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She sees the ring approximately four minutes after Thea and Laurel leave.
Oliver is...in need of his space — Felicity knows that much. So when she shuts the door behind their friends’ retreating backs and turns to see him running his hand distractedly over his face before heading upstairs, she doesn’t follow. At least, not at first.
First, she goes back to the table and piles their flatware together with reluctant fingers before delivering the stack of abandoned dishes to the sink. Her eye catches the soufflés, sitting discarded on the counter beneath the window that overlooks Dave and Leslie’s yard, and her heart sinks in her chest. Their romantic dinner is two hours past and entirely forgotten; it seems to be a theme with her and Oliver, never making it to dessert.
But what’s done is done, and the more honest part of her knows that it was only a matter of time before they were needed in Starling. There’s only so far you can run before the past catches up with you, after all.
Except, Felicity thinks, her eyes still fixed on the soufflés, the last two months didn’t feel like running at all. They felt like the opposite, actually — like settling. Like their feet had finally touched the ground and the world had stopped turning long enough for unpacking clothes and mowing the lawn (“Because if you stay in one place for so long, Oliver, it grows,” she had said, smiling, in response to his startling realization that the grass was brushing the base of his ankles. The boy who had lived surrounded by magically manicured backyards and the changed man who had survived amongst the dense shrubbery and thick mulch of purgatory, wide eyed at the growing grass in their front yard).
They had sunk into lazy days when hopping in the Porsche meant a trip to the grocery store instead of a trip to the next state, and Laurel and Thea inadvertently managed to shatter in two hours what Oliver and Felicity had taken two months to build. Felicity isn’t in the business of denying herself the truth these days, so she gives herself a minute to mourn every could have been contained within these four walls that she has so cherished over the past two months.
Felicity isn’t in the business of wallowing either, though, so after a measured thirty seconds, she lets out a quiet sigh and starts closing the kitchen windows that are so obediently carrying in the soft October breeze.
It’s then, when she’s craning over Oliver’s perfectly crafted desserts to reach the plastic crank, that a flash of silver snags her attention. She glances down curiously, only to have her heart seize painfully in her chest.
The ring is simple and understated and perfect and the sight of it makes her breath stutter across her lips and her eyes inexplicably fill with tears at the unadulterated want that rushes through her. As if this — wrenching themselves away from a life closer to simplistic paradise than reality — could be any harder than it already is.
(A secret: she had known there was a ring. Of course she had. Somewhere between North Carolina and Massachusetts he had left her to peruse a beachside bookstore while he and a mechanic “talked logistics” over the bruised and battered Porsche that a different mechanic had tuned up in Tennessee just the week before. When she had returned two hours later, he had been three shades more flushed than the ever-present sunburn draped over his cheeks, and his left hand didn’t leave its pocket for nearly half a day after that. Oliver Queen was a man of many talents, but subtlety was never one of them. Of course she had known there was a ring. And, until now, the thought had brought her nothing but unadulterated joy.)
The surge of desire is not, however, for the ring. The three simple diamonds, two smaller ones bracketing a modest centerpiece, twinkle up at her with taunting happiness, but more than anything, Felicity wants the promise of Oliver. Oliver and this unhurried, effortless life they’ve created together, small and strong and real.
She closes her eyes against the unavoidable desperation clawing at her chest, the aversion to leaving safety behind, and tears her gaze away from the ring and everything it symbolizes. Swallowing carefully, she drives back the tears that threaten to fall over her sudden regression into the familiar world of someday, maybe when it comes to having Oliver Queen.
Felicity locks the window with a firm click of the latch and pushes away from the counter. Before she knows where her feet are carrying her, she finds herself walking up the stairs to their bedroom. Maybe she can’t have Oliver Queen in the way that’s come to matter most in these two months of domesticity, but he’s here with her now, and that is everything.
She finds him bent slightly over a suitcase, arms braced on either side, and stills in the doorway, carefully shifting her weight to lean against the frame. He knows she’s there, watching him patiently as they breathe together into the oppressive silence.
After a long span of seconds, he turns his head to look at her, and everything she feels is mirrored right there in the calming blue of his eyes. Felicity feels a white hot flash of shame that she forgot, even for a moment, that he would understand. That she ever felt alone in this quiet agony.
She wipes absently at the moisture in her eyes and it only takes two long strides for him to reach her, to wrap his arms around her tightly and tuck her into his chest. It should say something about how far they’ve come — how far he’s come, with miles and miles of road and truths behind them — that he’s the one to close the distance between them now.
A minute later, her name is a whispered plea against her hair.
“I know,” she says, feeling the strain of his muscles beneath her fingers. The thought of going back is more terrifying than it has any right to be if they are completely certain of what it will mean for them, separate or together. Five months ago, the world of Starling seemed smaller than the one with nothing but a car and the open road. Somehow, it doesn’t feel that way anymore. “I know,” she repeats softly. “Me, too.”
He presses a grateful kiss into her hair. “We’ll be okay,” he tells her after a moment, his voice morphing into something sure and solid and true.
“Promise me?” she whispers, and despite everything, there’s the smallest of smiles stretching across her lips.
His arms tighten around her infinitesimally. “Promise.”
Unlike so many times in the past — she’s lost him too often for it to be anything other than a conscious effort — Felicity lets tendrils of hope wrap themselves around her bones and coil tightly. Because, unlike the past, things are different now. They are different now. And nothing — not Starling, or arrowing vigilantes, or the ring waiting for her downstairs — could possibly change how this feels. How loving Oliver Queen feels, like falling and landing all at once.
The way he smiles at her the first morning they wake up in Starling is the same smile he’s given her every morning for the past five months. It’s more of a promise than words can ever say.