Fringe Fic: Inventions in C Minor
Title: Inventions in C Minor
Rating: PG for two swear words.
Spoilers: Up to 2x19 "Brown Betty"
Summary: Five times noir!Olivia tried out noir!Walter's experiments, and one time she didn't.
Dedicated to: quirkyoppossum as a late birthday gift. Happy Birthday, my sweets! I hope you like it and that it was worth the wait!
And also, Happy Series 3 (just one more day) everyone! Consider this my official celebration gift.
Disclaimer: Fringe belongs to J.J. Abrams and the rest of the Bad Robot Productions team, as well as Fox. The title of the story is a track title from Billy Joel's piano composition album "Fantasies and Delusions." (Check this short track out; it's awesome!)
Inventions in C Minor
I.
When Private Investigator Olivia Dunham had first finished working on the case involving the glass heart and its custody battle between the non-related Bishops, she had thought she was finished with Dr. Walter Bishop, and possibly even former con-artist Peter Bishop, forever (though she had hoped to be wrong in the latter case). Instead, she had been shocked to learn that Peter was willing to continue to work with the devious, slightly malevolent, older scientist. Although, he had whispered to her quietly as he danced with her, it was also partially to keep a close eye on the old man and make sure he didn't steal from any more dreams. The old man would just have to work with what had already been stolen. Personally, Olivia felt it was a bit odd that a former con-artist was being so adamant against another man conning children, but she let the comment pass. After all, Peter was dancing with her, and she wasn't going to a waste a second of song time on a situation that she felt (at that time) had little to do with her.
Olivia was even more surprised when, mere hours later, Lieutenant Broyles put her on special extension with the Boston PD to look into a case that led her right back to Dr. Walter Bishop's lab. Olivia would never be able to explain how, but she knew in that moment that she was going to spend a lot of her future in that lab. While she was partially weirded out by the thought (singing corpses would not leave her mind, no matter how hard she tried to forget), she was also excited at the thought of spending time with the young man who had told her that spending time with her seemed like it would be "fun." Olivia wasn't used to people thinking of anything about her as "fun," and having a genius tell her that she was seemed like even more of a compliment than if it had come from someone like Esther. Olivia mentally smacked herself. She would need to tell Esther Figglesworth that her assistance was needed again. Olivia allowed herself another small smile. She considered herself pretty damn lucky that her assistant was so understanding and patient. Olivia decided that this time she would avoid firing Esther until it had been two weeks between jobs as opposed to two days. Some sort of higher power obviously didn't want her to close up shop just yet, and if Olivia was going to keep working, she was going to do it with Esther's assistance. No one else would put up with Olivia, of that she was sure.
When she pushed open the doors to Dr. Bishop's lab and burst into the room, she allowed herself a moment to appreciate the gentle jazz and blues tones of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue coming from some unknown area of the lab. Peter was nowhere in sight, but she could see Dr. Bishop doodling in his sketchpad once again, the singing corpses still sitting on gurneys behind the lab table, although she was heartened to note that this time they were silent.
"Ah, Miss Dunham!" Dr. Bishop exclaimed, his face lighting up as he saw her and his manic grin out in full force. The man seemed to have a short memory span given that he had no hang-ups about speaking civilly to a woman who, a mere 24 hours before, had been content to let him die if need be if it meant that Peter got to keep his glass heart. Although Olivia and Peter had not spoken on the subject, they both knew that by Peter taking the heart back (which had been the original plan), they had been dooming Walter to a life of a short few days. Olivia was not so stupid as to ignore the fact that Walter Bishop was probably well aware of this fact too. "What brings you back to my lab so soon?" the myopic scientist asked, directing his mechanical wheelchair back from the table and maneuvering it so that he could get closer to the private detective.
"The Boston PD has asked me to help them out on a case. I thought I might be able to benefit from the expertise of you and your assistant," she answered, hoping she sounded nonchalant as she forced her eyes to stay focused on the older scientist and not search out the younger Bishop (whom she still wasn't convinced was in no way related to Dr. Bishop).
"Are there corpses?" the scientist asked excitedly. Olivia almost expected to see him clap and bounce in the chair at the prospect, but he instead merely clasped his hands together and the smile on his face became a little less wide, though no less manic.
"Actually, that's kind of the problem. The people are just vanishing into thin air. And no bodies are turning up, not even days later."
"That is a really interesting dilemma. This problem needs some thinking about," he muttered quietly to himself, resting his right elbow on the armrest of his wheelchair and placing his fingertips against his lips in thought. With his left hand, he maneuvered his chair away, turning his back to her as he faced the singing corpses, as though they might sit up and share some otherworldly wisdom to the scientist.
The lab was silent for a few moments as the scientist thought, and Olivia nearly jumped when she felt cool fingers press against the back of her hand, which had been resting at her side. She turned quickly and saw Peter's face standing next to her and she noticed suddenly that the music in the lab had faded, and she could tell from the way his sleeves were rolled back to the elbows and the way he kept flexing his fingers that it had been he who had been playing the tune on the piano upon her entrance. His fedora was perched, as always, slightly sideways on his head, and his omnipresent toothpick was sticking out of the side of his mouth, finishing off the laid-back persona he tried to foster.
"Wasn't expecting to see you again so soon, Dunham," he said, a flirtatious smirk appearing at the right side of his face, the toothpick rolling as Peter's tongue played with the end. Olivia, refusing to be distracted by con artist charm, decided her best tac was to stay on business.
"I got a new case this morning. I thought your boss might be able to help."
"Really?" he asked, disbelief etched not only in his tone but all over his face as well. She could tell by his smug smirk that he didn't believe her story, at least not entirely. She couldn't decide whether or not she liked his apparently innate ability to read her.
"Yes," she said forcefully. After all, she really did need Walter's help. It may not have been the only reason she had strut through the doors of the lab that morning, but it was a valid one. "We have bodies going missing that aren't reappearing, and apparently Dr. Bishop is the go-to man for all things weird."
Peter allowed himself a small chuckle and Olivia found herself smirking at the sound. "He is at that," her friend verified.
There came a loud knocking noise, and Detective Dunham jumped slightly. Peter turned his head to the sound and merely rolled his eyes heavenward as though asking for mercy. Olivia followed his line of sight and saw Dr. Bishop whacking his hand against the table in vehement anger, though the reasoning behind it was something Olivia could not fathom.
"Walter! Walter!" Peter shouted, hurriedly walking toward the disabled scientist, and grabbing the man's hands in a fashion similar to the way he had done Olivia herself the day before, only with a bit more force. Olivia watched in fascination as Peter got down on his knees in front of the older man and looked him the eyes with barely existent patience. "What is it, Walter? What do you need?"
Walter was silent a moment, thinking. He glanced at Peter for almost a full moment and then said with great gusto, "Bubblegum!" as though it were the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything those bodies contained. Olivia concluded that it must have been some sort of code for Peter merely smiled, chuckled, and stood to his feet, squeezing the older man's hands slightly as he did so.
"Bubblegum it is, Walter," Peter said, smiling softly at the man before walking to one of the back rooms in the lab and he returned with three small, pink blobs sitting in his hand. He gave one to Walter, who promptly shoved it in his mouth and started chewing. The older man closed his eyes in apparent bliss and went back to staring at the corpses, an empty pad in his lap with which he began to write numbers and equations of which Olivia could not understand the purpose.
Peter came to stand beside her again, popping one of the pink blobs into his mouth as he did. He held his hand out to her and Olivia picked up the object. It was hard, but with a slight give to it which proved to her that it was indeed something chewable. She gave Peter a questioning glance.
"It's a candy. You just chew it and it helps you think. That's why Walter wanted it -- to help facilitate his thinking process for the maths required. He should be able to figure out the energy required to vanish a person from reality and/or make them reappear now that he has something to chew on." He glanced at her a moment, noticing that she was still staring at the pink candy and had made no moves to pop it into her mouth. "Seriously, it tastes really good." Olivia still looked skeptical. "Watch this," he urged her, and she stared in fascination and he moved the candy around in his mouth in much the same fashion as he had moved the tooth pick earlier. She then watched as he appeared to blow the candy and it surged up out of his mouth like a balloon, creating a big pink bubble in front of his face. He then merely retracted his tongue and moved his teeth and popped it, shoving the gum back into his mouth afterward.
"See? It's fun. You try," he urged. Olivia popped the pink candy into her mouth, allowing the unfamiliar, but not unpleasant, flavour to coat her tongue and merely chewed for a few minutes. She had to admit there was a certain appeal to the candy, though she couldn't help but feel that it may cause her jaw to hurt if she did it too long as the candy already felt like it was beginning to harden and lose its give. She then moved the candy around on her tongue, flattening it as she had seen Peter do a few minutes before. After a few tips from Peter, she began to blow experimentally on the gum, feeling the air rush under the gum yet over her tongue, and she watched in fascination as the pink bubble rose up in front of her face as it did for Peter before her. She found herself stuck on the method of popping the bubble and getting it back in her mouth. Before she had the opportunity to try and figure it out (or panic), Peter reached over and popped her bubble with his finger, causing the sticky pink goo to envelope a good portion of her face and stick to parts of her fringe.
It took five face washings, a fringe clipping, and week's worth of apologies from Peter for things to go back to normal. But it only took three days to solve the case, which forced Olivia to admit two things. One was that she, Walter, and Peter made a good team and the Bishop boys had good insights on scientific jargon that she could not begin to understand. The other thing she noted, after much prodding from Esther after the fact, was that bubble gum really was a good means of furthering the thought processes, as long as one could keep it out of their hair.
II.
Three weeks after the bubblegum fiasco, Olivia was forced to admit that solving cases with the help of Dr. Bishop and her favourite snarky research assistant was a lot more entertaining than investigating the occurrences by herself. Although, at times the cases were even more stressful with Walter's angry outbursts than they would be if it were merely Olivia and Esther in Olivia's one room office. As it was, Olivia had carved out an unofficial desk for herself in a small corner of the office, just slightly out of view of Peter Bishop's piano. There was a very strategically placed line of phials and apothecary flasks that kept him from noticing if she was more paying attention to him playing jazz (which she was slowly beginning to like -- not that she was planning on telling Peter that) than she was filling out her paperwork. If he noticed her staring occasionally, he said nothing. But, whether he was playing coy or merely liked to see her flustered, he still flirted outrageously during the day and merely tipped his hat to her at night before placing his coat over his arm and heading for the door. Olivia often imagined that she could hear trumpets softly playing as he walked out the door, but when she would shake her head to clear the sound, there was nothing. It was, she concluded, merely a side-effect of seeing too many of those cop dramas that were becoming increasingly popular at the local cinemas.
What with the strange cases people kept coming to Private Investigator Olivia Dunham to have solved, and with Peter's flirting, and Walter's unpredictable tempers, Olivia often felt she was walking on a precipice where on one side was a swimming pool filled with double-edged razorblades and shards of glass and on the other side was that same pine coffin filling with water that had almost claimed her life a mere month before. Olivia felt like she was living with stress 24/7 and she knew that if something didn't happen soon, she would inevitably fall apart in a messy way that not even the world's biggest mop would be able to clean up.
Olivia allowed her head to thunk against her work desk. Peter had long since left for the night and Dr. Bishop was off doing who knew what in one of the back rooms, and Olivia, for all her patience and endurance, wanted nothing more than to hit something. She kept following every case and solving each one in turn, but she felt like there was something larger connecting all the cases and she was missing it, and if she could only think of the problem for a few seconds more, she could figure it out. But she always thought for as long as she could until her brain felt like it would explode, and the answer still never came. The answer was always there, just out of her reach, and she was frustrated and tired and angry and she just wanted something to happen, though she couldn't figure out what event it could be.
"Need a fresh set of eyes?" came a familiar, friendly voice from her left and Olivia lifted her head to look at Esther Figglesworth. Olivia inwardly sighed, and allowed herself a small smile. Esther had joined with the rest of the group two days into the investigation of the vanishing people and had hit it off right away with both Walter and Peter. With Peter, she was a cute, smiling, innocent, young woman who was quick with research and had always had Olivia's back. With Walter, she was the same, plus able to deal with his moods. When Olivia had asked Esther how she bore the older man for more than five minutes at a time, Esther responded, "Well, mental patients need lots of patience, right? Why should geniuses be any different? Only the assistance he requires is different. Mental patients need help to live their lives. Walter just needs help to take his ego down a peg and make sure he doesn't make morally ambiguous choices. I'm happy to do it!" And from there, Esther had walked over to Walter as he was about to experiment on a gerbil for no foreseeable reason and smacked him across the hand, taking his scalpel and moving it to a high shelf where he couldn't get at it, giving him a stern look to finish off the reprimand. Walter pouted but didn't dare yell at Esther as he would have done Peter or Olivia. Esther had barely left the lab since and seemed so much a part of the fixture that Olivia was slightly ashamed to admit that she sometimes forgot that Esther was there. But, when Olivia was in the mood she was in on the day spoken of, there was no one she loved more than Esther.
"How about a fresh brain instead?" Olivia asked, taking her reading glasses off and rubbing her eyes. "I've been over these case files fifty times today and I can't find anything to give us an overarching reason for these attacks. I know there must be a pattern connecting all these incidents somewhere, but I'm just not seeing it. I'm beginning to think it may be something Dr. Bishop and Peter might have to figure out. Maybe there's a hidden math pattern or something."
"Or maybe your brain is just fried," Esther suggested, leaning against the desk and crossing her arms as she stared down her nose at Olivia's upturned face. "Take a five minute break and go for a walk or something."
"It's Boston in the middle of February," Olivia reminded Esther. "It's freezing and you know how I hate to go out in the cold if I don't have to do."
"True," Esther responded. Olivia's friend's eyes lit up suddenly and she stuck her hand in the pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a large yellow spool with a thin piece of string in the middle. "Here, play with this," Esther encouraged.
"I'm not one much for knitting," Olivia stated in confusion, wondering if the odd shape of the spool was some new fashion trend for knitters that she had somehow missed.
"It's not for knitting, Olivia," Esther said, in a tone which indicated she felt Olivia was being deliberately stupid. "It's one of Walter's inventions. He called it a yo-yo. He introduced me to it the other day while you and Peter were out grabbing dinner for us. It's fun and, more importantly, it's relaxing. It might help you decompress a bit, since you refuse to go home."
Olivia stared at the yellow object in Esther's hand for a moment before reaching out and grabbing it. She suddenly had an image of pink goop all over her face and hoped she wasn't in for a repeat performance.
"So, what do I do with it?" Olivia asked, staring at the yo-yo as though it might spring to life and dance in her palm if she waited long enough.
Esther moved around to Olivia's side and took the yo-yo from her hand. "Okay, first you take your middle finger and stick it through this little hole so that it stays connected to your finger," Esther instructed, taking Olivia's hand and putting the string in the appropriate place. "Then, you allow gravity to work its magic on the string and spool and watch as the string unwinds and the spool of yo-yo falls. When you feel the tension mount towards the bottom, you flick your wrist back up and the impulse-momentum will cause the string to retract and draw the spool back up towards your hand." Despite her instructions, the spool merely got to the end of the string and stopped with dead weight at the bottom.
Esther took the string from Olivia's hand, wound the string back around the spool, and demonstrated again, watching as Olivia's eyes followed the yo-yo in fascination. Esther then returned the yo-yo to Olivia and told her to try again. It took five more attempts, but Olivia finally managed to get the yo-yo to go down and then return to her hand. Esther gave a light chuckle in delight and went to go grab another yo-yo of her own. By the time she returned, Olivia was staring at the wall, the yo-yo moving down from her palm and back up the string to return to its destination over and over again, Olivia doing the action on auto-pilot.
"So, still need a fresh set of eyes? Or a new brain? Anything I can help with?" Esther ventured, her hand playing with a blue yo-yo and moving in opposite time with Olivia's yellow one.
"I think that would help a lot," Olivia confessed, her voice less stressed and her eyes a little less tired and her smile a lot less strained. And she and Esther remained that way -- yo-yos bouncing, Esther leaning on the desk, Olivia in the chair, and their voices trading theories and motives -- long into the night.
III.
Two weeks later, Olivia leaned back in her chair, allowing the kinks in her back to snap themselves out and back into place one by one as she stretched out like a cat, complete with a jaw popping yawn, and propped her feet up on her desk. She was exhausted, emotionally and physically, from the latest case involving the abduction of small children, and she knew the best thing she could do would be to go home and take a long-needed rest. But the honest truth was that she just couldn't seem to get her brain to quiet down. Children had been tortured for no other reason than for a man's sick pleasure, and if a worried Rachel Norris -- a drop dead gorgeous Rita Hayworth look-alike and devoted mother -- had not come to see her because she didn't trust the track record of Boston PD in finding lost children then...well, there would six or seven more children raped, tortured, and murdered than there should ever be. Olivia and Peter had found the children after a sleepless 48 hour search, but while they had saved their lives, the children would be scarred forever in ways that Olivia could do nothing to fix. And if there was one thing Olivia couldn't stand, it was a problem without a resolution that she could provide. And it was this guilt that had her sitting with her feet propped on her desk, the sound of Glen Miller's In the Mood playing in the background on the Victrola. Walter was currently trying to create a sugary concoction that could make whistling noises and Esther was humming quietly while washing out the beakers that housed Walter's many experiments. Olivia refused to let her mind wander to what location it was that Peter had escaped.
She seemed to have hit an impasse with the young research assistant and former con artist. While they still flirted on a daily basis, he had made no advancements towards her since their dance together the day after they met. In truth, they rarely spoke unless it was case related, and even then it was more of Peter and Walter discussing while she listened on and tried to follow half of the words they said. Peter Bishop was a virtual stranger to her, but she was curious about him and she wanted to understand him if for no other reason than that everything else in her world was now topsy-turvy and she wanted to feel as though she had conquered one part of the insanity.
In addition, she couldn't get that image out of Walter's sketchpad out of her head. In the beginning, she hadn't paid it much thought. It was another of the inventions that Walter had stolen from children and yet another one of thousands of his creations that she had yet to experience. But she kept seeing the sketchpad in the following weeks that she worked with the two men, and though the image it portrayed was odd and invasive, she was curious as well. She couldn't decide whether it looked pleasant or uncomfortable, and as such she often found herself staring at the image in her off-hours, wondering about the mechanics of it and what the purpose of the invention was supposed to be.
"Looks a lot like dancing, doesn't it?" came Peter's voice from just over her left shoulder and Olivia felt herself jump slightly. She sent him a glare when she had composed herself and lowered the sketchpad (which she had been gazing at all night) onto her lap, leaning her chair back on its hind legs and enjoying the daredevil moment where her chair tried to find the perfect balance between gravity and defiance so she could stare up at Peter's face without lifting her head.
"It looks...odd," Olivia admitted, her eyes watching the two people involved and their expressions and she wondered if anyone could really be that happy or peaceful. "I mean, I can tell that it's supposed to be enjoyable and comfortable. It's just that the placing of the arms and the proximity of the bodies look as though they should make one feel claustrophobic."
"It's called a 'hug.' That's what Walter calls it anyway. I would call it an 'embrace' myself. Sounds more fitting -- to bring in and hold tight. 'Hug' sounds like a nonsense word if you ask me."
"I don't care what you call it," Olivia contested, putting her chair down on all four legs and standing up to face him, crossing her arms as she did so. "It looks awkward."
"How would you know? You've never tried it," Peter reminded her, lifting one eyebrow at her and his mouth curving to the right in a half-smile. He then opened his arms to her. Olivia merely stared at him.
"What?" she asked, incredulously.
Peter shrugged his shoulders, his arms still open. "I'm a scientist. We experiment. Come on, Dunham. You can help further a scientific study. 'Are embraces awkward or pleasurable?'"
Olivia was silent still a moment longer, still skeptical and uneasy with the situation.
"Seriously," Peter wheedled to her, giving her the smirk that she was positive he knew would make her agree to almost anything, "it's just like dancing, only we don't have to worry about stepping on each others feet."
Olivia, still slightly anxious and unsure, stepped forward and stood chest to chest with Peter. She then, so slowly that an onlooker would think she would bolt any second, began to move her arms underneath of Peter's outstretched ones and reached around his upper back to pull him to her, instinctively moving her head to the side to rest against his chest while his hands came behind her back and spanned the length of her shoulders, holding her to him. For the first few seconds, Olivia was afraid to breathe and it was just as awkward as she had feared it would be and she wondered why any child would dream of this action and consider it a good thing. Then, her body forced her to take a breath and she was breathing in the scent of cologne and sweat and chemicals that was Peter, and she heard the steady clanging of his glass heart against the metal of his chest in a steady rhythm, and felt the whispers of his breath against the top of her head, and she felt calmer than she had since before the child abduction case had started. Suddenly, though her memory of the case hadn't faded, she felt safe and warm and her body suddenly began to feel an aching tiredness -- but it was the good sort of ache that came from doing hard work and doing it well.
After a few moments, she felt Peter's arms start to loosen from behind her and she stepped away, ignoring the burst of cold that came with so doing. Peter's eyes searched her face for a moment, looking for something that Olivia wasn't sure of, and he gave a small smile.
"So, what's the conclusion, Dunham?"
"Both. I think. It *was* awkward, just as I had said. But there was a strange sort of comfort from the experience as well, though I can't say if the feeling would be the same if I embraced each and every person I met. I would assume with some people an embrace would be either all awkward or all pleasurable."
"Well, a real scientist repeats an experiment over and over. I guess this just means you'll need to find more data to work with, Dunham," he told her, propping his hat up on his head in just such a way that it hid one eye in shadow, and then threw his thick duster on over his usual attire. "Let me know what data the different trials you perform accumulate for ya'," he said, already turning his back toward her and walking out the door of the lab, his hands stuck in his duster pockets and a smile evident in his voice. Olivia once again heard trumpets blowing a soft jazz in the background. She shook her head. They were gone.
IV.
Olivia Dunham hated both the Bishops, of that she was certain. She had woken up with a migraine, gotten paid to do a case that couldn't wait, gotten yelled at by Lieutenant Broyles when said case interfered with a case that he was working on as Chief of Police, missed both lunch and dinner, and now, to top the day off, she was soaking wet. And all because of one of Dr. Walter Bishop's experiments. And it wasn't even related to the case!
The first day of the investigation had ended with no leads and with Olivia having a strained relationship with the Boston PD (not that she was ever really on good terms with them), and Olivia wanted nothing more than to get Peter to hit the local jazz bar for a couple of drinks before she went home and curled into bed to sleep for a solid six hours. Instead, she had walked into the lab and found herself in a downpour. For the first few seconds, she had stood in shock, totally at a loss. While river-effect showers were not totally out of the question and could bring a rainstorm on a day that had a sky as blue as the ocean, they usually occurred *outside* and not in Dr. Bishop's lab. It was only after her fedora was thoroughly drenched through and the rim drooping over her forehead, her duster collecting beads of water at the ends and dripping into puddles at her feet, that she realised the sprinkler system had at some point been activated. She glanced around the lab and saw no evidence of a prior fire, and no sign of the scientists or Esther.
The sprinklers shut off after about a minute and a half of Olivia standing in the doorway, and she quickly started shivering, not only because of the cold, but also because of the damp. It was only mid-March and between being wet and having just stepped in from out of doors, Olivia was quickly beginning to feel that she might get hypothermia if she didn't find some dry clothes. Her breath was already beginning to come out in puffs of smoke before her and she crossed her arms over her chest on the off-chance that anyone came across her; no reason to advertise to the world how cold she was.
"Esther! Peter! Dr. Bishop!" Olivia called, suddenly worried as to where the rest of her team had disappeared, and wondered if the sprinklers going off was supposed to be some warning to her from Walter. The man was always trying to give her hints using clues and anecdotes that went over her head, and the man was just insane enough that he would think that sprinklers going off would mean something to her in a crisis.
"Miss Dunham!" came Walter's excited voice from the other side of the lab table. Walter then lowered his umbrella (camouflaged to match the colour of the tabletop), his body totally dry except for his ankle cuffs, which were completely soaked. "What do you think of my newest invention? Well, not the design. That's old of course, but seeing it in the flesh!" he exclaimed, his arms moving all over the place in his excitement.
"I'm pretty sure I've seen ceiling sprinklers many times before, Walter," Olivia said, her jaw slightly clenched, both in exasperation and to keep her teeth from chattering.
"No, no, no. That's not the experiment. I had to create a habitat for it -- " Walter began to explain, and Olivia felt her insides clench in fear. Create a habitat? There was an animal in the lab?! With a rain forest climate?! What had Walter brought in, a lion? Olivia's eyes immediately began to dart around, searching for a large animal that could bite her throat out at any given moment. It would be just like Walter to think it was adorable and assume that Olivia would be just as intrigued by it.
"-- but to see it requires refracting light off clear water particles, and since there is no rain in the forecast for weeks, I had to resort to my own means." Olivia breathed a sigh of relief as Walter finished his sentence. From the sound of it, he was merely growing a new type of mold or the like, something that required damp and light. She could live with mold -- even mold with special powers, so long as it didn't rip her throat out.
She was relieved, but she was hating the Bishops. Both of them. Walter for creating this experiment that would make her catch pneumonia and Peter for not suffering through it with her. He got off scot-free with Esther somewhere, while she was stuck with her clothes soaked through and her teeth chattering. She knew she never should have gotten out of bed that morning.
"And there it is," said Walter, his voice taking on a quiet, reverent tone. "Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? I mean, it was lovely in theory, when the image was only in my head, but this is...a work of art. What a beauty! Don't you think so, my dear?"
Olivia stared at the image emblazoned on the white wall that Walter was also viewing. The light was shining in through the windowpanes that were just visible towards the top of the ceiling, shining light through the mist left by the sprinklers, spraying colours of red, orange, yellow, indigo, green, blue, and violet across the white walls. What made the sight even more miraculous was that if she turned her head and faced the window, the colours disappeared entirely, despite the fact that there was still sunlight and mist in the room.
"What is it, Walter?" Olivia asked in awe, her discomfort temporarily forgotten in the beautiful oddness her eyes were trying to digest.
"I already showed you the theory when we met, dear. Don't you remember? It's a rainbow. A spectrum of colours created by just the right blend of refracted light and water molecules. And it has never been seen by a living being until the two of us, my dear."
For the next few minutes, Olivia sat staring at her breath, Walter writing his notes on his experiment in a fast hand next to her side. When the rainbow faded, she knew she would go back to hating Dr. Bishop until she was warm again, but for now she had to admit, sitting next to him as she was, that this particular experiment was pretty damn brilliant.
V.
On Olivia's first case as a private investigator, she had made a rookie mistake and gotten caught by the person she was tailing. The assignment had been simple: an employee had been suspected of selling trade secrets to a competitor and her job was to follow him for a few days and see if he contacted anyone. What she hadn't expected was that the competitor that was buying the secrets from the traitorous employee would turn out to be her boyfriend, John Scott. She also hadn't expected that he would be willing to put a gun to her head to use her as a hostage to get away from the Boston PD if the situation so required of him.
The cops hadn't even tried to save her, leaving her to wrestle with the ropes binding her hands. She would never forget the sense of utter abandonment she felt as the man she loved placed a cold gun barrel to her temple and the cops merely stared coldly at her, waiting for the chance to take a shot at the man using her as a human shield. In that situation, Olivia Dunham did what would later become habit for her in life -- she took care of herself. She elbowed him in the stomach, knocked the gun to the side and away from her head, noting the loud cracking sound it made as it went off, and kneed John in the groin while elbowing him in the temple. It was only after the cops had cuffed him and were leading him away that she became aware of a stinging pain in her forearm and realised that the bullet had grazed her as it flew by. Olivia had gone to Esther's (who was merely a friend, not an employee yet at that time), and drank five glasses of an expensive single malt whiskey while Esther stitched the wound with a needle and thread, before crashing on Esther's couch.
She had gotten away from the ordeal just fine, if a little bit more hard-hearted than she had initially been. She had survived, and she was stronger for it, and life had gone on. But that didn't stop the nightmares. It had been five years since John Scott had shown his true colours, but there were nights when she still dreamt that his gun was to her head. Sometimes, she couldn't save herself, sometimes the cops shot her while trying to rescue her, and sometimes everyone she knew and loved just watched as John squeezed the trigger. She always awoke to the gunshot blasting in her ears and it was always a couple of minutes before she could hear again. The nights when the dreams came usually ended up being early mornings of strong, black coffee with a shot of bourbon thrown in for good measure. They were few and far between and she could cope with a few sleepless nights here and there. That didn't mean she lacked in wishing for them to go away.
One day, as she walked into the lab, it was to see Esther pouring salt into a metal tank that had always stood quietly near the upper section of the lab. As Esther poured the salt in, Olivia heard a distinct splash of liquid and couldn't help but wonder what crazy experiment Walter had in mind this time.
"What's this?" Olivia asked, her voice failing to mask her amused state, her minding bringing up images of Walter trying to create saltwater taffy or some other confection that would require a huge vat of saltwater.
"It's a repeat experiment of Walter's. Apparently, he does this periodically," Esther told her, once again meticulously weighing another shovel full of salt to make sure it was just the right amount. "He told me earlier that it used to be how he extracted dreams from children. Now, he uses it to extract dreams from his own consciousness, or from willing participants. He calls it his own personal 'Dream Prognostication Machine.'"
"So, when he extracts these dreams, what happens? Do the children ever remember them or are they just gone?"
"They disappear because the memories the brain uses to bring about those images get buried. They're not taken away because that could cause suppression of something very important to a child's psyche, but they get pushed down to where the child doesn't actively think of the subject. Walter said to think of it as a visit to a subconscious psychologist."
"I'm guessing you asked him about the effects yourself, huh?"
"Of course," Esther replied, putting the salt shovel back in the bucket and closing the doors to the tank.
"Walter told me to let you know that you're free to use the tank if you wish. I think he's secretly hoping you will because he probably thinks you have some really awesome invention ideas in your head that you're not aware of."
Olivia thought seriously for a couple of moments.
"I'll pass. Thanks."
"You're sure?" Esther pried, both her eyebrows lifting in tandem as she considered her older friend and employer. "I know there is at least one memory in that head of yours that still causes you some pain. You know Walter wouldn't mind helping you get rid of it."
"I'm positive, thanks. They might be painful memories, but they're mine. We all have to have something to drive us, right?" Olivia countered, a smile on her face to show that she wasn't angry at Esther's suggestion.
Esther smiled in response and nodded, apparently accepting Olivia's decision with no further argument. If anything, it seemed as though she approved and was happy that Olivia had decided to pass up the opportunity. She gave her employer a brief pat on the shoulder as she passed by her and continued about her preparations for Walter's experiment. Olivia merely sighed and stared contemplatively at the tank. She was willing to try out a lot of new things for this wacky team of hers, but there were few precious things in her life (both possession-wise and relationship-wise), and she knew it would be a long time before she was willing to give anything up, even if it was more painful to hold onto it than to let it go.
VI.
It had been a good day. That was a rare thing in the life of Olivia Dunham and her small investigative team that she had unofficially assembled over the last three months. There was no case to work, so Olivia had merely sat around the lab, catching up on paperwork for her personal files and watched the lab experiments and crazy antics of her three closest friends. Esther and Peter had spent most of the day around Peter's piano, the top of it removed and fiddling with the wires, trying to see if there was any way to rig it to play itself. Olivia didn't have the heart to tell them that trick had been used in films for years already. It would hardly be groundbreaking science. Esther and Peter were enjoying themselves and it seemed so rare a sight for her to see, so she let them get on with it in any case.
Walter had been even more silent than Olivia. He had been sitting at his lab table, his trusty sketch book open in his lap. Unlike when Walter usually sketched, this particular etching seemed to be giving him trouble. He was mumbling to himself and continuously erasing sections of the drawing, pulling out pieces of paper and balling them up and starting over. At one point, he had thrown the sketch pad across the room and Olivia had been afraid that he was about to have a total meltdown. Instead, Walter had maneuvered his wheelchair over to the pad, dusted off the image, and started again. By late in the evening, however, he seemed to have figured out what he was trying to do with the sketch and was smiling softly to himself as he went, drawing carefully and with a lightness in his hand movements, as though the image were a small child that would wake if he pressed down on its lines too hard.
Olivia took a moment to shift her eyes from Walter back to Esther and Peter with a smile. Things had finally started progressing with the younger of the two scientists. He had taken her out to dinner a couple of times and still was willing to dance with her (despite his claimed hatred of the activity), and she had even found herself enjoying listening to John Coltrane and Duke Ellington, though she still couldn't quite seem to understand Peter's love of Louis Armstrong, no matter how hard she tried. She even found herself holding his hand sometimes in the lab without her knowledge -- one second they would be standing side by side, not touching, and the next his fingers would be interlaced with hers as though they had been there the whole time. And, as she had quietly admitted to him one night as they were dancing to Gershwin's Someone to Watch Over Me in her apartment, she quite enjoyed hugging as well, especially if it was his arms surrounding her.
Yes, Olivia was quite happy with this little circle of friends/family that she had fashioned for herself. And with the exception of the increasingly grotesque cases people kept throwing at her doorstep, and the occasional experiment of Walter's that would go horribly awry, she felt happier and more safe than she could remember having felt since she was child and her abusive step-father had ended up in the middle of the river with cement overshoes (but that had been a temporary feeling of safety that had disappeared when she realised there were even worse people in the world than her step-father).
Olivia was pulled from her musings by a triumphant shout from Walter. "Ah-hah!" he said, slapping his hands vehemently against his armrests in accomplishment, his manic smile lighting up his entire aged face. "I've done it, Peter," he continued, barely containing his joy as the younger scientist came down to join his employer with that ever-present smirk on his face. "I've created my best invention yet, and purely from my own genius. It's more beautiful than the rainbow, more intimate than the hug, harder to get the ingredients right on than the perfect taffy --"
"We get it, Walter," Peter interrupted, throwing his hand up as though he could physically stop the flow of words from Walter's mouth. "It's a difficult creation. You're proud of it. Can we see it?"
Walter handed the drawing to Peter who stared at it for a good few minutes before blushing slightly and putting the image down, scratching behind his ear in a way he often did when he was struck speechless.
"Well, you were right about it being intimate," Peter said and Olivia felt her mind wonder what the image was showing. It couldn't be sex, for knowledge of that act was already well known to her (her parents had been forced to create her some way after all), and therefore it wasn't Walter's creation. What could be so much more intimate that Peter would blush to think about it?
Olivia snuck closer to the two Bishop boys and snuck a look at the image, feeling her stomach drop. It certainly did look intimate. It showed a couple -- a man and woman in this case, though Olivia assumed it could be same gender if a person wished -- with their faces stuck together at the lips. Olivia wrinkled her brow in confusion. The action didn't seem to make much sense. For one, how could one breathe when their mouths were fused in such a fashion? And two, what possible enjoyment could one get from it? Olivia's mouth was getting more saliva within it just looking at the picture and she didn't see how adding someone else's saliva to the mix would be very appealing. And yet...there had to be *something* good about the thought because seeing the image was making something in Olivia's stomach clench as her mind associated the image with all things Peter, and it wasn't an altogether unpleasant sensation.
"What do you call it, Walter?" Olivia asked, trying not to make her thoughts too obvious and wanting to keep the conversation in neutral territory for just a few more seconds.
"I call it a 'kiss.' Because I think it will be just as irresistible as those little Hershey chocolates," Walter answered, his hand picking up a spare chocolate resting on the table in front of him.
"Do you want to try it?" Olivia asked Peter, unaware beforehand that the words were about to come flying out of her mouth. By the time she realised what was happening, it was too late to stop them. And anyway, she reasoned to herself, they had already hugged (which was way more intimate than any sex she had participated in up to that point), so how much more intimate could a kiss be?
Peter raised his eyebrows in slight surprise (as he was usually the one encouraging her to try something new and not the other way around). But, after a few seconds in which he apparently weighed the pros and cons, he nodded his head. Walter clapped his hands in excitement and stared at the two of them, anxious to see what conclusions the experiment could have and to see whether this action would truly be his best invention, as he hoped it would be.
Peter leaned in towards Olivia, his hands clenching into fists and un-clenching again over and over, as though they weren't sure what to do with themselves. When Peter's lips first collided with Olivia's, the only thought of which she was certain was that 'kisses' were very wet, though not slobbery. It was an odd sensation to be sure, and she fretted for a brief second over what to do with her hands before finally just resting them against his chest, pressing against him slightly for balance. Peter pulled away after a few seconds, and she thought that would be it, but he seemed to be more curious than she had given him credit for and started to move his lips slightly. He first moved them so that they caressed her upper lip before lowering them to caress the bottom, separating her lips from their previously closed position, finally settling his lips once again in the center, but with her mouth more open so she could feel the heat of his mouth against hers. His hands, before clenching nervously, were now framing her face, tilting her head in different directions as his mouth explored. His teeth were occasionally scraping against her lips, but instead of being painful it caused a pleasurable shiver to skate down her spine and her body involuntarily moved closer to his, her hips jerking forward to connect with his while her hands left his chest to find his hair and bring his head closer to her own (as though they could get any closer). It wasn't until she realised that this kissing activity didn't allow for oxygen (which her body began to tell her it desperately needed) that she backed away from Peter. Olivia once again heard jazz trumpets as Peter smiled softly at her from beneath his fedora, but she told herself that if the trumpets were indeed real and not just in her head, the sound suited him so she should stop trying to get rid of it.
Walter was beyond ecstatic. If the flush coating both Peter and Olivia's face and neck were any indicators, he announced to the room, then his invention was indeed a success.
"I don't know, Walter," Peter said, an apologetic tone obvious in his voice. "One test subject isn't enough to make a verifiable conclusion. You have to run repeated trials and come to the same conclusion each time. Once could just be an aberration."
Olivia unwittingly grabbed Peter's hand and interlaced their fingers, drawing his attention back to her as she smiled coyly at him in a way she knew made him as unsteady as his smug smirk made her. "Well, we could always try again."
"What?" Peter asked, and Olivia inwardly smiled. She knew her forwardness was making him extremely off-balanced, and she would be lying if she said she didn't like it.
"Well, you're a scientist. This is an experiment. 'Is a kiss a pleasurable experience and is it Walter's greatest invention?' Collect some data, and do trials as often as possible," she said, speaking in terms she knew he would understand. Her reward was the smug smile she was hoping for as Peter turned back to Walter.
"Well, Walter. I'd say you have at least two more than willing test subjects."
Peter gave Olivia's hand another small squeeze and Olivia smiled as she rested her forehead against the sleeve of Peter's duster. Yes, she was quite content indeed.
Rating: PG for two swear words.
Spoilers: Up to 2x19 "Brown Betty"
Summary: Five times noir!Olivia tried out noir!Walter's experiments, and one time she didn't.
Dedicated to: quirkyoppossum as a late birthday gift. Happy Birthday, my sweets! I hope you like it and that it was worth the wait!
And also, Happy Series 3 (just one more day) everyone! Consider this my official celebration gift.
Disclaimer: Fringe belongs to J.J. Abrams and the rest of the Bad Robot Productions team, as well as Fox. The title of the story is a track title from Billy Joel's piano composition album "Fantasies and Delusions." (Check this short track out; it's awesome!)
Inventions in C Minor
I.
When Private Investigator Olivia Dunham had first finished working on the case involving the glass heart and its custody battle between the non-related Bishops, she had thought she was finished with Dr. Walter Bishop, and possibly even former con-artist Peter Bishop, forever (though she had hoped to be wrong in the latter case). Instead, she had been shocked to learn that Peter was willing to continue to work with the devious, slightly malevolent, older scientist. Although, he had whispered to her quietly as he danced with her, it was also partially to keep a close eye on the old man and make sure he didn't steal from any more dreams. The old man would just have to work with what had already been stolen. Personally, Olivia felt it was a bit odd that a former con-artist was being so adamant against another man conning children, but she let the comment pass. After all, Peter was dancing with her, and she wasn't going to a waste a second of song time on a situation that she felt (at that time) had little to do with her.
Olivia was even more surprised when, mere hours later, Lieutenant Broyles put her on special extension with the Boston PD to look into a case that led her right back to Dr. Walter Bishop's lab. Olivia would never be able to explain how, but she knew in that moment that she was going to spend a lot of her future in that lab. While she was partially weirded out by the thought (singing corpses would not leave her mind, no matter how hard she tried to forget), she was also excited at the thought of spending time with the young man who had told her that spending time with her seemed like it would be "fun." Olivia wasn't used to people thinking of anything about her as "fun," and having a genius tell her that she was seemed like even more of a compliment than if it had come from someone like Esther. Olivia mentally smacked herself. She would need to tell Esther Figglesworth that her assistance was needed again. Olivia allowed herself another small smile. She considered herself pretty damn lucky that her assistant was so understanding and patient. Olivia decided that this time she would avoid firing Esther until it had been two weeks between jobs as opposed to two days. Some sort of higher power obviously didn't want her to close up shop just yet, and if Olivia was going to keep working, she was going to do it with Esther's assistance. No one else would put up with Olivia, of that she was sure.
When she pushed open the doors to Dr. Bishop's lab and burst into the room, she allowed herself a moment to appreciate the gentle jazz and blues tones of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue coming from some unknown area of the lab. Peter was nowhere in sight, but she could see Dr. Bishop doodling in his sketchpad once again, the singing corpses still sitting on gurneys behind the lab table, although she was heartened to note that this time they were silent.
"Ah, Miss Dunham!" Dr. Bishop exclaimed, his face lighting up as he saw her and his manic grin out in full force. The man seemed to have a short memory span given that he had no hang-ups about speaking civilly to a woman who, a mere 24 hours before, had been content to let him die if need be if it meant that Peter got to keep his glass heart. Although Olivia and Peter had not spoken on the subject, they both knew that by Peter taking the heart back (which had been the original plan), they had been dooming Walter to a life of a short few days. Olivia was not so stupid as to ignore the fact that Walter Bishop was probably well aware of this fact too. "What brings you back to my lab so soon?" the myopic scientist asked, directing his mechanical wheelchair back from the table and maneuvering it so that he could get closer to the private detective.
"The Boston PD has asked me to help them out on a case. I thought I might be able to benefit from the expertise of you and your assistant," she answered, hoping she sounded nonchalant as she forced her eyes to stay focused on the older scientist and not search out the younger Bishop (whom she still wasn't convinced was in no way related to Dr. Bishop).
"Are there corpses?" the scientist asked excitedly. Olivia almost expected to see him clap and bounce in the chair at the prospect, but he instead merely clasped his hands together and the smile on his face became a little less wide, though no less manic.
"Actually, that's kind of the problem. The people are just vanishing into thin air. And no bodies are turning up, not even days later."
"That is a really interesting dilemma. This problem needs some thinking about," he muttered quietly to himself, resting his right elbow on the armrest of his wheelchair and placing his fingertips against his lips in thought. With his left hand, he maneuvered his chair away, turning his back to her as he faced the singing corpses, as though they might sit up and share some otherworldly wisdom to the scientist.
The lab was silent for a few moments as the scientist thought, and Olivia nearly jumped when she felt cool fingers press against the back of her hand, which had been resting at her side. She turned quickly and saw Peter's face standing next to her and she noticed suddenly that the music in the lab had faded, and she could tell from the way his sleeves were rolled back to the elbows and the way he kept flexing his fingers that it had been he who had been playing the tune on the piano upon her entrance. His fedora was perched, as always, slightly sideways on his head, and his omnipresent toothpick was sticking out of the side of his mouth, finishing off the laid-back persona he tried to foster.
"Wasn't expecting to see you again so soon, Dunham," he said, a flirtatious smirk appearing at the right side of his face, the toothpick rolling as Peter's tongue played with the end. Olivia, refusing to be distracted by con artist charm, decided her best tac was to stay on business.
"I got a new case this morning. I thought your boss might be able to help."
"Really?" he asked, disbelief etched not only in his tone but all over his face as well. She could tell by his smug smirk that he didn't believe her story, at least not entirely. She couldn't decide whether or not she liked his apparently innate ability to read her.
"Yes," she said forcefully. After all, she really did need Walter's help. It may not have been the only reason she had strut through the doors of the lab that morning, but it was a valid one. "We have bodies going missing that aren't reappearing, and apparently Dr. Bishop is the go-to man for all things weird."
Peter allowed himself a small chuckle and Olivia found herself smirking at the sound. "He is at that," her friend verified.
There came a loud knocking noise, and Detective Dunham jumped slightly. Peter turned his head to the sound and merely rolled his eyes heavenward as though asking for mercy. Olivia followed his line of sight and saw Dr. Bishop whacking his hand against the table in vehement anger, though the reasoning behind it was something Olivia could not fathom.
"Walter! Walter!" Peter shouted, hurriedly walking toward the disabled scientist, and grabbing the man's hands in a fashion similar to the way he had done Olivia herself the day before, only with a bit more force. Olivia watched in fascination as Peter got down on his knees in front of the older man and looked him the eyes with barely existent patience. "What is it, Walter? What do you need?"
Walter was silent a moment, thinking. He glanced at Peter for almost a full moment and then said with great gusto, "Bubblegum!" as though it were the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything those bodies contained. Olivia concluded that it must have been some sort of code for Peter merely smiled, chuckled, and stood to his feet, squeezing the older man's hands slightly as he did so.
"Bubblegum it is, Walter," Peter said, smiling softly at the man before walking to one of the back rooms in the lab and he returned with three small, pink blobs sitting in his hand. He gave one to Walter, who promptly shoved it in his mouth and started chewing. The older man closed his eyes in apparent bliss and went back to staring at the corpses, an empty pad in his lap with which he began to write numbers and equations of which Olivia could not understand the purpose.
Peter came to stand beside her again, popping one of the pink blobs into his mouth as he did. He held his hand out to her and Olivia picked up the object. It was hard, but with a slight give to it which proved to her that it was indeed something chewable. She gave Peter a questioning glance.
"It's a candy. You just chew it and it helps you think. That's why Walter wanted it -- to help facilitate his thinking process for the maths required. He should be able to figure out the energy required to vanish a person from reality and/or make them reappear now that he has something to chew on." He glanced at her a moment, noticing that she was still staring at the pink candy and had made no moves to pop it into her mouth. "Seriously, it tastes really good." Olivia still looked skeptical. "Watch this," he urged her, and she stared in fascination and he moved the candy around in his mouth in much the same fashion as he had moved the tooth pick earlier. She then watched as he appeared to blow the candy and it surged up out of his mouth like a balloon, creating a big pink bubble in front of his face. He then merely retracted his tongue and moved his teeth and popped it, shoving the gum back into his mouth afterward.
"See? It's fun. You try," he urged. Olivia popped the pink candy into her mouth, allowing the unfamiliar, but not unpleasant, flavour to coat her tongue and merely chewed for a few minutes. She had to admit there was a certain appeal to the candy, though she couldn't help but feel that it may cause her jaw to hurt if she did it too long as the candy already felt like it was beginning to harden and lose its give. She then moved the candy around on her tongue, flattening it as she had seen Peter do a few minutes before. After a few tips from Peter, she began to blow experimentally on the gum, feeling the air rush under the gum yet over her tongue, and she watched in fascination as the pink bubble rose up in front of her face as it did for Peter before her. She found herself stuck on the method of popping the bubble and getting it back in her mouth. Before she had the opportunity to try and figure it out (or panic), Peter reached over and popped her bubble with his finger, causing the sticky pink goo to envelope a good portion of her face and stick to parts of her fringe.
It took five face washings, a fringe clipping, and week's worth of apologies from Peter for things to go back to normal. But it only took three days to solve the case, which forced Olivia to admit two things. One was that she, Walter, and Peter made a good team and the Bishop boys had good insights on scientific jargon that she could not begin to understand. The other thing she noted, after much prodding from Esther after the fact, was that bubble gum really was a good means of furthering the thought processes, as long as one could keep it out of their hair.
II.
Three weeks after the bubblegum fiasco, Olivia was forced to admit that solving cases with the help of Dr. Bishop and her favourite snarky research assistant was a lot more entertaining than investigating the occurrences by herself. Although, at times the cases were even more stressful with Walter's angry outbursts than they would be if it were merely Olivia and Esther in Olivia's one room office. As it was, Olivia had carved out an unofficial desk for herself in a small corner of the office, just slightly out of view of Peter Bishop's piano. There was a very strategically placed line of phials and apothecary flasks that kept him from noticing if she was more paying attention to him playing jazz (which she was slowly beginning to like -- not that she was planning on telling Peter that) than she was filling out her paperwork. If he noticed her staring occasionally, he said nothing. But, whether he was playing coy or merely liked to see her flustered, he still flirted outrageously during the day and merely tipped his hat to her at night before placing his coat over his arm and heading for the door. Olivia often imagined that she could hear trumpets softly playing as he walked out the door, but when she would shake her head to clear the sound, there was nothing. It was, she concluded, merely a side-effect of seeing too many of those cop dramas that were becoming increasingly popular at the local cinemas.
What with the strange cases people kept coming to Private Investigator Olivia Dunham to have solved, and with Peter's flirting, and Walter's unpredictable tempers, Olivia often felt she was walking on a precipice where on one side was a swimming pool filled with double-edged razorblades and shards of glass and on the other side was that same pine coffin filling with water that had almost claimed her life a mere month before. Olivia felt like she was living with stress 24/7 and she knew that if something didn't happen soon, she would inevitably fall apart in a messy way that not even the world's biggest mop would be able to clean up.
Olivia allowed her head to thunk against her work desk. Peter had long since left for the night and Dr. Bishop was off doing who knew what in one of the back rooms, and Olivia, for all her patience and endurance, wanted nothing more than to hit something. She kept following every case and solving each one in turn, but she felt like there was something larger connecting all the cases and she was missing it, and if she could only think of the problem for a few seconds more, she could figure it out. But she always thought for as long as she could until her brain felt like it would explode, and the answer still never came. The answer was always there, just out of her reach, and she was frustrated and tired and angry and she just wanted something to happen, though she couldn't figure out what event it could be.
"Need a fresh set of eyes?" came a familiar, friendly voice from her left and Olivia lifted her head to look at Esther Figglesworth. Olivia inwardly sighed, and allowed herself a small smile. Esther had joined with the rest of the group two days into the investigation of the vanishing people and had hit it off right away with both Walter and Peter. With Peter, she was a cute, smiling, innocent, young woman who was quick with research and had always had Olivia's back. With Walter, she was the same, plus able to deal with his moods. When Olivia had asked Esther how she bore the older man for more than five minutes at a time, Esther responded, "Well, mental patients need lots of patience, right? Why should geniuses be any different? Only the assistance he requires is different. Mental patients need help to live their lives. Walter just needs help to take his ego down a peg and make sure he doesn't make morally ambiguous choices. I'm happy to do it!" And from there, Esther had walked over to Walter as he was about to experiment on a gerbil for no foreseeable reason and smacked him across the hand, taking his scalpel and moving it to a high shelf where he couldn't get at it, giving him a stern look to finish off the reprimand. Walter pouted but didn't dare yell at Esther as he would have done Peter or Olivia. Esther had barely left the lab since and seemed so much a part of the fixture that Olivia was slightly ashamed to admit that she sometimes forgot that Esther was there. But, when Olivia was in the mood she was in on the day spoken of, there was no one she loved more than Esther.
"How about a fresh brain instead?" Olivia asked, taking her reading glasses off and rubbing her eyes. "I've been over these case files fifty times today and I can't find anything to give us an overarching reason for these attacks. I know there must be a pattern connecting all these incidents somewhere, but I'm just not seeing it. I'm beginning to think it may be something Dr. Bishop and Peter might have to figure out. Maybe there's a hidden math pattern or something."
"Or maybe your brain is just fried," Esther suggested, leaning against the desk and crossing her arms as she stared down her nose at Olivia's upturned face. "Take a five minute break and go for a walk or something."
"It's Boston in the middle of February," Olivia reminded Esther. "It's freezing and you know how I hate to go out in the cold if I don't have to do."
"True," Esther responded. Olivia's friend's eyes lit up suddenly and she stuck her hand in the pocket of her lab coat and pulled out a large yellow spool with a thin piece of string in the middle. "Here, play with this," Esther encouraged.
"I'm not one much for knitting," Olivia stated in confusion, wondering if the odd shape of the spool was some new fashion trend for knitters that she had somehow missed.
"It's not for knitting, Olivia," Esther said, in a tone which indicated she felt Olivia was being deliberately stupid. "It's one of Walter's inventions. He called it a yo-yo. He introduced me to it the other day while you and Peter were out grabbing dinner for us. It's fun and, more importantly, it's relaxing. It might help you decompress a bit, since you refuse to go home."
Olivia stared at the yellow object in Esther's hand for a moment before reaching out and grabbing it. She suddenly had an image of pink goop all over her face and hoped she wasn't in for a repeat performance.
"So, what do I do with it?" Olivia asked, staring at the yo-yo as though it might spring to life and dance in her palm if she waited long enough.
Esther moved around to Olivia's side and took the yo-yo from her hand. "Okay, first you take your middle finger and stick it through this little hole so that it stays connected to your finger," Esther instructed, taking Olivia's hand and putting the string in the appropriate place. "Then, you allow gravity to work its magic on the string and spool and watch as the string unwinds and the spool of yo-yo falls. When you feel the tension mount towards the bottom, you flick your wrist back up and the impulse-momentum will cause the string to retract and draw the spool back up towards your hand." Despite her instructions, the spool merely got to the end of the string and stopped with dead weight at the bottom.
Esther took the string from Olivia's hand, wound the string back around the spool, and demonstrated again, watching as Olivia's eyes followed the yo-yo in fascination. Esther then returned the yo-yo to Olivia and told her to try again. It took five more attempts, but Olivia finally managed to get the yo-yo to go down and then return to her hand. Esther gave a light chuckle in delight and went to go grab another yo-yo of her own. By the time she returned, Olivia was staring at the wall, the yo-yo moving down from her palm and back up the string to return to its destination over and over again, Olivia doing the action on auto-pilot.
"So, still need a fresh set of eyes? Or a new brain? Anything I can help with?" Esther ventured, her hand playing with a blue yo-yo and moving in opposite time with Olivia's yellow one.
"I think that would help a lot," Olivia confessed, her voice less stressed and her eyes a little less tired and her smile a lot less strained. And she and Esther remained that way -- yo-yos bouncing, Esther leaning on the desk, Olivia in the chair, and their voices trading theories and motives -- long into the night.
III.
Two weeks later, Olivia leaned back in her chair, allowing the kinks in her back to snap themselves out and back into place one by one as she stretched out like a cat, complete with a jaw popping yawn, and propped her feet up on her desk. She was exhausted, emotionally and physically, from the latest case involving the abduction of small children, and she knew the best thing she could do would be to go home and take a long-needed rest. But the honest truth was that she just couldn't seem to get her brain to quiet down. Children had been tortured for no other reason than for a man's sick pleasure, and if a worried Rachel Norris -- a drop dead gorgeous Rita Hayworth look-alike and devoted mother -- had not come to see her because she didn't trust the track record of Boston PD in finding lost children then...well, there would six or seven more children raped, tortured, and murdered than there should ever be. Olivia and Peter had found the children after a sleepless 48 hour search, but while they had saved their lives, the children would be scarred forever in ways that Olivia could do nothing to fix. And if there was one thing Olivia couldn't stand, it was a problem without a resolution that she could provide. And it was this guilt that had her sitting with her feet propped on her desk, the sound of Glen Miller's In the Mood playing in the background on the Victrola. Walter was currently trying to create a sugary concoction that could make whistling noises and Esther was humming quietly while washing out the beakers that housed Walter's many experiments. Olivia refused to let her mind wander to what location it was that Peter had escaped.
She seemed to have hit an impasse with the young research assistant and former con artist. While they still flirted on a daily basis, he had made no advancements towards her since their dance together the day after they met. In truth, they rarely spoke unless it was case related, and even then it was more of Peter and Walter discussing while she listened on and tried to follow half of the words they said. Peter Bishop was a virtual stranger to her, but she was curious about him and she wanted to understand him if for no other reason than that everything else in her world was now topsy-turvy and she wanted to feel as though she had conquered one part of the insanity.
In addition, she couldn't get that image out of Walter's sketchpad out of her head. In the beginning, she hadn't paid it much thought. It was another of the inventions that Walter had stolen from children and yet another one of thousands of his creations that she had yet to experience. But she kept seeing the sketchpad in the following weeks that she worked with the two men, and though the image it portrayed was odd and invasive, she was curious as well. She couldn't decide whether it looked pleasant or uncomfortable, and as such she often found herself staring at the image in her off-hours, wondering about the mechanics of it and what the purpose of the invention was supposed to be.
"Looks a lot like dancing, doesn't it?" came Peter's voice from just over her left shoulder and Olivia felt herself jump slightly. She sent him a glare when she had composed herself and lowered the sketchpad (which she had been gazing at all night) onto her lap, leaning her chair back on its hind legs and enjoying the daredevil moment where her chair tried to find the perfect balance between gravity and defiance so she could stare up at Peter's face without lifting her head.
"It looks...odd," Olivia admitted, her eyes watching the two people involved and their expressions and she wondered if anyone could really be that happy or peaceful. "I mean, I can tell that it's supposed to be enjoyable and comfortable. It's just that the placing of the arms and the proximity of the bodies look as though they should make one feel claustrophobic."
"It's called a 'hug.' That's what Walter calls it anyway. I would call it an 'embrace' myself. Sounds more fitting -- to bring in and hold tight. 'Hug' sounds like a nonsense word if you ask me."
"I don't care what you call it," Olivia contested, putting her chair down on all four legs and standing up to face him, crossing her arms as she did so. "It looks awkward."
"How would you know? You've never tried it," Peter reminded her, lifting one eyebrow at her and his mouth curving to the right in a half-smile. He then opened his arms to her. Olivia merely stared at him.
"What?" she asked, incredulously.
Peter shrugged his shoulders, his arms still open. "I'm a scientist. We experiment. Come on, Dunham. You can help further a scientific study. 'Are embraces awkward or pleasurable?'"
Olivia was silent still a moment longer, still skeptical and uneasy with the situation.
"Seriously," Peter wheedled to her, giving her the smirk that she was positive he knew would make her agree to almost anything, "it's just like dancing, only we don't have to worry about stepping on each others feet."
Olivia, still slightly anxious and unsure, stepped forward and stood chest to chest with Peter. She then, so slowly that an onlooker would think she would bolt any second, began to move her arms underneath of Peter's outstretched ones and reached around his upper back to pull him to her, instinctively moving her head to the side to rest against his chest while his hands came behind her back and spanned the length of her shoulders, holding her to him. For the first few seconds, Olivia was afraid to breathe and it was just as awkward as she had feared it would be and she wondered why any child would dream of this action and consider it a good thing. Then, her body forced her to take a breath and she was breathing in the scent of cologne and sweat and chemicals that was Peter, and she heard the steady clanging of his glass heart against the metal of his chest in a steady rhythm, and felt the whispers of his breath against the top of her head, and she felt calmer than she had since before the child abduction case had started. Suddenly, though her memory of the case hadn't faded, she felt safe and warm and her body suddenly began to feel an aching tiredness -- but it was the good sort of ache that came from doing hard work and doing it well.
After a few moments, she felt Peter's arms start to loosen from behind her and she stepped away, ignoring the burst of cold that came with so doing. Peter's eyes searched her face for a moment, looking for something that Olivia wasn't sure of, and he gave a small smile.
"So, what's the conclusion, Dunham?"
"Both. I think. It *was* awkward, just as I had said. But there was a strange sort of comfort from the experience as well, though I can't say if the feeling would be the same if I embraced each and every person I met. I would assume with some people an embrace would be either all awkward or all pleasurable."
"Well, a real scientist repeats an experiment over and over. I guess this just means you'll need to find more data to work with, Dunham," he told her, propping his hat up on his head in just such a way that it hid one eye in shadow, and then threw his thick duster on over his usual attire. "Let me know what data the different trials you perform accumulate for ya'," he said, already turning his back toward her and walking out the door of the lab, his hands stuck in his duster pockets and a smile evident in his voice. Olivia once again heard trumpets blowing a soft jazz in the background. She shook her head. They were gone.
IV.
Olivia Dunham hated both the Bishops, of that she was certain. She had woken up with a migraine, gotten paid to do a case that couldn't wait, gotten yelled at by Lieutenant Broyles when said case interfered with a case that he was working on as Chief of Police, missed both lunch and dinner, and now, to top the day off, she was soaking wet. And all because of one of Dr. Walter Bishop's experiments. And it wasn't even related to the case!
The first day of the investigation had ended with no leads and with Olivia having a strained relationship with the Boston PD (not that she was ever really on good terms with them), and Olivia wanted nothing more than to get Peter to hit the local jazz bar for a couple of drinks before she went home and curled into bed to sleep for a solid six hours. Instead, she had walked into the lab and found herself in a downpour. For the first few seconds, she had stood in shock, totally at a loss. While river-effect showers were not totally out of the question and could bring a rainstorm on a day that had a sky as blue as the ocean, they usually occurred *outside* and not in Dr. Bishop's lab. It was only after her fedora was thoroughly drenched through and the rim drooping over her forehead, her duster collecting beads of water at the ends and dripping into puddles at her feet, that she realised the sprinkler system had at some point been activated. She glanced around the lab and saw no evidence of a prior fire, and no sign of the scientists or Esther.
The sprinklers shut off after about a minute and a half of Olivia standing in the doorway, and she quickly started shivering, not only because of the cold, but also because of the damp. It was only mid-March and between being wet and having just stepped in from out of doors, Olivia was quickly beginning to feel that she might get hypothermia if she didn't find some dry clothes. Her breath was already beginning to come out in puffs of smoke before her and she crossed her arms over her chest on the off-chance that anyone came across her; no reason to advertise to the world how cold she was.
"Esther! Peter! Dr. Bishop!" Olivia called, suddenly worried as to where the rest of her team had disappeared, and wondered if the sprinklers going off was supposed to be some warning to her from Walter. The man was always trying to give her hints using clues and anecdotes that went over her head, and the man was just insane enough that he would think that sprinklers going off would mean something to her in a crisis.
"Miss Dunham!" came Walter's excited voice from the other side of the lab table. Walter then lowered his umbrella (camouflaged to match the colour of the tabletop), his body totally dry except for his ankle cuffs, which were completely soaked. "What do you think of my newest invention? Well, not the design. That's old of course, but seeing it in the flesh!" he exclaimed, his arms moving all over the place in his excitement.
"I'm pretty sure I've seen ceiling sprinklers many times before, Walter," Olivia said, her jaw slightly clenched, both in exasperation and to keep her teeth from chattering.
"No, no, no. That's not the experiment. I had to create a habitat for it -- " Walter began to explain, and Olivia felt her insides clench in fear. Create a habitat? There was an animal in the lab?! With a rain forest climate?! What had Walter brought in, a lion? Olivia's eyes immediately began to dart around, searching for a large animal that could bite her throat out at any given moment. It would be just like Walter to think it was adorable and assume that Olivia would be just as intrigued by it.
"-- but to see it requires refracting light off clear water particles, and since there is no rain in the forecast for weeks, I had to resort to my own means." Olivia breathed a sigh of relief as Walter finished his sentence. From the sound of it, he was merely growing a new type of mold or the like, something that required damp and light. She could live with mold -- even mold with special powers, so long as it didn't rip her throat out.
She was relieved, but she was hating the Bishops. Both of them. Walter for creating this experiment that would make her catch pneumonia and Peter for not suffering through it with her. He got off scot-free with Esther somewhere, while she was stuck with her clothes soaked through and her teeth chattering. She knew she never should have gotten out of bed that morning.
"And there it is," said Walter, his voice taking on a quiet, reverent tone. "Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? I mean, it was lovely in theory, when the image was only in my head, but this is...a work of art. What a beauty! Don't you think so, my dear?"
Olivia stared at the image emblazoned on the white wall that Walter was also viewing. The light was shining in through the windowpanes that were just visible towards the top of the ceiling, shining light through the mist left by the sprinklers, spraying colours of red, orange, yellow, indigo, green, blue, and violet across the white walls. What made the sight even more miraculous was that if she turned her head and faced the window, the colours disappeared entirely, despite the fact that there was still sunlight and mist in the room.
"What is it, Walter?" Olivia asked in awe, her discomfort temporarily forgotten in the beautiful oddness her eyes were trying to digest.
"I already showed you the theory when we met, dear. Don't you remember? It's a rainbow. A spectrum of colours created by just the right blend of refracted light and water molecules. And it has never been seen by a living being until the two of us, my dear."
For the next few minutes, Olivia sat staring at her breath, Walter writing his notes on his experiment in a fast hand next to her side. When the rainbow faded, she knew she would go back to hating Dr. Bishop until she was warm again, but for now she had to admit, sitting next to him as she was, that this particular experiment was pretty damn brilliant.
V.
On Olivia's first case as a private investigator, she had made a rookie mistake and gotten caught by the person she was tailing. The assignment had been simple: an employee had been suspected of selling trade secrets to a competitor and her job was to follow him for a few days and see if he contacted anyone. What she hadn't expected was that the competitor that was buying the secrets from the traitorous employee would turn out to be her boyfriend, John Scott. She also hadn't expected that he would be willing to put a gun to her head to use her as a hostage to get away from the Boston PD if the situation so required of him.
The cops hadn't even tried to save her, leaving her to wrestle with the ropes binding her hands. She would never forget the sense of utter abandonment she felt as the man she loved placed a cold gun barrel to her temple and the cops merely stared coldly at her, waiting for the chance to take a shot at the man using her as a human shield. In that situation, Olivia Dunham did what would later become habit for her in life -- she took care of herself. She elbowed him in the stomach, knocked the gun to the side and away from her head, noting the loud cracking sound it made as it went off, and kneed John in the groin while elbowing him in the temple. It was only after the cops had cuffed him and were leading him away that she became aware of a stinging pain in her forearm and realised that the bullet had grazed her as it flew by. Olivia had gone to Esther's (who was merely a friend, not an employee yet at that time), and drank five glasses of an expensive single malt whiskey while Esther stitched the wound with a needle and thread, before crashing on Esther's couch.
She had gotten away from the ordeal just fine, if a little bit more hard-hearted than she had initially been. She had survived, and she was stronger for it, and life had gone on. But that didn't stop the nightmares. It had been five years since John Scott had shown his true colours, but there were nights when she still dreamt that his gun was to her head. Sometimes, she couldn't save herself, sometimes the cops shot her while trying to rescue her, and sometimes everyone she knew and loved just watched as John squeezed the trigger. She always awoke to the gunshot blasting in her ears and it was always a couple of minutes before she could hear again. The nights when the dreams came usually ended up being early mornings of strong, black coffee with a shot of bourbon thrown in for good measure. They were few and far between and she could cope with a few sleepless nights here and there. That didn't mean she lacked in wishing for them to go away.
One day, as she walked into the lab, it was to see Esther pouring salt into a metal tank that had always stood quietly near the upper section of the lab. As Esther poured the salt in, Olivia heard a distinct splash of liquid and couldn't help but wonder what crazy experiment Walter had in mind this time.
"What's this?" Olivia asked, her voice failing to mask her amused state, her minding bringing up images of Walter trying to create saltwater taffy or some other confection that would require a huge vat of saltwater.
"It's a repeat experiment of Walter's. Apparently, he does this periodically," Esther told her, once again meticulously weighing another shovel full of salt to make sure it was just the right amount. "He told me earlier that it used to be how he extracted dreams from children. Now, he uses it to extract dreams from his own consciousness, or from willing participants. He calls it his own personal 'Dream Prognostication Machine.'"
"So, when he extracts these dreams, what happens? Do the children ever remember them or are they just gone?"
"They disappear because the memories the brain uses to bring about those images get buried. They're not taken away because that could cause suppression of something very important to a child's psyche, but they get pushed down to where the child doesn't actively think of the subject. Walter said to think of it as a visit to a subconscious psychologist."
"I'm guessing you asked him about the effects yourself, huh?"
"Of course," Esther replied, putting the salt shovel back in the bucket and closing the doors to the tank.
"Walter told me to let you know that you're free to use the tank if you wish. I think he's secretly hoping you will because he probably thinks you have some really awesome invention ideas in your head that you're not aware of."
Olivia thought seriously for a couple of moments.
"I'll pass. Thanks."
"You're sure?" Esther pried, both her eyebrows lifting in tandem as she considered her older friend and employer. "I know there is at least one memory in that head of yours that still causes you some pain. You know Walter wouldn't mind helping you get rid of it."
"I'm positive, thanks. They might be painful memories, but they're mine. We all have to have something to drive us, right?" Olivia countered, a smile on her face to show that she wasn't angry at Esther's suggestion.
Esther smiled in response and nodded, apparently accepting Olivia's decision with no further argument. If anything, it seemed as though she approved and was happy that Olivia had decided to pass up the opportunity. She gave her employer a brief pat on the shoulder as she passed by her and continued about her preparations for Walter's experiment. Olivia merely sighed and stared contemplatively at the tank. She was willing to try out a lot of new things for this wacky team of hers, but there were few precious things in her life (both possession-wise and relationship-wise), and she knew it would be a long time before she was willing to give anything up, even if it was more painful to hold onto it than to let it go.
VI.
It had been a good day. That was a rare thing in the life of Olivia Dunham and her small investigative team that she had unofficially assembled over the last three months. There was no case to work, so Olivia had merely sat around the lab, catching up on paperwork for her personal files and watched the lab experiments and crazy antics of her three closest friends. Esther and Peter had spent most of the day around Peter's piano, the top of it removed and fiddling with the wires, trying to see if there was any way to rig it to play itself. Olivia didn't have the heart to tell them that trick had been used in films for years already. It would hardly be groundbreaking science. Esther and Peter were enjoying themselves and it seemed so rare a sight for her to see, so she let them get on with it in any case.
Walter had been even more silent than Olivia. He had been sitting at his lab table, his trusty sketch book open in his lap. Unlike when Walter usually sketched, this particular etching seemed to be giving him trouble. He was mumbling to himself and continuously erasing sections of the drawing, pulling out pieces of paper and balling them up and starting over. At one point, he had thrown the sketch pad across the room and Olivia had been afraid that he was about to have a total meltdown. Instead, Walter had maneuvered his wheelchair over to the pad, dusted off the image, and started again. By late in the evening, however, he seemed to have figured out what he was trying to do with the sketch and was smiling softly to himself as he went, drawing carefully and with a lightness in his hand movements, as though the image were a small child that would wake if he pressed down on its lines too hard.
Olivia took a moment to shift her eyes from Walter back to Esther and Peter with a smile. Things had finally started progressing with the younger of the two scientists. He had taken her out to dinner a couple of times and still was willing to dance with her (despite his claimed hatred of the activity), and she had even found herself enjoying listening to John Coltrane and Duke Ellington, though she still couldn't quite seem to understand Peter's love of Louis Armstrong, no matter how hard she tried. She even found herself holding his hand sometimes in the lab without her knowledge -- one second they would be standing side by side, not touching, and the next his fingers would be interlaced with hers as though they had been there the whole time. And, as she had quietly admitted to him one night as they were dancing to Gershwin's Someone to Watch Over Me in her apartment, she quite enjoyed hugging as well, especially if it was his arms surrounding her.
Yes, Olivia was quite happy with this little circle of friends/family that she had fashioned for herself. And with the exception of the increasingly grotesque cases people kept throwing at her doorstep, and the occasional experiment of Walter's that would go horribly awry, she felt happier and more safe than she could remember having felt since she was child and her abusive step-father had ended up in the middle of the river with cement overshoes (but that had been a temporary feeling of safety that had disappeared when she realised there were even worse people in the world than her step-father).
Olivia was pulled from her musings by a triumphant shout from Walter. "Ah-hah!" he said, slapping his hands vehemently against his armrests in accomplishment, his manic smile lighting up his entire aged face. "I've done it, Peter," he continued, barely containing his joy as the younger scientist came down to join his employer with that ever-present smirk on his face. "I've created my best invention yet, and purely from my own genius. It's more beautiful than the rainbow, more intimate than the hug, harder to get the ingredients right on than the perfect taffy --"
"We get it, Walter," Peter interrupted, throwing his hand up as though he could physically stop the flow of words from Walter's mouth. "It's a difficult creation. You're proud of it. Can we see it?"
Walter handed the drawing to Peter who stared at it for a good few minutes before blushing slightly and putting the image down, scratching behind his ear in a way he often did when he was struck speechless.
"Well, you were right about it being intimate," Peter said and Olivia felt her mind wonder what the image was showing. It couldn't be sex, for knowledge of that act was already well known to her (her parents had been forced to create her some way after all), and therefore it wasn't Walter's creation. What could be so much more intimate that Peter would blush to think about it?
Olivia snuck closer to the two Bishop boys and snuck a look at the image, feeling her stomach drop. It certainly did look intimate. It showed a couple -- a man and woman in this case, though Olivia assumed it could be same gender if a person wished -- with their faces stuck together at the lips. Olivia wrinkled her brow in confusion. The action didn't seem to make much sense. For one, how could one breathe when their mouths were fused in such a fashion? And two, what possible enjoyment could one get from it? Olivia's mouth was getting more saliva within it just looking at the picture and she didn't see how adding someone else's saliva to the mix would be very appealing. And yet...there had to be *something* good about the thought because seeing the image was making something in Olivia's stomach clench as her mind associated the image with all things Peter, and it wasn't an altogether unpleasant sensation.
"What do you call it, Walter?" Olivia asked, trying not to make her thoughts too obvious and wanting to keep the conversation in neutral territory for just a few more seconds.
"I call it a 'kiss.' Because I think it will be just as irresistible as those little Hershey chocolates," Walter answered, his hand picking up a spare chocolate resting on the table in front of him.
"Do you want to try it?" Olivia asked Peter, unaware beforehand that the words were about to come flying out of her mouth. By the time she realised what was happening, it was too late to stop them. And anyway, she reasoned to herself, they had already hugged (which was way more intimate than any sex she had participated in up to that point), so how much more intimate could a kiss be?
Peter raised his eyebrows in slight surprise (as he was usually the one encouraging her to try something new and not the other way around). But, after a few seconds in which he apparently weighed the pros and cons, he nodded his head. Walter clapped his hands in excitement and stared at the two of them, anxious to see what conclusions the experiment could have and to see whether this action would truly be his best invention, as he hoped it would be.
Peter leaned in towards Olivia, his hands clenching into fists and un-clenching again over and over, as though they weren't sure what to do with themselves. When Peter's lips first collided with Olivia's, the only thought of which she was certain was that 'kisses' were very wet, though not slobbery. It was an odd sensation to be sure, and she fretted for a brief second over what to do with her hands before finally just resting them against his chest, pressing against him slightly for balance. Peter pulled away after a few seconds, and she thought that would be it, but he seemed to be more curious than she had given him credit for and started to move his lips slightly. He first moved them so that they caressed her upper lip before lowering them to caress the bottom, separating her lips from their previously closed position, finally settling his lips once again in the center, but with her mouth more open so she could feel the heat of his mouth against hers. His hands, before clenching nervously, were now framing her face, tilting her head in different directions as his mouth explored. His teeth were occasionally scraping against her lips, but instead of being painful it caused a pleasurable shiver to skate down her spine and her body involuntarily moved closer to his, her hips jerking forward to connect with his while her hands left his chest to find his hair and bring his head closer to her own (as though they could get any closer). It wasn't until she realised that this kissing activity didn't allow for oxygen (which her body began to tell her it desperately needed) that she backed away from Peter. Olivia once again heard jazz trumpets as Peter smiled softly at her from beneath his fedora, but she told herself that if the trumpets were indeed real and not just in her head, the sound suited him so she should stop trying to get rid of it.
Walter was beyond ecstatic. If the flush coating both Peter and Olivia's face and neck were any indicators, he announced to the room, then his invention was indeed a success.
"I don't know, Walter," Peter said, an apologetic tone obvious in his voice. "One test subject isn't enough to make a verifiable conclusion. You have to run repeated trials and come to the same conclusion each time. Once could just be an aberration."
Olivia unwittingly grabbed Peter's hand and interlaced their fingers, drawing his attention back to her as she smiled coyly at him in a way she knew made him as unsteady as his smug smirk made her. "Well, we could always try again."
"What?" Peter asked, and Olivia inwardly smiled. She knew her forwardness was making him extremely off-balanced, and she would be lying if she said she didn't like it.
"Well, you're a scientist. This is an experiment. 'Is a kiss a pleasurable experience and is it Walter's greatest invention?' Collect some data, and do trials as often as possible," she said, speaking in terms she knew he would understand. Her reward was the smug smile she was hoping for as Peter turned back to Walter.
"Well, Walter. I'd say you have at least two more than willing test subjects."
Peter gave Olivia's hand another small squeeze and Olivia smiled as she rested her forehead against the sleeve of Peter's duster. Yes, she was quite content indeed.