Casualties
There had been three significant dimensional breaches to cross Broyles' desk in the week after New Year's, and they'd taken Olivia kind of by surprise.
It wasn't that she'd ever let herself forget that she was a Fringe agent who investigated Fringe events (and was trying to stop an impending Fringe apocalypse)...but sometimes, lately, she found herself so focused on her personal experiments – the ones with Peter, and Walter, and Cortexiphan – that the reality of the outside world faded a little. And for days at a time, it could feel like pushing her own boundaries had replaced the apocalypse as the monster at the end of the book.
Add to it that Broyles' calls usually came at odd hours, which partitioned the usual Fringe events into a separate world, altogether. Heading out at 3am under the cover of darkness felt appropriately spooky – the 'right time' (if there was one) to encounter a man-bug or a bone-melting virus, and daylight hours held few reminders of the weirdness they uncovered at night.
But the recent Fringe events were changing that. Broyles' calls were coming at more ordinary times: 11am; 2pm; times that felt so normal that it made the Fringe events feel even more uncomfortable, like they were beginning to intrude on real live time and space.
And now it was 7:30 on a Friday night and she'd gotten another call. There was a fourth event, a big one, even more sudden and violent than the first three. The abruptness of it – the transition from half-eaten corn dogs at the dinner table to a panic of sirens and flashing lights – made it feel like she'd been yanked out of a dream, and by the time she'd caught up to herself she was walking side-by-side with Peter and Walter through the parking lot of an office building while junior agents handed them walkie-talkies.
The building was at the epicenter of the breach, Broyles told them, nestled in a swiss cheese of interdimensional holes. Through Walter's Other-Side goggles – recently adapted from the old, cracked window he'd salvaged from the back of the lab – it looked like an impossible maze. And from the 9-1-1 recording, Olivia gathered that that's exactly what it was: forty-three people trapped inside by the time dispatch took the emergency call.
The suits wanted Walter to use the prototype amber he was developing. They didn't care that he'd just come up with the formula, or that it hadn't had a live field test yet.
Who are 'they', anyway, Walter asked, but didn't get an answer. The amber wasn't really optional.
Peter wanted to go in after the survivors before the amber hit.
Olivia couldn't disagree that he was the best choice for a rescue mission, being impervious to the disintegrating effects of the rifts, but the building was in bad shape. The breach had eaten entire walls away. How much longer would it stay standing? Peter was immune to the breach, sure, but not to collapsing bricks and mortar.
In the end, though, he wouldn't take no for an answer. There were forty-three people trapped, and only one way to lead them out. So Olivia had the junior agents strap him with five backup radios (in case the com equipment wasn't as resilient as he was) and let him go.
Of the five backup radios, it took Peter under twenty minutes to destroy four of them.
Now his radio silence was about to hit eight seconds, which was five more than he'd needed to switch out the last replacement. Olivia paced in circles. How long did it take someone to hook a bluetooth over their ear? Not eight seconds.
Broyles glanced up from his watch to frown at her. Ten seconds.
Then Peter's line crackled back to life, and if lesser agents and local police hadn't been listening in, Olivia might have said something half-furious about Peter being the slowest draw in the FBI.
"Sorry," his voice came through.
"What's the delay?" she demanded, terse, wanting him to understand that time stretched out when he went dark in a place where she couldn't go in after him.
"Sorry," Peter said again, less casually this time, hearing the thing in her voice that was more than impatience. "Walked through something I shouldn't have. On the fifth set, now." He was careful not to say last.
"Are the goggles still working?" That question came from Broyles, though Walter was also listening for the answer.
"Still working," Peter said. "I can see the holes fine; the problem is that they keep moving around. Getting kind of hard to avoid, actually."
Olivia circled in place. "We can give you more headsets the next time you come out," she said. He'd been out three times already; leading tens of people through the minefield to safety like some Kevlar-heavy St. Bernard.
"Uh...no," he said. "No, look, I'm on the sixth floor, and the party was on the fourth. I don't see anybody else. I think we're done."
Broyles put an order through the intercom to the dump truck parked behind the cop cars, and suddenly the SWAT team was crawling over the edges like crabs from a bucket, hauling canisters of Walter's new prototype sealant, amber-1136.
"All right, then," Olivia said, off Broyles' nod, "come on out."
"Wait," Peter said, and Olivia's head ticked to the side. "I think...hold on. I hear something."
Broyles held a hand out at the SWAT team, who turned to stone behind him.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Definitely voices above me. I'm going up." A small silence, and then a muffled yelp, followed immediately by, "I'm fine, I'm fine. Sneaky little sonofabitch took out a piece of the floor."
Broyles took a turn looking worried. "You said the holes were moving," he said. "I take that to mean things are getting worse?"
"Correct."
"Will that affect your ability to lead these people out?"
"I'm pretty sure anything I try will be more effective than leaving them up here to get ambered."
"Understood," Broyles said.
Olivia heard Peter's breathing in her earpiece as he climbed the stairs. "So," he said, "what did you want to do for dinner?" Her eyes narrowed, not that he could tell. "I was thinking pizza, beer, my feet up-" his breath puffed, maybe as he dodged something "-on a table. Tell Broyles he's springing for extra topp-"
The building cracked - it was the best way to describe the sound. Something big, strong and deep within the brick facade split like an axed tree, and the building's right side sagged. From the seventh floor, there were screams – not Peter's - that even Olivia could hear.
"Peter," Olivia demanded. If she pressed any harder on her earpiece, it would go right through her skull. "Peter."
"I'm fine," his voice buzzed. "Something's going on with the infrastructure. Girder, maybe."
"We can see that," she said. "Major structural damage. You have to get out."
"I- I will," he said. But he was distracted. "Ah, found 'em. There's three."
"You may be safe from the rifts, but if you end up under a wall..."
"It's okay," he reassured her. "I'm bringing them down."
Them. Olivia glared at the asphalt so hard it should have melted. They would slow him down. What if there wasn't time? The windows were starting to blow out in columns. "Just...leave them," she said, and Broyles' head jerked toward her.
"'Livia..."
"Leave them," she ordered again, choosing it, owning it.
"I can't. You know I can't."
Metallic sounds twisted down from the upper stories.
"We're coming down," Peter said, and Olivia ripped off her headset and threw it.
She had the headset back on by the time Peter checked in again.
"Third floor," he said, and from his tone of voice, Olivia could tell that something had changed.
"Is Broyles listening?" Peter asked. Broyles pressed his earpiece needlessly against his temple.
"Broyles," he said. "What do you need?"
"I need you to get Nina on a line. I need to ask her something."
Nina was on in seconds.
"Here," she said. "Peter?"
"This might be a personal question," Peter said, and paused. Broyles glanced around the circle of agents, and their headsets peeled off in unison. Olivia begrudgingly did the same, though she listened like a hawk for the faint scratch of voices from the unhooked earpieces. Peter asked his question, but his voice was too low and she couldn't catch it over the gunshot sounds of popping brick. She only barely caught Nina's response: excruciating.
Broyles gave the signal when Nina's line dropped, and the headsets went back on.
"Peter," Olivia said, angry to have missed anything at all. "What was that about?"
"You know that thing I said about book clubs and shopping not making you happy?" he said. "I'm reconsidering."
She looked around helplessly. "What can I do?"
"Stop worrying. Shouldn't be long, now," he said. The headset clicked; Astrid leaned out of the tech van and called that she'd lost his signal, and the only things Olivia could do were step back and stare up and wait.
Peter came out alone.
An agent who'd gone to find three shock blankets edged back toward the ambulances when she saw him, taking the blankets out of Peter's sight, like she were somehow ashamed on Peter's behalf, like she might lessen the blow of Peter's failure by hiding the preparations for his success.
Broyles wanted a statement, like always. Olivia knew it. He thrived on statements. But he didn't say a thing about it, because Peter's face was tired in the blue and red lights and at some point, he'd started shivering. Olivia wondered if the agent who'd procured the blankets was watching from a backseat somewhere, wondering if it would be better or worse to appear with one, now.
She took Peter by the arm and led him away.
They were driven home.
The backseat of a car was an unfamiliar place to both of them.
Somewhere on the interstate, Olivia felt an irregular vibration through her seat. It took her a minute to realize it was Peter, looking out the window, gripping the door, shivering again. Maybe he hadn't ever stopped. She didn't think about putting her hand out to him; she just did.
By the time the car pulled up at the house, Peter's shakes had turned violent. Olivia shepherded him into the house, sat him down at the kitchen table.
"I'm fine," he muttered, flashing something that maybe he meant to look like a smile, though his teeth were chattering. "I'll be fine. It's just – adrenaline, you know? It'll wear off." He tested a deep breath. Olivia took a moment to decide between actions, then went for one of Walter's warmer overcoats.
"Get up," she said, heaping the coat into his arms. "We're going for a walk."
He looked up at her. At the moment, he wasn't sure he could stand again, let alone walk.
"C'mon," she said, waiting. She waited a long time, but then Peter hauled himself up.
"You might have to help me with this," he said, slightly wry, pushing the jacket across the table with hands that fluttered like butterflies.
Olivia chose their course; Peter just followed. They walked like this for miles, and when Peter found himself at their front door again, he couldn't say where they'd been. He felt better. Emptied.
He followed her a little longer, up the stairs.
Olivia didn't usually dream about cases. It was useless to live that way, with the work she did. To not let go easily and immediately was to throw energy away on nothing. But she couldn't help it, this time.
Preempting Peter's statement to Broyles had left her with an unsolved case, a string of possibilities, and maybe because it was Peter, she couldn't let it go. So her brain took Peter's casualties and killed them every way it knew how: dropped them through a floor, walked them through a hole, lost them under a wall, pushed them, let them jump, made them jump, shot them in the back, shot them to their faces. When she woke the fifth time, she decided not to sleep anymore.
"Peter," she whispered.
Peter hummed, barely awake. It was still dark.
"Tell me how it happened."
He rolled over but didn't say anything.
"I just," she shrugged the shoulder of the arm that was propping her up in bed, "need to know."
"Okay," he said. "Let me- let me be right back."
She waited while he shuffled to the bathroom, shuffled back, and sat on the edge of the bed. He thought about it for a long time.
"We weren't going to get past the third floor," he said, finally. "By the time we got down that far...it just wasn't possible. The holes were-" he let his hands spread in front of him, instead of finishing.
"You called Nina," she prompted, and he glanced up, surprised she hadn't kept her set on to hear it.
"She's the only one who's ever had...direct experience. I wanted to know how bad it was. With her arm, when it-" His hand lifted briefly from his knee. "You know."
Olivia'd been doing well maintaining eye contact until then, but her eyes went straight to the floor, to the rug, to Peter's feet.
"And, I mean..." He sighed, crushingly. "Look. I did what I thought was the right thing. I just started thinking of Reiden Lake, and Walter, and all the things that could have been done better - no, all the things that I imagined could have been done better about the way I was taken - and I didn't think about the reality of it. The way it looks, when you're in it."
"I had this idea, until very recently," he continued, "that I could've made choices for myself. I thought I would have wanted to make those choices: what universe was home. Where I would live. Whether I would live. But now, I get why Walter never asked me. Never told me. Because there was no fucking way I could have thought reasonably for a single second about any of it." He sounded like he was smiling. Olivia knew he couldn't be - she was looking at him, and he wasn't - but it was in his voice, something tight in his jaw.
He looked at her, and she couldn't look away.
"I walked through a hole," he said, simply. "Just...went. I could see it; they couldn't. They followed me. And that was it." He cleared his throat. "Does that – answer your question?"
She nodded.
"Consider it my statement," he said, and turned himself back into bed.
