In honor of Peter coming back, have an (almost) canon-compliant one-shot about the day he left!
Peter Nureyev spent a lot of time thinking about why Juno Steel left him without a word.
It shouldn’t have been a mystery. It wasn’t a mystery. Peter was not unfamiliar with the concept of cold feet.
But waking up in that bed alone had been…
There was something of a mystery about it. Something of a mystery about Juno. Because Juno Steel did not want Peter hurt. Not as such. Juno had tortured himself into unconsciousness time and time again when they had been Miasma’s prisoners, and he’d done it to keep Miasma from hurting Peter. The first time they’d met, he’d taken the brunt of an attack meant for Peter, had almost passed out from blood loss afterwards.
No, Juno did not want Peter to be hurt. And yet waking up alone in that bed had hurt far more than any punch Peter thought Cecil Kanagawa could muster. It had scared him more than anything Miasma had done to him. It had been like losing Juno all over again, not to a bomb this time, but to the detective's own demons. And this time, Peter was afraid, he wouldn’t be getting Juno back. There was no miracle he know of, no purus egg that could drive out Juno’s self-loathing.
Because that was what it boiled down to, really. It didn’t take a detective to see it. Juno threw himself in the way of everything, anything he could. His signature move was the sacrifice play. And that, more than anything else, was what made Peter angry.
He wasn’t angry that Juno had turned down his offer, although he wished the detective had at least the decency to say it rather than leaving without a word. Peter could live with being abandoned. But being sacrificed at the altar of Juno Steel’s self-hatred was too much for him. Peter Nureyev did not like being used. And no one, not even Juno, had the right to use him to hurt Juno.
Which was why, when he woke up alone, he had waited. There was no one there, there was no one to see him sit up slowly, pick up his glasses from the bedside table, and clean them. There was no one there to see Peter Nureyev’s vice-grip on his own emotions only waver slightly when he looked at the empty space Juno had left in the stiff hotel blankets. Juno Steel did not want Peter Nureyev hurt. And therefore, this was not about Peter Nureyev.
And that, perhaps, was the cruelest part of it.
The thought occurred to Peter that he should leave. Leave his self-destructive detective behind and return to the comfort of motion, the clinical simplicity of jumping from planet to planet, entangled in nothing but conspiracy, no complicated emotions to ensnare him.
But it was too late, he realized just as quickly. Leaving Mars behind would not seal away his feelings for Juno. Much like Juno, he had taken a gamble and decided to swallow this pill. And it had grown in him, continued to grow and spread. If he was not careful, he would lose everything to it. Peter’s weapon of choice, before knives even, was his mind. And there was no room in his mind now for anything but Juno Steel. In this state, Peter was worse than useless. A master thief needs a clear mind, and Peter’s was anything but.
He had stayed in that hotel room for hours. He had let his head rest in his hands, first sitting on the edge of the bed, then at the small desk the room provided. He had paced. He had washed his face, applied makup, angrily washed his face again and reapplied, and repeated the process until his face was raw with scrubbing. He couldn’t get it right. It felt like futility, and that was when Peter had finally broken, sitting on the edge of the tub with his eyeliner clutched in his hand, the heels of his palms pressed into his eyes as sobs rolled through him like ripples on a lake from a stone Juno Steel had thrown.
He went to the spaceport after that. He had sat in the car, staring at the ships arriving and departing, the two tickets he’d bought for Juno and himself tucked safely in his pocket. It made him sick to even think of getting on the ship alone. Not today.
And so he had turned back to the city, this Hyperion City that was as much a part of Juno Steel as the detective was a part of it. Peter had driven into the heart of it, until the dome overhead was just blue sparkles choked through chemical smog. And he vowed to try to learn this city.
This city was the kiln in which Juno Steel continued on his broken way without cracking apart entirely in the flames. Perhaps the detective was afraid that, removed from that heat, the sudden release would finally do what Hyperion City could not, and he would shatter into nothing more than a thousand sharp barbs.
So Peter wouldn’t commit to it, but he would try to learn the city. Because if he could learn the place that had made and broken Juno Steel, maybe he would learn to take Juno as he was, not as he wanted him to be. Maybe he would learn how to leave once again, the first thing he had truly been good at, a skill he seemed to have suddenly forgotten. And maybe, just maybe, he would get a chance to show Juno that Peter Nureyev was no one’s sacrificial lamb. He would not let Juno turn him into another wound to carry, another burden on those already-bowed shoulders, another knife Juno could turn on himself and push into his atrophying heart.
If this place was Juno’s heart, Peter would learn it. If it was Juno’s prison, Peter would try to learn why. And if it was simply an entity of which Juno was an avatar, and the two could never be separated…
Then Peter would leave. And he would try to forget the grouchy, unintentionally cruel detective who thought his most redeeming feature was that he tried to be cruelest to himself. He would try to forget how Juno’s suspicious nature was just a stubborn smokescreen to cover his latent fear and despair. He would try to forget how Juno walked, like the entire world was resting on him and he had never learned how to carry the weight. Peter would even try to unlearn the lines of Juno’s small, sensitive face, the greedy, guilty way it looked when he thought he was getting something he didn’t deserve, the way it had looked against the pillows in the darkness of the hotel room. They were so, so careful with each other, but Juno’s every move was desperate and needing and so painfully grateful for what Peter and he were doing. Peter had known, even then, that Juno did not think he deserved to be loved this way. He had tried to show Juno otherwise, taking all the cruelty of the world and doubling it, giving it back as gentleness to the man in his arms, tenderly giving Juno all of what he so clearly needed, until Juno was entirely unmade, succumbing to what Peter gave him, his mind finally yielding to allow himself just this moment of what he so clearly, desperately wanted.
Peter had told Juno he loved him.
It had not been enough to make Juno stay.
But Peter did not think that Hyperion City was Juno Steel. Too much of Juno was rage: he wanted the world to be better, and he couldn’t live with the disappointment that it wasn’t, so he fought against it with every breath he took. Peter had stopped fighting the same battle years ago, but Juno would not let go. Perhaps Peter had been a fool to think he could remove the detective from his ongoing deathmatch with the world. The world was always going to win, and yet Juno could no more give up than Atlas could put down the world and walk away.
But Peter at least deserved closure. More than Juno had seen fit to give him. And so he would learn this city that Juno was fighting, an entire small world Juno could not let himself leave.
Peter already knew that the city could not be saved. All he could do, if he was very lucky, would be to save the two of them from it
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