Author's note: Many thanks to liminalliz and 9seconds for the beta - any errors remaining are mine and only mine, to xxcrissy for the suggestion of the title - I suck at that, among many other things - and to my sister, lady_drose_sd , who has to put up with me and my self-impossed fringe hiatus(es?).
This was made for a challenge at fringeverse (an LJ landcomm). The story has a matching header but to see it (as you all know, fanfiction doesn't support images) you'll have to go see it at my journal, find the link on my profile page.
Being a nomad most of his life, he can't help but be amused at the irony of his situation.
After a life of going from place to place, he settled in Boston; and when he finally hits the road again, it's to go to the furthest - and closest - place he could go.
Boston again, just another universe.
He has this crazy idea, he thinks he could travel around this other world seeing the differences, the only problem is that when he gets there and looks around, really looks around, it doesn't feel that different.
But they are there, all over the place, and he sets himself to find them.
Almost like a game, and he had always loved games.
Mind games over all, make your opponent do things he thought he would never do and yet think that it was his own idea doing them. Deceiving. Yeah, he had always been good at that, he had been praised for that.
It makes sense that now that comes right around and bites him, hard.
Right were it hurts.
A different famous person on the notes, shows that were cancelled are still running, restaurants turned into banks, the twin towers are still standing majestically - the White House was destroyed instead.
Some differences are more obvious than others.
There are zeppelins - zeppelins - navigating the sky.
It's weird knowing that you've read a book that nobody else have ever heard of. He wonders if that makes the copy of Alice in Wonderland he bought in that old gas station, right before coming, a first edition here.
He wants to feel special about it but it just brings a sense of sorrow to a very beaten part of his anatomy that he doesn't want to think about now.
No-one here knows about the pretty blonde girl who felt into the rabbit hole and how it turned her life upside down.
He likes talking to the people he knows, a random waitress in a bar that is somehow working at the same bar here, Charlie, Walter, Astrid, Broyles and see what's different.
Some of them are almost exactly the same. Almost. Some are the total opposite and some of them are just… different.
Those are the persons he doesn't like talking to, even if that list is reduced to only one name.
Hers.
He doesn't say her name because every time he hears it, he wants to run, drink, get wasted, sleep and forget about this whole crazy situation. He thinks about the blonde girl in his back pocket and wants to climb out of his own damn rabbit hole, feel the earth and stones scratching his skin, he wants it to hurt like hell. Feel like he did something.
No. He wants to fall all the way down and get to the tea shop and drink the whole bottle with the "forget" label in it.
So instead, when his mind is in danger of going there, when he thinks he's gonna say it just to prove - check - that he still remembers it, he does the one thing he loves the most about this place.
He talks to the dead ones and imagines what it could have been like.
He talks to her and tells her everything he would have liked to tell his mother. He talks until the line between who was his mom and the woman in front of him is a blur, until he doesn't really know if it matters, if it ever mattered, that they were different people..
After a while he starts going through the motions, the differences that amused him so much in the beginning are slightly annoying now.
He's not happy here, but he's not miserable.
He decides he could settle with that.
Mother intuition must be real because she can actually see through his facade, she starts insinuating there's something off about him and as much as he tries to repel her queries, Elizabeth finally asks the question he doesn't have an answer to; "Do you want to go back?"
Want? He's not sure.
He only knows that if she were to ask him to go back, he would.
So when a few days later she comes, crossing universes, looking for him, and says; "You belong with me," he goes.
Author's note, part 2: This was written in my head since the end of season two so it's kind of (completely) out of cannon. I think I actually thought about this even before Over There Part 2 was aired and so the timeline doesn't fit, sorry about that.
There are mentions to "Alice" (the one who went to wonderland), but I'm not really an expert on that matter and any knowledge I have about it comes from the disney movie - which I saw when I was little, syfy's Alice (with which I'm totally in love) and the fics I've read about it afterwards.
Author's note part 3: The real size of the header is 800 x 360, click to make it bigger. You can find a textless version here: P&O header