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Her hands shook.
Her hands had started to tremble when she’d heard the first cries sounding weakly over her ear piece. Oliver’s sharp curse had startled her and she’d realised that she’d frozen up in front of her screens. Her fingers had clattered against the keys until she’d managed to steady them long enough to access the security feeds and city cameras from the address Oliver had tossed to her before running out of the Foundry bow in hand and hood in place.
The fire had almost completely consumed the ancient building by the time Oliver had reached the old, rundown corner of the Glades. The crumbling walls and splintered floors had lit up like so much tinder in the dry heat of summer in Starling City. Maybe it had been the surely faulty wiring that had provided the spark or maybe it had been something more deliberate, but the why hadn’t mattered so much as Felicity had watched flames lick up the sides of the building and through every blown out window as it devoured its way to the top, determined to turn the dried up husk of a building to nothing more than ash and heat-warped steel bones.
The cries had gotten louder then as she’d watched Oliver circle the crowd that had gathered to watch the building burn. Some of them had been the residents forced out by the fire - too poor to care about the leaking ceilings, the rats, or the fact that most of the window panes hadn’t been glass, but cardboard and duct tape. Theirs were the cries she could hear over the ear piece and reverberating into her head – theirs were the cries of those poor enough to have called that building home, now forced to watch their lives go up in hot flames and billowing smoke.
Oliver had stayed hidden on the outskirts of the growing crowd, watching and waiting, but for what she hadn’t known. She’d squinted at the screen, nearly pressed her face right up against the heat of it trying to see what he was seeing.
She’d seen it maybe a split second before he had, but the words had caught in her throat when the shadowed figure had appeared briefly in one of the topmost windows of the dying building. She’d forgotten how to breathe when Oliver’s head had snapped towards that brief flicker of movement. For one impossibly long second, he hadn’t moved and she hadn’t dared to speak. She’d wanted to scream reprisals into his ear, to convince him of the futility of what he was planning on doing, of the danger, and the terrifying possibility that once those flames finished consuming the tired bones of the building, they’d find him and consume him too.
She hadn’t said anything, but she’d watched Oliver disappear into the building next door and suddenly the cries and screams of heart-wrenching pain were gone only to be replaced by the sound of Oliver’s steady breathing as he ran up flights of stairs. She’d forced herself to focus on the long and slow pulls of air, the increasingly heavy breaths he would take the longer he ran up and up and up. She’d let those familiar sounds echo through her skull as her hands flew across the keyboard in a desperate attempt to make the city’s fire department and police respond faster to a call she was sure had already been passed over.
She’d helplessly watched as the fire devoured another floor on its way to the top and she’d wondered then if maybe they both hadn’t imagined the figure in the window. Maybe it had been the wildly flickering flames playing tricks on them to beckon more fuel into its burning depths, but in the same instant she’d been preparing to voice that improbable possibility to Oliver, another window had blown out on the top floor and a hand had reached out of the smoke and into the warm night air. Then a head, and though Felicity’s city camera feeds were silent, she’d known that there must have been cries for help.
She hadn’t spoken a word, had barely had enough time to suck in a breath with her heart in her throat, but maybe she’d gasped or possibly even screamed a little at the sight of person in the midst of the smoke and the flames because Oliver’s breathing had sped up and she would swear that she could’ve heard him move faster.
He’d exploded onto the roof after blowing the door off its hinges. All the buildings in the Glades had been crammed as close together as possible in order to fit as many of the city’s unwanted into the smallest space possible. Oliver had made larger leaps before, but that hadn’t stopped Felicity’s stomach from lurching when he’d been airborne and then crash back down again when she’d heard him roll onto the roof of the burning building.
It had been then that Felicity had heard the fire for the first time. A consistent crackling hum underscored every snap of old wood and every pop of release as the decrepit old building gave way to the new energy that poured itself into every crevice and crack, claiming them and consuming them in the same instant.
Oliver’s strained grunts had forced the fire into the background as he struggled to open the rooftop door. Warped by the heat of the fire, the door had resisted Oliver’s considerable strength and Felicity had felt a sliver of hope needle its way into her brain; maybe he wouldn’t be able to open it, maybe he wouldn’t be able to find a way into the inferno that blazed beneath his feat.
But she’d heard the door straining against its hinges and Oliver’s explosive exhale as it suddenly gave way and he’d been forced to stumble backwards. The moment he’d entered the building she’d known, not because she could see him, but because his coughs had been loud and sharp in her ear. They had echoed throughout her head, had bounced off the walls of her skull, and making her heart catch in fear on every other beat. She’d thought that nothing could get any louder than his painful, hacking coughs as acrid smoke filled his lungs until the collapsing roof on her camera feed crashed agonizingly into her eardrum.
With her ear ringing, she would have ripped out the ear piece right then, but she’d been too busy screaming Oliver’s name at that point. Desperation laced with the frustration of being unable to do anything coloured her words as she’d shouted at him to get out of building. She’d watched in horror as the fire suddenly began burning as though it were on fast-forward. The fire engulfed every floor, poured out of every window, and there were no more hands or heads or cries for help only hot yellow flames. She’d been sure at that point that no one could have survived and she hadn’t known anymore what she’d been shouting to Oliver as she’d listened to him cough and heave, but at one point he had cried out as he’d struggled to lift a burning beam off of a burning boy. She’d only stopped, her voice hoarse, when she’d seen him leap out of a top story window, flames licking at his back and a small body tucked against his side.
She’d collapsed into her chair then. She hadn’t even realised that she’d been standing. She’d watched in silence as fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances converged around the raging inferno that lit the night like a beacon. They’d arrived too late, of course.
Oliver had rushed the small boy to an ambulance, leaving before attracting too much attention, not seeing what would become of the only person he’d managed to pull out of the blaze before it had consumed everything in its path.
Her hands shook.
They shook as they carefully washed away the soot and ash from the burned skin of Oliver’s hands. They shook as they gently spread a thin layer of anti-burn ointment onto the red and blistered skin, and they shook as she poured a thick amount of a mash of Oliver’s herbs over top. They shook as she slowly wrapped it all up until the burns were hidden away behind swaths of clean white gauze.
With his hands burnt and damaged as they were, he’d only been able to stand under a shower and let the water wash away what it could, so now Felicity’s hands shook as she wiped the grease from around his eyes and the streaks of it off his cheeks and jaw. His eyes remained fixed on a point just above her right shoulder which was just as well, she figured, because she’d caught a glimpse of his eyes when he’d stumbled back into the Foundry earlier and she’d seen too much in them. She’d seen more than the cameras had shown her and more than the earpiece had allowed her to hear and she thought that maybe it was more than she wanted to know.
He sat silently on the cold steel table as her hands did what his couldn’t and when he closed his eyes to allow her to wipe the grease from his eyelids, Felicity hated herself for the small upwelling of relief she felt at not having to worry that she’d accidently catch another glimpse of the horror he’d witnessed.
Oliver tiredly opened his eyes when she was done, as though that small movement was costing him what little energy he had left. He wasn’t looking over her shoulder anymore, but right at her and Felicity couldn’t avoid him or it or anything any longer. There was an emptiness, a hollowness, in him that wasn’t empty or hollow at all (she wasn’t sure how that was supposed to work, but there it was in front of her), but it was pain and anger and sadness and desperation and all the things that could bore into a person and tear them apart from the inside out until there was nothing left but bloodied shreds of self.
Her hands shook as she caught a bead of grease-darkened water before it could roll off of his jaw and maybe he’d unconsciously moved to do it himself, forgetting about his wrapped hand, or maybe he’d been aiming for her hand all along, but somehow the damp towel she’d been holding had fallen into his lap and his hand had replaced it.
Fingers tightening around his before she could stop them, she was sure her grip was hurting him, but when she tried to loosen it he only held on tighter himself. He rested his chin against their joined hands, eyes never leaving hers. Felicity wondered what he was seeing and whether or not he could see the words she couldn’t quite get to form around her tongue.
She wanted to say she was sorry. She wanted to say how much more than just sorry she was. How sorry wasn’t enough of a word to explain how badly she’d wanted him to come rushing back out of that building with every person who’d been trapped inside by the unbearable flames and the suffocating smoke. How she’d wanted that almost as much for him as she had for them because she knew that the lives he’d taken still haunted him sometimes; in those nights when she’d find him working out in the Foundry or in those moments when he’d go still and his mind would drift off and he’d come back somber and quiet. She knew that somewhere along the way it had stopped just being about taking the bad people out and had started being about saving the good ones. She wanted to say all that, but the words refused to form up in the right order in her head and she couldn’t quite wrap her tongue around the ones that managed to wrest themselves free from the confusion and chaos of her mind.
So her hands shook instead and he held one of them in one of his as he looked at her like he knew it all, like he knew too much, like he knew more than she could even think of saying. She wanted to make it stop, was afraid he could feel the tremors in her knees too, but the longer he held on and the longer she held his gaze, the more she saw of him and this time it didn’t scare her or make her want to turn away.
He was struggling to put those torn shreds back together again, to fit them back into the closest approximation of their original place as he could. She didn’t know if she could help him, didn’t know where to start even if she could, but she was slowly starting to realise that maybe this – her hands and him, her fear and his – was enough to start stitching some of those tears back into some sort of whole. He would still be broken, but he wouldn’t be alone.
Oliver’s hands shook and Felicity held on.