Chapter 7 – Episode 7 52010

nothing but lies

Summary: He crossed the line the second he read her. They are losing themselves, slowly and irreversibly.

Warning: Yes, the title is intentional. This chapter is short, too. I don't think there was much to say about the ending of the last episode, and only a few things to be said about Olivia and Peter right now. Around 1000 words, seems pretty perfect…

Edit: Just realized it will be three weeks till the next episode is aired… Nooo! I guess I'll have to bridge the time by writing one or two additional chapters to this story.

Set: post-ep to Episode 7 of Season 6.

Disclaimer: No copyright inFringement intended.

A/N: For the two readers who leave reviews every time – Thank you so, so much. This chapter (and all the following ones) are for you. If you have a request for the next chapter, please leave me a note!


Olivia always had thought the world would die in a glorious display of sound and colors.

A huge explosion, endless ice, a meteor cracking the surface and causing devastation and death. Although all those possibilities don't seem appealing they have one thing in common: they are catastrophes not easily overlooked. Hundreds of thousands die in floods, in hurricanes and fires. Starvation and sickness follow closely. The Observers are no different to what she always expected: they have taken over the world, slowly poisoning it with darkness, carbon dioxide and desperation. Not so many days into the future, if – when – Olivia and her family don't find anything to stop them, the world will die. Mankind will die and leave a devastated planet to a species that is what they would have become anyway, and it will be the end.

But it is not what she thinks of now.

Olivia always thought the world would die with a scream. Ear-piercing, shattering, heart-breaking, an event impossible to miss. Now she knows it was wrong. The world dies with with a small sight With a silent voice, an empty glance. The world dies in a small, dark apartment filled with memories and a huge whiteboard, inhabited by the ghost of a girl and the ghost of a man she once knew. It might be pathetic that she thinks like that but without the two of them Olivia isn't entirely sure she wants to go on at all.

This is where the world ends: in Etta's apartment, the second she realizes what Peter has done to avenge their daughter.

She has suspected for quite some time that something wasn't entirely right anymore. It was the way he looked at her, the way he seemed too cheerful, his eyes too bright. The way he would disappear into the night, seemingly never sleeping, and always had the perfect explanation for his absence when she asked. Olivia prides herself in being able to read people. She knows when someone lies to her, knows when someone is hiding something from her in plain sight. But all of her skills of yearlong observation, the ability she always had to read people, are useless when it comes to Peter. Because she knows him better than she knows herself. She does not need her intuition to tell her something isn't right. She just knows.

They were little things, at first. The meeting with Anil. The reasons for his sleepless nights. But it also was the way he looked at her, his eyes bright and still empty. His lips smiled and his eyes betrayed his lies. It was one of the things she saw in him when they first met: he would play, he would con, he would make empty threats. But he would not lie. There are so many ways of telling the truth without revealing it, so many chances to mislead without telling a lie. It has nothing to do with white lies. It is the simple refusal to tell a lie and the knowledge that every truth hides another one that has kept him together, she thinks, and she is pretty sure Peter himself never realized this. As if he has been lying to himself and the thought is bitter. Because now he is lying to her, too. Perhaps it started the day he left her behind for the first time, promising her to return. Slowly Olivia begins to fear he never did. Peter left her behind, and the thought hurts so much she cannot move. Lies, lies, nothing but lies, and she is caught in the middle of it like in a spider web. Or rather, Peter is caught in it. Olivia stands at the side and sees her world die in the embrace of all the unspeakable things he told her.

He crossed the line the second he read her.

Unforgivable. Unforgivable. There is only one person in the entire world that Olivia would share her mind with. She already shares her heart, so what difference would it make? Peter has seen her sad and angry, tired and unconscious, happy and desperate and terrified. Peter shares her dreams and her soul, shares her grief for John and Charlie and Etta, shares her fear for the earth and her resolve to save it from the Observers. It doesn't matter if he shares her mind, too, because he knows her like no one else does. Olivia told Peter things she never even admitted to herself before. She trusted him with everything, she still would have done so today. She had thought there would be no single moment in time when she would not want to have Peter by her side. Would not want to share her thoughts with Peter. The worse it is that he read her, that he made his way into her head without her explicit permission. Maybe it was the way he did it, so cold, so unfeeling. Unforgivable. The same way Olivia never would let an Observer read her mind, she would never share her thoughts with someone who would try to use them against her. Someone who would use them to hurt her or the ones she loves. The fact that Peter read her – as if she was a faceless stranger, someone who could be played with – is so unforgivable that she cannot even cry for her loss. All the tears that seemingly came so easily after Etta's death are dry. Olivia is a desert – emptiness, emptiness, dry and burning – and only the lump in her throat shows her this has really happened. It suffocates her.

It is so foolish to put the death of a world beneath the death of a few of its inhabitants. But humans are selfish creatures. It is not for the first time that Olivia wishes a person's death undone. But it is the first time she feels the world does not matter all that much in the face of all the pain people can inflict on each other.