A/n: A re-imagining of when Oliver fell at the end of Arrow's third season. A little "what if" of when the daughter of Ra's al Ghul stumbles across a dying Oliver Queen and decides to save him instead.

I wrote this mostly because I was inspired by the potential they could bring, also because I can't really find any other stories involving the two.

This story follows the TV universe, except without the romance between him and Felicity.

Chapter: 1

It was dark – then it was white.

He blinked, eyelids fluttering against falling flakes of snow. The coldness blanketed him from all sides, but it felt distant, like an echo, a fading afterthought.

An icy gust swept over his battered form – and he gasped, hands moving quickly to shield his eyes from the snow. Wetness brushed across his cheeks, his arm leaving a trail of sticky red. His gaze fell, noticing his arm stained crimson, from fingertip to wrist. He couldn't move, his body felt detached, broken almost.

Eyes darted to his surroundings – white as far as he could see.

"Forgive and have mercy upon him..."

His face contorted in pain as memories shot forward like insistent stars upon a darkened sky.

"… Excuse him and pardon him, make honorable his reception."

Ra's al Ghul moved with a speed he could not match.

His blade was clumsy and unrefined, but Ra's was almost like an extension of his own arm.

"… protect him from the punishment of the grave..."

Forged steel tore into flesh – and then weightlessness, as the cliff's wall rose while he fell.

"... and the torment of the fire."

And fire he felt. His fingers dug into the snow around him as fire tore across his lower chest. He instinctively threw a clump of ice over the wound, but it did little to alleviate the agony. He couldn't breathe, each constriction of his chest expelling a little more blood into the surrounding snow.

Darkness came and went. The sky was darker when he regained consciousness.

He laid there for the longest time, trying to use his training to compose his strength. Still, something prevented him from moving. He had to find out what.

He pushed an arm into the snow, trying to lift himself off the ground when falling awkwardly onto his right side. He realized that his right arm had not moved the entire time. He turned his gaze and saw his own elbow twisted at an extreme angle, the sharp edge of what seemed to be bone protruding out from the gory wound. His entire limb was blueish pale from his shoulder down, most likely due to the onsetting effects of frostbite.

And like how the memory of his fight evoked pain from his sword wound, it was then his body noticed his broken arm.

He screamed – and darkness returned.

It's been 67 years since someone challenged me
Heir to the demon.
Oliver...
Choose...
Oliver!
Oliver!
Do you covet death so much?

Oliver Queen burst free from dusty sheets, cold metal brushing across his ribs. He convulsed in horror, realizing that his entire right arm was coated in metal of dull black. He tore at its edges, then slammed it against the nearby wall. But it was useless, he couldn't remove the coating.

Taking a long second to calm himself down, he started to examine the foreign attachment. It started at the end of his shoulder, where scarred flesh could be seen. He remembered the way his arm looked after his fall from the cliff's edge – he remembered the mangled flesh, the protruding bones.

The metal resembled an armored fist, but he couldn't move the metallic fingers, and he dared not imagine what laid underneath. Removing the sheets around him, he noticed bandages wrapped surgically around his lower chest. There was a dampened spot near where his frantic movements had resulted in the reopening of his wound.

He took a look at his surroundings – he was in a hut of some sort, in a condition as dismal as he was. It was dark and dusty; there was no other furniture but the bed he sat on. The window was boarded up with nails that seemed to have rusted in the last century. The curtains that hung to the side, once white, were now grey and torn, almost as lifeless as everything else was.

Then – came a soft crack, and the doors swung inwards.

"You are awake," a voice accompanied the hellish winds.

Turbulent winds forced against the opened door like wrathful demons. The doorway was quickly pulled shut, effectively shielding the occupants from the maelstrom outside.

"Where am I?" Oliver demanded, his grip tightening around the nail he hastily dug free from one of the wooden boards behind him.

"You seemed to have forgotten who it was that saved your life, Oliver Queen." Nyssa al Ghul's tone was non-threatening, but an air of ambivalence clearly hung between the two. She motioned towards his held weapon with a look of amusement until he hesitantly placed it aside.

She removed her winter hood, freeing a headful of darkened locks as tufts of hair mopped against her forehead. "You are somewhere safe."

"Are we still on Nanda Parbat?" he asked, his posture still equally as stiff. It was a rhetorical question, there was nowhere else on Earth that existed such hellish winds. "Why?" he asked. "Why am I not dead?"

A miracle, she thought.

He was more dead than still amongst the living. The feeble movements of his chest were barely noticeable; desperate, yet bravely unrelenting, clinging on to all it could. It took only a second for her to access his situation – he was critically injured, if she left, he would surely die.

He stood no chance – not against his wounds, not against the temperature, and surely not against the wolves.

The ice was a blessing. It prevented the excess loss of blood from the wounds that her father had inflicted. But his right arm was already gone. It was beyond salvageable, not just brutally twisted from the elbow down, but the entire stump already in a darkened shade of blue.

Frostbite. He would never shoot an arrow with that arm again.

She did not hesitate. Her blade swung forward – a clean slice, there was barely any blood.

She cut a piece of her cloak and made him a tourniquet before carefully moving him onto the makeshift shed that she brought along. It was already dusk, and she knew that the nights were even more so dangerous than an assassin's blade.

She started to pull. The ropes quickly dug into her gloves and flesh. She bled, but they survived.

It wasn't how she had imagined his eventual return to consciousness. She preferred him unconscious, like the way he was for the whole of last month. But only the latter half.

His first two weeks were plagued with constant peril – an insistent fever that just wouldn't set. He slipped in and out of a delirious state due to the setting infection of his wounds. There were no basic medical supplies on this part of the mountain, and she could only make do with the wild herbs that she could gather.

He did not know what she had done for him, but she did not blame him. She couldn't find the proper words to explain their current predicament.

"What else does Ra's al Ghul want from me?" his voice freed her from her thoughts. "What is-"

"Ra's al Ghul believes you are dead," she interrupted. Her lips twitched, "I found you by the cliff's edge and told them you were already dead."

His face was plagued with questions, but he was quiet for a long minute.

"Thank you," he said.

She nodded.

"My arm," he asked afterwards, the image of his broken arm still burning brightly in his mind. "I assumed it was… too late?"

She nodded. "You have the village doctor to thank for that contraption. He's the village's blacksmith as well. A talented old man. He helped with your wounds while I gathered the proper herbs from the village's garden. Not an easy task considering most of them were already withered frozen."

"What is this… material?"

"He mined it from the springs beneath Nanda Parbat. Near a small cavern lake, said to hold magical healing properties."

He studied the glove-like object. It fitted him like an actual arm, albeit bulkier than a natural limb. His rational mind dismissed the object's mystical healing properties, but with the things he had seen in the last few years, along with his recently amputated arm's lack of visible discomfort, he felt a little swayed in his beliefs.

"Garden? Village? Doctor?" he asked after her explanation, not quite sure what she was referring to.

"The village," she said as a matter-of-factly, like it was the most common-known piece of knowledge in the world. "Yes, we do have a functioning village, with young and old. Did you think Nanda Parbat is a place where only assassins reside, without a functioning society?"

"That's… exactly what I thought," he admitted sheepishly.

"We need to change your wrappings," she said when noticing the reddened stains of his bandages. "We can't let them get infected again."

She sat onto the edge of the bed, across from him, her presence barely making a dent on the bed's surface. She removed a fresh roll of bandages and a flask of ointment from the bag she brought along. "I will help you, you'll only embarrass yourself with one arm."

He didn't disagree. He positioned himself beside her, giving her an easier angle to attend to his wounds. Her fingers brushed across his skin, the cool ointment quickly glossing over his opened wound, her touch as careful and meticulous as one possibly could.

She leaned closer as the bandages started to further cover his ribs, each layered tenderly over the previous. Her breath washed lightly across his skin – he looked away, but she did not seem to have noticed.

"A month," she said afterwards when he asked, "you were unconscious for a month."

He wasn't expecting that. It was a lot longer than he anticipated. His team must have thought he fell in combat.

"I need to get back," his voice was shaky and filled with worry. "My team needs me. I need to get back to Starling."

"Have you lost your mind as well?" she motioned towards the outside world. "Look at where you are, we're on one of the highest points of the Tibetan mountains, during one of the harshest winters in a thousand years. You will not survive a day, much less the month's trek to the nearest inhabited village."

"Then what am I supposed to do!?" his voice strained, "to wait for my death in this icy prison!?"

"No," her voice softened, but it was filled with confidence. "You get better, you train and you become stronger. Then together, we kill Ra's al Ghul."