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Oliver has never been a morning person. Hallmark of the rich and famous. An older self, one that Oliver barely remembers, liked to cuddle in the mornings anyway, liked to feel the length of a body against his, maybe get a little AM hanky-panky in before his phone went off with his mother’s concern and carefully guarded disapproval. And he used to like breakfast.
Now he’s pretty sure that if he eats he’ll get sick all over the floor of Barry’s tiny childhood bedroom, and wouldn’t that be a laugh riot, he thinks, to sully this space more than he’s already sullied it. With his hands and mouth and—
He presses a hand to his eyes, then lets it flop back to his side. Breathes, realigns his focus. He barely knows where he is, save for the fact that it’s Barry’s room. The details had eluded him last night, everything a blur of motion and movement; that was his hundredth mistake. Instinct makes him case every room he enters, but Oliver knows himself. Passion bats all his hard-won instincts aside. He’s always been weak to temptation.
Not that skinny Barry Allen should have been a temptation in the first place.
Maybe he’s pulled in by the power. Jealous. He’d put his teeth everywhere, gripped Barry’s arms and then his thighs hard enough to bruise, to cage, to capture. Maybe he just wants to contain all that Barry is, get that lightning in a bottle where it can’t hurt anyone. For seven years now, Oliver has never trusted any one man with power.
But really, this bedroom. There are small nebula prints everywhere. Diplomas on the wall, one in chemistry and one in physics, outstanding honors. Science fair ribbons. Posters—a poster of Marie Curie, for God’s sake. It’s hardly the bedroom of a dangerous man.
Which means Oliver is literally, by every conceivable metric, the worst thing in here and he realizes he really, really needs to get the hell out of Dodge, so of course that’s when Barry appears in the bathroom doorway, a shirt draped over one thin shoulder, sweatpants at a low tilt on his hips.
Barry’s body is lean, beautiful, unmarked despite Oliver’s best efforts. Like Oliver never skimmed his mouth over those abs, bit up both sides of his throat. No stubble burn.
Barry, in all his whole and wholesome glory, pauses when he sees Oliver. In Oliver’s experience: not a great sign. “Oh,” he says, tone unreadable but for the surprise. “You’re still here.”
Yes. Still here. In Joe West’s house. Joe West is a police officer. Joe West is Barry’s father. “I was,” Oliver says, and his voice is unaccountably dry, “on my way out, actually.”
One of Barry’s eyebrows goes up, a fine arch. “Oh,” he says again, and then his head cocks to the side. Oliver knows, again from experience, that this happens when Barry is about to crack wise. About supervillain codenames or the Arrow’s dourness or why Oliver’s city can’t all be light and curbside daffodils, independently-owned Jitters instead of Starbucks chains. “And here I thought you were gonna wait for the cover of darkness.”
Oliver feels his teeth grit, half grimace and half smile. “Normally ...”
Normally. He didn’t, though, and there won’t be darkness in sunny Central City for another ten hours. The daylight filters gently in through Barry’s blue curtains, sheds light on his mistakes: his shirt on the floor, his belt slack and askew on Barry’s desk.
He’d gone because Felicity had told him—had told him over lunch that while he was gone (dead, his mind corrects helpfully) Barry had met his archnemesis, stared death in its red-lightning eyes and lost. And Oliver knows what it means, to lose the most important fights of your life. The book of his memories is all pictures now: the innumerable times a superpowered Slade threw his limp body aside. The light of victory in Merlyn’s eyes, always undeserved. The casual spread of Ra’s al Ghul’s hand when he caught Oliver’s sword, fingers fanned out for the briefest of moments like a wave goodbye.
He always thinks we have so much to discuss whenever he sees Barry, sees the Flash in the news. And now the Reverse Flash has taken his throne at the top of Barry’s list of priorities, a murderous mirror image, and Oliver has so much to say about hate and revenge. Words he wanted to have over coffee that got lost somewhere in the join of their mouths.
“Well.” Barry’s voice cuts through his reverie, the downpour of his thoughts. “Yeah. You’re probably super busy, so ...” He looks down, fiddles with a tube of toothpaste on his counter until the cap comes loose, incidental. “If you can wait fifteen, twenty minutes, I can take you home.”
It’s Oliver’s turn to raise an eyebrow now. “Fifteen minutes?” he echoes.
Only a trained eye would notice the way Barry plants his feet, defensively. Barry can traverse the distance between Starling and Central in ... basically nothing. “Fifteen minutes,” Barry repeats, and then he straightens up slightly, finds his gumption and waves it Oliver’s way with his toothpaste tube. “It’s my day off, okay? I was gonna take it easy, do some housework. And that means not playing taxi cab.” Then the gumption drops out from under him as his eyebrows pull together again. “... but it’s okay if you’d prefer the cab.”
Oliver took the bike, actually. Six hundred miles of wind and badlands, a helmet that doesn’t allow for the somber whisper of his teammates’ voices in his ear. But he left the bike at the bar. They’d walked home, to the suburbia just outside of downtown, miles and miles. Last night Barry’s hand had discovered his shoulder, the way sailors crash upon shores and build empires.
No one touches him, not really. Not since Sara. It’s Oliver who makes the effort. His mouth finds foreheads, his hands on upper arms; his feet dictate distance.
But Barry, and his hands. And now Barry has offered to carry him. Six hundred miles.
“We’ll talk about it,” Oliver says, in a tone of voice he used to use on Thea, and Barry brightens and shuts the door on him again. There’s the sound of the tap, the scrape of toothbrush bristles on that Colgate grin.
Oliver finally sits up fully and reaches for his pants, contemplates. He could leave now. Second-story windows are a joke. There’s a bus that leads to the train station that could take him back to the bike. He hasn’t actually taken public transit in years, possibly ever, but if Barry opened that door and found him gone—well, they could laugh about it later, weeks from now. Maybe there’d be a little hurt, but their friendship, their partnership could survive Oliver’s impulse control. After all, it survived a dozen arrows in Barry’s back, and what’s a one-night stand between friends?
The door swivels back open. Barry has his tee on now, a crime if Oliver’s ever seen one committed, and his sweatpants are still half a size loose. “You hungry?” he offers.
“Is Joe cooking?” Is he home in the first place? Was he home last night, down the hall while Barry spread his legs, clawed at his back, shook and begged for him—
“Double shift.” Barry grins again, but his own relief is palpable. He’s been dating lately, Oliver realizes; he’s done this since he moved back in. The thought sits in his stomach and congeals. “But we have leftovers. And ... about twenty boxes of Eggo waffles, because you would not believe how fast I go through those things. I’m basically keeping Kellogg’s in business.”
There’s plenty that keeps Kellogg’s in business, actually, like monopolization, like farmers that work their hands to the bone for pennies. Like lobbyists, some of whom live in both of their cities, fat not on processed food but wealth. One of them was on his father’s list.
But that list was two years ago, and anyway the Flash needs calories, and his glibness about it forces a smile on Oliver’s unwilling face. And then a laugh next, because yeah, he can see that, the open boxes everywhere, Barry and his Netflix and his appetite. “Barry,” he says, and wouldn’t it also be easier if his name wasn’t already a nickname, an easy endearment, God, “do you really think that’s a good idea?”
Barry shifts, plants his feet again. That fight or flight instinct rears its head constantly now that his body knows that it can last in a brawl.
Oliver pulls in a breath and finally slides his legs over the side of the bed. He’s still naked, his pants half-forgotten in his hand, and he doesn’t miss the way Barry’s eyes flick over him—appraising, remembering. The way his nostrils flare slightly. It occurs to Oliver that the want in the room isn’t all his, but that doesn’t excuse ... “Because it’s alright if you don’t,” Oliver says. “You don’t have to pretend that this is okay.”
There’s a ripple on Barry’s face, unhappiness in its seams and corners, like his body is a dam that keeps at bay the flood of his doubts.
But then suddenly all of him seems to soften at once. He’s neutral, in tone and in expression, when he looks up at Oliver and says, “But I’m not.” He actually sounds a little peevish. He spins on his heel and exits the small bedroom.
Two chances to leave. Two strikes. Three and Oliver should be out; he should be making a mad dash down the street to that bus stop.
He’s halfway downstairs before he knows what he’s doing. Barry saunters through the living room, touches his hand to the ceiling before he steps down from the landing; Oliver pauses there and touches the same place just because he can, lets his hand linger.
“Waffles or leftovers?” Barry’s voice calls from the kitchen, like he hadn’t even listened for the open and close of the front door.
“ ... waffles are fine.”
The inside of the West kitchen is quaint, maybe a fifth of the size of the one in the old Queen manor. When Oliver steps in after him, his feet feel out of step, and he’s tense when his shoulder brushes the doorway because he’s pretty sure the wood itself will reject him soon enough.
Which is why it’s easier to step in close behind Barry, to eye the rows of yellow boxes that line the freezer from bottom to top. “You weren’t kidding about the number of boxes,” Oliver says, his voice maybe an octave low, a breath too close to the curve of his ear.
Barry spins around. His eyes flick conspicuously down to Oliver’s mouth, the single-strap shoulder of his undershirt, and then his head drops; he blushes and Oliver’s stupid brain thinks cute cute cute. “Okay, that I might have a problem with.”
“What?”
He gestures with an open box. It smells like dry strawberries and plastic inside. “Less than thirty seconds ago you were worried if I could handle this! And now ...” Up and down gesture next to indicate Oliver, the inches of distance between the two of them that means Barry would have to tilt his head if he wanted— “Is that it? Are you sure you’re convinced?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver says. He doesn’t. He falters. “Barry, you have to understand. Everyone who comes near me, everyone I’ve touched ...”
“I am a consenting adult,” Barry says. “With superpowers. Also, twenty-five. Also if I remember last night correctly it was you who—”
He does. They’d kissed in the doorway because Oliver couldn’t take it anymore, his easy laughter, the easy tilt of his body towards Oliver’s, all of it easy and Oliver so terribly lonely. This too, easy, when Oliver kisses him again. The open box of waffles thumps to the floor, forgotten. The inside of Barry’s mouth tastes like toothpaste and ozone.
Barry reaches up and clenches his hands in the hem of Oliver’s shirt, lets his mouth fall open, presses into him gratefully. He pulls them away from the freezer—Barry kicks it shut with a wayward foot and lets himself be backed into the kitchen island, one knee up, his cock already hard and leaking in his paper-thin pajama bottoms.
And when Oliver slams his hands on the wood counter at both sides of his hips, Barry leans back and cuts him a look that Oliver’s only ever seen in champagne rooms and VIP tables and across the bed from Laurel at the Four Seasons. Jesus.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Barry,” he says. He means for it to sound plaintive. It’s mostly a growl.
Barry grins again, with teeth. “I’d like to see you try. Besides,” and he licks over Oliver’s mouth, sinfully whispers, “I heal fast.”
Oliver really, really doubts that’s true. Iris West used to live in this house, after all; she used to eat in this very kitchen, and Oliver knows what it’s like to have loved so long and so fruitlessly that you don’t know who you are without it, that you keep reaching for the nearest available bodies in hopes that if they press close enough against you you’ll rediscover your limits, where your skin ends and someone else’s truly starts.
And Barry, despite his recent humiliation at the hands of his double, is cocky. Cocky in a way that too easily dispenses with Oliver’s words, all his advice. But this is Oliver’s arrogance too: he thought he could just write a manual for Barry, how to be a vigilante and not go utterly insane. It’s all wrong, when all he wants to do is pour these words into Barry’s open hands, kiss them into that mouth, bury them in Barry’s lithe long body with his own.
But the trust in Barry’s hands, the laughter in his eyes, unassailable. Spilling out of his mouth when he wraps his legs around Oliver and slinks halfway against the kitchen counter so that Oliver can get his hands under Barry’s ass, his slick fingers inside, feel Barry vibrate against his hands and then on his dick.
He’s so fucking good. Here and everywhere. All light and sunshine and high, keening moans whenever Oliver grinds into him just right, his hands scrabbling futilely at the laminate, his come hot endless rivers between them and the silken tightness of him inside enough to tear Oliver asunder.
It’s only afterwards, when Barry is panting against his shoulder and staggering down from his high, that Oliver thinks of Felicity, the slap of her words in his head and the hundred ways she knows how to say farewell. Sara’s grave calls to him at night, like there’s a space for him next to her, deep in the ground. He thinks of Laurel punching her way through the streets, angry and directionless as he was when he first made landfall at Starling. Every touch he shares with someone puts them closer to the ground. Every affair a failure.
In real life, Barry steadies himself and then dances a hand over the back of Oliver’s neck.
“It’s okay,” he murmurs, nearly slurs. His voice soothes immediately, like he can tease out the rhythm of Oliver’s anxiety, speed-read his thoughts. “It’s ... we’re just us.”
Just us. Like they’re ever just them. Like Barry is ever just Barry and not a lightning strike, incorruptible, invincible—
Oh, Oliver thinks. His hands find, of their own accord, the small of Barry’s back. Oh.
They’re in the living room some minutes later, with burnt waffles because Barry’s toaster is old and overenthusiastic. Barry turns on the television and switches it to Netflix. He puts on an NBC show. With one hand he carves a bite out of his five-waffle stack with a deft fork; his other comes to rest lackadaisically on Oliver’s thigh.
Halfway through breakfast there are sirens outside. They both look up at the same time. The Arrow doesn’t work in broad daylight, and not too enthusiastically in a city whose verdant greens too closely match his hood and arrow tips. Oliver grimaces for that reality, but then he feels it: the whoosh of wind, the briefest and sweet press of a warm kiss to his mouth. The door slams open and shut.
He pauses to let the fact of his material solitude sink in, then reaches for the remote and switches the TV over to the news. The headline at the bottom reads: THE FLASH FOILS MORNING CAR CHASE.
TV is another thing he hasn’t had time for, these past seven years. It’s probably for the best. Too much to do, a city that always needs saving. But that doesn’t mean Oliver can’t have a favorite program.