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chaletianTitle: A Terrifying Man
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
chaletian
Fandom: Fringe
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Vague to 1x09
Summary: Astrid Farnsworth makes a discovery that is not altogether surprising.
She’s not surprised when she finds them. Astrid Farnsworth is, after all, an extremely intelligent woman, and this little discovery has been pretty clearly sign-posted in the few months she’s been working with Agent Dunham and the Bishops. She’s been cataloguing Walter Bishop’s old files for a couple of months, now, creating a database for decades of hypotheses and experiments. Some of the stuff is brilliant, some scary, some weird. There are a few ideas she can’t even find words to describe they’re so out there.
It’s a Friday when she finds the first box file. Walter’s eating coffee yoghurt (his shadowy memory having sparked off a new obsession – or revivified an old one) and pottering with some electrical circuits which may be a scientific breakthrough of unimaginable importance or may be an effort to get his yoghurt to taste more or less like coffee. Peter’s fiddling with the piano, obviously bored.
And Astrid makes another foray into the storage room under the lab.
It’s always chilly there, and whenever she thinks of it, she imagines cobwebs and creepy organ music, though the only music she’s ever heard is the faint echo of Peter’s piano playing, and she cleaned the cobwebs out her first week. She’s been going through the boxes in a grid pattern, following it strictly, not wanting to miss anything. She pulls a box down from its pile, carries it over to the trestle table, and opens it.
She knew – how could she not? – that Walter had experimented on his son. It wasn’t exactly a secret. But this— she sits and reads the files, one after another, flicking through them faster and faster, pushing them roughly to one side as she reaches for the next box. Experiment after experiment, hypnosis and regression, mind control and subliminal message, electrocution and genetic manipulation. Years of it, documented in neatly written files – results charts, photographs, hypotheses tested with sophisticated experimentation, conclusions spun out of columns of figures and empirical observations.
She puts away the files. Goes against her own training and intellectual inclination and fills out vague entries in her database. Continues to fetch and carry for Walter, whether his requests be practical or lunatic. Smiles when he remembers her name.
Never forgets how he screwed over his son. Never turns her back. Because a man like that, a man who can do that in the name of discovery and progress? That is a terrifying man.
Author:
chaletianFandom: Fringe
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Vague to 1x09
Summary: Astrid Farnsworth makes a discovery that is not altogether surprising.
She’s not surprised when she finds them. Astrid Farnsworth is, after all, an extremely intelligent woman, and this little discovery has been pretty clearly sign-posted in the few months she’s been working with Agent Dunham and the Bishops. She’s been cataloguing Walter Bishop’s old files for a couple of months, now, creating a database for decades of hypotheses and experiments. Some of the stuff is brilliant, some scary, some weird. There are a few ideas she can’t even find words to describe they’re so out there.
It’s a Friday when she finds the first box file. Walter’s eating coffee yoghurt (his shadowy memory having sparked off a new obsession – or revivified an old one) and pottering with some electrical circuits which may be a scientific breakthrough of unimaginable importance or may be an effort to get his yoghurt to taste more or less like coffee. Peter’s fiddling with the piano, obviously bored.
And Astrid makes another foray into the storage room under the lab.
It’s always chilly there, and whenever she thinks of it, she imagines cobwebs and creepy organ music, though the only music she’s ever heard is the faint echo of Peter’s piano playing, and she cleaned the cobwebs out her first week. She’s been going through the boxes in a grid pattern, following it strictly, not wanting to miss anything. She pulls a box down from its pile, carries it over to the trestle table, and opens it.
She knew – how could she not? – that Walter had experimented on his son. It wasn’t exactly a secret. But this— she sits and reads the files, one after another, flicking through them faster and faster, pushing them roughly to one side as she reaches for the next box. Experiment after experiment, hypnosis and regression, mind control and subliminal message, electrocution and genetic manipulation. Years of it, documented in neatly written files – results charts, photographs, hypotheses tested with sophisticated experimentation, conclusions spun out of columns of figures and empirical observations.
She puts away the files. Goes against her own training and intellectual inclination and fills out vague entries in her database. Continues to fetch and carry for Walter, whether his requests be practical or lunatic. Smiles when he remembers her name.
Never forgets how he screwed over his son. Never turns her back. Because a man like that, a man who can do that in the name of discovery and progress? That is a terrifying man.
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Perfect
Date: 2008-11-27 03:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-30 03:40 pm (UTC)That's all I can say, really. You nail down the reality of what Walter Bishop is in a way that is both eerie and gritty. For all of her kindness, I don't doubt that Astrid (especially after he sedates her all sneaky-like) forgets that Walter is semi-crazy and also involved in stuff that could honestly put him in a prison if people ever got terribly wise.
Anyway. Excellently done. Great voice, prose and flow, and the story is spot-on in its observations.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-28 04:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-05 07:35 pm (UTC)