oliver sparks ☆ oliver queen. (nock) wrote in dunhavenic, @ 2018-12-10 23:17:00 |
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At some point over the course of several weeks, Oliver had become much more acquainted with his other self than he had been over the past year or so. Before then, he’d caught glimpses of that other life. He’d watched both of his parents die, remembered pieces of his time on Lian Yu, and off. He could recall various parts of his relationship with Felicity, and others, too, like Laurel, and Shado, and Sara. Each memory had been just enough to make him realize that there was no comparison to the life he lead here, where he was happy and fulfilled and free. The other Oliver was never free. He was held captive by his experiences, by the choices that had lead him home, and the ones he’d made for the benefit of Star City. He was a prisoner to his guilt, and his shame, and his unfaltering sense of duty to the memory of his father and each person who had died after that. Above all else, that Oliver was weary and, though he’d never be able to admit it to himself much less anyone else, he was lonely. Oliver had known that even without a solid stream of memories from the man. But now that was all different. The moment Oliver had woken up, he’d known that something had changed. It wasn’t just the way that it took him several silently panicked moments to remember who he was or where he was, or the way his body stiffened as he quickly surveyed the room for every possible exit and easily attainable weapons. It wasn’t even just the way his eyes finally settled on Finnley and felt the squeeze of all of the joy and pain that came with loving Felicity the way that the other Oliver did. All of those things were easily explained by the onslaught of dreams he knew he must have had the night before because that other life was so much clearer now than ever before. It was Oliver himself that was different. He knew it the moment he’d come to his senses. As a man in another life who was always so hyper aware of himself and everything around him, it was only fitting that he’d felt it without even having to see the evidence of the change. Silently, stealthily, Oliver untangled himself from his sleeping fiancee and let himself into the attached bathroom. He locked the door behind him--something he never did anymore--and immediately pulled off the shirt he’d slept in the night before. And there before him was a roadmap of memories. As he twisted and turned to see himself in the full length mirror, he could clearly remember what had gotten him here. Yao Fei’s arrow, Slade’s torture, his initiation into the Bratva, Constantine’s tattoo, the shark bite he’d gotten in the Amazon, his defeat at the hands of Ra’s al Ghul. His fingers etched over each memory that he could reach, only an unmatched sense of self-control keeping him together. He didn’t know how any of this was possible. After all, he had never physically lived through those memories, even if they felt like his own. But here were the marks of another man, a man who was twenty percent scar tissue and one hundred percent damaged. Oliver knew without having to test it that, if he had to slip on the green hood right then and there, there would be nothing stopping him from being able to be the Green Arrow. Closing his eyes, Oliver tried to process through what he knew, tried to unpack what was happening to him and what it meant for this life if that life was deciding to bleed through so thoroughly. Leaning over the sink, he turned on the faucet as quietly as he could and splashed water over his face, hoping it would wake him up to what had to be a convincing nightmare. When he righted himself, though, there was no mistaking the fact that the changes were very real. He inhaled sharply and grabbed his shirt to pull it back on before slipping back out of the bathroom and into the bedroom he shared with Finnley. He couldn’t explain what was happening to himself much less to her, or to their son, and he wasn’t entirely sure he was ready to talk about it, anyway. So as quietly as he could muster--which was an unsurprising amount considering whose body he was in now--Oliver pulled on a pair of jeans, his shoes, and then grabbed his jacket and let himself out the front door. Maybe if he got some fresh air, everything would go back to normal. But Oliver knew himself, both there and here, and he knew that normal just didn’t seem to be in the cards for him, no matter what Q or Finnley said. |