Chapter 3: hell is empty (all the devils are here)
"i've spent the last half year digging
through flesh, nails caked with marrow
bruised knuckles squeezing
through too-tight ribs
whispers grow louder with panic,
prayers ascend, it has to be here
somewhere—but there is
no exit wound"
- exit wound, by saltwaterskies
She can't sleep anymore. Not won't – can't .
The tension perched on her shoulder has fangs for days and they're in her deep. She looks at her bed like it's the enemy, that's true, but it's not the dread of what awaits her there that keeps her away, so much as everything else that justamplifies . Her brain jumps to 11 and she'll start pacing and coding and surfing the darknet and she doesn't know anymore if it's a distraction she wants or just something to do.
She never really acknowledges why out loud, but it's there, hidden from sight, growing in the back of her head like mould. If she doesn't go to sleep, tomorrow won't get there as fast and she will be allowed to just be for a little while longer.
She insists on moving forward, needing to keep moving for fear of everything she's running from catching up to her and swallowing her completely. She shoves her feelings down a hole deep inside her heart and hopes to keep them quiet there. But once opened, that door cannot be closed. And she doesn't notice, but other things keep falling down that hole too, obliviously, without making a single sound.
Her favorite pair of earrings, the pretty pink nail polish she bought last summer, the blue-beaded necklace her grandmother gave her. The last time she smiled, her favorite dress, the last walk in the sun. Her mother's tear stained face, her father's betrayal. They make no ripples in her anymore. Laurel's curled up nose when she smiled so hard her face lit up; she pretends not to miss it until one day it's gone. Just like that. The feel of being wrapped in gentleness on the couch in a sunwashed living-room; it disappears. The second beating heart inside her planted there by all those who taught her what it feels to be loved - that goes too.
Sometimes she feels like nothing has remained, a whole lot of it: nothing, nothing. Weakness, self-destruction, and the tip of a flame of hell piercing the floor [1] .
It's okay though. It's okay.
Something has to give, right? Something has to! Most of the time she thinks this kind of slow disappearing is the only way she can ever bear to go on living.
I believe in justice. I do.
She's so tired though. Exhausted. In the deep silence of the night her heart hurts so loudly the walls keep shaking with it. But then a thick fog rises from the starvation planted in her belly and stretches like a blanket over her, numbing everything again.
You'd think laying under seven thousand layers in one's own body would make it easier to sleep.
It doesn't though, and even if her brain stops screaming at her enough for her to go to bed instead of just passing out on it, anger comes for a visit.
Felicity tries not to cater to it no matter how seductive it feels. She knows this kind of feeling: it's not a guest. You don't invite it over. You don't set the table for it or it will never fucking leave.
But this thing she's living with – there's no running away from it!
She is this . The grief, the anger and the guilt, the weight of her shame - it has all condensed into some dark living thingjust an inch under her skin, as much part of her as it's separate from her.
She'd been so afraid to feel any of it, at first. Afraid it would swallow her whole. She'd pushed it away and ran from it as hard as she could and when she managed to catch her breath, the emptiness she'd been left with had been just as terrifying. She'd tried then - tried to dig into herself, open up her chest and push around her insides, needing to shake loose from this darkness some of the feelings it had swallowed ( so ashamed that she hadn't cried, she hadn't grieved, that she could not ), needing to live it and then put it behind her.
And she'd felt nothing .
Even her own body denied her - she'd betrayed it so many times for it to trust her her. She looked at the pieces of herself: a best friend six feet under, left behind by a brother, her mother, no lover, no friends, no family, a murderer of thousands - and nothing to show for it. Running from her grief wasn't necessary anymore. It was gone now, leaving only the void behind.
No self, no pain, no grief. Just ugliness that hides within rooms inside her she didn't even know she had, translating to violence. A violence she cannot let out and that makes her feel as if somewhere along the way she swallowed a sword. It cuts her from the inside because it has to cut something . Makes her glare shapes into the walls and want to raise her own fists against herself, because they are exasperated at being still and they know they have to be used on someone .
She wakes up black and blue from within, more tired than she was when she went to sleep, crawls out of her bed and then does it all over again.
o
She keeps going to the bunker even when she doesn't quite remember why, or how much good it may do her. It's the one thing she can do, so she does it. Works with Curtis, builds gadgets with him, runs searches, keeps living as Overwatch.
She has a lot to make up for.
( There are times when she freezes. Times when she wishes she were anywhere else and she has to take a step back. Times when numbers of the square root of Phi, lining up one after the other in her head, are the line that saves her from falling into some black hole. )
She can feel his eyes on the back of her head every time – their silence echoes with his questions and is so strained that the very air feels thicker.
Mostly she avoids him. In the new world they inhabit, that happens. It should feel stranger, but these days so little feels like anything.
They used to glace each other and have whole conversations. He used to know her language and she would understand his silences and their togetherness used to feel like belonging, but that can't help her now. Now there's only a tiresome existence in this nameless in-between she populates.
She hates her loneliness and loves it and longs to leave and longs to stay, so she does not truly leave and does not truly stay and has become less than a body [2] .
o
In the end though, she will always make the same mistake.
o
It is an accident, but it really isn't.
It is exhaustion. And impulse. It is wave after wave of thoughts crashing down on her, and the isolation of it all pressing against her body so hard she is almost shoved out of it.
It is irrational fear… need .
The aloneness that she has been so comfortable with, that she has cultivated like some fucking poisonous garden – it has its trap doors too and they've sprung open on her all at once. She has found herself all alone in a room full of mirrors, with her heart beating up her throat for company.
But he's been there. With one ear pressed against the walls of her, like she's something sacred.
It burns when he touches her.
And it is the most real thing she's felt in so long. The body crying against its hands is left behind and everything inside her has collapsed to its knees. She could howl for mercy at the feel of it, if she had the breath.
He kisses her and the words press themselves to her skin like a brand, reminding her.
Murderess, murderess. Selfish. Taker, leaver, liar. Killer…
He would never say any of that to her, ever.
And that hurts worse.
Even silent, the way he loves hurts. Hurts and saves her soul at the same time.
He gives. She takes. Nothing could make anything worse than what it already is.
Fuck it.
o
She is wrong about that too, of course.
Of course.
o
She moves as if through a dream. Tries to open the door of her car but it feels like putting thread through a needle's eye. She takes a deep breath and tries again.
She should call a cab. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knows that. She should drive slower, pay more attention to the road.
She should do a lot of things she doesn't do.
She tries not to think, repeats lines of code in her head; the alphabet backwards, the names of all the capitals of Europe in alphabetical order, all the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. All the names of the streets down from the house she grew up in, in Vegas. She remembers as far as thirty blocks worth of them, before it takes too long to remember the next.
It doesn't make her body ache less.
She smells like him – like them . It's a cloud around her. He's present all the way down to her lungs. She's still wet between her legs.
She can't stand the feel of her own skin, it makes her nauseous.
Why do you do this to yourself?
There is no reason why. There's only 'why not?' and no answer.
She keeps going through mental hoops to engage her concentration so that she doesn't have to think about how, for the first time in so long, she has a body that feels like a body, and not just an empty cathedral where every sound echoes for days-
Not like this, though. Not like this…
-and she can't stand it. She can't breathe through it. Her soul eats her feelings.
How his face had collapsed with anguish just a moment ago-
You did that. It was you this time and you liked it. Every bit of it.
Shame crawls up her neck on millipede legs. It makes her feel small enough to fall through the cracks of the pavement on her apartment building's lobby.
She's naming the artists of the Italian Renaissance when she opens the door of her house with shaky hands and slams it shut. She doesn't turn on any of the lights, doesn't want to see what stares back at her from any mirrors tonight. She'll be a walking ache tomorrow, but tomorrow isn't here yet.
She peels the orange dress off as fast as she can and throws it in the hamper.
She should go to her room and sit on her bed the way she is, with him all over her, for days, for as long as she can stand it without dying. That would be fitting.
Instead she heads straight for the shower.
The cold water hits her in a blast and she shivers, but doesn't wait for it to get warmer. It washes away her sweat, his sweat, the stickiness between her thighs. It stings. She moves a bit so more of it can wash down her body. She hisses, grabs her body wash and pours generously, scrubbing down her body and pressing harder in on every patch that feels sore, just 'cause she can. The water and the fruity scent of her shampoo finally overwhelm the scent of him. She's tempted to scrub her tongue with some of it too, but instead opens her mouth under the downpour of the shower and pretends to drown some.
The feel of him remains. Nothing she can do about that.
Nor should she. Washing him away is cowardice, as it was cowardice to fall into him. She deserves a reminder of this. To feel the mark of it on her face, her lips, hands, between her legs where she'll feel him for days, and everywhere else too. This is the kind of pain that has an allure, a scent almost. Hothouse gardenias. Lurid, but almost furtive [4] .
It's what she'd wanted, isn't it? Something – be it pleasure or pain or both - to drown out the echoes of the gaping hole inside her? Without caring how she got it.
Without caring.
She let him press his mouth to her throat like a brand and she carries the shame of that too now.
She'd known it was a mistake. She had known it, she just hadn't cared. And yeah, it felt better for a while. It had felt , for a while, with her head blessedly quiet.
And then, when she got into the shower in the bunker, she had wanted to disappear. Just sit there under the beating of the cold water and vanish; every one of her cells evaporating, nothing of her remaining ever to be found [5] . The Fibonacci sequence she'd started adding up in her head had felt like a last thread of sanity.
She had wanted to leave - made up her mind right there in the shower, when shame for doing this to them - for not stopping it, shame for enjoying it - had made it hard to breathe.
But then she saw him sitting there on the edge of the bed and everything had turned so big and she'd felt so small. How did she get so small? And he was right there ! Looking at her like he wanted nothing more than to grab her and pull her out of the water. All that she had lost, all that she had done, came at her then. The curtain pulled, the true ugliness of it all stared her in the face and Felicity blinked first. The perverse need to disappear into thoughtlessness had become overwhelming.
So she'd made the same mistake again.
It was in her blood wasn't it? Failing at love to keep the family tradition going [6] sounded like something she could believe in.
She'd let the towel drop thinking 'what does it matter, anyway?'. She'd already fucked this up, why leave it halfway? She was Felicity fucking Smoak after all, right? She never did anything halfway; her mistakes were no different.
Laughter chokes her now, and she can taste the ashes of 20,000 souls in the back of her throat. ( She's been choking on them for weeks .)
No, her mistakes are no different! They leave craters .
On her life, on the world.
On what they used to be for each other.
They had never been about taking, about being selfish. Maybe… maybe sometimes it had happened, but they'd never left each other stranded in those places. That's not how they had loved, how they had wanted to be for each other. It's not… itwas not who they were !
They'd been each other's kindness, and gentleness. Not this …
But there is no 'they' anymore. What's left of the world after the flood is unrecognizable,and so is she. There's only water where there used to be a home, only grief she can't get close enough to feel and the vague outline of a body, where there used to be a person.
And then there's Oliver, clutching at hands that don't remember how to be hands, trying to save her.
She could let him. Truly, this time. He would be so good to her, so kind. Gentle enough to crack stone. She knows it.
She looks at her own hands and tries to come up with a reason to let him. It takes her thirty more minutes to remember to get out of the water, her fingers pruning and still no answers.
o
She tells Curtis she's taking a few days and he takes over for her at the bunker easily. She's hardly irreplaceable.
She sleeps, eats what's there. Avoids: her mother, Quentin, Thea. Diggle doesn't call. That's not surprising.
Oliver calls though. She doesn't answer him either. She knows she probably should, but she doesn't have the energy to speak to him or even to care what happens after. It's a contradiction.
She'd rather have quiet, so she opens a bottle of wine.
The sun comes up, goes down and she spends her time lying on different surfaces, feeling guilty she's so useless and feeling too drained to be anything else. Sleeps some more, wakes up no less tired.
On day number four she takes a shower, gets dressed, gets out. Walks around a little.
He's waiting for her when she comes back.
Felicity freezes, looks at him without understanding, because… why ?
Why is he here? Why would he want to be here?
The second he sees her, he stands up, hands hanging by his sides like he has no idea what to do with them before he shoves them in his pockets. He's come straight from the mayor's office, she can tell. His button-down is rumpled, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He takes her in from head to toe and she knows that the stress tightening the corners of his lips and eyes is because of her.
"Hi."
It sounds like a question. Maybe it is, because they don't do this. There are very clear lines now between them. What happened can't change that.
"I just wanted to check on you." He explains fast, as if he can read her thoughts.
Right.
"I'm fine." The words are out before she can think better of them and Felicity tries her best not to flinch.
Damn it!
"I'm pretending to be fine and it's getting less hard to pretend to be fine every day which means fine should be right around the corner."
She says it aggressively, as if it's his fault. It's not. Some things are, maybe, but not this.
"Okay."
Felicity's irritation deflates like a balloon emptying of air across the room and then flopping on the floor.
"Are you…" Are you what? Okay? It's too stupid a question to finish.
Oliver shakes his head. "I'm not, actually."
His openness shoves at her from five feet away and Felicity feels more helpless than ever, because she can't help him. She wants to. She's been trying so hard to do good, but it's like trying to read in a language she's forgotten.
She can't take back what she did. Not any of it.
And though Oliver will probably always be the first person she wants to help, right now she is the last person who could ever do him any good.
As she proved multiple times.
Felicity blinks fast to keep the tears at bay. "I already said I was sorry."
"No, that's not what I-" he takes a deep breath, passes a hand over his face, seeming so vulnerable that she can't bear to look straight at him. "That's not what I meant at all, Felicity."
Her shoulders fall, already too tired for this. "What are you doing here, Oliver?"
"I just…" he shifts on his feet, his thumb brushing insistently against the tips of his fingers. "I just needed to talk to you."
She wants to say no, doesn't want to talk to him, or be near him, or him near her. But then she thinks of how much he'd given just because she asked him to without having any right to ask anymore, and every ache in her body wakens all at once, reminding her what she did to him.
Felicity walks to her door, steps through it and holds it open.
o
It's the first time he's been to her new place.
It's smaller than the loft, white walls, open space. Empty kitchen if he doesn't count the boxes of takeout stacked on the counter. He can see the corner of her bed, its rumpled sheets, from the half open door at the end of the corridor to his left. He doesn't comment on how her stuff is still in boxes against the walls and that the only pieces of furniture are a coffee table – her closed laptop and tablet on it, a grey couch that he can't believe she picked, and a couple of blankets.
She sits on one end of the couch. He sits on the other. When she says nothing, just curls up and looks at him, he knows she's waiting for him to talk.
So he does.
Work, Diggle, Thea. The first time her lips curve up is when he mentions his play-date with little Sara so he goes on some more about that. City Hall is hard, the people are difficult, but he doesn't tell her much about that. He doesn't want to worry her - and then catches himself lying even in his head: he is ashamed of how hard the job is and how he feels he's going to fail at it. That's why.
He tells her that probably Thea knows more about being the mayor than he does. He knows she understands what he means, what he's hiding, but she doesn't say anything. He looks to his hands when he tells her the reason why he's really there. What Laurel told him in that hospital room and how he has no idea what to do about it.
The absent look in her eyes gives way to grief only for a moment.
"She was thinking about the future," he says, and he realizes how strange those words are, in this unlived apartment, between two people who only have a past and barely live the present.
Felicity's eyes shine with tears. "She didn't get a future, Oliver."
He stares at her face, determined. "No. But she did leave a legacy."
o
He talks about Laurel and Felicity feels like she's trying to breathe with an anvil planted on her chest. This is physics, she thinks. Boyle's law: there has been a decrease of whatever mass made up the insides of her, therefore pressure from the outside has increased with the same proportion.
She wonders if people break this way. Then she looks at Oliver and knows they don't.
She's not like him though. She's not.
"Felicity?"
She snaps her eyes to him. "What?"
He's looking at her like he can't quite figure something out. "You… you're breathing faster."
That breath she was taking gets stuck on its way in.
She has no idea why an observation so unlikely would unravel her fast enough that she can't get a hold of the thread. (She does know though. She does and she's never loved and hated him more than she does right in this moment, for knowing what's under her skin down to her last part. Well enough to know what her breathing is and isn't. )
His alarm is as clear on his face as it is in his voice and she's furiously trying to blink tears away.
"Felicity! Please."
She shakes her head.
Oliver isn't one to take no for an answer in the face of her pain, though, she should have known. She does know, but she can't help it. He touches her face and she lets him. She leans in and his breath fans over her face. His hand on her cheek, fingers so long they stretch all the way to the back of her neck, stops her gently.
Felicity's cheeks burn with the humiliation of rejection.
"You know I'd do anything for you." He whispers, so close she goes a little cross eyed looking at him. "But this is not helping you, Felicity."
"Nothing helps me."
He takes one of her hands, links his fingers through hers and presses the back of her palm against his chest, eyes impossibly blue and impossibly sad.
"What's wrong? Just tell me."
Felicity feels her lip shaking, so she bites down on it. Shakes her head.
She can't stand it. Can't stand him.
She gets up knowing he will follow. He does, steps in front of her and frames her face with his hands, holds her close enough that she has to crane her neck to look at him.
He looks as heartbroken as she wishes she felt.
' I won't use you ' she'd told him. Promised him.
She'd lied.
"Felicity…"
He keeps asking, but nothing inside her stirs.
I've forgotten how, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know anything .
He's the one who kisses her this time. He kisses her like he wants to save her and she lets him because not doing it would take more of a fight than she has left in her.
o
"It's okay." he tells her, and he means it. "It's okay that you don't know. Because I love you."
She doesn't seem to hear it, but he holds her tighter. Because he does love her.
'And I'm not fooled by the mistakes you've made, or the darkness of the thoughts you have about yourself. I'm not. Iknow you.'
He would have said it aloud, but she doesn't look like she would stand to hear it, so he tries his hardest to show her. Because he sees only beauty when she feels ugly and will always touch her like she is the best thing his hands have ever held.
'I love you and I remember your wholeness when you feel broken, your innocence when you feel guilty [7] . I remember everything about you. I'll be the keeper of your purpose too, if you're lost .'
It's all she did for him when he could hardly stand to be touched with gentleness after years of flinching from violence.
'I know how to love you, Felicity.'
o
She'd never imagined the end of the world, but she does now. She lives it. The world ended and she walks the aftermath of it.
The world, her self .
Gone, gone, gone now.
Ashes float in the air like thick snow, clog her throat. Everything's a ruin. Car tires melted into the asphalt, rows and rows of them like metal rivers, lifeless. A landscape of abandoned cities, decaying metal and blasted concrete. Buildings that were once homes are empty, crumbled and folded into themselves in ruin, in grief.
Starvation populates this world of hers.
The apocalypse is here... and she still wants to fuck him.
Wanting is strange these days. It's wonky. No surprise there – her compass is broken. So are her reasons. She wants many things and she wants nothing at all. She wants to go back and make a different choice. That is what she wants. That wanting is sometimes all she is, a concentration of self to the point of a needle, as heavy as the heart of a black hole. The questions that haunt her are there in her sleep and in her waking hours and in this world too: the shattered glass beneath her feet.
Why didn't you send the bomb to water? Why didn't you send it somewhere else? Why didn't you put in different coordinates?
Why weren't you faster, smarter, better? Why couldn't you save them ?
Why did you kill them?
But she can't go back. She can't fix it and she can't get rid of wanting to, so this wanting rots inside her and eats her heart, until she can't want or care about anything else.
The only time she feels anything is when he's inside her. And after, when she sinks into shame like a pool of ice water.
It's surprising, but not really. She doesn't handle guilt well, and now she doesn't want to handle anything. And things between them, they're over, but he still looks at her the way he used to. Like she matters, like there's something else in her besides buildings full of things she wants to raze to the ground.
It makes her sick and it makes her angry, but he doesn't care so she doesn't either. The locust and wild vines cover everything, and she goes to him and lets him fuck the anger right out of her, then leaves.
This kind of living, slurring, gnarled and damaged, through a destruction with no end, has evil floating inside it like dark ink through deep water. She chases down her hurts; finds her place among the ugliness and calls it belonging. It's not just inside her, but at her very fingertips. She leaves the mark of her cruelty on everything she touches: he says 'I love you' in her neck and she pretends not to not hear it.
She goes to the ceremony held in remembrance of the Havenrock victims, and in her wretched world the last broadcast announces in her head that there is no hope. The world is done for. This is the apocalypse.
Flames lick at her feet, so she puts on a red dress and takes off her panties and goes to find him. There are no words this time. He knows, doesn't even hesitate.
They end up in a small closet, one hand gripping her ass, the other between their bodies as he fucks her against the wall. 'Harder' she tells him. 'Yes. Yes ! Make me feel it' Anything, please . But that she doesn't say aloud. She wraps her arms around his neck, fingers digging into him, trying to sweat her evil out. ( It never works. It never leaves. Instead it blooms, it eats, it grins. ) He licks her body new again, his hands waking shivers out of her, the feel of him hot enough to melt pavements. Time and time again, he is what makes the sidewalks of her world blister.
She goes to him and puts her teeth on his pulse, over and over again. He lets her, gives her what she wants. On every pavement of the crumbling city she lives in, against every decrepit building, on every corner that isn't on fire. The world is shaking apart but she calls it foreplay. She doesn't let up, doesn't stop, pulls him in, holds him tight enough to make the air around them jealous. She lets him fuck her standing as she holds onto the back of his neck. In the storage room of his office, in the server room of the bunker.
Never the bed again.
She doesn't remember the last time she said ' I love you '. The last time he said it back or the last kiss they shared that didn't make her feel less than human.
Pretending not to feel the flames when everything is on fire is not the best choice she's ever made, but - she scoffs - it's not the worst one either.
She sucks the ashes of the destruction off his fingers, tastes them on her tongue. It's terrible enough to fit in her now. She lets guilt make a home out of her body. It belongs to her more than her name.
She falls to her knees in front of him, makes him lose himself, focuses on that. Lets him pull her onto his lap. They try to crawl into each other on her ugly couch, the boxes in which she's packed her life bearing witness.
May the fires of the world burning not be the only thing to makes her sweat.
She doesn't really care how much it all looks like madness. There's no putting reason back into her decaying cities - her mind - again. There's simply no room left for it now.
[1] Franz Kafka, from a diary entry featured in Diaries
[2] Mourid Barghouti, from I Was Born There, I Was Born Here
[4] Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
[5] Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend
[6] Warsan Shire
[7] Alan Cohen
Notes:
like many things about this fic, there are parts of it that are very closely related to genestee's fic of the same theme. this part:
"Why didn't you send the bomb to water? Why didn't you send it somewhere else? Why didn't you put different coordinates? Why weren't you faster, smarter, better? Why couldn't you save them? Why did you kill them? (How are you still breathing?)" - especially so, because it was simply so beautifully done the way she wrote it, and I couldn't fathom another way to say it.
here is me saying again that if you haven't read her fic (you probably have, but lets be sure), read it, because it's outstanding and you won't regret it.