A Long Trip Home

[chimeramimicry]

The door is two yards away but I can't move from the top of the stairs.  It's been months, four or so, since I've been here, in this spot.  Gone were the days of trudging up the stairs with my satchel on the way home from work because my building's landlords refused to fix the elevators properly.  Gone too was the pleasure I had of returning to this apartment I paid for with my own money and not from my trust fund.  I donated all of that to charity the moment I turned twenty-five and finished paying off my loans to school.  It was two years ago.  It feels like forever.

I'm not the same man I had been.  I'm not a child anymore.  At least, I want to think that.

I'm still clutching the photograph of my brother and I in our tuxedos.  There's a smudge on it from my thumb and full of creases.  I've not let it go since I opened that box containing everything that I am.  Everything I was.  I left Ireland without looking back.  There was, there is only one thing on my mind.  Nathan.

Nathan.

Nathan.

I know he's here.  I've always felt a connection to him.  Mohinder Suresh called it part of my empathy, to feel things like that.  Funny to be so empathically linked to someone I spent my whole life pining for, who has always had a life to live without me.  He's never had time for me.  Never.

"Just walk, Peter," I whisper to myself as I move to a door I have not touched in a long time.  I swallow.  And knock.  I know he's in here without knowing it.  I almost lose the nerve to knock.  Please answer, Nathan.  Please.

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[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

By that point, I'm sitting like an eskimo wrapped up in blankets and eating picnic style on a bed with my brother. So much has happened in the past two weeks, ever since I returned home from ireland, that I can't even tell what's up and what's down anymore. I stare at my brother across the bed as he finally says the only thing I've wanted him to since he arrived. It's just after two in the morning of my twenty-seventh birthday.

Thirteen years ago, just about now, he was taking my virginity, making me his, molding me to never love anyone else so long as I live.

"I love you, Nathan." I wish I could have said it without tears in my eyes. In two days it will be christmas. Tears are not for such happy times. They're for remembering hiding in attics and kissing and jerking off and getting drunk on stolen wine.

I know that my brother will remember almost nothing of that time. Sylar showed me everything. showed me on my brother's wedding night pushing my way into my parent's study to tell them that this was wrong, what my brother was doing. I told them everything, I told them that I was in love with my older brother, that he loved me too.

Mom wasn't surprised. But Dad... Dad took my memories. All of them. I was almost seventeen years old when that happened.

Nathan and I had been lovers for nearly three years. No. Longer than that. We've been messing around since i was twelve afterall.

I stare up at Nathan, I gaze into his eyes. "Will you stay with me for a little while?"