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“ Oliverrrr ,” Felicity calls in a sing-song voice, descending the Foundry stairs with a spring in her step and a heaping paper bag full of Big Belly in her arms. “I bring gifts in the form of burgers and waffle fries! And I know you said that I don’t need to bring you food anymore, but now you’re living here, you really can’t survive off those disgusting protein bars alone and our last Big Belly food delivery dude got mugged and refused to deliver to the Glades aga - oh my god .”
She drops the food on the ground - those poor waffle fries - and rushes toward Oliver, who is lying on a towel spread out over the floor in front of the medical card, motionless. She falls to her knees next to him, her heart jackrabbiting in her chest. Oliver did not just survive all the horrific chaos and beatings and near-death experiences to get taken out by whatever has caused him to collapse just now.
“Don’t be dead, don’t be dead, don’t be dead,” she chants, rolling him onto his back from where the archer is curled up on his side. “If you’re dead then I’m gonna kill you, don’t you dare be dead because I am useless at CPR and I’ll throw up if I have to break your ribs.”
He’s not dead, thank god. He’s sleeping. Just… very, very deeply. He’s also sweating profusely, so Felicity quickly checks his pulse and temperature. His heartbeat is rapid but thready, and his temperature is near fever level.
“You big dumb idiot,” she sighs. “Why didn’t you tell us you’re sick?”
She already knows the answer. Because Oliver hates to admit when he’s vulnerable. She catches sight of an empty blister packet of antibiotics in his limp hand. Clearly Oliver was searching for more drugs in the medical kit, but fell asleep before he could find any. And the reason he couldn’t find any is because he’s apparently used them all up while hiding his illness
Tucking a pillow beneath his head and draping a blanket over his body, Felicity slinks into her chair at her monitor set-up. There isn’t much more she can do for Oliver beyond ordering him some more drugs and keeping an eye on him.
“You know, this would all be a lot less dramatic if you simply admitted to being unwell,” Felicity comments aloud. “Instead of just trying to tough it out, because really, Oliver, you should know better than anybody that never works. What am I talking about? You’ve been shot and stabbed and god knows what else over the past seven years and you always just walk it off.”
She leaves him to sleep, eating her own share of the food and storing Oliver’s burger and fries in the mini fridge near the back of the Foundry, for him to eat when he feels up to it later. Kicking her feet up, Felicity scrolls Twitter on her phone and runs a security update on the servers that has been long overdue; she has been postponing the update until they get everything back in order after the Foundry was mostly destroyed during the Seige.
Things have been weird between them since they defeated Slade Wilson. One thing Felicity has noticed, along with the tension that hangs over them like an axe, is that Oliver has been a lot softer towards her recently. But he’s still stubborn, and will likely insist on going on patrol tonight despite his sickness.
She’s planning on sticking around for the night. With Diggle currently with Lyla visiting her parents in Keystone City, Felicity is going to have to be the Adult in the Room and try to stop him. And when she fails, she doesn’t want him to go running around the city alone, without some form of backup.
She’s in the middle of watching an adorable video of a cheetah cub and a labrador puppy becoming friends when she hears Oliver shift. Glancing over worriedly, Felicity shuffles over to him cautiously. The archer is twitching, his fingers rubbing together in his familiar tick, and his brows are furrowed with anxiety. She has been warned many a time by Oliver not to ever approach or get too close to him when he’s fidgeting in his sleep, as it’s a sign of him having a nightmare. And when Oliver has nightmares, he tends to get violent and lash out.
He begins to murmur, “ No, no, please, no ,” repeatedly under his breath, strained with panic
Felicity’s heart pangs for him. She can’t just… let him suffer. After all the crazy, agonizing shit he’s lived through, his nightmares must be terrifying. But she can’t touch him, or shake him away.
“Oliver,” she calls out loudly. “Wake up.”
He doesn’t stir.
“Okay, no other option. Sorry about this, dude,” she mutters.
Oliver uses tennis balls for target practice sometimes. They also make great projectiles. Felicity grabs one and lobs it at Oliver’s head. It misses, of course - her aim isn’t perfect and sports are not her forte - but lands with a boink on his arm instead.
The archer holts upright, straight, immediately fully awake. “ We’reunderattack, ” he blurts out, slurring his words.
“No, no, everything’s fine,” Felicity hurries to reassure him, hands held out placatingly. “Sorry, I just couldn’t figure out any other way to wake you up!”
Oliver blinks at her slowly, like a big cat showing affection. He looks exhausted, his eyes red-rimmed. He sniffles, wiping his nose on his arm. “Wasn’t asleep,” he mutters.
Felicity snorts. “Yeah, sure, buddy.”
Squinting at her, Oliver asks confusedly, “What are you doing here so early?”
She shrugs. “Thought I’d bring you something decent to eat, considering your diet has been entirely powder and bar based since you moved down here. Almost had a heart attack when I arrived to find you passed out on the freakin’ floor and sick with a fever. We’ve run out of antibiotics by the way - that’s why you couldn’t find any more. I’ve ordered some from your usual dealer but they won’t be ready to pick up until tomorrow.”
Oliver heaves himself off the floor with a pained grunt, teetering back and forth on his feet. Concerned he may lose balance and swan-drive toward the floor, Felicity steps forward and grabs his arms to help steady him. The tiny smile that she receives in response from the archer is achingly fond. But then that smile disappears as he bows his head and frowns, huffing through closed lips, as if in pain.
“Oliver?” she asks quietly. “What hurts?”
“Nothing,” he replies shortly.
She hits him with a stern look. “Oliver.”
He exhales slowly. “My head.”
Felicity bites her lip. Oliver has exceptionally high pain tolerance, and normal painkillers have therefore never really worked for him. Acetaminophen and ibuprofen are as useless as sugar pills, and anything stronger, like codeine, actually makes him physically sick. The only remedy that reliably works for him is the herbs that he brought back from the island. He won’t let Felicity test them to figure out what herbs they exactly are, so they remain a leafy, magical mystery.
“I’ll make you island herb tea,” she announces brightly. “That’ll help!”
She roots through his island belongings and finds two fabric bags full of dried herbs. Looking between the two bags, Felicity assumes that they must be the same, or they’d be marked differently, and so randomly picks one. She brews the herbs with fresh hot water in a tea strainer, wrinkling her nose in distaste as the water turns a murky swampy color. The tea smells awful, like cat piss times ten, but she’s not the one drinking it.
Oliver is seated in her chair, rubbing his temples.
“Drink,” she orders, thrusting the mug into his hands. “I won’t have you fainting on me, Oliver Queen. You are far too heavy for me to lift off the floor so you’ll just end up lying there until Diggle comes back tomorrow and do you really want him to arrive back to find you starfished and drooling?”
“I don’t drool in my sleep,” Oliver mutters, taking an obedient sip of the tea.
“You do,” Felicity grins.
“I do,” Oliver agrees.
He looks down at the tea, blinking rapidly.
“Felicity,” he says. “What herbs did you use?”
She shoots him a baffled look, midstep to the Foundry sink, where she’s carrying the tea strainer full of wet herbs to dump out in the trash. “The island ones.”
“ Which ones? ” he asks urgently, lurching to his feet unsteadily.
“Whoa, hey, calm down.” Felicity sets the herbs aside, alarmed. “The ones in the little green pouch.”
“With the white drawstring or the black?” he demands.
“The black! Why are you panicking?”
“Because the bags contain different herbs and the black drawstring one contains herbs that lower your inhibitions and essentially act as a truth serum,” Oliver blurts out.
Felicity’s eyes widen in shock. “Oh.”
Well this is… awkward. She didn’t intend to drug Oliver with truth serum but… she can’t deny that she’s intrigued to know how effective it is. And there are some questions she has always wanted to know the answer to but has never been brave enough to ask because she knows that Oliver would instantly shut her down or snap at her.
“So uh… you can’t lie?” she asks warily.
Oliver grits his teeth. “No.”
“So I could ask you anything I want and you would be compelled to answer?”
“Felicity,” he groans, and then, clenching his jaw shut, is forced to admit, “Yes.”
“Was it you who stole my Sour Patch Kids last week?” she immediately questions, pointing at him accusingly.
The archer insisted that he wasn’t the culprit, defending himself by claiming that he hasn’t been able to handle processed sugar since the island. Felicity has always suspected that he has a super secret sweet tooth and just avoids eating sugar to help maintain his physique. Not that he needs much help with that, considering he’s running parkour marathons around Starling City every night and could bench-press two of her with no problems.
Oliver looks resigned. He runs a hand over his pale face and confesses, “Yes.”
“Ha!” Felicity points at him, triumphant. “I knew it! I knew you were lying! You’re a terrible liar!”
“I’m an excellent liar,” Oliver counters. “You just… always see right through me.”
Felicity narrows her eyes. “Wait, if the herbs compel you to tell the truth, they compel you to tell your truth, right? What you believe?”
“Yes.”
“Oh my god, that’s adorable. You actually think you’re an amazing liar. You’re the worst liar I’ve ever known, Mr I ran out of sports bottles ,” Felicity laughs.
“I purposefully lied terribly to you,” Oliver says, his eyes slightly dazed, from either his rising fever or the drugs. “I wanted you to figure out the truth.”
“You did?” she asks, delighted.
“Yes, I knew from our very first meeting that you were brilliant and ridiculously intelligent. And you were funny. Actually funny, and you made me laugh, and I hadn’t properly laughed for a long, long time. I felt comfortable around you and you made me feel like a person when everybody else was treating me like some fragile broken boy.”
Her heart sings. She’s always suspected that Oliver deliberately told her dreadful lies when he started coming to her for help with Hood-related activities last year, but she honestly never would have thought he’d own up to it. Although, she guesses that he technically hasn’t of his own volition. He’s been drugged.
She suddenly realizes that if Oliver cannot lie, and is being forced to tell the truth, then he cannot truly consent to their conversation. “Err… I feel kinda awful asking you questions when you don’t really have a choice in answering them,” she says guiltily.
“I have a choice,” Oliver says, tilting his head. “The tea compels me to tell the truth, not force me to speak. And I could walk out whenever I want. I just like talking to you.”
“You do?” Felicity blushes. “You don’t… think I ramble on too much?” One of her biggest insecurities is that Oliver might get annoyed by her tendency to babble. She only really does it when she’s nervous, and she tends to get very, very nervous around him. Sometimes he interrupts her with an exasperated tone and she gets anxious that he might be starting to dislike her.
The archer shakes his head and informs her truthfully, “I think your rambling is adorable.” He looks down at the floor, blinking rapidly. He abruptly turns ashen in pallor, and then admits in a raspy, sad voice, “Felicity, I don’t feel very well.”
“Well, yeah, you’re sick and you have a headache, it makes sense that you’re not feeling your best,” she replies, patting his arm in sympathy. “Hey, maybe it would be better if you took a nap and slept the truth serum tea off.”
“No, I don’t want to sleep,” Oliver responds hastily, eyes darting about as apprehension washes over his expression. “I’ll have nightmares.”
Alarm bells begin to ring in Felicity’s head. “Oh - um -” She doesn’t want to accidentally say anything that will trigger the archer to overshare, because she knows how intensely private he is about his personal traumas. “Diggle has some prazosin that I’m sure he won’t mind you borrowing -”
“I keep dreaming about Slade killing you,” Oliver carries out, his gaze distant and haunted. A shuffer appears to run down his spine at the memory of it. “That I’m too late, and he thrusts his sword through your chest, directly through your heart, just like he did my mom. Over and over again. And I wake up feeling like your blood is still covering my hands.”
Felicity stares at him in horror, speechless. “Oliver…”
“Sometimes I think it would have been better if I’d killed him,” he says blankly, “Because I worry constantly about the possibility of him breaking out of that ARGUS prison and escaping the island again and I know that if he ever reached Starling, you would be his first target. Because he knows how much I care about you and that hurting you would hurt me the most.”
Her heart in her throat, and blood pounding in her ears, Felicity can’t resist the urge to croak, “Why?”
“Because he wants nothing more than to torture me by making me watch on helplessly as he kills the person I love the most.” Oliver sways in place. “I feel weird.”
Felicity somehow manages to lunge forward just in time to catch Oliver around his waist as his eyes flutter shut and his knees give out. She yelps as his weight falls on her, and nearly topples over himself, because there is no way that she can carry him by herself. Fortunately, the archer falls forward, not backward, and so it’s relatively simple to carefully ease him down to the ground - on one of the training mats, this time, so he’s not just lying on the freezing cold concrete.
“What am I gonna do with you?” she groans, rubbing her hands over her face as she is once again faced with caring for an unconscious, sick Oliver Queen.
An unconscious, sick Oliver Queen who just admitted to loving her.
Her heartbeat spikes, and she sits, just as the dizziness hits, because oh my god. Oh my god, Oliver confessed, under the influence of truth serum, that he loves her. This is everything she has ever wanted and hoped for and dreamed of. Felicity has never once entertained the thought of what might potentially happen if her crush on Oliver is reciprocated, because frankly, she didn’t think it ever would be.
Now, she’s more certain than ever that there’s a chance.
But he didn’t say that he’s in love with you , a tiny voice in the back of her mind says obnoxiously. Maybe you’re reading too much into things.
Draping a blanket over his prone form and shoving a pillow beneath his head, Felicity resigns herself to playing nursemaid. She stays up the whole night making sure he doesn’t stop breathing in his sleep, dosing him with a sedative before he can begin suffering from nightmares again. She then miraculously finds some IV antibiotics at the very back of the medical fridge, which are still in date. Felicity has had enough practice caring for Oliver whilst he’s laid up with injuries that she’s pretty skilled at putting in a cannula now, even though she gags and feels like she’s about to throw up the whole time she is forced to handle the needle.
Once the drip is nearly empty, she takes Oliver off it and then curls up in her chair, another blanket wrapped around her shoulders, and dozes until morning. The server update pings every couple of hours so she wakes up to check its progress and also to check Oliver’s pulse and breathing, which seem fine. His fever breaks around 4am and then Felicity relaxes, relieved. With that relief comes blissful sleep, her head pillowed on her arms.
She wakes up to somebody very gently shaking her shoulders, a warm hand brushing her messy blonde hair away from her face. She peers blearily up at Oliver, who looks a hundred times healthier than he did last night, color in his cheeks again, and his eyes clear and focused.
“What are you doing here?” he asks her softly. “Did you sleep here last night?”
“You’re awake. Oh my god, how are you feeling?” she asks, jaw cracking with a yawn as she jerks upright. She winces as her back aches from her hunching over all night. “Are you alright? Has the headache gone?” She narrows her eyes, asking cautiously, “Has the tea worn off?”
Oliver looks at her like she’s grown a second head. “What tea?”
“The wacky island tea I accidentally drugged you with,” she says slowly.
He raises an eyebrow, casting a look over to his island trunk. A brief expression of bewilderment passes over his face but then flattens into nonchalance. “I’m fine. Clearly it did its job, I feel great,” he shrugs.
He feels great? The tea… did its job? Felicity scrutinizes him, suspicious and also beginning to realize that the tea might not just have acted as a truth serum, but also as a short-term amnesia inducer. “Oliver? What do you remember from last night?”
“Everything’s a blur. Not much,” he murmurs, frowning in concentration. He looks perturbed for a moment, as he apparently blanks on the events of the evening. It must be very disconcerting to lose memories. Felicity’s worry must show, because he tries to lighten the mood by joking, “Why, did I say anything crazy?”
“No! No, you were - you were fine, just a little loopy and tired,” she rushes out. “Everything’s okay.”
“Good.” He nods shortly. He withdraws his hand from her spine, and Felicity instantly misses its presence, scooting back in her chair as if she might be able to follow him. “I’m going to shower and then go out on patrol. To be truthful, you look exhausted, you should go home.”
Felicity slaps a hand over her mouth to stifle her slightly hysterical, panicked laughter. Oliver has no idea just how truthful he has recently been. “Yeah,” she responds, stupefied. “To be truthful.”
He shoots her a strange look, and then departs, marching off towards the back of the Foundry where the bathroom lies.
She should have told Oliver about the truth serum tea when she had the chance. Now she’ll have to keep the entire night a secret, because Oliver would undoubtedly be mortified if he ever found out. And Felicity would rather throw herself off the Foundry roof than have to ask him if he actually meant what he said under truth serum.
Oliver loves her, though. And now that is all she is going to be able to think about, for weeks, wondering if he meant it in the way she wants him to mean it.
Felicity drops her head down onto the metal counter and heaves a groan, banging her head. “Idiot.”