2
"Don't I know you?"…..
No, you don't, Peter thought. You know very little, if you think you know anything about me from one very brief, very strange meeting a long time ago. In an instant all the terror and creeping weirdness of that old house and its inhabitants had come pouring back into Peter's conscious mind. That face that he wanted to forget, the one that lacked his sweetness but had most of the rest of his features – and apparently, they even shared a very similar voice. The last time he'd seen that face, it had been in a newspaper – accompanied by a headline that still haunted him today "Massacre at Westfield High School". He still recalled taking that newspaper outside to one of the buckets the Professor kept for the inevitable smokers to extinguish their butts, holding a match to it until it caught and watching as the face that was his and not his had been consumed by the licking flames. He had hoped that was the last time he would see it outside of those awful dreams he sometimes had. When he spoke again, it was not to reply to Tate but to the girl standing looking shocked and confused between them.
"Violet, is it?" he spoke in a low voice, hoping it hid his nerves, "You know this kid?"
"Yeah, we used to date! Dude, who *are* you?" Turning to Tate, who was hanging back a little, watching the scene play out, "How many brothers do you have again?"
"Two" he smirked, "And he's not one of them. It's Pete, right? I'm so bad with names"
"Peter" he corrected, "Violet, I think you should probably stay away from this guy. I don't think you know him as well as you might think – he's dangerous"
"No shit" Violet drawled, gave him a look as if he'd just pointed out that the water was very wet today, "and you didn't answer me"
This time, to Peter's immense surprise, Tate had jumped to his rescue. Stepped in to very gently offer a hand to Violet, give her that appealing smile that turned Peter's stomach with how like his own it was
"It's cool Vi, he's a friend of mine. We knew each other back when I was alive" his eyes flicked up to meet Peter's, black and soulless in the moonlight, "You still dig QMS?"
When he was alive? Peter blinked hard, nodded dumbly to his question. Of course, he'd known Tate was dead – shot seventeen times by a SWAT team as he recalled, and it was amazing how clearly he remembered that newspaper article, as though trying to forget it had only cemented it more clearly in his memory. What made less sense was how he was here talking to him. Peter wondered if eating as much candy as he had earlier had been such a great idea, if he was so high on sugar he was hallucinating.
Seemingly taken in by that gentle gesture, Violet had sat back down in the sand, Tate joining her, and she was fishing around in her bag for something. In a moment she'd pulled out a bottle of cheap vodka, cracked the top and taken a long pull from it, screwing up her face at the taste. Peter remembered that particular nasty brand – it smelled like paint stripper, and had pretty much the same effect on your insides.
"You might as well sit down," she was saying, again in that weary tone, "Catch up with Tate why don't you. I guess it's not every day he runs into a friend"
He could tell by the way she leaned sarcastically on the word that she knew that was because he didn't have any. It affronted Peter to be put in that imaginary group, but he'd sat down anyway, waved away the bottle when it was offered to him, heard Tate scoff at him from the other side of the girl.
"What?" he demanded
"It's not poisoned" he could hear the smirk in Tate's voice, hated it, "take a drink"
"I don't drink – and you kids are too young"
"Sorry, *Dad*" Violet sneered. Her companion sniggered.
"You don't drink? Do you make all your own dresses too?"
"Shut up, kid – and for the record we are not friends"
"Taking that as a yes" he grinned, added in a mutter, "pussy…"
Peter hated to think of himself as capable of unjust violence. Ripping up trainer bots and decking enemies aside, he hadn't thrown a punch in anger since he'd been at high school and under some of the worst stress of his life. As such, even he had been surprised when he had been around Violet in a fraction of a second, throwing Tate back into the sand, and landing a punch he had only managed to pull at the last moment straight on his left eye.
As though his touch had raised those memories, Peter could not help but think of the other faces in the newspaper, the yearbook photographs of kids of sixteen and seventeen smiling for the camera and not knowing that their lives would end at the hands of some stupid boy with inferiority issues. The thought of those faces blinded him with rage, and before he knew it he was pulling his fist back to strike again and again, only stopped when Violet had unexpectedly brought one Doc Marten boot into forceful contact with his cheekbone.
"What the FUCK is wrong with you?!" she was shouting at him, sprawled out in the sand beside his double, "Leave him alone!"
He should have left it there. Should have got to his feet and sprinted away, tried once again to forget. But the girl looked so small, so vulnerable, and damn it his blood was up now – no point in trying to deny how unexpectedly angry the sudden appearance of his Evil Twin had made him. Instead of doing the sensible thing, he had instead got up, fixed Violet with a hard look, demanded
"Don't you know what he did?! How many lives he ended for no good reason?"
Violet wasn't looking him. To Peter's astonishment, she was bending to help Tate sit back up, cuffing blood away from his nose with the sleeve of his sweater. The black eye was already miraculously fading – faster even than Peter could heal. Violet didn't look up at him, but held Tate's gaze as she said quietly
"I know all that, and worse. You don't know the half of what he's done" she straightened, pulled her hand away from where he still had hold of it, looked down at him with a sadness in her face that it hurt Peter to see, "I'm sorry. I thought I was ready to see you again. Turns out I'm not"
He reached to grab the hand back, but too late – she was gone. Peter stared at the space where she had been, ran off a little way, turning in circles, looking around for where she had gone, but she had seemingly vanished into thin air. He supposed he shouldn't be surprised – one of his best friends was a teleporter after all, and it wasn't like his night could get any stranger. At least, he didn't think it could, until he'd turned back to where his doppelganger was sat cross-legged in the sand and realised with a little jolt that he was sobbing his heart out.
I should go, Peter thought, watched the thin shoulders heave with sobs, he deserves this, I should just go and leave him to it. His anger had cooled off, gone as fast as it had emerged, and in its place was a creeping sadness for this lost little boy sat crying on the beach in the middle of the night. Peter might not have been able to stand the thought of what Tate had done, might have thought he deserved to be punished, but right at that moment his heart was breaking just a little for the boy. Again he tried to go, but found he couldn't leave Tate there like this. He couldn't stand to see a kid cry, even one with a heart as dark as this one. He heaved a heavy sigh, trudged back through the sand, and sat down beside the crying boy.
