Fringe -- The Blood in Your Skin

[anythingbutgrey]

The Blood in Your Skin (Or: Ten things that may or may not have happened to Lincoln and Olivia)
Spoilers through 'Bloodline'
For the personal canon meme i did on tumblr last week. alt!liv/lincoln requested by @flowerings
This is what leads Lincoln to kiss her the first time they almost die together. Lincoln thinks this is romantic. Olivia laughs in his face.



One

Olivia's his pick. Well, she's one of Broyles' top five picks, but Lincoln gets a say after the interviews. "It's your team," Broyles insists. "You get to make your case." And so Lincoln presents — he has facts and statistics and reports from her tour in Iran. Broyles doesn't so much as nod, but Lincoln thinks this could be a good thing. It turns out it is, and Olivia Dunham shows up at Fringe Division the next Monday carrying the sway in her hips that Lincoln will later use to keep time.

"Olivia Dunham," she says, hand outstretched. They've never met. The military likes two-way glass. I know, he is tempted to say. Instead he says, "Lincoln Lee. Nice to meet you."

He's about to ask her if she wants the grand tour when behind him, Charlie calls, "Dunham! I've been waiting for your sorry ass to show up."

Olivia grins. "Sorry I'm late, Charlie. I hope you didn't spend too much time picking out the nicest dress."

Charlie shrugs. "I've always been the prettiest girl at the ball and you know it."

"I do," Olivia says, this time to Lincoln. "Charlie was my date to all the military galas. Spilled wine on anything I wore."

"You two were a thing?" Lincoln asks, looking between the two of them.

Charlie laughs. Olivia laughs louder.

Two

Olivia is incredibly private. This is the nature of the military, of course; they bottle. Lincoln is no different, but with Olivia it causes trouble, because since Olivia is so private, Lincoln doesn't know about Frank. This is what leads Lincoln to kiss her the first time they almost die together. Lincoln thinks this is romantic. Olivia laughs in his face.

Two (a)

Look, Lincoln's hot. Olivia's well aware, and if Frank weren't around, she'd probably go after that least once, if only for the fun of it. But there's Frank, and there's also Lincoln himself, who she generally adores in the way one adores a puppy or a kid brother. After the kissing debacle, there are a couple awkward weeks and then it all seems to settle. She imagines he's over whatever crush he had, and that's the end of it, which is good. Olivia doesn't like mess.

Three

The other side comes two years later. Then, she comes back, and Lincoln and Charlie and Frank — they're rocks to cling to in a flood. She wants to spread her small arms around them and hold on tight, which startles her. She's not the sort. But Peter left a shadow over her. Though it's faint, it leaves her darker than she was.

Lincoln catches her staring at her lunch. "You okay?' he asks, mouthful of some vegan tofu mush Olivia imagines counts as food in some universe, but not in hers.

Olivia shrugs. "Long week."

Lincoln sits down across from her. She doesn't know how to say, to scream, Leave me alone without being suspicious. That she and Lincoln are part of a team hasn't changed, that he's her friend hasn't changed, but Olivia has changed. This world has kept ticking without her. It's not that she's particularly upset no one noticed that she wasn't herself. No one noticed her infiltration of the other Olivia's life either, and she thinks this is acceptable. It's just that she's trying to fit herself back into a world where she feels like a snipped puzzle piece, left just slightly off the mark.

"I know this job is hard," Lincoln says, and he's surprisingly quiet. "And I know you've been — I know it's been hard, these last few months. But you have friends in this office."

Olivia tries to smile. She's sure it doesn't work. "I know that."

"Good," Lincoln says. "Because as you could not have possibly forgotten, it's my birthday. Charlie bought the three of us tickets to the Yankees-Dodgers game. So, you're coming, no excuses."

"I don't know — " she starts, but he raises a finger to silence her.

"What part of ‘no excuses' didn't you understand, Dunham?" he says. "You know there's nothing I love more than watching you cry as your favorite team gets clobbered to death with a baseball bat. And since you inevitably forgot to even get me a card, much like every other year, this is how you can make it up to me."

Olivia laughs. "All you want for your birthday is to be able to laugh at my pain?"

Lincoln smirks, and presses a hand over his heart. "It is all I ask."

"Well," Olivia says with a grin, "if it's really all you want for your birthday."

"It is," Lincoln says. "And it doesn't even cost you a dime. I know how cheap you are when it comes to your friends. Who love you."

Olivia shrugs. "My love don't cost a thing," she says.

"You know that's not what that song is about, right?"

She raises an eyebrow. "It's art, Lincoln. It means whatever I want it to mean."

Four

After Frank and Olivia break up, Lincoln worries. He keeps catching Olivia staring off into space and messing up on missions and doing a whole number of unOlivia-like things, like crying in the bathroom just the one time, which Lincoln notices because it leaves Olivia's eyes bright red and puffy and makes Charlie sort of pounce to her side and do that stance Charlie does when he's telling really bad jokes.

And then, separate from Olivia at all, he's still trying to figure out how he fits. As Broyles' replacement, he's expected to stay behind, draw the plans, and make the hard calls. But Lincoln doesn't work that way, and he works that way even less when his friends are supposed to go and investigate potential quarantine situations. He will not be the general on his high horse, miles from the battlefield. He will not.

Lincoln ends up going on half the field missions, and Olivia teases him endlessly about being unable to handle authority. He laughs, and it's normal. A few days after Frank leaves, it's normal. Lincoln would this find alarming with anyone other than Olivia, who he thinks has a biological imperative to adapt. This makes her an excellent soldier. It also makes her difficult to track. But he's always been fascinated by her, though maybe entrapped is a better word. He can't stop circling her, and he doesn't know if he means that like the Earth around the Sun or like water around a drain.

Five

Olivia does not die. This is important, because in the moment when he thinks he's lost her he tries to picture a world without Olivia Dunham and it threatens to crack him apart like a spoiled egg. He is quite confident it is the most painful moment of his life, and this includes the time he had fifth degree burns all over his body, though the two are fairly comparable. If asked, that's probably how he'd describe it. Like being burned alive.

But no one asks, and still Lincoln has to deal with the aftermath. This not only includes conspiracies and government secrets he should not have been privy to, but also the fact that his secret has scratched its way out of the bag. Not that there was an alternative, not that he'd take it back, not that he could have lived with himself if she had died never knowing. He doesn't regret it. He just has to deal with it.

Part of him hopes that she'll be asleep when he works up the nerve to enter her hospital room. Then he can postpone this conversation until tomorrow, or the day after that, or the day after that. But instead she is awake, sitting up in bed with her knees curled to her chest, watching the news on low volume on the television. The baby is asleep in a bassinet next to the bed, kept with Olivia for security reasons. Lincoln has made all the arrangements himself. He doesn't announce his presence when he enters the room. Olivia doesn't look away from the television either, but she grins with a sort of accompanying wince.

"I was wondering when you'd get your ass in here," she says to the television. "Charlie's already snuck me in at least four pounds of chocolate pudding."

Lincoln laughs toward his shoes. "He's a far better man than I am. Far worse dental history, but a better man."

The television clicks off. Lincoln looks back up at Olivia, who has shifted to turn toward him, legs crossed and hanging off the edge of the bed. She has a fistful of white sheets in her right hand.

"Are you — have you been feeling okay?" Lincoln asks.

Olivia blinks. "I feel fine. A little tired. Very tired, actually, but. I'll be fine."

"That's good," Lincoln stumbles. "That's good to hear."

She rolls her eyes. "You don't need to try and placate me with small talk."

He breathes. She doesn't say anything. In the silence with someone else, he'd probably try and fill the gaps with rude jokes or loud stories, but here, with Olivia, he just wants to look at her. To be honest, he wants to touch her, because he still has that moment of her "death" stabbing its way through his brain. He wants confirmation that she's real.

"I thought you died," he whispers, as though it's a secret he'd rather not share.

Olivia looks at the baby. He wriggles in sleep. "I thought I did too," she says.

Then, she coughs, and looks back at him. "Lincoln," she says, and her voice is quiet and low. He feels somehow caught in the act of something. Maybe he was staring. He looks away.

"Lincoln," she continues, "we need to talk about what happened."

"Oh?" he says. Maybe she wants to talk about something else, maybe the entire event is hazy, it could happen, she could just not —

"You said you loved me," she says.

Lincoln scuffs a shoe against the linoleum. "I was hoping you wouldn't remember," he confesses.

"I remember all of it," Olivia says, and when he looks at her she appears to be miles away. Lincoln wonders, with a realization that seems to make an audible pop, if maybe he's been wrong. Maybe the cracks in her over the last two weeks had nothing to do with Frank at all, and instead were about readjustment. Maybe she's been splintering ever since she returned, and he just didn't know what to look for. He feels like he's betrayed her somehow, having never noticed.

Lincoln says, "The Secretary told us about your mission to the other side." It rushes out of him, words and consonants piling on top of each other. She doesn't move. No, it's more purposeful than that — she is stilled, frozen, perched on the edge of something.

"Oh," she says.

"And he told me about the father. Peter, right?"

Olivia looks up at him. "Yes."

Lincoln tries to swallow. His throat is dried out, withered like the left-behind skin of a snake. "Do you love him?" he asks. Maybe he doesn't want to know. Maybe he has to know.

Olivia laughs, or, rather, offers a pale substitute. "Everyone keeps asking me that," she says.

Lincoln looks out the window. It looks like any other evening, where the sun has long since set and the city continues to breathe. But he has the feeling that as far as the people in this room are concerned, everything has been reshaped. Like the world yesterday and the world tomorrow might as well be different universes in their own right.

"You've had a long day," Lincoln says to the window over Olivia's head. "I'll let you rest."

She nods, but when he's halfway out the door she calls after him. He stops and turns back, one hand lingering on the doorframe.

"I never got to thank you," she says.

Lincoln laughs. It's a real one too, bright and open. "Anytime," he says.

Six

The truth is, Olivia carries Peter with her like a scar. It snakes down her body, long and thin, the body's memory of a gash. Loving Peter leaves her marked — though if loving is the word to use, Olivia doesn't know. She thought she loved Frank, but she slept with Peter to survive. She tricked Peter with her body to survive. It doesn't really sound to her like she loves anyone. The child that sleeps in her apartment, wakes her at two in the morning begging for milk her body never learned to produce — Olivia doesn't even know if she loves him either. She knows that makes her a failure as a mother. She has heard it makes her a failure as a woman as well, though that particular train of logic has never been one Olivia formally identified with. It's not that she's unfeeling. It's just that there is a line between caring and loving, and love takes time, preparation. For a week she thought of her child as a virus. Now, two weeks after his birth, she is expected to have immediately converted to thinking of him as a gift. And she does, for the most part. But he is still a stranger in her home.

At 3:36 AM on a Tuesday, the baby wails its usual migraine-inducing screech and Olivia can't calm him, and in what seems like a logical thing to do at the time, she calls Lincoln. It's on the second ring before she realizes that calling her mother would be a smarter plan. Charlie's awful with kids, but at least he's not Lincoln. But before she can move to hang up the phone, Lincoln has already picked up. The sleepy haze in his voice calms her, which, she'll be honest, she did not expect.

"It's me," she says over the baby crying in her arms.

"Liv?" he asks, and she smiles at the worry in his voice. She must be coming down with something. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she says, "but I can't get the baby to stop crying. You wouldn't happen to be good with kids?"

"I babysat for my cousins a couple times?" he offers. "But I'm hardly an expert —"

"You'll do," she interrupts. "If you wouldn't mind. I'm out of ideas with this one."

There's a pause. Olivia imagines Lincoln is weighing options the way she now is weighing options: what the phone call means, why it's at 3:30 in the morning, why she thought to call him, if this is a bad idea, worse idea, worst idea ever, if his confession still hovers between them like a balloon threatening to pop and rattle cages.

"I'll be there soon," Lincoln says. Olivia does not say goodbye before she hangs up the phone. When he arrives, he does not kiss her. The baby falls asleep in his arms, and then he falls asleep on the couch. Olivia watches the sunrise.

Seven

The first time she kisses him it's by the patrol car. They've gone out to investigate a possible fringe event that ends up just being a tick in the universal framework. Nothing they need to address. It's just her and Lincoln, because Lincoln apparently can't stay in his office without going a little crazy. He keeps going on assignment with them, and tonight Charlie's out of town. Some romantic trip with Mona. Olivia thinks it's cute.

So, they're leaving the case and she kisses him, interrupting some diatribe he's on just because Lincoln likes to fill space. She kisses him because she wants to. That's it. Because she wants to, because in the three months since his confession she's been trying to imagine what his body would feel like against her body, and she thinks it could turn out okay. Kissing him, in the end, is easy. Sure, her heart sort of jump-starts like a car pulling electricity from another, which surprises her, but it's easy. For a moment, Lincoln is still. Olivia has her eyes closed, but she can feel the quiet in his body. Then, his hands pull on her hips until she's pressed flush against him and she thinks she hears him laugh and say, "Oh, thank god."

Eight

They go on a date. Charlie thinks this is hysterical. Olivia punches him on the arm just hard enough to leave a bruise. She wears a dress and does her hair and he wears slacks and it's odd to see them in the reflection of restaurant windows. They look like the sort of people who would never be caught dead in cargo pants. Olivia fiddles with the hemline of her dress under the table.

She's stumbling over some small talk conversation before the appetizers even arrive when Lincoln interrupts and says, "This is really fucking stupid."

Olivia blinks.

"Not you," Lincoln covers. "This." He gestures between the two of them and at the bottle of wine on the table. Olivia looks down at her dress again. She does feel a little silly. She doesn't really like heels. Being the other Olivia killed the soles of her feet.

"It does seem strange," she says. She doesn't know where he's going with this.

He places his hands on the table, palms flat. "We can't be anything other than you and me," he stumbles, and Olivia smiles. He's cute when he's flustered, she thinks, and then shakes it away. "And we're — I think we're pretty good as we are."

"I agree," she says.

"So," he continues over her, "how about we just pay for the wine and cancel the food and do some stuff that's more us-like."

Olivia smirks. "As in what?"

Lincoln grins. "I have a couple of ideas."

Nine

Olivia knew she would see Peter again. It seemed an implicit fact of the game, of the war, that they would crash into each other another time. Olivia even assumed this reunion would feature her staring down the barrel of a gun, which she is. She assumed Peter would be the one holding it, which he is. She assumed the other Olivia would be with him, which she is. What she does not expect is stupid fucking Lincoln barging into the now abandoned bus station with guns raised.

"Put the weapon down," Lincoln screams from behind her. Olivia, for whom time has felt rather sticky for the last sixty seconds, feels herself propelled forward, as though thrust into the regular rhythm of minutes, nanoseconds.

"Lincoln," Olivia says very slowly, because she has long since had the inkling that Peter Bishop is more dangerous than he looks. "Calm."

The other Olivia has her gun drawn too, but doesn't seem to be pointing at anything in particular. Instead, she wavers between Lincoln and Olivia, whispering to Peter to lower his weapon, that this isn't the way to do this, that this isn't why they're here. But Peter doesn't seem to be listening. Instead, his jaw is clenched shut, grip tight around the gun. Olivia can see that from her distance five feet away. She doesn't like it.

"Why don't we all just stop and talk for a second," the other Olivia sputters. "We didn't come here to fight."

Olivia narrows her eyes. She can sense that Lincoln has stepped up next to her, though he's standing a couple feet to the side and she can't see him. But there's a second sense about him now.

"Peter," the other Olivia is saying, and it's far enough and quiet away that Olivia can't really hear her, but she can read lips well enough. "Stop," the other Olivia says. "Stop."

But then there is a flinch, a jump, and the other Olivia tries to shove Peter's arm, to redirect his aim and —

the bullet goes nowhere near Olivia, and instead gets twisted to three feet away, where Lincoln has stopped to stare at the blood on his shirt, gun still in hand.

"Liv?" he says, and it's a question that Olivia refuses to answer. He teeters on his feet, and she runs to him, catching him before he crashes to the floor.

"You're okay," she says as she sinks to the ground with his body in her arms. Her gun isn't in her hands anymore. She must have holstered it or dropped it, but she can't remember when. What she's thinking about is the blood. She calls Fringe division and demands immediate medical assistance, but by then her hands are covered in it, in the blood, in the bright, angry red. Game over, it whispers. You lose.

"It's bad," Lincoln says, eyes shut. "Liv. Liv."

She shakes her head. She can't think when he's saying her name like that, like a supplication. If she can't think, she can't save him, and she has to save him.

"Shh," she says, palms pressed to the wound. There's blood seeping through the gaps in her fingers now. She has no idea where Peter and Olivia are. In the fragment of a second when she thinks to look back, she sees they're already gone. She doesn't really care. What she cares about is dying under her hands.

"Olivia," Lincoln is saying, and he sounds so far away, the way a child does before drifting into sleep. "Olivia, I — "

"Shut up," she interrupts. She already knows the end to that sentence, and she will not tolerate surrender to a death as simple as this one. A simple wound. Olivia has her gold medal hanging on her wall. There's nothing about a gun she doesn't know. She knows what a bullet does to a body.

"Olivia," Lincoln is still saying, and it almost sounds like he's trying to comfort her, and it makes Olivia want to be sick. It makes her want to stand up and scream. But his eyes are slipping shut.

"Lincoln," she says. She screams. She's crying, she realizes. She wasn't expecting that. "Lincoln, focus."

"I'm trying," he says, but it's just a breath above a whisper. Olivia thinks she hears sirens in the distance, though that could just be a wishful dream. She looks toward the window, but she doesn't see anything outside. Just the normal bustle of a day full of people who have no idea what is being lost in this room.

"I love you," she says to Lincoln, still looking out the window. She doesn't know if she means it. She might. She might mean it more than she's meant a good deal of things in her quiet life. She really doesn't care either way. What she remembers is that when she lay dying in his arms not too many months ago, his confession was halfway to a prayer. Olivia hasn't believed in any gods in a very long time, but if there could be one, and if they would listen, Olivia thinks that would be the only prayer to hear. She looks back to Lincoln. Tears have fallen onto her blood-covered hands, leaving strange, dilutes splotches on her knuckles. "Okay? I love you. So don't you fucking die on me."

Lincoln smiles. "I'll try," he says. "Just for you."

Olivia tries to laugh, but she's too busy sobbing, which, being an activity long-since abandoned, seems to be tearing her sternum apart from the inside. "Best birthday present I could ever ask for," she tries. It might come out a jumble of consonants and sounds.

"Just for you," Lincoln says again, so quiet that Olivia has to bend her ear to his lips to hear him. "For you."

And then he's gone.

Ten

Olivia knows war. The only constant is that it does not stop for the bereaved.

Comments

[ozmissage.livejournal.com]

hondagirll pointed me here, and I'm so glad she did. This fic was so poignant and sweet and then unexpectedly (perfectly) wrenching. I love this pairing and I love what you did with them here even more. The way you write Olivia with such care is amazing. This part in particular got to me: The truth is, Olivia carries Peter with her like a scar. It snakes down her body, long and thin, the body's memory of a gash. Loving Peter leaves her marked — though if loving is the word to use, Olivia doesn't know. She thought she loved Frank, but she slept with Peter to survive. She tricked Peter with her body to survive. It doesn't really sound to her like she loves anyone. The child that sleeps in her apartment, wakes her at two in the morning begging for milk her body never learned to produce — Olivia doesn't even know if she loves him either. She knows that makes her a failure as a mother. She has heard it makes her a failure as a woman as well, though that particular train of logic has never been one Olivia formally identified with.

Gorgeous fic. <3

[anythingbutgrey.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! And you have no idea how much The way you write Olivia with such care is amazing. means to me because oh gods, I love this woman. I love this woman so much, and so much of fandom doesn't or doesn't yet and I love her forever and it makes me so happy that you got that through this. Because, stan. Stan stan stan forever. :D