with love, from russia
yeah i ripped off a james bond title
She laughs, of all things.
It catches him off guard because how could she possibly be laughing at a time like this but he realizes he’s never truly understood the inner workings of her mind. She has always been his Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. As such, it stands to reason that it shouldn’t be any different even with the given circumstances now.
He can’t find it in himself to unravel his current logic, anyways.
Oliver has missed that smile and that sound and just about everything else about her so, so terribly much already and he drinks it in like a man who knows he will be caught in a drought with an unknown end. He doesn’t dare waste another opportunity to commit every detail about her to memory, all too careless every time before now to properly do so.
Her voice breaks him out of his reverie somewhere around the tiny knick on her upper arm that she got while they were together on the island. Whether he is startled because he was so focused or because he didn’t expect her to talk is unclear, all Oliver knows is that her voice sounds like coming home. The way she says his name feels like some salvation he doesn’t believe he deserves.
She smiles at him then, bright and cheerful and all the things she shouldn’t be right now and all he can ask is why, the rest of the English language has eluded him.
“The circle of life,” she says easily with a half-hearted shrug - it makes him furious with her, sends a wave of white-hot anger up and down his spine. How can she be so cavalier about the same thing that’s very nearly ripping his world apart, what’s making his chest feel like it might explode from how much he hurts.
“I feel like I’m - (dying is what he wants to say but can’t)”
She reaches out to him, gently cradling his face in hands that are too tiny and too cold and he desperately wants to cover them with his own, protect them from everything that tries to harm them. Her thumbs run soothing lines back and forth along his cheeks, slowly tempering the ire that was lit. Every second she holds on, he loses more of the self control that is keeping him from reaching out to her.
He doesn’t realize what he’s doing until his hands find his way to hers and they are even smaller than he thought now that he is holding onto them. Oliver turns to press a kiss to each of her palms, over and over again until he feels like her cold has fully seeped into his weary bones. His body starts to ache the way he imagines hers does, the pain in his chest more pronounced than it was before, his knees straining to keep him upright.
She forces him to look her in the eye and that’s what does him in -- all the hurt and the sadness and the emptiness finally catch up to him when she whispers that it’s okay, that she’s alright.
Oliver would have believed it if his legs hadn’t finally given out and no one was were to catch him.
The Foundry is quiet when he gets there at some ungodly time in the morning because he can’t sleep despite how heavy his eyelids feel. He thinks that maybe a good workout is all he needs, something to physically exhaust him enough to shut off his brain for at least a handful of hours. It’s a good idea in theory until he actually tests it out, punching a bag feels all kinds of off and nothing feels as satisfying as it should.
Oliver goes through another round on the bag before declaring his current endeavor futile, at which point he thinks some fresh air and an early patrol will do him some good. He pulls on a black hoodie instead of his uniform, not necessarily wanting to draw any attention to him while he jumps rooftops to clear his mind.
He takes his time combing the streets, calm so far due to the day just starting up - surely he’ll have his work cut out for him tonight so for now he indulges in the slow pace.
“Fancy meeting you up here, stranger.”
Her voice comes from somewhere behind him where he’s standing close to the ledge of the rooftop. When he turns around to face her, she’s leaning against the roof entrance in an old frat t-shirt of Oliver’s he didn’t even remember he still had.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Don’t really get cold much, not anymore at least.”
It’s a fair point he thinks, besides it’s only a bit nippy out, a little bit shouldn’t hurt her and he’s been out long enough as it is. Oliver isn’t quite as tired as he was hoped he would be but she provides enough motivation to call it quits sooner than he intended and at least this way he’ll have some sort of company with him.
“So,” he starts since she’s kind of just doing her whole staring fondly bit again, “what brings you out here on this fine morning?”
“I could ask you the same think, y’know.”
“I do - that’s exactly why I asked you first.”
She chuckles at that, a soft, sweet sound he soaks in along with the way his shirt is a little too big for her, nearly reaching the middle of her thighs. The pants she has on are vaguely familiar too, some awkward not-quite-full-length pair of sweats he remembers making fun of ages ago (before the island, before everything was messed up) that he hasn’t seen since.
“Well, I dragged my ass all the way up here to bring you home. You’re not going to fix much up here with my staff, anyways.”
The sun is starting to rise on the horizon and some light glints off the silver in his hands just then to remind Oliver that he didn’t pick up his weapon of choice before he headed out; Oliver’s bow felt awkward in his hands when he held it earlier and he didn’t want to go out empty handed. Her staff seemed like the best choice if anything needed to be done, it’s just he forgot to adjust his patrolling habits to follow suit.
“I’m sorry -”
She cuts him off with a shake of her hand and her head, “nah, keep it. Kind of interested to see what the Arrow can do arrow-less.”
“I’m gonna ignore the lack of confidence and just say thank you. Also, we should probably get going before someone wakes up and finds it suspicious that a guy dressed in black is on some roof waving around a long, shiny stick.”
He nods to where the darkness is lightening up into an array of mute colors as the sun slowly creeps up on them. They leave quick enough to make it back to Queen manor before it comes up completely, leaving his particular neck of Starling still shrouded in a tiny bit of darkness. He doesn’t mind too much anyways, his investment in blackout curtains a few months back have been paying off with his recent bouts of sleeplessness.
As soon as they make it to the room, she wastes no time jumping on top of the bed, declaring something about it being time to tuck ‘big, bad Arrow’ into bed that he doesn’t bother acknowledging while he’s changing into something more comfortable. When he makes his way to her, she’s already curled up on her side, snuggly situated into his bed as much as she can on top of the covers.
“What’d you dream about,” she asks as soon as Oliver has pulled up the blanket around him. Oliver was hoping to avoid this particular conversation, although it seems like wishful thinking now that he truly considers the circumstances. He sighs, deep and long, mingling his answer in with his breath. She immediately calls him out for the attempted dodge, raises an unimpressed eyebrow while she waits for a firm answer.
This time he whispers you just loud enough for her to hear.
She smiles that tiny smile that always gets him, the one that’s caught between two thoughts he was never sure he wanted to know. It makes her look younger than she is and Oliver wish she could have been allowed to stay that innocent, makes him wish he tried to be a better man earlier than he did.
“Stop that,” she chastises softly, running a hand through his hair to get his attention.
“Stop what?”
“Blaming yourself,” she says with an eye roll, “you weren’t the only one that decided to get on the boat that night or the one that joined the League or the one that decided to come back. I know you think that saving the world is your one man show but I made my own decisions, too, Ollie.”
Oliver almost manages to voice a ‘but’ when she pauses, though it seems when she catches wind of his plan, she immediately jumps back into it.
“Go dream of something happy.” She’s starting to run her thumb back and forth along his cheek like before. “I’ll be right here, I promise.”
He wants to tell her that he does dream of something happy when he dreams of her; that he dreams about her and how they used to be and all they (she) should have been.
Unfortunately for him he doesn't get a chance to explain, his exhaustion takes this moment to overcome him completely and he remembers falling asleep feeling whole again.
The whole process is as agonizing as it sounds - spending countless hours to find the slightest bit of a lead and then hunting it down to some dark alleyway that’s a complete dead end. By now it’s starting to feel like they’ve gone backwards more so than they’ve managed to actually get anywhere with all this.
Oliver doesn’t know how they’re going to get through his, he just knows that everything is starting to get to him, all the running around with absolutely nothing to show for it has him nearing the end of his rope.
At the same time, he doesn’t mean to take it out on everyone else, doesn’t mean to be short at Felicity when she apologizes or snap at Diggle when he tries to reassure him or send Roy home when tells him that Oliver’s being too hard on the others.
He especially doesn’t mean to take it out on the one person he’s been doing all this for but it would seem even that isn’t reason enough to bite his tongue when she finds him beating the pulp out of a heavy bag in his basement at home.
Being around the team wasn’t helping his mood and he was far too frustrated to go back out on the streets to do anything productive; self-imposed isolation seemed like a good idea at the time until she showed up.
All she says is quit it, Ollie - he knows she’s talking about berating himself and everyone else about always ending up empty handed, he just doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being right while coming and going as she pleases. Oliver wants her to hurt as much as he does because he’s supposed to be the glue even though he’s tearing apart at the seams the longer this wild goose chase goes on. He needs her to know that this means more to him even if he can’t show it in front of the team, and if he manages to put on a brave face still whenever she’s around.
The words tumble out of his mouth before he has a chance to think twice about what he says, frustration giving out to tactfulness in the heat of the moment. Oliver tells her that he can’t ‘quit it’ and he can’t let anything go simply because she tells him to. That this is the real world now, she can’t expect to have her way anymore like she used to because there are bigger things to worry about outside of what she does or doesn’t want.
He’s half expecting her to stand her ground and tell him she’s not going to let herself be pushed away by him again but he turns back to face an empty room with any frustration he managed to work off returned tenfold. It’s his own damn fault, he knows he more than deserved her walking out on him when he should have just come clean about what was truly bothering him. Oliver should have just asked her for a reason - any reason - to keep fighting for her, any sign of reassurance that someday this would help fix the hurt because he is terrified that this could destroy him before he gets a chance to heal.
There’s a picture of the two of them, from a carnival that they went to on a whim because she wanted to play hooky that day and Oliver was willing to do anything that didn’t involve responsibility.
A decently sized stuffed shark is squished in between them while she’s kissing his cheek as a thank you for spending forty-five minutes and at least that many dollars trying to win it for her. She said her baby shark needed a momma shark and he found it impossible to say no to that smile of hers. Looking back, he finds it a sufficient consolation prize for not being able to keep the thing for himself.
The rest of the day flits through his mind in surprisingly vivid detail, like it was saved for a rainy day when he needed a smile. He remembers the cotton candy stick that left half of his face sticky for the rest of the day after it was shoved in his face and the highly unfortunate brain freezes they ended up with after deciding to race eat too big frozen lemonade cups. There was funnel cake with too much powered sugar, way too much money spent on rigged games, rides ridden half a dozen times in a row until one of them felt like they were about to puke.
There was so much he remembers and so much he misses still.
He doesn’t realize he started crying until she calls him out for it. She wipes at his cheeks but it does little in the scheme of all things, though he appreciates the effort. “Aren’t you supposed to be some broody, tough guy? What will all the bad guys think of you if word gets out that you spontaneously burst into tears?”
“I do not spontaneously burst into tears, thank you very much,” Oliver chuckles. “I was thinking about the carnival.”
“The carnival?” She raises a curious eyebrow until he nods to the picture sitting on the coffee table. “Ah, that carnival. Man, I loved that shark.”
“What ever happened to it?”
“Wish I knew. Probably long gone, last time I remember having it was at school and I never exactly went back to collect my stuff.”
“I should have done something.”
The shift in mood doesn’t go over her head, most likely picking up on the way he tenses up next to her on the couch. Oliver has long given up subtleties when in her presence, enough for her to realize that he’s not talking about getting back the shark or her things. She lets out a labored sigh like she’s been avoiding this all along but he’s too stubborn to let it go because it’s been bothering him from the start. Her hand runs up his arm, through his hair, and ends up playing at the base of his neck.
“You couldn’t have known, Ollie.” She kisses him on the cheek, after her thumb smoothes over his jawline. “None of this was ever your fault, none of this is anyone else’s fault.”
“I wanted,” he starts but the truth is he doesn’t actually know what he could have done differently. His mind runs through scenarios of what-if’s and could-have’s every day, yet he comes up with nothing that would make anything change the past. Part of him thinks maybe he’ll suddenly find something that would have worked, not that Oliver knows what he would do when that day comes. “I should have saved you somehow.”
“It wasn’t saving that I needed.”
He knew that much already; if that statement was ever true about anyone, it would be about her. Still, he can’t shake the feeling he owed her more than simply finding her the morning after.
“I just…wish I could’ve done something for you.”
“You did manage to knock down those bottles for my shark.”
“I didn’t mean like that.”
“I know, but the point was you cared enough to get it.” Oliver’s tears are back again, silently making their way down his face even though she’s smiling at him wide and open. It makes him want to go back to the carnival, keep her safe in a place where nothing went wrong for once in his messed up life. Rubbing haphazardly at his eyes, he looks at her, begging her to understand that he’s been running around in circles but -
I’m trying so, so very hard.
“The point was always that you loved me enough try.”
(his Russia, he thinks, is the one puzzle he was alaways willing to try)
She laughs, of all things.
It catches him off guard because how could she possibly be laughing at a time like this but he realizes he’s never truly understood the inner workings of her mind. She has always been his Russia, a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma. As such, it stands to reason that it shouldn’t be any different even with the given circumstances now.
He can’t find it in himself to unravel his current logic, anyways.
Oliver has missed that smile and that sound and just about everything else about her so, so terribly much already and he drinks it in like a man who knows he will be caught in a drought with an unknown end. He doesn’t dare waste another opportunity to commit every detail about her to memory, all too careless every time before now to properly do so.
Her voice breaks him out of his reverie somewhere around the tiny knick on her upper arm that she got while they were together on the island. Whether he is startled because he was so focused or because he didn’t expect her to talk is unclear, all Oliver knows is that her voice sounds like coming home. The way she says his name feels like some salvation he doesn’t believe he deserves.
She smiles at him then, bright and cheerful and all the things she shouldn’t be right now and all he can ask is why, the rest of the English language has eluded him.
“The circle of life,” she says easily with a half-hearted shrug - it makes him furious with her, sends a wave of white-hot anger up and down his spine. How can she be so cavalier about the same thing that’s very nearly ripping his world apart, what’s making his chest feel like it might explode from how much he hurts.
“I feel like I’m - (dying is what he wants to say but can’t)”
She reaches out to him, gently cradling his face in hands that are too tiny and too cold and he desperately wants to cover them with his own, protect them from everything that tries to harm them. Her thumbs run soothing lines back and forth along his cheeks, slowly tempering the ire that was lit. Every second she holds on, he loses more of the self control that is keeping him from reaching out to her.
He doesn’t realize what he’s doing until his hands find his way to hers and they are even smaller than he thought now that he is holding onto them. Oliver turns to press a kiss to each of her palms, over and over again until he feels like her cold has fully seeped into his weary bones. His body starts to ache the way he imagines hers does, the pain in his chest more pronounced than it was before, his knees straining to keep him upright.
She forces him to look her in the eye and that’s what does him in -- all the hurt and the sadness and the emptiness finally catch up to him when she whispers that it’s okay, that she’s alright.
Oliver would have believed it if his legs hadn’t finally given out and no one was were to catch him.
The Foundry is quiet when he gets there at some ungodly time in the morning because he can’t sleep despite how heavy his eyelids feel. He thinks that maybe a good workout is all he needs, something to physically exhaust him enough to shut off his brain for at least a handful of hours. It’s a good idea in theory until he actually tests it out, punching a bag feels all kinds of off and nothing feels as satisfying as it should.
Oliver goes through another round on the bag before declaring his current endeavor futile, at which point he thinks some fresh air and an early patrol will do him some good. He pulls on a black hoodie instead of his uniform, not necessarily wanting to draw any attention to him while he jumps rooftops to clear his mind.
He takes his time combing the streets, calm so far due to the day just starting up - surely he’ll have his work cut out for him tonight so for now he indulges in the slow pace.
“Fancy meeting you up here, stranger.”
Her voice comes from somewhere behind him where he’s standing close to the ledge of the rooftop. When he turns around to face her, she’s leaning against the roof entrance in an old frat t-shirt of Oliver’s he didn’t even remember he still had.
“Aren’t you cold?”
“Don’t really get cold much, not anymore at least.”
It’s a fair point he thinks, besides it’s only a bit nippy out, a little bit shouldn’t hurt her and he’s been out long enough as it is. Oliver isn’t quite as tired as he was hoped he would be but she provides enough motivation to call it quits sooner than he intended and at least this way he’ll have some sort of company with him.
“So,” he starts since she’s kind of just doing her whole staring fondly bit again, “what brings you out here on this fine morning?”
“I could ask you the same think, y’know.”
“I do - that’s exactly why I asked you first.”
She chuckles at that, a soft, sweet sound he soaks in along with the way his shirt is a little too big for her, nearly reaching the middle of her thighs. The pants she has on are vaguely familiar too, some awkward not-quite-full-length pair of sweats he remembers making fun of ages ago (before the island, before everything was messed up) that he hasn’t seen since.
“Well, I dragged my ass all the way up here to bring you home. You’re not going to fix much up here with my staff, anyways.”
The sun is starting to rise on the horizon and some light glints off the silver in his hands just then to remind Oliver that he didn’t pick up his weapon of choice before he headed out; Oliver’s bow felt awkward in his hands when he held it earlier and he didn’t want to go out empty handed. Her staff seemed like the best choice if anything needed to be done, it’s just he forgot to adjust his patrolling habits to follow suit.
“I’m sorry -”
She cuts him off with a shake of her hand and her head, “nah, keep it. Kind of interested to see what the Arrow can do arrow-less.”
“I’m gonna ignore the lack of confidence and just say thank you. Also, we should probably get going before someone wakes up and finds it suspicious that a guy dressed in black is on some roof waving around a long, shiny stick.”
He nods to where the darkness is lightening up into an array of mute colors as the sun slowly creeps up on them. They leave quick enough to make it back to Queen manor before it comes up completely, leaving his particular neck of Starling still shrouded in a tiny bit of darkness. He doesn’t mind too much anyways, his investment in blackout curtains a few months back have been paying off with his recent bouts of sleeplessness.
As soon as they make it to the room, she wastes no time jumping on top of the bed, declaring something about it being time to tuck ‘big, bad Arrow’ into bed that he doesn’t bother acknowledging while he’s changing into something more comfortable. When he makes his way to her, she’s already curled up on her side, snuggly situated into his bed as much as she can on top of the covers.
“What’d you dream about,” she asks as soon as Oliver has pulled up the blanket around him. Oliver was hoping to avoid this particular conversation, although it seems like wishful thinking now that he truly considers the circumstances. He sighs, deep and long, mingling his answer in with his breath. She immediately calls him out for the attempted dodge, raises an unimpressed eyebrow while she waits for a firm answer.
This time he whispers you just loud enough for her to hear.
She smiles that tiny smile that always gets him, the one that’s caught between two thoughts he was never sure he wanted to know. It makes her look younger than she is and Oliver wish she could have been allowed to stay that innocent, makes him wish he tried to be a better man earlier than he did.
“Stop that,” she chastises softly, running a hand through his hair to get his attention.
“Stop what?”
“Blaming yourself,” she says with an eye roll, “you weren’t the only one that decided to get on the boat that night or the one that joined the League or the one that decided to come back. I know you think that saving the world is your one man show but I made my own decisions, too, Ollie.”
Oliver almost manages to voice a ‘but’ when she pauses, though it seems when she catches wind of his plan, she immediately jumps back into it.
“Go dream of something happy.” She’s starting to run her thumb back and forth along his cheek like before. “I’ll be right here, I promise.”
He wants to tell her that he does dream of something happy when he dreams of her; that he dreams about her and how they used to be and all they (she) should have been.
Unfortunately for him he doesn't get a chance to explain, his exhaustion takes this moment to overcome him completely and he remembers falling asleep feeling whole again.
The whole process is as agonizing as it sounds - spending countless hours to find the slightest bit of a lead and then hunting it down to some dark alleyway that’s a complete dead end. By now it’s starting to feel like they’ve gone backwards more so than they’ve managed to actually get anywhere with all this.
Oliver doesn’t know how they’re going to get through his, he just knows that everything is starting to get to him, all the running around with absolutely nothing to show for it has him nearing the end of his rope.
At the same time, he doesn’t mean to take it out on everyone else, doesn’t mean to be short at Felicity when she apologizes or snap at Diggle when he tries to reassure him or send Roy home when tells him that Oliver’s being too hard on the others.
He especially doesn’t mean to take it out on the one person he’s been doing all this for but it would seem even that isn’t reason enough to bite his tongue when she finds him beating the pulp out of a heavy bag in his basement at home.
Being around the team wasn’t helping his mood and he was far too frustrated to go back out on the streets to do anything productive; self-imposed isolation seemed like a good idea at the time until she showed up.
All she says is quit it, Ollie - he knows she’s talking about berating himself and everyone else about always ending up empty handed, he just doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of being right while coming and going as she pleases. Oliver wants her to hurt as much as he does because he’s supposed to be the glue even though he’s tearing apart at the seams the longer this wild goose chase goes on. He needs her to know that this means more to him even if he can’t show it in front of the team, and if he manages to put on a brave face still whenever she’s around.
The words tumble out of his mouth before he has a chance to think twice about what he says, frustration giving out to tactfulness in the heat of the moment. Oliver tells her that he can’t ‘quit it’ and he can’t let anything go simply because she tells him to. That this is the real world now, she can’t expect to have her way anymore like she used to because there are bigger things to worry about outside of what she does or doesn’t want.
He’s half expecting her to stand her ground and tell him she’s not going to let herself be pushed away by him again but he turns back to face an empty room with any frustration he managed to work off returned tenfold. It’s his own damn fault, he knows he more than deserved her walking out on him when he should have just come clean about what was truly bothering him. Oliver should have just asked her for a reason - any reason - to keep fighting for her, any sign of reassurance that someday this would help fix the hurt because he is terrified that this could destroy him before he gets a chance to heal.
There’s a picture of the two of them, from a carnival that they went to on a whim because she wanted to play hooky that day and Oliver was willing to do anything that didn’t involve responsibility.
A decently sized stuffed shark is squished in between them while she’s kissing his cheek as a thank you for spending forty-five minutes and at least that many dollars trying to win it for her. She said her baby shark needed a momma shark and he found it impossible to say no to that smile of hers. Looking back, he finds it a sufficient consolation prize for not being able to keep the thing for himself.
The rest of the day flits through his mind in surprisingly vivid detail, like it was saved for a rainy day when he needed a smile. He remembers the cotton candy stick that left half of his face sticky for the rest of the day after it was shoved in his face and the highly unfortunate brain freezes they ended up with after deciding to race eat too big frozen lemonade cups. There was funnel cake with too much powered sugar, way too much money spent on rigged games, rides ridden half a dozen times in a row until one of them felt like they were about to puke.
There was so much he remembers and so much he misses still.
He doesn’t realize he started crying until she calls him out for it. She wipes at his cheeks but it does little in the scheme of all things, though he appreciates the effort. “Aren’t you supposed to be some broody, tough guy? What will all the bad guys think of you if word gets out that you spontaneously burst into tears?”
“I do not spontaneously burst into tears, thank you very much,” Oliver chuckles. “I was thinking about the carnival.”
“The carnival?” She raises a curious eyebrow until he nods to the picture sitting on the coffee table. “Ah, that carnival. Man, I loved that shark.”
“What ever happened to it?”
“Wish I knew. Probably long gone, last time I remember having it was at school and I never exactly went back to collect my stuff.”
“I should have done something.”
The shift in mood doesn’t go over her head, most likely picking up on the way he tenses up next to her on the couch. Oliver has long given up subtleties when in her presence, enough for her to realize that he’s not talking about getting back the shark or her things. She lets out a labored sigh like she’s been avoiding this all along but he’s too stubborn to let it go because it’s been bothering him from the start. Her hand runs up his arm, through his hair, and ends up playing at the base of his neck.
“You couldn’t have known, Ollie.” She kisses him on the cheek, after her thumb smoothes over his jawline. “None of this was ever your fault, none of this is anyone else’s fault.”
“I wanted,” he starts but the truth is he doesn’t actually know what he could have done differently. His mind runs through scenarios of what-if’s and could-have’s every day, yet he comes up with nothing that would make anything change the past. Part of him thinks maybe he’ll suddenly find something that would have worked, not that Oliver knows what he would do when that day comes. “I should have saved you somehow.”
“It wasn’t saving that I needed.”
He knew that much already; if that statement was ever true about anyone, it would be about her. Still, he can’t shake the feeling he owed her more than simply finding her the morning after.
“I just…wish I could’ve done something for you.”
“You did manage to knock down those bottles for my shark.”
“I didn’t mean like that.”
“I know, but the point was you cared enough to get it.” Oliver’s tears are back again, silently making their way down his face even though she’s smiling at him wide and open. It makes him want to go back to the carnival, keep her safe in a place where nothing went wrong for once in his messed up life. Rubbing haphazardly at his eyes, he looks at her, begging her to understand that he’s been running around in circles but -
I’m trying so, so very hard.
“The point was always that you loved me enough try.”
(his Russia, he thinks, is the one puzzle he was alaways willing to try)