& so long to devotion / it taught me everything I know
He has a love-hate relationship with rooftops, more than he knows by way of his own technical memory, but feeling counts for a lot where Peter is concerned, sometimes too much according to certain people whose opinions may or may not mean anything to him anymore. Sitting on the edge of a rooftop looking over an empty alleyway where, so long ago, Nathan stood and looked up at him like he was crazy, the younger of the Petrellis tucks his arms against him, a flimsy counter to the wind funnel. Even this high up it has a hold that tangles his hair and drops it across his eyes. He finds it all too natural to catch that peculiar synthesis of street vendor smell and metropolitan air and a thousand people in trouble who will never get the help they deserve, and really, it could be so much worse. God knows his dreams have been. His nightmares.
But somehow the normalcy of it is worse than any chase by the government, than seeing his father, than Sylar . It bites into him with a contradictory loudness and snaps memories in twos and threes until he forces himself to stand up and turn away from the edge, hands curling into fists at his sides, head bowing. When he looks up again, he shudders with inhale and exhale alike before walking to the farthest corner from him and sliding down with his back against it. Nothing about this feels real except for the craziness behind his own eyes, and that's how he knows he's dreaming.
He only wonders at this point what he'll be waking up to.
There's just no way of knowing, and maybe it's stupid to think going to sleep in a dream means waking up in real life, but whether or not it is proves irrelevant when he tilts his head back to stare at the sky. No stars. He wonders what it means, if anything, but this isn't one of those kinds of dreams.
Pete. What the hell are you doing up here?
It's in his head. Nathan's voice. It's in his head, but he stands up anyway.
(Of course.)
He stands up and looks around, because in dreams anything can happen.
But no one's there and he laughs a short, choked sound as he shakes his head and smiles in a way that contradicts every honest feeling he tries to hold back on. His next breath shivers through him and he turns to the ledge again, placing both palms flat on the concrete as he leans on it, looking out over this block of Manhattan like he can pin it all down and learn all its quirks and inconsistencies, like he can handle things. But it doesn't sit well with him that even in his dreams he isn't doing anything, just thinking, just wondering, just stuck, and when the wind seems to die away he misses the noise because the silence is another secret he realizes has become too much for him. What he needs is a new horizon, outside of everything or inside of it, and he can almost close his hands around the person he used to be, stronger and brighter. What he has is the coping limbo between that and what he might become.
Time was, he thought he could do everything, anything. Time was, dreams were not his folly. Time was.
Things change, Peter. You never will. It's not in your nature.
Angela's voice is as piercing as ever and he would wonder if the others could hear it if there were any others to speak of, but when he turns again, glancing around the rooftop, it's still just him and the midnight hour, keeping each other company because their not really fit for anyone else.
[ooc; ldskf;slkfs; worst fail T--T m-must tag more after work later but will do so ASAP!]