DISCLAIMER: I don't own Arrow.
He had this bizarre tendency to step away. Mostly because she had the tendency to step too close.
It was like she completely lacked any sort of self-preservation instincts. He wasn't saying he had a big glowing sign saying 'BEWARE, HE BITES' in neon letters stuck on his forehead, but she knew things. Lots and lots of things – possibly too many of those. Certainly more than what he usually allowed. Then again, usual was not so much at the bottom of the list of adjectives he'd describe her with as didn't even count among them.
He had long ago found she wasn't quite wired the same way as the rest of them. (Then again, the island had made sure that he wasn't either anymore, like she herself had cracked up his skull and switched up a few things, the way she did with her computers in the lair.) And, well, he knew things too. (Before the island, he'd never have given a behavior like hers a second thought, but he had not met her before the island, and now he could actually recognize fascinating wonders for what they were.)
So when his muscles all conspired against him and forced his hand to her shoulder, her cheek, her arm, her hands, her waist and her back, it only took him a few seconds to regain control.
He let his arm drop away, let her fingers grasp thinly at his evading hand, let the hugs fade away tensely, and then he walked right past her and got some distance going between the two of them. Diggle shook his head a lot, mostly when he thought no one was looking, but Oliver was always looking. And Diggle seemed to always be in possession of some sort of superior knowledge that Oliver pretended not to be aware of. Mostly because it had him terrified.
He hated being terrified, always had, even before the island. He could get his adrenaline pumping a myriad of other ways, so why go the one guaranteed to co-produce unnecessary aggressiveness too?
He wasn't usually aggressive with her. Mostly because, looking at her, all he could see was all the very many ways he could so very easily break her. (Him and everyone else.) It wasn't exactly his main goal to get one more.
Except she had this funny tendency to get him too worked up to properly follow that logic. (Even though it wasn't funny at all.) She was so very good at making him feel things so stupidly exaggeratedly, he couldn't seem to think straight, and sometimes he had to pause and stun himself with a recount of what she had managed to coerce him into doing that day.
But she was like that. Lovely Felicity, far too emotional and cheerful for the things he'd gotten her caught up in. Far too emotional, far too cheerful, sometimes far too innocent, for him.
And that thought had no business being in existence. Partly because he had no right to find an explanation for something that didn't need one – didn't exist at all, he was her friend, her partner, she was his, and that was it, there was nothing of hers for him – and partly because nothing was ever going to happen. Not if he still had anything to do with it, with his choices. (That made him a tiny bit nervous, because he was pretty sure she was the one in control of those now.)
Sometimes he tested his – their – limits. He lingered too long, he stared too meaningfully, he forgot himself – but it didn't take long for him to get cold feet, at the eleventh hour no less. Then again, if he liked honesty (he avoided it like the plague, which was really turning out great for him), he'd have admitted to himself that it wasn't a test, not really. It was an excuse he heavily capitalized on for his own selfish enjoyment.
He regretted nothing. And he wouldn't ever, not until things changed.
Then things changed.
(The love was hers, the war was his, neither was fair, and the two of them were fighting both.)
It started when she frantically kissed him – pecked him on the lips, no more than a fraction of a second – and told him good luck. Because nobody liked the smell, the sound or the sight of this mission.
She turned away to her computers almost instantly. Diggle had to unfreeze him by reminding him he was supposed to be in a hurry. He left with the sight of her neck, completely red under her ponytail, imprinted on his mind.
Nobody ever spoke of it. Oliver started breaking staffs in half more frequently, and his attention had a weird tendency to falter when she spoke in his ear during missions.
From then on, a whole lot of groaning seemed to accompany Diggle's head-shaking.
Oliver knew what he wanted. It would make things easier on him. They could either– do something, or they could do nothing. Either way, the matter would be resolved. They just had to admit there was a matter in the first place.
But acknowledging it was a sure-fire way for change and for things to happen, which was a sure-fire way to guarantee the very strained balance they were perching on would be disturbed. Oliver had this tendency to be pessimistic, so he knew that anything that might come of it was to something to be afraid of.
So he let it be. Like this was something he could just pretend never happened.
Secretly, selfishly, he didn't want to. Because he had a good thing with Felicity, and he'd always been stubborn, so he refused to mess with it on the off-change things might get better. Because there was also the not-so-off-chance that they'd change to force some distance between the two of them. And then he'd have to give up the good thing.
He could give it up the same way he could give up breathing. It's just, technically, he could. He had the choice. He had control over his muscles. He would just probably not be agreeable when it came to facing the outcome. He'd be kind of dead, for one thing.
So he let Diggle's complaints get louder, and he let his hand go to her shoulder as always. The only thing he was more careful about was how far away from her he was before he left for a mission. (He made sure he was always within kissing distance, in case she tried a repeat performance.)
Dig noticed. It seemed to really frustrate him. He started gritting his teeth and everything.
Oliver began questioning why he didn't just tell them to do something already. The he began wondering if Diggle wasn't as wary of change as he was.
The others caught up then. Every time they were caught in a staring contest, or getting some hand-on-shoulder action, Thea would raise her eyebrows and smirk, Roy would roll his eyes, Sara, when she was around, would sigh, slightly exasperatedly, slightly mournfully (he'd be reminded of what she'd told him when they'd broken up, and would realize he really couldn't think of someone lighter than Felicity, which made him really happy, for some reason) and Laurel… Laurel would sort of stare at him a bit too long and a bit too silently.
Laurel was a package of too-much-history. He couldn't kiss her without thinking of how he'd kissed her sister twice shortly before both her 'deaths'. He couldn't hug her without feeling the guilt gnawing at his stomach over every time he'd lied, cheated or used her, over everything wrong he'd done because he'd been a stupid kid back then.
He might have loved her once (he wasn't completely sure he'd known what love was back then), but he knew he didn't love her now, because he tended to build this beautiful crystal ball around love (so that he couldn't see inside clearly, but could see perfectly at the same time) but hers had shattered. It hadn't been able to take so much ugliness, so much wrongness.
And Laurel could be really dramatic. Felicity was the exact opposite – and Oliver couldn't pile more drama on his life anymore.
Laurel was a chapter, but she was an old, finished one – he'd tried revisiting and it hadn't really worked out all that well – and it was going to stay that way.
And Felicity… Well, Felicity was the kind of girl who found it in her to give him a hug because the mission had gone poorly, because he'd disappeared until two a.m. and she was still waiting for him, but it was actually because he really, really needed one. Lately, she just kept saying he could use more hugs – and, well, so long as they came from her, he whole-heartedly agreed.
Plus, he knew, oh so well, what love was now.
It was in the way two of every five words coming out of her mouth were inappropriate. It was in the way she smiled at him, and in the way she had the gift to make any situation awkward. It was in her.
It was in him too. And he couldn't let it go, but he couldn't let it be his either.
He should have seen it coming, because they could only pretend for so long.
Her hugs were warm, and, eventually, even familiar. He found she liked to be held more than she liked holding him, liked to be hugged back more fiercely than she ever hugged him herself. She found out he liked to be kissed on the cheek (but not as much as he had liked being kissed straight on the lips). They shamelessly abused all this very powerful knowledge.
She gave him so much comfort, just by curling her tiny little frame into his arms, by leaving lip marks on his stubble, because there was someone out there who needed him in their life so wholly that returning from stopping a robbery unharmed merited a flash of blond hair all around him. Merited hugs and kisses on his cheek.
He didn't understand the sudden increase in affectionate gestures, not at first. (Though he did understand the affection itself perfectly.) In the end, he ended up figuring it out by comparison only. He still remembered what he'd done when he wanted something particularly badly before the island. He wondered what it was that Felicity wanted so badly that she was emulating that guy, and then he wondered no more, because he figured it out when her chin wobbled again and her eyes got watery when he talked about demons, and when she hugged him again and when he understood she was just way too good, too good for anyone, let alone him.
She was tired. They'd been dancing for a long time. She wanted a change, no matter what kind. So she was provoking it herself. Oliver could understand that.
He just wished that he wasn't the one required to make the following move.
Eventually, he knew it was coming to a head. She was mad at him. She'd said so in a loud voice when he'd called her to provide proof of life. She was really mad. He'd run blind into another dangerous situation with no backup and he hadn't even taken his comm. with him. She was furious when he finally came face-to-face with her. He had no consideration for anyone else, for the people in his life who cared about him, because he was more than a hood and a bow and arrow. She was really, really furious. Calling Diggle or Roy on the way wouldn't have wasted any time and he'd have been safer.
He pointed out it was a moot point, he was perfectly safe either way.
She lost it then. People cared about him. He shouldn't make light of that. He shouldn't give people who cared such blatant heart attacks, because he wasn't alone anymore.
Except she hadn't said cared and she hadn't said people either. She was a fair bit more specific about the amount of care and who it was that felt it. (Everything else was perfectly accurate, though.)
(He never really focused on everything else.)
Diggle was the only one with them because Roy was still on his way from not going to the hostage situation Oliver had handled alone, but he vacated premises very quickly when he heard the beginnings of the silence that had followed Felicity's speech-babble.
Then things came to a head.
He was all over her, or at least he tried to, because he'd been denying himself something he wanted so much for so long it was ridiculous. He'd learned plenty control over five years, but if she'd been enough to change everything else in his life, why not that too?
And when he wanted and wanted and wanted and finally got it, he found he was almost unsure of what to do with it.
But she was Felicity and he had her, and it wasn't that hard to figure it out after all.
She tasted like all the things he had had and had wanted, and somehow much better than it all combined. He was warm all over, like there was a fire and her lips had been licked by the flames. She had very full lips. It was a very big flame. The result was that he ended up with the firm conviction that he could never be cold again.
By the time they re-gathered their wits, he was clad only in leather pants. It didn't seem to upset her too terribly.
Except now it was the time to deal with it.
He took one long look at the apprehension widening her eyes and made the carefully thought-out decision to kiss her again instead.
They never did properly deal with it. Or talk about it. They sort of blundered their way through it all – Dig's grimaces (because the whole change thing took a while for him to digest, and it probably didn't help that he became sort of the unwilling third wheel who had to witness a lot of stuff he never would have wanted to), a pregnancy scare, the press' new piece of hot Oliver Queen news, another pregnancy scare because Felicity was detail-oriented (or obsessive-compulsive), a clumsy engagement that Felicity was fairly certain only happened because Oliver had been dangling single-handedly on the monkey bars (she would always call it that) when he should have been on one knee and she was distracted, and then a real pregnancy. Which was a bummer for Thea, who moaned and groaned for days about the wedding gown.
And then came the wedding, and it seemed that, by mutual agreement, the whole non-talking thing was to end at the altar, while exchanging vows and voicing well-known sentiments out-loud for the first time. They had issues, Oliver knew. He didn't think he knew anyone who said 'I love you' for the first time while exchanging rings.
From then on, the blundering through life thing cut down to a bare minimum. They shared a lot, after. Oliver was not surprised to say that they didn't share anything they didn't already know. Even if they hadn't ever spoken about it before.
Sometimes he had time to stop for a couple of seconds and think very hard about what would have happened if Felicity hadn't saved him (in every non-literal sense of the word, and hey, possibly literal too). He wondered if mentally stable people visited their mothers' grave to thank them for shooting them too.
He did. He didn't mind a scar if it was the payment required for having Felicity talk about motherboards to his one-year-old baby. Though he got the feeling the baby himself might disagree when he got old enough to get disagreeable.
He didn't care. Felicity made him a bit of a selfish man. And she was very selfless herself.
They were a good match. They just took a while getting around fitting together. That was okay. If it was worth a bullet wound, the wait was affordable.
And, well, she agreed. He really didn't have any other choice anyway.
Or, rather, there wasn't one to make.