Little fic from Peter's perspective during the end of Marionette.
Death of a Maybe
Pain.
He hadn't felt pain like this since … well, he never had, really. And Peter Bishop had felt pain. Physical pain - he'd been in countless fistfights in his life, collected a couple knife wounds and a bullet wound once (long story), not to mention a being tortured a few times since he joined Fringe Division. Psychological pain - these were almost too many to count. His father's abandonment; his mother's suicide; learning he was stolen from another dimension; going back to his home world to find that the grass isn't always greener on the other side of a dimensional rift, to name a few.
But this was different. This was entirely avoidable. This was entirely his fault.
This … this was the deep despair of "what if" and "if only". This was the death of a might have been. That was the worst of it, really. That they'd never even had a chance to see if it would work. That everything he'd lived with "her" was a lie. That there were no good times to look back on, because the good times he'd had hadn't even been with her. Now he couldn't look back without feeling ill.
The guilt of it was overwhelming, he was drowning, he couldn't breath or think and when he looked at her - god, when he looked at her, trying to hold it together but failing, failing miserably, it wasn't just a knife to the heart, it was a thousand knives, all of them stabbing and twisting and digging at him from the inside out.
She asks him why he didn't hold on to her. He doesn't answer, because his answer wouldn't help. Truth is, he did hold on to her. She was all he had when he came back, she was the reason he came back, she was his lifeline and his hope and his light, and he held on so tight, so damn tight, he didn't realize she'd slipped through his grasp. He needed her to be real, because if she wasn't real then … well, we know how that story ends. It ends here. In a garden, on cold metal chairs outside the house of a man who had also held on to his love too tightly.
She says she doesn't want to be with him, and leaves him alone in the garden. His "I'm sorry" falls on no ones ears but his.
He was wrong. The worst of it was this. Seeing what he'd done to her. She who had been through so much, so fucking much because of his father, was finally broken because of him, the son.