Warnings: Swearing, violence, torture
Chapter 3
The first few jobs are barely worthy of the name, low security gigs that don't make use of any of their unique talents and certainly don't need all three of them there. Neither Olivia nor Nick try to pretend the jobs are anything different. Peter is pretty sure Olivia's arranging for them to take all the scutwork the organization can throw at them. His chaperones watch his every fucking move, study how he handles himself. Olivia offers up the occasional thoughtful little critique, as if he isn't already a fucking pro at this shit. Nick just stays out of it and lets the two of them bicker.
Even with the arguing, Peter considers their relationship a marked improvement on the last couple of months. She's talking to him, at least, and the conversations sometimes even approach civil. As spring officially gives way to summer—not that the temperatures spent the last couple months paying a damned bit of attention to the actual season—Olivia's eagle eye appraisal of Peter's faults mellows to almost approving.
Olivia reluctantly allows that Peter has earned the freedom to have nights to himself on the rare occasions they're not out on out on the road, giving him the chance to contact Jones. Not that Peter tells Jones much of anything. Just enough to appear cooperative, and not a fucking bit more. He keeps his observations as brief as possible: not lying, but not being entirely forthright, either. He knows better than to show all his cards if he wants to stay in the game.
Missions mean road trips. Although being trapped in the Cherokee for hours on end with Olivia and Nick has its down sides—they never let him drive, which is fucking annoying, and their choice of music ranges from tolerable to dubious—the stories they tell are almost worth it. The drive to the job is reserved for settling into the mindset of the mission at hand and other boring crap, but the drive back is full of stories about previous missions from their years in the field, and is both fascinating and instructive. Nick's the better storyteller, playing up both the routine and the strange into hilarious and sometimes macabre entertainment. Olivia underplays, relating a report rather than telling a story, but it's even more interesting to listen to what she leaves out than what she says.
When Olivia picks up the phone one evening in late June, he can tell from her eagerness and Nick's excitement that the mission's for real. She listens for a few minutes, anticipation threading with wariness as she nods and jots down notes.
"We're hitting a lab in the Boston area," she mutters after she hangs up, tapping the phone against her palm as she stares out the window. Peter can feel the edges of her disquiet, of Nick's concern. She refocuses abruptly, tilts her head towards Nick as she turns sharp eyes on Peter. "Is he ready?"
"Olive." Nick's tone is chiding. "He's more than ready. You know that."
Peter pointedly looks from one to the other. "Do I get a vote?"
"No," she says, then raises her eyebrows. "Are you saying you don't want to go?"
"I'm saying I'm tired of being treated like a particularly dumb third grader."
The ghost of a smile flickers over her face and she nods, although her expression is reluctant. "Okay, then."
Nick grins. "Just remember to look both ways before you cross the street. And don't play in traffic. Oh, and if you see any strangers? Don't take candy from them."
Peter tosses a throw pillow at him and heads upstairs to change.
~***~
The drive is uneventful, twenty hours of Nick and Olivia trading off shifts while whoever isn't behind the wheel catches sleep while they can. Just like every other time, they don't ask Peter to drive. This time Peter doesn't offer, figuring Olivia needs the distraction from whatever is eating her. She's much less enthusiastic than he is about seeing the city of so many significant events in their childhoods, and it's making her moody.
He can barely remember the nine years he and his parents lived in the old house in Cambridge; he keeps getting more and more flashes of his past with Olivia and Nick, but the memories focus on them and them alone. He knows Boston better from when he'd returned after a couple years on the move, figuring if he was going to run he would try to find some connection to his past along the way. It hadn't worked; the only thing he found in Massachusetts was trouble. He hadn't felt any more a part of Boston than any other place he lived before or since. Still, he has fond memories of the city from before everything went to hell.
Going back for any length of time is probably a bad idea, but a night shouldn't be an issue. Be nice if he could reconnect with old acquaintances while he's there, but he'll take what he can get.
They stop off in Natick to meet their contact. Peter waits in the SUV with Nick while Olivia learns where they're hitting and picks up the keycard and building plans they'll need to do the job. Not the usual way of things, Peter gathers, but not so unusual to cause any concern; the job should be simple enough that not much advance planning will be needed. He's already figured out that while Nick and Olivia are brilliant at many things, they're not the most competent burglars. They're fine with simple locks and alarm systems, but anything more complex and they run into issues that are often resolved with careful—and occasionally gleeful—application of C-4.
Not that he objects to the judicious application of explosives, but sometimes it's just better to keep a lower profile.
And sometimes, Peter thinks, as the deadbolt remains engaged when they slip the keycard into the electronic lock at the back door of the seedy building housing Weymouth labs, they just didn't think to pack the explosives in the damned SUV.
"Shit." Olivia tries the card again, hits the lock as her annoyance spikes, but the light stubbornly stays red. "Nick?"
His eyes go distant a moment, then he shrugs. "As far as I can tell there's no one I can control. Place is empty."
Peter studies the security system. Not a newer model. Not even a particularly impressive model. He pulls out a few tools—he'd believed in being prepared for anything before hooking up with these two, but since they started telling him stories about previous missions gone wrong his concept of 'anything' has expanded a thousand fold—tweaks here, snips there, and the lock snicks.
He grins and toes the door open. "We going in or we standing here arguing about it?"
Olivia looks at him, looks at the open door. "Huh."
Evidently, she hadn't believed him when he mentioned his experience at B and E was probably more extensive than theirs. "I'm just full of surprises."
Nick claps him on the shoulder. "Not bad. Not bad at all."
"Keycard was supposed to work inside, too." Olivia shoves the card in her pocket, cuts her eyes towards Peter.
"Good thing we got Peter."
She nods, expression thoughtful. "Yeah. Very." She looks upwards, brow wrinkled. "Cameras are out. Let's do this."
"Cameras are...?" He checks the security system, glances towards Nick. "She takes out cameras?"
"Didn't I mention?"
"Think you left that part out." And it hadn't come up on any of their other excursions, either. What else hadn't they told him?
"Nick. Peter."
Peter shakes off that question to consider later and shoots Nick a dry look. "She summons."
"She does that a lot."
"Boys. Less chatter, more mission."
The hallways are deserted, but the maze matches up to the map of the facility that had been provided. Other than the keycard snafu this isn't any different than every other mission they've taken him on; even one of them there seems like overkill. "What particular part of our skill set led your bosses to give this to us, anyway? I'm sure they have people more competent at B and E."
Olivia shrugs. "Don't know."
"And don't care?"
"They give us the job. We do it."
"Aren't you a good little soldier."
"Could be a test," Nick offers.
"They test you?"
"They've never stopped testing us." Olivia glances back at them, then away.
There's something in her low murmur that sets Peter on edge. "What happens if you don't pass?"
"Failure is not an option." The look Nick exchanges with Olivia is bitter, almost grim, and the remnants still linger on his face when he turns to Peter and smiles. "Welcome to the wonderful world of the experimental soldier. Having fun yet?"
"Boatloads." Which is not exactly untrue. Granted, he's fucking sick of following orders, but the jobs themselves are a kick.
"It's probably not the job, but the sample we're retrieving," Olivia says. "They do that, sometimes. Send us out when the mission is important, not because it's difficult. Our record is nearly spotless."
"Nearly?"
"A couple minor hiccups. Nothing deemed overly worrisome."
Nick nods. "We know this 'cause we're still in the field. Major hiccups don't get that privilege."
Olivia turns again, meets Peter's eyes. "Too many major hiccups are cause for permanent retirement. Remember that."
If the hiccups are found out. Unstated, but lingering between them. Warning or threat?
Her somber mood gives no answers.
The lab is just where the map says. The lock on the door isn't any more of a challenge than the one outside, and in less than a minute they walk into a state of the art room with matte black lab benches and shining chrome highlights that looks like it has been pretentiously designed to scream "high tech lab" and impress the yokels. The huge, walk-in freezer is in the back.
Olivia studies the elaborate lock next to the freezer, pivots and stares at Peter. "Can you do it?"
"Oh, yeah." It's not all bravado, but he's less certain than he likes. What the owners hadn't spent securing the building or the room, they more than made up for securing the freezer. He pulls the faceplate off and studies the system, traces circuits and considers his best method of approach.
He drops to his knees and begins tinkering.
"How long is this going to take?" She's three feet away, peering over his shoulder. He looks at her, and she's watching the lock like if she stares at it intently enough she can snap it open with her mind.
Fuck, maybe she can? No, if she could do that, the keycard not working would have been a nonissue.
He returns his attention to the security system, tries to ignore her. "As long as it takes."
She's still hovering, close enough that her impatience prickles at his skin. He stops again, turns again, and glares at her. "Back. Off."
"What?" Her brows drop and her eyes narrow.
He rolls his eyes. "Go... guard a door or something and leave me alone."
She blinks and snorts, amusement twitching at her lips, backing away with a wide sweep of her hands. "Fine. I'll patrol the building, make sure there aren't any surprises."
"You have fun with that."
She slips off and he settles into cracking the security system, Nick a silent presence guarding his back.
He finishes navigating the maze of connections just as Olivia bounds back into the room. "Got it," he tells her. "Freezer's open."
"Good, because we've got company. Someone's coming through the front doors."
"What?" Thinks through every part of the circuitry—belatedly, and he could fucking kick himself for getting cocky—and answers the question. "Silent alarm on the outer door. Fuck."
A quick brush against the interloper's minds gets numbers but not much more. "Four, maybe five. Hard to get a good read."
Nick's eyes go distant, and he shakes his head. "Too many, with too much self-control. I can't take them all down."
"I got it." Olivia's guns are out. Her face is impassive but excitement and determination glow in her eyes, pulse through their link. "Get the vials."
Nick waves a sketchy salute in her direction. "I'll fog 'em up when they get close."
She nods and disappears around the corner. Peter walls off his mind, since he has no particular desire to feel the pain as their lives wink out. Adrenaline, familiar and much missed, pools through him as the stakes suddenly skyrocket.
He yanks open the freezer, steps into frigid air with shelves that stretch back for at least ten feet. Neatly arranged stacks of Petri dishes, canisters, and boxes line the shelves, but no glowing sign points to their target. Nick props open the door and takes one side, Peter the other, scanning for anything labeled HEP135-B-9. Whatever the hell that stands for. Nick finds a box near the back and empties it of the vials, carefully placing them into the insulated container they brought for transport. He drops the container into his backpack.
Peter jerks and turns at skitter of gunfire, sounds barely audible to his ears transformed into a pattern of seeking and eliminating targets in his head. Olivia, cool and focused, doesn't even notice she's drawn him in.
Nick grins. "She's used to linking fully with me. Shielding her mind doesn't fit into her working headspace, not when we're doing this for real."
She's calm. Not joyful, precisely, but fiercely satisfied at the world rendered down to black and white. "She's good," Peter murmurs. And a little frightening, in her single-minded way, but it's anything but a condemnation.
"Fucking best." Nick shoves the freezer shut behind them. "C'mon. Let's go see what sort of armed guards this place has protecting it."
Peter follows Nick, his sense of Olivia growing stronger the closer they get. The gunfire has ceased by the time they emerge into the building's lobby, a space as studiedly shabby as the lab was high tech. Olivia's crouched next to four bodies, riffling through pockets.
"No ID's," she says. "Mercs maybe? They were good, whoever they were."
Nick crouches beside her, searching the rest of the bodies. "Someone wanted something safe."
"What we came here for?" Peter watches them work, tries to reconstruct from the positions of their bodies and the flashes he'd gotten from Olivia what went down. Four on one, and she came out on top with barely a hair out of place. He hopes to God he'll never have to go directly against her.
She shrugs. "Who knows."
Peter catches a flicker of movement from the hallway at the other side of the room, hasn't even gotten his gun free of the holster when she's pivoted, still in a crouch. The sharp retorts of her shots followed by Nick's ring in his ears as the man slumps, blood pooling from his head and chest.
"Fuck!" Heart hammering, Peter drops his mental shields and scans for any sense of life. Nothing. Not in the building, not as far as he can sense outside.
"Thought there was another lurking around." Olivia rises to her feet, flips her ponytail back over her shoulder with a twitch of her head.
Nick sighs. "How 'bout a warning, Olive?"
"You're slow. Be faster next time." She smirks, doesn't holster her guns but rolls her shoulders back as she starts relaxing. She stalks around the room, peeks out the front door, then says over her shoulder to Peter, "Not bad, but you need to do better. We'll work on it." She glances back outside. "We'll go out the front."
"Cameras?" Peter asks.
"Down. Of course."
He checks for signs of life again, just in case. The night is still, no one out lurking in the shadows. "We're good."
"Yup. We are." She stretches like a cat and saunters out the door, attention flickering back and forth as she surveys the area, guns held loosely in her hands.
They make it back to the SUV without incident, pile in and divest themselves of the accoutrements of criminal activity. Three minutes and they're a bunch of college kids out for a night on the town, anything that says different hidden under a protective layer of twenty-something clutter in the back. Nick takes the wheel, driving towards downtown Boston.
Peter sprawls in the backseat, adrenaline still humming through him and making him edgy. The last thing he wants to do is be trapped in their hotel room until morning. "We're alive, they're not; we should celebrate. A drink, my treat. I know just the place."
She hesitates, tapping thoughtfully at the dashboard. Glances at Nick, who grins coaxingly although he doesn't take his eyes from the road. She rolls her eyes, but nods. "One drink. Then I have to meet our contact and pass off the samples."
Peter checks where they are, then directs Nick two streets over and one down to a kitschy little place where they'll blend in but the drinks won't be watered. Not one of his old hangouts, but not a place he wouldn't be caught dead in, either. They're carded, of course—even if they weren't actually underage, they could probably do a decent job passing as high-schoolers, so the chances of their getting in on looks alone are nill—but their ID's would hold up to a far more rigorous examination than that of a bored bartender on a busy Thursday night. Peter settles for scotch, Nick and Olivia for beer, and they find a table in the corner where none of them will have their backs to the room.
~***~
Nick turns to Peter, gestures becoming broader as he continues. "Y'see, we needed to get him out of there, and nothing I was trying had an effect—drugs or alcohol or fuck knows what pickling his brain cells—so she challenges him to a drinking contest, with her as the prize. You could see him thinking, little slip of a girl, it'll be the easiest fuck of his life—"
"Nick!" Olivia thwacks him on the arm. Given how hard she's laughing she can't quite pull off stern or outraged, as much as she tries.
"What?" Nick ducks the second swat, edges his chair away from Olivia before she can try for a third. "You know that's what was going through his head!"
Peter watches the interplay between them with amusement. Apparently the night they reeled Peter in was far from the first time Olivia played bait while Nick stalked their target, and Nick's set on relating a few of the more interesting, much to Olivia's chagrin. After the first story she tried to derail him, to little success. Every mission Nick's pulling up tonight feature her in a role Peter isn't used to seeing: the glib con artist. And fuck, but if half the things that Nick is saying are true, Olivia might even be a match for Peter in that area.
Nick turns his attention back to Peter and continues. "I figured her plan was to throw the game, get him to follow her out to claim his reward. So they sit down, side by side, and she proceeds to drink him under the table."
Peter glances at Olivia, who's shaking her head, then back at Nick. "Seriously?"
"Seriously."
Olivia props her chin on her hands and glowers at Nick with fond exasperation. "You left out that he was three sheets to the wind before we even got there."
"Details. You still outdrank half the rest of the bar, too." Nick waves his hand dismissively, turning back to Peter. "It was fucking awesome. Course she was hammered, though she held it together pretty damned well, considering."
Peter turns to Olivia and grins. She's somewhere between embarrassed and amused, head ducked but still meeting his eyes through those long lashes of hers, and he can't resist good-naturedly poking at her just a bit. "And how did you learn to drink half the bar under the table? Didn't think they'd let you off your chain long enough."
Her glare is half-hearted at best. "Good genetics?"
"Yeah, but you wouldn't have tried pulling off that stunt without knowing exactly what your limits were."
She acknowledges the truth of that with a lift of her shoulder and runs a finger around the rim of her glass. "Used to drink with the soldiers at one of the places they kept us at as teenagers. They thought it would help them get into my pants—well, some of them, anyway—so I took the chance to... practice my covert interrogation skills."
"She'd get details of stuff they weren't telling us," Nick puts in, leaning sideways to nudge Olivia with his elbow. "And she'd never let me help."
"They always told us to learn how to operate independently." Her crooked grin is mischievous. "I was just following orders."
"Why, Dunham," Peter says, impressed in spite of himself. Not quite the rule-abiding little automaton he expected her to be, and he's happy to see it. Easier to work with her if she's not insisting on toeing the line every fucking time. "You rebel, you."
She shrugs, but looks pleased. "It became a game. Despite everything, they never expected a teenage girl could get the better of them, not really. Not until..." Her smile dims, her expression fading from happy to haunted, and Peter's pretty damned sure what she's seeing isn't the bar.
"Olive?" Nick grabs her hand, and she looks up and blinks.
"Anyway, they learned to be scared of me, and that put an end to it." This time her smile is bitter. "Not long after, they cut us loose for field trials."
"Is that what they call it?" Peter asks, watching the interplay between them. They're leaning towards each other, just a bit, and Nick still hasn't let go. Solidarity against the memories.
"Better than being cooped up in the compound." Nick takes another swallow. "At least now they're not watching our every move and poking us with needles every other day."
"And we're doing something useful rather than endless rounds of training exercises."
"Not to mention less boring."
Peter snorts. "Yeah, I know the feeling."
Olivia raises an eyebrow, unimpressed. "Two months, we had you on training runs and you complain. Took six years after you left before they gave us anything interesting to do."
He does a quick calculation. "Fifteen?"
"Yup."
He was fifteen when Walter died, when he went on the run and never looked back, and he'd still had more of a childhood than either of them. He'd been eighteen before he'd had to kill anybody; he bets they'd done that while they were still hobbled by training wheels.
If not for Walter that could have been his life, too. Now, he at least has the memories of not being caged to sustain him.
She finishes up the beer, puts the glass on the table with a resounding 'thud'. "Got to meet our contact. Nick?"
Nick finishes his glass, wipes his mouth with back of his hand. His and Olivia's eyes meet. She tilts her head and eyes Peter consideringly, then tosses him a hotel key. "I want to be on the road by eight AM."
He turns the key over in his hands, running his thumb along the teeth. "You're leaving me here? Alone?"
She nods; her lips lift in a smile although her eyes remain solemn. "You've more than earned it." She looks like she wants to say something else, then shakes her head and shoots to her feet. He sips thoughtfully at the beer as he watches them wend their way through the crowd and out the door.
Calculated risk on her part, leaving him alone on ground more familiar to him than her. A thousand places in this town he could disappear into, and she'd have a hell of a time trying to pry him out. The temptation to do just that edges along his nerves, the lure of freedom so fucking strong he can taste it.
But no. He leaves now, he has Jones and his lackeys on his ass. He waits, he can develop an exit strategy with long term viability. He can lay low for months, a year, if that's what it takes to plot a lifetime of freedom.
It's not even a bad place to hole up. Nick could almost be a friend, and Olivia... well, Olivia is sometimes a pain in the ass. Pretty when she smiles, though. Or laughs. She's fucking beautiful when she laughs, eyes free of wariness and glee lighting her face. A different person. Just a damned shame she doesn't do either of them more often.
He doesn't let himself wonder what memory had dimmed that smile. He doesn't need to know.
A last swallow and he takes off, making the most of his one-night-only return tour of Boston. He does the rounds of all his old haunts, catching up with old acquaintances as he indulges in the first breath of real freedom he's had in months. This is his normal, his life. What he'll be so fucking happy to settle back into when he's served his term.
He's coming back from the bathroom when he takes a fist to the stomach before he even realizes he's not alone. A punch to the kidneys drops him to his knees.
"Peter Bishop." He doesn't recognize the voice, but even two words and he recognizes the tone: bully boy who gets his rocks off pushing people around. "My boss wants to see you."
Peter's dragged out the front door and no one even twitches, all turning a blind eye to the scene. Fucking hell. He thought they still had his back—or at least would have given a little fucking warning. No fucking way some of them didn't know what was about to go down. He should have fucking expected it, should have known he was the only one who would look out for his ass. None of them were going to risk going against Big Eddie's people, not if they wanted to stay alive in this town.
Only took months out of the game for him to lose the edge that kept him alive for so long. And that downtime is no fucking excuse, not given what he's spent the last months doing. Olivia would be so fucking disappointed. At least she gets her wish: he's gone from her life, just like she wants. And maybe that's what this was all about, why she unbent enough let him off the leash tonight.
That thought is acid in his stomach.
His captors truss him up and shove him in the trunk of an old Buick, bouncing his head off the edge as they dump him in. Pain greys the world, and he can feel the trickle of blood running down his head. He scrabbles at the ropes but they're too tight, tight enough that he's losing feeling in his fingers. His head pounds more with every pothole the car dips into, and he's pretty fucking sure it hits every fucking one. The uneven grumble of the engine, which is in desperate need of work, makes his head hurt even more.
An interminable amount of time later the car grinds to a halt. They yank him out behind a nondescript warehouse with lighting more perfunctory than effective, push him through the door and secure him to a chair in the middle of an echoing room. Another twisting attempt at the ropes makes no more headway than before.
"Bishop. How nice of you to join us." Big Eddie. Of course.
"Could hardly turn down the invite." Peter knows he's a self-destructive fucking idiot. He shouldn't have gone out on the town, shouldn't have made himself a target. Shouldn't have given Olivia and Nick a chance to sell him out, if that's what they did, or Big Eddie a chance to catch wind of Peter's return, if they hadn't. He doesn't cling to any illusions that he'll live through this. Once Eddie's gotten his jollies, Peter's destined for a swim in the harbor, or maybe a mudbath in a young block of concrete. It'll hurt first, though. Eddie'll make sure of that. And from the twisted waves of anticipation coming off him, he's going to enjoy it.
Eddie's grin is a narrow slice of a smile. "You should have stayed gone. Glad you didn't, but you should have. Got to say, kid, you piss people off something fierce. Don't think I've ever met anyone so talented at getting under so many people's skin."
Peter tenses against the first blow, not that it does any good. Soon the world narrows into a haze of pain and his life is counted by how many more breaths he'll take before it's over.
~***~
Maybe he's not dead, Peter dazedly considers some time later. Eddie and his goons may be working him over, but while they've maximized pain they haven't yet done anything permanent. And Eddie's anticipation hasn't twisted into a killing mood. He's looking forwards to the money he's about to make on the deal. Waiting for something—someone? Biding his time.
The explosion that rattles the windows isn't it, but Eddie is neither surprised nor concerned. He flips open his phone, snaps "Deal with it" to the person on the other end, then gestures for his two goons to stay while he leaves to do God knows what. Nothing good.
Peter glares at his guards with bleary-eyed defiance, sees the blood spray from their foreheads before he even registers the shots. Nick swings through the door and, on seeing Peter, gives a manic smile. "Miss us?"
They didn't betray him. The relief sets Peter reeling more than the torture had.
"What're you doing out there, causing a war?" he finally manages, blinking his eyes rapidly.
Nick lopes to Peter, knife in hand. "Making things up as we go along. We really weren't prepared for an extraction mission. The guy who grabbed you knew something was gonna go down, though, 'cause he's practically got a whole fucking army out there. Punks, mostly, but they're warm bodies keeping us from you." Nick makes quick work of the ropes, gets a shoulder under Peter's arm when he staggers to his feet. "It's letting Olive blow off steam, which y'know? Not a bad thing. She's fucking pissed."
"Not exactly here by choice." Peter hisses as he moves, pain making the process nearly as much fun as the original torture. Maybe just soft tissue damage, maybe broken bones. Nothing permanent, but only just.
"Oh, she's not pissed at you." Nick peers out the door, gun at the ready, before guiding Peter through. They move down the stairs, hugging the building. "Wants to dismember the fucking hell out of the bastard who took you, though. She's taking it personally."
"Why?" Peter stumbles, pain jarring ribs he's pretty fucking sure are broken, and Nick pauses to steady him. "My own fault," Peter adds through clenched teeth. "My own past coming to bite me on the ass."
Nick shrugs and pulls away, leaving Peter leaning against the side of the warehouse. "Stay here a sec," Nick says, then he's around the corner and gone. A minute later he's back, Olivia at his side.
Her head tilts and her eyes narrow. "You okay?"
"Just peachy."
Her gaze rakes him up and down, completely focused on him as she assesses every injury with deceptively cool eyes. Underneath the surface calm she's revved and worried, practically vibrating against him from four feet away. He's fucking glad to see her, to feel her in his head.
Nick smirks and thumps Peter's back affectionately—although the sentiment is welcome, it fucking hurts, and Olivia scowls irritably at Nick—then once again gets a shoulder under his arm. "Ready to make a break for it?"
"More than," Peter says.
Olivia ducks her head and smiles, just a little, then her head goes up and she whirls. One gun is trained on each of the guys who stepped around the corner while her back was turned. Her fingers are tight against the triggers, but he feels her reluctantly decide not to take the shots, not with Nick and Peter already in the sights of the opposition and no guarantee she can drop her targets before they fire. Nick levels his gun at the third, but when three others emerge from behind they're outnumbered.
Why Eddie's people didn't shoot in the first place, Peter doesn't know, but now it's a standoff, neither side willing to start the firefight that's going to end with deaths on both sides.
Fuck. Well, the freedom was good while it lasted.
Big Eddie saunters from the warehouse, grinning. "'A' for effort, but put down the guns, sweetheart. Both of you."
"Tell your people to put down their weapons." Her guns hold steady, and her voice is as cool as if she's the one running the show.
"Six to one. Are you stupid?" He shakes his head. "Tell you what, I'm feeling generous. I'll let you and your boy walk away, forget you even tried something this stupid. Impressive, by the way. Don't know how the hell you pulled it off, but impressive."
Olivia tilts her head towards Eddie, but doesn't take her eyes from her targets. "Peter goes with us."
"Bishop?" Eddie's grin turns mean. "Nah, I got plans for him. 'Fraid that's not gonna happen."
"No, don't be stupid," Nick mutters under his breath. "Don't piss her off. She's close enough to the fucking edge as it is, don't push her over." He's worked up enough that pictures are carried on the waves of emotion rolling off him, images of fiery destruction edged in alarm. Peter hastily walls himself against them before Nick's anxiety can fuck him up.
"Knock them out," Peter whispers, barely moving his lips.
"Not with us in the line of fire," Nick murmurs back. "Can't overwhelm that many and drop 'em, and I haven't studied them enough to predict which way they'll jump if I just influence them."
"Big Eddie."
Peter feels more than sees Nick's frustrated shrug. "They might start shooting if he drops, I don't know how he'll react if I throw emotions into him, and I don't have time to take control of him."
Between Nick's agitation and Olivia's growing rage, it's a fucking bitch to concentrate. Something's off about the situation. They should be dead already, not living long enough to negotiate. Olivia and Nick just took out a huge swath of Big Eddie's men. Given that he's a vindictive shit, he wouldn't let the blow to either his ego or his organization slide.
He's stalling, waiting for something.
Peter arrows into Eddie's mind. Tears through to the core, to gloating images of snipers moving into place and a plan well-executed. He tosses the images to Olivia as soon as he interprets them, to Nick who's also in her mind. Stays linked tight with them as he searches for the people he knows have to be hidden close.
And he finds them: two on flanking rooftops, one in a window across the street. He feels them lining up the shots, sees images of Olivia and Nick framed in their sights filling their minds.
Olivia narrows her eyes as she acknowledges the information. Fury scorches through her. The goons' guns go incandescent and Peter shudders through the waves of pain. One gun explodes, sending the man holding it spinning backwards less an arm. The other guns fall as soon as their owners can let go. She's firing before the weapons even hit the ground, and Peter drops as the deaths slam through him. The physical pain swamping him grounds him enough to wall off his mind for all he's worth, because he so fucking does not want to know any more about how it feels to die, or to be yanked over the edge into the great beyond as well.
When his head stops spinning, he thinks to check Eddie. His empty eyes stare at Peter, blood pooling around his head and gut.
"Should have left Big Eddie alive," he says conversationally. "We can't question him if he's dead."
"Y'know what?" Olivia snarls. "Not really my top priority right now." Despite her protestation otherwise, a thread of guilt curls through the anger that still blazes through her, and she sneaks a glance at Big Eddie before turning her full attention on Peter.
Nick takes point, scanning the area with wary eyes as Olivia holsters her guns and crouches down next to Peter. She stares at him, head cocked, assessing his condition both with her eyes and her mind. Satisfied with what she sees, she grabs his hands and pulls him to his feet. She squeezes his hands briefly, her concern rippling along his skin, then steps back, eyes still trained on him.
Peter leans against the wall until the world steadies, focusing his attention on the corpses. The guns are half-melted and still smoldering. "The fuck?" he mutters. Fire with no visible means, triggered by Olivia's heated glare. Fragments of memories escape from hiding. "Pyrokinesis?"
"Yeah. Sometimes." She shifts from one foot to another, her concern for him giving way to nervousness, flares of her anxiety reaching out to tug at him then retreating.
More fragments emerge. He remembers burning heat, vain attempts to shield her while the flames jump higher and higher in response to her increased terror. "You nearly killed me," he says, startled. "Nearly killed both of us. Fire got out of control and we were trapped."
She goes statue-still, not even breathing, but despair surges through her as she stares at him, eyes wide.
Reasons that puzzled him for years become clear. "That's what finally spooked Walter. Why he cut ties and spirited us out of the country." But why bury Peter's memories? So he wouldn't protest leaving his friend, his partner? Or because Walter hoped that with distance and memories suppressed, the bonds between them might snap and free them both?
"All I knew was that I reached out and couldn't find you," she whispers. "I thought I was being punished. Maybe that—" She stops and shakes her head, but he can feel the rest of the words in her well-worn grief: 'that you were dead'. That she'd killed him.
"He moved us oversees for four months, then took a teaching position at Stanford. By the time we were in California my memories of everything before were spotty at best. I had years of gaps." His early years are hazy, and all that's left of the years between the summer he met Olivia and the winter overseas are random fragments. All the pieces that featured her were squashed and paved over until barely a muffled echo was left.
He studies her, this missing piece of his past. She came to his rescue, Nick by her side, charging in with no concern for her own life. Granted, she outclassed Big Eddie's minions by about a thousand fold, but still. "You came."
"Of course." She bobs her head, looking up at him through long eyelashes. Says it like it's self-evident, like there was no question of her and Nick risking their lives to save his hide. Despite the fact that he'd been thrust into her life against her will, despite the fact that he was pretty sure she still didn't want him there.
Despite the fact that, from the looks of things, he'd been the unwitting bait for a trap.
He doesn't say it, doesn't want to offer that possibility until he has a better handle on what's going on. Maybe this was just part of the process, the 'training' they mentioned. They've been doing this a fuckload longer than him; certainly they'd know if something was off, even if they didn't bother sharing with him.
He continues staring at her, brushing the edges of her mind with the lightest of touches just for the bafflement of knowing she's there. She's stroking against the edges of his mind in turn, seeking reassurance that he's alive, if not entirely well.
"Guys? Not that this isn't fun and all, but we should take off before they scrape up reinforcements and more firepower."
Olivia turns at the sound of Nick's voice, and Peter feels the echo of him through Olivia's mind: just as concerned as Olivia, just as glad they got Peter back intact.
The last person who gave a fuck about Peter's well being is five years dead.
Peter swallows against a throat strangely tight. "Yeah. Beyond time to leave."