Homeward, These Shoes
1
He hears a loud noise. He listens intently and figures out that it is coming from the bedroom. Grabbing the baseball bat he keeps in the utility closet, with careful, silent steps he goes to the bedroom. The room is a mess. The closet doors are wide open, a small light is coming from inside. Clothes are thrown everywhere in colorful heaps. Just as he is about to raise the bat high in his hands, he catches a glimpse of brown hair, then hears a low giggle. He drops the bat and rushes to the closet and sees Felicity.
His little daughter has bright pink lipstick smeared around her mouth, dark eye shadow all over her eyelids. She has the pearl necklace he had given Donna for their first anniversary wrapped around her neck twice, her brown hair is in a messy bun. And she is wearing her mother's red high-heeled shoes. The shoes are at least three times her size even though she has big feet for a four year old girl and she stands tall in them, with a smile on her face as she looks at herself on the full mirror hanging over the closet door.
"Felicity-bear, what are you doing?" he asks in a soft voice.
She drops the other pair of shoes she is holding when she catches his reflection on the mirror and turns around, her smile faded. She knows she is caught red-handed so she looks guilty and makes a move to remove the necklace she is wearing but she doesn't step out of the heels even when he picks her up and takes her to the bathroom.
He grabs a hand towel and wipes the make-up off her face and puts her glasses back on. The make-up is a little stubborn so there is still some residue left despite his efforts, but his little girl looks like herself again.
"You are never going to play with your mommy's things again, understood?" he tells her as he lifts her from where she is sitting on the closed toilet lid and picks her up in his arms so that she can see herself on the cabinet mirror. "There is my little Felicity." he mutters and kisses her cheek loudly and smiles as she wipes off the kiss from her cheek, out of habit.
He watches as Felicity walks back to the bedroom, not stumbling, not even once, still in the red shoes and then she takes them off finally and puts them back in the box she found them. She helps him clean up the room, then she rushes into his arms and they go to living room to watch cartoons.
When he leaves them for good with a short note a week after, the one thing he keeps is the image of his daughter in her mother's red shoes in his mind.
2
It is hard to stand.
There is loud music she doesn't enjoy, there are people she doesn't know crowding around her, there is fancy food she doesn't like. Their living room is unrecognizable with the unnecessary amount of decoration and Hebrew letters. There are too many chairs around, borrowed from neighbors, but nobody is sitting.
Her pink chiffon dress makes her feel hot, the tiara she didn't want to put on feels heavy on her head. She adjusts the tiara, but it instead drops on the floor and she places her juice on the chair behind her and picks up the tiara before anyone else sees it on the floor.
Always one for ostentation, her mother stands in one corner in a tight red dress, her blonde hair in curls, her make-up heavy, talking to not one but three men at the same time, which makes her feel like throwing up in her mouth. What makes it worse is the fact that one of the men is Steve's father, Steve who has been the object her affection for the last two years. Steve has yet to return her affections because he has yet to acknowledge her as a girl and not as one of the boys even though she developed boobs.
As she takes a sip from her juice, she eyes Steve who talks to the boys around him, who never looks at her. The only time they actually talked about something other than computers was when they realized they were both Jewish after one biology class. She knows that regardless of what her mom thinks and says, the kitten heels she is wearing doesn't help with her mission of making Steve think of her as someone from the opposite sex.
She thinks the name kitten heels is cute and the pair her mother gave looks pretty, but as she stands in them, she thinks that nothing about them is cute. They are half a size small because her feet grew since her cousin's Bar Mitzvah last August and they can't afford a new pair for her Bat Mitzvah so they pinch her feet and the bandages she put on doesn't help. She doesn't like the feeling of her heels not being the same level as the ground, either.
She stands in the same spot, her juice finished, with her mother now talking to four men and with Steve still not noticing her. Knowing that nobody is actually paying any attention to the birthday girl, she rushes to her room and takes off the shoes and walks barefoot for a minute to enjoy the sensation of freedom for her feet, then finds her pair of very worn down Chuck Taylor and puts them on.
She runs back to the living room, her feet happy and goes to stand next to Steve and joins the conversation about the latest console game. He never realizes the change in her footwear.
3
It doesn't take her long to adjust to the city. It is greener and more compact than she is used to. She doesn't have to drive everywhere to run errands. Surprisingly, she gets accustomed to the idea of having four seasons pretty easily. As someone who has never seen snow, she spends her first winter in awe of the snow and the cold and almost misses not one but two finals in order to play with snow like a small child.
She makes new friends but never really feels like part of a group. After a disastrous visit back home to Vegas for spring break where she gets in a big fight with her mom because of the guy her mom is dating, she returns to Cambridge as a changed person.
It is an impulse purchase. She rethinks the shoes as she sits on the floor of her dorm room. They are black and look heavy, she spent the money she was saving from her scholarship on them, but once she puts them on, they are comfortable and don't feel heavy at all. At first she struggles with the laces, but once she gets used to them, it's like riding a bicycle, she can do them with her eyes closed.
Her mom is surprised when she shows up at her door at the end of June. She eyes her from head to toe, and when her eyes fall on the combat boots, she looks disgusted, which is the exact reaction she expected so she feels like she accomplished her mission of getting on her mother's nerves.
She interns in the security department of the casino her mom works at, not thanks to her mom but to her own computer skills, and learns a lot over the summer. She is grateful the strict clothing policy of the casino is not so strict on her boots. She spends most of her time cooped up in a room with large screens displaying images from the various cameras on the casino floor, with a dozen of older men surrounding her and the A/C blasts over her as she sits at one of the computers. For the first time in years, her feet don't feel cold at night as she drives through the streets of Vegas. She avoids her mother as much as she can.
When she returns to Cambridge, she starts looking into ways and means to utilize the practical skills she picked up during her internship and instead she finds herself in a group of hacktivists doing the opposite of what she did in Vegas. They break into servers and security systems and she finds it all fascinating.
She feels the leaves crunch under her feet as the days grow shorter. She loves the sounds her boots make as she walks down empty corridors of the campus library dark at night to meet her new friends. Her hair first becomes black, then she adds the purple streaks. Her clothes get tighter and darker. She feels like she belongs. Then she meets him. He becomes her first everything.
Cooper complains about her boots because they are hard to take off whenever they are about to have sex, but she just ignores him and takes them off herself, then thinks about new algorithms as they lie naked, side by side in bed. She is happy and it continues for almost two years.
She has always been better than the others in her group when it comes to hacking and creating the most durable viruses, but she has never used her skills for things other than seeing how good she actually is. Cooper, on the other hand, has other ideas. When he is imprisoned because of something she created, she doesn't sleep for days and almost fails one class.
That first day she sees him behind bars in that terrible orange jumpsuit is the same day she breaks off all contact with her hacktivist group. Months later, just a week shy of her graduation ceremony when she receives news of Cooper's suicide, the boots are the first things she throws away.
4
"I was wearing my new pumps and was towering over the dude, it was embarrassing." Sheila from accounting says as they sit around the small round table in the coffee break room. "Yes, he is gorgeous and funny, but I'm sorry, I can't stop wearing heels for a guy."
She takes a sip from her coffee and eyes the other two girls around the table nod enthusiastically. She doesn't know why she is sitting with the accounting girls, the mean girls of the office, but the coffee is good and it is good to be around people who just don't ask her to delete viruses from their computers after watching porn on their work computers. Work computers. As in computers their employer have given them to make sure they do their jobs on them and get paid in return. The whole thing baffles her.
Yes, she doesn't necessarily use her work computer entirely for work purposes all the time, if she has to be honest. There is the occasional hacking into some government servers, like that one time she needs to make sure her credit score doesn't drop after she forgets to pay her credit card bill, or that other time she clears a parking ticket for a Matt in security in exchange of a favor. Then there is the online shopping that she is trying to cut but is failing.
"A guy can get it only if he is taller than me." Cindy suggests.
"They can make it up with length in other areas, if you know what I mean." Sheryl adds and they all start giggling in hushed tones.
"What about you, Felicity?" Sheila asks. "You are surprisingly quiet."
She doesn't like attention on herself during these coffee breaks, and she doesn't want it especially when they are talking about men. There is nobody in her life and she is fine with it. She has her apartment, she has her gadgets, she has a freezer full of ice-cream, she has a Netflix subscription. She just started leasing the cutest car, she has some savings in her account, she has a new set of flannel pajamas awaiting her at home.
"I'm not the biggest fan of heels." she starts. "You can never go wrong with flats, they go with everything. You can wear them with jeans, not that I wear jeans that frequently, or with skirts and dresses. Even with fancy dresses. There is no risk of getting your heel broken or stumbling and making an idiot of yourself. I mean, I've fallen down with flats, but still, they are just practical. There is research suggesting they aren't the best for your posture and for your feet for orthopedic reasons, but they don't kill your feet as you walk in them, unless they pinch. With a pair of wool socks and a hair-dryer, you can fix the pinching problem, though. I read about it on one of those DIY blogs. I'm obsessed with DIY blogs these days."
The three girls look at her when she finally stops. They are silent and she can feel them judging her, something she is used to from her high school days. Then she realizes they were actually asking her about guys and she instead talked about shoes.
"Oh, you meant tall guys? I don't care about height. I've dated a couple of guys shorter than I am. I mean, it's a little weird since I'm not tall myself and they were shorter than I was, but their height wasn't the reason why I broke up with them. I'd rather look up than down, because my glasses fall down if I lean down actually."
Later in the day, after she returns to her desk, she looks up at Oliver Queen for the first time as she chews on a red pen. It is indeed better to look up.
5
It is Diggle's idea, to get fresh air and he drives them to Star Mall. She doesn't argue because sitting in front of a screen and coming up empty for the nth time isn't going to make another difference. Plus, she has been so focused on the single task of finding a clue as to where in the world Oliver Queen might be that she hasn't been able to do her laundry in weeks, which means that she doesn't have anything clean to wear and has been recycling the same pair of jeans with different cotton shirts, hoping Diggle wouldn't notice, not that he'd mind.
Diggle's cell phone rings right after they park the car and then he excuses himself, saying Carly is expecting him at one of the many coffee shops in the mall and tells her to go around herself while he catches up on some unfinished business. She knows what he means, he doesn't need to spell it out for her. Carly is there to break up with him and Felicity is there for emotional support, in case he needs it.
So she walks to the opposite direction of where John is going, ready to brave the countless stores herself. Star Mall is one of the biggest ones in the entire country and it has something for any budget and she isn't ashamed to admit that she has gotten lost twice before. Thankfully this time she has an app that shows her directions. First and foremost, she locates the chain store she usually buys her underwear from and grabs a five-pack panties set, in case she runs out of clean underwear which she hopes never happens. Just as she is about to slide her credit card off, she remembers the million dollar she has in her account, remaining untouched.
The idea hits her, that she has been given an outrageous amount of money, an amount that she can never be able to make herself even if she saves every penny she makes for the rest of her life, an amount that means nothing to the benefactor who just disappeared without a trace. She has been planning to use the money to upgrade the lair, to get new equipment and to help finance the rescue mission they'd be going on when they locate Oliver, but Diggle has been given the same amount himself and has agreed to spend his share on the expenses and the spreadsheets they have being working on so far, with exaggerated amounts to make sure they don't miss anything and run out of money, suggest that all the vigilantism related spending still leaves her with a hefty amount.
She decides to treat herself.
She leaves the pack of undies at the register and gives her apologies to the guy at the register and picks up her phone to see on the app where that one lingerie store is. She rushes to the store, picks up everything she likes in her size without even trying them out and brings them to the register and buys them just because she can.
She leaves the store with a large, pink bag and a smile on her face. That feels good. Now she can understand how rich people feel. It is an incredible feeling, being able to afford anything. Growing up dependent on the tips her mother made, not being able to afford nice things, always wearing things she outgrew or her mother got from thrift stores, she never had the luxury to splurge and now she can. The feeling makes her relax, probably for the first time since Glades fell and Oliver left.
She is walking through the fancier side of the mall with the same smile on her face when her eyes drops on them. A pair of green suede stilettos. They shine through the window display as the spotlights hit on them. It is almost as if they call out to her, begging her to at least try them out.
Without hesitation, she enters the store, holding her lingerie bag tightly and looks for the shoes inside the store. Everything is so fancy inside, with spotless counters and crystals hanging down. She doesn't feel like touching anything for fear that she will ruin them. She walks around, scanning everything to locate the shoes but she doesn't see them. She expects a salesperson to help her out but even though she is the only customer in the store and there are at least four of them around, nobody comes to her.
"Excuse me." she calls out when she finds the stilettos in black, but not in green. "Do you have these in green, in size 8? I saw them at the display but can't seem to find them here. I mean, it's almost impossible to see things in here since it's so dark but still." she says.
An impeccably dressed guy with a disdainful look on his face finally walks towards her. "Let me go check in the back." he says and turns around.
She is aware that in her stained jeans and basic white shirt, with her hair in a messy ponytail and her face devoid of any make-up except her pink lipstick, she doesn't look like the typical customer they are used to in the store, but just because she doesn't look the part doesn't mean that she can't be it.
The guy finally comes back carrying a box and motions her to sit on what seems to be the most comfortable ottoman in the entire world. The store is so fancy that the guy actually helps her put on the shoes rather than leaving her to her own means. She is so unused to the treatment since she has been buying her shoes from discounted stores and online for years, but it feels nice even if the guy gives a wry look to the chipped polish on her toes.
Holding his hand, she stands, and wow, even though she now has five inches extra, it feels like she is walking on clouds. The shoes are comfortable and she walks like a natural in them. She walks towards the mirror, not stumbling, and catches her reflection. She stands straight, her posture is almost perfect. The shoes makes her calves look wonderful somehow and she turns slightly and her butt just looks great. She has no idea how the shoes can change the way her body looks so drastically, but somehow they do and now she wants five of these.
"What do you think?" the guy asks, his voice grating.
"I love them!" she chimes. "Do they come in purple, too?" she asks immediately and the guy nods. "And black?" she adds when he turns around.
She ends up buying the three pairs, to the shock of the salespeople, and ignores the four digit amount on the receipts. She kindly asks them to prepare the green pair so that she can wear them out of the store and hands her flats for them to pack inside the empty box instead.
She remembers her mother and what she always told her about heels: Once you familiarize yourself with heels, all the pain and suffering you first feel disappears. She has a point, she thinks to herself. Then it hits her. The answer she has been searching for weeks. Oliver's location. She chastises herself mentally for not coming up with it earlier.
Just as she is about to call him, her cell phone rings and Diggle tells her that he is done and is ready to meet her. She agrees to meet him halfway at the Big Belly Burger in the mall and almost runs to the restaurant to share the news with Diggle.
When she walks in with four bags, he is already sitting at a table by the window. "Nice shoes." he comments when his eyes land on them, probably after noticing the increase in her height.
She ignores the compliment. "I know where Oliver is." she states at once, too excited. "He went to Lian Yu. That's the one place he is most familiar with, the only place where he can be alone with his thoughts so that he can brood properly. We both know how much he loves doing that."
Diggle drops her off at her apartment after they confirm that Oliver is indeed on the island and they start planning their trip. Alone at home, she spends the entire night shopping online for clothes. Instead of doing her laundry, she just throws away her old clothes, except a few items she packs for their trip to the damned island and goes to bed surrounded by the boxes of her new shoes.
+1
Corto Maltese is warmer than she expected. She has done her research on the island, packed her bags accordingly, but nothing actually prepared her for the humidity. She hates every second of it.
She is in shorts and a tank top but they don't help. She is already drenched in sweat, her top sticks to her back and she hates that she has to wipe off her forehead every five minutes to get rid of drops of sweat. She is just grateful that she put her in a ponytail and not let it down.
She is hiding under the shade of a large tree, away from the prying eyes of the members of the Triad and expects Oliver to talk to her any minute on the comms to give her instructions. Instead of clear instructions, she hears loud voices followed by a tumult and she recognizes the noises Oliver makes when he is fighting off bad guys.
The instruction finally comes. "Felicity, run."
It takes her a second to react and holding one hand up to keep the Bluetooth in her ear and holding her tablet in her other hand, she sprints towards the direction they came from. The flip-flops she bought from the store next to their hotel because her sneakers were too much in the humidity don't hold and fall apart simultaneously as she runs on the pebbled path. She yanks them off and throws them away and continues running. Small pebbles dig into her soles and she sees her pedicure going bad in front of her eyes, but she ignores the problems and runs until she sees the van they rented and jumps through the door Roy holds out for her.
Diggle hits the gas pedal and drives towards the direction of the warehouse to pick up Oliver and when all four of them are safe in the van after dodging bullets, he drives them directly to the hotel and leaves to return the van while Roy, Oliver and she go to their rooms.
She hisses as the cuts on her soles sting and ache, but she ignores the pain. Oliver gives her a curious look, then notices her pain and suddenly he scoops her in his arms, under Roy's curious looks. She struggles to get out of his hold, nudges against his chest, but he doesn't even budge.
Roy leaves them to go to his room on the second floor and Oliver continues, ignoring her pleas. She expects him to take to her room, instead he carries her to his own room and asks her to pick up the room key from the front pocket of his cargo pants.
She blushes but complies and with a quick move, she reaches down and picks the keys and uses them to open the door. Oliver carries her inside, bridal style, she needs to mention, and gently drops her on the foot the bed.
"Oliver, I'm fine." she finds herself repeating, but he continues ignoring her and disappears into the small bathroom.
He comes out a moment later carrying towels and a bowl. He places the bowl next to her on the bed and kneels in front of her on the floor with one of the towels spread over his bended knees. Without saying a word or looking at her, he gently holds her left foot and places it over the towel.
"Oliver, what are you doing?" she questions.
Instead of replying, Oliver dips another towel into whatever liquid is in the bowl and with the same gentleness, holds it against her feet. She winces as the liquid she now knows as antiseptic burns momentarily and clenches the mattress under her hands.
"You should've worn your sneakers." Oliver mutters as he looks up to her. "Those flip-flops weren't mission material."
"Well, I didn't know you were going to make me run in them." she answers. "It was too hot for sneakers."
"Don't wear flip-flops for a mission next time." he tells her.
She looks at him surprised because Oliver hinting at even the idea of another field mission involving her is sort of miraculous given how reluctant he was to accept her participation to operation Corto Maltese, but she doesn't say anything and just takes the opportunity to relish how his calloused fingers feel against her skin despite the pain she is in.
There is a small smile on his face as he diligently works on her feet and removes each and every piece of pebble embedded to her skin. He touches the ring she wears on her second toe, on purpose she notes. "You're wearing green nail polish." he comments quietly. Once he is done, he stands up and holds out a hand for her. "Come on." he urges, then hands her a pair of his own sneakers that are too large for her.
She puts the sneakers on and follows Oliver out of the room and then outside the hotel, each step careful and planned as she doesn't want to trip and fall. They walk in silence side by side for some five minutes until they reach the public beach.
"The saltwater will help with the cuts." Oliver says matter-of-factly. He reaches out and holds her hand, then they walk together through the small crowd of sunbathers and swimmers on the shore. He drops her hand momentarily to take his shoes off then rolls up the legs of his cargo pants. She follows suit and leaves his shoes she is wearing next to the shoes he is wearing himself and steps into the ocean.
The water is cold and the salt stings her cuts, but she takes two more steps, then another, and gets used to the sensation and looks down on her feet, watching as they sink into the sand. It's a wonderful feeling, the sinking, and she tries to remember the last time she has been in the ocean, but comes up empty.
"I thought you'd never want to even see the ocean again." she comments when Oliver comes to stand before her.
"Why would you think that?" he questions.
"Five years on an island, surrounded with nothing but the ocean?" she states. "It should bring back bad memories."
He takes a step towards her, their feet almost touch under the water. "I'm trying to make new memories." he answers with a smile. Then their eyes meet. There is tenderness in the way he looks at her and she feels a warmth creeping up in her body, not one caused by the heat and the humidity of the island but by the man standing before her.
She smiles. "That's very good to hear." she says. "Let's go back home, to Starling City." she whispers and grabs his hand.
They get out of the water and on to the shore, picking up their shoes, leaving footsteps on the sand in their wake.