The idea that you might end up in a job that doesn't allow you to be who you are, over the course of a lifetime, is still one of the most chilling nightmares to her. It's a good metaphor for fears she has about losing her soul in some accidental, mundane way. She was a woman who is was scared, but also a vigilante on behalf of her own soul.

That is a good example of why efficient and trustworthy courts are so important. Without them, people are left to their own devices. Frequently, that means violent, vigilante devices. Order breaks down. We no longer have civilization, only individuals acting in their own interest, not the common interest. The whole thing becomes like this evil enchantment from a fairy tale, but you're made to believe the spell can never be broken.

She had remembered skidding on a patch of black ice - a dangerous, unseen force that could cause deadly consequences. She remembered applying the brakes, something her mother taught her when she was learning to drive, but the brakes didn't work. What the hell? She remembered the pole and she remembered the feeling of the air bag knocking her out.

What she didn't remember, was someone passing by and calling the police.

Vincent checked his cellphone. "Shit, I gotta go. There's a car accident not from here - they need all the help they can get." He clapped Oliver on the back and excused himself. He was looking at the chapel as it disappeared from his rearview mirror.

When he reached the accident, there was no mistaking the crumpled Aston Martin and the identifying license plates.

Vincent's heart clenched.

When he got to the scene, they were using the jaws of life to get the car open. She was passed out in the driver's seat. But what really caught his attention, was the steel rod that was going through her abdomen.

"Don't move her!" Vincent climbed into the crumbled passenger's seat and checked for a pulse underneath the gushing blood. "She's barely alive."

"Vin... that's Cora." A paramedic friend of his whispered.

"I know." He had to keep his head with him. He couldn't associate his medical training just because she was his sister. He needed a level head. "We need to cut this pole as close as we can get it to be able to move her. GET A FIREFIGHTER OVER HERE NOW!"

A half hour later, and Vincent was riding in the ambulance with a bloodied Cora. He had instructed the police to check every inch of that car, because something told him that this was not an accident. Especially not after Richard paid them a visit.

"Give me another liter of B positive and someone call Oliver Queen."

"Why Oliver Queen?"

"He's her husband."

He took the other bag of blood and hooked it up in place of the empty one. She was losing too much blood.

"Female. 24. 130 pounds. Unresponsive at the scene. Car crash, metal spike from a nearby fence lodged in her abdomen, lost a lot of blood. BP is 180 over 100. Pulse is slow, possibly going into shock. Pupils are barely responsive." Vincent had spoke so fast as they gently pulled the stretcher out of the ambulance and carefully wheeled her into the emergency room.

The call that Oliver took as soon as the party was dying down made his nerves freeze. It was Vincent, telling him that Cora was in a really bad accident and that it was the call he got when he had to leave. Oliver could hear from Vincent's voice that it was bad, Cora's brother on the verge of hysterics.

Oliver knew it had to be Richard, especially after Vincent told him that it couldn't have been an accident because Cora would have been able to overcome the fish tail the cops said the car did before hitting the pole and fence.

He didn't operate on the same frequency as everyone else. On one hand, he was more dangerous than anyone he'd ever met. He could slip into a room, kill you with a spatula, and be out of town before anyone knew about it. That's just what he was going to do.

Oliver Queen had Richard Mercer by the throat. Dangerous as a lightning strike, as lethal as a pair of crisscrossing short swords, Oliver whispered dangerously. "You're about to find out how your liver tastes, my friend."

He unleashed the monster, the killer in him and nearly beat the living shit out of Richard Mercer, stopping himself only by mere inches of taking the bastard's life. Death would be too kind for the bastard. Then if Cora... if Cora died, she'd be stuck dealing with him for eternity. Oliver wasn't going to let that happen.

Their time together felt like a storm, like a wild wind and rain, like something too big to handle but too powerful to escape. In the absence of real thunder, he's making his own. He was like a dangerous fire that burned everything in it's path. Lightning. Once it has forked, hot-white, from sky to earth, there is no going back. Sometimes it's faster and more efficient to destroy.

When Oliver reached the hospital after his visit with Richard Mercer, Vincent was waiting for him.

"How is she?"

"Still in surgery, it's not looking good." Vincent was barely holding it together.

His heart clenched for his fourteen-and-a-half-hour wife. He wondered if it's medically possible to be addicted to another human being.

"I've been doing this a long time, and I've come to learn that predictions don't mean much. Too much lies outside the realm of medical knowledge. A lot of what happens next comes down to you and your specific genetics, your attitude. No, there's nothing we can do to stop the inevitable, but that's not the point. The point is that you should try to make the most of the time you might have left with her when she gets out of surgery."

"If she gets out of a surgery." The words slipped from his lips without his permission. It's like there's a filter set up in my brain, except instead of making things better, it twists everything around so what comes out of my mouth is totally wrong, totally different from what I was thinking. He thought.

He guessed that's just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up. It was a really fucked way, but Oliver had to come to terms with the possibility that she might not make it. It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.

It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me - such bullshit. I'll tell you another secret, this one for your own good. You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. You may think there's something in it for you, something to understand or make sense of.

But I know the truth: I know from the nights of Coldness. I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind and the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopeless. The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone. Take it from me: If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do—the only thing—is run.

Oliver's mind flashed back to the island, where he had no one and he fought his way to survival, killed a lot of things on the way. The only one that seemed to matter was that he had nearly killed Richard Mercer. What would Cora say to that? Would she not want to speak to him again? Assuming she lived. His mind cursed him. You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.

When they finally - after twelve hours of surgery - brought Cora out of the OR and settled her in the ICU, Vincent had went to clean up, while Oliver went to sit with her. She was alive. Stable, but not nearly out of the woods. They doctors didn't know if she'd be able to walk again, the spike just barely nicking her spinal cord.

She was intubated, but she was awake, barely. Oliver had sat next to her and took her hand in his. Under thick, heavy lidded lashes, Cora really wanted to speak to him. Tell him she was sorry. Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it: like eating ice cream so fast on a hot day you get a splitting headache.

"Don't try and move or talk, Mercy." Oliver's voice was just above a whisper as he brushed a few strands of hair out of her face.

An itchy feeling began to work its way through her body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through her blood, biting her from the inside, making her want to scream, jump and squirm. Oliver must have noticed her heart rate speeding up by the monitor.

"Calm down." He laid his hand against her cheek. So soft, so sweet. "Breathe, Mercy."

She tried her best. Instead, with little strength she had - which was more than he thought she would have - she gripped his hand as tightly as she could. Times like this, when she slips her hand into his and holds on tight, and her father becomes just a shadow in the doorway and the world simply disappears.

And then a nurse came in and the world reassembled itself.

Cora had touched her arm with her other hand and pointed to the intubation tube.

"You want it out?"

Cora nodded slightly.

The nurse looked over at Oliver, who nodded, mouthing a few words.

"I'll be right back."

When she returned, she brought a white lab coat wearing doctor with her.

"I want you to take a deep breath, okay?"

Cora nodded.

And on the count of three, he pulled the tube, causing Cora to cough uncontrollably, her free arm going across her stomach, tears falling free from her eyes. Oliver's heart broke for her. He knew what it was like to be in pain. And there was nothing he could do to soothe her. All he could do was hold her hand and brush away the tears until she uncurled herself slowly from the fetal position that she curled into.

She open her mouth to apologize again, for being stupid and leaving. But he took her face in his hands and pressed his forehead to hers. And he's so close that she can feel his warm breath, and all she knew is that when he draws his next breath, she wanted to get sucked in. Their lips touched, almost as soft as not touching at all. Then they press closer to each other, draw back uncertainly, touch again. There is warmth shooting through her broken body where there should be pain, and she put her arms around the back of his neck and held on to him. She held on because you never know in this place when something good will be taken away.

She wanted to be healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor-sharp. Life should be a risk. It's more than a straight line that you can see clearly from one point to the other. It dips and curves and you never know what's around the bend sometimes until you get there. That scares a lot of people. But that's the beauty of it.

"This has to be uncomfortable." Cora's voice was hoarse, but at least she could talk. The way she was holding onto Oliver had to be really uncomfortable for him. He at the edge of the seat, bent over the small bar on the side of the bed. He didn't seem to mind though.

"It is, but I don't mind. I care about you. More than I feel safe caring. You make my heart do some really weird things."

She needed him to know how she felt so she just kissed him as long as he would let her. She used to think talking was all about words. But you can say so much more with your eyes and your fingers and your touch. Words just make us one-dimensional.

"Get a private room if you plan on doing the dirty."

Oliver looked up to see Vincent standing there, with one eyebrow raised.

"The nurse told me you gave her a hard time and made her take the tube out." His face was serious, but then slowly but surely, a smirk formed on his lips as he leaned over her bed, his hands supporting his weight on the mattress and leaned forward to place a kiss on her forehead. "I'd kiss you, just for being alive, but then technically, I'd be kissing him." He inclined his head toward Oliver. "And I don't bat for that team."

Cora couldn't stop the laugh, both her arms wrapping themselves around her middle to stop the side splitting pain from tearing her apart. She can see his pain, see it in the way he runs his fingers through his hair, over and over, and she understood what it costs him to hide it all.

"I've gotta go, If I don't meet up with Tess, she's going to kill me." Vincent announced, then looked over at Oliver and mouthed; Call me if anything changes with her.

Oliver nodded. As he watched him walk out, he looked back over at Cora.

"Who's Tess?"

"His wife. She's the VP of Star Labs in Starling City." She tried to push herself up into a better sitting position, but it was proving difficult.

"Don't strain yourself."

She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust. This was him.

"I couldn't stop - the brakes wouldn't work."

"I know."

Cora turned her head toward him.

"I had a feeling it was your father doing - especially after the look he gave you. Vince had the same idea."

"What'd you do to him?"

Crap.

"I beat him within inches of his life and left him in the street." The truth slipped from him faster than anything he'd seen in his life.

Slowly, Cora's lips turned up into a slight smile.

Author's Note: So this is possibly the longest chapter to date, but I was on a roll and each time I thought of stopping, it didn't make sense so I kept going. What do you think? Vincent figured it out about Richard's involvement with Cora's accident and Oliver nearly beat him to a pulp. Do you think someone found Richard Mercer before he died? And for those of you who asked if Cora was related to a Tess Mercer (aka, from Smallville), what'd you think of her (small) introduction as Vincent's wife? Leave your thoughts and comments below! :)