Note: Second installment. It stretched out a little more than I expected, so I might add a last piece as a conclusion if I can get the exposition right or if anyone thinks it is needed to make this more comprehensible. But it should work as a conclusive piece as it stands now. I sincerely want to thank everyone that took the time out of their day to read this and leave a review. It helped since I'm one of those insufferable people twitchy about posting anything blind. Feedback, critique and suggestion of any nature is always welcomed, so thank you.

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the creative awesomeness of this show.

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.

It was such an odd time to recall anything that didn't belong to this seemingly evident apocalypse, but as one second seemed to refract into a prolonged array of moments, she remembered an afternoon that found her and Peter walking across the campus of Harvard, heading back to Walter's lab. Their harmonized gate was slower; Olivia remembered she had just lost her cane. The silence was companionable, easy, and unrestricted. Peter had matched his stride to hers, which admittedly was a little more halting and less agile than normal. He made no comment as she pushed herself, but she eventually picked up on a slight mathematical process of his. She found he would infinitesimally slow down in a set of four evenly paced beats, in step to her stride. She had to check herself when she found she had subconsciously slowed down to match with Peter's change in movement. After the third time, however subtly and expertly done, she picked up on the pattern. He had once, in passing, talked about synchronizing oscillators - elements that shared an environment, held independent beats, yet were influenced by one another, either relationally or through mere happenstance. She had smiled and laughed under her breath at his approach of seemingly trying to draw on natural tendency to sync to other elements in order to get a desired result out of her.

He had looked at her, catching the amusement. But the thing was he almost looked caught.

"What?"

She just shook her head again with another characteristic half-smile.

"It's nothing."

There had been moments later. Moments of admission, moments of suppression, of tension, of support, and reservation and barriers systematically dissolved. There had been stress and tragedy, minor and not so minor breakdowns, emotional chasms and even lies. There had by traditional definition been stronger moments, but it was this random (yet not really random at all) one that did her in. The first causative link; between what she could and could not stand to lose. And draped in its relative normalcy, this was her personal event horizon. While it was recognized then, it was deeply admitted now and as she experienced this memory over again -something occurring far before the platonic turnover of her relationship with this man – she broke.

She wasn't sure if she was mentally envisioning an image of the machine, of Peter, of the world flipping upside down in strange ways or if she was actually seeing it. Perception, reality, a union the two; she couldn't find a reason to play with the semantics of the metaphorically primordial mingling. But she saw him and his eyes boring into hers, some fractional attention of theirs now secondarily accounting for the new elements of mechanical horror that seemed to suspend in some crevice of time, wondering and fearing. With split attention he looked like he was trying to make a mental etching of her face, see something that wasn't a part of devastation, yet at the same time really was. Some part of him, in the level and intensity of his expression, seemed fully and finally broken and this was nearly in direct contradiction to what seemed like a melancholic admiration, directed at her, and some spark of resiliency that evidently with a second glance couldn't be entirely eradicated; a filament of hope that had always beforehand been wrapped in heavy, albeit not entirely truthful, cynicism. She recalled, briefly, staring down light-boxes and Peter reluctantly returning in the midst of chaos, playing partially on a gamble of chance and hope, and partially on something that had best been left unanalyzed at the time. But absorbing that expression of his: The warring elements of terror for her and the wrecked man outside, understated affection, of anger at her choice and what still oddly looked like a modicum of ashamed relief at not being left alone, she couldn't help but be overwhelmed by immense fear.

And love.

Her skin was so awash with this overflow of complex emotional reactions it seemed to break through her frame and explode, akin to some metaphysical Molotov cocktail of intensity; something larger than herself that she couldn't contain. Her fingers tingled and her limbs felt hot, and she wondered fleetingly if maybe this was it, that her body had decided to give in to the onslaught of this viciousness.

When had it come down to this? A father that couldn't let go of his son, a child damaged through drugs and desperation, a boy wandering aimlessly looking for a home he hadn't known he had lost, a traumatized girl shooting a man she had tried to love and growing up wishing to make up for her mistakes and right imaginary wrongs. All three being pulled apart only to fall together in fabrics of contradicting decisions and overarching synchronicity.

One had fractured a universe. One had the power to mend or destroy two. And the other could move between both. How serendipitous. And in light of vengeance and heartbreak, of trans-dimensional beings, of roads not taken, alternate selves, and losses to lament -even if it had all been for naught - she didn't regret it. She didn't resent it. Maybe she would have been better, maybe it would have been different, but if a set of universes hadn't been up in the air, she'd commit to doing it over again. These people had been worth it. He had.

And then it went white.

The rain had been thudding on the roof for over an hour. On some level she had been aware of it, her mind playing with numbers, increments of repetition, the amount of force the water exerted on the structure and in what amounts. Even when she was asleep, she never fully was. Some part was always tuned for a phone call, an intruder, the telling 'ping' of a new email emanating from a computer that she now left on all night. There had been a time when she used to shut it off, but those days were long over. And so while Olivia slept, the persistent cataloging of her brain continued, which is why, removed from the white noise of the rain, something signaled her to a change in environment - a shifting of sheets, a decrease in proximal temperature, and the waves of kinetic energy that spoke of another living entity that wasn't just turning over in unconsciousness.

She wasn't as readily inclined to panic as she once was. Some small percentage of calming was one of the side effects of this new arrangement, replacing some of the anxiety and unrest that was characteristic of her disposition no matter what level of awareness she occupied. And while this was true, it also gave her something else to tune to. Someone. Another pulse point with its own beat, a signature of breath, and spatial information denoting where he was and how he normally situated himself against her at rest. She knew when he was awake, and that phenomenon was really equally reciprocated on his part. There had been several times he had woken up to settle her before she hit the aftermath of her own nightmares. Olivia was pulled out of sleep with the new information and it took her a moment to evaluate the room and the situation before her eyes were drawn to the dark silhouette of a torso, upright, sitting in bed. His back was facing her and while she propped up on her elbows as quietly as she could, she noticed his hand coming up to his face; once, twice, and then back in line of his eyesight for assessment. She felt the undercurrents of concern.

"Peter, what is it?"

He hadn't heard her wake and started, his hand moving across his face swiftly before dropping it out of her field of vision.

"Hey," he said softly enough, twisting around just enough to acknowledge her. "I didn't mean to wake you. I was just heading for the bathroom, you can go back to sleep." His speech was still infinitesimally quicker than normal and woven with hesitant evasiveness, so when he lifted himself from the mattress and made for the door, she pulled herself up higher.

"Peter…," she said as he hit the threshold of his bedroom. The way she said it, firm yet laden with stoic anxiety and request, made him still, bare arm resting on the doorframe. She didn't want this repeated and he gathered the subtext of her admission, recognizing it with an acquiescent sigh and a subtle drop of his head. There was a pause while he gathered himself before he made any attempt to move.

"Can you hand me the towel next to the bed?" he asked then, turning himself around.

"Sure." She blinked once, processing, before twisting her upper body, zeroing in on the thick towel that had been tossed on the floor near the bed haphazardly the night before by Peter after he had dried his hair with it. When she held it out as he approached, allowing her a better view of his face in the near absence of light, she understood.

He brushed his fingers gently against hers a little longer than necessity demanded as he lifted the cotton from her grasp, gauging her expression before averting his gaze. He brought the towel to his nose, letting the red soak into the blue fibers of the terry cloth.

She took a breath, letting the silence soak in. It was a slightly sinister permeation of a cosmic problem leaching into an area where they both hoped to find some respite, if only grasped in fragmented hours either in sleep or stolen moments. It didn't feel like any sort of sanctuary right now and the threat felt even more omnipotent in the quiet of the night.

"Did this happen last time or is it worse?" She asked finally.

He motioned to her legs, waiting till she folded them, before lowering himself to sit next to her blanket-covered limbs on the bed. He pulled the towel away to check the rate of blood-flow, and found that it had slowed a little.

"I was closer this time. I think it may have been the proximity." The answer was short and low. She could tell his mind was working and he was tapering the anxiety down. He had been doing so ever since their second exposure to the machine in the hangar earlier in the day. She pursed her lips in response to this observation. She could tell he was…scared, and the overcompensation through the force to understand the presently incomprehensible had been a sort of vice, an attenuated vaccine that still just wasn't doing enough.

"Olivia?"

He was looking at her now, questioningly. She shifted a little in the hopes of dispelling some of his newly drawn concern, but spoke in opposition to the gesture.

"Peter," she started reservedly, "you know you can tell me when something is wrong. That practice goes both ways. You won't break me with truth, but it is harder not having it."

His respiration stalled subtly, a sign he was caught off guard. She could almost feel him turning this over mentally after the initial recoil. More uncomfortable and heartrending conversations had been started this way. But after a moment he brought his free hand to rest on her calf, half in assurance and half in affirmation.

"I've never perceived you as breakable, Olivia. I just…" He sighed.

She gave a small smile that really signaled to resignation more than amusement. "I can't help you if you don't let me," she said quietly. "You said that you trusted my judgment. Of course that was before Bell was making cracks about my bra."

He couldn't help but give a short laugh at this, yet it quickly faded out.

"But I still wouldn't have thought that would change," she finished.

His fingers fiddled with the blood-soaked cloth, muscles in his jaw jumping as he swallowed. He nodded, looked down and was quiet for a few moments. Olivia realized his demeanor right now much resembled what it was when she found him Over There, which had been hard enough to watch and was only counteracted by her own terror at his possible reception and the enormity of the situation. After a moment he lifted his head and stared out the window, taking the world in with all its silence: People resting at home, children sleeping, and dogs in family backyards. She followed suit and let the context of everything pull her down with excessive gravity.

"What do you think is going to happen?" He murmured after a length of time. The question was protectively sequestered and level.

She pulled these words in and mulled them over, weighing and measuring their meaning, the difficulties they alluded to and the undercurrents speaking of elicited vulnerabilities. What could she say? They all knew the stakes of this while still knowing absolutely nothing, really, in the scheme of things.

"I don't know," she answered slowly. "I…need to believe that not everything is set to fail. That there's some chance if we're determined enough to find it." She glanced at him to gather his response - not to tailor her own to his inquiry, but because of a separate hesitance at her own words. If they sounded foolish or ignorant she couldn't say, but good people had died for that small fragment of reason or folly alone.

But he must have found something there, a kinship or a raft in open water, because his posture softened a bit and he leant in to slowly kiss her brow.

"Thank you," he said as he pulled back, one hand still tangled in her hair. Those two, self-contained words spoke heavily and she wondered how much he felt like a directed marionette. He held her stare for a good ten seconds before she laughed self-consciously, wondering what he was thinking. He smiled in return, genuine but still tired.

"It's just - I was hearing you say the exact opposite thing a couple of weeks ago."

It took her a moment to comprehend that he meant Bell and felt that his questions into the matter of choice must have been partially attributable to the old scientist's unsettling postulations.

"Ah. Well, I don't think you're deluding yourself, Peter. Bell wasn't capable of knowing everything."

"No," he agreed. "He wasn't."

She nodded, seeing a little more vibrancy in his eyes and just a little less dread. It was moments like these, as rare as they were even when shadowed in momentary interludes at 2:30 AM, that she remembered how taxing all this remained and consequently how adept Peter was at compartmentalizing the potentialities of death and destruction. It plagued them all like some persistent pathogen. She and Walter had to watch this, shuffle to the outer circles of problem solving and support, suffering the abuse vicariously, but Peter had been right when he said she wasn't the one facing a mechanical anomaly directly.

There had been a time when she felt horrifyingly centralized to the veracity of oppositional warfare; the separate attempts of utilization in the forms of Loeb and Jones, Bell, and even Walter. The idea of being a centerpiece with assigned value to two universes had been incomprehensible and frightening enough. In a rare moment, her frustration and unsettlement at being this focal point had seeped out in such a manner that Peter noticed and commented on it, telling her she wasn't alone and didn't need to fight it herself. She hadn't expected their values to switch so measuredly. But they had.

And while this chemistry of uncertainty composed the underlying basis of life as it rested now, for however long it continued, she refused to have it take everything from her, and him, or her family by extension. She couldn't foresee the progression of events but she had resolved herself to keep some moments uncorrupted and unstolen. She was here and so was he and she needed that right now to get up in the morning and face this all over again. She had been around him long enough to the sense he felt something similar, strengthened by his sometimes unhelpful attempts to keep her out of such things like this, which she had been wrong to initially attribute exclusively to his self-imposed responsibility of being an emotional safeguard to her. Thinking of ancient parchment depicting events of fire and ruin and the philosophic ruminations of destiny, the threat of losing him, along with the problem of not knowing, she pulled together some of the more loose fibers of fear into something more finely knit. She then took in Peter's face, the resident affection for her there that still held regardless of the turmoil and that still could make her breath catch in amazement of it, and blinked.

He looked puzzled. "What is it?"

"Your nose stopped bleeding," she informed him, lifting a hand lightly between them in gesture. He brought his own up in response, checking the towel and cataloging the lack of wetness near his nostril. Peter shifted, eyeing the bloodied towel before looking back up to her.

"I'm going to throw this in the hamper. Do you need a glass of water?"

"No, thank you. I'm alright."

He pulled himself to his feet, squeezing her calf before padding out the door in bare feet, red soaked towel in hand. She let out an anxious, expressive breath as soon as he was out of earshot before recollecting herself again. Pondering for a couple of minutes, she then got up and went to pick up her phone. It was 3:00 AM. After deliberating she hit the 'end' key till the power died on it.

"Did we get a call?" He was standing in the doorframe in his t-shirt and boxers looking as tired as she felt.

"No," she smiled. "I'm turning it off till we wake up."

He knit his brows together before laughing at her. "Really?"

"Mhm."

He looked shocked and curious but evidently decided not to press for the reasons behind her decision; a part of him already seeming to have woven a hypothesis. Instead he moved around the bed, situating himself beneath several layers of covers before he held out a hand toward her.

"Care to come back? I promise not to deprive you of anymore sleep."

She smiled at Peter before curling her fingers around his outstretched ones, allowing him to pull her down on the bed and into him. "You're not depriving me of anything."

Instead of the rain, she now kept pace with the thud of his heart against her back. The last half hour had proved exhausting and she could feel his breathing start to even out behind her as he pulled her closer. She took note of his heart rate, which she had learned with the first night generally rested at 72 bpm. And while it was a bit faster than normal right now, she let the consistency, this constant, soothe her for the next few increments of borrowed time, relishing in the relative peace.

"Maybe it wasn't an accident," he suddenly murmured, half asleep, the breath of his words stirring the hair resting at the back of her neck.

She turned a little in response.

"What wasn't?" She whispered.

"I don't know; this, finding you."

She stilled, confused by this half asleep rumination, but then chuckled.

"Maybe it wasn't," she teased, before following him into sleep.