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Entry tags:
The Pied Piper
Prompt: BROSISMANCE and being Fringedopted
Canons: GONE series and Fringe series
Word Count: about 5,950
Shut up this did not take me two weeks to finish.
I’m going through the prompts at random and happened to finish this one first! It will also probably be the longest one because it turned into a Fringe episode. And I changed the premise for the whole thing about 5 times. I beg your forgiveness for anything glaringly OOC for these characters, and for the awkward pacing of the piece. It was fun to write and that was basically what I was going for. Also none of the Fringe Things make any sense. OH WELL I can good writing.
Everything is probably Peter Bishop’s fault somehow.
***
“I’m ditching.” Brianna decided. The crunch of her boots in the snow, which had been a constant presence in their walk to school, slowed almost to a halt. Not completely, because stopping was something Brianna just didn’t do, but it was enough to pull Jack’s attention away from his iPad to look up at her. There was a stubborn look set on her face that said she was going to do what she wanted and no one was going to tell her otherwise.
Lincoln had insisted, much to Brianna’s dismay, that they go to school. At least to try it out, he suggested. But his tone had left little room for argument, and sullenly Brianna and Jack agreed to go for the first day and see how they liked it. Originally Lincoln had planned to take them to school himself, but that morning he had received an urgent call from Broyles about a new case. There was nothing to do but scramble to pack the kids lunches, bundle them up in their winter clothes, and give them directions to the school even as he ran out the door.
Now that the threat of Special Agent Lincoln Lee wasn’t looming over them, Brianna had become emboldened with a sense of absolute freedom. No one could tell the Breeze what to do. They had a whole world to do whatever they wanted, and Brianna was going to make the most of it.
But Jack looked unsure. “We probably shouldn’t. We’ll get in trouble later.”
She watched him shift from foot to foot uneasily, but it wasn’t a flat-out no. Indecision riddled his face, torn between the idea of pleasing Lincoln and going to school or upsetting Lincoln and ditching. There was no force behind his words, and Brianna was sure that he would agree with a little bit of persuasion. She walked circles around him as he stood there debating it, her eagerness to rebel plain in her step.
“It’s not like he can ground us, he’s not our dad. And he didn’t even show us around town. We’re just going to check out the sights.”
She bounced around on the balls of her feet, eager to find an open place to run. Jack looked around, and she could see his mind whirling with the possibilities, trying to take in the variables or whatever. Behind his fogged glasses Jack’s eyes gleamed with the possibility of discovering a new world, similar enough to their own, but different enough for it to be an adventure.
“We have to stop first,” he told her, his eyes flicking back to the iPad and his fingers whirling across its screen. “I have to hack the school’s attendance records first, so Lincoln doesn’t know that we weren’t there, and it would be easier to do that on my laptop. Hopefully it won’t trigger the automated message they send to parents when their kids aren’t at school…” He trailed off, busy at work doing whatever he did on his computers.
“Sure, sure,” she said, already scurrying around to give him a shove from behind so he would keep moving down the sidewalk. “We can find a Starbucks, those have free internet right?”
“A library would be less conspicuous for kids,” he mumbled, stumbling forward and kicking up clumps of snow as he went. Brianna grabbed his arm to make him stop at a crosswalk, at the back of a cluster of kids heading in the same direction as them. They all looked equally depressed at the idea of school, but they were chattering away with their friends about their vacations, Christmas presents, and other mundane things. Those things didn’t matter to the Breeze—or at least that’s what she told herself as she nudged Jack.
“There’s like, a million Starbucks. We’ll find one of those sooner.”
But as usual, Computer Jack was too focused on his iPad to pay her any attention. Impatiently she snapped her fingers in front of his face. Brianna thought that she had somehow managed to pull him away from his technology for five seconds when he actually paused and slid the iPad under his arm. But then he pulled his brand new iPhone out of his jacket pocket, switching it off. Lincoln had bought them both cell phones so that they could contact him in case of an emergency. Brianna had yet to turn hers on; Parker had warned her that Feds could track you through a cell phone, and she wasn’t going to take that chance. Brianna puffed with pride at remembering this. Jack was clearly thinking along the same lines, from the guilty look crossing his face as the screen went dark.
“Kids aren’t supposed to have cell phones on at school anyway,” she reassured him with a slap on the back. “He won’t even notice.”
“Sure.” He didn’t look convinced, but he slid the iPhone into his jacket pocket without turning it back on and the iPad went back into his hands.
Brianna snapped her fingers in front of his face again as the crosswalk light changed and the gaggle of kids began to cross the street. Some of them shot Jack and Brianna a few curious glances, and Brianna pointedly turned her back to them as she dragged Jack away from the crosswalk and to their right, away from the school.
“We’re not going all the way to a library,” she said, dragging their earlier subject back as she towed him down the street at random, figuring they would happen upon a coffee shop along the way. “A Starbucks would be closer.”
“Okay, fine, then find whatever’s closest.” As soon as the words were out of Jack’s mouth he flinched, realizing his error. Before he had even looked up to add an amendment clause Brianna was gone, leaving only a flurry of snow where she had been standing.
But almost as soon as she vanished he heard a yelp and saw her crashing to her butt two streetlights down, startling a group of business men walking past her. Finally shoving his iPad away, he hurried over to where she was flopped down as fast as he could without attracting stares. When he reached her she was muttering a stream of curse words under her breath.
“There’s snow on the ground!” she exclaimed, wiping it off of herself like it was a deadly germ.
“Obviously.” It was then he realized the problem: Brianna couldn’t run on the snow without slipping and falling. She ran too fast and there was too little traction for her shoes.
“This place sucks,” she decided as her eyes grew dark and murderous. There was no way she was going to live in a place where she couldn’t even run. “There’s gotta be some place around here that isn’t covered in snow.”
“A park?” Jack guessed. “Or some kind of stadium. They’d keep it clear for practices.”
Brianna leapt to her feet. “Find the closest one. We’re going there.”
“Brianna…” Jack checked his watch. It was 7:28. School started at 8:00, attendance would probably be taken around 8:15, and Lincoln would receive a call around 9:00. As long as he hacked the school’s computer by then, Lincoln would never know. “Half an hour,” he decided. “And then we have to find some WiFi for my laptop, or we’ll be in trouble.”
But Brianna was already taking off down the street, going as fast as she could without slipping, looking for a park.
***
Meanwhile, in the basement of the Kresge Building at Harvard University, Lincoln Lee was being filled in on their newest case. He came into the lab to find everyone else was already there. Olivia was flipping through a file on the nearest counter while Peter tried his very best not to hover over her shoulder to get a closer look, and Astrid was making sure Walter didn’t eat whatever was in the beaker in his hand.
“What’s the emergency?” Lincoln asked Olivia when, hearing the door close behind him, she looked up. “Broyles just told me to come straight here, so I didn’t hear any details about the case…”
“Someone’s been abducting children,” she began, only to stop when the color left Lincoln’s face.
Peter quirked an eyebrow. “You dropped them off at school, didn’t you?”
“When Broyles said ‘get over there immediately’ I assumed he meant as soon as possible,” Lincoln said, already pulling out his phone and dialing Jack’s number. “He didn’t leave a lot of room for argument. The school isn’t that far of a walk, I thought they would be okay.” The phone went straight to Jack’s voicemail—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was at school. He had to turn off his cell phone at school. Lincoln tried to calm himself down. “Do we have any other details on the case?”
“We know that children in the area have been going missing for about a week,” Peter said, jumping right into the facts. “Always in public places, and not just one kid at a time. They’ve been disappearing in groups of three to five all at once. Parents would take their eyes off the kids for two seconds and the next thing they knew, all of their kids had vanished.”
“The only reason the case was handed over to us is because one woman saw her daughter and two other kids disappear into thin air,” Olivia added.
“Do we have any suspects? Leads? Have any of the children come back?”
Olivia flipped through the file in front of her. “The missing children are all between the ages of four and eight. Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of pattern. Even though they were all from this area, the places they disappeared range from schoolyards to playgrounds and daycares.”
“Younger kids tend to be easier targets because they’re more vulnerable,” Peter added, “But if they’re disappearing into thin air then I wouldn’t think that has anything to do with it.”
“We were just going to the daycare where the first child disappeared. Maybe we can get some clues, see if any of the other kids saw anything.” Olivia waited for Lincoln to respond, but he still seemed to be processing the information with a grim look on his face. “I’m sure they’re fine,” she told him. “They aren’t even in the age range of the children being kidnapped. We’ll catch this guy before they even get out of school.”
“Right,” Lincoln agreed. But he worried anyway.
***
Jack sat in the midst of a cluster of picnic tables in the park, his laptop settled nicely on the table front of him as he clacked away on it. Their backpacks and heavy winter jackets lay in a pile on top of the table next to Jack, essentially discarded by their owners. They were right in the middle of the park, too far away from any of the surrounding businesses to leech off of their internet, but for now Jack didn’t mind. Brianna had made sure to find a park with a Starbucks right across the street; a glance at his laptop’s clock assured him that they still had ten minutes left before he had to head over there to alter their attendance records. From there, they could have the day off with no worries.
“Caught another one!” he heard Brianna say, and waved a hand without looking up. He had no idea what she’d caught, but she wasn’t grumpy anymore and that was all that mattered. For the moment he was content enough immersing himself in the world of his computer—
Suddenly Brianna was next to him, dragging him away from his precious laptop and under the table. He grabbed for the bench in surprise and heard a crunch as the wood splintered and snapped under his strength. “What—?”
But she put a finger to her lips and shushed him. Immediately he fell silent, but that didn’t stop him from looking around for any signs of trouble. Nothing caught his attention. There were a few kids playing on a playset not too far away, an old couple walking down the path in the distance, and a gaggle of parents chatting near the playground.
“He’s suspicious,” Brianna said, pointing towards the playground. Following her line of sight, Jack spotted a man in a dark business suit and sporting a fedora, simply observing the children and their parents. The parents didn’t seem to notice him, and the kids were all too busy playing to pay him any mind. But he definitely stood out, and it was unusual behavior. Enough for him to be suspicious.
“Should we call Lincoln?” Jack asked her in a hushed voice, not taking his eyes off the man.
He heard Brianna make a scoffing noise. “And let him know we ditched school? No way. If this guy tries anything funny, we can take him.”
Before Jack could formulate a response, a cooing noise took his attention away from the man in the suit. He looked towards Brianna, who was clutching a pigeon in one hand. It stared at Jack with mournful eyes and cooed again. “Why do you have a—”
The rest of his sentence was drowned out by an eruption of screaming coming from the playground. Jack flinched and ducked his head, but Brianna, the Breeze, scrambled out from under the table, the pigeon flying away as she released it in favor of a knife. After a few startling seconds when the screaming only grew louder and more panicked, Jack climbed out after her to see what was happening, side-eyeing the knife as he did so. While Jack couldn’t bring himself to be surprised that Brianna had a knife on her, he was sure it was against school regulations.
The parents that had been idly chatting before were now scrambling to reach their children on the playset. At first Jack didn’t see what was causing the panic, but then he spotted one of the children growing more and more transparent before disappearing altogether. A mother screamed in anguish, which only caused the baffled children to start crying; they didn’t seem to realize what was going on.
Jack took two steps forward before he stopped himself. No. You’re Computer Jack. Leave the rash actions to Brianna—you’ve got to think. He took in the scene, his eyes searching for something that the others were clearly missing. Some way to get the kids to safety and make them stop disappearing. But he couldn’t see anything of significance. He waited for one heartbeat, and then two, mentally scrambling. Another child disappeared.
He spun around and dug through his jacket pockets for his iPhone, his body reacting to what his brain was just processing. Peter had added some upgrades to it; he knew what they were but with all the parents screaming and the kids crying he couldn’t quite remember—
“Jack, what’s going on?” Brianna demanded. He hadn’t realized she was still there, but he quickly realized why. She might have super speed and a knife, but there was nothing to beat up in order to save the day. Kids were just disappearing and she couldn’t do anything about that. “What do we do?!”
“Give me a minute!” In a flurry of spinning screens he raced through the new settings, searching for the one he was looking for. His eyes fell on the camera option and he clicked it. That’s it.
He whirled back around and pointed the camera at the playground, ignoring Brianna as she yelled, “We don’t have a minute, Jack!”
Through the screen the scene looked just the same as he saw it, at first. But then he flipped over the settings, switching it to infrared and dark vision and gamma radiation and the hundred other settings Peter had added. His fingers froze as he spun to another setting and saw what he had been looking for. There was some kind of shimmering dome surrounding the playground, curving ten feet over the highest point of the playset and then dropping down to the other side. That would be the affected area, he reasoned, except all of the parents were now inside of it and didn’t seem to be affected at all. He watched as one parent reached desperately for her child, only for her hand to pass right through her son’s arm. For some reason, probably the same reason they were unaffected, the parents couldn’t touch their children. But other children like Brianna and Jack might be able to.
“Get the kids away from the playground!” Jack said, and Brianna took off, the knife disappearing back into her belt. There were at least a dozen children left, going transparent and in danger of disappearing altogether. Lucky for them, the Breeze was faster than whatever was causing their vanishing act. She swooped in and snatched up the smallest kids, zipping them out of the danger zone and onto the grass. As soon as they were outside of the affected area, the children regained their solidity. Jack felt a sort of grim satisfaction at being right.
But super speed didn’t mean Brianna had super strength, and carrying the kids off the playground was slowing her down. Abandoning his belongings on the picnic table and shoving his iPhone into his pocket, Jack ran over to help, ignoring startled parents as he snatched up their children and literally flung them onto the grass. A few bumps and bruises would be a small price to pay for not getting sucked into thin air.
They had gotten all but two children off the playground in less than half a minute. Jack reached for one of the children, who was clinging to the top of the jungle gym, when the child suddenly vanished. The only thing that should have been in his line of sight beyond that was his outstretched arm. Except it had gone transparent.
“Brianna,” he called, his voice quivering. She was at his side before he’d finished calling her name, and he was horrified to see that she was disappearing right before his eyes. She sucked in a breath as she looked at him, no doubt seeing what he saw happening to her.
“Shit,” she said before everything around Jack went black.
***
“Jack. Jack, wake up.”
Jack woke to someone shaking him roughly. Startled, he jumped to his feet, nearly knocking Brianna over as he did. The only thing that saved her from getting a dislocated jaw was her super-fast reflexes.
Trying to drag himself into full consciousness, Jack rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. “Wha? What happened?”
Brianna shrugged. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”
With that being all the prompting he needed, Jack surveyed the area. They appeared to be in some kind of schoolroom, at least from what Jack could tell. The walls were covered with drawings from kids and brightly colored maps. There weren’t any desks, but there was a white board at the front, a teacher’s desk directly in front of it, plenty of childish learning games scattered around the room, and lots of bean bag chairs for kids to sit in. At the moment almost all of the bean bag chairs were occupied by sniffling children. Jack recognized three of them as kids that had vanished at the playground. A quick headcount told him that there were nineteen kids there, not including Brianna and himself. Jack’s eyes went to the big window on the left side of the classroom. It had thick metal bars going across it.
“The door is locked too,” Brianna supplied when she saw him staring at the window. “And my lock picks were in my backpack.” She looked at him expectantly.
“What?”
“Go break the door down so we can get out.”
While that didn’t actually seem like a bad idea, Jack looked at all of the kids curled up in their bean bag chairs. He had no idea if he and Brianna could look after them once they got outside of the room. None of them could have been older than eight; most of them were around four or five. And all of them were staring and Jack and Brianna, the oldest kids in the room.
“Where’s my mommy?” one of the little boys cried.
That trigged a mass of questions from the other children. “Are we going home? How do we get out? Who are you? Why are we here?”
“Hey, quiet!” Brianna snapped, and instantly the voices were silenced. She was staring at the door, tense and ready for a fight. That was when Jack heard it: a click in the lock on the door as the tumbler was released, and the door swung inward.
In stepped a man wearing a police uniform, his gun drawn. A few of the children screamed and ducked their heads, but as soon as he saw that there was no one else in the room besides the children he holstered his weapon and put his hands up in a friendly manner.
“Hey there kids,” he said, working a smile on his face as he did a mental headcount of everyone in the room. He paused when he saw Jack and Brianna, who were both glaring suspiciously at him, but the smile didn’t falter. “I’m Officer Smith. I’m here to help.”
“How did you find us?” Brianna demanded. The officer’s smile faltered then, but a reply was quick to his lips.
“We caught the man responsible for kidnapping all of you. After interrogating him, he released the location of this hideout.”
But Brianna wasn’t satisfied. “You have the keys.”
“They were hanging on a coatrack by the front,” the officer said, pointing back in some general direction.
Her eyes only narrowed in disbelief at this new information. Brianna was suspicious. So was Jack. There was no way it was that easy. If someone went to all of the trouble to teleport kids right out from under the watchful eyes of their parents, they weren’t going to be caught by the police so easily. And Jack seriously doubted that this man worked with the police. He wasn’t following any of the proper procedures. But then why bother to dress up like a cop in the first place? One glance at the other children gave him the answer. They all seemed much more at ease with an adult present, especially a cop. They didn’t know to be suspicious of someone who came to rescue a group of children without any backup, and yet had his gun drawn when he entered a room full of supposedly unarmed children.
“Don’t worry, the culprit has been caught,” the officer was assuring the other children, having found it easier to ignore Jack and Brianna altogether. “We’ll get you all back home to your families safely.”
A movement outside of the window caught Jack’s attention, and he stole a glance at it. At first he thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him, but the longer he stared the more certain he was. There was a zeppelin blimp in the sky. Jack sucked in his breath, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear him. The officer paused.
“He’s forcibly yanking kids from Lincoln’s universe into this one,” Jack breathed, turning to Brianna, momentarily forgetting that everyone else in the room could hear him too. Brianna perked up, her knife flicking from her belt into her hand as she discovered that they had an enemy she could actually attack.
The officer laughed, his attention focused entirely on Jack, the current problem. “You kids must still be disoriented from everything that’s happened. Why don’t you let me just take you to the station—”
“You can drop the act,” Brianna said, hands on her hips, where it was impossible for the officer not to notice the knife in her hand. “You can’t fool the Breeze.”
The officer’s smile vanished. “I don’t know how you kids know about that,” he said, “but it won’t do you any good now.”
“Oh yeah? You don’t even know who you’re messing with!” Brianna boasted. Jack inched backwards as the officer faced down Brianna, until he was next to the teacher’s desk.
“I can’t believe you all fell for this guy’s act,” Brianna huffed at the other children, but made sure to keep her eyes on the fake officer. “He’s obviously not a cop. He’s just dressed like that to trick you. He’s the kidnapper.”
In an instant the other children turned wary of the man, getting up and crowding together while eyeing him with suspicion.
“We’re not kidnapping them,” the man said, his temper flaring. “We’re giving them a new home.”
“These kids have homes, in the other universe,” Brianna argued.
“And their universe will soon be destroyed,” he shot back. “Why not keep them all here, where they’ll be safe? Or would you rather die along with the other universe?”
Jack saw the man reaching for the gun in his holster and decided they’d done enough talking. He grabbed the teacher’s desk with all his strength and threw it at the man, hitting him dead on. The children screamed and ran out of the way as the man and the desk both went crashing into the wall near them, the gun skittering out of the man’s grip and onto the floor. The man didn’t move. He might be dead. Jack didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.
Brianna picked up the gun, inspected it, and shoved it in her belt. “Finders keepers.”
“Wh-what are we supposed to do now?” one of the quivering kids asked.
Brianna gave a long-suffering sigh and rolled her eyes. “We get the heck out of here, duh.”
After having Brianna make sure the coast was clear, Jack ushered the kids out of the schoolroom and down several narrow hallways until they found a door that led out back to the schoolyard. A blast of cold air hit them as they hovered on the back steps, Jack leaning against the door to keep it open. The yard was unkept and what parts weren’t completely covered in snow were overgrown with weeds, suggesting that the school had been abandoned a while ago. Beyond the yard was a chain link fence, but there was a hole in it big enough for a child to fit through, or an adult to crawl through. The only thing past the fence was a thick forest, though at the corner of the yard Jack could make out a road. If they followed that, eventually they would reach a town or a city.
He opened his mouth to relay this information back to the kids, out of habit more than anything, when Brianna put a hand over his mouth. That was when he heard more voices, calling out from somewhere on the other end of the school. But the voices were getting closer.
Brianna made a disgusted face. “There’s more than one?”
“He did say ‘we’ earlier,” Jack pointed out, his voice muffled because of her hand. “I thought you said the coast was clear.”
“It was clear when I checked it.” She bristled at the implication that she’d failed to do her job. “I’ll go check it out.”
And before Jack could argue Brianna was gone. He barely had time to worry about whether or not she would get caught before she was back again.
“There’s a ton of them,” she said. “Like twenty.” Brianna looked at Jack. “They’ll chase after us.”
“Yeah.”
“They’ll catch us if we’ve got all these kids.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t run in the snow.”
“I know.”
An understanding passed between them that there was only one thing to do. Some of the children were putting on a brave face, but most of them looked scared. Some of them were crying silently onto one another. Jack grabbed one of the brave faces, a boy who looked about eight, and looked him straight in the eye.
“You get out of here with the other kids. Go through the forest, but make sure you keep the road in your sight. Find a populated area, it doesn’t matter where. Ask someone for Fringe Division. Say it’s an emergency. They’ll help you find your parents. Alright?” The boy nodded frantically. “Don’t let anyone separate you. Stay together.” Jack looked up at the rest of the kids, who all had their eyes on him. “You hear that?”
He turned to each of the kids in turn, making sure they all nodded. One of the other older kids, a girl about seven, asked, “But what about you two?”
“We’re the distraction,” Brianna boasted with a grin. “It’s our job to make sure you guys get away and find those Fringe guys while we hold these idiots off.”
“You don’t need to worry about us,” Jack said, trying to match Brianna’s bravado. He didn’t come anywhere close to it, but the kids looked more reassured. “We’ll be fine. You guys just stay safe.”
With a gesture from him they all took off across the yard, stumbling over snow banks as they ducked under the fence and into the trees. Once they disappeared he stepped inside the school and let the door close behind him. “That’s one problem down.”
Brianna grinned and gave him a punch on the shoulder. “You’re kinda cool sometimes, Jacko.”
A blush flew from his cheeks all the way to the roots of his hair. “You think so?”
“I said sometimes. And you better not try to show me up, you got it?”
“Got it.” He watched as Brianna pulled the gun from her belt and offered it to him. He shook his head, trying not to feel queasy. “I’ll manage without it.”
Instead of putting the gun away, though, Brianna switched off the safety and cocked it. “We can take them.”
She looked so fierce and confident that Jack had to believe her. “Yeah.”
But when they heard shouts and gunshots from down the hall, they both flinched and hit the deck. The gunshots continued, but they weren’t the ones being shot at. The noise was simply reverberating down the halls. From the sounds of it, the kidnappers were engrossed in a very heavy gunfight.
They looked at each other, Brianna lifting an eyebrow. “Do you think its actual cops?”
“Whoever it is, they’re providing a better distraction than we could,” Jack said, and pulled Brianna to her feet and shoved the back door open.
He came face to face with the barrel of a gun.
“Freez—” The word cut off as Jack jerked backwards and the person holding the gun realized he wasn’t a threat. But by that time Brianna had already leveled her gun at the woman aiming at Jack, a woman who looked very similar to Olivia Dunham, except with bangs and red hair. From the look in Brianna’s eyes, the only reason she hadn’t fired was because the woman looked so much like Olivia.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” the woman said, her voice steady. But she didn’t lower her gun. A smart move, considering Brianna was still aiming at her. “We’re after the men who kidnapped you.”
“Olivia?” Brianna asked, the word thick with uncertainty. Jack noticed there were two other agents behind the woman, both aiming their guns at Brianna as well. He clenched his fists. It was then he noticed the emblem on their bulletproof vests.
“You’re Fringe Division,” Jack blurted out.
The alternate Olivia nodded. “That’s right.” Slowly, slower than Jack thought Brianna would ever do anything, she lowered the gun. Alternate Olivia watched her, waiting until the gun was at Brianna’s side before saying, “I’m gonna need to take that.”
Wordlessly, Brianna switched the safety on and held it out, and one of the agents moved to take the gun from her.
“We sent the kids into the forest—” Jack began, but the alternate Olivia cut him off.
“We know. We found them as we were setting up a perimeter. That’s why we moved in.”
Jack realized the gunshots had stopped. The fight was already over. Before he could let that settle in, there was a shout from behind them that made him jump.
“Jack! Brianna!”
They spun around only to be almost barreled over by Lincoln, who was pulling Jack and Brianna into the biggest hug he could. Brianna protested loudly, elbowing Jack in the stomach in an attempt to free herself.
“We’re fine, chill out,” she huffed, wiggling until Lincoln let them both go.
He managed to look slightly abashed when she scowled at him, but continued to hover over them, checking for any signs of injury. “Sorry, I just—you’re both okay? You’re not hurt, are you?”
Peter came up behind him, a relieved smile on his face. “Thank goodness you’re both here. We thought we might have been off.” He put a hand on Lincoln’s shoulder, adding, “Give them a moment to breathe, will you? They look fine to me.”
“I said we’re good,” Brianna reiterated in her most put-upon voice.
Jack nodded vehemently, unable to find the words. Lincoln reached over and ruffled his hair. For a moment he just let the silence drag on, and then Jack asked, “How did you find us?”
Lincoln snapped his mouth shut, looking guilty. When he didn’t say anything, Peter jumped in. “We just started working on the case this morning and got a call that there was another incident. All of your things were at the scene, and the witnesses remembered you pretty clearly.”
“They said you saved their kids,” Lincoln added, making Brianna glow with pride. She deflated slightly when he went on to say, “The school also called to say you were absent.”
“But that’s not how you found us,” Jack persisted, his curiosity burning. “That’s how you knew we were missing.”
Peter and Lincoln exchanged looks. Very guilty looks.
“I might have put a tracking device in your iPhone,” Peter confessed.
“Because I asked him to,” Lincoln added in a mumble.
Jack’s cheeks flushed. But he was more embarrassed at not having noticed a tracker than angry at being tracked. He rounded on Peter. “You said it was an upgrade!”
Peter held up his hands. “It was. I just put a tracking device in there too. And it came in handy, you can’t deny that.”
Jack dug the iPhone out of his pocket and frowned at it. “You can just tell me next time you put one in there.”
“So you know beforehand not to ditch school?” Lincoln parried lightly, making Jack and Brianna wince. “I’ll let it slide, since you helped solve the case. Even if you didn’t mean to.”
Brianna heaved a heavy sigh. “Dude.” Everyone looked at her. She was staring at Lincoln “You just crossed universes to get us back.”
“I—of course.” Lincoln blinked profusely, waiting for more elaboration. But Brianna didn’t give any. Instead she just said,
“We should totally do this again sometime.”
Canons: GONE series and Fringe series
Word Count: about 5,950
Shut up this did not take me two weeks to finish.
I’m going through the prompts at random and happened to finish this one first! It will also probably be the longest one because it turned into a Fringe episode. And I changed the premise for the whole thing about 5 times. I beg your forgiveness for anything glaringly OOC for these characters, and for the awkward pacing of the piece. It was fun to write and that was basically what I was going for. Also none of the Fringe Things make any sense. OH WELL I can good writing.
Everything is probably Peter Bishop’s fault somehow.
***
“I’m ditching.” Brianna decided. The crunch of her boots in the snow, which had been a constant presence in their walk to school, slowed almost to a halt. Not completely, because stopping was something Brianna just didn’t do, but it was enough to pull Jack’s attention away from his iPad to look up at her. There was a stubborn look set on her face that said she was going to do what she wanted and no one was going to tell her otherwise.
Lincoln had insisted, much to Brianna’s dismay, that they go to school. At least to try it out, he suggested. But his tone had left little room for argument, and sullenly Brianna and Jack agreed to go for the first day and see how they liked it. Originally Lincoln had planned to take them to school himself, but that morning he had received an urgent call from Broyles about a new case. There was nothing to do but scramble to pack the kids lunches, bundle them up in their winter clothes, and give them directions to the school even as he ran out the door.
Now that the threat of Special Agent Lincoln Lee wasn’t looming over them, Brianna had become emboldened with a sense of absolute freedom. No one could tell the Breeze what to do. They had a whole world to do whatever they wanted, and Brianna was going to make the most of it.
But Jack looked unsure. “We probably shouldn’t. We’ll get in trouble later.”
She watched him shift from foot to foot uneasily, but it wasn’t a flat-out no. Indecision riddled his face, torn between the idea of pleasing Lincoln and going to school or upsetting Lincoln and ditching. There was no force behind his words, and Brianna was sure that he would agree with a little bit of persuasion. She walked circles around him as he stood there debating it, her eagerness to rebel plain in her step.
“It’s not like he can ground us, he’s not our dad. And he didn’t even show us around town. We’re just going to check out the sights.”
She bounced around on the balls of her feet, eager to find an open place to run. Jack looked around, and she could see his mind whirling with the possibilities, trying to take in the variables or whatever. Behind his fogged glasses Jack’s eyes gleamed with the possibility of discovering a new world, similar enough to their own, but different enough for it to be an adventure.
“We have to stop first,” he told her, his eyes flicking back to the iPad and his fingers whirling across its screen. “I have to hack the school’s attendance records first, so Lincoln doesn’t know that we weren’t there, and it would be easier to do that on my laptop. Hopefully it won’t trigger the automated message they send to parents when their kids aren’t at school…” He trailed off, busy at work doing whatever he did on his computers.
“Sure, sure,” she said, already scurrying around to give him a shove from behind so he would keep moving down the sidewalk. “We can find a Starbucks, those have free internet right?”
“A library would be less conspicuous for kids,” he mumbled, stumbling forward and kicking up clumps of snow as he went. Brianna grabbed his arm to make him stop at a crosswalk, at the back of a cluster of kids heading in the same direction as them. They all looked equally depressed at the idea of school, but they were chattering away with their friends about their vacations, Christmas presents, and other mundane things. Those things didn’t matter to the Breeze—or at least that’s what she told herself as she nudged Jack.
“There’s like, a million Starbucks. We’ll find one of those sooner.”
But as usual, Computer Jack was too focused on his iPad to pay her any attention. Impatiently she snapped her fingers in front of his face. Brianna thought that she had somehow managed to pull him away from his technology for five seconds when he actually paused and slid the iPad under his arm. But then he pulled his brand new iPhone out of his jacket pocket, switching it off. Lincoln had bought them both cell phones so that they could contact him in case of an emergency. Brianna had yet to turn hers on; Parker had warned her that Feds could track you through a cell phone, and she wasn’t going to take that chance. Brianna puffed with pride at remembering this. Jack was clearly thinking along the same lines, from the guilty look crossing his face as the screen went dark.
“Kids aren’t supposed to have cell phones on at school anyway,” she reassured him with a slap on the back. “He won’t even notice.”
“Sure.” He didn’t look convinced, but he slid the iPhone into his jacket pocket without turning it back on and the iPad went back into his hands.
Brianna snapped her fingers in front of his face again as the crosswalk light changed and the gaggle of kids began to cross the street. Some of them shot Jack and Brianna a few curious glances, and Brianna pointedly turned her back to them as she dragged Jack away from the crosswalk and to their right, away from the school.
“We’re not going all the way to a library,” she said, dragging their earlier subject back as she towed him down the street at random, figuring they would happen upon a coffee shop along the way. “A Starbucks would be closer.”
“Okay, fine, then find whatever’s closest.” As soon as the words were out of Jack’s mouth he flinched, realizing his error. Before he had even looked up to add an amendment clause Brianna was gone, leaving only a flurry of snow where she had been standing.
But almost as soon as she vanished he heard a yelp and saw her crashing to her butt two streetlights down, startling a group of business men walking past her. Finally shoving his iPad away, he hurried over to where she was flopped down as fast as he could without attracting stares. When he reached her she was muttering a stream of curse words under her breath.
“There’s snow on the ground!” she exclaimed, wiping it off of herself like it was a deadly germ.
“Obviously.” It was then he realized the problem: Brianna couldn’t run on the snow without slipping and falling. She ran too fast and there was too little traction for her shoes.
“This place sucks,” she decided as her eyes grew dark and murderous. There was no way she was going to live in a place where she couldn’t even run. “There’s gotta be some place around here that isn’t covered in snow.”
“A park?” Jack guessed. “Or some kind of stadium. They’d keep it clear for practices.”
Brianna leapt to her feet. “Find the closest one. We’re going there.”
“Brianna…” Jack checked his watch. It was 7:28. School started at 8:00, attendance would probably be taken around 8:15, and Lincoln would receive a call around 9:00. As long as he hacked the school’s computer by then, Lincoln would never know. “Half an hour,” he decided. “And then we have to find some WiFi for my laptop, or we’ll be in trouble.”
But Brianna was already taking off down the street, going as fast as she could without slipping, looking for a park.
***
Meanwhile, in the basement of the Kresge Building at Harvard University, Lincoln Lee was being filled in on their newest case. He came into the lab to find everyone else was already there. Olivia was flipping through a file on the nearest counter while Peter tried his very best not to hover over her shoulder to get a closer look, and Astrid was making sure Walter didn’t eat whatever was in the beaker in his hand.
“What’s the emergency?” Lincoln asked Olivia when, hearing the door close behind him, she looked up. “Broyles just told me to come straight here, so I didn’t hear any details about the case…”
“Someone’s been abducting children,” she began, only to stop when the color left Lincoln’s face.
Peter quirked an eyebrow. “You dropped them off at school, didn’t you?”
“When Broyles said ‘get over there immediately’ I assumed he meant as soon as possible,” Lincoln said, already pulling out his phone and dialing Jack’s number. “He didn’t leave a lot of room for argument. The school isn’t that far of a walk, I thought they would be okay.” The phone went straight to Jack’s voicemail—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. He was at school. He had to turn off his cell phone at school. Lincoln tried to calm himself down. “Do we have any other details on the case?”
“We know that children in the area have been going missing for about a week,” Peter said, jumping right into the facts. “Always in public places, and not just one kid at a time. They’ve been disappearing in groups of three to five all at once. Parents would take their eyes off the kids for two seconds and the next thing they knew, all of their kids had vanished.”
“The only reason the case was handed over to us is because one woman saw her daughter and two other kids disappear into thin air,” Olivia added.
“Do we have any suspects? Leads? Have any of the children come back?”
Olivia flipped through the file in front of her. “The missing children are all between the ages of four and eight. Beyond that, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of pattern. Even though they were all from this area, the places they disappeared range from schoolyards to playgrounds and daycares.”
“Younger kids tend to be easier targets because they’re more vulnerable,” Peter added, “But if they’re disappearing into thin air then I wouldn’t think that has anything to do with it.”
“We were just going to the daycare where the first child disappeared. Maybe we can get some clues, see if any of the other kids saw anything.” Olivia waited for Lincoln to respond, but he still seemed to be processing the information with a grim look on his face. “I’m sure they’re fine,” she told him. “They aren’t even in the age range of the children being kidnapped. We’ll catch this guy before they even get out of school.”
“Right,” Lincoln agreed. But he worried anyway.
***
Jack sat in the midst of a cluster of picnic tables in the park, his laptop settled nicely on the table front of him as he clacked away on it. Their backpacks and heavy winter jackets lay in a pile on top of the table next to Jack, essentially discarded by their owners. They were right in the middle of the park, too far away from any of the surrounding businesses to leech off of their internet, but for now Jack didn’t mind. Brianna had made sure to find a park with a Starbucks right across the street; a glance at his laptop’s clock assured him that they still had ten minutes left before he had to head over there to alter their attendance records. From there, they could have the day off with no worries.
“Caught another one!” he heard Brianna say, and waved a hand without looking up. He had no idea what she’d caught, but she wasn’t grumpy anymore and that was all that mattered. For the moment he was content enough immersing himself in the world of his computer—
Suddenly Brianna was next to him, dragging him away from his precious laptop and under the table. He grabbed for the bench in surprise and heard a crunch as the wood splintered and snapped under his strength. “What—?”
But she put a finger to her lips and shushed him. Immediately he fell silent, but that didn’t stop him from looking around for any signs of trouble. Nothing caught his attention. There were a few kids playing on a playset not too far away, an old couple walking down the path in the distance, and a gaggle of parents chatting near the playground.
“He’s suspicious,” Brianna said, pointing towards the playground. Following her line of sight, Jack spotted a man in a dark business suit and sporting a fedora, simply observing the children and their parents. The parents didn’t seem to notice him, and the kids were all too busy playing to pay him any mind. But he definitely stood out, and it was unusual behavior. Enough for him to be suspicious.
“Should we call Lincoln?” Jack asked her in a hushed voice, not taking his eyes off the man.
He heard Brianna make a scoffing noise. “And let him know we ditched school? No way. If this guy tries anything funny, we can take him.”
Before Jack could formulate a response, a cooing noise took his attention away from the man in the suit. He looked towards Brianna, who was clutching a pigeon in one hand. It stared at Jack with mournful eyes and cooed again. “Why do you have a—”
The rest of his sentence was drowned out by an eruption of screaming coming from the playground. Jack flinched and ducked his head, but Brianna, the Breeze, scrambled out from under the table, the pigeon flying away as she released it in favor of a knife. After a few startling seconds when the screaming only grew louder and more panicked, Jack climbed out after her to see what was happening, side-eyeing the knife as he did so. While Jack couldn’t bring himself to be surprised that Brianna had a knife on her, he was sure it was against school regulations.
The parents that had been idly chatting before were now scrambling to reach their children on the playset. At first Jack didn’t see what was causing the panic, but then he spotted one of the children growing more and more transparent before disappearing altogether. A mother screamed in anguish, which only caused the baffled children to start crying; they didn’t seem to realize what was going on.
Jack took two steps forward before he stopped himself. No. You’re Computer Jack. Leave the rash actions to Brianna—you’ve got to think. He took in the scene, his eyes searching for something that the others were clearly missing. Some way to get the kids to safety and make them stop disappearing. But he couldn’t see anything of significance. He waited for one heartbeat, and then two, mentally scrambling. Another child disappeared.
He spun around and dug through his jacket pockets for his iPhone, his body reacting to what his brain was just processing. Peter had added some upgrades to it; he knew what they were but with all the parents screaming and the kids crying he couldn’t quite remember—
“Jack, what’s going on?” Brianna demanded. He hadn’t realized she was still there, but he quickly realized why. She might have super speed and a knife, but there was nothing to beat up in order to save the day. Kids were just disappearing and she couldn’t do anything about that. “What do we do?!”
“Give me a minute!” In a flurry of spinning screens he raced through the new settings, searching for the one he was looking for. His eyes fell on the camera option and he clicked it. That’s it.
He whirled back around and pointed the camera at the playground, ignoring Brianna as she yelled, “We don’t have a minute, Jack!”
Through the screen the scene looked just the same as he saw it, at first. But then he flipped over the settings, switching it to infrared and dark vision and gamma radiation and the hundred other settings Peter had added. His fingers froze as he spun to another setting and saw what he had been looking for. There was some kind of shimmering dome surrounding the playground, curving ten feet over the highest point of the playset and then dropping down to the other side. That would be the affected area, he reasoned, except all of the parents were now inside of it and didn’t seem to be affected at all. He watched as one parent reached desperately for her child, only for her hand to pass right through her son’s arm. For some reason, probably the same reason they were unaffected, the parents couldn’t touch their children. But other children like Brianna and Jack might be able to.
“Get the kids away from the playground!” Jack said, and Brianna took off, the knife disappearing back into her belt. There were at least a dozen children left, going transparent and in danger of disappearing altogether. Lucky for them, the Breeze was faster than whatever was causing their vanishing act. She swooped in and snatched up the smallest kids, zipping them out of the danger zone and onto the grass. As soon as they were outside of the affected area, the children regained their solidity. Jack felt a sort of grim satisfaction at being right.
But super speed didn’t mean Brianna had super strength, and carrying the kids off the playground was slowing her down. Abandoning his belongings on the picnic table and shoving his iPhone into his pocket, Jack ran over to help, ignoring startled parents as he snatched up their children and literally flung them onto the grass. A few bumps and bruises would be a small price to pay for not getting sucked into thin air.
They had gotten all but two children off the playground in less than half a minute. Jack reached for one of the children, who was clinging to the top of the jungle gym, when the child suddenly vanished. The only thing that should have been in his line of sight beyond that was his outstretched arm. Except it had gone transparent.
“Brianna,” he called, his voice quivering. She was at his side before he’d finished calling her name, and he was horrified to see that she was disappearing right before his eyes. She sucked in a breath as she looked at him, no doubt seeing what he saw happening to her.
“Shit,” she said before everything around Jack went black.
***
“Jack. Jack, wake up.”
Jack woke to someone shaking him roughly. Startled, he jumped to his feet, nearly knocking Brianna over as he did. The only thing that saved her from getting a dislocated jaw was her super-fast reflexes.
Trying to drag himself into full consciousness, Jack rubbed at his eyes under his glasses. “Wha? What happened?”
Brianna shrugged. “That’s what I was going to ask you.”
With that being all the prompting he needed, Jack surveyed the area. They appeared to be in some kind of schoolroom, at least from what Jack could tell. The walls were covered with drawings from kids and brightly colored maps. There weren’t any desks, but there was a white board at the front, a teacher’s desk directly in front of it, plenty of childish learning games scattered around the room, and lots of bean bag chairs for kids to sit in. At the moment almost all of the bean bag chairs were occupied by sniffling children. Jack recognized three of them as kids that had vanished at the playground. A quick headcount told him that there were nineteen kids there, not including Brianna and himself. Jack’s eyes went to the big window on the left side of the classroom. It had thick metal bars going across it.
“The door is locked too,” Brianna supplied when she saw him staring at the window. “And my lock picks were in my backpack.” She looked at him expectantly.
“What?”
“Go break the door down so we can get out.”
While that didn’t actually seem like a bad idea, Jack looked at all of the kids curled up in their bean bag chairs. He had no idea if he and Brianna could look after them once they got outside of the room. None of them could have been older than eight; most of them were around four or five. And all of them were staring and Jack and Brianna, the oldest kids in the room.
“Where’s my mommy?” one of the little boys cried.
That trigged a mass of questions from the other children. “Are we going home? How do we get out? Who are you? Why are we here?”
“Hey, quiet!” Brianna snapped, and instantly the voices were silenced. She was staring at the door, tense and ready for a fight. That was when Jack heard it: a click in the lock on the door as the tumbler was released, and the door swung inward.
In stepped a man wearing a police uniform, his gun drawn. A few of the children screamed and ducked their heads, but as soon as he saw that there was no one else in the room besides the children he holstered his weapon and put his hands up in a friendly manner.
“Hey there kids,” he said, working a smile on his face as he did a mental headcount of everyone in the room. He paused when he saw Jack and Brianna, who were both glaring suspiciously at him, but the smile didn’t falter. “I’m Officer Smith. I’m here to help.”
“How did you find us?” Brianna demanded. The officer’s smile faltered then, but a reply was quick to his lips.
“We caught the man responsible for kidnapping all of you. After interrogating him, he released the location of this hideout.”
But Brianna wasn’t satisfied. “You have the keys.”
“They were hanging on a coatrack by the front,” the officer said, pointing back in some general direction.
Her eyes only narrowed in disbelief at this new information. Brianna was suspicious. So was Jack. There was no way it was that easy. If someone went to all of the trouble to teleport kids right out from under the watchful eyes of their parents, they weren’t going to be caught by the police so easily. And Jack seriously doubted that this man worked with the police. He wasn’t following any of the proper procedures. But then why bother to dress up like a cop in the first place? One glance at the other children gave him the answer. They all seemed much more at ease with an adult present, especially a cop. They didn’t know to be suspicious of someone who came to rescue a group of children without any backup, and yet had his gun drawn when he entered a room full of supposedly unarmed children.
“Don’t worry, the culprit has been caught,” the officer was assuring the other children, having found it easier to ignore Jack and Brianna altogether. “We’ll get you all back home to your families safely.”
A movement outside of the window caught Jack’s attention, and he stole a glance at it. At first he thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him, but the longer he stared the more certain he was. There was a zeppelin blimp in the sky. Jack sucked in his breath, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear him. The officer paused.
“He’s forcibly yanking kids from Lincoln’s universe into this one,” Jack breathed, turning to Brianna, momentarily forgetting that everyone else in the room could hear him too. Brianna perked up, her knife flicking from her belt into her hand as she discovered that they had an enemy she could actually attack.
The officer laughed, his attention focused entirely on Jack, the current problem. “You kids must still be disoriented from everything that’s happened. Why don’t you let me just take you to the station—”
“You can drop the act,” Brianna said, hands on her hips, where it was impossible for the officer not to notice the knife in her hand. “You can’t fool the Breeze.”
The officer’s smile vanished. “I don’t know how you kids know about that,” he said, “but it won’t do you any good now.”
“Oh yeah? You don’t even know who you’re messing with!” Brianna boasted. Jack inched backwards as the officer faced down Brianna, until he was next to the teacher’s desk.
“I can’t believe you all fell for this guy’s act,” Brianna huffed at the other children, but made sure to keep her eyes on the fake officer. “He’s obviously not a cop. He’s just dressed like that to trick you. He’s the kidnapper.”
In an instant the other children turned wary of the man, getting up and crowding together while eyeing him with suspicion.
“We’re not kidnapping them,” the man said, his temper flaring. “We’re giving them a new home.”
“These kids have homes, in the other universe,” Brianna argued.
“And their universe will soon be destroyed,” he shot back. “Why not keep them all here, where they’ll be safe? Or would you rather die along with the other universe?”
Jack saw the man reaching for the gun in his holster and decided they’d done enough talking. He grabbed the teacher’s desk with all his strength and threw it at the man, hitting him dead on. The children screamed and ran out of the way as the man and the desk both went crashing into the wall near them, the gun skittering out of the man’s grip and onto the floor. The man didn’t move. He might be dead. Jack didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.
Brianna picked up the gun, inspected it, and shoved it in her belt. “Finders keepers.”
“Wh-what are we supposed to do now?” one of the quivering kids asked.
Brianna gave a long-suffering sigh and rolled her eyes. “We get the heck out of here, duh.”
After having Brianna make sure the coast was clear, Jack ushered the kids out of the schoolroom and down several narrow hallways until they found a door that led out back to the schoolyard. A blast of cold air hit them as they hovered on the back steps, Jack leaning against the door to keep it open. The yard was unkept and what parts weren’t completely covered in snow were overgrown with weeds, suggesting that the school had been abandoned a while ago. Beyond the yard was a chain link fence, but there was a hole in it big enough for a child to fit through, or an adult to crawl through. The only thing past the fence was a thick forest, though at the corner of the yard Jack could make out a road. If they followed that, eventually they would reach a town or a city.
He opened his mouth to relay this information back to the kids, out of habit more than anything, when Brianna put a hand over his mouth. That was when he heard more voices, calling out from somewhere on the other end of the school. But the voices were getting closer.
Brianna made a disgusted face. “There’s more than one?”
“He did say ‘we’ earlier,” Jack pointed out, his voice muffled because of her hand. “I thought you said the coast was clear.”
“It was clear when I checked it.” She bristled at the implication that she’d failed to do her job. “I’ll go check it out.”
And before Jack could argue Brianna was gone. He barely had time to worry about whether or not she would get caught before she was back again.
“There’s a ton of them,” she said. “Like twenty.” Brianna looked at Jack. “They’ll chase after us.”
“Yeah.”
“They’ll catch us if we’ve got all these kids.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t run in the snow.”
“I know.”
An understanding passed between them that there was only one thing to do. Some of the children were putting on a brave face, but most of them looked scared. Some of them were crying silently onto one another. Jack grabbed one of the brave faces, a boy who looked about eight, and looked him straight in the eye.
“You get out of here with the other kids. Go through the forest, but make sure you keep the road in your sight. Find a populated area, it doesn’t matter where. Ask someone for Fringe Division. Say it’s an emergency. They’ll help you find your parents. Alright?” The boy nodded frantically. “Don’t let anyone separate you. Stay together.” Jack looked up at the rest of the kids, who all had their eyes on him. “You hear that?”
He turned to each of the kids in turn, making sure they all nodded. One of the other older kids, a girl about seven, asked, “But what about you two?”
“We’re the distraction,” Brianna boasted with a grin. “It’s our job to make sure you guys get away and find those Fringe guys while we hold these idiots off.”
“You don’t need to worry about us,” Jack said, trying to match Brianna’s bravado. He didn’t come anywhere close to it, but the kids looked more reassured. “We’ll be fine. You guys just stay safe.”
With a gesture from him they all took off across the yard, stumbling over snow banks as they ducked under the fence and into the trees. Once they disappeared he stepped inside the school and let the door close behind him. “That’s one problem down.”
Brianna grinned and gave him a punch on the shoulder. “You’re kinda cool sometimes, Jacko.”
A blush flew from his cheeks all the way to the roots of his hair. “You think so?”
“I said sometimes. And you better not try to show me up, you got it?”
“Got it.” He watched as Brianna pulled the gun from her belt and offered it to him. He shook his head, trying not to feel queasy. “I’ll manage without it.”
Instead of putting the gun away, though, Brianna switched off the safety and cocked it. “We can take them.”
She looked so fierce and confident that Jack had to believe her. “Yeah.”
But when they heard shouts and gunshots from down the hall, they both flinched and hit the deck. The gunshots continued, but they weren’t the ones being shot at. The noise was simply reverberating down the halls. From the sounds of it, the kidnappers were engrossed in a very heavy gunfight.
They looked at each other, Brianna lifting an eyebrow. “Do you think its actual cops?”
“Whoever it is, they’re providing a better distraction than we could,” Jack said, and pulled Brianna to her feet and shoved the back door open.
He came face to face with the barrel of a gun.
“Freez—” The word cut off as Jack jerked backwards and the person holding the gun realized he wasn’t a threat. But by that time Brianna had already leveled her gun at the woman aiming at Jack, a woman who looked very similar to Olivia Dunham, except with bangs and red hair. From the look in Brianna’s eyes, the only reason she hadn’t fired was because the woman looked so much like Olivia.
“I’m not gonna hurt you,” the woman said, her voice steady. But she didn’t lower her gun. A smart move, considering Brianna was still aiming at her. “We’re after the men who kidnapped you.”
“Olivia?” Brianna asked, the word thick with uncertainty. Jack noticed there were two other agents behind the woman, both aiming their guns at Brianna as well. He clenched his fists. It was then he noticed the emblem on their bulletproof vests.
“You’re Fringe Division,” Jack blurted out.
The alternate Olivia nodded. “That’s right.” Slowly, slower than Jack thought Brianna would ever do anything, she lowered the gun. Alternate Olivia watched her, waiting until the gun was at Brianna’s side before saying, “I’m gonna need to take that.”
Wordlessly, Brianna switched the safety on and held it out, and one of the agents moved to take the gun from her.
“We sent the kids into the forest—” Jack began, but the alternate Olivia cut him off.
“We know. We found them as we were setting up a perimeter. That’s why we moved in.”
Jack realized the gunshots had stopped. The fight was already over. Before he could let that settle in, there was a shout from behind them that made him jump.
“Jack! Brianna!”
They spun around only to be almost barreled over by Lincoln, who was pulling Jack and Brianna into the biggest hug he could. Brianna protested loudly, elbowing Jack in the stomach in an attempt to free herself.
“We’re fine, chill out,” she huffed, wiggling until Lincoln let them both go.
He managed to look slightly abashed when she scowled at him, but continued to hover over them, checking for any signs of injury. “Sorry, I just—you’re both okay? You’re not hurt, are you?”
Peter came up behind him, a relieved smile on his face. “Thank goodness you’re both here. We thought we might have been off.” He put a hand on Lincoln’s shoulder, adding, “Give them a moment to breathe, will you? They look fine to me.”
“I said we’re good,” Brianna reiterated in her most put-upon voice.
Jack nodded vehemently, unable to find the words. Lincoln reached over and ruffled his hair. For a moment he just let the silence drag on, and then Jack asked, “How did you find us?”
Lincoln snapped his mouth shut, looking guilty. When he didn’t say anything, Peter jumped in. “We just started working on the case this morning and got a call that there was another incident. All of your things were at the scene, and the witnesses remembered you pretty clearly.”
“They said you saved their kids,” Lincoln added, making Brianna glow with pride. She deflated slightly when he went on to say, “The school also called to say you were absent.”
“But that’s not how you found us,” Jack persisted, his curiosity burning. “That’s how you knew we were missing.”
Peter and Lincoln exchanged looks. Very guilty looks.
“I might have put a tracking device in your iPhone,” Peter confessed.
“Because I asked him to,” Lincoln added in a mumble.
Jack’s cheeks flushed. But he was more embarrassed at not having noticed a tracker than angry at being tracked. He rounded on Peter. “You said it was an upgrade!”
Peter held up his hands. “It was. I just put a tracking device in there too. And it came in handy, you can’t deny that.”
Jack dug the iPhone out of his pocket and frowned at it. “You can just tell me next time you put one in there.”
“So you know beforehand not to ditch school?” Lincoln parried lightly, making Jack and Brianna wince. “I’ll let it slide, since you helped solve the case. Even if you didn’t mean to.”
Brianna heaved a heavy sigh. “Dude.” Everyone looked at her. She was staring at Lincoln “You just crossed universes to get us back.”
“I—of course.” Lincoln blinked profusely, waiting for more elaboration. But Brianna didn’t give any. Instead she just said,
“We should totally do this again sometime.”