A/N: Apologies for the wait on this chapter, but here it is at last :) Thanks to Uroboros75 for the speedy beta work.
Music: Any Other World - Mika
Chapter Twenty-Five: Fragility
On the counter-top next to Walter's lab equipment, a tube of a strange pink substance fizzed on its stand. Before it perched Walter, humming to the classic grooves of Violet Sedan Chair's Hovercraft Mother.
"Walter," Astrid chided gently as she took the tube and placed it back amongst his lab equipment and away from the precarious edge of the table. "I told you to keep this stuff away from the edge."
Walter turned, his chain of thought broken by her interruption. "What's the harm in having this out?" he asked, picking it up and giving it a good swish. Astrid immediately reached for it, an urgent please-don't-do-that expression plastered on her face. Walter chuckled slightly.
"Relax! It's only cream soda, Astro, not one of those concoctions I whipped up yesterday!" he said as he took an enthusiastic sip.
Astrid rolled her eyes. "Oh, Walter. I'm just trying to make sure that you don't create another mess; I just finished cleaning up the last of that fruit!"
Walter smiled to himself as he scrawled out a few more lines on the page before him. "Oh, you mean the remains of Mister Pineapple?" Walter said with his back to Astrid. "Well...he was slightly overripe."
He thought that he heard Asparagus mumble something – perhaps along the lines of 'no more fruit' – when the door to one of the back rooms yielded to Peter's entry.
"Ah, Peter!" Walter said, jumping up from his seat. "What excellent timing; you're just in time for some lovely Cream Soda." he held up one of the tubes for his son. Peter's expression became creased with something that Walter could only classify as perplexity.
"Walter, what is cream soda doing in a test tube?" asked Peter, his eyebrows heading towards the ceiling.
Walter harrumphed in response. "The narrow shape of the tube provides an excellent environment to increase the fizz factor of the drink, thereby making it that much more wondrous," he said in delight before walking back over to the lab bench.
He thought that he heard Peter say something about fruit or hallucinogens (thereby reminding him to check on his last batch of Brown Betty), but he couldn't be sure.
"Hey, Walter," Peter said, catching Walter's attention as he turned from the lab bench. "Astrid's going to drive you home later, alright?"
Walter, with his buzzing scientific curiosity, would not accept such a vague statement. "And where are you going?" he asked, not because he was trying to pry, but because he was concerned that at any moment Peter could be snatched away by forces beyond the realm of his control.
Peter stopped, his path blocked by the quick snap of Walter's words. Walter knew that if Peter was exhibiting such trepidation that it had to be something concerning; he knew that there was something troubling his son.
"I'm going to see Olivia," Peter answered.
The silence that followed his words weighed heavier on the room than an anvil. It was no secret that the relationship between Peter and Olivia had been strained once they had been reunited on the Other Side, and Walter wondered just how deep the void was between them now. If the dark crescents beneath Olivia's eyes and the slight sag in Peter's shoulders were any indication, Walter could only suppose that things were far from alright between the two of them.
Walter took a few moments before responding, letting his words settle before releasing them. "You're doing the right thing, Peter. The truth is what Olivia needs now, and it's probably best that she learns it from you, no matter how difficult it will be for her to hear."
Peter nodded, his face conflicted by emotions that Walter couldn't pinpoint. "I know," he answered. He then made for the door, his shoulders slumping beneath the form of his jacket.
Walter watched him go, his eyes observing even after Peter had vanished from sight and the creaking lab door was the only evidence of his presence. It was a disquieting notion, that Peter could be gone so quickly and so little could prove that he was ever there.
"It's going to be hard for them," Astrid said after a moment, causing Walter to turn and catch her typing away at a new code at her computer. "To go back to normal – whatever that was for them." She shook her head, her hands falling away from the keyboard. "How Olivia must be feeling in all of this… I can't even imagine."
Walter stood and walked over to Astrid, placing a gentle hand on her shoulder. "It may never go back to how things were before, but I can only hope that what they become is something even better."
"If only everything could appear so optimistic," Astrid replied dryly.
"It's all we have to work with right now, I'm afraid," Walter said as he walked back to his lab bench, the soda bubbling joyously in its tube.
"Hey, Walter," Astrid said as Walter was about to take another sip of soda, "what do you think Beatty meant when he said that he was a dove?"
Walter set his concoction aside and folded his hands in his lap; he wasn't exactly enthused about his conclusions, but they were all he had at the moment.
"Beatty was a man tired of war," Walter began. "He wanted our universes to stop bickering, for there to be something better than what exists now, and I suppose that by getting us home, he felt that he was pushing the future onto such a path. Only time will reveal to us if his actions proved to be of any worth, but his motives… there, I still remain baffled. It's only after a great deal of thought that I think that I've found some sort of answer. You see, Astro," he said, "the dove, with its white wings spread wide in flight, is the angel of peace."
Olivia had never been uncomfortable with darkness before.
She sipped at her whisky, letting the liquor flow through her system as she flicked on another light. Since being on leave was nothing sort of tedious, Olivia had taken interest in finding her preferred brightness for each room. She never left her apartment in darkness anymore; there were too many shadows and whispers there for her to shut her eyes. Even in complete light she still slept with her gun at her bedside.
She'd only been back for a few days but it felt as if she'd just moved into an environment that was entirely foreign to her. Her apartment was still the same, but Olivia saw it cast in shades of black and white. Every place she looked was tainted, muddled into the sickly gray of her alternate's infiltration.
It made her sick.
She could still remember her first night back; she was shaking as she opened the door because she knew what awaited her. The red hair was the first thing to go, bleached halfway to hell until she lost sight of any traces of red. After that, she'd ripped her place apart. Her bed became a catastrophe as she stripped the sheets off, tearing a part of her alternate's hold out of her life. Her closet had made her stomach drop; it was littered with red. There were her usual grays and blacks, but the red was unmistakable. Olivia ripped everything out and filled a crinkling black bag with her alternate's infestation. The clothes gone, she turned to every other surface: the counters, the floors and washed them down, erasing the hand and footprints she knew tarnished them. She'd cleaned away at them, and she was completely unaware of the passage of time until she saw a clock reading 2:30 AM.
It was then that she'd finally stopped, but her still-tainted home left a lot to be desired. She'd resigned to sleeping on the couch, gathering a blanket that looked untouched and curling herself into the mildly stiff cushions.
When she woke later it felt like waking up in another world, one that wasn't her own.
After three days, that notion still hasn't changed, the path that she walked on was forever tainted by powers that she had no control over, by people that she both knew and did not know. The world was an ocean, roiling and rumbling beneath her feet, and she struggled to stay afloat.
She hadn't spoken to Peter in three days; she wasn't sure when she would be able to again. The very notion of his affection shifting allegiances on the tide of causation was nothing short of disconcerting, and she wondered whether there was a point in reconciling if it was so easy to mistake someone else for her.
Was she truly so plain?
A knock at the door drew her away from her whiskey and melancholy, and she hesitated for a moment before answering. She propped her face against the door and peered through the peephole, her throat tightening when she saw who was on the other side.
Peter.
She backed away then, uncertainty flooding her senses against the backdrop of charred trust. Broken bonds littered her world now, and she wasn't sure if any of them were salvageable.
"Olivia," Peter said, his voice muffled by the door. "Look, I know you're here; I just want to talk to you."
His voice would have been a little more persuading if she didn't know about him and her double; she was fairly certain that if she found a single trace of red on him she would crack open the universes just for the hell of it.
"Olivia," Peter repeated.
She reached for the door handle, carefully feeling the coolness of it beneath her fingers; brass, with a soft gleam to it, but nonetheless tarnished by her alternate's hand. She paused again before turning the handle. Olivia had always kept hundreds of closed doors between herself and Peter (and the rest of the world, for that matter), but she had opened one to Peter, allowing him to glimpse a sliver of her life. Now she feared that if she opened another, all the others would follow, and the shock of such exposure would pin her on reality's floor.
With a heavy sigh, she opened the door. Peter stood there, his hands tucked into his pockets and his shoulders tucked close to his face; she knew the signs of anxiety all too well. She felt a small amount of gratification at seeing Peter squirm in her presence; it made her feel like she had a bit of control, and after her ordeal on the Other Side she was grateful for any control that she could salvage in the chaos that was her life.
"Hey," Peter said, his mouth pressed into a flat line. There was stubble on his face – more than a few days' worth by Olivia's guess. His dark pea coat bunched around his shoulders, the collar flipped up against his neck. She didn't answer him.
"Look," he said, bringing a hand out of his coat and running it through his hair. "I know that these past few days haven't been easy for you, but I was wondering if you wanted to talk about this; about us."
It took her a few moments to process what he had said to her, and to decide whether it was endearing or far too bold. Her wounds were far too raw to be subjecting herself to such vulnerability, but if she didn't try to heal then she would never be able to move forward in her life, so she stepped aside and let Peter in.
"Thanks," he said as she shut the door.
She walked back around to her kitchen, taking another sip of whiskey before crossing her arms over her chest. "So you want to talk," she said, her voice stoic.
"Olivia," Peter began.
"No," she cut in. "Before you say anything, Peter, I need to make something clear. You thought that my double was me; you thought that another person was me." She shook her head in utter disbelief. "How could you do that? How could anyone do that?"
"I…" Peter tried to answer again, but Olivia held up a hand to stop him.
"I really don't think that there's any excuse you can give right now, Peter," she said. "She may have acted like me and tried to fit into the role that my life demands, but that doesn't make her me. Right now, I can't trust you to know those differences; you've already overlooked them once before."
She saw Peter's stature visually deflate and a bit of colour drain from his face. She knew that there had to be a part of Peter that stung, but she couldn't fathom that it hurt as much as the wounds carved out in deep arches in the heart of her being.
"What do you want me to say, Olivia?" Peter asked, his tone rife with defeat. "That I was wrong and that I should have seen them? I can't just look at someone and know if they're lying or not!"
There was a period of long, drawn out silence after his words, and Olivia wasn't sure if she should try to wring a little more honesty out of him or show him the door.
"That may be the case," she said, venturing back onto the thin ice. "But explain to me how it never once occurred to you that things were different and maybe, just maybe there was something more than just a 'change of character'?"
The ultimate look of resignation fell on Peter's face before he answered. "Because I wanted the best for you. For us. I had hoped that it was you taking down some of the walls that you'd built around yourself." He paused, his words falling like drops of mercury in her ears. "But clearly… I was wrong."
Olivia knew sincerity when she heard it, but there was too much stacked against him; too much uncertainty and betrayal lying on a path to walk upon. She had to rip away those supports and walkways before she could trust Peter again.
"You were," she answered. "And I can't trust us, or this," she said, motioning to the world around them, "until I can trust you again. I was replaced so easily... what does that make me?"
Her hands were starting to shake, her throat tightening. "What does that make me, Peter?" she asked, her voice quivering with anger and pain.
He gave her no answer, and that only served to infuriate her further. "Go," she hissed, reaching for her whiskey glass.
"Olivia, listen –"
"Go," she repeated, and Peter left, walking out the door and leaving her to her demons.
After a moment, she looked to her shaking hands, painted with the scars of her defeats and her anguish; she couldn't keep doing this. She downed the last of her whiskey, and with a frown she reached for more.
She had thought that she heard something else as Peter left, something whispered beneath the collar of his pea coat. It had sounded like the words I'm sorry.
She couldn't take apologies right then. Her wounds were still too raw to handle such a salt, and she wasn't sure when she would be able to. She downed another glass of whiskey, burning against her throat before setting her glass in the sink with the others.
She picked up her blanket from the arm of her couch, which was colored a serene beige, and curled up into the mildly uncomfortable cushions. The lights still on, she shut her eyes and drifted into a dreamless sleep.
And there, the darkness followed her.
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