Because I've been gone from the Bolivia campfire far too long, I present a little something to tide us over until the premiere...
Suicide by Tedium
They haven't had vampires yet, he comments on a fog-choked night that calls for something a bit more mythical than the exploding humans and gooey parasites they've become accustomed to. Peter's increasingly bored by the prospect of another mutant but this is a warehouse near a dock and some things are as certain as her tight ponytail.
She is not amused.
It's the closest thing to routine the team has experienced since the initial case tossed them in the blender of government conspiracy. Lately nothing seems extraordinary and though he counts this as suicide by tedium, the others label this run of similarly trite cases a welcome break. No surprises equals an enemy more easily fought, more quickly dispatched.
But where can a gambler find his challenge when the supernatural becomes predictable?
Olivia used to fill a piece of that need in the shape of a climb to convert a difficult woman. And some part of her had enjoyed the tease and pull. Once. But her confinement and subsequent escape from his home dimension shredded what promising connection they'd had.
It's business now, a perfunctory obligation. That it's growing dull seems to please her as few things now can. And while she'd made a practice of noticing his bouts of restlessness, she no longer offers anything to hold him back. A smile would do or some other emblem of false hope. But he must content himself with the gray shades of bland that are her available expressions.
He's ready to run again.
The plan was polished last night over too much whiskey and too small a brunette.
From experience Peter knows that sliding into old habits is the surest sign of a clock winding down toward implosion. Once upon a nightmare he'd believed he might – could – would stay longer. Forgiveness of parental crimes hasn't been easy but adjusting to the loss of the fidgety bond with his federal counterpart is harder still. Having spent too much time playing at being better than this, it's not an easy fall and there's nothing to soften the landing.
The replacement had words that spilled from lips that fueled her hands and her cell isn't far enough away to make him forget the right in the wrongs. There's no sense of familiarity in this original version despite his knowledge of an identical body and it's possible that he misses the other. But never aloud.
It's barely autumn and he's freezing.
No vampires again tonight but Olivia's phantom smile is nearly as bloodcurdling. He wants to shake those thinning shoulders, force her to snap out of it or fall apart entirely. But the likelihood that he'll be the one to break keeps his hands where she can see them.
Never close enough and never intrusive.
Sometime later Peter remembers the reason for the brunette, after the warehouse is secured and a rather mossy creature is reduced to reusable glue. The misconception is that loners aren't lonely, that they seek solitude as a matter of inclination. In this life Peter has sought for all the wrong things and the one he's found has fluctuating preferences.
And when he tires of forcing small talk to do the job of confession, he scrambles for contact with the limber wonder from last night. She'd asked no questions and didn't mind what name he voiced when things came crashing down around a different face. It was almost peace and almost enough. But only for a moment.
The dawn arrives with a smooth leg tossed over his thighs and dark hair coiled in his fist. He'll let this one go and other things follow the release. They're calling but he ignores the summons. There's no rush to keep company with granite.
She must know.
An almost shouldn't equal a promise but maybe when his lips had come so close, she'd taken it as fidelity. But Olivia had lied too, about his nature, about his place. It's why he left and why she followed. It's why he came back and why she got caught. It's not his fault that he fell for her and fell into her twin. But perhaps she knows and bestows on his cursed head the sin of betrayal.
He's just selfish enough to think that he might have shattered what alternate worlds only cracked.
Because he took what she wouldn't have given even if he'd waded through seven hells, eight dimensions and nine lives for it. The alternate Olivia had been impatient to move, to have, and while he can resist torture, Peter can't refuse legs locked around him and that pouty mouth begging. He's not that strong. But she's not that person.
Two people this screwed up don't deserve to figure it out.
And they won't. Not today. Because his father is pounding on an apartment door he shouldn't know how to find and the tanned body is stretching above Peter to steal what little attention he would have normally paid to the pending break in. Let them enter. Let them see.
It's what she's driven him to.
In a fit of cosmic timing, the text comes seconds after he does. Several gasping breaths must be swallowed before he's willing to acknowledge the electronic invasion. The knocking has stopped and the brunette sleeps again. The screen is too bright for his alcohol-tainted vision but the message is a compromise in shorthand.
For all the destruction of her spirit, she still knows the route around his stubbornness.
And she's promising vampires.