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Because you are beautiful I will have to tell you a number of my secrets.
(What does anyone hide anything for except to have it found?)
“I wasn’t always on the island,” Oliver says over garlic bread.
Danger has not forced his hand. Old ghosts have not screamed up to haunt him. This is not crucial intel to ensure his team lives out the week. There is absolutely no reason to tell her, except that she looks warm by candlelight. So warm that the memory alone could last him through a month of black, breath-frosting nights in Purgatory.
Without pity or accusation, Felicity says, “Where were you?”
Ollie Queen did every single one of the fun drugs (and a few of the sucky ones just for bragging rights). He was never addicted to anything as he is to this brief weightlessness when he tells her about Hong Kong. When her only reaction is to hold his hand that much tighter.
After the bomb and the blood and the heart-seizing terror, it does not matter that he says, “Maybe it’s better if we don’t do this,” or that she agrees, “Maybe it’s better.” It does not matter that he has no claim on her heart, nor she on his secrets. He still needs the feeling.
“Why would I know that? Technically, yes, I was once enrolled in an English literature class, but I paid a kid to write the term paper.”
“I cheated on Laurel with her. She, ah, she lost it after a few weeks.”
“I killed a man to be inducted into the Bratva. He wasn’t a particularly good man, and they would have killed me if I hadn’t. But it was murder all the same.”
“I don’t remember much about my first few weeks home after Lian Yu. I didn’t let myself feel them. It all runs together. But I remember meeting you.”
“There were times when I wanted to die.”
He is not making confession, and Felicity is not offering forgiveness. But she listens. Sometimes her eyes glaze over with tears or her head tilts in sympathy. Every now and then, he makes her laugh. Just once, she pushes the hood down onto his shoulders and she lays her hand on his hair. Perhaps you could call it a benediction.
In that moment they become a world unto themselves, warm as a flickering candle in the shelter of two cupped hands.
I have concealed from you too long the fact that space is curved,
That I have invented the night the better to see you by, that
If I seem upset at times it is because of the way you walk, leaning into wind.
Standing at her kitchen counter, Felicity reaches up absently to brush a few flyaway hairs out of her face. She smears cocoa powder across the apple of her cheek, and the thought drifts across Oliver’s mind that he will never love another woman.
His lips part in surprise. He stares.
“Should I make more frosting?” she says, swirling a spatula in the chocolate buttercream.
He has loved her for a long time, and he has wanted her for longer than that. Since October, he has learned to function around the ache of it, just as he learned long ago to breathe with cracked ribs. But it is a Sunday afternoon, she has no idea there is chocolate on her face, and she is it for him. The last word.
All of a sudden, in one gesture, anyone else is unthinkable.
“I doubled the cake recipe, but not the frosting. Frosting is a surface area thing.” She frowns up at him. “Cake surface area doesn’t increase at the same rate as cake volume, does it?”
Oliver remembers to breathe, and he opens his mouth to answer. Then he shuts it again, because he has no idea what she just said.
She makes a moue. “I should have made more frosting.”
“You’ve got something,” he says, picking up a dishtowel and reaching for her face. He licks his lips. “Right – there.” He tips her chin up with two fingers, watches her expression melt into amusement, and rubs away the cocoa. “Got it.”
She ducks her head almost shyly and tugs at her shirt, which is streaked with flour and confectioner’s sugar. “I’ve got something right everywhere.”
“You’re a mess,” he agrees. His fingers brush lightly beneath her chin.
He does not kiss her, which is some species of sin.
A lie of omission.
That most of my secrets are doors that open onto other secrets--
(Vistas of fields and beaches and columns stretching on forever),
Oliver does not pretend not to love her. The rest of the team does not pretend not to know.
For Roy, half the fun of flirting with Felicity is casting smug glances at Oliver. You see this, big guy? I’m macking on your girl. Look, she’s laughing. Are you gonna let that pass? How about now? You know you want to come over here and stop me. Oliver has long experience with deliberately annoying little siblings, and even as he rolls his eyes he misses Thea fiercely.
For Dig, it is convenient to treat Oliver and Felicity as a unit. “I’m going for Thai,” he says while Felicity has stepped out for a moment. “What is she going to want?”
“Pad woon sen,” Oliver says without looking up from the arrowhead at the grindstone.
Roy occasionally strolls through Oliver’s line of sight, deliberately breaking his absent-minded gaze. “You’re pining again,” he mutters. “Knock it off. It’s embarrassing.”
They know, and Oliver finds he does not mind. He trusts that they know the important things.
The next time he lies bloody and unconscious on the med table, Dig rattles off the options fast and decisive. His limited medical training might be enough, or it might not. The Arrow might need a hospital, or they might deliver him into the hands of the best doctors in the city and watch him die anyway. There are no guarantees with deep tissue punctures like these.
Dig and Roy keep pressure on the wound, and they both look to Felicity as if signed and notarized medical power of attorney is framed above her desk.
She makes the call. Dig does what he can.
When Oliver wakes a few hours later, grey-faced and exhausted, he does not have to pretend not to want her hand in his.
That even these words are secrets with turquoise doors in them,
Opening out to one side or the other, letting you glimpse for two seconds
Herds of speaking horses, temples full of starfish, clandestine moons,
The night sky tilts above him, and Oliver falls to his knees in the snow.
“Oh, God. Are you hurt? You’re hurt.” Felicity’s hands are warm on his cheeks. “Tell me where.”
Blood runs down his face from the rapidly swelling gash on his forehead, the last blow Maroni’s thugs landed before they ran for it. It stains Felicity’s fingers, and when she adjusts her glasses, she leaves a smear across her cheek as dark as chocolate.
“How many fingers?” When he slumps forward, putting a hand out to steady himself, she kneels down with him. “Oliver, how many fingers?”
He concentrates, and though his tongue feels thick and heavy, he knows he has this one right: “Three.”
“Who’s the president?”
“It’s a grade two concussion, Felicity.” Another section of hair falls out of her messy ponytail, and snow crystals gleam in the wisps around her face. She’ll be cold, Oliver remembers. She didn’t dress for a kidnapping and rescue in the great outdoors. “There’s a moon tonight,” he slurs, getting to his feet. “Enough light to find the highway.”
“No, no, no,” she soothes, pushing him back down and relieving him of the bow and quiver. “You’re in no shape for that.”
She must be crazy. They can’t stay here. They are in the middle of Blue Falls National Park, where Maroni planned to kill the troublesome hacker girl and dump her body. That did not go very well for him, but it was not a raving success for the Arrow either.
“You’re just going to have to hold on while I go get help,” she says. “I’ll flag somebody down.”
Now she wants to go off by herself? She is definitely crazy. He looks around at the trees heavy with snow, at the pale glow of crystalline fog. “You’ll get lost. Freeze to death. Dig knows where we are. Got a tracker in my boot.”
“Then we find shelter, we stay warm, and we wait for him to come get us.”
She shepherds him, stumbling and dizzy, to the base of a red cedar all overgrown with scrub and twisted yews. She scoots up against the trunk, then pulls him by his shoulders to lay with his back against her chest.
“Oliver, just stay awake for me, ok? Talk to me.”
“You’re better at that,” he says. “Talking.”
“Hey, look at you, cracking a joke. Well, almost.”
The nausea hits him hard and fast. He gives Felicity fair warning: “Might need to vomit.”
She tips him sideways just in time, and she holds his hood back while he retches up whitish foam. His head pounds and spins and pounds some more.
“Ok,” she soothes. “You’re ok. Come here, lay back. I’ve got you.” She sweeps wet leafmeal over the vomit, and she tucks the hood back down over his ears. It really does keep them warm. “Dig will be here soon.”
“You’re shaking,” Oliver observes. She is seventy percent of his body mass, and she does not have three layers of Under Armour beneath her sweater dress and fashionable leggings. “You should have my jacket.”
“Right, I’m going to take the jacket away from the concussed guy. Just keep talking to me, Oliver. Anything.”
Out past the low-hanging yew branches, blue shadows sway across the luminous snow. “The moonlight got like this sometimes on the island,” he says before he can stop himself. “Turned everything silver.”
“It must have been beautiful,” Felicity says encouragingly. “With no light pollution, I bet the stars looked amazing too.”
They really did. Touchable, so near to earth. “Slade pointed out constellations, but he didn’t know the stories behind them. He liked the one about Castor and Pollux when I told him.”
“I don’t know that one,” she says, and it might be a lie to keep him alert.
Nevertheless he does his best to explain, going on about hunter-brothers, comrades-in-arms, so inseparable that the gods granted them a shared place of honor among the stars. It comes out slurred and fractured, but he manages.
“But Shado grew up with different stories,” he remembers. “They weren’t Gemini to her. They lay across the White Tiger of the West and the Vermilion Bird of the South.”
He can hear the smile in Felicity’s voice. “There’s a vermilion bird up there?”
“Zhū Què, yes. They’re summer stars.”
“She showed you?”
“She used to wake me up on hot nights when she couldn’t sleep. That was her favorite time to swim. She’d cool down, and then she’d climb up high enough to find a breeze, and she’d lay back and tell me long, complicated legends all in Mandarin. I could never stay awake all the way to the end. But there were immortal lovers separated by the silvery river, and every year on the seventh day of the seventh month - “
“Oliver?” Felicity sounds frightened. “Oliver, you’re speaking Chinese.”
If it scares her so much, he will speak English. “I’ve forgotten some of them,” he admits, and he never mourned the loss until this moment.
“You loved her,” Felicity says softly.
He loves her memory even now. But this, too, is true: “Not the way she deserved.”
Felicity’s arms shift and tighten around him, and she rests her chin over his shoulder. “How were you supposed to have done it?”
“I lived.” A better explanation echoes somewhere in his head, but the hot throb of pain drowns it out. “She didn’t.”
Felicity draws in a breath right next to his ear where her cheek is pressed to the suede, and he cannot imagine why she sounds so frustrated. “If you went out one night in the hood,” she says slowly, “and you didn’t come home, would it be because I didn’t love you enough?”
For a few long seconds, the words are meaningless noise. Then they melt into a sentence, which sharpens itself into an idea, and then it stabs through his mind cold as ice. “What are you talking about?”
“Look, I get that your brains got a little scrambled and you’re not thinking in straight lines right now, but please tell me you understand how stupid and awful and wrong that sounds.”
He twists in her arms, pushing through pain to turn his head and look her in the face. He reaches clumsily to wipe the blood from her cheek. Succeeds only in smearing it. “It’s not going to be your fault.”
“Oh, it won’t?” she says archly. “Then by all means continue to talk about getting yourself killed in action like it’s a matter of when, not if. As long as it’s not my fault - ”
“It’s more than enough.” How does she not know this already? “You loving me.”
A long silence follows. Then Felicity pulls him against her chest again, and she tips his aching head back onto her shoulder. She kisses his temple and whispers, “Tell me more about the Vermilion Bird.”
They shiver together, pressed close. She coaxes Chinese fables out of him until Dig and Roy come to carry them home.
And as you walk, leaning into wind, into the terrible landscape of your own beauty,
These secrets are my gifts to you, these signs that lead you to my door.