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Elias, Peter’s found to his own consistent satisfaction, kisses hello like he missed him. Every single time, somehow. Not with any kind of desperation or insecurity but rather the opposite: with a long-reaching inherent sense of accustomed touch denoting something slipping into its proper place, the kind that means he leaves a space fitted for this and unfilled when Peter’s gone from him.
It’s lovely: the way Elias’s hands fall on his shoulder and waist with full confidence he knows where they’re intended to rest, the absence of resentment when Peter returns the favor with a hand in his hair and the other braced beside him. The fact that when Elias surprises Peter with a bite to the lip significantly harder than he could strictly speaking enjoy Peter knows it means he must have been thinking too loudly about what here he actually wants.
He tilts his head to drag tongue and free lip across Elias’s effectively closed mouth, obnoxiously soft compared to the broken skin and still-emphatic teeth in play, motion centered on the pleasant starburst of pain there, and then he does actually pull away. Elias lets him readily enough, but his hand trails the edge of Peter’s neck and jaw meditatively even as his arm has to stretch out to manage that and still let him stand up. He looks mildly disgusted at him, Peter finds at focal distance, even as Elias is also tonguing the slightest trace of Peter’s blood out of his own mouth; but that’s one of Elias’s less misleading resting expressions, all told.
They’ve had this argument enough times to be able to sort it out by metadata alone, if only because neither of them can quite swing the alternative. Peter finds Elias’s metaphysics opinions so esoteric as to be pointless, albeit funny to aggrieve him about. Elias finds what Peter holds in the same space personally offensive, allegedly, and as such can’t stand to be stopped from looking at it.
The scaffolding of existence, the only solid thing: Peter has debts and he has duties — honestly, though, everybody does, it’s hardly his affair that most of the world wasn’t raised right — but he doesn’t have that kind of uncertainty, the sense of something to prove characteristic of those who deal in proof. Of course Peter can carve out a place to give to the god that was already there just about anywhere he goes. By being there he proves there’s enough of himself to dedicate; breathes it and breathes it alone, at this point, has for years. If Elias is that jealous surely he of all people knows, figuratively speaking at least, where to find him.
Peter lets that familiar train of thought run its course for the sake of his observer, and offers Elias a guilelessly bright grin to go with it; he’s hardly got a deficit of them to work with. Elias sighs, then fixes Peter back in the usual sea-glass stare.
Probably minding more of his own mental business, given the sharpness, but there’s by definition no real way for Peter to know.
“I could also be objecting to how cloying your ego is,” Elias says, close to neutral as he ever gets. His hand crept back up to find comfortable purchase on the side and back of Peter’s neck as soon as Peter held still and let him, and Elias seems content using that to thumb at some of the hair that’s starting to arc unruly under Peter’s ear.
It makes him shiver slightly (mostly pleasant, not quite ticklish) and show an infinitesimal amount more teeth in what’s arguably a gesture of thanks. “Cloying,” Peter says delightedly — that one might be new, come to think — “Me? Really?”
Elias looks egregiously unimpressed at him for that. It’s truly excessive; sure, he’s under more than enough stress, but when isn’t he; he doesn’t have to go around letting Peter get to him like this just because of that. And Elias could also just get out of Peter’s head if it’s going to be so—
Peter wonders, feeling slow on the uptake for it, if that’s meant to be the point here. Elias has never quite had a comprehensible model of risk and reward that Peter can tell, it’s just that usually insofar as there’s mystery to it that lives in Elias’s supercilious inertia and not in something Peter hasn’t grasped that appears to have to do with him. A feeling prickles in his sternum with a chill following each point of false sensation, at that, and it makes no difference to the near-guarantee he’ll have and fail to find long fingers unfurling in his thoughts but he shrugs Elias’s hand away belatedly. Straightens up more fully, watched, and opts without thinking about it to sit on Elias’s desk because at least it’s going to piss him off.
Elias does sigh, pointedly, and closes his eyes. The matter of his hand falling to Peter’s knee goes without comment, much like an arbitrary set of other arguments around variables including those at hand they’ve already handled. Elias runs cold, generally, loath to disturb the world around him; Peter hardly notices the touch on his leg even in terms of pressure, and he’s obviously too dressed to note anything else, but he knows whatever Elias gets out of it he’s getting. It still takes Elias slightly too long, Peter thinks (not long enough to fidget with, just long enough to note), before he actually speaks. “You know I wouldn’t have you here if—”
“Oh, I see,” Peter cuts in on principle anyway, “So you intend to have me? Here? I mean…” He makes sure to leer in what he considers a perfectly appropriate manner, which is to say that Elias opens his eyes and ignores him for his troubles.
“—If it weren’t serious,” Elias finishes quietly.
Ah. “Right, right, I hear you’ve made some kind of horrible mistake. What can I do for you?”
“You’ve been in my life more than long enough for that to have stopped being news, Peter,” Elias returns with much more of a habit than he’d been showing, a perfect comfortable scorn. “Your own… idiosyncratic grasp of time notwithstanding.”
Peter doesn’t have Elias’s insight in all this and he doesn’t want it; the man’s vocation sounds both exhausting and cluttered, and nothing Elias has ever done has served to disabuse Peter of that first impression.
He has this instead, which is better: a sense of how Elias feels knowing him — which is more than enough to make the trade work, where Elias is so sure he gains something inherently in the knowing, always leaning further into it in response to becoming aware there’s a point he could conceivably stop — like awareness of an expanse of unlit water, thick-salted and still, and the expectation alongside one will inevitably not only swallow but inhale.
“Aw,” Peter says, all bright ice, lest he grow honest inappropriately and shame them both. “You wound me, Elias, I’m hurt. Truly.”
“You’re welcome, I’m sure.” Elias’s voice is perfectly flat, but then — to Peter’s brief and decentering surprise — the tone folds. “Look. We do not have infinite time. You’re… right, strictly speaking, much as I would personally contest the frame in question. I have. I…” Elias takes his hand back, even, to press fingertips against his now-closed eyes instead. “Need to speak with you about contingencies after all, I think.”
And here he’d been so aimlessly, indiscriminately confident the last time the idea of worst-case scenarios came up. Peter leans over slightly, though it hardly matters when Elias is telegraphing that he’s this set on seeing through him only. “I can’t help you with your Archivist problems,” Peter says, with a measure of intent that nets no visible response. “Awful turnover rate, really not ideal, no idea how you brought all that on yourself but it’s not my business.”
“What? No.” Elias looks up at him to say it, abruptly, then rearranges his reactions. “Not that. I don’t like it, the… No, he’ll be all right, this time.”
There’s something in his eyes for a second Peter fails to place, and the wondering actually dogs him for a moment thereafter, the not being sure what it meant. Elias doesn’t lie and in Peter’s understanding he doesn’t particularly hope, and Peter may have missed something if he’s really never noticed the presence of whatever that other flicker of feeling was.
His attention is significantly re-orientated on this instant, though, when Elias keeps talking: “Jon’s been doing well. He’s going to be fine. And even I might be, I think.”
“Might?” Peter repeats, with thoughtlessly pointed diplomacy. It doesn’t make sense to read much into that little when he has Elias right here to ask in the first place, but the question itself is amorphous and Peter can hardly stop where his mind goes in advance of an answer, which is: the worst and the most singular implication possible, because he knows Elias for an optimist.
“Yes, Peter, that’s what I said,” Elias says, with an edge to it. Watching him think unflattering things about him and his, surely, mouth pursed as if any of it could be new.
But maybe, then, it is, Peter thinks. The balance of power — at least as regards the two of them, or more relevantly Elias’s voracious master and his own family’s all-encompassing little god — has been stable for as long as, well, for Peter’s entire adult life is the part that matters here. He’s felt the potential for that to change, before, but more in terms of what could happen if Elias failed to keep what’s his on a reliable enough leash.
What he’s implying now, even in how circumspect Elias is being referencing talks Peter could taste Elias not wanting to have at the time, is different. And Peter does know force, the way he doesn’t know people, and isn’t sure Elias could stop him from following this train of thought if he wanted to sully himself with trying. So more than likely Elias is watching, just watching, while Peter reevaluates the kind of thing Elias so often falls into neglect of — feels potential energy coil in his straightening spine to imagine the fulcrum of the world turning against the necessary meddling over their shoulders for—
It’s not a shift in the world Peter’s spent much time on imagining, for such an ally to cease to matter. The approach toward an idea of standing entirely alone; dry ice on his tongue and a cold killing fog for breath. A silence of the analytic whisperers clustered so prettily below…
“Stop,” Elias snaps, the most steel in him Peter’s ever heard: in his voice, in the sudden grip on Peter’s wrist, in how Elias forces himself back into Peter’s sensory landscape. The chromosphere flare of his power, shoving Peter back into only himself; and the weight of awareness of the gaze on him is what rips away the swell of that creeping, hazy quiet out of the corners of the building full of coddled secluded voyeurs, a sear of omniscience sheltering them to go back to struggling to fill the hole in the human fabric they’re resigned to live within with hard-won whispered knowledge to collapse under the weight of their individual singularity, yes, but not now; but it’s Elias’s unflinching press of having been watching Peter overreach the entire time that brings him back down, here, himself, aware again, strenuously so, of the company of that which watches him. Of how known are each and every one of the not-empty places in the air.
And of Elias watching him: present, individual, equal enough to scrutinize. Within arm’s reach: able to anchor him to human contact. The span of what Peter actually owns, still and always centered inside him, peeling back to just the basics of what he can see and hear and touch, subject to the drag of his senses or his mind.
He can feel the way the rest of the Institute shudders back into color and motion, under his fingernails, like an itch. Exactly like an itch.
The world re-establishing itself, grudgingly, orientated with a reference point of Elias’s hand on his wrist; the reminder that Peter neglects to remember, often, that Elias is strong enough to hold him down.
“I will have you understand that this is still mine,” Elias says, with no less a sense of flaying for the increase in control, words striking into a silence he owns with a feel of unforgiven metal. The edge of a lack of premeditation, the implications of vulnerability from earlier, is entirely gone. Not hidden, just gone, and in its place his approach at making Peter feel himself rendered into being known to the point beyond privacy or uniqueness or agency — and Elias is doing a damned decent job of the threat, in fact. More than enough, just now, to have stopped Peter’s breath.
So this is what actually feeling Elias in his head would be, then. Good to know.
And Peter does not breathe, and sees the inchoate menace beyond them that is Elias’s god shining through him, light on his teeth and sclera as Elias goes on, “This place is mine. This power is mine. I am capable of handling even this mess without you, Peter. Control yourself.”
That, at least, is petty enough to breathe again, trace anchoring at the edges of his intent. Peter’s not in any way sorry, nor does he regret; but he’s too certain for there to be room for the selfhood of mere confidence to come into it that Elias knows and accepts and doesn’t care in turn. For one thing, he’s sure Elias would do his own equivalent of that kind of entitled violation with far less provocation, were he to move at all.
On a personal level all of this has given Peter more than half a mind to pin Elias to his chair and kiss the light out of his unsubtly vindictive mouth. He’s not surprised by wanting that, only by the timing: either that it took so long to see this part of Elias laid bare to the power at the bones of him, or that Peter ever got to see that at all.
For his own part, well, Peter does have a type. Several. But this matters in ways what he wants just can’t; and, anyway, Peter doesn’t have his hands free.
Elias laughs very slightly, vicious focus retreating to a nearly-human sadism, one that leaves some room for connection; and inherent in it, distance. “If you just want to witness what we are that badly, really, there are less disruptive ways. Some of us have work to do.”
His grip on Peter’s wrist relaxes enough for Peter to grab the hand up before Elias can withdraw fully into his own space again. Peter kisses the knuckles, deliberately obnoxious about it, and Elias further simplifies himself into annoyance. “Don’t get me wrong,” Peter says, letting his words brush Elias’s skin, “I know you’re not dead yet. You might even say I appreciate it. So talk to me.”
Peter’s own skin’s still tingling where it touches air, where it touches anything, with the effort to reassert himself against the abstract one-directional intimacy threatened in so being seen. It means he only thinks the encouraging crack about Elias’s lifelong love of his own voice before Elias preempts him saying it, the glare tossed Peter’s way intimately familiar, and Elias starts to explain.