Notes: Thanks to innerbrat for helping on this one! And wow, Felicity is really fun to write.
"So..." Felicity says, taking a seat. "Meeting your ex at the BBB? That's a new one."
Oliver smiles lightly, just a twitch of the corners of his mouth. It's one of his many controlled reactions for when he's out in public. Sort of makes her want to be down in the Arrow Cave, so he can speak freely. She starts to glance over her shoulder, to watch Laurel go before they get too involved in the news...
Oliver suddenly has his hand on her forearm, stilling her. "Don't look back. She's still there, watching us."
She'd never even seen him move. "Whoa," Felicity says, but doesn't turn around. "Mad Island skills much? What was in the water there?"
He never takes his eyes off her face, but she knows he's keeping Laurel in his peripheral vision. "Clarity." His hand continues to press down on her arm like an immovable weight.
She raises an eyebrow at him. Sometimes he can be a total drama... um, drama 'Queen.' A moment later, he releases her as quickly as he had grabbed her and pulls back as if nothing had happened.
Felicity leans back as well, folding her arms. "So, again, burgers plus ex equals what? Another case?"
"No. It was like I said, just catching up with a friend." He looks as if he wants to drop the subject. "And it was coffee."
"Fine, fine, okay, you don't want to talk about it, but..." She tilts her head down to peer at him over the edge of her glasses. "You would tell me if there were something in the works, right?"
"Of course. You're part of the team."
"For now," she reminds him.
Oliver simply nods. The longer she works with him, the more she's had to think about the future. What if they never find Walter? What if they do? She hasn't quite decided what her next step is yet.
"So what brings you by?" he asks, before taking a sip of coffee, his outward demeanor placid. She's known him long enough to see right through it. He might as well have a LCD marquee display with the words, DO NOT DISTURB, MUST BROOD running across his forehead in a loop.
Well, forget that. "I was running a couple of database searches in the background while I was finishing up a project... as you do... and I got a ping on a name from the List."
"Oh?" he says, and he's suddenly all ears, as much as he can be out in the open.
"Yeah, my tracking software caught a few large transfers of money into and out of Ben Hawthorne's account. Maybe related to The Undertaking?"
He nods. "Anything could be."
She passes over an flash drive. "Open this downstairs, the system will auto-decrypt for authorized users."
Suddenly Oliver is standing, pocketing the flash drive so quickly she almost doesn't see it. He catches her eye and gives her a sincere, "Thank you, Felicity. I'll take care of it." Then he pats her shoulder on the way out. No goodbye, he's just gone. She's gotten used to it over the past few weeks.
Felicity's stomach suddenly growls, and she gives it a side-eyed glance. "You got something against free food? Could have done that while the boss was still here." Being the vigilante's I.T. girl might be exciting, but it didn't come with a raise in pay.
The thing about onion rings? Not really the best choice for a working lunch. Crumbly and greasy, and the way the breading sometimes separated from the onion and fell onto the computer keyboard...
Felicity lifts the keyboard and shakes out the grimy bits the best she can over her wastebasket. She's going to have to disinfect and clean it—again—but holy crap, no one makes onion rings like the Big Belly Burger does. Though if she eats anymore, she'll have to spar twice as long with John tonight.
Honestly, she doesn't know how Oliver manages to eat at the BBB at all, even as much as he works out. She shakes her head—she hates mysteries, and she's starting to think Oliver Queen is one mystery she'll never completely unravel.
She's using a folded piece of tissue paper to get a particularly stubborn crumb out from under the edge of the 'h' key when the phone rings. She picks up the receiver and places it under the edge of her chin. "I.T. department, Felicity Smoak."
"Hello, Felicity? This is Laurel Lance, we met earlier?"
The voice is the last one she expected to hear when she picked up the phone. Felicity drops it from under her chin, and the keyboard takes a nosedive into the wastebasket. "Crap!"
By the time she recovers and gets the receiver back to her ear, she can hear Laurel saying, "Hello? Ms. Smoak?"
"Laurel! Yeah, sorry, the phone apparently decided to make a break for it," she jokes. "I've told it before, good luck finding a better boss than..." She trails off, feeling awkward, as usual. Clearing her throat, she starts again, "What can I help you with?"
"I'm hoping you can help me with a case." Laurel thankfully does not sound weirded out.
Felicity tries to keep her voice neutral. "Oh?" What sort of case would require tech help? Especially the non-illegal kind.
"Yes. Do you have any experience with translation software?"
"Some." Felicity has used it more in the last month working with Oliver than in her entire career to date, but there's no need to tell Laurel that. She opens up her programs file. "Which languages do you need help with?"
"Just one language. Russian. I'm defending a woman whose English is quite limited. I'm hoping I can get a more accurate picture of her side of the story."
Felicity presses her lips together in thought. Translation programs are only a stop-gap at best. Surely any translation obtained that way wouldn't be admissible in court...
"Is that a problem?" Laurel asks when Felicity's silent too long.
"Oh, no!" Felicity says quickly. "Not at all. I have several possibilities that would do the trick..."
"Wonderful."
"...but would you be able to use it? Legally, I mean?"
Laurel quickly explains, "Oh no, definitely not in court. She'll have a court-appointed translator. But I'd like to be able to start planning her defense as soon as possible. I'm hoping that if she can tell me her story in her native language, some detail might come out that will give me another angle to work. The actual human translators we have on retainer with CNRI aren't available this week, and time is of the essence."
"I see." Felicity's neon-colored nails tap across her keyboard as she talks. "I've used a couple of different programs, but I've not used them for Russian at all." With good reason. Between Oliver and John, they have Russian, Mandarin and Arabic covered. Felicity can speak a smattering of phrases in other languages, but she's has always been fluent in the language of coding instead—Python, C, Java, Perl, and LISP to name just a few. They are a foreign language, no matter what the head of the foreign languages department might have thought. She nods her head for emphasis at the memory of the stuffed shirt with the disapproving look sitting behind the desk. She had too many other interesting courses to waste her time with "foreign languages," and thanks to a flimsy university firewall, she never needed to.
"So..." Laurel's voice snaps her back to the present. Felicity must have been silent too long once again, letting her racing thoughts lead her not just down the rabbit hole but deep into the warren.
"Sorry, just researching a couple of different possibilities for you." It's not untrue, since Felicity had been searching and thinking at the same time. Multitasking, for the win. "Where should I send the links?"
Laurel gives her an email address and a telephone number (though Felicity could easily find either one, she has learned the hard way that it's only common courtesy to ask). Laurel's voice is relieved as she adds, "And thank you, Felicity. I can see why you're so indispensable to Oliver."
"No problem." Felicity says. As she puts the receiver down, the word hits her: indispensable? They only met in person this morning. Laurel got all that from a two minute conversation? Still, the thought pleases her, even if Laurel doesn't really know just how indispensable Felicity is to Oliver and his hooded persona.
Felicity sends off the links with a click and a smile. Now that she thinks about it, Laurel also fights for the helpless of Starling City, just in a different way. With a lot fewer arrows to the chest.
She glances at the clock, better get back to work. She's got a lot left to do—both on the clock and off.
Felicity throws a punch, a quick jab to the face, and John ducks under it with ease. He retaliates by trying to throw her to the mat, but she side-steps, and manages to sweep his leg. He regains his footing and jumps back, giving her a nod of approval. She's getting better.
As she lunges in again, she thinks about the two years of gymnastics her mother made her do—'to get you out of the house' was the ostensible reason. She wishes her mom had signed her up for martial arts instead. As an adult, she can see that there's actually a mathematical beauty, a raw physics, to the movement of the body. Apply this percentage of force at this angle, rotate so many degrees at this velocity... When she breaks it down this way, she can let her mind guide her body, almost access the same sort of fugue state that she feels when deep into hacking or coding. She's aware of what is going on around her, maybe starting to feel hyper-aware, yet there's also tunnel vision. The world narrows down to her and John, strike, dodge, spin, motion, force, acceleration.
"You're really improving." Oliver's voice suddenly breaks her concentration, and she gets knocked over by a kick to the back of her knees. She topples to the mat with an ungracefuloof, and lies there a moment, panting heavily.
"You okay?" John asks, standing over her. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see that Oliver is standing somewhere near the edge of the mat; she doesn't want to know what sort of expression he's wearing now.
She nods silently, then holds up her hands in a time out signal.
John holds out a hand to help her up. "She really is improving." He wipes at his face with a towel, and adds, "Despite that last part."
Felicity gives them both an exhausted grin. She wonders how long Oliver was watching them, arms crossed in thought. He's wearing his club attire, not his leathers. Has he already been out, or will he wait until after closing?
"It's getting easier," she admits, blowing out a long breath. Although she couldn't feel it in the throes of practice combat, she knows her muscles are going to be in want of a long, hot bath later. "Once I figured out the formulas, it started making sense."
Oliver lets out a short laugh. "Formulas?"
"Yeah." She walks over to a nearby table to pick up her water bottle, and takes a swig. "Like archery, for instance. You have to draw the bowstring with a certain amount of force and aim at a specific angle for each target, making calculations on the fly. Right?"
He shrugs. "I guess. I don't really think about it. The way I was trained... it's more of a spiritual thing." His gaze turns inward and he isn't present anymore, trapped in his secret memories of the past.
"One with the bow, you are," she teases to break him from his trance.
It works—he nods. "Something like that."
"Or maybe you're just an archery savant."
"Like Rain Man?" John asks, then purses his lips. "Would explain a lot."
Oliver looks between both of them, the corners of his mouth turned up in a half-annoyed, half-amused smirk. "Might as well be back at home. I get my full daily allowance of teasing from Thea as it is."
"Sorry," she mouths. John pats him on the shoulder as he comes around to sit at one of the computer terminals. Oliver isn't really put out, Felicity knows, and it's good to see him lighten up. The last few weeks have been pretty rough on him. If he's not careful, his anger and frustration might affect his focus. And she's afraid of what he might do if he loses his focus. "Make any progress on the Ben Hawthorne thing?"
"He's definitely not using the money for good, that's certain." He takes a seat at the third station, leaving the center chair open for her. "Not sure yet whether it has anything to do with The Undertaking."
"Better safe than sorry," John says. "Until we know who's behind it, we have to treat every name on the List as a possible suspect."
"And maybe he knows something about Walter, too," Felicity puts in as a gentle reminder. She sits down, hoping her sweaty legs won't stick to the leather. But now that Oliver is here, a bath has to take a backseat to business. "Could the funds be part of a payoff?"
Oliver places a gentle hand on her shoulder, as sticky as it is, letting her know he hasn't forgotten her true purpose in working with them. "It's possible."
She doesn't shrug off his hand, though she wants to. It would just call attention to this stupid crush of hers. She knows a relationship with Oliver Queen would be a bad idea. Abaaaaaaad one, a bleating voice in her head repeats, the more practical side of her stay-on-Team-Arrow-or-not ongoing mental argument. He's too broken still for the kind of relationship she wants. And too reckless—if he lives longer than the day he crosses the last name off the List, she'll reconsider. So you'll just have to help keep him alive, another voice says, the more hopeful side. That voice has been getting stronger of late.
She notices that both John and Oliver are staring at her, waiting for some sort of response. There she goes again, off on mental tangents. But better that than the word vomit she's often prone to spew. "Um..."
Her phone vibrates, off to the side where she placed it before her sparring session with John. Saved by the buzz. Oliver picks it up to hand to her, but freezes on seeing the screen.
She sees what is throwing him before he says it aloud. "Laurel? Why is she texting you?"