A/N: So, I know I missed last week's update. I got to a certain point (after my seven month meltdown) and had to take a step back to take a breath. Thank you to everyone for the "gentle nudges" and the continued support this story gets Big fat THANK YOU! To Inner Peter for providing the stellar line I was stuck on and for being just a bad ass in
general.
When she was seventeen, Olivia went to a fortune teller, dragged there by her younger sister Rachel. It was in an old house off the highway that Olivia remembered was once a flower shop; the air dense with the musky smell of incense and cat piss (and though she didn't mention it to Rachel, weed) every bare wall covered with old velvet tapestries in rich purples that made Olivia wonder what was hiding behind them.
"C'mon Liv, don't you want to know your future?" Rachel squealed through wagging mystical spirit fingers in front of her face as they waited for Madam Rogue to share her divine secrets of the universe. Olivia had just smiled as Rachel was lead to the backroom by a woman trying and failing in her impersonation of Stevie Nicks, her black dress billowing behind her as she walked, rolling her eyes and slouching in her chair to wait her turn. She was never very good at waiting, so she did what she always did when she was forced to sit still: she observed.
She wandered around the small space, the twangy melody of new age music sweeping through ancient speakers, touching all the little figurines that lined the shelves, leaving fingerprints in the dust on the hanging tapestries. She pushed a particularly garish one aside and let out a shriek of surprise when a matted black cat dashed between her ankles it to disappear into another veiled corner. She stopped investigating after that.
After fifteen minutes, Rachel bundled out, her face animated as she told Olivia about all the boys in her future, the babies and the carefree life she's going to lead.
When Olivia's lead back, the woman sat her down in a room lit entirely by candlelight and closed the door behind her, shutting her in. With worn cards shuffling between her hands, she inspected Olivia under false eyelashes, the air thick with more stink of weed and piss, a smirk on her weathered face that instantly annoyed Olivia.
"So how many kids am I gonna pop out?" Olivia asked her tritely, already bored and wanting desperately to be in fresh air again.
The woman's smirk faded as she flipped over the first card: a skeleton dressed in black robes standing over a small child, the rising sun behind the figures washed out by age. After a second, the woman spoke as if she were reciting a memorized script:
"Having left the tree from where he hung, the Fool moves carefully through a fallow field, head still clearing from the visions." Olivia sat silently as she listened. "The air is cold and wintry, the trees bare. He knows he has started on his spiritual journey in earnest, but feels strangely empty and profoundly sad, as if he has lost something."
Olivia couldn't help but roll her eyes then.
"Olivia Dunham," the woman said, even though Olivia knew she'd never mentioned her name before. "You sacrificed your old world, your old self. Both are gone, dead."
"So I'm fated to become the Fool?" Olivia asked.
"No, Olivia," the woman's painted lips curled. "You are fated to die."
The young shapeshifter continues on its merry way, and from the sounds of it, taking a strip of paint with it as a consolation. Olivia's got her hands buried deep in Peter's coat, the smell of urine heavy in the air as the heat beats down on the tin box they're hiding in.
She's not sure why being trapped in the camper brings up inexplicable memories of the fortune teller: the seedy room with velvet tapestries and cat piss and weed and the woman with lipstick stained on her teeth. When Peter lets out a heady breath against the crook of her neck, she shoves it back down and dismisses it. She's left only with the vague remembrance that to this day she still hates cats.
Peter's hands skirt across her elbows, the heat from his mouth too close to her skin as the shapeshifter's shadow fades against the metal of the doors. Olivia doesn't need the absence of sound to tell her that the boy's moved on and the others are not far behind him are still too far away to pick up their scent over the stench of fried piss. There's a prickling of consciousness trickling in over the frequency of Peter and his ever steady wave of misfired resentment; nothing helpful, really, other than the foggy acknowledgement that they're out there.
It's getting hard to concentrate on anything, the closer she is in proximity to him, the harder it is to concentrate on anything else.
Peter's taste is eclectic, his feelings fine-tuned and flavored on her practiced tongue. She's gotten good at zeroing in on him; during the last couple days of his avoidance she's taken to pushing him out while withstanding the urge to set him on fire. It's curious how his anger rubs so easily off on her, his grief, and especially, she noticed, his stubbornness. His head pulls back as he talks to her, lips moving urgently and she watches him without really hearing what he's saying.
"…wait them out," is all she catches at the end of Peter's train of thought for whatever plan he's set out for them. Her brow furrows as she withdraws her hands from his coat. It's the most words he's spoken at one time to her since they left Harvard.
"What?" she says when she realizes that he's waiting for some sort of response. He's impossibly close, practically breathing in her air and she feels something shift in the space between them.
"What is it?" he asks gently, his eyes hanging on each finite detail of her face, trying to discern her microexpressions in the fractions of seconds that she uses to try to blot him out completely. Her smile is tight before melting away, the creeping fear that he knows settling in her chest.
Peter takes a deep breath, and she feels his resignation before she sees it in his face. He rakes his fingers through his hair, pushing it off his forehead as he shifts his focus away from her face.
"Listen," he says, "I know this is difficult for you, too." He tells her in a hurry, his hair sticking up in little tuffs where he's mussed with it. "I know I've been difficult." He smirks even though it's not really funny. Olivia doesn't move a muscle, her face perfectly passive.
"I just need some time to—" Peter starts and that pretty much does it for her.
"Time to what?" Olivia asks, her heart hammering in her chest as she straightens her back and shoulders, arching against the peeling laminate of the cabinet. She takes advantage of the position they're in, trapped together in a tin box until the shapeshifters are far enough away for them to make a run for it off the highway. She knows they have time to kill from the aimless direction the shifters are taking. And she knows that if there's one thing that Peter Bishop hates, it's being backed against a wall.
Good, she thinks.
His lips pull down at the corners as he begins to reset his thoughts. Olivia doesn't let him.
"How much time do you need, exactly?" her voice is razor sharp, cutting through the heat surrounding them. Peter chews on his lip, his flash of fury a rocket ship tumbling its way toward her. She recycles it, lets it fuel her as she gears up for the fight she knows is imminent. The little sliver of everything she's been trapped with pumps up her chest and into her mouth to spit back at him. Everything.
"You're not the only one who's lost someone close to them." She snaps. "It's not exactly an exclusive club."
Peter's stomach lets out from under his chest.
"Olivia," he begins.
"I care about him too." Olivia continues, not letting Peter have a single breath to refute. "And despite what you think you know about me, you don't know ANYTHING if you think that I would have done that." Up until that point, she'd been doing well. Shifting through her anger like the gritty bits of gravel was an easy emotion to work through; thinking about Walter and his terrified face, however, is not.
Peter's shocked into silence, her words icy cold against his cheeks.
"I know what you think of me." Olivia's voice is softer. "From that moment in the lab, I knew everything changed." She looks away from Peter's stormy eyes. She can feel his desire to reach out and it's stifling when his hands remain clenched on either side of his hips.
"Olivia," he finally says, his voice without the acid from before.
"You see him, don't you? When you look at me."
No answer.
And then there's nothing else for her to say.
There's the croak out in the distance from one of the shapeshifters, and they both jump at the break in their silence. Peter hasn't stopped staring at her.
"I took my eyes off Walter." His voice is whisper-soft when he finally admits it. So soft in fact that Olivia isn't sure if he uttered the words or she's able to read his thoughts now. She waits for him to continue; despite the look on his face telling her he isn't keen on doing so.
"In the lab," he says after a long time, "it was just for a moment and it was because of you." His voice is teeming on resigned anger, his hands clenching and unclenching like he's ready to fight. Her eyebrows knit together, mind reeling back to the terror at the lab. She remembers watching the shapeshifter as it stalked toward Walter's unknowing face. Her failure as Peter screamed for her to save him, and the shame she still feels that she couldn't.
"I don't understand." She admits, his grief is pushing in on her, filling the small space of the cab and she feels like she's stepping into the cold water of the tank for the first time: exhilaration at the unknown, but half-naked and out of her fucking mind with terror.
His hands curl in on themselves in Peter's lap, and she's for a moment distracted. Those long fingers that she's dedicated more than one lewd fantasy throughout their working relationship; long and purposeful and agile even for someone who found himself the happiest when they were covered in grease. She wants to reach out to take them, lace her fingers between the spaces to fill them in, but she remains completely still.
"I watched you." Peter's voice flits into her consciousness, his hands balling again. Olivia has to physically bring herself to drag her gaze away from those hands and onto Peter's face, something new fluttering from his emotions that she's not quite used to.
"When that shapeshifter," he manages through a tight throat, his voice strained. He takes another breath to swallow down all the things he needs to say. "When it was that close to you, when you didn't see it, I took my eyes off Walter. Frankly, I didn't care about Walter. About my own father." He amends and lets out a strangled laugh that he can't pull off, his chest burning.
"I didn't want you to be taken from me."
Olivia feels the temperature drop a few degrees as she puts together his grief and the words he's telling her. He's too bright, the air too stale and she's covering her mouth with her hand even though she doesn't remember the action of doing so.
"It was my choice," he mutters, his voice breaking under the strain of uttering the words aloud, "I let my father die to save you. And now I'm going to let him die again because there's nothing I can do to save him."
She doesn't bother to try to tell him that there's still a chance to save Walter, to save everyone. Even though she believes it with every fiber of her being, she knows that It's beside the point. She's stifled into silence at the naked honesty that Peter's telling her. Practically shouting at her.
"You made the wrong choice." She finishes for him.
It feels like he shot her in the chest with a rifle.
Peter's movement is swift as he reaches for her face, capturing her cheeks between his palms to force her undivided attention.
"Olivia," his breath is hot on her face. "I made the only choice I could make." Olivia stares dumbly at him, mouth hanging open and tasting him on the tip of her tongue.
Then he pulls back into his corner, hands balled again and her cheeks are cold from the absence of his skin on her. Olivia shifts forward, reaching out to take his hands in her own and feeling the flush of his emotion as they loosen under her grip.
"There's nothing you could have done." She mutters.
He nods; eyes glassy as he pulls away from her gaze.
There are the outlines of shadows from the shapeshifters as they pass the cab, the quiet gurgle of breath that forces them to hunker low, all conversation halting even though there's so much more that Olivia wants to say. They watch them pass, or rather, Peter watches them and Olivia watches Peter. Watches the curve of his mouth as his teeth grind together, the meaning behind the words he shared.
She shifts, quiet as a cat to maneuver herself onto Peter's startled lap, slipping her hand over his mouth to silence him; his eyes wide as saucers when he looks at her. When she's confident that he won't give away their location to the passing shadows, she removes her hand to replace with her mouth, finding his lips a little unsteady as she presses herself into Peter's lap, her stomach burning when his fingers dig into her hips as he kisses her back.
"Olivia," he shudders when her hands drop from their hold into his jacket to touch his chest. His irises are blasted wide open, and she tastes the exhilarating tang of his excitement as it touches every nerve in her skin.
"Olivia." He says a little more clearly, his hands on either side of her face to gently pull her away to look at him.
"What?" she huffs as his fingers burn into her skin, scorching her.
Peter's black eyes go missing as he cranes his neck back toward the window.
"It's time to run."