“I love you,” Oliver mumbled into Felipe’s damp hair.
“I love you too. You all right?”
“Mostly.”
“I’m sure working with Ansley can’t be easy for you.”
Oliver released a sigh. “It isn’t Ansley. Well, notjustAnsley. He’s an ass, but I can deal with him if I have to.”
“Then, what’s bothering you?” Felipe asked, rolling over to face Oliver. “Specifically.”
For a long moment, Oliver merely held his gaze with a frown before looking away and threading his fingers with Felipe’s. “Many things. I don’t want to go to the Green Daisy. I don’t want to speak to Dr. Yates again. I don’t even want to think about doing any of those things right now, but...” He drew in a long breath. “I hate going to hospitals, and this was close enough. It reminds me too much of why I stopped being a doctor and what I left behind when I did.”
“Why did you stop? When I see you help Gwen with her asthma, you seem like a natural.”
“It’s different with Gwen, and I could deal with the patients, for the most part. People want to get better, even if they don’t want to see a doctor. It was everything else that was difficult. I was good at getting to the bottom of what was wrong. The learning and discovering part was what I enjoyed. If you are a good doctor, people are willing to overlook if you’re a tad brusque or cold.”
“But?”
“But you’re taught to act like an authority, to be unquestionable, in order to create distance. I didn’t like that. It didn’t make sense to me. A patient lives in their body; I don’t. I can’t tell them what they do or don’t feel, but we were expected to. They wanted us to treat patients the same as we did the cadavers in the lab, which was hard enough for me because I could learn their names and all about their lives if I asked. I understood the de-personalization to some extent. To acknowledge that you’re holding dozens of people’s lives in your hands at one time is terrifying, and if you were to worry about every choice you made while someone’s life hangs in the balance, you would freeze up. I managed to do it, for a time. I made it through college and most of my residency before I cracked,” Oliver replied, his voice thick.
Felipe gave his hands a comforting squeeze before it all tumbled out.
“It started with a patient who was dying, though you wouldn’t have known it from looking at her. Her husband didn’t want to tell her, and we weren’t supposed to go against his wishes. I kept thinking, if I was dying, I would want to know. She deserved to know and decide for herself what her remaining life should look like. Dead people regret not knowing it was coming, not the other way around, but I couldn’t tell anyone that. It upset me. I must have started letting my guard down more or,” Oliver paused as if searching for the right words, “something that happened made it harder to keep it up because I started noticing things I hadn’t before. Smells that never bothered me in college became too much, the noises from the patients, the clatter of a dropped scalpel, everything was too much. Then, I—”
Oliver bit his lip hard and shut his eyes as he drew in a tense breath and released it with a shudder.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, Oliver, we don’t have to.”
“I do. I never told anyone. I couldn’t. There’s a part of me that still worries you will think less of me,” he whispered, his eyes glassy with unshed tears, “despite all you already know.”
“Oliver...”
“I know you won’t, but it’s weird. It scared me, and the implication of it...” He shook his head and let out a wet laugh. “It ruined my life. I— I started to feel when people were dying. Not the moment of death, per se, but when they were hovering at that unstable place between life and death. I think I could always sense it, and I ignored it, or I didn’t realize what it was until suddenly I couldn’t turn it off. A fleeting flicker, like my powers were reaching for them while they were still alive.”
Felipe rubbed Oliver’s hand with his thumb. He remembered the moment in the cathedral when Oliver’s life seemed to be unspooling, trailing away before Felipe could catch it. Did he feel their life draining away like he did that night?
“When some of the patients on the ward suddenly took a turn for the worse after, I worried it was me, that I was sucking the life out of them. Then, I stabilized one patient and realized the feeling disappeared if the underlying issue could be taken care of. I became obsessive, trying to stop fires before they could flare up and burn out. I would spend the whole day walking the wards, questioning every moment if I felt someone in that precarious state.
“The physician overseeing me told me I was neglecting my duties, and that I was disturbing the patients. Apparently, one of the other junior doctors suspected I was somehow causing these people to get worse in order to then save them or kill them. How else did I have the uncanny ability to tell when people were dying? I obviously couldn’t tell them I’m a necromancer. They would have thought me mad, and even if they knew about magic, it didn’t look good. I tried to block the sensation out like I did everything else, but after everything that happened, it was too much. The attending physician suggested I go into teaching anatomy or look for work at a university lab, that my skillset would be better served away from the general public.”
“They fired you?”
“Technically, I finished the term of my contract, but they made it clear I wasn’t welcome back and that they would not be providing a reference letter to any local hospitals. I was ‘dismissed,’ which somehow felt worse. I could have gone into private practice. I thought about going off to some small town where no one cared that the hospital you worked for thought you were killing people as long as you could set broken bones and dispense tonics. Philadelphia no longer felt like home, but living in the countryside sounded equally awful, so I came to Manhattan. I thought I could start over here, and when I stumbled upon the Paranormal Society’s ad for a medical examiner, it felt like the perfect solution. If I only worked with the dead, I would never have to worry about feeling that pull again or scaring the living, though Head Inspector Williams wasn’t thrilled about having a necromancer as a medical examiner. God knows what I could be doing to the bodies with no oversight. That’s sort of been a theme in my life: people assuming the worst of me.” Drawing a deep breath, Oliver shook his head. “When we were at the institute, I had to keep hardening myself to all I saw. I don’t like having to dampen everything I feel just to muddle through. I keep thinking what if I had felt someone dying? Could I have ignored it and let it happen, or would I have broken character and ruined Ansley’s story? I can’t be trusted not to feel anymore, and sometimes, I hate myself for it.”
Felipe cupped Oliver’s cheek and kissed him before he could break. His lips trembled against his as he latched onto Felipe as if he was the only thing keeping him moored. Spikes of fear and grey waves of self-hatred battered the tether, but as Felipe gently pushed Oliver back and laid on top of him, he pictured the golden thread that held them together and the love that ran through it. The tether tightened beneath his heart at the thought of his lover’s younger self adrift. He wished he could have known him then. He might have told him how his mother and the other healers in his family would have seen a power like his differently. They would have thought it a gift to know when to intercede or when to send for the person’s family before it was too late or even to revive the dead long enough to say things that should have been said long ago.
When the storm on the other end of the tether quieted, Felipe slowly pulled back. Brushing the hair from Oliver’s forehead, he met his bone grey gaze and said softly, “I don’t assume the worst of you, and I never will. Everything you’ve ever shown me is that you try so hard to do the right thing, even if it hurts you. You can’t control what others think, but I need you to know that I trust you and love you. Back in the cathedral, after I hurt you, I felt something that sounds a lot like what you experienced. I could feel the tether coming apart, and every time I reached for you, you slipped farther away and I couldn’t catch you. It was terrifying. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been to feel that day after day. Even if those doctors couldn’t understand, you’re not evil or bad or wrong, but I’m not sorry it happened because it brought you here to me.”
A tired smile crossed Oliver’s lips. “Everything worked out eventually, didn’t it?”
“I like to think so, but I’m biased. If you never left, we might never have met, and I might not be alive right now.”
Still, he wished life had been kinder to Oliver. Felipe had always had soft places to fall when things got difficult. If work was hard, he had his family, and when that got complicated, he could throw himself into his work. He often wondered what life had looked like for Oliver before he came to the Paranormal Society, but those glimpses were infrequent and often tinged with pain. He knew his grandmother raised him until she died when he was barely an adult, that he worked as a doctor in Philadelphia before coming to New York, and that was it. He could make out the shadows of Oliver’s life, the things Oliver half mentioned before cutting himself off as if he still shied from their sting, but Felipe didn’t push. Oliver would tell him when he was ready, and they had plenty of time.
Kissing Oliver’s brow, Felipe trailed his hand down his throat to the collar of his robe and pajamas before sitting back on his heels. “Would you like that coffee now?”
“Yes, thank you, and I’ll type up the notes.”
