Felicity lets the Foundry door slip slowly from her fingers, it closing gently almost silently, before she starts down the steps. The sharp thwack of metal on metal is more than telltale. And the sound of Oliver's lately abandoned past time covers her clicking heels. Half way down she knows one thing – this is the first time since he came back, well back again, that they would be alone in the same room. And she hopes another – that his taking up the salmon ladder signifies a return to times more normal. Or their version of normal which is now irrevocably distorted.
She forces herself not to look up until she has passed the first glass case. The sight of one thing stops her violently when she does, a gasp so sharp it is practically a scream cracks the air between bar landings. And a thousand things she'd tried to ignore flood her brain.
She hadn't seen it before. And it was impossible to unsee.
Felicity knew it would be there.
She couldn't have imagined what it would do to her.
Even mostly healed, the deep pink heavily knotted tissue just below Oliver's ribs is awful. Sickening. Her eyes follow the length of it and the blade covered in his blood is there too. The dimensions of it burned into her memory. In an instant she knows exactly how deep Ra's stabbed him, skewered more like. It was only that wide at the hilt. But Felicity can't stop there, can't stop her computer brain from running all the numbers.
The length and width of the blade. The angle. Lungs, heart, how many major arteries and blood vessels directly in its path? He shouldn't be alive.
He shouldn't be alive.
He shouldn't be alive.
And then Felicity Smoak short circuits.
Her eyes cloud with tears. But she hasn't blinked. Can't. Light and movement are vague lens flares across her glasses. She knows her heart is still beating because the pulsing, unbearably constant whooshing of it in her ears is like white noise through a bass amplifier. She has stopped breathing. Each painful endeavor at shallow relief is cut off at the back of her throat by the wail of despair that hasn't yet escaped. But her body keeps up the involuntary effort every few seconds sending her chest and arms into tensed stutters. And she is so cold. Shoulders to toes, freezing.
She doesn't know that her hand is clutching her own diaphragm, trying to hold closed an invisible hole. She just knows she's never felt so hollow. She's lightheaded and nauseous.
She doesn't know why.
She keeps seeing her hands coated in red, covered in his blood.
How many times didn't he die?
Another failed attempt at breathing takes her out at the knees. And now she knows vaguely that she's falling. She doesn't see Oliver in front of her.
She didn't see him falter at the top of the ladder at her first cry of distress. His left hand actually losing the bar entirely. She didn't see him drop to the ground in the very same second without hesitation. She definitely didn't see him practically slide across the floor so he could be there when she fell, her decent so sudden he had no choice but to join her on his knees in the middle of the Foundry floor.
And she hadn't heard him calling her name.
She hears him now. Her name comes out sharp, short even, edged in fear.
"Felicity!"
She feels the heat of his hands at her waist before they move to her elbows and then he trails his fingers up to her shoulders. She feels his palms against her neck just before his thumbs brush her cheekbones. She knows what he's doing, somewhere in the back of her mind it registers as does the irony. Oliver is checking her for injuries. And Felicity knows she needs to move or speak. She needs to-
"Breath!" Oliver yells it. It's not gentle.
As much as she would like to, Felicity can't do it. She manages to blink, dammed saltwater free flowing now.
Oliver gets a little clearer in front of her. He's completely unmasked. No hood, no steely veneer, only the desperation she'd heard In his voice etched across his face, darkening his eyes. And it hurts her that much more to see it.
"Please," he whispers not sure if she is even seeing or hearing him. Her beautiful face painfully contorted in front of him.
It is the quickening of his pulse against her neck that does it, pulls her back. The impossible thrumming. He's alive. And he's scared. That brings an agonized sob into the space between them. She drags in a half a breath, her throat on fire, before she cuts herself off again with a traitorous wail that makes her jaw shake.
She steals tiny gulps of air, like breathing in on a hiccup, and releases deeply buried sobs that churn her stomach. She thinks she might be hysterical.
And when she doesn't stop, Oliver speaks again. "Felicity?" She feels the tremor he's fighting to control roll through his forearms. His hands on her cheeks shake just a little. "What happened?"
His words come out husky and disconnected, like he can't catch his breath either.
Felicity can't see that he is on the verge of tears himself, only that his eyes are the most piercing blue she's ever seen them and they are begging for an end to his current torture.
It won't be an end. But Felicity doesn't look away as she brings her hand up between them and lays it over the source of her distress. "You . . . " It's barely a word when it comes out and she can't even finish. It's taken everything she has to give him that and she finds herself pitching forward. Softly crashing into the man that died on her.
Oliver's arms wrap around her shoulders. Hers curl under his arms where her fingers latch onto the bare skin of his back. She trembles with every half breath, half cry losing all the strength and conviction of the past few weeks. She is breaking apart one tear at a time. Hot, hopeless tears that wouldn't come before now. Tears she couldn't afford.
"I'm here. I'm okay. I came back." He says it over and over again. But he is literally holding her together because isn't he the only one that can?
Felicity doesn't try to stop. This is what she held back while trying to fill the hole he left for everyone else. Suddenly the words she couldn't accept from him just a few months ago make perfect sense.
"I'd don't have the luxury of falling to pieces . . . If I grieve nobody else gets to."
God, they really are some pair.
Finally, maybe too quickly, the compression of Oliver's arms around her calms her enough to turn her cries to dying whimpers. And she can breathe.
He shouldn't be alive.
She breathes him in. Her overheated face burrowing into the crook of his neck. Deep, restoring breathes with her eyes closed until their chests rise and fall together.
It isn't fair. She knows that. She could have said she'd wait for him. She could have said she loved him. She even could have said she understood. But she didn't. Instead, she had chosen to say things she knew would hurt. Both of them.
This scar exists now. And it's different. It's different from the other scars that belonged to him before they ever met. It's even different from the healed bullet hole in his shoulder. The one that she helped close. This scar is him alone, bleeding, dying. It's her without him. It will never heal. Not for her.
So, she knows it isn't fair that she's in his arms right now. It isn't fair to ask this of him and to have him give it so freely. But he keeps dying on her and she doesn't know how else to deal with that.
