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“Got ‘em,” Oliver’s voice comes in over the coms and Felicity breathes a sigh of relief that the immediate danger has passed.
“Great, I just sent word to the SCPD — anonymously of course — and they should be there in 3 minutes. Is the perp secure enough to leave?” she asks.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Oliver says and Felicity can practically hear his satisfied smirk and it makes her smile despite herself.
“You should head back then, so I can patch up that cut you won’t tell me about,” she says as she rolls over to her other monitor to make sure there are no other pressing emergencies happening.
Oliver doesn’t respond and she can tell that he’s trying to come up with a denial or an excuse.
“There’s nothing on the police scanners. The city is safe for another night. Just come home,” she says with a roll of her eyes.
“It’s a scratch,” he argues. “Might not even need stitches.”
“Well then it won’t take long to patch you up,” she counters.
She can hear him grumbling, but she can also hear the sound of him starting his bike, so she knows he’s decided to listen to her.
Ever since they’d defeated Slade Wilson two months ago, they’ve been working on cleaning up the remaining mess of the city. That meant tracking down every known crime boss and locking them up. She finds the evidence necessary for the DA to prosecute, and the Arrow makes sure they are caught when they inevitably try to flee the city.
This evening had been different, though. This evening hadn’t been planned. It was supposed to be a quiet night in for them. Digg is in Coast City with Lyla and her family while Roy is at a friend’s bachelor party. Felicity hates when Oliver goes out without backup, so she’d convinced him to take the night off. Oliver had been doing some training while she worked on tracking down a witness for the Briarman case.
Everything had been going fine until news broke of an armed robbery at Pacino’s and there hadn’t been another option. The Arrow had been needed. With every grunt and groan of pain that came through the com, Felicity had been tempted to rush out to meet him. To do something to make sure that he came back in one piece. But in the end, the need for self-preservation and her trust in Oliver’s ability to take down the armed robber won out.
Oliver doesn’t know about her abilities and she intends to keep it that way. There had been several times over the last year and a half that they’d been working together that she’d thought about telling him. Especially when Slade Wilson began wreaking havoc on the city. So many times, she could have used her powers to help, but each time she thought about it, Oliver’s words would ring loudly in her ears.
Any man with that much power needs to be put down. Permanently.
It had been one of their first missions together. A pyrokinetic mutant had started attacking the city and Oliver had killed him. Felicity had almost left the team over it. The fight they’d had over it had lasted days and only ended when Oliver convinced her that he wasn’t a serial killer and she chose to believe him. Chose to let him believe that was the only reason she’d been upset. She couldn’t have explained the real reason for her anger had been his harsh opinions on mutants. Not without revealing that she herself was one. No. The day she’d agreed to come back to the team, she’d decided that no good could come from him finding out about her abilities.
“I’m on my way,” Oliver informs her. As if she isn’t tracking his movements via GPS and can’t already tell.
“Perfect,” she says. “You’ll be home with enough time to take me to Big Belly Burger before it closes. Or, rather, I’ll take you since you’re poor and all. Either way. I’m starving. I haven’t eaten since lunch.”
“You were eating Twizzlers and drinking a soda when I left,” he says.
“That’s not a meal,” she scoffs.
“How are you not 500 pounds? You eat junk food all day and can barely do 10 sit-ups.”
She can hear the disapproving lecture coming her way. He’s been on her to start eating healthier ever since October when she began working as his EA and he noticed how much candy she consumes on a daily basis.
“I’ll have you know, I did 12 sit-ups yesterday and I boxed with Digg for an hour,” she says defensively. It’s much easier to argue with him over her diet than it would be to explain to him that her body absorbs calories at an unnatural rate thanks to the energy pulsing through her veins.
“Besides, you work out enough for the both of us,” she adds.
“Do you even known how to cook?” he teases, and at this point, they are just playing out an old script.
“I cook!” she protests, deciding not to add the fact that the only non-microwavable food she can successfully cook is oven-baked pizza. The prepackaged kind, not the kind you make from scratch. Making anything from scratch is just asking the fire-department to pay her a visit.
“What’s the difference between sauté and pan-fry?”
She scoffs. As if Oliver Queen even knows the answer to that. Then again, with how pretentious Moira had been, perhaps he does.
“I’ll take you to Big Belly Burger if you promise to get a salad instead of fries,” he tries to bargain with her.
The door unlocks above them and she glances at her monitor to see that Oliver has made it back safely. She stands up and walks over to the stairs as he descends them.
“First off, I won’t be fat-shamed by you,” she says. “And secondly, if I’m paying then I get to choose what I eat.”
“Please, like anyone could call you fat,” he says with a roll of his eyes as he sets down his quiver and bow before making his way over to the medbay table.
“You’d be surprised,” she says, watching closely as he takes off his jacket and shirt, looking for the slightest sign of discomfort that would signal he’s more hurt than he’s letting on. That’s the only reason she’s looking at him so carefully, she tells herself.
Oliver and her? Never happening. Even if he wanted it to — which, no. He would never want Felicity. That night 2 months ago when he’d told her he loved her was a ploy. Oliver dates girls like Laurel. Gorgeous Laurel. Long-legged brunettes. Sara was an outlier, sure. But that doesn’t mean he’s suddenly in the market for short, blonde girls. Especially not IT nerds. Nope.
Even if Oliver ever loses his mind and decides he does want her… she can’t want him. Nothing can ever happen between them. Not without him finding out about her secret.
“Somebody calling you fat? I’m more than happy to give them my thoughts on the matter as the Arrow,” he says, poking her playfully in the stomach while she gathers up the supplies she’ll need to give him stitches. He’d been right. The cut on his stomach isn’t bad. It will probably only need 3-4 stitches. By Oliver standards, that’s practically a papercut.
“Not unless you’re okay putting arrows in Nancy from accounting,” she says, grabbing his hand before he can poke her again.
Oliver groans at the mention of Nancy’s name. “I hate her.”
Felicity doesn’t disagree. She’d had to put up with Nancy’s snide remarks at every staff meeting and no matter how nice Felicity was about it, they never stopped. Donna Smoak had been wrong in that regard — you can’t kill people with kindness. Not somebody as bitchy as Nancy.
“I guess there are some benefits to losing QC,” Felicity says, pulling the light over so that she can see what she’s doing better. “No more Nancy.”
Oliver lets out a shaky breath when her fingers touch his skin and she looks up at him curiously. It couldn’t have hurt, she hadn’t even touched the cut yet and he’s not bruised. Had she missed something?
“Cold hands,” he says. It sounds like a lie, but she can’t find any evidence that he’s hiding anything from her, so she lets it go.
“I wasn’t fat-shaming you — whatever that means,” he says once she finishes putting in the last stitch. “I just don’t want you to die of a heart attack at 30.”
“But the fries are the best part of the meal,” she whines.
“Fries today and a home-cooked meal tomorrow?” he asks, attempting to compromise as she puts a bandage over the cut.
“You know I can’t cook,” she says.
“I know,” he says.
She hands him back his shirt. A small spark of electricity runs through her and into him when their fingers touch, causing her to let go quickly. “Static,” she explains awkwardly.
Thankfully, Oliver doesn’t ask any questions. His entire attention is still on convincing her to change her diet. “I’d do the cooking.”
“You have a mini-fridge and a hot plate,” she says, pointing to the small corner of the space he’d turned into his living quarters. It makes her heart hurt every time she looks at it. He doesn’t even have a bed, just a sleeping bag.
“Well that’s why I’d commandeer your kitchen,” he says, jumping off the table. He doesn’t bother putting his shirt back on as he heads towards the direction of the bathroom to shower.
“You can’t get your stitches wet,” she says with a glare.
“I’ll be careful,” he promises before stepping into the bathroom.
She rolls her eyes and goes back to her computers. Really, there are bigger problems to deal with than Oliver getting his stitches wet. Like why is it that Oliver Queen can mess with her control as often as he does.
Felicity had learned to master her abilities years ago. Professor Xavier and the rest of her teachers had helped her learn how to control her powers. Under their tutelage, she’d learned how to harness her gifts so that she was no longer a threat to the outside world. She’d even learned how to utilize her abilities to help save lives.
But then Oliver Queen had started being — well, Oliver Queen — and she’d started slipping more and more. It was never big. Just small shocks of electricity every time he’d touch her unexpectedly. Which, lately, had been an almost daily occurrence.
It was ridiculous. It was like she was a teenager all over again, having her powers emerge for the first time. Thankfully, Oliver was none the wiser. He’d asked her about it last week, but she’d just babbled on and on about the science behind static electricity. Lecturing him about negatively and positively charged objects and eventually his eyes glazed over and he dropped the entire thing.
Science. That’s how she’s managed to keep her secret for as long as she has. Every time anyone on the team starts asking her too many questions about how she gets her information so fast, she just starts talking science until she loses them and they stop asking.
There is a reason she’s the best hacker in the world and it’s not because she graduated from MIT at 19 like everyone thinks…
“You still haven’t accepted my offer,” Oliver says, causing her to jump in surprise. She hadn’t even realized he’d come out of the shower.
She turns around to find him standing there in a towel. She’s sure that her face is bright red when she squeaks and turns back around in her chair immediately. She can hear the little shit laughing at her already.
“Warn a girl before you do that!”
“Why, afraid you’ll like what you see?”
“Are those the kind of lines you used back in your old Ollie days?” she responds, trying to sound disgusted when what she really wants to say is ‘yes!’ She most definitely liked what she saw. Oliver is an incredibly attractive man. There’s no denying that.
“No, he didn’t need lines,” Oliver says.
She groans. “Really? Ugh. You’d better be thankful I didn’t know you back then or we’d never have been friends.”
“I’m sure Ollie would have loved to meet you back then,” he says and she choses not to comment on the fact that he’s talking about himself in the third person again. Digg gives him enough crap for it. “He loved going after the smart girls who knew they were too good for him… You know, you’ve never told me anything about what you used to be like.”
“What do you mean?” she asks, purposefully looking at the wall rather than giving into the temptation to turn around and watch Oliver change.
“I mean, you know all about my sordid past,” he says.
“Because it’s all over the internet.”
“I’m just saying, you can tell me things, you know,” he says. His voice is much closer now. He grabs the back of her chair and spins her around until she’s facing him. “About your past. I would never judge you.”
She can see the sincerity in his eyes and she knows that he means every word he’s saying. The problem is, that he doesn’t know what he’s agreeing to. He probably thinks she’s covering up shame over being abandoned by her father, or her goth phase. He has no idea that her past involves running away from home to attend Mutant High. He couldn’t possibly guess that she has a Cooper sized skeleton hidden inside of an X-Men sized closet.
Oliver is a lot of really amazing things… but she’s not sure that accepting is one of them. Not when it comes to this.
“Fine,” she says.
“Fine, you’ll tell me?” he asks, a hopeful look in his eye.
“Fine, I’ll let you cook me dinner tomorrow,” she says, standing up and taking a few steps back to grab her purse, eager to put some distance between them. It would be easy to let herself get lost in those eyes of Oliver’s and she’s terrified of what happens the day she gets so lost that she lets the truth slip out.
She can see the disappointment on his face for a split second before he covers it up again.
“Whatever I cook you have to eat,” he says as they make their way to the door.
“Ugh,” she grumbles. “Then I’m getting a milkshake with my meal.”
She smirks, knowing that she’s won this round when all Oliver can do is roll his eyes.
“The second I figure out what your secret is, I’m bottling it and making my millions back.”
“Good. Then you can buy us a bed,” she says, unlocking the car and getting in. “You! You a bed. You can buy yourself a bed. I don’t need a bed. I have a bed. Separate beds. You can buy yourself a bed for the Arrow Cave. Because you’re sleeping on the floor. Not that I care where you sleep… Just… I want you to be comfortable because I’m your friend. Friends. 3...2...1… I just meant that I want you to get your money back so that you don’t have to sleep on the cement floor in the basement of your closed down club.”
Oliver is holding back a laugh and she wants to punch him in the face. Seriously, sometimes she thinks her real superpower is word vomit. She’d had the Professor check once after a particularly mortifying incident in history class, but he’d assured her that wasn’t a thing.
“We’re not calling it that,” he says, taking pity on her and not pointing out her obviously inappropriate comment.
“What?”
“The Arrow Cave,” he says. “It’s a bunker. Possibly a lair.”
“We’ll see,” she says and is about to start the car when there’s a loud knock on her window. Oliver is out of the car before she can even turn to look at what caused the noise.
“Help!” a girl says. She can’t be older than 14. She’s soaked from head to toe and her clothing is torn, but that’s not the most curious thing about her. No. What’s curious is that her skin is an unnatural orange and she’s got black spots running along her hairline, not unlike a cheetah.
“What do you want?” Oliver asks, using his Arrow voice.
The girl ignores him and continues to knock on Felicity’s window. She unbuckles her seatbelt and moves to open the door when Oliver calls out to her.
“Felicity, don’t!”
She ignores him, opening her door and stepping out of the car.
“She could be dangerous,” Oliver says. He jumps over the hood of the car and moves to grab the girl, but the girl growls at him, exposing an impressive set of teeth. Oliver instead pulls Felicity behind him.
“You are Current, right?” the girl asks.
Felicity’s heart skips a beat at that. It’s been almost two years since anyone’s called her by that name. Felicity’s eyes dart to Oliver and she tries to figure out how she’s going to get out of this without him finding out the truth.
“Please,” the girl cries. “They’re after me.”
Felicity doesn’t have to ask who they are. She can see by the look of fear in the girl’s eyes that she’s been marked. Felicity can’t, in good conscience, ignore her. Not even if it means exposing herself to Oliver.
“Come on,” she says, stepping out from behind Oliver to reach for the girl’s hand. Oliver attempts to stop her, but she ducks out of his reach.
“Looks like I’ll need a rain check on that dinner,” she says.
“What are you doing?” he asks, his eyes full of fear and confusion.
“Go home, Oliver,” she says, knowing that he won’t listen to her. Not when he thinks she’s in danger.
She leads the girl over to the door and is about to punch in the keycode to get in when Oliver grabs her wrist.
“Felicity!” he yells.
“Oliver,” she says as calmly as possible. Between the way the girl’s starting to growl and how tense Oliver looks, she knows how easily this could turn into a very bloody battle. “You told me earlier that you wouldn’t judge me for my past, so I’m asking you to keep that promise and let me go so that I can get her to a safe place.”
“Who is she?” Oliver asks. “What are you talking about? How do you know you can trust her. She’s a mutant.”
“Because I’m a mutant,” she hisses, careful to keep her voice down so that nobody overhears them.
Oliver drops her hand and takes a step back, looking like she’d just slapped him.
“You’ve never had a problem trusting me before, please don’t start doubting me now,” she says, holding back tears at the look of betrayal in his eyes. She’d known that this would happen. She knew if he found out, he wouldn’t accept her. She can’t focus on that right now though. She needs to deal with the situation at hand. She can cry later.
She takes advantage of Oliver’s shock and quickly opens the door and practically runs down the stairs with the girl in tow, desperate to get off the street where anybody could see them.
Felicity’s not surprised when Oliver follows them down. She flips on the screens so that she can keep an eye on the cameras she has surrounding the building. If Sinister and his men are going to show up, she wants a head’s up.
“Start talking,” she tells the girl.
“No, I want an explanation first,” Oliver demands.
“Oliver,” she sighs, turning to him, trying to ignore the anger in his eyes. “I’ll tell you everything you want to know, after I help her. Okay?”
He looks like he wants to argue with her further, but the sound of whimpering coming from the girl stops him. He gives a terse nod, letting her know that he’s accepted her terms, albeit reluctantly.
“What’s your name,” Felicity asks, pulling a chair over for the girl to sit in.
“Caroline,” she says. “But they call me Cheetah.”
Oliver snorts and Felicity glares at him. “If you’re going to stay here, then you don’t talk.” She turns back to Caroline and says, “They call me Felicity.” She gives the girl a kind smile, taking a seat next to her, trying to set her at ease.
“Current’s cooler,” she says, smiling back.
She smiles, despite herself, at the compliment. This is what she’s missed living in Starling City. The camaraderie. The easy acceptance. The understanding that only comes from talking to another mutant.
“No one’s called me that in almost two years,” she says. “But I always liked it. A good friend of mine gave it to me.”
Felicity tries not to think about that. It will only throw her off, and if this girl has truly been marked, she needs to be on top of her game.
“How did you know to come to me? How did you know who I was?” Felicity asks, needing to know if her cover in Star City is blown. If it is, then they aren’t safe here.
“Professor Xavier told me where to find you if I was ever in trouble. He said you would help me,” Caroline says, causing Felicity to shake her head. Of course it had been the Professor’s doing. Always claiming she is still a hero, no matter how much she argues with him. “He wanted me to come to his school, but I wasn’t ready yet. I didn’t want to leave my family… I should have listened to him.”
Caroline begins crying and Felicity pulls her into her arms.
“Sh, it’s okay,” she says, rubbing soothing circles into her back. “We’ll get you there now. They won’t hurt you.”
Her eyes meet Oliver’s over the top of the girl’s head and she can see the war in his eyes. His inclination to never trust anyone is battling with his need to protect the innocent.
“Oliver and I will protect you,” she says, praying to god that’s true. That the Oliver she knows will do the right thing here. That he won’t turn them in.
“Who’s they?” Oliver asks, still suspicious but willing to take a leap of faith.
She sends him a silent thank you. If this goes south, she’s going to need all the help she can get in order to protect Caroline.
“Essex Corp,” she tells him, ignoring the way that the name alone causes Caroline to tense up.
“Never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have,” Felicity tells him. “It’s not a company you’ll find in the yellow pages. No company that kidnaps mutants and performs experiments on them ever is.”
“What?” A look of shock and disgust comes over him and he stands up and grabs his bow, immediately looking around the room for potential threats. The way he turns his back on them to face the door, shows her more than any other action could that he still trusts her. He wouldn’t leave himself exposed like that if he didn’t.
“What are we talking, military grade training or men in business suits?” he asks over his shoulder. Felicity doesn’t have an answer for him. She doesn’t know what kind of team had been sent to recover Caroline. It all depends on how dangerous they consider her to be.
“Caroline, I need you to tell me what you saw,” she says.
“I don’t know, it all happened so fast. I heard them at the door and I ran. But they had guns and there was a mutant with them… One that looked like… a dog maybe? Or a wolf. I didn’t stop to draw a sketch.”
“And you ran straight here? From where?” Felicity asks, trying to gage how how much time they have.
“Coast City.”
“That’s 140 miles away,” Oliver says, looking Caroline up and down. It’s then that Felicity notices she doesn’t even have shoes on. Not that she would need them. Her feet appear to be more like paws.
“I run fast,” Caroline shrugs, clearly uncomfortable under Oliver’s scrutiny.
“Why not run all the way to Westchester. Why stop here?” Felicity asks. She then turns to Oliver and mouths for him to stop. The last thing she needs is for an already skittish girl to get more nervous. Not without knowing how much control she has on her abilities.
“That’s practically 3,000 miles. I can’t run that long. They’d catch up to me. I tried all the major stations, but they have my picture up. They’re calling me a criminal.”
“Why are they calling you a criminal?” Oliver asks, suspiciously.
“They’re saying I murdered my parents. Which means they murdered my parents. Oh god. None of this would have happened if I had just gone to New York when I had the chance,” Caroline starts sobbing again and Felicity pulls her back into her arms.
At this point, she doesn’t even know what to say to comfort the poor girl. What do you say to somebody who’s just lost her parents?
It may have been years since she’s seen her mother, but at least she isn’t dead. This right here is exactly why she keeps her mother as far away from her as possible. Being a mutant can be empowering… but it can also be a death sentence.
Felicity takes a deep calming breath, trying to remember her training. She spent 6 years under Xavier’s care training to save the world. She knows how to handle herself in difficult situations. She just needs to focus.
“Let’s all just relax,” she says, subtly reaching into her pocket to touch her phone. She sends out a blast alert text to all of the X-Men letting them know that she needs immediate backup. Scott responds the fastest. Letting her know that Ororo and Bobby are in Portland and will be there in an hour. If her calculations are correct, they should be here just in time for Sinister and his men to show up.
“Like you said, Coast City is 140 miles away. We’ve got at least another hour, probably two, before they show up,” Felicity says. “Help is coming.”
“What kind of help?” Oliver asks, giving her a suspicious look.
“The kind of help that knows how to handle mutant issues,” she says.
“The other X-Men are coming?” Caroline asks, looking relieved.
“Wait, the X-Men? I thought that was a myth,” Oliver says.
“You’re not even supposed to know about the X-Men, yet,” Felicity says, giving Caroline a playful glare.
“Please, every mutant knows about the X-Men,” Caroline says with a smile before turning to Oliver. “They are they ones that protect us and keep us safe when nobody else will. The humans have their Batmans and their Arrows. But everyone turns a blind eye when it’s mutants that go missing.”
“That’s not true,” Oliver says, defensively.
“Really?” Caroline says with a smirk, and Felicity has to wonder if she’s aware that she’s calling out the Arrow to his face or not. Then again, if she’s even so much as glanced around the room she had to have put two and two together.
“Last week, the Arrow saved a girl who was kidnapped and brought her safely home. That same day, a nineteen year old empath went missing. What was her name?”
Oliver shifts uncomfortably on his feet.
“It was Shawnna Carpenter,” Felicity answers for him.
“You knew there was a girl missing and you didn’t tell me?” Oliver says, clearly feeling betrayed.
“I didn’t think you worked those kind of cases,” she says, crossing her arms defensively.
The truth was — and she’d never admit it to anyone, but she’s pretty sure Xavier knows and that’s why he told Caroline to come to her — Felicity has been working on tracking down missing mutants for almost as long as she’s been on Team Arrow. Any information she finds, she’s always passed along to Logan with the express command he never tell anyone where he gets his intel from.
“Why wouldn’t you think I’d go after a missing girl?” he asks.
“Because it’s not a missing girl, Oliver. It’s a missing mutant!” she snaps, the stress finally getting to her. “And anyone with powers deserves to be put down. Right?”
“What are you talking about?” Oliver asks, staring at her like she’s grown a second head.
“You may not remember, but I do,” Felicity says. “You killed a mutant and when you did, you said any man with that much power deserves to be put down. Permanently. I wasn’t going to let you turn my people in!”
“Your people? What… Felicity… I don’t even understand what’s happening right now,” Oliver says, running his hands over his face. “You’re a mutant apparently and you never thought to tell me. You’ve brought a child into our secret lair. You somehow know the X-Men. What is going on?”
“What’s going on is that you’re freaking out and this is why I never told you!”
“I’m freaking out because you never told me!” he yells at her. “I had no kind of warning for this. I had no time to investigate this Essex Corp to come up with contingency plans for something like this. You sprung this on me and I’m supposed to just accept it? We were partners!”
“I was scared!” she says, unable to stop the tears that have started to fall.
The words land harder than she expected because the anger drains from Oliver’s face and he takes a step back, his bow falling to the floor. “You were scared? Of me?” Oliver whispers, his voice shaky. “Did you think I was going to hurt you?”
“I didn’t know what to think,” she cries.
“Why? Because I killed a man that set fire to three buildings with women and children inside? Felicity, when I said that I wasn’t talking about you,” he says.
She’s never seen Oliver look so hurt before. Not in relation to her. She doesn’t even know what to say, but the way he’s shaking his head repeatedly and blinking back tears tells her she needs to try something.
“Oliver—”
“I need some air,” he says, grabbing his bow and quiver and storming to the stairs.
“Oliver!” she pleads with him. No matter how angry he is at her, he can’t leave them now. Not until the threat has passed. She needs him here. If not as her friends, then at least as the Arrow.
“I’m not going far,” he says in his arrow voice, refusing to look at her. “I’m not a monster. I’m not going to abandon you two. I’ll be on the roof, keeping an eye out for trouble.”
“I’m sorry,” she says as he storms up the stairs and out of the lair without turning around. She’s not sure if he didn’t hear her, or if he did and simply didn’t care.
“He’ll come around?” Caroline is clearly trying to sound reassuring but it comes out as a question.
“I’m not sure this time,” she whispers.
Oliver doesn’t trust easy, and Felicity has just blown that all to hell.