Fic: The Edge Of All Our Fears
Hi, all! This is my first Fringe fic. But this show is too awesome not to write for.
Title: The Edge Of All Our Fears
Author: Mack the Spoon
Rating: PG-13 for mild language and violence
Spoilers: “LSD”
Summary: Olivia's POV of her experience inside her mind, and how she comes back.
Disclaimer: I don't own Fringe, its episode plots, or characters.
Author's Note: I hadn't seen any LSD fic that explores this angle of the episode, so I thought I might as well write my own version.
Thanks to namarie24 for the edits & suggestions.
~~~~~~
She's an FBI agent, so she should be able to figure this out. But Olivia can't remember how she got here, to this strange world full of landmarks and people that are faintly familiar and yet also sinister. When she thinks hard, she can remember Peter showing her an office and revealing that it had been him who was killing off the shapeshifters. She thinks it was before she had even had a chance to react that she somehow found herself here.
It looks like home, where she spends her life, and that should be comforting. But she finds that she can't trust the others who are here - even the ones who look like her friends. She's been to the lab, and Astrid was there as usual, but that was when Olivia began to think - to hope - that something about all this was majorly off. Astrid had greeted her, but when she asked about Walter and Peter, the junior agent had nothing to say. Literally, she had not answered, and when pressed, Astrid had just said she didn't know. She seemed completely unconcerned, and returned to whatever she was doing on the computer without another word.
Olivia remembers going to Peter's apartment next. This was even more frustrating. Walter was nowhere to be found, and Peter? Well, he was there... sort of. Someone had opened the door when she knocked, and she'd seen his figure moving up the stairs. When she had called out, she thought she'd heard him call back a greeting. But no matter what room Olivia tried to find him in, he always seemed to be in the process of going somewhere else. She had only ever seen glimpses of him from the back. It had gotten to the point that Olivia felt like she was in some kind of ridiculous game of hide and seek.
And just when she had been almost desperate enough to do whatever she could to join in the game, her stepfather had shown up.
She shakes her head at the memory, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. She has been doing her best to keep away from him since. Once or twice, she has started to confront him. She has even gone so far as to turn around with both hands on her service weapon, taking shaky aim at his heart this time. But each time, the chamber is empty and he simply sneers. Each time, it is enough to start her running again.
She has guessed that this must be some sort of dream world. It reminds her of sharing memories with John Scott, but it certainly isn't the same. Here, she knows everyone can see her, and they all seem to want to start something. That feeling only escalates whenever her stepfather shows up. He seems to instantly recruit everyone around him into a silent, inexorable army intent on catching her, no matter where they are to begin with.
She feels like she might be starting to get the hang of how best to avoid getting caught when it first happens. She has decided to go to Jacksonville if she can, because she thinks it would take a while for anyone to think of looking for her there. Since this place isn't real, she thinks she could get there without taking a plane.
But it is just when she has thought of that, that Peter is suddenly in front of her. “Peter - what?” she starts to say. Is she at his apartment again? It feels more real than the dream world. His face brightens, and he is about to speak. And then there is some kind of feeling like she has moved, although she doesn't recall doing so, and then she is back on those strangely familiar and unreal streets where she was a moment ago.
“Damn it,” she says, feeling sure that she has missed something important. A woman on the sidewalk shoots her a glare, and Olivia starts moving again. She brings to mind where she is trying to go, and this time that is all it takes for the streets of New York to fade into the streets of Jacksonville.
She knows where she wants to go. The daycare center is dismissed quickly as an option - she has no memories of that place except visiting it with Walter and Peter last year. And her stepfather would know it, she feels sure. No, what she wants is her house on the base, the red door house. She's even told Peter about the normalcy and calm of it, in a rather rare moment of reminiscence.
It takes some amount of time to get there, even though she's skipped what would be the longest part of the trip. It's difficult to guess how long it takes, since time seems to move differently here. When she turns around to look behind her, along the way, the skyline of New York is still visible, complete with the Twin Towers. She shakes her head again. She will be glad to leave this place, if she ever can. In the meanwhile, though, getting out of reach of her stepfather and the nameless other walkers in this dream is her top priority.
As she enters the base, though, instead of feeling safer, she begins to feel a strong sense of foreboding. “No, this has to work,” she mutters to herself. It is a few moments before she gives into the urge to glance behind her.
He's there again. Her stepfather walks toward her, taking confident, measured steps.
She grabs for her gun. “Stay away from me!” she yells. Her finger tightens on the trigger, although she knows it won't work. It never works. Her stepfather seems huge - or maybe she has shrunk. The gun feels unwieldy and useless in her hands. It's like a nightmare she can't escape from.
Suddenly, there is a loud bang. Olivia finds herself turning toward the source of the sound behind her - it's not the gun, she didn't even fire - and then Peter's there again, saying something that she can't follow, and everything is in sharper focus, and what the hell is going on? “Peter!” she cries out, and his eyes widen. “Peter, oh, Peter, help me!”
She feels herself falling, and he reaches for her. Maybe he can't help her. Maybe no one can, as she feels herself growing detached from her own body. The last thing she thinks she hears before fading out is Peter calling sharply for Astrid.
When she wakes up, she is lying on the sidewalk just inside the base. Peter is gone. Was he ever really here? Once again, she knows she is missing something important about all this. Her stepfather has disappeared again as well, but she doubts that will last. She has to get to the house.
It is not a short journey, and Olivia slows to a stop when everything begins to blur and shift in front of her eyes. Briefly, she feels dizzy. She blinks. It doesn't seem fair that besides everything else that is happening in this bizarre place, she could get sick as well. The dizziness begins to pass, but she hardly notices as the new sight of her surroundings sinks in.
It's still base housing, still the very same road she has been walking. But no matter how she blinks or rubs her eyes, it looks like something from a cartoon. Even more surreal, when she glances down at herself, she looks like something someone has drawn, as well. Nothing she has seen in her excursions into Walter's tank has prepared her for this.
But she's still herself, and she still has no other goal to aim for other than finding her old house. Who knows, maybe that normalcy she told Peter about will hold true once she gets there. She could use some of that especially right now.
It seems to take too long to get to her street. Maybe her steps don't cover as much ground as they should. Still, she would prefer that to being trapped in one of those dreams where you can never actually move forward despite how much you try. As she makes her way, though, everything begins to look bigger around her.
“What the hell?” she mutters, and her voice sounds... wrong. This time, when she looks down, she sees the body of a child. She looks at her clothes, and touches her face. Her hair is suddenly short, as it hasn't been since - “Jacksonville.” She supposes that makes sense, maybe. At least she can imagine there's some kind of a reason for this newest development. She can't help feeling a lot more vulnerable, though, as if she needed yet more ways to feel unsafe.
Olivia reaches the house, and though it is incredibly odd to have to reach up to open the red door, she does, and closes it behind her when she enters. Her surroundings inside are no longer like a cartoon, she notes. In fact, it even smells like her childhood home, and a small part of her relaxes. She wants so much to allow herself to feel safe now.
“Olive, is that you?” a voice calls from the kitchen, and Olivia shivers. She knows that voice. The last time she heard it, she was fighting a desperate battle against her alternate's memories.
But this time, she knows it has to be her own memories bringing her mother to life again. “Mom?” she asks, in her little-girl voice.
“I'm in here, Olive,” her mother says. “Come here. You can help me set the table for dinner.”
Her mind and emotions are racing. She's not sure what she expected would happen when she got to this house, but this wasn't it. She wipes a few tears from her eyes, not wanting her mother to worry, and slowly walks toward the kitchen.
She thinks it might be surprisingly easy to fit into this routine, though she hasn't thought of it in decades. She takes the handful of silverware her mother offers, and stares up into her mother's face. Her hair is less white, and her face is much less lined than the version of the woman who lives Over There. Olivia can think of nothing to say that wouldn't be insanely out of place in such a calm, typical situation.
“Well, go ahead, put the forks around,” her mother says. “Your father will be home any minute.”
Olivia does as she's told almost automatically, still hardly able to process this. There is a knock at the door.
“Good, that'll be him,” says her mother, going to answer it.
But this is all wrong. Her father wouldn't need to knock. Olivia feels her heart begin to race. She wants to shout out a warning, but the words won't come. Instead, she stands where she is on the opposite side of the table from the door. When it opens, her mother steps aside, now silent as well, and it's Charlie.
“Charlie? What are you doing here?” she asks, still hearing her childish voice, unable to quite get the Rs out.
“Well, hi there,” he says kindly. “I'm looking for Olivia. Do you know where she is?”
Her mother seems to have disappeared. Olivia doesn't know which of the Charlies she has known this one might be, but she does know she won't be able to figure out as a little girl. If she could just be her real self again, or find some way... her thought trails off and she feels a kind of disconnect suddenly, and then a figure steps out of the room across from the kitchen. “Hey, Charlie, what's up?”
Olivia blinks. It's... her. Her adult self is there, dressed as she normally would be for work, with her hair in the usual ponytail. Olivia can almost sense what she's sensing, can almost see out of her eyes. She finds herself thinking - not for the first time since she agreed to work with Fringe division - that there just must not be any point after which things can't get any weirder, because this is something she never would have begun to dream was possible. She's pretty sure that holds true even for dreams, or hallucinations, or drug trips, or whatever this is that's happening here.
“Hey, Liv. I tried calling, but you wouldn't answer your phone,” Charlie says, now completely ignoring the little girl in the dining room.
“Oh, sorry,” says the woman, and Olivia almost feels like she's the one talking - but not quite. She's not sure if she's actually controlling this... projection, or whatever it is. In any case, it's easier to deal with Charlie as the Olivia Dunham he knows. “What did you need to talk to me about?”
Whatever is going on, Olivia wishes her fake self or the memory of Charlie would close the door. She just knows that her stepfather will find them if the door stays open, although she supposes that doesn't actually make sense. Then something else catches her attention, and it makes her blood run cold. As Charlie begins to explain why he's there, Olivia can see that he looks nervous. His skin has a fine sheen of sweat on it, and the only picture that keeps coming to mind is of the fake shapeshifter Charlie in the few days before he tried to kill her.
Just as that thought solidifies in her brain, the adult Olivia steps back and puts her hand to her holster.
“What is it, Liv?” Charlie asks. She can see the way he can't quite meet her adult self's eyes.
“I killed you before,” Agent Dunham says, now pointing her weapon at him. “I can do it again.”
The thing that looks like Charlie opens its mouth, yet no sound comes out. It looks down, and a spot of blood spreads across its chest, red mixed with silver.
She blinks again, not wanting to face this event again, even in a dream. Abruptly the scene changes. She is sitting at the table with a pad of paper and some colored pencils. Charlie is gone. The front door is closed, and she's alone in the dining room. There is a lit candle on the table in front of her, which piques her memory faintly, although she can't quite place it. Outside, it is almost painfully bright. She's still her younger self.
Her older self walks past her from the kitchen into the front room, moving slowly and tentatively. She obviously does not feel at home here. Olivia shakes her head. She feels a strange kind of pity for this person.
At that moment, the front door opens again, letting in the over-bright sunlight, and her heart does a funny flip in her chest when she recognizes Peter. She can't see him too clearly when he steps in, but she does see the smile on his face as he embraces the woman who looks like her. Please, not again, she thinks. He's got to know this time. If it's really Peter, he has to have learned. She barely notices that her parents are now sitting at the table with her, silent as a still life.
The woman who seems to be Olivia tells him she's afraid. What she tells him is accurate - Olivia is afraid, and she doesn't know what's going on, and it seems like everyone is trying to hurt her and this could be her one safe place. But she really needs him to figure out the more important issue here.
“I know,” says Peter. He tells her that he doesn't have time to explain, but that she's safe and it's okay to come back.
Olivia grips her pencil tighter. She hears his words, but she won't believe unless this Peter can prove himself. It would be too painful. She bites her lip as Peter touches the face of the adult version of her. Please, please, she thinks again, to whoever might be listening.
Her hopes rise as he pulls his hand away from the woman's cheek, beginning to frown.
Her double speaks. “Peter?” He doesn't respond right away. “What's wrong? Peter, you're scaring me.”
Olivia hardly dares to breathe as Peter replies, sounding defeated. “You're not her.” The woman tries to protest, but Peter insists, “This is not you. I can see it in your eyes, it's not you.”
Finally. Olivia sets the pencil down and stands up from her seat. Somehow, as she makes her way toward him, she's not afraid that this will be awkward. “I just needed to know it was you.”
“Olivia?” he asks, and there is a spark of recognition there despite his surprise.
“People have been tricking me,” Olivia explains, “but I knew the real you would recognize me.”
He smiles and holds out a hand. She does not hesitate to take it, and returns his smile. He looks up, and she follows his gaze. Adult Olivia is gone. The décor of the house has changed to Christmas. Somehow, this is a bad sign.
“Oh, no,” she says, as she realizes what will happen next. Her stepfather is walking toward them, anger outlining his features.
Peter ushers her out the front door. At another time, she would be curious to see what he looks like as a cartoon, but now she is scared enough to hardly even register that William Bell is standing outside next to a motorcycle. “Run!” Peter calls, and they all put actions to words.
She wishes again that she was her adult self. She knows she is slowing Peter down. Cars are approaching suddenly, military vehicles with soldiers inside. She and Peter only barely escape being run over as Bell shouts advice. Somehow, Olivia knows this is the critical moment. If they can't get away from this...
She loses her grip on Peter's hand. There are Humvees barreling toward her. This is it. She's just too small to get away. What happens when you die inside a dream? She puts her hands across her eyes - and then suddenly she is pushed aside. Peter! There is a collision, a horrible sound of impact, and then he has vanished.
No. God, no. There are soldiers piling out of the vehicles, and her stepfather is there in front of them, and Peter is gone. William Bell takes her hand and they are running again, but there is no way they'll make it. She can hear the sounds of more and more men chasing them. Her hand slips again, but this time it is Bell who has fallen. “Go!” he orders, as she turns to look.
It's getting darker. There are far too many soldiers coming. Olivia's heart sinks, and then she frowns. This is not fair, she thinks. This is not right. “No more,” she says, walking forward and holding one hand out. Her stepfather comes right up to her and stops. Olivia doesn't care that he's bigger than her and surrounded by a literal army. “I'm not afraid of you,” she declares, and realizes that it's finally true.
Everything freezes for a moment. Bell slowly gets up next to her, and when he walks forward, she realizes that there's no longer a great difference in their height. “How?” she wonders, relieved to be speaking in her own adult voice again.
Bell stands next to her motionless stepfather. “I suspect I know what has happened here,” he says, going on to say something about an experiment of his. “You should have been safe inside your mind, except it's you - and you have never felt safe.”
Olivia has never thought of that in so many words, yet she must admit it sounds right.
In the end, Bell congratulates her for fighting back and overcoming her fears. “You are as strong as Walter and I always believed you were, and now you know it, too.”
Instead of dismissing his words, reacting with skepticism as she has in the past when Bell or Walter mentions this, Olivia finds herself believing him. “So what happens now?”
“Now, you go back,” Bell says, “but not me. For you to survive, I need to leave.”
“I don't understand,” Olivia says. She still doesn't even know how she got here, or how he and Peter got here, for that matter.
“You don't have to,” is Bell's response, cryptic as ever. There is a thunderclap, and lightning flashes. “Well, that's Walter. Right on time,” he adds. He turns to leave, then turns back. “Please, tell Walter that I knew the dog wouldn't hunt.” There is another thunderclap, and she is suddenly alone in the street.
One final thunderclap, and she is -
She blinks. Her surroundings are clear, real, and sharply defined - no, that's normal. What was she thinking they would look like? She's lying down, and Walter, Astrid, and Peter are in front of her, watching her as if they expect something terrible might happen. “Olivia?” Walter asks, as if he is genuinely unsure if it's her.
Her body feels a little heavy, unresponsive, so she settles for just saying, “Hi.” By the way they all break into huge smiles, she might as well have won a medal. Peter looks a little woozy, wrapped in a blanket, and she can't help wondering what's been going on as she half-hears Walter tell her to rest. He and Astrid move away, and Walter crows something about “One glorious consciousness!”
But her attention is fixed on Peter, who is looking at her as if he hasn't seen her in days. “What happened to me?” she asks.
Still smiling, he asks, “What do you remember?”
She thinks a moment, and sees flashes, like brief moments from a very intricate dream. “I remember you.”
He laughs a little, and she thinks she really must ask why he looks so out of it. But then something else occurs to her. “And I remember William Bell was there.” Somehow she knows it was real, even though she also knows he's dead.
Astrid speaks, and her voice is troubled. “Walter. It didn't work.”
There is a pause, and then Walter says, “He's gone. William's gone.”
The sorrow in his tone reminds her. “Walter, I think Bell gave me a message.” She doesn't know what it means, but the words are there. “He said, 'Tell Walter that I knew the dog wouldn't hunt.'”
That's about all she can handle right now. She feels stiff and tired, and yet she feels like she's been asleep for a long time. She is aware that this revelation causes Walter pain, and that it seems to mean William Bell is dead - again. Astrid returns to where Olivia is lying down, and welcomes her back.
“Thank you,” Olivia replies. As Astrid follows Dr. Bishop out of the room, Olivia turns her attention back to Peter. “Why was William Bell there? Where were we?”
“Long story,” Peter says. “You remember Walter's wild theory about soul magnets?”
“Yeah,” Olivia says slowly, suddenly thinking back to when the dream started. “So I - did Bell-?” she starts to say, frowning. It's not a pleasant thought.
Peter's face darkens. “I think Walter was the only one even remotely happy about that development.”
She nods. Obviously there will be a lot to process there. She thinks she's too tired to know how to feel about it, at the moment. But there's one more question she has to ask before she rests a little more. “Peter.”
“Mmmhmm?” he says, barely opening his eyes.
“Is that Broyles? And is he... blowing bubbles?”
~~~~~~
End
Hope you enjoy!
Title: The Edge Of All Our Fears
Author: Mack the Spoon
Rating: PG-13 for mild language and violence
Spoilers: “LSD”
Summary: Olivia's POV of her experience inside her mind, and how she comes back.
Disclaimer: I don't own Fringe, its episode plots, or characters.
Author's Note: I hadn't seen any LSD fic that explores this angle of the episode, so I thought I might as well write my own version.
Thanks to namarie24 for the edits & suggestions.
~~~~~~
She's an FBI agent, so she should be able to figure this out. But Olivia can't remember how she got here, to this strange world full of landmarks and people that are faintly familiar and yet also sinister. When she thinks hard, she can remember Peter showing her an office and revealing that it had been him who was killing off the shapeshifters. She thinks it was before she had even had a chance to react that she somehow found herself here.
It looks like home, where she spends her life, and that should be comforting. But she finds that she can't trust the others who are here - even the ones who look like her friends. She's been to the lab, and Astrid was there as usual, but that was when Olivia began to think - to hope - that something about all this was majorly off. Astrid had greeted her, but when she asked about Walter and Peter, the junior agent had nothing to say. Literally, she had not answered, and when pressed, Astrid had just said she didn't know. She seemed completely unconcerned, and returned to whatever she was doing on the computer without another word.
Olivia remembers going to Peter's apartment next. This was even more frustrating. Walter was nowhere to be found, and Peter? Well, he was there... sort of. Someone had opened the door when she knocked, and she'd seen his figure moving up the stairs. When she had called out, she thought she'd heard him call back a greeting. But no matter what room Olivia tried to find him in, he always seemed to be in the process of going somewhere else. She had only ever seen glimpses of him from the back. It had gotten to the point that Olivia felt like she was in some kind of ridiculous game of hide and seek.
And just when she had been almost desperate enough to do whatever she could to join in the game, her stepfather had shown up.
She shakes her head at the memory, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. She has been doing her best to keep away from him since. Once or twice, she has started to confront him. She has even gone so far as to turn around with both hands on her service weapon, taking shaky aim at his heart this time. But each time, the chamber is empty and he simply sneers. Each time, it is enough to start her running again.
She has guessed that this must be some sort of dream world. It reminds her of sharing memories with John Scott, but it certainly isn't the same. Here, she knows everyone can see her, and they all seem to want to start something. That feeling only escalates whenever her stepfather shows up. He seems to instantly recruit everyone around him into a silent, inexorable army intent on catching her, no matter where they are to begin with.
She feels like she might be starting to get the hang of how best to avoid getting caught when it first happens. She has decided to go to Jacksonville if she can, because she thinks it would take a while for anyone to think of looking for her there. Since this place isn't real, she thinks she could get there without taking a plane.
But it is just when she has thought of that, that Peter is suddenly in front of her. “Peter - what?” she starts to say. Is she at his apartment again? It feels more real than the dream world. His face brightens, and he is about to speak. And then there is some kind of feeling like she has moved, although she doesn't recall doing so, and then she is back on those strangely familiar and unreal streets where she was a moment ago.
“Damn it,” she says, feeling sure that she has missed something important. A woman on the sidewalk shoots her a glare, and Olivia starts moving again. She brings to mind where she is trying to go, and this time that is all it takes for the streets of New York to fade into the streets of Jacksonville.
She knows where she wants to go. The daycare center is dismissed quickly as an option - she has no memories of that place except visiting it with Walter and Peter last year. And her stepfather would know it, she feels sure. No, what she wants is her house on the base, the red door house. She's even told Peter about the normalcy and calm of it, in a rather rare moment of reminiscence.
It takes some amount of time to get there, even though she's skipped what would be the longest part of the trip. It's difficult to guess how long it takes, since time seems to move differently here. When she turns around to look behind her, along the way, the skyline of New York is still visible, complete with the Twin Towers. She shakes her head again. She will be glad to leave this place, if she ever can. In the meanwhile, though, getting out of reach of her stepfather and the nameless other walkers in this dream is her top priority.
As she enters the base, though, instead of feeling safer, she begins to feel a strong sense of foreboding. “No, this has to work,” she mutters to herself. It is a few moments before she gives into the urge to glance behind her.
He's there again. Her stepfather walks toward her, taking confident, measured steps.
She grabs for her gun. “Stay away from me!” she yells. Her finger tightens on the trigger, although she knows it won't work. It never works. Her stepfather seems huge - or maybe she has shrunk. The gun feels unwieldy and useless in her hands. It's like a nightmare she can't escape from.
Suddenly, there is a loud bang. Olivia finds herself turning toward the source of the sound behind her - it's not the gun, she didn't even fire - and then Peter's there again, saying something that she can't follow, and everything is in sharper focus, and what the hell is going on? “Peter!” she cries out, and his eyes widen. “Peter, oh, Peter, help me!”
She feels herself falling, and he reaches for her. Maybe he can't help her. Maybe no one can, as she feels herself growing detached from her own body. The last thing she thinks she hears before fading out is Peter calling sharply for Astrid.
When she wakes up, she is lying on the sidewalk just inside the base. Peter is gone. Was he ever really here? Once again, she knows she is missing something important about all this. Her stepfather has disappeared again as well, but she doubts that will last. She has to get to the house.
It is not a short journey, and Olivia slows to a stop when everything begins to blur and shift in front of her eyes. Briefly, she feels dizzy. She blinks. It doesn't seem fair that besides everything else that is happening in this bizarre place, she could get sick as well. The dizziness begins to pass, but she hardly notices as the new sight of her surroundings sinks in.
It's still base housing, still the very same road she has been walking. But no matter how she blinks or rubs her eyes, it looks like something from a cartoon. Even more surreal, when she glances down at herself, she looks like something someone has drawn, as well. Nothing she has seen in her excursions into Walter's tank has prepared her for this.
But she's still herself, and she still has no other goal to aim for other than finding her old house. Who knows, maybe that normalcy she told Peter about will hold true once she gets there. She could use some of that especially right now.
It seems to take too long to get to her street. Maybe her steps don't cover as much ground as they should. Still, she would prefer that to being trapped in one of those dreams where you can never actually move forward despite how much you try. As she makes her way, though, everything begins to look bigger around her.
“What the hell?” she mutters, and her voice sounds... wrong. This time, when she looks down, she sees the body of a child. She looks at her clothes, and touches her face. Her hair is suddenly short, as it hasn't been since - “Jacksonville.” She supposes that makes sense, maybe. At least she can imagine there's some kind of a reason for this newest development. She can't help feeling a lot more vulnerable, though, as if she needed yet more ways to feel unsafe.
Olivia reaches the house, and though it is incredibly odd to have to reach up to open the red door, she does, and closes it behind her when she enters. Her surroundings inside are no longer like a cartoon, she notes. In fact, it even smells like her childhood home, and a small part of her relaxes. She wants so much to allow herself to feel safe now.
“Olive, is that you?” a voice calls from the kitchen, and Olivia shivers. She knows that voice. The last time she heard it, she was fighting a desperate battle against her alternate's memories.
But this time, she knows it has to be her own memories bringing her mother to life again. “Mom?” she asks, in her little-girl voice.
“I'm in here, Olive,” her mother says. “Come here. You can help me set the table for dinner.”
Her mind and emotions are racing. She's not sure what she expected would happen when she got to this house, but this wasn't it. She wipes a few tears from her eyes, not wanting her mother to worry, and slowly walks toward the kitchen.
She thinks it might be surprisingly easy to fit into this routine, though she hasn't thought of it in decades. She takes the handful of silverware her mother offers, and stares up into her mother's face. Her hair is less white, and her face is much less lined than the version of the woman who lives Over There. Olivia can think of nothing to say that wouldn't be insanely out of place in such a calm, typical situation.
“Well, go ahead, put the forks around,” her mother says. “Your father will be home any minute.”
Olivia does as she's told almost automatically, still hardly able to process this. There is a knock at the door.
“Good, that'll be him,” says her mother, going to answer it.
But this is all wrong. Her father wouldn't need to knock. Olivia feels her heart begin to race. She wants to shout out a warning, but the words won't come. Instead, she stands where she is on the opposite side of the table from the door. When it opens, her mother steps aside, now silent as well, and it's Charlie.
“Charlie? What are you doing here?” she asks, still hearing her childish voice, unable to quite get the Rs out.
“Well, hi there,” he says kindly. “I'm looking for Olivia. Do you know where she is?”
Her mother seems to have disappeared. Olivia doesn't know which of the Charlies she has known this one might be, but she does know she won't be able to figure out as a little girl. If she could just be her real self again, or find some way... her thought trails off and she feels a kind of disconnect suddenly, and then a figure steps out of the room across from the kitchen. “Hey, Charlie, what's up?”
Olivia blinks. It's... her. Her adult self is there, dressed as she normally would be for work, with her hair in the usual ponytail. Olivia can almost sense what she's sensing, can almost see out of her eyes. She finds herself thinking - not for the first time since she agreed to work with Fringe division - that there just must not be any point after which things can't get any weirder, because this is something she never would have begun to dream was possible. She's pretty sure that holds true even for dreams, or hallucinations, or drug trips, or whatever this is that's happening here.
“Hey, Liv. I tried calling, but you wouldn't answer your phone,” Charlie says, now completely ignoring the little girl in the dining room.
“Oh, sorry,” says the woman, and Olivia almost feels like she's the one talking - but not quite. She's not sure if she's actually controlling this... projection, or whatever it is. In any case, it's easier to deal with Charlie as the Olivia Dunham he knows. “What did you need to talk to me about?”
Whatever is going on, Olivia wishes her fake self or the memory of Charlie would close the door. She just knows that her stepfather will find them if the door stays open, although she supposes that doesn't actually make sense. Then something else catches her attention, and it makes her blood run cold. As Charlie begins to explain why he's there, Olivia can see that he looks nervous. His skin has a fine sheen of sweat on it, and the only picture that keeps coming to mind is of the fake shapeshifter Charlie in the few days before he tried to kill her.
Just as that thought solidifies in her brain, the adult Olivia steps back and puts her hand to her holster.
“What is it, Liv?” Charlie asks. She can see the way he can't quite meet her adult self's eyes.
“I killed you before,” Agent Dunham says, now pointing her weapon at him. “I can do it again.”
The thing that looks like Charlie opens its mouth, yet no sound comes out. It looks down, and a spot of blood spreads across its chest, red mixed with silver.
She blinks again, not wanting to face this event again, even in a dream. Abruptly the scene changes. She is sitting at the table with a pad of paper and some colored pencils. Charlie is gone. The front door is closed, and she's alone in the dining room. There is a lit candle on the table in front of her, which piques her memory faintly, although she can't quite place it. Outside, it is almost painfully bright. She's still her younger self.
Her older self walks past her from the kitchen into the front room, moving slowly and tentatively. She obviously does not feel at home here. Olivia shakes her head. She feels a strange kind of pity for this person.
At that moment, the front door opens again, letting in the over-bright sunlight, and her heart does a funny flip in her chest when she recognizes Peter. She can't see him too clearly when he steps in, but she does see the smile on his face as he embraces the woman who looks like her. Please, not again, she thinks. He's got to know this time. If it's really Peter, he has to have learned. She barely notices that her parents are now sitting at the table with her, silent as a still life.
The woman who seems to be Olivia tells him she's afraid. What she tells him is accurate - Olivia is afraid, and she doesn't know what's going on, and it seems like everyone is trying to hurt her and this could be her one safe place. But she really needs him to figure out the more important issue here.
“I know,” says Peter. He tells her that he doesn't have time to explain, but that she's safe and it's okay to come back.
Olivia grips her pencil tighter. She hears his words, but she won't believe unless this Peter can prove himself. It would be too painful. She bites her lip as Peter touches the face of the adult version of her. Please, please, she thinks again, to whoever might be listening.
Her hopes rise as he pulls his hand away from the woman's cheek, beginning to frown.
Her double speaks. “Peter?” He doesn't respond right away. “What's wrong? Peter, you're scaring me.”
Olivia hardly dares to breathe as Peter replies, sounding defeated. “You're not her.” The woman tries to protest, but Peter insists, “This is not you. I can see it in your eyes, it's not you.”
Finally. Olivia sets the pencil down and stands up from her seat. Somehow, as she makes her way toward him, she's not afraid that this will be awkward. “I just needed to know it was you.”
“Olivia?” he asks, and there is a spark of recognition there despite his surprise.
“People have been tricking me,” Olivia explains, “but I knew the real you would recognize me.”
He smiles and holds out a hand. She does not hesitate to take it, and returns his smile. He looks up, and she follows his gaze. Adult Olivia is gone. The décor of the house has changed to Christmas. Somehow, this is a bad sign.
“Oh, no,” she says, as she realizes what will happen next. Her stepfather is walking toward them, anger outlining his features.
Peter ushers her out the front door. At another time, she would be curious to see what he looks like as a cartoon, but now she is scared enough to hardly even register that William Bell is standing outside next to a motorcycle. “Run!” Peter calls, and they all put actions to words.
She wishes again that she was her adult self. She knows she is slowing Peter down. Cars are approaching suddenly, military vehicles with soldiers inside. She and Peter only barely escape being run over as Bell shouts advice. Somehow, Olivia knows this is the critical moment. If they can't get away from this...
She loses her grip on Peter's hand. There are Humvees barreling toward her. This is it. She's just too small to get away. What happens when you die inside a dream? She puts her hands across her eyes - and then suddenly she is pushed aside. Peter! There is a collision, a horrible sound of impact, and then he has vanished.
No. God, no. There are soldiers piling out of the vehicles, and her stepfather is there in front of them, and Peter is gone. William Bell takes her hand and they are running again, but there is no way they'll make it. She can hear the sounds of more and more men chasing them. Her hand slips again, but this time it is Bell who has fallen. “Go!” he orders, as she turns to look.
It's getting darker. There are far too many soldiers coming. Olivia's heart sinks, and then she frowns. This is not fair, she thinks. This is not right. “No more,” she says, walking forward and holding one hand out. Her stepfather comes right up to her and stops. Olivia doesn't care that he's bigger than her and surrounded by a literal army. “I'm not afraid of you,” she declares, and realizes that it's finally true.
Everything freezes for a moment. Bell slowly gets up next to her, and when he walks forward, she realizes that there's no longer a great difference in their height. “How?” she wonders, relieved to be speaking in her own adult voice again.
Bell stands next to her motionless stepfather. “I suspect I know what has happened here,” he says, going on to say something about an experiment of his. “You should have been safe inside your mind, except it's you - and you have never felt safe.”
Olivia has never thought of that in so many words, yet she must admit it sounds right.
In the end, Bell congratulates her for fighting back and overcoming her fears. “You are as strong as Walter and I always believed you were, and now you know it, too.”
Instead of dismissing his words, reacting with skepticism as she has in the past when Bell or Walter mentions this, Olivia finds herself believing him. “So what happens now?”
“Now, you go back,” Bell says, “but not me. For you to survive, I need to leave.”
“I don't understand,” Olivia says. She still doesn't even know how she got here, or how he and Peter got here, for that matter.
“You don't have to,” is Bell's response, cryptic as ever. There is a thunderclap, and lightning flashes. “Well, that's Walter. Right on time,” he adds. He turns to leave, then turns back. “Please, tell Walter that I knew the dog wouldn't hunt.” There is another thunderclap, and she is suddenly alone in the street.
One final thunderclap, and she is -
She blinks. Her surroundings are clear, real, and sharply defined - no, that's normal. What was she thinking they would look like? She's lying down, and Walter, Astrid, and Peter are in front of her, watching her as if they expect something terrible might happen. “Olivia?” Walter asks, as if he is genuinely unsure if it's her.
Her body feels a little heavy, unresponsive, so she settles for just saying, “Hi.” By the way they all break into huge smiles, she might as well have won a medal. Peter looks a little woozy, wrapped in a blanket, and she can't help wondering what's been going on as she half-hears Walter tell her to rest. He and Astrid move away, and Walter crows something about “One glorious consciousness!”
But her attention is fixed on Peter, who is looking at her as if he hasn't seen her in days. “What happened to me?” she asks.
Still smiling, he asks, “What do you remember?”
She thinks a moment, and sees flashes, like brief moments from a very intricate dream. “I remember you.”
He laughs a little, and she thinks she really must ask why he looks so out of it. But then something else occurs to her. “And I remember William Bell was there.” Somehow she knows it was real, even though she also knows he's dead.
Astrid speaks, and her voice is troubled. “Walter. It didn't work.”
There is a pause, and then Walter says, “He's gone. William's gone.”
The sorrow in his tone reminds her. “Walter, I think Bell gave me a message.” She doesn't know what it means, but the words are there. “He said, 'Tell Walter that I knew the dog wouldn't hunt.'”
That's about all she can handle right now. She feels stiff and tired, and yet she feels like she's been asleep for a long time. She is aware that this revelation causes Walter pain, and that it seems to mean William Bell is dead - again. Astrid returns to where Olivia is lying down, and welcomes her back.
“Thank you,” Olivia replies. As Astrid follows Dr. Bishop out of the room, Olivia turns her attention back to Peter. “Why was William Bell there? Where were we?”
“Long story,” Peter says. “You remember Walter's wild theory about soul magnets?”
“Yeah,” Olivia says slowly, suddenly thinking back to when the dream started. “So I - did Bell-?” she starts to say, frowning. It's not a pleasant thought.
Peter's face darkens. “I think Walter was the only one even remotely happy about that development.”
She nods. Obviously there will be a lot to process there. She thinks she's too tired to know how to feel about it, at the moment. But there's one more question she has to ask before she rests a little more. “Peter.”
“Mmmhmm?” he says, barely opening his eyes.
“Is that Broyles? And is he... blowing bubbles?”
~~~~~~
End
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