Fic - Simple - One Shot
Title: Simple
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Felicity, Oliver. Olicity (if you squint)
Summary: Felicity wakes up on a deserted road in a ditch and her night just keeps getting better.
A/N: This is a one shot that I wrote to try and get a feel for Oliver and Felicity's voices. Possible sequel in the mix to wrap everything up but it might take a bit. :)
"Mm, hello?"
Oliver’s gravelly voice was such a welcome comfort that Felicity brought a trembling hand to her forehead to try and keep herself from crying at her boss’ stupid, awful, beautiful voice. "Ol…Oliver?"
There was a sound of bed sheets rustling over the line and what sounded like the phone shifting hands before Oliver answered, alert and concerned. “Felicity? Everything alright?”
A choked sob slipped past her lips. “I-I don…I don’t know?”
Friction resounded over the phone and Felicity worried that the call had dropped. She was breathing so fast from just the thought that she swore she was going to trigger an asthma attack.
"Felicity? I need you to do me a favor, okay?"
Felicity closed her eyes against the burn of tears and nodded.
"I need you to take a deep breath through your nose, can you do that?"
Again, Felicity nodded. She took a slow deep breath as best she could through her stuffy nose. The air was cold and felt like ice, it burned against her airway, the sensation made her chest feel tight, and her toes and fingers tingle. She took another deep breath; this time inhaling a bit quicker and holding the breath for a few seconds before exhaling. Again, she inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly.
"You’re doing good."
Felicity let out a strained laugh at Oliver’s soothing voice. Yeah, she was doing wonderful.
"Felicity, what happened, where are you?"
What happened? Where are you? Easy questions. Ones she should know the answers to. But, when she thought back to where she was before she ended up in her current position, a giant wall of blank met her inquiry. Oh God. Her heart started to pound ferociously against her chest. She couldn’t remember! Felicity knew she had locked up her office, she remembered that clearly. She could recall heading to the parking garage, she could remember seeing her car as she came off of the garage elevator, but after that things started to get fuzzy around the edges until everything faded to black. She couldn’t remember how she had gotten from the parking garage to the ditch she woke up in.
"Everything’s okay, Felicity. I’m going to come and get you but I need to know where you are."
Felicity finally opened her eyes, sniffled, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
She could hear Oliver mutter a curse that would’ve made her grandma blush to high heaven before the man cleared his throat and continued, “Are there any distinguishing landmarks near you? Anything you notice that will help me get a location on you?”
It was almost completely pitch black out but Felicity strained her eyes and scanned the darkened road on either side of her. It looked like some sort of private drive, maybe? Definitely not with-in city limits. “I’m outside the city, I think? Some place rural.”
"That’s a start. Describe it to me.”
Felicity squinted at the road as she heard a car start over the phone. “The roads made of dirt and rock and there’s a concrete thing.” She looked up and tried to decipher what exactly she was leaning on. “A shed, I believe?”
"I want you to try and get inside the shed and barricade the door until I get there, alright?”
"But how are you going to find this place? Dirt road and concrete shed describe just about ninety percent of the remote rural areas that surround the city." Felicity slowly pushed herself away from the concrete wall behind her and hesitantly shuffled herself around the now identified shed. "Not that I’m doubting your abilities because I’m pretty sure you could find a needle in a haystack but-"
"Felicity, just get inside the shed and stay there, please."
Having something else to focus her attention on helped ease the tension in her stiff muscles and calm her frantic nerves. It helped keep her mind from imagining all the various nefarious possibilities that could have happened to her while she was blacked out. Although, in her short time in assistant vigilantism, she had never heard of a bad guy dumping a victim in a ditch in the middle of nowhere and not stealing anything. At least, she assumed her mysterious attacker hadn’t stolen anything, her cell was still on her and her emergency cash was still safely tucked into her shoe. The mysterious person could of stolen her car, she supposed, but she probably would have just given him the thing if he’d asked. Her rust bucket Daewoo was not worth all this trouble.
"Felicity?"
"Still here." She rounded another corner of the shed, her hand feeling along the wall for a door.
"I’m almost to the city limits on the north side."
Her hand continued to run along the wall before finally it dipped and hit smooth metal. “Here’s hoping your sense of direction is better than my awful ability to describe my surroundings.”
"You’re ability to describe your location is fine, Felicity. I’ve had a lot of practice with having to decipher vague surroundings in my hay day. You’d be surprised the odd places drunk people can end up."
Felicity felt for the door knob and smiled in triumph when her hand grasped it. “I’m not sure I even want to know.”
"Probably not. "
Felicity pushed the metal door open only to lurch away when her abdomen heaved at the rancid foul smell wafting from inside. The scent was disgusting, the only way to even remotely describe the horrid odor was that of someone who had left a steak out to rot in the middle of summer smeared in fecal matter and blood.
"Oh, God. Oh, God!" Felicity stumbled a few feet away as her meager dinner surged up her esophagus. She fell to her knees just as her stomach revolted against the sickening smell. She dropped her cell phone and braced her hands against the ground trying to support herself while her stomach seemed determined to empty everything she’d ate in the last few hours. It didn’t help she could feel bile and her stomach contents splashing onto her hands which, when combined with the scent of that awful shed, sent her into another bout of sickness. By the end of it, her throat was burning in protest and her abdominal muscles where clenching in objection to the sudden expulsion.
"Felicity talk to me here! What’s going on?"
Felicity hugged her abdomen tightly and groaned. This was not her night. Not only had she been most probably kidnapped and dumped on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. She was now sure, well, mostly sure, she had stumbled upon something dead. As in human dead and, if the nauseating odor was anything to go by, it had been that way for a while.
"Felicity!"
Wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her sweater, the twenty-two year old reached down and snatched the cell phone up. “‘M fine. I’m fine just, just. Oh hell, I don’t even know right now.”
"What happened?" The clipped question would have sounded angry to anyone else but Felicity knew the gruff tone for what it was, concern.
"There’s something in the shed. A dead, possibly human something in the shed and it smells very disgusting and I would rather not have to hide with the possibly dead human thing inside the shed."
She swore she could hear his jaw clench through the phone. “Felicity, I want you to listen carefully to me, okay?”
She didn’t like the intonation of that request. “Okay.”
"I know this whole situation is probably frightening."
Understatement.
"But I want you to get to the main road and follow it until you find somewhere safe."
"Oliver-"
"You have two choices Felicity hide in the shed or walk."
Dead body, or darkened creepy road that she swore she could hear banjo music drifting from; to be honest, those choices were pretty crappy. “But what if I’m walking away from you?”
"It’s fine. Right now my concern is to get you away from, as you so eloquently put it, the dead human thing in the shed. And, more importantly, the person who possibly put it, and you, out there.”
Felicity swallowed nervously at that. Lulled by the familiar comfort talking to Oliver brought her, she forgot that there was still a chance her mysterious kidnapper was still running amuck. Which still confused her but she supposed, with a look back towards the concrete shed, she was probably better off not knowing exactly what went on before she woke up in a ditch beside Shed O’ Creep.
"Felicity?"
"I’m going." Felicity glanced at the shed one last time before staggering forward back towards the road that ran beside the shed. "Just so you know, I’m a tech geek, me and long walks anywhere are not best friends. So, be prepared for horrible complaining and bellyaching all the way to where ever it is I’m going." If she didn’t want to jinx herself she would swear that her night couldn’t get any worse.
"I think I’ll manage."
o0o0o0o0o0o0o
"I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves. Oh, I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves and this is how it goes."
"Do you really have to sing that?"
"Hey you refused to listen to my rendition of ‘I will Survive’ and downright laughed at my attempt to sing ‘I Believe I Can Fly’."
"You made up your own lyrics!"
Felicity smirked at the indignation in Oliver’s voice. “Hey, my best friend and I worked very hard on those lyrics in like third grade.”
Silence crept over the phone as Felicity sniffled and hugged her left arm closer to her person trying to stave off the late night chill.
A flash of headlights in the distance made Felicity stop in her tracks and stare dumbfounded. “Please tell me that’s you, Oliver…?”
"Felicity?" Oliver’s concerned voice trickled over the line.
Great, so not her boss then. “There’s a car coming.”
"Have they seen you yet?"
"I don’t think so?" They were just making a turn up ahead that would bring them on the same straight road she was currently on.
"I want you to hide in the ditch alongside the road until they pass."
"But what if it’s someone who can help?" She questioned even though she was already crouching down to hide in the ditch, which was currently filled with muddy sludgy water. Wonderful.
"It might be. But, lets play it safe."
Felicity peeked her head up to watch as the car passed above her. “Okay, they’re gone.”
"I’m almost there, I promise."
The affirmation in his voice made her pause in standing. “Oliver… how are you almost here? How are you even sure you’re going in the right direction?”
Silence meet her questions. “Oliver!”
There was a cough before Oliver’s deep voice filtered over the phone. “After you decided to start working cases in a more physical presence I may have put a tracker on you.”
"You’re freaking kidding me!?" Felicity put a hand to her forehead and sighed internally, no of course he wasn’t kidding, this was Oliver ‘freaking overly paranoid’ Queen she was talking about. The fact that he put a tracker on her should not surprise her in the least. "We are so having a talk about personal boundaries later."
"Of course."
"Does Digg have one too?"
At her boss’ continued silence, Felicity shook her head. “Right. For the record I want to be there when you tell him.”
"Of course."
Felicity huffed a laugh and continued down the darkened road. “Did I ever tell you about the time I did my internship at Wayne Enterprises?”
"I don’t believe so."
"Well, the tabloids were right about Wayne, he’s the biggest ladies man ever but that kid of his is so adorkable."
"Adorkable?"
She forgot, Oliver didn’t know current net lingo. She’d have to introduce him to Urban Dictionary sometime. “Dorky but adorable?”
"Right."
Felicity just shook her head. “Anyways, I may or may not have been testing out the database security for Wayne Enterprises at the time-.”
"You mean hacking?"
“Testing. There’s a difference, I just wanted to see how good their security was and if I could improve it.”
"Like any good intern."
"Right!" Felicity grinned before continuing. "And, here I was in the middle of testing their backdoors when this dinky little pip squeak pops up behind me and tells me what I’m doing wrong! Me, MIT graduate with honors! I was about to tell the little guy off when I realized who he was and about freaked. Seriously, who in the hell lets a ten year old wonder off on their own? Anyways, long story short I ended up being Dick Graysons babysitter for the entirety of my internship. Mr. Wayne thought it would be a good penance. He needed someone to watch Dick when he was working late and apparently someone needed to watch me so I couldn’t test the security again. Probably the best side job I had while I did my internship."
"Sounds like fun."
"Mmm." Felicity yawned and rubbed a hand against her eyes. She was ready for this crappy day to be over with.
"I didn’t know Bruce Wayne had a son."
"Right. Island. Yeah about 5-ish years ago he adopted Dick Grayson after his parents passed away. Really need to get you caught up on current events.” A sigh. “Please tell me your close because I think I’ve had about all the trauma and physical exercise I can for the day.”
" I’m a few miles out yet. Shouldn’t take long."
A few moments of silence passed between them, and then-.
"Oliver…" Felicity started.
"Yes?"
She just shook her head not sure how to even begin to voice the thoughts running through her mind. Instead, Felicity huffed a small laugh and smiled. “Thank you.”
"For what?"
She had so much she wanted to say, she wanted to say thanks for answering her call at the ungodly hour she called, wanted to thank him for calming her down when she wanted nothing more that to crawl in a hole and forget about everything, for coming to get her, for making her feel like she was a part of something, but instead she settled on. “Being a friend.”
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Felicity, Oliver. Olicity (if you squint)
Summary: Felicity wakes up on a deserted road in a ditch and her night just keeps getting better.
A/N: This is a one shot that I wrote to try and get a feel for Oliver and Felicity's voices. Possible sequel in the mix to wrap everything up but it might take a bit. :)
"Mm, hello?"
Oliver’s gravelly voice was such a welcome comfort that Felicity brought a trembling hand to her forehead to try and keep herself from crying at her boss’ stupid, awful, beautiful voice. "Ol…Oliver?"
There was a sound of bed sheets rustling over the line and what sounded like the phone shifting hands before Oliver answered, alert and concerned. “Felicity? Everything alright?”
A choked sob slipped past her lips. “I-I don…I don’t know?”
Friction resounded over the phone and Felicity worried that the call had dropped. She was breathing so fast from just the thought that she swore she was going to trigger an asthma attack.
"Felicity? I need you to do me a favor, okay?"
Felicity closed her eyes against the burn of tears and nodded.
"I need you to take a deep breath through your nose, can you do that?"
Again, Felicity nodded. She took a slow deep breath as best she could through her stuffy nose. The air was cold and felt like ice, it burned against her airway, the sensation made her chest feel tight, and her toes and fingers tingle. She took another deep breath; this time inhaling a bit quicker and holding the breath for a few seconds before exhaling. Again, she inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly.
"You’re doing good."
Felicity let out a strained laugh at Oliver’s soothing voice. Yeah, she was doing wonderful.
"Felicity, what happened, where are you?"
What happened? Where are you? Easy questions. Ones she should know the answers to. But, when she thought back to where she was before she ended up in her current position, a giant wall of blank met her inquiry. Oh God. Her heart started to pound ferociously against her chest. She couldn’t remember! Felicity knew she had locked up her office, she remembered that clearly. She could recall heading to the parking garage, she could remember seeing her car as she came off of the garage elevator, but after that things started to get fuzzy around the edges until everything faded to black. She couldn’t remember how she had gotten from the parking garage to the ditch she woke up in.
"Everything’s okay, Felicity. I’m going to come and get you but I need to know where you are."
Felicity finally opened her eyes, sniffled, and shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
She could hear Oliver mutter a curse that would’ve made her grandma blush to high heaven before the man cleared his throat and continued, “Are there any distinguishing landmarks near you? Anything you notice that will help me get a location on you?”
It was almost completely pitch black out but Felicity strained her eyes and scanned the darkened road on either side of her. It looked like some sort of private drive, maybe? Definitely not with-in city limits. “I’m outside the city, I think? Some place rural.”
"That’s a start. Describe it to me.”
Felicity squinted at the road as she heard a car start over the phone. “The roads made of dirt and rock and there’s a concrete thing.” She looked up and tried to decipher what exactly she was leaning on. “A shed, I believe?”
"I want you to try and get inside the shed and barricade the door until I get there, alright?”
"But how are you going to find this place? Dirt road and concrete shed describe just about ninety percent of the remote rural areas that surround the city." Felicity slowly pushed herself away from the concrete wall behind her and hesitantly shuffled herself around the now identified shed. "Not that I’m doubting your abilities because I’m pretty sure you could find a needle in a haystack but-"
"Felicity, just get inside the shed and stay there, please."
Having something else to focus her attention on helped ease the tension in her stiff muscles and calm her frantic nerves. It helped keep her mind from imagining all the various nefarious possibilities that could have happened to her while she was blacked out. Although, in her short time in assistant vigilantism, she had never heard of a bad guy dumping a victim in a ditch in the middle of nowhere and not stealing anything. At least, she assumed her mysterious attacker hadn’t stolen anything, her cell was still on her and her emergency cash was still safely tucked into her shoe. The mysterious person could of stolen her car, she supposed, but she probably would have just given him the thing if he’d asked. Her rust bucket Daewoo was not worth all this trouble.
"Felicity?"
"Still here." She rounded another corner of the shed, her hand feeling along the wall for a door.
"I’m almost to the city limits on the north side."
Her hand continued to run along the wall before finally it dipped and hit smooth metal. “Here’s hoping your sense of direction is better than my awful ability to describe my surroundings.”
"You’re ability to describe your location is fine, Felicity. I’ve had a lot of practice with having to decipher vague surroundings in my hay day. You’d be surprised the odd places drunk people can end up."
Felicity felt for the door knob and smiled in triumph when her hand grasped it. “I’m not sure I even want to know.”
"Probably not. "
Felicity pushed the metal door open only to lurch away when her abdomen heaved at the rancid foul smell wafting from inside. The scent was disgusting, the only way to even remotely describe the horrid odor was that of someone who had left a steak out to rot in the middle of summer smeared in fecal matter and blood.
"Oh, God. Oh, God!" Felicity stumbled a few feet away as her meager dinner surged up her esophagus. She fell to her knees just as her stomach revolted against the sickening smell. She dropped her cell phone and braced her hands against the ground trying to support herself while her stomach seemed determined to empty everything she’d ate in the last few hours. It didn’t help she could feel bile and her stomach contents splashing onto her hands which, when combined with the scent of that awful shed, sent her into another bout of sickness. By the end of it, her throat was burning in protest and her abdominal muscles where clenching in objection to the sudden expulsion.
"Felicity talk to me here! What’s going on?"
Felicity hugged her abdomen tightly and groaned. This was not her night. Not only had she been most probably kidnapped and dumped on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. She was now sure, well, mostly sure, she had stumbled upon something dead. As in human dead and, if the nauseating odor was anything to go by, it had been that way for a while.
"Felicity!"
Wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her sweater, the twenty-two year old reached down and snatched the cell phone up. “‘M fine. I’m fine just, just. Oh hell, I don’t even know right now.”
"What happened?" The clipped question would have sounded angry to anyone else but Felicity knew the gruff tone for what it was, concern.
"There’s something in the shed. A dead, possibly human something in the shed and it smells very disgusting and I would rather not have to hide with the possibly dead human thing inside the shed."
She swore she could hear his jaw clench through the phone. “Felicity, I want you to listen carefully to me, okay?”
She didn’t like the intonation of that request. “Okay.”
"I know this whole situation is probably frightening."
Understatement.
"But I want you to get to the main road and follow it until you find somewhere safe."
"Oliver-"
"You have two choices Felicity hide in the shed or walk."
Dead body, or darkened creepy road that she swore she could hear banjo music drifting from; to be honest, those choices were pretty crappy. “But what if I’m walking away from you?”
"It’s fine. Right now my concern is to get you away from, as you so eloquently put it, the dead human thing in the shed. And, more importantly, the person who possibly put it, and you, out there.”
Felicity swallowed nervously at that. Lulled by the familiar comfort talking to Oliver brought her, she forgot that there was still a chance her mysterious kidnapper was still running amuck. Which still confused her but she supposed, with a look back towards the concrete shed, she was probably better off not knowing exactly what went on before she woke up in a ditch beside Shed O’ Creep.
"Felicity?"
"I’m going." Felicity glanced at the shed one last time before staggering forward back towards the road that ran beside the shed. "Just so you know, I’m a tech geek, me and long walks anywhere are not best friends. So, be prepared for horrible complaining and bellyaching all the way to where ever it is I’m going." If she didn’t want to jinx herself she would swear that her night couldn’t get any worse.
"I think I’ll manage."
o0o0o0o0o0o0o
"I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves, everybody’s nerves. Oh, I know a song that gets on everybody’s nerves and this is how it goes."
"Do you really have to sing that?"
"Hey you refused to listen to my rendition of ‘I will Survive’ and downright laughed at my attempt to sing ‘I Believe I Can Fly’."
"You made up your own lyrics!"
Felicity smirked at the indignation in Oliver’s voice. “Hey, my best friend and I worked very hard on those lyrics in like third grade.”
Silence crept over the phone as Felicity sniffled and hugged her left arm closer to her person trying to stave off the late night chill.
A flash of headlights in the distance made Felicity stop in her tracks and stare dumbfounded. “Please tell me that’s you, Oliver…?”
"Felicity?" Oliver’s concerned voice trickled over the line.
Great, so not her boss then. “There’s a car coming.”
"Have they seen you yet?"
"I don’t think so?" They were just making a turn up ahead that would bring them on the same straight road she was currently on.
"I want you to hide in the ditch alongside the road until they pass."
"But what if it’s someone who can help?" She questioned even though she was already crouching down to hide in the ditch, which was currently filled with muddy sludgy water. Wonderful.
"It might be. But, lets play it safe."
Felicity peeked her head up to watch as the car passed above her. “Okay, they’re gone.”
"I’m almost there, I promise."
The affirmation in his voice made her pause in standing. “Oliver… how are you almost here? How are you even sure you’re going in the right direction?”
Silence meet her questions. “Oliver!”
There was a cough before Oliver’s deep voice filtered over the phone. “After you decided to start working cases in a more physical presence I may have put a tracker on you.”
"You’re freaking kidding me!?" Felicity put a hand to her forehead and sighed internally, no of course he wasn’t kidding, this was Oliver ‘freaking overly paranoid’ Queen she was talking about. The fact that he put a tracker on her should not surprise her in the least. "We are so having a talk about personal boundaries later."
"Of course."
"Does Digg have one too?"
At her boss’ continued silence, Felicity shook her head. “Right. For the record I want to be there when you tell him.”
"Of course."
Felicity huffed a laugh and continued down the darkened road. “Did I ever tell you about the time I did my internship at Wayne Enterprises?”
"I don’t believe so."
"Well, the tabloids were right about Wayne, he’s the biggest ladies man ever but that kid of his is so adorkable."
"Adorkable?"
She forgot, Oliver didn’t know current net lingo. She’d have to introduce him to Urban Dictionary sometime. “Dorky but adorable?”
"Right."
Felicity just shook her head. “Anyways, I may or may not have been testing out the database security for Wayne Enterprises at the time-.”
"You mean hacking?"
“Testing. There’s a difference, I just wanted to see how good their security was and if I could improve it.”
"Like any good intern."
"Right!" Felicity grinned before continuing. "And, here I was in the middle of testing their backdoors when this dinky little pip squeak pops up behind me and tells me what I’m doing wrong! Me, MIT graduate with honors! I was about to tell the little guy off when I realized who he was and about freaked. Seriously, who in the hell lets a ten year old wonder off on their own? Anyways, long story short I ended up being Dick Graysons babysitter for the entirety of my internship. Mr. Wayne thought it would be a good penance. He needed someone to watch Dick when he was working late and apparently someone needed to watch me so I couldn’t test the security again. Probably the best side job I had while I did my internship."
"Sounds like fun."
"Mmm." Felicity yawned and rubbed a hand against her eyes. She was ready for this crappy day to be over with.
"I didn’t know Bruce Wayne had a son."
"Right. Island. Yeah about 5-ish years ago he adopted Dick Grayson after his parents passed away. Really need to get you caught up on current events.” A sigh. “Please tell me your close because I think I’ve had about all the trauma and physical exercise I can for the day.”
" I’m a few miles out yet. Shouldn’t take long."
A few moments of silence passed between them, and then-.
"Oliver…" Felicity started.
"Yes?"
She just shook her head not sure how to even begin to voice the thoughts running through her mind. Instead, Felicity huffed a small laugh and smiled. “Thank you.”
"For what?"
She had so much she wanted to say, she wanted to say thanks for answering her call at the ungodly hour she called, wanted to thank him for calming her down when she wanted nothing more that to crawl in a hole and forget about everything, for coming to get her, for making her feel like she was a part of something, but instead she settled on. “Being a friend.”