{ thanks to the internet, i am now bored with sex }
Because you demanded it -- I finished the first chapter of "Circles." Shock and awe, you guys...
Title: Circles (pt. i)
Pairing: Mohinder/Peter
Rating: Mature readers. Boys touching boys and other boys being emo about it.
Continuity: Set two weeks after the events of "Incubus." Skips ahead in terms of episode sequence, after both Mohinder and Peter get back to New York.
Author's notes: Contains a healthy dose of speculation about Peter's dream-related empathy, so, you know, don't harsh my mellow. Also, a thousand thanks to tracker_lucifer, who is awesome and helped me whenever I ran into road blocks. And who is awesome.
Summary: Dream of something long enough and you may begin to think it meaningful. You may even begin to think that you want it, perhaps even love it, creeping into the corners of your mind to convince you it’s all you ever really needed.
Say it for me
Say it to me
And I'll leave this life behind me
Say it if it's worth saving me
&&&
“I know I shouldn’t have come here…”
&&&
Dream of something long enough and you may begin to think it meaningful. You may even begin to think that you want it, perhaps even love it, creeping into the corners of your mind to convince you it’s all you ever really needed. His lips still tingled, and felt swollen, bruised like the skin of peach slices beneath the brush of his fingertips. The memory of salted sheets still fresh in the back of his buzzing skull brought flush to his face and just the tiniest inkling of thrill, a sick fleeting sensation soaking at the base of his spine like the minuscule beads of sweat that dampened the back of his shirt and jacket. And rubbing the waning edges of sleep from his still-dim eyes he had stared out the cabin window at the flat beige topography speeding along beneath his line of sight and tried to assure himself it was nothing, nothing at all.
He had no control over them, these dreams. They took him to places he didn’t intend, slipping in through the fissures around the minds of those he was close to, mentally, spatially, like a thief through an unbolted window casing. Showed him things he wanted to see and things he didn’t, and sometimes things he had no business seeing at all but still they remained, burning blurry halos behind his eyelids as he tried to will away the redness in his cheeks and not feel as though he’d just stolen something that he had no way of returning. Because they were always real, the dreams, even when they weren’t. Real in that distant, disjointed way that had always made sense in his head, but spilled so clumsily from his lips to slip between his fingers like shards of broken glass whenever he tried to put words to it.
Like with Nathan’s accident, or Simone’s father, it had been real in all the ways that mattered. It was in the feel the hardwood floor beneath his feet, and the still night air that had wafted warmly across his face through the half-opened window. He’d tasted the salt of foreign skin on the edge of his tongue and tangled his fingers in thick sable curls, and felt the silkiness of cold sheets beneath him over the pivot of strong hips and the encompassing throb of a thick and beautiful cock. And most of all he had needed - deep and fearful and raw - any gesture, any touch made in the guise of kindness with which delay the realization that he was completely and utterly alone, speeding off to an uncertain fate in the half-formed hope of saving the cheerleader and with her the world.
He had needed, just as Mohinder had needed, for whatever his own reasons had been, however lacking Peter had been of the air of grace and the self-possession that the scientist seemed to emanate from the angles of dark and inherently beautiful eyes. It had been that same air of pride that had pushed him out of his headspace in the first place; left him standing there alone, feeling two-feet-tall the last time they’d known one another, in that subway car however many dreamless nights ago. When he tried to convince him - to beg him - to believe, to stay and let him prove himself to him and he turned away instead, vanishing little by little into that wall of people until it was simply him and his chirping thoughts and the human tributary that lay between them.
It had hurt him then, the same way this had hurt him. Hurt in a way and for a reason he didn’t know the meaning behind but already knew didn’t feel right as it ached emptily behind his eye sockets, pulsing in time with the rattling of the carriage car as it had righted itself on the tracks beneath him that night. Because just as assuredly as that night had meant nothing to the other man, Peter had known that this wouldn’t either, regardless of what he thought or felt or needed. That never seemed to matter, to anyone; how could he expect this man - this stranger, this passing iota on his already off-center emotional radar - to be any different?
He was simply desperate, reaching out for something to grasp onto. And with a wandering mind found instead an open door into the back of the other man’s brain, a hole in his defenses, just like a pretty thief or common criminal. What had brought him there didn’t matter, because that’s all he’d been and that’s all it would ever be between them, something quiet and desperate and stolen.
And staring at the blinking red light on his answering machine, as that darkly rich voice curled through the space of his silent apartment over the hum of electronic static, Peter suddenly didn’t know what to think anymore.
&&&
“You don’t have to believe me, if you still don’t want to…I just didn’t know if I’d see you again…”
&&&
“Peter Petrelli? This is Mohinder - Dr. Suresh. You may not remember but we met a few weeks ago, when you came to the apartment...”
As though he could let himself forget?
“I realize the last time we spoke wasn’t, particularly pleasant, but some things have come to my attention in the past few weeks, and - ”
A pause; the tone drops from direct and detached to somehow soft. Unsure. Surely a trick of the interference, he decided. Surely.
“I can’t explain it to you now but it’s important that we speak again as soon as possible. Call me back as soon as you get this message…”
Rustle. Clack. Then nothing.
The number he’d left on the machine was to his late father’s apartment, but Peter hadn’t needed it. Jotted hastily over the back of a weeks’ old grocery list with the apartment number and name he’d gotten from one of the campaign staffers from Nathan’s office when he called that morning, he’d kept it. Stuck it away between the covers of the book he’d armed himself with the day he found himself on Mohinder’s doorstep, expecting his father but being met instead with intelligent eyes and the angles of impossible cheekbones and a mouth like firm slices of ripened mabolo fruit. It was stupid to have kept it, but he did; each time his gaze caught the crumpled yellow sticky-note sticking out from the pages of the book he still found himself holding onto he thought of dark eyes, and felt all the more foolish for it.
In the days following their encounter he told himself to throw it away a thousand times, and promised himself he would, soon. Tomorrow, the day after, next week; chasing away the occasional drifting what-if that filtered in under the hum of paintings and predictions and cheerleaders, when he was lying awake at night, alone, watching the dance of shadows and city light across his bedroom ceiling.
What if he’d persuaded Mohinder to go back to Isaac’s with him; what if he’d followed after him when he left him on the train, stopped him, instead of just standing there with his fists shaking at his sides. What if he’d slipped his fingers into sable curls and kissed those full ripe lips, licking his way beyond their guarded edges to taste the sweet secrets they kept inside. Would they still have sneered? Called him mad and brushed him off, sent away like a fleeting irritation? Would they have kissed him back, and told him he was special and wanted and worth their time?
Would he have stayed?
He couldn’t say. Not for sure, and then again that never really mattered anyway. What he wanted -- what he needed, or at least thought he did - was a world away, beyond the reach of his needy fingertips, thinking him as foolish and useless as everyone else had. And now he was back, his voice on his answering machine, like the disembodied echoes of stolen touches that lilted along the corners his dreams. For all the things he couldn’t do or say he just swallowed down instead, knobby throat bobbing, tense, eying the worn yellow note in his hand. Thinking back, hearing his voice curl over the shell of his ear for the first time in weeks, he could almost feel the covetous heat of Mohinder’s hands on his skin; his mouth over his pulse again, biting, licking, kissing. Leaving his mark in the flush of his skin just as he had in the dreams Peter had stolen into, two long and lonely weeks ago.
Message deleted.
But what he wanted never mattered anyway.
&&&
“Oh Christ, Mohinder, please - ”
&&&
When he slept he still dreamed of whispers and wet kisses, even though his skull was as empty as his bed.
&&&
“If you get this message call me back, Peter.”
&&&
Eventually he would stop sleeping, and stop dreaming, all together.
&&&
The subway car clattered along the steel tracks beneath him, slender belly shaking in time with the intermittent flicker of dingy fluorescent light. Bodies packed together in the over-heated odds and angles of skin and cloth sway awkwardly as one, met in a tenuous understanding sought between stops as some bodies slipped free only to have more pile back on, fighting for space in the cracks and crevices of a human mass. And blinking away the twinge of sleeplessness from beneath dark bangs, he was numb to the entire process. Content to be herded, blend into the crowd, to hold his breath and mind his hands and try not to bump into anyone else too much. That was normal; that was life, such as it was, a sighing breath fogging the sweat and handprint-filmed glass as he leaned his cheek to the window, and simply waited.
Meeting his mother for breakfast uptown, and in a truly tragic state of affairs. It was surely another one of her ambushes, he figured, luring him out under amiable pretenses in order to harangue him over the therapist he hasn’t been seeing and the medications he refused to start taking and the job that he quit in order to start chasing shadows after cheerleaders and time-travelers. He knew better than to agree to go, but for once he couldn’t bring himself to care enough to make up an excuse, and hiding the bitter laugh that had edged into his voice promised he’d see her at eleven-thirty. After all it was still better than avoiding thoughts of stolen kisses, and watching the blinking red light on his answering machine flicker at him from across his quiet apartment.
The train slows with a shudder as it approaches the intended stop. Bottom grinds with the muted scrape of steel and a sudden jerk as it finally halts. The doors slide open on cue and people spill out onto the platform in an autonomous surge, funneled out into the underground like livestock towards their individual destinations. He shifts in the tangled sea of movement and pushing elbows, trying to avoid the sudden jostle; when the crowd begins to thin his eye is caught by something hanging on the wall towards the back of the car and he turns. A matte black poster, plain and unassuming, save the lonely white silhouette in the lower corner. Above it adorned in distinct white and red lettering is a warning, a simple advisory: Don’t Give Your Heart To Just Anyone.
He stared at it as the doors slid shut again behind him, blinked tired eyes, and swallowed.
Plastered on subway walls and the sides of buses and buildings he must’ve passed it a thousand times everyday, innocent, unthinking, but today it chose to mock him. Just as it had the last time he saw him, getting off the train and disappearing into thin air, the red and white letters standing out like a flare in the dark to remind him that for his talk of fate and saving the world he couldn’t even keep himself from getting caught up on a pretty stranger.
As the train pulls away from the stop the bodies packed inside sway again, once, twice in the subtle rattle of steel. Pinned in the crowd, the brush of a foreign chest against his back feels natural enough in the sudden pull of movement. A hand grazes his shoulder in a momentary gesture of apology as the rustle of clothing signals the sounds of limbs righting themselves. He thinks nothing more of it as the body passes his, slipping around him to head towards the left of the train car with a half-mumbled, “Sorry,” directed toward the back of his head. It isn’t until the accent registers, soft and exotic and lilting at the corners of the voice that Peter finally turns, and instead of a stranger or a passing memory finds the man whose voice has been haunting his apartment.
The fates must be crazy, a part of him decides, or simply punishing him.
He doesn’t hear himself say the name that’s making his heart pound against his ribcage, simply because he can’t believe he’d be stupid enough to let himself be trapped like this. When the other man turns and sees him - all intelligent fire and dark eyes and soft stubble still kissing the angles of the jaw he’d thought so much about stroking - it suddenly doesn’t matter, because he knows he’s already caught.
He wants to kiss him. And a few weeks ago, he probably would have.
More boy-touching in the next chapter, I promise.
Title: Circles (pt. i)
Pairing: Mohinder/Peter
Rating: Mature readers. Boys touching boys and other boys being emo about it.
Continuity: Set two weeks after the events of "Incubus." Skips ahead in terms of episode sequence, after both Mohinder and Peter get back to New York.
Author's notes: Contains a healthy dose of speculation about Peter's dream-related empathy, so, you know, don't harsh my mellow. Also, a thousand thanks to tracker_lucifer, who is awesome and helped me whenever I ran into road blocks. And who is awesome.
Summary: Dream of something long enough and you may begin to think it meaningful. You may even begin to think that you want it, perhaps even love it, creeping into the corners of your mind to convince you it’s all you ever really needed.
Say it for me
Say it to me
And I'll leave this life behind me
Say it if it's worth saving me
&&&
“I know I shouldn’t have come here…”
&&&
Dream of something long enough and you may begin to think it meaningful. You may even begin to think that you want it, perhaps even love it, creeping into the corners of your mind to convince you it’s all you ever really needed. His lips still tingled, and felt swollen, bruised like the skin of peach slices beneath the brush of his fingertips. The memory of salted sheets still fresh in the back of his buzzing skull brought flush to his face and just the tiniest inkling of thrill, a sick fleeting sensation soaking at the base of his spine like the minuscule beads of sweat that dampened the back of his shirt and jacket. And rubbing the waning edges of sleep from his still-dim eyes he had stared out the cabin window at the flat beige topography speeding along beneath his line of sight and tried to assure himself it was nothing, nothing at all.
He had no control over them, these dreams. They took him to places he didn’t intend, slipping in through the fissures around the minds of those he was close to, mentally, spatially, like a thief through an unbolted window casing. Showed him things he wanted to see and things he didn’t, and sometimes things he had no business seeing at all but still they remained, burning blurry halos behind his eyelids as he tried to will away the redness in his cheeks and not feel as though he’d just stolen something that he had no way of returning. Because they were always real, the dreams, even when they weren’t. Real in that distant, disjointed way that had always made sense in his head, but spilled so clumsily from his lips to slip between his fingers like shards of broken glass whenever he tried to put words to it.
Like with Nathan’s accident, or Simone’s father, it had been real in all the ways that mattered. It was in the feel the hardwood floor beneath his feet, and the still night air that had wafted warmly across his face through the half-opened window. He’d tasted the salt of foreign skin on the edge of his tongue and tangled his fingers in thick sable curls, and felt the silkiness of cold sheets beneath him over the pivot of strong hips and the encompassing throb of a thick and beautiful cock. And most of all he had needed - deep and fearful and raw - any gesture, any touch made in the guise of kindness with which delay the realization that he was completely and utterly alone, speeding off to an uncertain fate in the half-formed hope of saving the cheerleader and with her the world.
He had needed, just as Mohinder had needed, for whatever his own reasons had been, however lacking Peter had been of the air of grace and the self-possession that the scientist seemed to emanate from the angles of dark and inherently beautiful eyes. It had been that same air of pride that had pushed him out of his headspace in the first place; left him standing there alone, feeling two-feet-tall the last time they’d known one another, in that subway car however many dreamless nights ago. When he tried to convince him - to beg him - to believe, to stay and let him prove himself to him and he turned away instead, vanishing little by little into that wall of people until it was simply him and his chirping thoughts and the human tributary that lay between them.
It had hurt him then, the same way this had hurt him. Hurt in a way and for a reason he didn’t know the meaning behind but already knew didn’t feel right as it ached emptily behind his eye sockets, pulsing in time with the rattling of the carriage car as it had righted itself on the tracks beneath him that night. Because just as assuredly as that night had meant nothing to the other man, Peter had known that this wouldn’t either, regardless of what he thought or felt or needed. That never seemed to matter, to anyone; how could he expect this man - this stranger, this passing iota on his already off-center emotional radar - to be any different?
He was simply desperate, reaching out for something to grasp onto. And with a wandering mind found instead an open door into the back of the other man’s brain, a hole in his defenses, just like a pretty thief or common criminal. What had brought him there didn’t matter, because that’s all he’d been and that’s all it would ever be between them, something quiet and desperate and stolen.
And staring at the blinking red light on his answering machine, as that darkly rich voice curled through the space of his silent apartment over the hum of electronic static, Peter suddenly didn’t know what to think anymore.
&&&
“You don’t have to believe me, if you still don’t want to…I just didn’t know if I’d see you again…”
&&&
“Peter Petrelli? This is Mohinder - Dr. Suresh. You may not remember but we met a few weeks ago, when you came to the apartment...”
As though he could let himself forget?
“I realize the last time we spoke wasn’t, particularly pleasant, but some things have come to my attention in the past few weeks, and - ”
A pause; the tone drops from direct and detached to somehow soft. Unsure. Surely a trick of the interference, he decided. Surely.
“I can’t explain it to you now but it’s important that we speak again as soon as possible. Call me back as soon as you get this message…”
Rustle. Clack. Then nothing.
The number he’d left on the machine was to his late father’s apartment, but Peter hadn’t needed it. Jotted hastily over the back of a weeks’ old grocery list with the apartment number and name he’d gotten from one of the campaign staffers from Nathan’s office when he called that morning, he’d kept it. Stuck it away between the covers of the book he’d armed himself with the day he found himself on Mohinder’s doorstep, expecting his father but being met instead with intelligent eyes and the angles of impossible cheekbones and a mouth like firm slices of ripened mabolo fruit. It was stupid to have kept it, but he did; each time his gaze caught the crumpled yellow sticky-note sticking out from the pages of the book he still found himself holding onto he thought of dark eyes, and felt all the more foolish for it.
In the days following their encounter he told himself to throw it away a thousand times, and promised himself he would, soon. Tomorrow, the day after, next week; chasing away the occasional drifting what-if that filtered in under the hum of paintings and predictions and cheerleaders, when he was lying awake at night, alone, watching the dance of shadows and city light across his bedroom ceiling.
What if he’d persuaded Mohinder to go back to Isaac’s with him; what if he’d followed after him when he left him on the train, stopped him, instead of just standing there with his fists shaking at his sides. What if he’d slipped his fingers into sable curls and kissed those full ripe lips, licking his way beyond their guarded edges to taste the sweet secrets they kept inside. Would they still have sneered? Called him mad and brushed him off, sent away like a fleeting irritation? Would they have kissed him back, and told him he was special and wanted and worth their time?
Would he have stayed?
He couldn’t say. Not for sure, and then again that never really mattered anyway. What he wanted -- what he needed, or at least thought he did - was a world away, beyond the reach of his needy fingertips, thinking him as foolish and useless as everyone else had. And now he was back, his voice on his answering machine, like the disembodied echoes of stolen touches that lilted along the corners his dreams. For all the things he couldn’t do or say he just swallowed down instead, knobby throat bobbing, tense, eying the worn yellow note in his hand. Thinking back, hearing his voice curl over the shell of his ear for the first time in weeks, he could almost feel the covetous heat of Mohinder’s hands on his skin; his mouth over his pulse again, biting, licking, kissing. Leaving his mark in the flush of his skin just as he had in the dreams Peter had stolen into, two long and lonely weeks ago.
Message deleted.
But what he wanted never mattered anyway.
&&&
“Oh Christ, Mohinder, please - ”
&&&
When he slept he still dreamed of whispers and wet kisses, even though his skull was as empty as his bed.
&&&
“If you get this message call me back, Peter.”
&&&
Eventually he would stop sleeping, and stop dreaming, all together.
&&&
The subway car clattered along the steel tracks beneath him, slender belly shaking in time with the intermittent flicker of dingy fluorescent light. Bodies packed together in the over-heated odds and angles of skin and cloth sway awkwardly as one, met in a tenuous understanding sought between stops as some bodies slipped free only to have more pile back on, fighting for space in the cracks and crevices of a human mass. And blinking away the twinge of sleeplessness from beneath dark bangs, he was numb to the entire process. Content to be herded, blend into the crowd, to hold his breath and mind his hands and try not to bump into anyone else too much. That was normal; that was life, such as it was, a sighing breath fogging the sweat and handprint-filmed glass as he leaned his cheek to the window, and simply waited.
Meeting his mother for breakfast uptown, and in a truly tragic state of affairs. It was surely another one of her ambushes, he figured, luring him out under amiable pretenses in order to harangue him over the therapist he hasn’t been seeing and the medications he refused to start taking and the job that he quit in order to start chasing shadows after cheerleaders and time-travelers. He knew better than to agree to go, but for once he couldn’t bring himself to care enough to make up an excuse, and hiding the bitter laugh that had edged into his voice promised he’d see her at eleven-thirty. After all it was still better than avoiding thoughts of stolen kisses, and watching the blinking red light on his answering machine flicker at him from across his quiet apartment.
The train slows with a shudder as it approaches the intended stop. Bottom grinds with the muted scrape of steel and a sudden jerk as it finally halts. The doors slide open on cue and people spill out onto the platform in an autonomous surge, funneled out into the underground like livestock towards their individual destinations. He shifts in the tangled sea of movement and pushing elbows, trying to avoid the sudden jostle; when the crowd begins to thin his eye is caught by something hanging on the wall towards the back of the car and he turns. A matte black poster, plain and unassuming, save the lonely white silhouette in the lower corner. Above it adorned in distinct white and red lettering is a warning, a simple advisory: Don’t Give Your Heart To Just Anyone.
He stared at it as the doors slid shut again behind him, blinked tired eyes, and swallowed.
Plastered on subway walls and the sides of buses and buildings he must’ve passed it a thousand times everyday, innocent, unthinking, but today it chose to mock him. Just as it had the last time he saw him, getting off the train and disappearing into thin air, the red and white letters standing out like a flare in the dark to remind him that for his talk of fate and saving the world he couldn’t even keep himself from getting caught up on a pretty stranger.
As the train pulls away from the stop the bodies packed inside sway again, once, twice in the subtle rattle of steel. Pinned in the crowd, the brush of a foreign chest against his back feels natural enough in the sudden pull of movement. A hand grazes his shoulder in a momentary gesture of apology as the rustle of clothing signals the sounds of limbs righting themselves. He thinks nothing more of it as the body passes his, slipping around him to head towards the left of the train car with a half-mumbled, “Sorry,” directed toward the back of his head. It isn’t until the accent registers, soft and exotic and lilting at the corners of the voice that Peter finally turns, and instead of a stranger or a passing memory finds the man whose voice has been haunting his apartment.
The fates must be crazy, a part of him decides, or simply punishing him.
He doesn’t hear himself say the name that’s making his heart pound against his ribcage, simply because he can’t believe he’d be stupid enough to let himself be trapped like this. When the other man turns and sees him - all intelligent fire and dark eyes and soft stubble still kissing the angles of the jaw he’d thought so much about stroking - it suddenly doesn’t matter, because he knows he’s already caught.
He wants to kiss him. And a few weeks ago, he probably would have.
More boy-touching in the next chapter, I promise.