A/N: Hello everyone! I'm very excited to present the next chapter of this fic to you, as this is where we really start to see some of the effects of Peter's return (and if you know me well then you know that I can't resist a little angst :P). Enjoy.
Thanks goes to my fantastic beta, Uroboros75.
He spends three days in solitary confinement before Broyles finally decides to take him seriously. Freedom comes in small increments. First, thirty minutes outside the cell, then an hour, then two.
After three weeks, he's allowed to visit the lab.
When he walks in, Walter's puttering around with the usual suspicious concoctions and Astrid is by the computer, her fingers flying over the keys. Only now does he truly consider himself back home from the state of metaphysical depersonalization that he was stuck in; but when Walter and Astrid both look his way and say absolutely nothing, the ensuing silence slices through his euphoria with the precision of the finest blade.
He stands there for a moment, caught in the thick Bermuda Triangle of their gazes before he moves towards Walter, whom he suspects, with any luck, would be the more receiving of the two.
"Hey, Walter," he says nonchalantly as he attempts to peek over the man's shoulder. Walter flinches away almost immediately, curling the test tube in his hands closer to his chest.
"How do you know my name?" he asks with eyes wide from building apprehension.
Peter holds his hands up, keeping his distance between himself and Walter; he's only come to try and weave some of these shattered bonds, not crush them further. He doesn't understand how they cannot remember him. He remembers Walter clearly from the moments before he stepped into the machine, as the man whose lower lip quivered over the prospect of losing his son; then, in the future, as the man who discovered how to exploit the hidden loopholes of the matrix of Time in order to cheat its principles.
As the man who would sacrifice anything for Peter's sake, anything to see him smile.
To see him alive.
He sees none of that now. There remained only the broken shadow of scientist without a cause.
"Walter," he repeats, seeing less of a flinch now and more a gnawing fear. "It's Peter. Your son."
Walter shakes his head, his eyes billowing like sails caught in a summer wind. "My son died at Reiden Lake over twenty-five years ago."
Peter shakes his head; he knows that isn't true because he remembers what happened that night, the moment where the Observer pulled him and Walter from the lake shining brightly in his mind. He remembers it now because the shock of being pulled from a plane of non-existence back into reality is a far greater shock than that.
"No, he didn't, Walter," Peter replies. "He's standing right in front of you."
Walter tilts his head slightly, and for an instant Peter dares to believe that there's a flicker of recognition in the old man's eyes, but his posture remains closed off, his arms crossed over his chest in a way that bristles the hairs at the top of Peter's spine. He had often wondered what would happen if he'd never been saved on that night; now he knows.
"If that's true," said Walter, "then why do I remember none of it?"
Peter shrugs and shakes his head. "I don't know, Walter. But if there is anyone that has the ability to figure that out, it's you. You need to figure out why this happened. What went wrong when I stepped into that machine?"
Walter purses his lips. "No," he says and shakes his head, becoming more furious with each passing second. "No. For all I know, you could be one of those sadistic Shapeshifters sent by my devious counterpart in order to gain information that he can use as leverage. I will play no part in such a scheme!"
"Walter!" Peter exclaims, his hands curling to fists in the pockets of his pea coat. His frustration is growing to match his anxiety, and that's never a good sign. He longs for the familiar tone Walter would use with him, one with caring and tinged with authority; the voice of a father. He even admits to himself in his nostalgia that he misses Walter's blatant remarks about the grotesqueness of the bodies they'd often encounter, simply because that was the man he'd come to know as Walter Bishop. This shell that stands before him, befuddled by the simple presence of Peter is someone he's never known.
"I'm not part of some scheme, or whatever else you think that the Other Side is plotting against you. I just want you to remember me."
He sees a softness enter Walter's eyes, a gentle compassion that Peter wants so desperately to build upon; Walter needs this support, this foundation of goodness and trust that keeps him above the murky waters of insanity. Walter's face droops into a frown as he sets his test tube back on the rack, its gentle clink echoing through the room. Peter wonders if he sees it yet, those moments that he knows are there but just beyond the connections that his mind can make.
"Do you remember that lucky silver dollar I had when I was a kid?" Peter asks, and he almost smiles when Walter looks at him with a flicker of recognition in his eyes.
"My Peter had one too," he says, his eyes shaded with sorrow. "He was always trying to flip it over his fingers. He eventually got it, before he died."
Peter regrets bringing it up as a flash of pain clearly overwhelms any notion of remembrance that had previously occupied Walter's eyes.
He goes for the other end of the nostalgia spectrum, hoping for something a little more cheerful and bountiful in obscurity, something that Walter will have a hard time denying.
"Remember the cottage we had at Reiden Lake? You'd always wake up early on the weekends to make pancakes," he says, feeling a smile growing on his face as the warm scent of freshly cooked batter wafts into his body. "I'd come downstairs and there would be a huge stack of them waiting for me on the table; the ones shaped like whales were always my favorite."
"Such information could have been easily acquired through some non-approved snooping, I'm sure," Walter quips, and Peter feels a slash of pain at the remark. "Despite what you say, young man, I do remember some of these things, but I do not remember you. I remember my son, Peter, dying when he was a boy," he adds, and Peter notices the tears brimming at the corners of his eyes; he doesn't mean to make him upset, but it hurts Peter more to know that he is nothing but a random vapor to them.
"Your assistant, Astrid," Peter says, and he doesn't bother to look to see if she turns her head. "You always get her name wrong, you call her Aspirin, Asterix, Astro and probably a slew of others that I've failed to mention." He steps forward so that he's less than a meter from Walter. "Now I'm pretty sure knowing that would require more than non-approved snooping."
"That may be," Walter concedes. "But I remember none of this with you; you simply appeared in that device, and that is the first time I have ever seen you. I may try and remember other times, but where I try to place you in those scenes, the pieces don't match. It seems, almost as if you aren't meant to be here."
His words carve deep gashes of sadness in Peter, and when he excuses himself to his office Peter wonders if remaining in that dreary limbo would have been a better choice.
He's about ready to give up and leave when Astrid pipes in from her computer station. "I think that if you really want to convince him, it's going to take more than a few random memories to do it."
He turns slightly, twisting his neck over the curve of his shoulder to look her way. Astrid sits stoically, and the way her blazer is tucked in around her waist speaks business and nothing more.
"And you, Astrid?" he asks, feigning as much innocence as he can in what he hopes will come across as benign curiosity. "What will it take to convince you?"
She looks back to her computer, her eyes never leaving the screen as she responds. "Certainly more than a few nicknames, but even then your chances of convincing me are slim at best."
He feels his shoulders bunch up slightly, almost defensively at her blatant comment.
"Come on, Astrid; it's me."
Her head snaps up then, and Peter slinks back a step. Her eyes have been reduced to dark syrup comparable to molasses; it whispers to him in a foreboding manner, as if he'll be sucked into nothingness if he gets too close. She's unwilling to believe something that seems so plainly obvious to Peter, but the shell of her temperament has thickened beyond his ability to break through, so he retreats into silence.
"I don't know you," she says, punctuating each word. Her words are like the strikes of a whip on Peter's memory. " I have never seen you before in my life; you may think that you know things about me or my life but that doesn't matter so long as your identity is in question," she says as she turns back to her computer screen. Peter watches her for another moment in silence, flabbergasted by the sheer bluntness of her words; she's become a carving knife, sharpened to a hair's width by the shifting of time.
She reaches for a muffin that sits nonchalantly next to her cup of coffee and takes a bite; the gesture reminds Peter of a moment that he's sure contains a few mutual memories.
"You're nervous, aren't you?" he asks, and she pauses mid-chew. The tight lock of her jaw disconcerts him the most as she continues and swallows heavily.
"What makes you say that?" she asks, her voice peppered with curiosity.
"You bake when you're nervous," he explained. "Pies and cakes and muffins and all sorts of things." He lets out a small chuckle before continuing. "You once joked that I had made you so worried that you ate all the things you baked and were going to sending me the bill for your lap-band."
She shakes her head, and the lack of recognition makes the balloon of his laughter burst like a dying star. "I never said that to anyone," she answers, curling her bottom lip over the top one. "How did you know?"
He straightens his shoulders and tries not to sigh. "Because I remember you telling me."
She takes a sip from her coffee, her eyes never leaving his face, as if she expects him to make some audacious and dangerous move - like a jackal cornered in an alleyway the colour of a bloody moon. She sets the mug down and sets her one hand on the desk before standing.
"You may know these things, Peter Bishop, but how and why you know them is what bothers me. I think that until we can know otherwise, it's best if you keep those little tidbits of knowledge to yourself."
Then Astrid walks away before Peter can make another response.
He never expected to come back to a world that had re-molded itself in his literal absence, and where the gaps of his existence once sunk into the expanse of these universes, they had bled together into a new, almost violet mixture of the world he knows. Every ounce of what he's come to acknowledge as familiar is different, and where memory and swift rebuttals would usually suit his purposes, he's caught in the headlights of a world colliding with his own. Every interaction, reaction and perception is changed; all his relationships have been made into martyrs for his non-existent past, leaving him with nothing of his own.
It makes him feel like Rip Van Winkle.
The shuffle of feet and thunk of a desk drawer alert him to another presence, and with a quick turn of his neck he sees the inky shadow staining the blinds in Olivia's office. She is the last person for him to try and reach out to; without her, his memory is as good as a single piece of art set aflame by rebels. He doesn't want to force the memories on her, but as of late she's been less than receptive; and frankly, it infuriates Peter to every extent. He's only trying to restore things to how they should be, and he wishes that she could see the abhorrent wrong in the current state of things.
He makes the short stroll over to her office and knocks on the door, causing Olivia to look up from the chimera of paperwork staring in her face. There's a black pen tucked between her fingers and her black reading glasses are astutely perched on the bridge of her nose; he's missed those glasses.
"Can I help you with something, Mister Bishop?" she asks, and way her voice mimics that of a librarian makes Peter's blood go frosty; she's so aloof around him that even cynicism can't dull the throb it creates in his chest. He's so baffled by the new path that his words should take that he stands there in the doorway to her office for what feels like hours before he actually thinks of something to say. Even then, she beats him to the punch.
"Are you just gonna stand there, or do you need something?" She quirks her eyebrows at him as she takes a sip of her coffee, and that's when her expression goes sour. She makes a disgusted face at the cup and sets it back down on the table.
"Got your coffee order wrong?" he chimes, already knowing how annoyed she is at that; if there's one thing that you don't mess with, it's Olivia Dunham's coffee.
She makes a more mild face of annoyance and answers. "Yeah, they were way off; I usually take it –"
"– black with one sugar," Peter finishes.
She looks at him incredulously, because he's absolutely right and she simply can't get past the eeriness of it all. He knows so much more, but he's only giving her little tidbits, the same that he's done for the others; he knows that such a flood of information all at once will only serve as a catalyst for potential drowning. She doesn't deserve that kind of emotional assault; he knows the kind of ordeals that she's had to endure in the years that have clung to her like a rusted ball and chain. He's always been a gentleman around her, never rushing head-first into something that could only land him in the boiling pit of her resentment.
"Is that another one of those things that you just happen to know about me?" she asks, accusation seeping into her voice. Her tone is slightly deeper than he's used to, thick and sharp like the point of a whip. He swallows thickly before carefully choosing his next words; the last thing he wants at this moment is a verbal lashing from Olivia Dunham.
"It's not something that I happen to know," he states. "It's something I know because you told me how you like your coffee. And after I got your order wrong once you made sure that I never forgot it."
He sees the spike of curiosity in her gaze, and the thick knot in his stomach gives him an inkling as to what she's going to ask him next. He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans to try and stop the nervous jitter that he can feel creeping through the fibers of his nerves.
"Why did you get the order wrong?" she asks.
He feels his nails bite against the skin of his palm, a gritty burn like sand caking his skin in the sun. He doesn't want to tell her, but his honesty is already in question and if he backs out now there will be no more opportunities to secure trust of this importance.
"Because it was done the way she liked it."
He doesn't have to explain who he's talking about; the horrified recognition in Olivia's face makes her realization evident for all to see. Her eyebrows drop, curled along her brow bone as the corners of her lips droop into a small frown; the subtlety of it frightens Peter, because he knows that this how much emotion she's allowing herself to reveal, beneath her canvas of calm there is an ocean of roiling secrets that she lets no one sail on.
When she finally does speak it's with a tentative whisper, quiet enough that makes part of Peter hurt for her fragility.
"You knew my alternate?"
He nods somberly, because any words he once had have taken refuge far beyond his reach; he can only remember words that were spoken to him, in a garden tainted with poisoned intentions.
He said he looked into her eyes and he knew it wasn't her.
Olivia's words still spike flares of regret inside of him, because as much as he hates to admit that he's wrong, denial cannot save him. He'd blatantly ignored the signs that something was afoot, and he'd paid the price in quiet nights and whiskey bottles.
"Yes," he says with a nod. "She... she switched places with you, Livia. When we were coming back from the Other Side, she switched places with you and came back over here."
He swallows, because he can already feel the clarity of his words slipping as his guise of calm falters. "She pretended to be you, Olivia; and I fell for it. I believed it."
He hopes that maybe a part of her will understand why he's saying this, even if she doesn't remember; his heart is hers, as he hopes it always will be. She takes her glasses off and sets them on the slew of files covering her desk before standing. She walks over to him and stops; Peter can see the tension filling her jaw.
"I never crossed over," she says, shaking her head. "I was kidnapped and held in a cell for two weeks before I got out."
He drops his head, the magnitude of her words settling heavily on his shoulders before he answers. "Olivia, I–"
She holds up a hand to silence him.
"She still pretended to be me, Peter," she says, and the conviction of her words is all he needs to feel a tiny speck of hope in this massive void of unfamiliarity. She lowers her hand again. "And people didn't know; Astrid, Walter, Broyles, none of them. Was that... was that how it happened for you?"
He nods softly, uncertainty drifting over his face. "Yeah. We only found out when you got a message through to our side."
She makes a strange face at him, scrunching her eyebrows before shaking her head. "I never sent a message Over Here, Peter; I was in a cell for two weeks. There was no way to get a message out."
"Then how did you get out?" he asks, because he's tired of beating around this prickly little bush of a cactus.
She looks straight at him, without hesitation because that's how she's always done things, and he's relieved to see that her conviction has at least survived this cataclysm. "I fought," she whispers, her voice a hiss that vibrates through his ears. "I clawed my way out of that hell, and came back to find that my world, my home, was no different."
He reaches a hand out to her, because he feels like she needs to ground herself in something other than this thrumming anger that's beating inside of her; she needs something alive to remember what it's like to be just that, and Peter can think of no one better than himself.
"Olivia," he whispers as his hand reaches for her arm. She instantly recoils when she realizes what he's doing, and it's not anger that he sees in her eyes this time but a frightening uncertainty. "Sweetheart, listen to m–"
"Don't call me that," she snaps, the lightning in her tone crushing his good intentions. He thinks that she sees the instant look of hurt in his eyes and she says it again, her tone more hushed. "Don't call me that."
"Olivia, please; you have to listen to me. There are things happening here that I can't explain, and clearly, you can't either. Let me at least try and help you figure them out."
She's already so close to the door and so near the edge of Peter's reach that he feels fear trembling at the edge of his perception; he's already lost her once, and he's terrified of losing her again.
"Why?" she asks, and he sees that classic Dunham skepticism bleed into her tone, like ink into papyrus. He knows that she doesn't trust anyone without getting under their skin, because she wants to be sure that there's no chance of harm before she lets them get under hers.
He swallows, feeling the tight muscle of his throat glide over his Adam's apple. "Because I've seen the things that you've been through; how you let yourself get close to people and then have them rip it all away. I've seen what the world has done to you Olivia, and it's terrifying. But you don't have to face these things on your own."
Her eyebrows knit together, tension crinkling in the folds of her brow as she crosses her arms tightly. "You know nothing about me," she says, her words piercing in their absolution. "How can you just assume that you know me from whatever information you've collected about me?"
"Olivia, this isn't just some covert operation where I've spent hours pouring over files about you, Astrid and the others," Peter says a bit more forcefully. "This is me telling you about the time that I remember spending with the Olivia that I knew."
He feels exhaustion begin to settle in on the crests of his shoulders; he wishes that she could just capitulate to consider his side of the story for even a single instant and give him a little morsel of hope to chew on.
Her next words make him pause, because they are far too quiet for someone who seemed ready to walk out on him a few minutes ago.
"I'm not her," she whispers, and the pain in her eyes is all too clear. Peter comes close to smacking himself in the forehead, because even though the timeline has changed, Olivia was still replaced by her alternate. He sees the inferiority complex blooming open on her face, an onyx stain on the porcelain of her complexion. He wants to reach out to her, because she is that Olivia that he remembers, the edges of her being are just hardened where he hasn't been present to sand them down.
"Yes you are, Olivia," he answers. "You are the Olivia that I met in Baghdad three years ago, the one who blackmailed me to come back; you're the Olivia who asked me to help you save your partner John." He sees recognition in her face, and knows that their first Fringe case ended on a much drearier note in his absence.
"You told me that you never really had a best friend when you were growing up," he smiles before continuing. "People called you Han." It's there again, and the fright accompanying it in Olivia's eyes almost makes him stop; but he doesn't, he can't now.
"When you lived on the military base in Jacksonville, your father painted the door red. You told me that that was the last place that you had felt normal in your life."
Her bottom lip is starting to quiver, and remorse is filtering into his heart; he doesn't want to cause her pain, but he needs her to remember him.
"You were part of the Jacksonville Cortexiphan trials conducted by Walter and his partner, William Bell; and because of that you were bestowed with psychic abilities, some of which you still don't understand."
Her head is shaking now, and through her apparent distress she manages to mumble a soft stop. He pauses and closes his lips, seeing the fruits of his labor crack open and rot before him. "Stop it," she says with a little more force.
He moves a little closer to her, reaching out a comforting hand, but she backs away, her eyes turning slightly red now. He just wants to comfort her, but she's having none of it.
"Olivia," he pleads. "Listen to me. Don't shut me out like this. Your life has put you through so much; don't put that all on yourself. Don't let things like your stepfather make you think that you have to lock yourself away from everyone."
Her expression uncoils instantly, and the terror that he sees lurking at the edges of her face is dark like obsidian. "What do you know about my stepfather?"
Peter's very careful with his next words; he knows how sensitive these wounds are and doesn't want to rend open scars that will never vanish. "When you were nine, you shot your stepfather. He survived, and he's been sending you a card on your birthday every year since then."
She stares at him for a moment, eyes blown wide into emerald pools before swiftly grabbing her coat from the chair and heading for the door.
"Wait, Olivia! What's wrong?"
She pauses at the door, her blonde hair like golden pins down her back. "You are," she says with a turn of her head over her shoulder. "I killed my stepfather." Then she leaves without another moment of hesitation.
Peter sprints after her, but the door to lab is already closing on the clacking metronome of her shoes when he reaches the bottom of the stairs. He lets his shoulders fall, the tension turning to lead in his muscles; he can feel the real exhaustion settling in now. He can't remember the last time he slept because in that intrinsic limbo he was in, he wasn't even sure if sleep was a known concept. There was simply existence.
He's about to go flop onto the lumpy couch in the lab when he hears the clack of shoes against the concrete again, and when he turns his attention to the far right of the lab he sees none other than Astrid. She looks calmly demure, but a hunch tells him that her keen hearing picked up on more than just a few words of his conversation with Olivia.
"Everything alright?" she asks politely, and this time Peter doesn't smile.
"Not really, no," he answers, settling himself by a lab bench as he rests an elbow on the cool surface. "I still don't understand this, Astrid," he says. "How did I manage to make things this... screwed up?"
"Well," she quips, "spontaneously emerging from the bottom of a random lake certainly doesn't help your case."
"Hey, if it had been my choice, I would've gone with a five-star hotel in New York," he retorts.
She walks over to him and places her hands, palms flat, against the bench top. "Witty retorts aside, Mr. Bishop, flooding all of us with these supposed 'memories' of lives that we don't know anything about is probably what the problem is."
"But I need you to remember; I need Olivia to remember," he protests, but it doesn't make Astrid change her stance.
"Maybe we're not supposed to remember," she answers, and Peter feels that possibility dig into his body with the precision of a scalpel; it cuts at the exact point it was meant to.
"No, this isn't right," he answers. "If I'm here, then there must be something wrong, and I'm not going anywhere until I figure out what it is."
She makes a motion towards the office at the top of the stairs. "Is that what you were trying to find out with Olivia?"
He doesn't respond.
Astrid tilts her head, her black curls bobbing against her skin. "Why is it so important that she remembers above all others?"
He pauses for a moment because of all the people that he's told anything to, Astrid has proven to be one of the least receptive. Now the fact that she's so curious makes him pause; but he quickly dismisses it as simple curiosity and hopes that she's not looking for an excuse to get his ass thrown back in isolation.
"In the history before this one," he says with a motion of the lab and presumably, the changed world outside these walls, "in the timeline where I've lived my life, Olivia and I… were together."
Astrid raises an eyebrow, and at that moment he's glad that he didn't mention that Olivia had also been his future wife. He lets out a breath and begins to drum his fingers on the table instead.
The Astrid interrupts the silence, and his fingers fall still on the table. "The heart wants what it wants, Peter," she says. "But despite that, it doesn't always receive that." She withdraws her hands from the surface of the table and returns to her work, far away from him and his misery.
He remains seated by the table, and watches the reflections pan out against the skins of beakers like tattoos as his whole body sinks onto the surface, letting reality's weight push him into sleep.
Please review! up next... Olivia confronts a few demons.