Measures of Despair (Fringe fan fiction/Part 1)
Olivia and Peter sat down across from the woman, who even now, having spent five days in a different universe, seemed mentally still back in her own. "Shocked" did not adequately describe her condition.
The woman looked up at last, the first time she had even glanced at either of them since they had entered the room.
"You've got to understand," she began in a quiet voice. "Where I come from this woman can't stand me, despite how I feel about her. And yet I come to in a very strange place to find out in this world I'm dead and the person I love not only loves me back, but is in mourning for me."
Olivia said nothing as the woman stopped talking. She rarely acknowledged her own emotions, much less others, so she had no way to respond. More than anything else, she wanted to figure out how this woman had traveled from one universe to the other, with only herself and (as far as Olivia knew) nothing else, including any possibility of Cortixiphan being in her system. Of course, that would really be for Walter to determine.
Peter spoke when it became apparent no one else was going to do so.
"Ms. Holloway, we would like to find out how this all happened as much as you would. This isn't something you may want to consider, but I just want to see if it's a possibility, if you would be willing to be checked out by another place besides the hospital, a safe and secure place where someone more experienced who can very possibly discover and explain what's going on."
"What kind of place?" Wariness and sadness battled for control of her face.
Peter wished Walter was here with them. Though his father could unnerve or annoy a lot of people he met, Peter didn't doubt for a second this woman would be more than okay with Walter. She shared some of his fragility. Still, it was with some hedging that he answered, "My father's laboratory."
He might as well have said the words with a bad Boris Karloff imitation for how obviously uncomfortable they made her.
"But he knows what he’s doing," Olivia added. “And he won't hurt you."
Ms. Holloway, Marty Halloway, played with her hands, the bandages on her wrists very possibly a clue to how she had handed up here, or so Peter imagined Walter theorizing.
A woman who had clearly attempted suicide on her earth ending up on this one where her counterpart had just recently died under similar circumstances could not just be a coincidence. They had worked more than one case involving universe counterparts and how they affected each other before.
The silence somehow did not get awkward. It actually said more than any words she could have used would have.
Olivia and Peter had met not only police at the hospital, but a very drawn and confused looking woman who had insisted Marty had somehow survived a death she had seen herself.
Even now, five days later, the woman refused, sincerely yet also quite arrogantly, to leave the hospital, despite not being allowed to visit.
"Why not?" Ms. Holloway finally said. "It can't be any worse than here, assuming, of course, I'm allowed to leave."
Driving to the lab, Olivia at the wheel and Ms. Holloway in the back seat behind the driver's side, Peter worried that maybe Walter might have trouble dealing with someone who had tried to kill herself.
On the other hand, it might also lead to compassion on his part, and Walter did have a gentle strength that still surprised Peter after these years.
Lena continued to sit in the waiting room, having no clue what was going on and finding it maddening that she probably never would, ever. If she and Marty had been married, maybe she would have had more weight to pull in getting to see her, but, somehow, she doubted even that would help.
Something very, very bizarre and totally out of her control had made sure of that.
She only even knew about Marty because of the crowd that had appeared at the entrance to her apartment building as she was returning from a long walk to think out things.
For a second, as the crowd parted, she had seen that shockingly familiar hair, the kind of real red hair she used to joke with Marty only came to someone once in a lifetime, and that frail, yet lithe figure that had always called out to the protective side in her. Two police officers gently held on to her arms, Marty in between them.
Marty had conveniently happened to look up at the same time and her already pale face went even paler upon seeing Lena. Lena would have gone pale, too, except that her grief had numbed her to any kind of shock these days.
Had she passed out last night after drinking a full bottle of wine? (Did people even pass out after drinking full bottles of wine?) Was she still in bed, dreaming each night as she had for the past week that Marty hadn't died, that it was all a sickeningly bad, no, no, a sickeningly horrific, result of hate trying to take down love.
She and Marty had no business being together, but then they weren't really "together" in the first place, you could say, certainly not in the sense of being a couple or even good, solid friends. Nor had they had any kind of physical relations, though there was a very strong pull between them that some would call sexual and others would most certainly not.
No matter what else was going on, though, they deeply cared about each other, maybe in a way that hadn't even been invented yet, in the sense of anyone being able to define this kind of love.
"You make me feel better." She'd once dared to whisper in the hallway during work one day, in the days of their awkwardly tiptoeing around each other, precisely because they were just so aware of whatever “this” was.
Lena's family life cetainly did not suffer, she loved her kids and her husband with complete sincerity and in the way her Catholic upbringing had taught to do so. But she still felt so overwhelmed, no matter how good she was at hiding this.
She could tell in that way a person sometimes could, without being told, that Marty had feelings for her, liked her even though she didn't want to.
In fact, the more Marty (who, unlike Lena, had a terrible poker face) tried to hide how she felt, the more Lena knew and she felt oddly drawn to this.
It gave her a very pleasant kick in her heart that someone could like her so purely and sweetly and with no ulterior motive or any need for anything back in return. Something told her that Marty (extremely introverted despite working past this every single day) had never been in a relationship, that she wouldn't even know what to do in one.
Most days Lena worked up her poker face so perfectly into place, she came across as bitchy. She knew some people would replace the adjective with the noun and maybe they would be right.
Her expressions only cracked once in a while and when they did, almost always because of Marty.
She'd let her exasperation slip through (I don't have time to feel this way, I don't want to feel this way), she'd let her fears appear (how can you make me feel this way? why won't it get away? please go away!) She'd even let her affections show (though that at the very rarest of times) and look at her with her heart in her eyes.
THAT had happened one lovely fall day when both of them were in good, unreserved moods.
Marty's shyness had seemingly vanished for the day and she was talking to Lena without the usual qualms that had pretty much always plagued her. Lena, on her part, felt guilt and irritation disappear and had let her guard her down, actually not looking away when she caught Marty staring at her.
It had been an electrifying, though fleeting moment. Marty blushed as their eyes met and Lena knew the expression on her own face said something like: I care for you, too.
Quickly, far too quickly, for both of them, the moment flew away, because Lena and Marty, each in their own different ways, knew nothing could come from this quiet sharing.
After that, Lena never let her guard down again, unless it was in a professional capacity.
Despite their outrageously polar personalities, they had a strong work ethic in common and that went a long way to repairing the damage that could have arisen from the slow burn between them.
“Slow burn.” Now, in the present, Lena laughed to herself. Two words often used to describe the dynamics between two people in a romance novel.
We, she told herself, are most definitely not in a romance novel. Nor will we ever be. I'm so happily married and she's so socially awkward (intimately awkward came to mind) nothing could come from this.
Everything between them was either silent or imaginary, but Lena got the stangest, most halfhazardly conviction from out of nowhere feeling that somewhere there WAS a place for them.
