AN: this is happening (being thought?) sometime after the season 4 finale. It's a sort of resistance to reconciliation, I suppose.

She'd love to say it was something like déjà vu but it wasn't. Not really. It had never been like this. Never felt anything like this.

There had been a time when she used to look at him and want, indulging in her harmless crush; and then later, in the dazing possibility of the 'two of them', something unknown and so enthralling. Little flirting here and there, smiles and just tipping on the edge of possibility, the call of the free-fall more inebriating than any alcohol had never been. But back then, when she used to look at him from the corner of the room, when touch had been possible one because of caution (safe-zones: hands, arms, sometimes his face, not for too long) she had never had memories of him pressing against her back with all the cumulative weight of reality. Memories of them together, before it fell apart.

No longer a possibility; reality was a live creature, not the whispy dream behind rosy glasses. It was unforgiving. It was looking at him and being slapped with the acute knowledge of secret things about him that came to her at the most importune times. Intimate things she missed with physical ache. Memories that were live things inside her too, eating away. Of the weight of his arm around her waist and the feel of his lips; of the exact shade of his every emotion on his face, his voice; the confused mumblings early in the morning and the slow blinks, lids heavy with sleep after a night spent just talking. The grounding feeling of waking up with each other the next day.

Memories…

History lived between them now, sharpening the edge of longing, turning it into a sword without a hilt. It hurt to want, it made her feel weak-willed and almost verging on self-destructive. It made her afraid. It sparked anger at herself that little else could. She hated setbacks, always had. She'd never had patience with failure when failure was her own.

And every time she felt that way, she remembered it could be easier. She could have left; she could still leave. There was a reason why Felicity always physically moved away from the places that she wanted to leave behind. She was not the detached kind. She was the suppressing kind. She shoved her wounds away, deep inside where their screams didn't echo all the way to the surface. It was the only way she could breathe. She was a slow healer, scared to go anywhere near anything that hurt, until it stopped hurting quite as much. Slowly and subtly, she dismantled on her own ghosts, one piece at a time, but only when they had aged a little. Only after once they slowed, and their hunger for her calmed. When they quieted and didn't howl so loud that the only way to survive and be heard was for her to howl with them, louder.

But there had been no leaving this time. Nowhere to go and not even a desire to do so. She had found her life and her purpose and she wanted to live it, despite everything that just made her want to erase herself from the narrative, leave the ashes of her destruction behind and bloom again someplace else.

There was selfishness in that. Cowardice too. Felicity had been okay with both. But she'd wanted something else more. Despite everything, she liked her life. She wanted to keep it. (leaving would have meant leaving behind… and she didn't want to do that. She had lost too much to be where she was. She didn't want to cover up her scars. She'd earned them. Now she wanted them to show.)

She'd just had to… reframe her life, a little bit. So she had. And Oliver had, too.

Distance had felt… it had felt like opening up an infected wound without anesthesia, but that had been exactly what she'd wanted. What she'd needed. A merciless act, to safe what was still salvageable.

Space. (space to bleed in private)

The truth was, they worked better as friends. Partners. That was for the best. (they didn't have as much leverage to hurt each other, that way).

But it wasn't as easy being around him all the time. She didn't remember how to love from a distance anymore. (She'd never let herself admit to love for so long for exactly that reason. She was simply no good at it.) It wasn't as easy reminding herself that there were things she could not do anymore. Sometimes she forgot.

Sometimes they felt like two bodies propped against a chair and a doorway, waiting for something to happen.

When these moments of heavy silence came, Felicity never said anything. It was like holding her breath underwater felt, but she would not be the one to break this. She wasn't even sure she wanted to. (she'd long lost the courage to do it.)

There were times she didn't remember why not, though, and when she stopped to ask herself that, there was solace in memory; in history. Of how much the fall had hurt and how it had made her feel like she was dying. (those who were born without the ability to feel pain died very soon. Felicity made a lesson – one more brick on her walls – of every wound. Pain with purpose: there was no shame in surviving.) If she was merciless, that was because she was so with herself first. And so she reminded herself that there was a reason for what he had done and what he hadn't done and that in the end, all those reasons would accumulate to a very simple truth: she had not been enough. Not enough for him to trust. Not enough to be let in.

That was okay. I didn't mean anything, it was nobody's fault. They were simply not good enough for each other. It hurt, but that was life.

And that was the rock all those simmering moments would break against. When he looked at her in silence form the other end of the lair, with eyes that pressed against her back hard enough to leave a mark – she would remember. And when they spent too much time in his office talking about different policies and wage gaps and reconstruction of different parts of the city, she would remind herself again. When she accidentally caught sight of him training, or rolling his shoulders, or fucking eating, whatever, and her blood would feel hot enough to melt glass, she would remember.

It happened. It was good, (it was the best you've ever felt, ever had) but then it was the worst you've lived through. It was great, and then it hurt and now it's over. For a reason. Remember. Be afraid. There is no shame in surviving