Title: Don't You Dare Look Back (Just Keep Your Eyes On Me)
Category: Arrow
Genre: Romance
Ship: Felicity/Oliver
Chapter Rating: pg-13
Overall Rating: mature
Chapter Word Count: 1,531
Prompt: "Prompt from the song Shut Up and Dance With Me: 'Don't you dare look back, just keep your eyes on me.' " — fluffy-cloud94
Summary: AU. A fic that takes the characters of Arrow and places them in the Sense8 universe. Not technically a crossover.
1. Found
Helena Bertinelli was the first to fall.
When her end came, it was not at all what any of us would have expected. We had been warned of the pain, of the sorrow so deep and devastating that accompanied the loss of one of our cluster. We had all thought — in the midsts of the danger that followed us everywhere — that we were prepared.
But Helena's end was not what any of us could have expected. She did not call for help. The end for her looked like a beginning, and in her last memories there was no fear. I — the weakest of us all — was with her, and I failed her.
New York City is everything I'd always thought it would be. I have never been here, visited the "Big Apple" with its towering sky scrapers and millions of cabs and Broadway and never ending motion. But with Helena in New York, I can experience it all. The cold sting of frost bites my cheeks, and she looks over at me and laughs at my expression.
"Don't tease," I tell her, wrinkling my nose in embarrassment.
"I've never seen anyone so happy to see snow. Most of the people here hate it, it makes catching a cab even more of a nightmare and gets your socks all wet."
"I've never seen snow, and besides the people here are ungrateful, they don't know how good they have it. At least their weather doesn't just go from hot to blazing hot. They should come to Nevada sometime."
Helena laughs again, and I smile. It's nice to see her happy, the shadows of the nightmares and demons that hunt her fade even for a minute. Her mind is anything but an open book, but there are moments, when sleep and exhaustion leave her mind unguarded and the nightmares that plague her are as clear and present to me as if I lived them. In those moments, I can't help but wonder at the strength inside of her.
She calls his name out in her sleep sometimes, her voice hoarse and a sob getting stuck in her throat.
"You're adorable," she declares, something she's taken to doing any time she finds one of my mannerisms endearing. I continue to walk after her, marveling the cold crunch of snow beneath my feet, only to find that I leave no footprints behind. Our strange connection never ceases to amaze me, the way I can feel and see and smell everything Helena can. The way I can be in a city I've never set foot in and still haven't. I think this is my favorite part. "Visiting" someone had called it, another one of us who belonged outside our cluster.
Helena's favorite part is the "sharing", the way she can access our thoughts and skills. Once, when she was drunk and alone in her small apartment, she joked how the two of us could make the perfect team. Her strength and ability to fight, and my intellect and knowledge of computers. "If only we weren't both so broken," she'd lamented, taking another swig of the recently almost empty bottle of vodka she cradled in her hands.
Yes, if only were weren't both so broken.
—
I come back to her later that night, when the loud silence of seclusion and heat of the Nevada desert make it impossible for me to stay in my own body. I do what I always do when I my own reality becomes too much. I visit Helena.
She's drunk again. Tequila this time, her intoxication infects me, makes me swoon and stumble. I don't like being drunk. I've never liked the way it slows down my mind and makes my vision fuzzy, my hearing slow as if I've stuffed cotton in my ears. I'm a bad drunk, but Helena is even worse.
I want to leave, so I search for the familiarity of my own body, the sticky sweat that makes my clothes cling to my skin and makes the air unbearable to breathe. I panic when I can't find it, when the cold chill of the New York winter battles with the slow fire of the tequila in my belly. No. Not my belly. Her belly.
My mind, dazed and slow as it is now, cannot make the distinction between Helena Bertinelli and Felicity Smoak, cannot find its way back to me. Our thoughts become entangled, an endless loop of inebriated consciousness that leaves me unsure of where she ends and I begin. Right now, we are one.
Snow is flowing in through the open window, the dainty curtains that we never thought to change from the last tenant doing nothing to keep the cold powder outside. We should get up and close it, but our limbs feel detached from us. We can't remember how to get up.
Each thought comes slowly to us, the dark apartment fading in and out of focus. One moment it's there, the next there's nothing but darkness. The cold is uncomfortable, it bites our skin and makes us shiver despite the pleasant warmth from the alcohol. How strange, that we can feel so warm and yet so cold at the same time.
We're waiting. We did something today that was stupid and reckless. We know we should run, but dismiss the thought almost as soon as it appears. We knew what we were doing, just as surely as we know that running would only prolong the inevitable. Maybe that's why we decided to drink this liquor, to make ourselves feel good in these last hours.
Last hours…
The realization hits hard, and for a moment our awareness splinters apart.
Whatever Helena did today has led them to her. I look around frantically, hoping that someone has heard our struggles, that one of us will come and help her. But Helena has closed herself off. The crippling amount of alcohol in her system as potent a blocker to the rest of our cluster as a mind altering drug. I'm sure that if I hadn't come when I did, I too would have been kept at bay.
As it is, her mind reaches out to me, a wailing pit of guilt and despair. I can't fight it. The emotions are simply too strong for me to fend off. I drown in her.
The door flies open with a resounding crash, kicked open with enough force that the wooden frame breaks and splinters. Tiny bits of it fly across small space of the living and pelt our face. We squint against the sudden flood of light, blinking slowly. A frown pulls down the corners of our lips at the abruptness and violence of their entrance. So violent and unnecessarily showy. Did we not contact them ourselves, give them our location and description with such detail only a fool would not be able to find us? What ploy could we possibly have that they had to fear? We sigh and roll our eyes, regretting the action when it makes us more dizzy .
They're all the same. Simplistic humans too afraid of their sister species to act with rationality. It almost makes us smug, to know that they only reason they've found us so soon is because we let them.
They brought a squad of well armed soldiers, enough that even if we weren't hopelessly drunk, we wouldn't have been able to fight our way out of this. They are theatrical, but not stupid.
"There she is," someone says, and we shiver violently. We know that voice…
The world spins violently as we're wrenched to our feet, the hands the grip our upper arms so rough they're sure to leave bruises. The voice that we recognize but can't identify speaks again. "Be careful," he admonishes, as if by the controlling the roughness of his soldiers' actions it will somehow make the terrible things he does to our kind any less horrid.
We're suddenly reminded of our father, an evil man who was not ashamed of the things he did. But as cruel as he could be, he knew that he was truly bad. With the blood of his victims flecked on his face, he had smiled at us and told us the only useful thing he'd ever said; A man who is evil and shows it is honest, but there is no greater danger than a man who does evil things and believes himself the savior.
Our head rolls to the side, props against our shoulder, and we can see who the voice belongs to.
We know for a fact that we've never met him personally, despite how familiar his voice is. His dark hair is flecked with gray at the temples, with olive toned skin, and a muscular physique. It's the kind of face that should be handsome, but is marred by his eyes. Flat black circles, without even the benefit of a cold glint buried somewhere within the dark color. It makes us shudder.
He makes a small gesture, a casual flutter of his fingers in the direction of our ruined doorway, and we're being dragged towards it. We fall to the darkness before we cross the threshold.
A/N: So I've this little idea stuck in my head for a quite a while, ever since I finished watching Sense8. If you haven't watched it yet I seriously recommend that you give it a shot. It's fantastic.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to read this. Please leave reviews, they feed the muse!
-Owls