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Felix Smoak is not an idiot. He really isn't. He graduated top of his class at MIT. He was recruited by Queen Consolidated before he graduated. He is not an idiot. He just has a tendency to babble when he's around beautiful and intimidating women.
Which, in retrospect, probably bodes ill for his new night job.
It starts with Olivia Queen barging into his office with a megawatt smile and a laptop that is clearly riddled with bullets. It goes downhill from there.
Somehow the painfully obvious lies and almost but not quite amused smiles lead to him finding her bleeding in the back of his car and wearing a green hood. To be honest, he thinks he handles the whole thing pretty well, between driving her, not to a hospital, but to the basement of an unopened nightclub in the Glades, and being almost shot by her beautiful and terrifying bodyguard.
And sure, he says that finding Walter is the only reason he’s staying, and it is one of the reasons, but he finds himself. . . enchanted is the word that springs to mind. He’s never found his work boring, but he’s also never hacked into police servers and fought criminals.
And so he stays. He puts up with the new terse Olivia, because the flirting and obvious lies were clearly not a part of the Team Arrow package.
He finds a purpose there, and he can’t really bring himself to regret any of it, even when Joan is pushing him out of an airplane, even when he’s stuck floundering as an executive assistant, with Isaac Rochev shooting him daggers from those dead shark eyes of his.
But things start to go bad, and no one can figure out who’s pulling the strings. Even he can’t track them down, and they’re all on edge. Olivia starts going through tennis balls at an alarming rate and even Joan, whose calm he came to appreciate soon after joining the team, is starting to look a little frayed around the edges. Tommy, who usually only drops down into the basement to make Katniss jokes and make sure Olivia isn’t bleeding to death, starts to spend more time looking over Felix's shoulder and Felix hadn’t even thought the guy was capable of looking anything but relaxed. Even Sam is back in town, and the guy is straight up running from ninjas, so if he’s worried about Starling City, there’s probably something to worry about, and it’s just all very stressful.
And then it breaks. There’s a woman on the tv, it doesn’t matter what station, because they’re all hijacked, and she’s asking for the Arrow. She’s Australian and she has an eyepatch and a silver streak in her hair and she’s asking the Arrow to unmask herself onstage at the Queen Consolidated gala that night and if she doesn’t want to do that, well, there are plenty of people who might be able to convince her, and then she brings out her hostage, and it’s Thea.
And Felix tries to trace the signal, he really does, but it’s bouncing all over the place and Olivia’s gone upstairs to get a water when he finally finds it. He bursts upstairs to let her know that it’s ok only to find she’s already left.