Title: Always On the Edge
Character(s): Peter, hints of Peter/Claire
Rating: PG-13
Summery: He's always on the edge in his head.
A/N: It's really kind of dark and angsty. Some thoughts of suicide, so if you don't like that, don't read. I played up Peter's ability to where he absorbs powers permanently.
He's always on the edge in his head, hardly balanced between his old life and his new, his ability and the ones of others that he is still picking up without meaning to. He's stuck in a place where light and dark are on either side of him, staring him in the eye, grinning, laughing, teasing, taunting, but he can't touch either one. He's in that place between good and evil, sane and crazy, love and hate, and he can't seem to find his way out.
But it's all he wants anymore. He'd give anything to get out.
It's only fitting when he finds himself at the edge of the roof on a rainy afternoon.
"Peter? What are you doing up here?"
He hears her and her worry but he doesn't react, he can't. He can't do much of anything any more. Thoughts are pounding his mind while a second personality pounds back, space and time are warped so badly that no matter how fast he can heal now he can't tell which way is up or down or good or bad or wrong or right.
"Peter, come down from that ledge."
He doesn't heed her request, and instead sits down on the concrete ledge, crossing his legs, and staring down the street sixteen stories below him. He jumped once because he thought he could fly. He was pushed off the second time by a serial killer.
"Peter please. You're scaring me."
He wonders if the third time will finally kill him.
--
He stares at the mirror, unsure of the person staring back at him is really himself or someone else, someone darker, evil, someone who wants to take him and turn him into something he's not, something he can't be.
He wonders if it's all just a dream.
His expression grins at him suddenly and that's when he knows it wasn't all a dream. It's a nightmare come to life, a terrible, cold nightmare that's grinning as it swallows him whole.
--
He stopped showering five days ago.
He stopped talking four days ago.
He stopped eating three days ago.
He stopped sleeping two days ago.
He can't remember when he stopped caring.
--
He jumped off a building once, so sure, so certain that he could fly that he was willing to risk his life over it, if only to prove his brother wrong.
His mother told him that she was worried about him, that she saw the jump as an attempt at suicide and that she thought he was inheriting the same depression that his father had lived with, the same depression that had killed his father, a depression that was so dark, so scary that hardly any one could help. The disease was hereditary and he had always been a bit more sensitive then all the other boys in the world.
She was scared for him, scared that her baby was going to leave her like her husband had.
He knows now that she had every reason to be.
--
The silence is killing him more then the noise ever could. With the noise there was always something to distract him, always something to turn his mind from the darkness that was enveloping it and try to focus on something better, something real, something worth fighting for. It never worked like it should've but it was a distraction nonetheless and he misses it terribly now.
In the silence, there's nothing to stop it from trying to kill him and he's certain it's only a matter of time before it does.
He sits in his corner, pressed as tightly to the white walls as he can get, trying to blend himself into them, to become one of them, because nothing is when everything finally goes away. He knows she's there, watching him, making damn sure that he goes nowhere and he resents her for it. If it weren't for her, then he'd be free from this hell wreaking havoc on his mind. He wants to be free. He'd give anything to be free from it all, to get out.
"I'm not lettin' you die."
He wonders if he said that aloud or if she can read minds now too.
--
"I brought you some food."
He hardly glances at her. She says she wants him to get better, to start living again, to be Peter, the nurse who crashed her homecoming to save her life when he didn't even know her, again. She isn't getting the message though, she doesn't get that the only way for him to get better is to stop breathing.
"Peter, talk to me."
He winces when she steps too close. He can mute thoughts sometimes but not when they're close to him, not when she's just inches from his body, forcing him to listen to every single thought she has to share with him. His ears turn off at times easily but not his mind. That part never fucking stops.
"You have to stop this."
"I can't."
"You haven't even tried."
He doesn't want to admit that she's right. "I don't... I can't. I can't do it."
"You're gonna have to. I ain't lettin' you die on me."
"Why?"
"You saved my life once, Peter. Let me save yours."
He doesn't know what she plans on doing or how she'll go about fixing him because he's a fucking wreck and he isn't sure if even wants to know what her plan is. He knows it won't work. He knows that whatever she does, says, thinks, or tries to do for him, that it'll never work. He can't fix himself. She can hardly be expected to do it for him.
She reaches out to touch the side of his face, wincing with him when their skin touches. Her lips press against his forehead, cool and soothing, and she pulls him towards her, cradling his head against her breast, gripping his hair tightly in one fist, his shirt in the other. "Let me save you," she whispers against his hair, kissing that too.
"If you save me, will you save the world?"
"This ain't about the world. I want to help you."
He wonders that if he falls, if she'll catch him. He hopes so. He doesn't want to know what happens if she fails for when she fails, he's lost forever.
--
He finds a pen one day and instead of turning the metal tip on his wrists, as tempting as that is to his twisted mind, he turns it on the wall he's spent so much time pressed up against. He doesn't know what he's writing, his hand moves without command, forming thoughts and words that would make no sense to a sane person but make all the sense in the world to him--at times.
"Peter. What are you doing?"
His hand cramped hours ago but his fingers haven't stopped. That should strike him as odd.
"Stop it, Peter!"
He does, surprisingly, dropping the pen, seeing for the first time what he's been writing for hours. I have sinned. Forgive me. over and over, covering the wall in his insanity. In places where the ink ran out, he carved the words into the wall itself.
"What's wrong with me?"
She doesn't tell him that Mohinder found the same scratchings in Sylar's apartment.
--
He's always on the edge in his head, standing between redemption and damnation and never knowing which way he'll fall. It's so easy to say that he won't end up like Sylar, that the powers crowding his head won't turn him like they did the watchmaker, that he won't start killing people. He didn't turn into Ted, so he can't turn into Sylar.
Right?
He's Peter and that's all he'll ever be.
What he knows and they don't is that he isn't Peter anymore. He hasn't been Peter for a long time. He doesn't know who he is now. He can't look in the mirror and recognize himself anymore. What looks back at him is something foreign--something evil, something that needs to be stopped.
What he does know is that he doesn't have any hope for his salvation.
If there's a such thing as mercy, he couldn't tell you what it was.
--
He's aware of screaming and sirens and tears and pain and blood and terror and he can't do a damn thing about any of them. His limbs aren't responding to his commands, his mouth can't form a solid word anymore, his eyes see nothing but darkness, no matter how hard he tries to see light.
It's all darkness now.
There's too much power, too many abilities crowding his mind and demanding to be seen, to be known, to be explored, too many people relying on him to save the world and he hasn't the slightest fucking clue on how to do that. He saved the cheerleader, that should be enough. It should've been enough but it's not and he can't handle all the pressure. He's never been good with pressure.
"Peter!"
He crumbles under the weight of it all and the asphalt rises to greet him.
Comments are love.