FRINGE
Someone to Watch Over You
Fringe, The Simpsons, The X-Files, Jazzman (Carole King) or "Someone to Watch Over Me" [music by George Gershwin & lyrics by Ira Gershwin from the musical Oh, Kay! (1926)] don't belong to me.
I'm merely borrowing everything. I promise I will put everything back in their box as soon as I'm finished.
Note: Peter mulls over his role in the project and more -- "The Ghost Network" S1E03 episode.
-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-
He had rushed from the lab bench with childish enthusiasm to the sound of her voice. God, was he happy to see her! For the best part of the day, he had watched hopelessly Olivia hop from an idea to another and jump immediately in pursuit as if she was sucked out of the building every time she finally decided to set foot inside the lab.
"Hey," was all he could muster to say.
He felt a huge surge of pride at the prospect of telling her that they succeeded in recreating the compound –like a schoolboy showing off his results. Boy, he was really smitten.
"I hear you play the piano," she grinned expectantly.
It took him by surprise. For no good reason, he was feeling oddly self-conscious that she had found out, -- reminiscence of his personal ghosts of Christmas past…
"He doesn't just play. He's good. You should hear him," Astrid volunteered.
"No," he shook his head in disbelief; why am I being rude, he thought. "Maybe some other time," he added in an attempt to scale down his rebuff. Though his fit of irritation was more directed at Astrid, still it did not sound right.
"Olivia. You'll be pleased to hear we figured it out," Walter interrupted, ripping him off as well of presenting their extraordinary find. It ended an awkward moment that he was determined not to reproduce anytime soon.
In comparison, his trip with Olivia to his youth house in Cambridge has been a walk in the park, an out of time painless experience. There was no resentment left after all these years. He was not looking for closure either since he had come to terms years ago that he had been robbed of his father's attention first by his work then by Saint-Claire. In both cases, he knew that some obscure governmental entity was ultimately to blame, not the rejected teen exiled in Austin.
He felt compelled to walk down memory lane for her benefit, and he was glad to do it until he had to fight her nosy inclinations.
"So where's your mother now?"
She sounded as if she was making small talk but in the life of a FBI agent, something like small talk was simply not an option.
"That's a story for another time," he dismissed her with his usual smirk.
It comes with the territory, he pondered, but he was not ready to come clean with his family history any time soon, even with her. The best way to defuse the question was to launch his own attack. Unscrewing the window panel, he asked casually.
"So tell me. Of all the possible career choices, how did a girl like you end up in law enforcement?" That was a stretch and he knew it.
She looked frustrated. "Well, I pretty much knew this was what I wanted to do by the time I was nine," she said evenly.
Did she expect anything from me? Are we on the same page? No, it can't be.
"When I was nine years old, I think I wanted to be a brontosaurus," he scoffed, eliciting a smile back on her face. At least, he could make her laugh. "They say the psych profiles of cops and criminals are pretty much identical. Ever consider a life of crime?"
It was about time to learn something about her, he thought. Something more personal or at least non-John related.
"No dental," she said with a smirk of her own.
He acknowledged the fact that she was actually better at this game of hiding than he actually was. Compared to her, he was pretty much wearing his heart on his sleeve. He bent down to reach out to the last corner of the cabinet but his fingers did not wobble on anything except for lots of dust bunnies.
"Nothing, of course," he sneered, disappointment in his father sinking in, old habits die hard.
She was already calling Broyles when it hit home there was definitely another panel in the room that he could tear apart.
"What?" She followed him.
"My mom had this covered up. Used to hide in it all the time."
The words left his mouth before he had time to think them over. Now she will picture him forever in his pyjamas with a sheriff badge pinned on his chest or his Optimus Prime mask on.
Great.
Well, it was a start, he thought, retrieving his father's stuff from the hidden cabinet inside the wall. She beamed at him. It was easy to make her happy.
-o-
After to-ing and fro-ing for the best part of the day, he finally yielded to his father's wishes. There was no point in denying him such a trivial demand and nothing else he could do after having been challenged by Walter with a musical tournament.
So he asked Astrid to find them a piano and to have it delivered asap. The junior agent did not question his request. To get a piano for the Bishops' lab certainly appeared to belong to a realm of normality. Gene watched the movers install the instrument with apparent glee and Walter insisted on being the first to test it. He chose to christen the instrument with Rachmaninoff's Etude-Tableaux opus 33 n° 9 in C-sharp minor, a loud piece with patterns of leaps in the left hand, and a gorgeous romantic interlude.
Satisfied with his interlude, he let a puzzled Peter have the upper hand for the rest of the day.
Walter was not only a man of logic and rationality and the next Einstein if he could run against time and get back his seventeen missing years in Saint-Claire. He was also a man of feelings and intuition. For some reason, he knew that music will clinch the puzzle together -- regarding the case as well as their fragile relationship. How he was doing it totally eluded Peter. But ultimately here it was, the end of a nice day filled with chuckles, giggles, laughters adorned by music, major scientific breakthrough and a new success for the team.
Peter had missed playing the piano and though he was out of practice, all in all, he found himself quite entertained at the thought of revisiting his classics. If music helped Walter focus, providing him with a mysterious missing ingredient, an appreciated incentive, Peter knew better. Willingly or not, he was part of the equation. So he played and watched Walter working along. That was a pleasant sight and an alleviating experience.
"Jazzman take my blues away," hummed Walter a Petri dish in one hand and a test tube full of fresh milk in the other, "and make my pain the same as yours with every change you play." He toasted in Astrid's direction and invited her for a dance, only a few steps before he went back to his microscope and his new test subject. The whole time, the only thing Peter could picture to the Carole King's tune was Lisa Simpson and her saxophone.
Sitting before the piano, he was brushing the keys when she dashed inside the lab with a bright smile on her face. He could not wait for Roy McComb to leave and to get this case dealt and over with. On a perfect day, in another time and place, he would have invited her for a casual night out, nothing fancy, a good restaurant maybe, a last nightcap and who knew? But now, he just wanted to impress her –and he didn't need persuading.
"Dunham," he said in an even voice. He got her attention immediately. "Any requests?"
She came near the piano, her face serious, her eyes intent. If she was surprised by his change of mind she didn't ask. "How about some Bach?" she said, leaning casually against the piano.
"Bach?" He could not help laughing. What was it with Bach today? "No, that's way too stuffy," he said, unable to meet her eyes. Bach was not the kind of music she needed to unwind. He had a pretty graphic image of what he could actually do to help her relax but still, it was not part of his immediate agenda. "What you need is some jazz," he emphasized.
"Well, I'll take what I can get," she said gently.
He started to play that old Gershwin tune his mother used to play when she was lonely and needed comfort; he wished that his life would be as simple as a song on a radio, or the tune he was playing for her on the piano lab at the moment.
There's a somebody I'm longin' to see
I hope that she turns out to be
Someone who'll watch over me
But since he had left Iraq, he was living in the fourth dimension. Literally. Not only his world had been tossed upside down but the world around him was weird and tainted. His sole option was to become a mix of Mulder, Scully, Mother Teresa and Sherlock Holmes and accept he was the son of Frankenstein, --really.
As far as he could remember, Walter was never an anchor in his life, not as a child, not as a teen, definitely not as an adult and he wanted nothing more than to be as different as possible from him. He considered that having been estranged from his father was the best thing that ever happened to him. But for the last weeks, he had spent more time at the hotel with Walter, more time at the diner with Walter, more time at the lab with Walter, in a word more time with Walter than ever before in his last twenty years or more, and he was not bored or on edge or on the verge of losing it.
For the first time in his life, he was spending quality time with his father --no strings attached, no prospects, just enjoying the moment. Despite his initial reluctance at reviving their relationship or acting on lack of it, he was confronted with the fact that they definitely shared more than meet the eyes. It was some kind of an achievement, to say the least, that he was actually able to leave the past and its emotional burden behind.
And this probably explained why, chewing over his epiphany and their new rekindled bond, he lowered his guard and was unexpectedly touched by an angel.
I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood
I know I could always be good
To one who'll watch over me
Everyday, he was looking forward to seeing Olivia Dunham. He appreciated her ice cold attitude and detached efficiency so alien to his own demeanour. It was easy to peer at her convenient façade and see the real Olivia beneath it. She was smart, sassy, eye-catching and totally worth of putting down roots.
Although I may not be the man some
Girls think of as handsome
To her heart I carry the key
For the time being, he was content with being his father's babysitter and a civilian consultant and more than happy to provide her with funny one-liners and witty wisecracks to release the tension.
Today on the other hand, he felt pushed in the background, his role reduced drastically to being the complementary assistant, a dispensable connection whose importance happened to be paramount only on a random basis. And he did not like it.
Won't you tell her please to put on some speed
Follow my lead, oh, how I need
Someone to watch over me
He needed more. But to get it, he would have to accept losing control over his life as he knew it.
He did not know if he could do that, --just yet.
-o-
Ok. Here you go. Now…. Please I'd love some feedback!!!