Disclaimer: The last sentence is the truth. It's not in chapter one. The previous sentence is a lie.
I didn't plan that the answer would end up this way for this chapter. It's just how the shipping questionnaire was set up… luck of the draw, so to speak. I'm not interested in promoting a nature vs. nurture debate here.
Question #4: Peter falls in love with Bartholomew. How will their parents take this?
Barry is really a fantastic guy.
Of all the ten that came together that day from the different "universes", Peter was the most normal. It was an unusual novelty for him, but it soon wore off; he might've been smart and talented for his age, and his fathers did well to make sure that he was in shape and able to defend himself from any bullying, but compared to those who could summon fire and energy, fly and hang upside down from tress and walk on water, and invent and build devices for virtually any situation, he was a squirrel in the jungle.
Not that he held this against the others; he still liked them all quite a lot, and valued his friendship with every one of them. But Barry was probably the most accepting of the nine, the one who made him feel most at home and least confused about all the goings on surrounding them, further confused by the lineal fluctuations of the device that allowed them all to meet together. Of any friend that Peter ever had, Barry was definitely the closest.
Instead of feeling envy, he was able to now admire his friends, and he admired Barry the best. It wasn't that Barry was better than his sister at designing and figuring out new things—in fact, the twins worked best together—but he certainly stood out for Peter. Soon, when he went to visit his friends, although he was happy to see every one of them, he always felt a slight more disappointment if Barry was absent, or was markedly more happy when he wasn't. He decided that perhaps Barry was… his best friend? Yes, best friend makes sense.
But it wasn't until he found himself going on and on about his friends, with a very large emphasis on a particular one, at the dinner table that he began to notice something. His fathers were looking up from their meals, eyes trained on their son curiously and carefully. What was that emotion in their eyes? Fear? Caution? Were they just analyzing? It was very intense regardless.
"Umm…" Peter started and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "…Is there something wrong."
Axel leaned back and frowned with a sheepish, uncomfortable look to him. He put his arms behind his head and kept leaning until the chair tilted and balanced. "It's not like that, Peter. No, there's nothing wrong…"
Roxas threw his spoon down into his empty bowl (it made a loud clatter though the motion wasn't that jarring itself) and held his chin in thought. "Barry is a nice boy."
Peter felt confused. "Well, yes, he is, but…" He went silent.
The younger of the two fathers kept thinking for a bit before he threw his hands in the air. "Peter! How close are you and Barry, do you think?"
"Huh?" The young redhead scratched the back of his neck. "I don't know. Pretty close, I guess. Out of everyone, he's usually been the nicest. The best I could relate to."
"Does he feel the same way?" Axel cut in.
Roxas glared at him. "Damnit Axel!"
Peter blinked a little bit before he came to realize what they meant. "Oh. Oh! You think… You think that…?"
Axel continued, undeterred by Roxas. "You talk about him a lot. Just about all the time. If you go to visit them in that nexus he and his sister made, you come back looking sad if he wasn't there, or you come back terribly late to hang out with him if he was."
Peter sat still a moment. That didn't occur to him before. But, then again, did he really think of any girls as strongly as he felt of Barry?
Roxas seemed a little miffed else wise. "Great. I think we turned our son gay."
Axel wanted to be angry at the comment, but instead he burst out in a snicker was too fast for him to hold back. But he caught up to it and coughed it away, acting like it never happened.
Peter's eyebrows furrowed, but it didn't make him look any less flabbergasted. "I don't think it works that way, Dad." He picked up a utensil and started cutting his food again. "I read before that children from gay parents have the same ratio to be gay as straight parents."
Roxas glared at them both. "This is serious, you know. It's not easy. We don't even know what people in Barry's world thinks about.—" He put his fingers up in the air and made quote marks with distain. "—Alternative lifestyles."
"They're a lot more alternative than anything any of us could conjure up," Axel retorted without much concern. "Besides, they seemed alright with us. What I'm worried about is how they take the idea of a boy being interested in their son. That turns it into a completely different matter."
Peter narrowed his eyes. "I don't appreciate you deciding that I'm gay for me."
Axel made a wide, mischievous grin. "Sorry, Son."
Roxas sighed and got up with his empty plates. "That's fine. You go ahead and figure it out. But if Barry hurts you…"
"Barry isn't going to hurt me, Dad! He's my friend!"
"I'm just worried!" Roxas retorted. "He might hurt you without him realizing it." He shook his head and dumped his plates in the sink, once again making a loud clamor. "Just tell us if you need anything, okay? It wasn't all sunshine and kisses with Axel and I, either, so we want you to know that you have our support if you ever need it, okay?"
Axel shrugged and let his chair lurch forward before he rose and slapped a hand down on his son's shoulder. "We're here for you, got it?"
Peter looked between them, then nodded. "Yes, Dad."
.-.-.
Yeah, this is infatuation, all right, Peter admitted to himself, …if I don't outright call it "love".
The redhead struggled with this question the following week. Now that he thought about it, Berry was really… well… attractive. Had he noticed it before and not thought anything about it? Maybe he just called it envy before… but he never felt that envious of Barry.
Now terribly self-conscious, however, he watched Barry a little more closely, though he attempted to look as if he was still just as interested in hanging out with the rest of the group as he was with his "interest". It wasn't very successful; Yashagoro immediately recognized that Peter was acting strangely and started jabbing him on it. And when Yashagoro, the oldest of the four children from the world of ninja, noticed something, it made the Hatake children notice.
Peter tried to play it off, but these attentions from the ninja just made it harder for him to keep his "act" straight about figuring out if he… well… if he was straight. But the signs were pretty much there for the reading: he had already thought of Barry as something more than a friend, even if he still said "friend", even if Barry never acted any way of the sort in turn. He never came across another guy that he had liked in such a way, though. Or a girl, for that matter. Maybe this was just peculiar to Barry?
"Barry," he started at one point, cautiously testing the waters, "Have you been having very good luck with… um… girls in your world?"
"Girls?" Barry looked at Peter quizzically. "I guess not, but I think I'd want to be with a girl that had the Spark, and there aren't a lot of girls with the Spark. At least that stay alive… Why do you ask?"
Peter made a calculated shrug. "It's just that we all hang out so much in each others' worlds—I probably hang out the most in your world—but we don't really know anything about them." Or each other, he almost added.
"That's true, I guess, but your world, I think, is one of the most fascinating."
Peter blinked. "Really?"
"Sure. The technology you have… the most impressive thing about it is all the proliferation! And you succeeded in making a vast network of all people on your Earth so that they might continue the progress. Then there's the circuitry… fantastically elegant! And space travel! Well… the mind just boggles."
"But the three-eyes have some similar technologies… and better, at that."
"Yes, but theirs is still somewhat more haphazard. The capsules, for example, certainly are brilliant, but are certainly mostly the work of one of their Sparks, that Dr. Briefs that they're always telling me about. He obviously has some sort of market conquest, and his daughter will most certainly inherit it and she also has the Spark. Not like your world at all. I can't even imagine how you get Sparks to work together long enough to make such a streamlined, widespread network."
The redhead smiled. "I guess it is pretty impressive, huh?"
"Of course it is!"
.-.-.
Zeetha noticed Peter's peaked attention to her twin long before it dawned on Barry. She giggled about it privately for a little while, observing the potential drama with the same sort of enthusiasm she had for any scientific observation. Peter, however, was an introvert that had no understanding of making moves, and her brother remained rather oblivious to the whole thing. So she decided to bring up the matter to him herself.
"Sooo…" she started with a grin, looking over her shoulder as she shook out the fiberglass dust from the tarp she was meaning to salvage for a flyer. "What do you think about Peter?"
He didn't look up from his work desk. "Peter? He's a fun guy to hang out with. Probably my best friend out of everyone from the different worlds."
"Is that so?"
"Uh huh," he looked up, cleaning grease from a glass cylinder. "Why?"
"Did it ever occur to you that he might be…"
"…Might be?"
She grinned wide. "…Interested in you?"
He blinked and tilted his head. "Wha?"
"He's a good catch, I'd say. Very handsome, and nice, red curls, hmm?"
"What? Wait a second, sis…"
"What's today's discussion about?" another voice came in. Agatha's head was peaking in the room. "You two look like you're about to go into a huge debate about something."
Zeetha's large grin kept and she hopped over to her mother's side before Barry could say anything. A few whispers into her Agatha's ear informed her of the discussion. Her green eyes went a little wide, but she smiled and shrugged her shoulders. "Peter is a good boy. I don't see the problem."
Barry's face went dark with a blush. "I didn't say I was interested in Peter. And who says that Peter has a crush on me? And if he does, what of it?"
"Oh, right," Agatha answered, wide eyed and embarrassed to how she was already taking this. "Well, he doesn't have the spark, but it's not like you'd be having children." Then she added after a thought. "Unless you wanted to make them."
"I can't believe this!" Barry threw his hands up and looked like he was about to stomp off.
"Can't believe what?" This time it was Gilgamesh looking into the lab. "What's the discussion about today?" Zeetha gave a laugh.
Agatha looked over at her husband calmly. "Peter is in love with Barry."
"MOTHER!" Barry shrieked, his cheeks now darker than Maxim's cape.
Gil's eyes went wide. "Really?"
"Well, Zeetha just told me about it, but now that I think of it…"
"Hmm…" Gil brought a hand to his chin. "I see what you mean."
"FATHER!"
"There's nothing to be ashamed of, Barry," Gil said with a shrug, then something dawned on him, "Except… if it continues…"
"If vat continues?" Oggie's head popped in.
"Oh great!" Barry slammed his hands onto his face as if in hysteria. "Let's let the Jägers in the conversation, too!"
Agatha grabbed Ognian's face and shoved him back out with an order to go do something else. He made an unperturbed "hokay" before he left.
"Anyway, it's not a problem with me…" Gil continued, "…but what about my father?"
Agatha cringed. "You think the Baron will make a problem out of it?"
"That's just the thing: I don't know how he'd take it!" He shook his head. "How do you think Peter's parents are taking it? Do you think they noticed?"
"Don't you remember?" Zeetha chimed in, "Peter was adopted by a two men."
"That doesn't mean anything!" Barry cut in peevishly.
Zeetha shrugged. "I didn't say it did. I was just telling Father what he wanted to know."
"He didn't ask if Peter had homosexual parents!"
"Oh, that's right, he does have two fathers," Agatha mused, "…So how do they know which one he's talking to?"
Barry glared at his mother, expecting another uncomfortable comment. "What?"
"Does he call them by their first names, or does he call them by different forms of 'father'…?"
"Uh…" Barry blinked and shook his head. "He calls them both 'Dad' I think."
"Then how do they know which one he's talking to?"
"I think he has a slightly different tone depending on which one he speaks to; a separate timber and pitch in his voice. They seem to have picked up on the distinction and developed it a while ago."
"Really? Fascinating!"
"I know!" Barry continued. "It's astounding what the human mind can pick up, that we subconsciously pick up on many small variables that we can differentiate between barely different tones of voice and other sorts of nuances without even thinking about it."
"It truly is," Gil came in with a nod. "Even the difference between a Spark and a normal person could very well lie on small things about how similar perceptions are interpreted."
Zeetha beamed in after that. "Yeah, Grampa was just talking about that yesterday."
The conversation continued off track into more varied branches for the next two hours. It was late that night before any of them realized the original subject hadn't been properly resolved.
.-.-.
The next time that Barry saw Peter, the whole group of kids had gone to Peter's world to get some pizza and ice cream (Peter insisted they'd all enjoy it). The redhead was busy consuming a ham-and-pinnaple slice when Barry plopped down in the seat in front of him.
Peter looked up at him, still chewing"Er, what's up?"
"My sister and my parents like to meddle a lot in things that aren't their business," he started off. "What about your fathers?"
Peter swallowed and put down his slice. "They're the same. Jumping to conclusions, too."
"What sort of conclusions?"
He tried a nonchalant shrug, not helping at all the blush on his cheeks. "Just, you know."
There was a silence for a few seconds.
"So, what's that taste like?" Barry said, pointing at Peter's pizza. "Fruit and meat together like that on cheese?"
"Oh it's great! Hawaiian is my favorite. Why don't you have a slice?"
Barry helped himself and took a bite. "I never would have thought of such a combination! Brilliant!"
Peter gave a silly grin and continued with his own piece.
