A/N This is a stand alone companion piece to my story Counting - an echo if it if you will. You don't need to have read it in order to enjoy this but it might make more sense. Nether the characters here nor in the other are mine.
Olivia Dunham has always been sure of her place in the world.
Now she's lost. It has been nearly seven weeks since she's been back and she's struggling. On nights when she is on her own the space in bed is overwhelming. On the rare nights when Frank is home he suffocates her, lying his head on her chest, not placing his head gently on the pillow above hers as she's found she likes. So increasingly she finds herself pacing her apartment, napping on the sofa, sleeping in an armchair. In her night time waking hours, of which there are too many she wanders her space feeling like a stranger. She feels strangely violated knowing someone else has worn her clothes. She wants to empty out her closet, wash everything, make it hers again. Has to laugh at the futility of the action because even her laundry detergent is no longer her own. It is new, floral, strangely feminine and entirely foreign. She finds she has no interest in food, in eating. All the meals here seem dull, boring and plain without the addition of the rare foodstuffs that have until so recently been part of her diet. Anyway the kitchen also feels different. The fridge is rearranged; a bottle of wine stands on the worktop and a new pile of takeout menus sits on top of a radiator. In the living room her favourite chair has been moved, positioned more closely to the lamp and even whilst wanting to straighten it she has to acknowledge that it is better this way, easier to read from. In the pile of papers next to the chair are magazines she has never subscribed to, and on the pretext of sorting and throwing them away she cannot help but pick them up and before she knows it she engrossed and slightly in awe of the mind that had selected them in the first place.
Work too no longer fits quite right. She had imagined it would be a relief to be back in the bright airy headquarters of Fringe after the strange basement lab or the cold sterile offices of Massive Dynamic. That working with sane people after the unapologetic madness of Walter would feel like deliverance. The reality is somewhat different. Broyles is missing and the team are bereft. She has picked up enough knowledge about the need for balance between universes to know her return, has something to do with it, and the guilt stains her until she believes all must be able to see it. She finds Agent Farnsworth clinically calculating odds off-putting after sharing jokes, laughter and whispered confidences with Astrid. She misses her old, easy familiarity with Charlie. His insistence on teasing her on her descent and subsequent climb from madness creates a barrier, too many days she worries for her own sanity, her ability to hold it together for any joke like this to be funny. Even Lincoln feels different. She is desperate to know about his treatment, how he healed but the time to ask has been and gone and now she feels as though she has failed him. His intelligence draws her to him as it always has but now she cannot help but compare him to another intellect. Cannot help but feel wounded when he reflects on what he describes as her recent and unusual brilliance; wonders if they'd rather have Her back.
She'd like to fall back into her weekly lunches and routine with her mother but finds it difficult to arrange, to figure out what to say. When you've stood in front of someone's gravestone sitting and debating whether or not to share a starter seems somehow trivial, pointless. She wants to grab her mother, hold her, hug her, celebrate that she's alive but can't find the right words, the right actions and so conversation is stilted, difficult. Then there is the matter of her assumed psychotic break. She sees the worry in the older woman's eye and doesn't know what's been said, what still needs to be said. Doesn't know how to accept and move through such a pivotal life event when it didn't really happen to her. Is cynically amused that she has no briefing on how to reclaim her own life.
She tortures herself imagining Frank with Her. She hacks into his system and establishes that he was at home for more of the time she was away than she would have liked. He is softer with her now, more gentle than she remembers and wonders whether this all stems from her supposed illness or something She has done, something She has said. One morning he asks her if she'd like to cook dinner in the evening and she freezes. This is not the way of their relationship. He requests the lovely lasagne again and she almost sobs with the frustration of knowing she will fail. He seems confused when he offers her a glass of wine on the sofa one evening and she turns it down. Looks disappointed that the new shared enterprise is gone. When he holds her, he has taken to pulling her towards him with a firm hand flat in her lower back and she torments herself imagining where this new touch has come from. He seems taken aback by the forcefulness of her kiss. When she pushes him down on the bed he slows her down questioning what happened to slow and steady she is staggered by the reality of the other women in her bed. When he flips her over, whispers in her ear, suggests with a smile in his voice they do that thing she has to run away. Hides, shaking in the bathroom awed by the enormity of what she has given away.