Oliver goes to Felicity with a request. Again.

She suspects he's not being entirely honest. Again.

"So, explain to me one more time exactly what you were doing with this."

"Will that help you fix it?"

"No, but it'll definitely get me a round of drinks at the next IT bar night."

Oliver pressed his lips together and cocked an eyebrow at Felicity. His blue eyes glinted with something like exasperation and just a touch of amusement.

Felicity started to roll her eyes before she caught herself and cleared her throat instead. "Not that I would use it, of course."

"Of course," Oliver repeated, nodding.

"Or if I did," Felicity began slowly. Oliver's eyes narrowed. "I wouldn't make any mention of whose hard drive it was, how it came into my possession, or what I ended up getting off of it?" She looked up at him from where she was seated behind her desk, eyes wide and the corners of her mouth moving upwards to form a hesitant smile.

Oliver exhaled slowly through his nose, saying nothing. His eyes remained fixed on hers until she heaved a sigh and looked down at the damaged hard drive she held in her upturned palm.

"Fine, fine, fine," she said. She turned it over in her hands, carefully examining the ports to determine whether or not they could still be functional.

"Can you fix it?" Oliver asked after nearly a minute of watching her in silence.

Felicity jumped slightly at the sound of his voice as though she'd forgotten he'd even been in the room with her. She pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose from where they'd slid down and desperately hoped she wasn't turning an embarrassing shade of fuschia.

"Honestly? You're probably better off just getting a new one."

Oliver fixed her with another stare.

"Or," Felicity gently placed the hard drive onto her desk and began rummaging through a drawer for the right data cable. "I could try and save your vacation pictures."

Felicity paused mid-search to fix Oliver with a stare of her own over the top of her glasses. She wasn't an idiot and she didn't appreciate being lied to, so she figured she'd give him the chance to change his story. Not that it mattered. He was her boss after all. She'd do the thing simply because he'd asked her to do it, but she liked to think there was a principle she was upholding.

Oliver didn't flinch and so Felicity resumed her search. "If the port's too damaged to plug anything in, I'll have to open it up and see if I can't reinstall the circuits into another body." She yanked open another drawer when the first proved to not contain what she needed. "That's probably going to take longer than you're willing to wait."

"Is that your way of kicking me out?"

"What?" Felicity's head snapped up. "No! It's just that it'll take hours to do and I've got some computer diagnostics to run for accounting, so that'll slow me down as well."

Felicity's eyes widened when she realised what she'd said and she raced to correct herself. "Not that this isn't important and if you want me to do this first, I can." She thought about the fact that the head of accounting was practically hysterical and winced. "Probably."

"Felicity." Oliver took a step forward and leaned over her desk slightly. He watched her eyes flicker across his face as she tried to figure out what he was about to do. "It's fine. I'd like this done as soon as possible, but not at the expense of your work."

He allowed himself a small smile in an attempt to reassure her. The look on her face and the way she narrowed her eyes at him told him he'd probably achieved exactly the opposite. Sighing quietly, he stood straight.

"Just do it whenever you can," he said gently.

"Got it." Felicity relaxed and smiled up at him. "That's good 'cause you should see Robertson." At Oliver's blank stare, Felicity clarified with a wave of her hand as she turned back towards her open drawer, "Head of accounting. He's been all over the place ever since we switched to a newer operating system. You'd think it's the end of the world or something the way he's going on about the computers ruining his system for filing his weekly data sheets."

Felicity yanked a cable out of the overstuffed drawer and slammed it onto her desk with a triumphant smirk.

"I tried to tell him the end of the world wasn't until December and it probably wouldn't happen because of Microsoft anyway - " Oliver frowned, more confused by her rambling than usual, but she was too busy with the hard drive to notice, " – but you know accountants. Practically ripped my head off. Can't take a joke."

She glanced up at Oliver's decidedly unsmiling face.

"And apparently neither can certain other people," she muttered under her breath.

Oliver pretended not to have heard. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Right." Oliver took a step back towards the doorway. "So you'll give me a call when that's ready."

"Of course, yeah," Felicity replied without looking up. She'd quickly decided the body of the hard drive was unsalvageable and had started carefully opening it up with the edge of a small flathead screwdriver.

"And I don't need to tell you that this should stay between you and me."

This time Felicity did glance up, her brow furrowed. "You've never needed to say it before."

"Right." Oliver hoped the smile he was attempting a second time conveyed an apology. A thought as to why he was even apologising briefly flickered through his head.

"Some vacation, huh?" Felicity caught his eyes with her own. Her gaze was assessing, discerning, as though she were ready to figure him out from whatever he said next. There was a heaviness to her stare that Oliver wasn't used to from her and it made him pause. It made him rethink the lie on the tip of his tongue.

Oliver's smile tightened. He simply nodded in response, turned swiftly, and walked out of her small office.

Felicity held her breath as she watched him leave. She exhaled heavily a good ten seconds later and shook her head at herself. Looking down at the burnt casing and water damaged circuitry, she heaved another sigh.

"You know, Felicity," she spoke under her breath to herself. "Considering the fact that any moment you could piss off Oliver Queen and lose your job, you really should probably update that resume." She scrunched up her nose at the distasteful thought.

"Conversely," she continued conversationally as she carefully began to unscrew the damaged circuit boards from their bottom casing. "You could just learn to shut the hell up."

Feedback is always appreciated...especially since these two are entirely new to me and I don't have much to go on.