Through the Black Amnesias of Heaven
The comets
Have such a space to cross,
Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off –
Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling
Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere.
Sylvia Plath
Nick Lane dreams of dying.
He wakes up in the middle of the night, tangled in his sheets, drenched in a cold sweat, reaching for something in the darkness; he hasn't had nightmares like this since he was a child and Olive abandoned him. These dreams aren't actually as bad as those, really, because back then he was young and naïve so easily broken: he thought Olive was his in the same that he was hers, that they belonged to each other in some true way, but then one day she left and never came back and he was never the same. He knows now that he can't count on anyone.
In the first of the dreams, he doesn't actually die; but it sort of feels like it, for a moment or two. He's standing on a rooftop, surrounded by an army of ghosts—but they're not ghosts, they're prisoners, people he wants to let live but can't and he's screaming on the inside. And then Olive's there, but she's not the Olive he remembers—and if he thinks about it, he's not really the same Nick he remembers being—and she's looking at him like they're kids again and she'd burn the world down to save him. She shoots him then, because he's begging her to, but she doesn't kill him; and for a moment, he grieves because she should have.
When he wakes up, he instinctively reaches out with his mind—stretching, groping blindly, for that connection that had echoed through his dream. And she's there, bright like fire across the world, but he can't quite reach her and he thinks that the world is supposed to be different than this; she's burning a little too bright, a little too distantly. She's supposed to be like the fire they lit to keep the things in the dark at bay, but she's not; she's like the sun, burning desperately until that moment when it all implodes.
So he retreats back into in himself and wonders why he tried in the first place. Whatever connection they shared was broken—or warped, or changed somehow—when they were young and she abandoned him.
(There's that word again: abandoned. Abandonment. It rings in his head, over and over again, and he's been bitter for it as long as he can remember, but honestly sometimes it doesn't feel quite real.)
Sometimes he dreams of fire.
The dream doesn't start as fire. He has been shot, he thinks: he feels a terrible coldness, seeping through his veins, even as blood bubbles up his throat. There is a sucking sensation in him, like water swirling in the bathtub drain. It's a dark, lonely death—the kind of death he's been imaging for himself since he was a child and his best friend abandoned him. And then the dream shifts: suddenly there is an angel there, exploding over everything.
Except his angel is a phoenix and her name is immolation. It's not like Olive and her fire: Olive's fire is metaphorical, even when it's not, because her fire burns inside her. This fire hurts, and it melts him away from his bones, but at the same time it's transcendental. The phoenix says his name, over and over, like a mantra, like maybe if she makes the word holy she can keep them both from burning; but every night, in his sleep, they burn, over and over again. Somehow he doesn't mind.
The trouble is that these are only dreams, but they feel like they shouldn't be. He feels crazier than ever, and he debates checking himself back into the mental institution, but in the end he doesn't; they have need of him, the man had told him, and Nick believes it. After all, all the things that happened to him—surely they had to mean something?
The man tells Nick that he is a warrior; that he was meant to protect the world. That he has to prepare himself. Nick isn't sure exactly what that means, because the man leaves him alone for weeks at a time and only comes once in a while to make sure than Nick hasn't gone insane and accidentally killed a host of people with his unruly emotions, but Nick tries. Even though, really, he doesn't want to. He works out constantly, so that he is all wiry muscle; he's sort of dangerous-looking, all shoulders and arms and that scar on his cheek, in a way that should be attractive but probably isn't.
Nick dreams of Olive, more and more frequently, and of the phoenix; he wonders if this is him finally, irrevocably losing his mind, dreaming every night of girls who burn. Twice he dreams of a man who glimmers gold—and another color, blue, gold and blue like ancient jewelry unearthed at an archaeological dig, gold and lapis lazuli—and these dreams make even less sense to him than the ones about fire and death.
Once he dreams of someone else. A second man, who doesn't burn or glimmer or anything, but he's got a gun in his hand and the world on his shoulders. The dream is odd: they're standing next to each other on a bridge, talking about the weather, like they've known each other all of their lives and are tied to one another in an inexplicable way. This man is more normal, but he's not—he's the one who's ordinary, sans fire or glimmer, but is still somehow brave and true and saves the world.
It's only a few weeks later that Nick realizes he was dreaming about Lincoln Lee. The only friend he ever really had in high school, the one who took Nick's sickness and brokenness and accepted it; Nick hasn't thought of Lincoln in years, and it's sort of odd and terrifying and Nick knows that it should mean something.
Then he dreams of Lincoln again, and this time he's with Olive and the man who glimmers: and now they all glimmer, Olive and Lincoln flashing red and blue but never gold, the man who glimmered first an array of striking light in scarlet and lapis lazuli and liquid sunlight.
He wakes up and realizes that the world is wrong, and there is nothing he can do for it.
Months later, there is an inexplicable shift in the universe; Nick Lane begins to remember things that never happened, a person he never was, and a death that was never his. And maybe it should worry him, to remember dying, but it's oddly reassuring to know that he has died once and it wasn't dark or lonely. He went out in a blaze of fire, in love and immolation, and he had someone at his side.
In the end, Sally comes to him. She turns up on his doorstep one day, face round and flushed like she can't believe she's doing this, but whatever embarrassment she has over seeking out a man she's only loved in one of her lives is quickly overwhelmed by Nick's own delight at seeing her. He can't help but grin and it infects her; he doesn't know if he'll be in love with her again, love her in the same way, but he does love her somehow.
"We should go find Olive," she says, simply, voice remarkably childlike.
And Nick reaches out, searches with his mind: she's there, bright like fire across the world, and it's right somehow. Somehow, someway, this shift in the world has transformed her into something that in one life she never was and was always supposed to be; he doesn't understand, because there's nothing dual about her. It's like she's escaped into someone else, healed over all the parts of her that grew up wrong, and Nick doesn't care about how because he feels like he did when he was a child. She's burning, but close; like a fire lit to keep the things in the dark at bay, a fire like love and family and that odd kind of completion that should feel broken but doesn't.
So Nick takes Sally's hand and ventures out into the world; not dead, not yet. He feels love, like he used to never remember before, and he doesn't know what the future may bring but for once he's willing to face it.
A/N: My solutions to the whole Peter/Blue!Olivia/Blue!Lincoln love triangle: shipping OT3, and now I shipping Lincoln/Nick Lane. And IDEK why, but I want fic. Is there any? Because if there's not, I might actually probably write it. No promises, though: I was going to write a followup to my Supernatural/Fringe crossover, which itself to begin with was a distraction from this weird Fringe AU thing I've been working on, and then I got distracted from the followup by writing a weird Supernatural AU thing, and I got distracted from that by this. I have fandom ADD. Don't you judge me.
Also. The only, only, only good thing about the Amberverse is that Nick Lane is alive. Previously, I was like, oh, yeah, Alt!Broyles is alive, too, but apparently I was SUPERWRONG ABOUT THAT SHIZ. I want the Alt!Broyles of last season back, ASAP.
Now that I've gotten all weird and ramble-y, drop a review and tell me what you think. I figure that Amber!Nick is bitter, because Olive running away would mean she abandoned him, right, and the fact that for whatever reason they haven't run into Nick in the new timeline seems to say that whatever bond Olivia and Nick had isn't the same. (More ramble. I'm stopping now. For realsies.) MY POINT: is bitter Nick too bitter or just the right amout of bitter?