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The memories don’t come back all at once, and Ollie can’t shoot straight anymore. They’re connected, those two things, even if he doesn’t know how. Even if he doesn’t want to know how.
Dinah’s upset with him. It’s nothing new, but her being guilty about it is. He doesn’t get why she’s so hung up on a schmuck like him. She could do better any day of the week and twice on Sundays.
Ollie loves her. He loves her in the same, all-consuming way he loves everybody he meets. She loves him, too, but there’s something else beneath it. She hates him nearly as much. He thinks he must have done something to deserve it.
They still fall into bed together. Ollie’s got a skill for falling into bed. Sometimes, it’s easy to think he only learned the bow because it was too much trouble to seduce every bank robber he crossed paths with.
Neither of them sleeps after. They should. Ollie’d made a good faith effort at wearing her out, but there’s a strange pressure over the moment. He lies on his side and stares with the taste of her still on his tongue. She stares back.
“I cheated on you, didn’t I?” he asks.
Dinah props her head up on her hand. “I’m not sure.”
“I didn’t tell you?”
“I don’t think you wanted to,” Dinah answers.
Ollie huffs a laugh out of his nose. Dinah doesn’t find the words funny. Not so much as a twitch of the lips from her.
“Of course I didn’t want to tell you,” Ollie says. “Can’t think of many men who would. I still should have.”
“I don’t think you wanted to cheat,” Dinah says, and Ollie understands. His easy grin freezes on his face. Dinah’s eyes fall from his. “I know you didn’t.”
“What happened?” he asks.
There’s a bracing breath from Dinah. Her expression is calm like she’s going into a fight. Ollie doesn’t know how long he’s been her opponent.
“She attacked you,” she says. “Nearly killed you. I didn’t see it happen, but the scar was bad enough. You got an infection. You were in and out of it for a few days. Apparently, that’s when you and she…”
She trails off. There’s nothing to go with the image she creates, no memories rush to the surface. That’s fine. The words are bad enough on their own.
“’You and she’?” he demands. He doesn’t think he’d be so demanding if he could remember it. He doesn’t, though, and that makes it feel like it happened to somebody else. Ollie’d never let Dinah say it about somebody else. “I didn’t do much of anything, apparently.”
“You really don’t remember it?” she asks.
“Why?” Ollie asks.
Dinah sighs. Her voice isn’t as even when she answers.
“If you did, I could apologize,” she says. Her voice is more than uneven now. There’s the barest tremble in it. “I was stupid back then. A stupid kid. I never should have held that against you.”
Ollie rolls onto his back. The sheets are bunched just so that he’s exposed to the room. From what he hears about Barbara Gordon these days, he might have been scared of hidden cameras. After the show he and Dinah put on, though, there’s not much room for modesty. Besides, he’s always been a bit of an exhibitionist. It’s probably why he runs around in tights every night.
“I don’t,” Ollie says, “but you can do it anyways if you want. It might make you feel better.”
“No point in it,” Dinah says. She sounds bitter. “I can manage a guilty conscience. I’ve earned it.
Ollie doesn’t know what to say after that. He listens to the soft sound of her breathing. Then, he listens beneath that. The room feels hollow around him.
“We’re not getting back together, are we?” he asks.
“No,” Dinah answers. “No, not like we were.”
Ollie scoots closer so he can get an arm over her. He tugs her to his chest and she goes, nestled in tight like she belongs there. She had. Ten years together, and Ollie can’t remember a second of it. His body, at least, knows how to hold her. She slots against him naturally.
“Been too long?” he asks.
“You died,” she says. She sighs. “You died, and everything changed. I changed with it. I love you, but I can’t be in love with you. It’s too much like going backwards.”
“Way to hit me where it hurts,” Ollie says. “I feel like the youngest old man in history.”
Dinah’s hands are soft on him. He looks down at her wig — hair — and thinks she might be right. There’s a book about that, isn’t there? You can never go home again, or something like it. Ollie was a part of her home, and now she’s moved on.
“You can say it,” he says.
She looks up and into his eyes. He could fall in love again. He only tucks her hair behind her ear and bites the feeling back. He’s never liked breakups. Not even ones this easy.
“Say what?” she asks.
“Even if it’s just to make you feel better, say sorry,” Ollie says. He can’t look away from her. “Think of it as a parting gift, pretty bird.”
Her eyes are wet. No matter the dye on her head, her lashes are still black. It makes the blue of her eyes look like a sea beneath the beginnings of her tears.
“I’m sorry,” she says. She blinks away the wetness. “I’m so sorry, Ollie.”
She’s not really talking to him. He kisses the top of her head anyways. At least it’s easy to fall asleep beside her. It’s easier than anything.
The sounds of Star City outside the window are a comfort to him. The feeling of Dinah against his body is even better. His chest rises and falls in a pattern steady enough to set a watch to.
The memories come on their own time. The first one comes that night. He wakes at 3AM feeling like his skin is burning away. He feels like he’s dying, like there’s nothing in the world but agony. It’s a single moment, played again and again and again.
By the time it recedes, he’s covered in sweat and the room is full to capacity. Dinah’s at his side, hands hovering over his skin. Roy — bigger by far than he should be — is shirtless with a gun in his hands and Connor — Ollie doesn’t even know how big he should be — is gently comforting Mia.
His throat is raw enough that he tastes copper with every inhale. He’s been tortured enough that he knows what it feels like to shred your throat with your own screams. He tries to catch his breath.
“Ollie,” Roy says, “fuck, what was that?”
“I died in an explosion,” Ollie says, and he hears Connor’s breath catch. "I wanted it to happen, didn't I?"
Connor’s got the darkest skin of them all, but he manages to look ashen. He was there, Ollie can tell.
“Is that what happened?” Mia asks.
He relates to her the most in this room. She’s on the outside of their group, unsure in the same way Ollie is. She’s only known them a few weeks, and Ollie only knows the people they all were. Not the people they are now.
“You remembered?” Connor asks with wide eyes.
Ollie remembers a moment. Just the one, the last before it was all over and he was in that blackness he doesn’t want to think about. He knows what it feels like to be torn apart to his component pieces now. A flash of pain that he remembers like he was there, that his mind lived through a thousand times in the second it took him to recall.
He feels it slot into the place the memory should be. The pain fades in the way all pain does in recollection. It happens between seconds, faster than the moment of his death had been. He sits up. His arms are still shaky, but Dinah lets him do it without help. He must have been more similar to the Ollie of the future than he’d thought.
“Just the dying,” Ollie says. He runs a hand through his damp hair. “Remind me to avoid that.”
It settles into the background noise of himself. He’s always known how he died. There was never a yawning blackness all around him when he reached for the memory.
Ollie knows that’s not true. He can feel that knowledge warring with the other. For a moment, it seems neither will win. His brain bends under the strain of two truths.
They both lose. They bend and fit into a space big enough for one. Ollie feels it like an ice pick in his temple. He winces and tries to stand.
“Take it easy, old man,” Roy says. He shoves his gun into his waistband. “Just because you got three people here who can lift you up doesn’t mean they want to.”
Ollie ignores him. Roy doesn’t kick up a fuss about it. Things really can change.
“I could pick him up,” Mia protests. “Unless you’re the wimp you’re talking about, there’s four—”
Mia goes red and turns around. Roy snorts and throws his head back to laugh. Connor covers his eyes.
Ollie looks down. Yeah, he’s still naked. If there’s one boon the life he’s lived, it’s awful hard to make him blush. He still snatches a pillow to hide his delicate bits behind.
“Give us a second,” Dinah says to the kids. “We’ll talk about it once we’re all dressed.”
Ollie shoos them off with the hand not holding the pillow to him. “Absolutely not talking about anything. So far as I’m concerned, tonight never happened. Especially this last part.”
Connor’s the first to listen. He’s gone so quietly and quickly that Ollie barely notices him go despite looking right at him. He thinks the memory bothered Connor more than he let on. A lot bothers him more than he lets on, though.
Then, it’s Mia. She grabs Roy by the back of his shirt and drags him out. He’s laughing too hard to put up much of a fight.
“God, isn’t that your dad?” she asks him as she goes.
“If you can’t laugh at family, who can you laugh at?” Roy answers.
“I’m going to remember that next time you break your stupid sunglasses,” she says.
The last thing Ollie sees is Roy slinging an arm over her shoulders and saying, “didn’t know you cared, little sis.”
Then, the door’s closed and he and Dinah are alone in the room. She speaks first.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
Ollie sits down on the edge of the bed. He puts his face in his hands and slumps.
“What’s a little indecent exposure among friends?” he tries. “I’m sure I’ll be able to show my face sometime next century.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know,” Ollie says. He sighs. “Yeah, I know.”
They don’t talk about it. It’s not fair to say that, though. Dinah tries and Ollie doesn’t allow it. He doesn’t allow quite a bit. He’s gotten enough perspective from himself to recognize it.
Dinah leaves in the morning. Everybody pretends the last night didn’t happen. The memories keep coming. None of them explain why he can’t shoot anymore.
He makes a good faith effort to relearn how with Connor — Green Arrow — and it’s strange. Ollie goes down to the range wearing a costume that doesn’t fit quite right and hefts a bow that should feel like a part of him. It doesn’t. His hands shake so badly he can’t even nock an arrow.
“It’s alright,” Connor says. His uniform is perfect. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll come in time.”
He’s disappointed. He tries to pretend he’s not, but Ollie’s not so easily fooled. Every tell Connor’s got, he got from Ollie. Still, Connor tries to comfort him. He’s too good to have Queen blood in his veins.
“Just chili withdrawals,” Ollie says with a grin plastered across his face. “Now get me to a stove before I start hallucinating.”
The smile’s a lie and not a particularly good one. It’s never worked on the people he loves. It works on Connor, though, and that makes Ollie sad in a way he can’t quite explain. How much time with his flesh-and-blood son has Ollie been robbed of because of his memories?
“If you’d like,” Connor offers, “we can spar. I always feel better after a bit of exercise.”
He smiles. Ollie wonders just how much of his own DNA has made it through to Connor. Is this smile like one of Ollie’s, just real enough to bluster with, or does it go all the way to the core of him?
“Did you hear the thing about the chili?” Ollie groans. He’s only arguing for the sake of it. He knows he’s going to go along with it before he even opens his mouth. “You’re killing your dad, kid.”
Connor brightens. He always does when he hears Ollie say ‘dad.’ That’s got to come from Ollie, that craving for love. He wants to belong just as badly as Ollie always has. He’s smart enough not to handle it the same way.
“Just a round,” Connor says.
Ollie groans again, but he walks to the training mats all the same. He hands back Connor’s bow — Ollie’s bow, he doesn’t remember giving it up — and shakes out his limbs. He’s going to need to be limber for this one. Nothing to get him back in the swing of things like getting knocked around by somebody who can’t even rent a car yet.
It’s got to be one of life’s big jokes that Ollie’s managed to attach himself to not just one, but two of the world’s best fighters. He’s seen Connor and Dinah go at it, and he’s already counting out acetaminophen in his head because of it.
Connor goes easy on him. It’s a good thing, too, because Ollie still gets mopped. Connor keeps a half-smile on his face the whole time. It’s terrifying what counts as family bonding for people like them.
Ollie’s covered in sweat and Connor’s barely breathing heavy. He steps around hits like they’re not there and returns them with firm taps against everywhere Ollie’s leaving himself open. Tap, outside edge of his elbow; tap, high on his ribs; tap, back of his neck.
It’s hard to tell what triggers it. Connor’s moving past another of Ollie’s slow-moving punches and suddenly Ollie’s furious. It grips him hard and then Ollie’s snarling. He’s looking at Connor and the outfit’s right, but the setting isn’t. They should be outside, the sun blazing as hot as Ollie’s temper.
Connor’s expression matches what Ollie thinks it should, at least. His face open with surprise, softly hurt like he doesn’t know if he’s allowed the feeling. Ollie hates him. He hates something, at least. He’s so full of it that it should be superheating the air around him.
And Connor, well, he’s there. He’s there in reality and in the doubled version overlaid with it. Ollie swings at him hard, harder than he should for a friendly sparring match. If he had the wherewithal to pay attention, he’d know that it’s harder than anybody but the worst criminals deserve.
“Back off, sonny,” he spits out because this strange echo demands it.
Connor almost doesn’t catch it. Ollie’s fist barrels towards him and Connor freezes. Something happens behind his eyes and Ollie knows that neither one of them is in the right moment. When Connor finally moves, though, he handles Ollie just as easily as he has all day. He brings up his hand and tap, back of Ollie’s fist.
It’s a testament to how hard Ollie swung that he ends up on his ass from just that. He overbalances and trips over his feet. Reality resolves itself in the crash of his body against the mat. His head spins and he can only just see Connor’s stricken expression.
He remembers pushing Connor in some sun-baked parking lot in the middle of the country. He’d been furious, the sort of anger that was so much bigger than himself that he couldn’t see for all the red in his vision. Like all of Ollie’s anger, though, it’d been hiding something else. He doesn’t remember what it was that’d been lurking beneath it, only the shape of it. It’d been a behemoth, overwhelming enough to turn him on his own son.
“Oliver?” Connor asks.
He’s not ‘Dad’ anymore. Ollie wants to gather Connor into his arms and hold him until he is again, but he has to deal with the same disorientation as always. It’s not until the pain in his skull is only from the fall that he can stumble to his feet.
“Connor, are you alright?” he asks.
Connor nods. He’s looking at Ollie like he’s not sure whether the threat is past.
“You didn’t hit me,” Connor answers.
“That’s not what I meant,” Ollie says, and he gives in to the urge to hug Connor.
Thankfully, Connor doesn’t flinch away. If he had, Ollie wouldn’t know what to do with himself. It’s not like Ollie’s a threat to him, not at this distance, but he needs the reassurance of Connor going with the embrace. For a moment, all he does is go with it, body loose when Ollie holds it to his own. It’s a relief when Connor’s hands come up to tentatively return it, when he lets Ollie cradle him close like Connor’s young enough that Ollie can squeeze away a nightmare between his arms.
“I’m sorry, kiddo,” Ollie says to the silence of the room. The only sound is his own heavy breathing. “I don’t know what happened. I just… I don’t know.”
“You remembered what you thought about me, didn’t you?” Connor asks. The question feels like resignation. “How you felt before you…”
Ollie only holds him tighter. “I love you, Connor. You’re my son. That’s how I feel about you.”
Connor relaxes an imperceptible amount. It’s that training of his that has to allow tension in such finite degrees. Ollie doesn’t have the control over his body to carry his emotions in the strain of his body. He keeps it in his chest instead, spinning around beneath the harsh pounding of his pulse.
“Were you mad at me when you died?” Connor asks.
The question makes Ollie mad, but this is a more familiar anger than the last. It’s a welcome one. Ollie’s furious Connor has to ask.
“I don’t know,” Ollie admits, “but I’m not mad at you now. I couldn’t be. Don’t worry about the other Oliver, the one I was before. That guy was a dick.”
Connor hugs him a while longer. Times Connor lets Ollie close like this, when he lets himself be younger than he is, are rare. Ollie relishes it. He knows what it’s like to want a dad and find nobody there. Being able to comfort Connor soothes a bit of that ache in himself, too.
After a while, Connor shifts his feet and Ollie spares him having to ask to be released. He gives one final squeeze tight enough to take Connor off his feet before he frees him. The air is charged with things that could have been said, that maybe should have been. Ollie takes the weight of them off Connor.
“Did I get you all sweaty enough, or do you need another hug?” he asks.
Connor’s uncomfortable. The fact that nervous energy looks so strange on him only makes it more obvious.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks.
His offer is different from Dinah’s. There’s no resigned understanding that nothing will come of it. Dinah knows Ollie will only laugh until it’s not a joke anymore, then run from himself and anybody who knows him once it becomes too much to bear. Connor doesn’t have enough practice dealing with Ollie to recognize a lost cause.
“Would you want to?” Ollie asks instead of refusing outright.
“No,” Connor answers, but he doesn’t sound defeated. “I wouldn’t want to, but I’d do it anyway.”
“I’m not much for talk therapy,” Ollie says, a more firm dismissal.
Connor tries not to look away. He manages half of it, head forward and eyes on Ollie’s collar. His voice is soft.
“I wouldn’t talk about it for me,” he says.
Ollie gets that. It’s hard to watch the people you love suffer. It’s torture. In Connor’s place, Ollie’d be desperate to shoulder some of the burden, too. It makes the fact that Ollie doesn’t have any reassurance to give worse.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ollie admits.
“I’m scared,” Connor says. His hand comes up to hang between them, unable to cross the barrier between his space and Ollie’s. “I know you remembered the day outside the diner when you found out I was your son. I know you did. You said that same thing now that you did back then.”
“Connor—”
“No,” Connor says firmly, refusing to let himself be interrupted. “I need to say it. You say you love me, but you didn’t. Not before. I think you hated me.”
“I didn’t hate you,” Ollie says.
He feels the situation spiraling away from him. It comes with the same sense of secondary anger as before. Ollie starts to get mad because it’s easier than being sad. He bites his tongue.
“But you don’t know,” Connor says. “You don’t. Can you tell me for a fact that you didn’t hate me? Can you tell me that you won’t hate me again?”
They both know that he can’t. Ollie clenches his jaw against the frustration of that. He wants to be able to comfort Connor, but he can’t think of a damn thing to say. It’s never stopped him before, though, and it won’t stop him today.
“I can tell you that I love you now,” he says. “I can tell you that you’re my son and that nothing I remember is going to change that.”
Connor nods. He loses the fight to keep his head up and speaks his next words into the ground.
“I love you, too, Dad,” he says. He doesn’t fidget, but Ollie recognizes the impulse is there. He sees it in the set of his shoulders. “I’m going to get changed.”
He turns to leave. Ollie’d been right: he hadn’t been able to help Connor, just like he’d been worried about.
“Connor, wait,” he calls after him.
The answer he gets is the click of the training room door closing. Connor’s run to be alone with his feelings. That, Ollie knows for a fact, Connor got from him.
They don’t talk about it again. Connor shelves the feelings to be handled later and Ollie can’t think of how to broach the topic after that. He decides to let sleeping dogs lie and pretends it’s not his own cowardice.
It all comes back to the bow. It always has with Ollie. He fucking knows it’s at the core of his problem. He feels it pressing at the edges of his awareness every time he thinks about shooting.
He spends hours a day in the shooting range. He still doesn’t manage to fire an arrow. It’s agony.
He hurts the people he loves because of course he does. Why wouldn’t he? If he can ruin one thing about himself, he might as well ruin them all. It gets so bad that Connor can hardly speak to him. Eventually, Mia leaves to stay with the Titans for a while. She can’t bear the tension.
“I don’t care about the person you used to be,” she says before she leaves, “but I don’t like how the person you are is changing.”
It’s a fair shake. It gives Ollie something else to beat himself up about when he’s at the range. He wraps his fingers around the bow and catalogs the feelings it brings.
His throat is tight. Sweat is beading at his temples and down his back. The hand holding the bow is shaking and the other one is shaking worse. Most confusing of all, though, is the dread in the pit of his stomach.
It gets to be too much. He locks himself in the range and resolves not to come out until he manages to hit a target. Six hours later, he decides to settle for shooting an arrow at all. By the time the sun has set, he just wants to draw the bow. Hold the bow up and pull back the string, that’s all.
“God fucking dammit,” he mutters when he can’t manage that. He bites his lip hard enough to taste copper in the indents of his teeth. “Fuck.”
Of all the things he’s learned as a vigilante, the most important has been the sixth sense telling him when he’s being watched. It was also the first. If it hadn’t been, the lifespan of Green Arrow would have been a much shorter and bloodier affair. That, at least, operates independently of his ability to shoot a bow.
Ollie becomes aware of somebody behind him in the space between seconds. He turns before he can think about it because some instincts go deeper than memory. It’s Hal. He’s wearing a beat-up leather jacket and a pair of brown corduroys. There’s gray at his temples that Ollie doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember—
—Hal had worn that in the desert. He’d been glad as all Hell to see Ollie, face splitting in a broad grin that’d settled across lines Ollie hadn’t recognized on him. It’d still been him, though, which had surprised Ollie. Because Hal had been—
—anything about this. Ollie comes back to himself with a strangled gasp. There’s so much pressure in his head that it feels like his skull should blow apart from it. Hal frowns.
“You alright, buddy?” Hal asks.
Another jolt of pain. Ollie sucks in a breath through his teeth. He can barely see. The world is wavering like heat rising from the asphalt in one of the towns Ollie and Hal had driven through on their trip to see America.
“Ollie?” Hal asks again. He’s more concerned this time, brow furrowed harder. “What’s wrong?”
The only reason Ollie hasn’t fallen over is that his knees are locked in place. His vision splits. He sees Hal and he sees nothing. It’s agony that Ollie knows the blankness is hiding something. Ollie has to speak, to ask the question that seems impossible to get out. Something being hard has never stopped him before, and it won’t stop him now.
“How—”
“—much do you remember about the last time we saw each other?” he’d asked.
Hal’s face had twisted. “Let’s not go into that right now.”
The desert air had blown, hot and gritty, over the both of them. That answer hadn’t cut it. Not with everything that’d happened between them.
“I have to know, Hal,” Ollie’d pushed.
He’d always been good at pushing, and he had better reason than most to do it now. Hal had squeezed shut his fists and jaw and eyes. Rage had boiled across him, and he’d turned around. Still, he hadn’t been fast enough to hide the splash of something green across his eyes. It’d looked like the shadow of a mask, but not one Ollie’d recognized.
“Let’s not go into that right now,” Hal had bit out like each word had pained him.
But they’d needed to go into it after everything that’d—
“—are you here?” Ollie asks.
Hal looks at him. He’s sad now. Ollie remembers this from their days on the road together, too. It was how Hal looked at the end, when the strain of it had started to wear on them and their days had been filled with more fighting than fondness.
“You don’t remember, do you?”
“Remember what?” Ollie asks. People dance around the topic of his death, but they don’t even acknowledge Hal’s absence. Ollie’s one of them. “Hal, where have you been?”
Hal shoves his hands in his pockets and looks at his feet. Green Lanterns don’t feel fear. Not like Ollie and the constant terror that he only just beats back every second of the day. They don’t feel it at all, which means that it must be something else on Hal’s face. He can’t be scared of this conversation.
“I’ve told you before,” Hal eventually says. “A few people have, actually. You just don’t remember it.”
“I’d remember,” Ollie replies immediately. The idea that he wouldn’t just forget Hal, but forget him again and again is beyond belief. “Of course I’d remember talking to you.”
Hal sighs. “I didn’t want to come back, you know. I figured it was best for both of us if I didn’t. You needed space from me. From everything.”
“Fuck you,” Ollie says. Brows raised in surprise, Hal looks up at him. “Like Hell you get to decide what’s best for me. I don’t need a nursemaid.”
Hal huffs a laugh. “I guess it was expecting too much for dying to mellow you out.”
“A hell of a lot too much,” Ollie says, “and I’m not surprised. That ring didn’t pick you for your smarts.”
It’s the sort of jibe he and Hal have been throwing around for years. Hal, though, doesn’t respond in kind. He only pulls his hand out of his pocket and holds it up. Ollie doesn’t realize what he’s looking at until Hal speaks.
“The ring picked wrong,” Hal says, and then Ollie sees the paler skin the ring used to cover. The expression on Hal’s face doesn’t look sad, exactly, but it could be. It’s the sort of resignation only grief can bring. “I was really hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you about this again.”
“You didn’t tell me about this,” Ollie says. The argument is second nature. Ollie disagrees because it’s the easiest move to make. “Come on, I’d remember those little blue assholes taking your ring.”
Hal’s hand drops for his own examination. He wiggles his middle finger like he’s unused to the absence. How recently had all this happened?
“They didn’t,” he replies. He seems ashamed, but whatever it is doesn’t hide the pride in his voice. “Nobody could, not until I did it myself.”
“You gave up your ring?” Ollie asks. He thinks of the Hal from their days on the road — the plans he’d made during a time that feels like yesterday, but was so long ago it makes his head spin — and confusion curdles into disappointment. “For Carol?”
Hal furrows his brows. Ollie’s wrong, and the relief should be embarrassing. It isn’t. For all the years he’d held onto Dinah, he’d never stopped holding onto Hal, too. He’s always been selfish.
“No,” Hal says after a beat of silence. “No, not for her. I forget how much you’re missing.”
There’s a jittery feeling starting in Ollie’s throat that doesn’t have anything to do with the bow in his hand. It has everything to do with the bow in his hand. He has a sense of vertigo like the world is rearranging itself beneath his feet, but the memory still doesn’t come. Ollie gets mad because it’s all he’s ever been good at.
“Then tell me,” he says. He sounds like an invalid, frustrated and unsteady. “Quit with the man of mystery act.”
Hal gives a sad, sideways smile and nods. He puts his hand back in his pocket and turns to walk around the room. His voice, when he speaks, isn’t any less clear for it.
“Coast City was destroyed,” he says, and it takes Ollie a moment to understand.
“What?” he asks. He remembers a ticket, a moment of confusion just as profound as this. His mouth is filled with the taste of blood, but he knows there’s none. “When?”
“Couple years back,” Hal answers offhandedly. His voice sounds like it’s coming from right behind Ollie, from right in front of him. “Seven million people, give or take a few.”
He laughs his misery out in a short huff, a brittle sound that shatters against the inside of Ollie’s head. He winces, then flinches when it dislodges something else.
—“should feel great!” Kara had said.
She’d been holding a bundle to her chest. A baby, new life in the aftermath of something else. It’d been beautiful that something so precious had come in such a dark time. Ollie’d hated her with everything in him. Her happiness, her pride.
Her love.
“Right,” he’d said.
He’d stalked away from them, from their successes. He hadn’t succeeded. He’d lost more than ever before. He’d taken it from himself. He’d—
Ollie’s panting. The ache is bad enough that he can hardly see. He squints against it and tracks Hal he continues pacing, attention on anything but Ollie. He’s still talking.
“I wasn’t even there for it,” he says. “I came back and the whole state was on fire. Probably got smoke all the way up here in Star, but I wasn’t paying much attention to the wind patterns, you know?”
Another harsh laugh. “I did everything right. Years and years of trying my best, and it didn’t matter. My whole life wiped out over some stupid scheme. It really takes it out of you.”
There’s defeat in his voice. Beneath that, it’s all pain. The sort that makes the agony of remembering seem like nothing. Hal had lost his—
“—home, Ollie,” Hal had said. The flames of the monument had turned him into a silhouette, his face revealed in orange and red streaks of light. “And now all that’s left is an enduring flame.”
They’d been close enough to touch if they’d wanted. Hal had still sounded incalculably distant. He’d been the only Green Lantern there, which meant Ollie’d been free to be terrified by how far away Hal had gone. He’d tried to catch him with whatever he could think to say.
“I know, Hal,” he’d said.
Hal’s face had twisted into something beyond grief. It’d been beyond any feeling Ollie’d known. It’d been as complete as it’d been alien. Not even Hal’s feelings had been within Ollie’s grasp anymore. He’d reached out and put a hand on Hal’s shoulder, tried to make Hal familiar once again.
“We can’t win them all,” he’d said, “and we can’t do anything to bring back your town. But Supes was right. We can try our damnedest to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Every word had been the wrong one, but Ollie’d never been good with them. He’d always been a man of action. There weren’t any to take. He couldn’t avenge the city for Hal, couldn’t fix it with a snap of his—
The pain is tremendous. It feels like it’s eating him alive, like there’s nothing but pain. Ollie remembers what it feels like to die.
This is worse. It feels like dying twice, three times over. Multiplied again and again until there’s nothing but pain that’s so profound it’s hardly even recognizable as such. It feels like dying seven million times, all at once.
Hal’s bigger than he should be, the shadows behind him darker than the lights in the room should allow. He’s still pacing his circuit around the room, still keeping his eyes away from Ollie. Still talking.
“Stop,” Ollie tries to say. It’s hardly more than a moan. He knows in the way of anybody trained to spot danger that it’s Hal doing this to him. “Please, stop.”
Hal doesn’t.
“I went a little off the rails after that,” he says. “No more Corps. No more Guardians. No more anything. If I had enough power, I could have fixed it. That’s the thing, Ollie, I could have fixed everything if I was just a little stronger.
“I only made things worse.” His voice was low. Not in the way of a person’s, but of something greater and more terrifying. “I killed again and again and again. You wouldn’t believe how many people, Ollie. I hope you wouldn’t, at least.”
“Hal,” Ollie grunts.
It’s killing him. Whatever it is that Hal’s doing, it’s killing Ollie. He might not have the ring anymore, but whatever he’s gotten instead is so much worse. It’s awesome in the biblical sense, the way that terrifies as much as it inspires. Ollie won’t survive it if he continues.
He’s lucked into staying on his feet. It’s only because his knees are locked and he hasn’t pitched too far forward. He has to stop Hal before he makes an awful mistake. Before he makes another.
Batgirl had been on the ground. Hal had been in the air. Green Lantern — the new one, the impostor — had been on his back. He’d been holding him still so they could put their plan in action.
No.
No more plans. It’d needed to end. Parallax and Hal were different people. Ollie hadn’t understood until then. The Hal he knew never would have killed a girl with the wave of his hand and brushed it off in the same breath
Oliver raises his bow. He’s still got his quiver on his back, still got his costume on. This is like breathing.
He should be shaking from the pain, but he’s never been more steady. He pulls an arrow, nocks it, raises his bow. Hal turns around. His clothes have melted away, have been replaced with the flowing green robes of the Spectre. He grins at Ollie, though, and the face is all him. It’s cavalier and honest and the slightest bit amused.
“It all came down to power, Ollie,” he says. He doesn’t make a move to defend himself. He leaves his hands by his sides, lets his cape fly in the nonexistent breeze. “Everything was about power, and I just didn’t have enough.”
Ollie’s got the arrowhead facing him dead-on. For the first time since he came back, Ollie doesn’t want the bow. He doesn’t want drawing it to feel like breathing, doesn’t want his body to make automatic adjustments as he sways in place. He can’t help it.
He’s in a memory and he’s not. Hal had been in a cape, sure, but not this one. It’d had shoulder pads—and the light of the training room plays so strangely off the gray in Hal’s—around them is nothing, is the void of a space outside time—
“Oliver,” Hal says and had said.
It’s an endless recursive loop, the words repeated then and now, then and now. Hal’s something bigger than himself now, is holding forces beyond Ollie’s comprehension, but Ollie’s always been nothing more than a person. To split himself between reality and memory, past and present, is too much.
But he has to see this through. He knows it. He can’t feel anything but the sharpness of the bowstring cutting into his fingers, but he still opens his mouth. He still plays his part.
“Hal,” he says and had said.
He lets go. Hal makes some noise in the instant he does, some aborted word that could have been, “no.” Ollie can’t hear it. He can’t hear anything but the whistle of the arrow as it cuts towards Hal. Ollie’d shot his best friend, his partner, his—
The arrow stops the instant before it makes contact. It hovers in the air, point trembling against Hal’s chest and Hal looks down at it with curiosity.
“Power,” Hal murmurs. Present and past snap back, the elastic of the moment breaking. He sighs. “Not enough. Oliver…”
He doesn’t find the words. The arrow clatters to the ground. Ollie remains on his feet a bit longer than that. It’s a matter of pride. He lasts long enough that he can look up from the wooden shaft on the ground, that he can meet the sad look Hal sends him.
He falls. It must be from the pain, but it doesn’t hurt. He’s reached a point beyond pain. He’s beyond anything but the darkness of his eyes rolling back in his head. The oblivion doesn’t last long.
He’s aware of himself before he’s even hit the ground. There’s rustling fabric and hands on him. Hal, still dressed like the Spectre, has caught him. He lowers Ollie to the ground gently.
“I’m sorry,” he says. There’s no more of that otherworldly echo. “You had to know.”
Ollie’s eyes are wet. He only knows it when he clutches at Hal with desperate fingers. His bow has clattered to the ground beside him, and he can’t pay it any mind besides being grateful it freed his hands for this.
“Hal,” Ollie pants. The pain in his head is still pounding into him, but it’s nothing compared to the pain in his chest. “I was always sorry.”
Hal rests Ollie’s head in his lap and looks down at him. His face is more peaceful now than it’d ever been in life. He smooths a hand across Ollie’s forehead.
“I know,” he says.
Hal had died. Ollie’d killed him. He’d fired that shot and it’d been the right thing, the good thing. The world had lost Hal a long time ago, and the person wearing his skin wasn’t doing a thing but disrespecting the memory of a great man.
“I didn’t want to do it,” Ollie says. The memories are fitting into the places they should be. He has weeks of longing that slot into the empty spots they’ve always belonged. “I missed you.”
Hal’s eyes are sad when he looks down at Ollie. “I know.”
The truth they’d spoken in circles around for years is on the tip of his tongue. The pain fades enough that Ollie can think. He says it because there’s already so much between them that it can’t do any harm to brush away the mess and see what it’s all built on.
“I love you,” he says.
Hal brings the corner of his mouth up in a smile. He brushes a thumb across his lips and makes the barest kissing sound. Then, he presses that same finger against Ollie’s mouth. The pad of his finger traces Ollie’s bottom lip and it feels warm from the indirect kiss.
“I know,” Hal says. He shakes his head and the sadness is back. “I loved you, too.”
It’s a goodbye. Ollie and Hal have been one long goodbye from the very beginning, everything counting down to the next farewell. This is one of the worst, even if only because of everything that came before.
“Where are you going?” Ollie asks. “Is this it? All this just to never see you again?”
Hal lifts his head, but he’s looking past the walls. Past the city around them, the country. Ollie can see those eyes looking into everything. Everyone.
“I have a job,” Hal says eventually. He looks back down to Ollie and his eyes are the same, warm brown Ollie’s been watching for years. “It’s not the kind that lets me make time for personal calls. I shouldn’t see you again.”
“But will you?” Ollie asks. He recovers enough that he can reach up and grab the hand Hal still has petting across his forehead. He squeezes it. “You said you loved me, but do you still?”
Hal laughs. “You never change, do you?”
Ollie can’t so much as smile. He only waits. Hal looks away first.
“The part of me that’s still Hal does,” he answers before Ollie can take it as a rejection. “There’s more of me than that now, though. So much more.”
“I don’t care about the rest,” Ollie says. His eyes are wet at the corners, but it’s only because of his fury at the way things are always destined to go between them. Hal’s always going to be something more, something drawn to the sky, and Ollie is too much of this planet. “I care about you, Hal. Just you.”
“Who am I?” Hal asks.
“Fuck you,” Ollie answers.
Hal’s laugh this time is louder. “That your final answer?”
He’s always been handsome. Hell, he’s almost boring because of it. He’s good-looking and tall and brave and a million other things that make him the factory default wet dream. He still manages to be even better when he smiles.
“That’s who you are,” Ollie answers. He doesn’t look away from Hal. “This, right here, is Hal. Don’t you fucking forget it.”
Ollie’s tired. It’d crept up on him how much. Hal squeezes his hand.
“You’re doing this, aren’t you?” Ollie asks, the sleepiness too convenient not to be questioned.
Hal nods. Ollie yawns.
“You need some sleep,” he says.
“I’ll sleep when I’m—”
“Don’t,” Hal says firmly. His voice is softer when he continues. “Don’t. I’ll be back.”
Ollie’s too drowsy to be disagreeable. He lets his eyes slide shut.
“Stay until I’m asleep,” Ollie asks him. It’s a struggle to open his eyes again, to focus on Hal. “Please.”
Hal nods. “I will. Not like it’s going to take long.”
“You’re an asshole,” Ollie says.
His eyes are closed. He hears Hal huff a laugh.
“Sure, sure,” Hal says. A pause. “I missed you, too.”
Ollie’s too tired to answer with the same ‘I know’ bullshit Hal had been pulling earlier. He’s not that upset about it, though. He’ll have time for it later. The memories hadn’t come back all at once, but Hal had. Ollie can’t say he’d prefer it the other way around.
He can’t say anything once he’s asleep. He can only fall into dreams of years he’d lived and feel the faint sensation of lips brushing against his own. They take the same path as Hal’s thumb earlier, but it’s no surprise. You can always trust a pilot to make a flight plan.