Fandom: Fringe

Relationships: Peter Bishop/Alternate Lincoln Lee, Alternate Olivia Dunham/Alternate Frank Stanton

Characters: Peter Bishop, Alternate Lincoln Lee, Alternate Olivia Dunham, Alternate Charlie Francis

Additional Tags: Not a Love Story

Summary: He was living, Peter thought balefully, in a Talking Heads song. This was not his beautiful house, Olivia was not his beautiful wife. "And you may ask yourself," he said aloud, "well...how did I get here?"

The universe disdainfully refused to answer.

Notes: Written for smallearthcat for Fandom Growth Exchange 2015. AU post- 4x09 "Enemy of My Enemy" when Peter learns the Redverse isn't all that bad; Olivia doesn't regain her memories of the previous timeline.

Thanks to Rainer for first early read and initial Peter-wrangling. Many thanks to Sam for beta and Elfin for support and a kick in the ending!

Peter's first reaction at being pulled back from oblivion: horror at finding himself in a place where no one knew him.

His second: determination to fix what was so obviously broken.

His third: nothing less than sheer gut-wrenching terror at the understanding that this wasn't his world, and the Fringe agent who eyed him so suspiciously wasn't his Olivia. He was the one out of place, and nothing about this world needed "fixing." Olivia clearly didn't. Walter needed the help, but Walter wasn't even willing to look at him. Astrid was the same as she always was, only more so. Broyles, precisely the same. And if Lincoln Lee wasn't exactly the same agent Peter met during the Dana Gray case, he was similar enough to have integrated himself into Fringe Division without significant difficulty.

For a brief period Peter found a measure of solace in the idea that his own world was still out there, somewhere, and he'd simply...emerged in the wrong place. Another alternate universe, slightly off-kilter from his own. His Olivia could still be out there. His Walter, his Lincoln, his life.

He clung to that belief until both Walter and Walternate examined the machine in depth and concluded that no, there was no way this device could have yanked him from yet another reality it had no connection to; and furthermore, they'd found no evidence of universes beyond their two (although Walter said it grudgingly, unwilling to eliminate the possibility entirely).

Which meant that he was trapped here. And that fact made him tired and confused, because why the hell would he have reappeared here if it wasn't where he was meant to be? It might've been more appropriate if he'd emerged from Reiden Lake in Walternate's universe. He'd been born there, so it would've made some kind of cosmic sense to find himself "reborn" in that world. But he'd appeared here, in this universe that he'd adopted for his own, so much like the world he remembered except for a few small details.

The small details that meant everything to him, but nothing to anyone else.

It was, Peter finally came to understand, a matter of time rather than space. At the most basic level, his presence in what he was coming to think of as the previous timeline had been an anomaly. He'd been meant to die as a child but survived through an improbable intercession. In the wake of his disappearance, the whole universe course-corrected to how things should have been all along. A world without Peter Bishop, the way it was meant to be.

It was enough to make a man vomit up his dinner and he did, holding on to the toilet bowl for dear life while his guts tried to evacuate the body that shouldn't even be here. But he is here. And after Peter stopped heaving and cleaned himself up, he sat down in the big chair to think about that.

He is here.

"I exist," Peter said softly into the empty house. It felt good, almost essential, to say it out loud. Because it followed there must be a reason for his reappearance. If he was never supposed to be here, there would be no rationale for his sudden arrival. But if—

Given that he had lived and therefore impacted the timeline, perhaps it was reasonable to assume that time had then reconfigured around him, leading up to...a giant course correction. Maybe he'd been meant to die (discorporate, whatever) in the machine, his destiny fulfilled by merging the two worlds. That meant he did have a purpose, even in retrospect. It was a tempting hypothesis—the bridge, after all, still stood as a connection and hope of peace between the two worlds. From what he'd been able to gather, those events came about slightly differently in this timeline...the universe again correcting for his being missing. But he'd needed to exist in the first place to begin that cycle.

It was circular, chicken-and-egg logic at best. But that didn't make it impossible. Peter had learned that throughout his time with Fringe Division.

So for the sake of his own sanity, he had to believe that there was a reason he came back. And if it wasn't to fix things—he wasn't so arrogant to believe an entire universe needed fixing just to put him back in place—then there might be no choice other than to accept where he was and go on from here.

He'd scream about that until his throat gave out, if the outburst wouldn't attract the attention of the FBI guard so-helpfully stationed outside.

He was living, Peter thought balefully, in a Talking Heads song. This was not his beautiful house, Olivia was not his beautiful wife. "And you may ask yourself," he said aloud, "well...how did I get here?"

The universe disdainfully refused to answer.