Smile Upon Me

"Yes, everything is different

And I don't react well

To changes that come when

Your life's becoming hell.

There's a place in this world

Where people like me are found by people like you.

So find a place as this forever divine."

-Passion Pit (Smile Upon Me)

The next time Olivia has a day off, she drives two hours to see Simon again. It has something to do with the way he almost smiled when he told her it was refreshing to not hear her thoughts, the way he looked at her when she touched his hand in the hospital, and the way he crouched against the curl of the staircase at the museum.

And yes, it has something to do with the creased envelope and folded paper he'd handed her.

He hears her coming, but just the gravel crunching under her tires and the slam of her door after she slips out of the SUV. No thoughts. That's how he knows it's her. By the time she's reached the door large cabin door, so has he. She doesn't even need to knock.

"Hey," she says with a sort-of smile. He hasn't seen her smile wider than that. He wonders if she does. He wonders what it looks like when she laughs. Does she tip her head back and let herself go? He wonders who has seen her laugh. Has Peter Bishop?

He blinks at her and purposefully curves up the corner of his mouth. "Hi," he says. He steps back, holding the door open for her. "Come in."

She strides inside two steps. She holds her hands in front of her, pressing her fingers against each other.

"Uh," she says, thinking of where to start, of how to say anything that she's feeling. If he could read her mind, then he would know already. But, no… "You were right. These things—the things that you and I and the other cortexiphan kids can do—we're not supposed to be able to do them."

Simon closes the front door with his left hand and holds his right open, palm up. "Look, I'm sorry about the letter I gave you. Maybe I shouldn't have…"

"No," Olivia interrupts. "No, I mean. I'm glad I know. Now I don't have to wonder about it. Now I won't do anything stupid, like... It doesn't matter. I knew he must have felt something for her, right? How could he not? She's… She's a lot more open than I am, you know?"

"Olivia," Simon says. Her eyebrows are angled up and she's speaking quickly, the way she had in the hospital when he first noticed that there was something between her and Peter Bishop. "Do you want something to drink? I can make coffee."

Olivia stills. She drops her hands from where they still hover in front of her abdomen. She nods once. "Sure," she says.

Simon tilts his head in the direction of the kitchen and Olivia follows him there. She watches as he deftly fills his coffeepot and turns it on. She considers making small talk, but she didn't drive all the way here for that and she can't really think of anything small to say anyway. She leans back against the counter and crosses her arms. Simon leans against the counter opposite her, ankles crossed, resting a palm on the surface in front of the coffee pot. He looks down at his bare toes.

"I don't have to tell you what happened," Olivia says hesitantly. Simon looks up at her. "With Peter. You know it all, don't you?"

Simon looks up and shrugs. "Mostly. I can connect the dots from all the things he was thinking."

"That's… good," Olivia says. She stares at Simon for a moment before nodding. His face is open wide. She can talk to him. He knows all the facts, but now she can tell him her side. "When I first came back, I was just happy to be home, you know? But that was before I actually went to my apartment, and I saw that she'd moved things around. Little things, like I know she searched through my desk, and she opened the mail and wore my clothes. And then Peter told me what had happened between them."

For Simon, the storytelling is a revelation. It's not that no one has ever told him a story before; it's just that he's never really needed to listen. He's always already known it all. And so now he listens to the words and watches everything in Olivia's face, because those are the only ways he can find out what she's thinking. It thrills him, but he tries not to smile.

"I thought, how could he sleep with someone else? But she wasn't someone else. She was me. And I'd like to think that I'm something special, and that there's no one else out there like me, but then when he told me that I realized that I'm not. Special, I mean. There's someone else out there who's almost exactly like me, so no one I know or care about could even tell the difference. So it's like they don't know me at all."

Olivia doesn't typically ramble if she can help it, but right now she can't. She's not even sure that she's making sense. Over the past couple weeks so many thoughts have passed through her head. So many reasons to be angry and to blame Peter, to blame the other Olivia, to blame herself. She's blamed them, but she's defended them all, too. She's had all these thoughts, and now she's trying to explain them all to Simon at once. But she can hardly keep track or put words to them.

"Peter explained, you know, that there were differences. I'm sure you know that part. I'm sure when he thinks about her, he thinks about the way she smiles and tells jokes and the way that I can't really find it in myself to do that anymore. I know about those things because I was her, and I smiled like she does and laughed and saw all the people she had in her life, who she opened up to and loved. There were differences. So it's not that he couldn't tell that she was different, it's just that he liked her better. He likes her better."

She feels embarrassed now for talking so much and so deeply, but it feels good and it's hard to stop. Olivia tucks her chin down into her coat, which only reminds Simon that she's still wearing it.

"Let me take your coat," he says. She looks down as if she'd forgotten about it and then reaches her fingers up to unbutton it. Underneath she's wearing a long sleeved gray v-neck and jeans. Simon hangs her coat next to his in the hall closet, and when he comes back into the kitchen Olivia notices that he's dressed almost identically to her. Gray sweater, jeans.

"Coffee's ready," he says. He notices the way she's sort-of smiling at him again. "What?"

She waves her finger between them, pointing. "We match." She knows it's because of the cortexiphan. Something that Nick Lane said to her: they're soldiers, they blend it, they wear the blues and grays.

He smiles at her without showing teeth.

"How do you want your coffee?" he asks.

Olivia looks at him through narrowed eyes, head angled towards him. "One sugar."

Simon scoops in one spoonful of sugar and hands Olivia a mug. "Thanks," she says.

"Here," Simons says, touching her elbow. "Let's sit down."

They sit at the same table where she'd talked to him last week. Olivia puts her mug down in front of her and presses her fingers around its curve. Simon takes a slow drink from his own mug and looks at her.

"Are you angry at Walter?" she asks.

Simon considers the question. "Yes," he says confidently. "I know that saying he feels bad is an understatement. But I can't help it. Are you angry?"

"I was," she says. "For a while, I was really angry. But now it doesn't seem worth it anymore. At least not on my behalf."

Simon smiles. "So what, what he did to you isn't so bad but you could be angry at him for me?"

Olivia looks up him. Her shoulders are hunched over the table, and with her face angled up like that she looks very sweet. Simon is growing attached to the affect her sort-of smile has on her eyes.

"Yeah," she says, almost playfully. "I guess that's what I'm saying." She grows serious. "You said yourself that you can't have real conversations anymore. And it's because of something that Walter did to you. And he did that to me too, it just affected me differently. I can live a mostly normal life."

Simon doesn't want to interrupt her, because he likes the sound of a voice without murmurs and headaches behind it, but now he can't help himself. "I wouldn't call the life you've got normal," he says. He's hoping for another sort-of smile. He gets one, but it's forced. He likes it anyway.

"When Walter and William Bell did their experiment, they told us that we had to be soldiers. They told us to keep our heads down and wait, and then a day would come when we were older where we'd have to go to war. Now, when I was nine, I shot my stepfather. He used to beat my mom when he got drunk." Olivia is matter of fact, like she's presenting evidence. Simon shifts in his seat. He rests a hand on the table in front of him and resists the urge to tap a finger down. "I guess I thought the war had come, and I had to be a soldier and save my mom because she wouldn't save herself. That's around the same time I decided to become a cop. Because I had to fight the bad guys. The cortexiphan trials made me exactly who I am today."

Simon blinks. He touches the handle of his coffee mug but doesn't pick it up.

"I'm sorry," Olivia says. "I didn't mean to talk so much."

"No," Simons says. "It's fine, really. I actually… I like to listen to your voice. It's easy to hear you without all your thoughts getting in the way. It's nice—a nice change."

Olivia sips her coffee. Simon looks at his and thinks about taking a drink. Then, instead, he says, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure," Olivia says, nodding once.

"Why are you telling me all of this?" It's the story about her stepfather that's spooked him. Everything else she said he sort of knew already, but that was new. That was her trusting him with a part of her life that he wouldn't otherwise have access to. That doesn't happen to him often. Even when people think they're doing that, they're not. But with Olivia everything is more real, and he doesn't understand why she's opening up to him. She doesn't seem like the type. Peter Bishop certainly felt frustrated by how closed off she could be.

Olivia stares for a moment, taken off guard by the question. "I don't have a lot of people in my life who I can talk to. And I suppose that I felt that you understood something… Six months ago I would have said that only one or two people didn't have an agenda when it came to me, but now they do too. But not you."

"You mean Peter," Simon says.

Olivia exhales deeply. "Yes," she says. "Peter. He used to be one of the ones that didn't. But ever since I came back, he's wanted me to—I don't know—forgive him, I guess. Be with him, maybe. But not, apparently, because he wants to be with me, but because I'm the closest thing he's going to get to her."

Simon takes a sip of his coffee. When he puts the mug back down on the table, he runs his fingers around the rim. "Maybe it's the other way around. Maybe he has feelings for her because she's the closest thing he's ever had to you."

"That doesn't change anything." Olivia's voice is terse, tense. She's realizing that she only wants to have this conversation as long as she is in complete control of it. She doesn't want to hear another side of it. She's had enough of other sides of things. "He still feels something for her. You know that."

"Yeah, I do. And the point of telling you that was so that you would know what it's like to know things that hurt, things that no one would say to you out loud. And because you said you wanted to know." Simons manages to keep his voice even and calm. He feels even and calm, but Olivia can hardly fathom that now. She feels anything but. Lately she's been feeling this a lot, this spinning in her head and her abdomen. Like everything is going out of control around her and she can't do anything to stop it.

Once, when she was eleven years old, she spiked a fever of 103 had auditory hallucinations. A goblin voice spoke so quickly in her head that night, speeding up faster and faster until she could hardly make out the things he was saying. As she lay in bed awake, with Rachel sound asleep across the room, the voice whispered into her ear that first he would take away her mother, and then her little sister, and then her deck of cards and her chess set, and the dog tags that her dad had left behind when he died. He would, one by one, carry all of her favorite things out of her house and into the yard and then they would disappear to some goblin world, and she wouldn't be able to get them back.

She feels now like maybe the goblin voice will come back. Maybe this time he will tell her, "First I'm taking Peter, and then I'll take Ella and Rachel and Walter and Broyles. All of them, because they liked you better the Other way. And next it will be your job, and your favorite shoes, and your black-one-sugar coffee. And your photos and your whiskey and your brand of granola and your smile. There will be nothing left to smile about because I'm taking all of your favorite things one by one out the door and you're just lying in bed crying like you're eleven years old."

There is no fever now. These aren't hallucinations. There's no way to make the voice, which is really the echo of another version of herself, go away. Everything is spinning out of control and Olivia can feel it in her body. And right now, in this cabin's kitchen, Simon is sitting across from her and speaking calmly. Everyone keeps speaking so calmly, but she doesn't even remember calm.

"I do want to know," she says fiercely. "I'm glad that I know the truth, but that doesn't mean that I can't be angry that it's true, does it? And I am. Angry. I'm angry. And I'm tired of fighting for everything, and I don't want to fight against some other, better version of myself. That's not fair."

Olivia rarely allows herself to talk about what's fair. She knows that nothing is fair. She was told that every day as a child whenever she would complain about anything: "Life isn't fair." She understands that. But she indulges herself today, because she needs this decompression and Simon is being so good about listening to her.

Simon smiles ruefully. Olivia gets the impression that he's thinking of telling her that life isn't fair, but he doesn't. She supposes that's because he understands where she's coming from. Life hasn't been fair to him either, and he must know the psychological value of acknowledging that.

"I know," he says. Olivia drinks her coffee. "I know firsthand what those trials can do to a person. I wonder all the time what my life would be without them. I would be able to talk to people—" he lets out a small, self-deprecating laugh and clarifies, "women—without knowing exactly what they were thinking of me. I'd probably even wish I could read their minds, because I wouldn't know how bad that could really be.

"Olivia, you saw that. You saw what your life could have been like without the brainwashing of the experiments. Without two mad scientists telling you when you were just a little girl that you had to be a soldier for the future of the universe."

Olivia shrugs and holds onto her mug. "So now what?" she asks, shaking her head and looking up at Simon almost desperately. "Do I… try to change? Do I try and be more like her?"

Simon frowns and shakes his head. "No. Would you really want to?"

Olivia is afraid that everyone likes the other version of herself better than they like her. She's worried, because she knows that the other Olivia let Peter care for her, and was nice to Walter, and did both her jobs well. Nothing is left for this Olivia to be better at. There is nothing for her to use to even the scales.

But Olivia has spoken so much to Simon today and she's tired. Her voice is tired. She's not used to this release of all her emotions and her throat hurts from everything that she's saying and from everything that she's swallowing down. Maybe next time they can talk about that.

"Can we talk about something else?" she asks.

Simon smiles and pushed back his chair. "Sure," he says. "Let me make lunch."

Olivia stands too. "Oh you don't have to…" she starts to say, rounding the table towards the kitchen counter.

Simon, with one hand on the handle of the refrigerator, looks at her like she's being ridiculous. He thinks she is. "It's lunch time. You drove all the way from Boston. Let me feed you something." He quirks up one side of his mouth, and Olivia sort-of smiles at him again. He still hasn't seen her teeth through a smile, but he thinks that enough of these sort-ofs will add up to the equivalent. And that's enough for him. He opens the fridge and bends into it. Olivia steps closer.

"I'm sorry if I'm a bother," she says. "I didn't call, I just drove up here and then talked about myself more than I have in months. That's not…"

Simon straightens up and whips around to face her. Caught off guard, Olivia leans back and freezes. "If you say fair…" Simon starts in a good-humored, fake threatening voice with no intention of finishing his sentence.

And there. He's done it. Olivia smiles for real and Simon sees her straight white teeth between her perfectly pink lips. It's absolutely thrilling, the things that smile does to her face. The smile changes the curve of her cheek and the shapes of her eyes. He knows he's staring at her, but she's staring at him too. So they stand and they stare, both smiling with teeth.

They lean in. They kiss, a short peck like children. Then it's over and neither of them are smiling anymore.

"I'm sorry," he says immediately. "That was weird."

Olivia squeezes her eyes shut and wags her head curtly, shaking his kiss off of her. "Yeah, that wasn't right."

Then she does something amazing; she laughs. It's enthralling, but Simon doesn't want to kiss her. He just wants to know her. He doesn't want to love her, but he wants to understand her. And he wants to make her smile again, because he feels like she probably doesn't do that enough.

"It's just that you smiled," Simon says. "And now you're laughing." Olivia looks at him, still smiling but now a little confused. "Don't worry," Simon jokes. "I'm not going to kiss you again. I just… I like your smile. And I think you should smile more. I'd like to be friends, Olivia. If that's okay with you."

Olivia, miraculously still smiling at him, nods twice confidently. "Yes," she says. "I think we should be friends."

Simon smiles, nods, and turns back to the fridge to take out the fixings for sandwiches.

#

By the time Olivia pull her car back into her spot in Boston, it's dark out. There's a message on her answering machine but she ignores it in favor of removing her coat and toeing off her shoes. The letter from Simon sits on her coffee table. She'll probably leave it there for a while. She'll want to look at it again, despite the fact that she has it memorized. She glances at it now, passing her eyes over the inked handwriting, on her way to her bedroom. She shimmies out of her jeans and puts on a pair of pajama pants, then returns to the living room to listen to the message that was left just a half hour ago.

"Hey it's me," Peter says on the machine. "I'm just wondering what you're up to today, I guess. Um… Nothing important really. You don't have to call me back if you don't want to. Goodnight."

It's short and it's awkward. If he'd really wanted to talk to her, he'd have called her cell phone.

It's dark but it's not too late. Her afternoon with Simon has made Olivia feel normal again, human. Capable of interacting meaningfully with someone, capable of making someone smile. And of smiling herself.

She picks up the phone and dials Peter's number.

Note: This is the first thing I've written in ages and the first thing I'm posting in even longer, so I'd really love to know what you think.

Thanks for reading.