Chapter Text
Felicity
The first three weeks of their engagement had passed blissfully. The party had been a huge success and the picture auction had raised a huge amount, surpassing even Thea's lofty expectations. And the paparazzi had been much less in evidence than they'd feared. It should have been a sign.
Isabel had seen the emerald, or as Felicity was beginning to think of it: The Emerald, and said nothing. She'd looked like she wanted to say something, but beyond the narrowed eye and clenched jaw, she let it pass. Felicity had waited until the woman left, but she'd done a happy dance at her desk while Oliver watched, smiling.
Oliver's public stance was that Felicity was his partner and she worked with him. End of story. He'd told Isabel, and the Board, and any random reporter who asked the same thing: 'she's the brains, I'm the brawn.' And people started taking them both more seriously.
It was Tuesday when it changed. Thea wanted her company during another planning session with the charity that had benefited from their engagement photos and party. Predictably, they ran late so Oliver had told Felicity just to go on to Verdant and he'd meet her there. Now it was well past 8:00pm and no one had heard from him.
Digg went back to QC to see what he could find out. Swearing under her breath, Felicity started tracking Oliver's phone. Or trying to, since there was no sign of it anywhere.
Checking into the security footage at QC had been an alarmingly frustrating exercise. The cameras in the garage had been tampered with as had several others like the elevators and areas on the executive levels. Oliver's key card had been used multiple times in those blacked out spaces and it took her precious minutes to get around the blocks left behind to discover that the cameras had been turned off at the source inside the security offices. Manually taken off line.
Felicity texted Digg with what she'd found and waited for him to respond, shivering. This should not, could not be happening. Not to them. Not again!
Digg's response: "I'm coming in," was enormously unreassuring. Felicity was pacing, chewing her lip, nearly in tears when the door in from Verdant opened. Watching Digg's face as he came slowly down the steps was heart-breaking.
She could feel the blood drain from her face as he walked towards her, holding a piece of paper. Thea, who was waving her hands and yelling something at Digg, followed only steps behind. Roy had been bringing up the rear in the parade, behind a worried Sara, but he was the one who saw Felicity begin to fold so he was the one who caught her before she skulled herself on the concrete floor.
He settled her in her chair and pushed her head between her knees. It was several moments before Felicity was able to track the argument still going on above her head. She looked up to see Thea right up in John's face, shaking her finger and shouting, while Sara and Roy looked on with matching looks of worry.
It took a couple of tries before Felicity could get enough air in her lungs to deploy her Loud Voice. "SOMEBODY had better tell me what the HELL is going on. Right NOW!" Four sets of shocked eyes turned her way.
Thea snatched the paper from John's hand and marched over to her. "He thinks Oliver wrote this," she said, her tone dripping disgust.
"Thea," John's voice was quiet and infinitely kind, "he's bailed before. After the quake he went back to Lian Yu. If we hadn't gone there after him, he'd probably still be there."
Felicity looked daggers at John for saying it out loud. Yes, Oliver had run away, but he'd had reasons anyone with a heart could have understood. She held out her hand to Thea and took the sheet of paper.
'I'm sorry, babe. I just can't do this. I know my timing sucks, but I have to get out of here. Please forgive me for abandoning you like this, but I can't take it. I hope you'll understand it's for the best. Please don't try to find me. Just let me go.'
Felicity bent doubled over in her chair, shoulders shaking. Roy and Sara both looked alarmed and Thea put out her hands as though to offer comfort, but she wasn't sure how, while John shook his head and walked over to the heavy bag as though looking for something to punch. It took a moment for Thea to recognize that Felicity was actually laughing.
"'City?" Thea said, as Felicity sat upright, wiping her eyes, still chuckling.
Felicity looked over at Sara. "You would know better than I, but in all the time you've known him, has Oliver ever referred to a girl as 'babe'?"
Sara's eyes widened. "I think he used it once, but he was very drunk and it was a noun, rather than a term of endearment."
John looked at the ceiling and then closed his eyes. "I should have seen that," he said, shaking his head. "He would never have used that kind of term to refer to you. I'm an idiot."
Felicity shook her head. "No. You saw what you were supposed to see. And you could be forgiven for not knowing that he doesn't use those kinds of words. When he's got 28 different ways of just saying my name, why would he need them?"
Sara stood behind Felicity and looked over her shoulder at the note. "His handwriting is better now than it used to be, but that's not saying much. Still, if he were trying to get you to leave him to himself, I doubt he would have fired up the computer and then printed this out, just leaving it at the office for you to find in the morning. If he'd gone to the trouble of typing it out, why not just send it as an email and be done with it?"
Felicity looked at the paper and tested it with her fingers. "I'm betting this wasn't even printed from Oliver's machine. This is heavier than the paper QC uses in its printers and anyway, anyone accessing his computer, or mine, after I've left for the day, would have sent an alert here and to my tablet. Somebody brought it with them when they came to take Oliver."
"Did the security cameras catch anything?" John knew that Felicity had said they'd been manually disabled, but something might have been missed.
"I haven't looked at them beyond finding they'd been tampered with," Felicity admitted. "It was Oliver's key card that gave them access, but Oliver wouldn't have used it that way himself. He wouldn't have known how and frankly he wouldn't have needed to do any of it. It's not like he couldn't have avoided every camera in the building if he'd wanted to. He knows where they all are."
"So we assume that he was taken in the garage," Sara said, "because if he'd really wanted to avoid being seen, he'd have used one of the alley maintenance exits and dodged between the dumpsters until he was out on the street."
Felicity turned back to her computers and started accessing the traffic cameras outside the street side garage exit. All week she'd been testing which ones gave the best views of the garage itself after her own misadventure last month. None of them were perfect, but she was able to catch a glimpse of something close to the elevators that might have been a man falling.
Her view was almost instantly blocked by an idling city bus, which resulted in a stream of very unflattering comments on the bus driver's antecedents, timing and skills. Once the bus was gone, the scene was empty and no vehicles could be seen moving out that exit, even though she watched for several more minutes. No other cameras around had that angle or that image.
Felicity ran the sequence before the bus's interference several times by itself. Thea was peering closely at the monitor, so she missed the unhappy looks that passed between Sara and John. Roy caught Sara's eye and she shrugged.
"If we assume for the sake of argument that this is picture of Oliver falling," Sara said, "I think we can assume that he was darted or tased as he got off the elevator. Since we don't see them drive off with him from this exit, are there other exits they could have used out of the garage?"
Felicity looked thoughtful and started tapping on keys. The pictures on the screen changed and shuffled before settling into a 3 shot by 4 shot grid. The images in each mini-window moved backwards quickly, with the timestamps showing the time in each rewinding from 8:00 pm.
"How can you see anything?" Thea asked.
"I'm looking for blank spots," Felicity said. "If we find one it means they neutralized the camera there and we have a place to start looking."
After several tense minutes with no blanks, Roy said "Wait a minute! Look at the one on the top right. See how that door keeps moving?"
Felicity pulled it up and sent it to a second monitor. There was indeed a tiny movement in the door out to the alley that repeated in a loop. Felicity did a fist pump and kissed Roy on the cheek.
"Good eye, Roy!" Digg said.
Felicity started typing madly. "I'm pulling up the cameras that can see the alley," she explained. A pause, another flurry of keystrokes, another pause, a longer barrage of keystrokes. The third monitor split into 3 images focused on a car very like the sedan Felicity remembered seeing when Malcolm had removed her from the custody of the men Moira Queen had paid to abduct her.
As the Team watched, two men carried Oliver out to the back of the car and stuffed him unceremoniously into the trunk. None of the cameras was able to show the car's plates and the angles on the faces was just as bad. Even repeated watching didn't help confirm anything except that Oliver had no visible bloody marks on his suit.
The two men were joined by another and they got into the car and drove it carefully down the alley, out onto the street beyond. Felicity's fingers danced across the keyboard again and the view shifted so that they were now watching the car make its way through the relatively thin traffic. She was able to follow the sedan for almost 10 miles, until it pulled into a parking garage near the Aquarium. Felicity worked feverishly, but the screen didn't change.
"They don't appear to have a wireless uplink," Felicity said.
Roy heard her muttering something about 'backsliding neanderthals' as she kept trying to find cameras she could hijack to peer into the garage's interior. Before she was able to find any way to see any visuals inside the garage, the sedan returned to the street. It resumed the same path it had been following, but at a gradually increasing rate of speed.
The sedan made a sudden turn and headed across a parking lot, speed still increasing. Felicity watched in horror as the car raced towards the river. Whether it had enough speed to clear the embankment or not, the results were going to be very bad for the car and it's occupants.
Thea whispered "Noooooo!" in a low moan, as Roy put his arms around her. From the look on his face, it was hard to tell if he was giving comfort or taking it. Sara watched carefully to see if any doors opened before the crash, while Digg stepped up and put an arm around Felicity.
The car reached the embankment and started to crest it like there was a ramp built for it. The camera angles were bad, so Sara couldn't tell if there actually was something placed there for the purpose, but she suspected there was something because the driver's side door didn't pop open until the car was on the downward side of its arc. Only the driver's door opened, and Sara smiled in relief.
Thea looked at Sara in disbelief, but Felicity understood why. "They weren't ditching a body, they were ditching the one thing that would tie them to the abduction."
Sara nodded. "I'm going to take a look around that garage. We might get lucky, but we might get luckier at QC." She looked over at Diggle. "John, I think you should go with Roy and see what you can find there."
Felicity nodded. "Thea, I'm going to ask you to help me here. There's a lot of footage I skipped past because I was following the car Oliver was in. We need to look more closely at other cars on the road and I want to see if the plate for the first car is visible somewhere along the way, so we can see if it goes back to the same place as the van and the sedan that were involved ... before."
Thea gave Roy a hug and a fierce kiss as Sara moved to suit up. Pulling up another chair next to Felicity, Thea said, "Tell me what you need me to do."
"First, I'm downloading the sequence we watched to a DVD so we have it if we need it." Felicity tapped a few keys as she spoke and slipped a disk into the drive slot. "We'll need to decide pretty quickly if we're going to report him missing and how."
Thea cocked her head at Felicity and then nodded. There was no way as yet to know exactly who these people had taken. Were they after Oliver Queen, CEO, or the Arrow? Or was there something else entirely going on here.
"If the car comes back to the same place as the other one," Thea began.
"We will be having a pointed conversation with your mother." Felicity looked over at Thea. "I don't think she would do anything to him. Whatever else she may feel, however angry she may be with him, I truly don't believe she would harm either of you. What worries me most is how easily other people seem to be able to mess up her plans."
"How can we have a 'pointed conversation' if the Arrow is missing?"
"John has worn the suit before," Felicity told her, shrugging. "With him, and Sara, in their leathers, we should be able to get her to spill what's going on. If she knows."
"You think she doesn't?"
Felicity shrugged. "After having Malcolm scoop me out of the hands of the men she'd hired to kidnap me, I have a lot less faith in her omniscience."
Thea shuddered. If Malcolm hadn't been able to take Felicity, a lot of things wouldn't have happened, including, she suspected, the conversation that brought her here. She was of two minds about that part, because it probably would also have meant that Oliver would not have proposed, either and she was glad he'd done that. He deserved to be able to smile again.
It raised a question Thea suspected she knew how Oliver would answer: if it ended with him engaged to Felicity, would he do it all again? Oliver would probably say yes. But would Felicity?
When Thea asked, Felicity looked at her strangely.
"That's an odd question. My first instinct is to say no, because I hated that he had to put himself in Malcolm's hands." She shivered before she continued. "Malcolm was very specific about what he was going to do to Oliver once he surrendered. Very graphic. He already knew Oliver was the Arrow, because of the Undertaking."
Felicity turned to look at Thea. "That night, Digg went with Oliver when he confronted Malcolm because it was the only chance we had that Oliver would survive. Oliver had fought Malcolm before, twice, and both times Malcolm had defeated him. The first time was when he had that 'motorcycle accident' the night of Walter's disappearance."
Thea looked at her, eyes huge, stricken.
Felicity nodded. "It was only because Oliver was able to get a hold of Detective Lance that he allowed John to come with him. We'd discovered that the machine could be triggered remotely and Oliver knew that we couldn't trust to being sure of getting the trigger away from Malcolm as our only way of stopping it. Which is how I came to talk Detective Lance through disarming the device we found."
Thea's mind reeled. Lance's kindness towards Felicity during their interview/interrogation was clear now. But something caught her about what was only sort of being said.
"Oliver didn't expect to survive fighting Malcolm that night," Thea whispered, horrified by the realization. "He was going to go fight him alone even though it would probably get him killed."
Felicity put her arms around Thea as she remembered watching Oliver take the other bow out of the wooden box he'd come home with. His mother had just announced to the world that she'd been involved in Malcolm's horror, but he'd looked eerily calm, almost resigned. He'd tried to order her out of the basement, out of the area, but she'd been clear that he wouldn't do it all alone, that she would never leave him.
That one instant, where he'd argued, told her it was dangerous to stay. That was the one that cemented firmly in her heart the conviction that Oliver was a true hero. He had come back from the dead to rescue his city, his home, and if doing it meant that he would die again, he would do that to accomplish his mission and fulfill his father's last wish.
"To stop him, Oliver stabbed Malcolm in the chest with one of Malcolm's own arrows," Felicity continued. "This was awkward as Malcolm was behind Oliver at the time, strangling him."
Thea looked at her, frowning. "How? Not ..."
Felicity nodded, turning back to her screens. "The way Malcolm spoke about it he seemed to be equally pissed and amused. But it was that determination to thwart Malcolm's plan then that made him plan to kill Oliver before he took you away. He knew that Oliver would never stand aside and do nothing; that Oliver would fight to get you back. Fight and keep fighting until he got you home."
Thea put her head down. "I was so pissed when he up and disappeared after the quake. No word, not even a postcard for five months. While I was stuck here, holding down the fort and going crazy."
"When Malcolm triggered the second machine, Oliver saw that it was destroying the east side of the Glades, where Laurel's office was. He knew she wouldn't have left all their records and files to be destroyed, so he took his bike and tried to get there before it was too late."
Thea understood what Felicity wasn't saying. Oliver had spent the previous seven months doing battle against the people, like their mother, who had supported Malcolm in his mad quest for vengeance. He'd expected to lose his life winning the fight, only to have Tommy be the one who died, saving Laurel. The wonder wasn't that he run from the pain, it was that he'd come back. At all.
"Why did he come back?" Thea whispered. "Wait, John said something about after the quake. He went back to Lian Yu? After spending five years trying to get off it?"
Felicity smiled sadly. "He thought he'd failed, you see. He was punishing himself by going back." She looked back at the monitors and added, "I gave him as long as I could, but then Isabel Rochev decided to kill QC and I knew he wouldn't forgive himself if that happened without his knowledge."
"So you and John knew where he'd gone, all along?"
Felicity heard the hurt in Thea's voice. "No. I knew he needed time to heal, so I left him to it for a couple of months before I started tracking him. In retrospect, I should have guessed he'd wind up back there. John said once that he thought Oliver hadn't really ever left it, even though he'd been 'rescued' and it made sense when I thought about it. I think we brought him home for good this time."
Taking a deep breath, Felicity turned back to the computers. "I'm going to start with the security feeds in the garage going back to this morning. You saw the men who put Oliver in the trunk, so you know how they were dressed. I suspect that they were waiting for him for a while, possibly from the time I left this afternoon."
Images popped up on screen in front of Thea.
"Go through from the morning in case there was an earlier shift, or if they circulated. If there's no sign of them before they wiped the records, we'll look at the lobby too. The elevator bank would have told them what cabs stopped on what floors, so they would have known when one stopped on the Executive floor and didn't end their trip in the lobby." Thea nodded and started scanning.
Felicity went back to the beginning of the car's run from the alley to the garage. There were three cars that caught her attention. None of them followed the sedan into the garage, but one of them appeared to have circled the block while the sedan was out of sight, so she tagged it and was able to backtrack to a point where the license plate was legible. She suspected that both the plates and the car itself were stolen, but it was a clue. It was a start.
For a second, Felicity closed her eyes. 'Wherever you are Oliver, hang on. We're hunting you as hard as we can.'