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“Ow! I thought these frozen peas would have made my head feel better by now.” Felicity looked at the offending vegetables skeptically. “Instead, all I have is bag of mush and a serious case of brain freeze.”
She was stretched out on her couch, her laptop on the coffee table in front of her, an old sitcom playing on the muted TV. Oliver watched her through the doorway of her darkened bedroom. She looked at ease and comfortable, bathed in the warm yellow living room light. He had been standing there for 10 minutes, torn between letting her know he had come to check on her and leaving her in peace.
The thing was, he had just come to make sure she was physically okay, and a minute of observation had been enough to assure him that she was. When she had fallen and hit her head in her attempt to escape from the Dollmaker, he was worried that her need to appear independent might have caused her to hide a more serious injury from him and Dig, but she was clearly fine. He should have left as soon as he was sure.
But something about seeing her at home, in her own space and surrounded by her small comforts, had reminded him that, regardless of how tough she was, how fierce and fearless, she was not battle-hardened the way he and Dig were. From the beginning she had worked with him so seamlessly that sometimes he had to remind himself that she hadn’t always been a part of his team, and she was so competent, so brilliant, that he sometimes forgot how young she still was. How unacquainted with some of the harsher realities he’d had to face. And he realized that, as much as he depended on her, a part of him wanted to shield him from ever having to face them.
So he stood watching her, feeling like he should go but also needing to know that that light, hopeful part of her hadn’t somehow been damaged when she fell.
“Blankets. I need more blankets, and Mr. BearBear. God, what is this weather? Last week I was in miniskirts and now it’s practically sweater weather! I swear if there’s one thing I miss about Vegas….”
Oliver was so lost in his thoughts that he didn’t quite realize until it was too late that she was getting up from the couch, clearly heading toward the bedroom. He’d lost his opportunity to quickly escape out the window.
“Felicity.”
She screamed, but cut herself off abruptly. “Oliver!?”
He stepped out of the bedroom, into the light, and met her bewildered gaze neutrally.
“What are you doing here?”
“I just came to check on you.”
Felicity stared at him, speechless, then glanced from her front door to her bedroom, then back to him. “Well, wh- why didn’t you, I don’t know, use the front door?” Her voice was still a little high-pitched. “I mean, how long have you been here?” Her eyes widened suddenly. “Did I say anything... weird? Did you hear anything?”
In the year that Oliver had known Felicity, it had been his intention to keep her safe by keeping his distance. People who got close to him got hurt, and he had no intention of letting that happen to her. And yet, he was continually finding himself drawn to her openness, erasing that distance despite himself. And now, without really knowing it was happening, the corners of his lips turned up as he attempted to reassure her. “No, no. You didn’t. I didn’t. And I did try knocking, actually, but I was worried you might be asleep so I didn’t try very hard.”
She stared at him directly for a long, evaluating minute before she relaxed suddenly, as if he had passed some obscure test. “Okay.”
A weight seemed to lift from his shoulders, but he decided not to examine the feeling too closely. He took a breath to move the conversation back into safer territory, but then realized he had surrendered any claim to the upper hand by sneaking into her house. He exhaled again quickly, not sure what to say.
Felicity seemed to gain confidence from his awkwardness. “Well you might as well come in and sit. I was gonna grab some blankets and make some tea - you want tea?” She moved past him, turning the light on in her bedroom and grabbing a stack of blankets from her closet.
“Uh...I should probably head home.”
Felicity regarded him with a lifted her eyebrow, then shoved the pile of blankets into his arms. “Nuh-uh. Nope. You don’t get to creep around in the dark in my bedroom and then leave me here all alone.” She made a face at her phrasing. “You know what I mean.” She turned the light off and beckoned for him to follow her toward the couch. “Sit. Get comfortable. I will be right back.”
Oliver sat and looked around, relaxing despite himself as he heard Felicity moving around her kitchen. Her apartment was filled with color and light and objects that clearly held sentimental value. It was nothing like the expensive, coordinated luxurious interiors he had grown up with, but neither was it lacking in comfort or taste. It had personality, he realized. Felicity’s personality.
“You want green or black or herbal?” she called, appearing in in the doorway before he could answer. She leaned her hip casually against the frame, smiling slowly. “Let me guess - green?”
Oliver laughed, more at her obvious amusement than at the joke itself. “Green is good, sure.”
“Aha! Though we should probably both be drinking herbal at this hour.” She returned with two mugs and settled on the couch next to him.
They sipped their tea.
“So why did you feel the need to come check on me?” The silence had stretched comfortably for a few minutes, but clearly Felicity hadn’t felt entirely settled.
Oliver looked at her over the rim of his mug, wondering how honest he should be. Suspecting he might end up confessing more than he intended, because it was Felicity. “Well, you hit your head.”
“And I told you I was fine,” she challenged.
“And you’re always 100% completely forthcoming, huh?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you - you, Oliver Queen - seriously going to lecture me about downplaying my injuries? Because if I recall correctly, only one person around here does that, and it’s not me.”
Oliver didn’t look away, not denying the truth of her words. “Okay.” He nodded. “But everything didn’t quite go according to plan tonight.” That was a major understatement. “Are you really okay?”
“Oliver.” She gestured toward her head and then down her body, seemingly annoyed by his concern. “Don’t I look okay? It all worked out. I’m fine!”
“Felicity. You got caught by a serial killer.” The words came out harsher than he intended.
Instantly, Felicity’s defenses rose. “I was trying not to!”
Her flippant attitude was exactly what he didn’t need to hear. It meant she wasn’t taking her own safety seriously, and it made him angry. “Well try harder, next time!”
She stared at him, and he stared back in the sudden silence. They watched each other realize the implications of his words. That there would be a next time. That he wasn’t benching her. It seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised her. Eventually, she looked away. “I will.” Her voice was quiet and contrite.
Oliver watched her stare into her mug for a long moment, before he spoke the words that had been on the tip of his tongue all night. “You scared me.”
She quickly looked up, pinning him with her eyes, and he wondered if he had admitted too much. But she didn’t seem shaken or disgusted by his admission of vulnerability. She just looked at him. “I’m sorry.”
He nodded slowly, held by her gaze.
“I...I was scared, too,” she admitted. She looked away and took a long sip of tea. “I was glad, you know, that I could help. That I, as a woman,” she met his eyes briefly, “could help save other women. That I could be useful in a way that you and Dig couldn’t.” She looked at him again, as if awaiting judgment. “It’s silly, I know.”
He shook his head, contradicting her. Watching her, waiting for her to continue.
“Sometimes I wonder if I’m really cut out for all this.” She gestured vaguely. “Sometimes I think it would be easier if I just went back to being an I.T. girl, like I said I would after I helped you find Walter. But then I think of you and Dig, risking your lives every night, and I know I can’t just do nothing.” She shook her head. “If you don’t give up, after everything you’ve been through, how can I?”
Oliver watched as she dunked her tea bag absently. “Did I ever tell you that I tried archery when I was a kid?”
She looked up at him sharply, confused. “Nnn...no?”
He nodded. “My dad signed me up for lessons. One of those rich-kid hobbies, I guess, like polo and golf and fencing.”
Felicity was looking at him like he came from a different planet.
“I was terrible. Fencing and polo and golf weren’t my things either, of course, but for some reason, my dad seemed certain that I could be great at archery. I was 14, and he got me this private instructor, a woman about 22 years old, maybe.”
Felicity looked like she was trying not to think judgmental thoughts, and not quite succeeding.
He smiled self-deprecatingly, acknowledging the obvious. “My dad knew me. He knew what would motivate me. And for a minute, it worked. I really wanted to impress her, and I thought, ‘Why not?’ So I tried. I worked at it, which - you looked at my transcripts - I never worked hard at anything. But I couldn’t get the hang of it, and after about two weeks I got bored of trying. So I gave up, just like I had given up on almost everything that didn’t come naturally right away.”
Felicity smiled slightly. “Well, I guess your dad was right about the archer in you, after all.”
Oliver shook his head. “When I took up archery on the island, I was still terrible. If I could have given up, I would have.”
She pulled her knees up on the couch, bridging the distance between them, aiming for casual. Island talk was uncharted territory, and they were both aware of it. “Kill or be killed, huh?”
“No. No, for awhile on the island it was still about choosing whatever was the easiest option.” He glanced at her face before looking down. “The first time I thought I had a choice between a quick, easy death or a difficult survival, I opted for death.”
Felicity was silent for a long moment, so he lifted his eyes to gauge her reaction. She was staring at him, open-mouthed. “Opted for death? But - how?”
He stared into his mug as he remembered with vivid clarity. “It was a hallucination. I imagined I had a gun and a bullet, and I pulled the trigger.” He couldn’t meet her eyes, but he heard her gasp.
“Oliver, I -”
He shook his head, stopping her words. Needing to move past the moment. “That’s the difference between you and me, Felicity. It was only when dying was more difficult than surviving that I finally started to fight.” He forced himself to meet her too-compassionate eyes. “I live this way because it’s the only option available to me. But you could walk away at any moment. I half-hope sometimes you will.”
He forced himself to stop speaking, to let the suggestion linger between them. He was self-aware enough to admit to himself that he depended on her, that she brought something vital to the mission, to the team. But he also knew that he never wanted to become her obligation.
Her eyes were searching his for the words he wouldn’t say. “You want me to leave the team?”
And he was relieved that she asked, because the one thing he could never do was lie to her. “No. I just need you to be safe. And -” he cut her off as she began to protest, “I need to know that if it ever gets to be too much, you will walk away.”
She had been about to roll her eyes, but his intensity made her pause. She looked down to where his fingers had landed on her wrist.
“Okay?”
Her eyes traveled slowly back up to his face, but he didn’t move his hand. “Okay.”
He watched her for a moment longer, as if making sure she wasn’t planning on backing out of their agreement, and then the weightiness fell away as he let one of his barely-there smiles dawn upon his face. He released her arm and sat back against the couch.
Felicity watched him, suspicious at his sudden change of mood. “What?”
After a beat, he turned his head toward her, leaning it casually against the arm he had stretched along the back of the couch. “So who’s Mr. BearBear?”
Felicity’s eyes widened in shock. “Oliver! You said you didn’t hear anything weird!”
Oliver raised his eyebrows. “What’s so weird about Mr. BearBear?”
“Oliver!” Her tone begged him to take pity on her, but he only looked at her expectantly.
She sighed. “Mr. BearBear is just a warm, snuggly stuffed bear. Exactly as you’d expect.”
He shook his head seriously. “I have no expectations when it comes to Mr. BearBear.”
Felicity scoffed loudly, at a loss for words. She did the only thing she could think of: she grabbed the pillow from behind her back and hurled it at him.
He dodged it easily, laughing, and it went careening into the coffee table where it bounced off her laptop and knocked over Oliver’s tea mug.
Felicity yipped in horror, imagining a tea-meeting-laptop disaster, but Oliver reached over and picked up the mug, holding it up so she could see inside. “Empty.”
Felicity nodded in relief.
“Which means,” he set the mug back on the coffee table, fighting a strange wave of reluctance, “it’s probably time for me to go.” He adopted a neutral expression and turned to face her.
She was looking back at him, nodding with slightly widened eyes, and suddenly they were both aware of the odd intimacy of the evening, as well as the oddness of how not odd it had felt until that very moment. Distantly, Oliver felt the alarms go off in the back of his head, warning him not to get too close. But he had found that the more he tried to maintain distance from Felicity Smoak, the closer they became, so that now he couldn’t tell the difference between his attempts to push her away and his attempts to bring her close. And he realized it was too late to do anything about it anyway.
“Yeah, yeah. We have an early morning at QC tomorrow.” She stood up. “Well, at least I do.”
Oliver stood too, giving her a small, grateful smile that acknowledged how much time she put in at the office. “So I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
She walked him to the door, opened it, and he walked through before turning around to face her. “Thanks for stopping by to check on me tonight.”
He nodded, meeting her eyes sheepishly. “I’m sorry I didn’t try very hard when I knocked at your door.”
She held his gaze for an extended moment as the memory of their strangely comfortable evening settled around them. “Try harder, next time.”
And his eyes and lips lifted in that tiny smile as he nodded slowly. “I will.”