(no subject)
Title: He might succumb to what you haven't seen
Author: eonism
Rating: Pg13 (character death, themes, violence)
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to NBC. I'm just having a laugh at their expense.
Characters/Pairings: Peter/Mohinder
Word Count: 5,033
Author's notes: Highly speculative regarding the extent of Peter's memory loss/recovery. Post-season two. Written before the season three spoilers. I regret nothing.
Summary: He was out of himself, his head in the dusty apartment across town as time passed in a slow crawl. Perhaps his heart was, too; pieces of himself strewn about the city, bound by threads of twine leading back to Mohinder’s apartment. For it, he felt somehow cold.
--
In his mother’s home, Peter simply existed. His father would have called it moping; Nathan would have called it overly dramatic. His mother had already called it hiding, but what difference did that make, ghosting down the narrow apartment hallways and in the rooms where he was raised.
He stared at thumb-smudged photographs with thick curled paper edges, drawn to the spot at his mother’s mantle. They were carefully arranged in heavy and elaborate frames, looping metal and polished wood serving as shrines to abandoned ways of living, shed like a dying skin more and more each day. Looking into the whites in eyes and smiles and piano keys it was, or at least it seemed that way, his thoughts adrift in the liquid monotony of blank concrete walls and memories that still blinked at him sleepily in the back of his mind.
Maybe Nathan would have been right to say that; then again he usually was.
“It’s a tragedy.”
Peter turned, swallowed in a tense bob of his throat. From the parlor doorway his mother’s mouth was thin, long and weathered hands smoothing the imagined wrinkles from her well-pressed black skirt.
“It wasn’t supposed to come to this,” she assured him, chin up, “but you will survive it. Nathan tried so hard to make sure you had your life, Peter - it’s what he would have wanted for you.”
“Nathan never would have wanted this,” Peter told himself, but what difference did that make now?
--
Hiro had said that Adam was gone. Somewhere safe. Where he could never hurt anyone else again.
Hiro never said where, not really, with a grim note in his voice and certain heaviness in his brow. Seeing the tight lines forming beneath the bottom edges of his plastic frames, Peter looked down at his hands sitting uselessly in his lap. He nodded his head slowly, and decided not to ask.
But sometimes when he closed his eyes, he could still hear Adam’s voice, soft and smiling, whispering on the other side of the wall.
--
Heidi filled in the gaps.
She painted the picture of their lives in the four months that Peter was gone, cold and crude though it seemed to hear it after the fact. Her fingertips told the story, spelling out the clunky-sounding words as they skimmed absent gestures across the polished wood face of the kitchen table, smiling patiently amid the detached refinement in his mother’s formal dining room. It was a picture of hospital visits and empty beds and whiskey bottles, and late-night arguments over the telephone as Simon and Monty watched silently from the kitchen doorway.
His mother never told him anything, at least not like this. It didn’t really matter. It still made his head hurt, eyes closed, borrowed memories speeding by behind his eye sockets like a broken movie reel. Heidi just patted his forearm gently like she always did, her smile meeting the corners of her eyes, still shrink-wrapped in tears.
“At least Nathan finally found you,” she offered serenely. “This is what he would’ve wanted.”
Peter just looked away.
--
It wasn’t his brother’s casket, Peter decided, sitting on a church pew in a borrowed Armani suit.
It hadn’t been his father’s casket at his funeral either. He knew his mother would say that if she could hear him now, perched in silent repose on the bench beside him, the picture of grief in a flawless black dress and fur coat. But this time, feeling the hold of Heidi’s slender fingers his arm as she dabbed the running mascara from her cheek, Peter couldn’t find a way to make it real.
The minister led in a prayer. The gathering of mourners dressed in their darkly suited finery all lowered their heads. Out of the corner of his eye Peter noticed someone in the pew behind him, someone who didn’t. Black suit, pale rose colored shirt, a stiff looking Oxford tie; lowered eyes and brow lined under a crown of familiar, now carefully kempt curls.
The small cathedral whispered in a quiet progression of “Amen.” Peter stared, for just a moment, before returning to his brother’s empty casket.
--
His apartment was cold when Peter opened the door, sliding the key into the lock with a familiar shush-click of metal pieces. It almost surprised him, at first. To feel the way the key still fit after all this time, pushing the door open and feeling the recycled air on his face, smelling the dust and the feel of disuse.
His things were where he had left them four months earlier, clothes in the closet, junk mail on the coffee table with two books and a note pad. Collecting dust, untouched, like a shrine left in his honor, in memory of Peter Petrelli. The only thing that was changed was an empty refrigerator and the old photos tacked onto the wall, of long-gone Christmases and bad hair days. In the bedroom the skinny wall mirror he’d bought in college was smashed, shattered in a fist-shaped impact, a halo in slivers of broken glass that followed him with a dozen withered eyes whenever he walked passed it.
He could nearly hear Nathan’s voice; “I kept it all here, for you.”
In the bottom of the top right dresser drawer was a well-read edition of Activating Evolution. The covers were worn, tattered and weightless in his hands when he picked it up and thumbed through pages with folded corners and spotty brown rings from coffee-stains and soda. On the bottom right of the final page in his hasty scrawl were a name, number and address, written in blue ink and underlined twice.
Tracing his index finger across the looping M, Peter took a deep breath.
--
“You could cure it…couldn’t you?”
The apartment hadn’t changed, save new furniture and heavy looking metal locks. It breathed with something Peter couldn’t put his finger on, like a fuzzy memory or a bad dream, when he first knocked at the front door and saw Molly peek her head out with cautious eyes. In any case he was glad that Matt offered to take her out for the afternoon when Mohinder invited him in, the other man who was there when he was brother had died regarding Peter stiffly with a limp gesture in his direction and lick of his bottom lip. Mohinder just looked at him without speaking, sharing a strange sideways glance and inaudible swallow from across the kitchen. Standing between them, Peter felt like somehow unwanted, or altogether unnecessary. Neither would have surprised him.
Mohinder sighed and looked suddenly older than he’d let on in the kitchen. Perched like a bird in the chair facing the sofa, looking from over the coffee table with lines in his knuckles. It felt familiar, but Peter’s stomach still buzzed like angered hornets.
“In theory, yes,” he said patiently, “It’s possible to develop an inhibitor. But that kind of research takes time, testing. I don’t have the team or the resources to accomplish that, and even if they lent them to me - ”
“But you could.”
Another sigh. “What you’re asking requires weeks of development before it can even be tested, let alone administered to you on a trial basis.”
“I don’t have time.” Peter closed his eyes. “People get hurt because of me - because of what I can do, okay? I’m no good to anybody like this.”
The line of Mohinder’s brow creased unnaturally. “You don’t know that for sure, Peter,” he reasoned, and licked his bottom lip in hesitation. “I know this isn’t my place, but…I don’t think this is what your brother would have wanted for you - ”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Peter’s voice was suddenly harsh, a cold echo in the otherwise empty apartment. Mohinder lifted his chin with a deep breath, straightened in his seat, and Peter just looked away. “Nathan trusted you,” he said, and sagged against the sofa’s stiff cushion, his shoulders drooping as his fingers curled into his palms until blunt nails bit at skin. “I guess he just always thought you could…fix me, somehow. And I thought that, you of all people, after everything that’s happened…maybe you could.”
From the chair Mohinder’s neat posture melted. He swallowed audibly and leaned forward across the coffee table, elbows propped on open knees. With a hesitant hand he reached out, slowly, uncurling Peter’s fingers from his palm. The gesture was unconscious, but looking at Peter’s downcast eyes, Mohinder seemed somehow at ease with it.
“I don’t think you need a cure, Peter,” he offered quietly, “You don’t need to be fixed. There’s nothing wrong with what you are - you just need…time, to sort this out on your own.”
Peter’s mouth fell open crookedly on a shaky breath and slow blink, lifting hooded eyes to meet the newborn care in the other man’s face. “I don’t want be alone,” he said, barely more than a murmur, lost in the silence of the apartment.
Holding his fingers as though they were fit to break, Mohinder said nothing. Only swallowed, slowly, and nodding his head, for the first time in weeks Peter wasn’t.
--
When Peter slept he didn’t dream anymore, not really. Just saw cold gray concrete and his brother’s face in a faded photograph. Sometimes Adam was there and sometimes he wasn’t, sitting in the corner of the room with a smile, telling him it was all for the better. Sometimes there was a hand brushing through the shielding fall of bangs long since shorn off, and a desperate sigh of “Peter” hot against his cheek.
When he awoke, he was always alone, staring at the broken bedroom mirror and the tired eyes looking back at him.
Reaching out to blindly grope the nightstand for his cell phone, Peter dialed the now familiar number and held his breath through each hollow ring.
--
“I thought he murdered you.”
“Who?”
Even in the dark, the look Mohinder leveled him was dangerous. Peter’s throat felt suddenly dry.
“I drove your body back to your mother’s house. It was the only thing I could think to do at the time. You were so…small, lying like that in the back of my cab.” Sullenly, Mohinder’s gaze settled at a point on the wall by the headboard, above Peter’s head where he couldn’t quite read what was going on behind it. Surely something he must have picked up living with a psychic, Peter assumed. “I blamed myself. You came to me for help, and I was the one who needed saving.”
Peter traced the line of Mohinder’s vision in silence and swallowed. Placing a hand on the other man’s chest, he felt the heat of his skin and rush of his blood through the gauzy fabric of his shirt. With a soundless breath he shifted closer atop the neatly made bedspread, until he took up the width of Mohinder’s peripheral, and closed his eyes.
“I’ve done some really terrible things,” he murmured, if only to hear himself say it aloud. Suddenly he felt selfish for it, and beside him he felt Mohinder stiffen slightly.
The precursor to the inevitable rejection; Peter sucked in a breath and held it, waiting, but this time it didn’t come.
The bedroom dissolved into the quiet of breathing and the shudder-shush of skin shifting against cotton, and for a time it was enough.
--
“Why did you go to the funeral?”
Looking into his microscope, if Mohinder was irritated, he didn’t show it. Save a sigh and a vague shrug of his shoulder.
“When Matthew told me what happened I had to pay my respects.” His voice was tight, reserved from behind the undone buttons at the top of his collar and the strict row that followed. “He and I weren’t particularly close, but your brother - he was a good man.”
Peter had no business being here, he knew that much. The laboratory was cold, sterile under the clean white light of the strict lines of fluorescent bulbs overhead. He had promised himself he would never come back here, never put his trust in these people again as he sat on the metal examination table, his legs a dead weight swung over the sharply angled side. To never buy into their lies and false hopes, Bob, and Elle; instead Peter watched the slender line of Mohinder’s body busy about the lab, a tired looking silhouette in a long white lab coat.
Still, it didn’t hurt to ask. And it didn’t hurt to stay, either, just once. There was no pretense to his coming here this time, and what it was worth, that made it feel okay.
“I just had no idea you were going to the funeral, I guess.” He lifted his shoulder, a vague shrug and tilt of his head. “I haven’t - well, no one’s heard from you in a while. As far as I know.”
And what did he know? He’d been gone for months; how long, he didn’t really know anymore.
Mohinder paused, looking away from the instrument. Turning, he leaned back against the table and leveled Peter a look the other man couldn’t read. “I wanted to see you,” he admitted stiffly, crossing his arms in a measure of defense. “Matthew called me from Texas to tell me about Nathan, and I - ” His mind worked visibly behind his eyes, carefully choosing the words with a tightened line of mouth, “I just felt that I needed to know, that you were really alive this time.”
“Sylar?”
Mohinder’s brow furrowed. “Well, yes,” he shook his head, “and the explosion, at Kirby Plaza.”
Peter flinched inwardly, and swallowed. City light and fire slid into his mind like thin strips of film in cold recollection. Whether it was his own or the other man’s, he didn’t know, and it made little difference now. He ignored it in any case, sliding off the examination table with the skid of rubber sole on cold tile and crossing the distance between them.
“But I’m not going anywhere this time,” Peter said, and reached out to place his hands on Mohinder’s still stiffly held arms, regarding his still cautious frown with a canine sincerity. “Okay?”
Lifting his chin, Mohinder straightened rigidly and betrayed little. With the hollow whine of door hinges his eyes darted passed Peter’s face and over his shoulder. Frowning Peter turned, catching sight of Elle at the doorway in a slouching column of slender limbs, a capricious little smirk flickering across her mouth.
His throat bobbing tightly, Peter said nothing.
--
“I told you he could help you, didn’t I?”
Peter’s mouth curved knowingly. “You didn’t always think that.”
“Well.” Nathan’s brow rose. Shifting his weight against the edge of the kitchen table with a vague lift of his shoulder, he still couldn’t admit when he was wrong. Peter felt somewhat comforted by it. “Just, make sure you don’t push him off this time, Pete. There’s no one left to take care of you if you do - no one I can trust you with.”
“Don’t talk like that - ”
“It’s true. And while I don’t necessarily, approve, of whatever it is you’re doing,” to which Peter rolled his eyes, “Suresh is looking out for you now…and I don’t really want to know what would happen to you if he weren’t.”
“You always took care of me, Nate.”
“Not always.” Something cold ghosted the corner of Nathan’s mouth. “Just don’t burn your bridges.”
“Did you say something, Peter?”
Peter blinked at the sudden touch at his wrist, staring at the empty space around Heidi’s table.
“Nothing,” he said, and offered her a weak smile. “Just, thinking out loud I guess.”
--
Matt left the apartment, moving across town. Mohinder seemed vaguely pained at the decision but said nothing of it, and Peter thought better of it to ask. He wasn’t particularly upset to see the other man go, and it wasn’t really his place to say anything of it. Mohinder had said Matt was always “a little wary” of him since Texas; Peter was just tired of being looked like he needed to be watched.
Molly still regarded him impersonally, like something to be dissected under a microscope. It seemed fitting, he supposed, given who was raising her. Sometimes he imagined himself fixed to her bedroom wall by slender metal pins, kept under glass in a decorative case. Whether that was his thought or hers, Peter wasn’t sure.
She kept her distance, studying Peter from the kitchen table or at the bedroom doorway whenever he came to the apartment, as though she was waiting for him to do something. Whatever that was he never understood, and when he asked her if she needed anything her face simply pinched.
“You’re not allowed to hurt him,” she announced, and turned to leave him silent on the couch, flipping long plates of brown-blonde hair and closing the door behind her.
“She’s been through a lot,” Mohinder said softly when Molly was out of earshot, by way of explanation. Giving Peter a weak sort of half-smile, Peter felt as though he’d just walked into the middle of a conversation. “Just give her some time to adjust.”
“Why does she think I’ll hurt you?”
The smile wavered and Mohinder said nothing. Getting up from the sofa he muttered distractedly about needing to get up early the next day. From the chair Peter quietly watched him retreat to the bedroom, banished to the spot.
“He’s so fragile, don’t you think?” He could nearly hear the words coming from Adam’s mouth. It crowded out Nathan’s voice like a disease, leaving only a hot whisper smirking into his ear and a ghosting weight on his shoulder. “You’re going to break him at this rate. And then where will you go?”
Watching the bedroom door close, Peter had no answer.
--
“I can’t hear your thoughts anymore.”
Shifting in the warmth of cotton sheets, Mohinder had opened his eyes to the shadows striping the bedroom ceiling and sighed in the core of his chest. “Is that necessarily a bad thing?” he asked, eyes tracing the arc of dingy yellow light speeding across the corner of the room from the passing car outside. “Sometimes I just don’t have anything interesting to think about. I thought it was a positive sign, really.”
“I dunno. I just don’t like it.” Into the skin of his stomach Peter’s voice was dampened to a syrupy murmur. Lifting his head to distract Mohinder’s vision, his eyes caught the blur of fleeting light, round and dark in the blue-black of the other man’s bedroom, making the gold stand out between the speckles of green like a dog when faced with a flashlight’s glow. Propping himself on an outstretched palm Peter shrugged. “S’like it’s empty in my head again, I guess.”
“Don’t talk like that,” came the too-swift reply. Mohinder’s brow furrowed by degrees, then relaxed, his mouth going slack on a sigh. “You’re not alone.” He touched a hand to Peter’s shoulder, stroking his thumb softly over the light ridges of slender bone. “You know that.”
Peter said nothing, just looked down at his hands. Long-fingered, slender, they were now somehow useless like this, with their knobby knuckles and fine tips. No one would ever really know how much damage they’d done.
"Just get some sleep." Pressing his lips to Peter's brow Mohinder pulled him down beside him, circling his arms around his waist and keeping him close.
“I just need to know that I won’t lose you too,” Peter didn’t say, closing his eyes and burying his face in the crook of Mohinder's shoulder.
--
“He was here. Peter, he came back.”
When Peter heard the angry shudder of breath over the line he snapped his cell phone shut. Before it fell to the floor in a clatter of plastic parts he was already out the window, flying across the city in a burst of speed that left car alarms wailing at his back. He didn’t remember touching down or where he landed, or whether anyone had seen him when he did, just the sound of his footsteps echoing in the empty apartment stairwell in pace with the thrumming in his rib cage.
The front door was open, heavy lock pulled apart and lying in neat pieces on the ground. Pushing it back Peter expected the worst, thoughts turning to blood and broken glass and another goddamn wooden box. Instead Mohinder was standing in the living room, back to the door, one arm crossed over his chest and his other hand a fist at his mouth.
“Where’s Molly?” Peter panted, catching his breath as he looked around the room to survey whatever damage had been done. Everything appeared in order at first glance, the furniture placed in tidily arranged stations, glasses and plates in the cupboards. Nothing moved or out of place. “I came as soon as I could - I don’t understand - ”
“She’s with Matthew.” Mohinder’s voice was thick with something quiet and hateful. “She doesn’t need to know about this.”
“But it was him?” Peter went to his side, reaching a hand to his shoulder and making unconscious circles over the tensing stretch of muscle beneath his shirt. Mohinder didn’t seem to register it, his dark eyes fixed in empty space across the room. “You’re sure Sylar was here?”
“He pulled the locks on the doors and windows apart and laid them on the floor in neat rows.” The fire in his voice made Peter’s hands clench at nothing. “He’s making a point Peter.”
“So he’s still alive?”
“He broke in, about two months ago.” Exhaling deeply Mohinder rubbed his hand across his forehead as though to smooth out the furrows there. “When you were in Texas. He held Molly, a woman named Maya and myself hostage in exchange for my help.”
Shaking his head Peter made an incredulous sound. “And you never told me about this?”
“It had nothing to do with you.” Mohinder turned away, pacing towards the kitchen, throwing an irritated hand into the air. “So far as I knew you were dead at the time. And what difference does that make now? It’s not going to stop him.”
“Fine.” Peter closely followed his steps, anger smoothing from his features. “But you shouldn’t be here right now.” With a sigh Mohinder sank wearily into a chair at the kitchen table, shaking his head. Immediately Peter knelt to the floor in front of him, seeking his fingers to hold loosely in his own. “You can stay with me, or we can go somewhere else. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter - just, come with me, okay? I’ll pick up Molly from Matt’s place and we can just go.”
“Nothing’s going to change.” Shaking his head Mohinder brought his palms to his eyes to dig at them in slow circles, letting out a heavy and ragged sigh. “He’s going to keep coming until he gets what he wants. And now I’ve gotten you and Molly involved in this…this insanity all over again.”
The line of Peter’s mouth smoothed crookedly. “But what do you want?” he asked with rounded eyes, fingers nudging back and forth into the tops of the other man’s legs in a gesture meant to soothe.
Mohinder’s hands fell to his lap in a heavy clap of skin on khaki. With a short bark of a laugh his lips twisted into a toothy and vicious smirk. “I want him dead,” he said evenly, his eyes afire with more hate than Peter had ever seen him display, “but it seems even that is too much to ask for.”
Sitting silently at his feet Peter’s throat bobbed tightly. At length he drew a heavy breath, and nodded his head in the dawning of slow and ugly realization.
“Okay.”
--
Watching the warmth of sunrise chase away the blue-black shadows from his apartment walls, Peter neither slept nor dreamed. If he had it would have been of fire and broken glass and his brother’s arms, sobbing into the stiff, salt-smelling fabric of his bloodstained shirt. Instead Peter watched the sun creep out from behind the steel and concrete skyline and let Mohinder doze fitfully in the next room, reluctantly snatching what hollow measure of peace Peter’s bed could offer.
His silhouette standing guard at the bedroom window, Peter stared at the living city below and asked himself, “What would Adam have done?”
Somewhere, in whatever prison cell Hiro had made for him, he knew Adam would have been pleased to know that.
--
“Peter, what have you done?”
Finding Sylar had been easy. Peter had only needed to think of Molly for a few moments, feeling like a dusty butterfly under the girl’s careful scrutiny before he could see it, the map in his mind. At its center was a bright, bloody red dot, beaming sickly with the hiss of laughter behind his eyes.
The pinpoint was a small apartment across town. Some dusty space with blood on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, spilling out into the carpeted hallway in thick black stains. It had soaked into the floorboards and smelled like rust and death, making Peter’s face line unnaturally as he pushed open the unlocked front door, his knuckles white on the knob. After that, everything happened so fast.
“You just can’t seem to stay dead, can you?” Sylar had ground out over the scuffling of limbs and fabric on the wooden flooring, as he crudely squeezed the breath from Peter’s throat, pinning him to the ground until he was fit to dispose of properly. Peter’s ability to heal had always made that so difficult in the past.
Beneath his weight Peter kicked and flailed. His senses dulled, flooded with primal fear and the distantly glimmering memories of six months earlier, pinned to Mohinder’s living room wall. Without thinking a burst of lightning crackled to life in the spaces between their bodies; unblinking it sent the other man across the room with a guttural scream and the singe of burnt flesh, crashing into the nearby bookshelf in a hollow thump before bringing it to the floor with him. Grasping at his windpipe Peter wheezed uselessly, drawing his limbs to himself as though to make sure they were all still there, as the mangled tissue began to regenerate beneath his shaking hands. Blinking the sweat from his eyes, he watched the other man’s body begin to twitch futilely on the other side of the room, and waited for his heart to slow.
With fidgeting fingers, he blindly searched the floor for the vial of curare he’d stolen from Mohinder’s lab, and wondered if Sylar had any idea why he was even there. At any other point in his life, it may have seemed unfair.
“I did what you wanted.” Avoiding the near-lifeless body laid across the bedroom floor Peter stepped close to Mohinder, distracting his widened eyes with a determined murmur and canine tilt of his head. “You were right. He’s hurt you and everyone around you, and nothing’s going to change until he’s dead.”
“So you’ve killed him?” Mohinder asked, and let go a shaky breath, his face still lined with fear or anger, or some other horrible notion that Peter wasn’t anticipating. It was then that his eyes fell on the misplaced kitchen knife sitting on the dresser, which Peter had left out as a precautionary measure after he called the other man to come to the apartment. Mohinder’s throat bobbed on an audible swallow. “For me?”
“No.” Peter blinked slowly. “But is that what you want?”
Eying the blade, Mohinder stepped away from Peter, closing the distance between himself and the dresser in heavy steps. Peter watched Mohinder’s slender fingers trace the thick plastic hilt, staring at it in detached curiosity, his features smoothing into a clinical mask. “It shouldn’t be this easy,” he murmured to thin air.
“Is this what you want?” Peter’s legs wanted to move him closer but he kept himself rooted with tensing fingers, unsure of what to do.
“Go home, Peter.” The softness in his voice left Peter at a loss. “Please.”
--
Sitting on the edge of the armchair as night began to creep through the half-drawn blinds, Peter simply waited. He was out of himself, his head in the dusty apartment across town as time passed in a slow crawl. Perhaps his heart was, too; pieces of himself strewn about the city, bound by threads of twine leading back to Mohinder’s apartment. For it, he felt somehow cold.
A part of him wondered what Nathan would have thought of it, if he were still there; for a moment a part of him was glad that he wasn’t.
The knob turned suddenly, old hinges grinding into life. Peter shot up, turning to the door like an expectant dog awaiting its master’s return. The other man was unreadable, his face blank, blood on his shirtsleeve in fat dark blots. Without thinking Peter took a deep and shaking breath, reaching for the arm of the chair to steady himself as his knees began to turn to pulp beneath him.
“Look, I - ”
His throat was dry, lips tingling with everything he needed to ask, the words caught in his throat and in his head. Peter just wanted to be somehow nearer to him, to know that he’d done something right this time. Watching Mohinder cross the distance between the door and the armchair he could only stand precariously still as warm hands came to frame his face, callused thumbs stroking the apples of his cheeks and fingers sliding into his hair. Peter took a breath and held it, covering Mohinder’s wrists with his hands, brushing the slender bones there with the pads of his thumbs as though fit to break. He wanted to kiss him, but closed his eyes instead.
“Stay - just, stay.” Their foreheads touched. Mohinder’s breath was hot on Peter’s mouth, a plea and a command and a confession at once. “With me. Please.”
They stayed that way, breathing in the half-dark. Until city light crept in through the spaces between the blinds, to paint the ceiling in pale yellow stains, and Peter never left again.
Author: eonism
Rating: Pg13 (character death, themes, violence)
Disclaimer: Everything belongs to NBC. I'm just having a laugh at their expense.
Characters/Pairings: Peter/Mohinder
Word Count: 5,033
Author's notes: Highly speculative regarding the extent of Peter's memory loss/recovery. Post-season two. Written before the season three spoilers. I regret nothing.
Summary: He was out of himself, his head in the dusty apartment across town as time passed in a slow crawl. Perhaps his heart was, too; pieces of himself strewn about the city, bound by threads of twine leading back to Mohinder’s apartment. For it, he felt somehow cold.
--
In his mother’s home, Peter simply existed. His father would have called it moping; Nathan would have called it overly dramatic. His mother had already called it hiding, but what difference did that make, ghosting down the narrow apartment hallways and in the rooms where he was raised.
He stared at thumb-smudged photographs with thick curled paper edges, drawn to the spot at his mother’s mantle. They were carefully arranged in heavy and elaborate frames, looping metal and polished wood serving as shrines to abandoned ways of living, shed like a dying skin more and more each day. Looking into the whites in eyes and smiles and piano keys it was, or at least it seemed that way, his thoughts adrift in the liquid monotony of blank concrete walls and memories that still blinked at him sleepily in the back of his mind.
Maybe Nathan would have been right to say that; then again he usually was.
“It’s a tragedy.”
Peter turned, swallowed in a tense bob of his throat. From the parlor doorway his mother’s mouth was thin, long and weathered hands smoothing the imagined wrinkles from her well-pressed black skirt.
“It wasn’t supposed to come to this,” she assured him, chin up, “but you will survive it. Nathan tried so hard to make sure you had your life, Peter - it’s what he would have wanted for you.”
“Nathan never would have wanted this,” Peter told himself, but what difference did that make now?
--
Hiro had said that Adam was gone. Somewhere safe. Where he could never hurt anyone else again.
Hiro never said where, not really, with a grim note in his voice and certain heaviness in his brow. Seeing the tight lines forming beneath the bottom edges of his plastic frames, Peter looked down at his hands sitting uselessly in his lap. He nodded his head slowly, and decided not to ask.
But sometimes when he closed his eyes, he could still hear Adam’s voice, soft and smiling, whispering on the other side of the wall.
--
Heidi filled in the gaps.
She painted the picture of their lives in the four months that Peter was gone, cold and crude though it seemed to hear it after the fact. Her fingertips told the story, spelling out the clunky-sounding words as they skimmed absent gestures across the polished wood face of the kitchen table, smiling patiently amid the detached refinement in his mother’s formal dining room. It was a picture of hospital visits and empty beds and whiskey bottles, and late-night arguments over the telephone as Simon and Monty watched silently from the kitchen doorway.
His mother never told him anything, at least not like this. It didn’t really matter. It still made his head hurt, eyes closed, borrowed memories speeding by behind his eye sockets like a broken movie reel. Heidi just patted his forearm gently like she always did, her smile meeting the corners of her eyes, still shrink-wrapped in tears.
“At least Nathan finally found you,” she offered serenely. “This is what he would’ve wanted.”
Peter just looked away.
--
It wasn’t his brother’s casket, Peter decided, sitting on a church pew in a borrowed Armani suit.
It hadn’t been his father’s casket at his funeral either. He knew his mother would say that if she could hear him now, perched in silent repose on the bench beside him, the picture of grief in a flawless black dress and fur coat. But this time, feeling the hold of Heidi’s slender fingers his arm as she dabbed the running mascara from her cheek, Peter couldn’t find a way to make it real.
The minister led in a prayer. The gathering of mourners dressed in their darkly suited finery all lowered their heads. Out of the corner of his eye Peter noticed someone in the pew behind him, someone who didn’t. Black suit, pale rose colored shirt, a stiff looking Oxford tie; lowered eyes and brow lined under a crown of familiar, now carefully kempt curls.
The small cathedral whispered in a quiet progression of “Amen.” Peter stared, for just a moment, before returning to his brother’s empty casket.
--
His apartment was cold when Peter opened the door, sliding the key into the lock with a familiar shush-click of metal pieces. It almost surprised him, at first. To feel the way the key still fit after all this time, pushing the door open and feeling the recycled air on his face, smelling the dust and the feel of disuse.
His things were where he had left them four months earlier, clothes in the closet, junk mail on the coffee table with two books and a note pad. Collecting dust, untouched, like a shrine left in his honor, in memory of Peter Petrelli. The only thing that was changed was an empty refrigerator and the old photos tacked onto the wall, of long-gone Christmases and bad hair days. In the bedroom the skinny wall mirror he’d bought in college was smashed, shattered in a fist-shaped impact, a halo in slivers of broken glass that followed him with a dozen withered eyes whenever he walked passed it.
He could nearly hear Nathan’s voice; “I kept it all here, for you.”
In the bottom of the top right dresser drawer was a well-read edition of Activating Evolution. The covers were worn, tattered and weightless in his hands when he picked it up and thumbed through pages with folded corners and spotty brown rings from coffee-stains and soda. On the bottom right of the final page in his hasty scrawl were a name, number and address, written in blue ink and underlined twice.
Tracing his index finger across the looping M, Peter took a deep breath.
--
“You could cure it…couldn’t you?”
The apartment hadn’t changed, save new furniture and heavy looking metal locks. It breathed with something Peter couldn’t put his finger on, like a fuzzy memory or a bad dream, when he first knocked at the front door and saw Molly peek her head out with cautious eyes. In any case he was glad that Matt offered to take her out for the afternoon when Mohinder invited him in, the other man who was there when he was brother had died regarding Peter stiffly with a limp gesture in his direction and lick of his bottom lip. Mohinder just looked at him without speaking, sharing a strange sideways glance and inaudible swallow from across the kitchen. Standing between them, Peter felt like somehow unwanted, or altogether unnecessary. Neither would have surprised him.
Mohinder sighed and looked suddenly older than he’d let on in the kitchen. Perched like a bird in the chair facing the sofa, looking from over the coffee table with lines in his knuckles. It felt familiar, but Peter’s stomach still buzzed like angered hornets.
“In theory, yes,” he said patiently, “It’s possible to develop an inhibitor. But that kind of research takes time, testing. I don’t have the team or the resources to accomplish that, and even if they lent them to me - ”
“But you could.”
Another sigh. “What you’re asking requires weeks of development before it can even be tested, let alone administered to you on a trial basis.”
“I don’t have time.” Peter closed his eyes. “People get hurt because of me - because of what I can do, okay? I’m no good to anybody like this.”
The line of Mohinder’s brow creased unnaturally. “You don’t know that for sure, Peter,” he reasoned, and licked his bottom lip in hesitation. “I know this isn’t my place, but…I don’t think this is what your brother would have wanted for you - ”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Peter’s voice was suddenly harsh, a cold echo in the otherwise empty apartment. Mohinder lifted his chin with a deep breath, straightened in his seat, and Peter just looked away. “Nathan trusted you,” he said, and sagged against the sofa’s stiff cushion, his shoulders drooping as his fingers curled into his palms until blunt nails bit at skin. “I guess he just always thought you could…fix me, somehow. And I thought that, you of all people, after everything that’s happened…maybe you could.”
From the chair Mohinder’s neat posture melted. He swallowed audibly and leaned forward across the coffee table, elbows propped on open knees. With a hesitant hand he reached out, slowly, uncurling Peter’s fingers from his palm. The gesture was unconscious, but looking at Peter’s downcast eyes, Mohinder seemed somehow at ease with it.
“I don’t think you need a cure, Peter,” he offered quietly, “You don’t need to be fixed. There’s nothing wrong with what you are - you just need…time, to sort this out on your own.”
Peter’s mouth fell open crookedly on a shaky breath and slow blink, lifting hooded eyes to meet the newborn care in the other man’s face. “I don’t want be alone,” he said, barely more than a murmur, lost in the silence of the apartment.
Holding his fingers as though they were fit to break, Mohinder said nothing. Only swallowed, slowly, and nodding his head, for the first time in weeks Peter wasn’t.
--
When Peter slept he didn’t dream anymore, not really. Just saw cold gray concrete and his brother’s face in a faded photograph. Sometimes Adam was there and sometimes he wasn’t, sitting in the corner of the room with a smile, telling him it was all for the better. Sometimes there was a hand brushing through the shielding fall of bangs long since shorn off, and a desperate sigh of “Peter” hot against his cheek.
When he awoke, he was always alone, staring at the broken bedroom mirror and the tired eyes looking back at him.
Reaching out to blindly grope the nightstand for his cell phone, Peter dialed the now familiar number and held his breath through each hollow ring.
--
“I thought he murdered you.”
“Who?”
Even in the dark, the look Mohinder leveled him was dangerous. Peter’s throat felt suddenly dry.
“I drove your body back to your mother’s house. It was the only thing I could think to do at the time. You were so…small, lying like that in the back of my cab.” Sullenly, Mohinder’s gaze settled at a point on the wall by the headboard, above Peter’s head where he couldn’t quite read what was going on behind it. Surely something he must have picked up living with a psychic, Peter assumed. “I blamed myself. You came to me for help, and I was the one who needed saving.”
Peter traced the line of Mohinder’s vision in silence and swallowed. Placing a hand on the other man’s chest, he felt the heat of his skin and rush of his blood through the gauzy fabric of his shirt. With a soundless breath he shifted closer atop the neatly made bedspread, until he took up the width of Mohinder’s peripheral, and closed his eyes.
“I’ve done some really terrible things,” he murmured, if only to hear himself say it aloud. Suddenly he felt selfish for it, and beside him he felt Mohinder stiffen slightly.
The precursor to the inevitable rejection; Peter sucked in a breath and held it, waiting, but this time it didn’t come.
The bedroom dissolved into the quiet of breathing and the shudder-shush of skin shifting against cotton, and for a time it was enough.
--
“Why did you go to the funeral?”
Looking into his microscope, if Mohinder was irritated, he didn’t show it. Save a sigh and a vague shrug of his shoulder.
“When Matthew told me what happened I had to pay my respects.” His voice was tight, reserved from behind the undone buttons at the top of his collar and the strict row that followed. “He and I weren’t particularly close, but your brother - he was a good man.”
Peter had no business being here, he knew that much. The laboratory was cold, sterile under the clean white light of the strict lines of fluorescent bulbs overhead. He had promised himself he would never come back here, never put his trust in these people again as he sat on the metal examination table, his legs a dead weight swung over the sharply angled side. To never buy into their lies and false hopes, Bob, and Elle; instead Peter watched the slender line of Mohinder’s body busy about the lab, a tired looking silhouette in a long white lab coat.
Still, it didn’t hurt to ask. And it didn’t hurt to stay, either, just once. There was no pretense to his coming here this time, and what it was worth, that made it feel okay.
“I just had no idea you were going to the funeral, I guess.” He lifted his shoulder, a vague shrug and tilt of his head. “I haven’t - well, no one’s heard from you in a while. As far as I know.”
And what did he know? He’d been gone for months; how long, he didn’t really know anymore.
Mohinder paused, looking away from the instrument. Turning, he leaned back against the table and leveled Peter a look the other man couldn’t read. “I wanted to see you,” he admitted stiffly, crossing his arms in a measure of defense. “Matthew called me from Texas to tell me about Nathan, and I - ” His mind worked visibly behind his eyes, carefully choosing the words with a tightened line of mouth, “I just felt that I needed to know, that you were really alive this time.”
“Sylar?”
Mohinder’s brow furrowed. “Well, yes,” he shook his head, “and the explosion, at Kirby Plaza.”
Peter flinched inwardly, and swallowed. City light and fire slid into his mind like thin strips of film in cold recollection. Whether it was his own or the other man’s, he didn’t know, and it made little difference now. He ignored it in any case, sliding off the examination table with the skid of rubber sole on cold tile and crossing the distance between them.
“But I’m not going anywhere this time,” Peter said, and reached out to place his hands on Mohinder’s still stiffly held arms, regarding his still cautious frown with a canine sincerity. “Okay?”
Lifting his chin, Mohinder straightened rigidly and betrayed little. With the hollow whine of door hinges his eyes darted passed Peter’s face and over his shoulder. Frowning Peter turned, catching sight of Elle at the doorway in a slouching column of slender limbs, a capricious little smirk flickering across her mouth.
His throat bobbing tightly, Peter said nothing.
--
“I told you he could help you, didn’t I?”
Peter’s mouth curved knowingly. “You didn’t always think that.”
“Well.” Nathan’s brow rose. Shifting his weight against the edge of the kitchen table with a vague lift of his shoulder, he still couldn’t admit when he was wrong. Peter felt somewhat comforted by it. “Just, make sure you don’t push him off this time, Pete. There’s no one left to take care of you if you do - no one I can trust you with.”
“Don’t talk like that - ”
“It’s true. And while I don’t necessarily, approve, of whatever it is you’re doing,” to which Peter rolled his eyes, “Suresh is looking out for you now…and I don’t really want to know what would happen to you if he weren’t.”
“You always took care of me, Nate.”
“Not always.” Something cold ghosted the corner of Nathan’s mouth. “Just don’t burn your bridges.”
“Did you say something, Peter?”
Peter blinked at the sudden touch at his wrist, staring at the empty space around Heidi’s table.
“Nothing,” he said, and offered her a weak smile. “Just, thinking out loud I guess.”
--
Matt left the apartment, moving across town. Mohinder seemed vaguely pained at the decision but said nothing of it, and Peter thought better of it to ask. He wasn’t particularly upset to see the other man go, and it wasn’t really his place to say anything of it. Mohinder had said Matt was always “a little wary” of him since Texas; Peter was just tired of being looked like he needed to be watched.
Molly still regarded him impersonally, like something to be dissected under a microscope. It seemed fitting, he supposed, given who was raising her. Sometimes he imagined himself fixed to her bedroom wall by slender metal pins, kept under glass in a decorative case. Whether that was his thought or hers, Peter wasn’t sure.
She kept her distance, studying Peter from the kitchen table or at the bedroom doorway whenever he came to the apartment, as though she was waiting for him to do something. Whatever that was he never understood, and when he asked her if she needed anything her face simply pinched.
“You’re not allowed to hurt him,” she announced, and turned to leave him silent on the couch, flipping long plates of brown-blonde hair and closing the door behind her.
“She’s been through a lot,” Mohinder said softly when Molly was out of earshot, by way of explanation. Giving Peter a weak sort of half-smile, Peter felt as though he’d just walked into the middle of a conversation. “Just give her some time to adjust.”
“Why does she think I’ll hurt you?”
The smile wavered and Mohinder said nothing. Getting up from the sofa he muttered distractedly about needing to get up early the next day. From the chair Peter quietly watched him retreat to the bedroom, banished to the spot.
“He’s so fragile, don’t you think?” He could nearly hear the words coming from Adam’s mouth. It crowded out Nathan’s voice like a disease, leaving only a hot whisper smirking into his ear and a ghosting weight on his shoulder. “You’re going to break him at this rate. And then where will you go?”
Watching the bedroom door close, Peter had no answer.
--
“I can’t hear your thoughts anymore.”
Shifting in the warmth of cotton sheets, Mohinder had opened his eyes to the shadows striping the bedroom ceiling and sighed in the core of his chest. “Is that necessarily a bad thing?” he asked, eyes tracing the arc of dingy yellow light speeding across the corner of the room from the passing car outside. “Sometimes I just don’t have anything interesting to think about. I thought it was a positive sign, really.”
“I dunno. I just don’t like it.” Into the skin of his stomach Peter’s voice was dampened to a syrupy murmur. Lifting his head to distract Mohinder’s vision, his eyes caught the blur of fleeting light, round and dark in the blue-black of the other man’s bedroom, making the gold stand out between the speckles of green like a dog when faced with a flashlight’s glow. Propping himself on an outstretched palm Peter shrugged. “S’like it’s empty in my head again, I guess.”
“Don’t talk like that,” came the too-swift reply. Mohinder’s brow furrowed by degrees, then relaxed, his mouth going slack on a sigh. “You’re not alone.” He touched a hand to Peter’s shoulder, stroking his thumb softly over the light ridges of slender bone. “You know that.”
Peter said nothing, just looked down at his hands. Long-fingered, slender, they were now somehow useless like this, with their knobby knuckles and fine tips. No one would ever really know how much damage they’d done.
"Just get some sleep." Pressing his lips to Peter's brow Mohinder pulled him down beside him, circling his arms around his waist and keeping him close.
“I just need to know that I won’t lose you too,” Peter didn’t say, closing his eyes and burying his face in the crook of Mohinder's shoulder.
--
“He was here. Peter, he came back.”
When Peter heard the angry shudder of breath over the line he snapped his cell phone shut. Before it fell to the floor in a clatter of plastic parts he was already out the window, flying across the city in a burst of speed that left car alarms wailing at his back. He didn’t remember touching down or where he landed, or whether anyone had seen him when he did, just the sound of his footsteps echoing in the empty apartment stairwell in pace with the thrumming in his rib cage.
The front door was open, heavy lock pulled apart and lying in neat pieces on the ground. Pushing it back Peter expected the worst, thoughts turning to blood and broken glass and another goddamn wooden box. Instead Mohinder was standing in the living room, back to the door, one arm crossed over his chest and his other hand a fist at his mouth.
“Where’s Molly?” Peter panted, catching his breath as he looked around the room to survey whatever damage had been done. Everything appeared in order at first glance, the furniture placed in tidily arranged stations, glasses and plates in the cupboards. Nothing moved or out of place. “I came as soon as I could - I don’t understand - ”
“She’s with Matthew.” Mohinder’s voice was thick with something quiet and hateful. “She doesn’t need to know about this.”
“But it was him?” Peter went to his side, reaching a hand to his shoulder and making unconscious circles over the tensing stretch of muscle beneath his shirt. Mohinder didn’t seem to register it, his dark eyes fixed in empty space across the room. “You’re sure Sylar was here?”
“He pulled the locks on the doors and windows apart and laid them on the floor in neat rows.” The fire in his voice made Peter’s hands clench at nothing. “He’s making a point Peter.”
“So he’s still alive?”
“He broke in, about two months ago.” Exhaling deeply Mohinder rubbed his hand across his forehead as though to smooth out the furrows there. “When you were in Texas. He held Molly, a woman named Maya and myself hostage in exchange for my help.”
Shaking his head Peter made an incredulous sound. “And you never told me about this?”
“It had nothing to do with you.” Mohinder turned away, pacing towards the kitchen, throwing an irritated hand into the air. “So far as I knew you were dead at the time. And what difference does that make now? It’s not going to stop him.”
“Fine.” Peter closely followed his steps, anger smoothing from his features. “But you shouldn’t be here right now.” With a sigh Mohinder sank wearily into a chair at the kitchen table, shaking his head. Immediately Peter knelt to the floor in front of him, seeking his fingers to hold loosely in his own. “You can stay with me, or we can go somewhere else. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter - just, come with me, okay? I’ll pick up Molly from Matt’s place and we can just go.”
“Nothing’s going to change.” Shaking his head Mohinder brought his palms to his eyes to dig at them in slow circles, letting out a heavy and ragged sigh. “He’s going to keep coming until he gets what he wants. And now I’ve gotten you and Molly involved in this…this insanity all over again.”
The line of Peter’s mouth smoothed crookedly. “But what do you want?” he asked with rounded eyes, fingers nudging back and forth into the tops of the other man’s legs in a gesture meant to soothe.
Mohinder’s hands fell to his lap in a heavy clap of skin on khaki. With a short bark of a laugh his lips twisted into a toothy and vicious smirk. “I want him dead,” he said evenly, his eyes afire with more hate than Peter had ever seen him display, “but it seems even that is too much to ask for.”
Sitting silently at his feet Peter’s throat bobbed tightly. At length he drew a heavy breath, and nodded his head in the dawning of slow and ugly realization.
“Okay.”
--
Watching the warmth of sunrise chase away the blue-black shadows from his apartment walls, Peter neither slept nor dreamed. If he had it would have been of fire and broken glass and his brother’s arms, sobbing into the stiff, salt-smelling fabric of his bloodstained shirt. Instead Peter watched the sun creep out from behind the steel and concrete skyline and let Mohinder doze fitfully in the next room, reluctantly snatching what hollow measure of peace Peter’s bed could offer.
His silhouette standing guard at the bedroom window, Peter stared at the living city below and asked himself, “What would Adam have done?”
Somewhere, in whatever prison cell Hiro had made for him, he knew Adam would have been pleased to know that.
--
“Peter, what have you done?”
Finding Sylar had been easy. Peter had only needed to think of Molly for a few moments, feeling like a dusty butterfly under the girl’s careful scrutiny before he could see it, the map in his mind. At its center was a bright, bloody red dot, beaming sickly with the hiss of laughter behind his eyes.
The pinpoint was a small apartment across town. Some dusty space with blood on the hardwood floor of the kitchen, spilling out into the carpeted hallway in thick black stains. It had soaked into the floorboards and smelled like rust and death, making Peter’s face line unnaturally as he pushed open the unlocked front door, his knuckles white on the knob. After that, everything happened so fast.
“You just can’t seem to stay dead, can you?” Sylar had ground out over the scuffling of limbs and fabric on the wooden flooring, as he crudely squeezed the breath from Peter’s throat, pinning him to the ground until he was fit to dispose of properly. Peter’s ability to heal had always made that so difficult in the past.
Beneath his weight Peter kicked and flailed. His senses dulled, flooded with primal fear and the distantly glimmering memories of six months earlier, pinned to Mohinder’s living room wall. Without thinking a burst of lightning crackled to life in the spaces between their bodies; unblinking it sent the other man across the room with a guttural scream and the singe of burnt flesh, crashing into the nearby bookshelf in a hollow thump before bringing it to the floor with him. Grasping at his windpipe Peter wheezed uselessly, drawing his limbs to himself as though to make sure they were all still there, as the mangled tissue began to regenerate beneath his shaking hands. Blinking the sweat from his eyes, he watched the other man’s body begin to twitch futilely on the other side of the room, and waited for his heart to slow.
With fidgeting fingers, he blindly searched the floor for the vial of curare he’d stolen from Mohinder’s lab, and wondered if Sylar had any idea why he was even there. At any other point in his life, it may have seemed unfair.
“I did what you wanted.” Avoiding the near-lifeless body laid across the bedroom floor Peter stepped close to Mohinder, distracting his widened eyes with a determined murmur and canine tilt of his head. “You were right. He’s hurt you and everyone around you, and nothing’s going to change until he’s dead.”
“So you’ve killed him?” Mohinder asked, and let go a shaky breath, his face still lined with fear or anger, or some other horrible notion that Peter wasn’t anticipating. It was then that his eyes fell on the misplaced kitchen knife sitting on the dresser, which Peter had left out as a precautionary measure after he called the other man to come to the apartment. Mohinder’s throat bobbed on an audible swallow. “For me?”
“No.” Peter blinked slowly. “But is that what you want?”
Eying the blade, Mohinder stepped away from Peter, closing the distance between himself and the dresser in heavy steps. Peter watched Mohinder’s slender fingers trace the thick plastic hilt, staring at it in detached curiosity, his features smoothing into a clinical mask. “It shouldn’t be this easy,” he murmured to thin air.
“Is this what you want?” Peter’s legs wanted to move him closer but he kept himself rooted with tensing fingers, unsure of what to do.
“Go home, Peter.” The softness in his voice left Peter at a loss. “Please.”
--
Sitting on the edge of the armchair as night began to creep through the half-drawn blinds, Peter simply waited. He was out of himself, his head in the dusty apartment across town as time passed in a slow crawl. Perhaps his heart was, too; pieces of himself strewn about the city, bound by threads of twine leading back to Mohinder’s apartment. For it, he felt somehow cold.
A part of him wondered what Nathan would have thought of it, if he were still there; for a moment a part of him was glad that he wasn’t.
The knob turned suddenly, old hinges grinding into life. Peter shot up, turning to the door like an expectant dog awaiting its master’s return. The other man was unreadable, his face blank, blood on his shirtsleeve in fat dark blots. Without thinking Peter took a deep and shaking breath, reaching for the arm of the chair to steady himself as his knees began to turn to pulp beneath him.
“Look, I - ”
His throat was dry, lips tingling with everything he needed to ask, the words caught in his throat and in his head. Peter just wanted to be somehow nearer to him, to know that he’d done something right this time. Watching Mohinder cross the distance between the door and the armchair he could only stand precariously still as warm hands came to frame his face, callused thumbs stroking the apples of his cheeks and fingers sliding into his hair. Peter took a breath and held it, covering Mohinder’s wrists with his hands, brushing the slender bones there with the pads of his thumbs as though fit to break. He wanted to kiss him, but closed his eyes instead.
“Stay - just, stay.” Their foreheads touched. Mohinder’s breath was hot on Peter’s mouth, a plea and a command and a confession at once. “With me. Please.”
They stayed that way, breathing in the half-dark. Until city light crept in through the spaces between the blinds, to paint the ceiling in pale yellow stains, and Peter never left again.