'See You Soon' by Jewlz
Summary:
If here was a Hell; then that other briefly glimpsed place was a Heaven where the eyes she stared into had not had the life stolen from them by her own treacherous hands.
S2.02 'Night Of Desirable Objects' AU scenario.
Disclaimer: Don't own anything but a growing herd of plot bunnies.
Spoilers: For 'Desirable Objects'/2.02 ahead! Duck!
Warning: Character death. But no characters were actually harmed in the writing of this fic. Or molebabies.
Unbetaed. My bad, my mistakes. And I apologise for the odd way I wrote this. It insisted. Hope you like, regardless.
A/N:
Loosely inspired by the song 'See You Soon' by Coldplay.
Thanks goes out to wjobsessed for suggesting the Halloween Challenge 2009...I probably would have never gotten up the courage to post anything, ever, if not for it.
And of course typically hectic RL and unexpectedly severe writer's block in the middle interferes; and I'm ridiculously too late for the Halloween Challenge 2009 by the time it's eventually finished. So it's been sitting on my hard drive awaiting the next Halloween season. After some last minute tweaking, here it is...
Truthfully, I don't actually like/have a penchant for 'deathfic'. It's one of my least favorite types of fanfic. But, unlike 'Mary Sues', I do nevertheless read them eventually; and I have read many hauntingly excellent FRINGEy 'deathfics'. And this scenario just wouldn't let me go to this day; despite it being emotionally harrowing to write.
I was rather looking forward to all the angsty post 'Desirable Objects'/2.02 fics I was expecting; but not much has been posted so far. Therefore this is my own humble worst-case scenario offering. For all that this event as it turned out in the ep has seemingly inspired something of a running 'joke' (that I can only pray is not tragic foreshadowing in the show itself) of Peter often being on the wrong end of a gun - usually Olivia's.
Then 'Don't Let Me Go' by Nights Sleepless showed up as an excellent polar-opposite-to-mine-BEST-case-scenario fic. Bravo! That's from such a P/O song...
However, this story – as well as many of the other plots I have brewing – tend to involve scenarios that I would rather NOT see happen within the actual show.
I guess that is my own odd little way of dealing with all the possible possibilities; good or bad. But they're always Peter/Olivia.
So please keep this in mind if you still want to proceed.
Oh, and I've stuck with the now apparently(?) disproved(?) theory that Olivia's short dimension-hopping glimpses were a mind-meld/swap situation with her other self/Alt!Livia; just because it's such a cool plot device. Apparently the writers thought so too, in their own fashion.
But this is a true multiverse situation (nothing to do with Over There) because it's also just too cool a situation not to use.
And now I've just watched the remorse, concern and apology that should have been directed at Peter in or around 'Desirable Objects'/2.02 given readily by Our!Livia for basically just pointing a gun at the Peter-esque guy Over There/Lincoln. Feh! Anyway...I love you to death, Peter/Olivia... I really do! So dear readers, read on and please don't hate me too much...
(I think I might be able to come up with enough of a scene to do another POV/happy chapter, if anyone is interested).
Her brain was yanked sideways without the benefit of her skull following suit.
Blinking back the accompanying blinding flash she was met by the sight of a bullet hole embedded in the fading, cracking wallpaper. The person who was the name that had escaped her lips as soon as the bullet had escaped the muzzle was a bundle of tall taut muscle staring at point blank range at the forehead level impact crater bored therein.
His head whipped back and forth more than once, that endearingly quirky crevasse between his shocked eyebrows forming as she babbled out a string of apologies and excuses.
A rapid succession of emotions - none of which she had ever wanted directed at her for all that she now deserved them – came and went across his expressively handsome face; yet all settled in his intense eyes that were now locked with hers. Especially one emotion.
But she had missed the instinct honed target, for once in her adult life; and she thanked the hitherto not-truly-believed-in deity she had just called upon for the shaking hands that had accompanied the shaking nerves that had caused the incident in the first place. Or had he himself in his evasive maneuvers - in typically arrogant self-confidence - beaten the odds as usual? Or had he broken some physical laws with the ease in which he broke criminal ones? She was thankful for either of them as well, then. In the end it didn't matter...she had missed.
Her brain was yanked sideways without the benefit of her skull following suit.
Blinking back the accompanying blinding flash she was met by the still present sight of the ugly stain that had formed before her eyes on the fading, cracking wallpaper.
The person who was the name that had escaped her lips as soon as the bullet had escaped the muzzle was a long bundle of limp limbs lying where he had fallen.
Where her suddenly blurred eyes fell, drawn inexorably as a sort of self-inflicted wounding; her inability to look away, to otherwise not see, a self-imposed punishment for having inflicted this wound upon him.
But she had seen...and had not seen.
But she had seen...and had not seen.
If here was a Hell; then that other briefly glimpsed place was a Heaven where the eyes she stared into had not had the life stolen from them by her own treacherous hands.
The anger in those beautiful eyes was better than nothing at all. It meant that he was still gloriously alive. And she could...live...with that; just as she hoped her other self could, would. The other her had to have seen this just as clearly then as she did now. Perhaps they had both glimpsed something they needed to see.
And it was because of this she also hoped that the other Peter would forgive the other her for that. As her own Peter could never forgive her for this. She would never forgive herself for this. She deserved the Hell she was in, and any Hell to come (suddenly assuredly believing in that traditional Hell...and Heaven...as she was). Because of her actions her Peter had had the choice of forgiveness taken from him; along with his precious life.
Falling heavily to her failing knees beside him, she felt and heard the injured leg and hip joint groan and pop in protest; the teeth-grinding pain and utter incapacitation the movement caused her willfully ignored as simply physical pain. Cradling the ruin of his genius she gathered him to herself and held him tight; as he had done for her before...before.
But now there was no one there to take away the breaking weight of both agony and emptiness that started deep within and radiated outward; engulfing everything.
The keening sobs she heard were sounding increasingly unhinged.
The keening sobs he heard were sounding increasingly unhinged.
They had to be - the look of shock and, briefly, compassion as he took in the scene before him said as much. She had seen as much in him. Then not unexpectedly, the look on Hughes' face turned panicked as the labored breathing, growling, shuffling she'd heard earlier grew louder behind her. The...thing...was no doubt drawn by the smell of blood and the cries of distress that promised an easy kill. Something she couldn't see clearly was coming from somewhere out of the wall behind her; just as she had suspected, and she didn't need her hypersensitive hearing to know that now. It was an ability - if indeed that's what it was – that would die newborn: along with everything else that had been expected of her from her trip over there that would die unremembered. Wherever that was, though she was fairly certain somehow that it was not the same place she had just glimpsed. Just one of many.
As a decision, just one of many, was made the look on the man's face became something akin to a boy's morbid fascination with a fly caught in an advancing spider's web.
The momentary panic that had been on the sorrow-weathered face was not in fear for himself; but rather over a hurried decision involving her fate.
And how it in turn would affect both him and the thing coming out of the wall.
She...buried...no one might ever find their bodies...Hughes with his boots and his shovel would try to see to that...buried her fingers in his hair.
She...buried...no one might ever find their bodies...Hughes with his boots and his shovel would try to see to that...buried her fingers in his hair.
How easy would it have been to have run her fingers through the thick darkness before now?
With that thought, that contact, her earlier epiphanies of Heaven and Hell - and everything else those concepts implied - came coalescing inside the tiny corner in her mind that was still coherent and clinging instinctually to the concept of him. That place where certain past aspects of her life seemed to be flashing before her at the same glacial pace that current events seemed to be assaulting her outward senses with as well.
It happened complete with the revelations and regrets always implied in the expected experience, and with stunning clarity.
It happened complete with the revelations and regrets always implied in the expected experience, and with stunning clarity:
Matter was energy. Energy never ends, it transforms. That was something even Walter, steeped as he was in the unknowns and improbabilities of fringe science, would surely agree with (Oh, God...Walter...he would never forgive her). Perhaps there was no afterlife; only afterdeath. And the transition, difficult as it might be (the growling was growing louder) was merely to yet another form of life than what she had so recently become familiar with, and what she had always known (reality, dimension, world, universe?).
Perhaps the long held, widespread human belief in life beyond life was just as true as the newer, lesser known concept of multiverses that she knew for a very real fact.
To her, it wasn't just the same unfounded and debatable theory that she had considered an afterlife, or afterdeath, to be.
It was a kind of guilty comfort, believing that they would be more than just a file to be lightly taken over (undrunk) drinks by someone who were strangers to them and their lives.
Other thems had died, other thems would live. If death was merely yet another form of alternate reality which all the thems would eventually experience, even as other thems continued their variations on life until it was their turn; then what kind of reality was it? The 'near-death experience', so often heard about from those few that claimed to have lived to tell the tale; to those many who had yet to participate in that experience...was seemingly as widely universal and yet was as individually nuanced as the multiple lives they lived in the multiple realities in which they dwelled. Or so she thought; she had never paid that much attention to such a thing as a 'near-death experience'...and yet...
Someone like Peter Bishop couldn't just cease to exist, as if they had never existed at all. And neither could she.
Someone like Peter Bishop couldn't just cease to exist, as if they had never existed at all. And neither could she.
She had encountered evil men. He was not one of them. And the man that he had been before, was not the man he was now. Not entirely.
It had been so easy for her to instantly believe in the traditional concept of Heaven and Hell. And where her place now should be in it. And yet...
He didn't deserve Hell, and perhaps...she didn't either. She herself was not the same woman she had been before. Not entirely. In no small part due to his presence in her life.
Had it indeed been a mutual transformation? A feeling of forgiveness...from herself, from a deity, from him...from all three perhaps...descended upon her.
"Innermost subtle consciousness is ever present. It never leaves the body even in death." His voice, a vivid memory, of something they'd been so sure of in their shared doubt.
An uncanny, yet familiar, calm had already enfolded her despite the outward situation. And the uncanny, yet familiar, strength had come with it...taking away the agony and emptiness. Her keening sobs had since fallen silent; leaving only the sound of the labored breathing of others, still drawing nearer.
She bent her head, her cheek brushing for the first and the last time against his stubble, and past the nick in his cheek.
She bent her head, her cheek brushing for the first and the last time against his stubble, and past the nick in his cheek.
She'd never bothered to ask about how he'd acquired it. It was something, like all those things, always meant for later: when the time was right, when things were different...a twin trail of tears washed the regret down her face. Her lips came to his now unhearing ear; but she was now content to believe he somehow heard her nevertheless.
This was not the way she had waited, wanted, to someday say these words to him in a low, now cracked voice. But 'someday' was no longer an option for her.
Not in the way she had long believed it would be, anyway. She swallowed hard, and made her rictus frozen lips move.
"Tell that to Peter. You're going to need him by your side." Another, less vivid memory, of another man's voice, barely surfacing, finally, now...too late but no less relevant.
She prayed for the first time in a long time that the other Olivia would take advantage of her precious opportunity to say this and more to her Peter; the way it was meant to be said. Prayed that, having seen what she had, that the other her wouldn't take the easy and familiar path and close herself off from him, from herself, which would come to no good whatsoever.
That she would know...or rather, if they were anything alike, finally acknowledge...that she would need him by her side; just as she did hers. And that he, too, would be there. Always.
Then Olivia prayed, still in a silent shout; that her fresh and strong belief in a different sort of someday, of somewhere, for herself and her Peter wasn't actually unfounded after all.
What was whispered was meant only for him.
What was whispered was meant only for him; and not the predator (and the accomplice) drawing ever nearer for the eventual kill. Kill...kill...calm...strong...love. Of course.
Her blood-slicked hand tightened its grip on the now hated gun, the renewed trembling quelled even as it started. Her finger was on the trigger as she took one last voluntarily deep breath past clenched teeth. The situation, the scene, thoroughly analyzed. Just like always. And then, the conclusion: One would be ended before the other ended this.
She wouldn't miss.
"See you soon, Sweetheart".
*********************************** So you lost your trust
And you never should have...
And when all you want is friends...
So they came for you
They came snapping at your heels
They come snapping at your heels...
But don't break your back
If you ever say this...
In a bullet proof vest
With the windows all closed
I'll be doing my best
I'll see you soon...