Road Trip

They'd only been in the car an hour, but Peter had already offered her water and several flavors of Walter's homemade soda. While 'Charlton Heston' and 'Righteous Wave' were intriguing flavor names (and on another day she might have tried them), Olivia resisted his offers, holding on (and making sure Peter knew she was holding on) to what remained of her anger.

"Feel like telling me where we're going, yet?" she asked. She'd only asked three times so far.

"Upstate," was his answer, slightly more detailed than last time's you'll find out.

"Which state?"

"That would be the question, wouldn't it."

Olivia turned restlessly back to the window. It was too early to predict anything from the road signs; all she could tell was that they were in New Hampshire, dipping on and off the highway onto various city streets. Maybe their destination was the next town, maybe Peter was making a break for Canada or maybe he was taking the scenic route to Idaho. Maybe he was making it all up as he went.

"Do you even have a destination?" she asked.

Before he was bound to answer, Peter's phone buzzed from the cupholder; he checked the caller ID and tossed it to Olivia. "Walter," he apologized. She grimaced.

"I thought you said this was a vacation," she said, sliding the phone open against her ear. Peter heard Walter start to ramble without waiting for a salutation. "Walter-" she stopped him, "Walter, it's me." Peter could imagine the, oh, hello, dear, that followed. "Yeah, hi," Olivia said. "What is it?" After a short listen, she put her hand over the mouthpiece.

"He wants to know if you're going to stop at Clam Haven," she relayed. She waited for Peter's answer, half assuming that Clam Haven was a town and half not caring at all, except that as she glanced out the window she saw a squat, white shack with a plain, wide sign. Her eyes stuck on the lettering as the car passed by. "Walter, how-" she said into the phone, and then changed her mind. "Walter, do you know where we're going?" she asked, and Peter had to snatch the phone out of her hand.

"You realize it's December," Peter scolded into the receiver. "And you want me to stop at a boarded-up clam shack? What am I gonna do, take pictures?" He rolled his eyes at something Walter said. "Yeah, but- ... No. ... No- just, no. This is not an emergency, Walter. I'm hanging up now," he said, and he did, dropping the phone back into its little well.

"Sorry," Peter said. "I did tell him emergencies only."

Olivia put a foot up on the dash. "Food usually is, with him."

"I should've specified blood and/or gore."

"You'd have to split hairs over ectoplasm."

"Ugh," he said, shaking his head. "It's like leaving an eight-year-old home alone."

"Maybe a thirteen-year-old. He does know how to order pay-per-view porn."

Peter cringed. "Oh. Yeah. I was hoping you wouldn'tnotice that. Ever."

"He's not so good about changing the channel afterwards," Olivia said. "On the upside, you can't get much more innocuous than girls on trampolines eating ice cream."

"Oh, please can we not talk about it."

Olivia sat back in her seat with a small smile while Peter winced and tried to think about vector multiplication, Schrödinger equations, Taylor series, anything but girls on trampolines eating ice cream. It was difficult, though. He just knew his father sat through it wondering what flavor the ice cream was.

As their conversation fell further behind them, Olivia's smile faded. It felt good to throw words back and forth together. They hadn't, really, since their argument over the Walternator, save for his dig on the phone about her underwear. But as good as it felt, she was irritated to have given up her gravity for some easy banter. She would forgive Peter, eventually, but she didn't want him to think it had already happened.

Some time after noon they stopped into a diner along a four-lane road that sufficed as a highway. Peter's phone buzzed again as they crossed the parking lot toward the chrome doors. He didn't bother to check the ID, just opened it and asked, "Is something on fire?" Then, "Will something be on fire in the next five minutes?" Then, "Walter, tell me you didn't call to tell me that." He rolled his eyes at Olivia, who lagged behind him. "I'll tell her." Olivia frowned at him. "I saidI'd tell her. And for the record, Walter, this is also not an emergency." He hung up. "Apparently," he sighed, slowing to let Olivia catch up, "it will be a crime against man and nature if you don't order the jalapeno grilled cheese."

"If I don't order? What about you?"

"Lost cause. Walter and I are diner incompatible."

Olivia wanted to volley back about everything at a diner tasting like that week's batch of grease, but she tamped it down. No banter. She walked faster, getting ahead of him in time to avoid having him hold the door open for her.

The menu was illustrated with tiny men drawn in Grecian style, with tiny Grecian fig leaves over their tiny Grecian bits, and Olivia stayed glued to it until the waitress took it away. Then she had no choice but to interact.

"Did you plan everything about this trip so exactly?" she asked. Peter stopped organizing the sugars in their caddy.

"What do you mean?"

"Walter called as we were walking into this place. You must have written out our schedule by the minute." She stole the sugar caddy from him, jealous of his distraction. "Doesn't seem like you."

"No," he sighed. "He just got lucky. He knows our destination, he knows when we left. You know what they say: genius is ninety-five percent inspiration and five percent-"

"Extrapolation?" she finished. Peter watched her try to strap down a prideful smile at finishing his stupid joke, ducking her head toward the table to mask it.

"Yes," he said. "Absolutely." Olivia continued his work on the sugar caddy. From the look that replaced her smile, Peter thought she might have regrets about smiling in the first place. He waited for her to get bored with the sugars, but after a while it didn't seem that she would. He cleared his throat.

"Look," he said. "I want to apologize."

"If you're going to apologize for breaking the Walternator, don't," she said. For the first time since they'd gotten into the car, she looked straight into his eyes. "We both know you're not actually sorry." Peter was relieved to hear her say that, relieved to hear the resentment in her voice. It was, finally, an open admission that she was still upset.

"I am sorry," he insisted. "I was trying to help. I had your best interests at heart and I just- I didn't think it through like I should have. And I'm sorry." He waited hopefully for her response, but she was distracted by something over his shoulder: their food arriving in a storm of steam and cheese.

Half of her sandwich was gone before Olivia spoke again, and then it was simply, "Okay," dropped noncommittally between licks of her fingers. Peter got the feeling that nothing had changed. It made him want to keep talking until something penetrated.

"I promise," he said, "at least, I promise I'm going to try to make this trip worthwhile for you. Just give me a chance. Then, if all you can think about is getting back in the Chair, I swear I'll drive us home and work without sleeping until the Walternator is back up and running." He held his hands out in appeasement, half a sandwich in one and a pickle in the other. "Deal?"

"Sure," she said, expressionless.

"Olivia."

"What."

"You have to let me apologize."

"Then you have to actually apologize."

Peter put his sandwich down but kept the pickle, a sour brace against his consternation. "I said... Look, I don't know how else to tell you, but I'm-"

"-sorry, but you only did what was best for me?" she finished. "That's not an apology; it's a justification." Indignation almost made Peter argue the point. He'd engaged in way too much introspection over his actions, over the trip, over the way he'd gone about this whole thing, for her to tell him he wasn't really sorry. But he didn't want to make things worse. Not over sandwiches in some anonymous diner.

They finished their food in silence that was uncomfortable enough for Peter to consider driving home after the check came. But he couldn't. Because as awkward as things might get between them, he wanted them in the same cage until they fought it out. If he brought Olivia home, she'd make space again, distance to increase the momentum of their conflict, and if things went that way they might build a whole bomb from a speck of plutonium.

Out of the diner, insulin and direct sun played keep-away with Olivia's brain. She slept in the car until the sound of the tires changed from a constant 65-mph hum to the gravel-crunching stop-and-go of exit ramps and intersections.

"Where are we?" she asked. She felt disoriented and grungy, in need of water, or maybe some Charlton Heston.

"We're getting there," Peter said, glancing over. Her hair was clinging to the headrest in static tentacles. "You need a stop?"

Olivia looked groggily out the window at the scenery: auto garages, scrapyards and industrial buildings on a backdrop of tall, scrappy evergreens. "In a while," she said.

The stop Peter picked was a convenience store that abutted a park. He bought himself a superfluous road map so they could use the bathrooms, and when he came out, Olivia was gone. He found her in the park, walking laps around the playground. Instead of trying to keep pace, he wandered inside her orbit and sat on the steps to the monkey bars. It reminded him of being with her in Jacksonville, only colder. As she burned the restlessness out of her legs, her laps got smaller and smaller until she fizzled out, coming to a stop in front of him.

"Feeling better?" he asked.

"I know we haven't been driving for very long, but...I'm kind of dreading getting back in that car," she said. Peter huffed a quiet laugh at the wood-chipped ground.

"Yeah, me too." He dug his toe into the chips, finding dirt underneath. "I guess this was a little ambitious," he said, after a while. Now that he had what he'd thought he wanted - Olivia, alone, with no drugs in sight - he felt foolish for thinking he could make her do anything, let alone enjoy spending her enforced free time with him. Olivia looked over his head, watching some kids on the swings.

"Well," she said. "On the plus side, you've got me far enough from home that I'm not exactly looking forward to the drive back." She tucked hair behind her ears. "That's good for you, right?"

He squinted up at her. For a second, she looked more insecure than sarcastic. "I think so," he said.

They loitered a little while longer, making furrows in the ground, until a gaggle of parents started giving them The Look.

When they made it back into the car, Peter's phone was beeping. Two of Walter's three messages were park-themed: take her on the swings, Peter, you've both always loved the swings. The other was donut-themed, referencing a shop across the street. Peter listened to the first five seconds of each before getting back out of the driver's seat. It was no longer even remotely coincidental that Walter knew where they were.

"What's going on?" Olivia asked. She was already buckled into the passenger's side, but she bailed when she saw Peter duck behind the car.

"It wasn't luck," he grumbled, feeling around under the chassis. "Walter GPS-ed us."

"It's our phones," she said, "He's probably got Astrid helping him." Peter shook his head.

"Not possible," he said. "I obfuscated our signals before we left; I know how he is."

"I should bring you in on destruction of government property."

Peter concentrated, his hand working with something Olivia couldn't see. For a second, she saw him arm-deep in the Walternator again, removing that magic piece. "I don't think our phones cost Uncle Sam more than $100," he said. "Misdemeanor all the way."

"Another one for your collection."

"It's a hobby, what can I say?" He wrested a small, taped-up parcel from the inside of the rear bumper. "There we go," he said, holding it up. It was clearly homemade, a true Walter Bishop artifact, complete with Easter Seals stickers that had come in their junk mail. "I'll bet a lot of people would be more worried to find something like this stuck under their car."

"What are you going to do with it?" she asked. He shrugged.

"Toss it, I guess. Unless you want Walter to footnote the entire trip."

"Well, you can't ditch it here," she said. She jerked her head slightly toward the parents on the playground, who were now intently watching Peter, in his black coat and sunglasses, handle what looked like a bomb pulled from under his black, government-plated SUV.

"Oh, great," he said.

They ended up driving Walter's device a few miles up the street and throwing it discreetly in a McDonald's trash can.

"What do you think," Peter said, when Olivia climbed back into her seat. "Can you manage a straight shot the rest of the way?"

"How far is 'the rest of the way?'" she asked.

"Not very."

"I'll last."

As the sun was reaching the tree line, Peter pulled into a gravel driveway alongside a wide, low-grass field. The smell of horses preceded the sight of them. At the end of the driveway there was a house, and beside the house there was another driveway, which Peter drove down until he reached a small outbuilding. He parked by a side wall, and when Olivia opened her door she smelled cedar resin rising from the shingles.

"Horses?" she said, hesitating in her seat.

Rising from the car, Peter shrugged on his jacket. "Thought you'd like them."

She got out, stretching her legs. "Because girls like horses? Unicorns and Shadowfax and all that?"

"No," he said, tilting the rising syllable toward the ground. "Because I thought you'd like them. Power and silent strength and all that."

She fell silent, and Peter waited by the car while she looked around, finding her bearings. Unless she'd missed a state crossing, they were in Vermont, and from the time they'd spent in the car they were close to the Canadian border. Trees surrounded the open fields on all sides, deep greens that bleached the grass. Mountains punched out of the sky, and she could guess at how big they were or how far away they were but couldn't know both at the same time: Heisenberg's geography.

"So, was 'cowboy' one of your many fake careers?" she asked, watching the woods.

"Those careers were only a little bit fake. But no," he said. "Though I used to be handy with a rake."

"Please tell me we're not here to shovel."

"That would be counterproductive. And, also, too close to our day job," he said, following the short path to the cabin door. "I'm trying to get you to enjoy life, remember?" He turned back to see her standing by the car with her arms crossed. "You know, fun?" he prodded. "That thing you used to have before my father started gluing googly eyes on papayas and trying to turn you into a real-life Superman?"

"Superman didn't have to take road trips with Lois Lane," she said, grudgingly pushing off from the car to follow him.

"But I'll bet Batman spent a lot of time in the Batmobile with Robin, Boy Wonder," he called to her.

"Yeah, Batman," she called back. "He was a pretty well-adjusted guy."

The cabin had one bed and one couch, and Peter dutifully planted his things by the latter.

"What are you doing?" Olivia said. It was one thing for her to have been avoiding sharing their bed for the past week. It was another to see him act like Their Bed didn't exist. It worried her in a way she hadn't foreseen, hadn't thought about, hadn't even considered a possibility. As important as it was to her that he understand how upset she'd been, she didn't want to make the backward step permanent.

"I didn't want to be presumptuous," Peter said, standing by his bag.

"We've been sleeping in the same bed for weeks."

"No, we've been sleeping in the same bed for weeks, minus this last week, when you've been doing anything you possibly can to avoid it." It took Olivia too long to shoot that down. "I don't think it's a stretch to think you might not want to snuggle right now," he said.

"It's not...like that."

"Really?" he said, arching an eyebrow. "Coulda fooled me." She looked genuinely hurt. "And I did willfully destroy the Walternator," he admitted. "So. It's not like I blame you for being mad."

"I'm not..." she attempted, failing, and he laughed.

"Right. So you'renot mad, and I completely believe you." He fell heavily back onto the couch. Olivia stood by her bag, her hand on its handle, and for a second Peter thought she was going to ask him for the car keys. But then she came over and flopped down next to him, turning her head against the upholstery to meet his gaze.

"I am mad," she said. "Yes."

"I know," he said.

"I'm mad at what you did, and how you thinkyou're apologizing when you're really not. And what I really want is for you to stop thinking you can make decisions about me, for me. You're smart, but you're not smarter than me." She paused because he raised his eyebrows at that. "Okay," she said, "with the exception of those fake little internet IQ tests you and Walter compete over. But on the subject of me...not ever."

Peter didn't say anything at first; her words crowded his pride. "I get that," he ventured. "But I-"

"No," she said, pulling away from the back of the couch. "This is the point: there is no but."

"But that's...crazy. You can't expect me not to look out for you!"

"I can look out for myself."

"Sometimes I don't think you're interested in doing that!"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that I don't think you think about the cost of what you're doing."

"What I'm doing is-"

"Yeah, I know, saving people, fixing worlds; important, I get it, but-" He didn't know how to communicate to her the fear, the worry, the empathetic pain. Olivia waited for him to finish instead of speaking into his pause, and Peter almost spilled everything into the silence: his confusion, his inability to understand why she let him sleep in her bed and hold her on the couch but couldn't deal with the idea that he would react reflexively to the idea of her harm. "But, I care about you," he said, finally. As the words left him they felt pathetically weak, diner coffee to the espresso of his feelings, and yet still on the border of too strong; he didn't know if she would drink anything besides diner coffee with him, now or ever.

"I know you do," she said.

"No, you don't. If you knew how much I cared, you wouldn't expect me to sit back and watch you plug in."

"If Walter said that to you, you'd call it manipulative."

Peter hadn't thought of it that way, certainly hadn't meant it that way, and he could see how it could be taken that way but-

"I'm not saying you have to stop stop...caring," Olivia said, still odd around the word. She put her hands on her knees. "But that's all I want you to do."

"Caring about you won't save your life," Peter said, and it exasperated her that, of all their possible futures, he could only focus on the most horrible.

"Why is it that you act like the only outcome for our experiments is-"

"Death? Your death? Yes. Yes. Even if it isn't the only outcome, it's one outcome, and it's sure as hell the one that plays over and over again in my head, every time Walter puts that needle in your arm, every time I think about the future he's preparing you for."

"I can't help that you think that."

"But you can help me feel better about it. Let me feel like I have some control over what might happen to you. To me. To both of us." He was close to begging. He'd be on his knees, if he thought it'd sway her.

"I'm not trying to deny you that," she said, and meant it. "I just want you to understand that I make my own decisions, and they're mine, and even if you don't like them, they stand."

Peter looked, somewhat hopelessly, over at her. He stopped himself from speaking and made himself think. It couldn't be easy for Olivia to be on-call for the universe, and yet she did it, at the expense of herself. Maybe he couldn't understand her motivation, but he could certainly understand the feeling of owing something. He owed this universe a kind of debt, himself. It had given him time with her. With Walter, too. How much would he give up if it would save them, or keep them safe? How quickly would he race to sacrifice everything he had? Peter looked at Olivia's tidepool eyes and felt a sharp pang of empathy.

"Okay," he said. "I- okay. Point taken." He ran his hand over the rough woolliness of the couch. They lay back again, staring forward at a yard-sale painting of cowboys hung on the wood paneling. "You've been thinking about this a while," he said.

"About a week, solid."

Peter nodded, trying to find a pattern in the spots of a cowboy's horse. "I'm sorry," he said. "I don't want to give up the delusion that there's something, anything I can do. It scares me to think that there's nothing you wouldn't do. Which is exactly what I'd do, in your position. Except I'm not in your position, I'm in the position of losing you, and I... I hate it."

"I know."

"I'm glad you're here." He looked down. "I don't know if that makes you think I'm not really sorry for asking you to come. I am. But I'm still glad you're here."

Olivia closed her eyes. "Me too."

To his surprise, Peter felt better. This conversation was the price of his actions. He'd anticipated it to be something he'd have to con his way through, to make Olivia believe that he'd done the right thing. Instead, he'd understood her, and it made him feel more confident, ironically, than any con would have.

"Peter," Olivia said finally, "I want you to know that I appreciate the thought you put into this trip. But if the vacation you have in mind for me is sleeping alone in a cold bed, we're going to have a problem." She smiled, and Peter felt a wave of optimism.

"You realize you're the one who sleeps warm," he said.

"Only after I'm already warm," she said. "There's a threshold."

"Well." He shifted on the couch. "I have no problem being your enthalpy fairy, if it means I don't have to sleep on this thing." He wriggled against it. "I think it's stuffed with twigs."

"I think," Olivia said, with an awkward lean, "you may be right." They held their positions for another minute because neither one knew what they would do once they got up.

"Walk?" Peter suggested.

"Definitely."