Olivia's eyes tried to open, but there was hearty resistance: they were glued together from sleep. She was also cold, colder than she should have been. She tried again, harder, and managed to wrench her eyelids apart. She was greeted by an empty bed, her left arm draped across nothing, and no companion arm around her shoulders. He was awake again.
She propped herself up on her elbow and squinted out of the window. It was still snowing; she was childishly glad. Brandon had explained that the closure of the Rift had caused a massive jolt in the local magnetic field, and predicted that "weather patterns in the Northeast will be FUBAR for a few days while it all calms down." He's earning his money, that one, she thought. She turned over to check the time and found the mains alarm clock on her bedside table resolutely dark. The power hadn't come back on yet, making the night agreeably black. She hadn't minded the two days thus far in the Stone Age. Indeed, she had barely noticed; Peter had occupied almost all of her waking hours, his grief for Walter spiking and dipping like some diseased heartbeat.
Signing, she swung the sheet and blankets off herself, spun her legs off the bed to stand, and took her robe of the hook on the back of the door. Peter's robe had already been taken. He was probably outside. She didn't bother reaching for any light switches despite the pitch darkness – she could navigate this house blindfolded by now – as she padded quietly down the stairs. Turning to her left around the foot of the stairs she glimpsed the key in the back door's lock: he was on the porch swing. She closed and tied her robe against the forthcoming cold, glancing into the front room, whose sliding doors were open. Walter's former bed, now a mere couch again. She had helped Peter fold it up yesterday, and this simple act had caused him to collapse into tears and hacking, wretched sobs. She had instinctively laced her arms around his hitching shoulders and pressed her face into the top of his head; they had cried together for half an hour. She noted the grandfather clock on her way past – it was just after four in the morning. She had, incredibly, slept for six hours.
She knew it wasn't just grief Peter was feeling, but a strange mixture of bewilderment and guilt as well. She could partly understand - for a few hellish days it had looked for all the world like Peter would have had to be the one to cast his life into that hateful, laughing Machine, but Walter had somehow snatched that honour from his grasp at the last minute, with only Peter himself knowing how. He was still amazed to be alive.
The Machine. Its name had loomed in Olivia's mind in ten-foot-high obsidian-black letters, and September's ominous sketch had swelled to the size of a billboard. Oh, it had been given a real name by now – she thought Peter had called it a "false vacuum destabilizer", or some such pseudo-scientific nonsense – but to her it would always be "The Machine". Brandon had explained to the now-redundant Fringe Division's final gathering its intended purpose (it had truly been a diabolically evil thing) and how it had been modified to repair rather than to destroy. He had whined to her that all this would probably be "classified until ten years after end of time" – he was positive there was a Nobel Prize for Physics in it somewhere. He was agreeably childish sometimes.
Olivia had let his theories and speculations wash over her, though. She had known everything she needed to know about The Machine: it had taken Walter, almost her surrogate father, and it had wanted Peter, her… she didn't even have a word for what he was to her. Thus, she had felt a savage, smirking pleasure when, once the operation had wound down, Broyles had ordered it strapped with "enough C-4 to put a hole in the Moon" and sent it to the bottom of Lake Reiden in roughly ten billion pieces. The lake's ice refreezing had been a nice coup de grace: even Mother Nature didn't want to see the thing any more. Broyles, however, was not satisfied even with this; he intended to have divers in the water to recover the larger fragments as soon as the ice melted. The proceedings had been so willfully, extravagantly obvious - especially that gargantuan, scenery-gobbling sphere of purple-white light - that the place would be swarming with the public in short order; Broyles had always harboured a mild annoyance with the public, despite his fierce dedication to protecting them.
Put to the test, he had woven what Olivia thought had been a very plausible cover story: a prototype aircraft, with an "experimental magnetic propulsion system", had experienced a power surge and had crashed into the lake. It was total nonsense, of course, but there was enough meat to entice the conspiracy theorists. It explained both the cataclysmic EMP and the resulting power cuts that had stretched all the way into Maine. Broyles had said he could probably even explain the lingering snowfall if he tried, but, as he had pointed out,
"Who ever needs bad weather explaining? They'd rather just complain about it."
He had brought her something else when he had visited: a sheet of paper, hand-written due to the lack of power, granting her an indefinite leave of absence.
"I thought I'd save you the trouble of asking." They were standing at the foot of the stairs, and he glanced up. "Just take care of him."
His stoic mask had slipped here, and Olivia had squashed a wild urge to hug the man. She had settled for a chaste, glassy-eyed nod, and Broyles had looked almost pathetically grateful, retreating back out into the snow before things could get any more emotional. He, like her, had watched Peter spend a week sliding down a slope of apparently inexorable doom, and not even Broyles could pretend it hadn't bothered him. She knew he had been the last to see Peter before he had reached the Machine, and had wondered what went on between them.
"Agent Farnsworth is at your disposal," he tossed over his shoulder as he went down the porch stairs. He had phrased it dispassionately, but his meaning was clear: Astrid is there is if you need her. Of course she was – Peter and Olivia were her big brother and sister.
The first two days of her leave had been spent with a Peter whose emotional pendulum had swung crazily between piercing grief, zombie-like aimlessness, and the occasional laughing reminiscence.
Yesterday, for example: Astrid had come to visit, bringing pies - evidently not even the lack of electricity could stop her making them - and Olivia's heart had clenched at this oh-so-Astrid gesture. She had been strangely lost without Walter to take care of, and had obviously latched onto Peter as an alternative. Peter had been reminded by the surfeit of riches that they should empty the fridge and eat what food they could before it spoiled. They had found only an onion, an almost-empty jar of horseradish, and a four-pack of chocolate pudding pops – a Walter fridge if ever there was one. Peter had snapped one off, looked at it stupidly for a moment, and then exploded in a gale of laughter. Astrid had used them to propose a toast - "to Walter!", which Peter and Olivia echoed before they all dug in, grinning like loons. She had tasted it on his lips hours later…
Shaking her head to clear the memory, she opened the back door, softly, and found him sitting on the porch swing, his socked feet dangling. He was looking out across the garden at nothing in particular – that thousand-yard stare had been common lately – and a shiny quarter was dancing up and down the knuckles of his left hand with liquid ease. No, not just a quarter, she realized, that's the quarter. The one from… before.
She crossed her feet and leant on the doorframe, still marveling in the fact that she could now see him without that flaring cloud of energy she had at first thought beautiful and then grown to hate. Until two days ago she had seen him encapsulated in an almost opaque fog of billowing orange-white fire, his life force being ripped away, being stolen, ever faster by the growing Rift. Worse still, she couldn't not see it; she had been so consumed with fear and love and anger that willing the vision away had been beyond impossible. Seeing him clean and unmolested like this was as new and marvelous as seeing him clad in his glimmer had been the night she had rolled up to take him for "drinks". She could still remember, as though it were yesterday, that sickening drop from giddy teenage anticipation to thunderstruck dread as he had gone to get his coat.
"Hey," he greeted her, flatly, without turning around. So banal she felt like laughing and crying at the same time. She wanted the old Peter back, the one whose throat seemed to be a magazine loaded with bullets of sarcasm, whose eyes danced with mirth and mischief. She scolded herself for thinking so selfishly.
"Hey. How do you keep getting out of bed without waking me up?"
He uttered a yap of a laugh, turning to look at her with an expression that was somehow bashful and suave at the same time.
"Something from my former life – it used to come in handy. Anyway, I obviously did wake you; I'm sorry."
"Don't worry about it. I've slept on a hair trigger for a long time. Six hours is as good as a coma right about now."
It had not been his leaving the bed that had woken her up, but his absence. Like some child's favourite teddy bear, he seemed to have become her sleep talisman - the soft metronome thud of his heart, the gentle, slow rise and fall of his chest under her arm, the regular puff of warm breath that landed on the top of her head. Most of all, though, the way his hand rose to her head, apparently of its own accord, to fondle her ear, as if he were tucking a loose strand of hair behind it over and over again. She now so associated this with a flutter of pleasure that doing it herself had become almost masturbatory.
"How long have you been sitting here?"
He considered, trying to dispel that meditative semi-consciousness.
"I think the clock said one-thirty when I came down for a glass of water. I just came out here and… zoned out, I guess. Why, what time is it now?"
"Just after four."
He looked comically nonplussed. She could easily imagine that his eyes hadn't moved between then and now.
"Wow – where was I?"
She had a very good idea of exactly where he had been, and hoped he would be able to tell her; his final moments with Walter were obviously causing him a great deal of pain, and he was yet to share them. And there was still the mystery of how he had magically appeared, unconscious but glimmer-free and still clinging to life, a whole mile from where he had last been seen. She hadn't dare question it at the time, in case somebody up there had decided it was a mistake and recanted.
She drifted over to the seat, taking his glass – the quarter inch of water he hadn't drank had frosted solid – and setting it on the ground. She sat down softly, resisting the urge to lean into him; he needed space for this. She settled for taking his right hand in her left, lacing their fingers together. He handed her the quarter, his eyebrows raised in invitation. She tucked it into the gap between her right index and middle fingers and rippled her knuckles. The coin squirted out of her hand and fell to the ground. He shook his head, rolling his eyes in a keep practising expression.
"My hands are freezing, thank you!" she replied in mock outrage, bending down to retrieve the quarter and handing it back to him. He considered it for a moment, thinking of his father, before putting it in his robe's pocket. They sat in silence for a while, their breath painting soft clouds on the windless night air.
"It should have been me."
Amazingly, she had begun to drift off again, and this sounded a lot louder than she knew it was. It hurt her heart to hear it, but she could think of no reply, so she stayed silent. September's words to her in the lab a few days before came back to her, as momentous as if they had been delivered through a loudhailer: Bishop must die – we can see no other resolution. Peter hadn't been there to hear it – he had just been taken to the hospital in New York - but she and Walter had. Walter had all but broken in half with impotent grief, but she had reacted very differently, wanting to strangle the bald bastard, to hit him, smite him, wipe that glacial indifference off his face. He had seemed to be addressing only Walter, enunciating carefully as if he wanted to hurt the old man as much as possible.
Walter had disappeared soon after, and she was sure had finally descended all the way into the gaping jaws of madness that had so nearly swallowed him before Peter had come back into his life. Despite the vast resources at his command, Broyles could not find him. It dismayed her that her last memory of him was that tearful resignation to fate.
"It was my being here that caused it all. He should have just let me go; there was no need for him to throw his life away."
She just about managed to keep any sign of it from escaping, but the concept struck her as both impossible and laughable. She had been caught in Walter's tornado of frantic desperation during those last few days (before September had stuck his oar in, that is), and Peter's deteriorating condition was all he could see. The fact that two universes were at stake was, almost unbelievably, incidental to him: his sole aim in trying to close the Rift had been to defeat the hateful, life-sapping glimmer that had been tearing his son away from him with its insatiable and indifferent greed. The idea of him allowing him to die, the boy for whom he had shattered the fragile glass between the universes and walked into the penumbra of insanity, she simply could not accept.
Another thought occurred to her, a black and shameful one: exactly what kind of "life" had Walter thrown away? She had an appalling, crushing certainty that Walter would have simply taken his own life if Peter had died.
She reached up to his face, forcibly turning it to look him dead in the eye.
"Peter, he wasn't saving a universe, or two universes; he was saving you."
He was silent as he absorbed this, turning back to stare out at the unblemished white blanket that covered the lawn. She had prodded something within him, and she knew he was now back there at the lake. Reliving it all over again. His eyes had grown glassy and distant.
Part of her wanted to push him, to ask what had gone on, but that horizon-stare told her he wasn't ready. Not quiet yet. She swung her legs up onto the bench and lowered the left side of her head into his lap, staring with him across the lawn, prepared to lie there all night if that was what it took. He didn't look down at her, but his right hand inevitably found its way to her ear, fingers caressing it with barely perceptible lightness. A shudder went all the way down to her heels and her eyes closed, the reaction beyond her control. She hoped she wouldn't fall asleep.
[Author's note – believe it or not, the "false vacuum destabilizer" is based in fact: there is a theory that the entire universe is in an extremely unstable, finely balanced state, and that if this "false vacuum" were to collapse at any point it propagate at the speed of light, causing all matter it touched to degenerate into a lower energy state and cease to be "matter" as we know it.
If such a pulse were to originate anywhere on Earth, the Earth would cease to exist in just over four hundredths of a second. The wave would continue expanding forever eventually permeating the entire universe, but I think Walternate would be satisfied at the erasure of us meddlesome Earthlings, don't you? :)]