AN: You know what I didn't do for this ficlet? Research. Which is uncharacteristic, and I'm sorry. I'm invoking the Nikola Tesla "History Only When It's Convenient" clause. Written for the sfa_history battle prompt Will Zimmerman, FBI Admission Requirements.
Spoilers: Up to the end of season one.
Disclaimer: Not mine, though it would be nice…
Rating: Teen
Characters: Will Zimmerman, The Five
Summary: Someone has done their homework. Will's just not entirely sure who.
Background Reading
There are some things that are in the manual. There are a lot of things that aren't.
The physical requirements, the grades, the ability to handle firearms, all these things are practically engraved on the floor of the training rooms. What's less apparent is how much reading there would be. This doesn't bother Will, because he rather enjoys it and he's a quick study.
It really annoys pretty much everyone else, though, so he does his best to downplay his excitement about it.
This is made increasingly difficult as the topics of study become more engrossing. There are rather more publicly accessible files than Will would have thought, though they've all been carefully edited. Some day he might have clearance to read the originals, but he's not too concerned about that at the moment because what's available is more than enough.
He's not the first person through this program to believe in monsters.
Of course, their monsters are primarily psychological in nature, all of them names he's heard before, Bundy, or names that were never figured out, Zodiac. He finds horrors in those files, and discovers he is unbothered by them, which he had always suspected would be the case. Yes, they remind him of his mother, but they remind him of something else too, the first person who told him he would be all right, even though he's suppressed who that person was.
When he finds the folder on Nikola Tesla, he thinks it's been misfiled.
As he pours over it, he starts to wonder why anyone ever thought that he was one of the crazy ones. There is so much science-fiction in those letters and notes that Will is pretty sure he could simply photocopy it, edit a few of the sentences, make up some names to fill the blacked out lines and sell it as a novel. He had no idea that Tesla had made this much of an impact, but it's a compelling, if seemingly irrelevant read.
Will's never been the type to forgo extra credit.
Years and several lateral career moves later, standing in a room where they've assured him there never was a child, Will won't think of Nikola Tesla. He won't think of Tesla when he meets Helen Magnus either, not even when he finally remembers what she said to him the first time they really met. He won't think of Nikola Tesla, not really, until he's in India and has seen the man resurrect a lightbulb from nothing.
Because even after Jack the Ripper and Sherlock Holmes and the Invisible Girl, Will still balks at the idea that all of the stories are true.
Part of him, the part that clings to psychology like a drowning man clings to a life preserver, knows that this is because he hasn't truly accepted what happened to his mother. He's getting better at thinking about it, removing the blocks and accepting the fact that someday he might console a creature after it's killed someone's mother, but he's got a way to go. And now he's cracking jokes about a vampire and a serial killer, trying to ease the mind of a woman who can disappear at will.
He's not unaware of how ridiculous that is.
He doesn't have a lot of time for thinking in Bhalasaam. Well, not the productive kind of thinking, anyway. And after that there's only a few brief moments of respite before he has to confront the fact that he just watched Sherlock Holmes die of old age and Nikola Tesla has taken his place in the lab next to Magnus. He calls to mind everything he remembers about the official version of Tesla, tries to figure out what's applicable and what's probably an altogether more realistic fabrication. And he remembers, for the first time in a while, how odd the placement of the Tesla information had seemed when he'd found it, all those years ago.
Will's not given to paranoia, much, which is fortunate, because otherwise he'd probably waste a lot of time wondering who made sure he'd read that file.
fin
Note: It's totally Helen, btw, who's done the homework. ;)
Also, you can actually read the FBI File in question, and it definitely qualifies as "Seriously from the department of 'you can't make this stuff up.'" It's in the tags at the sfa_history comm on lj.
Gravity_Not_Included, March 11, 2011