Note: Speculative piece that will most likely become entirely incorrect with the season finale. There are spoilers through season 3 and also vague callbacks to seasons 1 and 2. I am not really a fanfiction writer. Actually, I don't often write anything aside from the technical, so please be aware of the potential roughness or inconsistencies, and I apologize in advance for them. I'm a student in biology, not physics, so most likely the science will be a little wacky ( but hey, osmium floated a few weeks ago). Also, all mistakes are mine. This will most likely have one other chapter.

My Disclaimer: I do not own Fringe, any of its characters, or even Walter's strawberry milkshakes and blueberry pancakes. Though I really wish I did.

Hangar

The sounds could have spliced through eardrums; a whining, frightening high pitched keening of metallic violence that reverberated through every solid, tangible object within a ten block radius. The concrete was cracking, crumbling, and little bits of residue bounced like jumping beans as induced seismic activity continued to shake through the foundation of the hangar. The wind blew, papers scattered, objects were pulled forward as if drawn past the event horizon towards a black hole to be crushed.

They had been told to clear. People had run, but there really wasn't much point in that. If there was a point in any of this, she couldn't ascertain it, didn't know which way this was going to go and she couldn't bring herself to rationally assess a fraction of any of this. Not here, where she couldn't do anything. Which was why she was now struggling to pull herself towards that black hole and closer to hell, not counting how many had tried to hold her back, including Broyles and a tear-streaked Walter.

If the world was coming down around them or if they were all to be saved, if a Trojan army was about to pop out and obliterate them all, she knew exactly where she was going to be for it. Broyles had snapped that she needed to do her job, follow orders – follow reason - a harsh low jab that belied his desperation to appeal to her rational center and keep her from doing something insane and utterly wasteful. At what other core could you hit her? But it was her job, he was her job. Whether or not he was responsible for this while she carried responsibility for the world – even if the two weren't entwined - her job had become him; a slow entanglement over the course of years culminating in this moment of two universes in a vice grip of destruction. It didn't matter either way, and as Walter clawed at her arm, telling her, emphatically, repeatedly, that she would be ripped apart from both the frequencies and the energy coursing through the epicenter of that machine belonging to Hades, she could only shut him down by wrenching her arm away from his trembling hold and telling Broyles to get him out of there. She decided Walter didn't need to be here to see this. She now saw how he had been able to let Peter go, even as he was falling apart for it, and the world along with him. He had lived out the mistakes of one act of pure, visceral love and couldn't do it again even if the effects consumed him. But she was not Walter, and while she couldn't put herself, or Peter, above the billions of other lives that had been unfairly dragged into this, she still had choices, and she planned on exercising them. The way she figured it, it was a simple measure of consequence and value. Everything always had been, for all of them.

The seizing ground had become so intense in its severity it started to vibrate through her bones, making them feel like glass sustaining stress fractures, as she tried to make her way toward her quarry. She counted half a dozen still anatomically complete dead scientists, subconjunctival hemorrhages in the eyes, unnaturally broken skin from secondary, external processes she wouldn't have a chance of pegging down. Many had simply disintegrated like one of Olivia's colleagues on the bridge Walternate crossed over on, the thing Peter was able to survive. Olivia guessed there was a relation to this. He would have been the one to ask and she remembered all the times he had answered when she put forth her queries, with an understated and pleased smile tugging at the corners of his mouth, happy for the engagement. Now this.

A yawning, truly unnatural process of sound that almost seemed attributable to a rush of air in answer to an imposed vacuum, nearly shattered her eardrums with both its pitch and physical pull as it reverberated both out and inward. For a heartbreaking moment she wondered how Peter could still be breathing, being at the focal point of this earthquake when the physics of this were narrowly missing pulling her apart at the fringes of the event. She had to get in there. Steel was being plied, falling in large beams and in twisted abnormal filaments as the structure of the hangar started to disintegrate. Large fissures in the foundation of cement opened like rivulets, dust dancing through the cracks and Olivia felt a mixture of sheer adrenaline and horror, not even noticing as her legs partially slipped into deep fractured recesses in the ground. And then she saw him as she pulled herself to her hands and her knees on the ground, and was glad she was already off her feet, because she would have broken down and not been able to keep herself upright after this.

There were contact burns and blisters where flesh met machine, his arms engaged at cruelly apathetic angles above his head, his lower limbs completely immersed past the joints of his knees. His neck seemed to have trouble supporting his head, which was bowed, either through exhaustion or pain. She couldn't see his face or his eyes due to the angle, but she realized that he was still conscious by the intermittent tensing of his shoulders and the flex of muscle from effort or unknown patterns of energy transference between him and the device. Strange light emanated from the smooth planes of the ancient metallic creation, eerily pulsating like a calm heartbeat, which was in stark contrast to the rapid and livid atmospheric and geologic violence currently perpetuating around it.

There had been unsettled shock and the undercurrents of fear when a bald man dropped off a random sketch on a barstool as she attempted to drown her sorrows, her emotions, and her mistakes in several glasses of tantalizing, clear amber liquid nearly a year ago. That disquiet had mounted into a persistent state of unrest and anxiety that slowly culminated in a mute terror she knew kept not only her up at night, but him along with his father. This unrest was not often spoken of between them, as if part of some psychological attempt to stubbornly refute something much greater than themselves through simple obstinacy. His quietly desperate fear had probably fueled his primary response of refusal; the adamant assertions that nothing, no moment or thing, could have him choose to step up and attach himself to the machine and commit himself to this type of forced universal entropy.

The funny thing was choice was inextricable, as well as equally relevant, to their fate. Or maybe they were one and the same, ultimately. The events that led up to this were unanticipated, wrought with before unknown elements, unanticipated lines of causality and ever-growing microscopic interplay turned macroscopic. What was written had come to pass, and despite all the efforts to subvert that eventuality, some part of her, dense and concentrated to near-invisibility, feared that no matter what she did, she'd end up here, watching worlds disintegrate along with the people closest to her. And this young man, in particular. For even if he did save one world, or two, what happened to him? And if something did, was her world really saved? She allowed herself this trifle of selfishness, because she found no way to extricate it or eradicate its truth.

She at last found the energy to speak. She felt strained and stressed physically but kept her attention on Peter. She called out his name and was half-startled to find that sound wasn't carrying right. She tried again.

"Peter!"

It sounded distorted and weak, tossed almost, and it wasn't enough to be heard, but through all the chaos in the present environs his eyes lifted and then his head, as if naturally following a magnetic pull. His eyes locked with hers and she felt the prickling of the familiar, albeit altogether unwanted irritation at her eyes. She hated this. She was angry at this. And she couldn't do anything.

There had been an eventual resignation to fate with him, she found then, all in all unanticipated yet still supportable, concentrated in his countenance. The fatigue or the eventual, imminent failings of his biology had made his usually quick uptake slow, but his resolved idea that he had nothing additional left to fear was slowly replaced by the presentation of the only thing remaining that could truly scare him. His eyes laced with agony and exhaustion widened as they locked on to hers, the rest of the partially leveled hangar free from all other life. The unlucky ones farther away had died in more physically tangible ways, had not dissolved into the ether, and remained strewn about in the antithesis of grace; the effects of the myriad of forces and energy too much to sustain.

"Olivia, get out!"

She somehow managed to read him regardless of the keening, the screeching and the general lack of oxygen through elements that kept pulling and pushing air, and consequently sound, around like a beach ball with concussive force. She had never witnessed anything like this. She pulled herself up, supporting her weight partially on a steel beam that had lodged itself vertically in one of the breaks of the earth. She shook her head, trying to keep a lock on him through all of the debris getting whipped and repelled in a sort of ordered chaos. What did the outside world look like right now?

"There's nowhere else for me to go," she said. He heard her.

"This is no time for fearlessness, Olivia. You need to go. Now!" His tone was sharp in severity but ultimately fueled by panic.

The machine seemed to shift, the tempo of the lights changing along with the hue, turning darker in concentration. He said something else, but whatever it was, was carried off. Peter's early state of powerless apathy had now visibly crumbled into distress. Olivia attempted to get closer, but her weight didn't match the weight of oppositional forces that kept situationally repelling her; there wasn't any way she could reach the machine, or Peter. She hadn't known some part of her had been hoping for that type of luck. She had been warned, in an exclusively vague fashion, of the interconnectedness of transient variables and their influence, not that she would normally call herself, or Walter, or Elizabeth Bishop variables. But this was past the point of manipulation. It had all gone to hell, regardless. But she wasn't leaving him alone to face this, she couldn't. And even if she could, it was all about choice.

"I'm not going anywhere."

She thought she could read a fractured "please" off his lips but after another small adamant rebuff through a shake of her head as she tried to keep herself upright and stationary, she cataloged two things: Peter pulling more forcefully at the attachments at his limbs, his eyes oddly bright from emotion and fatigue, and the higher pitch of whirring coming from the machine. Everything then seemed to go black with sound.

"Oh, god," Olivia whispered, and she couldn't even hear herself.