69. September 19, 2203 London, England
Oliver stands at the base of the curving stone staircase. St. Paul’s Cathedral buzzes with voices from all over the world. He barely notices. He lays his hand on the railing where Beatrix laid hers, centuries ago, and he climbs.
The days have bled into each other. Into weeks. Into months.
Lucy would scold him, if she knew. She would tell him time passes like it always has, like it always will.
She’d probably make him take another training simulation.
As a trans-temporal agent, he should be acutely aware that the flow of time is objective and linear and, most importantly, completely safe to pop in and out of with Aevum’s proprietary recall chip.
Not that he does that anymore. He spends his days in the Excursion Research Department, broadening Aevum’s offerings beyond the most obvious moments in history and curating as many adventures into the past as he can.
He hopes every approval he grants brings someone a little peace.
His nights are spent at the dance studio with Theo, teaching his brother and his fiancée how to dance a waltz. Trying to. He doesn’t have his mother’s knack for teaching, yet, and sometimes he has to remind Theo that he is the one in charge. They are learning together.
But Lucy must be wrong, or maybe time is, because a year has passed, and Oliver is sure it hasn’t.
A year since Beatrix died. A year since he woke up in a bed he was never meant to leave.
It was dark when he opened his eyes to see his childhood bedroom, somewhere in those strange hours between late and early, where time loses all meaning. His heart thundered in his chest. Alive. Alive. Alive. Impossibly alive.
Theo staggered from the chair at his bedside, Oliver’s choked name a question hanging in the air between them.
Oliver didn’t have an answer. He rose from the bed and pulled his brother into a hug, not so much in greeting but to prove to Theo that he was solid and real and still there. Maybe to prove it to himself, too.
Luke was stunned speechless.
Zoe cried.
And Beatrix was gone.
She was gone, and he wasn’t. Because he had died and he had come back. Just like her.
The realization brought him to his knees. He wasn’t impossibly alive. He was alive because of her.
Oliver closes his eyes and rests his cheek against the cool stone. “Talk to me, Bea,” he whispers, his sacred offering to the wall. He holds his breath, waits to hear her. Aches for it in his bones.
A soft, lilting voice curves back to him, through stone and time and memory. What do you want to know?
He said, Everything, once.
Now, he’d ask her how she could stand it.
He’d ask her if he’ll ever get used to the déjà vu, those glitches in time where he swears she is there, only to disappear again.
The glimpse of her out of the corner of his eye, or the laugh that makes him search a crowded room.
The sigh of her breath in his ear before he sinks into sleep.
The soft brush of her curls against his cheek as he wakes.
He’d ask her if he’ll always find her in the places she’s absent. Part of him hopes the answer is yes.
He lifts the black canvas backpack sitting at his feet into his lap.
He unzips it and pulls out a worn leather-bound journal, the one that started off his and ended up theirs.
The one he has spent the last year adding to, scrawling every detail he can remember about her in the margins, every scrap of a memory she shared with him, every moment that brought her to life again. The only piece he has left of her now.
But Oliver hasn’t forgotten the lessons he learned in the months he was dying. It was never the thing itself he cherished but the memories attached to it. He doesn’t need the journal. He will never forget a single moment he shared with Beatrix for as long as he lives—however long that is.
He sets the journal reverently on the bench next to him, with its worn cover and dog-eared pages. A treasured book.
And he leaves it.
Leaves it for someone else to find, for someone else to claim and read and maybe, he hopes, leave again. So someone else can know Beatrix and her stories like he does. So someone else can carry a piece of her, too.
Because this is how she lives. In memories made and moments shared, scattered through time like the stars shining in the heavens over Lancaut.
Forever.