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#21 with Arrowverse: Tommy Merlyn and Oliver Queen.

21. "I don't drink." "Oh really now? When did that start?" Sooooo.... this became basically a deleted scene from season one? I've never written arrowverse fic before, this was honestly very fun! I mean, angsty, ambiguous ending, but fun to write at least!

Be at the party. Be Oliver Queen. Be the idiotic socialite they all still expect you to be.

It’s not quite working the way it should, and Oliver kind of hates that. Most people are buying it, the strangers, the hangers on who’d always wanted to flock to and fill up the Queen and Merlyn parties back in the day. There’s a blonde girl by the bar who’s a little too young to be hanging with this crowd, and she reminds him of Sara with a sharp stabbing sensation right up under his ribs. There’s Laurel, real and here and so understandably mad at him, for dying and for surviving and for every shade in between those two extremes. There’s Thea, definitely too young to be at this or any party, still working on that drug problem he’d tried to curb when Amanda Waller had brought him back to Starling in time for Tommy’s birthday party, years earlier.

They all still see the Ollie they’d lost, the man who’d died the second Robert Queen pulled that trigger.

The memory of his father drags him out of his maudlin thoughts about how well his social camouflage is or isn’t working. He’s got a task, something to accomplish tonight. There’s a reason he’d arranged to have his welcome home party here, right across the street from the offices he’ll need to sneak away into, to cross one more name off the list.

“You look more in need of a drink than any man I’ve ever seen.”

Oliver tears his gaze away from the party, away from the target’s office, and discovers Tommy, standing beside him with a glass in his hand that he’s extending Oliver’s direction.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you at a party with an empty hand,” Oliver says, but he accepts Tommy’s offering. After his time in Russia, after his time with the Bratva, there’s basically nothing the booze in Starling City can do to him. Frankly, considering how he and Tommy had spent their youth, the only reason the Bratva’s vodka had been able to do anything to him at all had been because of his drier time on the island.

“Yeah, I don’t really drink at parties anymore,” Tommy confides.

Oliver takes a sip of the concoction Tommy’s brought him, and raises an eyebrow. “Who are you and what’ve you done with Tommy Merlyn?”

Tommy laughs, just a little, and ducks his head before he scans the crowd. Oliver doesn’t have to follow his gaze to note where his attention pauses: Laurel at the bar, Thea in the crowd, and ever so briefly on the blonde at the counter who reminds him of Sara.

“You don’t want to hear the story,” Tommy assures him. “Promise.”

“No, I think I do,” Oliver says. It’s not… quite right for the Oliver he’d been before all of this, but it’s in keeping with the man he’s trying to be publicly. The Oliver who regrets the decisions he’d made before he’d been lost at sea, the Oliver who’s come back to Starling City to do right by his family and his family legacy.

But there’s a script for stories like this, for reasons why socialites don’t drink at parties. It’s usually something like “I don’t drink white wine anymore, because I had a terrible day entertaining my father’s contacts at the club, and I spent eight entire hours at one table and the waiter kept refilling my glass of chardonnay and now whenever I smell the stuff, I dry heave.”

It’s usually silly problems like that, that don’t have any bearing on Oliver’s life anymore, that he can’t imagine caring about. But from the cloud that passes over Tommy’s face, he’s suddenly driven to remember Hong Kong, to remember escaping Maseo’s guard long enough to call back home, to remember being placed on a roof with a sniper rifle, because Tommy had trekked across the globe to find him on the faintest shred of hope that Ollie might still be alive.

It won’t be stupid socialite reasons, and Tommy confirms that when he steers Oliver closer to the stairs and to a quieter part of the party.

“While you were gone—” Tommy pauses to shudder, and swallow back the idea of the five years Oliver had been dead for all intents and purposes. “—my twenty-fifth, Thea snuck into the party, and she was, uh, I don’t want you to go off the rails about this, but she had a drug dealer, and, I should’ve been keeping a better eye on her. I tried, man, you have to know I did everything I could to be a big brother for her while you were missing, but this guy got into the party anyway, and I’d been drinking enough that it took Laurel intervening to keep Thea out of juvie, and ever since, I might not have been able to keep her out of parties, but I can at least make sure I’m sober enough to keep her out of trouble.”

He doesn’t mention that the drug dealer had died at the party, and Oliver doesn’t blame him. They’re not at a point where they can be totally honest with each other about what they’d been doing with their time in their five years apart, and they’re not at a point yet where Oliver can tell him about the Hood, about the arrows, about the list.

But they don’t have to be at that point for Oliver to know in his bones that Tommy is a good man. A better man than he’ll ever be.

“I know you did,” Oliver says, and lets himself give in to the impulse to throw his empty arm around Tommy’s shoulders and pull him into a hug. “There was never any doubt in my mind that you’d keep an eye on all of them for me.”

“Yeah,” Tommy says, and his voice is a little thick when he responds, but it’s nice when he actually hugs Oliver back. It’s… it’s nicer than Ollie deserves. All of this is, even the open animosity he’s getting from the Lance family. “Yeah, man, you know it was the least I could do, since I — since I couldn’t do anything for you.”

If they were other people, it might be the moment Tommy tells him about following a wild goose chase to Hong Kong, about clinging desperately to the hope that Ollie was still alive, not because he didn’t want to keep an eye on Oliver’s family for him, but because of the simple fact that he missed him.

But they’re not other people, and they’re both maintaining reputations, and Tommy’s reputation might be hiding less of a dark interior than Ollie’s own fakery, but it’s no less of a mask. One of these days, at least for a minute, he wants to sit down with Tommy without a mask to hide behind. He wants — well. He wants a lot of things, and one of those things is that he wants to share the whole truth of himself, the reality of everything from Lian Yu and Hong Kong and his return to Starling and Russia with someone, and Tommy’s the only candidate he’s got. Not just because he couldn’t bear the idea of burdening his mother or Thea with it all, not just because Laurel is rightly not speaking to him, but because Tommy’s… Tommy. He wants to tell Tommy about Shado and Slade and Sara and Ivo and Anatoly and Tatsu and Maseo and Constantine and goddamn Amanda Waller. He wants to tell him about his father, about the list, about whatever the fuck the Undertaking is.

But Tommy is Tommy, and therefore Tommy is a good man, and Ollie—

Well. He’s not Ollie anymore, for one thing. And he’s not a good man anymore either, if he ever was. But maybe, maybe, he can fix his city, and if it costs him his life, well. At least he’ll be content to know that he’s got Tommy, keeping any eye on everyone left who’s still precious to him, including Tommy himself.

“I love you, man,” Tommy murmurs, just quiet enough that it could get lost in the music and noise of the party if Oliver wanted it to.

“I love you too,” Oliver says, and then he has to tear himself out of the embrace he’d started. He has to duck into the stairwell with the excuse of needing to track down a bathroom. He has to find his bow and hood where he’d stashed them.

He’s got a name to cross off.

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