Okay, I'm going to keep updating this until 3.07 comes out (AKA until I find out what happened with that whole Ray/Felicity kiss and Oliver (hopefully) throwing a fit. Cheers.


Almost

It was the shudder of something unseen but felt, it was the sparks flying through the air before they burst into flame. The hotel doors slid smoothly open, and Mobago's security personnel filed out, and signaled for the waiting car. The chants got louder, more furious, galvanizing the air with so much hatred that Felicity felt the chill beneath her coat.

Then something crashed, and the shouts suddenly reached a crescendo of triumphant screams.

"Someone cut through the wires — the barricade's down!" Roy shouted, over the ominous shriek of the steel frames screeching across concrete. "I can't see anything!"

Felicity and Diggle looked at each other.

"Go!" Felicity snapped into full-gear, pulling up the surveillance on all the rooftops. Diggle took off into the crowd, shouldering through the protesters that had overturned the police-imposed block between the hated leader and the rest of the world.

She checked every single one for an alert — but there was nothing — nothing yet. While she was still scanning, Roy tried to beep through. She tapped the button for an open link, impatiently scrolling through the feeds.

"What, Roy? I can't see anything yet…"

"Felicity," said Roy, eerily quiet. "I found it. The wire wasn't cut. Someone shot through it. With an arrow."

"Grab it. We can check for DNA — oh!" A gigantic man barreled past Felicity, catching her on the shoulder and forcing her to stumble back into someone else, who shouted angrily at being accidentally poked with her umbrella and elbowed her in the back, knocking her glasses askew.

"You okay?" Roy asked urgently.

"No — but they're getting violent." Felicity adjusted her glasses. She was standing pretty much in her own little radius, since the rest of the protesters had moved in to try and force their way past the police. "Someone just called me a wanker, whatever that means — which probably isn't good. Keep watching for him, and hold onto that arrow — we don't want any evidence lying around if —"

"Got it."

"Felicity!"

"Dig!" The sounds on Dig's end were more vicious, and craning her neck, Felicity saw that the police had formed a human barricade of linked arms, semi-circling the still-wide berth between the angry protesters and the leader.

"It's not holding! We need another way. Can't you set off an alarm or something?"

"I'm on the police frequency," she said, tapping rapidly. "They're sending more backup, four minutes out."

"Not good enough! Mobago's not —" a scuffle, and Felicity lost Diggle.

"Dig!" Roy's breath caught.

Felicity started to walk. "I'll find him — you keep watching for Oliver —"

"You'll be crushed. Let me do it — I think I saw him somewhere…" Roy's breathing quickened, as if he was running, but Felicity was already pulling up the rooftop surveillance again, all the while counting the seconds in her head, the agonizing four minutes before it would all be over.

Felicity wished she had the sonic device Sara used to incapacitate targets, but the League must have reclaimed it before she got back to Starling. And she couldn't replicate it on the Tablet speakers, not loud enough to matter.

"He's coming out!" Dig shouted hoarsely.

Too many things happening at once. The police line straining against public fury. The brief flash of a navy blue suit and a dark head, disappearing into a massive black car. Why wasn't he taking off?

"The engine," she cursed. Of all the things to go wrong —? The League must have sabotaged it, or maybe it really was fate trying to end things for Mr. Mobago, but he'd have to move to the identical backup car, and that was another few seconds of danger. The car doors flashed as they opened, and the police line finally crumpled under the strain of resisting a mob, like a line of paper dolls —

A flicker of movement in the corner camera caught her eye. Felicity yanked the image into focus — a dark blur darting from one guard to the other — three down in seconds. She'd worked with him for two years, seen him fight from every conceivable angle, with every conceivable weapon. She'd have picked him out in a moving army. The way he yanked one of the guard's legs out from under him with a wire, the crouch he rose from after all of them were down, lithe as a jungle cat — it was Oliver. That sudden stillness, the unnatural straight stance of a string pulled taut, ready to fire —

"Oliver," Felicity breathed. Her sniper program was up and running the calculation, and she was running, skidding into the position that would put her in his sight line. There, she raised the rim of her umbrella high above her head, rain be damned, and let him see her defiant glare, arms thrown open as if to be a human shield between his arrow and Mobago. As her hair and clothes darkened with wet, she sucked air into her lungs, knowing that he wouldn't be able to hear her over the commotion, even if she shouted, but if there was even the slightest chance that he could…

"OLIVER!" she shouted, putting all the frustration, all the fear that he'd lost himself, all the inexplicable love she still had for him — all in that single word. His name.

Then softly, to herself and the ghost she conjured up in her mind, "Oliver, don't."

For those precious few seconds, Felicity couldn't breathe. She was waiting for the arrow to fly, the demise of his humanity, and the little death in her heart. The rain had fogged up her glasses, making it impossible to see whether there was someone on the roof, but she knew that the danger had passed when tires screeched out of the vicinity and the crowd shouted angrily.

Police sirens. Running. The distant rumble of thunder.

The rain…it was startling. It was cold. Felicity reached up with numb hands to brush her wet cheeks, close her open coat. She'd lost a button somewhere, and her hair was clinging to her shoulders like damp straw. She released the pent-up breath of relief, and it hurt to realize that she honestly believed Oliver would have shot.

She reached up and opened the comm link. "We're okay," she said to Roy and Diggle, her voice fraying in a dozen distorted echoes of a broken heart broken all over again. "We're okay," she said again, this time as if she'd meant it.