Note: I wrote this story a long time ago, back in 2016, when Laurel was still alive on the show. I recently dug it up again, deciding to finally post it. It started out centered around this metaphor of the Damsel in Distress, a topic I wrote about in one my university seminars about fairy tales, which just would not leave my head. As so often happens, a plot bunny was born.
Nowadays, this story means something different to me: It is a tribute to Dinah Laurel Lance and her journey towards the mask. Which was sadly, also where her story pretty much unfairly ended on the show.
Disclaimer: Arrow does not belong to me.
On a very different note, I would like to thank everyone who reviewed, favorited or followed my other Arrow story!
To Reach Out and Touch Destiny
"And Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun. When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door."
- Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm
When Laurel was still a child, she liked nothing better than the bedtime stories her mother read to her and Sara.
Her sister, who was still small and full of giggles and mischief during the day, would go quiet in anticipation every time her mother started reading. The book in her hands was always the same: a bound volume full of child-friendly versions of classical European fairy tales, bought on a whim by Dinah on a London-trip years before. Laurel loved the dark green of the covering and the pretty, fanciful drawing on the cover. But even more than that, she loved listening to her mother's voice, loved how she brought life to the tales from the pages.
Both girls found themselves enraptured by the stories of princesses, magic and knights. Sara especially adored the tales so much, that she would often wish to dress up as a princess. Laurel, while easily swept away by the happy endings, found herself always more enamored with the idea of adventure.
She was a girl still, when she started to wonder about these tales. The princesses, so different and yet all the same. They slept away the years, grew up isolated and alone except for terrible mother figures, or became a servant in their own home. One way or another, they were all girls locked in a tower, always alone, until saved by a handsome prince. Laurel didn't – couldn't – understand why none of them just left.
"Because she can't, dummy! It's a really high tower," Sara admonished her when she voiced her concern one evening during a retelling of Rapunzel. The younger girl was taken in by the story, yet too young to think beyond the enthralling words of a well-told tale. Laurel wasn't satisfied with that answer, but held back her questions for her sister's sake.
But just because she did not speak them out loud, did not mean the questions ceased to exist. On the contrary, the older she got, the more they appeared. Laurel was eleven, having far outgrown the phase of fairy tales. But Sara still liked them, so now it was the older sister reading to the younger, with their mother often hovering in the doorway, listening to her girls. Even while reading out loud, Laurel could not help but feel badly for all these fairy tale princesses who were stuck in their towers, dead to the world one way or another. A quiet resolve formed then: she would never be like that, helpless until a prince saved her. Her decision saw her to sleep, curled around a body smaller than hers, until her father came in and quietly carried her to bed.
Laurel was a teenager of barely seventeen, when she finally had to admit to herself that maybe the idea of a prince was a nice one after all.
Her, Tommy and Ollie were hanging out in the Queen's giant backyard. Laurel always felt a certain recklessness when she was with the boys, a feeling that conflicted with the carefully constructed persona of responsible young adult she wanted to project. Nonetheless, when nobody else was watching, she regularly indulged in the exhilaration of doing something her parents would not approve of – like climbing an apple tree. The boys were egging her on as she swiftly ascended into the higher branches. The first apple she picked ended up as projectile, playfully shot down at Tommy. While Ollie was laughing at her bad aim, the other boy pouted for a moment before joining in. She collected a few more apples. Beautiful, red and ripe. They reminded her of the tale of Snow White and the poisoned apple.
'You need no prince to dislodge a piece of fruit,' Laurel thought during the climb down, apples carefully balanced on one arm. It was not until the last branch that her precarious balancing act went wrong. Losing her grip and falling, she expected the pain of a hard landing. Instead, strong arms caught her, with Laurel and her rescuer both tumbling to the ground. After the initial shock had dissipated, all three of the teenagers started laughing. Ollie and Laurel were still on the ground, both slightly bruised but otherwise unharmed, when their eyes met. In that short, intense moment, Laurel could not help but think that maybe having a guy around – because he was no prince, not by far – was not such a bad thing.
In the year that followed, her questions were tempered by the curiosity of one slowly discovering love. Hesitantly, Laurel started to believe that maybe, being saved sometimes was not so bad after all.
As time passed, and their relationship grew more serious, she started to feel more and more like a princess; pretty dresses and romantic dates, on the arm of a handsome guy. Oliver was far from a Prince Charming, but it was not particularly hard to admit that the onset of adulthood looked good on him. And even though he was sometimes prone to pouting, he could indeed be very charming as well.
She tried her hardest for a while, to not fall prey to the dream of a fairy tale life. But all the questions and doubts she once had had were slowly washed away. She was a young woman in love and the future seemed full of possibilities: marriage, a home, children, a life together.
Maybe she was wrong to criticize the fairy tales as she did. And maybe the Disney adaptions with their happily ever after were not so terribly off the mark after all.
...
And then reality crashed down on her, like a dark ocean swallowing a yacht. The boy she loved had been a cheating bastard who had gone behind her back. And now both he and her beautiful baby sister were dead. Laurel's heart sunk to the bottom of the ocean, anger and betrayal unfurling in its place.
She threw out every book that even remotely connected to fairy tales, even the stupid clichéd modern love-stories. Everything that reminded her of a fairy tale romance, every book where the female needed to be rescued. Every book, except one. The old and worn children's book her mother had always read out of landed in a box instead, shoved far into the back of her closet, along with several photographs and Sara's stupid stuffed shark.
Life went on for Laurel. She stumbled and struggled, but always soldiered on. Always a good daughter, even when her father descended further and further into the bottle and her mother left. But still she kept going on, pulling herself through law school and dragging her father out of bars and through his meetings. Tommy was a supporting presence in those times, but her guard was always too far up to really let him in. Years later, she would welcome him in her bed and they would talk about these years, about Oliver and Sara; but like many others, he would never really know what she went through.
She took care to check in on Thea as often as she could bear it, but the memories that lingered in the large mansion made it a constant struggle.
And then there was Moira Queen. Moira, who saw and knew too much about how Laurel felt.
Moira, who was drunk one evening when Laurel came by, sitting curled up on the couch, a bottle of expensive Whiskey next to her. Thea was not home, she told her and the young woman was relieved, because as the daughter of a man who had been spending way too much time in a bar recently, she had come to detest the feeling of being around drunks. Her instincts were at war in this moment, because she wanted to run just as badly as she felt the obligation and need to help.
"I'm sorry for what my son did to you," Moira whispered, staring absentmindedly into her drink like it held all the answers. The usual poise and grace that Laurel had used to admire so much about the woman were gone now, merely rough grief laid bare in their stead. "And even though it might not seem like it, considering what happened... I know he loved you very much."
Laurel barely held her scream in, because you did not hurt the woman you loved by screwing her sister. Instead, she gritted out, unable to take the bitterness out of her voice, "He had a funny way of showing it."
Moira just looked at her then, pain telegraphed in the way her shoulders were slumped, written on her face, reflected in her eyes. This was a woman who had lost her husband and her son, and never let anyone see how much it affected her. Except for this girl before her, this young woman she would have liked to call her daughter-in-law.
"Just like his mother."
Laurel did not come by the house anymore after that.
There were days she was getting by. And then there were the bad days. Days on which she curled up and cried until there were no tears left. On some days, it took everything she had to hold herself together while in public, to not break down and cry. In her darkest hours, she was so close to screaming at the walls, so close to breaking a mirror, to trashing a room, to letting it all out. But she never did. She hated Oliver, because of how easily he had turned his back on everything they'd had had. The thought kept haunting her, that if he had cheated with Sara of all people...
She could not help but wonder if he had ever loved her, could not help but to doubt every moment of their relationship, to doubt even the friendship that had been the beginning of it all. Some days, she hated Sara too. Hated her for doing this to her, hated her even more for dying.
But most of all, more than the hate, anger and betrayal, not a minute went by when she did not miss and want them back, if only so she could scream at them.
And on some days, she felt tempted to break free from the role of the good girl she had assumed. The impulse to do something completely insane rearing up in the back of her mind, urging her to just hit someone, or drive her car too fast, or see from how high she could fall without hurting herself.
But she was a girl no more. She was an adult. She could no longer afford to be reckless.
...
And then one day, five years after her life had ended, Oliver Queen was alive. As much as she fought it, as much as she wanted to stay angry at him for betraying her like he had done, as much as Tommy tried to draw her in closer in response, she felt her thoughts return nonetheless to the boy who had stolen and then broken her heart like no other. Her recklessness, once upon a time tightly packed away with children's stories of adventures, broke free again. Nothing compared to the thrill of working with the mysterious hooded vigilante. Nothing, except that stupid boy she had loved so long ago and maybe still did, along with all the intricate ways in which he had changed, no matter how much he claimed to still be the same.
That first year after his return, she found herself in danger multiple times. But it was alright, because somebody – her father, the Hood – always saved her. Laurel was too lost in her recklessness to notice that she was slowly becoming what she had once hated: the damsel in distress, the maiden in the tower.
But then her own stubbornness, her recklessness in the face of danger, her inability to save herself, cost Tommy his life. Because she was just not strong enough to save herself, just like those princesses in the stories.
Another fairy tale cut short, Laurel found herself on a downward spiral that had once started with the sinking of the Queen's Gambit.
For a while, she was lost. She was a helpless girl in a tower, always needing to be saved, always in danger, never strong enough, slowly loosing herself to the darkness of loneliness and poisoned apples. Many nights she awoke in a cold sweat, having to blink several times to dispel the image of Tommy staring accusingly at her. It would take years for the guilt to lessen, for his ghost to stop haunting her, for her to understand that it had not been her fault that Tommy had died. That by putting his death on her conscience, she was only diminishing his sacrifice, denying the choice he had made.
And then, for one moment everything was bright again, as she discovered that her sister was alive. The joy was quickly tempered by lingering feelings of betrayal, the shock settling too deeply in her bones. The poison had taken root in her veins, the darkness clung to her skin and in a moment of grief and despair, she remembered the stories and thought herself the evil sorceress, cursing the name of prince and princess.
It was everything but True Love's kiss that finally woke her from the spell she was under. Instead, she found herself standing in a hallway as harsh words hit her and a feeling of utter loneliness was all she took with her, while her family stayed behind. She was now the one fairy no longer welcome at the castle, the one turned bitter enough to curse a whole kingdom.
But it was enough to finally, finally wake her up. Even with all the anger and pain, there was no denying that she still loved her sister. Later that night, in her empty apartment, she took out the box from the back of her closet, fingers carefully tracing the drawing on the old book, and read through the fairy tales. Her tears fell unhindered that night, but nobody was there to wipe them away. No mother who listened in the doorway, no sister curled up next to her, no father carrying her to bed.
Laurel woke alone, crumbled on the floor, the book in hand, and dried tears sticking to her skin. There was a new ache in her chest, and the powerful need to see her family restored.
It was an uphill battle, but slowly, she got better. She apologized to Sara, deciding to lock away the feelings of betrayal that still lingered on bad days. Her life started to get back on track, and she found herself no longer complacent in her passivity, longing to break free and save herself.
"Once you let the darkness inside, it never comes out." A part of Laurel wanted to laugh out loud at Helena Bertenelli's words, wanted to point out that darkness was a part of life, and that it was almost as much a part of Laurel herself as it was part of Helena. It had crawled into her when the Gambit sank, had taken root in the years after and had coiled together after Tommy's death. For Laurel, it had never been about letting the darkness inside, because she had never been given the choice to keep it out.
When her sister gifted her a leather jacket before leaving, something like purpose reignited in Laurel.
….
The next time she took out the box and held the precious stuffed animal, her sister was dead once more. The memories left her no rest, her dreams full of a figure falling to her death before her, of that deep well of desperation lending her unknown strength as she carried the dead body of her little sister away, as she threw earth onto a grave dug up anew.
Her dreams left her choking at night, but during the day there was only anger and rage. After her failed attempt at vigilantism – not strong enough, she was just never strong enough - she took up boxing. The training was an welcome outlet and offered an unexpected friend in Ted Grant. For a while, it was enough to still her hunger, to quench the fire roaring through her blood slightly. Until the day she was carried half-unconscious from a burning car. Her anger was renewed, only spurred on by Oliver's choking protectiveness. Laurel swore to herself that she was done being the weak, pathetic damsel in distress.
And then the protector, the supposed prince that once was hers, was gone. Suddenly and unexpectedly, Laurel saw what needed to be done, saw a city without a hero, saw people without anyone to fight for them. And while she had never wished to be a vigilante herself, she suddenly realized that this was the path she had been on all along: protecting people. She had always chosen the law, trying to fight for those who couldn't fight for themselves. And yet it never seemed to be enough. She might have won some small battles, helped on a small scale, but true justice was not to be found in the courtroom, under bright lights and wooden gavels.
As she stared at her sister's mask, lying abandoned on the table, her thoughts circled back to those fairy tales. She remembered all the princesses, all these girls who had nothing to show for their kindness, had to be rescued and freed.
No, she decided then, hand trailing along the table, her fingers following the tugging of her heart.
Never again would she accept being unable to help someone in need.
Never again would she be a girl locked away in a tower, a damsel in distress that needed to be protected all the time.
Her fingers touched black material.
She would be a knight instead.
She reached out towards the mask and took it.
The End