– Sacrifice –
Felicity isn't afraid of death. She really isn't. The way she sees it, death is easy and simple and final; it's life that is difficult and complex and prolonged. Call her a martyr, but if she had to pick a way to die, giving her life to protect the people she cares seems like the best way to go out.
So Felicity's not afraid to die.
What she is afraid of is leaving behind the same people she would die for in the first place. What would it do to Roy to lose one more person he cares about after losing so many others? How would Digg cope with her death when they both knew how important she was to him? Would it motivate Oliver to become a killer again to avenge her? Could Felicity's death be Sara's final breaking point? She hopes that they will remember her differently from the way they will find her. She wants to be remembered as their geeky, loveable IT girl, instead of whatever mess Slade is going to turn her into.
She shrieks as Slade presses the white hot iron to her bare stomach again. She can smell her own flesh burning, feel each and every individual nerve-ending on fire, but she hears her pained cry as if from a distance. If she were going to live, she knew the injury would leave a scar, but she doesn't plan on making it out of this warehouse alive.
"Now," Slade says, taking the iron away from her skin, "tell me what I want to know, and I'll end this. Your suffering is not necessary."
The blonde picks her head up and tries to focus her gaze on Slade's face, but without her glasses, her vision is warped slightly. She doesn't need to see him to tell him off though. "You're wasting your time," Felicity says emotionlessly. "I'm not telling you anything."
The force put behind the punch that strikes her face makes her sight blacken with little spots and stars for a moment, and she hears Slade growl in frustration. Felicity is too exhausted to even try to restrain her smug smile. Slade may be strong physically, but he has no idea what Felicity Smoak is truly capable of.
"They will come for you, you know," Slade taunts her dramatically. "Your heroic Oliver and amicable Sara will come to your rescue no doubt, and then we'll see what tune you're singing when it's them I'm torturing."
With the meager amount of strength she has left, Felicity tries futilely to lunge at Slade, but he's got her hanging from the high ceiling by her chained wrists, and all it does is cause the shackles around her wrists to cut into her skin deeper. She can feel the wounds around her wrists begin to bleed again, but the pain doesn't seem to be getting to her the way it was in the beginning. She almost welcomes the pain now, because it assures her that she is still alive.
"I see why Oliver likes you," Slade comments, poking her in her burned and bruised ribs and making her jolt away in pain. "You've got spunk, loyalty, a true warrior's heart. The kid needs someone like that in his life. I wonder what he'll do, once you're gone . . ." the man trails off menacingly.
"It won't matter," Felicity lies. "I'm just the tech-girl. There's a million-and-one just like me out there in the world. Oliver will have another tech-savvy replacement in a heartbeat."
"You're an intelligent woman, Ms. Smoak, but you've got a terrible poker face," Wilson tells her.
"And you've got a terrible face in general," Felicity retorted. Maybe Roy was right, maybe her comebacks did need a little work, but she was pretty sure she was thinking with a concussion so she considered the insult to be a decent one given the circumstances.
The multiple blows she sustained to her face and stomach were proof enough that she had gotten to him. Again, she marveled at the way that pain seemed to be becoming less and less of an issue. Every time Wilson pulled his fist away to hit her again, she pictured the faces of the people she cared for; Roy with his endearing pout after he had failed to put his arrow into the target for the umpteenth time, Digg as he shared a knowing smirk with her after Oliver completely missed the point of their discussion yet again, Oliver as he looked at her with pride, Sara smiling at her like the sun. She ran the images through her mind on a loop, until everything went dark and quiet.
When Oliver pounded down the stairs of the new hideout that evening with Sara behind him, he was fully expecting Felicity to be already sitting in her chair in front of her computer screens. He had sent out a text for the whole team to meet up in their newly furnished headquarters an hour earlier, and Felicity was usually the first to receive and respond to these messages, since she was constantly dialed into the information grid. She had been working hard on her self-assigned project of bulking up the automated security of the 'Arrow Cave' for days now, and had only left the lair in brief stints since Slade had invaded their first sanctuary.
His eyes scanned the basement for her, but found no sign of life, other than the cup of coffee on her desk and the revolving screensavers on the computer monitors. "Felicity?!" he called, walking further into the space.
Sara walked over to Felicity's desk and sat in her chair. She touched the bottom of her coffee cup and flicked on the monitors. Her brow furrowed in worry. "Her coffee cup is still half-full and she left in the middle of writing a code," Sara assessed. She turned to Oliver, "This isn't Felicity. She doesn't leave half-finished codes up on her screen and she always shuts of the monitors before she leaves. And the coffee? If she had left the foundry, she would have taken it with her. Something's not right." Oliver was taking out his phone and making a call, so Sara asked, "What are you doing?"
"Calling Diggle. Maybe they made a Big Belly Burger run and she just forgot to shut it down," he explained, but even he didn't sound convinced of this.
Just as Oliver was putting the phone to his ear, Sara's own phone rang and she answered it with lightning reflexes. "Felicity?"
"No, it's me."
"Sin?" Sara asked quietly, looking over at Oliver who shook his head at her as he hung up with Digg.
"You know the old Mallett & Co. warehouse down by the western docks?" Sin asked. She didn't wait for Sara's answer before she continued, "You need to get down here. Your friend? Felicity? I found her."
"I need to know if I should call an ambulance, but you should definitely get down here before the police do," Sin explained through the phone, keeping her fingers on Felicity's pulse point, just to reassure herself that the girl was still alive. "You're gonna want to see this."
"Okay," Sara said, and Sin could practically hear her panic even seven miles away. "Okay. I-I'm on my way, okay? Just–" Sara broke off, like her words were too strained to come out or something. "Sin, just . . don't leave her, okay? Don't leave her alone. Understand?"
Sin nodded her head, feeling a lump rise to her throat at the sound of her usually unwavering idol suddenly choked up and panicking, then she realized that Sara could see her. "I won't. I won't, I promise," she answered solemnly. "Just hurry, okay? She's still got a pulse but . . . God, it's just so weak . . a-and slow . . ."
"Call an ambulance, okay? Don't wait," Sara told her. Sin heard the distinctive revving of a motorcycle and the honking of car horns. "My dad's on the SCPD. If I need to see the warehouse, I'll find a way through him. Just get her to a hospital."
"Okay. I will," Sin said.
"Hang in there, kiddo," Sara told her supportively.
"Yeah," Sin agreed before hanging up the phone and calling the emergency hotline.
Sara pulled up on her motor bike just in time to see paramedics lifting Felicity's motionless body onto a gurney. She tugged her helmet off and threw it behind her, not truly caring where it landed. Her legs carried her over to Felicity at a break-neck speed of their own volition.
"Glenn!" she yelled to one of the paramedics, recognizing him easily.
Their fathers had been friends since forever. Sara even vaguely remembered drunkenly hooking up with him once at a college party during her junior year of high school, before Laurel had shown up with Oliver and Tommy and broken up the fun. She would have to thank her sister for that the next time she saw her.
He turned around and spotted Sara pushing her way through the throngs of on-looking dockworkers and loiterers. Glenn and his partner, an older guy with the name Boerner stitched onto his uniform jacket, were just rolling Felicity across the warehouse on the gurney. Sara spotted Sin not too far off, looking on in terror. The uniformed police officers tried to hold her back with the rest of the crowd, but a few unies who recognized her as Quentin Lance's daughter let her onto the premises after seeing her wild expression, bearing a striking resemblance to her father. Sara jogged closer.
"Sara Lance," Glenn greeted her with a tentative smile. He rubbed the back of his head, "Uh . . . now's not really a good time," he told her, just as Sin came running over.
"You're telling me," she shot back. "Your patient is a friend of mine. A close friend of mine." Sara stared him down threateningly, silently letting him know that standing in her way right now would be suicide. "So tell me what's going on," she ordered.
The strapping and broad-shouldered man took a step back as if the shorter and smaller Sara had physically punched him in the face, but he responded, "Your friend's been through a lot. We need to get her to a hospital– now – or she will die."
"You'd better hurry then," Sara told the medics, gesturing for them to load Felicity and get moving. She turned to Sin, "Oliver Queen is going be here any minute to look at the scene." Sin looked at her oddly. "Don't ask now, I'll explain later. Okay?" As Sin nodded, Sara went to climb into the ambulance but Glenn tried to stop her.
"You can't–"
"Glenn, you can either let me ride along, or we can stand here arguing, and I swear to God, if she dies, you're next," Sara threatened.
"Let her in, Fortier!" the other paramedic, Boerner, told Glenn from the driver's seat.
"Okay! Yeah! Come on then!" Glenn told her impatiently as Sara climbed in.
Only once she was seated to the side, across from Glenn Fortier, did Sara begin to understand the extent of Felicity's condition and why Sin had called her. Sara was a woman of her word and she truly did know her wounds. Looking at Felicity now, Sara almost saw red. She recognized that the injuries inflicted upon Felicity had not been accidental, they were entirely intentional. Everything from the way Felicity's face was deathly pale underneath the multitude of bruises, scrapes, cuts, and dried blood, to the hand-shaped contusions around Felicity's throat, to the visible breaks of her collarbone, sternum and several of her ribs, to the blistering burns and long slices on her stomach, suggested that Felicity's wounds had been delivered with purpose and deliberateness. This wasn't an accident, this was torture.
And Sara knew who was responsible.
She took Felicity's hand in her own and leaned forward toward to girl.
"Felicity, it's me, okay? It's Sara. If you can hear me, try to squeeze my hand," Sara encouraged her. She held her breath for several seconds, with no response from the suffering woman. "It's okay. You should save your strength anyway. That's smart. You're always so smart. You're smart and you're cute and you're strong, Felicity. I don't even know how you survived this honestly, but I need you to keep being strong and fighting, alright? I need you to pull through and be okay because, if you're not okay then none of us will be."
Sara pushed hair away from Felicity's face as Glenn worked around her, taking Felicity's vitals and examining her injuries. Usually, Sara would be driving real medical experts crazy with her own observations and input, but right now she could barely even function properly. Her thoughts were a mess and her feelings were in complete turmoil. She hadn't felt this kind of panic since Nyssa had abducted her mother and she had drank Tibetan viper venom to kill herself in retaliation. She thought that maybe she hadn't felt panic like this since she had knelt beside Shado in the darkness of Lian Yu with Ivo telling Oliver to choose which of them would live; the frantic thoughts that had been racing through her mind that she would never see her parents again, and she would never get to make things right with Laurel, that she would die knowing that somewhere out there she had a sister who would never stop hating her because Sara would never get the chance to tell her how sorry she was and how much she loved Laurel.
"Felicity, I have to tell you something," Sara told her unconscious friend with urgency. "God, I hope you can hear me, because I need to tell you that . . ." – Sara felt a wetness on her cheeks and she lifted the hand that wasn't holding Felicity's to wipe her tears away – " . . . for so long, I lived in this . . . inescapable dark world and I was all alone in the darkness. I feel like I spent lifetimes in this dark world, with my soul caught on fire, burning alive."
Sara brushed more hair behind Felicity's ear and continued to whisper, "And then I came home, for good, and I became a part of 'Team Arrow' and I spent time with you. The more time I spent with you, the closer we got, the more I let you in, and lately I've been noticing that there's a light shining in my dark, lonely world. You're that light, Felicity. You're the only light I have left in me and I need you, just like Oliver needs you and Digg needs you and Roy needs you. You're family needs you, sunshine.
"I survived for years in Lian Yu and Nanda Parbat among psychopaths and assassins, and I was mostly alone," Sara reminded her in a hushed voice. "If I can survive that, I know that you can survive this, because you have a whole family of survivors who are here for you and pulling for you. So don't you dare die on me, Felicity Smoak, or I swear to God, I will bring you back to kill you myself, and you know I will find a way."
As the ambulance finally pulled up in front of the hospital and Felicity was unloaded, Sara could have sworn she felt Felicity squeeze her hand, before the doctors and nurses shuffled Sara out of the way and took Felicity into the restricted area.
Sara had been waiting anxiously in the waiting room for an hour when Sin came in. Sara was sitting in one of the ugly and uncomfortable chairs, her knee bouncing compulsively, and she happened to look up just as Sin came through the doors with a wary expression on her face. The dark-haired teenager looked around and spotted Sara, and began making her way over.
"Hey, kiddo," Sara said, her voice betraying her weariness.
"Hi," Sin replied quickly. "I showed your pals to the warehouse, then I took off and came here." Her eyes kept shifting around the room, never lingering in one place for very long and her posture was rigid and tense, as if she were just waiting to run. "How's your friend?"
The lump that formed in Sara's throat had to be choked back before she could answer, "I don't know. Dr. Hamilton said they had to bring her into surgery to stabilize her before they could get x-rays, but it looked like a broken rib was pressing against her right lung and she had internal bleeding."
Sin's voice shook as she took a rattling breath and asked, "Is she going to make it?" The girl seemed to cast wary eyes around the room again.
Sara reached forward and grabbed Sin's hand in her own. "Hey," she called, regaining the younger woman's attention. Sara met Sin's young, scared, brown eyes and told her, "This isn't like your mom, okay? What's happening to Felicity? It's operable. The doctors stand a chance of fixing it. Now it's up to her."
After what felt like forever, Sin finally nodded and let out an unsteady breath. She sat down in the seat next to Sara, took the blonde's hand, and leaned her head against her pseudo-sister's shoulder. Sara smiled, drawing comfort from Sin's closeness just as much as she knew Sin drew comfort from her.
"Will you tell me why Oliver Queen and his bodyguard had to see where I found your friend now?" Sin asked after a long moment of silence between them.
Sara sighed, knowing she owed Sin the truth, but leery of telling the young girl a truth that wasn't hers to tell. She trusted Sin with her identity more than anybody else, she supposed that that same amount of trust could be put in her keeping Oliver's identity a secret as well. One thing was for certain, Oliver was not going to be thrilled about one more person knowing who the man under the hood was, but Sara figured that if Laurel, Thea, Roy, Felicity, and Digg already knew and her father preferred not to know, then it wouldn't hurt to let one more person into their family. Sin already knew about Sara and Roy and she'd been nothing but trustworthy and supportive.
"My 'crime-fighting partner' – your words, not mine – the Arrow? Is Oliver Queen," Sara told her in a low voice, wary of the few possible listening ears in the otherwise unoccupied waiting room.
Sin looked at her with wide eyes. "Dude! That actually makes a lot of sense!" Sin whisper-yelled. "Wait, does Thea know that her brother is Robin Hood and her boyfriend is The White Hulk? 'Cause, I'm not gonna say anything obviously, but I'm telling you, the girl should know these things."
Sara smiled with amusement and pride in her eyes. She was happy for the friend that Sin had found in Thea and vice versa. They made a peculiar but genuine and strong pair.
"Yes, Thea knows now," Sara confirmed, still smiling. "She found out about Oliver just after Laurel uncovered the secret of Team Arrow – that's what Felicity and Roy call our band of masked crime-fighters – about the time she was planning on leaving Starling City. It's why she stayed. As for Roy, well, it was kind of obvious after his crusade through the city."
"Hold on! Felicity knows about you too?" Sin demanded, looking unimpressed with Sara's lack of disclosure. "Is she a vigilante too?"
Sara laughed. "In her own right, she kind of is. She's our resident hacker, our eyes and ears, and our nearly endless fountain of intel."
"And what? Is Queen's bodyguard in on it too?" Sin joked. At Sara's telling look, Sin's jaw dropped open. "Oh. Okay. Wow. I have been so out of the loop."
"It's okay, so were Laurel and Thea," Sara told her. "We were all trying to keep you out of harm's way, but harm kind of ended up finding its way to you anyway."
Sin just nodded acceptingly enough and they fell back into silence until Sin asked, "Where's Roy now?"
"Oliver's secret hide out. Our lair, known to Felicity as 'The Arrow Cave'. It used to be in the basement of Verdant, but when Isobel Rochev – who is a villain, by the way – took over Queen Consolidated and Thea was forced to vacate, we had to relocate. Well, they had to relocate. I was still out of town at that point," Sara rambled in explanation.
"Is he okay?" she asked.
"That crazy strong drug he was on? The one that made him comic book strong? It's called mirakuru and it's the same stuff that's affecting the guy who put Felicity in here. Some allies in Central City have been working to develop a cure and their first batch has been injected into Roy," Sara informed her. "Oliver's bodyguard, Diggle, he's been watching him while the antidote takes effect."
"So, if this Diggle guy is with Oliver at the warehouse now, who's looking out for Roy?" Sin inquired hesitantly.
Sara's eyebrows pulled together in pensiveness. She turned to face Sin. "I'm not sure," she answered. The blonde tried to smile reassuringly. "Maybe it's already taking effect and it's working," she suggested hopefully.
Sin nodded and sat back in her chair. She looked straight ahead, not appearing truly convinced, but willing to shelf that issue for the moment. Sara was grateful to her for it.
She was especially grateful when her phone rang and Oliver's image appeared on her phone. The stragglers in the waiting room looked at her in annoyance, and she sent them an apologetic glance as she stood and tapped Sin's knee on her way out of the room.
"Ollie," she answered.
"How is she?" Oliver asked immediately.
"I don't know. She had a broken rib pressing against her lung and internal bleeding when they took her in to stabilize her," Sara relayed to him. "Aside from that, I'm guessing a few more broken ribs, collarbone, and sternum, a severe concussion, and significant blood loss."
"Whatever blood she lost, we found it at the scene," Oliver answered as he looked around the shabby, blood-drenched warehouse. He had to hold back the bile in his throat as he looked at the reddened floors that stank of spilled blood and desperation. "God, if we didn't know better, I would think there had been a massacre here."
"She hardly looked like Felicity when they took her in, Ollie. I don't know how she even survived," Sara commented. "It's gotta be some sort of miracle."
"Your dad let Laurel, Digg, and I onto the crime scene while the techs were examining it. They found a drug, something that works like cyanide. They think it might be tetrodotoxin," he explained. "Apparently in small, extremely low-concentrated doses it–"
"–Mimics death," Sara finished. "It's derived from the poison of puffer fish, which is a delicacy of China and Japan. But, Oliver, it's extremely rare and even more dangerous. A single drop of it could easily kill you if it has a high enough concentration."
"But who do we know, aside from you, who would know that and think to use it to their advantage?" Oliver questioned her.
Sara thought for a moment. At first, she thought Oliver might be referring to members of The League of Assassins, but it had been months since she had been released from The League and she knew the LoA well enough to know when they had people in town. Although, Nyssa herself had been a surprise to Sara. Then she began thinking more in terms of her current circle of friends, and it clicked in her mind.
"Felicity," she said. "Could she have taken the toxin to fake her own death?" Sara thought on that for a beat. "I'm not sure whether to be shocked, proud, or furious with her about that."
"Neither am I," Oliver agreed, checking his surroundings around the docks. He looked to Digg and Laurel, who were speaking idly as they stood by the car waiting for him. "It was a huge risk, taking that poison. If she had taken even point-one milligram too much, she could have really died."
"If she did administer it to herself, she had to have known that," Sara expressed, feeling drained and confused. "I'm having a hard time understanding where she would have even gotten it in the first place. Even on the black market, the stuff isn't exactly easy to come by, and if she had it on her the whole time, why not use it sooner?"
"So maybe she didn't. Maybe someone else did," Oliver suggested. He took in a deep breath and let it out to calm his racing heart. "Laurel, Digg, and I are coming to you. We'll be there soon."
Just as Oliver was about to hang up, Sara suddenly remembered something and screamed, "Ollie!"
"Yeah?"
"If you and Digg are coming here, then who's staying with Roy?"
"Thea."
"Oh."
"Yeah. I'll see you soon."
Sara took the phone away from her face and looked at it. Maybe Oliver was finally realizing that his baby sister wasn't a baby anymore. Or maybe Laurel had just lawyered him into concession. Yeah, the latter seemed much more likely.
It felt like several eternities before anyone had anything to say about Felicity's condition and even then it took some coercion for Sara to get anything out of the doctors, since she wasn't technically family. It was lucky that Digg came in just at the right moment, with Oliver and Laurel in tow, because Sara was quickly running out of patience. Diggle, while also not family, had been listed as Felicity's emergency contact.
"Digg!" she called to him, beckoning him over.
He came over without pause, seeming to understand the issue at hand. Digg offered his hand out to Dr. Hamilton. "John Diggle," he introduced himself.
"Mr. Diggle, I'm Dr. Hamilton. You were listed as Miss Smoak's emergency contact," the doctor told him.
"That's right," Digg answered in a strong voice that left no trace of doubt in anybody's mind. "How is she?"
Dr. Hamilton seemed to puff himself up to match Digg's size, and if she hadn't been dying for news on Felicity's condition, Sara might have laughed. "You have a very remarkable friend, Mr. Diggle," Hamilton told him. "I've never seen anything like it. Just from the severe burns and blood loss alone, her body should have gone into catatonic shock. Three of her ribs were broken or displaced, one of them was pressed against her right lung for an extended period of time. Both her collarbone and her sternum were fractured, and there was significant internal bleeding. What's even stranger is that they found a rare toxin in her blood, not one that's commonly found in the U.S. She's going through dialysis to remove the rest of the poison from her bloodstream. To be perfectly honest, by all logic Miss Smoak should not have survived this ordeal."
"But she did," John asked with a steady gaze. "Is she stable?"
"For now, but she's still in critical condition," the doctor answered cautiously. "We were able to stem the internal bleeding and reset her ribs to allow her lungs the room that they need to breathe. After that we started a blood transfusion and treated her burns and the fractures to her collarbone and sternum. She's in the ICU now."
"When can we see her?" Sara asked.
"She's asleep now. Whatever happens to her in the next twenty-four hours is critical. She needs her rest. Someone should contact her family," Hamilton said to Diggle, disregarding Sara's question.
Sara felt small in way she hadn't felt for a long time. Digg looked over his shoulder at Oliver and Laurel, and then to Sara directly to his left. Then he turned back to Dr. Hamilton.
"We're her family," Digg told him solemnly. "We're all she has."
Hamilton rocked backwards on his heels and nodded his head. "I see," he replied. "Well, in that case, perhaps you should all go home and get some rest yourselves. There's nothing more you can do for her here right now." The doctor turned and began walking away but Sara, despite her best efforts at restraint, lunged after him and grabbed his arm.
"Wait, Dr. Hamilton!" she exclaimed. He fixed his stare on her and she released her hold on him. She could feel Oliver, Digg, Laurel, and Sin looking at her like she had grown a second head, but her attention was mainly fixated on the man who stood between her and her injured friend. "Please. I need to see her. I'll be brief, I swear. I just need to see for myself that she's okay." She met Hamilton's eyes steadily. "Please."
The doctor seemed reluctant to humor Sara in any way, but he must have seen the desperation in her face. He cleared his throat and told her stiffly, "I'll give you five minutes. It's the best I can do."
Sara was almost certain that it was not the best that Hamilton could do, but she didn't argue. She would take what she could get without debate. Five minutes was all she really needed anyway.
She looked over her shoulder at her younger surrogate-sister. "Sin, I'll be back in five, okay?" she asked, receiving a single nod from the girl. Sara turned to Digg. "She knows," she told him simply, knowing he would understand. "She's trustworthy, believe me. Just stay with her, she's pretty shaken up and she doesn't like hospitals."
Digg nodded. "It's okay. I've got her."
"Thanks," Sara told him gratefully, before turning to follow Dr. Hamilton.
Felicity looked even smaller now than she always had before in Sara's eyes. Her breathing was still ragged and there wasn't much of her that wasn't covered up in gauze, stitches, or butterfly bandages. The same fear that had risen up in Sara upon first seeing Felicity outside the warehouse, now returned, gripping her heart like a vice.
"Five minutes," Hamilton reminded her, before slipping out the door.
Sara stepped further into the room, closer to Felicity, until she could finally reach forward and close her hand around Felicity's limp fingers. "Thank you," Sara told her. "Thank you for fighting." She brushed her fingertips over Felicity's hairline. "You're doing great, Felicity. Keep fighting." Sara cast a surreptitious glance over her shoulder, before leaning down and kissing Felicity's forehead. "Get some rest. I'll be back tomorrow, I promise," she whispered as she pulled away reluctantly.
When Sara got back down to the ground floor, she was expecting to find Oliver, Digg, Laurel, and Sin still waiting for her, but the waiting room was much less occupied than before. Instead, it was just Laurel waiting patiently for her, looking out the window at the harbor in the distance. Sara came up and stood beside her big sister silently. Laurel reached for her hand without moving her eyes from their fixed direction and Sara reveled in the feeling of not being in this alone anymore.
"How's Felicity?" Laurel asked after a peacefully quiet moment between them.
"Just like Hamilton said. She's still in critical condition, but she's stable," Sara relayed. She took in a deep breath through her nose and let it out slowly. "This never should have happened. We should have noticed she was missing sooner."
Laurel turned her head in her sister's direction. "You can't blame yourself for this, Sara," she said in her passionate, Laurel-like way. Sara looked away, because she couldn't stand to face her sister's comfort and pity right now.
Laurel squeezed her hand and kept talking to her, "When Felicity confirmed my suspicions that you and Oliver were the vigilantes, I wanted to be angry at you for lying to me and keeping secrets when the last six years of your life are already a huge secret. I felt patronized by you and by dad, like the two of you didn't think I could handle the truth. But then Felicity said something to me." Sara finally lifted her head to meet Laurel's eyes.
"She said, 'Sara knows you're strong, Laurel, but she's been through more than you or I could ever imagine and it's changed her. She's not your same kid sister who disappeared on your boyfriend's boat. Now she's a hero'." Laurel paused and took a moment to just look at Sara. "She was right. You are a hero, Sara, but Felicity's a hero too. Even the greatest heroes can't save everyone from everything," she finished.
Sara felt tears burn in the back of her eyes and well in her tear ducts. "I'm glad you know," she admitted. "Even if it puts you in danger, I'm glad you know. Does that make me a horrible sister?" She choked on a sob as she tried to stifle it unsuccessfully.
Laurel turned to face her and took Sara's shoulders in either of her hands. "No," she answered, tears welling in her own eyes. "It doesn't make you a bad sister. It makes you the kind of sister that I'm proud to call mine."
"I'm scared," Sara confessed, as if it were her deepest and darkest fear. Silent tears slipped down her cheeks, just as they had two weeks ago when she had broken up with Oliver. This time, there was someone else there to catch them for her.
"Of what?" Laurel chuckled in a watery voice. "The extremely powerful and indestructible sociopathic maniac hell-bent on vengeance against you and Oliver, the chances of Roy waking up still in a fit of blind rage, the mysterious and deadly League of Assassins whose leader's daughter you apparently had a clandestine fling with before you barely escaped from them with your life, or the imminent and unbelievable war raging on in Starling City unbeknownst to most of its people?" Laurel smirked, "It's okay to be scared, Sara."
Sara nodded. "It's been so long since it's been okay for me to be afraid," she spoke quietly, looking out at the boats buoyed in the waters across the busy streets. "The night I came home and you told me to get out of your apartment, was the first time I had cried in years." Laurel eyes flashed with guilt and sadness, but Sara smiled reassuringly. "I was actually kind of relieved to know that I still could." Her smile faded quickly. "Now I'm terrified of what's coming, but I'm not relieved to know that I still can be terrified."
The Lance sisters turned and shared an unspoken moment of understanding.
It felt strange to not have to go through Verdant to get into their new headquarters. The new place was nice enough, if you liked low ceilings and dim lighting, but it still didn't quite feel like home in Sara's opinion. They had had so much room in the foundry, it was a miracle all their things fit into Oliver's second hideaway.
As she walked down the staircase into the new space with Laurel right behind her, Sara felt a sense of displacement. Thea was sitting at Felicity's computer screens with Sin beside her, and they were speaking to each other in hushed tones and casting glances at Roy's still-comatose form on the steel table. Digg and Oliver were standing on the training mats, but the two of them almost had to duck their heads in the room, so it made any actual training a challenge. They had almost twice as many people as before and not even half the space they used to.
Thea happened to look up at the sound of their footsteps, and she quickly got to her feet. "Hey. How's Felicity?" she asked with genuine concern. It seemed that Thea had developed a bit of a soft spot for the team's resident computer whiz now that she understood Felicity's importance in keeping her older brother safe and alive.
"She's okay," Laurel was quick to assure her, but Thea was looking at Sara.
"She's okay," Sara repeated solemnly. "She will be anyway." Sara cast a glance at their lifeless teammate on the table. "How's Roy?"
Thea frowned. "No change," she said with a tense sigh. "I wish I could contact whoever Felicity had working on the cure, but I can't find anything on her phone or computer to give me even an idea who that is. All I know is she orders Chinese and Big Belly Burger take-out a lot, she's made a lot of calls to S.T.A.R. Labs – probably about her boyfriend – and she keeps seriously good tabs on all of you, which is actually good to know in case Ollie decides to disappear on me again."
"That's not going to happen again, Speedy," Oliver told her, coming over with Digg. "I told you that." He and his sister shared a look before Thea rolled her eyes and looked back to Felicity's screens. Oliver then turned to Sara and stepped closer, ushering Digg and Laurel along with them. Their gazes met with a seriousness. "How is she really?" he asked Sara.
Sara breathed in a deep breath to steady herself. "I told Thea. She's going to be okay . . . but she's not gonna bounce back overnight, Oliver," she warned him with a stern look. "Her wounds are going to heal. I'm more worried about what this is going to do to her on the inside. The psychological effects . . ." Sara look her head and then ran her fingers through her hair stressfully. "I'm worried," she told him finally, "that she isn't going to be the same Felicity that we said goodbye to after drinks two nights ago. You and I both know that something like this . . . can turn you into a completely different person."
Oliver's jaw clenched and he swallowed visibly. He had that glassy look in his eyes that he always had when he was trying to be all manly and not cry. "Felicity's the strongest out of all of us. We have to believe that she is stronger than anything Slade could ever do to her. I need to believe that he can't break her," he said vehemently, "because if Slade can break Felicity, then what chance do any of the rest of us have?"
In her heart of hearts, Sara knew that Oliver was right. When it came to fighting the physical threats, the two of them were second to none, but when it came to the emotional and psychological demons, it was Felicity who endured and shined light into the darkest corners of their hearts and chased away the doubt and guilt and fear and evil that resided there. They protected the city as best they could, but it was Felicity who protected them from themselves.
It was the reason it felt strange to be all gathered together like this. Without Felicity, they weren't a team. They weren't a family. They were simply a bunch of vigilantes and accomplices standing around in a basement.
"Hey, she's made it this far having to shepherd the likes of us," Digg pointed out to Oliver. "I think the girl is owed a little credit."
Sara, Oliver, and Laurel all smiled, but they knew that what Diggle said was the truth.
"I want to take Slade down," Sara told them all. "Now more than ever. Messing with the three of us is one thing, shooting Roy up with mirakuru was pretty close, kidnapping Thea almost did it for me, but torturing Felicity to within an inch of her life? If Slade Wilson wants a war, then we'll bring him one. Let's see if he can come back from incineration, a cement casing, and seven miles of ocean water."
While Oliver and Digg scoured the city for leads on Slade's whereabouts and happenings, Laurel did all the digging she possibly could into Sebastian Blood's business and past, and Thea and Sin continued to try to find the source of the first mirakuru cure serum, Sara went back to the hospital in the morning. She didn't bother with the receptionist or any of the nurses or doctors, she knew where Felicity's room was and how to get there. She slipped past the medical personnel with all the stealth of a former assassin.
"Hi," Sara greeted Felicity when she arrived in the room.
Felicity was still asleep of course, and bore no indications of responding any time soon. Sara picked up Felicity's medical chart from the foot of the hospital bed and scanned over its contents.
She was familiar with most of the medical jargon and implications of the information. She had, after all, been in charge of keeping records just like it of the men Ivo experimented on when she spent time on the freighter. The memories made her shudder, even though what she had learned during that time had been helpful.
"Light reading?" asked a voice from behind her.
Years of being an assassin had trained Sara not to jump at unexpected occurrences, so she simply turned around calmly to look at Dr. Hamilton. "I've spent time in a medical research facility of sorts," Sara responded. It wasn't necessarily a complete lie. "I'm familiarized with medical terminology and procedures."
"Yet you seem to have a blatant disregard for hospital rules and regulations," he retorted disapprovingly.
Sara met his eyes and tried to convey some sort of actual apology to him. She wasn't sorry for coming to see Felicity, she needed to be here, but she was sorry for the ramifications it caused Dr. Hamilton. She knew he answered to a higher power, just as she had on that freighter.
"I don't want to cause trouble for you, doctor. I just need to be here with her," Sara told him.
"Why?" he asked.
The question caught Sara off-guard. Why? She hadn't really thought about why. Why did she feel the need to be here with Felicity? If it were Laurel or Oliver or her father or Sin or Digg or anyone else, she knew she would feel compelled to be out on the streets banging heads together trying to find out where she could find the person who hurt someone she cared about. With Felicity, Sara felt like she never wanted to be even as far away as outside the hospital. Why was that?
"I don't know," she answered honestly. "It's just a feeling. I have to be with her. I don't know why."
Dr. Hamilton nodded thoughtfully. He eyes flickered to Felicity's face as he asked Sara, "What's your relationship to her?"
It was another question that caught Sara off-guard. Evidently doctors had become much more forthright than they had been six years ago. She wasn't sure that it was necessarily a good thing.
"We're . . . friends," Sara told him, but she sounded uncertain even to herself.
"Are you sure?" Dr. Hamilton questioned.
Sara thought about it. Their relationship was hard to pin down and label. They didn't fit neatly into a nice square box. They had been friendly the first time Sara came back to Starling City, but Felicity hadn't liked her very much when she had returned the second time around to stay. Felicity had been the only female on Team Arrow up until Sara came along, and Sara was not naive to the fact that Felicity had felt threatened by her in the beginning. But then, Felicity had taken a bullet for her and saved Sara's life, and Sara had stitched her up. After that, they had become friends, and Sara found herself admiring Felicity more and more the more she came to know her.
"People like Felicity aren't very common in the world. I can't imagine my world without her in it," Sara came to reply simply, deciding to further contemplate her deeper thoughts at a later time. "I know me being here isn't going to ensure that she stays in this world, but I just feel better being her with her than anywhere else."
Hamilton nodded pensively once more. "It sounds like you care a lot about her," he commented. He turned back toward the door calmly, and didn't look back as he added, "If anyone asks, I never saw you in here."
Though she knew Dr. Hamilton couldn't see it, she smiled gratefully at him. He closed the door behind him discreetly. Sara pulled the chair up close to Felicity's bedside and sat down.
She noticed Felicity looked a little better today than she had when Sara had seen her last night. There was more color in her face and cheeks, most likely from the transfusions and the dialysis filtering the rest of the tetrodotoxin from her bloodstream. The bruises looked a little worse, but Sara knew better than anyone that second-day bruises usually did. The cuts and scrapes looked less angry and red now. The breaks and fractures of her bones would take longer to heal; at least six weeks, or maybe more.
Sara took a deep breath and took Felicity's hand. "I know it seems really bad and painful, but it easily could have been so much worse, bǎo bèi. What you went through . . .you should have died, but you didn't. That's the real miracle here," she spoke, threading each of her individual fingers in between Felicity's with care. She looked from Felicity's sleeping face to the monitor that was keeping track of her heartbeat. Sara leaned forward, keeping Felicity's hand in both of hers and bring their hands to her forehead as she sighed. "You've got to be the strongest person I've ever met, Felicity Smoak."
It had been well over twenty-four hours since the last time Sara had slept, crashed out on her sister's couch after having drinks with the team on a Thursday night. None of them had known then that Saturday afternoon, Sin would find Felicity beaten and left for dead in a warehouse down by the docks. Sara was exhausted and she wanted to be back in that low-key bar, sitting between Felicity and Digg, exchanging glances with her newly-in-the-loop sister –who was drinking her sprite-and-grenadine as if being in an establishment built on alcohol wasn't bothering her at all – and occasionally playfully bumping shoulders and laughing with Felicity. That had been a good moment, the kind of moment that Sara wished could last forever, the kind of moment when she could feel little bits of who she used to be coming back to her and healing all the scars from the damage that killing people had done to her soul.
With her left hand still holding Felicity's right, Sara put her left arm down on bedside Felicity on the hospital bed and rested her head on the edge of the mattress. She fell asleep, hunched over in an uncomfortable hospital chair, taking comfort in the warmth and softness of Felicity's skin against her fingers. The gentle beeping of the heart monitor assured her that her friend was still fighting.
