One of laughter, one of anguish [Fringe]
One of laughter, one of anguish
Fringe//PG-13//Altlivia, Alt!Lincoln Lee, Alt!Charlie Francis
This started with sweet_anise's drabble prompt, which I then thought to expand on, and then I saw a quote on tumblr and one thing led to another.
Lincoln arrives a little later than he’d like, and manages to knock on the door. Sure, he’s a little bit nervous, but really, who wouldn’t be?
There’s a sound of locks unlatching, and then Olivia’s there eyeing him. “What’s up, delivery boy? Did your daddy lose his job and have you join ExFed?”
“You know Liv,” he hefts the box of case reports and holds it out to her. Maybe hoping that having a baby would make her less sarcastic was a little too much. “It’s not nice to make your commanding officer wait at the door.”
“Someone’s gotten bossy lately.” She grins and takes the box from him, setting it down beside the door. “That new promotion going to your head?”
“Only when the way you and Charlie says ‘boss’ sounds too much like insubordination for my tastes.” He steps inside to her apartment. It’s bigger than Lincoln expected, but then again he supposes having the Secretary of Defense paying for an apartment probably meant that it’d be pretty spacious.
“So,” Olivia closes the door behind him. “Where’s Charlie today? He didn’t pick up his phone, and I was guessing you wanted to do a double date for this.”
“Get this- he’s on a date.” Man, this apartment was loaded. Real coffee? Was a pregnant woman even supposed to have caffeine?
She raises an eyebrow. “A date? Old Scarlie with spiders inside got a date?”
“With a girl he met in a bar.” Charlie hadn’t been too forthcoming with details, which Lincoln couldn’t blame him for. “I think he said her name was Mina?”
“Mona?”
“Yeah, that sounds like her name. You know her?”
Olivia grins. Lincoln knows that look. It’s not one of her nice grins- it’s the special you’ve really got it coming now smirk that she only used when she won something. “Oh, do I know her.”
“I’m guessing she isn’t a girl he met in a bar.” He feels kind of bad for Charlie. But only a tiny, tiny bit. It’s nice to see someone else on the other end of that smirk. “So, who is she?”
“Well, she’s actually the entomologist we had to consult about the spontaneous bug eruption. But get this- she’s also the one who treated Charlie for his spider problem.”
“Everybody’s looking for someone who’ll love them inside and out?” That had to be a little weird, right? Or maybe she’s really hot. Still, having someone who liked the spiders inside your bloodstream?
“So what’s in the box? Is it a present for me?”
“If you’re offering to read through all the past case files for me, absolutely. I thought that being boss meant that I had to do less work, not more.”
“Well, maybe that’s why you got the promotion. Because you’re such a good and hard worker bee.” She’d probably say something else, but then her earpiece beeps with an incoming call. “Hold up- hello? Oh, yeah, I’m on my way. Thank you, Agent Farnsworth.”
“So, where’s the baby?”
“Sleeping in the other room.”
Now comes that hard part. Lincoln breathes in, then out. He could do this. He got a promotion, managed to deal with multiple Fringe events and got out of a Class 1 vortex.
Then Olivia walks back into the room with the baby in her arms. It- he- is awake and looking at Lincoln with those big brown eyes. Lincoln wonders if the baby’s judging him right now. “Hi, Uncle Lincoln.” She waves the baby’s arm at him.
Uncle? Well, whatever. It’d be a work in progress. “Hey there Henry.” Lincoln wonders where the name Henry came from- Lincoln is a much better name than Henry. “You and I are going to be spending some time together today.”
“You’re absolutely positive you want to do this? I can still call my mom if you too scared for this.”
He isn’t scared. “Trust me Liv, I can handle a baby for a couple of hours.” Just don’t let the baby see he’s afraid and it’d be cool. “Don’t worry about it. If I can deal with all sorts of Fringe events and the bureaucratic nightmare that my life’s turned into, he’ll be nothing.”
“Alright then. I’ll see how well you can handle for him for a couple of hours while I get these evaluations out of the way.” Olivia hands the baby to him and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Behave yourself, you two.”
Lincoln’s in a little bit of shock from the kiss- okay, maybe a lot- but he’s fast on his feet. “We’ll be perfect, no worries.”
She waves back over her shoulder, and steps out of sight onto the elevator.
“Okay.” Lincoln breathes, looks down at the bundle in his arms. It’s a lot lighter than he’d think it would be. “Hey there, buddy.”
The baby stares at him. Lincoln wonders if it recognized him at all- nah, that wasn’t possible. Babies didn’t start really remembering things till age five.
“Right, talking to a baby.” He just had to think of this like any other field exercise, only a very important exercise where the goal is to prove that he is responsible and trustworthy enough with Olivia’s baby. Besides, the little guy’s the Secretary’s grandson, so Lincoln supposes that it’d make the kid pretty important in the scheme of things.
That kiss at the door was nice.
Yeah, the kid is important.
“So, uh,” Lincoln looks around the living room. There had to be something where he could tuck in the baby for a little bit, right?
After some searching, he finds the crib in the closet besides the playpen. He sets it up on the couch, and sets the baby down in it. So far, so good.
Lincoln grabs some case files and is settled in on the couch, ready to read through a stack of reports, when the baby starts crying.
It’s really not a pleasant sound.
“Uhh, boo! It’s me, Uncle Lincoln!” That doesn’t seem to help either, and the pacifier only buys him a couple of seconds of silence. Maybe it’s feeding time.
Lincoln finds the milk formula after five minutes of searching- he half expected to find real milk, but that might’ve been too much a luxury, even for the Secretary.
Ten minutes later, the baby is making happy suckling noises as it drinks from the bottle.
This isn’t so bad after all. After Lincoln’s sure that the baby has enough milk to keep it lasted for a while, he drags the box next to his seat on the couch and flips through the case files that Colonel Broyles had to read when he was in charge of the whole show. Lincoln knows all the reasons of why he should read it- because it’s important to know about the other side, to figure out what happened, to know the details of the war and how to better defend themselves and all that gear.
But it doesn’t make it any easier to read through boxes and boxes of reports.
He starts reading a report about a case of twin girls who somehow became pyrokinetic. Weird shit happened in the world, but pyrokinesis was a new one. There’d been a girl in Central Park, the one who had almost killed him and sent him to rehab for eight weeks had done something similar. That was back when life had been simple, and right about when Olivia had been sent undercover and swapped with another Olivia.
He finds it a little hard to believe that the Olivia he had been working with for those months wasn’t really Olivia. Except that it was, only not quite entirely. It was a doppelganger, a perfect physical copy with an almost identical life to Olivia. Lincoln can’t keep referring to her as Olivia though, cause she isn’t Olivia.
Maybe…Altlivia. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.
It bothers him a little, okay, maybe a lot, that he didn’t know that Olivia had been replaced by Altlivia. Now that he knew, the little inconsistencies were glaring and obvious and he feels like an idiot. Only a little bit of it was that Charlie had been right all along.
But he’d been positive, absolutely positive that if Olivia had been replaced by a dopple, that he’d know. But she had been, and was sent off on a mission that he didn’t know about and now…
Lincoln sets the report down and scoots over to the baby. It’s sound asleep, thankfully. It’s strange to think that the one he’d lose out to would be chubby and bald.
Half an hour later, another report is finished. That was one really freaky- some poor guy had gotten decapitated and ended up somehow growing his head back. Sometimes, these cases didn’t even make sense.
Lincoln wonders if there’s another version of him on the other side as well. What’d he be like, his doppelganger? Probably not nearly as good looking or suave. Is the other Lincoln still alive? Or maybe he’s a professional filer and report reader.
Maybe he could get that version to come over and do his reading for him. Cause technically, Not-Suave Lincoln’s work should be the same as his, and no one would ever know the difference.
The baby looks so peaceful, lying there in its crib. Carefully, Lincoln lifts it out and cradles it in his arms. It’s surprising of how light it is. “Hey, Henry.”
“Remember me?” It’s not weird to talk to a baby, right? He couldn’t even understand what Lincoln’s saying, anyway. “I was the guy who helped save your mother. Me and the cabbie in a Chinese restaurant. She’ll probably leave that out of your childhood. Between you and me, I don’t think there’s anything your mom wouldn’t do for you.”
“And I guess that there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for her, either. But that’s a secret between the two of us.”
The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Lincoln’s working late and all alone.
Well, probably not all alone. He’d like to think that he is, the lone agent trying to figure out what’s up with all these reports.
But tonight, there’s a good reason for why he’s still here when everyone else is gone. There’s a stack of files, all stamped with Classified in giant blocky red letters in his bottom drawer. No eyes except for those of high enough security clearance got to see these.
Not even the Secretary knew that Lincoln had these. He’d been very careful in getting his hands on them. There had been too many of them for him to grab all at once, so he’d been carefully taking out a few at a time and swapping them with the ones he had read so no one might notice that there were missing files.
Lincoln isn’t sure if he’s going to like what he finds.
The amount is staggering. From the looks of it, this war had been going on for much longer than he had ever thought- there were files dating back all the way to the 80s in development and research in cyborgs that could cross over and change their faces.
There’s been nothing on Colonel Broyles. Maybe that’s a mercy.
He flips open another folder- a compendium on all the information about Altlivia. Her picture, habits, history- she’d been in the FBI? The FBI still existed over there? Hey, look at that- she’d been partnered with Charlie.
That Charlie didn’t have that scar running down his face. There’s more information about Charlie- loads of it.
At the back of the folder, there’s a stack of papers clipped together. They’re different from the rest- just lines of text that look like they came from a typewriter. More than a little curious, Lincoln reads through them.
Meeting prevented. Request extraction. Mission failure. Interrogate target then kill her. Target trusts me completely. She still believes I’m her partner.
She still believes I’m her partner.
Her partner was Charlie.
So what happened to Charlie?
“Something buggin’ you?”
Lincoln looks up from the coffee he’d been stirring. Black, one sugar. “Only the bugs inside you.”
“They’re not bugs-”
“They’re arachnids,” he finishes.
“Don’t give me that. Look, if something’s on your mind, if it’s any questions you’ve got about Liv, I want you to know, I’m here for you.”
Like how Charlie would be there for the other Olivia. Cause that’s what partners did. Except he wouldn’t be anymore. “I’ve got a question.”
“About Liv?”
“No,” maybe he should tell Charlie. But how does he even begin to say hey, your double in the other ’verse is dead and swapped out by a shapeshifting cyborg on orders from one of the most powerful men in the world who’s also probably also responsible for the death of Colonel Broyles?
The answer is that he doesn’t. It bothers him not to tell Charlie things, so instead, he asks “Why do you do keep doing this?”
“Do what?”
“This,” he motions at the entire scene in front of the office window. “Now that we know we’re at war with another universe which is filled with people like us- hell, with another Olivia. Why do we keep on doing this job? And don’t give me that ‘fighting for our children’, cause I know you can’t have kids, except for those spiders inside you.”
“You really wanna know why?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s simple. It’s cause I don’t wanna die.”
Lincoln doesn’t know how to tell Charlie that he’s already dead.
She’s busy feeding Henry and watching a show some guy called the Master flying through vortexes in a blue car when she gets a call from Lincoln. “What’s up boss?”
“What’d I tell you about calling me that outside of work?”
“Did you need something?”
“Uh, yeah. Wanna grab a drink with me?”
She laughs. “Is this a date?”
“Nah, just as friends.”
She saunters in and sees him in the corner, shoulders hunched, tensed and apprehensive- she reads the lines of his body as a map- she knows that this isn’t good.
“Heya there boss.” She slides into the seat next to his and orders a beer.
“Hey Liv,” his speech is a little slurred.
It’s all there in his face- dark bags under his eyes, overgrown stubble. “What’s wrong?”
He downs a shot and slides a folder stamped with Classified towards her. “Read it.”
She recognizes the first part of it- it’s a file that Newton had given her to review on the Olivia over there. It’s hard to remember that Lincoln probably still doesn’t know about everything that had happened in the other universe. Behind the file on the other Olivia, there’s a file on Charlie. Newton had mentioned him in the reports, of how one of the shifters had and then she sees the familiar block text of the Selectric 251.
Then it becomes clear why Lincoln asked her to come, and why Charlie isn’t here. “Lincoln, I-”
“Liv, we’ve been at this war for ages.” The alcohol is heavy on his breath. “Decades, even. They’ve known about this before Fringe Division even existed. I found records, Liv, that we’ve been sending cyborgs over there since the 90s and then I find out that we killed him. They killed him and replaced him with a machine and told it to kill their Olivia. Our side killed Charlie. Tell me, Liv, what does that make us?”
She looks away, because she can’t meet Lincoln’s eyes that are so earnest and pleading and questioning and confused and ignorant. She stares ahead, straight at the block text in front of her and turns the bottle in her hands. “I don’t know.”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and she’s thankful. “I joined Fringe Division because I thought I’d be making the world better. Tossing on one bandage at a time, you know? Cause the world’s a pretty messed up place, but I was thinking I’d be doing a right thing.”
The shame is burning at her and she’s glad, so glad that it’s dark so he can’t see her face clearly. “Yeah.”
“I thought I was protecting citizens, the people I cared about. So tell me, Liv, if I’m protecting the people I care about then why am I on the side that’s killing them instead? What sort of people are we if we’re killing people like Broyles?”
“Broyles?”
“Surprise, right?” He laughs- it’s an ugly bark, really. “I almost didn’t see it myself, but its all there. Died in a Fringe event around Boston around the time that you came back. Must be easy to change the story when you’re the Secretary.”
She swallows, and doesn’t say anything. She had known about Broyles, she knew about all of it. She had known that they had killed Charlie. But she finally meets his eyes, and it almost breaks her heart.
“Liv, I’m so sorry for telling you.” He reaches and grips her shoulder and bows his head, as if to apologize. “I’m so sorry.”
And she wants to tell him that he shouldn’t feel sorry for anything. She wants to tell him, so so much. Most of all, she wants to tell him that she doesn’t deserve his sympathy, or anything else.
But she doesn’t, because looking at his eyes, she doesn’t have the heart to.
Fringe//PG-13//Altlivia, Alt!Lincoln Lee, Alt!Charlie Francis
This started with sweet_anise's drabble prompt, which I then thought to expand on, and then I saw a quote on tumblr and one thing led to another.
Lincoln arrives a little later than he’d like, and manages to knock on the door. Sure, he’s a little bit nervous, but really, who wouldn’t be?
There’s a sound of locks unlatching, and then Olivia’s there eyeing him. “What’s up, delivery boy? Did your daddy lose his job and have you join ExFed?”
“You know Liv,” he hefts the box of case reports and holds it out to her. Maybe hoping that having a baby would make her less sarcastic was a little too much. “It’s not nice to make your commanding officer wait at the door.”
“Someone’s gotten bossy lately.” She grins and takes the box from him, setting it down beside the door. “That new promotion going to your head?”
“Only when the way you and Charlie says ‘boss’ sounds too much like insubordination for my tastes.” He steps inside to her apartment. It’s bigger than Lincoln expected, but then again he supposes having the Secretary of Defense paying for an apartment probably meant that it’d be pretty spacious.
“So,” Olivia closes the door behind him. “Where’s Charlie today? He didn’t pick up his phone, and I was guessing you wanted to do a double date for this.”
“Get this- he’s on a date.” Man, this apartment was loaded. Real coffee? Was a pregnant woman even supposed to have caffeine?
She raises an eyebrow. “A date? Old Scarlie with spiders inside got a date?”
“With a girl he met in a bar.” Charlie hadn’t been too forthcoming with details, which Lincoln couldn’t blame him for. “I think he said her name was Mina?”
“Mona?”
“Yeah, that sounds like her name. You know her?”
Olivia grins. Lincoln knows that look. It’s not one of her nice grins- it’s the special you’ve really got it coming now smirk that she only used when she won something. “Oh, do I know her.”
“I’m guessing she isn’t a girl he met in a bar.” He feels kind of bad for Charlie. But only a tiny, tiny bit. It’s nice to see someone else on the other end of that smirk. “So, who is she?”
“Well, she’s actually the entomologist we had to consult about the spontaneous bug eruption. But get this- she’s also the one who treated Charlie for his spider problem.”
“Everybody’s looking for someone who’ll love them inside and out?” That had to be a little weird, right? Or maybe she’s really hot. Still, having someone who liked the spiders inside your bloodstream?
“So what’s in the box? Is it a present for me?”
“If you’re offering to read through all the past case files for me, absolutely. I thought that being boss meant that I had to do less work, not more.”
“Well, maybe that’s why you got the promotion. Because you’re such a good and hard worker bee.” She’d probably say something else, but then her earpiece beeps with an incoming call. “Hold up- hello? Oh, yeah, I’m on my way. Thank you, Agent Farnsworth.”
“So, where’s the baby?”
“Sleeping in the other room.”
Now comes that hard part. Lincoln breathes in, then out. He could do this. He got a promotion, managed to deal with multiple Fringe events and got out of a Class 1 vortex.
Then Olivia walks back into the room with the baby in her arms. It- he- is awake and looking at Lincoln with those big brown eyes. Lincoln wonders if the baby’s judging him right now. “Hi, Uncle Lincoln.” She waves the baby’s arm at him.
Uncle? Well, whatever. It’d be a work in progress. “Hey there Henry.” Lincoln wonders where the name Henry came from- Lincoln is a much better name than Henry. “You and I are going to be spending some time together today.”
“You’re absolutely positive you want to do this? I can still call my mom if you too scared for this.”
He isn’t scared. “Trust me Liv, I can handle a baby for a couple of hours.” Just don’t let the baby see he’s afraid and it’d be cool. “Don’t worry about it. If I can deal with all sorts of Fringe events and the bureaucratic nightmare that my life’s turned into, he’ll be nothing.”
“Alright then. I’ll see how well you can handle for him for a couple of hours while I get these evaluations out of the way.” Olivia hands the baby to him and gives him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Behave yourself, you two.”
Lincoln’s in a little bit of shock from the kiss- okay, maybe a lot- but he’s fast on his feet. “We’ll be perfect, no worries.”
She waves back over her shoulder, and steps out of sight onto the elevator.
“Okay.” Lincoln breathes, looks down at the bundle in his arms. It’s a lot lighter than he’d think it would be. “Hey there, buddy.”
The baby stares at him. Lincoln wonders if it recognized him at all- nah, that wasn’t possible. Babies didn’t start really remembering things till age five.
“Right, talking to a baby.” He just had to think of this like any other field exercise, only a very important exercise where the goal is to prove that he is responsible and trustworthy enough with Olivia’s baby. Besides, the little guy’s the Secretary’s grandson, so Lincoln supposes that it’d make the kid pretty important in the scheme of things.
That kiss at the door was nice.
Yeah, the kid is important.
“So, uh,” Lincoln looks around the living room. There had to be something where he could tuck in the baby for a little bit, right?
After some searching, he finds the crib in the closet besides the playpen. He sets it up on the couch, and sets the baby down in it. So far, so good.
Lincoln grabs some case files and is settled in on the couch, ready to read through a stack of reports, when the baby starts crying.
It’s really not a pleasant sound.
“Uhh, boo! It’s me, Uncle Lincoln!” That doesn’t seem to help either, and the pacifier only buys him a couple of seconds of silence. Maybe it’s feeding time.
Lincoln finds the milk formula after five minutes of searching- he half expected to find real milk, but that might’ve been too much a luxury, even for the Secretary.
Ten minutes later, the baby is making happy suckling noises as it drinks from the bottle.
This isn’t so bad after all. After Lincoln’s sure that the baby has enough milk to keep it lasted for a while, he drags the box next to his seat on the couch and flips through the case files that Colonel Broyles had to read when he was in charge of the whole show. Lincoln knows all the reasons of why he should read it- because it’s important to know about the other side, to figure out what happened, to know the details of the war and how to better defend themselves and all that gear.
But it doesn’t make it any easier to read through boxes and boxes of reports.
He starts reading a report about a case of twin girls who somehow became pyrokinetic. Weird shit happened in the world, but pyrokinesis was a new one. There’d been a girl in Central Park, the one who had almost killed him and sent him to rehab for eight weeks had done something similar. That was back when life had been simple, and right about when Olivia had been sent undercover and swapped with another Olivia.
He finds it a little hard to believe that the Olivia he had been working with for those months wasn’t really Olivia. Except that it was, only not quite entirely. It was a doppelganger, a perfect physical copy with an almost identical life to Olivia. Lincoln can’t keep referring to her as Olivia though, cause she isn’t Olivia.
Maybe…Altlivia. Yeah, that has a nice ring to it.
It bothers him a little, okay, maybe a lot, that he didn’t know that Olivia had been replaced by Altlivia. Now that he knew, the little inconsistencies were glaring and obvious and he feels like an idiot. Only a little bit of it was that Charlie had been right all along.
But he’d been positive, absolutely positive that if Olivia had been replaced by a dopple, that he’d know. But she had been, and was sent off on a mission that he didn’t know about and now…
Lincoln sets the report down and scoots over to the baby. It’s sound asleep, thankfully. It’s strange to think that the one he’d lose out to would be chubby and bald.
Half an hour later, another report is finished. That was one really freaky- some poor guy had gotten decapitated and ended up somehow growing his head back. Sometimes, these cases didn’t even make sense.
Lincoln wonders if there’s another version of him on the other side as well. What’d he be like, his doppelganger? Probably not nearly as good looking or suave. Is the other Lincoln still alive? Or maybe he’s a professional filer and report reader.
Maybe he could get that version to come over and do his reading for him. Cause technically, Not-Suave Lincoln’s work should be the same as his, and no one would ever know the difference.
The baby looks so peaceful, lying there in its crib. Carefully, Lincoln lifts it out and cradles it in his arms. It’s surprising of how light it is. “Hey, Henry.”
“Remember me?” It’s not weird to talk to a baby, right? He couldn’t even understand what Lincoln’s saying, anyway. “I was the guy who helped save your mother. Me and the cabbie in a Chinese restaurant. She’ll probably leave that out of your childhood. Between you and me, I don’t think there’s anything your mom wouldn’t do for you.”
“And I guess that there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for her, either. But that’s a secret between the two of us.”
The beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
Lincoln’s working late and all alone.
Well, probably not all alone. He’d like to think that he is, the lone agent trying to figure out what’s up with all these reports.
But tonight, there’s a good reason for why he’s still here when everyone else is gone. There’s a stack of files, all stamped with Classified in giant blocky red letters in his bottom drawer. No eyes except for those of high enough security clearance got to see these.
Not even the Secretary knew that Lincoln had these. He’d been very careful in getting his hands on them. There had been too many of them for him to grab all at once, so he’d been carefully taking out a few at a time and swapping them with the ones he had read so no one might notice that there were missing files.
Lincoln isn’t sure if he’s going to like what he finds.
The amount is staggering. From the looks of it, this war had been going on for much longer than he had ever thought- there were files dating back all the way to the 80s in development and research in cyborgs that could cross over and change their faces.
There’s been nothing on Colonel Broyles. Maybe that’s a mercy.
He flips open another folder- a compendium on all the information about Altlivia. Her picture, habits, history- she’d been in the FBI? The FBI still existed over there? Hey, look at that- she’d been partnered with Charlie.
That Charlie didn’t have that scar running down his face. There’s more information about Charlie- loads of it.
At the back of the folder, there’s a stack of papers clipped together. They’re different from the rest- just lines of text that look like they came from a typewriter. More than a little curious, Lincoln reads through them.
Meeting prevented. Request extraction. Mission failure. Interrogate target then kill her. Target trusts me completely. She still believes I’m her partner.
She still believes I’m her partner.
Her partner was Charlie.
So what happened to Charlie?
“Something buggin’ you?”
Lincoln looks up from the coffee he’d been stirring. Black, one sugar. “Only the bugs inside you.”
“They’re not bugs-”
“They’re arachnids,” he finishes.
“Don’t give me that. Look, if something’s on your mind, if it’s any questions you’ve got about Liv, I want you to know, I’m here for you.”
Like how Charlie would be there for the other Olivia. Cause that’s what partners did. Except he wouldn’t be anymore. “I’ve got a question.”
“About Liv?”
“No,” maybe he should tell Charlie. But how does he even begin to say hey, your double in the other ’verse is dead and swapped out by a shapeshifting cyborg on orders from one of the most powerful men in the world who’s also probably also responsible for the death of Colonel Broyles?
The answer is that he doesn’t. It bothers him not to tell Charlie things, so instead, he asks “Why do you do keep doing this?”
“Do what?”
“This,” he motions at the entire scene in front of the office window. “Now that we know we’re at war with another universe which is filled with people like us- hell, with another Olivia. Why do we keep on doing this job? And don’t give me that ‘fighting for our children’, cause I know you can’t have kids, except for those spiders inside you.”
“You really wanna know why?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s simple. It’s cause I don’t wanna die.”
Lincoln doesn’t know how to tell Charlie that he’s already dead.
She’s busy feeding Henry and watching a show some guy called the Master flying through vortexes in a blue car when she gets a call from Lincoln. “What’s up boss?”
“What’d I tell you about calling me that outside of work?”
“Did you need something?”
“Uh, yeah. Wanna grab a drink with me?”
She laughs. “Is this a date?”
“Nah, just as friends.”
She saunters in and sees him in the corner, shoulders hunched, tensed and apprehensive- she reads the lines of his body as a map- she knows that this isn’t good.
“Heya there boss.” She slides into the seat next to his and orders a beer.
“Hey Liv,” his speech is a little slurred.
It’s all there in his face- dark bags under his eyes, overgrown stubble. “What’s wrong?”
He downs a shot and slides a folder stamped with Classified towards her. “Read it.”
She recognizes the first part of it- it’s a file that Newton had given her to review on the Olivia over there. It’s hard to remember that Lincoln probably still doesn’t know about everything that had happened in the other universe. Behind the file on the other Olivia, there’s a file on Charlie. Newton had mentioned him in the reports, of how one of the shifters had and then she sees the familiar block text of the Selectric 251.
Then it becomes clear why Lincoln asked her to come, and why Charlie isn’t here. “Lincoln, I-”
“Liv, we’ve been at this war for ages.” The alcohol is heavy on his breath. “Decades, even. They’ve known about this before Fringe Division even existed. I found records, Liv, that we’ve been sending cyborgs over there since the 90s and then I find out that we killed him. They killed him and replaced him with a machine and told it to kill their Olivia. Our side killed Charlie. Tell me, Liv, what does that make us?”
She looks away, because she can’t meet Lincoln’s eyes that are so earnest and pleading and questioning and confused and ignorant. She stares ahead, straight at the block text in front of her and turns the bottle in her hands. “I don’t know.”
He doesn’t say anything for a minute, and she’s thankful. “I joined Fringe Division because I thought I’d be making the world better. Tossing on one bandage at a time, you know? Cause the world’s a pretty messed up place, but I was thinking I’d be doing a right thing.”
The shame is burning at her and she’s glad, so glad that it’s dark so he can’t see her face clearly. “Yeah.”
“I thought I was protecting citizens, the people I cared about. So tell me, Liv, if I’m protecting the people I care about then why am I on the side that’s killing them instead? What sort of people are we if we’re killing people like Broyles?”
“Broyles?”
“Surprise, right?” He laughs- it’s an ugly bark, really. “I almost didn’t see it myself, but its all there. Died in a Fringe event around Boston around the time that you came back. Must be easy to change the story when you’re the Secretary.”
She swallows, and doesn’t say anything. She had known about Broyles, she knew about all of it. She had known that they had killed Charlie. But she finally meets his eyes, and it almost breaks her heart.
“Liv, I’m so sorry for telling you.” He reaches and grips her shoulder and bows his head, as if to apologize. “I’m so sorry.”
And she wants to tell him that he shouldn’t feel sorry for anything. She wants to tell him, so so much. Most of all, she wants to tell him that she doesn’t deserve his sympathy, or anything else.
But she doesn’t, because looking at his eyes, she doesn’t have the heart to.