The pulse of Starling City beats on in his absence, in their absence. Life flows through her arterial veins at the intersections of Main and Pollock, Kensington and Worth, a constant stream of people rushing through their days with the pulse of routine. The cancers of the Glades and City Hall are kept in check by other masks flexing their muscles and other faces tapping into her nervous system from behind a computer screen. Her immune system, they fight to rid her of the rot that plagues her still.
And they manage.
They do.
She is strong. And yet, she is different, changed in some way she can't quite seem to quantify.
The Arrow is dead, she thinks. Dead. The Arrow bled out on the dank, grimy floor of her seediest underbelly. She has killed him. And she is sorry for it and she is irrevocably, markedly different for it.
Her lights are dimmer, reality grittier, even as the days lengthen, stretch out toward midnight with too much sun. The air is all stifling and oppressive, a choking mix of summertime heat and ever-present exhaust. Sometimes, she can't breathe in his absence, under the weight of what she's done. The summer wraps its fingers around her neck and tightens it grip. Every breath is effort. Every breath is labored.
She slouches towards normal come Autumn, when the air turns crisp and leaves crunch beneath high heels and the wheels of a Porsche with too much mileage. It takes time. She's still not the same. But soon enough there's a man with a bow and a different mask, but the same mission to save her. And there's familiar fingers at keys that navigate the ebb and flow of her energy like they're mapping out her nervous system.
She breathes deep the cool, clear air of Fall, gulping it down with great relief as the chokehold 'round her slackens its grip and lets her breathe easy.
He is here. They are back. She is not complicit in his death, in her own destruction, in the exorcism of her very soul. They are home. And she is whole for the first time in months.
Bit-by-bit, little-by-little, she is saved.