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The thing they don’t tell you about being Oliver Queen is—well, they don’t really tell you much.
The thing they don’t tell you about being the Arrow is—there’s no vigilante handbook out there, no support group to visit while drinking stale coffee in the basement of a church.
The thing is: Oliver can hit a moving target with an arrow without blinking an eye. He can salmon ladder in his sleep. He can go hand-to-hand with the best of them, save the city, keep people safe. Oliver is good at a lot of things. But there are a lot of things that make him feel like someone cut off all his senses, that paralyze him with fear, that he is just plain old bad at.
Felicity comes into his life in a whirlwind of sunshine and color and wit sharper than the arrows he launches and suddenly what was supposed to be a solo operation, what reluctantly became a duo, is a team. There are people who look to him, and to whom he looks back. And somehow, she is the missing leg of the triangle; there’s only so much moping around in a dark basement Oliver and Dig could actually do before things got weird and sad. Or, weirder and sadder than they already are.
And you know what, once upon a time, Oliver would know what to do with someone like Felicity. He would know how to play her like a fiddle, to take what he needs and get her the hell out. And for a while, he does. Her eyes roll as his excuses get lamer and lamer, but she gets him the information he’s looking for. She patches him up when he’s bleeding. She helps him find Walter.
“What did you want to be?” Sara asks the ceiling one night.
“Hm? What do you mean?”
She props herself up on one elbow and looks at him in that way she’s done since it all went to hell: like she’s the wisest person on earth, like she knows all the answers to all the questions, like she’s five hundred years old. Oliver thinks all those things are probably true. He can’t reconcile her with her before self anymore, the girl who did too many tequila shots to prove she was just as grown up as Laurel and groaned about how long she’d had a crush on Oliver as she barfed all over his shoes.
“Like before all this—” she gestures around the room to where weapons and masks are stacked neatly, waiting—“what did you want to be?”
“Oh. Well, I was going to be Oliver Queen,” he says sardonically. The voice inside his head that sounds suspiciously like John Diggle berates him for speaking in the third person. “So I guess I never had to think about what I actually wanted to be.”
Sara falls onto her back and returns her gaze to the ceiling. “I wanted to be a doctor. Probably would have been pretty good at it since, when push came to shove, I never got queasy at the sight of blood.”
He leans over and presses a kiss to the dimple in her chin. “You still could, you know. This isn’t forever.”
“Is it forever for you?” she counters with a raise of her eyebrow.
Oliver groans. “We’re not talking about me.”
“One day, you’re not going to be able to save the city, you know. You’ll have to just live your life like a normal person.”
She says it with a far-off note in her voice, like it’s as foreign a concept to her as it is to him. It feels like they’ve been doing this forever and ever, and Dr. Sara Lance gets further and further away, tangled up with the asshole he used to be when he decided it was totally kosher and cool to cheat on his girlfriend with her younger sister.
“One day,” he repeats, but he knows neither of them is convinced.
There are nights and weeks where they run almost exclusively on adrenaline and caffeine, when the things that are wrong with Starling City are more wrong than usual and by the time they’re done, Felicity is patching up wounds and blinking back yawns. When her hands start to move slowly, Oliver knows it’s officially been too long since she’s had even an ounce of sleep; Felicity is all rapid motion and kinetic energy, brain and mouth and body moving with hurricane-force speed.
Sometimes she falls asleep right there at the computer, her head pillowed on folded arms, legs tucked up beneath her, glasses crooked. Dig always drapes the blanket over her shoulders and takes that as his cue to go home, where Oliver knows he sleeps about as well as Oliver does, tossing and turning with the things he himself has seen and done over the years.
When it’s just him and a sleeping Felicity in the foundry, Oliver waits. She snores just a little, the tiniest bit, and it serves as a rhythm as he cleans up the medical supplies, puts his suit back where it belongs, turns back into Oliver Queen. After he pulls on his sweatpants and tshirt, scrubs the sweat and blood off his face, and settles into his seat, she wakes with a start and a snort, looking around the room frantically for a second before realizing where she is.
“Oh,” she says as she spots him, “hi. I fell asleep.”
“You did. You should go home. Sleep in a bed.”
“Where’s John?”
“He went home. To sleep in a bed, I presume.”
She fingers the blanket around her shoulders and smiles softly. “You okay?”
He flexes his fingers in front of him, showing off his bandaged hands from where she covered his burns. “Perfectly fine. You want me to drive you home?”
“No, I’ll be fine.” She stands up and stretches her arms over her head and her shirt rides up a little bit from her skirt, showing a sliver of pale skin. Oliver tries—and fails—not to look. She notices, because she always does, and tugs down her hem and smirks sheepishly.
It’s been something that has crept into his mind from time to time, mostly during all those hours when it’s three in the morning and he’s not sleeping but doing push-ups instead, how it would feel to just say fuck it and go home with her, curl up next to her in bed, see all the things that those short skirts leave to the imagination. These are thoughts he tries his hardest not to think: the way her lips wrap around the ends of pens, how her fingers feel as they ghost over his wounds, what it might be like to render Felicity Smoak speechless. These are thoughts both inappropriate and dangerous and he tries not to remember that five years ago it wouldn’t even cross his mind not to let it cross his mind.
“Let me drive you anyway. It’s late.”
“You don’t have a car.”
“I’ll take yours. Walk home.”
“Oliver, it’s—” she looks over at one of the computer monitors—“three in the morning.”
“It’ll give me something to do.”
She doesn’t say anything to that, but her mouth twists into what might be a sympathetic sort of pitying look, and Oliver turns his eyes to the floor. A lot of people have looked at him like that, but she is the last person he wants to see it from. Something about it is embarrassing almost, makes him feel bare and vulnerable, makes him hate himself a little more than he usually does.
Maybe she realizes this, because her face smoothes back to normal and she rolls her eyes exasperatedly. “Whatever. But it’s like thirty degrees outside, and if you get a cold I’m not taking care of you. Vigilantes don’t get sick days.”
He laughs but as he gestures for her to go up the stairs ahead of him, she brushes her fingertips over his bicep gently and reassuringly.
In her seventh month, Lyla is placed on what she refers to as Johnny-mandated maternity leave. After months of spending her days doing Waller’s paperwork, she gladly swaps it for a life of decorating the nursery, watching trashy daytime TV, and hanging around the Foundry clicking through Felicity’s computers during her shifts at Tech Village.
Oliver watches her quickly grow restless, though, asking too many questions about the bad guys they spend their nights chasing, giving too many helpful tips, even logging into ARGUS databases to pass along information. He can’t image being suddenly and completely sidelined like that. So he brings her extra ice cream and doesn’t even laugh as she waddles around her and Dig’s apartment.
“She’s frustrated,” Dig says one night when Lyla goes home after stopping by to have Big Belly Burger with the four of them. “She’s never not been in the thick of things.”
Felicity tells him to go home not much later, because “it’s really shitty of you to be here hanging out with your friends while your pregnant wife sits at home alone” and Roy remembers to point out that Diggle and Lyla aren’t married before going home himself. She rolls her eyes at the both of them before sucking down the last of her soda and tossing the empty cup into the garbage can.
“You think that’ll be you one day?” she asks Oliver as soon as they’re alone.
“Being told off by you for not hanging out with my pregnant wife?”
“Well, besides that,” she says with a too-wide smile. “I mean when you can’t do Arrow things.”
“Why can’t I do Arrow things?”
“I hate to say this, but one day you’re going to be too old to strap on the ol’ leather pants and hop from rooftop to rooftop.”
He laughs. “Do you want the polite answer or the honest answer?”
“Both.”
“Polite: I’ll figure something out. Honest: I never really planned to live that long.”
As soon as it’s out of his mouth he wishes he never said it, because her face flinches like someone punched her in the stomach and she swallows hard as she composes herself. “Oh. Well. Yeah, I guess that will do it then.”
“Felicity,” he starts, reaching for her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have—“
“No, it’s fine. I asked for the honest answer. I just think you’re wrong.”
He tries again: “Felicity.” He’s not entirely sure how to explain it, that going home to a woman he loves whose belly is swollen with his child is the kind of paradise he’s never even dared to think about too much. His entire life feels like one big lead-up to the moment where he’s eventually going to have to make a choice between himself and the city he loves, and it’s never been a choice, really. It’s been decided from day one.
“I know you’ve been through absolute shit. And I know that you’ve lost and you’ve struggled and you’ve sacrificed a lot. But you act like you don’t deserve to be happy, to live. And it’s exhausting, watching you think you’re nothing, that you’re not a good person and that you should just give up on ever being happy. Aren’t you tired? I’m so tired, Oliver.”
And she looks tired, weary and fragile, and he’s never really thought of her that way. Physically, Felicity is the weakest of them; he’s seen her attempts at hitting the punching bag and while he knows she can handle herself with the rest of them, she’s not going to be up there on the salmon ladder or going hand-to-hand with Malcolm Merlyn. Day after day, she comes in, she gets shit done, and she does it all in four-inch heels. But tonight she looks young, like she should be tucked in to bed and left to sleep for a few days.
“I’m trying to be realistic,” Oliver says carefully. “One day, there’s going to be something I can’t handle.”
“What about Thea?” she counters.
“What about her?”
She throws her hands up. “You’re just going to abandon her? You’re all she has left, Oliver. To be actively planning for the day that you leave her all alone… I’m sorry, but it’s disgusting.”
“I know that you and Dig and Roy will take care of her.”
Her brow furrows and she sighs in frustration. “Talking to you is like talking to that wall over there.” She stands up and smoothes out her skirt. “I’m going home. I hope one day you’ll realize that you’re worth something, because you’re worth something to other people. I love what we do, Oliver, but I don’t know how much longer I can watch you hate yourself.”
She leaves without another word, and he doesn’t try to stop her. He tells himself it’s better this way, for her to lose faith in him like this, but he still spends the rest of the night pushing himself, working out until dawn creeps over the roof of Verdant and he collapses, her words still ringing in his ears.
It’s not that Oliver has been trying to die. It’s that ever since that first day, when the boat went down, he’s known that death is an eventuality, an inevitability. This life doesn’t end happily. But when Sara’s body is lying there, lifeless and cold and she was someone so full of life and warmth, someone he loved, someone he knew when she had braces and pigtails…
Suddenly death is a lot closer and a lot bigger.
But there’s no time to think about that, because someone has to take Laurel home and tuck her into bed and make sure she’s okay, despite her claims that she can do it herself. Someone has to move Sara’s body and start thinking of leads. Someone has to take charge and control.
After that’s all done, after Felicity accuses him of being cold and not having any feelings because she doesn’t—can’t—know that if he starts he’ll never be able to stop, Oliver sits alone in the alley behind the club. He’s lost Sara so many times now, but he’s never had the time to properly grieve her. Now all he has is time. He has to find her killer instead.
It’s cheap to mourn Sara’s life and his relationship with Felicity at the same time. But as he swings a leg over the side of his motorbike and rides through the streets as fast as he can with no destination, he does it anyway. The two things aren’t comparable; he still gets to see and talk to Felicity, he can touch her if he wants. But maybe now she’s realized what exactly a life with him would entail. He’s going to end up like Sara someday, and there’s no way around that anymore.
He ends up at the place she was killed again. Once she told him that there was still a light inside of him, that she was the one completely taken over by the darkness. She was wrong, of course, because if he had light she did as well. The truth is that she was the only person who could even sort of understand his reasoning and his hesitations and his motives and now he feels more alone than he has in a long time.
“I didn’t sign up to be your personal therapist, you know,” Diggle says as he comes back to the table with two tumblers of whiskey.
Oliver nods in thanks and holds his glass up in salute. “Dig of all trades.”
With an eyeroll worthy of Felicity, Diggle looks around Verdant. Though they spend the majority of their time there, it’s rare that they venture upstairs to take advantage of the actual club, but Felicity has a “not a date, totally work thing” dinner with Ray Palmer, and Thea has Roy scheduled for a shift, and the streets of Starling are oddly quiet.
“You should really go home and spend some time with Lyla and Sara,” Oliver says.
“One drink, and then I will.” Diggle takes a healthy gulp and then clears his throat like he has some sort of announcement or big news. “Look, Oliver, I wanted to talk to you about something.”
Oliver wonders if this is it; when Sara was born Diggle had said he wanted to step back a little bit, but it was to no avail. Theoretically, Oliver knows he could do this without Dig. After all, that was his plan, to do this alone, to be the only person in danger. But somewhere along the way Dig became more than the guy Oliver tried his hardest to avoid. Especially after Tommy, after watching his best friend die in his arms, Oliver needed the kind of steady and sturdy friend Dig could be.
He really can’t do this without Dig.
“You know I’m with you and I’ll support you and have your back no matter what happens. But we can’t be a team and we can’t have our heads in the game if we’re dealing with something else.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Oliver lies.
Dig shakes his head. “Man, what would you even be doing tonight if I didn’t ask you to have a drink with me? Throwing things around theFoundry? Waiting outside the restaurant for Felicity and Ray to finish their date? This is getting ridiculous, Oliver, and sooner or later it’s going to cause us to mess up.”
“So what do you want me to do?”
“You hate yourself so much that you think you don’t deserve someone as good as Felicity. This whole time you’ve made this excuse that you being with her would put her in danger, but she can’t be in any more danger than she already is. If that was really your concern, you would kick her off the team. I know things aren’t easy and they haven’t been easy for a long time. But you have to either be with her or not. You can’t do this in-between anymore. I love Felicity, too. I care about both of you, and I’m through watching this. It won’t end well.”
Stop dangling maybes, she tells him but he feels like his entire life is one big maybe. Maybe he’ll get to wake up tomorrow. Maybe everything will be okay. Maybe he can love her with the attention and ferocity with which she deserves to be loved.
It’s not until he dies and lives again does he realize that maybes aren’t out of his control. He can turn those maybes into yeses and the world won’t end. So he fights his way back to her, knowing that he’s been wrong this entire time, knowing that he’ll let her berate him about it for as long as she wants if he can only see her again.
Home is a tricked-out basement in a club that his sister runs with an iron fist. Home is a rag-tag team of misfits with hearts of gold who only want to defend their city from bad guys. Home is a fake blonde who always says the wrong thing at the wrong time and calls him out on his shit like nobody’s business.
“You know, Oliver,” Diggle says after the hugs and the tears and Felicity has hit Oliver in the shoulder more times than was probably necessary, “you have more faith in people than anyone I know. I hope now, after all this, you can have a little bit of faith in yourself.”
“I missed you, John,” is the only thing Oliver can say to that.
Thea hosts a big dinner, invites Diggle and Lyla and Felicity and Roy and Laurel and Oliver laughs more than he’s laughed in what seems like forever. He holds Felicity’s hand underneath the table and every so often she squeezes so hard her knuckles turn white, as if she’s afraid he’s going to vanish into thin air. He doesn’t blame her—he’s afraid of the same thing.
She’s the last one to leave that night, helping Thea stack containers of leftovers in the fridge and put away plates and silverware. When the kitchen is sparkling, Thea excuses herself to bed with a kiss on Oliver’s cheek and a sly smirk in Felicity’s direction.
“I should go, too,” Felicity says but she doesn’t move. It’s like she’s rooted to the spot, her heels stuck to the floor.
“You should stay,” Oliver says. “Please?”
She nods with a small smile and follows him to his bedroom.
“I’m not—this isn’t…” he tries. She laughs a little and he starts again. “I’m not asking you to stay because I’m trying something. I’m not making a move. I just missed you and I don’t want to be alone.”
“Okay.”
He shows her to the bathroom where she changes into one of his old tshirts and when she comes back, he’s shirtless in a pair of pajama pants. He stands still and holds his breath as she eyes his new scars, as she runs her fingertips over the raised skin. Her eyes are glassy with tears again and he wonders how she has any left to cry.
Slowly, he places his hand over hers. “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
“I just had dinner with you,” she says with a sniffle.
“I would maybe prefer if my sister and my ex-girlfriend weren’t there, too.”
She laughs again and falls against him. “I would love to have dinner with you.”
He sleeps with her tucked beneath his chin and in the morning he feels like maybe Sara was right about that light.
There’s a scar on Felicity’s shoulder, small and circular and neat from Sara’s stitching. Oliver traces it with his index finger in the gray pre-dawn light. She also has a scar on her hip from a childhood bicycle accident and a birthmark on her right ankle. Oliver knows these things now.
She stirs and groans without opening her eyes. “I know it isn’t morning yet.”
He laughs. “Technically it is.”
With another groan, she rolls over to face him. She has smudged makeup around her eyes and her lips are barer than he’s ever seen them. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“I got a good four hours.”
“I should have exhausted you way more than that,” she says, hooking her leg over his hip. “You’re making me self-conscious.”
He slides his mouth against hers and reaches beneath the blankets to palm the small of her back and to mentally relish in the fact that Felicity Smoak is deliciously naked against him. It feels like a scene from someone else’s life to be this happy; he loved Sara but their days and nights were filled with the heaviness of two people awaiting death. Felicity knows every inch of him, every horrible and terrible thing, and she still can look up at him with a smile on her face that isn’t tainted with sadness.
“This isn’t awkward,” Felicity says when they break apart. “Not that I thought it would be awkward, but I totally did, especially since I had to drug myself before our first date and I thought you were going to have a heart attack every ten seconds.”
“I’m much better at rescuing you from landmines than going on first dates.”
“Why do I feel like that’s a more recent development?”
He smoothes her hair back from her face. “Because you’re intimidating.”
“Me? Big bad Arrow is afraid of me?”
“Terrified,” he laughs. It’s the truth, but it’s the good kind of fear, the kind that makes his stomach bubble with butterflies and his palms sweaty with anticipation. It’s not the only kind of fear he’s going to feel from now on, he knows that, but for the first time he thinks things might actually be okay.