A/N: The new Tomorrow People will be premiering in October on Wednesdays, following Arrow. Since the stars of the two shows are real life cousins, I figured that a crossover where their characters were also cousins was inevitable. Then htbthomas and tptigger egged me into starting one. Thanks to htbthomas for the brainstorming and early comments, as well.

All we know about the new TP for sure is what's decipherable from the ads, previews, and what was provided in an early draft of the pilot script. As such, most of the details of how the characters' powers work and what their relationships are to and amongst each other are made up for this story, based a great deal on the original 1973 TP. There are spoilers for the show included.No doubt it'll all be Jossed when the show actually premieres. Until then, thank you for reading and humoring me. Questions, comments, observations, concrit, squee, etc. are all welcomed and appreciated.

The Thickness of Blood

The problem was not that Stephen couldn't escape; the problem was that escaping would lead to far greater danger later. They had captured him because they thought they knew what he could do. He couldn't prove them right.

With the echo of the door slamming still ringing through the room, Stephen struggled against the bonds that locked his wrists and feet together. He was hog-tied, and only a few minutes of being wrenched into that position had his nerves sending warning sparks of pain through his limbs and his back threatening to never forgive him.

His cheek still throbbed from the back-hand blow his masked captor had delivered, and fear gripped his whole body. All his captor had told him was that Stephen needed to do nothing more than cooperate—though he refused to answer Stephen's frantic questions about what that cooperation would entail.

The captor's thoughts, on the other hand, gave away a lot more: They were looking for a Tomorrow Person. They knew about Stephen's father and knew that Stephen might be one—had the mental illness history that pointed in that direction. They just didn't know for sure if he was.

The fact that Stephen was Moira Queen's nephew—albeit from the poor side of the family—was merely a pleasant surprise.

The concrete floor was cold and hard under him, the room around him colder and damp. The building smelled of mildew and neglect, and had the air of a place that had been abandoned before it was ever used.

[Stephen, where are you?] John's telepathic send appeared in Stephen's mind less as the words that made up the question and more as the concern and suspicion behind it. Not bad for someone thinking at him from the other side of the country.

"Can't-" he started, then cut himself off. Can't talk, can't move, can't respond.

The guard at the single door out of this room shifted his stance, the gun cradled in his arms the centerpiece of his position. The guard was a tall, thickly built white man with thinning brown hair and hard eyes. Though Stephen wasn't the mind-reader Cara was, he could read the man's thoughts clearly: Shoot if you see anything out of the ordinary.

Stephen figured that appearing to talk to himself would definitely count as "out of the ordinary." He offered the guard a conciliatory smile. They were already well past the point in their short relationship where Stephen demanded answers and begged for mercy and the guard stoically ignored him

As expected, the guard's only response was to blink. Once.

[Stephen, are you in trouble?] Cara interjected, her voice even clearer in his mind. Her stronger-than-typical talent for mind-reading made her telepathy easier to understand than any of the others'. With her in the link, it also meant that he didn't have to speak out loud to make himself heard back.

[Nothing I can't handle,] he answered, adding a quick mental picture of his situation. John and Cara's worry bloomed bright in his mind. He tipped his chin down and wiggled his body like it would help get some circulation to his arms. In truth, the movement was meant to disguise any expressions he was unable to keep off his face. [Don't worry about me.]

[You've been captured,] Cara pointed out. Then added, with a lilt that Stephen could easily visualize as an eyeroll, a sarcastic, [Again.]

[I know. I'm handling it.] Sort of, he added to himself. So much sort of. The bonds were pulled tight, leaving Stephen with only the ability to scoot in short bursts across the floor, which he really had no desire to do considering the gun pointed at him. [Stay where you are,] he insisted. The last thing he needed was Cara or John teleporting in. If his captors needed proof of Stephen's powers, his new friends' sudden appearances in a locked, guarded room would be more than enough. [I mean it. I have a plan.]

[No you don't,] Cara responded.

Stephen had to fight to not let his head drop back in exasperation. Of course she would have seen right through his lie. She had tried to explain to him that telepathy wasn't just mind-to-mind speech, but he'd never had the need before to test whether he could lie that way. So, it turned out he couldn't. Noted.

[Are you sure you don't need help?] John asked.

Stephen had to mull that over for a moment. The truth was, he did need help. But the help his fellow Tomorrow People had to offer was the wrong kind. Unfortunately, the only other plan he had was to sit tight and hope his captors would convince themselves that they were wrong and would let him go.

He refused to consider that they could just kill him when they got bored.

Maybe being related to a bunch of billionaires would finally be of some use to him.

[I'm sure,] he answered, at last. A twist of his shoulders sent him tumbling onto his side with a loud oomph. The scant protection his jeans and hoodie offered against the chill of the air would not save him from a giant bruise on his shoulder. "I'm fine," he called out loud. "Probably gonna be sore for a couple days, and..." He trailed off when the guard took a threatening step closer to him.

The guard's boots thumped heavily on the floor in that one step, ringing through the room. His expression was set hard, unamused. He didn't have to move the gun for its presence to be re-announced.

Stephen shuddered.

There was a moment of silence and then John came back, worry and resignation lacing through his response, but no fight. [Fine.] There was a flash of something too fast for Stephen to make out. It felt like the kinetic force of a rubber-band snapping in his mind, leaving the residual feeling that John knew a lot more than he was letting on. [We'll play it your way. Shout when you need to be rescued.]

With that, John cut off the link amongst them.

The thoughts of the guard, and the dozens of other people in the building, raced in to fill the absence. His powers were still too new, too raw, to make sense of the ricochets of thought-noise like a radio being turned on and off. The noise had him gritting his teeth and wishing he could do more than bide his time.

The lights went out with a flicker and a soft pop.

Stephen stopped moving. Physically. He tried to concentrate, to cast open his mind and focus in on the thoughts surrounding him. To figure out what was going on. Static-like bursts of panic and fear flickered across his mind, but he couldn't grab any of them long enough to figure out what they were about. He felt sweat break out across his forehead and the chill of the floor creep up through his skin.

"What are you doing?" the gunman demanded. He aimed his gun at Stephen, but didn't pull the trigger. Not yet, anyway. Soft light still filtered in through the dirt encrusted windows that lined the far wall of the room. It was enough to see by, if not enough for comfort.

"It's not me," Stephen replied. "I didn't do it!" He wanted to point out that the light switch was next to the door, and he very much was not, but he managed to bite back the sarcasm before it got him shot. He tucked himself into the smallest ball he could given how he was tied, and reached for the part of his mind that would let him teleport.

The door slammed open. The gunman turned and unleashed a shot into the hallway. A soft thwip interrupted a second try. He hit the ground with a thunk, his form distorted with what looked like a stick poking out of his chest. His gun clattered uselessly next to his still form.

Stephen shut his eyes then and forced himself to breathe. One thought came clearly to his mind: rescue.

A tall, shrouded figure entered the room, a bow in his hands.

Stephen's breath was sucked out of him. He'd had heard about this guy, the vigilante. Everyone in Starling City knew of him and spoke about him, their opinions strong and often trapped between fearful and appreciative. At first, Stephen had thought it was some kind of practical joke being played on him and Luca, his brother, the poor schlubs visiting from out-of-town and in need of a little chain yanking.

And then he'd turned on the local news and discovered that the vigilante was no joke. On screen, he was an imposing figure, if grainy security film and police sketches were anything to go by: Tall and broad shouldered, and always keeping his face obscured under a green hood.

In person, he was all that and more. The intensity of his thoughts struck Stephen like a physical blow, rocking him backward. Stephen's tongue darted over his dry, cracked lips as he processed the impossible information.

The last time the Jamesons had been to Starling City was for his Uncle Robert and cousin Oliver's funeral. The last time Stephen had seen Oliver alive, he'd been barely eight years old and far more interested in exploring the mansion than in spending time with a stuck-up cousin who was more than twice his age. Seeing Oliver again after so long came with the expectation of physical changes, especially after what Oliver had been through. The biggest surprise there was how much Stephen had closed the gap in their heights.

The real shock had been how Oliver's mind felt. The focus and determination in it was unlike anything Stephen had encountered, even in his uncle Jedikiah, who was the most determined person he'd ever met—up until walking into the Queen household and discovering what a calling truly felt like.

"Are you OK?" the vigilante growled. His voice was deep and synthesized, not at all like Oliver's, which Stephen figured had to be the point. It also sounded dangerous. If he didn't already know he was safe with this guy, he'd be flinging him across the room with the full force of his telekinesis.

"I'm fine," Stephen replied, surprised at how different it felt to say it this time. He tried to jiggle his arms to show why he wasn't contributing to his own escape, and realized in that moment that he'd stopped feeling them a long time ago. Only the ache of wrenched muscles through his shoulders let him know that he hadn't completely disassociated from his body.

"I'm going to get you out of here," the vigilante stated. "Hold still." Keeping his face carefully averted, and his bow held in ready position, he crossed the room to where Stephen sat. He crouched in front of him, head bowed so that all Stephen could clearly see was the top of his hood and the quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Then he made a strange twisting gesture with one hand. Only as the plastic ties hit the floor with dull clinks did Stephen realize that the bonds had been cut away. He still couldn't feel any of his limbs; he was shaking his head 'no' before the man even finished asking, "Can you stand?"

"My legs are asleep," he explained. "So are my arms." He tried to move this legs, get them straightened out for the first time in how knew how long. A telekinetic push helped, though he could tell from the complete lack of sensation that it was going to be awhile before he'd be able to put any weight on them. He suspected they didn't have awhile. People were racing through other parts of the building, their panic and anger palpable to him.

They were going to be here soon. Even if the vigilante's arrows would be enough against the guns, Stephen couldn't let him use them.

And if he didn't, they were both going to get shot.

Stephen's eye landed on the open door then and traveled down to the fallen gunman. The door was unguarded, and the others in the building were only starting to regroup. They had maybe a minute, which wasn't enough time for his limbs to recover, but was more than enough for other methods of egress. "Shoot one of the windows," he ordered, tipping a chin in the direction of the dirtied glass on the wall across from them.

"Why?" the vigilante asked. Through the shadows cast on his face by the hood, his stubbled-jaw tensed.

"To throw them off," Stephen replied. He took a deep breath and let it out as the first painful tingles of reawakening nerves began to prickle around his feet. He couldn't keep the grimace of pain off his face or out of his voice.

The vigilante hesitated for only a second before drawing an arrow from his quiver and loosing it at a window. On impact, the glass shattered and rained to the floor in large shards that hit the concrete and shattered further. Bright light flooded into the room, a stark contrast to the artificial twilight that had filled it before. "Now what?"

"Help me stand up," Stephen replied. He was ages away from being able to succeed at that task, but that didn't matter for what he really wanted to do.

The vigilante listened for a long second to the commotion of people running up stairs, the slam and clang of doors, of feet on metal. "We have to move fast," he said.

Stephen allowed a small smile to quirk his lips. "Faster than light," he replied.

His still-dead arm was no sooner wrapped around the vigilante's shoulder, when he closed his eyes, found his center, and teleported.

Stephen was still new at this whole having-powers thing, which meant that there were a lot of specifics to the skills that he hadn't worked out yet: like how to choose a destination when teleporting outside of line-of-sight. This time that meant that they landed in his bedroom—correction, the guestroom in which he was staying—at the Queen mansion. Stephen promptly fell backward onto the bed, a grunt escaping his lips as his arms chose that moment to come back to life.

The vigilante stumbled as the surface changed beneath his feet, though he found his new footing quickly. He had an arrow nocked in his bow and pointed at Stephen before the flash from the teleport faded. "What did you do? Where are we?"

Stephen sighed. The bedding beneath him was soft and inviting, especially after the hard floor he'd been sitting on. The sudden urge to curl up and go to sleep swept through him, though having an arrow pointed at his chest did make it easier to resist. "I guess we have a lot of catching up to do." A beat, and then he added the hook, "Oliver."

The string on the bow tightened just a fraction more, and Stephen instinctively reached for his powers again, though the close distance between him and the weapon pointed at him made it unlikely that he'd have even the reaction time to use them. The best he could hope for was to knock the arrow aside so that the only thing it hit was the mattress.

"Take me back," the vigilante ordered. "Right now!"

"I can't," Stephen answered, low, resolute. It wasn't an issue of knowing the location. He knew that room better than he'd ever wanted to know a room. The issue was what would happen if he followed the direction. People would die, and it didn't matter if they deserved it, Stephen couldn't be responsible for it happening. Not didn't want to. Couldn't. Tomorrow People can't kill, he remembered Cara explaining, and now he was beginning to understand how much that could limit his otherwise immense powers.

"Do it!"

"I can't!" Stephen shouted, forcing himself up on wobbly elbows. Anything to make his cousin take his words more seriously.

The bow lowered then, the arrow rejoining its mates in the quiver. "Stay here!" Without another word, the vigilante crossed to the window, opened it. He pushed the storm screen out and had himself through the aperture in record time, leaving only the curtains to drift in the new breeze.

Stephen dropped back onto the bed, all energy suddenly sucked out of him. His heart thudded in his chest, his breathing came ragged and rapid. All he could do for a long time was stare at the ceiling, not even a clear thought in his head except the image of the sharp point of the arrow that had been aimed at him and the sharper focus in his cousin's mind about how easily he would have been able to use it.