Title: You're His Hope

Pairing: Oliver Queen/Felicity Smoak

Context in the Arrow world:

Definitely post-Winter 2014 finale (AKA episode 9), building on some Tumblr theories floating around (which I've recently discovered and joined, by the way. Jeez that place is amazing.)

Anyway, this is my first Arrow fic, definitely in the spirit of an Olicity shipper, but not in a huge sappy crazy way. I have a plot to write too (for now). Comment if you enjoyed it, maybe request a scene or a thing you want me to put in, haven't figured out this thing yet. Also, I'm obviously not a massive DC comics reader (I did lift a few names from the DC universe though, so apologies if I use them weirdly), so if I don't follow the comics, it's because I haven't read them. I just watch the TV show and think that Olicity should end up together by the series finale, if there's any justice in this world. No pressure. Anyway, read and enjoy!

London

Felicity squinted through the fine mist of rain, under the rim of her steadily dripping umbrella. There were people everywhere, beneath crude handwritten banners, picketing graphic images of genocidal violence — shouting, all of them shouting.

SEND MOBAGO HOME

TAXPAYERS FUND GENOCIDAL MANIAC

JUSTICE FOR THE CHILDREN

The protest leaders were on repeat, shouting the same tirade against Ogonwe Mobago, the former Secretary of State of Nyasir, an East African nation that didn't make the headlines in Western media for off-the-charts poverty or starvation, but the genocidal civil war that ended in a loss of about 20,000 lives, some of them still missing because of bargains with the International Criminal Court. Mobago wasn't going to testify as to where the bodies were and incriminate his former President unless he received immunity. Mobago only agreed to meet in a "neutral" location, which was a five-star hotel in London Strand, in order to discuss a plea deal.

So far, the police remained unmoved, standing in the rain with their helmets stoically dripping onto neon yellow vests. She winced when one of the megaphones shrieked in a burst of feedback, and moved further away to put some distance between her and them. Her feet were swimming inside her shoes, from wearing flats instead of sturdy boots. Every time someone moved, a new wave of water rushed into her shoes.

"Anything?"

Felicity shook her head, even though Diggle couldn't see her. "The cameras aren't picking up on anything."

"Should I change position?" Roy asked, crackling over the rain and static interference. Felicity swore the signal was worse in London than it was in Starling, but nobody believed her.

Tongue poking between her lips, Felicity balanced her master tablet in one hand, the umbrella in the other, and flicked through the area map. By virtue of GPS trackers, Felicity had each of their locations digitally marked. They'd each taken a corner of the triangular blockade, Roy was watching the rooftops, Diggle was patrolling the crowd for anyone suspicious.

Felicity updated the calculations for the sniper's program she'd developed, calculating the best angles for a long-range assassin to shoot at the area cordoned off in front of the hotel. Mobago's car — based on the custom specs she'd hacked from various security correspondences — was pretty much proofed for bazookas, just shy of nuclear attack. Bulletproof glass, reinforced doors, alarm system — it was a bunker. They didn't have to worry about transit. It was the minuscule window between the safety of the hotel and the safety of his expensive bad-guy car.

When Mobago left the hotel for his car, he'd be vulnerable to attack, something all of them were actively trying to prevent for various reasons — ones that stretched dangerously thin every time the protesters reminded them of the atrocities Mobago was accused of.

"Calculating trajectories," she said, ignoring the nagging voice at the back of her head to let Mobago get what was coming to him. "Anybody know a good way to wash out your brain? Seriously guys, this program is dark." And it was. Based on a constant uplink to weather, light and visibility information, the program could calculate based on the stats (height, layout, occupancy) of the buildings in the designated areas. Along with a few other unsavory apps, Felicity kept it regularly shrouded in encryption only she could break, and even then only in cases of extreme emergency.

Which this was. "Budge about thirty feet to your right," Felicity said, reading off the report. "Watch the building with the stone crest on the front — security's thinnest on that rooftop...and one of the guards is asleep. Seriously? It's like you're begging someone to assassinate Mobago."

They mostly ignored the latter part, which she couldn't really blame them for. She could hear the cogs in Roy's pretty head turning as he tried to pick out the right building in a sea of stone and steel and glass. "The unicorn one?" he asked, finally.

"Yup. It's a lion and a unicorn, and it's the crest of England. Fun and totally situation-inappropriate fact — the unicorn actually doesn't stand for what the British want on their PJs, it symbolizes the folklore in their history and the lion stands for —"

There was a brief pop of static as Roy disconnected.

Felicity frowned, stung by the rejection. "The American public school system."

"I don't think the American way of educating has anything to do with why Roy's on edge," Dig reminded her, gently. "He's just never done this before."

All humor evaporated like the cold rain hitting the steam grate at the side of the road. Felicity was quiet for a moment, the jagged tear inside her chest ripping free of the messy stitching she'd done with her eyes blurred from crying. "None of us have, Dig," she said, so quietly that she wasn't sure he'd heard.

Then —

"I know." Dig's voice was hoarse from the hurt, incomparable to the one she wrestled with, because it was one and the same. He took a steady breath, and Felicity knew he was slipping back into his soldier persona, the one that reacted calm and cool to danger, the rationality to the chaos. "But we know it's probably going to be him."

Felicity found herself tapping out the surveillance program she'd been running for the last year from the Foundry computers, the ones pegged to find just one face — his face. After months of 30%-and-below matches and inconclusive results, after searching for a ghost who for all accounts and purposes had no desire to be found — bam. A 75.6% match, a miracle in the darkness before the first dawn. The fact that it'd coincided with chatter from ARGUS sources that the League was planning to intervene in the fate of a world leader, Mobago's controversial choice of bargaining location…and pure insanity from all that nothing…

Even Felicity had trouble distinguishing the truth from wishful thinking, the only comfort being that computer programs didn't sense desperation. That murky picture, grabbed from one of the street surveillance cameras by the River Thames — a brief flash of pale skin beneath a hood, too indistinct to make out unless it'd been run through countless adjustments. But it was enough to get them all to London and standing in a wet street, searching the rooftops and the buildings for a sign that the League had sent its assassin after all.

"Do you think…" Felicity hesitated, then gulped and continued. "Do you think it's him?"

She realized how stupid the question sounded after she'd said it. It was her intel, her program, her desperation that had brought them to London in the first place. Smoothing a hand over her humidity-frizzed hair, she got herself together again.

"Sorry, I'm just being desperate, and sad, and crazy —"

"Felicity," Dig said, firmly. "You're not crazy. You're doing what Oliver would have wanted you to do."

Felicity bit her lip at the name — more in surprise that it still had the capacity to hurt her, after all this time. She was perilously close to tears, perilously close to admitting that she wasn't holding it together, that she needed to hear him, needed to see him, hear her name in his voice…

The League of Assassins had swallowed Oliver up because the idiot had one of his sweeping, self-sacrificing moments of bravado and neither Felicity, Diggle or Roy had been close enough to stick another sleeping dart in his moronic neck. The League had given Starling — Oliver Queen — the Arrow — an ultimatum. He was either with them or against them, no in-betweens. So he went with them as the Arrow, but he left them as Oliver Queen, like the resurrected ghost he was and the living person he'd never been, claimed again by the darkness of the pit.

They'd tracked the League's movement for months, with results flimsier than wet paper. Tracked was a professional word for the increasingly desperate set of favors, data-mining and satellite-hacking that'd gone on while they tried to piece together the unexplainable acts of violence that were most likely the work of the League. All the while hoping that a mysterious archer would never resurface in the reports, because it would mean that Oliver had finally caved and was working for the League. And that would, and could only happen when Ra's al Ghul was satisfied that Oliver Queen's conscience had weathered away to nothing. So he'd be The Arrow, just The Arrow, the symbol, not the person beneath the hood.

Stop. Stop. Felicity hit the brakes on her imagination, the one that had run well-rehearsed circles during her sleepless hours, her waking nights in her empty bed. The one that held her in a death-grip for doubting Oliver's humanity, for doubting that he could lose it after all that, after everything he'd — they'd — been through. But she feared. Always. Because it was Oliver, and she found out after he left that she couldn't bear the thought of him without his humanity.

Instead, she looked up at the ceiling of her umbrella, taut against the steady drum of the cold London rain, and took a deep breath, blinking the tears away, the tears for Oliver's tenuous humanity.

"What are we doing, Dig? What am I doing?" she said, softly.

"You're hoping."

She exhaled in surprise, because of what he'd said, and because the voice wasn't just from her earpiece. Felicity spun around to see Diggle standing outside her umbrella, the shoulders of his leather jacket dripping from the lack of umbrella he refused to use because it hampered visibility, smiling steadily at her stricken face.

Diggle reached out and squeezed her shoulder with a warm, steady hand, showing her that he was sure. That she'd made him sure. "You're his hope, Felicity. Don't give up on him just yet."

After a beat, she smiled, and nodded.

"We'll get him back," she said, clutching the tablet to her chest, feeling like her heart was going to burst. "Thanks, Dig. Thank you."

For an instant, everything was bright again, and Felicity felt the hope. But then the moment shattered. Their hands both went to their earpieces as they heard the telltale pop of Roy reconnecting.

"Guys — something's wrong."

Then, right on cue, everything started to go wrong.