A/N: Last update for at least a week! Sorry, my sweets. But this is now over 10,000 words. How much have I written on my novel in comparison? Maybe 2000. So I need to take some time to focus on that. I really wanted to get all the drama from the auction in this chapter, but then CVS happened. :P Enjoy it, though. The drama will be in the next chapter.

Chapter 7—Tea and Sympathy and CVS

It was late enough that Felicity was creeped out as she scrambled from streetlight to streetlight, making her way toward her car. She kept reminding herself that she had a gun and she knew how to use it.

Second Avenue was close enough to be a fairly short drive but far enough out of the Glades that she didn't feel she needed to keep a death grip on her purse with one hand on the zipper. She slipped it into a parking spot one door down from the red awning, grabbed her purse, and headed for the diner.

The Lucky Fortune Diner smelled like burnt sugar and fried rice. Its interior was dimly lit, with few tables and a long counter. Detective Lance sat at the counter, midway down, a delicate handle-less in teacup in his large hand. He looked up as she approached, and indicated the stool next to his. She slid onto the round seat and hung the straps of her purse over her knee.

"Tea?" Lance pushed an empty cup toward her.

She shrugged. "Sure."

He poured from a cast-iron teapot. The liquid was light green with a sickly yellow cast to it, but steam rose in white curls from the spout and the cup, and she was cold. She'd thrown on a fleece jacket over her pajamas, and it wasn't enough to keep out the night's chill. She wrapped her hands around the cup and breathed in the steam.

"Were you serious?" Felicity finally asked him. "About the guy in the hood?"

Lance rolled his eyes. "Would I have dragged you out of bed otherwise?" He gave her clothing a pointed look and snorted.

She knew she looked ridiculous with her hot pink fleece topping off her bacon pajamas and her feet shoved into a grimy pair of green Crocs. She hoped no one looked too closely at her socks. They had lobsters all over them, lobsters in boiling pots, wearing shades and holding wineglasses.

"You said to throw on a jacket and get over here," Felicity said. "So I did. Are you going to tell me why?"

"I said I had a run-in with the hood guy. I meant it literally." Lance turned his head to show her a red mark on his cheek that was darkening into a bruise.

Felicity's hand reached out without her consent, but she quickly drew it back and took a gulp of her tea. The heat and the bitterness made her cough, and it was a few moments before she regained her composure.

"So he was confrontational," her partner continued. "Slammed me onto the hood of a cruiser and growled in my ear."

"What did he say?" she asked.

"He practically solved the damn case for us," Detective Lance said. "He somehow made the connection that the shooter's targeting these possible buyers, and he thinks he's identified the guy."

"What? How? Who is it?"

"The man in the hood says Interpol calls him Deadshot, but his real name is Floyd Lawton."

Felicity's head snapped up at the name she'd last heard fall from the lips of Oliver Queen. It took everything she had to school her features into a neutral expression.

"According to him, this Deadshot was hired by a guy named Warren Patel, and he's going to target the auction tomorrow night," Lance continued.

Another familiar name, the name tied to a computer riddled with bullet holes. She stared hard into her teacup.

"Then—and this is the best part—he asked for help," said Lance.

Felicity let her jaw drop, grateful for the distraction. "The hooded guy? What does he want?"

"He said that any one of these buyers at the auction could be a target," Lance explained. "He can't protect them all, especially not in a space that big, whatever the hell that means."

Her relief at moving her thoughts away from what Oliver Queen had said to her was gone. "The Exchange Building," she said. "That's where the auction will be held. And he's right—it's huge."

In her mind's eye, she could see the blueprints. Would they be useful? She still had the copied hard drive, but she wouldn't be able to explain how she'd gotten it.

Lance refilled his teacup. "He also mentioned the poisoned bullets, which is the only thing he said that wasn't news to me." He glanced over at her. "How come he beat you to this Deadshot guy? I thought you were some kind of savant when it came to computers."

"I'm the best," Felicity said without guile or arrogance. "But I'm also a cop, so I can only go so far without breaking the law."

Detective Lance huffed.

"I know I could have uncovered the identity of the shooter," she continued, "but it would have involved doing things anywhere from slightly shady to downright illegal." She looked up from her tea and held his gaze. "You know anything I could have found that way would be inadmissible in court. It could have sunk the case entirely."

He nodded. "I kind of figured . . . but, for the record, could you have done it?"

"Absolutely," she declared.

The sudden silence between them allowed her fear to rush back in, fear of her own slightly shady (and possibly illegal) activities on behalf of Oliver Queen being discovered. What did it mean? How did he fit into all this? His only connection besides the laptop was the fact that potential buyer Walter Steele was his stepfather.

Lance sat up and slapped his cup on the counter a little too loudly. Felicity jumped, but it was the jolt she needed to pull her out of the thoughts that had been dangerously close to the tip of her tongue.

"So what's the next step?" she asked brightly, then immediately followed it up with a massive yawn.

Lance half-smiled "Sleep, obviously. Then we'll need to get the goods on this guy Patel, at least enough for an arrest warrant. After that, we'll get a team together to cover the auction tomorrow night. Nail this dirtbag before he has a chance to shoot anyone else."

"'We'?" Felicity asked.

"Yeah, you and me. Who else?"

She shrugged.

"You're my partner, Smoak." He nudged her arm. "We're past that Crispin Bayne thing."

Felicity smiled, but it quickly reversed itself into a frown as something else occurred to her. "So . . ." she began slowly, drawing out the word. "We're helping the hooded guy. The hooded guy who's had a hand in at least three deaths."

"The way I see it, he helped us," said Detective Lance. "He gave us the names. But I haven't forgotten that he has blood on his hands. He has to answer for that, but we need to catch the shooter first."

The diner's owner was sweeping the floor and sighing noisily. Felicity had no idea what the place's hours were, but it seemed like they should take the hint. Lance must have come to the same conclusion. He walked her to her car, which she found annoying. It was an empty gesture considering how close she'd parked to the restaurant. She was also annoyed that she'd been dragged away from Candy Crush at 10:30 at night. And was annoyed that a creep wearing a hood had solved their case by doing the one thing she couldn't allow herself to do: access Interpol.

The next day, Felicity left her apartment early in order to catch Detective Lance at home. He still lived in the decent-sized house he'd once shared with his wife and daughters. As she climbed the front steps, she could almost feel the quiet loneliness of large, empty rooms. The ringing doorbell echoing inside the house only reinforced the impression.

Lance threw open the door, a snarly expression on his face. She took a step back, thinking this had been a really bad idea, and almost fell down the stairs. He caught her elbow and drew her in.

"Get in here, Smoak," he grumbled. "My neighbors will start wondering why a divorced man with grown daughters has a blonde babysitter showing up at his door first thing in the morning."

"'Babysitter'?" Felicity mouthed silently.

"Now, what are you doing here?" he asked after he'd closed the door behind them. "Either you're quitting or you're propositioning me."

"The answers to all of those are, 'I'm here to help you,' 'No,' and 'Ew,'" she said, ticking them off on her fingers. "I mean, not ew, but—I am absolutely not propositioning you. You're my partner, and you're old enough to be my father. I mean, sure, I like older men, but not that much older—"

"Smoak," said the detective. "Why don't you stop now before I have a chance to get really offended?" He didn't look mad yet, but he wasn't smiling either. "Why is it you think I need help?"

She rose on tiptoe and reached up (way up) to take his chin in her hand. She turned his head to the right so she could see the bruise that the Hood had given him.

"That's why," she said, dropping her hand and lowering herself onto her feet again. "Have you looked in a mirror this morning?"

He shrugged. She didn't think so. His jaw was still grizzled with yesterday's stubble, and he had crazy Muppet hair.

"Still getting ready for work," he said.

"Well, your face has a giant, puffy, purple mark on it," she replied. "You can't walk into work like that and not expect people to ask questions."

"I wasn't planning on telling anyone how I actually got it. I'm a decent liar."

"But I'm not," Felicity said. "You've heard me—I'm honest to a fault. If someone asks me directly, I have no idea what will come out of my mouth."

"That could potentially become a problem," Lance pointed out.

"I know, and I'll work on it," she said. "But for today, we need to cover that up."

Lance turned away, mumbling that surely Laurel or Dinah had left some make-up laying around, but Felicity grabbed his elbow. He turned back to face her.

"If we don't want anyone to ask questions," she said, "we have to do this right. Where's the nearest drugstore?"

Felicity thought browsing the CVS make-up aisle with Detective Lance at 7:30 in the morning definitely qualified as one of her life's more surreal experiences. It was hard to bite back a laugh as she held up different shades of foundation and concealer to his face.

Lance insisted on paying for the items himself. "This stuff could come in handy later," he said.

"Do you plan on getting beat up by hooded guys a lot?" she asked.

"He did not beat me up," her partner replied. "Be nice to me, or I won't get you anything when I stop at Starbucks."

"You be nice to me, or I won't fix your face," she retorted.

The half-overcast morning light sucked, but the parking lot was mostly empty. Lance sat on the opened tailgate of his SUV while she used the cosmetics to make his bruise disappear. She took a step back to examine her handiwork.

"Well, it's still kind of puffy," she said. "If anyone asks, you can just tell them you didn't get much sleep."

Detective Lance reached his hand up to his face, but Felicity slapped it away.

"Will it stay covered up all day?" he asked.

"I hope so, but it's not like a charcoal drawing you can spray with fixative. You'll have to be careful. No touching. And no sweating if you can help it."

They got back in their own cars and returned to the road. Lance followed her, then pulled off within sight of a Starbucks sign.

Her phone buzzed.

"Order?" he asked before she could say anything.

"A peppermint mocha with an extra shot of espresso," she said. "Without whipped cream. The whipped cream always melts before I get to work, and it leaves a layer of oil on top, which is just gross."

"Got it."

No one at the station seemed able to notice that Lance was sporting a bruise under a thick yet artfully applied layer of make-up. In fact, the desk sergeant remarked about how good he looked, that he must be getting more sleep. Felicity took that as a compliment on her skills. She hadn't just hidden the bruise—she'd improved the canvas.