I'm just saying. The first time is rough. - Olivia Dunham (Johari Window)

Al-Faw, Iraq.

August 2000

"I said put the guns down. We're here to do business. So let's do business." Hands in the air, Alex Knight meets the unwavering stare of the dark complexioned man sitting at the polished wooden table of the tea house, trying to ignore the three Kalashnikov rifles trained on him from around the room. They were old rifles, but serviceable--Soviet hand-me-downs, probably (only about $105 on the black market, cheaper than a case of decent Darjeeling tea--mathematical ironies like this were a regular interruption to his thoughts, byproduct of being on the wrong side of the law).

Today, he was Alex Knight. American, flawless Arabic, businessman of unknown business type, falsified passports. No one in the room believed that he was really what he seemed--only one person, however, knew to call him Peter when they were in less hostile territory. No one had guns pointed at Ahmed, though he'd vouched for Peter to get him into this meeting. It was just as well--Ahmed wasn't really a 'take a bullet for a friend' type. And they weren't really that good of friends.

'Alex Knight,' though, knew better than to show fear in front of a potential business associate. It wasn't the first time he'd had a gun pointed at him, and he wasn't naive enough to believe it would be the last. One of the most important things, he'd found, was to maintain a certain reputation among his client pool. A good poker face could get you farther than a bag full of cash, and while he was remarkably pressed for cash he was getting better and better at maintaining his composure.

Turning his wrists, he lets the sleeves of his suit jacket slide down his arms, unbuttoned sleeves of his shirt showing bare, tanned skin and no weapons. Nothing up his sleeves, a harmless unarmed business consultant. Who they'd already patted down, including popping a button on his shirt in their haste to make sure he wasn't wired. He was used to paranoia--it was a habit he cultivated, himself--but they were making him edgy with the lengths they were going to.

With an almost imperceptible nod, the man relieves his bodyguards, raising a finger and crooking it behind him as a signal as the rifles are lowered. The tension knot in Peter's shoulders twinges, rather than unknitting, some instinctual warning that the AK-47s were the least of his problems. He was over his head, but it was the last thing he wanted these men to suspect.

A teenaged boy, too young to have facial hair yet, brought a plate and two steaming cups in and set it in front of the man, before backing away again respectfully. With a faint smile, a baring of teeth far less encouraging as it was warning, the man. . . whose name Peter only knew as "Ashraf," a name probably as genuine as his own psuedonym. . . gestures politely at the opposite chair. "Come. Sit. You will not mind me taking iftar. I've not eaten since dawn, and tradition must be maintained." Plucking a date off of the plate before him, he considers it momentarily before popping it whole into his mouth, watching Peter as he sucks the flesh off of the small fruit. Behind them, the muscle shepherded Ahmed back out into the teahouse proper, leaving him alone with Ashfar. As alone as you could get in a back room of a public teahouse, with two more men with guns watching you. "You have come to our attention as a man of many talents, Mr. Knight. Tell me, are you a follower of Islam?"

"I am not, though I'll respect your celebration of Ramadan." Peter bows slightly forward, a gesture of humility and geniality that could get you from Japan to the middle east, through to the US over a conference table of corporate sharks, depending on how you tipped your head and whether you did it solemnly or with a quirk of a smile.

The orange hues of dusk, filtering through the dusty windows, highlighted the faint crease of a frown that gave away the other man's thoughts. Peter watched the tick, without shifting his gaze. Noting it as a tell--displeasure. Crinkle at the corner of his eyes--calculation. Catching the pit of the date between his teeth, he spits it back out onto the napkin and reaches for the next, but the fingers of his stationary left hand drum once on the table--change of tactic, decision.

Peter Bishop watches these ticks, this silent conversation, and adjusts his opinion of the other man's agenda accordingly. In negotiations, as in poker, half of the battle was in guessing the other person's hand. The other half was concealing your own. He couldn't appear too eager for the job, and he needed to start the bluff.

"You'd rather have a Muslim for the job, but frankly you don't have that sort of choice. What I have is a specialized skill set that you're not going to find all over the country, or you'd have already filled the job. You knew you wouldn't be able find someone like me in Afghanistan, or you wouldn't have come to a port city like Al-Faw to get your pick of the imported talent. I know what you want. You want what I know. So let's talk money."

There was no signal this time. They were close enough sitting at the narrow table that his knee was almost touching Ashfar's beneath it--he feels when the man moves, and registers that instead of having rifles aimed at his face, he now has a pistol aimed at his groin, the two bodyguards tensing and raising their weapons again after they hear the tension in their leader's voice. Like Doberman, ears perking on the alert at a threat to their master.

"Mr. Knight. Who said that I came from Afghanistan?"

Well, shit. How do you explain an instinct born of general observations? The way he shaped his words, the way he wore his clothing, they were all studiedly Iraqi, but it felt off. He'd gone through so many personas, so many names and so many origins, that it took an incredibly skilled liar to bluff him now. All that natural talent, though, and he was an idiot--he'd misread the tension in the room somehow. They believed he came forewarned about who they were, something that they were apparently trying very hard to conceal.

He felt the tension take over him, giving his words a rapid fire staccato rhythm, registered his change to his own native language too late to slow his own tongue. "Okay, you can shoot me, but you don't want to do that. How many other teachers do you have up your sleeve that could diagram how strip down an airplane and put it back together, let alone fly whatever type you're looking for. Cessna. Boeing. McDonnel Douglas. Tupolev. Concorde. I don't know who you are, I don't know why you want to know these things, but I know that you need me."

The switch to American English seemed to ratchet the tension up even higher, or something about what he'd said did. The effect was the same. He feels Ashfar move again, registers his words. "Goodbye, Mr. Knight."

Instinct takes over. Muscle memory, and the lifelong pursuit of preservation of person. He lashes his foot out, hooking it around the leg of Ashfar's chair and uses it to yank him closer, his hands grasping the other man's wrist, slamming it up against the wood to loosen his grip on his gun, transferring it to Peter's sweating palm. He flips it, turning it on its owner. Two sharp shots, as he continues moving, folding his lanky frame bent over backwards under the small table to avoid the first volleys of the guards. The cups shatter as they hit the floor, upset by the moving table, and the scent of chai tea mingles with the metallic odor of blood all around him as he hauls Ashfar's limp body below the table with him to shelter him, flipping onto his stomach and taking a fraction of a second to site down at the guards. Two shots for each, and movement catches him at the corner of his eye.

He reacts without thought, the hum of adrenaline in his ears, and aims a shot at the shadow in the doorway before he registers the startled, frightened face of the teenaged boy, his hands shaking too much to make the concealed gun he'd aimed any threat. The world seems to slow as the boy crumples to the floor.

The bile rises in his throat, burning, suffocating sickness. When he's yanked out from under the table by his ankle, he flips himself to aim the gun up at Ahmed's ashen face, registering the blood on the other man's shirt. The third guard was clearly no longer an issue.

"Go. Run. Leave now, and do not come back Peter Bishop."

Coming back to Iraq was the last thing he wanted. He wanted as much distance as he could between himself and the face of the men he'd killed, the smell of blood and tea and his own vomit. Numbness carries him, instinct propelling him to the docks, and he's on his way out of the middle east as quickly as he can. The boat's captain writes it off as seasickness that he spends the majority of the voyage hunched over the railing, voiding everything he'd eaten in his life into the waters.

He'd killed four men in less than 90 seconds. No. Three men and a boy, no older than he'd been when his father was locked away. Old enough to make stupid decisions, too young to understand how they'd shape his life. Or bring about his death.

It wasn't the first time he'd reacted with violence, but it was the first time he'd murdered a man. Their lives for his, and what did that mean? He wasn't good enough of a man to justify it, no better than them.

On the plane back to America after they dock, he registers the flight attendant's voice just as a buzz, a brush of movement as she goes to carry on to the other first class passengers. His voice is hoarse, hands shaking, and he sets the miniature bottle down with a clink and reaches out to catch the handle of the attendant's cart, ignoring the tremble in his hand.

"Just keep them coming, sweetheart."

To encourage her, he hooks the glass necks of four bottles between his knuckles and lifts them to the tiny in-flight table, ignoring the scrutiny of the other passengers. He doesn't sleep for three months without first drinking himself into a stupor. And he doesn't check himself at the betting tables, becoming reckless. He KNOWS he can win. He knows he should be winning. He knows that the house is cheating, just not how. It becomes the puzzle that pulls him out of his stupor, as he digs his own grave stubbornly with every flip of the cards.

A year and a month later he's on the run again. Tennessee, he went to see a man about a horse (literally), taking odd courier jobs to get him across the country for his contact (who he owed a favor to, no cash forthcoming). It's a dive restaurant, but the sort of greasy spoon diner that locals around the country always favored in their home town. In the booth behind him, a man named Earl complains over his pancakes that he can't keep an employee at the meat packing plant willing to spend over two weeks scraping viscera off of the floor. He's describing the horrors of such a job in detail when a flash on the television pulls everyone's gazes, the channel switching to the news suddenly, volume coming up.

". . . confirmed reports that a plane has now crashed into the second tower." Smoke streams out of iconic buildings on his native east coast, fire engulfing the upper stories, and Peter can't breathe. He can't think. His tongue has become thick, the waffle sticking in his throat. His coffee goes cold, and he doesn't notice. No one notices that the refills have stopped, as everyone stares at the screen for the next hours, news streaming in about it being a possible terrorist attack on American soil.

It's not merely possible. It is. Someone taught them how to fly.

And it would have been him. Propelled by his own need, completely ignoring the implications of his work. It was something his father would have done. Entirely self-centered, callous.

He flags Earl down several hours later, ignoring the confused look at his MIT sweatshirt beneath the leather jacket as he offers himself up for the job. Scraping animal blood and guts off of the floor seemed like only the start of his penance.

Some day, someone was going to come for him. Was going to seek him out and ask questions. Some day, he was going to pay for everything he'd done, and what he might have done.

---

"I know why you're here. I have your file."

"What file?"

"The one the FBI would say doesn't exist. And it has everything. Where you've been, what you're running from. And what you need while you're here. So, either you come with me, or I let certain people know your whereabouts."

"When do we leave?"

- Olivia Dunham and Peter Bishop (Pilot)

---

"When I heard you had been killed, I knew this could not be true. Because a person like you is good at one thing. More than anything else, a person like you is good at looking out for yourself. Now you are here... asking for my help?"

"Yes, I am."

"Maybe someone else will want your money. I don't."

"Ahmed... a lot of innocent lives may be on the line."

"I see. And this is something you care about now?"

- Ahmed and Peter Bishop (Fracture)

Author's Note:

Someone said in response to my last fic (my first Fringe fic) that they'd wished I'd been writing for it from the start. So it set me to thinking. . . what IS the start for these characters? I may delve more into Peter. I may go into Olivia next. I may even dabble at Walter, or how all of these characters are the possibility of redemption for the others. If you like what you see so far, let me know what you'd like to see next. I have a myriad of ideas, but am trying to pinpoint the next step.