a/n: a drabble about Peter's past. Rather dark, so be warned. Spoilers through season one. I don't know where this came from, but here it is.
No infringement intended.
The first person Peter ever had sex with name was Molly Simms. Molly was sixteen and Peter fourteen; Molly had trailed him two weeks into Peter's freshman year when he had finally shed the last of his baby weight and shot up a full six inches. It was a year after Walter was institutionalized. Peter never spoke about his father; Molly never asked.
Molly had the most infectious laugh: big and boisterous and would always catch him off guard when she opened her mouth. Whereas Molly was wild and exciting, she was not particularly intelligent. When she was struggling learning to drive a standard transmission, Peter had already mastered how to tear apart and rebuild a carburetor and hotwire an engine. Before he was fifteen, he had a firm grasp on quantum physics and thermodynamics, and that intelligence made him a little arrogant but mostly it made him angry because it reminded him of his father. He hadn't visited his father since he'd be institutionalized.
Peter liked that'd Molly would let him fuck her in the backseat of her father's Mazzerati, just after Peter would sweet talk her mother into pinching his cheeks and clasping her father's hand and ensure him that he'd take real good care of his baby girl. This would be a talent that would prove very useful later in life. The talent came easily for him. He loved that she'd wear denim skirts when they'd sneak out. For a fourteen year old boy, he didn't have a lot of self control nor time to waste on undressing. But most of all, he liked that he was able to stick it to a man he didn't really know by sticking it to his daughter in a car that was easily twice as much as the small house he shared with his mother. This gave him some small satisfaction as an angry young boy still resentful at the life his father had taken away from him by going crazy.
Six months into their relationship, Peter had shot up another three inches and was hated by his calculus teacher for finding a flaw in a challenging equation without bothering to recheck his work and had essentially rendered the old man's life work moot. Peter stopped returning Molly's phone calls, sidestepping her in the hallway for no other reason than he had just gotten bored. But he had become increasingly fascinated by short skirts and expensive cars.
Scarlett had by far the best tits that sixteen year old Peter had the luxury of ever bearing witness. She was a cheerleader and a senior and let Peter do all sorts of things to her on the couch of his mother's living room after she'd gone to bed. Scarlett loved two things explicitly in life: whisky and screwing. Peter was happy to provide both. He'd swipe bottles of whisky from his mother's hidden stashes that she didn't think he'd know about; he'd talk the old neglected house wives outside the supermarket to buy it for him; or he'd simply pocket it without notice when he couldn't get it any other way. His mother hated Scarlett, which made her all the more appealing, and he'd often come home with various stages of displayed hickeys, some new—others lightened into soft yellows or richer gold's, but he wore them like badges all the same. One day Scarlett came to his doorstep in tears. She was pregnant. Walter had been in the institution for three years. Peter played supportive boyfriend when she told him, assured her that he'd do the right thing; that he was there for her. The next day Peter packed a bag left his mother's house and disappeared to New York. He didn't even bother to leave a note. He met associates of Big Eddie's after a year when he was sweeping up animal parts from a meat processing plant and they told him he could make money if he worked for them. A lot of money. So that's what he did. He was barely seventeen.
He would sometimes let his mind wander in between beat downs and boosting cars whether or not Scarlett kept the baby. He hoped she didn't.
Tessa Roberts was the prized girlfriend of Michael "Paper Boy" Marzerrelli, the right-hand man of Big Eddie himself and Peter loathed the douchebag to an inch of his life. He took great pride and satisfaction when he hoisted her atop Michael's desk for the first time, pushing up the mini skirt that he was so engrained to love and she bit into his neck as he rode her in the back room of an underground gambling ring near the Bronx. There were probably over a hundred people just aside the other door, all drinking and losing money and Peter was supposed to be out there with them, filling in as muscle when he saw her across the smoke-filled room. She'd been eyeing him for weeks from under two black eyes and finger shaped handprints on her back, and Peter knew exactly how to push her from curious glances, to urgent kisses and finally to her legs wrapped around his back as he fucked her without caution, knocking picture frames and rolling pens off the desk as it shook under them. He was twenty-four.
Michael had screwed him good on a busted drug run; letting him take the fall when the fuzz came and Peter spent three weeks in county lock down on his sixth arrest. No one came for him, not that he expected they would; his mother had been killed in a car accident a year after he skipped town and Walter was still holed up in the loony bin for ten years and counting. He posted bail when the time came and went back to work once his feet hit pavement. He wanted to get back at Michael, but killing him would bring unwanted attention from Big Eddie, so he thought of something better. He thought of Tess.
Tess was a mean woman from New Jersey with a penchant for cigars and swore like a sailor. Peter thought she was attractive enough, but he had the smuggest satisfaction when he could get her to play back on his innocent advances, knowing she'd never tell Michael because they'd both be dead. It was perfect. They started their own twisted relationship, sneaking around and screwing during events and in Michael's bed when he was out doing the cake work for Eddie when Peter was making him millions in stolen credit cards and fraudulent real estate deals. That was his failsafe in case Michael ever found them out.
In late October of 2001 he learned that Walter was up for parole; he was being summoned in a hearing to test his father's sanity and Walter had requested to see him. It was the second phone call Walter had ever made to his son. The first one alerted him very unemotionally that his mother was dead. Peter refused to return the calls, and went, for lack of a better word, crazy—and two hazy days of drinking and gambling, counting cards and cheating the house he worked for he was in debt to his own people a cool six figures. Tess found him, hung over and wrecked in his shabby studio apartment to warn him that they were caught; he'd be dead in two days if he didn't leave town. He took the first flight back to Massachusetts, and with a freshly falsified degree from MIT, he talked himself into a swanky Chemistry professor at Emmerson. He went by Robert Knight. It was the best job he ever landed. He was there until he was discovered in '04, but not before getting five papers published and seducing the Dean's wife before he went.
It was a nice taste of what life could have been for him, but it was too late to dwell on that as he packed his bags once more and left Boston for the second time.
When he was twenty seven he was flying cargo planes as a civilian for a military base in Pennsylvania. He had no social attachments, no friends and a shabby one bedroom apartment being funded by Uncle Sam. He liked the irony of situation of being paid by the US government when he'd been arrested a total of seven times. Lucky they don't do thorough background checks on a civilian contractor—not that they'd find anything if they tried. These days he was going by Pete Rook, and Pete had a squeaky clean record and an ongoing one-night stand named Ruby that he refused to call anything more than mutually benefitting. He'd never invite her over to his place, and made it a rule to never to spend the night at hers. She'd let him slip out into the night without complaint, and Peter was thankful for that. Maybe he even loved her, but he would only be jockeying for the time when he could uproot and disappear into the night once more. Six months in he received a phone call well after midnight with no one on the other line. Two days later he was having breakfast and drinking bad coffee at the local dive when he thought he saw Jimmy, a lower level package boy that worked for Big Eddie. The next day he saw him again, sitting innocuously at the outside patio across the street from his apartment. Peter took only what he could carry and caught the red-eye to the furthest place he could go, he went to Iraq. He didn't even have a chance to say goodbye to Ruby.
Rachel Dunham was more of a social experiment rather than any sort of romantic endeavor. He was intrigued by the differences of the two sisters, the way that Rachel would toss her hair back when she laughed, how she'd unabashedly rake a gaze in his direction and give him attention that her sister refused to. He really didn't do it to harness a reaction from Olivia, but he was more interested in what she'd do when she found out. She was so unpredictable. One night he walked over, after a stressful case and slightly drunk, not sure why he'd come to Olivia's apartment, but he just did and Rachel was who answered the door. Olivia was out and Ella at a friend's and curiosity flared in Peter's chest as he catalogued the similarities of the two women in the low light of the foyer: the similar dusting of freckles that he'd never been attracted to before, the dips and slopes of contours of their noses, and even the same intense gaze they shared when they were obviously aroused. Soon Peter found himself in the very unlikely circumstance of kissing Rachel, feeling her fingers tighten in his hair as he guided her into the wall separating the living room from Olivia's bedroom. His pants pulled down around his knees, her shirt pushed over her breasts as he pushed into her roughly. He hadn't even bother taking off his shoes.
Images flooded his consciousness as he thrust into her. He didn't particularly invite them, but he also didn't necessarily shy away from them either. Images of Olivia stripped to her underwear as she's about to crawl into a tank for some science experiment; Olivia's spent face as she forewent nights without sleep to track something weird or inexplicable or insanely dangerous; Olivia smiling devilishly as she shared something personal in a bar over a card trick and bad bottled beer.
There were more evident reasons in the differences that Peter could perceive, despite the obvious distraction of his attention. He could detect Rachel's body soft and rounded from motherhood and a docile life of a civilian, very unlike the hard lithe plains of muscle and sinew and worn bone from a stint in the Military and rigorous FBI training. From this it was a short jump from wondering how fucking Rachel might translate to fucking Olivia and this revelation slightly unnerved him. Eyes popped open and he's lost in the perfect lines and inviting colors of her bed and he's coming hard, surging forward and bracing his arms on either side of the wall as he pounds through the waves as they shake every minute muscle of his back. He hisses out her name without the foresight or comprehension that the name he utters is Olivia's not Rachel's.
It's not until he'd regained some of his cognitive abilities that he realized his mistake. Rachel's face was a mixture of shock and comprehension and just a little bit of satisfaction (are all Dunham women so indiscriminately competitive?) that Peter feels a new sort of feeling washing over him that he was unaccustomed to: guilt. Shame. Remorse. It wasn't until they had redressed in silence and stood in awkwardness by the front door that Peter asked Rachel not to tell Olivia. He feigned protecting their professional relationship, but he could tell by the way she cocked her hip just like her sister that she just wasn't buying it.
"Did you find the wrong Dunham tonight?" She asked with no tracesn or hints of accusation, just a symbiotic knowing that Peter doesn't deserve nor want. He doesn't have an answer to that. What was first an experiment to fuel a reaction from a woman he couldn't pull a temperature from, who'd conned and deceived him to drag him from Iraq and now he's terrified if she found out. Not that he'd might hurt her feelings, but afraid that she'd look at him differently. Think less of him. And he was not willing to accept that, consciously or not.
Rachel agreed to keep his secret and he felt relieved; leaving the humble light of the porch to make his way into the biting cold of the Boston night when he almost crashed into her in his quickened gait—stumbling into her drunkenly and smelling the whisky on her like perfume.
"Peter, what are you doing here? Is everything okay?" She slurred slightly, but not noticeably if you didn't know her, but he does know her and he realized with burning realization that he just left her apartment after fucking her sister and she's asking if he's okay. Because that's just who she was.
"Everything's fine." He lied, walking past her briskly without further explanation and never feeling so guilty in his life as he walked into the shadows of the night.
All feedback welcomed.