Work Text:
Summer 1988
And so the thing is, and so the final matter of it all is that it's been a long
long
long
time, is the thing, is the facts, is the truth of it,
It has been a long time since Peter Walter IV, if he even counts as that kid, now, after it all, was flesh-blood-bone-blood-skin-blood-alive.
He’s sitting in the fresh-cut-lawn, it’s all leaves-bleeding-green and orange-california-poppy patches in the sun. Rabbit is at the duck pond, and his great-nephew is 2 years old and sitting beside her.
(Or— the child that would have been Peter Walter the Fourth’s great-nephew, if Peter Walter hadn’t–)
Wanda Walter remembers that day of 1962 as one of the worst days of her life. She doesn’t shy from telling him that, when he visits here, when he lets her,
The baby, his great-nephew was small. Peter Walter the Sixth. So small he fit in his hands. In past-tense horror, and between eye-blinks, he’s become so small he fits in his lap, now.
The baby is two years old, now, and fits on Cosmo’s knee less than he did three eye blinks and a breath ago. The baby can talk now, babbling sentences as he calls him Coso! Whenever he sees him, so excited, so excited,
And the baby walks. And the baby talks. And the baby demands. He runs and laughs like starlight when Cosmo plucks him up, flies him up up up into the sky, twirling in circles as the baby laughs,
He is a sweet child.
He is a Walter child.
But it's been the blink of an eye and he’s already walking.
So Cosmo sits there, looking at the baby-who-is-to-old-already.
Peter, Peter-Walter’s-The-Fourth’s-Brother’s-Son-Peter-Walter-The-Fifth, smiles at him, half-attent, squeezing his shoulder as he passes, walking to his son.
His brother’s son is 40 years old this year, and Cosmo has been 26 for longer than this country has existed. Longer than Rome existed. And his brother’s nephew is 40 years old, as he leans down and picks up his son.
And Cosmo is going to outlive him. And Cosmo is going to outlive the baby. And Cosmo is going to watch, in the blink of an eye, the baby grow up, age, die, rot, and he’ll still be the exact same, and he’ll watch every moment of it, he’ll watch the whole time.
The whole time.
And—
And he can’t– fucking handle that.
He misses Rav. And Gidget, and Blooplex, even,
He’s gone longer than this not seeing Rav, certainly, sure, but with thousands of years yawning forward before there’s even odds of Rav finding him–
He misses Rav. He misses sanity - Civil Rights, marriage rights, normality, because right now the government is letting people die and–
And at least in his future people aren’t scandalized by the idea of gay people. And at least in his future he has friends. Who knows when they even invent touch screens? Or the cure for cancer. He doesn’t know these things, and everyone is dying around him of things that are a 15 second fly-by to the urgent care, and all he knows is manufacturing with concepts that don't even exist yet—
Peter-the-baby is getting cranky, maybe, as his nephew walks him to the back door, and–
And Rabbit is over by the duck pond.
And over the duck pond is the cemetery up on the hill. Where Peter-Walter-IV’s dad is buried. Where Peter-Walter-IV’s mom is buried. Where Peter-Walter-IV’s brother and Peter-Walter-IV’s brother's wife is buried.
Where Peter-Walter-IV’s would have been buried, if he’d had the decency to have actually died.
His mother is in the ground, up there. He never even really knew her. He was the age of the baby when his mother died. And he–
Maybe it's the air out here, or maybe its the fact the baby starts crying as his nephew brings him inside, or maybe it's something about the fact he’s watched practically everyone he’s ever known die.
There was something like security in that he’d never see his family again, that he’d never see another Walter die,
But he will now.
He’ll see that little baby rot, he thinks, staring after them inside.
He’ll see his sister rot, see the robots rust or corrode out to nothing, eventually.
Or maybe it's the pressure, because–
Stabbing red boils over in his chest, crystals cracking-shifting as suddenly–
Suddenly, he feels about to explode as something—
Deconstructs.
Rabbit is next to him, the next time he manages to crack open an eye, Rabbit’s face is as haunted-red in the glow of light as Peter always is.
A dripping red tear sizzles to the grass, as he forces himself to look up to the sky.
“Ya doin’ alright, Petey?” asks Rabbit, and Cosmo knows Rabbit doesn’t mean anything by it, but something is—
Incongruent, inside him.
“Petey is dead,” he bites out, as another red-too-red tear globs out of his eyes, “He’s been dead over a thousand years, Rab,”
And Rabbit falters,
and Cosmo—
realizes, in horrible aching certainly, he cannot stay here.
This planet.
This life.
“I’m leaving,” he says, to Rabbit, to the sky, too— somewhere, someone, anyone who’s listening,
Rabbit’s stuttering something, behind him, as he turns, as he rises, and Rabbit’s reaching for him, as he rips red stabbing-horror from whatever is left of his eyes.
He’s leaving.
He’s not sure where, yet,
Not sure how yet,
but he’s not waiting a thousand years here. He’s not watching any more Walters die. He’s not seeing that baby grow up, rot.
“Petey is dead,” he says again, to no one, to himself, to the graves up on the hill.
There has to be something that can end this, out there.
Up is a far way.
And there has to be something, something strong enough to break this shell of crystals, something strong enough to smother out the fire in him that never stops.
He will find it alone.
He refuses to watch another person he loves die.