Threadbare | Arrow

Chapter Eleven

AUTHORS NOTE: Mature Content Warning

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"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.