The Decision

Erin was more than three years ahead of the day Walter and Paige met when the scene glimmering before her in The Window caught her eye.

Erin watched the scene play out before her in horror as she realized that Walter and Paige didn't have much time left. As she watched them declare their love for each other and how they wouldn't change their short time together, a crazy plan began to develop in her mind. But she was not sure if it would work. "Noah!" Erin called as she raced through the Garage. She ran up the steps to Walter's loft, which had become Noah's workspace as he studied the research and devised untraceable ways to corrupt the data of anything even tangentially connected to Project Domino.

Noah heard the panic in Erin's voice and hurried toward her, meeting her at the top of the stairs. Erin grabbed his hand, pulling him down the stairs after her. "You have to see this!"

The color drained from Noah's face at her words, "Walter?" he whispered.

"No, no, not... yet. Cousin Walter is still all right."

Relieved, Noah allowed himself to be pulled along by the force of nature that was Erin, now curious at what development had spurred her from her vigil at Walter's bedside.

They reached Walter's bedside, he was no longer lucid enough to watch Paige in The Window, and Noah knew that Erin had commandeered the device for her purposes. He had tactfully decided not to point out that her interest in the Other Side had become an all too familiar path that he did not want to see her travel down.

Erin pushed Noah into the chair she had recently vacated. Then she brushed a kiss across Walter's clammy forehead and squeezed his hand briefly before she moved to manipulate The Window's controls, repeating the last several minutes of other Walter and Paige's lives.

Noah watched with the same mixture of sorrow and horror that Erin had experienced as the other Walter and Paige reconciled themselves to their dire fate. "Why show this to me? This is unspeakably awful!" Noah snapped off The Window's display as Paige's voice drifted through the speakers singing to her beloved Walter.

Erin steeled herself for an argument with Noah before she spoke, "I want to send Cousin Walter's consciousness over to the Other Side, give him a chance to have even a few moments with Paige. We can't let him die this way, feeling so lonely and broken. Not when we have a chance like this!"

Noah stood, towering over the petite blonde he was so devoted to. "That's insane, Erin. How could you do that to him, to them?" He gestured to The Window. "There are consequences! The insanity, the deaths, the confusion. And even if you didn't care about that, how would you even get Walter's consciousness over to the Other Side? The drugs never worked on Walter's brain the way they were supposed to."

Erin was undeterred by Noah's pessimism. "Neither of them have long to live. There won't be consequences like that. As far as getting his consciousness over to the Other Side, there must be some way to make it work! I refuse to believe that there's no way to successfully send Cousin Walter's consciousness to the Other Side, to Paige.

Noah remained unconvinced by her argument. "What if it doesn't work? What if you've made Walter's last moments miserable?"

"Don't you see, my love, they're already miserable. If we can even give him a chance for a few moments of happiness, don't we have to try?"

"I don't know, Erin. There are just too many things that can go wrong."

"Please, just think about it. I won't do it if you don't agree. We can ask him if it's what he wants, but not if you don't think we should. But before you make your decision, look at him, really look at him. Look at what he's done to himself these past months and tell me that it isn't worth the risk to help him, to give him any kind of chance at even a few moments of happiness."

"Fine." Noah declared as he agreed to think about it. "But not here, I need space to clear my head, to not have you trying to convince me, to see if it can even be done."

"That sounds fair." Erin watched as Noah jogged up the steps to the loft, returning moments later with Walter's most recent binder of notes under his arm, then disappeared out the door of the Garage.

Erin spent the rest of the afternoon holding Walter's hand, talking to him about silly things: her favorite customers from the diner, Noah's questionable taste in snack foods, stories from the farm back home in Ireland. Things Walter would never have cared about, but would have let her prattle on endlessly about. Walter remained only semi-conscious, his breathing alarmingly slow and shallow, even with the supplemental oxygen. Erin let tears slide down her cheeks for the first time in front of Walter, knowing he wouldn't see them, wouldn't demand to know why. That thought made her cry all the more.

Shortly after sunset, Noah returned to the Garage. He moved slowly as if he were a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. He absentmindedly shoved his unruly hair out of his eyes as he spoke. "I've spent the last few hours pouring over Walter's research and the research at Kinetic Transformation. They both have incomplete conclusions because for more than twenty years they were both working on the technology separately. But I've been putting the ideas together. I believe that the final piece of the puzzle, the reason that the crossings weren't successful, was that the subjects didn't have an emotional anchor in their new reality. But Walter does, Walter will. He will be crossing to her, to Paige. To the woman he has loved and wanted all these years. I think it is possible." Erin wanted to run toward him, to hug him, to squeal with joy at his words, but there was something about his demeanor that stopped her. "But it's not worth doing. Once we do it, once it's possible, we alter the course of two universes in ways that we can not predict. How can we do this for one man? And what about the other Walter and Paige? They don't get a say in how they spend their last moments together?"

Erin hadn't stopped crying all afternoon. Her heart was broken, and from somewhere deep inside of herself, a fresh pool of grief welled up and she fell to her knees, still refusing to let go of Walter's hand. "'How can we do this for one man?' How can we not? Cousin Walter would bend the very fabric of the universe to save someone he loves, to save one of us. How can we do anything less for him?" Erin lifted her gaze to meet Noah's. "Why even tell me that it's possible if you had already decided not to do it? And as for the other Walter and Paige, how do we even know that they still won't get their final moments together? There's so much we don't know, so much we'll likely never know, but we have to try!"

Noah dropped to his knees next to Erin, he put his finger under her chin and gently wiped away the tears falling like rain from her eyes. "I-I don't know."

"I know you're afraid, I am too, but can we let everything that Cousin Walter has suffered, everything he has lost be for nothing? Can we let it end like this?"

Noah felt conflicted. He knew he was right, but he also knew that Erin was right. He asked himself what Walter would do if Erin's happiness were at stake and he already knew the answer. He'd known it all along, he'd just needed Erin to remind him. "You're right, whatever the consequences, we'll deal with them, but I can give Walter this, at least, an opportunity to spend a few moments with her, with Paige."

Erin smiled weakly through her tears, her heart filled with joy at Walter's chance to be with Paige, but breaking all over again at the thought of losing him.

"Before we do anything else, we need to try and ask him. He needs to agree to this if he can."

Erin nodded. "Of course." She stood and leaned over Walter, her hand on his shoulder, shaking him softly as she called his name, "Cousin Walter, please, wake up." His breath was almost imperceptible. His lips were tinged blue. "Cousin Walter…" she tried to rouse him again. Walter mumbled something and tried to push her hand away, with almost no strength behind the motion. Erin and Noah locked eyes, Walter was much further gone than they had expected. "Noah, we don't have much time. I don't think we can even explain to him what's happening, let alone ask him if it's what he wants."

Noah sighed, he knew she was right and he hated it, but if they were going to send him, they had to do it now. "Walter doesn't have much longer in this universe let alone another one." Noah crossed to the workstation where once upon a time he and Walter had been developing a more stable version of the drug. Noah's meticulous synthesis of both Walter's notes and Kinetic Tranformation's data had led him to the answer Erin was hoping for. Walter's early adolescent brain hadn't been capable of fully metabolizing the drug needed to cause the hoped-for effects. Walter still had plenty of it floating around in his body, all he needed was an infusion of fresh compounds to jumpstart the process. Noah would give him that jumpstart. He located a syringe in the nearby lab refrigerator and held it carefully as he uncapped the needle. He crossed back to Walter's bedside and looked at Erin. Tears began sliding down her cheeks once again as she nodded her agreement. Noah waited just a moment as she leaned down and kissed Walter's cheek, "Goodbye, Cousin. Remember me, remember that I love you." She held his hand with both of hers and looked away as Noah took a deep breath and inserted the needle into Walter's arm. He depressed the plunger and watched as the drug emptied into Walter's body.

Walter bucked on the bed, made a guttural sound of pain, and thrashed for several seconds. Suddenly he fell still, his breathing a little stronger, but he no longer responded to Erin's touch, even to push her hand away.

"He's in a coma, I think. This is what he told us would happen." Noah told Erin as he made a cursory examination of Walter's vital signs. "I think you should check to see if he made it."

Erin nodded and turned the device on once again. Her eyes were glued to The Window To Another World. "Noah, watch this. It's Walter and Paige speaking to each other. I think it may have worked, there's something different this time."

He glanced at The Window for a moment. "No. I don't want to know. I don't want any shred of information about this that I don't need to have. I don't want to be able to help anyone recreate this. It's too dangerous."

"I understand." Erin leaned into him for a moment and kissed him softly before her attention was captured by the movement on the screen once again.

Noah went upstairs to Walter's loft, where Walter's research about the Other Side was stored, ready to destroy it all.

Erin sat down once again in the chair she had hardly left for days and just watched, watching as her beloved, heartbroken Cousin Walter saw his beloved Paige for the first time in the waking world.