So... This hasn't been proofed by a Beta Reader, so please excuse mistakes. After years of reading (literally years!) I decided to dip my foot in the waters. Love it or hate it - let me know! - Icy
(FYI: If I owned these characters/story, I would not be reading or writing stories on this website!)
When someone dies, and you knew them well, time falls into a bubble. Everyone on the outside keeps moving. They go to school, work, buy groceries, do mundane things like laundry and wash dishes like it's nothing. But inside the bubble, life is very different. The insignificant everyday tasks are heightened. They become temporary distractions or goals to accomplish, to forget about the person you are missing. It's the tasks you give yourself to feel normal. But they're also the ones that make you feel guilty.
Should you really be washing dishes when so and so isn't here? Should you really be making the bed when the person you love will never be able to sit on it again? Should you even care about what shirt goes with your pants today? He or she won't be there to admire it.
Most people are strong and can overcome these dark thoughts of sadness. Some unconscious part of the mind pulls your heart out of your gut and you slowly make a hole in the bubble to keep living. Some people let themselves sink into the abyss of sadness and live their entire lives inside that bubble. And others… they live in both.
When Oliver died, I lived in both. The first few days, when we waited for him to come back, I lived in a constant state of nervousness and hope. How hurt was he that he couldn't call us to say he was okay. Maybe he was on a plane with no reception. Maybe he was hiking his way off the mountains and it would take him a while to reach civilization. Maybe he was in a coma and being nursed back to health. A million excuses. A million stories of survival. But after two weeks of nothing, I broke down.
I was cleaning up my apartment for the fifth time and found a random picture of all of us at the club. It was a rare shot of Oliver, Dig and I. Oliver was sitting at the bar and in the middle of taking a swing of his drink. Dig was standing behind him giving the camera an amused look. I was leaning against the bar with a planner open, writing something. Roy had taken it a few years ago, when we had just started working as a team. Finding it in my closet, amongst old work papers and college folders made me break down in tears. I ignored all my calls and fell into an all day cry fest that only ended after Dig came by to check on me.
"Felicity?" I heard Diggle's soft voice waft into my bedroom from the hallway. I quickly wiped away at my tears and snot with my sleeve and hid the picture of Oliver underneath the comforter I had dragged down with me to the floor. It was a pointless attempt of bravery. Diggle reached my bedroom to find me sitting on the floor, surrounded by my crumpled bed sheets and me with a swollen face and still in pajamas.
"Felicity… you can't do this." I felt a fresh wave of tears begin as Diggle stopped at my bedroom doorway.
"I just… I just need a minute. Can you wait outside?" I whispered as I wiped at more tears and brought the comforter up around my shoulders.
"Lis… he wouldn't want you to be like this."
I stared at the floor in response, a fresh wave of tears making their way down my face. All day I kept thinking of Oliver and what he would have wanted. I kept thinking about his sister, who was oblivious to his efforts to save her. I kept thinking about his work at the foundry. All the work he put in to train Roy and how he would never see if Roy could handle Arrow business on his own. I kept thinking about how he would miss watching Diggle's family blossom. I thought about the way he smiled and stared at me when he thought I wasn't looking. The way he would call or text me in the most inopportune moments to ask for help… or simply just because. But most of all I kept thinking about the last words he said to me. His confession still echoed in my head and made me want to tear my room apart in anger.
All the "could have been" moments and the "maybes" were piling up. It wasn't surprising that I broke down… it was just surprising that it took this long for it to happen.
"Diggle…" I looked at him between tears, "I want him back. I don't want him to be dead. I want him to come back." I choked back a sob and buried my face into my bed sheet.
Diggle made his way over to me and wrapped his arms around me. He never told me to stop crying and pull myself together. And for that I was always grateful. It would be another week before I left my apartment and another month before I went back to work with Ray.
The first month he was gone I spent my time drowning my sorrows in wine and working at the Foundry. We created an elaborate cover story for Oliver's disappearance. He had no money and no family other than his sister, so we faked a few phone calls, forged his signature and handwriting a few times and said he had escaped to travel the world. It wasn't so far-fetched since his sister had just done the same thing. For the press and the world he was backpacking through Europe, living the life of a bachelor and "finding himself".
Thea was angry at first. She had come back for her brother only to have him abandon her again. She was livid for weeks and called me and Roy constantly.
"You know where he is. You never stopped working for him, I know you didn't. So just tell me the truth. Where is he?" Thea hissed angrily through my cell-phone a few days after the news hit.
I stared at my computer screen blankly. I was sitting in the Foundry with Roy hovering over my shoulder looking worried. He had been ignoring her calls, always finding it more difficult to lie to her since they had history together.
"Thea, I'm being honest, I have no idea. He just said he needed some time to himself and left. He didn't leave any way to reach him." My voice a tad bit too somber. I was trying hard not to cry and was keeping my responses as short as possible.
"You're a liar. I'm going to find out what happened, I don't care how long it takes," she shouted.
She hung up after that and Roy was there as I stared listlessly at my computers and cried quietly.
Diggle handled Laurel, who went on a one woman warpath against every criminal in Starling City. While I tried to find a new routine to live by that resembled normalcy, Laurel forged a routine from blood, sweat, and tears. Diggle and Roy spent half their time keeping Starling City's streets safe and half their time keeping Laurel from killing herself. The work turned out to be a blessing in disguise; it kept the boys busy and gave them a purpose. But it also left me alone, trying to figure out how I fit in the equation now that Oliver was gone. I helped out with tactical advice, research, and surveillance the first few months. But eventually my work with Ray started taking up more time.
At first it was a few extra hours to help him crutch out numbers, then it was alternating nights between Ray's work and the Foundry. But that soon turned into four days of regular work and two days of Arrow business, I gave myself Sunday off. Diggle and Roy never complained. I was always a phone call away and always willing to help on any mission.
The reality was the basement was no longer my safe haven. It reminded me too much of Oliver, of the last night he was there, and all our time there as a team. Roy would be training or Diggle would come home after donning on the Green suit and I would grow nervous. Was it him? Had he come back? The place began to make me feel physically sick.
I would get the shakes and want to throw up. It happened from time to time at QC too. I would be in my office looking over something and be walking back to my desk and get an odd sense of wrongness. A faint image of Oliver sitting at the desk waiting for me to arrive with some report would flash before my eyes. It would always take me a moment to settle back into my skin and snap out of the image. The whole episode would leave me unsettled and ruin my day. Ray called it "Felicity's blues are down," his weird way of calling attention to my eyes and my depressive mood.
On those days Ray was especially obnoxious. If he suspected it was because of Oliver, he never let on. He would come into my office, flirt a bit, ramble about some new tech gadget and then ask me out for lunch. Some days I took the bait and others I politely declined and asked for some privacy to finish working in peace. Our work relationship, despite the kiss, remained professional. He constantly flirted and was awkward in general, but then again so was I. We developed a quirky friendship that Diggle said was good for me. Roy on the other hand disapproved. Any mention of Ray during our weekly team meetings, minus Laurel, would lead to Roy frowning and growing silent.
In the months after Oliver died, Roy had matured immensely. He no longer jumped head first into dangerous situations. He trained religiously and never missed checking in with me or Diggle on missions. He was always the first to look for exit strategies or alternatives to violent take downs during stake-outs. His patience with Laurel, who never seemed to listen to anyone, bordered on saintly. He always called for back-up if something looked strange. And he never failed to drop me off at home during late nights at the QC office. He had become my second shadow. Oliver would have been proud. Diggle had even begun to complain to me "the kid is going to beat me one day," after particularly hard trainings. I always shushed him and praised Roy on his improvements.
And so time played on, I lived a strange life of answering random calls of help from masked vigilantes and working long hours at a company I never thought I would have so much stake in. A year after Oliver died we were still pulling ourselves together. Missions didn't always go well, we didn't always get along, but we were coping. I was coping. I missed Oliver every day, but jumping in and out of my bubble of mourning was working. I had found a routine I could live by. Naturally, fate had other ideas… or rather Oliver had other ideas.