These Prison Walls (An Arrow: Season 7 Fanfiction)

Chapter 9: Slabside Release

'Get up, 4587. You got a visitor,' the guard said, coming in front of the prison cell door, dangling the handcuffs in front of him. 

Oliver was let into the visitation ward, and he made his way through the area to where he saw something hunched over, covered in black, on the other side of the visitation booth. The person raised their head and looked directly at him. The face of Ricardo Diaz stared right back at him with beady black eyes. 

'Hello, Oliver,' he said softly. Oliver walked slowly to the bench, and they both took up their phones and began to talk to one another. 'I see that prison life hasn't been treating you so well,' Diaz remarked, but there was no concern in it. 

'You listen to me very carefully -' 

'I don't think you're in the place to be giving demands right now...' Diaz looked over to see a family next to them, with the littlest girl speaking into the phone. '... Not unless you want a whole bunch of innocent people to die.' Oliver sighed in defeat. 'When I heard that you were getting released today, it felt as if... my last chance at payback was getting away. And I couldn't have that.'

'So that's your play? You're gonna come after me in a federal prison?' Diaz leaned forward. 

'See, I've been in and out of places like this my whole life. I know how to handle guards like that. Now you, brother, they don't see you as Green Arrow in here. You're just a number. It's pretty dehumanising, isn't it? But you weren't thinking about that when you were locking these people up in here.' 

'I'm not gonna do that to you. I'm gonna end you.' 

'You're going to die today.' He pulled the phone from his ear and spoke into the receiving end. 'And I'm gonna be the one who's gonna do it. But before that... I'm gonna make you suffer... the way you made me suffer. And when I'm gone with you, oh, I'm just gonna, you know, pay a little visit to Felicity... yeah - and little William, and your sweet sister Evelyn. And I'm gonna make sure, that this time, I finish the job.' Those last words angered him, and he began to violently slam the phone against the glass, causing it to crack and break as Ricardo Diaz stood, his work complete. The guards dragged Oliver away, as he cried out, 

'Hey! Let me go! That's Ricardo Diaz! That's Ricardo Diaz!' As Diaz walked out to the visitation ward, the guards tasered Oliver, and he collapsed with a groan. 

Hours later... 

A fight had broken out in the prison, no thanks in particular to Ricardo Diaz, who, after his prison visit to Oliver, coerced the prisoners to break out of their cells and start assaulting the prison guards. Now, he sat in the control room of the mess hall, watching the prisoners over the security cameras beat and kill the guards as they tried and failed to stop them. Getting up, he attached a bomb to the side of a control panel. 

'You planning some kind of light show or something?' one of the prisoners, Brick, one of Oliver's old foes, asked. 

'Something like that.' 

'It's nice to know someone hates Queen as much as I do.' 

'If it wasn't for him and his sister, I'd still be running Star City.' 

'Yeah, me too. They're cockroaches. They refuse to die.' Just then the chaos down below in the mess hall was interrupted by a familiar shout. 

'Diaz!' The activity came to a standstill. Diaz walked out onto the railing with Brick by his side.