Work Text:
Peter hadn’t expected Elias to be particularly cheery, when he came to visit him in his cell. He had been arrested, after all, sequestered away from his place of power, somewhere there was very little to learn and very little to occupy himself with.
He hadn’t expected, however, to walk out of the Lonely in the middle of the night to find Elias sitting bolt upright on the prison cot, staring at the wall.
He could have been meditating, as Peter knew he tended to do when he was worn out from trying to See, except for the fact that his eyes (and, faintly, in a halo around him, his Eyes ) were wide open, and his whole body was as tense as a violin string.
“Elias?” Peter ventured, when thirty seconds passed and Elias hadn’t acknowledged him. “Er, Elias, I’ve got… things… to discuss with you. Budgety things. I’ve printed out a spreadsheet and everything. Well, Martin did—”
“Shh.”
Peter blinked. “Did you just shush me? Do you have something better to be doing than the meeting you asked for?”
“ Hush , Peter.”
Elias was still staring at the wall. His hands were trembling so badly the cuffs around his wrists rattled.
Peter crossed his arms and waited patiently, but Elias kept his attention on whatever he was Seeing.
“E li as,” Peter sing-songed. “I’m sure whatever you’re doing can wait longer than I will.”
“Peter,” Elias snapped. “I can’t actually stop time, so please be a little patient so I can make sure my Archivist lives through the night.”
“Ooh, murder or—”
“There are two agents of the Desolation outside of my Institute. They’re deciding whether or not to force entry, and—”
Elias cut himself off with a groan, shuddering, hands curling and uncurling spasmodically.
“Well?” Peter asked.
Elias made a noise in the back of his throat, somewhere between a growl and a whine, and hunched forward, hands fisting against his stomach. The Eyes circling his head flared brighter.
“Yes, fine, good , one of them almost drowned as a child, the other one will run when their friend collapses if they know what’s good for them.”
Elias made another ragged animal sound. This time his voice broke in the middle, and he sucked in a breath through his nose.
After another moment, Elias went limp and slumped forward, breathing hard. He folded his hands in front of his face and pressed his fingertips to the bridge of his nose. His Eyes fell shut and faded.
“You’re not doing well here,” Peter observed, a little smugly. It was nice to see Elias taken down a peg. “Don’t like being away from your place of power? Having a hard time Seeing?”
Elias huffed out a breath. “Take a step to your left.”
Peter obliged him, mostly out of curiosity. He glanced over his shoulder, and there was a camera, crouched in the corner of the cell.
He looked back at Elias. “Why do you want me to block the—”
Elias punched the wall.
Peter didn’t flinch, but his mouth dropped open, and the folder of documents he’d brought along fluttered to the floor, forgotten.
Elias’ knuckles split, crimson blooming across pale skin, and he hit the wall again, hard enough to leave a stain in the shape of his bloodied fist.
Peter caught his wrist. He hadn’t realized he’d crossed the room until he was there, holding Elias back from lashing out at the concrete again.
“Elias,” Peter said, mildly.
Elias fought him, legs kicking and hands flailing, his chest heaving with effort. Peter remembered, suddenly, Jurgen Leitner, and Gertrude Robinson, and the man in the cafe, and how instinctively and furiously Elias sought to eliminate anyone he saw as a threat.
(Peter remembered the patterns of raised white lines along Elias’ thighs and upper arms, carefully spaced as to conserve room. Remembered the great knots of scar tissue that had covered James Wright—much messier, much less delicate. Frantic, furious. Afraid.)
Peter shifted, blocking the camera, and pinned Elias to the cot, letting him kick at Peter’s shins until he wore himself out.
“Well?” Peter asked, when Elias stopped fighting and just stared up at him, breathing hard. “You done?”
Elias went slack, eyes falling half shut, and let himself be laid out on the cot.
“That was an impressive little tantrum,” Peter said, brushing a sweat-damp lock of hair from Elias’ forehead. “Can you block the camera yourself, now, or do I still need to stand here?”
Elias frowned, brow creasing with effort. An Eye flickered into being just above the crown of his head, blinked once, and faded again. Elias shook his head. “I…” a wheeze of a breath. “It’s hard to focus.”
“Well, are you going to do anything else you don’t want them to see?” Peter shifted his feet.
Elias hesitated a moment, then tucked his bloody hand behind his head, under the cot’s thin pillow, and hummed in acknowledgement.
Peter sat down on the end of the bed, patting Elias’ shin. “I didn’t think a master voyeur and frequent exhibitionist would be camera-shy.”
Elias opened his eyes to look at Peter. “It’s difficult enough for me to See from here, in relative peace and privacy. I don’t think the psych ward of the prison infirmary and an IV of antipsychotics would benefit me at all.”
Peter nodded. “Right.”
“What I See is real,” Elias said, lowly. “And the actions I take are all in service of a goal.”
“The goal being breaking your hand?” Peter asked, walking his fingers up Elias’ leg to squeeze his hip.
Elias winced, and Peter’s train of thought diverted. He pulled down the trousers of Elias’ uniform, to reveal three scabbed-over cuts on the jut of Elias’ hip.
“Elias,” Peter scolded.
“Get out,” Elias snapped, and Peter saw the violence surge in him, the defensive adrenaline of being cornered.
“Elias.” Peter repeated, and flinched, hard, when Elias’ Eyes flared up with a hiss of static, as he dug his mental fingers into Peter’s mind, unspooling the memory of a particularly crowded port stop, trapped between two sailors with shoulders as broad as Peter’s, speaking a language he didn’t recognize, insistent and too close —
Peter vanished into the Lonely without a second thought.
He remembered, approximately ten seconds later, the way time dilated in the Lonely, and that he’d just left his idiot self-injurious husband alone on the heels of a breakdown, for much longer than he probably should have.
Peter stepped back into the cell, wincing, and found that Elias hadn't moved in the last ten minutes or so, except to turn his face toward the wall.
Peter listened carefully. Under his own squealing static, he could hear faint, hitching breaths.
“Sorry,” Peter said, stepping closer, letting the static roll away into a fuzzy white noise, and then nothing at all. “Forgot. But really, what did you think I was going to do? I can only put up with so much from you.”
Elias didn’t look at him. Peter could see his face from where he stood over the cot, and while Elias wasn’t quite crying, his eyes had gone shiny-bright with tears.
“You could just leave, you know.”
“He’s not ready yet,” Elias muttered, voice catching in the middle. “He Knows too much but he’s not ready yet. Besides—”
Elias took a deep, steadying breath, slowly sitting up, and Peter watched his mask go back on. Shoulders forced down, jaw relaxing, expression flattening itself out. A few deep swallows and quick sniffs, and the faint redness at the tip of Elias’ nose and the apples of his cheeks were the only signs something was ever amiss.
“— besides , Peter,” Elias continued. “I’m not going to let you win our bet that easily.”
Peter blinked at him. Elias might have shrugged off his moment of distress, but he still looked terrible. His eyes were shadowed and heavy, sunken into his face as though they knew they weren’t meant to be there. He seemed thinner, too, the prison uniform hanging off his frame, and pale as death.
“You’re not fooling anyone,” Peter said, and watched Elias somehow blanche whiter.
“Not everyone knows me as well as you do,” Elias muttered, looking away.
“Do you really think it’s because I know you that I can tell you’re a wreck?”
Elias bared his teeth.
Peter’s train of thought once again scraped to a halt. “You have blood on your teeth.” He grabbed Elias by the wrists, and just as he thought, the knuckles Elias had split open on the wall were still bleeding, even though it had been ten, maybe fifteen minutes. There were indentations of teeth around each wound.
Elias yanked at Peter’s sleeve, but Peter didn’t let him go. He sat down on the edge of the cot, tugging Elias so they were face to face.
“Elias.” Peter said.
“Don’t scold me, you wretched man.”
“What are you going to do about it?” Peter shot back, folding Elias’ bloodied hand into both of his. “Scare me off again? Go ahead.”
Elias didn’t even look at him. He scowled at the wall, eyes gone wet again.
Peter let him sulk for a moment, then sighed and asked, “What?”
“I would kill you if you weren’t doing me a favor,” Elias muttered, and Peter’s chest squeezed. That was about as close to ‘ I love you’ as Elias would get in this kind of mood, and as close to ‘ thank you’ as he would ever get.
“Good thing I keep doing you favors,” Peter replied, once he’d caught his breath.
Elias shut his eyes. Peter watched the tears gather on his lashes for a long moment, resisting the urge to cup Elias’ face and brush the dampness away, if only because he had blood on his hands.
Finally, Elias let out a shudder of a breath and slumped, turning his face into Peter’s shoulder. He might have been been crying, or just shaking his way through one of his silent panic attacks, or—
“You’ve got a migraine, haven’t you?” Peter said, trying to be probing but just coming across as accusatory. “You’ve given yourself a migraine, staring at these awful overhead lights to See, because you’re an idiot, is that it?”
“I’m very intelligent,” Elias muttered, petulantly, but when Peter lifted his arm and wrapped it around Elias’ head, blocking the light, he relaxed.
“Of course you are,” Peter scoffed. Elias was definitely crying into his collar, shaking with pent-up pain, but Peter couldn’t find it in himself to care. He’d seen Elias in worse states.
“I didn’t think they’d let you have anything sharp,” Peter said, once Elias wasn’t trembling so badly.
“They let me shave,” Elias replied, gesturing to the sink in the corner of his cell. There was a safety razor sitting there that seemed normal at first glance, but when Peter squinted at it, the head had been cracked, and the blade was nowhere in sight.
“You broke the blade out of a safety razor,” Peter deadpanned. “That’s impressive enough to be incredibly worrying.”
“I don’t exactly have the cream of the crop to choose from here,” Elias muttered. “Or the proper tools.”
Peter processed that. His stomach churned. “Elias, that’s a bit maudlin. And also not what I meant. Don’t make me want to report you. Because I will, if I think you’re going to do something rash.”
“And you would wish for death to put you out of the misery I’d inflict on you in return.”
Peter looked long and hard at the camera on the wall. “Fine,” he acquiesced. “Do it your way.”
“I always will, Peter. Now,” Elias straightened up, and Peter watched the mask go on once again, more firmly this time, despite the tear-streaks, and realized that he wasn’t getting any more vulnerability out of him, for the moment, at least. “I think you said something about a budget spreadsheet?”
Peter picked up the folder from where he’d dropped it on the floor, gathered up the loose sheets of paper, handed the whole bunch to Elias, and sat down heavily on the floor beside the cot. “I certainly did. Go ahead, tell me what I’ve been doing wrong, and make a dozen minor changes as significant as one massive restructuring. I know you want to.”
Elias smiled brightly, and Peter felt vaguely accomplished, though he knew nothing had changed. “You know me so well, Peter.”