Olivia's First Shocks

"We're starting slow on this, right?" Peter asked, because he remembered Olivia's first time with the drugs and it was not an experience he wanted to repeat just because Walter had decided to add electric shocks to her roster.

"Oh, quite," Walter said, affixing the sticky electrodes to Olivia's forehead. Astrid placed heat and smoke sensors for remote monitoring. Olivia was nervous, blinking and looking anywhere but at Walter's floating hands.

"It's fine, Peter," she said, as her hands clenched and unclenched around the armrests. He wanted to put a hand out for her to squeeze, but she'd never in a million years take it. Not while she was actually scared.

The drugs went in smoothly, as usual, and the Walternator - which Peter had made himself and tested in every way he knew how - worked perfectly. After the first two rounds of shocks, Olivia's brain waves started making pretty pictures, and the Bishops started watching the monitors so intently that when the first paperclip hit Peter's shoulder, he brushed it off without thinking, like it was normal for something to have fallen onto his shoulder in the lab.

The second paperclip, though, Peter noticed because it didn't hit him: it wormed through his hair in a crawly way that made him shudder and pat his head down. When his fingers found a paperclip and not a beetle or spider, he was confused. He thought illogically that perhaps it'd been thrown at him, and turned around to check. He didn't turn back.

"Walter," he said, still looking behind them. "You ever see this before?"

They stared into together into a veil of small implements: mostly paperclips and tacks with the occasional pencil or pen. It was almost hard to see, a wall of things where you wouldn't expect things to be. It just hung there, a motionless metallic haze that curved up and around them like they were inside a grey balloon. If Olivia was a nucleus, this was her extremely crowded electron cloud.

"This doesn't quite fit the firestarter profile, does it," Peter said.

Walter had an odd look. "Tastes change, I suppose," he said. He took an errant airborne tack in the face as they tried to decide what to do about the new development, and a pinprick of blood formed over his eyebrow.

"Walter, time for you to get out," Peter said.

"Absolutely not," Walter said.

"Absolutely yes," Peter countered, already tilting the monitors so he could see them all himself.

"Out of the question," Walter said. "This is a critical interval; she cannot be left unattended." Like Peter didn't know that. Like Peter didn't know the entire procedure, start to finish. Like he hadn't stayed up nights in a row trying to suss out every risk, every place it could go wrong.

"I'll stay," he said, because putting himself in bizarre situations and trusting his genius to get him out was practically his M.O..

A lone stapler wobbled by, on its way to join the cloud. Walter tracked it with his eyes as it passed between their faces. Peter could imagine what he was thinking: that a stapler was much bigger, much heavier than a tack. Walter touched the bloody pinprick on his forehead. There was a moment more of silence and then, somewhere behind them, an office chair started to shift quietly against the linoleum.

"Walter," Peter said, with decorum, "I get that you're not afraid of anything, anywhere, for any reason, but why don't you wait outside."

Walter gave in with a nod. Peter kept his eyes on the hollow sphere of office supplies as Walter backed through them, parting the curtain of debris cautiously. After a few seconds, the door to the lab shut and Walter was gone, and then Peter actually had to think of a plan. He figured the safest thing was to wake Olivia, to get her up, because even if it did nothing to stop her from turning the lab into a snow globe, he could get the hell out after she was safely awake.

Gently and quickly as he could, he flipped switches and cut IVs, holding out faint hope that she'd open her eyes and the metal would drop and they could go home and not try any of this again without three inches of bulletproof glass in the way. He started doing what he usually did when he was nervous: talk.

"All right, sweetheart, come on," he said, less to Olivia and more to the machine that was easing the liquid contents of a bag labeled 'Rise & Shine' into her arm. He didn't know why Astrid's handwriting had to be so eternally cheerful.

When she woke up, Olivia's displeasure was imminent as an elephant wearing crampons in a roomful of babies. She tried to focus on Peter with pupils the size of Saturn.

"Hey now," he said, trying to show her how relaxed he wished he were. "You're okay. You're okay. It's all right." A pen hit him in the back: just a tap. He jumped.

"Peter," Olivia said, turning her head to test her neck. "Ow." She didn't sound so much hurt as she did resentful. A light dusting of paperclips rained on his shoulders, driven by more than just gravity.

"'Livia," Peter started. He was confused. She was awake, and that was supposed to have solved things. Maybe she wasn't awake enough. Maybe the drugs were still hard at work on her, strong enough to warp reality. As if on cue, the cloud rippled slightly: a disturbed sheet of waiting projectiles.

Great.

Peter watched the monitor countdowns. Minutes left until he could safely leave her. He tried to decide whether it would be better or worse to undo her restraints: she might feel less threatened, but she'd have four more ways to hurt him.

"Peter," she growled, pleading.

Peter saw Walter's face pressed to the window of the lab door, watching him with a parental sort of anguish, and he reached for the buckles.

Right up to the moment the mug hit him in the back, Peter didn't think Olivia would actually hurt him. He'd been encouraged by her stillness after he'd unbuckled her left side restraints: no kicking, no swinging at him. He'd been so encouraged that he'd undone them all, freeing her completely, and when she'd tried to get up he had helped her by slipping the needles out from under her skin so they wouldn't pull. She'd looked up at him as he'd peeled the electrodes off her body and seemed grateful. Then he'd felt the mug between his shoulders: a shot that, just a foot higher, might have left him unconscious on the ground. A pen shot across the room in the other direction, and he understood that she wasn't aiming for him per se, but that he might be standing in the middle of an psychokinetic tornado.

Peter recovered his breath and tried to remember how many more heavy things were hovering behind him - how many might be sharp, or heavy - and came up with too many. So he exhaled hard, grabbed Olivia tight and held on, not to comfort her but because she was the center, the safest place to be in her storm.

"'Livia, it's me," he said. "It's me." He moved her in an awkward, feet-shuffling circle-in-place, trying to never be exposed in one direction for too long and hoping it wouldn't be long before the drugs cleared her system. When he had her turned away from the lab door, Peter looked up helplessly over her shoulder for Walter, hoping for some lifeline to be thrown, although he didn't know what Walter could possibly have for him through a door. True to his worry, Walter's drawn face in the window was all he got. Things were starting to fly past his head at a rapid pace. Most were un-alarmingly small, but some...

"Hey, sweetheart, come on, stop this," he continued, turning away from the door again.

"Peter," Olivia mumbled. His name was the only thing she seemed interested in saying. Her tone was altered, more miserable now, but that wasn't changing anything. A pencil holder shattered against the wall somewhere behind him. Peter started to wonder how long this was going to last, and if he should make a run for it despite the danger to both of them. Help, he thought, like it was a joke he was telling himself. Something clipped him painfully on the hip, probably a hole punch. He didn't know why they even kept hole punches in the lab, but they wouldn't anymore, after today.

He talked to her, steadily as he could, and kept talking mindlessly for a few minutes until he tripped over a new word, one he hadn't thought he'd meant to say, and then another one after that, and then he found he had the most compelling urge to sing them. Maybe it was a consequence of his desperation for a remedy - any remedy - that he did sing them. He knew he should feel more ridiculous about it, but he had trust in his brain, and in desperate times he let it call the shots and didn't ask questions. He shut his eyes and he sang and he shuffled around in his stationary orbit with her, letting the occasional object ping him and hoping the bad ones would miss. He'd lost count of their rotations by the time he noticed that he wasn't hearing things hit the ground in the background anymore.

He opened his eyes, just to slits, and peered out into the lab. Things looked normal. The ground was covered with a fine sheen of debris, but the air was clear. Olivia's brain-wave monitor, the only one he'd left attached, was as plain as he could ask for. He turned Olivia around so he could see Walter over her shoulder again, to show him that things were all right. He was afraid to stop singing. Walter would have to settle for a thumbs-up.

When Walter came into sight, he was mouthing words at Peter with a benevolent look on his face. Peter smiled at the praise he couldn't hear. He paused his circular movement for a moment to try and pick out a pleased word or two from Walter's lips: words he felt he deserved. And as he concentrated on the shapes of Walter's mouth Peter realized that his own mouth was making the same shapes. Same words. And Peter was sure that if he were outside with Walter, he wouldn't hear him speaking, he'd hear him singing.