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"Mr. Oliver?”
Oliver looks up from the documents he’s looking over at the sound of Raisa’s voice. He smiles at her and takes a deep breath, sitting up and wincing at the crick in his neck.
“Is he alright?” Oliver questions, glancing a look towards his son’s closed bedroom door. “You know, considering…”
“He is scared, Mr. Oliver, the nightmares are bad but he is sleeping now. I’ll stay tonight, in case he wakes up again.” The Russian woman smiles and Oliver nods, closing his eyes as he takes a deep breath.
“Thank you, Raisa, for everything. You dropping everything to come here, it… it means a lot.” He tells her but the woman he’s known his whole life shakes his head, waving him off.
“We have been through this Mr. Oliver. Family does not thank family.” Raisa tells him and Oliver smiles, nodding his head.
“Right.”
“And speaking of family… is Miss Felicity coming around any time soon?” She smiles warmly and Oliver sighs, shaking his head.
“Raisa…” He groans. They’ve had this conversation a million times over the past few weeks. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be with Felicity all the time, his heart practically calls out for her every second of the day, but they decided to wait until William and the two of them were ready.
“I just think that it would be good for you and Miss Felicity to stop lying to each other about this ‘just friends’ arrangement.” Raisa grins, shrugging her shoulders.
“We’ve both…”
“Got a lot to get used to. I know.” She fills in for him and Oliver thinks she’s walking away when she suddenly stops and turns around. “You know what I also know?”
“Hmm?”
“That phone is going to ring with Miss Felicity’s number in the next hour at least.” She states with a knowing look on her face and Oliver frowns.
“I don’t think…” He’s interrupted however by the sound of his phone ringing and even though he should probably groan at the fact he’s just proven Raisa right, he can’t help the elation that courses through his body at the sight of Felicity’s picture on the screen.
“Oh, would you look at that.” Raisa grins and Oliver rolls his eyes, reaching for the device as she walks away.
“Thank you.” He calls after her before hitting accept on the screen. “Hey, you.”
“Oliver?”
The tone of her voice immediately puts Oliver on alert. This isn’t an ‘I’ve found something and I need you to hood up’ tone, it’s not even an ‘I’m in imminent danger and would really like a way out’ tone. No, this is Felicity’s ‘I’m scared and I just need to talk to you’ tone.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” He asks, his voice immediately softening and he hears her take a deep breath. Her voice is shaking and he can tell she’s been crying. Judging by the clock reading 3 am on his laptop, he guesses she probably had a nightmare.
“I… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called. You have William and I…” She stutters out and Oliver shakes his head before remembering that she can’t see him.
“Hey, hey, you know that I’m here. Whatever you need. Don’t worry about William, he’s asleep and Raisa’s here.” He reassures her and sighs in relief when her breathing slows again.
“Oh, okay.” She says quietly and Oliver can picture her, curled up in their bed or the couch, wrapped up in a blanket. She always looks so small like that.
“You want to take a deep breath and tell me what’s going on?” He presses softly and relaxes a little when he hears her follow his advice.
“Nightmare.” She says simply and Oliver nods, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth.
“The island?” He asks, just as softly and he hears her take another deep breath.
“Yeah, I just wanted to hear your voice. I’m okay, I shouldn’t have called.” She tells him but her voice takes on that rambling tone where he knows she’s actually trying to convince herself more than anything else.
“Hey, no. I’m coming over.” He tells her and fully expects the soft sigh that follows.
“Oliver…”
“No arguing. I’ll be five minutes.” He confirms and smiles when he hears her huff of defeat.
“I knew there was a reason I got you the apartment around the corner.” She finally mumbles after a few seconds and Oliver chuckles. Her joking doesn’t necessarily mean that she’s feeling better, he knows her defense mechanisms too well for that, but it does mean that she’s able to talk properly at the very least, so she hasn’t spiraled into an anxiety attack.
“Five minutes, okay?” He confirms as he’s already reaching for his jacket and slipping on his shoes. Raisa’s head appears out of the kitchen and she nods at him, gesturing towards the door.
“Okay. Oliver?” Felicity asks, her voice soft once more.
“Hmm?”
“Thank you.” She states quietly and Oliver smiles, looking back at Raisa as he replies with conviction.
“Family doesn’t thank family.”
He makes it around the corner in less than the promised five minutes, choosing to scale the fire escape up to the loft rather than head through the front door where a camera might catch him. The last thing he wants his son to see whilst scrolling through the internet is his father rushing off for clandestine meetings with women in the middle of the night.
Oliver smirks when he sees that the balcony door has been left open and he heads in, closing it behind him.
Felicity is on the couch, wrapped up in that blue blanket just like he pictured. She does look small, tiny even, curled into the corner of the couch but despite the tear tracks running down her face, Oliver still maintains that this is one of his favorite looks on the woman he loves. Felicity’s ponytail, her glasses and her incredible array of dresses and heels are just as much an armor as Oliver’s Green Arrow suit is. She proved him right about that last year when she continued to dress as she always had even without the high-flying job at Palmer Tech. The fact that he is privileged enough to see the dressed-down, pajama look on her means a lot.
“You know me well.” He comments, gesturing to the balcony door and she shrugs, smiling that soft smile as he settles a few feet away on the couch.
“This all feels rather like a teenager sneaking through my window. Except your teenage son is actually the one we’re sneaking around behind. That was not intentionally suggestive.” She babbles and Oliver chuckles with a shake of his head.
“Remember when I told you that you don’t have to be funny for me?” He asks and she freezes for a moment. Her hand flies up to her hair and then she stops herself, it falling down into her lap once more. He knows that she’s nervous from that which makes him frown. He doesn’t ever want Felicity to be nervous around him.
“Hmm.” She sighs softly.
Oliver is not a big fan of this tension between them. He’s felt it all year, as if there’s a wall up between the two of them. The strangeness of it now is that it feels like both of them are waiting for the other one to kick it down.
“You okay?” He asks softly, extending his hand along the back of the couch. It’s an invitation and his heart leaps a little when Felicity moves just an inch closer.
“I am now that you’re here.” She tells him honestly and their eyes lock. Everything unsaid seems to pass between them in that moment until Felicity blushes and looks away. “Sorry, I just…”
Oliver frowns.
The hardest thing about his and Felicity’s breakup was having to pretend as if she wasn’t the person that knew him the best in the world and vice versa. Seeing her with someone else and seeing her tells for when she was upset or angry and knowing that it wasn’t his place to calm her in the way that only he knew how was agonizing, no matter what he tried to convince himself.
And now, here they are. This final barrier between the two of them. Oliver doesn’t know what the protocol is but he knows what he wants and he thinks maybe it’s time to start leading with that.
“When I found you on the island, we talked about it being extenuating circumstances. How about we extend that to nightmares about the island?” He poses, the nervousness rising in him as Felicity freezes for a second.
Finally, she nods, her lips curving in a small smile.
“I like the sound of that.”
“C’mere.”
He lets out a huff as she practically throws herself into his arms. Even though he prompted it, he wasn’t entirely sure she would agree so the weight of her body crashing into his offsets him for a moment. He quickly rights himself however and shifts her into his lap proper, curling his arms around her as she tucks her head into his neck.
The figurative wall crashing down between them seems to have also prompted something in Felicity and he hears her sniffle as she buries her head further into his neck.
“Hey, it’s okay. We’re all okay. I’ve got you.” Oliver promises, whispering into her hair as his hand rubs over her back.
He knows that the island scared her more than she’d like to admit. When Oliver returned to find the others and was able to move after finding his sister comatose, he had found a group of the others at the plane. His heart had skipped however when he saw that Felicity and Digg were not there. The idea of losing the two of them, his brother and his love, as well as his sister had brought him to his knees for several long minutes until Curtis yelled that he could see blonde hair in the rubble. Felicity had gotten trapped underneath a fallen tree and was struggling to breathe due to all the smoke she’d inhaled. Miraculously, she wasn’t badly hurt and she brushed off the trauma. She told him at the time, after a very emotional reunion, that he didn’t need her to be weak right now, he needed her to be strong so that’s what she would do. Oliver had blinked at her, astounded at her tenacity in the face of such a devastating loss. He knew that she’d be plagued with nightmares and he figures that she’s probably only called him after less than half of them.
“I’m sorry…” She finally mumbles and Oliver sighs, shaking his head.
“Don’t apologize. What you went through, it wasn’t nothing, Felicity. It may not have been as bad as Thea or Samantha or William but it still happened to you and you were still there. You’re allowed to be upset about reliving those moments in your dreams.” He tells her and Felicity sighs, her body going slightly lax against his. She pulls back a little, her head resting on his chest and her toes burrow under his leg in the way that always made him laugh when they first got together. Her hand is fisted in his t-shirt but it loosens slightly as she starts to talk.
“That’s the thing. They change slightly every time. Sometimes it is exactly what happens, sometimes you don’t get to me in time, sometimes I catch up with Thea and I watch her fall. Tonight was the worst though.”
Her voice is soft, her fingers playing with the material of his t-shirt. She rubs it back and forth between her thumb and index finger, reminding him of his own nervous tick.
“What was tonight?” He asks gently, prompting her but not pushing her. She stares at her own fingers and Oliver rubs his hand under her t-shirt and up the smooth skin of her back to calm her.
“William… I… I was on the boat, with you and Chase. William, he was on the island with everyone else and Chase, he… he had you tied up and he gave me the gun. He said I could either shoot myself and save William and the others or I could shoot him, save myself but kill all the others. You were begging me to save myself but I couldn’t take your son away from you like that and… oh god, Oliver, it was horrible. I can’t imagine how you…”
She’s sobbing by the time she gets it out and Oliver holds her tighter, pressing his lips into her hair.
“Hey, it’s okay. It wasn’t real. It was just a dream. I’m okay, you’re okay, William is okay. We’re all going to be so much better soon.” He whispers, his words a promise, into her skin and Felicity shudders out a breath, grasping his t-shirt tighter.
“You have to promise me, Oliver, if it ever comes between William and I that you will pick your son. No hesitation. You can love again, Oliver, but that boy is a gift you can never repeat.” She tells him, pushing back from his hold to look him in the eye. Oliver can see that she’s put a lot of thought into this, that she truly believes what she’s saying.
“It’s not going to come to that. I won’t let it, okay?” He tells her with just as much conviction as she spoke earlier, looking her dead in the eye. Something about the connection seems to calm her and she takes a few deep breaths, nodding her head. “Chase is dead, Felicity. He can’t hurt any of us anymore.”
Felicity nods, her head falling back onto his shoulder and Oliver smiles softly, wrapping an arm around her waist as the other sits softly on her thigh.
“At some point, we are going to have to have a conversation about you downplaying your importance in my life. You’re not just something to be replaced, Felicity. I don’t… I can’t function without you. If you had left with everyone else last summer, I truthfully don’t know what I would have done and if you had gone down on that island, I certainly would not be functioning right now.”
She mumbles something into his t-shirt and Oliver frowns, not quite able to work out what she’s saying.
“What was that?” He asks and she sighs softly, lifting her head just a tad.
“I don’t work without you either.”
He doesn’t reply.
He doesn’t need to.
He’s learned since loving the woman in his arms that there are a million ways to say ‘I love you’ and less than half of them use actual words.
They sit there, just the two of them, until the sun starts to rise over the Star City skyscrapers and the soft illusion of the night gives way to the harsh reality of day with all its responsibilities and pressures.
And the wall starts to build itself up slowly brick by brick.
“You want to get some sleep?” He finally asks when it gets close to when he should be back to send William off to school.
“You need to go, don’t you?” She whispers, her voice a little raspy, and Oliver sighs, nodding his head.
“I’m sorry.” He tells her but Felicity shakes her head. She moves off his lap slowly and they both cling to the contact for as long as they can, wanting to stay in their little bubble but knowing that they can’t.
“Thank you for coming.” She tells him as she wraps the blanket around herself again and Oliver shakes his head for a smile, reaching out to squeeze her shoulder.
“Family doesn’t thank family.” He reminds her and Felicity smiles.
“Go, I don’t want to keep you from William.” She urges and Oliver nods.
What he would give to kiss her goodbye right now, but he knows if he does that, he’ll destroy all the bricks of the wall.
“Felicity?” He asks as he reaches the balcony door, a small smile on his face. She looks up from her lap, her eyes bleary with sleep and still looking heaven sent.
“Hmm?”
“Soon, I’ll be over due to an intentionally suggestive comment.” He promises and Felicity giggles, nodding her head as she bites her lip.
“Soon.” He hears her soft whisper as he slides into the morning air as if he had never even been there.