Disclaimer: I do not own Arrow. If I didn't I wouldn't have had to write this backstory here.

A/N: I'm kind of hoping that Black Siren is just playing Quentin to get him to stay in her corner, because I do believe she cares a little bit about him. I'm also really hoping that she's also playing Diaz, letting him build his empire, destroy NTA and OTA, then just as he's basking in his victory, she kills him and takes over. That would be wickedly awesome. But not likely to happen. Depending on how the season ends and where my inspiration flows, I may follow up this story with how I was hoping this season would go with Black Siren's character.

Ashes

She returned to the world slowly. Smoke and sweat assaulted her nose. She tasted salt on her lips. A scratchy blanket wrapped around her, to fight off the chill of the dark evening. Streetlights and the giant overhead lights on the fire engines lit the block as the dying embers fizzled out. Service personnel moved purposely to and from, keeping order and saving lives. Except the ones that mattered. She heard John's voice nearby, convincing a paramedic and cop to let her stay a few more minutes. She felt numb to the world around her. And oh, so tired. She huddled under her blanket in the back of the ambulance, unable to look away from the scorched building.

She could not describe the abyss she floated in. Gone. He was gone. They were all gone. Snipped away and leaving her, alone. Bereft. Inconsolable. None of the words fit, none of them made sense. She'd failed them all and couldn't even find a way to voice how that felt. Because the words did not exist. Nothing could do justice for the pain that ripped through her once the numbness faded. Blinding hot pain stabbed her unexpectedly in the gut. Then it tore up her chest and through her throat, doubling-up her spine along the way to the back of her eyeballs. From her fingertips to her toes, excruciating pain. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't escape. The pain eclipsed everything. Her heart thudded loudly in her ears, pumping out more of the liquid fire each second. She choked. End it, she had to end it. Oh please, make it stop!

The decision to stand wasn't a conscious one, but once she had, she had to move. The blanket dropped from her shoulders. She felt it pool around her feet as she found a path through the buzzing bodies. The first step felt like a cinder block was holding her down, but she made it. Then she took another and another. She was leaving, going somewhere or nowhere, it didn't matter. A voice shouted behind her, but the words meant nothing. Another voice burbled in her ear, a pale face flashed with concern. She side-stepped and continued. Hands grabbed at her, she pushed them off. A stronger grip wrapped around her wrist. She twisted the owner in front of her and pulled until the wrist snapped. Hers or his, she couldn't say, but no one touched her after that. Pain hounded her the whole time.

Buildings passed in a blur. People too. At first, she had no idea where she was going, only that she had to find a way to stop the pain. Then a thought trickled in, a sign she recognized that had her taking a sudden left. A car squealed to a stop and a horn blared. She sped up, a plan forming. Then she found it, a much more ominous place under the cover of darkness. The ARGUS base in Central City, in the day it looked like one of a dozen office buildings along the metropolitan block. The lies those glass windows and concrete pillars told. She'd located the base earlier, in case they were discovered. She'd wanted an idea of the layout of the place she might have to break into or escape. Now she arrived with a new purpose. She stood in the street, the pain thrumming through her. She unleashed a scream and at last found a voice for her pain. She screamed and screamed until she wailed. The building toppled before her and so did the offices on either side and those in the row behind. She had never destroyed half a block before, had never tried. There were people still inside, those on the late-night shift. The pain dashed away any regret for those in the other buildings, the pain required the deaths of the agents. The agents that made it out trained their guns on her. They called at her to freeze, to get on her knees, to not scream. She turned on them, taunted them, waiting for one to shoot. A couple waivered, but their leader barked, and they retreated. Someone called for tasers, they wanted her alive. She attacked. Agents dropped like flies, but still they never shot to kill. They all died instead. But the pain didn't end.

She walked away. The pain drove her to find a new target, one that would ensure it ended. She returned to Starling City. She chose the drug dealers that had started the pain all those years ago. They weren't as strong a cartel as they once had been, she'd continued to dismantle their organization once she put on the mask. She'd kept an eye on them until the day she'd left the city, but her knowledge of their habits was still good. She found their main distribution warehouse, waited until enough of the underlings loitered outside but a few of the bigger players remained inside. Then she struck. The warehouse collapsed, anarchy reigned. She sauntered up, baiting them to fight. They had enough guns on them to do the deed. Instead they fled. Spineless thugs, all.

She found her way back to her old base. Contemplated her next move. The police seemed the best choice. The problem was what to do to incite them into action. She was researching targets, leaning towards a direct approach, attacking a station head on, when a box popped up on her screen. She clicked on the message. Robert Queen's voice echoed in the dark room. "Let's end this Dinah. Just you and me. Victor walks away, loser dies. Meet me at the old Queen factory, one hour."

Rage lanced through the agony for a moment. Her target shifted. He wanted a fight to the death, well he'd get one, but neither of them would be walking away. She stalked to the factory, single-minded in her focus. Just like at the wharf, he hid above. Her scream shook him loose, but not before he shot off a trick arrow. She expected, hoped, for an explosive arrow, so that even if his aim was off, the blast would end the pain. Instead she staggered back, a warm metallic device locked around her neck. Not tight enough to garrote her and it lit up with a blue glow. ARGUS agents popped up out of the shadows, weapons raised. She turned to the nearest group and screamed, but only a human shriek sounded. She grabbed at the device around her neck, what was it doing to her? The agents moved in with arrogance. She lashed out. More of them died at the kiss of her blades and hands, but more arrived and with tranquilizers. They overwhelmed her as Robert watched from the fringes. She shrieked until the drugs claimed her.

She woke in a concrete box. There was no better word for it. The ceiling and floor and three of the walls all concrete. No bed, no sink, not even a bucket. She'd been stripped and dressed in flimsy gray scrubs. The device still glowed around her neck. Robert stood outside the remaining wall which was made of glass. His pet blonde sneered from behind him. He pressed a button on his side.

"Welcome to ARGUS, Dinah. Amanda has a lot planned for you and while normally I loathe her methods, in this case I'm making an exception. A creature like you deserves this place." She snarled at him and rose to her feet. Stalked closer to the glass. He held his ground; "It disgusts me to think my son shared a bed with a thing so unnatural. That he loved you. But I think if he'd known the truth, he never would've fought for you the way he did. He would've kicked you to the side like the trash you are."

She pounded her fists against the glass and screamed. Robert and his pet took a step back. The glass started to crack. Then gas poured in and she was unconscious again. Robert never returned.

She cut it out. That bleeding mess that was her heart. All it ever brought her was pain and she so wanted the pain to end. She crushed it in her hand and scattered the ashes with the memories in the corners of that cell. But even excised from her body, the echoes of pain persisted.

Days or hours passed in that cell. It was hard to tell. Food came at irregular intervals, drugged. Bathroom breaks were infrequent and heavily armed. A couple of times she was dragged into a different box, one with a chair and one-way mirror, where she was questioned about her ability and how she got it. She said nothing. They roughed her up a bit but got the same result. She slept a lot and stared at the walls. She wondered what they were waiting for as the cells filled up around her. The others tried to talk to her, but she ignored them. Then one day she woke to see an unsmiling, cold woman assessing her from the other side of the glass. She acknowledged the woman with a glance, then studied the ceiling.

"My name is Amanda Waller, I'm the director of ARGUS. My scientists tell me you've been refusing to answer their questions. That simply will not do. If you do not start cooperating, things will get very uncomfortable for you, very soon."

"And if I tell you what you want to know, will you kill me when you're done?"

"If you survive until then, perhaps. If I cannot find a use for you afterwards. My scientists have questions you cannot answer, which only tests will satisfy, and they cannot guarantee you will survive them all. They say you will teach us so much Black Siren, but I'm afraid you will not enjoy the process much."

Waller was right. Under ARGUS's care, she learned a new type of pain that held the other agony at bay.

They put her under the knife first. She woke up in her cell the first time with a chuck of hair missing and several stitches on the back of her head. They never told her what they did, but she figured it out when they stuck her in the questioning room and showed her pictures from before, pictures they had no right to have or touch. The pain and rage welled up. Then she felt woozy, as if she'd taken a hard blow to the head. She saw white spots and blacked out. Rough hands slapped her awake and they showed her more pictures. The hurt shot through her again and she blacked out. The third time, she controlled her breathing and held the agony back, didn't let it overwhelm her, and she stayed awake. They weren't too happy with that and one of the guards knocked her out. The second time she woke with a sliver of metal protruding from the right side of her head, just above her neck. The guards wasted no time in showing her what that piece of casing did. They dumped her in her cell, held up the little black device, and pressed a button. Pain volleyed from the back on her head, down her spine, and into every nerve ending. She screamed, the collar making it a weakly human cry, and they laughed.

The testing started next. At first, they wanted to know the extent of her ability, the range of frequencies she could hit and how fine-tuned she could make her scream – they had guesses but wanted facts; they didn't ask about the level of destruction she could cause. A simple yes or no from her wasn't enough for the doctors, they wanted demonstrations and measured data for their projects. They stuck her in a training room, a larger cell the size of a small gymnasium where they could safely watch her from above. The collar deactivated once the guards sealed the door behind her and the doctors would give her instructions. If she tried to use her scream to escape, the shock piece was used to bring her to her knees and they wouldn't feed her for days in punishment, after the guards whipped her. If she refused to complete the test, the collar would be reactivated, and the guards would beat her until she cooperated, then they'd withhold water. She fought back whenever the guards came for her. She even managed to kill a couple of them with her own bare hands. Both times, the remaining guards used the shock piece until she was writhing on the floor, then they kicked her into unconsciousness, but they never killed her in return. And when she was a good test subject, they rewarded her with better food and longer breaks between experiments. She knew what they were trying to do, and she swore to herself she wouldn't break, but every time they dragged her bruised and bleeding back to her cell, she could feel her resolve crumble a little more.

Once the scientists were satisfied they understood the parameters of her ability, they decided to dig deeper into her genetic code. That meant more surgeries, where they no longer bothered to put her under; they gave her enough anesthetic to keep her from squirming and restrained her to the operating table. Then they took samples – blood, tissue, bone marrow, eggs, and parts of her liver and spleen. In between the surgeries they gave her injections and exposed her to different chemicals. Once they even tested her against elevated levels of radiation, after sterilizing her took a higher dose of radiation than expected. She became too weak to put up much of fight. Hallucinations became normal, but the hauntings were the worst. Her husband would find her in her cell, sneering; "What a pathetic creature you are. I never loved you. I never fought for you, because deep down I knew exactly what you were, a monster with a pretty smile." She screamed at him that wasn't true, that he wasn't her love, but he laughed mockingly at her and asked how she could be sure. Her older son watched over her in the lab, when they pressed an open flame to her thigh to see how badly she would scar from third degree burns – he smiled in apathy to her pain. Her baby crooned to her on the operating table and she felt tears build, but never cried.

She kept waiting to die. Thinking, this one will do it. This injection will be the lethal dose, the one that ends the pain and suffering. Only she kept healing, kept surviving, even when she tried not to. She heard the doctors whispering, her metagene included a strong healing factor, nothing like a speedster's but far more impressive than any of the other made-metas. They believed it was connected to the fact she was born a metahuman, but they couldn't test that theory without another natural meta. They took her eggs the next day; that was before they decided it was safer to sterilize her. She stopped eating and drinking. She thought she lasted a few days before the guards realized. They attempted to beat reason back into her first, but she was too weak to even moan. Then the doctors found out, they hooked her up to an IV and force fed her. Waller visited her once she was sent back to her cell and told her the next time she tried that gambit the punishment would be more severe and very uncomfortable. She tried again anyway; Waller remained true to her threat. She fed herself from there on. She let go of the hope for death, and eventually the wish to die receded into another boxed-away part of herself. When they found a compound that would inhibit her abilities, they didn't even have to restrain her to implant the device in her arm. Only a shell remained.

Then Waller decided to find out which of the metahumans in her care were the strongest and most brutal. The director of ARGUS created her own little gladiatorial arena, pitting meta against meta in a fight to the death. She was their prized meta, safe from the matches in the beginning until Waller had winnowed out the weakest and wanted to see the Black Siren in action. They forced her to get back in shape, she didn't resist. They locked her in the gymnasium with another meta and told her to kill, she didn't hesitate. She killed a man who could spark fire from his fingertips; her scream forced him to the ground, but her hands snapped his neck. She killed a woman who could set off explosions with a touch. She used the woman's own ability against her, forcing an about-to-blow test tube down the woman's throat. She killed others too but didn't keep track of their abilities – their faces however were burned to the inside of her eyelids.

"Mr. Sobel will not be as easy to kill as your previous competitors. He has a regenerative ability far superior to yours and heals almost as fast as a speedster. The doctors tell me his ability is directly connected to his nervous system," Waller commented conversationally as they waited outside the gym. Waller liked to have these little chats just before they sent her in to kill. Each time, Waller hinted how her opponent's ability worked, then watched how that information was used in the following fight. "He also has a personal vendetta against you, you see he was in love with the woman I sent to impersonate you. The woman you brutally murdered."

She didn't react to Waller's words, which neither irritated nor amused the director of ARGUS. Despite Waller's implications, she had no doubt that she'd survive this fight. Even if the other meta managed to beat her, as unlikely as that was, he would be shocked before he could finish her. She'd almost died when they pitted her against a telepathic gorilla; they'd had to kill the gorilla because he wouldn't stop after his shock collar activated. Though they wanted to see how meta abilities clashed in a fight and they wanted a fair result, they still needed her alive for their other experiments. She couldn't find it in herself to care. Sobel died after a brutal fight – she had more experience in fighting, but his regenerative ability gave him an edge. She had to sing her most powerful song directly into his ear until his entire brain turned to mush; hard for a nervous system to react with the main center down.

The guards started calling her Black Siren after that, mocking the name she'd once wore. Eventually the doctors picked up the habit too. And finally, she began to feel again. Her vigilante name had stood for something once, something good and just in a city riddled with crime and no hope. It had been a separate part of her identity, one she did not think they could touch the way they did her personal life. Each time they derisively called her Black Siren, a new spark of anger formed inside her. They were perverting a symbol of courage, just as they'd tainted and remolded her. A small part of her that wasn't entirely done fighting couldn't stand it. That part of her fanned the anger and hardened it into a shield that existed just beneath the shell they crafted out of her. She hid the hatred that sustained her, that reminded her she wasn't a puppet anyone could control. She trained that rage as she began to train herself in her cell, plotting her revenge. All she had was her fury; at the guards and doctors, Waller and ARGUS. She even loathed humanity, which had abandoned her and hated her for something she could not control. She harnessed that temper and made her plans. They thought they held the power, that they could take that name too from her, but they were wrong. She would make them fear the name that once brought hope.

Sometimes her anger would press too tightly against her heart and she'd collapse thanks to the neutralizer chip in her head. Between the neutralizer and shock piece, her plans to escape faced setbacks. Eventually she realized she would need to seek the help of the other metahumans, the few that remained alive and capable of fighting back, if she was going to bring the facility and all of ARGUS down. After months of ignoring those in neighboring cells, she hesitated at starting any conversation. She wasn't even certain she remembered how to speak, for so long she'd only been screaming. The words came, stilted after first, and offered to the woman whose cell lay directly across from hers. Pure white hair after her meta ability fully manifested, her name used to be Caitlin, but now the guards called her Frosty. As bitter as she was cold, Frost had good potential. She hadn't brought up her new plans to Frost, was building her way up to that, when a third party enacted a different kind of rescue.

Zoom.

The speedster she'd once contemplated killing saved her from ARGUS. He rescued the metahumans and offered those strong enough to follow him outside a new future, one where they would be the overseers of their oppressors, where they could get revenge on those that had hurt them. Her anger kindled at the sight of Zoom; he was as much to blame for her suffering as Waller, but her time in the cage had taught her patience and emptiness. She pushed her rage back, let it simmer out of range as she accepted Zoom's offer. Frost joined too, as did a pair of brothers, and a man whose whole body turned into fire. A meta who could stretch himself still had a touch of humanity in him, he refused, and Zoom killed him on the spot. She watched without feeling, her shield of wrath back in place.

"Aren't you Dinah Queen?" the burning man asked as they destroyed the facility; doctors and guards still breathing inside.

"Dinah Queen is dead," she answered coldly.

"Then who are you?" Zoom inquired in that unnatural voice of his.

"I am, Black Siren."

BS-BC-BS-BC

And the world burned.

THE END