(Part IX) -2036-

{Peter}

"Walter, wake up."

After his third attempt to arouse him, his father is still a lump under disheveled blankets, a heap of a body under the stitched cover of green and blue patchwork. Soundly snoring, he remains unmoving as Peter pushes against his father's shoulder with more pressure this time.

"C'mon Walter, I'm not going to do this all night. I'm not playing this game with you, you need to get-"

"Pique down will you, you're going to wake the neighborhood!"

His father's voice hisses, groggy, as he turns down the corner of the blanket until a curly head of graying hair gives way to an aged, blinking focus.

But he's not patient enough for the waking man to register the intrusion, instead it's his anxious nerves that guide him when he holds up what he'd grabbed from the zipper compartment.

"How long have you had this candy bar, Walter?" he asks, slowly, his own voice squeezing his eardrums as the questioned sits up, "Where did you get it?"

In answer, his father squints, his face an instant set of silence, a fifth amendment of age lines and deep creases under narrowly set green-ore.

He's less then forthcoming for a reason, and his eyes still high, they find a newly interesting spot on the floor, dark tile where the other room's desk light filters in, and Peter has to bite back his impatience at his father's mulishness.

"Goddammit, Walter-"

"From her, from Olivia."

This claim steals the feeling from his lungs, makes his forehead hurt from his frowns intensity, his confusion's sore imprint.

"When Walter? When did she give this to you?"

"When she came to me. Twenty years ago, in the lab."

Trying to understand, he's careful with his next question, sits down on the cot behind him before he asks it.

"She talked to you before she left?

"Personately, yes." his father responds, his voice stern at the start. "But not in the way you're reffering, not in the simple fundament of the general pretense."

Clueless, he's lost, the private correlating sounding a lot like nonsense. Again.

"What are you talking about, Walter. How did you get this?"

"I thought it was a hallucination at first," he begins to explain, his tone straight-laced, deep. "A biped fantasy caused by the rather large herbal concoction I'd ingested beforehand. But it wasn't. She was real, Peter, as real as you and I are sitting here now. "

"What?"

He has to blink through the confoundment, not sure entirely, if he wants to grasp onto the radical notion the suggestion was forming.

"She'd told me she'd confiscated a portal device from them," He hears, "from the Observers, used it to travel time they way they do, in the same linear fashion. To my surprise and great disappointment, she told me coffee would only be chewed in twenty years." In the darkness, his father's face turns to a look of disgust, "She was right. It's rather distasteful in masticated form."

As if the words were a simple enough explanation, perceivable to the average person, he says no more, merely sits, leaving the air punctuatingly sedate.

"You're serious."

Peter states, his words sounding more surprised then he'd intended them, trying deep inside, to remember that he should expect these left-field explanations.

His ascertainment just needs a way to work all this out.

"Of course I am." his father responds, his voice short, his brow line portraying the slight offense he'd just taken, "I'd think you'd know by now, Peter, that time has no objective existence, it's merely a subject construct. It shouldn't be so inconceivable for you to believe that Olivia could have-"

"I gave her this candy bar, Walter, " he interrupts, unable to bear a rant in the face of this surreal mindfuck, "two days before I last saw her."

Because of this, a set of eyes, un-aged for twenty years, frowns on new thought.

"Well, I suppose now that I can rule out an alternate iteration of her."

And as his father ponders something, alone to himself, all this information begins to register it's reality, the sequential working of his right-brain handing over his incognizance to the crushing hand of hard realization.

And it hits him now; the answer he'd wanted long ago.

"She's how you knew isn't she?" he asks, more a statement then question. "When I'd asked you in the lab twenty years ago how you knew of Bell's plan, how you knew of his intent, it's because she came to you. She knew somehow and she told you, didn't she?"

"Yes. She did that." Walter confirms, and when he brings something out from the blankets, Peter recognizes again what had been shoved in his hand years before.

"And she gave me this." his father says, holding up the tiny machine. "Said this device would be our only chance, that we'd have to build it. And that we'd have to do so in the future, in the year that they'd come for us, Agent Foster and my grandchild."

Another light bulb flicks on in his mental compartment, the expanse of his psyche that's suddenly radiating at warp-speed.

"Jesus, that's why you'd Ambered us."

The older man nods.

"She'd said I'd figure it out, that I'd already discovered a way to suspend time without stopping it."

It's all too heavy to take in, so he's speechless now, in the wake of absorption, filtering through the process dust with a hand to his lower face, his fore-finger and thumb curved to his chin.

"She came to me then, Peter," he hears his father say, after momentary silence, "so we could be here now.

"And if I hadn't been severely influenced at the time, I can't say I wouldn't have worn the same look you are now. Though, with a bit more fascinated open-mindedness. Even as a boy you had a rather timid imagination." Where there once may have been a slight smile, his father's face remains affectless, "You never were inclined to accept the possibilities of the impossible so easily."

After he swallows, the breath he takes is subtle, sufficient for what experience has brought him.

A proclivity to believe.

"It's not as hard for me now as you might think."

He responds, turning his attention back to the chocolate bar in his palms, and after a quiet five seconds, he's consumed by a new question that flips his chest upside-down.

"I know what you're going to ask," his father says, before he can ask it, "If I know where she is, how she is, but I'm afraid I don't have that answer. As you should know, the definites are undeterminate when viewing time re-placement from outside of it.

"But, I can assure you from whatever year she came from, whatever place, she didn't appear endangered. In fact, she didn't appear troubled at all."

This should bring him some kind of relief but it doesn't, only makes his desire for more answers ten times larger. Until he knows everything for certain, he'll be tied to the whipping post of what he desperately wants back.

"I have faith that where ever she is, Olivia's well. " his father says, "And I'd wager, that in time, we'll have the sense to know exactly where that is."