018 || rl; you're not as brave as you were at the start
Peter had told himself a number of times to get up and change his shirt, that sitting in clothes partially soaked in his own blood wasn't actually a good use of his time. But they were the clothes from Nathan's funeral, save for his suit jacket which he'd left at the scene of the crime, handed over to the woman who'd been taken to the hospital with a mostly healed bullet wound. Peter hadn't stayed for that part of it, slipping out the same way he'd came in. But it required far too much energy to care about something as simple as his clothing, energy he'd much rather spend on a hunt that still wouldn't bring his brother back.
As soon as he'd backed away from his laptop, he'd turned the police scanner up once again and just listened, forcing his mind to fog over. Absently, he noted that his hands were still stained red, and yet he couldn't convince himself to get up and clean up, to take a few steps away from the scanner that had ruled his life over the past few months. He was hardly listening at this point, numb to the constant chatter of missing cars and fist fights over too many glasses of beer.
He was supposed to be coping, wasn't he? That's what people did after funerals, they learned how to start coping. He'd helped other people do it before; try to remember the good things, the memories, the parts of death that connected people. But all Peter could think about doing was getting revenge, justice, making up for every single one of his failures. He'd spent the day at a funeral with his empathy turned up to full blast and wallowed in false sympathies from people who couldn't begin to understand. And now he felt sick to his stomach, overwrought with emotions that didn't even belong to him, tangled up in how much no one else cared. But how could they when they didn't know.
Jaw clenched tight, Peter bit back the astringency of grief, refusing to let himself feel anything past all the guilt, past the inherent need to keep moving before he realizes that Nathan was gone for good. When he started to feel anything more, he tuned back in to the scanner, which had begun to rattle off information about another potential break in. Just as he'd started to pay attention to it, there was a knock on the door and it occurred to Peter just how wrong everything had become, how small he felt, before he finally stood to get the door.