TITLE: Chapter Ten
PAIRING: Walstrid
CHARACTERS: Astrid Farnsworth, Walter Bishop, Peter Bishop, Olivia Dunham, Charlie Francis, Phillip Broyles
GENRE: Dark
RATING: M
SUMMARY: life in the mirror world
WORD COUNT: 2173
WARNINGS: Language, mild sexual humour
SPOILERS: Seasons One and Two
AUTHOR'S NOTE: none :P
DISCLAIMER: none
It was evening and while she hated spending ration points, Astrid had been missing the taste of fresh meat and the FBI's canteen was offering a turkey dinner, which seemed too good to pass up. Walter was in the laboratory reworking the orange oil formula with Charlie and Olivia, so she had some time to herself where she didn't have to worry about finding colouring books or empty offices for him to play marbles in… She sighed then breathed in the wonderful aromas of her food. Now here she was, carrying a tray with her dinner into the canteen's seating area. There was only one other person in there and at first she could only see a silhouette against the large glass walls looking out over the city's twilight skyline. As she approached, she realised it was none other than Peter, his work spread out across the small café style table. He looked up and she cleared her throat nervously.
"Good evening," she greeted. "Would you mind if I sat with you?"
"Sure!" He cleared off a space on the table for her to put her tray and spared her a friendly smile. "It would probably be a good thing for me to get some human interaction, huh?"
Astrid had mixed feelings about Peter. On one hand, they came from the same world of duty and obligation, both having grown up during war and hardship, trying to live up to others' expectations, products of political grooming. They both had that sharp edge that helped them get so far in their careers at such a young age. On the other hand, she wasn't sure she liked how quickly he'd given up on his father. She couldn't imagine doing that to any member of her family no matter what crime they had committed.
She nodded her head at his paperwork as she sat down. "What are you up to?"
He handed over a dogeared book. "I'm working on a new preface for my godfather's book. They're releasing a new edition."
"The Young Scholar's Guide to Quantum Mechanics," she read aloud and smiled fondly. "I remember my first copy. When I was just starting to train in the Church. My mom and aunt gave it to me."
Peter nodded. "It's a classic. I was pretty honoured when he asked if I wanted to write the preface."
"Is it weird to know yours is going to take the place of Walter's?" she said carefully as she looked at the cover again where the words 'forward by High King's Doctor Walter Bishop' had been marked out with a black sharpie.
"No. It'll be nice to see it with fresh material." His fingers hovered over her asparagus spears. "May I?"
She pushed the plate towards him, very pleased they were having a conversation that wasn't turning ugly as they usually did.
"What's your godfather like? I've read your file and I remember it saying that you lived with him for a while," she said, glancing at the back of the cover where a black and white photo of William Bell smiled up at her.
Her eyes flit up to Peter, hoping she hadn't offended or upset him—their relationship was so delicate that it was easy to piss him off. But Peter didn't seem upset and when he finished chewing, he spoke quietly.
"When Walter was locked up, Belly acted as my guardian. I lived with him until I graduated high school and he made sure I was accepted into the university of my choice. I really don't think I would have ended up where I am today if it wasn't for him."
Astrid quietly took a bite of her dinner to keep from pointing out that Walter would have made sure Peter ended up in any university he'd wanted, but that was something would probably make him mad and she couldn't afford to do any more damage to their already rocky association.
Peter gave her a calculating look. "I've read your file too, Astrid."
"Oh?" She really shouldn't have felt so surprised—he had access to that kind of information now.
He nodded and for the first time since she'd met him, she saw nervousness. "I was wondering if…"
She raised an eyebrow, wondering what it was exactly he was trying to ask.
"Can I…see her ashes?"
Her heart sank, realising that he had assumed that as the head of the cadaver division, she could help him in ways no one else could.
Astrid shook her head. "They were destroyed, too. Standard procedure."
"Can I see the crematory then?" When she hesitated, he added softly, "It's her final resting place."
Astrid wanted to say no because she respected the rules and guidelines that had been decided for the crematorium, but as the keeper of Tess Bishop's final secret, she felt that she owed Peter some sort of solace. "You sure?"
He nodded. "Absolutely."
"Let me have the canteen staff pack this for me," she said, suddenly not so hungry anymore.
He nodded enthusiastically, starting to clean up his papers as she stood up with her tray. She felt somewhat forced into this but Peter was part of her team and she'd done favours for others before, why would this be any different? As she watched a redsuit put her dinner in a small box for her to take with her, she sighed heavily and decided her comfort was a small sacrifice to make Peter easier to work with.
Her box of dinner in hand, she returned back to the table where she and Peter had sat. The sun had set and the canteen lights had finally come on, illuminating everything with a white glow. Astrid's eyes moved across his clean shaven face, the expensive tweed suit, and the glare of his glasses' square lenses. He had an unusually friendly look on his face and she gave him a nervous smile back, motioning with a nod of her head to follow her.
From the canteen floor (twenty-one) to the lowest level that could be reached by lift (sub-floor five) took thirty seconds exactly, the mechanical voice of the lift quickly counting down the floors they passed as they stood silently side by side. The cool, silent cement hallway that led to the main stairway was empty as expected during this time of the evening and they quickly decended the stairs to reach sub-floor seven where the crematorium used by the FBI to destroy all cadavers contaminated by the Outbreak was located.
Leaving her dinner box outside the door and swiping the barcode tattoo'd to her upper arm, they entered the decontamination room to put Hazmat suits on so they could safely enter the large room that held the spectacularly large furnace that was used both to heat the entire building and to reduce human flesh into nothing.
"We can only stay in here a few minutes," she said through the helmet's headset. "We don't have on the proper heat garments."
"Understood," he replied and she hit her palm against the large button on the wall that opened the seal.
A blast of heat hit them and while it wasn't uncomfortable, Astrid knew that anything longer than ten minutes would become unbearable. As they walked towards the large round door of the monsterous chamber, Astrid glanced over at Peter; the gloss of the Hazmat suit's face cover shielding his expression. As the head of the religious studies department at Harvard, Astrid somewhat expected him to say something at the site of his wife's final resting place, but he didn't. Silently they stared into the flames behind the thick portal hole of the large door, the heat of the crematorium starting to make her sweat beneath the Hazmat suit.
After they left sub-floor seven, they moved upstairs to sub-floor six; sub-floor six contained the morgue and cryogentic chamber that was used to store the DNA samples of every cadaver that had been contaminated with by the Outbreak. As they walked past the solid glass walls of the refrigerated room, Peter paused. They looked at the shelves containing hundreds of small phials with numbered labels and Peter tapped on the glass.
"What's in there? Is that where they keep the DNA samples?"
"Yes. Cryogenics at their finest." Astrid smiled, proud to be the head of this division of the Fringe Science Unit. "Can you believe it took only a month to construct?"
He continued to stare through the glass at the shelves filled with hundreds of thousand DNA samples as he murmured, "Fascinating."
Astrid could see he was thinking something, but she wasn't sure what it was and it made her uneasy. "Well, we should head back to the office. It's nearly time to go home."
"Of course," he said with a nod, though his eyes didn't leave the phials.
On the lift ride back to floor twenty-five, where the Fringe Science Unit was located, Astrid kept opening her mouth to say something, but all she could think about was, "You and your wife were going to have a child," and it chilled her to think about how he would react to that. When they entered the office however, the sight of Broyles storming towards her made all thoughts of Peter leave.
"Agent Broyles—" she started but he cut her off.
"Agent Farnsworth, I'd hate to have Dr Bishop brought up on charges of Unpatriotic Speech. Maybe you ought to get him under control," he said sternly, the vein in his forehead throbbing.
"Yes, sir," she murmured, her eyes lowered in embarrassment.
Broyles dismissed her to her desk and she pretended to busy with herself with paperwork as her cheeks burned with shame. Walter wandered over, holding a glass bottle of soda he'd bought at one of the hallway's vending machine.
He took a noisy slurp of his drink and said, "Hello."
She pointed to the chair next to hers and with a clenched jaw, instructed, "Please sit down."
Walter sipped from the bottle and casually commented, "Phillip seemed mad at you. Are you going to be fired?"
"Hopefully not anytime soon," she grumbled. "What did you say to him?"
"I asked him what it was like to be half."
She sighed, wishing he wasn't so bizarre. "Half what?"
His reply was so nonchalant that he might just have well have been talking about the weather. "Half Observer,"
"Why would you ask that?!" she shouted, causing the entire office to look over at them.
Walter didn't seem very concerned. "He is, you know. But only half—"
"Damnit, Walter! Don't say that kind of thing!" she hissed, horrified at what he had done, trying to cover his mouth with her hands.
By now Olivia was staring at her with a confused look on her face while she talked on the phone, Charlie had raised his eyebrows in her direction, and Peter was glaring at them both over the top of his glasses while Walter fought her attempt at silencing.
"It's true, though."
She nodded her head over at their superior. "He has eyebrows and eyelashes."
"But faint ones!" the scientist insisted.
"Stop it!" she snapped. "You'll get in trouble!"
"So much for uncovering the truth," he grumbled, glaring at her.
"I think you need to shave your legs and it appears I've lost my ration card again," Walter commented casually the next morning as he put his freshly laundered trousers in his half of the chest of drawers.
"Walter, your ration card is very valuable! When was the last time you saw it?"
"In the kitchen. Oh! I think I left it in the refrigerator!" he said, slapping his forehead and ran to the kitchen. A moment later he called out, "It's in here!"
"Damnit, Walter," she chastised as he returned to the bedroom.
"It's fine. I don't mind your legs being so prickly," he insisted as he tried tickling her toes.
"I was talking about the ration card," she said with a scowl, feeling a little embarrassed about the fact she hadn't shaved her legs in almost two weeks.
"I hate ration points," he pouted.
"I was born at the end of the Twelve Year Campaign and was raised during the Fifth Peruvian Conflict so I've spent my whole life using them. They aren't that complicated."
He strapped his Kevlar vest on over his oxford. "I just miss spending money in places other than the vending machine. I like dollar bills. And coins."
"The ration card was created for efficiency, Walter. This is the only way the government can ensure that stealing money doesn't occur. With the ration card, money is worthless within Boston. The point system ensures everyone gets a fair amount of food," she said quite pointedly as she finished lacing up her boots.
"I understand the principle, but it's still crap."
Sometimes she couldn't believe how irrational such a smart man was and she shook her head, trying to bite back a smile. "You're so funny. Now c'mon—we have to go pick Olivia and Peter up."