Chapter Text
Three Weeks Later
The apartment was a disaster.
It had been a disaster for three weeks, and Felicity Smoak had come to think of it as a kind of ecosystem. There were three monitors on the desk, humming. A fourth, on the floor, propped against a pizza box, displayed a scrolling wall of green code. A laptop sat open on the arm of the couch. A second laptop lay on the cushion, under a blanket, apparently asleep.
On the wall, a small television murmured the morning news.
She was not watching it.
She was typing. Her fingers moved across two keyboards at once, in a fast, steady, almost musical rhythm, while her eyes flicked between screens. She had a cold cup of coffee at her elbow, and a bag of pretzels in her lap, and a pencil in her hair, and the faint, distracted, contented air of a woman who has finally found her way back to the thing she loves.
She had a new routine.
Mornings were for work. Afternoons were for the Clock Tower, where Ava Sharp, who had become, over the course of three very strange weeks, something between a mentor and a friend, was teaching her to cast. Evenings were for texting Lena, who sent her a daily photograph of whatever the two of them had cooked for dinner, usually accompanied by a caption like Kara ate 11. Nights were for lying awake.
She did not cry anymore.
Mostly.
On the desk, beside the third monitor, sat a small green arrowhead, polished to a high shine. She had found it in the rubble of the street, after everything was over, and had carried it home in her pocket. She kept it beside her keyboard, where she could see it.
She did not talk to it.
Mostly.
"Morning, Oliver," she said, without looking up.
The arrowhead did not reply.
She smiled, a little crookedly, and went back to work.
"...and in other news," said the television, "officials in National City have confirmed the cause of last month's devastating series of explosions, which left a dozen city blocks in ruins and shut down the downtown district for nearly a week."
Felicity's fingers slowed.
She did not look up. She had heard this before. It had been on every channel, every morning, for twenty-two days. She had learned to tune it out, the way you tune out an alarm clock in the next room, a low, annoying murmur at the edge of her mind.
"Authorities have determined," the anchor went on, in a smooth, reassuring voice, "that the damage was the result of a ruptured underground gas main, which ignited following a faulty valve in an aging infrastructure network. City engineers say the incident was a tragic accident. No foul play is suspected."
Felicity's fingers stopped.
The room had gone very quiet.
"The mayor's office has issued a statement," said the anchor, "thanking residents for their patience and promising full repairs by the end of the year. And now, over to Karen with the weather..."
Slowly, very slowly, Felicity turned her head.
She looked at the television.
On the screen, a perfectly polished woman in a pink blazer was smiling in front of a map. Behind her, in the corner of the frame, was a photograph of the crater, a vast, black, glassy bowl in the middle of a ruined street, with a caption in neat white letters:
GAS LEAK EXPLOSION.
Felicity stared at it.
She stared at it for a long, long time.
A pretzel slid out of her lap and landed on the floor.
Her mouth fell open.
Her eyes went wide.
She dropped the keyboard. She leaped out of the chair so fast that it rolled backward and hit the wall. The laptop under the blanket slid off the couch. A cup of cold coffee went flying across the desk. She stood in the middle of the room with her arms thrown wide and her face tipped up to the ceiling, quivering, with the look of a woman who has just received the single greatest vindication of her entire life.
"I KNEW IT!" screamed Felicity Smoak.
She spun in a circle.
"I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! I TOLD THEM! I TOLD EVERYBODY! I MADE A SPREADSHEET!"
She pointed at the television with a trembling finger.
"A GAS LEAK! A GAS LEAK! IT'S ALWAYS A GAS LEAK!"
On the desk, beside the third monitor, a small green arrowhead glittered in the morning light.
She looked at it.
She took a deep, shaky breath, and lowered her arms, and pressed one hand to her chest. Her eyes were very bright. A single tear ran down her cheek, but she was grinning, and the grin was wider and warmer than any she had worn in weeks.
"Hey, Oliver," she whispered. "You hear that?"
The arrowhead said nothing.
But the morning sun lay across it, warm and green and gold, and for a moment, just for a moment, it seemed to shine a little brighter.
Felicity wiped her eyes, and sat back down at the desk.
She picked up the keyboard.
Then she opened a new document, in a bright white window, and at the top of it, in large black letters, she typed:
FIND OUT WHAT ELSE THEY'RE HIDING.
Finale