tampered | log; ON-GOING

log; ON-GOING

When; Monday, January 4th
Rating; PG
Characters; Peter (

adamantined)
Summary; Certain things need to be dealt with - and not dealt with - in true Petrelli fashion.
Log;

She takes the stairs instead of the elevator, despite the fact that Peter's apartment is only one floor up. Normally, Claire likes giving him the benefit of a warning bell, the ding of the elevators as the doors slide back, loud enough to rattle in her ears and stick with her all the way down the hall to one of the two doors she comes upstairs to knock on. The stairs are a better alternative when she needs to take her time, dreading this conversation as much as she dreads not having it all. Each step passes under her shoes like hands grabbing at her ankles, dragging her under the surf only to surface again with the glare of sunshine from outside directly in her eyes, and Claire takes her time, pausing on the landing leading up to the next and final flight of stairs like a disobedient child lingering outside of a punishment. She wonders if she's being punished, wonders if they're all being punished - even Sylar, most of all Peter, not least of all her - and takes another step. Another. Another. Until she's taking two at a time. Six more until she's at the top of the steps and pushing the tenth floor's door open.

It feels oddly heavy in her hands, and when it slams shut behind her, Claire thinks it's enough of a warning that she doesn't need elevator bells to announce her arrival, too small and insubstantial in the face of everything they're going to have to figure out. She hadn't even had this kind of a conversation when her father had died in Costa Verde. Everything had been taken care of for them, every last decision made with a pen stroke or a mustache twirl, as Claire likes to imagine. She can remember what Noah Bennet's urn had felt like in her hands, the clenching feeling in her stomach as she had poured them out over the Pacific Ocean, and even though it had all been a lie - and it's funny, in a way, that even his revival wasn't their decision to make either - none of it had ever been erased, none of it had ever gone away, and it rushes back now from all directions to choke and smother her. This is so much more real, so much brighter and sharper, and Claire spends a long time standing outside of Peter's door thinking about all the ways she wasn't there when her biological father died, how everything that happened between them in Mexico seems so much more real now that he's gone.

She shakes her head and lets her hair down, bangs pinned back, as she forgoes knocking on the door to just let herself inside instead. It's quiet, but it always is. Claire tries to make as little noise as possible as she shuts the door behind her, as if someone is sleeping nearby, as if someone has died. The strange, apprehensive twist in her stomach only grows tighter and bigger the further into the apartment she steps. Bright light from sunshine and lit up snow pours in the windows, and for a moment she imagines running away from this conversation just as she has been all week, but Claire stays firmly put, moving through the main room, calling for her uncle.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Claire's voice is the only one he wants to hear and the last one too.

Sitting in the window of his room, he isn't comfortable, but he never is lately. He can't be. The cold of winter cuts itself across his skin, wearing a black t-shirt not for mourning but because he just has a few of them, wearing an expression that says nothing at all of what else he might feel, because even Peter doesn't know. Beneath winter brittle palms the sill is uneven, painfully man-made, and dirty with puffs of snow still melting away in the contrary sun. It makes him squint, whatever direction he looks, and the one direction he doesn't bother with is behind him because he knows he should rearrange his distance before he loses it altogether. Describing in basic terms 'how' he has been is impossible when he thinks about and all too easy when he accidentally stands still for too long. His time in the hospital felt as surreal as everything else afterward, and between wakefulness and sleep that felt like a struggle he sometimes convinced himself he was there for any reason but the real one. He told himself lies, but it's too much to say because that is what you've been taught, however true it is. The taste on his tongue isn't bitter but it's new, not salt of tears that seem to have written themselves out of the equation and not the shadow of endings that makes everything else full with dullness.

Back in the apartment, he spends enough of his time on the roof that he knows he might as well move onto it. Chase's suggestion that time for grieving is a necessary was not shoved to the side, but Peter has always been the one doing the telling. He finds the reversal to be something he cannot cope with. Mechanisms for this have not been invented, and he bites his lip enough to feel it crack and bleed when he tries to line any of the pieces up, when he tries to treat it with any amount of equanimity and realizes he can't. When he closes his eyes, he knows it borders on scripted to picture his brother, but he can't see anything else, and of late, of recent nights spent weighting wakefulness with exhausted stillness, he sometimes thinks he can wake up if he waits long enough.

But in the dark there isn't any kind of comfort, no more than the light, and he finds the more hours that go by, the more of the hollow that manages to expand its hold with negative space, he can't talk about it. It's something that has somehow made itself into nothing because he can't even approach his niece, his eighteen year-old niece about the loss of her dad. As the older one, as her uncle, as her friend, he should be able to, or at least try, but beyond conveniently unfinished dialogues across the space between black boxes, he hasn't. Hadn't. Couldn't.

Can't.

But Claire is here. Claire has come to him, and bringing himself in from the edge, he vaguely brushes snow off of his jeans, as though a normal action will beget some kind of normal feeling even though he knows that isn't what she is looking for. Not this time. His lips thin and then he breathes a shallow second before walking out into the hall. From there he can see her: small but not weak, young but aged beyond her years in advance--the girl next door you never get to know, because she had to move away, again and again.

And not for the first time, Peter wonders what he looks like to her.

"Hey," he says like he has a reason to be quiet.

The roughness in his voice is the most expression he's had in days.

Claire feels tiny so often, so much smaller and shorter than the people that she surrounds herself with, so much easier to be hastily moved and positioned and protected, always protected. Looking at Peter, she suddenly feels huge, a hundred feet tall, taking up more space in the hallway than she could ever hope to in a situation any different from this one. His voice is a sandpaper up and down her back, deep in the pit of her stomach. It settles into her blood and pulls every bit of warmth she's carried with her right out of her body, leaving her submerged in icy water that actually does sting and prick and pinch, and she'd be half grateful if this was due to anything else, anyone else. He looks so small to her from this position, just a tiny boy she wants to still be angry with but ultimately can't, and for a brief moment, Claire is half-afraid and just as lost on what to do as he likely is. In her apartment, she had decided on a game plan, a way to keep it all together, and even though she'd lost half of it on the way up the stairs, she finds that whatever was left of it has dissipated in the face of Peter standing in front of her with snow on his jeans and a rough voice.

"Hey," she replies, her arms hanging limply at her sides, hair spilling over both shoulders as she tries to will herself into moving. Sandra used to play a game with her when she was little: Claire would stand still, close her eyes, and her mother would search and search, surprised when Claire popped back into existence with a shout and a squeal. She's too old these days for that - and she's been too old for a lot of things her age for a long time now - but it occurs to her as she makes her way down the hall, hands in her pockets, that maybe Peter isn't too old for those kinds of games, and it occurs to her, too, that this time she's going to have to be the one to hold it together, that she's going to have to be the one who picks up all the pieces and tries to mold them back into something not necessarily the same but not completely different either. If there's anyone in her life that she owes it to, it's Peter.

Peter, who has saved her, who has held her head up, who she feels safest with, who makes promises that he probably can't keep but says that he will anyway, just to make sure that Claire has peace of mind. There is no more peace of mind, no more belief that maybe things will turn out alright. Sylar didn't die, and Nathan didn't live. There is no more peace of mind, just like there was no normal in Costa Verde when Claire watched her father hit the ground like a sack of potatoes, everything in the world coming to one halting, crashing stop. She's done this before, one too many times, but Peter hasn't, and now it's her responsibility to play the same role that others have played for her, no matter how much she wants to break apart inside. She's capable of being strong, too.

After all, she's unbreakable.

Once she gets to the end of the hall, she notices the spots on his pants where the snow has melted and reaches out to wrap her too large fingers around his too small ones. "Are you insane?" she asks, no real bite to it, though she wants the bite to be there, wants to sink her teeth in so that he knows she still means what she said to him after he got out of the hospital. "The last thing you should be doing is sticking your head outside a window like it's eighty-five degrees." Claire lets go and crosses her arms, looking up at him and then looking away after a long, quiet moment. She grinds her molars down hard against each other, willing them to break, to snap, shuts her eyes and opens them again. "I'm not sure what to say," she admits, turning to head back toward the living room. She wants to sit down, to make him sit down, because she has a decent feeling that every part of this is going to go badly, even if they end up feeling better at the end of it all.

I'm sorry, too, she thinks, I'm sorry and I miss him and I'm sorry that my dad is a liar, that he ruins everything he touches. That she ruins everything that she touches by proxy, that the people in her life that she loves always end up getting hurt, that she can't make it stop no matter how hard she tries. She exhales and sits on a coffee table, staring at the space between the floor and the couch and then looking back up at Peter. "Talk to me, okay? Just... say something. Don't put your head out the window again."

Peter isn't insane. Sometimes he thinks it might be easier if he was, but he isn't and has this thousand-pound feeling that he never will be.

The subject floating in and around Nathan's mess of a death is the cause, and while the short answer is Sylar, the real answer isn't short, isn't simple, isn't an answer worth piecing out. They could cut facts a hundred directions and end up running in circles forever. Some most cynical part of him says he shouldn't be surprised. Angela Petrelli is a million other things before she is his mother, many of which he will never know or understand. Noah Bennet too has a great many masks, and the drag effect of reasoning everything out beneath the dust is that Peter well knows they all thought they were making the right decision.

They always think that.

Fleetingly, he swallows another thought: what did they do with the body?

He knows he is angry, knows it but doesn't entirely feel it. Everything stalemates with the fixture of something newly closed off and wide-eyed. When she asks him to talk to her, when she holds herself together like the adult he is supposed to be, he just looks at her for a few long moments that hook together with a painful friction. What words can he possibly offer her? This next inhale is too loud but doesn't seem to give him air at all as he bites his lip and shrugs, the hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth as if he remembers what to do with his face, because even when he's lying he's trying to be honest.

"Did you find another roommate yet?" He asks because he really wants to know, and he asks because it's something he doesn't have to rip out of his own mouth, words caught up in his mental tangle so thoroughly that the separation must surely hurt. Leave scars. It is an everyday thing, that people die and people are born, and on some detached scale of things it may be worth criticism, the way he spirals down, hands grasping onto edges only to fall farther down to the lower level, then lower, and lower again. Families lose sons, lose brothers, lose fathers, and they lose them at any given moment, but it isn't that Peter thinks he should be different, that Claire should be different.

It's that he thinks Nathan should have been. That wasn't supposed to be his death, throat slit in a hotel while trying to do the right thing, no, but that is what it ended up being, and every time he realizes it, it's a little like someone has him by the throat, whispering lies and truths in his cold ear until he can't tell the difference between them anymore. At the point that he has no sense to go off of, no one feeling, he still wants to be there for the girl who sits on the coffee table and speaks to him with a patience he may very well not deserve. After all, that should be him, asking her to talk to him. Pacing, he stops the third or fifth time to the opposite end of the sofa, standing at the back of it with a hand glancing off the corner before he turns, leaning both hands on the top behind the cushions.

The couch cushions are a lot more interesting than Peter's face in this moment, and Claire tries as hard as she can not to let her face twist up in disappointment but doesn't feel like she succeeds all that well. There have been things that they haven't told each other in the past, things that they haven't shared, and things that they have both missed in the other's life. But for as many things that they've each missed, Claire can count double the things that they've shared, double the times that Peter has been the only one she could talk to about anything, everything, trivial nothings and all-important somethings. And now, in the face of this one thing, this one thing that they need put out there on the table, he's coming up short when he's had everything in line in the past. It cuts her somewhere deep inside the way he answers her, and she has to turn her head to look out the window to mask the glare across her brow with the sharp glare from the sun.

It's not like she can force him to talk about this. Claire can't shove him into a chair and pry his mouth open with her bare hands until the sound and tone spill out. She knows that it's selfish, to want to make him talk to her about this, but she consoles herself by insisting that it's necessary, that she's not the only one who needs to have a little bit of release, that she isn't the only one who needs to stop running around and pretending things are normal while subsequently pretending that they aren't. Her father is dead. Peter's brother is dead. It's something that's done, and she wants it out. She wants it to be done. The more he bottles it up inside himself, cages it in his ribs and underneath his heart, ratting around in his lungs, the longer it's going to keep eating him up. Claire knows that, Peter probably does, too, but there's no way she can think to pull it out of him.

Her eyes move back to him, and she tries to communicate to him without having to speak at all. Say that she's thinking and imagining all the same things that he's been, has been since she found out about it, can't stop thinking when she lies awake at night and remembers Mexico, remembers Nathan's arms across her shoulders, behind her knees as he hoisted her onto her back for a ride across the sky, the way that she felt like maybe, one day, she could love him the way a daughter should love a father. She reminds herself constantly that if she'd done one thing differently, opened her eyes just a little wider, she could have seen Sylar before everything went to Hell. But she didn't, and it eats at her stomach like all the other mistakes that she's made in her life. It's too much for her to say, and her throat is too dry to even begin forming all those words and shapes to make all those sentences, so she twists her hands in her lap instead, then blinks hard and swallows sharply.

"I miss him, too, you know," she finally says, doing her best to at least force him to look at her. If she can't force him to talk to her, then she can pretend like she can make him look at her. Her throat and tongue are still dry, but she plunges on, needing it out, needing to make it work. So many of the things that she tries to fix end up broken, but she isn't going to let this be one of them. "I think about it all the time. All the what ifs, all the steps that I should've taken to fix it before it- before it happened. I want to kill him for it, too, Peter, and I don't want to talk about it, and I just want to pretend like it never happened. But pretending isn't going to make it go away. Pretending isn't going to make it any less real. And asking me if I've found another roommate isn't going to make you feel any better."

She's surprised at the way her voice doesn't shake, doesn't waver or hesitate or lower or raise in passion or pitch. She's surprised that she's not crying, but she's not at all surprised that she wants to.

He wants to yell at her that maybe it would make him feel better, but just as quickly as he wants to do that, he just wants to pretend he's a better person than he is, because as it stands, the reality of him isn't strong, smart, or brave enough to handle this for the two of them. Maybe that's their real problem. They want to fix it for each other, and if they can't fix it--because how does one fix death--then they want to fix each other, but that has just as much likelihood, and that's the same as saying nothing at all. The fixation is one he has been familiar with all his life, though he knows it started and always ends up the same way: wanting to fix himself. He doesn't think he's ever quite gotten there, though he feels he has come close, time and again.

Close doesn't count though. Not in this.

No, asking about Claire's living situation won't help either of them, but the truth is that he doesn't think talking about Nathan will help any more than any other topic they could stonewall on. When he turns to look down at her, he can feel his breath pinching tight in his chest, knife sharp and winter cold.

"I'm not pretending," but he falters even in the truth of it, hearing his own voice break in all the places that Claire's seems to hold itself together. I'm sorry is just the two word preface to a long list things preceded by 'for' and 'because' and 'I didn't mean to' or worse, 'I don't mean to', and he has them in spades but somehow he doesn't think they're what she wants to hear. Not even what she needs to hear. It just figures that after all of this time, he can't give her either, mouth dry and open only to close as he bows his head, hands leaning hard on the back of the couch as he bends forward, the picture of self-disbelief. Lifting his gaze to lock with hers, he tries to harness something more like the uncle she deserves, more like the friend she needs as he then straightens only to walk too slowly around to her side of the sofa, arms crossed too tightly.

I'm not pretending...I just don't know what to say. Maybe there isn't anything to say.

It sounds pathetic, even in his head, and it doesn't get any further than that.

Claire clasps both elbows with opposite hands, leaning over her knees as she draws her ankles close together. That feeling, of seeming too big for any one person to feel, shrinks and evaporates, and she suddenly feels smaller than she is, just a hitch of breath in the grand scheme of things, always saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing, always producing the wrong reaction when she really, truly needs to get the right one. She knows that she needs to be strong with Peter, to hold him up the way that he's held her up so many times, but all she can do is look at the floor between them, the distance and the space, and feel so far away from it all.

Nathan is dead. He's never going to walk or talk again, never draw breath, never embrace either of them or betray either of them. He's gone. He's done. He's dead.

There's a building pressure behind her eyes, but Claire doesn't cry. She looks at the floor for a moment longer, drawn into herself, and then looks up at him with a mirror, point for point, expression of his own. "Then what are you doing?" she asks, and it's as much to make her feel better as it is to put them on the path to making him feel less worse. There's no way to make it go away, no way to erase the pain, but Claire knows a thing or two about healing, and she'll try to make the best of it.

"I don't know," he admits, and it comes out more as a rush of air that he didn't know he had been holding than words.

The room looks like a regular living room, well, a regular living room with a Foosball table. They look like normal people, well, normal people who can't talk to each other, though that might be what makes them the most ordinary in the middle of the mess. The situation echoes of that regular quality too, of family death that etches itself too dark where things should be light and too light where things should be dark, and not at all where connecting lines could make all the difference in dealing with it all. But this all falls under the same category of 'looks like', 'seems like', and 'should be' when it is anything but, when instead of the expected following chapter it presents itself as the missing section of the chronicle--pages torn out, handfuls at a time.

"Not what I should be," he finally continues, sitting next to her, close enough that shoulders touch as he leans forward, elbows on knees and hands clasped like he has this under control even though he has just told her the exact opposite. His next exhale drags itself through the air, a subtle burn that reaches up through his throat to smolder and sting behind his eyes. He blinks the feeling back in before he looks at her again, this time from a lower angle, bent forward as he is, and he feels like negative space, there but not there, measured but inconsequential to anything but a design that he never seems to have control over no matter how many different ways he digs his heels in or curls his fingers around it. "...and I'm sorry." Peter thinks he doesn't sound like himself, but there is a constriction around his tone that may be to blame for that even as he reaches out to brush long strands of blond behind a warm ear.

As though he has overstepped, he draws his hand away too fast, glancing away again, lips thinning like the tension will counter a threatening tremble he feels too old to justify having.

Guilt blooms in her stomach like some sort of sick flower, reaching spindled fingers out to fan under her heart and lungs, choking her up, forcing heat to rise at her face. Claire has to look at the floor for a long time after Peter sits down next to him, the warmth from his skin burning through the thick, long sleeve of her sweater, pooling in her lap, over her thighs, dark green against the paleness of her hair and skin. It makes her wish that she could heal others with just a touch, suck out all the pain and hurt with the tips of her fingers, put everything back together with little more than a thought. Now, it's as if she holds all the pieces in the palms of her hands, but they're broken, lopsided, refuse to match up when she spans them all in front of her. She used to be so good with Peter, at reading him, at knowing how he was thinking or what he was feeling. It's too hard now, and Claire feels like she's superimposing her own feelings onto him. Maybe to make herself feel better. Maybe to shoulder how much worse he feels.

She brushes her hair back on the side furthest from him, tucks it behind her ears, letting it all fall in a pale gold sheet across her spine. Gradually, she turns her face to look at him, first just out of the corner of her eye, then with her head bent and angled toward him, so that she's looking up, hands flat across her knees as she chews on her lips. Words bubble up but never break the surface, a thousand possibilities that she can't bring herself to even whisper, a million sentiments that mean nothing because Peter knows how meaningless they are, because Peter knows she wouldn't want them anyway, wouldn't know what to do with them either. A small hand moves over to cover his fingers with her own, and she squeezes, not too hard but hard enough.

"I don't want you to apologize," she says, still looking up at him, still holding onto him like she's terrified he might drown if she lets go. Claire is just as much about fixing things, about taking care of things, as Peter is, but both her mother and Lyle had dealt with Noah's death in their own private ways, and the only person Claire had to comfort after the necessary hugs and long silences was herself. She's tried to be good at this, tried to insist to herself that she is, but at the end of the day, she's as ill-equipped as the next person. "I don't know how to fix this," she goes on, leaning her shoulder against his as she lets herself deflate a little again, swallowing thickly around the sudden weight in her throat. Claire isn't so good and putting the way she feels aside, but she does as best as she can for Peter's sake. "All I can say is that you can talk to me about it, about anything, but you can't keep it all bottled up inside. You can't just keep hiding it. You'll go crazy. And I don't want -"

You to get tangled up with Sylar again

You to go crazy.

You to leave me, too.

"- I just don't want you to think that you have to be in this by yourself. You're not, okay?" It feels lame coming out of her mouth, even lamer as it settles into the silence of the living room. Claire squeezes his fingers again, trying to pour a little of the warmth that she inexplicably retains into him, trying to make it right, as best as she can.

The young man who was once the dreamer at the back of the classroom thinks he used to be good with a lot of people, thinks he used to be good with people in general. He wasn't perfect, but he had a subconscious way, a manner of handling things rather than letting them be handled for him. As he is now, he finds himself questioning how much of that person is left, how much of him is really gone and how much of him is just missing, lost in his own history. There was a time, not so long ago in his past, that he would have managed this better, been able to balance things with some level of calm that was not a complete lie. He wishes he could manage that now.

"I know," he tells her, and because he doesn't know what else to say, doesn't know what else to do, he meets her lean against his shoulder with his own, two equal weights pushing against each other like anchors that hook at the ocean floor. His own exhale filters out as hairline ruptures of air, an unevenness to every memory and every thought to the future. From a distance, it feels dramatic, feels like too much, feels unreal, and yet the furthest thing from a bad dream. The way it sticks to him, the way it crowds in like too many familiar faces is nothing like that limbo-reminiscent state of the nightmare. That is, of course, what makes it so terrible.

His arm slips around her shoulders and he leans back this time, his own shoulder the perfect level for her to rest her head against if she wishes, if he still has the privilege of that shared space that has to do with two people trusting each other enough to trust themselves. To an onlooker, they may make the picture of close friends watching a sad movie, but that is the divide between seeing and knowing, the separation of perception and comprehension. Between the cracks there exists empathy and dissonance all at once, and the contradictions almost see fit to break even the smallest comfort to pieces. Maybe it's all they have left, those pieces they have to work with from here on out, or, even more likely, what they have had to work with for some time now, whether or not he acknowledged it, whether or not he allowed himself to believe in the flaws. Maybe.

With his head tilted back his eyes lose focus on the blank stretch of ceiling above with no points of distinction. He likes that uniformity for once, that consistency of light and dark, the opaque one-note best suited for people with cluttered minds or cluttered hearts. He should say something else, but even knowing this fails to help him make it a reality, lips pressing to each other in a thin line as he refuses a sigh, eyes closing.

Can you forgive me for not having the things to say I should? Can you forgive me for not saving him? Can you forgive me?

They are, point blank, stupid questions, as Claire does not blame him for any of this. Peter knows, and yet he wonders. He can't help it when he blames himself, can't get past his own guilt complex, can't grow up. Behind a shelf of memories, he hears Angela, hears Angela talking to him about Nathan, Nathan who is--was--more than a brother he was obligated to be and more the father than Arthur ever wanted to be. He hears her and for a second he thinks that if he blinks that he will be wide-eyed and stupidly hopeful again, thinks that if he holds his breath long enough he will be falling and then flying for all of five seconds, his hands clasped between Nathan's. He won't be--isn't-- though, and Angela's words redefine themselves, the other side of the knife on the sharpening block.

He took up more space than you.

Very true. He knew it then and he knows it now, and it's too much space to just leave empty, but he will never be able to fill it with anyone else. There is no medicine and mourning is only the stage between honest anger and a lie as far as he can tell, because accepting this, accepting not death but murder pins itself far out of his reach. Almost he can hear his brother telling him to just let him go, to pick up what he can and move forward, to be the bigger man...and almost he can hear himself telling Nathan the simple truth:

I can't.

He can't.

She has nothing left to say, no other creature comfort words that can slip out from between her teeth, underneath her tongue, to make any of this better at all. Claire spins out on control only slightly less than Peter does, and any reason that she holds onto that control at all is because someone has to. One of them has to be the strong one, and Claire can be the weak one later, when no one is looking. Right now she can miss Nathan, mourn him, hold Peter together, hold herself together, and later, after they decide something, nothing, she can scatter all the puzzles and look at what she has left and handle it in her own way. Out of all of it, she hates what she missed the most, hates that she never got the opportunity to find out if Nathan was someone she could have loved like a father, never got the opportunity to make up for lost time and missed chances, to tell him how much she hated him for the decisions that he made, that he forced them all to make, and how much she appreciated him for trying to fix it all.

Claire rests her head on Peter's offered shoulder, moving her hand from his hands to his back, a gentle pressure with gentle circles, as if trying to assure him that whatever he needs to do, she's not going to judge him for. She's not leaving, she's not running, and she's not dying. On the outside, they are some picture perfect family dealing with a loss: sophisticated elitist members of society who keep to themselves and keep their secrets even more secret. But underneath the surface, they break and they crack and all the secrets are what always expose them in the end, kill them, ruin lives and destroy those same families that always appear so outwardly together. She remembers what it was like to be in Odessa and not know what it was the future could potentially hold, what it was like to go to school in the morning, barely pass a math test, come home from cheerleading practice to her family sitting and smiling at each other across steak and salad.

Sitting and smiling and lying.

Everything she's known in her entire life has been a lie, and this is no different, and she's never been more grateful for Peter than she is in this moment for the fact that he has never lied to her. He's been her role model, her hero, for as long as she can remember, and it breaks apart sharply inside of her sternum to see him like this, makes her think more than ever that she needs to pick up the mantle, too. Her shoulders move sharply as she takes a deep breath and lets it out.

"It'll be okay," she lies, picking up her fathers' old tricks.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

log; ON-GOING

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject