Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
From prayers to broken stone.
The moment they steps in, Felicity's eyes latch on to them and within that first moment there is no way for her to hide that fear she'd been swimming in. But then she blinks and the surprise that attaches itself to her relief hurts just as much.
She's propped on the bed, hair pulled back in a braid, and covered from wrists and toes to her neck, wrapped in a white onesie made her crack a joke earlier (he was separated from her by a glass wall and couldn't hear, but he knows, because it made Barry smile and that time it reached his eyes). It's supposed to keep her body-temperature stable, so she hadn't protested, but Oliver knows it's bothering her by the way her hands kept fluttering to her throat. (He's only seen her wearing a turtleneck once and she'd fiddled with the neckline the whole time.) There are icepacks around her head too and though its dark Oliver knows the exact shade of her pale face and of the circles under her eyes.
Oliver takes her in as he counts the steps from the door to her bed (five) and hovers. Close, but not close enough, as Digg walks on and settles a chair close by her bed.
"Huh. I bet I look better than you two do right now." She says around a smile that is so shaky it just makes Oliver's eyes sting.
Digg huffs. "Wouldn't count on it."
Oliver looks at him so quickly he almost gives himself whiplash. Felicity snorts though, that draws his eyes back to her.
"I know, right! I look like I did my makeup backwards." She says with a grimace of distaste.
"Pretty close." Digg nods as he sits down and Felicity huffs out a sound that was supposed to be a laugh, maybe, but then choked along the way.
"That's rude!" She protests, without heat.
Digg shrugs. "You shouldn't have laughed, then."
Oliver stands there, feeling cold and apart, without knowing what to do with himself, and watches Felicity narrow her eyes at John with a small smile.
It makes him wonder how they do it. How can they, even now, find some kind of steady ground beneath their feet trough the familiar, while Oliver feels like he's endlessly falling?
Her eyes settle on him and whatever she seems on his face makes her sober immediately. That's when Oliver knows, without a measure of doubt that she's as awake in this as she is in everything else. Whatever sliver of pretence there is left in her, it's there for their sake, not hers.
"So you two are definitely in the clear?"
Oliver doesn't move. Can't. Digg nods for both of them.
"Ok. That's good. Any idea who's behind this?"
"Sara has a lead." Digg answers. It's like he knows that Oliver left coherence at the door. "You sound better."
Felicity looks like the words brush her by for a moment, but then nods.
(…and Oliver wants to tell her that he's going to tear whoever did this to her into pieces and make it last months. That if there was ever a reason why he's had to withstand horrors and learn to become one, maybe he's finally found it. Maybe it was all so that he could come to this moment prepared for knowing how to warp himself into someone's nightmare)
(…he doesn't say anything. He knows how to keep his violence to himself.)
"Yeah. Dehydration, the bump on the head, some weird neural thing Caitlin explained. Not a good combination, overall. It made me fuzzier than the Digg's aspirin."
Weird neural thing…
Oliver stares hard at the side of her face. She didn't look either of them in the eye when she said that - that would have been one tell. The other is time and the knowledge it brings. There are 206 bones in an adult's body. Felicity knows the names of 183 of them by heart, because 'there was a month I wanted to be a doctor back when I was a fifth grader'.
That she's choosing to fall back to vagaries for this, when she almost never does for anything else, tells Oliver a whole lot more than Felicity seems to be willing to share.
"And that's… is that…" Oliver stops; doesn't really know how to ask what he wants to know. As usual, Felicity doesn't really need him to.
"No, that's not supposed to happen again. Or so Caitlin said." she fidgets a little with the edge of the thin blanket covering her. "That was… not fun, no."
Oliver tries to imagine it, how it must have felt for Felicity to lose her ability to control her own thoughts. Her mind is her most powerful weapon, so Oliver thinks about losing his hands, or his eyes, his senses. He recalls his first days on the island, the chilling terror that used to freeze his stomach. The sense disorientation, the blind panic of when he realized what it meant to be at someone else's mercy in a place where mercy had dried out long ago. (the sense of loss, that hollow shame he'd felt as he continuously scattered pieces of self along the way, exchanging them for one more breath.)
'Not fun' is a whole new level of understatement, all of a sudden.
"Are you…" Oliver purses his lips against t words. Are you ok?! Really? He clears his throat and tries again. "How do you feel?"
Felicity takes on long shuddering breath.
"Ok, mostly. Cold?"
She's flirting with 104 degrees of fever - of course she will get cold flashes. That's the least of her problems and she knows it. Oliver grabs the bars at the foot of her bed (so hard he feels his bones protest) and hangs his head.
"Felicity."
"What, I am!" She insists, only with t frailest hint of defensiveness. "I can barely feel my toes."
And it comes out of her mouth so honestly that Oliver can't stand it. That small discomfort is nothing, but in that moment it overwhelms his whole word and bursts through the seams of it. It's what finally moves him closer through the air of this room that weights a hundred pounds over his shoulders, and sits right on the foot of her bed. Finds the shape of her feet over the blanket and wraps them in his hands (she jumps a little, surprised, then relaxes). He watches his own hands instead of her face as he tries to make the heat of his skin seep through and warm her tiny toes.
"Better?"
Oliver looks up to see Felicity biting her lip, face scrunched up with effort, eyes shiny. She nods and turns her eyes to the ceiling, blinking fast. A moment later she turns to the side facing Digg, and coils inwards, bringing her knees close to her chest, flinching a little when her head settles further into the cold pack against her temple. Both Oliver and Digg pretend not to notice the way she surreptitiously brushes her fingers over the bridge of her nose, where a tear had slipped.
oOo
Felicity feels herself floating between thick, unnatural sleep and achy consciousness. Neither grips her fully and it's a lot like having an anxiety attack in the middle of the night, wondering why you're not sleeping, even though every bone in your body is twice as heavy and the bed is like a giant marshmallow you're sinking into. Whenever she does open her eyes, every movement anyone makes feels like a stab through them. She struggles to get a hold of herself enough to break free… but she's hurting in ways that Felicity didn't even know her body could hurt.
She's pretty sure she's on some kind of happy drug though, because there is a vague pulling sensation from her abdomen but mostly she just can't feel a thing on that whole area down there. She smells like a pharmacy too and it makes her want to hurl, but there's nothing left in her stomach to throw up anyway. Sometimes she can't feel whole sections of her body and other times it's like she is perversely aware of every line of muscle skin tissue she is made of. She doesn't know how to read these sensations: they come at her like words in a different language.
And she's so cold too. She can't stop shivering even though she stopped asking for blankets a while ago. Can't feel her fingers and toes either… but Oliver is being sweet enough to break her heart, (such a surprise, that he could be that too) so Felicity doesn't say anything about that anymore. (She doubts it escapes him that she's shivering – at some point her teeth start clattering.)
She is so going to hate being cold from now on! Felicity's never really liked winter anyway, for a lot of reasons, but now the cold it's just going to remind her of wet eels.
She starts giggling at the thought and it halfway turns into a cough but it doesn't manage to wipe the smile off her face.
"What's so funny?"
She looks over to her side where John is leaning closer to her from seat that looks way too small for the breadth of his shoulders, and she smiles.
"I know what being a fish feels like now." She murmurs. Gross and shivery – that's how it must feel.
Though she doubts being a fish feels any kind of way to the fishes…
John manages to express a disproportionate amount of emotion through just a small twitch of his eyebrows, Felicity notices. He can look amused, disbelieving with a side of nonplused, by just twitching his left brow - while his right empathetically tells her from high on his forehead to 'get it together'.
Digg's left eyebrow is way judgier than his right one, now that Felicity thinks about it. The thought makes her giggle some more.
Digg's right eyebrow is Miley Cyrus.
This time she really wants to laugh, but instead Felicity rolls her face in her pillow, pushing the icepack away (unleashing a fraction of her frustration on it and yet, it's so satisfying when she hears it smack on the ground!) and bites her lip so hard she tastes blood.
The sting distracts her enough that she's able to keep in the mix of emotions curdling in her stomach mostly silent.
There is no thought ridiculous enough that will be able to distract her from how her heart is beating so fast and how she can't seem to control her breathing sometimes. Nothing that can really dull her fear… or that pressing thought at the back of her head that… that this is really it. It seems so strange. The possibility of dying. She'd never considered it before.
Well that's a lie. Of course she had. Multiple times. It really does speak to how her life has changed in the past 2 years. But Felicity has never had quite so much time on her hands to feel death's chilling breath against her neck. Never been so helpless against it. Without a plan, a strategy, adrenaline to dull the edge of the insanely dangerous risks she took. And the need to make them worth it anyway, because there were thousands of lives hanging in the balance of her being brave enough. This is nothing like that. Nothing is hanging in the balance but her this time, and this one time is the one Felicity can't do anything about it. (she'd almost started crying again when she'd tried to type on her phone and couldn't hit the buttons she wanted). She might as well be tied on this stupid hard bed.
The thought makes Felicity want to set it on fire. She can't do that either though. She probably would kiss the pavement right now if she tried getting up.
Angry tears make her even angrier really, because she can't afford them, so she has to hide them. (She's spent a lifetime believing it was a luxury she couldn't afford, dwelling in her fears. It's always helped her get through them, but she never really gets over them.)
I'm so tired…
The next coughing fit she has leaves tiny red dots on her pillow. And that's when it really downs on her: She's not just tired, is she? That's the wrong word. …She's dying.
oOo
"Can't you make them leave, Caitlin?"
Caitlin looks up from where she is checking the progress of Felicity's vitals, to meet the other girl's look.
The light is kept low because Felicity is hypersensitive to both light and sound, as well as touch, but Caitlin can still see the pleading look in Felicity's eyes, that desperation that is not quite there when Mister Diggle and Oliver Queen are in the same room with her.
Caitlin thinks back at how neither of the men had moved away from her bedside for a moment since they stepped in. How they watched her when she slept, like they were both trying to determine her condition without the benefit of a scanner. She thinks at how easily she can read the anxiety on John Diggle and how Oliver Queen keeps staring into space looking completely lost. (Doctor Wells thinks he's had at least on dissociative episode so far. Caitlin takes his word for it) She really doesn't think it's the very best idea to go anywhere near the man, but she will if it's what Felicity wants.
But then again, Caitlin can't really forget that Felicity was all nerves and restless shivers until she saw both her friends coming through the Labs doors, so…
"I will if it's what you really want, Felicity." Caitlin tells her, carefully choosing her words. "You're my patient, my obligation is to you."
Felicity takes the words in with that exceptional stillness that Caitlin is starting to find unnerving.
"There's some kind of law that says you have to tell me the truth, right? As my doctor." Felicity asks, taking carefully controlled breathes between words. It's getting harder for her to breathe and Caitlin thinks they might have to intubate her soon.
"Yes there is." Caitlin shakes her head, grasps for better words. "I mean, I have the legal and professional obligation to answer all your questions to the best of my ability."
"And honestly." Felicity adds, turning those bright eyes to Caitlin's face. And she knows that it's the infection that is starting to creep up on her that causes Felicity's eyes to look so shiny, but the effect is still very… unsettling.
"Yes, of course." Caitlin says. She has a feeling she knows where this is going, so she steels herself.
"Am I dying, Cate?"
Caitlin blinks against the calmness beneath that question.
"It's possible. I don't think so, but it's a possibility. Your heart is having trouble keeping a steady rhythm, and your left lung is bruised. That's why you… before…"
"Coughed blood and freaked everyone out?"
"Yeah. That. I didn't see that one coming. Your scans looked perfectly normal."
Felicity doesn't even blink. She's still waiting. She did ask a yes or no question, after all, and situations like these are the reason why Caitlin was so eager to work in research and not with actual patients.
How are you supposed to tell someone they could stop existing in the next hour?
Caitlin doesn't have the answer to that, so she falls back to the things she knows.
"Considering all your lab results and the progression of the infection, there's 47% chance that you could die of heart failure, 30% chance of liver failure. You have a very light inflammation of the esophagus and there's a 32% chance that it could develop into an inflammation of the lungs, and if it does, there's an 85% chance that it could prove fatal. I'm going to take care that that doesn't happen." Caitlin adds firmly. "Your body is consuming a stunning amount of fluids and energy, but that's good, because it means it's fighting back."
Caitlin steps closer, takes Felicity's hand.
"I'm going to find a vaccine Felicity. You know me, I'm good at this stuff." She tries for an encouraging smile. "I found the cure for the Mirakuru didn't I?"
She'd been hoping Felicity would smile back, of even nod, but she's disappointed. She looks away, through the glass doors where Oliver Queen and John Diggle are sitting, waiting for Caitlin to be done with her checkup.
Caitlin gathers the last of her nerve. "Do you want me to tell them to stay out?" She asks, voice carefully blank.
Felicity blinks fast, takes a deep breath (tries to) and then shakes her head minutely.
"No." She says softly, still looking out to her friends. Then she says it again, and this time it sounds surer. "No."
And though Felicity gave Caitlin neither a smile nor any other sign of faith before, that one word she says while not even looking at her is as good as.
oOo
(It's not her fault, really; Caitlin Snow just doesn't know what Felicity Smoak gathering her nerve for a goodbye looks like.)
oOo
Oliver knows what it means, to have things happen too fast to feel them and slow enough to catch every little detail at the same time. The whole room gets huge and he can see every little detail of it; of her. And then everything gets small enough to fit on the eye of a needle and Oliver can feel his bones grating against the inside of his skin, trying to break through.
She gets a lot quieter, a lot more intent, after the blood-on-the-pillow incident (Oliver has no idea on what her brain is turning around… but he has an inkling; one that grows in his brain like a weed, fed by the way she looks at him). She gets paler too, her skin taking a grayish hue that scares the hell out of him.
When Felicity tells them quietly to please turn off the remaining lights because it makes her eyes hurt, Oliver has to brace himself on the bars at the end of her bed so that the doesn't fold into himself, as Digg turns off the one light that had been on – the farthest one from her bed.
The room plunges into darkness, one that is broken only by the dull lighting that comes from the monitors around her.
"You don't have to do this, you know." Felicity says in half a whisper when Oliver leans in close to press a fresh gel icepack on her forehead.
Oliver's eyebrows twitch a bit closer together. It's not exactly a frown - he's been keeping his facial expressions under such tight control that Felicity has been counting time by the number of muscle-twitches in his jaw.
"Do what?"
Her cracked lips curve into a smile that is small and sad and hollows out her eyes even more… and Oliver knows he's just been slammed into a wall. He still refuses to open his eyes and face it, though.
(He'd rather keep slamming against it, actually.)
"I know you can't stand to be here." Felicity says slowly, carefully inhaling after every two words or so, her face open and so understanding it sparksanger in him, of all things. "It's ok. I wouldn't want to be here either."
He thinks back at the way he'd felt standing outside the door, needing to run and not being able to find his feet.
"Felicity, what are you talking about?"
Felicity snorts softly.
"You still suck at lying." she says around that same hollow smile.
The expression melts off her face pretty quickly. Maybe she can tell how much it alarms him.
"You don't have to, though. Try so hard, I mean."
Oliver just looks at her, wide eyed and heart in his throat, trying to keep it all down. He doesn't even dare open his mouth. He almost jumps when he feels her hand wrapping around his wrist. Her hold is barely there, but she might as well have a grip of steel for how likely he is to move.
"It's going to be ok, Oliver."
The words flutter around him, tangential and shallow. He's stuck in this moment and nothing outside of it makes sense.
"I know." He murmurs, the words barely making it out of his numb lips.
Felicity's smile is a bit warmer this time as she tilts her head to the side, her eyebrows arching up in an eloquent and perfectly soundless 'c'mon now'.
Her fingers flex around his wrist.
Oliver has no idea what Felicity sees when she looks at him most of the time… but she has particular expressions that he's learned to recognise. Like the way she looks at him sometimes, when she thinks he's hurting; an open wound of an expression.
She's looking at him that way now.
(I'm sorry. I'm sorry I wasn't strong enough, fast enough. I'm sorry you have to watch someone else you care about die. …I'm sorry that I'm sorry. How can you quantify regret anyway? Is it every link on the chain or the spaces in between? She doesn't regret the things she did – she regrets those she didn't do.
I'm sorry I was as scared to kiss you as you were to kiss me… Maybe if she'd been braver they wouldn't be here.)
"I'm so sorry." Felicity chokes out finally, biting the words of at the end like they just burst out without her permission.
And that's it really.
He's been keeping such a careful hold of his every micro-expression but the way her voice shakes rattles everything loose and whatever was so important before doesn't matter. He doesn't remember.
He can't see anything beyond right now and the shattered look on her face.
"What?" he's leaning forward before he has any idea what he's doing. (Her cheek against his palm burns him the way ice does when you hold it too long) "What is it? What's wrong?"
(What isn't?)
"You shouldn't be here."
Her whole face is an apology and Oliver feels his heart drop straight at his feet and through the floor.
"You… you want me to go?" he doesn't mean it to sound as cracked and hurt as it does, but he left pretence behind about five sentences ago.
"No." Felicity answers immediately. Strong. Sure. "But… I don't want you to go through this, either." Her hand slides down his wrist to curl around his frozen fingers, pulling his hand closer. "It's ok, I promise. I'm going to be fine. You can go now."
Oliver knows the feeling of the world shaking beneath the soles of his feet. He knows all the different sounds it makes when it crumbles almost a well as he knows what it feels like to fall on the broken shards of it littering the ground and just wish to sink deeper. It's not unlike being buried alive and wishing, from the most honest part of himself, to stay there. Die there.
He's breathed with these kinds of holes left in his lungs for years. It's no surprise that the echo of the shatter right now is so devastatingly familiar.
"I'm not going anywhere." Oliver says firmly, his face pulling into a harsher frown the more he understands. "And neither are you."
She doesn't really respond to that. There's some kind of amusement there in her eyes, lightening the depth of the thoughts turning in her head… but there's also a faint bitterness. Like the one he sees sometimes twisting her mouth over things she can't change.
"Well if you say so." Felicity murmurs.
It's supposed to be a joke, but it falls flat and straight on his back like an anvil.
Oliver is not exactly the best at words. He's better with actions, usually. Felicity is sometimes an exception because more often than not he looks at her and feels like he could maybe just say things, straight out of his brain. But right now trying to find words feels like trying to trap smoke between his fingers.
(In the end, he settles for hers)
"Felicity… remember what you said to me that night, when I was so convinced everything would end once I gave myself over to Slade?"
A flare of irritation lights up her eyes.
"This is not like that Oliver. I'm not giving up!" She insists and tries to tug him to his senses. (He's not the one that needs it this time, maybe that's ironic) "This is biology. There's nothing to accept or fight here."
Oliver brushes back a tiny curl stuck to her forehead.
"It felt that way for me too you know."
He watches her blink rapidly, her nostrils flaring with how hard she's trying to keep steady. It's a success, mostly – her voice barely shakes. "Like what?"
"Inevitable." Like gravity. "It wasn't though., remember?"
Felicity nods, but she doesn't look at him in the eye as she does. She doesn't agree with him, but she doesn't want to hurt him by spelling out what he's trying so hard not to admit to.
But what if it hurts more? Denial I something she's seen him roll in more than once – it has never actually made anything hurt less.
"Oliver…"
"You're not going to die." It's almost a snap. Almost. His voice is too quiet for it to be, but it comes close.
"And what if I do?" Because she's afraid of a lot, but the truth was never really on that list. She's seen what keeping it hidden away does to people. So she talks right over him, her voice wrenching his eyes to hers. Both stubborn in the same way, just different directions. "What then? …Am I going to be another one of your ghosts?"
She might as well have wrapped her hands around his throat and squeezed. She sees it too: the immediate devastation on his face. It stuns her. Felicity didn't expect this kind of open heartbreak.
Maybe she should have. After all, if there is one thing she's learned about him is that no matter how much practice he's had, Oliver never seems to get used to losing people. How that kind of childlike love can live in the same eyes that have seen (suffered and done) so much violence and darkness, is one of the reasons she… she…
Oh…
Felicity feels the realization come over her like a wave of heat. It's like dipping herself into a bath of warm water, form the tips of her toes slowly rising to her neck… and it's the first touch of warmth she's felt in hours.
It makes the bridge of her nose sting with tears she refuses to let out.
"I don't know." Oliver finally manages to say, once he was convinced that not breathing would only give him spots dancing around his vision and no better answer.
There is something that changes between them in that moment though. An almost imperceptible shift that is as subtle as a thin veil falling, in a flutter, to the ground. Oliver sees it settle in her, it looks a lot like a newfound calmness makes a bit of space for itself in her eyes. He doesn't understand what it is, what it means as Felicity curls a bit on her side, trying to bring her knees up. Struggling so hard just to find a comfortable position.
"Does that scare you? You look a bit scared right now." A smile softens her eyes, almost makes it to her mouth. She asks him then, in a small whisper. "Has anyone ever told you that it's ok to be afraid, Oliver?"
"Not in a while." He hasn't believed it in even longer. "Are you?"
It's almost too much to look into her eyes then, and see the answer carved there. He doesn't look away though, and she gives him the answer in silence, hands it to him like a secret.
"I'm trying to keep it quiet."
So fucking brave, that's just like her.
"You don't have to do that." Oliver had known she was doing it. He just hadn't known how to tell her to stop until right now. "John and I can take it Felicity."
He just wishes it sounded more convincing when he says it.
"It's my job to take care of you two though."
For the first time since he moved to the corner of the room to turn off the light, John moves. It's only then that Oliver notices he's not alone.
"We're a team, Blondie. Isn't that what you've been saying for the past 6 month?" Roy says as he steps closer to the bed, even though he seems weary of being too close. Oliver sees the panic flicker in his eyes, but the kid hides it well. "I thought the point was that we take care of each other."
Felicity jolts, then winces. It doesn't make her smile falter.
"Roy!" she eyes the bundle he's holding in front of him. "What's that?"
Roy shrugs, a bit helpless, a bit awkward. "Sara and I heard you wanted another blanket."
It's the first time since they got here that Oliver sees a real smile from her.
"Is that… is it pink? I can't tell."
Roy huffs.
"Yeah, no shit. It's like a cave in here. Yeah, it's the hottest pink I could find." Roy tries for a smirk. "Didn't know you had patented that shade."
Felicity's little laugh is soaked in tears. That blanket doesn't really keep her any warmer but she curls her fingers around it anyway and holds on tight. It won't keep her any safer either, but that's not the point.
oOo
Things get a bit strange after that. Roy being there teases Felicity into talking some more. He stops once Felicity starts giving taking shallower breaths and giving shorter answers.
The longer it takes for Felicity to say something, the steeper is the angle of the world's tilt for Oliver.
He'd been so adamant about not thinking about the word, even though the worst had been pressing against his skull ever since he got that call. But now that she tapped his fear on the shoulder, Oliver has been staring at it in the eye without interruption and it starts feeling a bit like ripping down the middle slowly, one stitch after another. Some parts of him are there with her, and the rest of him is some place else, where this can happen and he doesn't have to feel it. A place where he can look at her in that bed, surrounded by wires that seem to be choking the life out of her as much as keeping her alive, and able to think 'She's fine. She's gonna be fine' without having the thought burn. …Without having to be afraid of time.
He doesn't think about anything. Not her name, not even his own (especially not the way she starts saying it, and how it feels like she's digging her tiny birdlike fingers in his chest and pulling at whatever's left there) (Take it, take it! Live, breathe. I don't need it. I'm here. It's fine); not the time or that there is a world outside that room. Not John there beside them, or Sara, or Roy, or her mother…
He cracks open like an egg meeting the pavement when she asks him… or was it John? – to call her mother, after.
After…
Felicity looks at the storm in the eye and calls it by its name, but Oliver, he can't even think about it.
There is not going to be an after. After what?
Maybe he nodded, maybe he didn't, he doesn't remember. He knows he'd do anything she asked him to, so he probably did. The details of memories keep escaping him, though. One moment he's there by her side, the next he's by the door, and he doesn't know what happened in between.
The only thing that is scorched in his brain, the one thing he can't avoid are her eyes, wide and scared, looking back at him. That's his nightmares staring at him in the face.
He can't escape it, but he can't really be there for her either.
So he pretends. Just like she'd said he would, he plays the-dead-with-living-eyes for her, as he has for others before her. Gives her what she needs because she needs it and because he's been counting her breaths backwards ever since this started. Something huge looms over him, like a building falling and not moving away from the debris, he can't. So he stands there waiting, with her, and gives her the kind of face she needs. (Can she tell? The thought is like a piece of glass under his fingernails. She always could see the discrepancies. She learned to read him. One mask after another, faces he thought others needed to see in him… and her pursed lips whenever he pulled it off too stiffly. Ice-veined liar, dead man walking. He is lying now too. Does she know? Her words come back at him. 'You can go now.'
Of course she knows.)
It's the only way to survive. Playing dead, one heartbeat after another is how you make it through torture, through winter. Through blood and bone staining the world red with her every raspy breath until her eyes close, for another ten minutes and he can let the stitches holding his numb face together loosen when nobody's looking.
oOo
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends...
They all begin to understand that they haven't even brushed against the bad part of all this when Felicity starts being in real pain.
She's been so quiet for so long… Oliver's not really sure he even knew the sound of her screaming, outside his nightmares. But then he hears it with his eyes wide open and his empty stomach surges like it has just received evacuation orders from his spleen.
She wakes suddenly, a sob catching in her throat and by the time Caitlin sedates, her she has tears running down her face.
It's touch and go with her after that.
Technically it doesn't last even an hour, but it feels like it goes on forever. She's coherent enough to be afraid and misty enough that she doesn't really remember why she should hide it.
Or maybe she just doesn't care. Maybe she's forgotten why she's even there. That's what Oliver thinks when Felicity wakes in a harsh gasp and looks around, eyes utterly blind of recognition. Her breathing speeds up, no pause, no rest and starts wiggling her way out of the bed, ripping the I.V.s from her arm harshly enough that the inside of her elbows stain red.
John is the first one by her bed to stop her, just as the doc rushes in, Wells following behind closely. He takes Felicity's hands in his to stop her from causing anymore damage to herself and she whimpers at the contact, her face twisting in pain and curling onto herself to get away from him.
John wouldn't have let her go faster is she had been an actual hot iron.
They both watch as she curls her hands over her chest and tries to back away, slips and almost falls out of bed - she would have, if John hadn't caught her.
"No!" her voice breaks on the word. She hasn't had anything to drink in about an hour, it no surprise. The surprise is the fact that she seems to be utterly oblivious as to what is happening and where she is. Caitlin tries to calm her down but Felicity protests all the way through, at one point even almost hits the doc in a defensive move that Oliver recognises.
It's around that time that Caitlin calls two other nurses to help her while Cisco tries to get all three of them out of the room. (Roy is already backing away, a look of naked terror etched on his face. John has one hand hoovering on Oliver's chest, not yet touching him, but trying to usher him out anyway) Tries, being the operative word.
Oliver's not really moving. He's looking in the direction John and Roy can't stop looking. He's watching Felicity being sedated, listening to her whimpers die down and counting all the bruises he can see in the low light, watching her face and seeing the play of shadows on it show him skulls.
Oliver blinks hard, looks away. Tries to swallow and feels his whole stomach try to come up in protest.
They explain it to him later. That she has to stay sedated. That it's either that or restrain her to the bed, because without the I.V.s that Felicity insisted on ripping out, she would develop infections, dehydration, and all kinds of things the names of which Oliver doesn't understand.
He knows he should know these things, that he should pay attention, but all that occupies his brain is the way Felicity had looked at him when he was close enough for her to see him. How her whole face had relaxed, his name curling around a sigh or pure relief.
"I'm ok now." She'd said, her movements sluggish, but determined, pupils blow wide and trying so, so hard to sound like herself. "Im fine, really. Can we go now?"
And the more he stayed silent, the more anxious she got, the more desperate. It's all there on her face.
And Oliver had forgotten, he truly had, that he really couldn't trust her in that moment. She's Felicity, the notion doesn't take easily. But she's not really herself - not the self he knows - and Oliver forgets that. Forgets that she's scared and in pain, and just wants not to be any of those things anymore. She just wants it to stop, to go some place where not everything hurts and she's not so sick and helpless and scared. Oliver can't really know all these things, so when she asks him to go home, Oliver doesn't know what to say or do, except shake.
"Please. Please, I just want to go home." her words slur a bit together and mix with tears. Even sedated she tries to set herself free, her fingers careless - they slip against her own skin.
"We can't go yet, Felicity." He tells her slowly, one hand reaching for hers. he doesn't dare touch her. The bruises from where John got a hold of her fingers earlier still blooms dark on her skin.
"Why not?"
"You need to get better first."
And Oliver doesn't know that those are the wrong words to say. He can't know. (John does - but he can't really tell him right now. He won't tell him later either. Lier will be too late and they won't serve anything.) They only make her more frantic, more desperate to get away, as if moving will somehow stop what she knows is happening.
As if it will somehow stop her from fading.
(She can feel it. The slow decay inside her body. With every movement, every shift of air in that room, it gets harder to breathe. She is burning, and she is starving, but the mere thought of feed makes her insides concave against her backbone with protest.)
"It's going to be ok Felicity. You just have to stay here for a while. Just a little while." Oliver adds. He's speaking so softly, but his voice rattles her eardrums. Felicity turns her face away. She's trusts Oliver, it's not hard to believe him when all he asks for is just a bit more time.
(He's always asking for time, one way or another. She has none more left to give.)
oOo
They said three hours.
It's 2 hours and 15 minutes before she starts screaming. John send Roy out of Felicity's room precisely 21 minutes ago. The kid has enough to feed him nightmares at night, he won't be needing this too.
It's around the mark of four when Snow admits that her body is slowly shutting down and there is nothing they can do about it. Oliver looks at them like he doesn't understand a word. John knows he does. Just as he knows that it's best not to talk to him right now.
For once he's grateful. There are no words left in him.
It's 4.12 p.m. when Felicity wakes again. She's bleary eyed and calmer than she was the last time, even though John knows that she's in pain. There's only so much sedation i can give her before it stops her heart - that's what the doc had said.
They whisper to themselves and like many times before this summer, John leaves them to it. It feels like a perversion, thinking about it like that, but it doesn't make it less true. John doesn't hear what she says to Oliver this time. (He did overhear her before. 'I want to go home' she'd said, and John had turned away and rubbed his hands on his face. He'd been surprised to feel his own wet cheeks. Do all the dying ask for home?) But then again, maybe he doesn't need to overhead. He sees the shock clear as a picture on Oliver's face, the way pain ruthlessly slashes across that frozen layer of shock and opens him like a wound.
John watches as Oliver methodically, almost detached, unhooks Felicity from the needles feeding her life, one by one and scoops her up from that bed gently, so gently, and starts walking.
By way of explanation for this (a part of John wanted to stop him, the other part wanted to go other there and help him, take their girl home), it says a lot, and loudly, that when Snow starts to protest, Wells is the one that stops her.
And John, he follows them slowly as Oliver walks to the far corner of the wide room and slides against the glass wall, sitting there on the ground with Felicity across his lap, face curled in his neck. He doesn't move or look up when John gets closer, when Sara comes running through and stops cold just outside of Felicity's room, breathing harshly and hands slapped against the glass as if she means to blast her way through and stop everything. he doesn't so much as twitch at anything. The world begins and ends in that one square foot where he is sitting on and for one moment John dares think about how the hell they are going to survive this.
oOo
He doesn't so much sit as he just falls against the glass wall and slides down with her in his lap. It's a wonder he managed to walk so far, really his knees are water. He can hardly feel his legs at all.
But he feels her weight like it's the whole world he's carrying.
The line between her lips is stained red and Oliver remembers a time when, in the middle of a city turned a battlefield, that little stain of blood just under her nose and her forehead swollen and red had seemed like the last step towards the end of all things. Back when 'Felicity' and 'dead' couldn't even be put together in the same sentence.
He can't distance himself now. How would that ever be possible: her every breath is fanning against his neck, each shallower than the last one, slower.
He's survived years drenched in brutality and had it dripping from the end of his fingertips for years more… and yet, the bloodstained line between Felicity's lips right now is the most violent thing Oliver has seen in his life.
"Where's John?"
"Im' here, Felicity."
Oliver doesn't look up at John's voice. Felicity does.
"Oh. Ok." She takes a raspy breath, her fingertips curling a little further in his T-shirt, where she's been gripping it. "Why are we stopping?"
"We're taking a minute. It's ok."
She blinks her eyes open. The intense ring of blue around her dilated pupils is all that is left of her blue eyes.
"Ok. Im tired too… So tired…" the words lose themselves between the whisper that fades in her mouth and her lips moving around it.
"You can rest now. Just close your eyes. it'll be ok." Olive knows he's the one saying the words, but he can't really feel them. Can't really feel anything. Doesn't even feel the tears slipping out - he just notices his vision is blurry for a moment and then clears.
Felicity huffs. Blinks her eyes open again and looks straight at him.
"I don't want to close my eyes. I want to keep them wide open."
Oliver feels himself nodding. "That's ok too."
Her hands move, doesn't get farther than his collar, where she curls her fingers and tugs just a little bit.
"Don't be sad, Oliver. Just… let's just stay here… for now…"
He feels it happen. Feels the beat of her heart flutter and stop at the same time as her last breath brushes the skin of his throat. Her body loosens, her hand falls from where she was gripping him before, her head rolls to the side… and thats how it all ends.
One last long breath you weren't prepared for and a body that suddenly feels so heavy in your arms… and all your insides around which she'd wrapped herself in a thousand secure strings, they rip open with the same suddenness with which she wretched herself out of existence. She takes every piece of your soul that she has managed to sink her hands into and leaves just torn and mauled pieces of meat behind and cavernous places where loss will echo into a deafening scream for years.
Notes:
All poems for this part of the story are taken from T. S. Eliot's 'The Hollow Men'
Dont hurt me *hides*