A/N: Thanks again for all the favorites and follows! Text messages are underlined, and I still don't own Arrow.
Felicity made it about three hours in before she caved. She had already had what she estimated to be 50% of her blood taken, so she would later blame that as the reasoning behind her low self-control. The fact of the matter was that she was nervous now, and she did what she always did when she got scared: she talked to Oliver.
She was waiting for an ultrasound of her neck (she didn't even know that was a thing) when she figured that even if he was in meetings, which she knew he was, just texting him would make her feel better.
Save me.
Simple, concise, and not technically a lie. She knew that if she had been with her mother, she would want him to do just that.
Not enjoying this bonding time?
Felicity glanced around the room. Bonding time, right. She had really bonded with the nurse, Georgia, who had spotted her reading celebrity gossip on her tablet and snuck away from her rounds to read about the reality stars in LA with her. She had even bonded with the needle in her arm that was actually taped to her. They had said that it would be easier to keep in if they needed to draw more blood, but she kept getting waves of nausea every time she looked at it.
That's one way of putting it. You should be paying attention to Hae Lin.
She knew he was in a meeting with the CFO of China who was in town this week and she wasn't sorry she was missing it.
He keeps speaking Mandarin to his staff. It's really hard pretending I don't know they're calling me a 'pretentious white boy.'
They hit the nail right on the head, didn't they?
He sent her back some Chinese characters that she was sure said exactly what he thought of her last comment, and she barked out a laugh.
"Wasn't sure you knew how to do that." Georgia poked her head in, teasing Felicity. She was definitely the nicest nurse Felicity had encountered during her stay. She was in her mid-twenties, if she had to guess, and had her bright red hair pulled back in a frizzy ponytail. She wore minimal makeup but still somehow looked like a model to Felicity with her perfect porcelain skin with a light smattering of freckles. She was definitely her lifeline.
"This isn't really the happiest place, if you know what I mean."
"Boy, do I. Here," she held out a small carton of something to Felicity. "You looked like you were bored with the water. Doctor Monroe said you can't eat anything yet, but she cleared this. It's a vanilla milkshake, essentially. For the cancer patients, they can keep it down and it helps them put on weight. Which you totally could stand to do."
"Must be all that Krav Maga," Felicity muttered as she shook the carton. She was more than a little hungry after being told last night that she couldn't eat in the morning and a vanilla shake sounded heavenly to her.
"You do Krav Maga?!" Please don't let her practice it, please don't let her practice it! Felicity silently begged. The last thing she wanted was to have to lie her way out of that one. "That is so cool. I'm totally jealous."
Felicity could only smile helplessly at her.
"Think they'll let me bust out of this joint soon?"
Georgia bit her lip, flipping through Felicity's file that she pulled from the wall. "We're a bit understaffed today, so I wouldn't get your hopes up. You still have an ultrasound, a biopsy, and then it looks like a CAT scan, maybe."
"A biopsy?" Felicity almost spit her drink out. "Like, on me? Where? Will it leave a mark?"
If Georgia thought her questions were weird, her face didn't show it. She just read from her file before placing it back in the caddy on the wall. "Just a fine needle aspiration. Really easy, don't worry. It'll probably look more like a pimple than anything, if that helps. Nothing a band-aid can't cover. But hey, your doctors will tell you more when it comes time for it, so don't worry. I'm just telling you what I know, that's all."
She appreciated the girl's candor but she didn't feel much better after being armed with that information.
Might need more than the morning off. This is getting out of hand.
It was 2 p.m. by the time someone had let her know that she could put her clothes back on. Georgia's shift had ended over an hour before and her new nurse was not nearly as friendly or informative. She had undergone more procedures than she knew what to do with and the doctors were being fairly close-lipped about it. They explained everything that they did with meticulous precision, but anytime she asked what they thought she had, they just told her that the tests would be more conclusive, and they didn't want to give her any false information. The logical side of Felicity appreciated that, but the irrational, emotional, cranky-because-she-just-spent-all-morning-at-the-hospital side of her was less impressed with their professionalism.
She was waiting by the check-out desk for the receptionist to come back and confirm her appointment for the next day, because apparently this was the gift that just kept giving, when a voice made her pause.
"Miss Smoak?"
A real smile blossomed over her face. She hadn't realized how much she had wanted to see a familiar face that day until she had.
"Hi Detective Lance!" He was in his off duty clothes, jeans and a flannel, and looked just as miserable as she felt in this place. "What are you doing here? You don't have to answer that. I don't know why I asked that. That is super personal and I should be embarrassed, which I am, but also I should be respectful and respect you and I should stop talking."
"Just getting the ol' heart checked up on," he said, giving his chest a light knock. His eyes drifted over her, cataloguing the band-aid on her neck where they had taken a biopsy of a swollen lymph node and the bandage that was wrapped around her elbow, where the needle-of-doom had been for hours. "Everything okay with you?"
"Right as rain!" She closed her eyes briefly. "I have got to stop saying that."
"Miss Smoak?" The receptionist had returned, handing her a tiny appointment card. "You're all set for meeting Dr. Markowitz and Dr. Monroe here tomorrow at noon. It will probably take around forty five minutes, but they've asked for you to clear your afternoon. Have a good day."
Felicity shoved the card into her purse, not wanting to answer the unspoken question in Detective Lance's eyes.
"Anyways, I should...get back to work. It was nice seeing you, Detective."
"You too, Miss Smoak. I'll see you around."
She wasn't even sure if she responded to him as she rushed out of the hospital, eager to get away from everyone and everything there.
She got to work looking just as flustered as she felt. She opened the door to Oliver's office, about to let him know that she was there, when she realized that there were two Chinese employees sitting across from him at his desk. After an awkward apology, she backed out of the room and flopped down at her desk. It didn't matter that she was practically in a bed all morning - she was exhausted.
Oliver's meeting ended shortly after, she prayed not due to her interruption, and after he walked his guests to the elevator, he stopped at her desk.
"What are you doing here?"
"Working? And interrupting you apparently, which I'm really sorry about, by the way."
"I don't care about that, Felicity, I just assumed you'd be with your mom all day. I didn't even think I'd see you tonight."
"Oh! No, I'm...I'm going to see her tomorrow." She hated the way her voice rose at the end, as if she was asking him a question. She really was a pathetic liar.
"Not tonight?"
"No…" Her eyes darted around the room, trying desperately to come up with a good reason as to why she could leave her mom alone in an unknown city and be available for vigilante-helping duty.
"Ah," Oliver said knowingly. "She has a date, doesn't she?"
"...Yes. Which is why we are...meeting up for lunch tomorrow. At noon. So she can tell me about the date. And then take me shopping." She had no idea what words were even coming out of her mouth at that point, she just hoped that Oliver believed her for one more day, until this whole mono thing was straightened out.
"Well, great, in that case, I need you to run some numbers for bringing a few Chinese ex-pats over here to help with the Applied Sciences division."
Grateful to have something to focus on that wasn't needles or the guilt that warred in her for both lying to Oliver and not talking to her mom in months, she dove in and pushed all other thoughts out of her head.
"See you tonight?" Oliver held out her raincoat for her to slip on the next afternoon as she packed up her tablet and laptop to head out for the doctor's.
"Definitely," she reassured. "And if you happen to have a nice bottle of red wine waiting for me, I think it would be really appreciated after this afternoon."
"It'll be fine. Tell your mom I said hello."
She couldn't decide if she was really impressed with her lying skills, or really concerned with Oliver's lie-detection skills. If the vigilante tasked with protecting her city couldn't see through her feeble excuses and thin stories, she wasn't sure what else he was missing that was right in front of him. Of course, he also was seemingly blissfully unaware of her feelings towards him, so maybe his obliviousness was working in her favor at all times.
She dropped her keys twice when she went to start her car and refused to think about what it meant that her hands were shaking. Dr. Markowitz had actually called her that morning, trying to get her to come in sooner, but she adamantly refused, insisting that noon was the earliest she could get there. She knew she could make up another terrible lie for Oliver, but the truth was that she didn't really want to meet him any earlier. Meeting with him meant finding out whatever was wrong with her, and right then and there, she was perfectly content with not knowing. A definite first for her, where her curiosity didn't get the best of her, but this entire situation had her freaked out. Usually, when faced with a question that she didn't know the answer to, she did what she did best: hacked. She contemplated it briefly last night; she could easily hack the hospital's systems and find out some details that way. Hell, she could've googled all her procedures and symptoms and gleaned more information from her trusty pal the Internet. But she didn't. She just focused on Team Arrow and Roy's new love for all things radiation (she was pretty sure he broke one of Oliver's dosimeters last night) and she watched Oliver do the salmon ladder and she thought of absolutely nothing because there was nothing for her to think about. Ignorance really was bliss.
So she ignored her shaking hands and any frustration she felt at there being too little traffic. She ignored her sweaty palms and her body's refusal to pick up her feet as she walked into the hospital. She ignored her thick tongue as she informed reception that she was there. And she definitely ignored the shared look between Dr. Markowitz and Dr. Monroe as they led her back to not an exam room, but Dr. Monroe's office.
"Please, sit down Felicity." Dr. Monroe gestured to the chair across from the huge mahogany desk she situated herself behind. Dr. Markowitz slid into the chair beside her, but positioned it so that he could face both her and his colleague.
"Miss Smoak, Felicity," Dr. Markowitz began. "Your test results weren't - they weren't what we were hoping for. Your blood tests on Monday gave us an inkling, but the preliminary results from yesterday…"
"What?" She asked, eyes darting between the two doctors. "Is it mono?"
"I'm so sorry, dear," Dr. Monroe spoke up. "The tests yesterday confirm that you have a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma."
Felicity felt her stomach and jaw drop in tandem. "Cancer?"
Whether intentional or not, there was not one part of Felicity's mind that had even entertained the idea that she might have something more serious than the stupid kissing disease. She knew she was being unrealistic by putting all of her eggs in one mono-shaped basket, but it had all just fit. All of her symptoms, all of her tests, all of it...and now she was blind-sided by this, in every single sense of the word. Despite her mouth's tendency to work overtime, she couldn't seem to formulate one damn word right then. Luckily, Dr. Markowitz picked up the slack.
"While we will need to run more tests to conclude what type of non-Hodgkin's it is, as there are many, many types, it is important for you to know that it one of the more treatable cancers. It responds very well to treatment, generally, but I can't give you more firm statistics until these tests are done. You'll undergo some more exams and procedures and that will help us stage it and figure out which cells are affected and how best to proceed with treatments."
"Oh, okay?"
She had no idea what to say to any of this. Her mind was racing but surprisingly, all her physical issues - the shaking, the sweaty palms, the racing heart - all of that had calmed. She felt numb, just completely unaware of her surroundings. She kept returning to the one question she couldn't answer, which was how in the world was she going to tell Oliver this, when she felt like all the air in the room had been sucked out. She stood abruptly.
"I don't…I don't know what to say," she confessed.
"It's a lot of information to take in," Dr. Monroe placated her. "We know that, Felicity. But we do need to run these tests in order to gauge what we are working with. We can...we'd like to do them today."
That got an emotion out of Felicity, but not a great one. She whipped her head to look at the doctor.
"Today?"
Dr. Monroe nodded. "I know it seems sudden, but time is on our side with this if we've caught it early enough, which I suspect we have. None of the procedures are particularly invasive, and if we start right away, you might not even have to be admitted overnight."
"Admitted overnight?" She echoed. Yesterday they had told her to clear her afternoon, not to clear her entire life for the foreseeable future!
"It really is for the best," Dr. Markowitz agreed. "Getting treatment squared away is important right now, and this is the first step towards that."
She must have nodded because Dr. Monroe stood, clapping her hands together. "I'll go get some more paperwork for you to sign, and then we have some pamphlets that will be good for you to go over to better acquaint yourself with everything you're going through. After that, we'll give you some time so that maybe you could call someone to come be with you for this. David, I'll get the test orders started as well so all you have to do is sign off on it."
She left, and the silence that stretched between Felicity and her doctor was deafening.
"Will you be my doctor?" It seemed like such a benign, droll question to ask, but Felicity had been curious about this tag-team approach that they had been working with since it began. He shook his head.
"Unfortunately, no. My specialty was hematology, but I began working for a general practice just a few years ago. Dr. Monroe is consulting on this as a favor for me, but after the tests are complete, we'll do an official handoff to a specializing oncologist."
Another blank nod from Felicity.
"On Monday...did you know?" She had no idea how any of this worked, but she suspected he had to have had some sort of idea for this to all happen so fast.
He smiled sadly. "I hoped I was wrong. This really is a worst case scenario, you have to understand. It could have been so many options, but...I suspected, yes. I have seen it present itself like this many times. You're a wonderful girl, Miss Smoak. I'm sorry."
There it was. She had no doubt she'd be hearing that a lot in the months to come, but somehow hearing it from a professional just made it sound so much worse. So final.
She felt so out of sorts that it was driving her crazy. She wanted to scream, she wanted to cry, she wanted to climb the walls, she wanted to bury herself in Oliver's shoulder and hold him until this all went away. But still she stood, unmoving, unblinking, unfeeling.
She signed forms on autopilot. She listened to them read her risks and potential side effects and all she could think was that these tests were supposed to be the easy part. If she couldn't make it through these side effects, how was she ever going to survive the treatment phase? She nodded at the appropriate times and she might have even asked a few good, relevant questions, before they were standing up and heading back towards the waiting area and admissions.
"Rhonda here will be taking care of checking you in. We're gonna remain optimistic and just check you in under outpatient, and barring any complications, you should be able to go home tonight. These tests can take a little while to process, and there's no need to keep you here overnight already if it can be avoided."
Dr. Monroe's words bounced around Felicity's skull. 'Overnight already.' Because that was inevitable, right? She would be spending an inordinate amount of time here. She thought briefly about the amount of needles she was going to be forced to deal with and took it as a sign that she didn't even feel remotely nervous about it.
"Picture i.d. and insurance card please, ma'am."
She slipped her driver's license and insurance card on the counter before her eyes were drawn to the sliding doors that led to the outside.
"Is it okay if I just…" She gestured pathetically to the doors. "I need to make some calls, and I…"
Rhonda patted her hand and nodded. "I'll go ahead and start getting you checked in. You take all the time that you need."
Unwilling to stomach the look of pity in her eyes, Felicity stumbled towards the door, desperate for fresh air. She needed to escape, to have something, before she went back in there and had it all taken away from her.
The doors led her to a curved area for patients to be dropped off. She saw an ambulance idling a few yards down and headed the opposite direction.
She followed the sidewalk, hugging the wall and trying to make sense of what just happened. Except she couldn't make sense of it, because nothing about it made sense at all. She let herself get lost in her thoughts for a while, musing on life and death and how she never - not in a million years - could have anticipated this for herself.
Her phone started buzzing and she realized she had no idea what she was doing. Inside the building or outside of it. She went to take her phone out of her pocket when she spied the pamphlet that was still clutched in her hands. The same pamphlet that Dr. Monroe had insisted she take with her, calling it 'invaluable.'
Invaluable my ass, Felicity thought spitefully as she ripped it and threw it to the ground. Stupid pamphlet. Stupid words. 'So You Found Out You Have Cancer, What Now?' Isn't that the million dollar question? She doubted that the inside of a glossy, mass-produced pamphlet had the answer.
She wasn't even surprised when it started to rain. Her raincoat was inside, draped casually over the reception desk, along with her purse and tablet. She hoped Rhonda was keeping a good eye on it, but somehow she doubted it. But honestly, what kind of horrible person would steal from a hospital?
Her phone had silenced temporarily and she was thankful for the reprieve. She had no idea what she would say. She barely even knew how to keep breathing at that moment. She silently willed the rain to fall faster, harder, to somehow make it clean her, to wipe the cancer right off of her, to seep into her bones and renew her.
It didn't.
The sky opened up above her but she felt the same. She felt the cancer weighing on her like a heavy blanket that was only getting more and more waterlogged. Just when she thought her knees were going to give out, that she was going to collapse right there on the sidewalk outside of the damn hospital, she felt a warm, heavy hand on her forearm.