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Title: Here And Somewhere Else (End of the World Remix Arranged For Clockwork Figures)
Author: [livejournal.com profile] trollprincess
Summary: Nathan picks up the pieces of what Peter breaks apart. It’s just what he’s always done.
Rating: NC-17
Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: Nathan/Peter
Warnings: Slash, incest
Spoilers: "Fallout"
Author's note: Written for [livejournal.com profile] remix_redux as a remix of Here And Somewhere Else by [livejournal.com profile] txtequilanights. (Hence why I didn't do that "Guess what I wrote!" meme, because ... seriously? Post-apocalyptic Petrellicest? *grabbyhands*) Enormous thanks to [livejournal.com profile] daffybroad for the beta. The remix title is a reference to The Stand, because I couldn't resist. HEE. :)

Here And Somewhere Else (End of the World Remix Arranged For Clockwork Figures)


#


Nathan doesn’t have nightmares. He rarely even dreams, too busy savoring the sleep he can manage to cram into his busy schedule. When he stretches out in bed and closes his eyes the world goes black. Nothing’s there.

Sometimes fire sneaks in and sometimes he can’t feel the ground beneath his feet, but for the most part his sleep is free and weightless.

One night after the plague starts, streaking across the country like a bad fashion trend, he dreams.

He carries each of the boys out to the balcony, Simon first and then Monty, solid but limp in the cradle of his arms. A stiff breeze stirs their sweat-soaked hair but they smile up at him anyway. He doesn’t question what his body wants to do, pushes away from the balcony and up, up, up.

He flies each of the boys up over the city, points out their favorite spots. The park, the museum, the seaport. They grin down at the boats on the water, at the cars in the streets. They tug at his sleeve and say, Look, Daddy, and don’t seem to give a damn that Daddy’s flying like the birds, like they’re not even the least bit surprised.

They look sick but not that sick, not yet, still well enough to enjoy seeing the world below.

In his dream he holds them high above the streets of downtown, smoothes the hair away from their skin and kisses them both on their fevered foreheads.

And drops them.

#


Peter calls him in the beginning.

The situation is simple. The cheerleader -- Claire, her name is Claire -- is on his doorstep. She claims everyone she knows is dying, is already dead. She says it’s a plague, an illness. Her father told her it was her fault and that he sent her to Peter because she couldn’t hurt someone with powers like she had.

Peter calls him and asks him for help, sends over a box full of paperwork and medical files and books that Nathan passes on to a reputable family friend who’s a retired physician.

The situation, it turns out, is not that simple.

#


After the plague hits New York a man sets up shop in Central Park and starts burning bodies.

There is no other way they will be able to stay in New York otherwise, not with nearly eight million people dropping like flies. The cops should be stopping him. Instead dump trucks pile up the dead, and the burning man squints, and the flames consume everything they can.

Nathan sees the burning man just once, after Heidi and Mom and the boys have all choked to death on their own bile. They all weigh nothing in the end, skin and bones a gross exaggeration of what’s left behind.

Peter takes time out of taking in stray superhumans to help Nathan take care of the bodies. They wrap them in the sheets Mom bought, high-thread-count Egyptian cotton. Somewhere in there is a mummification joke that would never cross Peter’s mind and Nathan can’t bring himself to say out loud.

Nathan takes Heidi into his arms and walks out onto the balcony. Peter cradles Mom in his grasp and follows Nathan outside. He looks to Nathan for permission first -- Is this okay now?

Nathan just takes off. That’s answer enough, he supposes.

The burning man doesn’t even flinch when they land before him and add their women to the pile. Everything that didn’t make sense before is an odd sort of perfect these days. Besides, Nathan knows what homeless looks like; he highly doubts the burning man’s in his right mind.

His eyes are kind, though.

Nathan will take what he can get.

#


Peter’s apartment turns into a strange excuse for a refugee camp. Claire curled up on the couch, Isaac propped up near the windows looking out at the city and absently sketching. Hiro reads comics in the corner, DL watches Micah play with his laptop at the kitchen table.

All of them crammed into this small lived-in space, and Nathan is half-tempted to offer up the penthouse and can’t. Can’t bring himself to.

To …

Just can’t, that’s all.

At night he curls around Peter in bed, listens to the others spread out across the living room like lost kittens taken in on a rainy night.

He spreads his palms over the bare expanse of Peter’s chest, breathes in deep, and hates that Peter ever introduced him to the others as his brother.

#


Peter blames himself.

It’s what he does. Peter breathes and eats and sleeps and blames himself. Everything is something he can fix or something he broke in the first place, and this dying world around them is no exception.

Telling him that he’s wrong doesn’t work. Telling him over and over again that there are things in this world you can’t plan for, good and bad, real and unreal, just won’t sink in.

Nathan can put his hands on Peter and swear that he couldn’t have known what saving Claire would do, that keeping her alive meant killing everyone else.

Up until Peter leaves, that’s just what he does.

#


They should leave.

If they were smart, they would leave. The city is home, but it is also over three hundred square miles of graveyard stretching up into the sky. After a certain point, the burning man in Central Park is useless without survivors to bring in the dead.

Corpses lay where they drop, in beds and hallways, on city streets and in their cars, and the stench of rot carries on the breeze.

The ones left behind are immune to the disease but the smell, the growing lack of food, the oncoming failure of heat and electricity … that’s what’s going to get them. Everyone crammed into Peter’s apartment knows this, and knows it well.

But they can’t leave.

Because Peter will come home, and he won’t be able to find them.

Because Nathan says they can’t.

#


Peter has been gone for weeks when Isaac brings Nathan the painting.

Paint is free, canvas and brushes and frames are all free. Micah’s power becomes obsolete as Isaac’s grows with the freedom that comes from everything he needs simply lying around waiting to be picked up.

Peter’s apartment is so littered with paintings that they finally move them out into the hallway, hang them from nails hastily hammered into the walls. The halls become a gallery of the macabre, scattered images of Claire dying a dozen different ways, Hiro with his sword through someone’s chest. Nothing makes them flinch anymore.

Nathan wakes up one morning to Isaac quietly placing the painting at the foot of his bed.

“I thought,” Isaac says. The words shatter in his throat before he manages to add, “I think this is yours.”

It’s the unspoken thing, the one no one else in the apartment questions or argues. Peter will come back one day to the city, to them, to the bed he shares with his brother. The world is a dark and empty place, and there is barely anything left to hold onto. They take what they can get, whatever they can grasp at, and Nathan thinks that maybe if Peter comes back and they turn to leave the city hand in hand everyone they know will smile.

Nathan waits for Isaac to leave, pulls back the sheet draped over the canvas, and forgets how to breathe.

#


Peter in some cheap motel room far away, stationary on the side table and chintzy bedding and tacky wallpaper.

Peter spread out, naked and pale with empty eyes and some strange man’s cock in his ass.

Peter, taking his goddamn punishment.

Nathan hitches stale air into his lungs, harsh and ragged, and the world leaves the aftertaste of dead things on his tongue.

#


It takes only a handful of minutes for Nathan to get to Ohio.

He hasn’t even tried to practice the way the others have. Flying is just something he can do. He walks up to the roof of Peter’s apartment building sometimes and steps off the edge. He’s always enjoyed the sensation of solid ground dropping out from underneath his feet far more than he could ever consider natural.

He’s not like Hiro, who flits through time and space with deft precision after weeks of nothing better to do than learn.

But when he’s chased, he runs.

#


The motel is the only building for miles that doesn’t look haunted, the only one not a silent tomb. Voices rise from inside, sounds that are human and familiar and thunderous in their rarity.

Nathan lands in the parking lot, battered running shoes skidding across the gravel. He thinks he punches someone on the way to finding his brother again, thinks he knocks someone out of the way hard enough to crack a skull.

If pressed afterwards, he might remember stepping around a cowering little boy and a scared young woman with wide eyes and a threadbare robe. He might not. It doesn’t matter.

He just remembers throwing open a door and seeing his brother, his goddamn brother, with another man’s cock in his mouth.

He’s not supposed to be jealous. He’s not. In a normal world, that doesn’t factor into it.

But in a normal world Peter didn’t come here in the first place, and in a normal world when Nathan hauls the man away and asks Peter what the fuck he thinks he’s doing Peter doesn’t answer him with a quiet, “Forgetting.”

“Jealous boyfriend?” the man Peter had been sucking off asks.

Nathan could kill him.

No one would care. No one would arrest him or splash his face across the front page of the Daily News.

Instead, he growls, “I’m his brother.”

He’s less surprised than he should be that the naked man sprawled against the far wall doesn’t believe him.

#


Peter won’t fly home.

Won’t, can’t … there’s a fine line. As soon as Nathan leads Peter outside his feet pull away from the ground the least little bit, as if he expects Peter to follow just the same as if they were going to walk back to New York. Maybe he would have, before all this.

This sound rattles in Peter’s throat, bringing Nathan back to earth.

“Peter?” he says.

There’s no answer, just the faint hint of terror in familiar dark eyes.

Nathan nods. “We’ll drive,” he says.

He doesn’t think twice about taking the pickup parked nearby. Serves them right, the sick fucks.

Nathan looks back at the motel and pictures it in flames, smoldering for days from the heat, the breeze heavy with the scent of an obscene barbecue for weeks. He’s not a violent man, not underneath it all, but for this he could be.

For this he could raise hell and drop it on Ohio.

#


Nathan avoids the Turnpike and takes the back roads through Pennsylvania. He stays away from the valleys for fear of washouts and steers clear of towns because the threat of fire is stronger there.

In the country people thought they were safer, thought they could wait out the virus with enough provisions on hand. It didn’t quite work out that way, and if you’re willing to bury or burn a body or two you’re bound to find a house worth staying in for the night or a car with a full tank of gas they can steal.

Halfway across Pennsylvania on a long lonely stretch of highway, Peter starts in the passenger seat like someone’s poked him in the back with something sharp and says, “You have to pull over. I can’t go back.”

“You don’t get a choice,” Nathan snaps.

Nathan’s grip on the steering wheel tightens, because if it doesn’t he doesn’t know what he’ll do. Grab onto Peter’s shoulders and try to shake some sense into him or haul him into Nathan’s lap and kiss him senseless … it could go either way.

Peter asks how Nathan knew where he was and Nathan tells him about the damn painting, the thing he should have burned before he left.

Nathan pulls over to the side of the road, gets out and walks around the car to Peter’s door. Opens it, and orders his brother from the car.

It takes him a minute to find the words. Peter’s eyes are downcast and the scent of him has Nathan dizzy with relief, even if the hint of another man’s touch is still there.

“I don’t care what you did,” Nathan says. “I don’t know what you were doing or what you thought you needed to do. What I care about is having you with me again, do you understand that?”

He presses close and Peter is heat and fire, warmth and home.

The only home Nathan has left.

“What I care about,” Nathan says, pinning Peter against the side of the car, “is this.”

#


Nathan’s world focuses to a pinpoint, to getting Peter to come with a twist of his wrist and a slide of his fingers over familiar hot flesh. He savors the taste of Peter’s tongue licking into his mouth like a starving man devouring his first good meal in weeks.

“You never get to leave again, Peter,” Nathan hears himself say. “You don’t get to do that to me.”

Peter makes this soft sound of agreement, and maybe he nods, but all Nathan can feel is his brother’s fingers lacing with his around the hard length of Peter’s cock, and he’s not sure if he can handle this.

When Peter comes it’s the most right Nathan’s felt in weeks, like he might finally be able to stand up without getting dizzy.

Peter drops to his knees and Nathan means it when he shakes his head and says, “You don’t --”

“I want to,” Peter says.

A moment later his mouth descends on Nathan with hungry desire, and Nathan barely holds it together. His fingers thread through Peter’s hair, and he holds him -- holds on -- while his tongue strokes along the length of Nathan’s cock.

He looks down at Peter and thinks that maybe he could be like he used to be with Peter, could tighten his grip and fuck into Peter’s mouth with blissful abandon, could be hard, could just take. He looks down again, sees the need in Peter’s eyes, and restrains himself.

His release hits him like a train hitting a brick wall. When he comes back to himself Peter’s still lapping at his cock, nuzzling his balls, savoring what he’s missed.

He pulls Peter to his feet and cleans them up, straightens their clothing.

“We’re going home,” Nathan says, even though something tells him he’s already there.

Peter nods into the curve of Nathan’s neck, mouths at his skin.

“I’m ready,” he says, so quiet that Nathan barely misses it.

It’s almost winter in Pennsylvania and the air has a sharp cold bite to it.

Nathan doesn’t feel a thing.

Date: 2007-04-29 06:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] offtheceiling.livejournal.com
*beams at you like the SUN!* OMG, Jenn, I cannot even tell you how much I love this. When I was reading it, I was emailing PT all "OMG LOOK, I WISH I HAD THOUGHT OF SOMETHING THIS AWESOME!" Because, dude, yes. This is so amazing on so many levels and your Nathan makes me all flaily with glee.

Seriously, thank you so, so much!

Date: 2007-04-29 06:58 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] apocalypsos.livejournal.com
YAY! OMG, I'm so glad you liked it! I completely missed it the first time around and then I'm digging through stories all, "Oh, what to write, what to write, what to -- HOLY CRAP, POST-APOCALYPTIC PETRELLICEST?! *POUNCES*" \o/

Date: 2007-04-29 09:43 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lierdumoa.livejournal.com
This was just cool.

Date: 2007-04-29 09:57 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] callmetiff.livejournal.com
He spreads his palms over the bare expanse of Peter’s chest, breathes in deep, and hates that Peter ever introduced him to the others as his brother.

I, um, I just. This was great. Better than great, but my brain won't tell me what that is right now.

Date: 2007-04-30 03:30 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] tahariel.livejournal.com
I love your use of Nathan's POV here, it really works. I've come over all goosebumpy :)

Date: 2007-05-02 08:53 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] lostandalone22.livejournal.com
I really like this view of the post-apocolyptic world. Nice job!

Date: 2007-05-03 01:39 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] swallow-dream.livejournal.com
this is amazing.

Date: 2007-05-06 04:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] dodificus.livejournal.com
He spreads his palms over the bare expanse of Peter’s chest, breathes in deep, and hates that Peter ever introduced him to the others as his brother.

I *loved* this story. Thanks:)

Date: 2007-07-01 11:44 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] kelly-girl.livejournal.com
I don't know how I missed this story but I love it. I loved the original and I love this remix. Your Nathan voice is amazing.

Date: 2009-09-28 10:27 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] thepuppeteer.livejournal.com
Oh so yummy ^_^

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