One of life's greatest secrets was the pleasure of fixing something with your own hands.

It didn't used to be. Once upon a time, people used to be able to fend for themselves. Everyone had a tool box stashed in the garage, under the sink, under the stairs. Hiring someone else was always a last resort. You didn't call a plumber until your flooded basement was already ankle deep. You didn't take your car to the shop until the engine was on fire. These days though, everyone was too damned busy to handle their own problems. Kids grew up never knowing how to rewire a plug; hell, some could barely change a lightbulb. People couldn't even change their own damned oil and spark plugs any more; why learn, why get your hands dirty, when you could hand things over to a mechanic? Why upgrade your own computer, or fix a simple fault, when you could just pay for a whole new one? You didn't even need to talk to anyone any more, the whole situation could be resolved with a few swipes on an app, and attended to by robots and computers, without ever needing to take your eyes off your cell phone.

Malcolm would never understand it. That kind of laziness and disengagement just wasn't something he was wired for, and the idea of ever becoming that way, thanks to age, or injury, or apathy, was one of his larger dreads. People were afraid of all sorts of things, rational and irrational; valid as those might be, Malcolm's one and only was the inability to fend for himself.

The rumble of an expensive engine extracted Mal's head from beneath the hood of the car he was working on, drawing his attention to the forecourt outside his modest garage. He wasn't one of those savants who could identify a make and model just from the sound, but he spent enough time around broken cars to hear when one wasn't; and that whispered at something interesting. His garage wasn't exactly out of the way, but it wasn't exactly the sort of place you stumbled across either: tucked into one of those little industrial dead ends with a few modest warehouses and workshops for company, the entrance guarded by one of those quaint little diners where the waitress wandered around with a neverending pot of coffee.

One glance at the vehicle, and the driver stepping out of it, all sunglasses and sex appeal, answered most of the fledgeling questions that had started to form in Malcolm's mind. A wry grin settled across his fingers, hands occupied by wiping off the worst of the engine grease with an equally grimy rag, in case his visitor wanted to do anything as pedestrian as shaking hands. "Oliver Jonas Queen," he uttered with a hint of a deep chuckle, taking his time to relish each of the words as he spoke. His hulking frame hunched a little, not out of bad posture or shyness, but more to avoid the towering behemoth visage that he usually reserved for unruly kids and troublemakers. "Let me guess: you need the seat adjusted, and can't manage to figure it out on your own?"