AN: After 3x02 aired, I meant to sit down and finish my caper starring Team Arrow but coughed this out instead? I don't get it either, honestly, but it's just sitting on my hard drive so... enjoy?
Unbeta'd- let me know if you spot a mistake, I'll clean it up.
Partners
"Get up."
"Hmm?" He nuzzles further into her neck, twitching his nose as her long hair dances across his face. Felicity.
"Oliver."
A small smile against the warmth of her skin. She is always trying to tell him what to do.
"Hey. Sleep more,"he mumbles, he thinks. He tries to, at least. He blows out a long breath through his nose, his body sinking back into unconsciousness. Distantly, he feels a shove against his chest. If he could move he would chuckle at her persistence, but he is just so comfortable. And what do they need to get up for anyway? They should just lie here for a little while long-
Searing pain.
A burning lick of fire through his shoulder forces a cry from his lungs, his whole body tearing back into consciousness with the force of a freight train.
"Oliver!" Felicity screams and chokes through thick, oily smoke. A hot sheet of of metal pins his right shoulder; his ears are ringing; he can't see her- he is lying right on her and he can't see her. She grabs his face, her hands slick and warm with blood.
"Get Up! Move!" He can hear her screaming at him, sort of, through the ringing.
His vision clears and the first thing he can make out is her eyes, wide and willing him back to her.
"MOVE, OLIVER!"
He jerks his head around, brow furrowed in confusion. To his left is the wreckage of the private plane: twisted metal, the smell of fuel, and so much smoke. Move, she had said. Right. Move, they should move away from the smoke and the fuel. Why aren't they moving? No- why can't he move?
Hot metal.
With a pained grunt he pushes up on his good arm, manages to tip the overheated metal off of him, off of them, just enough. Felicity- strong brave Felicity- takes the opening, managing to launch herself out from under him, snag his arm and half-drag him with her before the metal can fall back onto him. He blinks. Once. Again. Was that part of the door?
His legs are working, or at least, he finds them eventually, but even in his dazed state he knows his arm is worthless. Felicity seems to have all of her limbs, though, so he focuses on her pulling him. He is on his feet now, running through wreckage, tripping over uprooted clods of frozen earth, until they are limping, stumbling through shin-high snow.
They are in a field.
They had crashed in a cornfield, the stubble of the autumn's harvest pushing through the snow in neat rows like backbones half-buried. Oliver blinks them away, turning his attention back to his- his partner. She is dragging him behind her as she beelines for the relative cover of the bare trees surrounding the field. A flash catches the corner of his eye. Deadly acronyms flit and chase each other through his mind, why is it so familiar? Shit, AGM. He blinks, turns, stumbles as the shock wave hits him. His mother's plane is engulfed in flames, roiling plumes of black smoke pouring off the wreckage. The contrast with the almost blindingly white field behind has him turning away again.
"Oliver!" she pants. He wonders how many times she has called to him before he noticed. He lets her pull him on again. His head is pounding. There is a copse of pines maybe 200 yards off down the tree line and he knows she is taking him there- clever Felicity- she'd take him there first.
"Not that clever, it's the only real cover in this godforsaken- careful!" she grunts, tripping over buried obstacles in the snow, "-field."
Apparently he's thinking out loud now, but he is not going to worry about that because his teeth are chattering- not from cold, it really isn't that cold. Shouldn't it be colder? -but from shock. He is going into shock. Fuck, he is 100% already in shock.
"Almost there. Almost there, and then you can sit down."
He had stopped walking, he realized. She is genuinely pulling on him to try to move him.
"Stay with me, we're going to keep moving. Let's put one foot in front of the other. Keep. Moving."
He wants to laugh, because he knows she must be hurt too, and probably fighting off shock of her own, and if he squints he can see tear tracks through the blood freezing onto her cheeks- but she just sounds so exasperated with him. He wants to laugh.
"You're good, Felicity, you're so good," he whispers.
"No compliments until we get to the trees," she says. "How's your arm?"
"Can't feel it," he mumbles, maybe. Maybe he thought it.
"Well, at least you're not in pain. COME ON," she is screaming again, because he's basically falling along behind her. Choking on sobs, she keeps talking to him because she doesn't know what else to do. "You are so freaking heavy. What is the point of that much muscle if you're not going to use it!?"
He can't see again. Nope, his eyes are closed. He opens them, squints, picks out which tree he is going to vomit under. When was the last time he was this shock-y? Jesus, it must have been that time with the dogs, and that awful smelling man- what was his name?
Wrenching his hand from Felicity's panicked grasp, he throws himself at the closest trunk for support and empties his stomach to the soundtrack of her sympathetic gagging. When even the dry heaving stops, he grabs a handful of snow, shoves it in his mouth and stands bent at the waist with the top of his bare head pressing into the rough bark. The tree is just holding him up, and he is just resting his eyes, he is going to be fine. A moan is all he can muster as he feels her grab the back of his jacket.
"No way- no resting, no sleeping." She hauls on the leather, yanks him back up to standing. The jacket pulls on the sides of his shoulder wound, ripping a strangled cry from his chest. But feeling anything at this point is like an instant buzz, so he latches on to the sensation, focusing on it as he stumbles on behind her once more.
She walks them deep into the stand of conifers before stopping and looking up toward a steel gray sky.
"Nothing. I don't hear or see anything up there." She looks like she's not sure if that's a good thing.
Fat snowflakes start to fall, catching on her eyelashes, and if you ignore the gore staining her cheeks it's sort of beautiful. Her brow furrows and she looks right at him, where he's slumped, pale-faced and dazed against a tree.
"Cough, Oliver," she says.
Cough? Right. Blood pressure, bring the blood pressure up. Stop standing around like a jackass, making romantic observations about your partner. He rubs his sooty face, breathes a little, remembers his training. You're in shock, kid, what are you going to do?
"Over here." He disappears under the low hanging boughs of a huge pine tree. The wound on his shoulder protests wildly when he lies down and props his feet up on the tree's trunk, but he doesn't intend to stay down for long. Felicity ducks in, taking her coat off and draping it over him. The branches block the wind sweeping off the field, but the temperature is dropping. She rubs her arms over her knitted sweater and sits beside him.
"What do you need," she asks.
"This. Five minutes or so. Then we should move." He can't speak without long pulls of air through his nose every few words. Right. Getting the breathing under control. He blinks a few times- it's more effective now- and looks up at her with his brows drawn together. "Your face. You've got blood- are you injured?"
"Cuts, probably very deep bruising, some cracked ribs." His gaze follows the familiar pattern of assessing herself, moving from head to foot. "Stupidly painful, but not disabling." Her own brow furrows as she checks out her legs. "Also, I seem to be missing my left shoe, which would explain why my foot's numb." Her hand hovers over his chest, hesitates before lying over her coat, over his heart. "You uh, you took the brunt of it for me." Her finger taps the echo of his slowing heartbeat. "You didn't have to do that."
"I don't remember making a choice," He shrugs, winces, successfully avoids her eyes and everything they might be trying to tell him.
Blowing disheveled hair out of her face, she uses her free hand to peek through the boughs of their tree.
"Well, snow's falling harder, thank god. It should cover our tracks enough to give us some time," She swings her gaze back to him. "What about you? Shoulder, obviously. Shock. Anything else?"
"Cuts, bruises, burns," the more his body recovers, the harder his head pounds. "Concussion, definitely. We're both extremely lucky we didn't break our legs." She nods, coming up on her knees.
"Here," she says, "Lean up, let me take a look at your back."
He drops his feet from the trunk, but keeps his legs loosely draped in front of him. Felicity scrabbles through the deep bed of pine needles until she is behind him, poking through the ripped fabric of his coat.
"Wow, that door did a number on you. Deep cut," he hisses as she proves it, "Sorry! Gonna need sutures," she makes a face, "lots of sutures. But, I'm betting your shock is due in large part to this truly nasty burn. Oliver this is… not good."
Oliver nods as she closes the jacket back up as best she can. There is nothing they can do for him here, their only option is to get him well enough to move again, to find help. He feels her hands trembling hard as she smooths the tan leather over his good shoulder.
"Here, you can have your coat back," he offers.
"No," she sniffs, her voice thick. Is she crying? "Keep it just a little longer, it's the least I can do, for…" she gestures behind them, the wind carrying the hiss of fuel fire even as far as their make-shift shelter.
We don't keep score, he wants to say. But he doesn't, because she knows. She sits leaning up against his side, sharing heat and strength. He can't stop saving her anymore than she can stop saving him- there are no favors between partners.
Partners.
His eyes are closed again but not in delirium. He rolls the word around in his mind. The one label they can both agree on, can both wear without fear: partners. Felicity.
"So," she speaks into the silence. They both watch the puff of her breath dissipate into the protective boughs. "What the HELL just happened to us?"
He can't stop the hint of a smile that ghosts across his face. Felicity Smoak: on the case. But he continues to concentrate on pulling air slowly into and out of his lungs, because he can not remember.
Unfortunately, he knows this pain gripping his skull, he has been here before. He does not bother pushing himself to try to remember the crash. Wouldn't help the shock, anyway. Instead, he concentrates on what he can see of her face, because he knows it will make him feel better. It always does.
"There was an explosion, and we went down." Her throat moves as she swallows back the smoke, the bitter roaring wind, Oliver grabbing her hard in terror, forcing her torso down to her lap. "I didn't see the crew in the wreckage, not that I could see anything from under you and that stupid door. And then I was so focused on getting us out and safe before the fire took the whole plane. And then..." She meets his eyes, presses her lips together to steady herself.
He nods. If the crash hadn't done them in, the air strike certainly would have.
"We almost died. Sara just died, and we almost just died." Shaking hands rub at her cheeks, dried blood flaking off into her palms. The still-weeping cut above her ear has matted her hair a rusty brown by this point, and he notices for the first time that her glasses are missing.
"Hey," he whispers with no intention of continuing, because he has no idea what to say. There's no time to mourn, there's never time to mourn. They have to move soon, it's always time to move.
His good hand reaches out of its own accord to move her hair back over her shoulder, he swears, because this is Felicity, his partner, and he doesn't touch her anymore. Not since he went cold-turkey.
She tenses for just a moment at his hand settles on that spot- his spot- on the nape of her neck. Months with no contact: not in comfort, not in companionship, certainly not in lust, all sit calcified in her shoulders. He feels every moment they've pushed each other away in that flinch. Friends with no benefits, barely friends at all now, just partners. Everything, but nothing.
But she eventually sighs and leans into his touch, and fuck, if he's going to fall off the wagon, it is going to be right now, huddled under a tree with his head pounding and coagulated blood coating her hair, the memory of their only kiss, the last time they really touched, hanging heavy between them. Gusting wind shakes the branches surrounding them, as that part of him he tries to pretend does not exist anymore scrambles to scatter any remaining resolve.
He is still disoriented, he lies a little, he would lie to anyone and everyone and especially himself about this. He is disoriented, that is why he was leaning in to her, eyes raking her profile begging for her to turn, to notice him, to love him, to deny him, to touch him, to condemn him. Because he is selfish. Because he knows she already does all of those things.
Because he wants anything but partners.
Her head does turn, and she is right there, her hot breath mixing with his own. Her tongue darts out to wet her chapped lips, and he couldn't tear his gaze from her mouth if he wanted to. She is trembling, probably from falling from the sky and hiding, injured, in a frozen forest, but he tells himself she is affected by him too. He's sick, he thinks, he hit his head very hard. He watches her mouth, watches her lips press together.
"Sara died," she says.
He reels back, her words hitting him hard.
"Sara died," she continues stronger, "She died, our Sara's in the ground and no one knows. We still don't know who killed her. It's been months, Oliver."
His jaw works as he drops his hand from her neck. He is recovering rapidly now, his body returning to normal function, even his ears have stopped ringing- but he wants to ignore it. He wants that rapidly retreating pleasant fog of Felicity to return, to numb the throbbing pain in his head, his shoulder.
"I won't die out here." She says. Her eyes are flint, and he sees himself reflected in their hardness. It has been a while since he's had such a depressing thought. "We have to move. Get up."