The lake and park were enclosed with a high gate, all these borders and boundaries, designed to keep her out, or cage her in. Tess, dismayed, put a hand on the cold bar. "Oliver, we should go," she said, looking into the darkness of the area. A lawn, with children's swing sets; a copse of trees and the long expanse of cool water.
Oliver looked at her sideways, "Why?"
She gestured to the fence with a 'duh' like look in her eyes, "Because there's a fence in the way," she said flatly.
He laughed a little, "That's nothing to people like us, Tess!" and he shucked off his jacket and began to climb the fence.
"What are you doing? We'll get arrested!" she hissed, looking up and down the street for signs of descending police. Oliver gave her a self-satisfied and cocky grin as he landed on his feet, smiling at her from the opposite side of the bars.
"Then you better kiss me through the bars, as practice for when we're in jail." Tess laughed at him, angling herself away slightly before she just smiled and leaned in to meet his mouth. His lips were hot and the fence felt like a band of ice on her cheek. When she pulled back he grinned, "Are you coming over or are you just going to stand there?" He waited for her. "Come on, Tess. You can own this world."
There's that dangerous glint in his eyes, she thought as she kicked off her heels, chucking them over the fence. She pulled herself over the top of the fence and down into his arms. Her heart fluttered with the thrill of rebellion. He inspired it in her. It filled her up with the reckless feeling she'd equated to her youth.
She followed Oliver barefoot into the darkness, the grass was wet with dew, soaking the hem of the long dress that fluttered around her ankles. "So, now that you have me alone…" She said in her sultry voice, "Whatever will you do with me?"
He laughed and grabbed her small hand, rubbing his thumb over the back of it, pulling her back to his side. "Just walk with me, Mercy, for a little bit."
They stepped into the deeper, matte darkness of the trees, Tess letting go of his hand to walk ahead, holding onto the branches above her as she swung around slowly, gazing up at the dappled starlight through the leaves. He stepped forward to catch, meeting her lips for a deep kiss, his hands in her hair, on her back, her arms. She shivered under his traveling touch, remembering when she was a teenager and how he could set her soul on fire.
Emotions bloom in her chest and fade away as quickly as snowflakes melt, all of the thoughts and feelings, all the shadows of their tarnished past tangle in her chest, and lie like thumb tacks, jabbing in with every beat of her heart, filling her with a sharp, metallic pain.
She steps away, almost unable to bear the memories and long forgotten feelings that she had bottled up, drifting between the trees like a shadow.
He followed her at a distance and eventually caught up with her, standing on the jetty that extended into the inky black lake. "Tess," he said quietly to announce his presence. She looked at him over her shoulder, her elegant profile highlighted, a different kind of darkness to the blue night.
"Oliver Queen." She sighed with nostalgia. "I remember you offered me the world once."
The tone of her voice made him nervous.
"I'd give it to you again, Mercy," he whispered hoarsely.
She stepped off the side of the wooden boardwalk and dropped onto the pebbly ground below, the rocks crunching as she landed. He followed, the sound of the water grew louder, the steady rush, and he found her turning slowly under the jetty with her fingers hooked into the gaps in the wooden boards above her head. He closed the space between them in the cool air.
"Hit me." She breathed, when his lips were close to hers.
He knows the weight of the burdens she's carried over the years. He knows that she has yet to believe he can pull her back from the darkness. He's seen her highs and he's seen her lows. He's seen the twilight fairground that she is, carousels in her eyes and a Ferris wheel heart. And he has loved her all the more.
She said it again, her eyes closed.
He kissed her instead. He knows she's not quite all there. He knows she needs an escape, but he won't strike her achingly beautiful face. Instead he kissed her with as much violence as he could muster into the harsh plunder of her mouth. He cupped her face and ruthlessly kissed her, pushing her back against one of the pier's support posts.
"Is this what you want?" he asked between kisses.
"I don't know what I want." Her voice is like gravel, it grates over him coarsely. He pressed his mouth to hers again and bites her lower lip until he could hear her hiss and intake of breath. "I just want to feel something. You used to make me feel such wonderful things…"
He ravished her mouth, barely giving her a chance to breathe. She slid her hands over his back, letting him devour her and make her remember how she used to feel. The shadows of their past selves, those beautiful dreams and raw energy, bursting into flames in the clash of their kiss. Those brilliant, passionate lost shadows that owned the universe. Tess tilted her head back to look past Oliver, to the stars blurring into a single band of brilliant, white light.
She felt Oliver's strong hands held onto her waist, bringing her back as she slowly felt her feet touch the pebbled ground. She drifted in and out, feeling safe with him holding her up in the long minutes and hours as they stared into the other's shadowed face and tried to catch their breaths. She felt all of those sparkling stars fade out of her fingertips, leaving her with nothing, ripped apart and hollowed.
She drowned in the brilliant empty spaces he created in her, where light shines from the distant suns that burnt out long ago. Where time and space compressed the universe into a tiny spear that he could present it to her in his cupped hands and show her everything that they could own, and the people they could be.
"Tess." His voice said softly, calling to her from a thousand miles away. She couldn't hear him anymore. "Tess, come back to me."
There were times when she'd try to hold on to the way he could make her feel, to capture those feelings like butterflies. Sometimes she would pull those emotions out on rainy days and hope to feel the same flutterings in her stomach. She used to, in the past when she was someone else, willing to believe that she still had a grip on the sphere of the universe that he'd offered her so easily in in the past.
Now she just felt foolish, clutching at all the things she could never have in the evening's cold blue light.
"Tess, come back to me," he said again.
She wanted to.
~
Fin.