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He’ll talk to Peter about what’s just transpired eventually, Elias presumes. Will he kiss him?
Yes, he decides; it’s been long enough. Peter has known him as a relatively (surprisingly) graceful loser and a vanishingly rare winner, and now the whole of it is set to pay off, and Elias is allowing himself to realise that he will soon be able to explain himself as much as he wants, and he would like to kiss him while he’s at it.
Will he startle in response, then? Presume for the sake of expediency that they’re standing, that the difference in their respective heights is predictably relevant instead of unpredictably so, such that Elias has to reach up and put a hand to the back of Peter’s head – no: the side of his face would be better, time enough for escalation after; especially if he freezes with the about-face and the lack of practice – at any rate, presume Elias has to reach out just to get him on the right level even when he’s within arm’s length already. In that case the motions would be practiced, very much so, the knowing of how their forms occupy space in relation to one another less a conscious thought on Elias’s part than muscle memory at this point, and the comfortable and reflexive sense of it would extend to when he pressed their mouths together. Just softly, the first time, just enough to confirm – however unnecessary the confirmation really is – they’re the right shapes they always are, in themselves and reciprocal to one another.
Yes, that sounds about right, Elias thinks. That’s enough – he can figure the rest out from there. And he would like to, he thinks, also. When he has the foresight to spare, he might even look forward to it.
Still coming down from the scintillating high of confrontation, of how unprecedentedly much he’s revealed – and he’s set something this meaningful in motion once before, just once, almost exactly where he stands now; but that was alone – Elias remembers: One of these days, you’re going to die by violence, and in that moment you’ll be completely and utterly alone, Peter had said, once, not quite joyful about it, when they were still first negotiating one another’s boundaries through the time-honored trial and error of violating them repeatedly.
That one had been fine, as it happens. It is almost certainly true; every finite iteration of himself to date has.
There remains one meaningful alternative.
Elias can’t particularly resent – well, any of it, not really; they are both doing what makes sense at the time given their respective natures, which is all he could have asked – it does not trouble him that he’s now seen the tail end of Peter’s attempting to orchestrate his death first-hand. That was well within their expected terms, and of Elias’s own volition for it besides. There are much, much worse options: so many deaths he wouldn’t even have been able to watch, if they transpired. And he knew beyond having to ask and get Peter to face up to the fact consciously that none of those were in the cards.
The idea still hurts, strictly speaking, it hurts him terribly. He lingers on it accordingly by near-unconscious habit, the thought of his own mortality perfectly familiar, the shape of his pained hatred for the same well-known and better-practiced. It’s been a long time building, the way that hating death forms the backbone of who and what he is – obviously he didn’t want Peter to win this one. Elias just can’t really blame the man for the attempt, if only because he’d had no small amount of faith that Peter would try and lose. He’s bet his life on it, after all.
Elias can’t predict the future, though. Of course. In some small and strictly limited ways, it’s even the case that Elias especially can’t predict Peter himself; he’s so often more of a problem than Elias can quite give him credit for in advance. Even that underlying blinding need not just for rules or structure but for externally-mediated ways of interacting where someone has to lose – Elias doubts he’d put up with how graceless Peter is about his own wins if it weren’t for the fact that he can also read his mind. But from that privileged position Elias can see more than the mundanely understandable mechanics of depending on a script: he can see that Peter sees himself as making fleeting attempts to counteract a deficit. That he has mitigation strategies for social interaction but no true success condition. He’s a nigh-intolerable winner because at all other times Peter feels – a semiconscious bedrock – that he’s always already been losing a war, and on top of that Elias’s individual existence in particular is the one battlefield he keeps circling back to.
Ever since Elias understood that, it’s been decent enough consolation, all told.
And will he tell Peter how long he’s planned this with respect to them in particular, in the sense that makes what Elias has in store for the world almost beside the point? Will he make Peter be the one to re-evaluate over two decades in light of what he didn’t know was going on?
Yes, he thinks. He’s sure he will. Elias has never fully been able to tell Peter what he’s doing with their partnership or why. He’s sure Peter doesn’t want to know, not the way Elias would relate to, not in any way that means he would anticipate finding out – not in a way that would let Elias have the measure of his eventual reaction taken in advance – and Elias is looking forward to telling him accordingly.
Elias turns an eye back to the shifting present, where things are finally coming to a head, with interest. And in time, as it happens.
Just in time.
Only just.
His breath catches.
Or not, he thinks. Watching.
Or not, after all.