Title: Like The Best Ever
Fandom: Fringe
Characters/Pairing: Olivia/Peter-ish-ish, Charlie
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own anything. Seriously.
Spoilers: takes place at an indeterminate time in the first season, so none.
Summary: Olivia's looking for the truth. Peter's just looking for the big picture.
Like The Best Ever
"What did you talk like when you were a teenager?"
The question shows up out of the blue, drops blankly and without preamble into the middle of their desultory conversation on the aftermath of the latest case fiasco (video games that get inside your head and control your movements, like pushing buttons. "In communist Russia, video games play you," Peter had said). Olivia takes a second to reorient herself, sliding just the tiniest bit backwards and blinking at him.
"What did I talk like?"
"When you were a teenager. Did you talk back? Did you use slang? Did you say 'like' every other word? I'm trying to imagine," he went on, seeing that she wasn't quite sure how to answer him, or if she should. "Trying to picture you as a young girl, what you were like. I think I've got everything, braces and your hair in a braid and you were right at the age where they wore saddle-strap pants, weren't you? But I can't get your voice. I don't think I've ever heard you use slang; as it is you barely use contractions." He huffs a chuckle, to hide the implication: she's uptight, too strict and ramrod straight to even bend her words, even a little.
She doesn't focus on that.
"You were picturing me as a teenager?" is what she says, and they're quiet for a few seconds. There's processing going on, on both sides.
Finally she says, "I talked pretty much normally."
"Normally."
"Yeah." She nods, shrugs a little. "Just like everyone else."
Peter squints at her for a moment, trying to see through her, like he does. Met with a blank wall, like always.
"I find that hard to believe," he says.
"You played sports in school," he says, some days later, and she shrugs back against the brick building behind her, smoothing back her unmessed hair.
"Yeah. You can tell?"
He gestures peremptorily at the man handcuffed on the street in front of them. "This guy, trussed up like a Christmas turkey, you took him down like you were a linebacker. And you kick like you were going for a field goal."
Olivia laughs, briefly, eyes on the sky. "I played soccer. Actually."
"Ah." Peter shrugs. He's caught his breath some moments ago, but it won't hurt to pretend it's the running that did him in, when she's smiling like that. He gives a darkly reminiscent grin himself. "I was on the football team. For a while."
"What happened?"
He pauses, waits, breathes. "Discovered I wasn't really a team player."
She's looking at him now, which is what he wanted in the first place. And her eyes are skeptic's eyes, and the lines around her mouth are watchful. They're both still too new at this.
"Anyway," he says, lightly, to break the mood, and nods again at the man on the ground. "Ten points."
And Olivia grins, and her lines are friendly, and they've won the day.
Peter takes a different tack, the next time. Give something away yourself, see what you get back.
"I used to be afraid of snakes," he says. Olivia looks up from her paperwork, and discovers that Charlie has been standing there for a minute and a half, patiently holding her coffee. She takes it, with a murmur of thanks, and apparently ignores Peter's confession.
"Snakes," says Charlie, matter-of-factly. He has noticed, one way or another, Peter's ongoing quest to get a broader picture of Olivia Dunham, and doesn't seem to mind.
"Snakes," repeats Peter, and halfway seats himself on the edge of the desk. There's a scritch-scritch-scritch of a pen going dry of ink, and the knock of Olivia's elbow against the desk thrums through it briefly. "One time, at the lake house, a snake crawled up through the pipes and ended up in our bathtub. I didn't find it, my mom did, but I heard about it. And then every time I went in the bathroom I had to have my slingshot. And took deeply mistrustful looks at the tub when I took a shower."
Charlie sips his coffee, eyes on Olivia. She sighs, puts a hand to her forehead, and scribbles in the margin of the paper.
"Don't know why it bothered me so much." Peter is also watching Olivia. "It wasn't a big one, wasn't poisonous, just a harmless garden snake. But I used to have dreams about it, and it took me years to get where I didn't think about it anymore when I was at the house."
Olivia says nothing, but puts her pen down.
Charlie touches her on the shoulder, gently. "Liv."
She looks up at him, obviously confused. "Sorry. What were we talking about?"
"Childhood fears," he reminds her. She stops to think about this for a moment, giving it her full attention. Peter waits.
"Gnome statues," she says, "in the garden. I hated those things. Thought they were going to start talking to me any minute. Sorry." She stands, gathering the papers, holding them to her and crimping the edges together. The faulty pen she drops into an otherwise empty wastebasket with a sound of finality. "This is not right. I need to."
She wanders off without finishing the sentence, still staring at the sheaf of papers; and Charlie picks up her coffee and follows her, giving a slight, apologetic shrug in Peter's direction.
Peter's bloody, Peter's bleeding, and Olivia is too, but less so. She crouches by his side, and the scratch on her forehead is distracting him. He reaches up to it, but his hand falls short.
"Just stay still, wait it out," says Olivia. She has no intention of doing any such thing. Out there in the corridor, men are marching, and there are approximately three and a half minutes to go till the possible end of practically everything. He could put a name to the things which will end, if he really wanted to, but A. it's depressing and B. his mind is a little fuzzy at the moment. Olivia presses a hand to his side, where the bullet-that-isn't-a-bullet has grazed.
"Ouch," mutters Peter.
Olivia smiles down at him, and anyone else would be frantic. But she's humming with energy, pent-up and waiting, practically pulsing with the effort to sit still. She's got a gun, and she knows to outrun everyone, ever.
"You're going to be fine," she tells him. "You'll be okay, Peter."
His eyes squinch shut for a moment, against his will; he wrestles them open again and looks up at her. She's luminous over him, a brilliance in the gloom, and though that bright hair's a target he knows she'll make it through. He smiles back, kind of, and grimaces too. The pain's ebbing, and sleep would be nice.
"Ask me a question," he says. "No, no, wait. Answer me a question."
Olivia's smile, so often politely puzzled, is intimate and understanding, just now. "Anything," she says, and for this moment, she means it.
"You really believe we'll make it out of here alive," says Peter, muzzily. And he doesn't just mean this situation, because it isn't just this situation. There's always tomorrow, and after tomorrow there's next week. You really believe we'll make it out of Fringe division alive? Alive, and with all our senses, and our wits about us, and each other? You really believe?
"I absolutely believe it," says Olivia Dunham, and Peter knows she isn't lying. He would nod, but now his head hurts.
"That's all I need to know," he says, and his eyes drift closed again for a second. He can hear her stand, can hear her moving, and knows that when his eyes open again, she'll be gone. But he'll hear her in the distance, hear the evidence of Olivia, fighting; he'll know that she's there; and the things that he knows will be true.
Sure enough, tomorrow comes, and then next week, and then the month afterwards, and they're still running, still fighting, still searching. They're at dinner now, though, so it's a little bit of a break anyway.
Olivia has had some wine.
"You like asking questions," she says, fingers playing around the fluted stem of her glass. Peter grins, and nods once, acknowledging it.
"I like getting answers," he amends. "Yeah."
"Right," says Olivia, and her feet are flat on the floor, and she leans across the table into his space and fills it up, and her grin is everpresent, just there, just below him. "Truth or dare?"
So Peter smiles, because it's almost a trick, an illusion. It seems like he has a choice, but there's really only one answer to that question, in this context.
"Truth," he says, and he pours the wine, and he lets her find the words.