knightsoflegend | chapter five ♔ it'll be a day like this one when the sky falls down

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chapter five ♔ it'll be a day like this one when the sky falls down

the blues - switchfoot

WHO || The Knights
WHAT || Failboat returns from the disaster in LA as the Knighthood goes on lockdown
WHERE || The castle, London
WHEN || Directly after this, Fall 2017
HOW || Actionspam

Hasmed's announcement does not brook any rebuttal: all Knights are recalled to the Castle, where they must remain until the Section Heads and Jack Chessing have spoken about the events in Los Angeles that have left the Knighthood without their usual leader.

The entire Los Angeles area is now covered with a dark miasma that has interfered with any signals that might be sent out from phones, etc., leaving the whole world wondering what exactly is happening down there. Final images showed horrendous monsters, a panic of citizens, looting and violence from humans and Shadowkind alike.

Hasmed has warned of extra magical wards on the castle, and anyone arriving will immediately take notice of one very prominent one: above the entire roof of the excessively large building hovers a black and red sigil in the air, a pentagram in a circle surrounded by runes or words in an unknown language, stretching for miles.

[ This is the social log for post-LA lockdown. Failboat must complete the top log before being allowed to tag outside of it. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ thea isn't coping well. as much as it feels like oliver already abandoned her, again, she never thought he'd up and die. the finality of that seems impossible. oliver simply can't be dead.

except he is. oliver is dead and she's all alone again and he isn't going to swoop back into her life with a souvenir of the mysterious island he spent five years on trying to become a superhero without so much as a collect call to his family. ollie isn't coming back this time and thea doesn't know what to do with herself.

she's in bed when the phone rings, watching reruns of some terrible british soap opera on her phone, cut off when an unknown number pops up. she doesn't want to talk to anyone, but she answers anyway. ]

Hello?

[The voice on the other line isn't a call service. It's not a voicemail asking him to leave a message. He sits up a bit straighter, clearing his throat.]

Hi. Sorry. I -- I didn't expect a real person to answer. Is this Thea Queen?

Yes. [ said like duh? ] Did you call me and not think I would be me or are you a telemarketer because now is seriously not the time to get me to sign up for solar panels to get a tax credit in Delaware.

[ look. telemarketers are weird. ]

[He chuckles, shaking his head.]

No, no. I mean, that'd be weird. I mean, I own a company that is working on a new solar cell structure for solar panels, but -- I don't need to sell them.

I was calling because you're -- [The sentence halts. Clearly a real person got the call about those deaths. He can't just ask her if she's aware of the identity theft.]

This is going to sound insane -- but you have the same last name as me and for the past few years, someone has been skimming from my company. Back door hacking, a little here -- a lot there. Well, not the past few years. It got better. Which is a weird thing to say about identity theft, but I was still looking.

I was trying to find the source and then recently I had an interesting discussion with my legal team about a plane crash. They needed to verify that I didn't... that I was still alive.

I don't... what are you saying?

[ plane crash, she knows he means the plane crash, but she doesn't understand what he is trying to tell her. someone stole her identity? there's honestly too much going on for her to suss out the point. ]

Right. [He takes a breath.]

My name is Oliver Queen... too.

I was trying to see if -- it sounds callous, but I just assumed that it had all been just an identity theft ring. Taking my name, some of my money, using a few of my contacts -- but see you're not an answering service. Which I thought would just make it all nefarious and easy to explain.

You know, like in the movies, when they have a table full of credit cards and one of those magnetic machines to recode them.

Oh.

They called you because my brother-- [ she can't spit it out, she can't say "because my brother died". ] Because you have the same name.

Yeah, the same name and some of his accounts are tied to mine, so when they put a freeze on everything, it sort of put a light coating of frost on my accounts. [It was a weird thing to have to confirm. In person. To his own board.]

I cleared it up, but like I said -- I mean, your name is really Queen, right?

Thea Queen, yeah. We're from, we were from the other side of the veil.

[ not that she doesn't 100% think oliver was stealing from someone with his name because it was an easy way to skim money. if it stopped or slowed down or got better a few years ago, that would be when he and felicty joined the knights and found her. ]

I guess you don't have a younger sister?

A younger -- sister. [He lets that sink in, because now it makes a little more sense, but then it stops making sense all over again.]

No. No siblings. My parents died when I was younger. [He says it as if he's trying to not be old all of a sudden.] There was [he pauses, briefly.] a plane crash. Not an accidental one.

[ people with the last name queen shouldn't be allowed to fly. ]

Were you nine?

[He clears his throat, unsure how she pulled that number out of the sky. Sure it was in the papers, but she's from the other side -- and why would she research his life? Maybe she is part of the identity theft ring. Maybe the research was all part of the plan.]

Yeah. [He tries to pull himself away from thinking about his parents.] Why?

Ollie's ten years older than me. Was. [ she sounds so heartbroken correcting herself. ]

Dad didn't die until I was twelve though, Mom was when I was eighteen.

[Oh.... oh. It's the math of it all. The mathematical improbability of her existing because his parents died...

And he was nine. Why would anyone try to offer him up any sort of medical information about their deaths? Who would even -- should he look into her medical records? Should he open up that wound just because the alleged sister of the identity thief says that she could have existed?]

I'm sorry. [That also means, she's the last one.]

I know how it is to be the last one.

I should be used to it. [ why is she telling a literal stranger this? probably because he's a stranger. she needs to blurt this out to someone and this guy just called her out of the blue, so he's it. ]

Dad and Ollie were in an accident. Dad died, but we thought Ollie died too. Five years later he just showed up at the front door like nothing had happened, like we didn't have a funeral for him already.

[ now she has to plan another one. ]

[He almost drops the phone. He knows that it could be a scam. That she could be selling him what he wants to hear, but the thought of another version - of someone else sharing the same experiences as him. It's frightening and yet still something that catches his attention.]

An island. [He wonders if this is like those call-in psychics. You give them a little, something to let them know you're on the right path and they run with it. Except, she sounds too hollow in her words. Too filled with actual loss.

He shouldn't be thinking poorly of this girl. He doesn't even know her.

She could have been his sister in another life.]

Yeah, I -- I never really asked if there had been a funeral. I didn't have family to put that together and the idea of my board of directors doing it... I just didn't see them as the type. I think I was just labeled as missing and after a while that gets upgraded to presumed dead.

...you were on an island for five years?

[ thea knows, she knows that other universes exist. that the veil can do things to memories. but this is A Lot. this is a guy with her brother's name but no baby sister, a guy who may or may not have been on an island for five years.

is he the green arrow, too? ]

Two years. I had pirates attack my yacht. I washed ashore and was on that island alone until drug runners showed up.

[He frowns.] Was your brother alone for five years?

No, not alone. He found people or they found him, I don't know, he never told me, I heard everything second hand.

[ felicity had tried to keep her as in the know as she could, but there was a lot of time to make up for. ]

Someone trained him to be a vigilante.

[He takes a deep breath and leans back in the chair he's seated in. He exhales and lets out an amused sound.]

That explains a few things about him. [He smirks, which she can't see, but it's clear in his voice.] I needed to eat and I had an archery hobby before I crashed, but it was a hobby. Definitely not a survival skill. So I practiced.

A lot.

I took down a boar. It was pretty cool to the whole... no one that had been there to see it.

The drug runners sort of forced my hand. There was this woman... [His voice does get a bit fond, but Tess hasn't shown up in his life again, so it's just fondness.] She had been kidnapped. Her and her friend.

Forced to help this small subset of a cartel. Her friend was killed in front of us and I knew -- I knew that I had to do something. She was the first person I saved.

I had wasted so much of my life doing things just for myself. I had sworn that if I ever got off that island I was going to make that life worth something.

I don't think Oliver had the same selflessness.

[ ...she isn't bitter. she's totally bitter still! she was repeatedly kidnapped because of oliver. her mother was murdered, right in front of her, because of oliver. ollie had spent something like a year telling thea to stay far away from the hood, who killed people, and then stole her boyfriend to make roy his protégé.

he'd lied to her for years.

no, thea is definitely still bitter, losing him hasn't made her less bitter, it's only tempered it with grief. he'd never apologized, felicity had in his stead. ]

Are you the Green Arrow?

So, under normal circumstances I have this whole thing where I deny that whole claim. I even had a friend dress up as the Green Arrow at one point to prove I wasn't him.

He kissed my girlfriend. She's my ex-girlfriend now. The two are not related.

But, since your brother added a few headlines to my portfolio -- I'm assuming you knew about his Adventures in Criminal Sitting.

I have subscribed to that whole... 'it's dangerous for you to know, because then people will hurt you to get to me' angle. Except, that doesn't work. People find out. Then everyone is mad. It's a trust thing and then when there is danger -- they think they can handle it.

So, yes. Just --- don't tell anyone.

[ how the fuck

did an absolute stranger

sum up why lying doesn't work

WHEN HER OWN BROTHER COULDN'T MANAGE IT. ]

Wasn't gonna. [ she huffs out a sigh, dragging her hand through her hair, it needs a cut. god, she should shower, this is disgusting. ] Honestly I don't even know how I'm supposed to explain this conversation at all.

Yeah... I -- [He closes his mouth.]

This isn't how I thought this would go. I mean, if I'm honest, I assumed it was just someone trying to prove how good they were at identity theft. It would be a big score, stealing the identity of Oliver Queen.

But, he just was Oliver Queen -- which is weird. Really weird.

Probably weirder for you right now, because now you're talking to Oliver Queen -- who has this unsettling similarity to his life. Which under all other circumstances would make you think that I was trying to scam you.

Did you ever search online for him? I mean, he came through the Veil - I assume you did too.

Yeah, but I guess Ollie plus Starling City kicked google's ass because I found zero things. I googled myself too, but obviously that was a bust. Queen Consolidated doesn't exist.

[ thea is not the best at research okay. she should have just googled oliver jonas queen with no qualifier. briefly she wonders if they have the same middle name, but chooses not to ask. ]

I was in Bruges, I had to basically learn a whole language and get a job and find some place to live, my phone didn't even have service.

[ it was a tragic first few months, okay, her first failed google attempts were disheartening enough to make her stop. ]

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