Be Near Me (8)
Title: Be Near Me (8)
Pairing: Peter/Matt, implied Peter/others
Rating: NC-17 (sexuality, drugs, language)
Length: 4100 words
Spoilers: Through 1-11: Fallout
Summary: Peter and Matt enjoy some hard drugs and pay-per-view porn (and trade thoughts in technicolor!), and Sylar invites Peter to his fortress of solitude-plus-one. PLEASE READ DISCLAIMER.
Be Near Me (8): It's How You Play The Game
How'd you find a heart when you feel no love?
--King Biscuit Time, "Kwangchow"
Out on the street, Peter rushed along, trying to keep his eyes open for an available taxi. The hotel where Matt Parkman was staying was about eighteen blocks away, much further downtown in the financial district. Eighteen blocks away, in Manhattan, at nine in the evening; it might as well have been in Siberia. All the peanut butter that Peter had just eaten sat in his stomach like an indigestible ball of mud, and he felt like hell, sweaty and shivery, like the chills section of fever-and-chills.
They had to be nearby. It was the only explanation. Isaac and Hiro, closing in. Peter felt a shocky sensation of impending doom, and he ran down a narrow side street, ducking into a dark, grimy alley.
Pedestrians kept walking past steadily on the other side of the entrance of the alleyway, but none of them ever glanced down it, and there were no faces at any of the windows arching overhead. Peter took several deep breaths, and rubbed his palms together nervously. There was no way he could get away on foot quite fast enough, and he knew he could more easily get a taxi a few blocks further downtown.
He had to try.
With another deep, measured breath, he felt his ankles going lax, and he knew he was hovering above the ground, rising slowly but steadily. It was scary to see the world slipping down in front of him, but Peter knew he had to keep his eyes open so he could see where he was going. It felt good to levitate, the same way that it felt good to draw, the same way that it felt good to put his own broken bones back into place. As he broke into a smile, he felt himself going faster.
A lot faster.
Buoyant as a helium balloon let go, he zipped above the roof of the building he had just been standing beside; it had to be a good thirty or forty stories high, and he could look down at the top of the next building, with its littering of pigeon feathers, pigeon shit, and satellite dishes. He struggled to control his flight, shooting along over the tops of the buildings, orienting himself toward Matt's hotel. Maybe I won't need a cab at all, he thought. If I was Nathan, I'd never drive anywhere. This is awesome--except that I'm really cold and my eyes won't stop watering. And it's scary; I shouldn't be doing this in the city.
Before he had gone the whole way, he felt his mood suddenly lowering, and his altitude with it. He was just too hungry to keep doing this, and he felt panicky, wondering where he was going to come down, and without Claire there to help him heal, he could get very nastily, publicly killed. He never had figured out how to land. He settled for sinking down into a large tree in a small corner park, praying that no one was watching him struggle down, the branches tangling in his pant legs and shoelaces. Somehow, he didn't get hurt; he guessed that he remained buoyant for just long enough for his feet to get a grip on a steady branch.
Peter dropped himself down from the branch, startling an old lady walking her beagle. He gave her an apologetic smile, and walked down the street toward the hotel, his whole body shaking. Scary; too scary. Maybe that's why Nathan didn't do it.
After a quick diversion into a corner store to grab a snack, Peter made it to the Park Rose Hotel. It was exactly the kind of run-down, mediocre financial-district hotel that law officers stayed in (as opposed to the opulent, high-tech hotels for executives on the next street over). And the place was crawling with cops, feds and military. They were all in street clothes, but Peter recognized their postures and speech patterns from having met some of Nathan's military pals. Peter almost wanted to walk through the front lobby with his hands behind his head, but they paid him no attention beyond a cursory glance. He hoped he didn't look too paranoid or strung out.
By the time he got off the elevator, he knew that Parkman was nearby; his head began to pound, going from "like being poked repeatedly in the temple with a pencil eraser" to "like being stabbed with an Allen wrench in the back of the head" as he walked down the hall toward the room. His eyes watered so badly that could barely see to read the room numbers on the doors.
Like a muttering directly inside his head, he heard Matt Parkman's voice. He's here already? What the fuck, did he fly?
Peter rapped on the door with his knuckles, wincing; it felt like he'd just punched himself in the face five times. It took a while before the door opened, and Parkman stood, staring down at Peter, blinking slowly. "What do you want?" Parkman asked, but his voice wasn't confrontational; it was more confused, and decidedly blurry at the edges.
"Can I come in?" Peter asked, peering out of one eye; the lights in the hallway were just too much. He noticed that it was dark inside the hotel room.
"Yeah, sure," Parkman said vaguely, standing aside. Peter lurched in and immediately sat on the floor, next to a chair, and curled up, gripping his forehead with both hands. Parkman shut and locked the door, staring down at him. "You OK?"
"I did fly here," Peter said. "You nailed it. How you doing? Your head hurt as bad as mine?"
"Nah, not as much anymore," Parkman replied. "I took some morphine. Got a prescription today, and a shot of Imitrex, too, while I was there. That's why I had to take a nap."
"Wow. That would put me out for days."
"It would, if you weren't in this much pain. For me, it just... throws a blanket over it, I guess. You want some?"
"Imitrex?" Peter asked, pain making him a little slow on the uptake.
"Morphine. Imitrex doesn't do this any good."
"I didn't think so... Imitrex is for migraine. And yes, please."
"I told them it wasn't a migraine, but they figured it had to be, if it was as bad as I said," Parkman noted, getting a bottle of pills from a small case on the bedside table and tapping out two little green tablets for Peter. Peter chewed one, almost gagging at the taste, and shoved the broken fragments under his tongue. "Wait a minute--you said you flew. How the hell did you do that? You couldn't do that before, could you?"
A thought involuntarily flashed through Peter's mind as he tried to figure out how to describe it: Just this little sex I had with Nathan and a little sharing of his power, and I hope you're down with us doing the same thing, because I'm down, I hadn't noticed before how cute... He grimaced as he heard it echo back into his own head. Oops.
Parkman looked aghast. "You did what? Isn't he your brother?"
Peter sighed, the morphine rushing into his bloodstream, making the edges of the pain fuzzy and indistinct. He stood up, headed for the bathroom. "Yeah... let me explain." He filled a cup with water, and washed down the other tablet, rinsed his mouth, swallowed. He felt a hundred times better that he had when he first walked into the room--maybe even a thousand times better. As quickly as he could, he outlined Bennet's mission.
"You came here to fuck me?" Parkman pressed on.
"I came here to gain your powers. I don't have to fuck you to do that. We just have to have orgasms at roughly the same time, while we're... near each other." Peter came back and sat in the chair this time, smiling a little as the pain got less and less important with every heartbeat. He now felt positively good. Narcotics, under the right circumstances, were so lovely. "We can fuck, though. That's pretty much the best way."
"We can't do that," Matt said, shaking his head. "We can barely stand to be in the same room with each other." And I don't know about you, but I don't play on that team.
It's all the same game, pal--as long as you know how to play, that's good enough. "We can do it, and we have to," Peter said. "Sylar now has abilities that I can barely even fathom--he can definitely telepathically communicate with me from a distance--telepathically manipulate me. I think... you can help me... determine his weaknesses. So we can take him down." Oh, Gabriel, I'm sorry... Shit. No. Ignore that.
Parkman scoffed. "I can't ignore that," he said. "That's--you can't be--Are you..." You have this twisted thing for him, I can tell. That's fucked up. He grimaced as his thoughts noisily swarmed back onto him.
Peter shook his head. You don't know him like I do. "No. I'm not. It's not like that. It's not. I can't control my feelings yet, but I can still control my actions. He's manipulating me, like I said. He's dangerous and he's a killer, and he's a son-of-a-bitch for breaking into my mind. I want to... figure him out. I want to find him."
"Don't you think that's dangerous?"
"Well, it was dangerous last time, too. And I died. I died to stop him before, and I'd do it again. Hopefully, if everything works out, I won't have to die. Because it hurts."
Matt thought of a line from a zombie movie: It hurts to be dead. He saw Peter smile in recognition, and smiled back, and repeated, "If everything works out..."
"Because Claire's next on my list. And then he... you don't know him. And then, apparently, I'll be powerful enough to... at least have a chance."
"Claire? I thought you already did her."
Peter wondered how much he had been thinking about the girl as he was coming in; probably a lot. He had a mental porn reel of Claire playing in his mind at all times, like the headline crawl on a cable news channel, remembering the sight of her bare breasts, her glossy limbs, her kittenish sounds as she rubbed herself on his spine. As he focused on the recollection, Parkman's smile grew. "No," Peter said, a little sadly. "Not that way. We haven't shared it yet. I'm almost scared; she's going to cripple me."
"Worse ways to go," Matt mused.
"True dat," Peter said.
They chuckled in unison, and kept laughing for a while. Peter was enjoying himself; a little wasted from the morphine, feeling himself get more so all the time, seeing his own goofy smile mirrored on Matt's face. Peter could tell Matt was a lonely guy; surrounded by people, but always isolated from them at the same time, the reasons why so tangled and so far underneath that it would take years to access them. And there just wasn't time for that.
"C'mon, Parkman," Peter urged. "Let's do this, OK? Really. It doesn't need to take all night. We don't even have to be touching, I don't think. You don't have to look at me. We can just... I dunno, watch porn. They got porn in these rooms?"
"Cop hotel? Fuck yeah, they do." Charge it to the FBI--your tax dollars at work.
Peter thought, I like you more and more all the time. Parkman smirked a little, modestly, but Peter could feel that Matt was pleased. "You go ahead and pick something."
"Nah, you do it," Matt shrugged, turning away. Can't read the fucking guide anyway...
Peter blinked at the revelation. "You're dyslexic?"
"I don't wanna talk about it. It's not gonna get me in the mood, exactly." Thinking about that shit makes me think about Janice, and I'm going to be thinking about Janice anyway, watching porn, feeling guilty about that, wishing I could reach out to her but practically not even caring anymore, and feeling guilty about that. Great. Thanks, asshole. No, I'm the asshole. I'm a selfish jerk. I'm a quitter.
Peter grasped Matt by the shoulders, turning him around, and trying to meet his eyes; Matt carefully avoided eye contact. "Hey man, you gotta stop doing that to yourself," Peter said. "That's horrible. It's thinking shit like that that's been wrecking everything--isn't it? Acknowledge that. Don't bullshit me."
"Yeah," Matt said sharply. "I know my self-confidence sucks. These thoughts... I can't help it."
"Sure you can," Peter said. "You ever meditate? Ever do yoga?"
Parkman scoffed. "Uh, no."
"Dude, you should really look into it. I'm not getting all hippie on you, I swear. I'm talking about controlling your thoughts, controlling your abilities. It's all about becoming aware of your breathing, getting flexible. I'm positive that you can do this--you have to learn how. I'm going to have to learn how." Peter sighed. "Maybe we can help each other. You won't be alone anymore--you won't be the only person alive who can hear other people's thoughts." Peter immediately demonstrated this by discarding the thought Besides Sylar before he could really have it. And he didn't hear an answering echo; it almost definitely hadn't been overheard by Matt.
It could definitely be done; it was possible to hide the things that really needed to stay hidden.
Matt nodded. "All right. Let's go."
They pulled the two chairs next to each other at the side of the bed, pointed toward the television. Peter didn't turn it on yet. "Let's just do some breathing exercises," he said, crossing his legs into a lotus position. Matt looked at him as though he'd just put on a sequined fez and waved his hands over a crystal ball. Peter smirked and shrugged back. "Force of habit. You don't have to do it like this, obviously."
"Good, 'cos there's no way." Guy's a total flake.
Peter smiled, breathing deep, feeling himself at peace. A total flake who gets to bang a psycho-horny seventeen-year-old blonde sometime in the next few days. Namaste.
Matt grinned. "Namaste," he replied out loud.
"That's how you do it," Peter said calmly and quietly. "Have the thought, experience the negative emotion, and then walk on by. Takes practice, but pretty soon it becomes automatic. Now... is your breathing synched with mine?"
"Yeah."
"OK," said Peter, lifting the remote, "let's do this. And if they want to give you the run-around, you can charge this to me." Peter chose the first movie listed on the program guide.
Oh, I've seen this one, Matt thought.
Peter resisted the urge to laugh. "Should I change it?"
"Nah, it's fine. It'll work. You'll probably like it; it's about ass."
Peter did laugh then. Yeah, I like ass, and in a much more complete way than you do. Does your wife--
"You better not go there, Peter," Matt warned sharply. "Don't even think about it."
"Yeah, you're right," Peter said contritely. "Sorry. I'm not that good with the controlling myself yet. Just relax, and stay chill." Peter breathed audibly for a moment to give Matt a guideline, and then, as another guideline, undoing his pants and pouring a small puddle of lubricant his palm. Matt carefully kept his eyes on the TV screen as Peter tossed the lube bottle into his lap, but, with a heavy sigh, obligingly followed suit.
Peter glanced at the screen from time to time, but most of his attention was divided between watching Matt touch himself, and thinking about Claire, thinking about Simone, crowding his head with as many images of naked, eager females as he could so that he wouldn't think about sex with men so that he wouldn't think of--
So he didn't.
He watched Matt, focused on Matt, replaying the sight of Claire taking off her bra in his mind, but watching Matt's hand stroking his cock, watching the visible signs of his arousal manifesting in front of him, listening to the way his breathing changed. This sight, combined with the delicious, heavy bliss of the morphine, caused Peter to drift into a state of hypnotic arousal, his thoughts rolling out like fog.
I wish I could fuck you. I wish I could suck you off. Your cock is beautiful. Yours is the only cock that matters right now. I wish we were fucking. I wish you were banging my ass just like that redhead on there. Just like that. God, that would be fucking amazing.
A little tentatively: I don't think I could fuck you like that.
I wish you could try, though...
You can't be serious. Doesn't that... hurt?
No. And I wouldn't care if it did. Because I'm a slut who loves to be fucked and I'll take it as hard as you can dish it out.
"Jesus," Matt whispered, glancing at Peter. "You've got a dirty mind." Peter smiled wickedly, and closed his eyes, running a barrage of filthy, unforgivable thoughts through his mind. After a few seconds, Matt leaned back into his chair, his arm and wrist moving more aggressively, with more purpose. Peter kept himself in rhythm with Matt, even though he wanted to rush toward the finish; he had to keep pace and control himself.
...Are you gonna fuck that cheerleader in the ass?
If she'll let me--And if there's time. I don't know if there'd be time, and oh, I'd like to take my time with her if I'm going south.
You definitely at least have to bring it up. You sound like you take it enough; you should dish it out more.
Everybody's got their thing.
"Oh, geez, d'you see that?" Matt's voice was odd in comparison to the slightly reverbating echo chamber of their traded thoughts.
"No, I missed it." Peter forced his eyes to focus.
"Oh, hey, we get an instant replay. And... look out... Oh, too late." Matt laughed.
Peter laughed too. "Oh, man, that's just mean. That's happened to me before. Stung like a son of a bitch."
"Jesus... Are you serious? Sick. Dude, what haven't you done? Wait, don't answer that."
Peter sucked his breath between his teeth and bit his lip. "Are you close?"
"...Kinda. Yeah." Matt seemed surprised to admit it, even though his his forehead had begun to sweat, and his breathing deep and staggered. "Snuck up on me. I didn't think..."
In split seconds, Peter decided that he would try an experiment, planned it, and carried it out. His focused his thoughts outward, and concentrated as hard as he could.
--you just want to fuck, you just want to come, you want to come, yeah, like that, that's you, you're coming, you want to come, yeah, get off, now, get off, now, it's happening now, c'mon oh yes that's it--
Even just structuring the thoughts in his mind was enough to nudge Peter over the edge. He struggled to keep his eyes open to watch Matt, who lay in his chair with his legs half-bent, half-splayed under him, eyes shut, biting his lip, his body held suspended, anticipating the moment. Matt stifled a moan inside his closed mouth as he came, then, as it just kept mounting in intensity, let it come tumbling out as the agonizing ecstasy spread and sustained, impossibly long, impossibly sweet, almost scary.
Golden snowflakes of pleasure, a feeling like the sound of the lowest string on a violin, held by a quivering finger, the note dying away into infinity.
He felt like he was falling--not too fast, but sinking down, heavy, as though underwater with a cannonball chained to his ankle. Peter realized with sad helplessness that he was losing consciousness, had already lost it, going deep underneath it. He didn't hear or feel or sense Matt anymore, as though he'd left him behind at the surface.
***
And then he was just elsewhere.
The place from his dream. But with far more detail, everything far more realistic and tangible. Instead of being naked and spreadeagled on his back, in a bed or whatever, he was walking around, dressed in the clothes he was wearing in the hotel. He looked around him at a vast room, the size of of the ballroom in Nathan's house, and with a big empty fireplace, but the similarities ended there. There were odd little lamps along the walls which cast yellow or blue light onto spots on the mirror-polished marble floor, which had been scuffed with every step from Peter's shoes. It was realistic, but also very stylized; none of the details seemed actual because everything was so cold and perfect and linear and precise. He paused and looked down at the gleaming, reflective floor, wondering if he should take his shoes off.
"No," came a soft, caressing, utterly familiar voice, "you can leave them on. Every step you take marks me."
"Gabriel," Peter said aloud, turning to see the source of the voice, fighting off an inappropriate sensation of happiness, fighting to replace it with fear. The fear stubbornly refused to come. "What's happening? What is this?"
The tall, dark man sat in an carved, dark-wood antique chair, dressed in pale-colored slacks and crisp white shirt open at the neck, barefoot, clean-shaven, smiling. Finger- and toenails immaculate and not a hair out of place. "I brought you here as soon as I could," he replied. "This isn't real. This is in our minds. You now have the ability to meet me here."
Peter glanced down at himself again. He looked the same as the last time he had seen himself in Matt's hotel room, all windblown from flying and dirty from climbing around in a tree, and in comparison with the impeccable Gabriel Gray, he looked like a pile of dust bunnies from underneath the couch. "I... don't... I don't like being manipulated like this."
"I'm sorry you're uncomfortable. That feeling will pass in time. This is a useful space for both of us, and in time, you will be as much in command of it as I am. I've been working on it for a little while, you see, as a kind of mental side-project, hoping that someday I'd be able to have someone come and join me. Now, with your telepathy, you've gained enough ability to access it. You and I are the only ones. You're safe here, I promise that."
"Your promises don't mean much to me," Peter replied, but he did feel his anxiety diminishing. He didn't feel the headache, or the effects of the morphine here, he noted; he felt exactly as himself, on a slightly better-than-average day.
"There's nothing I could do to harm you here. I wouldn't do that," said Gabriel softly. "You're the only chance I have."
"For what?" Peter scoffed. "For redemption? For survival?"
"For love," Gabriel said, with enormous sincerity.
It was, as the expression went, so funny that Peter forgot to laugh. "You," said Peter slowly, "are crazy."
"Isn't it something," Gabriel responded with a little smile, "how we can just dismiss someone entirely with that little phrase? How many times have you heard that, Peter? How many people have told you to see a shrink? Go get some meds? Go kill yourself if you're so unsure and miserable?"
Peter winced. True. How many times had he been told that? By how many people? How many times had Nathan told Peter outright to commit suicide? Joking, sure, but it still hurt, still left the lingering thought that Nathan just wanted Peter dead. Even though it wasn't true. It wasn't. "I was on meds for a couple of months after Dad died. They helped."
"I was on meds, too," Gabriel said, holding up his hands and grinning. "I've got an official diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive and BPD, how 'bout you?"
Borderline personality disorder? Oh, I don't think there's anything borderline about it, Gabe, ol' pal. Peter hoped that his thoughts could be overheard; Gabriel's smile disappeared, but he didn't seem upset, only fascinated by Peter. "Did you go off your meds, and that's why you've gone on this kill-crazy rampage?"
"Oh, wouldn't that be nice and simple? No, it wasn't like that. I stopped years ago. There's nothing really wrong with me. Drugs just dulled me even more, and I was already in danger of vanishing entirely. You didn't know me before. I was such a nice guy. I was as tiny and harmless as a mouse." Peter's mouth went dry as Sylar crossed his lanky legs; he was well over six feet tall. He was a lean but massive presence. How would anyone mistake this man for a mouse? "Quiet. Studious. Shy to the point of silence. I didn't want to disappear, but I didn't know how to stop that downward spiral into the shadows." That good-humored smile again. "All I had to sustain me was the knowledge that I was different, that I was significant. I hung on to that, despite everything, even though no one believed that nice, quiet little Gabriel Gray could ever really amount to something."
"And now..."
"It doesn't matter. We are now who we are now. And I don't want you to misunderstand me. The others--they can't share this with us. Only we can. We, the repositories of power. You and I, Peter. We're the only ones. You are my only chance. And I am yours." Those eyes, those wide-open, trusting, longing eyes, completely free of malice or guile, searched Peter's face.
"I... have to... destroy you," Peter faltered.
"Do you think they're going to let you survive?" Gabriel said, arching his eyebrows. "Do you really think they're going to just let you walk around, able to do what you can do, knowing the power that you have?"
"My power's not destructive; yours is."
"Oh, your power is destructive, Peter," said Gabriel, an edge of greed, of nastiness, sharpening his voice. "You just haven't learned how to use it that way yet. You will have to learn how, if you want to survive. Your friends are only your friends as long as you're useful to them; once they realize the power you've accumulated, you will become a threat. As I am a threat."
"The difference between me and you is that I don't kill people." Peter clung to that idea like a life raft. "You kill. You've killed so many people. You've even killed the wrong people; you just wasted them. Those were people with families and feelings. You're the threat."
"You think I'm a threat?" He stood up, approached Peter, stared down at him like he could incinerate Peter with the fire in his eyes. Peter stared back, willing himself not to be intimidated, holding his head up high and his body relaxed, but ready to fight if necessary. "You think I'm the threat you should be worried about? No, no, no. Bennet and his monkeys have done a great job of distracting you from the real threat. Those who would take people like you, and I, and your little cheerleader, and your precious, beautiful, sexy, wonderful, clueless brother, and eliminate us if we won't become their weapons."
"How do you know this?"
"Bennet likes to gloat," Gabriel shrugged. "It's part of his job satisfaction. That, and torture, and kidnapping; he's very good at it. I kind of admire him."
Peter sighed. "I don't have to be here," he said. "I don't have to listen to this. I can wake up and go."
"Yes, you can," was Gabriel's reply. The nasty edge was gone from his voice, and Peter caught a glimpse of how he had been before; shy, tentative, a faint hesitant lisp, still inclined to try to push up the glasses he no longer wore. "Kiss me before you leave. Please."
"I don't want to be your..." Peter was in mid-sentence when Gabriel bent and kissed him, holding him gently steady, and Peter put his arms around Gabriel and returned the kiss.
It's just a dream; nothing bad can happen. It's just a dream. It's just a kiss. We are nothing to each other and this is not about love, any more than rape is about lust. This is just an abuse of power, nothing more... I can't feel that way about him. He's a monster and he even acknowledges that he's a monster. It doesn't make sense. I can't feel like this.
Gabriel's eyes were moist when he finally broke away. "Don't trust Nakamura," he said to Peter, still in the same soft, whispery tone of voice, but somehow hard and steely at the same time. "He will betray you. They'll all betray you. Only I never will."
Peter snatched away. "You're full of shit." The last thing he saw was a quick, hurt, tentative smile on Gabriel's face, and then everything winked out and Peter was rising again.
Amazing how it felt to rise up out of dreams; amazing how much it hurt to tear himself away, to remind himself of hate and horror and war, when everything seemed so beautiful, so logical and clean, when he was in Gabriel's arms.
He had never felt so lonely in his life.
He woke up slumped in the chair, fly open and dick out, bathed in the blue, empty light of the television. Beside him, Matt was in the same state, but still unconscious, collapsed in a deep sleep. After checking Matt's vitals and determining that he would be fine (if very sluggish) when he woke up, Peter washed himself up in the bathroom, then hustled Matt's heavy body onto the bed. The morphine still coursing through his system made that process difficult, and Peter was out of breath by the time Matt's head and feet were both on the bed. And since Parkman was out cold anyway, Peter didn't feel too guilty about stealing a kiss. "If you ever change your mind," Peter whispered ruefully, drawing the blanket under Matt's chin.
According to the clock, it was a little after four in the morning; he had been out for almost seven hours, even if his time with Sylar had seemed to take only a few minutes. He stole another two tablets of morphine, which he wrapped in a hotel napkin and stashed in his messenger bag, and left the hotel room, making his way back down to the lobby and outside. Even through the morphine drowsiness, he felt his head clearing, the pain backing away.
Bye, Matt. Maybe it won't always be like this.
He paused at a bus shelter at the end of the block, and deployed his phone, sending a text message to Claire.
is it safe to come home yet?
The response was startlingly immediate. were all still here-sim1 too. Peter furrowed his brow in confusion for a moment before he figured it out: Simone. "Very clever," he muttered, and kept reading. v worried abt u-ceebee
im worried too. tell them to leave&to go simones, isaacs is not safe, i will call in the morning. you stay. coming home to sleep & need you to watch over me.
sit-stay-good girl. glad i could be so useful. :(
Peter sent the same message four times--claire don't be like that but she never responded, and when he tried to fly again, to save the time getting home, he found that he couldn't do it now, and had to walk to the subway station, the morphine making every step feel like he was struggling through honey. As he slumped on the platform, he prayed that he could make it the three stops uptown to home, and then another several blocks' walk home, praying that the platforms and the subway cars remained relatively empty, because he knew he didn't have the strength to screen out the thoughts of dozens of strangers.
He hoped that a few more hours' sleep would be enough to give him the strength to keep resisting, because at the moment, he just didn't have it.
He wanted to be back there with him. He wanted more of Gabriel's kiss, Gabriel's voice, Gabriel's eyes. He wanted to be kissing Claire, flying with her. He wanted Simone to hold him in her arms. He wanted Nathan to hold him. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to die. He wanted his old life back. But did he want to go back to being the little brother, flaky, crazy, slutty, without a direction or a purpose? He didn't know what he wanted, besides, maybe, a good dish of canneloni and 40 hours of sleep. He tried to reassure himself that two weeks ago, it seemed impossible that he could fly instead of taking the subway; maybe the canneloni wasn't outside the realm of possibility.
...TO BE CONTINUED...
Note: I just had to use the phrase "kill-crazy rampage", because I just don't hear it used often enough. :) More to come, though it might take me a little while.
previous:: next
Pairing: Peter/Matt, implied Peter/others
Rating: NC-17 (sexuality, drugs, language)
Length: 4100 words
Spoilers: Through 1-11: Fallout
Summary: Peter and Matt enjoy some hard drugs and pay-per-view porn (and trade thoughts in technicolor!), and Sylar invites Peter to his fortress of solitude-plus-one. PLEASE READ DISCLAIMER.
Be Near Me (8): It's How You Play The Game
How'd you find a heart when you feel no love?
--King Biscuit Time, "Kwangchow"
Out on the street, Peter rushed along, trying to keep his eyes open for an available taxi. The hotel where Matt Parkman was staying was about eighteen blocks away, much further downtown in the financial district. Eighteen blocks away, in Manhattan, at nine in the evening; it might as well have been in Siberia. All the peanut butter that Peter had just eaten sat in his stomach like an indigestible ball of mud, and he felt like hell, sweaty and shivery, like the chills section of fever-and-chills.
They had to be nearby. It was the only explanation. Isaac and Hiro, closing in. Peter felt a shocky sensation of impending doom, and he ran down a narrow side street, ducking into a dark, grimy alley.
Pedestrians kept walking past steadily on the other side of the entrance of the alleyway, but none of them ever glanced down it, and there were no faces at any of the windows arching overhead. Peter took several deep breaths, and rubbed his palms together nervously. There was no way he could get away on foot quite fast enough, and he knew he could more easily get a taxi a few blocks further downtown.
He had to try.
With another deep, measured breath, he felt his ankles going lax, and he knew he was hovering above the ground, rising slowly but steadily. It was scary to see the world slipping down in front of him, but Peter knew he had to keep his eyes open so he could see where he was going. It felt good to levitate, the same way that it felt good to draw, the same way that it felt good to put his own broken bones back into place. As he broke into a smile, he felt himself going faster.
A lot faster.
Buoyant as a helium balloon let go, he zipped above the roof of the building he had just been standing beside; it had to be a good thirty or forty stories high, and he could look down at the top of the next building, with its littering of pigeon feathers, pigeon shit, and satellite dishes. He struggled to control his flight, shooting along over the tops of the buildings, orienting himself toward Matt's hotel. Maybe I won't need a cab at all, he thought. If I was Nathan, I'd never drive anywhere. This is awesome--except that I'm really cold and my eyes won't stop watering. And it's scary; I shouldn't be doing this in the city.
Before he had gone the whole way, he felt his mood suddenly lowering, and his altitude with it. He was just too hungry to keep doing this, and he felt panicky, wondering where he was going to come down, and without Claire there to help him heal, he could get very nastily, publicly killed. He never had figured out how to land. He settled for sinking down into a large tree in a small corner park, praying that no one was watching him struggle down, the branches tangling in his pant legs and shoelaces. Somehow, he didn't get hurt; he guessed that he remained buoyant for just long enough for his feet to get a grip on a steady branch.
Peter dropped himself down from the branch, startling an old lady walking her beagle. He gave her an apologetic smile, and walked down the street toward the hotel, his whole body shaking. Scary; too scary. Maybe that's why Nathan didn't do it.
After a quick diversion into a corner store to grab a snack, Peter made it to the Park Rose Hotel. It was exactly the kind of run-down, mediocre financial-district hotel that law officers stayed in (as opposed to the opulent, high-tech hotels for executives on the next street over). And the place was crawling with cops, feds and military. They were all in street clothes, but Peter recognized their postures and speech patterns from having met some of Nathan's military pals. Peter almost wanted to walk through the front lobby with his hands behind his head, but they paid him no attention beyond a cursory glance. He hoped he didn't look too paranoid or strung out.
By the time he got off the elevator, he knew that Parkman was nearby; his head began to pound, going from "like being poked repeatedly in the temple with a pencil eraser" to "like being stabbed with an Allen wrench in the back of the head" as he walked down the hall toward the room. His eyes watered so badly that could barely see to read the room numbers on the doors.
Like a muttering directly inside his head, he heard Matt Parkman's voice. He's here already? What the fuck, did he fly?
Peter rapped on the door with his knuckles, wincing; it felt like he'd just punched himself in the face five times. It took a while before the door opened, and Parkman stood, staring down at Peter, blinking slowly. "What do you want?" Parkman asked, but his voice wasn't confrontational; it was more confused, and decidedly blurry at the edges.
"Can I come in?" Peter asked, peering out of one eye; the lights in the hallway were just too much. He noticed that it was dark inside the hotel room.
"Yeah, sure," Parkman said vaguely, standing aside. Peter lurched in and immediately sat on the floor, next to a chair, and curled up, gripping his forehead with both hands. Parkman shut and locked the door, staring down at him. "You OK?"
"I did fly here," Peter said. "You nailed it. How you doing? Your head hurt as bad as mine?"
"Nah, not as much anymore," Parkman replied. "I took some morphine. Got a prescription today, and a shot of Imitrex, too, while I was there. That's why I had to take a nap."
"Wow. That would put me out for days."
"It would, if you weren't in this much pain. For me, it just... throws a blanket over it, I guess. You want some?"
"Imitrex?" Peter asked, pain making him a little slow on the uptake.
"Morphine. Imitrex doesn't do this any good."
"I didn't think so... Imitrex is for migraine. And yes, please."
"I told them it wasn't a migraine, but they figured it had to be, if it was as bad as I said," Parkman noted, getting a bottle of pills from a small case on the bedside table and tapping out two little green tablets for Peter. Peter chewed one, almost gagging at the taste, and shoved the broken fragments under his tongue. "Wait a minute--you said you flew. How the hell did you do that? You couldn't do that before, could you?"
A thought involuntarily flashed through Peter's mind as he tried to figure out how to describe it: Just this little sex I had with Nathan and a little sharing of his power, and I hope you're down with us doing the same thing, because I'm down, I hadn't noticed before how cute... He grimaced as he heard it echo back into his own head. Oops.
Parkman looked aghast. "You did what? Isn't he your brother?"
Peter sighed, the morphine rushing into his bloodstream, making the edges of the pain fuzzy and indistinct. He stood up, headed for the bathroom. "Yeah... let me explain." He filled a cup with water, and washed down the other tablet, rinsed his mouth, swallowed. He felt a hundred times better that he had when he first walked into the room--maybe even a thousand times better. As quickly as he could, he outlined Bennet's mission.
"You came here to fuck me?" Parkman pressed on.
"I came here to gain your powers. I don't have to fuck you to do that. We just have to have orgasms at roughly the same time, while we're... near each other." Peter came back and sat in the chair this time, smiling a little as the pain got less and less important with every heartbeat. He now felt positively good. Narcotics, under the right circumstances, were so lovely. "We can fuck, though. That's pretty much the best way."
"We can't do that," Matt said, shaking his head. "We can barely stand to be in the same room with each other." And I don't know about you, but I don't play on that team.
It's all the same game, pal--as long as you know how to play, that's good enough. "We can do it, and we have to," Peter said. "Sylar now has abilities that I can barely even fathom--he can definitely telepathically communicate with me from a distance--telepathically manipulate me. I think... you can help me... determine his weaknesses. So we can take him down." Oh, Gabriel, I'm sorry... Shit. No. Ignore that.
Parkman scoffed. "I can't ignore that," he said. "That's--you can't be--Are you..." You have this twisted thing for him, I can tell. That's fucked up. He grimaced as his thoughts noisily swarmed back onto him.
Peter shook his head. You don't know him like I do. "No. I'm not. It's not like that. It's not. I can't control my feelings yet, but I can still control my actions. He's manipulating me, like I said. He's dangerous and he's a killer, and he's a son-of-a-bitch for breaking into my mind. I want to... figure him out. I want to find him."
"Don't you think that's dangerous?"
"Well, it was dangerous last time, too. And I died. I died to stop him before, and I'd do it again. Hopefully, if everything works out, I won't have to die. Because it hurts."
Matt thought of a line from a zombie movie: It hurts to be dead. He saw Peter smile in recognition, and smiled back, and repeated, "If everything works out..."
"Because Claire's next on my list. And then he... you don't know him. And then, apparently, I'll be powerful enough to... at least have a chance."
"Claire? I thought you already did her."
Peter wondered how much he had been thinking about the girl as he was coming in; probably a lot. He had a mental porn reel of Claire playing in his mind at all times, like the headline crawl on a cable news channel, remembering the sight of her bare breasts, her glossy limbs, her kittenish sounds as she rubbed herself on his spine. As he focused on the recollection, Parkman's smile grew. "No," Peter said, a little sadly. "Not that way. We haven't shared it yet. I'm almost scared; she's going to cripple me."
"Worse ways to go," Matt mused.
"True dat," Peter said.
They chuckled in unison, and kept laughing for a while. Peter was enjoying himself; a little wasted from the morphine, feeling himself get more so all the time, seeing his own goofy smile mirrored on Matt's face. Peter could tell Matt was a lonely guy; surrounded by people, but always isolated from them at the same time, the reasons why so tangled and so far underneath that it would take years to access them. And there just wasn't time for that.
"C'mon, Parkman," Peter urged. "Let's do this, OK? Really. It doesn't need to take all night. We don't even have to be touching, I don't think. You don't have to look at me. We can just... I dunno, watch porn. They got porn in these rooms?"
"Cop hotel? Fuck yeah, they do." Charge it to the FBI--your tax dollars at work.
Peter thought, I like you more and more all the time. Parkman smirked a little, modestly, but Peter could feel that Matt was pleased. "You go ahead and pick something."
"Nah, you do it," Matt shrugged, turning away. Can't read the fucking guide anyway...
Peter blinked at the revelation. "You're dyslexic?"
"I don't wanna talk about it. It's not gonna get me in the mood, exactly." Thinking about that shit makes me think about Janice, and I'm going to be thinking about Janice anyway, watching porn, feeling guilty about that, wishing I could reach out to her but practically not even caring anymore, and feeling guilty about that. Great. Thanks, asshole. No, I'm the asshole. I'm a selfish jerk. I'm a quitter.
Peter grasped Matt by the shoulders, turning him around, and trying to meet his eyes; Matt carefully avoided eye contact. "Hey man, you gotta stop doing that to yourself," Peter said. "That's horrible. It's thinking shit like that that's been wrecking everything--isn't it? Acknowledge that. Don't bullshit me."
"Yeah," Matt said sharply. "I know my self-confidence sucks. These thoughts... I can't help it."
"Sure you can," Peter said. "You ever meditate? Ever do yoga?"
Parkman scoffed. "Uh, no."
"Dude, you should really look into it. I'm not getting all hippie on you, I swear. I'm talking about controlling your thoughts, controlling your abilities. It's all about becoming aware of your breathing, getting flexible. I'm positive that you can do this--you have to learn how. I'm going to have to learn how." Peter sighed. "Maybe we can help each other. You won't be alone anymore--you won't be the only person alive who can hear other people's thoughts." Peter immediately demonstrated this by discarding the thought Besides Sylar before he could really have it. And he didn't hear an answering echo; it almost definitely hadn't been overheard by Matt.
It could definitely be done; it was possible to hide the things that really needed to stay hidden.
Matt nodded. "All right. Let's go."
They pulled the two chairs next to each other at the side of the bed, pointed toward the television. Peter didn't turn it on yet. "Let's just do some breathing exercises," he said, crossing his legs into a lotus position. Matt looked at him as though he'd just put on a sequined fez and waved his hands over a crystal ball. Peter smirked and shrugged back. "Force of habit. You don't have to do it like this, obviously."
"Good, 'cos there's no way." Guy's a total flake.
Peter smiled, breathing deep, feeling himself at peace. A total flake who gets to bang a psycho-horny seventeen-year-old blonde sometime in the next few days. Namaste.
Matt grinned. "Namaste," he replied out loud.
"That's how you do it," Peter said calmly and quietly. "Have the thought, experience the negative emotion, and then walk on by. Takes practice, but pretty soon it becomes automatic. Now... is your breathing synched with mine?"
"Yeah."
"OK," said Peter, lifting the remote, "let's do this. And if they want to give you the run-around, you can charge this to me." Peter chose the first movie listed on the program guide.
Oh, I've seen this one, Matt thought.
Peter resisted the urge to laugh. "Should I change it?"
"Nah, it's fine. It'll work. You'll probably like it; it's about ass."
Peter did laugh then. Yeah, I like ass, and in a much more complete way than you do. Does your wife--
"You better not go there, Peter," Matt warned sharply. "Don't even think about it."
"Yeah, you're right," Peter said contritely. "Sorry. I'm not that good with the controlling myself yet. Just relax, and stay chill." Peter breathed audibly for a moment to give Matt a guideline, and then, as another guideline, undoing his pants and pouring a small puddle of lubricant his palm. Matt carefully kept his eyes on the TV screen as Peter tossed the lube bottle into his lap, but, with a heavy sigh, obligingly followed suit.
Peter glanced at the screen from time to time, but most of his attention was divided between watching Matt touch himself, and thinking about Claire, thinking about Simone, crowding his head with as many images of naked, eager females as he could so that he wouldn't think about sex with men so that he wouldn't think of--
So he didn't.
He watched Matt, focused on Matt, replaying the sight of Claire taking off her bra in his mind, but watching Matt's hand stroking his cock, watching the visible signs of his arousal manifesting in front of him, listening to the way his breathing changed. This sight, combined with the delicious, heavy bliss of the morphine, caused Peter to drift into a state of hypnotic arousal, his thoughts rolling out like fog.
I wish I could fuck you. I wish I could suck you off. Your cock is beautiful. Yours is the only cock that matters right now. I wish we were fucking. I wish you were banging my ass just like that redhead on there. Just like that. God, that would be fucking amazing.
A little tentatively: I don't think I could fuck you like that.
I wish you could try, though...
You can't be serious. Doesn't that... hurt?
No. And I wouldn't care if it did. Because I'm a slut who loves to be fucked and I'll take it as hard as you can dish it out.
"Jesus," Matt whispered, glancing at Peter. "You've got a dirty mind." Peter smiled wickedly, and closed his eyes, running a barrage of filthy, unforgivable thoughts through his mind. After a few seconds, Matt leaned back into his chair, his arm and wrist moving more aggressively, with more purpose. Peter kept himself in rhythm with Matt, even though he wanted to rush toward the finish; he had to keep pace and control himself.
...Are you gonna fuck that cheerleader in the ass?
If she'll let me--And if there's time. I don't know if there'd be time, and oh, I'd like to take my time with her if I'm going south.
You definitely at least have to bring it up. You sound like you take it enough; you should dish it out more.
Everybody's got their thing.
"Oh, geez, d'you see that?" Matt's voice was odd in comparison to the slightly reverbating echo chamber of their traded thoughts.
"No, I missed it." Peter forced his eyes to focus.
"Oh, hey, we get an instant replay. And... look out... Oh, too late." Matt laughed.
Peter laughed too. "Oh, man, that's just mean. That's happened to me before. Stung like a son of a bitch."
"Jesus... Are you serious? Sick. Dude, what haven't you done? Wait, don't answer that."
Peter sucked his breath between his teeth and bit his lip. "Are you close?"
"...Kinda. Yeah." Matt seemed surprised to admit it, even though his his forehead had begun to sweat, and his breathing deep and staggered. "Snuck up on me. I didn't think..."
In split seconds, Peter decided that he would try an experiment, planned it, and carried it out. His focused his thoughts outward, and concentrated as hard as he could.
--you just want to fuck, you just want to come, you want to come, yeah, like that, that's you, you're coming, you want to come, yeah, get off, now, get off, now, it's happening now, c'mon oh yes that's it--
Even just structuring the thoughts in his mind was enough to nudge Peter over the edge. He struggled to keep his eyes open to watch Matt, who lay in his chair with his legs half-bent, half-splayed under him, eyes shut, biting his lip, his body held suspended, anticipating the moment. Matt stifled a moan inside his closed mouth as he came, then, as it just kept mounting in intensity, let it come tumbling out as the agonizing ecstasy spread and sustained, impossibly long, impossibly sweet, almost scary.
Golden snowflakes of pleasure, a feeling like the sound of the lowest string on a violin, held by a quivering finger, the note dying away into infinity.
He felt like he was falling--not too fast, but sinking down, heavy, as though underwater with a cannonball chained to his ankle. Peter realized with sad helplessness that he was losing consciousness, had already lost it, going deep underneath it. He didn't hear or feel or sense Matt anymore, as though he'd left him behind at the surface.
***
And then he was just elsewhere.
The place from his dream. But with far more detail, everything far more realistic and tangible. Instead of being naked and spreadeagled on his back, in a bed or whatever, he was walking around, dressed in the clothes he was wearing in the hotel. He looked around him at a vast room, the size of of the ballroom in Nathan's house, and with a big empty fireplace, but the similarities ended there. There were odd little lamps along the walls which cast yellow or blue light onto spots on the mirror-polished marble floor, which had been scuffed with every step from Peter's shoes. It was realistic, but also very stylized; none of the details seemed actual because everything was so cold and perfect and linear and precise. He paused and looked down at the gleaming, reflective floor, wondering if he should take his shoes off.
"No," came a soft, caressing, utterly familiar voice, "you can leave them on. Every step you take marks me."
"Gabriel," Peter said aloud, turning to see the source of the voice, fighting off an inappropriate sensation of happiness, fighting to replace it with fear. The fear stubbornly refused to come. "What's happening? What is this?"
The tall, dark man sat in an carved, dark-wood antique chair, dressed in pale-colored slacks and crisp white shirt open at the neck, barefoot, clean-shaven, smiling. Finger- and toenails immaculate and not a hair out of place. "I brought you here as soon as I could," he replied. "This isn't real. This is in our minds. You now have the ability to meet me here."
Peter glanced down at himself again. He looked the same as the last time he had seen himself in Matt's hotel room, all windblown from flying and dirty from climbing around in a tree, and in comparison with the impeccable Gabriel Gray, he looked like a pile of dust bunnies from underneath the couch. "I... don't... I don't like being manipulated like this."
"I'm sorry you're uncomfortable. That feeling will pass in time. This is a useful space for both of us, and in time, you will be as much in command of it as I am. I've been working on it for a little while, you see, as a kind of mental side-project, hoping that someday I'd be able to have someone come and join me. Now, with your telepathy, you've gained enough ability to access it. You and I are the only ones. You're safe here, I promise that."
"Your promises don't mean much to me," Peter replied, but he did feel his anxiety diminishing. He didn't feel the headache, or the effects of the morphine here, he noted; he felt exactly as himself, on a slightly better-than-average day.
"There's nothing I could do to harm you here. I wouldn't do that," said Gabriel softly. "You're the only chance I have."
"For what?" Peter scoffed. "For redemption? For survival?"
"For love," Gabriel said, with enormous sincerity.
It was, as the expression went, so funny that Peter forgot to laugh. "You," said Peter slowly, "are crazy."
"Isn't it something," Gabriel responded with a little smile, "how we can just dismiss someone entirely with that little phrase? How many times have you heard that, Peter? How many people have told you to see a shrink? Go get some meds? Go kill yourself if you're so unsure and miserable?"
Peter winced. True. How many times had he been told that? By how many people? How many times had Nathan told Peter outright to commit suicide? Joking, sure, but it still hurt, still left the lingering thought that Nathan just wanted Peter dead. Even though it wasn't true. It wasn't. "I was on meds for a couple of months after Dad died. They helped."
"I was on meds, too," Gabriel said, holding up his hands and grinning. "I've got an official diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive and BPD, how 'bout you?"
Borderline personality disorder? Oh, I don't think there's anything borderline about it, Gabe, ol' pal. Peter hoped that his thoughts could be overheard; Gabriel's smile disappeared, but he didn't seem upset, only fascinated by Peter. "Did you go off your meds, and that's why you've gone on this kill-crazy rampage?"
"Oh, wouldn't that be nice and simple? No, it wasn't like that. I stopped years ago. There's nothing really wrong with me. Drugs just dulled me even more, and I was already in danger of vanishing entirely. You didn't know me before. I was such a nice guy. I was as tiny and harmless as a mouse." Peter's mouth went dry as Sylar crossed his lanky legs; he was well over six feet tall. He was a lean but massive presence. How would anyone mistake this man for a mouse? "Quiet. Studious. Shy to the point of silence. I didn't want to disappear, but I didn't know how to stop that downward spiral into the shadows." That good-humored smile again. "All I had to sustain me was the knowledge that I was different, that I was significant. I hung on to that, despite everything, even though no one believed that nice, quiet little Gabriel Gray could ever really amount to something."
"And now..."
"It doesn't matter. We are now who we are now. And I don't want you to misunderstand me. The others--they can't share this with us. Only we can. We, the repositories of power. You and I, Peter. We're the only ones. You are my only chance. And I am yours." Those eyes, those wide-open, trusting, longing eyes, completely free of malice or guile, searched Peter's face.
"I... have to... destroy you," Peter faltered.
"Do you think they're going to let you survive?" Gabriel said, arching his eyebrows. "Do you really think they're going to just let you walk around, able to do what you can do, knowing the power that you have?"
"My power's not destructive; yours is."
"Oh, your power is destructive, Peter," said Gabriel, an edge of greed, of nastiness, sharpening his voice. "You just haven't learned how to use it that way yet. You will have to learn how, if you want to survive. Your friends are only your friends as long as you're useful to them; once they realize the power you've accumulated, you will become a threat. As I am a threat."
"The difference between me and you is that I don't kill people." Peter clung to that idea like a life raft. "You kill. You've killed so many people. You've even killed the wrong people; you just wasted them. Those were people with families and feelings. You're the threat."
"You think I'm a threat?" He stood up, approached Peter, stared down at him like he could incinerate Peter with the fire in his eyes. Peter stared back, willing himself not to be intimidated, holding his head up high and his body relaxed, but ready to fight if necessary. "You think I'm the threat you should be worried about? No, no, no. Bennet and his monkeys have done a great job of distracting you from the real threat. Those who would take people like you, and I, and your little cheerleader, and your precious, beautiful, sexy, wonderful, clueless brother, and eliminate us if we won't become their weapons."
"How do you know this?"
"Bennet likes to gloat," Gabriel shrugged. "It's part of his job satisfaction. That, and torture, and kidnapping; he's very good at it. I kind of admire him."
Peter sighed. "I don't have to be here," he said. "I don't have to listen to this. I can wake up and go."
"Yes, you can," was Gabriel's reply. The nasty edge was gone from his voice, and Peter caught a glimpse of how he had been before; shy, tentative, a faint hesitant lisp, still inclined to try to push up the glasses he no longer wore. "Kiss me before you leave. Please."
"I don't want to be your..." Peter was in mid-sentence when Gabriel bent and kissed him, holding him gently steady, and Peter put his arms around Gabriel and returned the kiss.
It's just a dream; nothing bad can happen. It's just a dream. It's just a kiss. We are nothing to each other and this is not about love, any more than rape is about lust. This is just an abuse of power, nothing more... I can't feel that way about him. He's a monster and he even acknowledges that he's a monster. It doesn't make sense. I can't feel like this.
Gabriel's eyes were moist when he finally broke away. "Don't trust Nakamura," he said to Peter, still in the same soft, whispery tone of voice, but somehow hard and steely at the same time. "He will betray you. They'll all betray you. Only I never will."
Peter snatched away. "You're full of shit." The last thing he saw was a quick, hurt, tentative smile on Gabriel's face, and then everything winked out and Peter was rising again.
Amazing how it felt to rise up out of dreams; amazing how much it hurt to tear himself away, to remind himself of hate and horror and war, when everything seemed so beautiful, so logical and clean, when he was in Gabriel's arms.
He had never felt so lonely in his life.
He woke up slumped in the chair, fly open and dick out, bathed in the blue, empty light of the television. Beside him, Matt was in the same state, but still unconscious, collapsed in a deep sleep. After checking Matt's vitals and determining that he would be fine (if very sluggish) when he woke up, Peter washed himself up in the bathroom, then hustled Matt's heavy body onto the bed. The morphine still coursing through his system made that process difficult, and Peter was out of breath by the time Matt's head and feet were both on the bed. And since Parkman was out cold anyway, Peter didn't feel too guilty about stealing a kiss. "If you ever change your mind," Peter whispered ruefully, drawing the blanket under Matt's chin.
According to the clock, it was a little after four in the morning; he had been out for almost seven hours, even if his time with Sylar had seemed to take only a few minutes. He stole another two tablets of morphine, which he wrapped in a hotel napkin and stashed in his messenger bag, and left the hotel room, making his way back down to the lobby and outside. Even through the morphine drowsiness, he felt his head clearing, the pain backing away.
Bye, Matt. Maybe it won't always be like this.
He paused at a bus shelter at the end of the block, and deployed his phone, sending a text message to Claire.
is it safe to come home yet?
The response was startlingly immediate. were all still here-sim1 too. Peter furrowed his brow in confusion for a moment before he figured it out: Simone. "Very clever," he muttered, and kept reading. v worried abt u-ceebee
im worried too. tell them to leave&to go simones, isaacs is not safe, i will call in the morning. you stay. coming home to sleep & need you to watch over me.
sit-stay-good girl. glad i could be so useful. :(
Peter sent the same message four times--claire don't be like that but she never responded, and when he tried to fly again, to save the time getting home, he found that he couldn't do it now, and had to walk to the subway station, the morphine making every step feel like he was struggling through honey. As he slumped on the platform, he prayed that he could make it the three stops uptown to home, and then another several blocks' walk home, praying that the platforms and the subway cars remained relatively empty, because he knew he didn't have the strength to screen out the thoughts of dozens of strangers.
He hoped that a few more hours' sleep would be enough to give him the strength to keep resisting, because at the moment, he just didn't have it.
He wanted to be back there with him. He wanted more of Gabriel's kiss, Gabriel's voice, Gabriel's eyes. He wanted to be kissing Claire, flying with her. He wanted Simone to hold him in her arms. He wanted Nathan to hold him. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to die. He wanted his old life back. But did he want to go back to being the little brother, flaky, crazy, slutty, without a direction or a purpose? He didn't know what he wanted, besides, maybe, a good dish of canneloni and 40 hours of sleep. He tried to reassure himself that two weeks ago, it seemed impossible that he could fly instead of taking the subway; maybe the canneloni wasn't outside the realm of possibility.
...TO BE CONTINUED...
Note: I just had to use the phrase "kill-crazy rampage", because I just don't hear it used often enough. :) More to come, though it might take me a little while.
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