Unravel Me | Arrow [ COMPLETED ]

chapter thirty two

"All the battles, all the wars, all the times that you've fought

She's a scar, she's the bruises, she's the pain that you brought"

5 SECONDS OF SUMMER - 'Broken Home'

.                     .                    .

"So are you going to tell me why you're moping around, or are you just going to drink all the milkshakes we can physically make and brood in the corner?"

Cali frowned down at her half-drunk vanilla malt milkshake as Janet threw herself into the seat opposite her, oversized jacket hiding her work uniform from view. "I'm not...moping," she said defensively.

Janet levelled her with a distinctly unimpressed look, crossing her arms. "CC, you're literally a little storm cloud over here. I can see the rain." Softening slightly when Cali only fiddled with her straw, Janet leaned forward and put her arms on the small table. "Hey," she said kindly. "We talked about this - you've gotta communicate with me, okay? I wanna listen and I wanna help, I promise."

Cali allowed a sweet smile to wash away the upset crease between her eyebrows, and reached across to grab onto one of Janet's hands. She didn't deserve this kind of gentle handling, not from Janet. Not after...well, everything. She'd not been fair to Janet, not by a long shot, and yet somehow, over the past month and a half, they'd grown closer.

"I've been hiding something from Tommy," she confessed with a hefty sigh. "He found out the night of the awards ceremony, the one that got shot up?" Janet nodded her understanding. "Yeah. He hasn't spoken to me since, and I don't know how to make him understand that I wasn't hiding it to hurt him."

Janet took a second to think, sucking her cheeks and scrunching up her nose sheepishly. "Okay, don't be mad," she said slowly. "But is the 'big, dangerous secret' that Oliver Queen is the vigilante guy? Because if Tommy's mad about that, it's kind of a dick move on his part."

Okay, well-

Oliver couldn't possibly blame this on her, because Cali honestly had no idea how Janet had figured it out.

"Oh come on, CC, don't look like that. It's really not a hard solve if you actually think about it." Janet's laugh was a little nervous as she squeezed Cali's hand. "Like, Oliver Queen is found and suddenly there's some guy running around in leather and shooting people with arrows? Of all the people to play dress up like that, Oliver makes the most sense."

"But-But he was on house arrest when there was a vigilante sighting across town!"

Janet's expression was so dry that Cali took a large mouthful of milkshake, just so she didn't say anything else stupid.

Okay, so yeah, she'd expected someone to start putting together all the pieces. And it wasn't like Janet was the only one. There were multiple websites, social media pages, theory videos, literally an entire underground cult that dedicated time to unmasking the Hood. The strongest theory there pinned the whole thing on Oliver too.

So Janet figuring it out wasn't actually a surprise, but if Oliver were to know that she knew, Cali would have to sit through a lecture that was entirely and shouted and never repeated itself, and she really didn't want that.

(Oliver's wrath would be scorching in the face of Tommy's ice-cold abandonment.)

"Okay yes," Cali said, flustered, when Janet did nothing more than continue staring at her. "Yes, that's the secret. And Tommy found out that we'd been hiding it from him and now he won't speak to anyone but Laurel, and she's so caught up in her own stuff right now that there's no connection there anyway."