Chapter Text
It had been hours since the very dangerous "ghost" of Oliver's past had shown himself. Slade Wilson - his mentor, his brother, his biggest regret. Oliver had never truly forgiven himself for Slade's demise. Of course now he knows that Slade survived - it doesn't alleviate the guilt. And now it seems that Slade is still changed from the drug being injected. The Mirakuru. Oliver has to admit to himself at least, that he is terrified. Slade was a worthy opponent before the injection. Now? He may be unstoppable. How can Oliver protect his loved ones - Thea, Walter, Tommy, Diggle - Felicity.
Felicity and Diggle had watched Oliver shutting down, internalizing everything. Forgetting that he has a team. She is terrified that he is going to start pushing them away - reverting back to when he first started his mission. Seeing Oliver so freaked out, Felicity starts doing what she does best - jumping down the rabbit hole - or the internet. Working on finding any intel on Slade Wilson - where he's been, where he is and what he wants.
Oliver was currently patrolling, more like looking for a fight. Anything to help temper the rage and unrest inside. Just when things were going well with Felicity, when they were rebuilding the city, along comes Slade to tear it all apart. And Oliver knows that he will. Oliver knows that he needs to tell Felicity and Diggle the story, prepare them. He just doesn't know how - how to tell them what a horrible person he was. What he did.
In the Queen Mansion "Bunker", Felicity and Diggle are scouring leads for where Slade might be hiding. Felicity knows that Slade must be dangerous, but she is not certain how dangerous or what he is capable of. The uncertainty makes her nervous, which throws her deeper into her world of circuits, wires, ones and zeros. Where she has control, where she is the dangerous one. As she runs more security diagnostics she has Diggle out placing more cameras both throughout the house and throughout the grounds. She hated the idea of a surprise visit. If any of the cameras goes offline for any reason, she will receive an alert. Of course they were pretty small and nondescript. You would have to really be looking for them in order to see them. After placing all the cameras, Diggle comes back in and watches as Felicity brings up all of the cameras, setting them to record, saving them to the cloud storage to be reviewed later if needed. She will have to write some code to look for certain things in the camera feeds as she knows there is no way they can watch all of the cameras 24/7.
Diggle had to admit that he was impressed with Felicity's thought process through this. She would have made a hell of an intelligence agent in the military. Except for her compassion, empathy and the fact she has a soul. Looking through the feeds with her, he knows that they are woefully unprepared until Oliver comes back and tells them the story - he knows there is a story. Dig understands the Oliver is needing time to process this and he knows that Oliver's way of processing is to fight. He would have liked to have gone out with Oliver, patrolling the streets, but he did not want to leave the house unprotected, didn't want to leave Felicity unprotected.
Working with the new cameras, Felicity's fingers were flying over keys, getting everything online. She couldn't help but think that Oliver had really closed himself off from the mansion and it's inhabitants. It would have been helpful for him to be there, telling them what they were dealing with, telling them why Slade was targeting him. She hated being blind in this situation. Preparing but not knowing for what. "UGH!" Felicity exclaimed, "this is so frustrating!"
Diggle patted her shoulder, "be patient, you know Oliver needs some time to process everything, work it out, hit something or someone. He'll be back and we will find out what's going on and what we need to be prepared for."
"I know Dig. I just feel like time is not on our side. We are already at a disadvantage as Slade is several steps ahead of us." Scouring the feeds, Felicity had found that Slade had been watching almost since Oliver had first arrived back in Starling City. He had been doing business with Malcolm Merlyn, mostly as an investor. Which meant that Slade was obviously well off and had to ability to set himself up well- making it harder to locate him. So far she had been unable to locate where Slade has been hiding. In the meantime, Oliver is out "processing", Tommy is at Merlyn Global working on righting his father's wrongs and Thea and Roy were working on getting the club reopened. Leaving Felicity there to worry. Especially as Tommy still had not broken things off completely with Laurel and in light of everything going on, Felicity understood really, that there were many more important things going on right now. But, her insecurities still rose to the top, leaving her uncertain as to the status of their relationship.
As Felicity continued to work on all things cyber, Diggle went old school, grabbing pen and paper and working on lists of items to stock in all panic rooms/bunkers. In the event that Slade Wilson brought war to their city, they would be able to survive it. Or at least some of them. The two teammates worked quietly together, comfortably, when suddenly Felicity's systems began blaring with alerts - someone had made it onto the grounds.