Fic: "The Elegy Season" (Peter/Claire) NC-17
Title: The Elegy Season
Author: Steph (andbless_mybaby)
Pairing: Peter/Claire (canon)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Angst, sex, incest
Spoilers: 1.23, “How to Stop an Exploding Man”
Summary: AU after the S1 finale. Claire and Peter are the last two people alive in New York City.
Word Count: 4,700
A/N: I started this story well over a year ago, and only just resurrected it from the limbo of my “incomplete” folder. I owe the twins a hearty “thank you” for learning to sleep through the night, and therefore giving me some time to write for the first time in five months exactly, as of today.
Naturally, I must give a shout-out to missaliceblue, who writes the most exquisite Paire I’ve ever read. You may actually want to skip this and just go read her stories instead.
Additional notes follow the story’s conclusion.
_
“…but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight…”
(Edna St. Vincent Millay)
_
November 2006
Within hours of the NYC explosion, the international media has already clamped onto the news, and started shaking it to pieces. Every channel is fixated on the unfolding story, even the non-newsy ones. They are virtually interchangeable, though, for the seemingly identical aerial shots of charred buildings and randomly blooming orange fires. The levels of radiation blaring from the city are sky-high and fatally dangerous, so no-one gets too close.
From overhead, Manhattan looks like a steel and concrete soufflé that was left in the oven too long and fell in its pan. The snapped centers of suspension bridges drag uselessly in the polluted river, and skyscrapers droop in their foundations, height intact but looking like nothing so much as a bevy of sagging, blackened giants leaning in to converse over the littered gridwork of empty streets and abandoned avenues. On their heads, lightening rods bend and dip but still branch towards the sky like stalks of asphodel.
Outside, ash covers every surface. It blankets the cars on the pavement, paints whorls on the windows that have managed to remain unbroken, and forms Gatsby-esque roadblocks at random intersections, taller than a man and wide as three coffins. Filtered in with rock, bone, and miscellaneous debris, the pervasive smut blows up unstrung elevator shafts and down through the stygian corridors of the sewers. The mortal remains of the city lie in apocalyptic fallow, its residents mercifully burnt to death or embossed on the faces of concrete walls.
Claire has seen the tiny details that nobody else has - nobody living, anyway. She has seen the radioactive powder leave a soft, lethal layer on the sidewalk like snow waiting for footprints that will never come. She alone saw the explosion blot the sun like an eclipse, and watched the black cloud of death sink to the pavement and rise to the stratosphere. She has seen the little weeds rising between the cracks in the pavement shrivel and die in an instant, as if captured on time-lapse film.
She has seen her own body lit from within, a walking x-ray, and felt herself singe and fry as her skin melted from her bones. Now, unscathed, she doesn’t look outside any more.
She watches the world react on the curved screen of a nineteen-inch TV at the Clifton Motor Inn in East Harlem, an insider looking out.
Claire currently holds the (highly) dubious distinction of being one of the last two living people in New York City. Well, maybe one and a half.
On the bed behind her, Peter is etiolated and motionless. Behind his blue-veined eyelids and sooty black lashes, a milky film covers his eyes like the runny inside of an egg. Unseeing.
Every time she touches Peter, his skin bristles with energy. The first time she leaned close to his face to check that he was still breathing, the force of his mute, defensive reaction threw her across the room and blackened her hand. It’s like there’s a live current simmering just under his skin. She’s fortunate that, in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, he was dead enough to drag six blocks to the motel, the closest and most intact structure around. The power, she thinks, must mean that he’s alive, and that’s a good thing. Otherwise, he’s moribund.
The Inn is a no-star kind of place, elevated above a crumbling parking lot on spindly legs that she swears she can hear creaking in the still air. The amalgam of mildew, dust, and rat turds is obviously excellent insulation against nuclear fallout, judging from the ubiquity of these materials and the defiantly sound state of the shithole’s fundamental architecture. Claire shook the key to room 12 free from the hook behind the counter in the office. It took smashing the filthy pane of safety glass, and splattering blood all over the smut-caked terrazzo, but she figured that was more or less inconsequential at the moment.
Room 12 reminds her of that movie where the young couple discovers that they are being held hostage by a snuff mob, only nastier. The wallpaper is yellowed and curling, giving way to a stucco ceiling made gray by countless cigarettes and spiderwebs. The door closes, but refuses to lock. The generic pastoral landscape hanging cockeyed on the wall even has a sinister look, as if the watercolor shepherds are hiding scythes and meat-hooks behind their faded overalls.
After finding one of the motel’s brochures in the bedside table (along with the hollowed-out carapace of a roach, half a joint, two condom wrappers, and a Gideon’s Bible with random pages torn out), she discovered that room 15 was the Honeymooner’s Suite, complete with jacuzzi tub and “Roman mirrors.” The shudder that gave her lasted for hours.
Peter breathes, but offers no companionship, no buffer against the lonely, abandoned city that seems to be crawling with phantoms. The silence is so pervasive that it’s almost overwhelming. Within her invincible body, a lead weight makes her chest burn and ache. She sidles as close as she dares to his body, and closes her eyes.
_
He finally wakes up on Day Three, just when she was starting to worry about him starving to death.
Claire is sluggishly ingesting a pack of honey roasted peanuts filched from the vending machine downstairs, feeling the kernels stick in her dry throat. The power keeps flickering off intermittently. It’s one of those periods (the most scary, for leaving her alone with her thoughts), and she’s morosely pulling at the many broken threads in the seams of her white shirt. The dark jacket and slacks she wore the day her world ended were gone with the blast, seared into her skin. She remembers, vaguely, hearing about people in Hiroshima having the intricate patterns of their kimonos branded on them. Something about lighter colors reflecting the ultraviolet glare. What had been a really nice, tailored white shirt was now a glorified rag, something her father wouldn’t even use to polish the car. (He, of course, is dead now. Her biological father, who maintained a cadre of staff to do things like polish his cars for him, is also dead.)
It occurs to her that there are people - girls like her, their budding lives untouched by tragedy and freak genetics - getting ready for bed right now. Girls in New Bedford, Massachusetts and Topeka, Kansas are putting on their pajamas and flopping into bed in their pink, scented boudoirs. Maybe they watch the news with a delicate shudder as they are wishing their boyfriends an extensive “goodnight” on their cell phones. Distinct, non-overlapping universes exist within the world, she realizes.
Daylight has lost its meaning; her circadian rhythm has gone chaotic. Vespers sets in over the ash heap, and she is wide awake at ten p.m. when she hears Peter gasp.
He sits upright in bed, and, for a moment, his eyes retain their opaque sightlessness. His arms fumble out wildly, and air fills his lungs in a series of frantic wheezes.
Claire rises up too quickly from her perch at the small table, slams her knees on its underside. “Pe-ter,” she cries, through gritted teeth.
His head turns. It’s as if he looks right through her at first. She watches comprehension dawn slowly, hideously on his face. His luridly bloodshot eyes blink, and his mouth opens and closes silently.
She sits down beside him, and reaches for his arm. No sooner does her hand touch him than he shakes her off, pushes off the bed on unsteady legs. She follows two steps behind him as he sways across the matted carpet towards the mirror.
It’s as if the very sight of himself is sickening, from the way he blanches.
Peter staggers towards the bathroom, and she hears him retch violently. She edges towards the door; he slams it in her face without even looking up. On the other side of the hollow panel, he vomits and whimpers in pain.
It seems like hours pass once there is silence throughout the room, but it probably has been about forty-five minutes when he appears around the corner. His black hair stands up unevenly, and his face is sunken and bloodless.
“Please…” she begins, unsure even of what her next words will be.
“Don’t look at me,” he croaks.
That night, he doesn’t sleep and neither does she. He pulls a chair up to the window and stares fixedly down at the ruins of 119th Street below. In the sooty darkness, she lies with her knees drawn to her chest and pretends not to hear him crying Nathan’s name.
_
Peter had been gone all day. She doesn’t know if he walked or flew, but he disappeared some time in the morning, while she was taking a freezing, sulfur-scented shower. All day, she huddled like a small, frightened animal in the back of the room, petrified that he might not return. She doesn’t have a watch, but, in her head the hours ticked by at an interminable pace. Each second’s passing seemed almost audible, as if there were a wound clock in the room.
He shows up before twilight, covered in blood and missing the vestiges of his shirt. Claire can’t help it; her eyes run a full scan of as much of his skin as she can see, looking for the cause. Of course, Peter’s skin is as cleanly-knit as her own, with the structure of his long, electric bones apparently intact. For a long moment, they stall at an impasse over who will speak first.
“I can’t kill myself,” he tells her, agonized.
Claire doesn’t respond to that. She compulsively bites at the inside of her cheek, and looks down at her thumbs.
“Where have you been?” she asks, avoiding what he said.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he shows her the inside of his arm, which is unmarked.
“I never realized what it all meant,” he explains softly. “For you.”
“For me…?” Her lack of understanding hangs in the air.
“For you. For me. This thing.”
He has a switchblade in his pocket, a big one. He flips it open against his palm.
“Why?” he wonders aloud. “Why shouldn’t I? Don’t I deserve this?”
Every muscle, every nerve in Claire’s body screams at her. Instinctual messages in her brain shout NO! and STOP HIM!, and it’s all she can do to plant her heels and stay still. Peter slashes a deep, bubbling incision from his wrist to his inner elbow. She shuts her eyes tight, and tries not to notice the unmistakable sound of blood soaking into the carpet.
She hesitantly peeks out through closed eyelids, and catches the tail end of Peter’s arm mending veins, tendons, and layers of dermis over his exhibitory suicide attempt. Blood spatter has sprayed macabre graffiti on the heavy, smoke-scented curtains and irreparably stained the rug. The switchblade drips crimson, and Peter, arm still extended at his side, hangs his head like the wounded Christ with the weight of the entire world of his shoulders. A pained sort of awe stretches his gaunt face from bone to bone.
“No,” she answers, at last. So quietly that it’s a wonder he even hears her.
“Why?” He asks her again, his voice challenging when he looks up at her. Claire is mute, her lips and throat and voice having failed her.
Then, he leaves the room.
In the murky hour between five and six, she unlocks the room that is two doors down from them. They have no worldly belongings to move, so she simply shuts the door behind her when she leaves #12, abandoning what looks like a crime scene. In Room 9, there’s an unfamiliar bed, but the surroundings are just as filthy. She wraps a sheet around herself like an ionic column, and the hem drags behind her as she pads back out to the balcony on her bare feet. She is careful not to lean too heavily on the rusted iron rail, lest she go plummeting down to the parking lot below.
Peter is gone for a second time, and that thought makes her inexplicably anxious.
If he wants to jump off ledges or use his body like a whetstone, what’s that to her? It’s not a rhetorical question. She considers the answer, turning her mind over and over as her eyes search for him in the darkness. Her eyes are steady and composed, she makes sure, but her heart hits her throat when he returns to her again, covered in ashes and lugging himself up the steps with the druggish fever of a penitent.
The first few nights, he fell asleep sitting up in a chair by the door with his fingers knitted anxiously on his lap, as if he were expecting someone to show up. Tonight, she gets sick of watching his chin hit his chest as he tries to nod off in that pathetic posture. She grabs his wrist and tugs once, twice so that he stands. Claire pulls him down beside her on the bed. She smooths the fitted sheet with her hand, and tells him to lie down. He sleepily obliges, and she arranges his fingers on her hip when she scoots up in front of him.
“Peter?” she mumbles into their shared pillow. She’s not sure if he’s still awake.
“Uhm.”
“It’s because I need you.”
“Huh?”
“What you asked earlier. It’s because I need you.”
He doesn’t reply to that, and she’s pretty certain that he’s just slipped off into something like a coma after the horrors of the day.
_
Every nerve in her body is on edge when they hear voices outside the door, the team of Hazmat-suited angels coming to drag the wreckage for any signs of life. The Geiger counters snap and crackle like sparklers as the sexless, ageless forms, huge in their protective garb, lumber and shuffle in. With their beekeeper’s veils, they look like spirit brides, ungainly and cold.
His fingers wrapped over her lips stifle her scream. He is bigger than her, he covers her totally with her face in his neck and him panting quietly (so quietly) into her scalp.
“Shhh.” Claire’s going mad, she swears that she hears him inside her head. “I’ve got you.”
Behind the press of his body standing in the corner, she is invisible, he is invisible, they are invisible together. This, she knows, because around them, the reconnaissance crew mumble to one another with the disembodied hiss of ghosts, and move bulkily through the room. She counts the watermarks on the ceiling and tries to remember to breathe.
_
The static on the decrepit television screen crackles fuzzily through the murky current of late-night talk shows and infomercials. A faded celebrity meticulously scores zucchini and radishes into matchsticks, and an old detective film plays out in grayscale on the classics channel. The masked bandit has absconded with the screaming blonde heroine, and is tugging her up the vertiginous ascent to the tower. Like clockwork, the hero arrives.
It’s a silent flick, and so intent is Peter’s concentration on the unfolding action, that he doesn’t hear the click of the bathroom door opening. He’s coughing again, a dry, raspy hack.
“Have some water,” she suggests, offering a tumbler.
He takes a long sip from the glass, standing up. His throat bobs when he swallows.
The shabby mattress caves in the middle, and the creaking springs of the frame complain nosily when she pushes him down on the bed. He does not protest when she straddles his lap, although something behind his eyes shifts. Her shirt is pockmarked with burns and her panties are rough from being wrung out with cold water and hand soap in the bathroom sink, but her own flesh feels hot and soft under his hands, which have settled on her hips, but just barely. Her hand behind his head guides his mouth up to hers, tilting fractionally at his neck.
The first kiss is delicate, as if they are picking gently at the seams of something that is about to burst. Peter’s breath hitches in his throat. Claire almost sighs from how good it feels, at the sudden, muted rush of pleasure infusing her gray, cold world. She is as tightly wound as the strings of an instrument waiting to be played, needing to find her tone. Her lips part almost automatically, and she tastes the rusty water, piquant and bitter like she just licked a penny.
Oh, but it is Peter who is licking, tonguing the pointed ridge of her eyeteeth. Claire gathers her fingers in his hair, pulls, and is rewarded when he drags his fingers up her side roughly. She accidentally bites his lower lip, and he hums in the back of his throat. Her hand gropes blindly for his, and she hauls it under her shirt, covering her small breast with its painfully stiff little nipple. His eyeteeth bruise her skin, and his hand contracts almost painfully.
He kisses her lips, her chin, her jawline, the space behind her ear. Her eyes roll back and close when his teeth find her neck and nibble her dully. He palms her ribcage and rubs his stubbled cheek against her soft skin, abrading it, and laps at her nipples until she arches her back against his mouth. Scraping his teeth against the peaked, beige flesh just enough to make her hiss and shift, he spider-walks his fingers down the long line of her torso and obscenely traces the curve of her navel, dipping in and out of her belly button.
Her gut bottoms out when she discovers that steady, constant Peter has a fine, thick cock, which pulses under her thigh and ass as she scrambles on his lap. Lust, pure and carnal, gnaws at her chest, and it’s all she can do not to come straight away when he grabs her hips and grinds her right into position, so that the hottest parts of their bodies align. Claire’s mouth hangs acutely open, and her thighs clench his. She crushes her pubis against his erection, their clothes chafing between them, and feels her engorged clitoris slide back and forth against the hard ridge of him. Her sex weeps hot and slick as she rides him.
Peter’s eyes on her are unwavering when he grasps her hand from his chest and sucks her fingers, all four of them at the same time. He wants to see her lose control, she realizes, needs her release as much as she does.
Claire kisses him frantically, her lips getting lax with desire as she rubs herself closer to orgasm against him. He’s murmuring some sort of encouragement, mouthing her neck. A scalding wave of love for him bubbles up inside her. Her gut clenches and her face burns and she realizes with a hot panic that she’s starting to come, her hips grinding frenetically against his, and it happens, quicksilver and elemental as lightening striking the earth, him under her, hard between her legs, thrusting against her.
It’s as if the hoarse shout of her orgasm ignites something in Peter. She has not stopped shaking when he nips her waist roughly and pulls her down to him. Claire’s chin tilts involuntarily, thirstily, up. His mouth lands on hers solidly, skidding sideways for maximum contact, every muscle in his body tight and sudden against her pliant limbs. He kisses her like he’s drowning, and she’s drowning, and sharing oxygen is the only way they’ll ever make it out alive.
Her thumb is in his mouth, along with her tongue. She wants to gather him under her skin, seal herself around him. His busy hands tear her panties, pull his pants down his thighs. She’s trembling with the first thrust of his cock inside her, mewling with desire as he pushes and freezes. She’s so aroused that she swears she must be dripping, but he has a hard time entering her.
“I’m hurting you,” he whispers, appalled.
“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” she pleads as she bears down, forces her body to submit, is wracked with pain and pleasure and glory, ohgod, as her knees spread on the mattress and he penetrates her fully. He shakes in her arms, and mumbles her name like a prayer in her ear.
He begins to move underneath her, and a current of electricity between them surges to her fingertips, sparks when she clutches his back and digs her nails in. Peter flips them over, no effort at all, and presses her back to the bed so that she can see his face as he’s fucking her. He rears back on his flanks, spreading her open in front of him. His searching thumb finds her clit, rubs in rough, arrhythmic circles. It hurts, but it’s so, so good. Her arm flies out, knocks the glass of water off the bedside table. A spreading circle of damp seeps under her shoulder, and the glass rattles to the floor.
On the TV, the film builds to a climax. The bad guy is dangling the pretty girl (who is not a princess, but looks like one) by a hand off the tower’s precipice. The hero has morals and all-American good looks; more importantly, he has a gun. Inexplicably he shoots the villain -who bleeds out in seconds- yet saves the damsel. She has fat tears of gratitude tumbling down her snow-white cheeks.
Oh! reads the title card. How shall I ever repay you?
“Oh!” murmurs Claire, her throat burning from ash and thirst and the arid stickiness of one hundred parched kisses. “Oh!”
_
She sits on the vanity while he washes his penis in the sink, and avoids her gaze in the mirror. She’s naked, and her butterscotch hair falls over her breasts like Godiva when she looks over, stares hard at the bites on his shoulder that are already healing cleanly over. There’s a starburst crack in the glass, which splits their mutual reflection into many jagged shards.
He splashes the water on his face, kneads his face in his hands like he could rearrange it into something better. There are livid, dark circles under his eyes, and his skin is fish-belly white, a pale shade of sallow. He is the most beautiful, dangerous thing that she has ever seen, and the proximity of him is making her a little unsteady.
“I can’t do this,” he tells her. “I destroy people. I can’t hurt you.”
Claire looks down, down, to where her toes hang about ten inches from the carpet. Her hands grip the counter, which is studded with cigarette burns and lacy with mold, and it’s a short journey to cover his fingers with her own, even not looking.
“You can’t destroy me,” she replies. “It’s a fact.”
“Claire-” he begins, faltering.
“Peter.”
She doesn’t give in, doesn’t let go until he looks up. It takes a long time; it’s like he gets stuck at the level of her mouth. When he finally meets her eyes with his own, his gaze is feral, so involved in her that she trembles, just a little.
“Are you all right?” he asks her.
“Yes,” she tells him, but her voice breaks in the middle.
He parts her thighs solicitously, touches her between her legs. His wrist moves almost imperceptibly, and she feels a small winter engender itself in the space between them. The tepid water droplets on his hand turn cold as he trails his icy fingers over her tumid labia. She sighs erratically.
“Better?” he asks.
“Yes.” She’s sore, and he knows it. His fingers feel heavenly on her swollen flesh, and her eyelids flutter shut.
He leans in close to her. She can feel him exhale on the parts of her lips that are wet, knows without seeing that he is less than a kiss away, less than a breath. Velvet isn’t as soft as his hands; the words in the back of her throat would fill volumes. She could burn herself white inside of him.
“You’re going to live,” she pronounces simply.
“Why?”
“You have to, because I’m not giving you an option.”
_
December 2006
One day, they will have to leave the city.
She knows it, and imagines that he does, too.
On the TV, the President is giving a stirring speech about rebuilding New York. It has been one month, and the nation is ready for some good news. It is far too early for any actual reconstruction, of course - the fallout emanating from the wreckage is deadly, and will remain so for a while. The newscasters fixate on diagrams showing the half-life of radioactive decay. Now, the aerial shots show the island wreathed with electric fences, their barbed-wire summits a full fifteen feet high. Artists have already begun turning in proposals for the grand memorial that is being planned. 2010 is the planned unveiling date for a ground zero tribute at the former site of Kirby Plaza to the .07% of the world’s population who were blasted to smithereens during the still-unexplained nuclear explosion. Currently, the most popular sketch is of a glass tower, one hundred stories tall, which will spiral up towards the sun like a mammoth glacier in the middle of New Manhattan.
Claire dreams of Clearwater, Florida, and Pearl City, Hawaii - tropic climates whose names imply beauty and cleanliness. She knows that Peter could, conceivably, blink his eyes and take them someplace different. Someplace balmy, where no one could ever possibly recognize them for the long duration of their respective lives.
But then, she wakes up in the frozen dark of a daybreak during Advent, to the feeling of him shifting the extra covers over her and biting her collarbone like a famished revenant. A broad wave of arousal cramps her belly, diminishing her to just need. The rest of her drifts away. She opens her legs to him as he mounts her under the bedspread, and tosses her head back in lust. Goosebumps blanket her skin like a shroud. It’s cold, cold, cold. She can’t tell if he actually reads her mind or just heeds her shivers, but he rolls her into a little ball, knees to shoulders, and fucks warmth into her until she unfurls like night-blooming cereus under his body, clinging allover with sharp points. She is losing weight quickly, and she sometimes feels a light-headed, unnatural euphoria at the exertion of their colliding bodies, like she is going to faint.
“I love you,” she says, surprising them both, and he comes suddenly. Semen stings her sex-chafed womb.
She almost believes that he is gradually seeping under her skin, turning her into something else. He touches her like an alchemist, and Claire swears that she can probably turn herself invisible. They are less and less disturbed by the intrusion of the world into their private necropolis; they drift through the ruins like wraiths.
Maybe they’ll never leave. Maybe they’ll stick around, evanescent and incorporeal, making love on ceilings and disappearing at sunrise.
Beyond the window, the sky is an irritated shade of charcoal. The first drops of rain sizzle through the electric air, and are quickly muted by the down of ash blanketing the pavement. Within minutes, it’s a downpour. Moisture is sucked under and swirls around in the dust, coagulating into a thick paste. Mottled clumps run down the gutters, and streak the sides of the buildings. Thunder echoes in the distance, and the staccato sound of precipitation takes on a life of its own, drowning the deafening silence that has reigned for weeks.
The news reports that the rescue teams have had to evacuate for the day, because the nasty, dun-colored ash-paste is releasing poisonous vapors into the air, sightless fumes rising and blending with the unseen force field of radiation in the atmosphere, and the acid rain is burning little holes in their spacesuits.
That night, Claire sleeps deeply, lulled by the rain. She dreams of flying, of rising above the toxic gray sea to a place where the sunlight is so pure and unfiltered, it makes your eyes squint. Up by the sky, she thinks, it must be warm, and dry, and beautiful. She dreams of the springtime that is never going to happen, that will never be again.
She must have sighed in her dreams, because Peter curls his knees behind hers and holds her a bit tighter.
_
end.
A/N 2 (i): So, apparently there would be NO WAY that there would still be electricity in the city in the case of a real nuclear bomb. By the time I realized that, however, it would have totally wrecked certain parts of the story that I felt were essential. We have no way of knowing what happens when an exploding man destroys a city, so I kind of went with that.
(ii): There is no Clifton Motor Inn in East Harlem.
Author: Steph (andbless_mybaby)
Pairing: Peter/Claire (canon)
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Angst, sex, incest
Spoilers: 1.23, “How to Stop an Exploding Man”
Summary: AU after the S1 finale. Claire and Peter are the last two people alive in New York City.
Word Count: 4,700
A/N: I started this story well over a year ago, and only just resurrected it from the limbo of my “incomplete” folder. I owe the twins a hearty “thank you” for learning to sleep through the night, and therefore giving me some time to write for the first time in five months exactly, as of today.
Naturally, I must give a shout-out to missaliceblue, who writes the most exquisite Paire I’ve ever read. You may actually want to skip this and just go read her stories instead.
Additional notes follow the story’s conclusion.
_
“…but the rain / Is full of ghosts tonight…”
(Edna St. Vincent Millay)
_
November 2006
Within hours of the NYC explosion, the international media has already clamped onto the news, and started shaking it to pieces. Every channel is fixated on the unfolding story, even the non-newsy ones. They are virtually interchangeable, though, for the seemingly identical aerial shots of charred buildings and randomly blooming orange fires. The levels of radiation blaring from the city are sky-high and fatally dangerous, so no-one gets too close.
From overhead, Manhattan looks like a steel and concrete soufflé that was left in the oven too long and fell in its pan. The snapped centers of suspension bridges drag uselessly in the polluted river, and skyscrapers droop in their foundations, height intact but looking like nothing so much as a bevy of sagging, blackened giants leaning in to converse over the littered gridwork of empty streets and abandoned avenues. On their heads, lightening rods bend and dip but still branch towards the sky like stalks of asphodel.
Outside, ash covers every surface. It blankets the cars on the pavement, paints whorls on the windows that have managed to remain unbroken, and forms Gatsby-esque roadblocks at random intersections, taller than a man and wide as three coffins. Filtered in with rock, bone, and miscellaneous debris, the pervasive smut blows up unstrung elevator shafts and down through the stygian corridors of the sewers. The mortal remains of the city lie in apocalyptic fallow, its residents mercifully burnt to death or embossed on the faces of concrete walls.
Claire has seen the tiny details that nobody else has - nobody living, anyway. She has seen the radioactive powder leave a soft, lethal layer on the sidewalk like snow waiting for footprints that will never come. She alone saw the explosion blot the sun like an eclipse, and watched the black cloud of death sink to the pavement and rise to the stratosphere. She has seen the little weeds rising between the cracks in the pavement shrivel and die in an instant, as if captured on time-lapse film.
She has seen her own body lit from within, a walking x-ray, and felt herself singe and fry as her skin melted from her bones. Now, unscathed, she doesn’t look outside any more.
She watches the world react on the curved screen of a nineteen-inch TV at the Clifton Motor Inn in East Harlem, an insider looking out.
Claire currently holds the (highly) dubious distinction of being one of the last two living people in New York City. Well, maybe one and a half.
On the bed behind her, Peter is etiolated and motionless. Behind his blue-veined eyelids and sooty black lashes, a milky film covers his eyes like the runny inside of an egg. Unseeing.
Every time she touches Peter, his skin bristles with energy. The first time she leaned close to his face to check that he was still breathing, the force of his mute, defensive reaction threw her across the room and blackened her hand. It’s like there’s a live current simmering just under his skin. She’s fortunate that, in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, he was dead enough to drag six blocks to the motel, the closest and most intact structure around. The power, she thinks, must mean that he’s alive, and that’s a good thing. Otherwise, he’s moribund.
The Inn is a no-star kind of place, elevated above a crumbling parking lot on spindly legs that she swears she can hear creaking in the still air. The amalgam of mildew, dust, and rat turds is obviously excellent insulation against nuclear fallout, judging from the ubiquity of these materials and the defiantly sound state of the shithole’s fundamental architecture. Claire shook the key to room 12 free from the hook behind the counter in the office. It took smashing the filthy pane of safety glass, and splattering blood all over the smut-caked terrazzo, but she figured that was more or less inconsequential at the moment.
Room 12 reminds her of that movie where the young couple discovers that they are being held hostage by a snuff mob, only nastier. The wallpaper is yellowed and curling, giving way to a stucco ceiling made gray by countless cigarettes and spiderwebs. The door closes, but refuses to lock. The generic pastoral landscape hanging cockeyed on the wall even has a sinister look, as if the watercolor shepherds are hiding scythes and meat-hooks behind their faded overalls.
After finding one of the motel’s brochures in the bedside table (along with the hollowed-out carapace of a roach, half a joint, two condom wrappers, and a Gideon’s Bible with random pages torn out), she discovered that room 15 was the Honeymooner’s Suite, complete with jacuzzi tub and “Roman mirrors.” The shudder that gave her lasted for hours.
Peter breathes, but offers no companionship, no buffer against the lonely, abandoned city that seems to be crawling with phantoms. The silence is so pervasive that it’s almost overwhelming. Within her invincible body, a lead weight makes her chest burn and ache. She sidles as close as she dares to his body, and closes her eyes.
_
He finally wakes up on Day Three, just when she was starting to worry about him starving to death.
Claire is sluggishly ingesting a pack of honey roasted peanuts filched from the vending machine downstairs, feeling the kernels stick in her dry throat. The power keeps flickering off intermittently. It’s one of those periods (the most scary, for leaving her alone with her thoughts), and she’s morosely pulling at the many broken threads in the seams of her white shirt. The dark jacket and slacks she wore the day her world ended were gone with the blast, seared into her skin. She remembers, vaguely, hearing about people in Hiroshima having the intricate patterns of their kimonos branded on them. Something about lighter colors reflecting the ultraviolet glare. What had been a really nice, tailored white shirt was now a glorified rag, something her father wouldn’t even use to polish the car. (He, of course, is dead now. Her biological father, who maintained a cadre of staff to do things like polish his cars for him, is also dead.)
It occurs to her that there are people - girls like her, their budding lives untouched by tragedy and freak genetics - getting ready for bed right now. Girls in New Bedford, Massachusetts and Topeka, Kansas are putting on their pajamas and flopping into bed in their pink, scented boudoirs. Maybe they watch the news with a delicate shudder as they are wishing their boyfriends an extensive “goodnight” on their cell phones. Distinct, non-overlapping universes exist within the world, she realizes.
Daylight has lost its meaning; her circadian rhythm has gone chaotic. Vespers sets in over the ash heap, and she is wide awake at ten p.m. when she hears Peter gasp.
He sits upright in bed, and, for a moment, his eyes retain their opaque sightlessness. His arms fumble out wildly, and air fills his lungs in a series of frantic wheezes.
Claire rises up too quickly from her perch at the small table, slams her knees on its underside. “Pe-ter,” she cries, through gritted teeth.
His head turns. It’s as if he looks right through her at first. She watches comprehension dawn slowly, hideously on his face. His luridly bloodshot eyes blink, and his mouth opens and closes silently.
She sits down beside him, and reaches for his arm. No sooner does her hand touch him than he shakes her off, pushes off the bed on unsteady legs. She follows two steps behind him as he sways across the matted carpet towards the mirror.
It’s as if the very sight of himself is sickening, from the way he blanches.
Peter staggers towards the bathroom, and she hears him retch violently. She edges towards the door; he slams it in her face without even looking up. On the other side of the hollow panel, he vomits and whimpers in pain.
It seems like hours pass once there is silence throughout the room, but it probably has been about forty-five minutes when he appears around the corner. His black hair stands up unevenly, and his face is sunken and bloodless.
“Please…” she begins, unsure even of what her next words will be.
“Don’t look at me,” he croaks.
That night, he doesn’t sleep and neither does she. He pulls a chair up to the window and stares fixedly down at the ruins of 119th Street below. In the sooty darkness, she lies with her knees drawn to her chest and pretends not to hear him crying Nathan’s name.
_
Peter had been gone all day. She doesn’t know if he walked or flew, but he disappeared some time in the morning, while she was taking a freezing, sulfur-scented shower. All day, she huddled like a small, frightened animal in the back of the room, petrified that he might not return. She doesn’t have a watch, but, in her head the hours ticked by at an interminable pace. Each second’s passing seemed almost audible, as if there were a wound clock in the room.
He shows up before twilight, covered in blood and missing the vestiges of his shirt. Claire can’t help it; her eyes run a full scan of as much of his skin as she can see, looking for the cause. Of course, Peter’s skin is as cleanly-knit as her own, with the structure of his long, electric bones apparently intact. For a long moment, they stall at an impasse over who will speak first.
“I can’t kill myself,” he tells her, agonized.
Claire doesn’t respond to that. She compulsively bites at the inside of her cheek, and looks down at her thumbs.
“Where have you been?” she asks, avoiding what he said.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he shows her the inside of his arm, which is unmarked.
“I never realized what it all meant,” he explains softly. “For you.”
“For me…?” Her lack of understanding hangs in the air.
“For you. For me. This thing.”
He has a switchblade in his pocket, a big one. He flips it open against his palm.
“Why?” he wonders aloud. “Why shouldn’t I? Don’t I deserve this?”
Every muscle, every nerve in Claire’s body screams at her. Instinctual messages in her brain shout NO! and STOP HIM!, and it’s all she can do to plant her heels and stay still. Peter slashes a deep, bubbling incision from his wrist to his inner elbow. She shuts her eyes tight, and tries not to notice the unmistakable sound of blood soaking into the carpet.
She hesitantly peeks out through closed eyelids, and catches the tail end of Peter’s arm mending veins, tendons, and layers of dermis over his exhibitory suicide attempt. Blood spatter has sprayed macabre graffiti on the heavy, smoke-scented curtains and irreparably stained the rug. The switchblade drips crimson, and Peter, arm still extended at his side, hangs his head like the wounded Christ with the weight of the entire world of his shoulders. A pained sort of awe stretches his gaunt face from bone to bone.
“No,” she answers, at last. So quietly that it’s a wonder he even hears her.
“Why?” He asks her again, his voice challenging when he looks up at her. Claire is mute, her lips and throat and voice having failed her.
Then, he leaves the room.
In the murky hour between five and six, she unlocks the room that is two doors down from them. They have no worldly belongings to move, so she simply shuts the door behind her when she leaves #12, abandoning what looks like a crime scene. In Room 9, there’s an unfamiliar bed, but the surroundings are just as filthy. She wraps a sheet around herself like an ionic column, and the hem drags behind her as she pads back out to the balcony on her bare feet. She is careful not to lean too heavily on the rusted iron rail, lest she go plummeting down to the parking lot below.
Peter is gone for a second time, and that thought makes her inexplicably anxious.
If he wants to jump off ledges or use his body like a whetstone, what’s that to her? It’s not a rhetorical question. She considers the answer, turning her mind over and over as her eyes search for him in the darkness. Her eyes are steady and composed, she makes sure, but her heart hits her throat when he returns to her again, covered in ashes and lugging himself up the steps with the druggish fever of a penitent.
The first few nights, he fell asleep sitting up in a chair by the door with his fingers knitted anxiously on his lap, as if he were expecting someone to show up. Tonight, she gets sick of watching his chin hit his chest as he tries to nod off in that pathetic posture. She grabs his wrist and tugs once, twice so that he stands. Claire pulls him down beside her on the bed. She smooths the fitted sheet with her hand, and tells him to lie down. He sleepily obliges, and she arranges his fingers on her hip when she scoots up in front of him.
“Peter?” she mumbles into their shared pillow. She’s not sure if he’s still awake.
“Uhm.”
“It’s because I need you.”
“Huh?”
“What you asked earlier. It’s because I need you.”
He doesn’t reply to that, and she’s pretty certain that he’s just slipped off into something like a coma after the horrors of the day.
_
Every nerve in her body is on edge when they hear voices outside the door, the team of Hazmat-suited angels coming to drag the wreckage for any signs of life. The Geiger counters snap and crackle like sparklers as the sexless, ageless forms, huge in their protective garb, lumber and shuffle in. With their beekeeper’s veils, they look like spirit brides, ungainly and cold.
His fingers wrapped over her lips stifle her scream. He is bigger than her, he covers her totally with her face in his neck and him panting quietly (so quietly) into her scalp.
“Shhh.” Claire’s going mad, she swears that she hears him inside her head. “I’ve got you.”
Behind the press of his body standing in the corner, she is invisible, he is invisible, they are invisible together. This, she knows, because around them, the reconnaissance crew mumble to one another with the disembodied hiss of ghosts, and move bulkily through the room. She counts the watermarks on the ceiling and tries to remember to breathe.
_
The static on the decrepit television screen crackles fuzzily through the murky current of late-night talk shows and infomercials. A faded celebrity meticulously scores zucchini and radishes into matchsticks, and an old detective film plays out in grayscale on the classics channel. The masked bandit has absconded with the screaming blonde heroine, and is tugging her up the vertiginous ascent to the tower. Like clockwork, the hero arrives.
It’s a silent flick, and so intent is Peter’s concentration on the unfolding action, that he doesn’t hear the click of the bathroom door opening. He’s coughing again, a dry, raspy hack.
“Have some water,” she suggests, offering a tumbler.
He takes a long sip from the glass, standing up. His throat bobs when he swallows.
The shabby mattress caves in the middle, and the creaking springs of the frame complain nosily when she pushes him down on the bed. He does not protest when she straddles his lap, although something behind his eyes shifts. Her shirt is pockmarked with burns and her panties are rough from being wrung out with cold water and hand soap in the bathroom sink, but her own flesh feels hot and soft under his hands, which have settled on her hips, but just barely. Her hand behind his head guides his mouth up to hers, tilting fractionally at his neck.
The first kiss is delicate, as if they are picking gently at the seams of something that is about to burst. Peter’s breath hitches in his throat. Claire almost sighs from how good it feels, at the sudden, muted rush of pleasure infusing her gray, cold world. She is as tightly wound as the strings of an instrument waiting to be played, needing to find her tone. Her lips part almost automatically, and she tastes the rusty water, piquant and bitter like she just licked a penny.
Oh, but it is Peter who is licking, tonguing the pointed ridge of her eyeteeth. Claire gathers her fingers in his hair, pulls, and is rewarded when he drags his fingers up her side roughly. She accidentally bites his lower lip, and he hums in the back of his throat. Her hand gropes blindly for his, and she hauls it under her shirt, covering her small breast with its painfully stiff little nipple. His eyeteeth bruise her skin, and his hand contracts almost painfully.
He kisses her lips, her chin, her jawline, the space behind her ear. Her eyes roll back and close when his teeth find her neck and nibble her dully. He palms her ribcage and rubs his stubbled cheek against her soft skin, abrading it, and laps at her nipples until she arches her back against his mouth. Scraping his teeth against the peaked, beige flesh just enough to make her hiss and shift, he spider-walks his fingers down the long line of her torso and obscenely traces the curve of her navel, dipping in and out of her belly button.
Her gut bottoms out when she discovers that steady, constant Peter has a fine, thick cock, which pulses under her thigh and ass as she scrambles on his lap. Lust, pure and carnal, gnaws at her chest, and it’s all she can do not to come straight away when he grabs her hips and grinds her right into position, so that the hottest parts of their bodies align. Claire’s mouth hangs acutely open, and her thighs clench his. She crushes her pubis against his erection, their clothes chafing between them, and feels her engorged clitoris slide back and forth against the hard ridge of him. Her sex weeps hot and slick as she rides him.
Peter’s eyes on her are unwavering when he grasps her hand from his chest and sucks her fingers, all four of them at the same time. He wants to see her lose control, she realizes, needs her release as much as she does.
Claire kisses him frantically, her lips getting lax with desire as she rubs herself closer to orgasm against him. He’s murmuring some sort of encouragement, mouthing her neck. A scalding wave of love for him bubbles up inside her. Her gut clenches and her face burns and she realizes with a hot panic that she’s starting to come, her hips grinding frenetically against his, and it happens, quicksilver and elemental as lightening striking the earth, him under her, hard between her legs, thrusting against her.
It’s as if the hoarse shout of her orgasm ignites something in Peter. She has not stopped shaking when he nips her waist roughly and pulls her down to him. Claire’s chin tilts involuntarily, thirstily, up. His mouth lands on hers solidly, skidding sideways for maximum contact, every muscle in his body tight and sudden against her pliant limbs. He kisses her like he’s drowning, and she’s drowning, and sharing oxygen is the only way they’ll ever make it out alive.
Her thumb is in his mouth, along with her tongue. She wants to gather him under her skin, seal herself around him. His busy hands tear her panties, pull his pants down his thighs. She’s trembling with the first thrust of his cock inside her, mewling with desire as he pushes and freezes. She’s so aroused that she swears she must be dripping, but he has a hard time entering her.
“I’m hurting you,” he whispers, appalled.
“Don’t stop, don’t stop,” she pleads as she bears down, forces her body to submit, is wracked with pain and pleasure and glory, ohgod, as her knees spread on the mattress and he penetrates her fully. He shakes in her arms, and mumbles her name like a prayer in her ear.
He begins to move underneath her, and a current of electricity between them surges to her fingertips, sparks when she clutches his back and digs her nails in. Peter flips them over, no effort at all, and presses her back to the bed so that she can see his face as he’s fucking her. He rears back on his flanks, spreading her open in front of him. His searching thumb finds her clit, rubs in rough, arrhythmic circles. It hurts, but it’s so, so good. Her arm flies out, knocks the glass of water off the bedside table. A spreading circle of damp seeps under her shoulder, and the glass rattles to the floor.
On the TV, the film builds to a climax. The bad guy is dangling the pretty girl (who is not a princess, but looks like one) by a hand off the tower’s precipice. The hero has morals and all-American good looks; more importantly, he has a gun. Inexplicably he shoots the villain -who bleeds out in seconds- yet saves the damsel. She has fat tears of gratitude tumbling down her snow-white cheeks.
Oh! reads the title card. How shall I ever repay you?
“Oh!” murmurs Claire, her throat burning from ash and thirst and the arid stickiness of one hundred parched kisses. “Oh!”
_
She sits on the vanity while he washes his penis in the sink, and avoids her gaze in the mirror. She’s naked, and her butterscotch hair falls over her breasts like Godiva when she looks over, stares hard at the bites on his shoulder that are already healing cleanly over. There’s a starburst crack in the glass, which splits their mutual reflection into many jagged shards.
He splashes the water on his face, kneads his face in his hands like he could rearrange it into something better. There are livid, dark circles under his eyes, and his skin is fish-belly white, a pale shade of sallow. He is the most beautiful, dangerous thing that she has ever seen, and the proximity of him is making her a little unsteady.
“I can’t do this,” he tells her. “I destroy people. I can’t hurt you.”
Claire looks down, down, to where her toes hang about ten inches from the carpet. Her hands grip the counter, which is studded with cigarette burns and lacy with mold, and it’s a short journey to cover his fingers with her own, even not looking.
“You can’t destroy me,” she replies. “It’s a fact.”
“Claire-” he begins, faltering.
“Peter.”
She doesn’t give in, doesn’t let go until he looks up. It takes a long time; it’s like he gets stuck at the level of her mouth. When he finally meets her eyes with his own, his gaze is feral, so involved in her that she trembles, just a little.
“Are you all right?” he asks her.
“Yes,” she tells him, but her voice breaks in the middle.
He parts her thighs solicitously, touches her between her legs. His wrist moves almost imperceptibly, and she feels a small winter engender itself in the space between them. The tepid water droplets on his hand turn cold as he trails his icy fingers over her tumid labia. She sighs erratically.
“Better?” he asks.
“Yes.” She’s sore, and he knows it. His fingers feel heavenly on her swollen flesh, and her eyelids flutter shut.
He leans in close to her. She can feel him exhale on the parts of her lips that are wet, knows without seeing that he is less than a kiss away, less than a breath. Velvet isn’t as soft as his hands; the words in the back of her throat would fill volumes. She could burn herself white inside of him.
“You’re going to live,” she pronounces simply.
“Why?”
“You have to, because I’m not giving you an option.”
_
December 2006
One day, they will have to leave the city.
She knows it, and imagines that he does, too.
On the TV, the President is giving a stirring speech about rebuilding New York. It has been one month, and the nation is ready for some good news. It is far too early for any actual reconstruction, of course - the fallout emanating from the wreckage is deadly, and will remain so for a while. The newscasters fixate on diagrams showing the half-life of radioactive decay. Now, the aerial shots show the island wreathed with electric fences, their barbed-wire summits a full fifteen feet high. Artists have already begun turning in proposals for the grand memorial that is being planned. 2010 is the planned unveiling date for a ground zero tribute at the former site of Kirby Plaza to the .07% of the world’s population who were blasted to smithereens during the still-unexplained nuclear explosion. Currently, the most popular sketch is of a glass tower, one hundred stories tall, which will spiral up towards the sun like a mammoth glacier in the middle of New Manhattan.
Claire dreams of Clearwater, Florida, and Pearl City, Hawaii - tropic climates whose names imply beauty and cleanliness. She knows that Peter could, conceivably, blink his eyes and take them someplace different. Someplace balmy, where no one could ever possibly recognize them for the long duration of their respective lives.
But then, she wakes up in the frozen dark of a daybreak during Advent, to the feeling of him shifting the extra covers over her and biting her collarbone like a famished revenant. A broad wave of arousal cramps her belly, diminishing her to just need. The rest of her drifts away. She opens her legs to him as he mounts her under the bedspread, and tosses her head back in lust. Goosebumps blanket her skin like a shroud. It’s cold, cold, cold. She can’t tell if he actually reads her mind or just heeds her shivers, but he rolls her into a little ball, knees to shoulders, and fucks warmth into her until she unfurls like night-blooming cereus under his body, clinging allover with sharp points. She is losing weight quickly, and she sometimes feels a light-headed, unnatural euphoria at the exertion of their colliding bodies, like she is going to faint.
“I love you,” she says, surprising them both, and he comes suddenly. Semen stings her sex-chafed womb.
She almost believes that he is gradually seeping under her skin, turning her into something else. He touches her like an alchemist, and Claire swears that she can probably turn herself invisible. They are less and less disturbed by the intrusion of the world into their private necropolis; they drift through the ruins like wraiths.
Maybe they’ll never leave. Maybe they’ll stick around, evanescent and incorporeal, making love on ceilings and disappearing at sunrise.
Beyond the window, the sky is an irritated shade of charcoal. The first drops of rain sizzle through the electric air, and are quickly muted by the down of ash blanketing the pavement. Within minutes, it’s a downpour. Moisture is sucked under and swirls around in the dust, coagulating into a thick paste. Mottled clumps run down the gutters, and streak the sides of the buildings. Thunder echoes in the distance, and the staccato sound of precipitation takes on a life of its own, drowning the deafening silence that has reigned for weeks.
The news reports that the rescue teams have had to evacuate for the day, because the nasty, dun-colored ash-paste is releasing poisonous vapors into the air, sightless fumes rising and blending with the unseen force field of radiation in the atmosphere, and the acid rain is burning little holes in their spacesuits.
That night, Claire sleeps deeply, lulled by the rain. She dreams of flying, of rising above the toxic gray sea to a place where the sunlight is so pure and unfiltered, it makes your eyes squint. Up by the sky, she thinks, it must be warm, and dry, and beautiful. She dreams of the springtime that is never going to happen, that will never be again.
She must have sighed in her dreams, because Peter curls his knees behind hers and holds her a bit tighter.
_
end.
A/N 2 (i): So, apparently there would be NO WAY that there would still be electricity in the city in the case of a real nuclear bomb. By the time I realized that, however, it would have totally wrecked certain parts of the story that I felt were essential. We have no way of knowing what happens when an exploding man destroys a city, so I kind of went with that.
(ii): There is no Clifton Motor Inn in East Harlem.