Chapter 9: Recovery and Revelation
The headache lasted three days—payment for erasing causality itself, Ben supposed, which seemed almost fair except for the part where reality shouldn't bend to human will in the first place. The pain wasn't like his Prescience overloads, which felt like information overflow. This was deeper, more fundamental, like he'd torn something in the fabric of existence and his brain was the part that had to heal.
Ben spent those three days moving carefully, avoiding bright lights and loud noises while trying to understand what had happened at the bank. In the privacy of his apartment, away from curious eyes and probing questions, he began testing the boundaries of whatever new ability he'd unlocked.
It started small. A coffee cup knocked off the table—Ben focused on the moment of impact and somehow made it not happen. The cup simply returned to his hand as if the clumsiness had never occurred. A book dropped while reading—un-dropped, the pages fluttering back to their proper position as reality rewrote itself around his refusal to accept the accident.
Each use brought a flash of wrongness, like the universe itself was offended by his edits. But it worked.
"I can negate events. Not prevent them—actually erase them from having happened at all. The detonation signal at the bank didn't fail or get blocked. It just... wasn't. I removed it from the causal chain like deleting a line of code from reality's operating system."
The implications were staggering. If he could negate events, could he undo anything? Death? Disasters? The terrible knowledge of future tragedies that had been eating at him since his arrival?
Ben tried rapid-fire negations—dropping and un-dropping the same object repeatedly—and discovered his first hard limit. After the third use in quick succession, the pain hit like a railroad spike through his skull. Whatever mechanism allowed him to edit reality, it had a cooldown period. Roughly thirty seconds between uses, he estimated, based on when the agony faded to manageable levels.
"There are rules to this. Limits. I'm not some reality-warping god—I'm a man with a very specific, very dangerous ability that comes with very real costs."
He added careful, coded notes to his power journal. "Edit function requires recovery time. Overuse results in severe cerebral trauma. Reality appears to have built-in resistance to unauthorized modifications."
The knock on his door came on Thursday evening, just as Ben was testing whether he could negate his own mistakes in real-time. He'd been practicing drawing simple shapes and erasing the ones that came out wrong, each negation leaving him slightly more drained but more confident in his control.
"Ben? It's Felicity. From the burger place."
Ben's blood went cold. Felicity Smoak didn't make social visits, especially not to the apartments of mysteriously knowledgeable gym teachers she'd met exactly once. If she was here, it was because she had questions he probably couldn't answer safely.
"Just a minute," he called, quickly stashing his journal and trying to compose an expression that didn't scream guilty of impossible crimes.
Felicity stood in his hallway wearing jeans and a Queen Consolidated polo shirt, holding a tablet and wearing the kind of smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. Professional curiosity masquerading as friendship.
"Hi! I was in the neighborhood—well, okay, I wasn't really in the neighborhood, but I wanted to follow up on our cryptography discussion. Can I come in?"
"No digital footprint before two months ago. Pays cash everywhere. Shows up at crime scenes. Now connected to an incident involving impossible electronics failures. Of course she's investigating."
"Sure. Coffee?"
"That would be great."
Ben's apartment was small and deliberately generic—nothing that would reveal his true origins or the extent of his knowledge about future events. But as Felicity settled onto his secondhand couch and looked around with sharp, cataloguing eyes, he realized that the absence of personal history might be just as suspicious as having the wrong kind.
"Nice place," she said. "Very... minimalist."
"I don't accumulate much stuff."
"Right. The whole burned-out-from-corporate-life thing." Felicity accepted the coffee with a smile that definitely didn't reach her eyes. "Actually, that's kind of why I wanted to talk. I've been thinking about our conversation, and some of the algorithms you suggested were really advanced. Like, graduate-level theoretical work advanced."
"I read a lot."
"I'm sure you do. But the thing is, I've been working on some consulting projects for the SCPD—tech forensics, electronics analysis, that sort of thing. And yesterday I got handed a really interesting case."
Ben's hands tightened on his coffee mug. "Oh?"
"Bomb collar that electronically failed in a way that has experts completely baffled. The detonation signal was sent—we have logs from the remote transmitter showing successful command delivery. But somehow, that signal just... vanished. The device has no record of ever receiving it."
Ben took a careful sip of coffee, using the motion to cover his expression. "That does sound strange."
"Strange doesn't cover it. It's physically impossible. Signals don't just disappear from digital memory. It's like someone reached into the electronics and erased a specific piece of data without leaving any trace of tampering."
"She knows. Maybe not exactly what happened, but she knows something impossible occurred. And she's smart enough to connect me to it through timing and proximity."
"Maybe the device was defective?"
"That's what everyone wants to believe. But I've been over the schematics, and there's no failure mode that explains this. The collar was working perfectly—right up until the moment it wasn't." Felicity leaned forward, studying Ben's face with uncomfortable intensity. "The really interesting part is that witnesses say a man matching your description was present when the incident occurred."
Ben set down his coffee with steady hands. "The police already took my statement. I was just trying to help."
"Right. Just trying to help. Like you were just trying to help with my cryptography problem. You have a habit of being in the right place at the right time with exactly the right knowledge."
"I could negate this conversation. Make it so she never came here, never asked these questions. But that would be a violation of everything I'm trying to stand for. And besides, Felicity Smoak is too smart to be fooled by gaps in her own memory. She'd investigate the missing time and probably figure out something even worse than the truth."
"Sometimes things just work out," Ben said finally. "Call it lucky karma."
Felicity's expression suggested she had several less charitable names for it. But before she could respond, her phone buzzed with the distinctive tone of an urgent work message.
"Sorry, I have to—" She glanced at the screen and her eyebrows shot up. "Oh. That's... unexpected."
"Everything okay?"
"Work emergency. Something about network intrusions at Queen Consolidated." Felicity stood, gathering her things with the efficiency of someone used to dropping everything for crisis management. "But this conversation isn't over. I have more questions."
"I'll try to have more answers."
"You do that." She paused at the door, looking back with an expression that was part warning, part curiosity. "Ben Hale who pays cash and has no digital history and just happens to be present when impossible things happen—you're either the luckiest man in Starling City, or you're something else entirely."
After she left, Ben slumped against his closed door and tried not to think about what would happen if Felicity decided he was worth investigating in earnest. Her resources, her connections, her demonstrated ability to uncover hidden truths—if she really set her mind to exposing his secrets, he wasn't sure how long his carefully constructed cover identity would hold up.
The knock came again an hour later, but this time it was Sin, materializing in his doorway with the silent approach she'd perfected as a survival skill.
"You busy?"
"Not particularly. Come on in."
Sin sprawled across his couch with the casual territorialism of a teenager who'd claimed this space as safe. She studied him with eyes that had learned to read adults for signs of danger, lies, or weakness.
"Marcus says you've been moving weird the last few days. Like you're hurt but trying to hide it."
Perceptive. Too perceptive.
"Just tired. Haven't been sleeping well."
"Right." Sin's tone suggested she didn't believe him for a second. "Ben, can I ask you something?"
"Sure."
"Are you special? Like, the way that hooded guy is special?"
The question hit like a physical blow. Ben forced himself to keep breathing normally, to not react in a way that would confirm her suspicions.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean you move like you know what people are going to do before they do it. You're never surprised, even when shit gets crazy. You teach us fighting techniques that look just like what the vigilante uses. And you showed up in the Glades exactly two months ago with no history, no connections, no explanation."
Ben stared at her, this sharp, damaged teenager who'd learned to survive by reading people and situations with deadly accuracy. Lying to her felt like a betrayal, but telling the truth would be worse.
"I need a cover story. Something close enough to the truth to be believable, but far enough from reality to protect the real secrets."
"When I was a kid," Ben said slowly, "I was in a building that collapsed. Earthquake damage, old construction, people cutting corners on safety. I got trapped under rubble for eighteen hours before rescue teams found me."
Sin leaned forward, recognizing the rhythm of truth in his voice.
"Technically, I died. Heart stopped for almost three minutes. But they got me back." Ben looked out his window at the Glades, where similar buildings with similar safety violations housed thousands of people who trusted that their homes wouldn't become their tombs. "When I woke up, things were different. My reflexes, my ability to read situations, the way I processed information about potential threats. Nothing supernatural, just... enhanced intuition. Like my brain learned to process danger signals faster."
It was close enough to his actual death to carry the weight of lived experience, vague enough to avoid specific questions, and plausible enough to explain his enhanced abilities without revealing their true nature.
Sin nodded slowly. "That's why you teach the way you do. You know what it's like to be helpless."
"Yeah. And I never want to feel that way again. And I don't want anyone else to feel that way either."
"The near-death experience thing explains the reflexes and the fighting skills. But it doesn't explain how you always know where trouble is before it starts."
Too smart. Definitely too smart.
"Pattern recognition. When you've been close to death, you get really good at spotting the signs that lead up to violence. Body language, environmental cues, the way crowds move when something's wrong."
Sin accepted this with the pragmatic wisdom of someone who'd learned similar skills through necessity rather than trauma. "Makes sense. And it means you're one of the good ones."
"How do you figure?"
"Because you could use those skills to hurt people, to take advantage, to get rich quick in a place like the Glades. Instead, you teach single mothers how to defend themselves and let street kids crash your classes for free."
The simple faith in her voice hit harder than any of Felicity's probing questions. Sin had decided he was trustworthy based on his actions, not his explanations. The weight of that trust felt heavier than any secret he was carrying.
"Just try not to get yourself killed being a hero," she continued, standing and stretching. "The Glades eat up good people faster than anywhere else."
After Sin left, Ben updated his coded journal with careful notes about his new cover story. The near-death experience explained his reflexes and situational awareness without touching on his actual powers. It was a foundation he could build on, a narrative that would satisfy curiosity without revealing the impossible truth.
"Enhanced intuition from childhood trauma. Close enough to reality to be convincing, vague enough to avoid follow-up questions. Can explain Prescience as pattern recognition, but says nothing about Negation. That ability stays completely hidden unless absolutely necessary."
What Ben didn't know was that across the city, in a converted factory that served as headquarters for Starling City's newest vigilante, Oliver Queen was asking Felicity to run deeper background checks on a gym teacher who kept appearing at impossible moments.
And when Felicity Smoak decided to investigate someone, she had resources that went far beyond simple curiosity.
The hunter was about to become the hunted.
Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
Can't wait for the next chapter of [ Arrowverse: The Survivor's ]?
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them (20+ chapters ahead!). No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more .
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1