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Felicity sits down at a café and orders a coffee. She can feel warm sunlight on her shoulders, even though part of her insists it’s not supposed to be sunny, and the air smells of crisp lettuce and the BLTs she always used to order at this place. Felicity stares at the menu and wonders why everything feels so perfect, yet altogether wrong.
A woman sits across from her, chair scraping on the tiles. “Been awhile,” says a voice, and Felicity blinks, looks up from the menu to see—
—the wall in her room as she wakes up in a cold sweat, gasping. She’s not in a café, she’s in her bedroom. She sits up and breathes as the pieces of the dream fall apart in her mind. She knows that café. She used to go there to meet Laurel for celebratory lunch every time Laurel won a case.
Felicity hasn’t been there in two years.
She doesn’t fall back asleep.
* * *
She can’t stop being curious, so instead of grabbing lunch at the deli around the corner from her office, she walks six extra blocks to the café. Only it’s not there anymore, it shut down six months ago and a bright orange sign for a bubble tea shop greets her.
Dejection floods through her so intensely that she feels the raw edge of grief sudden, no longer dulled by time.
When she turns, she sees a single feather on the sidewalk.
It’s ironic. For somebody who claimed the bird in her name, Laurel used to be kind of squeamish about loose feathers on the street. “They’re full of bugs and mites and disease, Felicity, don’t touch that.”
Felicity picks up the feather.
She goes home and googles how to clean feathers, which she does with judicious prejudice (thanks, Laurel). It’s a pretty feather, a splash of yellow into the brown, and when she searches for it online, her blood chills.
A canary feather.
She checks twice, three times, but it doesn’t change. Not a species native to the area. It has to be some kind of weird fluke, part of some art piece that fluttered off and sat on the sidewalk where she used to meet the Black Canary for lunch.
She pins it to her lampshade on her nightstand anyway.
* * *
“Something up?” Curtis asks on their lunchbreak, which they’ve taken to spending together in hopes of repairing their relationship.
“Just my subconscious being a royal jerk,” Felicity says, and launches into some stuttering and innuendo to throw him off the scent. She’s gotten so good at faking it that her friends can’t tell the manufactured babbling from the real. She does her best to forget about all of it until she’s walking home and a warm breeze passes by. It smells like the blintzes she used to pick up for Laurel on stakeout nights.
She finds a second canary feather while crossing the street.
That night, she’s back in the café in the middle like good dreams always start, and Laurel’s laughing but Felicity can’t remember what she said and that’s okay, Laurel’s there and she’s so beautiful when she laughs and—
Felicity wakes up again, not in a cold sweat, but with a grin on her face that fades when the truth comes crashing back in.
* * *
After that, she finds feathers everywhere. First single feathers on the sidewalk, one at a time, some brown and white, others with a bright slash of yellow. Then dozens at a time, on the balcony of her apartment, by her car in the parking garage. The dreams become clearer. She begins to remember bits of what Laurel says, complaints about the judge on her court cases, small talk, compliments. She remembers the things her heart forgot about Laurel’s smile.
And Felicity wants to tell her a thousand things she never said while Laurel was alive, things like we took you for granted and how did you stay so calm in the face of so much pain? But she always finds herself talking about whatever Laurel’s chattering about, laughing along with her.
“You should get more sleep,” Laurel teases one night.
“I’d get to see you more,” Felicity agrees.
Laurel, for the first time, looks away, her cheerfulness dropping like a marionette with its strings cut. Before Felicity can ask why, she opens her eyes to see the base ceiling, a horrible crick in her neck from falling asleep at the computers.
Felicity goes home—via cab at Oliver’s insistence—and stares at the boxes of feathers. For months, she’s reminded herself the dreams aren’t real. Laurel is gone. Death takes people and it doesn’t always return them and Sara has won all the fatal lottery tickets the Lance family can possibly have. She can’t live within these dreams anymore. She has to give them up.
So she unpins the first feather from her lampshade and moves to put it in the box with the others. As she does, a strange compulsion makes her stand, grab her purse, and leave her apartment.
The workers at the craft store all give her a wide berth, possibly due to the manic glint in her eyes, but she finds the material she needs. For thirty six hours, she toils, barely eating, using every bit of jigsaw puzzle knowledge she’s ever possessed until a wide set of wings, angelic and whole, spread over the wall.
They’re—perfect. Save for one missing piece. Felicity holds the final feather in her hand, her throat working.
She falls asleep still holding it.
* * *
In her dream, she’s not in the café. She’s not in any place she recognizes at all, actually. A bedroom, sunny and breezy, a fluffy white duvet on the bed and Klimt prints on the walls. Laurel lounges on a pouf chair, feet bare, in her uniform with the top shoved down to her waist so that the lace tank underneath shows off her arms.
She’s just asked Felicity a question, but Felicity can’t remember it for the life of her. “No, I’m not sure it’ll work,” Felicity says, answering anyway. “But it’s not like I’m sure of anything these days.”
“What are you so afraid of?”
“That I’ll try and lose myself, the way I’ve already lost you.”
Laurel’s lips curve upward. “Felicity Smoak. Afraid to try something. Now there’s a day I thought I’d never see.”
You’re not seeing it, Felicity wants to say, because you’re dead.
“The worst has already happened,” Laurel says. “So why not try?”
“What if I fail?”
“What if you don’t?”
And Felicity wakes up.
“I’m afraid I’ll lose myself?” Felicity asks, shoving her legs out bed and running her free hand through her hair. She twirls the feather in her other hand and looks at her creation with a snort. “If there’s one thing that’s obvious here, it’s that I’ve already lost it.”
And she really has. What does she think this final feather will do? Complete the wings and somehow conjure up a healthy, alive Laurel in her apartment? She doesn’t even believe in magic. It’s stupid to hesitate, and foolishness tastes bitter in her throat. Upset with herself for an undying sense of hope when it’s bound not to work, she all but crams the last feather into place.
Nothing happens.
* * *
Felicity goes to work hating herself for even hoping in the first place.
She stays late, though she avoids her coworkers. Helping out the team requires being clipped and brusque and repeatedly but firmly rebuffing all offers to talk. When she finds herself considering a hotel room instead of going home to face the wings, she scoffs and marches straight to her apartment instead. Felicity Smoak does not run from her fears.
Though she might avoid looking at them for a little while, after coming home. Out of shame.
It’s only when she’s preparing for bed that she finally looks. And she drops her toothbrush.
The wings are gone.
* * *
She tears her apartment apart, looking for anything else the intruders might have taken, but only the wings are missing. She almost calls every member of her team to come and stay with her, but she doesn’t want to explain the mania of the past week, or the dreams, or any of it. With the wings gone, reality seems to reassert itself into the cold corners of her mind.
Hell, she probably hallucinated it all in the first place. It’s not like she showed the feathers to anyone else.
She ignores the minuscule thread of hope in the back of her mind that Laurel—what? Might come gliding in through the window on a set of wings made from glued canary feathers?
She ignores that thread. It hurts too much. And she doesn’t sleep a wink.
* * *
Felicity can’t fight it forever. Even in college she sucked at all-nighters. Which is why she eventually gives in, climbs atop a stack of exercise mats in the base, and passes out while Rene and Dinah spar.
She’s in the room again, she sees immediately. Only this time there isn’t a feeling like she’s been there for a long time and just can’t remember it. This time she’s standing on the windowsill like she climbed in.
Laurel flips through a magazine on the same pouf chair, in a Starling City Comets baseball tee and loose sweatpants.
Her grin is blinding when she looks up and spots Felicity. “There you are! I thought you were avoiding me.”
Felicity can’t make her mouth form words. “Uh…”
Laurel jumps to her feet and crosses the room by parkouring over the bed. She grabs Felicity’s hand and it—it feels so real and warm. “Well, c’mon, don’t be shy. Let me see them.”
“See what?” Felicity asks, and Laurel gives her a strange look.
“See what?” Laurel echoes. “You’ve been working on them forever. I’m just sorry it took me so long to get you the feathers—”
And it clicks in Felicity’s mind that something’s moving at the edges of her vision. She turns her head.
A pair of wings engulf her vision, ten feet tall and stretching out from her shoulder blades. Wings. Just like the ones she built on her wall, only these rustle with life, each feather perfect. Felicity reaches out in wonder, her fingers brushing lightly over the tips of the feathers she’s spent hours—days—weeks staring at.
“You don’t remember,” Laurel says quietly, sliding one finger down a longer feather near Felicity’s shoulder.
Felicity can shake her head. That touch seems to shiver through her very core.
“You built these.” Laurel’s voice contains an odd mixture of sadness and pride. “Because we never have enough time. It’s the only way to get to me faster. You’ve been working on them for months, whenever you come see me here.”
“Where—where is ‘here’?” Felicity asks, hysteria rising in her voice.
“It’s where I’m needed.” Laurel squeezes her hand. “For now.”
“Is this real?”
“I ask myself the same thing every day. Yes, I think. Or at least I hope it is.” Laurel’s smile turns sad. “I’d hate to think that the place where someone loves me enough to build wings to come see me is only a figment of my imagination.”
“I…”
But a sound of fighting from somewhere beyond the room makes Laurel turn away. When she turns back, she’s in her uniform and mask, her tonfa flush against her forearm. “I have to go,” she says, and to Felicity’s shock, she leans forward and kisses her.
It’s perfect and sweet and over too soon, as Laurel runs for the door. Before she disappears, though, she winks over her shoulder at Felicity. “They really do look great,” she says, and runs out.
Felicity tries to chase after her, but the room swirls into mist, leaving her dangling above gray nothingness with her wings beating. And though she flies around for hours, she doesn’t find Laurel again.
She wakes with the memory of that kiss and that wink on her mind. Was it real? She can’t tell. She has no choice but to keep living her life while she tries to figure that out.
But in her dreams?
In her dreams she soars.