The reinforced steel door leading to the Foundry opened and the sound of heavy footfalls descending down the stairs rang throughout the room.
Felicity let out a huff of exasperation. She just wanted a place where she could mourn Oliver uninterrupted. Was that too much to ask for? She had tried staying at home, but pint after pint of mint chocolate chip ice-cream did nothing to make her feel better. Her tiny shoebox apartment had never felt emptier.
And so Felicity started working late nights at the office. Everything was fine until one day, Ray had decided to head into her office to ask about the progress of the ATOM chip. Instead, he found her sobbing into her desk. He had asked her what had happened, and she just snapped. She went on a tirade about how attempting to be a hero wouldn't bring Anna back, and how nothing he ever did would change that fact. Even the ever-understanding Ray had enough of her erratic behaviour, and had told her to take time off work. So the office wasn't an option anymore.
Finally, she had decided on the Foundry. It had felt right anyway. Sure, it was dark and damp at times, and the perpetually broken thermostat made the place a whole lot colder than what she was comfortable with. But it was the first place in the world where she finally felt that she was home. She missed the rhythmic clanging of Oliver working the salmon ladder, the whooshing sounds of staffs cutting through air, and the measured pounding of fists against the wooden dummy that was deadbolted to the floor.
The others hadn't been at the Foundry ever since she had vocalised her desire to quit the team. John had showed up at her office the next day asking for her to return, but she had adamantly refused. The team had just fallen apart after that. She knew very well that that would happen. Without her as the eyes and brains of their team, the others wouldn't last ten minutes in the field. But without Oliver, their whole crusade has just seemed so pointless.
The only other person that had been down here was Merlyn. Felicity thought that he really did care about Oliver, in his own sick, twisted way. But there was no one Malcolm Merlyn cared for more than himself. After all, he had been the one to send Oliver to his death - in exchange for the most marginal of opportunities in removing the League's bounty on his head. Ra's might have been the man with the weapon, but the one that handed it to him was Merlyn. So Felicity had told him to go to hell when he visited the Foundry, eyes wide in mock concern, expressing his faux condolences for her loss. And she definitely wasn't in the mood to deal with whatever reason he was here for again.
Rubbing her temples in frustration, Felicity intoned, "Merlyn, if it's you again, I swear I'll -"
"It's me," came an all-too-familiar to rasp from behind her.
"Now I'm hearing things," she chuckled mirthlessly, swivelling her chair around, her eyes landing on familiar gunmetal blue orbs that she had never thought she would ever see again.
It couldn't be. He was dead - the blood on the scimitar was his. Felicity had run six different blood tests in three different hospitals in Gotham, Central and Coast City, and had even hacked into the Starling General database to personally carry out the tests. All of them came back with the same conclusion that the DNA on it belonged to one Oliver Queen. Eventually, even she could no longer deny that the love of her life was dead.
Yet there he stood, at the bottom of the stairs. His face was gaunt and sunken. Dark circles lined the underside of his eyes, and his face was covered in weeks-old stubble. He was dressed in an ill-fitting white collared shirt that clearly wasn't his, and his trousers were tattered at several places. His usual brand of broodiness was gone, and in its place was an expression of pure lethargy and exhaustion. There was a strange gait in his step, and Felicity suspected that he had torn something in his knee… Again.
"Oliver?" she said in a tremulous voice.
"Yeah, it's me," he replied.
Felicity took a quivering step back, her hands finding their way to the side of her desk, gripping it so hard that her knuckles turned white. She didn't trust her legs not to give up on her.
"You died," she whispered accusingly, feeling hot, angry tears pooling in her eyes. "Merlyn found Ra's sword with your blood on it."
"I almost did. But Maseo saved me." It only took a few strides before Oliver was standing right in front of her desk. The broken, bruised, and battered man that stood in front of her was hardly recognisable - his broad shoulders were slumped, and he looked so tired.
She had spent countless nights trying to envision how their reunion would go. One of her favourite scenarios was the one where Oliver would turn up in the backseat of her Beetle after a long day at work, mirroring her first meeting with him as the Arrow – only this time, he wouldn't be bleeding out onto the leather seats. "It's done," he would rasp, his eyes exceptionally piercing under the dim lighting of the car park, as she melted into his embrace, his strong arms encircling her waist.
But no amount of conjuring up of make-believe scenarios would prepare her for the real thing. Felicity's legs were out of commission, and for the first time in ages, her MIT-worthy brain was bereft of a response. She didn't feel the need to babble uncontrollably - which never, ever happened.
"I need a minute," she managed to choke out, sinking onto the desk. Oliver just stood there, his expression reticent, hands limp in his pocket. There were so many things that she wanted to ask him. Where were you? What happened? How are you alive? Do the League know that you're not dead? How could you disappear after saying that you loved me? How could you leave for weeks - for months, after promising to come back? But she didn't, and just sat there mutely as the onslaught of painful memories assailed her.
Moments later, Felicity managed to find her voice again. "You died," she repeated, "you told me you loved me and then you died." Her voice rose in an angry crescendo as her hands balled into fists at her side. That sudden confession had been the only thing she could think of for the past few weeks. She had believed him, and had held on to the hope that he would return, if only for her.
Oliver had the decency to look abashed. "Felicity, I -"
She cut him off with a strike to his left cheek, the blow resounding through the starkly empty foundry. "Don't you dare justify what you did! I told you to kill him, Oliver. I told you to kill him, and then come home. Which part of that did you not understand?"
Oliver averted his gaze. "I tried, Felicity," he murmured softly. "I really did."
"Why didn't you say something? Something, anything, to tell us that you were still alive. I was waiting for you. Even when John and Roy told me that you were gone, I didn't believe them. I waited for weeks and weeks before I finally accepted that maybe - just maybe, you weren't coming back."
Oliver continued staring off into the distance, his face an enigmatic mask. Felicity felt her heart clench. She knew this broken man even better than she knew herself. There was no way he wouldn't make contact if he could. He wouldn't want his friends to worry. He wouldn't want her to worry.
"Was it because you didn't think you would survive?"
His taciturn response confirmed her fears as he slowly turned his head to face her, his eyes meeting hers in affirmation. "It was bad. I had nicked a major artery, and they couldn't stop the blood. I was slipping in and out of consciousness for weeks. And I did have a couple of broken bones from when I got kicked off the cliff."
She gaped at him, her mind reeling in horror. "You what, now? How are you even standing, Oliver? You need to sit down and let me have a look at your wound. What if there's an internal injury? You could be bleeding out right now and no one would know until you -"
Oliver placed his hands on her shoulders, snapping her out of her diatribe. "I'm fine now Felicity. Tatsu made sure of that before she let me return to Starling City."
The seemingly platonic gesture didn't feel platonic at all. She felt a tingling warmth spreading out from where his hands were, and felt her cheeks redden. If Oliver noticed that, he didn't give any indication whatsoever.
"You know what they say about seeing your loved ones for the last time before you die?" Oliver paused, his head tilting slightly to the right, just as he always did when he was trying to gather his thoughts. "Well, I saw my parents. And Thea. But the last person I saw before I slipped into unconsciousness was you, Felicity. And I fought so hard to stay awake because I wanted to come back here. To you." A sad smile flitted across his lips. "I just didn't think that I would take so long."
Felicity just stood there in silence, her mind reeling, as this emotionally stunted man bared his soul to her. A crystalline tear escaped from behind the confines of her lashes, and Oliver's thumb was there to brush it away just before it slipped past her cheek.
"Remember how I said that I had to be alone?" Felicity nodded, an almost imperceptible movement. But Oliver caught it. "Turns out I was never really alone. You were with me every step of the way. When I wanted nothing more than to give in to the darkness, I would hear your voice telling me to get up, and fight back. When the pain was unbearable, I would feel your hand in mine, telling me to hold on. You are the reason that I'm still here, Felicity. And I know I've blown any chance of anything happening between us, and you're with Palmer, but… I just wanted to let you know. Needed to let you know."
In love with Palmer? What? Oliver's words didn't make any sense to her until she recalled the night of her work dinner with Ray, where she had managed to secure a business deal with one of the largest oil magnates in the city. They went back to the office after that and she had kissed him, deciding to throw caution to the wind. It didn't mean anything. She had felt good about herself and Ray was there, he was attractive, and he was more emotionally available than Oliver would ever be. She remembered noticing a surreptitious movement behind her, but it was so fleeting that she had thought it was the lighting playing tricks on her. Now she knew it wasn't.
Oh, Oliver Queen. You stupid, stupid, man.
Grabbing him by the lapels of his shirt, Felicity pulled him in for a searing kiss. His lips were pliant and yielding under hers, and she could feel the little bumps and ridges decorating his parched lips. This kiss wasn't at all like their first kiss at the hospital. That kiss was urgent, passionate, turbulent; it was Oliver desperately trying to hang on to something that was slipping away while knowing that he wouldn't be able to. This one was passionate, too, but it was filled with so much more. Bitterness, anguish, pain, love - Felicity poured everything she had bottled up the past few weeks into the kiss. And Oliver did too.
He let the kiss convey all the things that he had always wanted to tell her.
I'm sorry.
I'm an idiot.
I love you.
And Felicity heard them. She heard them loud and clear. It took him ages, but she had been waiting. She would wait forever, if that's what it would take. Felicity had known, since the moment he walked into the office with a laptop and a bunch of lies, that she was truly, completely, irrevocably, in love with him.
"Don't you ever leave me again," she whispered into his lips.
"Never."