Title: through chaos as it swirls, it's just us against the world (1/?)
Fandom: Fringe
Pairing: Peter/Olivia
Rating: T (subject to change)
Spoilers: Through 3x22, "The Day We Died"
Words: 5472 (this part)
Summary: In the future she dies, and in the present he is never born; somewhere in the middle, they build a life together.
A/N: This is a co-authored post-finale-ish multi-chapter Fringe fic by Emma and Morgan. We both contribute to each update, with Morgan writing the parts in the voice of Peter and Emma writing those in Olivia's. This both allows each of us to deeply explore one character as well as (hopefully) gives the two of them two distinct voices in the fic.


May 10, 2011

"It's similar to déjà vu, I believe," Walter says in the days following the formation of the bridge, a note of confidence in his voice that does nothing to quell Olivia's uneasiness. "I've been feeling it too."

"But it's not déjà vu," she says, frustrated and overworked and underslept.

"I said similar, my dear. What you're feeling will naturally occur when two realities are merged. Quantum entanglement. You feel these holes because your mind is now coming into contact – tuning in – to the experiences of the alternate you. The things she has that you don't have manifest themselves in feelings of loss in your mind. You are missing what you never actually had. Not in this world, at least."

But it wasn't a bunch of small holes, really. Olivia had lived her entire life splintered with wholes and crevices and blemishes and fractures. Instead, what had settled in her stomach in the past few days, what had slowly spread like wildfire, like a tumor overrunning her body and brain, had been a very omnipresent and singular absence. She's grieving. She just doesn't know what.

It happened like this:

Ferrying back across the Hudson River from Liberty Island, watching the wind pick up the tips of the choppy waves and the nearing Manhattan lights drop a flickering glow across the darkened waters, she'd mistook the upset in her stomach as a building excitement. Bridging universes. The stuff of science fiction novels. Excitement at the potential of healing, and a small trace of loneliness over all the secrecy. All that she couldn't share with those she loved. The few she loved.

But it wasn't just excitement. Back home in Boston, with a bottle of Jack Daniel's under her arm, she had reached into her cupboard and absentmindedly pulled out two glasses.

Later that night in bed she reached over to thread her fingers through a non-existent head of hair on the opposite pillow. Laughed softly to herself, but then lay awake for hours.

Olivia Dunham does what she's never done before: she tries to explain away.

Walter's reasoning is the most rational, and so she accepts it like a security blanket, clings to his logic like a second skin.

The things she has that you don't.

Believing his words proves not to be difficult. It takes little time for the inferiority to set in with regards to her alternate: the other Olivia is a sultry redhead with the will to win in her eyes, a spring in her step, a bit of rebellion locked in under her cargo pants and army boots.

And buttoned-up blonde Olivia wants to believe this inferiority is natural, aligning somewhat with a sibling rivalry. She doesn't have the boyfriend, the mother, the job with two partners that manage to lighten the burden. And she wonders if it's not a bit shallow, this jealousy of a woman who lives in a dissolving world, while her own remains very much intact.

But what's the use in a solid world when you have no one to share it with?

She decides to test Walter's hypothesis, this thing that's similar to déjà vu. In The Bridge the following week, she and her alternate stand side-by-side at a set of computers, watching as Brandon sputters on about the logistics of interconnected worlds, of the heightened dangers of wormholes through time and space.

"Again, agents, I can't stress how important it is that this remains entirely confidential." The Secretary has marched over, speaks to them in a tone with a hint of condescension. Over his shoulder, Olivia can see Walter skulking in the corner in his ratty sweater, looking entirely out of place amongst the plasma screens and Massive Dynamic employees with donned white lab coats.

Olivia had sprung Walter Bishop from St. Claire's mental facility nearly three years beforehand in a desperate attempt to save the mind and body of a man who would die despite her passion and her drive and her love. The mission in the name of romance has long since faded, and the scars too – she stopped visiting John's grave last autumn when the leaves turned. But Walter Bishop has remained ubiquitous in her life, crashing in and breaking apart all she thought she knew of the world and the universe. In 34 months, their relationship had morphed from incredibly strained, adversarial and unproductive to positive, somewhat affectionate, even sliding along the edges of familial.

There were hiccups, of course. The Cortexiphan Trials reveal. Walter's occasional slips out of lucidity. But Olivia remained kind, patient. Thought of him as a more brilliant and less mature version of her six-year old niece. And that worked for the most part. Until.

"I believe I'm starting to think of you as a surrogate daughter," he had said just last week. "You see, Elizabeth and I never had children."

Her alternate's voice snaps Olivia back to reality as The Secretary turns and walks brusquely away.

"I hate lying. It's the worst part of this job," she mutters uncomfortably.

Olivia smiles, and then remembers. Test the hypothesis.

"Boyfriend?"

"Mhmm."

"What's his name?"

"Frank. Frank Stanton."

A flicker of memory brushes over Olivia. She'd met a Frank Stanton, an epidemiologist, on a case back when she was doing normal regulation work for the bureau. He had been kind, handsome, charming. She had been charmed. There were sparks. Of course, there was also a John then. Olivia had politely declined when Frank had asked her to dinner.

She remembers Walter's words. Feelings of loss. Was she missing Frank? A version of a Frank that a version of herself had spent the last few years of her life with? But before she could even finish processing the thought, Olivia knew the answer. A defiant, resounding no called out from the back of her subconscious.

She literally had the name on the tip of her tongue, and this feeling was familiar, only his name wasn't of someone she had met fleetingly at a party the week prior and had forgotten. And his name wasn't Frank. It was of someone she never knew, of someone she couldn't have known. And yet his importance beat at a slow and steady rhythm at the back of her mind, willing for her to not forget him. But who?

"Do you hear that?" Once again, her alternate's voice brings Olivia careening back to reality.

"Hear what?"

The other Olivia looks up, cocks her head, and listens for a minute. "I could have sworn I heard a baby crying."

Olivia hears nothing. Her alternate shrugs and turns back to the computer screen.


March 23, 2026

Whoever had told him that it gets easier, just take it one day at a time, was a liar.

Because there were no days, only long endless loops of reading, pouring over text, stumbling to the refrigerator. Short naps on the couch when his eyes were just too weary.

He smelt of booze, of stale food, but he couldn't bring himself to shower. Her things were in there. Her shampoo, her perfume, her scent, and he couldn't have another piece of her lingering on his skin. Even now, two weeks after her death, he could feel the ghost of her fingertips on his shoulder, the weight of her arms around his waist. And maybe the worst part was that he didn't even mind.

Grief can do strange things to people. He guesses he can say this from experience. Years ago when he and Walter had just moved into their house, before he had known the truth and the whole world began to crumble around him (both figuratively and literally; he'd laugh if it was funny), he'd catch Walter nearly in tears gazing at a picture or shaking slightly as he recalled some memory that Peter never seemed to remember.

Peter never told anyone this, but one time he went to his own grave. It was some point after Olivia had come back and there was no anchor, no one he could reach out to. He wasn't in the habit of running anymore, not after what happened, and especially now that there was so much riding on his shoulders, but he wished so badly he could escape. He wished so badly for the answers to his questions. And somehow he ended up there, in that cemetery. A weathered coin lay on the grave's surface, presumably placed there by Walter on some clandestine trip, and for the first time ever Peter thought about all that Walter had lost. About how broken the man was, and how the weight of his decisions and the grief over losing his only son must have taken its toll. Must have made him crazy.

When Peter came home that night, for the first time in a long time, he remembers he didn't feel even a tinge of anger or resentment. Just simply understanding.

This is what Peter remembers now.

This is what he remembers as he wanders his empty halls. As he pauses at each picture on the wall. Wedding photos and birthdays and just every day moments.

A man could go crazy wandering these halls.

Their bedroom lay just as he had left it that morning. Their bed unmade, sheets rumbled. The indents from their frames remained on the mattress; a composite of their last night spent together, her in his arms.

He'd almost stumbled in there - drunk the first night – but paused at the doorframe, finally leaning against it as the weight of this hellish reality hit him.

This was their bedroom. The place they had slept, the place where he had hoped a small child would crawl into bed with them after a bad dream, the place where they had shared their lives.

And really it all boiled down to this: if he could bring her back, if what Walter had said was true, then he would do whatever it took.

Ironically, the greatest obstacle to pulling off the feat of sending his consciousness forward and then back into time was actually convincing Broyles to give his father more time in the lab.

"Who knows how long we have left? Will it really matter then that we let Walter rot in prison for years? This might be our only shot to get this right." It's Peter's only strategy, his only plea. Although Broyles had changed over the years, as they all had, at heart he was still just a man trying to right every wrong. It was this man that Peter was hoping to persuade. This man who had had a family once and had sacrificed them and his happiness to keep their world safe.

"It's one thing to persuade the President to release a man in order to prevent an imminent threat. It's another to ask for a hypothetical cure-all," Broyles sighed, taking a sip from his glass of whiskey. He'd taken to drinking straight from his desk right after the funeral even though he'd always been the picture of professionalism. But these were hard times. Maybe the hardest.

"Hypothetical is all we have left," Peter said stone-faced. And maybe it was the honesty or the desperation of the statement, but when Broyles looked up from his glass, Peter could see the slightest tinge of fear in the man's eyes.

It was all he needed.

Walter was released and placed under house arrest two days later.

Life runs in cycles, just as history, and science, and civilization all inevitably do.

Peter is never more aware of this then in this intermittent time.

He feels as if he is once again at the beginning (so much happened here, and so much is about to), and for the first time in his whole life he gets that peculiar sense of déjà vu. That maybe he's finally in the right place. For a moment he is frozen still, balancing on the precipice of some great mountain, inches from tumbling over the edge, but able to see so clear, able to see everything around with such understanding.

Standing in that old Harvard lab, one that hadn't changed in over four decades, it was easy for Peter to forget that she wasn't about to walk through the door, her long blonde hair pulled back and her black peacoat covered in melting snowflakes.

And it makes him ache for her more than he could have ever imagined.

It's what drives him to work so hard.

And in some odd way there is no fear. Not that Peter had ever been a very fearful person, but the more he reads, the further he and Walter go down this path, the more he knows this will not end well for him. And he simply doesn't care. Not if he can make it right again. Not if he can bring her back.

Life runs in cycles, as does time.

This is where Peter begins.


February 18, 2014

It isn't until she's really alone that she realizes that solitude takes practice; she is out of shape, uncomfortable with and not accustomed to being alone. Though she had operated most of her life in essential seclusion, the last three years have left her surrounded, worn, loved, the companionship slipping up on her so quietly that she hadn't even realized it until now – until she is alone once more.

Her professional position means little in federal court; her love, even less. The night they arrest Peter he is physically ripped away from her during a quiet evening on the ratty couch in his living room; the SWAT team bursting in, guns blazing as though they expected to find a hardened criminal instead of a reformed one; a broken-hearted boy sits in a somber silence with his girlfriend as they mourn his father's arrest from the day before.

They take him away in handcuffs and no amount of pleading or phone calls to her various contacts or angry outbursts at a sympathetic but powerless Broyles will release Peter from his holding cell at Suffolk County Jail. She doesn't let herself laugh at the irony of him being held in county jail for supposed crimes against the universe (such crimes join the ranks of international law in years to come when men like Moreau try to rip apart the fabric of their world), but she also refuses to let herself cry when she visits him and clings uselessly to the glass separating them, her cheek pressed hard up against the dirty plastic of the telephone.

They've always been physical, an underlying fact she hadn't realized until now; she took for granted being able to lay a hand on his arm or feel the warmth of his fingers on her cheek, and even before they had been involved in any sense, they'd often communicated via brief, fleeting touches.

She feels her cheeks flush in frustration when she cannot touch him, and a tired but reassuring smile plays across his unshaven face.

"I'll be out of here soon enough."

"You don't know that."

"But you said it yourself – there's no precedent for this kind of thing, this kind of crime." He swallows the last word. "My lawyer's already said regardless that there's a good case for self-defense anyway."

Olivia nods. She feels foolish and weak, as though she should be the one consoling and not the one consoled, but she lets herself give him a small smile. "You're right."

Peter sighs. "It's really Walter we should be worried about. They say he was the initial cause and catalyst, that he had malicious intent. Next to him, what I've done seems far less egregious. Which is good for me – " he swallows. "—but really bad for him."

Olivia twists the phone cord around her index finger. "It's just not fair."

He laughs, somewhat harshly. "What is these days?"

To cope with the pain, Olivia does what she's always done best and goes back to work. It has been three years since Peter climbed into the machine and the number of vortex events seems to only climb exponentially by the month. Broyles has been given the go-ahead to expand his team and when a vortex appeared in Brazil last Christmas – the first out of the country – Fringe Division bureaus began to sprout up internationally.

There is more work than ever to keep her occupied, but Olivia is somewhat surprised to find herself crippled. The feeling runs similar to the weeks she spent hobbling around after she came careening back from her first trip to another world, only this time, her absent crutch is far more metaphoric.

The entire world is running on adrenaline, on fear, and all Olivia feels is numb. She had allowed herself to be cocooned away from the terror of knowing so much while everybody else knew so little by the quirky family she'd built with Peter, Walter, and even Broyles and Astrid. And now, despite the secret being cracked wide open, despite the entire world being just as vulnerable and aware and afraid as her, she finds herself feeling incredibly alone.

Rachel calls her the Saturday after Peter is taken in.

"I just saw it on the news." She's out of breath, and everyone sounds exhausted these days. Traces of oxygen depletion, science division says. Sometimes Olivia lies awake in bed at night just to practice measured breathing, the in and out of it all. "Liv, what did Peter do?"

Rachel doesn't understand and the world doesn't understand and the pressure bears down on Olivia too much and too hard and she feels worn out and defeated for the first time in her life. Coping has never been so hard.

"Maybe you should get a cat or something."

"Are you saying that I can replace you with a feline?"

"Hardly. For companionship, comfort. All that bullshit."

"Well if that's not a shining endorsement."

"I'm just saying, it could be nice. Heisenberg got me through my mother's suicide."

"Pardon me? Heisenberg."

"He was a basset hound." A beat. "Walter named him."

"What a surprise."

"You could pick up a nice domestic shorthair, name it Hawking."

"But I've never liked pets. Besides, you'll be out of here soon enough."

The last words spoken in a sharp tone, as though they are a given and not a hope built highly on chance and stacked odds. You'll be out, the phrase like a mantra passing through her mind as she wills it through the glass that separate them.

Peter is cleared on a Tuesday. Olivia gets the news and abruptly leaves the bureau, drives to Suffolk County with her hands shaking across the steering wheel.

She drives him home and she is crying, happy and sad all at once, and Peter is unshaven and disheveled and smells of rust and prison, but no matter; he takes her against the wall along the staircase and kisses the salt from her lips and cheeks.

Outside, the sky turns a sick shade of orange.

Across a dimension and into another world, a vortex swallows half of the Massachusetts. A redhead runs hysterical through a screaming crowd. She's lost her son. Lost or lost? Irrelevant, they are all lost eventually.


July 2, 2016

If getting pardoned was supposed to make Peter feel better, he could definitively say that wasn't the case.

As he sat on the cold marble benches of a DC courtroom, with the white Roman columns towering above him and the glaring light from the hundreds of cameras he had met on his way in still blinding him, he felt just as small as he did on the inside.

The only thing that seemed to help was having her by his side. Her fingers twined with his own, just as they had so many times before. In many ways she was like his life raft; it wasn't that he wasn't capable of swimming the waves, but with her it was just so much easier.

"Thank you for being here," Peter said as a small drop of sweat fell from his brow. The overcrowded courtroom was unbearably hot, and in his best suit with the temperature outside registering at about 105°, Peter had nearly soaked through his finely pressed shirt. The nerves were also a factor, but Peter was trying not to think about them. In fact, Peter had always been pretty good at shouldering his emotions and putting them on the back-burner, focusing instead on whatever was going to get him to the next place, using anger as his fuel to get him there. But this time, this time was hard. This time he couldn't move on even if he wanted to. He was tied up in this, like Bell had continually told him. The destiny he couldn't escape. In part he was responsible for what had brought them all here today. After all, he was the man in the drawing, the one who had inevitably brought devastation upon them all, and after that, after all of that, they were just going to let him go.

And there sat the cold reality, the double standard that made Peter ache inside. Because how could they blame the son who was kidnapped and inadvertently started the end of the world in the first place? It's not like he knew what was to come. It's not like he chose to kill billions of people.

At least this is what the public believed, and who was Peter to set them straight? What did it matter when they couldn't go back?

The guilt gnawed at his stomach like a rabid animal.

"You know it's not your fault," she said, placing her other hand upon his own and trying to meet his eye. It was eerie how she could read his thoughts at times like these when not even a fleck of emotion shone on his face, but in the past few weeks, he'd opened up to her more than once about what he was feeling as they lay in bed together after months apart.

He sighed, squeezing her hand lightly. "I knew what I was doing when I got into that machine. I thought I was saving our world, but I ended up destroying it. Walter shouldn't get all the blame for that."

Olivia placed a palm to the back of his neck, smoothing down the hair at his nape. "Well that's why you're here, isn't it? Na einai kalitero anthropo apo ton patera tou. You take care of the people you care about."

And as he turned his head and looked into her eyes, he knew he couldn't have loved her more than in that moment.

They had positioned themselves right behind the defense table in the hopes that they would be able to talk to Walter. Because of the severity of his crimes and his clinically diagnosed insanity, he was being kept in isolation with no visitors. Peter couldn't think of a worse prison. He remembers how miserable he was leaving Walter in that mental hospital for one night only a few years before and the state Walter was in when Peter came to bring him back home. The worst part now was that Peter no longer had that authority. He couldn't just sign a piece of paperwork and make it all go away.

A few moments later, Walter walked out in his gray jumpsuit, thinner and hairier than the last time Peter had seen him, and though the man was still in handcuffs, he attempted to reach out for Peter. Peter leaned over the rail and grasped Walter's hand with his own, searching the older man's eyes for any signs of distress or insanity.

"How are you Walter?"

"Holding up better than I could have imagined, although I miss strawberry milkshakes and oh, oh…." Walter began, frenzied, his hands shaking. "What was that song again? That one that your mother and I used to dance to? I can't seem to remember the tune. I've been trying to plot out the melody with a series of mind games, but…" he trailed off and began to hum and sing patches of unrelated notes, grunting with frustration when each one resulted in his dissatisfaction.

"Hey, hey Walter," Peter said soothingly, placing his other hand on the man's arm. He hated seeing him like this, on the brink of insanity and unable to navigate the bypasses in his own mind. As Peter looked on with worry Walter finally broke into tears.

"I know God is punishing me for the crimes I have committed, but it's a terrible thing to be locked away with only one's mind for company."

Peter wanted to say more, but the judge chose that moment to walk into the courtroom. They were all on their feet as the loud chatter of voices swiftly receded down to a low hum, and before he knew it, Peter was being called to the stand.

As he walked to the bench and settled into the witness chair, he was struck with how crazy this must seem to the hundreds packed into this courtroom. By now every one of them knew his story; in a life that was based almost solely on the hunt for anonymity, Peter was having a hard time finding it these days. And yet, he pitied all those who sat before him. At least he had had the luxury of growing up around crazy, of living and breathing it. When he discovered the tie between this world and the next one, he'd had it revealed to him one painstaking day at a time. But these people - the reporters, lawyers, the policemen and women – these everyday people, they had woken up one day with the realization that life would never be the same. That the government and its agencies had been hiding this horrifying truth from them right under their noses, and it was only a matter of time before they would be sucked into some black hole or blasted to oblivion.

At least Peter had had the time to prepare.

"Please state your name for the record."

"Peter Bishop."

"Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you god?"

Peter placed his hand on the Bible and answered, "I do."

The prosecutor got up then, shoving his hands into his pockets, and acting just cavalier enough to make Peter thoroughly pissed off. After a week of trial proceedings, he was used to the way this lawyer worked. He was ruthless, cutthroat, and just one centimeter away from not having a heart. And probably the worst part of it was that the man didn't really care. This lawyer's supposed anguish, his supposed outrage at what was happening in the world was really just that: supposed. It was obvious in the way the man carried himself. How he smirked slightly when he thought he'd won something, how he dressed, even how he was standing now, staring at Peter as if he was insignificant and a liability and just some inconsequential speck on his path to becoming one of the most celebrated trial lawyers in recent history. If he won this case, think of all the books they would write about him, all the clients that would come his way.

The end of the world meant nothing if you were gonna spend the last few years of it going out in style.

"Mr. Bishop, when you were eight years old you were kidnapped from your parents' home, correct?"

"Yes," Peter said, shifting slightly in his chair. He had prepared for any line of questioning that the prosecution could possibly throw at him with Walter's defense attorney, but it still hadn't made him feel any more comfortable here on the stand. He could feel his rage already bubbling below the surface, ready to thrash out.

"And you didn't see them again for another 25 years, am I right?"

"You are," Peter said, trying to answer casually.

"And in that time, the mother who raised you committed suicide! She took her own life simply because she couldn't live with the guilt that you weren't really her son! That her own husband was the one who had brought you into her home! Isn't that right?" His voice was rising in volume with every statement, as if he was the one with the right to be angry. It took almost all of Peter's restraint to keep his emotions in check.

"My mother was a very sick woman. But I loved her very much." It wasn't the answer to the question, but at this point the prosecutor didn't even seem to be addressing him. He was facing the jurors, the men and women in the audience, everywhere but towards him. He had his case with or without Peter, and he knew it.

"No one ever said that," the prosecutor said, turning to face Peter suddenly with a light smirk upon his lips. Peter wondered if the lawyer would still be smiling if he knew what Peter was imagining doing to him right at this moment.

"And was this the man that kidnapped you?" The prosecutor asked, pointing an accusatory finger at Walter.

Peter almost laughed. If the man thought this tactic would work in his favor, then he was in for a rude awakening. Instead of feeling any vitriol towards Walter, the man who supposedly ruined his life and drove the only mother he had ever known in his life to suicide, Peter only felt a fierce sense of loyalty and indignation that they would do this to this old man.

This man that he loved very much.

"You tell me. You read the papers, don't you?" Peter fired back with all the coolness and charm that he possessed in his con man days. A few people in the court laughed, causing some of the spark in the lawyer's eyes to extinguish. Peter picked up on the tick in the man's jaw like a tell in a poker game. Oh yeah, he was in for a shit storm.

"Tell me. Between the years of 1981 and 1986, was Walter Bishop involved in the Cortexiphan trials that experimented on dozens of children including Olivia Dunham, Nick Lane, and Simon Phillips?"

"Yes, but…"

"And tell me, where are most of those subjects now?"

"Most of them are dead, but…"

"And what about you, Mr. Bishop? Did Walter Bishop ever experiment on you? Ever put you in any danger?"

"Yes, but…"

"Now tell me, do you think his actions are justifiable?"

Peter sighed. He wasn't sure how to answer the question without being cut off just as he had before. If there was one thing Peter had learned in his life, it was that nothing was black and white, and yet this lawyer, this man who knew nothing about his life or the events that had been hidden from the public for decades, was preceding to make it seem like the world was simply monochrome.

Peter looked at the prosecutor, staring him straight in the eye, and he knew deep down he could never get this man to understand. But the jurors, well maybe, just maybe he could convince them.

"Do you have children?" Peter asked suddenly.

The lawyer looked taken aback for a moment. "I'm not the one on the stand, Mr. Bishop. Or do you forget?"

"I haven't forgotten," Peter paused, and then began. "It's just anyone who has children or has loved someone would know that you would do anything to save that person's life. Do I think my father's actions were justified? I'm not sure I can answer that question without being a little biased. Walter Bishop saved my life. He crossed universes because he lost his child, and if any parent, if anyone out there that has ever loved someone says they would act differently in this situation, then I would have to wonder how much they really cared."

Silence permeated the courtroom as Peter finished. Each of the jurors sat in their seats, contemplating, some of them with tears in their eyes. Peter's eyes rested upon Olivia's because though he could in no one imagine the pain Walter must have felt when he lost his son, he understood what it meant to love someone and to risk everything to bring them back. Olivia understood this too; Peter could see it in her eyes even across the courtroom.

And as Peter looked to Walter, he saw a small smile upon the old man's lips and tears in his eyes. "Thank you," he mouthed. Peter gave him a small nod back.

Looking to the prosecutor, Peter expected more, an onslaught of questions, a vehement statement that love was not a justifiable excuse for the destruction of humanity. But instead all he got was three words:

The prosecution rests.