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Roy Harper had been undercover in the FBI for a while now – when he first went into hiding, he got work as a mechanic for a while, ended up meeting his now-boyfriend Jason at that job. Then he met Jason’s family and discovered that the two of them had more in common that they could have ever guessed. Jason’s family offered him the opportunity to do something with the skills he had been painfully allowing to rust, and start a long-term undercover gig that would both keep him well hidden from anyone on the West Coast and provide a useful access point for investigations into FBI business.
So Neal Caffrey was born, a charming conman and forger perfectly suited to become a CI for the FBI White Collar division. A fun role to play; the only downsides were the suits, which Jason loved, and the fact that the perfect criminal to become a CI was a nonviolent one. To be certain that the FBI wouldn’t see him as a physical threat, Roy had to do all his sparring with Jason in a private room, and he had to be very careful to avoid getting into physical confrontations at all costs. The parkour he'd trained so hard at was thankfully deemed a reasonable skill for Neal to have, and Roy and Jason regularly went on rooftop runs through the city whenever they could be sure that ‘Neal’s’ handler Agent Burke wouldn’t be coming to look for him wherever the spoofed tracking data said he was.
Overall, everything was going great. He was embedded with the FBI, he was helping them solve some really interesting cases (and some really boring ones, because it turned out that a lot of white collar crime solving was just figuring out who was committing fraud) and he was sending regular updates back to the Bats. Given that New York was thousands of miles and the opposite coast from his old life, and he was living under a meticulous fake identity that the Bats’ computer person was apparently keeping from having photos in searchable databases, he figured there was no chance of anything or anyone from Star City catching up with him.
He was right, for a few years. Then he was wrong, big time.
Oliver Goddamn Queen was in his city. He had his own city, that he was always talking about protecting and crusading over, and for some reason he couldn’t just stay in it. Or even on the right coast! Roy felt like it couldn’t be emphasised enough that he had taken a general ‘stay away from Star City’ direction and gone to the opposite side of the country! And it was just Oliver, too, no Thea, no Felicity or Diggle or Laurel. Well, maybe it was for the best that Thea wasn’t there – Jason knew about Thea, of course, but the whole no-contact situation meant that Thea decidedly did not know about Jason.
Oliver was, for some reason, still playing the part of the arrogant, party-loving playboy without three brain cells to string together and a love of anything alcoholic or blonde. It was an image he had always relied on to keep people from realising the keen mind and expert marksmanship under the cloud of whiskey vapours, but it was also, according to Thea, pretty accurate to who he had been before he went missing. Still, Roy found it hard to see any truth in the drunken stumbling and bright laugh from the man who had saved his life, trained him, and fought crime alongside him. It must have been a decent act, though, because nobody else seemed to see through it the way he did.
“Ugh, can’t believe Oliver Queen is in town, he gives Brucie a run for his money,” Jason said as he flipped through the tabloid headlines while they ate breakfast on the patio. It was at that very moment that Roy had two realisations: firstly, that he had never actually told Jason or any of his family that Oliver was the Arrow; secondly, neither his boyfriend nor any of his boyfriend’s family had ever actually asked, which he supposed was kind of sweet for such a group of information-hoarders.
Then something else registered. “Brucie? I’ve not heard you call your dad that before, and what so you mean that Oliver gives him a run for his money? Oliver isn’t much like Bruce.” This wasn’t really a lie – Bruce was a lot politer than Oliver was when he did his intimidating ‘I hear you and this person I consider to be my kid are dating’ speech.
“Oh right, I forgot you must know Oliver Queen from when you dated his sister. Wow, that must have been wild. Anyway, ‘Brucie’ is what we call Bruce’s public persona. He acts like a total airhead and a klutz, and nobody ever suspects him of his night-time activities. It’s pretty smart, although don’t ever tell anyone I said that, but it’s also completely insufferable, and I used to have to live through seeing it at every public event I went to with him. Not having to watch the uncanny valley nightmare that is ‘Brucie’ is the best part about being dead.”
“Aw, I thought getting to be with me was the best part about being dead,” Roy said with a fake pout.
“Honey, you’re the best part about being alive,” Jason said, and that was all that was said for a while.
Roy had almost forgotten about Oliver painting New York City red until he came into work the next day and found that his former mentor was the hot topic of conversation in the office. Apparently, Oliver had managed to have something stolen mid-galivant, and it was a high-profile enough case that for some reason the FBI were getting involved. Guess it paid to have partied at one of the colleges you dropped out of with the son of the mayor. The others were all grumbling about how being rich and having connections meant you could make the FBI take time away from important cases to solve some simple theft that the police should have been more than capable of handling. Roy wasn’t sure, though – Oliver may have seemed like he was so drunk it would have been taking candy from a baby to steal his socks, but it was all just a ‘Brucie’ façade. Any pickpocket who tried to take something from Oliver Queen was getting their wrist broken. Something else had to be going on here.
Roy didn’t find out what else it was going on until Oliver came into the office. He had tried to avoid it, but he didn’t know exactly when Oliver was going to arrive, and Peter was getting suspicious about the frequent bathroom breaks. When he had started to get sympathetic looks every time he got up and heard whispers of ‘bad sushi’ he just gave up and decided on the angle to play when Oliver recognised him. Shouldn’t be too hard.
It wasn’t. “Roy? What are you doing here?” Oliver hissed the moment he laid eyes on his former protégé in a very nice suit sat behind a desk in the New York FBI White Collar office. Roy had used to think Oliver was a great actor, since he did such a good job pretending to be the ditsy trust fund three-time college dropout. Once he got some grifting skills of his own, though, he realised Oliver only had one act, and it was just pretending to be someone he used to be. There was never a chance that Oliver might be able to see the last person on earth he was expecting to see in that office and not react or be able to improv around his reaction. Luckily, Roy had it covered.
Peter and the others were already ahead of him, having jumped to the conclusion he knew they would. The start of a classic ‘Neal, what did you do now?’ look was already blossoming on Peter’s face. After all, they had all just heard a very rich and famously not-too-bright man recognise ‘Neal Caffrey, con man’ and call him by a name that was totally unfamiliar to them.
“Uh, hey, everyone, did I never mention that I know Oliver Queen? Haha, it’s the funniest thing, I may be a totally reformed con artist now, working for the FBI as a consultant and everything, but last time he was in New York I befriended him under a fake name and allegedly around the same time his expensive watch may have gone missing. All water under the bridge now, though, as I am a completely different person!”
Well, he didn’t know how he could have been any more obvious. He hadn’t just dropped those hints for Oliver, he had basically thrown them directly at his face. Hard.
Now, if Roy was an acting teacher, he probably would have had a few things to say about Oliver’s shocked gasp. As it was, the White Collar division, who were expecting an airhead heir, seemed to be completely convinced.
“You were a conman, that whole time? But we were buddies! You said that a hawk stole that watch! You exploited me, and you made me believe in a slightly more magical world? I can’t believe I let you go out with my sister!”
Okay, never agree to be on an improv team with Oliver, got it. And that last part got a little bit too real, and he was definitely irritated that their audience meant that he couldn’t clarify exactly to what degree Oliver had ‘let’ him date Thea. More like ‘forced him to break up with her then forced him to make her dump him when the breaking up didn’t work, eventually very begrudgingly recognised that being together was, at least at the time, better for both of them than being apart was’. But still, that was all stuff that the White Collar team would believe of Neal Caffrey, so his cover was secure. And Oliver’s cover of being an idiot was rock solid.
Clearly there was some kind of unspoken agreement that we would all just move past Oliver and his’ ‘history’ and get on with getting him out of our office as quickly as possible, as Peter quickly pivoted the conversation to the stolen item. The looks he was getting from everyone else within earshot guaranteed that Roy would be hearing about this later, though. Dammit Oliver, why did you have to go and say the part about your sister?
Roy realised that he’d zoned out of the conversation and missed what was probably some more excruciating acting from Oliver. Now he knew exactly what Jason meant by the ‘uncanny valley’ of his dad’s ‘Brucie’ act – it was truly painful watching a guy he knew could kill someone with his pinkie finger pretend to have no idea that playing a game of cards with men who were clearly in the mob was a bad idea. As far as the rest of the White Collar team were concerned, Oliver was lucky to have walked away significantly poorer but with his life – from where Roy was sitting, Oliver was lucky not to have a tattoo declaring him a lieutenant in yet another mafia. Seriously, Roy had no idea how Oliver made friends with literally any of the people who would seemingly grant him endless favours, Oliver was the least friendly person he had ever met.
Since he was having to read between the lines and fill in a lot of blanks, it took Roy until a few minutes into the conversation, which had moved into the conference room, to figure out why Oliver had come to the FBI. The stolen item was a USB drive, and Oliver wasn’t saying what was on it other than that it would be very bad for Queen Consolidated’s stock price if its contents made their way into the wrong hands. Of course, that was a classic Oliver Queen ‘truth in a lie’ – he had expertly implied that there were documents related to confidential company business on the drive without actually saying that. And, of course, it wouldn’t be very good for QC’s stock price if their CEO was revealed to really be a vigilante with a penchant for shooting arrows in people, but Roy thought Oliver would probably be more careful protecting that secret. He had better be, with what Roy sacrificed for that particular secret to stay hidden. It could just as easily be a drive full of Oliver’s nudes, and Roy almost visibly shuddered at the thought.
So the drive was the ‘what’, and Oliver had provided an idea of the ‘who’ in the people he had played cards with the night before. Roy’s best guess on the reality of the situation, however, was that Oliver had intended for these guys to steal the drive from him and this was all some kind of plan to take down the ‘thieves’. The FBI had technological resources that the police didn’t, and the White Collar division had a specialty in corporate espionage. And a private company’s data being deliberately stolen from its inebriated CEO was very possibly corporate espionage, so this was definitely under the division’s purview. If Oliver was telling the truth, that is, which Roy was pretty certain he wasn’t.
Honestly, Roy didn’t care about whatever weird scheme Oliver was up to. He just cared about making sure that his cover was still intact by the time Oliver left New York. And also preferably avoiding having Oliver and Jason meet, not for any specific reason but just because of a general ominous sense he had about it.
He decided it was time for Neal to interject. “So, we get this drive back, we check to see if the data on it was accessed by these guys, and then we send them off to the DA’s office neatly tied up in a little ‘corporate espionage’ bow. Anything I’m missing?”
Peter gave him the look that meant ‘I am finding your shenanigans tiring rather than amusing today’. “Oh, I don’t know Neal, how about a plan to legally recover the drive in a way that will be admissible in court? If these guys are planning on using this information themselves, either for insider trading purposes or to blackmail Mr Queen with it, they won’t be selling.”
Roy shrugged. Playing Neal was old hat at this point, and this was the sort of thing that Neal Caffrey was pretty damn good at. “So we convince them that the drive is worthless, but that they’ve gotten very lucky by finding some idiot willing to pay a ton of money for it. They give us the drive, thinking they’ve cleverly conned someone, and we arrest them for whatever kind of fraud that is.”
Oliver decided to pipe up and say that he thought that sounded perfect - clearly this would work for whatever his plan was. And even though they all thought Oliver was an airhead, clearly in this situation he had enough authority that Peter, Jones, and Diana all quickly agreed that the plan was a good start. Which was great, because now Roy got to go undercover to arrange a deal with some very dangerous people. Why did he come up with this plan, again?
A day and a conference room full of notes on the criminals in question later, Roy was disguised as Neal Caffrey disguised as a shady character with a few mob connections who worked for someone who could do a lot with Queen Consolidated private company information. It got a little confusing at times to keep track of who he was pretending to be, but slipping so effortlessly into different roles definitely helped sell his cover as a con artist. Peter and the others had no way of knowing that pretending to be Neal Caffrey every day was constant practice.
“Okay, the anklet is off, that means the watch is on,” Peter said. “If we lose the GPS signal on the watch, we come running. If we lose the audio feed for more than a minute, we come running. Got it?”
“Got it. I only get a minute head start.”
“Neal.”
“Just kidding. Lighten up, Peter!”
The mission was going off without a hitch, and Roy was just thinking to himself that he might actually get through one undercover job with the White Collar unit without something going wrong. Of course, just thinking this was apparently enough to jinx it, and almost immediately after the thought crossed his mind, things started to go wrong. Badly wrong.
“Hey, boss, I ran this guy’s picture like you told me and it says he’s some guy from back in Star who’s supposed to be dead. Few years ago now, got arrested for, get this, being the Arrow, then got stabbed in prison.”
The room fell silent. The earpiece connecting him to Peter and Diana in the van did the opposite. “What the hell is that guy talking about, Neal? When were you faking your death in Star City, and what’s the Arrow?” Peter demanded.
“Never mind any of that now. Neal, are these guys going to try to kill you for this?” Diana asked.
The men in the room had gotten over their initial shock and confusion. “But the Arrow’s still around, he’s been causing us no end of problems in Star. Kid, why’d you pretend to be the Arrow and get pretend killed? You work for him or something?”
Brain working overtime to figure out how to spin his way out of this (not to mention worrying about how his photo had shown up in a database again after the very thorough scrubbing the Bats’ computer person had done), Roy tried to buy himself some time. “That’s the sort of question with a right answer and a wrong answer, am I right?” he said with what he hoped was a friendly chuckle. Nobody had made any moves towards restraining him since he had gone from an easy mark they were doing business with to very obviously something more, and he wanted to keep it that way.
He decided to attempt to just brush past it and complete the mission, so he could move on to doing damage control with the FBI. “Look that’s a really long time ago and it’s a really long story. I’m just here for the drive, do you have it or not? I’ve got the money right here.”
“Sure kid, you can have the drive. Just as soon as you tell us why you pretended to be the Arrow and then faked your death. The short version will do, we don’t have all night.”
“The short version? Okay, short version, I was trying to impress this girl. She was a big fan of the Arrow, and he was about to get caught and arrested, and so I dressed up as the Arrow and turned myself in to save the real guy.” Huh. Pretty much all true so far, but with editorialising to make him sound much more like a sucker.
“So then how’d you die?” One of the goons at the back asked. He was smacked on the back of the head for interrupting and corrected himself. “Sorry, fake die.”
“Well, people kept trying to kill me in prison, because they thought they were trying to kill the real guy, and eventually one guard actually pretty much managed it and I thought I was a goner, but I woke up and the real Arrow was there, and he told me everyone would think I was dead and I needed to get the hell out of town.”
The group of mobsters had been hanging on to every word. “Wow, kid. All that and you had to let the girl think you were dead?”
Okay, there was his angle. “Yeah, that Arrow guy is a real jerk. That’s why I want the drive!”
“Whaddya mean?”
“My girl, she was a total Arrow conspiracy theorist, had a board and string and everything, and she was sure that Queen Consolidated were funding the Arrow. You know, buying him extra arrows and stuff, I guess. So I figure if QC goes down, the Arrow has to start, like, picking his arrows up again when he shoots them.”
“And that’s really worth all this money to you?” The mobsters were looking around at each other, like they couldn’t believe their luck at finding such a gullible idiot to take money from. Cover as idiot with a lot of money for them firmly back in place, pats on the back all around.
“Sure, yeah. Got this really good job, invested in some lucky stocks and shares, made a mint. That isn’t even all my money, just most of it. And hey, I’m going to bet on QC shares falling pretty soon, you guys should do the same.”
The mobsters looked at each other. They clearly all believed his story, and they couldn’t see any downsides to taking his money, even if he wasn’t quite who he had said he was.
The guy in charge took the drive out of his pocket and put it on the table. “Alright kid, you’ve got yourself a deal. Hope you turn out to be right about that Arrow thing, it would be great for us if his funding got kneecapped.”
Roy grinned, sliding over the briefcase and scooping up Oliver’s drive. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
That was the code phrase for the FBI team standing by that the deal had been made, and the room was suddenly full of authoritative shouting and guns. He was quickly hustled out of there before things could get nasty with the mobsters, and before he knew it, Roy was back in the van with Peter staring at him. Jones and Diana were clearly also part of the strike team and were still inside, so it was just the two of them.
“Neal? You want to tell me what the hell that was in there? We’ve run your photo through every database, and we certainly never came up with anything in Star City. I did some googling – the Arrow is some kind of murderous vigilante? What the hell were you mixed up in?”
There’s a lot Roy can’t tell Peter. He could tell him some story, but he had a feeling that wouldn’t go over too well after they day’s revelations. “Honestly, Peter, a lot of what I said in there was true. You know me – I’d do a lot of stupid things for a girl.”
The fact that those two sentences were unconnected wasn’t something Peter needed to know. He hadn’t impersonated the Arrow for Thea or any other girl – he’d done it because he had believed in Oliver so strongly that he would have done anything to make sure he could keep doing what he did.
Peter wasn’t totally satisfied with that answer, he knew. The guy had a nose like a bloodhound for a copout. But really all Roy wanted to do was hand over Oliver’s stupid drive and get him out of New York so he could go home to Jason and bitch with him about stupid billionaires making their problems everyone else’s problems. And really, pretending to be a vigilante then faking his death in prison was not the craziest thing that Neal Caffrey had ever done, according to Peter’s files. “Peter, if you have anything else you want to ask me about Star City or the Arrow, can it wait? I doubt I can tell you anything about the guy that google can’t” (not technically a lie, as Roy certainly could not tell Peter that he knew the Arrow personally, worked with him, and dated his sister) “and I’m really tired. Here’s the drive, I’m sure the techs can do the rest.”
And that would have been the end of it, if the doors to the van hadn’t swung open and Oliver freaking Queen hadn’t sprung through them. “Roy! I’m so sorry, I know your cover with the FBI and that whole fake conman thing is totally blown now but I already called Felicity, she’s going to scrub this identity and we’ll get you on a plane somewhere else by tonight. We’ll make sure that nobody ever believes these guys that the fake Arrow is still alive.”
Roy closed his eyes, took a deep breath, swivelled around to face Oliver, and opened his eyes while making a real effort to shoot lasers out of them. Pity that was one superpower he’d never had, although given how he coped with temporary super strength that’s probably for the best.
“That’s alright Oliver. I’ll make my own arrangements. Say hi to Felicity for me,” he said, trying to communicate with his clenched teeth and seething rage the extent to which Oliver had just completely upended his life in under ten seconds. Given the way Oliver glanced at Peter, who he had CLEARLY only just realised was also in the van, he seemed to get it. Correctly sensing the danger his face was in from Roy’s fists, he left as quickly as he came.
Roy turned back to Peter. “Okay, I didn’t do it for a girl. Entirely. But I was a young idiot idealist who put a cause a long way above himself and paid the price of losing my life for it, even if it wasn’t a stab wound that took my life from me. This is the last time you’ll see me, Peter, but I want you to know that even though I wasn’t who you thought I was, I’ve really enjoyed working with you, and I wish you nothing but the best.”
Then he walked out of the door, slipping the GPS watch over his wrist as he went, and neatly evading every FBI agent who might notice there was something up with Neal Caffrey walking around unsupervised. He made his way to a rooftop before Peter managed to get over his shock enough to leave the van, and he made one quick call before dismantling his phone.
“Hey babe, Oliver Queen is an idiot who I’m pretty sure put my photo back into a database so these mobsters would find out who I am. Neal Caffrey is well and truly burned. Feel like a holiday?”