Fringe -- Crane Your Neck
Dec. 18th, 2011 07:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anythingbutgreyi am unsure on the title as per usual, so let me know your thoughts. :)
Crane Your Neck
Fringe. Olivia. Lincoln/Olivia. Spoilers through 4x07, "Wallflower". This is (very, very) loosely based on speculation from the 4x08 promos. Title from Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's "Crane Your Neck."
Rated R. Many thanks to @agentfrancis on tumblr for the beta. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Olivia has other things to worry about, like the way Lincoln has his fingers perched just at the edge of the table, leaving prints. Olivia notices these things, of course. She likes evidence.
Olivia feels her back first. Pressed at the wrong angles against the hardwood floor, her spine kicks her awake just before the headache hits. And that headache — Olivia often can’t judge the ferocity of migraine to migraine, but she thinks this one might be the worst. The floor isn’t making it any better. She doesn’t know how she got down there at all, she realizes as she pushes herself to her feet and looks down at the clothes she wasn’t wearing just a moment ago. Then, she looks at the clock and its angry, red numbers and realizes that a moment ago was actually hours ago. It’s just before four AM now, and she remembers that she had other places to be.
So Olivia does two things. First, she pushes her rebellious, aching body to the bathroom and grabs at her last bottle of medication. Second, she gains control over her shaking fingers for long enough to pull her cell phone out of her pocket. The bright screen is too much to look at, but she makes herself do it anyway and puts the phone on speaker so it doesn’t ring right in her ear.
“Olivia?” Lincoln asks as he picks up the phone.
“Hi,” she whispers, though the words barely make it out of her mouth. “Are you at the diner?”
There’s a pause on the line. Olivia keeps her eyes closed, with her left hand pinching the bridge of her nose. Olivia is new to migraines, but she’s starting to learn the small things that make them just a little more bearable. She just needs it to pass.
“Yes,” Lincoln says. Olivia’s head falls just an inch.
“I’m sorry I’m not there I just — I just woke up on my floor? And I don’t know how long I’ve been passed out or —”
“Wait,” Lincoln says, and Olivia bites her tongue. Sometimes it helps the migraines to redirect the pain somewhere else. It’s only a split second of something resembling relief, but Olivia will take it.
Lincoln continues, “How do I get to your apartment from here?”
The buzz to get in the building makes her grind her teeth together, but when Lincoln knocks on her door it’s soft enough to sound like cat scratches. She’ll thank him for that later, but when she opens the door the light in the hallway is too bright for her to look at him.
“How are you doing?” he asks as she turns away from the door to the darkness of her living room, leaving him to shut the door. Olivia shrugs, a motion she then realizes he can’t see in the dark, and turns on a lamp on the table. It’s not much light, but it’s too much for her and enough to allow Lincoln to see how to cross the room in half a dozen paces. He turns it back off before sitting next to her on the couch.
Olivia actually vomited in the time it took him to get to her apartment, and despite brushing her teeth in the dark she’s not sure she did such a good job of it. She edges a bit further from him on the couch just to be sure. Her eyes are adjusting to the dark again, and from the minimal light from the streetlamps she can see the way his body twists toward her with one hand on the couch and the other on his knee. “I’ve been better,” she says.
“What happened?” Lincoln asks.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember I came home, I took a shower, I was looking in my closet for an outfit for our — to go to the diner and next thing I know I’m in the floor in different clothes and my head was killing me.”
Olivia watches his head bob a nod in the dark. “Do you think the migraine is what made you pass out?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says again, and realizes she sounds more exasperated than she meant to. “Sorry,” she covers. “It’s just — my head.” She’s so exhausted that even small words are starting to feel sticky. Olivia has only been having migraines for the last three months, and this is the thing she is starting to realize about them: her medication is only minimally effective; sleep is the only thing that really helps, but it hurts too much to sleep. She might nod off eventually, but the first hour of trying to rest ends up leaving her so uncomfortable that eventually she just gives up on the whole endeavor and goes for a walk instead. But standing during this migraine sounds like one of the worse ideas she’s had in recent days, and so instead she pulls her knees to her chest and rests her head on top of them.
“Hey,” Lincoln says, and though Olivia’s eyes remain closed she thinks she feels his fingers dust across her shoulder. “Is there anything I can do? Do you want water or anything?”
She shakes her head. Still, she remembers she’s allowed to ask for help. She’s allowed to rely on something beyond her skin and bones. “No,” she says, because he probably can’t see her shake her head in the dark, “but I wouldn’t mind the company. Unless you’ve got other plans.”
“I won’t make too much noise for you?” She thinks she can hear the smile in his voice, but maybe she’s imagining.
She smiles against her knees. “Whispering wouldn’t hurt. I took my medicine; now it just needs to pass. And waiting for it to go away isn’t so bad with people around.”
Olivia assumes as much, anyway. She’s never exactly tried this tactic before, but she did not like waking up on that floor at the wrong time of night. And her head hurts so much, it would be nice, she thinks, to have something like a distraction.
“Only if you wouldn’t mind,” Olivia says, looking up at his minimally outlined figure in the dark. “I know tonight was supposed to go differently —”
“I don’t mind,” Lincoln interrupts, tugging his jacket off and tossing it over the armrest. “But I think you should get some sleep.”
Olivia frowns. “But you’ll stay?”
Lincoln laughs. It’s soft enough to not hurt her but loud enough to let her know it’s genuine. “There’s no place else for me to be.”
“Thank you,” Olivia says, more grateful than she meant to sound. She’s not very good at playing it cool, as it were, which she knew before this conversation and of which did not need a reminder. Lincoln leans back against the couch. She shifts to lying down on her side, knees still tucked in to keep from touching him, and pulls the closest throw pillow under her head.
“Tell me something,” Olivia says with her eyes closed.
“Something?”
She shrugs. Even the sound of her shirt rustling against the fabric of the couch is too loud, but she doesn’t mind him talking. “Something. Anything. Why did you join the FBI? Where did you grow up? What are your parents like? Something.”
“Hm,” he mumbles, and Olivia thinks about his lips pressed together to make the sound. Not the time, she scolds herself. “My parents were nice, normal people. I mean, my dad still is. They wanted me to be a doctor.”
“And you wanted to be a cop,” she laughs.
“No,” he says, laughing as well. “Well, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I got to college meaning to study biology and I dropped all my science classes after the first week. And then my mom got sick that semester and I just sort of… stopped.”
Olivia opens her eyes. “I didn’t know that.”
There’s a rustling sound from his side of the couch. “I didn’t tell you.”
She stops herself from telling him she’s sorry. Maybe she should, but she’s gotten that comment too many times in her life to think the pleasantries bring much comfort.
“Anyway,” he says after a moment, “I took some time off. Came back a criminal justice major. My mom just wanted me to help people; I figured that was the best way to do it. The rest is history.”
“And your dad?”
“Lives in Cincinnati. He, uh,” and now Olivia can hear the smile in his voice again. It’s strange the way it calms her. She feels the muscles in her shoulders relax. “He owns a bookstore. Secondhand stuff. Used to be a tax attorney, but after my mom died he sort of restarted. New state, new job, new life, really. I’d be lying if I said we were close, but — we talk on birthdays.”
She remembers what Lincoln said about Robert, how he was the family Lincoln thought he’d never find. That might have been the moment when this started, when she had the first spark of a maybe. Maybe she saw the same sort tear she carries inside of her. Maybe if he came out repaired with the right people, the right faith, surely she could too. Maybe he could help, if she'd let him. Of course, at the time it wasn’t a thought so conscious, but Olivia has had some time to think. And she’s starting to learn that adults don’t outgrow butterflies, which means she thinks quite a bit more than she should. Olivia wraps her arms around her stomach.
“Family is hard,” she mumbles, not sure if she’s even audible. The headache is starting to pass but the exhaustion seems to be settling in. “Mine’s sort of funny, when you think about it. Well, funny’s not the right word.”
“Oh?” Lincoln says, and then maybe asks a question, but Olivia falls asleep before she hears it.
She wakes up to the smell of coffee. Her legs have stretched back in the night, and one arm hangs off the couch before she brings it to her face to rub the sleep from her eyes. The living room drapes do little to block the morning sun, and Olivia winces. The migraine is mostly gone, but migraines have an aftereffect that feels halfway to a hangover, which means she still doesn’t like sunshine. She’ll be better once she eats.
And that’s when she realizes how she smells coffee in her apartment that she lives in by herself. Her head drums a bit as she sits up and looks to the kitchen. There, Lincoln is sitting and reading the newspaper. His head lifts up as she stands from the couch.
“Hey,” he says, sitting up a little straighter.
“Morning,” Olivia says almost sheepishly. There’s a tired smile on her face and a blush she can feel spreading along her cheeks. Lincoln Lee is in her kitchen drinking her coffee. She excuses herself to brush her teeth and laughs to herself in the bathroom. Her head doesn’t like that, of course, and she winces. It doesn’t do much to sober her up, though. Lincoln Lee is in her kitchen drinking her coffee.
“I hope you don’t mind about the coffee,” Lincoln says as she returns to the kitchen. “I figured we’d both need some.”
She hums an assent and pours herself a cup, closing her eyes and breathing it in before taking a sip. It burns her tongue, but she doesn’t mind. Better that than the quiet pounding in her skull. When she opens her eyes, he’s still looking at her.
“Thanks,” she says. And, after a pause, “And for last night too.”
Lincoln smiles and glances at the floor for a moment before looking back up. “No problem. I didn’t know if you’d be okay in the morning, and it seemed rude to just pack up and go so —”
Olivia grins. “No, this is fine, this is good. I mean, if you just wanted to come over in the mornings and make coffee so I don’t have to think without any caffeine, that’d be a fine arrangement with me.”
He laughs. “Well it’s important to know your strengths.”
“Mm,” she says, lifting the mug to her lips. “And coffee is definitely yours.”
His eyes narrow in mock-indignation. “Just coffee? I think I’m offended.”
“Among many other talents,” she covers quickly, laughing again. “I’m sure.”
He nods. “I am very good at many aspects of breakfast, if I do say so myself.”
“But I only need you for the coffee,” she says as her phone rings. She glares at it on the counter.
“Do you not like breakfast?” he asks, sounding vaguely appalled as she walks to the phone and lifts it to her ear. It’s Walter, of course, and something he simply must show her right away. She rolls her eyes and says she’ll be there in an hour before hanging up the phone and tossing it back on the table.
“Walter,” she says by way of explanation, and then his phone rings as well. He picks it up and then looks at her. “Walter,” he repeats. She watches him as he answers. As far as first mornings go, this isn’t so bad, she finds herself thinking, and then shakes it off.
Lincoln hangs up the phone and walks his coffee to the sink. “I’ll take care of that,” she protests, but he’s already washed it out and dropped it in the dishwasher.
“I’m going to go home and change,” he says, walking to her. Olivia stands up just a bit straighter.
“See you in an hour?” she says, but he’s just a foot from her and so her question comes out more like a gravely whisper. His lips are pulled up just slightly into a smirk and, yes, she is staring at his mouth and making a bad go of being subtle.
“See you then,” he says, and then, after a pause, he takes a step back. When he turns to walk out the kitchen, Olivia catches her breath.
Then, he stops and turns back to her. Olivia gets that feeling in her throat again, like something is clutching at it. “We should actually go for coffee sometime though,” he says, looking at her socks, she thinks. “Maybe not in the middle of the night, even.”
Olivia smiles, and takes an accidental step toward him. “Daytime is a good time for coffee.”
Lincoln nods, and looks up from the ground. “Then it’s a date,” he says, and Olivia waits for the word to settle. Then, Lincoln nods again and turns once more toward the living room.
“Hey,” Olivia says, almost lurching forward. Lincoln once again stops and turns back to her. Part of her thinks she shouldn’t have to do this; she’s made the first move twice, after all, and some petty teenage side of her laments that fact. But her feet are taking her forward anyway, and she’s not about to complain. Now she’s the one to step right up to him; now he’s the one to stare at her mouth. She doesn’t mind that at all.
“Thanks for last night,” she says, her eyes dropping to his lips again.
“I think it was technically morning,” he starts to say, but then Olivia bridges the six-inch gap left between them and kisses him. She freezes there, right there, her lips pressed against his. He smells like morning and coffee beans. Her hands drift toward his sweater, but before she reaches him, he has his hands on her hips. She seems to sigh in that moment; there’s a puff of air she’d been holding back as she approached him and now it escapes. She makes a small, unidentifiable sound against his mouth, or maybe that’s him against her mouth, but either way her hips are now pressed against him and her hands are somewhere at her sides with her fingers flexing out because Olivia wants nothing more than to touch him but she suddenly wants all of him at once. Her fingers don’t know where to go. They just reach into the air.
And then it’s over. He’s the one to step back, but when Olivia opens her eyes she’s happy to see his remain closed. “We have to go to work,” he says, and then his eyes open. “I wish we didn’t have to, but—”
“We have to,” she acknowledges, and takes a couple steps back from him so she can breathe a little easier.
“I’ll see you soon,” Lincoln says with the faintest traces of a smile. Olivia nods, and he turns once more, grabs his coat from where it still rests on the couch, and slips out the door.
Olivia takes a final gulp of her coffee. At least the pounding in her head has gone down.
She gets to the lab before Lincoln does. It’s quiet. Walter is dissecting something Olivia can’t identify from a distance and that she doesn’t think she wants to identify close up. Astrid is sitting at her computer and stirring her tea too much.
“What’s going on?” Olivia says, walking to Astrid as she speaks.
Astrid looks over to Walter, and then back to Olivia. “The uh — Peter? He’s coming here.”
Olivia blinks. “What? On whose authorization?”
“Broyles,” Astrid says, and she stirs her tea just a bit harder. “Walter said he can handle it, but I think he’s going to freak. And Walter has really high levels of freak.”
“Why is he coming here?” Olivia asks, already walking toward Walter. Astrid says she doesn’t know, and Olivia steps up to Walter so she can hear what he’s mumbling about under his breath. It sounds like nonsense to her, no more than the usual, so she says, “How are you doing, Walter?”
“Olivia,” Walter says too loudly, not looking at her. “I am trying to get to the bottom of our friend Porky here.”
Olivia looks to the lab table. Yes, that does look like something that could have been a pig once.
“Pigs are very clean creatures,” he continues. “Horribly misunderstood, because of the sties.”
“Walter,” Olivia tries again. “Are you going to be okay when Peter gets here?”
Walter reaches his hands into the pig. Olivia moves back a bit. Sometimes things squirt from the carcasses Walter toys with. “Of course,” Walter says, his ear tilted toward the pig as though he is listening for the thing he’s looking for. “I can be professional.”
There’s a kidney in his hands when he pulls them out of the pig. Olivia sighs, and turns away as the doors open and Lincoln walks in wearing a freshly pressed suit. He looks right at her and doesn’t look away.
“Hey,” he says as they walk toward each other.
“Hey,” she repeats. They stop with three or four feet left between them. Olivia shoves her hands in her pockets. There’s a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth that she’s doing a very bad job of containing, but she notes Lincoln seems to be having the same trouble.
“So,” Lincoln says after a moment, the vowel dragging. “What’s the emergency?”
Olivia frowns and tosses a look back to Walter. “Broyles is bringing Peter over,” she says, turning back to Lincoln. “I don’t know why.”
Lincoln frowns. “Why didn’t Walter say that on the phone?”
Olivia shrugs. “Because I don’t think he knows what to do about it yet.”
Then, the door opens once more as Broyles and Peter enter the lab. Peter nods to her as he sweeps into the center of the lab, and Olivia is struck by how easily he moves in this space, how familiar it is to him. She thinks Peter is nice, she does, but she definitely finds him unsettling. He knows too much and acts too familiar with too many things. It’s the asymmetry that gets to her most of all: she still looks at him and sees a stranger; he looks at her like there’s thing about her that even she doesn’t yet understand. She doesn’t like it. She’s not his Olivia. The fact that they both know that doesn’t stop that first shimmer of recognition in his eyes before he blinks it away.
Lincoln is watching her when she turns back to him. “You don’t like him,” he says, though maybe it’s a question.
Olivia shakes her head. “I just don’t like that he knows things I don’t.”
“Olivia,” Peter says then, calling to her from across the lab. Walter has moved as far from the lab equipment as possible without fleeing the room entirely; his back is pressed to the door to his bedroom in the back. Peter waves them over, and Lincoln and Olivia cross the lab and stand behind him as he points to his laptop screen.
“I need to go to the other side,” Peter says, and before Olivia even processes that sentence long enough to protest, he says, “And I can’t take the bridge because I don’t exist.”
“What do you mean?” Lincoln asks.
“I mean,” Peter says, standing away from the computer screen for a moment, “I’m an anomaly. I’m a kid who died. I shouldn’t exist. And if I go through the bridge, they’re going to figure that out and they’re going to stop me before I can get where I need to be.”
“Slow down,” Olivia says. Peter’s right hand is shaking; it’s barely noticeable but it’s her job to see that which is difficult to see. “What do you need from the other side?”
“Walternate,” Peter says, too loudly, and Olivia thinks she hears Walter offer a muffled squeak. Then, lower so Walter can’t hear, Peter says, “If there’s anyone who will know how to get me home, it’s going to be him.”
Lincoln adjusts his glasses. They’re new frames, Olivia notices now. “But if you’re not going to go through the bridge, how are you supposed to get there?”
Peter doesn’t say anything. He just turns his eyes to her and she takes an instinctive step back. He’s not supposed to know these things. He’s not supposed to know anything.
“I can’t,” Olivia says. “I haven’t tried to cross over in months, there’s no way —”
“Yes,” Peter says. “You can. You just have to believe you can.”
Olivia narrows her eyes. Maybe Lincoln’s right. Maybe she doesn’t like him at all.
“Liv,” Lincoln says and Olivia jumps, because no one has called her that since she was living the other Olivia’s life. Later, she’ll have to tell him not to call her that. Now isn’t the time. “What’s he talking about?”
She doesn’t look at him. “Those experiments Walter did on me when I was a kid? My long-lasting gift is that I can cross between universes. Or I could, but I haven’t done that since —”
“You were kidnapped,” Peter finishes for her, and her fingers clench into a fist in her pocket.
“You were kidnapped?” Lincoln interrupts. Olivia looks at him. His eyes are wide; his left hand reaches toward her for just a moment before being forced back to his side.
Olivia nods. “That’s a longer story,” she says, and then looks back to Peter. “And I can’t cross over anymore. I won’t.”
Peter runs a hand through his hair, and then he seems to deflate. He exhales and his shoulders fall forward. The mania he’d be carrying flashes away. Olivia looks to Lincoln. His eyes tick toward her for a moment and then he looks back to Peter.
“Not that I don’t understand the immediacy of the issue,” Lincoln says very slowly, “but why now? Why today?”
“Not today,” Peter says, turning back to his laptop. “Tomorrow, around noon. I’ve been tracking the crossover points we know of for structural weaknesses, you know, stuff to break through. If I’m right, tomorrow should be the day.”
“Where?” Lincoln asks, and Peter looks to Olivia again.
“I’ve been trying to find weak points in the universal fragment so we can cross over. Hot spots,” he says, and Olivia rolls her eyes. Of course. “Olivia,” Peter says, and she lifts her gaze to meet his. “I know what I’m asking you. I know it’s asking too much. But, please, I need your help. You’re the only person who can do this.”
She shuts her eyes. Olivia has seen and done a lot of things in this job, and those are all things she knows how to carry. The other side was different. Coming back was different. The other Olivia slipped into her life and no one even noticed. It took her months to get over that — perhaps a short time by anyone else’s standards, but not by hers.
When she opens her eyes again both men are staring at her. She doesn’t look either of them in the eye. “Okay,” she says. “Tomorrow.”
Peter exhales. “Thank you. It’s down by the docks. I’ll meet you there.”
“All done then?” Broyles asks and Olivia had actually forgotten he was there. He didn’t say anything during the whole exchange; he had merely watched. Peter nods, folds up his computer, and rummages with his bag until he fits it in. Broyles heads toward the door and Peter turns with his body halfway out the door and waves at her. When the door shuts behind them, the sound echoes in the near silent space.
Olivia winces. “I need a drink,” she says.
Beside her, Lincoln shrugs. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, in the middle of the Atlantic.”
“There are boats.”
Olivia bites her lip to keep from laughing. Part of her scolds both of them; now’s not the time for light jokes and small flirtations. Then again, she supposes their lives could be best described as inconvenient.
She looks to him. “We’ve really got a strange track record going on here.”
“You’re the one who said our lives are unconventional,” he notes. She can see Astrid staring at them out of the corner of her eye, but Olivia just barely registers that. Lincoln just keeps looking at Olivia, who honestly would kiss him again right now if not for things like purported workplace etiquette. Still, it takes all of her restraint: her lips themselves seem to be buzzing. She’d forgotten what this was like, feeling like a string stretched between her and another person. Gravitation made sense; it was, after all, the only possible option.
Olivia coughs to gain back use of her vocal chords. “Let’s do it,” she says.
The waitress — 19, brunette, with a sort of face that makes Olivia think of her mother — seems a little concerned that Olivia orders a whiskey, double, dry at eleven in the morning. “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat with that?” she asks once more when she brings over Olivia’s drink and a beer for Lincoln.
Olivia nods. “I’m fine for now, thank you.”
“I take it you can hold your alcohol,” Lincoln says as the girl walks away.
She takes the first sip of whiskey and doesn’t wince. “It’s been said. You?”
He shrugs. “I can hold my own, but not at eleven in the morning.”
“It’s a skills set,” she says, and he smiles. Olivia somehow regrets that she didn’t just offer up the wine in her kitchen. They could sit on the couch; she would make some uncomfortable reference to the night before that she meant to be funny that falls flat. He might laugh anyway, just to be polite. She could get up to get more wine or food and he could catch her wrist on the way, stand to meet her and kiss her this time.
Back to earth, she thinks, and shakes it off. Lincoln stares at her.
“So,” Olivia coughs.
“So,” Lincoln repeats. They really are like teenagers, she thinks. Her palms might be sweating, and she rubs them against her knees.
“Is this a date?” Olivia asks, the words sort of stumbling out as one long, foreign sound.
Still, Lincoln seems to understand her. His mouth turns, and he drags a finger along the condensation on his glass. “I don’t know — is this what you had in mind for a date?”
Olivia looks around. There’s barely even an early morning lunch crowd. She’s wearing a suit, as is Lincoln. Anyone watching them would never label this any sort of romantic moment. She certainly didn’t go through the normal preparations of choosing a hairstyle or the right pair of shoes. Olivia’s not overzealous in date preparation but she likes to at least make a choice, and she definitely would not choose her most practical pair of boots.
“Not really,” she admits, and maybe Lincoln’s face falls a little or maybe she’s imagining it.
Still, he nods. “Then we’ll just have another re-do.”
She winces. Olivia was right; he does sound disappointed. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just had —”
“Better ideas for how this would go?” Lincoln finishes for her, and Olivia nods.
She straightens the unused utensils resting on the cloth napkin. “Something with mood lighting at least. And I don’t think sitting on my couch in the dark counts.”
Lincoln smiles. It’s a relief somehow. “It always counted in high school.”
Olivia laughs. “Simpler times.”
“Yeah,” Lincoln says, and then trails off, leaving the two of them to stare at each other and hope the other speaks first. “So,” he coughs after a moment and Olivia is grateful. “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
Olivia is less grateful then. She has a plan, of course; it was formulated before they even got here. Olivia works quickly and very quietly. She can outline the plan too, but that has too many questions. How does she explain that the last time she crossed over, people died? Or that her life came apart and she couldn’t look Astrid or Walter in the eye for weeks? Or that her body was infected by someone else’s mind, someone she wishes she didn’t understand but she does, she must, because the other Olivia still lives in her skin?
That must play on her face, because Lincoln rushes to say, “We don’t have to talk about that.”
They don’t, but Olivia knows they should. He can’t be kept in the dark, and she shouldn’t push him in there. They’re partners, she reminds herself. This is what partners do. They rely. She shakes her head. “No, it’s okay. It should be pretty simple on our side. We’ll go to the docks and I will try to get us across. Once we do, though, things could get out of hand very quickly. You need to be smart.”
He frowns. “Will the other Olivia be there?”
She nods. “There’s a version of you too.”
His mouth drops open. “Seriously?” There’s a ghost of a laugh in his face.
“Yeah,” she says, surprised to hear a faint laugh in her affirmation. “They’re partners too. But Fringe is in the Defense Department; there’s no FBI. Walter is the Secretary of Defense. It’s all slight changes that make worlds of difference.”
“Are we alike?” Lincoln asks. “The Lincoln and Olivia over there and me and you.”
“No,” she says too quickly. Lincoln raises his eyebrows. She takes in a long breath and starts over again. “The other version of me can’t be trusted, and the other Lincoln will probably follow her lead. You need to know that. He’s technically in charge, but he’s — too invested in her.”
Lincoln’s mouth presses into a thin line. “You mean he’s in love with her.”
Olivia looks to her whiskey. “I don’t know,” she confesses. “But she’s the most important person in his life, and she knows it.”
“How do you even know this? You don’t make them sound like the sharing types.”
Olivia downs the rest of her whiskey. She doesn’t blame him for having questions. It’s not that she wants to keep anything from him either, it’s just that she hates talking about this. But he needs to know. If something goes wrong on the other side, if they try to infiltrate her life again, Lincoln needs to know. She won’t lose him to this war, she decides, though it’s a sentence she must admit she’s surprised to think. It just pops into her head. She won’t lose him to this. Some things must be safe.
“Remember when Peter said I was kidnapped?” she asks, waving down the waitress for another whiskey. The waitress complies but brings over her second glass with an ever-increasing look of concern. It’s okay mom, Olivia does not say.
Lincoln nods her on. She has another sip of whiskey, but this time she does wince. It’s not from the whiskey. “They have more advanced technology on the other side. They put Olivia’s memories and characteristics in my head. I don’t know how. And it basically forced me out. I just — lived in her shoes.”
“That’s not possible,” Lincoln says, eyes wide.
“It is. So I know everything she has ever felt or thought or known. I still do, but I try not to think about it.” She pauses to collect her words and sort through the lump in her throat. Lincoln waits. If she looks him in the eye it’s somehow easier, as though she can then block out everything else. “They sent the other Olivia here to live my life. She didn’t have any of my memories. No one noticed.”
Lincoln catches the fingers of her hand resting on the table. They both stare at their hands; she doesn’t think he meant to touch her. “Olivia,” he breathes, but says nothing more.
“It’s okay,” she says faintly, even though it’s not and he’s not asking for comfort. He’s just here for her, she reminds herself. She’s allowed to let someone else share the weight.
“It’s not okay,” he says for her. Olivia shakes her head, and brushes at her eyes.
“It gets easier though,” she clarifies, because it does. Olivia puts little faith in old adages, but in her experience what they say about time and wounds has always proven to be the case. “But enough of that,” she says. This conversation has left her spent; they need to move on.
“Yes,” Lincoln says, pulling his hand away from hers. She’s not surprised to find she misses it or that her fingers are suddenly freezing. Olivia rubs her hands together under the table, trying to bring some warmth back to her skin.
“I called my dad this morning,” Lincoln says. Olivia smiles. He seems to blush. “Yeah, I mean, after our conversation last night I figured, you know, I owe him a phone call. He’s the only family I’ve got, right? I shouldn’t let that go to waste.”
“How did it go?” she asks, waving the waitress over for a glass of water this time. She seems relieved.
“Good, I think,” Lincoln says, and then his blush seems to deepen. “I told him about you.”
“No,” Olivia gasps. She might giggle. If she does, she won’t admit to it.
“I did,” he says, half-laughing and half-cringing. “He asked why I’d moved, and I obviously can’t tell him about Fringe but I did tell him I’d been reassigned — which I assume is okay?” Olivia nods, and he continues. “And I told him I had a new partner.”
“Which was the end of the conversation?” Olivia asks.
Lincoln smiles. “Not so much.”
She tries to bite her lip to keep her grin from giving her away, but fails miserably. “I see.”
“Is that okay?” He is leaning toward her over the table. It’s too close to be professional anymore, but far further than she’d really like his mouth to be. Part of her feels like a madwoman obsessed. Surely this was once a feeling familiar to her; there’s some vague memory of life like this with John. But she knows something in her crumbled into dust when John did, and to feel that part of her jumpstart once more is jarring to say the least. She’d forgotten what it was like. Even now, when she thinks about it, it has the sort of haze pertaining to a faded photograph. On the other hand, everything with Lincoln feels like neon lights in the dark. It’s so bright that she has half the mind to look away, but she also can’t see anything else. In the end, it’s the only thing she has to go on.
“Yes,” she says. It’s barely audible even to her own ears. Olivia has other things to worry about, like the way Lincoln has his fingers perched just at the edge of the table, leaving prints. Olivia notices these things, of course. She likes evidence. Here she has something: his fingerprints on the table and his mouth on the glass, matched with her fingerprints on the coaster, the glass, the chair. It’s important to have something tangible; Olivia lives in a world that balances itself on proof.
“Good,” Lincoln says, but now his voice has dropped to a barely audible pitch. Olivia mostly knows what he’s said by reading his lips. Somewhere in the back of her mind she notices the waitress is staring at them. The other patrons in the restaurant might be too. It’s quite a sight, of course, to see two clear coworkers in freshly pressed suits leaning toward each other over the table like crushing schoolchildren.
“Do you want to get out of here,” she asks. That sentence she can hear, and she enunciates every word. Olivia does not want there to be any misconceptions.
His mouth lifts. “Yes,” he says. Olivia has never heard a word so clearly. For a moment, she feels as though it’s the only word that exists.
She actually doesn’t know how she makes it back to her apartment without touching him. She doesn’t even know how she made it through the elevator ride without kissing him. They didn’t even look at each other, and instead had stared at the lights indicating the climb up. But they make it to her door in one piece, which is something Olivia is half-grateful for and somehow half-disappointed about. Her hands don’t shake while she unlocks the door but her knees tell a different story. Surely, he must notice. He must be able to tell.
The lock clicks and Olivia pushes the door open. She takes one step inside when Lincoln’s hand brushes against her hip. It was probably an accident, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Lincoln turns into her, or maybe she turns into him, but he catches her body in his hands and keeps her there. Olivia ends up with her back pressed against the table just inside her apartment. The door clicks shut behind them, the lights stay off, and Lincoln doesn’t kiss her. There’s no room between them; they’re practically sharing oxygen. But Lincoln still doesn’t kiss her and if she weren’t so interested in having sex with him she’d punch him.
“This is crazy,” Lincoln murmurs. Olivia has to stop herself from leaning forward and catching his words with her mouth.
It is. It’s completely ridiculous. They’re co-workers; they’re partners; they haven’t known each other for very long when she thinks about it; they’ve never been on a real date. In the end, though, that doesn’t matter. What matters is Olivia feels like a greedy child who has seen something she wants and now can’t let go of it. How juvenile, she thinks half-hazily. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care at all, and that’s the thing that startles her the most.
“It is,” Olivia says. It’s a small enough sentence that she can muster it. Her hands, which earlier in the day were so difficult to deal with, have now decided so run along the sides of his body, beginning at the ribcage and moving slowly down. Lincoln breathes in and her hands move with his torso.
“What if this is a bad idea,” Lincoln says, but he doesn’t move away from her; on the contrary, he leans in even closer. The ‘w’ in ‘what’ brushes against her lips and Olivia leans into him. He still hasn’t kissed her. Olivia doesn’t mind making the first moves, clearly, but she’d like some feedback. So, call her stubborn, she is going to make him kiss her this time.
“It’s not,” Olivia says, barely breathing. In this what can only tenuously be called a conversation, Lincoln has somehow managed to press up against her even more. The table bites against her spine, but she barely notices. Come on, she thinks, her eyes still trained on his mouth. Your move.
And he kisses her. It’s not anything like their kiss this morning, either. There’s no rush in the way he pulls her body up and toward his. It’s the slowest thing in the world, and Olivia can’t help but moan into his mouth. For a moment, she doesn’t even want to move. She wants to stay affixed right here. Her back is off the table; there’s nothing to distract her. There’s just her and Lincoln and the haziness of the afternoon.
Then, he lifts his mouth from hers. Her eyes are barely open before he whispers, “Bedroom?”
“Yes,” she mumbles, and kisses him before she follows with please. She just barely disentangles herself from him to walk them into her room, but almost as soon as they’ve crossed the threshold his mouth is on hers again. Olivia wants say they fell into bed, she wants to say it is something graceful, but really she’s trying to get Lincoln’s pants off and ends up tripping backwards instead. Lincoln falls with her, but he laughs at her nonetheless. She tries to scold him for that, but her words get buried under his mouth.
When she gets his trousers off, she turns her mouth away from his. “Finally,” she grumbles. “You’re of absolutely no help, you know that?”
“Hey,” he protests, “I think I’m helpful.” His fingers move to undo one button on her trousers, then the other. Then follows the echoing sound of unzipping in a room silent except for her breathing.
“Oh?” she chokes out. Lincoln’s hands are very, very low. He tugs down her trousers and she lifts her hips to lend him a hand. “See, that was me helping you again,” Olivia says, or rather tries to say, because Lincoln has looped his fingers into the sides of her underwear and that makes her words a little lazy.
“Mhm,” he mumbles, but he says it with his lips pressed to her hipbone and Olivia takes in the slightest breath. Her hand skips along the side of his face and threads into his hair. She doesn’t know how a room can be so silent, or maybe that’s just the way her breathing echoes in her ears. With her eyes closed, Olivia feels as though she has but two overpowering senses: sound and touch. Nothing else exists beyond Lincoln’s hands and mouth and body on her body and the near-silent rustle of sheets.
Then, his tongue finds her clit and Olivia learns that, yes, Lincoln is in fact very helpful.
“I’m exhausted,” Lincoln mumbles against her shoulder. They’re tangled in sheets and limbs and Olivia too feels herself nodding off.
“I should think you would be,” Olivia says, her hand drifting along his jaw line. “You haven’t slept in weeks. And we were very busy.”
Lincoln grins with his eyes closed. “Those are both very true.”
It’s the middle of the afternoon. She should probably do something else, but she’d far prefer to take catnaps with Lincoln than try to be a productive member of society where she has to think about tomorrow. No, here is best; she doesn’t have to think here. In this room, thoughts are simple: bodies are warm, as are blankets. She doesn’t want to think beyond her bed. Let me rest, she commands herself. Her mind is already constructing mission tactics for tomorrow and she pulls herself closer to Lincoln to block it out.
“You know, we never had our coffee date,” Lincoln says and Olivia laughs.
“I’m okay with being non-traditional if you are,” she says.
He frowns in mock consideration. “You know,” he says, dragging out the vowel. “I think I can live with things going in the wrong order.”
She kisses him again with her eyes closed and her fingertips just below his cheekbone. When she kisses him, they seem to freeze in place. She’s glad of it. Olivia wants to stay still and perfectly hushed. She’d like to keep this moment forever. She could hold onto it for years.
Lincoln pulls away first, eyes still closed. Olivia shivers, and he runs his hand along her spine. “I might actually fall asleep,” Lincoln says, sounding half-surprised through his exhaustion. Olivia smiles down at him and his tired body bent toward hers.
“I’m very proud,” she teases, brushing a strand of hair off his forehead.
He smiles. “You should be. The world seems a lot less scary with you around.”
Olivia breathes in. Her hand lifts off his face and hovers an inch above his skin. If Lincoln was seeking a reaction or is surprised to find she has one, he makes no display of it. A moment later, his breathing evens as he drifts into sleep. Olivia shifts onto her side so her head rests atop both of her hands and tries to memorize him until her eyes also slip shut.
It doesn’t surprise her, though, when she wakes just under an hour later. Olivia isn’t much for sleeping mid-day. Lincoln is still asleep, of course. She’s careful to be quiet as she slips on a t-shirt and sweatpants and goes to sit in the living room. She leaves the door to her bedroom open just a crack in case Lincoln has a nightmare. Olivia might not fear much, but lately she has learned what it’s like to wake up screaming.
He does not wake up screaming, though. He wakes up a couple hours later and emerges wearing boxers and his crumpled dress shirt, with his hair running in all directions. “Hi,” he says, leaning over the couch to kiss her. She smiles against his mouth.
“Hi,” she says as he wanders from the living room into the kitchen. He goes straight for the coffee in the cabinet. Olivia puts the paper she’s reading down and watches him move from the cabinet to the coffee maker to the fridge for the milk without once breaking stride. She turns her body toward the kitchen and pulls her knees onto the couch. Lincoln shoots her a sort of sideways glance that makes her laugh while he waits for the coffee to brew. When it beeps its completion, he turns back to the cabinets and stops. He’s forgotten where the mugs are, she realizes, and stands from the couch.
“No,” he says, raising a hand as she enters. “I am going to figure this out.”
She rolls her eyes. “You don’t have to prove that you know my kitchen by heart, you know.”
He doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on the cabinets as he walks to her and wraps an arm around her waist as he tries to decide which door to open first. “This is very important,” he says, though he does a very poor job of looking serious. “I need to know this kitchen.”
Olivia smiles. “I like you in my kitchen.”
He breathes in and then looks at her. “I like me in your kitchen too.” He leans toward her lips and when he’s an inch away from kissing her she says, “Second cabinet on the right.”
“Dammit,” he groans, turning his head to look to the cabinets but not moving from her. “It was on the tip of my tongue.”
“Sorry,” she says.
He turns to her. His mouth is just above hers again, and Olivia shifts her hips so they press against him. She likes the lack of space, she finds. It’s a surprise to her, she’ll admit, but she thinks perhaps this is the last safe place in the world. Might as well nestle into it. It’s all she has.
“I don’t think you’re sorry at all,” he says, and his words are guttural, rooted in the back of the throat.
She smirks. “Nope,” she says. “I’m not.”
He might respond with something like “Knew it,” but then he’s kissing her again. Olivia leans back. Lincoln has one hand on the space between her shoulder blades and another in her hair as if to catch her. Olivia’s hands are doing much the same, she thinks, but she’s not thinking about that right now. She just wants to think about her body against his body. Olivia likes finding out all the different ways he can kiss her, and the fact that there is more of him to study makes her pull him even closer. Even the skin between them seems unfair. She knows she sounds ravenous, but Lincoln is whispering her name into her mouth and she doesn’t care, she doesn’t care if she sounds nearly starved. Perhaps that’s exactly what she is.
“Stopping,” Lincoln says before she realizes that’s what he’s done. He kisses her cheek and then steps back, though he keeps his hand in hers. “Stopping before we don’t stop.”
He turns to the mugs, and then the sugar in its jar on the counter. Olivia tries to make her hands stop shaking. Come back, she wants to say. The sun is beginning to set. Tomorrow is almost here.
“Olivia,” Lincoln says. Something wet and warm is falling onto her hands; she’s crying. Olivia stares at her knuckles. She hears the sound of ceramic placed on the table, and then Lincoln has both of her hands in his. He says her name again and she blinks.
“I’m not ready,” she says. “I can’t do this.”
Lincoln frowns. “This being —”
She shakes her head. “Tomorrow. I’m not ready for tomorrow.”
Olivia pulls her hands out of his and sits in one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Lincoln follows and squats in front of her, keeping one hand on each of her knees. “Listen to me,” he says. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“I know that,” she says. She does. That’s not the problem. She’s going to do it anyway. “But Peter needs my help. That’s what I do, right? I help.”
Lincoln smiles just a little. Olivia almost starts crying again; people aren’t supposed to look at her the way he looks at her. “That is what you do. And you’re not doing it alone.”
Her eyes tick up to his. “No,” she says, though her voice shakes. “I don’t suppose I am.”
He sighs, and leans forward to kiss her. It only lasts a moment, and then he’s on his feet again, pulling her up. “So, I’m going to make you coffee and then we’re going to plan.”
“I already know the plan,” she says, but she still trails after him to the coffee pot. He doesn’t turn back to her, but she sees the smile in his profile.
“I assumed,” he says. He turns and walks past her to get another mug from the cabinet, and then he hands her a cup of her own. “But I need you to tell me the plan so I can help you.”
Olivia pauses to take a long sip of her coffee. She can do it; copies of the plan for the machine are in the living room, and she can draw the pathways from the docks on the other side to the Department of Defense complex. She knows the route by heart, of course. Olivia doesn’t forget anything, but even if she did she’d always remember how to trace those steps. But Olivia doesn’t know how to be helped, not yet. She doesn’t think she’s even been taught.
“It might take some time,” she confesses.
Lincoln pours his second cup. “I’ve got all night.”
It’s cold by the water. She shoves her hands further into her pockets. Lincoln’s breath frosts in the air. They’ve gone over all the maps. She’s told him about the technology they have on the other side. She’s detailed the fragmentation of the universe and the ZFT, which the other Olivia knew front to back and so now Olivia does too. Olivia fell asleep on the couch. Lincoln didn’t. When she woke up near-gasping, he was reading charts and holding her hand. They’re as prepared as they could possibly be. Now all that’s left to do is leap.
“Peter’s here,” Lincoln says, nodding to where Peter is indeed approaching them with an agent Olivia doesn’t recognize not far behind. Probably Peter’s security detail. The agent hangs back while Peter walks over to them. He keeps his eyes trained on Olivia as he approaches, and she looks anywhere but back at him.
“Thanks for this,” he says to her when he’s close enough. She nods just once. In her pockets, her hands are shaking. Lincoln stands no more than two feet away from her, but though she appreciates the distance in front of Peter, she would appreciate something to hold onto.
Olivia nods. “It’s my job.” Peter seems to wince, and she does too. She doesn’t mean to be cruel. This is just a mission she’d rather not be on. But it’s not about her, she reminds herself. This is about helping people who need help. Olivia knows how to do that. She knows how to save.
She breathes in. The air is so cold is stings her lungs. “Take my hand,” Olivia says, and Peter stares at her outstretched fingers. She does understand. An exact replica of the woman he loves is walking around and speaking to him like a stranger. Her wrist turns so her palm faces up and Peter stares at the lines on her palms. After a moment, he exhales a hiss as he reaches out to touch her. Then, she looks away from him. No matter what Peter says about other Olivias in other worlds that she can’t touch, Olivia doesn’t like the way he looks at her.
On her other side, Lincoln’s hand brushes against hers just once before intertwining his fingers in hers. When she looks up at him, it’s as though she catches him in the act of studying her; he looks surprised to see her looking back at him. A glimmer of a smile skirts across her lips before falling away. She has a feeling her hands are shaking and both men know it. She doesn’t want to be doing this, and on some level she wishes Lincoln were here even less. There are monsters across the veil. If he stays here, he stays safe. But the problem, of course, is that Lincoln keeps her safe too. Surely, in this of all matters she is allowed to be selfish. She is allowed to hold onto something.
Lincoln’s thumb moves to press against the pulse beneath her wrist. Almost immediately, Olivia feels her heart pound a little less.
“You can do this,” he says, and Olivia takes one long, stretched out moment to observe him. There’s no remnant of doubt anywhere on his face. His hands do not shake. He won’t turn back or run away, and he won’t let Olivia do that either because he steadies her. That’s the word she’s been searching for, that descriptor she’s needed to talk about this relationship that propelled itself from a stroll to a sprint. He steadies her. How necessary a task, she thinks, to simply provide balance. She stood tall without Lincoln; now she can stand even taller. It’s miniscule, but enough. Just the slightest realignment of the spine.
Olivia turns to the water and grips Lincoln’s hand in hers. “I know,” she says, and shuts her eyes.
Crane Your Neck
Fringe. Olivia. Lincoln/Olivia. Spoilers through 4x07, "Wallflower". This is (very, very) loosely based on speculation from the 4x08 promos. Title from Lady Lamb the Beekeeper's "Crane Your Neck."
Rated R. Many thanks to @agentfrancis on tumblr for the beta. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Olivia has other things to worry about, like the way Lincoln has his fingers perched just at the edge of the table, leaving prints. Olivia notices these things, of course. She likes evidence.
Olivia feels her back first. Pressed at the wrong angles against the hardwood floor, her spine kicks her awake just before the headache hits. And that headache — Olivia often can’t judge the ferocity of migraine to migraine, but she thinks this one might be the worst. The floor isn’t making it any better. She doesn’t know how she got down there at all, she realizes as she pushes herself to her feet and looks down at the clothes she wasn’t wearing just a moment ago. Then, she looks at the clock and its angry, red numbers and realizes that a moment ago was actually hours ago. It’s just before four AM now, and she remembers that she had other places to be.
So Olivia does two things. First, she pushes her rebellious, aching body to the bathroom and grabs at her last bottle of medication. Second, she gains control over her shaking fingers for long enough to pull her cell phone out of her pocket. The bright screen is too much to look at, but she makes herself do it anyway and puts the phone on speaker so it doesn’t ring right in her ear.
“Olivia?” Lincoln asks as he picks up the phone.
“Hi,” she whispers, though the words barely make it out of her mouth. “Are you at the diner?”
There’s a pause on the line. Olivia keeps her eyes closed, with her left hand pinching the bridge of her nose. Olivia is new to migraines, but she’s starting to learn the small things that make them just a little more bearable. She just needs it to pass.
“Yes,” Lincoln says. Olivia’s head falls just an inch.
“I’m sorry I’m not there I just — I just woke up on my floor? And I don’t know how long I’ve been passed out or —”
“Wait,” Lincoln says, and Olivia bites her tongue. Sometimes it helps the migraines to redirect the pain somewhere else. It’s only a split second of something resembling relief, but Olivia will take it.
Lincoln continues, “How do I get to your apartment from here?”
The buzz to get in the building makes her grind her teeth together, but when Lincoln knocks on her door it’s soft enough to sound like cat scratches. She’ll thank him for that later, but when she opens the door the light in the hallway is too bright for her to look at him.
“How are you doing?” he asks as she turns away from the door to the darkness of her living room, leaving him to shut the door. Olivia shrugs, a motion she then realizes he can’t see in the dark, and turns on a lamp on the table. It’s not much light, but it’s too much for her and enough to allow Lincoln to see how to cross the room in half a dozen paces. He turns it back off before sitting next to her on the couch.
Olivia actually vomited in the time it took him to get to her apartment, and despite brushing her teeth in the dark she’s not sure she did such a good job of it. She edges a bit further from him on the couch just to be sure. Her eyes are adjusting to the dark again, and from the minimal light from the streetlamps she can see the way his body twists toward her with one hand on the couch and the other on his knee. “I’ve been better,” she says.
“What happened?” Lincoln asks.
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember I came home, I took a shower, I was looking in my closet for an outfit for our — to go to the diner and next thing I know I’m in the floor in different clothes and my head was killing me.”
Olivia watches his head bob a nod in the dark. “Do you think the migraine is what made you pass out?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says again, and realizes she sounds more exasperated than she meant to. “Sorry,” she covers. “It’s just — my head.” She’s so exhausted that even small words are starting to feel sticky. Olivia has only been having migraines for the last three months, and this is the thing she is starting to realize about them: her medication is only minimally effective; sleep is the only thing that really helps, but it hurts too much to sleep. She might nod off eventually, but the first hour of trying to rest ends up leaving her so uncomfortable that eventually she just gives up on the whole endeavor and goes for a walk instead. But standing during this migraine sounds like one of the worse ideas she’s had in recent days, and so instead she pulls her knees to her chest and rests her head on top of them.
“Hey,” Lincoln says, and though Olivia’s eyes remain closed she thinks she feels his fingers dust across her shoulder. “Is there anything I can do? Do you want water or anything?”
She shakes her head. Still, she remembers she’s allowed to ask for help. She’s allowed to rely on something beyond her skin and bones. “No,” she says, because he probably can’t see her shake her head in the dark, “but I wouldn’t mind the company. Unless you’ve got other plans.”
“I won’t make too much noise for you?” She thinks she can hear the smile in his voice, but maybe she’s imagining.
She smiles against her knees. “Whispering wouldn’t hurt. I took my medicine; now it just needs to pass. And waiting for it to go away isn’t so bad with people around.”
Olivia assumes as much, anyway. She’s never exactly tried this tactic before, but she did not like waking up on that floor at the wrong time of night. And her head hurts so much, it would be nice, she thinks, to have something like a distraction.
“Only if you wouldn’t mind,” Olivia says, looking up at his minimally outlined figure in the dark. “I know tonight was supposed to go differently —”
“I don’t mind,” Lincoln interrupts, tugging his jacket off and tossing it over the armrest. “But I think you should get some sleep.”
Olivia frowns. “But you’ll stay?”
Lincoln laughs. It’s soft enough to not hurt her but loud enough to let her know it’s genuine. “There’s no place else for me to be.”
“Thank you,” Olivia says, more grateful than she meant to sound. She’s not very good at playing it cool, as it were, which she knew before this conversation and of which did not need a reminder. Lincoln leans back against the couch. She shifts to lying down on her side, knees still tucked in to keep from touching him, and pulls the closest throw pillow under her head.
“Tell me something,” Olivia says with her eyes closed.
“Something?”
She shrugs. Even the sound of her shirt rustling against the fabric of the couch is too loud, but she doesn’t mind him talking. “Something. Anything. Why did you join the FBI? Where did you grow up? What are your parents like? Something.”
“Hm,” he mumbles, and Olivia thinks about his lips pressed together to make the sound. Not the time, she scolds herself. “My parents were nice, normal people. I mean, my dad still is. They wanted me to be a doctor.”
“And you wanted to be a cop,” she laughs.
“No,” he says, laughing as well. “Well, I didn’t know what I wanted to be. I got to college meaning to study biology and I dropped all my science classes after the first week. And then my mom got sick that semester and I just sort of… stopped.”
Olivia opens her eyes. “I didn’t know that.”
There’s a rustling sound from his side of the couch. “I didn’t tell you.”
She stops herself from telling him she’s sorry. Maybe she should, but she’s gotten that comment too many times in her life to think the pleasantries bring much comfort.
“Anyway,” he says after a moment, “I took some time off. Came back a criminal justice major. My mom just wanted me to help people; I figured that was the best way to do it. The rest is history.”
“And your dad?”
“Lives in Cincinnati. He, uh,” and now Olivia can hear the smile in his voice again. It’s strange the way it calms her. She feels the muscles in her shoulders relax. “He owns a bookstore. Secondhand stuff. Used to be a tax attorney, but after my mom died he sort of restarted. New state, new job, new life, really. I’d be lying if I said we were close, but — we talk on birthdays.”
She remembers what Lincoln said about Robert, how he was the family Lincoln thought he’d never find. That might have been the moment when this started, when she had the first spark of a maybe. Maybe she saw the same sort tear she carries inside of her. Maybe if he came out repaired with the right people, the right faith, surely she could too. Maybe he could help, if she'd let him. Of course, at the time it wasn’t a thought so conscious, but Olivia has had some time to think. And she’s starting to learn that adults don’t outgrow butterflies, which means she thinks quite a bit more than she should. Olivia wraps her arms around her stomach.
“Family is hard,” she mumbles, not sure if she’s even audible. The headache is starting to pass but the exhaustion seems to be settling in. “Mine’s sort of funny, when you think about it. Well, funny’s not the right word.”
“Oh?” Lincoln says, and then maybe asks a question, but Olivia falls asleep before she hears it.
She wakes up to the smell of coffee. Her legs have stretched back in the night, and one arm hangs off the couch before she brings it to her face to rub the sleep from her eyes. The living room drapes do little to block the morning sun, and Olivia winces. The migraine is mostly gone, but migraines have an aftereffect that feels halfway to a hangover, which means she still doesn’t like sunshine. She’ll be better once she eats.
And that’s when she realizes how she smells coffee in her apartment that she lives in by herself. Her head drums a bit as she sits up and looks to the kitchen. There, Lincoln is sitting and reading the newspaper. His head lifts up as she stands from the couch.
“Hey,” he says, sitting up a little straighter.
“Morning,” Olivia says almost sheepishly. There’s a tired smile on her face and a blush she can feel spreading along her cheeks. Lincoln Lee is in her kitchen drinking her coffee. She excuses herself to brush her teeth and laughs to herself in the bathroom. Her head doesn’t like that, of course, and she winces. It doesn’t do much to sober her up, though. Lincoln Lee is in her kitchen drinking her coffee.
“I hope you don’t mind about the coffee,” Lincoln says as she returns to the kitchen. “I figured we’d both need some.”
She hums an assent and pours herself a cup, closing her eyes and breathing it in before taking a sip. It burns her tongue, but she doesn’t mind. Better that than the quiet pounding in her skull. When she opens her eyes, he’s still looking at her.
“Thanks,” she says. And, after a pause, “And for last night too.”
Lincoln smiles and glances at the floor for a moment before looking back up. “No problem. I didn’t know if you’d be okay in the morning, and it seemed rude to just pack up and go so —”
Olivia grins. “No, this is fine, this is good. I mean, if you just wanted to come over in the mornings and make coffee so I don’t have to think without any caffeine, that’d be a fine arrangement with me.”
He laughs. “Well it’s important to know your strengths.”
“Mm,” she says, lifting the mug to her lips. “And coffee is definitely yours.”
His eyes narrow in mock-indignation. “Just coffee? I think I’m offended.”
“Among many other talents,” she covers quickly, laughing again. “I’m sure.”
He nods. “I am very good at many aspects of breakfast, if I do say so myself.”
“But I only need you for the coffee,” she says as her phone rings. She glares at it on the counter.
“Do you not like breakfast?” he asks, sounding vaguely appalled as she walks to the phone and lifts it to her ear. It’s Walter, of course, and something he simply must show her right away. She rolls her eyes and says she’ll be there in an hour before hanging up the phone and tossing it back on the table.
“Walter,” she says by way of explanation, and then his phone rings as well. He picks it up and then looks at her. “Walter,” he repeats. She watches him as he answers. As far as first mornings go, this isn’t so bad, she finds herself thinking, and then shakes it off.
Lincoln hangs up the phone and walks his coffee to the sink. “I’ll take care of that,” she protests, but he’s already washed it out and dropped it in the dishwasher.
“I’m going to go home and change,” he says, walking to her. Olivia stands up just a bit straighter.
“See you in an hour?” she says, but he’s just a foot from her and so her question comes out more like a gravely whisper. His lips are pulled up just slightly into a smirk and, yes, she is staring at his mouth and making a bad go of being subtle.
“See you then,” he says, and then, after a pause, he takes a step back. When he turns to walk out the kitchen, Olivia catches her breath.
Then, he stops and turns back to her. Olivia gets that feeling in her throat again, like something is clutching at it. “We should actually go for coffee sometime though,” he says, looking at her socks, she thinks. “Maybe not in the middle of the night, even.”
Olivia smiles, and takes an accidental step toward him. “Daytime is a good time for coffee.”
Lincoln nods, and looks up from the ground. “Then it’s a date,” he says, and Olivia waits for the word to settle. Then, Lincoln nods again and turns once more toward the living room.
“Hey,” Olivia says, almost lurching forward. Lincoln once again stops and turns back to her. Part of her thinks she shouldn’t have to do this; she’s made the first move twice, after all, and some petty teenage side of her laments that fact. But her feet are taking her forward anyway, and she’s not about to complain. Now she’s the one to step right up to him; now he’s the one to stare at her mouth. She doesn’t mind that at all.
“Thanks for last night,” she says, her eyes dropping to his lips again.
“I think it was technically morning,” he starts to say, but then Olivia bridges the six-inch gap left between them and kisses him. She freezes there, right there, her lips pressed against his. He smells like morning and coffee beans. Her hands drift toward his sweater, but before she reaches him, he has his hands on her hips. She seems to sigh in that moment; there’s a puff of air she’d been holding back as she approached him and now it escapes. She makes a small, unidentifiable sound against his mouth, or maybe that’s him against her mouth, but either way her hips are now pressed against him and her hands are somewhere at her sides with her fingers flexing out because Olivia wants nothing more than to touch him but she suddenly wants all of him at once. Her fingers don’t know where to go. They just reach into the air.
And then it’s over. He’s the one to step back, but when Olivia opens her eyes she’s happy to see his remain closed. “We have to go to work,” he says, and then his eyes open. “I wish we didn’t have to, but—”
“We have to,” she acknowledges, and takes a couple steps back from him so she can breathe a little easier.
“I’ll see you soon,” Lincoln says with the faintest traces of a smile. Olivia nods, and he turns once more, grabs his coat from where it still rests on the couch, and slips out the door.
Olivia takes a final gulp of her coffee. At least the pounding in her head has gone down.
She gets to the lab before Lincoln does. It’s quiet. Walter is dissecting something Olivia can’t identify from a distance and that she doesn’t think she wants to identify close up. Astrid is sitting at her computer and stirring her tea too much.
“What’s going on?” Olivia says, walking to Astrid as she speaks.
Astrid looks over to Walter, and then back to Olivia. “The uh — Peter? He’s coming here.”
Olivia blinks. “What? On whose authorization?”
“Broyles,” Astrid says, and she stirs her tea just a bit harder. “Walter said he can handle it, but I think he’s going to freak. And Walter has really high levels of freak.”
“Why is he coming here?” Olivia asks, already walking toward Walter. Astrid says she doesn’t know, and Olivia steps up to Walter so she can hear what he’s mumbling about under his breath. It sounds like nonsense to her, no more than the usual, so she says, “How are you doing, Walter?”
“Olivia,” Walter says too loudly, not looking at her. “I am trying to get to the bottom of our friend Porky here.”
Olivia looks to the lab table. Yes, that does look like something that could have been a pig once.
“Pigs are very clean creatures,” he continues. “Horribly misunderstood, because of the sties.”
“Walter,” Olivia tries again. “Are you going to be okay when Peter gets here?”
Walter reaches his hands into the pig. Olivia moves back a bit. Sometimes things squirt from the carcasses Walter toys with. “Of course,” Walter says, his ear tilted toward the pig as though he is listening for the thing he’s looking for. “I can be professional.”
There’s a kidney in his hands when he pulls them out of the pig. Olivia sighs, and turns away as the doors open and Lincoln walks in wearing a freshly pressed suit. He looks right at her and doesn’t look away.
“Hey,” he says as they walk toward each other.
“Hey,” she repeats. They stop with three or four feet left between them. Olivia shoves her hands in her pockets. There’s a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth that she’s doing a very bad job of containing, but she notes Lincoln seems to be having the same trouble.
“So,” Lincoln says after a moment, the vowel dragging. “What’s the emergency?”
Olivia frowns and tosses a look back to Walter. “Broyles is bringing Peter over,” she says, turning back to Lincoln. “I don’t know why.”
Lincoln frowns. “Why didn’t Walter say that on the phone?”
Olivia shrugs. “Because I don’t think he knows what to do about it yet.”
Then, the door opens once more as Broyles and Peter enter the lab. Peter nods to her as he sweeps into the center of the lab, and Olivia is struck by how easily he moves in this space, how familiar it is to him. She thinks Peter is nice, she does, but she definitely finds him unsettling. He knows too much and acts too familiar with too many things. It’s the asymmetry that gets to her most of all: she still looks at him and sees a stranger; he looks at her like there’s thing about her that even she doesn’t yet understand. She doesn’t like it. She’s not his Olivia. The fact that they both know that doesn’t stop that first shimmer of recognition in his eyes before he blinks it away.
Lincoln is watching her when she turns back to him. “You don’t like him,” he says, though maybe it’s a question.
Olivia shakes her head. “I just don’t like that he knows things I don’t.”
“Olivia,” Peter says then, calling to her from across the lab. Walter has moved as far from the lab equipment as possible without fleeing the room entirely; his back is pressed to the door to his bedroom in the back. Peter waves them over, and Lincoln and Olivia cross the lab and stand behind him as he points to his laptop screen.
“I need to go to the other side,” Peter says, and before Olivia even processes that sentence long enough to protest, he says, “And I can’t take the bridge because I don’t exist.”
“What do you mean?” Lincoln asks.
“I mean,” Peter says, standing away from the computer screen for a moment, “I’m an anomaly. I’m a kid who died. I shouldn’t exist. And if I go through the bridge, they’re going to figure that out and they’re going to stop me before I can get where I need to be.”
“Slow down,” Olivia says. Peter’s right hand is shaking; it’s barely noticeable but it’s her job to see that which is difficult to see. “What do you need from the other side?”
“Walternate,” Peter says, too loudly, and Olivia thinks she hears Walter offer a muffled squeak. Then, lower so Walter can’t hear, Peter says, “If there’s anyone who will know how to get me home, it’s going to be him.”
Lincoln adjusts his glasses. They’re new frames, Olivia notices now. “But if you’re not going to go through the bridge, how are you supposed to get there?”
Peter doesn’t say anything. He just turns his eyes to her and she takes an instinctive step back. He’s not supposed to know these things. He’s not supposed to know anything.
“I can’t,” Olivia says. “I haven’t tried to cross over in months, there’s no way —”
“Yes,” Peter says. “You can. You just have to believe you can.”
Olivia narrows her eyes. Maybe Lincoln’s right. Maybe she doesn’t like him at all.
“Liv,” Lincoln says and Olivia jumps, because no one has called her that since she was living the other Olivia’s life. Later, she’ll have to tell him not to call her that. Now isn’t the time. “What’s he talking about?”
She doesn’t look at him. “Those experiments Walter did on me when I was a kid? My long-lasting gift is that I can cross between universes. Or I could, but I haven’t done that since —”
“You were kidnapped,” Peter finishes for her, and her fingers clench into a fist in her pocket.
“You were kidnapped?” Lincoln interrupts. Olivia looks at him. His eyes are wide; his left hand reaches toward her for just a moment before being forced back to his side.
Olivia nods. “That’s a longer story,” she says, and then looks back to Peter. “And I can’t cross over anymore. I won’t.”
Peter runs a hand through his hair, and then he seems to deflate. He exhales and his shoulders fall forward. The mania he’d be carrying flashes away. Olivia looks to Lincoln. His eyes tick toward her for a moment and then he looks back to Peter.
“Not that I don’t understand the immediacy of the issue,” Lincoln says very slowly, “but why now? Why today?”
“Not today,” Peter says, turning back to his laptop. “Tomorrow, around noon. I’ve been tracking the crossover points we know of for structural weaknesses, you know, stuff to break through. If I’m right, tomorrow should be the day.”
“Where?” Lincoln asks, and Peter looks to Olivia again.
“I’ve been trying to find weak points in the universal fragment so we can cross over. Hot spots,” he says, and Olivia rolls her eyes. Of course. “Olivia,” Peter says, and she lifts her gaze to meet his. “I know what I’m asking you. I know it’s asking too much. But, please, I need your help. You’re the only person who can do this.”
She shuts her eyes. Olivia has seen and done a lot of things in this job, and those are all things she knows how to carry. The other side was different. Coming back was different. The other Olivia slipped into her life and no one even noticed. It took her months to get over that — perhaps a short time by anyone else’s standards, but not by hers.
When she opens her eyes again both men are staring at her. She doesn’t look either of them in the eye. “Okay,” she says. “Tomorrow.”
Peter exhales. “Thank you. It’s down by the docks. I’ll meet you there.”
“All done then?” Broyles asks and Olivia had actually forgotten he was there. He didn’t say anything during the whole exchange; he had merely watched. Peter nods, folds up his computer, and rummages with his bag until he fits it in. Broyles heads toward the door and Peter turns with his body halfway out the door and waves at her. When the door shuts behind them, the sound echoes in the near silent space.
Olivia winces. “I need a drink,” she says.
Beside her, Lincoln shrugs. “It’s five o’clock somewhere.”
She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, in the middle of the Atlantic.”
“There are boats.”
Olivia bites her lip to keep from laughing. Part of her scolds both of them; now’s not the time for light jokes and small flirtations. Then again, she supposes their lives could be best described as inconvenient.
She looks to him. “We’ve really got a strange track record going on here.”
“You’re the one who said our lives are unconventional,” he notes. She can see Astrid staring at them out of the corner of her eye, but Olivia just barely registers that. Lincoln just keeps looking at Olivia, who honestly would kiss him again right now if not for things like purported workplace etiquette. Still, it takes all of her restraint: her lips themselves seem to be buzzing. She’d forgotten what this was like, feeling like a string stretched between her and another person. Gravitation made sense; it was, after all, the only possible option.
Olivia coughs to gain back use of her vocal chords. “Let’s do it,” she says.
The waitress — 19, brunette, with a sort of face that makes Olivia think of her mother — seems a little concerned that Olivia orders a whiskey, double, dry at eleven in the morning. “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat with that?” she asks once more when she brings over Olivia’s drink and a beer for Lincoln.
Olivia nods. “I’m fine for now, thank you.”
“I take it you can hold your alcohol,” Lincoln says as the girl walks away.
She takes the first sip of whiskey and doesn’t wince. “It’s been said. You?”
He shrugs. “I can hold my own, but not at eleven in the morning.”
“It’s a skills set,” she says, and he smiles. Olivia somehow regrets that she didn’t just offer up the wine in her kitchen. They could sit on the couch; she would make some uncomfortable reference to the night before that she meant to be funny that falls flat. He might laugh anyway, just to be polite. She could get up to get more wine or food and he could catch her wrist on the way, stand to meet her and kiss her this time.
Back to earth, she thinks, and shakes it off. Lincoln stares at her.
“So,” Olivia coughs.
“So,” Lincoln repeats. They really are like teenagers, she thinks. Her palms might be sweating, and she rubs them against her knees.
“Is this a date?” Olivia asks, the words sort of stumbling out as one long, foreign sound.
Still, Lincoln seems to understand her. His mouth turns, and he drags a finger along the condensation on his glass. “I don’t know — is this what you had in mind for a date?”
Olivia looks around. There’s barely even an early morning lunch crowd. She’s wearing a suit, as is Lincoln. Anyone watching them would never label this any sort of romantic moment. She certainly didn’t go through the normal preparations of choosing a hairstyle or the right pair of shoes. Olivia’s not overzealous in date preparation but she likes to at least make a choice, and she definitely would not choose her most practical pair of boots.
“Not really,” she admits, and maybe Lincoln’s face falls a little or maybe she’s imagining it.
Still, he nods. “Then we’ll just have another re-do.”
She winces. Olivia was right; he does sound disappointed. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I just had —”
“Better ideas for how this would go?” Lincoln finishes for her, and Olivia nods.
She straightens the unused utensils resting on the cloth napkin. “Something with mood lighting at least. And I don’t think sitting on my couch in the dark counts.”
Lincoln smiles. It’s a relief somehow. “It always counted in high school.”
Olivia laughs. “Simpler times.”
“Yeah,” Lincoln says, and then trails off, leaving the two of them to stare at each other and hope the other speaks first. “So,” he coughs after a moment and Olivia is grateful. “What’s the plan for tomorrow?”
Olivia is less grateful then. She has a plan, of course; it was formulated before they even got here. Olivia works quickly and very quietly. She can outline the plan too, but that has too many questions. How does she explain that the last time she crossed over, people died? Or that her life came apart and she couldn’t look Astrid or Walter in the eye for weeks? Or that her body was infected by someone else’s mind, someone she wishes she didn’t understand but she does, she must, because the other Olivia still lives in her skin?
That must play on her face, because Lincoln rushes to say, “We don’t have to talk about that.”
They don’t, but Olivia knows they should. He can’t be kept in the dark, and she shouldn’t push him in there. They’re partners, she reminds herself. This is what partners do. They rely. She shakes her head. “No, it’s okay. It should be pretty simple on our side. We’ll go to the docks and I will try to get us across. Once we do, though, things could get out of hand very quickly. You need to be smart.”
He frowns. “Will the other Olivia be there?”
She nods. “There’s a version of you too.”
His mouth drops open. “Seriously?” There’s a ghost of a laugh in his face.
“Yeah,” she says, surprised to hear a faint laugh in her affirmation. “They’re partners too. But Fringe is in the Defense Department; there’s no FBI. Walter is the Secretary of Defense. It’s all slight changes that make worlds of difference.”
“Are we alike?” Lincoln asks. “The Lincoln and Olivia over there and me and you.”
“No,” she says too quickly. Lincoln raises his eyebrows. She takes in a long breath and starts over again. “The other version of me can’t be trusted, and the other Lincoln will probably follow her lead. You need to know that. He’s technically in charge, but he’s — too invested in her.”
Lincoln’s mouth presses into a thin line. “You mean he’s in love with her.”
Olivia looks to her whiskey. “I don’t know,” she confesses. “But she’s the most important person in his life, and she knows it.”
“How do you even know this? You don’t make them sound like the sharing types.”
Olivia downs the rest of her whiskey. She doesn’t blame him for having questions. It’s not that she wants to keep anything from him either, it’s just that she hates talking about this. But he needs to know. If something goes wrong on the other side, if they try to infiltrate her life again, Lincoln needs to know. She won’t lose him to this war, she decides, though it’s a sentence she must admit she’s surprised to think. It just pops into her head. She won’t lose him to this. Some things must be safe.
“Remember when Peter said I was kidnapped?” she asks, waving down the waitress for another whiskey. The waitress complies but brings over her second glass with an ever-increasing look of concern. It’s okay mom, Olivia does not say.
Lincoln nods her on. She has another sip of whiskey, but this time she does wince. It’s not from the whiskey. “They have more advanced technology on the other side. They put Olivia’s memories and characteristics in my head. I don’t know how. And it basically forced me out. I just — lived in her shoes.”
“That’s not possible,” Lincoln says, eyes wide.
“It is. So I know everything she has ever felt or thought or known. I still do, but I try not to think about it.” She pauses to collect her words and sort through the lump in her throat. Lincoln waits. If she looks him in the eye it’s somehow easier, as though she can then block out everything else. “They sent the other Olivia here to live my life. She didn’t have any of my memories. No one noticed.”
Lincoln catches the fingers of her hand resting on the table. They both stare at their hands; she doesn’t think he meant to touch her. “Olivia,” he breathes, but says nothing more.
“It’s okay,” she says faintly, even though it’s not and he’s not asking for comfort. He’s just here for her, she reminds herself. She’s allowed to let someone else share the weight.
“It’s not okay,” he says for her. Olivia shakes her head, and brushes at her eyes.
“It gets easier though,” she clarifies, because it does. Olivia puts little faith in old adages, but in her experience what they say about time and wounds has always proven to be the case. “But enough of that,” she says. This conversation has left her spent; they need to move on.
“Yes,” Lincoln says, pulling his hand away from hers. She’s not surprised to find she misses it or that her fingers are suddenly freezing. Olivia rubs her hands together under the table, trying to bring some warmth back to her skin.
“I called my dad this morning,” Lincoln says. Olivia smiles. He seems to blush. “Yeah, I mean, after our conversation last night I figured, you know, I owe him a phone call. He’s the only family I’ve got, right? I shouldn’t let that go to waste.”
“How did it go?” she asks, waving the waitress over for a glass of water this time. She seems relieved.
“Good, I think,” Lincoln says, and then his blush seems to deepen. “I told him about you.”
“No,” Olivia gasps. She might giggle. If she does, she won’t admit to it.
“I did,” he says, half-laughing and half-cringing. “He asked why I’d moved, and I obviously can’t tell him about Fringe but I did tell him I’d been reassigned — which I assume is okay?” Olivia nods, and he continues. “And I told him I had a new partner.”
“Which was the end of the conversation?” Olivia asks.
Lincoln smiles. “Not so much.”
She tries to bite her lip to keep her grin from giving her away, but fails miserably. “I see.”
“Is that okay?” He is leaning toward her over the table. It’s too close to be professional anymore, but far further than she’d really like his mouth to be. Part of her feels like a madwoman obsessed. Surely this was once a feeling familiar to her; there’s some vague memory of life like this with John. But she knows something in her crumbled into dust when John did, and to feel that part of her jumpstart once more is jarring to say the least. She’d forgotten what it was like. Even now, when she thinks about it, it has the sort of haze pertaining to a faded photograph. On the other hand, everything with Lincoln feels like neon lights in the dark. It’s so bright that she has half the mind to look away, but she also can’t see anything else. In the end, it’s the only thing she has to go on.
“Yes,” she says. It’s barely audible even to her own ears. Olivia has other things to worry about, like the way Lincoln has his fingers perched just at the edge of the table, leaving prints. Olivia notices these things, of course. She likes evidence. Here she has something: his fingerprints on the table and his mouth on the glass, matched with her fingerprints on the coaster, the glass, the chair. It’s important to have something tangible; Olivia lives in a world that balances itself on proof.
“Good,” Lincoln says, but now his voice has dropped to a barely audible pitch. Olivia mostly knows what he’s said by reading his lips. Somewhere in the back of her mind she notices the waitress is staring at them. The other patrons in the restaurant might be too. It’s quite a sight, of course, to see two clear coworkers in freshly pressed suits leaning toward each other over the table like crushing schoolchildren.
“Do you want to get out of here,” she asks. That sentence she can hear, and she enunciates every word. Olivia does not want there to be any misconceptions.
His mouth lifts. “Yes,” he says. Olivia has never heard a word so clearly. For a moment, she feels as though it’s the only word that exists.
She actually doesn’t know how she makes it back to her apartment without touching him. She doesn’t even know how she made it through the elevator ride without kissing him. They didn’t even look at each other, and instead had stared at the lights indicating the climb up. But they make it to her door in one piece, which is something Olivia is half-grateful for and somehow half-disappointed about. Her hands don’t shake while she unlocks the door but her knees tell a different story. Surely, he must notice. He must be able to tell.
The lock clicks and Olivia pushes the door open. She takes one step inside when Lincoln’s hand brushes against her hip. It was probably an accident, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Lincoln turns into her, or maybe she turns into him, but he catches her body in his hands and keeps her there. Olivia ends up with her back pressed against the table just inside her apartment. The door clicks shut behind them, the lights stay off, and Lincoln doesn’t kiss her. There’s no room between them; they’re practically sharing oxygen. But Lincoln still doesn’t kiss her and if she weren’t so interested in having sex with him she’d punch him.
“This is crazy,” Lincoln murmurs. Olivia has to stop herself from leaning forward and catching his words with her mouth.
It is. It’s completely ridiculous. They’re co-workers; they’re partners; they haven’t known each other for very long when she thinks about it; they’ve never been on a real date. In the end, though, that doesn’t matter. What matters is Olivia feels like a greedy child who has seen something she wants and now can’t let go of it. How juvenile, she thinks half-hazily. But she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care at all, and that’s the thing that startles her the most.
“It is,” Olivia says. It’s a small enough sentence that she can muster it. Her hands, which earlier in the day were so difficult to deal with, have now decided so run along the sides of his body, beginning at the ribcage and moving slowly down. Lincoln breathes in and her hands move with his torso.
“What if this is a bad idea,” Lincoln says, but he doesn’t move away from her; on the contrary, he leans in even closer. The ‘w’ in ‘what’ brushes against her lips and Olivia leans into him. He still hasn’t kissed her. Olivia doesn’t mind making the first moves, clearly, but she’d like some feedback. So, call her stubborn, she is going to make him kiss her this time.
“It’s not,” Olivia says, barely breathing. In this what can only tenuously be called a conversation, Lincoln has somehow managed to press up against her even more. The table bites against her spine, but she barely notices. Come on, she thinks, her eyes still trained on his mouth. Your move.
And he kisses her. It’s not anything like their kiss this morning, either. There’s no rush in the way he pulls her body up and toward his. It’s the slowest thing in the world, and Olivia can’t help but moan into his mouth. For a moment, she doesn’t even want to move. She wants to stay affixed right here. Her back is off the table; there’s nothing to distract her. There’s just her and Lincoln and the haziness of the afternoon.
Then, he lifts his mouth from hers. Her eyes are barely open before he whispers, “Bedroom?”
“Yes,” she mumbles, and kisses him before she follows with please. She just barely disentangles herself from him to walk them into her room, but almost as soon as they’ve crossed the threshold his mouth is on hers again. Olivia wants say they fell into bed, she wants to say it is something graceful, but really she’s trying to get Lincoln’s pants off and ends up tripping backwards instead. Lincoln falls with her, but he laughs at her nonetheless. She tries to scold him for that, but her words get buried under his mouth.
When she gets his trousers off, she turns her mouth away from his. “Finally,” she grumbles. “You’re of absolutely no help, you know that?”
“Hey,” he protests, “I think I’m helpful.” His fingers move to undo one button on her trousers, then the other. Then follows the echoing sound of unzipping in a room silent except for her breathing.
“Oh?” she chokes out. Lincoln’s hands are very, very low. He tugs down her trousers and she lifts her hips to lend him a hand. “See, that was me helping you again,” Olivia says, or rather tries to say, because Lincoln has looped his fingers into the sides of her underwear and that makes her words a little lazy.
“Mhm,” he mumbles, but he says it with his lips pressed to her hipbone and Olivia takes in the slightest breath. Her hand skips along the side of his face and threads into his hair. She doesn’t know how a room can be so silent, or maybe that’s just the way her breathing echoes in her ears. With her eyes closed, Olivia feels as though she has but two overpowering senses: sound and touch. Nothing else exists beyond Lincoln’s hands and mouth and body on her body and the near-silent rustle of sheets.
Then, his tongue finds her clit and Olivia learns that, yes, Lincoln is in fact very helpful.
“I’m exhausted,” Lincoln mumbles against her shoulder. They’re tangled in sheets and limbs and Olivia too feels herself nodding off.
“I should think you would be,” Olivia says, her hand drifting along his jaw line. “You haven’t slept in weeks. And we were very busy.”
Lincoln grins with his eyes closed. “Those are both very true.”
It’s the middle of the afternoon. She should probably do something else, but she’d far prefer to take catnaps with Lincoln than try to be a productive member of society where she has to think about tomorrow. No, here is best; she doesn’t have to think here. In this room, thoughts are simple: bodies are warm, as are blankets. She doesn’t want to think beyond her bed. Let me rest, she commands herself. Her mind is already constructing mission tactics for tomorrow and she pulls herself closer to Lincoln to block it out.
“You know, we never had our coffee date,” Lincoln says and Olivia laughs.
“I’m okay with being non-traditional if you are,” she says.
He frowns in mock consideration. “You know,” he says, dragging out the vowel. “I think I can live with things going in the wrong order.”
She kisses him again with her eyes closed and her fingertips just below his cheekbone. When she kisses him, they seem to freeze in place. She’s glad of it. Olivia wants to stay still and perfectly hushed. She’d like to keep this moment forever. She could hold onto it for years.
Lincoln pulls away first, eyes still closed. Olivia shivers, and he runs his hand along her spine. “I might actually fall asleep,” Lincoln says, sounding half-surprised through his exhaustion. Olivia smiles down at him and his tired body bent toward hers.
“I’m very proud,” she teases, brushing a strand of hair off his forehead.
He smiles. “You should be. The world seems a lot less scary with you around.”
Olivia breathes in. Her hand lifts off his face and hovers an inch above his skin. If Lincoln was seeking a reaction or is surprised to find she has one, he makes no display of it. A moment later, his breathing evens as he drifts into sleep. Olivia shifts onto her side so her head rests atop both of her hands and tries to memorize him until her eyes also slip shut.
It doesn’t surprise her, though, when she wakes just under an hour later. Olivia isn’t much for sleeping mid-day. Lincoln is still asleep, of course. She’s careful to be quiet as she slips on a t-shirt and sweatpants and goes to sit in the living room. She leaves the door to her bedroom open just a crack in case Lincoln has a nightmare. Olivia might not fear much, but lately she has learned what it’s like to wake up screaming.
He does not wake up screaming, though. He wakes up a couple hours later and emerges wearing boxers and his crumpled dress shirt, with his hair running in all directions. “Hi,” he says, leaning over the couch to kiss her. She smiles against his mouth.
“Hi,” she says as he wanders from the living room into the kitchen. He goes straight for the coffee in the cabinet. Olivia puts the paper she’s reading down and watches him move from the cabinet to the coffee maker to the fridge for the milk without once breaking stride. She turns her body toward the kitchen and pulls her knees onto the couch. Lincoln shoots her a sort of sideways glance that makes her laugh while he waits for the coffee to brew. When it beeps its completion, he turns back to the cabinets and stops. He’s forgotten where the mugs are, she realizes, and stands from the couch.
“No,” he says, raising a hand as she enters. “I am going to figure this out.”
She rolls her eyes. “You don’t have to prove that you know my kitchen by heart, you know.”
He doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on the cabinets as he walks to her and wraps an arm around her waist as he tries to decide which door to open first. “This is very important,” he says, though he does a very poor job of looking serious. “I need to know this kitchen.”
Olivia smiles. “I like you in my kitchen.”
He breathes in and then looks at her. “I like me in your kitchen too.” He leans toward her lips and when he’s an inch away from kissing her she says, “Second cabinet on the right.”
“Dammit,” he groans, turning his head to look to the cabinets but not moving from her. “It was on the tip of my tongue.”
“Sorry,” she says.
He turns to her. His mouth is just above hers again, and Olivia shifts her hips so they press against him. She likes the lack of space, she finds. It’s a surprise to her, she’ll admit, but she thinks perhaps this is the last safe place in the world. Might as well nestle into it. It’s all she has.
“I don’t think you’re sorry at all,” he says, and his words are guttural, rooted in the back of the throat.
She smirks. “Nope,” she says. “I’m not.”
He might respond with something like “Knew it,” but then he’s kissing her again. Olivia leans back. Lincoln has one hand on the space between her shoulder blades and another in her hair as if to catch her. Olivia’s hands are doing much the same, she thinks, but she’s not thinking about that right now. She just wants to think about her body against his body. Olivia likes finding out all the different ways he can kiss her, and the fact that there is more of him to study makes her pull him even closer. Even the skin between them seems unfair. She knows she sounds ravenous, but Lincoln is whispering her name into her mouth and she doesn’t care, she doesn’t care if she sounds nearly starved. Perhaps that’s exactly what she is.
“Stopping,” Lincoln says before she realizes that’s what he’s done. He kisses her cheek and then steps back, though he keeps his hand in hers. “Stopping before we don’t stop.”
He turns to the mugs, and then the sugar in its jar on the counter. Olivia tries to make her hands stop shaking. Come back, she wants to say. The sun is beginning to set. Tomorrow is almost here.
“Olivia,” Lincoln says. Something wet and warm is falling onto her hands; she’s crying. Olivia stares at her knuckles. She hears the sound of ceramic placed on the table, and then Lincoln has both of her hands in his. He says her name again and she blinks.
“I’m not ready,” she says. “I can’t do this.”
Lincoln frowns. “This being —”
She shakes her head. “Tomorrow. I’m not ready for tomorrow.”
Olivia pulls her hands out of his and sits in one of the chairs at the kitchen table. Lincoln follows and squats in front of her, keeping one hand on each of her knees. “Listen to me,” he says. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“I know that,” she says. She does. That’s not the problem. She’s going to do it anyway. “But Peter needs my help. That’s what I do, right? I help.”
Lincoln smiles just a little. Olivia almost starts crying again; people aren’t supposed to look at her the way he looks at her. “That is what you do. And you’re not doing it alone.”
Her eyes tick up to his. “No,” she says, though her voice shakes. “I don’t suppose I am.”
He sighs, and leans forward to kiss her. It only lasts a moment, and then he’s on his feet again, pulling her up. “So, I’m going to make you coffee and then we’re going to plan.”
“I already know the plan,” she says, but she still trails after him to the coffee pot. He doesn’t turn back to her, but she sees the smile in his profile.
“I assumed,” he says. He turns and walks past her to get another mug from the cabinet, and then he hands her a cup of her own. “But I need you to tell me the plan so I can help you.”
Olivia pauses to take a long sip of her coffee. She can do it; copies of the plan for the machine are in the living room, and she can draw the pathways from the docks on the other side to the Department of Defense complex. She knows the route by heart, of course. Olivia doesn’t forget anything, but even if she did she’d always remember how to trace those steps. But Olivia doesn’t know how to be helped, not yet. She doesn’t think she’s even been taught.
“It might take some time,” she confesses.
Lincoln pours his second cup. “I’ve got all night.”
It’s cold by the water. She shoves her hands further into her pockets. Lincoln’s breath frosts in the air. They’ve gone over all the maps. She’s told him about the technology they have on the other side. She’s detailed the fragmentation of the universe and the ZFT, which the other Olivia knew front to back and so now Olivia does too. Olivia fell asleep on the couch. Lincoln didn’t. When she woke up near-gasping, he was reading charts and holding her hand. They’re as prepared as they could possibly be. Now all that’s left to do is leap.
“Peter’s here,” Lincoln says, nodding to where Peter is indeed approaching them with an agent Olivia doesn’t recognize not far behind. Probably Peter’s security detail. The agent hangs back while Peter walks over to them. He keeps his eyes trained on Olivia as he approaches, and she looks anywhere but back at him.
“Thanks for this,” he says to her when he’s close enough. She nods just once. In her pockets, her hands are shaking. Lincoln stands no more than two feet away from her, but though she appreciates the distance in front of Peter, she would appreciate something to hold onto.
Olivia nods. “It’s my job.” Peter seems to wince, and she does too. She doesn’t mean to be cruel. This is just a mission she’d rather not be on. But it’s not about her, she reminds herself. This is about helping people who need help. Olivia knows how to do that. She knows how to save.
She breathes in. The air is so cold is stings her lungs. “Take my hand,” Olivia says, and Peter stares at her outstretched fingers. She does understand. An exact replica of the woman he loves is walking around and speaking to him like a stranger. Her wrist turns so her palm faces up and Peter stares at the lines on her palms. After a moment, he exhales a hiss as he reaches out to touch her. Then, she looks away from him. No matter what Peter says about other Olivias in other worlds that she can’t touch, Olivia doesn’t like the way he looks at her.
On her other side, Lincoln’s hand brushes against hers just once before intertwining his fingers in hers. When she looks up at him, it’s as though she catches him in the act of studying her; he looks surprised to see her looking back at him. A glimmer of a smile skirts across her lips before falling away. She has a feeling her hands are shaking and both men know it. She doesn’t want to be doing this, and on some level she wishes Lincoln were here even less. There are monsters across the veil. If he stays here, he stays safe. But the problem, of course, is that Lincoln keeps her safe too. Surely, in this of all matters she is allowed to be selfish. She is allowed to hold onto something.
Lincoln’s thumb moves to press against the pulse beneath her wrist. Almost immediately, Olivia feels her heart pound a little less.
“You can do this,” he says, and Olivia takes one long, stretched out moment to observe him. There’s no remnant of doubt anywhere on his face. His hands do not shake. He won’t turn back or run away, and he won’t let Olivia do that either because he steadies her. That’s the word she’s been searching for, that descriptor she’s needed to talk about this relationship that propelled itself from a stroll to a sprint. He steadies her. How necessary a task, she thinks, to simply provide balance. She stood tall without Lincoln; now she can stand even taller. It’s miniscule, but enough. Just the slightest realignment of the spine.
Olivia turns to the water and grips Lincoln’s hand in hers. “I know,” she says, and shuts her eyes.
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Date: 2011-12-19 06:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 04:05 am (UTC)