A/N: First Green Arrow/Lauriver story I've written. Mostly written before I watched any of the episode past this point, and I've only seen through 1x05 by the time I posted this. Not based on any scenes that may or may not have occurred in 1x05, and ignores everything in 1x04 after this scene. Based entirely off very early Season 1 characters, hopefully I didn't do too bad a job on it.
I just felt like there were a lot of early moments between them, especially if you include the deleted 1x02 scene where Laurel basically asks Oliver over to Netflix and chill, many of which I feel like could have gone differently if other people/things hadn't interrupted, and Oliver had stepped up and acted like the caring man he had become on the island. So this is him finally stepping up.
Disclaimer: Beginning dialogue and scene is from 1x04, all characters belong to not me, no $$$, etc.
Oliver walked into the Queen mansion, still feeling the fatigue of both the fight and Dig's rejection. He was seriously looking forward to crashing into his bed, and pushing all of this out of his mind for a few hours. He'd just started up the stairs when a voice put an end to those hopes.
"Where were you?"
Oliver turned around, for once not particularly pleased that she was there. He also briefly wondered how long she'd been there, waiting on him to return.
"What are you doing here?" he asked her, genuinely wondering why she was at his house. While most of their interactions since he'd gotten back hadn't exactly been the best, the last time he'd seen her was when they'd all got kicked out of the new night club, and she'd seemed particularly mad at him then. Although that might have had to do with her belief that she needed to defend her screwing of his best friend.
"I heard about the shooting and wanted to make sure you were okay," she replied, the girl who always cared about how he was, no matter how mad she was at him, showing through.
"You did?" he asked in slight surprise. Even after how (relatively) well she'd taken everything after he'd gotten back, her genuine concern still surprised him.
"Yeah," she replied, nodding her head slightly. "I knocked on the door and I found a family terrified for you. They had no idea where you were," she continued, pushing far more guilt on him than he wanted to deal with at the moment.
"Oh," he groaned softly to himself, trying to subtly bang his head against the post. But she wasn't done yet.
"Are you so self-centered that you don't think that people who care about you will wonder where you are after you got shot at?"
"You're right," he replied, both sincerely agreeing with her (he did care about the people around; he was trying to make the city better, after all, even if he couldn't tell anyone about it), and hoping it would get her off his back until he'd had enough sleep to deal with this.
"I made peace with your selfishness a long time ago," she continued, making his heart tighten more than anything else she'd said had, "but Moira, Thea and Walter, they don't deserve that. They deserve better; someone who doesn't care only about himself."
She turned and started to walk out. Oliver knew he had to say something, to keep her from walking out the door; he couldn't let things stay like they were at the moment.
"Laurel."
Laurel turned back to face him. Oliver forced himself to look her in the eye.
"Thank you for coming."
"I care about the lives of other people, Oliver. Maybe you should try it sometime," she replied, before turning back towards the door, and starting to walk out once more.
As much as he'd hoped he wouldn't have to deal with anything else that night, this clearly wasn't going to be able to be avoided until later. Oliver sighed and said, "Wait."
Laurel stopped, not turning around for several seconds. When she finally did, she found Oliver looking at the floor around her feet, head hung low.
"What?"
It wasn't really a snap, but it certainly wasn't a question, either.
Looking up enough to look at her, but not meeting her eyes, he took a deep breath before saying, "Can—? Do you wan—?" He exhaled, closing his eyes, before opening them back up and actually meeting her eyes this time, trying again. "Would you be willing to come upstairs for just a few minutes?"
She studied him hard for a couple seconds, before nodding ever so slightly. Oliver let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, before nodding his head up the stairs, as he turned and started ascending them.
Laurel briefly wondered why she had agreed, before following him up the stairs.
Unseen by either of them, Thea had watched the latter part of the interaction from the shadows. As Laurel slowly followed him upstairs, she smiled softly. Her brother may have been a major jerk (although, who was she to judge, given how she'd turned out in his absence), and cheated on Laurel with Sara, but he clearly still cared about Laurel, and as much as Laurel tried to pretend she was over him, and mad at him, and everything else, she clearly still cared about Oliver as well. This wasn't a relationship that was going to be repaired quickly, but maybe there was still a chance for them after all.
Laurel followed Oliver down the second floor hall, not having been this far into the house since before he'd died — disappeared — in the yacht crash five years earlier. In fact, it was the only time she'd been in the house except when she'd come to invite him to come over to her place with Rocky Road and all the secrets he wasn't telling her — or anyone, if how his family had no clue where he was after the shooting was any indication. Of course, after his sister had apparently told him he needed to open up to someone, she was the one he'd gone to, so maybe it wasn't such a stretch that if he hadn't opened up to her, he hadn't opened up to anyone.
Entering his room, her breath hitched slightly, and she paused in the doorway. Maybe she wasn't ready to do this yet — this room brought back too many memories — good, bad, painful, all in such a flurry that she couldn't separate them.
Oliver apparently sensed her hesitation, as he quickly said, "We can do this some other place, if you'd like."
As he moved towards her, clearly intending on finding another room for them to talk in, she quickly said, "No. It's okay. I'll be okay."
Oliver moved back, sitting down on the edge of his bed, giving her time to enter.
Laurel slowly took a few steps forward, looking around her. His room looked exactly the same as she remembered it. She hesitantly made her way over to his bed, slowly sitting down on the edge, several feet of space between them.
Oliver waited until she looked up at him before beginning.
"You said I should care about other people," he said slowly, his own gaze somewhere around the carpet at her feet. "That I need to stop being so selfish."
He looked back up and met her eyes.
"You're right. And, I know it doesn't look like it, but I am. Trying."
"That would be easier to believe if I could actually see you doing something," replied Laurel, but without the normal bite that would usually accompany that comment. He was at least having a serious conversation with her, and it wasn't the first he'd had since he got back. In fact, if she was willing to admit it, she was pretty sure he'd had more serious conversations with her in the few weeks since he'd gotten back, than he had in the couple years they'd been together.
"Does trying to save you from the people who broke into your apartment count for anything?" Oliver asked softly.
"No, because you were saving yourself as well," replied Laurel, her tone soft but her words a little harsher than she might have made them if she didn't have something to add to it. "But trying to get your sister home from the bar might."
Oliver smiled slightly, knowing that was the best acknowledgement he could expect from Laurel at the moment, and more than he deserved from her.
"When I told you that I made plans when I was on that island, I was serious. And they weren't selfish plans. They're just not plans I can tell anyone about, for their safety. Including you. So I may look selfish, disappearing right after something bad happens, but I'm really not. And I obviously can't expect you to believe me, but it is true. But since I can't ask you to believe me, what can I do for you to show that I'm not selfish any more?"
"Ollie…" sighed Laurel. "It's not me that you need to show that you've changed to. Like I said—"
"You made peace with my selfishness a long time ago," interrupted Oliver with a sigh of his own. "Which is a terrible thing for you to have to have done. But if I'm going to start showing people that I've changed, I have to start with someone."
"Then why not your family?" replied Laurel. "They deserve it far more than I do."
Oliver sighed, and collapsed back on his bed, staring up at the ceiling. The bouncing of the bed as he fell back into it shifted them slightly closer together, though neither really noticed it.
"Because I need my family to think I'm a spoiled playboy who only thinks about himself?"
Laurel sighed, turning slightly and bringing one knee up on his bed so that she could face him.
Oliver propped his head up in his hands so that he could look at her. "I did just put — how did you describe it? — 'an outstanding effort into pissing everyone off and keeping my family and friends at arms length'."
Laurel chuckled lightly at this, remembering her own words too clearly. Looking back down at him, she couldn't help herself; she reached out and ran her hand over his arm. He had ditched his coat when he'd walked in, and was in just his dress shirt.
She rubbed his arm for several seconds, before finally saying, "So your excuse for being completely selfish and not caring about anybody besides yourself is that you need everyone to think that you're really like that so that you can go do whatever secret thing it is that you're keeping from me, and everyone?"
"Something like that," replied Oliver, before suddenly grabbing her arm and pulling her down onto the bed next to him. She gave an undignified squeaked, and slapped his arm. "I need everyone to think I'm the same person I was before the island. And that's what I was like before, right? Selfish and never cared about anyone but myself."
If she hadn't believed before that he'd changed, at least some, she certainly did now. The pre-island Oliver never would have been self-aware enough to acknowledge that he was selfish, and only cared about himself. Laurel positioned herself on her side, resting her head in her hand, studying him. She slowly reached out her other hand and lightly brushed the stubble on his chin, feeling it all prickly under her fingertips. All the time she'd been with him, he'd always been clean-shaven, and she found her mind wondering what it would feel like to kiss him with a beard.
"That was the Oliver from before the island," she said slowly, still stroking his face gently, unable to look him in the eyes. "I'm beginning to be convinced that it's not the Oliver who returned, though."
They lapsed into silence, Laurel's hand drifting down to rest on his chest, both their eyes drifting everywhere except to the other's. Finally, Laurel broke the silence again, looking up at his face and waiting until he finally made eye contact with her.
"I'm sorry for saying you were self-centered, and didn't care about anyone but yourself."
Oliver rolled over on to his side to face her, and shook his head. "It's okay. That's exactly what I looked like."
His move had brought them nearly face to face, something Laurel became acutely aware of in the quiet that followed. Oliver apparently recognized it too, as his eyes briefly flitted down to her lips.
She leaned forwards, slowly closing the distance between them. He leaned in as well, their lips brushing softly against each other, sparking feelings in Laurel that she'd long tried to bury.
To her surprise, Oliver pulled back slightly a second later, their breaths still mingling in the air.
"Wha—?" she began, before he cut her off.
"Are you sure about this? I did still —"
Laurel launched herself back on his lips, cutting him off. She really didn't know if she was okay with this, and certainly at that moment didn't want to hear him say that he'd cheated on her with her sister, or whatever else he might have been about to say.
She'd deal with how okay with this she was later — right now, all she wanted was the feel of his lips on hers again.
Five years was way too long.
