Um, sorry? It’s kind of angsty? Rated PG-13 (mentions of D/s). An alternate version of the start of this scene, but from Dinah’s POV.
Dinah Lance finds the obvious uninteresting.
Her League background has seen to that, rather neatly removing true shades of pure white and depthless black from her world and instead filling the void with varying shades of gray, some brighter than others. Obviousness serves two purposes. It either masks or it reveals, and Dinah’s long since discovered that she finds both properties equally annoying. She’d much rather search for the little subtleties in life, as those are where the richest clues reside. The calluses on one’s fingertips, hard to spot from a distance, can map an entire life’s story and philosophy.
Things about this world are obvious: the other her, the one who called herself Laurel, was loved, that much Dinah can see. She knows this because it’s shouted at her a few times, resentfully, by Thea and Felicity and even Oliver once or twice. She’s a poor replacement in their eyes and they don’t bother to hide that, which is why she really doesn’t care. Let them think what they will. She didn’t want to come over to his world in the first place and she has no desire to stay and fill a hole that is badly-shaped for her anyway, but that’s her lot in life.
The League taught her to deal with that, too.
So she ignores the obvious parts, the differences and the similarities her new teammates find between Dinah and Laurel, and focuses on what’s not obvious instead. How overlooked Laurel truly could be, which fascinates her because she’s now living in the woman’s apartment, taking over her life, and from what she can determine among the beiges and blues that Laurel Lance preferred, and Laurel doesn’t strike her as somebody easy to overlook. But this team manages to have done that, time and again, and they have no idea that they have. Likely because it’s not obvious.
She wonders sometimes what would happen if she brought it up. She doesn’t particularly care about their grief—she never met Laurel, after all—but they’ve done her the courtesy of not probing too deeply into her reaction over Nyssa, so she can repay the favor.
That doesn’t mean she wants to be interrupted from her reverie by the sound of the roof door opening. She schools her expression into bored disinterest when she hears Felicity’s startled “Oh!”
“You caught me,” she says. She’d hoped none of them would find her rooftop perch for a while longer. It’s a nice place to get away and from this removed distance, she can almost pretend she’s home. She shrugs off the typical reaction to Felicity.
“I wasn’t actually looking to catch you.”
Dinah turns toward Felicity, eying her shoes. It’s safest that way. The body language is entirely different between Felicity and Ms. Smoak, but they still wear the same glasses and they still reach for lipstick that should be too bright for them yet somehow works. Dinah can’t read her like the others if she can’t look at her face directly, but she doesn’t care. She’s annoyed, and the aggravation only grows when Felicity’s words really sink in. “You come to the roof to think, too? That’s just fantastic.”
She doesn’t want anything in common with this woman.
“You don’t have to leave. I’ll go.” Felicity’s words tumble over each other. Dinah’s already pushed herself to her feet, mostly out of reflex. Now she slows.
“Or we can both stay up here and not get in each other’s way. It’s a big roof,” Felicity says. “Seriously. You stay there, I’ll be over here, and I won’t bother you. I mean, if you want. You don’t have to. Hell, you probably have very important things to do. Leather to polish or something.”
Her cadence goes up and into nervousness, like she’s trying to share a joke. Dinah feels her lips twist down, and a flicker crosses Felicity’s face. She doesn’t want that camaraderie. It’s fine with Thea because she remembers a younger Thea Queen before they were all killed on the Gambit. But not with Felicity.
There’s something dejected in the slant of the woman’s shoulders as she turns away, though. It picks at Dinah because it’s a little movement, one she wouldn’t have caught if she weren’t paying close attention. Not an obvious tic at all, something private to Felicity. Dinah feels more than sees the other woman’s gaze turn in her direction multiple times, and she knows what that lingering gaze means.
Ms. Smoak never looked like that, out of control and nervous, and it builds under Dinah’s breastbone. Not quite homesickness, but longing for somebody to come and set things the right way. Ms. Smoak was the one who reached inside her skull and pulled out all of the messy feelings Nyssa and the League left behind and started to fix things and Felicity Smoak is the reason Dinah can’t settle into her own skin in this universe, where Nyssa is real and breathing and alive and just as unattainable as she is at the bottom of the Aegean. It’s as obvious as the day is long, and Dinah wishes she could find that uninteresting instead of just insurmountably sad.
She stares down at the lights below her for a long time.
A continuation of the Mirror Sub Verse, where e2!Laurel (Dinah) and Felicity slowly try to navigate a friendship. Takes place about a month after Dinah and Felicity’s conversation on the roof. Read the rest of the series here. Rated PG, 888 words.
“Felicity.” Diggle’s voice sounded strained, but she couldn’t tell if he was hiding amusement or if he was actually exasperated.
“Hmm?”
“Please stop poking the bad guy with a stick.”
Felicity straightened up and pouted, looking at Diggle in indignation. The sight of Dinah turning away, hand covering the bottom of her face, though, drew her up short. Was that an actual smile? “You’re ruining my fun,” Felicity said, since she was pretty sure calling it out would make said smile vanish.
Diggle folded his arms across his chest. “It’s undignified,” he said, and Felicity was sure he was close to smiling, too.
“He tried to blow up a building.”
“Still. Stop poking him.”
“I don’t know.” Dinah dropped her hand away from her face. She was a little sweaty and disheveled from being the one to actually keep up with their erstwhile bomber. And maybe she’d jumped three roofs in the process, which was seriously impressive with those heeled boots of hers. She combed her fingers through her hair. “He called me ‘pretty bird.’ I think she should poke him harder.”
Felicity bit her tongue. Dinah’s Black Siren outfit was really close to the Black Canary outfit. Like, it was pretty easy to mistake the two. Especially in the dark. In an alley. While she was trying and succeeding in kicking your ass.
“He’s tied up and helpless at this point,” Diggle said. “Neither of you are allowed to handle prisoner relations ever again.”
“Aw, why not?” Felicity asked.
Diggle gave her a wild-eyed look. “Because you keep poking this one with a stick!”
“Spoilsport,” Felicity said, and Dinah grinned, an actual full, beaming grin.
Oh god. She had Laurel’s dimple.
Diggle took the selfie stick—she’d found it next to the dumpster, obviously broken—away from her before she could poke the unconscious bomber in the cheek again. “You should go keep a lookout while we search him to see if he’s affiliated with anybody,” he said.
“I didn’t poke him that hard,” Felicity said. Really, it would be smarter for Dinah to be the lookout, since Felicity could really only alert them to danger rather than take the initiative to fight it off herself. But she trotted over to the mouth of the alley and looked out. Star City PD probably had their hands full with Mischief Night stuff. A solitary bomber that Team Vigilante—she could hear Oliver’s voice in her head, telling her not to call them that—had taken out barely even ranked on the trouble meter.
“How goes the looting?” she called over her shoulder, seeing that the street was completely empty. Nobody was aware just how close the building behind them had come to being blown up, which was as it should be, really.
“This isn’t a D&D game,” Diggle said, and this time he definitely sounded amused.
“Still, let me know if you find a good bag of holding. My laptop case is getting a little frayed.”
“What’s D&D?” she heard Dinah ask in a low voice. Diggle’s response was lost to Felicity as she pondered a world where tabletop gaming was lost to the ether. Tragic, she decided.
Until: “Oh,” Dinah said. “Like C&C.”
“C&C?” Felicity called back.
Dinah grumbled something. Eventually, she said, “Cellars & Cthulhu.”
Felicity whipped around. “You don’t have dragons, but you have eldritch horrors and elder gods?”
“HP Lovecraft is one of the founding fathers of science fiction. Or so I’m told.” Dinah looked distinctly comfortable. “I only know about it because a kid down the street became a Scientologist. Don’t look at me like—oh, are you serious? Scientology exists over here, too? I was hoping that was a nightmare that wouldn’t follow me.”
“I have a feeling they’re very different.” Belatedly, Felicity remembered she was supposed to be keeping an eye out for trouble, so she turned back around and eyed the neighborhood. Did those boarded up shop windows across the street look shifty or was that just paranoia? Either way, she kept her attention on them, even though she had so many questions now. Dinah’s world forever fascinated her, but whenever she asked too much, the other woman had a habit of disappearing. Sometimes for days. Which, with Oliver and Thea off doing their annual Queen Family Bonding and Possibly Almost Murdering Each Other Retreat on Lian-Yu, they didn’t really have the luxury for at the moment. Which was why Felicity was even in the field, doing such a stellar job at ‘prisoner relations’ and being a lookout.
“Bingo,” Diggle said.
“What? What is it?” Felicity checked over her shoulder.
“I don’t know.” Diggle had pulled out a little scrap of—was that parchment? It looked like it. Felicity gave up on lookout duties and wandered closer. “Either of you recognize this symbol?”
Felicity shook her head. It was swooshy and swoopy and looked a little like Arabic, but in a circle almost like the One True Ring—which she definitely wasn’t going to bring up. And it would be a long shot for Dinah to recognize it, considering she was still getting a grip on how things like ATMs worked—
“I haven’t seen it in a long time,” Dinah said, proving Felicity wrong.
thecatwriter replied to your post: thecolourpurpleinafield replied to your...
Omg i think my jaw just dropped at that last part. Wonderful ideas :)
Thank you! e2!Sara is also still alive, but Dinah doesn’t know her, I have decided. She’s caused a lot of conflict in Dinah, who swore she made her peace over the messed up family dynamics (Larry Lance was not a great father, which is why it’s heartbreaking that Quentin Lance is) years ago, but now she’s wondering what happened to her and if they would have had the same relationship Laurel and Sara obviously had.
Sara and Dinah, however, they have so much in common. They’re both little shits, they have a scarily identical league background, they both love Nyssas. Dinah lost hers, though, and won’t talk about how. She fell into the League because she was some punk kid who ran around with delinquents. Nyssa was her salvation and her undoing.
Sara: “Yeah, I know how that goes.”
Felicity, for her part, is very unnerved when the truth about her other counterpart comes out. “I’m not a tech geek?! I run a...a....”
“You’re a professional dominatrix,” Sara confirms with an absolute grin, and Dinah won’t look at either of them.
