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A/N: The (probably) final installment in the Sight of the Sun post-finale roadtrip ‘verse. Picks up right after The Symmetry Will Keep Me Close To You.
This is also the linking piece that launches this to future fic and ties this ‘verse to That’s All You, my Father’s Day fic. I have loved writing this series as a standalone hiatus fill-in, and I feel like as a reader you can leave it as that, or you can follow me further into this crazy universe by reading That’s All You as a follow-up, with a planned third series to come. Either way, you are all my Ann Perkins.
Blame It On The Queens
“Do you remember when we stayed up till the sun stretched through the room?
I used to blame it on the queens walking down 7th Avenue.”
-fun. - “Sight of the Sun”
When she looks back on it, she’ll think it’s pretty fitting that they only get about ten blissful minutes after he slips the band of emeralds and diamonds onto her ring finger. Right ring finger, she’s correcting herself mentally for the fourth or fifth time when her cell phone chimes.
She pulls her phone from her jacket and frowns a little when she sees it’s Thea calling. When she turns her frown on Oliver, he’s patting at his pockets.
“Mine must be in the car,” he observes, grinning at her. “Had something more important in my pocket.”
She matches his giddy smile and kisses him quick before answering the phone on speaker.
“Hey Thea, it’s both of us.”
“Ollie?” Felicity didn’t know Thea when she was a little girl, but she imagines she sounds pretty much like her worried tone does now. The look on Oliver’s suddenly stark face all but confirms this.
“What’s wrong?”
“We sort of need your help,” his sister answers. “Well, mostly Felicity’s, I guess. Unless there’s any chance you can be here in less than an hour.”
Oliver starts beside her, and Felicity immediately grabs at his arm to keep him in place. Because she knows where his head’s at, and she also knows she’s going to have to remind him of the reality of the situation.
“Oliver,” she says firmly. “We can’t. You know we can’t. We’re two hours out at least.”
“We can try,” he growls back at her.
“Yeah, or we can get me to a computer and actually be able to help them,” she rolls her eyes in frustration, turning back to her phone. “Thea, what’s going on?”
“Malcolm’s been...increasing the League’s presence in Starling over the past few weeks,” his sister answers. “Little by little. We’ve been monitoring…”
“What?” Felicity recognizes Oliver’s tone from an argument about Ray that feels like a lifetime ago now. “When were you planning on telling us?”
“Not until we absolutely needed you,” Thea challenges, and Felicity can see her clearly in her mind’s eye, puffing out her chest at her big brother. “Honestly, Ollie, we’ve had things under control.”
“Merlyn’s trying to run the city remotely,” a deeper voice interjects over the speakerphone and Oliver lets out a deep breath beside her. “He’s just sending his henchmen over to do his bidding.”
“Digg,” Felicity asks, before Oliver can find his words, “you’re going out?”
“Got my identity concealed and everything,” John’s assuring voice warms some of the icy panic in her gut and she wishes so badly she could see him. She settles for using her free hand to clutch at Oliver’s and he squeezes back, hard.
“He’s doing the same thing he did before,” they hear Laurel chime in from the background. “The bastard’s still purging the Glades, now he’s just doing it with his own personal army.”
“He’s taken hostages in a warehouse by the docks,” Thea explains. “Friends and family of Star City’s rich and famous.”
“Bargaining chips,” Oliver growls, and she finds she’s equal parts disappointed and proud (and maybe just the tiniest bit turned on), hearing his Arrow voice again.
“There’s security cameras all around the docks,” Felicity works out, shaking her head to get back to business. “I can hack into their network, switch them to infrared.”
“That’s what we were hoping,” Thea confirms. “Keep an eye out and keep tabs on us, since we’ve all got to be on the ground for this one.”
“I’ll try to find somewhere I can get on a desktop,” she tells them, already opening her phone’s browser. "Worst case, I can sort of run things from our phones and my tablet."
Oliver sets his jaw and nods silently at her as his sister’s voice crackles over the speaker.
“Go team.”
They pull up to the nearest Best Buy about seven minutes before closing time and Felicity immediately darts through the automatic doors and back towards the Geek Squad counter.
“Hi, is there any chance that we could maybe…. pay you for computer access?” she asks the wide-eyed, polo-shirted teenager behind the counter, seemingly the only soul left in the whole place. “Or maybe, buy a computer from you, use it real quick and then return it?”
“Felicity, I can just buy you…” Oliver starts to protest as he catches up, but trails off when he catches the kid staring wide-eyed with recognition. It’s a look he’s used to, but this time it’s directed at Felicity. Oliver clears his throat in a fairly obvious manner, uncomfortable with the attention for more reasons than he’s willing to admit, but the kid’s locked in.
“You’re Felicity Smoak, aren’t you?” Geek Squad gapes. “You work with Ray Palmer.”
“I do,” Felicity answers, sounding relieved to hear someone else refer to Ray in the present tense. Truth told, so is Oliver.
“Follow me.”
Without a word of explanation, the kid leads them to the back to the store’s home studio setups, opening the door to a small recording booth. It's a mockup, with fake mics, but the computer looks real enough to Oliver. Felicity’s approving nod to the kid as she sits down and boots up is confirmation enough.
"It's not on the store’s internal network," Geek Squad says with a look to Felicity that tells Oliver that's more important than it sounds. "It's not on any network."
“It is now,” she says, inputting a USB stick, clicking a few keys, and smiling up at the kid like sunshine. “It’s perfect. Thank you, Richie.”
“Door locks from the inside,” he assures them, stalwart expression betrayed by a furious blush at her praise. “I’ll hold things down out front until you guys are done.”
“Thanks.” Oliver does his best not to gawk at the kid, as he locks the door behind him but he’s pretty taken aback. It’s a setup so perfect he can't stop looking over his shoulder, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Everything’s fine, Oliver,” Felicity drolls absently as she clicks away, like she’s browsing through the files of his worried mind. “Everything’s going to be fine.”
She’s right, of course, for the most part. The cops don’t show and Geek Squad doesn’t turn out to be another one of The League’s young plants. The computer’s powerful enough for her to connect to the infrared security cameras, and she’s even able to hack two of the bluetooth studio headsets so they can both be on the comm network with “Speedy,” the “Black Canary,” and...Digg.
“No name,” their friend insists stubbornly. “Just, nobody call me anything and we’ll be fine.”
For Oliver, it’s surreal and uncomfortably smooth. Thea and Laurel sneak in undetected and smuggle the seven hostages out, into the waiting police vehicles, which he realizes is going to warrant a whole separate conversation about what, or who, got Quentin back on their side.
They’re just finishing up when there’s a rustling sound over the comm links. His “too good to be true” sensors are already on high alert, but they click up a notch..
“One second,” Thea whispers, and then her comm connection clicks off.
“Thea!” The sound of Laurel’s worried voice, the sound of his sister’s given name, is enough to send Oliver into panic mode.
“Thea?” he calls, turning his headset off and on, like that will bring her back.
“Her comm’s disconnected,” Felicity trying to sound calm, which only makes things worse. “I’m trying to override…”
The video screen blasts to red a split second before they hear the explosion over their headsets.
“Thea!”
There’s a moment where the only sound that’s audible in the insulated studio is her frantic keystrokes, so the panic in his voice echoes in her mind as she tries to simultaneously track any individual infrared signals on a now-inflamed video feed and reconnect his sisters’ comm link. She doesn’t dare hazard a glance back at Oliver, but she can feel him, tense and coiled behind her.
“Thea?” She hazards a guess at the first sign of success on her screen.
There’s a click on the line and then a few sharp coughs.
“Sorry guys,” Thea snarks. “Had to kill the chatter for a second.”
Oliver collapses, actually falls to his knees beside her chair, wrapping his arms around her waist and heaving hot, heavy breaths into her stomach and hips.
“Thea, what happened?” Felicity asks when Oliver makes no move to pick up his headset from where it’s fallen to the floor.
“They had the place rigged to blow in case anybody tried anything,” his sister explains. “I figured best case I get a clean shot at Malcolm, worst case I blow some of his goons into the bay.”
“That is not your call to make!” Oliver’s got his headset on enough to croak out his warning, but his tone belies his emotions. “Guys, what the hell happened?”
“It is absolutely my call,” Thea retorts through clenched teeth, not giving anyone else the chance to speak. “And it was my mistake. I missed. I’ll get him next time.”
Oliver throws his headphones against the opposite wall of the studio, so hard Felicity hears them crack.
“Guys, we’ll be back in town tomorrow,” she announces, clearing the air, waiting for sounds of affirmation from Laurel and Digg before signing off. “Call or text if you need anything.”
When she turns from the computer to him, he’s pacing the tiny room, shaking his head.
“Oliver, you have to stop.”
“Everything was fine, everybody was fine,” he mutters under his breath, still lost in some darkness. “She just had to go barging back in there…”
“Hey, hey,” she stands and moves to press herself right up in front of him, stopping his gait, wrapping her arms around his waist. “It’s not easy at the beginning, remember? She’ll get better. We’ll help.”
He’s quiet for a long moment, but no amount of time would have prepared her for his next thoughts.
“Tommy would have hated me for this.” His voice is gravel, scraping at his raw throat. “If he were here, he’d hate me for putting his girls in danger. Especially if he had known about Thea…”
“If he was here, both of those ‘girls’ would disabuse you of the notion that you put them anywhere,” she snaps a little, mostly still furious at Thea for making him worry. “You heard your sister. Oliver, you didn’t make them do anything.”
He nuzzles her neck and when he speaks, she wonders if he did it to muffle his words.
“I’m going to kill his father,” he confesses, newly resolute after what’s happened tonight. It’s in this moment that she lets go of the crazy hope shes been harboring that he’d never have to put on the suit again. It’s easier than she thought it would be. “Someday. I don’t know when. But I’m going to kill my best friend’s father, and wipe out his family name.”
When he pulls back, he looks so tortured what’s left of her crumbles at the need to soothe his pain. It’s just like after any other mission, she realizes, only this particular time, the hurt is all internal. And she knows that when he suits up again, it will be different. Because they’re different. The emotion of the understanding chokes her next confession.
“If Tommy were here, he would know that you’ve saved us all, so many times over.” She cards her fingers through his longer hair, and stifles a shudder at the unbidden thought of his last haircut. “He’d know what you’ve given up, for your family, for your city. He’d know you were a hero, that you still are. He could never have hated you.”
“He would have loved you.” Oliver kisses her lips softly as her heart twists with the meaning of his words. He presses his forehead to hers for a long moment, then lets out a breath. “Let’s go home.”
He shakes the Geek Squad kid’s hand firmly on their way out, too spent from adrenaline to worry about calling this anything more than pure dumb luck. And, because he’s got Tommy on the brain, he pulls out one of his best friend’s oldest tricks and palms the kid $200.
“I accidentally...dropped some headphones,” he goes for cool guy suave, but he’s still a little shaky.
“Don’t worry about it,” Geek Squad says, pulling his hands back in surrender. “Keep your money.”
“No, seriously, you should take it,” Felicity tells him. “They’re going to take that out of your pay. Plus, you really saved our butts.”
“It wasn’t a problem,” the kid smiles sheepishly, blushing hard but taking the cash, “and I appreciate it.”
“Seriously, thank you, Richie.” She lingers and Oliver sees the moment her curiosity gets the best of her. “Can I ask, though, why did...how did you….”
“My mother’s an executive at Mercury Labs,” the kid interrupts. It doesn’t mean anything to Oliver, but Felicity’s eyes go wide.
“The bees,” she says, kind of hushed, eyes far away on a memory, and the kid nods seriously in affirmation.
“I hacked the security cams after the attack and saw that it was Ray Palmer’s ATOM suit that saved her that night,” he tells her, more than a little proud. “You were his #2, and with your credentials, I… I just assumed you were behind hijacking the swarm.”
“Pretty smart there, Rick.” Felicity smiles, and the kid goes beet-red again. “Come and see me when you graduate.”
She hands him a business card and thanks him one last time as they head out to the parking lot. This time it’s his curiosity that’s overwhelming.
“Bees?”
“I didn’t tell you about my nemesis?” It sounds like she’s teasing, but his fists clench involuntarily at the thought.
“You have a nemesis?”
“Had,” she corrects. “Past tense. While you were gone. But don’t worry, I totally vanquished her.”
It’s late by the time they get back to the motel, but they’re both too wired to sleep, so they decide to have sex and hit the road, in that order.
The afterglow is a literal one when the sun starts to stretch through the cheap blinds. When he lifts her hand to press his lips to it and bites his teeth down lightly on the band on around her finger, something in her gut rolls for maybe the hundredth time that night.
“You’ve been staring all night long, Oliver,” she teases. “And not even at me, at the ring. If I were less competent, I might have let it distract me.”
“If you were less competent, it wouldn’t distract me so much in the first place,” he fairly whines. “It’s on the wrong hand.”
“Oliver…”
“I know it’s not the right time,” he interrupts, sounding childish as he draws out the last two words. “But I didn’t realize...how it would feel, seeing it on you. It just makes me want to do it right now. It makes me want to say the words.”
“What words?” She’s almost to exasperated, because she doesn’t even want to play devil’s advocate here. She doesn’t want to have to remind him why they can’t when every other cell of her body is telling her that they absolutely should. But she does have to. So she turns to look him dead in the eye.
“What words, Oliver? For better or for worse? For the Arrow or Al Sah-him? In sickness and in health, no matter which one of us is lying on the med table? For as long as we both shall live? This time?”
“Felicity…” The only word he gets out is her name, but she can hear the hurt and the guilt and the questions in it.
“We’ve been through so much in this last year alone, and we have dealt with so little of it,” she whispers, trying not sound scared. Failing. “I just want to make sure that we’re ready.”
He’s stunned a little silent, but not for long.
“I just want you to be my wife, Felicity,” he shrugs, “as soon as possible.”
“As soon as possible,” she promises with a hesitant smile, aware that they’re talking about slightly different timelines, but too blissed-out to care.
“Good.” He presses one final satisfied kiss to her right hand and spins the band once more around her finger.
“Oliver,” she laughs shakily through the tears that are still stubbornly clogging her throat, “if we’re not getting married, you really have to stop proposing.”
“Yeah, I don’t know.” He hops out of bed and pulls her up, wrapping her legs around his waist and scraping his grin down her throat as he carries her to the shower. “I wouldn’t count on it.”
He does keep asking. He asks her all the time, really. He just tries to do it without using his words. He knows that one day, when she’s ready, she’ll say yes. And that will be that.
He asks her when he brushes her hair out of her eyes in the morning and when he reaches for her in the middle of the night. He asks her when he holds her tight after a hectic night as the Green Arrow and when he tucks her under his shoulder after a hectic night at Palmer-Queen Incorporated.
He asks her the first time Thea gets hurt in the field, bad enough to land her in the hospital. He asks her when, instead of pulling away, he doesn’t let go of her for nearly a week straight, like she’s a port in a storm and he’s trying desperately to stay tethered.
He asks her when he drops her off at Laurel’s apartment almost every night for a month after Sara re-returns to their lives. Felicity calls them “Girls Nights” but he’s fairly certain that everyone involved -- Thea, Lyla sometimes, even Laurel herself -- knows that they’re really “Keep Laurel on the Wagon Nights.” He’s not sure why he’s surprised when they work, she saved him after all, and Felicity Smoak’s capacity for kindness is seemingly unending when it comes to those she loves. So, he really can’t help himself if every night when he drops her off at Laurel’s, he pecks her lips, tells her how amazing she is, and after she shuts the car door behind her, asks her to marry him.
He asks her the night he and Digg finally have it out over their jagged recent history, a battle that comes to blows but ends in a bear hug. He meets Felicity’s loving, tear-filled gaze over his brother’s shoulder when he embraces her by way of saying goodbye, and he tries to make his eyes tell her “thank you” and “you were right” and “I love you” and “just marry me already.” He waits until Digg leaves to let his mouth tell her the same things. All of them except for the last one.
He asks her constantly, silently, for a year or two and she always answers him in the same way. Then one day, life makes him ask out loud.
Malcolm Merlyn makes his last stand on Star City, and Oliver, his team, and assorted allies (or enemies of the other side) fight for nearly two weeks, taking out wave after wave of League pros until the man himself comes home for a final showdown. It’s been nearly two straight days of battle and Oliver’s dead on his feet and dead-set on getting the final shot in on the unsuspecting Demon’s Head.
The new Ra’s al Ghul doesn’t know his goons outside are being handled with stealth and precision by Speedy and the Black Canary. He doesn’t know that Oliver’s team has rigged the incinerator in this waste management plant. And he doesn’t know what’s coming when a black figure swoops down from the roof and puts three arrows into his jugular. They’re all kill-shots and he bleeds out, sputtering as Nyssa pushes him onto the conveyer belt. She pries a ring off his finger just before his body drops into the flames of the incinerator.
When she starts back towards him, Oliver takes his final shot, an arching arrow that slices the fuel line just enough. The room erupts in blue heat as they turn and run for it, not stopping until they’re outside, not stopping until they feel something other than fire on their skin.
“Al Sa-Her is no more,” Nyssa’s declaration echoes over the comms, and as soon as she knows it’s safe, he hears Felicity’s voice. It sounds small and scares him more than anything he’s seen in the last two weeks.
“Oliver?”
“Yeah?” he croaks out, already racing for his bike as Nyssa gives him the go sign.
“Can you just come back, please?” she asks. “As quickly as you can.”
He’s moving before she’s done speaking, but the ride still feels like it takes forever. When he bolts into their headquarters, she only accepts his hug, locking him in tight and letting their hearts smash a few dozen bass drum beats against each other before pushing him back to arm’s length.
“I need two more minutes,” she says, eyes darting anywhere but his. “Go change.”
“Two minutes for what?” He’s still breathing heavy from the fight and the ride over, and now she’s not making any sense.
He tosses a helpless look at Digg, but his friend only nods heavily at him from where he’s sitting on the couch, with a sleeping Lyla and Sara leaned up against him. It is about 9 a.m. after all and most of them haven’t slept much in a week or two. Oliver vaguely remembers hearing Laurel and Thea sign off on his panicked drive over, but that doesn’t help him decode what’s going on.
“I just...can you just go change?” Felicity pleads with him, nearly wild-eyed, and it seems to be with something other than exhaustion. “I need two minutes and I need you to not be wearing that.”
He does as she tells him, throwing sweats and an old t-shirt on and storming back out to the main room at the same time she exits the bathroom, eyes wide, hands clutching at a plastic stick. He stops cold, suddenly wide awake.
“Is that...”
“I took two of them earlier, but I figured I should probably make it three because of the rule of threes, you know?” She’s babbling, but Oliver’s locked in on her hands, what’s in them, what she’s telling him it is. “But I wanted to wait until after tonight, because I didn’t want to jinx anything. And I just couldn’t imagine…”
“Felicity,” he cuts her off, but then loses the words himself, disbelieving, “are you…”
She nods at him with a hopeful, watery smile and his whole world changes.
“Oliver, I’m pregnant.”
He pulls her in his arms and kisses her once, hard, then disappears back to the locker room for five more minutes. When he comes back out, the sweats are gone, replaced with his backup suit. It’s a little wrinkled, but it’s charcoal grey with a blue tie and the one percent of her brain that isn’t totally overwhelmed notes that it still totally works for him.
“Meet us there,” he tosses keys to Digg, who just continues nodding knowingly.
He grabs Felicity’s wrist, the one that’s not holding the pregnancy test, her third positive, and nearly drags her up to the parking lot to her car, ignoring her litany of questions. She climbs reluctantly in the passenger’s seat and waits for him to speak, but he just guns the engine, flirting with the speed limit the whole way downtown. When he stops the car in a street spot in front of the city courthouse, her heart thuds hard in her chest.
“Felicity, this is me asking you.” His eyes are dead serious when he turns to her, and his voice sounds like nothing she’s ever heard before. “I will give you whatever kind of wedding you want. I will marry you in a synagogue or a Vegas chapel or on that sand dune on the beach where that family caught us making out. But will you please just...right now, be my wife?”
A tiny bitter part of her brain that’s scoffed at too many romantic comedies feels like it knows why he’s doing this, and she tells him so, but he breaks down the last of her defenses when he’s so emphatic about how she’s wrong.
“It’s not about obligation. It’s not about social norms or guilt. But it is about this baby,” he tells her, so earnest her heart grows three more sizes like the Grinch. “You’ve already given me a family. You’re my family, Felicity. You and Thea and John and Lyla and Sara and Laurel...”
“You’re my family, too,” she chokes out as tears start to fall.
“But this is...so much more. I think this is what comes next for me, Felicity,” he continues, and the look in his eyes reminds her of her Jewish mother babbling on about lighting up like Christmas. “Of all the things I’ve been, the best of me is going to be this baby’s father. I just want it to all be real. And I want you to be my wife.”
It’s not even worth blaming the hormones when she starts outright sobbing her affirmation into his shoulder. When she pulls it together enough to go inside, she fears her makeup is a lost cause. But for decades to come, he’ll always say that his favorite picture of the two of them is the one Lyla snaps on the steps of the courthouse that day.
“Because it’s just the two of us,” he tells her. “And we’d just been through another hell of a fight. But this time, our names are on the right paper and your rings are on the correct finger, and there’s a baby in your belly.”
“It was everything I thought I’d never have,” he says with the same wonder every time, “and it was finally real.”
They never plan on naming any of their children after people they’ve lost, but when Felicity panics in the minutes after their first baby girl is born, insisting through her sobs that their chosen name “isn’t her,” he calms first his wife and then his new pink bundle of joy with kisses and hushed assurances. Felicity actually takes longer to settle, the second he takes his daughter in his arms and looks down at her, she quiets, looking up with him with big blue eyes. She’s tiny and perfect and so much her mother, except for those eyes. Those he recognizes as his own.
Physically, her gaze is the same as his, but hidden in hers is something he doesn’t see often in the mirror. It’s a look that tugs at the fragile web of his memory, digging deep into some past happiness.
“Rebecca,” he blurts out breathlessly, and he hears Felicity gasp beside him.
“That’s her.” She nods when he looks over at her with wide eyes. “Rebecca.”
“That’s a heavy name for a little girl,” he murmurs mostly to himself, taking a moment to consider the tragic implications, the hundreds of dark marks that have seeped through the joyful memories of the woman he remembers. Malcolm Merlyn is dead, and this time it seems to be for good, but he still can’t fathom the thought of any of his darkness touching his daughter. But this wouldn’t be for Malcolm, this would be for Tommy.
“Oliver, she’s our kid.” That sentence alone is nearly enough to blast every dark thought from his mind. It’s one of the best thing’s Felicity’s ever said to him. And that bar is high. “She’s going to think she can do anything. And the worst part is, most of the time, she’ll probably be right.”
He’s too overwhelmed for coherent sentences, he just nods, wanting to stare at this precious thing in his arms, this latest miracle they’ve pulled off together, until his vision goes dark.
“Rebecca.”
They stop planning names after that, but when “it’s a boy” a few years later, Felicity’s pretty sure it’s a no-brainer. But Oliver’s eyes still go wide with wonder and about seven other things when she suggests it, and then even wider when she asks her follow-up question.
She knows he’s nervous, so she promises to take the lead, waiting until one night when they’re in the lair and Laurel is the last to clear out.
“Hey Laurel,” she asks with a shaky voice, hands rubbing her rounding belly, eyes darting to Oliver for strength. He nods steadily and she lets out a stuttered breath. “Can we talk to you about something?”
“What’s up?” Laurel starts out flippant, because she’s turned away at her locker, but when she gets a better look at Felicity and (mostly) Oliver’s body language, her eyes narrow warily. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing bad!” Felicity’s quick to assure for some reason. “We just, we uh...we found out, last week, that we’re having a boy.”
“Really!” Laurel’s eyes light up with genuine excitement. “That’s amazing!”
She moves to hug Felicity, who reciprocates stiffly enough that Laurel pulls back in concern. She doesn’t even make a move to congratulate Oliver, who’s currently fixated on an invisible spec on the floor.
“Okay, seriously, what’s going on?” she asks after thirty more second of awkward silence. “You guys like you’re freaking out. This is a good thing, isn’t it? Now you’ll have one of each.” Her tone is teasing, but her eyes are concerned.
“We wanted to...I wanted to ask…” Felicity stumbles, cursing her mouth for only the millionth time in her life. She didn’t think it would be this hard. But standing here, prying open this particular floodgate, it scares her silent.
“We want to name him Tommy,” Oliver’s voice rasps heavily beside her, but at least he gets the words out.
Laurel’s eyes go wide and Felicity desperately tries to read them.
“I just wanted to ask,” she scrambles, finding all her thoughts at once, so they come out in a rush. “I don’t know if that even something you’ve ever wanted, but if it was…I don’t want to take that from you. Or, if it would be too hard...”
This time Laurel’s hug is more of an attack, wrapping her up fiercely in a way that reminds Felicity so vividly of her sister. And this time, she absolutely returns it as her friend whispers a heavy “thank you” into her ear.
“Would you guys do me one favor though?” Laurel asks when they pulls back. “Will you take a suggestion on the middle name?”
Thomas Quentin Queen comes out screaming and doesn’t really stop until he’s eleven or twelve years old and takes to his namesake like a duck to water. From then, all his crazy energy, all his noble emotion, everything Felicity’s sweet little boy is, becomes devoted to becoming a police captain “just like Uncle Q.”
Quentin Lance serves fifteen more years as captain of the Star City force, the last five with an enthusiastic young deputy he affectionately refers to as “Tommy Two-Qs.” When the time comes to pass the torch, it’s difficult to say who sheds more proud tears at the ceremony. Felicity’s overwhelmed as she watches her baby boy get sworn in, but it’s Laurel who sobs audibly when her father announces her godson’s full name.
Their last baby girl comes out silent, with the biggest scowl on her face, and Felicity can’t help but laugh out loud when she gets a good look at her.
“You know who this is, right?” she asks Oliver, handing over their daughter with the easy confidence of a woman who’s done this twice now.
“Felicity, no,” he protests as soon as he sees it. “We can’t do that to her.”
“I’m not doing anything,” she claims, feigning innocence. “Look at that face and tell me that’s not Moira Queen.”
“I can’t,” he sighs heavily, and his precious little girl glares up at him. “But I can’t….I’m going to have to call her Mo or something.”
His wife wrinkles her adorable nose and he can’t help but lean down and kiss it, even as she whines at him. “You are absolutely not calling her Mo.”
A/N: So there we are. Now, if you so desire, you can go read That’s All You as a follow-up piece about the family. If not, thanks for the ride. It’s been a beautiful road trip summer.