AN: I was on a roll last night and this morning, so here's the main part of the story. Probably my way of dealing with the interminable wait until Friday. Still unbeta'ed so please excuse typos and any other mistakes.
Peter had to admit it was acutely disorienting in the tank. Without any reference points, be it by vision or touch, he felt like he was floating in a deep, dark void, and he had a hard time discerning where was up and where was down.
A burning sensation in the back of his right hand told him that Walter had started the flow of drugs. Peter clenched his teeth, unsure what to expect. He still remembered his escapade with the LSD when they went looking for Olivia in her own mind. Peter hated not being in control of himself, so it wasn't a sensation he was eager to repeat. But this time was worse.
He had heard Walter tell Olivia last time that what he was giving her would 'rip open her consciousness', and that was exactly what it felt like to Peter. His mind filled with sounds and shapes and patterns, giving him the impression that his brain was expanding. The pressure grew to the level of acute discomfort, and Peter tried to raise his hands, to clutch at his aching head but his limbs would not obey him. He grunted as the pain turned into agony, but just as it became unbearable the bones gave and his mind burst clear out of his skull.
Next thing he knew his consciousness was floating over a large expanse of dark water towards a beacon in the distance that was flashing a green-green-green-red pattern. Peter was drawn towards it as if by a strong magnetic field, picking up speed as he went. At the same time images started to flash through his brain. Some were familiar like Jones being cut in half by the closing portal, the scene he had woken up to in 2026 or the bridge room with the machine; others were not, like two young children in a field of tulips or a sleeping baby.
His mind continued on its collision course with the beacon, and Peter braced himself for the impact that was sure to come. But when he finally hit the bright object, it was not a crash but more like a gentle embrace. Peter slid into the light, was enveloped by it and realized he was back in his body. Slowly he opened his eyes.
For a moment he thought he saw Olivia, frantic and disheveled through a pane of security glass, but the vision disappeared and Peter found himself in a spherical room. A pattern like storm clouds was racing all over the walls, but Peter only had eyes for the other occupant. It was the Observer who was at this moment lying in the lab, the same one who had zapped Peter with his energy weapon on more than one occasion. But now he was standing across the room, in his usual grey suit, and ostensibly in perfect health.
"Who… or what are you?" Peter finally asked, half expecting his words to be parroted back at him by the bald man in front of him. But this time it didn't happen. Instead, the Observer replied in his usual monotone, "I am September." Then he cocked his head in his characteristic way and continued, "You are truly extraordinary."
"Really?" Peter replied sarcastically. "That's quite a statement, coming from somebody like you."
September completely disregarded Peter's jibe and continued, "Wherever we send you, you continue to bleed through."
Peter held up his hands in mock surrender. "Okay, okay." This conversation was going to be difficult. He knew the Observers tended to speak in riddles. He would have to use straightforward questions, that would hopefully be answered in a way he could comprehend - if they were answered at all. "Can you please start expressing yourself in a way I can follow? Who's sending me where and what's with the bleeding through?"
When September didn't answer but just stood looking at him as if he was waiting for something, Peter decided to try a different approach.
"Right. Let's start at the beginning. What are you? What's your purpose?"
"We are the record keepers," September said simply.
"Record keepers for who?"
"The one who came first."
"And where did he come from?"
"That is… uncertain. In a way, he has always existed."
Peter fought down the urge to bang his head against the wall. Obviously he was dealing with matters way beyond his pay grade. But then, solving the existential problem of these stoic fellows wasn't really why he was here. Rather, he was on a mission.
"You said Olivia needed me. Where is she?"
"Olivia…" September said, and Peter thought he saw a flicker of emotion in the expressionless face. "There was not a single future I could see where she survives."
An ice cold hand wrapped itself around Peter's heart. Could it be that Olivia was already… No, he wasn't even going to consider this possibility. "What is that supposed to mean - has something happened to her? Then why did you come to the lab?"
"Do not worry, Peter Bishop, Olivia is safe now. I have made her… important."
Peter let out a deep breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding as relief flooded him. But then his mind latched onto the second sentence in September's little speech. "Important how? Could you maybe… elaborate?" Great, he thought, I'm starting to sound just like him.
"Olivia Dunham caused my death. That makes her important. She will live."
"Wait…" Peter was beginning to see a bit of light here. "You stepped in and stopped a bullet that was meant for Olivia?" There was no reaction to his question, so Peter continued, "Not that I'm not endlessly grateful, but why would you do that? I thought you were not supposed to interfere."
"Olivia… she was good to me."
The image of a pale face - both young and old at the same time - with deep shadows around the eyes swam into Peter's mind. "The boy - the one they found underground in the condemned building… That was you?"
Again, September showed no inclination to answer the question. "She was good to me, and so was the other one. She called me... Henry."
Peter's momentary elation morphed into frustration as he felt the thread of understanding he had just managed to grab hold of slip through his fingers. "You mean her alternate? From over there? Well, we figured you guys could cross between universes, but where is she coming in?"
September turned away from Peter's searching gaze, focusing on the shimmering patterns on the wall instead.
"When timelines are rewritten, people are erased. Some of them are chosen by He who came first to join our ranks." His pale eyes swiveled back to Peter. "Not everybody is suitable. You too were meant to become one of us, Peter Bishop. But your emotional ties were too strong. You were unable to let go of your reality." Suddenly another series of images flashed through Peter's mind, like a movie on fast forward. He saw September and an older Observer sitting at a table; September in a hardware store, making purchases; and finally September outside the Harvard lab, pushing buttons to activate a strange looking device and getting ready to throw a master switch, but then changing his mind and deactivating the mechanism again.
"You were ordered to erase me for good," Peter said in awe of what he had just been shown, because he didn't doubt that September was the cause of his inter-cranial picture show. "But you refused. It's because of you that I'm back. Why?"
"I wanted Olivia to be… happy," September said simply.
"And you figured I was the guy to do that," Peter stated. "Don't get me wrong, I love to think I am that guy, but what is it to you? Why would her happiness - and mine by extension - matter to you so much?"
"I told you once, Peter Bishop - it must be hard being a father. It is equally hard being a son. There are so many choices..."
"Whoa, whoa, hold your horses - you're not trying to imply you're Olivia's son, are you?"
"I am a Olivia's son," September clarified. "But I must be taking after my father. I too have difficulties to... disregard my emotional ties."
Peter felt as if the floor had fallen away below him. "That's not possible. You can't be my…" He found himself incapable of even saying the word out loud. "I mean, I would never…" Peter broke off as realization hit him. Fauxlivia. He buried his face in his hands.
"Have you never wondered how the Other Side was able to activate their machine?" September asked. "It required your genetic profile."
Peter ran his fingers through his hair to clutch at the back of his head. "I was unconscious for days after I crossed over. I figured they had taken a blood sample." As his brain slowly started to recover from the shock of this revelation, it mapped out the events before he got into the machine. "Wait, that's not possible. The time frame is completely wrong."
September shook his head. "It is not important. Past, present and future are one to my kind."
"Your kind maybe, but my kind still needs nine months to grow a proper baby."
"There are… ways to accelerate matters."
A thousand questions were flooding Peter's mind, but then he noticed that the roaring in his ears he'd been experiencing for a while now was not the result of his frantically beating heart. There were faint tremors running through the ground he was standing on, and suddenly a crack appeared in the wall to his left.
"We are running out of time," September declared. "You must go and find Olivia. She needs you."
"Find her where?" Peter was furious with himself for having wasted valuable time when he should have concentrated on what was really important. Anxiously, he watched a trickle of water that had come through the crack and was now running down the wall.
"You already know the answer," the Observer said, as another, bigger crack opened up behind him. More water started to pour in.
Peter shook his head violently. "No, I don't. You have to tell me."
"I planted the information in your mind. It is the only way how you can take it with you, back to the real world." September cocked his head again. "It is… surprising you made it here. Again, your brief time as a chosen Observer must be bleeding through. A mere human could not have synchronized his brain with mine."
Peter had to fight his urge to ask where he had been before he reappeared in Reiden Lake, but there was a more pressing matter at hand.
He racked his brain for Olivia's location, but came up empty. "I got nothing. How do I access this information?" He had to shout to be heard over the creaking and groaning of the walls that appeared to be about to buckle under an enormous pressure from outside.
"You will find a way," September told him. "She is important. She must live."
Peter lunged at the impassive figure in front of him. "Dammit, you'll have to do better than…"
He never got to finish the sentence because the walls of the sphere they were in collapsed and a wall of water rushed in, drowning Peter in a swirling vortex.