Resurgence
A/N: Suggestion lead to speculation; speculation leads to ideas; ideas lead to fanfiction. This is set after 4.03 'Alone in the World' and is mainly inspired by the final scene where Olivia reveals that she has been seeing Peter in her dreams.
With this fic I'd like to give a shoutout to Ambre (Elialys), who has written some of the most emotional stories that I've ever read. Keep doing the great work that you do Ambre!
Many thanks as always go to my beta Uroboros75 :)
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the tide that the ocean of my ideas obeys, rising and then falling with the breath of my imagination.
"The human brain is a miracle... a most resilient organ... a storage unit for everything you have ever known... seen, or felt. It's all still in there, whether or not you are conscious of that." - Walter Bishop, "6955 kHz"
It's only a quarter past dawn and she already needs a second cup of coffee as Walter progresses to theory number one hundred and ninety-four.
She didn't realize that when she confided in Walter of her dreams with the mysterious stranger that it would spark a thousand theories in his ever-inventive mind. By the time he reaches the absurdity of aliens and poltergeists she feels a headache beginning to tip on the precipice of her tolerance; it's too damn early for this.
Theory two hundred and fifteen is when she cracks. She stands abruptly and tells Walter that she's going to get a cup of coffee. Astrid looks her way with a mix of concern and confusion; the latter has become increasingly common for them as of late. Olivia gives her a considerate nod, an in-between of silence and an I'm fine before grabbing her coat – the long, black pea coat that is a staple of her wardrobe from October to March – and walks out the door.
At the coffee shop three blocks away she orders a large black with one sugar and sits by the window; she needs a few moments to collect her thoughts before they drag her to the ground. The idea that her entire life is comparable with falsified information is staggering at best, and makes her feel like a fraud at the worst. She wonders what she was originally like before this calamity; was she in another field, another job, hell, another country?
She wonders if she was happy.
She fiddles with the cover of her coffee, mindlessly chiseling away at the darkened plastic with her nails as the shop's entrance bell chimes obnoxiously loud in her ears. She cannot comprehend an existence other than what she has always known, and the temptation of something better sparks a bit of jealousy in her. She's been fighting for years for something she doesn't understand and gotten nothing in return; she thinks that by now she deserved to have at least a small slice of that infamous human euphoria.
"Olivia," a voice interjects with such abruptness that she nearly knocks over her coffee.
"Hey."
She manages to catch it from plummeting to liquid disaster, but not without that dull tear that signals a ruined nail. She looks up to see the bespectacled face of Agent Lincoln Lee (theirs of course, since Broyles doesn't exactly approve of allowing their doppelgangers the opportunity to run freely like a herd of gazelles through their universe), and she tries to smile, although exhaustion makes it rather difficult.
"Hey," she responds, feigning enthusiasm. It's not that she doesn't want to talk to him; she had simply been enjoying the unobtrusive company that silence was providing.
"Do you mind if I join you?" Lincoln asks, his own cup of coffee perched soundly in his right hand.
She nods gently and motions to the seat across from her as she reassures herself that this is nothing more than two colleagues meeting at the same coffee shop at eight o'clock in the morning, a mere coincidental occurrence. But even that seems tainted with absurdity.
She tries to return attention to the flimsy plastic cap on her coffee, but her torn nail creates a most annoying friction and the motion only makes her brows tense.
"You remember how you mentioned those hypothetical times when I may be freaked out?" he says casually, and she can already tell where this conversation is going. She's on the fence as to whether she likes it or not, because she doesn't really want to talk about the things that are happening around her, but it seems like it's the thing that she needs the most.
"And I said that I was here for you," she answers, looking up from the crinkled rim of her coffee cup. "If ever you needed it."
He shrugs, a lazy half-grin curling over his face. "Well, I was wondering if... if that offer still stands."
She leans forward on the table, her palms pressing against each other as she intertwines her fingers; she wishes that it wasn't always her own hands that were locking together like this.
"It does," she replies. For a moment she's almost tempted to ask if he'll return the favor, but that would be too easy and the thought of doing so quickly becomes too difficult.
He shrugs lightly and then shakes his head, and she can tell by the confusion beneath the curve of his glasses that he's seriously troubled. "Do you ever wonder what it was like... before he vanished? What our lives were like? How do you try and get on with your life knowing that your every thought, every memory… knowing that every moment of your life might have been nothing but a colossal lie?"
She curls her bottom lip over the top one slowly before letting it drag over her teeth; she puts her hands in her lap to hide the trembles that are starting in her fingertips.
"All the time," she whispers, and she sees a slight blurriness in the corners of her vision. She swallows thickly, because she needs composure more than anything at this moment.
He looks at her incredulously as his dark brows arch high along his forehead. "How do you deal with it? How is it even possible to try and comprehend all this?" He sets his coffee on the table and leans forward; his hands come up and fold together before he leans his forehead on them. "I just... I just wish that things could be easier," he whispers.
She looks at his half-hidden eyes and knows the trouble that is haunting him at those un-Godly hours; they are the exact same troubles that have her reaching for her bottle of whisky at three in the morning. The symmetry between their troubles is both comforting and frightening, because she didn't think it would be this easy to understand Lincoln Lee.
"You know," she says after a heavy pause, "I've always wished for a moment where things could be simple for once, to have a second where a decision didn't have so much weight attached to it, where a thought didn't come with so many burdens."
Lincoln sees where she's going with this and lowers his hands away from his face, his right coming to rest on the table top. His eyes brighten a little like a child being told the secret to winning at hide-and-seek.
"But I've realized that... there are no moments like that," she continues. "Every decision we make echoes through our lives and we have no way of adjusting them. Now, we have the choice of living with what we've known…" She lays a hand on Lincoln's. "…or risking everything for lives that we know nothing about."
Lincoln looks from their hands up to her, and the comfort in his face is shadowed with a sense of awkwardness. She instantly regrets that boldness and slowly withdraws her hand from atop Lincoln's. He takes his cup of coffee from the table and stands, moving for the door.
As he pushes his chair in, he looks to Olivia one last time, and she sees a sincerity that she hasn't known in years. "Thank you, Olivia."
As he turns to leave, she smiles briefly and replies into the air. "You're welcome."
Left alone with her cold coffee, she thinks of the last time another man took her hand out of sheer affection, the last time she's known something as tangible as love. The last time was John, before he died in that horrifying catastrophe of pseudo-science led astray. The awkwardness of her conversation with Lincoln still seeps into her body, cooling her fiery ambition. She misses the days when awkwardness was not in her relationship vocabulary, and she could simply live without boundaries.
She looks out the window at Lincoln's parting car and wishes that things were easier than this.
Somewhere deep in the recesses of her heart, something tells her that it should be.
As always, please review! There are more chapters still to come :D