May 24, 2202 Boston, Massachusetts
Oliver wakes in a bed that is not his. His head throbs in rhythm with his heart. He opens his eyes and a too-white, too-bright light stabs through his skull. He groans and throws his arm over his face. It tugs on his IV line.
He remembers where he is now.
“Oli?”
Shit.
Dread settles like a stone in the pit of his stomach. He turns toward the voice. His brother straightens in the fake leather chair that is some color between gray and brown, pulled close to his hospital bed. His eyes are bloodshot, his dark hair disheveled, his face etched with worry.
“What are you doing here?” Oliver pushes himself up to sit in the bed. It shifts beneath him, and he squeezes his eyes shut against the tipping world. When he opens them, the furrow between Theo’s brows has grown deeper.
“Luke called me from the bar.”
Oliver cringes. He must have scared the shit out of his friend for him to call Theo.
“What happened?” Theo asks.
The night is a blur. The last thing Oliver remembers is Luke reaching out to steady him. “I guess I was drunk. Fell and hit my head.”
He doesn’t remember drinking that much. Maybe he hadn’t eaten enough.
Or maybe he was exhausted from graduation.
He gave the doctors the same excuses when he came to.
They still ran every test they could think of on him.
He thought Theo had something to do with that, but everyone assured him it was routine procedure. Now, he’s not so sure.
“Have you been sick?” Theo asks, part concern, part accusation, torn between being a doctor or a brother or a parent. Typical.
“No,” Oliver says. He has spent the last few months dragging himself from his apartment to class to the library, then back to his apartment for a few hours of sleep before doing it all over again.
Of course he was exhausted. And he got wicked headaches sometimes, but that wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence for a grad student running on too little sleep and too much caffeine. “Last night was an accident.”
Theo doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t get a chance to interrogate Oliver further. A doctor enters the room. He’s a portly, balding man with wire-framed glasses perched on the end of his nose. Oliver hasn’t bothered to remember his name.
“Good morning, Mr. Rhodes,” he says. “How are you feeling today?”
Tired. Dizzy. Aching. “Fine.”
Theo glares at Oliver. “He’s not fine. He’s still dizzy and his head is killing him.”
The doctor isn’t surprised by Theo’s assessment. “You are sick, Mr. Rhodes. Very sick. Denying that you are won’t change it.”
“What?” He can’t have heard right. He is just tired. Hasn’t been eating or sleeping right for months, working too long and too hard on finishing his thesis. It’s like he told Theo. It was an accident.
The doctor keeps talking. He doesn’t notice Oliver is drowning, grasping at his words, trying to stay afloat. But there is nothing to hold on to. Not when words like terminal and inoperable are already sinking him.
He doesn’t know the doctor’s name, doesn’t care, as the man shows him charts and numbers and scans that all say the same thing.
There is nothing he can do to stop it, nothing he can do to fix it.
Maybe he should pay more attention, at least try to focus on what the doctor is explaining to him, but what is the point?
He’s dying.
“I am sorry, Mr. Rhodes.”
Oliver nods as if he has heard all of it, processed any of it. “How long do I have?” He doesn’t recognize the calm voice that is speaking, even though it’s his own.
“Nine months. Maybe a year.”
“Thank you, Dr. Krasten,” Theo says, his voice hoarse.
The doctor leaves the brothers in silence, the only sound the click of Oliver’s IV. Theo clears his throat. His voice shakes. “Oli, listen, I think—”
“Don’t, Theo. Just don’t, all right?” He can’t handle one of his brother’s lectures right now.
“You don’t even know what I’m going to say.”
“It doesn’t matter.” None of it matters.
Theo keeps talking anyway. “Dr. Krasten is wrong.”
Oliver laughs, but it’s hollow. Theo always has to be right. He never hesitates to let Oliver know what he can do better, when he is making a mistake, or, worst of all, when he is wasting his time. But this? “I think I’m the one that’s supposed to be in denial.”
Theo’s face crumples. “That’s not what I mean.”
“Then what do you mean?” Oliver has the sinking feeling that denial is better than whatever Theo is about to tell him.
He runs a hand through his hair. “What do you remember about Mom and Dad’s accident?”
“I was fourteen, not four,” Oliver snaps. “I remember everything.”
Theo made all the arrangements, wrote the eulogies and read them in front of everyone: their father’s colleagues and coworkers from the hospital, their mother’s current and former students from the dance studio, all of Theo’s friends and their parents, and Oliver’s, too.
Oliver wanted to crawl out of his skin. He didn’t want his friends’ pity, didn’t want them to look at him that way. Like he was fragile. Damaged. He even caught Theo looking at him that way a few times. Luke was the only one who didn’t.
Theo’s throat bobs. “It was so sudden, you know? Out of nowhere, they were just gone, and I kept thinking, ‘That could happen to anyone. That could happen to me.’ And if it did—if I died, too—what would happen to you?”
For weeks after the funeral, Oliver would lie awake and listen to Theo pace circles around the kitchen below his bedroom at all hours of the night. He never imagined it was the same terrible thought keeping them both awake.
“I took some of the money Mom and Dad left me, and I went to Aevum,” Theo admits. “I had to know you’d be all right.”
“You time traveled?” Oliver can’t imagine his older brother going on any sort of adventure.
Theo shakes his head. “No. I filled out a lot of forms. Then they sent an investigator twenty years into the future and gave me their report.”
Oliver’s heart pounds. “What did it say?”
Theo reaches inside the coat tossed over the arm of his chair and pulls out a folded piece of paper. It’s obvious by the state of it that it’s been crumpled and flattened, folded and refolded time and again. He offers it to Oliver. His hand trembles. “I’m sorry.”
Oliver carefully unfolds the page, his heart in his throat. A photo of himself he doesn’t recognize stares back at him. His gaze trails down to the paragraph beneath it:
Oliver James Rhodes, born December 3, 2177, passed away peacefully, surrounded by loved ones, on September 19, 2202.
“Dr. Krasten is wrong.” Theo’s voice cracks under the weight of his words.
This time, Oliver understands. He doesn’t have a year if he’s lucky, doesn’t have at least nine months. He doesn’t even have six.
Oliver Rhodes has three months, three weeks, and five days left to live.
He tears his attention from the date, already burned into his memory, and examines the grainy image. He can’t tell where he is, only that it is somewhere green and sunny. At least he looks happy.
He can’t bring himself to read any more, but he can imagine what it will say.
Surrounded by loved ones is probably a stretch.
Theo will be there. Maybe Luke and Zoe, if they haven’t become too entangled in their new lives.
Theo will have to guess at his interests.
He’ll probably mention the time they ran the Boston Marathon together, even though it was years ago.
Say Oliver left behind one brother, his only surviving family. Ask for donations in lieu of flowers.
He’ll be buried with their parents, and Theo will be alone.
“Maybe it’s a mistake.” Maybe it’s not the doctors, maybe it’s Theo and Aevum who have it wrong.
Theo shakes his head. “I said the same thing when Aevum gave me the report. They insisted there was no mistake, but I wouldn’t believe them. I couldn’t. I made them check again.” His throat bobs. “They were right.”
The weight of Theo’s words sits like iron in Oliver’s chest, cold and unyielding, squeezing the air from his lungs. “And then you, what? Decided not to tell me?”
“I was going to tell you,” he assures him. “I always meant to. But you were young and I—”
“I am not fourteen years old anymore!” Oliver yells. “I haven’t been for a long time, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“I know. You’re right,” Theo agrees.
It doesn’t make Oliver feel any better. “What did the report say about you?”
Theo hesitates too long.
Jealousy bursts through Oliver. “Let me guess. A long and happy life?” He should be ashamed of himself. If anyone deserved that, it was Theo. But he is too angry and too hurt to care.
Theo meets his gaze. His eyes are red and shadowed by dark circles. “I would trade with you if I could. In a fucking heartbeat. You know that, right?”
Oliver does. Theo would give him anything. Everything. That only makes it worse. “Can you stop with the self-sacrificing bullshit?”
Theo flinches. Good.
“You don’t have to handle this all on your own. I think you should come home.”
But it stopped feeling like home to Oliver the night his parents walked out the door and never walked back through it. “I’m not a kid, Theo. I’m not your responsibility anymore.”
Theo glances at him. “You’re still my brother.”
Tears prick behind Oliver’s eyes, and he looks quickly away. There was a time when he would have given anything to hear Theo say those words. But it is too late for that now, in every way imaginable.
“You should have told me sooner.” While there was still time for it to make a difference, to do something other than haunt him like the ghost of the life he could have had, of everything he should have done differently.
He could have traveled instead of wasting six years on a degree he’ll never use. Six fucking years. A quarter of his life. That’s what Zoe always says, isn’t it? He would have spent more time with his friends, less time working. Risked more. Made fewer excuses.
“I know,” Theo says. “I couldn’t do it. I thought something could change it. That if I told you, it would make it real.” But it is real, whether Theo wants it to be or not.
“You’re a fucking coward.” Oliver pours all of his anger and resentment and helpless, hopeless fear into the accusation.
Theo’s shoulders slump. “I know.”
“You should leave,” Oliver says, suddenly tired. He keeps his gaze on his pilled blanket.
“Yeah. Okay,” Theo agrees reluctantly. He’s at the door when he turns back. “Let me know when you get back to your place?”
“Sure,” Oliver concedes. And then his brother is gone.
He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands until a kaleidoscope of stars bursts across his vision, but he doesn’t wake up.