strongerthanyouknow | { we're starting fires 'til our lives are burning gold

My name is Oliver Queen.
They called me Al Sahm Al Akhdar and for the past five years I have been an assassin. A killer. After the explosion on Lian Yu I was found by a woman. Nyssa. She brought me home to her father, to the League of Assassins.

R'as saw potential in me, saw the things I had learned from Slade and gave me a home. A purpose. So for five years I did his bidding. Killed who he told me to kill. I was his. I forgot my name and lived only for the next assignment, the next mission.

There were rumors in Nanda Parbat that he was going to call me his heir, the next Demon when he chose to step down. Naturally that didn't sit well with his daughters or the factions within the League that had no desire to see an outsider as their next leader. It didn't sit well with R'as when I refused to marry his daughter either. But how could I when I still remember her?

So I fought.
I killed.
I ran.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

When Oliver crawls onto the beach, he is exhausted. Broken and the only reason he hasn't bled to death is likely the salt water he had been floating in. His armor is gone, the only weapon he has left is a knife clutched in one hand. A knife meant for those who had betrayed him and dumped him in the water to die.

Another island.
His thoughts are fragmented, scattered as he claws his way out of the surf. He wants to keep moving but his limbs have failed him.

If he survives, he will have his revenge.
He will return to Nanda Parbat and he will kill everyone who stood against him. A small comfort as his world shifts from grey to black.

She races the wind. Tendrils of blonde hair breaking loose from the intricate braids she sat through only an hour ago having piled on her head. Arms out, fearless, for a few seconds, as the wind rips through her, before she laughs and digs her fingers into the dark mane of the horse beneath her, leaning back in.

They say she flies: small, and golden, and fearless. Just like her name.
Nothing short of a good fight makes her feel this free. Nothing.

Her heart is high in her chest, beating against the back of her throat, through quick breaths in and out her nose, as they break through the emerald trees and the foreground explodes into an endless horizon of ocean every shifting blue and silver no gemstone could ever even dream of one day becoming. The world is gorgeous beyond even dreams here.

The shining brilliance of Paradise Island reflected in ease and exhileration as she sweeps her gaze down the beach she'd broken on to. The endless smooth sand of -- Καναρίνι's brow furrowed on a black form, huddled to the beach. Her heart hard with shock and a trill of fear. Had one of her sisters fallen? Who would have even been on patrol this morning?

"Go! Now!" she cried, and the back of her boots don't even need to drive in, because the horse is already obeying as her. Joyful sprint turning fierce in that one heartbeat. Fast as it had been earlier. No, even faster. Need driving necessity. They're still at a gallop when she launches herself off. A trained tumble, through the air, into the sand, and with one expert hand, she's right back up on her feet running.

She's halfway to there, when she can see too clearly. It's a man. A man on Paradise Island. In direct opposition to Aphrodite's, Law. Still, Καναρίνι approached, hand reaching for the blade at her belt, even as the sword at her back called out more. But he didn't look ready to spring. Not even with the knife clasped in his hand.

He looked half-dead, blood saturating him and the sand all around him.

It's the last step within ten feet from him that makes her heart jerk hard.
The word pulling from her lungs with ice, to the scent salt and blood.
Hitting as hard as though he'd lodged that dagger between her ribs.

"Ollie?" Impossible. That face. He's long dead.

He wakes to the sound of his heartbeat drumming in his ears.

No. Not a heartbeat.
Hooves.

Stand up. Fight.
Digging within, digging beyond his failing strength to summon the will to move. He is Al Sahm Al Akhdar and he will not die on his knees. He will meet any threat on his feet.

A snarl has him pushing up, but he gets no further than that.

The vision whites out everything else, his pain, his fury, even his desire for revenge. Sara. Shining in white, her hair cascading around her like a halo of gold. Sara. It's her and she remembers his name.

For the first time in five years, Oliver Queen smiles before he collapses back to the wet sand.

She found him.

Oliver Queen can't be alive.

Oliver Queen sank with The Gambit.

Still Oliver Queen surges from the ground with alarmingly ferocious speed and the growl of a mad dying animal only to stare at her with dark, desperate, swimming, far away eyes in a face of streaked blood and sea gaunt skin. The trick of a second, of only gazes meeting, before Oliver Queen is falling back to the sand like someone invisible had pinioned him back to the bloody ground.

"No, no, no," Sara's on her knees without remembering crossing those last few feet. Bloody sand getting on her skin, and the white of her skirt. Not battle-ready out here joy riding. Not ready for this. "Hey." Her hands are on his shoulders and she's trying to get him back flat, even while struggling with the impossible urge to hug him, touch his face, his hands, his cheeks, and the knowledge she probably shouldn't touch him. "You stay with me."

She can't tell where he's hurt yet, but there's so much blood and that much blood doesn't come from nowhere. None of her tools are with her for this either, but she can't bear the thought of him dying here. Again. Somehow alive long enough to die in front of her this time. Not just swallowed in the crack of that ship that still broke apart in rare nightmares of it.

He couldn't have come here, just to die. She wouldn't let him.
Even if a man alive on Paradise Island was all but a death sentence waiting.

Edited 2017-11-27 19:17 (UTC)

The sand isn't cold.
Good. The water is almost warm and Oliver could drift in that warmth. He can't remember the last time he was really warm. Maybe back on the Gambit? Certainly not on Lian Yu or Nanda Parbat. No. Those places were hard and cold and had turned him similarly hard and cold.

Oliver is vaguely aware that he's going into shock. There are hands on his shoulders and a familiar voice over him. Urging him to stay conscious, to stay awake just a little while longer even as shock threatens to steal him under again.

His forearms are covered in slashes. Defensive wounds. A puncture wound to a shoulder and another in his thigh, a vicious stab wound to his side and another in the back. Bruises everywhere. A solid lump on the head where he'd been struck before being thrown into the water. Oliver can catalog each injury and who it had come from. Payback he was going to deliver in full when the time came.

Provided he lives that long.

"Sara." A weak whisper.
He had dreamed of her. Dreamed of warm hands and golden hair and her voice saying his name. One of the rare, good dreams that Oliver had that didn't end in blood and bodies.

"You found me."

Sara.

Sara.

It rips through her chest, through her heart, like it's made of tissue paper, stealing her breath and for one blinding second all she can even do is hear the question in her head: when was the last time anyone had called her Sara? Five years ago? Six? Before the choice. Before her new name. Her whole new life.

Sara. You found me.

That voice she'd never forgotten jamming itself between her ears, into the entire space inside her rib cage. Warm, and familiar, and somehow ... not. Something was different. Something hard and rough rasping through it, left by his time in the sea likely, and from all of this pain and agony.

Sara. You found me.

"I di--you--" Her voice seemed to have come back, but not with an ability for the right order of thoughts turning into words as her mind scrambled in search of order. Her mind turning then to what it always did then. Focus, καναρίνι. Find the greatest need. Start there. The greatest need. The greatest need. He was wounded and bleeding out. He needed to be treated. Needed to be saved. She needed to make it to her things, and back here.

Without anyone seeing him, and without anyone becoming suspicious of what she was doing, where or why.

Which meant most of all, "We have to move you. You're not going to like this."
If he managed to stay conscious at all, losing so much blood.

She's even more beautiful than he remembered. Hair longer and slipping free from countless intricate braids. Windswept and striking and even in his shock Oliver can't take his eyes from her.

But he can't die here.
He won't.
There are betrayals that will be answered in blood and death and pain.

Oliver sets his jaw against the pain. Sets his will against it and pushes hard. He has endured worse. He will continue to endure if only for the sake of revenge.

A weak cough that sends fire through him and he grabs onto that pain, using it to anchor him in the world around him. He extends a hand. "Pain and I came to an understanding a long time ago."

Because even now, even after fighting for his life, running and fighting to simply stay alive, Oliver trusts her.

It feels unreal. It all feels unreal, and so desperate dangerous. He extends a hand and καναρίνι's eyes go to the trees and the cliff first, to the necessity of being certain no one is here, no one is watching, no one can come and take him from her already, even now when it feel impossible he's even real. But there's no one there. It's just them, and the horse, on the beach.

She rocks back on to her feet, and digs her heels in, to help support his weight while standing. The same moment she's looking over her shoulder and holding her other hand out, making a clicking noise with her tongue against the top of her mouth to call her mount closer, too. "You can use the horse. He's gentle when he needs to be."

He's a warhorse when he doesn't, and even if καναρίνι's voice is a riot of clear apology that feels like it's shattering her heart, for not stepping closer, for not sliding under his arm to help even more, she's clad in white, and it's already dotted red, along with parts of her sand caked legs, and she has to be able to get back into the city and out. She'll never manage covered in blood.

"Over here." She says softly, even if there's panic in her voice, as the horse gets closer. "You know how this goes."
Bloody and beaten people happened. Wargames and practice for it was nothing new on Paradise Island.

Edited 2017-11-30 03:59 (UTC)

He swallows any sound of pain as she helps him to his feet. Oliver doesn't presume to ask for more, to feel warmth pressed against his side for the sake of being there, never mind the fact that he's only on his feet because he wills it.

The warhorse is far larger than the steppe ponies he trained on. Small and light creatures meant for long distances and archery training. As Sara calls it closer he understands. Oliver knows what needs to be done even if it will cost him the last of his strength. He wraps the reins tightly around one hand, gripping the pommel. Not once does he question Sara or her intent.

He can't swallow the strangled sound of agony as he hoists himself up, barely healed wounds tearing open again and fresh blood flowing across his skin. "Rope," he rasps. "When I pass out." She'll have to tie him to the saddle to keep him from falling.

The sound of pain ripped from Oliver as he hoisted himself high, has her looking in every direction too fast. At him and whether he's going to fall right over the other side, and every direction around them. The peaceful waving green trees and the long stretches of pale sand and the endless blue waters, looking for the eyes that must have heard it like a bullhorn. A man. A man on Paradise Island. A man on Paradise Island a gasp away from death already.

But it comes back, as Oliver, bleeding all over himself, and now her horse, tells her what to do with him. Like he isn't dying.

"I know what I'm doing," she says, a little faster than she expects it to come out, with her last words taking so much effort to string to choices, but something in it pricks and prickles. Because she does. She knows what she's doing, and she's proved as much. Again, and again. That she knows what she's doing, and she earned her place at The Princess' side just as much as she'd been chosen for it. She's knows what to do.

Which . . . is actually pulling out a length of rope, to do what he said, but she'd known that would probably coming before he had said it. Just like she already knew where they were headed, and how fast they probably needed to get there, for her to get away and get back . . . before he decided to bleed out on her all over again. The knots go tight, and after a tug, καναρίνι does say, quietly. "I am sorry for this."

Which isn't hard to question what she means, when a second later, her hand finds not another rope, but the flat, strong side of the stallions neck under her fingers and palm, and she makes another of those noises. Faint but distinct, tongue against the top of her mouth, and the barest edge of a whistle right at the end, and then they're running as one. The horse staying beside her, even when her hand falls away and he could outpace her quickly.

To the caves, with every sprinting step intoning a desperate prayer to the Goddess Aceso,
that Oliver doesn't die now because she's trying to save him.

As he steadies himself on the saddle, Oliver grips it with all of his remaining strength. The world is going grey and fuzzy around the edges and soon even his willpower won't be enough to keep him conscious and aware. He's bleeding to death and if that doesn't take him the exhaustion and dehydration will.

The horse begins to move and every jolt of the hooves on the sand pushes him a little deeper into the world where things are grey and muddled.

Sara. Sara. Sara. Her name drummed into his head with every pound of the horse's steps as Oliver begins to drift. Remembering the steppes, where the air was crisp, clean and frigid, riding his pony with nothing more than his bow and a full quiver of arrows. Free.

He is free again. With her.

Sara

The world goes from grey to black as the horse pulls up to a halt and Oliver does his best to pitch forward, across the muscular neck of the horse to keep from falling.

She doesn't stop moving forward, but even then, she can't stop looking backward. Finger reaching out to brush the neck of the great beast next to her, and so much taller. No fear in her about whether he'll skitter, or they'll collide, or if there was a chance fo trampling. It's only for the man in the saddle, and every sound that comes from him, his body, and the saddle with all four of them in flight.

Hitting the rockier outcroppings puts them close, and when she finally can, she calls him to a stop, too. Her heartbeat is in her ears. Her teeth. Everything feels like it has the race and vibration of it, as she comes back to where Oliver is sprawled, looking both nothing like a threat and everything almost like one (black clothes, ripped, bloodied, far more built than she remembers). "We're here."

She's most than mostly certain he's unconcious, but she says it the way you would.
Out of habit when speaking to something both wounded and possibly predator.

An announcement, even if she's still mostly out of breath, muscles gone loose and sliding, throbbing everywhere with the run. There's a careful air to figure out if he is or isn't out before she touches the knots again, in case it's directing him, or simply keeping him from tumbling all of this space to the hard stone floor.

He is barely conscious by the time the horse pulls to a halt at the caves. Pain and blood loss and exhaustion have tipped Oliver towards unconsciousness even as familiar hands tug at the knots on the rope to free him. The world shifts and bobbles as warm and achingly familiar hands pull him down from the mount.

Sara.
His light.
His beloved.

Oliver groans as she helps him down and keeps him from crashing headfirst to the hard ground. Safe. He's safe with her. His Saraa.

"S'ra," a barely there mutter as he staggers hard.

His eyes are rolling. His body sluggish. There's blood all over her saddle and, looking back the way they've come, with the expert focus of her training, she can see spots of the trail of blood that has flown from them on this way. She'll need to see to that as well, between leaving and getting back, and doing both in time enough for him not to pass and out and die in her absence.

Her name -- that name -- still punches into the soft of her heart, the filigree of her lungs, taking out more than it puts in. But Oliver's saying it as he's stumbling, and she's shouting, "Hey! Hey!" Trying to catch him even as he's falling. Though it's in the middle of it that she knows down is the better direction than up. They aren't far from the front of the cave, but no one would have cause to come down this way. No one had for years.

It's easier to just help him down, rather than back. He probably can't hear her any better than he can talk, but she tells him anyway, once he's down on the hard ground. "You have to stay here. For your own safety. I'll be back as soon as I can."

He's exhausted. Worn beyond measure.
There is little left that he has to give at this point. Oliver has fought and struggled to this moment and even given his stubborn nature and determination, there is only so much more that he can offer.

Sara. She found him.
Bright and shining and while he isn't sure if he's dead or alive he's certain that she is the reason he's still breathing.

He trusts her.
His Sara.

The cave is dark and hidden and it speaks to Oliver so much of his home for the past few years. A life hidden in darkness. A life bathed in blood. He startles badly, throwing off the blankets and clinging to his knife like a lifeline.

Sara?
Sara!

Had he screamed her name? He can't be sure.

καναρίνι would say she can't remember the last time she was this scared, but it would be a lie.

It's the day she washed up here, starving, terrified, all but drown. But, like she's been taught for years now, you don't fight fear. You run with it, you use it, and καναρίνι has gotten very good at that. She takes the horse but not the saddle, and she stops only to rinse the blood from her skin. She avoids people where she has to, and tries to hurry conversations where she can.

Every second is one second too long, is one second she's too late, is one second where she must have fallen off her horse and hit her head because Oliver Queen can't be real and a man can't step foot on to Paradise Island, but she can't stop. She can't stop until she has everything she has the horse laden with blankets and everything she could pack without arousing too much suspicion.

The ride back feels like it takes forever. Each closer space covered feeling only like it's taking too long, until she can reach the beach and the caves beneath the far caves beneath the cliffs. She can't entirely tell if there's yelling or if it's the crash of the waves on the rocks. She fills her arms and heads for the first opening Oliver had made, desperately hoping that he's still alive, and he is.

And he is shouting.

"I'm here," she says, as the noise she couldn't quite pull from the waves suddenly sounds deafening when she's near him. Like the whole island will hear. His voice, and her wrong name. "I'm here." Even though he looks more than half-crazed and the smell of blood has started to grow since she left. He's armed. Again. She freezes but then keeps moving. Her sandals are light on the ground, thin and quiet, as she drops the armful by him, digging for her kit. "You need to lay back down."

"You can't keep moving this much. You'll bleed out." She wonders if shock can last this long. For him. Or her.

It had to have been a dream. Some form of hallucination even if Oliver didn't recall how he got from the beach to the cave he found himself in. It had to be because Sara had been stolen from him. Screaming his name as she was sucked away by the water a second time when the Amazo went down.

But then she's there. Her hair a shower of gold, her arms laden with things and Oliver stills instantly.

It wasn't a dream.
Sara had found him.

He sinks to his knees, dizzy and exhausted as she begins to unpack things. Tools of healing. Thread. Water. Oliver is too worn to do anything more than obey. When he is directed to lay down, he lays. Move this way or that and he does. But he does manage to rasp a question.

"Where are we?"

He obeys, silent and weak and closer to death than she can guess, but he does anyway, which is more than she really expects. She can't stop the sharp inhale of breath or the worried look, mixing horror and confusion more and more potent each time she has to remove another piece of his clothing to reach another wound and finds him only further and further scarred.

She was no novice to scars. καναρίνι, who learned to fall into suit and stride, to say with her sisters, still laughing even at the most dire of seconds, complain tomorrow, if you're still alive. You didn't become an Amazong without knowing them all intimately, both on your skin and on others, training for war every day as though it was already raining down from the heavens. But this. This was something else. She didn't know what it was.

But the brutality of the strikes and the lack of care when it was given sung in every ragged ridge of even the scars that weren't open, it's like a map she can read with a compass to translate the words.

καναρίνι started a little at the sound of his voice, assuming he might have passed out from the pain of cleaning out and stitching up five wounds already. The question isn't any easier than the darting, trapped bird of her heart at that voice. At the scar, the one she'd almost let her self-reach out a finger to trace in confused, sympathetic horror.

"Paradise." Someone said that, and that alone, to her when she first asked. It's hollower on her lips this time than her memory of how it was given to her. Because it will not be that for him. Anything offered or earned by her here will not be extended to him through grace. She knotted her last stitch on this one.

"The island. Specifically. Paradise Island."
It probably won't be for her either, when she's discovered.

He is weak, but he is not yet dead. Pain sings along his nerves, but he can breathe through it. Ignore it. It is not the first or the last time he has felt pain.

Oliver can hear her quiet reactions as they strip him free from his waterlogged and ragged clothes. Tattoos and scars that had come long after Lian Yu littered his skin, evidence of brutal struggle after struggle for survival. The League needed their members strong and the strong ones were the ones who did not die in training.

Paradise.
And he had landed in hell, taken in by the Demon himself.

"Good." His eyes drift closed. "You deserve paradise."

She didn't know what to do with those words. Everything she'd come to love and everything she'd once lost seemed to have thrown itself into a complete disarray, made of Oliver's voice in her ears and Oliver's blood on her hands. Too real. Too here. Too alive. Ripping up ghosts and graves she thought she'd made peace with when she took her name and chose the only future available.

"You should save your strength," she says,

like the only thing she's thinking isn't 'you're supposed to be dead.'

A weak sound that was almost a chuckle before tapering off into a wet sounding cough. "I will not die this day." Nor will he die the next. A mantra that had carried him both through Lian Yu and later through Nada Parbat. The simple determination to not die, to not succumb to injury or weakness or even exposure. Al Sahm Al Akhdar set his will against the world and he would continue to do so.

His eyes drift closed. There is water in his belly and his limbs are finally warming.

"I will not die this day. I will have my revenge. I will kill them all."

The first time he says it the corner of Sara's mouth almost flutters, at the almost familiarity in the way that is put, the way her sisters would, but the second repetition of the words, harder, colder, firmer, like cementing bricks, makes a shiver run down her spine. The words after those chasing it with something sharper, that has her sitting back and looking back up toward Oliver's face, where his eyes are closed.

"Kill all who?" Which starts what can't be stopped. "Who did this to you?"

Edited 2017-12-05 00:52 (UTC)

The words are hard and cold because he means for them to be. Oliver takes a long, slow breath. He registers the shift in her voice but his awareness is drifting, tugging him down into sleep as his body demands rest.

"The League of Assassins. The Demon thinks he can sacrifice his heir." A chilly smile. "But I will have my revenge. The Lazarus pit will not save him this time."

Sara's brow furrowed looking down at him. His voice thick, slightly slurred, like he might be about to finally pass out or fall asleep, one, the other, or both. His body probably needed them both. But it doesn't stop him from smiling that strange slash of s smile that reminds her too much of metal. Sharp and cold. Hard under her breastbone. Confusing in her chest.

"The League of--" She cannot have heard that right. Or demons. Or revenge. Or sacrifices.

Oliver Queen was a spoiled rich boy who drowned in a surprise accident.

Oliver Queen was a very different man.
While he can hear the hesitation in her voice, the confusion, he can no longer fight his body's demand for sleep. Rest. In time he would heal and in time he would return to the League and have his revenge.

They will all die.

He sleeps, dreaming of golden hair and laughter and small, warm hands on his skin.

Oliver wakes and the sun has shifted in the sky. Hours perhaps, or even days had passed. He can hear the crash of surf as he remains still, assessing his injuries. Aching and in pain, but nothing that he couldn't stomach.

He starts to move, to sit up and take in where he was with a far clearer head.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject