A/N: Here it is, as promised! Hope everyone is having a wonderful Passover or Easter or just plain weekend!

Oliver walked over to her, put his hands on her shoulders, and looked her in the eye.

"Felicity, what is going on?" She almost broke down right then and there at the tone of his voice; he was so concerned for her. He was so worried.

"Careful dude, I don't know if you want to be touching her right now."

"I'm not radioactive! Not anymore! Not that I ever really was, for the record."

"My dos-whatever begs to differ."

"Roy, I swear to god," Oliver barked out. It was the angriest she had heard him in a long time, and it wasn't his typical Arrow-anger. This was all Oliver Queen, completely frustrated and clueless about what was going on.

She grasped her hands tightly in front of her, desperately trying to get them to stop shaking. It wasn't supposed to happen like this. She was...so close to telling everyone in her own way. Not that that would have been perfect, but it would have been preferable to this. A firing squad would have been preferable to this.

"I didn't want to tell you…" She whispered. "Not like this."

Oliver's hands fell from her shoulders and he took four steps back, more in line with Dig and Roy. His face was closed off and she couldn't get a read on him but something told her that maybe that was for the best right then.

"Tell me what?"

"I was going to tell you," she insisted. She had to get him to understand. He had to know that she was going to tell him! "This Thursday. Pizza. Talking."

"Felicity." Now that was his Arrow voice. Low and emotionless. "What do you need to tell me?" He enunciated every word, not looking away from her.

She swallowed thickly.

"You're sick."

All eyes darted to Diggle.

"What?" She hadn't expected anyone to guess, let alone correctly, and she was more than a little stunned.

"Come on, don't treat me like an idiot, Felicity. You're sick," he repeated. His eyes were hard, glittering at her and inviting her to challenge him.

"Is he right?" Oliver turned on her. "Are you sick?"

All she could manage was one jerky nod. The mask fell off of Oliver's face and she wished it would return. He looked so hurt and confused and it only served to make her feel more hurt as well.

"Sick with what?" She didn't respond right away and his voice grew louder. "Sick with what, Felicity? Are you still sick from last month? What the hell is going on?"

The silence was deafening. Felicity's response was barely above a whisper, but heard by all.

"Cancer."

"What?" Oliver ran a hand over his short hair. "Did you just say cancer?"

"A type of lymphoma, actually." She wanted to add more but stopped herself. As much as it would comfort her to babble at that particular moment, she honestly didn't think it would be appreciated or tolerated.

Oliver's mouth opened and closed, unable to form words. Diggle stood beside him, arms crossed, glaring at her, expressionless. Roy was on the opposite side of Oliver, bracing himself on a beam behind him. His mouth was open and his eyes were soft and sympathetic but unfocused, trying to process what he was being told.

"I-" She stopped herself, unsure of what she was even going to say. She felt the need to defend herself, or to apologize, or to say something, but how could she make this right? She had planned for a lot of reactions, but she had never accounted for this; she felt like she was being blindsided right along with him.

"How long have you known? How long have you known, Felicity?"

It took her three attempts to force her response out of her lungs.

"A month."

There was a pause in the room, like everyone was holding their breath, before Oliver let out an animalistic roar. In one smooth move, he swiped all four of her monitors off of her desk, throwing them to the floor. The noise was almost deafening as it echoed around the basement and Felicity couldn't help but to jump, closing her eyes and trying desperately to keep the tears at bay. That wouldn't help her now.

"A fucking month, Felicity?! I can't - you lied to me for a month?" He stilled, his hands still in the air from gesturing wildly at her. "Lance," he accused. "Lance knew, didn't he? That's what you've been doing with him all this time."

She wasn't aware of nodding or affirming anything, but she doubted Oliver was waiting for that anyways. He was pacing like a caged animal in front of her now; his hands were tugging violently at his short hair and his eyes were darting wildly around the lair. Suddenly he stopped in front of her, and she found herself wishing again that he would put the damn mask up. From the man who kept himself closed off from everything and everyone, the look of betrayal on his face was more than she thought she could handle right then.

He shook his head at her and was gone, up the stairs and out of the lair. He moved far too fast for her to chase after him, but she couldn't help the step she took as if to follow him, his name on her lips.

"Let him go," Dig commanded quietly, as if she actually could catch him if she wanted to.

"Dig…"

"I'm not going to pretend to understand. I don't. I don't understand and I don't want to. I don't want to know your reasons and I don't want to know why you felt like the right thing to do was to keep something like this from us. Not right now." He took a deep breath. "I do want to know if you're okay. Right now, at this moment, are you okay?"

She nodded. "I'm okay."

"Do you need me to do anything? Is there something I can get you, or someplace you need to go?"

"Not...not right now."

"Okay. Okay." It sounded as if he was talking more to himself than to her, and she didn't move to interrupt him. Finally, he spoke again. "If you don't need anything tonight, I'm going to go. I just - I need to. Will I see you tomorrow?"

"I'll be at the office, yeah."

"Okay. I'll see you then."

And then he was gone too, leaving her and Roy alone in the silence.

She turned to him, ready to attempt to apologize to the one team member that hadn't ran away from her. But before she could even open her mouth, she found herself enveloped in his arms, his scent and his signature red hoodie infiltrating all of her senses.

She wasn't sure how long they stood like that, him just holding her tight, or even at what point she started to cry. All she knew was that she felt drained after that last encounter. She had expected a weight to be lifted but all she felt was it move from her shoulders to settle in her stomach. She hadn't felt this out of control since all of this had started and she was first diagnosed.

"I'm so sorry," she found herself sobbing into his shoulder. "I'm so so so sorry. I never meant for this, I promise. I didn't want any of this."

"I know," he comforted her, hands running through her hair. Finally he pulled away, making a half-hearted attempt to wipe his own tear tracks from his face. "What do you say we order in some Chinese, huh? From that place with the terrible dumplings that you like?"

The Felicity of the last few weeks would have turned down his offer, insisting she was okay and she would be fine. However, the Felicity of the last half hour realized that she needed this. She needed someone. She couldn't do this on her own, not now, not after tonight, and if he was offering, then she was accepting.

"That sounds good. But do you think maybe we could eat at my place, if that's okay?" She didn't think she could handle being near her destroyed monitors at that moment, a constant reminder of the look in Oliver's eyes.

"Sure, of course. Let's go. Don't worry about the mess. I'll get it tomorrow."

She changed into some comfy yoga pants and over-sized MIT t-shirt while Roy ordered in some food. A quick glance in the mirror told her that she looked how she felt.

She was exhausted. Her pants, which used to be tight on her, hung awkwardly on her now, clinging to her knees, bunched loosely around her thighs. Her hair was a mess, half up and half down, whether by her own frustrated pulling or Roy's comfort, she wasn't sure. She had taken off her makeup and was staring at herself in the mirror for a first time in a long time, completely bare. She had dark circles around her eyes, and her paleness was much more pronounced. She was still severely anemic and despite the supplements and even the blood transfusion she had to have a week prior, it didn't help her pasty complexion. She tore her eyes away from her reflection. If this was how she looked now, she didn't even want to contemplate how she'd look in the middle of undergoing chemotherapy. Her hand went up to tangle in a stray lock of hair before she shoved it down, holding it in place with her other. She had been resolute about not thinking about the possibility of her losing her hair, and after bringing it up once, Detective Lance had also learned that that topic was taboo.

She sighed, sure that she had been gone for much longer than she should have been. She found Roy leaning against the wall outside her bedroom door. He shrugged, looking a little embarrassed, but the look in his eyes took away any reprimand she would have normally made. He was scared too.

They settled in on the couch; Felicity turned on some mindless sitcom, but the volume was too low for them to really pay attention. He spotted a pamphlet on the coffee table and picked it up.

"Can I…?"

"Yeah, go ahead."

When had her life become so ruled by pamphlets? That one she had been using as a placeholder in a book she was reading about stem cell therapies, but she had finished it the night before. It wasn't the most informative; it was about non-Hodgkin lymphoma, but it was only a few short pages.

"So this is uh, what you...this is you?"

She nodded. "I have a type of it, anyway. There are a lot of different kinds."

"What kind do you have?"

"B-Cell. Well, a type of B-Cell. Like I said...lots of variety."

They were interrupted by a knock on the door. Felicity must have been in her bedroom for longer than she thought.

"Speaking of variety," Roy walked back to her living room with three huge plastic bags filled with food. "I wasn't sure what you wanted to eat, so I kind of…"

"Got one of everything?" She laughed. This was the most food she had seen in a long time and she was going to be eating leftovers for a week.

"Thank you," she said eventually, after polishing off a significant portion of lo mein and five steamed dumplings. It was the most she had eaten in one sitting in a long time, and she attributed that to the company. Roy was just a good kid. He didn't judge, he didn't even try and force her to talk. He just sat with her, a calming presence, and waited for whatever she would be comfortable with.

"No problem." He poked around in his cashew chicken before meeting her eyes. "I'm sorry about earlier. I know you didn't want me to say anything…"

"Don't apologize for that, Roy. I'm sure you must have been pretty scared to see your radiation thing go off."

"Try terrified," he laughed. "Everyone made fun of me for being overly cautious but no one thought it would ever come in handy. I really thought we were in the middle of some sort of attack."

Even Felicity had to laugh at that, the idea so ludicrous. No attack on Starling, just her. Just her body that was being barraged with radiation that was designed to save her life.

"I didn't realize that it would make your thing go off. I had a PET scan and they inject me with this radioactive solution. I didn't really think about it at all, actually. I was happy to see you there," she confessed. It was the same way she felt when she ran into Detective Lance at her first test appointment. There was a part of her - a really small part, but a part nonetheless - that had wanted Roy to figure it out. For him to know what was happening, and she wouldn't have to go through all the trouble of telling him, and she could be absolved. It would just take the problem completely out of her hands for once.

Of course, she wanted it to be just him. At the hospital. There was not one bit of her that wanted what had happened at the lair to have occurred.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Shoot."

"Why did you wait to tell Dig and Oliver? I mean, I get why you didn't tell me, but it just seems like...maybe you'd want to tell them. They could have helped."

"What do you mean, you 'get' why I didn't tell you?"

"Well, I know I'm the youngest and the newest to Team Arrow, and you and Sara are like, blonde besties, so it makes sense - wait, does Sara know?"

Felicity shook her head. She wasn't looking forward to that.

"Roy, you are just as much a part of this team as anyone, do you understand that? I wanted to tell all of you. I thought about going to Oliver first, just because he always seems to know what to say, but…" she trailed off with a shrug. After all, Oliver wasn't the one that was there with her now. "At first I didn't tell because I thought I should wait for more tests. The first entire week, I was convinced someone was going to tell me that they made a mistake, and that I really just had mono or something. But then they figured it out, and I don't know...I had to do some other stuff first, and I just thought I should only tell you guys once I knew what my treatment was gonna be."

"So you haven't started any like, chemotherapy or whatever?"

"No, not yet. But it will be soon. They really want to get that going."

"Why haven't you started yet? I mean, I feel like a month of knowing is a long time. Shouldn't they have done something?"

"I had to...do stuff." She felt the tips of her ears flush. Crap.

"Like what? Cryogenically freeze your tissue so that they can clone you later?" At the look on her face, "I was kidding!"

"Not for cloning, you moron, but just my eggs. And it is a totally common thing that people do before undergoing chemotherapy, I'll have you know!"

"I knew it!" He crowed, clapping his hands together. Felicity was stunned. Had Roy really known that she was harvesting her eggs? "I knew you had been more hormonal than lately this past week. It was last week, right?

"I have not been more hormonal!"

"Oh, please! You yelled at Oliver for 'making fun' of me!"

"I did not!"

"Yes, you did! It was right after you cried at that video of a dog tucking itself into bed."

The giggles snuck up on her, until she was holding her stomach and laughing harder than she remembered doing so in a long time.

"Okay, maybe I was a bit on the ridiculous side."

"Yeah," he laughed along with her. "Maybe."

The conversation eased up for a while, reminiscing over Felicity's bouts of hormone induced craziness and Roy's paranoid fear of radiation poisoning. She hadn't realized that it would be possible to have a conversation like this with someone who knew about her sickness. She had thought it would always be doom and gloom and misery, conversations laden with serious looks and painful topics. She was surprised to find she didn't mind it when Roy directed the conversation back to her cancer. He was interested, yes, maybe even a little afraid for her, but he was mostly curious. No one this close to him had ever gone through something like this.

"So what uh, happens next?"

"For me? Well, I'm kind of just waiting for whatever that scan told me today. Then they'll let me know. I have to have a pretty big surgery soon."

"Why?"

"Gotta take out my spleen and anything else that's infected. I'm not looking forward to that. And then after that, we start the chemotherapy stuff. That's when things start getting fun, I assume."

"Will you let me know when the surgery is? I can give you a ride, if you want." He flashed a huge smile. "No day job and all that."

"I will definitely let you know. It might be this week, I'm not sure. And between you, Detective Lance, and Dig, I doubt I will ever be late for an appointment ever." She bit her lip. "Well, maybe not Dig."

"He'll come around. He's just - and Oliver, too - they're just scared. I don't think they're really mad."

"Tell that to my monitors."

"I mean, just think about it. The biggest threat to your life to date, well okay, maybe not including that Count thing, but still, a pretty big deal. And Oliver can't even shoot it? He's got to be freaking out."

She hadn't really thought about it like that. This was the first time in a long time where no one could help her. They might still be a team, but Felicity was on her own in this fight for her life.

"Hey, that's not what I meant." Roy drew her out of her musings. "I didn't mean that you're the only one that has to fight this. I mean, physically, maybe. But Dig will be there to stand guard and growl at people, and Oliver will throw money at it, and Thea will probably buy you a whole new 'cancer wardrobe.' So you're not alone."

"And what are you going to be doing?"

"I'm going to be making sure that no one gets radiation poisoning."

"Thanks, Roy. For everything." She let herself relax and rest her head on his shoulder, her feet tucked under her.

"You promise you're not still radioactive, right?"

NOTE - I will begin posting my companion series to this story, an Oliver-centric group of one-shots, for when I think his side needs a bit more explaining and I feel like I can't do so within Blue Skies without interrupting the writing flow. I would anticipate that to be up around Tuesday or Wednesday; it is titled For Darker Days and the FIRST CHAPTER is seeing and feeling Oliver get the news and where he disappears to afterwards. So if you were wondering why I didn't focus more on him in this chapter, it is because there was far too much going on for him and he deserves his own chapter. Thanks for reading!