NOTE: There are some potentially triggering themes in this chapter. There is nothing explicit and nothing in depth, but please read with caution.
. . .
"Smile, we're all dying
Hey, you've been lying to yourself again"
WILLIAM CRIGHTON - 'Smile'
. . .
"Please don't name your child Anakin," Tommy said dryly, itching the side of his nose. "You know that's objectively, like, a terrible idea, right?"
"I like it," Cali protested, a smile threatening her lips. "It's better than Leon." She said the name as though it personally offended her. "Like honestly, that's what you think is a good name? Leon?" She shook her head. "That's worse than Thea's."
Thea, who'd suggested Klive. Unironically. With a deadpan expression. Cali had been horrified.
Tommy pouted, lifting a spoonful of half melted ice cream to his mouth with a dramatic huff. "Well, what does Michael think?"
Cali's smile slipped only slightly. She cleared her throat and picked at the skin of her wrist. "He thinks I should name the baby James."
"Isn't that his middle name?"
Cali shrugged.
Okay, so Leon wasn't actually that bad of a name - in all honesty, she wasn't sure what she wanted to call her unborn child. None of the names she'd agonised over seemed to fit right for the lifeforce growing inside her.
In every book she'd read, every online interview she'd watched, every mother always said that if they didn't have a name before the birth, then they'd look into their new-born's eyes for the first time and the name would just come to them.
Yeah, fuck that. If Cali didn't have a name for her baby before he came into the world, then she could just hold off the pregnancy until she found one.
Tommy cleared his throat. "Okay, the name Anakin aside, this is going to be your son. Not mine, not Thea's, not even Michael."
"It's his kid too-"
"As far as I'm concerned, if he's not pushing the damn thing out of his body, he doesn't get that much of a say, okay?" Tommy leaned forward. "This is your baby Cali. You name him whatever you want to."
Weeks later, right as the little life form was launching an impressive barrage of kicks against her soft insides, the name slipped into her mind and grew roots, planting inside her thoughts with a certainty she hadn't expected.
"Gabriel," she whispered to her swollen stomach. "Because you're my little angel."
. . .
Cali liked Anita. She had a dry sense of humour that seemed at odds with her gentle hands, her presence a muted grey of calm and steadiness. Everything about her was unobtrusive and simple, and Cali appreciated that more than anybody could ever possibly understand.
As it was, even with Tommy and Oliver having been shooed out of the room, Cali was aware of them lurking outside the room in a way that wasn't entirely normal. They lingered and flickered in the yawning cavity somewhere beside her heart. They were... She could feel them.
It was something to ignore, for now. To acknowledge that she knew exactly what kind of emotion Tommy was suffering through was to acknowledge that she was reaching a whole new level of freak.
"I can't find any sort of anomaly in any of your vitals," Anita told her with a smile. The small thread of her pleasant feelings tickled Cali's chest. "Normally, with head-trauma induced comas, I would push for PT and constant monitoring, but my superiors have told me that there are... special circumstances here and I'm to forgo normal procedures."
Fucking Malcolm.
Cali pressed her lips together, managing an uncomfortable twitch of her mouth. "Is my brother allowed back in?" She asked tightly, not because she particularly wanted direct exposure to the hurricane of emotions that was Tommy, but because they really needed to talk about Malcolm.
Anita's expression pinched only slightly, pity and understanding breezing over her elfish features. "Sure thing, sweetie. But the second you start feeling tired, or something doesn't feel right, you press the call button and I'll be here."
Which was nice, in a way. Cloying and smothering, in another.
Cali nodded encouragingly as Anita moved over to the door and opened it, murmuring something quietly to the two figures outside. It was only another moment before Tommy was creeping in, eyes bright.
Surprisingly, Oliver stayed outside, his crackling, electric snap of intense and passionate feelings hovering just beyond the door - a safe enough distance that Cali could shove it to the side and ignore it for the moment.
"Hey," Tommy said gently, coming to stand beside her bed. He looked tired, she noted, even as she felt his slithering adrenaline mimicked underneath the skin of her arms. "How are you feeling?"
Cali snorted. "It's not what I'm feeling that's worrying me," she snapped. Tommy started at the unexpected edge to her voice. "What the fuck happened while I was out? Because Anita tells me there are 'special circumstances' that apparently mean I'm not being monitored for most of my recovery."
Tommy winced, his left hand shooting to the back of his neck in an instinctual mirroring of his old childhood habit. Usually, it was a sign of guilt.
Even more startling than being aware of his guilt was actually physically feeling it; Cali's stomach felt shrivelled and cramped, her throat tightening as the sour tang of Tommy's self-condemnation coated the inside of her mouth.
"What-" she said slowly, "-the fuck is going on?"
Tommy blew out a heavy breath, opting to take a seat in one of the vacant seats instead of continuing to stand. "If I tell you why Malcolm is paying off the hospital staff," he began haltingly, "will you tell me why you threatened to shoot him?"
Well she'd messed this up something spectacular, hadn't she?
It'd been foolish to assume that nobody would find out about it, especially if Malcolm needed leverage for something. She should've known that he'd feed Tommy enough information to get him confused and distracted by the implications.
And she knew, really, that she couldn't even explain why she'd done it. Telling Tommy about the boat, about Oliver and Robert and Sara, and what Malcolm had done-
She couldn't tell him. She couldn't do that to him. Not now, when he was already being forced into a corner by Oliver, by her, by Laurel, by Malcolm. His low level panic was a simmering lava pool somewhere behind her ribcage. His helplessness was a swelling bubble of water somewhere in her left shoulder.
"Tommy, I..." She shook her head. She splayed her hands on the sheets. "It's not my story to tell."
"Yes it is!" Tommy hissed suddenly, and she jolted at the rapid change of tone. Invisible razor blades sliced into her heart, leaving tiny lines of fire in their wake. "Damn it, Cali! You always do this - it's never your story to tell, never your secrets to keep, never you. Well, this time, there was nobody else who pulled a damn gun on our father."
His anger wasn't unjustified but she had no way of making him understand that she could talk about threatening Malcolm until she went blue in the face, but trying to justify the act without giving away the horrible, horrible truth was impossible.
Cali closed her eyes so she wouldn't have to see the expression on her brother's face as she said, "He's a bad person, Tommy. He's done so many bad things, and I couldn't let him keep doing it to innocent people." She clamped down on the part of her that longed to spill the full truth - about the 'Gambit' and the warehouse and everything Felicity had told her about Moira. "And I don't think Thea's wrong about him and Moira having an affair."
Unexpectedly, Tommy didn't respond straight away. In fact, the silence stretched on long enough that she blinked her eyes open again and stared at him, waiting for any kind reaction. Any kind of indication that he'd heard her and understood.
Some kind of pressure built in her chest - a sucking, greedy, type of sickening anger that took root dangerously close to a vein and burned like a bitch.
Tommy's face remained impossibly blank and calm as he said, "I know you're lying to me, but I'm used to it by now, so I don't even care." He brushed a hand over his face, seemingly ignorant to the face of hurt Cali could feel herself making. "Alright, uh, Malcolm's been injecting a synthetic and experimental antidote into your IV which is why you took so long to wake up, and he's been paying off the hospital so they won't look too closely."
Well, it explained why her arm wasn't in a cast even though she'd heard the crack of the bone before her head had hit the dash. And why Anita was so confused about such an extensive recovery after literally being comatose a day or two ago.
"I don't think the antidote fixed anything," she admitted, and Tommy sighed.
"Yeah, I was worried about that."
"Well shit."
It was, realistically, the most adequate response for the situation.
The door creaked open slightly, and Cali's heart seized painfully as Oliver stuck his head in. His expression was sheepish, but there was a droning whine in Cali's ear that made her wonder if he wasn't fronting for them, and tucking his real feelings away in that little pocket inside himself.
He was significantly chirpier than both of them when he said, "Do you mind if I butt in to say goodbye to Cali? I've gotta get home - John's sent an SOS about Thea."
Oh, right. Thea. Cali mouth skewed to the side, the movement entirely reactionary. "How is she?" She asked. "I mean, she's obviously better off than me, which - go her, I guess - but, like, is she okay?"
Oliver evidently took that as his invitation to properly enter the room, stopping beside Tommy's chair as though Tommy's discomfort and disdain wasn't a sour spot at the back of Cali's throat.
"Thea's fine," he said, smiling warmly, even as Cali's right trigger finger twitched like she'd just fired a shot. "You're the one everybody's worried about at the moment." Another half-truth - Cali's finger moved again.
Yeah, that antidote hadn't done shit.
Tommy's phone buzzed before Oliver could keep talking to fill the slightly awkward silence, and Cali's face got overly warm as he read the text, visibly displeased. It had to be Malcolm. Nobody else seemed to piss him off that easily, except Oliver, who was standing right there.
"What's dear old dad done now?" She drawled.
Tommy didn't look away from his phone. "I would've thought you'd know. You seem to know so much other shit about him."
Okay. Rude. But also completely deserved. She was blatantly hiding things from him, and while she wasn't technically lying, there were enough implications in what she wasn't saying that she was surprised that Tommy was still sitting beside her and not halfway out of the damn city.
Oliver, apparently, was still playing the fool. "What's that supposed to mean?" He asked. Cali's inner cheek stung something fierce.
Tommy just waved a hand at their friend and continued to frown down at his phone. "Listen. Malcolm found out who sabotaged the car." The mood, somehow, dropped even further. "Apparently it was a third party who was hoping to collapse Queen Consolidated. If Thea was taken out of the picture as well as Walter, the thought process seems to be that Moira wouldn't be able to leave the house and the company would be open for the taking."
A plausible story, Cali would admit.
It was a complete and utter lie, of course, but a plausible lie that would soothe most people's ruffled feathers. Cali had no doubt that whatever had happened had something to do with Malcolm and Moira, and the 'Gambit' going down five years ago.
Or she was just being paranoid, and the political environment in Starling City really was that toxic.
Oliver shook his shoulders out, sighing. "I guess I should talk to Mom then. And Thea too. We'll up security until we're sure that the danger has passed."
Sharp pain - swift and fiery like a wasp sting - left a throbbing patch on Cali's left shoulder and she winced as Tommy's entire face froze into something cruel.
"You're so selfish," he hissed lowly, in a tone that was so unlike him that Cali winced again, grabbing the sheets in her left hand and gnawing on her lip. She didn't like where this was going - the intense cold creeping up her neck hurt. "God, I don't why I keep expecting you to actually care, because you keep making it obvious that we don't mean shit to you."
"How is wanting to protect his family selfish?" Cali asked.
Tommy shook his head and laughed bitterly, angrily. The icy pressure built up to Cali's jaw. "Because it's his family that got you into this mess! If Thea hadn't gotten high and started driving, I wouldn't have sat here and watched my baby sister be comatose! And she hasn't even bothered to give us an apology!"
"That's not Oliver's fault!" She argued, inhaling sharply as the invisible ice built up to her eye sockets and the pressure increased. "Thea is a grown woman who can make her own choices, and Oliver cares about her!"
Oliver, stupidly, opened his mouth and asked literally the stupidest question. "Why are you allowed to burn the world for your sister, but I'm not allowed to protect mine?"
Cali thought her eyes might burst with the amount of pressure on them. Agony was clashing with a freezing cold agony. She was a cacophony of emotion that wasn't hers, that she was stealing from someone else-
Tommy stood up, squaring up to his childhood friend. "Ask me that again."
Emotions that she could control.
"Enough," she said from her bed, even as Oliver rose to the challenge, eyes flashing.
"I love Cali," he said in a growl. "I love her dearly, and she's important to me. Her safety is important to me. But Thea is my sister, and you don't get to tell me who's more important. And you especially don't get to dump the blame on Thea when Cali knew she was high and let her drive anyway!"
The ice started cracking.
Tommy cackled wildly, and this was it - this was their breaking. "You're telling me that you've never let a friend do something stupid? Because I remember you encouraging me to drink with you, age be damned. I remember you bringing me to parties that we shouldn't have been at, talking to and sleeping with people who would have ruined our lives. You left me with girls I didn't want to be with and you thought it was funny"
"That's different-"
"Bullshit it's different! Thea's been on drugs long enough to know better!"
"Thea's under a lot of emotional stress right now-"
"And you think Cali isn't?"
"I'm not saying that, Tommy. You're not listening."
"You're the one who isn't listening! Because you're Oliver fucking Queen and you survived a sinking ship, and now that you're back we all have to fall to our knees in worship as you pick and choose who you're not going to shit on."
Oliver's jaw clenched, a steely and unsettling mask sliding down over his face. "Say whatever you need to so that you can feel better, Tommy, but the only thing wrong in our friendship is your constant neediness. You want me to be the same person because that person was your best fucking friend, but I've changed." His voice dropped to a deadly murmur. "Let it go."
Tommy punched him in the face.
The ice that held Cali's entire face and neck captive shattered and the release of pressure forced an instinctual cry out of her as she grabbed onto every pinprick of foreign feeling and yanked.
"STOP!"
They did.
At once, every bit of tension slipped from Oliver and Tommy's bodies, and their faces slackened into something blank and mindless. For all the tumultuous and raging emotion she held in her metaphorical hands, none of it was displayed on either of them - almost as if she'd pulled it right out of them.
It was almost as though she'd pulled it out of herself too.
All of it, the burning and the freezing and the pain, it was gone. Her chest was hollowed out, her throat ragged and bleeding but free from the dangers of another person's dangerous feelings. The wasp stings were gone from her arm.
Oliver and Tommy stood still and silent, puppets to her wandering hands.
Gritting her teeth, Cali took the trembling things in her possession and crushed them together, massaging and squishing and moulding and getting out every last one of her own emotions. Her sensitivity to heightened feelings was going to be her downfall if she stayed around her brother, if she stayed around Oliver, if she stayed around Malcolm.
(Except that damn file had spelled out her fate in bold, blocky, type-writer text. She was doomed to crawl back to Malcolm again and again, reliant on him, dependent on the relationship that he'd forced between them.)
So Cali mashed and sliced and forced everything she held, every drop of feeling, together until she had a grey sludge that she could let drip between her fingers.
If this was misery, she should cram it into every living being in Starling City and maybe everybody would be too bloody sad to do anything evil.
As it was, the implications of Tommy's words - 'you left me with girls I didn't want to be with you thought it was funny' - played on loop in her head. The sheer thought of it was incomprehensible, horrific, sickening. And it couldn't be true, he couldn't mean it like that. Because if what she was thinking had any kernel of honesty to it, Oliver Queen would not live another day.
If he'd done nothing but laugh while Tommy was-was-was-
Fucking hell, she couldn't even say it.
The grey sludge burst into flames and melted away into nothing. Cali watched it, and felt nothing, because there was nothing left to feel. She'd stripped all three of them of their heart, their soul, their depth.
And why should she give it back? Why should she endorse more fighting, more hurting, more betrayal, more lies, more, more, more? Who did she owe that to? It certainly wasn't herself. If she could spare Tommy the pain of being on the bench, of being on the side-lines, of forgetting about the agony of existing alongside people who lived so much louder-
She would spare him in a heartbeat.
She would spare Oliver too. She would spare the whole damn city.
And she would be just like her father if she did.
A thin stream of warm blue light trickled back to Oliver and Tommy, and the haze cleared from their faces. It still wasn't right - Cali didn't know how to return their passion to them, didn't know how to replicate the strength of the argument now that she'd destroyed it. The most she could give them was a base sort of tranquillity and let them build it back up themselves.
The only thing she gave herself was an overwhelming amount of apathy.
Tommy barely even looked at her when he said, "I think we need to talk to Malcolm."
Oliver said, "I'm sorry that none of you will ever be enough for me."
Cali said nothing at all, because she'd just taken something vital from them without their consent, and if that didn't make her worse than her father, she didn't know what did.
. . .
Oliver, after being stripped down to the type of killer calm he'd been hiding from himself, promptly went out and did something really fucking stupid.
Building connections with the Bratva was necessary - it would be a good asset while he was the vigilante - but it was a stupid, stupid risk to take. Especially pulling John in on it. There was only so far new-found loyalty would stretch, and there was only so much Oliver was willing to reveal of himself.
But it was necessary, because he had to keep Thea out of jail. He would burn Starling City to the ground if it meant protecting her. So he brought John along. He carved out that small truth and handed it over with a lick of foreign language and a trick a dead man had taught him.
Meeting the Count went terrible, horribly, spectacularly wrong.
The effects of a Vertigo overdose went a little bit like this:
Oliver remembered Lian Yu. Remembered fighting. Remembered Slade. Remembered Shado. The world around him spun, alight with the wailing of the damned. Fire threaded through his veins and heat waves slammed his head back against the metal table Diggle had dumped him on, again and again.
It was too much and not enough, and everything he couldn't stand. Hands that might've been his lashed out at someone's throat, and he screamed and thrashed and howled because it was too much, too much, too much.
Claggy paste was crammed down his throat and it was like falling into a pool of water.
All at once, there was a resonating kind of silence. Like somebody had reached inside his head and fiddled around and pulled out everything that might've been in there. Coherency evaporated under the simmering violence of his rising body temperature, awareness trickling away like a withered stream in the summer sun.
There was dark, and there was quiet, and Lian Yu was an idea that existed outside of his body - it lingered in another place, alongside the concept of the Hood being a different mask and not a part of him, with the trauma and the memories of the killing and the stabbing and the burning and the slicing he'd endured and inflicted for five years.
Through that hush, he heard a voice.
"It's not a weakness to be afraid," she'd told him one afternoon, his hand in hers. He hadn't believed her then. He didn't believe her now.
"I don't know what you're hiding from, but whatever it is scares you." A fountain, the urge to run, wishing there was alcohol on his breath to explain away the poison in his words. Cali, being gentle despite it. "I'm here, okay? Always have been, always will be."
"This is to do with you taking and taking and taking as though you deserve it, or you're entitled to it. Guess what? Everything you were entitled to disappeared once you fucking died!" She'd shouted at him, yelled herself red in the face and he'd deserved it. He'd disappointed her that night. He'd protected her too.
I don't know what to do, he pleaded silently as his body thrashed and jolted - somewhere in the real world, John Diggle was desperately holding him down, fear in his eyes as he remembered the soldiers in his care that'd squirmed just like this when bullets had torn flesh.
I don't know what to do, tell me what to do. HELP ME-
"You do what you always do," Cali whispered to him under the covers in the early morning. The smell of vanilla shampoo made the flames inside his body burn hotter, burn angrier, burn sadder. "You go on."
I can't, he wailed, because Lian Yu was drawing close again, was dragging back those chains made of identity and memories and blood on his hands. I can't, please, it's too much.
"You go on," Cali whispered again, and then he burst through the surface of the water and let the fire take him.
. . .
Tommy watched the world whiz by and felt around inside his chest in search for the emotions he knew should be sitting there. He didn't miss them, really, but they'd left behind an aching chasm that reminded him far too much of his father.
What Cali had done to him, what she'd done to Oliver...
How could he justify that? It was an invasion, a theft. She'd taken him away from himself, and then she'd put him back wrong. His bones didn't fit underneath his skin anymore. His thoughts didn't fit in his head. He felt like a jigsaw puzzle, only someone had mixed two different pictures together and now the pieces wouldn't fit.
What was it to know yourself? Tommy didn't understand it anymore, didn't understand his own being. A thread had wrapped around his throat from the first twitch of his emotions, and it had tightened enough to strangle him the moment Cali had ripped the heart right out of him.
Surely this was how Oliver felt being back in Starling City. With the clarity Cali had gifted him - with the forced objectiveness unclouded by grief and rage - Tommy could see the suffering etched into the statue of Oliver's soul. Coming back to a suffocating city, living with the very people who could live without him.
Maybe Cali was being merciful by tearing that away from him. Maybe Oliver would be better for it, would appreciate the blank slate.
Tommy didn't.
Tommy would never appreciate being unmade, being whittled down into some hollow and empty thing. Left to the mercy of his sister, he wished he could feel his mother's arms again, just once more before Medusa's stone closed around his face and forced him away from the world.
Cali looked like their mother. She was her father, though, through and through, and that scared him. Oh if there was a feeling that Tommy could identify, it was fear. Fear that was seeping into all the empty spaces that Cali had left behind as she sat on her hospital bed and held Tommy's yarn-tangled ball of emotions in one hand.
"Sir?" His driver - Ben, maybe? - was watching him through the rear-view mirror. "Have you decided on a destination?"
Right. He'd called for a car and gotten in and they'd started driving and that had been that. The only direction Tommy had given was for the car to get him out of the city. To get him away from Cali. To get him out and away.
He didn't smile. Didn't offer platitudes. Why bother? He was only a thing, needlessly aware of his insignificant role in the narrative of this universe. He'd been created in a supporting role - destined never to be the important one, the focus, the main character of his own life. He was the best friend, the brother, the lover, but never the one.
God had taken one look at him and deemed him worthless, and Tommy had to live with that knowledge branded on the inside of his ribcage, where the flowers grew sadder and sadder with every breath he took.
"Just keep driving," he said to Ben with a voice that was barely his own. "Drive until it's somebody else's turn to care."
Ben's mouth twisted. "Are you okay?"
Tommy smiled - it felt wrong. "I'm supposed to say yes."
"Sir- Tommy," Ben corrected himself. "Forgive me if I'm overstepping my bounds, but the staff care a great deal about you and your sister. If there's anything we could ever to do to help you, if there's anything you ever need-"
"I won't ask for it," Tommy said bitterly. "I would collapse in on myself if I had to, just so that I could get away with not acknowledging how meaningless it all is."
Cali hadn't just taken his emotions, his feelings. She'd stolen something that was so much more important. Because the light that she'd given back - that foundation upon which he could build himself again - it was barely a shadow of the roaring solar flares that had kept Tommy warm.
His phone rang, and he answered it without looking at the screen.
"Hey," Laurel greeted. "Just thought I'd check in. How's Cali?"
Tommy wanted her to love him the way she loved Oliver. He wanted her to hold him at night, to run her fingers through his hair and whisper things that had no meaning but meant everything. He wanted their dates to feel less friendly, for them to be in love.
She loved him. She wasn't in love with him.
Warmth bloomed in his throat anyway. "Laurel," he murmured. "Laurel."
"Tommy? What's going on? Are you okay? Did something happen?"
He gripped the phone, looked out at the world outside of Starling City. "I need you," he admitted. "God, I need you to just.... "
She could fill in the emptiness that Cali had left behind, mend the tattered threads of broken emotions. She could colour in between the lines until Tommy was himself again, and this melancholy monster was locked away under his skin. Laurel could fix him, just by smiling and breathing and existing.
He moved the phone away from his mouth and signalled to Ben. "To Laurel's apartment, please."
Ben smiled at him, and the first drop of colour splashed into the yawning cavern that was his body.
. . .
Cali stared down at her phone as she obsessively read and reread the message she'd just sent. Well, the second message she'd sent. The first had been to Malcolm, telling him to damn well explain himself. There hadn't been a response to that one yet, but she didn't care. Not when Janet's contact had the little text message bubbles.
Cali had said, 'I know you walked away, and I'm not angry, but I need a friend right now and I hope you didn't walk right out of Starling City.'
She couldn't do this alone.
'It's a big city,' Janet responded. 'I might just get lost trying to find you.'
Heart in her throat, Cali screenshotted a map, labelling the hospital. 'X marks the spot.'
Almost immediately: 'I'm coming, CC. It's going to be okay, don't you worry.'
Cali started crying.