Heroes fanfic: Another Family Affair, chapter 4
Title: Another Family Affair (4/?)
Rating: T
Warnings: Mild swearing, violence
Characters: Peter Petrelli, mentions of the rest of the Petrelli family, Alex Petrellli (OC)
Summary: Arthur had another son from an affair that Peter and Nathan never knew about. It's only after Nathan dies that Angela confesses they have a younger brother, Alex, who lives with his neglectful mother and realises he has an ability of his own. After his mother dies, Alex is sent to a terrible foster home and found by Peter who decides to take him in and teach him all he knows.
At ten years old, Alex is used to his mother stumbling home drunk when it’s way past his bedtime. He’s never been certain why she does this; why she insists on drinking herself stupid in the late evenings, crying to herself or staring miserably in to space, but he’s always had a suspicion that it’s something to do with his father.
Alex never had a father. But that was okay, because he didn’t need one. He had always been this mysterious figure who his mother rarely talked about. Just a name on a birth certificate. The only thing that they would ever share was a name. Of course, a boy naturally wonders where it is exactly he came from. But he never dared ask.
He didn’t dare the night he overheard his mother yelling down the phone about someone abandoning their own flesh and blood, about not giving a damn about their own family. He didn’t dare the night he found her with a bottle of vodka on the desk and she stared right through him, shutting the door so he could no longer see her. He didn’t dare ask when she burst in to tears and held him close, slurring apologies and insisting that she loved him and that they only had each other. That they would only ever have each other.
She never struck him or beat him, though sometimes Alex felt as though she might as well have. Growing up with a mother so unstable and miserable made living with her so unbearable. Sometimes he felt himself overridden with guilt for things he hadn’t even done. It was almost as if she were punishing him and he couldn’t figure out why.
She claimed to love him, but she hardly ever showed such affection towards him. And so she cried, and Alex cried, and he learnt to hate this mysterious man who had destroyed his mother so effortlessly. And he learnt to not ask questions and to bury them deep inside his mind.
But the questions built up and the curiosity only got worse. Rose Greenwood had no answers. She was a mother only in name, floating around the house like a ghost. She ignored her son and so he took care of himself.
It’s only at sixteen years old, after a hundred fights and endless blurred nights of torment and misery, that Alex realises he can’t stand to watch his mother deteriorate any longer.
“You can’t leave. It’s you and me, remember? We’re a family.” Her lip trembles as she pushes back a thin strand of blonde hair. But as she drinks, the trembling stops and the yelling starts:
“Don’t be ridiculous, Alex! You can be so ungrateful. I’ve brought you up all by myself, I feed you, I clothe you, I take care of you! How can you stand there and tell me you can’t live like this anymore? Do you have any idea what this is like for me?”
“You’re not listening, mom,” he says through clenched teeth. “There is no you and me. There’s you and then there’s me. Will you stop drinking yourself to death for five minutes while I tell you why we’re so messed up? I’m not a little kid anymore! And I think you need help.”
“Help? Don’t be so stupid. I don’t need help.” She takes another swig and stares right through him again, seeing only emptiness. And he sees much the same when he looks at her. But he knows he’s not going anywhere.
It’s around this time that Alex notices he’s not like other boys his age. The other boys hang out in groups while Alex prefers to be alone. The other boys play sports while Alex prefers to stay in. The other boys don’t like him and Alex doesn’t like them.
But above all, Alex doesn’t understand how he knows that his neighbour Jessica Mabel got a nine carrot cold necklace from her aunt in Italy for her thirteenth birthday, or how he knows the local ladies’ man is still a virgin, or how he knows that Bobby Hathaway used to be the biggest nerd in the class before he became a bully.
Secrets suddenly weren’t secret anymore.
He inexplicably experiences the terrible devastation Joey Roberts felt when his uncle died six years ago, senses the immense pride Gabby Walters felt when she won the science fair in 5th grade, and feels what it was like when Adam Singer’s father hit his son across the face one Christmas Eve.
None of these people tell him these memories, these experiences. But Alex knows them and feels them. He tries to tell his mother after months of desperate confusion. He needs to know where he came from, who his father is, how he came to be like this. He needs answers. So this time he dares to ask. He grabs her arm, looks her in the eye and asks her what is happening.
Rose Greenwood has no answers.
Instead she stares at him like he’s a stranger, and as his hold on her tightens, Alex sees something that changes his life forever.
He can’t explain why, but he’s looking in to a mirror at his mother’s reflection. She’s smiling, even glowing. He’s never seen her so happy. It’s hazy but he looks down and sees her protruding belly as she places a hand over it. She sings to it, and somehow he knows that she’s singing to him.
Next thing he knows, he sees his mother being handed a newborn baby in the hospital. She calls it Alex and holds him close to her chest, tears in her eyes. “I love you so much,” she whispers and the baby just wails in her arms.
He sees things that he remembers himself, but through his mother’s eyes. He feels the nerves that she felt on his first day of school, the joy she felt when he made her Mothers Day cards, the heartbreak, the sadness, the happiness and the pride. He feels it all, sees it all.
And he sees his father. He’s a tall frowning man in a suit: a stranger. But he knows that this man is his father. He can’t help but feel love for him, as well as hatred and betrayal, because this is what his mother feels. “Arthur!“ she cries. He sees them arguing, a flicker of regret in the old man’s eyes before he says goodbye and walks out of his mother’s life forever.
Then it’s all a haze of echoed thoughts and blurred vision; images of the bottom of a whiskey glass and the sound of screaming voices.
Alex’s eyes are wide with unshed tears as he meets his mother’s shocked gaze. His mouth is dry as it hangs open. But he can’t speak. It seems now that some of his questions have been answered.
He only wishes he hadn’t been driving at the time.
Before he realises what’s happened, his ears are filled with his mother’s screaming and his eyes snap back to the road. He swerves to miss a parked car and their vehicle topples over, rolling across the ground until it slides to a stop. Silence. Alex is upside-down, but alive nonetheless. The blood rushes to his head and his eyes start to show dots. He suddenly becomes aware that his head is bleeding.
His mother is silent beside him and he turns to face her, heart pulsing fast. “Mom?” he trembles and tries to reach out for her, her face hidden by a mass of flowing blonde hair. The world feels so strange from this angle, and Alex resists the urge to go limp and give up. He pushes away a section of the thin blonde hair and breathes a shaky sigh of relief when he sees Rose looking back at him, her teeth clenched together in fear and her nose bleeding.
Rose tries to swallow but in this position its painful. Tears roll up her forehead. “Alex,” she whispers and tries to reach for him. “Alex, I’m -”
Two seconds, and that was it. Alex has spent month after month trying to figure out what the end to that sentence was, but now he can never be sure. He thinks he probably blocked out what he saw in those two seconds, but he remembers hearing the loud bang of another vehicle slamming in to theirs and sending the car forwards with a force. Then he recalls climbing out of the upside-down car with painful difficulty, scrambling across the dusty road and ripping open the door to the passenger side of the car. But it was too late.
He stares for a moment at the bloody body of his mother, pushes back her stringy blonde hair to reveal lifeless features. “Mom?” he trembles, his voice breaking. He closes his eyes and lets the tears fall. “I love you too, mom. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
The world is still upside-down. Even at her funeral. He can sense the crowd of strangers staring at him, judging him. They know it’s all his fault. Of course, they try and seem sympathetic with their empty words such as “I’m so sorry for your loss” and “how awful to lose your mother at such a young age”. Alex doesn’t care for their words because Alex knows they don’t care for him. The place is full of mom’s hairdressers or mom’s workmates or mom’s drinking buddies. They don’t care about him and they hardly cared for his mother either. There’s no family left to care, and so Alex stands in the corner in his five dollar suit by himself, and decides to hate everyone here as much as he hates himself.
He notices a stranger he will later discover to be Peter Petrelli standing in the corridor, watching him with saddened eyes. Alex stares at him. His eyes look so much like the man he saw in his vision. They were his father‘s eyes. He felt sick and turned away, and when he looked back, he was gone.
Alex is sent in to care and this is where he meets Tom, a man Peter will bump in to and think of as “menacing” on the way to Alex’s bedroom months later. Tom, whose eyes are filled with hate and whose strength can challenge a boxing champion’s. Tom, who gains pleasure from the suffering of others and whose anger is fuelled by the screams of his victims. Tom, who will make Alex’s life a misery for several months following his mother’s death.
Tom is not a pleasant man. Alex considers the possibility that he is related to the Devil Himself. Tom has no heart, he has no soul. He has nothing. And so he takes this out on the children.
Alex isn’t sure whether Tom punishes the other kids as harshly as he does with him or whether the large man just has a personal dislike to him, but he hasn’t noticed the bruises on anyone else. He hasn’t noticed anyone else yell as loud as him when they’re locked in that room with him. He hasn’t noticed the same look of fear and fury that Alex gives him in anybody else’s eyes.
Tom loves violence and violence loves Alex. Alex loves nothing. Tom beats him, Tom hides his clothes, Tom confiscates his things, Tom treats him like shit. Alex is too ashamed to tell anyone, but he thinks Karen and the rest of the staff already know.
The world is more upside-down than it ever was. So Alex gets angry, and he remembers what he’s capable of, and he uses it against the kids who don’t like him. He’s figured it out by now: all he has to do his touch them and he sees their memories play out in front of him like a movie. He knows their secrets; they’re not secret anymore.
And so the kids bully him, and the adults bully him, and they all think he’s got a screw loose. But Alex tries not to care. He learns to rely on himself and trust nobody else. And that works out pretty well, that is, until Peter Petrelli comes along.
He doesn’t trust him, can’t trust him. Once he learns the truth he’ll be running in the other direction. He won’t help him then. Alex doesn’t want his help. But he keeps showing up to this horrible place. Is he really that concerned?
They accuse him of stealing the files. But Alex never read them. He doesn’t need to. All he did was squeeze Ryan’s wrist and he saw it all. Ryan calls him a son of a bitch, Ryan calls him a freak. Well, Ryan has a few dark secrets of his own.
But it’s all Alex’s fault when Karen takes him to see Tom.
“You know I didn’t do it, what’s your problem?”
Tom shoves him hard in to the wall and tells him to admit what he’s done.
“Okay, okay! I’m sorry!”
Tom’s eyes light up with fire and he starts talking with his fists.
“I said I’m sorry! Stop it, man! STOP!”
Tom doesn’t stop.
“Don’t touch me, don’t touch me!”
*
Peter pulled away in terror, ripping his hand away, breathing hard, his palms sweating and his eyes red and watery. Alex stared back up at him and met the older man’s gleaming eyes with a sense of bewilderment. Peter swallowed hard and caught his breath, remembering where he was. He was shaking harder than Alex was and he tried to resist the urge to embrace the boy in a hug. Because he knew everything now and he felt like he knew Alex more than anyone. He pulled him up and squeezed his shoulder reassuringly.
“It’s okay. You’re coming with me.”