anythingbutgrey (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
anythingbutgrey) wrote2011-10-09 08:28 pm
anythingbutgrey) wrote2011-10-09 08:28 pm
Entry tags:
Fringe -- Easy
Easy
(Blueverse) Olivia. Lincoln/Olivia, Peter/Olivia.
Emptiness without Peter wasn’t any better or worse than emptiness with him. It was just different. "I was happy without you,” she says.
Contains references through 3x03
What Olivia does not mention is whether her dreams about this mystery man would be better classified as nightmares. Sometimes they’re not, but then again sometimes they are. Walter calls it being haunted. Olivia has seen many things, but she doesn’t believe in ghosts.
“Folie a deux,” she mumbles as she runs the picture through the FBI facial recognition database again.
Astrid lifts her head. “Sorry?”
Olivia tries to smile. “Folie a deux,” she says. “A madness shared by two.”
“You think this is what this is?” Astrid asks. Behind her, Walter is speaking to the dead pigeon in his hands. This is his favorite activity, speaking to the dead, trying to bring them back through speech and science alone.
“It makes more sense than what we’ve got,” Olivia says. “Daydreams and nightmares aren’t exactly hard science.”
Astrid tries to smile, but it’s the sort of smile Astrid has when she’s focused on reassurance, not honesty. “He’s not contagious, you know.”
Actually, years of working at Fringe division somehow dissuades her of that confidence, but still Olivia smiles. “Of course not,” she says.
But Olivia has seen stranger things.
And then Peter is back. Well, not and then — there is impossibility and the pulling forth from a fragment of memory and to be honest she can’t remember much because of the pounding in her head but he is back and standing right in front of her, shaking, hands reaching out, wanting to say —
Olivia turns away. She can remember everything now, from the days he kept calling her sweetheart straight on to the day she let him climb into that machine to try and save the world. But she can also remember the other timeline, the one where Peter Bishop died as a child. He did not have a genius IQ. He did not falsify documentation from MIT. He did not run from the government. Olivia did not chase him down in Iraq.
No, instead Olivia lived her life. She grew up and learned to shoot a gun and put her stepfather’s body in a grave somewhere she chose to forget. John met her, John loved her, John died. She joined Fringe Division and read medical journals to relax. She and Astrid went out for drinks the last Thursday of every month just to keep each other sane. They pretended to be normal women with normal lives. Eventually they grew too tired, and the drinks became every other month, every six months, whenever they remembered. Olivia came to think of emptiness as something sewn into her like the tags on the backs of her sweaters. She might not have liked the way it scratched at her skin, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.
But now Peter is back and Olivia dreams for a moment that she will lose that silence that has been scraping at her. She looks at him and his shaking hands, reached out, and she hopes, And now? Olivia’s hands aren’t shaking, though. They are perfectly still. She thinks about her memories as the timelines rest side by side in her mind, and realizes that emptiness without Peter wasn’t any better or worse than emptiness with him. It was just different. With Peter she could pretend she was getting better. Without him, she still had hope that something might save her.
“I was happy without you,” she says. She shouldn’t have, not now, but she’s so startled by the mismatch in her mind that she can’t help it. It’s more to herself than to anyone else but of course Peter hears her. His hands fall back to his sides, slipping into the pockets of his jeans. She doesn’t say happier and she doesn’t mean that she was happier, but Olivia knows she was different and she doesn’t think the difference was so bad. She could see clearer there. She could stand sturdy there.
She says, “I’m sorry.” Peter doesn’t tell her it’s okay.
She meets Lincoln at a bar in Central Square. They’ve been there before, months ago after the Gus fungi incident. As it turned out, she had needed to talk about it. “I haven’t had a partner since John,” she had said then. The feeling of panic, the worry of loss, that was all unfamiliar to her. She had to relearn. “You get used to it,” Lincoln had said after a moment. “It makes you a better agent, in the end, if you have something to lose.”
She’s staring into her second glass of whisky when he arrives and slips into the seat next to her. Normally a pretty woman alone at a bar would have some companion meander over at some point of the evening, but this rarely happens to Olivia. She thinks she projects some sort of poorly veiled discomfort to the outside world. Therefore, the seat next to her is open, and Lincoln sits down without a word. She doesn’t look up at him. By now she can recognize the fringes on his coat.
“I know what happened,” Lincoln says. “I called Astrid when I started remembering things that never happened. I thought you’d be with Peter right now.”
Olivia downs the rest of her whisky. She does not wince. “I shouldn’t expect things to be simple. My life has never been simple. But some things have to be simple, right? Some things must be easy.”
Lincoln nods. “Some things. But I can’t tell you what those things should be. There are shapeshifters and other universes and a dead man took over your body, and I don’t know if the work we do will ever be simple.”
She ignores how he’s started speaking in we and us lately. “I’m not talking about the work. I’m talking about people. It’s never simple.”
Lincoln looks at her. Olivia looks back and it’s the first time she’s looked anyone in the eye since Peter returned. “It can be. If you find the right people, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she says. Her voice drops to quieter than she meant, though he can still hear her in the near-empty bar. “You’ve had Robert and friends. I feel — I feel like I haven't had that in a very long time.”
Lincoln shakes his head. “You’ve had that. You have that now, no matter what timeline you’re in. So maybe it’s not enough for you, maybe the people you’ve had before weren’t enough. But they were there, Olivia. They’ve always been there.”
Olivia waves the bartender over for another glass of scotch. When it sits in front of her she looks at her hands and she says, “It’s been easier with you. Easier than I expected, anyway.” She would like to blame the alcohol for this, but Olivia is not a liar, not even to herself.
For a moment, Lincoln says nothing. Then, he seems to smile and says, “Well that’s something.”
Peter is at the lab the next day. Olivia knew he would be, of course, but it still startles her somehow and she spills a bit of her coffee on her coat. It will come out with a dry clean, she hopes, and hangs it in the coat closet they never use. Peter stares at her as she moves from computer to lab table and back again, trying to find some task to perform on this most inconveniently slow day.
Even Astrid seems chillier to her today. That’s not about Peter, of course. That’s about the two women and who they were in different worlds. Even in all her wishful thinking, Olivia could call them no more than coworkers, not if she’s honest. Olivia wants to be honest. Now is a time where self-delusion would be so easy, and Olivia doesn’t want that. She wants an honest life, whatever that means. She wants to pull that out from whatever tangles she has now.
Lincoln isn’t coming in today. He sends her a text message in that regard, including a disclaimer should information about shape shifters arise. It’s best, of course. This has reverted back to her space with Peter. Yet, though she supposes the original timeline is the technical truth, it is difficult to remember that the rewritten timeline is technically false. It certainly doesn’t feel that way. That Olivia — and she does now feel like they are both separate and the same — buried her stepfather in Georgia and always kept fake dandelions in her kitchen. That life feels just as real as this one.
She’s glad Lincoln is going to stay away today. He would make things too complicated. That she has a new partner now would be difficult for Peter. Olivia does not want him to feel replaced. This is important in his new adjustment. Walter flits from one end of the lab to the other, overjoyed. Peter looks and smiles at his father, and then he turns back to Olivia. Olivia looks at the ground.
Later, Peter brings her coffee. He got her order right this time, too. Olivia envies his easy, linear history. She nearly jumps when he walks up beside her, though. She’d been spending the day trying to focus, and focus meant pretending he didn’t exist. Maybe that’s what Peter has always done: distracted.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Peter says as Olivia quietly thanks him for the coffee without looking above his chin.
“Okay,” Olivia says, turned back to the computer screen. She’s reading about false memories, and minimizes the window.
Peter looks over his shoulder, to back where Astrid and Walter are back to studying dead birds. Olivia wishes they’d come up with a new project. She doesn’t like the notion of waking up the dead.
“I was thinking maybe somewhere else,” Peter says. “It’s a nice enough day for a walk, don’t you think?”
Olivia looks out the dusty window. It’s sunny out to be sure, but late autumn in Boston always looks deceptively inviting. “I need some time,” Olivia says still facing the window. “There’s a lot to sort through.”
Peter nods. “I get that. I was just hoping I help you through it, maybe, or — I don’t like you keeping me in the dark.”
Olivia winces. “I need some time,” she says again, and with that she stands, walks to take her coffee-stained coat from the closet and brushes out the door and into the day. She calls Lincoln before she makes it down the front steps. He picks up on the third ring.
“Shapeshifters?” he says in lieu of a greeting.
“No,” she says. “Just me.”
She doesn’t ask if he’s got the time, but he doesn’t protest either. Instead, he suggests a café on Elm Street and tells her he’ll be there in an hour. Olivia drives there and waits, poking at a bran muffin with a fork and trying to be hungry. When Lincoln arrives she finds herself sitting up just a bit straighter and hating herself for it.
“Rough day at the office?” Lincoln jokes as he sits down.
She grimaces. “Something like that.”
“Peter?”
“Me,” she says. And then, if she wants to be honest, “Peter too. Astrid also. It’s been rough. Walter’s happy as a whole colony of clams, though.”
Lincoln nods. “Anything I can help with, or did you just want to talk?”
Olivia blinks. Perhaps this is actually what having a partner is like, having someone just to talk to who has seen what you have seen. She and Peter must have had that. But there have been so many months between that timeline and this that it seems halfway to a distant memory by now. Maybe they never even had that at all. But they must have. So what if Peter took his hollow insides and raised his fists to the world while Olivia turned inward and away — they still understood each other. Their empty spaces were the same, surely.
“You said with Robert it was like finding family,” Olivia says, remembering, “which you never expected to find. How did you do that?”
Lincoln pauses, and then a smile flits across his face. Olivia watches him in this moment of memorial. There’s not even a tinge of sorrow at the things he’s lost, not right now. Olivia envies him.
“It takes time,” Lincoln says. “Well, with some people it takes time; other people are lucky enough to just click, you know? But for me it took time, or it used to. For most of my life I was… a lot like you, I suppose. All about self-preservation because I was the only constant I had.” Lincoln looks up at her to judge her reaction. Olivia imagines he wants to know if he’s read her right, and he has. Olivia looks away.
Lincoln continues, “But surprising things can happen if you’ll let them, Olivia.
In my experience, sometimes we just need one person to keep us steady. Once we have that everything else gets so much easier.”
“And Robert was that person for you,” Olivia says, taking a sip of her now cold cup of coffee and peering at him over the lid.
Lincoln nods. “Robert was that person. I told you, sometimes things are easy.”
“But then you lost him,” Olivia points out and then wishes she hadn’t. Lincoln looks — well, horrified is the simplest word, but bereaved might be a better choice. Then, that look falls away and Lincoln leans forward just an inch as though he were about to impart on her a secret. Olivia leans forward too, and so now she imagines they look like co-conspirators. The idea makes her smile, and she notices that Lincoln glances down at the turn in her mouth and smiles back.
“With the right people,” Lincoln tells her, whispering now and Olivia feels somehow that she is gathering some information that only they can know, “it is always worth it.”
“No matter what?” she asks, still leaning forward.
Lincoln laughs and leans back. Olivia finds it suddenly easier to breathe with the added foot or so between them. “No matter what.”
Olivia nods, and runs her tongue along the back of her teeth. “Can I ask you a question, then?” Olivia asks, and Lincoln nods her on. She has to catch her breath first. “Was it — is it easy with me too?”
His mouth lifts. “It is.”
She takes him to her apartment. There is a logical and linear pathway from the coffee shop to here, but it went by too quickly and Olivia is trying not to overthink. Still, she feels so juvenile, what with the way she fiddles for too long with the key while hoping her living room is in order. She wonders if there’s wine in her kitchen, the good stuff she likes to keep around for the imagined day she will entertain people. Or is there coffee in the cabinet — that much is easy; there is always coffee. And besides, morning coffee is presumptuous. Lincoln stands two feet behind her and is kind enough to not mention the trouble she’s having with the lock. Olivia reminds herself that time is probably not going as slowly as it is in her head.
She gets the door open and flips on the light. The living room is indeed in order. Only a wayward sweater lies haphazardly over the arm of the couch. She tugs her coat off and hangs it by the doorway. After a pause and a look around the room, Lincoln does the same and Olivia shuts the door behind them.
“I have some wine if you’d like,” Olivia says as the door clicks shut.
“Wine sounds nice,” Lincoln says, and Olivia nods but then neither of them moves.
“White or red?” Olivia asks, though she doesn’t know what she has of each.
Lincoln seems to laugh. “Whatever you’ve got is fine.”
Olivia nods, and looking away from him manages to put one foot in front of the other. She doesn’t get very far, though, because Lincoln seems to move with her and by the time she’s taken her third step he’s right in front of her, hands starting to hold her hips. He does this slowly, of course. First there are his fingertips, then his fingers flatten joint by joint until his palms press against her. Olivia takes a single step toward him, bridging the small gap between them so she can lean into him. His hands move from her hips to the small of her back, slipped under her shirt and pressing against her skin.
Then, one hand moves from her back up to his face, where he removes his glasses and sets them down on the table. This free hand now moves to rest against her face, his thumb brushing against her lips just once. Olivia wants to shut her eyes, but she can barely even blink because Lincoln is quite literally pressed against her and isn’t moving to kiss her. He certainly wants to; while Olivia spends this moment examining every inch of his face, Lincoln is just staring at her mouth. No, this is just going to be her moment and her decision to make.
She leans forward bit by bit and as she moves closer she sees his mouth curve upward. When she kisses him, she finds him warmer than she was expecting. Lincoln’s hands drift to the front of her body, where he tugs at the clasp of her trousers while she keeps her eyes closed. She can’t help but gasp, though, at the placement of his hands and Lincoln pulls away for just a moment. Olivia opens her eyes.
“Is this okay?” Lincoln asks, and Olivia smiles. “Yes,” she says, and he grins back, leaning forward once more and smiling against her mouth as he continues to undo her trousers. She pushes his suit jacket from his shoulders and she opens her eyes to watch it fall to the ground without a sound.
Lincoln looks at her, but this time he doesn’t say anything. He merely watches as Olivia leans back to unbutton his shirt. While she almost wishes he would say something while her fingers trip against the fastenings, she is also quite glad for the quiet and the way she can see him looking at her out of the corner of her eye. The rest of these undressings are far easier though, and they end up on the couch simply because her bedroom suddenly seems too far away. The apartment is cold without clothes on, but Lincoln remains warm and Olivia presses her body against his until she thinks she’s close enough to a fever. When she climaxes, Lincoln breathes in. There’s a way he looks at her after that makes her turn her face to the cushions. It’s just that it's been quite a while since anyone looked at her the way Lincoln looks at her in this precise moment.
But then Lincoln presses a kiss to her cheek and he reminds her, “This is easy.”
She looks back at him. Her hand drifts to his face, and her thumb brushes against his lips for a moment before he bends to kiss her. She gets off the couch and pulls the forgotten sweatshirt over her shoulders and runs to grab underwear from her bedroom while Lincoln puts his boxers back on. When she returns to the living room, he catches her by the waist and kisses her and yes, yes, this is easy.
They get called into work, of course. Fringe Division has no respect for the fact that she is busy curling herself against Lincoln’s body and making fun of themed sweaters on QVC.
“I hate our job sometimes,” Lincoln remarks as she brushes out her hair. She watches him in the reflection of the mirror. His body is turned toward her, his feet resting on the floor by her bed. The woman on the television reminds them that you can never go wrong with a Thanksgiving-themed sweater during the holidays. Olivia thinks about the holidays.
“Someone has to do it,” she notes, but by then Lincoln is already halfway to the living room, where his clothes sit folded on the coffee table. When Olivia walks out of her bedroom, Lincoln is already fully dressed, adjusting his tie in the mirror by the door. She picks a different coat out of the closet, one without a coffee stain, and holds the door open for him as he walks out. Lincoln brushes his hand against her hip as she follows him, but she has no trouble with the locks.
Still, she has to tell him in the car: “It’s probably best if we don’t tell anyone at work just yet. It’s a bad time for that.”
Lincoln looks at her. “Because of Peter?”
Olivia nods.
“Did you love him?” Lincoln asks, and he doesn’t sound unnerved or jealous but Olivia doesn’t want to have this conversation with him. She doesn’t want to have this conversation with herself, let alone with anyone else.
“I did,” she says, keeping her eyes on the road. Lincoln doesn’t ask if she still does and she’s grateful, because she doesn’t have an answer for that. She thinks she should. She thinks it should be easy, but it’s not. Things with Peter have never been easy. But she can’t just scrub him out — there are still days she thinks she sees John on street corners, even though Olivia doesn’t believe in ghosts. Still, she and Lincoln don’t say anything until they get back to Fringe division, and they are careful to keep five feet between them as they walk in.
“Yes,” Walter says as they walk in. “Olivia, Ford, take a look at this.”
Lincoln rolls his eyes, but walks forward anyway. Olivia looks around the room. Peter is sitting near Astrid’s desk, staring at her. When they make eye contact, Olivia looks away.
It’s a shapeshifter case. Lincoln stands up just a bit straighter. Olivia catches her hand mid-motion toward him and brings it back to her side. Peter is watching her. Them. His eyes tick between Lincoln and Olivia and the too-purposeful gap between them.
“You’ll have to go to the other side,” Walter says. Now it is Olivia’s time to bristle and Lincoln’s time to step toward her even though he shouldn’t and then freeze. “The shapeshifters were Walternate’s creation; if they’re out of control, he must know why.”
“Or be the reason why,” Lincoln says, and Walter nods.
Peter reaches between Lincoln and Olivia to grab the car keys to the car off the table. “Let’s get to work then,” he says, and leads the way out the door.
Olivia looks over to Lincoln. He shrugs, and then follows. Olivia trails after last.
The other version of herself speaks primarily to Lincoln. Olivia asks a question and the other Olivia answers Lincoln instead. He notices too, and keeps glancing at Olivia for an answer Olivia can’t give him. The other Lincoln is here too, actually, but Lincoln hasn’t noticed him yet. Olivia has, because she knows what to look for. Peter stands next to Olivia with his arms crossed. The other Olivia keeps her shoulders turned from him. Olivia wishes she could stop remembering the things she now knows.
The other Lincoln walks over. Lincoln stares, though the other Lincoln just laughs. “I’m a nerd over there,” he says, and the other Olivia retorts, “You’re a nerd over here too. I know about your doll collection.”
“Action figures,” the other Lincoln groans. Olivia looks over at Lincoln. He’s laughing at them, and this makes Olivia smile in turn. Lincoln steps forward to the other Lincoln and says, “Can you show me what those machines do?” and the two walk through to the other end of the room.
The other Olivia takes a one second glance at Peter and her mouth stretches thin. Olivia turns to look at him. His arms remain folded across his chest. Olivia knows enough about the details here to want to walk away from this mission entirely. She looks to the Lincolns on the other side of the room. The other Lincoln is trying on her Lincoln’s glasses. She smiles.
“I have some files for you to look at,” the other Olivia says, turning and walking to the long metal table nearby. Olivia follows and is thankful Peter does not. He wanders over to the machine and then stares up at it. Olivia watches him there for a moment, and when she turns back to the other Olivia she sees the other woman is doing the same.
“I had a child,” the other Olivia says, and Olivia stops moving. “A boy.”
“Peter’s?” Olivia asks, though it comes out more like a wheeze than a word.
The other Olivia nods. “I forgot,” she says, still staring at Peter. “I had a son and I forgot.”
Olivia doesn’t say anything. There’s little to say, of course. They’re not friends; Olivia has no desire to be friends with this woman. She doesn’t have to offer any cold comfort and she doesn’t want to. But it’s hard to look at her now without seeing past the monstrous imaginings Olivia had built about her alternate. This other Olivia is not a monster. She’s just something Olivia can’t understand.
“Did you love him?” Olivia asks.
The other Olivia looks toward the Lincolns at the other end of the room. “That’s a pretty common question these days.”
Olivia frowns. Maybe they have more in common than she thought. “You and Lincoln?”
“That,” the other Olivia says, turning back, “is a question I don’t have an answer to.”
A lot of that going around these days, Olivia does not say. Then again, they deal in that which appears unanswerable. It’s their job to dig to the core of things and reveal truths. The two of them sit at the table to go over the files and around twenty minutes in, the pair of Lincolns return to their side of the hangar and sit next to them. While Lincoln sits on her left, the other Lincoln sits on the other Olivia’s right. It’s the little things. One day Olivia will learn what all of this means. Peter is still standing by the machine, walking around it in circles, looking for answers to his own questions. Olivia wants to help him, she realizes. The feeling clutches at her suddenly, and she turns away. For now, Peter is another accident victim. Olivia knows what to do with that. Olivia knows how to help.
“Hey,” Lincoln murmurs from next to her. He has two fingers resting on her thigh. “Everything okay?”
She runs her nails against her mouth. Not everything is going to have an answer. Not everything is going to be easy. Still, Olivia turns to Lincoln and catches his hand in hers under the table just for a moment, just to reassure.
“I’m fine,” she says, and for once she might mean it.
They don’t make it back to their side until late the next evening. They haven’t slept either, and her bed has never been so inviting. Lincoln trails after her into the apartment. It’s just that her apartment was closer, of course, and Lincoln is apparently not as good without sleep as she is. Neither of them says anything as they trudge through the door. Olivia tosses her coat on the table by the door and Lincoln piles his there as well. She’s too exhausted even for changing into sweatpants, and instead kicks off her shoes and crawls into her bed fully clothed. Lincoln follows suit. Outside, the quiet street announces only the crickets. The clock on the dresser ticks on. Lincoln drapes his arm around her waist and presses a kiss to the place where her neck meets her shoulders. Olivia closes her eyes.
*
Concrit forever welcome
(Blueverse) Olivia. Lincoln/Olivia, Peter/Olivia.
Emptiness without Peter wasn’t any better or worse than emptiness with him. It was just different. "I was happy without you,” she says.
Contains references through 3x03
What Olivia does not mention is whether her dreams about this mystery man would be better classified as nightmares. Sometimes they’re not, but then again sometimes they are. Walter calls it being haunted. Olivia has seen many things, but she doesn’t believe in ghosts.
“Folie a deux,” she mumbles as she runs the picture through the FBI facial recognition database again.
Astrid lifts her head. “Sorry?”
Olivia tries to smile. “Folie a deux,” she says. “A madness shared by two.”
“You think this is what this is?” Astrid asks. Behind her, Walter is speaking to the dead pigeon in his hands. This is his favorite activity, speaking to the dead, trying to bring them back through speech and science alone.
“It makes more sense than what we’ve got,” Olivia says. “Daydreams and nightmares aren’t exactly hard science.”
Astrid tries to smile, but it’s the sort of smile Astrid has when she’s focused on reassurance, not honesty. “He’s not contagious, you know.”
Actually, years of working at Fringe division somehow dissuades her of that confidence, but still Olivia smiles. “Of course not,” she says.
But Olivia has seen stranger things.
And then Peter is back. Well, not and then — there is impossibility and the pulling forth from a fragment of memory and to be honest she can’t remember much because of the pounding in her head but he is back and standing right in front of her, shaking, hands reaching out, wanting to say —
Olivia turns away. She can remember everything now, from the days he kept calling her sweetheart straight on to the day she let him climb into that machine to try and save the world. But she can also remember the other timeline, the one where Peter Bishop died as a child. He did not have a genius IQ. He did not falsify documentation from MIT. He did not run from the government. Olivia did not chase him down in Iraq.
No, instead Olivia lived her life. She grew up and learned to shoot a gun and put her stepfather’s body in a grave somewhere she chose to forget. John met her, John loved her, John died. She joined Fringe Division and read medical journals to relax. She and Astrid went out for drinks the last Thursday of every month just to keep each other sane. They pretended to be normal women with normal lives. Eventually they grew too tired, and the drinks became every other month, every six months, whenever they remembered. Olivia came to think of emptiness as something sewn into her like the tags on the backs of her sweaters. She might not have liked the way it scratched at her skin, but there wasn’t much she could do about it.
But now Peter is back and Olivia dreams for a moment that she will lose that silence that has been scraping at her. She looks at him and his shaking hands, reached out, and she hopes, And now? Olivia’s hands aren’t shaking, though. They are perfectly still. She thinks about her memories as the timelines rest side by side in her mind, and realizes that emptiness without Peter wasn’t any better or worse than emptiness with him. It was just different. With Peter she could pretend she was getting better. Without him, she still had hope that something might save her.
“I was happy without you,” she says. She shouldn’t have, not now, but she’s so startled by the mismatch in her mind that she can’t help it. It’s more to herself than to anyone else but of course Peter hears her. His hands fall back to his sides, slipping into the pockets of his jeans. She doesn’t say happier and she doesn’t mean that she was happier, but Olivia knows she was different and she doesn’t think the difference was so bad. She could see clearer there. She could stand sturdy there.
She says, “I’m sorry.” Peter doesn’t tell her it’s okay.
She meets Lincoln at a bar in Central Square. They’ve been there before, months ago after the Gus fungi incident. As it turned out, she had needed to talk about it. “I haven’t had a partner since John,” she had said then. The feeling of panic, the worry of loss, that was all unfamiliar to her. She had to relearn. “You get used to it,” Lincoln had said after a moment. “It makes you a better agent, in the end, if you have something to lose.”
She’s staring into her second glass of whisky when he arrives and slips into the seat next to her. Normally a pretty woman alone at a bar would have some companion meander over at some point of the evening, but this rarely happens to Olivia. She thinks she projects some sort of poorly veiled discomfort to the outside world. Therefore, the seat next to her is open, and Lincoln sits down without a word. She doesn’t look up at him. By now she can recognize the fringes on his coat.
“I know what happened,” Lincoln says. “I called Astrid when I started remembering things that never happened. I thought you’d be with Peter right now.”
Olivia downs the rest of her whisky. She does not wince. “I shouldn’t expect things to be simple. My life has never been simple. But some things have to be simple, right? Some things must be easy.”
Lincoln nods. “Some things. But I can’t tell you what those things should be. There are shapeshifters and other universes and a dead man took over your body, and I don’t know if the work we do will ever be simple.”
She ignores how he’s started speaking in we and us lately. “I’m not talking about the work. I’m talking about people. It’s never simple.”
Lincoln looks at her. Olivia looks back and it’s the first time she’s looked anyone in the eye since Peter returned. “It can be. If you find the right people, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” she says. Her voice drops to quieter than she meant, though he can still hear her in the near-empty bar. “You’ve had Robert and friends. I feel — I feel like I haven't had that in a very long time.”
Lincoln shakes his head. “You’ve had that. You have that now, no matter what timeline you’re in. So maybe it’s not enough for you, maybe the people you’ve had before weren’t enough. But they were there, Olivia. They’ve always been there.”
Olivia waves the bartender over for another glass of scotch. When it sits in front of her she looks at her hands and she says, “It’s been easier with you. Easier than I expected, anyway.” She would like to blame the alcohol for this, but Olivia is not a liar, not even to herself.
For a moment, Lincoln says nothing. Then, he seems to smile and says, “Well that’s something.”
Peter is at the lab the next day. Olivia knew he would be, of course, but it still startles her somehow and she spills a bit of her coffee on her coat. It will come out with a dry clean, she hopes, and hangs it in the coat closet they never use. Peter stares at her as she moves from computer to lab table and back again, trying to find some task to perform on this most inconveniently slow day.
Even Astrid seems chillier to her today. That’s not about Peter, of course. That’s about the two women and who they were in different worlds. Even in all her wishful thinking, Olivia could call them no more than coworkers, not if she’s honest. Olivia wants to be honest. Now is a time where self-delusion would be so easy, and Olivia doesn’t want that. She wants an honest life, whatever that means. She wants to pull that out from whatever tangles she has now.
Lincoln isn’t coming in today. He sends her a text message in that regard, including a disclaimer should information about shape shifters arise. It’s best, of course. This has reverted back to her space with Peter. Yet, though she supposes the original timeline is the technical truth, it is difficult to remember that the rewritten timeline is technically false. It certainly doesn’t feel that way. That Olivia — and she does now feel like they are both separate and the same — buried her stepfather in Georgia and always kept fake dandelions in her kitchen. That life feels just as real as this one.
She’s glad Lincoln is going to stay away today. He would make things too complicated. That she has a new partner now would be difficult for Peter. Olivia does not want him to feel replaced. This is important in his new adjustment. Walter flits from one end of the lab to the other, overjoyed. Peter looks and smiles at his father, and then he turns back to Olivia. Olivia looks at the ground.
Later, Peter brings her coffee. He got her order right this time, too. Olivia envies his easy, linear history. She nearly jumps when he walks up beside her, though. She’d been spending the day trying to focus, and focus meant pretending he didn’t exist. Maybe that’s what Peter has always done: distracted.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Peter says as Olivia quietly thanks him for the coffee without looking above his chin.
“Okay,” Olivia says, turned back to the computer screen. She’s reading about false memories, and minimizes the window.
Peter looks over his shoulder, to back where Astrid and Walter are back to studying dead birds. Olivia wishes they’d come up with a new project. She doesn’t like the notion of waking up the dead.
“I was thinking maybe somewhere else,” Peter says. “It’s a nice enough day for a walk, don’t you think?”
Olivia looks out the dusty window. It’s sunny out to be sure, but late autumn in Boston always looks deceptively inviting. “I need some time,” Olivia says still facing the window. “There’s a lot to sort through.”
Peter nods. “I get that. I was just hoping I help you through it, maybe, or — I don’t like you keeping me in the dark.”
Olivia winces. “I need some time,” she says again, and with that she stands, walks to take her coffee-stained coat from the closet and brushes out the door and into the day. She calls Lincoln before she makes it down the front steps. He picks up on the third ring.
“Shapeshifters?” he says in lieu of a greeting.
“No,” she says. “Just me.”
She doesn’t ask if he’s got the time, but he doesn’t protest either. Instead, he suggests a café on Elm Street and tells her he’ll be there in an hour. Olivia drives there and waits, poking at a bran muffin with a fork and trying to be hungry. When Lincoln arrives she finds herself sitting up just a bit straighter and hating herself for it.
“Rough day at the office?” Lincoln jokes as he sits down.
She grimaces. “Something like that.”
“Peter?”
“Me,” she says. And then, if she wants to be honest, “Peter too. Astrid also. It’s been rough. Walter’s happy as a whole colony of clams, though.”
Lincoln nods. “Anything I can help with, or did you just want to talk?”
Olivia blinks. Perhaps this is actually what having a partner is like, having someone just to talk to who has seen what you have seen. She and Peter must have had that. But there have been so many months between that timeline and this that it seems halfway to a distant memory by now. Maybe they never even had that at all. But they must have. So what if Peter took his hollow insides and raised his fists to the world while Olivia turned inward and away — they still understood each other. Their empty spaces were the same, surely.
“You said with Robert it was like finding family,” Olivia says, remembering, “which you never expected to find. How did you do that?”
Lincoln pauses, and then a smile flits across his face. Olivia watches him in this moment of memorial. There’s not even a tinge of sorrow at the things he’s lost, not right now. Olivia envies him.
“It takes time,” Lincoln says. “Well, with some people it takes time; other people are lucky enough to just click, you know? But for me it took time, or it used to. For most of my life I was… a lot like you, I suppose. All about self-preservation because I was the only constant I had.” Lincoln looks up at her to judge her reaction. Olivia imagines he wants to know if he’s read her right, and he has. Olivia looks away.
Lincoln continues, “But surprising things can happen if you’ll let them, Olivia.
In my experience, sometimes we just need one person to keep us steady. Once we have that everything else gets so much easier.”
“And Robert was that person for you,” Olivia says, taking a sip of her now cold cup of coffee and peering at him over the lid.
Lincoln nods. “Robert was that person. I told you, sometimes things are easy.”
“But then you lost him,” Olivia points out and then wishes she hadn’t. Lincoln looks — well, horrified is the simplest word, but bereaved might be a better choice. Then, that look falls away and Lincoln leans forward just an inch as though he were about to impart on her a secret. Olivia leans forward too, and so now she imagines they look like co-conspirators. The idea makes her smile, and she notices that Lincoln glances down at the turn in her mouth and smiles back.
“With the right people,” Lincoln tells her, whispering now and Olivia feels somehow that she is gathering some information that only they can know, “it is always worth it.”
“No matter what?” she asks, still leaning forward.
Lincoln laughs and leans back. Olivia finds it suddenly easier to breathe with the added foot or so between them. “No matter what.”
Olivia nods, and runs her tongue along the back of her teeth. “Can I ask you a question, then?” Olivia asks, and Lincoln nods her on. She has to catch her breath first. “Was it — is it easy with me too?”
His mouth lifts. “It is.”
She takes him to her apartment. There is a logical and linear pathway from the coffee shop to here, but it went by too quickly and Olivia is trying not to overthink. Still, she feels so juvenile, what with the way she fiddles for too long with the key while hoping her living room is in order. She wonders if there’s wine in her kitchen, the good stuff she likes to keep around for the imagined day she will entertain people. Or is there coffee in the cabinet — that much is easy; there is always coffee. And besides, morning coffee is presumptuous. Lincoln stands two feet behind her and is kind enough to not mention the trouble she’s having with the lock. Olivia reminds herself that time is probably not going as slowly as it is in her head.
She gets the door open and flips on the light. The living room is indeed in order. Only a wayward sweater lies haphazardly over the arm of the couch. She tugs her coat off and hangs it by the doorway. After a pause and a look around the room, Lincoln does the same and Olivia shuts the door behind them.
“I have some wine if you’d like,” Olivia says as the door clicks shut.
“Wine sounds nice,” Lincoln says, and Olivia nods but then neither of them moves.
“White or red?” Olivia asks, though she doesn’t know what she has of each.
Lincoln seems to laugh. “Whatever you’ve got is fine.”
Olivia nods, and looking away from him manages to put one foot in front of the other. She doesn’t get very far, though, because Lincoln seems to move with her and by the time she’s taken her third step he’s right in front of her, hands starting to hold her hips. He does this slowly, of course. First there are his fingertips, then his fingers flatten joint by joint until his palms press against her. Olivia takes a single step toward him, bridging the small gap between them so she can lean into him. His hands move from her hips to the small of her back, slipped under her shirt and pressing against her skin.
Then, one hand moves from her back up to his face, where he removes his glasses and sets them down on the table. This free hand now moves to rest against her face, his thumb brushing against her lips just once. Olivia wants to shut her eyes, but she can barely even blink because Lincoln is quite literally pressed against her and isn’t moving to kiss her. He certainly wants to; while Olivia spends this moment examining every inch of his face, Lincoln is just staring at her mouth. No, this is just going to be her moment and her decision to make.
She leans forward bit by bit and as she moves closer she sees his mouth curve upward. When she kisses him, she finds him warmer than she was expecting. Lincoln’s hands drift to the front of her body, where he tugs at the clasp of her trousers while she keeps her eyes closed. She can’t help but gasp, though, at the placement of his hands and Lincoln pulls away for just a moment. Olivia opens her eyes.
“Is this okay?” Lincoln asks, and Olivia smiles. “Yes,” she says, and he grins back, leaning forward once more and smiling against her mouth as he continues to undo her trousers. She pushes his suit jacket from his shoulders and she opens her eyes to watch it fall to the ground without a sound.
Lincoln looks at her, but this time he doesn’t say anything. He merely watches as Olivia leans back to unbutton his shirt. While she almost wishes he would say something while her fingers trip against the fastenings, she is also quite glad for the quiet and the way she can see him looking at her out of the corner of her eye. The rest of these undressings are far easier though, and they end up on the couch simply because her bedroom suddenly seems too far away. The apartment is cold without clothes on, but Lincoln remains warm and Olivia presses her body against his until she thinks she’s close enough to a fever. When she climaxes, Lincoln breathes in. There’s a way he looks at her after that makes her turn her face to the cushions. It’s just that it's been quite a while since anyone looked at her the way Lincoln looks at her in this precise moment.
But then Lincoln presses a kiss to her cheek and he reminds her, “This is easy.”
She looks back at him. Her hand drifts to his face, and her thumb brushes against his lips for a moment before he bends to kiss her. She gets off the couch and pulls the forgotten sweatshirt over her shoulders and runs to grab underwear from her bedroom while Lincoln puts his boxers back on. When she returns to the living room, he catches her by the waist and kisses her and yes, yes, this is easy.
They get called into work, of course. Fringe Division has no respect for the fact that she is busy curling herself against Lincoln’s body and making fun of themed sweaters on QVC.
“I hate our job sometimes,” Lincoln remarks as she brushes out her hair. She watches him in the reflection of the mirror. His body is turned toward her, his feet resting on the floor by her bed. The woman on the television reminds them that you can never go wrong with a Thanksgiving-themed sweater during the holidays. Olivia thinks about the holidays.
“Someone has to do it,” she notes, but by then Lincoln is already halfway to the living room, where his clothes sit folded on the coffee table. When Olivia walks out of her bedroom, Lincoln is already fully dressed, adjusting his tie in the mirror by the door. She picks a different coat out of the closet, one without a coffee stain, and holds the door open for him as he walks out. Lincoln brushes his hand against her hip as she follows him, but she has no trouble with the locks.
Still, she has to tell him in the car: “It’s probably best if we don’t tell anyone at work just yet. It’s a bad time for that.”
Lincoln looks at her. “Because of Peter?”
Olivia nods.
“Did you love him?” Lincoln asks, and he doesn’t sound unnerved or jealous but Olivia doesn’t want to have this conversation with him. She doesn’t want to have this conversation with herself, let alone with anyone else.
“I did,” she says, keeping her eyes on the road. Lincoln doesn’t ask if she still does and she’s grateful, because she doesn’t have an answer for that. She thinks she should. She thinks it should be easy, but it’s not. Things with Peter have never been easy. But she can’t just scrub him out — there are still days she thinks she sees John on street corners, even though Olivia doesn’t believe in ghosts. Still, she and Lincoln don’t say anything until they get back to Fringe division, and they are careful to keep five feet between them as they walk in.
“Yes,” Walter says as they walk in. “Olivia, Ford, take a look at this.”
Lincoln rolls his eyes, but walks forward anyway. Olivia looks around the room. Peter is sitting near Astrid’s desk, staring at her. When they make eye contact, Olivia looks away.
It’s a shapeshifter case. Lincoln stands up just a bit straighter. Olivia catches her hand mid-motion toward him and brings it back to her side. Peter is watching her. Them. His eyes tick between Lincoln and Olivia and the too-purposeful gap between them.
“You’ll have to go to the other side,” Walter says. Now it is Olivia’s time to bristle and Lincoln’s time to step toward her even though he shouldn’t and then freeze. “The shapeshifters were Walternate’s creation; if they’re out of control, he must know why.”
“Or be the reason why,” Lincoln says, and Walter nods.
Peter reaches between Lincoln and Olivia to grab the car keys to the car off the table. “Let’s get to work then,” he says, and leads the way out the door.
Olivia looks over to Lincoln. He shrugs, and then follows. Olivia trails after last.
The other version of herself speaks primarily to Lincoln. Olivia asks a question and the other Olivia answers Lincoln instead. He notices too, and keeps glancing at Olivia for an answer Olivia can’t give him. The other Lincoln is here too, actually, but Lincoln hasn’t noticed him yet. Olivia has, because she knows what to look for. Peter stands next to Olivia with his arms crossed. The other Olivia keeps her shoulders turned from him. Olivia wishes she could stop remembering the things she now knows.
The other Lincoln walks over. Lincoln stares, though the other Lincoln just laughs. “I’m a nerd over there,” he says, and the other Olivia retorts, “You’re a nerd over here too. I know about your doll collection.”
“Action figures,” the other Lincoln groans. Olivia looks over at Lincoln. He’s laughing at them, and this makes Olivia smile in turn. Lincoln steps forward to the other Lincoln and says, “Can you show me what those machines do?” and the two walk through to the other end of the room.
The other Olivia takes a one second glance at Peter and her mouth stretches thin. Olivia turns to look at him. His arms remain folded across his chest. Olivia knows enough about the details here to want to walk away from this mission entirely. She looks to the Lincolns on the other side of the room. The other Lincoln is trying on her Lincoln’s glasses. She smiles.
“I have some files for you to look at,” the other Olivia says, turning and walking to the long metal table nearby. Olivia follows and is thankful Peter does not. He wanders over to the machine and then stares up at it. Olivia watches him there for a moment, and when she turns back to the other Olivia she sees the other woman is doing the same.
“I had a child,” the other Olivia says, and Olivia stops moving. “A boy.”
“Peter’s?” Olivia asks, though it comes out more like a wheeze than a word.
The other Olivia nods. “I forgot,” she says, still staring at Peter. “I had a son and I forgot.”
Olivia doesn’t say anything. There’s little to say, of course. They’re not friends; Olivia has no desire to be friends with this woman. She doesn’t have to offer any cold comfort and she doesn’t want to. But it’s hard to look at her now without seeing past the monstrous imaginings Olivia had built about her alternate. This other Olivia is not a monster. She’s just something Olivia can’t understand.
“Did you love him?” Olivia asks.
The other Olivia looks toward the Lincolns at the other end of the room. “That’s a pretty common question these days.”
Olivia frowns. Maybe they have more in common than she thought. “You and Lincoln?”
“That,” the other Olivia says, turning back, “is a question I don’t have an answer to.”
A lot of that going around these days, Olivia does not say. Then again, they deal in that which appears unanswerable. It’s their job to dig to the core of things and reveal truths. The two of them sit at the table to go over the files and around twenty minutes in, the pair of Lincolns return to their side of the hangar and sit next to them. While Lincoln sits on her left, the other Lincoln sits on the other Olivia’s right. It’s the little things. One day Olivia will learn what all of this means. Peter is still standing by the machine, walking around it in circles, looking for answers to his own questions. Olivia wants to help him, she realizes. The feeling clutches at her suddenly, and she turns away. For now, Peter is another accident victim. Olivia knows what to do with that. Olivia knows how to help.
“Hey,” Lincoln murmurs from next to her. He has two fingers resting on her thigh. “Everything okay?”
She runs her nails against her mouth. Not everything is going to have an answer. Not everything is going to be easy. Still, Olivia turns to Lincoln and catches his hand in hers under the table just for a moment, just to reassure.
“I’m fine,” she says, and for once she might mean it.
They don’t make it back to their side until late the next evening. They haven’t slept either, and her bed has never been so inviting. Lincoln trails after her into the apartment. It’s just that her apartment was closer, of course, and Lincoln is apparently not as good without sleep as she is. Neither of them says anything as they trudge through the door. Olivia tosses her coat on the table by the door and Lincoln piles his there as well. She’s too exhausted even for changing into sweatpants, and instead kicks off her shoes and crawls into her bed fully clothed. Lincoln follows suit. Outside, the quiet street announces only the crickets. The clock on the dresser ticks on. Lincoln drapes his arm around her waist and presses a kiss to the place where her neck meets her shoulders. Olivia closes her eyes.
*
Concrit forever welcome