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1.
Before Ivy Town, Oliver Queen had never touched a lawn mower in his life. While other teenage boys might have been given the chore of mowing the lawn by their parents, or even cut grass around the neighbourhood for pocket money, the Queen Mansion had had a team of gardeners and teenage Oliver would have scoffed outright at the idea of earning his own way. But Ivy Town is a long way from Starling City, and grown-up Oliver is a far cry from his teenage self.
Maybe it’s the domesticity of it all, of caring for a yard in the home he and Felicity share, or the still novel feeling of living an ordinary life doing ordinary chores, but Oliver finds he actually likes taking care of the grass. And it’s oddly satisfying, he thinks, to see the neatly cut lawn when it’s all said and done. A little victory of normal life.
He’s just finished his final pass and is wheeling the now quiet mower back to the shed when he hears it, a scream so visceral it stops him in his tracks. It’s not a shriek of delight or a yelp of surprise, it’s not someone being started or children playing a game. Oliver has faced enough fear in his life to know what it sounds like, and this is a call that holds such terror he swears he can feel it in his bones.
He’s moving before he realizes it, jumping his backyard fence and sprinting across the neighbour’s lawn, following the frantic cry that’s still buzzing in his ears. He jumps the next fence, and the next, without breaking stride. It’s in the third yard over he finds them, a woman, toddler clutched in her arms, screaming at the edge of a backyard pool. Under the waters surface, a small shape bobs aimlessly near the bottom.
He dives without thinking, the movement automatic. Once second his feet are treading across the ground and the next they’re kicking through the water, pushing him down as fast as he can go. He scoops the child into his arms and returns to the surface just as quickly.
With a splash of water Oliver hoists them onto the pool deck and lays the boy out as delicately as he can in the frantic moment before starting CPR. His clothes are sodden and the concrete of the pool deck bites into his knees, but his focus is absolute.
“Call an ambulance!” he directs between breaths to the woman who seems to be in too much shock to move. Things start happening around them, he can sense the movement, hear muffled voices, but it’s only when the boy sputters and coughs, rolling onto his side to expel the water from his lungs, that Oliver shifts his attention enough to see any of it.
Neighbours have gathered, drawn by the commotion. He can see heads peaking over fences and people milling in the yard, trying to help the best they can. Soon enough sirens pierce the air and paramedics rush in. Somebody hands Oliver a towel.
By nightfall, the story of the boy’s rescue is all over the neighbourhood; how Oliver leapt over three fences like an Olympian and dove headlong into the pool. He tries his best to take the chatter in stride.
“Don’t let all this notoriety go to your head,” Felicity teases him when yet another neighbour drops off a tray of baked goods in what seems to be the universal gesture of thanks in Ivy Town.
Oliver rolls his eyes. “This isn’t the first person I’ve saved you know.”
“I know,” she says, running a hand over his cheek. “And I doubt it will be the last.”
She pecks a kiss to his mouth and with pride in her eyes tells him “Once a hero, always a hero.”
2.
He’s walking back home from the farmer’s market, bag of fresh lettuce and green onions in his hand, when he sees it in the display window of the sporting goods store. A bow. Compound design, made of a lightweight composite with, if he’s not mistaken, a binary cam system. It wasn’t as nice as the bow Felicity had made for him, but it wasn’t bad. He lingers for a minute outside the window, before continuing down the sidewalk towards home.
It’s on his third trip past the window, finishing off a run one cool and windy afternoon, that he finally goes inside. When he comes out ten minutes later it’s with the bow, a handful of arrows, and a dozen tennis balls all in an oversized plastic bag emblazoned with the store’s logo. His brain has given him half a dozen reasons why he’s doing it. Because it wouldn’t be so bad keep up his skill, because he never knows when his past might come back to bite him, are among some of his perfectly logical thoughts. He spends his walk home trying not to overthink it.
His street is quiet when he gets back, like it always is. His house is quieter still, with Felicity away for the day. He enters the garage through the side door, flicking on the lights in the empty space. It’s smaller than the Foundry was by far, but the concrete floor and dim lighting gives him a bit of the same feel. Using an empty utility self he sets up the bow with practiced ease, nimble fingers repeating motions they’ve done a thousand times. When it’s done he slings it over his shoulder and grabs the sleeve of tennis balls, popping one out and bouncing it against the floor. After catching it once, twice, three times, he narrows his eyes, takes a breath, and launches the yellow ball towards an empty wall.
Taking the bow off his shoulder and nocking the arrow take no thought. The movements come as fluid and proficient as they, seemingly, always have. The aiming takes a fraction of a second (the space is small and there are few outside factors to consider) and it’s true, the arrow pinning the once bouncing ball tightly to the drywall.
Unwittingly, Oliver’s lips curl into a bit of a smile.
It takes less than a minute for the rest of the balls to join the first, pinned like abstract art to the unfinished drywall. But he doesn’t let them stay. Instead he tosses the punctured balls into the trash and gathers the arrows together. He bundles the whole thing, bow and arrows, into an old duffle bag and slides it onto a shelf behind an empty jerry can before going into the house to shower off his run.
For reasons he can’t quite explain to himself, he doesn’t mention the bow to Felicity. And even though he’s pretty sure she’s noticed the collection of holes in the garage wall, she doesn’t bring it up.
3.
“You want to play paintball?”
The surprise is evident on Felicity’s face. Oliver shrugs.
“It’s the second time Adam’s asked me,” he says. “He and his buddies go from time to time, other guys from the neighbourhood.”
It does not escape Felicity’s attention that he hasn’t actually answered her question.
“And you, Oliver Queen, former Starling City vigilante, want to go and play fight with a bunch of average joes from Ivy Town?”
Her tone makes him pause.
“Do you not think it’s a good idea?” he asks.
“Do you?” she replies just as questioningly.
“I guess… I mean it’s not like…it’s all just for fun…”
She smiles slightly at his fragmented sentences and walks over to rest her hands on his shoulders. He stops his somewhat flustered explanations.
“Oliver,” she starts softly, “obviously you can have a man play-date with whoever you want to.”
He quirks his lips at her turn of phrase.
“But,” she continues, “don’t you think they’ll notice that you’re, like, really fracking good at it? Like going out under the cover of night and taking out bad guys sort of good?”
It had occurred to him, he had to admit (and, maybe, to a secret part of him, that was part of the appeal). But this, here in Ivy Town, is him trying to live a normal life. And isn’t hanging with the neighbourhood guys part of that?
“I’ll…dial it back,” he answers.
“Dial it back,” she echoes.
“Yeah,” he says. “No vigilante stuff. Just…regular guy stuff.”
She looks at him for a beat, her face saying she’s not quite sold, but she just pats his shoulder and says “Ok.”
Two days later, Oliver finds himself in the woods just outside of Ivy Town with half a dozen guys from the neighbourhood wearing goggles and a blue pinnie. The paint ball gun he’s holding feels odd but familiar at the same time. They’d split into two teams for capture the flag and the rest of Adam’s group (and it was an impressive number of guys to bring together Oliver thinks) is at the other end of their playing field with red pinnies on their chests, waiting for the blue team to make their move or busy plotting their own.
Oliver listens to Adam map out a plan and his first exercise in not being a vigilante is to bite his tongue about the terrible tactical decisions. It’s just paint ball, Oliver reminds himself, not life or death. Adam’s plan is good enough.
His next challenges comes when he realizes that trying to miss when he shoots is a lot harder than he thought it would be.
For the last three years under the hood, and a few more before that, Oliver has stayed alive by hitting the things he aims at. And, regardless of how good Adam and his friends might be at paintball, Oliver knew that if he was going to fit in with the group, he was going to have to pull a few punches. But it turns out that years of survival training is really hard to turn off. When Oliver spots the first group of guys in red pinnies coming at him, he hits them each with one shot, leaving blue paint splatters center of mass.
A chorus of “whoa” and “wow” and “holy crap man!” tells him he needs to tone it down, and he brushes off the praise by saying he got in some lucky shots. He starts trying to miss, but the process is just so clunky in his brain that he has trouble doing it. So he decides, instead, to just start aiming at other targets. The tree trunk three feet past the guy in the grey hoodie. The top right corner of the wooden barricade. One of the guys in the group, Oliver thinks his name is Carl, is wearing a pair of ridiculously pocketed cargo pants and Oliver decides to aim for every single one. By the end of the game, Carl’s legs are streaked with blue paint.
Oliver lets himself capture the flag only once. He mounts an offensive with a few of the players and uses the spray of paintballs to hide his own precise hits before dashing the flag back across the playing field to his team’s base, easily avoiding the other players who stick out across the landscape like sore thumbs.
Later, when the pinnies have been shed and the group is having post-game beers in their paint splattered clothes, somebody points out that Oliver is so clean it’s like he didn’t even get hit. Oliver laughs it off and makes a joke about having good hiding spots, but makes a mental note to change that for next time.
When he gets home and kisses Felicity in greeting, she asks him how it went. He shrugs and tells her it was fine.
“Fine?” she questions him with a raised brow.
“Yeah,” he answers and, giving her another quick peck, begs off to shower.
Afterward, he tells her about the pinnies and the terrible ambush plans and about hitting every pocket on Carl’s cargo pants, and they laugh together. What he doesn’t tell her, is how it somehow managed to come both too close and too far from his life before this.
4.
It was fairly obvious that Felicity was up to something. And it wasn’t a very big leap to figure out what it was. Oliver had seen enough police reports to know what they looked like, even if he just glanced them for a second or two before Felicity noticed his presence and hid them away, switching browser windows or slamming her laptop shut.
More than once, Oliver had woken in the middle of the night to find Felicity gone from their bed. It said a lot about how far he’d come that his first thought was no longer irrational panic. Instead, he’d just get up and follow the sound of keyboard clicks until he found Felicity in her home office or at the dining room table, computer screen reflecting in her glasses. She’d always greet him a little sheepishly, apologize for getting him up, and say that she couldn’t sleep, or that she’d had an inspiration on a project she was working on, or that there was some super urgent Palmer Tech stuff that just couldn’t wait. And he’d say “ok” and kiss the top of her head, then settle onto the couch and watch Sports Centre until either she was ready for bed again or he fell back to sleep. He never asked any more questions.
Part of him was happy that Felicity had the team’s back. He knew that no one was better at it than she was, and her intel would be helping Thea and John and Laurel just as much as it had helped him. And part of him wanted to tell her that he knew, that she didn’t have to sneak around, that she was, of course, free to make her own choices. But it seemed to be a conversation that he just couldn’t start. A door he wasn’t quite yet ready to open.
5.
How he’s found himself talked into so many barbeques, Oliver will never know. He has survived torture and interrogation and any manner of horrible things, but he can’t seem to find a way to say no when Laura Hoffman invites them to a neighbourhood party. Really, the woman has a gift that would make the Bratva proud.
It’s not that he objects to the idea outright. There’s something to be said about deviled eggs, hamburgers, and a cold beer on a nice summer day. But after a half dozen garden parties, weekend barbeques, and one fairly rowdy Fourth of July bash, Oliver has done more than his share of small talk.
“So, Oliver,” says his current conversation companion, a middle-aged guy sporting Bermuda shorts and flip flops (Oliver thinks his name is Ken, but it might be Kyle) “What do you do?”
I’m a retired vigilante is the first thought that runs through Oliver’s head.
“I, uh, just left a pretty stressful job. Now I’m just taking some time off,” is what he says instead.
“Oh yeah?” says Ken/Kyle, as if Oliver has peeked his interest. He takes a pull from his bottle of beer. “What kind of work did you do?” he asks.
Mobster, reluctant ARGUS agent, ill-fated CEO…
“Business,” Oliver answers, taking a drink from his own bottle.
“Anywhere I’d know?”
One of the biggest fortune 500 companies on the western seaboard. Or it was, anyway, until I signed the whole thing over to a woman bent on revenge.
“No,” he says. Then, before Bermuda shorts can ask any more questions, Oliver jumps in with “Hey did you catch the Celtics game last night?”
Later, when the party is over and they’re walking the down the quiet sidewalk back to their house, Felicity will bump his shoulder with hers and tease him about just how long he can spend talking about cooking with Laura Hoffman or chatting about sports with “the guys”, and he’ll laugh and shrug and say he likes those things (and he does). But it’s more than that. Sports statistics and swapping recipes don’t require any lies. And they don’t require him to share anything more about himself, anything deeper. How can he ever tell these people, these strangers, about the life he’s lead?
Even if he didn’t share the more sordid details, he’s still Oliver Queen. He still grew up in the 1%, his family having more money and power than most people see in a lifetime. He still had a youth full of over indulgence and bad decisions. He still, seemingly, spent five years marooned on an island in the North China Sea before coming back to Starling City and running his family’s company into the ground. And he still doesn’t want to talk about any of it. Not to them.
So Oliver keeps the conversation light. He talks about Netflix and farmers markets and the whirlwind vacation he and Felicity recently embarked on, and he carefully navigates around other topics, like work and family, always careful never to reveal too much.
Oliver tells himself that it’s fine, that the longer he lives a normal life, the more normal life stories he’ll have to share, and he won’t feel like so much of an imposter. But part of him wonders if, in a place like Ivy Town, he can ever be anything but an outsider.
+1.
As soon as he sees Thea and Laurel, arriving late and unannounced 300 miles away from Starling City, he knows what they’re going to ask. Part of him lightens at the chance to say yes.
He has loved his time with Felicity, traveling, being free, living for himself for the first time since he boarded the Gambit almost a decade ago. But from the minute he slides on the green leather jacket and feels the weight of its armour on his shoulders, he knows. And when he rests the quiver across his back and grips the bow with anxious fingers, he feels it even more, like a missing piece has been clicked back into place. Somewhere along the way, in his years of fighting and winning and losing, the mission he carried had shifted from being a burden, to being part of who he is.
He’s not sure when it happened, when fighting for survival, for obligation, turned into something more. He has a sneaking suspicion is had to do with Felicity, with John; his partners showing him he could take his tragedy and use it for good. That he could be better.
Without conscious thought his gaze gravitates to Felicity and, from the look on her face, he knows she feels it too. Eyes on his she walks to him and, without a word passing between them, raises on her toes and pulls the hood to settle it over his head.
The last time he’d worn a suit like this, he’d been conflicted. He’d seen this part of himself as a barrier standing between him and normalcy, between him and happiness. But he’d had normal, and it didn’t quite fit. Maybe, it didn’t fit either of them.
He might not carry a bow forever, injury and age will catch up with him eventually he knows. But he also knows that he’ll never stop fighting, for justice, for those who can’t fight for themselves.
Somewhere, in the recesses of the new lair, an alarm sounds, dragging Oliver’s attention away from Felicity and prompting John to say that it’s time to move out. Oliver gives him a silent nod, then looks back at the woman he loves. Her eyes shine as she tells him “Once a hero, always a hero.”
She pushes up to kiss him, and he bends to meet her in the middle. When they pull away, she drops her hands from his chest and takes the slightest step back before jutting her chin towards the door.
“Go get ‘em, Arrow.”