A/N: Inspired by the Postal Service, the entire processes of cycles, and a certain, very special boy I know. This is for him.
Peter/Elle hints and nothing more than "paranoid delusions" for those of you not too into the pairing. Constructive criticism rocks hardcore, especially feedback regarding Elle's character here.
cycle
What goes around, comes around.
She's all cyclical angles, sharp round the edges of her mouth and her feet, softer round the edges of her hips and her ears.
She's really not the devil Adam's making her out to be.
That's what she tells Peter. Pretty, pretty Peter, who's simple and beautiful and receptive, drab in gray like the prison walls, but she won't take him any other way.
"You can trust me," she says, smile gone soft with prescription pills, and hands gone softer with a touch of lotion. "You can tell me anything, the way I can tell you anything. You feel the same way, right?"
And Peter, Peter who feels everything and anything, he says of course he does.
---
She's hoping for loyalty.
Some days she wants Peter to be puppy-loyal, to follow her come hell or high water. She wants him aching for her touch and attention, she wants him whining when she's gone. And some days, you can tell, just there: his muscles twitch when she's about to leave. And she knows he'd follow her to the ends of the earth.
But some days she wants something else. She wants Peter to be like a prince from the fairy tales she liked, from the days before the long holes in her memory, before the birthday spent with lithium in her arm. And oh, he'd be a fetching thing in armor, coat of arms emblazoned on his shield, tearing down dragons' veins and castle walls to find her, find his pretty little princess.
She decides one day that he'll be both.
She usually makes a choice when it comes to them: Adam Monroe was going to be her prince, and the one before him her puppy, and the one before him her prince. And it was always like that, so on and so forth throughout an endless string of pretty freak boys who came to the facility.
Peter's the first to be a compromise between the two.
She takes it as a sign.
---
Some days she can't help but to daydream of the life they'll have together: Peter and Elle, Elle and Peter, and she always, always likes to picture herself as Mrs. Peter Petrelli.
Daddy wouldn't be so pleased to hear that she'd want to leave him, of course; but that's nothing a couple amperes shot up Daddy's ageing veins won't fix. That makes a slight problem regarding who may walk her down the aisle, but she's a big girl; she can do that herself.
She considers things often like how she probably shouldn't wear white during the wedding, however physically virginal she is; she's probably got more blood on her hands than most of the criminals awaiting sentences on death rows across the country.
Then she decides to fuck that because she'd be damn pretty in white, probably make a weak Petrelli relative shed a tear or two.
She does decide against giving Peter a normal kiss when the priest tells them they can. What's a wedding without a little fun? is her first thought.
Her second is that their children will be anything but ordinary, so why should they even go through any of the motions once they're together? It doesn't make sense, it doesn't gel or click inside her membrane and so it won't.
Besides, she's gonna be calling all the shots anyway, and Peter, her puppy-prince, he won't protest at all.
The way he's supposed to be.
---
This isn't the way he's supposed to be.
Adam wasn't supposed to poison him, wasn't supposed to weave webs through Peter's ear. He was going to forget, honest he would have, if only she had been given a little more time to make an antidote against Adam.
Stupid, stupid Adam, who just had to save Peter's stupid, stupid brother.
She knows she was likely fucked over from the beginning, even with the walls and the electricity and his hands digging into her hips. Even walls have ears and mouths, even electricity stops surging, even touches can no longer be felt.
He escapes from his cell, running in circles.
And, almost cyclical, she follows.
---
What goes around, comes around.
Setting Peter on fire didn't make him stay.
Wiping him clean and giving him a tabula rasa didn't make him stay, didn't make him stumble back into her open arms.
She pouts and kicks things and sets glass and trees and skin afire.
All because her puppy-prince is gone.
Then she sees someone new near Daddy's shoulder, a pretty thing called Mohinder Suresh.
And because she's cyclical and angular and sharp and soft all at once (and because girls like her aren't supposed to ever fall in love), she asks Daddy, "He's so cute, can I keep him, Daddy, can I, can I?"
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