Felicity had missed her husband's scars. More specifically, she had missed her ritual of tracing over them with her touch, feeling them beneath her fingertips as she made a path from one to the next, following the roadmap of his pain that she'd become familiar with over the years. Lying in bed beside him for the first time in six months, she ached to trace that path again.

Oliver was lying on his side, his back to her. Felicity reached out and placed her fingertips over the spot on his left shoulder where his dragon tattoo used to be. There was a faint white scar there, barely visible against the tan of his skin, probably the only one he had that hadn't come from excruciating pain. She let her fingers rest there for a moment, then dragged them slowly to the right, to the first of those scars, a long thin slash mark that started near the top of his shoulder and ended below his shoulder blade. As she brushed her fingers down its length, she recalled the story Oliver had told her of how he had gotten it- from a Bratva initiation ritual where you gave a knife to the men you would call your brothers and turned your back to them, trusting them not to stab you in it. From there, she moved upward, over the slope of Oliver's shoulder and into the hollow between his shoulder blades, coming to a stop on the lash marks on his right shoulder. Her touch left a trail of goosebumps in its wake. This was clearly an unconscious reaction, as Oliver was still soundly asleep, but it nevertheless gave Felicity a thrill to see that she could still elicit it, even after all of this time.

Pausing only for a moment, Felicity resumed her ritual, running a fingertip down the first of the lash marks, then horizontally along the one that intersected it, then down again along the last one, marking out something almost like some kind of twisted tic tac toe board. As with the slash mark on his opposite shoulder, she remembered the story that came with it- a cruel, archaic punishment that had been inflicted on Oliver for perceived misdeeds back when he'd been working undercover for Amanda Waller, though thankfully not by Waller herself, as that would have been brutal even for her. Both stories sent chills down Felicity's spine at the sheer barbarism of the acts contained within them. And speaking of barbarism...her fingers drifted downward to Oliver's League brand, tracing over the outline of its familiar arrowhead shape once, then twice, then three times before she moved on, following the curve of Oliver's spine downwards, hovering for a moment on the mark left by Ra's Al Ghul's sword before coming to a halt on the burn scar across his lower back, lingering on its twisting, ropy shape.

Oliver's hand reached out and grabbed her wrist, halting her fingers in their motion over his scar.

"I'm sorry," Felicity whispered.

"You don't need to apologize," Oliver murmured, letting go of her wrist and rolling over to face her. "I didn't stop you because I didn't like what you were doing."

"Then why…?" Felicity asked, leaving half of her sentence unsaid.

"Because there's something I need you to hear," Oliver replied. With a sigh, he shifted in the bed, settling into a more comfortable position. After a moment of silence, he said, "When I decided to come home, I went back to Lian Yu."

"Because you knew you would need a plausible explanation for where you'd been for the last five years," Felicity said, thinking out loud. Oliver nodded.

"While I was there, I…" he went on, trailing off for a moment as he became lost in memories of past pain, "... I was tortured, by a man named Kovar. He injected me with this drug that made me relive the pain of every wound I'd ever suffered, like they were new again."

"Oh, Oliver," Felicity breathed, reaching out and brushing a hand over one of the scars on his arm, hoping her touch could erase the memory of his pain. Much of Oliver's five years in hell had come to light over the last seven years, but that story was one she'd never heard. "I'm so sorry." Oliver's shoulder lifted in a halfhearted shrug, dismissing his own suffering as had become all too familiar.

"When you touch my scars," he said, "it's like the opposite of what Kovar did to me. When you touch my scars, you take the pains of those wounds away, a little at a time." Felicity felt her breath catch in the back of her throat. All this time, she'd been performing this ritual of mapping Oliver's scars for her own benefit, to remind herself of everything he had endured, everything he had survived, how lucky she was to have him. She'd had no idea that it meant so much to him.

"What made you decide to tell me this now?" she asked.

"When I was in Slabside, I missed that ritual of yours," Oliver replied, referring to what she'd been doing when he'd awoken. The pain in his voice was still sharp edged and raw- after all, he'd still been in Slabside less than twenty-four hours ago. "And I needed you to know what it means to me." Felicity was silent for a long time, keenly aware of the way Oliver's words seemed to hang in the air, heavy with the weight of half a year of traumas that he'd struggled through alone, without anyone to lean on, not even her. Felicity had her own traumas from the last six months, and she was struggling to formulate a response to Oliver's that wouldn't reveal hers. She didn't want to burden him with them. Not now. Not so soon.

"Thank you for sharing that with me," she finally said, the right words coming to her at last. "All this time, I've been doing that for my own benefit. I didn't know it meant so much to you."
"Now you know," Oliver whispered. He pulled her close to him, tangling his fingers in her hair and pressing a long, lingering kiss against her forehead, his eyes squeezed shut as if to hold back a rising tide of painful memories. Felicity lay still for a moment, then dropped her head downward toward Oliver's shoulder, pressing a kiss of her own against the half-moon shaped scar just above his collarbone, the one she considered to be the start of their story.

"I hope someday I can wipe away every last memory of your pain," she whispered against his skin.