Author's Notes
I guess letting two emotionally damaged dummies with bows and arrows ruin me wasn't enough.
Meatball Surgery
"Easy," Oliver hissed through his teeth. "You're trying to fix the arm, not take the whole thing off."
Felicity paused to cut him a look over the rims of her glasses. "That's an awful lot of sass coming from someone whose mess I'm trying to clean up. If you were a little more careful…"
"You know it was an accident!"
The half-indignant, half-guilty little boy look scrunching his features was too much for her.
"I do know. Now shush," she dropped a kiss on his pouting lips to take the sting out of her words, "I need to concentrate."
Setting her needle aside, Felicity knotted the thread pinched between her turquoise nails. She tilted her head to inspect her work with a critical eye, the end of her ponytail tickling her bare shoulder as she did. The gash was deep, but as she carefully ran her thumb along the stark, neat stitches she'd made, they seemed to hold.
She felt more than saw Oliver's fingers twitching and rubbing together with impatient, nervous energy.
"Okay, I think we're good here. Just keep an eye out for—"
"Mommy?"
More times than she cared to remember, Felicity had seen Oliver face down madmen and killers with glacial indifference, had watched him be physically and mentally tortured without so much as a crack in his stoic expression to betray him.
Basically, the man had a poker face to end all poker faces.
But the sound of their daughter's voice in that moment drained the color from his face. At all of four years old, bedheaded, a pillow crease on her cheek, and still blinking sleep from her eyes, Violet Queen terrified the Green Arrow without even trying.
The utter ridiculousness of the situation did not escape her, and Felicity bit her lip against the giggle fit bubbling at the back of her throat. It didn't help when she noticed that Oliver, with a degree of subtlety that was probably overkill, was edging along the kitchen table until his body shielded it from Violet's view.
"Hi, baby," he said, voice tender and low in that way it always seemed to be for their little girl. "Did you have a good nap?"
Violet nodded, but her lower lip trembled dangerously. "I can't find Theodore. When I woke up, he was gone."
The silence that followed was so profound, Felicity swore she could hear Oliver Queen, you have failed this child ricocheting around the inside of his skull. He turned to her with frantic eyes. If she didn't intervene and fast, she was about to wind up with a scruffy, muscle-y pile of vigilante out cold on her floor.
"Come here, Violet," she said as she scooped up her sleep-warm body. Settled comfortably on her mother's hip, Violet immediately rested her head on her shoulder. She usually needed some serious cuddle time post-nap, not that Felicity was going to complain. She smoothed her snarled curls back somewhat before feathering them with a kiss.
She turned to Oliver, wordlessly telling him to step aside, but he hesitated. Her eyebrows flicked up as if to say, We can't hide it from her forever. When he moved, every line in his body was tense like he was bracing for a punch.
The table was littered with sewing needles, pins, scissors, discarded curlicues of thread, and the occasional white froth of cotton stuffing. And in the center of this galaxy of craft store rummage was a very shabby, very well-loved teddy bear.
"Theodore!" cried Violet, one rosy cheek dimpling with the intensity of her joy, a sight that never failed to set off a fizzy warmth in Felicity's breast because it was so very Oliver.
Theodore (Theodore Bearington if they were being formal—Theodore Bearington II if they were really splitting hairs, since his predecessor met his untimely end in a decidedly indelicate wash cycle that no amount of thread in the world could mend) had a too-dark line of stitches banding around one arm, proof of the emergency surgery Felicity had performed.
She had been in the middle of remotely upgrading her office servers when Oliver came tearing into the study, whisper-shouting her name with a level of panic that had her lunging for their go-bags before she processed the bear and his precariously dangling arm cupped gingerly in his hands.
Not that she could blame him. Sure, she'd given him a bit of a hard time with her teasing, and maybe she had laughed herself silly as he offered jumbled explanations of what happened, but as the culprit behind Theodore I's death-cum-laundry, she understood. She's pretty sure she cried more than Violet did that day.
Finesse had taken a backseat to speed in their fever to reattach Theodore's arm before Violet woke up, but all told, Felicity was pretty proud of how she'd triaged the crisis.
Oliver's callouses catching on her skin as he twined his fingers between hers brought her back to herself. By now, Violet had noticed the stitches and was peering up her mother, all big blue eyes and crinkled forehead.
"Theodore had a little accident," Felicity said gently. "He had a boo-boo, but we fixed it."
She expected suspicion, questions, a tantrum even, but instead, the plaintive confusion melted from Violet's face, and she turned to consider her teddy bear more thoughtfully.
"Oh," was her simple reply, "like daddy."
The stutter Felicity's heart gave was echoed by the hand clutching hers.
Oliver's eyes never strayed from Violet as she asked, "Does it hurt?"
He shook his head, biding for time until words found him again. "No," he finally answered in unsteady voice, reaching out to take Violet from her. "No, not anymore. Mommy made it all better. But I think a Violet-kiss would make it extra sure."
Violet whirled then leaned down, implicitly trusting that her father would never let her fall, and plucked Theodore up off the tabletop before smacking a sloppy kiss against the newly stitched arm. She brushed a far softer kiss against the fabric of Oliver's shirt, just over the tangle of scar tissue above his heart.
"One for you too, daddy," she said as she patted his chest reassuringly.
"Thank you, baby," he murmured, cradling her closer to his chest and burying his nose in her hair.
Oliver met Felicity's gaze over the small blond head tucked into the crook of his neck, and she gave him a tremulous smile. He tugged on the hand still in his until she joined their little huddle. Closing her eyes, she pressed her lips against his shoulder, lingering there.
Felicity had been patching Oliver up for years. Whether it was with butterfly bandages or faith, she fought to hold him together even when he didn't think there was anything worthwhile left inside him. He was wrong, of course. (He usually was.) All the little broken pieces of himself he feared had drowned in blood long ago slowly knit themselves together again, making up the man who was the city's protector, her husband, and the father of her child. She had always believed, no matter what he had done in his past, Oliver deserved to heal.
And now, eyes burning bright and their daughter in his arms, she knew he finally believed it too.
End Author's Notes
Look away if you haven't watched the S5 finale, because spoilers, but can people please stop blowing their goddamn brains out on the North China Sea in front of Oliver Queen? I mean Jesus.