So, yes, I'm a horrible author who takes on FAR more projects than I should at any given time, but that's the way the muse wind decides to blow… This new little monster, my first posted Arrow fic, was born from my dartie and I fangirling over how awesome Goth Felicity was and wondering what Oliver would think if he'd seen her like that, what it would have been like if they had met back then… So, of course, I couldn't help myself… Thus along came this undertaking because it was too awesome for me NOT to write and right now it's a much less traumatizing version of Arrow-verse than what they're putting us through on the show. The title of the story comes from "Mixed Tape" by Jack's Mannequin, and each chapter will be titled after a song. This first chapter is "Bones" by MS MR. The premise is basically Felicity didn't handle losing Cooper quite as well as she did on the show and ended up in ARGUS' sights. Amanda decides to not only put her skills to "good" use but to use her as more leverage to control Oliver… And thus our story begins…
Disclaimer: Maybe if I knew how to hack like Felicity I'd find a way to own Arrow, but yeah…that's not going to happen… XD I do not own Arrow or any of the characters or any of the songs used or quoted in this story, they all belong to their respective owners. No profit is being made off of the production of this. I'm just having a little fun playing in the proverbial sandbox… The title of this chapter and the lyrics are from the song Bones by MS MR.
Dartie…what have we done?! XD
(My dartie's response to this was: "Something amazing, dartie, something AMAZING. XD" And I can't disagree. XD)
-ARROW-
Mixed Tape: Side A
Chapter 1: Bones
Dig up her bones but leave the soul alone
Boy with a broken soul
Heart with a gaping hole
Dark twisted fantasy turned to reality
Kissing death and losing my breath
Midnight hours cobble street passages
Forgotten savages, forgotten savages
Dig up her bones but leave the soul alone
Let her find a way to a better place
Broken dreams and silent screams
Empty churches with soulless curses
We found a way to escape the day
Dig up her bones but leave the soul alone
Lost in the pages of self-made cages
Life slips away and the ghosts come to play
These are hard times
These are hard times for dreamers
And love lost believers
Candybar creep show
My highs hit a new low
Marinate in misery
Like a girl of only 17
Man-made madness
And the romance of sadness
A beautiful dance that happened by chance
Happened by chance, happened by chance
This is the biggest mistake of my life, Felicity Smoak inwardly groaned. Well, technically it was the second…or third…ya know, 'cause there were the mistakes that landed her in this position in the first place and all… She buried her face in her hands with an audible groan this time. She supposed that her downward spiral could be attributed to the loss of Cooper, but creating that virus in the first place…yeah, probably best to figure she just generally had poor judgment… Boy, had she screwed up.
"You have a choice, Ms. Smoak." The woman who'd introduced herself as Amanda Waller smirked at the young woman who had, only moments earlier, been handed her diploma from MIT, summa cum laude. "You can either go to federal prison for the rest of your life…or you can come to work for me and have those little infractions forgotten."
A snort escaped Felicity at the memory. Oh yeah…she had a choice… Some frickin' choice.
She dragged a hand through her purple-streaked black hair, well, at least she could say she was maintaining her own individuality and sense of style even as she was now trapped by this possibly government or not-government, but definitely off-the-books, black-ops agency. She gave herself a half-hearted mental fist-pump.
Felicity's head snapped up as the door handle rattled, alerting her that someone was coming in. Just as it opened she leapt to her feet, unsure of who or what—was that ever a cliché—might come through, but preferring to be on her feet to face them…or it.
Waller strode in, as striking as ever, looking down on Felicity with that smirk that pissed the hacker off more than she knew she could be. A movement behind the other woman drew Felicity's attention, and her eyebrows shot up her forehead.
Well, she wasn't sure you could get someone any more different from Waller than the person accompanying her. Not only was he male, and thus the opposite of Waller's gender, but he had a long, shaggy blond mane that reached his shoulders with a nearly full beard, his clothes were a T-shirt and cargo pants and beat-up boots; his all-around scruffiness a stark contrast to Waller's perfectly coifed, pressed, business-suited self. And then there was his build, tall and well-muscled, if the corded lines of his arms were anything to go by, versus Waller's—likely deceptively—slender build. But what really caught Felicity's attention was his eyes, sharp, blue, super intense, he couldn't be more than a couple of years older than her but those eyes…they carried the weight of seeing far too much. Felicity had no qualms admitting to herself that the man was hot, beyond hot, like…light-years beyond hot… God, she hoped that her lacking brain to mouth filter didn't let that thought through…
"Congratulations," Waller's tone was less congratulatory and more smug, "you two are going to be working together." She gestured between Felicity and the man at her side just inside the door.
"Is this really necessary?" the man growled through gritted teeth, those blue eyes she'd just been admiring gave her a once-over, looking unimpressed by what he saw.
"I think it is," Waller told him, smirk possibly even wider.
"She's a civilian, she'll get in the way," he bit out.
"Excuse me," Felicity snapped, offended, "'She's' right here, and I'm smarter than both of you combined, and can hack into pretty much any network." She tilted her chin up defiantly and, as best she could manage given how much taller he was than her, looked down her nose at him. "I don't even know what you do."
His gaze cut to her sharply. "I beat people and put arrows in them."
Her eyebrows relocated to her hairline, not sure whether or not he was being serious.
"And he's quite good at it too," Waller put in; God, Felicity really hated that smirk.
Well, that answered as to whether or not he was serious…but arrows…really?!
"What?" Felicity questioned sarcastically. "They run out of knives at Rambo school?"
She really should be much more scared of the glare he was giving her right then, what with her knowing that he kills people and could probably break her in half with his pinky and all, but she was just too pissed-off at his dismissive attitude. And she was definitely not going to pay any attention to the look that screamed "shut up" that he was giving her.
"Well, it looks like you two are making friends, I'll just leave you to it." Waller sashayed out the door, leaving the other two occupants of the room to watch her go.
Silence hung heavy for interminable moments.
"So," Felicity began, waiting until the man was done glaring at the door that'd just closed behind Waller, "what's your name?"
Piercing blue eyes snapped to her, gaze shuttered. "Archer," he finally said after a drawn out pause.
She raised both of her eyebrows at him, head cocking to the side, conveying her disbelief.
His expression gave nothing away. "What's yours?"
"Hacker," she shot back snarkily.
"Listen…"
Was his voice permanently growly or something? Felicity wondered idly.
"…when we're on an op, do as I say and stay out of the way."
Her mouth dropped open, now truly offended. "Hey," she strode forward and poked his chest with one finger, "you should be nicer to me! And you shouldn't underestimate me! With a few keystrokes I can ruin your life!"
His mouth twisted into a bitter facsimile of a smile. "Most of the world, including everyone that I care about, thinks I'm dead…"
Her hand fell to her side, ire fading at his biting but honest admission.
He turned on heel, starting toward the door. "Not much left to ruin," he tossed over his shoulder.
Felicity continued to stare after Archer long after he'd disappeared through the door. Who the hell was that guy…and what the hell had she gotten herself into?!
-ARROW-
Oliver thought that he might've lost count of the number of times he felt the burning desire to put an arrow in Amanda Waller. He kept thinking that he couldn't hate her more and then she'd go and prove him wrong.
"I have a new partner for you."
Oliver really hated that smirk of hers. "I don't need a new partner," he growled out between his teeth as he followed her down the hallway, shoving thoughts of and guilt over Maseo away.
"Maybe not another person with a similar skill set to yours but that's not what she is. She has a very different skill set. One that I think will be useful. She has a degree in computer science and engineering and is quite the accomplished little hacker."
He narrowed his eyes stopping abruptly. "I don't need another person to have to look out for on ops, and I don't need a babysitter, if she's supposed to—"
Waller stopped just ahead of him, spinning on the spot to face him. "I think you could use the help for certain aspects of your operations. And while she isn't here completely voluntarily she is cooperating with us for her own reasons. And as for you, you know how this goes, you try to escape, try to contact any of your family or friends, or refuse to work with us…we kill her."
Oliver didn't know what he was expecting "her" to be like, but the young woman, who looked maybe only a couple years older than his sister would be now—he pushed aside the sudden spike of pain at the thought of Thea—certainly wasn't even in the realm of his imagination. She was perhaps 5 and a half feet tall, maybe less, dwarfed by his own 6'1" frame, long black hair streaked with purple spilling around her shoulders. Her face, likely already fair, was made even paler by makeup and the fluorescent bulbs overhead, causing her dark lipstick to stand out starkly, and her kohl-rimmed, bright blue eyes to really pop. The silver ring in her nose glistened, and he could make out more rings around her ears through her hair, while the cross-like symbol hanging from the cord around her neck shone against the black of her long-sleeved shirt. Her hands—most of the fingers adorned with silver rings—had smoothed down her tan cargo pants nervously, belying the fearless façade she was trying to maintain.
His first thought was that she radiated an innocence, it was perhaps battered and injured but definitely still there… With all of her dark clothing and heavy makeup she looked like a little girl trying to appear tougher than she was, their world would chew her up and spit her out. And he actually had to fight to hold onto that determination, that disdain, to that safe distance for the first time in a long time. But there was something about her, something about that innocence that was so very tempting, calling to him like a moth to flame. And then the fire leapt in her eyes, the steel that ran beneath the surface asserted itself, and she glared at him fearlessly… Oliver didn't want to be impressed, didn't want to feel even more drawn to her, but he was and he did, and he knew he had to crush those feelings, ignore them, do whatever he could to get rid of them, because they were dangerous. And not exclusively to him.
For all of the arguing he'd done with Waller to try to keep the girl—Hacker as she'd told him to call her—out of the field it'd done nothing. With that obnoxious smirk she'd told him to get his ass and Hacker's out on the op, and shoved the folder in his hands.
So that was why he was now standing in this derelict building across the way, waiting for the girl to hack the security system of their target's building.
"So…" Hacker kept her gaze on the screen but watched him out of the corner of her eye, "how did you end up in this indentured servitude?"
Oliver grit his teeth, staring out the window. "I died."
She turned her gaze on him, waiting, and when nothing else was forthcoming she rolled her eyes. "Well, that's illuminating. Tell me," she tapped away on her laptop, "did you ever speak in sentences of more than five words or were you just born monosyllabic?"
Clutching his bow, he glared at her over his shoulder, but it was getting harder and harder to keep her at arms-length even after such a short time. The sassy, sarcastic tech Goth beside him was just somehow so…endearing. Oliver shook those thoughts off, he had to keep his distance, for both of their sakes; Waller had a gun pointed at the girl's oblivious head and letting her close would be deadly…for them both.
But that fact, for some reason, still didn't stop the following from leaving his mouth. "How did you get into Waller's crosshairs?"
Her own expression shuttered. "I wasn't being careful enough while hacking the wrong system…ARGUS' to be precise." She lifted one shoulder in a shrug, eyes still focused on the screen. "They had other dirt on me as well. It was this or prison." Her computer beeped. "Got it!" She typed away a bit longer before snapping the lid of her laptop shut, shoving it into her backpack and swinging it across her shoulders as she stood. "We're in."
Oliver had to work hard to hold in his grimace at that, taking her elbow and directing her toward the door, hating the necessity that forced him to bring her—a weaponless, untrained asset—into a building that had dozens of guards armed to the teeth. "Stay close to me and don't speak unless I tell you it's all right," he rapped out the orders, ignoring her glare. "We don't want to draw any unnecessary attention."
"Fine, bossy," Hacker huffed, but still allowed him to direct her from the room, down the hall and out of the building.
He guided her toward the building across the street by way of every shadow and object they could conceal themselves behind. She was ungainly, movements choppy—God, he hoped no one was watching from any windows, even in the dark her sharp movements would draw attention—and Oliver kept her behind him as best he could. They reached the back of the building, he scanned the ledge above them for the spot he knew…there! Drawing a very specific arrow, he nocked it and drew back, aiming with the same speed and accuracy the island had burned into his muscle memory. The grappling line gripped in his hand, Oliver tucked his bow into the holder on his back and reached out with his now-free arm for the young woman beside him.
Her kohl-lined eyes were as large as saucers as she looked up at him. "Please tell me you aren't going to do what I think you're going to do?!"
Pressing his lips into a thin line, he glared at her.
"Are you out of your arrowing mind?!" she whisper-screeched.
He didn't budge, just intensified his glare.
Hacker's jaw set and she met his look mulishly, hands clinging to the straps of her bag.
They stood there locked in a stalemate for long moments.
"There's no other way," Oliver finally ground out between gritted teeth.
After another moment of stubbornly compressing her lips, finally she huffed and stepped toward him. "Fine."
As he wrapped his arm around her waist, Oliver tried very hard to ignore the feeling of her pressed against him—he hadn't let himself think of any woman like that since his brief affair with Shado—her own encircling his neck. He noticed how she was trembling and her eyes darted around: she was scared, not of him, but of what they were about to do, and in all honesty he was asking her to put a rather substantial level of trust in him, when they quite obviously didn't have any to split between them.
"I've done this before," he told her gruffly, trying to reassure her somewhat. "Just hold onto me tightly."
"You know," she remarked in a wavering voice, eyeing the ledge above their heads, "I always imagined a super hot guy saying that to me under different circumstances."
He turned his head to look at her, her own whipped to meet his gaze, eyes wide and cheeks pink. "Purely platonic…circumstances…" she quickly added.
It took a few moments before he could break their stare, eyes focusing back on his task. "Hold on," he mumbled once more, and he felt her arms tighten around his neck.
-ARROW-
Felicity wished she could say that she maintained a stoic silence through the experience, but a small "eep" escaped her as they were abruptly lifted off the ground by the ascension device. To muffle any further noises she pressed her face into the joint of his neck and shoulder—and nope, she most definitely wasn't going to think about how his skin felt pressed against her cheek or how good he smelled. She felt herself slide a little, but it couldn't have been more than an inch, those muscles that she could feel under Archer's clothes obviously weren't just for show, the corded strength of his arm around her waist keeping her relatively immobilized against his side. Her own hands had a death-grip on his neck and she refused to look down.
Archer curved his body in a way so that he could hook his feet on the wide ledge of a tall window on the top floor. "Put your feet on the ledge," he breathed into her ear.
Felicity had to bite back the shiver that wanted to cascade down her spine, reminding herself that this was seriously not the time for such inconvenient feelings and that he was only trying to stay as quiet as possible. She stretched her feet out to do as he instructed, managing to get the toes of her black high-top Converses on the surface, with some fumbling and shuffling and Archer's own form drawing her forward she was able to get her soles on it entirely. However, even with her feet now on a flat plane she knew she wouldn't be able to get herself fully onto the ledge with her admittedly lacking musculature.
That became a moot issue when Archer used his own strength to pull them both upright on the ledge, bracing them, her body between his and the window, in the small space.
The computer specialist was acutely aware of the fact that all that separated her from the ten-story sheer drop was a stretch of cement no wider than her feet were long, and Archer's body. It was terrifying, but soon Felicity found that there was absolutely no give in his frame, even as she swayed against him he didn't budge an inch, and something in her somehow immediately relaxed, trusting him not to let her fall.
Archer pulled something out of a pocket and reached around her, looking over her shoulder she could just barely make out his black-gloved hands using shiny implements on what appeared to be the lock. After a few seconds there was a click and he pushed the window open. "Get in," he instructed, and for once she was most happy to oblige his orders.
Felicity let out a sigh of relief when her feet were planted on the nice, solid, non-sheer-drop-off floor of the office. He swung himself into the room, landing on the floor with hardly a sound—damn, ninja skills, she inwardly grumbled—and lowered the window just enough that it appeared closed to a quick scan, but made sure it was just shy of closing—man, Felicity wasn't looking forward to the eventuality of using that as their escape-route.
"Let's go," she quickly said before he could—yes, it was petty, but she'd take her kicks where she could get them.
He held her back from the door, forcing her behind him, much to her annoyance. Archer met her glare with one of his own, mouthing "wait" before inching carefully up to the door, he turned the handle with such care and eased it open slowly, smoothly, keeping them both pressed against the wall as he scanned the hallway outside. Felicity mentally huffed, but reluctantly admitted to herself that he was the better of the two of them to lead since he knew how to sneak around and be all tactical. Finally Archer drew her out of the room with him, closing the door soundlessly behind them before leading the way down the hall to their destination, a room cut-off from the network but still drawing an obscene amount of power.
They reached the door they were looking for, the keypad lock for the door the only security measure in the building still actually working, since she'd shut down the rest of the system—though the building security thought that it was still operational since she'd made sure it would look like it was, however this particular measure was on a system all its own. Felicity bent over by the pad and went to work. Archer stood behind her, his back to hers keeping a look-out while she was preoccupied with hacking the lock. Carefully opening the pad she studied the wiring and circuitry, finally taking a couple of cords from her backpack along with her precious laptop—it was a very nice computer they'd handed to her before Waller sent them out on the op (look at her getting all tactical with her lingo) and she was going to call him K-9 if they let her hang onto him—and connected her computer to the pad.
"How long?" Archer's voice was barely even audible to her.
"Three minutes," she whispered back, fingers flying over the keys on her computer, "tops."
-ARROW-
Tension had Oliver's body strung tighter than his bowstring. They were too exposed. It was a long, straight hallway, stretching out on both sides of them, with no cover and no external windows…no escape. His ears pricked to a soft sound.
Footsteps.
Getting closer.
"Hacker…" he growled out the warning under his breath, glancing back at her as he drew an arrow.
Her own eyes had flicked in the direction of the approaching noise, worry visible, though her fingers never paused. "Patience is a virtue…" she told him in a soft, sing-song voice.
Nocking the arrow and drawing it back, he grit his teeth. "Not right now it isn't."
A choked sound escaped her before she stifled it and then her breath caught at a soft beep. "We're in."
Oliver kept the arrow aimed in the direction of the approaching enemy, behind him Hacker closed her laptop and pulled the cord from the pad, slapping it closed, before pushing the door open. He backed into the room behind her and carefully closed the door, gripping her arm, not letting her move for a few moments while he listened.
The footsteps grew closer and closer…and passed the door without pausing. Oliver released a relieved breath, finally letting go of Hacker's arm and replacing the arrow in his quiver.
She made a show of glaring at him and rubbing her arm—unnecessarily, he knew he hadn't gripped it hard enough to hurt—before heading over to a terminal on a desk in the middle of the room full of…computer stuff… Yeah, Oliver had no illusions about the limits on his technological know-how, and there certainly had been very little use for it on the island so he was far behind current technology.
Hacker immediately went to work, typing away before pulling from her bag what she'd informed him, in an exceedingly patronizing voice, was an external hard drive and plugging it in. "This should only take a couple of minutes," she murmured, anticipating his question.
Still gripping his bow, he kept his gaze on the door. This room wasn't as exposed as the hall with the towering shelves to hide behind, but the walls were impervious to his explosive arrows, leaving them no other way out, if guards got in here it'd be shooting fish in a barrel.
"Ok," Hacker finally said, "that's all saved, now to erase all evidence we were ever here…"
Oliver was growing antsier with every second that passed with them still in this building.
"Done!" She pumped a fist in the air—he really shouldn't find that as adorable as he did.
Barely giving her enough time to shove the cords, hard drive and laptop into her backpack, Oliver grabbed her arm and pulled her over to the door, cracking it the barest amount.
After several moments of listening closely for any noise, he fully opened the door as slowly and quietly as possible. With the same caution he'd used the entire night, Oliver led Hacker through the door and out into the hall. With quiet footsteps—hers a little less so, but then that wasn't exactly her fault, he admitted to himself, since she'd never learned how to move as quietly as Oliver had been forced to—they moved as quickly as possible back to the room with their escape route.
There was the loud clicking of a gun cocking from behind them and shouts in Mandarin.
Oliver yanked Hacker to the ground with him and, as he spun to face the threat, dragged her behind him, the bullets from the guards' weapons whizzing by above their heads. Oliver could already see them adjusting their aim, but the island had taught him to be faster. The first arrow was embedded in the nearest guard before their next round of gunfire had gotten even half a foot closer to Oliver and Hacker, with two more following in rapid succession dropping two others. This made the other guards, further away down the hall, more cautious and they ducked into rooms. The time it took them to open the doors and get in, bought the pair enough time for Hacker to open the nearest door with outside access and for them to duck inside. They locked the door before running over to the windows; this wasn't the same room as earlier, Oliver opened the window and stuck his head outside to glance in the direction of where his rig should be. It was one window over. He pulled his head back in and turned to Hacker who was white knuckling the straps of her backpack. "You're going to hate this."
Her eyebrows shot up. "More than how we got in?"
"We're going to have to climb from this window to the one next door."
Oliver was fairly certain she paled more than under the fluorescents before and her eyes flew wider. "Are you—" The sound of pounding on the door followed by bullets being shot at it cut her off and had her surging toward Oliver. "Let's go!"
He boosted her through the window first, making sure she was steady enough before following her out. They shuffled as quickly as was safely possible along the ledges, Oliver trying to keep an arm across her back to help steady her. When they came to the gap between the window they were on and the one next door, she froze.
"Hacker, don't look down!"
"Too late!"
He cursed fluently.
Just then Oliver could hear the guards bursting through the door in the other room. No time. He grabbed her by the waist and lifted her, her own arms wrapping around his neck instinctively. "Hold on tight." He lunged the remaining distance, grabbing the grappling line as he did so, his feet barely had time to touch the other ledge before he pushed them off.
The terrified scream that escaped Hacker was muffled in his shoulder and blown away in the rush of air as they rapidly descended. The moment their feet touched the road, Oliver was already running, dragging Hacker with him, all the while shielding her as best he could from the bullets and ricochets.
"Keep going," he shouted in her ear once she'd found her feet and didn't need him practically carrying her.
She was doing a fair job of keeping up, but he could tell she was flagging. They needed an out now.
As if conjured by his thoughts, a dark SUV screeched to a halt in front of them then the door flung open and an agent he recognized shouted, "Get in!"
The pair dove into the vehicle, slamming the door shut behind them while they slumped into their seats, panting, as the driver took off, tires squealing.
"So," Hacker began conversationally between heaving breaths, "is it…always…like this?"
Oliver just about had his breathing back under control. "Pretty much."
"Fantastic."
-ARROW-
So there it is, my friends! The first chapter of this new monster I've created. XD I'm both excited and terrified to see where it goes! :-D I have SO MUCH planned for our couple and the road they take together. ;-) Thank you for reading and please let me know what you think! :-D