It was a very strange feeling. That smooth, featureless curtain of blackness in Peter's mind had begun to flutter and ripple with vague unease. He stood stock still, hardly daring to move, to breathe; his right eye remained closed – he was afraid to open it, lest it disrupt the fine equilibrium he sensed.
Nothing was happening.
Ten seconds elapsed. Thirty. A minute. His right eye opened, and his head swiveled back and forth. Everything was as it had been – the Rift was still there, shattering and reforming his view of the outside world. He strained his ears and heard gunfire and shouts – the Other Siders' pre-emptive assault had obviously descended into a two-sided firefight. None of this was right. The rippling in the curtain became more pronounced, became active concern.
Nothing was happening.
He had been expecting one of two things when his hand had finally met its metallic partner: to die immediately, unknowingly, or else to have been galvanized as if by an electric shock as the show began. Clearly, the first had not happened, and he began to grasp that the second wasn't going to happen. The concern flared into fear.
Peter again took his hand out of the restraint and held it in front of his face, staring stupidly at his palm. That initial unease had now swollen grotesquely, like a dot of ink on tissue paper, and was threatening to reach a wild, scrabbling panic. His eyes, which had so recently been unable to open, were now as wide as saucers. He put his hand back into the restraint, gripped the power supply tighter, mashed his hand into the thing, willing it to work, slicing a set of parallel, bleeding cuts into his palm. He had cut the last of his tethers to life mere moments ago, and had come crashing back down like a sack of bricks thrown from a fifth-storey window. Shit. SHIT!
He uncoupled the power supply from its restraint and examined it. It looked exactly the same as it had all those years ago, sprawled out on the table as he ran his experiments. Without that same equipment he had no hope of determining what, if anything, was wrong with the thing. He hiked his feet, with great difficulty, out of their plinths and carried the device down the steps, still peering at in the hopes of seeing past its dull metallic surface and into its brain. It remained inscrutable, seeming to laugh at him, to mock him.
His head whipped around, eyes comically wide, as if he expected to see help come sauntering out of the trees. Not knowing what else to do, he stepped out of the Machine's core and walked around to the electronics that had been jerry-rigged and shoehorned into the loop by himself and Brandon. Every movement was slow and agonizing – he had a mind with a very great need to act and a body that was threatening to sink to the ground, like a marionette whose strings had been cut, at any moment.
He bent and checked the waveform on the main monitor. It was very difficult – there seemed to be three keyboards and six hands – but the wiggling acid-green line perfectly matched what he was expecting: it would heal, not hurt. The muffled crackle of gunfire from the holding area flared again as if to remind him that the Other Siders still did not believe it, and that time was still running out. He checked every possible setting and configuration, begging for an anomaly, and found not a single one to be incorrect. His weariness overcame him again, seemingly twice as strong all of a sudden, and he thudded to the ground, putting his hands over his face. He knew he would never awaken from this last lapse. It was over.
I was ready to die for this, hell, I AM ready. WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
He pushed his palms into his eyes and sobbed, his bare lower back against the diabolical coldness of the Machine's alloy. To die while saving the universe – universes – was one thing, but to wink out here, pointlessly, in aid of nothing at all, sitting at the foot of this gibbering, leering monstrosity was quite another. He had been told many times that he was important, and this was his first and only chance to prove it. Why was he being denied?
Why?
A barely audible crump reached his ears. The sound of a foot on snow.
His arm swung behind him with a speed that surprised he himself. The Glock Broyles had given him lanced out in front of him, and immediately began to dip and sway. The gun felt as if it weighed twenty pounds, and the muzzle wouldn't keep still; it danced in lazy, random sweeps. He thought he had caught a glimpse of something vaguely man-shaped some distance away, but his now-useless vision was also tear-blurred, and no amount of painfully effortful squinting could resolve it into something he recognized, be it friend or foe.
The gun's weight doubled, trebled, and it pulled his hand to the ground. Utterly, completely exhausted, he suddenly had the idea that all of this was taking place in his head, the Machine having blasted his sanity clean away; at that moment he might have been a drooling vegetable, his head lolling, his limbs contorted into that degrading X shape while the Machine, laughing and capering in victory, sapped the last of his life force... He lost consciousness and sank, sideways, to the ground.
xXXXXx
He felt something on his chest. Something very light, with no more force than a hummingbird's wing beat. Or a snowflake. He ignored it. He was dead, after all.
Immediately, or perhaps hours later, the sensation became more pronounced, more insistent – a finger poking into his chest, two fingers, two fingers with sharp nails. Still believing himself dead, he frowned in mild perplexity. Then the perception knob was wrenched all the way to the right, and the sensation rocketed from mild annoyance to blazing agony: it felt like someone was grinding a lit cigar into the middle of his sternum. Along with this, sounds came back to him – running water, the gently pulsing wind. He was cold again. No, not merely cold; at was as though his very nerves had been pulled out and thrust into a freezing puddle. A very clear image came to him: a stooping, elderly caretaker was shuffling through the switch room in the building that was Peter Bishop and was heedlessly hiking every single breaker into the ON position. He decided to try opening his eyes, and immediately wished he hadn't - what he saw came within a hair's breadth of sending him over the brink of shrieking lunacy.
A hypodermic syringe was poking out of the middle of his breastbone, a syringe that to Peter's recently reactivated senses looked ridiculously, cartoonishly large; the barrel could have gone into the middle of a roll of kitchen towels. He gaped at the thing with mounting, dreamlike horror, then remembered he had lungs and almost screamed them out of his ribcage and onto the snow. His own scream hurt his ears very badly, but not screaming was simply not an option. The scream went on and on and on, and he vaguely wondered when it would be time to breathe in again. He then remembered he also had hands, and they rose in front of him to pull the thing out. It took several tries – his fingers moved with the stuttering reluctance of ancient, never-oiled hinges – but he managed to wrap his fists around the needle and yank it out. He spared it one final
(ohmydearJesusitwasinmyHEART!)
thought before he flung it as far as he could into the surrounding snowdrift. The scream petered out; he replaced it with ragged, panting breaths and found that the previously-useless air was now working for him again. His eyes felt as big as manhole covers, and he used them to assess the situation. He was sitting at the base of a tree, his legs straight out in front of him, about ten yards from where he had passed out. How did I get here? Gunfire flared again, this time very much louder, more relevant. He realized what had been in the needle: adrenaline. It was the only possibly thing that could take him from death's door to this jittering, caffeine-powered Technicolour world so quickly.
"My God! Peter! Are… are you alright? Did it work? I did it exactly how he told me!"
Walter's face appeared directly in front of him, his bottom lip quivering slightly, his eyes searching Peter's face for any sign of recognition. Peter opened his mouth to speak, but instead produced a string of choked, barking coughs.
"Where's your shirt, Peter? You'll freeze!"
Walter stood, unbuttoned his cardigan, and draped it around Peter's shoulders. It felt blessedly warm, as if it had been held in front a fire. He resumed his hunker.
"There, that's better." As if he were addressing an eight-year-old. Incredible.
Peter was now giving serious weight to the possibility that he, Peter, had gone insane. He wondered again where his body was – had he passed out on the way to the Machine, or was it at this moment gobbling his obliging aura and doing its job of sewing the inter-universal fabric? His father's presence here, not to mention his incomprehensible banality, was extremely difficult to weave into any notion of sanity. Still, he realized that if he were insane none of this would matter anyway. He gauged his ability to speak, and found that he could.
""Where's my shirt?" Walter, what the hell are you doing here? Don't you know what's about to happen?"
Unbelievably, he smiled.
"More so than you know, son."
Typical Walter Bishop. The obfuscation annoyed Peter, and he spoke again, more forcefully.
"Walter, you shouldn't be here! It's dangerous! Are you out of your mind? Why are you here?"
He wanted his father to turn and run, as fast and as far as possible, but his newly-recovered power of speech couldn't quite get the point across. He tried to answer his own questions, since he was sure that Walter would duck and weave, but couldn't come up with anything even resembling answers. Peter had made it abundantly clear that nobody should be inside the Rift with him when the time came – it was unclear what would happen to that space when the Rift was closed, but all had agreed that the Machine would most definitely remain – and the only reason he could conceive for Walter being here was to somehow comfort him. If so, he was throwing his life away, probably feeling guilty, and Peter couldn't, wouldn't let it happen.
Walter had been strangely absent during Peter's week in hospital, visiting only once and talking about nothing of consequence, evading Olivia's questions about his activities. She had spent every waking moment (and, he suspected, most of his sleeping ones) at his bedside, and she had been confounded by the fact that his father was off doing God-knew-what instead of spending what had seemed for all the world to be his son's last remaining days with him. Seeing her angry, furious, even, with his father had caused him great dismay – they would need each other once he was gone…
His reflection was interrupted by renewed activity from the front, now much clearer thanks to the adrenalin. First came a shout… no, a scream. Several screams. These were not the screams of men being quickly and cleanly removed from the midst of battle, either; they were piercing wails of pure agony, as though the dying men were being
(burned alive)
tortured. On the heels of this he heard a deep, reverberating rumble that could only be heavy diesel vehicles of some kind. He wondered to which side they belonged – the portal was certainly big enough to admit tanks and the like, but not, thankfully, any aircraft. Given the suddenness and lack of lead-up, he suspected they had come through the portal, and felt a flash of worry for
(Olivia)
the defenders. Walter, however, seemed completely at ease, his head cocked slightly sideways in a dog-like listening pose. Noting Peter's concern, he whispered, with an almost conspiratorial nod,
"Just wait."
As if cued by Walter's voice, an entirely new and more terrifying set of sounds arose. Peter could scarcely attribute what he was hearing to anything real – it sounded as though whole trees were being torn out of the ground and set aflame. He heard several booming crunches that sounded an awful lot like car crashes. These new vehicles weren't getting very far, it seemed…
"Ah!" Walter exclaimed, with the air of a man who has found his car keys after a brief search. "It seems your dear Olivia has gone to work!"
As the words rolled out of his mouth those awful tree-snapping sounds doubled, quadrupled, and ignited what sounded like a nuclear war. He heard the tell-tale buzz of Gatling gun fire, more of those dreadful tortured shrieks, but mostly BANG after BANG after BANG. "Olivia's gone to work?" What the hell is he talking about?
"Walter, you know you're in danger here. You must know."
The old man was immune to any warning, still hunkering with that serene expression on his face. Peter wondered what kind of drugs were currently coursing through his father's veins. Valium, probably.
"The power supply isn't playing with you, is it?"
The tangent confused him utterly, and it was several seconds before he realized what his father was talking about. As if to make himself clear, Walter produced the thing from beside him in his squatted position. Holding it face up in his right hand, he presented it to Peter as if to say "Watch!", and very slowly offered his left palm to the top. It was at least two inches away when the device leapt out of his right hand and melded to his left, the retainers clapping around the wrist in a perverse parody of a hug. He jiggled the palm/power supply combination in front of Peter's face – "See!" – before pulling the device off. It took a great deal of effort. Walter peered at the thing as if he were admiring some amusing curio, before turning to Peter with an eager smile and exclaiming
"I think it likes me!"
Peter's felt his face contort into a frown of utter, uncomprehending bemusement. His eyes danced and swiveled of their own accord. This was too much to take in, water being poured into an already-overflowing jug, and a million questions were trying to climb out of his one, uncooperating mouth. He settled on one, inspired by the impossible sight of the power supply clamped around Walter's hand:
"It can't be working for you. It was designed for me. Only me. There was no way to adjust it!"
Walter's face slid into something Peter simply couldn't not credit, not here, not now: for all the world, it looked like mischief.
"Yes, Peter, that used to be the case. However, I…" He paused, and seemed to choose his next words very carefully indeed. "I… made a deal."
This cryptic pronouncement started an avalanche of further questions in Peter's mind
How did you do it?
Why are you here?
How did you get here?
Why bother? It won't work anyway without a gli…
The rest of the imagined questions, the hows and the whys, were scattered away, like chess pieces flung from a board by a petulant child's arm. An epiphany so monstrous, so colossal that he couldn't even see its edges, had smashed into the centre of his head with a deafening clarion of iron bell clangs:
He wants to take my place...
There were several seconds of utter, uncomprehending shock, and then Peter began to moan – no… no, no, no, no – his head swiveling back and forth in pathetic repudiation. He wouldn't, couldn't let this happen. It was his job, he was destined for it, ready for it. His chance to repair all the damage he had done. He felt a bolt of nausea, as if he had missed a step going downstairs, and his alertness plunged. The adrenaline shot had had been given less than five minutes ago had already begun to wear off.
Walter took his son's face in his hands and stopped its idiot jittering. He was still smiling, but it had turned into a fragile smile of exasperated patience.
"Peter, please, for once, see this from my perspective. What I did was wrong, I have always known that, but I did it out of love. Seeing you die the first time…"
The smile fell away; he began to cry, and Peter felt his own heart break.
"Seeing you die the first time was bad enough, but seeing you do it again through that blasted window, being powerless to do anything about it…" His mouth turned down in a rictus of perfect misery, and he trailed off into thick sobs. His consciousness beginning to turn soupy again, Peter wrapped his hand around his father's wrist to steady him.
"Watching you go into that thing," he indicated the Machine with a tilt of his head, "and pay for my mistake… I can't do it. It would be the end of me."
Walter's desperate, beseeching honesty penetrated Peter's brain-fog with the ease of a laser beam: the man was almost hysterical at the thought of his son casting his own life away, and Peter suddenly knew that if he had done so, his father would have died, broken and truly insane, a very short time later.
His eyes had not left Peter's all this time. He lowered his forehead until it was touching his son's, tears flowing freely now. Peter managed to speak, the words thick with his own imminent tears, his head shaking again.
"No… no, I can't let you…"
Walter chuckled through his tears and tried to smile.
"Come on, what's the use in a crazy old codger like me plodding along through the twilight in favour of a vital young buck like you?"
It was just like Walter to try something like this and incredibly, despite the furious, raging denial coursing through him, Peter laughed.
They sat in silence for a while, simply looking each other in the eyes. Peter was still trying to mount some kind of case against his father's intentions, anything to keep him from going into that thing. He opened his mouth, still not quite sure of what he would say, when Walter's next utterance destroyed everything in his mind except for moaning, impotent grief.
"Peter... if you go, I have nothing left. It would tear my heart out. You are the only reason I live. You always were."
In that moment Peter knew, finally knew, what had to happen. The realization hit him in the belly with the force of a prizefighter's body blow, and he crumpled, his body heaving with sobs of exquisite pain.
Walter leant in and wrapped his arms around Peter's shoulders, tipping his son's head into his shoulder, whispering comfort into his ear. The raging storm of activity from the front seemed to fade, leaving only the glassy whine of the Rift. It was just the two of them. Peter wept.
xXXXXXx
All too soon they were interrupted, by a sound so dreadful and portentous that even Peter's grief evaporated for a moment. What Olivia had heard as a blaring brass-instrument discordance, Peter heard as the interference that came when a microphone is placed too close to its speaker, amplified to an strident roar that made his eyes hurt, his teeth hurt.
He felt his father's arms unweave from his neck, and the old man's expression when his face reappeared drove a spear of terror into his chest: resignation. It was time, and there was so much left to say…
Walter backed away slightly, seizing his son's face again, but this time much tighter, as if the grip could push his words deeper, drive them home. His eyes were fierce with determination. His demeanour was now that of a man who was very close to being late for a very important meeting. He spoke hurriedly.
"Peter, listen to me. The last six years we've had together have made me whole. If I had to do it all over again, I would do it without hesitation. It would be worth it. You were worth it. I hope, in time, you'll finally forgive me."
He leant in and placed a lingering kiss on the side of Peter's head, above his ear, then connected their foreheads again. With heartbreaking sorrow, he spoke his last words with infinite softness:
"I love you, son."
That last word reached right into Peter's chest and squeezed his heart. His awareness fading very rapidly now, he made one last, gargantuan effort to speak, to scream I DO forgive you! I love you, too! All that came out was a barely-human croak, but he loaded it with all the love and forgiveness he could muster:
"Dad…"
It was all Walter needed. He froze, half-risen, his sorrow disappearing instantaneously, eyes closing in an expression of sunny, contented joy. In that moment he looked twenty, thirty years younger: he knew he had been forgiven. He smiled, and turned to face his end.
xXXXXXx
Peter was barely aware of anything now, the world having blurred and dimmed into a roaring, incomprehensible semi-dream, but he clearly saw his father straighten himself, square himself, and walk with defiant dignity into the beckoning arms of the Machine. A brick landed on each eyelid, and they tried to close, but he drew on the last of his reserves to keep them open. He glimpsed a blackish X shape forming in the centre of the podium. Heaving the dregs of his remaining consciousness to the surface, he channeled all of it into one last, beseeching roar:
"DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD!"
There was a brief, pregnant pause, and then it began.
xXXXXXx
The light came first – a blazing, purple-white ball of fury that surrounded the Machine and its occupant. Peter allowed his eyes to close against it, but the light sliced through his eyelids with imperious contempt, turning them to glass; he could see that small, dark, wavering X in the core of that hell storm whether he wanted to or not. He also became aware of a sound. It was, at first, more felt than heard, but its volume multiplied with ferocious speed.
He would have great difficulty describing that sound to Olivia as they on the bench, days later; it was a sound so hideously alien it had no business being heard by human ears. He would cast around for analogs, eventually arriving at a combination of the pure, continuous hearing-test tone of a high-C tuning fork, and a cycling electronic humming/grind he could only equate to a lightsaber, being swung in an ever faster circle. She had smiled at that comparison.
His tear-stained face lit with that eldritch glow, he saw his right arm rise of its own accord, carrying a hand that felt as heavy as a car battery, and reach out across the ten yard/ten mile gap that separated him from his dad. His fingers formed into a grasping claw, desperate to touch the man one last time. He overbalanced, falling onto his knees, that arm still straining, wanting to tear loose from its shoulder. Sweat sprang out on his forehead in beads the size of air gun pellets. He was weeping and sobbing and moaning in total misery, his face half-buried in snow, but his eyes still nailed to that tiny X in the middle of the conflagration. Incredibly, he began to crawl.
xXXXXXx
Both the light and the sound were swelling, billowing beyond Peter's capacity to bear. His field of vision was collapsing from the outside in, black stars blooming at its edges. Sounds became muted and choppy. He had a brief moment to worry that he would die anyway – the Machine's byproducts having seared his eyeballs, imploded his ear drums and turned his brain to mush – before he passed into senseless oblivion, his body slumping face-first to the ground.
