The day after he'd left, she was given the drawing.
It was a delineation of Peter, a terrifying depiction of him caught in a machine, trapped in a horror of archaic-mechanics and implied fate.
She'd been sitting at a barstool, distracting her pity, when she'd spotted the Observer's back. Swiftly, silently he'd left the paper beside her and when she'd picked it up, she'd scanned the crisp white of a nightmare.
She'd given it to Peter, over there, after he'd examined diagrams of that alter-Walter's machine. It responds to him, he'd realized, when the power cell had charged under his hand.
It's a doomsday device, the Wave-sync, an ancient terror of engineered metal that harbors Armageddon flames.
And Peter's caught in its fire, burned by whatever ignition that drawing's showing he started.
He's not going to let it happen, he'd stated, he won't destroy a universe to rescue another.
I have to believe there's another way, he'd said to her over there as he'd shuffled the illustrations, I have to believe there's a way to save both worlds.
Then we share the same hope, she'd told him, we'll find a way. We have too.
And it's why, over here, they've unburied the machine, tracked down its mammoth pieces from every end of the globe. Massive Dynamic has reconstructed it, connected steel and joints and wires to reveal an omen of disaster through a structure of wonder.
As she stands here now, in this shuffling hanger, she feels its radiation; a foreboding, airborne contagion that poisons her breath.
"It's bigger than I'd imagined." she comments to Nina, Broyles and her team.
"I suppose." Peter responds, "It's just big enough to destroy two universes."
And then a freight train hits her, a fast railroading of unimaginable proportion that makes her head spin.
For months now, he's been at the center of this, not just the rebuilding, but his own horrid implications of a pre-determined destiny.
There's a special place reserved in nightmares for uncertain fears, a dark, subconscious corner holding the bleakness of future what-could-be's. When dread overthrows, all that fear rests snuggly, infinitely, in a bed of stolen fate.
And it's that bleak, locomotive hit that has her questioning if he visits there often, to the cold room of his recess mind where apprehension lays bare, sprawling ugly and naked on that same bed of what-if's.
She tries to shake it off though, ignore the answer, because they're all talking, saying the machine doesn't work because the power source is gone. She took it, that fake her, for reasons they don't know until they've sorted through her data.
Suddenly there's a loud clanging in the lab, a harsh rapping of metal against steel, and she looks behind her.
It's moving, the machine, in an instant wakening that's disrupted the computers and set off mass panic.
It's stunned Olivia, amazed her, not because of its grandeur or scale, but its horrible, come-to-life monstrosity.
Before their eyes, it's groaned awake and it's terror seems eighty times more real then when it didn't move at all.
Behind her, Walter gasps, in the words of "Good god" before Dr. Falcon remarks that it's been triggered somehow.
"Something did trigger it." Peter says, and Olivia turns on his matter-of-fact tone. "Me."
And then he holds up his finger.
She sees the red of blood glistening, slowly drying on his fingertip and as Nina sucks a breath, she feels depleted of her own.
Blood has never made her queasy, but right now she feels sick, nauseas, kicked by the come-to-life reality of what all this really means.
This mechanical monster could mean his death.
And when she starts to feel dizzy and unbalanced, she has a sure idea why.
This machine is gripping his matter, and what's been entangled in his senses is breaking her down with him.
At eleven thirty-seven, she'd called him.
She'd toyed with her phone, tossed it in her hands, wrestled with the concept of dialing before she'd punched his number in the keypad.
As it rang, she'd held her breath, felt her throat burn with saliva and swallowed something like nerves.
He'd been shaken earlier, not surprisingly, after they'd left the hanger, but he by-passed the machine's representation with humor. As always, he'd filled the rest of the day with light sarcasm and despite his resistance, agreed to an M.R.I in the morning.
In six hours, they're to find out what physical side effects that fucking world's end beacon harbors.
On the other end of the phone, she gets his voicemail and closes her eyes. His non-answer could be her way out, her escape from a conversation balancing her apologies with empathy and she can't say she isn't, if slightly, relieved.
And then she considers reason two for his phone's empty line.
Fear begins to envelope her now, creepy-crawling from her toes to her fingertips and it pools in her chest; an incarnation of panic.
Oh god, what if something's happened to him?
What if the extreme effects were postponed, delayed, waiting till these quiet hours to strike him with unconsciousness or some other malady?
Olivia envisions it again, his seizure in the lab, his body contorted and twisted in painful convulsion, and that panic rises to a level that forces goose-bumps on her flesh.
She tries to think of Walter's number, of Astrid's, then remembers her cell-phone and it's speed-dial contacts.
She races to her jacket, pulls the phone from it's right-pocket before pressing number four.
Pressure swims in her veins now, in her head and ears, as her ribs struggle to hold her hardening lungs.
"Hello?" The voice is clear, precise, sweet-like even and Olivia exhales to control her panic.
"Astrid, it's me. Have you talked to Peter lately?" Her words are hurried, and she swears, under her breath.
I saw him not ten minutes ago, she's just told her, before she speaks of just leaving Walter and their three rounds of Monopoly.
"Why Olivia?" she questions, "Is everything okay?"
Chasing Astrid's words, is her instantaneous relief and it quickly lessons her body's frozen trauma.
"Yeah, no, I uh-." She tries to think of something valid, something passable, but nothing comes. "It's-it's nothing. Have a goodnight Astrid."
After the agent wishes her the same, she flips closed her phone.
Then in a heap of all-consuming exhaustion, she falls to her couch.
This is getting ridiculous, this constant back and forth of both her apprehension and want for him.
She dry washes her face, runs a hand through her hair and allows herself a slice of the truth she can't erase.
No matter what confusion or upheaval stalk her at night, Olivia can't look past what he still is to her.
The brilliantly infinite cornerstone of her fucked up, rocky foundation.
And under her skin, that scar of independence constricts.
The observance room is white, still, bathed in bright lights and tense trepidation. There's a large pane, on the wall-to-wall window, and she leans against it as the M.R.I cocoons him.
I went for a walk last night, Peter told her, when getting prepped for the test, that's why he didn't pick up his phone.
She'd shook her head and patted his hand, pretended his skin hadn't melted her palm. If he'd needed her, she'd be outside, she'd said this to him though she knew him much better.
He'd shown no fear, no hesitation, as wires were placed on his skin, instead humor had lightened his brow.
It eats her up inside, his cool handling of that Wave-sync's threat.
She envies his ability to be so collected, to seem so un-phased. If it were her on the other side of this window, anxiety would shade all the planes of her face.
And it's only making her astonishment, her adoration of his soul's core glory beat even hotter under her flesh.
Behind her, Walter's arguing, his voice raised at Doctor Falcon in protest of the test. Peter's heart rate is high, narrowly taccicardic, and his father fears it's going to quicken. It's hardly life threatening, the practitioner says, but Olivia's own pulse starts to beat heavy.
"Okay, so what is going on?" she questions, and Falcon tells her what she's already deduced. Peters blood pressure is elevated. It should have stabilized by now.
"Do you think his heart rate could have triggered the machine?" She asks, already knowing the answer.
It was stable when he was in that hanger, because it was beating on the base of her neck.
Falcon ratifies her but says it's a curious finding, they should run more tests and she needs certainty, of her life-blood's resiliency , so she doesn't argue.
Beside her, Walter stiffens and objects. "By all means, let's use my son as the Massive Dynamic lab rat-"
"Walter, I don't think the doctor was sug-" before she can continue, her phone rings and she answers.
It's Broyles and there's another dead shape-shifter. She's needed at the Port Authority.
She tells Walter to call her, if the tests reveal anything else and as she walks away, she hugs her collar to the cooling skin of her neck.
They've printed out the encrypted data from that her's computer.
It's separated categorically, in piles of names, places and objects, wet nouns of ink drying on the tabletop's surface.
Spread out here is a wealth of organized information, a paper-well of words forming that hers intentions.
But they don't want Olivia to sift through it, to read it, and it makes her question the teamed opposition.
Broyles and Astrid exchange a glance, and their silent, shared knowledge doesn't go unnoticed.
"Because she wrote about me."
Peter's voice is stern, huskily soft, and it's drained Olivia's veins of red cells.
She grips the table but feels cotton sheets, the one's she'd yanked off her bed to rid her room of the filth.
But it's rode on her heels and followed her here.
On this table, tainting these pages, is the dirt she'd left bagged on her apartment's street-corner.
You can't truly leave behind, what you refuse to look past.
That truth is a head-on collision that's rammed into her now. And she closes her eyes from the bone-breaking back-lash.
"Yeah." Broyles responds. "There's parts of this that read like a diary. You're quite prominent."
A vicious agitation, the kind borne of inner turmoil rebounds Peter's blood, a plyometric launching of embarrassment that latches onto the bottom of her spine.
They don't want her to read it in fear of her hurt.
Protect the protector, that's the order here, and she tastes, in the back of her mouth, the metallic tinge of irony.
"We better get to Massive Dynamic." He says, dismissal punctuating the end of said sentence.
Olivia tells Astrid to keep her updated before she follows him out the door, and as she walks behind him, his pace quick and direct, his crimson-colored fury seeps into her every single vertebrae.
A year and a half ago, she'd first seen him glimmer.
She'd believed, until that night mostly evil colored 'over there', swiftly moving in shadows of electric monsters and biological freight-fests. She'd thought that world to hold only quiet darkness. The one that encroached on our side to fight for our light.
When she'd stood on his threshold and saw the sheen of his energy, his reality in this world turned her morale on its head.
He was eerily captivating, frightfully luminescent, a stunning origin discovered on the heels of her 'sees things from that side' ability. Nothing over there anymore, could be only vile and nefarious, because even then, her night terrors cowered at Peter's striking soul.
What she'd believed in, what she thought real, lost it's credibility that night when his truth spun her world's axis.
For days following, she'd kept her distance, from him and Walter, mistaking easier with it's opposite, and in the bottom of tumblers some kind of immaterializing, un-corporeal version of him would appear.
Empty whisky bottles failed to fill her, though it hadn't been the brazen liquid that had twisted her stomach.
She'd contemplated telling him the truth, bit down on the idea of it,but cost and worth were two different things.
Peter had asked her, days later, after she'd called him for help, why she hadn't phoned Broyles.
From across the room, he'd stared her down, curious, maybe grateful, and that goddamn blue-green fire had turned her ligaments structure-less.
In those minutes, she'd felt the inaugural surge of his blood, a metastasizing surrender of her owns' parent muscle.
His name, that day, had endangered her heart for the first time.
And in that moment, she knew her own cost was his infallible worth.
It had been a selfish, unfair decision, but she'd chosen silence in return for his air.
He'd caught her up in hot quarks, angry nuclei that had danced on the skin of her arms, the tip of her tongue. In the least, standing there, she'd wanted to say what he's come to mean to her, but she'd known herself on that night, and wouldn't take such a risk.
So she'd blockaded him out, and simply thanked him instead.
A year and a half ago, real became her helpless rendering to relentless synchronism, to connectedness, a level of interrelation shared with no-one before him.
They were no longer merely alive, standing together as colleagues, but they coexisted, collided on the invisible planes of every universe.
Real became an extrasensory perception of someone else's core context.
Though it's anatomically impossible, scientifically absurd, a year and half ago his heartbeat integrated her own.
And to this day, it's the most certifiable truth she's ever known.
They would have been alone in the white room if not for the rift between them, the invisible tear of things unsaid and un-faced; the lining of their would-be companionable conversations cut to short replies and curt acquiescence.
If Olivia were to reach out her fingers, it wouldn't be mere space between her and Peter. She was knocking elbows again with that goddamn white elephant.
It's become the third wheel of their company and she considers, bitterly, if she should give it government clearance.
Beside her, Peter's arms are tight to his sternum, in defense of the same intruder that still painfully nudges into the deep of her back.
And it's making her divergent to tell him she'd rather be at the lab.
Standing around has never been her strong-suit, so being here in a stalemate, watching facial stress technology screen for suspects, is testing her impatience.
There's clues, answers, laying in stacks in front of Astrid, and Olivia's unrepressed if eager to know the words typed into the consensus of her other's time here.
She'd think twice, maybe, if that virtual journal could enlarge her chest's hole.
It's only to feed her curious bitter disparity now, her anger's aftertaste, that she wants to know what lover's whispers her ears never heard.
Pain's climax has already numbed her heartache; three times over.
So she's merely a spectator now.
"Peter," she says to him, breaking the quiet, "about the other Olivia's files, I know you're trying to protect me, but reading about it isn't going to make it worse."
He tries to interject, but she cuts him off.
"Peter, I'm not doing any good here. But if I can help Astrid with the files-"
"Olivia." Granite, flanked by tenderness, stops her persuading, invades her self-sense.
His glabellas muscle is deep, beautiful, softly tight and she's narrowed down her tense shoulders to his looming power.
"I've conned people." He tells her. "And I know what I would have written about that."
His vision glues her soles to tile floor and he swallows, hard.
"She must have thought I was a fool."
As it had before, her back clenches, a forcible ache of his self-loathing, a taking over of her skin with gloom echoes of his chakra.
That other her has raped him too, from the inside out, and she sucks his vulnerability into her lungs.
Just as she, he'd been her victim, and she's suddenly repulsed by her own blinding selfishness. All this time, these past three weeks, he's been pounding his head on regret's thick door.
But her ignorance has deafened the knocks of empathy he's earned.
And her next breath stings.
Turning away now, is their third guest, their mammoth ton of debilitation.
It's uninterested in the ionosphere of said things.
Peter drops his head and she reprimands her own shame.
"And I don't want you to see me that way."
These words are softer then the former, almost cracking, and they succeed in breaking her resilience.
He fears she'll comprehend him a lesser man, an insult to dignity, but he doesn't understand she hasn't the ability.
Because in one sentence, he's torn apart her self-inflicted defense, undone her fibroblasts of scar tissue and ripped away her independence.
Again.
And again, where she stands, his bewildering beauty has taken her over.
Brandon reports, through the overhead speakers, that they're done, the tests are over and as the moment breaks, between his burrowing vision and her stagnant lungs, she's left standing in his fog from that her's smoke and mirrors.
That hers journal gave a voice to the ghosts that stole a life, a soft whisper of a psyche too familiar for comfort.
Caught in the neatly typed sentences had been echoes of Olivia's own chest, an issuing of her own sentiments in her own language, inked together to define a hold without the limit of one world.
His attraction disarms the her of now and then.
And the other played it to the beat of his mental berating.
It had taken his turning back and her gathered courage to send permanently home their 900 pound white intruder.
After the lab they'd found themselves in their latest victims home, surveying and collecting, before the unassuming foyer cradled her apology.
Time and place had come second to the need for clear air, an internal, all around dual vaporizing of that her's carbon monoxide.
So she'd filtered the fume by admitting her selfishness, her blind, narrow-sidedness of who and what that her affected.
He'd been just as used and violated, peppered with a hundred unwelcome adjectives that elicited contempt, and he deserved to know that she finally understood it.
Because his quiet sorrow, his self-deemed unforgivable sins cried at her feet.
So what absolution she could grant, she'd had. If only to acquiesce his repentance and lay-down her own.
"She's gone now." she'd said to him. "I know it doesn't feel like it but, she is gone. And we can move past this."
They were on their way to Boston, in the memory, her broken hip and senses forced her invalid, so he was driving.
He was messing with the radio, speaking of some younger experience of a different existence, but she'd heard only static, the speedy incoherent sound of her accident's fizzling after-shock.
She'd been released from the hospital five hours ago, and if not for her shaking wrists, her unstable perceptions, she could pull off the guise of being fine.
Except for him. He'd known, despite how she'd wanted it, he'd known better.
They'd been and still are, after all, unexplainably compelled to perceive each other.
And she'd be angry of his knowing her, if the injured, innocent scared child inside her hadn't clawed at his shoulders for comfort and trust.
Indulgences he freely offered.
She'd heard him laugh lightly, and when she'd turned a questioning brow, lines form the corner of his eye.
"What?" She'd asked, and he'd shook his head, hugged the wheel in his palms.
"What normal is to us, I think this is it." he explains. "Driving to the ends of the earth to discover the latest extraordinarily, grueling mystery that threatens humanity." he ducks his head, reading the street sign and before he continued, he turned the car.
"Not to mention our sanity."
She'd smirked and he'd chuckled.
God, on that day, she'd loved his laugh, soft and rolling from the place where amusement met boyhood innocence.
A complete contrast to the demons he wore on his brow.
"What's sanity?" she'd responded, her grin growing.
They'd drive a few more miles before he spoke again.
"As strange as it sounds, I would have missed this."
I would've missed you, he'd really said, she'd felt it in her jumbled senses, read it through the white knuckles of his hand.
He'd meant it so strongly, he'd stressed every muscle in his body taunt.
This had broken through her mind's static fizzle, the first, small hint of their magnetic synchrony.
There'd been a tenderness in the air then, a thickening of mutual compassion derived from his words and her examination of them.
So she'd reached out her hand to brush his arm.
"As strange as it sounds, I would have too."
Under her scratched, bruised fingers, she feels his forearm tighten.
"If you hadn't-" he begins, but swallows the words, catches his vulnerability.
"I'm glad you're back, Olivia."
She'd squeezed his forearm, a hugging of appreciation hinting at need.
"So am I."
He's standing in front of her and inside, she's breaking down.
She's just told him he he'd had nothing to worry about, that the words, inked in that journal, burned into her corneas, carried nothing but the valiance pertained to his beauty.
He's smiling at her but tension grips menacingly on the muscle of her ears, so even the words she'd told him in that busy corridor felt air light now.
It's because she's wondering, with a brash, betraying drop of her lungs, if she'd stood here like this, looking at him, two inches from the threshold and seven from his mouth.
God, she was tempted to close the gap, squelch the differences from that her she'd swore to own. Her tongue burned to taste again his lips, his breath, the honey flavored wonder at the corner of his smile.
And suddenly, her shoulders are heavy, her chest thick with shame, and his hands, once to his sides, now find his pockets.
Again, he was crossing over and into her, seeping through her skin like water into fibers.
That painfully beautiful line creases deep in his forehead, raises his brow, turns his eyes sad and regretful, with the hint of a memory.
Here, in this entranceway he'd led that her upstairs.
Olivia feels this truth beating in the center of her back, her wrists.
So she bites her cold lips and turns the door's knob, carries the rush of night air into the heavy hallway.
Without a word she steps outside, begins to climb down the stairs when he calls her name. She presses tight her eyes, and fists her hands in her pockets, wills him to go back in and shut the door.
She wants to be the only one party to her own disparity.
But she turns around feeling, knowing, it's a misery shared.
Under the porch lights his face is soft, pained, his chin, slightly set with words that won't come out.
I'm sorry, isn't good enough, and it was supposed to be you, no longer holds water.
So in response to his silence, she drops her head, feels the cool of the night against the blur in her eyes. Her lips press into a line as she raises a sad brow.
Tonight, this is what it is. They are what this has made them.
Two ghosts in a mirror; fractured by three.
He feels it, as strongly as she, and the whisper of that her's presence carries on the breeze through her hair.
This makes her breath hitch, his body stiffen, and so before she falls apart, cranium to toes, she shrugs her shoulders, urging him to not speak.
Not tonight, her eyes tell him, I can't hear this right now.
So he's defeated, and presses his forehead to the arm he's braced against the doorframe.
In the same sadness as she, she feels his soul choke, and its raising the small hairs on the back of her neck.
Undone and broken, she turns from him, and makes her way to her car amidst the stifling silence.
