Part II
Too many minutes have past now, since she's stood here, vainly attempting to brace herself for the confrontation that awaits at the end of her waiting knock. Closing her eyes, she breathes deep, takes the plunge, her mantra of now or never rapping on her induction like the hard sound of her fist against his door.
She swallows back a hesitant fear, feeling her nerves exposed, tries to dispel her courage from fading into the died down rain. Her struggle ends at his answer, a swift pull of his door that presents her with a sight burned into ocular memory; three years of being here, in front of an identical house, prompting him and his father toward another dark, death-defying mystery.
He's haggered, exhausted, the emotional toll of a tortured man written in the drawn lines of his face. Still though, he's beautiful, breathtaking under the lights of his foyer, his eyes, a pale blue swallow of the gray sky behind her. And like out here, he bears a shadow of something somber, the two-second realization of her presence that's contoured his brows into a sad line.
At the very sight of her, he's pained, and the turmoil emanates through the soft crack of his voice.
"You shouldn't be here."
She throws her hands up, a defense to his tense air, to the death grip he's latched onto the doorknob to bracket his resistance toward this meeting. And the brunt of his hesitation, his careful anxiety, is penetrating her whole in the place where she stands.
It's a bitter heartache that's arresting her, the desperate, aching kind she feels in every breathe of his body, recognizes in every facet of hers.
But he only reads of reluctance, with a strength that's so immanently aggressive, it's turning her veins to needles, and her blood to pin-pricks.
"I know you don't want to see me, but please, Peter, you have to hear me out."
This carries his eyes to the ceiling, his frustration a force of the nerves she's rubbed on, the fragile, self-tortured one's that are tearing him between patience and evasion, between granting her access or shutting her out.
And as he builds up his defense, his discord reads of an opposing unwillingness, of his battling better judgement, but she won't give in to his self-torment, won't sacrifice the truths she knows to his false pretenses.
So before he tries to dismay her, she presses on, knowing he'll never accept her there, in front of him, unless she gives him good reason.
"Peter he came to me. He spoke to me."
It takes only this, for his eyes to find her face, for his brow to arch in question, and his knob-gripped knuckles to find relief in release.
"Who?"
He asks, and under her drawn fingers, the air breaks, his tense body victim to his own curiousity.
"The Observer."
This deepens his frown, colors his irises in a navy slate of shock and intrigue.
"What? That's not-." he's lost to his own argument. Aware, as she, that present and past have no definition to these strange beings. Injury and death are only relative, when you can't travel time to evade them. "He came to you? When?" He asks this as though he's tasting the question, carefully savoring the meaning with a calculating conscious.
"Last night." she answers, and recognizing the safe-zone she drops her hands to her sides. "He was there. In my room. In my head."
Suddenly compelled to hear more, he pushes back inside and motions her to follow.
"What did he say to you?"
His words are urgent, after he's shut the door, hanging in the hallway in an ionosphere of his eagerness. And intuit to his impatience, she feels suddenly small.
He's pressed for homeward answers in ways he can make sense of, not the left field logic she's about to throw at him. It's only bound to irritate the baffled line already etched in his beautiful face.
"He told me that there are things you need to realize," she says, "Things I need to make you understand."
"What things?"
After his question, she feels her collar warm, a restlessness that started gnawing at her ribcage the moment he'd let her inside. It's encompassing, a cocktail of nerves and fear and self-perception and gravity, all grinding into her skin through his magnetic matter.
Silently he's urging her on, with the eager but reserved stance of his body, and she knows nothing is more important now then he hear her, comprehend her and the phenomenal message that's playing her pulse to a lightening-fast bass line.
So she has to be sure to pace herself, debates in her mind how to do so when the air begins to steel, follows the new form of his posture as anticipation braces him against something unknown.
Already, she fears he'll be remiss to accept her. If there's any way he'll accept her at all now.
Swallowing that panic, she pushes into his defenses, decides to start at the angle she's whittled down so much, it's scarred her five times over.
Herself.
The one that he refused days ago, the one that he's stubbornly, self-justifiably blind to.
"Peter, I know you think I'm not her," she begins, carefully, "I know you think I'm not your Olivia, and I understand why you're confused, but you're wrong."
In his eyes, there's a blue defense of this, and surprise, a dark agate that instantly fuses resistance again into the power of his stare, re-fuels his personal wall back to the reluctance he answered the door with.
This isn't what he expected she'd say, isn't the answer he wanted to hear, and in response he's tensing every one of his muscles so tight, she feels it constrict her own skin.
Fighting the assult, she continues.
"The person I'd been here, before you came, was an identity assumed in a world where you weren't supposed to exist. And I think-I think I'm the reason you do." she takes a breath. "I think I'm the reason you're here now. In fact I'm-I'm sure of it."
The hall grows quiet as her words fall on the mute of his reaction, his complete astoundedness visible in the slack of his jaw, the skeptical furrow in the rise of his brow.
It's a look she's seen hundreds of times before, after he's heard another crazy-ass theory from the repetoire of ridiculous things his father says. As if he has to re-consider what he'd heard right to begin with.
But this time he presses his lips to a thin line, replacing what was once routine sarcasm with an even louder silence. And instead of breaking into amusement, his face breaks into something else, the deep line between his brow signifying an honest consideration of what she's just said, a re-analyzation in the aftermath of an immature notion.
It was almost to quick, his close observation of her words, and it makes her wonder if he's merely just so absolutely desperate now for answers, he'll grasp at the end of what he'd once consider implausible straws.
It's too much to hope, that he feels her, is granting some part of himself admission to the electro kenetic thrill ride that pulses every part of their shared air, that's lingering, in this foyer, to dance under her five aptly tuned senses.
That somehow, he knows it's really her, is too much a strained reality for her to find hope in.
Whatever the reason, his voice is soft, when he questions her.
"How are you sure?"
He seems, in the least, cautiously receptive, but she shifts her weight, licks her lips, uncomfortable suddenly, from the skepticism that's flexed his shoulders rim-rod straight.
"Because of the cortexiphan." she answers, on the heels of his guardedness, "Because of the way that I can crossover, the way that I can manipulate a light box."
When she opens her palms to the air, she knows shes treading the delicate line of his patience, and when he tilts his head in question, his frown deepens, a forte of his struggling conherency.
He's too taken-aback now by all of this to make any sense of it.
Intent he does, she explains further.
"When we were in that hanger, the day this time-line started, I used my-my ability to pry open the forcefield around the machine. I was able to concentrate my power so you could get in. And I remember-I remember being so scared." She still sees it in the back of her mind, his slow pace as he climbs the metal stairs to the Wave-sync, can still feel under her clavicle the pressing hollow of fear, the panic of losing something irreplaceable to the greedy hands of fate. "Peter I didn't want to lose you." she punctuates, "And-and I remember being intent to believe that you were going to come back to me. And that somehow you where going to be okay."
In response there's a quick turn in the hard line of his brow, the beginning grasp of the logic she's offered his perception, and relying on it, she continues.
"What if-what if in-in believing that, I somehow projected it into reality, in the same way I can envision myself crossing over or-or turning on or off the lightbox."
This makes him step back, wrestling with the amazement that's begun to piggy-back his confusion, striking dumb what expectations he had at the start of her visit.
"What if-somehow I-I shielded you in the same way that machine was shielded, but with-with a different kind of invisible forcefield. Peter, what if I protected you, and that's why you're here?"
After this, after she feels spent almost from the force of her words, he's quiet, unmoving, stunned in place before a shell-shocked gray heather finds the inside of his hands.
They drag across his face, dry washing his complete dumb-foundness into the deep breath he blows out. And as he presses his head into his palms, she feels a thick evanescence surround her, the weight of all she's suggested that's taking him over, that's numbed his every synaps then latched onto her own.
For two, or maybe three seconds more, it threatens to crush her bones to dust, but then he moves again, dropping his arms, pinching his bottom lip in his teeth while his eyes fall on nothing dellible. There's a harder pain in them, augmented to a soft blue from the harsh shadows that play on his surface, the process of a private deliberation, a grapple with understanding that's etching itself into every beautiful crease of his face.
And she holds her breath, waiting for any sign of his acceptance, but when he gives her none, merely stands, affixed into his own postulating process, she fears he's convincing himself this is all too irrational.
And it's what she feared, his resistance, what he'd given leniency to earlier when he gave her a fair chance to be heard. So before his silence can re-perpetuate her panic full-force, she tries again to convince him.
"Peter I know, I know how incredible it sounds. But is it really anymore incredible then that I have these abilities at all?"
This is what makes him see her, what focuses his gaze back to something solid, but still, he has a handle on something distant, something she can't put her finger on that fades ash gray into the edges of his pupils.
"I think-I think you bled through because I pulled you back here, to me." she explains. "In a type of-of quantaum entaglement unlike we've seen before. After you created the bridge, you- you should have been erased from history, from time, but you weren't. You came back. Because I couldn't let you go." she catches herself, allowing her words pause before; " I wouldn't let you go."
It's this that fastens him to reality, back to her and this room, in the slow-breaking dusk outside the hall window. And as his inner struggle surrenders his features, she thinks she sees a glint of faith in the slow fade.
"You're the reason I can concentrate this." she tells him, alluding to her power. "That I can focus it. You're the reason I can elevate it, so wouldn't it make sense to say that because it was you I held on to, it would have been strong enough to bring you back?"
He exhumes this, granting it priority with a slow breath of calculation then it's heartache, a languid rendering of the worst imaginable emotional torment that conquers the planes of his face.
"If that's true, then why couldn't you remember me?"
He cracks on the words, swallows them down as pale blue gleams glossy, his self-resolve betrayed by the surfacing of inner pain. But he doesn't give in, only fights the vulnerability by willing it back.
If only he could see now, that he's not alone anymore, that she's right here too, living out the hell of this forced circumstance, then maybe she'd have a real chance at persuasion.
So as perplexity blinds him, conviction becomes her, as heartsore as he's making it.
"Because every action has a consequence." she finally answers, softly, "And I think that was ours. And while you re-wrote this reality, I was already hanging on to our past. That's why I had the visions, the dreams. While you were bleeding back through, so were my memories. Even if I couldn't recognize it at the time."