###### Mechanical-Arm Spider #74
The smell of gasoline mixed with swamp water filled the air.
Jake recognized it the same way he'd recognized it in Gotham and in the lobby the day before. Sleeper was running it through his pores and he could feel the secretion continuing, a slow steady pressure just below the skin, the symbiote maintaining output with the patience of something that understood biochemistry better than he did.
Canary had stopped pulling at the webs.
She'd been working the lines across her arms since he'd put her down -- methodical, controlled, the hands of someone trained to find the structural weak point in any restraint. That had stopped. Her hands were still. Her shoulders had dropped from the high position they'd been holding through the morning's fighting, and her chest was moving at a rate that suggested the Cry was no longer building toward anything.
She shook her head once. Slow, like clearing water from her ears. The motion pushed a few strands of blonde hair across her face and she didn't move to fix them, just stayed there with the web lines across her arms and her hair fallen forward and her expression doing something that wasn't quite settling.
Then she looked at him.
The Cry built anyway -- he could see it in the way her throat moved, the column of muscle flexing as her body tried to do what it had been trained to do when the threat was this close and this immediate. She was fast about it, the sound already forming in the resonance chambers.
Sleeper moved before he did.
The mass surged from his chest in a single forward extension -- not the full reach it had been going for when Canary was pinned and helpless, but concentrated, deliberate, a fist that came down across the side of her head with enough force to rock her sideways and enough restraint that she didn't go all the way down. She swayed.
Her bound hand found the road to stabilize herself and stayed there. The sound in her throat died as a reflex rather than a decision, her body prioritizing the impact over the output, and for a few seconds she just held the position -- one hand on the asphalt, shoulders curved inward, the sunlight catching the bleeding side of her face.
Sleeper pulled back to his chest.
Jake watched the retraction and understood, without needing to examine the reasoning, that the symbiote hadn't tried to consume her. He'd been clear about that -- clear enough that Sleeper had absorbed the instruction and acted on it, had pulled the blow into something that disrupted without ending, and was now settled back into his body with the particular quality of restraint that cost something to maintain. The pheromone output continued.
She straightened slowly.
A few strands of blonde hair had fallen across her face during the impact and she didn't push them away. She just sat there with them crossing her cheek and her mouth and looked at him with an expression that was doing something he hated to recognized -- in Gotham, the face of someone who'd been mid-sentence about one thing and had lost the thread entirely and didn't know yet that they'd lost it.
He crouched in front of her.
He used his right hand to tuck the strands back from her face, fingers working them behind her ear with a care that had nothing to do with gentleness and everything to do with needing her attention focused and her threat assessment offline. She didn't pull back. Didn't tense. Her head tipped almost imperceptibly toward his hand as he moved it away, a small unconscious lean that confirmed what the chemistry had been building toward since he'd started the secretion.
He held his hand where it was for a moment.
Behind the mask, his eyes tracked hers, and what he found there was the thing he'd been recognizing since the first time he'd used this -- the particular quality of the gaze once the pheromones had done their work, how it wasn't blank, wasn't empty, was instead full in a way that made it worse. She was still there. Just oriented differently than she'd been a few minutes ago.
He pulled his hand back and held the resolution where it was.
"You feel warm," she said. Her voice came out slightly uneven, the words spaced a little wider apart than her usual cadence. "Your hand. Even through the suit."
He said nothing.
"I don't know why I was fighting you." She said it the way someone says something they've just realized and can't quite account for the delay in realizing it. Her head moved slightly to take in the craters, the burning truck, the two figures still down on the road behind him -- and then came back to him. "You're not the problem here."
"I'm burning your city." His voice came out flat.
Something flickered across her expression -- a reading, quick, more coherent than it should have been under the pheromone load. Her eyes moved across the streets with a momentary focus that felt like the real Canary working the scene. Then it softened.
"You have a reason for it," she said. "I can feel that you do." She shifted against the web lines and looked at him steadily. "Untangle me. Let me help you and we can put all of this right."
The arm was dark at his left side, frozen at the half-open position the Cry had left it, the interface filaments still warm where they'd found his nerve cluster through the wrong socket. He'd been aware of it continuously since Canary arrived -- the weight of it pulling at the elbow joint, the palm holding its incomplete gesture.
He didn't move to free her.
She read the pause the way she'd been reading him all morning, with the lateral attention of someone who'd been working threats long enough to understand that what a person doesn't do tells you as much as what they do. Her head tilted.
"You're afraid I'll hurt you again," she said.
"I learned not to be afraid."
The effect was visible. Not dramatic -- just a deepening, the pheromones finding the statement and doing what they did with displays of certainty from the source of the compound. Her chin lifted slightly.
"But my friend--" He raised the mechanical arm, not as a gesture, just to redirect her attention, and let it fall. "He's not happy with you." Sleeper shifted across his chest in response to the mention, the surface texture changing, showing the symbiote was aware it was being discussed.
Canary looked at the chest mass with the careful attention of someone trying to remember why they should be cautious and not quite getting there.
"Then let me make it up to him," she said. "To both of you. Cut me loose and I'll do anything."
He stood.
"I know you will."
She was looking up at him from the road with the strands of blonde hair still tucked back where he'd placed them, and her eyes went to his left arm -- to the sleeve running from elbow to shoulder in the rough mount he'd forced it into, the interface point where brute connection had substituted for proper fitting, the palm frozen at its half-open angle.
"Your arm," she said. "The connection's wrong. You forced the interface." She studied it with the focus of someone who'd been looking at this problem from the outside for long enough to have an opinion. "I know where you can have it properly mounted."
He looked at her. Silent. Unmoving.
Her eyes dropped briefly to the arm, then came back up to him.
The silence held for one more second, then his shoulders shifted.
"Star City has been tearing itself apart all night," he said. "Its protector hasn't shown himself once." He held her gaze. "Where is Green Arrow?"
The shift was immediate -- the cloud of mild dejection lifting, her expression reorganizing itself around the question the way a child's face reorganizes when they realize they're being given a chance to make things right. Her chin came up.
"If I tell you -- will you untangle me?"
He shifted his stance and said nothing, and the silence did the work that words would have wasted. She read it correctly.
"If I know him well," she said. "He's not coming straight for you. He never does when the city's already burning." She paused, assembling it. "He'll be working the edges first -- pulling gangs back from each other, keeping the fires from spreading, making Star City manageable before he moves on the source. Because getting to you and stopping you wouldn't stop the territorial fighting. Wouldn't stop the gangs from burning each other's operations down while the opportunity's there. He knows that." Another pause. "That's why I came directly for you -- to cut the problem at the root. Stop you, stop the chaos." Her eyes moved around and then returned to him with the soft, re-routed certainty of the pheromone working through her. "But I see now that I was wrong to try. You're doing this for something that matters. Whatever it is, I want to help you accomplish it."
He turned the response over and found the sense in it -- Green Arrow running containment while the city bled, working from the outside in, meant there was a window. How long depended on how bad the damage had spread, and the damage had spread considerably. Long enough, possibly, to get the arm functional. Long enough, possibly, for something else, and his eyes moved to her as the thought completed itself -- her totem.
He raised the mechanical arm and looked at it. The palm still frozen at its half-open angle. The interface filaments still warm and still wrong.
"You said you knew where I could fix it."
She nodded immediately. "A lead I've been running for months. An operation connecting downtown to the docks -- container trucks moving one way, never coming back. Mixed cargo that didn't make sense when I first started pulling the thread. Weapon parts, equipment, Kobra-Venom vials all moving together through the same network." She paused, and her eyes went to the two figures still down in the road behind him, and back to the arm. "After what I've seen this morning, I now understand what's been going on beneath Castellan. The equipment will still be there and--"
She stopped. Held the rest of whatever she'd been building toward as he moved to the web lines and cut them in three passes.
She stood with the immediacy of someone whose muscles had been working against the restraint for the last several minutes, rolled her shoulders once, and looked at him with an expression that held nothing complicated in it -- no threat mapping, no exit geometry, nothing that suggested she was building toward anything except wherever he pointed her.
"Thank you," she said.
"You'll take me there," he said. "Castellan."
"Yes."
"But first --" He let a beat pass. "A detour."
She looked at him. "Detour? To where? Why?"
"Do you trust me?"
"With my life." She said it the way someone states a fact they've always known and are only now being asked to say out loud.
"Then take me to the thing you care about most," he said.
It went through her like something with weight. Her expression didn't crumble -- it drained, steadily and from the edges inward, the compliance pulling back just far enough from her eyes to show what was underneath it. Her jaw locked. Her throat moved once, the vocal cords flexing toward something and finding nothing to hold onto. He watched the internal struggle happen in real time and recognized it the same way he'd recognized it in Gotham -- the person still in there, pressing against the load from the inside, finding the surface and losing it again.
He directed his attention toward Sleeper without moving, and felt the secretion increase through his skin.
Her hands were shaking when the smile finally came.
"Yes." The word came out through teeth that had been pressed together a moment before, each syllable placed with the visible effort of someone carrying something heavy up a slope. "I'll take you to where I kept it." She held the smile and the pain sat directly underneath it, present and unresolved. "Whatever you need."
"Good." He held the mechanical arm out to his left side, palm up, the frozen fingers still caught in their interrupted gesture. "Hold on. You give me directions as we go."
She stepped to his left and her hand closed around the mechanical forearm and his shoulder. The interface filaments registered the contact as pressure without translating it into anything the arm could use. It stayed dark and still against his side.
He fired a webline into the building above them and left the road, and Star City's skyline opened up ahead of them as she pressed against his left side and began to speak.
~MimicLord
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