Fringe Drabble: Fairytales (spoilers for 4:03 and 4:04
He sleeps fitfully. The dream is curiously dissociative, out of sync with reality. Like most dreams it leaves Peter as a passenger, watching the mileage turn over, until it shifts from benign impressions to the familiar grip of a night terror.
There’s silt in the back of Peter’s throat, ice in his chest; he’s hit with the child-like certainty the man before him isn’t his father. He struggles in a dream where the ice cracks and the plunge down is nothing but deathly shock. Where a man with dad’s face, with changeling eyes, doesn’t reach for him. In the dream there’s an arrow of light and the imposter is caught up by another man, lifted away, out of the clutching water. The ice reforms.
Weighted down with boots, parka, the mittens his mom pulled on, Peter sinks.
His lungs burn with lack of oxygen, indistinguishable from the fever he’s lived with for two years. He sucks in water - flavored with betrayal - and spasms, fighting painfully. He dies alone. His body drifts in the depths of Reiden Lake, forever unclaimed. It is this more than any other act that sends Walter insane - he doesn’t notify the proper authorities - the body of the child he stole is never recovered from its watery home. The real Peter died one month earlier; Walter can’t risk the questions, the close scrutiny a police investigation would bring if the body were found. It's easier instead to let things lie. Walter awakes forty-five minutes after falling through the ice, bundled in a blanket in the back seat of his car and shakes. He shakes like an earthquake, knocking the fortifications of his sanity to tatters. He tells no one but his wife.
Among the icy currents, the forest of reeds, pitted crevices and misplaced trinkets, the lost boy is preserved. He died knowing it wasn't his dad (without even the meagre comfort of a parent's last touch), he died knowing the imposter tricked him into this fate all along.
He dies with his fingers trailing over silt, muddying the waters of his grave.
There’s silt in the back of Peter’s throat, ice in his chest; he’s hit with the child-like certainty the man before him isn’t his father. He struggles in a dream where the ice cracks and the plunge down is nothing but deathly shock. Where a man with dad’s face, with changeling eyes, doesn’t reach for him. In the dream there’s an arrow of light and the imposter is caught up by another man, lifted away, out of the clutching water. The ice reforms.
Weighted down with boots, parka, the mittens his mom pulled on, Peter sinks.
His lungs burn with lack of oxygen, indistinguishable from the fever he’s lived with for two years. He sucks in water - flavored with betrayal - and spasms, fighting painfully. He dies alone. His body drifts in the depths of Reiden Lake, forever unclaimed. It is this more than any other act that sends Walter insane - he doesn’t notify the proper authorities - the body of the child he stole is never recovered from its watery home. The real Peter died one month earlier; Walter can’t risk the questions, the close scrutiny a police investigation would bring if the body were found. It's easier instead to let things lie. Walter awakes forty-five minutes after falling through the ice, bundled in a blanket in the back seat of his car and shakes. He shakes like an earthquake, knocking the fortifications of his sanity to tatters. He tells no one but his wife.
Among the icy currents, the forest of reeds, pitted crevices and misplaced trinkets, the lost boy is preserved. He died knowing it wasn't his dad (without even the meagre comfort of a parent's last touch), he died knowing the imposter tricked him into this fate all along.
He dies with his fingers trailing over silt, muddying the waters of his grave.