Title: Snow in a Field of White Tulips
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Just by looking at the amount of the boxes and the care that had been taken by sealing them and making sure they would survive decades of dirt and rot, he knew who Subject 13 was.
Author's Note: This is my first multi-chapter Fringe fic. It's set some time after Subject 13 and it does include spoilers for that episode. So if you haven't seen it, don't read the fic :)

.

.

When he had agreed to help move and catalog the boxes from the Jacksonville day care center, Peter hadn't known what he had gotten himself into. The shipment to the Harvard lab had come in late the afternoon before, so the fifty two boxes still sat scattered around the entrance area of the lab. The labels had come off most of them, some had water damage from an unknown occurrence while others had fallen victim to the curious assaults of mice and rats.

While Walter was indulging himself in some experiment he didn't even want to ask about, Peter was moving boxes, shifting contents from cardboard boxes into plastic containers, all the while labeling them properly and cataloging every single item he had come across.

Fifty two boxes that all had to do with the Cortexiphan trials in Jacksonville. Fifty two boxes that contained the reasons of why sixteen children had their lives changed in a daycare center in Florida. And one of those children was Olivia. Peter knew that within these boxes, he would inadvertently find traces of her and discover what Walter had done to her that neither he nor Olivia could remember. Since most of the files, tapes and other items he had found in the boxes were labeled with subject numbers rather than actual names, he felt relieved. While part of him wanted to know what had been done to Olivia, what had changed her that made her tick the way she does, part of him rather wanted not to.

So he just kept on shuffling things, assigning item numbers to boxes and containers that each had been labeled with year and a subject number…. until he reached a stack of plastic containers that each had two words written on them in black marker. Subject 13. Just by looking at the amount of the boxes and the care that had been taken by sealing them and making sure they would survive decades of dirt and rot, he knew who Subject 13 was.

For a long moment, he just stared at the boxes in front of him, trying to decide what to do with them. He couldn't just open them, take the contents outside and catalog them, pretending he didn't care about what he was holding in his hands. When it came to Olivia, everything was different - because he did care deeply about her. For an hour, he succeeded in pushing those four boxes out of his mind while he sorted through different boxes, different files and different people's life. But the nagging still remained, the nagging that Subject 13 had been so special that she had required not only one but four boxes of her own.

He didn't really know whether he was going to open them or not when he hauled them into the empty office at the back of the lab. He just knew that they needed to be separated from the rest. Whatever he was cataloging at the moment would eventually go into the Massive Dynamic archives, and he didn't want Subject 13 to end up as another box of files, notes and tapes in some dark and lonely underground archive. Subject 13 wasn't just a number to him. Subject 13 was the woman he loved.

Peter didn't know how long he sat in that chair, elbows on his knees and rubbing his cheeks while just silently staring at the boxes that sat near the door, one stacked on top of the other. Tempted to call Olivia, he had reached for his cell phone twice, but always had placed it back in his pocket before making the call. There inside those boxes lay Olivia's past, a past she couldn't remember, and maybe also a past she didn't want to remember. A past he wasn't so sure he wanted to know about either. Whatever had happened in that daycare center in Jacksonville lay inside those boxes, and once opened, there was no going back ever to not knowing. Peter was staring at not only one but at four Pandora's boxes.

And he wasn't going to open any of them, at least not now without Olivia being there. He would go home that day and tell her what he had found and then they would decide together what they wanted to do about them. It was for Olivia to decide whether they would remain sealed, whether he would go through them alone or if they would do it together and whether they would end up in the Massive Dynamic archive with the rest of the trial material. Until then, these boxes would be locked away.

So Peter got up and placed his hands on the top box, trying to move the entire stack to the back of the office so it could be hidden behind other boxes where no one would look for them until they had figured out their fate. He kicked the bottom box lightly which caused it to slide across the floor for about a foot, taking the three boxes on top with it. He managed to move them about halfway through the lab until he accidentally hit the edge of the table and the weakened construction of one plastic container on top of the other began to sway. Frantically, he reached for the two boxes in the middle to keep them from falling, but the one sitting on top slid further across the edge and came crashing down onto the floor.

Papers went flying across the room, a couple video tapes slid under the table and a stack of photos spilled from the box. Without even looking at any of it, he pushed the papers and the photos back into the folders they had fallen out of before he reached for the box and sat it upright on the floor to place the precious contents back inside.

That was when he saw what was peeking up from the very bottom of that box – a couple of drawing pads. The one most visible to him had a cover that had been artistically colored by a young child. Colorful flowers were drawn on the yellow cardboard and six letters had been scribbled among them. O – L – I – V – I – A. Even before he realized what he was doing, he was holding the first sketch pad in his hands, his fingers tracing the red, blue and green letters that made up her name. Those scribbles, the way her name was written… it all looked so happy.

It was like he was drawn in by an invisible force when he flipped open to the first page. But what he saw here wasn't so happy anymore. It was as if he was staring right at the devil. A face completely colored in red, teeth that looked more like fangs of a wolf or a tiger and dark black eyes staring up at him adored the page. He didn't know what to make of it. So he flipped it over to reveal yet another image of this monster, followed by another and yet another version of this devil. It was all he found, page after page, the same gruesome face staring up at him. Shaking his head slightly, he placed the pad on the table in order to be flip open the second book he held in his hands. The pictures he saw where different. They no longer held the gruesome face that was all he had seen in the previous book. The first few pages were of animals, flowers or colorful mandalas until the sketches of people started to appear.

First, it was just a brown haired boy he saw, standing among white flowers he thought looked like tulips. Then the blonde girl appeared next to him in the pictures. First, at a distance, then closer and closer until in the last picture, they were holding hands. And in every picture that Olivia had drawn, they were standing in a field of a white tulips. It wasn't until he flipped to the last page that his fingers started to tremble and the pad almost slipped from his grip. It was the names that were written under the children that sent his heart and mind racing. The boy and the girl, holding hands and standing among the tulips, carried the names Peter and Olivia. The kids in the picture – it was them. Him and her. But he couldn't remember, and he was sure neither could she.

He dropped the pad on the table and just stared at it. Peter and Olivia…. They had met as kids, an encounter in a field of white tulips that neither of them could remember but that obviously had had such an impact on young Olivia that the pictures in her sketch book had changed from the drawings of the devil to a sweet encounter with a young boy named Peter that had made her smile again. His fingers traced the carefully drawn children, the long blond hair the girl had, the smile that was drawn across her face before they traveled to the middle of the picture, just about where their hands were locked.

It was at that very moment when an old thought began to creep up in his mind, one he hadn't had in a long time. From the very first moment he had met Olivia Dunham in that hotel in Iraq, he had felt a strange connection to her. He had never been able to explain it because he had never experienced something like that before. It hadn't been just attraction he felt towards her, it more had been as if he had known her his whole life, as if, at one point on his life, they had been one. And now seeing all these pictures, he knew why.

From the distance, he heard Walter call for him. Quickly flipping the pad closed, he flung them both back into the box, then dropped the other folders that had fallen from it on top. Within a minute, the whole stack of boxes was neatly sitting next to file cabinets. The sharpie markings were hidden towards the wall, and the boxes looked as if they had been sitting there forever. Peter looked at them, pondering, until he opened the lid of the top box again and reached for two the sketch pads at the bottom. Whatever Olivia's decision was concerning the case files concerning Subject 13, whatever was happening with them, this pad… it didn't belong with them. These pictures she had drawn as a kid, they were part of her, part of her childhood, and strangely enough, also part of his childhood.