Fic: The Strong One

Jan 22, 2010 01:30

(inspired by this video)

Nights like these with soggy streets and dripping clouds, the tail lights of traffic bled all over the ground, turning the puddles red instead of black.  It looked like the worst of accident scenes he'd been to.  It also reminded him that he hadn't seen the sky since Nathan's funeral.

But even if he could see the sky, the stars, it was empty.  The sky wasn't the brilliant blue curtain that held in the ocean from overflowing onto the stars the way it was when he went to the Hamptons with his family as a child.  It wasn't the stage for a dance of fighter jets the way it had been when he visited Nathan on the naval base in Texas.  It wasn't the nighttime sheet, poked with pinholes to let the light in the next room shine through.  It was bland now, filled with swollen, swirling clouds that refused to stop crying.  Whenever he heard the roar of engines in the sky, he looked up, expecting to see them.  But Peter saw clouds instead.

Working in the rain was a lot harder.  The attitude of the city had changed with the weather to one of insanity.  Peter went to accident site after accident site, helping the victims, saving people he didn't even know.  That's what a hero did.  He held his hands on a woman's stomach wound, focused on her, even if his insides were being ripped apart constantly, being torn away by loss.  He smiled at her, told her she'd be just fine.  You'll be fine, but I won't, my brother is gone and I don't even know how to go on with life, was what he didn't tell her.

He avoided it.  He sucked it up.  He held another person's life together in his hands even though he couldn't hold the thing that meant everything in his life tangibly in his hands again.  The world wasn't going to wait for him to get better; the world didn't care that he felt like a tree hollowed out by lightning, but still standing.  Except his scar wasn't visible.

He didn't know what would happen when Loss started to eat at his shell too--he didn't know what would happen when he was entirely gone.  Instead he had the duty to save this woman.  He'd never see her again.  He'd never invite her to Thanksgiving or give her presents on Christmas, or call her when he was down, or go to see her when he just wanted to smile.  He'd save her when he couldn't save his own family, despite that he was a hero.  Heroes saved each other.  Nathan had saved him; Nathan never let him fall.

When the first of the blue sky peaked out in the morning after a shift filled with bloody tail lights and puddles of red, Peter cried.  The sky was so...empty.  Even on the roof of his apartment building, he didn't feel any closer to the sun and the stars behind the blue veil.  It was faded and worn because the sky had lost one of its own.  When the clouds cleared, it was because it was Peter's turn to grieve.  He had been afraid that if he started, he'd never stop again.  It wasn't as easy as living and remembering--he didn't think he could do that.

But in the end, he pulled himself together with the same hands that held other people together.  He had to live his vacant life and his vacant job.  Even if the sky would never be the same again.

verse: canon, what: fic

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