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Sara wasn’t angry. She didn’t have the energy to be angry about… anything—she leaned against the headboard of the bed she shared with Ava, drained.
She was just sad. Really sad.
That’s really how Ava felt. That’s really how Ava saw her.
Does Ava really love me?
Obviously, Ava cared more about Sara’s past than she was willing to admit. Sara hated feeling so needy, constantly begging for reassurance about her past. I’ve been the other woman. I’ve had sex with a lot of people. I’m a murderer. I’ve been hurt. I’m full of darkness.
Ava had always responded I know. And I love you anyway.
But did Ava, really?
Dear Sara,
I’m sorry the vigilante you slept with
when he was already dating your sister died.
Some say it’s better to have loved and lost
but I hope you never loved him at all.
It hurt. Deep in her chest. Hearing those words for the first time in front of a packed audience had felt like a punch to the gut, her eyes suddenly moistening. She’d had to bite the inside of her cheek to prevent herself from crying not only in front of her crew but the whole world.
Those words didn’t sound like acceptance. They sounded like condemnation.
Sara was in no way proud of the things she had done: she kicked herself over getting on that goddamned boat with Oliver. She had hurt Laurel so, so badly. But in the end, the sisters had made up. So why did it feel like Ava—who hadn’t even known Oliver or Laurel—wasn’t over it? Ava had to know why that Sara wasn’t the same person anymore. 19-year-olds made tons of bad decisions: bad decisions they learn from and use to grow. It had been more than 12 years. Before she had gone through Hell.
Sara had definitely grown. Now, she was a different woman. And now, Oliver was dead. Sara felt the crushing aloneness of it all, the sudden rush of uncertainty, of insecurity.
Ava had said it was a condolence card.
It felt like a fuck you card to Oliver Queen and the person Sara had been in the past. The person Sara sometimes still mourned for—how carefree and bouncy and happy she had been. Just a little girl in a big world that didn’t know how much life could hurt yet. That little girl whom life was about to teach a very, very painful lesson. Oliver had been the last person still alive tying Sara to that person—her father, Laurel, Tommy, they were all dead. Thea had left Star City, probably forever. Her mother… they didn’t really speak. Sara couldn’t even remember the last conversation they’d had.
Truthfully, Sara was reeling from the loss of the last thread of that girl. Oliver’s death had meant that she had nobody left from Starling. No one left from before she was a killer.
That weighed more heavily on Sara than she was keen to admit—if she was the only one who remembered, did it really count?
Did that blonde girl with bangs even really exist anymore?
Has she finally, actually lost the last shred of her innocence?
Was the killer really all that was left of her?
Sara felt like part of her died with Oliver Queen. That now all she was was a slightly reformed assassin that ran a time ship.
Is that even a real person?
Pre-Gambit Sara hadn’t been an angel—far from it, actually: she got involved with the wrong boys, rebelled against her family, partied, drank. Despite all this, Sara still mourned for all that purity; so alive, living just to have fun, not suffering, not carrying the weight of life and death (and then literally all of time) on her shoulders.
Oliver had been so, so much more to Sara than an affair. He had been a girlhood crush. A best friend she had spent some of her most transformative young years in the company of. A protector. A rock.
Sara had truthfully moved on from Oliver a long, long time ago. When she had returned to Star City and gained freedom from the League, she had fallen back into Oliver’s arms. But deep down, Sara knew that it wasn’t from lust like it had been all those years ago.
It was because Oliver knew and understood things about her that nobody else ever could. The suffering they had gone through, the pain she still felt every single day. Oliver had been just as broken as Sara. She didn’t have to hide anything about herself, least of all her scars and her nightmares and her trauma. They were like two cracked teacups that finished off the set. Sara had desperately sought that comfort in the only way she felt that she knew how: sex. She’d always been a very physical person, punching out her anger and fucking out her anxieties; never one to talk about her feelings. With Oliver, she never had to talk. He just knew. He just understood her. Falling into him again had been the easiest thing she'd done in years.
There was more than one way to love someone, Sara knew. She always had, and always would, love Oliver. By the end, he had almost become like a big brother—she resented the comparison as soon as it crossed her mind, realizing that she was inventing another family member that had been killed off. Although she supposed it was possible there had been an Earth on which Oliver had become her Brother-in-Law.
She loved Ollie like a brother.
No, Sara wasn’t proud of what she’d done with him. But if she hadn’t been that person, she couldn’t have become this person, the person Ava professed to love. Sara could never have become the person she is today without Oliver. It went just beyond the decision to sleep with him that turned her into a fighter—she learned how to be a person again after the League, how to let people back into her life and her heart, how to care about herself again. Perhaps Oliver had died and taught her another lesson she didn't even realize yet. A lesson about sacrifice.
How could Ava love Sara and hate the man who had been so instrumental in helping her grow?
It felt like Ava had taken all of Sara’s complicated feelings about herself and thrown them into her face.
҉
“Are you okay, baby?” Ava asked, breezing into their shared room. Sara was reclined against the headboard, eyes staring into the distance.
Sara shrugged.
“I know you’re still angry about—”
“No.” Sara interrupted quietly. “I’m not still angry about the camera crew. You’ve apologized enough for that.”
Ava noticeably flinched. Sara took a deep breath before trying again: she hadn’t mean for the words to come off so rough, but she often found that when she was hurting, speaking sharply pushed all other emotion out of her voice. “I know that you were just trying your best to keep the ship and crew going with the government pressure, especially in my absence.”
Ava tucked her flowing hair behind one ear before sitting at the foot of the bed. “Okay. Then what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Sara—”
“The card.” Sara snapped, cringing at herself. She didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to bury it away and never think about any of it ever again But here she was. Yelling at Ava anyway.
Ava’s brows creased in momentary confusion before understanding dawned on her face. “The card. Oliver’s card.”
“Yeah, the card where you said you hoped I never loved him.”
Ava bit her lip. She knew that the crew had filmed her saying that—even if she hadn’t thought they would include it in the final cut, she probably should have talked to Sara about it anyway. Just in case. Or maybe just because writing the card made Ava realize she had some pretty deep-seated feelings she hadn’t even thought of before.
“I didn’t really mean it… that way.” Ava realized how empty the sentence sounded.
Sara shrugged. “Well, that’s how it came out. And the it’s not what you think coming before any I’m sorry I upset you is pretty rich, too.”
“Sara, you know I’m not good at feelings.”
“You said you wanted to be there for me, at the palace. So be here for me.” Sara resented the tone of her own voice, the bitterness. “My best friend just died, Ava. And you choose now to express how much you hate him. How much… you hate me.”
“I—” Ava was dumbfounded. “I don’t hate you. How could you ever think that?”
“’The vigilante you slept with when he was already dating your sister.’ Those aren’t exactly friendly words, Ava. Those words hurt. It makes me wonder what you actually think about me.”
“What… what do you mean what I think of you?” Ava went cold with fear.
“You always said that you loved me in spite of my past, in spite of all the things that haunt me. But when you go back at least 12 years to bring up something I did as a kid instead of all the other things that Oliver clearly meant to me… it makes me wonder if you really accept that past as much as you swear you do.”
“I swear I do, Sara.” Ava’s chest hurt and her breath felt fleeting. “I love and accept every version of you, every part of you. Past, present, and future.”
Sara felt so helpless, and she let out a heart-wrenching sob. “I know it was only a week for you, Ava, but for me it was months. Months and months trapped in the Vanishing Point after the end of the entire universe, living with the knowledge that you were dead, that everyone was dead, that I had failed everyone again! And I come back mourning the death of a life-long best friend--survived by his infant daughter and young wife--for you to throw it in my face with that fucking card!”
Ava felt tears spring to her own eyes. What had she been thinking? That card had been nasty, awful. To Oliver, who didn’t deserve it, and to Sara, who was just a dumb kid at the time who'd had no idea of what would happen to her.
“I honestly don’t know why I wrote that card, wrote it like that. As soon as I heard it on-screen, it hit me how mean-spirited it sounded. I don’t know.” Sara hated how hopeless Ava sounded and knew that the other woman was telling the truth: Ava hadn’t realized the tone in the message until she’d heard it read back to her.
“Why?” Sara also hated how whiny and needy that sounded but she felt desperate for some kind of… answer. Some understanding.
Something that made Ava feel less distant and fleeting.
“Oliver and you… you guys were close. You guys shared things we can never share; he knew you in a way I can never know you.”
“You seriously can’t be jealous about a dead guy!” Sara shouted, surprising herself. “I can’t believe you would really think that of me! I would never ever cheat on you, Ava. Let alone with Oliver Queen, my best friend who is married to my other best friend! I am not the same person I was 12 years ago.”
“I know Sara.” Ava winced. “I… don’t think it was jealousy, really. And I know that you would never ever cheat on me. I trust you. I think…” Ava let out a heavy sigh, trying to organize her thoughts. “Oliver Queen was a representation of my short-comings, in my head. I felt upset that you had lost someone so profoundly important in your life and knew that I couldn’t even begin to fill in that roll. I felt like you had lost something so important and incredible—a once in a lifetime relationship—and I don’t know how to comfort you and I definitely can’t fill that roll in myself.”
“You’re right.” Sara’s voice was so quiet that Ava could almost have imagined it. But she knew she didn’t, and her head jerked up to look at Sara, heart dropping into her stomach. Had Sara… decided that Ava wasn’t enough for her? Tears sprung into Ava’s eyes at the thought.
“Ollie was a once-in-a-lifetime friend, a once-in-a-lifetime person. And he meant so, so much to me.” Sara scooted forward, grasping Ava’s hand in both of hers, squeezing. “I don’t need you to replace him. I don’t want you to replace him, Ava. If I wanted Oliver Queen… I wouldn’t have left Oliver Queen. But I did. And I’m here with you. You are not a consolation prize, Ava. You are incredibly important to me. I want you. Not Oliver Queen, and not anybody else. I want Ava Sharpe. And you are an incredible woman, Ava. And a lot of the time… I don’t feel like I deserve you. I wake up next to you and I still feel amazed that I’m here, that this isn’t a dream. A lot of the time I’m convinced that you can—and should—find someone better than me, someone who is less fucked up and who has done less fucked up things. But selfishly, I don’t want you to leave. I don’t know what I would do if you did. I know I’m a nightmare, but for some reason I’m a nightmare that you put up with. And that card… it made me feel like maybe you were waking up from that nightmare, coming to your senses, realizing who I really was. Who I really am.”
“I know who you really are, Sara.” Ava’s other hand drifted up to cradle her girlfriend’s face, gazing deeply into watery blue eyes. “You are brave, and strong, and incredible, and I feel so incredibly lucky to have you in my life. I don’t see you as my nightmare: I see you as my wildest dream. I… don’t know what I was thinking. I was feeling helpless: yet another piece of pain I can’t take away from you. And you lost so much by losing Oliver. I guess I hope you never loved him was me being selfish. Hoping that some part of you wasn’t touched by him because then that means some part of you wont be aching right now. Because honestly, I don’t know how to help. I want to be there for you, but I don’t know how. I have never had to mourn a best friend before—I haven’t really had to mourn anybody that I’ve been close to. And I know that Oliver was so much more than a friend, really. And it scares the hell out of me that I have no idea how to help you or even guess at what you’ve been feeling. And I know that you don’t want me to replace him, but after everything he’s done for you, it makes my heart ache that he’s gone. He’s been there since the very beginning. The very first step. And it worries me that I can’t be that person for you.”
Sara softened. “That doesn’t make you less important to me than Oliver. Oliver… he practically watched me grow up. He was there when I almost died, he was there to welcome me home. He was there to convince me to come home; because I needed convincing. Oliver watched me become the person I am today. But Ava, you made me realize that I am that person to begin with. I had changed and grown but... sometimes I hate myself and my past so much that I wasn't able to see that growth. That new person that I'd become. That person capable of love, of something more than sex. You are really the first person that I’ve been with, especially for so long. And we’ve had our rough patches, but you’ve always stuck by my side. It’s true, I wouldn’t be who I am without Ollie. But I wouldn’t be who I am without you, either. I would still be alone—convinced that I am incapable of love, undeserving of it. Ollie… because of him I was put in a situation that placed me on the path to becoming a good person, but you’ve made me a better one, Ava. You’ve made me happy. Something… honestly, that Oliver never managed, not in the way that you have. There’s something about you that makes me blossom in a way I never have before.”
Ava felt a smile crease across her face. “I’m so sorry about hurting your feelings, baby. I was so caught up in my own head that I didn’t even stop to think about how what I’d written sounded, or about how it might make you feel.”
“It’s okay, Aves.” Sara reached her own hand up to push a strand of hair behind Ava’s ear, hand lingering. “I know, and I’m sorry I got so… aggressive. I was in my head, and everything felt like it was piling up on me. It felt like too much. I just snapped, and I’m sorry.”
Ava planted a light and quick kiss on Sara’s nose, delighting in the smile the action earned. “It’s okay, Sara. I know you’re hurting. I love you. So much.”
“I love you.” Sara breathed back. “More than anything.”