(A/N: This totally got away from me and has only a little Olicity in it (but it's good Olicity). I honestly don't know what happened. :P)
Currency—Take Your Daughter to Work Day
When Felicity came back from the seventeenth-floor vending machines with the cold can of Dr. Pepper she'd been craving, she found her chair already occupied. A young girl with a halo of frizzy black hair sat at her desk, swiveling from side to side.
"May I help you?" Felicity asked, pushing her glasses up on her nose.
The girl pushed against the desk to spin the chair violently. "Are you Necessity?"
"Am I what?" She was getting dizzy watching the girl spin.
"Necessity. That's a weird name. Is it yours?"
"Nope. My name is Felicity."
The girl wrinkled her nose. "That's weird too," she said. "What does it mean?"
"Happiness," said Felicity.
"Hmmm . . ." The girl stuck out her foot to stop spinning. "That's a lot of pressure to put on a baby."
"Tell me about it. What's your name?"
"Kiesla," said the girl.
Felicity set her Dr. Pepper on the desk. "And that's not a weird name to you?"
Kiesla shrugged. "It's just a name. My mom made it up. Names that are other words are weird, like Charity or Honor or Courage."
Felicity smiled. "Who have you met who's named Courage?"
"No one yet, but there was a boy in my kindergarten class named Majesty." She eyed the soda. "Where'd you get that?"
"Vending machine, two floors down." Felicity opened the can and took a long sip. "So are you bucking for my job or what?"
Kiesla spun the chair again. "I don't know. What's your job?"
"Executive assistant to the CEO," said Felicity. "My boss would be lost without me, so you'd have some pretty big shoes to fill."
"Your boss is Oliver Queen, right?" Kiesla asked. "The desert island guy?"
Felicity nodded, glancing through the glass walls into Oliver's office. He was focused on the man and two women sitting across from him. They were from Finance and Marketing, two parts of the business that bored Felicity to death.
"My big sister says he's hot."
Felicity choked, spitting Dr. Pepper on the edge of her desk and the front of her red top. She blotted the damp spots with her sleeve. "And—and what do you think?" she asked. It was a dumb thing to say, but half the time she had no control over what came out of her mouth anyway.
Kiesla arched a black eyebrow. "I'm ten. I think salsa is hot." She jumped up and gestured toward Felicity's chair. "You can have your spot back."
Felicity took her seat and assessed the girl standing next to her. She was wearing a bold ensemble: a blue tutu-like skirt over red-and-white-striped leggings, and her sweatshirt was pink with a rainbow-maned unicorn on it. She stumbled, leaning on the desk.
"Are you okay?" asked Felicity.
Kiesla's face paled. "Dizzy. I think I spun too much." Without preamble, she turned and threw up into the waste basket next to the desk.
Swallowing against her own gag reflex, Felicity pulled Kiesla's hair back from her face and rubbed her back while the girl retched. When she straightened up, Felicity handed her a tissue.
Kiesla wiped her mouth. "Okay, so maybe spinning was a bad idea. I already threw up once today."
"You did?"
"That's why I'm here," Kiesla admitted. "I threw up during science, so my dad had to pick me up from school."
"Yeah, I think spinning was a pretty bad idea," Felicity said. "Is that your dad in there?" She nodded toward the group in Oliver's office.
Kiesla nodded, swaying on her feet.
Felicity got up and urged Kiesla to sit in her chair again. There was nowhere in her office for guests to sit. Oliver didn't like people lingering, and Felicity hated to have anyone looking over her shoulder as she worked. She got enough of that at her night job.
"I should get your dad," she said.
"No, don't," Kiesla said weakly. She was doing her best to curl up into a ball on the chair. "He already feels bad for having to bring me here. It's a really important meeting. He stayed up all night to study his notes."
"Kiesla, you're sick. I'm sure your dad would want to take you home."
She wrapped her arms around her legs and rested her chin on her knees. She squinted at Felicity. "Let's make a trade."
"A trade?" Felicity asked.
Kiesla rolled her eyes. "You do something for me—don't get my dad—and I do something for you. What do you want me to do?"
"That's easy," said Felicity. "I want you to sit very still and try not to throw up."
"Well, duh, I'm already doing that. Think of something else." The young girl sat up. "And it better not be making paperclip chains. That's what my dad has me do when I'm hanging out in his office. He acts like it's super important for him to have all his paperclips in one long chain."
Felicity considered for a moment what a huge pain it would be if she reached for a single paperclip and pulled out a whole chain. What task could she give Kiesla to keep her busy until the meeting was over?
She shoved her tablet across the desk toward the girl. "Do you play Candy Crush?"
Kiesla rolled her eyes again, as if to say, Who doesn't? Felicity thought kids weren't supposed to get into the eye-rolling thing until they were teenagers.
"I'm stuck," said Felicity. "If you do whatever you can to get me off this level, I promise I won't pull your dad from the meeting."
"Deal," said Kiesla, pulling the tablet closer.
"I need my chair, though," Felicity pointed out. She glanced around, her gaze landing on the tall potted plant sitting on a low table near the windows. She set the planter on the floor. "You can sit here."
Kiesla hopped up on the table and sat cross-legged, resting Felicity's tablet on her lap. "What level are you on?" she asked.
"One eighty-five," Felicity replied, settling in front of her computer. She entered the password to close out her screensaver. It was that dumb Windows star field. When she was in I.T., she had a really cute Hermione Granger screensaver, but Harry Potter characters weren't professional enough for executive assistants. Or so Isabel Rochev had informed her one day when Felicity caught her snooping.
"Pretty impressive," Kiesla declared. "My sister says she knows someone who's 416 or something like that, but I think they're lying."
"It's possible." Felicity brought up Oliver's schedule in one window and started a quick search on Kiesla's father in another, just to satisfy her curiosity. "More than likely they cheated."
"How can you cheat at Candy Crush?" Kiesla asked.
"Someone who really knew what they were doing could hack the game and change the code," Felicity said.
"Why don't you just do that?"
Felicity sighed as she looked at Oliver's schedule. The meeting was set to last another hour. She wondered if she should move the trash can closer to Kiesla. Or maybe not, since it was starting to smell. Her stomach rolled, and she reached for her Dr. Pepper.
"Cheating takes all the fun out of it," she said to the girl after taking a drink. "It's not very satisfying to just change things so it's easier to win."
"And yet you're letting me play through the level for you." Kiesla skewered her with a look she'd seen before on Roy's face. This girl would be a handful in a few years.
"It's not technically cheating," Felicity said. "And it's either that or making paperclip chains. Either one is a weird currency."
Kiesla tapped on the tablet. "What's all this stuff about the Arrow?" she asked. "Are you an Arrow fangirl like my sister is?"
Felicity managed to swallow this time instead of spitting out her drink. "There are Arrow fangirls?" she asked.
"Oh, yeah," said Kiesla. "My sister and her friends. They wear green a lot and make googly eyes over that stupid police sketch. It's so dumb—you can't even see his face in that, just his hood and his chin. What's so great about his chin?"
"He does have a really excellent jaw line," Felicity murmured.
Somewhere a throat cleared. The sound—was it coming from her desk? Felicity checked her computer, but she always kept the speaker volume turned low. Was Kiesla playing a video on the tablet? No, she was still going on about her sister fangirling over the Arrow. Over Oliver.
"Felicity, could you step in here a moment?" It was Oliver's voice, coming from the intercom. The intercom he didn't even know how to work. He mostly just texted her if he needed something and couldn't catch her eye through the glass walls.
"Coming, Mr. Queen." She hit the talk button to turn off the intercom, but the light stayed on. She jabbed it a few more times, but nothing happened. "Oh well. Kiesla, I'll be right back. Don't go anywhere."
The girl glanced up from the tablet and rolled her eyes. It had gone from cute to annoying, which was familiar territory, at least.
Felicity entered Oliver's office and stayed close to the door. "What can I do for you, Mr. Queen?"
"The intercom," he said, waving toward the phone on his desk. "I'm not sure how it got turned on, but it's . . . stuck. It won't turn off."
She felt the heat of a blush creeping up her neck. To cover, she stepped around his desk and leaned over the phone. She stared at it intently and jabbed a button or two. "So you heard all of that?"
"Mmhmm."
Felicity turned her attention to the phone in earnest now. No matter how many times she hit the talk button, the light would not go off. How long had it been on? How much had Oliver heard today? Did he hear when she was singing along with Imagine Dragons over her lunch break? (She could never play "Radioactive" without doing that gasp and exhale.) Did he hear when she totally sassed him behind his back after he'd asked her to make dinner reservations for him and Thea? Not to mention the whole conversation with Kiesla. Arrow fangirls. She shook her head.
"How long?" she dared to ask.
"A while," was all he would say, but when she glanced over at him, he was doing that head-tilting thing and the corners of his mouth tugged upward.
The intercom still wouldn't turn off. Panicking now as she thought of everything she'd said to herself or to Diggle that morning, Felicity just started punching random buttons. She looked up. Oliver was smiling now, and the women he'd been meeting with were looking at her with raised eyebrows. Kiesla's father only stared down at his notes.
"It's off now," she said, pointing at the light.
"Thank you, Miss Smoak," Oliver said as she stepped away from his desk. Then, in a murmur so low she almost missed it, "I really do have an excellent jaw line."
She stumbled as she headed toward the door. Back in her own office, she checked the phone to see if the intercom light was off there too. It was. She could feel Kiesla's eyes on her and looked up. The girl had commandeered her Dr. Pepper.
"He likes you," Kiesla said. "He stared at your butt the whole time you were leaning over his desk."
Felicity's face was on fire. She felt as if she needed to make another visit to the break room and just stick her whole head in the freezer.
"But he has some stiff competition, because it's pretty obvious you're into the Arrow too." Kiesla waved the tablet around.
More throat-clearing. Felicity stared at the phone.
"Felicity, the light is off," Oliver's voice said through the speaker, "but the intercom is still on somehow."
In desperation, she picked up the receiver and whacked it against the base a few times. "Can you hear me now?" she asked, glancing up. Oliver shook his head. She looked at the cracked panel on the phone and sighed. "This is why we can't have nice things."