"Lying to myself I can make it on my own

Making it alone is lonely"

LIZ LONGLEY - 'Rescue My Heart'

.                         .                      .

Things didn't get better.

Cali's remaining time in hospital was short and unremarkable; Tommy never returned to visit her and he didn't respond to her text telling him she was being discharged. In fact, the only updates Cali got about her brother came from Laurel, and they were scarce enough that Cali still worried.

Oliver, at least, was still responding to her texts, but their conversations were short and bitter. She'd broken the ever-fragile thing between them with a word and a power she never wanted.

And really, everybody should be freaking out a lot more than they were about the fact that she had weird superpowers! What part of that was normal? How was everyone so at ease about the fact her father had literally turned her into some genetically mutated freak and then proceeded to drug her and manipulate her and-

No, it was too insane to think about, even in the solitude and privacy of her own home.

Well, she said solitude, but she wasn't exactly alone.

Felicity was a surprisingly quiet house guest.

House guest, not roommate, because although she rarely went back to her own apartment, and the spare room had a closet full of her clothes, and she'd claimed Fridays as home-cooked nacho night, and she left small reminders of herself strewn about the apartment, the two of them weren't actually living together.

Cali didn't miss the loneliness, and Felicity stayed impressively silent and out-of-the-way on her bad days. It was almost like living alone, except....well, she wasn't.

They fought, of course, but it had only ever really spiralled once, when Cali had slipped back into a self-destructive type of anger as a result of her thinning relationship with Tommy.

"Why are you here?" She'd shouted, channelling every ounce of temper she'd inherited from Malcolm. "I'm not some project for you, some charity case you can use to justify being part of this fucked up mess!"

Felicity had said, very calmly, "I'm here because you're one of the only friends I have, and I think you need someone in your corner right now." Which was ironic, really, because then she'd walked back to her own apartment and Cali hadn't seen her for two weeks.

She'd come back with several bottles of alcohol and they'd both gotten exceedingly drunk for the next three consecutive nights. Cali had put in for long service leave at work, almost four months worth, and Brenden had all but told her that they didn't need her to come back.

He hadn't meant it like that, but Cali had been left tasting salt on her tongue for the next few days anyway.

Janet stopped by often enough that Cali could comfortably say they were working their way back to what they'd been, before Cali had frozen her out. Sometimes, when Janet thought she wasn't looking, the waitress would send her a lost look that was so full of love and sadness that Cali had to excuse herself from the room so she wouldn't cry.

She missed Janet, missed their relationship, more than she could ever say.

Felicity rarely mentioned it, only ever giving her an evaluating look over the top of her laptop screen late at night. "You know," she said casually, tapping at the keyboard lightly. "I always thought it was you and Oliver destined to be the star-crossed lovers, but you and Janet are too adorable."

Pain - age old and summoned by a young child who didn't know what love was - gripped the back of Cali's neck. "If we were star-crossed, Flick, he'd have to love me back."

Felicity's mouth formed a little 'o' and she winced. "Eesh, sorry."

They really shouldn't have this conversation. Felicity was Cali's friend, not her therapist, and they'd been having such a nice time not talking about Oliver or Tommy. They'd kept conversation mainly business - the Gambit, Moira and Malcolm, theories on whatever nefarious plan the wealthy people of Starling City would cook up next.

But it always seemed to circle back to Oliver. To Tommy. To the fact that Cali had violated them both, so extensively that she'd been cut out of their lives.

Cali sighed. She could leave this conversation, say nothing and go back to reading. Felicity would let her. Or she could take a risk and say what she needed to, and then they could go back to pretending they weren't sad and lonely people trying to find a reason to keep going.

"I was....gosh, I think I must've been twelve or so when Oliver stopped being a boy." Cali's mouth quirked to the side, a bitter laugh tumbling out of her mouth. "We were at one of those fancy parties, and my dad had stuck me with this other little girl. She was snotty and horrible, and Oliver and Tommy chose to be my bodyguards."

"You know," Felicity interjected, "I really hate you sometimes. In-In a nice way." Cali raised her eyebrows and Felicity flapped her hands. "Oh, you know what I mean! I literally would've killed to have two people care about me so much. I mean, they're literally your fairy-tale boys!"

Cali didn't know how to tell her that Oliver used to be the one to treat the bruises and split skin. She didn't know how to get her tongue around the truth that she had her mother's voice and Tommy had her face, and Malcolm hated them for it. And what Malcolm hated, Malcolm tried to destroy.

But it wasn't Felicity's fault, so Cali swallowed down her harshness and forced the levity to return to her tone. "Tommy used to hide cooked spaghetti in my room because he thought it was funny when I would squeal," she deadpanned.

Felicity's laugh was precious. "At least it wasn't bugs," she teased.

"I was lucky," Cali agreed, then continued her story. "Anyways, this girl, I think her name was Marjorie, was being horrid. Saying things about my mom and picking on Tommy's scabbed chin, and I remember Oliver just tackled her to the ground. Everyone was scandalised. All three of us got in huge trouble." Cali grinned. "But it was so worth it to see Marjorie crying. Oliver looked so proud."

Malcolm had been furious when they'd gotten home, had slapped Tommy hard enough to leave a red mark and yelled loud enough that Cali had wet herself with fear. They'd been shut in their rooms, forbidden from visiting Oliver and baby Thea for a month.

Marjorie never came to another party though. Cali thought the sacrifice might have been worth it for that.

Felicity very slowly set her laptop aside and puffed out her cheeks. "You loved him," she said quietly, "didn't you?"

Cali shook her head and sucked her messy feelings back down into her stomach, where they simmered and rumbled and hurt. She'd revealed more than she'd meant to - it seemed like after she'd stripped herself bare of emotions in the hospital, they'd just come pouring back in, stronger and more, and she couldn't find a way to keep them buried inside her. They spilled out over the sides.

"Yeah," she admitted. "Yeah, Flick, I did. I still do, to be honest, but I'm usually too angry at him to really notice it."

"He is remarkably easy to be angry at."

That was part of the problem, really. Oliver was easy to pin the blame on, because he took it and he didn't say anything and he carried the weight of everybody's burdens. He'd disappeared from their lies because of his mother, because of Cali's father, and then he'd come back to accusations and anger.

And Cali had taken that from him. But she'd taken everything good from him too, and she didn't know how he was ever going to forgive her.

Felicity shifted slightly. "Okay, so you love him. He's easy to love. And you love Janet too, I know that. You're very bad at pretending you don't."

Cali shrugged. She did love both of them. Oliver, who'd taken pieces of her heart with every ice pack carefully pressed against a bruise, with every smile and laugh. Even when he'd grown out of their friendship, when he'd become interested in what it meant to be a young and attractive Queen, he'd kept pieces of her heart. It had been a slow spiral into something mature, a careful but unconscious surrender.

Janet had toppled into her life and stolen Cali's laugh and Cali's kisses, and Janet had a cat and Cali had fallen for her with the taste of Neapolitan milkshake in her mouth.

"I ruined things with both of them," she said, and wished she'd never found the courage to start this conversation. "But I don't know how to stop wanting them. I don't know how to not need them." She dropped her head in her hands. "Felicity, I don't know how to choose."

Felicity tilted her head. "Then don't."

.                          .                       .

"Not what's wrong with this picture? You look like you're...working."

Tommy's voice was too casual to be natural, but it was the first time since the hospital that they'd spoken to each other, so Oliver latched on to the feeble attempt at normality with both hands and managed a strained chuckle.

"I'm going over resumes for the Chef's position at the nightclub," he said brightly, because he was. He held out one of the applications to Tommy, who hesitated for only a second before sitting down and accepting the page. "This guy looks pretty good. He won 'Top Chef' Season Six."

Tommy didn't really look impressed. "At this point it is basically a culinary prerequisite to be on that show." He wrinkled his nose and handed the paper back.

"Oh." Oliver blamed five years at sea for his lack of knowledge because, you know, it wasn't like they had free-to-stream TV while they were running for their lives on an island full of murderers.

Tommy's face shifted slightly, a very particular expression appearing. Oliver very carefully put the Chef applications down on the table. "Can I talk to you about something?" Tommy asked softly.

Oliver sat forward and very seriously said, "Tommy, every time you want to talk to me about something, and that something is Laurel, you look like you're about to tell me you have a terminal disease."

It was a feeble joke, and a dangerous one, but Tommy's mouth twitched weakly and Oliver felt some kind of satisfaction settle in his chest.

"She's been working with the Hood guy."

Oliver knew this, given that he was the Hood guy, but he still frowned. "What? You're letting her work with that....crazy person?" He almost smiled then, just at the sheer absurdity of it all. "She could get hurt, Tommy."

"I'm not letting her do anything, okay?" Tommy retorted. "I only just found out about it because she accidentally slipped up on one of her many lies."

And of course, of course, Laurel would lie about talking to the Hood. No matter that everybody in Starling City knew that one of Tommy's main triggers was people lying to him. Never mind that Tommy hated the Hood, and only had half of Laurel's heart to begin with. Never mind that nobody ever seemed to be on Tommy's side of things.

"She's lying to you?" Oliver repeated dully, all the joy sucked out of the conversation as his grip on his façade loosened slightly. "That doesn't sound like Laurel."

Tommy, thankfully, was too caught up in his own angst to really notice the change of tone. "Lying, keeping secrets about who she's spending time with - does that remind you of anybody we know?"

There was a right answer here that Tommy was looking for, and it leaped off Oliver's tongue instantly. "Me," he said, "in every relationship that I've been in."

He wasn't ashamed to admit it anymore, wasn't the same scared kid who didn't want to own up to the fact that he was afraid of what it was like to be committed and in love.

"Me too," Tommy said. "Except this one." He sighed, and for a moment, Oliver truly ached for him, for the hurt and confusion in his eyes. They were still friends, still best friends, no matter everything that had gone wrong between them lately.

Oliver, in that moment, wanted so desperately to fix it, to have Tommy tell him it was okay. Oliver missed him, more fiercely than he had since he'd come back.

Tommy continued, standing up. "There's some sort of infatuation thing going on here. I..." He sniffed. "We both know that she has a pretty strong track record of being attracted to guys who are dangerous, who break the rules. Show me a more dangerous rule breaker than the Hood."

Truth, truth, truth.

Oliver hated that it had come to this - that he had cornered himself into sitting and listening to his best friend tear himself apart inside trying to understand why his girlfriend would talk to a murderer. Would talk to Oliver, even if she didn't know it was him.

He'd known, going into this, that nobody in his family would ever understand. He'd known that Tommy's morals would have been a problem between them, a barrier. But despite it all, he'd hoped that they could maybe look past it. They could maybe understand.

Instead, he was just pulling everybody apart, ripping them to shreds.

"I just think you need to have an honest chat with her," he said, the words chalky in his mouth. "Find out the real reason she's keeping secrets."

"I just can't believe that Laurel, of all people, would lie to my face." Memories of kissing her at the party, of Cali shouting, of pleading with her not to tell Tommy- "I guess that's the way that it is with the people that you're closest to."

They weren't just talking about Laurel anymore.

For a moment, a long moment, the two of them sat in silence. Cali's name loomed over them, unspoken but heavy at the forefront of their minds. Oliver had recovered well after the stunt she'd pulled in the hospital. Tommy, by the looks of things, hadn't.

How quickly things had fallen apart.

"About what you said the other day," Oliver said in a quiet voice, reaching for the job applications just to have something to do with his hands. "About-About the things I did when I was young and-"

Tommy cut him off, looking away. "Please. Don't. I can't-" He took a deep breath. "I can't talk about that with you yet."

"Tommy, you told me that you didn't want-"

"Oliver."

Okay.

Okay. They wouldn't talk about it.

But it sat heavy on Oliver's conscience, tainted every thought that wandered around. Every time he looked at his friend he could hear those terrible words - 'you left me with girls I didn't want to be with and you thought it was funny' - and he could see it. Young Tommy, struggling to keep up with Oliver's confidence, struggling to find himself amongst bruises and his father's harshness and his overly-dependant sister. Constantly outshone by Oliver.

Constantly second best. Constantly second choice.

God, what had Oliver done to him?

Very carefully, Oliver asked, "Have you spoken to Cali since the incident?"

He knew the answer even before Tommy stiffened and shook his head. Had known by Cali's frequent questions, her worry, her guilt. Oliver himself hadn't responded to her often, but there was a writhing force in his stomach that forbade him to ignore her completely.

"She keeps in contact with Laurel," Tommy said tightly. "That's all that she needs."

"You know how she gets."

"Yeah, Ollie." Tommy sounded tired. "I know how she gets. But I-" His voice gave out and he cleared his throat. Oliver's heart twanged. "I can't face her after what she did. I can't let her near me knowing that she can just...turn it off."

Turn it off...an apt description of an action so inexplicable and unnatural. Because she had - she'd reached inside them and scooped out everything that mattered until they were blank slates for her to write her legacy. She could change them at will, could wrestle them into line with a word, with a look, with a feeling.

Oliver had seen some things in the five years he was gone. He'd seen Slade Wilson infected with the Mirakuru. He'd seen magic kill almost everyone around him. He'd witnessed so much death and decay and horror and still, it was Cali that scared him the most.

How was he supposed to protect himself from someone who had the power to seize control over him? Oliver was good at fighting physical things, but the idea that he could be taken and used as some puppet - the idea that it would be Cali pulling the strings - it made something go sour in his mouth.

"She's probably really scared," he said softly, not to make Tommy feel bad, but to remind them both that Cali hadn't exactly asked for this. "That doesn't mean she's entitled to our forgiveness, but I think we can give her a little bit of slack. It's not like there's a handbook for this sort of thing."

Tommy considered it for a moment - Oliver could see him turning his words over and over in his head, searching them thoroughly - and let out a slow breath. "Aren't you scared?" He asked helplessly, splaying his hands.

"I'm terrified," Oliver admitted easily, "but I'm not going to let that control my relationship with Cali. It'll take me some time, but I know I can get over it. Like I said, it's not like she chose this."

Something bitter and hateful stole across Tommy's face, a kind of jealousy that made Oliver suddenly very aware of his ribcage. He braced himself for a fight, but Tommy's expression settled into something far more like self-loathing, and he only said, "I wish I could be the better man, Ollie, but we both know that's always been you. I'm the one who holds a grudge."

Oliver wanted to laugh, not because it was funny, but because it was so horrendously sad.

He wasn't the better man - there was so much blood on his hands he could paint his entire life in red snapshots. If only Tommy knew what he'd turned into during those five long years; if only Tommy knew that Oliver Queen really had died on that island, and a monster had crawled into his deflated skin sack and had been walking around in it ever since.

The Hood had been born from the blood of that very same monster, but there was a little more...Oliver to it. It was his favourite skin to slide into, his favourite character to play.

If that made him the better man, he shuddered to think what it was Tommy thought about himself that made him believe so strongly that he was unworthy.

As far as Oliver was concerned, Tommy was the best of them.

Cali probably thought so too.

Oliver looked down at the paperwork in his hand and cleared his throat. "I know that things have been going wrong between us, uh, pretty much since I got back, but..." He held out the stack of papers hopefully, for once not needing to force the genuine tone to his question. "Would you come back to the club? Work with me? I don't know if I can do it without you."

Dangerous and stupid - it was dangerous and oh so stupid to bring Tommy back, to draw him so close to the truth, to that nasty secret Oliver knew would break them apart forever.

But Oliver couldn't build this nightclub on his own. Didn't want to. Not if it meant leaving his best friend adrift and listless, without something to build and be proud of and claim as his own.

Tommy shook his head and puffed out a short laugh, but there was nothing but gratitude and devotion in his eyes as he accepted the stack of applications and said, "You owe me so many free drinks."

Oliver smiled - it was almost real, too - and willed himself not to confess it all, right then and there. "Once we build this club, buddy, you can have as many free drinks as you want."

Tommy's grin lit up the whole room.

.                          .                       .

"I have a confession," a very young Oliver whispered late one night as he and Tommy lay curled up next to each other, Thea and Cali asleep on a pull-out bed in the corner. Tommy hummed sleepily but didn't open his eyes. Oliver moved his face closer. "I don't like your dad."

Tommy's face twitched, and the bruise that mottled his cheek twitched too. "Don't, Ollie."

"He's so mean to you," Oliver said defensively. "I don't like people who are mean."

Tommy's eyes, when he opened them, were watery and sad. It struck Oliver then, how young the two of them were - how young Tommy was, to already look so defeated. And maybe he didn't just 'not like' Malcolm; maybe, for the first time ever in his short little life, he truly knew what it was to hate someone.

Cali made a small, quiet sound from the bed in the corner and Oliver watched Tommy immediately and without hesitation get out of bed and pad across to her, mumbling something until she settled again.

It took a long time for Tommy to come back to Oliver, after that, but Oliver didn't say anything until Tommy had crawled back under the covers and curled up again. "One day I'm going to be big enough and strong enough to take you and Cali away from him," he vowed fiercely, with the type of passion only a young child could have. "I promise, Tommy, I'm gonna save you."

Tommy didn't say anything for a long while, he just stayed nice and still. Oliver wanted to push, wanted to put his fingers on the bruise and push on it hard enough that it wouldn't hurt anymore, but he knew that Tommy was, and always would be, some kind of bomb that would go off as soon as someone pushed the trigger.

Oliver, selfish and so heartbreakingly young, desperately hoped that when Tommy went off, he took Malcolm out with him and brought the whole city to its knees.

"I'm scared, Ollie," Tommy finally said in the dark. There were tears in his voice, maybe even tears on his face, but Oliver didn't dare look. "I miss my mom. And-And you're right, Dad is mean to me and he's mean to Cali 'nd I dunno how to make him stop."

Of all the ways Oliver knew people to grow up, he'd never realised it could be like this.

Wordlessly, he reached for his best friend and Tommy came to him easily this time, yielding his body to Oliver's arms without any kind of fight. They were both radiating far too much heat to be comfortable, but Oliver knew that Tommy couldn't sleep without a blanket over him and neither of them were willing to let go now.

"You can have my mom and dad," he offered nicely. "I'm sure they won't mind."

Tommy just pushed his face into Oliver's neck and they stayed like that all night, tucked into each other. Two little boys abandoned by the universe, left to find friendship only in each other.

Years later, when Oliver disappeared at sea and Malcolm stopped hitting them, Tommy held that moment close to his heart and wished, with all his heart, that he could've stayed a child.

.                          .                       .

The problem with your brother being angry at you was that he'd drop a text saying, 'Laurel's been kidnapped. Lance and the Hood are working on it now,' and then fuck right back off again and leave you to suffer the panic on your own.

Or, in this case, panic with Felicity, who'd read the text with wide eyes and promptly freaked out.

An understandable reaction, all things considered.

"Who would kidnap Laurel?" Felicity asked, eyes wide as she tapped frantically away at her computer. Cali, who was pacing enough to potentially wear a hole in the floor, shrugged once. "Great, that's helpful."

"I don't keep track of all this shit, Flick!"

"Well, was there anybody she was prosecuting, or whatever? You know how passionate she gets about all her justice stuff."

Cali threw her hands up, her worry making her voice sharp. "I don't know!"

Tension clawed deep into her shoulders, pressure overloading the front of her skull. Felicity's stress was a tangerine stain on her tongue, fizzy and sour and all at once too much for her to handle. Instinctually, that horrible and ugly static rose inside Cali's chest, cresting in her throat and washing away Felicity's leaky feelings with a soft sigh.

Conveniently enough, Cali's own leaky feelings dissipated under the salt as well, leaving her slightly hollow but infinitely more comfortable in her skin.

Felicity exhaled softly, eyes going slightly blank as Cali, subconsciously and without meaning to, gently unravelled her anxiety. "Oh," she breathed. "Oh, okay."

If Cali hadn't been floating on the high of her own sudden peacefulness, she might've been horrified with herself. Might have remembered that it was this exact thing that had stripped her of Tommy, of Oliver.

As it was, that would come later, in the dark of night when it was only her and her demons to contend with.

"I think...." Felicity didn't sound quite right, didn't have the right cadence to her voice and her words, but Cali didn't acknowledge it, didn't acknowledge that she'd done it again. "I think I need to go back to the office. I've got a project I need to finish."

It was an admissible lie, and Cali leaned into the excuse. "Of course," she agreed lightly. "Do you want Parker to drive you?"

Felicity shook her head, which was testament to how unnatural this entire moment had become, because Felicity had taken to Parker like a duck to water and would choose him to drive her everywhere rather than drive herself.

Slowly, Cali moved to sit down as Felicity rose from the dining table, effectively switching their positions. Except Felicity didn't stand or pace - with slightly faltering and unsure steps, she simply floated away from the table, toeing on some flats and drifting right out of the front door without another word said.

Cali's ribcage felt impossibly tight and restrictive, the bones carving her insides up with every dangerous breath in. Flowers were growing in her lungs, their petals soft and cloying. She could taste the pollen, was far too aware of the catch in her breathing.

She'd done it again.

She dropped her head in her hands.

She'd done it again.

So smooth the reaction had been, so natural and easy. She'd not thought about it, not paid it any mind until Felicity had walked out with half her feelings missing. Cali remembered the look on Oliver and Tommy's faces in the hospital, twins to Felicity's own vacant expression.

She was going to be sick. She was going to-to-

There was still a gun in the drawer in the kitchen. If she was truly this out of control, truly some sort of freak, she could find a way to fix it that didn't mean her crawling back to Malcolm, begging on her knees for another experimental serum, another experimental drug, another foreign substance injected into her bloodstream.

Besides, it wasn't like Malcolm's 'cures' could be trusted. What he'd been slipping into her IV was supposed to have cured her, or at the very least suppressed these terrible and unnatural abilities. She'd trusted him to do right by her, and he'd sworn that he would, and now she was sitting here, hands stained by Felicity's feelings.

Why wasn't anybody stopping her?

Her phone trilled once, signalling a text, and Cali bit back her cry as Tommy's name flashed on her screen.

'Laurel's shaken but unharmed. Lance got her back.'

Her hands were trembling, she realised faintly. No, not just her hands. Her entire body was jolting and shuddering, like there were spiders crawling through her veins. She'd gotten caught up in herself again, had forgotten that one of her friends - Tommy's girlfriend - had been in danger.

She had to respond, had to say that she was glad that Laurel was okay, that she missed Tommy, that she was sorry, that she'd done it again and if Tommy gave the word, she'd walk into the kitchen right now and fix the problem.

Instead, she squinted at her screen and painstakingly typed out, 'A swift rescue by Starling City's finest. Glad she's okay.'

The message sent, was read. Dots appeared on the screen, Tommy typing a response. The first communication between the Merlyn siblings since Cali had done the unforgivable. She'd held onto hope that someone would take the first step, held onto the fear that stopped it from being her.

The dots disappeared. A response never came through. Cali turned her phone screen off and set the device down.

She hadn't expected forgiveness, but she hadn't expected this.

.                          .                       .

Hours later, once the moon had soared up into the sky and was now lazily making its way back down towards the horizon, Cali's phone rang.

Statue-still and lifeless, Cali watched it buzz on the table, chills dancing across the exposed skin of her arms. Her shock had deadened inside her, had become formless and sickly inside her heart.

She should answer her phone. It was probably important, and even though she knew that it would not be Tommy calling her, she ached to hear his voice on the other end.

She tapped the answer button. Felicity's voice came through, glitchy and scared. "Cali, oh my god, I literally have Oliver Queen bleeding out in my backseat, and instead of letting me take him to the doctor's he's making me take him to some abandoned factory and this is a new car - how do I get the blood out of the seats? Oh my god, did you know that Oliver is the Hood? I mean, it makes so much sense but I never actually considered it, right?"

"Felicity," Cali said gently, and Felicity fell silent, breathing shakily. Clearly, Cali's invasive transgression hadn't shut down her feelings for very long. "Trust Oliver and take him to the factory. I'll meet you there."

Felicity let out a sound that might've been a sob, except she didn't like to cry so it was likely just a breath. Cali was the one to hang up.

She didn't let herself stop to think about what she was doing as she shoved on some shoes, grabbed a jacket, and hurried out the front door. Oliver had always expressly said he didn't want her at the soon-to-be-nightclub, didn't want her downstairs where he and John locked themselves away to do 'secret vigilante things'.

Given the circumstances, she figured she was allowed to take some liberties.

She drove wildly, ignoring the outrage of the other drivers she cut off. Safe choices weren't really at the forefront of her mind, and this was one situation in which her riches and fame would cover her ass.

Look, if your best friend was presumably bleeding to death, you wouldn't give a crap about the law either.

Felicity's car was already parked outside the old factory when Cali skidded to a stop, and she wasted no time in scrambling out of her own and inside the half-destructed building. Debris littered the floors, raw material and scattered pages lay abandoned in random spots. Red paint scorched the concrete, mapping out grand plans for a grand lie.

"Felicity!" Cali called, dodging the metal and steel and venturing further into the building. "Felicity!"

Footsteps sounded ahead of her and Cali abruptly realised that it was a rather stupid idea to announce her presence in some abandoned factory in the Glades. She had no guarantee that her friends were here, no guarantee that this seemingly abandoned structure was actually uninhabited.

A figure emerged from the shadows, tall and hulking and far more intimidating than a random figure had any right to be. Cali fought the urge to drop into a crouch, and instead reached around to the small of her back. Her fingers brushed against cool metal and she clenched her jaw as the figure moved closer.

She drew her gun. "Not another step!" She shouted, and aimed. "Or I shoot!"

"Woah, woah, Cali! It's me! It's Diggle!"

She didn't lower the weapon. "Hi John," She called. "I'm sure you have a very good reason for loitering in the shadows and scaring the shit out of me."

It wasn't until the light touched John's face and Cali confirmed that yes, this was actually John Diggle and not some random creep, did she relax and tuck the gun back into the waistband of her jeans.

John's eyes were blown wide. "Where'd you get a gun?" He demanded. "Were you going to shoot me?"

"You didn't want to ask those questions in a different order?"

"Cali."

She shrugged. "It's Starling City, John. It's not hard."

"To shoot people?"

"To find guns." Cali considered him for a moment before adding casually, "but yeah, also to shoot people."

John looked like he wanted to say something about that, but appeared to change his mind last second and instead jerked his head towards the back of the building. "C'mon," he said. "Felicity's downstairs with Oliver."

Cali followed him without hesitation. "Is he okay?" She asked, grimly reminded of the situation at hand. "Felicity said he was bleeding out? What happened?"

John grimaced. "He got shot. Non-fatal but risky. I've got him patched up the best I can, but I'm not a doctor." He stopped talking as he entered a passcode on a section of the wall. Cali squinted, catching the last three numbers. "The, uh, nightclub is part of his cover," John explained sheepishly. "Guess he's not too bothered about the rest of the building."

Cali snorted but said nothing, all too aware that Oliver had never wanted here at all down here and so this may the first and only time she could see the entire truth about what he was, what he never wanted her to be exposed to. This was where Oliver let himself loose, where he relinquished his hold on that seething, brimming anger he always tucked away from her sight.

The seething, brimming anger that she'd stolen from him in the hospital. The anger that she wanted to keep from him forever, if only it would obliterate this twisted part of him.

It wouldn't. She knew that it wouldn't, because what John was about to show her was still Oliver.

But she'd hoped, dreamed maybe, about the kind of man she could make him into if only he let her in just a little bit more.

"Oh," she breathed as John led her down the stairs and over to the table where Oliver was sprawled, his body entirely too still to be comforting. "He looks like shit."

A slightly wheezy laugh gave away Felicity's position, and Cali grinned at her friend teasingly. The smile faltered slightly as she caught sight of the blood smeared down Felicity's front and the paleness to her face.

Felicity beat her to the punch. "If you think I look bad, you should see the inside of my car." She pulled her arms close to her chest. "When he wakes up, he's gonna owe me so much money to cover my deposit."

Cali's expression warmed. "You saved his life by bringing him here," she said softly. "He's gonna owe you a lot more than that."

Diggle cleared his throat. "Cali, don't take this the wrong way because I'm glad you're here, but you and I both know that when Oliver wakes up he's not gonna be happy to see you."

Well Oliver could get over it, Cali wanted to snap. Oliver was unhappy about a lot of things, and in some of them he was justified, but this was not a situation where he could lower his voice and growl out orders and expect her to just obey. He might want to keep her out of this part of his life, but Cali had grown up with him. She wasn't going anywhere.

Oliver was so used to people leaving him, so used to people walking away because they didn't like what they saw, that he never showed anyone.

He was so used to people pushing him away that he learned to push them away first.

Cali swallowed down her mean words and instead leaned over the table to brush a thumb over Oliver's face, collecting some of the semi-dried blood. How many times had he needed a tender touch on that island, only to receive more pain, more anguish, more suffering? How many times had he lain awake, staring at the stars and wishing that he were home?

How long had it taken him to break? To grind himself down into a well-oiled machine that forgot what love was and could only survive?

Cali hated to think about that boy, and how much it must've ached to kill that soft part of himself so that some part of him, no matter how bitter and wild, could come home to them.

She loved him, and knew it as surely as she knew the colour of the sky. She'd never stopped loving him, really, and it hurt because she loved Janet too. And she'd always sworn that she wouldn't end up like Tommy, sworn that she wouldn't end up settling for half a heart, so how could she expect Oliver or Janet to do the same?

She couldn't offer either of them anything that was worth possessing.

She withdrew her hand and let Felicity take her place.

Oliver opened his eyes.

"I guess I didn't die," he rasped, eyes scouring the room lazily. He was smiling slightly, but there was something wrong about it, like the smile had gone sour and was wilting. "Again. Cool."

Cali wanted to say so many things to him, wanted to shout and wail and scream and then drop to her knees and apologise until she ruined her voice, but she did none of it. Instead, she turned away and went to fiddle with Felicity's computers while Oliver sat up and investigated his wound.

So maybe she was a coward, but Oliver's temper was notoriously volatile and no matter how badly she wanted to show him that she wouldn't run away, he hadn't wanted her down here.

He hadn't wanted her down here.

Even though he'd told Felicity to bring him here without a second thought.

Cali knew, deep down, what that might mean.

"Hey," Felicity whispered, and Cali startled at the unexpected voice. She hadn't realised that Felicity had followed her away from Oliver. "Are you okay? I'm sorry if I broke some rule by calling you, but I-I didn't know what else to do when my boss appeared in my car, bleeding everywhere."

Cali shook her head and gently nudged Felicity into her seat. "It's okay, Flick," she murmured and ignored the way her trigger finger twitched with the lie. "You didn't do anything wrong."

She hadn't done anything at all, really, except exist in that wonderful way of hers.

Oliver and Diggle were talking quietly in the background, and Cali left Felicity to absorb herself in her technology. At once, she felt adrift, listless. This was a place that had no room for her. She wasn't a soldier, wasn't a vigilante, wasn't a genius. She was just a girl with a touch of monster, one hundred percent a screw up.

Was this how Tommy felt? Stranded on the outside, forcing himself into a shape that wasn't right, didn't fit, a shape that hurt, because it was the only shape that got him recognised.

In that moment, she was glad he had Laurel. She was so, so glad.

A hand touched her shoulder.

"Cali," Oliver greeted, wincing as he dropped his arm back down to his side. The war paint made his eyes seem sadder than usual. His jaw flexed. "Felicity said she called you."

Cali lifted her chin, even as she pressed a hand to her abdomen. "You got shot and showed up, bleeding, in her car," she said flatly. "You'd better be glad that I'm the only person she called."

Maybe that wasn't such a great start to this conversation.

The ice that crept across Oliver's face agreed. "You knew I never wanted you to be down here. I gave you express orders to avoid this place!"

"Well it's a damn good thing I don't take orders from you!" Cali shot back, her anger slippery and fragile. Oliver's wrath was a writhing mass in her left arm. "You nearly died, Oliver! I'm not going to sit by in my apartment while Felicity and John watch you bleed out!"

Oliver's voice immediately softened to a deadly velvet. "So you thought it would be a good idea to come watch me bleed out, too?"

"I didn't just come for you, asshole!" Her heart was beating weirdly. Light-headedness was staking a claim. "Do you have any idea the stress you're putting on these two by almost dying? Felicity had no idea the danger you put yourself in every night, and then you show up out of the blue after getting shot and expect me not to support her? Not everything is about you!"

"This is about me!" Oliver yelled back, splaying his arms. "This is mine!" Almost immediately, he ground out a harsh groan of pain and clutched at his shoulder.

The mass nestled at the crook of Cali's left elbow jostled, so she tangled a vein in it and yanked.

Oliver's body tensed.

Cali continued on, swept away by her emotions and unnoticing of the way Oliver had gone dangerously still. "You say this is about you, that you built this and it's yours, but then you drag other people into it and it's not just you anymore! These are real people's lives you're playing with!"

John took a small step forward to announce his presence. "Cali, maybe you should-"

Cali pinched her left elbow slightly as she snapped, "Maybe I should what? Sugar coat things? Not be angry? Should I baby him, John?"

He shook his head. "Maybe you should stop doing whatever you're doing before you do something you regret."

Why was she the one who was getting censored? Why was it that Oliver could scream himself blue in the face and people would take it, but the minute she descended into justified anger, she was told to calm down?

She turned back to Oliver, fully intent on continuing her tirade, but the words dried out on her tongue as she took him in. His cheeks were red, not from shouting, but from how hard he was clenching his teeth. His eyes were closed, one hand pressed to his shoulder the other pressed to his chest.

He was shaking.

Immediately, Cali's frustration mutated into concern, and she lowered her voice as she said, "Ollie? Are you alright?"

He wheezed what might have been a manic laugh before shaking his head and stepping back, away from her. "You're doing it again," he said through gritted teeth. "Stop it."

"Stop what?"

"Cali, stop it!"

Her left arm heated up, pressure trapped under the unbreaking shackles of her skin. This sickly thing that she was holding in herself was...was Oliver's. And she'd been pulling on it, been dissolving it, been....

She'd done it again. She was doing it again.

Abruptly, she dropped her nails to the soft skin of her inner forearm and scratched, gouging deep liens into herself as she searched for a way to give back what she had taken. With each breath she took, with each motion of her hand, she forced that poisonous pain back into Oliver's body, back into him.

She didn't stop until her wound was raw and bleeding again.

For a moment, they stared at each other, panting.

"Okayyyy," Felicity drawled. "I really don't know what's just happened, but are you two going to brawl? Because if you are, I'm going to leave so I don't have to watch John stitch either of you back together."

Cali shook her head and turned her face away, shame and disgust clogging her throat. She couldn't control it, couldn't find that line between what was hers and what wasn't.

"Felicity," Oliver started, but Cali cut him off before he could say anything else.

"I can control people's feelings."

Surprisingly, Felicity did not laugh. Did not scoff. Did not run screaming back upstairs. She just stayed sitting, a pensive look on her face. "Okay," she said slowly. "Um, important distinction - feelings or emotions?"

"What?" Cali said.

"Well, this poses a very interesting philosophical question! Feelings and emotions are two very different things, and from what I've just seen, I'm going to say you control feelings, which is far more impressive than emotions, I think - oh, not like there's a good or bad or best power sort of thing here - but like, emotions are subconscious chemical reaction to something, whereas feelings are more conscious and more, well, controllable."

Well....those were words. Said in an order.

Really, one more existential crisis and Cali was calling it quits on this shit.

John was the one to break the silence. "What?" He said.

Very eloquent, John, Cali thought.

"I second that." she added. "What?"

Oliver said nothing, but gave her a pointed look.

Felicity flushed slightly. "Look, simply put: Emotions happen as a really fast chemical reaction to stimuli. From there, we react to those emotions and experience feelings. It's why people react differently to different situations. I might get stressed over an exam, but Cali might not. Because we're feeling something different in response to the same chemical emotion. And then there's physical feelings, like cold or hungry or..." Her eyes settled on Oliver's shoulder. "Pain is a feeling."

Cali very understandably said, "Flick, there's a reason I didn't take philosophy or psychology in school."

It made sense in a terrible way.

"So Cali wouldn't be able to control grief, but she could control what we feel because of that grief?" John asked.

Felicity shrugged. "I don't know, I've been privy to this stuff for like, not even an hour." She waved a hand at the basement. "Besides, I don't really think this is the weirdest thing going on. Oliver literally dresses up and goes out to kill people. Cali making pain a little easier to bear is a blessing next to that."

Cali cringed and very specifically didn't look at Oliver. She'd been trying to avoid mentioning the whole 'killing people' thing, because while she understood that they were bad people (exhibit a: Malcolm Merlyn) she was a little bit against the way he dealt with them. Why not just put them in prison for the rest of their lives? They'd suffer a lot more.

Oliver, it seemed, was willing to let it slide. "Does that mean you're in?" He asked casually, and very specifically didn't look at Cali.

Felicity tilted her head. "You mean as in, am I going to join your crusade?"

"Well, you're practically an honorary member of the team already."

"Hmm, so Mr Diggle said." Felicity rose from her chair, taking long steps to make her way to face Oliver directly. "No."

Oliver breathed out a chuckle. "Then why'd you upgrade my system?"

Felicity, upon realising exactly how close she'd gotten to him, backed up a step to safety. "First, because seeing a network that poorly set up hurt me. In my soul. And second..." She trailed off, eyes flickering between all of them. "I want to find Walter."

A pang of guilt scored deep into the soft flesh of Cali's stomach. She'd forgotten about Walter in all the insanity lately. She should've been looking for him, should've demanded answers from Malcolm. She'd forgotten. She'd given up.

"He was nice to me," Felicity said quietly. "And Mister Diggle told me that the notebook you use to fight crime is the same notebook that got Walter abducted. I'll help you rescue him, but that's it. Then I want to go back to my boring life of being an I.T. girl. That's my offer."

It was an offer that Oliver could agree to, Cali knew that. But she also knew it would turn out to be a lie. There was no going back after this. There would never be any going back. They were all in too deep, all bound so tightly together that they would never pull apart.

She watched as Oliver gave in with a soft, "Okay."

For a moment, nobody moved, nobody spoke, nobody breathed. The severity of that decision weighed in the air around them, rang full of promised treachery.

Felicity said, "I've been meaning to ask...is there a bathroom? 'Cause I've had to pee since I got here."

The moment broke.

John sniggered slightly as Oliver blinked once, adjusting to the change of pace. Something about him shifted, lightened, gave way to a softer smile. "Yeah," he said. "Uh, get John to show you."

"Man-"

"I need a moment with Cali," Oliver explained. Diggle gave no further protest, simply nodded and motioned for Felicity to follow him. "Felicity," Oliver added, stopping her. He took a deep breath. "Thank you."

For a moment, a blinding moment when Felicity's lips parted and her eyes twinkled, Cali could see them together. Could see the love they might have, the problems that would come with it. And she wanted that. Wanted Felicity to understand how precious Oliver's feelings were, how honoured she must be to have those feelings lavished upon her in the future.

Felicity breathed, "Yeah," and followed John upstairs.

And then it was him and Cali, alone in a basement built of secrets and missed opportunities.

Oliver said nothing for a while, he simply moved back towards the table he'd been lying on when Cali had gotten there, hefting his weight up onto it with a mere grunt. It was a typical Oliver move, to downplay his pain, to hide his weaknesses, to pretend that Cali was the enemy so it would be easier to have this conversation, it would be easier to shut her out.

She knew what he would do because it was the exact same thing that she did.

"Who shot you?" She asked in a low tone, stepping forward and picking up some gauze pads and some tape. Oliver watched her approach warily, but didn't protest her presence as she gently pulled his robe away from the wound. "Was it while you were out saving Laurel?"

Oliver hissed as she gently pressed one of the gauze pads to the bullet wound. She'd not seen anything to help fight bacteria, but she could at least get it covered so John's handiwork wouldn't be undone stupidly swiftly.

"Mom," Oliver answered tightly. "Diggle got a recording of her talking about an Undertaking, so I wanted to prove that she wasn't...she wasn't bad. And I was right. She was begging me, begging me, not to kill her. She talked about me and Thea, about how she was a mother."

Cali hummed as she used some tape to secure one side of the gauze pad, enough that she could use both of her hands to rifle through the medical kit that was abandoned on the bench ."Ollie, did she deny that she knew what the Undertaking was?"

"No, but she's not a bad person."

Memories of an early morning phone call, of horror and nausea, and a boat that was sabotaged. "She doesn't have to be a bad person to do bad things." Cali's fingers closed around a tube of Savlon cream. "You said it, she's a mother. What if she's a part of the Undertaking because it'll protect her children?"

Oliver scoffed. "You don't believe that."

No, she didn't. Not after everything she'd found out. Not after Malcolm, confessing that he'd known Moira had set up her husband and her son to die at sea. Moira Queen might be a loving mother, but she was not a loving person. She was not a forgiving person. She was a power-hungry woman who used her family as a shield while she scrabbled for some scrap of authority.

"Hey," Cali said mirthlessly, "maybe we've both just got fucked up parents."

Oliver bit his lip as Cali smeared some of the cream around the edges of the wound, and she grimaced as his muscles flexed and the stitches moved. "I guarantee you that your father is worse than my mother," he said, and if it was supposed to be a joke, Cali wasn't laughing.

She pressed the gauze pad on harder than she needed to, and made sure the tape pinched the skin. "Asshole."

"Sorry."

It was strange, Cali mused as she started cleaning up the supplies Diggle had strewn about the place. They'd been at each other's throats not ten minutes ago, and now here they were, like there'd never been a problem. Was that her, manipulating the situation? Or was it just their bond, the way they worked around each other?

"I'm sorry," she said mostly to herself as she carried some rubbish over to the bin. "About coming down here, I mean.. I know you don't want me to be involved in this part of your life, but Felicity called me. And I don't understand why you'll let her in so easily but the moment I get a hint of what you're hiding, you push me away again."

"Hell, Cali, maybe I'm scared of you."

"Well no shit, Sherlock, you made that pretty clear."

"No, Cali, I'm scared of you." There was a nuance to his tone that sliced straight across the soft underside of her tongue. "You have....so much power over me. Not just your abilities, but as a person." Oliver pulled his robe tighter around himself. "I can handle Laurel's complicated feelings, and her hot and cold hatred, and I can handle her guilt and her shame and everything we should've had. I can take that. But if you see me and you walk away, or you get hurt, or-or i lose you somehow, I can't-I wouldn't-" He broke off.

It's everything she's wanted him to say to her, and yet hearing it here and now, it just hurts.

Because she's not some breakable thing, and Oliver shouldn't be either, but he is and Cali's never been good with fragile people. She wants to be, and she keeps her hands soft so as not to scratch the glass, but Oliver is giving her something valuable and she doesn't know what to do with it.

She inhaled through her nose, long and slow. "I'm scared of me, too," she confessed. "After what happened at the hospital, what I did to you before- Ollie, I don't know how to control that." She stared at the medical kit in her hands. "I-I can't even justify it in my head. I am a monster, and I just keep expecting you to deal with that."

"Cali, the amount of stuff you've dealt with for my sake...I can handle a little bit of monster."

And she should tell him that she knew about the Gambit, that she knew about Moira, that Diggle was right and Oliver was wrong. But the truth got tangled in her vocal cords, and Oliver was finally starting to thaw, and telling him now would undo everything.

She swallowed that phone call with Felicity and didn't let it taint her smile. "So how long do you think it'll take before John kicks me out and goes on some big, impassioned rant about how you shouldn't trust your mother so blindly?"

Oliver's glare wasn't so....sharp, this time. "Five bucks says he'll walk Felicity to her car and come straight back."

Cali grinned. "Ten bucks says he waits until I leave."

Oliver stretched out his good hand. "Done."

Molten gold simmered just below Cali's wrist as Oliver's fingers brushed hers.