fic: on your gun barrel, you see the general fear (fringe)
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear
fringe. an outline of time spent between worlds. olivia; olivia/alt!charlie, olivia/charlie, olivia/peter. rated pg. 1763 words.
notes: happy birthday, vega_ofthe_lyre! i am 99% sure you getting into this fandom coupled with the start of season three is what drove me to write this, haha. um, general spoilers through the season three premiere with a nod to the promo for next week's episode.
here are your bones
crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate’s flag, bravely specific
and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
(FRANK O’HARA)
She saw Peter first.
Like everything else, her journey in this world starts with Peter.
She spots him downtown, and the dissolution of the new Olivia Dunham, the one with a mother still alive, the one who shares a bed with a man she calls her boyfriend, the one with Charlie still at her side, begins.
The last thing she remembers seeing is Charlie. He raised a loaded gun.
They let her live.
Only Walter, she will think (and she will think this later, much later than this), could possibly understand the cruelty of a sentence like this: trapped and left to live in a world not your own, where strangers take the faces of family, friends, lovers.
Charlie takes her home.
There was a job down in South America once. Drug runners, cocaine, the persistent beat of helicopters circling over their heads, FBI stenciled in white across her back.
She finds herself thinking of that job a lot, in idle moments, during television shows she does not recognize, city walks that turn into confused sojourns through unfamiliar landmarks. It was a failure, or at least it was rubber-stamped as such back at the bureau in DC once they returned to their black SUVs in the states.
She can recall Charlie at the airport. The day had been sunny but a storm front was moving in fast, a ledge of gray shifting forward across the sky. They had walked together through the parking lot, shared a ride back into the city, and as they approached his car, he had turned to her.
“You’re a good bet to have in a pinch, Liv,” he said. She had smiled just before the first distant clap of thunder.
She had pantomimed a gun with her thumb and index finger, and he laughed.
Olivia bumped her shoulder against his as she wound around to the passenger side. Their fingers might have touched.
This Charlie says her name the same way the Charlie she used to know would: a gruffness belied by a certain amount of tenderness, her name stained with soft emotion she never thought to catalog and label.
In a moment of weakness, her hair still long and red, she tells him: I missed you.
Charlie smirks, the well-worn lines around his eyes familiar, almost comforting.
“Nah,” he tells her, “you don’t miss me. Per se. Still catching up with all this time travel, Twilight Zone, multiple universe lingo, you know? Enough to send a man around the bend.” He looks down for a second, studies his hands, the tumbler clasped between them, silent for a beat. “You didn’t miss me, kid.”
What Olivia says next is bred from a similar weakness, one she pushed down good and deep when in places familiar, among people she knew and who knew her.
“Can we pretend?” she asks, voice quiet but steady. He raises his chin and looks at her, eyes dark and face cast in half a shadow, the lined scars across marking him as someone different, proving the futility of what she asks. “Just once. Can you let me pretend.”
He doesn’t answer. There is a small tic in his jaw as his teeth grind, but he doesn’t say anything, not even her name.
And that’s so like Charlie, she lets herself think. That's so like him.
He asks more questions than she does. She is patient with him, or at least this is what she thinks, though in reality, this reality, he is easily the more patient party.
“In your world,” Charlie starts, and then he pauses. “In your world, were you and him, you and me, fuck, man, I don’t even know how to phrase the question.”
Olivia helps him. She shakes her head. She thinks about telling Charlie, this Charlie, how there was never any room for that. There had been John, and there had been his wife, and then there was Peter, whatever it was Peter became for her: his lips on hers a ghost of a memory, a memory that tangles with other memories not her own, and it confuses her. But she can still remember some things: that sticky, sweaty stretch of summer they spent in South America, the fetid stench of jungle mixed thick with gunpowder and perspiration.
She doesn’t ask him the same question in return. She is sure she already knows the answer.
“I was a blonde,” she tells him. He cocks his head to the left.
“Ah, you don’t say,” he says. Olivia doesn’t fight the small smile that knocks the corners of her mouth upward. “It look real nice on you?”
“I never got any complaints,” she teases.
He hums his assent, but his face is still quizzical as he looks at her. “I can’t even imagine it,” he says quietly. Olivia stands there, the kitchen table a buffer between them, all that stands between their two universes and the ever present threat of collision. She feels self-conscious in this moment - the low, animal gurgle of the coffeepot as it struggles to spit out the day’s hot liquid, the quiet clicking of the clock mounted on the wall above a calendar, too much time left to hang on a single strip of drywall, the general drone of the large apartment building: pipes that creak inside the walls, the steady thrum of the heat as warm air drifts down from the open vents. She knows in that moment he is not thinking of her, not really, his eyes unforgiving and focused on that long veil of hair.
She doesn’t tell him that he looks different to her. The Charlie she knew dressed immaculately, the quick snap of leather gloves and long wool coats. His face was clear of any scars and a gold wedding ring encircled the fourth finger on his left hand.
There are memories she has collected now, and sometimes, some nights, she can’t recall which Charlie to attribute them to. Some memories are easy, the memories couched in events and other people. The conversations are more difficult, the small, familiar gestures between them even more so.
One of them likes the fit of her elbow in the palm of his hand. Maybe it’s both of them. Maybe they both like that.
The first time he calls her Livvy, he’s touching her face.
He’s more gentle with her than she ever thought he could be, and she thinks maybe that’s unfair. But even then, his fingers ghosting down the side of her jaw, back up again to tuck a strand of darker hair behind her ear, she finds herself thinking of the other, thinking of a different man, and she is sure she would have made a similar judgement about him as well.
She can’t decide if that makes this more fair, or less.
(But in a hospital room, in a hospital, the same day he died, and it’s so strange, isn’t it? Charlie died, yet here he is, but it isn’t him, it’s not the same man who died that day, at the hospital, the same day he pressed his hand to her head, so firm, the heat and the pressure against her hair, all that blonde, and maybe, maybe, it goes farther than that, they have gone farther than that, and she is no longer the same woman who had laid there and said, Charlie, I am so afraid).
“Smile for me,” Charlie says, and his hand falls from her face.
And she does, a little half crescent of a grin, her front teeth barely showing. He shades his disappointment with concern; she will never ask him if he misses her.
In his bed she tells him things she should not share.
With his skin under mouth, pockmarked by violence he does not explain, she tells him that she shot Charlie in the head in an alley.
His hand stills at the nape of her neck, long strands of her hair caught and knotted around his knuckles.
“That’s how I died?” he asks, voice thick and husky. He says I too naturally; the city lights here are dimmer than back home, his room is bathed in a muted blue glow, and she knows he can’t see her face, can’t see the rapid way she blinks her eyes, holds a hand up to her mouth.
“Not you,” she murmurs into his chest, her nose bumping along each notch of boned rib. “There was another, they took him. He had your face,” but she doesn’t bother to explain further.
He kisses her, too brutal to be an appeasement, and she kisses back just as bruising in kind. When he drags her body over his, finds the way they slot together, the rough burn of used flesh against flesh, his name remains stillborn, lodged in her throat. She blinks fast.
Charlie had come for her first, self defense fueling her adrenaline, the revelation it’s not him it’s not him deafening in her head.
And then her gun went off, his blood and the graffitied wall.
When she does leave, when she returns because return she must, she finds herself confused. She tries to tell Peter about it, only once, and if the words hurt him, they don’t make any sense to her.
“I can’t remember which Charlie it was,” she says then trails off, and Peter frowns.
“Which Charlie was what?” He has to know the end of that sentence, she thinks. She hedges her bets; she doesn’t answer. Peter’s frown deepens, and she is sorry for that, but she doesn’t say anything to soothe the wrinkles embedded in his forehead, between his eyebrows, around his mouth as it turns sour and down.
They trapped her there for eight months. She can't remember which one she loved first.
On a different continent, sweat dripped in a line down her neck and into her shirt. The velcro of her bulletproof vest was noisy against her as she moved further into the jungle. Charlie reached for her; he drew a line down her arm, a line as neat and invisible as the same bead of sweat slicking down her throat.
She thinks it had been a jungle. Maybe it had been his kitchen.
Charlie drew a line straight down and he divided her in half.
fin.
fringe. an outline of time spent between worlds. olivia; olivia/alt!charlie, olivia/charlie, olivia/peter. rated pg. 1763 words.
notes: happy birthday, vega_ofthe_lyre! i am 99% sure you getting into this fandom coupled with the start of season three is what drove me to write this, haha. um, general spoilers through the season three premiere with a nod to the promo for next week's episode.
here are your bones
crossed on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate’s flag, bravely specific
and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
(FRANK O’HARA)
She saw Peter first.
Like everything else, her journey in this world starts with Peter.
She spots him downtown, and the dissolution of the new Olivia Dunham, the one with a mother still alive, the one who shares a bed with a man she calls her boyfriend, the one with Charlie still at her side, begins.
The last thing she remembers seeing is Charlie. He raised a loaded gun.
They let her live.
Only Walter, she will think (and she will think this later, much later than this), could possibly understand the cruelty of a sentence like this: trapped and left to live in a world not your own, where strangers take the faces of family, friends, lovers.
Charlie takes her home.
There was a job down in South America once. Drug runners, cocaine, the persistent beat of helicopters circling over their heads, FBI stenciled in white across her back.
She finds herself thinking of that job a lot, in idle moments, during television shows she does not recognize, city walks that turn into confused sojourns through unfamiliar landmarks. It was a failure, or at least it was rubber-stamped as such back at the bureau in DC once they returned to their black SUVs in the states.
She can recall Charlie at the airport. The day had been sunny but a storm front was moving in fast, a ledge of gray shifting forward across the sky. They had walked together through the parking lot, shared a ride back into the city, and as they approached his car, he had turned to her.
“You’re a good bet to have in a pinch, Liv,” he said. She had smiled just before the first distant clap of thunder.
She had pantomimed a gun with her thumb and index finger, and he laughed.
Olivia bumped her shoulder against his as she wound around to the passenger side. Their fingers might have touched.
This Charlie says her name the same way the Charlie she used to know would: a gruffness belied by a certain amount of tenderness, her name stained with soft emotion she never thought to catalog and label.
In a moment of weakness, her hair still long and red, she tells him: I missed you.
Charlie smirks, the well-worn lines around his eyes familiar, almost comforting.
“Nah,” he tells her, “you don’t miss me. Per se. Still catching up with all this time travel, Twilight Zone, multiple universe lingo, you know? Enough to send a man around the bend.” He looks down for a second, studies his hands, the tumbler clasped between them, silent for a beat. “You didn’t miss me, kid.”
What Olivia says next is bred from a similar weakness, one she pushed down good and deep when in places familiar, among people she knew and who knew her.
“Can we pretend?” she asks, voice quiet but steady. He raises his chin and looks at her, eyes dark and face cast in half a shadow, the lined scars across marking him as someone different, proving the futility of what she asks. “Just once. Can you let me pretend.”
He doesn’t answer. There is a small tic in his jaw as his teeth grind, but he doesn’t say anything, not even her name.
And that’s so like Charlie, she lets herself think. That's so like him.
He asks more questions than she does. She is patient with him, or at least this is what she thinks, though in reality, this reality, he is easily the more patient party.
“In your world,” Charlie starts, and then he pauses. “In your world, were you and him, you and me, fuck, man, I don’t even know how to phrase the question.”
Olivia helps him. She shakes her head. She thinks about telling Charlie, this Charlie, how there was never any room for that. There had been John, and there had been his wife, and then there was Peter, whatever it was Peter became for her: his lips on hers a ghost of a memory, a memory that tangles with other memories not her own, and it confuses her. But she can still remember some things: that sticky, sweaty stretch of summer they spent in South America, the fetid stench of jungle mixed thick with gunpowder and perspiration.
She doesn’t ask him the same question in return. She is sure she already knows the answer.
“I was a blonde,” she tells him. He cocks his head to the left.
“Ah, you don’t say,” he says. Olivia doesn’t fight the small smile that knocks the corners of her mouth upward. “It look real nice on you?”
“I never got any complaints,” she teases.
He hums his assent, but his face is still quizzical as he looks at her. “I can’t even imagine it,” he says quietly. Olivia stands there, the kitchen table a buffer between them, all that stands between their two universes and the ever present threat of collision. She feels self-conscious in this moment - the low, animal gurgle of the coffeepot as it struggles to spit out the day’s hot liquid, the quiet clicking of the clock mounted on the wall above a calendar, too much time left to hang on a single strip of drywall, the general drone of the large apartment building: pipes that creak inside the walls, the steady thrum of the heat as warm air drifts down from the open vents. She knows in that moment he is not thinking of her, not really, his eyes unforgiving and focused on that long veil of hair.
She doesn’t tell him that he looks different to her. The Charlie she knew dressed immaculately, the quick snap of leather gloves and long wool coats. His face was clear of any scars and a gold wedding ring encircled the fourth finger on his left hand.
There are memories she has collected now, and sometimes, some nights, she can’t recall which Charlie to attribute them to. Some memories are easy, the memories couched in events and other people. The conversations are more difficult, the small, familiar gestures between them even more so.
One of them likes the fit of her elbow in the palm of his hand. Maybe it’s both of them. Maybe they both like that.
The first time he calls her Livvy, he’s touching her face.
He’s more gentle with her than she ever thought he could be, and she thinks maybe that’s unfair. But even then, his fingers ghosting down the side of her jaw, back up again to tuck a strand of darker hair behind her ear, she finds herself thinking of the other, thinking of a different man, and she is sure she would have made a similar judgement about him as well.
She can’t decide if that makes this more fair, or less.
(But in a hospital room, in a hospital, the same day he died, and it’s so strange, isn’t it? Charlie died, yet here he is, but it isn’t him, it’s not the same man who died that day, at the hospital, the same day he pressed his hand to her head, so firm, the heat and the pressure against her hair, all that blonde, and maybe, maybe, it goes farther than that, they have gone farther than that, and she is no longer the same woman who had laid there and said, Charlie, I am so afraid).
“Smile for me,” Charlie says, and his hand falls from her face.
And she does, a little half crescent of a grin, her front teeth barely showing. He shades his disappointment with concern; she will never ask him if he misses her.
In his bed she tells him things she should not share.
With his skin under mouth, pockmarked by violence he does not explain, she tells him that she shot Charlie in the head in an alley.
His hand stills at the nape of her neck, long strands of her hair caught and knotted around his knuckles.
“That’s how I died?” he asks, voice thick and husky. He says I too naturally; the city lights here are dimmer than back home, his room is bathed in a muted blue glow, and she knows he can’t see her face, can’t see the rapid way she blinks her eyes, holds a hand up to her mouth.
“Not you,” she murmurs into his chest, her nose bumping along each notch of boned rib. “There was another, they took him. He had your face,” but she doesn’t bother to explain further.
He kisses her, too brutal to be an appeasement, and she kisses back just as bruising in kind. When he drags her body over his, finds the way they slot together, the rough burn of used flesh against flesh, his name remains stillborn, lodged in her throat. She blinks fast.
Charlie had come for her first, self defense fueling her adrenaline, the revelation it’s not him it’s not him deafening in her head.
And then her gun went off, his blood and the graffitied wall.
When she does leave, when she returns because return she must, she finds herself confused. She tries to tell Peter about it, only once, and if the words hurt him, they don’t make any sense to her.
“I can’t remember which Charlie it was,” she says then trails off, and Peter frowns.
“Which Charlie was what?” He has to know the end of that sentence, she thinks. She hedges her bets; she doesn’t answer. Peter’s frown deepens, and she is sorry for that, but she doesn’t say anything to soothe the wrinkles embedded in his forehead, between his eyebrows, around his mouth as it turns sour and down.
They trapped her there for eight months. She can't remember which one she loved first.
On a different continent, sweat dripped in a line down her neck and into her shirt. The velcro of her bulletproof vest was noisy against her as she moved further into the jungle. Charlie reached for her; he drew a line down her arm, a line as neat and invisible as the same bead of sweat slicking down her throat.
She thinks it had been a jungle. Maybe it had been his kitchen.
Charlie drew a line straight down and he divided her in half.
fin.