tuesday
The world ends on a Tuesday.
Peter’s vacuuming when it happens, just getting into the nooks and crannies and sniffing from the dust going up in the air, ignoring how his hair tickles his forehead. Thinks about how he should hurry up and finish so he can open up the windows, so that Adrian has no reason to be angry with him when he gets home from his grocery run.
Always keep the house clean, without being seen cleaning. Always keep yourself presentable, without being obvious about it. Smooth, shaven skin without the act of shaving, clean, polished marble stovetops without ever being polished.
Peter is like a piece of expensive furniture, like a house-plant to be forgotten, there to be seen and used and to always be in pristine condition lest it gets thrown out of the picture perfect home.
The television beeps loudly, loud enough to be heard over the sound of the vacuum and for Peter to snap his head up and towards it. Adrian left it on when he left, and now the screen is black and there is a message printed on the screen.
CAUTION
EMP EVENT INCOMING
Peter blinks at the screen, leans down and turns off the vacuum. Looks back at the screen just in time to see the ‘Breaking News’ screen pop up before a woman in a newsroom takes the stage.
It was a sports channel, Peter thinks dumbly as he looks at the TV. There shouldn’t be any news on it.
‘A state of emergency has just been called, due to an electromagnetic event that is expected to take down... ’
She never finishes her sentence, because the power goes out. The screen goes black, and Peter hears the oven in the kitchen stop working. There is a moment of complete, perfect silence, before there is a crash right outside the house.
Peter jerks, drops the vacuum that was clenched tight in his hands, and goes over to the window. He looks out just in time for the screaming to start.
There’s a car crash just outside, a vehicle crushed against a powerline, front part of the car completely crumpled. There’s a woman at the wheel, and she is screaming her head off. As Peter watches, another car crashes right into hers. The screaming cuts off.
Peter can hear his heartbeat in his ears. He can feel it in his fingertips. He swallows, feels his throat dry like sandpaper, clutches onto the beige curtains in order to stay up. Then he lets them go. Adrian would get angry. His hands are dirty. He might leave handprints on the fabric.
Peter steps back from the window, rubs his sweaty hands on his slacks. He’s terribly thirsty.
In a moment of insanity, he thinks that he should go out and help the woman. She could be gravely hurt. She could be dead. Then he remembers that he’s not allowed outside the house when he’s not with his alpha.
So he has to wait.
Peter rubs his hands against his legs once more, like that’ll calm him, like that’ll slow his heartbeat and his breathing, walks to the couch and sits down.
He should clean the house so it’s spotless, but there’s no electricity, so he can’t do it. He could do it with a broom, but that would do as good of a job. Adrian would be able to tell, Peter knows.
He wonders if Adrian is going to be angry when he gets back, anyways, because he didn’t finish his tasks. If he’d started earlier he could’ve finished before the power ran out.
Peter tries to breathe deeply, ignores the new voices yelling in the street, and waits for the door to unlock. Waits for the electricity to come back on, even though he knows it will not. Still, he’s not supposed to know anything, not supposed to understand anything but cooking and cleaning and fucking and looking good.
And Peter knows he doesn’t know much. Knows just snips and pieces, understands very little. He never got to go to high school, not like the regular kids, like the kids that were supposed to be people instead of things, the kids that were supposed to become something.
Kids that grew to be like Adrian, like the woman in the street driving the car.
But Peter knows that an electromagnetic blast can potentially bring down the whole grid. He knows it can potentially destroy the whole grid so badly that it can’t be repaired. Not quickly.
Peter gets up and walks to the window once again. He ignores the people crowded around the two cars crashed in the street, ignores a man being extracted from the other vehicle. His head is covered in blood, and Peter can’t tell if he is alive or not. He ignores it all and looks at the cars.
There’s no blinking lights, no alarms, no sound except the yelling and the screaming and the overall sound of people panicking.
A dog barks ferociously, right across the street, and Peter watches as a house at the end of the lane begins burning.
Peter didn’t think his life would turn out this way, when he was a child. He had hope. Even when his aunt and uncle died and he went into foster care he still had hope.
He still had hope because even orphan kids could be something, as long as they were not an omega. As long as they got the right genes, expressed the right secondary sex characteristics, as long as they never went into a heat and developed a sweet scent, they had a chance.
Peter lost that chance. He lost it a long time ago, and he doesn’t know why he’s still hung up about it, why he’s still sad about it, why he hasn’t gotten over it. He listened to the same lessons as the other omegas, learned from the same teachers. He heard over and over that this was hit lot in life, that it was better this way, that omegas couldn’t, weren’t able to make decisions for themselves, that if they did, god forbid, they went mad and hysterical.
He listened and learned all of it, learned how to behave and how to clean and cook and take care of himself and how to be perfect, and he doesn’t understand why he doesn’t believe it when so many other people do. When so many other omegas do.
He thinks his life would be so much better, so much happier, if he did.
Peter sits on the sofa and watches the sun go down, watches as a darkness more complete than anything he has ever seen descends over the neighbourhood. He sits on the sofa until he can’t see a thing, just the whispery shapes of the furniture in the moonlight coming through the windows.
The door never does unlock, and Adrian never does come home.
Peter tries the faucet, looks at the weak stream that comes out before the pipes run dry. He takes a bottle of water from the fridge. It’s still cool inside it, but not for long.
Peter drinks the water and wonders what time it is. There’s no old-fashioned clocks in the house, so he doesn’t know. After midnight. It’s after midnight and it’s eerily quiet outside. Peter can only see the moon when he looks out, no other light visible. The house that was on fire burned down, detached as it was, while people screamed and tried to put it out with meager amounts of water that would have been better used for something else. Now there’s just the bones of it, invisible in the darkness.
Peter watches the street, deserted, and thinks about what he’s going to do.
It’s one of the things that he shouldn’t do, one of the capital rules. No decisions. He doesn’t get to make decisions. His alpha decides what he’s going to do, how he’s going to dress, when he’s going to get up in the morning.
He decides whether Peter is going to stay in this house or not.
Except he’s not here, and it’s the end of the world. Peter doesn’t know a lot, but he knows some things, and he knows that whatever it was that took out the power supply took it out completely. He knows it made the cars stop working, most definitely made the phones and computers stop working as well. He knows it’s not something that is going to be fixed overnight.
He doesn’t know if it’s something that can be fixed.
He wonders where Adrian got stuck. It could be in the grocery store, or it could be on his way back. The store he likes to go to is twenty minutes away by car. That’s a long way when the cars aren’t working.
Even if he was halfway home by the time the power was cut, he’d still have over an hour left to cover on foot. And Peter knows it would take longer than that because the streets are a mess. If the suburbs got as messy as they did today, he wonders what the highway is like.
Peter shouldn’t think like this, has been taught and trained all his life not to think like this, but his brain has never learned that. So he thinks about it.
About whether he wants to be home when Adrian gets here.
He realizes that the alpha could be coming any second, that he has spent a lot of time just sitting around and waiting, just sitting and waiting for someone to show up and tell him what to do.
This is a chance to not be told what to do. Peter could walk out and get killed, he could get taken hostage, but at least he wouldn’t have to jump at every whim of a fucking middle aged man. He wouldn’t have to clean and cook and stay quiet and stay perfect and just take it, just take all of it, literally and metaphorically, lying down.
He could go out there and die.
Peter knows, in the parts of himself that he doesn’t allow out, that he’s been waiting for something like this for a long time. Not particularly an apocalypse, but something that would happen to him. he was afraid of getting Adrian angry but hoped, occasionally, that he would make him so angry that he would kill Peter. At least then Peter wouldn’t have to do this anymore. Wouldn’t have to live like this anymore.
The years have grated on him for a while, have been grating more and more as they pass. It’s been too long. It’s been enough, living like this.
Peter would rather die. He’s just too much of a coward to do it himself.
Peter takes another sip of his water, feeling terribly ill. His usually sluggish thoughts are racing, more determined and precise than they have been in years, and he squeezes the plastic bottle in his hand until it starts crinkling loudly. He stops, looks around. He’s still alone.
In the bedroom, he finds a decorative candle that has never been lit. He knows it’s there because he dusts it every three days. He roots around for a lighter, his hands shaking more and more as the minutes go by without him being able to find it. Time is ticking, and it is ticking terribly quickly. And if he doesn’t hurry this Adrian will come home and kill him before he even has a chance to step a foot outside.
And Peter would like to walk around freely just once more, before he dies.
He finds the lighter, to his overwhelming relief, and lights the candle. It doesn’t give off a lot of light, but it is something, so Peter stands up. He puts the lighter in his pocket, knowing it could be very valuable, and goes straight for the closet. There’s no backpack, but there is a fairly spacious bag there that Adrian takes to the gym. His water bottle is in there, metal and sleek under Peter’s fingers, and a spare change of clothes. Peter leaves them there, even though they are not in his size. He looks through the closet, half-blind. His clothes are mostly very impractical. Blouses and slacks and coats. He digs out his underwear and socks from a drawer, remembers his turtlenecks and throws some of them in the bag. He takes a pair of Adrian’s jeans, along with a belt. He grabs an old forgotten hoodie and puts in on, knowing he needs all the free space in the bag that he can manage, puts on a jacket over it.
He stands up, overwhelmed. He needs too many things. He needs too many things but what he needs more than that is to get out. Because if he doesn’t do it now he might not have another chance. Maybe this is what he has been waiting his entire life for. His only chance to get out.
Peter goes to the kitchen, opens the fridge and packs the bottles of water into the bag. He takes a knife from the chopping block, puts it there as well. He grabs an apple from the table, walks into the pantry, grabs the few cans of tuna he knew were stored there. He feels a few more cans under his hand, almost completely blind in the windowless room, and stuffs it in his bag too. It’s getting heavy, and Peter wonders if he’ll be able to carry it, but he ignores that thought as he puts it down and zips it up.
Then he goes on and puts on his shoes, a pair of short leather sneakers, the most fitting option.
Peter lugs the bag up onto his shoulder, unlocks the door, and steps out.