Heroes fic: To the Shelter of Magnolias
I started moving in to school yesterday, but instead of packing up more things to drop off today and tomorrow, I wrote this. Ah well. Researching different types of magnolia trees and looking at pictures of expensive homes in Pennsylvania is way more fun than packing, anyway. :) Also, a little bit of artses follows the fic, whee.
Title: To the Shelter of Magnolias
Characters: Peter/Mohinder
Word Count: 3,103
Rating: PG
Spoilers: through 1.23, "How to Stop an Exploding Man"
Summary: Peter reels from the aftermath of the explosion.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything except the words.
A/N: A sequel of sorts to Autumn Eyes, but you shouldn't feel lost if you go into this one not having read the first. That said, I'd love you forever if you did in fact read both. :D
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
-“Magnolia,” The Hush Sound
It was tradition while Peter was growing up for the Petrelli family to go down to the country home in Pennsylvania for a long weekend every April. The weather was usually still cool and crisp, and the thin birch trees were only beginning to bud, but Peter was home for spring break and that seemed to be the easiest time to coordinate everyone’s schedules. For many years it was only the four of them living in the vast house; Peter would walk through the quiet hallways by himself, barefoot on the sleek hardwood, headphones often pushed against his ears. The house felt solitary, but not empty, and while the trip was a family vacation on the surface, Peter usually left his family members to themselves and roamed the grounds on his own. No one seemed to have a problem with this, and so Peter grew up remembering the Pennsylvania house as a haven separate from his family, even if they happened to be sharing the same walls as always.
The grounds were wide and rolling, wrapped in a deep hush that seemed to permeate the pale walls and dark hardwood and even muffle the birdsong outside. A thin blue-black driveway trailed from the main road down to the house, curling across the neatly trimmed lawn dotted with oaks and evergreens; as it neared the inner grounds the driveway forked in two, circling around the house and the servants’ cottage like a moat. Behind the house was green and soft, a veritable lake of grass, fading away into gated gardens and finally melting into a crosshatch of thick woodland. When sounds of the everyday became too much for him inside the house, Peter would often wander out here in the sunlight, venturing through the garden gates and breathing in the quiet. Roses and peonies and rhododendrons twined together here, nurtured and nursed by the gardeners to appear wild even in this carefully manicured estate. In the shadow of the forest stood a magnolia tree, long and lean and layered in pink fragrant lace; the flowers retreated from the feet of the magnolia so that the tree was skirted by a patch of thick grass, leaving Peter plenty of room to lounge beneath the saucer blooms until the sun fell away below the trees. It was here that Peter recovered from his father’s first heart attack, here that he scribbled out embarrassing love songs that never lived beyond the pages of his journal, here that he fell soundly asleep among the blushing petals and woke up the next day with dozens of mosquito bites up and down his arms. The blooms soaked up Peter’s thoughts and dreams for one weekend every year, and no one, not even Nathan, was invited to tread among his sanctuary of magnolias.
He didn’t visit the magnolia tree as much as he grew older, not because he didn’t want to, but because Mom said it wasn’t appropriate for a man in his twenties to run and hide in the gardens during a family vacation. The four Petrellis had grown to seven, and the soft hush of the Pennsylvania estate was often painfully interrupted by Simon and Monty’s tiresome games on the lawn. They climbed the rod-iron gates and trounced across the azaleas, and once Peter even caught them swinging from the delicate magnolia branches. Dinner pulled them away before they did any damage to the trembling tree, and Peter was relieved for that; but he couldn’t help but think that he was too old to be resentful about his nephews playing around a tree that belonged to them just as much as it did to him. Still, he sat beneath the pink boughs that night anyway, creeping through the grass after everyone was asleep, and watched the moon rise.
Earlier this year, seven shrank to six, and Peter didn’t care that he hid under the magnolia that April; the comfortable solitude of the house had dissolved into actual emptiness, and he desperately needed to get away from it. The buds had shriveled away in an early spring frost; he stared blankly at the tree’s naked spread of fingers. He worried for Nathan, but Nathan sat among the emptiness in the house with painful defiance, no matter what Peter did or said or tried to say.
Next year, six would shrink to five. Peter imagined that the emptiness would find its way even to the magnolia then. It already haunted him now, a terrible ghost that followed him mercilessly through the alleyways of New York, rising in tendrils from the sewers and mingling with his flesh as he stumbled across deserted roads in the black dead of night.
Time seemed unimportant, but the sun had risen and fallen many times since the explosion. He couldn’t remember having eaten anything since then; he couldn’t remember much of anything, really, except for the fire bursting from his pores and his brother screaming. Night and day phased into one another, every dark alley seemed the same, and the echoes of Nathan’s voice in Peter’s mind never ceased. The quiet silence of the Pennsylvania estate seemed to have never existed in this nightmarish version of reality.
His head was light and throbbing and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He noticed this without much thought, for he was thinking of Nathan, always Nathan, but a distant part of his mind was frightened. The symptoms that manifested whenever he absorbed too many powers, these headaches and tremors and the nausea in the pit of his stomach, had not diminished at all since the explosion - in fact, he was pretty sure they had gotten worse. Having not eaten for days probably contributed to this, but in his clearer moments Peter figured that having his emotions tuned always to Nathan’s memory was at the heart of the problem. If he wanted to be healthy again, to survive, he had to stop thinking about his brother. But he couldn’t. The emptiness ate his insides like the hunger did, and he couldn’t not think about the hole Nathan had left.
He needed help. The lucid pieces of his mind realized this, but the haze of hunger and depression swallowed any traces of purpose left in him. What did it mean to survive if his brother were not there, because of him? What was there to live for, except to die again?
He remembered dark eyes and skin and seemed to feel the kiss that had once touched him. The haze cleared for a moment, and his feet began to take him in a familiar direction.
---
His legs dipped and sent his body forward when the door opened; strong hands caught him in his fall, hands that began to shake as violently as Peter’s own once they traced across numb fingers and balmy skin. He heard his name repeated in the darkness, felt himself being pulled awkwardly across the cold floor as two pairs of feet tumbled over one another. As his body was lifted onto wrinkled bed sheets, Peter pressed his head against his savior’s heaving chest, listening to the quickening heartbeat underneath those shallow breaths and trying to remember what it felt like to be alive.
His head lolled away from the cotton jacket and fell across a cool pillow. Through lidded eyes he looked up into the darkness to find a kind face staring back, lines stretched over cinnamon eyes, rife with pain but also with relief and something else Peter couldn’t quite put a name to. His fingers searched across the bed until they found their counterparts; he squeezed Mohinder’s hand with the strength he had left, then closed his eyes and let the blackness smother him.
---
A cold cloth fell over Peter’s forehead and he fluttered open his eyes. His ears still buzzed with screams reverberating dully in his head.
A glass was pressed into his hands. “Drink this,” Mohinder said, taking away the cloth, and Peter gulped down the water greedily. Soon a plate of food was in his lap, and he shoveled that down, too. He looked up gratefully at Mohinder’s focused face once he finished but didn’t say a word, allowing the apartment to settle in silence except for Mohinder’s measured breaths and the clink of Peter’s fork on the empty plate.
They both struggled for words but couldn’t find any. Mohinder left the edge of the bed and came back with a pitcher of water, filling the glass again to its brim. Peter turned against the pillow and wished numbly that the screaming would stop.
“You’re dehydrated,” Mohinder said, pushing the glass into Peter’s hands again. It was easiest to talk in these shallow terms, Peter knew, better to avoid the swollen wound and embrace the symptoms for a while, and he didn’t have to strength to argue anyway. He drank the contents of the glass and set it on the table by the bed, watching his fingers shake and wishing that they wouldn’t.
“Had you eaten anything before today?” Mohinder asked, voice short and controlled and taut like a wire. Peter heard the concern behind the walls Mohinder was trying to put up, and that made him feel a little better. He shook his head in response to the question, thinking how it was lucky he had even remembered to breathe during that time, let alone eat and drink. Mohinder frowned, clearly wanting to say something, but Peter looked away until the moment had passed. He could only handle so much.
He felt Mohinder rise from the bed, leaving the pitcher on the table, and walk soundlessly away. The emptiness pulsed anew, and Peter yearned for Mohinder to come back and dull it again. But Mohinder didn’t come back, not until Peter had drifted off to sleep, and only then did he stand in the doorway and watch the rise and fall of the young man’s chest beneath the sheets.
---
“Mohinder?”
Peter rubbed sleep out of his eyes and wriggled his way into a sitting position, looking about the room. Mohinder was leaning forward in a chair by the bed with his chin on his hands, and his face brightened as their eyes met. “You seem to be recovering swiftly,” Mohinder said, stretching back and tilting the chair onto its rungs. “It appears as though the cheerleader’s ability is helping you come back to good health even more quickly than I had expected.”
“How long have I been here?”
“About two and half days, I suppose,” Mohinder said. “You knocked on my door around four in the morning on Thursday, and it’s Saturday afternoon now.” Peter glanced through the open doorway into the other room; a pillow and a lump of blankets sprawled across the couch, and he realized he had taken away Mohinder’s own bed since he had arrived here. Mohinder followed Peter’s gaze and shook his head, saying, “Don’t worry about it, Peter, it’s only been a few days. Besides, I’ve spent most of my time in here, with you.”
The words were kinder and softer than Peter had expected, and his ears flushed; it seemed that Mohinder was surprised by their tone too, for he stood up quickly and passed to the other side of room, hiding his face. “How are you feeling?” he asked hastily, to cover up whatever it was that had made them both embarrassed for a moment.
“Okay,” Peter answered, only half lying. Physically he felt as though he could probably support his own weight again, but Nathan still lived in the wrinkles of his mind, leaving Peter’s body shivering and his hair damp with sweat. He sighed.
“You won’t fully recover until you accept your brother’s death, Peter.”
The words cut across his chest like a knife, and he sat taller in the bed, clenching his shaking fingers. Mohinder had no right to speak about his brother, not now, not ever, not when he didn’t even know what he was saying--he felt violated, like Mohinder had invaded the intimacy of his mind or opened his journal with greedy fingers. The anger boiled up in his throat so that he couldn’t speak for a moment, silent curses simmering on his tongue. “What the hell do you … how could you even think … how would you know that he’s dead?”
“You were talking in your sleep.” Mohinder’s voice was quieter now, aware of the line he had crossed. “I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t mean--”
“Just stop.” He had ripped off the sheets now, fuming and sick with fever. The screams rang like alarms in his ears, warped into sickening screeches from the worst kind of horror films, and he let out a desperate cry before pressing his hands over his temples and crumpling back into the mattress. Mohinder was at his side again; he took hold of Peter’s hands and pulled them away from his temples, and Peter was too drained and tired from the anger to tell Mohinder to stop as their fingers twined together.
“I’m sorry,” Mohinder whispered helplessly as Peter buried his face in his knees. “I’m just scared that you’re killing yourself over this. I don’t want to lose you again.”
He felt Mohinder’s arm slowly wrap around his shoulders, and he stiffened. “Don’t,” he choked through tears, wrenching himself out of Mohinder’s grasp and staggering out of the bed. Mohinder reached for him, and Peter suddenly caught the glint of desperate sadness in his eyes, but he shrank away from the outstretched hand. “Don’t follow me,” Peter managed to say, and he stumbled out the bedroom, out the apartment door, out into the glaring sunlight, squeezing his eyes shut with his last ounce of strength until the pavement beneath his feet melted into manicured grass and the stifled air of New York gave way to freshness. He collapsed onto his back and cried, sprawled across the Pennsylvania lawn, drinking in the hush; he tried to forget the loneliness, but now Mohinder’s despairing eyes were mixed in with the hot screams, and he couldn’t help but think how he had driven away the only person who could ever understand.
---
He ambled through the hollow rooms, hands stuffed into pockets. He had never been here before without the family, and it was strange, realizing that there were no rooms he needed to avoid or nephews running about to break the stillness. The quiet oddly placated him and his thoughts; it was that different layer of peace that had always resonated with him in the Pennsylvania house, but even so, he had expected the loneliness here to suffocate him. The walls were thick with memories, but there was something calming in seeing Nathan’s ghost in these grounds instead of shrieking in Peter’s mind. The feeling was unexpected, but welcome.
Eventually he found his way to the garden. The air was chilly, the grass dark and brittle in the hazy November light, and the magnolia tree was not in bloom. He unlatched the black gate and left it swinging, stepping delicately among the sleeping flora until he stood beneath the dark green foliage and smooth gray boughs. The tree may not be blooming, but it was flourishing even in the cold; it looked less beautiful but still felt whole. He slid down against the sleek trunk until he sat beside its base, closing his eyes to the chill and allowing the tree to support him.
When Peter opened his eyes again the sun was beginning to sink, and silhouetted against the pale raspberry clouds walked Mohinder, wrapped in a pea coat. Peter watched unflinchingly as the figure tread slowly through the trimmed lawn, touching the gate idly before moving through to the garden, pausing a few paces from where Peter lounged in the saturated paint strokes of sunset.
Peter’s chest was tight with unadulterated emotion. But Mohinder’s face was unreadable, closed off, veiled in shadows from the dying rose-light; so Peter stayed where he was, moving only to rise to his feet again and wrap an arm around the magnolia.
“I asked you not to follow me,” Peter said softly.
Mohinder’s voice was guarded but not cold. “I am aware.”
“I’m glad that you did.” Mohinder’s posture loosened at these words, and Peter was relieved for it. “How did you find this place?”
“Your mother.” Peter flinched, but said nothing. “She figured you would look for refuge here. She’s worried now, you realize, and she wants answers about what happened - but I didn’t give her any, Peter, and I told her not to come. I figured you would want to handle that matter, not me.”
Peter nodded, grateful for Mohinder’s judgment, and took a wavering step closer. “Mohinder … I’m sorry.” His mouth was full of earnestness and guilt, and he tried futilely to shape words from them.
Mohinder noted Peter’s tone and let his face slack a little, shrugging. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
“No, you should have.” Peter moved closer again, placing his hands on Mohinder’s shoulders. When Mohinder didn’t resist the touch, Peter let his hands slip down onto his arms. “You were right, and I just didn’t want to hear it. I still don’t, but that doesn’t excuse how I treated you. You saved my life, Mohinder, again. You keep saving me.”
He gazed into Mohinder’s steady eyes, searching for acceptance. Mohinder’s lips quivered into a small smile, and Peter’s hands fell down into Mohinder’s own, squeezing them. The tension fell away at last, and Peter grinned broadly. “It was the least I could do,” Mohinder said genially, and looked around at the garden dusted in pink light. “So this is your summer home?”
“More like a spring home, actually,” Peter answered. “Usually we come down here in April. The magnolia tree is really beautiful then. I wish you could see it in bloom.” He paused. “I didn’t ever let anyone else come here, you know, under the tree. Not even Nathan.”
Peter hoped Mohinder felt the significance of these words as he guided him under the magnolia’s small canopy. The sky was blushing radiantly now, echoing the tree’s April blooms, and Peter held his face so close to Mohinder’s that he could feel the man’s quickening breath on his eyelids. “Do you remember when we first kissed?” he murmured, still holding Mohinder’s hands fiercely.
“Yes. Afterwards we agreed that it was better to wait.
“I’m done with waiting, if that’s okay with you.”
“It is,” Mohinder said, and they pressed their hearts and lips together in the pale hush of twilight, falling into one another underneath the shelter of the magnolia.
^It looks nothing like a magnolia tree ... ah well.
Also, I originally got the idea for the fic from the small piece of song that I quoted at the beginning of the post. However, after looking at the song in more detail, it seemed to me that it fit as a sort of Mohinder POV. Here are the lyrics, for anyone interested:
Your heartbeat is pulsing at night in your chest
It's gold and it's glowing with all the life you have left
I received your words from hospitals where you felt alone
Your words like smoke, they made me sick but they kept me warm
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
Your eyes are like sea glass, so weathered and worn
From all they've seen of adolescence torn
The lovers who have tainted you, they pulled you into the night
They touched your skin with velvet gloves and made you feel alive
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
There's not much time
The blush in the sky begins to fade
You are weathered and worn
Your petals soft and torn
The fading color
You have bent your shoulders
To hold the weight of the world
You will surely shatter
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
There's not much time
The blush in the sky begins to fade
-"Magnolia," The Hush Sound
Title: To the Shelter of Magnolias
Characters: Peter/Mohinder
Word Count: 3,103
Rating: PG
Spoilers: through 1.23, "How to Stop an Exploding Man"
Summary: Peter reels from the aftermath of the explosion.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything except the words.
A/N: A sequel of sorts to Autumn Eyes, but you shouldn't feel lost if you go into this one not having read the first. That said, I'd love you forever if you did in fact read both. :D
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
-“Magnolia,” The Hush Sound
It was tradition while Peter was growing up for the Petrelli family to go down to the country home in Pennsylvania for a long weekend every April. The weather was usually still cool and crisp, and the thin birch trees were only beginning to bud, but Peter was home for spring break and that seemed to be the easiest time to coordinate everyone’s schedules. For many years it was only the four of them living in the vast house; Peter would walk through the quiet hallways by himself, barefoot on the sleek hardwood, headphones often pushed against his ears. The house felt solitary, but not empty, and while the trip was a family vacation on the surface, Peter usually left his family members to themselves and roamed the grounds on his own. No one seemed to have a problem with this, and so Peter grew up remembering the Pennsylvania house as a haven separate from his family, even if they happened to be sharing the same walls as always.
The grounds were wide and rolling, wrapped in a deep hush that seemed to permeate the pale walls and dark hardwood and even muffle the birdsong outside. A thin blue-black driveway trailed from the main road down to the house, curling across the neatly trimmed lawn dotted with oaks and evergreens; as it neared the inner grounds the driveway forked in two, circling around the house and the servants’ cottage like a moat. Behind the house was green and soft, a veritable lake of grass, fading away into gated gardens and finally melting into a crosshatch of thick woodland. When sounds of the everyday became too much for him inside the house, Peter would often wander out here in the sunlight, venturing through the garden gates and breathing in the quiet. Roses and peonies and rhododendrons twined together here, nurtured and nursed by the gardeners to appear wild even in this carefully manicured estate. In the shadow of the forest stood a magnolia tree, long and lean and layered in pink fragrant lace; the flowers retreated from the feet of the magnolia so that the tree was skirted by a patch of thick grass, leaving Peter plenty of room to lounge beneath the saucer blooms until the sun fell away below the trees. It was here that Peter recovered from his father’s first heart attack, here that he scribbled out embarrassing love songs that never lived beyond the pages of his journal, here that he fell soundly asleep among the blushing petals and woke up the next day with dozens of mosquito bites up and down his arms. The blooms soaked up Peter’s thoughts and dreams for one weekend every year, and no one, not even Nathan, was invited to tread among his sanctuary of magnolias.
He didn’t visit the magnolia tree as much as he grew older, not because he didn’t want to, but because Mom said it wasn’t appropriate for a man in his twenties to run and hide in the gardens during a family vacation. The four Petrellis had grown to seven, and the soft hush of the Pennsylvania estate was often painfully interrupted by Simon and Monty’s tiresome games on the lawn. They climbed the rod-iron gates and trounced across the azaleas, and once Peter even caught them swinging from the delicate magnolia branches. Dinner pulled them away before they did any damage to the trembling tree, and Peter was relieved for that; but he couldn’t help but think that he was too old to be resentful about his nephews playing around a tree that belonged to them just as much as it did to him. Still, he sat beneath the pink boughs that night anyway, creeping through the grass after everyone was asleep, and watched the moon rise.
Earlier this year, seven shrank to six, and Peter didn’t care that he hid under the magnolia that April; the comfortable solitude of the house had dissolved into actual emptiness, and he desperately needed to get away from it. The buds had shriveled away in an early spring frost; he stared blankly at the tree’s naked spread of fingers. He worried for Nathan, but Nathan sat among the emptiness in the house with painful defiance, no matter what Peter did or said or tried to say.
Next year, six would shrink to five. Peter imagined that the emptiness would find its way even to the magnolia then. It already haunted him now, a terrible ghost that followed him mercilessly through the alleyways of New York, rising in tendrils from the sewers and mingling with his flesh as he stumbled across deserted roads in the black dead of night.
Time seemed unimportant, but the sun had risen and fallen many times since the explosion. He couldn’t remember having eaten anything since then; he couldn’t remember much of anything, really, except for the fire bursting from his pores and his brother screaming. Night and day phased into one another, every dark alley seemed the same, and the echoes of Nathan’s voice in Peter’s mind never ceased. The quiet silence of the Pennsylvania estate seemed to have never existed in this nightmarish version of reality.
His head was light and throbbing and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking. He noticed this without much thought, for he was thinking of Nathan, always Nathan, but a distant part of his mind was frightened. The symptoms that manifested whenever he absorbed too many powers, these headaches and tremors and the nausea in the pit of his stomach, had not diminished at all since the explosion - in fact, he was pretty sure they had gotten worse. Having not eaten for days probably contributed to this, but in his clearer moments Peter figured that having his emotions tuned always to Nathan’s memory was at the heart of the problem. If he wanted to be healthy again, to survive, he had to stop thinking about his brother. But he couldn’t. The emptiness ate his insides like the hunger did, and he couldn’t not think about the hole Nathan had left.
He needed help. The lucid pieces of his mind realized this, but the haze of hunger and depression swallowed any traces of purpose left in him. What did it mean to survive if his brother were not there, because of him? What was there to live for, except to die again?
He remembered dark eyes and skin and seemed to feel the kiss that had once touched him. The haze cleared for a moment, and his feet began to take him in a familiar direction.
---
His legs dipped and sent his body forward when the door opened; strong hands caught him in his fall, hands that began to shake as violently as Peter’s own once they traced across numb fingers and balmy skin. He heard his name repeated in the darkness, felt himself being pulled awkwardly across the cold floor as two pairs of feet tumbled over one another. As his body was lifted onto wrinkled bed sheets, Peter pressed his head against his savior’s heaving chest, listening to the quickening heartbeat underneath those shallow breaths and trying to remember what it felt like to be alive.
His head lolled away from the cotton jacket and fell across a cool pillow. Through lidded eyes he looked up into the darkness to find a kind face staring back, lines stretched over cinnamon eyes, rife with pain but also with relief and something else Peter couldn’t quite put a name to. His fingers searched across the bed until they found their counterparts; he squeezed Mohinder’s hand with the strength he had left, then closed his eyes and let the blackness smother him.
---
A cold cloth fell over Peter’s forehead and he fluttered open his eyes. His ears still buzzed with screams reverberating dully in his head.
A glass was pressed into his hands. “Drink this,” Mohinder said, taking away the cloth, and Peter gulped down the water greedily. Soon a plate of food was in his lap, and he shoveled that down, too. He looked up gratefully at Mohinder’s focused face once he finished but didn’t say a word, allowing the apartment to settle in silence except for Mohinder’s measured breaths and the clink of Peter’s fork on the empty plate.
They both struggled for words but couldn’t find any. Mohinder left the edge of the bed and came back with a pitcher of water, filling the glass again to its brim. Peter turned against the pillow and wished numbly that the screaming would stop.
“You’re dehydrated,” Mohinder said, pushing the glass into Peter’s hands again. It was easiest to talk in these shallow terms, Peter knew, better to avoid the swollen wound and embrace the symptoms for a while, and he didn’t have to strength to argue anyway. He drank the contents of the glass and set it on the table by the bed, watching his fingers shake and wishing that they wouldn’t.
“Had you eaten anything before today?” Mohinder asked, voice short and controlled and taut like a wire. Peter heard the concern behind the walls Mohinder was trying to put up, and that made him feel a little better. He shook his head in response to the question, thinking how it was lucky he had even remembered to breathe during that time, let alone eat and drink. Mohinder frowned, clearly wanting to say something, but Peter looked away until the moment had passed. He could only handle so much.
He felt Mohinder rise from the bed, leaving the pitcher on the table, and walk soundlessly away. The emptiness pulsed anew, and Peter yearned for Mohinder to come back and dull it again. But Mohinder didn’t come back, not until Peter had drifted off to sleep, and only then did he stand in the doorway and watch the rise and fall of the young man’s chest beneath the sheets.
---
“Mohinder?”
Peter rubbed sleep out of his eyes and wriggled his way into a sitting position, looking about the room. Mohinder was leaning forward in a chair by the bed with his chin on his hands, and his face brightened as their eyes met. “You seem to be recovering swiftly,” Mohinder said, stretching back and tilting the chair onto its rungs. “It appears as though the cheerleader’s ability is helping you come back to good health even more quickly than I had expected.”
“How long have I been here?”
“About two and half days, I suppose,” Mohinder said. “You knocked on my door around four in the morning on Thursday, and it’s Saturday afternoon now.” Peter glanced through the open doorway into the other room; a pillow and a lump of blankets sprawled across the couch, and he realized he had taken away Mohinder’s own bed since he had arrived here. Mohinder followed Peter’s gaze and shook his head, saying, “Don’t worry about it, Peter, it’s only been a few days. Besides, I’ve spent most of my time in here, with you.”
The words were kinder and softer than Peter had expected, and his ears flushed; it seemed that Mohinder was surprised by their tone too, for he stood up quickly and passed to the other side of room, hiding his face. “How are you feeling?” he asked hastily, to cover up whatever it was that had made them both embarrassed for a moment.
“Okay,” Peter answered, only half lying. Physically he felt as though he could probably support his own weight again, but Nathan still lived in the wrinkles of his mind, leaving Peter’s body shivering and his hair damp with sweat. He sighed.
“You won’t fully recover until you accept your brother’s death, Peter.”
The words cut across his chest like a knife, and he sat taller in the bed, clenching his shaking fingers. Mohinder had no right to speak about his brother, not now, not ever, not when he didn’t even know what he was saying--he felt violated, like Mohinder had invaded the intimacy of his mind or opened his journal with greedy fingers. The anger boiled up in his throat so that he couldn’t speak for a moment, silent curses simmering on his tongue. “What the hell do you … how could you even think … how would you know that he’s dead?”
“You were talking in your sleep.” Mohinder’s voice was quieter now, aware of the line he had crossed. “I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t mean--”
“Just stop.” He had ripped off the sheets now, fuming and sick with fever. The screams rang like alarms in his ears, warped into sickening screeches from the worst kind of horror films, and he let out a desperate cry before pressing his hands over his temples and crumpling back into the mattress. Mohinder was at his side again; he took hold of Peter’s hands and pulled them away from his temples, and Peter was too drained and tired from the anger to tell Mohinder to stop as their fingers twined together.
“I’m sorry,” Mohinder whispered helplessly as Peter buried his face in his knees. “I’m just scared that you’re killing yourself over this. I don’t want to lose you again.”
He felt Mohinder’s arm slowly wrap around his shoulders, and he stiffened. “Don’t,” he choked through tears, wrenching himself out of Mohinder’s grasp and staggering out of the bed. Mohinder reached for him, and Peter suddenly caught the glint of desperate sadness in his eyes, but he shrank away from the outstretched hand. “Don’t follow me,” Peter managed to say, and he stumbled out the bedroom, out the apartment door, out into the glaring sunlight, squeezing his eyes shut with his last ounce of strength until the pavement beneath his feet melted into manicured grass and the stifled air of New York gave way to freshness. He collapsed onto his back and cried, sprawled across the Pennsylvania lawn, drinking in the hush; he tried to forget the loneliness, but now Mohinder’s despairing eyes were mixed in with the hot screams, and he couldn’t help but think how he had driven away the only person who could ever understand.
---
He ambled through the hollow rooms, hands stuffed into pockets. He had never been here before without the family, and it was strange, realizing that there were no rooms he needed to avoid or nephews running about to break the stillness. The quiet oddly placated him and his thoughts; it was that different layer of peace that had always resonated with him in the Pennsylvania house, but even so, he had expected the loneliness here to suffocate him. The walls were thick with memories, but there was something calming in seeing Nathan’s ghost in these grounds instead of shrieking in Peter’s mind. The feeling was unexpected, but welcome.
Eventually he found his way to the garden. The air was chilly, the grass dark and brittle in the hazy November light, and the magnolia tree was not in bloom. He unlatched the black gate and left it swinging, stepping delicately among the sleeping flora until he stood beneath the dark green foliage and smooth gray boughs. The tree may not be blooming, but it was flourishing even in the cold; it looked less beautiful but still felt whole. He slid down against the sleek trunk until he sat beside its base, closing his eyes to the chill and allowing the tree to support him.
When Peter opened his eyes again the sun was beginning to sink, and silhouetted against the pale raspberry clouds walked Mohinder, wrapped in a pea coat. Peter watched unflinchingly as the figure tread slowly through the trimmed lawn, touching the gate idly before moving through to the garden, pausing a few paces from where Peter lounged in the saturated paint strokes of sunset.
Peter’s chest was tight with unadulterated emotion. But Mohinder’s face was unreadable, closed off, veiled in shadows from the dying rose-light; so Peter stayed where he was, moving only to rise to his feet again and wrap an arm around the magnolia.
“I asked you not to follow me,” Peter said softly.
Mohinder’s voice was guarded but not cold. “I am aware.”
“I’m glad that you did.” Mohinder’s posture loosened at these words, and Peter was relieved for it. “How did you find this place?”
“Your mother.” Peter flinched, but said nothing. “She figured you would look for refuge here. She’s worried now, you realize, and she wants answers about what happened - but I didn’t give her any, Peter, and I told her not to come. I figured you would want to handle that matter, not me.”
Peter nodded, grateful for Mohinder’s judgment, and took a wavering step closer. “Mohinder … I’m sorry.” His mouth was full of earnestness and guilt, and he tried futilely to shape words from them.
Mohinder noted Peter’s tone and let his face slack a little, shrugging. “I shouldn’t have said what I did.”
“No, you should have.” Peter moved closer again, placing his hands on Mohinder’s shoulders. When Mohinder didn’t resist the touch, Peter let his hands slip down onto his arms. “You were right, and I just didn’t want to hear it. I still don’t, but that doesn’t excuse how I treated you. You saved my life, Mohinder, again. You keep saving me.”
He gazed into Mohinder’s steady eyes, searching for acceptance. Mohinder’s lips quivered into a small smile, and Peter’s hands fell down into Mohinder’s own, squeezing them. The tension fell away at last, and Peter grinned broadly. “It was the least I could do,” Mohinder said genially, and looked around at the garden dusted in pink light. “So this is your summer home?”
“More like a spring home, actually,” Peter answered. “Usually we come down here in April. The magnolia tree is really beautiful then. I wish you could see it in bloom.” He paused. “I didn’t ever let anyone else come here, you know, under the tree. Not even Nathan.”
Peter hoped Mohinder felt the significance of these words as he guided him under the magnolia’s small canopy. The sky was blushing radiantly now, echoing the tree’s April blooms, and Peter held his face so close to Mohinder’s that he could feel the man’s quickening breath on his eyelids. “Do you remember when we first kissed?” he murmured, still holding Mohinder’s hands fiercely.
“Yes. Afterwards we agreed that it was better to wait.
“I’m done with waiting, if that’s okay with you.”
“It is,” Mohinder said, and they pressed their hearts and lips together in the pale hush of twilight, falling into one another underneath the shelter of the magnolia.
^It looks nothing like a magnolia tree ... ah well.
Also, I originally got the idea for the fic from the small piece of song that I quoted at the beginning of the post. However, after looking at the song in more detail, it seemed to me that it fit as a sort of Mohinder POV. Here are the lyrics, for anyone interested:
Your heartbeat is pulsing at night in your chest
It's gold and it's glowing with all the life you have left
I received your words from hospitals where you felt alone
Your words like smoke, they made me sick but they kept me warm
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
Your eyes are like sea glass, so weathered and worn
From all they've seen of adolescence torn
The lovers who have tainted you, they pulled you into the night
They touched your skin with velvet gloves and made you feel alive
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
There's not much time
The blush in the sky begins to fade
You are weathered and worn
Your petals soft and torn
The fading color
You have bent your shoulders
To hold the weight of the world
You will surely shatter
Run where you'll be safe
Through the garden gates
To the shelter of magnolias
There's not much time
The blush in the sky begins to fade
-"Magnolia," The Hush Sound