Leaving Oliver behind outside of Nanda Parbat was the hardest thing Felicity had ever had to do. There'd been a moment, a painfully short lived moment, when she'd thought they might have a chance of getting him out. It wasn't until they'd gotten surrounded, and had only escaped with their lives by Oliver's chance intervention, that Felicity realized how truly desperate their plan had been.
During the plane ride home, she curled up in a ball in her seat and wouldn't meet anyone's eyes. She glanced around furtively, trying to gage the others' reactions. Thea was sprawled across a row of seats, sleeping off her ordeal. Merlyn's face was emotionless. Of course it was- he cared for one person in the world at this point, and that person wasn't Oliver. John's face, too, was empty of expression, but the tension in his posture indicated that this was an intentional arrangement, a facade. Felicity wondered what he was feeling, and why he felt the need to hide it. Blinking back tears, she turned her head away from the rest of the group and spent the remainder of the trip staring blankly out the window of the plane.
When they landed in Starling City, Felicity was so desperate to get away from the others, to be alone with her grief and her guilt and her pain, that she practically threw herself down the stairs and out of the plane. It wasn't until she was standing on the runway, an icy wind whipping her hair, that she remembered that they'd all arrived at the airport in one vehicle. She had no way to get home. She started walking, away from the plane, her head in a fog. She heard John call her name, his voice faint and carried away in the wind. She picked up her pace until she was running, her shoes ringing against the pavement. She didn't think about where she was going. She didn't want to think. She just ran.
She wasn't entirely surprised, some time later, to find herself at the Foundry. Even in its current ruined state, having been ransacked by the SCPD, it was still the one place she could still feel a connection to Oliver. She entered the building and punched in the code for the basement door without looking. The beeping of the keypad's buttons seemed unnaturally loud in the quiet of the empty building.
At the bottom of the stairs, she switched on the lights, then immediately shut them off again. She couldn't bear to look at the mess the police had made of the place in their frenzied search for evidence. That wasn't how she wanted to remember it. Curiously, the lights in the display cases, both the two laying on the floor and the one leaning against the one remaining table, were still working, casting long, angular shadows on the walls and floor. It was those lights, however little they managed to cut through the encompassing darkness, that Felicity used to find her way around. Once upon a time- not so long ago, really- she could have walked the lair with her eyes closed, but that was no longer the case. Feeling her way around in the semi dark, she tripped and stumbled into something that yielded unexpectedly beneath her weight. A moment later, she realized what it was- Oliver's bed. The covers were thrown back as if he'd just gotten out of it, the shadows making mountains and deep valleys out of the creases and folds in the sheets. It served as a stark reminder of just how little time had passed since he'd been here.
Her legs feeling weak, Felicity fell back into the bed. Oliver's scent enveloped her, bringing tears to her eyes. She'd promised herself that she wouldn't cry, that she would be strong for Oliver, but it was too late. The tears came thick and hot and fast, and she couldn't stop them. She could only lay there and wait for them to subside.
She wasn't sure exactly when she fell asleep, only that she was awoken later by a sound she instantly recognized as that of an arrow clattering against the ground. To her, that sound was visceral and unmistakeable. Someone must have accidently kicked one of the arrows lying scattered around on the floor. She wasn't alone. She squinted into the darkness and was able to make a human shaped shadow moving cautiously through the lair, clearly having as much difficulty navigating the space as Felicity herself had had earlier. For a single, fleeting moment, her sleep addled brain told her that it was Oliver, but then reason returned and she remembered that that was impossible.
"John?" she asked, because he was the only person she could imagine would have had any reason to come here.
"I thought I might find you here," came John's voice from the darkness.
"Why are you here?" Felicity asked. Her voice sounded small and brittle,even to her own ears.
"It wasn't your fault," John said by way of answer. Felicity snorted.
"You don't see Oliver here, do you?" she asked bitterly.
"Felicity," John said, in the same tone of voice he used when Oliver tried to carry too much of the weight of other people's misfortunes on his shoulders. Maybe that was what Felicity was doing right then- trying to bear all of the weight of what had befallen Oliver when she didn't need to- but, quite frankly, at that moment she didn't care.
"I'll never forgive myself for leaving him there," she said before John could continue with whatever point he'd been about to make.
"We have to believe that Oliver has a plan," John said firmly, with a conviction Felicity wished she shared.
"But that's the whole point- he didn't - doesn't- have a plan," she said, rushing her words in an attempt to get them out before she started crying again, voice quavering with the effort. "Ra's Al Ghul forced his hand. He didn't have a plan, and neither did I. I was just...I was just desperate." John sighed.
"Look," he said. "I don't pretend to know what you're going through, but you have to believe that you'll see Oliver again. It's the only way you get through this with your sanity intact."
"I don't know if I can make myself believe that," Felicity said softly.
"Well, try," John replied gently. "Or, at the very least, try to stop tearing yourself up over the fact that he's not here." Felicity nodded.
"I'll do my best," she said, voice hoarse.
"Good," John replied. "That's...all I ask." Silence stretched between them, broken only by the barely audible patter of retreating footsteps. After a moment or two, Felicity realized she was alone in the Foundry once again. She appreciated John deciding not to force his company on her further. To be alone with her thoughts was exactly what she needed right now.