Fandom: Fringe, Young Wizards

Characters: Astrid Farnsworth, Olivia Dunham, Charlie Francis, Phillip Broyles, special guest stars

Summary: The situation is becoming dire, but the wizards are on the case.

Notes: Written for Crossovering 2015 for sprocket. Thanks to Carmen and Nora for suggestions!

Inspired by "Adjunct Talent" by Sprocket, though set in yet another universe one step over; not Blue nor Red nor precisely Amber, but most like the latter.

2009

For the past three months, Fringe Division had been tracking down Agent Dunham's fellow Cortexiphan subjects. They'd already brought a few in safely, like Olivia's childhood friends Nick Lane and Miranda Greene. All evidenced some kind of emotional trauma, compounded by the destructive potential of their abilities. Astrid was glad they were finally getting the help they needed, both psychological and practical.

But the search had become a race against time. Some of the former subjects had been recruited by ZFT terrorist David Robert Jones as part of his insane plan to accelerate the destructive vortexes plaguing the planet. Increasing entropy in its rawest form, Astrid knew. But Fringe Division was dedicated to stopping the spread of the disasters, or at least mitigating the effects. And they had allies, unknown to them.

Today the team had tracked down one of Jones' first and most dangerous disciples. Sally Clark was a full-bore pyrokinetic. And a full-bore fanatic. She laughed as she threw firebombs toward them, not heedless of the damage she was causing but reveling in it. Her aim was haphazard, but sooner or later—

Right on cue, one of the fireballs streaked directly toward their position. Maybe Olivia would survive the blast—her immunity to the others' abilities wasn't predictable or reliable—but the rest of them would literally be toast.

Astrid had no choice. She threw out her hand and shouted a word, and the fire splashed off an invisible shield as the air briefly turned solid. Others might have been able to convince the flames to go around them, but fire wasn't Astrid's specialty. Protective magic was.

Astrid's teammates, thankfully, didn't pause to gawk. Charlie dashed forward and neatly clipped Sally under the chin, dropping her to the ground.

Crisis past, Astrid took a deep breath as Olivia and Charlie turned to stare at her. "I can explain..."

The explanation took a while.

Thankfully, both Olivia and Charlie were inclined to take her at her word. After the year they'd had since Fringe Division was established—after dealing with men who walked through walls and transgenic monstrosities—they'd adapted to the hidden realities of the world. "Magic," as far as they were concerned, was another manifestation of what they'd been dealing with all along.

Not particularly accurate, but fuller understanding could wait. Astrid explained, as far as she was permitted, that her assignment to Fringe also included her typical wizardly duties: enhancing the protective wards and "see me not" spells around the Boston transport gates. She didn't specify that the gates included ones that linked Earth to other worlds, leaving that revelation for another time.

Olivia raised an eyebrow. "You mean we could have been...teleporting...between Boston and New York all this time?"

Astrid shook her head. "Not really. There's a cost to using the gates, like with any energy expenditure. Civilians, uh, need special dispensation. And wouldn't instant travel be hard to explain to the boss?"

"Touché," Olivia murmured, but she still looked thoughtful.

Charlie, on the other hand, seemed undecided. "You're sure you're not really a Cortexibrat like Livvy?"

Astrid laughed while Olivia huffed and failed to look outraged. "Really really sure."

"And your abilities...you haven't felt the need to use them before now?"

Olivia's tone was mild, but Astrid caught the gist. She looked her colleague in the eye and said truthfully, "I have, but you didn't need to know when I did. I've used small effects mostly to facilitate things that were already happening. Except..." she took a deep breath and turned to Charlie. "I did help 'convince' the hybrid larvae that you weren't the right host for them."

"Bishop's cure..." Charlie started, but Astrid shook her head.

"Wasn't quite enough, and anything stronger he might have used would have killed you. The compound made it easier to encourage them to leave." She added with a twinge, "I would have preferred not to kill them, given another choice. But their biology was intrinsically flawed, and—"

"I can't be sorry about that," Charlie snapped. He got up and left Olivia's office without another word.

"He'll be okay," Olivia said when Astrid started to follow him. "Let him process. He's grateful to you, and so am I."

Astrid sat back down and spread her hands. "Think of it like— Well, my abilities really aren't very much like yours, but think about what it takes out of you to use them."

Olivia nodded slowly. "You said, 'There's a cost.'"

"There's always a cost. If there isn't...look for the hidden catch." Or the temptation of the Lone Power, Astrid thought but didn't say. "But yes, now that I'm out of the wizard closet—" she grinned at Olivia, and Olivia smiled back— "it'll be easier to contribute my other talents. Although..." she hesitated for just a moment. "I really would prefer to keep this from Dr. Bishop."

Olivia tilted her head. "You think Massive Dynamic doesn't already know about the existence of wizards?"

"'What don't they do?'" Astrid quoted the company slogan with some irony. "Maybe. But I don't want to clue him in to the existence of magic if he doesn't already know. He'd probably want to take me apart. Literally."

"That's a fair concern." Olivia, of all people, should know. She'd gone looking for a remedy for her former partner's exposure to toxic chemicals and unearthed Dr. Walter Bishop: eccentric, unpredictable, and firmly ensconced (and monitored) in the depths of Massive Dynamic's most experimental laboratories. He was lent out to Fringe by the direct orders of MD's Chief Operating Officer Nina Sharp and had been their consulting scientist-in-residence ever since.

His release from the Massive Dynamic labs allowed Bishop to follow up on some of his old projects...or victims, depending on how you looked at it. He'd been delighted to be reacquainted with Olivia, his most prized subject from the Cortexiphan experiments. Olivia had been less than pleased, but she'd agreed to the necessity of working with Bishop in light of the surge in fringe events.

In return, Massive Dynamic agreed to help any of the other subjects who were suffering aftereffects of the experiments. And when Olivia discovered that a terrorist named Jones had been exploiting their abilities for his own ends, the hunt for her childhood friends began in earnest.

Astrid had tried to maintain some empathy for Walter Bishop. He'd lost his son Peter to illness when the boy was only seven, and his wife Elizabeth had committed suicide shortly thereafter. He'd taken their deaths as a mandate to explore the furthest reaches of fringe science, eventually attempting to breach the walls between the world and the next universe over.

Those walls were much thinner than he could have known. His attempts caused chain reactions that eventually led to tears in reality opening everywhere, manifesting as vortexes and inter-dimensional rifts. Nina Sharp took him under Massive Dynamic's wing (and virtual house arrest) to contain the damage and, to her credit, turned her company's seemingly infinite resources to combating the problem.

And to give him credit, Walter Bishop's innovations since then had expanded the reaches of science and contributed significantly toward Massive Dynamic's bottom line. But he was an angry man, and bitter, and he never stopped reminding everyone that he was the smartest person in any given room. The last thing Astrid wanted was to become the subject of his too-sharp scrutiny.

"But I think it's also fair," Olivia said without allowing room for argument, "to inform our supervisory officer of his employee's newly revealed status."

Astrid contemplated that for a moment, gulped, and nodded. She'd known there would be consequences to revealing her abilities. And truth always strengthened the bonds between people and therefore the larger universe. It was, Astrid thought with a resigned sigh, her wizardly duty as much as her responsibility as an FBI agent.

Later that afternoon, Astrid entered her boss's office. She'd been less nervous facing her Ordeal, but she'd been a lot younger and far more naïve then.

She met his cool gaze and dived in. "Sir, this might be difficult to swallow, but...I'm a wizard."

Astrid was prepared to follow up with an explanation and a probable demonstration, but the way Agent Broyles was regarding her so calmly threw her off her game plan.

"I am not on errantry," he replied in perfectly fluent Speech, "but I greet you nonetheless."

She gaped at him. Broyles smiled thinly and continued mostly in English. "The rest of the world remains sevarfrith, but Fringe Division is a special case. Given the current circumstances."

"The breach events," Astrid said. She knew many of her fellow wizards were working on the problem, but her Advisory hadn't mentioned that they'd joined forces with the civilian authorities. Maybe he'd wanted her to evaluate the efforts of Fringe Division's nonwizards on their own merits. If that was the case, her teammates had passed with flying colors.

And Agent Broyles was evidently one of those rare nonwizards who had acquired facility with the Speech. That talent usually developed through close contact with wizards over a significant period of time, but she didn't feel it was her place to ask. He was still her boss. "Sir, now that we're on the same page, would it be appropriate for our division to begin consulting with the Advisories?"

He nodded slowly. "EAD Skinner and I have been discussing the possibilities."

And that—that made so much sense. Of course the former head of the X-Files would have learned about wizards somewhere along the line. Fringe Division had the latitude it enjoyed thanks to Walter Skinner's experience with the precursor to the division. From what Astrid knew about the EAD, he wouldn't hesitate to use any resource at his disposal. "I can request a meeting with the Manhattan Senior, if that would be appropriate."

Broyles sighed. Astrid empathized; it couldn't be easy to acknowledge that your best efforts simply weren't equal to the task. But wizards had always worked behind the scenes to protect the world from chaos. Now they'd just be a little more visible to the nonwizards most involved in that battle. "Set it up, Agent Farnsworth."

2010

A year later, Astrid's job had and hadn't changed.

The team was still investigating fringe events, but Astrid was acknowledged at full Special Agent rank, no longer Olivia's assistant. Officially she was just another agent in a small overworked division; unofficially, she was the liaison between Fringe Division and the wizards attending to breach events along the northeast corridor. Not an Advisory, because her own day job kept her far too busy to consult regularly on their workings. But where the languages of science and magic collided, Astrid was there to provide a translation.

There'd been losses. Amy Jessup's death still hurt, and it galled Astrid that all the power potentially at her command hadn't been enough. But her Ordeal had driven home the fact that magic couldn't save everyone—or solve every problem. It was a lesson that kept repeating.

The cases had become more complex, "weird science" manifesting at greater extremes by the increasing stresses of the breach events. The whole world was out of whack, as Charlie liked to say; when the laws governing physical reality started to bend, the impossible became everyday.

That made it easier to disguise wizardry in public spaces, but no wizard found that fact any kind of consolation.

Usually, those kind of displays ended up taking place in the middle of a crisis. They hadn't found any reliable way of stopping events before they started. But the wizards had collectively managed to create a kind of sensitive "web" over critical areas that sent out a magical alert when a breach event began. Pinpointing the source of a disruption as it started gave them time to put a team in place, at least. And most important, save lives.

On the morning of May 13, a significant breach alert sounded in Brooklyn. Olivia, Astrid, and Charlie headed over to the site—a restored opera house—to confront the impending tear in reality. They had backup on call at a moment's notice, a network of wizards ready to lend their energy toward containing the situation. The raw power of the Long Island teenagers Nita Callahan, Dairine Callahan, and Kit Rodriguez had averted more than one potential catastrophe, whether they were physically at the scene or otherwise.

Astrid hoped their intervention wouldn't be necessary, but she wasn't holding her breath.

The Fringe team reached the theater just as a hole began to open in the air above the stage. It didn't look like the usual kind of breach—less chaotic, more deliberate, somehow—so Astrid made a judgment call and watched, carefully, as the ripple in the air clarified to reveal four people in a circle, surrounding a fifth.

And then the distortion was gone, leaving the five figures behind. One of them collapsed onto the floor and the others bent over him, clearly concerned, and that more than anything provoked Astrid into action. She started running toward the stage, Olivia pacing her.

"Astrid, that's me," Olivia said in a fierce whisper as they went, "and Nick and Walter."

Astrid hadn't even registered their faces. Now she saw that the newly arrived Olivia Dunham wore her blonde hair much longer than Astrid's colleague, but she seemed much the same otherwise. The other Nick Lane had an unfamiliar scar on his face, and he was holding a swaying woman who Astrid recognized with a start as Sally Clark. Or another version of her, anyway. This group's Walter Bishop was wearing a grubby sweater that the man Astrid knew wouldn't be caught dead wearing. The man on the ground wasn't familiar to her, but Olivia caught her breath as they ran up the stairs.

Astrid saw his face and had to repress a shudder. He'd broken out in...boils, tumors maybe, and his breathing was labored. The other Olivia looked up, narrow eyed, as they approached.

"Let us help," Olivia said in her accept-no-arguments manner, and the other Dunham nodded her reluctant assent.

Astrid stretched her hand toward the man on the ground, feeling for his energy. "He's being eaten alive by—"

"By his own ability," Bishop said, watching her closely. "James expended too much energy in the crossing. Sally, too."

There was no time to dissemble. "His name and birth date?" Astrid snapped.

Both Olivias replied in unison: "James Heath." They eyed each other as Astrid's colleague finished, "May 12, 1979. I've got Sally."

Astrid nodded her thanks, too busy constructing a quick spell diagram to speak. This wouldn't be pretty, but it'd keep Heath alive until his body regained its own strength. Astrid poured energy into him through the spell, watching with satisfaction as the tumors visibly shrank. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Olivia holding her hand to Clark's forehead, using her Cortexiphan ability to stabilize the other woman.

Heath drew in a long gasping breath. Astrid disengaged the spell, feeling like she'd just run a marathon. She'd pay for the energy expenditure, but saving a life was worth the cost.

"'Any sufficiently advanced technology,'" Bishop murmured, like he was assuring himself of the impossibility of the alternative.

Dunham had held perfectly still during the intervention, but now she leaned in again to check on James. Naturally wary, Astrid thought, just like her Olivia. And just as forthright. "We're in the wrong place," she told Astrid and Olivia.

This wasn't the first time they'd had a brush with alternate universes, but it was a new record for extended contact. Astrid was determined to ensure it remained peaceful, and she knew Olivia felt the same. She saw Dunham's eyes widen in surprise as she caught sight of Charlie. There would, Astrid thought wearily, be a lot of 'splaining to do.

Notes:

Sevarfrith: "a place where wizardry must be conducted under cover."

EAD: Executive Assistant Director. Skinner got a much-deserved rank bump.

Head canon: This Broyles' mother was a wizard.