In one life, John dies without a chance at being saved and hope dies with him. She joins Fringe division for answers, seeks a barely sane man's help in finding them, cobbles him into someone who can at least function and thinks love was never meant for her.

In another life too, John dies. In another life, she's betrayed before she vindicated, she's heartbroken and swept into a world of insanity without much of a choice. She's barely coping and she's sad most of the time.

But in that life, hope doesn't vanish. It lives in the smoky blue eyes of a man who infuriates and intrigues her in equal measure.

In one lifetime, she shoots her step- father and doesn't miss. She kills him, end of story.

In another, she misses, she fails… she's reminded every year of the fact. She shares her disappointment with him.

And he listens… it's the first of many times he does that.

In one life, she goes home to an empty house and an empty bed every night, feeling the inexplicable absence of someone who should have been there with her, making those spaces feel less empty.

Someone whose face she can't even picture but finds herself drawing comparisons to as she sits through dinner dates her sister insists on setting her up on, her expression is always polite, feigning interest in perfectly agreeable men who can't seem to stir anything in her the way she remembers feeling at some point in her life.

They're always too damn clean shaven for her liking for some bizarre reason.

In another life, she goes home to general pandemonium every evening, to the excited chattering of a three year old, who looks up to her and thinks she is the absolute 'bestest', to kitchen catastrophes and broken ovens as the fabulous Bishop boys and their little helper attempt to pursue their dream of creating the world's best strawberry shortcake.

In one life, she walks by happy families and thinks about how it would be to be in their place. To know something more than loneliness, to have a child of her own with someone she loved, to have a family.

She looks at the couples, holding hands and pushing strollers, and wonders when it was exactly that she gave up hope, when she stopped believing she could have that too.

In another, she sits up at nights and listens in awe to vibrations, hand pressed to her swollen stomach, feeling the strong kicking from within.

She's fierce, her little one, Olivia tells him with a smile as his hand caresses her belly through the soft material of a borrowed MIT sweatshirt.

A real fighter through and through.

In one life, Olivia thinks she could like Lincoln because he's sweet and nice and sincere. Because he understands something about being on the fringe of this world, because he deals with the same things she does and because he sees her, behind the armor of her professionalism and her job, he actually sees her and for some strange reason doesn't find her wanting.

She thinks she could like him because he's everything and nothing like whoever it is; she has felt the absence of for as long as she can remember.

In another, she sits in a bar, nursing a drink. She's tired and disappointed and frustrated because he's gone and because she realizes that she's in love.

She's in love with a man from another universe, and he's gone now.

In one life there's less pain because she doesn't allow herself to feel any. There's no heartbreak because there is no one who means enough to be capable of causing her any. But there's a hole in her heart and it never goes away.

In another, she loses everything she loves, over and over again. She watches her only child die in front of her, watches her family fall apart.

But when he holds her, and they're together and she feels his heart beat against her ear drum, his hand threading through her hair, she feels complete, she believes she'll be fine.

In one life, she doesn't love him.

In another, she does.