'Take away my affection and I should be like sea weed without water. Like a shell of a crab, like a husk. All my entrails, marrow, juice, bone, would be gone. I should be blown into the first bubble and drown. Take away love of my friends and my burning and pressing sense of importance and lovability of human life and I should be nothing but membrane, a fiber uncolored, lifeless.'

Virginia Wolf.

Being back in Starling while still being dead to the world at large wasn't as difficult as he had expected: in a city of 25 million people, you could go unnoticed easily and the Glades were the perfect place for that. Nobody really looked at anything, and even if they did, they didn't repeat it to anyone. It's easier to survive that way.

The first two weeks had been spent setting up the Foundry with everything he'd need, planning, training. He rarely went out during the day, and he hunted his prey during the night with methodical precision and cold detachment. Now that Oliver finally was to this point, there was nothing in the world that would be able to stop him from keeping his promise to his father. Robert Queen had not died as a good man, but Oliver would honor his father's sacrifice, no matter what. It was with that thought in mind that Oliver tried to build his existence as the vigilante, trying to find footing in this new phase of his life. He established a rhythm to his days, a patter, and found comfort in that… or as much comfort as he was capable of finding everywhere.

But despite all the restraint and the focus on his mission, there were still things that weighted on him. There was a part of him under all the layers of discipline and careful control, that still wanted the very simple things he had wanted when he was stranded on that island, sometimes (when he had a moment of quiet, a moment when being weak for home, would not have been fatal) with an intensity that sometimes unnerved him. …Oliver wanted to see his mother again, knowing she'd hold him as if he was still a boy. He wanted stand in front of Thea and hold her so close, kiss her hair and tell her he loved her, that he'd missed her more than anything. He wanted to see Tommy and ask him where the fuck he'd been, who took him, why. He wanted Felicity…

Oliver wanted a lot, he always had. There seemed to be no bottling up his greed, so instead of suppressing it, he tried to control it. He couldn't have all those things he wanted, not yet – there was a point to what he was doing, even though most times it felt like it was hard to remember it. There was a point to being back only as the vigilante: he owed it to the very people he loved, to protect them from what he was doing, so that once Oliver Queen did come back from the dead, nobody would ever associate him with the Hood.

So instead of going to them, Oliver settled for the next best thing: watching over them. He never got too close. That was the rule for everyone, but it remained especially important for people that would actually recognize him if the caught so much as a glimpse of him.

He sometimes followed his mother when she went to lunch, or out with her new husband. She was still a beautiful woman and though there was a forlorn quality to her eyes, a coldness to most of her expressions, she seemed content most days. It was a strained kind of emotion, as if she was wearing the same way she wore her impeccable suits, but at least she was trying to be happy. Thea had been easier to keep track of… but more difficult to actually look at. Oliver couldn't keep any kind of distance from her, not emotionally, not the way he'd thought he would. Thea was his sister, she was precious to him in a way nothing had been able to taint. Even just at the sight of her, love – of the purest kind, unblemished by guilt or broken promises - bloomed in him. One look at her and Oliver had felt everything; he'd felt Ollie again, he'd felt like her brother for the first time in a long, long time. It had been a shock to find out he was capable of feeling so much, after having been dead inside for so long… and all Thea had to do to remind him was exist. But in the same breath that he had loved, he had also hurt. Because Thea, his Thea, she had lots of friends but solitude was etched deep in her eyes; she was always smiling, but only rarely did she manage to look truly happy. And every other day, she would go out into the grounds of Queen manor and sit down on the cold ground between two gravestones, telling them about her day.

The sight of his sister looking so small and sad and forlorn, happier with ghosts than she was in most places, had jolted Oliver's heart to life with a wrench that felt a lot like heartbreak. He had almost hyperventilated as he listed to her, feeling his throat closing around emotions that flooded his veins too thickly for him to be able to contain them. Oliver had taken two steps towards his sister before he'd even realized what he'd been doing, and it had been a miracle he'd remembered his mission, his duty to her safety first, and changed his direction. So he ran until he wasn't able to run anymore and only once he was in the relative safety of the Foundry had he allowed himself to stop and take a full breath, lungs burning… and if the sweat mingled a little with tears, so what. At least he was human enough to be able to shed them.

He had been back in Starling for 35 days and one morning when, at the sight of his sister talking to his own tombstone, Oliver felt jarred into actual life. And that was also the day he realized how two very important things: how fully unprepared he had been to be human again; and that finding whatever soul he had left would be as painful as shattering it had been.

It had been 78 days since that morning. Things hadn't gone exactly as Oliver had planned (when did they ever, anyway) but all things considered, that might be for the better.

Three months though, and tonight was the first time he dared to get this close to the other woman in his life… and she wasn't even there.

If Oliver had been careful about his distance with his mother and Thea, he had been absolutely paranoid when it came to Felicity. He'd avoided her purposefully in the beginning; staying away even from Thea or Laurel or Tommy during the days he knew they would be around her. He couldn't imagine himself around her, scurrying in the edges of her life like that; it's a line that Oliver couldn't bring himself to cross with her. So for a while, all he had of her are articles online, pictures of her and videos of scientific conferences he couldn't understand much of. And if he had been shocked, initially, to see how changed she was (at least on the outside), Oliver wasn't at all surprised by the life she was living: he'd always known she was remarkable.

In the end, that was precisely the trap he fell into, without even realizing: she was living, fully, and nowhere around her could he feel traces of pain, of hollowness. Oliver's insides bottomed out at the thought that Felicity had moved on from him completely, making him actually feel the meaning of being 'dead to the world'… but even in the darkest, most selfish part of him, he couldn't resent her for it. Maybe, if he could push aside the hollowness it caused him, Oliver could even be glad for it: because he looked at her life and the absence of unhappiness in it abated the guilt that tried to smoother him sometimes. She was happy, she was everything she had ever wanted to be and she had had the strength to do it despite everything else that had been taken from her… and knowing that, knowing she was capable of that kind of strength gave Oliver a strange, utterly foreign sense of safety. It made him feel as if, maybe, even I he got a little closer to her life it wouldn't matter, that he wouldn't taint anything, because Felicity was stronger than that.

But he realized only too late that once he took that first step, there would be no going back. That despite his efforts, it would only escalate. Because once Oliver did gather the nerve to get closer, to be at the other side of the street when she went to work, or at the top of the building when she came home at night… he just couldn't stop!

Every single detail about this new version of her stunned him: the glasses, the dresses, the hair, the make-up, the heels… She was blinding in all the brightness of every single color she put on, girly and flirty in a way he had never seen and that could easily make him breathless from a block away, because this wasn't just anyone, it was Felicity. Felicity flicking her golden ponytail, beautiful mouth painted boldly, everything about her impossible to miss even in a city as crowded with bodies as Starling. This Felicity was so different from the edgy, dark girl Oliver remembered; different in everything, even the smallest detail, in a way that made him think of deliberate construction: she had taken the person she used to be and flipped it on its head. And for some reason, that made perfect sense to Oliver: if anyone could do it, it would be her. It also helped that, no matter what colors she was wearing, whether in heels of heavy boots, she was still undoubtedly Felicity, the same person he had fallen in love with years ago, and that part of her shone through everything she did, everything she was. Sometimes it made him smile, just looking at her… (most times it made him want to do something incredibly stupid, because he missed her now more than ever, with ever broken beat of his heart and it was like breathing with broken ribs).

Unfortunately for Oliver though, watching her through a screen or several hundred feet of distance does not prepared him for what it feels like to walk into her space, even if it is just her office. It smells like her in there, a thin scent trapped between heady and fresh, a sweetness that lingered. He takes off one glove as he walks to her desk, touches the surface of it. There is a jar on the side, filled with at least 40 different kinds of pens and though it is pitch black in there, Oliver knows they are all red (12 seconds of scanning the room before he entered it had told him that though there was no trace of 'Oliver Queen' in Felicity's office, there were marks of 'them, together' everywhere and it had been like a punch to the gut and warm bucket of water over his back at the same time). A chewed one is over the folder she abandoned not 5 minutes ago, when she'd been called for an emergency in the labs, on the other side of the building. Oliver snatches it before he has time to change his mind. His hand hovers over the keyboards of multiple computers. He knows better than to touch those.

'That is a brand new TX-500 and if you like your fingers unbroken you will remove them from my baby!'

He is smiling before he even knows it. He's been remembering lately, what that feels like.

His heartbeats become irregular when he wraps his fingers around the soft sweater that she had left on the back of her chair – a fluffy, vivid pink thing. He buries his nose in it, the softness of the material as gentle against his face as a caress, and takes a harsh, deep breath, blood rushing loudly in his ears as the scent and warmth of her fills his lungs over and over, until Oliver is sure he will be able to detect traces of it on his face even afterwards. Oliver had never figured out why or how, but she used to have this way of leaving her scent all over him: he would hold her, kiss her and afterwards, his hands, his clothes, his face – they would smell like her. She'd linger on him like a brand… She smelled exactly the same even now, and Oliver feels his chest threaten to open up in a way that almost made him groan out loud, his feelings raging up a violent storm of want and crippling need… And he is grounded in that moment, both frozen in it and standing 12 inches behind himself, watching the vigilante of Starling City with his bow in one hand and Felicity Smoak's soft sweater in the other, nose pressed against it, her scent in his lungs, down his throat, and it should be ridiculous, but its only heartbreaking. Because he remembers with slicing clarity the spot just under her ear, the curve where her neck turned to her shoulder… those patches of her had smelled just like this, only better, because there had always been a palpable warmth to Felicity's scent that made it unique, always clinging to her skin, but never lasting on her clothes. Oliver remembers the line he used to follow with lips and teeth, from the hollow of her throat all the way to her collarbone and lower… and lower, and suddenly it feels like the cruelest thing in the world that he can't walk up to her and do it again. The impulse is so strong that it leaves Oliver reeling: for control, for steadiness but there is none to be found, usually.

He clenches his jaw and tightens his fist around the stupidly soft sweater before he puts it down on the back of her chair… and then takes a second to smooth it out the way she had left it (and maybe because he feels foolishly guilty that he tossed it). One deep breath and he finds his calm center, another and he remembers to pull out from within his jacket the file he had put together for her. he punches one of his arrows through it, nailing it to the wall just behind her desk.

He doesn't wait around for Felicity to find it. It would be stupid to do that, in the state he is in.

But even as he ziplines his way down from the top of Palmer Technologies, Oliver can see her in his head as if he is there with her. he sees her come in, saying hello to Rudolf the Blowfish and Nemo the Clown, tapping the aquarium as she walks. She will probably turn the lights on and say something along the lines of 'Ok, not creepy at all' and then she'll see his little gift there on her wall.

He heard her as clearly as if he were standing right next to her.

'Ooh, frack.'

He remembers how, on the island, he used to sit down sometimes on the roots of some tree, stare up at the night sky and imagine her there beside him, and he'd have whole conversations with her ghost… and miss her with a soul-crushing ache that used to bring tears to his eyes. In time he had stopped thinking about his family, stopped remembering who Oliver Queen had been before he dipped his hands in blood and death… but for some reason (he'd always thought it was to punish himself), he had always kept her ghost, and every other night it was to her he confessed. 'I killed a man today with my bare hands. I had to torture a man to death, he wouldn't talk; I shot someone from a rooftop, half a mile away without even knowing what he'd done to deserve it; I saw a kid die today, couldn't stop it; I thieve, I blackmail, kill for little good reason now, it's so much easier; I help people buy and sell people, I… I saw girl being raped, didn't do anything. She had black hair, just like you.'

He stopped talking to her after that. He'd imagine her sitting in front of him, and he'd stare at her in silence, anchoring him to a life and a person (Oliver Queen? Who was he before this?) that he had almost forgotten completely. Eventually, he stopped trying to imagine her there. He couldn't come up with a reason for her to be in his vicinity anymore, even if she was just his imagination.

And now he is back, and is still stuck having conversations with her in his head, because though Felicity is literally just an arm's length from him, he might as well never have left the Island, or Hong Kong, or Russia… He is still very much in love with her and the memory of her both; clinging to with what she meant to him a lifetime ago and hungry for who she is now. He wants, but is ashamed of it. He could be in the same room with her and still miss her as if he were half a world away, because Oliver knows himself well enough to know that anything short of 'everything' from her is never going to feel like enough… just as he knows that there is nothing he could do to ever remotely be a man that would be worthy of having that chance.