Heroes Ficatude!
So, I have a Secret Santa fic challenge in one of my RPs, and I decided to also post them here!
I have three to do for three different chars. This is the first. Because I'm odd, they'll be in a kind of a loose theme, one for each of the ghosts of Christmas.
This is the first, therefore it is the Ghost of Christmas Past.
Sadly, my fics never quite work out, so the theme here is only marginally applied. Oh, well. >>
Title: The Ghosts of Christmas Past
Characters: Peter Petrelli, Arthur Petrelli
Rating: Totally G. Sorry.
Summary: Snapshots of the past.
A/N: Not mine (sadly). No money made (even more sadly). Lyrics in the beginning are The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance.
When I was a young boy,
My father took me into the city
To see a marching band.
He said,
"Son when you grow up, will you be the saviour of the broken,
The beaten and the damned?"
He said
"Will you defeat them, your demons, and all the non believers,
the plans that they have made?"
Because one day I’ll leave you,
A phantom to lead you in the summer,
To join the black parade.
He was four the first time he realized what he wanted to be when he grew up. Four and zooming around the living room with a bedsheet tied proudly around his shoulders, cackling madly as he flew hundreds of thousands of millions of feet above the earth. Soaring past the Christmas tree, jumping off of the couch with a giggle and a cheer, Peter landed face first in a pile of cushions, nearly drowning in the dastardly things.
He wanted to fly.
Peter was seven and running home from school with his first split lip, the cold winter air catching the tears that fell from wide eyes and flinging them behind him as his feet pounded the earth. It didn’t matter that he’d jumped into a fight not knowing the first thing on how to even throw a punch, didn’t matter that he’d been contentedly swinging halfway across the playground when it all had started, didn’t even matter that he hadn’t really known anyone involved. He’d seen three kids gang up on one and his childlike hatred of injustice had made his blood boil.
But now he was racing back towards his house with wet eyes and bruises, and Peter wanted more than anything to run along with super speed, to make the world fade away as he zoomed faster than light. He just wanted to be home so his mother could smooth back his hair and make everything all right.
Grown up and twelve, Peter had long since put aside childish dreams of flying and had learned well to either hit back or hide the black eye. Standing in front of the mirror, trying desperately to smooth down his wayward hair, he practiced the same speech over and over with a cracking voice.
He was going to ask her. To the dance. Nathan had said he should, had said that fortune favored the bold or something like that, so now he’d put on his best shirt and his father’s aftershave and was on his way to her house. Her. The girl he was in love with, the perfect girl, and he was going to ask her to the Christmas Sweethearts Dance. Because, of course, that's what one did.
When she opened the door, blonde hair falling in curls and mouth opening just slightly into a perfect rosebud oh of surprise, Peter wanted, more than anything, to freeze that moment. To catch it in his hand and hold it up to the light.
When she said no all he could think of was to go back. To take back everything he’d done that day, run backwards as fast as he could until the clocked turned that way as well and he could save himself the pitying glance, the wrinkled nose, the way her lips twisted into a cruelly amused smirk when she thought he wasn’t looking.
At eighteen, he was going to save the world.
Well, he was going to join the Air Force. Like Nathan. But good enough.
His father didn’t think he could. That much had been obvious when he’d brought up joining the night before at dinner. He’d gotten that same bland look, that same half smile of vague polite affection like you might give a favored dog. It was no secret that Arthur Petrelli found Peter to be… Odd. Different. There were times when his father looked at him that Peter was quite sure he was trying to figure out how he’d had a part in making something like him.
But he was going to do this. He wanted to do this. This wasn’t a phase like his dad had called it. It wasn’t foolish, like his mother had said. He wanted to do something, something important. And Nathan had been in the Air Force. That must mean it was good.
Standing outside the recruiting office, he pushed back his hair and tried to look…Air Force-y. He didn’t think he was succeeding very well. Especially not given the looks he was receiving from the officer inside. But Peter smiled and answered the questions with a ‘sir’ and tried.
He always tried.
The chair wasn’t very comfortable, and as the officer typed in some information, Peter shifted slightly. Nervous, he wiped his hands on the front of his slacks, looking around the tiny room. A man in full uniform walked past them, leaning down to have a whispered conversation with the officer interviewing Peter.
There was a poster on the wall of a smiling soldier in with some children, some text across the bottom about giving back to the community. But instead of filling him with a sense of purpose and hope, Peter was suddenly struck with cold dread. Maybe it was the gun in the smiling poster soldier’s hand. Maybe it was something else. But Peter could suddenly see fields filled with smoke and shouting, could see empty eyes staring up at him from a corpse with the bullet he’d fired in the chest. Could feel the breath of a dying man exhale across his cheek, could smell the tangy copper of blood coating his hands.
He was out on the street, heaving for air, before he realized he had moved. Bowing his head, he reached an unsteady hand out to lean on a light post, not minding the cold metal against his skin, and tried to clear his mind. Where those feelings had come from he didn’t know, but Peter was suddenly sure of one thing. He couldn’t go back in there.
All he wanted to do was heal. To help save the world, one small step at a time if he had to.
Twenty-one and drunk out of his mind, Peter stood under his girlfriend’s window and sang some song about brown dresses and red eyes - or maybe it was the other way around - and laughed when she threw raisins down on his head. His friends from school helped him up the stairs and he and she danced on the fire escape to the strains of the college radio station.
Peter was in love. And Peter in love meant the world fell away. Twirling her, his perfect girl, around and around while they grinned and laughed and watched the snow falling, he knew he couldn’t ever feel more content than he did in that moment.
‘What do you want? The moon? I’ll bring the moon down and put it on a chain.’
‘That’s not how it goes, Peter. If you can’t even quote old movies right…’
‘I’m very drunk. Very, very, very drunk. But I’ll do it. Do you want the moon? I’ll move it down here.’
‘How? With the power of that big brain of yours?’
‘Yes. Exactly. The power of my mind will move the moon, just for you.’
Maybe the moon didn’t move. But as he kissed her (she tasted of wine and the salty bite of peanuts) he would swear the earth did. Maybe he could do that, just with the power of his mind. Or maybe she did. He didn’t know, he was extremely drunk after all. But the night turned into day and they just kept finding new ways of making things tremble.
Wanting to be a nurse was one thing, but actually becoming one at twenty-five - finally - was a horse of a totally different shape, size, color, and anything else you could think of. A hospice nurse was even more weighty, and Peter stood there in the doorway at his first job for what felt like hours. Trying to gather up the courage to go inside. Trying to make himself take that first step.
His patient was this amazing older man. Terminal lung cancer. Very late stages. He didn’t have much time.
They talked a lot. Or, rather, the patient talked. Slowly and shakily, taking long drags from his oxygen mask in between every sentence, but Peter was a rapt audience. Consuming every word, every story, every drop of wisdom from the man as if it was water in a desert.
Sometimes they played checkers. Peter never won. He wasn’t good at looking at his next move, his patient said. He only stared at the pieces right in front of him, never to where they might be.
He knew better than to attempt chess.
The end came quickly.
It always came too quickly.
Peter held his hand, when it came. The man was alone and Peter knew that while people might live in solitude by choice, no one should die that way. Cheeks blanketed in tears he let fall, unheeded, Peter waited until the last beat died away, the last breath finished lingering on the air. Then he put his head down on the blanket and wept.
He’d just wanted to heal people. Maybe he’d thought he would. Some stupid part of him hoped that he would be special enough to magically touch them and make them all better. Instead all he’d been able to do was sit with an old man while he died.
Most days Peter would say that was enough. But right then, next to the body of his first patient, all he wanted to do was somehow cheat death.
It was later that year when he had the dream. Christmas night, to be exact, after another day spent with Nathan and his father part of some unreachable ideal he couldn’t understand. Watching his mother holding them together, knowing something more was there that no one bothered to tell him.
His dreams had always been particularly vivid. Girlfriends had complained about sleeping with him, roommates had bought ear plugs. But Peter didn’t mind. Not most nights.
This time he was walking along a beach. Rocky cliff on one side, turbulent sea on the other. And a thin swath of sand, just barely wide enough that Peter could keep his feet from touching the water. He wandered down the path for what seemed like hours, the scenery never changing, the way never widening.
And then he looked up, and there was his father. Standing in front of him, hands thrust into his pockets, head bowed. Looking much smaller here than in real life. Or maybe it was just the lack of disapproval on his face as he looked up.
‘I knew you’d come.’
‘It’s my dream.’ Peter didn’t understand, but he was willing to wait it out. Dreams were funny things.
‘I suppose you could say that, yes.’ His father removed his glasses, cleaning them off with one corner of his sweater before perching them back on his nose and staring at Peter. ‘You need to know something. Something that no one else will tell you. Something that I can’t, not out there. But you have to listen very carefully, Peter.’
Peter blinked a few times before rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. ‘Okay?’
‘You’re the one we were waiting for.’
As statements go, that one was pretty intense. What did you even say to that? So Peter just gaped and wondered vaguely why he didn’t dream about walking naked into school or flying fish like everyone else.
‘You have to be the one, Peter. You have to save the world. You’ll figure out how. I’m sorry I can’t show you. But trust yourself. Trust in what you can do. And lead them, when they have need.’
The alarm clock woke him before he could respond. Before he could reach out to his father, before he could connect. But not before he’d imagined the words ‘I love you’ actually coming from his dad’s lips.
A few months later Nathan was standing outside his door, and his father was dead. And all Peter wanted at that moment was for dreams to be real. For his father to have once looked at him with pride, with acceptance. With love.
More dreams when he was twenty-six, once again Christmas heralding the first. But they became more frequent and more vivid with each passing night. And Peter knew as he woke up reaching for the sky, as his fingers grasped hold of air. He knew.
He was going to fly.
I have three to do for three different chars. This is the first. Because I'm odd, they'll be in a kind of a loose theme, one for each of the ghosts of Christmas.
This is the first, therefore it is the Ghost of Christmas Past.
Sadly, my fics never quite work out, so the theme here is only marginally applied. Oh, well. >>
Title: The Ghosts of Christmas Past
Characters: Peter Petrelli, Arthur Petrelli
Rating: Totally G. Sorry.
Summary: Snapshots of the past.
A/N: Not mine (sadly). No money made (even more sadly). Lyrics in the beginning are The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance.
When I was a young boy,
My father took me into the city
To see a marching band.
He said,
"Son when you grow up, will you be the saviour of the broken,
The beaten and the damned?"
He said
"Will you defeat them, your demons, and all the non believers,
the plans that they have made?"
Because one day I’ll leave you,
A phantom to lead you in the summer,
To join the black parade.
He was four the first time he realized what he wanted to be when he grew up. Four and zooming around the living room with a bedsheet tied proudly around his shoulders, cackling madly as he flew hundreds of thousands of millions of feet above the earth. Soaring past the Christmas tree, jumping off of the couch with a giggle and a cheer, Peter landed face first in a pile of cushions, nearly drowning in the dastardly things.
He wanted to fly.
Peter was seven and running home from school with his first split lip, the cold winter air catching the tears that fell from wide eyes and flinging them behind him as his feet pounded the earth. It didn’t matter that he’d jumped into a fight not knowing the first thing on how to even throw a punch, didn’t matter that he’d been contentedly swinging halfway across the playground when it all had started, didn’t even matter that he hadn’t really known anyone involved. He’d seen three kids gang up on one and his childlike hatred of injustice had made his blood boil.
But now he was racing back towards his house with wet eyes and bruises, and Peter wanted more than anything to run along with super speed, to make the world fade away as he zoomed faster than light. He just wanted to be home so his mother could smooth back his hair and make everything all right.
Grown up and twelve, Peter had long since put aside childish dreams of flying and had learned well to either hit back or hide the black eye. Standing in front of the mirror, trying desperately to smooth down his wayward hair, he practiced the same speech over and over with a cracking voice.
He was going to ask her. To the dance. Nathan had said he should, had said that fortune favored the bold or something like that, so now he’d put on his best shirt and his father’s aftershave and was on his way to her house. Her. The girl he was in love with, the perfect girl, and he was going to ask her to the Christmas Sweethearts Dance. Because, of course, that's what one did.
When she opened the door, blonde hair falling in curls and mouth opening just slightly into a perfect rosebud oh of surprise, Peter wanted, more than anything, to freeze that moment. To catch it in his hand and hold it up to the light.
When she said no all he could think of was to go back. To take back everything he’d done that day, run backwards as fast as he could until the clocked turned that way as well and he could save himself the pitying glance, the wrinkled nose, the way her lips twisted into a cruelly amused smirk when she thought he wasn’t looking.
At eighteen, he was going to save the world.
Well, he was going to join the Air Force. Like Nathan. But good enough.
His father didn’t think he could. That much had been obvious when he’d brought up joining the night before at dinner. He’d gotten that same bland look, that same half smile of vague polite affection like you might give a favored dog. It was no secret that Arthur Petrelli found Peter to be… Odd. Different. There were times when his father looked at him that Peter was quite sure he was trying to figure out how he’d had a part in making something like him.
But he was going to do this. He wanted to do this. This wasn’t a phase like his dad had called it. It wasn’t foolish, like his mother had said. He wanted to do something, something important. And Nathan had been in the Air Force. That must mean it was good.
Standing outside the recruiting office, he pushed back his hair and tried to look…Air Force-y. He didn’t think he was succeeding very well. Especially not given the looks he was receiving from the officer inside. But Peter smiled and answered the questions with a ‘sir’ and tried.
He always tried.
The chair wasn’t very comfortable, and as the officer typed in some information, Peter shifted slightly. Nervous, he wiped his hands on the front of his slacks, looking around the tiny room. A man in full uniform walked past them, leaning down to have a whispered conversation with the officer interviewing Peter.
There was a poster on the wall of a smiling soldier in with some children, some text across the bottom about giving back to the community. But instead of filling him with a sense of purpose and hope, Peter was suddenly struck with cold dread. Maybe it was the gun in the smiling poster soldier’s hand. Maybe it was something else. But Peter could suddenly see fields filled with smoke and shouting, could see empty eyes staring up at him from a corpse with the bullet he’d fired in the chest. Could feel the breath of a dying man exhale across his cheek, could smell the tangy copper of blood coating his hands.
He was out on the street, heaving for air, before he realized he had moved. Bowing his head, he reached an unsteady hand out to lean on a light post, not minding the cold metal against his skin, and tried to clear his mind. Where those feelings had come from he didn’t know, but Peter was suddenly sure of one thing. He couldn’t go back in there.
All he wanted to do was heal. To help save the world, one small step at a time if he had to.
Twenty-one and drunk out of his mind, Peter stood under his girlfriend’s window and sang some song about brown dresses and red eyes - or maybe it was the other way around - and laughed when she threw raisins down on his head. His friends from school helped him up the stairs and he and she danced on the fire escape to the strains of the college radio station.
Peter was in love. And Peter in love meant the world fell away. Twirling her, his perfect girl, around and around while they grinned and laughed and watched the snow falling, he knew he couldn’t ever feel more content than he did in that moment.
‘What do you want? The moon? I’ll bring the moon down and put it on a chain.’
‘That’s not how it goes, Peter. If you can’t even quote old movies right…’
‘I’m very drunk. Very, very, very drunk. But I’ll do it. Do you want the moon? I’ll move it down here.’
‘How? With the power of that big brain of yours?’
‘Yes. Exactly. The power of my mind will move the moon, just for you.’
Maybe the moon didn’t move. But as he kissed her (she tasted of wine and the salty bite of peanuts) he would swear the earth did. Maybe he could do that, just with the power of his mind. Or maybe she did. He didn’t know, he was extremely drunk after all. But the night turned into day and they just kept finding new ways of making things tremble.
Wanting to be a nurse was one thing, but actually becoming one at twenty-five - finally - was a horse of a totally different shape, size, color, and anything else you could think of. A hospice nurse was even more weighty, and Peter stood there in the doorway at his first job for what felt like hours. Trying to gather up the courage to go inside. Trying to make himself take that first step.
His patient was this amazing older man. Terminal lung cancer. Very late stages. He didn’t have much time.
They talked a lot. Or, rather, the patient talked. Slowly and shakily, taking long drags from his oxygen mask in between every sentence, but Peter was a rapt audience. Consuming every word, every story, every drop of wisdom from the man as if it was water in a desert.
Sometimes they played checkers. Peter never won. He wasn’t good at looking at his next move, his patient said. He only stared at the pieces right in front of him, never to where they might be.
He knew better than to attempt chess.
The end came quickly.
It always came too quickly.
Peter held his hand, when it came. The man was alone and Peter knew that while people might live in solitude by choice, no one should die that way. Cheeks blanketed in tears he let fall, unheeded, Peter waited until the last beat died away, the last breath finished lingering on the air. Then he put his head down on the blanket and wept.
He’d just wanted to heal people. Maybe he’d thought he would. Some stupid part of him hoped that he would be special enough to magically touch them and make them all better. Instead all he’d been able to do was sit with an old man while he died.
Most days Peter would say that was enough. But right then, next to the body of his first patient, all he wanted to do was somehow cheat death.
It was later that year when he had the dream. Christmas night, to be exact, after another day spent with Nathan and his father part of some unreachable ideal he couldn’t understand. Watching his mother holding them together, knowing something more was there that no one bothered to tell him.
His dreams had always been particularly vivid. Girlfriends had complained about sleeping with him, roommates had bought ear plugs. But Peter didn’t mind. Not most nights.
This time he was walking along a beach. Rocky cliff on one side, turbulent sea on the other. And a thin swath of sand, just barely wide enough that Peter could keep his feet from touching the water. He wandered down the path for what seemed like hours, the scenery never changing, the way never widening.
And then he looked up, and there was his father. Standing in front of him, hands thrust into his pockets, head bowed. Looking much smaller here than in real life. Or maybe it was just the lack of disapproval on his face as he looked up.
‘I knew you’d come.’
‘It’s my dream.’ Peter didn’t understand, but he was willing to wait it out. Dreams were funny things.
‘I suppose you could say that, yes.’ His father removed his glasses, cleaning them off with one corner of his sweater before perching them back on his nose and staring at Peter. ‘You need to know something. Something that no one else will tell you. Something that I can’t, not out there. But you have to listen very carefully, Peter.’
Peter blinked a few times before rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. ‘Okay?’
‘You’re the one we were waiting for.’
As statements go, that one was pretty intense. What did you even say to that? So Peter just gaped and wondered vaguely why he didn’t dream about walking naked into school or flying fish like everyone else.
‘You have to be the one, Peter. You have to save the world. You’ll figure out how. I’m sorry I can’t show you. But trust yourself. Trust in what you can do. And lead them, when they have need.’
The alarm clock woke him before he could respond. Before he could reach out to his father, before he could connect. But not before he’d imagined the words ‘I love you’ actually coming from his dad’s lips.
A few months later Nathan was standing outside his door, and his father was dead. And all Peter wanted at that moment was for dreams to be real. For his father to have once looked at him with pride, with acceptance. With love.
More dreams when he was twenty-six, once again Christmas heralding the first. But they became more frequent and more vivid with each passing night. And Peter knew as he woke up reaching for the sky, as his fingers grasped hold of air. He knew.
He was going to fly.