Arrow: the Two Archers

Chapter 9: To Fight for an Innocent

"Didn't expect to find you out here."

Lydia turned to him, her eyebrows giving a slight raise in surprise.

"Mr. Diggle." she acknowledged before turning back to face the sea.
"You might not know this, but I grew up around here. My father was a former army medic working at Glades Memorial hospital. He used to bring me here sometimes to watch the ships. Sometimes we'd feed the seagulls, if we had food with us."

Diggle was caught a bit by surprise. He had expected her to maybe come from around the same neighborhood as Laurel Lance, not the Glades. But he disguised it with a nod.

"Is that how Queen convinced you to work for him? Offered you a chance to save your old home?"

Lydia turned to him with narrowed eyes.

"Who do you think I am, Mr. Diggle?"

"My honest thoughts?" Diggle questioned out loud, continuing when he saw Lydia's silent confirmation.
"I think you're a young girl who got stranded on an island and lost both of her parents. I think that you were so alone and afraid that when Oliver Queen found you, you latched on to the closest thing to a brother-figure and sense of safety you had. I think that after five years you have no idea how to live life without him. And I think that because of that you now blindly follow his command without fully understanding what you're getting into."

Diggle knew that the chances she would be able to see his point of view were slim. But he didn't expect the ice cold glare he received. Maybe he had misjudged this, because that wasn't the look of an angry young girl. That was the kind of look he saw on the faces of his brothers and sisters in arms when they were pissed off.

"You're wrong. I don't blindly follow Oliver. And I'm not just a young girl." she told him, her voice firm and sharp like steel, before turning back to the sea.
"To survive on the island I had to grow up and leave behind what made me a kid. I had to become something else. I had to learn how to fight and kill to survive. The girl whose plane crashed on Lian Yu, that's not me anymore. I'm not doing this just because the Glades used to be my home. My only ties to Starling City right now are Oliver and my memories."

Diggle watched as she stopped, took a deep breath and turned to him again.

"Mr. Diggle, I'm not doing this because of loyalty to Oliver or because he's brainwashed me like some child soldier. I do this because it's something good that I can do with the skills I was forced to learn. I do this because it gives me a purpose. I only partnered up with Oliver because he's the person I trust most to watch my back."

Diggle could only watch in stunned silence as she turned and walked away. Hearing all of this felt... strange to Diggle. The words were coming out of a girl's mouth, but it felt like they were being spoken by someone much older. Someone who had seen and experienced things no seventeen year old should have to go through. It wasn't the usual mindless spouting of ideologies and propaganda he had heard countless times in Afghanistan. And he did see the things Oliver and Lydia kept pointing at, the flaws in the system, the way their city was being destroyed from the inside out by the corruption of the one percenters. And he heard the determination in Lydia's voice. This was a girl who, maybe due to whatever had happened in the past, saw this as her only way to help people. Maybe he'd gotten this all wrong. Maybe Oliver wasn't a manipulator like he thought. Maybe he was just a man who found a lost kid and was trying to guide her to the right path, helping her give her life meaning and keeping her safe as best he could. The only problem was that he was lost too.

*

Lydia couldn't stop replaying the conversation she'd had with Diggle in her head. She wasn't as annoyed as she had been the first time back at the Foundry. Despite the girl he described seeming so completely alien and different from reality to her, Lydia could tell he didn't mean it with ill intent. She hadn't detected any kind of condescension in his voice. In its place she heard concern, the kind that made him the exact type of person Oliver wanted on their team. But she still hadn't been able to tell if he understood her reasons, if he had realized that this mission wasn't some deluded crusade to make Oliver feel better about his father's sins, but instead an effort to help the people of this city.