“Seriously? You’re going with ‘ow’? I’m not sure if your parents ought to be congratulated or examined for child abuse.”
They stumble inelegantly; or rather they sink knee-deep into the snow. The landscape is paper white against a line of burnt trees, black bars that remain gaunt and brittle with ice. The forest was scorched summer last, the leaves long since gone with passing seasons. The sky is white, the ground white; the blackened trees are the only contrast colour aside from Peter’s scarf and Lincoln’s blood.
“Sasquatch,” Lincoln mutters, his breath a dragon’s cloud. “Who would have guessed?”
“You will not mention that name in my presence again,” Peter says stoically.
“Walter will be thrilled. *Sasquatch*.”
“Don’t exist.”
“Have the torn shoulder to prove otherwise.”
“You’re just being difficult.”
Lincoln blinks up at the sky, his mouth pulling into a grimace or a smirk. “I believe in Sasquatch’s, it’s why Walter likes me best.”
“Walter likes you best because you play chess with him,” Peter snorts. He readjusts his grip, pulling Lincoln into his side, one arm gentle around his shoulders. “Move it, usurper, before your Sasquatch decides to finish the job.”
He’s cold, blood leaking sluggish down his side. Lincoln can’t feel his toes or his fingers or his right arm for that matter and there are no visible tracks within eyesight. “You sure we came this way?”
“Yep.”
“Okay,” he agrees, and pushes through the snow again.
Lincoln keeps his left hand curled around the barrel of the gun. The clip is spent, what warmth the chamber once held after rapid firing has long since gone. He figures he can club the damn thing over the ears if it decides to come back, box him on the nose. Peter’s a live-wire against him, eyes narrowed against the glare, cheeks wind-swept and pink with cold. “Jesus fuck,” he snarls when they sink to waist level.
Lincoln gathers himself, slogging through the worst of it until the snow’s back to their knees, shins, falling to ankle-height. Both of them are sodden through. In the distance, he can see yellow light, a headlight beam crossing their barren landscape. Worryingly, his teeth have stopped chattering. Lincoln blinks, eyes hurting under so much relentless white, and forces himself to say. “Maybe a Yeti, then?”
“Nope.”
“Bunyip?”
“Wrong continent.”
“Science project gone horribly wrong?”
“That I could believe.”
In the distance, four shots are fired. One...two… the next so closely spaced together the report sounds as one. Peter drops him, left arm stiff with the weapon he raises. “Liv?”
Lincoln’s fingers sink into the snow, his right shoulder jolted brutally with the fall, ears ringing as if he’d attended a live concert, saw ACDC from the front row. That buzz is getting ominously louder and Peter’s gun only has one cartridge left. “Don’t go.” He’s not sure if he can stand and he doesn’t want to be eaten alive. Sasquatch, bears, and cougars, oh my. Leather gloves touch the back of his neck, curl around his nape in reassurance.
Peter draws one deep breath and bellows. “Liv?”
The resounding shout is distant, undoubtedly her. “Clear.”
He can’t see Peter’s face, everything is white, turning whiter, phasing out into glare. Peter sounds distant, relieved and irritated, coming from too far away. “We have this rule, see. It’s a great rule. One might even say genius. Where field agents don’t wander off by themselves, but stick with their partners, who in this case would be Olivia. Dunham. Senior Agent. Compliance with this rule means you don’t get torn apart by weird science projects gone horribly wrong.”
“Sasquatch,” Lincoln insists stubbornly, only to hear Peter swear.
***
He wakes up in the back of the SUV. It’s perishingly cold. The wind howls through the broken window and the airbags are deployed, flopped across the front seat like a discarded condom, soggy and opaque white. The keys are in the ignition, the nose of their sorry vehicle crumpled with impact.
“…must have doubled back,” he hears Olivia say.
“It’s dead?”
“Half buried in the snowdrift over there.”
There’s silence. Lincoln imagines they’re touching, foreheads resting together, bodies sidled close. He breathes out against the pain, wonders how much of his shirt is embedded inside his chest, if the claw marks on his torso match the ones down his shoulder-blade. A matching set – from flying porcupines to snow Yeti’s. Peter mutters despondently. “The engine’s totalled.”
They tried their cell-phones when they first hit the Sasquatch, when it stumbled out of the snowstorm and onto the road as if blinded. The SUV had flipped twice on impact before landing upright, the headlights shining down the road they just travelled, two of the tyres blown out and Lincoln had seen it lumbering into the woods when the others were gathering their senses. Hadn’t believed it, wanted to see it again, and he’d given chase without thought, skidding out of the car and onto the road, diving into the woods.
He winces now because Peter’s right. It was stupidly stupid in a magnitude of stupidity. His curiosity always did get the better of him.
It’s still white outside, the snow falling in a sideways slant, if Lincoln cranes his neck, tries to judge where the sky kisses the ground, he thinks the shade is slowly turning charcoal. His watch says it’s quarter past five and the temperature’s surely dropping.
“The GPS said there was a building maybe eight miles down the road.”
“He’s lost blood.”
They seem to communicate in half sentences sometimes, ideas and thoughts shared in the common space of silence. Lincoln tucks his chin against his chest and blinks owlishly when the door is wrenched open. Olivia ducks into the back seat with him, her beanie pulled low over her eyebrows and ears, the coat buttoned to her chin. Peter stands on the road, shifting from foot to foot.
“Be quick,” Olivia says bluntly.
“Yes, ma’am.” The grin is cocky. Peter’s eyes slide past her and land on Lincoln. He pulls his beanie down low, wraps the scarf securely around his neck and throat then painfully unbuttons his coat. It leaves Peter in a long-sleeved Henley and a t-shirt underneath. “Can’t jog in the damn thing anyway,” he says dismissively, and tosses the garment to Olivia. He turns on his toes and is gone before Lincoln can argue.
Olivia shuts the door. She scoots into the front seat, the snick of a knife being flipped open silencing conversation. Lincoln watches her mutely as she cuts the air bags free, slicing them sideways to extend their length, and then rummages around in the glove department for duct tape. It’s haphazard at best, but she manages to seal the broken window against the worst of the wind before squeezing into the back seat again.
“Eight miles?”
“Might take him an hour, depending on the snow, less if there’s another car on the road. Lie back.”
Lincoln eases down, he tries not to close his legs when her knees lands dangerously close to important parts of his anatomy, and hisses when Olivia lies upon his chest. Face to face, awkwardly close. She’s careful of his shoulder, the rendered flesh, the bloody clothing. One hand presses against the open wound and its make-shift bandage, the other remains low on Lincoln’s abdomen, covering vital organs and forcing warmth into his skin, her thigh firm against his groin. Olivia places her head against the slope of his neck gingerly, breathes out hot and steady, the air a gush of warmth down his collarbone, chest. Peter’s coat is dragged around the two of them, cocooning them until Lincoln feels Olivia everywhere, smell’s Peter surrounding him, and tries not to choke against the stirring of sensation. He’s warm. It’s the closest Olivia’s been to him in weeks.
“You’re okay.” She whispers against his pulse, and Lincoln blinks up at the ceiling, blames the sting in his eyes on exposure, torn open and leaking raw, laid open like a festering wound.
It takes Peter forty-five minutes. He comes back in a snowplough, hot-wired expertly, the cabin blasting out heat like an African summer. “Phone lines are down with the storm,” he says shortly. “Still no reception with the cells either.”
“Any good news?” Olivia asks. Peter leans out and grabs Lincoln by the collar, hauling him into the cabin, she scrambles up beside him and slams the door shut, pressed together like the three wise monkeys.
“The building on the GPS was a camping supplies store. Must have just missed the owner when I arrived.” It’s pressing close to six now, the sky a violet bruise. The snowplough lurches forward, turning a one-eighty before grumbling down the road. “There should be medical supplies, and if we break in and the security alarm goes off, all the better.”
They do break in, without their usual finesse, but there’s no security alarm attached to the building, and the place remains dark, the power gone with the phone lines, both victims to the storm.
Peter ditches his wet jeans for flannel pyjamas, a fleecy top. He sits with his back against the wall, feet flat against the floor and his knees raised. He pulls Lincoln down until he’s cradled in front, held steady against the cage of Peter’s body. Chest to back, hand on top of Lincoln’s and their fingers interlaced together. Olivia expertly cleans out Lincoln’s shoulder and stitches it back together again, each flinch, half aborted move, any attempt to escape the needle only presses him into Peter, and Olivia - crouched between both of their legs, holding needle to thread - meets his eyes with an inquiry Lincoln can’t read. Her touch is familiar, surprisingly tender. Peter’s a furnace behind him, stealing the oxygen and throwing out heat. Lincoln lets his head loll against the other man’s shoulder, breathes out through the pain, and allows himself to turn boneless.
When he slits his eyes open, Olivia’s gaze has turned dark, cheeks flushed. The tip of her tongue is caught between her lips, and Lincoln can barely feel the tug and pinch of the needle. Charmed, he thinks, drunkenly. She hypnotised him from the moment they met, changed his perception, shifted his world axis. He’s been hopelessly smitten for months.
Olivia slips him a glass of water and two panadol when she’s done. Lincoln tries not to feel bereft when Peter eases him forward, creating space enough to stand. The two of them walk away, perusing the aisles, taking sleeping bags, MRES and beef jerky, talking over the coat-hangars and breaking into the weapons cabinet to steal ammunition, to reload the guns, and bring everything back to Lincoln like a magpies stolen nest. He’s stripped of his remaining clothing, everything that’s wet, touched by snow or blood, peeled off him. He should feel bashful. Ideally, he’d blush, insist on doing it himself, but Peter’s hands are sure against his skin and it feels good to lean into it, to let the ache of his torn shoulder bleed into the sensation of fingers skating against his hip. The snap as the button on his slacks is loosened; the zipper pulled down in a tantalizingly slow tease. Olivia keeps her eyes averted but she’s close, too close for propriety. Lincoln reaches out with one hand, touches her wrist. Buried under sleeping bags, surrounded by sugar and electrolyte drinks, he considers his options.
Lincoln doesn’t watch them together normally, made it a point not to watch them, but he’s tired, cold, and there’s something glittering bright, mesmerizing about Peter. There’s something surreal and untouchable about Olivia. They’re beautiful, he decides without rancour; as if leaving the lab, the confines of his usual routine altered the way he observes them, too. Lincoln moved his desk to the opposite side of the room; let Walter become the embodiment of a great dividing range, to spare himself the detail of being within their proximity. For their part, Olivia and Peter were careful not to flaunt their relationship at work.
On his bad days, Lincoln fantasized about moving worlds, before the bridge was sealed forever and the option was taken from him. He dreamt about walking away from his newfound partnership with Olivia, his burgeoning friendship with Peter, except he made a promise to avenge Robert and Intel pointed at Jones’ being on *this* side of the bridge. On his bad days, he finds reasons to work by himself, to chase down leads, to keep distance, a growing chasm of yawning space between them, and it’s *exhausting*, wearing Lincoln down.
Slumped, so lonely his back teeth ache; Lincoln exposes her palm, sheds light on the calluses of her trigger finger. “I miss you.”
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Just like That - Lincoln/Olivia/Peter
Date: 2012-06-14 07:02 am (UTC)“Seriously? You’re going with ‘ow’? I’m not sure if your parents ought to be congratulated or examined for child abuse.”
They stumble inelegantly; or rather they sink knee-deep into the snow. The landscape is paper white against a line of burnt trees, black bars that remain gaunt and brittle with ice. The forest was scorched summer last, the leaves long since gone with passing seasons. The sky is white, the ground white; the blackened trees are the only contrast colour aside from Peter’s scarf and Lincoln’s blood.
“Sasquatch,” Lincoln mutters, his breath a dragon’s cloud. “Who would have guessed?”
“You will not mention that name in my presence again,” Peter says stoically.
“Walter will be thrilled. *Sasquatch*.”
“Don’t exist.”
“Have the torn shoulder to prove otherwise.”
“You’re just being difficult.”
Lincoln blinks up at the sky, his mouth pulling into a grimace or a smirk. “I believe in Sasquatch’s, it’s why Walter likes me best.”
“Walter likes you best because you play chess with him,” Peter snorts. He readjusts his grip, pulling Lincoln into his side, one arm gentle around his shoulders. “Move it, usurper, before your Sasquatch decides to finish the job.”
He’s cold, blood leaking sluggish down his side. Lincoln can’t feel his toes or his fingers or his right arm for that matter and there are no visible tracks within eyesight. “You sure we came this way?”
“Yep.”
“Okay,” he agrees, and pushes through the snow again.
Lincoln keeps his left hand curled around the barrel of the gun. The clip is spent, what warmth the chamber once held after rapid firing has long since gone. He figures he can club the damn thing over the ears if it decides to come back, box him on the nose. Peter’s a live-wire against him, eyes narrowed against the glare, cheeks wind-swept and pink with cold. “Jesus fuck,” he snarls when they sink to waist level.
Lincoln gathers himself, slogging through the worst of it until the snow’s back to their knees, shins, falling to ankle-height. Both of them are sodden through. In the distance, he can see yellow light, a headlight beam crossing their barren landscape. Worryingly, his teeth have stopped chattering. Lincoln blinks, eyes hurting under so much relentless white, and forces himself to say. “Maybe a Yeti, then?”
“Nope.”
“Bunyip?”
“Wrong continent.”
“Science project gone horribly wrong?”
“That I could believe.”
In the distance, four shots are fired. One...two… the next so closely spaced together the report sounds as one. Peter drops him, left arm stiff with the weapon he raises. “Liv?”
Lincoln’s fingers sink into the snow, his right shoulder jolted brutally with the fall, ears ringing as if he’d attended a live concert, saw ACDC from the front row. That buzz is getting ominously louder and Peter’s gun only has one cartridge left. “Don’t go.” He’s not sure if he can stand and he doesn’t want to be eaten alive. Sasquatch, bears, and cougars, oh my. Leather gloves touch the back of his neck, curl around his nape in reassurance.
Peter draws one deep breath and bellows. “Liv?”
The resounding shout is distant, undoubtedly her. “Clear.”
He can’t see Peter’s face, everything is white, turning whiter, phasing out into glare. Peter sounds distant, relieved and irritated, coming from too far away. “We have this rule, see. It’s a great rule. One might even say genius. Where field agents don’t wander off by themselves, but stick with their partners, who in this case would be Olivia. Dunham. Senior Agent. Compliance with this rule means you don’t get torn apart by weird science projects gone horribly wrong.”
“Sasquatch,” Lincoln insists stubbornly, only to hear Peter swear.
***
He wakes up in the back of the SUV. It’s perishingly cold. The wind howls through the broken window and the airbags are deployed, flopped across the front seat like a discarded condom, soggy and opaque white. The keys are in the ignition, the nose of their sorry vehicle crumpled with impact.
“…must have doubled back,” he hears Olivia say.
“It’s dead?”
“Half buried in the snowdrift over there.”
There’s silence. Lincoln imagines they’re touching, foreheads resting together, bodies sidled close. He breathes out against the pain, wonders how much of his shirt is embedded inside his chest, if the claw marks on his torso match the ones down his shoulder-blade. A matching set – from flying porcupines to snow Yeti’s. Peter mutters despondently. “The engine’s totalled.”
They tried their cell-phones when they first hit the Sasquatch, when it stumbled out of the snowstorm and onto the road as if blinded. The SUV had flipped twice on impact before landing upright, the headlights shining down the road they just travelled, two of the tyres blown out and Lincoln had seen it lumbering into the woods when the others were gathering their senses. Hadn’t believed it, wanted to see it again, and he’d given chase without thought, skidding out of the car and onto the road, diving into the woods.
He winces now because Peter’s right. It was stupidly stupid in a magnitude of stupidity. His curiosity always did get the better of him.
It’s still white outside, the snow falling in a sideways slant, if Lincoln cranes his neck, tries to judge where the sky kisses the ground, he thinks the shade is slowly turning charcoal. His watch says it’s quarter past five and the temperature’s surely dropping.
“The GPS said there was a building maybe eight miles down the road.”
“He’s lost blood.”
They seem to communicate in half sentences sometimes, ideas and thoughts shared in the common space of silence. Lincoln tucks his chin against his chest and blinks owlishly when the door is wrenched open. Olivia ducks into the back seat with him, her beanie pulled low over her eyebrows and ears, the coat buttoned to her chin. Peter stands on the road, shifting from foot to foot.
“Be quick,” Olivia says bluntly.
“Yes, ma’am.” The grin is cocky. Peter’s eyes slide past her and land on Lincoln. He pulls his beanie down low, wraps the scarf securely around his neck and throat then painfully unbuttons his coat. It leaves Peter in a long-sleeved Henley and a t-shirt underneath. “Can’t jog in the damn thing anyway,” he says dismissively, and tosses the garment to Olivia. He turns on his toes and is gone before Lincoln can argue.
Olivia shuts the door. She scoots into the front seat, the snick of a knife being flipped open silencing conversation. Lincoln watches her mutely as she cuts the air bags free, slicing them sideways to extend their length, and then rummages around in the glove department for duct tape. It’s haphazard at best, but she manages to seal the broken window against the worst of the wind before squeezing into the back seat again.
“Eight miles?”
“Might take him an hour, depending on the snow, less if there’s another car on the road. Lie back.”
Lincoln eases down, he tries not to close his legs when her knees lands dangerously close to important parts of his anatomy, and hisses when Olivia lies upon his chest. Face to face, awkwardly close. She’s careful of his shoulder, the rendered flesh, the bloody clothing. One hand presses against the open wound and its make-shift bandage, the other remains low on Lincoln’s abdomen, covering vital organs and forcing warmth into his skin, her thigh firm against his groin. Olivia places her head against the slope of his neck gingerly, breathes out hot and steady, the air a gush of warmth down his collarbone, chest. Peter’s coat is dragged around the two of them, cocooning them until Lincoln feels Olivia everywhere, smell’s Peter surrounding him, and tries not to choke against the stirring of sensation. He’s warm. It’s the closest Olivia’s been to him in weeks.
“You’re okay.” She whispers against his pulse, and Lincoln blinks up at the ceiling, blames the sting in his eyes on exposure, torn open and leaking raw, laid open like a festering wound.
It takes Peter forty-five minutes. He comes back in a snowplough, hot-wired expertly, the cabin blasting out heat like an African summer. “Phone lines are down with the storm,” he says shortly. “Still no reception with the cells either.”
“Any good news?” Olivia asks. Peter leans out and grabs Lincoln by the collar, hauling him into the cabin, she scrambles up beside him and slams the door shut, pressed together like the three wise monkeys.
“The building on the GPS was a camping supplies store. Must have just missed the owner when I arrived.” It’s pressing close to six now, the sky a violet bruise. The snowplough lurches forward, turning a one-eighty before grumbling down the road. “There should be medical supplies, and if we break in and the security alarm goes off, all the better.”
They do break in, without their usual finesse, but there’s no security alarm attached to the building, and the place remains dark, the power gone with the phone lines, both victims to the storm.
Peter ditches his wet jeans for flannel pyjamas, a fleecy top. He sits with his back against the wall, feet flat against the floor and his knees raised. He pulls Lincoln down until he’s cradled in front, held steady against the cage of Peter’s body. Chest to back, hand on top of Lincoln’s and their fingers interlaced together. Olivia expertly cleans out Lincoln’s shoulder and stitches it back together again, each flinch, half aborted move, any attempt to escape the needle only presses him into Peter, and Olivia - crouched between both of their legs, holding needle to thread - meets his eyes with an inquiry Lincoln can’t read. Her touch is familiar, surprisingly tender. Peter’s a furnace behind him, stealing the oxygen and throwing out heat. Lincoln lets his head loll against the other man’s shoulder, breathes out through the pain, and allows himself to turn boneless.
When he slits his eyes open, Olivia’s gaze has turned dark, cheeks flushed. The tip of her tongue is caught between her lips, and Lincoln can barely feel the tug and pinch of the needle. Charmed, he thinks, drunkenly. She hypnotised him from the moment they met, changed his perception, shifted his world axis. He’s been hopelessly smitten for months.
Olivia slips him a glass of water and two panadol when she’s done. Lincoln tries not to feel bereft when Peter eases him forward, creating space enough to stand. The two of them walk away, perusing the aisles, taking sleeping bags, MRES and beef jerky, talking over the coat-hangars and breaking into the weapons cabinet to steal ammunition, to reload the guns, and bring everything back to Lincoln like a magpies stolen nest. He’s stripped of his remaining clothing, everything that’s wet, touched by snow or blood, peeled off him. He should feel bashful. Ideally, he’d blush, insist on doing it himself, but Peter’s hands are sure against his skin and it feels good to lean into it, to let the ache of his torn shoulder bleed into the sensation of fingers skating against his hip. The snap as the button on his slacks is loosened; the zipper pulled down in a tantalizingly slow tease. Olivia keeps her eyes averted but she’s close, too close for propriety. Lincoln reaches out with one hand, touches her wrist. Buried under sleeping bags, surrounded by sugar and electrolyte drinks, he considers his options.
Lincoln doesn’t watch them together normally, made it a point not to watch them, but he’s tired, cold, and there’s something glittering bright, mesmerizing about Peter. There’s something surreal and untouchable about Olivia. They’re beautiful, he decides without rancour; as if leaving the lab, the confines of his usual routine altered the way he observes them, too. Lincoln moved his desk to the opposite side of the room; let Walter become the embodiment of a great dividing range, to spare himself the detail of being within their proximity. For their part, Olivia and Peter were careful not to flaunt their relationship at work.
On his bad days, Lincoln fantasized about moving worlds, before the bridge was sealed forever and the option was taken from him. He dreamt about walking away from his newfound partnership with Olivia, his burgeoning friendship with Peter, except he made a promise to avenge Robert and Intel pointed at Jones’ being on *this* side of the bridge. On his bad days, he finds reasons to work by himself, to chase down leads, to keep distance, a growing chasm of yawning space between them, and it’s *exhausting*, wearing Lincoln down.
Slumped, so lonely his back teeth ache; Lincoln exposes her palm, sheds light on the calluses of her trigger finger. “I miss you.”