Archive of Our Own ^beta

Oliver shouldn’t be here. It’s foolish for anyone who serves Fear, even reluctantly, to get too close to the Archivist. She’s a very dangerous woman.

But sometimes the dreams are simply too intense, too compelling, to be ignored. Oliver doesn’t have a lot of cash going spare, but he managed to get a nearly affordable flight to the USA and find his way to a hospital in Pittsburgh. The veins had led him unerringly up stairs and through corridors until he’d found himself at Gerard Keay’s bedside.

He knows Gerard doesn’t have long left. Minutes. And he knows that he won’t wake up again before he slips away into the warm embrace of death. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have someone with him, and it seems that the Archivist won’t be doing the job.

Oliver takes Gerard’s hand. It’s thin and limp, the eye tattoos on his knuckles standing out sharp against his waxen skin. He gives no sign that he’s aware of Oliver’s presence, although his head is so thickly wound about with the veins of death that perhaps Oliver wouldn’t be able to tell.

Sometimes Oliver tries to warn them. When the dreams are particularly intense or the same one comes back again and again. Perhaps if he’d been able to find Gerard earlier, he might have tried to warn him, too. But it seldom goes well. He can’t be sure, but he doesn’t believe he’s managed to prevent a single person’s death. He doesn’t understand what the point of the dreams is. All he knows is that he wants to escape them, and he can’t. Wherever he goes, the dreams are there.

He thinks, sometimes, that it all might be easier if he understood why. Why Oliver? Why the dreams? Why know people are going to die, if he can’t prevent it? And why does it all feel so dreadfully right?

Oliver doesn’t have any answers. He simply survives, as best he can, and when the veins urge him to some course of action, he follows it, because it feels too wrong not to.

Gerard is barely breathing. The moment is coming closer, and closer, and then, between one laboured, almost silent breath and the next, it’s here.

Oliver lets go of his hand. He’s never touched a corpse, and he doesn’t want to. He feels Gerard’s death just the same. His chest goes still and the veins fade away as though they were never there, revealing Gerard’s face, slack and still, his eyes open just the narrowest crack. Oliver wonders whether Gerard knew he was there.

Probably not.

Still, Oliver waits until he hears someone coming to check on Gerard, and then he slips away. He wonders whether, one day, he’ll understand what the point of the veins is, of his knowledge of people’s deaths. He wonders whether it will all make sense, and if, when it does, that will make any difference at all.

Under cover of darkness, Oliver Banks walks away from the hospital without any more answers than he had when he entered.