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Run and Repeat
It seemed to Laurel that everything she thought she'd understood about the world had become more complicated since the moment Oliver Queen had been confirmed to be alive. Having the Queen family become a semi-regular part of her life had been a surprise all on its own, but the addition of the Hood just made everything even more bizarre. He might just be a man with a boy and arrows, but he'd already taken out a significant few members of Starling's criminal underworld, on top of the times he'd helped her with a couple of her cases.
The notion that she would sympathise with a vigilante would have been impossible to her just at this time last year, but something about the Hood's approach had just forced her to acknowledge that there were some situations where the law on its own wasn't going to be enough. She still believed in the law as a means of getting final justice, but there were definitely times when she would have failed the innocent she wanted to protect if the city's green defender hadn't been there to help…
"Miss Lance?"
"Mr Diggle?" Laurel was surprised to find Oliver's bodyguard standing outside CNRI as she left the building. "Thea's just-"
"I know," the other man nodded politely at her. "But we need you to come along as well."
"Hey…" Thea's voice suddenly called out from behind Laurel, the older woman turning to see Thea looking anxiously at her brother's bodyguard. "Is Oliver-?"
"He's fine," Mr Diggle nodded at her.
"Thank God…" Thea sighed in relief before she looked at him in a more pointed manner. "And you could have told me that before now-"
"There was a reason we sent you to the safehouse last night-"
"Safehouse?" Laurel cut in, looking at the bodyguard in surprise. "Why would Thea-?"
"It wasn't really a safehouse, it was just some old loft somewhere where nobody was living that I could hide out in for a few hours…" Thea began, before she looked awkwardly between the other two. "And that probably makes it sound a lot worse to you than it actually was-"
"This is all going to be easier if we explain things to you at the Verdant," Mr Diggle explained as he indicated the car. "I appreciate that this… probably sounds a bit sinister, but I promise we'll clear up everything."
"…OK," Laurel nodded tentatively as she and Thea got into the car. She had to agree with the other man's observation that what he'd said did sound a bit sinister in the wrong context, but Thea clearly had no problem with it, and regardless of the girl's past drug habit, Thea wasn't completely reckless…
The relatively short trip to the club left Laurel turning over all kinds of possibilities in her mind as to what Mr Diggle and Thea had to tell her when she got there. She considered the idea that Oliver was behind this, but at the same time it didn't exactly strike her as likely; Oliver had enjoyed the occasional surprise party or equivalent event back when they were dating, but their relationship right now wasn't exactly in the kind of place where he would do something like that.
When they reached the Verdant, the area was still relatively quiet, once again reinforcing for Laurel just how much this neighbourhood had gone downhill over the last few years. It had never exactly been a prosperous part of town, but it seemed as though so many areas in the Glades had basically closed down over the last few years…
Lost for anything else to do, Laurel followed Mr Diggle and Thea back behind the bar to a door with a keypad behind it. After exchanging a smile with Thea, Mr Diggle tapped a few buttons and opened the door, revealing a set of stairs that led down to a basement level. As Laurel walked down, the lights in the lower level soon revealed a set of arrows on display cases in the wall.
A set of green arrows.
Laurel supposed that the only surprise was that she didn't feel that surprised about this discovery. Seeing Oliver wearing the Hood's suit and holding the Hood's distinctive bow in full illumination in the middle of the room below his club was a surprise, but it filled in so many subtle questions Laurel hadn't even realised she'd been asking herself until now.
"Huh," she said, as Oliver looked up at her with a tentative smile that seemed so utterly out of place when he was wearing that suit.
"Yeah, that was kinda my reaction too," an unfamiliar voice said. Turning around, Laurel could only stare in confusion at the sight of an unfamiliar young man leaning against the wall, dressed in casual clothing with a polite smile on his face as he stepped away from the wall and held out his hand. "Hi, I'm Barry Allen; I'm kind of from the future."
"…Excuse me?" Laurel stopped herself taking the offered hand as she looked at the unknown man in surprise, trying to decide if she was dealing with a lunatic before concluding that Oliver wouldn't give a madman free reign down here. "You're… how can you be kind of from the future?"
"Long story short, about a year from now I'll be exposed to some freaky exotic matter when a particle accelerator explodes, and it gives me and various other people… well, we get superpowers," Barry explained. "I ended up basically running through time when I was trying to stop a tidal wave a couple of years from now, and now I've essentially possessed my younger self."
"…OK," Laurel nodded tentatively, taking a moment to think over what she'd just heard before she said anything else. "That's… I can't decide if that's more or less strange than the idea of my ex being an archer vigilante."
"Hey, I happen to think that part's kinda cool," Thea put in.
"Thanks?" Oliver said, looking at his sister with an uncertain smile.
"So… you knew us in the future?" Laurel looked uncertainly at Barry, trying to put together a slightly clearer timeline of what they were talking about right now.
"Pretty much," Barry shrugged. "I mean, I didn't really have much time to work with you and Thea, but you were both… last I heard, you were each training to help Oliver-"
"Training?" Thea looked at Barry with a new grin. "As in we were going out with him? We were kicking bad guy ass-?"
"That is something we can talk about later," Oliver said, looking firmly between Laurel, Thea and Barry. "What matters right now is that, for various reasons, Barry's only got his powers and his memories of the future for a certain amount of time before he'll revert to his present self with neither, so we need to act on his knowledge as fast as possible."
"And… what is that knowledge?" Laurel asked, trying not to consider the implication of what Barry Allen had mentioned about her future. "I mean, what's he here to warn us about?"
"A few weeks from now, Malcolm Merlyn is going to level the Glades with an earthquake machine."
If Laurel had been holding anything, she would have dropped it in that moment.
"Tommy's dad?" she looked at Oliver in shock. "How- why would he do that?"
"I think it was something about the circumstances of his wife's death that provoked him, but I never really looked into why he did it; keep in mind I only learned about his attack after the fact and didn't even meet any of you until a few months later when we had more immediate concerns to focus on," Barry shrugged apologetically. "The important thing is that we've already found one of the machines Merlyn was going to use for that attack, but I know for a fact that he had two in the future, so we were thinking… well, if we're going to find the other one…"
"We sue him."
"Sue him," Laurel repeated, looking uncertainly at Diggle. "We sue the guy planning to destroy the city with an earthquake machine…"
She stood in silent thought for a moment before she nodded. "It's… unconventional, I'll give it that."
"I recognise that, but what choice do we have?" Oliver countered. "Barry's already confirmed that we would have tried to hack Malcolm's computer records in… the original timeline... and we obviously didn't find anything that way, so an electronic search won't get us anything useful. We were thinking that if we can issue a case against Malcolm for neglecting his public duties with his plans to shut down his wife's clinic, we might be able to get access to any paper records he has about the second machine's existence…"
"Which could give him time to destroy them," Laurel finished for Oliver as the archer trailed off, looking around the room in frustration. "I could certainly sue him for closing the clinic without due notice, but without knowing for a fact where those papers are, we can't guarantee that we'd get anything useful out of it.
"Right…" Thea nodded with a bitter shake of her head. "The guy's planning to destroy a city; we can't exactly count on him playing fair with the paperwork…"
"Unless…" Laurel said, a tentative smile forming on her face as she looked around the room, as though struck by the sense of camaraderie she would form with these people in Barry's future. "Maybe we don't rely on the case to get the paperwork…"
"In what way?" Diggle asked.
"If we inform Merlyn what we're doing, maybe we can… give him the chance to get away to gather his files so that we can work out what ones he's most afraid of us finding?"
"The old Scandal in Bohemia trick?" Barry smiled at Laurel in understanding.
"Exactly."
"…Scandal in Bohemia?" Oliver repeated uncertainly.
"You never read Sherlock Holmes?" Barry looked at the archer in surprise.
"He could never even decide which TV version to watch," Laurel observed with a slight smile.
"Right…" Barry said before he looked back at Oliver. "Long story short, Holmes is trying to get a blackmailer to reveal where she's hiding her blackmail material, so he tricks her into thinking her house is on fire so that she'll instinctively run for the thing in the house that she values most."
"And you think we can do the same thing for Malcolm Merlyn?" Thea asked.
"Put him in a situation where he thinks he has to destroy his files to protect them; it's got to be worth a shot, right?" Barry shrugged. "Particularly if I've still got enough speed to follow him when he tries to destroy the files in question…"
"If there's any chance of stopping him destroying the city, I think we've pretty much got to take it," Diggle said grimly, before he looked between Barry and Laurel with a smile. "And if we're going with that plan, I think I've got an idea or two about how to pull this all off…"
