Chapter 4 - Oliver

Just Desserts: Starling City Edition

Spotted: Oliver Queen without his Queen. The Starling City native has been seen for the first time in a spell sporting a hot, maybe drunk, caveman look with his not-so-dead-and-still-yummy bestfriend Tommy Merlyn leaving Verdant Saturday night. Hopes are high that the handsome billionaire is newly single, now that his maybe-not-so-lobster girlfriend was seen with perennial arm-candy Bruce Wayne in tow. The future is looking bright, ladies!

Left with nothing better to do, Oliver went to bed, or tried to.

It was terribly hard for an insomniac to sleep - harder still when said insomniac was being plagued by memories he had shared with Felicity on the very bed he was trying to sleep on. It was one of her favorite places and she always made sure he knew it.

"God, I love your bed," she had sighed.

"Is that why you insist we come here whenever we can?"

"Yes," she had giggled when his forehead scrunched up in disbelief, "but don't worry, baby. It's because of you that I stay."

There were many variations of that conversation. Loving snippets that were testament to their relationship. Perhaps the most sacred, and now the most painful, was the exchange that made him finally decide to bite the bullet and get a ring.

"Felicity, wake up. Come on! It's nearly l unch."

"Five more minutes…" She had groaned as burrowed deeper into the bed.

"You really do love my bed!"

"I'd marry your bed, if I can."

"Why don't you marry me instead? That way you get me… and the bed."

"Sounds good."

"Felicity, did you just agree to marry me?"

"Hmmmm…" she had murmured as she turned onto her belly and proceeded to snore.

That truly felt like forever ago. Their conversations after their fight, especially in the aftermath of Roy's unfortunate accident, were at their worst composed of mere syllables, and at best, were unfailingly stilted.

She hadn't even been gone a full hour since their shouting match, when she came rushing back to their apartment. He had thought that she had cooled off, but she had come back more distraught than when she left.

"What's going on Felicity?" he had asked for the second time.

Felicity jolted, as if she had just heard him the first time around. "It's Roy," she said, with a slight quiver of her lips.

She had haltingly relayed that a nurse from Gotham Medical Center had contacted her as she was listed as Roy's next-of-kin. She didn't understand what Roy was doing in Gotham but the lady had said that he was in critical condition.

He had helped her pack a bag that night and had been about to call Digg to get the chopper when security said that a helicopter was already waiting for her at their building's landing pad.

He hadn't known what to do with himself but Felicity had such a death grip on him, that he had gone with her, rumpled tux and all. She was in shock and was cut off from the rest of the world during what to him had been the longest helicopter ride of his life.

He didn't expect his childhood nemesis Bruce Wayne to meet them at the Gotham hospital's private wing. But there he was. He remembered thinking how uncannily small the world really was. The Arrow meeting The Batman in the most unexpected and unfortunate circumstances. Oh, he had known that Bruce Wayne donned a mask. It had been yet another thing Felicity didn't let him forget after a particular run-in one long ago night.

Bruce had told them what little he knew about the murky details surrounding the attack that left his eldest son in a coma and Roy in critical condition. He had then apologized for the fact that he unilaterally decided to airlift both of them to Gotham, which he said had better medical resources than Blüdhaven. Felicity thanked him for his quick action before Roy's doctors approached her.

Roy had been in a bad place. He had lost a lot of blood and the wound on his arm was so deep, and had already began showing signs of infection, that they had to amputate it as soon as possible to give him a fighting chance. Felicity had quickly consented to the procedure citing that there wasn't any choice to make and had borne the brunt of that decision as best she can in the aftermath.

Waiting with her during the surgery had been one of the hardest things he'd had to do. He had felt powerless then. There was nothing he could have done to protect Roy, so he had decided to just stay with Felicity all throughout that night, and then all throughout Roy's protracted hospital recovery, bringing her coffee, a change of clothes, food. It wasn't until Roy woke up that she finally broke down and cried endlessly in his arms.

That was probably the last time he had held her before they had fallen into this rut that he had no idea how to break. It was pure desperation on his part that he had sent her the journal that held his most private thoughts in an effort to make her understand.

She was coming back in a few days, later than originally planned, but he still didn't know where they really stood.

And that made him anxious enough to give up all together on sleeping.

So, he got up to change and opted to catch the hockey game instead. Or better yet, get Tommy to catch the second half of the game with him, having had woefully unused season tickets for two all this time.

Maybe then, he'll find something else to bother himself with, before his whole world starts crashing down on him.

Again.