Fic: "Adjunct Talent" (Fringe/YW)
Feb. 15th, 2015 12:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sprocketHey look, I finished a thing!
Adjunct Talent (1951 words) by sprocket
Chapters: 1/1
Fandoms: Fringe, Young Wizards
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Astrid Farnsworth, Nita Callahan
Additional Tags: Episode Tag, Female Friendship, Crossover
Summary: Astrid had a standing New York girls’ weekend with her college roommate. In theory, at least; in practice, they didn’t exactly bat .500. And when they did manage to get together, their weekend plans didn’t necessarily stay in New York. One crisp Saturday morning in late autumn, Astrid stepped off the train at Grand Central and through a series of worldgates to “a nice beach on a planet that I am positive has nothing going on,” juggling her bag and Nita’s giant beach umbrella.
“How can you afford this?” Astrid asked, kicking off her shoes and digging her toes into the hot sand. She squinted at a horizon much higher and more distant than Earth’s, enfolding a distant, deep blue sky. “The transit costs-”
“I know someone in the Rirhait B Crossings Stationmaster’s office. Piggy-backing on that cargo shipment saved us a bunch of energy.” Nita’s bags hit the sand with a satisfying thump. “Wizard’s holiday; what did you want to talk about?”
Her day job was so classified, the classification was probably classified, but there were some parts she could share, edited of context and names. “...and then he said, ‘You can shoot me up, too, but I would most likely enjoy it,’ ” Astrid finished, hearing the exasperation in her voice as she flopped back onto her beach towel. “The job description said assistant, but it feels more like adult daycare."
Nita shook her head in sad appreciation. "Yikes," she said. “What did you tell your boss?”
“Just the truth. I let my guard down, and this guy took advantage of that.” Astrid made a face. “My boss was pretty irate with him.” Astrid hadn’t realized Walter’s hysteric demands were a pretext to get Peter out of the lab until she came to, Peter frantically shaking her back to consciousness, in the otherwise empty room, her neck still throbbing where Walter had slid the needle into the vein. A very smooth escape from his protective keepers, she reflected, for a recent mental patient prone to self-medicating with psychoactive drugs. Somehow she couldn’t summon much appreciation for the revival of Walter’s executive functions.
She’d sat out the Walter-hunt, still woozy from the drugs, but she could remember the uproar, in fragmented snapshots: Peter shouting at SAIC Broyles, the worried briskness in Olivia’s movements as she guided Astrid, half-numb and disoriented, to the couch in the lab’s back room. She had sobered up enough to finish out the day at a desk, working through a backlog of paperwork, after a long talk with Agent Broyles. The Bishops may work with us, but neither of them play by the FBI’s rules. If you stay on, don’t forget that, he’d said, with reams of other advice. Astrid sighed, and wiggled her toes deeper into the warm peach-colored sand. “I tried to tough it out, when I should’ve known I needed someone to watch my back.”
A pained look passed over Nita’s face. “We’ve all made that mistake. Though most of us don’t need to be on guard against our coworkers jumping us with sedatives. I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about not seeing that coming.” She stretched out, one hand disappearing into apparently thin air. It reappeared clutching two bottles, both sweaty with condensation. Nita offered Astrid one of the bottles before groping for a bottle opener. Astrid popped the cap off hers with a pass of her hand and a quick spell.
“Show-off,” Nita said lightly, as she rummaged through her claudication for a more conventional bottle opener.
“Here, give it to me,” Astrid said, and repeated the spell for Nita’s benefit. ”You’ve been on there for a while, haven’t you?” she said to the bottle cap. ”It must be pretty hard holding onto the glass, with all that gas pressure and liquid sloshing around. Are you getting a little tired? How would you feel about loosening up, just a bit?”
The cap popped slightly as the spell took. Astrid passed the bottle back to her friend. Both women were silent, relaxing in the roar of the surf and the sympathetic undemanding company, for some time.
"And how is New York?" Astrid asked, about halfway through their drinks.
Nita grinned. “You mean, how are the wizards, or how are the coworkers?” Though, as one of the New York area Advisories, Nita’s after-hours work could be at least as demanding as her professional life. Astrid didn’t envy Nita her stories of walking into her living room, straight from the offices of New York’s city planning department, to find her husband and fellow Advisory cheerfully neck-deep in another wizard’s spelling problem and itching to ask his oracular partner to back up or refute his “hunch” about the solution.
“Yes,” Astrid said dryly.
Nita groaned. “That’s what I get for phrasing the question that way. Nothing really interesting at the office, but we had a novice on Ordeal pop in last week, quite literally - kids love the beam-me-up spells -" and she launched into a string of anecdotes about the New York wizarding scene that finished off their drinks.
They spent the rest of the day catching up and relaxing, in and out of the pleasantly warm ocean waves as the mood struck. Astrid explored the dunes behind the beach as the afternoon light deepened toward sunset, while Nita checked in with Kit via her Manual.
“I want you to see something,” Nita said, as the sun slipped under the high horizon, “that’s a bit of a puzzle. You’ve got some of the steganographic gift, right?”
“Some,” Astrid agreed cautiously. One of the gratifying benefits of working with Olivia was her unquestioning acceptance of Astrid’s talent for code-cracking: cryptography, linguistics, pattern recognition. To unflappable Olivia, the aptitudes that set Astrid apart from a lot of her fellow agents, and even some wizards, were just part of the “Junior Agent Farnsworth” package.
“Okay, I have a question about a species’ possible sapiency. The keks - that’s what the former inhabitants called them - build on the beaches at night. So far as we know, they haven’t developed a higher intelligence, but it can’t hurt to have a pattern-cracker take a look, right?” Nita glanced down the beach, blue-white with twilight and starglow, and back to Astrid. “Settle in - even if they’re not sapient, watching them is amazing.”
“Maybe especially if they’re not using higher faculties,” Astrid said. They dug out light jackets and settled in under the soft light of the Milky Way, a wide bright starry band overhead from this planet’s location.
“Are you going to stick it out?” Nita asked softly, over the murmur of the night-time surf. “At your job? Sounds like your boss wouldn’t question putting you back in the regular pool.”
Astrid tucked her chin into her knees. “My coworkers are amazing,” she said. She admired Olivia’s self-containment and unwavering focus, so like and unlike Astrid’s division of life-at-work and life-outside-work, even as their cases brought forth questions that shook Astrid’s usually well-grounded perspective. And when Agent Dunham’s relentless drive was too intense, there was Agent Francis to bring some humor - and sanity - back to the lab. “If you’d asked me, before I was assigned to the task force, what I’d do to work with them, I would have said ‘almost anything’, and meant it. Even our other consultant is…” she searched for a phrase that evoked Peter’s contradictions. The brilliant, restless son of an intelligent, broken man; the proverbial wanderer, always breaking away from the group, now held fast not by any logical tie, but by his own insatiable curiosity; a con-man’s hard slick grin that had started to melt toward sincerity around Olivia. “He’s interesting, at least.”
Nita was silent, for a moment. Astrid listened to the planet’s night-sounds, but didn’t look for the other wizard’s expression in the moonless starshine. “If you’re staying, there’s some spells you could set up around the office to help with your more problematic consultant…” Nita said, trailing off invitingly.
Astrid shook her head in the starlit night. She’d thought about possible solutions as she weighed the benefits of working with Olivia and Agent Francis against the lab’s other hazards, like working around Peter and Walter’s simmering half-acknowledged history. And working around Walter, period. Olivia seemed unfazed by Dr. Bishop’s burning enthusiasms and explosive tantrums, but Agent Francis and SAIC Broyles treated the older man with at least as much caution as respect. If you refuse the choice, a quiet voice asked, in the back of her thoughts, who will rise to it? She tried to imagine some of her fellow junior agents’ reactions to whatever unpleasant surprise Agent Broyles’ Pattern might spring on the task force, or their likely tolerance for Walter’s obscure babbling and childish outbursts. “Whatever’s going on at work, it’s... weird. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to add perimagical effects from active wizardries to whatever W- our weirder consultant is doing in the lab this week. Or any week,” she finished darkly. “Yes, I’m staying. My coworkers need someone to do the assistant-work. And... I want to know what happens next.”
The package arrived at the lab two weeks later, mixed in with the rest of the deliveries: chemicals for Walter, electronics for Peter, Olivia’s interoffice mail, her own memos, and a small box with a Long Island return address in familiar handwriting. Astrid saved that for last, as Walter called out, “Alex, I need your help...”
After she filed billing orders for a terrarium and frog food, and reminded Walter who she was for the third time that week (Peter had started keeping a tally, with an offer of coffee or alcohol – her choice – when the tally hit a baker’s dozen), she dug out the box-cutters, cracked the packing tape, and lifted a small snow globe out of its nest of recycled paper. Astrid smiled: to most eyes, it was just a garish New York souvenir. Only a wizard, or a very close observer, would see the glittering flakes of the storm were formed from the Speech, new phrases swirling through the water with every shake. Try the third cabinet down. Buy the papayas. It's not an omelette.
A note was tucked in the bottom of the box:
Hey Astrid,
Kit and I found this at a rummage sale a couple of years ago. It might be a little bit of a solution and a little bit of a puzzle. We never got around to fully checking out the spellwork, but obviously the snowglobe has some near-future guessing functions. Maybe this will give you a heads-up the next time someone’s brewing a tempest in your work teapot. But the diagrams seem pretty baroque for a wizarding magic 8 ball, and the power figures are, well, you take a look. I think there might be something else going on with this beyond a 15 minute warning. It's probably just someone’s hobby project, but evaluating the effect of those diagrams might keep your hand in, if you need another project. (I'm not saying that you do!)
Dai stihó,
Nita
P.S. Speaking of projects, a local-to-Alaalu team is following up on the keks. I told them to look you up in the Manual. Remember when I said nothing was happening there? I take it back.
Astrid snickered appreciatively at Nita's plaintive tone in the postscript, then gave her attention to the snowglobe's tightly bounded, almost quiescent spellwork once more. If it helped her avoid more Walter incidents - or better manage the outcomes – she definitely owed Nita a reciprocal box of her favorite cookies for this. Astrid put the note in her desk and set the snowglobe in easy reach, for the days when the team needed an alternative to shaking sense into Walter.
"I speak five languages, but I don’t speak Walter." - Astrid Farnsworth
In the best spirit of both sources, timelines and ages have been fudged to produce a more entertaining story. New Millennium Editions, what NMEs? Explicit references to elements of 1x04 “The Arrival”, Wizard’s Holiday, and Wizards at War. Thanks toraspberryhunter and kerithywn for beta-reading!
Adjunct Talent (1951 words) by sprocket
Chapters: 1/1
Fandoms: Fringe, Young Wizards
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Astrid Farnsworth, Nita Callahan
Additional Tags: Episode Tag, Female Friendship, Crossover
Summary: Astrid had a standing New York girls’ weekend with her college roommate. In theory, at least; in practice, they didn’t exactly bat .500. And when they did manage to get together, their weekend plans didn’t necessarily stay in New York. One crisp Saturday morning in late autumn, Astrid stepped off the train at Grand Central and through a series of worldgates to “a nice beach on a planet that I am positive has nothing going on,” juggling her bag and Nita’s giant beach umbrella.
“How can you afford this?” Astrid asked, kicking off her shoes and digging her toes into the hot sand. She squinted at a horizon much higher and more distant than Earth’s, enfolding a distant, deep blue sky. “The transit costs-”
“I know someone in the Rirhait B Crossings Stationmaster’s office. Piggy-backing on that cargo shipment saved us a bunch of energy.” Nita’s bags hit the sand with a satisfying thump. “Wizard’s holiday; what did you want to talk about?”
Her day job was so classified, the classification was probably classified, but there were some parts she could share, edited of context and names. “...and then he said, ‘You can shoot me up, too, but I would most likely enjoy it,’ ” Astrid finished, hearing the exasperation in her voice as she flopped back onto her beach towel. “The job description said assistant, but it feels more like adult daycare."
Nita shook her head in sad appreciation. "Yikes," she said. “What did you tell your boss?”
“Just the truth. I let my guard down, and this guy took advantage of that.” Astrid made a face. “My boss was pretty irate with him.” Astrid hadn’t realized Walter’s hysteric demands were a pretext to get Peter out of the lab until she came to, Peter frantically shaking her back to consciousness, in the otherwise empty room, her neck still throbbing where Walter had slid the needle into the vein. A very smooth escape from his protective keepers, she reflected, for a recent mental patient prone to self-medicating with psychoactive drugs. Somehow she couldn’t summon much appreciation for the revival of Walter’s executive functions.
She’d sat out the Walter-hunt, still woozy from the drugs, but she could remember the uproar, in fragmented snapshots: Peter shouting at SAIC Broyles, the worried briskness in Olivia’s movements as she guided Astrid, half-numb and disoriented, to the couch in the lab’s back room. She had sobered up enough to finish out the day at a desk, working through a backlog of paperwork, after a long talk with Agent Broyles. The Bishops may work with us, but neither of them play by the FBI’s rules. If you stay on, don’t forget that, he’d said, with reams of other advice. Astrid sighed, and wiggled her toes deeper into the warm peach-colored sand. “I tried to tough it out, when I should’ve known I needed someone to watch my back.”
A pained look passed over Nita’s face. “We’ve all made that mistake. Though most of us don’t need to be on guard against our coworkers jumping us with sedatives. I wouldn't beat yourself up too much about not seeing that coming.” She stretched out, one hand disappearing into apparently thin air. It reappeared clutching two bottles, both sweaty with condensation. Nita offered Astrid one of the bottles before groping for a bottle opener. Astrid popped the cap off hers with a pass of her hand and a quick spell.
“Show-off,” Nita said lightly, as she rummaged through her claudication for a more conventional bottle opener.
“Here, give it to me,” Astrid said, and repeated the spell for Nita’s benefit. ”You’ve been on there for a while, haven’t you?” she said to the bottle cap. ”It must be pretty hard holding onto the glass, with all that gas pressure and liquid sloshing around. Are you getting a little tired? How would you feel about loosening up, just a bit?”
The cap popped slightly as the spell took. Astrid passed the bottle back to her friend. Both women were silent, relaxing in the roar of the surf and the sympathetic undemanding company, for some time.
"And how is New York?" Astrid asked, about halfway through their drinks.
Nita grinned. “You mean, how are the wizards, or how are the coworkers?” Though, as one of the New York area Advisories, Nita’s after-hours work could be at least as demanding as her professional life. Astrid didn’t envy Nita her stories of walking into her living room, straight from the offices of New York’s city planning department, to find her husband and fellow Advisory cheerfully neck-deep in another wizard’s spelling problem and itching to ask his oracular partner to back up or refute his “hunch” about the solution.
“Yes,” Astrid said dryly.
Nita groaned. “That’s what I get for phrasing the question that way. Nothing really interesting at the office, but we had a novice on Ordeal pop in last week, quite literally - kids love the beam-me-up spells -" and she launched into a string of anecdotes about the New York wizarding scene that finished off their drinks.
They spent the rest of the day catching up and relaxing, in and out of the pleasantly warm ocean waves as the mood struck. Astrid explored the dunes behind the beach as the afternoon light deepened toward sunset, while Nita checked in with Kit via her Manual.
“I want you to see something,” Nita said, as the sun slipped under the high horizon, “that’s a bit of a puzzle. You’ve got some of the steganographic gift, right?”
“Some,” Astrid agreed cautiously. One of the gratifying benefits of working with Olivia was her unquestioning acceptance of Astrid’s talent for code-cracking: cryptography, linguistics, pattern recognition. To unflappable Olivia, the aptitudes that set Astrid apart from a lot of her fellow agents, and even some wizards, were just part of the “Junior Agent Farnsworth” package.
“Okay, I have a question about a species’ possible sapiency. The keks - that’s what the former inhabitants called them - build on the beaches at night. So far as we know, they haven’t developed a higher intelligence, but it can’t hurt to have a pattern-cracker take a look, right?” Nita glanced down the beach, blue-white with twilight and starglow, and back to Astrid. “Settle in - even if they’re not sapient, watching them is amazing.”
“Maybe especially if they’re not using higher faculties,” Astrid said. They dug out light jackets and settled in under the soft light of the Milky Way, a wide bright starry band overhead from this planet’s location.
“Are you going to stick it out?” Nita asked softly, over the murmur of the night-time surf. “At your job? Sounds like your boss wouldn’t question putting you back in the regular pool.”
Astrid tucked her chin into her knees. “My coworkers are amazing,” she said. She admired Olivia’s self-containment and unwavering focus, so like and unlike Astrid’s division of life-at-work and life-outside-work, even as their cases brought forth questions that shook Astrid’s usually well-grounded perspective. And when Agent Dunham’s relentless drive was too intense, there was Agent Francis to bring some humor - and sanity - back to the lab. “If you’d asked me, before I was assigned to the task force, what I’d do to work with them, I would have said ‘almost anything’, and meant it. Even our other consultant is…” she searched for a phrase that evoked Peter’s contradictions. The brilliant, restless son of an intelligent, broken man; the proverbial wanderer, always breaking away from the group, now held fast not by any logical tie, but by his own insatiable curiosity; a con-man’s hard slick grin that had started to melt toward sincerity around Olivia. “He’s interesting, at least.”
Nita was silent, for a moment. Astrid listened to the planet’s night-sounds, but didn’t look for the other wizard’s expression in the moonless starshine. “If you’re staying, there’s some spells you could set up around the office to help with your more problematic consultant…” Nita said, trailing off invitingly.
Astrid shook her head in the starlit night. She’d thought about possible solutions as she weighed the benefits of working with Olivia and Agent Francis against the lab’s other hazards, like working around Peter and Walter’s simmering half-acknowledged history. And working around Walter, period. Olivia seemed unfazed by Dr. Bishop’s burning enthusiasms and explosive tantrums, but Agent Francis and SAIC Broyles treated the older man with at least as much caution as respect. If you refuse the choice, a quiet voice asked, in the back of her thoughts, who will rise to it? She tried to imagine some of her fellow junior agents’ reactions to whatever unpleasant surprise Agent Broyles’ Pattern might spring on the task force, or their likely tolerance for Walter’s obscure babbling and childish outbursts. “Whatever’s going on at work, it’s... weird. It doesn’t seem like a good idea to add perimagical effects from active wizardries to whatever W- our weirder consultant is doing in the lab this week. Or any week,” she finished darkly. “Yes, I’m staying. My coworkers need someone to do the assistant-work. And... I want to know what happens next.”
The package arrived at the lab two weeks later, mixed in with the rest of the deliveries: chemicals for Walter, electronics for Peter, Olivia’s interoffice mail, her own memos, and a small box with a Long Island return address in familiar handwriting. Astrid saved that for last, as Walter called out, “Alex, I need your help...”
After she filed billing orders for a terrarium and frog food, and reminded Walter who she was for the third time that week (Peter had started keeping a tally, with an offer of coffee or alcohol – her choice – when the tally hit a baker’s dozen), she dug out the box-cutters, cracked the packing tape, and lifted a small snow globe out of its nest of recycled paper. Astrid smiled: to most eyes, it was just a garish New York souvenir. Only a wizard, or a very close observer, would see the glittering flakes of the storm were formed from the Speech, new phrases swirling through the water with every shake. Try the third cabinet down. Buy the papayas. It's not an omelette.
A note was tucked in the bottom of the box:
Hey Astrid,
Kit and I found this at a rummage sale a couple of years ago. It might be a little bit of a solution and a little bit of a puzzle. We never got around to fully checking out the spellwork, but obviously the snowglobe has some near-future guessing functions. Maybe this will give you a heads-up the next time someone’s brewing a tempest in your work teapot. But the diagrams seem pretty baroque for a wizarding magic 8 ball, and the power figures are, well, you take a look. I think there might be something else going on with this beyond a 15 minute warning. It's probably just someone’s hobby project, but evaluating the effect of those diagrams might keep your hand in, if you need another project. (I'm not saying that you do!)
Dai stihó,
Nita
P.S. Speaking of projects, a local-to-Alaalu team is following up on the keks. I told them to look you up in the Manual. Remember when I said nothing was happening there? I take it back.
Astrid snickered appreciatively at Nita's plaintive tone in the postscript, then gave her attention to the snowglobe's tightly bounded, almost quiescent spellwork once more. If it helped her avoid more Walter incidents - or better manage the outcomes – she definitely owed Nita a reciprocal box of her favorite cookies for this. Astrid put the note in her desk and set the snowglobe in easy reach, for the days when the team needed an alternative to shaking sense into Walter.
"I speak five languages, but I don’t speak Walter." - Astrid Farnsworth
In the best spirit of both sources, timelines and ages have been fudged to produce a more entertaining story. New Millennium Editions, what NMEs? Explicit references to elements of 1x04 “The Arrival”, Wizard’s Holiday, and Wizards at War. Thanks to
raspberryhunter and kerithywn for beta-reading!