Thea Queen didn't raise a hand to Ra's Al Ghul because she thought she would win. She didn't use every single thing her father taught her with anger aching her bones to escape. She didn't go in for the kill at every opportunity because she knew she would walk away. She did it because Thea Queen knew she was going to die and she sure as hell wouldn't be doing it without a fight.
She wished he had just killed her, a bullet to the brain would have sufficed and it would have been cleaner, faster. If the league wasn't so pretentious in their gun ban Thea would have been dead already. Instead there was a sharp pain in her side, a pain that distracted her from the glass stuck in her legs and the blood leaking from her lip, a pain that motivated her to make her last dying effort a call to the one person who always swooped in to save her - her brother.
As she laid there and bled out, Thea realized that the "life flashing before your eyes" cliche is complete bullshit. The only thing flashing through her eyes were a colorful assortment of torture ideas for Ra's Al Ghul himself. He had denied her the privilege of a quick death and the only thing worse than dying was being stuck to drown in her own whirlwind of thoughts as her consciousness waned and her body grew weaker.
She really thought she would have made it to 25; if Thea hadn't been bleeding out all over her fluffy white carpet, she would have laughed. That seemed to be the Queen family tradition: death by sword. Her father (her real father, Robert) being the only exception, respectively. He just had to go and swipe the "get out of stabbing free" card, huh?
It took all her might to keep her eyes from fluttering close. But maybe her eyes closing shut for one last time wouldn't be that bad. With a life tainted by death and tragedy time and time again, it comes as no surprise that a person would spend a lot of time thinking about death and what comes after it. After the death of her mother, Thea concluded that there was no heaven and no God, at least, not a very benevolent one. However, when you can feel your pulse weakening, your ideas on the stance seem to become muddled. Maybe there was a heaven waiting for her, a heaven with her mother and father and Tommy and Sara. Then, after a long while she'd see Oliver, Roy and Laurel and they'd all be eternally young and beautiful and happy, sipping mojitos on an ethereal beach and waving as Tupac and Marilyn Monroe walked by.
But even with her mind beginning to flicker, she knew that was Pure Thea talking. The Thea who hadn't been defaced with trauma, who hadn't heard a knife slicing through her own mother or was constantly picking up the pieces of her shattered life, watching as they cut her fingers time and time again, reopening sealed wounds. That Thea was gone. Maybe forever. Even if she survived (unlikely), that Thea was never coming back and, as she lay on her death bed (well, floor), she realized that she was okay with that.
Thea took a shallow, shaky breath and let her eyes flutter close.
A pair of heavy footsteps interrupted the deafening silence of Thea's loft. Those footsteps turned into an erratic run.
"Oh my god, Thea!"
"You're gonna be okay…. You're gonna be okay…"
Oliver Queen had survived 5 years of hell, being orphaned, the death of his best friend and the death of his ex girlfriend, but he wasn't sure if he would be able to survive this.