Technical Assistance

Chapter 46: Extraction of Compressed Files

The candor there startles Felicity, and she realizes this is Oliver Queen trying to open up and let her in—starting with something easier to talk about than the island. "By the time I figured it out," she answers slowly, "I already knew you, Oliver. That didn't change the way I saw you—it helped me understand you." She finds herself tracing the lines of the tattoo again. "When I saw you that first time," she starts with a chuckle, waving to the Arrow gear strewn all over the room, "in all of that gear, my first question was what would make you try to do this." She flattens her hand over his heart. "This told me why."

He doesn't answer her immediately or directly, musing quietly, "I wasn't on the island the entire time I was gone, Felicity." Startled by the turn of the conversation and the revelation itself, she lifts her head from his chest to look at Oliver, reaching across him to the nightstand for her glasses. As she slides them on her face, he continues, "The first two years were on the island, but I spent a year in Hong Kong doing missions for ARGUS." He looks away for a moment. "One of them brought us back to Starling City."

Questions immediately spring to Felicity's mind, but she decides that asking questions would be the worst thing she could do for Oliver right now. After all, if he wanted someone to ask questions, he would have told his family this information. So she bottles them up and replies slowly, "That must have been agony—to be so close to your family and not be able to see them."

"I did see them," he corrects. "They didn't know I was there, but I watched my sister meet a kid at my father's gravestone—at my gravestone—and buy drugs. She thought I was a horrible brother, and the worst part was that she was right." Finally he looks at her again. "In some ways, seeing my family that way was worse than not seeing them at all."

He changes topics abruptly, as if that wound is still to raw to talk about. "The reason my ARGUS handler brought us back to Starling was because the data they needed was at Queen Consolidated, and I knew the layout of the building and I could access the servers."

The realization hits Felicity more violently than any lightning bolt or battering ram ever could. "About three years ago," she finds herself stating slowly, "we had a glitch in the system. Mr. Steele asked me to investigate because Mrs. Queen thought some things on her desk were moved around, and she wanted to make sure no one accessed her computer. I remember it because the biometric scanner recorded a result that didn't make sense—said that Oliver Queen had accessed the computer." She feels her brow furrow. "But it wasn't a glitch, was it? That was you."

It surprises her when he smiles; it honestly surprises her that Oliver still finds reasons to, if that small look at his past is any indication. "That was me," he affirms. "We thought that no one would bother to remove my access, and it worked." Something similar to a chuckle leaves his throat, but Felicity can't understand what there is to laugh about. "I was distracted by some of my father's old files, and I almost got caught by someone who was working late that night."

Felicity can't help but lean forward, curious, but she doesn't dare interrupt him now when it's clear he's in the mood to share. Oliver pauses for a long moment, as though he wants her to ask, but when she doesn't, he continues, "She was..." Words seem to escape him for a moment before he finishes, "Unforgettable—from the lipstick, to the glasses, to the pandas on her shoes."

When it dawns on her, Felicity's throat tightens. The day in question comes rushing back to her in vivid detail—it was the first time she ever walked into the CEO's office, and she had looked at the photograph of Oliver and his father and... She groans. "I called you cute," she remembers, and her face is already heating with embarrassment. "I comment on a photo of a dead man, and somehow he still manages to hear me and make me feel like an idiot." She shakes her head. "Typical."