Author name: Anxia -- author
LiveJournal, author email, author website
Recipient name: Jamjar
Requested character(s): Mia Dearden/Speedy II
Story title: To Wish Possible Things
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I claim no ownership to Green Arrow, Mia Dearden, Oliver Queen, Roy and Lian Harper, or Connor Hawke. Obviously.
Spoiler warnings: GREEN ARROW #45
Summary: Things have been changing for Mia. She really doesn't mind.
To Wish Possible Things
Mia had more or less given up on anything happening with Connor.
Really.
He was cute, Mia allowed, and was probably the nicest straight man she'd ever meet. But (and she was sure Ollie would agree, despite moonlighting as The Amazing Liberal Man) anything between Connor and her would just be too weird at that point, and Mia wasn't even sure how certain the 'straight' thing was, anyhow.
But, God, was he cute. Especially shirtless.
She shifted from one foot to another, and hoped Ollie wouldn't notice. But of course he did (and probably because Mia hoped he wouldn't), and he strode over to her with that look on his face again while Connor hovered in the background, looking sympathetic.
"Too much?" Ollie asked, and Mia could feel the rope digging in her skin and that damn bead of sweat that just wouldn't go away trailing down her cheek.
"No," she said, and straightened her back while ignoring her shaking shoulders.
"Good," Ollie said with a grin. "That's my girl." He turned to Connor. "Get the 120s."
"Don't you think you're being a little hard on her, dad?" Connor asked, bringing the 120s out anyway; and even though was Mia inwardly groaning at the sight of them, she threw down the 100s, cracked her knuckles, and stretched her hands out towards whatever torture device Ollie had ready for her next.
"Bring it on," she managed, her voice low and short of breath, and tried not to think about how lame and overdone 'bring it on' was (and how it wasn't a very good movie, despite what its cult following – and how that piece of crap got a cult following was beyond her - seemed to believe).
Ollie stared at her long and hard, then finally gestured towards Connor to put the weights away. "You have homework," he explained, in an attempt to prove that he most certainly was not going soft, "And it's nothing we can't do in the morning."
Mia briefly considered staying down there the whole night and training anyway; but it would probably only motivate Ollie to push her even harder in some weird effort to show her that he could break her before she could break herself, and besides, she really did have homework. Trigonometry. A whole month's worth, in fact, that she naturally left off until the last minute.
Mia fondled the weights sadly, with a wistful sigh.
On the surface, things hadn't really changed. Her training was (a lot) harder, and with a different (and less attractive) person, but the time always came when she would have to go upstairs and they would run off into the night, Green Arrow and Green Arrow – and while they fought for truth, justice, and all that other crap, she was left grappling with logarithms, graphs, and other things she would never use. (Not that Mia was bitter.)
But the... feel of things had shifted. (And she knew that sounded stupid). She wasn't chased out of the room the moment Ollie and Connor began to suit up for the night, lest her virgin eyes spot a bow that wasn't used just for "fitness training". And now whenever Connor filled her in on the details of a case, Ollie stopped hovering in the background with his trademarked frown of disapproval.
It was mostly the little things; the way she was treated, what she was allowed to do, and the fact that she was going to have to get used to relying on a scrap of cloth being the only thing that protected her so-called "secret identity". (And, of course, not to mention the fact that she actually had a secret identity now.)
Mia paused, listening to the sounds of Connor and Ollie getting ready, then padded up the stairs, and tried to remember if she was passing math or not.
Sooner or later, things began to fall into a routine; therefore, Mia didn't really find herself thinking about making her way to the bathroom or grabbing the empty cup, which now had a permanent place in her medicine cabinet. She paused briefly when she went to grab the pill capsule, tracing a finger softly over the pop-up 'W', but filled the glass and downed the pills with little to no hesitation.
Mia made her way to her bedroom, sat on her bed with a sigh, then opened her math book; then, after warily eyeing page 436 for a moment, promptly closed it and slid it back under her bed again.
There was always tomorrow. Besides, Mr. Jun liked her. He'd give her an extension.
She checked the time (10:28) and considered the wisdom of waiting up for Ollie and Connor. On one hand, waiting up would look good; on the other hand, she was fucking tired.
Mia toyed with an arrowhead on her nightstand. She would wait. Besides, it wasn't like sleeping was it was cracked up to be. She made her way to the window, and almost thought that for a second, when she saw a brief flash of green on black, that she could see Ollie and Connor.
"Wonder what they're doing," she muttered to herself as she knelt down in front of her closet door and pulled out a large, wooden box. Which, okay, probably wasn't the best hiding place, but she liked it, and it wasn't like anyone was going to go rooting through her closet anyway. Besides, it wasn't nearly as obvious as Ollie's little goatee.
She pulled out the cloak first, laying it across her lap and stroking the yellow fabric before throwing it over her shoulders. The mask came next, her fingers poking the eye lenses as Mia wondered, and not for the first time, how the damn thing could fool anybody, let alone supposed evil geniuses. The bodysuit and the boots came last, and Mia stood back to observe the full costume laid out for what wasn't the first time that week, and probably wouldn't be the only time that night.
Red and yellow. Probably not the colors she would have picked out, but there was the whole legacy factor to consider. Besides, Roy would probably be annoyed if she went around in a costume that looked too much better than his did. (Then again, all the costumes from that time period did have a tendency to be hideous.)
Roy. Mia sighed, trying to think of the best way to drop the Speedy bomb to him that wouldn't end in screaming matches and slammed doors. She liked Roy – really, she did, and not in an "I wanna fuck him like an animal" way, either.
Roy was... well, Roy was inspiring, as stupid and sappy as that sounded. Roy had been Speedy, and he did a damn good job at it – and he had spent time drowning in the gutter, too, but he moved past it. Ollie and Connor were great, sure (if sometimes unbearably annoying, in Ollie's case), but sometimes they just felt so damn unattainable. Like, no matter how hard she tried, she could never be like them. But Roy... was different. Roy felt real.
If that made any damn sense.
Besides, Lian was sweet, and Mia would be bummed if she could never see her again. So it was probably up to her to find a way to break it to Roy, mostly because she didn't trust Ollie to do it in a way that wouldn't piss him off.
And hopefully, she could find a way to do it without playing the HIV card. Not that she didn't want to tell Roy – of course she would tell him – but 'HIV Girl' wasn't who Mia wanted to be.
Mia turned back towards the clock. 12:04.
She would wait. Really. She wasn't getting bored at all.
Mia sighed, throwing the costume into the box again, and pushed it back into the closet. She wouldn't be putting it on tonight. She would leave the cape on, though. She liked the cape, even despite the fact that capes were almost always inherently stupid.
She walked over to the window, and peeked out it one last time before closing the shades. Even though she liked it, there was no reason for the neighbors to see her stumbling around her room after midnight in a bright yellow cape.
Mia stood there for a while, her eyes narrowed at the clock. Then, with a resigned sigh and a tortured sigh, she made her way to the bed, reached under it, and pulled out her math book. Again.
Goddamnit.
She didn't understand trigonometry when Mr. Jun was babbling about it in class, and she didn't really understand it at 12:06 the morning it was due. But she did it anyway, mostly because passing was nice, and maintaining decent grades was one of the hoops Ollie made her jump through before she could put on the costume.
Or, rather, it was one of the hoops that Ollie made her jump through so she could get to the other hoops she had to jump through before she could put on the costume.
It was annoying, sure. Of course it was annoying. At this rate, it seemed like she would never actually get out there until she was eighty-five; and even when she did, the only way she would be able to attack anyone would be to tackle them and start doing push-ups on their back.
But at the same time, it was sort of... well... nice. Sort of. Not really. To know that Ollie cared that much. To know that someone cared that much.
All of the capes sort of had their own little families; the Bats, the Supers, the Wonders, and pretty much everyone else out there. Why, she never really figured out, since one would think that the last thing someone would want to do at a family reunion is fight crime.
Mia never really envisioned herself being a part of any family; let alone one that dressed up in tacky costume and went around making pincushions out of the criminal population. And, all arrows aside, Mia couldn't really (not that she had much experience the area) imagine a better family than Ollie and Connor. Even though one of them was annoyingly attractive and the other was just annoying. And then there was Roy and Lian and even Dinah – even though that at her current rate, she would never touch a bow until her hair was gray, part of her still wanted to have sex with Connor, and she had to take eighty million goddamned pills a day to keep her immune system from imploding, Mia was happy.
Although she would probably be a lot happier when her math homework was done.
2:15. Her last wrist cramp, her last math problem, and the time when Ollie and Connor came stumbling back home. 'Must've been a slow night,' Mia thought as she shoved her homework into her book and into her book bag.
The original plan had been to go down there and meet them whenever they came back. But now, as Mia stood in her room and realized that she was really quite fucking tired and probably wouldn't find anything out that she couldn't just ask Connor for in the morning anyway, she would much rather go to bed.
So the whole thing had been pointless, Mia thought to herself with a sigh. But, hey – at least she finally finished the fucking math homework, and it was probably good practice for all the nights she would spend sitting on rooftops doing nothing.
She had brushed her teeth, took out and stashed the costume yet again, and was climbing into bed when there was a knock at the door. "Yeah?" Mia said, figuring it was probably Connor coming to bitch her out for still being awake, or Ollie coming to bitch her out for still being awake.
"You're still awake." Ollie said as he walked into her room, and Mia had to work to suppress a snicker.
"So are you," she responded as she plopped down on the bed. "So, you here for something, or did you just come for the bitching?"
"A little from column A, and a little from column B," Ollie smirked, and then handed her something. "I brought you a little gift."
Mia tested it, tugging at the string and running her fingers across the red surface of the bow. "A bow?" she asked. "So we finally moved past the push-ups?"
"Maybe," Ollie said guardedly, with that damn look still on his face. "Or maybe I just wanted to see if you still have what it takes." He turned, beginning to walk out of the room. "6:00 AM, practice room," he said over his shoulder. "Be there."
6:00 AM. Which meant she would get about four hours of sleep, provided that she fell asleep as soon as she hit the pillow, which was unlikely. "Goddamnit," Mia muttered, dropping the bow gently at the side of her bed and lying back down on the mattress.
But, hey. It could be worse; especially if being up at 6:00 AM meant that at some point she would get to kick that smug smirk off Ollie's face.
Yeah, Mia thought to herself as she drifted off. (And maybe going to sleep as soon as she hit the pillow was more likely than she thought.) A lot worse.
Reference image taken from the cover of GREEN ARROW #45.
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