A/N: I am terribly sorry for the long delay. I have been really struggling to find the motivation to write lately, and I'm hoping to change that in the coming few months. Please come yell at me for more updates if I take too much time.

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"Take your eyes off of me so I can leave

I'm far too ashamed to do it with you watching me

This is never ending, we have been here before

But I can't stay this time 'cause I don't love you anymore"

ADELE - 'Love in the Dark'

.                            .                        . 

"You have to go see her, man."

The thing was, right, that Oliver kind of...didn't want to.

Diggle, standing on the other side of the table with a long-suffering expression, just sighed at the lack of response, reaching up to rub a hand over his face. "You can't avoid her forever. She got discharged from the hospital this morning - Oliver, man, she's living with you. You're gonna run into her eventually."

"I've got a job to do," Oliver muttered in response, peering over Felicity's shoulder and running his eyes over the chunks of text she'd pulled up on her computer screens. "Mathis is still at large. If we don't catch him, the bodies are just going to keep piling up."

"See, I would believe that if I didn't know you so well."

"You think I don't want to catch this guy?"

"I think that you're using him as an excuse not to check up on Cali." To his credit, Diggle didn't wince away when Oliver turned to glare at him angrily. He met Oliver's eyes evenly, chin sticking out with that steely kind of stubbornness he'd gotten from the army. "I'm just saying I think you're scared of what being around her will mean now that she's got her feelings-radar back up and running."

Oliver wanted to tell him he was wrong, wanted to get defensive and snappish and shut the conversation down like he used to do when they barely knew each other. He could taste the poisonous barbs sitting prettily just behind his teeth, ready to launch themselves at all of John's soft spots and tear him to shreds just to shut down the conversation that Oliver wasn't ready to have.

But Diggle didn't deserve that, so Oliver could only clench his jaw and look away.

Because Diggle, as usual, was completely right. It was infuriating. He could see right through Oliver, down to that writhing mass of fear that lived in the hollows of his abdomen. The mortifying fear of being known. Of someone seeing him, just as he was. Not as the Hood, or as a Queen, or as a son, or as a lover.

Someone seeing him just as a person. As a soul. As a weak, shivering child curled up in the blistering suit of armour that he called his body.

As Oliver.

Cali's abilities returning... Oh yes. Oliver was afraid of it, of what it meant, of her.

Diggle raised an eyebrow smugly as Oliver's silence stretched on, clearly no retort coming. "Go home. Talk to her."

But what would Oliver supposed to say?

Was he supposed to say that he was sorry for abandoning her for months? For letting her walk away from him, straight into Michael's arms? For not opening his glued-together heart to her when she needed him to? For letting her get captured by a bloodthirsty psychopath and somehow feeling relieved that it was her and not Thea that he had to coax to the hospital afterwards?

Was he supposed to be angry at her for turning herself into something so cruel and mean and distant? Angry at her for holding him here in this hollow, vicious city? Angry at her for having Tommy's crooked smile and Malcolm's nose and Rebecca's eyes? Angry at her because she represented every part of him that Slade Wilson would want him to kill?

It didn't matter, she would smell it all on him. Would coax it out from under his skin and drag it across her tongue, tasting the lies and the betrayal and the confusion and the pain.

She would take it from him and devour it, and he would be left empty and listless - the very same kid that he'd been when he'd washed up on Lian Yu. The very same kid that had been moulded into a weapon by everyone he was supposed to trust.

"We finish this first," he finally said to Diggle, whose shoulders straighten at the gritty command. Oliver didn't have it in him to feel satisfied at the compliance. Instead, he turned back to their girl genius and her computers. "Felicity, does the new victim give us any forensics that we can use?"

"CSI did a complete forensics work-up," Diggle answered for her, clearly surrendering the fight and shifting his focus to match Oliver's. "But they sent everything out to a private lab."

Of course they did. Oliver inhaled sharply, leaning down and murmuring to Felicity, "Can you get in?"

His frustration is mirrored in her answer. "No. They took their system offline." She sighed, tone melting into something a little more sheepish. "It seems like someone hacked into a lot of police-related systems last year."

If he were in a better mood, Oliver might have stopped to appreciate the irony in that. Instead, he pushed off Felicity's desk and strode over to his weapons cabinet. "Then we do it like we did the Merlyn job," he ordered, and his teammates were kind enough not to mention the way his voice wavered just slightly as he tripped over the name.

What happened between him and Malcolm Merlyn had been so much more than a job.

But to talk about it any other way would invite pity and sad looks from his companions, so Oliver swallowed it all down and picked up his bow again.

It was time to go hunting.

.                            .                        . 

"Oliver, come sit with me for a moment."

His dad sounded kind, but firm, like he tended to be when it was time for Serious Conversations. They didn't have many, because Oliver was very young and hadn't yet discovered the dangerous world of drugs and parties that would soon be at his fingertips. So he skipped over to his father's side, and settled in beside him on the couch, looking up expectantly.

Robert smiled down at him, but his eyes were droopy and sad as he said, "Son, I need to ask you some questions about Tommy and Cali. And I need you to keep this conversation a secret from them, okay?"

Little Oliver frowned. Tommy and Cali? Were they in trouble? "You said secrets are bad," he argued, scrunching his nose.

Robert huffed, reaching over to ruffle Oliver's wild hair. "Not all of them, kiddo. Not when it's about making sure people are safe. Do you understand?"

Oliver considered this for a moment. He didn't quite understand how keeping secrets from someone would protect them, but his dad was very rarely wrong about things and Oliver trusted him, so he nodded. "Okay."

"Okay," Robert echoed, relieved. "Alright, kiddo. Your mom and I are worried that Cali and Tommy are...unhappy, at home. We know that sometimes they have bruises - marks - on their skin, and that sometimes their dad isn't very nice to them. And when Cali stays here, she has nightmares, doesn't she?"

"Their daddy doesn't love them," Oliver confessed, a little sadly. It wasn't fair that parents didn't love their children - especially true when it came to his best friends. It was almost impossible not to love them. Oliver didn't know how anybody could turn them away when Cali and Tommy were some of the best people he knew. "Tommy says so. He yells at them, and he left them alone when their mom died. He's mean to Tommy, and he doesn't let Cali cry, and sometimes he forgets about them and Mister Lyle has to make sure they eat dinner and go to school."

A troubled look drifted across Robert's face. "I'm sure Malcolm adores his children. He always used to talk about them-"

"Nuh-uh!" Oliver protested. "He doesn't! He makes Tommy sad all the time, and Cali is scared of him. Tommy says that his dad is never nice to them anymore. He says that when his mom died, so did his dad's love for them. And-And Mister Merlyn hits them if they do something wrong, I've seen it. He hurt Tommy's finger last week. And Tommy says he breaks things if they talk about their mom when he's around."

"Alright, son." Robert drew Oliver close, and the young boy nestled in against his father's side, content.

He didn't understand why his dad was asking all of these questions, didn't understand why it had to be a secret. Tommy didn't keep it a secret! Was it because Oliver's dad didn't want to get Tommy's dad in trouble? Wouldn't getting Mister Merlyn in trouble make him be nicer to his children?

"Are Tommy and Cali gonna stay here now?" He asked naively, peering up at his father, who was now staring pensively at the wall in front of him. "So that their dad doesn't yell at them anymore?"

Robert hummed low in his throat, and tightened his hold on his son almost absent-mindedly. "I don't know if we can, kiddo. Mister Merlyn is a very powerful man and we don't want to cause trouble for his family. We'll just watch, okay? And you come tell me or your mom if it gets worse, okay?"

"Okay," Oliver agreed, a little hesitantly.

Because to a child, it didn't matter who had what amount of power. His parents knew that Tommy and Cali were sad and hurting, and they weren't going to do anything about it! It wasn't fair, not in the slightest.

So Oliver vowed to himself, sitting on that couch with his dad, that he would do everything in his power to take the hurt away from his friend himself, so that they would remember what it felt like to be loved.

.                            .                        . 

"I'm just saying that it doesn't make sense."

Oliver sighed from under his hood as Lance repeated the same phrase he'd mumbled the whole trip to the lab. It hadn't been difficult to convince the man to come with him - not when Lance was hellbent on catching Mathis and Oliver held some of the answers - but clearly he wasn't ready to accept the losses they'd already endured.

"He did it to torment you," Oliver responded, feeling like a broken record. "To show you that he can hurt you. Or the people close to you. He made you choose to try and unsteady you, to increase his chances of getting away with it.

"But Mathis doesn't leave people alive," Lance argued. Oliver fought the urge to audibly groan. "Surely he would've known that I would be much more hurt by Cali's death than her survival?"

"He's a psychopath!" Oliver growled, unable to stop the glare he sent Lance's way, even if it was hidden under his hood. "I think you're giving him a little too much credit."

"I don't think you're giving him enough."

"He let Cali go."

"But why? It doesn't make sense-"

"Gentlemen!" Felicity interrupted irritably over the headsets they both shared, the channel open between the three of them. "If you'll please pay attention - you're coming up on the records room. There's one security guard in front of you; I recommend taking him out so that he doesn't double back and find you."

"Now hang on-" Lance started, right as Oliver stepped into the shadows of the wall next to him and loaded a tranquiliser dart into the little spring-loaded compartment in his wrist. It took five seconds for the guard to round the corner, and before he could move on, Oliver released.

He did not miss.

The guard dropped against the wall and slid gracelessly to the floor, clutching at his neck. He was out instantly - they'd bought themselves time, but not all that much of it.

"So glad you invited me to tag along," Lance muttered to him as the two of them stepped over the prone body on the floor, slipping into the records room.

Oliver stalked over to the mainframe, uncaring if Lance followed him or not. "Tranq dart," he said over his shoulder, pulling out the little USB that would grant Felicity access to . "He'll be out for thirty-six minutes."

Lance shut the door with a soft but audible click. "Yeah," he said bitterly. "I remember."

Oliver ignored him, hooking up to the system and addressing his IT companion. "You're up, Felicity."

"So, this is what a typical night's like for you," Lance continued, either unnoticing or uncaring how little Oliver was appreciating his running commentary and conversation attempts. "Just a little breaking and entering?"

It sounded like he was planning to continue the judgement tour, but Felicity spoke up first, her voice a welcome balm to Oliver's ears. "Alright. I got toxicology first." Various screens appeared and disappeared in rapid succession on the screen around them.

"What are all these?" Lance asked, wandering forward, closer to one of the screens.

"Chemical ingredients of all the makeup found on the victims," Felicity answered promptly. "Skin cream, nail polish, lipstick."

Oliver let the information flash by, desperately hoping that something would stand out to him, something helpful that would give him that last puzzle piece so he could put Mathis away for good. It was kind of jarring, then, to hear Lance speak up instead.

"Wait, wait, wait," Lance said sharply. "Stop. Scroll back. Scroll back!" Felicity hastened to obey, the sound of her nails hitting her keyboard filling up the silence until Lance evidently found what he was looking for. "This one. Ethylparaben. Sodium laureth sulphate. I've seen this before."

Felicity's typing picked up, her voice drifting back over the headsets. "It's skin cream. Forensics found traces of it on her fingers. Probably something she used before he grabbed her."

"Skin cream," Lance repeated thoughtfully, the slightest edge of an idea waking up in his voice. "Uh, mermaid something. One of the victims from his last run - she had something like this in her purse and I had the lab analyse it. It's the same-you know, it's the same formula."

Well.

Oliver was never going to hear the end of Felicity's 'I told you so's.

In his defence, he didn't think that Lance would remember the chemical makeup of skin cream.

"Felicity," he rumbled lowly.

"Already on it," she responded, and mercifully spared him her usual tone of superiority.

Within moments, a picture had filtered through of a branded skin cream, the word Mermaiden plastered front and centre. "How the hell could she do that?" Lance wondered out loud, sounding suitably impressed and dubious.

Pride, warm and supple, oozed through Oliver's ribcage, and he couldn't help the way his mouth curled up at the corners. It was a suitably smug expression, directed at the disembodied voice buzzing pleasantly in his ears. "Ethylparaben and sodium laureth sulphate is Mermaiden's proprietary formula," Felicity read out dutifully.

"Two victims with the same taste in skin cream," Oliver said, partly to himself. "That can't be a coincidence."

He felt more than saw Lance's eyes land on the back of his head. "I could never figure out how he chose his victims."

"I think you just did."

And then he was grabbing Felicity's USB from the mainframe and stashing it in one of his pockets, throwing his bow into his other hand as he motioned for Lance to follow him back out the door. The guard was still unconscious at their feet, the hallways clear of any nosy presences.

It was as easy to sneak out as it was to sneak it, Oliver easily leading Lance down the many winding hallways until they slipped out the back door and escaped into the fresh air. The alarm would be raised soon, when the guard woke up, but there would never be any evidence of their presence there.

To his eternal credit, Lance didn't say a word until they made it back to his cruiser, parked a suitable distance from the lab.

"I really have to say thank you," Lance said out loud, appropriately disgruntled. "Which is not something I say lightly. You didn't have to help me find Mathis, especially now that I'm little more than a disgraced officer, but you've stuck by me and you're helping me find clues I would've missed. So... thank you, I suppose."

The boy Oliver used to be - the boy that Laurel had loved once - would've given anything to hear that kind of gratitude. To reach that level of acceptance and endorsement from Quinten.

It was a hollow thing, now. Something that he pressed down into a conveniently sized cube and stored away with everything that had the power to unravel his carefully built charade.

"Keep yourself safe," he said back to Lance. "Don't give Mathis the chance to take anybody else from you."

Lance glanced down at his hands, maybe looking for signs of the blood covering them. Oliver made sure that when he looked back up, the Hood was gone and Lance was standing there alone.

.                            .                        . 

'If you step foot back in Verdant, I'll get Felicity to lock you out of the basement.'

The text from Diggle had come in as soon as Oliver had left Lance by his car, and while all instincts screamed to ignore the warning and pursue the fresh lead, Oliver didn't doubt that his friend would be more than happy to follow through on the threat to lock him out. Felicity definitely had the technical know how.

The fact remained, though, that he was still in his suit and had nowhere to stash it.

'I've gotta get changed,' he texted back. 'I promise I won't stay long.'

'Bullshit. I'll meet you out the back. You can change, get in the car, and I'll drive you home. Then I'll bring the suit back with me to Verdant while you talk to Cali.'

Ahh, Diggle. A soldier through and through; trained for every situation. It was endearingly frustrating. A good trait to have, but a terrible rub on Oliver's nerves. He liked having control, liked knowing what he could avoid and what he could charge headfirst into. Being pushed into uncomfortable confrontations that ultimately only further his personal life and not his goals as the vigilante chafed against both his pride and his survival instincts.

Slade had always warned him about forming attachments. It was ultimately too bad that Oliver had already formed an attachment to him.

But arguing with Diggle was like arguing with the wall, so Oliver bit down his frustrations and his simmering protests and found a dark corner to swap into a grey Henley and dark jeans, tucking his suit and bow behind his back, out o sight, and holding them there until a sleek black car pulled up in front of him.

The driver's window wound down. Diggle grinned at him. "You need a ride, sir?"

Oliver bit back a retort, and just slid into the back seat, settling his bow across his lap and his suit beside him. "I could have just gone downstairs and put everything away," he said crossly, trying not to seem like he was pouting and failing rather epically. "You know I don't like people touching my stuff."

"If I really believed you would walk back out the door again to go see Cali of your own accord, I would have let you in, no problem." Diggle held his gaze in the rear view mirror. "The truth is, Oliver, you run from things that make you uncomfortable. You shut down. You make it almost impossible for people to understand the real you, buried under hundreds of protective layers, and then when someone gets in, you ultimately end up pushing them away."

"Yeah, well." Oliver broke the connection, choosing instead to watch the world blur by out the window. "People get close to me and they get hurt. They die. I'm a little bit tired of it."

Diggle went quiet for a long time after that.

It was until they were turning into the long driveway to the mansion that he spoke again, tone surprisingly gentle. "People don't die because they care about you, Oliver. Sometimes, caring about you is what pushes them to stay alive."

.                            .                        . 

He visited Slade's mask almost every day.

He didn't know why, not exactly. Maybe it was because Slade was the one who taught him about death. About having things taken away from you. About what holding on too tightly could result in. Maybe because Oliver had just killed half of his city, and Slade had been one of the only people who had known that darkness in him and still found him worthy of saving.

Some days, Oliver missed him so much it left him breathless.

On this day, he sat cross legged on the pebble beach and looked out across the calm waters, Slade's helmet sitting just to the right of him. It was a peaceful day - the slight covering of clouds taking the sharp edge of the sun's rays away but not diminishing it completely, and the breeze cool but not frigid. The stones were warm underneath him. The wondrous sound of nature filled in what would have been a terrible kind of silence.

"There is so much that I have to thank you for," Oliver said to the mask conversationally. "I know that I resented you for so many of the things you did, the things you said. I know that I ruined our friendship by pursuing Shado. I know that I killed you instead of saving you. I know that I let you turn me into everything you feared I would become."

The mask, as expected, said nothing.

"But you taught me a lot of things. You taught me how to survive. How to switch off the part of me that bleeds with every arrow. How to survive losing, again and again and again. How to live with the grief of being so utterly alone. Because you were alone for so long until I came along. The first person you trusted on this island. The person who would ultimately kill you."

A bird trilled happily behind him. Oliver closed his eyes. The words kept pouring out.

"I wish you were here, Slade. I wish you could see the mess I've made of things. I wish you could meet Cali. I wish you could pull us both out of the abyss we've fallen into. You'd know what to say to her, how to pull her back from the edge I've pushed her over. You'd know what to say to me, too. You'd make me spar until my arms dropped, of course, but you always had this way of making things a bit lighter. I wish you could've seen everything I was building towards. I like to think you might've been proud of me."

Somewhere, out in the distance, the crash of a wave sounded a little bit like Slade's laugh.

"There are a lot of ghosts on this island." Oliver swallowed thickly and peeled his eyes open again, peering out at his refuge. "I am so sorry that I made you one of them."

And then he sat, silent and lonely, and wished so desperately that he'd chosen the other path, all those years ago.

He was just so tired of his friends dying because of him.

.                            .                        . 

She woke up slowly, in a bed that wasn't hers, dangerously aware of the presence of someone clattering around in the adjoined bathroom.

It wasn't just the sounds that gave him away, as much as she wished it were so. No, instead, Oliver was loud in her body: honeysuckle vines of exhaustion wrapped around her shoulders and crept up the back of her neck and the softest tickle of regret lingered in the back of her sinuses, like the beginnings of a particularly annoying cold. His frustrations and anger were a static buzz in her ears, his fondness and affection for her a blistering brushstroke of fire directly up her spine.

But underneath all of that, if she strained to mute all of his surface level feelings, he left the phantom impression of lips on hers and a hand on her waist. His love for her was held in his muscles, in that weapon of a body that only ever softened for her.

"I didn't expect to find you in my bed instead of your own," Oliver murmured quietly, drawn to the doorway of the bathroom. His hair was just slightly damp, like he'd wet his hands and run them over the short strands. His face, also damp, was tired but cautious, and he watched her like an eagle. Straining for the slightest hint that he should start running.

But Cali was too tired to chase him away. Was too tired to bat at the tumbling raucous of emotion battering her chest as she reached for him with those tendrils of sensation, tasting every spiritual part of him to find out which foot she should put forward first. She sat up gingerly. "It smells like you. My bed was too...unwelcoming. I always sleep better here."

As flash of his tongue as he whetted his dry lips, sharp attention taking in the way she clutched the blanket to herself, raked a hand through her unkempt hair. "You can feel me," he guessed.

"You haven't found Mathis yet," she rebuked, but not unkindly.

Oliver's eyes shuttered, and his jaw feathered as he stared her down. His shame was lemon-sour dripping from her gums. "No. I'm sorry."

"Sorry that you didn't catch him?"

"Sorry that after all this time, you still aren't safe."

"I'm never going to be safe, Ollie." She tried for a smile, unsurprised when all it achieved was making him tense further. An ice cube got lodged somewhere between her third and fourth rib as his self-imposed failure spread crooked fingers throughout her torso. "You can't fight every battle for me. Especially when you're the enemy."

In an entirely subconscious move, Oliver drew his sleeves down over his hands, curling his fists into the soft sleeves. It was a habit he used to have before Lian Yu. It was something she hadn't seen in many, many years. "I don't want to be your enemy," he said miserably. "It's my job to protect you."

Such a burden he forced upon himself. How she wanted to take it from him. "It's your job to protect the city, Oliver," she told him, soft. "Whatever that entails. You've established plenty of times that it's impossible for you to put me first. I understand that. I respect it."

"It's not something that you should have to understand and respect."

"I'm not angry."

Somehow, she'd made it the truth.

Because she had been angry. For a long time, she'd been angry with him. Sure, it had been hidden under the layers of grief and sadness and loss. Under the desperation to take herself somewhere far beyond this plane of existence, where she could rejoin her family.

But the truth of the matter was that she'd been angry. Angry that Oliver couldn't stop the earthquake. That he couldn't save her brother. That he left her alone to bury her dead. That he wasn't here to protect her when she went into hiding. That he wasn't here to stop her going back to Michael. That he came back, but not for her, and then used her almost immediately upon his return. That he waited until she'd ruined herself and was hiding behind a glass wall of no emotion to show her that gentle, caring side of himself.

Angry that he'd left her alone in the hospital after that wall had shattered, and she'd been forced to go through it alone.

But that anger had burned out, during those long hours where she'd grovelled at Thea's feet, desperate for forgiveness. That anger had burned out with each text to Felicity that went unanswered.

Because Oliver hadn't made a mess of her life. That was entirely Cali's fault.

"My duty to the city..." Oliver paused, took a breath, considered her with an unusual amount of tenderness. "My duty to Starling City is logical. It was a conscious decision I made in my head, a choice. But Cali, my duty to my family, to you....that comes from my heart. It's what I'm made for."

She wouldn't have thought him capable of this kind of emotional depth before the quake. For all the parts of him he'd shut away after losing Tommy, there were now parts of him open to her that had never been open before. Parts of him that she could cup and hold in her hands, parts of him that fit so perfectly with the parts of her that it almost hurt to push that clinging desire away.

But for all the good that he was giving her now, there was still something lost between them. "You don't love me anymore," she said - realised - with a lurch of her stomach. "Not like you used to, at least. That part of you...it died with Tommy, didn't it?"

There was a memory of his, lingering just below the surface of his skin. She could almost watch it play out like a movie - Oliver, peeling off parts of himself on that island and giving them a name and a face, only to hide them away inside himself, ready to be worn whenever he needed them. Slamming a rock into an intruder's face just for touching what was his. Not love. Not in the way that mattered. But survival. Desperation not to be alone.

"I want to love you," Oliver said, sounding like he was being torn apart inside. He was. She could feel the razor blades slicing up his organs as they broke each other's hearts. "Cali, I really do. But I can't. Not right now. Not when part of me is still on that island."

"Part of you will always be on that island."

"There is too much of me there at the moment." Everything about him was just begging her to understand what he was saying, what he was sacrificing to carve this awful, awful truth and hand it to her. "I have too many ghosts. Too many names. You don't deserve the things that haunt me. Let me spare you that, when I couldn't spare you any other pain."

How could she make him understand that she didn't need all of him? That she knew she would be sharing this man with Death, with the city, with Felicity and John and Thea and Moira and every enemy they fought. That she only wanted the parts of him that could be hers. She wanted to live inside him, wanted to drape his soul over her like a blanket and just be.

She didn't need his devotion, not like he needed to give it to her.

But they'd hurt each other a lot, these past few weeks. It would take them a long time to untangle that knot of hurt and blame and guilt.

"I should've come to see you sooner," he admitted, barely above a whisper, his head hanging low. "Before you got out of the hospital. It wasn't fair of me to abandon you just to spare myself the guilt of what I let happen."

"Me getting kidnapped was not on you," she said with half a smile. "I was being a horrid, spiteful little bitch to everybody because I didn't want to face the consequences of my actions. I dragged Thea out that day with no chaperone, and I drove her away at the end of it all. There is literally nobody to blame by me for everything that happened. I just have to be grateful to Quinten for picking right and letting me live."

Finally, finally, Oliver met her eyes. "Has he been to see you?"

She shrugged, picking at the blanket dropped across her. "Once, when I was still getting checked out in hospital. Laurel was with him. He just sat and watched my vitals for a while, and then left. Laurel says that he's working through it. Once Mathis is apprehended or dead we'll talk properly."

"You're worried that the relationship between you is irreparably damaged?"

"He'd only just found out about Michael, and now Mathis... I'd be surprised if he could stand to be in the same room as me for a few months."

Oliver considered her for a moment, some of the stress held in his body draining away at whatever he found on her face. "You two will work it out. You wanna know how I know?"

"Because you know everything?" She teased.

He risked the few steps forward, drawing up close to the bed, and reaching down to press a kiss to the top of her head. "Because you own a little piece of all of us, and it's beyond impossible to ever ask for it back."

She clutched at him when he drew away, seized by the sudden need to have him near her, to have his body heat sink into her suddenly-too-cold skin. "Please," she begged. "Stay with me. Sleep here. You can give yourself back to the city later. Let me have you for now."

He tilted his head as he looked down at her. All her senses went kind of muffled as he carefully drew all of his emotions back into himself and locked them away. "It won't fix the things that have gone wrong between us."

"I don't need it to. I just need you to stay."

The briefest flash of desire - to run, to get away, to shatter her heart right now just so that he wouldn't accidentally do it later - before his resolved crumbled and he succumbed to her wishes, shucking his jeans off until he was just in his shirt and boxers, and then crawling over her to settle beside her on the bed.

"Just for a little while," he breathed, tugging her down to lay against him. "Just for now."

"Until Starling City takes you away," she agreed, pressing her head under his chin until she was cradled against his chest under the covers. "I know, Ollie."

And once upon a time, this situation might have heated her bones, might have planted flowers along her vertebrae and kissed every freckle painted on her skin and eased that lingering feeling that at any moment, everything was going to be ripped away from her. Normally, she would lay here with Oliver, and she would only feel loved and whole and happy.

But on this day, there was just the lingering smell of sadness, the taste of missed opportunities, and the crippling understanding that everything they had between them was dying, and neither of them knew quite how to fix it.

Cali closed her eyes, breathed in the smell of leather and varnish and Oliver, and tipped them both over the edge into sleep with the slightest brush of a finger.