December 10-11, 2013:
In the last hours before Tuesday ends and Wednesday begins, Lance calls the Arrow with news that he doesn't want to share over the phone.
"You sure you're good to go?" Felicity asks worriedly as Oliver throws the hood over his head.
Oliver hasn't told them about every instance he's hallucinated something in the past two days since he'd almost died, but they know he's still seeing things, even though most of the bruises have faded from his body. (The deeper aches, not so much, but the surface bruises are more or less gone.)
"It's just a meeting," he reminds her, but, given that she and Digg had walked in on him standing taut, arrow aimed at empty space, when they'd arrived that evening, he can't blame her for her caution. Still, he knows enough not to shoot at the sight of the long dead while the living are still around him. (He hates not being able to trust his own mind. There have been times in his life when that had been the only thing he could trust.)
"Stay safe," Digg says.
Oliver doesn't reply, mostly because he knows he's not the only one rattled by his near-death experience. He hasn't been in a fight since, but Digg had had his own close encounter within twenty-four hours of Oliver's. The Mirakuru has them all on edge.
Hwang is at the meeting place instead of Lance, standing in the only ray of streetlight on the short rooftop Oliver'd chosen as a meeting place. It throws him for a moment, the sight of her standing there calmly in her uniform, gun at her hip, badge on her chest, feet solidly planted against the concrete.
She looks unmovable. Relaxed. Ready.
She looks like she has no idea about what Oliver's putting her up against.
She looks young.
He almost turns and leaves before she spots him. Almost. This is Mirakuru after all; he's already made his decision. And so has she.
"Sorry about this," she says easily. "Lance got held up by the captain, sent me instead."
Oliver's… not sure how to feel about that. He's worked with Hwang here and there, yes, but mostly in terms of handing off petty criminals to her on Lance's nights off. Lance is the one he passes information to.
"He said to tell you to get over yourself, that he'd be here if he could, but if we want to catch this guy he needs all the support we can get," she continues calmly in the silence.
So, Lance is talking to his superiors about going after Gold, Oliver surmises.
"He also said that I'd have to be an idiot not to know that you had another way of passing intel onto him, and that I would have found out eventually."
She knows about the phone, then too.
"What did the detective want to talk to me about?" he asks. It's a subtle dig and he knows it – and she probably knows it too – but he's not sure he's quite ready for Hwang to be on the same level as Lance in regard to how much he trusts her. Besides, it had been Lance who'd called him. He's not happy about the switch, and he doesn't care if word of that gets back to the detective.
"We think we found Cyrus Gold," Hwang says plainly. There's a thread of anticipation running through her though that reminds Oliver of why she probably became a cop. He adds thrill seeker to his mental file on Hwang, even if that's not her driving motivation. "The taskforce's been working on it since you filled in the detective. Now that we're pretty sure, we're looping in the rest of the force, assembling some SWAT teams. We've even had some volunteers. Detective Lance thought you ought to know."
"Where?"
She tells him. "Raid should be in two hours from now, if all goes to plan."
"You can't underestimate Gold."
"We don't plan to. Detective Lance probably used up the last of his favors, but they've authorized the use of nitrous oxide to clear the building."
Sleeping gas. There's a reason the police don't typically use it – any drug is finnicky, reacting differently in different people depending on their weight, medical history, and other factors. But if the SWAT teams had been authorized to use lethal force anyway, it's not really all that different in Oliver's mind. In his mind, at least. He can't imagine the favors that Lance had to pull to get that authorized. He hadn't even been able to provide any proof of the Mirakuru.
They're relying entirely on his word. Oliver'd known his word had gained some weight with the city, after the miniquake, but it's one thing to know it and another thing entirely to see it in action.
He nods once, ignoring the sight of Slade looming in a distant corner of the shadowed rooftop.
"How goes your recovery?" Hwang asks.
Oliver tenses at the question. He'd told Lance that he'd been compromised, not injured.
Hwang probably doesn't notice his small movement, but she doesn't need to. His silence is answer enough in the moment. "Oh come on, it's pretty obvious. You're not really the kind to sit this kind of thing out."
Oliver's not about to admit that even at his healthiest he's not sure he could take on Gold one on one. Not until he manages to clear his head at least, and stop thinking about Slade and the Amazo every time he hears the word Mirakuru. That had been his downfall last time.
"I'm working on another lead," he says instead. He doesn't need to explain himself to Hwang, and it's not entirely false – what they've found out about Cyrus Gold, what the man had actually told Oliver during their fight, has made it clear that he's not the mastermind behind the Mirakuru. He doesn't have the scientific background to mass produce the serum on his own. (And there's still the question of where the formula even came from in the first place. Stolen from ARGUS? Had someone gone back to Lian Yu? Had the Japanese had additional records, stored somewhere else?)
He doesn't give Hwang a chance to respond, firing a grappling arrow at a nearby building and disappearing into the night.
"Something doesn't seem right."
Tense – from the talk with Hwang, from the sight of Slade again, from the fact that the police are going up against Gold without him – Oliver glances over at Felicity's worried expression. It hasn't even been an hour since his return, so the raid hasn't started yet, but she's biting her lip, frowning at the screen in concentration.
Digg looks up from where he'd been cleaning his gun. "What's not right?"
Felicity shakes her head. "Gold's location. That building, it's abandoned."
"He wouldn't want to draw attention to himself," Oliver tells her, not because he thinks she hasn't spotted something strange, but to prompt her to explain further. An abandoned building is a decent hideout, if you set things up properly.
"No, I mean, yes, that would help, but it's not connected to the power grid. Even if they have their own generators, you'd need massive amounts of power to run that centrifuge. Not to mention store all that blood in the proper temperature-controlled environment."
Oliver doesn't doubt Felicity's mental calculations. He doesn't doubt the conclusion she's illustrating with her words either. "We knew that Gold isn't the mastermind," he reminds her.
"Is there any way to look for buildings that are drawing that level of power?"
Felicity grimaces in regret. "Maybe 'massive amounts of power' wasn't the best description – any office building in the Glades of a semi-decent size would have enough. I just meant that a single generator wouldn't do it."
So there's no way to narrow down the location based on power usage alone. Oliver furrows his brow in concentration, running scenarios in his mind.
Digg spots his look easily. "You think it's a trap?"
Oliver's not willing to discount the possibility. "Even if it was," he reminds them, "Hwang told me they authorized the use of sleeping gas on the building – only the taskforce even knows about it. Gold's metabolism might be increased – I don't know – but even he won't be able to fight off the effects for long."
"Could he be sleeping there?" Felicity suggests. "Since we kicked him out of his motel, so to speak?"
The more Oliver thinks about it, the more he starts to think that it probably is a trap. How did the police track down Gold to an abandoned building in the Glades that isn't where the Mirakuru was produced? Hwang hadn't mentioned anything about associates, which means that it's probably only Gold that they have confirmation of going into and out of the building. Is it a trap meant for them, or for him?
"I'll tell the detective to use caution," Oliver says. "In the meantime, let's see if we can narrow down a base of operations." His phone ringing interrupts him before he can say anything more. It's Oliver's phone this time, not the Arrow's, and Thea's name that flashes on the screen. An internal debate wars within Oliver for a moment. But the last time he'd seen Thea, she'd stormed off from him, and she knows what he spends his nights doing now. Surely she wouldn't call unless it was serious. He answers the phone.
"We need to talk. Now. It's serious," she says, before he can even get in a greeting. "I'm upstairs." She hangs up.
The desperate urgency of Thea's tone sticks in Oliver's mind and he's moving even as he pockets his phone again. But then he hesitates at the bottom of the stairs and turns back to his partners.
Communication. Compromise. And, despite what they'd done (to save your life), he's not about to reveal their secrets without their consent.
"Thea's upstairs," he tells them. "She doesn't know either of you are involved yet."
Digg and Felicity exchange glances, shrugging.
"Don't see why she shouldn't know," Digg says easily.
Oliver studies both of their expressions. Their casualness doesn't seem forced. Not that he'd expected them to be worried about Thea knowing about their involvement, but it's good to see regardless. He nods once, then hurries up the stairs.
"Entrance is clear!" Felicity calls up after him.
Oliver opens the door secure in the knowledge that no one will see down into the basement but Thea and hurries his sister inside. She's already talking.
"Roy's missing. We've been looking into Sin's friend's death, but they didn't wait for me, and the blood drive burned down and Sin can't find Roy."
"Slow down, Thea," Oliver says, his own heartrate rising at her frantic words. She needs to be clearheaded if she wants him to understand the problem. He takes his hand off her elbow as they reach the bottom of the stairs, turning her around to face him. She doesn't even seem to have noticed Digg or Felicity. "Start from the beginning."
Thea takes a deep breath. "It's Sin's friend, Max. He showed up dead a couple days ago – the police said from an overdose, but Sin said he didn't do drugs. He donated blood for money. So we started looking into it."
A wave of frustration and anger washes over Oliver. He wants to ask Thea why, if she has any idea of how dangerous that was – Sin's a Glades resident through and through, which means Max was too, and if the police are brushing it under the rug it's either serious or they seriously don't care – but she only pauses to catch her breath, not long enough for him to interject.
"I asked them to wait, until I figured out what was going on with you –" she gestures vaguely at his whole body, and, even through her worry for Roy, Oliver can tell she's not pleased with him "– but they didn't. Roy went to the place where the blood drive was held, to try and get Max's file, except there was a fire there and now Sin can't get a hold of him. His phone goes straight to voicemail every time I try."
Oliver doesn't have nearly enough information yet to believe that Roy's in any danger but he knows well enough that a destroyed phone works the same as one that's turned off – which means that Felicity won't be able to track him that way.
"Let me try," he offers. Roy has more than one phone, and Oliver knows he keeps them both on him at all times. But he doesn't immediately pull out his phone. Instead, he turns to Felicity, who's heard enough of the conversation to already have guessed Oliver's next step.
Most phones, normal phones, don't really have any way to relay the fact that they've been damaged, or destroyed. Numbers don't really connect to physical devices. Well, they do, for actual phone calls, but there's no way to tell why a call goes to voice mail, if the phone is off or in pieces. The phones that he hands out to his allies, however…
"It's been destroyed," Felicity says grimly, spinning back to them. "Or at least, damaged enough that it's not transmitting a signal anymore."
Thea's already shoving her phone toward his face. "Here. Sin sent me the picture he took. Does that look like a drug overdose to you?"
There's blood dripping from the eyes of the young man on the screen. He's dead, and Thea's stiff with tension and worry, and Digg and Felicity are clearly curious, but there's blood dripping from the eyes of the young man on the screen and it's all Oliver can see for a moment.
He remembers what happened to Slade like it was yesterday. His face, badly burnt from the explosion. The creaking metal of the sub and the cramped quarters the four of them had shoved themselves into. The last hope of the Mirakuru. Slade's (seemingly) final, desperate breaths.
And the blood dripping from his eyes.
Thea's friend – Roy's friend, Sin's friend, whoever he is – is dead. He won't be getting back up again, not like Slade had.
"Did you really think you could keep her out of it, kid?" Slade asks him critically, somewhere off to Oliver's left. "How many times do you have keep putting your friends – your family – in danger before you get the hint? Or are you going to wait until it's too late? You're not a hero, kid. You couldn't even save yourself."
"Oliver?"
Deep breaths. Oliver's not sure if it was Digg or Felicity calling his name, but it doesn't matter. No, he's not a hero. No, he couldn't save himself. But he'd damn himself to another year of hell if it meant keeping Thea safe. He's hasn't been fighting for himself since he snapped Taiania's neck on Lian Yu. He'd been fighting for her, after that, and now that he's come home he's been fighting for them, the people here in this basement. Tommy. Laurel. His mother even, Walter, Roy, Lance, the people of Star City. But not for himself.
"Go home," he tells his little sister.
She frowns at him, probably disturbed by his reaction – how long had he lost focus for? – but in the end focuses more on his words. "What?"
"I don't want you involved in this. We'll find Roy. Go home."
He should have known better than to phrase it like that. He should have known better than to think that would work. But he's rattled (still rattled, ever since he'd realized Mirakuru was in his life again, and he doesn't know how to get his focus back).
Instead of obediently turning and walking back up the stairs, Thea looks around, finally taking in Felicity and Digg.
"No," she says defiantly. "No. You let them help. You've let Roy and Tommy and even Laurel help. Why not me?"
Oliver takes another deep breath and manages to think rationally. This is Thea. His stubborn, obstinate, loyal little sister. She won't listen to most of the arguments he has on the tip of his tongue, all the reasons he doesn't want her involved, all the danger he'd be putting her in.
She'd fight that.
"You're too close to this," he says instead.
Thea wasn't expecting that argument. She takes a step back. "And you weren't, when you rescued Tommy?"
That was different. Oliver's had training. He knows how to set his emotions aside and consider all tactical options. And he'd been the only one looking. But this… Thea has no training, and she doesn't need to be the one to track down Roy. Not when he's here to do it for her.
"Oliver…" Digg says, low and careful from behind him.
Oliver's pretty sure he's not warning him to be careful in what he says next. There's an urgency to Digg's tone that suggests otherwise, at least.
Every minute he wastes arguing with Thea is another minute Roy's in danger. He can kick Thea out – and keep her out – once Roy's been found.
Oliver spins back to Felicity.
"Already got the location of the blood drive," she tells him, with her usual grimness that comes during any urgent situation when someone's in danger. "It's sponsored by Alderman Blood, but the business running it isn't any of the large hospitals – it's a clinic in the Glades. And the building caught fire not too long ago."
Thea tenses at Oliver's side, a sharp intake of breath signaling her shock. "Roy –" she starts to say. She'd known about the fire already, of course, but the image on the screen isn't encouraging.
Oliver cuts her off, striding toward the computers. Now isn't the time to think about her and Roy and their friend, getting involved in dangerous things – in Mirakuru – without telling him or the Arrow. "Any casualties?"
Felicity shakes her head. "No, thank goodness. I mean, it's the middle of the night, so I wouldn't really expect anyone to be there – except Roy, you know – but the fire didn't last too long and the fireman have already cleared the structure. There's no –"
"This says they suspect arson," Digg interrupts. He's standing over Felicity's other shoulder now, reading the same screens as Oliver.
"Someone didn't want those files read," Oliver agrees. Of course, it'll take time for the SCFD to prove arson, but the circumstances are too suspicious – too coincidental – for Oliver to think anything but. "Cameras in the area?"
Felicity's rapid typing fills the large room for a moment as she switches programs, pulling up their interactive map of Star City, complete with all the cameras, marked by those they have access to and those they don't. "Nothing on the building," she relays, "but, here." She selects something on the screen with finality, typing Roy's name in. "I set up facial recognition on the nearest cameras. There's only six, so it should be –"
'No Results' flashes on the screen, but Oliver doesn't let that dampen his mood. The cameras they do have don't canvas the area very well, and anyway, Roy's rather fond of his hoodie. Facial recognition isn't all that reliable yet, especially only with partial faces.
"Schematics?"
Felicity pulls them up. Oliver gets to work mapping entrances and exits, probable routes given the nearby streets and the direction Roy was coming from. Digg and Felicity each take a computer, fast-forwarding through the last couple of hours of footage manually for anyone matching Roy's description, or carrying equipment that could have started the fire. They're only at it a minute or two before Thea jolts out of the stupor she'd entered at seeing them in action.
She steps forward. "I want to help," she demands.
Oliver grits his teeth. He doesn't want her anywhere near this. He'd specifically asked her and Tommy to stay away from Mirakuru. But then, he supposes, she also has no idea that that is what this is. Even if she had wanted to listen to him, there's no way she could have known that what she and her friends are investigating is the exact thing he'd told her to stay away from. Not with the little information he'd managed to share with her. (He only has himself to blame.)
"See if you can help Digg or Felicity find Roy on the security footage," Oliver says shortly. He doesn't bother with introductions or explanations. They've all met before, however briefly, and if Thea wants to know more about how Digg and Felicity got involved, she can ask them on her own time.
Thea doesn't immediately look pleased at the task, but she doesn't argue, moving to Felicity's side. If she's curious about their operations, her worry for Roy overrides it.
With Thea scanning through footage, Felicity switches tracks, working with Oliver to track down information about the blood drive in particular. The digitalized patient information is sparse, mostly just names and contact info, but when Felicity pulls out those names of young, Glades residents with no emergency contacts entered in the system there's a small percentage of them who've gone missing the past few months.
Small, but significant.
Oliver grits his teeth and turns to Thea. "Walk me through what you guys were doing?"
She tells him, speaking quick and tense, clearly eager to feel like she's actually doing something in looking for Roy. (He's only been missing a couple hours at most, but Oliver can't blame Thea for her reaction. Between their kidnapping and Tommy's, and everything else that's happened in her life, a little paranoia is to be expected. He's not happy to see it, but he understands it.)
The timing of his sister's friends' investigation also seems too coincidental. They'd gone looking for Max, and then they'd found him, dead. Oliver wonders what would happen if someone else went looking for other blood drive participants who seem to have dropped off the radar.
Truthfully, there's nothing concrete to even suggest Roy's in danger from the little information they have, but the little doubt Oliver had had at the beginning is gone. Roy had gone intending to snoop around a clearly suspicious building, which had then proceeded to catch on fire. Now they've lost all contact with him.
"Got something!" Felicity declares happily.
As one, they all spin toward her. She doesn't wait for Oliver's prompting before she continues.
"The company that owns the building that the blood drive was held in, it's a dead end," she says quickly, clearly working up to the good news. "It's a shell company of a shell company, and it'd take me too long to trace it back to whoever put the paperwork in place. However, they do own four other structures in the Glades."
Four. That's a nice, small number, plenty easy to search through.
"Pull them up," Oliver orders, but Felicity's already done so. None of the immediately stand out, but he hadn't expected them to, not based on location alone.
"Occupied," Felicity mutters, eliminating one building. It's a shelter – hunting ground or genuine philanthropy, it's difficult to say with what little they know. "This one's registered as an office building, not a lot of space," Felicity continues, pointing. "These two don't have night hours and they've got sturdy, concrete basements."
Oliver knows all eyes are on him but he stands stock still, thinking hard, trying to connect the dots in his mind. Cyrus Gold was injected with Mirakuru and survived the process. Max Stanton was injected and didn't. His body only showed up days after he'd gone missing, when Roy, Thea, and Sin started looking into his disappearance. The police claim that Stanton died from an overdose, and the building he'd been regularly donating blood to has just caught fire. Roy, who'd presumably gone there to investigate, can't be reached. The police have tracked Gold to an abandoned building, with plans to raid it in about fifteen minutes.
Cyrus Gold was not the mastermind behind his own enhancement, but he is a fanatic, devoted to whoever had given him the drug. There's someone behind it all, pulling the strings.
Oliver revises his opinion of the medical office that had hosted the blood drive. He doesn't have enough details. They could be a hunting ground, but that doesn't mean anyone that works there knows what's going on. They can investigate that avenue, but they don't have the time right now if Roy's really in danger.
His gaze goes again to the three pins in the map on Felicity's screen. (She's getting good at this, looking straight at the basements as possible bases for their criminals to operate out of while he thinks.)
"What do we do now?" Thea asks anxiously.
He doesn't have an answer – not yet – so Oliver ignores the question.
Chances are, Stanton wasn't the only one the Mirakuru was tested on. Chances are, Gold was the first one (hopefully only one) it worked on. But they've got a centrifuge now, and the supplies to make more.
"The centrifuge in the warehouse, it was bolted to the floor," Oliver says tentatively, testing the thought by voicing it aloud.
Felicity frowns at him but Digg picks up what he's getting at after only a moment.
"Does it need to be?" he asks Felicity. "To work properly?"
"It has to be secured somehow," Felicity agrees pensively, still not quite connecting the dots. "Which means…?"
"Concrete foundation."
The lightbulb clicks on and Felicity spins back to the computers, typing again. "Well, that definitely eliminates the office building then, but we've still got the two others."
"We can look into both," Digg offers, testing what Oliver thinks of the idea, seemingly hesitant himself.
He doesn't like the suggestion. Roy could already be dead, if he'd been caught snooping. And if not… They're injected kids from the Glades with Mirakuru, kids with no family who might miss them. Oliver doesn't think anyone else has made that connection yet, but then, the bleeding eyes don't mean anything to Digg or Felicity.
Struck by the image Thea had shown him, Oliver hadn't said anything, just jumped into action.
"You think this is linked to the Mirakuru?" Felicity asks, probably the question both she and Digg had been wondering.
"I know it is," Oliver says. He should tell them why. He wants to tell them why. But he very pointedly does not want to think about Slade dying in that submarine, or the man who'd surfaced when it was all over. He doesn't think he could bring himself to say the words. "I've seen the effects of Mirakuru before," he manages to grind out through gritted teeth, nodding at Thea's phone, still in her hand.
Thea looks like she's torn between questioning him further and worrying about Roy, but thankfully – though looking equally curious – Felicity and Digg let the matter drop, turning back to their work.
"Well, both buildings are hooked up to the power grid, and they both have concrete foundations, and they're both in the Glades."
Oliver looks again at the positioning of all the buildings: Gold's motel room and his current hide-out; the blood-drive facility; the two pinpricks on the map in front of him. He'd gotten lucky, when he'd deduced which building Tommy was in a month ago. He can't rely on luck again. He looks at the clock. Ten minutes until the raid. Can he wait that long, to see what they turn up? What kind of evidence could Gold have on him, that could potentially lead Oliver to his real base of operations?
"Nearby cameras?"
"We could look at traffic levels," Digg agrees. "See which one has more people coming and going."
If they're injecting people with Mirakuru, taking their dead or unconscious forms into and out of the building, then they'd need somewhere secluded. Unfortunately, there's not really a good neighborhood in the Glades. In the middle of the night, both buildings are suitably cloaked in darkness.
They search through traffic cameras, watching cars come and go on the nearby streets. Five minutes until the raid. There's really no point in heading out beforehand, not when Gold might have something that points Oliver in the right direction. With Tommy, at least he'd been able to make an educated guess, a reasonable assumption. Here, he can't see anything that makes this more than a 50-50 chance.
He steps away from the computers. "Gold might be able to tell us something," he says.
"If he's in the mood to talk," Digg comments grimly, but they both know that Gold doesn't need to actually speak to pass along information to them.
Oliver goes to change. He can hear Thea asking about Roy as he walks away, but the others should fill her in. He knows better than to call Lance, or even Hwang, in the middle of the raid, so he heads out on his motorbike instead. His ribs are still bruised and his body still aching from nearly dying, but with Roy missing he doesn't want to wait until tomorrow, after the SCPD have had time to process and catalog all the evidence. He needs to know what Gold does as soon as possible.
The raid… Well, it doesn't go poorly, by Oliver's estimations at least. Either Gold had managed to avoid the majority of the sleeping gas, or the Mirakuru had enhanced his metabolism, because he'd still been swinging when the SWAT teams had stormed the building. Even with their body armor, one man's currently being rushed to the hospital in critical condition, three others have clearly broken bones, and a few more are banged up. But Gold's in custody.
Oliver can't help but worry that the SCPD won't be able to hold him, but they've seen what he's capable of now. Any doubt Lance's superiors had had should be gone. (In the back of his mind, Oliver realizes this, hopefully, means that the city's trust in him – the SCPD's trust in him – will only increase, now that they've seen what Gold is capable of.) Besides, that's not his problem right now. Roy is.
"Are there more men like him?" Lance asks in the alley they're tucked in, just out of sight of the hustle and bustle of SWAT cleaning up after the raid.
"I don't know," the Arrow admits gruffly.
Lance gives him a hard look, searching for answers somehow. "You know what this is."
Oliver'd already told him he had, more or less, that first time he'd filled the detective in about Gold, but seeing is believing he supposes. And Lance's comment was a question more than a statement. He thinks of the image of Max Stanton's corpse, blood trails across his cheekbones.
"Gold wasn't behind the thefts. There's no reason his benefactor can't make more of the drug that enhanced his strength," Oliver admits.
Lance shifts unhappily at the news, glancing back toward where the rest of the SCPD is working. "I was afraid you'd say that," he says.
Oliver waits. From the way the conversation has gone so far, he doesn't think he's going to have to ask for anything.
"Here, fine," Lance says unhappily, handing over a small evidence bag. "We're still searching the building, but that's everything he had on him."
Cell phone. A key. It's not much at all, but it should be more than enough for Oliver – for Felicity. He nods his thanks, pulls the phone out of the bag (he's wearing gloves; Lance doesn't complain) and sticks a microUSB into the port. Within a minute he's got all the data on the cell phone in his hands. He puts it back in the bag, takes out the key, and hands the bag back to Lance.
"What, not going to make an impression?" Lance asks humorlessly, still clearly unsettled by the fact that he's handed over evidence to the Arrow – and maybe partially by what he'd seen that night.
"You'll have it back by the morning," Oliver says.
"Don't bother," Lance returns. "Chain of custody's ruined now."
It doesn't really matter – if the key is the key, so to speak, of breaking the case, then Oliver will take care of it. If not, then the police haven't really lost anything, have they? He'd mostly just been trying to be polite, to not strain his already tenuous relationship with Detective Lance. (Too often, lately, the man's been turning to him for help. Oliver's not sure how much more of that the normally law-abiding detective will be able to take.)
There's a lot of information on the phone, there's no doubt about that, but a quick trace of the serial number on the key pinpoints the address on Crescent Circle. Oliver's still in his suit, so he readies himself to leave again for the second time that night.
"You can't go out there right now," Felicity stops him worriedly, with an uncertain glance over at Thea.
"The police have Gold," Oliver reminds her.
"And are you sure he's the only one in Star City on Mirakuru?"
No, Oliver isn't. But Roy's (hopefully) out there, and not only Roy but also the mastermind behind Gold's enhanced strength in the first place. Oliver doesn't have many other options.
"I have to stop this." He cannot let them produce any more Mirakuru. He cannot let them kill Roy, or worse.
"We could get the police involved –" Digg starts.
"We can't risk it."
"Oliver," Felicity says hesitantly, with another glance over at Thea. "If you're still –"
"We don't have any other options," Oliver says, cutting her off too.
"How badly are you hurt?" Thea steps forward, looking torn.
"I'm fine," Oliver says. She opens her mouth but he cuts her off. "I'm fine," he repeats firmly. "And I'm going to get Roy back."
"What about you?" Felicity interrupts.
"I'm going to get Roy, and then I'm going to come back," Oliver vows.
It doesn't seem to assuage Felicity's worry, or Digg's from the looks of him. Oliver knows the last time he went out to fight he almost hadn't come back – he wouldn't have, if Digg and Felicity hadn't come to get him. Gold's no longer a threat, but that doesn't mean there isn't someone else with Mirakuru in their blood out there.
"Promise me," Felicity demands.
She's taking his near-death experience harder than he'd thought she would. She hasn't really settled down, even with Barry Allen gone.
Oliver doesn't answer her, but he does look over at Thea. There's a hard expression in her eyes and a deep worry. She looks like she wants to tell Oliver to stay. She looks like she wants to tell him to hurry up and leave.
They both know how easily promises can be broken.
Oliver leaves without another word spoken.
A cursory look at the building makes it clear that, whatever's going on, it's happening in the basement, as Felicity had expected. Oliver charges in firing, one, two, three arrows finding their homes in the shins of men dressed like the muscle. Another man in a strange skull mask stands over the figure of Roy bound to a chair, needle in his hand.
The leader. This is Oliver's chance.
He holds the bow string taut, fletching against his fingers.
"Brother Cyrus told me he killed you," the masked man says. He's got a voice modulator similar to Oliver's own and he doesn't sound worried. That might just be an act though, because Oliver's already taken out his guards. (Brother Cyrus. This is sounding more and more like some sick cult the more Oliver discovers about the operations.)
"Guess he's not as strong as you'd hoped," he growls back. "Where'd you get the Mirakuru?" The man doesn't immediately respond and Oliver doesn't give him much time to think on it. "Who gave you the formula?!"
"It was a gift," the man replies, more or less calmly. "A gift I would use to save this city from itself."
Beside him, Roy groans in agony, teeth gritted, muscles taut. He doesn't appear to be aware of anything around him, and the needle in the man's hand looks empty. The distraction costs Oliver – one of the men he'd hit before has surged up from the floor and Oliver just barely dodges the bullet aimed at his face. He has to throw himself to the side, onto the ground, because he wasn't paying attention, and the impact rattles his aching body badly enough to distract his mind for a second.
No longer in a good position to fire his arrow, Oliver rolls to the side as another bullet impacts the concrete where he had just been lying, managing to use the motion to get into a crouch at the very least. All three men are upright again, though one of them is kneeling similarly to Oliver to alleviate his injury. They're determined enough to fight through their wounds, a determination that does nothing to shake Oliver's thoughts of how cult-like the group seems to be. Most people, once they get an arrow to the shin, learn to stay down when up against him.
He swaps arrows in his quiver and pins one of the men to the wall before he has to stagger to his feet and engage in hand-to-hand combat with a man who's already pulled the arrow out of his leg. He dodges a few blows, gets in a hit or two of his own, and then suddenly it's two on one, the third man unexpectedly joining the fight.
Even aching and bruised from his fight, even not at the top of his game, Oliver's ultimately not worried about losing. Then two more men, fresh and uninjured, run into the room, entering the fray. (The masked man stands watching and nearly motionless, still projecting calm and a lack of concern. Oliver keeps an eye on him but he's not in the fight and he's got more important things to think about.)
Well, he needs to destroy the already created vials of Mirakuru anyway, and the fridge full of stolen blood. Oliver nocks an arrow, pretty sure that when it hits his target the centrifuge will explode. He's far closer than he would normally allow himself to be when triggering an explosion, but he's not sure Roy has the time for him to struggle through this fight.
He takes a deep breath, fires, then relaxes his muscles and ducks away as the electronics explode. He and his enemies both go flying.
Oliver hits the ground hard, vision blacking for a moment, torso a bundle of pain, jaw clenched tight, shoulder numb from the impact. Roy's stopped crying out in pain, and Oliver's only a few feet away from him now. He watches, feeling like he wouldn't be able to stand, as the masked man places his fingers on Roy's throat.
"Another failure."
Another failure. The words echo through Oliver's mind. The man means that his latest attempt to create a Mirakuru soldier didn't work, but Oliver hears something else entirely. Another failure. Another person he couldn't save. Another reason why he's not cut out to do this. It's the same thing Shado and Slade have been telling him since he'd almost died trying to take down Gold two days ago.
People have died on him, since his return to Star City. There've been civilians he's been unable to save. Petty criminals who didn't deserve death caught up in friendly fire from their own side. But since donning the hood – since coming home, since leaving Lian Yu behind – Oliver hasn't lost anyone he actually knows. Not like all those friends and allies he'd seen die during those five years. (He's not counting Malcolm Merlyn.)
Now Roy sits before him, unmoving. Oliver's entire body aches. He thinks of Thea, waiting for the both of them in the foundry basement. He thinks of Diggle and Felicity. Slade, and Shado. He doesn't know why he ever thought he would be enough – he never has been before.
"Get up, Oliver." The words are firm. Determined.
Oliver blinks. He knows Tommy's not here, knows it, and yet… "Tommy?"
"You're not going to die down here."
So apparently he can hallucinate the living, as well as the dead. Well, he supposes there was no reason that it wasn't possible. He tries to tune Tommy out best he can. He can already imagine what worst case scenario his mind has probably come up with. He doesn't need to hear his best friend call him a murderer again, doesn't need another reminder of what a failure he is, other than Roy's body right in front of him.
"Get up, Ollie," Tommy repeats, more forcefully, crouching down in front of Oliver.
"I'm a murderer," Oliver says, dismissing him, thinking of Roy, wondering if all of the thugs caught in the explosion will be waking up tonight.
"No," Tommy counters, so quickly, so fiercely, that Oliver's startled from his own pain and grief. He knows Tommy's been trying to reconnect with him – sending jokes in his text messages, scheduling dinners and lunches, supporting him, even when Thea had gotten upset with his decisions – but this…
"You are not a murderer, Oliver. I was wrong. You're a fighter. You're a hero. You beat the island. You beat my father. So fight, Oliver. Get up and fight back!"
Tommy's waiting for him to come home. Thea's waiting for him to come home. Felicity and Digg too. His mother's trial is in a few weeks. Laurel's already lost her sister. And there's still a chance for Roy – Slade had survived when it had seemed all hope was lost, after all.
"Kill him," the masked man says in the background.
It's hard to focus. It's hard to move. Oliver's ears are still ringing from the explosion. His whole body aches. His head feels like it's stuffed with cotton, pounding in time to his heartbeat. But Tommy vanishes as he struggles to his feet, and the last enemy standing isn't much of a challenge, similarly rattled by the explosion.
The ringleader runs. Oliver doesn't consider chasing after him. He's in no shape to do so, and Roy needs him. Blinking aside the blurriness of his vision, Oliver slices the bonds holding Roy to the chair and starts in on CPR. He doesn't know what he says to the kid, doesn't know how long he works, palms pressing against Roy's chest, but eventually Roy gasps another breath and Oliver lets himself slump in relief.
Roy's got Mirakuru in his system, but he's alive, and Oliver's destroyed the current stock of the drug. Anything else they can deal with later.
AN: I debated with myself about changing Oliver's hallucinations, but even if Tommy's not dead, he's still the most supportive person Oliver could probably think of. (I even considered using Robert instead, but I really don't think Oliver's mind would ever conjure up his father being that supportive, unfortunately...).
Chapter 29: Asking for Something, should be posted Dec. 14th, and things should slow down a bit from there.