Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
T.S. Eliot
Oliver jolts awake and for one short moment he doesn't know why. But then the phone rings again - a ridiculous song about china dolls in bullpens that used to make his eyebrow twitch in annoyance, (because there was no way to change it!) - and he sprints from the bed before he's even fully aware of anything else.
It has to be past three in the morning. Why would she be calling?
A thousand scenarios, like doors banging open at the same time, whirlwind through Oliver's head and make his blood run cold as he crosses those three steps that separate his cot from the bench where he'd left his phone. (only one of them is not as bloody as the others and that one does not in fact scare Oliver any less)
"Felicity?"
Only silence answers him.
When he says her name the second time it's barely above a whisper. He listens intently, for anything, phone crammed so hard against his ear it almost hurts.
He's had Felicity's voice in his ear, guiding him, every night for more than two years. Being silent with him as they wait a target out. He knows the sound of her steady breathing, when she's biting her lip on the other side of the coms, counting back from three before she says anything, so that she doesn't distract him. He knows what she sounds like. And yet, right now it feels as if he's never had her silence on the end of the line.
It doesn't matter. He's already moving.
Maybe it's his imagination. Maybe it really is her raspy breathing he hears. Oliver can't really tell. The rush of blood in his ears deafens him to anything but his heartbeat.
He doesn't bother to change out of his sweatpants – just throws on a T-shirt, socks and shoes, hides a glock in his jacket and pats it down to make sure his hidden knives are already there as he takes the stairs of the lair two by two. She's made it easy to access the app on his phone that tracks all their phones' locations. All Oliver has to do is click the smiley-face and it tells him Felicity is currently at home, the red dot that is supposed to be her phone, unmoving in her room.
Felicity's line is still open in the Bluetooth in his ear as he calls Digg through the other phone.
John picks up in the second ring.
"We have a situation," Oliver says without preamble."Felicity called me. The line's open, but she's not saying anything. I'm on my way to her place."
He can hear John get up and start to dress. "I'm calling Roy."
"Sara too." Oliver adds, the bike roaring to life and bursting forward like a bullet out of gun. It might be nothing, but it might be something and he's not taking any chances. "Tell her to send Laurel in the Lair in case we need someone manning the coms and tracing locations."
It's simple logic really, his brain reaches for it without his permission at all: just because Felicity's phone is in her apartment it doesn't mean is there too. …The thought makes Oliver feel like he is moments away from bursting out of his own skin and at the same time, as if he's moving like jello, despite the fact that he was zinging through traffic at 100 miles an hour.
"Copy that. Meet you there in ten. Keep the coms open." Jon says. And then, a bit more calmly. "And see that you get there in one piece, Oliver."
Oliver just grits his teeth, trapping words behind them. He focuses on driving, speeding through the city and trying to ignore the catalogue of all the horrible ways she could be bleeding right now, that his overactive brain is trying to shove at him.
He uses the emergency brake to stop the bike and feels the momentum of the fast deceleration trying to slam him forward. It's as much braking as parking and at this point Oliver doesn't much care.
Her windows are pitch black and it's not fucking reassuring in the least.
"Five minutes out." Digg reminds him quietly. Oliver doesn't answer. He feels his insides disappear and then come back filled with lead when he gently turns the handle of her front door - and it opens without the minimal resistance.
His breath leaves him in a rush. A familiar tension starts gathering along his muscles, coiling them like springs as he slips inside Felicity's home like a thief, as silent as the rest of the silvery shadows her house is swimming in. The signs of struggle are everywhere, they scream at him. He takes it all in in one quick, practiced glance: the dent on her kitchen's drywall, the mess that cuts a path right to the smashed coffee table in her living room. (He'd watched from her threshold, despondent but silent, as Digg taught her how to tape that tiny Smith & Wesson 9 mm on its underside two months ago)
His nostrils flare with barely suppressed rage. (Beneath it, fear coils in tight)
The next slow breath he takes is deliberate, a grasp for the last strands of his calm. It becomes an exercise in cold-bloodedness to keep still and listen for movement.
Nothing comes back at him.
Everything in there is painted in different shades of grey - an illusion. The quiet feels like one too: like it's holding a secret tight within its breast. His heart thunders behind his own breastbone in answer. His senses adjust seamlessly, his whole body finding the familiar rhythm within the constraints of the high pressure. He'd palmed the glock the moment he stepped in, done so without even consciously thinking about it. It's cold metal makes his fingers twitch, but still as much an extension of his arm as a bow and arrow.
Silent steps take him through the living area, bent on checking everywhere.
He finds her in her room.
(between one heartbeat and another, everything he's been holding back ever since he got that absent call slams into him like a battering ram and for a moment it's hard to breathe).
She's on her own bed, limbs askew. There is zero chance of her falling asleep like that on her own: it's a horrible angle for her neck. She'll complain about it for days. (She will!) Three darkening blotches stain her tank top around her abdomen and Oliver knows (knowledge like claws in the dark, the shade of blood by any light, and knows that at night it looks as black as tar.) The low glow from her phone give her face a bluish hue that makes her seem like she's three feet underwater. His fingers shake when he reaches for her, (please…please pleaseplea…)hand brushing a stray curl from her face (finds,feelsthe immediate warmth of her cheek that, to someone who knows well the cold stillness of corpses, whispers fiercely 'alive, alive'), searching for her pulse.
Her quick heartbeat sings beneath his fingers. The relief is a true uncoiling weight from his shoulders.
There are no dark puddles on the bed; there were none in the living room either. That too lets him breathe easier.
But he doesn't know yet.
Oliver steps away to check the rest of her house for surprise lurkers. There's a whole hive buzzing under his skin and Oliver feels like he's fighting gravity every moment he spends making sure they are alone.
Once he's sure her apartment is empty and there's no assailant waiting to jump from the shadows and kill them both, Oliver narrows the distance between himself and Felicity faster than he's ever moved. He stops short on the edge of her bed to cup her face in both hands. (Not a single muscle in her face responds.) Gently, almost afraid t really touch her, he feels her head, searching for the wound to match that cracking on her drywall.
There it is, the tender swell.
Oliver grits his teeth against the screaming rage that is starting to burn in his veins.
"Digg, I got her." He says instead, voice so rough it surprises even himself.
"Thank god." John's relief is so intense Oliver can perceive it by the tone of those two words alone. "Is she hurt?"
Gently, Oliver lifts her tank top to get a better look at her wounds. He has to swallow the lump in his throat to talk.
"Three puncture marks on her abdomen. She's unconscious." Felicity, unconscious. So still and silent. Unnatural. She moves and mumbles even in her sleep. "Her pulse is going a bit fast and… and she's a little too warm."
His relief dies the quickest of deaths: barely there to let him breathe before it vanishes.
This is too orchestrated. The whole thing feels like a set scene someone wanted him to walk on. The call, the phone, Felicity in her own bed.
What is this?
Oliver sits down close to her, slips one arm under her shoulders and angles Felicity's head with the other so that it rests right at the crook of his neck, where he can feel her every breath against his skin. Summer has barely passed - its heat still lingers, but Oliver wraps her in the blanket he finds at the foot of the bed nonetheless. Once he's sure she won't be chilly (she hates being cold. The only thing she liked about going to Russia last year was the cute hat she bought.) He sneaks his other arm beneath her knees and lifts her gently, trying to jostle her as little as possible.
"Apartment's clear, but I still want Sara and Roy to check the perimeter."
"Got it." It's Roy that answers him this time.
"Any hint to what we're looking for?" Sara asks, and the fact that she's out there watching out for them right now gives Oliver a little bit of calm he desperately needs right now.
It scratches at him, that he doesn't know the answer to her question.
"Anything that seems suspicious." Oliver says instead.
He hears it when Digg parks his car right outside Felicity's house. John opens the passenger door and Oliver gets in carefully, Felicity nestled close to his chest.
"Hospital?"
Oliver meets the other man's eyes in the mirror.
"Foundry is on the way. We stop there first."
Digg frowns, but doesn't hesitate or slow down. "What are you thinking?"
Oliver's thinking a thousand things. Peripheral thoughts keep brushing by him, feather light and shallow, as he keeps counting the beats of her heart, hand wrapped around her left wrist. (her pulse is strong, but erratic). She feels warm… too warm? Oliver can't tell.
"I'm thinking doing our own bloodwork on her at the Foundry would be faster." Oliver says tightly, considering the options.
Digg's eyes when they meet his in the mirror are hard, his frown deep.
"Poison?"
Oliver grits his teeth, lips pressed into a thin line. His nod is as stiff as the line of his shoulders. He feels the car accelerate, slowly, but steadily. Digg drives smoother than he ever has and for once Oliver's grateful for the late hour, because the streets are so lifeless.
"Those island herbs would come in handy right about now." Digg suggests, voice tightly controlled.
"Yeah." He'd been thinking that too.
Those herbs kept him from dying of curare poisoning and vertigo overdose, among other things. They counteracted the effects of Tibetan pit viper poison.
'More magical than a fairy godmother'. That's what Felicity said about them.
They better be!
Oliver looks down Felicity's face against his shoulder. He carefully untangles her hair from the askew bun, smoothes the curls down, away from her face. He adjusts her head a bit higher on his shoulder to take away the strain from her neck… and the moment after feels stupid.
She's unconscious - she won't know!
Except she will, after.
She's so pale…
His fingers flex around her wrist. A fine tremor shakes them but Oliver refuses to acknowledge why and keeps counting.
It'll be fine.
He says that to himself over. Sometimes, in his head, the words come back to him, like an echo. Sometimes like a scream.
She's gonna be fine.
oOo
Felicity wakes up on the med-table of the lair, wrapped in her own green and blue blanket, choking on the ninth sip of the distilled island-herbs antitoxin that Oliver is carefully trying to pour down her throat.
He immediately sets the glass down, helping her turn her face to the side as she coughs. She flinches at the light (Dig moves immediately to turn off the ones right over her head), bites her lip to trap a groan when she's forced to move.
With most of the lights off, her face is a play of shadows, but when Felicity turns to look at him, he can see the shaking panic etched in every line of her expression as clear as if she was screaming it. Her breathing picks up, fast and shallow and Oliver leans down just a little bit (enough to be close, to remind her she's safe, but not enough to for her to feel stifled), one hand soothing a steady rhythm up and down her arm over the blanket.
"Hey, it's ok." Oliver says trying to keep his voice low and smooth. "You're ok. You're safe."
Felicity hisses and curls in a tighter ball, but her hand wraps around his wrist, nails digging in as she draws one sharp breath after another. She shakes her head just a little bit, blinking rapidly the way she does when she doesn't want to let tears fall, and Oliver reaches for her face with the hand she isn't sinking her nails into. He just means to untangle the loose curls falling in her eyes but then Felicity closes her eyes and leans in with an almost silent sob, using his palm as a pillow between her head and the med table, as a crinkle forms between her eyebrows.
She's trying so hard to just breathe. Oliver knows the feeling.
"Deep breath, and then hold it." He rends her, voice low enough for the words to stay trapped between them. He counts backwards from five for her (and three… two… one…) the first time, and then exhales. Felicity does the same, eyes closed and eyebrows pulled tight in concentration.
He hasn't seen her hyperventilating like this ever since that night with Slade. They'd taken long deep breaths together then too, until their hearts stopped trying to hammer out of their chests.
It's about ten minutes before she can take a breath and actually have it fill her lungs. Once she can do that, she opens her eyes and blinks at him before squinting just a little bit, trying to see him clearly.
Oliver takes out her glasses from where he'd pocketed them earlier in her apartment. Her bottom lip shakes when he helps her put them on, before she bites it to make it stop.
"How…" her voice breaks. She doesn't have to finish the question.
Oliver licks his lips, hesitates. Doesn't really want to remind her of what happened.
"Whoever it was, called me from your phone, after. Left the line open."
Confusion clouds her face as she looks between him and John.
"We think you were injected with something." Digg adds.
Felicity's frowns deepens, her lips thin as she presses them together tighter. She tries to sit up and groans. Doesn't give up. John tells her not to move, but she just shakes her head at him, so he ends up helping her. The effort of sitting up robs her even of that small amount of color her face had gained since Oliver started feeding her the antitoxin.
Oliver grits his teeth harder, trapping the piling words behind them. This isn't about him. This is about Felicity doing whatever she has to do to feel in control of her surroundings again – Oliver has been on that table enough times to know that.
Doest really make it any easier to accept though.
He watches in silence as she unwraps the blanket from her shoulders and lifts up her tank top to look at the bandages John taped on her abdomen, where her shallow wounds are.
Her gaze is vacant when she looks up. The ripples of her shellshock travel from her to him, squeezing Oliver's lungs against a ribcage suddenly too small to accommodate them.
"We'll have your bloodwork in a few." John reassures her gently, pulling the blanket over her shoulders again and stepping back. Oliver hands her the glass of antitoxins, helps her wrap her hand around it. Neither of them steps too close, the distance between them – the space - a deliberate reassurance.
Felicity nods slowly, licks her lips.
Both Oliver and John wait a beat before asking what they want to know. Enough for Felicity to take a whiff off the clear liquid in the glass and scrunch up her nose.
"This smells awful." she says, her voice rough around the edges.
"It'll taste worse." Oliver warns. "You'll have to drink all of it."
Felicity purses her lips into a half-hearted moue, but takes a gulp anyway. Her whole face scrunches up and she smacks her lips as if she just took a gulp of lemon juice.
"Oh, that's gross." She groans, making a sour face. It's almost enough to make Oliver and Digg smile. Almost.
"How do you feel?" Oliver asks her. "Headache? Dizziness?"
Felicity takes a breath, winces. "Both."
Her hand reaches up to touch the side of her head. Oliver wraps his fingers around hers before she makes contact.
"You have a head wound." He explains, trying to focus on her and push his own feelings back. "Again. If you didn't have a concussion before, you certainly do now. As soon as you finish drinking the antitoxin, we're going to the Hospital."
She nods, and the fact that she doesn't protest tells Oliver more than her words ever could.
"Felicity…" John begins.
She shakes her head before his question is even out. "I don't know who it was. His face was covered."
Oliver's spine straightens. He tries to contain the itch beneath his skin. "So we're looking for a man."
Felicity's frown deepens.
"I think so. It's blurry, I don't really…" Felicity shakes her head as if to clear it, but it just makes it throb worse. She settles for taking another gulp of the antitoxin. It makes her eyes water and her stomach churn.
The hand wrapped around the glass shakes and Oliver takes it from her before she drops it.
"Oh god…" The words come out laced in a whimper, panic just at its heels. "I think I'm gonna throw up."
"Try not to." Oliver says urgently, just as Digg sets a deep bowl in her hands. The herbs need to stay in her system to counteract whatever she was injected with, otherwise it's all for nothing. Felicity grits her teeth, shakes her head minutely.
A moment later she bows her head over the bowl and empties the contents of her stomach in it.
Oliver bites back a curse and holds her hair back from her face. He can feel the tremors running up and down her back, shaking her like a life, and it's all he can do not to flinch. He doesn't dare move because he's not sure whether he'll flinch away from her or not and he doesn't want to find out.
It's strange how much pain he can stand, and yet the thought of hers, being in the vicinity of it, shoves at him like this, leaving him grasping for his equilibrium.
The computers beep and Oliver and Digg share a quick look, before John hurries to check the results.
"I'm sorry." Felicity moans, without looking up and Oliver can tell that this time it's tears that are thickening her voice.
"Don't be." Oliver says immediately.
He all the things inside him that have been rattling loose and that don't allow him to sound as reassuring as he wants to for her. But talking feels like biting off pieces of iron right now and he doesn't know how to fix it. So he tries to translate gentleness in the way he helps her straighten up, even though her face twists a little bit in pain as she moves. He hands her a napkin, a bottle of water. Takes the bowl from her and sets it down (but not too far). He stays close enough to catch her if she wavers enough to tip over and watches silently as she washes out her mouth, takes a few deep breaths and rubs away the tears with a shaking hand.
"We'll take the antidote with us." Oliver says as Felicity wraps her blanket back around her shoulders. The way she's shivering makes him think about getting his grey coarse one too. "We have to go now, ok?"
Felicity nods.
It's then that Digg steps into their line of vision. Oliver can tell from the sheer look on his friend's face that things are about to get worse.
"What?" he asks.
"There's no ID on the substance she was injected with. It doesn't match anything in any database." John says, his face forcefully blank.
"That's impossible." She mumbles as she reaches for her tablet. Digg holds it in front of her. Oliver looks down, understands nothing of the sequential numbers, so he looks back up – just in time to see Felicity's confusion melt into a look of backbreaking fear.
"What?" he asks, reaching out for her and then changing his mind, hand falling stiffly at his side, fingers curling against his palm in a tight fist.
Felicity gulps heavily. She was hurting before, feeling like… well like someone just beat the crap out of her. But now it's different.
Now her heartbeats are getting erratic again and her hands are sweating and she's starting to feel like she is made of water. All that is keeping her liquid insides contained is a thin layer of fragile skin. The most flimsy construction ever.
"This isn't…" her voice cracks. It's as if her tongue is going to stick to its roof and she'll never speak again. Licking her lips doesn't help much.
She hates how smart she is sometimes. Because her brain just jumped the distance and this mystery unraveled in front of her the moment she pulled at the first string she was able to get her hands on. It makes her wonder how people who don't always understand things feel. Do they feel safer?
"There's no match because this isn't a toxin. It's not poison." Felicity explains, sounding steadier than she feels. She looks at both John and Oliver in the eyes and feels like saying 'sorry'. "It's a virus."