Her heart throbs at the sound of his voice saying her name. Her given name. Her other name. First. Deepest. The tone, the tenor, the weight. The sound of it, wrapped in his voice. After so long. It feels like it lands so much deeper than any arrowhead could. Like it's hit something deeper and denser than bone. Sheering through her like she's smoke.

Which is almost nothing to the words that he says next.

To the explosion of that. Stay. Stay; like she'd somehow planned not to stay. Like she'd had some other plan. Like there was some other place. She'd been so consumed with the desperate need for him to just be alive. Just not die on her again. Not die behind his eyelids, in the night, again, the same way he'd suddenly been gone when the ocean came rushing into the Gambit and swallowed her down and down and down into that ravage dark.

"Stay." The word isn't even a choice. It just sort of falls out of her mouth. Almost like she's never said it before.
As if every thought isn't suddenly a collision of too much. The long time she'd tried, dreamed, yearned, raged.

Her parent's faces. Laurel's. The place she's earned at the side of her princess above others.
The world suddenly exploding in awareness bigger than island edges and ocean views again.

On Oliver Queen. (The irony, freeing and damning, is not lost on her. Even years later.)