Disclaimer: I do not own nor make any profit off of Arrow. It belongs to The CW, DC Comics, etc.
A/N: This was my first published Arrow story, and it's not my best piece, but I'm keeping it anyway. A few might recognize this story from my Arrow tumblr blog: HoodSmoaked. I'm also publishing all of my fanfiction on a fanfiction-only blog which will be called 'Mir Queen' the same as this account. It's not up yet, but it will be in the near future, so I'll put a note on my FFnet profile once it is. :)
Blessedly Beautiful
"Everything makes so much sense now."
Oliver Queen turned from the skyline across from the hospital rooftop with the barest tilt of his head, barely able to capture the profile of his one-time love as she said the words, her voice staid and monotone.
Laurel Lance was not one to withhold emotion. She fought, argued, debated, loved, and laughed all over her face. Nothing of Laurel was ever truly hidden, no matter how much she attempted to do so. The fact she could do so now with so little apparent effort was not encouraging.
Yet Oliver could not speak. He had no idea how to say what needed to be said. Although truthfully, he didn't fully know what did need to be said in the first place. So he let her do it for him.
"Tommy suddenly trusting the vigilante with his father's life, him being so awkward around you, that business when my mom came back and he wasn't really there for me, his injured hand, the Vertigo accusations and your hesitation with the basement, Tommy quitting the club…" Laurel executed her list of reasons as though it were a mundane book she never genuinely wanted to finish. But finish she did. "And of course his behavior when we came to the mansion with Arthur. Him… breaking up with me. Then telling me you still loved me and we belonged together. Now I know why you kept defending the vigilante – oh, inadvertently, perhaps. But by constantly pointing out to me that Malcolm – not the vigilante – was at fault, you were attempting to protect your intentions that night and keep away the guilt."
Now, with everything laid out so plainly, Oliver tried to speak and explain, finally turning to face her, but Laurel didn't stop.
"I blamed you, as the vigilante, for Tommy's death," she admitted, finally turning to face him, too. The tears in her eyes startled him somehow. She was not able to become so emotionless, after all. "I blamed the Hood for creating bigger and stronger villains to taunt this city. For starting an all-out war between the law and the criminal world. I thought Tommy died because of a power-feud between the Hood and the Copycat Archer. And honestly, Oliver? I still don't understand how I'm wrong. I keep telling myself it's you and of course you wouldn't do that, but… Why, Oliver? Why did Tommy die?"
This is what it all boiled down to, Oliver realized. Losing Tommy, who had proved how much he cared with his very life, was the one thing Laurel could neither sanction nor understand.
"When Rebecca died," Oliver began, pausing to inhale deeply of the chill night air as he recalled his best friend's words on the night of his birthday, "Tommy said Malcolm… disappeared. For several years, he was just gone. When he came back, he had changed. Now we all know how he changed. He trained to become the Dark Archer."
"That doesn't explain—" Laurel started impatiently, but Oliver cut her off.
"Just wait," he demanded firmly, shaking his head irritably. "I'm trying to lay it all out for you. You've spoken your piece. So just listen for a moment, will you?"
Her mouth snapped shut with an audible click of teeth, but silent she remained.
Refueling his resolve with another deep breath, Oliver went on more calmly, "After Malcolm's office was searched, the police found a recording on his desk. It was an old phone message of Rebecca's. From the night she was killed."
A sharp inhale was all the response Laurel uttered, and Oliver was grateful. His words became harder to say every time one passed his lips, particularly when he remembered who had hacked that message for him.
"That night," he pressed on doggedly, "Rebecca called Malcolm for help while she lay dying. But phone records show he ignored her calls. In the message they found, Rebecca said no one would help her. And she died there in the street. After that, Malcolm left here angry and lost… and finally found a purpose in one foul plan. To destroy the Glades. Not because he was fighting the Hood for power, but because he wanted them all to pay for what happened to her. For not helping her after all she had done for them. He even placed one of the devices in the subway right beneath the place Rebecca died."
"One of them?" Laurel exclaimed in shock, eyes widening.
"Didn't your father tell you?" Oliver inquired with confusion.
"Tell me what?" Laurel asked, shaking her head as if to clear the chaos away.
Lips pursed in heavy thought, Oliver wondered if he had any right to tell of Quentin Lance's part in saving half of the Glades. All in all, though, it would be pointless to hide it, he supposed.
"After my mother's announcement, I went to face Malcolm," he explained first, giving Laurel a particularly reprimanding expression when she seemed ready to interrupt again. "I knew Malcolm would probably have a remote on his person, through which he could trigger the device. I had to stop him from doing so. We also needed to disable the device in case it had its own arming feature. So I called a reluctant ally."
"My dad," Laurel inserted seamlessly, almost knowingly.
"He disarmed the device with Fel… Felicity's help," Oliver tripped over the name with a wince. To her credit, Laurel looked slightly sympathetic. "Diggle and I defeated Malcolm just as your father disarmed the device. But Malcolm had one last ace… he had a second device waiting in the wings. We had no idea of its existence until he told me. And then it was too late."
Silence encroached on the two of them, the mild breeze around the rooftop the only sound for a number of minutes.
"Did Tommy know?" Laurel finally asked, voice barely above a whisper.
Sighing heavily, Oliver forced himself to explain something he had never told Laurel and something he doubt Tommy had confronted her about before he died.
"That night I came to you," Oliver answered quietly, shamefully, "Tommy saw us together."
A gasp escaped Laurel's lips in one solid rush of horror, but Oliver pressed onward without waiting for a reply. "Just that morning, I had told him to go back to you and then I betrayed him by coming to you myself. He was rightfully angry and hurt. At the club the next day, he drunkenly confronted me and I tried to explain about Malcolm. Tommy didn't want to listen, of course. Not that I blame him… He went to Malcolm later that day, no doubt relying on the only person he had left. Whatever happened between them, Tommy must have tried to stop his father. When I came, he had obviously been knocked to the ground. He even said I was right about Malcolm. So he must have known."
"How did you know what happened to him so immediately later that night?" was Laurel's soft question.
"The damage was mostly contained on the east side of the Glades," he responded with a horrible dryness in his mouth as the memories flooded him. "Where you were."
"You came to save me," Laurel said on an exhale, the sudden understanding lighting her eyes. "Instead… instead, you found Tommy."
"I was there with him as he died," Oliver spoke through gritted teeth. "I pushed a piece of rubble off of him, thinking I could save him. But the steel had gone through him…"
He was shaking, he realized after a moment. Shaking after all these months because he had never really let go of the pain. It had simply become his purpose, his drive; to never let himself forget what Tommy had died believing.
"Ollie," Laurel cried quietly, reaching out at last to envelope him in an embrace full of forgiveness, apology, and mutual pain. She began to cry, and he found the same human phenomenon wetting his own face.
Oliver crushed Laurel to his chest, amazed to find he could still cry over Tommy, even after how many tears he had shed already. He cried for that loss, for the betrayal he had perpetrated, and for the lives and homes destroyed in the Glades. More than anything, Oliver cried for the hole in Laurel's heart which surely matched the fatal wound in Tommy's.
"I'm so sorry," he apologized through a tight throat. "If I had never come to you…"
"No, don't," Laurel stopped him suddenly, pulling back to look him wildly in the eye even as tears streamed down her cheeks. "Even if Tommy had come back to me, I would still have tried to save the CNRI. The lives we tried to save there… I wouldn't have been able to let all of that burn like so much trash."
"You're right," he admitted weakly, swiping at his eyes, "but the guilt for that betrayal will never really fade."
"I know," she whispered, torment in her voice. "But I understand. You thought you were going to stop Malcolm. That you wouldn't have to hide from me anymore. Because there wouldn't be a need for the vigilante if the Undertaking was stopped. Am I right?"
"Yes," he nodded once. How well she knew him.
"Thank you for telling me everything," Laurel attempted a watery smile. "It couldn't have been easy."
"It's one of the hardest things I've ever done," he confessed with a ragged exhale.
She nodded, and another silence pervaded, the likes of which Oliver didn't know how to (or even if he should) break.
"I was wrong, you know," Laurel looked up, seeming to have no such trouble breaking the quiet. "You're not a coward. You've become a hero."
"Felicity always knew I could be," he whispered brokenly, fighting back more tears all of a sudden.
"She knows you even better than I do," Laurel offered kindly, almost teasingly somehow. "I'm glad you have her."
"I almost didn't," he said out loud for the first time since the event which had nearly destroyed him. Speaking the words was painful.
"It's my fault," she sighed darkly. "If you hadn't been forced to hide from the search groups, you might have gotten to Felicity before Deathstroke could hurt her…"
"Didn't we just talk about this guilt thing?" Oliver laughed with very little humor in his voice. He already knew why the search parties had been on the scene well ahead of schedule. Yes, he had been viscerally angry at first, but after it was all over and Slade had been taken out, and Felicity was safely on the road to recovery, Oliver's slow compassion had grown quite exponentially.
"Yes, we did," Laurel sighed again, "but I'm sorry. She nearly died because of my choice."
"In part, yes," the billionaire confessed bluntly, moving to grasp her shoulder comfortingly. "But she'll forgive you for it as soon as she sees you. Its how she is. And if she can, I have no reason not to."
Oliver's thoughts turned to his IT girl, his friend… and knowing how kindly she would react to Laurel, in spite of what happened, sent tender feelings shooting through him.
"Thank you," Laurel smiled a little, before melting into a thoughtful expression as she stared at him. Something of his tenderness must have shown on his features, because she followed up with, "You're happy, aren't you?"
She wasn't asking because she was uncertain, Oliver could tell. She was asking because she wanted him to confirm what she had seen in his eyes or on his face when he thought about Felicity. It was a lawyer-like trait Laurel had always been imbued with.
"Yes," he agreed with a tiny nod. "After all this time, I'm finally happy. The truth is out with the people I care about most. And I can finally move on from the past."
"Finally happy," Laurel murmured mistily, smiling in spite of herself. "Knowing that… and seeing how happy Thea and Moira are after learning what you're made of… I think… I'm ready let go of the past now, too."
"This is probably the first time we've ever genuinely meant that," Oliver murmured with a sad smile.
"Probably," she agreed just as sadly, laying a congenial hand on his still-extended forearm as she hesitantly went on to say, "Like I said, Felicity knows you better than anyone else. She's good for you, Ollie."
"Felicity has her flaws, her faults," Oliver admitted with a tiny, knowing grin that only his blonde genius seemed to bring out in him. "I can admit those kinds of things now, and I can appreciate them. With you, I… I couldn't do that. Even with McKenna and Helena, I put them higher than I could legitimately reach, but with you it was such a high pedestal that we were bound to crash eventually. And in some ways, I think you did the same thing with me. You saw a better version of me and you expected me to be that new man before I was ready. Not that it excuses the wrong choice I made with Sara—"
"I know that," Laurel stopped him firmly, her eyes sincere with comprehension. "We both put each other too far above who we really were. Even if you had never gone with Sara, we would have destroyed our relationship because we expected perfection from each other, however unconsciously."
They both paused a moment in mutual understanding, remembering all of the moments where they crashed and burned in small, seemingly trivial ways over the course of their relationship. Either because Oliver had believed her too perfect to fail or because Laurel had pushed him to be someone he had yet to become. These moments, in hindsight, had grown in significance every time, and they would have continued to do so until everything blew up in their faces.
"With Felicity," Oliver spoke up again as the memories faded into the past, "I can honestly admit she is flawed, that she has weaknesses. And it's not a criticism. It's not a misogynistic degradation. Flaws make us human. They make her human. She's just so… real. So genuine. She's not a supermodel or a goddess… and she's not an angel."
He laughed into the night air at some of the… unique… things he had learned about Felicity since getting to know her better. Like how she had learned her away around a casino, how she had gotten her ear stud, or why she wore such wild colors at times.
"All of that…" he breathed, in awe of the special woman who had come into his life because of a bullet-ridden laptop and a ridiculous cover-story, "…all of that is what makes her so blessedly beautiful."
"I'm glad your happy, Ollie," Laurel spoke just as quietly, respecting the moment. "Now, you'd better get going. The doctor said Felicity is going to wake up soon. You don't want to keep her waiting any longer than she already has."
Oliver smiled in a mixture of happiness and regret; happy that Felicity was now his, and regretful that she had been forced to wait so long before he truly acknowledged and returned her feelings. Pushing the regret away and focusing on the future he had been given, Oliver moved towards the door that led back inside.
He and Laurel didn't speak, but shared a smile that spoke to things lost and things found. They understood each better in that moment than they ever had. As Oliver walked away, her hand slipped from his arm, along with the past to which he had once clung so strongly. Laurel was no longer his salvation.
Walking into the private hospital room to find Felicity awake — her hair in a ponytail and her blue eyes searching the room for him with lucid strength through a pair of black-rimmed lenses — Oliver's heart expanded and warmed, and he accepted the simple truth.
If Felicity ever needed a savior, Oliver would be her Tommy.
-The End-