Chapter 12 – Episode 11 The Boy Must Live

love, hands

Summary: Eight times.

Warning: There was nothing in the last episode that caught my special interest so I settled for a little challenge. Chronological, for once.

Set: post-ep to Episode 11 of Season 5. Spoilers for many others (look below for a list).

Disclaimer: No copyright inFringement intended.

A/N: Only two more episodes to go. This chapter turned into some kind of memory lane for me... God, I love this series.

A/N: And the title of the readers of the week goes to... Tadaaah! One anonymous guest (you were the only one that left a review, yes, I mean you) and ref51907, who both made my day. Welcome, and thanks to both of you.

Prompt: "Sometimes we make love with our eyes. Sometimes we make love with our hands. Sometimes we make love with our bodies. Always we make love with our hearts."


[you looked so tired]

There is a woman waiting at the end of the stairs.

Peter hears his name and reacts, and she is blond and grey-eyed and has a nasty gash on the right side of her forehead. In the midst of the crowded hotel foyer she does not stand out, she is plainly-dressed and of average height. Women like her are his taste, actually – blond, with strong features and deep eyes – and yet there is nothing like that in his mind when she extends her hand and he takes it. He shakes it with his usual vigor and remembers too late that most women flinch because his grip is too tight. This woman – she does not react.

–Sweetheart, we all know someone who is dying. –I have your file.

Suddenly he hates her – hates her delicate features and her pleading eyes, her creamy skin, her blonde hair. Peter hates her injured forehead and the tiny break in her voice. –I beg you. He hates her voice that does not seem weak anymore as she threatens him, the file the FBI would say does not exist, how her eyes bore into his and force him to change his plans. And there it goes. Four days, she said, so he follows her from the hotel to the airport and spends the most uncomfortable flight of his life sitting next to her and trying to ignore her. Exhaustion is etched into her features so deeply he thinks she might collapse but she walks three steps ahead of him the entire time until the alarm resounds and steel doors open and there he is, back to where he ran from in the first place. Back to the one person he never wanted to see again.

[you could have let go, you know]

It is like watching a picture. A painting, only Peter never had an eye for art. A photograph, rather, because she is as real as one. People look at photographs and know this one thing will never be theirs, be it a moment, a place or a far-away memory. Looking at Olivia is a lesson in Keep your eyes on the road, pal, no touching allowed. (He wonders where the urge to do so comes from, anyway.)

Every time she goes down into this tank he wonders whether she will come back.

She goes in for a multitude of reasons but the one reason that matters is the one she should not be acting on, at least that's his opinion. –You're gonna be fine. A silly thing to say since she obviously isn't, as much as she pretends she is. A few hours later he thinks he never held a half-naked woman in his arms before without thinking of sex but the only thing he thinks when he holds her is that her hair smells like salt and chemicals and that her skin is cold. –Hey Peter. And that her hand that clamped around his arm was so much stronger than her shaking body felt in his arms. (Desperation, perhaps, but Olivia Dunham isn't desperate, never is.)

[but we tried so hard, so hard]

Her voice is hesitant. Her eyes won't meet his and she looks so frail he wants to hold her but doesn't dare because he thinks she might just be falling apart, right there. Her hands are hesitant, too, one wrapping around his neck, one stopping right before him and curling to a fist on his chest. –Peter, it's me. Her lips are soft, searching, and every quiver of her being screams with the fear of being rejected. (I don't plan on letting you go, you know.) He can just tell her by holding her but he's as hesitant as she is. The light of the skyline is blinding, explodes behind his closed eyes like a firework. There is nothing more than her – Olivia, Olivia, Olivia, his whole being reaches out to her. He might have been told he was supposed to fix a universe but they didn't expect him to, not really. And besides, he can't. He can't fix the universe, he can't fix his father, he can't even fix himself. He cantry and try as he might but he's just himself. He's never really had a home since the day his mother (the other one, at least, damn it is hard to differentiate two lives that both belong to him) died. He has given up the hope of ever finding a place for himself. He never thought the answer would be so close, so easy. –You belong with me. And so incredibly, inexplicably right.

[how could I ever, ever]

He could watch her sleep forever if not for the feeling of guilt that rumors in his guts like cancer. His hands feel like ice.

Peter. His name falls from her lips like a prayer, her eyes search for him fervently. The smile is tiny but beautiful, just the way he remembers it, and he never felt more tainted.

Once upon a time, a time so far past he barely remembers, his mother told him a story. It was something about a girl and a boy falling in love (Don't laugh, Peter, it is going to happen to you one day and when it happens I want you to be happy). It was such a silly little story, especially for a child who had no notion of life and love and such. It ended with the boy realizing that he would never mistake the girl's hand for someone else's again, as he had done once during a party game, and they made up and lived happily ever after. Years later he happened to stumble upon an ancient book, buried somewhere between her personal items. She had altered the ending in her story for him. In the original story the girl died, and the boy had only been able to see her as a ghost for one day until they were forced to part forever. He hadn't thought much about it then, the book was precious because it had belonged to his mother, the story was trivial. –Don't apologize. But suddenly it is so clear in his mind, so horribly obvious. Olivia still does not know what he did, what he did to her, he dreads the moment she will find out. Peter doesn't think he has the courage to tell her. She is beautiful even in her exhausted and beat state, her hair, her skin, her hands – they are different, so terribly, completely different. He realizes it now but it is too late. Once he tells her she won't smile at him like this anymore. –If it wasn't for you… She might never smile at him again.

He holds her hand tighter than ever before. Olivia notices it and thinks it is because he has her back again – in truth Peter dreads the moment he has to let go.

[there is a place somewhere]

–Don't.

The tulips at her feet are burnt to ashes. White tulips, white ashes, her hair is white in the light of the moon. –I'm not scared. Come to think of it, he never was. He felt surprise and shock, and sometimes worry, but pure, unaltered fear he couldn't remember. Olivia taught him that. (Years later, because the worst he can imagine is losing her and it already happened far too often.) But right then he is small and young, and the girl in front of him is small and scared and pretty. –You've got to try something, right? The night wind is cool and fresh and her hand is small and real in his and the white flakes feel warm on his skin. –Imagine it how you want it to be and then change it. If it only was that simple. He's young and lost but he knows it is not that simple, never. Either way, everything seems easier the second he takes her hand. She is amazing.

Some memories get lost in the course of life. Some memories are destroyed by altering fates, or overwritten, he has no idea how to put together the pieces. Their first meeting is not a memory Peter still has but when he takes Olivia's hand he knows they are meant for each other. Sometimes he wonders whether they have met in previous lives – but with their wild agenda of meeting, falling and losing each other he wouldn't bet on it. Although – if their lives already were re-written once without anyone of them noticing, it is very possible it has happened more than once before.

[you can do this]

Together is not a concept he finds trivial when it comes to them.

Don't say I never took you anywhere.

Together means so much more than he ever thought. Means waking up next to her every morning (for the rest of his life), listening to her brush her teeth in the bathroom, to her steady breathing when she falls asleep. Together means meeting her again every day, as if she was a foreign subject he could study for the rest of his life. Every encounter, every hour, every minute with her seems frozen in his mind. His entire being is a snapshot of Olivia's at every stage of their time.

Together.

Together means he gets to prepare breakfast for her every Sunday. It means going out on free days, watching Walter on the swing in the playground. It means trivial things like shopping and cleaning up the kitchen after cooking together, even cleaning the apartment isn't a bothersome chore anymore when he coaxes her to climb unto the sofa so he can vacuum, and she splashes soapy water at him when he tries to ambush her at the kitchen sink. It means he can call her without any reason, at whatever time it is, and even when she sounds sleepy and annoyed it is her voice he listens to as if it was the most beautiful song in the world. It means he recognizes her (I don't know what's happening but this is not you), he could look at a dozen mirror images and he wouldn't hesitate to find her. Together means the past and the present and the future, whenever, wherever, and it feels far less sappy than it might sound. –Peter? I love you.

He'd save worlds for her alone, be it in his power or not.

[tell me a story with a happy ending]

So he was erased from this timeline.

So Olivia doesn't know him.

So Walter and Astrid and Broyles don't know him, either, there is a stranger where he once was (Hi, I'm Lincoln Lee). Someone else where he lived, someone else where he worked, someone else where he belonged. Belongs. It is his right to be there, he thinks, his place, how could they forget him? And then he thinks, perhaps not, perhaps he is in the wrong place. Wrong place, wrong time and wrong people, enough material for a million stories that have come before his. (But she smiles just like her.) This Olivia looks like his Olivia (we've been through this before, haven't we) and talks and walks and behaves just like his. And now she is looking at him like she should. He can see himself in her eyes and he knows, without fail, that he is in the right place. Both of them are. He lifts her up and whirls her around, his arms around her middle, her hands on his shoulders, the night is cool but he doesn't feel its chill.

The world can end now. The world can end and he will die a happy man, whatever happens.

[if I never told you I love you]

She takes the tech from him and places the bullet in his hand and suddenly he can see Etta in her.

So clearly, so close – how could he have missed it before? –And I know our hearts are broken and that it hurts but it's what makes us human. Her hands are small, she can't even wrap them around his. And it hurts – it hurts it hurts damn it hurts – and he can just fall into her arms and cry. –I've lost you before over this and I'm not going to let that happen again. How Olivia always knows what to say and where to find him is beyond him but that's why he loves her, in the end.

Etta. Etta. Ettaettaettaettaettaolivia. Olivia. Olivia.

Because she is alive, and Etta is not. (And God, the admission hurts more than the self-inflicted wound in his neck.) Because she is alive. Because Olivia is alive. She's alive inside us. So he listens to her. (I'm not going to lose you again.)

He cannot count how many times he's already lost her. A hoax, a mental invader, a world, a bullet, a lost child, a broken heart. He's lost her again and again and she always came back, as if she, somehow and unconsciously, understood that there was no Peter without her. He was no one without Olivia. Worlds could die and people could disappear, they could take away everything they had (except for Etta, not Etta not Etta not her), they could make them sick and old and helpless, jeopardize his health, his world, even his home. But they couldn't take her away. Whatever Gods ruled the universe(s), thinking treating him like that was fun – one of them must have had mercy on Peter Bishop's soul. (Broken and shattered but he's alive and Olivia is alive, too.) It's probably not right to base his own life on someone else but that is how he feels.

Can you feel it?

–Feel what?

–It's close.

–What is close, Peter?

–The end, my love.

[at least you know I tried]


A/N: Episode List

S01Ep01 Pilot / S01Ep13 The Transformation / S02Ep23 Over There, Part 2 / S03Ep08 Entrada / S03Ep15 Subject 13 / S03Ep21 The Last Sam Weiss / S04Ep15 A Short Story About Love / S05Ep08 The Human Kind