Work Text:
For three months, Felicity waits for somebody to notice that Oliver Queen is missing, but Starling City mourns neither its former favorite son nor its sometimes-hero. After all, there's still somebody shooting arrows at criminals in the night and nobody seems to register that the new Vigilante is a little slower on the uptake and a few inches shorter.
There are occasionally whispers in the tabloids, but almost everybody writes it off as the latest eccentricity of an infamous family. His disappearance is just another twist in his riches to rags story, and it’s not even the strangest one.
If it hadn’t been the worst possible way to honor him, Felicity would’ve set the City on fire. Or at the very least, left some really dirty coffee cups on the curb. But he loved this city, all the way down in his bones, in a way he let himself care about so few things, and she knows that means something, it has to mean something or what was the point of any of it.
Sometimes she wishes he hadn’t told her that he loved her; that maybe the strength of that regret would’ve been enough to bring him back. But then, it wasn’t enough to make him stay.
At first, she chalked it up to choice. He’d disappeared before, and when she’s completely honest with herself, part of her assumed, given every other man she’s ever known, that he would disappear again, someday. Maybe he’d run back to the island to lick his wounds and brood. Diggle suggested they give him two weeks before they dragged his ass home.
But that didn’t stop her from tracking his credit cards or hacking into ten different camera networks to search for any trace of his face. For her, keeping tabs on Oliver is involuntary, like sneezing.
Until Nyssa showed up, the truth written all over her face, and the blood rushing through Felicity’s veins swelled into a drumbeat that made Nyssa’s voice small and tinny, as if she was whispering from a very long distance.
How, she asked, because it was essential that she know. Because if he was just presumed dead or drowned in an ocean somewhere, she would find him or he would find her. But even Oliver couldn’t come back from a sword to the heart at the bottom of a mountain. Like her mom said, when their aging cat, Pudding disappeared one day, even cats run out of lives eventually, honey.
Nyssa describes the injury clinically, in great detail, and somebody else might’ve thought it was cruel, but Felicity knows it’s a form of kindness. Nyssa wanted to see Sara’s body too.
There’s no missing person’s report, no body, and there’s no explanation they can offer the police, so there’s no funeral. Diggle suggests holding a memorial service just for them, but something about the idea makes Felicity’s stomach churn.
She’s relieved when Laurel shakes her head. “I can’t believe this is happening again.”
“It’s overkill. Literally,” she says and then bites down on her mouth, because she wouldn’t be herself if she weren’t saying the worst possible thing at the worst possible moment. “Sorry,” she offers to Laurel uselessly.
“I still don’t believe it,” says Roy, who has developed a knack for directing attention away from her when she needs it. “I can’t believe he lost.”
“Oliver was the strongest fighter out there. If he didn’t survive the fight, it’s because he didn’t want to,” snaps Laurel.
Something about her tone makes it sound like wishful thinking, although Felicity’s not sure what she’s wishing for. These days, Laurel is shaved down to the point of a knife. Her body has become all angles; even her voice seems sharper, thinner.
Loss turns people into strangers, Oliver’s voice says in her ear.
“I don’t believe that,” says Felicity and hopes she’s not lying. She spent the first twenty years of her life trying to convince people that she was something other than exactly what she looked like. Yes, she was bottle-blonde and yes, she owned multiple cardigans with birds on them, but she was also the best at what she did.
Oliver was the first person who ever seemed to recognize her completely, right from the start. She’s not sure what that means, but she can’t help but feel like she owes him the same unwavering trust.
Diggle shakes his head, more like a weary father than ever. “Ra’s Al Ghul is a living legend. Oliver knew what he was facing.”
Felicity closes her eyes, swatting away the memory of another time that they were all standing together in the Arrow cave. “If we’re not telling the police, I think we should tell Thea." The words surprise her even as they burst from her lips.
“I’m not sure that’s our choice,” Dig says, frowning. But Oliver’s dead and that means he doesn’t get to take choices away from any of them anymore.
“She should’ve heard it from him,” she says, dodging the hand that is moving towards her shoulder, twisting away from John’s kindness, from the truths he knows about all of them. “But she didn’t. And she deserves to know.” And because somebody else should mourn him, should hurt in some of the same ways she’s hurting (deep in her gut, like a stomach bug she can’t get over, as if he’s a kind of bad Chinese food).
“He should’ve,” he agrees.
“She should know who her brother was,” she says defiantly, as if he’s saying no, even though he’s nodding. “I want to tell her.”
When she tells Thea what happened, starting with the island and ending with the duel, a lifetime of emotions flits across her face: rage and pain and shock and guilt and briefly, violence. She is a Queen too, Felicity remembers then, and a Merlyn.
“Thank you for telling me,” Thea says finally, her voice stumbling just once and then she’s gone.
If Felicity had been hoping for some sort of closure from that encounter, she would’ve been disappointed.
She wishes, sometimes, that she’d remembered to tell her what Nyssa said when she came bearing the news, looking genuinely sorrowful. “In the League, we have a saying: those who live violent lives are given a quiet afterlife. Perhaps he is at peace now.”
Tenuously, step-by-step, she rebuilds her routine. But it’s constructed around all the spaces where he’s not, the long wake he’s left behind in her life.
Oliver is dead, she tells her microwave and her laptop and the stop sign outside the coffee shop. Over and over, she tells the world around her that he’s gone, as if she can turn it into something normal, like saying goodbye or god bless you; empty words that mean nothing.
She scribbles his name on napkins and taps out his obituary on her tablet. Oliver Queen was relentless and an idiot and brave and kinder than he had any right to be. You all know his face but none of you knew him.
Her work is as impeccable as ever, but the hours drag on her in a way they never used to before. Some days she even contemplates hanging up her keyboard and retiring from the super hero business.
When Ray asks her to help him, she shakes her head, no, no, and entreats him to stick to corporate social responsibility. CEOs almost never end up dead in a sword fight halfway around the world.
From the beginning, Ray recognized her symptoms for what they were, and since then, she's wanted to tell him that her traitorous mouth failed her the one time she needed it to blurt out the unfiltered truth. That she still thinks of Oliver in the present tense. That all that time, she was the voice in his ear, and now, he’s repaying the favor. But she can’t think of a box to put Oliver in that will make sense to him. He has a dead fiancé and she has a dead question mark with an asterisk next to it.
Her body feels jetlagged, like everything but her brain is drunk. Mondays never used to make her this tired. She wants precisely three things, her bed, a cozy blanket, and Indian food, in that order.
Felicity nudges the light switch with her shoulder and lets out a short scream when the lamp illuminates Thea, curled into her couch.
“Holy crap,” she says, touching her hand to her chest, feeling the erratic thump of her heart. “Why does everybody in my life have a phobia of front doors?”
Her rant dies in her throat when she sees the fresh bruises on Thea’s face. She rushes towards her, but Thea raises her hand, waving her off. “I’m okay. Really,” she says. “I just had a little chat with dear ole dad.” With a slight grimace, she shifts over to make room for her on the couch.
In a few quick steps, Felicity walks to the fridge and pulls out a cold compress, because Thea is not the first or even the tenth visitor to show up here a little worse for wear. Thea accepts it with a grateful smile and Felicity sinks down into the cushions next to her.
“What happened?” she asks.
After a pause in which Thea switches the ice pack from her face to her shoulder, she answers, but she’s answering a different question altogether.
“Right after Oliver got home, I used to spend most nights sitting outside his door. Even when I was so mad at him I could’ve smacked him, I was just so glad he was back, you know? But eventually, I stopped watching his door. I forgot to stay vigilant. And he got taken away from me again. But this time, I’m not going to sit around and wait for him to come back.”
Felicity wants to reach out and squeeze Thea’s hand, but something about the tense line of her body, burning with restless energy and yet perfectly still, reminds her of Oliver so instead she grips her pillow tighter.
“Thea, I’m so sorry, but he’s really gone this time,” she says.
“Maybe he was,” Thea says. “But, the League knows things we don’t. I think I have some idea of where he is. And I want to hear from his lips why he didn’t trust me enough to tell me the truth.”
There’s an open gash on her arm and spatter of blood, like a Rorschach test across her shirt. From this angle, it looks like a butterfly. Felicity wonders whose blood it is: father or daughter.
Malcolm Merlyn miraculously rose from the dead, she remembers, and for the first time in months, the exhaustion drains from her limbs.
“I’m coming,” she says. She expects a fight, but instead Thea grins.
“Why do you think I’m here? We need to leave tonight. Make sure you pack warm clothing.”
II.
His muscles strain and crack against the chains. Every time he moves, he hears the cold clink of metal on metal, the scrape of cement against his skin, and sometimes it's so loud it’s like a symphony, and that’s when he joins in, letting out deep, guttural yells.
His blood pounds against his skin insistently and he can taste it, bitter and sharp on his lips. Every muscle, every tendon of his body is corded, quivering, pulling at his restraints.
Sometimes, a sliver of weak sunlight slips through the bars of his prison. He watches as it shivers and twists, dropping like a ribbon into his lap until his vision narrows into his rage, like staring down a black tunnel. The earth spit him out, cleansed him, took his pain and left behind something else. You went into the dark, and you brought the dark back.
The rage burns itself out of him, slowly, like a fever. He wakes up one morning and for the first time in his short life every inch of his body is not pulled taut against his chains.
His wrists are bleeding where he’s twisted them raw against his bonds and there are blood-crusted scratches in his shoulders that must’ve come from his own fingernails. The stench of urine permeates the dark, cold room. It occurs to him that he’s not wearing a stitch of clothing. His muscles are burning, even the bones of his skull ache. And yet somehow, his skin seems perfect, completely unblemished, like he just stepped out of the womb.
His only memory is of a dark crack in the ground and his arm pushing through the crumbling crust into the cold air. The smell of the dirt filling his nostrils, grit coating his tongue.
He can’t hold on to any other memory; it’s like trying to remember the details of a movie you saw once, a very long time ago.
Distantly, he recalls that there is somebody who comes here every day. That food appears. He thinks, the pit is an infection that must be burned out and he knows these are not his words.
His captor is a tall man, who walks towards him with a light step. A shapeless wrap covers him from head to toe, effectively disguising his build and age.
“Release me,” he says. He’s aiming for threatening, but his voice has gone rusty from disuse and it comes out in a croak.
“That’s not in my power, I’m afraid,” the stranger says. He has a polite, pleasant voice. The guard drops a thick slice of bread slathered with cheese on a paper plate and kicks it close enough to him that he can reach it without being unchained. “Even if I wanted to, my employers did not leave behind a key.”
“Then tell me who I am,” he says.
The guard shakes his head. “I don’t know. And before you ask, I don’t know why you’re here either.”
He doesn’t have an accent, but something about the deliberate way he speaks makes him think that English is not the guard’s first language. He realizes, as a stab of pain jolts through his skull, that English is his first language, and his accent is American. He tucks this piece of knowledge away for another time.
After that, the same man appears twice a day, with the same meal and occasionally a slice of cured, unidentifiable meat. He does his best to pull the guard into small talk, as much out of boredom as strategy, although he suspects that neither of them are the kind of people who typically enjoy small talk.
He keeps waiting to pull on the right string that will send all of his memories tumbling back to him, like dominoes, but so far all he has are snippets of his past self.
He has tattoos, but he doesn’t recognize what they signify. He knows what pressure points can be used to make torture more painful. He knows he used to love the ocean. And once he noted, off-handedly, that the components haphazardly piled on the other side of the room could be used to make a small bomb.
When he puts the pieces together, they do not add up to a good man.
Maybe it’s a relief. Muscle memory might get him out of here. He sizes up his captor and flexes his own arms, which are growing slack, but still strong, and he decides that yes, he’s capable of killing him, if it comes to that.
The door scrapes open earlier than usual, but he doesn’t notice the lighter tread. His head doesn’t jerk up until he hears her voice.
“Hey, big brother,” she says.
“Thea,” he whispers, his mouth making the words before his brain can fail to remember her. He knows that there was a time when he couldn’t be surprised, when even exhaustion and madness couldn’t blunt his instincts, but now he’s a jigsaw puzzle that’s been put together all wrong.
“You didn’t think I’d let you stay here forever, did you?” she asks.
Thea half-carries, half-pushes him out of his subterranean prison and when his new eyes see the sun for the first time, he blacks out and when he wakes up, there are hands everywhere, dabbing at him, and he tastes salt.
In the split second before his eyes open, he can feel fingers tracing abstract shapes along his chest. His body surges up instinctively, his shoulders lifting off the bed until he’s snapped backwards by restraints. Out of the frying pan into another prison.
But even under a layer of muck and scratches, this new guard has the friendly, open face of an elementary school teacher, and she’s beaming at him like he’s her best student. “Welcome back,” she says.
With the back of her hand, she touches his forehead and something heavy settles in his chest in a way that is both painful and pleasant. Maybe this is another form of muscle-memory.
“Tell me who I am. I think you know,” he says.
“That’s…a harder question than you’d think,” she says. She waits a beat, her eyes scanning his face. “You’re Oliver Queen, among other things. But mostly, you’re Oliver.”
“Oliver Queen. Among other things,” he repeats.
“If it makes you feel better,” she says, “this probably wouldn’t even make the top ten list of terrible things that have happened to you. Ehh, not top five anyway.”
He feels his face being pulled into a smile, despite himself. “That doesn’t really sound like a life I want,” he says.
“Well, unfortunately for you pal, you don’t really get a say in that. Do you have any idea how many pairs of shoes I ruined looking for you? Do you see what’s going on with my hair?” she asks, pointing at the two inches of brown roots forming a dark ring around her face.
The smile fades from her face and there’s a sudden tremble in her jaw. “There are people out there who need you. You’re important to us…to me,” she adds. “And the first thing you should know about yourself is that you never let down the people who care about you.”
With deliberate gentleness, she reaches over him to release his restraints. The sensation of her fingers brushing against his skin is the first soft thing he can remember feeling. He watches her warily, but he pushes back his urge to flee, to crush the tiny bones of her fingers.
“The second thing you need to understand, is that you trust me, you have always trusted me. It’s what we do.”
And then she tells him everything she remembers about Oliver Queen.