Olivia stopped running long enough to throw up. It didn't make her feel better, just empty. She'd ducked into an alley and was now leaning against a brick wall, trying to catch her breath. She'd been running for a while, ever since she left Etta's apartment. Running back to Harvard because Walter could fix this, couldn't he, she thought? Walter could take the tech out of Peter's head and bring him back.
Olivia took a deep breath and wiped her mouth. Her breathing was calmer now and she knew she needed to start moving again but she just couldn't do it. Is this is where I give up, she thought? Here in a Boston alley, in a future I don't understand, is this is where I give up? She looked towards the street and took in her surroundings. The monorail station was only about two blocks away but she didn't move; all she could think of were Peter's eyes.
His eyes had been empty. They were lifeless, merely a way to visualize his surroundings, a physical act of seeing, and nothing more. Peter's clear, blue eyes no longer conveyed love or comfort, or home to her. They were empty of any trace of emotional recognition. The eyes she saw tonight were not the same eyes that gazed at her in a delivery room so many years ago, and said, "I love you so much. I love our daughter so much." They were not the eyes that, with just the slightest twinkle, would tell her that he wanted her, that she was beautiful, that she was his everything, that he would never leave her. They were not the eyes that loved her. Looking into his eyes tonight, she'd felt the void of their absence and it made her feel abandoned and alone, and it had frightened her. She'd been afraid of Peter, of what he had become, and that was why she'd run.
There'd been another timeline where a virus had invaded his system and altered him, and he "hadn't been himself." She'd saved him that time, she, Walter, and Astrid. They could do it again. Peter was still in there. Somewhere behind those dead eyes, was her Peter. He's been replaced, she thought, like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and suddenly Olivia remembered Peter telling her how much the movie had scared him when he was a boy. A tear fell down her cheek. Oh, Peter, she whispered, what the hell have you done?
Olivia stood up and took in a deep breath. She started to run; two blocks to the monorail station and then to Harvard, and then to Walter. They would bring him back. And if they couldn't save him, if his eyes would never look at her as they once did, as they once looked at their daughter, then, and only then, would she give up, because then she would be broken, but not tonight. Tonight she runs.