Title: Son of Men
Chapter: 8
Rating: T
Summary: When a message comes through the typewriter, it's going to turn everyone's life upside down.
Author's Note: It's Sunday! Time for another chapter! We're finally in the alternate universe, so let's see what's going to happen. I hope you enjoy what I'm posting. If you do, drop me a note, as a review or in private. I'm always just a PM away :)
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It was moments like these that reminded Olivia that it had not been a good idea to split up in a city like New York. On the one hand, it had given them the advantage of going unnoticed from the authorities, most importantly Fringe Division and the Secretary. On the other, it made keeping in touch all the more difficult. The phone lines were monitored, they both knew that. Using them was out of question. So they had decided to do it like people had done it for centuries. Leave paper messages.
They had certain spots all throughout the city, public, crowded places where they knew they would be unnoticed while hiding and retrieving short paper notes. They would always follow the same pattern. If one had left a message at one spot, move on to the next one and leave an answer. They would never show up any place twice, and never together. She had arrived at number eleven, expecting to find a note – but there wasn't one. She had checked the whole place three times, all while not drawing too much attention from the public and keeping out of reach of video surveillance. She couldn't stay much longer, knew that she had to move on to spot number twelve, but a part of her couldn't shake the feeling that something was not right. That at number twelve, there wouldn't be a message waiting for her either. That something had gone terribly wrong.
She felt a short tug on her long hair, causing her to stop observing her surroundings for just a moment. Tiny fingers were wrapped around a strand of her red hair, a pair of big blue eyes shining up at her while short giggles filled the air around her. The baby strapped to her body was bouncing happily in his carrier, unimpressed by all the commotion that was going on.
Olivia had never seen her son so bubbly and bouncy as she had seen him since they were on the run. She had always seen Henry as the silent observer, laying in his stroller or crib or sitting in his carrier and observing his surroundings with a pair of big, round eyes. Whenever she was around other mothers with their babies, her son was the most quiet, but also the most immobile baby of all. He wouldn't reach for things, he wouldn't even look at things... he would just sit and stare and not move.
Suddenly, there was that nagging feeling again that she should have noticed sooner that something had been so terribly wrong. From the day he had been born, Henry had slept a lot, had hardly ever cried or whined. While she had thought it to be odd - after all she had only ever heard from colleagues how much screaming and wailing their babies would do – everyone had told her that she was blessed to have such an easy baby boy. Even her mother had assured her numerous times that there was nothing wrong with Henry, that he was just that cute, little miracle baby.
The first few times she had picked him up from Liberty Island after a visit with the Secretary, all Henry had done was sleep. Sometimes, he would sleep not only through one feeding, but two. Trying to wake up him up was almost impossible, and if he did wake up to suck at his bottle, he would fall back to sleep after only a few minutes. She had taken him to his pediatrician several times, but the answer had always been the same: he was healthy, he was in his percentile, there was nothing to worry about. If he was hungry, he would make himself known.
Then she had noticed that glassy look. She knew well that at his age, Henry wasn't able to really focus on her or anything around him, that his surroundings were nothing but a blur of colors and lights. But the way he had kept looking at her had started to scare her. It had been as if he was looking right through her. He would react to noise, would turn in her direction when she spoke to him, but he had just kept on looking at her with that empty stare. Again, after numerous tests done at the pediatrician, she had been assured that her son was perfectly healthy, that there was nothing physically wrong with him.
It was when she began noticing the circular rashes on Henry's wrists and ankles after every visit with his grandfather at Liberty Island, that she had decided to take her son to a different pediatrician outside the city without the Secretary's knowledge. He had been diagnosed with contact dermatitis, probably caused by electrodes being stuck to his body. Nothing that some lotion couldn't cure, she had been told. But she still didn't know what had been done to her son at Liberty Island. After two weeks, she had found the courage to bluntly ask Walter Bishop about the rashes. His answer had been just what she had expected: it was nothing to worry about, probably just some allergic reaction due to a change in the detergent she used. He would have Henry checked out by a specialist.
From that day on, the rashes had stopped. But small, red pricks had started to appear on the soles of his feet. First just one on the left, then a couple on the right. They had been so tiny they could have easily been missed, but Olivia had known what to look for. The pediatrician in Upstate New York hadn't quite been able to explain the marks. They had been too small for a regular hypodermic needle, oddly shaped and in all the wrong places, too, but when Henry's blood work had come back showing an unknown substance in his bloodstream, there was no explanation needed any longer. That had been the moment when Olivia had finally been reassured that her intuition had been right all along – her baby son was the Secretary's newest pet project.
Trying to limit Henry's visits with his grandfather had not been an option. She had tried that once – only to be reminded ever so gently that it would take just a phone call to have Henry taken away from her forever. Olivia knew the Secretary wasn't bluffing. But if she wanted to keep her son safe, she needed to keep him away from Liberty Island. And the only way she could make sure of that was if she sent him away, to a place where even the Secretary would not be able to get to him.
Lincoln had called her insane when she had told him about her plan to send Henry to the other side. There was no way she would be able to pull that off without the Secretary ever finding out, especially since the only way to cross Henry over was by using technology available only within the secret, underground lab at Liberty Island. She had told him that she wasn't going to rely on a piece of junk that had pulled her back from the other side so violently, she had had to spend a whole day in the nano tank to recover.
Lincoln had called her even more insane when she had told him that she needed his help to get the Selectric out of secured storage to send a message to the other side. She was going to ask Henry's father for help. Because she knew that there was only one person who could help her take her son to safety – her alternate self.
For the last eight weeks, they had sent messages over the Selectric, trying to establish a connection with the other side. They had never received a reply. While Lincoln had been the pessimist, trying to talk Olivia out of her plan to send Henry over to the alternate universe, she had been ever the optimist, clinging to the hope that once they were ready to ask Peter for help, he would come. After all, hope was all she had.
Olivia was pulled out of her revery rather violently when a hand grabbed her by her upper arm and yanked her around the corner into the shadows of an old redbrick. One arm immediately wrapped around Henry's tiny body for protection while her hand reached for the gun strapped to her leg. Within a second, her fingers were closing around the cold metal, pointing the gun at the face of the man who had pulled her into the back alley.
"Whoa, Liv!" Lincoln called, raising his hands up in defense while Henry let out a startled wail.
"Fuck, Linc, you know better than to scare me like that!" She pushed the gun back into her holster, then placed a quick kiss on top of her son's head to soothe him, "You're not supposed to be here. What happened?"
"Got a message from Charlie. Class one event down at Battery Park. Same strange readings as the Opera House last year."
Olivia took in a deep breath, "They're here."
"It would seem so," Lincoln reached out and gently cupped the back of Henry's head with his hand, "Look, Liv, we can still call this off."
"No," she answered him rather quickly, "I'm not letting the Secretary use my son as a guinea pig for God knows what."
Lincoln just shrugged his shoulders at her, "We're way past the point of no return anyway."
Olivia undid the top buckles of Henry's carrier, removing the straps completely. The sling fell to her feet a moment later, and Henry was now freely cradled in his mother's arms. It seemed like an eternity to her that she held the baby protectively against her chest, trying to shield him from all the wrong in the world outside. From the day he was born, it was all she had ever wanted – protect her baby boy from all the evil around them. Change the world into a better place, just for him. In reality, she knew that all it had ever been was wishful thinking. It only lasted a few seconds before Lincoln's hands closed around the small body and took Henry from her arms.
"9PM Trinity Cemetery. In case you change your mind," he told her, but she just waved her hand at him, "Please just go."
"9PM, Liv," he reminded her but Olivia seemed not to notice. She placed one last kiss on the top of her son's head and whispered a short "I love you, nugget" before she turned and walked away, leaving Lincoln and Henry behind.