"Gentle touch, Delicate breath, Flash of pearl in the darkness of another heavy Wednesday – These lips know how it feels to be given a taste, but denied another; blissful, longing whimsy – A loss of sense, A sense of disregard – Lay awake and wonder how she's sleeping."
- "Long Distance", Alex Gaskarth
He's not sure what time it is when she wakes him, only that it's dark in the foundry and the telltale padding of her panda flats against the stairs echoes around the space in a familiar rhythm. It's hesitant; her feet hit the stairs in an uneven pattern like she's not sure if she should take the next step or turn and retreat. The fact that Oliver isn't even alarmed when he wakes should bother him, but it's just one of the countless ways she's softened him.
He's lying on the mattress that's pushed back into a dark corner, the mattress she bought him, face half covered with a pillow and the blankets all tangled around his ankles from a couple hours of fitful sleep. When he hears her heels make contact with the concrete floor, he rolls over to face the entry way. The movement must startle her, because her hand flies up to rest over her heart and she lets out the tiniest squeak.
"Jesus, Oliver. You're going to give me a heart attack one of these days." She says, and takes a deep breath before she lets her hand fall back to her side, turning questioning eyes on him.
"What are you doing here, anyways? I thought you were staying with Thea," she asks, and she's using that voice, the one that's so caring and so Felicity that it always makes him wonder what he ever did to deserve someone who is so concerned about his wellbeing, someone like her. It's the voice that makes him love her all the more, because even after all he's put her through she still uses it with him; she still treats him like the man she's always believed he could be, even after every time he's shown her otherwise.
Oliver sits up and settles his weight on the edge of the mattress. He lets his fingers skim over the grey jersey sheets Felicity insisted he would need and purchased before he could object. She had sent him looking for pillowcases after that. "But nothing green," she'd said, shouting it after him through the aisles of Big Lots. The memory of it brings a smile to his face, accompanied by a pang in his chest that's all too familiar. He's so used to it by now that he can almost overlook it.
"I was here late, decided to crash for the night. Thea's at the club late most nights, I don't like waking her when I come in after she's home." Finally looking up at Felicity, Oliver gives a little shrug and ignores the way home feels awkward in his mouth when she's the only thing he's come to define it as.
Felicity nods and glances around the room, a habit that lets him know she's trying to figure out what to do next. Oliver watches her, revels in her presence even if she's several yards away. She hasn't been around much, and even though he knows why, it doesn't make it any easier to ignore how much her absence affects him.
"What are you doing here so late?" He eventually asks. She's dressed in faded yoga pants and a too-large t-shirt that's falling off her shoulder and advertising some band he's never heard of. She nods again before she answers him, and it shakes a little more of her hair free from its loose braid.
"I left my tablet," she points towards the bank of computers and steps over to retrieve the device. She holds it up for him to see, waggling it around in the air like a prize. "You know me, always forgetting things around here." Her tone strains to sound light and casual, an uncomfortable smile playing over her lips as she lets out an awkward chuckle. The corners of his mouth tug upward anyways.
Bolstered by exhaustion and maybe a little intoxicated by her presence, Oliver finds himself on his feet and strides over to the work area. Leaning against one of the tables, palms against the cold metal, he ignores the way he seems to have positioned himself perfectly for the potted fern next to him to tickle its leaves against his bare forearm.
Felicity is determined to look anywhere but at him. She alternately brushes nonexistent dust off of her tablet, like her fingers are itching to unlock the screen and busy themselves, and studies the wall behind her computer station.
Her eyes are sporting dark shadows behind her glasses and she's worrying her bottom lip between her teeth in a way that would be absolutely infuriating if she didn't seem so tired. It doesn't take a genius to see it, to see the stress written in between all the lines she tries to blur with quirked lips and eyes that seem to light up for everyone but him lately. Oliver has never considered himself a genius in any sense of the word, but he thinks that after two years, he's become fluent in the language that Felicity speaks when she's not using any words at all.
Of all the things he's learned, everything he's accomplished, that's the one thing he will always be the most proud of.
He watches her for a while, drinks in her presence like he's drying up in the Sahara and she is the first rain in a century. He's never been interested in philosophy or those dusty old books that had lined the shelves in his former home, filled to the brim with metaphors he might never understand if he tried, but he can't stop himself from thinking that looking at her feels like sunshine after a harsh winter, melting away at the ice in the gentlest way possible.
She shuffles her feet when the silence shifts from awkward to stifling, and Oliver takes it as his cue to start talking. For the first time in a long time, he opens his mouth without any thought as to what might come out.
"Are you okay, Felicity?" he asks. That gentle timbre that always seems to come out when she's around sneaks into his voice, and the question catches them both a little off guard.
She meets his eyes in that tentative way she does lately, looking hesitantly like she's searching for something but she's afraid that she might find it.
"Yeah, Oliver. I'm okay," she says slowly and after a lengthy pause, the sentence coming out fragmented and quiet, cracked into pieces by all the things she's not saying.
He pushes off the counter and closes a little bit of the distance between them before his mind can catch up with his bodies' actions. It's instinctual, this pull they have. If he were the kind to believe in such things as soul mates, he would say that she's his. She always has been, really. Ever since that first lame excuse, since that first genuine smile she'd elicited from him that would be nowhere near the last, something had kept him coming back to her. At every end and every beginning, it had been Felicity. Always Felicity.
He'd lost himself in her somewhere in the middle, and right now he's not sure that it's such a bad thing.
It's been months since the whirlwind of dates and explosions and dead girls that changed everything for them. Week upon week since Oliver had shown up at her office with empty hands, a heavy heart, a million words on his lips, and no idea which ones would spill out. It's been week upon week since every single one of those words died on his tongue and he discovered exactly what it feels like to be left behind even when she never went anywhere at all.
It's been weeks, still, since that dark night in the Foundry when they came crashing right back together and he's starting to wonder if this isn't becoming a habit, the way they constantly collide with one another just to retreat to their own corners again.
Felicity watches him with a tenuous sort of curiosity as he cuts the space between them in half, and he stops just short of arm's length because he's not confident that he could stop himself from reaching out to her.
"You look tired," is what he finally manages, and if Oliver weren't so exhausted too he might have flinched at the bluntness of the statement.
She gives him a soft laugh and the muscles in his shoulders relax, accepting the brief respite she gives him from holding up the blame of the world. Truth be told, she's always been the absolution of everything he couldn't save himself from.
"Yeah, I probably do. It's two in the morning."
Oliver returns her tiny grin but his eyes stay serious, dark blue and clouded with worry and a million other emotions.
He shakes his head, "I mean, you seem more tired than usual, not just sleepy."
Felicity's expression goes dark and for just a second Oliver regrets having said anything at all, but then she meets his eyes again and just like that he's lost in them, encompassed by everything that she is.
"I haven't been getting much sleep lately," she says quietly, and shrugs one shoulder as an afterthought. "It hasn't exactly been an easy few weeks."
It's nothing he doesn't already know, but the words hit him like a fist to his gut. He'll never be comfortable with the thought of hurting her, even if it's all he seems to know how to do anymore.
Somewhere in the midst of everything, he's inched his way closer to her and his thumb has found its place in the crook of her elbow, and they've fallen into the old habit of forgetting about a pretty little thing called personal space again, so he takes a step back and gives himself a little room to breathe. It doesn't help, though, because he's drowning in her. He has been for so long that he doesn't remember what breathing in anything other than her feels like anymore.
Felicity looks almost rejected at his small escape, but there's nothing he can do about that without knocking them both over the edge of this precarious balance they've established.
"I haven't been sleeping either," he says before he can stop himself, the words bubbling up out of him like she's pulling the truth out of him without even trying.
She nods, breaks his gaze to look at her tablet again, furrowing her eyebrows like he knows she does when there's a hundred different things going on her head and she's trying to sort them out.
His name falls from her lips at the same time he breathes hers and the look in her eyes when she meets his is as desperate as he feels.
He closes his eyes and he can feel her watching him. She's waiting for something, anything, but the words all die in his throat and the only thing that comes out is her name again, broken and falling between them like shattered mess he is.
Felicity closes the distance between them this time, Oliver's eyes fluttering open just as she brings her hands up to cradle his face. Blue meets blue and her eyes are saying a thousand words, asking and answering all at once.
She leans forward and he thinks she might kiss him, crash right back into him like two trains on the wrong tracks meeting again and again in the right places. She doesn't kiss him, though. Instead, her fingers trace his cheekbone, follow his jaw up to card through his hair and he closes his eyes against the intensity of her gaze. He leans into her touch, and the gentle ministrations bring him more peace than anything else has in as long as he can remember.
Her motions stop after several moments and his eyes flicker open to find her staring at her hand like she's not sure how it got there. Oliver brings his own up to cover it and slides them both down to his chest to wrap her hand in both of his. His thumb coasts over the pulse point on her wrist and he takes comfort in the steady beat he finds there.
He doesn't know how long they stand there like that, eyes locked in a hundred different silent conversations and her hand in his. He only knows that after a while, Felicity blinks and gives her head a tiny shake.
"Goodnight, Oliver. Get some sleep." She says in a gentle voice, before she squeezes his fingers, drops her hand from his grasp, turns on her heel and climbs the stairs to the door.
Oliver is still standing in the middle of the Foundry floor, amidst all the computers with the fern at his back and the scent of her shampoo still lingering in the air, when he hears her car door shut and the engine start.
He makes his way back to the mattress in the corner and the only thought in his mind is of a blonde that reminds him of sunshine and makes him want to be a philosophical man who understands things like love.
But that part is no different from any other night.