Summary: An innocent question on a stakeout causes Oliver to reflect on how Felicity sees him, and how she make him see himself. Lots of angsty introspection – Oliver Queen just really lends himself to brooding. Implied Olicity if you squint, but plausible deniability if that isn't your thing.

A/N: A bit of a character study that came out of a much, much longer story I've been working on. It's set a few weeks after the final show down with Slade. This is the first fanfiction I've sent out into the wider world in a long, looooong time, so constructive criticism is quite welcome. No beta, so the mistakes are mine alone; the characters herein are not. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoy it.

8/28/14 - New! Improved! Now with fewer dumb typos!

Greater Than the Sum

The lair is quiet, save for Oliver's harsh breath as he pulls himself up, again and again, on the bar above Felicity's computers. It's been a quiet night and the rest of the team departed long ago. Being the Arrow wasn't all crashing through windows and fighting hired goons after all, sometimes it was sitting in the dark watching warehouses. Tonight had been one of those nights. The recon mission had gone off flawlessly for once and they'd gathered the information they needed to take down a new member of the Starling City elite. Generally a great guy, except for the fact that he'd built his fortune by trading guns to a West African rebel group for diamonds and future mineral rights. It would be a few days before they could move on the intel though, so they had called it an early night. Felicity, Diggle, and Roy didn't question him when Oliver stayed back, telling them he needed to burn off a little energy after a quiet night of recon.

But it isn't restlessness Oliver is trying to escape as he works out, number of reps long since forgotten. It is the question Roy had asked him while they had been sitting in the dark, time oozing past as they waited for movement in the warehouse below them. It had been innocent really, just idle curiosity he was sure that Roy had already forgotten. Felicity had come over their coms to report on the thermal sweep of the building, and had drifted off on a tangent as she tended to do. When the coms had gone silent again, Roy noted that Oliver seemed more relaxed around Felicity than almost anyone else. He'd asked Oliver if it was because she reminded him of what he was like before the island. He hadn't answered, the question too loaded, too dangerous as they sat in the darkness. He suspects Roy took his silence as a confirmation – that Felicity made him remember the care-free, happy-go-lucky, spontaneous playboy he once was – because the younger man didn't press the issue any further the conversation segueing easily to target practice.

Yet it still nagged at Oliver, made him uncomfortable in a way that sent him immediately to the practice mats, though training did little to assuage his sense of unease. His right hand slipped, and Oliver caught himself jerkily with his left. He finally halted, hanging from the pull-up bar by one hand for a moment longer before admitting it was time to quit. But not before he made himself swing his right hand back up and do one more. Only then did he drop down, arms shaking, to find his towel and water.

He sank down on a stool before a pile of new arrowheads still waiting to be honed, too tired to distract himself with training any longer. The assumption that he'd forgotten what his life was like before was a surprisingly common one. He can see why people would make it and why they follow it to the logical conclusion that he harbors some longing to recapture what he lost when the Queen' Gambit cracked open in the cold China sea. But the truth was Oliver doesn't have much trouble remembering what it was like before Lian Yu. He doesn't need a reminder of what it was like to be Ollie. What few people seemed to realize was, the man Oliver was now doesn't really like the boy he had been then.

Ollie was a spoiled, selfish, feckless youth who coasted through life on good looks, rakish charm, and unexamined privilege. He can clearly recall how it felt to be content to spend someone else's hard-earned money, the sense of utter entitlement to seek his own pleasure, with little or no regard of how his actions would affect anyone else. He remembers the rush of invincibility in slighting his perceived inferiors, taking advantage of his friends, and cheating on his lovers utterly sure he'd get away with it, comfortable in the knowledge that his money, his family, or his slick tongue would always bail him out.

He would never say those five years away were good for him – there had been too much death and suffering and he had been left far too scared and damaged in its aftermath. But he is self-aware enough, now, to know that he not been thrust into his crucible, he would have spent the rest of his life on the same idle path. When he is feeling charitable towards himself, which isn't very often, he can admit that boy had some decent traits. Had there not been some semblance of a solid foundation, after all, he never would have survived.

He doesn't think he is necessarily a better man now than the one he would have surely become if fate hadn't intervened. The man he is now is a killer, ruthless, secretive. He is haunted by the people he lost, and weighed down by responsibility and regret. That was probably much worse than being lazy, selfish, and glib. But he can no longer respect or tolerate the kind of man who is happily without purpose beyond his own self-gratification; and he feels bereft without a mission, unable to rest easy if he doesn't feel like he's contributing to the greater good, or at least pulling his own weight.

Felicity never makes him feel like that frivolous and self-involved boy. He doesn't feel invincible or entitled around her, and on the few occasions he may have slipped back into old habits, her "loud voice" nipped that neatly in the bud. When she's around, his sense of purpose and mission are crystal-clear. On the nights it all feels like a Sisyphean exercise in futility, she points out the good that he's done and makes the potential for more seem real. And truthfully, Oliver doesn't think that Felicity would have liked Ollie Queen much either, had they met seven years ago. But she seems to like him, and that's a comfort on the days where he's invested so much of himself into convincing the people around him he still is that man, he can't help wonder if he's really changed at all.

He picked up an arrowhead, examining the dull edge. No, Felicity doesn't remind him of the man he was before, but she also doesn't remind him of that he is the vigilante. It's quite a feat, considering that she is essentially his mission control. He feels it most acutely after they've argued. If she thinks he's taken the wrong course, or if she just doesn't appreciate his tone, she becomes five feet four inches of pure steel and she lets him know in no uncertain terms. She does not hesitate. She does not back down. And he cannot intimidate her.

By all rights, he should intimidate her. He is profoundly aware that he is dangerous. He is a killer, damaged and a little unstable. That awareness is always close and always keen, no matter what he is doing. He can't stand behind someone in an elevator without imagining snapping his fellow passenger's neck, or sit at a dinner without instinctively mapping out how to take out everyone in the room with his table service. Most of the time it makes him feel like a grenade with a loose pin; like he is precarious inches away from blowing and taking anyone within arm's reach with him.

Diggle sees it in him, and Roy too, to an extent. Though Digg has proven his loyalty time and time again, he still sometimes looks at him askance, soldier's instincts assessing him as the threat he most certainly is. So when she walks straight into his personal space because he's about to hear a sizeable piece of her mind whether he wants to or not, he sees the way John unconsciously tenses, poised to intervene. Intellectually, Diggle knows Oliver would never hurt Felicity. But he also knows, more comprehensively than most, just how badly Oliver could hurt her, having borne intimate witness to both the depth of Oliver's capacity for violence and his sometimes tenuous control of that capacity. Seeing an unarmed, untrained IT girl walk up to all that horrifying potential without missing a step and lay into him without pulling a punch – it's no wonder sometimes Digg has to take a breath after she's stalked away in order to get his shoulders to relax again. Oliver doesn't blame him when he shakes his head and mutters, "Brave girl."

But Digg's wrong. He can't quite explain why or how, but he knows, down to the very the marrow of his bones, that yelling at him isn't Felicity being brave. Which is not to say she isn't brave; Felicity is, possibly, the bravest person he knows. It was one thing for him or Diggle, battle-tested fighters both, to go up against the common and even uncommon criminals who preyed on Starling City. Entering into that particular fray barely made the two men nervous any longer after all years of training and combat, and a certain sense that they had nothing really to lose. But Felicity, she regularly did things she was not trained for – letting him zip-line her over great heights, jumping out of planes, jabbing needles into insane, near-invincible bioengineered super-men. These things terrified Felicity and she had everything left to lose, and yet she did them anyway, for the team, for the greater good, for him. Wasn't that the truest measure of bravery?

Yelling at him, however, isn't brave; because she isn't scared. Not of him. Not in the least. When she goes toe-to-toe with him, he is still that grenade, but she reminds him that he, indeed, does have a pin. He is capable of great harm, but he also capable of restraint and control and she trusts his restraint implicitly. Felicity is so sure that she is perfectly safe with him, that he is no threat to her, that event though he should know better, she makes him sure of it too. And no matter how heated they get or how nervous they make Roy, when he is with her, he doesn't feel dangerous. He is just a frustrated, exasperated, (and probably, as usual, wrong) man.

Suddenly, without a thought for the time, or what she might think, or even what he will say, Oliver reaches for his phone, hitting the autodial for her number. Roy is right, he can relax around her in a way he can't with most other people, but not because she reminds him of the boy he was, or that he's not just the killer he became. The phone line rings in his ear; once, twice. The tone cuts off abruptly on the third ring and he can hear her fumbling with the receiver, a combination of hisses and unintelligible mutterings. His heart picks up in recognition and anticipation as he waits for her to get the receiver to her ear. Because right now he needs the reassurance that only she seems able to provide; to remind him, not of who he was or who he isn't but instead to remind him that he is...

"Oliver?"

Oliver.