[Heroes] Pigwacket returns (Petrelli ensemble, gen)
Title: Pigwacket returns
Fandom: Heroes
Characters: Petrelli ensemble (Nathan, Peter, Heidi, Monty, Simon, Angela, Arthur)
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 2,035 (W)
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the little fluffy (probably) animated beta.
Notes: For juliettesaito, who requested: "Twenty years after Voyeur, Pigwacket appears on Nathan's desk".
Previous installments:
+ Nyctophobia
+ Bunnies hate flying (but little brothers don't)
+ Voyeur
At thirty-seven, Nathan Petrelli knows that plush bunnies don’t leave boxes full with old toys piled in the attic out of their own will.
Plush bunnies are, by nature, motionless. If they’re put on a table or inside a box, they don’t move. They don’t go out for a walk; they don’t stretch their paws. Certainly they don’t climb up little, insurmountable cardboard walls and don’t open tape-sealed lids to walk around the house. Certainly, too, they don’t cross half New York to reach their old owners from their childhood house to the one they reside in with wife and kids. Maybe, if they could do it, they’d be a little more interesting; but this isn’t their problem. Plush bunnies don’t need to be interesting.
Standing in front of his desk, Nathan Petrelli contemplates the bunny’s dirty and ruined fur, the loose ribbon with the frayed end, the long left ear not standing up anymore but hanging loose to one side. Peter used to grab that ear and drag the bunny around everywhere.
Nathan reaches out and takes the toy in his hands, squeezing the white and soft belly. The paws are the dirtiest part, for some reason.
“Hey,” he mutters to himself, recognizing the familiar weight and consistency in his hands. He frowns, but the wrinkles on his forehead smooth out immediately when he passes his fingers on the little triangle nose and the two tiny buttons that are the eyes, opaque because of the dust. Under his fingertips, the bunny’s fur is hard and ruffled as if for many years nobody cared about stroking it in the right direction.
“Hi, Pigwacket.”
The bunny doesn’t answer.
+
He’s almost sure it’s Peter’s doing, but he can’t call him just to ask. So he calls him to remind him that tomorrow they’re all invited at Mom’s for lunch, and not to forget his present. On the phone, Peter’s voice is slurred and slow, as if he just woke up. (Nathan checks his watch: nearly eleven-thirty.)
For all the time, Pigwacket stares at him from his sitting position on the desk. Nathan remembered him bigger and fatter - even if last time he saw him Nathan wasn’t a child anymore. It can’t be longer than - he counts quickly, but it ends with a vaguely discouraging result - fifteen years. He can’t remember the reason why Pigwacket disappeared overnight; he always imagined Peter got bored of him and asked Mom to shelve him somewhere.
The cell trapped between ear and shoulder, Nathan fastens again the ribbon without even thinking.
“... thing else? Nathan?”
He wakes up. “Yes, see you tomorrow. On time.”
Heidi’s out and the kids are with their grandparents; Nathan takes Pigwacket and crosses the hallway with the bunny in his hand, his arm closed around the toy’s belly. In the drawing room, he puts him on the couch and opens the photo albums’ cabinet. One is as large as a painting, with a light blue faded cover and the worn out corners; on the spine there’s an inscription with his mother’s thin and straight handwriting: Nat.-Peter 1983-84.
(At the edge of his consciousness, Nathan can’t help but notice that “Nat.-“ has been added later, with a slightly different handwriting. Without the additional letters, the inscription would be perfectly centred.)
When Heidi and the kids are back home half an hour later, Nathan’s putting the albums back to their place. He’s let a single Peter photo slip in his pocket: in it, Peter’s twelve and has a huge, crooked smile with teeth so white, a dentist would be touched, his fists on his hips and the defiant attitude of a young Superman in incognito. But that’s another story.
“Dad, Dad!” Monty screams, running into the room and sticking his arms to the sky from the considerable height of two feet six. “Hug, please?” Simon steps in more slowly, with Heidi.
“Hi, honey. Looking at old photos?”
Nathan nods, kissing her lips with Monty perched on his hip.
“Your mother wants you to remind Peter that tomorrow’s her birthday. And to throw away the scarf you’ve got her and buy her something else.” Heidi shrugs, amused. “Don’t look at me. I told her nothing.”
“What’s this toy?” Simon asks, grabbing Pigwacket by the healthy ear and lifting him up.
Heidi turns around. “Honey, don’t touch it. It’s dirty.”
“It’s old!” Simon replies. Then he frowns, considering the thought. ‘Oldness’ is such a hazy concept when you’re just five.
Nathan takes the plush toy from his hand. “Is it yours, Dad?” Monty asks, his arms closed around Nathan’s neck.
Nathan opens his mouth to answer, but Simon precedes him, his tone candid and all-knowing at the same time, and sounding like he’s patronising Monty for his stupidity: “It can’t be Dad’s! It’s a rabbit!” And then he adds, in case somebody hasn’t got the point: “Rabbits are for girls”.
“It’s not true! Un... Uncle Peter likes rabbits,” Monty replies, blushing up to his eyebrows.
“It’s an old toy of your uncle’s,” Nathan answers, giving Pigwacket to Monty’s hesitating little hands, that immediately reach out to grab it. “It’s called Pigwacket.”
“Pig...?” Heidi says, closing the photo album’s cabinet.
“... wacket. Pig-wacket.”
Heidi smiles, frowning. “Where did Peter take this name from?”
“Dad, can I call it just Pig?” Monty asks under his breath, tugging at the collarbone of his shirt.
“I have no idea,” answers Nathan. He was named so long before he was Peter’s; ten years before, at least. Ever since Nathan’s had any memory, Pigwacket’s always been called Pigwacket.
“You can’t call a rabbit Pig!” Simon protests.
Nathan looks down, finding Monty absorbed in studying the bunny’s half-torn ear with a pained grimace. “If you try hard enough, you can call him by his name.”
“Pequacker?”
“Pig-whack-ett.”
“Pequawker.”
Nathan smiles, pressing a kiss on Monty’s temple. “Now give him to Mom. When he’s clean you can play with him.”
“The ear can be cured, can’t it, Dad? I mean,” he bites his lips thoughtfully, “fixed.”
“If he was a person they would have to cut it away,” Simon observes, vaguely satisfied he can offer the truculent information.
“Nobody’s going to cut anybody’s ear,” Nathan declares, glaring at him, and Simon shrinks on the couch’s cushion. “Go wash your hands.” He puts Monty down on the floor.
The child consigns Pigwacket to Heidi’s hand with the highest seriousness, and glancing back to be sure Simon’s gone, his hand still squeezing the bunny’s paw, he asks in a whisper: “You don’t put him in the washing machine, do you?”
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” answers Heidi, holding back a smile.
“Simon says in the washing machine plush toys swell and then explode.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything your brother says,” Nathan observes, his tone a bit tender and a bit reproachful.
“And Simon shouldn’t tell him things just to scare him,” Heidi adds, when Monty’s gone running in the hallway too.
“He wants him to get used to things.”
“To be scared?”
“Not to be scared.”
Heidi lifts Pigwacket up by his front paws, studying him carefully. “You know,” she says aloud. “I would never have said Peter was the bunny type.”
Whether the change of ownership bothers him or reassures him more than going back to his old box, Pigwacket’s discreet enough not to let on either way.
+
At twenty-five, Peter Petrelli knows bunnies are for girls, but he knows that not everything must be said, too.
At five, Simon Petrelli feels the vague moral duty to show the world he’s not a child anymore, revealing the ton of useful things he knows, and receiving back as many compliments as he can.
At three, Monty Petrelli loves his new plush bunny, Pigwacker called (secretly) Pig.
“And now who’s this?” Peter asks, taking the toy from Monty’s stretched and proud hands. “Mom gave you a new toy?”
“Dad,” Monty answers, squeezing lightly Pigwacket’s little (and a bit ruined) bobtail.
“Really?” says Peter, looking up at Nathan, who’s drinking his coffee with a severe expression. “I thought Dad’s gifts were ties or Criminal Law for kids and stuff like that.”
“Thanks, Peter. Hilarious.”
“Monty can’t read,” Arthur Petrelli observes absent-mindedly.
“I can read,” Simon interrupts.
“Good boy,” comments the grandfather, giving him a caress and an approving half-smile.
Crouched on his heels next to Monty, Peter makes a bored grimace.
Even clean and with his stitched ear and ribbon, the bunny doesn’t really look new. “It looks familiar,” Peter mutters, stroking the fur on the bunny’s face in a direction, then in the other.
Nathan puts down his little cup. “Are you joking?”
“His name is Pig,” says Monty in a very proud voice, then hastily corrects himself: “... wacker.”
“Dad says it was yours,” Simon adds. Peter looks up and moves his eyes from Nathan to his firstborn, vaguely creeped out by the likeness and weight of the same enquiring look.
“Pigwacket? Is it Pigwacket?” Peter looks back and smiles, rubbing the bunny’s loose ear. “Where did you find him? I thought he’d got lost ages ago.”
“Where you left him yesterday morning, Peter. On my desk.”
“Me?”
The silence falls on the table for some moments.
“This is the first time I’ve seen him in... fifteen years at least.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Angela contemplates the scene with a half-smile on her lips, wiping quietly the corner of her mouth with a lap of her napkin, out of the impeccable carmine circle of her lips.“ Nathan didn’t make a step without that toy,” she declares, in a tone that would be tender if there were just a drop of tenderness in it. “We had to take it from his hands not to let him bring it into the photos too.”
Family silence is that particular shade of silence in which you know somebody, not later than a couple of seconds, will look at somebody else straight in the eyes and absent-mindedly say something that will just make things worse. Nathan looks at his mother sitting at the other head of the table and he knows for sure this is his punishment for the perfume he bought her.
“You mean Peter,” Arthur replies.
“I mean what I said.”
Arthur frowns, lifting and putting back the coffee spoon on his little dish. (It doesn’t matter how many times Peter’s told him he shouldn’t drink coffee in his condition.) “Nathan didn’t have plush toys. Plush toys are for girls. Plush toys and dolls. Nathan had a huge Lego box. All the pieces together, it was higher than the table in the dining room.”
“Yes, Dad. When I was ten,” Nathan tells him delicately.
“The only gift you ever bought him,” Angela tells him nonchalantly.
This seems to silence Arthur. Heidi holds bravely back the laughter in her throat although sometimes a tiny merry snort escapes from her lips, immediately suffocated in a fake cough in her napkin.
“So Dad hadn’t told you he liked bunnies when he was a child,” Peter sings softly with an annoying childish voice, holding Pigwacket by the ears and making him wave in the air in front of Monty’s nose.
“I was three,” Nathan hisses.
Monty laughs, his eyes sparkling while they move from the hypnotic waving of the bunny to his father, now revaluated as a plush toys lover, but Simon is petrified.
Nathan can see layers and layers of soft child certainties, slowly piled up like clay, melt down and flow away like mud in the rain.
“Simon,” Nathan calls him, stroking his cheek in his palm.
Simon swallows a lump in his throat as big as a watermelon, and with his fists clenched on his knees and the most serious expression, he declares with a slow voice, torn between all the contradictions of his five years:
“Pigwacket is... pretty.”
Older than half the people around him, with his stitched red ribbon, his ear healthier than ever and finally free from that layer of itchy dust in his fur, Pigwacket lets Monty’s small hands pet him with the silent grace of the winner.
Fandom: Heroes
Characters: Petrelli ensemble (Nathan, Peter, Heidi, Monty, Simon, Angela, Arthur)
Rating: Gen
Word Count: 2,035 (W)
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the little fluffy (probably) animated beta.
Notes: For juliettesaito, who requested: "Twenty years after Voyeur, Pigwacket appears on Nathan's desk".
Previous installments:
+ Nyctophobia
+ Bunnies hate flying (but little brothers don't)
+ Voyeur
At thirty-seven, Nathan Petrelli knows that plush bunnies don’t leave boxes full with old toys piled in the attic out of their own will.
Plush bunnies are, by nature, motionless. If they’re put on a table or inside a box, they don’t move. They don’t go out for a walk; they don’t stretch their paws. Certainly they don’t climb up little, insurmountable cardboard walls and don’t open tape-sealed lids to walk around the house. Certainly, too, they don’t cross half New York to reach their old owners from their childhood house to the one they reside in with wife and kids. Maybe, if they could do it, they’d be a little more interesting; but this isn’t their problem. Plush bunnies don’t need to be interesting.
Standing in front of his desk, Nathan Petrelli contemplates the bunny’s dirty and ruined fur, the loose ribbon with the frayed end, the long left ear not standing up anymore but hanging loose to one side. Peter used to grab that ear and drag the bunny around everywhere.
Nathan reaches out and takes the toy in his hands, squeezing the white and soft belly. The paws are the dirtiest part, for some reason.
“Hey,” he mutters to himself, recognizing the familiar weight and consistency in his hands. He frowns, but the wrinkles on his forehead smooth out immediately when he passes his fingers on the little triangle nose and the two tiny buttons that are the eyes, opaque because of the dust. Under his fingertips, the bunny’s fur is hard and ruffled as if for many years nobody cared about stroking it in the right direction.
“Hi, Pigwacket.”
The bunny doesn’t answer.
+
He’s almost sure it’s Peter’s doing, but he can’t call him just to ask. So he calls him to remind him that tomorrow they’re all invited at Mom’s for lunch, and not to forget his present. On the phone, Peter’s voice is slurred and slow, as if he just woke up. (Nathan checks his watch: nearly eleven-thirty.)
For all the time, Pigwacket stares at him from his sitting position on the desk. Nathan remembered him bigger and fatter - even if last time he saw him Nathan wasn’t a child anymore. It can’t be longer than - he counts quickly, but it ends with a vaguely discouraging result - fifteen years. He can’t remember the reason why Pigwacket disappeared overnight; he always imagined Peter got bored of him and asked Mom to shelve him somewhere.
The cell trapped between ear and shoulder, Nathan fastens again the ribbon without even thinking.
“... thing else? Nathan?”
He wakes up. “Yes, see you tomorrow. On time.”
Heidi’s out and the kids are with their grandparents; Nathan takes Pigwacket and crosses the hallway with the bunny in his hand, his arm closed around the toy’s belly. In the drawing room, he puts him on the couch and opens the photo albums’ cabinet. One is as large as a painting, with a light blue faded cover and the worn out corners; on the spine there’s an inscription with his mother’s thin and straight handwriting: Nat.-Peter 1983-84.
(At the edge of his consciousness, Nathan can’t help but notice that “Nat.-“ has been added later, with a slightly different handwriting. Without the additional letters, the inscription would be perfectly centred.)
When Heidi and the kids are back home half an hour later, Nathan’s putting the albums back to their place. He’s let a single Peter photo slip in his pocket: in it, Peter’s twelve and has a huge, crooked smile with teeth so white, a dentist would be touched, his fists on his hips and the defiant attitude of a young Superman in incognito. But that’s another story.
“Dad, Dad!” Monty screams, running into the room and sticking his arms to the sky from the considerable height of two feet six. “Hug, please?” Simon steps in more slowly, with Heidi.
“Hi, honey. Looking at old photos?”
Nathan nods, kissing her lips with Monty perched on his hip.
“Your mother wants you to remind Peter that tomorrow’s her birthday. And to throw away the scarf you’ve got her and buy her something else.” Heidi shrugs, amused. “Don’t look at me. I told her nothing.”
“What’s this toy?” Simon asks, grabbing Pigwacket by the healthy ear and lifting him up.
Heidi turns around. “Honey, don’t touch it. It’s dirty.”
“It’s old!” Simon replies. Then he frowns, considering the thought. ‘Oldness’ is such a hazy concept when you’re just five.
Nathan takes the plush toy from his hand. “Is it yours, Dad?” Monty asks, his arms closed around Nathan’s neck.
Nathan opens his mouth to answer, but Simon precedes him, his tone candid and all-knowing at the same time, and sounding like he’s patronising Monty for his stupidity: “It can’t be Dad’s! It’s a rabbit!” And then he adds, in case somebody hasn’t got the point: “Rabbits are for girls”.
“It’s not true! Un... Uncle Peter likes rabbits,” Monty replies, blushing up to his eyebrows.
“It’s an old toy of your uncle’s,” Nathan answers, giving Pigwacket to Monty’s hesitating little hands, that immediately reach out to grab it. “It’s called Pigwacket.”
“Pig...?” Heidi says, closing the photo album’s cabinet.
“... wacket. Pig-wacket.”
Heidi smiles, frowning. “Where did Peter take this name from?”
“Dad, can I call it just Pig?” Monty asks under his breath, tugging at the collarbone of his shirt.
“I have no idea,” answers Nathan. He was named so long before he was Peter’s; ten years before, at least. Ever since Nathan’s had any memory, Pigwacket’s always been called Pigwacket.
“You can’t call a rabbit Pig!” Simon protests.
Nathan looks down, finding Monty absorbed in studying the bunny’s half-torn ear with a pained grimace. “If you try hard enough, you can call him by his name.”
“Pequacker?”
“Pig-whack-ett.”
“Pequawker.”
Nathan smiles, pressing a kiss on Monty’s temple. “Now give him to Mom. When he’s clean you can play with him.”
“The ear can be cured, can’t it, Dad? I mean,” he bites his lips thoughtfully, “fixed.”
“If he was a person they would have to cut it away,” Simon observes, vaguely satisfied he can offer the truculent information.
“Nobody’s going to cut anybody’s ear,” Nathan declares, glaring at him, and Simon shrinks on the couch’s cushion. “Go wash your hands.” He puts Monty down on the floor.
The child consigns Pigwacket to Heidi’s hand with the highest seriousness, and glancing back to be sure Simon’s gone, his hand still squeezing the bunny’s paw, he asks in a whisper: “You don’t put him in the washing machine, do you?”
“Don’t worry, sweetie,” answers Heidi, holding back a smile.
“Simon says in the washing machine plush toys swell and then explode.”
“You shouldn’t believe everything your brother says,” Nathan observes, his tone a bit tender and a bit reproachful.
“And Simon shouldn’t tell him things just to scare him,” Heidi adds, when Monty’s gone running in the hallway too.
“He wants him to get used to things.”
“To be scared?”
“Not to be scared.”
Heidi lifts Pigwacket up by his front paws, studying him carefully. “You know,” she says aloud. “I would never have said Peter was the bunny type.”
Whether the change of ownership bothers him or reassures him more than going back to his old box, Pigwacket’s discreet enough not to let on either way.
+
At twenty-five, Peter Petrelli knows bunnies are for girls, but he knows that not everything must be said, too.
At five, Simon Petrelli feels the vague moral duty to show the world he’s not a child anymore, revealing the ton of useful things he knows, and receiving back as many compliments as he can.
At three, Monty Petrelli loves his new plush bunny, Pigwacker called (secretly) Pig.
“And now who’s this?” Peter asks, taking the toy from Monty’s stretched and proud hands. “Mom gave you a new toy?”
“Dad,” Monty answers, squeezing lightly Pigwacket’s little (and a bit ruined) bobtail.
“Really?” says Peter, looking up at Nathan, who’s drinking his coffee with a severe expression. “I thought Dad’s gifts were ties or Criminal Law for kids and stuff like that.”
“Thanks, Peter. Hilarious.”
“Monty can’t read,” Arthur Petrelli observes absent-mindedly.
“I can read,” Simon interrupts.
“Good boy,” comments the grandfather, giving him a caress and an approving half-smile.
Crouched on his heels next to Monty, Peter makes a bored grimace.
Even clean and with his stitched ear and ribbon, the bunny doesn’t really look new. “It looks familiar,” Peter mutters, stroking the fur on the bunny’s face in a direction, then in the other.
Nathan puts down his little cup. “Are you joking?”
“His name is Pig,” says Monty in a very proud voice, then hastily corrects himself: “... wacker.”
“Dad says it was yours,” Simon adds. Peter looks up and moves his eyes from Nathan to his firstborn, vaguely creeped out by the likeness and weight of the same enquiring look.
“Pigwacket? Is it Pigwacket?” Peter looks back and smiles, rubbing the bunny’s loose ear. “Where did you find him? I thought he’d got lost ages ago.”
“Where you left him yesterday morning, Peter. On my desk.”
“Me?”
The silence falls on the table for some moments.
“This is the first time I’ve seen him in... fifteen years at least.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Angela contemplates the scene with a half-smile on her lips, wiping quietly the corner of her mouth with a lap of her napkin, out of the impeccable carmine circle of her lips.“ Nathan didn’t make a step without that toy,” she declares, in a tone that would be tender if there were just a drop of tenderness in it. “We had to take it from his hands not to let him bring it into the photos too.”
Family silence is that particular shade of silence in which you know somebody, not later than a couple of seconds, will look at somebody else straight in the eyes and absent-mindedly say something that will just make things worse. Nathan looks at his mother sitting at the other head of the table and he knows for sure this is his punishment for the perfume he bought her.
“You mean Peter,” Arthur replies.
“I mean what I said.”
Arthur frowns, lifting and putting back the coffee spoon on his little dish. (It doesn’t matter how many times Peter’s told him he shouldn’t drink coffee in his condition.) “Nathan didn’t have plush toys. Plush toys are for girls. Plush toys and dolls. Nathan had a huge Lego box. All the pieces together, it was higher than the table in the dining room.”
“Yes, Dad. When I was ten,” Nathan tells him delicately.
“The only gift you ever bought him,” Angela tells him nonchalantly.
This seems to silence Arthur. Heidi holds bravely back the laughter in her throat although sometimes a tiny merry snort escapes from her lips, immediately suffocated in a fake cough in her napkin.
“So Dad hadn’t told you he liked bunnies when he was a child,” Peter sings softly with an annoying childish voice, holding Pigwacket by the ears and making him wave in the air in front of Monty’s nose.
“I was three,” Nathan hisses.
Monty laughs, his eyes sparkling while they move from the hypnotic waving of the bunny to his father, now revaluated as a plush toys lover, but Simon is petrified.
Nathan can see layers and layers of soft child certainties, slowly piled up like clay, melt down and flow away like mud in the rain.
“Simon,” Nathan calls him, stroking his cheek in his palm.
Simon swallows a lump in his throat as big as a watermelon, and with his fists clenched on his knees and the most serious expression, he declares with a slow voice, torn between all the contradictions of his five years:
“Pigwacket is... pretty.”
Older than half the people around him, with his stitched red ribbon, his ear healthier than ever and finally free from that layer of itchy dust in his fur, Pigwacket lets Monty’s small hands pet him with the silent grace of the winner.