Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

CNRI collapses in a cloud of rubble and dust. Around him, the Glades is in chaos—trails of smoke obscure the stars, and the wail of police sirens and grief-stricken shouts for help, for people’s names, echo from every side.

No one reacts to the Starling City vigilante who stands in the middle of the street, eyes glazed over like a walking dead man. No one cares.

Oliver doesn’t care. He doesn’t care if someone spots his face from under the shadow of his hood, the grease paint around his eyes absent in his rush to stop the Undertaking. (He failed. He failed this city. He failed—)

His brain doesn’t want to process what his eyes are seeing. Oliver staggers forward. An unheard “No” slips past his lips.

Because the limp body that Tommy’s sobbing over, clutching so tightly it must hurt, has to be someone else. It can’t be who Oliver thinks it is—who he knows it is—even though cold logic says Tommy would never fall apart like this for anyone else.

It can’t be her.

Not her.

Not Laurel.

But it is. As Oliver gets closer, Tommy’s voice filters into his ears. Laurel’s slack face comes into view. There’s blood soaking the front of her shirt—so much blood—and Oliver knows that no one can survive that.

“Open your eyes,” Tommy’s saying, his voice muffled by Laurel’s hair. Oliver hasn’t heard his best friend’s voice shake this much since his mother died. “Dinah Laurel Lance, you open your eyes. Open your…your goddamn eyes, Laurel!”

Oliver continues his approach. He doesn’t know how to stop. He wants to stop, but his feet don’t stop moving forward, carrying him toward his worst nightmare. A nightmare that’s real.

His hooded shadow falls over his friend, cast by a lone, unbroken street light.

Tommy looks up at him through red-rimmed eyes. “I tried to save her,” he sobs, trembling hands lowering Laurel’s body to the ground. There’s blood on them—the same blood that stains Laurel’s shirt. “I tried…”

Wordlessly, Oliver sinks to his knees. He reaches out but pauses halfway through, and his gloved hand hovers inches from Laurel’s face before dropping, uselessly, to his side.

“I know, Tommy,” he murmurs, and he knows that he’s in shock, that his emotions have slipped away and left an empty husk in their wake, but it’s the only way he can survive this. “I know.”

There’s silence. Screams. Sirens. The rumble and crack of more buildings falling apart, walls crumbling and ceilings collapsing. Shattering glass.

“Laurel!”

Oliver and Tommy both startle, turning toward the sound. Quentin Lance is there, moving through the thick haze that chokes the street. He turns his head, looking around wildly, and he doesn’t see them yet.

“Laurel, baby, where are you?!”

She’s on the ground, on the street, lying dead between the two men who’d failed her. Laurel is dead, and Quentin doesn’t know it yet—that he’s lost another daughter. (Oliver couldn’t save either of them.)

Mechanically, Oliver stands. His eyes remain locked on Laurel’s too-still face. He knows he needs to leave, but it’s so hard to turn away.

The detective’s footsteps approach.

There’s a strangled gasp when Quentin finally sees her. He races to her side, barely sparing the vigilante a glance. (If he’d looked, he might have seen Oliver’s face.)

“No, no, Laurel…baby, no…”

Oliver takes a step back, then another. Each one feels like he’s ripping out his own heart. “I’m sorry,” he chokes out. His voice modulator is broken, but he barely sounds like himself anyway. He sounds wretched, broken, and before Quentin can turn around, the vigilante’s gone, fading away into the haze.

Oliver runs, his mind so numb that he forgets his bike—he runs right past it, diving into the destruction headfirst, grunting as he hauls away debris and pulls people out of the wreckage of his failure.

He loses count of the survivors he saves and the bodies of the ones he can’t. People thank him, but he doesn’t deserve their gratitude, not when he could have—should have—stopped this from happening at all. He moves on before they can get past “thank”.

His shoulder throbs fiercely, exacerbated by all the heavy lifting, but he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop. Blood seeps through the green of his suit, but he keeps going, because he’s survived worse, and he’ll survive this too. The pain keeps him going—it reminds him of why he has to keep going.

He can’t be Oliver Queen right now. (He deactivated his earpiece hours ago, right after he’d checked in with Felicity. The tracker in his boot, he left alone, but he’s moving too quickly and the ground is too treacherous for Diggle to ever find him.)

He’s just a man with a hood and a bow, and he couldn’t save Laurel…but he can still save them.

(Some of them.)

He stays out as long as he can, fighting through exhaustion and dehydration and the dizziness of moderate blood loss. He stays until dawn breaks and the arrival of the National Guard forces him to flee.

Diggle and Felicity are waiting for him in the Foundry. It shouldn’t surprise him, but somehow it does.

“Oliver!” Felicity blurts, spinning around in her chair as his uneven footsteps clank heavily down the stairs. “Thank god…” She trails off when he reaches the bottom and steps into the light.

“You alright, man?” Diggle says, cautious like he’s trying to calm a spooked animal. His gaze lingers on the blood that stains Oliver’s shoulder.

“Yep,” Oliver replies curtly as if half the Glades hasn’t been destroyed, as if hundreds of people aren’t dead because he failed to save them, as if Laurel were still alive.

He sets down his bow and takes off his quiver as Diggle and Felicity share a loaded glance. They don’t say anything—they don’t have to.

“I said I’m fine!” he snaps, eyes flashing with a deadly warning. Felicity flinches. Diggle doesn’t.

He wants to scream, wants to cry, wants to fucking kill someone. He should have killed Malcolm when he had the chance. (It wouldn’t have saved Laurel, but it would have avenged her.) He wants to break something, so he does, grabbing a fallen light fixture and hurling it across the room.

“Fuck!”

He breathes heavily, staring blankly at the wall. Laurel is dead. He takes off his hood and places it on a nearby table. Laurel is dead.

Diggle takes a slow step closer. “Oliver…”

“I told her to stay out of the Glades,” he says, his voice eerily calm. “I told her to stay away, but I didn’t tell her why.” He clutches his head with steady hands. His shoulder still hurts, but he doesn’t even flinch. The words pour out of him, and he doesn’t have the energy to stop them. “If I told her what was going on, if I told her who I really was, then…maybe she would have listened. Maybe she’d be alive.”

“Who, Oliver?” Diggle asks, even though he must already know.

Oliver swallows thickly. His composure fractures. “Laurel,” he whispers.

He grabs a change of clothes and leaves before either of them can think to stop him.

There are about a billion unread texts and missed calls on his phone. Most of them are from Thea. A few are from Tommy. One is from his mom.

Oliver thinks about going home. He thinks about facing the reporters that are inevitably lurking there, thinks about facing a devastated sister and a mother who’s surely on her way to prison, if she isn’t there already.

He pauses on the ground floor of Verdant, surrounded by the ghostly, white shapes of plasticky furniture. His newly bandaged shoulder aches. His muscles feel like lead. Oliver takes a step forward and stumbles, catches himself on a black stairwell railing to the second floor.

He blinks until the room stops spinning.

(He’s not going home tonight.)

Slowly, painfully, he makes his way up the stairs. He texts Thea, ‘I’m alive’ with one hand, turns off his phone before she can reply, and collapses into the plush, leather armchair in Tommy’s old office.

And then he can’t keep his eyes open anymore.

He dreams of fire and ash, twelve city blocks folding inward—crumbling, imploding like it’s the end of the world. A grey hellscape of concrete, rebar, and shattered glass is all that’s left, stained red by the blood of fractured families.

He could have stopped it. (He failed.)

He dreams of black arrows and a monster wearing the face of his best friend’s dad. (This time, nothing stops those arrows from piercing his heart.) Standing over the vigilante’s cooling corpse, Malcolm Merlyn laughs.

He dreams that he stops the Undertaking. The Glades remain still and intact. There are no screams, no sirens, no bodies.

He dreams that he tells Laurel everything, and wakes to the reality that he’ll never tell her anything ever again.

“Hey.”

Oliver blinks his eyes open to find Tommy standing there in the doorway. The sunlight streaming in through the windows is a little bit brighter. He blinks again and straightens from the awkward position he’d fallen into in his sleep.

“Hey,” Oliver echoes. His brow furrows. “Is Thea okay?”

Tommy steps fully into the room, letting the door close behind him. “Thea’s fine—Walter’s with her.”

Oliver nods. “Good,” he says, clearing his throat dryly. “That’s…that’s good.”

Silence settles, dark and heavy. Tommy sits down on the other side of the small, paper-strewn desk. Oliver stares at him. His friend looks almost as bad as he does, with the red gash across his cheek and the dark circles under his eyes.

(There should be a third person here, but there isn’t. It’s just them.)

“Did you kill him?” Tommy says slowly. “My father.”

Oliver pauses, meeting Tommy’s eyes. “No.”

Tommy looks away and chews his lip, his expression conflicted but unreadable. Turning back to Oliver, he finally replies, “Good.” His eyes darken. “Because I want to do it myself.”

Oliver blinks. He doesn’t know if he’s surprised. He doesn’t even know if he cares. But still, he remembers how appalled Tommy had been about Oliver being a killer. “Tommy…”

“He killed Laurel, Oliver. The Glades, all those people…my father’s a monster. He’s insane. He used my mom as an excuse, and if anyone deserves to die, it’s him.”

“I know.”

(Helena was right—Oliver is a hypocrite. But Helena Bertinelli wasn’t his best friend. Frank Bertinelli wasn’t Malcolm Merlyn. And, above all else, Michael Staton wasn’t Laurel Lance.)

Though Oliver knows he has no right to promise anyone anything, he adds, “We’ll find him.”

(Sometimes vengeance is justice—and, for Laurel, for Tommy, for Robert…Oliver will get his.)

Chapter Text

Oliver stands in the back, looming like a silent shadow. (He doesn’t know if he deserves to be here, but he couldn’t stay away. He never could.)

At the front stands Quentin Lance, and he’s not alone. Dinah’s back in Starling—of course she is, because her daughter’s dead, locked away in that shiny, black coffin and surrounded by flowers. She clings to her ex-husband’s arm, mascara running down her face.

Oliver looks away. (He didn’t kill their daughters, but he'd failed them both.)

Detective Hilton hovers nearby, along with a few other members of the SCPD, and Oliver recognizes the faces of Laurel’s work friends, Joanna among them. Thea stands somewhere in the middle with an uncertain Roy. There are just as many faces he doesn’t know, though a few look faintly familiar—people she helped working at CNRI, probably, and it strikes Oliver then just how many lives Laurel Lance has touched, how many lives she made a little bit better.

Now, she’s gone.

Her picture smiles at him from a stand beside the dug grave. It’s a recent one, from a work event—she’s wearing a grey suit jacket, and there’s a familiar, determined glint in her eyes. (Whoever had chosen it had chosen well.)

Oliver takes a deep breath, fighting back tears. He exhales sharply.

They’re burying her in the plot beside Sara’s empty grave.

Eyes flickering between the two gravestones, he can’t escape the guilt. His mind is brought back to the island, to Ivo and Shado and Slade. All of them are dead because of him, one way or the other—he never thought that Laurel would join that list.

“I always thought,” Tommy says, his voice raw, “that she would outlive us both.”

Oliver doesn’t reply.

The city’s reeling—from the destruction of the Glades, the 503 people who lost their lives. Crime is up. The SCPD is stretched thin, and copycat vigilantes are popping up like cockroaches in the wake of Malcolm’s Undertaking.

It’s been two weeks, and the Hood is MIA. The news thinks he’s dead.

Oliver sits in the living room of an empty mansion, eyes glued to the TV. He doesn’t know why he bothers—he’s useless until his shoulder heals. The local news is filled with people he can’t help, problems he can’t fix, but he can’t bring himself to do anything else. (Felicity would say that he’s brooding. Maybe she’d be right.)

He rolls his left shoulder and grimaces. It’ll be a while before he can hold a bow, much less shoot one. A few more weeks until he can get back into fighting shape.

“I brought you lunch, Mr. Oliver,” Raisa says with a smile. She sets the tray she’s holding onto the coffee table in front of him.

“Thanks, Raisa,” he says softly, matching her smile. “You didn’t have to.”

The housekeeper shoots him a stern yet fond glance. “Your shoulder says otherwise.”

She retreats from the room before he can open his mouth to argue.

Oliver huffs a laugh and shakes his head.

He eats.

With his mom in prison, awaiting trial, and Thea spending most of her time with Roy, the house is eerily quiet.

The front door bursting open would usually cause Oliver to tense and reach for a makeshift weapon, but he recognizes the footsteps that follow. He doesn’t move as Tommy sweeps into the room.

“Someone threw a brick at me today, barely missed my head. That was fun.”

Oliver frowns in concern. Tommy isn’t hurt, but underneath the flippant attitude, he can tell that he’s shaken. “I told you to take Diggle—you shouldn’t be going to the Glades alone, not even to the club.”

“Because my dad’s gone, and the city needs someone else to hate,” Tommy replies, holding his arms out to the sides as if the target on his chest is visible. When Oliver only levels a deadpan stare at him, Tommy sighs and lowers his arms. “I might take you up on that.”

Oliver is about to stand, but his friend flops onto the couch beside him, eyes distant.

“Speaking of my dad…” Tommy continues. “I got my trust fund back…along with the rest of my dad’s money. His properties, his stake in the company…I’m thinking of selling it all and making a charity—for the Glades. I’m sure he’ll just love that.”

Tommy narrows his eyes at the TV as an old picture of Malcolm Merlyn flashes across the screen. The reporters declare the man legally dead, and when Tommy’s name is mentioned, Oliver grabs the remote and switches it off. They’re both left staring at a dark screen.

“You don’t have anything to prove,” Oliver says softly, tearing his eyes away from his own reflection in the dead TV. “You’re not responsible for what he did.”

Tommy looks at him flatly, points a finger in his direction. “That is not what this is about. This is about me not wanting anything to do with that murderer’s money. I don’t need it—the people of the Glades do.”

“Okay.” Oliver nods.

“Besides,” Tommy adds darkly, “we both know he’s not really dead. If he ever comes crawling back, I want there to be nothing left.”

“Yeah,” Oliver says. “Just…be careful, Tommy.”

“With what? My psycho, mass-murdering father who’s not as dead as the media thinks, or the city that curses my name?”

Oliver sighs. “All of it. Talk to Dig?”

Tommy pats his uninjured shoulder and stands. “I’ll call him,” he promises as he leaves the room.

The front door opens. Closes.

Oliver reaches for the remote and turns on the TV.

He starts doing pushups in his room. His shoulder twinges with the motion, but he pushes through it, determined to recover as fast as possible so that he can get back out there and actually do something. The Hood’s been missing long enough.

Channel 52 is a dull drone in the background that he barely listens to, but a sudden shift in the chatter has him pausing mid-pushup and raising his head.

“We have breaking news here in Starling City. Tommy Merlyn—heir apparent to Merlyn Global Group, which went under in the aftermath of last month’s earthquake—is donating an unprecedented two billion dollars to the city’s restoration.”

Oliver lowers himself to the ground and sits up. A slow smile spreads across his face.

“This fund, managed by the newly founded Laurel Lance Foundation, is an incredible gesture by Mr. Merlyn and is expected to fully cover the cost…”

He shuts off the TV, grabs his phone, and calls Tommy. His friend answers on the first ring.

“Tommy?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“…She’d be proud of you.”

Felicity has really outdone herself.

The Foundry is completely transformed—gone is the dingy, badly-lit basement. The damage from the Undertaking is completely gone, and in its place stands a facility that would put ARGUS to shame.

The training area is refurbished, padded mats covering the floor beneath new equipment. Straight ahead, several glass cases are arranged in a circle—one holds his suit, others display razor-edged arrows. State-of-the-art computers rest on a dark table. A large, square light fixture hangs overhead, illuminating it all as Oliver steps forward.

“You’ve been busy,” he notes, impressed.

“Dig helped,” Felicity says, running a hand across the surface of the computer desk. “So did Tommy. We knew you’d be back here as soon as your shoulder healed.” She pauses. “How is it, by the way?”

“Fine,” he says with a smile, and though it’s only partly a lie, Felicity eyes him with obvious doubt.

Oliver gravitates toward the glass case opposite his suit. A black compound bow rests on a stand, sleek and new. He picks it up, turns it over in his hands. He looks at an expectant Felicity. It’s…

“Perfect,” he says. Then, softer, “Thank you.”

“I thought you were dead,” Detective Lance says bluntly, staring across an alley at the Hood.

On the ground between them lies an unconscious body—one of the many vigilantes terrorizing the streets with misguided intentions and directionless rage. (He reminded Oliver of Roy, but fortunately for them both, Oliver hasn’t run into Thea’s boyfriend on his patrols.)

Perched on a low rooftop, Oliver shrugs. His distorted voice echoes in the night. “It takes more than Malcolm Merlyn to kill me.”

“Good,” Quentin says with a heavy sigh. The man looks hollow, like his badge and the continued unrest of the city are the only things keeping him out of a bottle. That and Dinah, who had moved back from Central City not long after the funeral. “I know you and I haven’t always seen eye to eye, but this city needs you. Laurel saw that, and…now so do I.”

Oliver inclines his hooded head. He hesitates. “I’m sorry about your daughter, Detective. I couldn’t save her.”

Quentin’s mouth twists into a grimace. “Yeah, well…not everything bad that happens to this city is your fault.”

Oliver slips away into the shadows, races across broken rooftops. The ghost of Laurel’s smile haunts him all the way back to Verdant.

The sky is overcast and dark, threatening rain that hasn’t yet come. Bouquets of flowers are islands of color in the sea of grey.

Dinah Laurel Lance
1985 - 2013
Loving daughter and sister

Oliver stares at the gravestone, and all he can think about is how she had once been in a similar position, staring at the grave of Oliver Queen. (He’d give anything for her to be able to come back, too.)

“I wouldn’t have survived those five years,” he murmurs, “if it weren’t for you.”

His gaze drifts to the left, to the gravestone beside Laurel’s.

“Both of you.”