Two weeks.
Fourteen days of being in a mountain while the world turned without him.
Ethan lay on the bed in his assigned quarters with his phone above his face, thumb scrolling through the social media feeds with a mechanical rhythm of a man who'd found all manner of entertainment in his given circumstances. The ceiling above was the same reinforced alloy he'd been staring at for the past fourteen days. He counted the rivets. Twice. There was three hundred and forty-seven of them.
The quarters themselves were comfortably functional. Batman had designed every element to maximize utility which in all actuality was a fancy way of saying there were no unnecessary frills to make extended stays in the mountain more tolerable. A decent bed. Private bath. A desk and terminal with connections to the League's internal networks. A bookshelf with a curated selection of tactical manuals and paperback fiction courtesy of whatever algorithm Bruce used to determine what he wanted his guests to read.
None of it did a lick of good.
Ethan was bored out of his mind.
The decision to keep him in the mountain had been mutual, technically. After the briefing that Batman had given him about the possible scale of the vampire conspiracy, Clark had sat him down to explain the reasoning behind their current course of action, which was all very reasonable and infuriatingly sound in the way that logical arguments usually were.
"The vampires know something is wrong," Clark had said. "Twenty-eight of their people have gone silent in the span of a week. They'll be investigating. Looking for the source of the disruption. If they trace it back to you—"
"They don't know my identity. I always wore my suit during patrols and I didn't even went out with you guys during those specific missions. I always used my civilian identity to check around and it also fits with my background since I did say I was gonna take a break from my carrier to travel around."
"I know but we can't take any risk. There is a reason why the word accident exist. If they find out about you which I do not think they can but if they do then they will do everything and I mean EVERYTHING in their power to remove you. You are the only thing seperating them from winning completely. Without you we can't move a muscle right now"
The logic was sound. Ethan hated it, but it was sound. His detection ability made him invaluable to the investigation and simultaneously made him a priority target. If the vampire leadership identified him as the source of their exposure, they would come for him. Not with some lone agent or even a small hit squad but with the concentrated force of an organization that had spent centuries building up their assets and resources in the shadows. Hell even the people behind the scenes might just show up to kill.
At Sequence 8 given his mutated pathway he could handle his equals too easily and even someone much stronger than him but he could not handle an onslaught of ancient vampire blood magic and combat techniques that had been honed to near perfection over several centuries.
So he stayed in the mountain.
And browsed the internet.
And slowly lost his mind.
The first few days hadn't been that bad. He'd used the League's terminal to research vampire mythology in various databases, cross-referencing the DC historical records against the fragmented bits of knowledge about his past life that remained. He'd been in touch with Hermit through the Sefirah about the biological food project, which was coming along great. He'd even been able to throw together three brand new songs, albeit laced with a rather hefty dose of melancholy.
By day four he was done with productive activities.
By day seven he started counting rivets.
By day ten the internet was the only means of communication that he had with the outside world and what he discovered there wasn't a particularly nice thing.
The public didn't know about the vampires. Batman had taken great care to ensure that nobody knew about the vampires, leaving no witnesses or hiding the clues to his operations from both civilians and the many government agencies that kept an eye on things like metahumans.
The few vampires that had been caught simply ceased to appear in their usual haunts and that was all the reassurance anyone needed considering the elaborate cover stories Batman had devised for them.
But the League's increased rate of activity wasn't something that had gone unnoticed.
Ethan scrolled through a thread in a popular superhero discussion forum, his stomach twisting into knots with every line.
@MetropolisMike: Anyone else notice Superman's been way more active lately? Three times this week I've seen him flying over the financial district at night. He NEVER patrols there.
@GothamWatcher: Batman's been pulling double shifts too. My source at GCPD says he's requested access to missing persons databases going back five years. What the hell is he looking for?
@CentralCitizen: Flash was in Star City yesterday. WHY was Flash in Star City? Green Arrow's got his own city covered. Something's going on.
@TruthSeeker404: The League is coordinating something big. Cross-city operations. Unusual patrol patterns. Increased presence in civilian areas. And they're not telling anyone what it's about. As usual, the so-called heroes decide what we need to know and what we don't.
@RealTalk: Remember when Superman leveled three blocks fighting Doomsday? Remember when the League's space station almost crashed into Metropolis? They say they protect us but every major threat they face causes more damage than it prevents. Now they're running secret operations and we're just supposed to trust them?
@WakeUpSheeple: The League answers to nobody. They operate above the law, above the governments, above any form of democratic accountability. Whatever they're doing right now - whatever secret crisis they're managing behind closed doors - we'll find out about it when the collateral damage starts. Just like always.
Ethan closed the thread with a click and opened another. Then another. Then another.
It wasn't all hate mail. There were more than a few posts defending the League, extolling their virtues and criticizing the negative contributors to the conversation. Someone like this @NightLord, @Eternalslepper, @pro, @Sol, @Brass,@Lore and many other similar guys who were chewing out anyone that was spreading false news about the league and they have been doing it to multiple places too. They somehow even got 5 media outlets to take down their fake news and apologize. Guys like them probably eat testosterone for breakfast. But the haters had a considerable amount of support, and a growing amount at that. [T/L: Got to glaze the boys]
And they weren't completely undeserved.
The League was running secret operations.
They weren't sharing information with the public, making decisions that affected their lives and making billions of people around the world uneasy about something they couldn't control.
The reasons for their actions were understandable.
The fact that they saved countless innocent lives by keeping the existence of vampires secret was indisputable.
But the lack of their presence in the minds of the public was damaging to their reputation, something they cared about despite their insistence on being more about the mission than ideals.
Ethan set his phone down on the bed and stared at the ceiling.
Three hundred and forty-seven rivets.
He was starting to wonder if the number meant anything or if it was just an idiosyncrasy of manufacturers when a memory floated up unbidden.
Eleven days ago.
Day three of his confinement. The boredom had set in deep roots, threatening to turn into full-blown depression. Ethan had walked up and down the length of his quarters for what felt like an eternity, read two tactical manuals from cover to cover and not remembered a single bullet point, and was debating with himself if he should ask Batman if the mountain complex had a gym when he heard it.
The unmistakable sounds of a fight being waged somewhere in the building corridors. Not the muffled thuds of a punching bag or the evenly spaced impacts of a single combatant testing their skills against a training dummy.
No, these were the sounds of two very well-trained warriors sparring, the sharp crackle of their movements echoing through the halls.
Ethan had followed the sound to a training room he didn't know was there - a wide, matted space with reinforced walls and a weapons rack stocked with everything from bo staffs to throwing knives. The ceiling was high enough to allow for acrobatics and the lights had been dimmed to simulate the conditions of an outdoors fight.
Green Arrow and Black Canary stood in the middle of the matting.
They moved like water and lightning. Oliver Queen was fast and efficient as he had learned to be on the island, using every tool at his disposal and his own skills and determination to survive. He attacked with the precision of a man who knew exactly where to hit, what pressure points to hit, and where a man would naturally pull back and where his opponent would push him. Dinah Lance met his skill with her own, fluid movements and a lifetime of grappling with her own humanity.
Ethan had watched from the doorway for several minutes, mesmerized. In his last life (and current one, apparently) he'd never seen a fight like this. The coiled violence. The lightning-fast responses. The way two fighters had turned into something so beautiful and brutal it made his skin prickle.
"You going to stand there all day, or are you going to come in?"
Oliver's voice cut into Ethan's thoughts. The bowman hadn't even turned to look at him, he'd apparently picked up on Ethan's presence through some kind of sixth sense.
"I didn't want to interrupt," Ethan said.
"You're not interrupting. We're between rounds." Oliver turned to face him, rolling his shoulders. "Dinah was about to concede anyway."
"I was about to break your arm, actually," Dinah corrected, dabbing at the sweat on her brow with a towel. "But sure. Let's call it a tie."
"Would you mind if I joined?" The words tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop them. "I could use the training. And I'm going insane sitting in that room."
Oliver and Dinah shared a look that said a thousand things without needing to say anything
"Sure," Oliver said. "Why not? Let's see what you've got."
What Ethan had, apparently, was a whole lot more than either of them expected.
They began with the basics. Oliver was teaching Ethan basic stances, guards and attacks a decent fighter would employ as a base for more advanced techniques.
Ethan absorbed it all at once,
After a few minutes of stumbling, not that impressively for a novice. Immediately. With the first demonstration, Oliver produced a single defensive stance (weight, position of arms, feet), and Ethan duplicated it on his first try.
"Okay" Oliver said blinking.
"That was, let's try something harder."
Combinations. Defensive transitions, counterattacks, footwork patterns necessitating simultaneous movement of both upper and lower body.
Ethan executed them effortlessly
Dinah folding her arms and studying Ethan's movements carefully. "He's not just mimicking movements, but realizing the principles. See how he adjusts his weight? It's not following the your model, but it works for him."
"I noticed" Oliver said thoughtfully. "Alright, kid, let's try sparring. Not too hard, but real. I want to see how you perform under pressure."
They only lasted for twelve seconds before Oliver paused catching his breath. He tested Ethan, a good fighter testing out his skills against an unknown opponent, looking for weaknesses. Ethan countered his probing with blocking, deflected one punch, countered a hook with a jab that narrowly missed Oliver's ribs.
"Again" Oliver said.
This time the bout lasted twenty seconds. Oliver tried to test him harder, adding feints, varying the pace, but Ethan was adjusting with every second, adapting to new conditions. He wasn't merely learning while sparring, but thinking, analyzing and improving and making everything thought a part of him
It wasn't a gradual increase in progress rather he was exponentially getting better every moment
It took three hours since they entered the gym for Oliver to stop holding back. They had sparred in earnest the last hour, and, after seeing Ethan perform several impressive finishing moves, Oliver was genuinely impressed with the young man's skill.
Even more so because Ethan had also improved exponentially during the long bout.
By the end of the first hour he was keeping up with him, the second - occasionally besting him and the third, Dinah joined in, fighting Ethan alone. And the fourth, they stopped, two of them sweating freely, but Ethan, despite the effort, looked calm and composed.
What Oliver saw when he finally pulled out of the fight, was a mixture of emotions in his opponent that Dinah managed to conceal with effort. Admiration mixed with unease.
"How long have you been training" he asked.
"Seriously? About three hours. Since we started."
"That's not possible, you couldn't -"
Oliver shook his head. "What are you?"
"Lucky, I guess."
"That's not luck. There are talents in genetics, but even the best in the genetic lottery don't win this particular lottery" Oliver said. "Look, I've trained with the best fighters, living and in this city. Shiva, Bronze Tiger, Batman, I know when someone has inborn talent, not taught skill, and you somehow seem to have both though it doesn't seem to be that high. Did you learn those from watching people fight"
"I did see some videos related to fighting before since I did want to start my hero carrier too like you guys and knowing how to fight is essential to this" Ethan thought, swallowing hard. The Sequence Eight of Sun pathway Light Supplicant had blessed him with enhanced physical conditions and from what he could tell he also somehow got combat talents from other pathways that relies on combat somehow from this spar. Maybe the others also got things from me?
"And you're saying I actually could be one of the best?"
"I'm saying if you keep training like this, for perhaps a year or two, you may become best at combat. Sure you might not be the strongest or the toughest or the fastest but on skill alone you would be unmatched but that relies on many things"
"What are they?" Ethan was dying to know. "Is it something I don't have?"
"No, it relies on your willpower, your skill, and your attitude" said Oliver suddenly. "Which, by the way, is outstanding. Even if you don't have the skill. Because it takes time to learn which given from this spar that we had you will reach that state very quickly but for that you need to continue training. You have talent but talent without polishing is worthless. You might as well not have it"
The young man didn't know how to respond. Oliver was giving him advice, useful and well-meant, but he was also telling the truth.
"Oliver. Have they found anything about the vampires?" Ethan asked the question he was dying to know
The last question caught Arrow mid-stroke, polishing the bow he inspected with his fingertips.
"Batman's following up on financial trails. Clark is scouting the perimeter of the suspected locations, and Diana is checking in with people. People who know what the ancient vampires are capable of, in case you're wondering. Nothing solid, though."
Arrow laid down the weapon, replacing it with a knowing look
"Honestly, this might turn into something bigger than we anticipated. The more Bruce examines, the more strings lead to other vampires, which in turn have more strings attached to something much worse. We're pulling the thread, and the more we pull, the more we realize the web's bigger than expected."
"That's not exactly good news" Ethan replied.
"As far as I understand from Bruce, it's always bad news. You did the right thing, identifying the vampires, so don't let anyone convince you otherwise. In the meantime, it really is best to stay out and let us handle the part of the job involving punches and kicks. Just in case punching and kicking aren't enough" said Oliver, resuming his inspection of the weapon.
"Then we punch harder."
Present day.
Ethan stared at the phone in his hand, Oliver's words dissolving into the static of two weeks' worth of anxious thoughts. The internet had not been kinder in the days since.
In fact, the vitriol directed at the League seemed to be growing exponentially courtesy to Vampires. A prominent political commentator had written an op-ed on the League recently, criticizing their lack of transparency.
A hashtag campaign was erupting on social media demanding answers; #TransparencyNow had five hundred thousand posts in four days. Three members of congress had raised the issue publicly, demanding hearings on metahuman oversight.
None of them knew about the vampires.
None of them knew that the League was responding to a genuine and present existential threat instead of posturing for power. The League couldn't tell them for that would cause too much Chaos. Chaos which the league can't handle right and chaos which the people behind the scenes are desperately trying to do now. Batman had warned them in no uncertain terms that doing so would be the best way for the League to get itself exterminated.
Ethan scrolled past another thread accusing Superman of running an illegal surveillance state and felt a familiar knot of guilt in his chest.
They're saving the world and people are trying to ruin it for them. Again. And here I am, counting rivets in a mountain, waiting for the end of the world to come.
His phone beeped, another hashtag blooming on the trending topics. Another condemnation. Another indictment. Another distraction from the work he needed to do. He set the phone down on the table. There were three hundred and forty-seven rivets in total. He would count them again, for the third time. There was nothing else he could do.
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T/L: Sorry for the late Update. I had too many irl problems. But don't worry. Now all those problems are mostly finished. I will try my best to make it up for not uploading this week