Fringe Fic: The Missing.

[rainer76]

Title: The Missing
Spoilers: Minor for season 4
Walter character study.


Walter spends seventeen years in a room that spans seven paces by three.

It’s large enough for a single bed and a chair that resides in a corner near the meshed window - placed there for a visitor who never arrives.

Saint Claire’s is built in a hollow square. Walter’s view consists of a small community garden directly below and another inmates (patient’s) room opposite. There’s a games room, a common cafeteria, and a television room on the first floor. The screen’s protected behind the same mesh that covers the windows, bisecting the cast of MASH as they struggle through syndication. On the second level, treatment rooms, drug therapies, psychological evaluations and the shower block congregate along the narrow corridor. There was a swimming pool once, used for physical therapy, but the water’s been long emptied, leaving a sloping pit in the middle of the floor.

When Walter first arrived, he played games. He was a dexterous man, nimble-quick, and the pills they used to addle his mind vanished like a well-performed magic trick. Seventeen years ago, Walter said the fire wasn’t his fault, they had no right, how dare they…until the simmering fury, the arrogance, brought every attendant running; they locked buckles and straps around his wrists, used needles to produce the result they desired. Walter doesn’t think it was about making him better; it was about making him compliant. He tried talking to his fellow inmates (patients), until Walter realised they were criminally insane, and having a spork stabbed through the centre of his eye wasn’t appealing.

He maintained his innocence.  Walter watched the visitor room daily, his eyes drifting over the unfamiliar faces - a father, someone’s daughter, a pale man in a hat with a briefcase placed neatly over his thighs – waiting for a glimpse of black curls until he learned to stop looking for her.

Walter says there’s work he needs to do, counter-measures to be taken. He fights. He doesn’t fight. He argues. Begs. Pretends indifference. In retaliation, the doctors increase his dosage, try different samples, keep him in solitary or drag him out to ‘socialise’ amongst his peers. He doesn’t feel safe in the common room. Walter eats jelly cups, his fingers once so dexterous, can barely grabble with the spoon in his hand. His vision blurs out of focus, he gets the shakes by three pm until the doctors realise they miscalculated his dosage.

He should have a voice, a friend (a wife) to speak up for his rights, to hold Saint Claire’s accountable. Instead he goes through withdrawals while tied to his cot.

Walternate doesn’t appear until the fifth year, he sits at the bottom of the bed, ramrod straight and smiles, his grin the black maw of colliding worlds.

He starts to forget minor details, the dimple at the small of Elizabeth’s back, how’d she bite down on her bottom lip, the clean beauty of her mathematical equations. She doesn’t visit, not a single dot in the visitor book. It doesn’t take long before Walternate starts conversing with him. He hangs over Walter’s shoulder in the common room - while Walter sorts through a thousand-piece puzzle - and says he was never innocent; it was hubris, arrogance; leading children like a poisoned pied piper.

Walter ignores him. He knows its best for everyone if he ignores him. Walter sits hunched over a table, working the edges of the puzzle, one painstaking piece at a time. The image remains incomplete, a field of flowers with a hole in the centre. The puzzle's been in the common room for years and if Walter were thinking clearly, he'd realise the only suspicious thing about it was that it wasn’t missing more. Instead, he stares at a lost silhouette that keeps it from completion. Walter checks under the table, he checks the surrounding floor, he upturns the box and runs his finger along the seam of cardboard, trying to feel for the missing piece, and then, he starts accusing the inmates (patients) of theft.

In the eighth year of his incarceration (treatment) Walter starts a riot…because those crazy bald-headed freaks stole something, you see. And he wants it back.

After that, he starts to lose track of the years. His room, seven paces by three, are the only diameters he needs. He’s safe here, away from the doctors, where a mournful rendition of a children’s song echoes through the hallways at night. Soon after the riot, Walter begins to think he deserves Saint Claire’s... But he doesn’t want to stay.

A girl with blonde hair shatters it all. There are cuts on her face, nails trimmed down, she draws a hand over her brow as if exhausted and asks for Walter’s help. He stares at her like an apparition, just one of many, and then Walter’s mind snaps to attention. “You came here today with my wife. I’m not allowed visitors you see, except for immediate family. Unless the order has been lifted.” He sees the flinch, the way Agent Dunham draws backward, staring at him hard. “I would very much like to see her.”

Walter swallows his water convulsively, spilling the remainder down his chin, dampening the salt and pepper of his beard.  Agent Dunham pushes her chair away, her footsteps heavy as she walks out of the visitor room.

He wants to stab Elizabeth in the throat or crush her body to his own; he wants to remember the curve of her spine and ask: why didn’t you visit? They were lovers once, where did her compassion go? He vibrates on the edge of his seat until Elizabeth appears. Her hair’s pulled back in an austere bun, crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes, the click of her heels resounds in the cavernous room. “You haven’t aged well,” Walter observes, and sees his wife pull up short. Her mouth parts, her right cheek twitches.

“That’s all you have to say to me?”

She still has the same lilt to her voice, Elizabeth carries herself like a queen. Walter jerks; he dismisses his wife's presence from his mind and fixes his attention on Olivia Dunham. The FBI put them up in a motel with a single bedroom, a double mattress pounded into submission by the shape of human passage. The room is the extent of the financial resources Broyles will allow for Agent Dunham’s ‘pet project’. Elizabeth looks at it once, her mouth bitter. “I can’t do this, I’m so sorry, Walter,” and walks out the door.

The dimensions of the room are not seven paces by three.

It’s too large, threatening to swallow Walter whole, he stares at the front door as he waits for Elizabeth. The television screens are flat, music pounds from the roadside, a steady duff-duff that has Walter twitching the curtains closed. He listens to the clock, to the doors of the motel as they’re slammed shut. Outside, the light wavers from orange to flushed pink, subsides to twilight blue. The moon appears. Walter feels sweat slide down his neck, he gasps shallowly. The room needs to be sub-divided. Scott, Olivia Dunham, Apex, contagions, too many elements were introduced at once. He needs Elizabeth to take up half of the space…except she never returns.  By eleven pm, Walter’s hands won’t stop shaking. He tries to reach Agent Dunham but he can’t manage to connect with an outside line. He opens the front door to search for Elizabeth and is confronted by vastness - where all of his sins are no longer boarded up or guarded. Walter shuts the door firmly. Astrid finds him hiding inside the closet the following morning. “Doctor Bishop?”

“I can’t,” he says, miserable; his face stiff with tears.

There should be someone here, long legs hanging over the edge of the couch, sharing Walter’s tiny space not because it’s the extent of the FBI budget (they could lease a house with the FBI budget); but because he knows Walter can’t sleep in a strange room larger than this. There should be someone willing to wait, (almost a year if necessary) until the memory of Saint Claire’s isn’t so raw. Walter’s bones have been packed down for seventeen years, contained in a neat psychological box, he doesn’t know how to stretch his limbs.

Astrid squats down beside him. She doesn’t appear to understand, her voice is gentle, head tilted like a bird. “Walter, where’s Elizabeth?”

He plucks at a random thread on the carpet. “I can’t,” he repeats, insensible, and starts working his way through the Fibonacci sequence.

“Agent Dunham,” Astrid says into her phone, her voice urgent. “We may have a problem…”

Walter rocks back and forth, knees drawn to his chest until Agent Dunham arrives with a letter in hand. Walter hears snippets of conversation… “She left notice at the office…signed papers…FBI care…she remarried in 2001…” Walter blocks it out until Olivia swims into his line of vision, her expression dubious, there are shadows under her eyes, Walter imagines she spent the night at the hospital with Scott. “Walter, you need to find a way to make yourself useful to me because if you don’t, I guarantee they’ll send you back to Saint Claire’s.”

He flinches with his entire body. Sickragefear. There should be someone here, someone to connect with, a way for Walter to fixate his mind on something other than himself. “Where’s Elizabeth?” he says, hoarsely.

Olivia looks at him pityingly. “Walter, you signed the divorce papers a decade ago.”

He stares at her blankly; feeling betrayed because he doesn’t remember doing that, and then he flies into a rage. Walter's temper does very little to impress Agent Dunham, the young agent at her side, though, flinches away. He flails until Agent Dunham grabs hold of his wrists and says sharply. “Enough!”

They work out a system. Walter’s ferried to the lab (surrounding himself with the familiar) in the morning, and returns to the motel at night. He makes the walk from the car to either of these locations at a near trot, shoulders hunched up to his ears, while Olivia assures him the situation's temporary. Agent Farnsworth drives him to the motel, her car filled with shopping bags.  She helps him inside, juggling groceries, canned food, a Halloween’s supply of candy and smiles at him. Walter catches her by the forearm, his expression pleading. They rearrange the furniture together; move the couch into the centre of the room, bisecting the living space until the diameters resemble his room at Saint Claire's, seven paces by three. “Thank you.” Walter says. He clears his throat, trying to find a way to make his thoughts coherent. “The walls were so closed in, I can’t…open spaces...”

“It’s okay, Walter,” Astrid says, trying to soothe his agitation “You don’t need to explain…there’s a word for your condition.”

“Agoraphobia,” Walter says, numbly.

“Institutionalised,” Astrid corrects, so very gently. “We’ll find a way to work around it, okay?”

It’s not. None of it is. He wants to tear Astrid apart because ‘working around it’ is not the solution Walter needs - there’s no one at his shoulder, standing within arm's reach, goading Walter outside - no voice bordering between irritation and patience.

“Thank you, dear,” Walter says, and realises they’ll cater to his fear; Olivia needs him operational for the FBI, not flailing in a panic attack. He sags in relief, the topsy-turvy wave of his emotions de-stabilising him. He smiles at Astrid, while part of him wonders why no one can be bothered to keep Walter company, until he learns to breathe the fresh air again.