#chucklicity

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” She made a half-hearted attempt to fix her hair, as she’d been subconsciously fiddling with her ponytail while coding, as she trotted down the hallway. Barry and Iris had already gathered at the front window, where Barry’s old battered menorah had been set up. He’d picked bright red candles this year to match his customary lightning hoodie, which was nowhere to be seen.

“You’re not ready either,” Felicity said, as Barry was still pulling on his kippah. “I don’t see why you’re giving me such a hard time.”

“Because it’s fun,” Barry said.

Iris pulled Felicity into a hug. “Happy Hannukah. Don’t worry, I wouldn’t have let him start without you.”

“Would’ve served you right, though,” Barry said, giving Felicity a hug, too. His phone dinged. “And there it is: sunset. My turn to go first this year?”

Felicity gestured at him to have at it, standing back with her hands folded in front of her as the Shamash was lit. Though she and her mother rarely sang the prayer, the Allens had apparently insisted on it, so she sang along as first the center candle and then the first candle were lit. She watched the flames flicker against the dark glass beyond, facing their courtyard, her chest aching a little. She might not get on well with her mother all the time, but every time they lit the menorah, she remembered being little and watching transfixed as Donna told her all about what the candles meant.

Barry took a step back once he’d lit the candle and surveyed his handiwork. “It always looks a little lonely out there by itself,” he said, setting the matches on the ledge by the menorah. He wrapped an arm around Iris’s shoulders. “Of course, by the eighth night, it’s a fire hazard so…”

“That was one time,” Felicity said. “And your dorm room was completely fine.”

Barry grinned at her to take the sting out of his joke.

“And besides, I plan to steer well clear of it anyway,” Felicity said. “I’ve already had, like, three close calls with fire today. Curtis tried to put all of the Buy More Christmas trees on the same circuit, exactly the same as he did last year. This time we didn’t have to call the fire department because Walter anticipated him and flipped all the breakers, which set all the registers offline and they called the Nerd Herd to help out. Oy.”

Iris gave her an amused look. “Any time you want to escape that place and come work with me at the paper, just let me know. I will totally get our current IT dude fired.”

“Thanks,” Felicity said, like she always did.

In truth, she didn’t know why she didn’t take Iris up on the offer. Well, besides guilt. She didn’t want somebody to get fired because of her, for one thing. And really, the Buy More might be annoying and occasionally fraught with fire hazards, but it had become comfortable and home, just like Barry and Iris’s apartment had. “I’ll just stay for a little while, while I get back on my feet,” Felicity had said.

Five years after MIT, here she still was. But Barry and Iris repeatedly told her they loved having her around and some days, Felicity could almost believe them.

They moved away from the windowsill now, Felicity collecting up the shopping bag. “What time are the others getting here?”

“Cisco gets off at six and he’s the last one, so I think we’ll eat around seven,” Iris said. “Linda sent me a recipe for healthier latkes, but they looked disgusting, so if anybody asks I didn’t see the email. My phone must be broken or something.”

“Got it,” Barry said, shooting finger guns at his girlfriend as he hopped the counter to grab beers from the fridge. “Though what’ll we say when she asks why Felicity hasn’t fixed your phone yet?”

“Lie,” Iris said, and Barry and Felicity laughed.

They sat on the living room floor like children rather than the mid-twenty-somethings they’d become. Iris’s full time job at the paper didn’t pay much, and Felicity’s work at the Buy More barely meant she was able to make the rent she insisted on paying herself, so they’d agreed early on to set a price cap—which of course all three of them ignored. In Felicity’s defense, she had a really nice discount at the Buy More. It was easy to ignore the way her credit card had smoked a little buying the foot spa for Iris when Iris hugged it to her chest in glee now. And Barry immediately insisted on dueling against her in the karaoke game she’d programmed for him—until Iris roped both of them into helping her with dinner.

The menorah still burned brightly a few hours later when their friends—well, Barry and Iris’s friends, but Felicity liked them well enough—piled in for latkes and donuts. They played dreidl, but only after Cisco insisted on looking up the official rules (“Ha, like you’ll get anybody to agree on something like ‘official,’” Barry had said) before the gelt was brought in, on account that Barry had spent at least two years in college scamming all of his friends out of their chocolate. By the time they played poker with their chocolate winnings, Felicity was feeling a little overfull from the greasy food and the beer, and she’d laughed more than she had in over a month.

It was times like these that she could forget she was a college dropout working a dead-end job, all because her roommate had once betrayed her.

Their friends trickled out, as everybody had to work the next day, toting Tupperware containers of leftover food at Iris’s insistence. Felicity promised Linda that she would indeed fix Iris’s phone—sharing an amused look with her friend as she did so—and waved the last of them off with a yawn.

“We’ll clean up,” Barry said as Felicity headed to the kitchen.

“What? No, you got all the food for tonight, I thought the deal was I’d do the dishes.”

“They made you close and then open right in a row. You’re dead on your feet. Go get some sleep,” Iris said, giving Felicity another hug. “We’ll get the candles before we go to bed.”

“I swear, you almost burn down a building once,” Felicity griped with a grin, but she allowed herself to be shooed away.

Night mask on, teeth brushed, she stopped by her laptop to make sure her code was still compiling safely. She’d left her phone in her room out of respect for the holiday, but it wasn’t like she had that many emails, not when most of her friends had been with them all night for the feast.

Still, a single email made her blink. She’d forgotten she even had that account, as it mostly just gathered spam that it auto-filtered away. Puzzled, she clicked the icon on her computer and brought it up.

From: [email protected]

Subject: Fwd: Happy Chanukah

Felicity’s entire body went cold for a second. She hadn’t heard from Sara in five years—and the woman was reaching out now? To wish her a Happy Hannukah? After the number of times she’d been lectured about how “No, it’s not Jewish Christmas, it’s just a minor holiday that got, like, promoted because it’s around Christmas, there are other holidays that are so much more important” so many times?

And, oh, right, after she’d stabbed Felicity in the back and had gotten her kicked out of college and had derailed her whole life?

Curiosity made Felicity click the email before she could think better of it. The body of the email was so perfectly, typically Sara that Felicity almost smiled and rolled her eyes before she remembered the aforementioned backstabbing.

Two candles away on a little, glitchy gif of a menorah in the email. Sara hadn’t bothered with salutations or farewells, simply typing “remember this? :)” And attached was a file: sara_and_felicitys_awesome_adventure.zrk.

“Oh my god,” Felicity said, blinking at the attachment. She’d thought that file was lost to the ether. She’d had a copy herself—they’d spent so many nights programming that game, dammit, that even if she had mixed feelings about Sara, she was proud of her work—but that hard drive had been fried ages ago. Eagerly, she clicked it.

The same nostalgic feeling that had flooded her at the candle lighting hit her solidly in the chest now as the screen went black. Words scrolled across:

The Terrible Troll Raises His Sword

Sara wanted to play a game? Was this her way of apologizing? Maybe there was something else to it. Frowning, Felicity searched her memory. Had it been the elvish sword to kill the troll? No, in their version, they’d decided on the nasty knife.

“The knife gets you closer,” Sara had said, her bright teeth flashing in a grin. “Really lets you feel that kill, you know?”

Felicity had protested—no way was she getting near a troll—but in the end, Sara had won that argument. With a shrug, she typed Attack Troll with Nasty Knife and hit enter.

The screen went black.

“Well, that’s weird,” Felicity said. Maybe the code had been broken, or Sara had done something to it. She reached for her mouse, ready to fix the problem, when a truly bizarre image flashed across her screen of a captive man whose eyelid was being forced open. What had Sara sent her? Felicity froze as the images continued to change, speeding by in a random cycle so fast that she couldn’t look away. Her mind grew distant, the deluge of sheer color and pattern and sound battering against her brain, leaving her helpless to look away.