Chapter 3: Revelations II

Oliver laughs in between putting his fork down and taking another sip of wine.

Maybe the wine was going straight to his head but it certainly complimented the intensity of the dish well. While he choose the type of liquor, the Alpha offered the particular bottle.

The Alpha was an alright cook, he'd give him that, the two of them eating mostly in silence, an easy quiet falling over them. The meat not too tender, not too soft, but not like he'd tell Slade that. This one meal definitely made up for some of Slade's worse ones.

"What's so funny?" Slade asks, looking up at Oliver whilst cutting a piece of meat.

The Omega supresses another half-cough, half-laugh, putting down his glass before he ended up accidently spitting in it.

Slade takes a bite of meat off his fork, watching Oliver for a response.

"Nothing," Oliver responds, leaning back into his chair, "I was just thinking that I hadn't thought to consider you possibly drugging the drinks or food before I started digging into it."

Slade shakes his head. The Alpha wasn't sure if he was supposed to take that as a joke or the Omega insinuating something about him.

"That would be a waste of perfectly good food. Probably would make it taste like shit too."

"I'm sure you'd get away with eating it," Oliver adds.

Slade knows that's likely true, the Mirakuru usually filtering out any potential harmful substances he put into his body quickly.

Dropping his knife and fork on the cleaned plate, Slade collects the leftovers between them and gathers up Oliver's cutlery as well, Alpha getting up from the table. Not quite ready to wash up yet with Oliver still here, Slade leaves everything on the countertop, bare plates in the second empty sink, beside the full one, before returning to the table.

Oliver hadn't said much as to the quality of his cooking but Slade took that as a good thing. No feedback—a lack of complaining from Oliver—was good feedback.

"You watched me cook the food," Slade says, settling back into his chair, "I didn't have time to do anything to it other than what you saw. If I drugged the wine too, I would have had to have done every bottle over there as I had no idea what you were going to want."

Downing some of the liquor in his glass, Slade watches Oliver visibly appear to format a response to his logic behind his eyes.

"True."

"I hope that wasn't a serious accusation either. If I wanted to drug you or knock you out, there'd be plenty easier ways to do it then sweating on you eating some food."

Oliver and Slade both knew that to be true.

They were just sitting across from each other now, food eaten but the bottle of wine left about half-full on the table. Oliver knows this is probably his opportunity to try and get some answers out of Slade, the both of them in a good mood.

He almost didn't want to ruin the semi-enjoyable atmosphere between them though.

Oliver looks down at his glass for a moment, swirling the liquid around in it like it would give him the answers to his problems.

"Oi, you better not be completely shit-faced," Slade quips.

Putting his wine back on the table, Oliver straightens up facing the Alpha. Slade leans forward in his chair, elbows on the tablecloth whereas Oliver keeps his back straight in his chair.

"So…" Slade starts, trailing off.

It seemed as if Oliver wasn't the only one that didn't know what to say.

Slade had been somewhat anxious to talk to Oliver after they ate, despite rehearsing in his mind a lot of the questions he thought he might get asked and how he would answer them. Albeit he wasn't quite sure what the Omega's reaction to any of it would be.

Oliver thankfully fills the silence as Slade doesn't.

"It's been a while since we've actually talked like this," Oliver says, looking downcast and then out the window.

He wasn't as restless as he was before in Slade's presence but the Omega still equally felt like he was at a loss for words at times. It felt like so much had been riding on this moment, that when it actually came to getting to it, Oliver wasn't quite sure if he could do it. He didn't particularly feel like interrogating Slade at the moment.

Slade shifts in front of him, fingering the collar on his shirt, looking slightly taken aback.

He smells good too.

"Back at your place doesn't count?"

Shaking his head, Oliver gives a no.

"What? So you're not immediately going to attack me either? Dinner is technically over now and I gave you my word we could talk after eating."

"Food was good," Oliver assures, "But yeah, I'm not going to."

I don't want to prosecute you.

"All that prior hostility of yours today, all for nought," Slade snorts.

The Alpha makes a face like he's laughing at Oliver on the inside, yet their eyes never leave.

Oliver thought there really wasn't much else for them to do in this situation other than talk.

"I wasn't being hostile, just… unsure," Oliver admits, running a hand through the back of his hair.

"And I gave you the right to ask me whatever you liked too."

Slade sits back from the table, creating more distance between them, one elbow still on the cloth.

"You go first; ask me… whatever you want. It seems only right."

"What? So how does this work? Do I ask you something, you answer, and then you ask me something?"

"Yep."

"Oh okay."

Oliver thought it sounded more like they were going to play twenty questions with each other rather than have a serious discussion. He didn't know what he wanted to ask the older man either, so he went with starting off easy.

"How'd you know I was the Arrow?"

Slade's face immediately blooms into a cheeky smile.

"Because I'm not stupid."

Brows furrowed, Oliver frowns telling the Alpha his explanation wasn't good enough.

"Come on," Slade responds, throwing his hands out in a gesture.

"Prodigal son returns home after five years lost at sea, hooded vigilante with a bow starts running around shortly after. It wasn't all that hard to connect the dots."

A stone drops in the pit of Oliver's stomach. Slade made it sound so obvious, that he was the Vigilante and all his attempts to keep his identity a secret were for nothing.

Was that true? Was he really that transparent?

How many other people could have known then, about him? If a complete foreigner to the city like Slade could figure it out…

Doubt filled Oliver's mind as he fiddled with his fingers under the table.

Slade shoots him a dark but earnest gaze.

"I know what you're thinking. Are you really that easy to read? Just like an open book? No, you aren't. It took me a while before I was absolutely certain it was you, but then I was looking for all the evidence that would suggest so."

More questions are immediately raised in Oliver's mind rather than him feeling like he'd just gotten an answer. What did Slade mean by 'looking for all the evidence?' What evidence? What possible information could Slade have used to discern him as the Arrow? Whatever it was, he wanted to know about it, that way he could pull the rug over any potential loose ends he might have had lying around.

Pushing those concerns to the back of his mind, Oliver steels himself.

Now only if he could get over how distracting Slade's scent was at times…

"Alright, go."

"Starting off small are we? Hmm?"

Slade smirks, stroking a hand over the stubble on his face as if he was actually pondering what to ask Oliver.

"Just go," Oliver urges.

Slade had answered his question so easily, maybe because the Alpha hadn't given him a total explanation to his query, yet he still seemed to answer it calmly and collectively all the same.

Whereas Oliver was fretting inside.

"Why do you do it?"

"Hmm?" Oliver mumbles in between taking another drink of liquor.

"Why do you do it?" Slade reaffirms.

"Why do you run around every night with your bow and arrow? Once outright killing the criminals in this city but now just incapacitating them for the police to come get?"

At Slade's words, Oliver flinches slightly, hearing himself and 'killing' used in the same sentence together.

"What's it to you?" the Omega retorts, not seeing how this was relevant to their current situation.

"I'm curious… And besides, you can ask me whatever you want and I'll answer. So I should be able to expect the same from you."

Oliver releases a sound somewhere between a groan and a whine. He doesn't even remember it being this hard to tell Diggle and Felicity about his crusade, and they were on-board it with him.

Slade continues to have eyes on him.

Less Beta spray around his neck and collar seemed to be having the unsurprising though somewhat good yet mostly bad effect of meaning his sense of smell wasn't as impaired and clogged as it usually was. Most things smelt about the same, albeit stronger however he was far more acutely aware of the opposite dynamic's pheromones than usual.

He had absolutely no trouble picking up the Alpha scent, rich and overpowering wafting off of Slade—a more potent scent than those Oliver was used to picking up in the city. Maybe that suggested Slade wasn't from an urban part of Australia—was much of it even urban? Or more likely it hinted and tied into his masculine nature—something not all 'domestic' city Alphas quite had—, a certain predatory quality.

Apex Alpha, maybe?

It was more of a coined phrase than any scientific terminology—Oliver knew it wasn't uncommon for aristocrats to try and push it as such though—, a term used to describe Alphas that had no Betas in their family tree and still held to certain 'rudimentary values'. Allegedly, Alphas were the first ones to carry the 'Beta gene', and when that gene became active, Betas were born.

Or so Oliver was lead to believe by his father. Hence why guardians would often insist on pre-approving potential mates before they let them near their Omega offspring.

Oliver wondered if all the blame on Alphas for supposedly ruining their 'perfect race' was just Omegas shifting the responsibility onto the dynamic they once left mostly in charge. Trying to avoid taking potential blame on their parts as certainly many more people than just some Alphas would have to carry the 'Beta gene' now?

Often people who had the money and assets to seek out the sometimes elusive Alpha-Omega courtships and the supposedly 'untainted' lines, found so much as proven carrying of the 'Beta gene' condemnable in their high society.

Possession of the gene wasn't really provable without backtracking up the immediate family tree to look for Betas or intervention on science's behalf, but Omegas were often thought to be able to smell the difference between a true Alpha—with generations of Alphas and Omegas behind it—and a 'quasi-Alpha'. Omegas had the best olfactory system of the dynamics, probably due to their inbuilt flight nature over fight, but Oliver rarely trusted his nose anyway so what would he know?

All he knew was that Slade had a very distinct smell, a smell like sandalwood and heavy musk that the Alpha obviously made no attempt to hide. A scent that reminded Oliver of the kind of Alphas his father would push as admissible suitors or potential mates he'd let near his son but Oliver fobbed off like that was never going to happen.

Oliver didn't know if he found that stray thought comforting or alarming, though the Omega would admit he wasn't going to let any suitor take him without a fight. It would at least be interesting to have an Alpha around that could try…

Shaking that thought from his head, Oliver tells himself to stop smelling Slade. Robert wasn't around anymore so he had little need to worry about his father's disapproval of who he would bend over or bend over for.

Oliver refrains from inhaling deeply, as doing so made him think about yielding in Slade's presence. If he was going to make a habit of backing off on the Beta spray, maybe he ought to start by doing it first not around Slade…

"I told you back at Verdant—not today, but a couple weeks ago—that I had an oath," Oliver chooses to start with.

"Which for the most part was true. Before… Before my dad died, he told me he wasn't the man I thought he was, or even possibly the man anyone thought he was. He said… that he didn't help the city—our city—he failed it. He helped run it into the ground where it is today along with others.

He told me I had to survive, to right his wrongs, to save the city."

Slade is quiet the entire time listening to Oliver's explanation. He doesn't allow his face to show it but inside he's thinking of the moron Oliver's father is. Telling his son a thing like that, like the father's crusade should become the son's crusade like it was some sort of birthright to be inherited.

The Alpha doesn't say anything of that sort however, seeing from the way the Omega's eyes glazed over and he looked out the window at the lit-up city, the subject was a touchy one for him.

Yet Slade also notices somewhat of a discrepancy in Oliver's tale.

"Your father told you all of this before you were shipwrecked?"

If he did, he sounded like an even bigger dick than Slade would have originally thought.

Oliver meets Slade's gaze again for a moment, pupils seeming to focus again in his eyes.

"No. He said it all before he shot himself in the head on the lifeboat."

Slade immediately regrets asking the question at all.

Despite the fact that Oliver's half-assed explanation for doing what he does—going out playing hero every night—just seemed to come down to his dad screwing him up in the head right before he killed himself.

Poor kid…

"I'm sorry," Slade immediately apologizes.

There are no tears in Oliver's eyes but his voice was unbelievably more sombre than usual.

"It's okay," Oliver says, seeming less bothered by the situation than Slade was.

"I'm over it now. No time to grieve about it… I thought my father was a real right bastard to me at times, but… He killed himself so that I could live, with the intention that I would go on living. He sacrificed himself so that I could live. So I suppose he loved me, in his own way.

I couldn't squander that, I suppose. I couldn't not try and do what he hoped to do. Not after he gave his life for mine."

The Omega's elaboration still felt to Slade like he was getting partial cliff notes on the situation. Like there were certain things that just didn't add up to him. The change in the Vigilante's 'targets' between a year ago and now, Oliver no longer putting an arrow in those targets, among other things.

Slade didn't have the heart to continually push or ask the Omega for questions potentially related to his father's death though.

Oliver releases a heavy exhale, sagging forward in his chair.

"Forget I asked," the Alpha says.

Nodding, Oliver accepts Slade's apology despite not being overly concerned about it himself.

Their conversation didn't seem to be going the way either of them expected or intended it to go.

Mentally shaking of the last strands of his past, Oliver composes himself.

"Don't you back out on me now, old man," Oliver scolds, "I've still got things I want to ask you."

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After the first round of questioning, Slade and Oliver seemed to get over their initial awkwardness with one another. The Omega quickly recovering from bringing his father's death up and the two of them slipping into a routine of exchanging information, rather than feeling like they were interrogating each other.

Slade and Oliver started belting through their questions, as well as the rest of the wine bottle.

Oliver would ask a question, Slade would deliver.

Then Slade would ask a question and Oliver would answer.

Sometimes they were less questioning one another and more just confirming what they already knew.

"You've been in Starling City for a while, haven't you?"

"I have," the Alpha snickered.

"How long?"

"Longer than you know. Biding my time… I've been hanging about since before the start of last year, 2013."

"What? What do you mean?"

"Ah, ah," Slade would tut, "You've had your one question, now it's my turn."

Oliver had flopped back into his chair defeated; removing his hands off the table from where he'd gone to pull himself up.

Slade was a lot more selective with his questions, albeit Oliver not always seeing why they were relevant or why Slade cared to know the answers to them. It seemed like while Oliver's questions were serious, Slade's questions were trivial prying for information at best.

"Oi, so what ever happened with you and that girl in the picture you looked at so much? The Beta's sister?"

Laurel.

"It didn't work out," Oliver would respond, "She hates my guts. Probably because I got her sister killed."

Probably also because after coming back from the island, he got her boyfriend at the time to sleep with him, causing things to become complicated between them despite her not knowing that part of his involvement in the situation. And then… said Alpha—Tommy—was killed in the Undertaking.

Heartbreak all around.

The two of them continued on that way for a while—just talking.

"What's with this building you live in? Do you actually live here? I don't think this is the same room as last time?"

"You're correct in thinking that, this isn't the same room I brought you too last time to put your ass in its place. But yeah, I needed the space around here."

"Needed the space? It doesn't look like you use much of it?"

"Not that you see."

"Okay, you go."

Of course, not all of their conversation had been intended to be completely serious. Had it? If it had, that premise was forgotten in the presence of good times and maybe a little bit of alcohol.

Some of their questions seemed to turn slightly random, sometimes not even able to be considered questions at all. Things that albeit strange, seemed perfectly fine to share with one another. They had spent months living together on a mostly deserted, hostile island after all.

Oliver lost his virginity at sixteen to a Beta girl, which turned out to be a very uncoordinated experience. Slade seemed to be impressed Oliver had managed to remain chaste for that long.

Slade, on the other hand, had allegedly had sex with nearly just as many Alphas as he had Omegas. A probable side-effect of there being so many Alphas in the armed forces. Oliver jokingly asked if Slade had been the receptive partner in any of those situations there.

After a short time of mostly mindlessly questioning one another, sort of re-evaluating where they both stood—on good terms with one another—, the almost empty wine bottle and glasses put to the side, Slade didn't have a question to ask when Oliver offered the opportunity to ask one over to him.

So far, it didn't even seem like they'd actually managed to learn that much about each other—or rather from each other—and in spite of that, Slade didn't actually feel like he really had anything else to ask Oliver.

He felt like he'd almost just been improvising from the start, Oliver certainly the one who had all the burning questions on his mind. Yet the Omega hadn't seemed to have asked him many of those questions Slade logically thought Oliver would either?

"Hey," Slade says, "are you… going to ask me at all what I'm doing in the city? What I'm doing here at all?"

Slade didn't know why he felt the need to bring it up, almost confused that the Omega himself hadn't mentioned it at all.

"I don't feel I need to. At least not right now," Oliver exhales, sounding genuine.

"Why not?"

Oliver bites his lip for a moment, something akin to worry etching into his face.

"Because I know I'm not going to like the full-blown explanation any more than I don't like what I already know."

A sliver of guilt stabs Slade in the chest at Oliver's words, but no doubt he deserved it.

"Well," Slade says, checking to make sure his voice is steady before going on.

"Why don't you tell me what you know, or rather suspect, and we'll go from there?"

Although Oliver had been drinking and his mind might have been mildly incapacitated from it all, the Omega's words come out crystal clear and sentient.

"You're in charge of the man in the skull mask, Cyrus Gold. Everything related to the Mirakuru reproduction here in Starling City, all the people that have died… You allowed it to happen. Possibly more too, other things I don't know of."

The Omega doesn't meet Slade's gaze as he speaks, and the Alpha feels horrible inside.

He just wants to apologize, for everything, beg for forgiveness from the Omega. But he knows he can't do that. He made the bed he know lay in—more like the grave—and he had to pull himself out of it.

Slade may manage to keep his face straight and his body from going completely tharn yet inside he felt like hell.

"I'm not particularly proud of any of those things," Slade says, not denying any of what Oliver's just said.

He doesn't know if it's a look of disbelief or relief that crosses Oliver's face as the younger man closes his eyes momentarily. Disbelief because he could have actually done those things, or relief because at least Slade wasn't trying to deny it?

Slade doesn't get a chance to read too much into Oliver's facial expression as when the Omega refocuses on him it's with boring icy eyes.

"But why? Why would you do any of those things? I get it you hated me; maybe you still should hate me. I stabbed you, I ruined you, I fucked you up in the head, but does that really justify you doing all those things? Was it really that bad? If it was really so bad that it meant you had to do all of this, just to get back at me, just to teach me a lesson…"

Oliver pauses for a moment before his voice escalates into a shout.

"Why don't you still hate me now—"

"—Because it has nothing to do with you!"

Slade's palm comes down on the table between them, silencing both of their shouts. The wood doesn't splinter or crack beneath his hand but the noise it produces is loud over the two of them quickly falling quiet.

The Alpha looks at Oliver almost as shocked as the Omega looks back at him.

He shouldn't have done that… He. Should. Not. Have. Done. That.

Slade had no right to be angry at Oliver and the Omega cringing like a deer caught in a car's headlights in front of him reminds him of that. Underneath all that armour Oliver had created and all the suffering he must have endured, there was still a traumatised kid who got shipwrecked on an island there.

The Alpha removes his hand from the table and deflates back onto his chair.

Oliver looks at him with an expression midway between disgust and defiance. Or maybe Slade was just imaging that?

"I'm sorry," Slade says again.

If he got angry, he'd possibly lose it. Slade knew that. He had a short-fuse temper to begin, something that could easily get the better of him. But mixed in with the Mirakuru inside of him is where things got out of control.

Calm, calm… Gotta stay calm.

Slade waits for Oliver to say something, that he deserves to go die in a hole even, but the Omega says nothing. Just looks at him with his head titled to one side and a blank mask up on his face.

Slade doesn't really want to have to explain this to Oliver, something he was both ashamed and frightened of—a rare thing for him—but he forces himself to do it anyway.

"I should probably thank you."

Their eyes still following one another, Oliver makes a noise barely above a whisper. Slade picks it up though, and it sounds like a 'hmm'.

"Your reluctance to outright kill me and stubbornness to not go along with what I blindly believed, pulled me back. We wouldn't be here, sitting here today if it wasn't for you. I might not even be here at all."

Oliver surprisingly seems to be listening to his words and taking them in, though the Omega's facial expression remains mostly vacant.

"I don't get it… What do you mean? You told me just a few weeks ago you hated me for stabbing you in the face. And I-I… I wasn't… I didn't want to have to kill you."

Voice cracking in the middle, Oliver swipes a face over his mouth as if to steady his vocal cords.

He could have… he would have done it. Oliver possibly would have killed Slade had the Alpha continually forces his hand. If it was between Slade's demise and the continued lives of innocents in the city—his friends, his family. There was… There was no choice to make. Or at least that's what he told Felicity after he put three arrows in the Count for holding his friend hostage.

Killing dulled the soul, that much was for sure, ripped it asunder as taking other's lives would surely only take yours in the end. When there was no alternative to killing though… the lives of many outweighed the life of one. At least… supposedly it did.

But what kind of cruel choice was it to have to choose between the lives of your friends?

Oliver shakes himself from his thoughts, almost… relieved that it hadn't come down to that. That Slade was still reasonable and not a rabid dog that needed to be put down.

"What I told you was… partially true," Slade murmurs.

A white lie then, Oliver deduces.

"Then what's the rest of the truth?"

Slade sits up, leaning over on the table closer to Oliver.

"I see things…"

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I gave the demon my heart and it took my soul.