For four straight days the three of them were coddled, charmed and cared for by Felicity's mother. She entered the redesigned arrow cave in a flurry of anxious motherly concern and unending motion, her worry a very palpable thing and her attention solely on her daughter. She brought in countless bags of take-out, openly expressed the normal concerns of a mother whose only child had suffered an injury, and teased and flirted with the doctors and therapists Oliver brought in. All in all, she brought Felicity a bigger and brighter sense of normalcy than the young woman had thought was even remotely possible.
During the entirety of the visit, Felicity didn't stop to allow herself a single, solitary thought of anything but enjoying the rare comfort of her mother's presence. She was reminded of those childhood illnesses that would have her bundled up on the couch in the living room with a mountain of pillows and the softest blanket from her mother's own bed, horror movies playing on the TV, and her mother checking her forehead every few minutes for any sign of a rising temperature. By the time her mother was satisfied that she was on the way to a full recovery, Felicity thought she might have gained back at least a good amount of the weight she had lost while in captivity, not to mention some sorely missed sanity.
It was quiet once their visitor had headed back to her home and work in Las Vegas. Too quiet by far. Although there wasn't a moment that she was ever left by herself, Felicity felt more alone than ever. As determined as she had been to run as far away from Las Vegas as was possible once she graduated high school, she found herself missing the comfort of the desert. The desert was quiet too but it was a quiet that teemed with hidden life and activity just beneath the surface. Tucked away as she was in the arrow cave, the quiet was too reminiscent of a tomb, of that cave on Martinique.
The first night after her mother left, Felicity woke up screaming. The blood curdling sound jolted both Oliver and John to wakefulness. Oliver crashed to the floor, his limbs tangled in the blanket he'd pulled over his legs. John fared only slightly better. He was up and mobile in record time, gently shaking Felicity's shoulders in an attempt to rouse her, to quiet her heart-rending cries. Between the two of them, they somehow managed to wake Felicity. Her screams slacked and became chest shuddering sobs as her eyes finally registered wakefulness.
"It was just a dream. You're safe. You're safe now."
"No!" She pulled herself away from the comfort of strong arms, her head shaking violently. "No, it isn't safe. I wasn't safe. I'm not safe!" She turned tear-filled eyes toward Oliver. "It wasn't just a dream." She watched with morbid fascination as he closed his eyes against the pain. "I don't want to remember anymore!" In a sudden jolt of unprecedented motion, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and shoved herself to stand on unsteady legs. She managed to walk as far as her bank of computers before she was forced to sink into her desk chair. Curling over onto herself, she screamed again, burying her face in her hands.
"Felicity!" John followed her at a safe distance. "Come on now, girl. You are safe."
"No, no, no, no, no..."
Oliver sunk to his knees beside her chair, his hand carefully detaching one of her hands from where it clawed at her face. He managed to stop her jerky movements and was careful to keep his voice calm and level. "Right now, right here, you're safe. That much I can promise you."
Felicity stared hard at him. "Right now?"
"Yes," he agreed
She drew in a shaking breath but managed to calm herself to some degree. Seeming to wake up from the nightmare that had gripped her so forcefully, she looked around. "Damn. I'm sorry."
Both John and Oliver shook their heads but it was Oliver who spoke their thoughts aloud. "You have nothing to be sorry for."
"I can't keep freaking out like that."
"You need to allow yourself more time. You're still recovering and you know the emotional injuries take longer than the physical ones." John held out a warm robe.
She accepted it once Oliver released her hands from his grip and even allowed him to help her put it on over her pajamas. "It feels like it's been long enough," she muttered darkly.
"Unfortunately, it hasn't been." Oliver's eyes narrowed just slightly. "You were away from us for four and a half months, you've been back for just two weeks. Things will get better but you have to give them a chance."
"How long did it take you to recover?" she asked pointedly.
"Still working on that," he admitted softly.
"Great."
She looked around her, slowly spinning her chair to face her extensive bank of computers. It had been a long time since she had last sat there and she lovingly stroked the keyboard. Typing a minimum of characters, she changed the screens from medical data to her usual research.
"Much better," she murmured. "So," she began matter-of-factly, "fill me in on what you've been able to discover about this Master guy and I'll fill you in on what I know."
"What do you mean?" Oliver asked, casting a worried look toward John.
"Do you honestly think I would just sit in bed and play on social media while you were out trying to track this guy down?"
"Well, that is what we had hoped you would do."
Felicity cut her eyes sidelong at John, her fingers continuing to play across the keyboard in front of her, bringing up various windows of information on the monitors. "I've never been much of one to use social media - it's too fake. And since my days of hacking banks and such for the good of the people are a thing of the past… Well, that really doesn't leave me a lot to do besides try to find out who this Master person is, now does it?"
The next night her own scream woke her up as it filled the lair and reverberated off the walls, seeping into every crack and crevice. It was a horrifying way to wake up. The sound of pure, unadulterated terror jolted her to her bones and soaked into her soul. The chills that wracked her were only further intensified by the realization that the scream had come from her own mouth.
Wakefulness fully achieved, Felicity turned her panicked expression toward the two men who had seemingly materialized at her bedside. Their eyes told her everything she needed to know. They were worried, far more worried than she had ever seen either of them. For that matter, she was more worried than she could remember ever being before.
"Hey, you're okay. Felicity, you're safe. It's okay."
She could see Oliver's hand gently gripping her upper arm but she couldn't feel it. All she could feel was the hard throbbing of her blood as it pulsed rapidly through her body. Likewise, she could see his mouth moving, could even hear the words he was saying but they had no meaning and were quickly being drowned out by the sound of rushing blood that filled her head and made her feel as if her ears were stuffed with cotton.
With her panic peaking once again she could feel the scream building in her chest. Along with the building terror was another fear – one that kept repeating a rapid mantra in her thoughts.
No. Nothing. Don't. Don't. Don't. No sound. Stay quiet. Don't say anything. No. No. Don't make a sound. Don't say anything. Don't even squeak. Nothing.
She clamped her mouth shut, her hands clawing at the sheets and mattress in her desperate need to remain absolutely silent. She pulled out of Oliver's grip, her skin still desensitized to his touch. She frantically shoved herself into a sitting position and scooted backward until her back was pressed against the wall. Pillows were shoved aside by her momentum until they landed softly on the floor, the blanket followed suit.
"Whoa, girl. You're gonna scoot yourself right onto the floor if you don't calm down." John reached out and grabbed her hands, effectively trapping them in his own. He leveled his gaze at her, not allowing her to look away until the unadulterated terror began to seep slowly away. "It was just a nightmare. That's all. Just a really bad dream. You're safe now. Oliver and I won't let anything else happen to you. I promise."
Her thoughts were very slowly losing the feeling of utter desperation and the sound of her own rushing blood was beginning to fade away from her ears to be replaced by the familiar and far more comforting sounds of the lair and her friends' voices. But despite the fading fear, she couldn't bring herself to speak.
It seemed to her that with every step forward she made on this road to recovery, she took a dozen steps backward. She hadn't been back that long, not really, and intellectually she knew healing required time but she had always been an instant gratification kind of girl. Programming, hacking...all of that provided instant feedback, immediate answers – her spotty recollection of her time away and her brain's distressing jolts of recovered memory were driving her ever closer to the edge of a great yawning abyss of the unknown and it scared her to death.
There was a great deal that she remembered with vivid clarity but there were other things that her brain had suppressed, that it had intentionally forgotten. But she sometimes remembered things in her dreams, things she knew to be real despite their surrealistic horror, things she wished she could forget again upon waking. These things quieted her voice to the point of muteness, they caused her blood to run cold and her heart to pound so fiercely she thought it might just leap out of her rib cage.
"Felicity?"
She forced her eyes to meet John's. He looked so worried.
"Felicity, are you still with us?"
She nodded, a small jerky movement that jarred her vision momentarily. She let her gaze drift slightly sideways to take in Oliver as well. He looked no more relaxed than she felt.
"It was just a dream, a nightmare," Oliver offered softly.
She jerked her head to the side more forcefully than before.
"Okay, it wasn't just a dream," John allowed. "Are you remembering things from your captivity? Things that happened before we rescued you?"
She was so tired that she couldn't muster the energy to nod. Her eyes would have to express her thoughts without benefit of words or gestures. It felt as if all her strength had been drawn out of her but the thought of sleeping was unthinkable. Sleep meant dreams and dreams were something she could not bring herself to face again so soon.
"Oh Felicity…"
She looked into Oliver's eyes, unflinching. "I'm not getting better. I'm getting worse."
"It's always darkest before the dawn."
She cut her eyes at John for a brief moment.
Raising his hands in mock surrender, he turned back to his temporary bed and left her to Oliver's care. He lay back down, rolling to one side so that his back was to the rest of the room and affording them a modicum of privacy.
Oliver took her hand in his as he settled against the edge of her hospital bed. "I know that you feel like you're getting worse but you're not. You're getting better, I promise you that. You're brain is just having a rough time processing all your memories. You just need to give it time."
"I'm tired of giving it time!" she demanded. "I'm tired of waking up terrified and covered in a cold sweat." She sniffed against the tears that threatened to fall. "I just want the life I had before...before all this happened."
He drew in a deep breath. "I'm sorry, Felicity. I'm sorry I didn't protect you. It won't happen again - ever."
"And if this Master person finds me and captures me again?"
The softness in the depths of Oliver's eyes hardened perceptively. "Not gonna happen."
A tiny self-depreciating smile tugged gently at the corners of her mouth. "I want to believe you."
"Then do."
She shook her head slightly. "I can't."
to be continued...