AN: Hey, all! New chapter for ya. There's not really any action here, either, but I hope you still enjoy.

(Announcer): This week on Under the Hood… Our hero seems to have come down with a nasty case of the vigilante flu. While some simply refer to this as a gunshot wound, the fact remains that he's forced to some rather drastic action. As his steward, one John Diggle, tries to save his life, he learns that some surprising things come in strange packages. Just who is Felicity Smoak, and where does a computer expert learn trauma surgery?


January 32, 2012:

It was a rash move, he knew. Oliver wasn't prone to moments of spontaneity, but he needed to leave quickly. He couldn't drive his motorcycle, not with a hole ripped through his chest, and Dig was too far away. His options of extraction were thus limited to one. He had absolutely no idea how she was going to take the news, and yet trust was somehow never a factor of his unease.

As he waited in her car, a small red vehicle that was rather suited to her for the oddity it was and which he had seen easily in the nearly vacant lot, he noted the irony of the situation. The only way to continue his crusade was for him to reveal his identity to someone whom he had hoped never to. To focus on something other that the blood seeping from the gunshot wound given to him by his own mother, Oliver focused his attention on the car and what it might say of its curious owner. There was little to glean, however, because one facet of her life had muted everything else.

With an almost desperate need to gain some measure of control in her life, Felicity Smoak had thoroughly and almost relentlessly cleaned every surface of the interior of the vehicle. He might even say she'd just bought the car had the purchase not been one of the few things on her he'd been able to dig up in his background check on her last Christmas. There were no receipts littering the console, no stains to describe eating habits, and there was an impressively small amount of debris on the underfoot rugs; he could still smell hints of the bleach from the thoroughness of her cleaning. The only thing in that car that said anything of Felicity personally-other than that she had gone through something traumatic and thus currently wished to control anything she could-were the computer parts he could see sticking out from under the passenger-side seat.

Truly ironic was that if he had been able to search more thoroughly, looked in the trunk, for instance, he would've discovered a truth about Felicity that would surprise even him; familiar gear stashed in a hidden, secondary compartment. Alas he had neither the inclination nor the strength to look there, so he remained ignorant.

It was as Oliver was beginning to muse that perhaps calling Diggle would've been faster after all that the door at his feet was thrown open. He looked down his bloodstained chest to see Felicity standing there with a hand inside her purse, likely to reach for some sort of weapon used for self defense. Her look of utter surprise told him she had already recognized him. From her angle, she could surely see underneath his hood, and the overhead light had turned on the instant she'd opened the door, lighting the shadows underneath the identity concealing headwear.

"I'm not gonna' hurt you, Felicity." He ground the words out through harshly clenched teeth as he shifted to lower the now useless hood.

She understood his meaning and removed her hand from her handbag, and then she stepped closer to the door to get a better look at him.

"Oliver, you- Oh my God, you're bleeding." He gave her an incredulous look, and she blushed, embarrassed. "Which you obviously know because you're the one-" She cut off her own ramble, thankfully enough, because time was a factor here. "What do you need?"

Oliver had seen many things in the past five years that had surprised him, and yet this moment, her eagerness to help with no explanation needed, stuck out in his mind as noteworthy.

"I need you-"

He grimaced as his wound pulled painfully, and his vision went black for a moment. He was going to pass out soon.

When he looked back to the open door, he found Felicity to be gone, and he was confused until he saw the trunk pop open over the backseat. He heard her rummage around for all of three seconds before she slammed it shut again in her haste and then ran back around to the door. She held a clean workout towel out for him, and although surprised by her insight he accepted it with quiet thanks and held it to his shoulder to help stop the bleeding.

"I need you," he continued his earlier statement, "to take me to my father's factory in the Glades." Felicity nodded and made as if to retreat from the door. "And please," he said, more desperately than he had intended, and she paused, likely not expecting to hear him say this, before bringing her face back into view to look at him. "Don't take me anywhere else."

He was going to pass out. He wouldn't be awake for the trip or likely any of what followed. He had to be sure he was going to the foundry.

Felicity stared at him for a moment, taking in the gravity of his words, and then she nodded. Oliver was instantly relieved, and he wondered if he should be concerned by his inexplicable trust in this woman whom he'd only met on a few brief occasions.

"Watch your feet," she said somewhat gently, indicating his feet which were hanging out of the open door-his tall frame wasn't exactly built for such a small space-and he quickly complied, pulling them back inside the vehicle, so she could close the door.

He was already starting to fade out when Felicity took the driver's seat and started the car.

Just before he blacked out, he saw her turn in her seat to look at him and say, "Hold on, Oliver. Stay with me, okay?"

The last thought to go through his mind before he lost consciousness was that something about that statement from her seemed awfully familiar.


Oliver Queen is bleeding out in her car.

Oliver Queen is bleeding out in her car.

Felicity speeds through three red lights because, let's face it, the streets are empty, and she's in a bit of a hurry. In a brief moment of consciousness, he mentioned the club's side door and it's access code, and this is fortunate because she otherwise wouldn't have been able to explain away how she already knows both. By the time she finally pulls around Verdant, he's gone deathly pale, and she's in a nearly full-blown panic.

It takes her two tries to key in the code correctly because her hands are shaking so badly, and then she's leaping down the steps two at a time-thankful she wears modest heels, when she wears them at all.

When she enters the giant space underground, John Diggle is already out of his seat with his weapon drawn because, let's face it, she probably sounds nothing like Oliver on the stairs. But, as soon as he recognizes her he gets this look of complete bafflement that might amuse her under different circumstances.

"I can't carry him," is all she says, but it's all she has to say because the man is up and bounding over even as she's turning to head back up the stairs.

With Mr. Diggle supporting most of Oliver's weight, they somehow manage to get the wounded vigilante out of the backseat of her mini, down the stairs, and onto a metal gurney; or maybe it's just a table, but Felicity doesn't care enough in that moment to give the question another thought.

John says Oliver has a 'Zone 2' wound. She doesn't know what that is, but judging by the amount of blood, it probably means it's bad. A bullet barely missing the carotid artery will do that, she supposes. He's talking, something about 'no hospitals', and the blonde suppresses a catty "Duh," because the man is explaining this to 'simple computer nerd Felicity', not 'secret vigilante Felicity'. Normal Felicity should want to take Oliver to a hospital despite the questions it will arise in the populace of Starling City. Vigilante Felicity knows that's not an option.

Gunshot wounds have to be reported to the police.

Felicity doesn't hear much of what John says. She's too focused on the amount of red on her hand as she holds a cloth to the bullet wound and how pale Oliver has gotten. If he doesn't get more blood in him soon…

But, maybe she should be paying more attention because that's just the issue John is trying to address. Felicity-still a little in shock, she admits-lets the man take her place in applying pressure to the bleeding hole in Oliver's chest, and he sets a bag of 'O-something' blood on the table-focus, brain! As John lifts the cloth to examine the wound, Felicity takes a step back. Her hands are shaking quite a lot, she notes numbly.

There's so much blood on them…

She wills the images not to come, but they do anyway. She fights against them, and this leaves her with disjointed fragments that still impact her heavily. She's in two places then: standing in the secret base of a friend who's bleeding out and on a burning freighter off the coast of a forsaken island.

She can't stop looking at the blood on her hands.

Then she hears John say, "Damn it…" in that quiet yet foreboding way he does, and she's suddenly back in the present.

"What?" she hears herself ask, although she doesn't actually remember saying the word.

"The bullet is still inside," the man informs her, and Felicity knows instantly that this makes matters of mending the wound infinitely more difficult-they can't close it with the bullet in there, or the risk of long-term complications will be even greater. It means the bullet has to be removed.

And, just like that, her hands stop shaking as a wave of inexplicable calm washes over her.

She knows what she has to do.

John is saying something about his army training, but Felicity's still not listening-she'll apologize later for how utterly rude she's being. In a blur of movement, the blonde is beside him, snatching up a pair of rubber gloves and hastily putting them on.

"I can do that," she says.

Despite the situation, John Diggle finds the time to stop and look at her like she's just sprouted a second head-gawd, she can't even imagine the babbling if she could talk to herself. To be fair, it is an odd thing for her to claim, but a spot just off to the side of her stomach gives a phantom throb to reinforce the matter.

"Felicity, are you s-"

"Yes!" She says it a little harshly, and now she'll really have to apologize to him later because she shouldn't take that tone with a man who just wants to be sure that his friend isn't being treated by one of those "I read about it on the internet" doctors.

Still, John moves aside for her, and Felicity grabs two pairs of calipers. She takes in a deep breath to calm herself and ease the shaking of her hands until they're still. If the bullet is as close to Oliver's carotid as John suggested, she could puncture it while removing the offending bullet. She'll have to be careful. Perhaps building computers from scratch is more help in this regard than it seems at first glance, however, because steadiness is important for both.

It certainly helped her last time.


May 28th, 2008:

"I don't think I can do this," Felicity said as she looked down at the enemy campsite-with the sun down for about an hour, the site was lit only by a few lights hanging on posts and more stars in the sky than she had ever seen back in Vegas.

Who was she kidding? She didn't know anything about that thing. How was she supposed to shut it down? It wasn't like she had the schematics in front of her, and there weren't exactly classes at MIT geared towards how to program your personal missile launcher.

"And I won't force you," Slade said beside her, and she was relieved for a moment. "But, kid, I don't know the first thing about that beast, and neither does Shado. You're the only one with a real shot at taking it down."

She saw memory flashes from the plane, people getting sucked out after a hole was blown into the side, and Felicity knew Slade was right. It had to be stopped. Fighting a powerful wave of nausea, both for her memories and for her fear, she gave a nod.

"Like I said before," Slade continued, placing a hand on her shoulder, "you're not actually going down there, kid. You just have to-"

"Use the radio," Felicity finished for him, nodding along. They'd gone over this on the way over. She took a deep breath to settle her roiling nerves. It didn't work especially well. "Alright."

"Are you sure?" Felicity got the distinct impression from his tone, however he tried to hide it, that Slade was getting impatient with all the waiting. On her other side, Shado was a stark contrast of silent passivity. "Because we've likely only got one shot at this. As soon as they realize we're here, they'll pull all of their men back here with the rest, and then we won't have a hope of getting to it."

"Yeah, yeah, I'm sure." And, if she didn't sound it, then who was he to judge? "Let's get this over with. I have an interview to get to. Though… I think it was actually yesterday. Maybe they'll let me reschedule. I mean, not everyone has the excuse that their plane got blown up, right? They can't just ignore-" Slade and Shado were both staring at her in that way, so Felicity clamped her mouth shut. "Sorry."

"Then, let's do this." Slade moved right onto business before she could change her mind again, and when Felicity turned to look at him, he was already gone.

"Whoa!" She looked around, peeking into the surrounding brush, but she couldn't see him anywhere. "Frickin' ninja, here. Can I learn that?" she asked no one in particular, and beside her Shado smiled her first smile since the death of her father.


In the end, the girl managed the task with a heavy sigh of relief, straightening with a bloodied and mangled piece of metal tweezed between the calliper prongs. Diggle was quick to take her place then, and in moments he'd stitched the wound shut with little trouble. Felicity had done good work. Oliver's carotid was still well in tact, and there were no further complications as he sewed the torn skin together.

Once they'd finished treating Oliver, Felicity asked where the bathroom was. She ended up taking a while, so he went upstairs briefly to check on her. When he heard her puking through the door, however, he decided it was best to give her some space. His questions could wait.

While he waited, he went down to keep an eye on Oliver, relieved that the heart monitor he had hooked up moments before was still beating out a regular cadence. He checked the man's vitals again, which were already a touch stronger with the blood transfusion in place. Everything was looking good, all things considered. The one thing Diggle couldn't treat was the fact that it was Oliver's own mother who had shot him. He wasn't sure there was even any licensed professional who would be able to touch that mess.

When Felicity finally made it out of the restroom and back downstairs-her hands red from what must've been a lot of scrubbing to get Oliver's blood off-John had patched the wound completely, had wrapped it after applying heavy antiseptics to fight off potential infections from the foreign body that had been in his bloodstream. When she saw this, Felicity seemed a bit more relaxed, and he thought it a wonder she'd been able to fish the bullet out of Oliver's shoulder with such finesse just moments before when she clearly had a strong dislike for the sight of blood. And, as she meandered around the lair, taking in all of the odds and ends of Oliver's secret life, she didn't seem particularly surprised by anything she saw.

The girl was an oddity in more than just her speech, it seemed.

"Where did you learn that?"

Felicity turned, a tad surprised to hear him speak, and John realized by the circles under her eyes just how tired she must be-finesse while in such a state was another odd facet to consider about her. She didn't seem to follow his line of thought, so Diggle inclined his head towards Oliver. Realization dawned in Felicity's expression, but it was quickly replaced by a look so guarded and closed off that he struggled to reconcile the girl with the chatty, chipper one he'd briefly met at QC when Oliver was there visiting his mother some weeks previous-the girl had been delivering something to Walter Steele at the time. Felicity averted her eyes and folded her arms across her chest.

"Let's just say I learned a lot of first aid while I was away."

Diggle was instantly confused by this comment.

"Away?" he asked, and Felicity turned back to him, taken aback by something.

She looked surprised before, as her gaze slowly drifted over to Oliver, her eyes softened into an expression he would later recognize as trust.


He doesn't know.

It's the conclusion Felicity quickly comes to as she observes John Diggle's curious expression. She's not quite sure how to take the news at first, and she finds moments later that her eyes have strayed over to Oliver, still unconscious on the slab. On the one hand, she now has to explain what happened to her to John Diggle, to fend off his curiosity over her unusual skills if nothing else. On the other hand…

He's kept her secret.

Something flutters inside Felicity's stomach as she watches Oliver slumber, and she has to take a breath to settle it. But, then she realizes she's been caught staring by the man's partner, and she blushes, averting her gaze.

Of course, when she says, "I was stranded on an island for four years after my plane went down," her undoubtedly obvious crush on the vigilante is surely the farthest thing from John's mind.

"You were-" he stops himself short. He'd heard her correctly, and he knows it. Now he's just working on the transition between the stages of hearing to comprehension.

"I'm still finishing up my Master's right now because of it."

Silence falls after these admissions, and Felicity knows she's being sized up because of them. It's not the first time this knowledge has made people reconsider her. She sometimes wonders what it makes them think, but she never asks.

She doesn't want to know that people pity her.


It was early into the morning when Oliver finally began to rouse, and John glanced over at Felicity. She was seated in front of the lair's computer, her feet propped up on the chair with her and her knees drawn up to her chest as she observed the progress of some sort of computer diagnostic she'd set in motion. Her head was tilted to rest on her shoulder, and he would think she was asleep if she hasn't been in that very same position hours before. John had thought her asleep then as well, but the instant Oliver had gone into a seizure, Felicity had been up on full alert far too quickly for any sleeping person. She then proceeded to save Oliver's life when, after his heart stopped and the defibrillator malfunctioned, she'd worked some of her tech magic to get it functioning again. Even after the stress of the night, however, John still got the feeling that she, like himself, was unable to sleep despite the exhaustion he'd seen in her hours earlier.

"Felicity," he said, and his hunch was proven correct when she spun around the instant he said her name. She was on her feet the instant next and approached Oliver alongside John.

Oliver looked up at the ceiling, blinking several times to adjust his eyes, and then he turned as he heard the pairs' approaching footsteps. That he didn't instantly go on high alert told John that he'd recognized his surroundings. When he saw John, he was relieved, but when he saw the small, odd blonde woman whose help he had rather recklessly enlisted, his expression and posture shifted into something completely different. It was something John had never seen from the man before; he was pleasantly surprised to see her there.

John glanced at the woman once more, wondering again just who Felicity Smoak was but this time in the context that she was someone Oliver had clearly sought out in a moment of weakness-as to whether Oliver realized this fact, John doubted it because the man was dense in all matters that didn't involve where to shoot his arrows next. He probably also failed to notice the way his carefully barred barriers seemed to fall just a little bit.

On some level, John called it in that moment. Stranger things had certainly happened.

"You stayed," Oliver said, his voice hoarse and dry.

Beside John, the girl gave a nervous little smile as she fidgeted with her hands, which were still a little red from her earlier overly harsh scrubbing.

"I did," Felicity said quietly in turn.

Oliver smiled then. It was small, but it was one of the few earnest smiles John had seen from the man.

"I'm glad."


Oliver couldn't deny the small bit of disappointment he felt in Felicity's lackluster response to joining the team.

"Well, anyway, I'll help you find Walter," she had said, "but then Felicity Smoak goes back to her boring internship Co-op with QC. Deal?"

The way she'd phrased it had caught Oliver's attention as odd because he'd thought himself the only one to ever refer to himself in the third person-Diggle had been right when he'd said it was strange. But, he had accepted her counteroffer, and Felicity would be back the following night to do more work on his systems. Her hasty insistence that she had been referring to his computer systems had mildly amused him, and he thanked her before bidding her goodnight, thinking how he may appreciate having her around for more than just her abounding skills with technology.

Diggle, however, didn't wait long after the door up the stairs had closed behind her to voice his concerns.

"Oliver, you just asked that girl to throw herself into the wolf's den. Don't you think that's a little reckless?"

"We can protect her, Diggle," Oliver countered, honestly trying to tell himself this as much as he was his compatriot because the thought that this line of work may place the woman in danger… unsettled him.

He didn't like to be unsettled.

"And if we can't?"

The question was a loaded one, and Oliver didn't have any viable response other than to reaffirm what he'd already said with a falsely sure, "We can." John, a moral compass the archer was starting to rely on, seemed less than certain.

"We need her," was Oliver's next argument, and Diggle nodded without argument.

At least he agreed with him on this.

"Are you sure she can handle it?" John asked next, and the archer was about to respond when he was cut off. "And before you answer, let me be clear. That girl has clearly been through a lot. She told me about what happened to her, about her being stranded."

"She told you?" Oliver was a little surprised.

He denied the little voice in the back of his head that said he was jealous, that said he himself hadn't been told, hadn't been trusted with the information-although Felicity might've told him herself the previous night if he hadn't informed her that he'd already known. Felicity had only just met John, and yet she'd already told him her darkest secret. It shouldn't matter to him whether Felicity trusted him in this way, so Oliver pushed these thoughts aside, shoved the childish jealousy into his mental compactor for subsequent demolishing and shoved it into a back corner of his mind with all of his other personal baggage.

John nodded and said, "Mm-hmm. Just after she pulled that bullet out of your neck-which is another thing we should talk about sometime because I have no idea what kind of deserted island forces you to learn trauma surgery. But, right now, what I worry about is her mental situation."

Oliver was still trying to fully understand the first part of this statement, that it had been Felicity to remove the bullet from him, when the second pushed that thought onto a backburner.

"What do you mean?" he asked, and Diggle sighed.

"I mean that I've known a lot of soldiers after they came back from the war, Oliver. Some of 'em appear fine for a while, but it's only when a trigger is found that you realise anything is wrong."

Oliver was ready to respond, to say Felicity wasn't a soldier and to ask what he was trying to say, but John beat him to the punch with the answer to that very question.

"I'm talking about PTSD, Oliver," he said, and this quieted the archer and his growing irritation quickly. "Probably undiagnosed, but I recognised the symptoms tonight when she had your blood on her hands."

Oliver tried to reconcile those two-three-things, Felicity and PTSD-and his blood on her hands)-but the relation rebelled in his mind for a moment. Until he thought of how quick to startle she'd been when he'd first met her and how alert she always seemed to be each time since, almost like she was just waiting to be set off.

"I'm saying," John reinforced, not continuing until he knew he had Oliver's full attention. "We need to be careful if we don't want that girl to break."


May 28th, 2008:

The plan wasn't going as it was supposed to. Slade had managed to lure most of the guards away, leading them on what she was sure was a merry romp through the forest. But trying to talk someone through disabling a device she wasn't familiar with over a glorified walkie-talkie was more of a challenge than Felicity had anticipated. Shado managed to find the onboard terminal, but they then spent so long trying to figure out how to communicate what they needed to that Shado had been spotted. So, off she went too, chased by the remaining soldiers, and then Felicity was alone in enemy territory. The biggest part of her wanted to just curl into a ball and hope either Slade or Shado would come back for her.

But a much smaller part of her, the part that was pissed at the world and prone to righteous fury, thought of the plane. She thought of 200 murdered people. She thought of the survivors, of their grief; the man who had succeeded his wife by the most horrible means and the girl who was so distraught by the death of her sister that she'd yet to even speak. After tonight, these soldiers would move this thing back to where they couldn't get to it, and who knew what they would do after that? How many more planes did they plan to bring down for reasons unknown?

Ultimately, it was this last thought that got Felicity moving.

So, the blonde slunk from her hiding spot and did her best to sneak down to the monster machine that had caused her so much grief. The terminal was still open and active, so she got right to work, scouring its files for what she needed.

"Alright, Scylla, talk to me."

It took longer than she would've liked, but the system was unfamiliar to her, and she had to keep checking her surroundings to make sure no one had returned yet. Finally, however-her watch told her it had been just over five minutes-she found a promising directory. It brought her into the launcher's targeting files. She didn't have time to keep searching for another way to bring it down, so she ran with it. After hacking in-hey, those skills were still useful after all-she scoured the code for something she could tweak that would make the thing useless for downing any more aircraft. In the end, she added just a few lines to the code, short but devastating. The launcher would still lock onto its target, indicating nothing was wrong, but seconds after it fired the missile, the missile's online guidance chip would invert its vertical coordinate axis.

Up would be down.

She didn't want to risk the missile managing to hit something else if she just altered its course a little, and the vindictive part of her was going to get a kick out of this logical alternative. If she couldn't let the missile go up, she would make it go down, and the only thing down to hit were the very soldiers using it.

She was going to get a kick out of-

"Hey!"

"Freeze!"

Damn…

Felicity had gotten so immersed in the code that she hadn't noticed a few soldiers return to the area, and she'd been spotted. She quickly exited to the home screen of the terminal to keep anyone from easily noticing what she'd altered, and then she held up her hands in surrender. The three men were shouting at her, and as Felicity followed their orders to back away and kneel on the ground, she couldn't help but cry because these past few days had just been so cruel to her.

But, at least her last act would be turning Scylla on its masters.