Chapter Text
Felicity understands, now, what valuable lessons she learned from her mother. She hadn’t understood when she was thirteen – then, she was all Mom, if Dad were here, HE would be able to help me with Fourier transforms or integrating by parts with trig functions or maybe something else, not that it matters any more. What matters is that her mother – with her push-up bras and skin-tight dresses and drunk, handsy, married patrons declaring their undying love – taught her the importance of boundaries.
And she needs those lessons now that she’s spending her nights, again, with Oliver. In the euphemistic slip-of-the-tongue way, not in the cuddling-together-after-mind-blowing-sex way, not that she thinks about the second way. Not very often. And when she does, she shuts it down, because Felicity’s mother also taught her the importance of honesty, and how absolutely wrong lies are, especially in relationships.
Felicity has also put careful boundaries around the knowledge that her mother was actually lying to her, that entire time, about why her father wasn’t around to teach her about Fourier transforms.
*****
“Felicity?” Curtis sounded as though he had been trying to get her attention for a while.
“Hmm?” Felicity looked around. The adaptation of her facial recognition software had barely started compiling. She hadn’t been day-dreaming for too long. “What’s up?”
“I was just telling you about something from Paul’s Facebook group. But if you’re busy...”
“No, I was just...” She waved her hand. Curtis would understand.
“I thought you might want to see this.” He pulled up Facebook on his tablet.
Felicity cringed. Facebook was for people who barely knew her in her college goth phase, telling her about their combined job-child-things. Not the best social media for someone with a secret identity.
“Definitely not. But Paul doesn’t have a secret identity, and he has a lot of friends from college. So it’s good for him.” Curtis knew to just roll with it when Felicity’s brain-to-mouth filter broke down.
“So his group shares photos of... is that Oliver?”
Curtis nodded. “His friends are obsessed. ‘Mayor McHottie,’ they call him.”
Felicity scrolled through the photos. Paul’s friends weren’t wrong. That man could rock a suit. Or a pair of jeans. Or pretty much anything.
“Hey, you said it,” Curtis responded. “But if you could look at the rest of the scene for a moment...”
Felicity looked, and finally figured out the point. “He’s here. Or near here. In all the photos.”
“Exactly,” Curtis said. “Paul’s friends are speculating about what he’s doing here so much.”
“Well, he’s on his way to the...” Felicity stopped. “Oh. The Arrow cave.”
“I thought you didn’t call it that?”
“He doesn’t. I do.” She scrolled through more of the pictures. “That could be a problem. He doesn’t have a good reason for being here any more.”
“He doesn’t,” Curtis agreed. “Except...” He opened another window.
Felicity read through the posts. “They think... seriously? No!”
Curtis shrugged. “Paul thinks you’re getting back together. He keeps asking me for inside info.”
“But we’re not together. We’re working together, but we’re not together, together. We have very clear boundaries.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” Curtis said, scrolling the other window to another photo. “Because most co-workers look like that when their ex-whatever brings them sushi.”
“I really like sushi,” Felicity argued. But she could see the point. She scrolled through the comments on the photo. “Though that actually makes a pretty good alibi for him.”
“He could use one,” Curtis said. “There are pictures of him everywhere. Instagram, Twitter... you could probably piece together his entire day. The photos are all time-stamped and geotagged.”
Felicity was already on it. “I didn’t know he ran out of coffee already,” she said, looking at photos of Oliver going into, and then out of, the coffee shop, carrying a bag of beans. “And he walks to the office sometimes. I didn’t know that either.”
“Bet you could write an Oliver-tracking algorithm...”
“I’m already on it.” The screen flashed with little red dots – she could edit the color later – that traced paths from Oliver’s new apartment to City Hall, from City Hall to various businesses and photo-ops, and especially to the lair. Arrow cave. Bunker. Whatever.
“Looks like he goes missing every night for about six hours,” Curtis pointed out. “Anyone could figure out that the mayor and the Green Arrow are never seen at the same time, anywhere in the city.”
“Anyone with my skills could figure that out,” Felicity said. “Which isn’t that many people.”
“It would just take one supervillain,” Curtis warned.
“Fine,” Felicity said. She downloaded the photo of Oliver handing her sushi, dumped it into an editing program, adjust the background, moved their bodies just a bit, and...
“Wow. Looks like the mayor was on a date.” Curtis sounded impressed.
“At the same time that the Green Arrow was taking down the guys selling bad concrete mix to people trying to rebuild,” Felicity said smugly.
“Could you change the time stamp and the geotag?”
“Do you seriously have to ask?” Felicity typed something quickly, then spun away from the computer. “Ta-da.”
Curtis slid into the desk. “Let me drive for a moment?”
Felicity nodded. “Though don’t tell Oliver that I let you onto Twitter on my workstation.”
“Never.” Curtis typed a few things. “Nice. Even the hidden metadata is fixed. May I post it?”
“Be my guest.” Felicity watched over his shoulder and gestured at the name. “That’s you?”
“One of me. I’ve got a bunch of secret identities on the Internet.” Curtis typed a few more things.
“Curtis, are you a troll?”
“Never.” He held up his hands to show that they were empty. Which made no sense given the accusation, but Felicity just went with it. “But sometimes you don’t really want to be an Olympic decathlete when you’re talking about Battlestar Galactica, you know?”
Felicity shrugged. “Fair enough.” She frowned at the screen. “You tagged it #OlicityWatch?”
“Paul's already using that on Facebook.”
Hundreds of retweets later, it was a thing. And Felicity had her own secret Twitter identity. And had a program running in the background that combed through social media for pictures of Oliver and plotted his location on a map. To create better alibis. Not for stalking her ex-whatever.
Felicity understood about boundaries, she reminded herself as she edited another photo, remembering what it had felt like when Oliver had actually done that thing that they didn't talk about. She understood boundaries. She just didn’t always know where they should be.