Supplementary

A/N: This is completely and utterly AU, without doubt. There are certain paths that Walter could have taken... this was simply one that we never saw.

This is for CiderApples, who inspired this little idea after discussing a chapter from their fic 'Standby'.

Thanks to Uroboros75 for the beta work :)

This is my longest one-shot to date. I hope that you all love reading it as much as I loved writing it.

Disclaimer: I do not own Fringe. I also do not own 'The Sign of the Four' by Sir Arthur Canon Doyle which I reference in this story.

"We always long for the forbidden things, and desire what is denied us." - Francois Rabelais

"Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that Time will come and take my love away." - Shakespeare's Sonnet 64

It's when he looses his Red Vines for the third time in the same day that his patience begins to waver, fluctuating at the brink of self-control like a leaf on the wispy end of a branch. He flits about the lab like a lost sparrow whose mother has neglected to notice he was missing from the other hatchlings.

His mutterings tumble through the air with an organic buzz, like a surgeon's master work spilling into a wide corridor. "Confounded things! I set them directly next to my Pyrex Erlenmeyer flasks so that when I went to-" His words are cut off by the entrance of Astrid. She looks at him with a fragile concern that mirrors a broken eggshell.

"Walter?" she asks, forsaking observation for direct inquiry. "Everything alright?"

He flicks a hand through the air (he's not entirely sure which one, only that there's a sensation of coolness fluttering over his skin). "No, not really dear," he says with a shade of disappointment. "You see, I seem to have misplaced my newest package of Red Vines, and I have a particularly fierce craving at the moment."

Astrid's brows rise slightly, the scope of binoculars magnifying objects at a distance. "Do you remember where you were when you had them last?"

He nods feverishly. "Yes, yes! I specifically placed them right here so that I would find them when I got back," he says with a motion towards the foursome of flasks.

Astrid quirks her lips to the side, the right corner of her mouth bunching up as if tugged by an imaginary thread. "Well," she says, inspection giving way to suspicion, "they aren't there now, so I think a search is in order."

Walter produces a smile that threatens to split his face. "Ah, an investigation! How wonderful! Give me a moment, Astro; I must retrieve my magnifying glass for such an event!"

He quickly struts to the back room; where boxes line the walls like collector plates, each one the bearer of a unique story. He sifts through one of the first ones and discovers a pair of spectacles, as well as a book titled "первые люди" (he sets it aside, suspicious of both the title and the language). He finds another lab coat, dotted with stains whose origins he can't place and finds the rest of the box empty. He frowns as discouragement creeps over him like a spider. He feels the itching tingle of its legs on his shoulder as his frown deepens.

If it's not that box, then which one could it be?

He loses all notion of time as he sifts through boxes like file cabinets, flicking through the rainbows of memories as if he could simply pluck them from the air. Unfortunately, such a feat has passed beyond the veil of his abilities, and some of the items he discovers draw fog and nothing more.

"Walter!" The voice is high and gentle like a dove at high noon, and Walter dashes out of the back room. He never finds the magnifying glass.

He sees Astrid's face first, a gentle smile caressing the lower vista of her face. Her hands are at her side, one clutching something of clear importance. Walter tilts his head slightly, not really aware of the motion as much as the change in view. Curled against the mocha hue of her skin he can see the package of Red Vines, glistening with the light twirling into the room.

"I see you've found them all by yourself, my dear. How splendid! That is some excellent detective work. I do believe that you could rival that fellow... Holmes I believe is his name." Walter curls a finger over his chin. He imagines a figure with a peculiar hat and trench coat, producing a spy glass from his pocket. But the image only lasts for a second. He wishes that he could ask Peter about it; Peter would surely remember the story.

Astrid reaches her out her hand, which is closed into a partial fist around the sugary delights. "I suppose I did. They were by the Bunsen Burners."

Walter's eyes flick elsewhere momentarily, distracted by other contingencies of thought and consideration. Why had he put them there if he... "Aha!" He says triumphantly with a pump of his fist. After a moment he looks to his right and notices Astrid's quizzical glance. "I put them there because I knew that once I went to the Erlenmeyer flasks I would be going over the burners right after. I was getting ahead of myself. How curious, planning too far ahead for even myself to catch." Then he looks back to Astrid. The candies are still clutched between her nimbler fingers, like red vines caught in boughs of mahogany.

"Oh yes. Thank you, Asteria," he says before reaching for them. When he wraps his fingers around them, he briefly brushes his fingers against Astrid's (normally, he would think nothing of it, a mere passing gesture, but he's gone and flipped the unlucky coin this time), and the world goes white. It's brief, like the overwhelming wash of a camera flash, minus the expected shush of the shutter.

In the disorientating moments following the event, he surmises something quite important but also disturbing. It runs through him, driving a chill through his synapses like ice. He shudders, uncertainty clinging to him like a mound of slugs. Fear trickles onto his skin like the venom of monsters lurking in secrecy.

He realizes with a great amount of certainty that he is no longer in the lab. The walls are washed a dull gray, and the windows are muted by shadows that emulate the steely complexion of onyx.

When he turns to Astrid to inquire as to what has just occurred he discovers another truth altogether terrifying to him. It shrieks at him, baring its jaws like a furious ghoul. The face he sees before him is sharper; skew lines cut jaggedly into her features at sharp angles. Her eyes sit like cloudy opals, nestled in a russet cocoon with chocolate staining the center. Crescent moons haunt the space below her eyes, hanging at half-mast like flags for the lost. Her face is far too ominous to be Astrid's.

Walter recoils, and the flash takes him. It nearly propels him - like an engine with no purpose - back into the lab. He lands on his back, disoriented like an upturned goat. He sees Astrid's look of shock, but it's too mild for his liking. After assuring her of his well-being, he checks his pockets. He systematically feels for the contours and shapes of his few vials and a scrap of paper that he's kept in his pocket for twenty-five years. When he's satisfied that all of it was is in its proper place, he heads back to his experiment. With a sigh, he makes a bold mental note to check the expiration of his batch of Brown Betty at his next convenience.

He hears a low moan, jointed with a squealing creak pitch through the air. He turns and sees the lab doors open to yield Peter and Agent Dunham. "Ah, Peter!" he says, abandoning his experiment for a moment. "Do you recall some of those detective stories I recited to you when you were a boy? I believe that they involved a character by the name of 'Holmes'."

Peter quirks his mouth, puckering at the edges like the wrinkled face of a pug dog. "As in Sherlock Holmes? Yeah, sure. Once in a blue moon you'd read one to me. The Sign of the Four and stolen treasure ring any bells?"

"Absolutely!" Walter says, a wide grin spreading over his face. "You would always ask me to portray the characters with thick accents like those stuffy businessmen who walk around wearing overly tong trench coats." He paused, swallowed and continued in a much deeper tone.

"But love is an emotional thing, and whatever is emotional is opposed to that true cold reason which I place above all things. I should never marry myself, lest I bias my judgment."

Peter raised an eyebrow after he'd finished reciting. "Funny, I seem to remember that voice being substantially less creepy when I was a kid." Walter looked past him to Agent Dunham, who (he thought) was smirking, but after another glance she appeared to be frowning slightly.

"Oh yes, Agent Dunham," he says, returning back to his lab equipment. "You are probably curious as to the progress I have made with the compounds." She doesn't follow him at first, and he feigns interest in his equipment in favour of patience; but after a rather skeptical "Yeah, sure," she approaches. He tells her about the curious things he's learned, the strange bonding behaviours and unusual reactions. He suspects some form of advanced chemical engineering, but more so he suspects a lack of interest in Agent Dunham.

He finds this disturbing, as he works for her (as the papers have told him, marred with black ink); he would think that she would have much greater interest in his findings. Although, such instances are usually during the timeframe of a case and he can neither recall nor think of one that has occurred in the recent weeks. He finds this peculiar, but brushes it off like a flake of dust. Regardless, he shows her his findings with the colourful diagrams and formulas riddled with Greek symbols. Even if it swoops over her head like a passing crane Walter admires his work; a virtual tapestry of scientific formulae.

"It's... interesting," she says and Walter frowns slightly. He isn't offended; often others have been boggled to the point of pure complementation by the sight of his work. He doesn't inquire or badger for more; he simply breathes and allows time for contemplation. She steps back and says tentatively.

"Walter I have to go now, but I'll be back later alright?"

Walter nods, his face directed away from her but he knows that she understands as well as he does. He keeps facing the screen, the ornate twirl of the particles enchanting his eyes to join in their merry dance. He enjoys it, for he imagines that Agent Dunham is whispering a few things (perhaps of a secretive nature, but he doesn't pry) to Peter and he doesn't want to be of annoyance.

When he hears the door shut he turns his head slightly and sees Peter, arms crossed like a professor who thinks that he's too astute for his job. "You know Walter, with your luck you're gonna go blind if you keep staring at that thing."

He smiles, and distantly thinks of butterscotch pudding.

It's Thursday when he goes to the library, perplexed by its jumbles of wrinkled literature. To him, the books are the products of minds saturated with philosophical ideas both fascinating and disturbing (and at times, condescending). But it's the perspective that he values, as if each book is but one of a thousand kaleidoscopic spyglasses trained on the world. Even if it is just a momentary peek, he still likes to look.

There is one other man there, with short brown hair that tufts about his ears and dark eyes that seem to billow like furious storm clouds. He seems familiar to Walter, though he pays him no attention as he approaches the bookshelf. His fingers flutter over the coloured spines of the various books and then stop, a particular space empty on the shelf. His favourite volume is missing, and with a niggling suspicion in the back of his mind he turns towards his counterpart in the section. The other man's hands cradle the sole copy of H.P Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. Walter frowns; he has always cared for that book. To him it acts as a fantastical doorway that leads to beasts and vistas alien to him in ways he is still trying to comprehend. With each read he discovers something new, whether it is a particular emotion evoked from the sound that echoes through a landscape or a sensation that pours through him with the ferocity of a hurricane.

"I see you are reading some Lovecraft," he says calmly, not trying to pry but feeling for information none the less.

"Yea," the man says nonchalantly. "What's it to ya?" he adds, punctuating the phrase with a dash of hostility. He shifts away in an awkward manner, framing his shoulder over the book. As if to keep his interest in the book as clandestine as possible.

"Are you a fan of Mr. Lovecraft?" Walter asks, not really caring so much if he's tempting fate or annoyance. The other man shrugs in response, his eyes still trained on the book.

"Not really," he says. "I liked the title, thought I'd give it a look."

It pains Walter to see something so valuable to him be treated so casually, as though the book were nothing more than a leaf on the ground. It was comparable to the time when a man had walked into the lab and joked that Gene was just another dairy cow. He'd promptly thrown some acid at him of course (at least in the mental image he'd conjured). In reality he'd scowled at him until he left, hoping that the man met with a rather nasty crocodile in the near future. He doesn't wish that particular fate upon this man, but simultaneously he wishes for a way to safely re-acquire that book.

Then, with a sigh heavy like a mortar over ground paprika, the man places the book back amongst the others. Walter doesn't immediately reach for it, but his eyes linger on its place for a few moments. He ponders these worlds, these utopias of imagination, before continuing.

"Sometimes, I wonder if somewhere in these pages there's a world better than ours." The other man turns and looks at Walter; his brow is swept up in a look of strange curiosity. Walter makes a brief note of it, but doesn't pause for very long.

"I wonder if there's a world with no disease, no war, no conflict." He stops and reaches a hand for the shelf directly in front of him; his fingers rest lightly on the edges like a frog on a lily pad. "But I've come to the realization that these pages are written by authors who live in an imperfect world," he says as his fingers fall from their perch on the shelf. "And I know that it's impossible to create something flawless with tools that are already flawed."

He peeks a look at the other man, still standing by the shelf. His eyes are trained on Walter, mirroring his own sorrowful expression. He straightens his shoulders and tugs a strand of hair out of his face before saying.

"Yea... it's a shame that. Probably one of the reasons that a lot of them are dead now."

The phrase struck Walter more harshly than he thought, as if instead of a light slap a bolt of lightning had whacked him to the ground. His eyes turn back to the shelves and their archive of fantastical adventures, which now seem empty at the thought of the authors being nestled beneath smooth stones of gray.

"Tell me, young man," Walter says as his eyes trail pensively over the shelves. "What do you know about death?" From the corner of his eyes he sees a slight stupefaction pass over the face of the man; his features trembling in a rain of uncertainty. After a pause which draws out like thick taffy, he answers.

"Not much."

Walter's head moves gently and elicits the shadow of a nod. "Exactly." Then, with a subtle grace he hasn't exhibited in years Walter steps forward. He reaches his left hand high, and grazes the spines of a few books on one of the higher shelves. "Death is like an overturned hourglass; it controls how much time you have, and how much you have left." He takes another step towards the shelves, his breath billowing against the dark wood. "Imagine the amount of time it took to write all of these," he says as he runs his fingers over four particular books, their colours lined in a sequence of green, green, green, red. "You have to wonder if death was being generous, or if they knew what was coming."

"Why wonder at all?" The man interjects, stepping closer to Walter. "We don't know when we're going to die; we've just got to live with what time we have, no matter how small."

Walter turns his face away from the books, the colourful spines losing some of their luster. "You know," he says, his voice dropping in intensity. "I sometimes wonder if something so supplementary as time were not to exist, what we would make of the world then."

The man's expression does not change; it remains a melancholic stare that unnerves Walter. After a long pause he replies. "We would make the same of it as we do now, except that we'd have a lot longer to make sense of things."

Walter focuses his gaze, training his eyes on the concrete stare of the other man. His eyes are a formidable blue, like azure trapped beneath the icy frost of a glacier. He breaks away after a moment and shakes his head; his mind is suddenly too cloudy for him to concentrate. After the fog has cleared from his mind he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his cardigan; they feel exposed to him in the cool library air.

"Perhaps that is why such a thing as time exists," Walter says as the man plucks another book from the shelf. "To force us to focus on certain things, and leave a few mysteries for others."

The man makes no move to respond. He strolls towards the counter with a work of H.G Wells tucked beneath his arm. Walter watches him leave and suddenly misses the companionship, despite it being brief. He hasn't had many people to talk to over the years, and that was the first glimpse of an actual conversation he's seen in ages. With a sad sigh he turns to leave, leaving his favourite volume of Lovecraftian lore nestled in a nest of other glories.

Olivia Dunham has encountered things that have bent her imagination like a stringy pipe cleaner, contorting her notion of reality into a mess of monsters. Her current circumstances are no exception.

Walter Bishop has knowledge of utmost value to her, and she's been imploring officials for weeks to see her side of the debacle. Unfortunately, the turn of tide pushes against her will, and this makes things even more difficult.

She stands before Walter Bishop, who dons a dull gray jumpsuit and equally colourless shoes. She swallows thickly and steels herself; not because of his condition, but because of the expression of total immersion on his face. She listens to him babble about a Sherlock Holmes tale to a man named Peter, and she slowly begins to understand why he's spent the last twenty-three years here. She jumps slightly when he calls her over and begins motioning at the walls, as if there were some grand display there for her to watch. She does her best to play along as she doesn't want to upset Walter, because for all the iron courage her dark business suits portray, Walter frightens her.

When he's done, she turns and slowly makes for the door. She pauses for an instant to watch him as a dark worry squirms in the back of her mind. She feels an outpour of pity for the man for having to live such an existence, having no company except for a man who exists only in his mind. It pains her to think of the decision his wife must have made; the last time Olivia saw her there were dark valleys under her eyes, filled with a haunting that Olivia tries not to re-imagine.

She turns swiftly and makes for the door, which opens promptly before her. As she shuts the door behind her, a man walks forward. Dr. Bruce Sumner, as she recalls; a man with an eye for superiority and a spine rigid from the knowledge of countless protocols. She doesn't dislike the man; however, she's not particularly fond of him either. He's like a plant that you try to cut down but keeps growing back; you don't mind him for the first little while, but after a few encounters he really starts to bug you.

"Agent Dunham," he says with forced courtesy. "Tell me, how does Walter seem today?"

She swallows thickly at his tone; it was thick with the grime of smugness. She dislikes his arrogance more than anything, as it appears to make his head swell like the fat body of a zeppelin. "He seems fine, a bit... distracted but otherwise-"

"He was talking to Peter again wasn't he?" Sumner interrupts, gesturing to the cell where Walter resides. Olivia looks to the buttons on her coat, fascinated by their gleam in the artificial light. When she looks back at him her words come softly, like the fall of rain.

"Who is Peter?"

The man hands out a folder, one that she hadn't previously noticed, and opens it. Inside is the picture of a young boy with brown hair and light blue eyes, and beside it two years separated by a single dash. It reads 1978-1985. Before she can read any further, Sumner calls her attention again.

"He was Walter's son; he died of a rare disease as a child. Consequently, Walter became so obsessed with the death of his son that he was determined to get him back. His wife said that he spoke of... alternate realities and crossing over. She said that she would come home to find him speaking to the walls and playing Monopoly with no one else."

Olivia looks back at the door, and wishes for an instant that there was a window somewhere on it's ominous form. She thinks how lonely it must be to have only walls for company. "It's sad," she says. "I can't help but feel sorry for him, being trapped like that."

"I wouldn't feel sorry for him in all honesty Agent Dunham," he quips harshly. "Walter Bishop cannot function in a normal society. He regularly talks about escapades to other... dimensions as if they were nothing but a walk in the park. And that is not the most intriguing piece of information we've observed." He steps closer to her, placing an aged hand on the top of the open folder in her hands. "After your last visit Walter mentioned you in his little adventures." A pause filled the air, pregnant with rotten expectations. "More than once I might add."

She recoils slightly from him, wishing that there was some way to hint to him to get a mint. She shuts the folder heavily, the manila ruffling against her palms.

"Walter Bishop is a dreamer," he continues. "A dreamer who has replaced reality with his own perfect vision of the world. How you fit into it I have no idea and frankly am not that concerned about; however, if you plan on getting him out of here, I would suggest you pull a few more strings." He backs away from her, his shoulders settling like rods of steel. "Because at this rate, Walter Bishop will soon be too far gone for anyone's good fortune."

She resists the urge to wrinkle her nose and straightens her spine. "Dr. Sumner, I think that it's important that you realize that I am not here for my own personal benefit. I am here because there are people dying out there on the streets, and this man may hold the key to ending these attacks. So I suggest that you stop putting up roadblocks and let me do my job." She shoves past him, bumping her left shoulder against his aggressively.

When she's halfway down the hall she hears his voice again. "Remember Olivia, you are not the only one with obligations," he says as he folds his palms in front of his body. She turns on her heel and marches towards the exit, the folder still in her hands. She doesn't give it back; it feels too important to give up. Once she's in her car, she looks at the pages regarding Walter's son and feels as if she is looking at the key to immortality, but she doesn't know how to use it. Any sort of reasoning is jumbled with the bulk of her intentions in her mind.

The man had gone and imagined his son, continued his life as if he had never died as a child. He'd gone and built a shelter out of the pain that'd tortured him for years, and now he resides beneath the canopy of his own agony. She can't imagine what it's like, to lose something so valuable; to have light drained from your life as if it were fuel being siphoned.

She sets the folder aside and plugs her keys into the ignition, and with a heavy sigh she drives away.

In the room where no one but Walter speaks, he sits facing the wall. His voice echoes off the concrete, bouncing across the surfaces like a jackrabbit. The camera in the far corner of the room records his words, and the empty silence that follows. But regardless of that fact, Walter Bishop continues speaking as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Fin

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