Title: Son of Men
Chapter: 4
Rating: T
Summary: When a message comes through the typewriter, it's going to turn everyone's life upside down.
Author's Note:I'm sorry for the delay in getting out this chapter. The only excuse I can offer is that I actually do have a life. A life outside of fandom that is ;) So without further ramblings about why I'm late posting this, here's chapter 4! Thanks for sticking me with me so far and I hope you'll continue the journey with me until the very end. Thanks for all the great feedback I've received as well! If you ever feel as if you want to say something about this story, good or bad (I LOVE constructive feedback!) but don't want to do so in public, I'm always just a PM away.
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Peter sat crouched down in the corner of the Massive Dynamic lab, his eyes fixed on the typewriter that sat on the table at the other end of the room. Two hours ago, Olivia had sent a message to the other side, asking a question that only the other Olivia Dunham could answer.
At first, Peter had paced the floor impatiently while Olivia had sat in the chair at the table the Selectric sat on, watching his every move. After she had told him that he was making her dizzy, he had sat down in one of the other desk chairs in the room but had soon found that doing nothing other than impatiently tapping his finger on the table's smooth surface was driving him crazy.
His mind was going berserk. While he was pacing the lab floor, it at least had helped distract him from thinking why it was that they were stuck in a lab at almost 3 in the morning. Now, all that was going through his mind was the thought of a child in the other universe that was supposed to be his, but as much as he tried to calculate, the timeline was always wrong. Eight weeks he had had with the other Olivia Dunham, out of which they had spent six really together. If there was a little boy on the other side that was his, just as the message had said and the Observer had implied, he couldn't be more than a few days old.
It just reinforced his suspicion that this was nothing more than a ploy from Walternate to get him to come to the other side. The math was all wrong. It had to be. It was the only thing he could believe in... the only thing he wanted to believe in. Because everything else would mean that his life had collapsed completely.
His eyes remained glued on the typewriter even as he heard the door to the lab opening somewhere to his right and footsteps approaching. He didn't want to talk, he hadn't felt like it since they'd sent the message over the wire, so he just sat there, crouched in the corner of the lab while the footsteps stopped right next to him. Olivia came into his line of view when she slid down against the cold white wall and held a cup of steaming coffee in front of his face.
Silently, he took it from her, his fingers curling tightly around the warm plastic container. It was eerie how she always knew what he needed when he himself wasn't really sure. She hadn't pressured him to talk, she had just let him be, allowing him to sort through his thoughts and feelings. And just when he thought that he wasn't able to go on any longer, when he felt drained and empty, she'd appeared with a cup of coffee. He let out a light chuckle at the thought of this and turned his eyes away from the typewriter, gazing at the woman who sat crouched down beside him.
She had pulled her knees up to her chest and had tightly wrapped her arms around her legs while she was looking off into the distance. Long strands of blond hair were falling loosely over her shoulders, cascading down her body like a beautiful waterfall in the still of the night.
"Where's your coffee?" he asked, and she moved to face him with a shrug of her shoulders, "Didn't feel like having one."
She gave him a weak smile before she glanced back at the Selectric that was as still as it had been for the last couple hours. The silence, the waiting, it was dreadful. But there was nothing else for either of them to do, nothing but wait.
"I never wanted to be a father."
Peter's voice was nothing more than a whisper that hung in the air between them. He didn't dare look at the woman next to him, didn't dare take his eyes away from the typewriter, afraid that once he did, he would miss the movement of the keys that would tell him once and for all that this was nothing more than another desperate attempt from his father to bring him back to the other side. That none of this was true, that he still was just Peter Bishop. Not a father.
He heard the shifting of feet on the tile floor, and even without looking, he knew that Olivia had tightened the grip around her own legs, had pulled them even closer to her body, had wrapped herself even tighter into her own little cocoon. What he said had caught her off-guard, he was sure of that. But the truth was that yes, he never wanted to be a father.
"My father," he gave a sarcastic snort, "Walter, he was never around. My mother raised me. By the time I was eighteen, I was off cruising the world. I was alone. I had nowhere to go, no place where I belonged. But you know all that."
His fingers fidgeted with the coffee cup in his hands, and he took a big gulp. The hot liquid slipped down his throat, filling his body with a strange, but comforting warmness. For just a moment, it took off the edge as the heat rose inside him, relaxing his muscles, relaxing him. Coffee always had that effect on him.
He stole a quick glance over his shoulder, just to see Olivia sit motionless next to him. Her fingers were rubbing lightly over the coarse fabric of her dark jeans, her eyes no longer fixed on the Selectric but on her knees. How much he wanted to reach out for her, put his arms around her and hold her close to him... but he couldn't. He'd caused her so much pain already, and no matter how hard he tried not to, he still hurt her even more.
He dropped his shoulders, "A child had no place in my fucked up world."
Until that one day that had changed it all. The one day when his life had suddenly found a purpose. The day he finally discovered the one place in the world where he belonged.
"And then," he picked up his monologue after taking another sip of his coffee, "this one day, in a hotel in Baghdad, in the middle of a war zone, this feisty, beautiful, sexy, FBI agent walks up to me. And guess what, she conned me, the conman."
"I guess she had a pretty good poker face," came the reply from beside him, and he chuckled, "I never thought that anybody would be able to con me. I made a living by scamming people. I was a pro, the best at what I did. And yet... she still conned me."
When he turned, he found her looking at him, a faint smile playing across her face.
"You remember what you said to me when I was getting ready to take Walter back to St. Claire's?" He paused for a moment to watch her nod at him silently, "You looked so lost, so vulnerable... and then suddenly, there was this smile on your face. That was the moment when I knew I'd found the one place where I wanted to be, where I wanted to belong. That day... it changed my life. It changed me. You changed me."
His gaze dropped to his hand that was still holding on tightly to the coffee cup as if he was holding on for dear life. He'd never been one to talk openly about himself, about his life, about his feelings. With Olivia, that all had changed, and he had to admit that it felt good, that it made him feel better even at the worst times. They'd build a trust and understanding that he'd never experienced before and that, for nothing in his life, he would want to miss.
Even though he'd never told her in words directly, she knew that she was the one for him, that she was the one he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. She was the part of him that had been missing, the part of him that kept him grounded, that made him feel like he belonged. He didn't know how long he'd kept his head bowed, he just knew that the moment he looked back up, she was still there, still looking at him, still the same smile on her face.
"I've been thinking a lot lately about me, about you, about us. What I want for my life, what I want for our life. This... this baby thing... I wanna be a father one day, Olivia. Just not like this."
That was the moment when the keys of the Selectric came to life, and with loud, clacking sounds, the typewriter started to spit out its message.