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“Nathan. Nathan,” is all Peter can say, over and over, barely more than a whisper. He’d feel like an idiot if the only thing he could hear wasn’t his name being whispered over and over again too, if Nathan wasn’t holding onto him so tightly Peter isn’t sure where he’s getting the breath to speak.
They’re clutching each other just like the last time, Nathan’s face pressed up against Peter’s. Just like his dream. Warm. Not like one of them is a potential human bomb, just warm like two people can be together.
Peter hasn’t been this close to anyone in, well, as long as he can remember.
“You’re the only thing that kept me going,” he blurts out. “The only thing that mattered to me.”
He can feel when the words sink in, the way Nathan tightens up, the moment that Nathan stops breathing. The moment he starts again.
And that’s the only thing that changes. Neither of them lets go.
They end up in an apartment. His apartment, and he can barely remember how they got there. Maybe they flew. They’re sitting across the table from each other, leaning too far forward because Peter just wants to touch, to make sure it’s real. He reaches out tentatively to touch the scrub brush growing on Nathan’s face. It seems wrong – he can’t remember Nathan with anything more than stubble, and that was on his worst days – but it’s really not as rough as it looks.
“When’d you give up shaving?”
“About six months ago,” Nathan says wryly, the corners of his mouth curling up next to Peter’s fingertips, and it’s just then Peter realizes how intimate a touch this is. “Since that night.”
“Six months,” Peter repeats softly, and draws back his hand. “Is that how long it was?” This whole time Nathan’s eyes have never left him. For the longest time all he knew were those eyes and now he can’t look away. Peter’s skin prickles – he burns with something else now.
“Time got away from me, for a while there,” he finishes, flushing a little. “I’m not myself.” Sometimes he’s not anybody.
Nathan’s eyes soften, impossibly gentle in a face that could have otherwise been chiseled from stone. “It’s all right, Pete. It’s all right.” Nathan clutches his hand, his voice breaking just once. He’s not crying or even teary-eyed, but Peter instinctually knows that Nathan is not the type to get teary-eyed. “I thought I lost you.”
“I came back,” Pete whispers. “I did everything I could to come back.”
“I know, Pete. I knew you would.”
Peter isn’t exactly sure who’s comforting whom here.
They take a moment to pull themselves together. Peter runs one hand through his hair – not as long as it was, but long enough to look up through a fringe of dark hair if he tilts his head just right. Nathan lets go of Peter’s other hand and clears his throat.
“Where were you?”
Peter shrugs. “I woke up in a storage container on a dock. Maybe in Ireland? Their accents sounded like it, maybe. I shocked one of them and flew away.” Not exactly an epic adventure.
Nathan’s eyes widen suddenly. “Oh, God, Ma. She’ll want to see you.”
They take a cab this time. It drops them off in front of a townhouse – a very nice one, pale yellow with white trim, brick here and there, a high wrought-iron fence.
Peter doesn’t like it.
Nathan rings the doorbell instead of going straight in. Peter lounges behind Nathan while he asks Sonia if their mother is in, deftly avoiding looking anyone full in the face on the way to front room.
The door swings open and Peter doesn’t know what he’s expecting. Who he’s expecting.
“Nathan, I don’t know what –”
“Mom.”
Her head snaps up. “Peter. Peter, oh, Peter.” She crosses the room in three quick steps – quicker than he would think a women in heels that impressive could move, but –
“Hey Ma.”
– but his mother was never one to be bothered by what she should and shouldn’t be able to do. Things come back to him in waves – sharp, visceral things. Her hands over the piano in the front room, pressed to his arm, curving around his face. Her perfume, soft but severe and only hers. And always, always, the quiet clack of her heels.
Then there’s the soft click of a door behind them -- Nathan retreating to the front room. Peter distantly thinks that shows of excessive emotion always did put him off a little.
“Peter. Sweetheart.” She’s clinging to him in a way that seems decidedly at odds with her character, but he hugs her back just as hard. He’s inclined to comfort her – to comfort everyone, he thinks wryly, remembering all the times at the coffee shop he’d consoled sobbing girls over broken hearts and bad dates. She’s not crying, but she’s shaking a little. “I thought I’d lost you, I did. We all did.”
It’s a long moment before she pulls away from him, delicately touching her face. “Where were you?” Her eyes are a little wet, shining with happiness, maybe, but something else too. Guilt. A scrambling sort of intelligence. And maybe Peter wouldn’t see it if he wasn’t looking for every little clue, if he wasn’t still trying to drink everything in. If he had more sentimentally attached to those memories, to her – if she wasn’t still a stranger to him.
“You knew,” he says softly, and though her eyes flicker again she doesn’t flinch. He’ll give her that. This woman – his mother, God – banked on her dirty secret finding its way to light someday.
She takes another step away from him, gracefully smoothing the moisture out of the corners of her eyes. “You shouldn’t have remembered so quickly.” You were never this quick, is what he hears.
“Why?”
Gasp of wet laughter. “It’s what had to be done, Peter. For the family. For the… oh, the bigger picture. You were never supposed to be alone, and you certainly shouldn’t have escaped. Those incompetents,” she sniffs, smoothing her skirt now, rearranging her pearls. “And your return was an eventuality, that was never debatable. But for a while –”
“For a while, what?” Peter shouts. “For a while I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I am, I don’t know anything except what it feels like to explode?” No family, no friends, no memories, nothing to help him understand, nothing to hold on to, nothing to look for, nothing except his nightmares, nothing, nothing, nothing.
“Peter,” she grates out, and he realizes that she’s not choking from emotion but because he’s doing it again – pressing her to the wall, that invisible force pushing down on her esophagus.
And just like before, he doesn’t want to stop.
But she’s his mother – she’s his mother, she rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night to hold his hand and push back his hair and tell him he was her favorite and even he isn’t immune to that, to the pale faint joy he had felt then, and he –
He lets her go.
And he goes back to Nathan.
“Can we fly back to the apartment?”
Nathan waits a beat before he answers, but he’s doesn’t ask any questions. For that Peter is grateful.
The flight is short and Peter distracts himself with watching the city underneath him, with the wind over him and under him, with pushing past Nathan and twirling and twisting around him until even Nathan rolls his eyes. They both climb into the apartment through the fire escape, and Peter manages to knock over a chair while he does it.
He blushes hotly when Nathan laughs.
“You can fly, but you still can’t manage to walk across a room without tripping over your own two feet.”
“Not a room that looks like this,” Peter mutters, and this time it might be Nathan who blushes.
“You, uh. You probably want your apartment back, huh?” He looks a little sheepish about asking, which is pretty understandable considering the Nathan-shaped indent on the bed and the shrine of pictures on the end table. Not to mention the collection of bottles under the sink.
“Not really,” Peter says blandly. And he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to be in New York anymore. If this is his life, he’s doesn’t want it. He’s decided. “I’m leaving.”
Nathan looks as though the bottom dropped out of his world and he forgot how to fly. “Pete…”
“Come with me.”
Nathan gapes at him. “Come with you? Pete, where are you even going? This is your home, your family – ”
“You’re my family,” Peter says firmly. “I’ve been living in Portsmouth. Working at a coffee shop. I’ve got this really shitty apartment that’s probably full of asbestos and lead paint. Doesn’t even have a proper bed.”
“Peter…”
“But I like it,” he finishes earnestly, flashing a crazy half-grin. “I do, really. I’m going back there.” He takes a step forward, right up next to Nathan and grabs loose handfuls of Nathan’s shirt. “I’m going back there and I want you to come with me.” He can practically see Nathan digging in his heels and he knows he has to keep this conversation short. You can win an argument just by being willing to fight around the clock rather than back down, and Nathan’s tenacious enough to be that stupid, so he has to make this quick and he has to make this count and hit Nathan right where it hurts because this – this, he has to win. Right now Peter’s on the high ground and he knows it, he just knows. He needs Nathan and Nathan needs him, and he can’t let Nathan rationalize exactly how much or it’s game over. He loses all over again.
He doesn’t remember everything, he knows. He can’t tell you what he was doing this time last year. He can’t tell you who all the people in his head are, all the things he is, all the things he can do. But he remembers Nathan. He’s pretty sure he remembers every moment he’s spent with Nathan ever, and he remembers all of them crystal-clear. More importantly, he remembers how he feels with Nathan, and he knows that’s something he can’t lose.
“Peter,” Nathan breathes out, sharp and cutting and Peter can’t help flinching. At that Nathan softens a little, and his voice is a little sweeter when he says, “Peter, this is crazy.”
Peter laughs. “Is it? Is it really, Nathan? You were going to die with me. For me. You were going to let me blow you up.”
“Sure, instead of half of New York City. Very altruistic of me.”
“You could have let Claire kill me. You could’ve. Even I won’t come back from a bullet to the brain.” Peter knows. Dear God, he gets it now. “You didn’t.”
“So I’d die for you,” Nathan concedes the point smoothly. “People die for a lot of things.”
“Dying’s easy.” Well, at least for most people, when all Peter has to do is close his eyes and he’s back at the explosion. His skin prickles. Happiness – who else deserves it? “You were going to give me everything.”
Nathan’s considering it. Peter can see it in his eyes.
“And really,” he adds, looking around the empty apartment. His apartment. Like a perfectly preserved tomb without the body inside. “Nathan. What have you got to lose?”
A moment’s hesitation, Nathan’s hand sliding up to wrap around Peter’s wrist, and there is nothing Nathan can say that will make a difference.
“Monty and Simon,” Nathan says finally, one last ditch effort of Normal and Before and This Is What I Should Want. “Heidi has them. She won’t let me even see them –”
“She doesn’t want them to see you like this. You know she won’t take them away, not like that. And you’re not going to be like this anymore, Nathan. You’re going to be…” Peter pauses, searching for the word. “Whole. You’re going to be whole again, maybe in a way you never were.”
Peter, Nathan murmurs, stunned and shaking, something Peter hears even though Nathan’s mouth hasn’t moved. We’re going to be together.
“Always.”