He still dreams about it. Wakes up…screaming, sometimes. Or thrashing. Anything, because what he wakes up from is a nightmare in which he can’t make his body move.
But no, the nightmare isn’t that he can’t make his own body move. It’s that something else is moving it instead. He’s fighting, fighting, fighting with absolutely everything in him, every single fucking scrap of self, not to reach his hands out toward Arthur’s neck. Not to bare his teeth and laugh and step forward and—
Screaming with everything in him for Arthur to run, to get away.
But Arthur doesn’t.
And Peter wakes up, screaming and clawing and begging.
Read more: Malevoween Day 28: Fever & Delirium***
When he was a kid, Peter got night terrors. Throughout his adult life, they remained the scariest thing he’d ever experienced.
Not a record he’d ever wanted to break.
But he relives hanging from ropes in the middle of that room, with the chanting and the fire with the smoke that had smelled like something dead. Struggling and shouting and then—sudden as all hell—losing all control of himself. For a second he hadn’t understood. He’d thought someone must have brained him with a pipe or something. That’d happened before, and it’d been like that, losing control of his motor functions for a moment while his skull had rattled around.
And then there’d been banging and shouting and Arthur hurling himself through the doors. Gunshots. Laughter. Wild, maniacal, completely fucking unhinged laughter and that was when Peter realized he was standing, that he’d shrugged out of the ropes and was stepping forward to bend down and grab the…whoever, the guy, the cultist probably who was bleeding at the shoulder from the hole Arthur had put in him…
And Peter’s body had taken its hands, grabbed the guy on either side of his face, and squeezed till the poor bastard had exploded like a ripe watermelon.
He couldn’t forget how that felt. How it smelled. How it looked. He got to have every fucking sensory experience of it except the part where he decided he wasn’t gonna fucking do it.
And that laughter had been his.
***
Arthur and John catch him in the bathroom, leaning in over the sink so he’s nose to nose with his reflection.
He’s checking for shadows and John knows it. Peter can see the glint of understanding in his eye.
“Come here, Peter,” Arthur says, after that second or two of delay that means John’s interpreting his world for him. He holds his hand out to Peter.
Peter hangs there for long enough it gets awkward, because he feels like a miserable shit. It’s been months now. But sometimes…sometimes he just…he needs to know it’s not still there, hiding. Waiting.
Sometimes Peter gets angry, see. Or sad or upset or…fuck. It just feels like that thing in his head did. Awful. Vicious. Sick. Wanting to make people hurt. Wanting to hurt Peter. And he just gets…well. He just needs to know, is all. That it’s only him being a prick, and not anything else.
John reaches his hand out too, beckoning, when he sees the look on Peter’s face, and finally Peter gives in to his own sadsack impulses and takes it, and pulls them close.
Pulls John close, in this case. Arthur follows, but John is the one with the eyes, and he’s the one who leans them in close as anything, till John is the only thing Peter can see, and hunts through the shadowed corners of Peter’s eyes for any trace of that thing.
After a long moment—because John doesn’t take this lightly, he doesn’t halfass it and he doesn’t cut corners, he really looks and Peter’s so pathetically grateful to feel like he’s taking this seriously—after a very long moment, John lets their body drop back onto their heels and pats Peter on the shoulder.
“He says he doesn’t see anything,” Arthur says gently. “It’s just you in there.” And then he slides his arm up around Peter—and John follows suit on his other side—and pulls Peter’s head down to their shoulder. Peter goes along, lets them cradle him. He feels like his heart could bleed out from how grateful he is. “I could have told you that, Peter. I can feel it. I would know.”
***
Arthur did know, is the thing. Peter had stood there—except he hadn’t stood there, it hadn’t been him keeping his legs straight, keeping his head up, keeping them looking at Arthur—in a body that wouldn’t fucking obey him, laughing. That wild gleeful godawful laugh burned his throat like drinking battery acid, and even more, the reason it was laughing. Because it had loved the look of terror in the dead man’s eyes. The sounds of pain from the woman on Peter’s other side, where she curled up, gutshot, probably dying, because she had a knife and it’d been pointed at Peter. It was laughing because the look on Arthur’s face, in John’s eyes, was the kind of twisting horror that made Peter’s stomach do slow revolted rolls in sympathy.
As he—they, because Peter couldn’t fucking get away from this thing, he could feel it, gleeful and excited and anticipating—as they watched and Peter got sicker and sicker just from being a they, John’s eyes went sheened with tears. And Peter wanted to stab himself.
Peter wanted…
What he didn’t want was for Arthur to drop the goddamn gun and step toward him.
Arthur had stepped toward him. And he’d reached out a fucking hand and Peter thought he’d cry—should have cried, wanted to cry but it wouldn’t happen—as Peter’s body reached out to grab his wrist. Pull him close. Get Peter’s hands on him to squeeze and scourge and gouge and tear—
—and there’d been an odd moment when Peter’s hand had closed around Arthur’s wrist, squeezing till the bones ground, when he’d have sworn he heard another voice, low and resonant and snarling, saying what Peter was desperately trying to say, “Arthur, you idiot, get back, get away from him”—
—but “Peter is stronger than I am,” Arthur was saying, the colossal dumbass. “And this thing is weaker than you. Peter, I know you won’t let it do this. I know you can stop it.”
And the little asshole…he’d sounded so goddamn serene. So absolutely certain. Peter’s head had spun. He couldn’t process that kind of faith. It was madness.
His fingers had spasmed, obeying their last command to close around Arthur’s neck while Arthur made a horrible, soft little rattle in his throat, and then—complete fucking insanity—obeying Peter’s to pop back open. And then his body had stepped back when he’d wanted it to.
And then reared back and decked Arthur across the face, like he really wanted it to, and Peter was shouting, “YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE, I COULD HAVE KILLED YOU, I ALMOST KILLED YOU, YOU STUPID FUCKING ENGLISHMAN, I WAS KILLING YOU AND I COULDN’T STOP IT—” and he probably kept going but John’s and Arthur’s arms were around him that time too, lowering him to the ground while he sobbed hysterically on them, and probably they couldn’t understand a single fucking word he was trying to say. But at least he was saying it.
***
Arthur is asleep with Peter’s head in his lap. His left hand is resting on Peter’s chest, holding a paperback dime novel. The latest Sam Spade, which John is cheating and reading ahead on since Arthur drifted off in the middle of chapter five.
He fumbles a page. Peter turns it for him. John glances a ‘thank you’ at him.
They have their ways of communicating, sometimes.
Peter is looking up at their face—every line of Arthur’s sharp cut features, with their scars cutting across them at odd angles, and the way John’s eyes wrinkle at the corners in ways they didn’t when they were Arthur’s. Age and stress and just John’s generally warier nature.
“Do you trust him?” Peter says quietly to the one of them who’s awake.
John’s eyes flick to his. He can see the surprise in them.
“No no. I mean.” Peter reaches up and sticks his finger in between the pages of the book where John is, to mark his place for him. “I know you trust him. So do I. I trust him with my life. I mean…”
John glances at the page number, closes the book, and sets it aside. Peter’s got all his attention.
Peter finds his words. “…I mean do you trust him with his life?”
And then he knows—he knows—John is laughing his ass off. There’s a wild, almost hair-raising gleam in his eyes that can’t be anything else.
Peter lets him have it for a bit, because yeah, okay. That’s kinda fucking hilarious, they’re on the same page there. But after a bit, he tries again. “No, I mean. Do you trust him to… If you were fucking awful to him. If you hurt him. Would you trust him to…to take care of himself? About you?”
Saying it is like feeling a dam of rotten wood finally burst inside him. Because yeah. Yeah, that’s what’s been eating at him, isn’t it? Not only Arthur but, shit, anybody Peter cares about. His family. John. Random bystanders. What if Peter went off the rails and someone needed to stop him, and it was Arthur and—?
John lays his fingertips on Peter’s mouth.
That shuts Peter up good, because they’re…well the two of them are kind of, but they’re not exactly…it’s just intimate in an unusual way, coming from John. Once he sees that it’s worked, his hand moves to cup around Peter’s cheek. His thumb brushes delicately at the corner of Peter’s eye, and Peter really isn’t sure what the hell that’s supposed to mean, if anything, but the look in John’s eyes is a breathtaking combination of softness and strength.
He goes all the way down, does John. Peter’s thought that before. If you look at him too long, it starts feeling like you’re staring into a depthless abyss. And it’s looking back at you, and it’s more or less friendly, but…but still. He feels like he’s unbreakable because there’s just too much of him to break.
Yet again, for a second he feels queasy about how he and Arthur are. And then he feels queasy about what he is and how many places there would be to hide in a space like that.
“Don’t let me hurt him,” Peter whispers. “Or you. Or anybody.”
Deliberately, slowly, non-threateningly, John closes his hand around Peter’s throat. Every muscle of his body unwinds at the promise of that, knowing that someone’s got his back.
And then John swats him gently in the face and pulls his head tight against Arthur’s belly.