Fandom: Fringe.
TITLE: Three times Olivia never met Peter Bishop.
AUTHOR: rainer76
RATING: Gen
CHARACTERS: Olivia Dunham, Peter Bishop, Walter Bishop
DISCLAIMERS: Property of Bad Robot and J.J Abrams, no originality here, just playing in their sandbox.
Spoilers for the end of Season Three
What is essential, is invisible to the eye
- The Little Prince.
1/.
Walter Bishop’s been a recluse for twenty years; he’s sixty-three, pants too short on his body and his socks visible. He wears ratty old cardigans with holes in the elbow, mind sharp as a two-sided dagger. When Olivia elicits help, one side of his face draws into a patented sneer. “No,” he says and slams the door in her face. After that, Olivia drags out all the dirt she can find.
In truth, she winds up with a hill the size of Everest.
The second time Olivia asks for help Walter Bishop’s more accommodating. He’s mean. He hates William Bell. He doesn’t explain his motivations or his reasoning and he doesn’t like people; which includes Astrid, Olivia, and anyone who pokes their big toe in the lab with the exception of Gene. Blackmailing Walter Bishop may not have been the wisest recourse, but he agrees to help John, and that’s all Olivia wants.
Olivia’s been drugged before but Walter’s narcotics are a breed of their own. She’s floating in the tank, half naked, calm, waiting for the moment when her mind slips one inch to the left - into an altered state - where perception and reality become the meeting ground for John’s consciousness.
She waits…
The ground is divided between the FBI seal and a rocky terrain, circled by a graveyard. Olivia turns a slow orbit, watches the kayak as it glides overhead, green, green, red circled on its empanelled wood. A spate of solar flares make Olivia drop her eyes (will-of-the-wisps her mother would have said, Marilyn adopted her husbands’ fancy for all things fae), and for a second Olivia thinks she sees something blurred, out of focus, moving through the graveyard like a coyote.
Between one breath and another John materializes, flanked between tombstones. Olivia’s relief is dulled by narcotics; she tries to make up for the emotions she can’t access, hands skating across John’s chest, tongue delving into his mouth, lingering, desperate to bring them closer. John’s cardboard stiff, the first stage of rigor mortis and when he speaks it’s distant, a ventriloquist throwing his voice. Olivia leans close, unwilling to let him go; the tombstone over John’s shoulder is written in bold column - HE’S NOT DEAD - the tombstone on the right simply reads as ishop.
There’s a sudden smell of decay, rotting flesh, and Olivia wakes up, flailing in her tank of water. Olivia thinks it’s a message, (holds on to the hope) but John Scott does die and whatever meaning she could have derived is lost to overwhelming grief, the surging tide of anger.
Astrid and herself learn to juggle Walter Bishop, to know when the thin curve of his shoulders means ‘don’t interrupt’; or if Velvet Sedan Chair’s blasting from the record player, they both stand in danger of being swept across the lab in a crazy waltz. Walter’s a bizarre mix of obsessive charm, fury, and danger. He fixates on certain foods, coins, beverages; he compulsively pats the pockets in his lab coat. “I think I’ve lost something,” he confesses, eyes watery and wide. Astrid passes him a pen, passes him red vines; passes him music and drinks and food of every variety. Walter accepts these tokens absently, lines etched deep in his forehead until Astrid wants to run her fingertips over his face, try to decode the lines of worry as if it were Braille. “Thank you dear.” Walter smiles; then frets the following day. “I think I’ve lost something.”
Olivia begins to dread those words, tension coiling between her ribs, spine; her lungs, if the sentence were to have a manifestation it would be nails dragging against a blackboard.
2/.
There’s jagged spikes of agony in her stomach, blood thick on Olivia’s fingertips. She doesn’t like the color, too dark on her digits and the world has the negative light of silver tempos, she can’t expand her chest for breath, her respiratory shallow and fast, like the hummingbird Rachel caught as a child, fluttering wings beating frantic against the kitchen window. There’s involuntary tears in Olivia’s eyes, result of gut-shot and too much pain; her piece rests in her hands; Jacob Merrill lies six feet away.
Everything's preternaturally still after the gunfire - hushed and wary - she wishes there were sound, birds or distant traffic, Ella’s bright laugh, the soundtrack of Olivia’s existence, but it’s her and blood and the vague knowledge she won’t have the chance to say goodbye to anyone she’s ever loved. “Honestly sweetheart, I’d do the comfort thing but you’re too stubborn to die.” Olivia blinks, tries to refocus her eyes, ten feet away, standing where there was empty space a moment ago.
She swallows, draws moisture to speak. “I need help.”
“Don’t we all.” Light catches behind his head, shimmering in distorted waves; it takes Olivia two seconds to realize she can see through him; electrical misfires in the brain, her body chemistry shutting down, and if Olivia’s to be haunted by hallucinations she would have preferred someone closer to her own frame of reference, her mother maybe or dad; she doesn’t want to expend energy talking to someone she’s never met. Olivia closes her eyes. “I’d keep them open if I were you.” He sounds closer; Olivia’s fingers skitter over her open wound.
“Why?”
There’s a rustling sound as if he shrugged. “Because it’s bad enough everyone’s forgotten, but if you fall asleep on me it adds insult to injury.” There’s a lighthearted quality to his voice, at odds with his choice of words. Olivia breaths, careful, shallow. “I’m not sure if this is harder than knowing you died alone the first time around.” Olivia's eyes snap open. He’s reclined against a tree, hands shoved into his pockets, a smile quirked on his blurred face. “Hey there gorgeous.”
Half of her blood is leaking from her body; there are tears in her eyes, gunpowder on her fingers and as hallucinations go, he sucks. Olivia was meant to see the circus tomorrow, a surprise gift for Ella’s birthday; her niece is inquisitive, charming, and if there’s one thing Olivia’ regrets it’ll be not having the opportunity to see Ella become a woman. “It hurts.”
It’s not what Olivia intends to say, raw as the bullet wound in her stomach, or the way her fear creeps upwards by notches, because there’s a difference between being brave and dying and being brave and dying slow. She can feel the edges of her composure start to fray; regret and pain, the first molten crack in the lava bed. Olivia hasn’t told Ella she loves her for at least a week; she can’t remember the last time she hugged Rachel; she wants to look Christina Merrill in the eye and say ‘look, I put Jacob Merrill down,’ because the bastard deserved it and Olivia has stood in those shoes, forced to protect herself, her sister, and her mother too.
She doesn’t want to die.
His expression tightens, a line creasing his forehead. He tilts his head up, scanning the sky through the foliage and talks to her.
He has a storyteller’s voice; quietly reflective, weaving tales of mobster’s, grifters, beautiful damsels, a life lived by wits and lack of boundary; he paints a vivid picture in her mind about the ocean on Cable Beach, where the Staircase to the Moon shimmers on a flat sea; or the cobbled streets of Bruges, places, events, sights Olivia’s never seen. The cadence of his voice reminds Olivia of going to the movies for the first time, enraptured by nothing more than a red curtain and a bucket of popcorn, by the promise of what lay on the other side. Magic.
The fear starts to ebb, regret backsliding because Olivia won’t go out like this, curled on forest leaves like a hunted animal. She won’t.
“There you are.” He sounds approving. Olivia hears a distant shout, Charlie’s voice echoing among the trees, hoarse with worry. “There you are,” he repeats, half heard, immediately forgotten, “It was worth it.” When Olivia turns her head there’s nothing but pine needles, wet trees and Jacob Merrill staring through sightless eyes.
Olivia Dunham’s released from intensive care two days later. She spends a fortnight in hospital, three months in rehab, carefully relearning her body; the hallucination she puts down as an aberration. When Olivia re-enters the lab at Harvard University Walter stands from his desk, dry lips brushing against her cheek. “I always wanted a daughter,” he whispers.
Olivia strokes his forearm, lets her arms fold around his back, holding him close. She doesn’t comment on how tightly Walter hugs her, or how his constant mantra is the same, except for the addition and subtraction of words. “I thought I lost you.”
***
3/.
It’s been three years and Olivia’s familiar with him now, with how he appears when everything’s off kilter, her mind skidding across the surface of perception.
His last appearance occurred when Olivia fell between the cracks of two separate realities - and he wasn’t so much soothing as he was fucking furious - snide, rude, poking at Olivia with sarcastic barbs until she was fighting mad, desperate to go home just so the spikes of elevated fear could level out and she would be rid of him. If Olivia wants to feel like the slowest child in playschool she has Walter, she doesn’t need a hallucination harping on her shoulder.
Except the other side follows Olivia home and if William Bell weren’t already dead, Olivia would torch him with her mind for being the instigator of this entire mess. They have a bridge now, Olivia has a double, and on most days, a severe headache to accompany it.
The only other time Olivia stood in a building where realities merged, the kitchen floor tiles were on the wall, a table leg half-buried in the ceiling. The bodies of the inhabitants were merged grotesquely, heads poking from torsos, arms and legs at opposing angles. At Liberty Island, after all the shouting and accusations are finished, Walternate takes one look at the room, the neat division, and congratulates Olivia on a job well done. Every object that resided still exists, unharmed, carried safe upon their persons.
Olivia accepts the Secretary’s compliment blankly, her eyes skittering from the Machine and the low song it emits. Its mass should make it the most dominating structure in the room but to Olivia it feels out of sync, on the threat of vanishing altogether. She goes home, Ella tucked into her side on the couch, the book well worn, its pages soft with repeated use. Olivia does the voices, gruff and rough (an imitation of Charlie) wide-eyed and innocent (Astrid) just to hear Ella’s laugh, playing Alice, the King and a multitude of characters. “Just look along the road,” the King said, “and tell me if you can see either of the two messengers.” “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too!” Ella squirms, her eyes wide. Olivia reads chapter after chapter until her voice turns hoarse, until the flesh and blood of her family slumbers peacefully.
Walter stands facing the Machine, his cardigan undone, hand clenching around a coin he found in his pocket, a flash of magic silver. Olivia stands beside him. “He said it was important, that he needed to show his father, and I took it from him because…because.”
Because you were jealous, Olivia thinks, unbidden, the thought coming from nowhere. Walter’s become more eccentric in the last two days, unstable, Olivia can see the differences between the Secretary and her own Walter Bishop, distinct as opposing players on a chessboard. He’s unraveling before Olivia’s eyes like a spool of yarn across a floor. “I think I’ve lost something,” Walter cries.
Olivia places a hand on his shoulder, turns him a degree off-centre, frustrated worry eating her from the inside because she won’t let the Other’s see the vulnerability. Olivia will shelter Walter until the end. She wants to take him away from the Machine and Liberty Island, as if the room itself is driving him insane, no amount of pens or vines can keep Walter quiet. He cries like a child - shameless and real. “Hush,” Olivia rubs slow circles between his shoulder-blades, the same way she comforts Ella when she’s distressed. “I promise, I’ll help you find it.” But not here, where Walternate’s distaste for his double’s tangible as blood, where Liv smirks from across the room, her body an insolent slouch as she watches them. Olivia takes Walter to the lab, to Harvard, where solitude and privacy reside.
“Are you high Agent Dunham?” He sounds amused.
Olivia turns a slow circle; for the first time her hallucination’s clear, his features strong; he’s dressed in faded jeans, a long-sleeve top, he’s wearing a hat like the Observers except it’s brown rather than slate blue, tilted off his forehead at a jaunty angle. It suits him. He’s good-looking in the way men from the 1930s were good-looking, rough at the edges, without artifice. She is high. “I think my double’s a bit of a bitch,” Olivia confides.
She’s not prepared for the slow smile, the way it strips years from his face, or how her toes curl when he laughs. He stalks forward three paces, chest-to-chest, finger hooked under her chin. “Hello, gorgeous.” He smells like bed-sheets, warmth, bodies curled close, he smells like them, and Olivia, drugged, yearning, tilts forward to kiss him. She wakes up in the tank, bewildered and aching. “I think I lost something.”
***
“Well?” Walter demands.
“Wait a minute,” Olivia slams the door in his face, towel wet, not even dressed.
“I’ve seen naked women before!”
“Congratulations… And wait a minute!” She can hear Walter hopping from foot to foot. The hat, Olivia thinks, her hallucination always did have a warped sense of humor.
She drives to the office after promising Walter she’ll return soon as possible. Michael Jenkins started his career as a street performer, working in charcoal and graphite before employed by the FBI. Olivia has perfect recall but the process is arduous, exacting, making Michael go over it and go over it until the likeness is perfect. The drawing won’t match any record in the FBI files, but Olivia takes the paper with shaking hands, with her heart hammering wildly, like the King in Wonderland Walter can't see who stands upon the road. “Who is he?” Michael yawns, stretching his fingers one by one.
Olivia still doesn’t have a name for her hallucination. “My personal Cheshire Cat,” she answers. When she shows the drawing to Walter, his spine snaps taut, lightning flashes in his eyes, Walter changes before her very eyes.
“Peter."
(notes: Through the Looking Glass has been quoted without permission as has the Little Prince. Regarding the Pilot episode, He's not Dead can be seen on the tombstone and was too good an opportunity not to mess with.)