AUTHORS NOTE: Mature Content Warning

.              .             .

"You're everything I want, but I can't deal with all your lovers
You're saying I'm the one, but it's your actions that speak louder
Giving me love when you are down and need another"
THE WALTERS - 'I Love You So'

. . .

Defending against the attacker in his house had been easy. So, so easy with Sara by his side. Easier again without Moira or Thea being home to get in the way or ask difficult questions. The fact that the intruder had gotten away was less easy, as was the fact that he'd dressed exactly like Malcolm had the night Oliver had lost Tommy. The familiarity had frayed him somehow, left him wild eyed and panting as Sara skirted around him with a peculiar look on her strong features. She hadn't asked, and he hadn't offered, and it just reminded him how much harder it was to connect with her now.

She slept in his house, just a few rooms down from Cali, and she haunted the hallways like a particularly vicious ghost. She watched him with blank eyes whenever he wandered into her field of sight, and the feeling of that attention lingered long after he fled from her presence. She was always armed, always on guard, and sometimes she touched his shoulder to get his attention and his instinct was to break her wrist.

None of this is to say that he didn't understand. He knew what that island had done to both of them. He knew what the time after the island had turned him into. He could only imagine what she'd been through those years that he'd thought her dead.

But he wasn't the right fit for her anymore. Or she wasn't right for him. She was too jagged, too guarded, too hard edged. Being around her felt like being in battle; head back, chin raised, jaw set. Anticipate the attack. Negate the need to defend. Maybe once, before he'd come back to Starling City and the people here had softened him, she might've worked out. He might've felt safe around her.

He had come home to Tommy and to Cali, and they had reached into that dark and ugly space inside him and started to make themselves a home.

"We just had an uninvited guest in the Queen Mansion," he told Felicity and Diggle as he leaned back in Felicity's desk chair, once the awkward greetings were out of the way and Felicity had stopped babbling. Diggle subtly shifted his weight, rolling tension forward into the muscles of his arms. Oliver bit back the warrior's satisfaction at the action. "Trained. Highly skilled. And he was dressed like Merlyn."

Diggle's eyes gleamed. "Well, the last I checked, Malcolm Merlyn was dead, courtesy of an arrow jammed through his heart."

"It wasn't him," Oliver said. "It was a follower, an underling bent on revenge. Whoever it was-" he reached for the small collection of dirt he'd swept up from the foyer and handed it to Felicity as he hauled himself out of the chair, "-know who I am."

"Gee," muttered Felicity as she accepted it. "I didn't get you a bag of dirt."

Oliver's lips twitched in amusement as he escorted her over to her work station. "I found it in the house. Copycat Merlyn tracked it in. I want you to analyse it. Hopefully it'll lead me right to him."

"Then what?" She asked.

Oliver elevated his attention to Diggle, who was already observing him with cool scrutiny, "If this pretender wants to follow Malcolm Merlyn so badly, he can follow him right into a grave." He lingered just long enough to catch the sleek satisfaction that threaded across Diggle's face, before he threw over his shoulder, "Sara? We'll find this guy." Reassurance was not his strongest suit, but he'd had some practice with Thea, Cali, and Laurel alike.

Sara kept her back turned for a long moment, saying nothing. Oliver took a second to take in her posture - her hunched shoulder, arms folded tightly across her chest, feet shoulder width apart. He knew what she would say before she turned to say it.

"I don't want you to," she said quietly.

"What do you mean?"

Uncomfortably on the defensive now, Sara pivoted to face them. "He wasn't after you, Ollie." A split second pause where she sucked in a shaky breath. "He's after me."

"Who is he?"

She was bringing trouble to his doorstep, just in time for his life to fall apart. She had to have known about this since she'd shown up, had to have realised the inevitability of whoever she was running from catching up. And he had loved her, once, but he had other people to protect now. Other people who needed him, who couldn't weather the storms that Sara could.

She sighed, peeking over his shoulder at Diggle and Felicity before relenting. "He's called Al-Owal. 'The First'. And he's a member of the League of Assassins."

She might as well have stabbed him.

He'd known, maybe, somewhere in the back of his mind. He'd always known, and he'd just let himself forget, had let it fade into the background while he covered it with stupid things like love, and family, and pretending.

He should have figured that Sara would end up there, that she would be the one leading them straight back here. Diggle was talking, Sara answering, and then they were looking at him too as he walked away, but cotton was in his ears and his heart was in his throat and he just wanted everything to stop. He wanted Cali, or Tommy, or the fucking island again. Anything to get out of here, to get away from Sara and the past he had accidentally orchestrated for her.

"That's where you've been the past four years." It was flat. Accusing. Accepting. He didn't even know he'd said it until Sara winced. "That's where you learned to fight." The tiniest dip of her chin. And he couldn't stop the hurt spilling out into his voice when he managed, "You're one of them."

Sara didn't respond in kind. "After the freighter," she offered as an explanation, emotions vacant from her tone, "a member of the League rescued me. Took me in and brought me to Nanda Parbat. They remade me into what I am. And I swore them my allegiance."

He should understand - he did understand - what it was to be remade. To be broken down into little pieces and then built back up in the image of somebody else. He knew how to feel grateful for it, how much it made you feel sick to owe everything you were to someone who never cared to begin with. He understood.

But he just...

Not like this. Not with the League.

"Why are they kicking down doors trying to find you now?" Diggle asked.

Sara's frigid eyes fell away from Oliver just for a moment. "Because I left. And there's only one way that you leave the League." It was the way she said it that had Oliver grimacing, the way the words sounded recited straight out of a book. The sentiment had been drilled into her relentlessly - to be with them or die. To choose them, love them, give up who you were for them, or sacrifice your life at the tip of a blade.

Oliver knew what it was to owe your life to someone like that. "Is that why you didn't want to see your family?" he asked lowly, dangerously. 

Ice crept over Sara's expression, glacier slow and just as frigid. "A year ago, I was in Guyana," she told him, voice barely above a whisper. "I was sent there for a man named Suarez. He was a local diplomat." A swallow, a barely-there flicker of remorse. "And I slit his throat. In his bed. And his kids...they found his body in the morning."

Hadn't he done that? Hadn't he been that kind of thing too? He'd swallowed his morals and stored them away somewhere they couldn't touch him for years - long before she had.

"I'm a murderer, Ollie," Sara said viciously.

So am I, he wanted to say, wanted to scream. So am I, so am I, so am I.

He had done to himself exactly what Sara had done - worse, even. He had butchered and slaughtered and tortured and maimed. He had kidnapped his own best friend and terrorised him into letting Oliver go. He had bartered his way into people's hearts and beds, only to rip their heart out with his teeth the next morning.

But he had come home. He had faced everyone that he'd left behind, and he'd figured out how to show them someone they might recognise. He'd done that. And it had been hard, and messy, and unforgivable.

But he had done it.

Sara was nothing more than a coward.

"You think that my family will be happy to see me?" She said, and Oliver's answer tripped across his tongue and disappeared back down his throat, unsaid.

. . .

Cali knew without knowing that tonight was a hunting night. It had to be; Thea had showed up in her bedroom absolutely distraught, sobbing out the awful truth of Moira's intentions to accept the plea deal. Cali had gathered her close, curled them both into the fresh sheets on her bed, and cooed to her for as long as it had taken for the shaking and tears to subside.

"She's giving up," Thea had sniffled, burying her face in Cali's shoulder. "She's my Mom and she's giving up on me."

Cali, for once at a loss for words, had just held her and held her and held her.

Eventually, after Thea had finished confessing her fears and secret truths into the crook of Cali's neck, she'd dozed off. Cali had let her, had tucked her in and pressed a gentle kiss to the side of her head. She'd texted Roy to come over when he could, even though Thea hadn't asked for him, even though Roy had almost no idea who she was.

And then Cali had called Felicity. And then Cali had called Oliver.

And neither of them had picked up.

So it was a hunting night. A night of no contact, of worry, of gunfire cracking on the other side of town, of Oliver refusing to feel his emotions until he inevitably came home to her and she drew them to the surface. He has Sara with him now, so she wasn't worried about him going out alone, but she was worried about what he might do. What kind of things Sara might not be able to pull him back from. What kind of things Sara might actually encourage.

Cali had all but moved into the mansion since the Dollmaker - a move that Oliver had supported wholeheartedly - which meant that her movies had found a new home in the cabinet beside the living room TV. So after she snuck downstairs and let Roy in, waving him up to where Thea slept on, she settled on the couch and kept the volume of 'Lilo and Stitch' turned down low.

Oliver wouldn't be home until the early morning, if it was a hunting night. She would fall asleep, as she often did, despite her efforts, but those nights that she waited up for him in the living room always made him smile just that little bit wider in the mornings. Made him hold her just that little bit tighter.

She would wait for as long as it took for him to come home. And when he woke her, he would press his lips to hers and say thank you without words. Because having nobody waiting up for you anymore made it increasingly more difficult to find the desire to return at all.

. . .

Going to dinner with Laurel had been born from some kind of hybrid mix of guilt and affection. Guilt that he couldn't save her from the pain she was inevitably going through, no matter how much she denied it. Affection, because he had loved her deeply once, and while he had long since outgrown those feelings, he still cared for her as a friend.

"I noticed you didn't have a drink at dinner," he said carefully as they wandered the hallways towards Laurel's apartment.

"No," she responded, voice sharp with smugness and victory, only barely tempered with friendliness. "I didn't. So will you now admit that you and my father overreacted last week when you thought that I was becoming a drunk?"

Oliver smiled. "I am prepared to admit that I care about you," he said, purposefully not reacting to the challenge she had thrown down without realising. She was volatile like that - setting a trap without thinking about it, only to take you out while you were distracted. So very like her sister in that way. The thought made Oliver's chest tight.

"Is that why you insisted on walking me to my door?"

"You know me." He turned to face her as they stopped walking, took in the softness to her face, so at odds from the guarded frown she'd worn most of the night. "I just wanted to make sure you were safe."

"This is safe," she hummed, and then tipped forward to kiss him.

Only years of surviving life-and-death situations gave him the reflexes to lean back, his grip gentle on her arms as he held her away. He hadn't meant for her to think that he was seeking solace in her like he had when he'd first come back from the island; he still had the taste of Cali's cherry lip balm on his tongue from when he'd kissed her goodbye all that time ago.

Laurel's features drooped in embarrassed defensiveness, and Oliver sucked in a breath as she demanded, "Why did you come all the way up here, then?"

This is what he'd been waiting for - the cracks under the surface. SHe may not want to admit to herself that they were there, but he'd always been able to see them. Tommy's death had shattered something very important inside her heart, and try as he might, there was very few ways he could think of to help her without sabotaging himself to give her a piece of him.

"I'm really sorry if I was sending the wrong message," he began, but Laurel cut him off.

"No!" She snapped, voice shaking. Her eyes moistened. "No, no, I got the message. I get it loud and clear every day." She took a step back from him. "Run. Run away from Laurel. Run as fast as you can."

Those cracks were getting bigger, that cavern in her chest where Tommy used to live yawning open like a gaping, black maw. "Laurel, come on-"

"Sara-" the name sent a bolt of lightning through his throat, "-She got on the 'Gambit' with you. My father, he-he climbed into a bottle. My mother, she-she climbed into her car and she drove away, and then Tommy-" Her words gave out with a gasp. "What is so wrong with me that everybody leaves?"

They'd been kids during their relationship. He'd been immature, uncaring, distant. He'd put more time and energy into the assortment of parties and drugs he'd built his life around, and Laurel had waited for him. She'd given him everything. Because she was young and in love and naive enough to think that it was that easy.

Standing here, watching her now, he could barely find any traces of that girl she had been. Indeed, it must have all washed away under the wave of grief for Tommy and Sara and her father and the dissolution of her entire family.

"I will never leave you," he promised, in a rare moment of vulnerability and sentiment. He had taken her sister from her, only to bring her back into her life unknowingly. Laurel had little to thank him for and Oliver had his work cut out to make up for it.

There was a look in her eyes that said she knew it too. "Until you do."

And then she was walking away, and he was going to let her because that was what she needed from him. She needed to hurt him, to hurt herself, to hurt everyone, so that she could justify the misery she forced herself to live in. Selfishly, he could let her have that, because he would always go home to Cali, and Cali would always make that pain go away. He could afford to let Laurel draw the first blood, could afford to stand there and let her rake her nails through his veins and bleed him dry, because Cali would always be waiting for him to stitch him back together again.

But Laurel stopped just shy of her apartment threshold, abruptly going stiff and still. "I thought I locked that."

Her door, sitting open barely an inch, let out a tiny sliver of light from the lamps that were beaming brightly inside. Oliver stepped up to her side and then past her, reaching for the door with a quiet command to stay where she was. With the League of Assassins in play now, there was no saying what kind of horrors lurked in the shadows of her apartment.

He slipped inside, footsteps almost silent on her hardwood floors as he methodically scanned each corner of each room. The knife - silver, and solid, and warning - was wedged obviously in the frame of one of the doorways, and he settled in front of it, eyes narrowed to slits as he took notes of the markings on the handle.

They'd marked her. Identified her as leverage to get to Sara.

"Ollie?"

He ripped it out of the wood and slid it into the waistband of his jeans, using his shirt to hide it from view. It would do no good to get Laurel involved. It would bring up too many messy conversations and she wouldn't understand.

"All good," he told her, moving over towards her front door to make his escape. "I have to go."

Her lips twisted in pained displeasure. "Listed, I'm sorry about what I said-"

"Don't be," he interrupted, reaching out to squeeze her elbow reassuringly. "Just stay here." Just stay safe.

Sara would kill him if anything happened to her sister under his watch. He would be inclined to let her.

. . .

Watching Sara Lance cry into her father's arms as she said goodbye reminded him suddenly of Thea, of how young she still was, of how much she needed a mother just for a little while longer. And Moira was prepared to roll over and give up, just like that, without even a hint of a fight.

Quinten Lance bit back his own sobs as he watched his daughter leave, and Oliver resolved not to watch his family fall apart the same way. He could play the part of dutiful son once more, if it meant sparing them the pain he was witnessing now.

Sara walked away. Oliver's heart did not leave with her.

. . .

"How does Sara fit into the equation," Shado asked quietly, in those rare moments where peace prevailed and the night was quiet. Slade sat just off the side, close enough to hear, but his attention wholly focused on the fire. Sara slept fitfully to Shado's left.

Oliver hummed in confusion, glancing up from whittling the shaft of a new arrow, eyebrows crinkled. "What?"

Shado favoured him with a warm smile. "The equation of your heart, silly boy. You speak of many lovers, and now here another is, washed up at your feet."

His cheeks coloured under the day's worth of dirt and grime, and he ducked his head, suddenly unable to meet her eyes. He'd seen no judgement there, only mild curiosity and amusement, but it still made him feel...childish. Shallow.

"I was in a relationship with her sister," he answered quietly, the confession rough and raw. "Laurel. I betrayed her by taking Sara on the boat with me. I was too afraid of what our relationship meant, so I found a way to destroy it."

Shado tilted her head. "You don't love her? Sara?"

Oliver chewed on the question for a bit, carving the wood in his hands as he mulled over the answer. "I loved the freedom she gave me. I loved the fun we have. I loved how easy it was to be together. I love that she reminds me of home." He sighed. "But no. I don't think I love her. I don't think I know what love is at all, really."

"But you speak of so many people back at your home, surely you must love some of them?"

"I love my family. My mom, my sister, my da-" His voice caught. He cleared his throat. "I love my best friend, Tommy. I even love his crazy little sister, who might be one of the kindest people I know. I think I love Laurel, but not enough to commit to her, apparently."

Shado shifted closer to him, her lean fingers plucking the arrow shaft and knife out of his hands with ease and placing them somewhere off to the side. "And me?" She purred lowly in his ear, and he shivered. "Do you love me, Oliver?"

He didn't say anything, he merely turned to lock his lips with hers, and she grabbed onto his shoulders and took what she wanted from his kiss. Her grip was bruising, possessive, feral in that way she had only become during her time with him and Slade. Their weird dynamic, moulded by the forest and the plane carcass and the cold nights spent side by side to keep warm. They had made her this way, and Oliver only spared a second to wonder why that made him feel so unsteady, why suddenly Slade was sitting so ramrod straight, why none of this should be happening before Shado deepened the kiss and he was lost to the sensations once again.

Two days later, Oliver couldn't stop Ivo from shooting Shado in the head.

. . .

The dim glow of the lamp gave Cali the gentlest of halos, the sweat-soaked strands of her pretty brown hair sticking to her forehead as she threw her head back and moaned through gritted teeth. It was a move that exposed the column of her throat, and Oliver surged up from underneath her just so he could give in to temptation and press his teeth to the expanse of skin. It was salty against his tongue, but hot, and he moaned in appreciation as he sucked a mark.

"You promise you'd stay still," Cali gasped out, fingers digging into his arms like claws as he held her against his raised torso. "You swore you'd be good for me."

He had promised that at the beginning, when she'd had him on his back with his cock in her hand, keeping herself completely clothed even after stripping him the second they'd made it through the door. He would've promised her the world right then and there if she'd asked it of him. If it had meant she'd given him exactly what he wanted. If it meant she'd just do something with what she was holding.

Instead, she'd drawn it out. Kept it slow, almost-soft, like she could see all the fissure cracks lurking under his skin and decided that he'd needed coddling. She'd put just enough pressure for those cracks to start giving way, taking him to pieces so gently that he hadn't even noticed it until he'd hit rock bottom.

Maybe it had something to do with how off-kilter he'd felt after Sara. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that his hands hadn't stopped shaking since the showdown with John at the club. Maybe it was the way Cali had gathered him close and led him away and said nothing about the way he didn't actually cry.

So yes, he'd promised to be good. But when she'd sunk down on him, deceptively strong legs flexing and tensing as she steadied herself, soft pants already falling from her shining lips, some of that goodness had started to slip. When she'd set the pace - torturously steady and restrained, her hips twitching and swirling in ways that made stars burst behind his eyes. But never enough to tip him over that edge, to give him that relief.

Oliver had been taught that sex was a weapon. He was just used to being the one who wielded it.

"Oliver," Cali whined as he bit down again, further down towards her clavicle, shifting them so that he was holding a bit more of her weight, reducing her movements by a fraction. "Oliver, I had a-" her breathing hitched as the pad of his thumb brushed over a nipple, "-plan."

"It was a good plan," he promised, soothing the teeth marks with his tongue. "And you've done what you intended to do - I feel much better now. I think it's only fair that I return the favour."

He wasn't even lying; though Cali's methods had been teasingly treacherous and mean, they'd served their purpose. That bubbling knot of pain and confusion inside his chest had loosened, and the sting of Sara leaving, of Diggle and Felicity grilling him about her appearance, of Laurel and her ever tightening-spiral. Cali had drawn out each poisonous thought and memory with careful movements and instead replaced them with delicious warmth and anticipation, until he'd all but been a melted puddle of contentment on the bed.

And he'd tried to be good for her, he really had. But she was just so delectable, perched above him with her skin gleaming just so in the weak light. The concentration on her face had reminded him just how much work she put into him, and just how much of the bad things she took into herself to spare him even a moment of upset.

He couldn't do that for her the way that she did it for him. But he'd always spoken well through skin-to-skin contact, so he hooked a hand behind her and steadied his legs, and flipped them over in one quick move that had her squealing just a little bit.

"There," he purred, using his hands to prop himself above her. She blinked up at him, dazed and off-balance. "Now I can thank you properly."

She smiled up at him, dimples pitting her cheeks, and reached up to cup his cheek with one hand. "Silly boy," she chided. "You've got nothing to thank me for."

Oliver grinned, filthy and predatory, enjoying the way Cali's pupils dilated at the sight. "Well then, this is just spoiling you." And then he dropped his head and drew a nipple into his mouth in the same moment he snapped his hips forward.

Cali's moan was ragged and choked off, her hand falling to the sheets as she pushed her chest up into him. He waited for her to relax before he did it again, wrenching another sound from her and then another and then another. Her chattiness had worn away by the time he let her nipple pop out of his mouth, and one hand had found the back of his head, nails scratching through his short hair as he turned his attention to the other side.

"Tease," she accused between breathy moans, only to keen low in her throat as he thrust forward again.

"Just giving you what you deserve," he promised lowly, the words coming out as a rumble against the soft flesh of her breast. "You took me to pieces right here, but you didn't let me finish. To repay you, I think it's only fair that I do the same."

Sparks zapped him everywhere the two of them touched, the tingling sensations leeching straight into his bloodstream. Cali's acceptance of the challenge he'd issued. Her eagerness for something that had been a long time coming between them. The familiarity between them, bred during their stolen moments together in that lull before the quake, eased whatever reservations they might've still secretly carried going into this.

"You don't have to prove anything to me," Cali managed to exhale, voice catching and tripping into a whimper as Oliver twisted just so. "I don't need anything from you."

Oliver's teeth scraped over to her sternum and then down, his shoulders curving inwards as he bowed his head to follow the movement. If he didn't know any better, if he had a taste for the arts of poetry of the world like Tommy had, he might've compared this to worship. Might've considered himself at the mercy of a deity so burningly precious that he should consider himself grateful to lay eyes upon her, much less his bloody hands.

"I know you don't," he whispered into the warm flesh of her stomach, pleased that she'd gained just a little bit of weight over the past few weeks. He'd been worried about her, after Tommy and Janet and Checkers the cat. "That's why I'm giving it to you anyway."

That was why he was giving himself to her, in a way that he didn't give himself to others. Those five years away had moulded him into something that didn't care for such treatments; his body was leverage, a tool he could use in just a certain way to get what he needed, whether it be information or a desperate kind of reminder that he was alive. He'd slept with dangerous people and innocent people and people who were a curious mix of both, and while neither of them had left unsatisfied, it had never quite felt like this.

So it was with reverence that he trailed one hand down her side, finally coming to rest on her thigh, using the hold to gently adjust her position. The subtle movement paid off - Cali's whines were abruptly high-pitched and reedy, her head thrown back into the pillow and her eyes squeezed closed. Her arousal skittered across his skin in sparks, a phantom thread of something hot and delicious curling around his wrist and maintaining just the barest pressure.

"Now," he teased, looking up at her from his bowed position with a sly curl of his lips. "I find that I'm in a merciful mood. To repay you for the care you've already shown me tonight."

Cali, seemingly beyond words now, simply tried to swat him.

Oliver's laugh was a low, rolling vibration that rippled up through his chest and into his throat, and he took notice of the way Cali seemed to shiver at the sound of it, her toes curling into the mussed sheets. She truly was a beauty, and kind, and wonderful, and far too good for him.

Diggle had called her Princess, all that time ago. Oliver knew why, now. Knew what his friend saw in this remarkable woman.

So he sped up, worked his way back up her body in licks and bites and sensations as he moved faster, falling back into those habits he'd once used to use people, relishing in every little noise and gasp and clipped whimper he could coax out of her. And when he'd made it back to her face and pressed his lips to hers, he reached to tweak her abused nipple and she went taut underneath him.

It was like fireworks had erupted in his brain as Cali's sensations bled over into him, zinging stars tingling through his blood and elation seeping through every single pore. For a moment, there was no figuring out where she ended and he began, and just for that shining moment, he thought he might understand how it felt to be Icaurs, reaching for Apollo while he sat atop the sun.

Except here, in the safe cocoon of Cali's bottomless love, Oliver found that he did not melt under the heat of her, and was instead rescued before he could tumble all the way back down to Earth.

Much later, when they'd cleaned themselves up and regained at least some of their critical thinking skills, Cali rolled over onto her side so she could prop herself up and look down at him. Her lips quirked to the side. "I do love you, you know," she said quietly, earnestly. It only took a moment for her eyes to go wide and she hurried to add, "Not that you have to love me back right now. I know you said you couldn't spare that part of yourself at the moment, and I know that Sara being here must really be fucking with you, but-"

"Cali," he interrupted gently, blinking up at her and wondering just how he could go back in time to give himself a smack around the head. "I know. And I promise that one day it won't be so complicated."

'One day, I'll be able to say it back and not feel guilty.'

Because she was right; Sara's return had conjured a lot of largely unwanted emotions that he didn't feel particularly inclined to examine under a microscope. Loving Sara had cost him Shado and Slade, sacrifices that he wasn't sure he would choose if he could do it all again. Because he had loved Sara once, and possibly still did, but he found that he'd missed the easy companionship of Slade and the quiet love of Shado more in the passing months and years of his life before returning to Starling.

He'd promised Slade, all those moons ago, that they'd get off the island. That Slade could meet Oliver's family, that he could go back to his son, that family still had a chance amongst the rot of the world.

Shado probably would've loved Diggle and Felicity.

"Do you think you'll talk to John and Flick about everything later?" Cali asked him, without a trace of judgement. Instead, her tone was drenched in mild curiosity.

Oliver shifted slightly, tangling one of his legs with hers under the covers and letting the touch ground him. He hadn't told her about his plans to reveal the past five years to Diggle. It would open up too many questions, too many theories, too many considering looks. He wasn't ready for her to know how deep his treachery went yet, not while she was still so eager and warm and pliant beside him. He would tell Diggle first, and once he'd weathered that storm, he would figure out just how hard he had to work to find the courage to reveal it to her too.

"Not yet," he confessed. "Not about this. Mom starts her trial in a few weeks, and Thea's going to need me to be focused."

"She'll understand that you've got stuff going on-"

"I owe it to her to be the big brother she deserves, not the disappointment she's come to expect."

Cali's next breath out had a note of sad understanding, of soothing compassion. "Oh Oliver, Thea knows. She's not the same girl she was when you came back - she's grown up, become someone who knows exactly what it's like to not know how to pick which life to lead."

Oliver smiled up at her, the gesture small but not without genuine warmth. "And I am so glad that she didn't choose the path she was on before."

Cali hummed, amused by his antics, and leaned to press a honeyed kiss to his mouth. "I love you," she murmured against his lips. "I find it highly unlikely that's going to change."

"How devastating," he murmured back. "How hard it is to be loved by you."

She fell into him again, not for sex, but just for closeness, and he held her against him tight enough to feel the shifting of her muscles under the skin and smell the vanilla of her shampoo. Some things never changed, he supposed. He would always end up lying to her, and she would always let him. They were good at speaking with their bodies, and she was good at giving him what he needed even when he didn't ask for it.

And all he gave her in return was pain and betrayal, secrets and lies and history with people she'd never even known had existed.

How hard it was to be loved by her, indeed.

. . .

"You have to promise me that you'll never have sex with my sister."

Oliver was startled into a laugh as he tapped his cigarette against the glass dish next to him on the table, but as he turned to his friend, he very abruptly realised that Tommy wasn't joking. No, his face was stone, eyes beady and expression steady as he peered at Oliver.

Oliver cleared his throat. "Why would I want to sleep with your kid sister?"

Tommy shook his head, unusually solemn. "Because she's not a kid anymore. And there's only a few years difference between us and her, and that gap won't matter when we're older. I know you-"

"I'm not like that," Oliver protested.

Tommy ignored him and simply continued, "-but I also know her. I know how she can be. I know how quickly and how deeply she feels things. She'll fall in love with you if you let her, and if that happens and you sleep with her anyway, it'll break her heart." He levelled a cool look at Oliver. "And then I would have to maim you extensively."

Oliver, young and weed-dumb and cocksure, just snorted and waved the hand holding his cigarette. "Alright," he agreed easily. "I promise I won't sleep with your sister."

Tommy didn't seem convinced, but he never mentioned it again. But later, much later, when Cali did indeed fall in love and Oliver did indeed let her do it, he sighed to himself and prayed that they didn't tear themselves to shreds against each other.