Oliver Queen is the Arrow.
Oliver. Queen. is the *Arrow*.
Thea's brother is the *Arrow*.

Roy wanted to sit down and let the information sink in. He wanted to take a minute and think about all the implications of the idea that Thea's brother was the one who had saved his life...and had never told him. But he couldn't.

Because if they didn't do something soon, Thea was going to be as dead as everyone thought Oliver had once been.

Still, it did nothing to keep Roy's mouth from dropping open as Oliver Queen stood by the bar at Verdant, his hood open, but otherwise dressed in full 'Arrow' regalia. When he recognized that the two people he had been waiting for had arrived, Oliver approached quickly, offering his hand to Maggie. "Oliver Queen," he introduced himself.

"Maggie Carpenter," Maggie responded in kind, shaking Oliver's offered hand.

Roy could only shake his head in shocked amazement. "Wow..."

While Oliver understood and empathized with what Roy was feeling, he also knew that time was of the essence. "If you will follow me, please," he instructed Roy and Maggie, acting very much like the CEO he was in the 'real world', "I believe we have business to discuss?"

Roy's head kept shaking as he watched Oliver punch a set of numbers into a keypad and opened a door to what appeared to be door to a secret section of the basement that he had never noticed before.

Maggie, though, seemed to be unwilling to let the display of technology around her change her mind. "Okay, clearly you guys are well funded," she told Oliver, "but that doesn't change anything about what you're going up again...Sara!" Maggie did seem truly surprised to see the girl from the previous night's rescue standing in the back of the basement area, waiting for her. "What are you doing here? Do you work for Mr. Queen?"

Sara couldn't help herself from chuckling at the idea. "I suppose you could say we're in a...partnership," she replied, leveling a teasing smirk at Oliver as she did. The smile, though, faded quickly. "But I have my own reasons for going after Beso Rojo."

Maggie carefully studied both Sara and Oliver, impressed to see that they both carried themselves with the same warrior's demeanor. "I've seen Sara fight," she told Oliver. "Can you...can you two work together? As a team?"

"If we need to," Oliver replied.

"Then you just might make it out of this alive," Maggie declared, satisfied by Oliver's response. She then turned to the other two people she noticed in the room. "What about you two?"

Felicity threw her hands up in a gesture of surrender. "I'm just technical support," she declared. "I'm just here to help you guys get ready for the fight, not go in there and do the fighting myself."

"Fair enough," Maggie agreed, cracking the first smile that she had allowed herself since entering the basement. She waved her had to indicate their surroundings. "This stuff your idea?"

"The tech side," Felicity replied with a shrug. "Most of it is Oliver, though."

Maggie took another careful the very well-appointed fighting setup. It reminded her of some of the tools and training spaces they had back home. Perhaps Queen is better prepared for this than I'm giving him credit for... "What do you know about Red Court vampires?" she asked Felicity.

Oliver and Felicity, in particular, broke into wide smiles...as if they knew something that Maggie didn't. Oliver tilted his head back in the direction of the basement stairs. "Why don't you ask our resident expert on the subject?" he told Maggie. Confused at the declaration that there was someone else in the room that she hadn't already seen, Maggie turned around to face the stairs...

Her heart started to race as soon as the veil spell was lifted. It can't be, she thought in stunned denial. There's no way... She approached the stairs cautiously, not wanting to break the image if it were some sort of dream-vision, and yet not really believing the evidence of her eyes. The possibility that what she was seeing was actually *real*. That he was here. Standing right in front of her. "Daddy?"

Harry approached with an equal level of caution, slowly coming out of the shadows and into the light. "Hi pumpkin," he finally greeted her sheepishly.

Maggie gasped at the sound of the voice that she knew as well as her own. The voice that she, somehow, had been able to hang on to all her life. "It's you," she whispered, tears starting to travel down her cheeks as slowly as she was moving. Those two words had brought her whole mission to Starling City into perfect clarity. God hadn't brought her there to take care of a nest of vampires or to investigate the appearance of a new, previously unknown wizard. God had brought her there for *him*. The one thing that she had wanted all her life. "It's really you, isn't it?"

Harry, for his part, was staring at Maggie with an equal sense of wonder and astonishment. "You look so much like your mother..." he whispered, his voice breaking at the thought of the woman he had loved and lost to the enemy they were now fighting. "God, you're so beautiful..."

Those last words were more than Maggie could bear. She ran toward the vision full-speed, her heart leaping in her chest when she finally realized that he was there, he was *real*, and that she could finally wrap her arms around him like she had wanted to do for her whole life. The smell of him...the smell sent her mind back to that awful day, the day she had been running from her whole life. But she didn't care. That day was a bad dream. A terrible, awful memory. But that was in her past.

This was *now*.
And here, in the now, he was really *here*.

Harry buried his own face in Maggie's hair, the tears flowing freely down his own cheeks. He never thought he would ever live to see this moment. The daughter he had given up, that he had entrusted quite literally to God's care, returned to him. And yet here she was, embracing him so tightly that his back was starting to hurt from the force. He was so far beyond caring that she could break his back if she wanted to. It didn't matter one bit. "It's been so long," Harry finally admitted, his voice breaking from the emotion of the moment. "I thought you would have forgotten all about me."

Maggie pulled out of the embrace, wiping her tears away as she tried to process Harry's last words. "*Forget* you? How could I possibly *forget* you? If I even *tried* to call pop 'dad', he would immediately launch into some story about how you helped him or saved the world in some way or another. Or both. There was no way that I could have ever forgotten about the 'great Harry Dresden'." She pulled his hands into hers, her own voice breaking as she thought about how much her foster father would have wanted to see this moment. "Or that I was the great Harry Dresden's daughter."

Harry suddenly found himself unable to meet Maggie's eyes as old guilt found its way back to the surface. "I thought you would hate me, especially after all this time..."

The idea that Harry was proposing was horrifyingly foreign to Maggie, and it showed on her face. "Hate you?"

"For leaving you," Harry confessed. "For...for not being able to protect your mother..."

Maggie mouthed a silent "oh", suddenly understanding the source of her father's words. The events of Chichen Itza were as etched on his memory as they were on hers, but, evidently, they had very different perspectives on what happened that day. "Mom gave her life to save mine. It was her choice. You had absolutely *nothing* to do with it."

"But," Harry countered...then stopped, finding himself suddenly unable to say the words. "But...but I..."

Maggie knew where her father was going, and stopped him before he had a chance to get there. "Dad, if you had talked to me ten years ago, I might have been *mad* at you. But that's it. And since then..." her voice trailed off as her expression showed a hint of the very familiar haunting pain of dark memories that Harry himself was well acquainted with. "Dad, that thing you killed was *not* mom. And I refuse to let you think anything otherwise. Is. That. Clear?" Harry shook his head, chuckling at his daughter's demand. It was not the response that Maggie had expected to hear. "What?"

"You," Harry replied, "you...sounded so much like your mother just then."

Maggie smiled wistfully at her father's comment. "You should tell me more about her sometime."

"I will," he agreed warmly. "I promise."

Maggie squeezed her father's hands to seal the deal before pulling her hands away from his. "And as for that whole nonsense about me being mad at you for leaving me to be raised by the Carpenters..." She pulled the sword out from the holster on her back and held it between them. "I trust you know exactly what this is?" When Harry nodded, Maggie continued, "dad, I grew up around such an overwhelming amount of love that I took up the 'sword of love' and my pop's mantle as a Knight of the Cross to express my gratefulness for everything that had been done for me. God does everything for a reason. I don't regret any of it. And pardon the expression, but I sure as *hell* don't hate you for it."

Harry felt like a five-ton weight had just been lifted from his shoulders. "Thank you," he whispered. He tucked a wayward lock of dark hair behind her ear. "God, there is so much I want to ask you..."

It was then that Maggie finally remembered her surroundings. "And I have a ton of questions to ask you, too," she agreed. "But right now we've got a raid to plan. You're in, right?"

Harry's smile threatened to split his face open in radiant joy. "Sweetheart...wild horses couldn't drag me away at this point."