IMPORTANT: So about the German thing. I have been alerted to the fact that the German I used in my last chapter was not good to put it lightly. I would just like to make it clear that that was very much NOT ON ME. Blame the Google Translate gremlins. That said, if you feel like correcting the German because you genuinely speak it go right ahead and send me the right translation.
Message to Xaka (also kind of German thing part 2): I am TOTALLY ON BOARD with you translating this story in to German. Go! Run! Translate away! Just please do post a link to the original and mention that I am the author. Send along a little message when you've read this. If I don't hear from you by tomorrow I'll put a note like this in chapter 1. The email you gave me didn't work.
Now on we go! Oh, and there's that little thing where I don't own any of this. Please don't sue me oh almighty gods of the CW and DC comics.
Captain Lance had always known that no one in the Queen family was particularly inclined to make wishes on birthday candles or falling stars. At first, that was simply because they were so freaking rich they didn't really need to wish for things. They just needed to mention that they wanted something to one of their parents, a check would be cut or a credit card scanned, and it would be theirs.
By the time Lance met Oliver Queen he had already basically figure that out. He was a little boy who had quickly learned that wishing for material things was much less effective than asking, and that hoping for the kind of thing you couldn't buy was mostly an exercise in disappointment. The closest Lance had ever seen him to entertaining those kind of ideas had been for Thea.
Oliver had been close to seventeen and Thea was nearly seven. Lance had been stopping by for coffee at a local shop near the precinct when he had seen the two siblings standing by the fountain next to the building. Thea was crying.
"Thea," Oliver said, sounding calm but a little frustrated. "I know you're disappointed that Mom and Dad aren't going to be able to go to your recital, but they have some big charity thing they have to be at so that other little kids can have things. Things like ballet classes."
"It's not fair," Thea sniffed. Then she launched up and tried to wrap small arms around her brother who had crouched down to be on her level. Lance noted with amusement that she wasn't even close to being able to reach. "You're going to be there right Ollie."
Oliver hugged her back and set his chin on top of her head. "I wouldn't miss it for the world Speedy. If you want I'll even ask Tommy to come to. You'll have the loudest cheering in the theater."
"Can Laurel and Sara come to?" Thea asked in a small voice. Oliver winced slightly in a way that Lance both knew about and approved of. The empty carton of ice cream in the garbage can was all he needed to know that Oliver and his daughter were in one of the rough patches Lance personally wished would simply permanently subside in to no patches.
Oliver quickly smoothed over his expression with a bright smile and reached in to his pocket. He handed Thea a quarter and gestured over to the fountain. "Tell you what Speedy, how about you go and make a wish on it in the fountain over there?" He straightened up as Thea tore off towards the pool of trickling water. "Watch out for the edge Speedy!" Oliver had called, beginning to jog after her.
Lance had just huffed and gone back to work.
He had realized later that Oliver might have grown up and gained a sense of vigilante castaway maturity, but he was still a kid that had decided that wishing just wasn't worth it. The rest of Team Arrow didn't seem big on the idea either. All the same, Lance thought he might now what they would wish for if they had been guaranteed it would come true.
Laurel had been the kind of little girl who would cross her fingers and wish for him to come home after night shifts in the glades. She had also been the little girl who had blown out her birthday candles and absolutely refused to tell anyone what she had wished for because then it wouldn't come true. She had said with a vey serious expression that it was too important to too many people to not come true. Now Quentin thought that if Laurel could wish for something she would preface the wish with about a million stipulations about having no negative repercussions from the wish, and then wish for her sister back.
Quentin didn't quite know what Roy would wish for, but he had a feeling it would probably have something to do with the parents he never talked about, or maybe the family of that one cop who had died that he was always watching over. Of course, it was equally possible that the kid just wished he hadn't had to leave and pretend to be dead. He got the feeling that Thea Queen would probably wish for something along the same lines as well. She would also probably wish that the people in her life hadn't felt quite such a need to lie to her. Hell only knew how much Lance himself wished he had been given that courtesy.
He didn't have a clue what Nyssa would wish for. From his few brief experiences with the women, he had gotten the distinct impression that he wasn't the wish making type. Wishing she could annul a Nanda Parbat marriage might make the list. According to Oliver it was a little difficult to annul a marriage in an undisclosable location, witnessed by people that according to the government didn't exist, between two people who hadn't consented, made without legal papers, and only binding in a religion/culture that was more dead than Latin.
Lance didn't know John Diggle very well. But he did know that the man was a father with a young daughter. Because of that, Lance was convinced that the man would wish for his daughter to be safe and happy no matter what might happen to him in the line of his "night job." If he had two wishes then the second one on the list would be for Floyd Lawton to never have been hired to kill his brother. If the sniper that had been hired to kill Andy Diggle had been a hair worse of a shot then his brother never would have died.
Felicity would wish for the same thing every night, a thousand times a night. For everyone on the team and in the field to come home safe, and relatively undamaged. Lance had once noticed her sitting quietly on the floor with a fluffy dandelion seed head, blowing off each seed one at a time. The team was working a particularly dangerous case, and the IT genius was simply waiting. Waiting and wishing.
Lance still didn't learn what Oliver Queen wished for until he had gone to drop off his latest tip for the team. He walked in to find Oliver and Felicity curled up on the couch as the final scene of the Disney movie Aladdin transferred over to final credits. Apparently once weekly movie night was something that Felicity had instituted while she and Queen had been on their vacation. Lance was willing to bet it had begun as a way to catch Queen up on pop culture and then become a way to simply guarantee a break from life.
Felicity turned off the movie and sat up on her knees facing Oliver. "So?" she asked. "Find a bottle with a genii in it and you get one wish because, let's face it three is excessive. What would you wish for?"
Queen looked up at her his expression was one that had Lance practically picturing the little cartoon hearts popping out of his eyes and circling his head. "Most of what I would have wished for is you," he said. "Just you."
She smiled back at him. "You have me."
"I know," he said. He reached out and twined his fingers with hers before pulling her in to the couch next to him, with her head over his heart. "That's why I don't have anything I really want to wish for. My life as had enough wishes and half granted miracles. And enough of them have gone wrong that I don't want to make any more."
"Makes sense," Felicity said, her voice was sleepy. Quentin couldn't see the two of them anymore, but he could hear just fine.
After a long moment later Oliver spoke. "I guess I would wish that Rebecca Merlyn had never gone to work at her clinic in the glades that night." Lance heard a rustle of fabric as felicity moved and her question was clear in the silence.
"If she hadn't gone that night, then Malcolm Merlyn would have never gone to the League of assassins or planed the Undertaking," he explained. His voice was thoughtful but not necessarily closed down the way Lance normally associated Queen's answers to personal questions. "My parents and maybe the Merlyns would have cleaned up the city legitimately. I wouldn't have gotten on the Queen's Gambit, Sara wouldn't have gone with me. No League, No Island, No Slade, and no Mirakuru. So many people that are dead now would be alive."
"You wouldn't have met me though," Felicity pointed out. "Or John. Thea might not even have met Roy."
Oliver let out a quiet huff of laughter. "No. It would have gotten worked out. Thea still might have crashed a car on her birthday and ended up working at CNRI because that's the kind of people we were. Roy would have still stolen her purse and that might have been good enough. John went in to private security and nothing really would have changed that. My family would have still hired him."
"And what about me?" Felicity asked.
There was a brief pause and then. "I would have spilled a latte on my laptop." Felicity laughed quietly and buried her face in his shoulder. "For real this time," Oliver clarified. "And I would have kept coming back because you would have been real, and that would have been different in my life. I'd have faked computer problem after computer problem until I finally got you to let me buy coffee for you. And I would have fallen in love with you either way."
"That's nice," Felicity said quietly. There was a long moment of silence before she said quickly. "You know I love you to right. I was thinking through what you said and it was such an interesting concept what with the whole alternate future thing that I sort of didn't think about it. By the time it all worked out in m head I realized that that would have been the right moment to say it back. And I do really seriously love you so-"
"I know," Oliver said reassuringly. "One of the few things I always know. Now go to sleep, I'll drive us home in a while."
Felicity murmured an assent. After a moment of peaceful silence Lance heard Oliver say. "You. I am always going to wish for you."
Lance knew why. It was one thing to wish for something you didn't have. It was a completely different thing to have what you wanted, and be constantly terrified that you wouldn't be able to keep it.
Wishing for things could be easy. Wishing to keep them was very, very, nearly impossible.
Hoping for things wasn't something Team Arrow did easily. Lance had noticed that most of them generally treated the least pleasant scenario as the most likely one. Optimism was not a dominant feature.
Laurel had always hoped for the ideal situation, but only because she relate to law and perfect justice. As a lawyer and an assistant DA she chased the best situation the law could provide. But she rarely hoped for it. Of course she hadn't always been that way. When she had been little Quentin had loved that both of his daughters had the kind of girls who hoped for little things like rain in summer, and snow days.
Over five years in the military had long ago made John Diggle the kind of person who Lance thought never hoped for little things. If he hoped for anything at all, Lance was willing to bet it was for the big things. Hope that no ghosts from the past would show up to haunt him, and hope that life wouldn't get more difficult or harder to live probably took up most of his time.
Felicity was really the only true optimist of the entire group. Lance could liken it to a single ray of sunshine in an incredibly large, dark storm cloud. She hoped that no one would get shot or hurt. Lance had even heard her say once that she had worn her lucky panda flats simply because she hoped it would give the team an edge when they shut down one of the off shoots of the Triad in Starling.
Hope was fleeting and elusive in the lives of people who probably needed it the most. Lance counted himself as an involuntary member of that particular group. But Felicity was surrounded by those people, and she still managed to hope for everything. Big and small because as she had explained on one particular ramble, hoping couldn't hurt anything.
Praying wasn't something Lance had ever set much store by. He wasn't religious and neither was his wife when he was still married. After everything that had happened with his life, he thought that if there was a God then he must be a special kind of cold and uncaring bastard. Praying to someone like that had exactly zilch in the appeal column.
The Queen's hadn't been a religious family either. Originally Lance hadn't really cared. Weather or not you thought an invisible, omnipresent, omniscient, being was watching out for you and deciding your life was entirely your own personal business.
After the Undertaking had happened, Lance began to think that maybe it was just the fact that the idea of heaven didn't sit well with people who had committed enough sins to be fairly certain they were headed towards the other option. Lance was a big believer in their being a special space in hell for people who a. plotted genocide, and b. ran multi-billion dollar corporations.
It was possible the Queen family wasn't as non-religious as he had thought though. As far as he understood it, Oliver's entire hooded and leather bound quest had begun as a mission to remedy the sins of his family. The sins of the father etc, etc. Of course, Oliver Queen post-island had proven to Lance (and everyone else) time and time again that he was in large part a creature of guilt. Not religious inclination.
"I've met the devil already Diggle," Oliver had once said after nearly a week spent fighting a new villain who called himself Lucifer. Oliver had been grazed with a bullet and it had been close but he had come through. "I've met him, and I've shaken his hand in a deal to take his place. This guy was bad but it could have been a whole lot worse."
Diggle clapped him on the shoulder and moved away towards the door. "I guess you'll just have to pray it doesn't ever get back to that point. And tell Felicity your bandages need to be changed every four hours." He had called the last part over his shoulder and the door had slammed shut.
Team Arrow's version of praying more closely resembled knocking on wood and small ticks and habits. Laure twirled her hair around her index finer in times of heavy stress. Ray flipped to computer programming and Felicity babbled about things that didn't really matter very much as a distraction. Diggle cleaned his hand guns in a slow rhythm and Nyssa sharpened hand knives using a traditional wet stone.
Lance could understand the last two ticks even as violent as they were. Knowing your weapons were close and functional was reassuring for any trained soldier. But it wasn't really praying. They were just habits for luck. More like pre-game rituals for athletes than anything else.
Quentin Lance didn't think Oliver really even prayed when his life was in danger. If he did, Lance was fairly willing to bet the thoughts represented something more like please don't let me get fatally injured again. I haven't re-stocked the fridge with ready blood transfusions since this happened last time two weeks ago.
Oliver's preference to not pray was something Lance identified with. Being out and fighting every night meant in large part relying on yourself and your team only. Widening the circle from there only made things dangerous for everyone.
Working with Oliver ha illustrated to Lance just how unwilling he was to rely on people who had proved time and tie again to be loyal friends and allies. Praying for divine intervention from an invisible and very possibly unreal being was an idea Lance would bet Olive regarded with an attitude that generally consisted of pointing and laughing. Of course, the Queen kid didn't laugh much these days. Or smile. Or generally show large quantities of any emotion.
There were only a few times that Lance had ever seen Oliver Queen have any kind of conversation with a deity.
The first had been when Felicity Smoak caught a stray bullet from a nutcase taking pot shots at everyone related to the Arrow. Lance had posted a police guard on her hospital room and had stopped by himself to check in on her. Somewhere along the way, Quentin Lance had ended up adopting another daughter. Maybe not legally, but he worried over the IT genius as much as he worried about Laurel these days.
He entered the room to find Oliver sitting on his knees with his fists clenched together on the bed by Felicity's side, careful not to press or tug on any of the wires. "You owe me," Oliver said in a dark voice. For a minute Lance was confused about who he might be talking to. "I don't know if I'm supposed to be talking to a god or to destiny, or the universe. But it doesn't matter."
Oliver forced his hands to unclench but they quickly reformed their fists. "Or maybe you don't owe me," he muttered. "I'm selfish, and a murderer. I lie. I cheat. I steal. And their I almost nothing I can do to ever make up for everything I've done." Lance was inclined to disagree there. Stabs, bullets, falling off of cliffs, preventing three sieges, and a relentless war against criminal activity probably made things a wash.
"You don't owe me," Oliver repeated. "But you owe her." Lance watched his eyes flick to Felicity. "She's good. And I don't deserve her. But..." He trailed off. "She's just good," he finished. "If your real, just please don't take her from me."
A very long moment later, Felicity's eyes cracked open. "Didn't know you ever prayed," she said in a croaky voice. "Didn't think you were really the type."
Oliver let out a huge sigh of relief and pressed kisses over the pulse in her wrist around the wires connecting her to the monitors. "This seemed like a special case."
The second time was when Malcolm Merlyn died. He and Oliver had made an uneasy alliance and fought back to back to protect the one thing besides Thea they both loved. Starling City. Damian Darhk killed Merlyn mere moments before Oliver's Arrows pierced his heart.
The battle ended then, and Oliver sank down beside Malcolm as Thea cradled his head in her lap. Malcolm looked up at Thea. "I loved you," he chocked out. "From the second I knew you were my daughter I loved you." Then his eyes locked on to Oliver with a dead stare. "You know the words," he ground out. "Say them. YOu have to."
Lance watched as Oliver seemed to consider before giving a curt nod. He spoke in a long, unbreaking stream of Arabic and then paused, repeating the words in English. "Lord have mercy on him," he said in a voice laced with steely determination. He continued the prayer as Thea began to cry. "Protect him from the torment of the fire, and the punishments of the grave."
Merlyn gave an almost thankful nod and pulled the ring off his finger and pressed it in to Oliver's hand. "It should have been yours," he chocked. Then Malcolm Merlyn breathed his last breath, and died.
Thea held her father and cried. Oliver placed a hand on her shoulder and turned to face the assassins Merlyn had brought with him. "Kneel," he said in a voice filled with a terrifying level of cold authority. "Kneel before Ra's Al Ghul."
He took a deep breath and moved forward continuing his speech. "From now on you obey me," he commanded. "If you wish to leave I will not hold you here, but those of you who choose to stay will follow my lead. No more killing if it is at all avoidable. Those such judgments will fall to me and Nyssa Al Ghul." He paused and stood tall in front of the world's most deadly army. Lance thought he looked completely and totally unafraid. "You are no longer a league of assassins, you are a league for justice."
Oliver later explained the logistics of the plan. A long running back up he and Nyssa had coordinated that should Malcolm die, Oliver who had been selected by Nyssa's father and fulfilled the prophecy would assume official mantle while Nysaa handled day to day operations.
The next time Lance saw the ring of Ra's Al Ghul it had been reformed in to two. One was a simple gold band, thick but light enough to not impeded the use of a bow and Arrow. Lance knew that Oliver originally kept the first ring on a chain around his neck. The other Oliver had shaped himself, adding in a handmade and etched arrow head to the gold, with a green emerald set in to the metal.
Lance watched when Oliver handed the second ring to Felicity Smoak. He had met her eyes. "It's the ring of Ra's Al Ghul combined with the metal of an Arrow head I made," he explained, his voice almost nervous. "The emerald was passed down through my family."
"Something from every part of your life," Felicity said, staring down at the ring.
"It's every bit of me," Oliver agreed. He reached up and closed her fingers around the ring. "Will you take it?"
Felicity smiled at him with the kind of smile she used that always put Lance in mind of the sun coming out. She wiggled her fingers around until the ring finger of her left hand had slipped through the band. "I thought I already had."
Oliver breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank God," he breathed, straightening up and kissing her. Lance backed quickly away. If that moment hadn't involved some quality prayer jut for the hell of it on the part of Oliver Queen then Lance didn't know what was.
After a while working with the team and a few truck loads of full night hours, Lance had started noticing that Oliver Queen didn't sleep very often. In fact, the only times Lance had ever actually seen Oliver unconscious had been times when he had been- well... actually unconscious. The lazy kid who had habitually slept until noon now only seemed to sleep if had something to due with semi-lethal drugs, excessive blood loss, or massive amounts of blunt head trauma.
Lance had seen Oliver sleep exactly once, and as soon as he had gotten within ten feet of the cot Queen was lying on he had bolted upright fully aware. His breathing had been shallow and his hand had clenched around the handle of a knife that Lance guessed he must have hidden under the mattress.
That was when Quentin had figured out that Oliver didn't so much sleep as suffer through a few hours of nightmares when it was absolutely unavoidable. Dreams essentially stayed out of the picture. You didn't sleep armed unless you didn't trust your nightmares to not come to life.
Observation had proven that Oliver treated sleep and emotional responses the same way. Optional things like pieces of paper with suggestions on them. He collected them, folded them up tidily, tucked them in to his back pocket, and pulled them out for assessment of what was actually crucial later. Sleep seemed to fall in to the "Not-So-Necessary" category.
When Lance heard one of Oliver's dreams it was totally and completely by accident. But really, he couldn't help that Felicity hadn't shut the door behind her all the way when she went to talk to Queen as they attempted to stop Ra's in his attempt to annihilate the city. Nor could he help the fact that his position allowed a perfect view through the door.
"Every night since the mountain I've had the same dream," Oliver said quietly. He sat at the counter that held technology and supplies while Felicity stood above him. "You are pleading with me not to go, and I listen to you."
Lance couldn't help it, his ears perked up to listen. He new next to nothing about the circumstances surrounding how they had even gotten in to this mess. All he knew was that Sara was dead, Oliver was a vigilante, and the bad guy who had orchestrated the destruction of Starling City wanted to work with him. Any new information was welcome.
Oliver was still talking. "Sometimes it still ends badly," he said, fingers tapping over the sheathed sword that lay on the counter. "I end up with this sword in my chest. But most of the time... we escape."
Felicity's breath caught in her throat so audibly that it reached Lance across the room. "We're just driving," Oliver continued. His face had broken out in to a kind of desperately wistful smile. It was also almost disbelieving, like he couldn't quite comprehend even the idea that all of this could have worked out differently. "And all of this seems so far away, because it's just the two of us," Oliver finished.
Lance continued to listen as Felicity stepped up to him, placing a hand on his chest. He watched as Oliver's face broke in to a small smile as Felicity slowly took away the fear that the dream was impossible. She told Oliver that his dreams could change because he had changed.
After everything was over, Oliver announced that he was leaving if Felicity would go with him. Felicity's head dropped to his shoulder, burying a smile as she gripped one of his hands with both of hers.
Lance slowly slipped from the room and made a phone call. He gave a specific description of Queen's car and commanded all officers patrolling the city limits to let it pass under any circumstances. Speeding, deficient headlights, faulty turn signals whatever. He ordered his officers to let the car freaking go.
Captain Lance couldn't do much for Oliver Queen's hopes, or wishes, or prayers, but after eight years of complete and absolute crap, Lance figured the kid deserved for at least one dream to be easy.
A/N: So what did you guys think? This chapter took a while so I hope you like it. It might be a little longer until my next one, I have finals coming up. Review for me!xoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxooxxoxxoxoxxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxxoxoxxoxoxoxoxxooxoxoxoxoxxoxo