Hello everyone!

So instead of delivering inspiration for my multi-chapter fic The Wedding Slasher, the muse planted this in my head and I couldn't get rid of it. Two fairly short chapters, there might be a third at some point.

Haven't situated this story anywhere in particular, time-wise, it can really work whenever you want it to take place.

Let me know about mistakes you see, please, so I can eradicate them – English is not my first language and I don't have a beta.

Hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: This is just for fun, I don't own anything.

Fire

Finally finding the door Felicity was supposed to use as escape route, Digg tried to open it, but the handle wouldn't even move an inch, clearly locked from the inside. It was a steel door that opened to the outside, so there was no kicking it in either. His stomach lurched, picturing their partner trapped behind it, in panic. He turned back to face Oliver, who was standing a few feet away, recovering from another coughing fit. Shock and fear were clearly painted across the features of his friend, who just stood there, displaying an extremely uncharacteristic passivity. John was about to speak when the explosion threw both men to the ground and the world around them seemed to stop for a little while.

When he came to, it couldn't have been more than a few seconds later, the world was eerily silent, his hearing gone after the ear-shattering bang. He could see that the steel door had been blown off its hinges, the inferno's fiery tongues angrily licking its edges. His partner's sooty face was contorted in what looked like a silent scream, but even though Diggle couldn't hear it, he was sure that Oliver's scream was loud and raw and desperate.

This couldn't be. It was unthinkable that they should lose one of their team. Felicity.

Suddenly, the world tasted like ashes in his mouth. He had never been this cold, couldn't even register the searing heat of the fire that had taken her away. His legs were leaden, his mind blank. He could put arrows in people, slay monsters for her, to keep her safe, but this fire was not tangible. He couldn't kick it, he couldn't stab it, he couldn't put an arrow through its heart.

He screamed his lungs out, but he couldn't even hear it. Maybe the screaming was just in his head? There was nothing but the ringing in his ears; no movement but the fire, mocking him, continuing as if it hadn't just brought his world to a standstill.

Purgatory, he thought. This is it. This is where he would spend the rest of his life.

60 seconds earlier….

She kept running, thanking Mother Nature for the adrenaline that was fueling her body now, allowing her to run faster than she ever had. Finally making it to the end of the long hallway, she turned right and pushed open the door marked 'Only Use in Case of Emergency'. "I guess this qualifies as an emergency," she thought to herself. The cold night air filled her lungs and she had never been this happy to see the sky.

Although she was expecting it, the immensity of the explosion still caught Felicity off guard. It hurled her forward vehemently and she landed on the pavement a few feet away, her arms instinctively wrapped around her head to brace for the impact and absorb the shock as much as possible. The blast had burst all the windows on the upper floors, and splinters of glass were raining down on her, as she lay on the ground. Her arms were scraped, her knees bloody and she suspected she had one or two severely bruised rips and a concussion – but the worst was the ringing in her ears; just ringing, no other sounds discernible anymore. The rational part of her brain helped her suppress the panic that threatened to spread. It was probably just temporary and she would get her hearing back soon. Certainly not to this extent, but the landmine on Lian Yu had had a similar effect.

Oliver. Oliver and John. The thought of them gave her the strength to force herself up in a sitting position, slowly raising herself onto very shaky legs, hissing in pain when she put weight onto her right leg. Apparently, she had sprained her ankle, which hurt – but not as much as seeing her severely damaged tablet on the ground, a few feet away. Limping over to pick it up, she hoped that she would be able to salvage the data from it, or otherwise all of this would've been for nothing.

The fear for the well-being of her two best friends had settled on her chest as an almost unbearable weight and she had trouble breathing, feeling as if someone was choking her. She had to find them, and fast, before police and firefighters would reach the scene. From the blueprints she had studied she knew she was at the east side of the warehouse now and had to turn left to get to the north side, where Oliver and Digg would be if they had made it out of there. "No, not if," she admonished herself. "They did. They made it out. They must've." She angrily wiped away a tear that had snuck out of the corner of her eye. She was being ridiculous.

While she slowly stumbled forward, holding on to the wall to support her as her stupid legs were not exactly willing to listen to the commands they were receiving from her brain, she replayed the mission over in her head, but came to the conclusion that there was nothing they could've done differently.

The entry into the (allegedly abandoned) factory had been easy enough. It had taken Felicity under 30 seconds to disable the security system. They had made their way over to the office where she set to work to hack into a self-contained computer network to access information which, so they hoped, would help them bring down a major human trafficking operation. Oliver was by her side, Diggle had split earlier to clear the rest of the floor. The infrared satellite images Felicity had accessed shortly before they entered ("borrowed from the NSA" was her way of putting it) had showed that no one else was inside.

But there was – they must've been in the basement, that's the only thing that made sense, Felicity concluded later. Their heat signatures would not have been picked up by the satellite. The blueprints hadn't even showed a basement, but maybe that's why the guys had picked this place for their criminal operation in the first place. Equipped with machine guns, they had John cornered. Oliver hadn't wanted to leave her side, but Felicity had ensured him that she would be alright for a couple of minutes and there was really no way that Diggle could get out of this by himself. So he went.

As they were outnumbered, the fight had forced her two partners to fall back from the ground floor down a staircase and they had ended up in said basement, which turned out to be a meth lab. That's when the fire had started. Unfortunately, their attackers hadn't paid attention in their High School chemistry classes and thought it would be a good idea to fire their guns in a lab that was brimming with a plethora of highly flammable chemicals.

Felicity had yelled, "GET OUT OF THERE! I'll take the back exit," knowing that there was no way that they could make their way up three floors to her before the fire spread and incinerated the two big cooling tanks on the ground floor. Luckily, those had been in the blueprints of the former refinery. Of course, Oliver had started to argue, which she cut short with an "Oliver, NOW!" – her loud voice infused by fear when she heard him and John starting to cough from the mixture of chemical fumes, smoke, and lack of oxygen in the basement.

Knowing that the fire had started in a different part of the building, Felicity allowed herself another 90 seconds to wait for the download to finish, mentally propelling it on with "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon!" She couldn't bear the thought that this mission had been for nothing – and for more young girls to be trafficked abroad by these monsters. When the download was finished, she told Oliver and John that she was making her way to the exit now, which was answered by "Hurry!" from John and a relieved "We'll meet you at the back door, we're close to the front exit," from Oliver. Disconnecting her tablet, she ran.

When Felicity had reached the ground floor back exit, which they had designated their main escape route, it was barred with a large padlock. "It's locked!" She shouted, panic slowly rising in her chest. Rattling the handle, she realized there was no way out here. Why could it not have been an electronic lock? She would've been out in seconds. "Felicity? FELICITY!" was the only thing she could hear over the comms before they cut out and all that remained was static. Oliver had sounded as if he was freaking out. A sentiment she could relate to – but decided it had to wait until she had found another way out. Glad that she had studied the blueprints rather carefully, she knew there was another exit at the east side of the building, all she had to do was follow the hallway to her right and hope the whole building didn't explode before she made it to the end of it.

Thanks for reading! Please leave a review – reading those makes my day!

I'll post the next chapter fairly soon, probably tomorrow after I've had some time to proofread.