Work Text:
Astrid has not, since joining the Fringe division, had a lot of time for friendship. If she’s being honest—which she likes to think she is, at least most of the time—Fringe was not the root cause of this problem, nor is it where it began. It’s just that dealing with the multiple universes, both of which are threatening to be ended at any moment, tends to speed up the process. Spending time with people other than your coworkers, or having hobbies, or eating meals that don’t consist of at least 60% licorice are not things that can really take up too much space on the top of the priority order when you work for Fringe. Simply, there are more important things to be dealt with.
Not that she’s complaining. But if we’re being honest again, she doesn’t find she has much to complain about, these days. Sure, it took a significant adjustment period to get used to some of the aspects of working for Fringe, including but not limited to: spending time doing science experiments on increasingly bizarre and sometimes seemingly impossible dead bodies; listening to the same record on repeat for days on end; meeting and regularly working with the clone versions of herself and all her coworkers; and doing grocery runs that are just as often for the cow that lives in her workplace as they are for the people that work there—but she’s somewhat confident in saying that she’s used to it now. She’s aware of the fact that that’s what she said before the other Astrid walked into the lab, but. She only screamed once, for like half a second, and she’s entirely confident in saying that that’s a much better reaction than she would have had even a month or two ago.
She’ll take the victories where she can get them. Her life is more interesting than it ever would have been if she’d been able to join that rec volleyball league she’d bookmarked the week before getting moved to Fringe. And with all the grocery trips Walter sends her on, she’s pretty sure she gets an equal or greater amount of exercise, anyway.
Today, she most definitely has. Walter decided he wanted to make his famous strawberry milkshake for Lincoln now that it seems like he’s going to be sticking around, which is great and all, but the most recent iteration of Walter’s recipe includes a teaspoon and a half of tart cherry juice that can, according him, only be sourced from one specific seller in Chinatown. They ran out yesterday when he used up the last quarter of the bottle trying his hand at homemade licorice in the downtime waiting for blood results from some guy whose head exploded. They reached the conclusion that red vines are at this point still superior to anything Walter can create in his lab, and that the jury was still out on why that man’s brain is still smeared across the alley near Oak and Tremont, which, actually, is not all that far from where Astrid is headed back from now.
She’s not complaining—it’s been established she is not in the habit of doing that—but parking near Chinatown simply is not good, so whenever she does these specific runs she always ends up having to park a ways away and walk at least fifteen minutes in and out, all for one single bottle that barely totals six fluid ounces. At the very least, she gets to be flirted with by the man that sells her the juice— much too old for her, but she honestly stopped minding by the fourth time because she gets to feel cute, even when she’s wearing the same outfit for the third day in a row because she’s too tired to do laundry when she gets home from trying to solve the universe(s).
And, speaking of flirting, or in this case the lack thereof, she also gets an hour away from whatever flavour of fraught, hot-and-cold catastrophic period film level repression slash timeline-crossed lovers mind-breaking bullshit is happening between Olivia and Peter at the present moment. This week, it’s a lot of Olivia watching Peter watch her sadly, and Peter taking ten to twelve business seconds to muster the strength to look away, even after she’s already broken eye contact.
The threshold of what Astrid can handle in the workplace is pretty damn high and covers a pretty damn broad range, but sometimes they’re just a bit much.
It’s not anything technically inappropriate, or concerning, but it’s just a shade too… intense, for two people that logically, objectively, have only known each other a month or so. But Astrid decided to take Peter’s impossible claims at face value a while ago—firstly because that’s just what you have to do to survive in Fringe division, but secondly because he really was starting to grow on her, in a way that sometimes made her wonder if maybe there was a bit of truth to what he believed, if she really did know him at one point. If she really did love him—if they all did, a little family unit in a Harvard half-basement, one foot in the eighties and the other striding forward into god knows what, but striding together.
No matter what timeline anyone’s from, she can’t argue that it isn’t a nice thought. And while she’s enjoying the silence of the drive that allows her to think it, uninterrupted, she still takes the shortest possible route back to the lab.
It’s relatively quiet when she gets there, which is either a neutral sign or a very bad one. Astrid is gearing herself up for any number of things as she sheds her coat—not hurriedly but not not hurriedly, either, not until she knows for sure if she has time to waste or if she’s going to need to start synthesizing some compound with one glove still on—but instead she is met with something else, something mundane and lovely and quietly remarkable that she has not been primed to anticipate.
The back half of a conversation, overheard:
“—best friend will be back soon, and then you’ll see!” It’s Walter’s voice. That much she will always be able to discern, no matter how many words or what context she’s missing. Through the frosted glass of the doors she can see the shape of him waving a hand, dismissive, at an outline that doesn’t match anyone else in the group but Lincoln.
A second later, his wobbly voice hums and stutters out a reply. Bingo. “Your—William Bell? I thought he, uh—you know, he’s—”
“What? No, not Belly. My best friend, agent Farnsworth! She’s out getting us cherry juice for the milkshakes.”
“I thought you said it was strawberry?”
“Oh, agent Lee. You still have quite a bit to learn here.”
Astrid stands there holding her scarf in her hands, a little stupidly, just for a couple of seconds. Her eyes, also a little stupidly, start to blur, and it’s only when the door flies open in front of her—narrowly missing decking her in the head—that she blinks them clear, Olivia suddenly crowding her vision.
“Astrid!” she half-shouts, rearing back as she smiles, laughing at her own surprise before it’s even finished running its course. “You scared me, I didn’t realize you were back already.” She nods her head back, letting out a breathy laugh as she says, “He’s been saying you should be here any minute for the past fifteen minutes.”
“Yeah?” It’s absentminded, faraway as Astrid’s gaze slides across the lab to Walter, an almost overwhelming warmth crawling up her throat at the sight of him cutting up strawberries, clumsy and uneven. My best friend, agent Farnsworth.
She can feel Olivia clocking the glistening on her cheek, not yet dry, as she lowers her voice and asks, “Hey, you okay?”
“Astro!” Walter’s cry of joy eats up any response Astrid was going to give, his arms raised above his head in triumph as he announces her appearance to, seemingly, all of Harvard. Astrid laughs twice; once at the utter festivity of it, and then again at the way Lincoln nearly throws himself to the table to dodge the knife still clutched in Walter’s hand, forgotten in his excitement at Astrid’s mere presence.
My best friend.
Astrid turns back to Olivia, half in a daze with half of an explanation on her lips, but the look she receives tells her that Olivia doesn’t need her to answer the question anymore. A smile, knowing and precious and painfully soft, has found a home replacing the concern as she says, gently, “You better get in there. Important stuff.”
“Yeah,” Astrid says, “it is.”