Hello! Sorry about the long delay between updates, but this chapter and the next ended up being absolute beasts for some reason. I hope you enjoy what I finally managed to wrestle onto the page. As always, thanks for reading and please feel free to tell me what you liked or what I'm screwing up in the review.
If only I owned Arrow, but alas...
Chapter 3
Felicity slumped against the door of her apartment, sagging against the cool wood as she examined her space. Coming back home again felt slightly surreal, as though she were returning after been gone for months rather than a mere 72 hours. She caught herself studying her living room as though it might be somehow unfamiliar. It was a ridiculous thought, and she admonished herself for it, but she still looked around for another moment before she pushed wearily off the door and walked cautiously into her home.
Her caution was even more ridiculous considering that both Oliver and Diggle had already searched her apartment top to bottom. Her neighborhood had made it through Slade's attack and the looting that followed relatively unscathed; there had been no sign of anything amiss when they pulled up to her door. Still, neither man would allow her to enter until they had both personally verified her apartment was secure. The only danger they found were the smells emanating from her refrigerator – apparently the power had been out for a good stretch while they had been gone.
Felicity was immensely grateful for that her home had remained inviolate. Had there been even the slightest hint that Slade or his men had been here, she didn't think she would have been able to walk through that front door. While Walter had sounded genuinely happy to open his home to Oliver, but she doubted he'd be willing to take on more guests, not to mention the uncomfortable questions that would surely be raised, or at least pointedly implied in an arch, unspoken British fashion. And though Oliver and Diggle would possibly be the greatest friends in the history of moving – both possessed giant muscles and owed her big – Felicity already felt like she had lost a home when they'd walked into the ransacked base. She wasn't sure she would be able to bear it if she lost her actual home as well.
Felicity shook her head as though she could shake the troubling thoughts away and made her way to the kitchen. She didn't want to think about Slade and all the havoc he had wrought, real or potential any longer. All she wanted to do was eat something, take a long, hot shower, and collapse into her own bed for the first time in three days.
As her fridge had been declared a disaster site, her dinner options were limited to the contents of her meager pantry. Hunting though her cabinets, and vowing to do better on stocking staple non-perishables from now on, she eventually came up with her can of emergency soup – Campbell's Chicken and Stars, to be opened for nothing less than actual flu or near-apocalypse – and a box of crackers that were only slightly stale. It was a rather humble dinner, but it suited both her limited appetite and the amount of effort she was prepared to expend on food preparation. She dumped the can in a clean bowl, shoved it in the microwave, and had a moment of silence in honor of the almost-new pint of ice cream that she'd bought the day before Moira Queen had been killed.
Munching crackers over her sink, she eyed her television speculatively while she waited for her soup to heat. After what had seemed like three days of constant noise, she found her quiet apartment unsettling. Briefly, she considered turning the TV on and searching for something dumb and mindless to alleviate the now-unfamiliar silence and the tension that still settled heavily in her stomach and clenched her muscles into tight knots. As the microwave beeped, she decided against it. After watching the city splinter around her for the second time, she simply wasn't prepared for the possibility of seeing it again on the local news. Felicity sat at her kitchen table, ate her soup, and reminded herself that sounds of battle that seemed to echo just outside of her hearing were only in her head. By the time she finished, she was starting to get used to the quiet again.
She left her dishes at the table, too tired and too sore to even bother bring them to the sink. Her already aching muscles had stiffened further as she sat, and by the time she finished eating, her limbs felt clumsy and leaden and it hurt to breathe. She shuffled to her bathroom by sheer force of will and cranked the water in her shower up as hot as she could stand. Felicity stood under the spray until the sting from the cut on her head no longer surprised her and the water went tepid, the long, hot soak and the ibuprofen she downed with dinner finally granting her some relief. It eased the pain and fatigue just enough for her to change into her warmest, ugliest pjs and brush her teeth, but no more.
When she finally crawled into bed and turned off the lights, the exhaustion weighted so heavily she felt like she sunk an extra inch into the mattress. But, perversely, sleep refused to come. Felicity groaned; she'd done what she could to try and avoid this exact scenario but, really, how did one unwind after trying to avert a mass-killing? Though this was now the second time she'd found herself lying awake in this bed after helping to prevent the complete destruction of Starling City, she was no closer to the answer than when she'd huddled under her covers a year ago, listening to the sounds of distant sirens in the Glades. Though there was a slight difference this time. Last year, when she closed her eyes, she saw the foundry shaking and falling around her. This year, all she saw was Oliver's face searching hers in the gloom of his unlit foyer.
Felicity didn't want to think about what had happened in the entry of his shuttered, empty home. She liked the tidy narrative she'd almost successfully told John – Oliver has a cunning plan but no time to fill her in on the details, a comic misunderstanding ensues but is quickly corrected, bad guy is defeated and all's well that ends well. It was straightforward and neat as a sitcom plot-line – resolved in one episode and with everything back to normal for our intrepid heroes by next week's theme-song. She was most emphatically not interested in subjecting it to any type of scrutiny. Instead, she tried counting sheep. She tried figuring out the code script for a sheep graphic in BASIC, then C++. She made a mental grocery list of items to replace the contents of her fridge. She plotted the logistics of sealing up the whole fridge and getting a new one. But no matter what she tried, her traitorous mind refused to rest, doggedly drifting back to the Queen mansion. Until, finally, around 2:15 in the morning, she was too tired to fight any more and simply let her mind drift back, replaying the memories of that night.
It felt like they had been fighting for days already when they arrived at Queen Consolidated. Even with the cure, even with the League of Assassins, their task was Sisyphean. Unless they cured Slade, for every soldier they'd put down, another would eventually rise up and Slade had thwarted them at nearly every turn. Oliver's conference room epiphany had been the first glimmer of hope that they might actually be a way to end this Starling City mostly intact and their team still alive Felicity had dared to feel since the attacks had begun. That tiny glimmer had grown, fed on Oliver's newly purposeful movements as he steered them confidently though the city, until, by the time she got off that bike in front of his home, she didn't even question what they were doing there. All she cared about was how she could help.
When he'd told her to stay in the mansion because he needed her safe, that hope had rushed out of her in a whoosh, leaving her wrong-footed and off balance for the first time in an evening that had been an unrelenting push of fear, pain, chaos, fighting, and running Isabell Rochev over with a van. Felicity was well accustomed to Oliver's occasional attacks of martyrdom, but she'd know immediately this was something else. She'd been by his side and in the thick of it since this had begun after all, her presence at his left hand assured. He hadn't needed her to be safe when he'd told Laurel to stay at the base. He hadn't asked her to walk away after Slade escaped again, or after they found the STAR lab courier, or in the clock tower when their failure - and worse - had seemed all but certain. So him asking her then, when they had the cure, and a yet-unexplained plan, when the tide might finally be turning, defied all reason.
She'd demanded an explanation immediately, mind firing into overdrive as she tried to compile every possible reason for this sudden insanity and all corresponding counterarguments. Either she was going to disabuse him of whatever misguided sense of duty or guilt was getting in the way of them finishing this within the next two minutes, or she was getting back on that terrifying motorcycle and simply refusing to get off until he took her with him.
She thought she'd covered every possible reason or excuse Oliver could conceivably come up with in that beat of silence between when she demanded he tell her why and when he answered. But if she'd had ten years to think on it, she would have never anticipated that Oliver would look her straight in the eye and tell her Slade had taken the wrong woman. So when he did, her mind had thrown a gear, thoughts suddenly stuttering. He didn't love Laurel? What did that mean? Did he love Sara then? Surely he couldn't…. He must have read the bafflement on her face, because his expression had shifted. He'd looked at her as though he'd taken off his hood and her stomach had dropped. Then Oliver Queen told her that he loved her And her mind had gone completely blank.
Felicity was supremely grateful that she'd frozen in that moment under Oliver's naked, searching gaze. Because, she finally admitted in the darkness bedroom, she hadn't almost believed him, like she told Digg and kept trying to tell herself. In that split second, she had completely believed him. God knows what she would have said had her brain actually been working.
There lay the crux of the issue, she admitted, burying her face further in her pillow. She'd believed him not because Oliver was a particularly good actor, or even because she'd been so shocked, she'd just taken it at face value. She'd believed him because what his words reflected her own feelings and in that moment, with the world burning all around them, it seemed only natural and logical that he'd feel the same way. The truth of the feelings she'd been denying and dismissing for months as a "crush" - a physical attraction based on a heady combination of adrenaline, secrecy and, shirtless workouts - was suddenly and brutally exposed. Only to have their foolish futility revealed seconds later. That was what was behind the persistent ache behind her breastbone and the burn in the back of her throat.
The press of the syringe into her palm a few seconds later had been such a shock, she had flinched. But it had jolted her mind back into gear, the mysterious plan and his odd behavior and what he was really trying to tell her all snapping into focus. Of course Oliver didn't love her, but if they could make Slade believe he did, they would finally be able to get close enough to cure him. He did need her to stay there; the entire city did. So she screwed up her courage, curled her fingers around that syringe so tightly her palm still bore an indentation from the flange, and said yes to everything he was really asking when he whispered, "Do you understand?"
She knew Oliver cared for her, deeply. He'd been showing her for months through a hundred little gestures that he valued her as a partner and a friend. And if she'd had any lingering doubts, he'd proven it unequivocally when he'd palmed her that syringe. The only thing more difficult for Oliver Queen that trusting people, after all, was asking for help. Even now, that brought some small consolation. But she'd also known from the first, or at least from the first time she met Laurel, there could never be…more… She thought she'd accepted that fact and done what she needed to squelch the tender feelings that tended to cropped up with the tenacity of dandelions whenever she spent time with him. Pinning for someone who had made it clear he didn't feel the same way was unfair and more than a little creepy, after all. But that moment had shown her that her best efforts hadn't been enough; she had failed both of them.
Oliver must have known it too, she realized, a sudden rush of mortification scalding her. He'd all but acknowledged her feelings in his post-Russia, "It's not you, it's me," speech. He'd probably even counted on her being half in love with him still, months after his attempt at letting her down easy. If not, wouldn't he have told her what he planned lest she laugh or not believe at his "confession" and blow the whole scene?
Felicity embraced the righteous indignation welling up as she considered his actions again. The ever logical part of her brain, bolstered by the respect and friendship she felt for Oliver, offered the counterpoint that it probably hadn't been a conscious manipulation. He hadn't had a lot of options for plans or time in which to warn her; to say nothing of the fact that, for people who had secret identities, they were terrible liars. But Felicity decided she was under no obligation to be fair or logical or to give Oliver the benefit of the doubt in her own bed at 3 am, especially when the heat of her anger so effectively masked the pain in her chest. He could have warned her somehow, he could have skipped the whole, "I love you," bit. When he left, he could have just gone, instead of hesitating that minute more with eyes full of something that had almost resembled regret; as though it was his heart that was breaking. Instead, he exploited her feelings to lend a little extra veracity to his story, to really sell it to Slade.
Well, Felicity decided, no more. She pulled her face from the pillow and gathered her anger around herself, hardening it into a steely resolve. She was going to move on. For a fleeting second, she considered leaving the team altogether, but dismissed it almost immediately. Despite all of this – her foolishness and his betrayal - she believed in him and his mission and she wanted the opportunity to help keep the city safe. She'd done too much good and seen too much evil to walk away, especially now that Starling needed the Arrow more than ever. But pinning for Oliver, giving him this kind of power over her, was not just a fool's errand, it was dangerous and it had to stop. Tomorrow when they begin rebuilding everything: the base, the team, the city, Queen Consolidated; Felicity decided, she would start rebuilding their relationship as well. This time she'd keep it strictly professional: no more lingering in the lair to keep an eye on him and offer what comfort she could after a tough day; no more cataloging his complements; no more being his girl Wednesday; and definitely no more watching him workout. She'd do the IT, run the missions, and that would be it. And she would stop putting her life on hold, she promised herself; make time to reconnect with her old friends and maybe even reactive her OKCupid profile. She'd help save the city twice in as many years after all – didn't that entitle her to at least an occasional date? Once she stopped blurring the lines of their partnership and expanded her world beyond QC and the Arrow cave, surely her silly feelings would fade away, she told herself firmly. In a few weeks, she'd probably think of Oliver like she did Diggle – as a very muscley friend and partner – and nothing more. A plan and a new resolution provided Felicity with a welcome, though fragile, sense of equanimity. She didn't necessarily feel better, but it was enough to finally allow her to drift off to sleep.
A/N: Even though I swear on the Salmon Ladder that I go over these chapters multiple times before I post them, stupid, stupid errors still inevitably get though. So I've taken advantage of the fact that this is and spent some time cleaning up the previous chapters - I haven't made any major changes, no need to go back, just fixed some typos and tightened the language in a few places.
Also, if the Arrow writing staff want me to believe Ray Palmer as a viable romantic partner for Felicity, they need to dial down the creepy stalker about 90%. This show. This F$%king show.