The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
Doctor Snow is young, but she seems very capable and confident. And besides, knowing Felicity has changed a lot of John's perception on age and expertise.
The doc has been updating them on Felicity's condition as she takes their blood for the fifth time since they got there. They've been send through three checks and as many passages from one pressure room to another.
Digg has been keeping a careful eye on Oliver the whole time.
They're both walking on the razor's blade edge of control, but Oliver is more likely to slip and cut himself open. He's is a walking ball of explosive energy wrapped in thin skin and jaw-breaking willpower. John can practically see it, the nerves loosening what is left of the seams of his control.
For him though, it's different.
John's never liked hospitals. The barren whiteness makes him nervous. The smell of sterile cleanness itches on the inside of his nose and splits his skull into a headache like no other. One that feels familiar and throws him 15 years into the past, back when he was a barely more than a teen, with a little brother to take care of and a mother who was slowly fading away without anyone being able to do anything about it. It feels like the exact same situation he's in now, and that opens old hurts that John had thought had long scarred. He can't help but look around the steel and glass halls and taste the same helpless of that child he was then.
"- The virus itself is unlike anything I have ever seen before, and I mean that literally. It's active in her body and completely alive, but it dies immediately if in contact with any other live organism. Which leads me to believe there was some kind of agent that 'weaponised' it, so to speak, as it was injected in her. I can find no traces of the agent, though…"
The moment Oliver looks at him, John knows they're both thinking the same thing: Felicity was the sole intended target of this… and neither of them knows what that means.
Caitlin Snow turns and looks at Oliver and John in the face.
"You should both be thankful for that. The virus without the active agent is useless and that's the reason neither one of you has been infected."
One other glance shared between them and John knows that neither of them can even conceive of that kind of thankfulness at the moment. Snow seems to sense it because she nods and then continues.
"As far as I know, there is no record in medical history of anything like this, so it has to be some new hybrid." The doc's voice is steady and almost dull. He's heard the girl speaking before; he knows that's not her usual tone. John wonders, maybe unkindly, if they teach that at med school too. "Most viruses to this day are no more advanced than they were thousands of years ago - they still haven't learned to stop killing the cells they infect. But whatever it is that Felicity has in her system…"
Snow takes a breath and rubs her forehead with her forearm, keeping her gloved hands away from her face. She looks about as weary as John feels, which is saying a lot, but her movements are quick and precise and so are her words.
"What? What about it?" John prompts.
Snow meets his eyes unflinchingly.
"It's infecting the cells without destroying them. They are instead altered, so that they can 'multitask' their own needs while also producing virus clones, which in turn infect more cells." she explains. The drained expression on her face overwhelms her professionalism for one small fraction of a moment, long enough for her to expel a careful breath. But then the moment is gone and her eyes are as sure and steady as ever when she looks at them.
"Her body is reacting as if this is an infection – producing antibodies and trying to fight it off. It's why she has such a high fever. But the antibodies aren't specific to the virus, because it's unprecedented. And once the thyroid glands were infected, her metabolism increased and it's only making this virus spread faster."
"And that means what?" Oliver asks, voice tight and carefully controlled. He's been biting down words ever since they got here, jaw working against his tongue to the point where John thinks any moment he might open his mouth the room will explode in blood[1].
The pause Snow takes before answering is in itself an answer – especially to two people who are so on edge they will read your every shift down to your eyebrows and collect it, to make a language out of your every twitch.
"It means that the window I have to come up with an effective vaccine gets smaller, and Felicity's chances of it working get slimmer." Caitlin Snow sighs. "And I don't know what the lasting damage of the virus will be, if… if I can in fact create a vaccine."
It takes a long moment for John to process that. He's not sure he even can, not really, because it sounds like the doc's saying that there's no way out of this. He flexes his fists. Open and closed, again and then again, rubs his hands on his thighs – a self soothing gesture he hasn't fallen back on ever since he was a kid. (Oliver starts bouncing his right leg again and then grabs his knee to stop it. Clenches his jaw harder, viciously trying to restrain whatever is storming up inside him. It's a wonder his teeth haven't snapped yet.)
In the mean time Caitlin Snow takes off the rubber gloves with a snap and sits down in front of multiple computer screens to process their blood data and Felicity's.
"The speed of the infection is only part of the problem. The other part is that it does not seem to discriminate." Wells adds, derailing John's attention.
The professor's eyes are bright and unsetting in a way John can't explain in words, but that causes the muscles of his neck to tingle. He knows what Oliver means when he says there is something off about the guy, but in that moment his cold intellect feels reassuring.
"Most viruses are highly specific in what tissues they target, but this one seems to be able to infect every living cell in the body, with the exception of red blood cells." Wells takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. "And though it seems to be a mononegavirus, it's behaving more like a retrovirus. Once inside a cell's cytoplasm, it uses a reverse-transcriptase enzyme to produce DNA from its RNA genome, via the cell's ribosomes, which is then absorbed…"
Oliver inhales a sharp breath through his nose.
"In simpler terms, if you could, professor." He grits out almost between his teeth.
Wells blinks and then nods. "Of course mister Queen. The virus is practically rewriting itself in minute parts of her DNA, one cell at a time, in what seems to be mutating Miss Smoak's genetic makeup."
Oliver presses the tips of his fingers against his eyelids. If he's anywhere John is, the inside of his eyelids probably feels like sandpaper against his eyeballs.
"What does that mean?" Oliver almost growls.
Snow and Wells exchange a look that Oliver misses, but John does not. It makes him frown.
"We… we don't know." Snow answers, looking at Wells for confirmation, who doesn't add anything.
John sees it coming, but it happens too fast for him to do anything about it. (he's not sure it would have been smart to anyway. Touching Oliver right now would be like putting his hand on a high-tension live wire)
Oliver gets up on his feet so violently that the chair he was sitting flips on its back legs and falls down.
"You're supposed to know!" Oliver insists, voice lowering to that pitch of ruthless anger that was better suited under the hood.
Caitlin Snow flinches. "We're doing everything we can…"
Oliver takes one step towards her. John gets up immediately, shadowing him, ready to take hold of the situation.
"Are you? Cause all I keep hearing is that she's in there slowly dying and you have no idea what is wrong with her!"
"Oliver!" John snaps and Oliver turns away from both doctors, hands linking behind his neck, head bowed.
"Mister Queen…" Snow begins, a bit hesitant, taking a step forward. She squares her shoulders instead of shrinking, when Oliver turns a blistering glare at her. "We never said anything about her dying."
It's almost physical, the way John feels the whole measure of his concentration focus on the young woman. It's almost like getting tunnel vision in the middle of an open fight: insanely sharp details swarm him as his brain concentrates on that one thing and whole room seems to stand as still as he and Oliver are standing.
It occurs to neither of them that maybe their sharp scrutiny is the one that puts the doc in and not her own uncertainty.
"We don't know what's going on, but we do know that Felicity's body is not effectively failing. I mean…" Caitlin Snow licks her lips, hands locked in front of her, knuckles whitening for how hard she seems to be holding on to her composure. "It's changing, yes. We don't know what that means and it looks like a sickness, but…" she takes another breath and her words gain momentum, eyes shining in bright hopefulness. "Her fever is under control, we're keeping her hydrated and… and thought her heartbeat is erratic, it's not showing signs of heart failure. She's not… she's not actually…"
Caitlin Snow's open palms, waving in front of her as she explains make her seem as if she's reaching for the words out of thin air. Maybe it's John's experience with doctors and their inability to really know what disease they are fighting against, but nothing she's saying sounds very reassuring.
"You're just abating the symptoms… and waiting." John fills in for her, deliberate and merciless. Snow's face falls.
Oliver looks at him. John can hardly look back for more than a few moments.
"How long?"
Two blank faces and a pair of eyes too shocked to hide the terror beneath it stare at him, but John doesn't relent.
"How long?" He repeats, even though he doesn't really know what he's asking for. But if there is one ting he does know is that doctors usually have timeframes. There is always a deadline, once you step into a hospital.
To get better, to get worse. To wake up.
To die.
There's always a finish point and sometimes John thinks hospitals are the truest graveyards of hope.
Wells is colder, but Caitlin Snow turns out to be braver. She lifts her chin a little, straightens her shoulders.
"At this rate, the infection will be complete in about three hours." She says cleanly. No minced words. No maybes.
John stands up. "Are we done here?"
Oliver is already out the door. John follows a moment after.
oOo
Digg turns away to talk to Sara and Oliver just… freezes in front of the glass wall that separates him from the bed where Felicity is laying, dwarfed by the machines around her and the tubes and wires. He can hardly even see her. There's her outline on the bed but she looks like she's sinking it.
The room is dark because she's hypersensitive to light. Snow told them to touch her carefully, if they must, because her blood vessels are still a bit more dilated than normal and they will leak more easily. She'll bruise if he touches her.
The thought burrows beneath his tongue, slices him up with surgical precision.
He'd wanted to tell them, before, when they were helping her change, to be careful when they touched her. (Oliver's seen her be extraordinary, she is remarkable. He hates the way they touch her now, how they say her name as if it belongs in ordinary places[2].) Not to put too many needles in her because she hates them, as well as fears them. She likes making jokes about it, but they both know there are more frightening truths beneath. Needles were never her favorite but now they make her anxious. Oliver knows exactly why.
Oliver flinches, moves away. Walks toward the exit. Only stops when Digg's arm catches his elbow.
Their eyes meet and John doesn't even really need to say anything. The disbelief in his eyes is enough and thought there is on judgment in them yet, Oliver knows it's just a moment behind the curve.
He looks away.
"I can't stay here, John." His voice is rough as fuck but then again he's been choking for an hour.
John lets him go.
"Yeah, I know. But you can't really leave either, Oliver." Digg reiterates.
He doesn't understand: Oliver can't breathe in here. He can't think. He feels like his skin is boiling off his body with the need to run, to do… something! To hit something, (someone, anyone!) let go of some of this oppressing weight that keeps slamming his chest every time he tries to take a breath.
He can't be here. Can't!
…but if he starts running he won't stop until he finds someone to tear apart every way he knows how. A specific someone – whoever it is. One, many - doesn't matter. Won't stop until he's taken all their screams. (The need for it is staggering, a screech in his head that rattles his brain. It's a hint of violent clarity, a dark promise. This would be the one monstrosity he would never ask forgiveness for or ever regret.)
Maybe he won't stop running even after.
… because in the mean time, while Oliver chases down his cowardice, Felicity Smoak is going to take her last breath in a lifeless white room that she would hate, and he will never know what her last words were.
(He doesn'twantto know… and he's not sure what that makes him.)
Oliver closes his eyes and tries to push that thought away back. There had been a time when he had so many missing pieces that he could get away with being numb for days, until the present became memory and he didn't have to think about it. But now… now he's ragged, desperate and stuck- and trying to savagely restrain whatever it is that is loosening along the seams of his skin. It feels a lot like throwing his hands out to stop an avalanche though. (It's impossible. It will bury him alive. He's the one that has to move to escape it.) He stands no chance.
How do people survive this?
"I talked to Sara." Digg says evenly from his right. Oliver doesn't turn to look at him. He can't look away from her in that room. He bets she has a whole monologue about how depressing the white walls are.
"She says she has a lead. It's gonna take her out of the country, so she's stopping by first. She wanted… I asked Snow to send her Felicity's data so far."
Oliver doesn't say anything. His pulse is frantic, his hands are sweating. He feels like he's standing twelve inches behind himself, everything muted.
There's nowhere to run. Just a threshold to cross.
"There has to be something that they can do." Oliver murmurs, speaking between clenched teeth.
There has to be. We don't just accept things.
He hears Digg sigh.
"If there were, Snow and Wells would have told us. If a hospital were better for her, that's where we'd be."
Right…
Nothing.
The words repeat itself in his head, like the reverberating sound of a struck gong. It leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, reminds him of bodies floating in the water.
The image echoes so loudly in his head Oliver flinches. He shifts his weight from one numb foot to the other, index finger rubbing against his thumb despite the fact that he can hardly feel his fingertips. He's been here before – not like this but close enough.
There is no way not to die, if he stays here. And Sara has a lead. He should be out there chasing it. He wants to.
But to Felicity Smoak, love means staying.
Oliver crosses that threshold. (Maybe that decision is one he made months ago too, he just never knew it until it made him bleed)
[1] Margaret Atwood
[2] Inspired by a Ezra Pound verse: 'I who have seen you amid the primal things / Was angry when they spoke your name / In ordinary places'