Felicity liked to think the last 18 months had taught her a great number of lessons. One of the more useful ones was "Always be aware of your surroundings". In her pre-Oliver life (she thinks of things these days as pre-Oliver and post-Oliver) she would often find herself paying little attention to anything apart from what was currently in her line of vision. It was great when you're trying to reverse engineer the newest smart phone (a girl has to have her fun). But not so great when there were people actively trying to kill you.

At least she was pretty sure (100% sure actually) someone was actively trying to kill her, she was the only known associate of the vigilante (she was so sick of that word) ever identified by the police, it wasn't a huge stretch of the imagination that there would be people looking to "speak" with her. She'd been doing a lot of thinking of her own in the last three months, and no matter which way around she thought or what she said to convince herself she didn't think Malcolm Merlyn's death was the end of "The Undertaking" (she always saw it in italics in her head when she thought it).

It started six weeks ago, at least she thought it did. She would be lying if she didn't admit to at least herself the previous eight weeks had been spent being preoccupied with hating Oliver for leaving and in equal measure missing him more than she thought possible. It didn't help her state of mind that while Diggle would check on her safety several times a week and stay for hours drinking coffee or beer in her kitchen (even though she told him she didn't need babysat) he didn't seem to actually want to talk about what had happened.

After she spent one Tuesday evening after he left on WebMD and Wikipedia diagnosing him with PSTD she realized that maybe she wasn't the only who was suffering and she made more of an effort to get over Oliver Queen. He wasn't the most important man in the Universe and based on the way he had behaved she couldn't even afford to make him the most important man in her Universe. She started seeking John and Carly out, making an effort to leave her apartment for something other than work.

She realized something else? It worked. She was moving on, or at least until people started trying to kill her.

It started innocently enough, she was walking to the parking lot two blocks from her office at Queen Consolidated (no more parking garages for her, thank you) and she looked both ways and started to cross a street when out of no where a car careens around the corner straight at her. If a random stranger hadn't pulled her out of harm's way she'd have been a Felicity Pancake.

Well, if she was being honest the man who pulled her out of harm's way no longer qualified as a random (though still a stranger) as he'd been at the scene of several more of her "close scrapes". She never got a good look at him though, all dark shadows and her trying not to hyperventilate from the near death experiences.

After the third "accident" where it was clear her break lines had been cut (the second being an attempted mugging Mr. Dark and Mysterious had stopped) she decided she wasn't going to keep playing the damsel in distress, she didn't need a new hero to come in and save her. She knew the man wasn't Oliver; she knew well and good exactly where Oliver was and it wasn't here to save her from the bogey-men. She was perfectly capable of saving herself.

She decided she'd be her own hero, she may not be able to go all "grrr...you've failed this city" but she could do more with computers than most people could imagine. She moved back into the lair under Verdant, upgrading the computers. With Oliver missing, no one was interested in the empty building anyway. Her intentions had been to keep herself under 24 hour surveillance so she could find out what in the hell was happening to her and once she figured it out she'd make sure someone paid. If in the mean time she committed a little hacking here and there to bring ruin to a few names that may or may not have been in the book it didn't matter. That was just busy work, figuring out who was trying to kill her was the important stuff.

The "accidents" continued and she'd review the footage over and over again but for some reason each time she was in clear site of danger all the CCTV footage would die, static. She knew static like that didn't just happen and it wasn't a coincidence and it was frustrating. In desperation she turned to John, who was livid she'd not told him before. He railed into her and she'd been expecting it and knew she deserved it so she let him. He told her he'd help her and that they'd figure it out as he gave her one of his "I'm the big brother and I'll take care of it" hugs.

That night, she thought that was that; he'd show up at the Foundry in the morning and they'd tackle this by themselves. But at 4 AM she got a text

"This is his fault Felicity, you have to bring him home."

And so she did.