I Shall Be Telling This With A Sigh
A/N: This is set after Charlie's death in 2.04 'Momentum Deferred'. I decided to write this since I've had a lot of angsty plot bunnies clogging up my mind lately and decided to do some spring cleaning :P The title is from the poem 'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost.
Disclaimer: I do not own Fringe, no matter how many plot bunnies keep springing up, it still isn't mine.
She let herself absorb the indecision like a sponge at the funeral, whether or not to accept that the coffin contained Charlie or some cold doppelganger with consideration for her that spanned the length of a smooth bullet shell. To that shape shifter she was blank, nothing more than an untouched canvas that he had no care to lay his hands on. Even in the alley with her hair frizzled like dry seaweed and her face traced with tears she was a blank canvas.
But he was no artist.
If in some strange manifestation of mercy he had decided to bring something to her, colour her life in some way; she saw nothing good of it. The only shades he painted with were throbbing crimson and venomous silver. And he wasn't neat about it either; his work came out in ugly spatters of red and silver like gunshots.
What ripped her heart into ragged chunks was the idea of how little consideration that creature had had for Charlie; her Charlie. He had constantly been there and now she had to adjust to his absence. It reminded her of the one summer she spent in Italy and the way the Coliseum was there but just beyond her reach behind the yellow ropes. Now all she had from that summer was a faded postcard wrinkled like the withered petals of an old rose.
The smell of the flowers by his casket made her nauseous, something she didn't usually encounter in the presence of lilies and roses; but the idea of people placing these fragrant blooms before the casket of an impostor made her stomach recoil and squirm like a restrained cat, clawing at her until she thought she would bleed her own raw crimson.
But she didn't show it, Olivia Dunham was never one to let her little glass facade falter. There was always a pane of glass between her and everyone else, frosted with her good intentions and sheer determination.
It was a wonder she could even see where she was going through that thick, crusty ice.
Now she felt another layer forming on the ice, creeping up over her good intentions like a bitter frostbite; one that didn't thaw easily. She was blind in the ice storm, paralyzed in the cold and the pure cruelty that it grasped her with, like a jacket that was two sizes too small. It squeezed on her ribs, poking on her bruised and trembling heart.
She didn't cry; her eyes were dry like soft dunes in the Sahara and her mouth smooth and calm like the gentle curve of an emerald leaf. But beneath the stern exterior something broke and shattered like a crystal vase that had been filled with water and flowers; now strewn across the floor of her existence like red wine; she would clean up the mess but she would never get the stain out.
There was something uneasy about how their relationship had fit under the category of 'friendship', something mildly obtuse and restrained like a dog on a leash. They could run anywhere if they just got out of the collar.
Perhaps there had been something there; something lively and jovial like a grasshopper hidden among the long blades of grass that came up in the spring. But she hadn't been careful and now she held that dead grasshopper between her fingers; legs bent and cracked like brittle toothpicks and wings that jutted out slightly like a broken camera lens. The eyes were onyx, hungry for her in their emptiness and she swallowed as the muscles in her neck went rigid like taut elastic bands.
Was this loss so tangible that it would leave the cold tang of steel in her mouth?
The final needle in her heart, like the tiny block that tipped the scale too far was the notion that Charlie's death would leave Sonia alone, like a lone wolf under a creamy full moon.
And there would be no children for Charlie Francis. The possibility of children bearing the name Francis had been snipped like a rosy flower that was only partially bloomed and cast aside.
It was that little bud of intuition inside her like a sharp green weed that told her it could have been hers and an instant later that mental weed was shredded, cut up into thousands of little pieces like confetti.
She didn't want some new level of friendship; she wanted her old friend back. She wanted to go back to the coffee breaks and the friendly banter like dandelion seeds in the wind. She wished that she could have saved that flower before the steel clippers found it.
The weight of the situation was heavy and pressing like steel with the thick texture of molasses; if she tried to swallow too much of it at once it would become like mercury and poison her.
She left the funeral after all the words had been said and hers tucked away in a velvet box; her sorrow left in little invisible balls of mercury on the grass. But as she walked away the volatile pearls sprouted wings and followed her like vultures.
Sorrow was her companion now.
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