Written for Porn Battle 2014. Prompts: admiration, forgetting, soothe, quiet. Porn!fail.
"You're back."
Olivia glanced around the featureless white space, but there truly was nothing to see. She would have thought herself blind if she hadn't been able to see her own hands, spotted with blood.
"Most people see me once," the woman's voice continued. "Twice, if they get lucky and something pulls them away. You..."
The voice trailed off. Olivia turned—at least she thought she turned, it was impossible to tell without gravity or ground beneath her feet—looking for the speaker. There was nothing, and then there was: a spot of black, resolving into a mane of raven hair outlining the top of a woman's head.
Her skin was nearly indistinguishable from the white nothingness all around, her presence discernible only by the stark blackness of her hair and clothing. And when she drew nearer, by the darkness of her eyes and her mouth and the spiral marking her cheek. An eye of Horus, Olivia thought dimly, and then she saw the silver ankh around the woman's neck, and she knew. "I remember you."
"Thought you might." Death stood close now, almost close enough to touch. "That's different, too."
How, she didn't say, and Olivia wasn't inclined to ask. They stood there together in a space that wasn't a space, no time passing, until Death finally shook her head and laughed.
"I shouldn't be surprised. No, I mean, it should literally be impossible to surprise me! But you've done it twice now and it's not the end for you, Olivia Dunham. It's nowhere near the end."
"I'm...glad," Olivia managed, because she was, she wanted to go on...but there was something profoundly sad about that too, about having to leave this quiet painless place.
Death smiled at her in sympathy. The expression was so compassionate, so understanding, that Olivia put her hand out without thinking and laid it gently along Death's cheek.
Death gasped, her eyes widening. "You are impossible. Unpossible! You really don't have any idea at all." Her fingers stroked over Olivia's hand, her skin not cold at all but warm with being. "There are rules, you know."
"Nobody told me," Olivia murmured, more certain now, and leaned in for a kiss.
Death's lips were warm and her breath was sweet, and when she pulled back her eyes were shining. "The traveler is right. About you dying in every version of the future."
But this time it wasn't a pronouncement of doom, but a promise to be kept. Because every possible death meant another chance to make things right before it occurred. And death, Olivia knew intimately by now, wasn't always an ending. Maybe never would be an ending.
She'd forget this when she woke. She had before, she would again. But she would rest here until she was ready to return, in this place where time didn't exist, safe in Death's embrace.
The many deaths of Olivia Dunham: brain death "New Day in the Old Town"; shot in the head "The Day We Died"; shot in the head "Brave New World, Part 2."