A Beautiful Mine
Title: A Beautiful Mine
Rating: PG
Characters: Astrid, Walter, Olivia
Spoilers: All aired episodes, spoiler-free speculation for future episodes.
Disclaimer: Fringe belongs to its creators and Fox. The title was taken from an RJD2 song.
Summary: Astrid has had a very lucky life.
Astrid is a people person. It’s sort of a natural reaction to her childhood; she spent a lot of time staying with different aunts and grandparents and family friends. Her dad wasn’t around much because of work and her mom died when she was ten, so she got shuffled around a lot. Astrid got used to it, though. It’s why she’s so good with meeting new people or moving to new places. Adaptation is an important strategy.
Especially when dealing with Walter Bishop.
Every day she wakes up and wonders what exactly she will be in for today. Will it be putting test tubes into a centrifuge? Or will it be helping Walter test out some new equipment, sometimes on a person?
Those days are always the worst.
_-_-_-_-_
The FBI job was sort of a fluke. Astrid didn’t really know what she was going to do after college. The scholarship she’d gotten allowed her more freedom with her classes; instead of cramming everything into two or three years in order to save money, she had the full four years to take random Classics classes and computer science. And a lot of biology. A predisposition towards the sciences was genetic; her mom had studied biochemistry.
The only problem with majoring in whatever you want in college is that it makes for a hard time trying to find out what to do afterwards.
It was just luck that she walked into the career services office five minutes before the FBI recruiter came to talk to a small, anxious group of students.
Astrid overheard a girl say that “the best thing about the FBI is that they don’t care what you major in, so long as you can pass a lie detector test.”
Astrid liked the sound of that. So she went to the meeting, grabbed an application, and within two years of graduation she was fully employed by the FBI.
_-_-_-_-_
Astrid likes her work, even if it did take a turn for the strange in the past year. Her work life is crazy; she is confident that she is the only one of her friends to work with a cow on a daily basis. But despite the insanity, she likes it. She likes Olivia and Peter and she even likes Walter a little bit.
Astrid knows that the seventeen years Walter spent in Saint Claire’s were not easy on him and that she needs to regard him through that lens. He’s not the cocky scientist who experimented one too many times on a lab assistant, he’s a confused man who does not know how to live in the real world. She feels sorry for him sometimes. But then pieces of what she imagines is the old Walter will come back, ready to do anything for the science, and her sympathy disappears. She remembers his human testing and its cost.
She doesn’t think those seventeen years were quite enough.
Still, it’s hard not to like Walter and all his idiosyncrasies, and working with him is always an adventure and it’s turned into a good use of her skills. But Astrid does not sympathize with him. She always keeps in the back of her mind that he’s a murderer. Any time she starts to like him too much, she reminds herself of that fact. Then she goes back to work, back to another day of being called Astral or Asteroid or just Agent Farnsworth.
It’s funny how he always gets her last name right. It’s almost like he’s heard it before.
_-_-_-_-_
Here’s something about Astrid: she’s not just a people person, she’s nice. And she likes to keep people happy, or at least relatively unbothered. It makes everyone’s lives easier. She’s not the type to go out of her way to make people angry.
It was the same when she was younger. There was a girl in her seventh grade class who used to make fun of her. Apparently Astrid’s hair wasn’t right, her clothes weren’t right, her family wasn’t right. It was the sort of things a thirteen year-old girl would say that was stupid but still hurtful.
Astrid didn’t do anything to her. She didn’t tease back, but she didn’t run off crying to a teacher either. She just took it; there was no reason to make the situation worse. Eventually the girl got bored and moved on.
Astrid still remembered every horrible thing that girl said, though. And she waited.
Three years later, when she saw her cheat off another girl’s Spanish test, Astrid told the teacher after class. After all, the girl who she was cheating off of was too meek to ever speak up. Astrid isn’t too good with fighting her own battles, but she’ll take that step for someone else who can’t.
It’s the only reason she helps Walter when he needs to use an experiment on human subjects. It makes her skin crawl, but she stays because the test subjects need someone looking out for them, not the science. She knows that if she’s not there to keep Walter in line, there might be another “accident.”
The thought of it makes her sick.
_-_-_-_-_
Astrid never wanted to do fieldwork. There was too much training involved and she isn’t really one who’s up for doing the necessary aerobics to stay in shape for it.
She wasn’t surprised when she was assigned to be Olivia’s assistant. It made sense that the new girl with a wide range of skills was assigned to the up-and-coming field agent. Olivia was a surprise, though. She’d heard things about her before and she’d expected a Sydney Bristow-type; someone who was smart and well-trained and friendly.
The first two were true. And it’s not like Olivia was mean. She made Astrid feel welcome and made it clear that she valued her input. She was just stand-offish. She still is. Astrid knows it’s nothing personal because Olivia’s like that with everyone. It’s just her nature and it’s the complete opposite of Astrid’s. It’s part of what makes them a good team. Their different ways of looking at people help make a bigger picture when working on a case.
Astrid knows that she was very lucky to be paired with Olivia. A lot of her life can be chalked up to luck. Lucky that she got that amazing Bell Scholarship for college, lucky that she happened upon the FBI interest meeting, lucky that she was paired with Olivia, lucky that Olivia became caught up in the Pattern.
And it’s lucky that no one bothered to check her file before she and Olivia were assigned to this new division. She supposes that’s just the way the FBI works. You go where they tell you and if you have any problems with it, you suck it up.
Astrid is pretty good at that.
_-_-_-_-_
If patience is a virtue, then Astrid makes all the saints who ever lived look like frauds.
Ever since she started working with Walter, she’s been waiting. Waiting for the perfect moment. It’s been hard not to give up. After he drugged her, she wanted to quit. But she reminded herself that she would never get this opportunity again, and she stayed.
And waited. She has waited through weird experiments, a cute but creepy bald kid, a cow, and Walter. She has survived spending almost every day with Walter Bishop, cringing internally every time she got too close to him and constantly reminding to herself what it is he did.
She has been waiting to take the step that her mother never could.
Seventeen years ago, Walter Bishop killed her mother.
And someday, Astrid’s going to kill him.