Sum over Histories
by MVariorum
Summary: Olivia comes back. Olivia and Peter save the world. Again.
Pairings: Peter/Olivia
Rating: M. So kiddies, the faint of heart, and those with refined taste should scoot along elsewhere. You have been warned.
Story Notes: Please accept my preemptive apologies for the pseudo-pseudoscience. Not a scientist. Sadly, I'm not even a pseudoscientist. Never will be.
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters and settings are the property of their respective owners. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.
Chapters: ?
Completed: No
Spoilers: AU after early season 3 (more or less around Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?). Includes some elements of the early part of Season 3, but no spoilers beyond that.
A/N: As always, thank you to all who read and reviewed. I sincerely appreciate all comments on this now monster-sized story. We're definitely on the back-half of this baby and the end is in sight. I'll probably try to conclude right around the time Season 4 starts, which isn't all that far away now. I'll warn you that the next update may be delayed because RL will keep me irritatingly busy for the next couple of weeks, but by the third week of August it should be smooth sailing around here.
Deep and wide thanks to starg8fans who did the beta.
Chapter 10 / ?
When Olivia barreled into the lab, making both doors slam behind her against their opposite walls, she looked so much like a superhero fighting the forces of evil, I regretted she didn't have a bustier or skintight spandex to complete the look. If I hadn't already had the shit kicked out of me, I would have stood up and cheered.
Until, of course, the man restraining me burst into flame. Then I just wanted to run.
There were six of them and it started with the minion who was trying to restrain my arms behind my back with a zip-tie, (what else?) so his partner could drug me with the needle he dangled over my face. Olivia barely glanced in my direction, and the next thing I knew the man screamed with pain, or fright, or both, and clutched his chest a millisecond before it exploded into flames. When he started to run towards the doorway where Olivia was still standing—evidently he didn't listen to the firefighters in kindergarten who explained Stop, Drop, and Roll—he didn't even get halfway there before it looked like he ran into an invisible wall with the bone crunching force of a Crash Test Dummy. When I glanced past his crumpled flaming body, I registered briefly that Olivia's hand was outstretched in his direction doing an imitation of Diana Ross singing Stop in the Name of Love.
Since my hands were now free, I busied myself with the other two guys still restraining me. I braced myself with my hands and kicked the one trying to tie my feet in the nads and then turned to address the one coming towards me with a needle. He headed my way with a gleam in his eyes, but he was slow, and obviously not terribly bright. I faked to the right, and when he leaned, I hit him with my left, feeling the satisfying crunch of his cheekbone under my fist. It had been months since I got the chance to shatter someone's face with my own hands and almost immediately I felt better. As he crumpled to the ground, the needle rolled out of his hand. I grabbed it, stabbed a grapefruit Walter had sitting on one of the tables, pushed the plunger, and stamped the fruit under my heel. I wanted to ensure that no one I cared about found themselves on the business end of that needle.
By the time all that was done, the lab was nearly engulfed in flames. Walter was still hollering from the back room and I scanned the room to see if I could count the bodies of the minions.
I looked up towards the door and saw Olivia still standing where she'd stopped after the doors slammed open and she took three steps into the lab. Even through the fire I could see she had the concentrated look she got when she was working hard with her mind. I'd seen it enough through the fuzzy camera in the Tank to recognize it now from orbit.
I followed Olivia's line of vision as she looked across the room at a little girl whose face had the placid sereneness of china-doll, though now it glowed orange in the light of the flames licking around her. The perfectly curled dark ringlets of her hair and pale, vitreous eyes didn't hurt the comparison either. It had to be Miriam, I guessed, even though I could only see the top of her head from where I was standing. It couldn't be anyone else, though what the hell she was doing trailing behind Olivia into the lab at a time like this was completely beyond me. Unless she'd started carrying candy around in her pocket, Olivia doesn't really have the kind of demeanor that attracts small girls to her side, which was one of her more attractive qualities if you asked me.
I counted flaming bodies. One, two, three near me. Four and five over near Miriam. I think there had been six when they came in, but maybe I miscounted.
I took two steps toward the back room where Walter was, thinking I'd head back there to get him untied. I got distracted when I almost tripped over Astrid piled against a table on the floor. I reached into my pocket for my phone to dial 911, since we were obviously going to need some professional assistance with the fire. As I dialed my three favorite numbers, I prayed Olivia could turn the fire off as easily as she turned it on. I had just started to bend down to see if Astrid was okay when things went south very, very fast.
Olivia turned in the direction of the back room just as I started to kneel next to Astrid when the final minion popped his head out of the door with some kind of weapon raised toward Olivia.
I wasn't entirely sure what happened, even long after the fact and I had some time to think about it. I knew the man was going to be engulfed in flames just as his friends had, but I also knew without conscious thought that behind him in the corner by the office door was where we stored the gas tanks. I knew this because it was always me, not Walter, who lugged them around the lab and back to their corner-storage when we used them.
It unfolded before my eyes just as I imagined. The guy exploded in fire and Olivia began taking her long-strided steps toward the back door to retrieve Walter right about the time I started sprinting across the lab toward the minion who was stumbling dangerously close to the stash of gas tanks.
"Olivia!" I screamed her name, but didn't have much hope she could hear me over the roar of the fire and the hum of her own single-mindedness. I leaped up the stairs, my feet not touching them at all, rounded the corner, and headed toward Olivia and the flaming man who was uselessly clutching his chest, like somehow that was going to improve matters for him.
"The tanks!" I hollered when I got close enough I thought Olivia would be able to hear me.
Two steps later I had passed her by, though she took off after me, responding more to the urgency in my voice and movements than to any comprehensive idea of what was going on.
"Shitshitshitshit," I Rain-Manned, since no one could hear me anyway and it's not like in the face of impending explosion anyone would expect me to utter a speech in blank-verse.
"Get Walter," I screamed at Olivia as I unhooked the first of four tanks and tried to drag it out the door.
It only took Olivia a second to catch up to the newest, yet very real problem we now faced. Her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated so much I couldn't see any color in her irises anymore. She whipped in the direction of Miriam who still stood still on the other side of the room and, as if my day wasn't already weird enough, I watched as they conducted a wordless game of telephone across the expanse of the flaming room.
I started dragging one tank. When Olivia was finished doing the mind-meld with Miriam, she followed my example and dragged one behind me. Out of the corner of my eye I watched Miriam walk toward Astrid and shake her awake, using some kind of power to rouse her for all I knew. Whatever it was, it worked, and through the smoke and flames I saw Astrid's tiny outline stand and stumble towards the door. Miriam calmly walked up toward us, passed us by, and went into the back room like she walked through walls of fire every day of her life. A second later, I heard the choral tones of Walter's gratitude wrapping around the edges of the insistent sound of roaring flames.
They passed us by on the way out as I thumped the tanks up the stairs, Olivia doing the same beside me. We got the tanks out in the hall, and I motioned with my hand we should return and get the other two, reasoning that all our work would be for naught if the flames reached those tanks and we detonated along with the rest of the building. Both of us sweating and swearing, we had just dragged the remaining two tanks to the stairs when the firefighters rushed in.
I knew Astrid, Walter, and Miriam were safe, so once I explained with gestures and screams what was going on, I resolved I'd had enough heroics for one day and decided to leave the rest to the professionals. I grabbed Olivia's hand and tugged her out the door behind me, only letting go when we reached fresh air. Walter, Astrid, and Miriam were standing on the little knoll outside the lab and I took a few steps toward them, planning on joining them to watch our home-away-from-home burn to a crisp in the winter air.
"Well, that was bracing," I cracked, slowing to look over my left shoulder, fully expecting to see Olivia's tired smile shatter through her soot-covered face behind me.
What I saw instead was Olivia's head hit the ground, following swiftly behind the rest of her body about two feet outside the burning building.
####
The next twenty-four hours were only marginally less hair-raising than the ones preceding them.
After Olivia slid to the ground with the grace and style of a bowlful of Jell-o, I raced back to her side, ignoring the little voice in my head that told me running back toward a burning building filled with toxic chemicals was not what sane people did, and shoved my arms under her shoulders to drag her away.
To the everlasting gratitude of my back and thighs, the paramedics had seen her topple right about the same time I did, and they reached her side with a gurney about five seconds after me.
They loaded her on it with appropriate professional dispassion while I stumbled alongside clutching her limp hands in my own, babbling to them about what it was I thought might be wrong with her, after amending the facts to make them suitable for All Audiences.
Long story short. I told them I thought she might have been struck by lightning.
With true New England fortitude the paramedics ignored the fact that it was the dead of winter, that Cambridge's over-developed tundra hadn't seen a thunderstorm in the months, and that Olivia had been inside the building when it happened. They nodded reassuringly at me. Meanwhile, they gave Olivia the same care-worn once-over they probably did to every poor schmuck that landed in the back of their squad for whatever reason.
After they covered her with the thermal blanket, checked her vitals, and strung an IV up for her, Olivia stirred and sat up drunkenly. I really expected little tendrils of smoke to come curling out of her ears, nose, and mouth, like in a horror film when a demon vacates the lead's body.
But no. She just focused her eyes first on the paramedics, then on me. When she finally recognized me after a heart-stopping few seconds she raised her eyebrows at me: Where the fuck am I, and what is happening?
I just shrugged at her silent question, gesturing lamely at the squad, the EMT's, the equipment. When the young, female paramedic came at her with the IV catheter, however, Olivia swiveled toward her and shot her a look that would have turned cream.
I shifted in uncomfortable sympathy for the young woman. I'd been on the receiving end of that stare enough to know the distress it caused. The male EMT's lips twisted at our silent communication. He was older, more careworn, and when I glanced at his hand, I noticed he wore a ring. He had someone at home doling out looks like that, I'd bet my share of next month's dividends on it.
Olivia made to stand, and to my surprise, she actually managed it. Waving off the tinkling warnings of both EMT's, she scribbled her name at the bottom of the AMA form they shoved her way and then stumbled out of the squad toward where Broyles was already standing in the distance with one of his enormous hands dwarfing the top of Miriam's head.
I didn't want to leave her, but I did it anyway. While Olivia stayed to play FBI in-charge. I shuttled first Astrid, then Walter home.
Walter went to bed immediately. He was so tired, or so afraid of what would happen when Olivia came home, he didn't even snack beforehand. I settled on the couch, pretended to read, and waited.
Three hours later, she stumbled into the entryway looking like she'd been on the losing end of a back-alley brawl.
She leaned heavily on me while I slipped her coat off her shoulders and then guided her up the stairs. She sank onto the bed and fumbled halfheartedly with her clothes, managing to slip off her jacket and yank at a couple of button on her blouse before she collapsed over on her side, her feet still resting on the ground. I undressed myself and then finished undressing her, rolling her motionless body around on the bed to remove her clothes and shovel her under the covers.
I climbed into bed beside her and enclosed her with my body as best I could, reasoning that she wasn't conscious and was therefore unlikely to complain about what she called my "constrictor-like cuddling."
Only when she was tucked in tight next to me, my body curled around hers like the shell of a conch, did I recognize that, for the first time perhaps ever, I was a little afraid of her. I've always been very aware that Olivia could kick my ass if she wanted to, but in the past I'd chosen to focus on how erotic it was that she was female, angry, and armed. I'd never considered the possibility that she would turn her considerable powers on me. But since I'd just gotten a front-row seat to Olivia setting a half-dozen men and a stone building on fire (with only slight assistance from flammable substances of the lab) it was suddenly hard to ignore that the woman breathing evenly alongside me had fulfilled Walter and Bell's aspirations beyond their wildest wet-dreams. She was a killer, and an efficient one at that.
I'd always wondered if there was a connection between the Cortexiphan children's personalities and their abilities. Walter and Bell just wanted to push their subjects to see if they could make them do unthinkable things. It had only partly been about preparing guardians for the gate to the Other Side, and as usual they didn't trouble themselves much about the details. From what I'd seen, the Cortexiphan subjects' abilities seemed as unique as each individual.
Fire was fierce, indiscriminate, purifying. Just as I dropped off to sleep I considered that maybe that's what made it so attractive to Olivia.
####
Olivia didn't wake up the next morning. Or the next. Or the next.
She slept almost straight through for nearly three days.
By the afternoon of the third day, I had left concern far behind me in a cloud of dust on the dirt road of panic. I was embracing full-blown hysteria, fearing she'd never wake again. For at least the amount of time I'd had the opportunity to share a bed with Olivia (admittedly, before the last few weeks the occasions had been infrequent) I'd never known her to sleep for more than a few hours at a stretch. I'd never before slept with someone who was so restless, so unable to quiet their mind for even a few moments in order to fall asleep, so incapable of preventing night horrors from swamping their consciousness. Anyone sleeping for three days was cause for concern; when Olivia did it she may as well have bled out in front of me, so certain I was that she was dying.
By the afternoon of the third day I had advanced deep into desperate-times-call-for-desperate-measures territory. I didn't take her somewhere to get checked out not only because I was afraid to move her, but because I honestly didn't know what I'd tell the doctors if I did.
Because I was fresh out of options, I called an old friend who was a doctor. I felt like I could tell her slightly more of the truth than I could some random urgent-care doctor, and I hoped she'd be more likely to tolerate my half-truths and take on simple faith that something was wrong. As a bonus, I figured the exam wouldn't go in Olivia's medical file. I guessed she didn't want Broyles to know how debilitated she was unless absolutely necessary, and I figured an off-the-record house-call was the most efficient way to determine if it was worth the risk of seeking more comprehensive medical attention.
It had been years since I'd seen Akhila and I wasn't sure she was even still in the area, let alone if she would agree to help me. It took me a half a day's phone calls to find her, but it wasn't like Olivia was going anywhere.
Akhila was an Indian woman, no bigger than a minute with liquid brown eyes and wavy, waist-length hair. She'd been my TA when I'd impersonated a professor, had co-authored the articles I'd published, and shortly after I'd been dismissed and then arrested, she'd sworn off chemistry for med school, much to her aristocratic parent's dismay who expected her to finish her Master's and come home to marry the man they'd chosen for her.
When I opened the door for her it was well into the night. Her hair was gone, chopped off a little North of her chin and she was so pregnant I wasn't sure how she remained upright with the weight of her belly that looked like she was all baby from her shoulders to her knees.
"Akhila," I stuttered, "You look— umm—fertile?" It was the only think I could think of to say when there was so much stomach stretched between us my arm couldn't span the distance to touch her shoulder and guide her into the house.
"And you still have a smart mouth, James," she replied. Her eyes were the same. Soft brown and kind, though guarded now when she looked at me.
I motioned her into the house, noting that she scarcely looked pregnant from behind. Though her gait wobbled a little, I could see even under the knapsack she had slung on her shoulder that her back still had the same straight pride I remembered from years ago.
She stopped when she was inside our entryway and turned to look at me. Her eyes flickered around our house, noting the shadows the TV cast in the living room where Walter laid stretched out on the couch asleep and the number of coats hanging in the entry and shoes piled under them. I could see her eyes counting the potential occupants of this house before they returned to mine.
"Well James, I suppose it could have been stranger if Moses had phoned asking for help, but not by much," she remarked, waiting for me to fill in the blanks.
She was still gorgeous, pregnant belly and all I noticed. We'd never slept together, not that we both hadn't been tempted. I'd spent more than a fair share of my imaginative life at the time fantasizing about her coffee-with-cream skin and the compassion that always glowed in the backs of her eyes when she looked at me. But something had always stopped the both of us. I'd always feared that sleeping with her would have erased the understanding I'd seen there; not pity exactly, because that would have been unwelcome, but some kind of comprehensive kindness regarding how and why I seemed to do little other than ooze arrogant, mouthy, charm. And I suspected that the promise of all my swaggering grins wasn't quite tempting enough to make her willing to help me lug my baggage around, even for a little while.
"Um. It's Peter, actually," I told her, because it seemed best to lie only as much as I absolutely had to.
She actually smiled. "Of course it is."
I fidgeted nervously, still hovering next to the door I'd just closed.
Her hands were stuffed in the pockets of her unbuttoned coat and she moved her arms restlessly, still looking around the house like she was trying to figure out how I landed in this warped little domestic tableau. The movement made the flaps of her coat swing wide around her. She looked up at me from under her eyelashes. "Honestly?"
"Yeah," I told her trying to maintain eye-contact because I wanted her to believe me. "I go by my real name now."
I heard a rustling noise in the living room and almost groaned when Walter's fast-moving body headed our direction.
"Peter," he practically yelled. "I have to piss."
"Upstairs, Walter."
Akhila stood stock-still, her eyes shifting rapidly as she took in Walter's shuffling gait and my frozen form. I sighed. May as well just get it out of the way. "That's my father," I explained, gesturing vaguely up the stairs at Walter's fast-retreating rear end. "He lives here with me. He likes to give constant updates."
Thank you for coming," I added, since it was about the only thing left to say at that point.
"I know you wouldn't have called unless it was important." Was that just a little bit of hurt hanging around the wry edges of her tone? I shuffled away from the door, anxious about asking a favor, but fear for Olivia's condition more than overwhelmed that anxiety.
She looked around a little impatiently. "Where is she?" she finally asked when I didn't say anything.
I led Akhila upstairs into my room, nervously babbling re-explanations along the way that Olivia was a friend and the nature of her profession made it difficult for her to seek medical assistance in a way that would leave a record.
Inside my room, Akhila scanned the walls pasted with bits of weird science; her eyes took in my desk covered with parts of both outdated and otherworldly technology and the women's clothing draped around the room and spilling out of the wardrobe whose gaping doors we had to navigate around to get to Olivia's side of the bed.
Akhila advanced to the side of my bed and looked down at Olivia's sleeping form. "And what happened to her?"
I swallowed. "She was struck by lightning," I told her, but the look she shot me told me she didn't believe me.
"Mmm-hmm," was all she said, sliding her bag off her shoulder, waving at me to bring her a seat. I headed for my rolling desk chair, and then thought better of it when I glanced at her body. If she got in there, I wasn't sure she'd be able to get up again, so I headed into one of the spare rooms for something seat-like without wheels, first running downstairs to get the blood work results Walter had run daily while we waited for Olivia to recover.
When I got back to my room a few minutes later with the chair and the papers Akhila was holding something in her hand. As I moved closer to her to open up the chair I could see it wasn't anything she'd taken from her bag.
She laughed a loud, tinkling laugh, unabashedly at my expense. "An FBI agent, Peter?" she said, emphasizing my new-to-her first name, waving Olivia's badge under my nose, completely unashamed that she'd poked around in the bedside table drawer where Olivia kept her weapon and her ID. "Jesus. I figured she was a call girl with a pissed-off pimp, or a dealer or something." She shook her head at me. "I always knew you could charm a grandmother out of her knickers, but I swear, you do take the cake. I didn't think anything you'd do would surprise me, but I was wrong."
When I didn't say anything she went on, "How in the name of all that's holy did you get involved with an FBI agent?"
She tossed the badge back onto the bedside table and sank into the chair I stuck behind her. "Tell me what happened. For real, now. I can't help if you don't tell me the truth."
"Honestly, Akhila, you wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Try me," she ordered as she busied herself running her fingers over Olivia's scalp, checking for wounds.
I told her as much as I thought I reasonably could, explaining that Olivia had been exposed to a large amount of electro-magnetic energy (which was actually true, as Walter and I discovered when we'd run our own tests), that her blood work looked clean to me, that Olivia wasn't one much for sleep and never had been, and yet she'd been asleep for days, that she didn't seem to be in any pain, that I'd only been able to rouse her for a few seconds each day to coax some fluids in her, and that I was fearful that she might never wake again.
I left out the part where Olivia's dreams made her twitch and writhe and sob, and that not even pulling her against me, wrapping my arms around her, and murmuring endearments she'd never permit if she were conscious soothed her. Akhila's face was thoughtful as I told my heavily redacted narrative, but even I could hear the shrill desperation in my voice. I also knew Akhila noticed how my eyes kept straying to Olivia as I spoke.
Akhila finished her exam and turned to me. "I know these are all things you already knew, but she has no fever, her vitals are stable, she has no outward signs of physical trauma, and she doesn't seem to be in any pain." She shuffled through the papers with Olivia's blood-work on them. "Everything here looks normal. I'm not really sure what to tell you."
I sat down on the edge of the bed, near Olivia's bent legs and I scrubbed my face and neck with my hands. "Is there any psychological or emotional reason why she might be sleeping?" Akhila asked softly. "Maybe there's something her conscious mind doesn't want to face?" Her tone was soothing. She addressed me like you would speak to an injured or frightened animal.
I was so upset I told Akhila the truth. "Always," I confessed, "But she's never done this before," knowing that the confession gave away far more than I would have liked about our relationship, our work, and our lives.
That was the worst part. Not being able to tell if what was happening to Olivia was a physiological effect of her re-discovered pyrotechnic skills, or if it was a psychological shutdown in response to this newest calamity. But that was the puzzling part. Obviously turning into a psychic weapon wasn't a field day, not the kind of thing anyone really wished for, but to the best of my understanding it also wasn't very far up Olivia's scale of Large Problems. Was there something else that happened I was missing? Or, had this merely been the straw that broke Olivia's violated back? With her unconscious on the bed, it was impossible to tell.
I swallowed loudly in the silent room, and Akhila reached out and put her hand on my knee. "I'll give her something to see if it can wake her up." At my alarmed look, Akhila just smiled. "Nothing major, just a low-dose stimulant—the kind of thing they give narcolepsy patients." She reached into her well-stocked bag and removed a syringe and vial while I readjusted my thinking to allow that Akhila was actually a licensed physician and, unlike Walter, was probably only going to administer chemicals that had been approved by the FDA.
When she saw my clenched fists, she handed me the vial so I could see what it was. "Modafinil," I said, like it meant something to me. I knew little about legal drugs since Walter engineered and administered his own and I myself was almost never sick. I handed the bottle back to her and watched her fill the syringe. She looked at me and waited. While I was considering that Akhila probably wasn't a minion from the Dark Side of the Force since I hadn't spoken to her in over five years and it was unlikely anyone could have predicted I'd call her for help, she put the medicine down and reached back into her bad and pulled out a prescription tablet. She scribbled on it for a moment, tore the slip off.
She picked up the vial and syringe again, still patiently waiting for me to give the go-ahead. I finally nodded at her and then watched carefully as she injected Olivia and deposited the needle in the sharps box she also produced from her bag. She handed me the prescription and asked, "Does she take anything else?" When I nodded in the negative she said, "These are 100 mg tablets. She can take up to four safely. I just gave her a full dose."
Akhila stood and shoved the chair behind her with the backs of her legs, squatting uncomfortably to retrieve her bag from the floor. "Start with two tablets tomorrow if she's still groggy." She put a hand on my shoulder. "If she isn't awake by tomorrow morning, you're going to need to take her to a hospital."
I nodded as Akhila took two steps toward the door. After one last glance in Olivia's direction, I followed her out of my room and down the stairs.
Walter was back on the couch when Akhila and I got downstairs. He didn't move when we came down, and I gave thanks that he seemed to have passed out again in front of the TV.
I reached around her to open the door for her and she turned and smiled at me, reaching out her hand like she was going to touch my face. But she thought better of it, and let her fingertips graze down the side of my arm instead. "It was nice seeing you again WhoeverYouAre. Why don't you call me sometime when your girlfriend isn't ill? Then we can talk like normal people, hmm?"
I smiled at her in gratitude. "Thank you," I told her. "It was kind of you to come out here in the middle of the night." I glanced at her belly. "You obviously need your sleep now."
She snorted and rolled her eyes, but she still looked at me thoughtfully like maybe she'd never met me before. "I don't sleep anymore anyway."
When I got back upstairs, Olivia was stirring and thrashing around a bit on the bed. Thirty minutes later she rolled over onto her back. Her eyes fluttered and then opened, blank as cardboard when she looked at me.
Her brow scrunched. "Peter?" she asked, looking around the room. She started to get up, reaching instinctively in the direction of her weapon. I grabbed her arm and threaded her fingers in mine to stop her motion.
"It's okay," I soothed her. "You're home. Do you remember anything?"
Her eyes flickered around the room uncertainly, but she nodded at me.
"Peter?" she asked, her face going an unhealthy shade of puce.
"Yeah?"
"I think I'm going to be sick," she said. And then she leaned over the edge of the bed and vomited so violently and so long she made Regan Macneil look like a hypochondriac.
It must be love, I thought dizzily as I held her hair for her while she rode out the dry heaves that followed the vomit, because at that moment, there wasn't anywhere else I'd rather have been than seeing her awake and upright, coughing and gagging her way through her three-day-old stomach contents.
I slept on and off for two more days after I threw up on Peter's shoes, but it wasn't unconscious sleep anymore; it was more the sleep of the guilty and unwell.
The nausea didn't stop. Or the vomiting. That went on for days, until there were thin coils of blood in the vomit, and I felt like I'd hit the pavement fast and hard after a multi-story fall. After I ruined his bedroom floor, Peter brought me a bucket, but fortunately I only had to throw up in that once. Every other time I managed to make it to the bathroom.
Walter and Peter fed me Gatorade, broth, and three days after I woke up, toast, until just the sight of those things activated my gag reflex.
As I quit vomiting, slowly recovered, and established a more normal sleeping routine, Walter declared that my sleep, the pain, the nausea were all side-effects of the pyrotechnics I'd been performing with my mind. Peter didn't look so convinced, but he didn't protest or offer any alternatives.
Evidently, those pyrotechnic abilities seemed to be here to stay and I didn't have the energy or the nerve to decide if this were a good or a bad thing. The morning after I woke up, I was laying in bed trying to muster the strength to get up and the resolve to put my meeting with Elizabeth behind me for the time being, when Walter walked into the room with a pile of Peter's clean clothes from the laundry. He burst into the room as he usually did, loudly and without knocking and it scared the piss out of me. I wasn't able to control it; it was as involuntary as breathing or drawing my weapon. I jumped; my spine tightened and my chest burned. A milisecond later, the pile of clothes Walter was carrying burst into noisy flame. Walter pulled his arms back and let the pile of fiery cloth fall to the floor. While I stared wide-eyed with horror he jerked his head from the fire back to me with surprise.
Then, Walter smiled at me. A toothy, half-delirious smile of pure lunatic joy, as if all of his life's dreams had suddenly materialized in front of him.
We stared at each other, me with dread and him with glee, until the smoldering varnish on the hardwood floors melted, releasing its pungent and no doubt toxic fumes into the air before Walter called for Peter, still looking more like someone had given him a trunkful of his favorite foods than that he'd just been nearly crisped by my Hephaestian gaze.
The smell of the flames and the sound of Walter's unadulterated glee brought Peter up the stairs in triple-time. He skidded into the room at the end of a dead run, only nearly missing the circle of fire now licking up almost to Walter's waist. Peter either had world-class reflexes or he'd dealt with Walter and an unexpected fire before (instinct told me it was the latter). Without missing a beat in his skid, Peter yanked off the quilt crumpled at the bed and smothered the flames, stamping it out with his feet and shoving Walter aside as blaze turned to smoke and billowed up from around the edges of the blanket.
When the fire was out and we could get Walter to stop fidgeting with excitement, I explained to them that I believed Miriam had done something to me to release my buried pyrotechnic abilities. Walter added merrily that he believed my fear for their safety also contributed to me accessing my abilities.
Apart from being tired, and now potentially deadly because I was likely to make anything in my vicinity burst into flame, nothing else had changed. Unfortunately, I remembered everything from the ordeal that preceded the fire. You'd think, the trauma my body went through, I'd at least be gifted with a little amnesia, but it wasn't to be.
I was surly, in pain, and absolutely wrecked about what I'd learned from Elizabeth Bishop. The dreams were back too. I shuddered and sobbed my way through nights when I was so tired I couldn't stop myself from sleeping but couldn't quite wake up either. Peter held and petted me while I vainly tried to shake off the dreams that hadn't haunted me much since before Christmas. They weren't any less dark or horrible, although now both of Peter's mothers and all his children co-starred in them along with me.
Peter's warm breath in my ear and soothing touches only made me feel worse, until I flung myself away from him and started spending the bulk of my nights downstairs.
I wanted to tell him, really I did. But I could never quite bring myself to begin. I at least wanted to begin to figure the mess out myself before I could tell Peter, who likely as not, would try to catch the next plane to New York if he thought he could do something to save both worlds.
Elizabeth Bishop was insistent that the only way to reunite the broken worlds was for Peter to get into the machine. I didn't trust her any more than . . . well, I couldn't think of anything untrustworthy enough to compare her to. I knew there were a lot of unanswered questions, not least of which was why Cassandra sought us out in the first place. Elizabeth had tried to glance over that in our conversation, but I didn't miss that she seemed unaware of exactly what Cassandra had told us. Add to that, Cassandra claimed she'd broken her programming, but it was still unclear whether Elizabeth helped her break The Secretary's programming or if it was Elizabeth's programming Cassandra had broken. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that she and Elizabeth had few ways of communicating over the years that Cassandra had been here guiding the children. Also, why would the Observers go out of their way to ensure that Peter had some kind of unknown abilities, only to turn around and sacrifice him. Little of what she'd told me made sense. Plus, she herself had nearly killed Peter the last time her people got their hands on him. Why on earth was she be so hell-bent on sacrificing Peter? I needed some more information myself before I told Peter.
Denial isn't just a river in Egypt and I commanded it with more authority than any Egyptian Queen ever did.
Peter sensed that something was wrong—it would have been hard for him not to. The confused hurt that rolled off of him whenever he was near (which was always) made me avoid him all the harder, which, I might add, was difficult, since he refused to let me out of his sight.
A week after I was able to tolerate solid foods, I finally convinced Peter that nothing horrible was going to happen to me if he went for a run, so he did. I needed to get the ball rolling with Walter on figuring out the mess Elizabeth Bishop had left in her wake. I was getting worried that Peter was going to figure something out before I had a chance to process everything and then tell him myself. Those fucking Bishop men. Their minds buzzed around so quickly, the two of them could get bored faster than paparazzi could sniff out a cheating Senator.
And, like under-exercised puppies, when they got bored, they got into trouble. I wanted to make sure Peter only got into the kind of trouble I wanted him in, and only when I was fit enough to bail him out.
Before he left, I asked him to send Walter up to his room so we could play cards.
Walter was a goddamned card shark. In the event that he ever grew disillusioned with his career as a mad scientist, he could have made a killing in Vegas in a few months and retired to a warm island. Not that he'd ever need the money, but he might do it for the challenge. If he went to Vegas, Walter had his flighty, old-man routine down pat so thoroughly he would be long gone before anyone figured out that he was scalping them.
Walter shuffled into the room wearing his cardigan and his wool socks. He smiled at me tentatively and sat on the edge of the bed, reaching out with his hand to show me the deck of cards he'd removed from his pocket.
But I didn't want to play cards.
Walter looked down and his smile fell.
"What is it Olivia?" Walter knew. I don't know how he knew, but he knew that Miriam didn't just pop out of thin air, wandering in the street, which is the story she'd told Broyles, and then the Child Protective Services when they'd consulted before her parents were called. I wasn't sure what she knew or didn't know. It was hard to tell with Miriam. She wasn't big on conversation in the first place, and, crazy or not, powerful or not, she was still a little girl and probably lacked the cognitive ability to understand just what had happened to her. Aside from the feeling that she was drawn to me, I wasn't sure if she knew, understood, or even remembered her life for the last 10 weeks or so. I sighed. We'd have to use Miriam again sometime in the future I suspected, but I wasn't looking forward to it. I couldn't deal with that now though.
Walter also knew that what was making me as jumpy as a teenager when the condom broke was definitely something I didn't want Peter to know. I've never been able to tell what parts of Walter's insanity was put on and what parts were genuine, but whether it was some preternatural intuitiveness or just his overwhelming need to bind his broken little family together, he almost always sensed when something was wrong, even if he didn't know the details.
"Elizabeth Bishop came to see me, right before the fire," was how I started because it seemed best to tear the bandage clean-off right away.
The fire was what we called it. As if it were its own thing birthed whole from some unconnected timeline, like Athena from Zeus' head. Not at all something I was responsible for.
Walter flinched like someone had struck him, and I caught a glimpse of pain in his eyes, which for once, were clear and lucid, before he looked down at his lined hands which shook and looked painfully older. "The other Elizabeth Bishop," I amended.
Walter just nodded. Of course he knew that.
"She was responsible for Peter's abduction. She engineered Peter's DNA in a lab using recombinant DNA from the Observers, who she claims are The First People, responsible for creating the machines and splitting one world into the two realities we now know. She made the shapeshifters. She also claims she made the children and farmed them out to adoptive families on this side in the hopes that one of them could run the machine, an experiment that failed by the way which is why she took Peter in the first place.
Walter stood up and went over to stand at the window with his back to me. He clasped his hands behind his back by holding one wrist in another hand, his shoulders slumping under what I knew to be his self-castigation and guilt.
"I'm not sure how much of this I believe or not. I don't trust her. She hurt Peter on purpose. She abducted those children and did horrible things to them. They'll never be the same." Walter glanced at me and raised his eyebrows, indicating the children weren't the only things who would never be the same again. I shook my head and dropped my eyes. "We can check the adoptions of course. And the DNA. Walter, I need you to run some tests."
"I . . ." I paused. I wasn't sure how to go about this. "We have to confirm or deny what she's told us as best we can. I have some samples from the FBI. From the children. Hair, I think. . ."
Walter turned and looked at me, his shoulders still slumped, his hands still clasped behind his back. I swallowed hard and took a deep breath. "Will that be enough? For a DNA test?"
"Yes," he said slowly. "For a paternity test, I'll need a full comparison sample."
"You have one," was all I could manage.
Walter didn't say anything. He just shuffled over to the middle of the room, retrieved the cards from the bed, and walked to the door.
Walter paused in the doorway but didn't turn around. "It will take a few days," he said and his voice sounded tinny and remote like he was stealing himself for some as-yet-unknown violation.
"I know," I told him.
I silently watched him run his fingers along the circle of the doorknob before he grabbed it and slid quietly down the stairs.
Something was definitely up with Olivia. She was avoiding me. It was as simple as that.
It wasn't the sex. That, if possible, was even more enthusiastic and acrobatic than before. From just about the moment she could sit upright again and go twenty minutes without vomiting she'd resumed yanking me to her with a hand on my cock, crushing her mouth to mine a second later, and within minutes she was panting in my arms, clutching her to me with such desperate abandon I began to wonder if maybe, since we were all going to die anyway, she was storing up pleasures for the afterlife.
But, except for the sex, she was clearly avoiding me, which is pretty much her MO when things get fucked-up six ways til Sunday.
But forcing Olivia to say or do things until she's ready is counterproductive. Ask me how I know.
So I kept my mouth shut and pretended not to notice as best I could. Tried vainly not to let it bother me that she suddenly seemed to be always looking elsewhere when I tried to catch her eye and she refused to touch me, except when I was inside her of course.
But her distance made me anxious, which in turn made me uneasy and insecure, reluctant to let her out of my sight, petrified that if I let her go even for a minute, she'd slip away from me forever like a newborn spider on an unfelt breeze.
Three weeks later I had my answer.
One slow afternoon when Olivia and Walter were out—those two whispered more secrets together than a pair of pre-adolescent girls these days—and Astrid was pulling time at the field office, I was alone in the now only slightly-charred, FBI-refurbished lab. I was shoving Walter's work papers into a semi-tidy pile at the end of the table when a notebook I'd never seen before slid out from under a pile of loose, homeless notes and Pop-Tart wrappers.
Evidently there was a whole series of tests and investigations being conducted I wasn't aware of. I tried to read Walter's notes, but he'd used some kind of code, probably so they wouldn't catch my attention, since hard experience had taught me not to delve too deeply into Walter's mind for any reason. And it would have worked. I would have tossed it aside without another thought if the PCR films hadn't slid out from the back of the notebook. A whole handful of them falling to the floor and skimming across the lab in every direction.
When you live my life, reading PCR films is about a second-nature as breathing. Not to read them is like trying to not read a stop-sign. You just can't do it. When I went to retrieve the one that had fallen the furthest, I recognized my own fucked-up, still unexplained series of nucleotides. When I stacked Miriam's and Melek's on top of mine, however, still half-wondering why these were still out in Walter's papers and not filed in the boxes of the back room which thankfully escaped the fire, I couldn't un-see the match.
I stumbled against a nearby table, then just stood there, trying to decide if I could make it to a sink before I lost my lunch.
I slowly gathered the results from the four children, each a match, each film layering another horror on top of the one before it in my over-taxed mind.
It took me twenty minutes to crack Walter's note-code. It helped that I knew his mental habits as well as I knew his personal ones.
I read the notes. As usual, Walter was anything if not thorough. I read about Olivia's clandestine meeting with my mother (who somehow learned to cross over to make social calls), about my previously unknown offspring, spawned by her in an attempt to engineer children of mine capable of running the machine, about the vagaries of my own recombinatory conception and aberrant genetic makeup, about my mother's claims that I needed to power the machine because it was the only way to heal the rift and reunite the two worlds.
As I skimmed Walter's wild speculations, I comprehended he and Olivia's implicit betrayal in keeping all this from me. I managed not to lose my lunch because I embraced the rock of anger gathering hard and dense in the back of my throat. The anger bullied the hurt out of the way and bloomed with the symmetry of a bird-of-prey stretching its wings.
I left it all spread out on the table, along with my notes for cracking Walter's code, just so there wouldn't be any confusion as to why I'd left.
And I fled, running I knew not where, at that point only intent on moving.