Arrow: Fanfic: The long road home

[m_findlow]

Title: The long road home
Fandom: Arrow
Characters: Oliver, mentions Thea and Tommy
Author: m_findlow
Rating: PG
Length: 500 words
Content notes: none
Author notes: Written for juliet316’s prompt "any, any, long road home" at fic_promptly
Summary: Oliver is home, but home feels further away than ever

It was the same old Starling City, but something had completely changed in the last five years. It wasn't the band new skyscrapers that towered over the masses and added to the concrete and glass skyline. It wasn't the change in mayor, or even the fact that The Glades had become even more forbidding, a feat though almost impossible.

But something had changed. Maybe it was Oliver. He knew he'd changed. Five years on the island, Slade Wilson, Shado, Hong Kong, ARGUS. It had all changed him in one way or another, but there was something else. Something that left him returning home, welcomed, but somehow still living on the outside of it all, as if watching the lives of the people he knew playing out like a movie, or trapped in a snow globe, just within reach and yet untouchable. Like he hadn't quite made it all the way home yet.

Tommy was still good old Tommy. He hadn't asked Oliver what happened for those five years and for that he was eternally grateful. Instead, Tommy had done the best friend thing and simply embraced him like a brother and got on with life, which for Tommy, meant living hard and partying even harder. How had the last five years not changed him one little bit? He was still the well intentioned but notorious playboy Oliver remembered.

Thea on the other hand, had become the irreverent and rebellious teenager that he'd feared. Deprived of any source of grounding from her brother and father, she'd instantly reverted to dealing with her grief in other ways, seeking out the good times to cancel out the bad. Clashing heads with her mother was to be expected since there was no one else to lash out at.

Tommy and Thea were like reverse sides of the same coin. Oliver supposed that for Tommy, the difference was that he had no one to rebel against. His father had disappeared not long after his mother had been killed. He came back after a few years but his efforts were expended on his ever growing business empire, and not on the last remnant of his family. Tommy might be the hapless playboy, but underneath was a boy who'd had to grow up on his own.

Perhaps that was the difference. Thea had all the money and privilege in the world, but she could still hold her mother accountable for the direction her life had taken.

He loved them both dearly, but despite being back home, he couldn't shake the feeling that home was now a fluid concept as opposed to an irrefutable fact. Where once his mission had been to come home, he'd had dozens of other missions in between. Now it remained to him to compete the very first one. To avenge his father's death and put his beloved home back together. In order to save his city, he's going to have to become an outsider, and find his way back via the long road.