Spoilers: Everything, specially "Over there."
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Author's notes: Just a very short piece about Olivia in "Over there", mostly a filler, totally unbeta, all mistakes are mine. Not trying anybody, just a bit of analysis on Olivia.
Faith or fate?
Olivia Dunahm stopped believing in God when she was nine; somewhere between the beats her stepfather gave her mother and empting a loaded gun on him make her think that there was no way there was a mighty person outhere who woul allow her to almost kill a person at that age.
If you had asked the day before she would have told you; "Sure, God exists, and Santa and the fairy tooth." She was nine and naïve, the next day she was thirty and disingenuous.
Her mother stayed the whole night at the hospital waiting for news, Rachel sleping in her arms, Olivia didn't know what to do, her mother never really blamed her for what happened but it seemed she wasted her life trying to safe Olivia from a hell she was sure, at that point, didn't exist.
She only went to church on Sundays until she was ten, he mother stopped trying to maker her go after she received her first birthday card.
Faith in God didn't improve for Olivia, in fact, it wen downhill.
Her mother died when Rachel was barely getting to her legal age, before dying her mother gave Olivia her necklace saying it would protect her, from what? Olivia didn't know. She tried to wear it once but she felt like a hypocrit, she just decided to keep it until she knew exactly what to do with it.
Olivia never whined about the life she got, she live it and gave it her best, she never blamed the guy above for any of her missfortunes, she never asked for anything, she knew if she wanted something she would have to get it by herself, that no pray in the world would help at any time, maybe that was why she was so good at been alone, because she knew she really was.
Olivia saw this page marker once, "Footprints in the sand", it was about a person talking to God in a dream, how a set of foorprints always acompany her during her life, but in the most difficult moments there was just one set of prints, God had answered her that on those moments he not lonly was with her, he was carrying her. Olivia thought it was nice, having someone with you, no matter who, in such difficult times, but she didn't quite grasp the idea.
Olivia Dunham, twenty three, had just prosecuted Sanford Harris for raping three women, she was heartbroken, but when she held Ella for the first time she thought that maybe, just maybe, there was someone out there.
The next time Olivia tries to talk to God the man she loves is lying on a hospital gurney, translucent and dying, she doesn't actually get to do it, instead she focuses on finding a connection between flight 627 and Jhon's condition, then she founds Walter Bishop. She knows it was hard work and not some omnipotent presence since Jhon ended up dying anyway.
For the next couple of years Olivia goes backwards and forwards, she sees weird things, she tries to decide if it was God or Walter Bishop who made her how she is, did she have a say in the matter? She sees miracles and tries to decide if it is Walter or God who are responsible for all the damage, but the only thing that she slowly comes to understand is that she is not alone anymore, that he is with her, by Walter or God she doesn't know.
That's also why she hates both of them so much when she sees him glimmering for the first time.
Olivia Dunham, now thirty one talks to God, really talks to him, while drinking her whiskey and figgeting with her morther's necklace, she demands, because she had never asked for anything and so far she hand't got anything in return, because she knows this is out of her and Walter's hands.
"I'm not asking you to be the one who carries me, I'm just asking you to let me get back the person whose footprints have followed mine for the past two years."
The end