A/N: Spoiler for Season 2x13. Not-exactly canon/slight AU.

Summary: Felicity walked in on Oliver and Sarah, but did not share that information until a week later, when she let it slip to Oliver. This is about Felicity's thoughts and her resolution. Short one-shot piece.

Rating: K, Genre: Angst

Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters of Arrow, or Arrow. Just borrowing in humble appreciation.

Felicity halted. She didn't know what to do. He was staring at her. Worse. He was approaching her now. She was perched against her desk, both hands behind her bracing her weight, tightly holding onto the edge. She didn't mean to say what she had. Her mouth ran away from her again. Heart racing, she could feel the air sucked out from her lungs, as clichéd as that could ever be. It wasn't the first time that he could do that to her. But this time she was in trouble. This time, her heart was near ready to completely arrest if it beat any faster.

In less than a second, his dark eyes were now inches away from her own, his heated gaze penetrating her soul. His hands were slowly reaching up towards her now flushed face. Cradling her, she held her breath, his own breath near upon her lips.

'Felicity..' he whispered, the lightest of whispers, a feather touch upon her heart.

She closed her eyes, tears prickling the back of her eyelids and unwilling to let her nose wrinkle over the intense feelings brimming from within her.

'I promised you once, and I will promise you again, you will never lose me,' his voice breaking now, realising his earlier mistake in thinking he could spend time with Sara without it some how affecting his Girl-Wednesday

'Forgive me, Felicity.' And then with a greater sense of conviction he spoke more firmly, 'I am the one who would be lost if you ever left me.' The irony was not lost on him. He could barely speak knowing that anything more he said would come across as empty sounding. How could he explain Sara? Sara was the metaphorical island in his momentarily madness, she was the temporary land upon which his ship was anchored from the broken compass he found himself holding. But Felicity, she was the stars, that guided his lost ship in the darkness and showed him the way. His world had shattered and Sara was there, with all her past history and their present history and she was home. He was broken and hurting. It didn't mean Felicity was valued any less.

And there it was, Felicity thought, her brain just barely able to register the words Oliver presented before her, his truth, awaiting her judgement. She could sense there was more, but there was something about hearing any more that would not have altered things any better.

Felicity could barely contain herself. She did not want to be in his presence in that moment, she was unable to breath, drowning in his aura, his immensity. She was rendered immobilised in her thoughts and emotions. What was she supposed to do? She started to feel like those proverbial rabbits caught in headlights of deathly indecisiveness.

'No..' she said, quietly at first, as if gasping for air. She turned her head downwards and tried to release it from his grasp. He loosened his hold a little. Then more firmly, Felicity repeated, 'No!'

She released her hands from the edge of the desk, using it to push her off it and side-step from Oliver. She was backing away from him, away from the desks now, and trying to make a bee-line for the exit. She needed some space. She needed some time to understand, to process what he said.

His rendez-vous with Sara was another unspoken painful reality of their non-existent, undefined relationship.

She needed time to think.

'Oliver, I have to go… I need some time to think…' she answered his question, unuttered by him but evident nonetheless. She did not want to hurt him, despite how she was feeling. That was all she could say. She didn't want to lose him either, but she needed to redefine things for herself first.

'Felicity…wait..' he urged. A strained looked passed across his beautiful features.

'Oliver…I can't Oliver…you know you mean the world to me, but I can't….I need time to think….I promise I'm not leaving …but I need some space…' she trailed off, painfully constricted inside. Her eyes were downcast, her eye brows knotted. This was all the reassurance she could give him, but in order to save herself from him, she needed to step away from the lair right now.

She had confronted him about Sara not two minutes ago. Her mouth slipped, and she let it be known that she had known about his night antics with the blonde vigilante. A week ago, she happened to walk in on the both of them from afar, unrealised by either of them from the shadows. That night, she consciously swiftly turned back, and slightly tracked back up the steps, as hush hush as she could. She was bewilderedly confused. Questions flooded her mind ever since then. How? Why was she even surprised? Felicity, what did you think would happen? That he would come to you with open arms? After you revealed to him the truth of his family, something which she warned you would shatter his world? But more inevitably, that which would cause him to always see her as the one who caused more hurt, despite his obvious hate for his mother, Moira was right, he would never look at her the same way. How could he?

And so she confronted him, albeit a week later. She had spent some time processing everything. She told him she knew, but that she couldn't blame him for not liking her anymore for being the bearer of the worst news possible, for inextricably worsening the myriad of lies he now had to keep from his family and be part of. Sure, he was grateful for her honesty, he expected nothing less of her, but, he subconsciously, clearly, placed distance between them.

He asked her to go home that night. A sign that there were demons he had to exercise, and he didn't want her there. At least that is what she told herself. How was she to know that she would find him being comforted in the arms of his old flame? How was she to know? Felicity didn't belong to Oliver and neither Oliver to felicity, so why should this have been a shock to her? After Rochev and Russia, this should not have been a surprise. But, it stung. Still stung.

Squaring her shoulders as she quickly left from the lair with great hardship, she reminded herself that she was intelligent, blonde 'au bottelle' not 'au naturelle' and that she was stronger and psychologically sounder. Sound enough to understand that she should have realised that between the two of them were nothing more than a partnership of everything except of the sexually intimate sort. She was in effect, being dim-witted, she told herself, to have hoped for something more, to have thought that there could have been something more, to think for a moment that she should have the right to interfere in his intimate life.

Even if she admitted this to herself, she quickly concluded that her heart needed to catch up with her mind and this long-running, unintentional or intentional desire to be something more had to be reigned in.

She got into her car and started the ignition, the engine roaring to life, before she shifted gears to move out. She drove back to her apartment, her thoughts still vying for her attention.

She was his partner in work. Arrow's partner. Partner in fighting crime and saving the city, a superhero's partner. She was nothing more than the crux of Team Arrow, and the crutches he leaned on, and she could be that, she did love him enough to be that, but she would never be anything more than that.

The sooner she realised this, made it her mantra, made it her reality, the sooner it would hurt less. The sooner she could go back to being what she was good at, maximising her efficiency and wasting less time on useless feelings. She was being harsh with herself. But that's what one does when survival becomes a necessity.

She loved him, but she knew where she needed to stand.

Seconds of thinking turned into minutes, and before she realised it, she had been sitting in her car, parked infront of her apartment, never having occurred to her that she had already arrived and had been sat in the car for a good hour before making a move to stand.

Yes, of course she loved him, but she knew where she needed to stand, for her heart, for her own survival, for Team Arrow.

Resolute, she stepped out of the car.

She would move forward from this. There was no doubting it. She was not new to challenge or to heart complaints. She was Felicity, and if anyone knew her, she would not be held hostage to anyone least of all herself.

'Tomorrow is a new day,' she said to herself, as she approached her apartment door. Turning the key into the lock, and entering in, she dropped her back to the side, removing her coat and flinging it to the couch as she simultaneously toed off her shoes. She entered into her bedroom dropping herself to her bed, the look of Oliver's face entering her mind's eye.

Curling up into the foetal position, she whispered to herself in exhausted certainty, before drifting into an undercurrent of fitful sleep,

'I know what I must do.'