Okay, this is my first time posting anything that was inspired by something that could loosely be called a prompt. After posting chapter nineteen of "What happened to Vegas" these two messages reached me at Ao3:

"longlivesmoak on Chapter 19 Sat 21 Mar 2015 02:51PM CET
[…] Oliver and Felicity together! I wish they kiss outside Firestorm or the Foundry, the paparazzi catch them and the next day the picture of them would appear in all the gossip magazines

who_is_vanda on Chapter 19 Sat 21 Mar 2015 01:46PM EDT
hahaha And I would like to see Laurel's reaction about this. Your idea would be one of my favorite scenes... Jules, think about it..."

I did think about it and I came up with something that might not live up to the expectations coming with hoping for a favorite scene, but I still feel like it adds a new dimension to the Vegas!verse and I felt like putting it out there to bridge the time until the wonderful Albiona approves the next chapter. She sacrificed her lunch-break to get this short piece to me, because she's wonderful. I cannot thank her enough.

Okay, guys, I hope you at least slightly enjoy it. Dedicated to longlivesmoak and who_is_vanda over at Ao3. This is their fault. ;)

Silent Musings (on princesses, cyborgs, and strangers)

January 10th, 2013

The early morning came with quiet solitude. The rest of her day was filled with noise, with bustle and talking, but the first thirty minutes of the day were her alone-time, the moments she gathered the strength for the next ten hours surrounded by people, working in the stress of the overcrowded office of the CNRI, standing in court fighting for people nobody else cared about, debating with overworked policemen who'd arrested mothers caught stealing diapers for their babies.

Laurel Lance's life was founded on talking, on out-smarting other people with words, on quick thinking and quick acting—and she was good at all of these things. She loved these things.

Laurel Lance also loved a man who was a talker, who was all worded wit, quips, and clever commentary. She loved Tommy Merlyn, whose loose tongue got him in trouble quite regularly but whose loose tongue also had managed to pull her out of the darkness. He had made her smile when nobody else had been able to. He still did. She loved to hear what he had to say—she would never wish for him to fall quiet.

But she liked the quiet that came with being an early riser while her fiancé slept in.

The apartment around her lay in complete silence. The smell of coffee lingered in the air and mixed with the scent of freshly toasted and well-buttered bread. Sitting by the kitchen counter, she stirred her coffee in the huge mug. It was an old thing, its print faded, the pink letters spelling "when I grow up I want to be a princess" almost completely washed off by years of nearly daily use.

Buying this mug and giving it to her little sister Sara on her fourteenth birthday had been a joke. Sara had always been the princess of the family, into pink and unicorns and the idea of finding her Prince Charming. Laurel, three years older and newly dating her own version of a charming Prince in the form of a Queen, had felt the need to poke fun at her sister's ideal. It had been a crappy older-sibling move, but her little sister had liked the stupid mug, had laughed at it and said, sighing wishfully, "God, I really hope so."

Sara had used the mug every morning—until she had boarded a yacht with Laurel's Queen-Prince to die in the North China Sea. Since then Laurel used it every morning to make sure Sara was always her first thought, to remember her little sister when she had only been an innocent girl, full of life and dreams. It was nice to remember the simpler times. Laurel liked to start each day with something as simple as remembering that she loved her sister even though Sara was gone.

Reaching for that mug now, Laurel took a sip. Hot and sweet, exactly how Laurel liked her coffee. Carefully she sat the mug down and took another bite of her breakfast. Chewing, she reached for her tablet, another part of her morning routine. The rest of the day was spent reading serious things like propositions and petitions and motions, but her mornings were filled with mindless surfing the web. And Laurel's first stop was always Starling City's Gossip Network.

The website loaded and she took another bite—only to nearly choke on it.

She coughed, took a huge swig of her coffee—and burned her tongue. A curse was stuck in her throat as her eyes watered from the combined mishaps. Laurel coughed again and swallowed heavily, her tongue hurting.

Rarely had she been as grateful for her early morning solitude as in this moment. "Royally in Love." What a crappy headline! Journalists and their bad puns were just too predictable! Especially the writers working for SCGN loved their jokes about the Queens and their reign of this city, neglecting that it was founded by power based on money.

Sure, the same was true for the family she planned on marrying into in four months, but the word-games possible with the name 'Merlyn' were limited and less obvious than any connotation that came with the Queen name. And the paparazzi were much less interested in her and her fiancé than they were in her ex and his slut-wife.

Those were petty thoughts, Laurel knew and she didn't like that they popped up in her head every time she was confronted with the bitch marrying the guy who had feared committing to Laurel. It was an old wound and even though it wasn't open anymore she could still feel where it had stung. Because it had stung painfully. It had burned and bled, and the fact that her little sister had betrayed her, too, had only increased the intensity and pain. Her sister had died while Laurel had felt blindsided, without any chance to yell at Sara and tell her in very clear terms how much her actions hurt and devastated her older sister. Ultimately, Laurel would have forgiven Sara, the sisters would have found a way to move past this; Laurel knew they would have. But in reality they couldn't. And that made Laurel feel like she needed to die, too.

Every time Laurel Lance saw Felicity Queen, she was reminded of all of that: of the betrayal, the grief, and the helplessness to make anything right ever again.

Deep down Laurel knew that she was unfair, that she was placing blame unfairly, letting her frustrations out on the wrong person, but she didn't care. Because Laurel Lance firmly believed that Felicity Queen wasn't a nice person. How could she be when Felicity Queen used a drunken marriage and the unexpected death of the drunken boy she had married to her own advantage? When she lied about Laurel's dead little sister, turning her into a stalker creeping onto the boat and making it seem like her untimely death was her own fault? When she lived off the family name she didn't deserve?

For years Laurel believed that Felicity had lied about her pregnancy, too. The fact that Felicity hadn't had rattled Laurel—because it had rattled the man she loved. Ever since he had been to court for Ollie's legal resurrection, Tommy felt guilty for starting the rumor that Felicity had had an abortion. Tommy had visited her at the CNRI later that day and Laurel perfectly remembered the sight: his pale skin, the guilty look in his eyes, the shake in his voice when he told her, "The baby was stillborn. A boy." He had swallowed heavily then and forced himself to continue talking, "You should have seen Moira and the Queen Bitch in court—they weren't the heartless cyborgs they usually are."

His conscience had plagued Tommy since that day. Two months of feeling guilty had ended with an apology. Laurel still didn't know how she felt about that, about Ollie forcing Tommy to apologize to the Queen Bitch. Did Felicity Queen really deserve an apology? A small voice inside Laurel told her that, yes, she did. Because everything Tommy had told her had convinced her that Felicity stopped being a heartless cyborg when it came to her stillborn son. And despite everything: the pain of losing a child was nothing Laurel wished for anybody, anybody.

But there also was another, louder voice inside Laurel that told her that if Tommy had had to apologize, so should have the woman who'd ruined Sara's reputation, turning Sara into the other woman when it was her, Felicity, who stole a taken man. Laurel had been Ollie's girlfriend back then—and that was a well-known fact. Oliver Queen was a paparazzi magnet since he was only a young boy, his relationship status had always been public knowledge, and Laurel was sure that Felicity had known, because Laurel couldn't think of a girl not knowing Oliver Queen.

In the first months after her sister and her boyfriend had vanished together, Laurel had tried to imagine how that woman had won Ollie over, manipulating him to give in to her. She had wondered despite knowing deep down that not much manipulation had been necessary. Sadly, Tommy hadn't been around when Oliver met the woman who fueled a hate inside Laurel that she had never believed herself capable of. Tommy wasn't able to shed any light on how this had started, and Laurel knew that it was probably a blessing he couldn't. The first meeting had probably been worse than anything Laurel could imagine. And when it came to that she had a very vivid imagination founded on real and personal experiences. Ollie had rarely been faithful to her. He'd always had a wandering eye.

She had caught him cheating multiple times.

And she had taken him back every time.

Now that the emotional distance coming with the passing of five years separated her from last feeling this kind of betrayal, Laurel could admit that she should have ended it years before Ollie left her and took her sister with him to drown. But she had held on to a fairytale that had never even come close to reality. Her relationship with Ollie had been picture perfect—it had looked good in still frames, but that image never matched reality.

Being with Tommy was the exact opposite. She didn't blind herself into thinking that their relationship was perfect, because it wasn't. It didn't need to be, because despite the small imperfections it was exactly what she wanted, what she needed.

She knew that people thought she had settled for the best friend after Ollie had disappeared—which couldn't be further from the truth. She had simply found the perfect fit in the most unexpected person. And she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. There wasn't the slightest doubt within Laurel regarding that, not the slightest doubt of her love for Tommy.

Sitting by the kitchen counter, her burned tongue prickling, Laurel also knew that it wasn't jealousy bubbling up at her, making her heart beat heavily in her chest as she stared at the display of her tablet. Her eyes were glued to the picture of the boy she had once loved, and who had grown into a man she didn't know anymore, and the girl Laurel blamed for her ultimate loss, and who had grown into a woman she despised.

It was the most harmless picture of a couple on a sidewalk. Only when Queens were involved could such an everyday action turn newsworthy. It was ridiculous and offending, really, if you thought about it, but to Laurel it came with a shocking revelation that felt like an earth-changing shake.

She had been wrong.

The silence of the early morning surrounded her as she studied the photo taken in front of Firestorm, Inc, Felicity Queen's company with the utterly ridiculous name. Apparently, Oliver Queen had turned it into a habit to drive his wife to work—on his bike. There were two pictures. The bigger one showed them kissing, sharing a sweet goodbye kiss that looked strangely intimate. Even though it was appropriate for all audiences, it had the feeling of being explicit content. But that wasn't the photo rattling Laurel. It was the second, smaller one showing Ollie sitting on his bike while Felicity stood next to it, handing him back a helmet. She was saying something and whatever it was, it made Oliver smile. It wasn't a huge, flashy smile like the ones she remembered Ollie sending her; it was a soft curving of his lips that reached his eyes and made them shine.

Never had Ollie looked at her like this.

Alone in her kitchen with the sun just starting to cast its light onto the streets outside, Laurel Lance could admit that and she could accept that it brought back feelings she believed to be at least four years in the past. Looking at this stupid paparazzi picture proved facts she had always taken for granted to be wrong.

This drunken marriage wasn't as meaningless as she had always believed it to be.

New Year's Eve might have been a first hint, but Laurel had been too worked up by the closeness of the woman who had entered her life when she had been at her lowest, hating the fact that she couldn't get the rise out of her that Laurel'd wanted. Felicity Queen had been the careless cyborg Laurel believed her to be, all business and catty comebacks that fit her, and she had believed Ollie's support of all that to be an act, at least partially.

But this image displayed on her tablet was all real.

It showed a man she honestly didn't remember, somebody she hadn't met before.

What if Laurel had never met the woman in this picture either?

That thought was so shocking that Laurel managed to make herself flinch. "Where the hell did that come from?" The question popped up in her head and she didn't even notice that it passed her lips. Instead, she jumped up from her chair, fumbling with the button on the side of the tablet to turn it off, getting that photo off her screen as quickly as possible. Right in that second she wished Tommy were up already. Waking him wasn't an option, because that would give her wandering, irrational thoughts way too much importance. One picture shouldn't be enough to rattle things she had firmly believed for years.

These thoughts were just the result of the last months, of the fact that Ollie was a part of Tommy's life again, Laurel reasoned as she put the plate, her barely touched breakfast, and the nearly full mug to the sink.

The friends planned on opening a club together. They'd rekindled their friendship. Tommy couldn't think of anybody else he wanted to be his best man. All of that meant that Oliver Queen was a part of Laurel Lance's life again. And Ollie had made it clear that he brought his wife along. Laurel needed a way to deal with that. Strange that these facts and a photo had brought on such doubtful thoughts.

Pouring the coffee down the drain, the pink fading letters on the mug that had belonged to her passed sister caught Laurel's eyes. Despising Felicity Queen was part of remembering Sara. This mixture of love and hate had always been there, but Laurel had never consciously acknowledged it. Never in the previous five years had she been so aware of this fact, of this emotional combination. Perhaps this wasn't the best way to remember a girl whose life had been all ease and enjoyment.

It was that thought that drove Laurel out of her kitchen.

Her heart suddenly unnaturally heavy in her chest, she busied herself with mentally listing everything she needed for the day. Focusing on that, on work and the tasks that lay ahead, she raced through the apartment, collected the files she had been studying last night while perfecting her opening argument. She slipped her heels and her coat on and reached for her car keys. It was time to tackle this day, because today she couldn't stand the quiet one second longer. The silence needed to end.