Chapter 9: Elevated Opinions

Author Notes:

Sorry about the delay in posting. My dog had an emergency c-section and I had 10 premature pups(they didn't make it) and one very sick mom to take care of (she's recovering well but it was touch and go for a while). There wasn't any writing happening during that time.

Thank you NocturnalRites for the beta work and for all the support! You rock and are very much appreciated!

Thank you everyone who has been reading and everyone that has left comments and kudos! I love hearing what people think. This is a bit of a transition chapter but I will update soon since I took longer than expected on this chapter.

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Chapter 9 Elevated Opinions

Felicity's hands were shaking when as she closed the list she'd been reading. It was a list of all the people that the helicarriers were supposed to target until Captain America, Steve, she corrected herself - crashed them into the Potomac River. Her name had been on that list. That shook her. Steve didn't realize it, but he'd already saved her life once. He'd probably saved it a lot more times she didn't even know about.

The information that had been released onto the internet by the Black Widow was enormous. It had just been luck that Felicity had stumbled on the list as she'd been sorting and trying to look up Steve and his partner Natasha Romanoff. It wasn't that she was prying. She just wanted to know more about his life.

Felicity was careful to only get what was out on the net or had been released when he took down Hydra and S.H.I.E.L.D. If she didn't give in to the temptation to hack anyone else's database then she wasn't doing anything more than any other potential date might do, she told herself.

Felicity clicked to another screen where she had a video of Captain America and Bucky Barnes from the 1940's war reels paused. She looked closely at the picture of Bucky Barnes. It was Steve's Bucky. She recognized him from his sketch book.

Her fingers itched to track him now that she had all his information and knew who he was, but in her mind's eye she saw the worry in Steve's face as he'd asked her not to pursue it. She wasn't going to start what they were trying to build by going against the only thing he'd ever asked of her but it was hard not to try to help him.

"Is that Steve?" The sound of John's voice sounding from right behind her made Felicity nearly jump out of her chair as she sucked in a breath and held a hand to her heart.

"Cowbells!" she shouted, almost making it a curse. "I'm getting you and Oliver each a set. Do you both have a bet going to see who can scare me into a heart attack first?" she groused, trying to distract him so that she could click the screen off, but it was too late. John was leaning over her shoulder looking intently at the black and white video. It was paused with Bucky and Steve smiling at each other and Steve didn't have his helmet on. His hair was a bit shorter, but it was unmistakably him.

"Felicity," Digg's voice was unusually subdued and thoughtful. "That's Steve." He was pointing at the screen. "That's Steve Rogers…" She watched realization dawn on his face. "Oh man, that's Steve Rogers, Captain America. Steve is Captain America. I threatened the man that was responsible for saving my grandfather." He ran a hand over his hair and pulled up the chair next to hers so he could drop into it. "That's how he punched a hole through the punching bag."

Felicity sighed, watching her friend's face with a sinking feeling inside. The first time her new potential boyfriend told her something in confidence and she didn't make it an hour without spilling the beans. She shook her head in disgust at her lack of 'situational awareness'. Oliver might just be right on that. Digg wasn't trying to be stealthy. She should have heard him come in.

"I should have recognized the name." Digg was in his own world, Felicity snapped her fingers to get his attention. He blinked and focused on her. "I've been hearing stories about how Captain America and the Howling Commandoes liberated the camp that Granddaddy's whole company was being held in all my life. Captain America saved them all. I should have recognized him."

John stepped back a little and pointed at the screen. Felicity smiled. She'd never thought she'd see John Diggle do the fanboy thing. "That's Captain America, Felicity." John told her.

"I know," she agreed. "Steve told me this evening who he is." She waited for that to sink in. "But he told me in confidence."

"Why is he keeping it a secret? That's never been his MO before. He's always been out there in the public eye," Digg commented. Yeah, she'd seen that on the footage that she'd been able to find on him both from back in the 40's and from now. Back in the 40's he was a little more free with not wearing his mask/helmet all the time, but even today there were a few pictures of him without it.

Felicity sighed. The cat was definitely out of the bag with John and she didn't want him upset with Steve's decision to keep him in the dark.

"Steve said that when he crashed the ships, he destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA and that HYDRA might still be after him. He didn't want his troubles to be anyone else's." She told her friend.

John still wasn't saying much. She turned in her chair and laid a hand on his arm to get his attention. "The only reason he told me was that he promised me he wouldn't lie to me and he felt dishonest not telling me." She felt her face warm in embarrassment and hesitated a little as she went on. "I asked him to go to the Avengers New York fundraiser with me."

John looked at her incredulously for a moment and then barked a laugh. "Only you, Felicity," he chuckled.

"What did you mean, you threatened Captain America?" she asked as John's earlier comment caught up to her. He looked a little taken aback at the question and avoided her eyes.

"What is that?" John pointed at the flashing screen she had reduced. He didn't answer her question she noticed, making a mental note to come back to that later.

"I'd been doing some searches. I stumbled across project Insight when I was looking for info on how S.H.I.E.L.D. ended. I was curious why Steve left DC and what happened to S.H.I.E.L.D. and Hydra." she told him. At his raised eyebrow, Felicity rushed on. "I was curious how things ended. OK, I was also curious about his partner." she admitted. "Once I started reading, I realized that it was the name of the project that Steve discovered. It's what got him labeled a fugitive."

She flipped to the blinking screen and checked to see what her search had pulled up. "I set up the search to flag any information on Captain America, Steve Rogers or Natasha Romanoff related to Project Insight or taken during the last two days before the ships and S.H.I.E.L.D headquarters had been destroyed."

She couldn't believe all the information that she had access to. "The building had an amazing amount of surveillance. They saved everything, conversations and videos of work that was being done on site. They recorded everything but it had a really high clearance level until it was dropped on the internet." She looked at the list of blinking folders showing hits on her search.

"When all the S.H.I.E.L.D and HYDRA files started showing up across the web, I was working down here. I downloaded everything and saved it. I figured that someone would try to clean it off the Internet pretty quickly so I wanted it saved. They did." The info had been off of the web within hours. Considering the amount leaked, that was no easy feat.

"So this is actual data from inside the building in DC that was destroyed?" asked Digg.

"Yep, all you ever wanted to know on what exactly happened that day and why those ships were destroyed." She felt her heart begin to pick up speed. John had distracted her when he'd come in, but now that she was reminded, the names on the list she'd been reading played over in her head.

"What are you two doing?" Oliver's voice from across the room didn't startle her, but she didn't need him seeing all of the information on Captain America either. She wasn't sure how to be loyal to both of them yet. She needed some time to process. She'd never betray Oliver's secret, but she needed to find a way that she'd be OK with Steve too and she needed to find a way to tell Steve some version of what she did. He'd been honest with her. She owed him as much honesty as she could give without betraying Oliver.

"Just research," John said, standing away from the screens and intercepting Oliver. "How did it go tonight?" He asked. "Why were you out there by yourself?"

Felicity listened, shocked, as Digg gave Oliver hell for not having his phone on. John was covering for her. He was incredibly loyal to Oliver, as was she, so he must not think that Steve represented a threat or he was giving her the time to tell Oliver herself.

With a sigh, she reduced windows so that her normal scans showed. She had some serious thinking to do. She wanted to protect Oliver and be honest with him, but Steve had told her in confidence. She also needed to be honest with Steve that she was working for Arrow, but again she couldn't betray Oliver and now Digg knew and was in the middle. She was sure that when they were alone she'd get the 'you've got to come clean with Oliver' speech.

"I have something I need you both to hear." Oliver set down his bow in its case. "I want to run it by everyone as soon as Sara and Roy come down here." Oliver was saying. Felicity didn't like the feeling she was getting. He had something big to tell them. She could feel it hanging in the air.

"What's wrong, Oliver?" she asked, trying to prompt him to tell them what was happening. She hoped it wasn't more bad news about Slade Wilson.

"I'd like to know too, Ollie," Sara suggested from the stairs. Roy wasn't far behind her. When they were both in the room, it was Oliver's turn.

"I want to bring someone else in on our team," he stated. Felicity glanced at Digg. His mouth had dropped open. She was pretty sure hers had too. Roy was grumbling, but Sara didn't say much. She stopped at the edge of Felicity's computers and sat down.

"Oliver, do you really think it's the right time to bring someone else in while Slade's trying to hurt everyone around you, man?" Digg was the first to say it, but Felicity agreed.

"You've taken on so much with training Roy." He glanced at the man in question. "Sorry Roy," he added.

"It's okay," Roy replied shrugging. "I know training me has been hard. You can't walk anywhere in here without the fear I'm going to splash you." Felicity smiled at Roy. She liked his sense of humor and they all knew how much he didn't like slapping water for hours on end.

"We've got Slade lurking out there waiting to get his revenge on," John continued. "Why bring someone else into the mix when we're just starting to come together as a team?" Felicity's mind wandered a bit, trying to decide who it could be. Would it be Laurel? She wasn't sure she could handle having Laurel around all the time. Oliver's ex was not fond of Oliver's EA from what Felicity could see. She was always polite, but the little passive aggressive snide comments would be hard to take on a day to day basis.

Oliver didn't answer for a few minutes. "All right," " he said. "You're right. We do have a lot on our plates and now wouldn't be a good time to bring someone else in to train, except this is someone that can help in more than one way, but only if you agree. If any of you say no, then the answer will be no," he assured them. "I don't have the right to reveal your identities without you, but you should know, I've already told him who I am." He confided.

Everyone spoke at once. Sara and Roy's voices blended as they both demanded to know why he would do that and how he knew he could trust the person.

"Oh man," was Digg's only comment but she could tell he was not pleased. She wasn't either.

"Don't you think you should have discussed it with us first?" she couldn't help asking.

"Like you did with Barry?" Oliver snapped. Digg visibly cringed. At least one of her friends had a clue what a stupid thing that had been to say. Felicity struggled not to boil over at the now dead horse they were about to beat… again.

"Are we back to that, Oliver?" she snapped, losing the battle to remain calm. "I've apologized. I've said how sorry I am that I rudely brought someone down here I trusted to save your life. It would have been a much better decision to take you to the hospital and explain that one or should we have just let you die?"

"Hang on, hang on," Digg tried to be the point of reason as he interrupted. Felicity tried to let her anger go. Getting into that old fight was not going to be productive in any way. "Who is this mystery member you are looking to add to our growing numbers down here?"

"Captain America," Oliver announced.

Felicity's heart turned over. She coughed to cover her gasp.

Roy looked like he thought Oliver was crazy. Sara stood up and made her way over to Oliver. "You're joking, right?" She asked.

"How do you know Steve?" Felicity asked standing out of her seat and blurting.

"How do you know Steve and who he is?" Oliver's voice conveyed his confusion. Damn, she hadn't meant to say that.

"I met him on Easter at the VA and we went out this evening." Felicity told him. She didn't like the look on his face or the fact that her world was getting so small. Crap.

"You what?" Oliver's voice was low and quiet like it got when he was about to arrow something.

"I went out with him this evening and he told me who he is." she told him. "But how do you know him?"

"I'd like to know that also," Sara interjected. "I know we didn't meet him on the island and you've never mentioned knowing one of the Avengers before. So what happened?" Her body language was stretched tight. Felicity hadn't seen Sara so on edge since she'd first joined the team.

When Oliver launched into his story about meeting Steve and them starting to spar, Felicity was a little shocked. Oliver was not the bonding type.

"OK," Roy jumped in. "So let me get this straight. Captain America is Steve, the guy you called 'Muscles' and helped us at Easter." Damn, Steve's identity was out of the bag for sure now and it was her stupid blurting to blame. "The guy that played catch with me and that kid most of the afternoon on Easter, he's Captain America?" Roy asked, before turning to Digg. "Did you know?"

"I didn't know," Digg replied.

"Okay," Roy continued. "Say Captain America's on the up and up about helping. Can we trust him? He took down his whole organization because they'd been infiltrated by an enemy from what I read. So if he thinks we have issues, will he turn on us?"

"I'd like the answer to that too, Ollie," Sara jumped in. "How do we know he isn't here on S.H.I.E.L.D's behalf?"

"S.H.I.E.L.D doesn't exist anymore." Felicity jumped in to point out. "And Steve has already saved all of our lives at least once when he destroyed S.H.I.E.L.D. and those helicarriers." She felt the need to defend him. Whatever little she did know about Steve, she was confident that he was an honest man. If he said he was going to help, then she believed that was what he would do. "He had his whole team turn on him. That had to be hard, but he confronted them right out."

Oliver and Digg were staring at her with open mouths. "How do you know all this Felicity?" Oliver asked. "You said you just went out with him. Did you discuss his work the whole time?"

"We didn't discuss his work much at all." She mentally kicked herself for jumping in with the information she'd found. Good intentioned babbling be damned. She'd really stuck her foot in her mouth this time. She'd said a whole lot more than she'd meant to.

"I found it in the information S.H.I.E.L.D. dumped when I was researching him," she told them after a short hesitation. She knew they weren't going to let it go, especially Oliver. "The ships he destroyed, they were targeting anyone that HYDRA saw as a threat. Everyone in this room was flagged. If those ships had fired, we'd all have been dead."

Felicity let that sink in for a minute as she turned to her computer and pulled up one of the reduced windows. The picture expanded to show Steve outside a glass elevator. As she pushed play, numbers counted down at the bottom of the screen showing the date and time of the recording. Felicity carefully paused the screen and pointed out the members of Steve's team, all 10 of them that got onto the elevator.

Oliver listened to Felicity point out Steve's team members. He wasn't sure how he felt about the fact that she'd gone out with his sparring buddy or how he felt about the fact that he'd been right, someone, Rogers, had had a hand in her hair. He pushed that line of thought away and concentrated on what she was saying.

"The first thing I found when I started looking was that he was assigned to work with a strike team. When I checked to see exactly what that meant, I got a list of the men you see all coming into the elevator. This is the team he was working with." She pointed to one of the shorter men standing beside Steve in the picture. "That's the strike team leader, Rumlow. He seems to be assigned to and take orders from Steve for the last couple of years."

They all watched the team pile in at each floor the elevator stopped on. "It seems like they are trying to overwhelm him, force him in the center so they can attack from all sides at once." Sara noticed.

"He's starting to figure it out," Oliver pointed out. He'd seen Steve's relaxed pose and that wasn't it. About the time that Oliver spoke, two more men stepped into the elevator and the doors closed.

"Before we get started, does anyone want to get out?" Steve could be heard saying quite clearly on the recording before all hell broke loose.

The barely controlled fury and hurt Oliver heard in the other man's voice chilled him. He'd never heard that tone from Rogers, but he'd felt that kind of anger and betrayal. For just a minute, he wondered if that was how Slade had felt when he'd been confronted with the knowledge Oliver had lied to him, in Slade's eyes that would have been almost as big a betrayal as allowing Shado to die. A part of Oliver had always wondered if he'd been straight with Slade right up front about what Ivo did, would the older man have seen things differently.

Pulling himself from those thoughts, Oliver watched the fight on the screen as Rogers took down all 10 men, but it wasn't without cost. Rumlow got a few good hits in and the shocks he delivered to Steve's core made Oliver flinch in sympathy. Rumlow was seriously good at hand to hand. Oliver wasn't sure he could take the man one on one. That and the way Steve fought, even one handed made him realize just how much Steve was holding back when they sparred.

Even with that many men, Rogers had managed to avoid any real damage to him. Even the electromagnets they'd tried to use to subdue him hadn't held him long. When he flipped his shield up to cut the electromagnet off his wrist and pointed out to the unconscious Rumlow that the attack had felt personal to him, Felicity clicked off the recording.

"That was badass!" Roy exclaimed. "I'm a yes." Oliver secretly agreed, but didn't let his face change as he nodded to his young protégé.

"I think it's a good decision, Oliver," Digg put in. He'd been silent for the last part of the conversation. "More than his strength, I think he'll bring a fresh perspective that we could all use. Slade's in our heads, all of us, but especially you two." Digg swung his hand between Oliver and Sara. "He's got us on the run, always one step ahead. I think we need someone with a clear head to help. I think you did the right thing, Oliver."

That felt good to Oliver. Getting one of the core members of the team, a man he trusted and relied on, to say he'd made a good decision helped.

"Sara," he prompted, waiting for her answer.

"I don't like this, Ollie," she started. "Captain America, he's used to leading teams, even the Avengers." She sighed and turned intense eyes on him. His heart sank a little. He hoped she didn't say no. He'd keep his promise and not ask Captain America into their group, but that wasn't what he wanted. "I'm an assassin, not a team player and I still don't know if we can trust him, but I won't say no." He smiled and laid a hand on her shoulder gratefully before turning to the last person on the group that hadn't answered.

"Felicity," he questioned. She hesitated, but then came to stand in front of him.

"On one condition," she told him. Oliver tensed, he didn't like conditions. "I need to tell him about my involvement first." He didn't like it, but before he could say anything, Felicity rushed on. "Before you say anything, this is nonnegotiable to me. I feel terrible I lied to him by not telling him anything. I can't just be sitting here when you bring him in. I really like him, Oliver."

Felicity was looking at him with such hope in her eyes, he couldn't say no. He was with Sara. He had no right to feel as if someone had punched him in the gut when he looked at her face and saw it light up with the mention of someone else's name.

"Okay," he said finally. He was with Sara, he reminded himself again. He had no legitimate reason to say no to her request. "Why don't you meet with him and then after that, bring him to the club."

The smile on Felicity's face was worth its weight in gold. Oliver was glad he'd resisted his urge to give in to his gut and he'd allowed her to have her time first.

"Thank you, Oliver," she told him, catching his arm and sliding her fingers down the outside before squeezing and letting go. The whole touch was only seconds, but he could still feel her touch on his skin. Glancing sideways at Sara, he turned back to Felicity with a smile and accepted her thanks.