A/N: Olicity Future Fic for geniewithwifi's Father's Day Contest. I kind of dreamt this fic up one day. Like, literally. I woke up with the ending scene in my head and worked back from there. I don't really know what it is, and I'm sorry that it gets a little sad. Great intro, right?
That's All You
She thinks it was probably Thea that pointed it out, once the kids were little older. Mo must have been walking and talking, probably kindergarten at least, which would have made Tommy 7 or 8 and Becca 10 or 11. She's cloudy on who exactly said the words, but she remembers them knocking the wind right out of her.
"Do you think it's strange how Oliver never calls them 'his girls'?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean…" Whoever it was that pointed it out had faded into the background as Felicity started turning it over in her head. Because they were sort of right. Oliver loves all three of his children equally and ferociously and takes pride in each of them, but he's always been just a little light-handed with the girls.
It probably was Thea, come to think of it, her sister-in-law tends towards hyperbole. It's not that Oliver never refers to his daughters as "his girls," but it is rare. On the other hand, she can't count the number of times she's heard him tell someone, "they're all Felicity."
She knows it's easy for him to see himself in Tommy, the good and the bad. Tom, Felicity corrects herself mentally, remembering how her little boy had recently puffed out his chest and declared that he wasn't a baby anymore. Oliver had tried to explain around the lump in his throat, but in the end, it was Felicity who told him how his namesake was "Tommy" well into adulthood.
"That's stupid," their son had declared, oblivious to his father stalking quietly out of the room, rubbing at his eyes.
The boy is a classic middle child, a classic Queen, and a classic Smoak, all in one. It's basically a perfect storm. He's softened from the absolute hellfire he was as a toddler, but she knows they've still got a ways to go, and she already dreads the thought of him as a teenager. There is a lot of his father in him, that's true, though honestly the hard-headed tendencies and smart mouth could have come from either side.
But the girls...
I mean, with Rebecca, Felicity totally gets it. The poor girl is a gangly carbon copy of herself at that age, right down to the knobby knees and terrible eyesight. She's pretty, she just has no idea how to wear it yet, which, by the way, is perfectly fine by her father.
Becca's smart and savvy and a great leader, when she chooses to speak up. She's never had any trouble bossing around her younger siblings, but Felicity feared that her shyness might be a setback in school, until a recent classroom visit where she had beamed with pride upon learning that the teacher had her brilliant girl leading her own study group.
Mo, on the other hand, is bossy as they come and knows it. Even at six, she's becoming trouble in a completely different way than her brother: fiercely loyal like her namesake, almost to a fault, and totally fearless in a way that has scared them silly more than a few times. Felicity already refers to her as the "Arya" to Becca's "Sansa," which only makes Oliver roll his eyes.
Surprisingly, at least to Felicity, Mo also already shows the most promise and interest in her mother's tech knowledge of any of the three kids. In fact, she nearly broke her father's heart when she asked for a tablet instead of a pony for her birthday this year.
Felicity knows they remind Oliver of her, but could he really think that somehow makes them less of him?
"Oliver," she starts one night, as they get ready for bed, before she realizes she has no real direction for the sentence. When he looks up at her with Rebecca's eyes, she knows she's just got to dive in head-first.
"You...you see yourself in our girls, don't you?"
She watches his face as he registers the question, right up until the point where his eyes drop to the ground.
"I try not to," he answers finally, so soft she barely hears it.
"What?" she breathes. She's not totally surprised, but a current of shocked despair jolts through her anyway. "What do you mean?"
"I just…" He trails off, hazarding a glance at her and she can see that his eyes have gone watery. "They're so perfect, you know? There's so much of you in them, and I love that. I want them to be as much you as possible."
And as little of him as possible is the unspoken second half of that sentence, the part that lights an angry fire inside her. "You're insane, you know that?"
"Felicity…"
"They're not perfect," she says firmly holding his gaze with sharp eyes. "As much as you or I want to think so, that's just dumb. And to think that you have nothing to do with who they are is... beyond dumb."
He doesn't say anything, just looks at his feet again and rubs his thumb and forefinger together. He doesn't shoot the bow as much these days, but she still knows what that means.
"You have to know, you have to see it," she fairly begs, standing from the bed to wrap herself around him and mumble into his shoulder. "They're protective and good and loyal and kind. There's so much of you in both of them. It's part of the reason I love them so much."
He nods softly as she trails off and holds her tighter, but she's still not sure he's convinced. So she starts reminding him, as much as she can, whenever she can.
"That's all you," she giggles softly when Mo fights a nap so hard she ends up falling asleep sitting up, hands balled defiantly under her chin.
"That's all you," she sniffles when Becca is devastated for weeks after her kitten dies, convinced that the feline leukemia wouldn't have manifested if only she had been more a vigilant caretaker.
"That's all you," she reminds him every time they look down for literally one second, and Mo scales the jungle gym, not to the the top level, but to the actual top of the structure.
"That's all you," she says proudly, when Becca charms her way to class president.
"That's all you."
She hands him some gauze with a grimace as they take a seat outside the principal's office, letting him deal with the blood still dripping from Mo's nose and the small cut above her eye. Her stomach twists at the sight of her baby girl bruised and bloody, but then the door to the office opens, and out steps a boy who's got at least three years and a foot of height on their daughter, and is in even worse shape.
The best part is watching Oliver's reaction, watching his eyes dart between the kid who clearly got the short end of the stick in this fight, and their daughter, who's unsuccessfully trying to swallow her proud smile.
Felicity's proud too, when she hears from the principal about Mo standing up for a friend who she knows, from her daughter's distressed after-school stories, was being bullied to the point of torment. That doesn't stop her from scolding as the three of them walk out to the car after their meeting.
"A week's suspension?" she says, mustering up her best disapproving mom tone. "That's gonna go on your permanent record, Mo."
"Ugh, permanent records are crap," their youngest grumbles. "Anyway, I can take care of that thing in a few clicks."
"Hey," Felicity snaps, not letting her daughter see any of the pride she's feeling, "powers for good, not for evil, young lady."
"What was I supposed to do?" Mo casts a pleading look at what she's sure will be her more sympathetic father. "Zander couldn't stand up for himself, Joey would have beaten the crap out of him!"
"So you had to fight instead?"
Felicity raises an eyebrow in her husband's direction and he grunts knowingly, but she mouths the words to him again anyway.
"That's all you."
They both tuck Mo in that night, even though she's just a bit too old for it, a fact they're both having a hard time with. She kisses her daughter's forehead, careful to avoid the butterfly band-aid, and Oliver reaches for her hand as she turns to go, giving her a squeeze and a look that she understands to mean give us a minute.
"About today, Momo…" she hears him start as she pulls the door mostly closed behind her. She rolls her eyes when their daughter interrupts him almost immediately.
"I know, dad," she protests. "But I couldn't just let him say that stuff. It wasn't right. I just...I had to do something."
"I know, sweetheart," she hears her husband murmur. "I know the feeling."
She says it when Becca does everything in her power to keep Tom from joining the Starling City PD's junior deputy program.
"Am I the only one who thinks this is a terrible idea?" Becca's always been her worrywart, and she's bordering on tears, looking around the living room at her family like they've all grown second heads. Felicity's the only who looks back though, the other three have their eyes half-glued to the football game on TV.
She feels for her daughter, but unfortunately Becca is the only one who thinks it's a terrible idea. She and Oliver have already discussed what had begun to seem like an inevitability, and while her husband is only warily accepting of Tom joining up with the SCPD, she is outright ecstatic.
Felicity's been grateful to Quentin Lance more than a few times in her life, but probably never more so than when the man had taken her bratty 12-year-old son by the ear after an incident at a Thanksgiving dinner and talked him not only out of his snot-nosed adolescent phase, but into the cop life, instilling in him a burning desire to help bring justice to the city.
It's probably not a coincidence that it happened around the same time that the League of Assassins had attempted to return to Starling City and they had to come clean with their children about how Mommy and Daddy didn't really work at Queen Consolidated all those years. Or at least, that's not all they did.
"It's too dangerous," their level-headed daughter protests to a lukewarm audience. "He's going to get himself killed!"
"Jeez, Bec, chill. It's not even the real cops," her brother grumbles. "We're just doing, like, paper work and shit."
"Thomas," Felicity warns. "Language."
"Language?" Becca fairly shrieks. "You're cool with giving him a gun and setting him loose on downtown Starling, but he can't say 'shit'?"
She's 90% focused on her daughter, but that doesn't mean she misses how Tom and Oliver roll their eyes at each other just slightly.
"Do you get a gun?" Mo chimes in curiously, turning to ask her brother from where she's seated by her dad's feet.
"Moira," Felicity warns even more sharply, rapidly losing control of the situation. "Rebecca, your father and I said yes. Tom wants to do this and we think it's a good idea. Unfortunately, it's not your decision to make."
"That's just great." Sarcasm shining even through her tears, Felicity thinks. That one's all her. "I hope you all are very happy."
It's a bit of overkill for an exit line, but Becca caps it off by slamming the door dramatically as Felicity reaches over to swats at her husband's arm.
"Thank you, by the way, for all your help," she snaps sarcastically.
He just shrugs. "Seemed like you were handling things."
"I have never had siblings to be crazy-overprotective of," she says, matter-of-fact. "That's all you."
Ironically it's Becca's hawkishness that helps them solve the mystery of Mo's late night escapades just a few years later. Felicity starts noticing some subtle changes in their youngest daughter around Halloween, most notably the constant dark circles under her eyes, but it's not until her older sister is home for the holidays that she starts to put the pieces together.
"You know, she didn't get home until four a.m. last night." Becca tells them, just a little haughty for her mother's liking, when Mo excuses herself from the dinner table and bolts out the front door.
"You would know all about that wouldn't you," Tommy snarks, not looking up from his plate.
She's suspicious, but Felicity knows he's right. Their soft-spoken oldest had surprised everyone by going through a fairly serious rebellious phase her senior year of high school and Felicity would have doled out a "that's all you" to Oliver back then if she hadn't spent nearly a full year worrying herself sick.
Thankfully, Becca's god-given smarts had gotten her through without derailing anything too severely, and it's hard to see that girl in the sophisticated MIT senior that sits before them now (though the tattoo on her wrist certainly jogs her mother's memory). She takes a quick moment to hope with all her heart that they're not about to go through it all over again.
"We'll handle it, Rebecca," Oliver says softly, flashing her a look, and Felicity isn't surprised at all when he slips out the next night, a few minutes behind their youngest.
What does surprise her is the look on his face when he returns.
"I followed her to the old foundry," he tells her, eyes wide. "Felicity, she and some other idiot are putting the hoods on."
"She's the Green Arrow they've been spotting?" Felicity scrunches up her nose, trying to recall the grainy surveillance shots she had studied when the news first broke that Starling's resident vigilantes, or some new incarnation thereof, had returned. "No, she's red, isn't she?"
He nods, looking as strangely unsurprised as she realizes she feels.
"Who's green?"
"I have no idea," Oliver tells her honestly, though she thinks they both have a pretty good guess.
"Felicity, we told them the truth to clear our consciences," he says as she mulls it over, as if she didn't already know that, "not so they would follow in our footsteps.
"You really think there's any way to stop her?"
"I know you're going to say that's all me," he tells her with a small smile and she loves him so much for trying to lift her spirits, even a little. "But consider this: who do you think is running their tech?"
He's got a point there.
She teases him about it when Becca brings home a boy from grad school, a brilliant mechanical engineer with coke-bottle glasses and an unfortunate but endearing cowlick. Felicity has a great time picking his brain, but the poor guy is so cowered by the intimidating presence of his girlfriend's father that he can barely answer a simple dinner table question without sputtering or backtracking himself several times over.
"I don't like him," Oliver grunts as they crawl into bed that night. "He's doesn't have enough...confidence, or something."
"You stop that right now," she scolds, trying to suppress a grin. "You know that's your fault. You didn't give the poor boy a chance."
"He's not good enough for her," her stubborn husband grumbles, but the fight's going out of him.
"Oh come on, they're crazy about each other," she teases him, smiling fully now. "Plus, falling in love with a babbling nerd? That's all you."
(She says it again to him, years later, when it's time for him to walk their oldest down the aisle. Or at least she tries, her throat is tight with tears at the sight of Rebecca in a beautiful white dress and the same babbling nerd waiting for her at the altar with a look of devoted love in his eyes that Felicity recognizes.)
She doesn't say anything when Tom calls them from the hospital, dropping her cell phone to the ground after his first two words.
"It's Mo."
Their son meets them at the elevator, his uniform tinged with dark stains Felicity tries not to notice, and attempts in vain to talk his parents down from the ledge of panic they're both teetering on.
"She's okay," Felicity barely hears him say over the buzzing in her head. "She's gonna be fine. Just a concussion, a few cuts, and a bruised rib or two."
Felicity nods, and for the first time in their marriage, Oliver finds his words first.
"Was she…"
He trails off and she knows what he was going to ask. Both of their jaws drop open when Tommy knows how to answer the half-question anyway.
"I got her into street clothes," he said, looking anywhere but at his disbelieving mother until she's finally able to speak.
"You know?"
"C'mon Mom," he smiles sadly. "You don't really think they were pulling this off without an inside man, do you?"
"They?"
The final piece of the puzzle clicks into place when John and Lyla round the corner of the hospital corridor, looking as frantic and worried as Felicity and Oliver feel.
"Ezekial?" Lyla gasps her son's name like it's a hundred different questions.
"He's upstairs," Tommy tells them, so serious he's almost in cop mode. "Critical care."
"But he's alive," John chokes out.
"He is," Tommy nods, glancing back at his parents to add, "and she is too, thanks to him."
Felicity stays at her daughter's bedside all night, until she wakes in the early hours of the morning.
"Zeke?!" When Mo's first words are her partner's name, Felicity somehow knows immediately that her daughter's as deep into this thing as she was once. "Where is he? Is he okay?"
"We don't know yet," Felicity tells her, watching her whole face drop in devastation. "He's still in surgery."
"He saved me," Mo breathes, squeezing her eyes shut and letting the tears stream down her face. "He threw himself on top of me like a fucking idiot."
Her sobs turn to painful coughs that rack her whole body, and Felicity's heart nearly breaks clean in half when her daughter turns back to her with total helplessness.
"Mama.." she whimpers, like she did only once or twice as a child, and Felicity can't help herself when her own tears start to fall.
"I know, baby," she coos softly, brushing the sweaty strands of hair from her daughter's forehead. "I know how it feels."
"That's all you."
When Becca and her husband move halfway across the world with the Peace Corps, their eldest having found her very own city to save.
When Tom tells them how he looked up from his paperwork one day to the desk across from him in the precinct and realized the girl he's been looking for had already been his partner for years.
When Mo and Zeke's first kid, a boy they name Felix, begs for a bow and arrow every Christmas until his doting grandfather buys one behind his wife's back.
Oliver is eighty-six years old the first time Felicity sees the fight go out of his eyes and when he tells her, "call my girls," she knows it's really time. It doesn't hurt as much as she thought it would, but that might be because her heart's been slowly disintegrating ever since they got the diagnosis.
They congregate in the master bedroom, none of them able to fully grasp the sight of him like this. Even if the kids barely knew their father as The Arrow, to them, he's always been a superhero. To see him tired and frail nearly does them all in. Felicity and Rebecca are openly a mess, and Mo's clenching her jaw so tight, her teeth might crack, but her upper lip won't stop betraying her by trembling.
Tom's backed himself into the corner of the room, hands shoved into the pockets of his dress blues. The two of them, her stoic but sensitive boys, have already shared their moment, so he's stepped back, eyes downcast so no one can see him cry. It'd be a better cover if his shoulders weren't shaking silently, Felicity thinks.
Oliver's girls, all three of them, gather around his bedside, holding whatever bit of him they can, wiping off their matching mascara into matching crumpled Kleenex.
"I love you all so much," Oliver whispers, as his eyes close and his breathing starts to slow. "You were perfect."
Felicity shoulders shake uncontrollably when she presses her forehead against him and her lips to his one last time. "That was all you."