What Was My Daddy Like?
Chapter 7: John Diggle
A/N: Finally... I am able to post again. I'm very sorry for the delay, but really, RL has been exceptionally hectic these days. I do hope you'll enjoy this, especially the surprise at the end. ;-) The next chapter will be posted within the same day, HOPEFULLY. I'd really want this fic to be completed before the finale airs, because... who knows what aches and pains await us? This fic was meant to help soften the blow.
"I don't think we're getting out of here anytime soon," John huffed in frustration as he slumped down beside Mia inside a dilapidated elevator at the bottom of an elevator shaft.
Just seconds before one of the Ninth Circle's bombs had gone off, he and Mia had taken the leap of faith and jumped into the dark elevator shaft of an abandoned multi-level parking building in the south side of Star City. There had been no time to check whether or not they were jumping into their deaths. They just jumped.
They were glad that they had landed on an empty car at the bottom of the shaft, and yet their relief had been cut short when the bomb exploded about three floors above and debris started raining down on them. John had covered Mia with his huge frame, but Mia had been immediately able to open the hatch on the elevator's roof and had pulled him into the car with her just in time, before a slab of concrete landed on his head. They had thought that the car could not take the impact of the falling debris, but it held despite the ugly denting of the roof above them, until the rumbling of the abandoned building had stopped.
For the last thirty minutes, John had been trying to find a way out of their predicament, worried about the prospect of oxygen soon running out. Even though he had managed to clear the opening of the elevator above them, he had not found a way for them to climb out of the shaft safely without any gear. Mia had suggested climbing the walls, but John didn't think that was safe, since there was no way to guarantee that what was left of the structure would not give way after such a powerful blast, which probably leveled the rest of the building. The elevator shaft had been their best bet for surviving the explosion, but now John was afraid it was also going to be their grave. If no one came to their rescue, it was just a matter of time.
Their injuries were minor. Not counting bruises and some abrasions and cuts, John thinks he has only a minor wrist fracture from the fall, which was why scaling the wall of the shaft wasn't really a good idea. Mia, on the other hand, only complained of the left ankle that she sprained when she landed on top of the elevator; she had favored that foot in order to keep herself from toppling over and losing her grip on her bow. The first thing that John had done when the shaking of the building had ceased was to check her for injuries. He had promised Felicity that he would keep her daughter safe whatever happened.
"My mom won't stop until she finds us," said Mia, "and then they'll come for us." She was clearly out of her element, and it wasn't just because of the explosion that rocked the entire building. It was because she felt that she and John had failed their part of the mission.
Breaching the secret base of Eden Corp. earlier that evening had been successful. As soon as Felicity and William were able to upload their super-virus into the Archer system in the server room, the members of the vigilante team and the remaining Canaries had spread out and moved in to the identified locations of the bombs. Connor and Mia had rendezvoused with John and Lyla Diggle at the outskirts of the city and had decided to split up into two pairs when Felicity contacted them through coms and told them that there was yet one more bomb that had just been located by the scanner in an abandoned parking building on the south side of the city. Lyla and her adopted son decided to proceed to their original destination, while John and Mia had volunteered to take care of the bomb to which no team had yet been sent to disarm it.
En route to the bomb's location, they had encountered a few members of the Deathstroke Gang, which had set up an illegal checkpoint in the middle of the road as a means of extorting money and other valuables from travelers into "their" part of the city. As much as John had not wanted to engage, Mia's stubbornness had ticked off one of the gang members, who had recognized her from a previous encounter in the market when Connor had asked to see their leader, JJ Diggle. The resulting skirmish had delayed them significantly, and although their masked leader had ordered his guys to stand down upon seeing none other than his estranged father, John and Mia still had arrived at the parking building with too little time to disarm the bomb properly.
They had been aware that the virus that Felicity and William planted into the Archer program was only going to disable the system temporarily. Everyone involved in the mission had been briefed that they only had a fifteen-minute window to follow Felicity's instructions and disarm the bomb. Their window had lapsed due to the unfortunate delay caused by the trouble with the Deathstroke Gang. Just as they were getting started to disarm the bomb, the countdown to detonation had started. When they'd realized that their enemies must have already overridden the virus that temporarily disabled Archer, triggering the countdown, they knew that the only thing they could do was to try to minimize the damage by moving the bomb away from the side of the building that was adjacent to a row of residential buildings and then hope to survive the blast themselves. They had driven the van like crazy all the way to the far end of the building, and as soon as they screeched to a halt, they jumped out of the vehicle and ran to the nearest elevator shaft.
"Let's not keep our hopes up," came John's reply.
"Why not?" Mia protested.
"In this day and age, hope does not come by so easily," John answered.
Mia responded, "But we can't just give up. I refuse to die down here. Not like this."
John did not say anything after that. He just closed his eyes and massaged his sweaty forehead with his fingers.
"Your head wasn't in the game, was it?" Mia asked frankly. She had seen the look on John's face the gang leader had taken off his mask. She had only met John Diggle in person about thirty minutes ago, but it did not take a genius to be able to put two and two together, based on the little that Connor had told her about his adoptive father. Seeing his biological son, who had gone wayward and rogue some years ago, had thrown the veteran vigilante off kilter.
John sighed. When he opened his eyes, he told her, "I wasn't expecting to run into him tonight."
"By him you mean your son JJ, right?"
John simply nodded. "I'm guessing Connor's told you about our fateful family drama."
"The gist of it, yes."
Mia turned to look at him, studying his face like she had been trained to do when she wanted to get the truth from someone who was being difficult. "I grew up without my dad, and I've always resented that. But now I'm not sure which is worse – that, or raising your own flesh and blood and watching him turn against you and against everything you believe in. It must be hard on you and Lyla."
"Losing my biological son to a notorious cause was my greatest failure," John confessed. "Before JJ left us, I thought that not being able to save the city alongside Oliver all those years ago was my biggest regret. Turns out, I had failed more miserably in the parenting department."
"I'm sure you tried to do your best. Connor turned out okay," Mia remarked, as an attempt to console the kind-hearted man. Her mother had recently been telling her stories of the vigilante hero once called Spartan, who had always been her mom and dad's closest, most loyal friend.
"Yeah, he did. He's a good kid." John's lips turned up for a small smile, briefly reminiscing their boys' growing up years. Connor and JJ had been best buddies when they were kids even if they weren't exactly the same age. That all changed when JJ had gotten entangled with the wrong crowd and got roped into a gang by none other than the escaped convict, Joe Wilson, the founder of the gang that he had named after the villainous title of his father.
Mia thought it was a good opportunity to find out more about Connor's back story. Maybe focusing on John's success with his adopted son would ease the pain caused by the rebellious one. So, she dared to ask, "How did Connor become your other son, if you don't mind me asking?"
"Long story."
"We've got time. Like you said, I doubt we're going anywhere anytime soon."
John smiled. The way Mia was such an impeccable blend of Oliver and Felicity amused him so much.
"It happened after your dad had gone and disappeared," John began to explain. "His father, Ben Turner, reached out to us from prison. He was still in Slabside, waiting for his sentence to be shortened and for him to be given his freedom back, as former DA lawyer Laurel Lance had promised to do for him. He had gotten wind of a rumor that Dinah, who was also an inmate there at the time, had been targeted by a terrorist organization that had assets inside the prison."
"Ninth Circle?"
"Turner, who was known as Bronze Tiger, had no knowledge of the Ninth Circle, and Felicity and I thought that it was better that way. But yeah, no doubt it was the Ninth Circle. Emiko was probably trying to tie up loose ends," John agreed with her. "Anyway, since the team had already been disbanded then, there was just Felicity and me and Lyla. There was no way we were gonna get a free pass into Slabside, not while Emiko was running the city behind her puppet politicians. We couldn't go to the SCPD with this information either. It was Felicity's idea to find the only person alive other than Oliver that knew a way to break into the prison undetected."
"Who?"
"Your Aunt Nyssa's older sister. Her name is Talia."
Mia's eyes widened upon hearing this piece of information. She had never known that Nyssa still had family. Nyssa had never mentioned having a sister name Talia. Her eyes narrowing in curiosity, she asked, "I'm guessing Talia is a lot like Nyssa. You know, when it comes to kicking ass?"
"Like Nyssa, Talia was a skilled warrior of the League of Assassins. In fact, she trained your father for a time, taught him how to be the Arrow, and even gave him the hood he'd worn when he first terrorized the criminals of Starling City as a vigilante."
"Wow… This story is getting better and better. I can't believe Mom never told me any of this," Mia commented. "So, Talia helped Dinah escape from prison?" she asked.
John shook his head. "Narrowly, yes. Turner was our man on the inside to ensure that nothing would get in the way of Dinah's extraction, but the prison guards had been tipped off somehow and he'd been made. He knew that as soon as he got out of solitary, the bounty would be on his head instead. A week after Dinah's escape, we learned that Turner had been murdered in Slabside. Before everything had gone down that day, his last words to Dinah had been a plea to make sure that his little boy would get a chance to have a life, one that was better than he had."
"So, you took Connor into your home."
"Yeah. Dinah had no plans of ever settling down. And since she was a fugitive on the run, she thought that Lyla and I could give Connor a better life, so she brought Connor to our safe house. We didn't hesitate to take on the responsibility."
"Did you ever try to convince JJ to leave the gang?" Mia asked.
"My wife and I tried to reason with her. We even reached a point when our conflict had become physical, and I realized I wasn't going to win back my son using my fist." John paused, thinking deeply. Those times had been really tough, especially without his best friend Oliver to help him go through the devastation. "Our last ditch effort was to ask Felicity to find Slade Wilson."
"Slade Wilson?" Mia asked again, frowning.
"Slade Wilson was another of your father's mentors. They met on the island of Lian Yu. Slade trained your father in hand-to-hand combat and many other stuff. Later on, Slade became a bad guy and had gone after your dad in revenge. Another very long story," John explained. "Much later on, with your dad's help, he found redemption from his crimes, but it had been too late to redeem his son Joe."
Mia was trying her best to keep up. "So… Mom found Slade Wilson for you, and you asked him to help you convince JJ to walk away from Deathstroke Gang for good." John simply pursed his lips in response and looked down. Mia said, "I'm guessing things did not go as planned." John shook his head in sheer frustration.
Mia truly appreciated John Diggle's honesty and his willingness to narrate the events in the past. The more she discovered about what had happened, the better she was able to piece together the puzzle in her head. And the more she appreciated how Connor Hawke had been a survivor all these years.
"Can I ask you something else?" Mia suddenly blurted out.
"Sure."
"You and my parents have been friends for decades, right? Why do you think my mom didn't talk much about what happened in the past? How come she hardly speaks of what really happened to my dad? Growing up, she would tell me stories of Team Arrow in your glory days, and she would always tell me that my father was a hero. But, she has never told me why my father left and never came back. What really happened to him?"
"That's because none of us actually knew what really happened to Oliver when he left with the Monitor to fight a battle in… in another earth."
"What do you mean? And who's the Monitor?" Mia was now even more intrigued. When Felicity and Roy had narrated the events from twenty years ago, they had spoken of a pit of healing waters that could bring even a dead person back to life. Here was Diggle, speaking of another earth. She found it quite incredible… and too good to be true.
"See, this is exactly why your mother probably never told you how things had gone down back then. It's complicated."
"Try me."
John patiently explained what parallel universes and doppelgangers were, who the other superheroes were (including the Legends), and how time travel worked (in general). By the time he was done, Mia's jaw gaped open in disbelief, and the frown on her face betrayed how puzzling this was all to her. She could hardly believe that her parents and their team had had to deal with extraordinary situations in their struggle as heroes. In the end, she asked, "So, this Monitor guy… He was responsible for my father's disappearance?"
"Not exactly. It was more like your dad's decision," replied John.
"What?"
"The Monitor revealed to Oliver that the Flash and Supergirl – both superheroes that were friends with your dad – were going to die trying to prevent a catastrophe. Thousands upon thousands of people were going to die, including two of his very good friends that those people depended on. Oliver couldn't allow it. He just wouldn't. When the Monitor explained that the balance of the universe needed to be maintained, then someone else needed to take the place of those who would be spared from their fate. Your father made a deal with the Monitor – his life for theirs. The Flash and Supergirl survived, but Oliver had already bound himself to the deal."
"Did my mom find out?"
"Eventually, Oliver told her, yeah," John replied, but his voice was sad. "You were a few months old when the Monitor came back to collect. Oliver had no choice but to tell Felicity. If that had happened one or two years prior, Felicity would have gone ballistic, but she had grown a lot through the years. That time, she had understood his selfless decision and backed it up with all the courage she had left in her. It didn't mean, though, that it hadn't been very hard on her."
Mia was quiet, absorbing all this new information intently.
John continued, "The Monitor had given your dad a day to set his affairs in order and say goodbye to family and friends. Oliver was just as devastated as Felicity, maybe even more so. He questioned his judgment and wondered if he would have made the same choice almost a year prior if he had known that they were going to have you."
"Didn't he try to find another way? Mom used to say that whenever they – or the team – seemed to be in a bind, Dad had always found another way. She said it was one of the things about him that she had fallen in love with."
"Your parents had come a very long way, Mia. Trust me. But I had never known a time in their lives when they had struggled most with pain than that day when the Monitor came back to take Oliver with him. It broke them both beyond mending. I think that a huge part of their pain was because they had you. I gathered that much from what Felicity told me of that day."
Mia's eyes were tearing up now. Why had her mother not told her about these details before? Didn't she deserve to know? What was there to be afraid of or ashamed of? She thought that she would have understood if only Felicity would have related things to her the way John had this time around. She would have been mighty proud of her parents, especially of the father she didn't get a chance to know.
She wanted to ask John those questions out loud, but someone else's question beat her to it.
"Anyone down there?!" someone hollered from above. "Hello?!" The man's voice echoed in the elevator shaft.
John Diggle stilled. He could not believe his ears. He must have hit his head during their fall, and now he was imagining things. But he knew that voice.
"John?! Are you in here?!" The familiar voice called out again.
This time, John took a deep breath and dared to respond incredulously, "Oliver! Is that you?!"
"Yes, John, it's me! Hang on! We'll get you out!" came the reply.
Mia gasped, her chest constricting as a lump formed in her throat. Could it be? Could it really be? Impossible. Was she really hearing her father's voice? Was he really there? She tried to keep the tears at bay, but then she failed miserably, for the second time that night.
A/N: So, how was that encounter between Mia and Diggle? More importantly, what are your thoughts on the ending? I am of the opinion (and persuasion) that Oliver's deal with the Monitor in the show will not involve him dying, just leaving to who knows where. So, I've taken the liberty to diverge from canon even further instead of resigning to the possibility that Oliver's character (or Felicity's, for that matter) is going to die. This is my fic after all, even if I do not own the rights to Arrow and its characters. Haha! :-)
Some thoughts:
1. It was about time the Arrow writers gave us John Diggle's detailed back story. It just took them 7 yrs! Anyways, I was happy with 7x19. I am also hoping that Diggle's move in the right direction in the second half of season 7 will continue. His character growth took a wrong turn in season 6 (maybe even further back, since he killed his brother), and it felt like he has been stuck. He seemed to have lost his purpose and couldn't make up his mind whether to be loyal to his OTA friends or look out for his own interests. I know his future is bleak, given what happens to his son JJ in the flashforwards, but I hope his integrity and steadfastness do not erode any further than they already had.
2. The flashforwards give me the impression that Mia had never met John Diggle before, which is sad, considering he was among the only three people other than Olicity that know about Mia in present day (that we know so far) - those being Diggle, Alena, and Emiko. I wanted to make up for 20 yrs of lost Diggle-Mia interaction, so I thought a heart-to-heart while trapped in an elevator shaft could help.