Peter Walker

Peter
Portrayed by	Nathaniel Arcand
Full name	Peter Walker (orig. Peter Stone)
Birthday	January 11, 1928
Species	Human (former Wolf-Shifter)
Age	81 (appears in 40s)
Height	5'11"
Weight	179 lbs
Eyes	Brown
Hair	Black
Power	Real Ultimate
Parents	Benjamin and Alecto Stone (deceased)
Siblings	Sisters (twins, unknown to character), Nephews and Nieces (unknown to character)
Occupation	Hacker/Computer Science Engineer

To the Quileute Tribe, Peter Stone was a wolf shifter, legally Killed In Action in 1945, a soldier of the United States Army in World War II. As luck would have it, he didn't die. Instead, he has moved through the world with his close friend Klara for fifty years, making a solid income as a mercenary hacker under a number of evolving handles, or as traveling telecommunications engineer Peter Walker. Long after the lupine magic left his blood, he continues to work, hoard electronics, play, and age with debatable grace.

European supernaturals may even remember him having done work as a private investigator working occasionally even in cooperation vampires to protect the secrecy of their underworld: a handy mortal to have around.

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Biography

'You can still matriculate here when you get back,' is what Dean Forsythe at Port Angeles told him, bright with patriotic approval.

The information bore no actual weight in whether or not fifteen-year-old Peter Stone was going to illegally enlist in the United States Army for the Second World War, of course. Joining World War II was not something a young man did if his priority was the circumstances of his return home. Nevertheless, those words changed everything, defined a certain line in the sand, one that derived as much from racial differences as from filial love. His father, who had already been reluctant to participate in enough fraud and deception to let his precocious offspring stray as far as college or the police academy, didn't want him to go. The battlefields, Mr. Stone said, were no place for a wolf. Those given the gift of change weren't supposed to turn to a career in killing humankind, but protecting it.

It would be an uncomfortable fireside thought in La Push for years: that maybe if Peter had killed more vampires, it would have gone out of his system.

Peter had been the last of the Shifters to manifest in the Quileute era's wave of retaliation against vampire kind. They say that every generation has its war, but the Stone boy had been born to the perplexing cusp between the one waged by the supernatural with its stakes in souls and tribal magic, and the one between humans, complicated by politics, machines, and the salt of basic moral decency.

He'd been a brilliant pupil, of course, but also a faithful tribesman. A respectful son, a skilful hunter, both as a man and then as a wolf. However, in the decrescendo of seasons that the other shifters spent in grateful rest, reacquainting themselves with songs made of actual lyrics and hunting bows, imprinting, shedding their pelts in favor of mortal domesticity, their appetites for battle long since slaked, Peter was left unsatisfied. As his pack brothers looked forward to fading gracefully into domesticity and old age, he was left wrestling with the world of possibilities available to an ambitious fifteen-year-old who looked twenty. He hung around the police station, hero-worshipped the young Quileute Homicide Detective who'd gone to D.C. to pursue his career, befriended veteran communications oficers from the Great War, and considered college-level courses which promised excitement, fascinations, challenges, and—

(To say he was relieved when they bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, would be awful and untrue, but--)

To say he was relieved when they bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 would be awful and untrue, but it gave Peter a sudden lightning strike of inspiration. Also known as rage, grief, a rare blast of nationalist spirit, only days before his twentieth birthday. Despite that his skills lent themselves readily to the Coastal Lookout System on spotter detail, he was one of the first to apply for the African campaign.

Promotions found him. Not many, but enough to differentiate his specialty of skills from the average trench soldier. Peter didn't set foot on anything he or the other boys regarded as Axis territory until he was flown to Italy in the spring of 1944, hot on the heels of optimistic Allied advancements.

Europe during the way was virtually unrecognizable as Europe out of it, or so he'd hoped. Farmland turfed up by infantry, fire and rubble. This was war as only humans could do it, an engorging feast to make sick after. They were winning, though: he would be the first to hear of this victory across the radio. He'd be the one to tell his brothers.

Only months before Hitler's suicide, Peter Stone was shot out of the sky over Germany by an Axis resistance who was far less impressed with the Army's stealth plan than the Army had been with themselves. His course diverged from the war only then, unexpectedly, completely, and dishonorably. Their plane crashed into the Bavarian Forest, broke its wing on stone, caught fire, blew out the legs of the man to his left and caved in the heads to his right. The world lurched and bellied, turned upside down in the physical sense and more levels than he cared to think about. Time split itself up into seizured fragments of sensible perception, between dragging himself free, comrades free, supplies free, hiding from the first crack and pop of combusting fuel, smoke tears and deafness afterward, and then the Wehrmacht Heer's soldiers ascending the hill.

He shifted.

It went by in a blur. Literally, what with all the blood in his eyes. Vampires are supposed the ones who eat humans, and Peter Stone understood that as well as anybody else, but his metabolism was incinerating itself in its effort to regenerate. Mostly, he killed to eat.

Peter couldn'tve told you what he expected after that. To be struck down by lightning, or stripped of the ancestral gift, to be magically transported back to La Push to face tribal justice amid drumming fanfare and burning incense— none of that happened. Almost nothing happened.

The only thing that happened: his fur turned white. It was, still is, would always remain unclear, whether this was the effect of far-reaching sorcerery or a relatively mundane, genetically encoded response to stress. Peter suspected both: shifter magic was, after all, in the blood, and a white coat was damning when you were trying to move stealthily through forested terrain in the spring.

By the time he wandered out of the woods, the Allies had won. There were parades as long as cities, and some kind of awful farce where the only Jews to die at soldiers' hands were the starved matchstick figures who ate too much and too fast when liberated from the concentration camps. He stole jackboots and threadbare clothes and went around in a daze until he met Klara, who was Polish and spoke only Polish but whose one-word script, dzieci, dzieci, streaky-faced misery and the simple fact that she had somehow made it all the way down to indicated unmistakably to him that she was untimely deprived of her children. The fact that they both smelled of supernatural was neither a sparking point of connection nor major repulsion, but a tentative reassurance that, unlike anonymous encounters between mortal men and women, rape or robbery were unlikely motivations.

Peter took a shine to her, instantly, for no reason more imaginative than sympathy: that losing one's children probably felt a lot like losing one's soul.

On average, one's chances of survival go up expotentially when one has the capacity to morph into a supernaturally large and physically powerful canine, but Peter had other advantages to surviving in post-war Germany. A solid vocabulary in a smattered variety of European languages for notions like bootlegs, identification, weapons and technical parts, a soldier's honed instincts and wolf's nose for recognizing those who could supply. False IDs for both of them were not difficult to manage, but the shortage of tangible education credentials and a need for privacy kept him from more pursuing higher education or more prestigious employment. Fortunately, he had a way with repairs, and there was so very much that needed reparation.

Peter Walker, as he was now named, was merely one face out of dozens of Allied deserters and disenfranchised who chose for inscrutable reasons not to return home in post-war Europe, eking out an existence in mortar-Swissed cities with the odd wolf for companion and the occasional vampire coven to bristle at.

Years passed. Peter found a great many things in Germany. Solace, between restoring life to copper-arteried devices and careful investigation into the history of Klara Lisiewicz's children, accompanying her when the moon held sway over her shape— every bit as brutal and terrifying as his tribe had always suspected, but forgivable— then in teaching her English and piecemeal Quileute, learning Polish. He found her a piano inside of a strange house with a swan nesting in the submerged foyer, a roof and no floors. A red cornflower to plant in her milk carton at breakfast.

After what was admittedly a little bit of selfish stalling and hesitation to end the primary reason for their acquaintance, Peter also, finally, found the two Lisiewicz children's paper trail to the Auschwitz concentration camp. And then the one trail that led out of it.

Though they held each other in remarkable confidence, Klara and Peter weren't exactly the closest of confidants. He didn't ask what she thought about the child they watched through the frost-patterned windows of the adopted home, but he stayed with her when she left. It was 1954.

The Volturi's rise to power had long been in session, but a lone shifter and World War veteran wasn't wont to really pay attention to any of that; at least, not before he was suddenly and unexpectedly approached to locate and destroy photographic evidence that some idiotically kamikaze fledgling coven had left behind. The young vampires themselves had already been 'taken care of,' to use the terms of the pedantic old nocturnal monster who approached him in Wroclaw. Partly for the money, partly because it suited the interest of all supernatural everywhere, Peter did it.

Only to find himself bursting out of his apartment ceiling with a pair of Romanian vampires, eager to show up their rivals, swift on his heels in the dead of one night. Not as swift as he was, granted, though their efforts were in earnest and rather alarming for a Quileute shifter operating alone.

And he did conduct the operation alone, of course: legends of the conflict between the other, full-blooded Children and the vampires predated World War II and Klara had experienced enough visceral terror and soul-crushing violence for as many lifetimes as she was doomed to survive. Ergo, Peter did the visceral terror and soul-crushing violence by himself, leading his pursuit far from his friend's quiet career in musicianship.

Nevertheless, as far as initiations into becoming the modern technological go-to in a world of bloodthirsty and pathologically secretive primordial myths go, that went pretty well. It wasn't the last private investigation he would conduct, in the ensuing years. Even when he began to lose the ability to shift, his status as a mortal with his access, awareness, and skills made him a reliable or at least expendable asset, and Klara tolerated his work and travel fortunately without ever having to get directly involved. The combination of paid and practical intrigues and the necessity of keeping abreast of technological progress kept him alert and vaguely connected to the world, though he withdrew further and further from personal contact.

Physically, he gradually aged; mentally, he perhaps even began to grow old. Anonymity provided by the Internet and long fur were his retreats of preference. Time passed and bore its mark. He ate baguettes in Paris in the mornings, hacked and deleted pornographic photographs of angry ex-girlfriends from public websites in the afternoon, and hurdled rivers and ravines at night, at times with Klara.

His father died in 1999 and he read about it on Google. Peter approached that news the same way he did word of the Vietnamese and Gulf Wars— that was, careful not to do so at all. The urge to come home did not find the wayward son for another few years.

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Timeline and Current Plots

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Personality

Despite that most of Peter's inner-life is characterized by a deep, soul-strangling abiding regret, he isn't an outwardly melancholy fellow in the slightest.

Day-to-day, Peter is an eccentric man-child, characterized by a honking laugh, an eccentric interest in small collectibles, guns and gadgetry, and cluttering together the most ingeniously affordable of bargain bin home theater rigs. His time in the United States Army has left him with a cheerful affinity for physical humor and toilet jokes, as well as the certain misappropriated sense of comfort, that most things you're going through as a civilian now, aren't nearly as bad as how things were at war back then.

Though he prefers his own company or those of computers and would probably be wearing inch-thick glasses for myopia by now were it not for the advantages of shifter physiology, Peter is not often particularly socially awkward. What he lacks in singular passion for conversation is compensated for by rabid intellectual curiosity. He enjoys tangible accomplishments, keeping busy, and rewards proportional to effort. He is a big fan of mathematics, logic, and many aspects of post-industrial 21st century cities. He's thrown himself wholeheartedly into the era.

There's a peculiar materialism and propensity for comfortable living in him, partially endemic to the culture of first world nations, and partially a symptom of old trauma. It isn't merely an enjoyment of having 'nice things.' Peter Walker only really trusts himself when the going is relatively easy. Yes, it was practical necessity that compelled him to kill humans and consume their flesh. However, it's left him with a shakey sense of his ability to manifest wisdom in major crisis or retain moral fiber under pressure.

Back when he could shift, he kept the wolf and human portions of his life compartmentalized to a distinct degree, adhering very precisely to a personal code of conduct. Habit stuck even when the magic faded from him. Ingrained, he holds meticulous rules about everything from management of his finances to giving other humans a panickily wide berth when he's out with Klara-the-wolf. His relationships with humans tend to be pleasant but largely distant, reliable without making promises of an intimate sort. He enjoys academic challenges, but tends to lose his nerve at personal ones. He's an old dog, and despite his unrelenting appetite for learning, he is strangely resistant to learning truly new tricks.

He is still motivated more by justice and 'the good fight' than he cares to be conscious of.

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Relationships

Humans

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Vampires

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Werewolves

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Shifters

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Additional Photos

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Playlist

Watch me heave up what I've sown. I'm made of peanuts, not of shells. God spares a quality in himself, Uniquely designed, But we can't help ourselves. So— why? I made the face that bugs you. I won't design conversation around you. I made the face that bugs you, Spyglass scans the field. Hold my hand, I feel a chill in here. Chevelle, "Mia"

Gravitate spacewards Find a home for the head. From my basement No darkness ever left. Some days are playful Making play faces, But we will not let it through, The darkness and the sense Of being born to lose. This is the night, this is the sound. Here comes the warm machine. Such a war machine. Bush, "Warm Machine"

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