Title: Living in a Dream
Author: Y3lhsa
Summary: Olivia has always known she was missing something.
Rating: Teen.
A/N: I've had this idea for awhile but had to let it percolate before committing it to paper...well, computer as it where. The line from the first ep of the season capped it off for me.
There is no one else, there is only me.
I really don't remember when I became aware of the absence. It's not as if I think about it all the time because I don't, or I didn't. It's like something peripheral. Sometimes I would dream about a field of tulips and I think I remember there being a boy but it always faded quickly upon waking. After a few years I learned to hold onto the dream. I drew comfort from the little boy holding my hand while snow fell around us. My earliest memories of him are friendly. Which, I suppose, is why I'm not more freaked out. As if he were an imaginary friend that has stayed with me all these years. I stopped dreaming about him around thirteen but I never forgot. Like a security blanket he was always there when I needed him. A few years ago it developed into something more, something almost real.
I find myself going for the number three on speed dial only to hang up when I realized there wasn't one. I will look off to the side and start at the realization that no one is there looking back at me. While dealing with Walter is usually a bit difficult, he started leaving me painfully bereft. As if there is a missing link that should be there separating us. I feel it and when he's most aware it's as if he can feel it too.
He's waiting in the back of my mind, always. There is a relationship that I'm only privy to in my unconscious. He's always been there, just out of reach, but my feelings about and for him have changed. Yet I don't know how I could have ever not known him. I don't remember exactly when the dreams came back nor did I realize in the beginning that my feelings toward him had changed. It was as if the boy and the man were two different people. Maybe it is I who am different. I don't know, but what I do know is that over these last few years I've been falling in love with a dream. He's there every night almost. A dream that has held me while I cried and helped me solved these sometimes horrifying cases. He's a whisper in my ear leading me in the right direction or telling me why I should go this way instead of that. Watching the sun rise after dreaming of a man I've never met makes me ache with loss. Somehow that is also familiar but it's only recently that I've felt it. As if something happened but I'm missing pieces of the puzzle. He kept me sane. He kept me on my feet when all I wanted to do was fall. He's what got me through the kidnapping and subsequent brainwashing that occurred on the other side. I welcome the dreams. This other reality that belongs to me and me alone.
But he isn't real.
That's what I've always tried to tell myself. Until today. Until Walter Bishop described the man he's been seeing. The same man who has stolen my heart and lived only in my dreams.