HOMEMADE DYNAMITE !
❝ VENDETTA. ❞

"JESS. JUST STAY HERE. YOU CAN'T LEAVE RACHEL ALONE." Dick's reasoning seemed fair enough, but the purple haired girl was having none of it, her arms crossed and eyebrow raised (she'd just watched this chic get possessed by a demon. Horror films were not her type of genre. Or life style. At all).

"She's literally in a convent full of fucking nuns, Dick!" Jess hissed bewilderedly. Clearly his point was ridiculous. "What are they gonna do?! Nail her to a cross?!"

"That joke was made in really poor taste so I'm gonna pretend you didn't say it," Dick said, opening the passenger side and placing a foot in before turning back, "Don't let her out of your sight."

Jess stuck her middle finger up indignantly. Abby leant across the car to peer up at her through Dick's door. "He has that effect on most people, Jess."

"You're not helping," Dick muttered, forcing Abby to move back as he sat down and buckled in, pulling the door shut. He looked to her, "We really need to work on presenting a united front."

Abby rolled her eyes, "She's seventeen, Dick. A united front is gonna do fuck all if she doesn't wanna do what we're asking."

Satisfied with his grunt of a reply, Abby shook her head and pushed the car into first gear. The two rolled out of the drive, and she quickly moved through the gears, shooting off down the road. They left a fast disappearing Jess in their rear view mirror, middle finger raised in the air after them.

Dick reached into the bag at his feet and pulled a tablet out, turning it on and watching as a location system booted up. He eagerly honed in on the one labelled car, and Abby found herself scoffing — Jr had been a tease, but she was starting to think maybe Dick had become more like Bruce in the past five years than she cared to believe.

"It doesn't even surprise me that you have a tracker in your car. Not even a little bit," Abigail mused, eyes fixed on the road ahead.

"Actually, it's in my keys," Dick responded nonchalantly, before picking up on her tone and frowning.

"Cause that makes it so much better," Abby mused, eyebrows quirked mockingly at him.

Dick turned to look at her, eyes flicking up and down before settling on her face. "Growing up with a crime fighting billionaire had some perks."

"Oh, I'm sure."

"Right here!" Dick suddenly exclaimed as they passed Scooter's Roller Rink.

Abby slammed down on the brakes and indicated right, swerving across the road and down a junction, heading towards a sign signalling storage space. Dick was braced against the dashboard like he'd be ejected from the seat if he didn't cling on for dear life (he probably would).

"Where the hell did you learn to drive, Abs? A fucking video game?" Dick's eyes were wide as he stared over at Abby.

As if to prove a point, she accelerated down the damp road. "Not my fault your map reading skills are below par, Dick."

"My map reading skills are perfectly fine, thank you very much," Dick defended indignantly.

Abby scoffed mockingly, "Course they are. Remember when you tried to give me and Donna directions to Dark Archer's base of operations and we nearly ended up in Pennsylvania?"

"That was Nora's fault," Dick grumbled, eyes scanning the road signs for the turning, but not being able to help the way his lips curved up at the old memory.

"No, Nora was the one who pointed out you had the map upside down," Abby corrected, a fond grin spreading across her face. "You're pretty much the reason we've used GPS ever since, Grayson. Just accept the facts."

"Yeah, yeah. Just shut up and pull over. We're here," Dick muttered flippantly, gesturing to the entrance as he shook his head bitterly.

Abigail grinned but said nothing, pulling into the nearest parking space and turning the engine off. She clambered out first, Dick trying and failing to neatly place the map on the backseat and instead getting a face full of paper. He huffed and climbed out, shutting the door and exchanging a hesitant look with Abby as they debated simple leaving it.

"I'm gonna tell her it was you who hot-wired it if gets stolen," Dick stated blatantly, smiling at the unimpressed glare Abby sent his way as the two approached the beeping signal of Dick's keys.

"Real noble of you, Dick. Really."

Dick went to reply, a smile forming on his lips, when it twisted into a frown when he caught sight of all too familiar magenta hair in his peripheral vision. "Hey!"

Their car thief turned around, barely even registering surprise on her face as she took them in.

"You stole my car! I like my car," Dick pouted, crossing his arms. The woman raised an eyebrow, slowly sauntering towards them, entirely unthreatened by his tone.

She frowned, sounding genuinely intrigued. "How did you find me?"

"There's an app for that," Dick muttered, tucking his phone into his jacket pocket as he stepped into the garage.

Abby's forehead creased and her lips parted in disagreement. "He's lying. He has a tracker in his key."

"Right. Cause that's normal," the magenta haired woman scoffed. 

Dick turned to give her a pointed look. "And kidnapping teenage girls is?"

"For the last time: I didn't kidnap her," she growled, making even Abby debate taking a step backwards.

Dick didn't bother to answer her, his attention instead drifting towards the papers and photos and articles lining the walls and furniture, sticky notes and scraps of paper taped to them. Abby found her eyes trailing over them, concern mingling with begrudging admiration at the detail and precision of the work.

"This yours?" Dick finally asked.

"Yeah," came the curt reply.

"How long you been looking for Rachel?" he asked slowly, almost afraid of what the answer might be.

"A few months, I thought," the pink haired woman sighed.

Abby let out a disbelieving hmmm. "You might be a tad off with a few months. I'd go with years."

"Ya think?" she snapped, before pausing, then offering an apologetic look, to which Abby offered a sympathetic smile.

Dick began to wander around the room, snapping pictures of various sections. Abby moved to follow, but a strange creaking caught her attention. It was coming from above them. It was coming from the roof. Not waiting to tell the others, the brunette slunk off, slipping out of the garage and quickly moving to the other row of garages. It only took her a second to spot the figure.

She'd know him anywhere. 

Arthur King. The third Dark Archer.

But he spotted her, too. In seconds, he was moving, tearing across the metal plates as a curse slipped from Abby's lips and she took off after him. Quickly clambering up the side of one storage facility, she scarpered onto the roof, leaping over gaps and drainpipes in pursuit of Tommy Merlyn's son.

Ever heard of sins of the father? Well this was kinda like that. Oliver Queen (aka Green Arrow) and Tommy Merlyn (aka the second Dark Archer. Don't ask about the first. Malcolm Merlyn is a touchy subject for both Bruce Wayne and Melanie Merlyn) used to be best friends. The loss of his father drove Tommy to assume Malcolm's villainous identity and become the second Dark Archer.

But Tommy's comatose state by the hands of Green Arrow left Arthur King (the biological surname of the Merlyn family, and Malcolm's birth name), Tommy's son, with a personal vendetta against the Green Team of Star City. A vendetta which, unfortunately for them, Roy Harper and Abigail Lance usually found themselves having to deal with.

Abby slipped under a hanging tree branch, launching herself off the end of the rows of buildings, tumbling into a roll and coming out on her feet. Arthur stood before her, eyes narrowed and fists clenched so tightly into fists it was a miracle a finger hadn't snapped.

"What're you doing here, Merlyn?" Abby asked slowly, eyes trained on him, anticipating a move.

Arthur's voice came out bearing its usual fury. "Looking for you, Lance. You've gotten sloppy. Finding you after Washington was almost too easy."

"Oh great. Stalker now?" Abigail raised an eyebrow at the dark haired man before her. "Criminals these days. You couldn't just wait to throw a punch when you saw me in Star? I'm flattered."

"Don't be," he snarled in response, "I came here to kill you. The same way Oliver Queen did my father."

"You gotta stop saying that. Your dad's not dead, Arthur. It was an accident," Abigail felt the need to defend Ollie flare up in her chest like a right hook made her hand twitch. "Ollie would never hurt Tommy on purpose. You know that."

Okay, yeah. The Merlyn Family and the Queen & Co. Family knew the faces behind the hoods. Arthur King knew exactly what name Tremor took on when she peeled off the mask and suit. The thing was, he didn't care. This wasn't about identities or damnation or ruination or whatever you wanted to call it. This was about revenge.

Arthur wanted Green Arrow to feel how he felt when he had found his father in a hospital bed (that is, powerless and heartbroken). He wanted Oliver Queen to look down on the corpse of the closest thing he ever had to a daughter and feel his heart break. He wanted Oliver Queen to know that he had failed.

The Dark Archer didn't give a second thought to a response, letting out a feral cry and hurling two shuriken he'd snatched from his belt at the brunette. Despite having taken a holiday from her nightly escapades in Star City, Abigail's reaction couldn't have been more perfectly executed. She plucked the star blades from the air the way a child would a daisy from the ground. It was a skill Black Canary had happily taught her.

"Nice technique. Need to be faster though," Abby replied flippantly, then in a blink threw them back.

She didn't wait to see if they'd hit their mark (she knew they would've) and instead charged at him, slamming her body into his and pushing them both to the ground. Now with the upper hand, Abigail quickly landed two blows to his sharply featured face and pushed his hands down, slipping him a sly elbow to the throat before leaping up.

Leaving the sound of Arthur King choking behind her. Abigail took off down the path she'd just ran across, skidding around bends and corners until she stumbled onto the seemingly only open storage garage in the entire fucking place.

Barrelling around the entrance, Abby only caught the end of what they were saying. Considering the sounds of it, she was almost glad Arthur King had decided to stop by. Destroyer of Worlds did not sound like something she was particularly keen on having to process and deal with right now.

"Uh, hate to interrupt," Abby cleared her throat, gaining the attention of the other two, "But we have a prob—."

Before she could finish, a giant boom seemed to rock the very earth. The metal structure shook, and Abby could feel the vibrations in her very bones, even from all the miles away that they were. As a fellow earthquake-inducer (at least, only sometimes), Abby knew straight away this wasn't tectonic plates. This was power. This was Rachel.

"Okay, now we have two."

Dick turned to her in alarm, "Two? Of what? What was that?"

Abigail and Rachel's-new-friend exchanged a look, before rushing back out of the doors and into the daylight. A pillar of smoke and ash rose up in the air, painting the stark white sky a sullen, foreboding grey. Dick stumbled to a stop behind them, she could hear his breath hitch in his throat and then escape him entirely.

"Rachel," Dick whispered, his words barely audible over the rising wind.

Abby's eyes dropped briefly, and landed on an approaching Arthur King. She turned back to Dick. "Yeah. That's not the only problem. An old friend decided to stop by."

Dick's eyes fell onto Arthur, and widened in alarm (it's not every day you see three generations worth of anger and vengeance on someone's face, in his defence). Abigail turned back towards the archer, and her lips parted as she watched him raise a crossbow at her.

A cry escaped Abby's lips as the arrow was set loose.

NOTE!
don't hate me for the cliffhanger pls. also just don't hate me for this chapter in general. i hope the merlyn/dark archer part wasn't too confusing! i just LOVE the idea of supervillain's kids picking up a legacy with the superhero's kids — lemme know what you thought!!