AN: This is sort of an idea that I had after re-watching season one on Netflix. This choice, the symmetry of it later, the agony that Slade and Oliver go through after Shado...it is all very painful, and it sparked the what-if AU monster in my mind. This can be a stand alone, but I kind of want to build upon it and take it back off the island, through the show. Let me know your thoughts.

The Choice

Oliver sat in the mud, hands bound behind his back, long greasy, blonde hair hanging in his eyes. A feeling of hopelessness sat in his gut as he stared forward, deaf and dumb and blind to all the world except for the woman in front of him. She lay in the same mud he did, body limp and lifeless from the bullet that had ripped through her smooth forehead, shattered the beautiful mind beneath her skull, and out the back of her head.

Lifeless eyes stared back at him, challenging, accusing, thanking.

He'd had the choice. It had been placed squarely on his shoulders by Ivo. By Ivoand his vendetta and his gun. Mostly, it was that gun. It hadn't ever occurred to Oliver Queen, playboy, alcoholic and irresponsible youth, to marvel over the wonder of inanimate objects. Now that he'd seen it, he recognized the potential there, in a hunk of metal and engineering. For the first time in his life, he saw behind the superficial.

It was a pity it was already too late.

Vaguely, he was aware of people dying around him. Of anger and shouting and wrath. It didn't much matter, because Oliver had already laid death on the shoulders of someone that he loved, on someone that meant more to him than just another face. More than the superficial. His fault. His fault. His fault. So much was already his fault. Too much. It crippled him.

Before the Island, before Lian Yu, he might have made such a choice without flinching. Without the darkness and the gun in his face and the knowledge that between the two, there was no good option, he might have pointed a finger indiscriminately. Sara Lance. Beautiful. Vapid. Shallow. Perfectly imperfect because she was anything but Laurel. Shado. Beautiful. Intelligent. A survivor. Perfectly imperfect because she was half of Oliver's world. The only half that had been left after Slade. After Oliver had been too slow, too inexperienced, to save him. The Mirakuru had failed, but Oliver had failed first. What choice was that, really? He'd already lost half of his world. Was the other half so important? Could he survive without that half?

"Kid." The voice was familiar, vague on the corner of his mind and memory. That voice was gone, dead and lost to him. "Oliver."

He couldn't take his eyes off of the body. He owed that to her, to the memory of her, to what she had been. He couldn't-

Except there were dark eyes in front of him, staring into his and whispering his name. A delicate hand was against his cheek, drawing him back from the memory of a beautiful woman and how he'd wronged her, how he'd damned her. Those eyes softened, and she whispered something to someone behind him. Strong hands came down on either of his shoulders, squeezing in a way that was both painful and reassuring. That pressure became a little too much, and he winced, biting into his tongue. The pain was welcome. He deserved it. The moment it became cathartic, those sharp brown eyes cut to whoever was behind him, and the pressure slackened off immediately, the hands disappearing from his skin as if burned. Maybe he did burn them. Maybe whatever was dark and evil in his soul had leached out through his skin and scalded the palms.

"Oliver?" the woman whispered, her hands never leaving his cheeks, his neck, comforting and drawing him away from the memory of the dead woman.

"I killed her," he whispered. With the words, the burning at his eyes ran in little streaks down his face where it was soothed away by softly questing thumbs.

"No," she said firmly, shushing him. A firmly drawn mouth dismissed his concern, his self-damning. She shook him slightly. "No."

"I did," he repeated, stronger this time. "It was you or her, and I couldn't...Slade's already gone, and if he's gone, there's no point if...I killed her." He recognized the stinging lines and hot tracks on his face as tears then, and she kept rubbing them away, hiding the evidence of his weakness.

"No, Oliver," she whispered, but those knowing eyes weren't on him anymore, they were over his shoulder, speaking without moving her lips. The presence at his back appeared again, and those hands were so very careful when they settled again, one on his shoulder and the other beside him. A large body slid down beside him, roughly jostling despite the apparent care.

Oliver had seen a gorilla once at the zoo. It was giant, powerful with dexterous fingers. A child had fallen in from an overhead walk, landing in the watering hole. The animal had saved the toddler from drowning and held it in those powerful hands. The infant had been extracted bruised with a broken arm, but it had been taken alive. Oliver remembered, even as a child, thinking that the gorilla had tried so very hard to hold the toddler with care. It had simply been too strong. The man settling next to him moved with similar hesitance.

"It's not your fault, kid," the man said. The familiar accent and cadence, the gargled-with-gravel sound belonged to a man that was dead and cooling, and it took that man jostling him again, forcing his head up with too powerful hands, to realize.

"Slade," Oliver said on an exhale, too exhausted to say it properly. The man had been dead. His pulse had stilled beneath shaking fingertips, and everything that had been the Aussie had gone. The Mirakuru had failed, and yet, there he sat, alive and well, if not thunderous. Except, Slade always looked angry. Now was no exception.

"Yeah, kid," Slade said, his hands bruising against Oliver's jaw, anchoring him in place until realization slowly dawned on Oliver. A groping, grasping hand came up and gripped Slade's wrist.

"I killed her, Slade," Oliver said, squeezing firmly.

"No, kid," Slade said, and just like that, Oliver's entire frame melted. His head fell forward, and Slade released him as if burned. Chin hit chest, and his hands tangled in his hair. Slade never lied to him. Slade demanded the truth, demanded he speak it and be told it. He never spared Oliver's feelings and he blamed him for more than was truly his fault. If he said that Oliver didn't kill her...

"Ivo killed her, Oliver," the woman said, running delicate fingers against his thighs, soothing, grounding. "He gave you a choice, and you lost either way." The woman paused, drawing a deep, steadying breath, as if the next words needed more strength than she had. "I am sorry for your loss. I know you cared for her."

"She was my fault," Oliver said to his chest, and Slade's grunt of annoyance had him speaking again. "The island, I mean. She wouldn't have been here." He looked up then, over the woman's shoulder to her.

She lay there, light eyes closed, blonde hair falling to obscure the bullet wound that ended her life. She looked nothing like Sara Lance in that moment, nothing like the woman that he'd taken on the Gambit so long ago. Nothing like her sister or her father or even of her mother.

"Everyone makes their own choices, Oliver," Shado said, her knowing face staring at him, capturing his attention and putting herself between Oliver and Sara, so he couldn't see her.

"I made a choice," he said, but there was none of the agony in his tone, none of the indecision. "It was...it was the best I could..."

"We'll talk about it later, kid. For now, we've got to get out of here." Slade pulled him easily to his feet with only an arm around his shoulders. Later, they would talk about the strength in the man that had always been present but was now almost uncontrolled. Later, they would talk about the darkness in Shado's eyes, about the way she looked at Sara as they laid her to rest beneath the ground quickly. They would talk about Oliver's sense of responsibility, about begging for Fryers to kill him instead of the other two. That would all come later, though.