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Every so often I stop and think about what I'm doing. With my nights. With my life. There's a part of me that recognizes that my 'normal' would be almost anyone else's crazy. 'Complicated on a curve' doesn't really cover it anymore.
It isn't just that I'm breaking the law with what I do. I knew when I started that the cops would be against me, and not just because of the body count I left in my wake. My crusade put me directly in opposition to people like Quentin Lance, for whom upholding the law was as much a religion as a job. He sees more grays now than he did as a Detective, so he's currently less likely to shoot me on sight, but the rest of the force is not so restrained and one bullet is very like another when it hits.
There are now way more people who know my secret than I'm ever going to be comfortable with. And the potential for any one of them to say the wrong thing to the wrong people gets exponentially larger with each new person in the pool. The thing is that it's not me personally that I'm afraid for in this. What worries me most is the way it leaves my loved ones and my friends vulnerable to threats I'm not aware of, threats I can't then block.
So normal now means knowing that I could die any night. I'm not looking for death, but I know it could be looking for me. I'm working to oppose people for whom killing is either the first or second answer to a problem, and I'm doing my best to be the biggest problem they have so I can stop them before they hurt someone less able to defend themselves.
Normal now means living with the lies my mother has told, because knowing Malcolm is her father could destroy Thea. It now means accepting that my mother is every bit the monster Malcolm is, because she knew he was still alive and she did nothing to warn anyone. I very much doubt that he's going to be satisfied with simply having survived the arrow I put through him when he has to know I'll kill him before I'd let him hurt Thea.
I spend my days trying to drag my family's company back from the brink of disaster with what's essentially a high school education. It was my own fault and if it weren't for Diggle and Felicity grounding me, I'd have drowned a long time ago. The financials are still more opaque than not, but I no longer feel a migraine coming on every time I open one.
The press still touts my playboy/bad boy image, which makes hiding my true self a little easier. It was much harder to deal with them when I first came back. The way they would push right up and shout questions in my face made it really hard not to physically force them to back off.
I grew up being a celebrity because my father was a billionaire and people with money seem to be more interesting than people without it. Especially when all you're looking for are flaws. I certainly gave them a lot to look at back in the day and while it helps now it still puts my teeth on edge.
Most of the press see me as a story rather than a person. I never liked it, even before. I'm a little more self-aware now and I have so much more to hide, so I've been practicing my stone face. Felicity warns me that it's rather close to my Arrow face, so I may have to rethink that. Not that I don't want to shoot most of them most of the time, it's that I need to remember what else I'm wearing when I let him out.
Both Digg and Felicity have called me on the times I've referred to myself in the 3rd person, but it's really just shorthand, a way of tracking which of my personas I'm talking about. So far, there's Ollie, the idiot who got himself shipwrecked, the one everyone still expects the playboy me to be. Then there's Oliver Queen, CEO who's supposed to be keeping the company afloat just well enough that Isobel doesn't decide it's worth more in pieces; he's the more adult version of Ollie but not that much brighter. Then there's the Arrow, who's sort of the Hood except he doesn't kill first and ask questions later anymore.
There's also Oliver the son, who can't be seen wanting to Arrow his mother and Oliver the brother, who can't be the support he'd like to be because of all the other directions he's pulled in that he can't show. And then there's me. The one who's all of these people and yet, actually, none of them. Really, talking about myself in the third person should be the least of their worries.
Except of course, because of me they have multiple personas they have to keep track of, too. Eventually Felicity will forgive me making her my Executive Assistant, but I'm not holding my breath on it. Diggle jokes that he's 'just' my black driver, but I owe him my life more times than I can count. It's ridiculous that they should have to wear those tiny labels when what they do is truthfully so much bigger. God knows, I need to remember to say thank you more often.
When Digg and Felicity dragged me back from Lian Yu, I wasn't sure I could still do this. Still be a vigilante. It wasn't simply the people I'd killed, though they're a drag on my soul if I let myself drift towards depression. It was that I'd failed the city in spite of their deaths. I hadn't been quick enough or sharp enough or just ... enough period, to stop Malcolm before he destroyed the Glades. Before he killed Tommy.
But the Arrow isn't the Hood. I'd probably have fewer scars if I ... he was as ready to kill as before, but at this stage what's a few more? It's more likely the broken bones and messed up joints that will do me in. Assuming I don't do something catastrophically stupid in the interim, I can only expect my body to be up to the challenge for another 5 to 7 years. Parkour at 35 is going to take a special dispensation.
I don't think the Hood would have been able to survive 2 years at the rate he was, I was, going. Rage was his only fuel. Rage and self-loathing. The list and then the Undertaking, Malcolm and then my mother. Looking back, it's a wonder I didn't simply implode after Tommy's death.
Digg said once that he didn't think I'd ever really left the island. I think perhaps that was why it seemed like going back was some kind of solution. Now, I think that this time I really did leave it, that coming back this time was sort of hitting the reset. Until I realized that my dad had wanted me to stop the Undertaking, as the Hood I couldn't see past the end of the list, couldn't see a future where I could put Shado's hood aside and move forward.
It's a measure of how crazy I was at the beginning that I thought I could handle the whole crusade by myself. And keep the whole thing secret. I was still working on simply surviving the next thing put in front of me, and the one after that. It took weeks of sleeping in an actual bed in a room in a house, surrounded by people who weren't actively trying to kill me, to get to the point where I could look around rather than just straight ahead.
I've been very lucky with mentors. Even Fyers taught that there were things my family's money couldn't buy me out of. Slade had been good to me and for me before the mirakuru and losing Shado destroyed him. Digg has helped me keep my head screwed on by pushing me to think things through, check my assumptions. I would never have survived mentally without his support.
Felicity is ... Felicity. I will freely admit within the confines of my own skull that I didn't think through the way her promotion would look to the rest of the company, the rest of the world. It's insulting to her that they'd assume she'd slept her way into the position. My need to be able to see her, talk to her, to know that I'll know if she's in trouble still keeps me from letting her go back down to I.T.
Originally, I think she tolerated me because I amused her. When you start off telling MIT/top of her class that the laptop in question died of a latte not the bullet holes, you're going to get one of two reactions. One: humor the crazy man whose name is on the building or, two: a puzzle? Fortunately for me, she likes puzzles. She bulled her way through everything I brought her, in spite of my inability to create a believable story about why I was bringing it to her.
The number of times I've nearly gotten her killed makes my heart stutter. I know that if I go back and look at where I started to think there was a life beyond the Arrow, it's because I can see her at the center of it. People talk about the light at the end of the tunnel. Without her light I wouldn't have known it was a tunnel and not the grave it felt like.
The fact that she told me the truth about my mother is the one bright spot in all of this. She trusts me to stay and face this demon, even after I abandoned her and and the city when I failed to stop Merlyn or save Tommy. I've been shot, stabbed, beaten, burned; pain and I are old enemies. With her light, I'll survive this, too.