title: Lost Happiness

author: melpomene blue

chapter: five

Eighteen weeks.

One hundred twenty six days.

Three thousand twenty-four hours.

One hundred eighty-one thousand, four hundred forty minutes.

Ten million, eight hundred eighty-six thousand, four hundred seconds.

Maybe having her tablet so readily at hand wasn't such a great thing after all - with each simple computation her distress grew by leaps and bounds. She liked it better when she didn't know how long it had been, when the only measure of her time spent in the cave was a pile of pebbles she had refused to acknowledge or count, a pile of pebbles she had left behind in that cave along with all the nightmarish implications of counting down her final days. She liked it a lot better when she was ignorant.

John was still in the lair. He had refused to abandon her completely although he had moved off to sit at her bank of computers, allowing her some privacy in which to mull over the information he had provided. He looked busy but she was relatively certain it was all just an act for her benefit. She felt like she had been sucker punched and she couldn't decide if it was because she now knew how long she had been stuck down in that hellish cave or because John had deliberately given her the one piece of information she had openly admitted she didn't want to know.

"Why?"

John's head jerked back from the computer screen and, after pausing for a beat, he slowly turned the chair to face Felicity's bed. "Why..." His eyes were filled with questions but Felicity was relatively sure he knew what she was asking.

"Eighteen weeks..." She could feel her eyebrows draw together and her forehead furrow, she fought back against the tears that pricked at her eyes and threatened to fall. "Why did you wait so long to come for me?" Despite her determination to appear strong and untouched by it all, her voice betrayed her and broke when she asked the question she really hadn't intended to utter - ever.

He closed his eyes, the grim expression back solidly in place and becoming more grim as the seconds ticked by. "We looked everywhere as soon as we realized you were gone. We tore this city apart but they didn't leave behind any clues. They left nothing to give us any idea where to look next, where they had taken you or even who they were."

"Security cameras, traffic cams..." She wanted to believe him but it was proving to be a difficult thing to do.

He leaned forward in his seat. "...were all blank. For half an hour on that night every camera in the city quit working at exactly the same time. They had planned for every possibility. It was like...like you just disappeared into thin air. They left no trace to follow. Nothing."

She did her best to accept his words. "Then how..."

"It was a week after you were taken that we received the first clue."

She bit her lip. That first week had been so far beyond even what had been her worst idea of hell had once been that she had no desire to relive any of it, even in recollection. The physical scars that were left behind would provide plenty of memories as it was, the emotional scars...no one needed to know about those. No one would know about those. All she had to do was keep her mouth shut – for once – and no one would be the wiser.

In spite of her determination to not remember, her mind's eye turned back to those early days. She had been so sure that Oliver and John would appear at any minute to rescue her. Every time the trapdoor would creak open, she would feel her heart race – not from fear of what was to come but from excitement at having been found. Every time she saw that is was her captors instead of her friends she would break just a little bit more.

She would have given them anything they asked for a single aspirin, she was in so much pain. She would have willingly died rather than betray her friends, but had her captors asked for any other information she would have gladly handed it over to them on a silver platter with sugar on top. She offered to hack anything they wanted: trust funds, retirement savings, banks, the treasury department at Fort Knox...anything. They never said a word.

It was maddening, their refusal to give her a way to relieve her own suffering, but it was only to grow progressively worse until she was literally begging for death, planning it out in her daydreams while she clutched her pet rock. Little tortures piled one on top of the other filled her waking and sleeping hours. The inventors of the Chinese water torture could take lessons from these guys, she decided in one of her more lucid moments. She could feel her mind slipping a little more sideways with each passing day. She wondered exactly how long it would take before her sanity was a thing of the past, a fleeting memory that would only serve to plague her nightmares.

She could focus on the experience as a whole atrocity but even in her thoughts she couldn't focus on the details without breaking out in a cold sweat and feeling her stomach quickly sour. There were some things that, even though she experienced them, she could never admit to having lived through. Some, well most, of the details could just remain secret. John and Oliver, she decided with grim determination, would just have to deal with her silence.

"Felicity!"

She jerked out of her thoughts, wondering how long she had zoned out. If John's expression was anything to go by, it had been a while. "Guess I got lost there for a minute."

"More like ten minutes."

"Oh. Sorry."

He shook his head. "No need. You've got a lot to process." He handed her a cup of lukewarm broth. "Wanna try something on your stomach?"

She sniffed it with disinterest. She knew she needed to eat something, the nutrients she was getting through the IV really weren't intended to keep her going for weeks on end, but her stress eating habits had abandoned her and every time she considered eating anything she would remember her captors' offerings. She took the cup, fighting to control the trembles that shook her hand. In an attempt to distract herself from the horror brought to mind by a simple cup of veggie broth, she ventured into slightly dangerous territory.

"Who was it? I mean, it doesn't really matter but...who would do this to me?"

John swallowed. "We haven't found out his true identity but he calls himself the Master."

"Haven't found out? As in, he's still out there somewhere?" The blind panic she had been able to keep relatively firmly in check threatened to bubble over and drown her. "You didn't catch him."

"You're safe, Felicity. There's no way anyone's going to get within a hundred yards of you without us knowing about it." He gently patted her shoulder, smoothing the soft, worn fabric of the T shirt she wore.

"But I was supposed to be safe before." She felt very much like a rat trapped in a maze except no treats waited behind the trick doors, only more horror. Fear surged wildly through her veins. "I was supposed to be safe before," she repeated, "and I wasn't. I haven't been safe since Oliver brought me that laptop with the stupid excuse that he'd spilled a latte on it. I knew what bullet holes looked like even then – even without any experience in seeing them up close and personal."

John only just managed to snag the cup of broth from her hand before she dropped it in her lap as she suddenly sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. Although now out of traction, her leg kept her from trying to get completely out of bed. Even just sitting up, she was still extremely weak.

She wanted nothing so much as to be able to get up out of bed and go home. At home she had doors and locks and more than just a fleeting illusion of privacy. But with her abductor still lurking out there somewhere in the world...

Desperate to turn her thoughts away from all the things she couldn't have, she continued on her previous train of thought. "So this Master person, what's his MO? How did you figure out who it was?"

John rested his hand against her good leg, pressing lightly against her knee but not in any way that felt threatening. "That first clue we got was a statue. We received a few more before we finally managed to piece together all the clues and figure out what he was trying to tell us."

"Statues?"

John nodded. "It didn't make any sense at first. Oliver just kept receiving these obscure statues in unmarked packages that appeared on his desk. The security tapes always froze just prior to the box arriving and picked up again once it was left behind."

"What kind of statues?" The oddity was at least taking her mind off her current worries.

"Persephone, Alice in Wonderland... It took us a while to decipher the meaning at all – being trapped underground. We were afraid you had been buried alive until the statue of Merlin."

Felicity grew instantly confused.

"Not the Merly family, but Merlin from the King Arthur legends. According to our sources, legend says he was trapped in an underground cave from which he could never escape. We figured you were still alive but trapped in a cave somewhere."

She was duly impressed. "Not bad."

"Well, we got a lot of help from Quentin Lance. Now, I'd appreciate it if you actually tried to drink some of this," he handed the broth back to her, "rather than try to dump it in your lap."

She eyes the cup of broth dubiously. "I'll try?"

"That's all I ask." He leaned forward and lightly kissed her hairline.

to be continued...