Felicity sat stubbornly in the front seat of the car. Her arms were folded over her stomach like a petulant child, even her lower lip was stuck out in a pout. Her jaw was set, staring down into her lap and she did not have tears in her eyes and -
"You do a tiny bit," Oliver said from beside her, showing her that she'd spoken out loud.
She didn't move her face, her angry eyes flickering to him. If looks could have killed, she'd at least have been in the opportune place to dispose of his body.
The passenger door was open, Oliver leaning in through the open space to where she refused to move from her seat. "Do you really want to spend the entire weekend sat in the car?" he asked her, his voice showing that he was desperately trying to remain patient with her.
"You said we'd be in signal range," she shot back at him, gesturing down at the tablet in her lap. "And look at my baby, it's dying, Oliver. It's near death. I can't even check the weather!"
"I said we needed a weekend away from everything to unwind," he said, stressing that final word. "Something you were all for. Besides, we have a satellite phone for emergencies."
"This is a state of the art tech system, Oliver," she said, waving the tablet in her face. "I programmed it myself, this baby managed to pick up wifi signal in Nanda Parbat. Nanda Parbat. What kind of forest did you bring us to where I can't find internet access?" she asked him desperately.
"The kind that you can relax in," he explained, taking her hand and releasing it from the tablet, locking it securely in the glove compartment. "Come on, the weather's beautiful. We'll see if it's going to change. Emails can wait. Internet can wait. Do you know what can't wait?" He flashed her his most charming smile. "Being part of our god-daughter's first camping trip - her first real vacation. So, come on. Out of the car."
She did get out of the car, disgruntled as she was, and no sooner has she closed the car door behind her she was assaulted by a flying mass of dark curly hair, as four-year-old Sara crawled her way up Felicity's leg and onto her hip. Sara gave her a cocked head and a frown. "Cartoons?" she asked, looking into the car window over her shoulder.
"No cartoons this weekend, little girl," Felicity said, as they made their way to the small group, purposefully ignoring Oliver's grin as he turned back to them.
"Why?" Sara whined.
"Because Uncle Oliver's got a weird camping fetish," she muttered under her breath.
They'd set up in a small clearing right next to the woodland, where there was a stream that opened up to a wider mouth of the river at the edge of the clearing. Despite it being a registered camp site, it came with the advantage of being very secluded. It may have been far enough away from most of civilisation, but they weren't entirely closed off from the road even if it felt that way.
Oliver, of course, took to camping like a fish to water. His time away had been more a compulsory camping trip and he wanted try it with a more laid-back approach. John and Lyla were naturally set to camping in some respect because of their tours as well, and the three of them got stuck into setting up their tents on the flat ground and Felicity explored the waters edge with a firm grip on Sara's hand.
Sara squealed in delight when she saw a fish dive completely out of the water, turning her body around to call out to John and "DADDY, DID YOU SEE THE FISH? THERE'S FISH IN THE WATER!" Despite her distaste for camping, Felicity was grinning at Sara's discovery of the outdoors far different to the parks of Starling City, and when she followed the girl's gaze she found Oliver watching her with a smile she couldn't quite describe. It made her stomach flip, and she turned back to the water just in time to stop Sara slipping on a wet rock.
With Sara's fascination with the fish in the water, fishing had been their first activity of the day. John had set up a fishing rod for Sara to hold, and she held onto it gleefully while the two men stood with her, showing her how to cast out and fish on her very own line.
About twenty feet away, Felicity and Lyla had set to the real essentials - coffee. They'd set up an area where they could eat and had pulled over a small log for them to sit on as they drank, both watching the three at the water's edge with smiles. Felicity was starting to lose the itch in her hands for her tablet, the urge to tinker falling away because if Oliver could look this carefree then so could she.
He didn't just look carefree, he looked happy. Happy Oliver was a far greater occurrence in their lives now, but there were levels of happy that she could pinpoint with far greater clarity. The level when Thea had told him he was going to be an uncle - after he'd threatened Roy endlessly - had been a personal favourite of hers, the only reason the pair hadn't joined them for the weekend is because pregnancy and sleeping on the ground hadn't been something Thea was enthusiastic about.
But this level of happy was near on delirious. Oliver looked like he'd be happy enough to spend every day of his life out here, joining Sara in her loud declarations of joy every time she saw the splash of a fish.
"Suits him," Lyla commented from beside her, her shoulder knocking against Felicity's. In the last few years, they'd fallen into an easy friendship which was closer than Felicity had ever had with another woman.
She hummed in question, tearing her eyes away from the trio to look at her. "I think he enjoys using the Lian Yu survival skills for better memories," she said quietly, raising her travel cup to her lips with both hands.
"I didn't mean camping," Lyla smirked. "I meant Sara." Felicity's eyebrows shot up at the same time Oliver's arm did to stop an excited Sara from stumbling. When Felicity said nothing, Lyla gave her a more questioning look. "He looks at her like she's the best thing in the world, then we do things like this altogether and he acts like this is all he wants for his life." Felicity said nothing again, and Lyla's interest peaked when she bit her lip. "You two disappeared on this grand gesture road trip, come back talking about this master plan you both have, and all that's happened in the last three years is an engagement. I gotta say, Johnny and I are starting to wonder what this master plan is."
Felicity's head raised up, tapping her far-too-expensive engagement ring against the side of her travel cup. "The plan still applies," she said vaguely. "The plan was that was just...live," she explained. "Everything before felt like a pressure, like we were working to a time scale that we didn't set. We're not doing that any more. We haven't set a wedding date because we don't want something huge and fancy. We want just...us. One day you'll get a phone call to meet us at the courthouse, or we'll fly you guys out to meet us in Vegas, and it'll happen. No time scales. No pressure."
But there was a tremor in her voice as she finished, and she looked at Lyla nervously. Lyla, for all her good graces, tried not to look too distracted when Sara ran over to them asking for a snack, and she quickly passed her a bag of apple slices and told her to hurry back to her father. She turned on the log, facing Felicity entirely. "Talk," she ordered quietly.
Felicity's eyes flickered to Oliver, checking he was still distracted before biting her lip. "So you know how anti-camping I've been?" she asked. "Well, I thought I was going to be...not in a position to be in the middle of nowhere because biology is a bitch," she explained in a jumble of words. Lyla nodded in understanding. "Except that doesn't really apply and I'm kinda….late," she explained.
"Late? How late?" Lyla asked.
"Three weeks," she muttered under her breath, all too aware of how good Oliver's senses were.
Lyla leaned in a little to lower her voice, sounding excited. "Have you been to the doctor? Have you done a test?" she asked.
"I've done a few tests," she mumbled.
"And it said?"
"One didn't work, and eleven said positive." Lyla's jaw dropped a little. "What?" Felicity asked defensively. "I was nervous, and I wanted to know and wanted to be sure and…"
"Lis," she said softly, her hands covering hers. "Does he know?"
She shook her head firmly. "Not yet, but…"
"Felicity!" Oliver's voice interrupted them, jogging over and tugging on her hand until she was standing up. "Come on."
"Where are we going?" she asked.
He pulled her towards the mounted fishing rod, circling his arms around her as he lifted it, placing his hands over hers to guide her. "You are about to catch your very first fish," he declared proudly, not even listening to her protest that she wasn't a fisherman, woman, whatever, as he pointed out to where the line disappeared into the water. "Look, it's already, hooked, the waiting's already done."
So she reeled in her very first fish, a very proud little fish that wouldn't do for dinner for them, but made a very good Sara-sized after dinner snack. And if she'd spent more time paying attention to how Oliver's body fit around hers, well, that'd be her secret.
"Daddy, can you hear the owls?"
"Go to sleep, Sara."
"And the trees are making noises too."
"Close your eyes, Sara."
"Was that a bear?"
"There are no bears here."
"But Daddy-"
"Sara, it's bedtime."
Biting their lips to keep from laughing, Oliver and Felicity didn't envy Lyla and Diggle at all with their daughter trying to keep them up all night. She was excited over the trip, who could blame her? Felicity had even managed to keep up with them and the grand outdoors by the end of the day. Now, they were hidden away in their own tent for the night, just a few feet away, with the unspoken promise that they wouldn't be getting up to no good.
They were already in trouble. It hadn't been the possibility of a bear that Sara had heard, it was Oliver growling into Felicity's neck.
They'd stopped quickly over that.
"You surprised me today," Oliver whispered across to her as she jammed her still-freezing feet between his. "The whole camping thing, I didn't think you'd actually enjoy it."
"It's not that I don't enjoy camping," she told him. "I used to like it on the school trips, I just missed my wifi," she explained.
He fixed her with a stare. "And what's the real reason?" he asked her, with a small glint in his eye.
She bit her lip, caught out on her cover up. "Okay, so when I tell you, you have to remember that we promised to be quiet, okay?" she mumbled.
At that, his face broke out in a grin. "Felicity...I know," he told her, like a schoolboy caught with his hands in the cookie jar.
"Know what?" she asked.
He shifted in their sleeping bag, moving his arm so that he could touch his hand to her lower stomach. Her eyes widened slightly. "I know," he repeated, his voice softer this time.
"How?" she asked, the only word she could form. She'd been half-killing herself trying to figure out how to tell him, and he'd known?
"Do you really think you can hide that many tests in one trash can and I wouldn't see them?" he pointed out with a small smirk. "And the fact that you've disappeared to pee six times since we came to bed."
She actually pouted a little, but then he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers, and nothing else mattered. The outdoors didn't matter. Camping didn't matter. That little rock just under her back didn't matter. All that mattered was that he was happy, that he was kissing her and that had to be a good thing. Even still, when they parted, she kept her hand fisted in his sweater and gave him a nervous smile.
"I know this wasn't part of the plan…"
He cut her off with another kiss. "Felicity…" he whispered, in that way that made her weak in the knees. "Being happy with you, building a life with you...that was always part of the plan," he reminded her. His hand still hadn't moved. "You are the plan."
Her nervous expression turned into a slightly more eager kiss, her arm slipping around him. She shifted closer to him, breaking away before it could lead to something more heated, but he wasn't quite as reluctant, peppering small kisses over her face and along her jaw.
"Mother of my child," he said quietly, his voice rolling over the words as he did her name. "Been waiting a long time to call you that," he added with a small hitch in his voice.
"So we're good?" she checked, swallowing thickly, because damn it, he was too perfect for words. "Because I'm good with this, if we're in this together."
His other hand found hers, tapping his thumb over her engagement ring. "We're in this together," he assured her. "You're pretty much stuck with me. For all you know I've hidden a tracking device in the diamond."
"Don't be ridiculous, Oliver," she told him bluntly. "I checked it for that three days after you gave it to me."