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A/N: For the purposes of this fic, Palmer takes a few weeks to chill post-finale before he starts tinkering with the suit and goes kaboom. Also, FYI, I’m totally ignoring the Flash finale madness in this ‘verse because I think I have to for any of the road trip happiness to happen.
I Try Not To Speak Superlatives
“You know I try not to speak superlatives,
but it’s impossible to you”
-fun. “Sight of the Sun”
They talk about it here and there after Nyssa’s surprise visit, but the event that turns their conversations about returning to Starling from generalities to specifics is when Ray Palmer literally blows the roof off the building.
They’re having dinner at a little dive on the side of the highway, outside Coast City, when they see it on the news. “EXPLOSION AT PALMER TECH, CEO MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD.” Felicity freezes, frantically grabbing her cell phone from her purse and turning it on to a flood of texts and voicemails. Unplugging’s become something of a surprising habit of hers on this trip, keeping her phone off, living in the moment, and it’s been wonderful but she hates herself for it for a few violent moments just then. It’s only once she makes certain that there are no messages from Ray, no last communications or cries for help, that she can breathe again.
She gives herself one week to figure it out. She talks to Laurel and Digg and Lyla and learns that security cameras show Ray working in the lab up until the moment of the explosion, but so far no one’s found anything that indicates he’s part of the wreckage. No body parts, no DNA, nothing.
Even the Starling City media, perhaps wary of having to retract yet another prematurely published obituary, seems hesitant to declare Ray Palmer dead. Felicity works her way through some of the more plausible theories, but keeps finding fault with each one. A meta-human from Central City? (One whose only evil powers were what, blowing up labs?) A kidnapping staged like an explosion? (Seems like more trouble than it’s worth and there haven’t been any demands.) Maybe Ray finally mastered that crazy shrink-ray tech she sort of remembers him babbling about? (Come on, it’s more plausible that he just up and vanished. Right?)
She’s so busy trying to solve the mystery, she misses the way Oliver’s demeanor shifts as the week progresses, until it’s harshly presented to her in one fell snap.
“We should just go back,” he bites at her one day as she babbles about miniaturization, a healthy dose of annoyance laid into his tone. “You’re not going to figure it out in a hotel room hundreds of miles away. We should just go back.”
“Oliver…” she turns to him, and watches the hard lines of his consternation soften immediately at her confusion.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it sounds like he’s gritting his teeth. “I know this must be hard for you. I know you loved him.”
His words hit her like a rubber bullet to the chest. Not piercing, but enough to knock the wind right out of her.
“You think I loved him?”
“I…” He just looks down at his hands, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. She hasn’t seen him do that since they left Starling. She’ll realize later what it means, but her immediate knee-jerk reaction is pure indignation.
“Is that why you’re being so weird about this?” Really, she’s angry and scared and sad about a mystery she can’t solve, but he’s right here for her to be mad at. “This is like, some kind of twisted jealousy?”
“No, Felicity, I…”
“I need some air.” She’s aware that it’s childish to just storm off, but she slams the door behind her before he has a chance to follow. Even though she hears him call her name again, she’s more than a little relieved when he doesn’t chase her down.
Her head’s buzzing with so much fury and confusion, it’s not until she’s half a glass of sirah deep at a wine bar the Uber driver recommended that she realizes her phone is buzzing as well.
“Hello?”
“Ms. Smoak?”
“Gerry?” She realizes she shouldn’t be surprised to hear from her old EA. In fact, she probably should have contacted him along with the others back home when she heard the news. He’s basically been running the company for her over the last few months, making excuses when she missed important meetings, keeping up with her correspondence, covering for her when she bailed on important conference calls. He deserves a lot of credit.
“Yes, hello, Ms. Smoak?”
“How are you?” she asks. “I’m sure things have been…”
She trails off but it’s okay, because the EA is still talking a mile a minute.
“Yes, things have been hectic, to say the least,” he admits breathlessly. “How are you doing, uh….personally?”
Apparently, Gerry deserves a lot of credit.
“I’m okay,” she blushes. Embarrassed over the phone. She’s pretty much falling apart. “I’m fine, thank you.”
“Good,” Gerry says, but it’s weird, because he doesn’t really sound like he means it. “We need to discuss the timeline for your takeover as CEO.”
“My takeover?” she sets her wine glass down with more force than she means to and turns a couple of heads. “No, Gerry, I’m sorry, I resigned from Palmer Technologies. Ray knew all about it. I’m not even in town.”
“Mr. Palmer did mention something about that, before the uh...accident,” the EA says nervously. “Unfortunately, he also filed a signed contract that names you as CEO.”
“Signed contract,” she stammers, bewildered. “Signed by whom?”
“By you, Ms. Smoak.”
She has a vague memory of scripting her name on a piece of paper on Ray’s back.
“So you’re saying…”
“Yes,” Gerry finishes, almost apologetically. “You are currently, pending the board’s approval, the acting CEO of Palmer Technologies.”
She downs two more glasses of wine after promising to call him back tomorrow and wanders down the boardwalk for a while, lost in even more emotions than when she first set out. It’s not until she notices the sun setting that she realizes how long she’s been gone, grabbing a cab that’s dropping a couple off for dinner and heading back to the hotel.
“Okay, Oliver listen,” she’s already talking as she walks through the door of their room, wringing her hands with emotional energy, but he doesn’t listen, he just wraps her in his arms and squeezes tight, almost too tight.
“Felicity…”
She can hear his heart pounding rapidly in his chest and when he eases up in the slightest, she glances down at her phone and realizes she must have shut it back off after Gerry called.
“I’m sorry,” she breathes into his shoulder. “I just needed some air.”
“Stay here,” he fairly begs. “There’s plenty of air. Yell at me, freeze me out, whatever you need, just don’t go.”
Something about the desperation in his last few words flips a switch inside her and the ensuing flood of emotions threatens to drown her, forcing her take a step back, out of his arms.
“You know what I’ve been thinking about all week?” She can only meet his confused eyes for a second. “What I was thinking about just now? You going down on that cargo plane.”
“Felicity…”
“No, you’re just going to listen to me for a second,” she chokes on the tears that are already threatening to spill down her cheeks. “You’re the one who was going to die, you’re the one who was going to leave again, without saying goodbye. You can sit right there and listen to me.”
He whispers her name again, so soft she almost misses it, but he holds his hands up in surrender, sinking down to sit on the bed.
“I never get to say goodbye,” she whispers harshly, hazarding a glance at his face. “My father, Cooper…”
She almost doesn’t say “you,” the blow is already registering, she can tell. But they’ve come this far. And this is one of those moments.
“In Nanda Parbat,” her voice is shaking but unmistakably angry, “you stood there and you kissed me and you told me, ‘Not this time.’ You didn’t let me say goodbye. You didn’t even tell me that you loved me.”
“Because I couldn’t, Felicity.” His voice comes out in almost a hiss and he’s staring at his shoes, scuffing them angrily against the cheap motel carpet. “If I said that to you, if I had to look at you for ten more seconds, I was getting on that plane. We’d all be dead by now.”
She can’t help herself, she reaches out for him then, grabbing his hands from where she stands in front of him and squeezing them too tight to be comfortable.
“I saved Ray’s life, did you know that?” He shakes his head and raises sad eyes to hers, but she only sharpens her edge further at the memory. “Thanks to one of your guys. They didn’t just give him an arrow wound, they gave him a blood clot that was going to kill him.”
“I saved his life, broke the law to do it actually, and I was so relieved,” she breathes. “He looked at me all grateful and told me that he loved me and I…”
She had been wondering if this confession would make him draw back She should have guessed he would only squeeze her hands tighter.
“I thought, this one’s about me. This is where I get my chance. And I had it,” she stops for a deep breath to steel herself. “I could have told him goodbye, I could have told him that I loved him, but I didn’t tell him anything.”
He opens his mouth, but nothing comes out, which is good, because she needs to finish what she’s started.
“All I saw was your face.” His eyes go wide at this confession and he pulls on her hands where they’re connected, drawing her into his lap and rubbing her back until she lets out a deep shaky breath.
“I didn’t love Ray, Oliver. I never did,” she mumbles into his neck. “He was a band-aid on a busted dam.”
He scoots them back against the headboard and cradles her in his stupidly strong arms, and only then does she realize she’s been sobbing.
“If you had gone down with that plane, I…I like to think I’d be doing what I am now. I like to think I’d be strong enough to look for conspiracy theories and crazy ways to prove that you were still alive. I like to think I’d be worried about what comes next. But part of me is pretty sure that I wouldn’t be. Part of me is sure that I wouldn’t be anything at all.”
Her voice breaks as she trails off and the tears and wine and adrenaline catch up to her quickly. She dozes off, wrapped in his arms and the last thing she thinks is that his forehead is pressed against hers again, but this time he’ll be there when she wakes up.
It’s nearly dawn before she gets around to telling him the other fairly important development of the day.
“You be great at it, you know that right?” he says, rubbing her feet from the other side of the bed. “Better than either of us, probably combined. Though I’m not pulling a whole lot of weight in that equation.”
“I could just sign it over to you,” she muses and he looks at her like she’s grown a second head. “You could have Queen Consolidated back.”
“You’re not going to do that Felicity,” he emphasizes with a shake of his head. “No way in hell.”
“Why not?”
“There’s a long list of reasons why not, number one of which is that you’d be a hundred times better than me at that job,” he says, looking at her with his serious eyes.
“You’re sure?” she asks. “I know how badly you wanted your company back.”
“That feels like a million years ago,” he tells her honestly, pulling himself up to sit beside her against the headboard and look her in the eye. “Listen, Felicity, we have talked a lot about me becoming someone else. But we never really talked about what that means for you.”
She’s a little disappointed in herself when she realizes he’s right. She hasn’t thought about it at all. She’s even more disappointed to realize that, for as much as she’s thought of herself as an independent woman, when she thinks about what she wants to do next, the only thing that come to mind is being with him.
“I think you’d be great for this,” he continues cheerfully, oblivious to her internal struggle. “And I think you should take some time and think about if this job would be great for you.”
“I don’t…”
“Besides,” he interrupts with a glint in his eye. “There are ways to get the Queen name back on the building other than making me CEO.”
“Sure, I mean, I guess you could let Thea take over.”
“Not Thea.” She’s a genius, really she is. She’s got the paperwork and everything. But it takes her nearly a full minute to put together what he’s saying.
“Oliver...” she asks warily, even though his Cheshire cat grin is so bright they could turn out the lights and still be able to see each other. “What are you asking me?”
“I’m not asking you anything.” The grin turns to a satisfied, almost smug smirk, and she breathes a little sigh of relief.
“Good, because I love you, I do. I’m just not sure we’re ready for...”
“You’re right,” he says with a nod, and he’s still smirking, he doesn’t look disappointed at all. “I don’t think we are either. That’s why I wasn’t asking.”
“Okay, but…”
“Felicity, when I’m asking, you’ll know. You know how?”
“How?”
“Because I’ll be asking.”
She slaps his arm hard enough that he winces a little, but he’s still got that smile.
“I love you.”
She scoffs, because duh, he basically just said that he was going to marry her. But he keeps talking and her heart swells with every word that passes through his lips.
“I love you, and I don’t say it enough...out loud, I mean.” He’s adorable when he stammers. “I think it all the time. I have to stop myself from saying it too much, because I’m thinking it all the time, constantly.”
“Oliver,” she says, teasing but a bit breathless. “You’re babbling a little. You’re not about to ask me to another explosive Italian dinner, are you?”
“These past three years,” he continues, frowning quick at her flippancy, “there has been so much to occupy my mind. Revenge, danger, misery, my own mortality six or seven times over...”
She winces a little at that but is frozen silent at his laser focus and gravely, almost broken voice.
“Since we left though, it’s like all that’s been muted, or at least turned down low. Because it’s just the two of us, and the only thing that runs through my head, day and night, is I love you, I love you, I love you, I…”
This time she’s the one holding him too tight, swinging a leg over to settle in his lap and hold him with her whole body. She loosens her grip only to press desperate kisses all over his face, landing finally on his mouth, where he kisses her like he did the first time, desperate, like he can’t help himself.
“I love you too,” she breathes against his lips. “I love you so damn much.”
“I don’t know what happens next,” he answers, similarly breathless. “I don’t know what my life looks like now. But I swear to you, Felicity, I want to live. For you, with you, beside you, for as long as I’ve got.”
And she thinks it’s a good thing he said something before, because otherwise that sounds an awful lot like asking.
They stay up talking about identities past, present, and future, until the sun spills through the curtains.
“I wasn’t jealous,” he tells her in the low, honest light of the early morning. “I was just being selfish. And I hate myself when I’m selfish. I know we have to go back, I know there are people to help, and still, I just...a really big part of me just wants us to turn in the other direction and run for it.”
She nods at him shakily, thankful that she’s all cried out for the night, and gives him a watery smile because she gets it. And at the same time, she gets that they both know how impossible that is. It’s just not who he is. Who they are. So he presses kisses to her eyelids and her lips and runs out to get them breakfast while she starts planning their route home.
“You could be my EA,” she teases, when he comes back with her coffee just the way she likes it.
“I’ll bring you coffee every day if you want,” he tells her seriously. “Whatever you need, Felicity.”
She’s joking. She finds out in the months to come that he was not. He brings her coffee every day for months as she takes her spot as CEO. He brings her mugs of hot chocolate mochas when she’s up all night with paperwork, taking the company to new heights. He brings her shots of espresso in to-go cups as she rushes to meetings around town, succeeding in her goal to build not just a corporate superpower, but a force for good in the city.
And nearly a year to the day after the crews finish rebuilding the top of the Palmer Technologies tower, word comes in that it’s time to change it all over again.