Work Text:
You Keep The Light On
“For everyone I’m out to prove wrong, you keep the light on.
The only one, you know me better than the truth.”
“Sight of the Sun” - fun.
Felicity wakes the morning after Nyssa’s unwelcome visit in the Coast City vineyard to an empty bed, and as much as she tries to reassure herself - his stuff is still here, there are no messages on her phone and no sign of any struggle - she panics a little. The bed is cold, which means he’s been gone for a while. The man is an actual space heater, she’s realized, especially when he wraps himself around her.
It’s strange. For all the thought she’d given to sleeping with Oliver throughout the years, she’s discovered she didn’t give much consideration to actually sleeping with Oliver. And it’s kind of a disaster, to be honest. He’s a thrasher, and a blanket hog, and a furnace, which exasperates her to no end, because if he’s so hot, what does he need all the blankets for, anyway?
She remembers that he just raised his eyebrows at her the first time she had “yelled” at him for that, taking her in for a long moment before tackling her back to the bed, growling in her ear, “I’ll keep you warm.”
When he still hasn’t returned after forty minutes, she works herself into a full panic. She tries to busy herself with packing, they’re set to leave Coast City this afternoon, but all she can think is that he’s gone, and every horrible thing about sharing a bed with him pales in comparison to waking up without him. That realization socks her in the gut, because it’s only been a few weeks that they’ve actually been sleeping together in any capacity, and she’s been successfully waking up alone for years before him.
At 25, Felicity has lived a whole lifetime of awful lessons about what it means to count on someone else for your emotional well being and she’s horrified to find that the carefully built defenses around her heart have been blown to bits without her even realizing it was happening. She’s known that she loves him for a while now, has wanted him for even longer, but something about this crazy escapist intimacy has obliterated her defenses and she’s terrified to find herself needing him in this heart-stopping kind of way.
She only realizes she’s been holding her breath once she hears the lock turn in the door and sighs in relief. Thankful that her back is turned to him, she drops her head to her chest to heave some deep breaths and wipe away a few stray tears as he swings it open softly.
“Felicity?” He sounds worried and a little broken and she knows that it’s because he can read her as well as she can read him.
“Yeah?” Her voice cracks into a thousand little pieces and then all of a sudden he’s banding his arms around her from behind, wrapping himself around her like he can hold it all together.
“Hey, hey,” he whispers against her hair. “What’s wrong?”
“I just..” She doesn’t want to tell him the truth, but she also knows that there’s no choice to make. “I woke up and you weren’t...and I just panicked a little. I’m sorry. I’m fine.”
“I’m sorry,” he presses his mouth behind her ear and down her neck. “I’m so sorry. I had a dream, I had to walk it off. I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”
She turns in his arms and the haunted look in his eye tells her all she needs to know about his dream. It was a bad one.
“The same one?” She thinks about bringing him coffee that night at Palmer Tech, remembers how her heart tore into smaller bits of confetti when he told her how he dreamed every night of their demise or escape.
“No,” he breathes out, shaking his head. “I haven’t had that dream since we left the city.” He smiles to himself and then at her and adds, “Maybe because we made it come true.”
“What do you dream about now?”
“Some days they’re good, and some days they’re bad,” he huffs out, face returning to stoic neutral, but softening when she puts her hands on his cheeks. “But, for the first time, they’re about the future instead of the past.”
That first morning, he tells her that he dreamed of their wedding, and her heart slams twice in her chest before plummeting when she realizes he won’t elaborate and won’t meet her eyes.
“Oh, just tell me,” she tries to tease it out of him. “It can’t have been as bad as your first one.”
“Felicity, please,” he whispers desperately. “I’ll tell you...sometime. Just, drop it for now, okay?”
She knows he must have seen something horrible, knows she should force him to share it, but they went twenty rounds over Nyssa and Malcolm Merlyn last night and honestly, she’s a little exhausted from her mini panic attack. So she offers him a mulligan. He can keep this one to himself, but he’s got to tell her about all the rest. Everything he dreams. Every morning.
“All of them?"
“Every part of you, remember?”
“Okay,” he agrees simply, and that’s that.
They settle into a little routine. He’s up before her, always, and when he goes for a run, or to grab them breakfast, he writes down the time he’ll be back on the little hotel notepad that sits on the nightstand. By her count, he always walks in the door at that exact time. She tells him after the first day or two that he doesn’t have to keep doing it, that she’s fine, but she’s secretly thrilled when he ignores her.
Sometimes he opens the door right as the clock changes, like he’s been outside waiting. Sometimes she hears his footsteps pound down the hall as he races to make it, but he’s always right on time. Oliver Queen was never on time and The Arrow never used his ninja-like stealth skills to chase his own happiness, but this new someone he’s becoming pulls off both in a way that makes her chest swell every time he comes back through the door.
And after he comes back exactly when he said he would, he tells her he what he dreamed that night. He tells her about spending time with Thea in street clothes and in leathers, he tells her about fighting alongside Laurel as she uses the Canary Cry, he tells her about reuniting with Roy and he tells her about tracking down Damien Darhk.
He tells her his dreams, and sometimes she doodles the happy ones down on the sheet of paper from the notepad, marking the date and location next to his time stamp and saving the scrap inside the hardcover book he bought her on one of their early stops, but she hasn’t gotten around to reading.
Unsurprisingly, most of the things he dreams about are realistic, practical and logical events. Nearly all of the good ones involve her and a sizeable chunk of those make her blush fully down her chest. But the few that are pure nonsense amuse her to no end.
“I dreamt that Digg was a gingerbread man,” he rasps into her ear one morning after a particularly late night and she feels his stomach rumble against her side. “Sara was a chocolate chip cookie.”
“I told you,” she mock-scolds, laughing at the imagery, “you should have eaten something before bed.”
He just grins at her lasciviously. “I did, don’t you remember?”
When he swallows her gasp with his lips and rolls over to pin her to the mattress, she knows he’s not making it out for a run that morning.
His next dream about John is far less sweet. When he comes back bruised from a boxing gym near Gateway City one morning, he tells her about being in a crowd back in Starling, and seeing his friend (his partner, his brother) out with his family. Except dream-Digg didn’t know him, wouldn’t believe him, and, when Oliver got pushy, beat the shit out him.
“We could call him, you know.”
“I’m not going to do that, Felicity.”
“Don’t tell me you think you’re too macho for a phone call.”
“I just…” he trails off, and she wants to press but knows it’s not the right time. “I don’t want to rush him.”
She sets up a Skype date with Lyla that afternoon anyway, under the not-so-false pretense of needing to see Sara every few weeks, lest the Digglet grow up too much while they’re away. She calls from the road, so he won’t feel pressured to participate much (and also so he can’t run away).
“Little lady!” Felicity squeals when the camera connects. “Oh my god, Lyla, she’s so big!”
“I know,” Lyla smiles. “She’s nearly walking. She’s going to run this place soon!”
“She looks great. So do you. Retirement agrees with you.”
“Not sure about that, I’m starting to get itchy,” Digg’s wife admits. “But it’s been great being home with her.”
“She said her first word,” John’s voice booms through the background as he finally enters the frame behind his little girl, who smiles at the sound.
“She did not,” Lyla sighs at him in exasperation, before turning back to Felicity. “She didn’t.”
“She absolutely did, she said Digg,” her friend insists proudly. “My girl’s a genius."
“I’ve already got her first laptop all set up in my mind,” Felicity tells him. “You just say when.”
Digg just shakes his head, smiling for a second before turning his serious face on her, nearly squinting at the phone’s camera.
“You good, Felicity?” he asks. “Both of you? You’re happy?”
“Crazy happy, Digg,” she tells him with a grin that splits her face, switching hands on the phone and reaching down to settle her free one over Oliver’s on the gear shift. “We're really good, both of us, we’re..we’re good."
Her burly big brother chuckles a little at her enthusiastic babble before handing the phone back to his wife.
“Good,” she hears him say as a goodbye. “I’m glad to hear it.”
“Any idea on a return ETA?” Lyla’s always good for that no-nonsense kick in the pants. Felicity’s certain that 99% of people wouldn’t pick Diggle to be sappy sentimental one in the relationship, but they’d be wrong.
“Not yet,” she confesses, feeling Oliver’s hand turn into hers and squeeze gently. “We’ll call you next week.”
“Sounds good,” Lyla says, signing off and holding Sara’s hand up to wave. “Be safe.”
“You too,” Felicity replies, hearing Oliver croak out the same beside her.
He squeezes her hand tight twice before pulling it back to shift gears quickly and she swipes her newly-freed fingers at the moisture collecting at the corner of his eye. “Big baby.”
They’re not through the fire yet, but they’re holding hands as they step across the coals.
She has to wake him one night, in a swanky hotel in Metropolis, because he’s thrashing so hard he nearly tosses her from the bed.
“It was Thea,” he gasps, when she finally shakes him aware. “When we talked to Nyssa, I didn’t ...”
He trails off, taking a long pause and a few deep breathes.
“I spent so much time trying to make sure she was safe,” he says, voice barely above a whisper. “Then, all I wanted was for her to be alive. Alive, and away from that place. And now she’s the goddamn Heir to the Demon.”
“What happened?” She asks about his dream, because she hasn’t yet figured out the real-life predicament of his sister, and hates dwelling on unsolved mysteries.
“She died...again,” he spits the words out. “We had to go back to Nanda Parbat. Malcolm put her in the Pit, he was eager this time. And she didn’t come up.”
He clears his throat, and she reaches up to lay a hand on his chest.
“She didn’t come up, so I...I went in after her. I had to swim so hard, down hundreds of feet, but then I got to the bottom, and...they were all there.”
“Who?"
“Everyone. Thea, Tommy, Sara, my parents,” he chokes out. “Everyone who died.”
Everyone who died because of me. He leaves that part unspoken, but the anguish is plain on his face and she props herself up on her elbows to run a hand through his disheveled hair, pulling on it a little so he meets her eyes.
“None of their blood is on your hands, Oliver,” she tells him sternly. “I will always be sorry that you had to lose so many, but I am certain that your survival does not make you a failure or a fault.”
His survival has meant the rescue and long happy lives of countless others, she reminds him, pressing a kiss to every scar she can find from where she lays at his side. “It’s what made you a good man, and a hero, and a loyal friend... and the man I love.”
She’s annoyed when he shakes her awake the next morning before the sun’s even fully up. Well, at first she’s panicked, remembering the horrors of yesterday, but when she sees his dopey grin and realizes everything’s okay, she slides back to annoyed.
“Oliver, it’s so early,” she whines. “Let me sleep.”
But he can’t. Because he’s too excited to tell her about a little girl with blue eyes and glasses. The calm certainty with which he describes every detail of their daughter makes her heart slam against her ribcage as she traces the words on the Holiday Inn Express notepad.
“And she’ll have your remarkable brain, and your blonde hair…”
“It’s going to have to be your blonde hair, remember?” She interrupts, tugging at her frayed strands to show him her roots, which definitely need touching up, as soon as she finds the time to care. “Besides, she’s got to have some stuff that’s yours.”
He smiles wide with a hint of surprise, like he’d forgotten for a second that he was part of the equation, and she has to catch her breath. It’s so unfair, she thinks, not for the first time, how much the horrors of his recent life have robbed the world of that smile.
“I’ll teach her how to shoot arrows,” he announces proudly, and she barks out a laugh and slaps his stupidly big bicep.
“You absolutely will NOT teach her how to shoot arrows,” Felicity scolds. “Not until she’s old enough to drive at least.”
“What?” he whines. “Why not? Don’t even try and tell me you’re not going to teach her how to hack.”
“Of course, I’ll teach her to hack,” she scoffs. “That’s just good sense in the Information Age. Your thing is an imprecise medieval hunting method.”
“It’s not imprecise when I do it,” he growls into her ear, waggling his eyebrows and she squeals out a laugh, suddenly fine with tabling the rest of this conversation for later.
Not surprisingly, they end up checking out of that hotel just under the wire, and are ten miles down the road when Felicity panics.
“We have to go back,” she looks at him wide-eyed and at first he smiles back at her, thinking she’s kidding.
“I’m serious, Oliver, turn the car around.”
“Wha..?” he asks, but he’s already starting a U-turn on the thankfully empty stretch of road. “Felicity, what’s going on?”
“I forgot something.”
“What could you have forgotten?” he asks, incredulous. “Felicity, I told you, I’ll get you whatever you need.”
“Just...drive faster."
She refuses to answer any more of his questions, but he guns the engine at a respectable clip and has them back at the hotel in seven minutes. She bolts from the car as soon as it’s in park, leaving him sitting dumbfounded in the driver’s seat and grabbing the keycard that’s still in her back pocket. She doesn’t exhale until she opens the door to their room and sees that the maids have mercifully not made it through yet.
And there it is. Tangled in the comforter they had swept off the bed. The notepad, where she had scribbled his silly, sappy details about their daughter. She holds it to her chest for a second and closes her eyes, opening them only at the sound of him barging in after her.
“Felicity, what the hell?”
“Sorry,” she stammers. “I just, forgot...this.”
He takes the paper from her and reads it and when he looks back at her, his eyes are soft and sad, but also crinkled with confusion.
“Why’s it so important?” he asks, and she shoots him a disbelieving glare. “I mean, I know why it’s important. But...I could always just tell you again.”
“I just want to keep them,” she drops her head and her tone and tries to get around him to leave, but he won’t let her.
“You panicked, Felicity,” he says, soft but firm, blocking the door. “Tell me why.”
“These dreams of yours, they’re some kind of future for us,” she admits, everything spilling out in a rush that turns into a full-on babble. “Even if only you see them. Even if they never come true. I just want to keep them in case…”
She stops on a raspy inhale and watches him close for the moment he realizes the true panicked question she’s silently begging him not to answer.
What if we don’t get these chances?
“Felicity…”
“I already lost you once,” she doesn’t let him finish, her shaky voice growing louder for strength. “And this trip, this whole thing is a dream. But in reality, we don’t know how long we’re going to have, what kind of future we’re going to get.”
She pauses to take a deep breath and he just nods, taking one of her hands in both of his and pressing a kiss to her palm.
“So I want to keep these.”
“Okay,” he says simply, holding her hand tight until they get back out to the Porsche and are on their way again.
Felicity wakes before him just once, on the day they’re set to return to Starling. She relishes the opportunity to watch him sleep, tracing her fingers over the star on his pectoral with the strangest sense of foreshadowing, watching the gems in the ring on her hand catch the early sunlight.
She still can’t believe any of it. That they’re going back, that they were gone so long in the first place. He’s surprised her continuously these past few weeks, and never more so than last night, as they watched the lights of Starling from a mountaintop outside the city. In all of her 25 years, she’s certain there hasn’t been a happier moment than when he slipped the band onto her right ring finger and whispered into her ear, a promise that sounded like a vow.
She feels him shift into wakefulness beneath her, watches his eyes blink open and then crinkle at the corners when he smiles at her sweetly. HIs voice is low and rough when he speaks and she can feel it beneath her palm.
“I didn’t have any dreams,” he tells her, sounding amazed. “I slept through the night for the first time in...eight years maybe.”
“I’m glad,” she tells him truthfully, tracing her fingers up his chest in a direction that makes his eyes catch the ring and the wonder on his face erupts into pure, unadulterated joy.
Then, because it seems like there might be no better time, she decides to ask again.
“Will you tell me about the wedding dream?” she pleads, voice a little smaller than she’d like it to be. “Just, tell me what happened. What went wrong?”
He pauses for a long time, staring up at the ceiling like the right answer might be written up there. She’s steeled herself for the worst, but she’s not prepared at all for what he tells her.
“Nothing,” he says, looking at her with clear, worried eyes. “It was perfect. Everyone was there and I was happy and you were…”
His eyes well over and she puts her hands on his cheeks and smooths her thumbs to wipe away the tears that fall.
“God, Felicity,” he says, voice overflowing. “You were so beautiful.”
She pulls herself up to press her forehead to his and a soft kiss to his lips and she thinks about how funny fate is, to lead a brainy girl from Vegas into the arms of this warrior of a man. This man, who has faced down super villains and tasted his own death, but only truly fears happiness. This man who has fought wars and saved cities, but is only ever daunted by the tremendous capacity of his own heart. This was her fate when she loved Oliver Queen, her fate when she loved The Arrow, and looks to be her fate now as she realizes, not for the first time, how desperately she loves who he is becoming.
She resigns herself to it forever a year and a half later, in a courthouse in Starling City, when they make another one of his dreams come true.