Disclaimer: See chapter 1

Please see my A/N below if you want an author's ramble.

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Chapter 12 - Reconnected Assassin

Rubbing a towel through her hair as she entered the kitchen, Sara Lance found her unexpected hostess talking to their mutual friend over the phone.

"Oliver, don't be so ridiculous!" She exclaimed, even as she grinned to herself. "I'm quite sure that a trained warrior and an Amazon albeit powerless but also still well trained, can look after themselves. I'll see you in there in an hour. Oliver..." She listened to whatever he was saying and shook her head. "Oliver, enough, we'll see you when you get there. Just don't forget the coffee."

She ended the call and swung round, jumping slightly on seeing the other woman in the doorway. "Sara."

"Felicity..." She put her towel down and sat down on a breakfast stool. "I... I don't know what to say."

"Then don't say anything." Felicity replied simply as she leant back against a counter. "Oliver and Diggle will be here to pick me up on their way from work in an hour. I think he wants to speak to you again."

Sara immediately begins shaking her head. "I can't do it; I can't see them, not after all that I have done. They would never understand. You don't understand."

"Don't I?" Felicity replied softly, before folding her arms and just looked at her silently, an act that actually made the trained assassin shiver from the memories that were still making their way into her consciousness. It was not the first time she had been on the end of one of the Amazon's silent looks of disapproval and being hit with that memory at that same time made the effect now even more piercing to the soul then it had been then.

"No, I won't do it." Sara shook her head.

Felicity sighed. "They don't actually need to know any of that; they just need to know that you are alive." She held up her hand as Sara went to speak again. "I'm not going to argue with you, Sara, I understand your reasons but then again, I expect nothing else from a Lance but I'm telling you now, your father at least deserves to know you are alive even if you don't want to tell..."

Sara buried her face in her hands, choking slightly on a laugh as the other woman simply refused to say her sister's name. "Please Felicity."

Before she could reply this, glass windows suddenly broke around them.

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Which was why an hour later, Sara watched in stunned disbelief as the perpetually cool-headed Oliver Queen raced down the stairs of his lair, across the floor to pull Felicity out of her chair, checked her over before pulling her into his arms and burying his face into her hair. "Thank your gods!"

She was stunned even more by how Felicity herself just allowed him to do that, merely burying her arms around his shoulders to hold him to her, murmuring in his ear words meant only for him but her sharpened hearing caught something.

"I told you, Oliver, there is nothing in this world that can even keep us apart." She pressed a kiss to the tip of his ear, and then pulled back so that she could look him in the eyes, running her hand through his hair. "Oliver, there something that you need to know and you're not going to like it."

Placing her back on the floor, he placed a finger on her lips silencing her for a moment before turning to the watching Sara and saying a tone that she had never heard from him, even when she knew him as Ollie (someone he clearly no longer was). "Thank you Sara."

She shook her head, trying to wave him off and all three members of Team Arrow did not fail to notice the slight look of guilt that crossed her face. "Don't, please don't, not when it's my fault."

Oliver immediately looked back at Felicity who rested her hand on his chest. "He was dressed like Merlyn, and it was clear that he was there for Sara. His attacks were to capture, not kill."

"What are you saying?"

There was a slight silence that was suddenly filled by Felicity, not Sara. "He was dressed like Malcolm Merlyn, Oliver; and I think..." She cast a look at Sara for a moment, eyebrow raised. "I think he was a member of the League of Assassins..." She let silence fall for a moment before continuing. "...As is Sara."

Sara swung round in stunned astonishment as Diggle spoke next. "But the League of Assassins' an urban myth, I heard about it from a tribal leader in Afghanistan and no-one was smoking what he was selling."

Felicity actually cleared her throat at that, mock-coughing wryly. "According to most people, so are Amazons, yet here I am." Her sharp gaze then fastened on the pale blonde opposite them. "And the only reason I can think for them to be here is that someone broke their cardinal rule and has left them, but not in their preferred way."

Sara literally shrank backwards, fearful gaze going from her to Oliver, Diggle and then back to Felicity once more. "How can you know this, no-one outside the order is supposed to know this?"

Surprisingly, it was Diggle that answered for them. "Something tells me that urban legends tend to know about other urban legends."

"This is why no-one has heard from you in the last four years." Oliver said in a slightly stunned and angry voice (Which had Felicity running her hand over his heart to silently calm him). "This is why you won't tell your family you're here."

"They rescued me, trained me, made me what I am, Ollie," She noted Felicity's silent wince at the use of his old nickname and cast a quick silent look of apology at her. "I'm a murderer, Ollie I killed a man and left him to be found by his children, so do you really think that my family will be happy to see me?"

Before anyone could answer, Oliver's phone pinged and for the first time since entering the lair, he released Felicity to read the message he had just received. She read the screen over his shoulder and ran her hand over his shoulder. "Go to Iron Heights and see your mother. I have something from the attack that may help us track this..." She looked at Sara who answered "Al-Owal," "When you return."

Oliver nodded his eyes dark with residual anger but leans down to snatch a kiss from her before leaving.

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"Felicity..." Sara moved to her side. "I'm sorry, about bringing all this into your life."

Felicity just smiled. "You're not the first person to join the wrong club, Sara..." Smiling wryly in an attempt to lighten the atmosphere, she then continued. "And it took a year for me to get out of that gym membership."

The other blonde couldn't help herself but laugh slightly. "Can I say that I am glad that he, you found each other again." She looked down for a moment. "And can I say... I think I'm glad for me too."

Felicity immediately turned from the machine she was working on to look at her, casting a quick look at Diggle over her shoulder. "Why?"

"Because I just now remembered how good you were for him on the island." Sara said bluntly. "And because you've just accepted me for who I am, what I've done since then and you never judged me for getting on the Gambit with him in the first place."

"I didn't know either of you then or the circumstances that led to it, so why would I?" Felicity replied even as she read the results that had just come out. Her head turned as she heard the familiar sound of Oliver's footsteps coming down the stairs even as Sara continued speaking.

"I'm glad that he has you and Diggle, before the island he was never very good at picking his friends." Sara said softly as she watched Felicity walk into Oliver's arms to greet him back. "I'm so glad that's clearly changed."

Diggle turned from the work he was doing, nodding to Sara (he had realised that the conversation between the two women had been in some way directed at him as well) and was not surprised to see his two partners greeting each other. He was also not slow to notice that Oliver was even tenser than he had been before leaving but just having Felicity near him was easing it.

In fact it made him sure enough to ask "How did it go with your mother?"

"It didn't go well." Oliver smiled grimly down at the woman in his arms (but he was also smiling at the conversation he had overheard as he came back into the lair) and ran a finger over her cheek. "Have you found me someone to hit yet?"

"Somehow I knew that would be the first thing you asked on your return." Felicity immediately pulled him with her to her computers and showed him her findings. "My guess is I've found a League of Assassin's lair."

Oliver immediately moved to the display case and pulled out his bow as Sara followed him. "He will kill you."

"Like you, I'm not that easy to get rid of." Oliver replied firmly, returning her hard stare.

"Listen to me, Ollie, it's my fight."

"He made it my fight when he came into Felicity's home and threatened somebody that I care about; especially when he threatened her." Oliver replied as he stared her down before he walked away from her to change.

Felicity swiftly moved to Sara's side and laid her hand on her should. "Sara, he meant both of us, just so you know."

"I know." Sara replied softly, covering her hand in silent thanks and continuing, "But you're the love of his life and therefore even more important to him." before leaving to change herself.

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"That could have gone so much better." Felicity murmured as she rested her head on Oliver's shoulder. "But at least Detective Lance now knows that Sara is alive and is out there somewhere."

He wrapped his arms around her and settled further back into the sofa in his bedroom in the Queen Mansion. He had refused to allow her to return to her home until the damage done to her home had been fixed and she had been able to upgrade the security measures she had on the house. (And Thea was staying with that Roy Harper kid again – as much as he hated it!)

He had finally gotten round to telling about all that had happened with his mother and Laurel (something that had actually managed to amuse him, considering all the seriousness of the situation as he had managed to do it without actually mentioning the elder Lance sister's name!)

"He did understand that it was absolutely necessary not to let either of the other half of the family know that she was alive, didn't he?" She sat up abruptly to look at him, her blues eyes dark with alarm at the thought that either he or the girl she was now willing to claim as a friend could be in danger.

Oliver immediately pulled her back down, tightening his hold around her slender frame, "Felicity."

It was all he needed to say to make her relax once again.

After they had been quiet for a while, content just to be in each other company without Arrow duties for once, Oliver suddenly spoke. "I told Diggle he was right about the past always catching up with you."

"I take it you also told him that you were not always on the island, as everyone thinks." She asked as she played with a loose strand she had found on his shirt.

"How the... I'm going to regret this but how are you so sure of that?" He asked as he stilled her hand.

"There's only one place you could have got that tattoo on your chest, Oliver and it was most definitely not on an island in the middle of the Chinese Ocean." She said simply as she freed her hand and laid over the said tattoo. "And did you really think I wouldn't have googled a symbol that wasn't on your body in such a prominent place?"

"I said I was going to regret it." He replied as he pulled her on top and tickled her sides, making her laugh before they fell silent again, Felicity laying her head on his chest over his heart. "But at least..."

"Yes, at least we know now."

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There we go, an extra long chapter for this weekend - and even as I finish this, I'm going to put in an interlude chapter, not something I using do but a certain elder sister wants to say something and can't say in our regular line-up!

So you may be lucky and get two chapters this weekend!

Next week's chapter is going to be difficult as it is, yes, you know it, the dreaded Russia chapter!

So please give me extra incentive and not only review this chapter but put one up for Wizard's View as well - extra please.

Look forward to hearing from you ;op

(And to see if you're reading these things, do you prefer an A/N at the top or the bottom of the chapter?)