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.

Comments

[law-anddisorder.livejournal.com]

I wake up with a start, because I'm momentarily unsure of where I am, why I'm sleeping sitting up in a chair. My mouth is dry and tastes like alcohol, my neck is stiff, and there is a heavy weight pressing down on my chest. I close my eyes almost as soon as I open them; the bright morning light lances through my head. Another fucking hangover.

My son is curled up in my lap, his head against my chest, and when I'm able to open my eyes again I look up, and my ex-wife is standing over us.

She's startled when my eyes open, and she stammers, "I was--I was just going to wake him up for breakfast."

Heidi stirs Simon, and then Monty, and ushers them out of Peter's room, down the stairs towards the source of those delicious aromas that finally reach me, coffee, scrambled eggs. Buttermilk pancakes with fresh strawberries, Peter's favorite.

I get up and go into the bathroom, and find an extra toothbrush. When I finish washing my face and brushing my teeth, I feel Heidi's arms slip around me, and my eyes meet hers in the mirror over the sink.

"What are you doing?" I ask rather callously, spitting toothpaste into the sink. She has no right to touch me like this. No right to be kissing my neck like she's doing right now. Definitely no right to be pushing her hand into my pants, curling her palm around my morning erection.

"I heard you last night, Nathan. Talking with Simon. Do you mean what you said? You'll try to make it right?"

I'm half-angry, half-horny now, and at first I just ignore her, rinsing my mouth. But I haven't forgotten how much I love her, how much I need her.

"If you were listening, for your information, you need to try too, you know," I growl playfully, turning around, pushing her out of the bathroom and onto the bed.

Peter's bed.

No way. Not here. I have more respect for him than this.

"Let's not do this here, honey. Not in my brother's bed," I insist, pulling her to her feet, kissing her. She gives me a look, as if to say, He doesn't even sleep in it anymore.

"There's always your bedroom," Heidi says, winking at me, nearly yanking me out of Peter's room and across the hall to my own.

I have just enough time to lock the door before Heidi pulls me down, and when my limbs tangle with hers, as my hands slip beneath her nightgown and slide her panties off her, I'm painfully aware of my brother's scent all over these sheets.

Peter...

I push it away, push him away as I make Heidi mine again, but something lingers, like a memory that sits just beyond my mind's ability to grasp fully. Even while sunlight warms our heaving bodies, something dark fills my soul, weighs me down, an unseen force, a crushing weight upon me.

Don't do this to your baby brother. Don't take his innocence like this... I inhale sharply, and I can't bring myself to continue, not here in my bed either.

Because of Peter.

"I have to--I have to stop, Heidi--I'm--I'm sorry--" I gasp, pulling out, rolling off of her. I stare up at the ceiling, panting and unfulfilled.

Heidi just looks at me disbelievingly, a mix of pity and disgust in her eyes, and she spits, "Fuck you, Nathan."

She's dressed and gone before I even open my eyes again.

I don't even care about her and her fucking melodrama right now, as I jerk myself to completion, not even enjoying it.

Three days ago in Peter's apartment, I forced myself on my brother. But that wasn't our first time.

Something happened here in this very room, between myself and Peter, of that I am certain. The memory is vague: disjointed, unassembled thoughts.

But it is there, just out of my reach.

Does he remember? Had Peter and I carried on this incestuous relationship years ago, and just somehow forgotten? Is that why we were so easily able to push the rape, for lack of a better term, behind us and pick up where we had supposedly left off?

I swipe at myself with some tissues from the nightstand, then pull on my pants and bolt down the stairs, hoping beyond all hope he's down there with my sons and our mother having breakfast. I have to talk to him.

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

There's always drama in the Petrelli family, though I tend to be the one that gets to sit back and watch. The trouble with being an empath, however, is that I can not stay completely neutral over anything. I feel Simon and Monty's happiness. And I feel Heidi's lust and anger. I feel my mother's need for a drink before nine in the morning. I feel my brother too... But he's feeling too much for to sort out properly. It makes my stomach ache.

I push away my plate, half eaten and leave the table when I hear him come down the stairs. If I look at him now, I won't be able to control myself. It's awful, but true. Being aware of just how in love with him I am has left such a terrible taste in my mouth.

My timing couldn't be more off, however. I meant to pass him and hit the study, but just as I hit the bottom of the steps, so does he, two up from the floor. I pause, turn, and look at him with red, swollen eyes. Will I always be crying for this man?

I take it upon myself to step up. It makes me even shorter then Nathan, but the man can bend at the middle. In the dark of the lonely, but exposed staircase, I grab him by his collar and jerk him down to kiss me. My arms wind around his neck. I taste mouthwash and the remains of another kiss, but I don't care.

So long as it's Nathan, it doesn't matter.

[law-anddisorder.livejournal.com]

Once I can pull my face away from his, I say, struggling to keep my voice low, "Are you out of your fucking mind, Peter?"

The hangover is pounding at my temples, behind my eyes with every beat of my heart, and I have to sit. I grip Peter's wrist and pull him into the study where we'll be alone, and I sink into a chair.

Peter looks upset, partially at my harsh words, but there's something else there too. I know he remembers. Probably much more than I do; he heals. He lost his memory before, after a run-in with the Haitian, but he was able to heal the wound in his mind, and all his memories came flooding back to him.

The memory is there, but it's as if...it were written over. Taken from me. I can't touch it. I just can't reach it. When I think I might, shame and guilt washes over me, at something I can't even fucking remember.

Oh, God. What if I raped him then, too? What if the Haitian got to me? Why? How would he even know about myself and Peter?

That's ridiculous. There's got to be some other explanation.

"Something happened to us, Peter," I moan, shutting my eyes against the bright rays of light that spike through my eyes, into my brain.

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

It's all right, he can push me away for now. I am out of my mind, he's right. I won't deny it or fight the accusations. Instead, I thumb the lock on the study door closed and crouch to do so to the bottom lock as well on the thick sliding wood panel doors. I use to love this room when I was a kid. There's so many books on the walls even now, most of which belonged to Dad. I miss him. I won't like there.

My nostalgia fades when my brother speaks, however.

I know that something happened to us, I just don't know what. Not exactly. I have only bits and pieces of the puzzle, moments of time opening for me. It's like pulling off tape from a window, uncovering the pictures behind the glass one by one, ever so slowly.

I invade my brother's personal space, climbing into his lap. I'm taller like this, sitting back on his thighs. My head covers the sun glare as I dip it down to kiss him.

There are two things I've learned in the past three minutes, standing totally exposed on those stairs as I kissed my brother.

He's worth fighting for.

I'm not going to lose him to Heidi. Even if it means breaking up a family.

He was my family long before hers. Or the boys'.

[law-anddisorder.livejournal.com]

"You have to stop. We have to stop this..." I murmur against Peter's mouth, my heart picking up speed, sending blood straight to my groin even after I finished myself off, after my failed encounter with my former wife.

Because of you.

If we keep doing this, I'm going to lose Heidi and the children, and I can't stand the thought of that. I can't crush the hope I saw in her eyes, felt in her embrace, tasted in her kisses.

But I can't push Peter away again, not after all we've been through. His heart doesn't heal like his body does. I don't want to hurt him anymore, either.

I'm in love with Heidi, and I'm in love with Peter. I need Heidi, and I need Peter too. I need a lot of things. I need him to keep kissing me, keep touching me.

Somehow, my hangover fades to a mild headache, and I kiss him more fervently. Just being with him seems to ease my pain and comfort me, body and soul.

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

I don't try to do this. I never try to. Sometimes his thoughts just fill me. Fill me up totally and I get lost in them. I pull my mouth away from him and slug him. It's not the first time I've hit him, but it is by far the weaknest. My eyes fill with tears as I give him the tiniest of shakes.

"Can't I just be enough?" God, he's thinking about her. He's thinking about what he wants and who he wants. He was just with her. I pick that up too. He can't have us both. If he won't have me, I need to figure out a way to get over him. Or go somewhere else.

Maybe I could have the Haitian wipe my mind clear again?

My jaw is absolutely aching as I pull away from him and realize that it's not my pain I feel. It's his.

"I can't ever be enough for you, can I Nathan." It's a statement. A truth. A certainty. He doesn't even have to answer.

[law-anddisorder.livejournal.com]

Peter just hit me. He was just kissing me, and now he hits me? For no fucking reason? Out of nowhere?

No, it was out of somewhere, I realize, after he speaks. He was listening in on my thoughts, the sneaky bastard.

Well, that's what you get for digging into my head where you don't belong.

I give him a smile and rub my jaw gingerly. "Nice shot." There'll probably be a little swelling later, but I'm lucky he didn't accidentally take my head clear off with that super-strength of his.

"You're seriously still jealous of Heidi, Pete? I could expect it from you when you were a teenager, but you're a grown man! Of course you can't be enough for me! She's the mother of my kids! What do you want me to do, tell her I can;t try to fix my broken marriage because I'm in love with and fucking my brother? She'll have a fucking heart attack!"

I'm laughing hysterically now, because I remember Peter after my bachelor party, his voice clear as day inside my head. You could always marry me. And then you wouldn't have to leave.

He was jealous of her...he's been in love with me his whole damn life, and he's been jealous of Heidi for more than ten years, because she took me away from him.

"You're a sad case, Pete. This is insane."

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

I could kill him. The way he looks at me, the way he speaks to me, nothing can prepare me for the wound I feel when he tells me that I am sad. That I'm insane. I can't stop the tears, violently bubbling up from a source of pain that's been collecting inside of me since he started to use me. Since he took anything from me that would allow me to love anyone else the way I love him.

His jaw swells slightly even as I touch his face. I'm not going to hit him again, I think he's realized that now by the way I look at him. He's snatched my heart right out of my chest. The man's been whispering to me how much he loves me since I was a child. He's fucked me, indoctrinating my physical need for him, all the while cursing me to being in love with him far more than he could ever love me.

"I'm going away," I whisper, a choice I know I have to make before I ruin him with my love for him. I am well aware that I am blaming myself for this. That I'm accepting his diagnosis, no matter how cruel it is.

Climbing out of his lap, I run my hand over my face and try to catch my breath. I can sob later, later when it sinks in that he was just using me again for some fun in between the points of his life that matter to him.

[law-anddisorder.livejournal.com]

"What do you mean, 'you're going away'?" His words chill me to my core. He doesn't answer me, he just starts toward the door and slides back the first lock. I get to my feet and take him by his shoulders before he can attend to the second lock, and I turn him around to face me.

I don't know what he wants me to do, and he always has a hard time telling me. He doesn't know how to ask for what he wants, and God damn it, I can't just sneak a peek into his head anytime I want.

I lower my voice and say very softly, "What's wrong with you? You know I love you more than anything in the world, Peter. Can't that be enough for you?"

He just stands there, angrily swiping at his face. He looks like a lost little kid, and I know this is all my fault. Whatever happened between us, those memories we lost long ago, that's where this stopped being hero-worship and turned into this obsession, into what I know he feels as unrequited love. I cup his chin in my hand and help him wipe away his tears.

"Why can't you just accept us for what we are? We're brothers, Peter. We're also more than that. We shouldn't be, but we are. You're just gonna throw it all away? You're just gonna run away from it? We have to figure this out together, Pete."

I wonder how I'm going to get him to start telling me exactly what he remembers. I''ll never know if I let him just fly away. But how can I stop him, really?

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

When I finally looks up at him again, I've commanded myself not to cry. I've managed to really do it, to stop the tears, to make sure that my voice will not crack when I speak again. I can't afford to look when, though I feel it when I gaze at him and see the man that kissed me softly yesterday in bed as he pushed his way into me. It was a mirror of how it had been twelve years ago.

Thirteen years ago a week from today.

"Listen to yourself," I say, taking his hands in mine. "You're asking me to be your mistress, but only when you can't take the stress of your high pressure life at home with Heidi and the boys. You know that I will never say no to you, Nathan. That I will wait for you every night to see if you'll be spending it with me.

"I've been waiting for you my entire life. I've always been the second choice. You use to ditch me at ball games and behind movie theaters to meet some girl. And I would wait for you...for hours." So much for the tears ending. I'm choking myself on my pain.

Nathan can see it, can't he? That I can't live in his shadow?

"This can't be my life, Nathan." I try to smile and fail miserably. "I.... I'm in love with you. And I can't watch you be in love with someone else again. I can't let it be weeks between the times we see each other. I have to move on."

[law-anddisorder.livejournal.com]

Be my mistress? Move on? Peter's words hit harder than his actual punch in the face did.

I've never known Peter to be selfish whatsoever until right this second. He's taking a page out of my own book right now. He wants all of me, or nothing. I never told him he couldn't have a girlfriend, or a boyfriend if that's what he'd prefer. I don't care what he does with other people. All I care about is what I do with him, how much I love him.

And he thinks I don't love him because I'm willing to share. He's tired of sharing me with everyone else. He's done it his whole life. But what he wants from me is unreasonable. It's idealistic. The world is too imperfect a place for a person like my brother, and it breaks my heart.

I'm going to lose him, or Heidi and the kids. He's making me choose. I know I said to myself I'd choose Peter over them, but that was when I thought reaching Heidi was impossible. When I thought all was lost. I told him I'd never hurt him again, never leave him again. I've made a liar out of myself yet again.

No, that's not right either. I'm not pushing him away, and I'm not hurting him or leaving him, not directly. He's hurting himself by dealing in absolutes. He won't compromise. There's no way around this roadblock. We're at a standstill.

"Okay. You win. I will continue to drink myself to death, and I will tell Heidi to go fuck herself, and I'll break the promise I made to my boys last night to make things right. Because you want me all to yourself. Will that make you happy?"

No, of course it won't. That's not what he wants, not really.

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

It is my brother that functions only in absolutes and extremes, not me, though I know he thinks that I am selfish, that I am only trying to hurt him, that my mission here is to free myself of him. And it's not. I can read his emotions as if they were written on a piece of paper and handed to me. Not only that, but I am affected by them. They take me over. They always have, long before I could take anyone's power that I wanted to. Feeling how others feel has always been my curse.

"Listen to yourself speak, Nathan." I look up at him with eyes that match his own. "I never asked you to tell anyone to fuck themselves. Or to break your promise. Why won't you let me go?"

My jaw does not tremble, I'm surprised at how strong I'm being.

"You've had me under your thumb for my entire life. You've had me addicted to you physically since I was twelve years old. Don't you understand, Nathan, that I just can't do this anymore. If I stay here, I'll ruin us both again."

Oh, why did I have to look into his eyes?

I find myself kissing him again, kissing him because that is what my life revolves around. Is it really better to leave? Is it better to have nothing of him? Or to have his cast offs? Could I live with one touch, one kiss, when he was not busy with his wife...his other women? Other men?

"I don't--"

--want to be your afterthought.

"--want to lose you." Tears bring salt to our lips. I pull away from him and wipe my face and all he can do is stare at me. "So. You win, Nathan. You always win. That's what you were born to do." I stop touching him all together and move towards the window, tugging it open, back towards me. The streets look a mess with ice and rain, but I can fly in this all right. I think. "I'll be where I always am when you need me." A phone call away. Before he can say anything, I take off. I can't even get good and properly drunk for all of this.

But I can get good and properly fucked.

I've never been to a gay bar before, but it turns out that Philadelphia -- my destination once I leave my mother's house -- is filled with them. And it takes little more than a glance to have someone take you into the back room.

[law-anddisorder.livejournal.com]

I watch Peter disappear into the chilly gray sky, and I immediately feel like crying and getting totally hammered, not necessarily in that particular order. I ask my mother for one of her Valiums instead. With the help of those little blue pills, I go without drinking for the next three days. An incredible feat, really.

These three days are extremely difficult for me. Heidi and I begin our reconciliation, which consists mostly of marathon fucking sessions and keeping up appearances in front of Monty and Simon. We still do nothing but argue behind closed doors. Heidi wants us to go to marriage counseling, and I agree numbly. We're not even married anymore. But I still wear my wedding ring, though she has not replaced hers. We go to one session and I walk out. Heidi doesn't seem to care, either. She's resigned herself to the fact that we're just trying to do this for the children. It's not working.

I'm cheating on her again. I'm actually surprised at myself for this one. I fly into the city, walk into a gay bar, get totally smashed, and take the prettiest young man I can find back to a hotel and fuck him until I pass out from the liquor and the exhaustion.

I dream of Peter, of making love with him, and the thing that scares me most about these dreams is that he appears much too young. I know for a fact now that I had been doing this with my brother before he was even out of high school. What I don't understand is, who erased these unspeakable acts from our memories?

Later, when I wake up by myself in that huge bed, covered in sex and dried sweat, hungover and alone, I cry for my brother.

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

No one asks names except for me. I can't just bend over and let some nameless stranger fuck me. I'm not like that. I want romance and the appearance of normalcy. And even as I say that, I'm well aware that I do not want anything permanent. I drink and dance and swallow the pills that they give me even if they only work for a few minutes before they disappear from my system. And when they kiss me, take my hand, go to lead me away from the dance floor, I always have to say it.

"I'm Peter."

And inevitably, I get a quirky smile and a "Hey, Peter," back without much of anything else.

The night before my birthday, something chances though. I'm dressed in something tight, something that inevitably makes me feel sexy and will wind up around my ankles in under an hour. A guy with dark hair and darker eyes leans against the bar next to me as I survey the dance floor. I never pick anyone out. I let them come to me. "What are you drinking, beautiful?"

I turn my head towards him and smile until I realize who it is. My eyes immediately widen, my heart skips a beat.

Oh God. Oh God.

"S-Sylar--"

"Peter Petrelli. Fancy meeting you here."

He grabs my hand and tugs me out onto the dance floor of all things, hands on my hips, lips against my throat. I'm in shock, really. He's not trying to kill me -- and I'm surprised he isn't dead...Hiro ran him through with a sword a few months ago before I blew up. He's just...there. Holding me.

Christ, I must be insane, like Nathan said.

Sylar/Peter

[crashgirl82.livejournal.com]

Must be something in the air tonight, I think to myself, biting roughly into the pale flesh of Peter Petrelli's neck. He doesn't pull away, either. I half-expected him to open his mouth and give me some speech about how he wouldn't dance with a serial killer if it's the last thing he ever does. But he just leans into the kiss, and I hear him growl low in his throat.

What is this pretty thing doing in a less than upstanding place like this? His brother must have gotten tired of him in order to let Peter this far off his leash.

Looks like Christmas came a little early this year. I've been walking around powerless for months, trying to find some way to restore my lost abilities, and I've finally gotten my present. Peter Petrelli, the most powerful one of us all. The most special. All that's missing is the shiny paper and the bow.

It's not the outside of the package that means anything anyway. It's what's inside that counts. Plus, I'll take it upon myself to get him out of this ridiculous get-up he's wearing. He'd look much better naked, covered in nothing but his own blood, everything that makes him who he is becoming mine for the taking.


"What do you say we go into the back room, pretty boy? Or have you not forgiven me yet for killing you?"

Re: Sylar/Peter

[chimeramimic.livejournal.com]

I don't actually think that I'm breathing when we pass the beaded curtains. This is my favorite bar and have my favorite back room. Everything is open, there's dark spaces and light spaces. I'd rather be in the light. I love being watched. Sylar's going towards the back where the smelly couches are.

If I'm going to do this, and for some reason, I don't seem to care that we spent several months trying to kill each other, I want it to be where it can be seen. It's not that I fear him, not entirely. My mind is not on revenge or danger.

I lean myself against a wall, right under one of the lights. A four or five time over lover -- whose name I still do not know -- calls me his Spotlight Baby. I guess I am. Just last night, five or six men took their turn with me right here.

But now I want Sylar. I pull him towards me by his shirt, knowing how wrong this is as I tug at the chest hair he's got smattered across his skin. "How about you shut up...just be some nameless guy for me..." I pull his mouth to mine.

It's no secret I'm absolutely addicted to sex. Not even to me.