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Before the Gambit, there was anger, annoyance, even the occasional self-doubt, but never fear. During and after the island there had been only fear-- the kind that wraps itself around your heart and with every pump of blood, you feel it squeezing you a little hard, dimming your ability to see beyond a narrow spot in front of you. He had been terrified, frozen, emotionally-numb, but scared?
This simple lazy fear that just nipped at the edges, while allowing him to still breathe, to feel how warm sunshine feels on his cheek, to fully lose himself in her taste and touch, this fear was new. During the years of drugs and terrible life choices, the years of fighting to survive, and the years fighting to allow others to survive, Oliver Queen had never simply been scared.
So, when he was holding her, bare shoulders gently rising and falling in the early morning light, he struggled with this feeling. It let him live. In the daylight, when they were talking out their dinner plans or considering the best way to rearrange the loft, he was able to mostly ignore it. In the evening, when her voice was guiding him through narrow alleys and darkened warehouses, he was able to turn it down. It was now, in these early hours, when he could feel her bare chest resting warmly against his own, the echoes of their fevered cries having faded to the soft hum of her dreaming sighs, that this new sensation came to life.
Only around the edges, never too much at once, just a single icy finger touching his heart, reminding him how fragile this, all of this—life, love, joy-- could be. It reminded him of the pain and suffering that had enveloped his life, some coming from the sins of his parents, more from the whims of madmen, but plenty had been his own doing, something he would not allow himself to forget. As the cold edge of this feeling pressed deeper into his heart, he would begin to wonder what terrible choice he would make next that would take this all away, what new horror would be unleashed into their lives, what past wrong would come to punish him ten-fold, who else would be made to pay for his ignorance and stubbornness?
These weren’t new thoughts, new concerns, new fears. No, these had been part of him since the day he chose to try to run from responsibility and expectations, and they only intensified when he decided to try to turn his back on life. It was how he reacted that had changed. He no longer opened his heart and soul to those frozen tendrils of dark what-ifs and tragic unknowns. He refused to spring from the warmth of his bed to enter into the cold, darkness of emotional isolation.
He didn’t fully understand this new fear, and sometimes old habits would begin to resurface, but it was always those moments that he would feel her fingers, calloused for reasons different yet no less skillful than his, walk across his chest, pushing away the intruder. It was then that Diggle’s deep voice, full of annoyance and affection, would boom out in his mind, drowning out the angry voices of the dead; Thea’s loving embrace would hold him steady. When darkness would threaten to overtake him, Felicity’s smile would radiate out, giving no quarter to the lingering shadows. It was in that moment, when his life could alter course, revert back to an easier, enclosed path of expected death and certain loneliness, that he decided he would not let himself be consumed.
He was learning how to be scared yet continue living and embracing. It was in these moments that Oliver Queen realized he was content.