Felicity stumbled through the door of the apartment, barely managing to see straight long enough to input the security code. She was dizzy, unsteady on her feet, and all around her the walls seemed to expand and contract, like the building was breathing.
Something's wrong, she thought. She'd left work early because she'd been feeling queasy, but this was clearly something more than simple illness.
Mustering up her strength, she staggered over to the kitchen sink and poured the contents of the travel cup in her hand into it. When they had drained away, there were little green and purple flecks left on the bottom of the sink, the remnants of the outer casing of a Vertigo pill, the rest of it having apparently dissolved in her coffee. Now that she thought about it, as much as she could think in her drug addled state, she remembered that there'd been a suspicious looking kid at the coffee shop that day, all twitchy and shifty eyed. He must have been a dealer, trying to drum up business by dosing unattended drinks with his product, hoping to get their unsuspecting owners hooked on it. It was a strategy remarkably similar to the one employed by the Count, years back, involving tainted flu vaccines.
A wave of nausea overtook Felicity, and she gripped the edge of the counter to keep herself upright. When it passed, she pushed herself away from the counter and out of the kitchen, stumbling down the hall toward her bedroom, leaning on the wall for support. Her vision started going black around the edges, and she did her best to pick up her pace. She'd never had a previous encounter with Vertigo herself, but Oliver had once described to her what it was like- first came the dizziness and the distorted vision, then the nausea, then she would pass out, and after that would come the hallucinations. Felicity wanted to be in her bedroom when those last two things happened. She didn't want William to come home from school and find her unconscious on the floor. She didn't want to scare him like that.
Finally managing to make it to her bedroom, Felicity tripped through the open door and shut it behind her. She leaned back against the wall for a moment to regain her breath and her equilibrium, then crossed the room to her bed. She was just barely able to reach it, and just as she collapsed onto it, everything went black.
A loud banging sound jerked her awake. She sat up and looked through the bars of what was clearly a cell door to see a man in a prison guard's uniform standing on the other side, baton in hand.
"Morning 4587," he said in a mocking tone, a snide smirk sliding across his face. "It's a beautiful day." Realizing that his gaze wasn't turned in her direction, Felicity looked across the cell and gasped.
"Oliver," she breathed. The next thing she knew she was throwing herself down from the bed on which she sat and striding across the room toward him. Her footsteps on the hard concrete floor sounded far away and distorted, as if they were being heard from underwater, and when she tried to touch Oliver, her hands passed right through him like he wasn't there.
I'm dead, Felicity thought. I'm dead or dreaming. Dimly, she remembered how she'd gotten here and realized that it was the latter.
With a sigh, she sat back down on the bed she'd woken up on, leaned back against the wall behind her, and took in the first view of her husband she'd had in five months. Even if it was only in a dream, or a hallucination, or whatever it was, she wasn't going to waste it. First, she noticed that he'd grown a beard, then saw that his hair had been shorn close to his skull, reminding her of how much she missed running her fingers through it. Then she saw the slump in his posture that she couldn't recall being there before, and the cuts and bruises on his face, like he'd taken a beating recently. Maybe more than one. But one thing hadn't changed- Oliver's drab prison greys didn't diminish the brilliance of his blue eyes or dampen the fire that burned within their depths. That give Felicity hope- if that hadn't changed, then there was still a chance that they could get back everything they'd lost.
Her hope would prove to be short-lived, however. As she accompanied Oliver throughout his day, following behind him invisible and intangible, like a ghost, she saw far too many things that made her worry about his mental state. He walked with his head down, not making eye contact, shouldering the taunts and verbal abuse slung at him by the prison guards without so much as a word of protest. When the other inmates in the prison attacked him, clearly intent on making his life hell for being the one to put them in that prison in the first place, he didn't raise a hand to defend himself- which explained the recent injuries Felicity had noticed earlier- and the one inmate who tried to befriend him, who'd clearly been doing so for months, he chased away with dark looks and sullen silences. It was all very troubling, and when Oliver got a visit from Dig Felicity nearly cried with relief to see him and to know that Oliver still had at least one person left to turn to. But her relief proved to be as short-lived as her hope- Dig looked as worried as she felt, even if this was all in a dream and none of it real. By the time Oliver returned to his cell at the end of the day, Felicity was ready to give in to despair. She sat down on the unoccupied bed that she'd woken up in at the start of all of this and watched over him as he drifted off to what would no doubt be extremely uneasy and troubled sleep, wishing she could really be with him right now, really be there for him…
Felicity returned to reality as suddenly as she'd entered her dream state, jerking awake to find William standing over her, his features folded into a worried expression that made her have to close her eyes and take a moment to compose herself, because it reminded her far more of his father than she wanted to be at that precise moment.
"Felicity?" she heard him ask. "Are you okay?"
"Where am I?" Felicity asked instead of answering him, because, still in a haze, she wasn't quite sure.
"At home," William replied, worry in his voice. "Lying in your bed. I came home from school and found you like that. You were muttering to yourself. I swear I heard you say Dad's name." That had Felicity opening her eyes and sitting up, swinging her legs off the side of the bed to face William. She'd tried so hard to keep from scaring him, and it had happened anyway.
"What happened?" William asked, his blue eyes- his father's eyes- locking with hers.
"I got dosed with Vertigo somehow," Felicity said, not seeing any point in hiding the truth from him. "Someone at work must have slipped it into my coffee while I had my back turned."
"What?" William asked, the worry in his voice intensifying into something closer to terror.
"Hey, it's alright," Felicity soothed. "I'm fine now. Just...promise me that when we see your dad again, you won't tell him about this. I don't want him to worry." She made sure to say "when" and not "if"- believing that they would see Oliver again was the only way she could get through this.
"But… I worry," William said, halting Felicity's off track train of thought. She saw his mouth form the word "Mom", but he didn't say it out loud. Felicity had noticed that he'd been doing that a lot lately, almost as if he was testing out how it might feel to call her that, and didn't comment on it. Best not to force it.
"I know," she said instead, pulling him into a tight hug. "But I'm fine now, okay? I promise, everything's fine."