Ether
A/N: So yea... it's been a little while, sorry if anyone's been wondering where I am. Some vampires from the realm of stress decided to show up and try to suck the life outta me so I had to fight them off. Anyways this is a post season three fic regarding the question of Peter's existence.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but my own plethora of ideas.
It's the apparent phase of limbo that inspires the mound of questions to fester, like mold crawling over the surface of rotten fruit. It's like being caught between two slices of thick marble wall; one defining the known, and the other the unknown. It's the lack of definition that she hates, murky and dark like the ink of a broken pen.
The signs appear slowly, only one a week or so.
At least at first, then they start coming faster.
It starts with a stray pen found on her desk, one that she's never seen before. It's red, and she never uses red pens. All her black pens are arrayed in a neat fan poking out from the plain black cup on the corner of her desk. Normally she would assume that Astrid or Walter simply left it on her desk in a moment of distracted thought, but neither one of them is at the lab.
She shrugs it off as a coincidence and places the red pen in the cup with the plan to ask Astrid about it later.
After a week the red pen completely vanishes from her train of thought, as if the event had not occurred; never existed. She carries on with her usual routine, burying herself beneath the rumpled mountains of files and paperwork. Occasionally she comes face to face with a classified stamp bearing the FBI insignia, thick and dark like a large black eye gazing at her. Watching.
Then one morning she arrives at the same time as Astrid and when she walks to her office, the door is strangely unlocked.
She never leaves it unlocked.
She curls the fingers of her one hand over the handle of the door, the other sitting on the edge of her gun, ready to draw it.
The door creaks open with a long, heavy sigh. It makes Olivia think of large, wooden doors that one finds in antique castles or watchtowers. Something that once was ripe with the motion and vigour of human life, now no more than an echo of the past. It makes her wonder how one can be sure that people were even there and there was not some other force at work.
It makes her wonder if she simply forgot to lock the door last night, as she recalls that was rather late when she finally shut the files away.
Then she sees the steaming cup of coffee on her desk and she knows that the unlocked door definitely isn't a result of her fatigued memory. The cup is bright red and the cap is open, yielding thick plumes of steam into the air.
Astrid comes up a moment later with a file in hand,
"Olivia, I found-" she sees her expression, the cup of coffee on her desk and falls silent too.
"What is it?" she asks tentatively.
"My door was unlocked, and that coffee definitely wasn't there before."
"Maybe a friend dropped by?" She offers.
Olivia shakes her head and Astrid shrugs, "Olivia I wouldn't think too much of it, it's a cup of coffee."
She heads back to the main part of the lab and Olivia walks into her office and picks up the cup of coffee, chucking it right into the trash.
She leaves nothing to chance.
Two days later, she finds another cup of coffee on her desk when she arrives, except that this time her door is locked. The trash bin is also missing and she huffs a thick sigh and walks out into the lab where Walter is working. She takes the cap off first and throws it in the garbage bin, but Walter protests when he sees that the cup is full.
"My dear, aren't you going to drink that?"
She jumps slightly at first, spilling a bit of the warm liquid over her hand, then she shakes her head, "No Walter."
"Why ever not?"
She looks up at him, a sweet curiosity on his face. It very much resembles the look he has when he asks his wife how she is; he already knows but asks for the sake of sanity. She knows this because Walter invited her and Astrid over to the Bishop residence for dinner one night, and the slight sadness in his wife's eyes spoke volumes to Olivia. Walter is anything but discreet when it comes to describing his family life, and one day it just happened to slip out that they have no children, and Olivia couldn't help but attribute that to his wife's sadness.
Walter knows why she doesn't trust suspicious cups of coffee.
"I just found this on my desk when I came in this morning, and I have no idea who sent it," she says as she moves to toss it in the trash.
"If it's poison that you're worried about Agent Dunham I can test for that."
She looks back at him, his eyes are gentle and his concern makes him even more endearing. She moves her hand away and passes the cup to Walter, who smiles like a giddy child:
"Ah wonderful! I do love a good bit of detective work."
She smiles weakly and walks back up to her office. She sits down behind the mountain of papers and reaches for a pen from the cup on the corner of her desk. She pulls her hand back when she feels her fingers grasp one, and when she sees the pen she raises her eyebrows.
It's red, that same pen that she found on her desk a week and a half ago.
She never did ask Astrid about it.
About half an hour later Walter comes bumbling up the stairs, humming a light tune as he steps into her office.
She looks up and smiles softly: "What did you find Walter?"
"Oh the results are most wondrous my dear! Not a single drop of poison or any sort of toxic substance."
"That's good to hear," she says.
"But," Walter says as he holds up a hand, only his pointer finger showing, "I found a most delightful addition in the beverage."
"And what might that be?"
His face lights up, a huge smile nearly splitting his face, "Sugar!"
Her smile falls; she always takes her coffee black with one sugar. Possibility tips its hat to her, and she knows why. Someone is doing this, leaving her these little tokens, but as to whom she doesn't have the slightest notion.
After a moment she realises that she's staring at the pages, her hands lying palms open on her desk. She can feel her jaw slacken slightly.
"Olivia," Walter asks, "Is everything alright?"
She snaps her head back up quickly and smiles, weakly like a thin twig.
"Everything's fine, thank you Walter."
But she knows it's not.
The following day it's not a cup of steaming coffee that she finds on her desk. Instead she finds a box of mint tea and a bottle of vodka perched on her desk. A yellow note stuck to the bottle reads: Red Russian.
She finds such a combination bizarre, she knows very well that it's a drink, but she can't remember where from. It's a distant memory, flickering just beyond the reaches of her mind. She scrambles for it but it wriggles away like a limp jellyfish, slippery between her fingers.
She tucks them away in her desk; both are still sealed so safety is not doubted.
When she gets home, she mixes the two and nearly gags when she takes a sip as it burns through her body. The taste is bitter and vile on her tongue and she wonders how on earth someone can stand to drink something like it.
But it brings about an image in her mind, slightly fuzzy and hazy from a time that she doesn't remember. It's of her sitting at a bar somewhere, her clothes are different and she's not alone. She can't make out the face exactly, but there is a form next to her, someone sitting at the bar with her.
She doesn't remember any of it.
She wonders if it was a dream.
The next day there's evidence to the contrary, and her reality is spun around and the dream cast up in bold, bright lights when she sees it on her desk. Sunlight peeks through the blinds as she rubs her eyes open, still groggy from the early wake-up call.
There's a note on her desk, written on the same yellow paper as the note on the bottle of vodka.
It says: I wish I could be there - P.B.
She's as confused as she is shocked, and there's a mild dash of fear pulsing through her veins. Why would this P.B want to be here with her? Her first thoughts are of some psychopath who has more than a little decent company in mind, but then she thinks of the coffee, made to her exact tastes. Then she remembers the vodka and mint tea, maybe not her favourite combination but she isn't one to turn down liquor.
Could it possibly be that this P.B. had done all this? Or maybe it was someone goading her under the alias of P.B, luring her into some game that she doesn't know the rules of.
She has nothing but a note and half-empty bottle of vodka to go on, and for her that's about as much as a few grains of sand. She wants to know who this P.B is, there's a lurking desire inside her to find out how he knows her. That notion makes a creepy shudder twist through her body, but she knows that if someone was really out for her their tactics would've been more drastic.
It's the idea that this person could be and yet might not be that intrigues her, perhaps they were the one in her memory of that darkened bar, drinking a Red Russian.
As the sunlight carves patterns on the piece of paper, Olivia looks out to the lab. Possibility curtseys before her like a dancer, long and sinewy in the light. Perhaps there is something significant with this P.B, something grand and mysterious.
She reaches for her cup of coffee and sips it carefully, warm liquid swirling through her body as a hint of sugar prances on her tongue.
Perhaps nothing at all.
Fin
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