Making This Cold Harbor Now Home (When We Arrive)
Title: Making This Cold Harbor Now Home (When We Arrive)
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: Peter/Astrid. Peter centric.
Spoilers: None
Summary: Peter has spent most of his life looking for things he thought he needed.
Warnings/Disclaimer/Other Stuff: Peter, Astrid, Walter and all things awesome belong to JJ Abrams. Title borrowed from the song Sons and Daughters by The Decemberists and will be returned in good condition. Written using prompt table 1 from 100_situations. No warnings, mostly a character study because writing Peter is really intimidating me for some reason. many thanks and cookies to my partner in awesome justice and beta captainkay.
Peter wanted so badly to believe that he wasn’t like other geniuses. There was a widely held belief that people who related easily to books and facts could not relate to people. His own father proved that-held prisoner by his intelligence and love for science he treated people like meat, never really connecting that he himself was a person too. That, were the situations reversed that he would not have wanted to be poked and prodded at. Were he rational he would not want to be studied. But, he wasn’t rational. He was Walter. His unyielding curiosity made him into what he is and were he suddenly in the patient’s chair he probably would greet any gruesome malady that afflicted him with a murmured, “Fascinating.” It frustrated Peter to no end that Walter couldn’t connect beyond the facts, turning what could be considered friendships into relationships based on usefulness for scientific studies. Yet, the FBI needed him for just those reasons. It was a symbiotic relationship that he couldn’t understand and found himself more often than not, not wanting to. If they wanted Walter’s reclusive genius, as far as he was concerned they could have him. They weren’t going to trap Peter though. He’d eventually move on. He’d have to.
But was he his father’s son? Was there any way that he was looking through a glass darkly into his life in the future, what he could become? He knew that there was a large part of him that could very well go that way if the smaller part of him, the snide part that he let the world see wasn’t firmly in control. And though he was intrigued by the infinite possibilities of science and mathematics, Peter busied himself with the world of mechanics. Machines, artificial intelligence notwithstanding, were not sentient. There wasn’t anything alive about them. There seemed to be power in the words of scientific study and that was not something he wanted to bring to life. He’d seen Walter try. He’d seen Walter fail. Worse yet though, he’d seen Walter succeed.
Walter called Peter’s younger years his Nomad period, harkening back to a prehistoric time where people wandered the earth in search of what they needed. Peter believed that money was what he needed and his journeys all centered on that in one way or another. But then his life changed in Iraq (lives changed a lot there it seemed, statistically speaking for the worse). When Olivia told him to point his feet for home he thought that he could count himself among those lost, such was his dread. Then for the first time in a long time, Peter was wrong.
The lab that was too cold in the winter and stiflingly hot in the summer had given him what he needed all along-companionship. Needing other people wasn’t something he was accustomed to. Leaving Boston was what he’d needed at that time in his life. As a younger man he’d been restless and wanted to wander. Being close with someone was an unnecessary complication, a tether to cut when the time came to leave. But in being back in Boston with these people, his fear of turning to the darkness of becoming Walter’s wasted potential…well it didn’t go away exactly but it got much smaller with every time Walter came in from the fog and talked to him like a person instead of a science experiment, every time he got out of the lab to a case with Olivia and felt useful beyond the norm. All those quiet moments with Astrid, eating rapidly cooling Chinese food out of paper containers, sharing the headphones on her iPod like a couple of teenagers with crushes on each other in the same boring study hall.
And come to think of it, maybe that is exactly what they were.
Astrid was a surprise for him that was for sure. He had expected that Olivia would be the one for him but there wasn’t that spark. There wasn’t any of that thing indefinable by either science or mechanics and yet was still somehow called chemistry. He tried to win her over, he was glaringly obvious most days about his interest but she either chose to ignore him or just didn’t notice. Astrid noticed.
He noticed that she noticed.
And maybe that was another thing he didn’t know he needed.
Rating: PG
Pairings/Characters: Peter/Astrid. Peter centric.
Spoilers: None
Summary: Peter has spent most of his life looking for things he thought he needed.
Warnings/Disclaimer/Other Stuff: Peter, Astrid, Walter and all things awesome belong to JJ Abrams. Title borrowed from the song Sons and Daughters by The Decemberists and will be returned in good condition. Written using prompt table 1 from 100_situations. No warnings, mostly a character study because writing Peter is really intimidating me for some reason. many thanks and cookies to my partner in awesome justice and beta captainkay.
Peter wanted so badly to believe that he wasn’t like other geniuses. There was a widely held belief that people who related easily to books and facts could not relate to people. His own father proved that-held prisoner by his intelligence and love for science he treated people like meat, never really connecting that he himself was a person too. That, were the situations reversed that he would not have wanted to be poked and prodded at. Were he rational he would not want to be studied. But, he wasn’t rational. He was Walter. His unyielding curiosity made him into what he is and were he suddenly in the patient’s chair he probably would greet any gruesome malady that afflicted him with a murmured, “Fascinating.” It frustrated Peter to no end that Walter couldn’t connect beyond the facts, turning what could be considered friendships into relationships based on usefulness for scientific studies. Yet, the FBI needed him for just those reasons. It was a symbiotic relationship that he couldn’t understand and found himself more often than not, not wanting to. If they wanted Walter’s reclusive genius, as far as he was concerned they could have him. They weren’t going to trap Peter though. He’d eventually move on. He’d have to.
But was he his father’s son? Was there any way that he was looking through a glass darkly into his life in the future, what he could become? He knew that there was a large part of him that could very well go that way if the smaller part of him, the snide part that he let the world see wasn’t firmly in control. And though he was intrigued by the infinite possibilities of science and mathematics, Peter busied himself with the world of mechanics. Machines, artificial intelligence notwithstanding, were not sentient. There wasn’t anything alive about them. There seemed to be power in the words of scientific study and that was not something he wanted to bring to life. He’d seen Walter try. He’d seen Walter fail. Worse yet though, he’d seen Walter succeed.
Walter called Peter’s younger years his Nomad period, harkening back to a prehistoric time where people wandered the earth in search of what they needed. Peter believed that money was what he needed and his journeys all centered on that in one way or another. But then his life changed in Iraq (lives changed a lot there it seemed, statistically speaking for the worse). When Olivia told him to point his feet for home he thought that he could count himself among those lost, such was his dread. Then for the first time in a long time, Peter was wrong.
The lab that was too cold in the winter and stiflingly hot in the summer had given him what he needed all along-companionship. Needing other people wasn’t something he was accustomed to. Leaving Boston was what he’d needed at that time in his life. As a younger man he’d been restless and wanted to wander. Being close with someone was an unnecessary complication, a tether to cut when the time came to leave. But in being back in Boston with these people, his fear of turning to the darkness of becoming Walter’s wasted potential…well it didn’t go away exactly but it got much smaller with every time Walter came in from the fog and talked to him like a person instead of a science experiment, every time he got out of the lab to a case with Olivia and felt useful beyond the norm. All those quiet moments with Astrid, eating rapidly cooling Chinese food out of paper containers, sharing the headphones on her iPod like a couple of teenagers with crushes on each other in the same boring study hall.
And come to think of it, maybe that is exactly what they were.
Astrid was a surprise for him that was for sure. He had expected that Olivia would be the one for him but there wasn’t that spark. There wasn’t any of that thing indefinable by either science or mechanics and yet was still somehow called chemistry. He tried to win her over, he was glaringly obvious most days about his interest but she either chose to ignore him or just didn’t notice. Astrid noticed.
He noticed that she noticed.
And maybe that was another thing he didn’t know he needed.