The shouting is not over. In fact, Olivia feels her face heat impossibly further as she paces in the kitchen of the Bishop's brownstone, her voice raised, ignoring the occasional, halting interjections of Walter, who is seated at the small, wainscoted island, watching her wear a path in the aged hardwood floor. Behind him, Olivia can see herself reflected in the glass cabinet fronts as she passes, over and over.
"He's making it up," Olivia says, startled by the vitriol in her own voice.
"My dear—"
"He has to be. There's no way, Walter, no possible way. You saw his file. Peter is a professional-grade con man."
"We're all confused here, Olive, and—"
"Smooth, smart, an expert at finding…no, worming his way in."
In the moment she takes to draw breath, Walter cuts in quickly.
"Olive, do you want to talk about what happened last night?"
"No," her response is swift and vehement, and it earns her a reproachful look from Walter. She didn't need his reproach any more than she needed his questions about why she'd woken up at the lab, in sheets that smelled like Peter Bishop. Softening her voice, she adds, "I don't see how it would help, Walter."
His answering smile is gentle. "It's just that this Peter doesn't seem at all the type to do half of what's in that file. You must admit that there's some merit to the idea that Secretary Bishop might have lied. We've only known the man a handful of months, and it's entirely possible that he hasn't been forthcoming with his true motives." At Olivia's continued pacing, Walter tuts. "Come, please. Sit. You're making me anxious."
Walter gets up from his chair, leaving it empty for her, and he turns to the plain, white fridge to his right. "You haven't had breakfast. I'll get you a glass of milk and some of those cookies Lizzie made yesterday. That will make you feel better."
Olivia has finished another lap. The fridge that Walter tugs open is covered in takeout brochures, photos, and even an old birthday card that she'd drawn for him when she'd been a child. The careful lamination around the card's edges is starting to yellow and curl, and Olivia looks away, not willing to contemplate anything about childhood—hers, Peter's, anyone's.
Her stomach roils with acid at the thought of the explosive argument that she'd just fled at the lab. The last thing she wants to do is eat. She thinks of the bite in Peter's voice as he'd tried to explain, but the words had been lost as she'd mentally sifted through Secretary Bishop's comms about his son, kicking herself for believing the illusion of safety that she'd fallen into the previous night. Peter's hushed voice in the dark of the lab. His warm hand curling into hers as she's slipped into long-needed oblivion. Another night of no dreams—but what use would she have had for them, with the living, breathing embodiment sleeping next to her?
Olivia ignores the foil-wrapped plate that Walter draws from the fridge, taking a sharp turn into the living room on her next circuit as the sound of the front door opening reaches her. She halts at the back of the couch, reaching up to grip it as she waits.
Please, Elizabeth. Please have found out some truth.
Elizabeth Bishop sweeps into the living room, followed closely by Lincoln and Broyles. Olivia searches their faces, one by one. Broyles first, because he'll be the quickest—he's almost always unreadable, and now is no exception. Then, Lincoln, whose carefully neutral expression tells Olivia there'll be good news as well as bad; there's no line of tension bisecting his forehead behind the bridge of his heavy-framed glasses, suggesting he's not worrying over whatever's occurred in her absence. Finally, Elizabeth. Olivia trusts Elizabeth's placid expression, the serenity of her wise eyes.
The three of them stop in the living room, but none sits down. Olivia sees Elizabeth's eyes flick past her, behind her, and then Walter's hand lands on her shoulder.
"What news, Lizzie?" Walter asks, and Olivia feels his fingers flex against her jacket.
Elizabeth, her halo of dark curls framing her high-boned, patrician face, comes forward and holds her hands out to Olivia. Olivia—never able to resist any comfort that her surrogate mother offers—takes them.
"He's telling the truth, Olive," Elizabeth says softly. "I'm sure there's a lot to untangle, but Peter isn't the villain here." She's using her psychologist voice on Olivia, and while it's often something Olivia finds soothing, it only grates in this instance.
Olivia's fingers tighten around Elizabeth's. "He lies, Lizzie, don't forget. He plays on whatever weakness he can find." Olivia drops one of Elizabeth's hands and presses two fingers to her own right temple. "A-a-and there's this thing that he can do with his mind, like me—"
Walter's hands drop from Olivia's shoulders. He's suddenly beside her, his eyes wide. "What? How do you know this?"
"At the lab, when we jumped back, he was in my head."
Broyles steps forward, speaking for the first time since arriving. "Is that dangerous? Should we be concerned?"
"I don't know," Olivia whispers.
Lincoln fills the space to the right of Broyles, and he holds up what appears to be a flash drive. "Peter says he has proof, that he hacked his own medical records out of the secure facility where he was held as a child, on the other side. They're on here." The line appears between Lincoln's eyebrows, and Olivia knows that the bad news is next. "But—it's not—we can't access any of it. The tech to read this doesn't exist on this side."
Olivia would laugh if she knew she wouldn't sound borderline crazy. Instead, she bites back everything she wants to say. She'll save it for when she gets back to the lab.
"If there's a chance that important information is on that disk, we need to find out what it is," Broyles says. "Agent Lee, Dr. Bishop, we need a way we can extract the data on that disk."
Lincoln shoves his slipping glasses up the bridge of his nose. "If we could get Agent Farnsworth to assist…"
Olivia catches Lincoln's eyes, and there's a hopeful gleam in them. Even though the request is a valid one—Astrid is brilliant, and Olivia would have asked the same, were she in Lincoln's place—she suspects that Agent Lee's ask is weighted with a touch of the personal, and it surprises her.
Broyles nods curtly. "Get started right away."
"After coffee. Coffee, Agent Lee? We can take some to Asgard, too."
"She's teaching a class this morning, but should be done in about half an hour." The faintest blush stains Lincoln's cheeks. No one else seems to notice, and so Olivia keeps the observation to herself.
Walter slips out of the living room, followed by Lincoln, leaving Oliva with Broyles and Elizabeth. Broyles trains his gaze on her, next.
"Agent Dunham, until Dr. Bishop and the others make progress on this, I want you to stay away from the lab."
Her reaction is instant. "I can't do that, sir."
His frown deepens. "I could make it a direct order, if that's what you're after." He crosses his arms. If he was intimidating before, he's now practically frightening.
She opens her mouth to protest, but he holds up a hand.
"Look, I know you and he share this…strange connection. But until we know more about the why—the how—and whether or not it's dangerous, you need to keep your distance."
Olivia swallows, hard. "Is it, sir?'
"What?"
"Is it an order?"
Broyles's eyes search her face. There's a long moment where Olivia holds her breath. She has to get back to the lab. There is no way that Peter told Lizzie the truth, and if Olivia can just get back, she can get the truth out of that smug, slimy, son of a bi—
"You're going whether I say yes or no, is that it?"
Olivia nods. "Yes, sir."
"Olivia!" Elizabeth admonishes.
Broyles sighs, rubs the bridge of his nose. "Two hours. After that, I want you out of the lab, regardless of what you get out of him."
"Thank you, sir." Olivia spins, practically dashes to the kitchen island for her purse and keys. She needs a quick stop at her place, because no way is she going to show back up at the lab in anything less than full professional gear.
She doesn't stop to explain when Walter and Lincoln—fussing over coffee in the kitchen—give her questioning looks. She doesn't stop when Elizabeth reaches for her on the way out; she simply presses a kiss to the older woman's cheeks, leaving on a trail of promises to be careful, to report back in no less than two hours, and, finally, Walter's shout behind her as Olivia is closing the front door.
"Olive, cookies!"
Olivia finds Peter working. He's hunched over a table full of electrical components, a thick book open on the table beside the pile. In his hands is a small soldering iron, and the heavy tang of hot metal fills the air of the lab. She doesn't care if she interrupts him. Hell, she doesn't even care to ask what he's doing. She marches down the steps to the sunken floor of the main lab, her voice raised before he says a thing.
"Look, asshole, you lie to me all you want. I'm used to criminals and their little mind games. But Elizabeth and Walter, they're not as immune to you as I am—so I find it especially offensive that you're trying whatever this run is called on them."
Peter looks up and pulls off the safety goggles he's wearing, tossing them onto the lab table and setting down the soldering iron. He doesn't say anything, just crosses his arms over his chest and looks at her with those ridiculously disarming eyes.
"I don't even get what you have to gain from playing for their sympathy. Explain that, huh?"
His eyes narrow.
"No? No explanation? Of course not. I know how much it must hurt to tell the real truth for cons like you." Olivia unclips the handcuffs from her belt. "You're going to come with me to an interrogation room, right now. And I will get the truth out of you."
One dark eyebrow lifts. "Are you done?"
"Excuse me?"
The lopsided grin appears, the one that does damage to her determination to resist him. "Are you done—finished, ended, complete with your little speech there?" Peter twirls a finger toward her.
The cuffs dangle from Olivia's hand. She's at a loss as to how to respond, and in her momentary fluster, he comes around the lab table and stalks toward her. Her bravado falters. She takes a few steps back, but he's still advancing. "It's not a speech."
"Did you practice it on the way here?" He says this as Olivia trips backward up the stairs to the upper level, dropping the handcuffs on the way. He shoves his hands in his jeans pockets and saunters toward her as though she is not an armed and articled FBI agent who knows a hundred ways to hurt him, despite their size difference. His own ascent of the stairs is so nonchalant that it makes her grit her teeth.
"I don't see what that has to do with anything."
Olivia has her gun, but it's holstered. Peter doesn't frighten her. In fact, his unexpected casualness angers her. She's pissed at how she's letting him back her up, herd her like a wolf on the weakest of the lambs. And if she's not retreating from him under any pretense of fear—but her feet still slide backward, a step at a time, until her back hits the cold brick of the lab wall cattycorner from the door—then why is she letting him corner her?
"I just wondered if you'd preplanned all those insults, or if you just have a fount of disparagement constantly swirling inside your head, ready to be dipped into at a moment's notice."
"Too bad you'll never know what of mine is free to be dipped into," she hisses. Olivia makes a show of unsnapping the holster under her jacket.
"You know, I'm amazed at the ugly things that come out of such a beautiful mouth," he says, and it's then that Olivia understands, hears it in his voice—he is just as furious at her as she is at him. She can see it now, too, as he clenches his jaw, as he pulls his hands free of his pockets and flexes his hands at his sides. The move does alarmingly delicious things to his forearms and biceps.
Peter stops in front of her, so close that Olivia can feel the vibration that passes between them, a drugging mix of barely restrained anger and heated intent. He puts one hand on the wall beside her head. They are both suddenly breathing heavily, and she knows that as much as his eyes are spitting fire at her, her own fury is just as plain to him. She hears, rather than sees, as he curls the hand that's flat against the wall into a tight fist. He cracks his knuckles, one by one, against the rough brick.
"You're a liar. And you're messing with things way beyond your comprehension."
"No," Peter says, low and seething. Olivia can't look down to see where his free hand is—but she knows it's on the same side as her holstered Glock. "What I am is fucking sick of being a pawn. Sick of being moved around the board at the whim of my father, who is a fucking psychopath. Sick of always running, only to have him outmaneuver me. I didn't have a warm, fuzzy childhood, 'Livia, a place to call home. I grew up in sterile rooms, strapped to exam tables, counting the days by injection."
With each emphatic word, he eases closer, until they are nearly nose to nose.
"Boo-hoo," she spits back, raising her chin. "We have therapists on this side, if you think you can tell one of them the truth. I would suggest Elizabeth, but you've already lied to her."
Peter's chest is heaving, his shoulders tight. The barking laugh that comes from his throat is just on the edge of maniacal. "And you, Olivia, and whatever this is…my god, this…" His breath is hot on her cheek.
"You're sick of me?" She laughs, too, turning her head away to grant Peter the courtesy of at least not doing it directly into his face. She scans behind him toward the door to the lab, gauging how fast she might be able get there if she knees him in the balls right now.
He raises his free hand, and Olivia fights the urge to reach for her gun. Slowly, and much more gently than she expects him capable of in their current fervor, Peter turns her face back to him. She jerks away from his touch, and he withdraws, his fingertips hovering at her jaw—just shy of making contact again. The anger in Peter's eyes has faded, slightly, and of the two impulses that she sees warring in him, it isn't anger that edges his next words.
"I'm sick of knowing what we had in some other life. Of being shown what it feels like, but not…"
Those impossibly potent eyes flicker down from hers. Olivia swears she can feel the flame-center blue settle on her lips. It's unfair, the way Peter's thick lashes frame those eyes. She wants to claw at him, slap him, pull him into her and wrap herself around every tense, lanky angle of his body.
There's a question in his gaze when he brings his eyes back up.
Olivia can't push the air from her suddenly constricted lungs to answer—and so, she nods, once. It's as much as she can muster, because she doesn't trust herself to say the words. His sharp, indrawn breath is a synchronous counterpart to her own sudden, forced, shaky exhale.
Peter makes a sound that is halfway between anguish and relief, something that Olivia thinks would be more at home in a confessional than rumbling into the otherwise silent lab. He presses his forehead to hers, a tender gesture that makes Olivia's eyes prick with unexpected tears. Her determination to stay angry with him falters, and she lifts her hands to his face, where the five o'clock shadow there is rough to the touch.
With another low groan, Peter slides his still-hovering free hand to the back of her neck, threads his fingers into her hair, and pulls her up to meet his mouth.
It's not a nice kiss. It's explosive, possessive, aggressive—fantastic—but it's not nice. There are no soft preliminaries, and there is no tentative dance of figuring out whose nose goes where. Peter Bishop's body molds to hers, chest to hip, his elbow presses to the brick wall beside her head, and his tongue takes a prisoner of hers. He is stealing her breath and giving it back in short, hot bursts that do little to alleviate the lightheadedness that she feels. After long, delirious minutes spent under his attentions, Olivia vaguely recognizes that she is whimpering unabashedly into every momentary parting of his skillfully searching lips.
His hand slides out of her hair, down her shoulder, skimming the side of her breast through her jacket. Her back arches away from the wall when Peter bites her lower lip, just enough to make her gasp, and then soothes the sting with the flat of his tongue. She opens her eyes to find his already open.
Olivia's mind is bursting with pulses of hot, electric activity. The hair at his nape is just long enough for her to grasp, and so she does, tightly, savagely, causing him to break contact and draw in another sharp breath. Inches away from her, his eyes lock on hers. His grin is smug, self-satisfied, predatory. There's no way she's letting go.
Peter eases closer, until his mouth is near enough to brush hers, again. He speaks against her lips, and his voice is hushed and heady, a touch all on its own. "Tell me again how you're immune to me."
She presses her lips together.
"Do you want me to stop, 'Livia?"
Olivia stares up at him, searching his face. She can't catch her breath, and she can't decide if she should pull him back down and lose herself in the deliciously right wrongness of all the things they could do to each other, or push him off and storm out—again. She seems to always be fleeing with Peter. She's lost track of what she even came here to do in the first place.
As they both pant into the heavy air between them, Olivia feels a tug at her side, and before she can react, her gun is in Peter's hand. There's a split second where everything in her field of vision goes strange—images doubling, colors leaping apart.
What the hell?
Peter releases the clip, lets the full magazine drop to the floor, and pushes off the wall for just enough time to pull the slide and eject the live round that is chambered. The single bullet clatters to the concrete, and Peter reholsters her gun, now empty, at her hip.
Olivia's eyes widen.
Peter licks his lips.
"Now, the only thing dangerous between us is this."
Both of Peter's arms snake her waist. He slides his hands down, behind her, cupping his palms around the curves where her ass meets her legs and lifting. And then, his broad, solid weight is pressed against Olivia once more, and she remembers that she's still gripping his hair, and she lets her head fall back against the brick as his lips find her neck. Olivia winds her legs around him. Her sensible shoes dig into the back pockets of his jeans, and though they are both still fully clothed, she shudders as he presses between her legs and speaks across her skin.
"I told you I would never hurt you, Liv. Unless you ask, of course—very, very sweetly."
"Peter." She's writhing against him, yanking at his T-shirt. She gets it midway up his torso, and he leans away to let her pull it over his head.
Then, pushing her tight to the wall with just his hips, he uses his now-free hands to grasp her shirt collar at each side of her neck. His pupils are blown, so wide that she can barely see the blue at the edges of the black. She wants to forget that he is anything but that rich, sinful darkness—and forget that she is supposed to be someone keeping the darkness at bay.
In two swift, hard pulls, Peter tears the placket of her button-up from collarbone to navel, sending buttons flying off to join the single, lonely bullet on the lab floor. She drops her shoulders, and he pushes the fabric off with a reverence that, again, contradicts her expectations. Olivia has no idea where her jacket or shirt lands, nor any care to find out, because Peter Bishop's mouth and hands are back on her skin, and if everything about him is a lie, she's ready to believe for however long it takes her to get the rest of his clothes off.
She gives herself over to his deft fingers and the heat of his lips, and all she can offer in return is the raw repetition of his name. His bare stomach is scalding against hers. Her fingers glide up his spine, to the back of his neck, and she feels a scar there, the skin raised and rough.
Their argument echoes.
I grew up in sterile rooms, strapped to exam tables, counting the days by injection.
"Olivia."
Don't stop. I don't care what's true. I only care that you make me feel this forever.
"Olivia."
His voice sounds so very far-off.
"Olivia!"
Everything disappears—the wall behind her, the lab in the light of morning, the discarded parts of her Glock. She's suddenly back in bed in Peter's room, and he's flat on his back beneath her, a hand gripping her knee through her sweats. She's straddling his hips. His T-shirt is rucked up halfway, exposing the light trail of hair that leads under the waistband of his pajama pants, and to—oh.
Her palms are planted by his ears, fisted in the comforter. Peter's other hand is under her shirt, splayed at the small of her naked back. Olivia's loose hair curtains around them, and she looks down at Peter to see that he is utterly ruffled.
Had they just—?
Olivia licks her lips, and she can taste him. They had.
His chest rises and falls too rapidly for the dream not to have been shared.
"What time is it?" she asks, somewhat dumbly. Olivia can't make her scrambled brain coherent enough to handle the situation with anything approaching finesse.
Peter doesn't move, just cranes his neck, his eyes rolling to search for the clock. He bats at her hair until she tosses it back herself. "Eight-thirty in the morning. We crashed about five hours ago."
She nods and sits up slightly, a move that takes her farther from the temptation of his lips, but causes him to moan low in his throat when she settles flush against his erection. His hands wander from her back and knee to each side of her waist.
"You're killing me, Dunham."
Olivia puts both of her hands on his chest, sliding them down to smooth his shirt back into place. Her face is on fire. She looks down at him, struggling for breath. "Stupid question…"
"Mmm-hmm?" He lifts his hips underneath her.
"Peter!"
"That, it is."
She wishes at that moment for the gun she'd had in the dream, if only to give him a sound knock on the head…on his shoulders.
"Do you have a flash drive from the other side?"
He nods.
"Do you have a scar on the back of your neck?"
His gorgeously scandalized face—half-lidded eyes, flushed neck, those same blown pupils from their dream—clouds. "I do. Why?"
"I believe you, Peter. In the dream, you said your father was lying. I believe you. And I know how to prove it to the others."
With that—and a heavy dose of willpower—she lifts herself off his lap and begins looking for her shoes. Peter falls back on the bed, grabs a pillow, and presses it over his face, muttering a string of creative expletives into the depths, loud enough that she can still make them out despite the cushion.
Olivia finds her shoes at the same time that she finds herself inexplicably smiling.