"You were right... what you said before, about the consequences. I don't think of them. Never have, don't know if I can. It's not who I am."-Walter Bishop (Unleashed)
It started out as a mantra for himself. "Don't Dream. Don't Dream." In his dreams, a seven year old boy lay pale and cold on a metal slab in the county morgue. Hollow, sickly face forever still. He had always been so animated as a youngster, plump cheeks creasing into a smile whenever his mother offered him encouragement, brow furrowed in concentration when Walter came upon him taking apart the lawnmower and spreading pieces across the lawn in a mechanical dissection, or the wagging chin that inevitably ended up smeared with maple syrup from his attempts to cram an entire pancake into his mouth while talking. He had been forever talking. Talking his way out of things, his way into them. Even at a young age, he had been a charismatic child. He did not whine, or wheedle, but seemed to enter every conversation with children or adults as a negotiation. He bargained, and inevitably came out ahead for it.
But in Walter's mind, the memories of Peter Bishop as a precocious child were forever superimposed with the unnatural stillness of his corpse. A cadaver, waiting for the knife of some hackneyed backwater physician whose hands shook from too many years of downing moonshine, who was too inept for any task beyond corpsecutter in rural Massachusetts.
Belly had wrapped an arm around his shoulders, tried to guide him away from the sterile featureless room behind the wire-reinforced window, but he had stayed. Shrugging off the arm of his friend and ignoring the pleas of his wife, Walter Bishop stood with fists clenched to watch the start of the "Y" incision that would tell him how he had failed his only child. Flesh and tissue carefully excised, examined, weighed. A small human heart in a hanging scale, ounces carefully recorded, and it provided no insight.
He had been speaking with the dead in a laboratory for the past decade, Belly at his side. . . but seeing Peter's memories would do him little good and provide him no answers. And he was afraid. . .afraid that the moment he was lowered into the briny water of the tank he would see the one thing that truly terrified him, that woke him with images of his son's fragile shell.
The clear understanding of his son's perception of him.
Walter Bishop's imagination had birthed truly horrifying creatures, delved into the nauseating aspects of science and technology and had done it with a clinical detachment and fanaticism. In the eyes of a neglected seven year old boy, these qualities could be little more than disregard for life and personal attachments. For a child who was unaware of the work consuming him, his behavior could only be conveyed as disinterest. Apathy. Antisocial. In short, the perception of one of only three people in the world whose good opinion interested him, would see a psychopathic monster.
In the end, Walter Bishop had failed his boy long before the illness struck. As intestines were extracted like coiled ropes of flesh and blood, slipping through the examiner's hands inch by inch looking for clues, Walter had felt a tremor run through him, setting his hands twitching as he finally turned away.
They twitch and tremble, given a life of their own, as he stands by to watch the mahogany casket lower into the ground. He attempts to capture them, one hand restricting the other, both struggling to be free rather than consent to his command of his musculature. He cannot hold his wife as the first shovel of dirt rains down on the coffin below with a hollow rattle. He can feel their eyes on him, the LSD enhancing his perception so that he can feel each stare as a palpable weight that bows his shoulders, the infinitesimal crowd of supposed friends and family judging him.
Nina drives his wife home to Cambridge, an insult to both women that he is entirely blind to and that Belly doesn't attempt to explain on this day as they turn onto the unpaved roadways surrounding Reiden Lake. Here, purpose revives Walter again—he is driven, determined, his hands steady and though his eyes shine with unshed tears he argues his point eloquently enough that Bell consents.
Physics, the balance of the scales, mass replaced for mass taken, the car in the statue. . . none of it amounted to anything in the face of his grief. His most precious possession had been stolen away from him, and he would rip heaven and earth asunder to get it back.
On the shores of Reiden Lake, surrounded by the press of trees and the oppressive silence as the singing of cicada and rustle of animals in the foilage cut short with the first shimmers of reality's end, he did precisely that.
At 2:12 AM, Walter Bishop walks back into the world with something that never belonged to him. As the drugged and unconscious seven year old changes hands, he collapses to his knees on the gravel and vomits, shaking, trembling. This time. . . this time, this child. . . it would be different. Belly lives up to the bargain, making nearly everything from before disappear. The corpsecutter's eyes slide past him in the town, a stranger's glance. Records seem to evaporate before they ever make it to a database. And even as the electricity courses through the child, making his back arch off the table, eyes rolling into the back of his head, muscles shaking uncontrollably, he sees the adjustment begin.
But his wife never completely conceals the look of horror when she sees him, something the perceptive little stranger that looks so familiar picks up on quickly. Walter tries though for the first time to connect.
The screams wake him in the night, and he passes on his wisdom, his experience, as best he's able.
"Don't Dream. Don't Dream."
Ten years later as the sentence falls with the gavel, committing him to a lifetime of confinement for his carelessness, he sees a stranger's eyes glowering at him from beneath lowered brows as he draws short suddenly in pleading with his child. Language is lost to him as he realizes that he failed this son just as he had his first. What broke in him a decade before shatters, and when Peter Bishop stalks out the courtroom, out of his father's life, and away from all that he knew, Walter Bishop is docile as he lets them lead him away.
An asylum, named for the patron saint of clairvoyants. The irony draws him from one thought to the next, until he alights on Dante Alighieri's elegant hell. The contrapasso. Guesome, yes. Utterly brutal, as you would expect from hell, but elegant in its design.
In each crime, its punishment.
Oracles heads twisted backwards, forever looking into the past and never seeing ahead. Gluttons forever hungry, and left to eat their own excrement. Satan, who fought to deny free will, is frozen in a lake of ice. . . capable of free thought but forever unable to act, the beating of his wings refreezing his eternal prison. All retain their personalities, the qualities they were damned for. . .unable to change, unable to be redeemed, forced to dwell in their sins for eternity.
And the scientist, Doctor Walter Bishop, is left with only his thoughts and failures, for nearly two decades. . . and no way to act on them.
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"It's one of the inherent pitfalls of being a scientist, trying to maintain that distinction. . . between God's domain, and our own. Sometimes I forget, myself. But then, you already know that."
"What do you mean?"
"If you've read my file, then you know the truth about Peter's medical history. I've been meaning to ask you. . ."
"Walter, there's no mention of his medical history. Just his birthday."
"No? I was going to ask you to keep it between just the two of us. But I suppose there's no need."
-Walter Bishop and Olivia Dunham (The Same Old Story)
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"Have you never taken anything that didn't belong to you because you knew it was the right thing to do?"
"This isn't about me."
"Maybe it is, Peter."
- Walter Bishop and Peter Bishop (The Arrival)
Author's Note
Walter's chapter is a bit less in-the-moment than Peter's, I know. But where Peter DOES live in the moment, with Walter the muddling of timeframes (autopsy, funeral, retrieval, courtroom, asylum) was intentional between the grief, drugs, and Walter's increasing insanity. . . though I'm not sure it conveyed well, and may tweak it later. Olivia's next, and then I may begin weaving the stories together.