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For as long as Quentin Lance had known Oliver Queen, he had known that he was not a particularly good liar. He went around hiding, projecting an arrogant grin that generally just made people back off. He avoided telling the truth, but most of the time he didn't flat out lie. Besides, when he did it was easy enough to tell.
Lance had long felt that if the Queens hadn't been rich not a single one of them would have been able to get away with a single lie their entire lives. Well, very possibly Robert could have. You don't get to be the owner of a multi-billion dollar corporation through honesty and hard work alone, and Moira Queen could probably give most CIA NOC agents a run for their money.
But Lance had always thought that the Queen kids could barely lie to save their lives.
Thea was mostly just too young to know that lying was a thing people could do at first. Then when she had grown up Thea Queen had pretty much just decided that you could shock people more with complete and utter honesty.
Oliver had always been a little bit different. When he lied he did it with a sort of mocking smile, like he knew everyone knew he wasn't lying well but he was daring them to challenge it. Lance had immediately felt like this was exactly the sort of pompous ass hole behavior of someone who had figured out early that they had enough money to do whatever they wanted whenever they wanted and wasn't shy about using it.
What Oliver did more often than lie was simply omit. The kid had eventually gotten smart enough to figure out that if you were a bad liar keeping secrets it was best to just not talk about it. If the sin of omission could send you to hell then in Lance's book Oliver Queen had earned a ticket before he had learned to legally drive.
Then he had spent five years doing God only knows what.
Suddenly, the immature kid who hadn't been able to lie no matter what had been obliterated and replaced by a man who had learned to fix his face into a mask with all the blank rigidity of a concrete statue. The old omitting playboy had been thrown on over the top to hide the new liar. But Lance could still tell that he was lying.
The Captain had to admit that he had been grudgingly impressed even in his anger that Oliver Queen had somehow become able to beet a polygraph. That sort of thing took dedication and practice. More than that though, it took total and utter control. The version of Oliver Queen that had come back from that island was good at control.
Even Queen's movements were sort of clipped and direct. They reminded Lance of the movements of a boxer. There was a swift economy of movement without a single modicum of energy wasted. The formerly slouched posture Oliver had used had transferred to a militarily straight back and set shoulders.
Slowly, Lance began to work out when Oliver was lying. When Queen halted and stumbled over his words it was the truth. When he used short, simple words that was generally the truth to. It was just more a truth that lacked emotion.
When Oliver's words flowed easily. When there was no paused between one and the next and he looked at the person he was addressing with a neutral, manufactured openness he was lying like a sailor swears.
By the time Lance had figured out that Oliver Queen was in fact the Arrow, the realization that Oliver Queen had been convincingly lying on a near sociopathic level had hit him over the head like a ton of bricks. Lance supposed that when you were actually lying to save your life, you started to get really damn good at it.
Honesty was like a rare commodity in Oliver Queens life, one he only granted to his immediate and most trusted friends. From what he had gathered, Lance figured that Diggle had pretty much figured out the truth about Oliver when the man had hit an attacker from ten yards away with an unweighted and unbalanced kitchen knife. He wasn't sure on the exact details about how Felicity had learned the truth, but he knew it involved syringes full of "energy drinks" and laptops full of bullet holes culminating in Oliver getting shot and bleeding out in the back of her car.
But with pretty much everyone else Oliver Queen post-Island has learned to lie with a sort of bland, wide eyed, sincerity. He lied to police, his sister, and his mother for absolutely as long as possible. Lance got it to a level. He didn't tell the people he loved about most elements of his own job because a lot of it was just too ugly to show. He had made lying easy.
More than being a liar, Lance noted that Oliver has developed a sort of sixth sense about when he's being lied to. There's a little hard grain of truth to the saying "it takes on to know one."
After some careful observation, Lance figured out a certain Oliver has to being lied to. It was just one Thea Queen had been kidnapped by Slade Wilson. The hostage negotiator had gotten a call and then come to talk to Moira and Oliver. The man had gone over to them and tried to spin some story about how everything was going to be alright. Oliver had let the negotiator speak, and then simply tipped his head to the side.
Lance would never be able to erase the image of total, unforgiving, cold, blankness in his eyes. His voice had been like velvet over concrete. Something vaguely civil and soft covering something unyielding and hard when he said, "So what exactly do you suggest we do?"
The hostage negotiator hadn't had an answer. He had stumbled over a feeble reply while Moira had fretted and Oliver had simply stood there, his expression completely unchanging. You couldn't bull shit a bull shitter and Lance had realized that even before the island Queen had more bullshit to hand out than any other farmer. It came with the territory of being a public figure. The Queens had simply indoctrinated Oliver with the idea that if you had to give out bullshit, the least you could do was sell it as fertilizer and turn a freaking profit.
Whenever anyone lied to Oliver Queen Lance saw him use that same blank look and tilt of the head. Then he would proceed to place the words of his replies like traps and landmines in the trenches. At first, this had infuriated Lance. He had seen it as a sign of misplaced arrogance in thinking that being able to spot a lie from someone else made him any better than the first liar. As that fell away Lance had begun to realize that it was something more. It was Queen's first line of defense.
But Lance wasn't going to be playing poker with him anytime soon that was for damn sure.
In fact, playing poker with Team Arrow at all was just generally a major no-no.
He had sat in on a game once, and had at first walked in on Roy Harper shoving extra playing cards into his pockets, up his sleeves, and in to every other orifice of clothing he could possibly work out. "You realize that's cheating right Harper?" Lance had asked with a skeptical expression.
Roy looked at him with an expression of almost manic determination. "It's the only way," he said fervently. "Besides, I dress up in red leather and engage in vigilantism each night after nearly a decade of being a pick pocketing street thug. What part of that makes you think I'm the kind of person who cares about cheating at poker?"
He pushed past Lance who shook his head and simply went to watch the game.
Roy deployed his cheat cards with shameless aplomb. John Diggle proved that years and years of being in the military had forged him in to the kind of man who could hold his own in Texas Holdem with the best of them. He had sat calmly, sipping a beer and betting with military precision. John hadn't had the best cards or the best cheating technique but he had been the one to bet the smartest, and had bowed out gracefully at the opportune moment. Laurel had failed epically, giving up around the same time Oliver raised the stakes for the second time and Roy pulled an Ace of spades from a location Lance would rather not think about.
Eventually, the game had boiled down to Felicity counting cards and Oliver watching her with bland, observant eyes. The two of them went back and forth before Felicity finally came out as the victor.
As the others were leaving, Lance witnessed something interesting.
Felicity split out the money and handed half of it back to Oliver. He had looked up at her with a small smile. "Thank you."
"Thank you," Felicity replied. "This is like, the best way you have ever thought of to make money. It's really just taking advantage of your natural abilities to show limited emotion plus my brain. I'm starting to feel bad about taking money from our friends though. Maybe we can expand this. I'm sure we can find that underground casino again."
Oliver hummed. "Might not be the best idea considering you purposefully got cheating and I shot up the place last time we were there."
She nodded. "Probably true." She stretched up on her tiptoes and patted him on the shoulder. "I so would have crushed you if we were playing for real though. You suck at lying."
Oliver smiled up at her almost sadly. "Only with you."
Oliver Queen figured out how to pull a poker face over his five year stint. That face becoming permanent though, that was another matter. The first time Lance ever saw Al Sah-him that was what it looked like. A version of Oliver Queen who had developed a permanent poker face.
Something about it was even more extreme though. Before, the face had just been a face. It had been a mask, as much as the one Queen strapped over his eyes every night. Now it was his actual expression. Dead eyed and void of anything.
"The Oliver Queen you knew is dead," Oliver said coldly. Even his speech pattern had changed. Not more tightly controlled, just flatter. There was nothing left to control. "Grieve for him, then move on. He is gone."
Felicity slowly walked across the rooftop they were standing on. She stepped cautiously like he was worried that the ground could be about to cave in under her feet. It was an image to behold, a tiny blonde girl walking towards a mountain of a man armed to the teeth and ready to kill at the first wrong twitch. A butterfly moving towards a snake.
"You might be almost completely different from who you used to be," she started. "But you are not dead Oliver."
Oliver didn't move. He stayed frozen. Then Felicity gently reached up and pressed her hand against his cheek. Oliver continued to stare blankly at her, as though some sort of connection in his mind was bending and snapping, failing to actually get there. "You're Oliver," she emphasized again. "You are Oliver Queen. You are still the man that I believe in. And dear God are you a horrible liar."
Lance watched in near shock as Oliver's eyes seemed to slowly slip shut. His head tipped sideways for a moment, dropping in to her palm. He watched as the newest and strongest lie that Oliver Queen had ever let define himself shatter to the floor.
The almost imperceptible sound of an Arrow being released from a bow sounded through the night. Oliver wrenched his head away and moved quickly to the edge of the building. His blank mask was firmly back in place. "Only with you," he said. Lance thought it sounded like the words were chocking him. "I am only ever a bad liar with you."
Then he stepped off of the edge of the building, plummeting towards the street, away from the light of the moon and in to the darkness below.
A/N: How did I do? I worked on this chapter for a couple days longer than I normally do. I liked the idea just noticing how much of the lying Oliver actually does on this show even though people keep saying he's horrible at it. I also learned recently that humans aren't technically psychologically programmed for honesty. Review for me! xoxxxoxooxoxoxoooxoxoxoxoxooxxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxxoxoxoxox