Reviction

Oliver has the decency to wait until the nurses have left the hospital room before ripping the IV out of his arm, holding pressure to it with the paper towel he took out of the bathroom earlier. The bleeding in his arm stops fairly quickly, and he sits there a moment longer, trying to figure out where the hell the ICU is. It's been a long time since he's been to Starling General, and he's certainly never been to ICU. He thinks it's probably going to start an uproar when they find him gone on rounds in two hours, but it can't be helped—he told them not to put him in an entirely different unit from her, but they thought he was hysterical and didn't listen.

While he waits for his arm to stop bleeding, he thinks about the way the doctors and nurses fretted around him, asking questions about his many injuries, about how he managed to get to Hong Kong in the first place. At that point, though, he wasn't in the mood to answer questions—not when they were ignoring his. It had occurred to him then that this was precisely why he never wanted to come back to Starling City—too many questions about where he'd been and his injuries.

Then that damned lightning bolt had set the forest on fire and she'd managed to get caught in it, and he'd decided that he wasn't going to watch anyone else die from gangrene and third degree burns.

Oliver shakes his head, making his way out of the room they gave him and following the signs to intensive care, thinking again how the hell he'd managed to get to this point. It had all started with the boat; his father had wanted to go to Beijing to check on some business interests, and the boat had seemed like an interesting option. Oliver had needed a break from Laurel—and some time with Sara—so he had decided to go on board with his father and the girl he was grooming to be his business protégé.

Until that point, Oliver had only heard the name Felicity Smoak, and he was surprised to see she was everything he thought she wasn't. At first he had taken her to have a superior attitude like the last one (Isabel, he vaguely remembers the name) and only wanting to share in the Queen family power—or screw around with his father; Oliver was never blind to Robert's faults—but then she had started to talk, and Oliver realized she was only trying to keep herself from saying all the things she was thinking (because when Felicity started talking, she started talking).

All it took was two seconds with her while Sara was on the deck to find out she was precisely all the things his father had said, while still managing to have a sunny personality and a deflated ego. She'd kicked his ass at blackjack (which was accompanied by a story about how she card-counted the Mirage out of the money that later paid for her college tuition at MIT, without being caught), and, for once, she'd treated him like an adult instead of the spoiled brat he was back then. For some reason, it drew him back, and, in one short week at sea, Felicity Smoak had become a friend.

And then the shipwreck had happened.

He can't bring himself to think about the events that pulled them both to Lian Yu, but he remembers the dread of knowing that both of them were going to starve on that goddamn island together—he didn't know how to save them, and Felicity wasn't exactly a survival expert, either. But she'd surprised him by taking up the mantle to bury his father's body, to take the book from his pocket and save it in her own overcoat. While Oliver had been mourning, Felicity had been the logical, rational one who took action, who was determined to keep them alive while Oliver had accepted his fate.

He finally finds the intensive care ward, and the glass windows streamline the process of finding her. He expects it to be bad, but, other than the morphine pump and the heart monitor, she seems to be doing as well as can be expected. Oliver breathes a sigh of relief; his fears had run away with him over the last few hours, and part of him had expected a ventilator and the like, even though he knows there is absolutely no reason for it.