Multifandom Het Recs

Sometimes the crossing isn't as difficult as the arrival. (Spoilers through all aired episodes of Fringe.) Peter/Olivia UST.

I've read all of the Fringe stories posted to Yuletide this year. All are well worth reading if you are a fan of the show. "13 Ways of Looking at a Betrayal" is worth taking a look at even if you're not. It might be the best season three story I've read to date. Oh, heck, it might be the best Fringe story I've ever read. Perfect character voices for everyone, case files deftly woven into the story, humor and angst, cultural references galore to everything from the Wallace Stevens poem the title is taken from to the Alfred Hitchcock film, "The Birds."

Huddling in the house as the waves of angry birds attack, Olivia checks her clip. She's got six shots left, which is as useless as none. The thud thud thud is like the pounding of the surf. "Who takes their animal experimentation cues from Hitchcock?" she wonders as another windowframe splinters and the glass bursts inward. She and Peter scramble across the floor, ending up in a poorly reinforced closet lit only by the light spilling through the cracks at the top and bottom of the doors. Women's suits, smelling of dry cleaning fluid, take up most of the space.

Peter pants, then: "There's also an iPhone app. That might be the reference. Nobody knows the classics these days." As if reminded, he pulls his phone out and checks the signal again, then shakes his head, barely visible in the glow of the screen.

Toward the end of that section, there's a sly reference to "The Pied Piper," too.

But underlying the sophisticated structure and language, it's the story of Olivia's emotion journey as she struggles to come to terms with what happened with Peter and her counterpart while she was trapped on the other side. There's a hopeful ending, oh, and did I mention it's even Christmas fic?