"Trauma impels people both to withdraw from close relationships and to seek them desperately. The profound disruption in basic trust, the common feelings of shame, guilt, and inferiority, and the need to avoid reminders of the trauma that might be found in social life, all foster withdrawal from close relationships. But the terror of the traumatic event intensifies the need for protective attachments. The traumatized person therefore frequently alternates between isolation and anxious clinging to others. […] It results in the formation of intense, unstable relationships that fluctuate between extremes."
- Judith L. Herman
Chapter 1: stronger than grief
"Some stories you carry around in your heart. Others live in the throat, in the skull, in the fangs — all worthy places, too."
- Natalia Antonova, "His Sin, Her Soul" from The Second Pass
Years ago, before he really knew her, he used to look at Felicity and wonder if she ever got that suffocating urge to just catapult herself out of her life.
He knew Sara did. That she needed to pick up and leave sometimes. But Sara's need to move was a fierce kind of reach for freedom. For new places, adventures, people. It was how she recognized home: by missing it. In Oliver, the need to run was not so noble, nor as honest. Escape for him was just another way of not caring. Another way of being too exhausted to live, but too stubborn to die.
Sometimes the random 4 am thought would make him wonder what something like that would look like on someone like Felicity. ( maybe this was the place from where all his fantasies about going away with her started. ) It used to be a half-hearted kind of speculation, because he'd never really believed Felicity needed escape to be free. She had looked as perfectly at her ease in her cubicle as she had in her office. She had made herself belong in the foundry. Even on Lian Yu, at the edge of the world, she'd made herself belong, because despite everything, he'd been glad to see her there.
To someone like him, who had had survived the world by shedding his sense of self time after time, the way she made the world fit her, and not the other way around, had seemed like a miracle. Her ability to plant her feet, stare at anyone dead in the eye and say ' No. You move. ' had been so surprising that it managed to catch him by surprise every time.
( It's how he knows it's real when she says it's over . He had expected it the whole time and it still left him breathless.)
These days he watches her her from the other end of the bunker, the light of the screens painting her face with a subtle blue hue that makes her look like she's six feet under water, and wonders how much it cost her to plant her feet this time. ( There's always a price. Felicity doesn't need to go anywhere to be free, but she's not one to linger on the scene of the crime either. It's just harder to notice with her because there's no hesitation between her making up her mind and her willingness to pay for it .) He look for the toll of it in her eyes, but he doesn't have a name for what he sees there. The dark smudges of exhaustion under her eyes, the way she can spend hours on end without saying a single word, but keeps chasing the next wrong to make right with a touch of obsessive energy, makes Oliver wonder if it would have been easier for her to leave. Better, maybe? He knows she has it in her. She's left him before plenty of times.
It still feels a little strange. Felicity, leaving him….
She's never left him on the battlefield. She put her life in his hands long before he had any idea what to do with that kind of trust, other than to put his body between her and anything threatening her. It used to terrify him, how she just jumped and trusted him to catch her, after what had felt like a flat three seconds after meeting him. ( there's a kind of irony there: that she trusted him with her life but not with her heart. But it's too sad and though he might believe he's too broken to be loved, he can never believe Felicity capable of that kind of lie. If she'd thought that, she wouldn't have been with him .)
It seems a cruel cosmic joke now, that he'd never understood how ' if you're not leaving, I'm not leaving ' and ' this far and no further ' could live fully within the same person, without contradiction.
He understands when she leaves him and understands Felicity better when she stays in the end, to pick up the pieces. And even that time, she manages to catch him by surprise.
Always the surprise with you…
She tries very hard to act like herself. It works on Curtis, on people who don't know her as well as he does, but there is this thin cloud of perpetual sadness pinching the corners of her lips, hollowing out her eyes that Oliver cannot miss. He can't do anything about it either. Unless they're getting too close to having a real conversation – in which case she'll babble her way into random tangents until he takes a hint and backs off - she talks little and says less. Their silences are heavy, the unsaid words accumulating in corners, like shiny little knives piling up in the dark.
He can sense her eyes on him sometimes and knows she bites her lips instead of speaking. He feels he has to lock his knees every time she opens her mouth: the room might explode in blood one day, if she lets out everything she has been chewing on.
The room might explode in blood without her ever saying a single word: between the two of them there is enough loss and anger to raze the whole city to the ground.
But they don't talk about that either.
There is something… else happening.
He can sense it, the way he can sense a storm coming: the change of the wind, the static in the thickening air. It's in the way she sets apart the variables and leaves all the choices to him, instead of making the best one herself. In the things she says sometimes, about herself, and how they make him feel like she's walking at an angle, tilted to the wind, a breath away from falling. Sometimes Oliver feels like taking her by the shoulders and yelling in her face, 'J ust let me in. I'll do anything. I'll do anything for you, just ask me .'
It's wishful thinking, of course. Felicity doesn't ask for help anymore than he does. ( she explained it to him that night, after they found Palmer. Laying side by side, her thigh between his and her hand on his cheek, she'd let it go quietly, like a secret.
'I've been surviving on my own since I was a kid; it's habit.'
She'd said 'I'm sorry' and he'd said 'I love you' and that's how he'd ended up spending more of that night inside her than not. )
He wishes he were brave enough to just talk to her, but then remembers she might hate him and he doesn't want to give her a reason to actually say it.
He doesn't know how he would breathe through that.
But the tide turns on that too.
It's not something specific that changes his mind; no tangible cause or reason. It just happens. He looks at her hitting a dummy relentlessly one day, her stance perfect and her hits powerful; watches the angry bruises blooming over her knuckles days later, and remembers. He knows what happens to things that don't bend.
It's not an answer - there was no question – but it is a direction, a decision. She matters more than everything else he's afraid of.
( Later on he'll wonder if that moment was where it truly started )
He is thinking about the briefing on the urban restructuring projects for the Glades when he steps out of the elevator - which is why he doesn't immediately notice. But even these days, the first thing his eyes search for in any room is her, so when he spots her by the conference table, Oliver stops, taken aback.
She's slumped on the table, her head resting on her arms, her back bent at an angle that he knows will give her neck cramps when she wakes up. One of her bright pink heels has slipped off her foot and he can see her unpainted toes as he gets closer. She looks pale under the white lights of the bunker, and there's a little frown pulling her eyebrows together.
Even in her sleep she looks unhappy.
Oliver thinks about it for perhaps 10 minutes, and then makes up his mind. He takes off his jacket and hangs it on the back of one of the chairs so that he can move more easily. He crouches and pulls her in slowly towards him, so that her head moves to rest on his shoulder, wraps his arm around her back, the other under her knees and lifts her up with every bit of gentleness he's capable of. The weight of her in his arms startles him. She'd lost weight after she was shot, but gained it slowly, after. Now she feels almost too light for it to really be her , and suddenly there's a fist tightening where his throat used to be.
He's careful when he lays her on the bed, in the makeshift bedroom of the bunker. He covers her with a blanket, takes off her glasses and remaining shoe and places both of them neatly by the bed, before he tucks the blanket in around her feet the way she likes - a habit he'd picked up from when she was… when she couldn't shift the blanket on her own.
He walks out without a sound, wondering how he'll manage to talk to her about any of this, when she's gone from being fixed star of certainty into his sky, to becoming the absence under his feet.
In the end he doesn't need to worry, because his plans get derailed spectacularly.
It starts with him hearing her whimper from the other room. She's scared herself right out of sleep by the time he gets to the door to check on her.
She's sitting on the side of the bed, folded onto herself.
He kneels in front of her before he thinks better of it, hesitating for one moment before his hands settle on her arms. He keeps his voice low and reminds her to breathe, because she's not and it scares him. Felicity looks up, her eyes going straight through him. She looks like she has no idea where she even is for a moment and it's a wonder the sight of it doesn't knock him on his ass.
He rubs his hands up and down her bare arms, keeps talking to her. Tells her she's in the bunker, that she's safe and that she has to keep breathing. He wishes he had an ice cube to press against her palm, but he doesn't, so he cups the back of her neck, pressing his fingers against her skin with steady pressure.
"Oh my god…" her face crumbles and she bites her lip so hard that she almost breaks skin. She stands up so fast that she almost makes Oliver lose footing. Paces, shaking out her arms as if they're numb, passing a trembling hand through her hair a couple of times. She undoes her falling ponytail viciously when her fingers catch on it. He winces for her.
"I'm fine . Everything's fine." She nods a little to herself, as if she can ' mind over matter ' her way through it. She's been trying so hard at 'fine' for weeks; he honestly doesn't think he can stand to watch her try any harder.
"I'm sorry."
Oliver frowns. Sorry? What does she have to be sorry about?
"It's okay." He hears himself say anyway, even though nothing about this is okay. She's not okay – she's the farthest thing from it and for once, Oliver is the one who doesn't want to ignore the obvious. But before he can say anything she walks out. Oliver watches her go and then turns to where she forgot her shoes. One of them has tipped over to the side, the sharp heel looking elegant and dangerous, and for some reason it makes him want to scream.
He takes a breath and picks her shoes up instead, follows her out.
She's already settled on her chair, tapping the different keyboards and waking up her systems. She sits there with her hair a mess of waves, her lipstick faded and her mascara smudged around her eyes after having wiped her face dry, and all Oliver can think of is how she wears her lipstick like it's her uniform and thinks she's 'suiting up' every time she puts on a dress she loves. All that means nothing, really; she could be wearing pajamas for all Oliver cares, but the cognitive dissonance is in the fact that she doesn't seem to notice at all.
"So, I wasn't getting anywhere – or to anyone - using the old search algorithm, so last night I wrote another one."
"Last night." So no sleeping, then.
"Yeah. I added the new data that you picked up – and we've got something. I've got a couple of locations that might be worth checking out and this here, here and here are-"
He knows what she wants him to do. This is his que: to pretend. To look away. But he can't. It's been feeling like betrayal for too long.
Instead he walks over to her station, slowly, trying to keep the expression on his face as neutral as possible, and sets her shoes down by her chair. Felicity glances at him, as if giving into half-hearted curiosity as to how he's getting so close all of a sudden, and then blinks. She looks at her heels for long moments, their bright pink hue strangely harsh under the industrial lights of the bunker, then glances at her bare feet. She looks like she can't understand why she's seeing what she's seeing - until she does , and her toes curl in almost at the same time as her shoulders do.
There's something about the helplessness of watching the pain of someone he loves, that makes Oliver's bones feel heavy. Out of all the flavors of pain he's sampled, this is the one that he hates the most.
He wants to reach for her, lay a hand on her shoulder to remind her that he's still there. That he wants to help. That she's not alone. It seems to be the only thing left to them and he's desperate not to lose that too, but when Felicity purses her lips stubbornly and shakes her head, he knows it won't be that easy.
( Nothing has been for a while now; he's forgotten what easy feels like .)
The tears in her eyes don't fall. Of course they don't. She's too stubborn to cry in front of him.
"I'm becoming more and more of a scatterbrain these days, huh? No wonder we're having such a low success rate out there." Her voice is rough and her laughter strained. It takes two tries for her to slip her feet back in her shoes. "I don't mean you, by the way. You're doing great – though I think you might wanna cut down on the hours here a little bit, Mister Mayor. But time-off is not good for me. I haven't done nothing since I was 11 years old, maybe even before that, I'm just not used to it."
She combs her hands through her hair carelessly and pulls it back, wraps her elastic band around it four times. If he'd known nothing else about her, the tightness of her ponytail would have told him all he needs to know.
"I think we need to take a minute."
"No, we don't." Felicity counters quickly, and then tries to soften it with a smile that makes him want to look away. "I just told you, I wouldn't know what to do with it. And the SCPD finally has the full report on the activity we've noticed by the bay, so I've got actual real locations for you to check out. Two by the port and one in the industrial area just on the outskirts of the city. According to our not-so-friendly police force, there's been some unusual movements there lately, and they think it might be-"
"Felicity…"
" Stop saying my name like that!" She snaps, and Oliver tenses. He watches her grimace, her fingers pressing against her temples. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean that."
"Yes, you did."
She looks at him and he stares back, makes a careful study of her face. He knows it so well, he can trace every line fatigue has left on it, chronologically.
"You think just because we're not together anymore, I wouldn't be able to tell when you're unhappy? That i wouldn't know why?"
She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath. "I really need you to let this go, Oliver."
Those are the first words she's said to him in a while that feel honest.
He sighs, understanding; but not accepting. "I can't do that."
"Well, find a way to do it."
So he amends. "I could. But I won't."
Felicity narrows her eyes at him, lips pinched with barely contained anger and then turns back to her computers, the line of her shoulders tight with tension.
She's freezing him out. She's done it before.
"Remember last summer, how I wanted you to leave the room any time I had a nightmare I couldn't wake up from on my own? And you-"
"This is nothing like that!"
"-and you bought a water-gun and decided that you would spray me with it from the corner of the room, to wake me up, because you didn't want to leave me alone when I was like that?"
Her bottom lip shakes, but the look she's giving him is sharp with anger and hurt. And he remembers then, as if out of the blue, that the reason for their booby-trapped silences had been that unspoken agreement between them: that they wouldn't poke at each other's wounds. That they'd look away when they bled through the hastily made-up band aids slapped over them. They might have lost their relationship, but neither had wanted to lose the friendship that helped build it. And at first it had felt like a mercy, because it would still keep them around each other, but that feels so long ago that Oliver has almost forgotten why they ever thought it was a good idea.
And either way, he'd just destroyed it in one sentence.
For once, he's not sorry.
"That's not fair." She tells him slowly.
"No, it's not. But you're still my friend and I'm worried about you."
Felicity shakes her head minutely. "You don't get to be worried about me anymore."
He presses down on the irritation like he would on a particularly stubborn wound. "That's not your call to make."
She scoffs, gets up so fast the chair rolls backwards, and stalks away from him.
"That is rich coming from you."
Her words smart right as she means them to. It's why he ignores them. She's just trying to distract him.
"It's not going to just go away, Felicity." Oliver calls after her. "Whatever's going on with you – if you keep pretending it's not happening, it's just going to get worse."
"I'm fine."
"So you say."
"And this – this is the weirdest déjà vu ever, by the way." Felicity mumbles, the bitterness in her voice underscored by the fact that it cracks at the end. She's crumbling the papers scattered on the conference table in her haste to collect them and leave.
"You're the one that told me not to talk to you like you were other people." He reminds her. Felicity stops shoving her files into her bag, stops moving, stops breathing. He doesn't miss the way she's shaking. "I thought that went both ways."
She turns away from him, and Oliver feels guilt well up to the point where he can't ignore it anymore.
"You know, it's rude to throw someone's word in their face like that," she tells him quietly, leaning on the table with both hands, like that's the only thing holding her up. There's nothing in her voice, no accusation, no hurt. Maybe that's better.
"Never really been known for my manners." Not as Oliver Queen, nor as the vigilante. At least he's consistent.
She snorts. "Remember the old ladies in Tuscany?"
He does. For a moment it rather takes his breath away that she does.
They'd been staying in a random little town for the weekend. The whole sunday night the piazza had been filled with people dancing and eating from the various food stands propped around the town square, celebrating. They stayed up almost till dawn and on the bus back, Felicity sat on his lap because there were no other free seats. She'd fallen asleep a little, with her face tucked into his neck and it made the old women sitting in front of them smile. One of them patted his cheek as they got off to their stop, laughing between them, talking about ' i rari giovani gentiluomini' .
Felicity had loved it. She'd teased him about it for days.
She'd loved the fireworks that night too. He remembers it so vividly, how she'd taken his hand and held it so tight ...
Oliver curls his fingers into a fists.
" They thought you had great manners." She says, her voice low as if she's speaking to herself.
He can't breathe for a moment. But then she's settling her bag over her shoulder, and Oliver realizes he hadn't even noticed when she'd finished gathering her things and Oliver realizes that this is a distraction too.
This one Oliver can't swallow so easily. He can roll with the little sharp pokes. He's been dealing with them most his life - though he'd be lying if he said it's the same coming from her. But Felicity using their memories together to shove him off her is new.
It hurts…
"Alright. I understand." Slow. Deliberate. "You don't have to talk to me, but at least talk to someone, Felicity."
Maybe it comes out a bit harsher than he intended. Maybe not. It doesn't seem to touch her, either way.
She scoffs. "Oh, yeah? Assuming that you have a point, which you don't - who would I talk to? John's gone. I can't put any of this on Thea, because she deserves a clean break if she wants one and Curtis is great, but he really doesn't have a frame of reference for any of it." She shakes her head, the expression on her face opaque, as if the lonely picture she is painting with her words does not belong to her. "Lyla already has enough on her plate, and Laurel …"
Her voice cracks then, and Oliver looks away, shifts on his feet, takes a breath.
They stand there ruins of who they used to be, unable to reach out to the other to do something about it.
Unable maybe, but not unwilling to try.
"I know that I wasn't… that I made mistakes and wasn't the best…" best what? Boyfriend? Fiancé? Teammate? He'd picked up each of these titles and fucked them up, so really, what was he trying to say here? Oliver swallows and tries again. "I wasn't the best partner. And not even a good friend to you before that, but I can be better." This here and now is the easy part, because he means it. "Just let me help, Felicity. I just want to help."
Felicity sighs and shakes her head just a fraction. Passes a hand over her ponytail, eyes closed.
"I know you do, but this isn't something you or anyone can fix. I'm… I'm just tired." She admits it with a kind of helplessness that has just a little too much effort behind it. "It's fine."
He stares at her hard, without blinking, as if he can make something real crawl up her throat by sheer strength of will. "You're lying."
The look she gives him could almost be surprised. Her lips quirk upwards in a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. It feels like being touched on the cheek with the flat part of a knife.
"You really want to go there?" she says flatly.
Oliver clenches his jaw. Some weeks ago she would have said something along the lines of ' well, you should know ', so he counts himself lucky that her pain has dulled enough that she doesn't want to hurt him with it anymore. He waits, instead. Waits for her to say something else, something real , but nothing comes and then he realizes that this is it. This is it for him.
This far, and no further.
(There is always a price. Always. )
Oliver takes a deep breath, presses the heel of his palm against his eyes. This time, just like every other time before it, he can't make her do anything. If alone is where she thinks she needs or wants to be, then he can't force her out of it. But he's going to pay the price right along with her.
"Alright. Okay. No talking. Let's not... fucking talk anymore. Okay."
It's how he ends up sitting on the chair next to hers on the conference table, a bottle of vodka between them, two glasses and her bag forgotten on the ground. They're both alone in here, but they can be alone together. He doesn't think about it too long - what little sense there is in it will unravel if he does.
"I won't say anything at all; I'll just… be here, with you. How's that sound?"
Felicity doesn't answer. But she's not leaving yet, so he takes that as acceptance.
"John and I would do this sometimes." He continues, softer now, as he uncaps the bottle. He tries to remind himself this shouldn't hurt, that it's not an ending. That John is still out there, hurting and alone like them, but alive - no matter how much he sees his ghost in Felicity's eyes.
"Boys only, huh?"
He huffs, tries to smile but fails. He's too heavy for it. "Something like that."
It's not like that at all, actually. They've gone out for drinks plenty of times as a team.
He and Felicity on the other hand, are used to do a different kind of drinking.
Oliver keeps his eyes stubbornly locked on the glass in front of him, because he is sure that they're both thinking about the last time they had a strong drink like this together and he doesn't want to see the memory written out on her face; same as she probably doesn't want to see it in his.
( It comes anyway, because his mind doesn't care about his sanity . It had been tequila in Ivy Town.
Body shots had seemed like an excellent idea, because nothing had seemed better than licking salt off the side of her soft breast except taking a gentle bite of it.
He'd never before laughed that much during sex. Or seen anything hotter than her sitting up on him, hands pressed to his pecks to hold him down, nails biting into his skin, riding him so hard they shook the whole bed, till he sobbed and saw little starbursts when he closed his eyes.
The memory of it now is ridiculous, and it feels like holding on tight to barbed wire.)
Oliver passes her the glass slowly, maybe because he expects her to protest. She doesn't. She just reaches for her drink and downs it in a breath, scrunching up her face at the taste. Vodka was never her favorite and she never made it a secret. For some reason, Oliver always found that hilarious.
Felicity shakes her head and purses her lips in distaste. "Ugh. Gross."
But she holds out her glass for another shot. Oliver obliges, pouring for himself too.
"No red wine close at hand. Sorry."
"Takes too long to get drunk on wine anyway." She looks at him with glassy eyes. "What's that word you use? The one in Russian?"
"Prochnost."
"Yes, that. 'Strength', right?"
"Yeah."
The twist of her lips comes along unwilling, soaked through in sadness. "Great. Let's toast to that. Prochnost."
She butchers the pronunciation enough that it's funny, and downs the second glass all at once, just like the first. Oliver keeps his eyes on her as he drinks his own, the second shot waking a warm spark in his belly, spreading the heat outwards. Getting shitfaced with her wasn't what he'd intended when he broke out the vodka, but Felicity sets a fast pace and he feels he can't leave her alone in that either.
"To 2016." She says at their third shot, slow enough that Oliver knows she's good and buzzed. "Just be over already, you have made your point !"
Oliver smiles. He can't help it.
She's tired, drained and faded - and possibly three more shots away from a good cry, but she's still Felicity. She's still Felicity and whenever he lets himself feel it, he has to stop himself from rubbing a hand over his chest where the ache blooms.
In his own way he's still pretending, because he's still as much in love with her as ever and he still wants her back. It all makes being around her hurt in a strange, fractional way, like walking around barefoot on shards of glass, sometimes feeling it, sometimes not [1] .
After the third shot, he starts feeling warm and loose, his thoughts slower along the paths of his mind. He gets up to get them both two small bottles of water - mostly for Felicity's benefit. She drinks the water in smaller sips than the vodka.
He asks her about John. John is as good a topic as any.
She still can't believe that he's all the way on the other side of the world – it's in her voice when she talks about him, a sort of shell-shocked incredulity sticks to her words.
So maybe John isn't that safe after all. But then again, there's a shell-shocked aftertaste to everything about Felicity these days.
Oliver's eyes wander and fix on the costumes hanging on the mannequins on the other side of the room and he can't tear them away. He's edging on a pit he knows well, he could easily fall into it. There's almost a sense of familiarity about it. About the abyss staring him hard in his face is almost a friend now. He looks over at where Felicity is sitting, glass precariously dangling from her fingers, bare feet looking pale and cold, her eyes fixed ahead with that thousand yard stare going nowhere that makes cold chills rattle up his backbone.
He can't fall. Can't slip or give in. He has to hold on and keep an eye on her, because she's right there with him, tipping over too, but no abyss may ever have her as long as he's breathing.
She passes a hand through her hair as if to brush away some thought she'd never confess, and then flinches, when that is not enough. It's an exercise in self control, watching the expressions her face goes through. How lip-shaking misery changes into anger and exhaustion until she slams her glass hard on the table. It slides away and falls off from the other side, shattering.
Neither one of them cares much. Oliver actually likes the sound of it. Something here should be breaking - as long as it's not them.
"I'm tired of thinking!" The words burst out of her angrily, if not a little desperately, as if they'd been in the middle of a conversation. It doesn't surprise him. She does that all the time. "Let's not… not fucking think for a while."
That's a strange choice of words, in Oliver's opinion. Especially considering their history with how to get her not to think. It makes him frown, unsure of what to do ( what she means, what she wants ). Felicity though, gets on her feet. She stumbles only a little. He reaches to steady instinctively, but before he can fully stand, she's in his space – too close for comfort or safety - and he stops, sits back down, looks up at her with his heart in his throat.
The heat radiates from his stomach to his lungs, thighs; spreads through his every vein. His fingertips feel numb.
He knows it's not the alcohol.
"You said you wanted to help." The unfallen tears make her eyes shine like glinting stones under the sun.
"I did." More than anything. "I do."
"What's stopping you?"
Oliver heaves a breath, leans forward, just a little bit. "Felicity…"
It sounds like he's pleading, but he has no idea what he's asking for. Something gentle maybe….
She shuffles closer still, the flaring orange skirt of her dress fluttering around her thighs, against his jeans. Her leg is so close, he can feel the heat of her skin against the back of his hand. So close and open, for the first time in so long, that he can see the hurt in her eyes, begging to be wiped away.
Uncertainty flickers there too, cheeks heating with embarrassment when he hesitates a moment too long. A second more and she'll retreat, thinking he doesn't want her, so Oliver lets go of a shaky breath and touches the backs of his fingers to the soft skin just over her knee and tries to remember how to get another breath back into his lungs.
She sighs, skims her fingers down his arm. Need hisses inside him like hot metal dipped in water.
He knows what this moment is. He's always known a bad idea when he's stood in front of one. Without exception, he's known. So he is 110 percent positive that what's staring at him full in the face right now with the wide blue eyes of the woman he loves, is one of the worst ideas he's ever had. He knows, because he wants it so badly he can hardly breathe, even though he can already taste the ashes of it in the back of his mouth.
"Fucking, not thinking?" his voice is so thick and heavy, it makes its way up with difficulty, scraping along his throat.
Felicity bends her knee, touches it to the inside of his thigh. His fingers slip to the back of her knee without any thought, just desire floating in warmth. There, where her skin is so soft it makes him tremble a little.
He wants her so much it feels like starvation. He misses every part of her, even the screaming ones. He wants all of it. All of her. Even the faint air of disappointment that hangs around her shoulders like a second skin; even her greyness and that layer of grief, fine as ash, just beneath the surface. He wants to hold her until she stops hurting. Kiss her until she blooms alive beneath him, until there is no world beyond the two of them and what they make with their bodies. He wants her to scoop him out of his body the way she used to, the way only she can.
He wants , but he's afraid.
Afraid of her eyes, how dark they are and how they have none of the love that used to warm them before. He's afraid to touch her for fear of bruising something far more precious that might lurk beneath her anger and her hurt. He's afraid for himself and what will be left of him after this, because he knows her better than to think this changes anything. But that's an afterthought.
He's afraid and she's empty, and they really are quite a pair.
I just want to help...
When he was on the island, there came a point when Oliver sort of- lost his capacity for feeling. The guilt, the concern, the shame - even the fear fell away, and he woke up to a sharp, ruthless sort of living. He'd walked through hell leaving behind the piece of himself with the capacity for caring, and that's how he'd survived. When he came back home, some of it had come back to him, but there had been so many times when he'd done horrible things to people, people he loved, and felt nothing. Times when he used to think there wasn't enough of a person left in him to care. That maybe he just couldn't .
Or maybe he had been born selfish.
Either way, when the gaping holes inside him left no energy for the struggle of living, he'd survived off the easy things instead. He had taken and taken and there had been no guilt. And it had felt good. It had felt like something that wasn't fucking awful.
Oliver looks up from where his hand is drawing little circles on her thigh, to her face - and there she is: a shadow of the woman he fell in love with. She looks back at him, beautiful, terrible, starving from the soul, and Oliver realizes there is no truth beyond this: he loves her.
He can scoop up all the parts of himself and set them side by side, and all of them love her. The old parts and the ones that grew in the empty places love her. His ruthless ones and the ugly ones, his goodness and his violence and everything in between. Even his solitude loves her.
He slides his hand up the inside of her thigh and she tilts her head to the side, looking at him through heavy lids. He finds her where she's warm and alive, his thumb pressing down, and her nails drag over the skin of his shoulders. She grabs fistfuls of his T-shirt, her bottom lip caught with her teeth. He's sweating, hands shaking. She straddles him in the chair, thighs on either side of his hips, arms around his neck. His hand finds the back of her neck, gathers her hair into a loose fist and brings her face close.
He wants to stay there with her pressed against him, breathing the air from her lips for hours, but she leans in, her lips fitting to his, her tongue sliding over them… and Oliver falls back with the feel of it all.
He lets it become simple again. She needs, he gives, they both take and that is it. That's it. If easy is what she wants, he will give it. If not caring is how she manages to take one breath after another, he will help her. He will breathe into her with his own lungs if he has to.
Whatever you need. Anything. I'll do anything. … If it's you asking…
They say if you get hungry enough, you start eating your own heart. When she kisses him like she wants to eat him alive, Oliver believes it. He kisses her back with the same hunger, no apologies, no pretenses. He loved her when she tasted of summer, he will kneel in front of her pain and love her when she tastes of war.
He knows no other way.
[1] Scherezade Siobhan, from "Father, Husband"
[1] Charles Bukowski