Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Fandom: Fringe
Characters: Olivia Dunham, Alternate Charlie Francis
Summary: Walking with your ghost.
Notes: Written for Everywoman 2015 for APgeeksout. A missing scene post-"One Night in October."
Given the relative success of the McClennan case, hastily assembled oversight committees on both sides insisted that the two universes connected by the bridge room under the Statue of Liberty must continue to work together. The reward for a job well done, Olivia thought sourly, meant more of the same.
The next assignment involved scanning locations in both worlds where fringe events had occurred to compare readings. Logistically, it was deemed sufficient to limit the comparative scans to the area around Manhattan, since the other side's Manhatan had been comprehensively examined over the years. In return, Olivia's team would receive event-detection equipment and the training to use it. "Equipment" meant a hand-held scanner that Walter was already frantic to take apart; "training" meant one of their agents would be sent over to visit the sites and show Olivia how everything worked.
She expected the other Agent Dunham and braced herself for a difficult day. Working with the people who tried to destroy their universe was hard enough without contending with her smirking doppelganger. The woman who'd stolen her place in the universe for weeks.
Olivia had done it before, she would bear through. But someone belatedly realized that bad blood meant bad allies, so they sent a new liaison. Not the other Olivia Dunham. Not Captain Lee, who'd at least been a neutral, competent presence.
They sent her Charlie Francis.
She knew better to assume the alternates were anything like the people on her side. Her doppelganger emphatically wasn't, and their Walter Bishop was an attempted mass murderer.
But the others in their division hadn't known anything about Walternate's plan for the machine, or the mission he'd set for their Dunham. They didn't know about Olivia's abduction, incarceration, and replacement. Every time Colonel Broyles spoke, it was like hearing her own boss. Captain Lee wasn't much like the Lincoln Lee she'd recently met on her side, at least superficially, but he'd been professional in their interactions. Their Agent Farnsworth was decidedly different, though clearly as dedicated to her Fringe Division.
Their Agent Francis deserved fair consideration, at the very least.
He walked through the doorway to his world and Olivia's breath caught, just for a second. She saw her friend, dead these three years—
No. Her Charlie always wore suits, using them as camouflage against his Bronx tenement upbringing that no one cared about but him. This man wore the khakis ubiquitous to the Fringe Division on his side, and he looked entirely comfortable in them. He had a scar on his cheek, twisting up toward his eye. And he swaggered.
Agent Francis looked at her with a too-familiar lopsided smirk. "No need for bona fides. I'd guess this is as weird for you." He paused. "Maybe more."
She cleared her throat. "We should get to work."
He gestured with exaggerated courtesy, clearly under orders to be on his best behavior. "Lead on."
The first stop was at a construction site in Brooklyn where a mysterious metallic cylinder had burst through the ground, killing three people and injuring two dozen more. Olivia waved toward the area. "We determined that the cylinder was a transmitter of some kind, but we couldn't decode the signal before it buried itself again."
Charlie—no, Agent Francis, she had to keep that distinction very clear—surveyed the still-abandoned site, shaking his head. "Doesn't ring a bell. But we knew some events haven't manifested on both sides." He strode forward, holding out the scanner. "Okay, this is so easy they even let me do it. You press this button here on the side and wave it over the area."
A fine mist spilled out of the device. "What's the vapor composition?" Olivia asked, mindful of Walter's probable questions.
"Got me. It's all in the documentation, though." Francis clicked another button and the twin bars began to glow with violet light, like a black light lamp. "Wave it around and the more red cracks appear in the air, the more trouble you're in."
Olivia raised an eyebrow. "That's the technical terminology?"
Francis snorted. "There's a scale to determine order of magnitude. Like here, there's barely any red cracks left, that indicates a residual event. This was what, three years ago?"
"Almost exactly," Olivia said, surprised.
Agent Francis nodded. "You get a feel for it after a while." He paused. "Well, we did. Let's hope you can get by without that particular skill set here."
The honest hope in his voice shook her. "You...don't blame our side for the disruptions?"
He glanced at her, shrugging easily. "I looked over the comparative history briefs. Supposedly the Zero Event happened in 1985, but there are divergences going back long before that. Your Kennedy assassination—and Jesus, excuse me, but what a goddamn horrible thing—and the states entered the union in a different order and with different names. I don't see what your people had to do with any of that." He turned off the scanner and stowed it on his belt, brushing at his hands. "I can't even imagine how you got Texas to agree to be one state. Our North and South versions are practically fighting their own civil war."
He sounded professional and casual at the same time, interspersing his comments with wry observations. Just like...
No, not just like. He wasn't her Charlie. She'd never had dinner with this Charlie Francis and his wife, spent time on the firing range with him, waited alongside him for the go signal on a target with a tac team. She'd never trusted him with her life.
Olivia jerked her head toward the car. "Let's go. Lot of places to see today."
They visited other sites in Brooklyn, including the Rosencrantz Building and Franklin Street Station. No particular event had occurred over here at the latter site, but Agent Francis took readings to fill out the data set. "I'd just as soon skip the Empire State Building, though," Francis told her, looking uneasy. "You don't have an airship dock there anyway, and that case was all about bugs." He shuddered, then glanced at the chrono on his wrist. "Speaking of."
She watched as he placed a sleek injector against his arm. "Arachnid infection," he said easily enough, but it threw her off balance.
"Hybrid creature?" she asked. "Our team encountered one too."
"Yeah."
The information wasn't strictly essential, and therefore not required by the bounds of the treaty. Olivia cleared her throat. "We used the creature's own blood to kill the larvae."
Agent Francis sighed, his expression rueful. "Our docs whipped up an inhibitor. Can't use the same trick, we burned our critter to ashes."
Olivia drove over to a parking structure in Queens, where Tyler Carson had compelled four people to kill themselves. "Yeah, I worked this one. Creepy little fu— uh, brat," Francis said with disgust.
"Does that happen a lot on your side? People developing abilities?"
"Happens enough to keep us busy." Francis handed over the scanner. "Here, you try it."
She duplicated the procedure, with much the same results. Francis nodded his approval. "Yeah. Most fringe events, the one-off things, don't leave a lot of evidence. The big disruptions—vortexes, gravity anomalies, the really fun stuff—you get much bigger readings, even years after the fact. 'Course, on our side most of those are covered in Amber."
He said it casually enough, but Olivia could tell just how deeply the whole process offended him. Particularly, she thought, when it came to the innocent people who'd been trapped inside when the anomalies were contained.
They headed into Manhattan, a hub of events on both sides. Two sites in particular—an architecture firm and the Brayson Place Hotel—contained especially strong residual indicators. "This was in 2010. These were our first known world-merge events," Olivia told Agent Francis. "We couldn't do a thing to stop them. If they'd continued..." she trailed off.
"I was working this on the other side. We Ambered the whole thing." Francis looked grim. "Liv—Agent Dunham, sorry—do you think the eggheads are gonna be able to sort all this out?"
"If they don't," she told him, more fiercely than she'd intended, "we will."
He stared at her for a moment, then cracked a broad grin. "Damn right."
They took readings at Bell Plaza (the square was a park on his side, Agent Francis told her) and as a last stop, Madison Square Garden.
Agent Francis stared, wide eyed, as they walked through the Garden. "This...this is all under Amber." He swallowed hard. "I gotta say, being here is creepy as hell."
"Tell me," Olivia said softly.
He nodded his head with a jerk. "I'd just joined the FBI that year. Hotshot young agent, was gonna change the world." He waved his hand in complete dismissal of his own youthful arrogance. "I was still paying off law school, though, not a lot of free cash. That saved my life."
Olivia tilted her head in question. Francis went on. "Billy Joel was playing for New Year's in 1999. I would've given my teeth for tickets if anyone had been selling. But just to make sure the year ended on the crappiest note possible, a wormhole opened up right in the middle of the concert. The broadcast cut out as soon as someone realized what was happening, but...not soon enough." He shuddered, his whole body recoiling in remembered horror. "There wasn't any choice but to quarantine the whole thing. Ten thousand people." He glanced around again at the echoing space. "Pardon my French, but let's do the thing and get the fuck out of here."
As soon as they got back into open air, Francis—Charlie—glanced at her. "And now I'm starving. Any chance of a bite before you kick me out of your universe?"
Her friend always had to remind her to eat, too. "Sure. Any preference?"
"I got an idea," he said, far too casually. They took the A train from Penn down to Greenwich Village and walked a few blocks, ending up at a place called simply Joe's Pizza.
"Trust me," he said, confidently leading the way. He ordered a plain cheese pie, no frills: the way, as he put it, that God intended. It was just as well the place didn't serve alcohol. Olivia really could have gone for a pitcher, but she settled for a cream soda instead.
"I heard," she said, "that you've recently gotten married. Congratulations."
He laughed. "Cross-dimensional gossip. Don't know if that's a good idea. But thanks."
The pizza arrived, steam still rising from the bubbling cheese. She took a careful bite, swallowed, and looked down at the rest of her slice with surprise. "This is really good."
Charlie grinned. "Had a bet with Linc about the comparison between your side's pizza and ours. Gotta say, it's a draw. I'm shocked you didn't know about Joe's, though." He snapped his slightly greasy fingers before she could reply. "That's right, you're based in Boston. Too bad for you."
Olivia nearly let herself laugh before she remembered—
She laughed anyway. He wasn't her Charlie. He was entirely his own.
There'd been a question behind his eyes all day. He wanted to know and he didn't want to ask.
"He was like you," Olivia finally said. "He was a lot like you."
Notes:
An unstable wormhole at the Madison Square Garden that would not close was quarantined by Fringe Division in 1999. Due to recent legal developments, the 10,000 citizens encased in quarantine amber have been recently ruled legally dead. — "Over There, Part 2"
Billy Joel played a four-hour concert at Madison Square Garden for New Year's 1999, dubbed "The Night of Two Thousand Years."
I just saw Billy Joel at MSG, and that event provided a timely (if morbid) keystone for this fic. Sorry, BJ! You're still rock & roll to me.
Joe's is only one of the many great NY pizza places.