The thing is: the first time Astrid meets Walter Bishop he pushes her into oncoming traffic.
****
On her person Astrid carries a combination earpiece and camera Dr. Bishop married together, a gun, an FBI radio and a pair of runners she keeps in the well of her car seat at all times. She knows better than to wear nice clothing or even her most favourite shoes. At Walter’s behest, Astrid’s crawled through air ducts, along sewers, over bodies, and on one memorable occasion *up* a California redwood, balanced precariously between the trunk and a branch that was thick as a small tree.
Her breath had come in sharp bursts, almost asthmatic with fear; bark beneath her nails and nothing but a rocky precipice below, a forest stretched before her like the blurred strokes of an impressionist painting, a blotting of jade and olive green.
“It’s breathtaking,” Walter whispered in her ear and Astrid had stared, stunned by the vista of nature: by the sharp cry of a peregrine as it pin-wheeled in the dawning hush. It took a moment before Astrid comprehended what he said then she hollered, furious with Walter for making her climb the tree for no other purpose.
She had scampered down like a twelve year old, dropping from branch to branch, feet skidding along the ancient trunk until her toes touched the earth.
Astrid carries with her a notepad, a pen, and the unspoken knowledge Walter sees the world, its collection of oddball inhabitants, its frenetic beauty, while perched on her shoulder.
He sings sometimes, glam-rock melting into German nursery rhymes, his voice acerbic in her ear. Walter’s regard should pull Astrid off balance, tip her over the edge with a rush of vertigo, but she has yet to fall from the heights he entices her to scale.
__________________
2008: __________________
“It’s not over. Reanimation of the corpse will give Agent Dunham some answers at least. We could attempt another joining of minds - “
“Walter,” Astrid says.
“Find out who else was responsible for the Flight 627,” Walter says frantically. “Seven hours at least before decay of the synapses becomes irreversible –“
“Dr. Bishop,” Astrid tries again.
“It can be done! You can’t send me back yet!” He’s circled the table twice, maintaining exact distance. There’s a wet spot near Walter’s crotch that Astrid doesn’t comment on. His reactions aren’t his own yet, mind and body divorced from each other after two decades of prescribed and experimental medication. “I didn’t fail,” he insists.
He looks terrified. The etched lines of Walter’s face speak of the contingencies of his release, none of which were met. Save John Scott’s life.
It was a chance to impress Olivia with his intellect and the final result was a cooling body on a slab. John never even awoke from his coma.
“I didn’t have enough time. Please don’t send me back.”
He’s balanced on tenterhooks, face grey as he twitches from her approach. There’s something small, selfish, inside Astrid that wishes Olivia were here to deal with Walter, to assuage his terror, to look him in the eye and say *Sorry, but it was a good try, no guarantee there will be a next.*
“Walter, the decision isn’t up to me,” Astrid reminds carefully. “And Richard Steig is in custody.”
They have the culprit, just not a breakdown of chemicals used to infect the passengers of Flight 627. That too will come, through reverse engineering and patience, only too late to save their co-worker. Astrid’s uncertain what Agent Dunham will do – the state of her grief, the nature of her relationship with John at question - but if Walter breaks apart now, if he shivers and shakes, fails to produce *any* type of result, the end game is pre-written.
“If you want to stay out of Saint Claire’s, find a cure so this won’t happen again. Let Olivia have some measure of peace.” Don’t let her go back in the tank, Astrid encourages silently. She leans over the cadaver, curling her hands around Walter’s forearm and agrees. “It’s not over unless you want it to be. Give Olivia a reason to look at you twice, Walter.”
It should feel like an imposition, to reach out when there were other, more important people who slipped through Astrid’s fingers.
Walter says searchingly. “Who was it?”
Astrid startles, her fingers turn loose, opening like a petal. Walter doesn’t wait for an answer. Seemingly, he lost interest before the question left his mouth.
“I’ll need to perform a thorough autopsy. No further dalliances in the tank for Agent Dunham I’m afraid. Would you be kind enough to assist me?” He makes eye contact briefly before his gaze skitters away.
Where Walter was high-strung with fear, now he’s nervous with inactivity, vibrating with the need to prove himself, to make his presence indispensible. Astrid feels her stomach roll over. She has it on good authority a background in linguistics and computer science doesn’t qualify her for a human autopsy, the largest thing she’s dissected is a frog.
Her mouth opens and closes almost haplessly. “What’s my name?”
“Astrid,” he proclaims immediately.
He says it with a hard A and soft D, all the letters in between rushing forward in ambush. Walter reaches over John Scott’s body with his hand extended, the motion awkward; oblivious to the blood on his gloves. He says her name like he can ill afford to forget it. “It’s Astrid, and I’m pleased to meet you, miss.”
Astrid looks at the corpse briefly and blanches.
“Good to meet you too, Walter.”
His request is deeply inappropriate. Walter doesn’t consider the possibility they might have known one another (which in fairness, they don’t), but it should feel wrong to partake in a fellow agents autopsy. Astrid should look down and have an immediate sense of her own mortality, of the perils the job entails. Instead, she looks at the disease that has wasted John Scott’s body into a Halloween costume, (translucent skin, ivory bone, teeth visible), and thinks gross/squishy/I don’t think I want to touch that and finally, it’s freakishly brilliant. Suzy would have loved it.
They hull John’s body until it resembles a macabre canoe; organs removed, his rib-cage spread wide. Astrid weighs her pound of muscled flesh, jots down altering notes on his brain and heart function. Unconsciously, she starts to drift closer.
She has the sense Walter’s watching her, his eyes assessing.
“Relatively, they’re only separated by thirty centimetres,” he says imperiously, fingers gentle on Scott’s brain stem. “Thirty centimetres between the brain and the heart, such an inconsequential distance, yet sometimes it feels as if they’re miles apart.”
“I suppose. But then you’re a scientist, keeping heart and mind separated ought to be second nature.”
He stares at her, eyes half lidded, his lower face pulling into a patented sneer.
She can find no discernible pattern in the manner of Walter’s work. It appears he approaches a problem from above, below, side-on, and when none of that works, he’ll spin it on its ear and start over again. He works with a frantic undercurrent as if tripping on ideas.
“I’m not your common scientist.” Later he’ll add: “Keeping heart and mind separated was ever my failing.”
It takes Walter fourteen hours to find a cure for Disease 627, for the tension in his shoulders to abate. He looks at her giddily. “Can we tell Agent Dunham?”
Sixteen hours too late for John.
Astrid hesitates as she disinfects her hands, taking in Walter’s smile, how he seems to have lost years in the space of a scientific discovery. She can see him suddenly as a young man.
“Olivia’s at the bureau, Walter.” His smile dims, feet shuffling backward. “You’re welcome to come with me?”
In fact, Astrid hasn’t forgiven him for their first meeting.
There’s a darkening bruise on her lower jaw, her right wrist still aches from where she hit the pavement. She remembers the car; the way the snow had crunched under her gloved fingers, how the cold seeped into her kneecaps and how the breath left her body in a violent whoosh.
Dr. Bishop pales. “No. I’ll wait in the lab if you don’t mind.”
She grabs her coat and car-keys silently, makes her way to the door.
It might be easier to call Agent Dunham with the news of a cure rather than going in person; but Astrid wants to check with the older agent, touch base and find out what’s going to happen next. Is this a one-off or the beginnings of a division? Is she expected to work with Dr. Bishop every day? Churlish and brilliant, mad or a visionary? Astrid doesn’t think she can handle Walter alone.
She doesn’t think any one person could.
“Astrid,” he calls gently, before she vanishes out the door. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m not accustomed to the outdoors anymore.”
The thing is: Astrid forgets the curious case of madness that begets Walter Bishop is not anything she has experience with. His flights of fancy, unexpected rage are as sudden as a snowstorm, turning the winding roads slick, unpredictable. His moods out-of-control-fast as a speeding vehicle.
“I know, Walter.”
She finds Olivia at Agent Scott’s desk at the bureau office, hands flat on his table. Olivia’s packing away his belongings methodically, her eyes veiled as she regards Astrid’s approach.
“Walter’s found a cure,” Astrid states forthrightly then feels the weight of the sentence penetrate her subconscious because he *actually found a cure*. “Steig…?”
“Isn’t talking.”
Whatever their relationship, Olivia shouldn’t have to pack away John’s belongings alone, not the day after he died.
Astrid bites the edge of her lip and motions at the desk. “I could do this for you, if you want. I think Walter could use some reassurance that you’re not about to send him straight back to Saint Claire’s.” She smiles uncertainly, probing for information, more for Dr. Bishop’s sake than her own.
Olivia looks down at the half-open drawer. “There’s not much to pack away to be honest. I was going to take the non-essentials to John’s mother.”
“Oh.” The two of them fall into an awkward silence, the desk spanning the distance between them. She waits a beat before changing the subject to what (Astrid hopes) is a safer topic. “And Walter?”
Olivia’s expression turns flat, uncompromising. “My guardian seems to think we should hang onto Dr. Bishop for a while.” Astrid stares, nonplussed, before Olivia elaborates. “Ms. Sharp’s clearance level is higher than yours or even mine. She recommended Walter to begin with.”
It doesn’t match the script in Astrid’s head. She thought it was Olivia who found Dr. Bishop, searching through forgotten articles to discover an edge, her every act driven with purpose.
“This isn’t a one-off investigation?”
“No. It’s not.”
There’s something brittle in Olivia’s expression before it’s locked down. Too complex to read, woven tight as a tapestry. The overall picture’s coloured with annoyance, rich with resolution, beneath it, runs a weave of betrayal.
Olivia’s thorough. Astrid’s known it after a mere twenty-four hours in her presence, but she thought Agent Dunham would have been more curious about Walter.
Astrid shifts her feet and stares at the shoebox containing John’s belongings. “Were you close?”
Olivia closes the lid on Agent Scott and rises to her feet stoically. “We were partners. He hinted, but well…I wasn’t interested.”
That’s the problem right there, Astrid thinks unbidden. You’re not interested in much of anything.
“So I can tell Dr. Bishop to relax and not pack up the lab?” The anger sharpens her tongue. Astrid’s feeling the corners of her tapestry; trying to see the whole picture through the knots and tangles, through the broken weave; to shake it out into a recognisable pattern. Olivia’s done her best to avoid Walter so far. Bitterly, Astrid’s come to the conclusion it reflects Agent Dunham’s attitude toward mental illness.
Olivia blinks, as if the idea of Walter’s distress hadn’t occurred to her, she says slowly. “Of course.”
“He’ll be glad to know that.”
She thinks about the wet spot on Walter’s pants, how his nervous tics, his twitches all accelerated the moment John Scott died. How one kind word from Agent Dunham might have offset the trickle of urine.
Just a squirt, he had said, face closed to any sense of embarrassment.
Olivia regards her. One hand fists around the medal of valour awarded to John: he kept it in his desk drawer for luck.
“Astrid, you should be careful with Dr. Bishop. The type of science he practices, his code of morality, it’s fluid, not stable.”
He hasn’t practiced in twenty years.
Astrid stills. She sees a loose thread, tantalisingly close, something she could let her fingers catch on. “Maybe you should get to know him,” she suggests mildly, thinking about Walter’s cure, how Suzy’s mouth tasted like mint julep, almond eyes lazy under the hammock, her bare toes scraping across the shorn summer grass. Astrid understands prejudice. She recognises brilliance just as readily.
Olivia’s teeth show. “Maybe I should.”
The older agent brushes past her, John’s shoebox tucked under one arm, her spine straight.
There are two schools of thought regarding first impressions: one, the instant sizing up done in less than two minutes, without any factual background, is always, instinctively correct. Two: a first impression, while important, counts for absolutely nothing in the long run. Embarrassingly, it takes Astrid almost two weeks before she realises Walter and Olivia know one another.
Two months later they head out for drinks, and while Astrid’s speech becomes slurred, she remembers the edge of bewilderment in Olivia’s tone. “Nina had no right to foist Walter on me like that. She knew Astrid….she *knew* what he did to us. ”
Olivia and Walter were an estranged child and parent - connected with remembered history; their emotions a hodge-podge of suspicion versus protectiveness. Astrid says, tipsy with alcohol. “But you’re relearning him.”
Because Walter’s different; because Olivia’s resentment isn’t directed at him entirely: Olivia’s confession feels like a lance at a festering wound, at an unknown hurt not even considered by the perpetrator. Something Olivia doesn’t examine until she’s loose with alcohol.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
Now and Then - or how the Woolley Mammoth was Completely Wrong. Gen. Astrid, Walter
Date: 2011-12-21 09:55 pm (UTC)****
On her person Astrid carries a combination earpiece and camera Dr. Bishop married together, a gun, an FBI radio and a pair of runners she keeps in the well of her car seat at all times. She knows better than to wear nice clothing or even her most favourite shoes. At Walter’s behest, Astrid’s crawled through air ducts, along sewers, over bodies, and on one memorable occasion *up* a California redwood, balanced precariously between the trunk and a branch that was thick as a small tree.
Her breath had come in sharp bursts, almost asthmatic with fear; bark beneath her nails and nothing but a rocky precipice below, a forest stretched before her like the blurred strokes of an impressionist painting, a blotting of jade and olive green.
“It’s breathtaking,” Walter whispered in her ear and Astrid had stared, stunned by the vista of nature: by the sharp cry of a peregrine as it pin-wheeled in the dawning hush. It took a moment before Astrid comprehended what he said then she hollered, furious with Walter for making her climb the tree for no other purpose.
She had scampered down like a twelve year old, dropping from branch to branch, feet skidding along the ancient trunk until her toes touched the earth.
Astrid carries with her a notepad, a pen, and the unspoken knowledge Walter sees the world, its collection of oddball inhabitants, its frenetic beauty, while perched on her shoulder.
He sings sometimes, glam-rock melting into German nursery rhymes, his voice acerbic in her ear. Walter’s regard should pull Astrid off balance, tip her over the edge with a rush of vertigo, but she has yet to fall from the heights he entices her to scale.
__________________
2008:
__________________
“It’s not over. Reanimation of the corpse will give Agent Dunham some answers at least. We could attempt another joining of minds - “
“Walter,” Astrid says.
“Find out who else was responsible for the Flight 627,” Walter says frantically. “Seven hours at least before decay of the synapses becomes irreversible –“
“Dr. Bishop,” Astrid tries again.
“It can be done! You can’t send me back yet!” He’s circled the table twice, maintaining exact distance. There’s a wet spot near Walter’s crotch that Astrid doesn’t comment on. His reactions aren’t his own yet, mind and body divorced from each other after two decades of prescribed and experimental medication. “I didn’t fail,” he insists.
He looks terrified. The etched lines of Walter’s face speak of the contingencies of his release, none of which were met. Save John Scott’s life.
It was a chance to impress Olivia with his intellect and the final result was a cooling body on a slab. John never even awoke from his coma.
“I didn’t have enough time. Please don’t send me back.”
He’s balanced on tenterhooks, face grey as he twitches from her approach.
There’s something small, selfish, inside Astrid that wishes Olivia were here to deal with Walter, to assuage his terror, to look him in the eye and say *Sorry, but it was a good try, no guarantee there will be a next.*
“Walter, the decision isn’t up to me,” Astrid reminds carefully. “And Richard Steig is in custody.”
They have the culprit, just not a breakdown of chemicals used to infect the passengers of Flight 627. That too will come, through reverse engineering and patience, only too late to save their co-worker. Astrid’s uncertain what Agent Dunham will do – the state of her grief, the nature of her relationship with John at question - but if Walter breaks apart now, if he shivers and shakes, fails to produce *any* type of result, the end game is pre-written.
“If you want to stay out of Saint Claire’s, find a cure so this won’t happen again. Let Olivia have some measure of peace.” Don’t let her go back in the tank, Astrid encourages silently. She leans over the cadaver, curling her hands around Walter’s forearm and agrees. “It’s not over unless you want it to be. Give Olivia a reason to look at you twice, Walter.”
It should feel like an imposition, to reach out when there were other, more important people who slipped through Astrid’s fingers.
Walter says searchingly. “Who was it?”
Astrid startles, her fingers turn loose, opening like a petal. Walter doesn’t wait for an answer. Seemingly, he lost interest before the question left his mouth.
“I’ll need to perform a thorough autopsy. No further dalliances in the tank for Agent Dunham I’m afraid. Would you be kind enough to assist me?” He makes eye contact briefly before his gaze skitters away.
Where Walter was high-strung with fear, now he’s nervous with inactivity, vibrating with the need to prove himself, to make his presence indispensible. Astrid feels her stomach roll over. She has it on good authority a background in linguistics and computer science doesn’t qualify her for a human autopsy, the largest thing she’s dissected is a frog.
Her mouth opens and closes almost haplessly. “What’s my name?”
“Astrid,” he proclaims immediately.
He says it with a hard A and soft D, all the letters in between rushing forward in ambush. Walter reaches over John Scott’s body with his hand extended, the motion awkward; oblivious to the blood on his gloves. He says her name like he can ill afford to forget it. “It’s Astrid, and I’m pleased to meet you, miss.”
Astrid looks at the corpse briefly and blanches.
“Good to meet you too, Walter.”
His request is deeply inappropriate. Walter doesn’t consider the possibility they might have known one another (which in fairness, they don’t), but it should feel wrong to partake in a fellow agents autopsy. Astrid should look down and have an immediate sense of her own mortality, of the perils the job entails. Instead, she looks at the disease that has wasted John Scott’s body into a Halloween costume, (translucent skin, ivory bone, teeth visible), and thinks gross/squishy/I don’t think I want to touch that and finally, it’s freakishly brilliant. Suzy would have loved it.
They hull John’s body until it resembles a macabre canoe; organs removed, his rib-cage spread wide. Astrid weighs her pound of muscled flesh, jots down altering notes on his brain and heart function. Unconsciously, she starts to drift closer.
She has the sense Walter’s watching her, his eyes assessing.
“Relatively, they’re only separated by thirty centimetres,” he says imperiously, fingers gentle on Scott’s brain stem. “Thirty centimetres between the brain and the heart, such an inconsequential distance, yet sometimes it feels as if they’re miles apart.”
“I suppose. But then you’re a scientist, keeping heart and mind separated ought to be second nature.”
He stares at her, eyes half lidded, his lower face pulling into a patented sneer.
She can find no discernible pattern in the manner of Walter’s work. It appears he approaches a problem from above, below, side-on, and when none of that works, he’ll spin it on its ear and start over again. He works with a frantic undercurrent as if tripping on ideas.
“I’m not your common scientist.” Later he’ll add: “Keeping heart and mind separated was ever my failing.”
It takes Walter fourteen hours to find a cure for Disease 627, for the tension in his shoulders to abate. He looks at her giddily. “Can we tell Agent Dunham?”
Sixteen hours too late for John.
Astrid hesitates as she disinfects her hands, taking in Walter’s smile, how he seems to have lost years in the space of a scientific discovery. She can see him suddenly as a young man.
“Olivia’s at the bureau, Walter.” His smile dims, feet shuffling backward. “You’re welcome to come with me?”
In fact, Astrid hasn’t forgiven him for their first meeting.
There’s a darkening bruise on her lower jaw, her right wrist still aches from where she hit the pavement. She remembers the car; the way the snow had crunched under her gloved fingers, how the cold seeped into her kneecaps and how the breath left her body in a violent whoosh.
Dr. Bishop pales. “No. I’ll wait in the lab if you don’t mind.”
She grabs her coat and car-keys silently, makes her way to the door.
It might be easier to call Agent Dunham with the news of a cure rather than going in person; but Astrid wants to check with the older agent, touch base and find out what’s going to happen next. Is this a one-off or the beginnings of a division? Is she expected to work with Dr. Bishop every day? Churlish and brilliant, mad or a visionary? Astrid doesn’t think she can handle Walter alone.
She doesn’t think any one person could.
“Astrid,” he calls gently, before she vanishes out the door. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m not accustomed to the outdoors anymore.”
The thing is: Astrid forgets the curious case of madness that begets Walter Bishop is not anything she has experience with. His flights of fancy, unexpected rage are as sudden as a snowstorm, turning the winding roads slick, unpredictable. His moods out-of-control-fast as a speeding vehicle.
“I know, Walter.”
She finds Olivia at Agent Scott’s desk at the bureau office, hands flat on his table. Olivia’s packing away his belongings methodically, her eyes veiled as she regards Astrid’s approach.
“Walter’s found a cure,” Astrid states forthrightly then feels the weight of the sentence penetrate her subconscious because he *actually found a cure*. “Steig…?”
“Isn’t talking.”
Whatever their relationship, Olivia shouldn’t have to pack away John’s belongings alone, not the day after he died.
Astrid bites the edge of her lip and motions at the desk. “I could do this for you, if you want. I think Walter could use some reassurance that you’re not about to send him straight back to Saint Claire’s.” She smiles uncertainly, probing for information, more for Dr. Bishop’s sake than her own.
Olivia looks down at the half-open drawer. “There’s not much to pack away to be honest. I was going to take the non-essentials to John’s mother.”
“Oh.” The two of them fall into an awkward silence, the desk spanning the distance between them. She waits a beat before changing the subject to what (Astrid hopes) is a safer topic. “And Walter?”
Olivia’s expression turns flat, uncompromising. “My guardian seems to think we should hang onto Dr. Bishop for a while.” Astrid stares, nonplussed, before Olivia elaborates. “Ms. Sharp’s clearance level is higher than yours or even mine. She recommended Walter to begin with.”
It doesn’t match the script in Astrid’s head. She thought it was Olivia who found Dr. Bishop, searching through forgotten articles to discover an edge, her every act driven with purpose.
“This isn’t a one-off investigation?”
“No. It’s not.”
There’s something brittle in Olivia’s expression before it’s locked down. Too complex to read, woven tight as a tapestry. The overall picture’s coloured with annoyance, rich with resolution, beneath it, runs a weave of betrayal.
Olivia’s thorough. Astrid’s known it after a mere twenty-four hours in her presence, but she thought Agent Dunham would have been more curious about Walter.
Astrid shifts her feet and stares at the shoebox containing John’s belongings. “Were you close?”
Olivia closes the lid on Agent Scott and rises to her feet stoically. “We were partners. He hinted, but well…I wasn’t interested.”
That’s the problem right there, Astrid thinks unbidden. You’re not interested in much of anything.
“So I can tell Dr. Bishop to relax and not pack up the lab?” The anger sharpens her tongue. Astrid’s feeling the corners of her tapestry; trying to see the whole picture through the knots and tangles, through the broken weave; to shake it out into a recognisable pattern. Olivia’s done her best to avoid Walter so far. Bitterly, Astrid’s come to the conclusion it reflects Agent Dunham’s attitude toward mental illness.
Olivia blinks, as if the idea of Walter’s distress hadn’t occurred to her, she says slowly. “Of course.”
“He’ll be glad to know that.”
She thinks about the wet spot on Walter’s pants, how his nervous tics, his twitches all accelerated the moment John Scott died. How one kind word from Agent Dunham might have offset the trickle of urine.
Just a squirt, he had said, face closed to any sense of embarrassment.
Olivia regards her. One hand fists around the medal of valour awarded to John: he kept it in his desk drawer for luck.
“Astrid, you should be careful with Dr. Bishop. The type of science he practices, his code of morality, it’s fluid, not stable.”
He hasn’t practiced in twenty years.
Astrid stills. She sees a loose thread, tantalisingly close, something she could let her fingers catch on. “Maybe you should get to know him,” she suggests mildly, thinking about Walter’s cure, how Suzy’s mouth tasted like mint julep, almond eyes lazy under the hammock, her bare toes scraping across the shorn summer grass. Astrid understands prejudice. She recognises brilliance just as readily.
Olivia’s teeth show. “Maybe I should.”
The older agent brushes past her, John’s shoebox tucked under one arm, her spine straight.
There are two schools of thought regarding first impressions: one, the instant sizing up done in less than two minutes, without any factual background, is always, instinctively correct. Two: a first impression, while important, counts for absolutely nothing in the long run. Embarrassingly, it takes Astrid almost two weeks before she realises Walter and Olivia know one another.
Two months later they head out for drinks, and while Astrid’s speech becomes slurred, she remembers the edge of bewilderment in Olivia’s tone. “Nina had no right to foist Walter on me like that. She knew Astrid….she *knew* what he did to us. ”
Olivia and Walter were an estranged child and parent - connected with remembered history; their emotions a hodge-podge of suspicion versus protectiveness. Astrid says, tipsy with alcohol. “But you’re relearning him.”
Because Walter’s different; because Olivia’s resentment isn’t directed at him entirely: Olivia’s confession feels like a lance at a festering wound, at an unknown hurt not even considered by the perpetrator. Something Olivia doesn’t examine until she’s loose with alcohol.
“Nina should have asked me first.”