A/N: Just a thing I wrote for Peter after watching the Season 3 episode where he talks about Derek and Paige. Its my headcanon that he had a wife (mate) that was killed before the Hale House Fire, which aided in him losing it. (As if having your whole family being burned alive and then being bedridden for six years weren't enough).
Also, I just have all these Peter feels all the time.
Title taken from the e.e. cummings poem "Your homecoming will be my homecoming." For some reason I always read him when looking for titles for my TW fics.
He remembered what it was to love. To feel the pulse of his family (his pack) beat in time with his heart, resonating in his soul. To breathe in and know he was loved, that he belonged, that he had a place in the world. To breathe out and echo everything he had taken in, offering the same assurance. To touch his head and know Patrick (brother). The voice of reason, the calm in the storm. Blood. The right side of his chest (feeling his lungs take in and push out air) and know Talia, Alpha, sister, brother's mate. Guardian, protector. Press his hand to his side and hold his cousins and his nieces and nephews, their young aggravating ways and the times they would cling to his legs as he dragged their laughing bodies around the house. His chest (his heart) and think and pulse Anna. His mate (his life), dead (taken) with their babies in her belly. His stomach and know the worry (the terror) of losing the rest of them. And then he did.
His kind described losing a member of their pack like the loss of a limb. He'd yet to find a way to describe what it was to lose all of them at the same time. Something like the fire that had ravaged his body and tore away his mind. Something like him wishing that Derek and Laura had never found him in the tunnels under the house with what was left of Talia. (The instinct to save his Alpha driving him into the flames even as she screamed at him to let her die.) But he'd saved her long enough for Laura to take her birthright and her mother's rare gift. Slash her mother's throat open while he watched and hoped he'd die. But he didn't. He endured, holding onto revenge in his ravaged mind and a barely there scent of madness.
Sometimes he can't remember why he killed Laura and sometimes it is too clear. She was her mother all over again. Calm, commanding, the voice of reason in the terror ridden dark. She wouldn't seek vengeance. She wouldn't seek vengeance. Its all that had kept him alive and she would not acknowledge it. So he took her power and did for his family (his pack, his life, his soul) what she refused to do. And Derek took his for the effrontery of it all.
He leaned back, head thunking against the glass behind him and breathed in. (Derek and Isaac and Cora and the fading scent of Boyd and the hollowness of Erica) His family returned and the fragile beginnings of pack and its almost like he can breathe again (without the scent of smoke and burning skin and the screams of all he loved echoing in his ears). Sitting on the floor of Derek's loft, knees drawn to his chest, the moon shining bright at his back, Peter dares to hope. To touch the different parts of his new body and wonder what each will come to represent, if all the spaces will be filled. If they will endure long enough to become parts of his old ravaged soul. If all the pieces will be put back together to make him whole. (To make him pack). Or if he will forever be a piece of a body torn apart and thrown into a void. To drift alone forever.
This may expand to hold other Peter drabbles. Just an FYI.
Peace