AN: This is my own version of "The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak." Based on the short and long promos and the episode pictures released. Written and (barely) posted before the episode premiere (I'm getting it in just under the wire).

This is my first "Arrow" fan fic, and so it's also my first Olicity fic. I marathoned the entire first two seasons in one week and caught up just in time to watch "The Secret Origin of Felicity Smoak" live. Super excited to see more Felicity on my screen!

Title taken from the Mumford and Sons song "Lover of the Light," which is my own unofficial Olicity theme song. Please give it a listen.

Love the One You Hold

Felicity has never been that close to her mother. Growing up, a small part of her used to blame her mother for her father leaving. But there's more to it than that now: a larger part of her is still angry with her mother for holding onto her so tightly.

As far back as Felicity can remember, her mother has been clingy. Felicity knows part of it has to do with her father leaving. He left a huge hole in her mother's life; a hole that only Felicity, her one child, could fill. Growing up, her mother rarely let her go out with friends. She always wanted her to stay home, for them to spend "mother-daughter time" together. When she was little, Felicity didn't mind as much. But the older she got, the more her mother's clinginess began to irritate her, and the more resentful she grew. Why couldn't her mother find her own friends? Why couldn't her mother let her do what SHE wanted to do for a change?

In response to her mother's neediness, Felicity pierced her ears, dyed her hair, and started to wear black. She hoped that it would irritate her mother – the woman who always wore nice dresses and heels she couldn't really afford – enough to get her to back off. When that didn't work, Felicity threw herself into her schoolwork. She got outstanding grades, excelling most in computer sciences and all things tech.

Over her high school summers, Felicity maintained a job as a waitress in the same place her mother worked. It was a necessary evil. It kept her mother happy and allowed her to make money at the same time. Her mother always talked about how great it would be if they could keep working together after Felicity graduated.

For a long time, Felicity let her mother believe that that was the plan. In secret, Felicity picked up extra hours fixing computers at a nearby casino. She saved up all her money, kept up her grades, and applied to MIT. The thought of spending the rest of her life stuck in Vegas working with her mother made her want to scream.

The day she got her acceptance letter to MIT, complete with full scholarship, was the happiest day of her life.

It took her months to finally work up the courage to show it to her mother – only a week before she was going to leave

Part of her had always hoped that her mother would see her side of it in the end; that her mother would be proud of her little girl. Top grades, a full ride to one of the best schools in the country; any parent would be proud.

She should have known better.

She argued with her mother for hours that night. She told her in no uncertain terms that she was going to MIT and there was nothing she could do to stop her. Her mother eventually broke down into tears, asking Felicity why she hated her so much, why she was abandoning her. Felicity tried to tell her that she wasn't abandoning her; that this was her decision to make, that she needed to move on for her own sake.

When Felicity got on the train a week later, her mother was nowhere in sight.

Felicity never went back to Vegas. Between work study and a part time job at a computer repair shop, she made enough money to live in Boston over the summers.

During her freshman year at MIT, she met Cooper Seldon. He was a genius, and cute, and seemed to care about her in a way that was fierce but not suffocating.

She trusted him enough to show him the program she had been working on for the past semester: a program designed to hack into and control multiple systems at one time from a remote location. He had taken a real interest in it and offered to help her with it. Looking back now, Felicity knows she should have seen the warning signs, but as independent as she was back then, she was also more naïve than she'd ever realized. She was in love, and she trusted him. She'd only ever created the program to prove that she could do it. To her, the program was a sign that she had moved on from her mother's suffocating influence, and that she could be her own person.

To Cooper, it meant something else entirely; something that Felicity never really understood until it was too late.

Felicity had her share of Mommy issues, and after a few weeks of dating him she shared them with Cooper. Cooper, it turned out, had his own issues: a father who got drunk almost every night, who hit him, who called him weak and pathetic. A father who was eventually arrested for beating his wife to within an inch of her life while his ten year old son cowered in a corner, too afraid to stand up to him.

When Cooper finally opened up to her, Felicity did the best she could to comfort him. She assured him that he wasn't weak. That he had gotten himself into MIT, despite the fact that his mother had spent the last five years of her life in a psych ward while Cooper was raised by his uncle, was proof enough of that.

She thought she was getting through to him. But then he began to spend more and more time away from her, working on the program that she had developed. The more time he spent working on it, the less time he spent with her. Eventually, he put more time into the program than he put into her, and as he drifted farther away, she realized that his anger and hurt went deeper than she'd thought.

She tried to pull him away from his new obsession, plying him with lectures, trivia nights, computer clubs, and all the usual nerdy stuff they liked to do together. But the harder she pulled, the more he resisted.

One night she couldn't take it anymore. She told him that if he couldn't pull himself away from his damn computer for one night then they were through.

In response, he called her a bitch. That was the final straw.

As she was picking up her bag to leave, he grabbed her arm hard enough to make her gasp in pain.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean it," he apologized, smiling at her. But the smile didn't reach his eyes, and Felicity had always been smart enough to know when she was being played. "Give me one more chance?"

She shook her head. "It's over, Cooper. Let go of me."

She turned to leave, but he only gripped her arm tighter.

"Don't be like that. I told you I didn't mean it."

"I don't care," she told him, working as much venom into her voice as she could, even as her voice started shaking. "Let me go."

She grabbed his arm and yanked his hand off of her forcefully.

Without warning, he pulled back his fist and punched her in the face.

It was the first and last time she ever let him hit her.

She left his dorm room that night and returned to her own apartment, allowing her roommate to fawn over her black eye and insist that she tell the school about what happened.

She didn't tell anyone. Not at first.

But then he began following her. He never touched her, or even spoke to her. But she'd turn around on her way to class to find him sitting on a bench pretending to read a book. Or she'd find him staring at her from the crowded lecture hall of a class they didn't share. Or he'd show up at her job and ask her to help him fix a computer problem they both knew he could fix by himself.

She asked him repeatedly to stop, but he didn't. After two weeks of this behavior, she couldn't take it anymore. She told her story to the school counselors. Surprisingly, Cooper admitted to everything. A week later he was put on academic probation.

Two weeks later, he used his own version of Felicity's program to hack into the school's server, delete all student records, and fry all the computers in the Computer Science building.

Felicity knew it was him, and she left an anonymous tip with the police. She didn't even care that the program was hers and that it could lead back to her. When they arrived at his dorm room, they found proof of Cooper's actions on his computer. He was arrested that same night. He didn't even put up a fight. It was like he wanted to get caught.

Felicity stood far back in the crowd outside Cooper's building as they led him out in handcuffs. Somehow, he still managed to find her. When their eyes met, he smiled at her, and Felicity shuddered as her blood ran cold.

His was a face she hoped to never see again.

When she started at MIT, Felicity called her mother once a week…at first. As the years went by, she talked to her mother less and less. Her mother never asked her how she was doing, or told her she was proud of her, or supported her the way she had always wanted to be supported. Her whole life, Felicity had felt like she was the mother in their relationship, and she just couldn't face it anymore.

Over time, she begins to lose track of how long it's been since she's talked to her mother.

After she graduates MIT, she moves to Starling City and starts her job as an IT girl at Queen Consolidated.

She knows her mother is alive and well. A quick computer hack every once in awhile tells her she's still in Vegas and that she's making enough money to get by. A year ago, she found out that her mother's started seeing a therapist.

The day she tells Oliver about his mother's lies – the day she first talks to him about her past – Felicity looks into her mother's life once more and discovers that the therapy has been working.

At some point she met a man, and a month ago she married him.

Felicity hasn't thought about her mother since she closed her laptop that night.

Then yesterday afternoon her mother walked into her office without warning and turned her whole world upside down.

Last night, Felicity let her mother take her out to dinner. She took her to one of the fancier places in Starling, proving Felicity's theory that she must have married into money.

Over a steak dinner that Felicity barely touched, Donna Smoak told her daughter about how she eventually hit rock bottom and found that there was nowhere to go but up. She pulled herself out of the bottles and into therapy. She went back to work and managed to earn herself a promotion when her boss retired. In time, she decided to start dating again, for the first time in more than twenty years.

Eventually, her therapist put her into contact with his wife's brother's best friend or something (Felicity began losing track of the story somewhere around this point) and they hit it off. He'd lost his wife to cancer a few years back and he'd been raising his young daughter alone ever since.

Six months after meeting Mr. Bigshot Dentist, she decided to marry him. Now Felicity has a ten year old step sister and isn't that just great news?

"Aren't you happy for me, honey?"

And that was the comment that put an abrupt end to the evening.

"I can't do this," Felicity said in a rush, standing up from her chair and banging into the table in the process. "I can't…I just can't," she repeated breathlessly, feeling herself start to panic. She left the restaurant, ignoring her mother's voice calling after her.

Why did her mother come to Starling City after so long? How did she even find her? And why on Earth did she expect that Felicity would be happy for her? Felicity's mother had never been happy for her; why should it work the other way around?

She went to bed early that night, but she didn't fall asleep for a long time.

The next day, she came in to work three hours late to find her mother waiting in her office.

She spent a good fifteen minutes yelling at Ray Palmer for letting her in without her permission. Ray spouted off some nonsense about mending fences and how her mother really did love her, but Felicity wasn't having any of it. Eventually, she got so frustrated that she sat down in chair at the conference table and started crying. She hated crying in front of people, and it only made her cry harder.

Then she felt a gentle hand on her shoulder.

"Come on, honey. Let's go for a walk."

And for some reason she still can't fathom, Felicity nodded and let her mother lead her outside.

Twenty minutes later, Felicity found herself sitting quietly in Starling City Park eating mint chocolate chip ice cream with her mother.

And then, finally, Felicity heard her mother say the two words she never thought she'd hear her say.

"I'm sorry."

First she apologized for dinner; for how she'd told Felicity all about how great her life was going without asking Felicity about hers. For assuming that Felicity would be happy for her when her own mother had never told her how proud she was that her only daughter had gone to MIT and was now working for one of the biggest companies in the country.

Then she apologized for not talking to her more in college. She apologized for holding onto her so tightly when she was little, for making her feel like she couldn't live her own life. She explained that she had been feeling bitter about Felicity leaving for years. It had taken time, and more than a little help, for her to get past those feelings. Her new life, her husband, and more than anything her new step-daughter, were what really opened her eyes to how she'd treated her daughter.

"I'm in a better place now than I've been in a long time, Felicity. Maybe even since your father left. Samantha may not really be mine, but I want to do right by her…like I never did with you."

Silent tears started to fall down her mother's cheeks, and Felicity felt like a dam was slowly tearing itself down inside her, and years of resentment and bitterness started to seep away. Her mother had made a mistake, but now she was trying to fix it. She couldn't really stay mad at her forever, could she?

In the end, Felicity smiled at her and told her she had to get back to work. But she was open to a redo of last night's dinner. Same time, same place.

As Felicity walked back to QC, she had no idea that her world was about to fall apart yet again.