Pale Glass
A/N: This is definite AU for Fringe and probably a slight canon for Inception.
Disclaimer: I do not own Inception or Fringe, if I did I would be one lucky person.
Chapter One: The Pledge
The sun shattered the sidewalk as Olivia took her cup of coffee from the vender under November's frigid guise. She nodded to him gratefully and strolled away, reaching for her sunglasses.
She sighed when they fell on the pavement with a clatter. As she stooped down to pick them up she saw an abandoned coffee cup nearby.
It annoyed her to the extent that she wished it weren't there at all and she tried to push the thought away with the image of white tulips that appeared monthly on the kitchen table when she was a child.
It was when her fingers were inches from her black sunglasses that she saw it; a perfect white tulip growing out of a crevasse in the sidewalk.
And the coffee cup was gone.
She was drawn back to her sunglasses when a sharp crunch snapped through the air. She looked down and saw her sunglasses, crushed beneath the foot of a-in her opinion- rather ignorant person.
Her shoulders curved into taut bows of frustration as her eyes trailed up the person's form until she saw the face, a man. He had a crisp dark suit on with a blue tie.
It would have been worse if it was yellow.
She noticed that he had blue eyes, and something along the lines of irony and frustration made her annoyed by the similarity.
It reminded her of Peter, but he was far from what she would associate with his character.
Peter at least watched where he was going.
The man made no attempt at apology; unless one called a blank stare some unorthodox form of remorse.
But she was severely doubtful of that.
She left her mangled glasses on the ground and continued walking as the sun glared in her eyes.
As she rounded a corner she wished that she had another pair of sunglasses, but something else caught her attention as she passed the corner of a glass building that rose like a glossy sycamore.
She cursed and dropped her steaming cup of coffee when she saw it, blandly obvious and startling against the sunny sky, a cancer of impossibility that spread through the air.
She had simply wished that the sun wasn't so bright in her eyes and as if on a cue from a magician's wand and a sparkle of some mystic dust a building shifted. It morphed and twisted up into the air as its shadow crawled over her skin and the sun was swallowed by its massive form.
It took her all of thirty seconds to realise that she was the only one to notice this particular ambiguity. The people around her carried on without the slightest hint of surprise or suspicion, their coffee cups still perched in their calm hands.
Her hands had fallen to her sides, tense and frightened. Her eyes jumped over the building as she searched for some explanation, some sign of this strange occurrence.
She lived under the presumption that there was a logical explanation behind any event, and she was determined to flush out the logic behind this.
She had always had her sunglasses before and with them she never noticed the sun, but all she had seen in her line of vision were thousands of sharp golden needles that prodded into her retinas and that prompted her desire for some shade.
The building just sprouted in the same manner as the magical beanstalk that she had read about as a child, but she had always had some preconceived notion that there was a fine line between fantasy and reality.
It was as if some massive tide had just swept in, careening over those fine lines in the sands of her life until they were gone.
And at that exact moment she had nothing to carve out those lines again.
She could only marvel at the madness.
In her bewilderment, she wondered for an instant how it could truly be possible, but then her line of work dealt with things that bordered on the brink of impossible.
The notion didn't comfort her in any sense.
She realised that she probably looked rather strange standing on the sidewalk staring at a building that to everyone else exhibited no signs of suspicion and decided to carry on, leaving her cup of spilled coffee in its mocha splatter on the ground.
It was when she had bumped against the shoulders of at least a dozen people in a matter of minutes that she felt like the space on the sidewalk had gotten smaller.
She had never known herself to be claustrophobic, but in cases where it appeared that one was being boxed in by other people it was difficult not to cultivate the slightest degree of concern.
She continued down the street, but convenience had defected from her list of allies as people continued to close in around her. It was like trying to navigate between the slimy scales of sardines.
At an intersection where traffic and tail lights bled a cherry red she attempted to cross.
It was all going fine until someone grabbed her arm.
And then ten others joined in the scuffle.
She flailed, kicked and tried to scream but something dry and thick was stuffed into her mouth as a kick rammed into her stomach and a fist jutted into her shoulder.
It was as if she were at the mercy of a dozen infuriated hammers and as each one smashed aggressively into her body she tried to imagine the white tulips.
None appeared.
Every muscle that she was still aware of throbbed sharply as hot nails of pain dug through her skin. Her head pounded like a drum; she only wished that it would stop.
Her hands had come up to cover her face when she felt the fists stop trying to crush her battered fingers.
With a large reserve of caution she peeked out between her bloody fingers and saw a man holding out his hand to her beneath the sunlight. The people on the street were frozen in a strange tableau; it was a curious concoction of chaos and calm that she had never seen before.
It wasn't until after he helped her up that she noticed his eyes were blue, along with his suit and tie.
It was the man whose shoe had crushed her glasses.
She said nothing to him, so after he gave her a stern glance he sighed gently and said to her:
"This is what happens," he said as he motioned to the still forms surrounding them on the street, "When you try and control the dream; the dream fights back."
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