Chapter Text
Boston, 2024
Connor doodled on the café napkin. Long curving lines formed into careful patterns and shapes. The action kept his nerves quiet and mind distracted. He had an eye for art, one Mama fondly declared hadn’t come from her gene pool. Generally, Connor liked the renaissance stuff, original ninja turtles: Donatello, Leonardo, Raphael, and Michelangelo (particularly Michelangelo). The mathematics in their work made sense. It turned the mess of creativity into a logical and achievable formula. Fifteenth century European art were puzzles meant to solved. Equations for perfection.
But modern art.
Modern art, and all that came after, caught Connor in a vice grip. The colours drew him in: careful, precise, and random. Between Romanticism and Impressionism, art lost its restrictions. The twentieth century heralded in a new age of useless creation. Art became confusing, unanswerable, leaving its viewers bewildered. Conner languished in that aspect, the not knowing. Unsolvable mysteries created from strategized chaos. Fury, beauty, and mundanity.
Connor sighed. He made a mistake. His art supplies were still in an unpacked box under his dorm bed. MIT’s freshman workload proved relentless. His grades weren’t bad but they weren’t close to what Ma’s had been. Felicity Smoak’s legacy didn’t fade easily. Time Magazine called her a genius: the mother of modern cyber security and a leading innovator in cybernetics. It made Connor proud but a little awkward. Connor lacked her affinity for computers. The coding and hacking didn’t come naturally. He had to work for it, study, and revise. While Ma had created super viruses that could take down governments at eighteen with a baby on her hip.
Mama didn’t understand his fascination but she liked to listen. ‘I can learn to love art’ Ma said simply. She memorized the names and works as if studying computer code. A checklist of the world’s great art museums and galleries was pinned to her kitchen cork board with over a dozen large ticks. They traveled to Europe during summer break. London, Berlin, Paris. They were meant to see more but a day visit to the Louvre turned into a week. Connor wandered, wonderfully lost between Rembrandt and Monet, studying every brushstroke. Impressionism devoured Connor whole. The colour in the ‘Haystacks’ series became the object of day dreams. Yellows gliding into orange. Hints of purple. Touches of pink.
There were good art schools in America, with a strong modern scene. Art school might not have been easier than MIT but the expectations would have lessened. Connor toyed with the idea of switching departments. Dropping computer science like a hot potato and switching to the art department. Ma wouldn’t mind, not if he had a solid plan. Ma was good like that. She gave him room to make mistakes and change course, it was never a failure to her. His father’s side were another matter. An artist in the family: The Queens couldn’t imagine worse. That made the prospect more enjoyable and tempting.
Conner reached the edges of his doodled napkin. Drawing and painting calmed him. It cleared his mind in a way computers couldn’t. Connor needed a steady head for his Father’s visits. They were usually sprung by business trips with little warning.
They agreed to meet in a café far from Connor’s usual haunts. Connor didn’t want his father part of the Boston life he created, the one carved away from the dubious legacy as the bastard son of a billionaire playboy. However high the expectations of having a genius mother were, Connor would take that shadow over the Queen family glare any day.
Connor felt the room still as Oliver walked in. Oliver Queen held a strong presence. Even past forty, he drew the crowd’s eye in the small cafe. The man carried himself comfortable with power, familiar to wealth. Oliver’s fine suit was paired with strong jaw that always held high. Soft crow’s feet cornered Oliver’s eyes and his demeanour drew more severity than it did a decade prior, but that didn’t negate his good looks. The familiar feeling of inadequacy hit Connor’s gut.
Oliver approached his son smiling confidently. Connor didn’t trust that smile, he had seen it too often directed as an empty courtesy to strangers and business associates. It held little truth and false warmth.
‘Connor, son, it’s good to see you’
Connor grimaced. Son. Oliver used the term casually, throwing it into the greeting as if it came naturally. A soft anger swelled in Connor’s gut.
‘It’s nice to see you too, Oliver’ Connor replied, emphasizing the man’s name rather than genetic title.
Connor had never called him Dad. It seemed too intimate and alluded to a bond they did not have nor did Connor want. Oliver looked disappointed at the formality but quickly swept his face clean. Connor stiffly gestured for him to sit while refusing to meet the older man’s eye. These meetings were awkward and forced but they pleased Ma so Connor gave enough effort to show up.
Ma’s father never tried. The man walked out of seven-year-old Felicity Smoak’s life and didn’t bother to return. Connor reasoned these visits because of that. His mother rarely talked of the man, Noah Kutler. She shrugged off any mention of him and claimed he left too early for her to remember him. Instead it was Nana Donna who supplied the details softly when Connor asked.
‘She adored the man’ Donna said with a sad smile ‘She looked at him like he hung the stars and moon. She kept thinking he’d come back. Building that damn computer so it’d be ready when he returned. When she finally finished it, it was like everything clicked, him leaving became real and him never coming back even more real…. So Felicity smashed it. Screamed and cried until she lost her voice and then she went quiet for so long I thought she’d never speak again.'
Connor had none of that sudden betrayed fury. His father’s abandonment occurred when he was less than two months in the belly. Conner didn’t have time to fall under the man’s spell. When they finally met, Connor was eleven and he already decided to hate Oliver Queen. He preferred to describe the man as a necessary donor to his gene pool. The one who gave him a strong jaw and dirty blonde hair.
Moira Queen liked to insisted Connor was a spitting image of eighteen-year-old Oliver, despite the lacking broad shoulders and strong stature. On that incentive, Connor kept his hair cropped short and always wore reading glasses. Connor didn’t need comparisons between him and Oliver nor would he be the grandson Moira desired. He refused to be another pawn in their sick game of wealth and power.
‘What are you doing in Boston?’ Conner asked bluntly. The question came across as accusatory, even to Connor’s own ears. Oliver didn’t flinch. He carried a business smile, calm and attentive.
‘The usual QC business.’ Oliver paused ‘I also wanted to see you. Your mother said you came down to Starling for a surprise visit last month, I would have liked to have seen you. We could have had a family dinner.’
Connor shifted his eyes focusing down on the doodled napkin. He didn’t want to say the truth. The truth that he hated those family dinners Oliver kept suggesting. They weren’t a family. Conner and his Ma were a family. Ray, Connor’s father, had been family. The Queens were unwanted intruders who came a decade too late to the party. Conner dealt with them for past seven years due to unfair custody rulings. But he was eighteen now and their wants meant squat. Oliver just needed to stay away from him and his mother and let them live their lives. Particularly Ma. Connor was old enough to recognise it now, even if she didn’t, the way Oliver’s eyes lingered on her. Hungry and eager like a teenager with a crush.
‘It was just a quick visit’
Connor paused then reluctantly offered a little more information.
‘Ma won’t admit it, but I think she is a little lost without having someone to look after. She dives too deep into her work’
A genuine smile passed Oliver’s lips and his eyes lit with both worry and fondness. Connor refused to call it love.
‘She is rather extraordinary your mother, putting everyone and everything before herself. I’ve been worried too though, you’re right, she has been working too hard.’
Connor regarded Oliver cautiously and decided to ask bluntly.
‘Why did you want to see me? What do you want?’
Hurt flicked across the older man’s face but he didn’t deny it. He always wanted something. That’s how the Queen family worked.
‘Your mother and I have been spending a lot of time together lately, has she told you?’ Connor nodded.
He spoke to his Ma regularly. He hadn’t wanted to move to Boston, away from her, although she insisted. ‘I never expected you to take care of me Connor.’ Felicity repeated, holding his face in her hands. ‘We can’t live scared anymore. That’s not what Ray would have wanted, not what I want. And I certainly don’t want you to feel responsible for me just because of this stupid chair.’
Oliver’s visits increased after Connor left for college. He imagined it easier with no broody teenager eyeing him warily.
‘I wanted to talk to you about it first. I know how…. protective you are of your mother. But Felicity…’ Oliver treasured the name, playing with the syllables. ‘we have something. Something that I want to explore.’
Connor’s face twisted with anger.
‘Explore until you grow tired of playing house.’ Connor threw out bitterly.
His father’s calm demeanour faltered. Although Oliver knew Connor resented him it was rare for the boy to so openly reveal them.
‘Con, son…’
‘NO! You don’t get to call me that!’
Eyes from nearby tables gave them quick glances at Connor’s raised voice.
‘You came into my life eleven years too late. You don’t make up for anything we lost. You’re not my dad, not my real dad, not the man who raised me. You don’t get to replace him just because he’s gone. You don’t get to have my ma after you threw her away.’
What kind of man leaves a seventeen-year-old pregnant and alone? Seventeen. Connor could barely grapple that thought. She had been younger than he was now. His Ma didn’t disguise the truth. She told Connor how scared and angry she’d been, the feeling that her world was crashing down. ‘But as soon as I saw that winkled slimy little human face of yours, I knew it was worth it. That you’d be the best thing that ever happened to me.’ Ma spent the first year as a mother alone. She managed to graduate from MIT, a little later than planned but still top of the class.
Then Ray came. First as her friend, then her partner, and eventually husband. By the time Conner was five, he was calling the man ‘Dad’.
Connor’s throat tightened as he felt the familiar grief swell in the pit of his stomach. Oliver leaned forward and grasped Connor’s shoulders tightly.
‘Ray was your Dad, and you are the son he raised’
Oliver said firmly
‘But like it or not, I am your father too, and I don’t want it to be just biologically. But that’s your choice Connor.’
Connor shrugged his father’s hands off. ‘And my Ma? You want a relationship with her right? That’s why you’re here’
Oliver kept a steady gaze ‘Don’t you think that’s for her to decide?’
Connor’s blue eyes lit up with fury and he stood suddenly, causing the table to jilt forward.
‘Do whatever the fuck you want Oliver, but if it’s a blessing you want, I won’t give it’
With that Connor stormed away, letting the door bang behind him.