Part III
For what seems like minutes he's unresponsive again, immobile in his struggle to process, to accept, and then it's only one hand this time, that covers his eyes, that runs down his face to trail the stubble on his jaw. He's articulating, so slowly, so methodically, that her pulse is a loud baritone under the sound of his silence .
"Jesus-"
This is all he can say, all the audible response he can muster before he's too unnerved to stay still, his axons frantic under the stress of stifiling opposition. So he turns from her and the hallway, finds a surface to brace his astonished state on when he leans his forearms atop the living room's desk.
The scope of what she's said, the grandeur of it all has beaten him down with it's meaning, spent him ragged in the aftermath of his own perusal. There was so much strength in her abrasive attack of his self-percieved reality, that it's tripped him up completely.
And the pressure of his silence barrels into her chest, stalls the breath there as she inches closer to him, his hands now gripping the oak tabletop with a white-knuckle exertion that's molded his back into a solid wall of tight muscle.
She watches it rise slowly and fall, restrained inhalations of acid-heavy air, and she's a memory of reaching out to him, of easing a different calamity with her touch and her kiss until he's taking comfort in the span of her hot skin and wild hunger.
The time though, there's only the fragile atmosphere between them, the one that's pressing the reality of how-this-could-end into a larger fear.
She's no idea at all what he's running through his head, what the wheels in his mind are spinning him to conceive so her next words are the last act of her desperation.
The last plea of the love she's pain-stakingly alone in.
"Peter, when he came to me, The Observer, when he talked to me, he said that I have to make you understand what I've done." he makes no response to the sound of her voice, and it encourages her to press on. "And then I was knocked back, and-and somehow I was seeing memories differently, I was hearing them and they didn't raise questions anymore but pointed to this answer. That it was me. That I'm the reason you reappeared. I'm the reason you're still here."
Still, nothing from him, only his turned back in the self-suffering confines barricading him whole.
"Peter he showed me all of this, so that you would know, so we both would." she tells him.
"I know how this may seem. I can understand how-how difficult it may be for you to grasp, but Peter, you have to believe me. " she hears the hoarse in her words, the roughened plea of an exhausted conviction. "You told me once that they can't be wrong, the Observers, that you don't see how they could be, so I'm asking you now, to trust yourself, and to trust what I'm telling you."
Whatever part of her heart still under her ventral bone, drops to her feet, a swift dominion of gravity that's sank a bitter dejection into the whole of her, it's laced yearning with the pain of heartache, an un-mendable break of her soul if he refuses to believe her.
"This is your home, Peter. This is your home, because this is where I am. This is where you're meant to be."
The same certainty she felt years ago, when she crossed a universe to save him, she feels now, humming below her flesh, coursing the phantom sensation of his static into her every nerve fiber, burrowing through muscle and tendon straight through to her bones.
And now, it's only making every calcified pore ache for his notice.
It's why she's being buried alive by his quiet, his only response a drop of his head, a shallow intake of breath that makes his shoulders arch, his fingers gripping the outside anchor to his inside world more fiercely then before.
"Peter, please say something." She finally says, unable to physically bear anymore dimissal.
And it isn't until she begins to feel self-conscious, diminutive among the magnificence of her cause in the first place, that he relinquishes his silence.
"Incredible would be an understatement if there was a word to describe everything you've just told me."
His words are quiet, cracking, hailed from the suffocating place he's just pulled himself out of. And with another drawn breath, he composes himself, releases his thoughts from their capture, and the air in every corner of the room is grateful for the new ease of his body.
"Because as jarringly insane as it all sounds..." he turns to her, leaning back against the desk, "Impossible isn't that word."
Not quite knowing what to make of this, she frowns, but it's the softness in his eyes that comforts her apprehension, the victorious finale of an internal struggle flecking a promising tourmaline along the outskirts of gray.
"Four years ago, I started to believe that nothing is inexplainable. Or unbelievable." he begins, half-sitting on the edge of the wood. "And this, all of this, happened somehow. And I know, that there has to be an answer for it. "
For a nano-second his eyes reach again to somewhere she can't find, and it's when he presses his lips tight, curves his brow in a curtain of desolation that she feels the true extent of his past pain, the secret weight of existing in a world without recognition, without a true place to call home.
But as soon as it appeared, it's gone, replaced with an array of hopeful desperation, the same one that allowed her enter when she first got here.
"And after everything I've already tried, after all the other possible reasons I've failed to make sense of, this reason of yours is the best explanation I have to be standing here."
There's a kind of hope that crawls into her chest wall, implodes the muscle there, hinges itself on the underlying acceptance in the root of his words. And if she could, she'd reply, but her every nerve-ending is anesthetized by the mass of his power, torpid under his invisible influence.
So now it's she who's quiet, benumbed in the air he's turning thick again when he turns his head down, concentrates on nothing when he stares at the same,
"When I was in that machine..." he begins, dragging the thought from his far away place. "Walter had found a way, to pull my consciousness forward. And I saw the future, I saw the destruction we'd caused by destroying a universe."
He looks at her, with an ache so strong, it echoes into her, a flash of a tragedy lived through fantasy, and it softens the line between his brow, a tender pain fused into slate gray that pushes into her empathy.
"And he told me we could do it over." he continues, "That we could use the machine again to make a different choice. He said, we could cheat death, we could cheat fate." For a second his mouth curves, not out of joy, or amusement, but in the sad wretch of the consequence purveyed in his words. Then it falls, and he's sober again, somber under the weight of his memory.
"And if anything were to go wrong, you would be our safeguard. You would have the ability to counteract the unpredicted circumstances.
And you did. And I think in more ways then one." His eyes change now, away from his own cogitation and into the room they're standing in. And they catch in the light of the lamp behind her, a beautiful swell of blue-gold that sends her pulse into a dizzying frenzy.
"You weren't only the safeguard for worlds,Olivia, you must have been my failsafe, too."
She knows this look, this thick lashed concentration of his soul, this deep-seeded emanation of all that makes him stunning and magnificent in view of her surrender. This is the way he's looked at her, for the past three years, with a tenderness that illuminates from the inside out.
And what it means crashes into her, knocks down her nervosity to arrest her with, hope, gladness, and the ten million and one adjectives this part of him exhilarates her person with.
"I don't know how, but Walter must have known you would be." there's a tiny glint of something lighter now, in the upturn of his mouth. Then it washes away, when he stands straight, opens a hand in the air and motions it toward her. "So because of everything I do know, in it's own way, all of this makes an absolutely perfect sense."
There's nothing held-back or resistant anymore in his posture, it's been replaced by something secure, a self-assurance that's titillating the room, and her body and the slow-change of their shared air. And his eyes moor that certainity, a delicate grey-blue color burn she'd seen four days ago, when his kiss fused into her everything she wants most.
And he walks to her, closes the space between them in three strides of a slow pace.
"And if there's anything I have to trust in..." he says, reaching out, burning the side of her face with the touch of his hand. "If there's any proof that this is my home, that this is where I'm meant to be, it's the way you're looking at me now."
Everything she is, conforms to his ascendance, her self-measure exposed and forgotten under his obsidion supremacy, the glory of his half-lashed gaze darkened with the same desire that's fueling her senses.
"It's the same way you looked at me when you crossed a universe to bring me back." He says, his breath falling on her face in a hot whisper. "And when we stood in my kitchen and you told me you wanted what I want, and before I got into that machine, and you told me the one thing above all else that made me so desperate to get back to you."
"I told you I loved you."
She says in a same, low whisper, and he smiles, a radiance capturing every handsome surface of his face, drawing love and affection into every beautiful line and arch and crease.
And he cups her face with both hands now, his palms hot against her cheeks, burning into her whole body an impatience that screams only his name.
"And what I knew then, I'm sure of now," he says,"That everything I love I see in your face." His eyes grow impossibly soft, impossibly tender as his thumbs roam over her cheekbones, her jawbone, her lips, as though he's validating his memory with every millimeter of his pale-gray concentration.
"I see my home." he finally says, meeting her eyes again, the one's blurry now with the moist reaction of his own. "And you have no idea how much I've missed you." There's a joy in his voice, under it's hoarseness, and it's drawing up her lips while it's filling her heart. "How much I've wanted you to be here this whole time."
The love and desperation of his gaze, pits in her chest, pulls on every invisible part of her, it's his soul that's ripping out of him, falling to the feet of her own, handing over every beautiful thing he's made of in a dark-blue surrender.
It's an apology, and a plea, a recognition and a promise.
This is the way he gives into her, struck helpless from the truth they both know now. That there's no where else he belongs, but right here, with her.
"And you have no idea, how badly I've wanted to do this again-"
What air she'd have taken, he swallows, capturing her lips with his in the kind of kiss borne of lost passion, of lust and desire and comfort and need. And she devours the flavor with a matched fervor, paunching the delicate flesh of his mouth with her own, swelling it pink, savoring the whiskey honey taste of her personal god. He worries her lips between his, nips them with his teeth and his tongue, and the tickle pulls up her mouth, heats every inch of her skin that's not burning under him already.
Then he pulls back, rests his forehead on hers, his breath diffuse in the aftermath of her pillage.
"Thank you. For bringing me home." he says, his voice a vibration through his body, a current through hers. And she smiles wide, feeling the vast of his meaning in the way he's taking her in, breathing the air she's expelled as it it were the purest oxygen.
"I'd do it again." She states simply, as though she'd been physically aware at all then, of what she could do.
This makes him chuckle, a hot breath that falls into the nook of her neck.
"I know you would."
Damn the consequences, she'd scale heaven and earth to keep him here, at her side, and the way he's holding her, as though letting go means a painful death, she's absolutely sure he feels her conviction. This is his arms before three months ago, when he knew who she was in a world they'd fought side by side in, loved side by side in. She was a tether then, to everything that gave him meaning, to a life where he no longer evaded aspiration but fought to sustain the one hinged in the palm of her hands and the flesh of her mouth. And she's that tether again, his purpose.
As she him, he needs, craves, every inch of her made-for-him skin.
And they'll feed desire later, before his breath falls on her neck, before his bare chest molds to her back, and he's pressed into her so tightly, she feels every beautiful form of his muscle melt into hers.
And she'll wake him with her lips, and he'll respond with his, because there'll never have enough time anymore, to be okay with patient. They'll have re-awoken the nights fused in her memory, her sweat and taste tangled in his, heated by his, his hands and mouth re-commited to the ghost-trails left when their private world tore-apart.
So they'll hold on for dear life, to the other, safe again in the boundries of gratification and existence, the kind they give each other in a world replete with monsters and time-jumps.
Tonight, they'll find home, in each other, the one created in an an alternate timeline to state itself here, in a world where he cheated death because she cheated fate.
They'll be keepers of a fantastical flame, bearers of their truth.
That there's no limit to love.
There's no such thing as impossible.