Warnings: None.
Spoilers: None.
Disclaimer: Not mine, etc.
Notes: Character study of little!Olivia. Set when the characters are 8 or so.
The new alarm on the window was irritating her. The first time she set it off she was halfway out the window and the acrid, orange-tinged screech startled her so badly she fell to the ground. Always check. Lesson learned.
She sat on the floor under the window, back pressed against the wall. They had moved her bed again, back to the front of the room under the ugly picture of cows. She'd move it back, maybe tomorrow. They all eventually pushed their beds across the room, as far from the door as they could get. She traced the circuits of the alarm with her mind for a few minutes before giving up. It wasn't beyond her, she knew. She was just tired from the testing and training and couldn't separate which path would trip the alarm and which would silence it. They changed it constantly.
The stupid alarm was probably another test anyway and she didn't want to take any more tests. She sighed and picked absently at a scab on her knee, listening for the orderly to make her rounds. It was too cold in her room. They were always cold after a test and she had pulled on her fuzzy pajamas with the bullfrogs on them. She looked at her grass-stained toes and wanted socks but she was too tired to get up to find any. The cold sounded wrong and it made her scared and she didn't like being scared.
Today had been hard. There was a new test and none of them had done very well. Her head was filled with blurry, noisy pain and she wanted to just curl up on the floor and sleep but she kept getting little shards of panic from Nick. The school's new insistence that they be independent and mature and not cling to each other like children when they were upset irritated her, too.
It was okay though. They hadn't put an alarm on her door yet.
She padded across the room and paused at the door, listening before cracking it open and slipping out. Her bare feet were silent against the floor and she counted the tiles as she stepped on them. She didn't like stepping on the green ones. She avoided the security cameras easily.
Peter was already there and she burned hot with jealousy for a moment. Nick was hers to take care of, not Peter's, Peter in his stupid Scooby-Doo pajamas who got to leave when it wasn't summer.
"Don't be like that Olivia. You'll make him more upset."
She made an annoyed little sound at him but he was right. She hated how he was always right.
Nick was laying on his side, back against the wall. His head was pillowed on one of Peter's chubby arms and Peter was humming softly.
She crawled into bed behind Peter, draped her arm over him and over Nick, too. Peter was always warm. He smelled like the color of the sky where it met the ocean that one time they went to Dr. Bishop's house and got to play on the beach and he sounded like ice cream. Nick sounded like trees.
She pulled the blanket over them. Nick was still shivering and he was making her shiver, too. He held her hand so hard it hurt. Peter sang as quietly as he could and she couldn't really hear him but she could feel the sound where her cheek pressed against his back. They'd get caught in the morning, extra chores and lectures on rules and they'd do the same thing again the next time it was bad.