Chapter Text
Thea didn't know what it was like to burn, and to freeze all at once, she didn't have a concept of what it was like to have her whole being consumed with one feeling, one singular feeling, not until the Gambit went down. She didn't know what it was to hate, but she spent the first nights shaking, sore, and full of something that burned like the bile in her throat. She hated the pain she felt, she hated what it was to lose something, she hated to feel anything so keenly as her brother's absence.
She did what she could, she begged, she prayed, and she screamed but her father was gone, and her brother with him. Thea Dearden Queen, the girl who had everything, the princess in a sparkling tower, was watching her kingdom fall to ash and be blown away in an icy gust.
Thea learned to numb the pain, and fill the hole Ollie left behind. He had felt like sunlight, and she created a new universe with a new sun, a sun that burned red and bright, touching her skin and flooding her over with any and everything but him. Bottles, pills, fast cars, boys, anything to get the warmth she so dearly missed. It wasn't enough, and every scratch she left on a panting frat boy's back, every hollow echo of a pill bottle hitting her floor swept a deeper chill through her bones. The light of a bloody sun wasn't the light she wanted, but it was the one she was living under.
Gone. She fought so hard against the word, she fought it when the police came, she railed against it when her mother pleaded with her to understand, and she shut it out when Tommy and Laurel started to feel it too. Ollie's not gone. Thea wasn’t going to let him go, because people don’t really die, not if they stay on in memories. Thea would always have her memories, and when the time came as it always did, she struggled to bury them. She buried them in flesh, in tearing fabric, and in sighs, she cried out and when the words fell away so did every smile, every light touch, and embrace. Any beating heart, any rush of blood, and any warm body to keep the freezing ocean water she felt herself drowning in away.
The older she got, the more blurred the lines became. She stopped thinking in terms of blood, because if she only had memories, what’s blood to a thought? The nights were still the hardest part, and she got by. The ocean water became sweat soaked sheets, slicked down satin underwear, and pillow cases with make up stains that wouldn’t wash out. The hands she had no longer seemed to belong to her, they felt rougher, square, and they scorched her skin. Fingerprints burnt into her thighs, trailing sizzling lines down her stomach. With no body to bury, she didn’t feel the guilt, just the emptiness, and the understanding that part of her couldn’t come back, and it was a part she didn’t even know she was missing. Nothing, no one person could silence the voice in her head that was never hers, no sweat glossed flesh against hers held her quite so captive as the body whose old shirts filled her closet. She could drink, smoke, and fuck with the best of them but she was a Queen, she was so much higher above. The air she breathed was filled with stars and the only one with that same understanding was gone. Thea was falling, blue eyes, and the hint of a scent she could never name were pulling her to the ground, counting on gravity, and the crash to break her. No one but Oliver who burned as brightly as she did, and there wasn’t an Oliver to say goodbye to, no Oliver to hold her, and no Oliver to adore and never touch.
Eighteen, bright, beautiful, and sick with an ache that she couldn’t bear, the sun returned to her. Home. Ollie is home. Seeing him whole, living, and solid was a shock to her system like nothing else, a bolt of lightning in the night sky. This vision, this person was as promised, her brother. He wasn’t a whisper in the air, or a flickering smile in her dreams, he was real, alive, and barely a shadow of himself. Her sun was back, he held her in his arms, and while she clung to him, she didn’t feel the same furious need to shine, no companion light matching her own.
He felt real, solid, strong, and as warm as she’d dreamt of, but not present. Her mother wept, her stepfather tried to be kind, and Thea raged. This was her Ollie, Oliver as he referred to himself, and he returned broken, everything she’d begged the universe for but Ollie came home with him. She’d find a way to bring him back, to be with her, real again, whole, and on fire. Her nights became filled with screams on the other side of the hallway; the room so long empty became full of demons, and the dust stirred by the man who’d brought them home with him. Thea cried when she heard him, no longer willing to lose herself to the phantom version of the man whose pain rung in her ears. She cried because she’d lost him again, and holding together what she’d found was a new, sharp, blinding pain that made her ill.
The first time she knocked, she almost couldn’t hear him answer, the permission he gave her to be his light in the dark came by way of a glass of water, and a hand on his shoulder. It wasn’t what she wanted, not when the scars on his new body so clearly ached to be soothed by a gentle hand, but it’s what she gave him. He slipped a strong, sweat beaded arm around her, and nuzzled his face into her hair, breathing in and pulling her tightly to him. This was the first sign of her Ollie she’d had, the real Ollie, and he was as raw, and bloodied as she’d been. She couldn’t make out the whispers he’d pressed into her hair, but he was grateful, she could feel it. A presence he needed, and an anchor to his reality.
It wasn’t the same vicious, painful, shattering blow of lips, teeth, and fingers to keep the memories they were running from away, but she was his one real thing in the dark, and all of her was his if he wanted it. She only wanted him to ask.