Title: Optical Network
Word Count: 2804
Notes: Apparently my new goal for OHFAT (my favorite acronym ever, by the by) is to take every prompt and turn it around. For "summer vacation," I wrote in a 'verse where Oliver and Felicity don't get to take one. And now for "eye contact," I'm twisting that around, too.
Shout-out to Elsie, who was epic enough to beta this.
Anyway, as always, thanks for reading! If you are so inclined to talk to me about it, I appreciate that, too. ;)
Felicity Smoak likes to think of herself as practical even in the chaos. When someone's portcom breaks down and they lose their lifeline, she can get it going again. Malfunctioning ship just before important travel plans? She can hook you up. Fiber optics go out in a 10K Ultra HD television? She's your girl. No matter what, when it comes to electronics, she can fix it. That's her one constant.
Provided, of course, she can see.
"You sure you want me in your panel?" Roy asks for the third time. His voice comes above her ear, and since she increased the sensitivity on her auditory sensors to compensate, she can hear his shoes squeaking against the floor. The familiar clacking noise tells her he's twisting the end of the spanner in his hand.
"No," she tells him bluntly, though it probably doesn't surprise him. Only one person has ever been in her panel beside herself, and that was when her dad was still controlling her wiring. But whether she likes it or not, Felicity needs someone to tell her the color of her wires since she's working blind—quite literally. A moment later, she adds, "But I don't see a choice."
She pops the panel open herself, unplugging the triangular wire with the blocky end that connects all motor function to her CPU. At least her father was smart enough to predict the need for circuitry repair separate from her involuntary functions, so that, even though her cybernetic arm falls limp in her lap, her lungs keep working. Which, all in all, is a good thing.
"Blue wire," she tells him. "Look for a scorch mark along the line—but be careful. They're all still live. Even if my mods aren't." She tries to lift her left arm, but of course it doesn't move. "Why did my visual sensor choose now of all times to go out?" Felicity can't help but whine. "I have to be at this thing with the Queens in ten minutes, and I kind of need my eyes." She groans. "Why did I agree to that, Roy?"
"Because you were too busy salivating over Oliver Queen to be logical," he replies, and she can practically hear the eye roll that accompanies it.
A wire tickles the back of her neck, and her skin pebbles as it scratches. "I was not salivating over him," she protests hotly.
"Whatever, Blondie," Roy replies, in that infuriating way that sounds as if he thinks he's won the argument despite conceding. "You didn't see your face after he left." Before she can argue further, he pinches her with the rubber-handled forceps, and Felicity jumps. "Sorry. Your workspace is tight."
"Sorry I'm not the size of a star cruiser," she quips back. "Any burns will probably be near the bridge-point CPU—that's at the base of my skull, feeding into my brainstem. You'll want to go up slightly from the top of my panel." A second later, she adds, "Don't poke around too hard in there, or you could end up paralyzing me. And I mean the kind of paralysis that new wiring can't fix."
She can feel Roy's hand shaking. "But no pressure," he mutters under his breath. "This is why I prefer star cruisers and portcoms, Smoak." She winces. He said her name; that's never a good sign. Roy never calls her by name. "If you kill one of those, you can bring it back to life." He makes a noise in the back of his throat. "Wait. Is this the wire you took out of the Singhs' starship last week? The one that fritzed and took down their whole interface?"
Something about his tone makes her wince. "Well, I clipped off the shorted part," Felicity answers defensively. "Waste not, want not. It's an HD interface wire, and it really helped make my retina display and picture output so much clearer."
Under his breath, Roy groans, "Unbelievable." Louder, he adds, "Blondie, if you're going to pull shit like this to get an HD interface wire, I will buy you one that hasn't shorted before."
"Felicity?" a new voice calls. She winces; just what she needs.
"Hey, Oliver," she answers. Roy mocks her under his breath, and she shoves an elbow into his side. The oof he releases afterward is probably the most satisfying thing that's happened to her today. "I, ah, I'm upstairs finishing up." She trills a nervous laugh, smoothing out the skirt of her dress. "Can you give me a few minutes?"
Even with a maxed-out audio sensor, she can't hear footsteps, but his voice is closer when he asks, "Is everything okay?" There's a thoughtful pause as she contemplates the answer to that, but then Oliver adds, "Everyone else is outside. It's just me. I hope that's okay."
Her heartbeat picks up for a moment before her active sensors regulate it, and Roy makes a noise in the back of his throat. "Everything's fine," Felicity assures Oliver, even though it isn't. Because she didn't even convince herself, she adds, "Well, okay, no. Everything is crap. My wiring is on the fritz again. It's going to take us a while. Roy's helping." Wryly, she adds, "Which means I'm probably going to die here before he finishes." Roy's good, but he's slow.
"Bite me, Blondie," is his response, as expected.
A knock on the repair room door makes her jump and, Roy curses under his breath when his fingers brush against a live wire. For a brief moment, she does manage to see something: stars spark across her vision. "May I come in?" Oliver asks in a quiet voice.
While a part of her appreciates that he's asking, the other part knows how humans respond to the cluster of wires hanging down her back. "If you're asking if I'm dressed, I am," she answers in a careful tone. "Whether you come in or not is up to you. My panel is open and I'm positive Roy has half my wiring exposed." Generally, that has a tendency to freak people out; the less they're reminded she's a cyborg, the better.
Oliver only rephrases: "Would you feel comfortable if I came in?"
Roy makes another disgusted noise and mutters salivating under his breath. Because he's in her wiring, she can't even hit him this time. "I guess so?" Felicity answers with a shrug. On the bright side, she won't be able to see his absolute horror—or watch him stare. "If you want to, sure."
The door creaks as it opens, but still his footsteps are silent. Felicity thinks of a holo-book she read as a child, where one of the characters would float over the ground using magic. She does, however, hear one of the workbench stools scrape across the floor. His knee brushes against hers as he slides in front of her.
"Thank you," is what Oliver chooses to say, and she's never heard anyone thank her quite like that. He isn't just reciting the words, sincerity radiates from his tone, as though she's saved his life instead of asking him to come in. The stool groans under him as he sits. "I wanted to talk to you about some things before you meet my family, if that's okay." He clears his throat. "Is there something wrong with your eye? It isn't blue."
Truthfully, she had forgotten about what synth-eyes look like when powered down, and she wonders how he can manage to be so calm about the whole thing. Her eye probably looks greyed out and dead. She used to have nightmares about blank synth-eyes as a kid.
Either way, this she can handle—more so than Oliver Queen sitting across from her while Roy pokes around in her head. "My optics cable fried," she answers, motioning to her face with her right hand. "My left eye is synthetic tissue. It only turns blue when it has power. Right now, everything cybernetic is switched off so Roy won't electrocute himself back there." She lifts her left arm with her right as evidence, and it flops back into her lap like a dead fish. "My right eye is real, but without my optical network, the cyborg part of me can't process it. I'm basically blind right now."
She motions to her best—and only—assistant before finishing, "Which is a terrifying thought when you have him poking around near your central nervous system." Sighing, she adds, "And my leg just went numb—thank you for proving my point." The feeling comes back, and Felicity wiggles her toes before motioning between the two men. "Oliver, Roy; Roy, Oliver."
"Nice to officially meet you," Oliver offers. Roy just grunts in reply, and the billionaire, wisely, turns his attention back to Felicity. "I know Roy is your assistant and that you trust him," he starts in a gentle tone, "but my stepfather is waiting in the hover. Walter does this for a living. If you need another set of hands, I'm sure he'd be glad to help."
Oliver's hand falls on hers—the real one, not the currently useless one covered by a tech glove used to navigate portcoms. "He'd be discreet, if you wanted him to be," he assures her. Clearly he must have noticed her choice of dress: a red, floor-length number that has a sleeve to cover her cyborg left arm, while leaving her right exposed.
"Yeah, because the Queens would rather be seen with a serial killer than a cyborg," Roy interjects.
"It's not about that," Oliver answers in a sharp voice. "Not to me." There's something cold and hard about it that screams danger. "If Felicity wants to present herself as a cyborg, that's her choice." For some reason, the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, as if he's blatantly staring at her. "But I also don't want to force you to do anything you don't want to."
Yeah, like she has any idea how to respond to that . "Roy's managing just fine," she assures him. Her design isn't QC's, and the only person who knows how to manipulate her wiring is Felicity herself. As an afterthought, she adds, "But thank you." Her thank-you falls a little flat compared to Oliver's previous one. "And I don't think it would be a good idea to walk around as a cyborg in front of the media, if you don't mind."
"Of course not," he assures her. Roy's forceps slip, and pain radiates down her entire jaw, causing her eyes to water as she winces. "Felicity?" Oliver's hand touches her arm, but she can only hold up an index finger as she bites down against a string of curses. His voice is darker when he asks Roy, "What did you do to her?"
When she can finally breathe through the pain again, she grits out, "Get out of my nervous system, Harper."
"Thought it was a wire," is his clipped reply, though his tone is sheepish. He sighs. "Hey, Queen, want to make yourself useful?" The stool slides backward. "Come hold this light so I can see in here."
They work in silence for several long moments, with the occasional spark across her vision or numbness in her leg. Finally, Roy says, "Okay, I think I have everything connected again. But do me a favor? The next time you decide to put a shitty wire in your head, think twice about it." He places a hand on her shoulder. "I'm going to reconnect you. Queen, make sure her eye comes back online."
She can feel her processors whirring, trying to make sense of why her autonomic nervous input was cut so suddenly. They start to slow after a moment, and an uncomfortable ache in her left leg makes her shift her foot. That's to be expected; motor function always comes back first.
Sensory happens all at once. Felicity blinks her eyes, and when they open again, everything comes flooding back. Without being tempered by her moderating sensors, they water at the sudden burst of color and—
It's beautiful.
Everything pops with the HD interface cable. Unhindered by her usual retina display—yet to come back online—it seems like she's seeing the world all at once. The fluorescent lights over the dingy workspace seem a little brighter, and the red of her dress a little more vibrant. The black suit coat thrown over the table seems five shades darker than before.
And that's when she notices Oliver.
It isn't that she wasn't paying attention the last time—when a billionaire walks into her shop, she tends to pay attention. It isn't even that he's sitting there in a suit that probably cost more than her cybernetics, nor does it have to do with the way he wears a pair of suspenders. Something about him looks more… alive than before, down to the bright blue of his eyes.
She blinks several times because oh. Wow. Yeah. Roy might have accused her of salivating before, but this time she actually is . And right now, all she can do is stare. Next time she replaces her optics cable, she's avoiding HD because it's dangerous.
As Felicity tries to blink away her stupor, he offers her a tentative smile and how is that even fair? "Hey," is all he says, soft and quiet.
"Hi," she manages to say back.
It takes her a moment to realize she's never held eye contact with him before—not really. In fact, she thinks she might not have held eye contact with anyone before in comparison. When Oliver stares at her, he doesn't just meet her eyes; instead, it feels like he has the ability to see the inner workings of her mind. It's as though there's no one else in the world.
A strand of blonde hair falls into her face, but she can only meet his partial smile with one of her own. As if afraid to break the spell, he reaches up, tucking that errant strand behind her ear. She swallows as callused fingertips brush against her face, and he offers her a gentle lopsided grin before his eyes flick downward.
Her retina display comes back online. Her visual sensors modulate the input from her eyes, and it all vanishes under a wall of holographic blue text and ordinary levels of vision.
The healthy dose of reality jolts her into action. Felicity reaches behind her to snap the panel closed, nearly catching Roy's fingers in the process. He jumps away in protest as she realizes none of her cables are back in yet. Wires fall out as she tries to shove them into place, desperately looking everywhere but at him. For the second time today, she's glad she can't blush. Here she is making goo-goo eyes over Oliver Queen in the great glory of HD visuals, and her panel is open so all the world can see her wiring.
"Here."
She jumps at his touch, wondering again how the hell she missed his footsteps. "Are you a ghost?" she demands to know. "I didn't even hear you move." She busies herself with the wires, but strands of loose hair falls in the way.
His hand stills hers, gentle on top of a cybernetic hand that could probably snap his spine in half. It feels the same way as the one he places on top of her real hand. "Let me," he offers, as though he closes panels for cyborgs every day of his life. He brushes her hair aside, and she holds it away as he rolls the sets of wires up to fit them back in her panel. Somehow he does it without making her feel strange or uncomfortable or freakish.
It just makes her feel human.
When the panel latches, it isn't soon enough. Felicity releases a shaky breath before rising to her feet. She smooths out the wrinkles in her skirt, making sure that the black legging over her left leg leaves no metal exposed. While the slit may be up the right side, this is not going to be the night to show up as a cyborg.
Roy clears his throat, and Felicity jumps; she'd forgotten he was still standing there. Her retina display helpfully tells her that her body is initiating cooling procedures. Her fingers tangle in her hair as she turns away. "I, um, I should try to do something with my hair before we leave," she mutters.
"I'll just wait in the lobby," Oliver assures her He pulls the door to as he darts out of the room like a flash. At first she wonders if he's finally realized just how unnatural she is, but a tiny part of her questions that. After all, if he was disgusted, he would have expressed it a long time ago.
"Salivating, Blondie," is all Roy says, his voice low in warning.
"Shut up, Harper."