Contingency

Disclaimer: I do not own Fringe, at least the two universes they've been in so far...

A/N: This is set around the time of "Marionette". Also this is my first fanfic posted.

There was something bloody about the whole scenario, as if something had lacerated the air and from the wound poured viscous crimson. And Peter Bishop was covered in it.

It was as if he'd been a tiny sapling trying to spring to the height of other people in his life and only made the tiniest shred of progress when he met a rather perseverant FBI agent who didn't too kindly to the name 'sweetheart'. Then there came the disgruntled reunion with his occasionally lucid father. The somewhat dysfunctional family unit they made seemed to have made the sapling of his being sprout into the sky and thousands of twirling and tangled branches grow from this new purpose.

He'd treaded cautiously onto a few branches of possibility in the vastness of his imagination and the murkiness of his dreams, but there was only one that had taken on life's tangibility. It was a path that he had paid the greatest attention to, the prospect of being with Olivia. On that path she'd asked him to come back, and he did, for her.

But there was another, one coloured the black of obsidian and tangled with treacherous vines that prospered as well. One that led to her. But of all the possibilities that had scampered through his mind, this one had never made an entrance. It was as if it had been cut from the tree before he could even consider it.

The branches took on the look of tarnished silver, infected with the poison of the alternate Olivia's infiltration. Now they all felt as if they were sawed off, and the bark blacker than onyx, ruined by the very notion of her.

All the growth he'd achieved over the past years seemed to spiral downwards, rotting the very core of the tree so that the only road left to travel was one back to the ground, where other acorns and pine needles sat in dry graves.

Peter stood outside the hospital under a massive oak tree, feeling completely gutted.

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