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It hadn't even crossed Oliver's mind that she would be the one hurt by his forays into the underworld of Starling City. He understood collateral damage. He understood the workings of a scheming mind better than any person rightly should. He even understood the insistent pull of curiousity on an agile mind, but he'd somehow managed to overlook the fact that the person he'd entrusted to salvage information off of a badly damaged hard drive might become suspicious once she realized he'd been lying to her. Again. He should have known better.
Stupid, Oliver viciously reprimanded himself. Not only stupid because it had resulted in an innocent woman getting hurt, but because it meant that he was growing too comfortable and too complacent. He'd gone to her with the damaged hardware because she was the best person he knew to retrieve the information he needed. She was smart, quick, and despite an overt fondness towards sarcasm and a tendency to talk through every silence, he'd trusted her to get the job done with discretion.
Oliver shook his head angrily as he impatiently waited for the traffic light to turn green. The moment it did he accelerated out of the intersection, the engine on his motorcycle revving loudly. Weaving in and out of the usual long line of cars during Starling City's rush hour traffic, he couldn't quite stop himself from furiously cursing her for getting involved. He figured it'd be best to vent his frustration on the road than on her in the hospital.
He parked quickly without thinking seconds after pulling up to the hospital and stalked through the automatic doors leading to the emergency room.
"I'm looking for Felicity Smoak," he told the nurse at the admitting station.
The nurse cast him a shrewd look before turning to glance at his computer screen and asked, "Relative?"
"Boss."
"Not really."
Oliver turned around at the sound of Felicity's voice. She was slowly pushing herself out of a chair in the waiting area, one hand bandaged, the other arm in a sling, and a vicious bruise forming along her jaw and the side of her face.
Oliver carefully scrutinized the way she favoured her right side as she moved slowly towards him. She was obviously fighting the urge to limp and he concluded that she'd injured her leg and probably her torso if the shallow breaths she was taking were any indication.
He glared at her. "What are you doing here?"
Felicity waived her bandaged right hand in his face, wincing when the movement pulled on sore muscles. "I'd give you a rundown, but I think the visual's probably enough and it'd probably take an hour to go through it all anyway."
Oliver's gaze hardened, his steely blue eyes catching her tired ones. "Why aren't you in a bed?"
Felicity shrugged before she could think better of it. Oliver reached out to steady her with a hand on her uninjured arm when she swayed on her feet.
"There isn't much they can do here that I can't do at home," she replied, squeezing her eyes shut to ward off the dizziness.
Oliver took in her pale and drawn face, the lines of pain crossing her forehead, every bruise and scratch along her cheek and jaw, and turned back towards the nurse at the admitting station.
"She needs to be admitted." Oliver's tone brooked no argument, but the nurse merely spared a second to glare at him for interrupting another patient. Felicity sighed loudly behind him.
"You're being admitted," Oliver declared over his shoulder.
"You're being weird," Felicity replied as she stepped around him and began to carefully walk towards the main doors.
Oliver clenched and unclenched his jaw as he watched her hobble towards the doors. "Where are you going?"
Felicity waved with her good hand towards the door as she walked, too exhausted to repeat what she considered to be blatantly obvious.
Oliver exhaled slowly and pushed away the wave of aggravation he felt at her stubbornness. She was hurt, probably scared, and he wouldn't be helping the situation by fighting her. She would give back as good as she got, but he needed to make her understand that a hospital bed would be the best place for her considering her injuries.
And the safest considering he still needed to hunt down the bastard who'd done this to her, he thought darkly.
Catching up to her quickly, he let his hand ghost along the small of her back, ready to catch her as they continued walking in silence. They managed to reach the ambulance bay and pick up area just outside the main doors before Felicity stopped to catch her breath.
Oliver watched his breath form icy vapour, watched it float in front of his face and slowly disappear. He heard the distant sound of sirens slowly getting louder and as he shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat, he thought of taking it off and putting it around Felicity's hunched shoulders. Her coat must have been lost somewhere along the way because she stood beside with only a thin sweater to ward off the chilly morning air.
"What are you doing here?" Felicity's quiet question broke through the silence between them.
Oliver didn't respond and started to remove his coat instead. Felicity stopped him with a raised hand, shaking her head.
"Don't," she spoke, her voice firm, harder than it had been before despite her exhaustion. "I like the cold."
Oliver lowered his hands slowly, pushing them back into his pockets. He hated the cold - hated that it felt familiar to him.
Felicity fixed him with a gaze almost as icy as the frosty vapour between them. She had her injured arm pressed tightly against her chest, she couldn't stand up straight, and she was squinting slightly from the pain as she looked up at him, but he could read the steely resolve in her eyes and in the tension gathered in every muscle.
Gritting his teeth, lips pressed tightly together, Oliver turned away to stare sightlessly into the parking lot beyond.
"Walter called to tell me you'd been attacked," he said curtly.
Felicity didn't shift her gaze from the side of his face. "Why?"
Oliver inhaled slowly. He fought down the instinct to lie. "Because I asked him to."
Felicity frowned, confused. "You asked him to call you if I were ever attacked? You usually assume people you know are going to be attacked?"
Oliver remained silent; the only response he gave her was the steady clench of the muscles in his jaw.
Sighing as she turned away, Felicity rolled her shoulders to try and lessen the painful tension in her back. Her injured shoulder protested the movement and she hissed at the stab of pain that radiated down her spine.
The sirens that had been faint when they'd first stepped outside were ear-splitting as an ambulance sped into the emergency room's ambulance bay. Oliver and Felicity stood silently side by side, watching as hospital personnel came rushing out and converged around the gurney being lowered from the back of the ambulance. The mass of people disappeared back through the doors, the paramedics briskly calling out vital signs, as quickly as they'd appeared. The sirens stopped shrieking and the usual morning sounds rushed to fill the void.
"Look, Oliver," Felicity began. She didn't turn to look at him as she spoke, content to watch her breath float away instead. She could feel the heat of him against her side and briefly wished she'd accepted his coat. "This wasn't your fault."
Oliver frowned. "That's not-"
"Don't," Felicity interrupted him harshly. She turned to glare at him, blue eyes cold and hard. When he refused to look at her, she stepped around and directly in front of him, fixing him with an icy stare. "Don't lie to me when I'm trying to make you feel better."
"Sorry." Oliver found the word coming out of his mouth before he could stop it.
Felicity's shoulders relaxed, but her eyes refused to soften. "I get that you have secrets and I'm in no position to ask or to expect you to tell me what they are. But," Felicity paused when she realized that her voice had risen louder than she'd meant it to.
"But," she repeated more softly, voice hard and quiet. "I won't have you treating me like an idiot."
Oliver shook his head once, twice. "I don't think you're an idiot."
"No," Felicity allowed. "You just treat me like one."
Oliver bit back the automatic apology bubbling up in his throat. He breathed through the frustration and just looked at her. She'd been beaten and bruised; one arm in a sling, the other wrapped. She probably had a few bruised ribs and a sprained ankle and yet, somehow, she still managed to find the energy to make him feel about three feet tall. And yet as admirable as he found her spirit, she could have been killed and he'd been the one who'd put the hard drive containing dangerous information right in the palm of her hand.
Oliver's head fell back, his eyes falling shut as he exhaled heavily. "You weren't supposed to look at the files."
"I needed to make sure the data hadn't been corrupted," Felicity replied matter-of-factly. "And you'd said they were vacation pictures."
"You didn't believe me," Oliver accused.
"I wanted to."
There was nothing Oliver could say to that. There was nothing Oliver wanted to say to that. If he allowed himself the luxury of dwelling on that particular thought for too long he figured he'd become entirely too well acquainted with the knot of guilt tightening his stomach. He instead decided to ignore it with the same steadfast determination he used to ignore the ever-present pain of his scars.
"If I asked you to," Oliver turned to face Felicity as he spoke, forming the words carefully in his mouth, "would you spend the night in the hospital?"
Felicity frowned up at him and shot him a questioning look. She parted her lips to reply, but he quickly interrupted her by placing both of his hands gently on her shoulders and lowering his face until it was merely inches away from hers. Her eyes widened in surprise, mouth snapping shut.
"Please don't ask me why," Oliver said quietly. "I don't want to lie to you. Just trust-" Her eyes narrowed at that and Oliver inhaled sharply. "I know I don't deserve it – your trust. But I need it."
Felicity's clear blue eyes bore into him, searching his face. He didn't know what she was looking for, didn't know what expression to plaster across his face or into his eyes that would convince her of his honesty. Whatever it was, she must have found it because he could read the agreement flash across her face and it felt like a tightness he hadn't realized gripped his chest was being slowly eased. He couldn't stop the corners of his lips from turning up into a small smile.
"Are you asking?" Felicity asked, the question floating between them in the frosty air.
Oliver nodded.
"Great," Felicity groaned and hung her head. "Now they're probably going to make me undergo another CAT scan for changing my mind so quickly. They'll think they missed a concussion or a brain bleed or cancer or something equally as horrible that requires more tests."
Oliver frowned at the top of her head. "Changing your mind? I thought you'd been discharged."
"Not exactly," was Felicity's reluctant response.
"What does 'not exactly' mean?"
"It means that I maybe might have signed myself out against the doctor's orders."
Oliver heaved a sigh. "Of course you did."
Raising her head back up to meet his eyes, Felicity noted the faint sparkle of amusement he couldn't quite manage to hide quickly enough from her and bit back a smirk.
"Want to use some of that Queen charm to help get me out of those tests?"
Oliver tilted his head to one side, his face resuming its usual stony set.
Felicity nodded thoughtfully. "Stony silence works too. Very intimidating. Good plan. Not everyone goes for charm."
He raised an eyebrow at that.
"Charm makes people suspicious," Felicity spoke in a loud whisper. She shrugged as if she couldn't be bothered either way, wincing in pain as she did.
Turning serious, Oliver carefully turned her back around towards the emergency room doors. "Come on. You're going back inside."
"No tests."
"All the tests."
Felicity shuddered. "I hate tests."
"You know," Oliver said thoughtfully as he guided her back to the nurse's station. "I never would have guessed that."
Oliver stayed with her as she was taken through the process of being admitted, stepping away only once to call Diggle and ensure that he'd be around while Oliver took care of the person who'd put Felicity in the hospital in the first place. The nurse had been less than impressed to see the two of them again, but Oliver guessed that he was probably less than impressed by most of the people he saw and most of what happened on a daily basis.
"Shit," Oliver swore suddenly and jolted away from where he'd been casually leaning against a wall.
Felicity's head snapped up towards him. "What happened?"
"Did you see a bike when we were out front?"
Felicity brow furrowed in thought, but she shook her head after a few seconds. "Where'd you park it?"
Oliver cursed colourfully under his breath. "I didn't."