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Felicity Smoak does not believe in fate. She does not believe that her future is pre-destined — that the unseen powers of the universe make decisions for her.
Maybe, once upon a time, she could have fallen for it — and maybe, once upon a time, she did. But her father walked away with another woman’s name tattooed against his shoulder blade, and her mother cried on the kitchen floor with another man’s name tattooed against hers.
People may say that it was never meant to work out — that you can’t ignore a soul mate mark. But that doesn’t change the fact that, soul mate or not, her father had built a family. He made a choice to leave, and he has made a choice every single day not to return. Even as she feels her heart splintering at the edges, Felicity refuses to let him off the hook for something as nebulous as fate.
Rumor has it that Donna Smoak cried on the day Felicity was born when she saw the name write itself out against her baby’s wrist. Felicity is kind of terrified when she hears the story, if she’s being honest. That same fear is what keeps her from looking under the ribbon that has been tied around her wrist since her first minute in this world.
That fear turns into something else — something like conviction — when her father leaves. Who cares what name is etched into her skin? It’s nothing but an excuse, a reason to hurt people without suffering any consequences. Felicity wants absolutely no part in it.
It’s not uncommon to hide a soul mate mark. Ever since the media started searching out the names on celebrities’ wrists, making it into a sort of game that only ended in harassment and messy lawsuits, ribbons and patches and more conservative clothing were common. Some of the wealthier figures even resorted to a restorative surgery that eliminated the tattoo altogether.
A part of her wishes that she had the resources to buy her freedom like that. A bigger, more realistic part of her hopes that her soul mate does, because she doesn’t plan on surrendering to a synthesized destiny.
Instead, Felicity chooses to blaze her own trail, do what she wants to do, love whom she decides to love. The things she hates most are unanswered questions, but the exception is the ribbon tied around her wrist.
There is no such thing as fate in this world — nothing that is endgame, nothing she can’t overcome — so she feeds her endless curiosity elsewhere, through books and computers and code. She feeds her strength by never touching the white satin that covers her tattoo.
(A secret: once, when she is eight years old, she tugs idly at one of the loops, pushing both the fabric and her own boundaries. She is lying in the darkness of the room she shares with her mother, just having been scolded for something so insignificant she can’t even remember. This is her form of retaliation, edging down the border of the fabric ever so slightly.
But then the ribbon budges just a millimeter towards her elbow and a miniscule black mark comes into view. It’s a rounded edge, just a thin, dark curve barely visible from behind the ribbon, but fear grips fiercely at her chest. It could be anything — the top crescent of an a or an n or an o at the tail end of a last name — but the thought of knowing terrifies Felicity, and she yanks the ribbon back into place.
She doesn’t want her choices to be stripped from her. Her father opted out of her life for a beat up car and open road, and she refuses for her identity to be built on anything other than her own decisions. She will not turn out to be her father; there is no such thing as fate.)
Sometimes she’s resentful that she can’t cover her mark as easily as her mother, as easily as so many other people whose marks slip away under the sleeve of a t-shirt or the waistband of a pair of jeans. Those people, she thinks, are the luckiest. Her ribbon is gold in a sea of coal, and the curious gazes she receives only make her more determined to keep it there.
(Fact: Felicity is not stupid. Once, when she is fifteen years old, Melissa comes over for dinner and flips through an article in an entertainment magazine about double-trouble Tommy Merlyn and Oliver Queen spending a weekend out on the town in celebration of the latter inheriting his fortune. It had a full spread across the glossy pages, detailing a weekend lush with models and alcohol and shiny, shiny cars. The centerpiece is a picture of Tommy helping Oliver into a taxi, the newly dubbed billionaire looking dazed with a lazy, heavily intoxicated smile painted onto his face.
“It’s kind of gross,” Melissa comments with a scrunched nose as she scrutinizes Oliver Queen’s slumped posture at Felicity’s kitchen table. “The way he lives his life, you know? With zero regard for responsibility or other people.”
Normally, this is why Felicity finds a friend in Melissa. Her values, her morals, her certainty — she’s a breath of fresh air in materialistic Vegas. Now, she feels a foreign sensation hit her gut like a fist to the stomach. It’s not unlike the feeling she gets when she sees strangers looking at her mother’s fashion choices with disapproval. Felicity may agree with them, but her mom is her family.
“He didn’t ask for it,” Felicity finds herself saying. The words slip out unintentionally — not altogether unusual for Felicity, but this time she didn’t even know she was thinking them, let alone about to speak them. “And besides, every family with money like that is bound to be messed up.”
“You feel bad for the billionaire frat boy?” Melissa asks incredulously.
“I’m just saying he didn’t ask for it.”
“He didn’t exactly turn it down, either.”
“God, Mel, it’s not like he’s not hurting anyone.”
Melissa’s eyebrows climb towards her hairline. “Who are you, and what have you done with Felicity Smoak?”
Felicity opens her mouth uselessly and the strange sensation in her stomach dissipates at her friend’s words, leaving her feeling uncomfortably hollow.
“Dinner’s ready!” Donna trills, a little bit louder than usual, from where she stands a handful of feet away in her tiny kitchen.
Felicity’s eyes snap to her mother, having totally forgotten she had been standing there at all, and swallows nervously. If she notices the way Donna’s eyes are a little strained around the edges, the way her hands grip the casserole dish so tightly her knuckles are nearly white with the effort — well, Felicity has learned not to ask questions she doesn’t want the answers to.
It doesn’t mean they don’t keep her up at night.)
As things tend to do, it worsens with time. There’s an uncomfortable swoop in her stomach when she sees him on TV, and the appearances become more and more frequent as the months pass. He’s dressed in designer suits and puking on sidewalks. His four-hundred-dollar jeans are pooled around his ankles and he’s urinating on officers of the law. He’s everywhere, all the time, and even as her heart beats louder in her chest when she sees his smile plastered across tabloid magazines at the grocery store, she repeats it to herself: there is no such thing as fate, there is no such thing as fate, there is no such thing as fate.
So even though she knows — and she does know; the truth twisted up inside of her and shoved in the darkest, ugliest corner of her mind, but it’s there all the same — she doesn’t look. Doesn’t let herself believe.
(Her dream college happens to be 3,000 miles away. She struggles not to think about what, exactly, she’s trying to escape.)
Oliver Queen cannot — will not — be her soul mate.
This is her mantra, something she whispers so quietly into the darkness of her dorm room that her roommate wouldn’t even be able to hear it were she awake. Felicity does not want another man in her life who will disappoint her — who will take her for granted and treat her however he likes with the excuse of this is how it was meant to be, sweetheart.
Felicity has grown up the opposite of everything that Oliver Queen stands to represent. She finds the beauty in her underprivileged life; she pushes harder, moves faster, grows stronger to break away from her gray, bleak world. She has barely a penny to her name and still she forges on, because Felicity Smoak is a survivor.
Oliver Queen hasn’t suffered through a single thing in his entire exquisite life. He’s inconsiderate and irrational and one night, just before she leaves for college, she decides that she hates him for it. What kind of cruel, twisted future would fate have in store for her to pair Felicity Smoak with Oliver Queen? After all, even her mother had known, from the day Felicity was born, that the name of a Queen on her daughter’s wrist was anything but a blessing.
She starts avoiding televisions and magazines altogether, because as much as she hates him — and she does, hates the way he’s careless and idiotic and effortlessly happy — she can’t stop the stupid tremble in her muscles when she sees his face, his figure, his anything. It’s infuriating and she can’t — won’t — tolerate it.
Rounding out the first semester of her sophomore year and heading into her eighteenth birthday, Felicity has finally found her stride. The white ribbon around her wrist has been switched to black (“Please, Mom, just do it,” she says to her mother during a rare visit, laying the black ribbon alongside a box of black hair dye. “I won’t even look, I swear.”), and she’s found people who finally understand her — or maybe just one person, but she thinks he’s the only one that really matters.
She gravitates towards Cooper’s apartment in part because her roommate thinks it’s acceptable to create a tropical climate in their dorm room and in part because falling in love with him looks like a someday maybe. It’s simultaneously the closest she’s gotten to love and the farthest she’s gotten from the name on her wrist; she craves the possibility — the reality of a life lead on her own terms.
It’s a Friday afternoon when she’s fiddling around with the laptop that is finished save for one little piece for which she’s been searching for months. She’s been tuning it endlessly, tweaking bits and pieces to make it all the more perfect for when she finally finds and has enough money to buy the last part. Then she’ll be able to run the programs she wants, write the codes she’s been dreaming about for months — the ones she and Coop have been designing for what feels like forever now.
Besides the sound of Cooper’s shower, the space in the apartment is silent like an oppressive weight resting on her shoulders. She’s already feeling a little on edge today; this one circuit in the computer is getting on her nerves for the umpteenth time and she’s almost sure that her new ribbon is giving her a rash from the way the skin underneath feels irritated and raw, but there’s also something else making her uneasy that she can’t quite pinpoint. Regardless, she has neither the power nor the patience to deal with any of the building tension in her shoulders until, quite suddenly, the annoyance of it all seems overwhelming, the exhausting buzzing in her head growing too loud.
She reaches for the TV remote almost mindlessly, certain that she can find some sort of trashy reality television show in which to invest her attention, and switches the television on.
Her eyes need only to flick briefly to the screen before they widen, and Felicity has the presence of mind to recognize that if fate exists, it is one sadistic son of a bitch.
She doesn’t even have to change the channel. Right there, on the local news, are the words that make her breath freeze in her lungs.
Queen’s Gambit disappears at sea: Robert Queen and son lost in the wreckage.
Her fingers go slack. The laptop slips from her numb hands and clatters to the ground. Shards of expensive plastic and metal break away from its open cavity, skittering across the grimy wooden floors and underneath the sparse furniture. Her vision tunnels until all she can see is the flashing of the screen — and even that is blurry, like her brain has suddenly lost the ability to absorb and process information.
The words no reported survivors echo clamorously in her head and she feels a wave of nausea crash through her body.
You don’t even know him, she tells herself, bracing her hands on her knees with an iron grip and bending her head forward, but the words are like a punch in the stomach instead of a comfort. That truth that she has never met him, never known him, is suddenly so unbearable she’s sure she’ll die from the agony of it. She scrambles for any shred of sanity, any sense of logic.
This shouldn’t matter. If there is no such thing as fate, this shouldn’t matter.
But shouldn’t is a far cry from doesn’t, and it doesn’t even come close to keeping her from staring blankly at the TV for ten straight minutes with something like denial coursing through her veins. She’d felt those stupid little dips in her stomach when she watched him make a fool of himself for the world to see — surely she would feel something if he was truly gone?
Then again, maybe she does. Maybe it feels like her lungs are constricting against her rib cage; maybe it feels like her heart is tripping through ditches and dirt until it’s forced to a pathetic crawl through the mud. Maybe the irritated skin under her ribbon has suddenly been set on fire.
But that would be stupid, right?
Right?
Because Oliver Queen does not — does not — mean anything to her. He is loaded with money and devoid of all rationality and she would never associate with someone like him, not for her own choices or for stupid little letters that write out his name on her skin.
(She knows they’re there as well as she knows her own name. She loves Cooper, and even with him her skin doesn’t tingle like it does when she sees Oliver Queen’s moronic, handsome face through the grainy quality of a cell phone video gone viral.)
Cooper has to stand in front of her for two minutes, yelling her name and shaking her shoulders, before she snaps out of it.
“What?” she asks him finally, dazed and utterly shocked to find tears prickling at the edge of her vision. Her voice comes out garbled and raspy against her tongue, and when she chances another look at the screen, the news anchor has moved onto the morning’s top sports stories.
“Jesus, Felicity, are you okay?”
Is she? She’s not entirely sure. Oliver Queen is gone, and with him her heart and morality seem to have left as well.
“Felicity?”
She looks up at him. Cooper’s in nothing but a towel and his hair is damp and before she quite knows what she’s doing, she pulls him down for a kiss, rough and desperate and deep, trying to replace this part of her that she feels like she’s lost without it ever having been there. He doesn’t question it, of course — because who the hell is Oliver Queen to him, to her, to either of them? — and being tangled up with him distracts her for a while, at least.
After, the ball of lead in her stomach feels a little bit like guilt, and there’s a voice in her head whispering something that sounds strangely like cheater, and what the fuck is up with that?
She pushes the voice away, because she has spent almost eighteen years assuring herself that fate doesn’t control her feelings. Even as she closes her eyes against the threat of tears, she’s not about to stop now.
But three months, two weeks, five hours ago, the weight of Cooper’s arms around her never felt intolerable, like chains holding her captive. And now she’s desperate to escape them, wiggling her shoulders out of his embrace and fighting the constricting tightness in her chest until she breaks free and suck down air into her lungs.
Slowly, inhaling and exhaling with the utmost concentration, she extends her arms and holds them out in front of her. Her smooth skin is illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the windows and her chest is heavy with something like grief. She feels like a fake, an undeserving fraud, because there are people out there who actually have a basis for their grief over Oliver Queen. His mother, his sister, his girlfriend.
But regardless of how she should feel, she registers that’s exactly what this is — grief. She recognizes it faintly from when her father left, like a dormant switch inside of her that flipped on of its own accord and sent an electric shock through her system from the frayed wires that have been mangled with time.
The pressure behind her sternum, she realizes, is overwhelming urge to feel validated, to put some rhyme and reason to the catch in the beat of her heart and the way her emotions are trying to claw their way out of her throat. The obvious answer, the one she has cursed and ignored in equal measure for so long, is right in front of her. She glares at the black ribbon, a stark contrast to the pale column of her wrist.
Fate is stupid, being in love with Oliver Queen — somewhere, someday, even the possibility — is so, so stupid. Felicity, though, is not stupid. She has demanded answers for herself her entire life in everything else but this, sought explanations that make for logical reactions. And that’s why, finally, after eighteen years, she searches for one more.
She reaches forward and plucks the ribbon apart with shaking fingers, her fingertips skimming over the material that’s starting to fray slightly at the edges. That’s all it takes, really, and the satiny fabric slides from her skin with much more grace than she possesses in her entire, clumsy teenage body. For some reason, at some point, she had come to think of the fabric as an ironclad shackle, but it flutters to the floor with the weight of a feather.
And underneath it, there it is — an unavoidable truth written out right under the moonlight for all the stars to see. His name is printed out on her body like someone took tiny typewriter letters and branded them into her skin. The curve she saw all those years ago is the peak of the n at the end of his last name, planted directly over her pulse point. A mark that is as sure as the beat of her heart.
Oliver Jonas Queen.
There is no such thing as fate — that is what she has spent eighteen years convincing herself. There is no such thing as fate; he is not her soul mate; she could never love Oliver Queen. But lying there under the light of a clear sky, it feels a little like the universe is collapsing in on itself, like her axis has tilted and her world will never be the same.
Her truth and conviction has shattered and now, in the arms of another man and faced with the impossibility of losing something she never had and never, ever wanted, Felicity starts to cry.