The Trouble With Blue Dresses - Just Like Monica
Post 3x07 Olicity smangst. "He goes back with every intention of straightening up the mess he made in the Foundry. Really, he does." (in which I couldn't stop thinking about Oliver mussing up Felicity's pretty blue dress)
He leaves Diggle's feeling heavier, and it's not just because Lyla's dinner was the first home-cooked meal he's had in a good long time. There had been a clenching in his chest at the sight of Felicity kissing Ray Palmer in his old office, in his family's building, in a company that had been stripped of his legacy, but that feeling had sunken lower in the hours since, settling into a heavy weight in the pit of his stomach. Oliver was used to carrying the weight of responsibility on his shoulders, but this was something different.
He shrugs Roy off at the curb, selfishly ignoring the pained look that comes across the younger man's face when Oliver suggests that he "hit the club, see what Thea's up to."
He goes back to the Foundry himself, with every intention of cleaning up the mess he knows is left there, wanting to put everything back in its place before she could see what he had done. But as he descends the stairs and sees the bottles strewn across the ground, every moment from that night comes flashing back. He sees the blue of her dress and the green of his hood and the red that flares up behind his pupils when he allows himself to consider the true implications of the last twelve hours.
Diggle's warning voice when he told him about Felicity's reaction to his speech to Cupid. The hurt that had flashed across her face, for just a second, when he had told her "Do what you want." The way her hand clasped Ray Palmer's arm as her head angled toward his. That kiss.
Before he knows what's happening, he's destroying everything. The table he had swiped the bottles off of earlier is overturned, the contents of every surface (except for Felicity's desk) scattered to the ground. He puts his fists through the glass case that holds his Arrow suit and gear and uses the pull-up pole to beat the shit out of the salmon ladder until the bars are warped and cracking. He bloodies himself destroying every part of the fortress he (they) holds so dear, and when the only thing left standing is her desk, her computers, he stands in front of them, panting.
That was how she found him.
Felicity wouldn't have thought it possible, but she leaves QC, Palmer Technologies, feeling even more conflicted and heartbroken than when she came in. She knows, deep down, that Palmer's outright rejection should burn her deeper than Oliver's, The Arrow's, self-sacrificing confession to Crazy Carrie Cutter, but she can't stop thinking about his voice and "I know what it's like" and how Ray Palmer's lips felt nothing like Oliver Queen's.
She drives to the Foundry nearly on muscle memory, blinking as she pulls into the parking lot, unable to remember how or why she's there. Might as well check on everything, the logical part of her brain resolves, while a smaller, clearly insane, part screams tell him, Tell Him, TELL HIM.
Tell him? Tell him what? Tell him again what an idiot he's being? Tell him that the way he said "Do what you want" is one of the worst things she's ever heard in her life? Tell him that another man kissed her? Tell him that another man rejected her?
She's readied herself to face Oliver, but nothing could have prepared her for the sight of him shirtless and and broken and bleeding, standing in the destruction of the Foundry like the world had simply collapsed around him. It looks almost as bad as it had after the Undertaking, like a cyclone had blow through, uprooting everything in its path.
She makes it halfway down the stairs before she gasps audibly.
That was when he saw her.
"Oh my god," they say in unison, but she's quicker to follow up because of course she is.
"Oliver! What happened?" Instinct takes over and she rushes down the rest of the stairs to him, bracing herself for a threat that might still remain, but unable to not try and help him, at least help tend to his many visible wounds.
But she's not prepared, again, to see him step back from her as she approaches, his arms shooting up defensively.
"Stay away from me, Felicity" he warns, but it does nothing to slow her.
"What are you talking about, what's going on?" she's frantic now, reaching him and grabbing at his arm. "What happened to...everything, who was here?"
The force at which he pulls his bicep away from her grasp actually causes her to take several steps backward.
"Felicity!" he nearly yells and this time the sound of his voice stops her cold. "No one was here. It's fine. Stay right there and just...don't touch me."
"Oliver, what's going on?" she asks again, but this time the resolution in her voice is overpowered by something else he know is fear.
"I...I destroyed it," he says, and his resigned tone is echoed in the slumping of his shoulders as he shrinks down right in front of her. "I destroyed everything."
"Why?"
What else is there for her to say?
"Felicity," he says, like she's supposed to know.
"You have to at least let me stitch you up," she replies, stubbornly stepping forward again and tracing her fingers along a particularly large gash on his forearm. She's wondering if he's in shock, but then he hisses and when she looks up, his eyes are anything but unfocused.
"Felicity," he says her name again, and then he's wrapping his arms around her and kissing her desperately and it's hot and heavy and she lets it be perfect for maybe ten seconds, before she pushes his chest back. She doesn't move completely from his grasp, but she pulls back far enough to draw his whole face into focus, to see the desperation burnt on his blown pupils.
"Oliver, what happened?" This time her voice is pained in a different way, but nowhere close to his when he answers.
"I saw you."
She knows what he's talking about, of course she does, but she lets herself pretend she's wrong for just one second.
Because of course that's what happened. Of course a misguided kiss with the man she should want would lead to a misguided kiss with the one she actually did.
And it doesn't matter that the way he's looking at her is more meaningful than any million dollar necklace or billion dollar business deal, it doesn't matter that she can't imagine ever feeling the way she does right now with Ray Palmer, or anyone else for that matter. It's meaningless because he doesn't mean it. Because he doesn't really want her.
"That's what this is about," she spits at him, finally pulling away fully, shoving at his biceps and his stupid, perfect chest. "You saw me with him and just wanted to claim me back."
"No," he protests, but his broken voice betrays him and he can't seem to form any more words.
"Yes," she hisses back. "That's all this is. If you don't want me, you can't be upset when someone else gets to have me!"
"Felicity," he nearly whispers and he sounds so hurt and he looks devastated, and fuck him because he doesn't get to be upset right now. So she jabs at him again, determined to find their breaking point, anything to end this brutal standstill between them.
"And for fuck's sake, Oliver, you can't throw a temper tantrum and destroy the Foundry just because somebody else finally decides to kiss me!"
It's somewhere between her saying the words "fuck" and "kiss" that he lunges again, arms banding about her waist, pressing her flush against him as he captures her mouth against his, her only protest a surprised squeak that gets muffled as she wraps her arms behind his neck and kisses him back.
He hitches her up against him, rucking up the skirt of her pretty blue dress and stumbling over some of his wreckage as he moves to press her up against the concrete pillar, one of the few things he hadn't actually been able to tear down with his bare hands. He shifts up against her just slightly and they both groan when her long legs lock around his waist.
Her hands seem to be anchored to the hair on the back of his head, gripping the short strands tightly between her fingers, while his hands are roaming, scrambling to touch every part of her before his time runs out. He skims them down her sides to squeeze her hips and then trails them back up over her breasts. He brings them to the nape of her neck and pulls out the elastic in her hair, scraping his fingers up her scalp and ruining the up-do she had done up for someone else.
He knows it's not right, and he knows this is going to be another thing that will haunt him, but when he grips her ass with his left hand and presses that dress up just a little further to touch, just to touch, the inside of her thigh with his right, she makes a sound into his mouth that makes him willing to question any logic that says he's not supposed to be here with her right now.
She pulls away from his lips with a pop, just long enough to softly moan, "Oliver, please," and his right hand abandons all pretense, dragging her panties to the side and pressing one finger inside her.
"Oh, fuck!" she cries and he'd answer if he hadn't momentarily been struck dumb by how wet she is. And he nearly grins for one stupid second because unlike her dress or her makeup, or her hair, this is for him.
When she moves her mouth down to his throat, she can feel his hot breath against her ear, can feel him vibrate as he moans her name, the best way he's said it all night. She slips her hands down from his neck to scratch at his chest and he adds another finger inside her, groaning as she rolls her hips against him.
She's so close already, and so she moves her hands down further grab at the front of his pants, sliding the zipper down with one hand and wrapping the other around his length at the same time he crooks his fingers inside her and brings his thumb down to press down on her clit.
And then she's coming.
And it's everything, it's everything, it's too much when she clenches around his fingers and cries his name at the same time that she's undoing his pants and licking at his neck. He was worked up before she even got here, and he's on such a live wire that he goes off too, erupting in a mess all over her thighs and her stomach and oh god no, on her pretty blue dress.
His guttural groan of her name descends into a pained apology as he realizes what he's done, but she's too blissed out to hear him at first, instead mutely following his gaze downwards.
And holy shit, if the sight of him all over her isn't one of the hottest things she's ever seen.
But when she raises her eyes back up to say so, she sees the horror and regret in his and it freezes her yet again. Not just because he takes away his warmth when he steps completely back and away from her, but because she's finally starting to hear the words he's frantically mouthing and all she hears is "I'm sorry" and "oh god" and "mistake."
He's gone before she even has a chance to piece his words into sentences, and she's left alone once again, wondering if she's setting a record for being walked away from while wearing couture.
They avoid each other studiously for the new few weeks, she spends most of her time at work, finding her way around a somehow more-awkward Ray Palmer and he spends his days reassembling the Foundry and his nights dismantling their relationship, ignoring her except to talk official Arrow business. She still catches him giving her heated stares when he thinks she's not looking, but it's different. It's worse. She could handle heat tinged with longing, because at least that felt like possibility. Now all she sees in his eyes is regret, and something about that feels so final it makes her chest ache.
Diggle raises an eyebrows at them once or twice, but they suddenly have much bigger fish to fry, so that's all the attention anybody pays. When he leaves for Nanda Parbat, he says goodbye to her first, flatly and in front of the rest of the team and her eyes burn with angry tears when she realizes what he's doing. He never even meets her stare, but everyone else is too distracted to worry about it.
And she feels just like a cliche, and a little bit like a crazy person, two weeks later, when she sobs as she pulls blue couture out of a dry cleaning bag and shoves it to the very back of her closet.