Olivia Dunham was never very good at love.
She had hazy childhood memories of a tall man of military bearing who loved her, but those memories might just as well have been projected on a screen at a movie theater; Olivia knew factually that her father - her real father - loved her, but she couldn't quite conjure up the actual emotion of it. Her main memory of a "father," was the brutish, sick bastard who made her mother's life a nightmare of violence and anger, and who turned that anger on her when he grew tired of inflicting it on Marilyn.
So, Olivia grew up believing that love was either expressed with anger, or was nothing more than a fantasy. Of course, she loved her mother, and she loved her sister Rachel, but that wasn't the same. Whenever there was a man involved, love meant pain.
As a Marine, Olivia steered clear of romance, making herself, "one of the boys." She was a tough, no-nonsense investigator; if you had something to hide, you'd better not get within ten feet of Olivia Dunham, because she'd nail you in a New York minute. It was a feeling of power - power over men, specifically - that Olivia had never had, and it felt good. She discovered she had another power, as well; despite her formidable demeanor, and her forbidding profession, men found her attractive. She'd never really considered herself pretty; she knew she wasn't ugly, but for some reason, her pale, natural look and unusually olive-green eyes were enticing to the opposite sex. As a result, she was never at a loss for male companionship.
Olivia liked sex. She liked sex a lot, actually - the physical aspect of it was exhilarating and cathartic. Not surprisingly, she liked it on top, straddling her partner and controlling the rhythm as she brought him to the brink. It was a turn-on for her; it was power. Occasionally, she wondered if there was something wrong with her that she didn't really care if she orgasmed or not; she enjoyed the power so much, that was almost as good. Yes, Olivia Dunham loved sex, as long as there were no strings attached.
Those strings got mightily entangled when she joined the FBI and met John Scott. He looked like something out of a romance novel; he was so tall, blond and square-jawed, she almost laughed at his mundane name, expecting it to be,"Brad," or "Sebastian," or some other Harlequin name. Olivia took one look at John Scott, and realized that she had a "type," and it was the most cliche one in the world - she liked heroes - and she decided to add him to her list of conquests.
Olivia knew how to flirt; she had her lip-biting, Princess Diana pout down to a science. Seeing John Scott in the main lobby at Quantico one morning, she opened the second button of her blouse, removed her ponytail holder, and walked over to him. "Agent Scott? Olivia Dunham. I wanted to tell you how much I'm looking forward to working with you." Holding out her hand, she angled her head down just so, looking up at him with a mix of coquettishness and candor that men almost never failed to fall for.
Agent Scott looked at her and smiled, taking her hand in his. "Looking forward to working with you, too, Agent Dunham. I've heard a lot about you. Should I be wearing my vest on a regular basis? I hear you like it rough." At Olivia's widened eyes, he chuckled. "You have a reputation for rushing in where angels fear to tread."
Olivia blinked. "Oh, uh… well, my reputation is greatly exaggerated. I'm tenacious, that's true. But in the pursuit of justice, I feel it's my job to be the one who charges in, as you put it."
"Ah, okay," he said with a knowing smile. "Tenacious is good. Tenacious is… attractive in an agent. I'm sure we'll get along just fine."
They were sleeping together within a week, with John Scott almost always on top. He controlled when and where they met; he controlled the rhythm of the sex, learning and perfecting every touch, every thrust, that he knew would drive her over the edge before him. All control was lost to her; this was John's game, and she found herself enjoying playing by his rules. After all, there had to be some rules - they were breaking every rule in the FBI book by sleeping together. It was just a matter of time before her partner, Charlie, dropped the dime on them, and one of them would be transferred, or worse. As the more junior agent, Olivia feared she might even be drummed out of the FBI altogether. Strangely, that fear - that sense of danger - was even more of a turn-on to her. She couldn't lose John, she knew that much, but was what she was feeling love, or just another adrenaline rush?
When John told her he loved her, Olivia felt as if all the air had been squeezed from her lungs. She needed time to process those words, and his look of disappointment when she didn't respond in kind wasn't lost on her as they lay in bed. Later, as they drove to the storage facility they were assigned to investigate, she decided to throw caution to the wind. Standing in the snow with him, surrounded by storage lockers and industrial buildings, she said, "I've been sorta bad at this, for a long time. Until you. I wanted to say, I love you too." They kissed, and Olivia Dunham felt like her whole world was spinning off its axis.
She wasn't wrong, because ten minutes later, her world exploded, taking John Scott - and her dreams - with it.
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Olivia Dunham hated to lose. She had to save him. And the only way she knew was by getting Dr. Walter Bishop out of St. Claire's Hospital. Broyles - damn him for the narrow-minded martinet he was - practically dared her to try, knowing full well her only chance was by tracking down his only relative, the elusive Peter Bishop.
Olivia sat down with Peter Bishop's dossier, and looked at one of the two photos in the file. It was a surveillance photo, taken two months earlier by the Bureau in Stockholm as part of an investigation of bank fraud. She was surprised, after reading his bio, at how young he seemed; the man wearing jeans, Doc Marten boots and peacoat in the photo looked more like a hip young high school teacher than the jack of all trades con man in the dossier. She eyed the stats: 6 feet 2 inches tall, approximately 165 pounds. Blue-gray eyes, brown hair. Small scar on right cheek. Fluent in multiple languages. High school dropout, IQ of 190. "Damn," she muttered to herself. "That's 50 points past genius." She was intrigued.
She laid the first photo aside, and read on. He had held many jobs in his young life - wild land fireman, cargo pilot and briefly, a college chemistry professor. He falsified a degree from MIT, even publishing papers before being discovered. Those papers were still available in the MIT archives; he may have been a total fraud, but it couldn't be denied that Peter Bishop was brilliant.
Olivia picked up the second photo, taken during the same surveillance. Obviously, Peter Bishop knew how to spot a tail, because he was looking directly at the camera and smiling. She was a bit startled by the full-face photo before her; Bishop was about her age - he'd just turned 30 - but the face before her was a strange combination of youth of world-weariness. The softly squared jaw, with its few days' growth of beard, seemed designed to mask the full, boyish face beneath, and Olivia guessed that if Bishop allowed the closely cropped hair he sported to grow out, the illusion of maturity would fly out the window in a riot of curls.
It was his eyes that garnered most of Olivia's attention, though. The large, light eyes beneath the full brows were almost eerily intelligent, the slight bags beneath them signaling a life lived on the run, with no time for sleep. They were wary, daring, and, she thought, more than a bit mocking. He knew he was being watched, and he didn't care. He almost seemed to welcome the challenge.
She disliked him instantly, and dreaded having to haul herself all the way to Baghdad - his last known location - to bring him back. Her fears were confirmed when she met him - arrogant, cocky, and smirking, she resisted the urge to slap that unconventionally handsome face more than once during their plane trip back to Boston.
As the investigation professed, and as John's betrayal became more evident, Olivia found herself falling back into old habits. She broke out the vague flirtations in her dealings with Peter Bishop, manipulating and blackmailing him into working with his father. The power was back, even if her life was falling apart, but at least she knew she hadn't lost everything. She actually found she enjoyed working with the Bishops; Walter was, of course, certifiably insane, but she enjoyed the back and forth between the two brilliant, stubborn men she suddenly found in her life. And the smirking arrogance she had wanted to slap off Peter's face seemed to mellow into a playful cockiness; Olivia started to see a bit of herself in this boy genius, for every once in awhile, she saw pain and loneliness ghost across his face after a particularly prickly exchange with his father. Daddy issues? Oh, yeah, she knew about those.
She couldn't say for sure when she'd come to need him so much; perhaps it was as early as the day on the bench when he'd touched her hand and told her she wasn't alone. Wasn't alone? Of course she was, or at least she'd thought so. But she looked over briefly at Peter, and saw something she never thought she would - a sincerity and openness that nearly took her breath away. This man, this nomad, had suddenly seemed to plant his flag in the middle of the barren landscape of her heart, and with great surprise, she realized she liked it there.
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"You belong with me." As soon as the words left her lips, Olivia had been seized with panic; she hadn't laid her heart that bare to anyone since John, although she was still a long way from admissions of love. To her relief, the anger and stoicism in Peter's face had melted, and oh so tentatively, their lips had met. She was forgiven. She would bring him home, and they could start over.
But only one of them had made it home, and when she had finally found her way back as well, it was to a world that didn't even know she was gone. Her alternate had so completely fooled them, that she had found her way into Peter's bed. She pretended for a brief while that it was okay, but then her anger and betrayal had exploded at him in a garden one night; "She wasn't me. How could you not see that?" As she walked away, she thought she heard a plaintive, broken apology come from Peter, but she didn't care.
Who was she kidding? Of course she cared. As the weeks went on, she took any opportunity she could to punish Peter. She'd never thought of herself as passive-aggressive, but she found herself sticking the emotional knife into his heart and twisting whenever possible, watching his back stiffen as he took the onslaught without a word. His patience, his willingness (or was it need?) to take it, started to wear her down; she looked at him when he wasn't aware, and saw the slump of his shoulders, his utter emotional exhaustion,and realized that she wasn't the only one who had suffered under Bolivia's deceit.
Astrid had told her that the feelings he had shown toward Bolivia weren't meant for her, but for Olivia. Could that be true? Peter, surprisingly had become incredibly open with his affection since they had met- a touch of his hand on her back, his long arms wrapping around her when she needed support. She couldn't remember if she had ever touched him in kind; Lord knows there had been occasions when he needed some reassurance, and she thought she'd been there for him. But had she ever physically touched him, as he had her? It seemed a little thing at first, but she knew Peter had grown up nearly as isolated and lonely as she, and she knew how much a small touch could mean.
As she sat in her apartment the night after the Merchant case had wrapped up, she pondered all these things. She stared at the bottle of bourbon before her, and thought of their aborted kiss in the bar and grill; what was wrong with her? She had asked Peter as much when she had admitted he glimmered as their lips had met. Were all those years she had spent building her walls, learning to wield a certain kind of power over men, left her incapable of the vulnerability she saw every day in Peter? She wanted to feel that; she wanted to be able to look at someone with such open love and desire as Peter had looked at her earlier. She'd always thought of herself as brave, fearless even. But she suddenly realized she'd been deluding herself. Fear had ruled her all her life, but all she needed was to look at Peter Bishop - the misfit, abused son of a madman who had somehow found it in himself to open his heart to not just his erstwhile father, but to Olivia herself - to find that same strength in herself. Without another thought, she grabbed the bottle, put on her coat, and headed over to the Bishop house.
Their first night together had been unlike any other time she'd been with a man. She had been prepared to show Peter she was willing to have the kind of life he'd described to Mrs. Merchant, and as they began to make love, she gently pressed herself on top of him in bed, stretching herself across his lanky frame like a sinuous blanket. As her hand made her way down his flank, though, he took it in his own. "No," he whispered into her mouth, slowly rolling them over onto their sides. "I can't believe you're really here," he said, and she thought she saw tears in his eyes.
"This is what I want," Olivia said softly, pushing against him to turn them back, but he resisted. "What?" she asked, suddenly feeling vulnerable. Powerless.
He threaded his hand through her long locks. "You are so strong," he said lovingly. "I want to give you something."
Her eyebrows rose, and a quizzical smile crossed her face. "Seriously? Right now?"
He smiled and nodded. "Seriously. Right now. My gift to you is this - I'm going to make love to you. And you're going to let go. You don't always have to be strong, Olivia. You don't always have to be in control anymore. Let me make love to you. Let me make you feel as beautiful as you are to me." He kissed her so deeply that she couldn't remember where she ended and he began. "Let me be strong for you." His lips blazed a trail down her throat. "Let go." They traveled downward. "Let me love you."
And so she did.
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..."If there's even a chance that he can turn this machine off, then I have to speak to him. I'll find him." Olivia Dunham nodded at Nina Sharp, and left the Massive Dynamic executive's office in search of her next quarry, Sam Weiss.
Glancing at her watch, she noted that she'd been away from the lab at Harvard - away from Peter - for close to six hours. Even if she floored it, she probably wouldn't be back in Boston for four more hours, and the way she had left things with Peter had her feeling uneasy. He had stopped her on her way out the door, and she suspected from the look on his face that he was preparing to say goodbye - not the temporary, "See you at home later," they shared sometimes, but something much more permanent. She feared he was going to try and get into the Machine while she was gone, to spare her the pain of seeing what would most likely be his death. He was literally going to sacrifice himself to save the universe, and knew it was something that would be better done alone.
She couldn't blame him for not wanting her there. If it were her, she'd do the same thing; they had no idea what the Machine was capable of. Peter's nose had bled when he simply stepped into the same room as the thing. Walter told her after she had found out about the shapeshifters that he feared Peter's proximity to the Machine had weaponized him. There were too many horrible possibilities to contemplate.
As she got into the car and took her phone out to plug it into the charger, she saw she had missed a call from Astrid; Massive Dynamic was one big dead zone for most cell carriers. She swore under her breath as she dialed Astrid's number. "Olivia, thank God," Astrid's voice came through the phone.
"Astrid, what's wrong?"
"Peter. He's been hurt. The Machine… "
"How bad?"
"We don't know yet. He's still in the trauma unit. But he's alive, Olivia."
"What hospital?"
"Berkshire County."
"I'm on my way. Oh, God. Walter. Stay close to him, okay? Please? Take care of him for me?"
"Of course I will. I'll call with any news. Drive safe."
Memories of their nights together - the lazy Fridays of takeout and "Plan 9 From Outer Space," the Saturday mornings spent watching cartoons and eating bagels - stormed through her mind as she drove to the hospital following Astrid's call. She knew it; Peter had tried to access the Machine, and it had most likely violently rejected him. She shook her head in disgust - why in hell would they watch cheesy horror movies, when they were living a real one?
She suddenly remembered one night when they had broken their usual routine. They had been in bed one Friday night, and had actually run out of horror movies to watch, so Peter had grabbed the remote and channel surfed. Olivia stilled his hand. "Stop," she said softly.
Peter looked at the screen for a moment, then turned back to Olivia. "Romeo and Juliet? Really? This sure isn't our usual fare."
"I remember watching this in high school. It just broke my heart." Peter shrugged, and they sank back into the pillows and watched the sad tale unfold. "She loved him so much," Olivia sighed, snuggling against Peter.
"And he loved her just as much," he agreed. "It's amazing what someone will do for love."
She nodded, smiled and murmured into Peter's chest:
"Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow'd night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun."
Peter chuckled, "Well, damn, woman. And I thought I was a closet romantic."
Olivia smacked him. "I'm just saying. Here's this, what? Fourteen year old girl, and she knows, without hesitation, that this is the man she'll love for all eternity. That even death won't change that, as inevitable as it is." She felt Peter stiffen in her embrace. "What? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he said dismissively, trying to relax.
"Peter," she commanded him, and he turned his face to hers. "You're scared."
Hesitantly, he nodded. "I know what I have to do, 'Livia. I know I have to get into that Machine soon. And I'm pretty damn sure it's not going to give me a nice backrub when I do."
"Then don't do it."
"Not an option," he said matter of factly. "But, well… when it happens… when I get in the Machine… I dunno." He waved his hands toward the TV. "I just need you to know… "
She stilled his words with her lips. "If it happens, which it won't," she whispered, "I'll take you, and cut you out in little stars…"
They never watched the rest of the movie.
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She approached the bed quietly, seeing Walter hovering over his son. "Walter?" she called softly.
He turned, his hand still gently resting on Peter's forehead. "He's so still," he said sadly. "It just threw him like a rag doll. The sound… he hit the floor so hard… and so much blood… " His fingers ghosted over the cuts that peppered Peter's pale, still face. At the touch of Olivia's hand on his shoulder, he added, "He didn't want you to have to see it."
"I know. I'm not angry," she said reassuringly. "I had a feeling that's what he had in mind. But he's going to be okay, Walter. We're all going to be okay."
Walter nodded, none too sure. Turning to face her, he said, "I'll give you two some time alone." He shuffled from the room in search of the hospital chapel.
Olivia sat down at the bedside and look at the monitors or a moment before taking Peter's hand in hers. "Give me my Romeo," she said tenderly as she brushed a slightly curling lock of hair from his forehead, mindful of the electrodes. "You sure know how to make a grand gesture, Bishop. But I'm not quite ready yet to cut you out in little stars. I want my time in the garish sun with you, ya hear me?" She stood and brushed her lips against his. "I'm gonna find Sam Weiss, and we're going to figure this out. You just rest. You've been strong for me. It's my turn now."
Olivia Dunham didn't like to lose. And now that she had everything in the world she wanted right before her, she'd be damned if this was the one time she failed. Because she had another arrow in her quiver now, one she hadn't had before. She had love. If anyone had suggested that to her a few years ago, she would have laughed. But now? Cortexiphan be damned - that was the most powerful weapon in the world.