Author's Notes: Hi, everybody! Remember me? (I doubt it, but let's go with it.) I've been terribly remiss in updating this collection on this site despite something like 15 chapters being added over on AO3, so prepare for a major chapter dump over the next few days. I'll do my best not to inundate you.
Please note this was written over the summer, so the references to Felicity's mother were just speculation at the time.
And as always, I'd love to hear what you think.
Written for Sunday Six on Tumblr, though it's never just six. Title from the Stone Sour song of the same name.
He leaves when she's just shy of her fifth birthday, and through the years, somehow the picture his mind holds of his daughter is always Coke-bottle glasses, pigtails and a smile that could light the world. He remembers that even when his world was crumbling, often at the hands of Felicity's mother's mental illness, when that little girl that looked at him like he hung the moon and the stars, everything had made sense again.
But now he is looking at her, in the most unexpected of places: on a beach in the Caribbean a mere five minutes from the seasonal home he set up with his second wife and their children, and where he's at a beachside watering hole watching the FA cup, and suddenly nothing makes sense, but he's never been so in love with a state of confusion; it is, in actuality, a state of grace, and he revels in it even as he is unworthy of it.
She's the most beautiful ghost he's ever seen, and he watches in wonderment as his past and her apparent future, going by the rings on her left hand, collide in harmony to the waves crashing against the shore. Both he and her companion smile when she pulls out a floppy hat and about a dozen other things from a tote bag, and he remembers her love of "Mary Poppins," how he'd bought an extra seat to leave empty when he took her half-siblings to see it in New York for her.
He's never forgotten. His heart has just broken too many times that the slices that come with missing her threaten to make him bleed out.
She's looking at the man he's assuming is her husband — technically his son-in-law, but his heavy heart tells him he had to be a father first to claim that title — the way she used to look at him. This man she's chosen is clearly her world, and as they settle into their day of relaxation, they reach for each other in tandem, and he has to smile when the young man brings Felicity's knuckles to his mouth to kiss them.
Even next to each other, he's never going to let her go, and in that instant, her father knows he's a partner worthy of his Felicity.
He wonders if she knows how hard he fought to keep her with him, keep them together; how her mother went underground time and again, how the police in one state wouldn't enforce the custody decree he got in another. He hopes she doesn't know how he disappeared into a bottle for a decade from the pain and frustration of the alienation, that the only reason he got clean was to attend her high school graduation, or that, four years later and with the help of his youngest son helping him use Google to look for any online presence she might've had, had been in Cambridge when she walked from MIT with her degree.
He's sure she doesn't know her mother spotted him and told him in no uncertain terms that twenty years does indeed a chasm make, one of hurt and anger and betrayal and confused children crying themselves to sleep every night for almost a year because Daddy had said he'd come back.
He'd typed out a thousand emails to her when his son had found her on LinkedIn, has a pile of addressed Hanukkah and birthday cards in his desk drawer, and had steadfastly refused to have formal portraits of his family done because she was missing and as a result he is incomplete. There's just so much to say, he knows, and yet nothing at all, because all the words in all the languages would never be enough. Amends are achievable when you're a worthy, better man, and with his Felicity, he's not. So he'll continue to love her from afar and let the man — who, while Felicity's father has been lost in his own reminiscences, seems to have left his daughter to her floppy hat and book — take care of her the way he could not.
And because the universe laughs at the plans of men and proves them fools, the stool next to him is occupied with Felicity's companion when he turns back around to watch the end of the match.
He opens his mouth to say something, but the younger man beats him to it. "So that's where her eyes came from."
Her father swallows hard, choking on twenty years of memories and shame and change. Still, he takes the hand and introduction when it's offered. "Oliver Queen."
"Sam Smoak." He has a hundred questions and explanations and feelings of unworthiness to even ask about her, and his heart feels like it's going to beat out of his chest, but he can't help but look back to his little girl. He doesn't know what he's asking when he whispers, "Is she…"
"Everything," Oliver replies simply, even though it's not. "She's…just everything." His tone is reverent, respectful, adoring, and the fact his daughter is so thoroughly loved warms Sam even on a beautiful late spring Caribbean day.
The knot in his throat is making it hard to push the words past the time lost and all the things left unsaid, but he still tries. "She's had a good life?"
Something darkens Oliver's eyes for just a moment, and his words are weighted when he finally answers. "She tries to make the world better. There are good days and bad days."
He has no right to ask, but in this moment he is a man in a desert of perdition finally being offered a drop of water after wandering for so many years. "How long have you been there for both?"
Oliver smiles, glancing back at Felicity, and the sheer adoration on the younger man's face is so bright it rivals anything the island could produce. "Longer than either of us had realized, I think."
Sam motions to the band Oliver's been twisting absentmindedly around his left hand. "Honeymoon?"
Oliver shakes his head slowly, and for the first time, his visage sparks with just a hint of nervousness, but Sam still feels the strength of Oliver's gaze as he studies the older man when he says, "Babymoon, actually."
Sam rubs his hand over his face at the news. His baby's having a baby. "This is one of those times I wish I still drank."
Oliver tilts his head, and Sam knows in his bones it's something he's picked up from Felicity. "Is that why you left?"
Sam shakes his head. "Because I left."
"You're here now, though."
Sam looks back at Felicity, who's still leafing happily between her preferred pages. "I didn't even say goodbye."
He expects a "why did you leave in the first place?" or "why didn't you come back?" — alibis and excuses masquerading as reasons why, the answers to which Sam dreams about never answering in the violet nightmares of his darkest hours — but Oliver simply stands. "Now's as good a time as any to say hello." When Sam doesn't rise to join him, Oliver says quietly, "We've lost a lot the past few years." Though the words come easily, Sam know the battles that have entrenched themselves into the lines on Oliver's face were anything but. "Including my parents by happenstance. You have a choice to give her something I never can. And she deserves it, Sam, but so do you."
The reverent tone is back on that word "choice," a weight that tells Sam choices are what define people to Oliver, probably to Felicity herself; that decisions made and chances taken are their truth, not necessarily the outcomes, and there's an odd sense of absolution coloring that idea. There's a freedom there, room to breathe in that second chance, and he decides not to waste it.
(He finds out Oliver's own island story later, of course, and embraces the man to whom he becomes both a friend and a father figure, holding tight to him in a way that will again never fully explain the depth of what he feels — the gratitude that Oliver had taken a trip to the islands given what Lian Yu had done to him that gave Sam his little girl back — and in that moment, the verbosity Sam shares with his daughter isn't needed.
Oliver and Felicity get to know Sam's wife and boys in New York, though it's "Matilda" they see on stage, and their first family portrait is taken by a nurse as they're all taken by Alexandra Grace Queen's arrival into the world.
Despite the professional ones they pose for over the years, that one remains Sam's favorite.)