This is a new fic I've been working on for some time, completely against my will. Oliver and Felicity won't get out of my head, though, so I've finally given up and allowed them to run rampant. This is a long one that's already largely complete, so I will be posting a chapter a day for the foreseeable future. Hope you enjoy!

For most of my life, I was the girl who could not be touched. I know: Hello, melodrama. It sounds like it should be accompanied by swelling music and some cheesy, ominous voiceover: Felicity Smoak… (dun dun dun) The Girl Who Could Not Be Touched.

Welcome to my world.

I screamed when doctors or nurses approached; squirmed away whenever someone tried to hug me; cringed if a teacher so much as patted my head. It's a hard sell in an orphanage, convincing prospective adopters to take a chance on the skinny blond girl who cries whenever anyone comes near.

They called it attachment disorder, at first. Chalked it up to a history of sexual or physical abuse, even though I had no such history. Later, when I told them about the voices, the visions, they called it schizophrenia. Paranoid delusions. These weren't paranoid delusions, though. These were six voices, and I knew them all as well as I knew my own. Six voices, belonging to girls who looked an awfully lot like me. Unlike me, however, who grew up being bounced from foster home to institution to state home and back again, these girls all grew up in an estate on an island I had never seen before.

I stopped talking about the girls by the time I was twelve, though the visions continued. Sometimes they were triggered by someone's touch, other times by the smell of pine needles, or an old song on the radio. Eventually, I could lie in bed and call them up all on my own. They were my secret shame and my only comfort, these imaginary friends who visited me in my loneliest hours.

Until I learned they weren't imaginary at all.

Merlyn Manor was an old Victorian mansion, the kind with towers and turrets and dormers, a wraparound porch along the south-facing side of the house. It was originally the home of Byron Merlyn, one of the most renowned painters in Maine history. Byron fathered Andrew, who was second only to his father on the Maine art scene; he in turn had Jared Merlyn, who bested both of them and, in 1966, was named the greatest painter in America by a panel of his peers.

I'd heard of the Merlyns the same way I'd heard of Grant Wood or Norman Rockwell, not because I knew anything in particular about them or their work, but because everyone had heard of them. To my knowledge I had never seen any of their paintings, knew nothing about their history; it definitely never occurred to me that the Merlyns were the family I had been searching for all these years.

The family home was located on Crab's Neck, an island two miles long off the coast of Maine – one of only a dozen such houses that were built there when a bunch of rich widows decided to start an artist's colony smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 1868. Byron Merlyn, then a seventeen-year-old unknown from Saco, Maine, won a scholarship to attend a retreat on the island in the summer of 1879.

The rest, as they say, is history.

I learned all of this online, while traveling to the island from my home three thousand miles away in Portland, Oregon. While I may have heard of the Merlyns before, I knew nothing about Crab's Neck and I certainly had never heard of Robert Queen or Moira Merlyn-Queen, the couple whose attorney requested my presence for the reading of their will after a car accident had taken their lives a week before.

"I know it's a shock, Felicty," the man had said over the phone. Quentin Lance, he told me. Longtime personal lawyer and friend to the Merlyn family. "They gave you up for adoption when you were just a baby, but they never stopped thinking about you. Trust me, you want to make this trip."

I wasn't so sure about that, but Quentin paid for the ticket. Made transportation arrangements. All I had to do was show up.

When I looked at the pictures online, I realized he was right: I definitely wanted to be there for this. Partly because I wanted to learn more about the parents who dumped me when I was a baby, sure…but mostly because of the fact that I had seen the house shown in those online pictures before.

It had been the centerpiece of a series of visions that had haunted me for the past two decades. For twenty years, I had been searching for that house.

And now, here I was.

"Are you sure you'll be warm enough?" Reggie Merlyn asked me, for the hundredth time since he'd picked me up at the airport. Uncle Reggie – that was technically what he would have been to me, though I definitely didn't volunteer to call him that. My mother's brother. "We should have stopped at L.L. Bean on the way. "

"What I have is fine," I said automatically, also for the hundredth time. "I had to scrounge change for the peanuts on the plane ride out here – a three-hundred-dollar coat from L.L. Bean is definitely not in my budget."

He glanced at me, eyebrows raised, and I realized that was one of those things that should have stayed in my head rather than being said out loud.

"I mean," I said, closing my eyes against the blush climbing my cheeks, "it's not like I'm poor or something – I have a job. A good job, actually. But I just got a new car and I didn't want to take out a loan, so that took up most of my savings and—" God, Felicity. Please stop talking.

I pulled myself up short, since Reggie had his eyes back on the road and his jaw was tensed, his fingers tight on the steering wheel.

"There may be some things in Moira's closet that fit you," he said. We were driving in his Lexus RX, the latest model by the look of it. We'd left the highway – or what passed for it out here – in favor of a pothole-laden Maine road straight out of a Stephen King novel. Drizzle was falling, greasing a road bordered on either side by brown crusted snow and dominated by pickup trucks and SUVs.

"You two are about the same size," Reggie continued, glancing at me. "Slender, I mean. Though you're shorter than Moira." I nodded numbly. It's not like I'm a shrimp, but I'm average if anything. "She was five-six, maybe five-seven. You?"

I hesitated, not sure what he was asking. "How tall am I?" He nodded briefly. "Uh – five-five, I think."

"Ah," he said. "Well… Yes. Robert was a big man, built like a football player. You look more like Moira – like our side of the family. I don't know where the poor vision comes from. Robert never wore glasses, and Moira has perfect vision." He paused, and swallowed hard. "Had. She had perfect vision."

For the first time, I saw grief leak through the oh-so-professional façade. I pushed my glasses up my nose as I tried to process what he'd said. For the bulk of my twenty-two years, the blue eyes, blond hair, and fair skin that I saw in the mirror every day had been a mystery. I didn't know where they came from. I didn't know where I came from. Suddenly, that had changed.

I still wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with that.

"So, this island…" I began. I had a million questions, and no idea where to begin. The island seemed like the least loaded way to get started.

"Crab's Neck," Reggie supplied. "A beautiful place. We grew up there – Moira and I, with a constant stream of cousins and aunts and uncles going in and out."

"I see." I paused, my gaze drawn out the window once more. We passed the town marker for Warren, which I knew from that brief research was just a few miles from Thomaston, which was in turn a few miles from Port Clyde – where the boat launch awaited.

"Listen," I finally said, because it had been an hour and a half in the car and only twenty-four hours since I'd first heard about any of this, and all along a single question had risen above all the others clamoring around in my head. One question, that had been driving me crazy for my entire life.

"Yes?" Reggie said. He glanced at me coolly, the grief I'd glimpsed before effectively gone. He was a pale, fine-boned man who could have been thirty-five or fifty. I had seen him before – maybe that should have been my first question. What had he been doing playing with a little girl who looked eerily similar to me, in visions inside my head for the better part of my life?

I took a breath. "My mother and father… They stayed together? After they gave me up, I mean?"

Reggie's already thin lips thinned further. "Apparently so."

"So, then… I mean, maybe it's a silly question. But…" Come on, Felicity, get it out already. I closed my eyes. "Did they have other kids? Besides me?"

"No," Reggie said, after an unusually long pause. "They have no other children. As far as I know, at least."

"Wait," I said, the implication catching me off guard. "Does that mean you didn't know about me? You didn't know Moira had me?"

"I'm afraid not," Reggie said. "I had no idea until Quentin called and told me that I would need to meet you at the airport."

"Oh," I said. "Well… I guess we're even then. I had no idea you existed, either. Any of you."

Reggie grunted noncommittally, but said nothing more.

I thought of that phone call with Quentin again. I know it's a lot to take in, Felicity, but please. You'll want to come. I had thought I'd heard, over the line and three thousand miles away, a hint of compassion. We want you here.

Right. Sure they did.

The ride to Crab's Neck took an hour once we finally reached the boat launch, riding in a boat that probably cost enough to pay off my student loans. Reggie said it had belonged to my father, MOIRA FOREVER written boldly across the side. I still had no idea what Robert Queen – my father – looked like, but I tried to imagine him out on the water in this boat. He and my mother would have gone out on trips together, wouldn't they? Had he been an artist, like everyone else in the Merlyn family? Did that have something to do with why they gave me up?

A pretty blond probably a couple of years older than me piloted the boat out, offering only a brief smile before her focus shifted to the horizon. Reggie and I rode in silence while I tried to imagine my family in this place. It was March, just ten days till spring. Reggie said it had been an unseasonably mild winter, but at temperatures that barely reached freezing and a biting wind, it felt anything but mild to me.

"So, climate change," I said, out of the blue. Reggie raised his eyebrows at me, while the blond woman – Sara, at least according to the name written in script on the breast pocket of her coveralls – glanced my way and then returned her focus to the horizon.

"What about it?" Reggie asked shortly.

"It must impact things around here," I said quickly. I really hoped I hadn't been born into a family of backwoods climate deniers. "I read an article about sea level rise in Maine, and the Gulf is one of the bodies of waters that has warmed most significantly in the past fifty years."

"Merlyn Manor is fine," Reggie said.

I frowned. "Well… That's good, I guess. But there must be fishing on the island. How are other people on the island adapting?"

"I caught a seahorse in my net this fall," Sara said, out of nowhere. "First one I've ever seen, outside of the Boston Aquarium. That was something."

"Species from warmer waters are migrating farther north," I said.

"Or else somebody took a wrong turn," Sara said dryly. I laughed, then stopped when she didn't smile. Maybe she hadn't meant for that to be a joke.

"You're interested in climate change?" Reggie asked. It was the first question he'd asked about me since picking me up at the airport.

"I was a double major in college: environmental science and landscape architecture. I've been working the past five years with a landscaping company in Portland, and they kept me on while I was going through school. It was a lot of work, of course, but I like being outside. And hard work in the sun is nice – I had a foster family that said if you couldn't work outside in the sunshine you might as well be dead in the dark, which always seemed a little…well, dark. But they weren't the sunniest people, and the father – Joe was his name, we always called him Handsy Joe because…well…"

Please stop.

By the time I managed to put my mouth back in neutral, Reggie and Sara were both staring at me. Sara was smiling, something attractive and laughing in her blue eyes. Reggie didn't look amused, however.

"Hang on," Sara said. "It can get a little rough coming in, but we'll be docked in a minute."

I gripped the cold steel rail and looked out onto the water, my hair whipping around my face as freezing sea spray pelted my cheeks. Sara brought us into the dock without any obvious problems and then, with the engine still running, tossed a rope over the cleat on the wharf to pull us in. I watched, mesmerized, at the athleticism and casual grace of every movement.

Once we got Sara's nod, my uncle got out of the boat with the agility of a younger, much less dour man, and held his hand out to me.

"I've got it," I said. I stumbled clambering over the side, but I kept my hands to myself. Reggie eyed me with suspicion, but he didn't offer to help again.

Safely on the island, chilled to the bone, I paused to take in the scene around me.

A boat house stood at the end of the pier. I was plunged headlong into another déjà vu moment. Along one side of the building were kayaks and lobster traps, buoys painted blue and gray, yellow and red. If I went inside, I was ninety-five percent sure I would find two bunks along the far wall, seashells on the windowsill and an old fishing net suspended above. We're not supposed to be in here, a girl whispered inside my head. Rose – one of the six who'd taken up residence in my mind years ago. I may have never set foot in that boat house, but Rose definitely had.

I looked away, the hair on the back of my neck on end. Diverting my focus, I looked around for what you usually find on islands: a ferry terminal and disembarking tourists, beat-up island cars and year-round residents toting their belongings in little wheelie carts.

Instead, I saw a couple of fishermen working on their boats in the water while a staticky radio played Van Morrison. "Brown-Eyed Girl." Sara nodded to Reggie, barely spared a glance toward me, and returned to the boat. She flung my backpack onto the dock without a word, gunned the engine, and sped away.

"Where's the…" I hesitated. "Everything. Where's all the stuff?"

"The 'stuff'?" Reggie asked, an eyebrow arched. "To which 'stuff' are you referring?"

"Civilization stuff. Cars, and a post office. People. I don't know. A road."

"Ah," Reggie said. He smiled faintly, for the first time since I'd met him. I hadn't even thought it possible. "That stuff. There is no road, or not a paved one anyway. The only vehicles are a couple of pickups owned by local fishermen.

"The post office is at the end of the lane there." He pointed to our right, vaguely inland. "There is a school in the same building, which also houses the library and volunteer fire department. The island is governed by a town on the mainland. The police out there respond if there's an issue here."

"Oh," I said. "That's…intimidating." I looked around. Fog hung low over the water, the air cold enough to breathe white. "You and my mother grew up here," I said, half to myself before I addressed the next question to Reggie. "And my father? Where was he from?"

"Away," Reggie said shortly.

I started to ask more questions, but Reggie stopped me with a silencing glare. I reminded myself again that he was grieving, and shut my mouth. Instead of more questions, I gathered my backpack and nodded onward. "I guess we should go."

Reggie nodded, grim, and led me on in silence.

According to my uncle, Merlyn Manor was on the other side of the island, though he assured me it was a short walk. I didn't care – being outside always feels better to me. I busied myself cataloging plants and wildlife, content to ignore my companion and travel in silence for the remainder of the walk. If it felt as though I'd walked this path a thousand times before, as though I knew well in advance exactly what I would find at every bend up ahead. I told myself that was just my imagination, and kept moving.

There was still snow on the ground, deep in spots where it had drifted, patchy in others. Spring may have had a firm hold in the Pacific Northwest, but apparently the East Coast hadn't gotten the memo. We crossed over deer tracks and a few delicate prints from birds that had lighted on the path, but there was no trace of the paw prints you'd see in a typical snowscape like this – no sign of squirrels or mice, raccoons or foxes. Which was understandable, since we were ten miles out to sea. Blue jays followed our progress from a distance, while chickadees and titmice perched on branches just a foot from my head, the whir of their wings the only sound apart from our breathing and the distant crash of waves.

The incline got steeper, our trail more narrow. I paused for a moment as a familiar sensation crawled along the back of my neck. A whisper, like the breath of some invisible enemy, crept along my spine. I closed my eyes. Just ignore it. It will go away, I reminded myself silently. There's no one there.

I opened my eyes and kept walking.

The feeling intensified.

Reggie stopped so abruptly that I almost crashed into him headlong. "My shoe," he explained, and paused to retie his boot.

While I waited, I looked around some more. The trail was bordered by pine and spruce, birch and hemlock. My eyes followed the path – up, up, all the way to a peak overlooking the ocean.

Sun glinted off glass panes, blinding me for an instant. And in one of those moments that's happened to me since I was a child, my vision sharpened, narrowed, until it was as though I looked through some supernatural spotting scope. I saw past the trees. Past birds, melting snow, and fading evergreens.

A man stared at me – directly into my eyes, watching from his vantage in the glass-paned house. He was tall. Dark hair, laughing mouth. Deep brown eyes that seemed to see everything. I knew him as well as I knew anyone. Maybe better. I had seen him in a thousand visions over the years; there was no doubt in my mind that this was the same person. This time was different, though.

This time, he saw me.

I gasped, tumbling backward. Out of the vision, and back to solid ground.

"Felicity?" Reggie said, impatient. "Come on. They'll be waiting for us. We should have been there an hour ago."

I pointed up the trail, far in the distance, where in reality the glass-paned fortress could barely be seen. "Is that… That's not the house, is it? Merlyn Manor?"

"No," Reggie said shortly, his voice tight. "That is Palmer Estate. Trust me, we have nothing to do with that place. We're this way."

After another few yards, the trail took a sharp right, taking us away from the man I'd seen watching me. The man who had seen me, or so it seemed. I dismissed the thought. I was imagining things – hardly new for me. If I'd learned anything in the past twenty-two years, it was that my own mind could not be trusted.

I know, there's no Oliver yet. I promise, he'll be in the next chapter and will be omnipresent for most of the rest of the fic. If you enjoyed this, I would love to hear from you - I'm just returning to the world of fic after a long time away, and am a little nervous about being back!