mylunarsolstice asked: Her fingers reached up and touched the glass and she watched him mimick her.
THIS WAS SUPPOSE TO BE ALL ANGST! Every little stinking bit of it. The prompt was part of mine and FZ's angst battle fest thingy but I got a different plot bunny from it and this masterpiece (kidding, word vomit) was born. Conceived. Created.
It's kinda out there. Weird but just go with it. Please.
Thanks for reading!
Reviews feed the muse!
Her fingers reached up and touched the glass and she watched him mimick her.
For years and years all she had seen looking back at her in the mirror was him.
Everytime she walked passed a mirror she would glance over at it, thinking that maybe this time she would see herself, dark hair and blue eyes staring back at her.
But it was always him.
The only way she knew what she looked like was because of photographs. Cameras never lied.
Mirrors did.
The first time she had looked in the mirror she thought it was a window and tried to touch him, talk to him. He always did whatever she did. She called her mother over and tried to tell her of the boy in the mirror. He mother looked at her like she was crazy and took her to a psychiatrist.
For years, Felicity took medicine but they never changed anything. The boy in the mirror was always there.
She tried talking to him one time. But the only shapes she could see him make were the ones she made with her mouth. The words echoing in her ears her own.
She thought that she was a boy for the longest time. Her reflection grew up with her, danced when she danced. All he could do was copy her moves. The one thing she tried though was being naked in front of the mirror. That was the one thing her looking glass puppet never did- change clothes.
It didn't matter the reflective surface, a mirror, a window, a TV, what she was wearing (or wasn't wearing), her mirror boy always wore the same thing: a dark green leather jacket.
As she grew up, she realized how handsome he was. Dark, dirty blond hair, crystalline deep blue eyes. A sharp jaw bone.
When she was twelve, she noticed something different about him. Felicity had stopped looking in mirrors when she was seven, knowing that she would never see herself. But one glance and she was dumbstruck from the change. Most people would have never noticed it. But Felicity was bonded to him in this bizarre way.
He was growing a beard.
Oliver, she called him for the dark olive of his jacket, was about four years her senior, as much as she could guess. But darker hair covered that nice jaw and it made her pause. Carefully she ran her hand over her cheek, feeling the smoothness under her palm but watching the hair bend and wave under his.
This was proof that he was real. He wasn't an imagination or hallucantion as she had always feared. Oliver had never changed before.
Then came the time when she turned sixteen. For her birthday, an aunt had sent her an antique looking glass, gilded with silver. It was beautiful, and yet Felicity knew she would never need it. Not with Oliver as her reflection.
As she went to put it down, it slipped off the table and shattered against the hardwood floor.
While lamenting over the loss of the beautiful mirror, and cleaning up the sharp shards of glass, she heard a voice call her name.
"Felicity."
She looked around, but only her mother was next to her.
"Mom, did you say my name?"
"No, sweetheart, I didn't. Why?"
"I thought i heard someone say my name." Felicity went back to cleaning. Then she heard it again, louder.
"Felicity!"
"What!" She cried in response, whirling around. There still was no one. Her mother looked at her carefully.
"Felicity, are you all right?" Her mother approached as one would approach a spooked horse.
"Mom. Mom, I'm alright. I guess I"m just imagining things."
The voice called again and again, but each time she ignored it. That action had a price though. Felicity couldn't sleep because of the voice in her head. At 2 am, she gave up, pattering into the bathroom. She leaned against the counter top, hands bracing her up. She washed her face until the voice called again, "Felicity!"
This one was the loudest. She looked up, glancing at Oliver.
Who was mouthing her name at her.
Startled, she backed up, banging against the wall. "Felicity." He said, softer. She couldn't help but stare at him.
"You can talk?"
"Felicity."
"How come you never talked back to me?"
"Felicity."
"Why are you talking now?"
"Felicity."
"WILL YOU STOP SAYING MY NAME?!" She could see him sort of sigh.
"Felicity."
"Is Felicity the only word you know?"
"Felicity."
Felicity shook her head. "I guess that means yes. Can you blink?"
Oliver was silent. She looked up at him blinking rapidly. Felicity couldn't help but laugh at the ridiculous sight.
"Okay, okay, you can blink. I'll ask the questions and you can blink once for yes, twice for no. Okay?"
Oliver blinked.
"Is Felicity the only word you can say?"
One.
"Okay. Why is not that you're only talking to me? No wait that's not a yes or no question. Can you hear me? That's an obvious answer of course you can hear me, because you wouldn't be responding if you couldn't hear me."
"Felicity."
She breathed in. "Are you trapped?"
Yes.
"How can I-Can I free you?"
Yes.
Felicity thought a long time about how she could word a 'how' question into a yes or no question. Nothing came to mind.
"Did I do something today that let you speak to me?"
Yes
Felicity thought back to the first time she heard him. She had been cleaning up glass shard from the...
"The mirror! I broke the mirror. Is that why you can say my name?"
Yes
Her mind was now racing a mile a minute. "By breaking a mirror I was able to have him talk to me. Perhaps if I break more mirrors he can go free. Am I right? I break the mirror, you can go free."
No.
"But I thought breaking the mirror had you talking."
Yes
"Oliver! Make up your mind. If I break this mirror, can you talk to me more?"
Yes.
"Okay, here goes nothing." She grabbed a wrench from the tool drawer in the kitchen, bringing it back to the bathroom. With one hard swing, she cracked it, the noise making her flinch.
"Seven." Oliver spoke to her. "Can you say anymore?" She spoke to the different facets in the spiderweb.
No.
Felicity hit it again
"Seven times seventy."
She was reaching back to swing a third time when her mother came in the room.
"Felicity! What are you doing?!"
Felicity was torn. The last time she had told her mother about Oliver, she had ended up with millions of pills to take. So she broke a rule she had always kept with her mother.
She lied.
"There was a spider and I missed and broke the mirror. I'm sorry."
Donna sighed. "Okay, sweetheart. But this is two mirrors in one day. You know what they say about mirrors. Breaking one means seven years of bad luck"
At her mothers words, Felicity's eyes swung to Olivers. There had to be a connection with what he could say and the old saying. He blinked once.
Yes.
Could he hear her thoughts? Can you hear me? She asked. Oliver just looked at her, not blinking. No, he couldn't , he could follow her train of thought though.
Making sure her mother had left, she whispered to Oliver. "I'm going to get you out. And soon."
It would take her ten more years to fulfill her promise.
Felicity had rarely been a rule breaker. There had been this one time in freshman year she had hacked into the school's system to change a particular bully's grade. But that was just desserts. And they never caught her.
Now her mission was to help Oliver.
And so every mirror she saw, she broke. The first mirror after that night was the girl's bathroom mirror. She got over to the boy's before the principal came down and stopped her. She was suspended for a week and had to pay for the mirror.
Her mother was deeply upset because those mirrors were expensive. Donna had to work later that whole month just to pay for them.
Felicity never broke a public mirror after that.
But now Oliver could nod and shake his head, no more watching for blinks. She learned a lot about him, as much as she could. His favorite color was green (which is why the jacket was that color) his favorite sport was archery ("Are you sure you're not Robin Hood" to which the answer was "no") and he was cursed. Nothing else he could tell her with yes or no questions. And any question about his curse besides the words "Seven times Seventy" he couldn't reply to. No yeses and no nos. Just a blank stare. Felicity figured that was part of his curse.
After that one incident in school, Felicity stuck to the junkyard. There she would break mirrors of cars, freeing Oliver bit by bit. Sometimes it was a word, other times a body movement.
She started counting them, figuring out early on what Oliver meant by Seven by Seventy. 490 mirrors she needed to break.
She was at three hundred when she was arrested for breaking and entering. At seventeen, she almost got off with just a smudge on her record, until they realized that she had been breaking mirrors. Concerned for her mental state, the let her go with only one condition; psychiatric help.
The shrink was concerned when he got Felicity's file. That much she could tell. She had a history with mirrors and feared that they would make the connection. Her fear was fathomed. The doctor prescribed admittance to a psych hospital.
For one year, she wasn't put in any proximity to mirrors. Solitary confinement, the doctor recommended. She would have actually gone mad from boredom, If it wasn't for Oliver, faint in her head. He could only say a handful of phrases. His favorites during that year was "I'm here." "Hey." "Felicity." "you're not alone." "you're going to be fine" "Count to seven times seventy" "you can always talk to me."
When the doctors found nothing wrong with her, they let her go. Her first act was to find a mirror and touch the image of Oliver. She didn't break it though, no matter how much she wanted to.
Thankfully, she had graduated High School and had applied to MIT when she was incarcerated. A leave of absence for medical conditions was granted. With Oliver as her reflection, she left Vegas and headed to Boston.
Felicity's first day of exploring the historical town found her in an antique shop, staring at a beautiful framed, hand made mirror. It was such a pity she had to break it.
Taking down what looked like a portrait of Oliver, she quickly paid for the expensive prize and took it to a junkyard where she pounded at it with a hammer and safety goggles. Within minutes, she could hear Oliver speaking in her head, fluently.
"Finally." Were his first words.
"What?"
"I can explain the curse to you. Listen, I can only do it once. The first handmade mirror broken makes the first connection, the second, word freedom. 70 of the 490 mirror that you have to break are required to be handmade. Older are preferred, but new are just as well. Do you understand?"
"Yes. 70 handmade mirrors 420 any kind of mirror. Regular window panes don't count, right?"
Oliver was silent.
"Alright, I'll take that as a no. Got it." Seeing a car on the way out, she swiftly smashed all three mirrors left undamaged by the apparent wreck it was in.
She could do this. She could free Oliver
Six years later, she held in her hand a small mirror, not unlike the first one, She ran her hand along the glass, Oliver mimicking her movements. She could barely feel the pads of his callused fingers.
Across from her lay a mirror hand made by her favorite glassblower. They had become friends over the years that she had lived in Starling. Felicity had wandered into his shop, the looking glasses displayed in the front window catching her eye. Twenty of the seventy had been made by Diggle. He never asked why she needed them, nor did she offer.
The other 18 she had broken while in Boston. MIT had been a whirl wind of experience. She had never had a lot of time to spend breaking mirrors. Classes took their toll and she rarely talked to Oliver. This had only gotten worse when she met and dated Cooper. She feels strange to admit that she may have forgotten about him, once or twice when hanging out with her boyfriend.
Then, Cooper killed himself and she went running back to her best friend. Because that's who Oliver was—her best friend. He was always there for her, even if he was cursed to. He had reassured her many times that even if he wasn't cursed, he would be her shoulder, anytime any day.
That was the day that she realized he was in love with her.
Oh they never said it, Oliver was forbidden to say the word love. She had seen him mouth it before, but it wasn't the same.
They day she realized that she was in love with him, was the day she graduate. Her mother had flown out but all she wanted to do was talk to Oliver, hug him, kiss him.
The thought had startled her so badly, she almost tripped. She had avoided Oliver as much as she could that day, not wanting him to know.
But she couldn't stand being away from him for so long. In the morning, she ran to the mirror in her dorm and apologized profusely. He had wanted to celebrate that special day with her so bad, but she had ruined the chance for him.
As her Oliver always did, he forgave her.
When she moved to Starling City, she learned more about the curse. Working for Queen Consolidated, there came a day that everyone wore black. Felicity didn't know about it and stood out like a sore thumb in her yellow peplum dress.
Felicity asked one of her co-workers about it. All they told her was that it was the Queen's child's birthday.
Confused that what should have been a happy occasion was celebrated with such somberness, Felicity dug into her employer's past.
That was the day she learned Oliver's last name.
Robert and Moira Queen had had a son, a son named Oliver, who had disappeared on his fourth birthday and had never been found. In remembrance of the lost heir, the city of Starling, and in particular, Queen Consolidated, wore black.
Chagrined, and determined to try harder to free Oliver, she threw herself into mirror breaking. The day after was the day she had found Diggle.
However, finding cheap, older handmade mirrors proved to be a challenge. It took years, even with the combined efforts of Felicity and Dig, until they had found close to fifty mirrors. Desperate, Felicity asked Dig to make the rest. He did, as quick as he could.
Now the day had come. Diggle had called that morning, informing her that he had finished his last one and that the handheld Victorian mirror had come in. In a flash, she had run down to his shop, dragging along with her the neighborhood boy, Roy Harper. With his help, they carried the mirror back to her townhome, onto the blue tarp.
That had been two hours ago. When Roy left, she had sat in her chair, eager to get this over with. Felicity had picked up the hammer and had been primed to smash it to smitherings. But she couldn't.
What if he left her, like when her father did? What if he really didn't love her and was just pretending to for her sake? It would be weird when he left. She would go to look in the mirror and he wouldn't be there, in her head, talking to her. Felicity would see herself in the reflection instead of him.
It wouldn't be the same.
Oliver was in her head, begging her to do it, reassuring her, comforting her. "Come on Felicity. I'm not going anywhere. Promise."
"But it will be weird."
"Weird is good. Weird is change. We all need change."
Finally, he had convinced her. She ran her fingers over the glass one last time.
Oliver echoed her movements. She could start to feel him, even if it was just the pads of his fingers.
Quickly, she closed her eyes and swung down, cracking the mirror. Felicity could hear the grunt of approval in her head.
"If I do this I won't hear you in my head anymore. I'm going to miss that most of all." She sobbed. When had she started crying?
"Felicity." The one word took her back to the first time she had heard his voice.
Felicity approached the giant mirror. Left palm she laid flat on the surface. Oliver did the same, lining his hands up with her smaller ones.
Readjusting her grip on the hammer, she lifted it. Right before she brought it down though, she looked him dead in the eyes, blue on blue.
"I love you, Oliver." His eyes widened. She had never said it before. Before he could respond in her head, the hammer came crashing down.
A roaring filled her ears and she was deaf for several seconds. When she looked up, she was disappointed and sadly relieved to see a reflection she had never seen before.
Herself.
But then, right behind her, she saw him, his tall shape filling up the mirror. He wrapped his arms around her and for the first time, felt him.
Felt the heat of his skin, the roughness of his jacket, breathed in the scent of him. Her Oliver. Turning, she buried her face in his chest her hands coming up beside her head, clutching his lapels. He tightened his arms around her.
"Felicity."
Her name from his lips caused her to look up, to the real him.
"I love you, Felicity Smoak." He whispered before kissing her on the forehead, then her nose and then finally her lips.
All her worries fell away as she was absorbed into his mere presences. Time stopped, colors disappeared. It was just them. Two people joined together. Neither of them knew why, all they knew was they couldn't live without each other.
Two halves to a whole.
Different sides of a coin.
Mirror Images.