Slave Verse vs. Shattered/Salvation
So I was driving to work this morning pondering the personality differences between Sylar and Peter of Slave Verse, versus those of Gabriel and Peter of my other fic, Shattered Identity and Salvation of Acceptance.
Sylar and Gabriel aren't the same people. There's a lot of similarities, sure, but I mean for some of Nathan's personality elements to shine through with Gabriel that aren't there for Sylar. Sylar is far more callous and less empathetic/sympathetic than Gabriel. Sylar's reaction to "Oh, Peter's brother is dead" is "Oh, Peter's brother is dead." Gabriel's would be more along the line, "I'm so sorry, Peter, is there anything I can do?" They're both a little at a loss on how to handle emotions, but Gabriel is better at it than Sylar. Gabriel understands that he's in love. He believes that's a good thing. He accepts it. Sylar knows he's saying the words and he knows he's feeling *something*, but he doesn't really understand it, if that makes any sense. It's an illogical emotion and he'd sort of rather he didn't feel that way. Or at least that it made more sense.
Peter in Shattered/Salvation is healthy - mentally healthy. Sure, he has his quirks, like a martyr syndrome and a hero complex, but he's as normal as anyone else. Peter in Slave Verse has had his sense of "normal" so heavily skewed around that it gives him problems in interacting with people.
I read some stuff about ten years ago about childhood and how everyone grows up with only their own experience of childhood and parental roles as a frame of reference. And each person can look at other people's lives, but you're only seeing it from outside and you're having to make guesses, which you'll inevitably make based on the dynamics of the household you grew up in. I suppose if you bounced around a lot, or lived in an extended family, that would broaden your perspective, but you'd still be somewhat blind to the situation of someone who grew up in a more insular environment.
I think about that with Peter. For Peter in Shattered/Salvation, I assume there was very little abusiveness or emotional harm in the house. His father didn't like him and disapproved of his basic outlook on life. They argued from time to time - his dad always won. He didn't like his dad. "Hated" might be an appropriate term at times, but this is Peter we're talking about and he didn't hold onto the hate. His brother was usually there to shield him from his father anyway, playing mediator and being a buffer. He was attracted to Peter once he hit puberty, but he never acted on it and was otherwise a pretty model big brother.
When Peter and Nathan did finally begin a sexual relationship, they were both adults and Nathan let Peter instigate it. He let Peter dictate most of it: when, how often, what form it took, etc. That gave Peter enormous confidence. And Nathan didn't cramp any of Peter's other relationships.
Peter in Slave Verse was a target of his brother's affections very early. As I have him relate in tomorrow's chapter, the first time Nathan touched him was when he was 12, explaining the birds and bees and jerking him off. And for that version of Peter, this just rolls right off his tongue like it's no big deal, because from his frame of reference, it's not. He doesn't see what an outsider would call "grooming" or "forced sexualization" in what Nathan did with him, making him hyper-aware of his sexuality far earlier than he should have been and encouraging him to use it to get what he wanted - out of his brother and out of others.
In Slave Verse, Peter's father was more absent than in Shattered. His mother was more bizarre - probably about as bad as we saw in the show, but without as much humanity and good intentions coloring it. I cast his mother much like the mother of my husband. She was very abusive on many levels. His older brother died in her care as an infant. When my husband began having similar "problems," his aunt took him from her and raised him until he was five, whereupon he was given back to her. He has a number of scars he attributes to his mother's treatment of him. She's deceased now. I was very affected by talking to him while she was dying of pancreatic cancer. He kept thinking, right up to the end, that she might have some manner of deathbed conversion and apologize for her role in his life. She didn't. He...
Well, this is about Peter. I look at how twisted a rough childhood made my husband and I project that onto Peter, using the personality from Shattered as a baseline/healthy personality. And into that I drop something my husband didn't have to deal with, which is a much older, stronger, more powerful brother who molests him. I tweak that brother to be more Jim Profit than Nathan Petrelli from the show, liberally seasoned with the behavior right out of Trekker's stories about him, which were hot and lascivious and awesome in their way, but pretty psycho.
Sylar taking Peter as a sex slave isn't going to break Peter. He's had worse. Sylar, at least initially, didn't have any emotional hooks in Peter. He was just this guy who was fucking with him and once he set his mind to it, he took over that situation and got in control of it. (As sabacat said: dominant bottom!Peter.)
Just my ponderings for now.