Long after everyone else had faded away from Oliver's grave, Felicity lingered. It was a cold, grey day and a fine silver mist hovered in suspended animation all around her. Felicity herself felt caught somewhere between grief and acceptance; unwilling or unable to allow herself to feel the full breadth of the loss pressing in on her from all sides. Numb.
Her nose was dripping but the packet of tissues Dig had pressed into her hand before heading back to the car with Lyla crinkled empty in her pocket so she let it run. What was a little snot when her ears were still ringing with the last words Oliver would ever say to her, I love you; I love you; I love you, as though he were standing next to her whispering them at that very moment.
So he had loved her then. She had never been sure. Even after the kiss in the hospital she hadn't been sure. She had wondered a million times, as she stumbled into her dark apartment late at night, not pausing to change into her pajamas before collapsing onto her bed, whether there could ever be any kind of future for the two of them. A thousand fantasies had played out across the blank canvas of her ceiling in the moments before sleep stole her away. Most of the time it was just simple things: tracing the line of his jaw as he slept next to her, waking up to slanting sunlight and the sounds of someone else in her shower. Holding his hand. She let out a strangled laugh at her own naïveté. The sound tumbled across the damp grass before dissipating into the mist. God, she must have imagined that a thousand times. She somehow knew exactly how his hand would feel in hers: dry, warm, calloused. Alive. She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes as a dry sob escape her lips. She tried to swallow the raw ache in her throat but it stubbornly bobbed back up again like a fishing float. Well, she was sure of it now. Too bad he was dead.
The cold damp brushed its lips against the exposed part of her neck, sending shivers down her spine. She pulled the lapels of her black trench coat tighter around her body and hunched her shoulders against the wind. She knew she should leave. She wasn't accomplishing anything here except feeding the black hole gnawing away at her insides but she couldn't seem to peel her eyes away from the headstone at her feet. Oliver Jonas Queen. 1985-2007. It sat atop a grave as empty as it had always been. When Nyssa had come to inform them of Oliver's fate she hadn't deigned to bring them the body. Felicity couldn't decide whether she was furious or grateful for that fact. He had been so warm as he had pressed that kiss to her forehead, just before turning to leave forever. Every night since then she had awoke in a cold sweat, the feel of his lips a burning a brand onto her skin that she didn't think she'd ever be rid of. She didn't think she could handle him lying cold and lifeless on the med table in the foundry. Just like Sara, she thought bitterly. Another person she had allowed to care for only to have fate steal them away.
Felicity was no stranger to loss. First her father, then Cooper, now this. She felt as though all the layers of protection she had built up around herself over the years had been slowly yet surely been scrapped away leaving her raw and exposed. Her vision blurred as a hot tear slid down her cheek. She pulled her fogged up glasses from her nose and wiped the lenses on her jacket before sliding them back on. They had made no death announcement for Oliver; held no public funeral. Thea didn't even know he was dead yet. Roy had promised to tell her, soon, he had said, just not yet.
They had all just showed up here, a few days after Nyssa's announcement, almost as if by accident. In the rational part of Felicity's brain she knew they must have planned it but for the life of her she couldn't remember doing so. Everything in the last 72 hours had been a blur. Felicity felt a surge of anger wash over her. Oliver Queen had given up his life in an act of ultimate sacrifice. His life for Thea's; his future for Starling's. She couldn't let his sacrifice—their sacrifice—she had also lost a future, life she could never get back, to Malcolm Merlyn's scheming and the League's self-righteous sense of justice, be for nothing. If the island had been Oliver's crucible, his death would be hers. An echo of the words Oliver had used to preface his "I love you" floated across her mind. I do know two things…
Well Felicity also knew two things and by the time she finally turned away from the grave some time later, shoulders back, grey eyes turned from water to steel, her resolve in both of them was ironclad. One: she had loved Oliver Queen with every fiber of her being, every fake blonde hair on her head. Two: this was not over. Not by a long shot.