Olivia Dunham (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
flip_the_lights) wrote2012-12-24 09:22 pm
flip_the_lights) wrote2012-12-24 09:22 pm
[Brooklyn, NY]
Olivia leaves the infirmary only a fraction lighter than when she walked in. After saying her thank-yous and goodbyes to Charlie, she lingers by the bulletin board a moment longer, studying the name and dates, wondering if she should add a remembrance of her own. Another flower. A note to Captain Rogers.
In the end, she does neither: all she does is pick up the hair dye she'd been meaning to get when she first arrived.
When she opens a door back to Brooklyn, her hair's stained dark with water, but already lightening to blonde at the edges. Peter stirs as she pads to the free bed in their hotel room. She pauses, waiting for him to settle back to sleep before moving on.
A rather large part of her wants to crawl into bed next to him, not wanting to fall asleep without some kind of presence beside her. She wonders how comfortable it would feel to doze off with his arms around her.
Pushing it from her mind, she draws up the sheets and turns her back on his bed.
Broyles isn't happy to see her when she turns up at headquarters two days later. "You're supposed to be on leave," he says as he takes a seat.
"I didn't have the chance to debrief you after Penn Station." Olivia's hands fold in her lap. Broyles studies her, gives every impression of sighing without actually doing so, and nods for her to go on.
Once she's laid out her debrief, he attempts to dismiss her so she can continue recuperating. Immediately, Olivia shakes her head. "I'm not going to deny that the last five weeks haven't taken their toll," she says. "But I don't believe they've impaired my ability to do my job. I need to get back to work."
A few more rounds of arguing ensue. Finally, though, Broyles relents and hands her a case file. "Peter and Dr. Bishop ought to be en route," he says. "We'll meet them there."
'There' is a small suburb in New York. (New York again. God, it's the last place she wants to be, but it's either that or being put on leave.) The report details a man who had his heart cut out, only to wake up and plead for help -- without a working cardiovascular system -- when the EMTs tried to move him. Olivia almost smiles as Walter bustles into the crime scene. His happy chattering about Lady Fortuna smiling on them is so normal, his demeanor so reassuring after five weeks around Walternate.
It turns out the heart wasn't the victim's, strictly speaking. Peter finds a cabinet stacked with pill bottles, immuno-suppressants and antibiotics and everything a person could need to ensure a donor organ wouldn't be rejected. As Broyles and Walter return to Boston, Peter and Olivia move on to find the doctor who prescribed the medication.
It's while they're in the waiting room that Peter breaks the news.
On a subconscious level, she knew it from the moment Bucky asked, So if you're here...where's she?
Peter had no reason to think something was wrong. He wrote off the small changes, the way Red was quicker with a smile and so much less intense. He believed her when she said her trip to the Other Side had changed her; made her want to be happier.
And the last thing Olivia had done before the other Fringe captured her was say, I want you with me, and kiss Peter like both worlds were collapsing.
"I thought she was you, Olivia," he whispers, and even though she knows, she can feel the foundation give way beneath her stomach and expression as her mind whites out. With a Herculean effort, she finds her voice -- or something small and weak enough to form words, at least.
"Does everyone know?" she asks.
"I reported everything when I found out who she was." Peter watches her closely, refusing to look away. She can't bear the scrutiny and drops her gaze. "I'm sorry."
As fast as she can, Olivia rebuilds the foundation. He didn't know. He couldn't have known. To expect anything else is unreasonable, and there's work to be done, and all she needs to do right now is focus on the case without thinking about...anything, really. This is, after all, why she asked to return to work so soon.
That evening, she showers, wraps herself in a towel, and opens her bedroom closet. The tips of her bangs touch her eyelashes; fitfully, she brushes them back to where they've been pinned all day. She pauses. From the corner of her eye, her reflection in the closet mirror lowers its hand in time with hers, letting the strands of too-short hair fall back into place.
They'll have to grow out. She can't get rid of them. Every trace of the other Olivia is gone, but those --
No. Not everything else. In her closet hang the shirts and suits Red wore every day; in the bathroom are shampoo bottles she half-emptied. On the nightstand are two empty mugs she drank from and didn't return to the sink. She's still here, permeating the air like cigarette smoke.
Olivia peels one of the suits from its hanger and drops it to the ground. Then another. And another, then all of them, some with their hanger still attached, each one wrenched out in a sudden flurry like someone trying to claw an insect from their hair, get it out, get it out --
The bed's next, sheets violently ripped away and balled up in her arms. Olivia ignores the mugs as she half-runs to the washing machine, pulls open the lid, and sees a nest of clothes already inside. A faint musty smell wafts up from their days of neglect. Swallowing, Olivia sets down the sheets and begins to extract the clothes.
A pair of pants. Her fucking underwear. A T-shirt...
A T-shirt that doesn't belong to her, stamped with the MIT logo and exactly Peter's size.
Deep in her chest, Olivia can feel something unravel and snap. The shirt slips from her fingers back into the washing machine, and, doubled up with silent, wracking sobs, Olivia sinks to her knees on the carpet Red walked for five weeks.
Whatever feelings that Peter had, they were not about her, Astrid tells her over the break room swill, which still tastes amazing after weeks with so little coffee. They were about you. And they were real. They still are.
She tries to take refuge in that, but it grows more difficult with each day. Olivia can't beat back the tension, can't escape so easily into the case with Peter matching her step by step. They're making progress, though: the man's heart -- and half a dozen other organs, each removed from a collection of victims spanning several states -- can be traced back to a young woman, Amanda Walsh, who took her life earlier that year.
Roland Barrett, the man responsible for the murders, fell in love with her during their group therapy sessions. When the Fringe team finds him, he insists all he wanted to do was correct the terrible mistake Amanda had made. He had experience in creating synthetic life on the cellular level; surely, he believed, he could bring her back once he brought all the pieces together. And he had brought her back, albeit only for a few minutes.
"But...her eyes," he whispers brokenly, tears in his own gaze as he stares up at Olivia. "When I looked into her eyes, it wasn't Amanda. I don't know what I brought back, but I know...it, it wasn't her."
All she can think about is how quickly Bucky and Charlie knew something was wrong. All she sees is the concern on their faces, the quiet insistence in their voices as they told her who she really was, promising her they would find a way to fix it. All she imagines is Peter looking at the alternate Olivia and seeing nothing as she led him to her bedroom.
Peter finds her outside a few minutes later. By then, Olivia still hasn't finished composing herself.
"Olivia?" he asks softly. When she doesn't lift her face from her hands, he touches her shoulder. "Hey. You okay? What is it?"
What the hell do you think? she wants to say. Instead, Olivia shakes her head back and forth against her palms. Drawing a deep breath, she wipes the side of one hand across her nose before forcing herself to look up. Her mouth stretches into nothing at all like a smile.
"You know what Barrett said?" she asks. "He said that he looked into her eyes, and he knew it wasn't her."
Peter closes his eyes. He hangs his head, shoulders slumping. "Olivia..."
She can feel her expression start to crumple again. Straightening up, she tries to wave it away. "I understand the facts," she says. "I know that she had reams of information about me and my life and the people that were close to me -- and I understand that if she slipped up, she would've had a completely reasonable explanation for it." Mingled grief and anger chokes her voice. "And I guess to expect you to have seen past that is perhaps asking a little bit too much."
Peter leans back in his chair, wiping a hand over his mouth like trying to get rid of the taste of something foul. Maybe, if it had been any case but this, if her throat wasn't trying to strangle on tears, if she hadn't so very recently seen the obituary for a friend who held her hand and talked her through the devastation wreaked by the Other Side -- maybe she'd be able to grasp her understanding and push it to the forefront. She spent weeks with a Charlie Francis who wasn't Charlie. She knows the weight of being duped.
But it's all she can do to grit out the words, and she has no strength left for anything else.
"But when I was over there, I went into Milliways and there were people who didn't know me nearly as well as you, who knew instantly that I wasn't another Olivia from another universe. And I thought about you -- you were just a figment of my imagination, but I held onto you, and it wasn't reasonable and it wasn't logical, but I did it. So...why didn't you?"
Peter doesn't answer. He can't even look at her. The burn in her throat gets worse.
"She wasn't me. How could you not see that? Now she's everywhere, she's in my house, my job, my bed -- " Her voice twists, trembles, rushes. "And I don't want to wear my own clothes anymore, and I don't want to live in my apartment, and I don't want to be with you."
The words hang frozen in the air. Peter's eyes are red-rimmed when he finally turns them back to her; she knows hers must be the same, but she doesn't care, she doesn't care. Olivia touches a finger to her nose again, then lifts both hands in a helpless warding off. "She's taken everything," she whispers, and surges up to her feet.
As she walks back to her car, she thinks she hears Peter say something behind her -- but she doesn't look, and he doesn't follow.
In the end, she does neither: all she does is pick up the hair dye she'd been meaning to get when she first arrived.
When she opens a door back to Brooklyn, her hair's stained dark with water, but already lightening to blonde at the edges. Peter stirs as she pads to the free bed in their hotel room. She pauses, waiting for him to settle back to sleep before moving on.
A rather large part of her wants to crawl into bed next to him, not wanting to fall asleep without some kind of presence beside her. She wonders how comfortable it would feel to doze off with his arms around her.
Pushing it from her mind, she draws up the sheets and turns her back on his bed.
Broyles isn't happy to see her when she turns up at headquarters two days later. "You're supposed to be on leave," he says as he takes a seat.
"I didn't have the chance to debrief you after Penn Station." Olivia's hands fold in her lap. Broyles studies her, gives every impression of sighing without actually doing so, and nods for her to go on.
Once she's laid out her debrief, he attempts to dismiss her so she can continue recuperating. Immediately, Olivia shakes her head. "I'm not going to deny that the last five weeks haven't taken their toll," she says. "But I don't believe they've impaired my ability to do my job. I need to get back to work."
A few more rounds of arguing ensue. Finally, though, Broyles relents and hands her a case file. "Peter and Dr. Bishop ought to be en route," he says. "We'll meet them there."
'There' is a small suburb in New York. (New York again. God, it's the last place she wants to be, but it's either that or being put on leave.) The report details a man who had his heart cut out, only to wake up and plead for help -- without a working cardiovascular system -- when the EMTs tried to move him. Olivia almost smiles as Walter bustles into the crime scene. His happy chattering about Lady Fortuna smiling on them is so normal, his demeanor so reassuring after five weeks around Walternate.
It turns out the heart wasn't the victim's, strictly speaking. Peter finds a cabinet stacked with pill bottles, immuno-suppressants and antibiotics and everything a person could need to ensure a donor organ wouldn't be rejected. As Broyles and Walter return to Boston, Peter and Olivia move on to find the doctor who prescribed the medication.
It's while they're in the waiting room that Peter breaks the news.
On a subconscious level, she knew it from the moment Bucky asked, So if you're here...where's she?
Peter had no reason to think something was wrong. He wrote off the small changes, the way Red was quicker with a smile and so much less intense. He believed her when she said her trip to the Other Side had changed her; made her want to be happier.
And the last thing Olivia had done before the other Fringe captured her was say, I want you with me, and kiss Peter like both worlds were collapsing.
"I thought she was you, Olivia," he whispers, and even though she knows, she can feel the foundation give way beneath her stomach and expression as her mind whites out. With a Herculean effort, she finds her voice -- or something small and weak enough to form words, at least.
"Does everyone know?" she asks.
"I reported everything when I found out who she was." Peter watches her closely, refusing to look away. She can't bear the scrutiny and drops her gaze. "I'm sorry."
As fast as she can, Olivia rebuilds the foundation. He didn't know. He couldn't have known. To expect anything else is unreasonable, and there's work to be done, and all she needs to do right now is focus on the case without thinking about...anything, really. This is, after all, why she asked to return to work so soon.
That evening, she showers, wraps herself in a towel, and opens her bedroom closet. The tips of her bangs touch her eyelashes; fitfully, she brushes them back to where they've been pinned all day. She pauses. From the corner of her eye, her reflection in the closet mirror lowers its hand in time with hers, letting the strands of too-short hair fall back into place.
They'll have to grow out. She can't get rid of them. Every trace of the other Olivia is gone, but those --
No. Not everything else. In her closet hang the shirts and suits Red wore every day; in the bathroom are shampoo bottles she half-emptied. On the nightstand are two empty mugs she drank from and didn't return to the sink. She's still here, permeating the air like cigarette smoke.
Olivia peels one of the suits from its hanger and drops it to the ground. Then another. And another, then all of them, some with their hanger still attached, each one wrenched out in a sudden flurry like someone trying to claw an insect from their hair, get it out, get it out --
The bed's next, sheets violently ripped away and balled up in her arms. Olivia ignores the mugs as she half-runs to the washing machine, pulls open the lid, and sees a nest of clothes already inside. A faint musty smell wafts up from their days of neglect. Swallowing, Olivia sets down the sheets and begins to extract the clothes.
A pair of pants. Her fucking underwear. A T-shirt...
A T-shirt that doesn't belong to her, stamped with the MIT logo and exactly Peter's size.
Deep in her chest, Olivia can feel something unravel and snap. The shirt slips from her fingers back into the washing machine, and, doubled up with silent, wracking sobs, Olivia sinks to her knees on the carpet Red walked for five weeks.
Whatever feelings that Peter had, they were not about her, Astrid tells her over the break room swill, which still tastes amazing after weeks with so little coffee. They were about you. And they were real. They still are.
She tries to take refuge in that, but it grows more difficult with each day. Olivia can't beat back the tension, can't escape so easily into the case with Peter matching her step by step. They're making progress, though: the man's heart -- and half a dozen other organs, each removed from a collection of victims spanning several states -- can be traced back to a young woman, Amanda Walsh, who took her life earlier that year.
Roland Barrett, the man responsible for the murders, fell in love with her during their group therapy sessions. When the Fringe team finds him, he insists all he wanted to do was correct the terrible mistake Amanda had made. He had experience in creating synthetic life on the cellular level; surely, he believed, he could bring her back once he brought all the pieces together. And he had brought her back, albeit only for a few minutes.
"But...her eyes," he whispers brokenly, tears in his own gaze as he stares up at Olivia. "When I looked into her eyes, it wasn't Amanda. I don't know what I brought back, but I know...it, it wasn't her."
All she can think about is how quickly Bucky and Charlie knew something was wrong. All she sees is the concern on their faces, the quiet insistence in their voices as they told her who she really was, promising her they would find a way to fix it. All she imagines is Peter looking at the alternate Olivia and seeing nothing as she led him to her bedroom.
Peter finds her outside a few minutes later. By then, Olivia still hasn't finished composing herself.
"Olivia?" he asks softly. When she doesn't lift her face from her hands, he touches her shoulder. "Hey. You okay? What is it?"
What the hell do you think? she wants to say. Instead, Olivia shakes her head back and forth against her palms. Drawing a deep breath, she wipes the side of one hand across her nose before forcing herself to look up. Her mouth stretches into nothing at all like a smile.
"You know what Barrett said?" she asks. "He said that he looked into her eyes, and he knew it wasn't her."
Peter closes his eyes. He hangs his head, shoulders slumping. "Olivia..."
She can feel her expression start to crumple again. Straightening up, she tries to wave it away. "I understand the facts," she says. "I know that she had reams of information about me and my life and the people that were close to me -- and I understand that if she slipped up, she would've had a completely reasonable explanation for it." Mingled grief and anger chokes her voice. "And I guess to expect you to have seen past that is perhaps asking a little bit too much."
Peter leans back in his chair, wiping a hand over his mouth like trying to get rid of the taste of something foul. Maybe, if it had been any case but this, if her throat wasn't trying to strangle on tears, if she hadn't so very recently seen the obituary for a friend who held her hand and talked her through the devastation wreaked by the Other Side -- maybe she'd be able to grasp her understanding and push it to the forefront. She spent weeks with a Charlie Francis who wasn't Charlie. She knows the weight of being duped.
But it's all she can do to grit out the words, and she has no strength left for anything else.
"But when I was over there, I went into Milliways and there were people who didn't know me nearly as well as you, who knew instantly that I wasn't another Olivia from another universe. And I thought about you -- you were just a figment of my imagination, but I held onto you, and it wasn't reasonable and it wasn't logical, but I did it. So...why didn't you?"
Peter doesn't answer. He can't even look at her. The burn in her throat gets worse.
"She wasn't me. How could you not see that? Now she's everywhere, she's in my house, my job, my bed -- " Her voice twists, trembles, rushes. "And I don't want to wear my own clothes anymore, and I don't want to live in my apartment, and I don't want to be with you."
The words hang frozen in the air. Peter's eyes are red-rimmed when he finally turns them back to her; she knows hers must be the same, but she doesn't care, she doesn't care. Olivia touches a finger to her nose again, then lifts both hands in a helpless warding off. "She's taken everything," she whispers, and surges up to her feet.
As she walks back to her car, she thinks she hears Peter say something behind her -- but she doesn't look, and he doesn't follow.