More Alive Than You've Ever Been

It happens by accident. Up to that point, Felicity has managed to keep it to herself. A girl has to have some secrets. And it's a silly one, kind of embarrassing. She can't imagine how she'd ever explain it, not so that anyone else could understand. It was her weird little quirk. It was hers.

She only ever does it when she's so nervous or scared that nothing can stop her rambling. Not deep breaths, not counting backward, not anything. But it finally happens one night. She's sneaking around the server room at Merlyn Global after swinging across an elevator shaft with Oliver like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia . . . without the awkward brother/sister thing.

Felicity is alone in the server room, and her hands are shaking so badly that she can't plug the cord into her tablet. She feels like throwing up, and she knows it's only a matter of time before she's discovered. And though her lips are silent, her brain is in overdrive, and then . . .

It appears. In her mind's eye, copied onto a sheet of notebook paper in blue ink, because that's what she did in high school before she started memorizing. Out loud, she reads the words written in her mind.

I am not yours, not lost in you,

Not lost, although I long to be

Lost as a candle lit at noon,

Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

Diggle is speaking to her on comms, and then Oliver, but their voices are far away, and she pushes them even farther from her thoughts.

You love me, and I find you still

A spirit beautiful and bright,

Yet I am I, who long to be

Lost as a light is lost in light.

One of them draws in a sharp breath—she can't tell who. She doesn't blame them. It's Sara Teasdale, and it's the kind of beautiful that hurts your eyes.

Her heartbeat is less frantic now, and the cord goes into her tablet easily, but she feels like she should finish the poem for Oliver and Diggle.

Oh plunge me deep in love—put out

My senses, leave me deaf and blind,

Swept by the tempest of your love,

A taper in a rushing wind.

Then her hack into the Merlyn Global mainframe is successful, and they're off and running, trying to prevent the Undertaking. Nobody mentions Felicity's strange interlude, and in the ensuing chaos, she forgets.

The second time it happens, Oliver is unconscious. Or so she thinks. She is standing by his side at the med table, holding his still-gloved hand. Dig has gone to retrieve Barry from the train station, and Felicity, afraid that Oliver is dying before her eyes, begins to recite one of the longest poems she knows. Without realizing it, she traces his features with a slender finger as she speaks.

It begins, as most things do, with a prelude—

an overture, an introduction before the waterfall

of words cascades from our lips. Your mouth

slips and curves past talk of key lime

pie and the entombed ruins of Pompeii.

Your face is a study of light and shadow, a chiaroscuro.

Dig returns with Barry slung over his shoulder. Felicity continues in a barely audible whisper as they monitor Oliver's condition and wait for Barry to wake up.

With your fingertip as brush, you paint my mouth,

delineating shade and light. Make me a Caravaggian chiaroscuro.

The hand that plucked a ripe lime

from its tree now conducts a soft prelude,

opening notes before the splash of a waterfall,

the cascade of earthly fire beneath Pompeii.

When Oliver starts hallucinating, she sees another stanza in her mind and utters it like a prayer, even as he writhes and groans.

You do not take my hand. Instead, you press a slice of lime

into it, a gift of refreshment to cool the fires of Pompeii.

Your austere face, in this cathedral of stars, strikes the prelude

to a service that cannot speak to me. Your mouth

will not say what I want to hear. The chiaroscuro

of your lips casts no waterfall.

Barry asks her what she's doing, and she has no choice but to explain. Felicity tells him it's a trick she taught herself a long time ago. When she is very, very scared, and her mouth won't shut up, and her brain won't shut up, she recites love poems. When Barry asks why love poems, she shrugs. She was fifteen—she still thought Romeo and Juliet was so romantic. Reciting love poems just made sense.

Later, after Oliver returns from defeating Cyrus Gold and saving Roy, after the body-slamming hug she can't stop replaying in her mind, Oliver asks her what her favorite part of the poem is. She responds without a second thought.

Come closer, entwine your fingers in the waterfall

of my hair. Cup my face in your hands like a lime,

casting shadows on my cheeks, a delicate chiaroscuro.

Discover me. Stumble upon me like the ruins of Pompeii

and wipe away the ash that seals my mouth.

This is your moment, your prelude.

As soon as the last word leaves her lips, Felicity realizes she has basically just asked him to kiss her senseless. Her face is an inferno. She has to be blushing from head to toe. Oliver just tilts his head and smiles, the way he does when she is rambling, and then walks away. Not until her head hits the pillow that night does it occur to her that he had been unconscious before, that he shouldn't have known about that poem at all.

The third time it happens, she is barely awake, in that post-surgery fog before the anesthesia completely wears off. Her head feels heavy, and her whole right side is throbbing, but it doesn't really hurt. Not yet. This time it isn't her voice, but his, soft and tender, a tone that he seems to only use with her.

I promise to make you more alive than you've ever been.

. . . For the first time, you'll note gravity's prick

like a thorn in your heel,

and your shoulder blades will hurt from the imperative of wings.

I promise to make you so alive that

the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,

and you'll feel your eyebrows like two wounds forming

and your memories will seem to begin

with the creation of the world.

Felicity's eyes flutter open at the familiar words. It was her favorite. If her soul was a poem, it would be that poem. She'd read it in a college lit class and had been indignant when none of her peers had agreed with her that it was a love poem. She loves the poem so much that she painted it in tremulous calligraphy on her bedroom wall, and she realizes that's the only way Oliver could know her connection to it.

The fourth time it happens, Oliver asks her to repeat herself. He makes it sound casual, like a request to find something he's misplaced, and again she recites without thinking.

Come closer

He does.

entwine your fingers in the waterfall

of my hair.

He does.

Cup my face in your hands like a lime,

casting shadows on my cheeks, a delicate chiaroscuro.

He does, and her voice falters. They are so close that his breath raises goosebumps on her scalp. So quietly that she can hardly hear him, he asks her to finish the stanza. She clears her throat loud enough to startle them both. Oliver asks again, adding a "please." So she finishes.

Discover me.

His forehead touches hers and she sighs.

Stumble upon me like the ruins of Pompeii

and wipe away the ash that seals my mouth.

His thumb runs over her lower lip.

This is your moment, your prelude.

(A/N: I know this is quite different from anything else of mine. I posted this with fear and trembling, and only after a second, more objective opinion from the wonderful Halcyon Impulsion, who gave me the prompt in the first place. I hope you enjoyed it. Poems: "I Am Not Lost" by Sara Teasdale, which appears in its entirety, excerpts from "Kiss" by yours truly, excerpts from "Ordeal" by Nina Cassian, and "Kiss" again by me.)