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Peter woke up, which was the first surprise. Every bit of him prickled with the agony of being dropped from a cold room into a hot bath, though it was less of a physical pain than an existential one. He remembered the Archivist's pressing questions, the weight and pressure of them, so unnatural in Forsaken's cold embrace; in a way he felt as though the questions had never stopped, despite the clear memory of a brief, blissful moment when he thought that everything had stopped. Peter shifted his limbs against unusually soft sheets, trying to get his bearings. He certainly wasn't in the Lonely any more, nor was he in his cabin on the Tundra or the hard, narrow bed of his childhood room in Moorland House. It was...familiar, though, and he came to the obvious conclusion just as the smooth, rich voice from the doorway removed any doubt.
"Ah, Peter, you've rejoined us at last. I was almost beginning to worry." Elias looked as smug and polished as ever, even if he was in his shirtsleeves. His smile could have been genuine, and Peter shuddered under its weight as Elias carefully perched himself on the edge of the bed. There might have been worse people to see under the circumstances, but he couldn't think of many.
He had to swallow twice before his voice would cooperate, and even then it was rough, as though he hadn't spoken in years. "You lied to me," he said, less angry than he might have wished. "You told me your Archivist wouldn't be a threat."
Elias hummed in agreement, reaching out to run his fingers through Peter's hair. It was good, painfully so, to be touched after being nothing; it was terrible to suffer such intimacy after having fallen apart into the Lonely itself and then become barely more than human again. Peter felt tears sting behind his eyelids and he opened his eyes again. Better to look back at Elias than to cry in front of him.
"To be fair," Elias said, "I was as surprised as you. I truly didn't expect such ruthlessness from him."
Peter doubted that. "You must be very proud," he muttered.
Elias's smile went sharp then, that sharks-tooth grin he'd carried with him from James Wright, and his hand tightened in Peter's hair enough to hurt. "It was very impressive, but Jon has served his purpose." He loosened his grip to pet Peter's cheek, and Peter couldn't stop himself from flinching away from the gentleness of it.
He could blame that, surely, for how long it took him to understand. "It worked, then," Peter said, and he knew it was true as soon as the words left his lips. It was why he had been so disoriented; the world was nothing at all like it had been when he'd left it. The aura of fear that brushed at the edges of his awareness was not the singular note they had all expected to be the result of a ritual, but it was deeper, richer than anything in the world he'd known.
And yet – there was a flavor to it, a single note stronger than all the others. It shivered down his spine and crept down his throat, pressing in like the Buried but without the comfort of being fully enveloped, too much, too close, eyes everywhere.
"What did you do?" Peter said. He tried to pull away from Elias's touch, but he was still so weak, and Elias was determined, slipping fully onto the bed and pressing close against his side.
"Nothing more than I'd promised," Elias said primly. Which was true, though not at all what he'd been asking.
Peter closed his eyes again, hoping to find that lost, drifting feeling he'd had upon first awakening, but now that he could feel the Eye there was no escaping it. Elias laced their fingers together, drawing Peter's hand into his lap, and Peter clung to it, the one familiar thing in a world perfectly shaped for the one thing he could not bear.
"I would have been happy to stay there," Peter said quietly. It wasn't quite true – how could he be happy when he was nothing, when there was not even a him to break the peaceful silence of isolation – but Elias had never been able to understand the appeal of the Lonely, and he did not have the strength now to try to explain. He still prickled and ached, drawn too suddenly from perfect loneliness to being utterly Seen.
"Oh, Peter," Elias murmured with aching tenderness, pressing a kiss to Peter's knuckles. "But I missed you terribly. I could hardly have a world made over entirely to my demands without you in it. Don't worry," he added, punctuating it with another kiss to Peter's wrist. "I know you've suffered terribly, and it was my fault. I intend to make it up to you. I promise I'll look after you."
The curve of his lips on Peter's skin belied the sincerity in his voice, and still Peter couldn't help but press closer to him. There was not enough of him, yet, to walk out under the great Eye that filled the sky. He could bear up under these smaller ones, surely. He always had before. He felt a sharp pang of longing for that perfect, muffled world, lost to him now that it had been made a part of this one, present but always subservient to the Watcher. The tears slipped away from him before he could try to stop them, and Elias crooned a soft noise as he wiped them away, running his thumb gently along the soft, yielding shape of Peter's eye.