Yeah, remember when I said I was going to be focusing on exams and sporadically updating? HA. Should NOT have watched 3x21. Seriously.
More
The arrow pinged off a corner with a tiny burst of sparks and embedded itself in one of the pipes, leaving the target board completely — and pristinely — untouched. Felicity quietly covered her face as steam hissed shrilly from the fissure, product of some truly terrible aim.
"Not good?" she said, looking over her shoulder at Oliver.
Oliver uncrossed his arms. "Roy's aim was worse," he said, evenly.
"Really?"
"No."
Felicity made a small noise when Oliver turned her around by her hips, simultaneously tapping the side of her foot to adjust her position and tugging gently on her elbow to align her arm with where she was shooting.
"Remind me why we're doing this again?" she said, trying not to sound undignified as Oliver corrected the numerous errors in her stance.
"Because," he said, his breath stirring the stray hairs near her ear, "you wanted to learn how to shoot."
"To be fair — I could have meant pool."
Oliver laughed, and Felicity felt it, standing with her back to his chest. His broad palm all but engulfed her much-smaller hand when it came up to adjust her grip, his muscled arm flush against the length of hers. Gently, his other hand spread across her stomach, anchoring her to where she was.
Difficult, very difficult not to be distracted, because Felicity felt…everything. The caress of every breath as it passed between her parted lips, the thrum of Oliver's blood — so, sublimely close when felt skin-to-skin — and the cool glide of his ring, worn on the same hand to mirror her own.
"Now," he said, barely above a whisper, "you draw."
Felicity stared at the heart of the target — a red as vivid as blood, surrounded by concentric circles of pure black. They seemed to shudder as she watched them, as immaterial as rings of smoke.
"How do you concentrate?" she asked, trying not to laugh at herself.
"Close your eyes," Oliver murmured, as the bowstring quivered in her grip. "Trust your instincts."
My instincts.
Felicity shut her eyes, shrinking her world — distractions, unfiltered thoughts — to the point of an arrow, the arrow between her fingertips. Three deep breaths.
When her eyes opened again, Felicity froze — partly because her body refused to move, partly because she didn't understand what she was seeing. The targeting board was gone, swallowed by the shadows enveloping the far wall of the Foundry, shadows she swore inched closer to her by the second, a yawning mouth of growing darkness.
"Oliver…?" she said, uncertainly.
But Oliver was gone. In his absence was a sweep of cold air across her bare arms, because Felicity was alone, alone and facing the expanding darkness. She blinked to clear her vision, hoping it was a mistake, and blinked again.
There.
She hadn't imagined it. In the shadows, a tiny pinprick of red, quivering slightly like it was being swayed by a phantom breeze.
"You have to choose," said a voice. It materialized like a noxious gas, a foul whisper that wound its way into her senses. Faintly recognizable, but she couldn't quite put her finger on it, not without turning to see for herself.
But she was paralyzed, an arrow in her bow, aimed at the shapeless darkness that inched steadily towards her.
"Choose what?" she said, the words falling sharply from her lips like she was standing on a precipice overlooking a void.
"Not what," the voice answered, sly as a snake in the tall grass, "but who."
Felicity flinched at the snap — as crisp as a lever being pulled — and the mechanical hum of an unseen machine whirring to life beneath her feet, and the shadows were suddenly seared away by a ferocious blaze of light, one that left her momentarily blinded.
But when her eyes adjusted, Felicity sucked in a ragged breath.
It was the Foundry, but like she was looking at it from above, an unseen voyeur into their safe haven — not-so-safe anymore. This was a scene she knew by heart, the sight of her friends working together in the Foundry. It was an inexplicably beautiful clash of chaos and order — Oliver and Diggle's methodicalness with Barry and Cisco's enthusiasm, Thea and Lyla's single-minded concern for each of their families, Teams Flash and Arrow, mentor and mentees, friends and partners…
Felicity felt as if she was watching them through an invisible bubble, a veil of protection, one that shuddered as if it was about to crack.
"What is this?" she whispered.
As if in answer, the same crimson lights — pinpricks of blood-red — darted along the floor, traveling unseen over and around her friends, until…
The lights froze, seemingly at random, hovering harmlessly over their heads.
"No," she said, watching as they drifted slowly downwards, and the randomness of it became not-so-random anymore.
Targets. They were all targets.
Her friends were still laughing and talking, oblivious to the laser sights fixed on their skulls.
The bow shook in Felicity's immobilized hands, because after everything, she was still rooted in place. Helpless. "Leave them alone," she said, trying to make it an order — even though it came out sounding like a plea. "They're not the enemy."
"Oh, but they are…"
Suddenly, Felicity knew who it was — who the voice belonged to.
"Dad," she snarled, "leave them alone. You can't hurt them — this isn't real — you're in a cell — this isn't real —"
Still the laser sights wouldn't move, so Felicity pushed back. She could control this — she could control this dream, and she would. The more her body refused to move, the more her mind rebelled. The ground shuddered beneath her feet, fissures she couldn't see but felt — spider-cracks widening into chasms — the frantic pop-pop-pop of the lights shattering overhead, raining sparks around her body…
"You can't hurt them," she repeated, as the dream came crashing down around her, around Damien. "You can't — hurt — the people I love."
"Oh, but they're all threats…" Damien whispered again, a disembodied hiss.
"Dad—!"
"…they just don't know it yet."
The dream held itself together long enough for Felicity to feel the hair-raising rush of a volley of deadly bullets, hurtling past her to destroy the invisible glass that had been — without them knowing — their last protection.
Felicity watched it disintegrate before her eyes, felt the punch to her gut at the sight of her friends lying dead on the Foundry floor, the hot tears on her face and the bitter scream tearing at her throat…
Until the unseen barrel of a gun pressed solidly against the back of her skull.
"Where is ORACLE?" Damien asked.
Felicity was on her knees, the insides of her hands shredded from clenching tight around fragmented glass, a shard of ice embedded in her beating heart from the knowledge that it was her fault — all her fault that her friends were dead.
She raised her head, pushing back against the gun like she wasn't afraid. One last act of defiance.
The words forced their way through her gritted teeth. "I don't kn—"
Damien pulled the trigger, and Felicity jolted upright with her hands over her ears — hearing only the phantom roar of a gun shooting her in the head. Her mouth was wide open and gasping, every breath an ongoing fight, as if her body needed to be reminded that she wasn't really dead.
Not dead. There was no gun. Home. She was home. This was her bed — her home — her mother, asleep peacefully beside her.
But even with the knowledge that she was safe (in theory), Felicity's hands and feet slid clumsily across the sheets like they were slabs of slick ice on a moving river, and she was desperate not to drown.
It was a dream. Just a stupid dream, she repeated, her mantra against the wordless panic clawing her insides raw.
Justastupiddreamjustastupiddreamjustastupiddream —
The ringing in her ears gradually receded, and Felicity could hear herself think again. Her chest rose and fell with each slowing breath, and she turned mutely towards the still-dark window, as a bead of icy sweat trickled slowly down the throbbing pulse in her throat and came to rest above her racing heart.
Oliver rested his hand at the back of Felicity's empty chair, scanning the monitors to verify that everything was under control. Damien was still in his cell, and Sara was still asleep on the other side of the Foundry. Everything had gone quiet, like the gears in a vast factory, stilled for the night.
Except him.
Oliver pushed away from the desk, reaching absently for a tennis ball and bouncing it without much conscious thought — force of habit. He calmed himself through practice the way other people calmed themselves with rest. Even though his recent track record with sleep had been more agreeable, there was a part of him that was still apprehensive of surrendering his control to the unpredictable world of the unconscious mind.
But enough of that.
The ball sailed in a smooth arc through the air, and Oliver shot. Two at the same time — three — four — three again. He fired arrow after arrow until his fingertips hummed from the blood racing beneath his skin, but his pulse stayed at an even tempo, as controlled as his stance before he loosed an arrow.
The air rushed past him with a fluid snap when he released the string, a second of held silence until he heard the solid thwack of his arrow striking its mark. The sound reverberated into the rafters, quickly receding behind the perpetual hiss of steam billowing from the grates.
Oliver strode towards the far wall and began to collect his arrows — only realizing that his phone had been vibrating the whole time when he circled back to the table. The fistful of arrows was still clutched in his hand when he reached for the phone, his eyebrow furrowed in mild confusion because of the display.
"Felicity?" he said. "It's early — you should be resting."
Felicity made a soft ha sound, an almost-laugh. "Line forms behind me," she said, her voice scratchy from sleep. "I had a brilliant, meandering apology for waking you up…but I'm guessing I didn't."
"No." Oliver left the handful of arrows on the table and sank into his chair, letting his head rest against the leather back. "You know I don't sleep."
"You do."
Oliver smiled faintly. "You know I sleep better when you're with me," he said, correcting himself.
"Apparently it goes both ways." Fabric rustled on Felicity's end as she shifted her position, and Oliver imagined her curling up in some kind of chair.
"Where are you?" Oliver asked. "Are you in bed?"
"Did you give the telephone operator your credit card number?"
Oliver waited. Humor was one of the many ways Felicity used to deflect focus, to play off her worries.
"I'm on the couch," she said, with a sniff. "Mom's dead to the world…and I'm calling my almost-husband, who's spending the night in the basement of a nightclub."
Oliver sat up, immediately wary. "Are you…crying?"
Felicity didn't say anything, but he heard rustling on her side of the line, as if she was shifting her position again.
"Felicity…what's wrong? Is it your shoulder? Are you taking the medicine Caitlin gave you?"
"It's not that," she said, finally. "Crying…is just one of the nicer side-effects of having a bad dream. And by bad dream — I mean a freak-tsunami of a nightmare. There's no way of saying that without sounding like I'm about twelve, is there?"
"I can be there in fifteen minutes," Oliver said, with an involuntary glance at the staircase. "Wait for me."
"Oliver, I want you to — believe me. But if I remember correctly, Sara's lying on a table resurrected, meta-humaned, and unconscious…and we have a homicidal megalomaniac darkening one of the storage closets." Felicity half-coughed, half-laughed. "Someone needs to keep watch, and you, my almost-husband, got the short end of that stick. So to speak."
"You come first," he said.
"And I love you all the more for it," she said, without hesitation. "But it's only a few more hours. What time does the sun come up these days, anyway?"
Oliver exhaled slowly, not liking this at all.
"Don't brood — you're cute when you frown, but you're adorable when you lighten up. I mean — I know it's a long shot, since everything's kinda crappy right now, but…could you pretend? That it isn't?"
"You know we don't pretend," he said, steadily. "But you know I'm here, I'm listening. You can always talk to me."
Felicity cleared her throat. "Believe it or not, that was always the plan — what with the early-morning phone call. I just wanted to be polite. You know, get you to ask first."
Oliver let his head dip back against the chair, shaking his head slightly at Felicity's ability to confide in him with humor and in earnest. "I did," he said, smiling in spite of himself. "So tell me."
"Everything?" Felicity asked, as if there was anything in the world she could say or do to make him love her any less.
"Everything," Oliver answered, because there truly wasn't.
Felicity picked at a loose thread in the couch cushion, curled up beneath a lurid blush-and-lilac afghan while she told Oliver about her Franken-dream. Well, at least there was a hidden perk to all the times Oliver had woken her up with his nightmares. When it was her turn to be crazy about bad dreams — he couldn't judge.
"My dad wanted it — ORACLE — and he killed everybody I love — including you, especially you — and then, then, my nightmare-dad shot nightmare-me in the head. Needless to say, it sucked."
It really didn't sound any better when she said it out loud.
"Then I woke up," she said, like she was tying a bow around the story in its totality. "I'm starting to regret not taking Barry up on his offer to dump it in the Atlantic. ORACLE, I mean. Not my nightmare. I don't think even STAR Labs can invent a way to condense dreams into a disposable physical form, but —"
"Felicity," Oliver said, firmly. "Come back."
Felicity looked up, startled mid-sentence. Come back, something so earnestly simple to remind her where she was — why she'd called Oliver instead of trying (and probably failing) to fall asleep in her bed.
Because Oliver was her anchor as much as she was his. All those times that he'd nearly lost himself — to the island, to the now-forgotten list that had at times been more vengeance than justice, to a league of trained killers, and finally death — they'd brought each other back.
A nightmare couldn't possibly threaten that.
Felicity inhaled, deep and slow. "Back," she said, and felt like her feet were on solid ground again.
"Felicity, whatever your dad did, whatever he's trying to do…it's not your fault."
"Debatable," she muttered. "That saying — sins of the father and all. Pretty sure the karma's transferrable."
"You're trying to stop him, even though he's your father. That's a hard decision to make — and you did. That's more — more than anything you should have to do."
Felicity rested her chin on her hands and said, quietly, "there was no choice to make."
She could hear Oliver shift on the other end of the line, softening his voice to match hers. "And I love you all the more for it."
The strip of light showing beneath her curtains was faintly blue now, a clear morning, a misty dawn. "I've been thinking," she said, twisting the ring around and around her finger as she thought. "Justice. Security. Peace. In some other world — some bizarro-world — we could have been him. We want the same things. We could have been doing what my dad did — targeting threats before they have a chance to hurt innocent people."
"Fear makes us act in drastic ways."
"To protect the people we love, I know." Felicity covered her mouth, nearly lost in thought. "But eliminating threats before they even become threats…that's a world without faith, without free will. Everything pre-determined, no room for anyone to become better than they're expected to be. I don't accept that. Bizarro-you would have been some billionaire frat boy who died on that boat, he would never have come back to save his city — again, and again. Bizarro-me would have been a cocktail waitress, or maybe an IT girl in some big office — no masks, no nocturnal hideouts. Dig would have stayed a bodyguard — not a soldier in a crusade and a protector, Roy would have been a pickpocket — not an archer, and a hero, and Sara — Sara would never have become this warrior capable of fighting for her home…"
Felicity was momentarily at a loss, because quivering in her mind was the totality of her friends' collective experiences, the winding roads they'd traveled that had brought them all together. There was pain and loss and heartbreak in those roads, but that only made the bravery, kindness, and love in the path ahead all the sweeter.
"We're all…more," she said, finally. "More than something a system could have predicted. We're complex, we're…human — not just threats, or assets, or civilians. I mean, what — what if the answer isn't removing threats? What if — sometimes — the best we can do is be ready to face them?"
"That's what we do," Oliver agreed. "It's what we've always done, Felicity, and we'll keep doing it. One day at a time."
Felicity closed her eyes and leaned her cheek on her shoulder. "One day at a time," she murmured, as if she was making a promise.
Sorry about the bait-and-switch thing for the archery scene. I was actually hoping to make it a real thing, but then I thought "meh, I'm evil, might as well steer into the skid" :D
Thoughts on 3x21:
- Ray-free episode. Score.
- Nyssa is adorable when she's being normal.
- It's very difficult to not look at Laurel in all these situations and ask: "Why are you here?"
- *Brace for rant about the Canary Cry* I get for aesthetic reasons why it'd be weird for her to close her mouth and use the sonic-fetish-collar thingy, but it also looks weird that she's opening her mouth and screaming when the collar is literally doing all the work. Maybe the answer is - stick with the handheld sonic device. Not as if having it on a collar made the Canary Cry appear when it was ACTUALLY needed (i.e. warehouse fight? Where was it?) I swear, my biggest pet peeve with the Canary Cry is how, no matter what form it takes or who's using it, the Canary Cry NEVER gets more consistently written.
- Oliver's face when Ra's tells him to marry Nyssa is literally one of the funniest things I have ever seen. It's equal parts "WTAF dude" and "You do realize this means she will murder me in my sleep, right?"
It's like Ra's WANTS his own version of the Red Wedding.
- Then again, I've chosen not to speculate as to the logic of Ra's' actions since he makes like ZERO sense these days, so whatever. I mean, not to be crude, but given Nyssa's proficiency with bladed weapons (or anything, basically) I fear for Oliver's reproductive capabilities if he ever tries to come near her. And don't go by me here, but I THINK that Al-Sahim's reproductive parts are at least SOMEWHAT important to Prospective-Grandpappy Ra's' idiotic scheme.
TOTALLY UNRELATED:
I'm going to be in New York beginning June. ANY SUGGESTIONS ABOUT WHERE TO GO? Any help would be appreciated, the only places I've been to in the States are 1) Minnesota, 2) Disneyland. I was eight and stupid both times. I'm nineteen now and I'd like that to (sorta)change.