AN: just so everyone is aware, I already have 12 or so of these chapters written-I'm just editing them as I go, making small additions and whatnot-and through maybe half of season 3 planned. This will be a lengthy project.
Also, flashbacks will not be in italics. Any dates before 2012 means the following passage is a flashback.
May 26th, 2008:
If Felicity thought she would be arriving on land with relative safety after miraculously surviving the fall into the ocean alongside the guy in the leather jacket, she would soon find out just how mistaken she was. It was almost the instant the second raft of survivors touched down on the sand that two figures came darting out of the treeline. A man in heavy tactical gear and a woman in a green hood-
And, oh dear God, the man had a gun.
"You all need to get off the beach now!" the man bellowed in a gravelly baritone as he reached them.
Was that a sword on his back?
"You must head for the cover of the forest." That was the woman who spoke, and she pointed to the indicated treeline with- Was that a bow?
No, really, it was a friggin' bow.
One of the survivors-an African-American man wearing a suit who looked like he'd been working an office 9-to-5 job for fifteen years-flew off the handles the moment next. Really, after the day they were having, who could blame him? But, it still seemed terribly ill-advised when 9-5 stomped right up to Mr. Tactical. Seriously, that guy's arms were twice as big as his-not to mention he was holding a gun-and yet suit guy wanted to argue with him?
"We just watched people we love die, and now here you are giving us orders?" Suit guy raged. "Who the hell do you people think you are?"
Oh, sweet baby J…
Mr. Tactical turned his eyes on the man, and suit guy actually had the sense to back up a step. Of course, that proved rather difficult when gun guy snatched his tie and held him stationary with his considerably superior strength. That look in his eyes didn't quite seem to be a sane one to Felicity.
"If you don't want to join them, you will do as I say and run!" Gun guy shoved 9-to-5 towards the treeline off towards the left, and the man stumbled, barely keeping upright.
Felicity couldn't move if she tried. She really wanted to because, to her knowledge, when a man with a gun told you to run, you probably should. But, her limbs wouldn't respond to her commands. Everyone else must've been having the same problem, because no one else budged either. Then Mr. Tactical held his gun in the air and squeezed off two very loud shots that certainly fixed that problem. Beside her, Leather Jacket reached for his side to an… empty gun holster. He must've been an air marshal or something to be carrying on a plane of all things. And the landing in the water must've stripped his gun away.
"Run!" Mr. Tactical bellowed, and most people were very hasty to comply this time.
Felicity and a few others still rendered immobile by recent dire events were the first to notice the dark figures that poked out of the treeline twenty yards in front of them. Somehow, the blonde knew that this was the danger the two armed people were warning them about. She was proven correct when, noticing the reactions of the survivors, the woman in the green hood drew an arrow from a quiver on her back and knocked it as she turned, and she let the arrow fly. It hit one of the dark figures center mass, and he went down with a loud shout. Another man with him raised his own weapon and fired in retaliation.
One of the plane crash survivors dropped as he took three rounds to the chest from the automatic fire-he wouldn't survive this one-and Felicity and several others screamed.
"Run, dammit!" Mr. Tactical shouted at them one more time, and they didn't have to be told again.
They ran after the others as more armed men appeared at the treeline. Mr. Tactical and Miss Archer drew most of the masked gunmen's attention, thankfully, but not all of it. Under the rain of bullets, two more crash survivors would never leave that beach, dead or dying by the time they hit the sand, but Felicity honestly didn't notice. It was all a blur to her, just a bunch of screams and the pounding of her feet on shifting sand. All she truly recalled afterward was how loud the pumping of her blood sounded in her ears as she joined the others in a mad dash for the cover of the treeline as they'd previously been bidden. Most of them made it, and, although they weren't yet being chased, they didn't stop to let the enemy catch up.
But, today's luck was just gawd awful.
One minute, Felicity was running for her life with the others through the forest-lagging behind a little because gym had never been her forte growing up-and the next she was tumbling down a large incline, tripped by the foliage under the canopy of leaves that covered the ground. It was completely undignified and true to almost every woman in any horror film ever. It was a hard fall down the hill, and she was pretty sure she hit a rock or something on her way down because her side suddenly started screaming at her in protest. She landed heavily on her back at the base of that hill, and her glasses flew off. She thought she heard them land several paces to her left, but she couldn't look for them if she wanted to with how her vision was momentarily failing after the harsh landing.
Felicity didn't move for a bit, instead just sort of lay there in a tired heap as she slowly caught her breath-there was a reason her Major involved computers and not Phys Ed. Her side was killing her, and she was sore in so many places after the harsh tumble. She must have been lying there for longer than she realized, however, because, when she finally lifted herself up with a groan and managed to find her glasses which had-miraculously-not broken during either fall, there was a shadow at the top of the hill. Felicity turned, but she already knew before she looked up that her luck of the day had gotten no better. The man, wearing a ski mask and toting a truly impressive looking rifle, had his weapon poised and ready to shoot.
The blonde murmured a soft apology to her mother because she knew then that she wouldn't be able to send her any of those pictures from China she'd asked for.
But, then the man screamed and jerked as if he'd suddenly been hit from behind, and the rifle fell from his hands as he lurched forward and then dropped.
There was an arrow in his back.
Felicity squeaked out a muted shriek and skittered back when, after his own tumble down the hill, the man landed but a couple paces from her. If the utter stillness of him wasn't already enough of a hint, the wide and unblinking nature of his eyes was the only indication Felicity needed to know he hadn't survived his fall. It was a first for her, seeing a dead body, and there was something slightly surreal about it, almost like she thought he would jump up any minute with an exclamation that it had all been some sick prank. And, it made no sense at all because he'd surely been about to kill her. She should be pissed as hell, especially after the month she'd had, but somehow Felicity and her angry, bitter heart actually felt… sorry for him.
It was a rustling of leaves somewhere off to the side that ultimately snapped her from her daze, and Felicity turned, jumpy like a foal caught out in the open, to find the man had not been traveling alone. This other man was scouring the area. Undoubtedly by the way he was expecting to find someone, he already knew she was there, and she realized somewhere in the back of her mind that these men must have access to radio communication-he'd been informed of her presence but hadn't been told exactly where she was.
He was going to find her. It was only a matter of time, so Felicity did something that would probably be classified as 'drastic' by any computer nerd's standards. She dove for the cooling corpse of the man before her-or, more specifically, for the pistol holstered at his thigh. The commotion naturally drew the attention of the man hunting for her, and he leveled his own impressive rifle on her just as Felicity turned the dead man's sidearm on him.
They both froze. The man's composure, however, seemed cool as a cucumber while Felicity was admittedly less level-headed. Her hands were shaking so bad, she would probably never hit him if she pulled the trigger, even as the man was slowly bringing himself closer to her by taking slow and tiny steps forward. He was testing her challenge line, gauging if he could push far enough to warrant getting a shot off before she did, but Felicity didn't know that.
All she knew was, as she held the gun leveled on the man, the face of that dead man beside her kept coming to her mind and how inherently wrong the unseeing nature of his eyes was. She and her mother had never been the strictest followers of their religion, mostly only recognizing the high holidays. They never really fasted on Yom Kippur or rested on Saturdays-or Shabbat as they were formerly known. Felicity didn't pray. She wasn't even sure if she believed in God or not. But, as she held a gun on the man in front of her, the stresses on the value of life in the Kaddish resurfaced in the back of her mind, and the weight of the weapon in her hands suddenly became all too apparent. The man could have a family. He could have children. There could be some little girl out there who he hadn't abandoned, waiting eagerly for him to return to wherever 'home' was. A simple pull of a trigger could take all of that away.
Were all guns this heavy?
December 12th, 2012:
Oliver had planned on never contacting the kid again. He'd been so resolved to it, in fact, that he hadn't once touched that laptop in the past month-and-a-half. It had just been sitting in that pouch in his motorcycle, collecting dust and losing it's battery.
Then Adam Hunt had been killed by another archer. If it had been almost anyone else on the List, Oliver probably wouldn't have cared, but he'd already visited Adam Hunt. That debt had been paid, so that he'd been killed meant there was someone in Starling who was undermining his authority. That Black Archer was a wildcard, and that made him a threat to Oliver's mission. He was a threat who needed to be eliminated, but the vigilante had tried all avenues he knew of in tracing the arrow he'd recovered. It had been made specially, so he couldn't trace it back to a manufacturer of any kind by its appearance. He was quickly running out of ideas.
So, he'd gone out and bought a battery charger for the laptop that had since died.
0118181523: I need your help.
It pained Oliver just to type the message out. He'd learned to rely on only himself to such a complete degree that even the thought of admitting he needed assistance on anything set him on edge. This was supposed to be his own personal crusade. No one else was supposed to get involved. It was bad enough that he'd had to enlist John Diggle because, however useful the man might be, the thought that he could lead such an honest man to the slaughter was enough to turn his stomach with guilt. Oliver was not accustomed to feeling guilt anymore, and he found quickly that he had a powerful disdain for it.
He did need help, however, and this matter was time sensitive. That was the only reason he was reaching out.
1925142008: And here I was thinking you'd forgotten about me. What can I do for you, Barton?
Oliver ignored the name, undoubtedly some pop-culture reference that meant nothing to him, and stayed on point with his inquiry.
0118181523: I'm looking for the identity of an archer.
The kid replied quickly, doling out typed comments almost as fast as human speech.
1925142008: I'm just going to assume this is someone other than yourself we're talking about.
This should go without saying, and the sarcasm he could almost hear was an added irritation. Oliver was in a hurry.
0118181523: I have one of his arrows, and it seems specially made. Can you do anything with it?
A pause followed, lasting a few beats that personally dragged out much longer than reality for his anticipation, and then Oliver got the answer he'd been dreading.
1925142008: No.
Oliver sighed and rested back in his chair. It had been a long shot anyway.
He'd just starting to weigh his options again when another beep sounded, and he turned a half-attentive eye back to the screen, thinking the comment to be nothing of consequence. He was wrong about that, as it turned out, and there was a spike of something that ran through him-some positive entity-as he read the next message that he couldn't quite identify until much later: gratitude.
1925142008: But I know someone who can. There's an intern at QC I've gone to for… odd jobs. She may be able to help you, and she's discreet.
Oliver was already planning to run an in-depth background check on this QC employee-quite the fortunate coincidence-when he responded.
0118181523: It's worth a shot. Who am I seeing?
Felicity Smoak.
His Anonymous Friend-whom the news had dubbed Synth after the past several weeks of the kid taking on street crime-had given him some contact information for the woman, an e-mail address and a phone number, but she worked at QC which meant it would be simple enough for him to just contact her in person and without his vigilante garb.
Oliver had to say, her history painted a rather intriguing yet tragic picture. He'd done his research on the girl the night before in the hopes of getting an idea as to whether she could indeed be useful to him. What he found had certainly not been what he was expecting. There was little of her on the internet, an oddity if he did say so himself, but that was why the first thing he'd learned about her was that she'd survived being stranded on an island for almost four years after her plane went down off the coast of China. At the time of her return eight months previous, a number of news articles had been written on the story, and, if he hadn't just returned to town himself a couple months ago, Oliver may have even heard about it.
With nothing else to find on the internet, he'd then delved into QC's records to find her personnel file and had been further surprised to learn she was only 24, yet she was in a Co-op internship with QC to get her Master's degree in 'Cyber Security and Computer Sciences'-as listed in her file. If she'd finished the degree on track, she would've had her Master's at 20. The serial college-dropout had to admit as he went to the tenth floor to find her that he was a little intimidated by the formidable intellectual image this girl set.
What he wasn't expecting were such bright colors.
Felicity sat in her small cubicle, her blonde hair and the bright pink of her shirt standing out distinctly against the otherwise drab backdrop of the corporate workplace setting. The vibrant red of her lips matched the color of the pen she held between her teeth almost to a tee, and if Oliver hadn't known going in that she'd spent four years stranded on an island, nothing about her cheerfully colored appearance would have told him so.
Her attention was on her computer screen, and the degree of focus she displayed had to be one of the reasons she'd done so well in school before her time away. There were some kind of notes open beside her, and Oliver wondered if she was using some free time to work on her studies. He found himself wishing in a brief moment of wistfulness that he'd been that dutiful with his education pre-China. But, if that had been the case, he never would have snuck off to China with his father. He never would've been forged into the weapon his city sorely needed him to be, so he was quick to discard any thoughts of how life could've been if he'd been different growing up.
"Felicity Smoak?"
He hadn't spoken very loudly, yet the girl jumped in her chair high enough that she was practically halfway to her feet as her hand flew in the general direction of her side for a reason he'd surely misplaced, and her blue eyes flew up to his with a degree of alarm he was surprised to see from such a normal looking girl. She managed to recover quickly, settling back into her chair and correcting her expression in swift order, but he saw a glimpse of the hardened part of herself that her bright appearance hid well from those who didn't know where to look.
"Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you," Oliver apologized, and he was surprised himself by how sincere he was with this sentiment.
The girl's mind seemed to catch up with her then because she blinked and gave her head a slight but firm shake and put on a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes.
"No, no, I… I startle easily. That's all."
She waved her hand through the air to dismiss the matter, and Oliver had no right to call her out on the reasons why. After all, it had undoubtedly been her time on that island that had resulted in her easy-to-startle nature, and he had no right to pry into the matter which was wholly personal. Everyone was entitled to their secrets, a notion he himself was no stranger to. So, the billionaire slash secret vigilante instead moved on to the business at hand.
"I'm Oliver Queen," he introduced himself, and Felicity gave a small and nervous smile, one that was partly sincere this time.
"I know who you are," she said with a light breath of a laugh. "You're Mr. Queen." She said these last words with a wide flourish of her hands in the general direction of his person that told him she couldn't believe a larger-than-life celebrity such as himself was standing there in front of her.
"Please, call me Oliver," he responded quickly. "Mr. Queen was my father."
Aside from needing to keep up his image of immaturity, the moniker of 'Mr. Queen brought to Oliver's mind a shrewd businessman who may very well have been able to walk on water as far as his enraptured son had been concerned. They'd butted heads on many occasions, but there was no way to deny that Oliver had once looked up to the man for the empire he'd built-an empire whose wealth had sustained his profligate and petty lifestyle as a boy. 'Mr. Queen' brought to mind a man whose last act had been to end his own life to ensure he wouldn't be the anchor that got his son killed. While the archer was hellbent to correct his father's wrongdoings, he would never live up to his image and therefore had no right to his title.
"Right," Felicity said as she gave a nod, "but he's dead." The girl flinched instantly as her own words reached her ears, and she shook her head with a grimace. "I mean, he was shot."
Oliver swallowed deep as images of their car being shreaded by automatic fire flashed before his mind's eye, but he was quick to push them back with an ease that had come through practice. Felicity seemed to notice quickly how much worse this last comment from her was because she fumbled on, her face flushing more and more as she spoke.
"But, I mean, of course you know that. You were there that night." Flinch. "And you weren't shot, so that means you can come down to CyberSec... and listen to me babble on and on about what was probably the worst night of your life." Felicity took a breath, and she looked so earnestly contrite that Oliver strangely found himself already forgiving this girl for her rather terrible string of faux pas. "I'll stop. I promise I will."
Felicity turned from him and closed her eyes and took another, deeper breath, and Oliver barely heard her count back from three under her breath. Then she opened her eyes again and turned back to him and put on another a smile, one a little more honest if also greatly embarrassed. Oliver found he had only one tangible thought.
This was the girl who'd been stranded on an island for four years? He'd expected someone less… personable? More like himself, perhaps. Brooding and bitter and with a general mistrust and dislike of people. Next to him, however, this girl seemed strangely well put together.
"What can I help you with?"
The degree and range of honest emotions she could display were quite surprising to Oliver, who was admittedly quite emotionally stunted after his own harsh reality check over the past five years. He felt like he might get whiplash from her many expressions, yet… he was smiling, wasn't he? It had completely snuck up on him, this mildly uplifting feeling of… amusement? It took him a moment to recognize it. Although subtle, the earnest quirking of his lips couldn't be refuted, and he was well aware that it was in response to the complete oddity that was Felicity Smoak. She was absolutely nothing like he'd expected going in, and he found himself wondering how much of that had to do with her years of isolation and how much of it was simply 'her'. How much of herself had she managed to hold onto, he wondered?
But, Oliver couldn't dwell on it. He had an archer to find and a crusade to continue.
"My buddy, Steve, is really into archery," the archer started his pre-thought-up story. "Apparently it's all the rage now."
Felicity actually rolled her eyes a little bit.
"Uh huh. An archer or two come to my mind as well, actually."
Oliver quirked his head a little and narrowed his eyes at this odd comment from her-because he'd been lying about archery growing in popularity-but he moved past it without much further thought. His alter ego had been in the news a few times, so that was surely all she meant by it.
"Personally, I don't understand it. It looks utterly ridiculous to me."
Oliver forced his expression to remain neutral as he told himself to ignore this unintentional slap to the face.
"Mm-hm."
'You thought the same thing once,' he reminded himself.
He must've been wearing an odd expression because Felicity tilted her head slightly to the side, and Oliver quickly shook off his wounded pride-a pride that he had no right to feel as a weapon.
"Anyway, it's Steve's birthday next weekend," he said aloud as he unscrewed the arrow tube he'd brought with him, "and I wanted to buy him some arrows. The thing is, he gets these special," he noticed the way Felicity's eyes went a little wide the instant he took out that black arrow, but he just assumed she'd never seen an arrow in person before, "custom made arrows. I have no idea where he gets them, and I was told you might be able to help me find out."
He attributed it to her clear interest in the arrow as he held it towards her, so Oliver didn't question why Felicity didn't question him on who could've possibly sent him to a computer expert for information on arrows. He simply assumed she'd done this sort of thing before since his Anonymous Friend had said he too went to her for help sometimes with 'odd jobs'.
As she took the arrow-verbally heeding his warning to be careful with the weapon with a suppressed eye-roll and her first completely honest smile-she looked up at him. For the briefest moment, Oliver thought she was reassessing something about him, as though she'd just realized something and looked at him with a new understanding. It passed so quickly, however, that he couldn't decipher the look further, so he ignored it.
When she was able to find with a few keystrokes what he'd been unable to find with an entire night of research, he realized why his Anonymous Friend had sent him to her.
She would've died. The man was about to squeeze the trigger of his rifle, and Felicity would've been ended because, honestly, she-bitter and angry as she was at the world-couldn't pull her own trigger knowing what it would mean.
Then Mr. Tactical was there. He shoved Ski Mask's rifle to the side just as the man got his shots off, and Felicity fell to the side on instinct as his shots went wide. She didn't notice until later that one of the bullets had grazed the outside edge of her right wrist, and she would understand then just how close she'd come to death. She didn't see the blow, but she heard the sickening crunch of bone that came with it. When Felicity looked up, Ski Mask was dropping like a rock, and Mr. Tactical wrenched a large knife from where the unfortunate man's spine had once met the base of his skull.
The only thing that kept Felicity from screaming was the bile that rose up in her throat.
Mr. Tactical turned to her then, bloody knife in hand, and Felicity looked up at him from her place on the ground, her eyes wide. Panic surged through her system.
"Run, kid," he said.
And she did. She couldn't really say if she was running from the armed gunmen hunting them or from the man who'd just saved her life. Both seemed like logical choices in that moment. She ran, ran until her legs felt like jelly, and then she fell to her knees and threw up that burrito she'd eaten on the plane. She heaved until her stomach was empty, and even then she still felt nauseous. Then she noticed her hand.
Or rather, she noticed the gun that was still in her hand.
Felicity dropped the weapon as if it had burned her, and then she skittered backwards until her back hit a tree. She'd never even seen a gun in person until that day, and this one… She clapped a hand over her mouth as a sound not un-kin to either a sob or a whimper escaped her, and then the bottle blonde was crying. She couldn't help it, and, before she knew it, she was sobbing outright.
Her plane had been shot out of the sky, and she was now stuck on an island where she was holding onto a gun she'd picked up off of a dead man who'd previously tried to kill her.
What the hell?
She didn't know how long she'd stayed there having her mental breakdown, but it was however long it had taken her to be found. Felicity gave another squeak of a shriek-muffled by her hand-when a man ran into her view, and she wasn't as relieved as she probably should've been to find it was Mr. Tactical who'd tracked her there. She would've shied away from him but for the tree that impeded her retreat.
The man held his hands up in an appeasing gesture, showing her he wasn't armed, but Felicity couldn't quite find it in herself to be relieved.
"Are you hurt, kid?" he asked, his tone gruff even when he wasn't yelling, and he earnestly seemed to want to know.
When Felicity could finally get her body to respond to her brain's commands, she offered a small, jerkish shake of her head as her answer. Mr. Tactical nodded, and then he observed her for a moment. He noticed the bullet graze on her wrist-which she had yet to notice herself-but said nothing of it, and then he turned and stooped to pick up the pistol she'd dropped on the ground.
Only then did Felicity realize the safety had been on the entire time.
Mr. Tactical checked the weapon and then tucked it into the back of his waistband.
"The others have not gone far," said a much more feminine voice, and Felicity turned to find the archeress-bowoman?-in the green hood was approaching them. Like Mr. Tactical's weapons, her bow was also put away. Was it put away? Was it sheathed? Or, was it holstered? Did you holster a bow? Felicity couldn't say because, honestly, it was a friggin' bow.
Mr. Tactical gave the woman a nod, and then he approached Felicity, which she only truly noticed after he'd stooped down and taken her by the arms.
"Come on, kid," he said as he pulled her up onto her feet. "We need to move."
By the time they made it to the others, Felicity felt numb. She hardly noticed when the air marshal who had saved her life, upon seeing her catatonic condition, demanded to know what had happened.
She did notice when Mr. Tactical's only reply was, "The first dead body is always the hardest."
The first, he'd said.
...Did that mean he expected there would be more?
As it usually is, it's late that night by the time Felicity leaves work. She's just heading out to her car to head home when her phone alert goes off and shows her the story currently breaking on the news.
The Dark Archer, undoubtedly the same one Oliver Queen had bid her to help him locate just earlier that same day, has taken five hostages. He wants to face The Hood alone, threatening to kill the civilians if any police officers enter the building.
That he has one of the terrified hostages deliver the message is just wrong on so many levels.
Felicity is more surprised than she should've been to learn who the man under that green hood is. She doubts he recognizes her. In fact, she knows he doesn't given their meeting earlier, but that's not important. He never really did see her face, after all, so she has no right to expect him to remember. As to his current nightly activities, the timing of his return is more than coincidental. It's telling. She really should've realised it sooner.
It's possibly the most foolish decision she's ever made-which is really saying something after the past five years. Felicity hurries the rest of the way to her car, tossing her trepidation and reservations into the trunk with her purse and laptop bag, and she casts a careful glance around to make sure she's alone in the parking structure-fortunately, it has no cameras that reach this angle-before she pops the hidden compartment in her trunk. She's dressed in minutes and tosses her equipment onto the floor of the backseat, and then she's speeding across town, stopping at each infuriating red light to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She's already late, she knows, by the time she makes it to the broadcasted location.
The Hood, Oliver Queen, is surely already inside.
The fight wasn't going nearly as well as he'd anticipated. Oliver quickly found himself outmaneuvered by the Dark Archer, and the frustration building in him was making him careless and sloppy. He searched the shadows where his adversary had disappeared the moment before, his bow leveled and an arrow nocked with the drawstring drawn as tight is it would go without damaging the weapon.
He didn't notice the archer was actually behind him until it was too late.
The first arrow that hit him in the back barely missed his spine, and Oliver cried out as he stumbled forward. A second arrow inserted itself forcibly into the tissue on the other side of his spine-clearly intentional given the placement was damn near symmetric-and he went down. Or, he would have, if he hadn't stumbled into a wall that was under construction. But, when the Dark Archer kicked him in the back-the pain it ignited was excruciating-he was pushed right through the wooden boards. Oliver staggered to his feet, then he was kicked again and back on the ground. The green-clad archer lashed out with one of the flechettes fastened to his thigh, but this man was two steps ahead of him again. He screamed as the man twisted his arm, dislocating it at the elbow, and then the Dark Archer took the throwing arrow from the vigilante's hand and stabbed him in the shoulder with it to add insult to injury.
Oliver was then kicked in the ribs so many times that he couldn't even scream again, and he knew he was on the verge of passing out by the way his vision failed momentarily. He couldn't quite seem to get that ringing in his ears to stop, and he was barely conscious enough to realize the man was saying something-something about 'the man who created the list' and 'wants The Hood dead'. His vision was faring marginally better than his sense of hearing at the moment, so he was able to watch more clearly as the archer drew his bow and leveled it on him.
And then he thought of Thea, and his mother, and Laurel, and Tommy, and the fear that spiked in him was so foreign that he had trouble recognizing it as such.
All he knew was that he wouldn't see them again.
For the first time in a long time, Oliver Queen had something to lose, and it terrified him. No longer was he the weapon, forged by a cold and unrelenting reality. He was the boy who'd watched his father shoot himself in the head, the boy who'd missed his family for five long years, who yearned to reconnect with his sister and make amends to Laurel, and the boy who desperately missed the easygoing and often crude jokes of his childhood friend. He was the boy who wanted nothing more than a hug from his mother. He wanted to talk to them again, to revel in the simple pleasure of some light, inconsequential banter, and he wanted to tell them that he, even in his broken and unrecognizable state, still loved them in all the ways he was still able.
He hadn't felt so human in years.
Time slowed to a near standstill as Oliver watched the arrowhead come to bear, and he wished it would just end already. He also thought time might not have slowed at all, that the Dark Archer was simply lapping up his uncharacteristic fear like a gluttonous hound lapped up meat scraps. He just wanted it to end…
But, then it happened.
Oliver saw the glinting light more than he heard the swish of cutting air as a sword blade moved through the space behind the enemy archer. The drawstring of the man's bow was sliced through by the blade's tip, the Dark Archer's arms flying wide as the weapon became unstrung, and then the tactical katana's blade was nestled squarely against the man's shrouded neck. The archer had been too focussed on his prey. He'd been so distracted that he hadn't noticed the intruder until his plans were already thwarted.
Oliver's Anonymous Friend had come.
He tried to tell the kid to flee because he would surely stand no chance in this fight even with the Dark Archer's bow now rendered useless. But, Oliver was so stunned that he was left speechless. He didn't even know what loyalty was these days, and before that moment he probably wouldn't have trusted himself to it. But as Oliver watched this inexperienced fighter who'd made his dislike in the vigilante's methods very clear, he simply couldn't fathom the reasons why.
Why would the kid come to help him?
Next time: Felicity versus Malcolm.
AN: If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to mention them. I'll try my best to address them without spoiling the story. If not, let me know what you think. I love to hear from you guys.