, though, haven’t there?" Ollie lets her hold his diminished hand, her fingers smoothing the bandages back in place and easing out the long purple strands caught in the fabric of the gaps where his index, middle fingers should be. "That hurt you." Mar’i shrugs and pushes a heavy petal of her hair back behind her ear, but Ollie knows it to be true. Whenever she’d managed to get back into Star City, Kate had brought news of what was happening in Gotham, how Roy and Mar’i had ended up taking refuge there once the cities broke down one by one and the mobs took hold.
She has new scars, and her shrug had been in jerking jags, not the smooth roll it used to be. A part of one earlobe has been shorn away. They’ve none of them come out of this unscathed.
"I know about them," Ollie says, his voice catching. "I want — I’d love to see them. If you’ll let me."
Mar’i blows out a breath, her mouth puckering. “I didn’t know if they’d told you,” she confesses. “There was so much that we had to keep secret, especially when it came to…” She stops there, as if saying it would invite back luck. And maybe it would. Ollie nods and tells her, “I understand. It’s okay.” When he’d decided to stay behind in Star City, right to the bloody end, he’d learned the potency of superstition with every day that he managed to keep a patch of it safe.
Turning, Mar’i calls back to where the stable used to be, before everything went to hell. The Manor’s been attacked and invaded and reclaimed so many times that none of the outbuildings are the originals, anymore. There’s an enclosed garden on the stable grounds, and from the patch of hard-grown vegetables two children emerge. Twins, scribble-haired and sweet-cheeked, holding hands as they approach with caution but not fear. “This is your 할아버지,” she tells them. “Do you want to tell him your names and say hello?”
Clearly they do, because the children step forward and hug Ollie as a pair. “I’m Kit,” the boy in his left arm announces, with a nose-scrunch that looks exactly like Roy’s. Ollie looks at the little girl leaned into his right elbow. She pronounces her own name with careful articulation, the way people do when they’re accustomed to strangers mangling their names, but it’s one that Ollie would never get wrong. The little girl tells him, “My name is Moir’a.”
"Oliver," Bruce calls from the verandah, and although Ollie can tell he’s right from the weariness stealing through his body, still weak from blood loss and the severe beating he’d taken, he doesn’t let go of the twins just yet. Thanking Mar’i would seem insulting, somehow, so instead he looks at her over her babies’ heads and says, "I always knew you belonged in our family."
"Excuse me," Mar’i says with some of the old mischief in her voice, "But I think you joined mine first.” She gives a pointed look over at Bruce, and then Kit suddenly giggles and tugs Ollie’s beard. And just for a moment, everything seems … normal.
---
kate
It comes back piece by tiny piece.
The truly wretched thing is — this isn’t the first time Ollie’s had to excavate memories of what’s happened in his life. His whole childhood is like that, locked away in his mind in one of those school tuckboxes, his stupid initials on the lid. OJ Queen. He’d had to do it when Hal brought him back from the grave, everything he remembered of himself still buried six feet down as he wandered his own city for months, mind wiped clean.
Doing it this time makes those two look like playground games.
"You were there three years," Kate tells him, a charred and lingering pain in her dark brown eyes. When she blinks there’s a narrow pale stripe over one eyelid, where it had been almost split up the middle, and the line carries on to bisect her eyebrow and streak into her hairline. "We never stopped looking for you, Ollie, cielo. Not one day."
"I know," he says, and squeezes her bony hand. Kate’s knuckles grind together in his grip and she looks almost grateful, even though the only reason he knows is because she and Bruce have told him so, ever since they got him back. They don’t leave him alone, ever. Occasionally Ollie lies awake listening to their breathing and wonders if before, he would have found this stifling, to be constantly in their presence. He can’t imagine he would have.
Kate tells him little stories of their life together, the things that he enjoyed, the things they’d done. Those three years had made Ollie’s stress-induced tendency towards hypervigilance into a constant state, and he can tell that she’s working hard to create a cocoon of memory for him on multiple levels — with verbal stories about two beachhouses, one silver clean wind and the other sugar-salt gold; with her body as she strokes his shaggy hair and bites her lip and links their fingers together; with their surroundings as she sets out branches heavy with cherry blossom in a vase and cooks french toast and tamales and chili for them.
He tries, too. But every time he thinks he might be tugging a memory out from where it’s been buried, an avalanche of fresher, brighter pain slides down over it again, coal slag dark and impenetrable. Ollie doesn’t keep anything from Kate and she’s been there, most of the time, when he’s tried and failed to uncover something good. Been there with assurances that range from fierce to angry to tearful to comforting, never asking anything for herself, and it isn’t long before Ollie wants desperately to remember something for her, about her.
"Sweetie," Kate tells him with his face cupped in her hands (she can recognize all of his moods and mannerisms, and he finds it soothing and frustrating in equal measure), "Oliver, you were held prisoner and experimented on — tortured — for three years. Give yourself time to heal.”
"This is what’ll heal me," he says, watching her sharp white teeth worry at her bottom lip. "Remembering you." There are no scars for him to explain to her. His captors, intellectually amoral residents of a technologically advanced future, had all sorts of machines that healed him up flawlessly after each bout of abuse. Fresh for the next session. Kate and Bruce, Mar’i, Zee and Kyle, they’d razed the entire compound from top to bottom and destroyed it all, every single bit of medical equipment. "We’re not bringing the fruits of their fucking eugenics labour into our world," he remembers Mar’i saying in that solar flare voice of hers, as green Lantern energy tore through the compound so viciously that it screamed.
Ollie’s been back for five months now, and he hasn’t remembered anything other than facts. He knows these people, knows them like dossiers, but he can’t remember good things, happy things he’s shared with them. Sad or upsetting things, either, but he’s trying for the happy things first. The kids diligently keep him inundated with texts and photos, his friends and colleagues are all supportive and helpful, but it’s Bruce and Kate who are there twenty-four/seven and he still hasn’t managed to dredge up a damn thing.
"Ram’s coming by this morning to spend some time," Kate tells him as they’re in the Manor kitchen, and she’s drinking coffee with her hips leaned against the counter. She’s given him hot cocoa with chili. "I don’t know if he’ll ever warm up to using his meta abilities per se, but he’s determined to hone his skills with them, if he has to use them." Kate looks fond, tracing swirls along the side of her mug as her mouth curves into a smile, beautiful, so much that Ollie feels his stomach lurch.
"I don’t remember the ways we loved each other," he blurts, and when Kate looks over there’s such deep, heartbroken sorrow on her lovely face that he almost can’t continue. But he licks chili and chocolate from his lips and says, "…we can make more. Katie. We can always do that."
She doesn’t quite smile at that. She sets down her mug and comes over, cupping the back of his head and scratching a little, and says, “Yes, cielo. Let’s do that. I’ll do that with you forever.” When she kisses him, Ollie thinks that this is the point in a movie where he’d remember some tiny, poignant image and offer that hope up to her like a peony. Nothing comes. But Kate is warm and fits against him like they’d been constructed together and taken apart, and within her arms Ollie gently, quietly allows himself to stop trying to pick that lock, stop trying to exhume the lost, brittle bones of the past.
---
damian
heirtotheknight liked your post: time goes by
For a moment, Ollie finds it hard to breathe.
He’s not quite the same in build; the solidity of Bruce’s massive frame when he’d bulked to his heaviest is refined by a more whiplike temperament, Ollie can see it in the long muscles. He carries himself with more imperiousness than Bruce ever had. But there’s enough similarity — the plush lips he got from both his parents, the intensity of his eyes under that severely styled black hair, the pervasive sense of finely-leashed power — to make Ollie’s heart clench in a pain that never seems to diminish.
“I didn’t think you’d come back so soon, Damian,” he says. The observation is met by a sneer that Ollie remembers well, although it’s grown out of the tiny cub snarl and is now a real threat, gleam of incisor underlining the derision.
“Soon? Your dotage has made you even more foolish than before, Queen. Or perhaps the ability to gauge time becomes eroded the closer one gets to the end.” Damian looks for a moment as if he’s about to toss his head and sweep past Ollie entirely, but instead he pauses. “The symphony won’t start for a few minutes yet,” he says instead, and then ascends the stairs to the Wayne family box. Ollie follows. He’s not as decrepit as the young man would make him out to be, nowhere near that, but sorrow has put lead into his step and he’s faintly out of breath by the time he joins Damian in the curtained, ornate box.
“You knew I would return in time,” Damian points out immediately, a petulance that he still hasn’t outgrown lacing the words. Might /never/ outgrow if he takes after his father that way, Ollie thinks, and stifles a smile as Damian continues, “I have affairs in Gotham that require my attention. Especially now and after my prolonged absence.”
“Of course,” Ollie says. “Since you have two empires to manage.”
They stare at each other across the box, over the velvet-upholstered and gilded chairs, the heavy curtains making the enclosure stifling under the weight of all the bloodstained memory. Damian looks out over the rest of the audience below, every inch the young king, but when he speaks next there’s a cracking, secret pain in his voice. “She knew that she would be following them,” he says, words crumbling into his voice, and Ollie realizes with a shock that this is probably the first that Damian’s spoken of the whole affair.
“Yeah,” Ollie says. “She expected you.”
One angled shoulder raises in a shrug. “Mother always knew what I was capable of. Otherwise she would never have wasted her time and resources training me as Father’s heir.” He takes a breath and that mouth (so much like Bruce’s, so much like Talia’s) tugs downwards, cruelly. “When she killed Father and Spencer, she knew that I would come for her.”
There’s another breath that follows this sentence, a tiny one, full of pain. The cruelty had been meant for himself as well as Ollie. And Ollie doesn’t protest it, because taking revenge was worthless next to their failure to protect the people they loved, and murdering Talia didn’t bring either of them back or bring Damian and Ollie any peace at all. It just meant they lost one more person in the deal.
The tuning note sounds from the orchestra, round brass tones swelling until they fill the private box, press against the two men like so much memory. “The symphony is beginning,” Damian observes, underneath the plaintive strings that join the brass. “I must attend. It was written in memory of them.” Woodwinds shiver into the long note of music and Damian looks over at the orchestra in the pit, far below him. When he looks back, Ollie’s gone.
The disappearance - Batlike, there’s no doubt what Queen’s intention had been — makes Damian’s lips tug, faintly. The softness doesn’t last long. The conductor raises her baton and he takes his seat, mouth warm with the taste of his blood.
---
zatanna
The short blonde hair is the most visible change in her … but it’s not the only one. Ollie can tell that much from the darkened blue of Zatanna’s eyes, shadowed even as the choppy fringe of her pale hair leaves them too exposed. She looks like scorched lace, he thinks crazily as they embrace, Ollie’s arms cradling her gingerly while Zee digs hungry fingers into his sides.
"You smell different," is all he can think to say, trying to seek out sawdust and lily-of-the-valley in this uneven hair, these white feathers. It’s a foolish and useless thing for him to blurt out, considering this is the first foot she’s set on her home planet in just about ten years. Of course she would smell like this, alien and white light, fringes of electric green.
The look Zatanna gives him is sharper than he would have anticipated, from the worn and tired drag of her eyelashes when she blinks. “Is it that unexpected?” she inquires, and it’s there in her voice, too, that blade-edge note. “I know you never cared for space, Ollie, but I thought that was because you understood that it was too complex to grasp.” She shakes her head, lifting a hand to her mouth to gnaw at her thumbnail. “It’s because I haven’t been … earth-Zee for a long time. Even being in magical realms, pocket dimensions, it’s not the same as being off-planet. There’s so much I’ve …”
Zee looks up at him and pushes against Ollie’s chest with her fingertips, a tiny grin tugging a corner of her pink mouth. “I’ve been gone so long that you haven’t made one crack at Kyle /yet/! Are you holding back to be polite?”
Ollie grins back, letting it unfurl wide and welcoming over his teeth. “Polite? Me? It’s like you’ve totally forgotten who I am, Zee!” He laughs, rocking back on his heels, and adds, “Besides, he can’t annoy me if he’s not here. Where is he, anyhow? Filling up on pizza and tacos somewheres?”
The smile that had been curling Zee’s lips slackens instantly, as if it had been held by a buttonhook. “You think I’m not the same,” she says flatly, cupping her elbows. “Well, Ollie — you wouldn’t recognize him, not anymore. That’s why we’ve been gone so long. We were searching for a way to bring him all the way back from … what happened.” There’s a dark note, an ashen and smeared tone to her voice that stops Ollie from asking for any more details than that; he’s only heard Zee sound that way a scattered handful of times, and always when the fight looked most dire. She passes one thin hand over her face and Ollie could swear that he sees another face superimposed over Zee’s, a fluttering array of them, human and non-human and some of them so horrifying that he’s glad they don’t stay long enough for him to get a good look.
"You can see, now," Zee says, and although the words could be taken as bitter, the look on her face is one of determination. "I’m keeping him together — we both are, his willpower and my magic — but we can’t stop, Ollie. Not yet. Not till we find a way to fix him."
Ollie feels his heart sink, a little, a physical dunk in his ribcage. “You mean you’re not staying? You’re not back for good?”
Zee throws her arms back around him in an even fiercer hug. “Not yet,” she whispers, tiptoeing so she can kiss his cheek, then his mouth, like she’s drinking memories of her life here from him to take with her. ”Not until I can bring him back with me for good.”
Swallowing, Ollie holds her close. “We’ll be here,” he murmurs. “We’ll wait for you.”
For a moment, he can almost smell tiny white flowers, and see stars in midnight-dark hair.
---
steph
It was his own fault for not paying close enough attention to the windows of the office. An innocuous set of room features for other people, other cities, but here in Gotham, the rules were different. Always had been.
The bo staff is collapsed, but that makes no difference to Ollie’s larynx crushed beneath it. The person standing behind his office chair leans in closer, and her voice is ragged, harsh, when she says, “I can’t believe you still have the nerve to come here and act like everything’s okay, after what you did to this city.”
"Stephanie," Ollie rasps, not making a move to dislodge her, "you don’t know the full story."
He holds up his hands, spread with the palms out, and maybe the sight of his fingers gnarled where they’d been broken and left to heal bad and re-broken stirs some pity in her, because she backs down and comes around the desk, putting it between them. Her hair is scraped back so tight in a knot that her whole face looks tense, wounded, bleeding cracks at the sides of her mouth. She’s malnourished, the sunken eyes and high bumps of her knuckles tell him that much. Stephanie sees him taking this all in and gives a short, shattered laugh.
"Take a good look, Olliewood," she says, the old nickname salted with derision. "This is the Gotham you left in your wake, you and your friends at MIRA. And I’m one of the lucky ones.”
"There’s reasons I cooperated with the Meta Information and Registration Agency," Ollie says, scowling at the defensive note in his own voice. "Reasons that you weren’t party to and wouldn’t understand, Steph, because you don’t know how much worse it could’ve—"
"Shut up." Steph’s eyes flare in the dim light — he hadn’t turned on the overheads when he’d come in, more fool still — and she points her bo staff at him, the length extending out like some alien limb over the desk, forcing him to lean back in his chair. "Just … shut up, Ollie. I don’t wanna hear it. Not after what happened here and who got caught in the crossfire of your — your secret back room meetings and reasons that I wouldn’t understand.” Her expression turns sadder, more somber, but the staff doesn’t lower. “After what happened to the people of Gotham and to Cass. To Damian.”
Ollie breathes in and puts his hands down on the armrests of his chair. “That was never supposed to—”
But it seems like Steph’s fuse and patience have been worn down to the bone, because the tip of the staff comes up, under his chin, and she’s giving him that gimlet stare again. “No,” she says. “No. And I’m sorry that your good intentions got so colossally fucked up. But that doesn’t excuse the things you did and supported, Ollie, and what it meant for us. It’ll never excuse it.”
Steph lowers the staff and takes a step back from the desk as the weapon collapses, and there’s something — something sharp and merciless on her face that reminds him of Kate, so much his heart contracts — before the entire building goes dark and Stephanie says,
"You made your choice."
---
bruce
Lighter than you would think.
Back in the day, Ollie’d thought it was because Bruce was … well, flighty. He’d always been big-framed but gentle of step, and it only made sense when you learned that every night, his life depended on how quietly he could get the jump on the cowardly and superstitious lot. Even now, bigger and broader and heavier, that padding step stays the same, despite the way that everything else has changed. It’s enough to make Ollie smile, down in his cell, and lurch to his feet to move closer to the high barred grate that lets light and air into his subterranean pen.
"I’m not gonna waste time asking how you got in and where the guards are," Ollie says, and pretends the choked gruffness of his voice is from the chaff spread on the floor. Dust motes float in the air up to Bruce’s booted feet, and then he’s stooping, and then he’s looking at Ollie through the bars, the blue of the one good eye they’ve left him sharp as ever. Bruce licks his lips and Ollie says, "I’m glad we have a chance to say goodbye."
"That’s not why I came." Bruce’s voice is low and tempered, assured (just a touch haughty, to Ollie’s delight), and Ollie laughs slightly.
"You’re not thinking of a rescue, are you?" he asks. "Some plan you’ve hatched to ride in and snatch me up at the last moment, like Lancelot and Guinevere?" Ollie’s joking makes Bruce’s face spasm, just at the corner of his jaw, a mixture of pain and anger that quiets Ollie’s gentle mockery. "Bruce," he says. "Honey. They’re going to kill me tomorrow and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ll be damned if Star’s gonna end up like Keystone."
It’s a strange place they’ve found themselves, in an Earth hurtled back into its own history as a last-ditch effort to save it from … fuck, Ollie still wasn’t sure of the specifics of it, some interstellar science experiment run rampant and utilizing all technology capable of a certain stage of advancement in order to spread itself, to kill. So here they were, turned back to a time before transistors and circuitboards and sliced bread to escape that tech, and who could have predicted that capes and vigilantes would be blamed for it all? Who could’ve seen Godfrey and his ilk forming a government that would put Cromwell to shame, systematically hunting down and publicly executing all the crimefighting types?
Kid Flash and Nightwing had staged a rescue, when Wally’d been set for the chopping block — that was how they did it in the Midwest, stocks and axes — and Godfrey had retaliated through a lottery of Keystone citizens, killing four thousand and fifty-three innocent people and destroying a third of the city to make up for being cheated of one speedster.
"You should never have stayed here!" There’s a raw hiss to Bruce’s voice, now, and Ollie hasn’t been separated from him long enough to mistake it for anything other than the kind of anguish that only Bruce can suffer, can be susceptible to: a lasting, eviscerating pain, curling up through his psyche, green absinthe and cyanide.
"Are we gonna have this argument again?" Ollie tugs at the manacles around his bleeding wrists, trying to get closer to the window even though he knows the chain only extends so far. He’s about three feet from Bruce, craning closer, wanting to get just the scent of the man, the touch of his fingers. Bruce seems to be galvanized by the same desire; he reaches through the bars, far as he can manage, and Ollie pulls and leans as Bruce shoves and stretches and —
— there. The very tips of Bruce’s fingers catch a few strands of blond hair, brush faintly against Ollie’s fevered, damp forehead, and Ollie doesn’t know which one of them gives a gasping, frustrated sob but fuck, it might as well be both. Either. “She couldn’t come,” Bruce tells Ollie, and his words are getting more rapid. Time is running out, in the small space of now, in the bigger space of Ollie’s life drawing to its close. “I wanted her to. She said there was less chance of being caught or tipping off the guards if it was only one of us. She didn’t want to —”
"It’s all right," Ollie says, when Bruce’s voice finally falters and gives out. "I know. I love you both."
"Oliver," Bruce whispers. And that cracks any composure Ollie’s holding onto, here in this cell knowing that this is the end of it and tomorrow morning, he’s for the fire. That’s how they do it in California, stakes and kindling, billowing smoke carrying the wails of the condemned up high for everybody to hear and witness. It could be worse, he’s been telling himself. In Gotham they have the wheel.
"Don’t let me die alone." Ollie doesn’t plan to say it, but the words tumble out like broken teeth, sown with the fears of deaths gone by and the scars they’ve left. Bruce looks back at him with a fierceness on his face that’s almost palpable, almost shining through those bars, that long-ago searchlight in the night sky. His hands wrap around the black wrought iron and Bruce promises, "I won’t let the pyre take you." He glances behind him and says, "I — I have to go, baby."
"Go on. Don’t get caught. I’ll need you tomorrow."
Ollie expects that when he looks up again, Bruce will be gone — the oldest Batman trick in the book. But he’s not. He’s still there, and for one terrified moment Ollie thinks that Bruce has given up, means to be caught, will be mounted on the stake beside him and they’ll have to smell each other’s flesh blackening and melting. But instead he throws a little folded-up star of paper into the cell, to the back where Ollie can stoop and pick it up, and then, then he’s gone.
Unfolded, it’s a letter covered in tiny, deep black words, Kate and Bruce mingled on the page in places and taking turns in others. Everything and anything they never got the chance to tell him, laid bare in strokes and swoops so wounded that it could be their blood smeared across the paper.
Ollie sits cross-legged against the wall and reads it, over and over and word by word, until the light is completely gone.