Title: Captive
Rating: PG-13
Fandom: Fringe
Pairing: Peter/Olivia heavily implied
Summary: This very somber piece takes place after the second season finale and is from Olivia's POV, I won't say more so as not to spoil anybody. Betaed by
George Stark II @ FF.net
Warning: Spoiler for Over There Part 2
Wordcount: 1301
Disclaimer: These characters are not mine, they belong to FOX and JJ Abrams etc... I'm just borrowing them, no copyright infringement intended.
A/N: Written for the Big Bang Challenge @
jjverse At some point, she started only living thanks to the memory of him.
It was silly, sure, but she couldn't remember how long she had been locked in that goddamn cell. She had tried keeping track of the time that passed, but they sometimes left her in the dark for days at a time, and she couldn’t tell when a whole day had gone by or when it had only been a few hours. They treated her like poultry, in those farms when they turned off the light to make the animals believe the sun had set so that they would lay more eggs. Except that she was not chicken, and it was just about disorientating her. They were technologically more evolved than her dimension, right, but in a way they were also so much crueler. She shouldn't be surprised, yet she was. She wondered if Oliv'nate, as she called her dopplegangler, was taking part in her suffering. For some reason, she could picture the red-headed version of her sitting at a table or talking to the Other Broyles about the new things they would inflict upon her. She had read it in her eyes when she had met her. The other her was a major bitch.
As she stayed awake for hours, getting too weak most days to do anything but stare at the wall in front of her, Olivia thought about the man she had come to find in this universe, and that she had ultimately lost a second time when they left her behind. Peter was one of her only clear memories. Sometimes she would remember something Walter had done, or the way he would heat up when he got caught up in what he was explaining, but the rest of the time Peter was always on her mind, whether she was awake or sleeping.
The last time she had seen him, she wished she had known that it was indeed the last. She would have done more than kiss him. Or maybe she would have done just that. She pondered it a lot. One kiss, an embrace? Would she have let it go further? She was a big girl, she was not afraid of sex. She had gotten apart from him after their kiss, trying to focus on how she was supposed to get him out of there. Yet if she had known she was never going to see him again, would the plan have mattered as much?
This was a fake debate if she was honest. Even if she had known, she still would have stuck to one passionate kiss, because getting him out was more important. She took comfort in knowing that wherever he was, he was with his father, the one who had loved him so much he had tried to cure him of a disease and intended to give him back to his real parents. Walter was more than worthy of Peter, Walternate was not, as he had proven himself to be. Yeah, Peter was better off, wherever he was. They could treat her as badly as they wanted, she could hold on to that thought.
She sometimes wondered why they hadn't killed her. It would have been so much simpler, she wouldn't need to worry anymore about how many days had gone by since they had locked her up. Perhaps it was exactly why they were keeping her alive: torture. They were not above that.
So she tried to stop caring about them, which meant than in addition to seeing him whenever she was alone, she also started acting on her hallucinations. Had she forgotten to mention that she saw him? She did. At first it was just whenever she closed her eyes, but the more they kept her in that small padded cell, the more she saw him. He would smile at her, never speaking. She could remember his voice, vividly, but she never heard him speak in her hallucinations. It was probably because he was too unpredictable, she wouldn't have been able to imagine what he would say to her. She loved his mind, and how twisted it could be. The only thing she could rely on was the fact that if he were ever to speak to her, he would speak her name the way he always did, "'Livia," cutting the O off, and making it sound like a caress.
He was basically the only thing keeping her alive nowadays. It felt weird. Sure, she had very strong feelings for him before, but the John-episode had been too tough on her heart. She hadn't thought she would ever be ready to love again, and most importantly to trust again. She had wanted Peter, had liked his mind and what he made her feel, but she wasn't in love, just very, very infatuated. She had known Peter Bishop could be very dangerous to her poor recovering heart, even before their Jacksonville encounter, even before she had turned off the red lights with her mind. When they had locked her up there, they had freed her in a way. There was no ultimate betrayal that went beyond that, and Peter had been no part of it. She could trust him with her soul. He was not running away anymore, he was ready to come back home with her, because he agreed they belonged together. She often wondered where they would be now if she hadn't been captured... Maybe they wouldn't have made it in the long run, maybe they would have. In her mind, she was with him every day, or he was with her... Who cared? Those were just semantics.
He was the key to her survival. She talked to him during the day, longing for the time when she would be able to hear her name spoken by him again. She would see him everywhere, and speak to him. It didn't really keep her sane, but at least she felt like she still had a purpose, something to get her though the day. She also had silent companionship, defeating her captors’ purpose: she was not alone.
One day, her hallucination finally spoke. She hadn't been expecting it; she was just telling him about her theory on Oliv'nate, that nasty bitch, who had to be some kind of weird masochist that made herself suffer by proxy, when he suddenly spoke, telling her to come with him.
She could barely stand still on her feet, too much inactivity had atrophied her muscles but she did. She felt like singing, the joy of her name on his lips almost too strong to keep in. But he kept on insisting, talking so much when her mind had kept this silent image of him with her for so long, she just couldn't not do as he said.
When she had tried to follow him, her legs had almost given out on her, and she fell forward. Before she found herself on the floor, he had ducked to catch her, and she suddenly realized how much weight she had lost. She was not supposed to look so frail compared to him. Then again they didn't feed her every day. He had tucked her in his arms and started running. With her head against his shoulder, she thought that her mind must really have been stronger than she’d thought. She knew it had been a very long time, maybe years since she had been captured, yet suddenly her nose remembered what he smelt like. It was unexpected, but so good. She thought that this new and improved hallucination was a gift from God. It couldn't be real, could it? And if it wasn't, then maybe she was dying. She didn't care, as long as he kept talking in her ear and his smell filled her nose.