Light Up

[game_byrd]

Title: Light Up
Characters: Nathan/Peter
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Explicit sexual content, incest
Word count: ~2,300
Setting: Preseason, New Year’s Eve, 1998. Peter has been 20 for a week now. Nathan is 31 and will be married within a few months in a sudden manner. For those who follow Shattered Salvation, this is background for that AU.
Summary: Nathan

Comments

[no_ones_sleep]

I´m sorry it took me so long to get back to you- short comments are no problem, but when I get thinky (and that’s what your comment made me), I need time and foremost inner calm to be able to write down what I want to express.

First thing is that it feels so unbelievably soothing to have someone to talk to about Peter again! I am pretty much into Supernatural these days, but Peter has such a special place in my heart and even owns a part of my soul so that no one else should be able to replace him. Doesn’t sound too healthy, I guess, but that’s just how it is. I am reading my way through a discussion you had with dancing_dragon, and judging by how you wrote about Peter I believe that you spend a lot of time thinking about him, too. Which is probably what a writer does.

Second, it is absolutely intriguing to be in a writer’s headspace! I wrote four or five Petrellicest-themed short stories myself, but I… just write. The words flow out, and then that’s it. To read how you took a bath with that song on loop, how you wove some parts into the story, how you prepared by doing research about Nathan’s serving time- I love to know more about how you approach your work. That is so different from what know, and I have a deep interest for that.

And that’s what brings your characters to life- little information, strewn into almost casually, short flashbacks in a character’s mind to show where he’s been and where comes from. And now I have to apologize in advance, because I am surprised you know so much about these civil war sides. Is that a common concern in the US, or is it just you who is so informed about these wars? (I believe the latter, but I might judge by German prejudice…)

I totally second what you wrote about Nathan and Heidi. When Nathan danced with her in Peter’s apartment- I didn’t know anything about Petrellicest at that time, but I had a strange feeling that there was something off. Holding your wife while looking at your brother that way?! Yeah, well… poor wife. So it sadly makes sense that Heidi isn’t on his mind in his last moments, but like you said, his sons would have needed his father. But probably Heidi estranged them from him, and maybe at one point he just gave up on them (and maybe he was even convinced that it was better for them that way). Nathan always had a very weird way of showing his affection. Aside from his I-touch-my-brother-every-opportunity-I-get- attitude. :-)

And can you link me to the story you told me about? My problem is that I just cannot read Petlar- I tried, but it just breaks my heart, and I find it so wrong for several reasons, but what you wrote seemed to point in a different direction…

And one last question: Why did you choose Peter?

[game_byrd]

I understand about the comment length. Just last night I left two kind of short comments on fic by a friend of mine, and the fic really deserved something longer ... but since I'd already said most of what was on my mind when I beta read it, my brain was kind of blank. But I didn't want to *not* comment, so I left a short one and maybe tonight or this weekend I'll be in the right place to go back and leave something longer. If not, she'll at least I know I read it. I know for myself, I'd rather have a short comment than none, but I do adore the long ones!

Peter is totally in my head, but he didn't start there. When I first got into Heroes fandom was the middle of season 4, about the episode Thanksgiving. I had to know what happened next, or what people thought was going to happen next, with the Sylar/Nathan thing. I knew Adrian Pasdar's contract had been cancelled, so in a way Sylar was going to win, but I wanted to understand that situation so badly. There's a lot of personal stuff behind that obsession for me, but I wanted to know if it was possible for someone to shed their crazy. Sylar had talked about wanting to do it, and with Nathan's help he had for weeks. Now that he was 'awake' and aware of what had happened to him, would he be able to keep up a life where he wasn't a killer? Essentially, was redemption possible, in his own heart?

I didn't find the answers I wanted in fanfic, so I started writing my own. As it turns out, I came into the fandom at a point in time where Petlar was turning softer and gentler. I gather that before season 4, it was often rough, violent, hate-sex and frequently dub-con or non-con, with Sylar being smugly, smirkingly superior and Peter sucking it up. That seriously doesn't do it for me. Like you say, it's wrong for several reasons and yeah, it breaks my heart. First, that Peter keeps coming back for the abuse and second that Sylar is so callous and inhumane as to keep dishing it out. That sort of story hits my triggers on many levels.

But I wasn't exposed to that much given my timing in joining fandom. Very soon The Wall was out and I was absorbed in writing my own long story anyway. It's called Shattered Salvation and the best place to read it is on Fanfiction.net. I've got part of it on LJ, but not all and it's tedious to click between screens to get all of it. You can find it here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6757575/1/Shattered_Salvation

So ... I was headed towards why I choose Peter. As I said, initially I didn't. Initially I choose Sythan, and I was clear it was Sythan I was interested in, not Sylar and not Nathan (though I thought both had their good points). I wrote the first plot arc of Shattered Salvation from Sythan's POV and when I sat down to write a sequel, I decided to do it from Peter's POV. At that point, I really had to struggle to get into Peter's head. He was so good, so giving and so forgiving that I hadn't really comprehended him as a fully realized character, completely rounded with a voice of his own. Oh, I think my characterization of him was consistent before then, but I hadn't addressed and internalized his driving motivations.

It was Peter's flaws and faults that showed me what kind of man he really was, more than his heroism, more than his kindness. I started paying attention to the points in the show where he'd been petty, mean, hateful and wrathful. I started seeing him as a real person then. Instead of just idolizing him, I started to love him.

That's why I choose Peter. I have more to say, but LJ has a text limit so I'll make a new comment.

[game_byrd]

There's another story I'm part of where I write for Peter that's fairly long (and ongoing). It started when I joined a role play game with means2bhuman, but the other players backed out. Originally I'd been going to play Noah, but then there was just the two of us. She'd read a lot of my writing and she suggested since there was the two of us, that we take up Peter and Sylar in The Wall, where we didn't have to keep up with a complicated real life plotline and it was just the two characters interacting. It was an idea she'd apparently had for a while and I was game for it. I think we both wanted to write for Sylar to start with, but if I had the chance to switch now there's no way in hell I would. The story starts with what you see in canon of Peter entering Sylar's head and then we write every interaction they have - what they say, what they do, how they're working out their issues with each other. So far, we're about 250,000 words into it and 10 days have passed. She writes 500 words or so from Sylar's POV and then she emails me his section. I read it and write 500 words or so back of Peter's POV - what he says in response to what Sylar said, what he's doing, what he's thinking, maybe a memory of his past if that's relevant. And then I email that to her. Every 8000 words or so we bundle it into a chapter and publish it. If you're interested in it, it's called More Between Us Than A Wall, and it's here: http://means2bhuman.livejournal.com/8424.html

So far in More Between Us, there have been two bad fistfights and a lot of arguing, because ... well, they have a lot of issues. And Peter can't *not* hit Sylar in the face. I mean, it's one thing to think you can go grab the bastard and drag him to a carnival to save people, but it's another to be trapped there with him, having to put up with your brother's killer. And of course Sylar has his own issues, too. So even though means2bhuman and I have said that Petlar is a probable eventual result in the story, we're first going to go through all the growth and resolution of having the guys deal with all these other issues. We both feel the TV episode rushed an enormous degree of interaction.

You might find this interesting: http://game-byrd.livejournal.com/96900.html . It's a characterization questionnaire I did for Peter for More Between Us. For MBU, there was never any Petrellicest. Peter was/is bi, but he and Nathan were not sexual. For Shattered Salvation, Peter and Nathan had a sexual relationship. Other than that, my 'background' for Peter is pretty much the same for those two AUs.

Um ... let's see, what else did you ask about? Ah, writer's headspace! You might find this interesting: http://terror-scifi.livejournal.com/30914.html . I wrote an entry for the latest Heroes_contest challenge and I decided to do something I hadn't done before. I did a voice-over narration by Mohinder. I'm not wild about Mohinder and I've never really written for him before, but if you're interested in my writing process, I wrote up the process for this other comm I'm in, terror_scifi, a comm that talks about how to be a better writer in between appreciating great terror, horror, science fiction and fantasy works. So I wrote up a fairly long description of what I did to get the "voice" of Mohinder down and the "feel" of one of his narrations. The actual story I wrote was only 325 words.

One more comment to come...

[game_byrd]

Now, civil wars. It is not a common concern in the US. Most people are only vaguely aware of those things, with an attitude of 'oh yeah, that's something that happened somewhere else'. They're much more interested in a school shooting two states over than a genocide across the ocean. Americans are a bit myopic, by and large. That doesn't mean we don't have members who pay a lot of attention to such things, but you have to go out of your way to do it.

In popular media (at least here in the US), the Holocaust is presented as the Great Evil That Surpassed All Other Evils, as though humanity had never done similar anywhere else. My interest in genocides, civil wars and the like started when I read something twenty years ago about how, as awful as the Holocaust was, that it wasn't the singular event it was often portrayed as. And so I started reading up on other events, like Stalin's rise to power, Mao's pogram, Pol Pot's killing fields, some extrapolations and aggregations of the genocides reported in the Bible (interestingly told from the POV of the victors, as though they were great things), etc. Around that time as I was reading and studying, the tragedies in Bosnia and Serbia were occurring. Later the one in Rwanda and Darfur.

I think it is very important for people to be aware of the evil that is possible from other people. Awareness is the first step towards vigilance, so we can do our best to make sure these things don't come to pass in areas where we can do something about them. It is when people pretend these things don't happen, or that they don't matter, that they create an environment that allows such atrocities to occur. We can see that in a microcosm in rape culture. As long as our culture pretends that rape is something that only happens to bad girls who get drunk, or to girls who are jumped by strangers out of shrubs, then we will forever ignore the women getting raped by abusive spouses, coercive boyfriends, vengeful ex-boyfriends, etc. There is *NO* discernible psychological difference between a rapist and a normal man. As long as we pretend there is some mysterious difference, then we blinker ourselves from being able to face the problem and deal with it. It's like imagining that there is some mysterious spiritual trait that separates a Nazi from a 'normal' human being, or a Hutu from an 'average guy'. Newsflash: these are normal, everyday people who committed these atrocities. We can't insulate ourselves by claiming they were different. They weren't. They're human. Just like us.

So my interest in the civil wars, genocides and so on are a part of my interest in human beings and understanding what makes them tick. We don't do ourselves any favors to deny what people are. It's sort of like with Peter - I didn't really understand him until I took in his bad side as well as his good. He's still a wonderful person in so many ways, but the reason why he's good is that he's made a conscious choice to be that way. It's a choice he makes every time he's faced with a decision. It's what defines him as a hero.

That's what I love about him.