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John Diggle is distraught when he learns about the accident. When he rushes to the hospital minutes after Oliver's frantic call, Lyla can taste the panic on his lips as he kisses her goodbye, and she can see it on the shaky hand he runs over Sara’s head. She’s worried too -- Felicity has become a friend, but she knows that for John, she’s so much more than that.
She’s family.
He can’t remember the last conversation they had, just the two of them. It both surprises and shames him.
When he sees her, lying there on a hospital bed, his mind flashes back involuntarily. “I’ve been building computers since I was seven ”, she’d once told him. “ Wires are wires.” She’d always been the one to tame the wires. Now, those wires have her trapped.
He heaves a shaky breath and tries to calm himself. She’s here. At least she’s still here. He turns, and Oliver’s here too. Exhausted, blood-soaked clothes. Her blood. Of course he’s here. Of course they both are. John lays a hand on his brother’s shoulder, and it goes unnoticed.
The guilt gushes forth like a tidal wave. He should have been there. He should have been driving the car. If he had, none of this would have happened. He'd have gotten them to safety, driven like hell past the cowards in masks raining bullets and hellfire down at them. He’d have run them over one by one and made no bones about it. Better them than Felicity. He'd gladly have taken a bullet if it meant she would be safe.
Oliver tells him that it's not his fault, but his voice is weak and the words half-hearted. It’s not because he blames John; he’s just too busy blaming himself to muster energy for anything else.
John remembers the time he sat outside her house all night, keeping watch, keeping her safe from Slade Wilson. He remembers the hot cocoa she brought him, and the lack of marshmallows. He remembers her pajamas with the matryoshka dolls.
He remembers all this because it was the first time she told him that she loved him.
They said they would protect her. All those years ago, when she came into their lives, when she decided she would stay, they’d made a pact that they would always protect her. If she knew, she’d have told them the same thing she always did -- she didn’t need their protection.
They never told her that it wasn’t about that; it was never about her needing their protection.
It was about her being too precious for either of them to lose.
They’ve spent too much time in hospitals over the years, the three of them. If there’s ever a constant to these things, it’s the waiting. The nerve-spiking, anxiety-inducing, never-ending waiting. Time becomes a blur of doctors and tests and an endless stream of visitors. She knew how to make friends, and she made a lot of them. They all come; Barry comes every day.
Lyla comes too, and sometimes she brings Sara with her. She’s too young to know what’s going on, but seeing her usually animated aunt lying motionless and unresponsive to her touch confuses Sara, and she cries as though even she can sense that this is a bad thing.
Oliver is gone a lot. Donna thinks she’s sending him home to rest, but John knows better. Oliver won’t rest until he’s found what he’s looking for -- someone to punch until Felicity wakes up. John thinks about trying to talk to him, to tell him not to fall back into old patterns, not to lose sight of the progress he’s made. He thinks about telling him that Felicity would never want this, and then he thinks about the ache in his own heart, and how often his fists want to ball up in rage. He can’t tell Oliver not to do something that he so desperately wants to do himself. He can’t be the voice of reason. Not this time.
Every night, after he leaves the hospital and before he goes home, John goes to the lair. He heads straight down to the basement, to the dark recesses of their second home, to the corner that houses a cage. A cage that currently contains his brother.
He’s experienced a lot of emotions since Andy came back. Joy, sadness, love. Rage. Seeing him now, all he feels is revulsion. He knows that he should feel a sense of confusion, of being caught between two people he loves.
His big brother and his little sister.
Instead he stands in the shadows, looks at the man wearing his brother’s face, and sees nothing. They call them Ghosts, and never has this description fit better. The entity before him -- that’s not his brother, it can’t be. His brother could never have been part of something that so callously ripped through his sister.
John looks at Andy, and all he sees are the men who put Felicity in the hospital. It doesn’t matter now that he wasn’t there too, that he didn’t carry the gun that shot her. He is the nearest thing that John has to closure, and as his fists curl involuntarily, preparing themselves for a fight, he has to work very hard not to step any closer.
No, he doesn’t feel a sense of division any more. He’d been struggling to reconcile what he knew of Andy with the man he sees now; he’d been hoping against hope that there was something to be salvaged, some way to find his brother again.
He thinks that might be over now.
In fitful sleep, his dreams take him back to that dank cell in Nanda Parbat. As they lie on the floor, the Alpha-Omega virus polluting the air around them, he tells her how sorry he is -- for bringing her into this life, for not being able to protect her, for a hundred different things he doesn’t have the time to say. ‘You don’t have to be sorry, John ’, she tells him in his dream, as she did in life. ‘ I’m glad to have known you.’
He doesn’t feel the tears that stream down his face.
When she wakes, he’s there. He hangs around in the background, letting Oliver and Donna be the first to see her face. He waits, and then she spies him from across the room and smiles tiredly. He moves closer, and she lifts her hand towards him, just a little bit. Oliver steps back, gives him the space. John grasps her hand, squeezes gently. He never realised how small her hands were until this moment. As she squeezes back, almost in defiance, he corrects himself.
Small but strong. Just like her.
When she decides she’s ready to go back to work, he has a moment of pure panic. He’s not the only one, and as he and Oliver exchange worried glances, something passes between them. Perhaps it’s a revisitation of that old vow; or perhaps it’s a need to feel useful. He hopes it’s not a need to hide her from the world. She would never allow that, and he would never want that for her.
He tells her anyway, and as he knew she would, she counters. ‘But you’re not a bodyguard anymore, John’, she tells him, and it’s true -- technically, it’s true. Still, he tells her, he’s always seen himself as a protector. ‘But what about Oliver?’ she asks. ‘He needs you too.’
John smiles, because they both know that Oliver is going to be fine without him. The irony is that for all she balks at the idea that she might need protection, she’s a protector too. It’s what makes her so special.
He tells her nothing of this, of course. He loves her, but he’s not stupid. Instead, he tells her something that puts that brilliant smile back onto her face, and quashes any objections she can conjure.
“What can I say? I just really love being your knight in shining armour.”