Disclaimer: I have no intellectual rights over Fringe.

Author's note: I tried to give this new universe a chance, but I can't deny it anymore: I want the old Fringe back.

Chapter 1: En Passant

Sakanoe Korenori, Shinkokinshu 997, trans. Edward Seidensticker:

O broom tree of Fuseya in Sonohara,
You seem to be there, and yet I cannot find you.

He still wasn't sure why she had invited him to play chess. It was like the game was part of the negotiation, the first power play, the first forced concession. Though she had said it was to avoid drawing attention.

They were playing in a park. Avoiding attention was something he had become good at. It was necessary for someone who wanted to observe without changing that which was observed.

"Black or white?" she asked.

"Which do you prefer?" he inquired in his ponderous voice.

"Black."

They set up the board in accordance. Two pawns on a giant game board maneuvering pawns on a smaller game board.

"I still don't see how this is...useful," he stated.

"You're the one with all the time in the world."

He looked at her. Her hair was dark brown, long, and straight. Strangely lusterless, like a wig, but not something the average human would note as unusual. Her eyes were wide and dark, with a strange brightness to them, an eerie subliminal light that, once again, humans wouldn't notice unless they knew what to look for. Her clothes consisted of a purple blouse and blue jeans.

They could pass far more easily than his kind. He envied that. Whenever he had dealings with them he felt an unpleasant sensation, something he was certain came close to the emotion humans called loathing.

But when they made threats, they did not make empty threats.

"The opening move is yours," she reminded him.

He glanced at the board and moved a pawn out from in front of his left knight.

She quickly moved the pawn in front of her king two spaces forward. "I'm sure you have some idea why we asked for this meeting," she said.

He moved out another pawn, and didn't answer.

"You tried to erase Peter Bishop from spacetime. It was not very nice of you." She brought out a knight.

He wouldn't mention the choice not to erase him completely. Dissension within the ranks was not something one revealed to the enemy. "Peter Bishop was an anomaly, his existence a paradox."

"A paradox you couldn't undo by erasing what you had done. Had he not existed, nor would have the machine, the key to fixing the damage his existence had led to."

"It was inevitable. A lesser paradox."

"It was impossible," she said sharply. "He was indelible."

"We had not known that."

"He was ours, and you did know that. He's a perfect candidate, and you tried to take him away from us."

He looked at her. When the decision had been made to erase Peter Bishop from spacetime, they had not considered that possibility. They could see all possible futures, but not all extant dimensions. Her kind did not move in the same directions as his. They could not see the future. They were bound by the temporal event horizon. But the universes were far clearer to her than to him, and the intricacies between them easier to navigate.

"It is unfortunate for all that events have unfolded as they have," he noted.

"It's not like we don't have other options," she said, bringing out her queen.

"What are the options to which you refer?"

"Restore him to where he belongs," she said cryptically. "You will never recover the reality that was lost when Dr. Bishop noticed a strange man in his lab instead of the compound that would have cured his son, but two paths can lead to the same destination."

He stared at her. What she was proposing would involve interfering. In fact, a great deal of it. Which was against everything.

But exactly what her kind did.

"The choice you made to save the boy from Reiden Lake, a choice which, as we have seen, had profound effects on both his worlds, was done to try to prevent a disaster that would have ensued because of that one little slip," she said. "But it was the right thing to do."

"His timeline was resulting in the end of both worlds. If he were restored to it as it was, that destruction would be all but certain."

"Deal," she said so quickly that for a moment he wasn't sure he hadn't posed that as a suggestion.

It was unsurprising that to them the destruction of two worlds would be an acceptable exchange for the gain of Peter Bishop. To them the greater good was meaningless. Balance was meaningless. They served different ends, and used different means. The Observers avoided meddling with events as they unfolded in the timeline, and tried to smooth it out whenever they were compelled to. These, though, they meddled.

But if what she was proposing came to pass, the two universes from which Peter Bishop would be removed would then be allowed to proceed as if he had not existed. The imbalance in one timeline would improve the balance of another.

And all it would cost was the eventual destruction of two worlds.

"He has already been undone. He would need to be...restored."

"Leave that to me," she said. Her queen moved to a seemingly randomly selected square in a corner of the board.

He moved a pawn to take one of hers. "How would it be done?"

"Olivia Dunham."

"And I'm sure it has not escaped the scope of your knowledge that by doing so she will also become yours."

The woman smiled slyly. "What makes you think she isn't ours already?" Her queen took the pawn in front of his king's bishop. Her knight had already been maneuvered to protect the queen from his king. "Checkmate." She looked at him for a minute. "Do we have a deal?"

He nodded slowly, once.

Four dimensions instead of two had existed from the moment two decades ago when a young boy and his father fought for their lives under the ice of Reiden Lake.