Setup/characters: Peter as Angela sleeps on his shoulder in the church. The whole scene screamed "Hamlet's soliloquy" to me.
Disclaimer: I don't own Heroes. Or Hamlet.
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To sleep, perchance to dream
"Anything else you need?"
Angela was sitting in the pew, not looking at him as he stood next to her but staring fixedly in front of her. Peter could only marvel at her calmness. The echo of the cathedral portal closing behind the agents who had been chasing them was still sounding in his ears, yet here she was, a cup of tea in her hands, her composure in stark contrast to his own restlessness.
"Thank you, Peter." She gave a slight shake of the head and looked up at him. "Just… sit with me." There was a slight smile on her face.
He didn't feel like sitting. He didn't know what he felt like. Not like running, not like fighting. He'd had so much of that. Not like talking, either. He wouldn't have known what to say. After her raw, hurried revelation in the confessional, he looked at her and had trouble seeing the Angela Petrelli he thought he had known for all his life. Someone different looked back at him, someone strange, and yet … not.
He sat.
Neither of them moved for a very long time, then Peter felt her head drop against his shoulder. He felt a twinge from where Danko had shot him a few days ago, and gently shifted her to a more comfortable position. She didn't wake.
To sleep, perchance to dream.
Look at me. I'm sitting in a church, my mother sleeping on my shoulder, and here I am dragging up Hamlet from some corner of my brain.
He almost envied her. He felt bone-weary, but at the same time, he knew he couldn't have slept, not here, not now. There was too much on his mind.
Please, just show up. Those had been the words on which he had ended his prayer – if it could be called that – just before the agents had found them, and the person who had shown up, saving his life for no less than the fourth time in just a week, had been Noah Bennet.
Clearly, God had a sense of humour.
Or maybe He was trying to make a point.
Peter looked at his mother's face, looking completely at peace, and for the first time in his life, he realised how much of his worries and concerns he had bestowed upon people who must have been far less burdened in their lives than she had been, for so many years. Pangs of disprized love. He'd struggled so hard for his father's respect, even for Nathan's; his mother had always been the cornerstone, the one he had felt most sure about. She'd never been particularly demonstrative in her affection, but it had always been there, and she had always appeared so strong that he had never been led to wonder whether anything was wrong in her life.
Then, last fall, he had discovered she had known so much more than he could ever have imagined, and had played everyone around her to her ends. Had he hated her? He couldn't say. He had been angry, for certain. He had also been brought up to respect his parents. Had that stopped him from hating his father? For a long time, yes. In the end? He didn't know.
Then his protestation that he didn't hate her, and her off-hand comment that unconditional love wasn't really love at all.
And now, all her manipulation, all her deceit had suddenly been revealed as yet more deception, not to make the world see what she saw, but to make it do what she felt needed to be done.
No, he didn't hate her. Not even for the unconditional love remark. He didn't think she realised it, but Peter now felt it had said a lot more about Angela than it did about him. Once, he would have felt hurt by her words, and would even have been led to believe she was right. Now that her mask had slipped long enough for him to look behind it, he saw that it was her take on life more than anything else, that she had written off love as something that brought more harm than good.
He carefully shifted her head again, in search of a more comfortable position in the hard pew, until he found one he thought he could bear until morning. The church was completely empty now, and the stained-glass windows were dark. Night had fallen outside. That thought should have been enough to make him want to sleep as well, tired as he was, but still he remained sitting there, his eyes wandering across the familiar scenes depicted in the windows and along the walls, the altar decorations and the crucifix behind it, which he had looked at so many times before for as long as he could remember, during services that had sometimes, in his childhood, seemed even longer than this night did.
Perchance to dream.
Was she dreaming now? Was she receiving guidance as to what needed to be done? Was it even guidance? Peter had never talked about his own dreams to his mother, not in the context of sharing what they had meant to each of them. He wondered whether her dreams took the same shape as his had, or if they were different, the way all abilities seemed to shift and vary depending on who was using them. What dreams may come. Some of his had never come to pass, or not quite. Did hers? Were they open to interpretation? How likely was a wrong interpretation after decades of practice?
If she woke, and came up with a plan, could he just go along?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.
No, he told himself. Whether she was dreaming or not, and whatever came of it, he would be ready. He didn't know where they were going to right this mess that Nathan had gotten them all into, but he needed to have faith. In his mother, in himself.
Maybe even in God.