This one kind of jumps around an itty bit and requires a little suspension of disbelief.
Part 8
There was no grand helicopter ride to Boston and a touchdown on the Harvard commons, just a boring drive. Olivia in the passenger seat of a Bureau SUV and Harrison, government-paid babysitter-extraordinaire, in the driver's seat following an ambulance as it exited out of the morning rush-hour traffic. Time had ceased to have meaning for Olivia sometime after the sun had risen about an hour ago. She was riding the crest of a coffee wave, trying to stall the inevitable crash.
She skipped around from radio station to radio station. They were all abuzz with what had transpired in the harbor the night before, but no official story had emerged yet and all the pundits were wildly speculating.
"I wonder what story Broyles is going to go with." Harrison seemed to be thinking along the same lines as her. She hadn't told him much about what had happened, just enough to keep him happy. But she could tell he knew it wasn't the complete story.
"Whatever it is, it had better be a good one."
The last bit of real news she heard was that they had found her "double" (as Broyles had referred to her alter-self) unconscious and taken to the very same hospital Peter was at. Before they left, Olivia had stolen away to the cafeteria for a few minutes and made a quick detour to peer in on her alter-self.
Olivia asked the nurses about her condition (telling them she was her twin sister) and they said it was touch and go but she was healing remarkably fast. Olivia declined the offer to go in and visit her 'sister', choosing to look in on her from the doorway. She nodded at the FBI agent stationed outside the door. It was almost too surreal for her brain to comprehend the image of herself sitting in a bed with all the tubes and machines hooked up. In fact, the last few days had been so surreal, she would have thought it was all a dream induced by Walter in the Opera House. But the real consequences of it all were surrounding her: Peter in a hospital bed a few floors away, a spitting image of herself a few feet in front of her, all of the tvs in every room she entered were tuned to the 24-hour news channels talking about the new addition to the New York Harbor and how it got there.
It worried Olivia that her alter-self was now on this side and it was a problem that would have to be dealt with very soon, but it was not her main worry at that moment.
She watched the back of the ambulance ahead and hoped that her quick decision to send Peter to Boston would prove to be the right one. The doctors wouldn't send him willy-nilly to Boston right away, she'd had to stick around while they waited the results of some blood-work and x-rays and tried to figure out what was wrong with his foot. She kept telling them he had a unique medical history and there was a doctor in Boston who was familiar with it. And then finally, after speaking with Walter (who was able to get a grip on himself long enough to placate the doctors) and after scratching their heads for a few hours about why he was in this condition, they were willing to transfer him out of their hair.
"Maybe you should get some sleep, Agent Dunham, we have almost two hours before we get there," she heard Harrison say after she closed her eyes and rested her head against the seat. How had Peter been able to power the device? She hadn't wanted to think about it, but the last few hours at the hospital and the massive amounts of caffeine keeping her awake had left her with nothing to do but think. What was it about Peter that made him special? Was it his illness? Was it the fact that he had lived in both universes? Had he been experimented on with Cortexiphan? And if he had, which side was doing the experimenting? Her mind boggled at all the questions she could think up to ask both Walters. And if she ever got her hands on Walternate...
Olivia finally drifted off to sleep.
...X...
Olivia opened the lab door and the ambulance techs wheeled in their charge. They looked hesitant as they took in the contents of the basement laboratory.
"It's okay, he's a doctor," Olivia said at their looks of apprehension.
"Dr. Frankenstein is more like it," one of them whispered to the other and they both laughed. She threw them a wicked glance, but was too tired to say anything more.
She barely said hello to Walter, who had sprung up from behind a desk and rushed over. Astrid jumped up from her desk and watched the proceedings from afar.
He looked up and down at the floor and ceiling and nudged the bed over a little bit. "Put him here," Walter said. And as an afterthought, "Please."
The bed was occupying the space in the lab that had previously held the metal sensory deprivation tank. Olivia noted with some curiosity that it was pushed over to the side and she wondered how he had managed that by himself.
They wheeled the gurney over and transferred an unconscious Peter to the lab's own bed and set up the IV bag. Walter grabbed the chart and stared at it and then at his son. It distressed him to see him here in this lab again, helpless and sick. Dying, likely, just like before, like when he was a boy, if his suspicions were correct (and Walter didn't always like being correct). After his conversation with the doctors in New York, he had begun to suspect something terrible and he just needed to perform some of his own tests before he could say for sure.
It was almost too much for him to deal with and he stared off into the distance. But he felt Olivia's hand on his shoulder, grounding him.
"Walter."
He snapped out of whatever thought he'd gotten momentarily lost in and flipped through the chart, looking over the readings, tsk-tsking at some and shaking his head at others.
"I'll need to do another blood work-up, but..." he stopped himself and stared off again.
"But what, Walter?" Olivia almost snapped at him, trying to bring him back again.
"But I may know what is happening," he said. "I just don't want to jump to conclusions. Astrid!" he shouted over his shoulder at Astrid whose head appeared from around the doors of a supply cabinet.
"Astrid, lets take some blood-"
"I'm already on it, Walter," she held up some medical supplies from the cabinet and dove in for some more.
"Good, good. She's on the ball more than I am, sometimes." His smile was strained.
"What do you mean you may know what's happening?" Olivia asked, unsure if that was good news or bad news from the way he said it.
"Let me do the bloodwork first, Olivia, and then I can tell you for sure."
...X...
TWO AND A HALF DAYS LATER
Peter slowly awoke. His sense of smell told him he wasn't in a hospital (and if he was, he was going to have to report it to the health department immediately). He heard the scratchy sounds of a guitar solo from the first side of the Violet Sedan Chair album, a comforting sound. It was all comforting in a way. And safe and familiar. The opposite of how he felt when he woke up on the other side in a strange house with strange machinery hooked up to him.
His eyes flickered open and from the row of darkened windows and the old bricks (and of course the smells and the sounds), he knew it could only mean he was at the lab. He groaned. It might actually be the worst hospital he'd ever been in...
He found he couldn't move hardly at all, the blanket over him was so heavy it might have been made of lead or steel. He felt so weak and he could barely manage to turn his head. But he did slightly and into his field of vision, jumped a half-smiling Walter, munching on something.
"Peter! You're awake! How are you feeling?"
"Hot," he barely managed a whisper. It was the truth, he felt like he was burning up from the inside, like a furnace on full-blast.
"That's to be expected." Walter said gravely, filling a hypodermic needle from a small bottle. "You're still feeling the effects of using your body as an electrical conduit. You depleted all your electrolytes to dangerous levels and your organs almost shut down." He squirted a little bit out of the end of the needle and frowned down at Peter. "You generated quite a lot of energy." Walter would have appended a 'son' to the end of that sentence, but he stopped himself.
"I did?" Peter was surprised to hear that.
"Do you remember anything?"
"No." His voice was back to a whisper and fading fast. He remembered some things, but mostly it all felt like a dream. Even this felt like a dream.
Walter injected the contents of the needle into the IV port. "Rest, Peter. You're going to need it."
He felt the delicious effects hit him and his eyes slid languorously shut. For a moment, he felt like he was in a warm sun-kissed meadow, a cool breeze blowing through the trees and over his hot skin as he laid down in the grass for a little nap.
Walter always did have the best drugs.
...x...
THE NEXT MORNING
Olivia stopped into the lab to check on Peter and Walter. She had been away in New York for two days, trying to do damage control, trying to analyze a small fraction of the millions of files that were stored at the facility, her attention divided as she fretted over Peter's condition. And Walter's condition.
She had called every few hours for an update.
They were still trying to get the main power up on Liberty Island, it had been damaged almost beyond repair. They had brought in generators to get the computers up and running, only to find the voltage was wrong after zapping half of them and the valuable data to smoking chunks of plastic and metal.
Peter looked the same as he did last night when she came by to check on him: sleeping somewhat peacefully, wires and tubes hooked up all around him. She noted with relief that his temperature was down from the night before. It was only a hundred and two degrees today.
Walter had dragged out an old army cot that was stashed away in a back room and was using that as his bed, but it was currently empty. She suspected the cot had been used many times back in the heady days of his and Bell's research here. There was a record playing and if she remembered correctly, the band was Cream. Walter appeared from a back room with a toothbrush in hand. He was starting to look rough around the edges.
"Agent Dunham!"
"Walter, you need to go home and get some real rest," she scolded him.
"Don't worry about me. Peter woke up last night a few hours after you left!" He did a happy dance, the rough edges melting away for a moment.
"He did? Did he say anything?" She was disappointed she hadn't been there.
"A few words, but he faded fast."
"What did he say?"
"That he didn't remember anything. And then I knocked him out. Well, I didn't 'knock' him out, I gave him a sedative."
"So how is he doing?"
"Much better after you came in last night. Slowly, but surely, he's recovering and that's to be expected. When he was a child it took him almost a week to recover. But those were very different circumstances... How was New York?"
"A nightmare."
It was almost beyond hope that they could bring some sense of order to the chaos that was raging there. The people of New York were not buying the story they were being told and all of the crackpots were literally marching in the streets. Not to mention her alter-self had miraculously recovered and escaped the guard at the hospital. She had been captured on the surveillance cameras, perfectly fine, sneaking out in the wee hours of the morning and that was the last she had been seen.
And all the while she'd been there poring over information and sophisticated computer systems, Olivia worried about what was going on here in the lab. Because she hadn't wanted to leave Peter after the chaos that had happened right before she was called back to New York...
...X...
TWO AND A HALF DAYS EARLIER
Walter threw the half-eaten bag of pretzels against the wall, but it didn't make as much of a dramatic display as he'd hoped for. So he grabbed an Erlenmeyer flask and chucked that at the wall. It made a resounding crash and shattered into a million glass shards. He felt immensely better but regretted wasting his pretzels in such a useless gesture.
"Walter!" Astrid shrieked at him from across the lab.
"Where are my files?" he yelled picking up a test tube and pondering whether he wanted to throw it, too, against the wall.
"Olivia's bringing them! You have to calm down, she'll be back soon!" Astrid was about ready to flee the lab, she'd had enough of his cursing and yelling. And now breaking things. She realized she was getting a rare glimpse of the old pre-St. Claire's Walter and was about to throw in the towel and leave. And if Peter hadn't been there, she would have.
Walter had gone through every box of files they had stored at the lab and what he was looking for was obviously not in there. And then he'd gone through every box he had at his house and it wasn't there either. So now, file folders were scattered everywhere, some had been thrown, some had been ripped to shreds in anger, loose papers littered the tables and floors. Walter kicked an empty box and it went flying. Astrid hoped Olivia was driving as fast as humanly possible from the Bishop's storage space across town.
Walter started his wind up to throw the tube against a far wall.
"This is not helping Peter!" Astrid yelled at him from across the room, planting herself not so subtly between Walter's rage and Peter, who was lying blissfully unaware of the carnage going on around him. Not that she thought he would harm Peter, but if Walter's anger got any more out of control, she didn't know what might happen.
Walter looked back at Astrid and realized she was right. Getting angry wasn't going to solve this problem, he needed a clear-level head. So he put the glass tube back down on the table.
He was about to start salvaging the pretzels from among the pieces of glass on the floor when Olivia burst through the lab door with a box under each arm. "Astrid! Could you grab the other boxes from my car?"
"Gladly." Astrid fled the lab. She didn't need to be told twice.
Walter hurried over and pulled the boxes out of Olivia's hands, almost dumping them out on the floor.
"Walter! What is going on here?" she looked around the lab at the pretzels and glass shards and papers scattered everywhere. It was somehow worse than she'd left it only an hour before.
"We are running out of time, that's what's going on here, Agent Dunham!" he yelled at her and pulled a handful of files from the box.
She wasn't even going to help him, only he knew what he was looking for. She had attempted to go through one of the boxes earlier, only to have Walter go through it again. And again. And then have the contents end up on the floor in a disorganized pile. Sheets and sheets of dizzyingly complex equations, formulas scrawled on the backs of manila envelopes, recipes, photos, Peter's childhood drawings all scattered about. And somebody was going to have to clean it all up.
She stood over Peter's form, reading the monitors on the table next to him, not turning her back on Walter. The monitors told a grim tale in numbers and beeps. His temperature was still very high and he hadn't woken up. "Maybe we need to take him back to the hospital, Walter."
"No! I know what I need to do, I just need to find it!" His voice was an enraged shout and the look about him reminded Olivia of the look that Walternate had when she was being held in his make-shift prison.
He rifled through another box and moved onto the next one. "We cannot cure one without curing the other."
Olivia did not want to regret her decision to bring Peter here. She really didn't, because she feared Walter was Peter's only hope at this point, but she was starting to. Walter was whacked. Far more erratic and out of control than she'd ever seen him. She folded her arms across her chest and took a deep breath, keeping Walter in her sights as she looked back at Peter. And yawned She was running on a few hours of hastily caught sleep and gallons of coffee that was no longer working any more. She was bone-tired and was expected to be in New York the next morning. But she couldn't leave Peter here in this condition and not with Walter like this and it might push her past her breaking point.
Earlier that day, when Walter told Olivia what he suspected, that Peter's childhood illness had inexplicably come back, possibly accelerated or reversed by whatever he had done to get them both back here, she was slightly relieved, that maybe Walter knew how to fix him. But Walter couldn't remember the exact formula. But it was most assuredly written down somewhere, he had told her at the time.
Finding it was the problem.
He was like a squirrel; Walter had so many files scattered in so many different hiding places. He'd even mentioned a cache of files in the Jacksonville daycare that Olivia dreaded possibly having to return to. Without Peter at her side. She hoped it never came to that.
Astrid swooped through the door with more boxes and Olivia hoped the formula for Peter's childhood cure was somewhere in one of these boxes. Because if it wasn't...
But Walter spied a brown box in Astrid's arms and he rushed over to take it from her.
"Yes! I think this is it!" He opened it up and pulled out a file, reading it. Astrid and Olivia looked on anxiously.
"Yes! Yes, this is it!" He hurried over to Astrid and kissed her on the cheek. And then began to tell her what supplies they would need.
Olivia breathed a sigh of shaky relief and started to clean up the mess.
...X...
EIGHT DAYS LATER
When Peter woke up this time, it startled him to see Olivia standing right over him. She smiled. And he smiled back at her.
A dream come true?
"We've gotta stop meeting like this," she told him.
"Yeah." What did she mean by that?
Astrid came into his field of vision and he smiled at her, too.
"Astrid...?"
"Boy, am I glad to see you. I was getting worried." She placed a cool washcloth on his forehead and hurried off again. The washcloth felt wonderful on his warm skin.
"Why?" he asked. He honestly couldn't remember how he'd gotten here in the lab, flat on his back. The last thing he remembered was- what? It was all starting to come back in bits and pieces...
"You've been very sick," Olivia told him.
"Huh," was all he could say to that. It felt like he was still sick. Olivia was holding his hand and he squeezed it as hard as he could (which wasn't very hard) to let her know how glad he was that she was here. That somebody was here, that people still cared for him even though he was the source of all their troubles. He tried to swallow back his dry mouth and Astrid reappeared at that moment with some ice chips that felt like heaven sliding down his throat. He thought he had something important to tell her...
"How are you feeling?" asked Olivia.
"I don't know. Everything's fuzzy." The important thing he had to tell Astrid was lost again.
"You've been out of it for days. On Walter's good drugs," she smiled down at him. "He finally figured out what was wrong, though."
"What was wrong?"
She hesitated before speaking. "Do you remember what happened in New York?"
"New York?" He felt so out of it, he had no idea what she was talking about, no idea why he was sick, why he felt like shit, why he was answering questions with questions, and why Astrid had been so worried. He did seem to remember something about being in New York, but... wasn't that all on the other side? Wasn't it all a dream?
"I don't exactly know how you did it, but you rescued us both and brought the Statue of Liberty and almost two dozen people over from the other side."
"I thought that was all a dream. I do vaguely remember talking to you about something like that."
"That was over a week ago."
"A week? I've been out of it for a week?"
Olivia nodded. "You also managed to bring the other me over. She was in pretty bad shape. They took her to the hospital. But she somehow escaped."
He remembered THAT. Of all the things to remember... "I thought I killed her."
"What? Well, you didn't kill her. From the surveillance tapes from the hospital, she looked pretty alive to me."
Even though she had escaped, Peter was relieved because her death was not something he wanted to have on his conscience. "So what happened in New York again?"
"Where do I begin? Walter thinks that when you used that power supply you had- from the intelligence we gathered from the building you exchanged, we think it's called a wave sink- you were able to generate such a large amount of energy that you opened up a doorway between the two universes around Liberty Island. With that amount of energy, you were able to exchange everything in that area."
"And that's what made me sick?" That was a lot for his still fuzzy brain to process.
"We think so. You depleted all your electrolytes to dangerously low levels. And on top of that, somehow your childhood illness came back. Walter was able to replicate the cure again and so far it looks like it's working. But he's puzzled as to how that happened, the cure was a form of gene therapy and it would have had to be purposely reversed."
Peter squeezed his eyes shut, he just wanted to go back to sleep again, just trying to think about all of this was taking a lot out of him. Olivia must have noticed because she gripped his hand a little tighter. It was so much nicer when he could lump it all into a dream because then he could go back to the now wonderful sounding job of extracting pus from dead bodies, crawling in underground molebaby lairs, and inventing glass-reading electron microscopes. A simple life, really.
He thought about the room he had woken up in on the other side and the myriad of strange equipment he had disconnected himself from.
"My father had me hooked up to something intravenously when I woke up over there. I didn't know what it was. If the machine was symbiotic to my DNA. Maybe he had to reverse the cure for me to be able to use it." It was bad enough his father wanted to use him to destroy this world, but to make him sick again in order to do it? It was diabolical.
She squeezed his hand with both of hers. She hadn't suspected that at all. "I'm sorry, Peter. I know how much you wanted to be reunited with your real family and for everything to be made right again. But it was never going to happen. He was using you."
"Don't pull any punches, Dunham, tell me how you really feel," he said sarcastically. "I know he was using me. What Walter does doesn't surprise me any more. I've seen many sides of him. And even though he's a little nutty and he kidnapped me as a child, I do think I like the version on this side better. But I got to see my mom. And you're here with me and you're safe. That's all that matters to me now."
He just wanted to go back to sleep and maybe it would all be nothing but a dream when he woke up for real. Maybe if he asked nicely he could get Olivia to sing 'Row, row, row your boat' to him.
"Where's Walter?"
"Astrid took him home. He's been here almost constantly. So have I. As much as I could to help you get better."
"What do you mean?"
"It's the energy, Peter. Your energy. My energy. Intertwined on some cosmic level. I don't know, Walter explained it and it all made sense at the time." She didn't repeat the Tantric part that Walter had tried to vividly describe before she steered him back on track. "That's how you were able to power the device, how I'm able to cross over. It's all related to harnessing energy. He said you improved quicker when I was around, something about my energy. And he said you would know why."
"He did?" Peter didn't like where this was going. Maybe he could check out now and explain it away later.
Olivia got a look on her face that Peter could only describe as wounded. "He said it has to do with how you can calm people. Why didn't you ever mention it?"
He'd never wanted Olivia to find out, it was his secret. Maybe deep down he really didn't want to know why he could do it. Because then he'd have to ask the question of 'how' he was able to do it.
"Because... It just complicates things."
"You brought over a whole island, you brought me and twenty-two other people and a three-hundred-foot tall statue over from the other side. And Walter thinks that's how you did it, with this ability you have. That complicates things."
"Please don't be mad, Olivia."
"How can I be mad? But it would be nice to know the complete truth once in awhile, from you and from Walter, so that I know exactly what I'm dealing with."
"I'm sorry. None of us have been fair to each other, have we? It's just always something I've been able to do."
"Do you use this... ability on me?"
"What? No! I mean, I can't control it, it just happens. It's gotten me into trouble in the past as much as its gotten me out of trouble," he said cryptically. "Let's just talk about it later." He closed his eyes, clearly not wanting to continue this line of questioning. He was exhausted and unable to completely defend himself any more.
"Your foot... Does it hurt?" he heard her say from far away.
He felt his mind beginning to drift away.
"No, just numb."
