21 DREAMS
Summary : Twenty-one nights of a stranger who isn't quite a stranger. Twenty-one dreams she can't seem to remember fully no matter how hard she tries. Twenty-one little ficlets of Peter and Olivia because... these are her dreams. Of him.
Disclaimer : Yeah, it took me three seasons to finally come up with a Fringe fanfiction because I've been busy running and owning the show. NOT.
21 Dreams
One : A Familiar Stranger
"'Livia…"
"'Livia…"
"Olivia!"
She doesn't know where she is, or even when she is, a question she's come to contemplate many times in the past three years of working with Walter Bishop.
She has had many dreams in her thirty-odd years, and just as many nightmares, and the thing about them was that they tended to be a bit… repetitive. So this new dream with this new field and this new voice is almost too much for her, especially after such a long day.
Peter Bishop knows it's been a long day for Olivia, which is precisely why he's been in her head all day long. He'd contemplated going to Walter for help, but he had worried over the possibility of misleading Walter into believing that he was going insane again, and so he had stuck with his first choice – Olivia. Her mind proved to be much stronger than the random few he had experimented on, and so Peter had developed a plan and had waited a long time for this day.
Olivia had gone for at least 36 straight hours without sleep before he had attempted contact. A whispered name here, a 'you know me' there, and he was set. All that he needed was for her to fall asleep and dream and now here they are.
"Olivia."
"Stay there; don't move."
Her voice is hard and cold as her hands automatically move for her gun – her non-existent gun because it simply does not exist, not here; not in this calm night where the curious scent of white tulips sweeten the air.
He is hurt by her words, her tone, and the implications of it all – she does not remember him. Even in this dreamland where his wildest desires had come true as a boy, the one thing he wants more than anything in the world does not come true and Olivia continues to pin him down with a cold and suspicious glare, mild panic in her eyes as she realizes that not only is her gun gone, but her holster, her suit – her entire self.
She is ethereal in white, the gentle breeze picking up a few strands of her light hair to play with. Even without her memories she is more like his Olivia than this new Peter-less Olivia he has observed for the past few weeks and he is glad, because it's the little things that make all the difference.
A second look and her glare is gone. He dares to step forward, one step, and then another, and another; finally, he is hovering just outside of her personal space and she is discomforted, at the very least, by this strange calm that seems to connect them.
It is a while before she can speak the words he is hoping she will not, and yet he admits defeat the moment her lips part to shape the words.
"Who are you?"
A moment; then two. Olivia is impatient and she wants answers, because it is not every night that she has a new dream, and it is certainly not every night that a stranger – a figment of her imagination, most likely – co-stars in it. In her three years at Fringe Division she has come across some strange things, and she's dreamed of a suspect once or twice, though most of them proved to be more than human and so she had never wondered about her… ability.
But here he is, this perfect stranger who has such blue eyes and such brown hair and everything is heightened, even this strange sense of familiarity she cannot even begin to understand.
And then he is gone.
My first Fringe fic!
I am so excited yet uncertain and I hope this will be well received. I have no time at all for anything but this idea would not leave me alone ever since Olivia's confession of her dreams last week and now here I am, a crazy woman on a crazy mission to write twenty-one dreams in twenty-four (give or take) hours before the next episode airs and this defies canon.
There will be twenty-one chapters, little ficlets in their own, each under a thousand words. I hope to gradually built up the word count and maybe slip in a few waking moments, but for now I'm going to go with three weeks' worth of dreams – twenty-one nights of Peter.
Wish me luck, fellow Fringe-fans, as I embark on this crazed and doomed mission.
A review might soothe my insanity, and I am never too busy for a PM. Tweets and e-mails are much appreciated and those who read my homepage make me feel like a rock-star who constantly updates her adoring fans. (Yes, that is a good thing.)
E Salvatore,
October 2011.