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How Felicity and Tommy can be friends in Once More
So, for all the curious readers out there, here are my reasons for why their friendship could have existed off-screen:
1. Season 1 focused on Oliver almost singularly. Any scenes not of him were integral to the plot or focused on Laurel Lance, which gave us a peek into her romance with Tommy Merlyn but not much else.
2. Felicity wasn’t a main character, so our knowledge of her backstory is non-existent. Even in season 4 to date, we still have no idea why she chose a low-level IT job in Starling. For me, a close friend in Starling seemed like a good reason for her to pick that city over another one.
3. The screenshot of Felicity’s number in Tommy’s phone. I’m a fangirl and I believe they would be friends, so I capitalized on an opportunity. *shrugs* It happens.
4. Tommy knew Oliver logged into his email from China. How did he know that? Well, I just decided to have a little fun with those answers.
5. Oliver is completely self-involved and mission-oriented in season 1. Even once Digg and Felicity join his crusade, his focus is singularly on stopping the Undertaking and checking names off his list. He wouldn’t have noticed a friendship at all, even if it were important enough to document in the TV show.
Additionally, this is how I could see their friendship existing inside actual cannon:
1. Events of “Do I Look Like a Barista to You?” up to Part IV.
2. Felicity starts to grow apart from Tommy: he’s spending more time between wooing Laurel, and getting reacquainted with his best friend. She doesn’t blame him for spending less time with her, but the realization that their relationship has shifted prompts her to start exploring more job options.
3. Tommy gets swept up in his new job managing Verdant. For once, it’s something he’s actually excited about doing. He still talks to Felicity, but now it’s once a week over coffee or on a weekend movie night.
4. Just as she’s kicking off her job search, Walter comes to Felicity for help looking into some matters. Sure, she’s looking into leaving QC, but she still knows she’s an asset to QC. And maybe she’s channeling some of that pent-up frustration into her rant as she enters Mr. Steele’s office. And the problem he presents her with intrigues her, almost as much as the prodigal son coming to her with increasingly ridiculous excuses.
5. Things with Laurel are going great (finally) and Tommy’s preoccupied with everything going on in his life, that Felicity starts to slip a little further away: a cancelled lunch date, a missed phone call, no more surprise visits. He went from having one really good friend to having a returned brother, a new job, and a beautiful girlfriend. And Felicity is just as busy. Their schedules never seem to line up, so it’s forgivable that they’re going longer and longer without talking...right?
6. Felicity starts working with Oliver in the Lair and forgets about the job offers that have started coming in. It’s not that she’s not interested in the better pay, but the positions aren’t that much better than what she has at QC, and she’s attached to the people here, the city. Sure, it’s not Tommy’s friendship keeping here. No, now it’s Walter’s, John’s, Oliver’s, and the lives that they’re saving. They save people. She’s actively making a difference and that’s something she’s never had before. She’s challenging herself and finally, finally doing something that requires all her skills. And that is worth more than a bigger check somewhere else. It’s worth all the menial tasks and sexist comments at work, especially when she finally sees Walter reunited with his family.
7. Tommy and Felicity only run into each other at Verdant once, which is remarkable when you think about it. She had just finished up a longer-than-usual (read: an all-nighter) fixing up her gadgets in the basement and he was coming in to receive a shipment that apparently “couldn’t be pushed any later”. He wonders why she’s there. He knows it isn’t her scene and she just babbles something about missing him and possibly hacking in to see when he was going to be here. It sounds a little fishy, but Tommy lets it go because he’s happy to see her. She waits for him to unload the truck, talking the whole time as she catches him up on some work shenanigans – avoiding the big, green secret in the basement – and then they go out for coffee before parting ways to go about their normal lives.
8. Tommy’s life starts to fall apart soon after that. Laurel is keeping secrets, he finds out Oliver’s the vigilante, and his father is still acting like his father (which is to say a jerk). He can feel his life crashing in a downward spiral and he wants to reach out to the one person he knows will listen to him and talk him through anything. So he calls Felicity.
9. Felicity knows what’s going on with Tommy...vaguely and only through Oliver’s grumbled explanations which she pries out of him after some very worrying texts and voicemails from Tommy. She doesn’t want to get in the middle of their weird love triangle. She was over those well before Twilight. She wants them to deal with it, but until then, she meets up with Tommy whenever their new schedules will allow it. Since he’s actually working a 9-5 job, it gets a lot easier to plan lunch meetings.
10. Tommy comes to her after he sees Oliver and Laurel through the window. He doesn’t explain anything: he just shows up at her door in the middle of the night with an open bottle of wine and a pint of mint chip. She just lets him and they get drunk while watching cheesy romcoms.
11. Felicity leaves before he wakes up the next morning. She makes it through a whole day of work before she gets arrested and then it the world ends. Well, it doesn’t actually ends, but it kind of feels like it’s going to in the Glades with the threat of the Undertaking looming over them. As they race to stop it, Felicity misses the texts she gets from Tommy.
12. Tommy’s 98% sure Felicity’s nowhere near the Glades so he’s not too worried about her. But he’s 100% sure Laurel’s still in CNRI. He knows it’s a risk going there, but there’s no choice to make. He’s been in love with Laurel far longer than he’ll even admit to himself, and he can’t just walk away when she needs him, even if she’s crushed his heart. In the end, knowing that she’s safe is enough that he slips into that eternal sleep without regrets.
13. Hearing Tommy’s last words over the comms are the worst moments of Felicity’s life. She breaks down right there in the Foundry with the world shaking around her and debris falling from the ceiling. When the tears dry up enough for her to see the computers in front of her, Felicity disconnects the comms before curling herself into a ball on her chair and crying all over again. She knows he would be happy Laurel’s alive, yet she can’t help but curse his good heart for trying to rescue a woman who spurned him. She can’t deny she would do the same thing for someone she loved. Hell, she might even do that for a perfect stranger. That was what Team Arrow did, after all. She might only work the computers, but she was part of the team. She just can’t believe her best friend is dead.
14. Felicity stands next to Oliver at the funeral. He’s too wrapped up in his own grief to see hers, too stuck in his own doubts and self-recrimination to notice he’s not the only one who lost their best friend. She knows before he leaves a couple days later that he’s planning on running. She knows because that’s what she did once upon a time after Cooper’s death. She ran to someone familiar: Tommy. It took his familiar presence to make sense of what had happened. So she vows to do that for Oliver. She’ll let him have this. She’ll let him grieve in his own way until she’s fixed the basement of Verdant. That’s his deadline. And then she’s bringing him home. Because this city still needs them. And she’s not giving up on it just yet.