Post-ep for 'What Lies Below.' No Pirate, I couldn't work the wife-beater in either. Sue me...
CAUTERIZE
THE SLICE OF TEARS TO CAUTERIZE WOUNDS
That the scrubbing has left a weary body raw has gone unnoticed, angry fingernails carving guilt into heat-reddened flesh like a sinner destroying evidence of a wrong committed under the influence. The once scalding spray no longer steams the room, the dip in temperature adding volumes to the tremors that fear has already nurtured at his core. Peter will not open his eyes because there will be blood, less his own than that of a faceless man. Droplets of water weigh down his lashes but the sting of moisture in his eyes comes from within, dredged from the rot he might have become.
However forceful the cleansing, he cannot remove what is no longer there.
THE WHY IS THE LIE
The motives of that day, a borrowed yoke he couldn't return of his own will, play against the mind they salvaged. He'd been controlled by an illness, graded into action he remembers only afterward when the sheets are scrambled at his feet and the voice in his dream tells him to get out. To spread the alien in his blood. To kill with a red eruption of all he'd been given. A parlor trick labeled him fine but later, when they witnessed the stranger claiming him, he was caged. He sees it still, fearful expressions that decided he couldn't be saved. The string that tethers his sanity is reeled back in, held closer as the dream fades. It's a desperate grab for control of what has betrayed him.
There is little now that separates Peter from his father.
I LIVE AGAIN TO DIE
Because the fever passes and all is right in their world, he is asked to enter an office building and there's just enough panic on his tongue to make him hesitate. The looming structure rises above his head, a pillar that Samson couldn't topple and Peter considers letting them proceed without him. Let them vanquish the demons waiting inside while he flees from his own. It matters only marginally how they perceive the weakness, not enough to make the shuddering stop. There's a hand on his arm to coax him, steer him, but he can taste the blood he's still trying to erase while someone wearing his flesh pounds on large windows with a savagery he's never owned. Let me out.
It feels as though he's been saying that all his life.
CARRY ME TO MY ADDICTION
The sink has become a conspicuous fixation. While Peter can't explain the disruption of his sense of self, the effects of the violation can be discerned through his new obsession. The sickening compulsion to wash his hands numb every time a faucet is passed has been noted by the others. They neither confront nor console the flashes of mania and he can't decide which crime of neglect is worse. For all the courses that the Pattern has made them run, a sprint with disease should have been the least staining. That their eyes are upon him when he reaches for the sanitizer only makes him rub harder.
They offer him pity in a glance but he'd prefer they withhold forgiveness.