"Things will never be found, Peter," his father used to say (distractedly, his hands a blur amongst glass beakers and steel knives, his eyes lost in thoughts of other places), "unless there is someone who chooses to look for them."
This always made him think of his dreams, the ones he had when the house was silent and his bedroom was cold with empty, still air. Dreams of being lost in nothing, of seeing everything around and knowing that for him, it didn't exist. He was not of it. And he could never touch it.
The scream in his throat echoes only in his mind—nothing breaks the smothering silence as he chokes. And the world moves on.
(His father listened carefully as he described the nightmares. His fingers only clenched a little, thinking of a coin—but Peter didn't notice.)
Unless there is someone who chooses to look.
x
There was so much inside her sometimes, Olivia thought there must have been at least one passerby who felt the pressure, the building temperature, the presence of something more than her calm. She quelled it, kept it down, and kept her gun pointing steady and relentless with a strong voice. That's how it worked. That's how it happened. That's how she was.
But at the same time, there was something about that which she suppressed. Something. Something intangible, something spiritual and stronger than she could ever be, a force by which she knew she would eventually be overcome (just one more day; I'll fight just one more day). And in that something was someone.
Sometimes, when she was left alone to her thoughts, staring at the dark ceiling above her bed in a silent apartment, she would think that the someone might have been her. And she would think that perhaps the true Olivia Dunham, behind closed doors and tight lips and a cold collected mask, had been lost long ago.
Unless there is someone who chooses to look.
x
And so they would live and live and live as days went by and time passed and the world moved on, each lost and wandering, but moving with such wild intention that it almost seemed as if they knew where the hell they were going. And occasionally, when the wind blew too strong and life was moving too fast and they wavered on the edge of something dangerously vast, they would reach out and catch each other.
And, just for a moment, the world would ease. Just for a moment, they'd be found.
They'd be real.
Then other things called, life spun and spun, and they'd be wandering and searching anew—even as their hearts leaned inexorably towards each other.