Arrow 1. All That Could Have Been

Oops. 'Nother John/Lyla fic, this time taking place pre-series. This is all _My Best Friend's Wedding_'s fault, or at least that of the soundtrack and it also happened because I'll Be Okay and I have a kind of complicated history and it somehow begged to be written. Also, Presentation of Doom looming on the horizon, so naturally, I'm writing like a berserk and maybe, if everything goes better than expected _or_ things really go down the drain (just covering all my bases here), there'll be another story in the series tomorrow or on Friday. Not making any promises, though. Anyway... enjoy! (even if it's rather sad? I'm sorry :S)

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><p><strong>All That Could Have Been<strong>

"_It's time to let you go  
>It's time to say goodbye<br>There's no more excuses  
>No more tears to cry<br>There's been so many changes  
>I was so confused<br>All along you were the one  
>All the time I never knew<br>I want you to be happy  
>You're my best friend<br>But it's so hard to let you go now  
>All that could have been."<em>

_Amanda Marshall, "I'll Be Okay"_

Once in Afghanistan, there was a boy. Once in Afghanistan, there was a boy who could have been Tuareg in his swathes of clothes and his face veiled save for his eyes, if it hadn't been for the distinctive American accent in his Arabic when you met him for the first time. Once in Afghanistan, there was a boy who became your best friend, your confidant, your lover.

Once in Afghanistan, you married that boy because he asked you one particularly boozy evening in a German bar at Camp Marmal where no one knew the two of you and you'd just been back from an off the records HUMINT stint in the desert.

It had been a bad week and you'd realized that you didn't want chance encounters and booty calls anymore. You wanted no one but him waiting for you at the airfield in Bagram and just inside the gates of Bastion and on any godforsaken FOB they sent you to. You wanted to come back to your barracks at Losano and find him lying on your bed, one of your battered paperbacks in his hand, telling you that your taste in books _really_ sucked. You wanted all of it so bad that you said yes and didn't even mind when an entire company of German Airborne soldiers set out to search for the next best military chaplain and dragged an unsuspecting Navy padre back into the shed where they housed their bar half an hour later.

It was the most unprofessional thing you ever did and even with the hangover they next day, you thought it would be the one thing you'd never regret.

You were so, so _wrong_. You and John both.

At first you thought it was the amount of paperwork – officers marrying enlisted men still isn't really one of the Army's most favorite things – that would make you regret the decision but he kept dropping by Losano to help you sort through the masses of dead trees with the same diligence and patience that he would display when he was hunting the bad guys up in the mountains. Officially, you weren't supposed to know about what he did for a living but you weren't in military intelligence for nothing.

Then you thought it was the secrecy of what you were both doing, the classified missions and the hush-hush nature of your jobs but even before you got married, you never needed to talk about your jobs to find a common ground. Often enough you didn't have to talk about anything at all.

It wasn't the ranks, either or the distance between your bases or the wounds that too many close calls and near misses and full hits left behind, visible and invisible. All of that didn't bother either of you because you were young and in love and thought nothing could touch you and nothing could, as long as you were surrounded by danger, death and destruction, as long as you had each other. You thought it was enough.

It never occurred to you that _war_ wasn't your problem.

And now you're sitting here, pen in your hand, poised over the dotted line right next to the post-it arrow that says "sign here" that your lawyer put there, as if she wanted to make _absolutely_ sure there would be nothing standing in the way of just another military marriage dissolved after less than a year. "It's just routine," she told you. "Happens every day," she told you. "Hundreds of marriages are probably dissolved today," she told you.

And all you wanted to was scream back at her that what you and John have – _had_ – was never routine, never average, never "one among a hundred", always "one in a million" but you guessed that she probably hears that several times a week and you're so tired of reminding yourself that you're doing the right thing, anyway.

So you nodded and asked her to send you the papers and almost lost them twice in between moving out of the apartment you shared with John, before you both realized that you couldn't go on pretending that there was no difference between living in a country at war and living in Fayetteville, Georgia, leaving the Army and starting your training at A.R.G.U.S.

You'd like to think it was on accident but that's not who you are. You never lose important documents. You copy them, file them and make sure that you always know where they are. And you never delay signing anything, either. You adhere to deadlines and return everything posthaste, in better condition than the one you received it in. You still haven't put your name on the dotted line two weeks after you received the manila envelope with your lawyer's address.

It's stupid, your hesitation, the little tremor in your hand, the unnecessarily long staring at that line, you _know_ that. What's done is done and it's not like you're leaving him in the dead of night, with all of his money and no forwarding address left behind. No, you both agreed that you just couldn't cut it as a couple, that peace was hacking away at your love with a ferocity that war never even began to master, that you needed to put a stop to it if you wanted anything to be left of each of you after peace was finished with you. Right before he told you that he'd be going back to Afghanistan in two months, you both decided to put a very sensible end to maybe the only insensible thing you both ever did in your entire lives.

You spent the rest of the night convincing yourself that you weren't crying next to him, that it was just something in your bedroom that you developed an allergy to. Needless to say, it didn't work and needless to say that the struggle between wanting him so bad to ask you what was wrong and being glad he didn't nearly tore out your heart.

He'd been gone the next day, telling you he needed to step up training for his next deployment, that it was better for him to move into the unmarried NCO quarters, to strengthen team cohesion and probably also to be able to push himself beyond exhaustion without you knocking some sense back into his thick head and you nodded like you'd understood, and you _had_. You'd wanted to knock some sense into his thick head, anyway.

And you still haven't signed and it's starting to become ridiculous. You're kind of glad that he isn't here to see you fail so pathetically at the simple task of putting your name on a piece of paper and maybe that's the last incentive you need; John's soft, sensible, always just a bit deadpan voice in your head, telling you to cut the crap and do what's best for you and him and you put that pen on paper.

Or maybe you rather stab it into the papers than softly putting it down and you don't jot down your signature but aggressively scratch it into the stack and maybe those aren't actual tears in your eyes but you can't deny that just for a moment, your vision is suspiciously blurred. With more force than necessary, you push the entire mess back into the envelope and seal it.

The same evening, you finally send it away to your lawyer and good riddance.

In the end, it takes the next three months for your anger at yourself, John and the universe to finally dissipate and when a copy of the papers appears in your new mailbox far away from Fort Bragg, in an envelope bearing the cryptic mess of acronyms of an APO address you never heard of before, you thank God that you aren't far enough in your training at A.R.G.U.S. yet to have access to the information you'd need to find out where he's currently stationed.

Because if you had, you would. You would find out and you would pack in your training, throw on a uniform and fly out to wherever he's holed up right now, just to be at war again, to be with _him_ again. And all it takes you to nearly destroy your new career before it even began is a little note on the back of a page he must have ripped out of his ancient paperback copy of _All The King's Men_, saying _This isn't how I wanted it to go. Wish it had ended another way. I'm sorry, Lyla._

It probably was the apology that did you in or John not being as afraid as you to spell your pain – and his – out in black and white and you have never been looking forward to two weeks of intense SERE training as much as right now. Nothing like huddling in the underbrush, freezing your ass off and hoping to God your instructors don't find you to pull your mind away from the train wreck of your divorce and the gaping black hole of a future in which John has no part, that's for sure.

But SERE is still two days away and so you hole up yourself in your quarters, telling everyone you do your best studying alone and curl up on your bed and think _This isn't how I wanted it to, either_ and _I'm so sorry, John_ and you finally let yourself cry for the boy and girl who met in Afghanistan in another life not so long ago and for the love that never was their problem and you swear to God that you will shoot him yourself if he manages to get himself killed wherever he is now. Having to let him go is the one thing you'll force yourself to, no matter the cost. Never seeing him again is one that you won't ever be able to force yourself to.

And you're okay with that, or you will be, in time. Not right now, not tomorrow but you'll have to be someday because you owe it to John and to yourself and one way or the other, you'll be okay with it. One way of the other, you'll survive it and that's all you can do, anyway. And if there's one thing you were always good at, it's surviving. Lucky you. Lucky, fucking you.


	2. It's Always You

Well. Err. As my tumblr followers _might _have noticed, my latest uni project (a presentation I'm deathly afraid of and I don't mean that in a joking way) drove me to this week's obsession, John Diggle/Lyla Michaels (John/Carly shippers may hopefully forgive me but I actually shipped Digg and Lyla from their first scene together, no kidding). And, since there's a shockingly large lack of John/Lyla fic, I _naturally_ was attacked by a really big herd of rabid bunnies. And this... is just the first story spooking around in my head (which is why even the first story already is part of a series...). So, let's hope that between this new series and _Military Madness_ I'll get _anything_ uni related done this week. Eh, anyway, enjoy :D

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><p><strong>It's Always You<strong>

"_If red roses weren't so lovely  
>If wine didn't taste so good<br>If stars weren't so romantic  
>Then I could do what I should<em>

_Oh you, it's always you  
>It's always you."<em>

_Sophie Zelmani, "Always You"_

Once in Afghanistan, there was a girl. Once in Afghanistan, there was a girl who wore a headscarf with her battle rattle, Captain's bars on her collars and an M14 in her hands, in a place where she wasn't supposed to be, when you met her for the first time.

Once in Afghanistan, there was a girl you married because you thought love could survive everything, even peace.

And then it wouldn't, which you both should have known and you tried very hard not to think about fate and irony when you put your signature below the divorce papers on a bitterly cold day in the Afghan mountains a year and six months after you married her.

You saw her again when you came home from your third and last tour and she'd just finished her latest training and was Agent Michaels now instead of Captain Diggle. There were no hard feelings and you told yourself it didn't hurt like a bayonet between your ribs when she told you that she was seeing another agent. You told yourself it didn't feel like torture to pull up the corners of your mouth to smile and wish her good luck.

It almost worked.

You kept seeing her over the years, when you were both in town between assignments and needed information from the other or someone who knew that "it's classified, I can't talk about it" usually meant "thank God it's classified, I don't ever want to talk about it again". You thought you'd be a lifer, Army life being the only thing that kept you away sufficiently long from the apartment you used to share with her but then they shot your brother and you realized your family might need you more than the Army.

After the anguish, after the hurt, after the mourning came obsession and you found yourself waiting for her to be back from her assignments so you could probe and see and try to get her to reveal any information they might have about Andy's death. The excuse of revenge and brotherly love almost outweighed the dirty, dishonorable feeling it always gave you when she did pass on a file note here and a little hint there. "Almost" was enough for you during those years.

You kept looking and searching, using your Special Forces skills to keep yourself employed by rich people thinking themselves important enough to need someone with a gun standing in their back and looking threateningly and you thought you were growing closer to Carly while what you were really doing was pulling yourself away from that girl you met in Afghanistan who wouldn't leave you alone with all your might.

Make no mistake, you told yourself, you did love Carly and you did feel guilty for liking her and finding her attractive. But you always thought it was because Andy would hate you for enjoying what once was his, for taking over his family when it was because all you wanted, all you ever wanted since that day they told you you'd never see your brother again was to be close to him again. You thought you could find that with Carly and A.J. and you were _wrong_. It was, in hindsight, almost embarrassing, that it was Felicity Smoak of all people who had to spell it out in black and white for you.

You love Felicity like a sister, but Lord, can she be dense at times.

As you crawl home, you find yourself smiling, despite the lingering pain from the Vertigo throbbing in the back of your head, making your feet stick to the ground like a leaden weight in the sole of your shoes. It's been a hell of a day but you're smiling. You'll never tell them but it's probably all Oliver's and Felicity's fault that you're still smiling when you reach your door and turn the key in the lock.

You go into alertness mode the moment you open that door. Damn, you think as you draw your gun out of habit. Someone's opened that door before you and hasn't left as all the little traps you planted around your place as soon as you started working for Oliver Queen tell you. They even took the front door which tells you that whoever entered must have been one sloppy son of a…

Or maybe it was one exhausted A.R.G.U.S agent not bothering to be subtle. Or, as you only realize now, leaving clues so you won't freak out when you see a human shape half buried under that quilt your mom made for you before your first tour, telling you "it does get cold in that place, son, I read all about it" on your couch.

You watch her for a moment, carefully putting away your gun and you realize that it's been a long time since you saw her with her guard down like that. Maybe you never saw her with her guard down like that before. "Hey, Johnny." Maybe… she doesn't have her guard down now, either.

Of course she hasn't.

As you see her pulling herself up on your couch, blinking into the light you wonder how big the number was they did on her in Russia. She has the unique talent to be fully awake the moment she opens her eyes. Sluggish movements and rubbing the sleep from her eyes are not part of the Lyla Michaels package.

Choosing not to comment on it, you walk over and sit down in the spot she just vacated, leaning forward with your elbows digging into your thighs. You link your hands behind your neck and you wonder briefly what kind of number the Vertigo did on _you_.

"How was work today?" she asks and you can hear a faint trace of worry and realize that she still knows you far too well, better than Carly or any of the other women you met over the years did.

Just one of the side effects of falling love with each other when you were fighting a war and you keep telling yourself that it isn't the same for you, that you aren't the only one who can see the years that Koshmar took away from her edged into her face even from a few feet away.

For a moment, you consider telling her about the moment you realized that it wasn't the flu shot that kept pulling you under at the court house, the moment you realized that something was very, very wrong. You consider telling her about the pain pushing through your veins when you were lying on the table in Verdant's basement, about the violent shaking and the helplessness when the _craving_ took over your body, all the time, all until the moment Felicity released you from the prison of addiction. You consider telling her about the embarrassment at being caught with your pants down like that, about feeling like a failure because you couldn't make Felicity stay in the basement when you knew what her decision could cost both you and Oliver.

You consider telling her about how you know very well what it cost Oliver to break his promise about never killing again, even if it was for Felicity and how very well you know that part of that is _your_ fault.

But then you remember how she knows you far too well already and you remember that the reason you didn't want them to tell her about it all was that you knew that she didn't need you on top of everything Russia did to her so you just lean back and give her a dismissive shake of your head. "Just another day at the office. What about you?"

She gives you a little sleepy half-smile and shakes her head. "Same old, same old. They still won't let me out in the field yet."

You can see that it rankles her, hurts her pride and her honor, how she burns to be back in the saddle to show them all that Russia was a fluke, that Russia didn't mean anything. You _know_ that she knows that they'd already given up on her and that she tries so fucking hard not to take it personally, to be a professional about it. You're a little afraid of what it means that _you_ have a hard time not taking it personally, too.

So all you do is kick off your shoes and drag your legs up on the couch, inviting her to come into your embrace, settle her back against your chest and you pull your mother's quilt up and hold her in your arms, building a shelter for the two of you, to keep it all out, Vertigo and Russia and guilt and shame and when the rain starts pounding down outside and she falls asleep in your arms, you finally let yourself relax, too. Just for a moment, you can make yourself believe that the story that once upon a time began in Afghanistan might not be over yet and that's all it takes that you, too can finally fall asleep. It _was_ a pretty hard day, after all.


	3. But If You Close Your Eyes

**A/N: **Ah, yes, finally. This one took me a bit longer because I coudn't seem to figure out how much Lyla knows about Team Arrow and Digg's part in it (was it ever mentioned? Like, I know that Amanda Waller knows about it and that Lyla is one of her most important agents but that doesn't mean that she'd have to tell her everything she knows about Oliver and John, right?) and I hope I did it right (also, I hope we're going to see her again this season, _and it better not be because she and Digg break up, okay_?). Also, a great many thanks to **sajina** because she sacrificed a few brain cells and found usable quotes from _Fifty Shades of Grey_ for me. Thank you!

And, err, enjoy?

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><p><strong>But If You Close Your Eyes<strong>

"_And the walls kept tumbling down  
>In the city that we love<br>Grey clouds roll over the hills  
>Bringing darkness from above<em>

_But if you close your eyes,_  
><em>Does it almost feel like<em>  
><em>Nothing changed at all?<em>  
><em>And if you close your eyes,<em>  
><em>Does it almost feel like<em>  
><em>You've been here before?"<em>

_Bastille, "Pompeii"_

So you just finished your first mission in the field after Russia and you'd never tell anyone but when you stepped off the Air Force C-130 A.R.G.U.S. put you on in the disguise of a soldier just back from her latest deployment to Djibouti, you could have really done without the debriefing. Especially when they told you that some madman just nearly blew up a plaza in Starling City.

That is, if every security agency's best friend, the Arrow, hadn't stopped the guy yet again. You just wished they'd have let you analyze the press coverage and security camera feeds to confirm a theory of yours, a theory that has been steadily building up ever since Russia. You were asleep for most of the flight back and you were in pain and pretty sure they'd also pumped something to keep you subdued into your veins in Koshmar but you weren't _blind_.

You _saw_ who it was that drove the jeep that took you away from Koshmar and you saw that it was the rich boy that John is supposed to babysit. _Wearing a Russian police uniform_ and maybe your brain was addled by pain and fatigue and drugs but you sure as hell saw who downed the five armed guards outside the prison.

Yes, you have a few theories about Oliver Queen and being forced on light duty for over four weeks didn't help with that, either. A few times you were tempted to directly confront John about it but you like this newfound closeness too much to sacrifice it for your curiosity. Still, you'll probably go through the footage about the shooting again, anyway.

But you won't do that now because it's oh dark hundred and you can still feel Djibouti all over you. You washed off the sweat and sand and grime of six days in East Africa in an A.R.G.U.S. shower and the feeling of failure and shame of losing Lawton's trail _again_ in the A.R.G.U.S. debriefing room but you still felt it a little harder to strip off the mission at the front gate and walk away than usually. Everyone has bad days, though, don't they?

Or at least that's a more comfortable explanation than anything having to do with Russia.

More logical, too. Russia wasn't the first time you fucked up, neither in your time in the Army, nor as an agent, it wasn't even the _worst_ fuck up. It was just the first time you got burned. On the plane home, John told you about how it was Waller that got him involved, in a shady snag and bag op, before he gave you a kiss on the forehead and told you to call if there was anything you wanted or needed. You were nearly exhausted enough to tell him that you _wanted_ nothing more than to fall asleep with him right next to you on that bed in the back of the Queen company jet but you were also so exhausted that you'd started to believe that "Always have, always will" was a trick your fucked up mind played on you.

You smile as you drag yourself up to your apartment. You woke up at some point, startled and disoriented, your heart pounding hard against your ribcage and a steady, velvety voice murmuring, "Just a dream, Lyla. You're safe now," in the twilight of a darkened plane. It nearly gave you a heart attack at first but then your eyes adjusted to the low lighting and you saw him sitting in a seat by the window opposite the bed.

You put your head back on the pillow and curled up under sheets that probably cost more than you make in a month and maybe it was the semi-dark or the aftermath of a nightmare you still don't remember messing with your head but you kind of extended your hand towards him, fingertips curling into the sheet and because he's John Diggle, he didn't even ask, just got up and walked over to the bed, a little too slow to be deliberate, lied down and put his arms around you as if nothing changed ever since he did so for the last time before you called it quits.

When he held you, you could feel that he wanted to hold you tight, shield you, protect you and even half asleep you had the suspicion that he needed to do it as much for himself as for you. You didn't mind at all.

You're in front of your door now and you wonder if walking up the stairs was always this exhausting but it's easy to tell yourself that you're not twenty-two anymore and that you just spent six days in a place everyone just abbreviates to SHD. Shitty hotty Djibouti, indeed. Well then, you think and unlock your door, your senses going alert the moment the lock clicks. Someone's inside and you keep your gun in your hands until you see John's shoes pushed against the wall in your hall.

Forcing yourself to relax, you put away your gun, drop your bag and your jacket along with it and walk into the living room. There he is, lying on your couch, feet propped up on your coffee table, another paperback in his left hand… and his right in a sling.

You really need to get a hold of that security camera footage.

"So," you say, "I leave you alone for a mere six days and you manage to get yourself beat up?"

Before he answers, he closes the paperback – a hot spike of embarrassment pushes through your veins because you can't believe that you left _that_ one lying around out in the open when you knew that you weren't the only one who can pick locks in this relationship – and gives you one of his patented "Are you trying to fuck with me, Captain?" looks that even back in Afghanistan only served to make you want him more. Then, "Shot up, actually."

Shot… it's too late at night and you're too winded after a too long flight for that shit. You consider actually going off on him for _getting himself fucking shot up_ but in the end, you only have enough energy left for walking into your bedroom and changing into something a little more comfortable than her present clothes. While you pull out a pair of sweat pants and a yoga shirt from your dresser, you can hear him getting up and walking over and you're pretty sure that the only reason that you _can_ hear it is that you don't freak out when you hear him say, "Just a through and through, Lyla. No reason to get pissed off about it," from behind you.

Suddenly tired of all the shit your job threw at you in Djibouti, you turn around and the bits of your anger that were still left fizzle out when you see him leaning against the jamb of your bedroom's door. The only light is coming from behind him but you can somehow see in the way he stands, the way he subconsciously cradles the arm in the sling with his uninjured one. He's tired, too and it's probably more than the painkillers. If he even took them.

You want to ask him if he's okay but you know that he'll just give you a useless affirmative, so you walk over to him and give him a kiss, standing on your tiptoes, careful with the arm in the sling. He reacts instantaneously, leaning down and putting his good hand behind your neck and you realize that things haven't changed that much altogether since you kissed him in a seedy, half broken down mud hut in Afghanistan after not seeing him for ten days straight after you shared your quarters for the first time.

"You know… your taste in books still really sucks. _Fifty Shades of Grey_? Really, Agent Michaels?" – "What if I told you it was for research?" – "I'd tell you to get better resources than _this_." – "Judgy, aren't we today?" – "Just looking out for you." – "How considerate of you, Mr. Diggle."


End file.

Arrow, Friendship, Romance