coda: an honorable human relationship

"An honorable human relationship - that is, one in which people have the right to use the word 'love' - is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to all persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other. It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity. It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.

- Adrienne Rich, 'On Lies, Secrets & Silence'

John gasped awake, gulping a harsh breath that got caught in his throat. He leaned onto his side, coughing. One hand went to his throat instinctively, the memory of Oliver's arms around it harder to shake than any nightmare.

Christ…

John fell back against the gurney's hard surface with a groan and passed a hand down his face. They'd failed.

Goddamn it!

He felt hollowed out, so he didn't open his eyes for some long moments and just focused on breathing in and out instead, trying to get his heart rate down. He concentrated on the feel of the bed against his back, the beeping of the machines around him, the cold metal of the rail that he'd wrapped his hand around.

He'd been doing this for years, but somehow it never got any easier.

John touched his temple, testing if the stinging cut was still there but found only smooth skin instead. His head still throbbed with the memory of it, though.

He gritted his teeth against a curse that threatened to crawl up his throat.

For a simulated reality, everything in there had felt pretty fucking real. And dream or not, an iron bar to the face hurt like hell.

John heard hurried steps getting closer to him, but he didn't open his eyes. He didn't need to, to know it was Caitlyn Snow.

"Mister Diggle! How do you feel?"

He made a vague gesture with his hand.

"Here, drink this." Caitlin passed him a bottle of water, barely waiting for him to wrap his hand around it, before she reached into her pocket.

"Can you follow the light?" She continued, shining a penlight directly on John's eyeballs. He flinched with a hiss.

"Maybe in a couple of seconds, Doc." John said, moving her hand away gently.

Caitlyn retracted her hands immediately. "Oh, of course. So sorry."

John sat up. A wave of dizziness hit him so he closed his eyes again and tried to order the contents of his stomach to stay put. Slowly, he swung his feet off the side of the bed and opened his eyes.

There she was, exactly where he'd left her: in a deeper sleep than anyone could be, on a bed between Oliver and himself. She was eerily still and pale, electrodes taped to her forehead and her breastbone, keeping track of her vitals.

And keeping her hooked to the alien – fucking alien! - dream machine.

John resisted the urge to groan again.

Three years ago, the idea of Mirakuru had sounded ridiculous. He didn't even know what to think of this! John could only handle it one step at a time, focusing on what mattered. And though his mind couldn't wrap around the fact that he had just been inside a simulated reality Felicity Smoak had created and in which she was trapped in, John knew he didn't have to understand the 'why' and 'how' behind it. It was far simpler than aliens, or dream machines, or whatever the fuck. It was like this: Felicity needed his help. That was the beginning and end of it all for him. When she woke, she would explain him the rest of it and he would listen. Until then, his own feelings on the issue were just a distraction, and as such, they were firmly ignored.

John stood and took a step closer so that he was standing right by her bed. She'd been sweating. It was making the fine hair at her temples curl about her face in a way John knew would annoy her. He brushed one of the curling locks away from her forehead, smoothed it down. Someone had undone her ponytail at some point and for a long excruciating moment, all John could think about was the two them training the summer after Slade's attack and how she used to flick her pony, trying to hit him in the face with it whenever he immobilized her.

John looked up and found Oliver looking at her too, shoulders hunched and hands clasped between his legs, that look in his eyes…

"Oliver. Oliver!"

Oliver looked up, blinking. The thousand-yards stare hadn't quite fallen away.

John's frowned deepened. "You alright man?"

"We have to go back." Oliver said slowly, in lieu of an answer.

John looked at Felicity's heart monitor and her neural patterns on the screen just next to it. None of them knew how much time they had to get her out. When she'd helped them get Felicity out of the ship, Kara had told them to be careful. That if she stayed under too long, Felicity might not be able to tell what was real and what was a dream anymore , when she woke. That they might not be able to get her to wake up at all.

John looked around, at Oliver's forlorn face, Palmer and Cisco talking, Caitlin checking Felicity's chart, changing her IV. Out of all the ways he'd thought he would lose a friend, this had never been it.

It didn't feel like any of those times either. Not like those endless grating hours in the waiting room of Starling General, last Christmas. Or the couple of months after that, when Felicity seemed neither here nor there and hadn't quite learned how to hide her pain yet, so she refused to let herself be seen by anybody. Not even like those moments in a League dungeon, feeling her die shoulder to shoulder with him.

All those times had reminded him of how it had felt to be trapped under enemy fire in that small deserted village north of the Registan Desert. Like that trap his unit had fallen south of the Pamir mountains. The exact same way losing consciousness after that grenade had made him feel, knowing Lyla and his unit were out there, about to die: a desperate terror that had left its stain for years. A fear that reached so deep, it made him feel as if his body would come apart without it.

But now…

John wiped his sweaty hands on his jeans, shifted on his feet. Yes, they needed to go back.

Cisco walked up to them quickly, fingers flying over the screen of the fortified tablet in his hands.

"Guys, what did you do? The whole simulation just collapsed and rebooted again!" He looked from his tablet to the two of them, expectant.

John scoffed, remembering the terrifying feeling of a room exploding around him. "Yeah it did. Literally."

"Literally?" Cisco repeated, incredulous, his right hand still over the surface of the tablet. "Which… which part was the literal part?"

At any other time, talking instead of doing something might have annoyed him, but this once, John could not blame Cisco for his confusion. He'd just been in that crumbling room and he could hardly believe what he'd seen himself.

"The collapsing part." John answered.

Ramon's eyes rounded with surprise, the hold he had on his tablet slackening minutely. "Wait, are you seriously telling me that the room like… fell on you?"

"Kind of." Oliver finally said, his voice so rough he had to clear his throat. "I thought you'd know?"

"No, I only read the code of how that thing responds to what's happening in the simulation." Cisco pointed at the pieces of equipment they had stolen from, yes, an actual alien ship. "I can't actually see what goes on in there."

He turned the tablet so they could see the constant stream of code that kept falling down the screen, like blue rain on a black surface.

"We have to look at it encoded, actually." Ray added, sidling up to them with his own tablet. "They didn't have an image translator and there's way too much data for the ones we have to process. It's… I honestly have no words." He huffed a small laugh. "Felicity would love this."

Oliver flinched so visibly John saw it out of the corner of his eye.

"So, you said the whole place 'kind of' fell down on you," Palmer asked.

"I don't know what happened, Ray." Oliver snapped. "Does it matter?"

John narrowed his eyes at him in warning. Oliver looked so tense he seemed ready to crawl out of their skin and John could feel each second drag against him like sandpaper, but this was not the best time to take it out on innocent bystanders.

Ray looked between him and Oliver and gulped. "It could, maybe? I won't know unless you tell me."

"There were explosions." John said, a touch more conciliatory than he was sure Oliver would be. "The bunker – that's where we were – seemed to collapse. Or something. It happened fast; a lot of it just doesn't make sense."

Cisco and Ray exchanged a quick look.

"You both died?" Palmer asked with a frown, his fingers frying on the tabled in a familiar way.

John nodded without looking at Oliver.

"Felicity would have had to 'die' too, for the simulation to reboot like that." Cisco said, interrupting John's scrutiny. He used his fingers as quotation marks around the word, but it didn't keep Oliver and John from grimacing.

John cleared his throat. "Yeah she probably did."

The way that room had fallen apart had been like a sequence out of one of those goddamned cartoons his kids watched every Saturday morning. There really wasn't any way she could have gotten out.

She'd died there, under a crumbling building, and John could think of nothing but those first couple of months after the Undertaking, when Felicity had to move into his guest room because of the damage her apartment had suffered. She hadn't slept through the night once, the whole time she'd been there. She'd tried to hide it though, so John hadn't pushed her. And then one night he had caught her in his kitchen, staring at a cup of coffee she'd forgotten to drink. So he'd made them both cocoa, he remembers that so clearly now, it's almost strange. He'd told her about his brother, some of what kept him up at night, and then waited for her to decide of she could trust him with her own fears. She had.

The next day, John had filled in the cracks in the ceiling of the foundry and cleaned up the last of the debris. They'd had Big Belly on the med table and she'd told him she was going to remodel the whole foundry with the money 'that idiot' had left them. And after that, they were going to find said idiot and make him come home. It hadn't been a question and John had known that if he refused to help her, she'd just go ahead and do it herself. Not that he would refuse or argue.

They'd both needed something to do those months, but it had been twice as hard for Felicity. She'd never seen combat before they'd dragged her into a war. Now her life was one battle after another.

But even after so long, she was still afraid of the same things. And now she'd gone and died exactly the way she'd always feared.

A 'dream world', Cisco and Ray called it, but to John it sounded more like a nightmare.

He took a deep, slow breath, reminded himself that it hadn't been real. None of it! Felicity hadn't died, she was just afraid of falling buildings, the same way John was afraid of them.

"The version of me that- the one she-" Oliver's words halted, his fists opening and closing as if they were trying to grasp for the missing words.

"Felicity's projection of you?" Palmer helped.

"Yeah, him. He stabbed me. And then…" Oliver stopped again and looked at John.

John frowned at him. What?

"I saw him walking towards her." Oliver said, the last bit of color draining from his face as he spoke. "And I- I don't know what he did."

It wasn't a question, but there was one in Oliver's eyes and John felt his shoulders sag, in both understanding and a sharp sense of sadness for a loss that wasn't even his.

Some years ago, when Oliver and Felicity started to become obvious to anyone but each other, John hadn't known how to feel about a potential relationship. Back then, working with Oliver and Felicity had been the first thing in a long time to give John a purpose, after years of doubting if he even was capable of having one. The team had mattered to him more than anything, and he didn't like the idea of anything upsetting that stability. He hadn't known how Felicity's nature and Oliver's volatility would mix, and John hadn't liked not knowing.

When things had gone from obvious to undeniable, the reason for his worry changed too. They lived intense lives, and John of all people knew that danger had a way of throwing you out for a loop. That you could never know where you might land, after. If that place would look anything like the place you started in, or its middle. Sometimes love outside a battlefield looked different. Sometimes it wasn't sustainable.

John knew that. He'd lived it.

When the end had come for Oliver and Felicity, John hadn't noticed much of it. He'd been in the middle of his own storm, trying to bring back a brother who had already slipped through his fingers long ago. Sometimes he was ashamed of that. Most days he tried not to think about it. Leaving Starling had meant leaving everything; at the time, he'd thought he'd needed it. That he had nothing but that to give.

But outgoing is never the same as incoming and maybe that was why coming home had felt a lot like walking along the shore of a shipwreck. He kept finding stray bits and pieces of his friends' lives here and there. New coping mechanisms, dynamics he was unfamiliar with, built around stretches of silence so unnatural, John didn't know how to interpret them anymore.

He understood the need for things to be this way though, whether he liked it or not. John knew better than most that neither war nor grief can leave love the way they found it.

It wasn't either of those that he was seeing in Oliver's eyes now, though. Anyone else might not have noticed the alarm there, the guilt, but John wasn't exactly new to this.

"He wasn't walking to Felicity. He was coming for me," John explained slowly, "I was standing right next to her."

He waited for Oliver to look him in the eye and understand, even though he knew he wouldn't, not really. Oliver hoarded guilt as naturally as most men breathed.

"Yeah, but you see, there is no 'he'!" Palmer reminded them both, enthusiastically enough to distract them. "Everything you see in there is part of Felicity's unconscious mind. The 'Oliver' in her world is who Felicity thinks you are." Ray considered that a moment, glanced at Oliver and then quickly looked back down to his tablet, his smile wistful. "It's not surprising that in her mind, you're the protector."

Oliver clenched his jaw so tightly John saw a fine muscle ticking there just on the side of his cheek.

"Apparently she thinks you're stronger than you actually are too." Palmer continued without looking up. "Which, compliments aside, does complicate things a bit, since it kind of makes it hard to get around him."

"No that's not… that's not it." Cisco interrupted. "It's not about her perception; this is…" but he kept being distracted by what he was seeing on his tablet.

John spoke before Oliver could snap. "Full sentences, Cisco. We don't have all day."

Cisco looked up, eyes wide. "Right. Yeah, sure okay. So listen. You're going into Felicity's mind without having been there when the simulation was set up. So far, that has seemed to mean two things. One: her reality is both harder to penetrate and more hostile. With you all together, the simulation had to combine the realities of five different people. This meant that what scared you didn't necessarily scare John or Ray!"

"What does that have to do with-" John started, but just then Sara and Thea burst through the doors, both still in their suits. Oliver's relief at the sight of them was so palpable that it seemed like the temperature in the room actually went up a few degrees.

Thea had her bow in one hand and she lowered the hood with the other. She threw herself in Oliver's arms for a hug, careful not to hit him with the bow.

"Everything okay?" she asked, looking from him to John and then to Felicity.

"No, not really." Oliver admitted." Everything okay with you guys?"

"It's handled, don't worry." Sara answered. "Lyla is still in the field. She's great at neat clean up, your wife."

Sara smiled at John, who could only manage a nod.

"How is she doing?" Sara asked, eyes on Felicity.

"Her vitals are good; brain activity is also totally normal, so there's no reason for alarm yet." Caitlyn said, just as she finished changing Felicity's IV.

John tried not to smile, thinking what Felicity would have to say about needles in her arm.

"Are you guys okay?" Thea asked them then, looking from John to Oliver.

"We're fine." Oliver's answer was curt, but Thea knew him well enough to understand why and not press him. "Cisco, you were saying?"

"Erm, simulation hostility. When you guys were under, there were more of you, so when either one of you guys freaked out, the simulation didn't necessarily collapse to keep you in there, like it just did with Felicity."

"But this world belongs only to Felicity. So that means that, in there, she is basically god and you are her guests." Ray added. "So whatever happens in there, as well as your strength – or hers – is not about muscles. It's about what Felicity wants."

John felt lost. "What?"

By the look on Oliver's face he was just as confused and starting to lose patience.

"I mean, it makes sense." Sara said and when everyone turned to her she just shrugged. "When we were under, we all faced our worst enemies and we defeated them at first try."

Cisco nodded. "Yes exactly. Because that was your dream and once you decided that you wanted to leave it, that was it. Of course, you had to 'fight your demons' first, so to speak." Cisco said around a small chuckle that was not received very well. "But you wanted to leave more than you wanted to stay, so you did. Get it?"

Thea stepped forward, arms crossed in front of her. "So you're saying that we won the fights on our way out 'cause we wanted to?"

"Basically, yeah. None of that was actually happening. It was all in here." Palmer tapped his temple. "You just have to get Felicity to realize she's dreaming without scaring her."

"Easier said than done." John murmured. "Why did everything start going to shit the second she started to realize the truth?"

Oliver's eyes snapped to his, wide and startled. "She believed you?"

"I think so. But it didn't matter at that point because we were trapped."

"It's the simulation." Cisco said, drawing their attention. "Kara said that it's a program designed to learn about the subject wired into it. She said that if you try to interrupt it, it's gonna defend itself by turning strong emotions against the dreamer. It's why you guys had to face whoever scared you the most." Cisco looked from Oliver to John, as if willing them to understand. "Basically whatever Felicity is dreaming will turn into a nightmare, if you upset her enough."

"Either way, she'll have to face what she's afraid of to wake up, just like we did." Palmer added, looking at them one at a time. "It makes sense, in a way."

"In what way?" Thea snapped.

John wished he didn't know the answer, but the truth is that he'd spent too much time as a soldier not to know. Everyone keeps secrets, and mostly those secrets are either of fear or of shame. And with most people, if you know them, you own them[1].

"You learn a lot about people once you know what they're afraid of." Sara said softly, looking down at the tips of her shoes.

John wondered in that moment, who he would be, if he wasn't a man who knew these kinds of things.

Thea scowled, but didn't deny it. Oliver, on the other hand, was silent and very still.

John decided then and there that, the next time the Legends, or the Flash, or a white girl flying around in a skirt came looking for them for an emergency, he would lock his team inside the bunker and just play cards for two days.

John checked his watch before taking a gulp of water. Another ten minutes before they could go back under.

Sara took off her jacket with a sigh and sat down heavily on the nearest chair. "I just don't get why she wasn't in there with us in the first place. Why put her apart?"

To John, it wasn't worth wondering because it wouldn't help them any, but he couldn't pretend not to be angry about that too. If she had been with them, they could have all woken up together. Instead they'd found her in one of the pods, completely unresponsive. It had been Kara who told them told them what critical parts of the alien ship's technology to take and what to leave behind. If they had taken Felicity off the simulator manually, who knows if it would be possible for her to wake up at all.

John looked at Felicity's seemingly peaceful face. She'd love the thought of them stealing tech from aliens.

"Oh, she was with us." Palmer piped up. When four different pairs of eyes fixed on him with the same intensity, he dialed down the chipper a little bit. "I downloaded the logs of the simulators we were all into, and it turns out that Felicity was wired in with us, but she kept waking everyone up."

John frowned. "How do you know? I don't remember that happening."

"I don't remember it either," Oliver said, turning to look at Thea and Sara for confirmation. They both nodded.

"Well, I don't 'know' know." Palmer clarified. "But according to the data, the first simulation crashed twice before it was successful. And since Felicity is the only one of us who has her own simulation, I assume she was the one that caused the crashes."

"She knew it was fake. Just like I did." Thea murmured, her voice dropping as her eyes did. She reached for Felicity's hand with one of hers. "Maybe there was nothing in a world made for all six of us to make her want to stay there."

That stung, but then John remembered how desolate the existence he'd imagined for himself had been, and he had to gulp down a whole new level of discomfort, having a close look at himself.

"But that is good news." Cisco reminded them. "It can be good news. Theoretically. If she woke up once, she can do it again."

Thea scoffed.

"She's all alone in there this time, though." Thea murmured without looking up. John tried get a better look at her, but her face was half obscured by the curtain of hair falling over it.

"You think that matters?" John asked her.

The look Thea gave him was familiar.

Thea Queen was one of the most driven and determined people John had met in his life, but she was such a sad kid. On the rare occasions when she let it show, she looked disarmingly like a twelve-year-old.

"It would, if it were me." She admitted with a shrug, sharing a quick look with Oliver before she looked down again.

"Felicity wouldn't want to live in some kind of fantasy-world. She's not like that." Sara stated, sounding absolutely sure.

Thea's smile was pained. "You would have said that about me too, before, wouldn't you? And you would have been right."

She sounded completely calm, but John knew she was hiding something beneath that smoothness, because she hadn't looked up yet. And because Oliver was looking at her like she was breaking his heart.

"I didn't think I'd want to live in a fake world either, until I was in it." She continued. Softly, as if it was neither a secret nor a regret. Just a fact.

John understood, and his fear started to trickle anew, like a reopened wound. Because maybe Thea was right. Maybe this was so difficult because Felicity had already made her choice. Getting everything you ever wanted, even if it wasn't real, after being tired of losing really was something that fucked with your head. He could understand that.

Oliver wiped both hands down his face. "Alright! Wire us back in."

Cisco and Ray shared an alarmed look.

"But… it's not been thirty minutes yet."

"Cisco!"

"Kara said-"

"I don't care what Kara said!" Oliver snapped harshly. But then he took a controlled breath and spoke more calmly. "Do it, please."

John watched Oliver carefully. Watched the rigid line of his shoulders, the tension bunched along his muscles that made him look like he was about to spring into violent action, and honestly, he couldn't say he didn't understand where Oliver was coming from.

But still. "We can't fuck around with this stuff Oliver. We barely understand it as it is."

"John-"

"It's not about what could happen to us. What if we mess something up for Felicity?"

The low "fuck" Oliver hissed between his teeth went mostly unheard. John knew he would wait. Felicity was, usually, the surest immovable object to put in front of Oliver when he got like this.

So they waited. John would have been impressed by Oliver counting all the minutes, but the truth was, he was counting too.

[1] Sense8, season 2