Chapter 2: Return

"Walter, oh my gosh… Walter." Peter nervously uttered under his breath as he got down inside of the deprivation tank, careful not to hurt Walter whose head was just barely floating above the surface with his eyes closed. For a brief moment Peter almost froze in place as he stood there, fearing that the worst could have happened to the man that he had come to know as his father, but he knew that he didn't have time to waste and forced himself to be brave enough to push forward to see if his father was still alive. Quickly stooping over and gently taking him into his arms to keep his father's head above the surface of the water that was sloshing around against the sides, Peter looked him over to make sure that he was still alive. The slow up and down motions of his father's chest told him that the man was still breathing, and he moved his hand over to check his pulse, which seemed to be weak to him, but it was still there.

"How did he end up in here?" Peter asked, looking over to Astrid who was watching the situation as it unfolded in front of her in what seemed to be shock. "I know that we checked this thing months ago when he went missing, he couldn't have been in here for six months… but he's still alive…" Peter shook his head as he tried to figure out a safe way to get Walter out of the deprivation tank. He had managed to get Olivia out of the tank once before, but she was a lot lighter than Walter was and he didn't seem capable of moving himself to help him get himself out of the tank. "Astrid, go and get me a towel… or something to lay him on, and Walter needs something to wear. We need to get him to the hospital."

Astrid wasted no time at all and started scrambling to find something to help get Walter cleaned up as Peter took a moment to himself to look down at his father as he held him in his arms. Emotions were finally starting to overtake him as he ran his fingers over his father's wet, curly hair. After months of searching for him, there he was, alive, but everything still seemed to be far from the finish line. He had imagined that he would have turned up dead, or that they would have found him far away in some other state and that they would have met in an embrace when they showed up to rescue him, but he hadn't been prepared for something like this.

Moments later, Astrid brought over some towels over, along with an unrequested pillow from Walter's bed, and laid them out onto the floor and together, the two of them managed to hoist him up and out of the tank and onto the floor. "I'll take care of him from here. You call an ambulance and Olivia, and tell her to meet us at the hospital."

"Already on it." Astrid replied, trying not to let her nerves get the best of her as she called in for an ambulance and Peter went straight to work trying to dry Walter off. The weather had been chilly lately, and it almost felt cold enough to snow and the last thing that he wanted was for Walter to die from something else right after he had just gotten him back. "They're on their way. They should be here any minute now." She finished as she stooped down beside of Peter and helped him finish drying Walter off. "I can't believe that he's back…" Astrid said, still hardly believing her eyes. Was he a ghost or was this a dream? Nothing was making any sense to her on how he could just show up inside of the deprivation tank like that, and unfortunately the only person that actually could help them make sense of any of it wasn't able to tell them anything about what had happened.

Peter paced about in the waiting room, waiting to hear something, just anything about his father's condition. Astrid was also in the room, sitting close by with her hands clasped together in her lap with a solemn yet anxious look on her face, just as eager to find out what was wrong with him as Peter was. "Peter, Olivia will be here soon." Astrid's voice came out as stressed as she looked, but she had grown to feel almost like a mother to him over the years, as strange as that might sound to anyone else, and she felt the urge to try to soothe him. "Walter will be okay. Maybe he just needs some rest. I mean who knows what he's been though the past few months?"

"That's the problem." Peter said as he stopped in his tracks. "He could have been tortured for all that we know and we weren't there to stop it…" his voice started to crack as he spoke those last words, but Astrid knew the man well enough to know that she could sense something else hidden in his words, and that was anger. She knew that for the longest of time, Peter had blamed himself for Walter's disappearance and took it upon himself to go out on his own and look for him. He had distanced himself from the rest of them as he went through his own process of grief and anger, and that had put a strain on his and Olivia's relationship at times, but he did his best to balance everything out and Olivia was as understanding about everything as she possibly could be under the circumstance. He had lost both of them more times than he could count and Peter couldn't bear for it to happen to them again, to just let their little family be shattered by forces beyond their control.

"I don't think so Peter. I didn't see any cuts or bruises on him while we were drying him off. He just looked like he was sleeping…" she said as she drifted off into her own thoughts as Olivia suddenly came into view down the hallway that led into the waiting room with the young Etta in tow behind her. Peter quickly met up with her and welcomed her with an embrace.

"Grandpa Walter is back?" Etta asked and looked around the room for her grandfather and then back up to Peter with a worried look on her face. "I don't see him, where is he?"

Peter knelt down to his daughter's height and looked her in the eyes as he took her hands into his own. "He's resting, kiddo. In another room. But he should be able to take you to the carousels again very soon." He said, giving her a soft smile and Etta's face lit up with a smile of her own.

"You promise?"

"Mhmm." He said with a nod as stood back up and mussed her curly hair up and then turned his attention back to Olivia. "Olivia… I-I don't know how this happened. We heard a loud noise and then the next thing that Astrid and I knew; we found Walter was in the deprivation tank." He went silent for a moment, there was something familiar about what he was saying but he couldn't quite put all of the pieces together yet. "What if Walter was erased?" Peter asked, eyeing the waiting room to see if anyone else was listening in on their conversation. "From time. And-And he just suddenly appeared like I did back in Raiden Lake?" Peter's eyes widened as he searched his mind for other clues that could help him put everything together, but hardly anything else was coming. "The tulip… it didn't make sense to me, but now it does. He must have known that something was about to happen and sent it to me before he went missing."

Olivia grimaced as she tried to take everything in and make sense of what her husband was trying to explain to her. "Peter, do you know how crazy all of that sounds?" Olivia asked but then went silent in thought herself. Most of her memories from that time had been wiped away, clean, and replaced with her old memories, the ones that she should've had but were erased along with Peter. "Okay, let's run with that thought then. Why would Walter come back in the deprivation tank? You came back in Raiden Lake, that's where you had the accident that night…" Olivia glanced down at Etta for a moment, knowing that she couldn't go much further without ruining the innocence of their daughter. She wanted to shield and protect their daughter from the truth of what was really going on in this strange world for as long as she possibly could, and that wasn't an easy task with the whole family working for the Fringe Division.

"Pardon me." Said a deep voice, coming from a door of an adjacent room, it was the doctor. "I don't mean to interrupt anything, but I thought that you would like to know that your father checks out. All of his vitals are doing surprisingly well. There's no reason why he shouldn't be up and about after he gets some rest." He said as he looked down at his clipboard to check for anything else that he might mention. "Although it seems that his body has been through a great deal of stress lately, so he needs to take it easy and take some time off to recover from whatever might have happened to him. That means no work for a while."

"Great! Can we see him yet?" Peter asked, knowing his father well enough to know that he wouldn't be taking any time off when he went back to the lab. His father's work was what always kept him going. Work is good for the soul, he could remember him telling him over-and-over again when he was younger.

He rocked back on his heels for a moment and gave a look to them that said, I should say no, but… "You can go in and see him. But keep it quiet. He needs his rest."

Peter nodded and pushed past him and into his father's room. They had put Walter into a private room, with a window in the back, with the shades cracked just a little to allow some of the sunlight in, even though the rest of the lights in the room were out. Olivia came into the room next, carrying Etta into the room, along with Astrid shortly behind them.

"He looks so… peaceful…" Astrid said as she walked over to the head of Walter's bed and gently ran her fingers through his curly hair and rested her hand on his cheek. "But it looks like he's in need of something good to eat." She said with a sad smile, as she took notice that it looked as though he had lost some weight while he was away. "It's probably a good thing that I bake things when I get nervous… I still have some pies at home that I think that he would just love to have to eat later. It's been driving my father crazy."

"I just hope that he can remember what happened…" Peter muttered as he walked over to the opposite side of the bed and peered down at him. "I'm just glad to have you back… dad."