The Most Important Lesson

Banner By: Andrea
Title: The Most Important Lesson
Rating: PG-13
Author: Sxymami0909
Fandom: Smallville
Pairing: Oliver/Chloe
Word Count: 635
Prompt: “Success is dependent on effort.” from Miss_Morrygan





Success is dependent on effort. ~ Sophocles~

Most people saw Oliver Queen as a spoiled, playboy, billionaire. They never had the opportunity to see the man behind the mask. They assumed he was lazy and materialistic, just another rich boy who had everything handed to him.

However, those who knew Oliver, both the man and the myth, knew he lived by a very solid set of codes. They weren’t ordinary or traditional. They were the same set of rules that his father had taught him to live by when he was a boy.

But the most important lesson his father had ever taught him, the one that Oliver never forgot even when he sometimes wanted to, was that success was dependent on effort. It was a lesson he used daily in every aspect of his life.

When he decided to settle down and run his father’s company, this was the motto he implemented, throwing himself into the business. Going over all his father’s files on the company, the employees, and the research. Oliver spent months learning how Queen Industries worked from the bottom all the way through the top.

People might have thought he was ignorant and most of the time he let them, but no one knew the inner workings of his company better than he did. Next was archery. Being good was never enough for him. Oliver needed to be great.

And so he put in the effort and from that the Green Arrow was born. It took a lot of trial and error, but he’d finally come to a point where his alter ego was successful at what he set out to accomplish with his masked persona. Again his father’s words had echoed in his head.

Success is dependent on effort. He had conquered the business world and was learning more each day. He had conquered the vigilante world his team growing bounds each day. With those two aspects of his life taken care of, Oliver’s current focus was on the feisty blonde in his personal world.

His relationship with Chloe had started off rocky. He knew her history with men and by moving their relationship past the friendship zone he’d committed to her in a way she hadn’t yet realized and somewhere along the way he’d fallen in love with her.

It had taken patients and effort, but in the two years they’d been together he had never once wavered in his approach to their relationship. It had taken him seven weeks to get her to spend the night with him at his apartment. Ten weeks had passed before she invited him to spend the night at hers.

They’d hit the six month mark before she admitted they were in an actual relationship and it took him being cornered by more than a dozen flying creatures for her to admit she was in love with him. He looked back on that day as one of the best of his life, minus the near death experience of course.

Things were easier now. They fought every so often, she accepted his gifts without too much complaining, she let him take her out in public and even attended company events with him. She still refused to talk about the future. Bring up any kind of permanent living arrangement or god forbid talk of a family and she’d bolt as fast as those four inch heels could take her.

Oliver wasn’t worried though. They’d come a long way since that first night in Watchtower, and he was confident that with a little determination their relationship would be a success.

Because like his father used to say, success was dependant on effort, and Oliver was putting in the kind of effort that would make his relationship with Chloe be the kind of success that lasted forever.