Chapter Text
If Ollie thought the cafeteria was going to be the end of it, he was wrong.
It was like some kind of invisible dam was burst. Or some line in the sand was swept away. Once the mystery guy had shown up the one time, he started showing up at other times. And he didn’t have the decency to only ever show up around or with Wally.
Sometimes, Ollie would run into the mystery mask just... on the Watchtower, seemingly no one else around. It had begun to get on his nerves. And put him on edge. It was like, at any given time, this guy could pop up and pop out of nowhere. And Ollie had no idea who he was!
“He’s chill,” Roy said, once. But that was it. It was, obviously, enough to show that Roy knew him, but no more. Ollie still didn’t know who the hell the guy was or what the hell he was doing on the Watchtower!
He got a better look at him, though.
Besides the most obvious visual trait of a black quasi-Kevlar weave suit (vaguely reminiscent of Ollie’s Green Arrow uniform, or the Bat’s uniform), the mystery mask had a stripe of friendly blue down either arm, which carried onto his shoulder, splitting into two lines that met at the center of his chest and between his shoulder blades in a blue arrow that clearly meant something. Meant something to the young man wearing the symbol, at least.
He was pale, had long black hair, and never was without his domino. Physically fit. Prone to acrobatics and, just, movement in general. Not very good at standing still. Also not very good at not disappearing without warning.
Attached to the back of his costume, the stranger had two batons, which appeared to be magnetized (maybe?) in place. Ollie’d seen the stranger in the training room, once or twice, practicing with those batons, but didn’t have a name to put to the weapons until he’d asked Dinah about it. Dinah was able to tell Ollie that the batons were escrima sticks. She was also able to explain that escrima was a style of Filipino martial arts – also called kali or arnis – that emphasized sticks or bladed weapons, improvised weapons, and unarmed combat.
(Frankly, Dinah went on for awhile, about the martial arts that the sticks were involved in. Ollie wasn’t able to ingest as much of it as he might have liked, but he did pick up that, technically, the “sticks” were called bastons. Or something. More people seemed familiar with “escrima sticks,” though.)
(Dinah also mentioned that the brain behind the Birds of Prey, a multitalented wheelchair user, was escrima-trained, to some unknown extent, and that said brain – Oracle – had learned from an unspecified “old friend.” Or learned with an “old friend.” One or the other.)
So.
Where did that leave Ollie, anyway? He knew what the guy looked like and what he fought with (usually?). But he didn’t even know where the guy was from or what he called himself. It was going on weeks and Ollie still had no idea on the name or codename fronts. None!
“It’s not that big a deal,” Hal said. Hal was wrong.
“Don’t let it bother you,” Barry said. But Barry talked a big game for someone who actually knew what was going on (and who the damn stranger was)!
The only other thing Ollie could glean about the stranger was that he had ADHD that almost rivaled Wally’s. And, part and party to that ADHD, the guy was constantly listening to music while doing other things. And, no, Ollie didn’t personally understand the music thing, but Barry (the original ADHD king of the Justice League) had once told Ollie that the music was like a secondary stimulus, distracting the ADHD mind just enough so that the person with said ADHD could focus better. Other secondary stimuli could be fidget items, balancing, doodling, or other forms of “stimming” (self-stimulating). Anything to distract just a small part of the mind so that the rest could pay attention.
Ollie had seen enough stimming in the JL ranks to recognize it in the stranger. Though it was kind of interesting to watch Wally and the stranger play progressively more complicated rounds of cat’s cradle during a debrief (that the stranger shouldn’t have been allowed into) as a sort of shared stimulus. Interesting, if a bit unprofessional seeming.
Hell. The Justice League was a bunch of people in colourful costumes taking the law into their own hands on a daily basis. Professional? Who the hell even cared about whether or not something looked professional, so long as it worked and kept people even-keeled.
So. ADHD. Untreated, if the jokes between Wally and the stranger were anything to go by.
But no name.
Not even a codename!
At least this guy, whoever the hell he was, wasn’t out in the field. The line absolutely had to be drawn somewhere.