Threadbare | Arrow

Chapter Eight

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'

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"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?