I'm About to Break - Peter Wall Fic

[italianeaglesct]

Character: Peter
Genre: Gen
Author: thewatchmaker
Fandom: Heroes
Word count: 900
Rating: PG
Prompts:
060. Staying with a friend in rainy weather. - 100_fairytales 57/100
One Step Closer by Linkin Park - 30_ballads 6/30
Jack Sparrow: The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can't do. - scifi_muses vol3.week32
For: vampire_peter


My shoulders hurt, but fuck they do all the time now. My wrists ache, and I can barely turn my neck right now. I’ve been pounding the Wall for another day and into the night. Been through half a dozen bottles of water, and I ate the sandwich Sylar brought me hours ago. We didn’t talk much. We haven’t for a good week. It’s my fault too, because I was lonely. I needed to feel something, and something happened. I pressed my forehead against the bricks and let out a disgusted sigh. Oh yeah something happened all right.

But it wasn’t just the kissing or the rest of what I’d done with Sylar. What was getting to me was he was getting to me. I liked him. I cared about him. It wasn’t all about Emma and saving all those people anymore.

“How the fuck did that happen?” I knew how. I’d listened to him. Learned about what had happened to him, and now I understood why he did what he did. Hell I even understood why he killed Nathan, and that bugged me more than any of the rest of it. He did it to hurt me. He did it to hurt my mother, because we rejected him when all he wanted was to be a goddamned Petrelli.

It would be easier if it was only physical. If all I wanted to do was fuck him, it’d be all right. That’s what happens when you’re a guy in prison, right? But I cared. I wanted to help him. I believed him when he said he was sorry for taking Nathan away from me. i knew he was telling me the truth when he said he wanted to change.

I flung the sledgehammer across the alley, and it connected with the dumpster with a sound like thunder. It bounced off the blue steel and skipped across the ground a couple of times before coming to a rest. I couldn’t take one more swing. Sylar’d be looking for me soon, but I wasn’t in the right place to talk to him.

So I took off running into the empty city. My legs were as tired as my arms by the time I stopped. It was spooky as hell being so far away from Sylar and home. Jesus, when did I start thinking of it as home, and him as my family?

“God, Nathan, I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” I’d found my way to the storefront where he’d run his congressional campaign. It was a used bookstore now. There were no red, white and blue posters with my brother’s big ass shark grin on them, and I wished to hell there were. I let myself in and slipped into the darkness. It smelled like old paper and a bit of mold. Kind of like the library did. I wondered if Sylar knew about this one, but I bet he’d never been here. If he had Nathan’s memory of the place, he’d avoid it. I didn’t blame him. I would to.

Nathan and Sylar’s worlds collided in this store. It was Nathan’s past. His dream of the future that he let go because his win had been a lie, and because he was falling apart when he thought I was dead. Now here I was years later falling apart because he’s dead. I sank down between the shelves and ran my fingers over the carpet. That hadn’t changed. It was the same one that had been here when Nathan told me I was insane for thinking I could fly. I didn’t need Sylar’s power to read the history of objects, but I wanted it. I wanted it so bad right now.

“How can I forgive him, Nathan? How can I like him?” The back of my head thumped against a shelf full of hardback books a few times, not that it helped. But it was better than when I beat it against that fucking wall. “I love you. I miss you, and I don’t know how to do it without you.”

Nathan wasn’t going to answer me. He was gone. He’d been gone for months. Hell in this shithole he’d been gone for years. I had to move on. Had to grow up, but I didn’t want to. I wanted my brother.

It was the growling of my stomach that made me get up. My muscles had locked up, and I had to hang onto the shelf to stand. I ran my fingers over the spines of the books. There wasn’t enough dust here. There’s never enough dust, but that’s another little flaw in Sylar’s World of Weird. No dust. No birds. No cars.

That’s when I saw the book. The Pillars of the Earth, Sylar read it more times than I could count since we’d been trapped here. It was important to him. He brought me a comic book when we’d been here a month. Bringing him a copy of his favorite book was the least I could do, so I took it. I wasn’t sure when I’d give it to him, but sooner or later I would. I’d know when it was the right time.

Comments

[game-byrd.livejournal.com]

Oh, that is beautiful. I'm fascinated by the turning point, when Peter decides that Sylar is okay, because although in canon we get to see when he admits it to Sylar, by bringing him the book and apologizing as he did, then clearly he'd been thinking it through before that. The Wall was such as tease as an episode, giving us like 16 minutes of material that was supposed to cover 3-6 years of time and an enormous amount of relationship and character development.

I never get tired of reading these fics. Thanks for writing them!

[italianeaglesct.livejournal.com]

The Wall was magical. I would have loved to see flashbacks to their time there all through another season of Heroes. So much had to happen for Peter to be able to make peace and start to care about Sylar. It was pretty obvious at the end that Sylar would do anything for Peter. I loved it, and it gives me so much to work with too.

Thanks

[vampire-peter.livejournal.com]

That's really great Scout, I'm sorry you're having to deal with all that by yourself, wish I could be there to help.

((Mun loves this, it's great. I feel bad for Peter but it's nice to see him starting to come around to admitting and dealing with how he feels about Sylar.))

[italianeaglesct.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if I don't have you in my head somewhere during this. <3

((It seemed like the right time to start exploring what made Peter accept Sylar. It was pretty obvious they were friends at the end. YAY for PETLAR!!!))

[vampire-peter.livejournal.com]

As long as I don't get in the way. *grin*

((YAY PETLAR!! lol It really was obvious and it's fun seeing how it could've been for them.))

[italianeaglesct.livejournal.com]

((I don't get how anyone can deny that friendship was there between them. Peter had years to forgive.... It's not like it was 17 minutes, and suddenly Peter and Sylar were buddies. It took a lot of time, but it's canon. The slash might not be, but that friendship is.))

[vampire-peter.livejournal.com]

((It's like they forget that it was 8 years of just the 2 of them, 24/7, working through things. That's a helluva long time and more than enough to finally get to a friendship phase.))

[italianeaglesct.livejournal.com]

((I know. It's not like suddenly Peter stopped grieving for Nathan either, but the person who killed him was gone. That isn't who Sylar was anymore. He wasn't even Sylar by then. He was a new Gabriel.))

[vampire-peter.livejournal.com]

((Gabriel 2.0. LOL But yeah, he'd had time to come to terms with Nathan's death and stuff. I'm sure it wasn't easy at all for him to come to terms with that and Sylar but Peter was always ruled by his heart and eventually he'd have to give Sylar a chance when he saw just how repentant he really was.))

[lornrocks.livejournal.com]

You never cease to amaze, my dear. Gorgeous.

[italianeaglesct.livejournal.com]

Thank you, sweetheart. That means a lot coming from you.