Holes
A/N: This takes place around the end of season 3 but before the finale, it's a little insight into Olivia's coping mechanisms for all the chaos with the deterioration of the universes. I was partially inspired for this fic by the song 'Save Your Scissors' by City and Colour.
Disclaimer: You know if I went back in time I could technically own them, but I currently do not own a time machine so my plan is foiled... temporarily.
It's five in the afternoon and she's craving about three shots of whiskey behind the mountain of paperwork on her desk. It's nothing short of colossal, but she would go as far to say that it could give Mount Everest a run for its money. It's unnaturally warm and she tugs at her collar slightly after it chafes against her neck for the hundredth time. She looks over to the window, slashed by the pattern of the open blinds; even outside is nothing brilliant. The clouds are dark like charcoal and colour has withdrawn into its cave; everything is in thick shades of grey.
She's never liked grey; it's too much of an in-between. She likes things straight black or plain white, no murky in-betweens. Grey is too much of an ambiguity for her liking; it sits on the centre of a teetering scale and one can never know which way it will fall.
Ah, the beauty of a great uncertainty.
Not that Olivia is particularly interested in beauty at the moment; a beautiful sight to her would be the absence of papers on her desk.
The door to her office creaks open and Peter walks in, a bright smile perched under his shining eyes.
"Hey," she says.
"Hey," he answers, walking around the desk to give her a light kiss on the cheek.
He looks at the desk and quirks an eyebrow, "Did the photocopier explode?"
She sighs, "More like a million of them, these are all from fringe incidents that have occurred in the past two weeks."
He raises his other eyebrow and pokes a finger between some of the pages before looking back at her: "And the people in the big chairs don't think that this is more than a one person job?"
She folds her arms and quirks her eyebrows: "There's a lot of things that they don't think, although," she purses her lips, "It could be worse."
Peter smiles widely: "They could make you do all these things with an old-fashioned type writer."
Olivia snorts a laugh: "Could you imagine? If you made one mistake you'd have to start the page all over again."
"You wouldn't stand a chance," Peter whispers with a hint of sarcasm.
She looks past his smile to the grey backdrop outside her window and her own smile slips, falling into the drooping curve of a frown.
She knows that there are things more fearsome that type writers that she has to worry about.
"Livia?" Peter asks and she looks back at him, "You alright?"
She shakes her head lightly and motions to the window, "Look."
Peter turns to face the window and his expression is hidden from her, but she can only imagine that is some mirror of her own.
"I've never seen anything like it before," she says, "These things just keep... popping up."
Peter nods, "Like garden gnomes."
She squints at him, "Like what?"
Peter looks at her and holds up an apologetic hand, "Hey don't blame me, you wouldn't believe the things that Walter keeps for a good twenty years."
"Oh I'm sure they'd look lovely in your garden," she adds jokingly.
"Oh yea," he says with a scoff, "A better question would be how he managed to convince my mother to keep them," he shakes his head, "I swear you wouldn't be able to distinguish those things from gremlins."
She laughs for a moment as Peter looks back at the window, and it's when he doesn't look back at her for a few moments that she stands and walks to him. She puts a hand on his shoulder and looks at him, "What is it?"
He looks to her and then back out the window, "My mother would have a garden every year when I was younger, it's one thing that I actually remember," he smiles, "She'd always grow these huge sunflowers that were as big as my face and tomatoes that were the brightest red I'd ever seen."
Olivia leans against his shoulder slightly and he frowns a little bit: "I was just thinking how over there, she wouldn't have a garden anymore," his face turns to his shoes, "And pretty soon that won't be possible here," he says with a sigh.
Olivia responds by rubbing small, smooth circles on the back of his shoulder and he continues: "I'd always imagined that someday you and I, we'd end up together and have this house with a beautiful garden, just like my mother had."
She looks at him and there's a longing in her; a drive to do something that she knows is close to impossible and places a gigantic weight on her shoulders but she wants it there, it's an incentive that she's been waiting for. There's weight on his shoulders too, she can tell by the way they slump in shadow of the grey afternoon, but he weight feels entirely different to what she believes that he's experiencing. They both have decisions; but while his is meant to stop events from occurring, hers is meant to prevent them all together.
And that's a tough little pill for her to swallow.
"How did it come to this?" she asks suddenly as her eyes gaze out the window, her hand still on his shoulder.
"How did it become a matter of ripping apart universes to declare victory?"
"It's like the drop of a pebble in a pond," Peter says, "It spreads and it never stops."
"Unless you build a wall," she says softly. She feels a slight quiver in her lip and tightness in her throat. She's never been one for admittance, but that was before there were circumstances like these.
"How am I supposed to do this?" She asks him, turning her eyes to his and watching his blue eyes. They rest on her, but there's a twinge of something darker; a stain of some emotional ink that she's never noticed before.
"I'm supposed to be able to stop this, flick some sort of magic switch and it's done," she feels her face cringe slightly, a strain in her expression as she shakes her head, "How am I supposed to stop this using something that I don't completely understand?"
When she says that, she hopes that Peter knows that she's referring to her abilities. They come and go, beyond the margin of her control like waves; rising and falling with the torrent of her emotion. That's what bothers her most, not the internal politics of this little game; that she understands perfectly well. She feels a slight rush of air behind her, and knows that Peter is standing behind her before he wraps his hands around her waist and pulls him against her.
"There's always a way Sweetheart," he whispers to her.
"A way for what Peter?" she asks, her shoulders tensing, "A way for both worlds to survive? A way for you not to step into that machine? A way for us?"
He moves to stand in front of her, his hands resting gently on her shoulders:
"Livia," he says, "If I've learned anything it's that there is always a solution, sometimes they're hard to find but if anyone can find it it's you."
"Peter, it's always me," she retorts, "Why does it always have to fall on one person?"
His hands fall from his shoulders and there's a spike of something dark in his eyes, a splice of obsidian that's only just festered there; it worries her.
"Olivia," he says, "It isn't just resting on you."
She swallows tentatively; she's struck a nerve that she's never known was there.
"Everyone has their own pressures, be it with keeping the peace or keeping the universes together you are not the only one. I'm supposed to step into a machine that could decide how this turns out."
Her eyes have fallen to the floor but she looks back up at him when he finishes talking: "Peter my abilities in some way could prevent you from even having to step into that machine," she takes a breath, "And I'm the only one with these abilities so there is no one else who can take a part of this off my shoulders."
"Was it even there to begin with?" Peter asks her with a soft whisper, "Or is it something that you've put on yourself because that's how you've always dealt with things Livia, on your own?"
She doesn't know how to respond, in a sense he's right but in another he has no notion of her methods of processing. Her life governs her knowledge and her experiences, and those govern her thought process.
She doesn't like being deciphered.
"Peter," she says, "this is something entirely different."
"It is," he acknowledges, "But why are taking all this as your own?"
After a pause he adds, "Full disclosure."
She looks out the window for a moment, watching the melancholic swirl of the clouds and the dark, brooding puddle of green curve into the shapes of trees. It isn't her picture of ideal.
She isn't sure what is anymore.
"I've always had to fight on my own; for me, for Rachel," she feels uneasy, the ground beneath her feet is weak and wobbling, "Why should it be any different now?"
"Because there are people who will fight with you," Peter says, "Olivia I am here; know that, believe it. I will never abandon you."
"Thank you Peter," she answers, but she knows that it's not enough. There's something in her that's still cracked and bleeding but she's too frightened to stitch it back together.
She looks away again and she knows that he's too intuitive to miss it:
"Livia, what is it?"
She looks back at him as a burst of thunder rumbles in the sky.
"Peter," her voice trails off, and she struggles to find the words; her tongue can't seem to curve around the words that she needs to say.
"I'm not someone who trusts easily, you know that as well as anyone," she licks her lips, they're dry like parchment, "And I think, how can I possibly know that it won't all fall to me in the end; that it won't become a battle of one instead of a world?"
"Because you've already done that," he says.
She looks at him quizzically, "What?"
"When you were on the other side, you fought to get back home; fought against the other Olivia's memories," his voice is convicting but gentle; the smooth caress of fingers against harp strings.
"You already fought your war with the other side," he pauses for an instant and breathes, as if the words have taken a lot out of him, "Now it's time for you to take up your allies."
She understands him now, he is right. She fought her own battle and now it has expanded to a bigger scale; she'll have her own part to play but not the entire thing. She's just a major soloist in this concerto.
She looks right into Peter's blue eyes; deep and soothing like gentle undulations of waves and feels something secure about that notion. He will always be there, it's a constant that she's grown used to and let doubt be crushed by. She's never been one for chance but she knows how much of that there was when she was on the other side, and there's no doubting that she used it to her advantage.
She walks towards him slowly and when she's standing in front of him she cups his face with her right hand, his stubble bristling against her palm. It makes her smile.
Peter smirks, "What?"
"It's a bit like a cactus," she says nonchalantly.
"Like a what?"
She feels her smile spread across her face at the sight of his bewildered expression; she's never known that eyebrows can jump that high on someone's face.
"Your beard, it's prickly like a cactus."
He frowns: "Me and my beard don't appreciate that comment."
She laughs, "Guess you should shave then eh Bishop?"
He laughs with her and pulls her into an embrace as they look out the window, the spiral of clouds now a little less menacing. Olivia watches them for a moment and their movements, slow and languid like sloths before looking back at Peter. He has a grand smile on his face, she's sure that he's slightly radiant.
"What?" she asks as she feels a slight blush creep along the edges of her smile.
"You know," he says, "When you smile; your face reminds me of something."
"And what might that be?"
His smile blooms wide open, beaming like a daffodil: "A sunflower."
Fin
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