Chapter Text
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, Ollie. He didn’t even touch me.” Sara sighs as she balances her phone between her ear and injured shoulder which maybe isn’t the smartest move.
“Did you—“
“No, I didn’t see his face. No, I didn’t recognize his voice. No, I don’t know who he is. Ollie. I’m tired. I’m hangry. I’m in pain despite the horse pills I took. I don’t want to be interrogated right now.”
He sighs. “Understood. Get some rest, Sara.”
“I will.” She lets out a tired breath. “Good night, Ollie. You get some rest too.”
“You know I won’t.”
“Yeah. I know.” She pulls the phone from her shoulder and winces as it pulls at her stitches.
“You should really be more careful.”
Sara flips around and her knees almost buckle from the pain. Gentle hands grab her elbows to steady her and she flinches back from the touch.
“Easy Sara Bell.”
Sara goes still, the voice familiar yet so different, but the nickname rolls off his tongue the same way. Her eyes fill with tears of disbelief. “No. No.” She forces herself to look up at the masked figure, dressed in familiar League of Assassins armor, the kind that she’s seen Nyssa in countless times. The kind that only someone of her status would wear. Someone like her…
“You’re married to Nyssa?” It’s not the question she means to ask, nor the one she wants to, but it’s the one that she asks.
He chuckles darkly, his voice gruffer than she remembers, deeper not with age but with wear. “And you’re her beloved. Gotta say, I didn’t expect her to keep it so in the family.”
The tears finally fall and she pulls down the cloth obscuring his face with trembling hands.
And staring back at her is the brother she lost eight years before. The brother she thought she would never see again. The brother who is somehow miraculously alive.
It hits her, the rumors she’s heard of Nyssa’s husband. A ruthless assassin with a murderous rage, slaughtered through countless bodies. Insatiable bloodlust, nearly inhuman from his monstrous thirst to kill.
It doesn’t make sense. It’s incompatible with the brother that has lived in her memories, encased in rose colored glass, forever the young man she loved who drowned all those years ago.
Barry, who would stay up with her while she painted his nails and they talked about boys. Barry, whose nose was always stuck in a book with a litany of facts that fascinated him spilling out as he traced the words on the page. Barry, who was always kind, his compassion unmatched by anyone she knew.
How can he… how could he…
“Hey, Sara,” Barry whispers.
“Barry,” she chokes out, gripping his arms as she feels her legs once again start to give out. “I don’t understand. You—“
“Died? Yeah. Though, not when you think. I was rescued by the League when… the boat sank. It wasn’t easy. I started as dirt beneath their shoe. I trained until I bled. Trained until others bled. And then… I lost too much blood and I figured it was over. Until it wasn’t. And then I didn’t care about how much blood was shed, mine or my opponent, and at some point the only blood shed was theirs.”
The horror grows over Sara’s face, her gut churning over Barry’s words. She knew, distantly, had heard enough from Nyssa, but to see someone she loves, someone she loves who was not born into it, warped into something so unrecognizable… it makes her sick and she hates herself for it.
“You’re going back,” she says.
He smiles sadly, taking her hand in his. “You know I have to.”
“I know,” Sara whispers.
Barry pulls her pinky finger into his. “You’ll see me again.”
“Last time you said that you drowned in the China Sea.”
“And you saw me again.” He shakes her hand, pinky fingers still interlocked. “You’ll be okay, Sara Bell.”
“I don’t know how.”
“You will.”
“And you’ll come back?”
He tightens his pinky around hers. “A pinky promise is a pinky promise.”
When his finger slips away, she feels as though he’s slipping away too.
Her eyes swell with tears and when she pulls her hand away from wiping her eyes, he’s gone.
.-~*~-.
They’re in a standstill.
Barry’s has pulled the cloth back over his face slinking out of Sara’s window and Laurel about to enter Sara’s apartment from the fire escape that he was just about to escape down.
He’s holding back his instincts, to succumb to the bloodlust and get rid of the witness, because while he was prepared to face Sara, the beloved of the daughter of the Demon, he’s not prepared to face down his big sister, the woman who was never supposed to get wrapped up in any of this.
“Who are you?” Laurel says darkly. “Did you hurt her?”
It had always been the four of them, Laurel, Sara, Iris and Barry.
Well, no. That’s not true. It wasn’t always the four of them.
But ever since the four had become siblings, they swore to always choose each other, to always believe each other, and to always be there for each other.
Which is why when Laurel discovered that Oliver had been cheating on her with her own brother, the betrayal stung so deep.
Barry had been there through every one of her heartbreaks. He knew how hard she loved. How much the people she loved meant to her.
And for him to…
Behind her back…
There was evidence of their affair littered in his phone and computer. It was wrong to look through it, especially after he had died, but she needed to know.
Months worth of messages, incriminating conversations filled with flirtatious back and forth and photos exchanged that could not be misconstrued as anything platonic that she wished she could wipe from her mind, both at the discovery and also something she never wanted to see of her brother.
She had slammed his computer shut when she reached that point of the thread.
It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t.
Because it meant that her brother and her boyfriend were both dead and they… together, they were…
Sara wasn’t much help, too consumed by her grief. And maybe Laurel should’ve been too, but she was too angry. Too hurt.
When Oliver came back, when he told her the truth, and five years worth of bitterness and resentment was finally lifted for her brother she so desperately wanted to believe hadn’t meant to hurt her.
But it was five years too late. The hurt had festered and his memory was forever tainted by what he and Oliver did.
Eight years later and she still struggles to think about him, because of the guilt of how angry she was with him for so long and for what he did and for how she felt and for how unfair it was that he was dead and she still felt all of this.
Oh what she would do to get him back and just talk. Talk again like they’re teenagers again, him and Sara and Iris and her, them against the world.
But now it’s the world against them. And Barry’s not here anymore to face it with her.
It’s too much, seeing her again. The hunger gnaws at him from the inside out, searing through his veins, and he cannot hurt Laurel.
He needs to get away. He needs to hunt.
And so he flees, like a coward, and a predator searches for his prey.
.-~*~-.
“There’s another body.”
Oliver freezes at Felicity’s words.
“Simon Lacroix.”
“Simon Lacroix,” Oliver repeats. “The mercenary archer who we were trying to track down before… all of this?”
“Seems a little convenient, huh? Too much of a coincidence?”
“How was he killed?”
“Brutally,” Felicity says. “Dismembered. Slowly. It’s gory. Like Rated R, need a parent’s permission to go see it in the theatre, kind of Rated R. I had to look at the photos and trust me you do not want to have to see them too.”
“I think I do.”
Felicity sighs. “Alright. But I’m not gonna look at them again.”
Felicity wasn’t exaggerating when she said it was gory. Lacroix is barely recognizable beneath the pool of blood and the stray pieces of limbs and torso disconnected from his head which remains perfectly intact.
“You think this is the same guy? I mean… the MO—“
“It’s definitely excessive,” Oliver agrees. “Even for the League.”
“But if it’s the same person—“
“Then he’s a much bigger threat than we anticipated.” Oliver runs a hand over his face. “I hate to say it, but it’s starting to line up with the Demon’s Knight.”
“Nyssa’s husband?” Felicity asks. “Like… the Nyssa who Sara is currently in a secret relationship with?”
“Yes,” Oliver says gravely.
“Well shit.”
Oliver silently agrees. It’s entirely possibly he stopped Thea from killing Sara so he can kill her himself. Or he is protecting her on Nyssa’s behalf which makes even less sense. Either way, they need to get Sara to safety.
“The question is,” Oliver says, studying the photo, dread stirring in his gut. “What is his motive?”