Spoilers: Up to 3x08
A/N: My first short foray into Fringe fic, not betaread (sorry, not been lucky enough to find one for this fandom). The style may not be for everyone. Mostly gen piece about the different trauma's the two characters have been through in the original Redverse timeline. Also tagged for them as a ship due to it calling on Alt!Lincoln's unrequited feels that I apparently can't leave out.
Inspired by elfin's fic "Skin Deep" that can be found on archiveofourown.
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"It's like nothing ever happened" – Alt!Lincoln
"Just like nothing ever happened" – Alt!Olivia
3x08 "Entrada"
Like he hadn't been fried to a crisp, heat soaring through his flesh in an endless agony (but they tell him it will end, when the drugs kick in, missing that the horror and his instinctual reaction can never be unlearnt).
Like she hadn't felt the sick twist of her stomach when they didn't question who she was when she first appeared there (but she tells herself it's just as well, no matter what it means, failure is not an option).
Like he hadn't lain there helpless whilst they rearranged most of him cell by cell.
Like she hadn't found herself living in a world just similar enough to feel totally alien to her.
Like he hadn't woken up night after night in a treatment chamber, feeling only marginally less trapped in there than he had in his own charred locked body on the pavement in the park.
Like she hadn't wondered about the fate of her universe, her division, her team, her friend every night in the rare quiet of her own thoughts when she could afford to let them live in her.
Like he hadn't worked side by side with Liv, whilst she was a woman who thought she wasn't the one he knew, whose first reaction on meeting him had been to shut him away in a gas station restroom. At least it hadn't been to shoot him or he'd be stiffed like a sheep.
Like he hadn't felt fear he'd be stuck there too long, that he'd feel the boiling regression of something he shouldn't have – a miracle time and circumstance could still sear from him.
Like he hadn't felt a wrench at her lack of recognition, like she could forget him completely, not important, not needed and not recognised for who he was to her (never will be).
Like she hadn't worked day in and out against the other side as sure as she stood beside them and smiled (reserved, or attempting it) and pushed back her doubt (because they didn't act like the monsters, like soldiers, like her she realized, except in fleeting ways).
Like she hadn't felt fear every time someone asked her an innocuous question - like how she took her coffee – that she couldn't skip over with another of her own (don't leave a footprint, it's not your world, don't leave room for suspicion). She was there for information and for what was theirs to take back (like their world, broken, pieces to slot back together into the system it should be).
Like she hadn't felt she was losing herself in another woman, in another woman's life and another woman's man (not Frank, but not a problem, what did that say of her or who she had become) – another woman she couldn't really be and couldn't let herself think like, even as her thoughts mimicked Olivia's (what to say, what to do, how to stand, who to look to) ontop of her own mostly stifled ones. The only time she felt herself, not their pressed suits Olivia Dunham, was when she had to act out, on the mission, and what it made her into was that soldier she'd expected in them, a missing role she fulfilled for every version of herself somehow.
When Lincoln grins at her and heaves his arm around her shoulder at the end of the day as they walk out (a little too friendly, would Peter accept that? an echo reverberating that no longer belongs) she shakes off vehemently what she hopes is the last vestiges of the other identity inside her head.
He feels firm against her, solid and real. Too close feels kind of right because there is no Peter and thereis her Lincoln. Her partner, her friend, not one of that Olivia's borrowed from a ragtag bunch of colleagues-cum-acquaintances. Her words are still careful, still something hidden from them all, even her team regrettably, yet she can feel freer here than any second in another universe. She belongs here (she thinks, she hopes, doesn't quite feel).
She breathes in the off-balance air she's longed for (now isn't that twisted to miss, but very right to to Liv, to her) and she leans on him, cool and collected. So like him to be completely unphased that's he grown an entirely new skin. He is, she reminds herself, exactly the same underneath it as when she left. Not like her, same skin veined with tainted thoughts now, but she can pretend she is, see herself like he does. Like it never happened and not like she's been through something neither of them could have ever imagined.
When he puts his arm around her shoulder and walks out the door with her, free to roam the city (no time limited tether to the medicenter) he can pretend it's like it never happened. Feeling comfortable again in this new skin as he touches on familiar with her.
Because even though they tell him it's exactly the same physiologically, there is still the memory of more pain than he could comprehend slamming into him at once, unrelenting, a sensation that has numbed him to everything since; all else a drop in an ocean, the tip of a knife not pressing deep enough to cut through the scarred layers. Liv's touch is different, special, the slightest hint a brush with a memory of something else and he feels again for once, as her fingertips press against his hand. She doesn't move to correct his presumptuous almost overbearing contact, leaving him to soak in a gentler warmth from her, one that doesn't burn him up. Like it never happened and not like he's been through something neither of them could have ever imagined.