Laurel descended the stairs tentatively, unsure both of where her foot needed to land on the darkened stairs and what she was going to find when her feet landed on the basement floor. The fighting sounds returned at full strength when Laurel reached the bottom of the staircase. She turned and looked up to see her sister fighting with Oliver and matching him blow for blow. Sara moved with a graceful speed and vicious fighting style that was on par with Oliver's...and in many ways, exceeded it. It was a style that Laurel was starting to find increasingly familiar. She gasped as another piece of the puzzle fell into place in her mind. "You were there..." she whispered.

The new sound was enough to stop the two fighting warriors in their tracks. "Laurel..." greeted Oliver.

Laurel ignored him and made a beeline for Sara. "That night...you...I only saw you for a second. Once the bullets started flying I ducked under a desk, but that was you, wasn't it? That night we almost arrested Oliver? Youi helped him get away?"

Sara avoided Laurel's gaze as she nodded. "You were about to make a huge mistake, Laurel, even though you had no idea at the time exactly how big a mistake it was. I was trying to protect you..."

Laurel's eyes widened. "Protect me?!" she spat out angrily, her emotions flaring up once more. "Were you protecting *me*, or protecting *him*?!"

Sara lifted her eyes up to meet Laurel's. "Both of you," she admitted. "You didn't need to find out about any of this in a police interrogation room."

It only took Laurel a moment to run the hypothetical scene in her head. Finding out that Oliver was the vigilante in front of a swat team...and then having to 'process' that information with her whole world watching. Reluctantly, she nodded once in agreement with her sister's admission, then stopped as her still-unresolved frustration pushed past logic. "When *were* you guys going to tell me?" Laurel demanded of both Oliver and Sara. "Were you ever going to tell me at all?"

Oliver sighed, cursing himself, Harry, and all the gods in the universe for putting him in this position. "I wasn't."

Laurel felt like she had been sucker punched. "You weren't? So you were just planning on waiting for me to figure it out when you were arrested? Or when..." Laurel's gaze drifted away from Oliver's as she forced herself to admit where Oliver's lifestyle was leading. "Or were you just going to take this secret to the grave and make me have to mourn you all over again? When you die for *real* this time?"

The pain in Laurel's voice was more than Oliver could stand. Desperate to try to offer her some comfort, he crossed the room to get within arm's length of her. "Laurel..."

Laurel smacked Oliver across the face with a physical expression of her rage that sent him falling to the mat. "Fuck you, Oliver," she cursed. "Do you really hate me that much?"

Hearing the unrelenting anger in Laurel's voice made it feel like his heart was getting ripped out of his chest. "No!" Oliver gasped out, the surprise of the physical blow being surpassed by the vicious tone in Laurel's voice. "I wanted to protect you..."

"Well a fat goddamned lot of good your 'protection' has done me so far, hasn't it?" Laurel countered. "Think about it. Think about every miserable thing that's happened to me since you've been back. How much did this little 'secret' of yours protect me from them?"

Oliver's face fell as he realized how right Laurel was. "It didn't."

"You're damn right it didn't," Laurel agreed. Her anger sated for the moment, she took in their surroundings in full for the first time. "Why the hell did you have to start something like this, anyway? Is it some sort of sick, twisted PTSD 'therapy' from whatever happened to you on that island?"

Oliver stood up slowly, keeping Laurel at just past arm's length and not letting her out of his sight until he was fully upright once more. He then pulled his father's diary off of a nearby workbench and offered it to her. "This was my father's," Oliver explained. "I pulled it off his body when I buried him."

Laurel idly flipped through the book as the disconnect between Oliver's words and her assumed timeline of events left her confused. "I thought your father went down with the ship?"

Oliver shook his head. "Three..." he stopped when Sara caught his eye, correcting his explanation to fit what he now knew to be true. "Four of us survived. I was in a lifeboat with my dad and one of the crew members. We were in that boat for days. We ran out of water, and we almost ran out of food...we almost died right there."

"So what happened?" asked Laurel.

Oliver sighed, not wanting to continue but knowing he had no other choice than to tell Laurel the truth. "My father...he told me he wasn't the man I thought he was. He said that he didn't build Starling City. He failed it. He begged me to survive. To come back and right the wrongs he had committed. He then shot the other man in the boat before turning the gun on himself and pulling the trigger."

Laurel tried to picture how she would react if she had to watch her father kill another man and then himself. It didn't take her long to appreciate how traumatic an event like that could possibly be. "That still doesn't explain...this," she countered, waving her hand around to indicate their surroundings. "Why all of this?"

"When I was on the island," Oliver admitted quietly, "I...I wasn't alone. There was a man named Yao Fei. He taught me how to honor my father's last wish and survive. The outfit that I wear was his."

"Was?" asked Laurel. "What happened to him?"

"He was murdered," Oliver explained. "There was a group of terrorist merceneries that were using the island as their home base. He and his daughter were their prisoners. He found me after he escaped. When we tried to rescue his daughter he was killed."

Laurel's eyes widened as she realized that Felicity was right: there was far more to Oliver's story than she ever could have imagined. "What happened to these terrorists? Were they able to launch their attack?"

Slowly, cautiously, Oliver opened up and told his story. Taking down the terrorist camp, and making the choice to do the right thing even though it cost him his shot at being rescued. Slade. Shadoe. Doctor Ivo and the mysterious Mirakuru. Sara chimed in where she could, telling her perspective of their time on the boat and the island, then describing her experiences with the League of Assassins once Oliver's story ended at his rescue. Laurel listened to their stories with rapt attention, her heart softening toward both Sara and Oliver as she understood the hells they had gone through. Different versions of hell, to be sure, but hell nonetheless. And instead of hell breaking them, they had come out stronger. Stronger...and with a passionate desire to make the world better. Any way they could.

It was a desire Laurel was sure she had had at one point in her life. Definitely when she was working at CNRI. But now...Laurel had to fight the urge to cringe as she realized what the difference was between them. Passion and purpose no longer defined her life; instead, her life had grown to be defined by anger, rage, guilt and grief. Ever since...Laurel drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly, her mind settling on the one question that Oliver's story had not yet answered. "What happened between you and Tommy? Felicity told me a little, but..."

"What did Felicity tell you?" asked Oliver.

"Not much," Laurel replied, not wanting to divulge any more information than she had to. "She said that Tommy knew you were the vigilante. And that he died in your arms the day of the quake. Did he...know any of this?"

Oliver shook his head. "You're the first person I've told the whole story to."

"Not even Felicity?" asked Laurel.

"Or Diggle," Oliver agreed. "Just you."

"What about...what about Tommy?"

Oliver's gaze drifted to the floor by his feet. "Tommy knew that I was the vigilante. But everything that happened on the island...all of this...I never got to tell him."

"Why?" Laurel asked, amazed. "He was your best friend, why wouldn't you..."

"I tried," Oliver countered. "Once he found out I was the vigilante, I tried to tell him, but..."

Laurel had a feeling she knew where Oliver was headed. "He wouldn't listen."

Oliver nodded. "At first he thought like you did. That I was a killer who couldn't be trusted. Then when he found out about us..."

"Us?" asked Laurel, confused.

"That night before the Undertaking," Oliver explained. He blushed, uncomfortable bringing up the subject with both Lance sisters in the room. "When I...when I came over. He saw us."

Laurel immediately understood the source of Oliver's embarrassment. "Oh," she whispered, blushing herself.

"It drove a wedge between us," Oliver explained. "It got worse when I told him that his father was the mastermind of the Undertaking. We reconciled that night, but after that..."

"Tommy was gone," Laurel agreed quietly. Her eyes glanced down at the book she held in her hands. "Was...was the Undertaking described in this book somewhere?"

Oliver shook his head. "It's mostly just a list of names. Every time I went after someone I built as much of a case against them as I could. I didn't just shoot first and ask questions later."

Laurel ignored the teasing glare that Oliver was leveling in her direction. "Did you go after Malcom Merlyn? Before the Undertaking?"

"I tried," Oliver admitted. "Remember that archer in black that was sighted not long after I got back?" Laurel nodded. "That was him."

Laurel's eyes went wide. "Malcom Merlyn?" she exclaimed in disbelief. When Oliver nodded, Laurel thought about everything she heard and thought about the two mysterious archers of Starling City. "He...he almost killed you, didn't he?"

Oliver nodded again. "More than once."

Laurel turned to the only other person she had ever seen best Oliver's reputed combat skills. "Malcom Merlyn was a member of the League of Shadows at one point," Sara replied to Laurel's unspoken question. "Our paths never crossed, but..."

Having seen Sara in action, Laurel realized she didn't need further explanation. "He was a highly trained killer who went crazy and had enough money and...friends to implement his dreams of mass destruction." Laurel shuddered as she thought of the damage someone could, and had, wreaked upon the city. She studied Oliver's face as she processed everything she had been hearing. He's a highly trained killer, she thought. He's experienced more pain that anyone should ever have to go through. And he's richer than I'll ever be. So then how... "How aren't you like him?"

"Like who?" asked Oliver. "Merlyn?"

Laurel nodded. "Everything you've been through should have driven you as crazy as he was..."

Oliver caught on immediately. "I probably should be," he admitted. "But I've been very lucky. I've been able to surround myself with good people."

"Felicity and Diggle," Laurel agreed, her mind replaying her few interactions with the pair as she thought of them.

"And now Sara," Oliver added. "And your dad and his friends...and now you, I hope."

"Me?" asked Laurel, surprised.

Oliver scooted closer to where Laurel was seated and pulled her hands into his own, making sure he had her total and complete attention. "You know everything about me now, Laurel. For the first time since I've been back. Which means my life is now in your hands."

Oh. Laurel pulled her hands away from Oliver's and stood up, slowly walking around the basement as she considered Oliver's words. He had given her everything she could possibly need to build a case against him. If she went to her bosses with what she knew, she could have the vigilante of Starling City and all of his accomplices in a jail cell within the hour. It would make her career almost instantly. But at what price? she thought. Would the city really be better off if I have Oliver thrown in jail for the rest of his life? Would *I* be better off?

Her gaze fell on a rack of arrows sitting at the side of the room. The Arrow, she thought. Isn't that what people are calling him now? People may have watched what they were saying in her presence, but Laurel wasn't deaf. She knew what people were saying about Oliver. How much hope he was bringing to the darkest corners of the city. She had, at one point, desperately wanted to bring that hope to Starling City herself. It was why she joined CNRI. But now...

She wasn't bringing hope to the city. Oliver was. If she stopped him from doing that...what did that make her? Before today, she was convinced that bringing down the vigilante was bringing justice to Starling City.

Malcom Merlyn probably thought the same thing.

"I'll keep your secret, Oliver," Laurel finally declared, her eyes never leaving the rack of arrows. "But I need something from you in return."

Oliver jumped to attention, pleasantly surprised to not see Laurel on the phone to the local precinct. "Name it."

Laurel turned around to face Oliver and her sister. "Teach me to fight," she declared. "I'm...beyond sick of being the damsel in distress here. I want to know how to rescue myself for once."

The relief was clear Oliver's body language before he ever spoke. He crossed the room, getting as close to Laurel as he dared. "When do you want to start?"

"As soon as possible," Laurel insisted confidently.

Oliver's eyes went straight to Laurel's current choice of footwear. "You're sure? In those shoes?"

Sara couldn't resist the opportunity. "After all, this time, Oliver..." she teased, shaking her head as she crossed the room to join the new center of the conversation, "you still don't understand the power of a woman in high heels?"