Author's Note: This was written in about an hour with no beta, so if you see any mistakes, please let me know.

How To Temper Selfishness

In the end, it wasn't a knife from the dark or the bullet from a bad guy's gun. It was her. She had him lying there, choking back the pain and the blood and the anger even as he reached out, reached for her with only escaping breath.

There were no words anymore. There were screams, pleas, and demands, but none came out with the structure of a sentence, the thought needed to form those utterances into something coherent was focused on something else entirely.

She was babbling again, he always liked it when she spoke without thought, when her mind was seen through her words. She was screaming at him, to the men around him, begging them while ordering him to stay with her.

Stay with her. He didn't realize until quite recently "staying with her" had become one of the few precious things left to his battered existence. To stay with her, to be by her side and hear her voice as it rambled along, to smell the scent of her as she moved by, to watch her eyebrows draw down when a program offended her, all of it he wanted. He'd found himself more and more trying for the light she gave off, that radiance which spoke of innocence and fierce will and incredible determination. She was something beautiful without any knowledge of it, and that fact had always amazed him.

It started the day he woke up on a table, shot, bleeding, stitched and bruised, to find her smiling at him. Smiling. She had to have known what a man he was then, the kind of man who killed when he thought it necessary, the kind of man who had more blood on his hands than could ever be washed away. She'd seen the news, read the articles, heard the rumors; surely she had an image formed of him that would never be dark enough to match reality.

But this woman, this wonderful, beautiful woman just smiled at him, and seemed genuinely happy to have him come back to the world. She smiled at him, and it was a thing that pulled at a part of him desiring peace, to be happy and live for himself.

He couldn't live for himself.

There was a city to look after, a city dying and withering away, and he could not afford to think for even a moment the notion of life lived on his own terms would ever bear fruit. No, he had to lock away the last bit of himself, his previous self, the part of him that said he could have what he craved and not suffer for it, lock it away as one more thing the island had taken from him.

She didn't leave him.

She stayed at his side, catching him before he thought about falling, and forcing him to think long and hard about the why's and the how's and the maybes.

And one day, she was just a part of him. He didn't know the when of it, but there she was, the physical form of a desire he thought he'd locked down tight. She moved around him with her awkward grace and only the strength gained by that damndable island kept him from taking her up and crushing her close, to prove that this thing, this woman who had such power, could be real.

He had to satisfy himself with the occasional off-handed touches; a shoulder would be squeezed, a hand shook, a body held close during a moment of contact while sparring. He told himself that was all he needed, those small gestures, but his mind, ever so ready to play the traitor, told him these things would never be enough. He craved to touch her skin, in all the places he could never see, to let down her hair and bury his hands in waves of gold, to have those brightly coloured lips on his

Oh, to kiss her! He'd thought about the hundreds of ways it could happen, but all of them ended with the same sobering conclusion: she would be hurt, and he would lose the little remaining light in his life.

Because he couldn't have her. She wasn't a conquest, she wasn't a prize. She was the awkward IT girl that loved a good red wine and bad television shows, cutting edge technology and romance novels. There was nothing he could give her, but so much he could take away. To ask her for something more than what she already gave would be selfish, and cruel.

But he was being selfish now, wasn't he? He was looking at her beautiful face, marred purple and black, smudged with red, lipstick nearly gone and mascara running, and she looked back at him with worry. With fear.

She was afraid for him. She was sitting bound to a chair just a few feet away, one shoe missing and dress torn in all the wrong places, and she was terrified. Not for herself, he knew. She was shouting his name, begging again for him to stay with her, then throwing venomous curses at those watching the scene unfold. It confused him to hear such phrases come from a woman like that. So odd, yet endearing.

And he was the cause of all this. He was being selfish by making her worry. He'd come to rescue her and yet here he was, forcing her to fight back when she had no claws.

But things weren't working right. His stomach was blossoming blooms of agony tinted fire, sending out tendrils of electrified pain through the rest of his beaten body. His bow arm was broken, sitting at a funny angle, struggling to work. Blood had stained his green leather to black, coating the material as it refused to soak in. The floor - dirty, stained, and covered in grit - had slid with a crunching sound under his gloved hands, before the spreading scarlet got in the way.

Now there were long lines of red streaking the floor from his attempts to find leverage to stand; his legs were having none of it. But he could inch closer, and by God, he was going to stop being selfish. He would free her, scoop her in his arms, and take them away from the blood and the pain and the ugly.

It was a folly, and she knew that its end was coming.

Her words were quieter now, or was that just his imagination? She looked so scared, so pale, so unlike her that it pained him more than any physical torture had ever aspired to. His IT girl was facing death and all she could manage were pleas for his aid, for someone to take mercy on him and help him.

And something gripped him then, a thought so damning it caused him to choke on more than his own blood: what if she felt the same?

Would his selfishness been assuaged had she felt the same? Would they have made it past those first few steps to take on the rest of his crusade together, to fight his fight, not as two people working towards an end goal, but as a pair looking past the final page, the last name, and seeing life on the other side?

Could he have given that to her, and not be called selfish for wanting it?

His brain reminded him that there would be no final page, no last name. This dimly lit, filthy, oderus warehouse would be the end of his promise, the end to his vendetta.

And she was there, right there, and Christ, he wished now he'd kissed her. He wished he'd taken her up and never put her down. He wished they'd had mornings together, lazing about in bed, and evenings together over dinner, and a thousand other moments too late now to realize.

A new voice entered the scene, and he couldn't understand the words, they were so dim. But he could feel the presence of another, and when he looks to her face again, he can see panic, incredible fear, and overwhelming sadness.

A loud sound interrupts any more musing, and the man named Oliver Queen dies without further ceremony, his body still and his last thoughts, those of the light he never took hold of, the light that killed him, fading away until nothingness finally takes control.