The walls are crumbling around her and it's a fight with her body just to keep herself breathing. The panic attack closing her lungs up has them ready to give up as the shiny, metal desk in front of her coats with a film of dust and fine concrete. A particularly large piece of the ceiling crashes to the cement floor behind her and she spins around so fast she forgets, for only a moment, to force herself to breathe. And any control she had a moment ago leaves her body as she curls her legs underneath her and takes sharp, labored breath. More of the ceiling falls around her and she closes her eyes, knowing what she had accepted hours earlier when she'd told Oliver she was staying. She was definitely going to die in the stupid club!
2 months: 1 week: 4 days: 7 hours: 32 minutes: 46 seconds later.
Felicity's fingers shake slightly as she taps hastily at the keyboard in front of her computer monitor. She hardly notices the feeling of them shaking anymore, she can't remember the last time they had been completely still. The tapping of the keys reverberates through the silent room that has quickly become the only place she feels remotely at ease.
It's not halfway through the work day when he walks in, all suit and tie and good intentions, and Felicity isn't surprised in the least by his presence. His visits had, at one point, been a biweekly thing as he tried to ease her, convince her, schmooze her however he could. Now, they were more like twice weekly begging sessions.
"I'm really busy today," she tells him shortly, barely glancing away from the bright screen of her computer. There's a frustrated sigh as he sits down gently in a chair across from her.
"Good morning to you too, Felicity." She returns her sigh with one of her own and her fingers pause over the keys she'd just pressed as she looks up at him.
"John," she says gently, "I really am busy." He tilts his head to the side and stays silent, expecting an explanation of just how busy she is, why she is busy. He wants to win this, he wants to catch her faking just to get him to leave. It's regular procedure. Even when she is lying, he never catches her. She's become good at lying somewhere over the past two months.
And sometimes, when she thinks about that, it scares her. So, she tries not to think about it.
"Look, they have some new big wig coming in soon to try and pick the company back up. They wanted my supervisor to make sure everything on our servers was as up-to-date as possible and, of course, he pawned that job off on me because.., well, he's utterly incompetent," she explains, her words rushed and causing her to have to stop to take a breath. "Plus, some dumbasses in legal deleted their entire company inbox by accident and now I have to get all of their e-mails back. How multiple, full grown adults managed to all delete their entire inboxes at once is beyond me, I'm pretty sure it wasn't an accident." Today, she isn't lying.
John sits back in his seat and lets out another great sigh. She's noticed, over the past two months, that a large amount of their conversations have become sighing and silence. She wonders if these things even count as conversations?
"Then I'll be brief," he insists.
"Does that mean you're going to paraphrase the same schtick you come in here with twice a week?" Felicity asks, her eyes returning to the screen and the sound of keys being pressed filling the room again. "Because, if so, you really don't need to. At this point, I'm fairly certain I have the whole conversation memorized." She catches him nod out of her peripheral but she can tell he's not feeling defeated.
"Then let me say something I haven't yet," he begins, sitting forward to lean on his knees and emphasize his point. He's commanding attention and she knows it, denying it to him as she keeps her attention firmly on the lost e-mails being recovered in front of her. After a moment, he continues:
"You once told me that Oliver needed me, that he couldn't do what he does without me."
"Paraphrasing," she quips quietly. He ignores her and presses on.
"You were right, you're very rarely not, but it's not just me he needs, Felicity." Her fingers freeze and her eyes meet his. Her lips purse as the silence settles in the room. John stands and moves toward the door into the hallway, back up to the executive floor where he's supposed to be protecting Oliver Queen. He hesitates a beat at the doorway, looks back to her.
"You know I'm right," he insists. "Just talk to him." He exits into the empty hallway and she can hear his footsteps fading until he turns the corner for the elevator. She lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding and shakes her head. Trying to put the words out of her mind, she rolls her shoulders and leans her chin on her fist. It shakes slightly against her jaw.
1 day: 5 hours: 28 minutes: 52 seconds later.
Felicity's hands shake more than usual as she presses the elevator button for the top floor. She steps out onto the marble floor, her heels clicking against it, and tries to remember the last time she'd been up her. Had she been visiting Walter while she worked for him? Or helping Oliver as he fed her some ridiculous lie? Both seemed so long ago, both seemed to have happened to such a different woman.
She put both memories out of her head as she checked her posture and strode into the office she was looking for, trying to look confident and tough and like her hands didn't shake constantly. The minute she sees Oliver, she has to remind herself to breathe again. Her view is only from behind but she can tell his hair is longer than she remembered and his suit is ridiculously expensive but it somehow feels the same. It's not but she longs for it to be.
John notices her first and is clearly surprised by her presence but puts it aside well as he excuses himself from his boss and opens the door for her, leaving the office as she enters. She'd like to ask him to stay, to make this feel less intimate, but she can't make the words come out and suddenly she's alone, staring at the back of his head.
"Mr. Queen." She's surprised at the strength of her voice, that it doesn't crack or make her sound like a frail, little girl. Oliver spins so fast she fears for a moment that he might fall against his desk, but this is Oliver and, hood or no hood, he has the grace of a gymnast.
"Felicity," he breaths and she can feel her composure cracking at the sound of it. His eyes flash to the glass wall to the side of her and his face hardens, the mask falls into place. Her least favorite of all his different masks.
"How can I help you?" Her eyes fall to her feet for a moment, quickly deciding that this might have been a mistake. But she's already here and her fists are shaking at her side and she can't remember the last time she'd slept through the night so she's going to do this if it kills her.
"I thought we could talk," she says and is thanks God that, of all the weakness she is feeling, it hasn't reached her tongue. Oliver motions to the desk and moves around it to take his seat as she moves forward to take the one across from it, the one meant for business partners and important investors, not the IT girl who used to help him fight crime.
"About what?" She doesn't answer but gives him a hard stare.
"The lost law e-mails," she says coldly and his eyes fall to the desk in front of him. He gets the point, hears it in her tone. This isn't Felicity from the IT department. This is Felicity who more than once risked her life for his causes.
"About Malcolm," she continues after a beat. His eyes flash up to hers, a warning in them, but she presses on, refusing to be pressured out of her questions.
"Are you sorry?" He seems surprised by the question but doesn't miss a beat in his answer.
"No," he whispers, a little more harshly than she thinks he means to. She nods and continues onto her next question.
"Are you scared?" He hesitates longer this time, searching her eyes for a hidden meaning he can't seem to gauge.
"What do you mean?" His eyes flash to the glass walls again, the hallways she knows are empty except for John and a few various security guards and workers who could care less about what IT business Felicity is relaying.
"Are you scared, Oliver?" She asks a bit more harshly this time and he tilts his head backwards slightly, sizing up her anger. "Because I am god damned terrified," she hisses across the desk at him, her hands moving from her lap to the glass surface.
"I can't remember the last time I had a full nights sleep. The other night, a heavy load truck drove by my apartment, shook the whole building, and I cried. I cried, Oliver! At a fucking truck!" She ducks her head for a moment, attempting to compose herself and gain control of her volume. Her hands are rattling against the desk and her eyes fall on them.
"My hands haven't stopped shaking for almost three months," she breathes, watching her fingers tap against the surface of the desk against her will. She looks back up, her eyes meeting his again.
"So," she begins calmly this time, "are you scared?" He reaches both his hands forward, trapping one of hers between the two, calming the shaking by holding it still. He watches her eyes as she watches his hands.
"Constantly," he tells her. For the briefest of moments, while her hand is being held steady by his and his thumb is rubbing small circles against the inside of her wrist, she doesn't feel scared.
"Good," she breathes, looking up into his face again before scrunching up her face and trying to backtrack, "I mean, it's not good that you're scared per say. It's just, you know, good that I'm not the only one. Assuming you're not just saying you're scared to make me feel better.. which I've become pretty good at reading your lies, I think, so I think you're telling the truth but, it has been a while, I suppose I could be losing my touch..," her run on sentence fades to silence as she catches him smirking at her in that way she had come to love. She chuckles and shakes her head, feeling her cheeks heat up slightly.
"I'm babbling," she breaths and he chuckles this time, shaking his own head slightly.
"I've missed it." She grins at him and realizes her hand is still sandwiched between both of his. She looks down at them and opens her mouth to speak again.
"One last question," she begins, "are you lonely?" He tilts his head to the side, confused at where this is going, but nods nonetheless.
"It's funny, I have more people by my side than ever. And yet, I'm lonelier than I've ever been," he tells her and she nods understandingly, looking back up from their hands.
"Do you think we could go back to being lonely together?" She asks with a smile and he chuckles again.
"Absolutely."