my favorite detail in true detective s1 is that neither of them wear seatbelts. i assume this is because rust has a death wish and marty feels emasculated by safety regulations
Summary: Peter is home late from work again and he's growing increasingly desperate to keep his marriage together. Warnings: Angst, fluff, smut, pathetic yearning, thoughts of baby-trapping.
The wind had a way of finding every crack in the single-pane windows, a low, persistent whistle that had become the constant, unwanted soundtrack of your life in Ennis. You were sitting at the small kitchen table, a half-empty mug of coffee long since gone cold cradled in your hands, when you heard the familiar crunch of tires on the gravel-and-ice driveway. The sound didn’t make your heart leap; it just made you tired in a deeper, more bone-weary way. It was the sound of the end of another day that felt exactly like the one before it.
You didn't get up. You just listened to the heavy thud of his boots on the porch, the stomp-stomp to knock off the clinging snow, the click of the door. A gust of frigid air that smelled of diesel and cold metal swept into the small house, instantly swallowed by the dry, recirculated heat. Peter Prior stood in the doorway, still in his blue Alaska State Trooper jacket, his face ruddy from the cold, exhaustion etched into every line around his eyes and mouth. His brown hair was a mess from his hat. He looked at you, and for a moment, he just stood there.
“Hey,” he said, his voice a little rough from a long shift spent mostly in silence.
“Hey,” you echoed, your voice flat. You didn't move to greet him. The cold from the open door had already made you shiver inwardly. He closed it with a soft, final click, sealing you both back in. The small house felt smaller still with him in it because of the sheer weight of all the things that hung unsaid in the air between you. Things that had been building for months.
He shrugged off his jacket, hanging it on a peg by the door. In his uniform pants and a long-sleeved thermal shirt, he crossed the room to you. He leaned down to kiss your cheek, his lips cold and chapped. You didn’t turn your head to meet them.
“Long day?” you asked, but it wasn’t really a question. It was a placeholder. Every day was a long day for him. And every day was an eternity for you.
“Yeah,” he sighed, running a hand through his hair. “The usual. Darrien’s still a ghost, Danvers is on the warpath about the Tsalal files, and Connelly’s breathing down our necks from Anchorage. It’s a mess.” He moved to the sink. “What about you?”
The question, so simple, so domestic, was the spark that lit the powder keg. You let out a short, humorless laugh. “What about me?” you repeated, your voice gaining an edge that made him freeze. “I think I watched the same flake of snow drift from the top of the window to the sill. That took about an hour. Then I re-read two chapters of a book I’ve already read three times because the library only gets new books in when someone dies and their relatives donate them. After that, I applied for another job online, this time for a bookkeeping position at the mine, which I’m sure I’ll be spectacularly unqualified for because my degree, and they’ll hire another miner’s nephew anyway. So, to answer your question, Peter…it was a very, very long day.”
The silence that followed was as cold and expansive as the tundra outside. Peter set a glass down on the counter with a quiet clink, his head bowed. You could see the tension coiling in his shoulders, in the way his back straightened. He wasn't angry. He was bracing. This was a fight you’d had a dozen different ways, a dozen different times.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and the two words were so freighted with guilt and a profound sadness that it almost made you feel worse. He finally turned to face you, and the look in his eyes was one you knew well. It was the look of a man holding onto a rope with bloodied, aching hands, terrified the moment he loosened his grip, he’d fall into a bottomless abyss. It was the look of a man who was terrified of the day you’d look at him and tell him you didn’t love him anymore. Terrified of the day you’d tell him he was wasting your life.
You hated this town. You loathed it with a passion that surprised even you. The endless dark, the soul-crushing cold, the smell of the mine that permeated everything, the feeling of being trapped at the edge of the world. You never wanted to live here. You had come because Peter lived and worked here, and you loved Peter. You loved him with a fierceness that was your only source of warmth in this frozen place. But you could feel that love, that fire, being slowly smothered by the oppressive reality of Ennis. And the worst part was, you knew he could feel it, too. He could see the light inside you dimming, day by day, and he blamed himself for it.
“You always say you’re sorry,” you murmured, looking down at the wood grain of the table. “It doesn’t change anything.”
He crossed the space between you and knelt beside your chair. His hands, still cold, closed over yours, pulling them from the coffee mug. “I know. I know it doesn’t. God, I know.” His thumbs stroked the backs of your hands. “Let me…let me try to make it up to you. Just for tonight. Please.”
His plea was broken, a raw nerve exposed. He wasn’t asking for forgiveness. He was asking for a reprieve. For both of you. He looked up at you, his eyes were wide and pleading, filled with an almost unbearable tenderness. He was afraid. He was so deeply, fundamentally afraid of losing you.
You could have stayed cold. You could have pulled your hands away and walked to the bedroom alone, leaving him there on the floor. But the exhaustion in your bones was a shared one. And beneath the frustration, the love was still there, a sleeping giant you were too tired to rouse but couldn’t bear to slay. You gave a single, tired nod.
He rose, gently tugging you up with him. He led you down the short hallway to the small bedroom, a room that felt more like a cell than a sanctuary. The bed was made, a small act of normalcy you forced yourself to perform each morning. He reached for the hem of your sweater, and you let him pull it over your head. He undressed you, his cold fingertips trailing down your arms, your sides, raising goosebumps on your skin. He didn’t rush. He was trying to pour every ounce of feeling he had into the act, a physical apology. He shed his own clothes, letting them fall to the floor in a heap, and you were both just shadows in the dim light.
You took his hand, and he gently guided you down. He looked both defeated and utterly determined. He nudged you onto his lap, helping you to straddle him. The cold of the wall at his back was a stark contrast to the searing heat of his skin where your thighs met his. His body was a landscape you knew by heart: the soft, sparse hair on his chest, the lean muscle of his arms, the constellation of old, faded scars on his hands from a life lived outdoors. He leaned his head back against the wall, his eyes fixed on your face, never wavering.
He reached for you. “C’mere,” he coaxed, a low, husky murmur. His hands guided you with an unyielding gentleness. He nudged you again, a silent, encouraging pressure, until you understood what he wanted. He was offering himself to you, putting you in control. It looked like he was giving you the reins to do as you pleased, to take what you needed, to use him for your own pleasure.
But you knew him. You knew the man you married. You settled your weight onto his lap, feeling the hard, hot length of him press against your core, still separated by the damp cotton of your underwear, his arms came around you. One hand splayed wide on your back, right between your shoulder blades, the other locked around your waist, his fingers pressing into the soft flesh of your hip. This wasn’t about giving you control. This was a cage of muscle and bone and desperate love. He was terrified to let you go, even an inch. The action screamed what he couldn't bring himself to articulate: Don’t leave me. Don’t get up. Don’t go away.
You lifted your hips just enough to push your underwear aside, and he watched, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed hard. You sank down onto him, a slow, inexorable descent. A broken sigh shuddered out of him, his head falling back against the wall with a soft thud. His eyes, however, remained fixed on you, and in them, you saw it all. It looked like misery. His brow was furrowed, his lips were pressed into a thin line, and the effort of letting you set the pace seemed to be causing him physical pain. But his eyes…oh, God, his eyes were pools of pure, aching, incandescent love. He looked at you like you were the only star in a permanently black sky, the only source of light and warmth in his cold, dark world.
You began to move, a slow, deep rocking that made you gasp. His fingers dug into your flesh, not to guide, but to anchor himself. His arms tightened, a living vice, pulling you harder against him, closer, deeper. The charade of control evaporated. A frantic energy began to build in him, his hips bucking up to meet your downward thrusts, creating a rhythm that was less a collaboration and more a mutual, desperate clinging.
“I love you,” he groaned, the words torn from somewhere deep in his chest. It wasn’t a declaration, it was a prayer, a plea, a frantic incantation. “I love you so much.” His thrusts became more urgent, more powerful, driving up into you as he whimpered, a high, broken sound of pure, unadulterated need. “Don’t leave me. Please. I love you. God, I love you.”
He was babbling now, his face buried in the crook of your neck, his breath hot and ragged against your skin. You could feel the frantic beat of his heart slamming against his ribs, a frantic percussion against your own chest. Your own climax broke over you with a sudden, blinding intensity, a white-hot sun finally burning through the months of twilight. You cried out, your body clenching around him, and the sensation pushed him over the edge.
With a final groan of your name, he surged up, burying himself to the hilt, and you felt the hot, pulsing spill of him deep inside you. He held himself there, rigid as stone, his entire body trembling with the force of his release. And then, a profound stillness fell, broken only by your ragged, mingled breathing.
He didn't let go. He didn’t move to pull out, didn’t loosen his grip. His arms, still locked around you, trembled with a post-coital fatigue and a persistent, unshakeable fear. If he could just hold on, if he could keep you this close, maybe he could stop the slow drift, maybe he could permanently fuse you to him.
In the profound quiet, his mind, finally untethered by the relentless demands of the job, began to race down a treacherous, hopeful path. He thought of you, here, at home. Home all day. The silence that plagued you, the loneliness. An image, unbidden and breathtaking in its clarity, bloomed in his mind. A crib in the corner of the spare room. The smell of baby powder. The sound of a cry that would shatter the oppressive quiet, a cry that wasn’t the wind but life. A child. His child. Your child.
It would be something to bind you to him, a tether of flesh and blood, far stronger than any vow, a piece of him that you would hold and love unconditionally. You were so full of love, he could see it, a trapped, furious light inside you. What if you could pour that light into someone who wasn’t just him, a man who was clearly failing you? A part of him, a new, innocent part you could pour all that frustrated love into. It would make you stay. It would give you a reason. It would make this frozen, hostile place a home.
He opened his eyes, the words forming on his lips. He looked at your face, your closed eyes, your breath slowly evening out. He had just taken everything from you, your body, your anger, your pleasure. He had given you everything he had in return. And now he was thinking of asking for more.
The mirage cracked just as quickly as it formed. He looked at you, at the weary slump of your shoulders even now, in his arms. He thought of the light that had faded from your eyes, a light he remembered so vividly from before Ennis. A child wouldn't just be a tether; it would be an anchor, shackling you completely to a life that was already crushing your spirit. He would be asking you to give up the last, faint glimmer of escape, of a different life. You were already sacrificing so much just by being here. Could he really, in good conscience, ask you to sacrifice more? To give your body, your future, your entire being over to a life, just to soothe his own gnawing terror of being alone? Was his love not already selfish enough? The thought of him being the one to fully and irrevocably ruin your life, to take your future and bury it in the permafrost of this godforsaken town, was a sickness that settled in his gut.
How could he even consider bringing a child into that fear, into this world of permanent twilight? You’d resent him forever, and you’d be right to. He was afraid he had ruined enough of your life already. So, he swallowed the words. He bit down on the fantasy so hard he could almost taste the blood. He kept the vision of a small, swaddled baby, of a giggling toddler pattering down this very hallway, locked in a vault deep inside his heart. He wouldn’t say it. He couldn’t. He had already asked for the world from you. He had taken the sun from you. He wouldn’t ask for the moon and the stars, too.
He held them inside, where they joined the cold and the fear and the desperate love, a secret, glowing ember he would carry alone. He pressed a trembling, reverent kiss to your temple, pulled the duvet up around you both.
He held you tighter, if that was even possible, his nose pressing into your hair, inhaling the scent of you, a scent that was the only thing that felt like home in this entire, frozen wasteland. He said nothing, his silence an act of both profound love and deep-seated cowardice. The wind continued to howl outside, a mournful, ceaseless cry over the endless dark, but inside the small, cold house, Peter Prior held his whole world in his arms, trembling, and prayed to any god that would listen that she wouldn't slip away.
a/n: Is this anything, guys? Finn Bennett's characters are just plaguing my mind.
a/n: Voluntary donations are accepted on Ko-fi, your support helps me write more: https://ko-fi.com/catbayunthestoryteller <3
