Yup, Zaedah's gone metaphorical again in an attempt to rescue her sanity from Fox's hiatus-reflex. Please enjoy responsibly, which means feedback : )

Mitre Depth

The chess teacher's death is far from extraordinary for a burn victim; her organs are a study in the definition of crisp, her blood boiled to a film within dry veins. That her body is separated at the waist, allowing the disturbing interior view, is not as disconcerting as the flawless flesh. A woman internally destroyed by the obvious effects of flame shows no outward charring. It brings three FBI agents and a pair of consultants to the scene with field kits and a mound of sterile gloves.

Immediate curiosity turns Walter Bishop into a child with virgin Play Doh. The new Pattern case shifts the previously amiable Olivia Dunham into a rigid warden. But it's the corpse's profession that occupies Peter Bishop; specifically, the tool of her trade. A chess board has been arranged for a game not yet undertaken, the pieces deposited with almost obsessive precision in each square's exact center. Whether intended as a lesson or a message of the killer, the government agents debate quietly. But Peter has mentally abandoned the room.

The distinct moves of each carved piece are well known to a boy raised with intellectual exercises as the replacement for biking and catch. His namesake was always his father's favorite weapon against opponents, though young Peter, having pleaded successfully for horse riding lessons, preferred the knight on principle. Matches were the one accepted justification for ignoring bedtime, his mother unable to refuse two males whining for more time. Neither could sleep without an outcome, no game ever left incomplete.

There is movement through the room as the team, minus Peter, begins the work of investigating how a body, laid out in two distinct halves on a spotless classroom floor, might have been cooked from the inside with no evidence reaching the skin. While he may have been expected to assist in the translation of Walter's current ramble about a human microwave, Peter is too drawn to other conversations; ones from a past he is now unable to stifle.

As if happening in the same room, he can hear a Walter of years ago expounding on the underrating of bishops as though speaking of his own soul. The man seemed to need his only child to view the heirloom board and its lacquered pieces with the reverence of a religious experience. Bedtime stories occasionally took on a chess-like turn, as the deep voice would send Peter to sleep with a discourse on how Pinocchio would have kept out of trouble had Gepetto taught him chess. The strength of the piece was comparable to the knight, either holding advantage depending on the player's manipulation. Days when the school sent home a note about Peter's intolerable fighting earned him no more than a lecture on forking tactics. The boy knew how and when to fight, Walter reasoned to his mother. What he needed was lessons on chess strategy, as these clearly had practical applications in the real world. Thirty years later, Peter was still waiting for the moment that would require that sort of information.

This isn't to say Peter hadn't discovered genuine uses for the knowledge chess provided. One of his father's more frequent muses became something of a mantra in the face of less than flattering odds. Bishops, Walter would say, generally increase in strength as the endgame approached; as more pieces fall, precious space is opened for maneuvering. This truth was first reflected in Peter's narrow escape in Turkey, where a roomful of descending bodies marked an unnatural exit path.

More than simple genes bind them, father and son, as their reactions to events have proven. As with any 'good bishop,' they can both manipulate their own pawns into serving their needs, blocking the path of others from hindering their goals. That documented tendency is one of the factors that convinced a jury to commit Walter. When, in the course of his schemes, Peter is impeded by his own people, he's learned to think in different and sometimes dangerous ways to turn it to an advantage. This is a tactic learned from the 'bad bishop' his father would force him to block with his own pawns. They share the weakness of frustration when faced with minor players that interfere with their progress. And of all the life experiences that could shoulder the blame, Peter nominated chess with his father as the foundation of his sarcasm.

The verbal derision is an instinct and needed at present because Olivia touches his arm to ask if he's all right. Apparently the silence, coupled with a total lack of interest in their purpose here, has been noticed and Peter falls back on a quip to excuse his inattentiveness. The body is wrapped for transport to the lab and as they drive back in the roomy SUV, Peter listens as his father's initial theories pour out and the sound fills the space between them.

The bishop is not restricted in the distance it can travel in its diagonal movement, just as the Bishop men have no restrictions on how far apart they can or should be. It's a rule Peter has used well over the years. But no matter how far the move, there's a diagonal line straight back, because genes keep his father near. Now Peter's spine crawls with a ghostly itch to engage Walter in a match, something last done when they comprised a family of three. And it would be a bishop that his father would have used to beat him.

The groove at the piece's top represents a bishop's mitre, a religious headgear Peter had never seen on a living soul in person. It occurs to him now that the deep fissure symbolized their relationship to this point, a chasm he'd held onto as a religion. And as he watches the older man wrack his brain for a decent purpose, the closure for someone's family, Peter recognizes that the depth of their fissure reduces by the moment. Where once there was an unbridgeable gulf between them, built of resentment and fortified with anger, time and proximity have constructed a bridge. Rickety, true, but crossable.

Bishops are known by other names across the nations; soldier, runner, thief, spy and council-keeper. All roles he's assumed in the game that describes his life. But as the midday sun casts no shadows on the board that is their slowly mended connection, Peter determines that a chess set will be purchased before that sun sets.