grav_ity | New Fic: Fire in the Sun (Fringe)

AN: Written for the

op_ficathon, as requested by

marymc, who wanted mindreading. I am terrifically sorry for being late.

For me, the iconic picture of Fringe has always been Olivia, crouched in the white spot of that burned room. I've wondered what it would look like if the room had been black to start with.

Thanks to

irony_rocks for the beta (even though I'm obstinate, and didn't change a few of them), and to

lone_pyramid for not letting me give up (or giving up on me).

Spoilers: This takes place after the end of season two, spec for season three (unsubstantiated, so I suspect I am nearly entirely wrong, but I kept away from spoilers in order to write this fic, so that should count for something!)

Pairing: Olivia/Peter

Disclaimer: I do not own Fringe, nor do I make any profit from writing this story. The title and the summary are taken from Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

Summary:
You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through

++++++

Fire in the Sun

He dreams about Walter for a week after they all get back before he can see the details clearly enough to figure out the puzzle. His dreams have always been so foggy, so difficult to pierce with logic or string together with the commonality of storytelling. It wasn’t until he dreamt over there that his dreams were easy to read. It isn’t Walter that he dreams about.

Once he makes that leap, his world changes. He notices smaller details than he has before, and he has always been good at noticing details. It’s like everything is suddenly highlighted by giant flashing neon lights, full of warnings so ambiguous he cannot yet decipher them. He is not worried. He taught himself to see the signs. It stands to reason that soon he’ll teach himself to understand them.

Life continues as before. Walter, broken, beaten down, wouldn’t change him for the world, literally, Walter is in his lab with inappropriate music and ill-timed snack cravings, and Astrid has somehow learned to stomach everything at once. But Olivia is different. When Walter catches her suddenly with today’s inanity, she straightens the way she straightens for Broyles, like she’s coming to attention.

Once, he would have shrugged it off. They’d all been through quite a bit, after all. But the dreams call to him even when he’s awake, and force him to notice things even if he can’t understand them.

+++

At first, the room is black. Then it is white. There is never an in between any more than there is a warning that the shift if colour is about to come. She knows better than to imagine that white is day and black is night. She doesn’t need a clock to understand that this is how they’ll break her; take away all sense of up and down, night and day, until all that’s left is a room she can’t control.

There is something very important that they don’t know. They can’t know it, because on this side William Bell died before he could meet Walter Bishop, before their partnership could wreak havoc the way it did on the other side. She wonders if the universe didn’t arrange it that way on purpose. The idea of two such partnerships, working in separate realities towards similar goals is just too terrifying to think about. But Bell’s premature death on this side guaranteed this Walter’s ignorance of the most important thing in both worlds.

Once upon a time, someone had locked a little girl who called herself Olive into a white room and taken away all of her control. And when they opened the door, screaming for her in a panic, the room was black and full of fire and smoke. Olive forgot about it, forgot how to be afraid because she knew what she was capable of in fear. But Olivia has seen the room, smelled the burnt walls, and she remembered.

She doesn’t go mad, doesn’t break, because she knows she can get out of the room whenever she wants.

+++

He sleeps all the time now. It’s not refreshing sleep by any stretch, and he feels like entire deserts worth of sand have crawled in behind his eyes. Walter worries and putters and hovers and brews the most ridiculous combinations of soothing teas, but Peter isn’t worried. He’s close to figuring it out now, to knowing what the light around everything is trying to tell him. Astrid is concerned too, but Olivia doesn’t care. The light around Olivia flares whenever he thinks about that.

The dreams shifted from Walter to Olivia just after he realized that Walter wasn’t the Walter he saw every day. In the dreams, Olivia’s hair is blonde, like it used to be, and soft around her face. She smiles at him, and when he tries to look at her closely, he’s blinded by a white light so brilliant that he always has to wince and look away.

He has become obsessed with doors. Not with opening them himself or with shutting them, but with keeping them open once they already are. Doors all over the house and the lab are wedged or tied or blocked open. It happened so gradually he didn’t realize it, until Walter tried to shut the door to one of the side offices in the lab and discovered that it had been tied so securely that Astrid had to cut the handle free. When he came in that day, they both looked at him like he might be cracking around the edges.

Walter looks so heartbroken at the idea that Peter takes the pills Astrid has got for him and sleeps dreamlessly for two whole nights before that white light breaks through his mind again and he has to stop.

+++

She has nothing to do but think. She knows they are wondering why she stopped screaming and crying to be let out. She knows they’re annoyed that she hasn’t broken under their manipulations and spilled out all the secrets of her reality so that they can sop them up and find a way to thoroughly destroy them. The last time the room was white, Walter opened the curtain and stared at her through the glass. She looked at him once, and smiled before returning to her comfortable seat on the floor.

The next time the room was black, the temperature dropped ten degrees and the floor became too cold to sit on comfortably. She knew that Walter was still at the window, watching, but he didn’t know about the fire and so he couldn’t even begin to imagine how to put it out.

She keeps herself warm by thinking about Peter. She doesn’t think about the very real possibility that he is kissing her duplicate, smiling at her the way he smiled in the hotel in Iraq the first time she laid eyes on him. She thinks about Peter to keep warm. She thinks at Peter to give herself the chance to really escape. First about Walter, the one that’s here, and then when she has his attention, she thinks about doors. She can open it, but she needs someone to be the doorstop if she’s going to get home.

They stop feeding her altogether at some point, but she doesn’t notice.

+++

He figures it out. They went to another reality and brought home a changeling. She eats her favourite food with distaste and is unsettled by Ella. He doesn’t know why this Olivia hasn’t killed them all, but he guesses that their ignorance of her true identity is keeping them all safe. If it were just him, Astrid and Walter, Peter wouldn’t care. But there’s Olivia’s family to think about, and so Peter smiles like nothing is wrong and pretends not to notice how Olivia recoils when he passes her a shot of whiskey in the evenings.

He also figures out the dreams. They must be from her, from his version of her. And she wants him to think about doors and ways to keep them open. So he does. He remembers everything William Bell said, everything Walter said in those last few frantic minutes before they’d left the other side.

He invites Olivia over for dinner one evening. Walter makes up an excuse to stay at the lab and Astrid volunteers to drive him home late. Olivia smiles, and for a moment Peter forgets that it’s not her. She fit in with such precision. But then he looks at her eyes, the way they gloss over Astrid and harden when they look at Walter, full of scorn for him and the way he has become on their side, and he smiles back at her, because he remembers.

It happens just before they start dessert, but after he’s watched her eat foods he knows aren’t her favourite, and drink the alcohol he knows she can’t abide.

+++

The room is black and the curtain is drawn when it happens. Olivia reaches into her fear and into her love, and wraps her mind around them. There is a flare of fire and a flash of light, and then Olivia Dunham starts to scream.

They think she has finally broken.

+++

She smiles in his arms. She doesn’t remember how he got from his seat across the table to hers, or how they ended up on the floor in a mess of tangled limbs, but she does remember the look in his eyes as he all but tackled her.

He’s whispering something, over and over again, but it’s lost in the rustle of fabric and the sensation of rediscovery as each of them reaffirms the other’s presence. He’s apologizing, and it takes her a moment to realize what it is he’s apologizing for, but when she does, she takes his face between her hands and holds them both still for a moment.

In that moment, there is complete understanding, and a promise that this, here on the floor of the kitchen, is only the beginning.

+++

finis

Gravity_Not_Included, September 3, 2010