Okay, this part is quite a lot longer the previous ones and ends on a dark note. Although it isn't really graphic, it might be a bit scary for sensitive readers.

Red and Green – Part 5

All the anxious waiting that Oliver had been doing down in his lair had granted him the freedom to travel to his intended destination by motorcycle. By the time he revved the engine of his customized ride, aiming it straight for the on-ramp leading to the highway, the afternoon had faded into darkened blurs around the edges of his vision. In the middle of the tail end of rush hour traffic, he was just another leather-clad biker on the road. Nothing suspicious about a man in leather riding a motorcycle, helmet safely shielding his masked face from the motorists that he sped past. If he had set out an hour or two earlier, he would have been forced to stow his costume and mask in the satchel that he'd strapped to his back. Now it was stuffed with a t-shirt and a pair of jeans – regular clothes - just in case he needed to escape into a public area, minus his ride.

A few minutes after he'd been on the highway, traveling north at fifteen to twenty kilometers over the speed limit, his two-way communicator buzzed in his ear.

"Yes, Felicity?" He was mildly pleased to note that he sounded a lot calmer now. He regretted that he'd spoken rudely to the slightly socially inept woman earlier. Felicity didn't go out of her way to be annoying. Oliver was just easily annoyed.

"Uh… yeah, hi."

Oliver found himself grinning despite the seriousness of his mission. He could definitely see why Sara thought Felicity was cute. "Hi yourself. I'm about ten or fifteen minutes out from the target."

"About that…," Felicity uncomfortably cleared her throat. "Roy is here, right now. Right beside me actually. He wants to know where you are."

The black helmet that Oliver was wearing suddenly felt intrusive, claustrophobic, and hot. "I thought that Diggle was going to handle him."

"Oh, he tried. He's upstairs taking some painkillers and trying to keep his weight off of his swollen left ankle. Diggle, not Roy. Sara managed to pop his dislocated shoulder back into place, but…"

"Dislocated shoulder?!" Oliver shouted into the helmet, cringing when the earpiece echoed and vibrated in his right ear.

"Yup. You should've seen it. It was a whole five minutes of testosterone, blood, and four letter expletives. I'd prefer not to end up the same way, so can you please just settle this with Roy, by yourself?"

The earpiece screeched again as its receiving twin was dropped, dragged, and picked up on the other end.

"Oliver. Where are you?" Roy demanded to know, his voice thick with concern.

"Roy, now is not the time."

"This isn't about that. But we are gonna talk about it later. Whether you want to or not."

"Listen, there is nothing to discuss. It shouldn't have happened, and it won't happen again."

Roy snickered on the other end. "We'll see. But, like I said, I don't give a shit about that right now. I want to know where you are. You need backup."

"That's what Diggle is for."

"In case you have trouble hearing, Diggle is recovering from a serious ass kicking at the moment. Now, are you going to give me your location or do I need to scare it out of Felicity?"

"We both know that you wouldn't do anything to Felicity. I'm signing off now. I can't deal with these distractions." Oliver cut the signal on the transceiver, returning his full attention to the road in front of him. He couldn't think about Roy now. He needed to erase the lingering feeling of Roy's hands on his arms, of the way he'd been kissed on the stairs of his own house by a man that was supposed to faithful to his sister. And of the way that kiss had made him feel.

Down in the hidden basement of Verdant, Starling City's hottest new nightclub, Roy slammed his fist into the back of the chair that Felicity had been sitting in, denting the steel frame inwards. "Dammit!"

"He's like that," Felicity said with a shrug, referring to Oliver's stubbornness while ignoring the damage that Roy was constantly causing.

"Okay, I tried to do this the right way by asking Oliver himself. Since he's too much of an idiot to admit that he needs help, you're going to give me the address instead."

"I am?"

"Yes, you are. Because he's your friend and you'd rather not see your friend get hurt because he took on hell-knows-what by himself."

"There's a reason why he doesn't want you out in the field again," Felicity warned, refusing to give up the address.

"Yeah, there is. And it isn't the reason that you think."

"Look, it doesn't matter what I think. I promised Oliver that I wouldn't give you the address. I can't break my promise."

Roy swore in frustration, turning his gaze downwards so that Felicity wouldn't be able to see the pain that was festering there. "So, Oliver goes out and protects the city and everyone is happy with that," he said bitterly. "But nobody seems to care that there's nobody to protect Oliver. What if something happens to him after I went and took out his bodyguard? Do you know how to get in touch with Sara?"

Felicity watched Roy for a moment, wondering what reason he had for pursuing Oliver so adamantly. He sounded sincere enough. And he had a point. It wasn't like she never worried about Oliver. If she could count the number of times that careless man had come back injured and close to death… "I don't know how to contact Sara. She comes and goes."

"Felicity, please?"

Roy's imploring plea finally managed to reach her. She silently wrote down the address that she'd given Oliver, passing it to Roy this time. "Promise that you won't breathe a word of where you got it from."

"I swear. Thank you. I owe you one."

"Two actually, but who's counting?"

When Oliver slowly cruised past the address that Felicity had painstakingly acquired, he quickly began to reformulate his plan of attack. He'd been expecting a hole in the ground, but instead was confronted with a wide estate set behind a barbed wire fence, most of its grounds concealed by rows of thickly grown bushes.

Oh well. He needed to hone his acrobatics skills anyway, and nothing beat flipping over an electrified fence in a hooded getup with an armful of arrows.

Parking his motorcycle in a quiet little cul de sac down a ways, Oliver stealthily made his way back to the large estate. After reassuring himself that there weren't any guards lurking around or hidden cameras in the bushes, he made a running jump onto the slanted trunk of an oak tree on the boulevard. From there, he sprang upwards, temporarily latched onto a flimsy looking branch overhead, and successfully flipped over the thorny fence. Once he'd landed gracefully inside the perimeter, he crouched behind a bush and waited.

There was no sign of movement on either side of the fence. So far, his entrance had gone unnoticed.

Oliver crept along the back of the bushes, keeping them between him and the pitch black house that he kept in his sights at all times. He continued until he spotted a window leading to the basement. Most of the time he avoided basements due to their restrictive layouts. There were far too few ways out, and, if the basement hadn't been renovated in a while, it was like a death trap of clutter. But this time he purposely sought out the basement, edging towards that window, testing it for alarms, before gently prying it open. He reasoned that the stalker profile that Felicity had put together was accurate in assuming that the man was some closet pervert conducting his online sessions from the privacy of his bedroom. Given the stalker's attention to detail, he would probably be alerted to an intruder coming in from the second floor. Oliver couldn't chance him escaping or injuring anyone else who might just happen to be in the house with him.

Still, it was awfully dark…

For some unknown reason, Oliver held his breath in anticipation, drawing his bow and arrow as soon as his feet were planted firmly on the floor of the basement. It was cold. Colder than a basement had any right to be in the middle of autumn. And it smelled awful.

Moving carefully around shadowy lumps of furniture and dusty cardboard boxes, Oliver made his way to where he estimated the staircase to be. He was nearly halfway across the room when a quivering whisper caused his heart to lurch in his chest. Swallowing the need to breathe, he spun around in a panic, aiming his bow and arrow at… the body of a crumpled naked woman, lying brokenly on the floor.

"Help me," she rasped, reaching a trembling hand out in Oliver's direction.

As soon as he realized what he was aiming at, Oliver lowered his weapon and rushed to the woman's aid. "Are you alone? Who did this to you? Where are you hurt?" He pulled off his glove to press two fingers to her throat, checking her pulse. His eyes had yet to adjust to the dimness of the room so he couldn't see how badly injured she was.

"Only… me," she croaked.

"How long ago did he leave you here? Do you know when he'll be back?"

"No."

"Can you stand?" Against his better judgment, Oliver put down his bow and arrow to help support the woman when she attempted to get to her feet and slumped over instead.

"Maybe…"

Oliver gently slid an arm around her shoulders, preparing to guide her back towards the window he'd come in through, when his vision blurred as the room spun violently past him. His back slammed into something hard, knocking him forward again, onto his hands and knees. Somewhere in the back of his mind he realized that he'd been thrown, but he had a difficult time pinpointing the location of the enemy. He struggled to his feet, grimacing when his lower back throbbed painfully from where it had hit the invisible pole behind him. He had to protect the victim. Get her out before it came to gunfire or hurled objects.

Before Oliver could make a move, his feet were swept out from under him, the fall knocking the air out of him. He gasped for breath, kicking and clawing at the cement floor as he was dragged across it.

"He said you would come. The vigilante is so predictable, he said." Although the voice was not light, it was surprisingly female. And the fingers that gripped Oliver's ankles were thin but powerful. "Always so sexist. Thinking that I needed your help. That I would want your help."

How?! Oliver rolled on the ground, scissored the supposedly frail woman's arms between his legs and brought her forcefully to the ground. Proving that the whole injured damsel in distress thing was nothing but a charade, she recovered quicker than he did, pouncing on him with the speed of a wild animal. Her grimy fingers scratched at his mask, her thighs clamping onto either side of his ribcage with bruising force.

It wasn't that he didn't want to hurt her. At that point, woman or not, he really did want to do her some serious bodily harm. It was that he hadn't been expecting any of this. There weren't supposed to be any women in the basement. The stalker shouldn't have known he was coming. What kind of stalker trained his victims to attack their rescuers? The world had really become screwed up during the five years that Oliver had spent stranded on that island.

"Get off of me!" Oliver growled, roughly shoving the woman's hands away from his face so that he could punch her solidly in the temple. But she barely faltered, shifting so that she moved with the blow. When she pulled back her fist and landed a hard punch to Oliver's stomach, he almost retched from the pain. She deflected the rest of Oliver's attacks, using Oliver's prone position to his disadvantage. She was heavier than she looked, and a lot more vicious. Her hands latched onto the collared area of Oliver's green hood, cinched it tightly around his throat, effectively choking him, and hauled his unwilling body to the back of the room. It was there that she flung him backwards, through an even darker doorway and into an abyss of black. A door closed after that, sealing Oliver in with the stench that had repelled him from the basement in the first place.

Crawling to his hands and knees, Oliver tried unsuccessfully to draw fresh air into his lungs. His stomach ached and his throat refused to allow him to swallow for several moments. Not even a fragment of light penetrated this room. There were no windows. When Oliver could breathe normally again, he fought for precious seconds against the overwhelming urge to throw up. Pulling his hood closer around his face, he felt along the ground for a weapon of some sort. Something he could use against his attacker if she opened the door again.

His hand touched something cold, soft, and slack. Now Oliver was desperately fighting the instinct to scream. He'd been locked in a room full of dead bodies.

"He'll be back for you soon," the woman called from the other side of the door. "He's been looking forward to playing with you for some time."

What was that supposed to mean? Oliver began to panic, jerkily backpedaling away from the body he'd accidentally touched only to brush up against another behind him. He felt his way to the door, tried the handle, threw his body weight against it. From the far corner of the room, something moved.

It was like he was eight years old again, having just awoken from a really bad nightmare. He knew that his parents would be mad at him if he made a fuss over it, but he needed them to come to his room all the same. If for nothing else then to reassure him that it had been only a nightmare. His father would turn on the light and his mother would tell him how silly he was calling for them in the middle of the night. Monsters didn't exist. Not in the real world. Only that they did. And Oliver wished that he hadn't rejected Roy's insisted offer of help. If Roy had been with him, he never would have let down his guard so easily. Roy would have had his back.

But Roy wasn't with him now, and Oliver had never felt more alone than he did in that claustrophobic room with frigid corpses for companions. And shapeless things scuttling around on the floor. Oliver backed as far against the door as he possibly could, drawing his knees up to his chest and covering his hands with his ears. He tried to block out the sounds, to quell the tide of insanity rising inside of him. However, when the sound of a buzz saw from the other room began to cut through something far too dense to be wood, something inside Oliver broke.

(I think that I might just have nightmares after writing this. Hopefully not. Poor Oliver. Will Roy get to him in time? As always, reviews are greatly appreciated and inspire me to write faster.)