On the Subject of a Lack of Knowledge Leading to Contentment by futuresoon (PG)

[sandystarr88.livejournal.com]

Fandom: HEROES
Pairing: Nathan/Peter
Length: 12,339
Author on LJ: futuresoon
Author Website: 'this is a fic' tag
Why this must be read:

This is amnesia!fic at its best, with Nathan and Peter after the near explosion of New York ending up in the cold with the faint sense that they somehow know one another. I loved how easy their relationship is in this piece as they survive together out in the wilderness and hilarious little conspiracy theories on how exactly they got their powers and ended up there.

It’s a flash of white—and then it’s a flash of yellow—and then it’s white again, so white it burns through his eyes and sears a brand of light onto his bones—and then it’s kind of orangeish-yellowish for a while—and then it’s mostly black or maybe dark gray or actually, come to think of it, more like a dark blue, but the orangeish-yellowish is still visible somewhere in the distance. The wind rushes and curls in on itself, pushing outward and upward and downward in a spiral of heated air. And the wind is the only sound, save for this sort of ringing noise, and what is that? Actually—where—and the wind rushes down, down, down, through endless dark blue until there’s a lighter gray below—and the air slows almost to a standstill, and the light gray eases up at a far more acceptable rate, and the previous heat has vanished utterly; it’s downright freezing now, so where—the ground arrives with a soft, cold thump, and all thoughts vanish.

Later—not that much later, because, as he would later consider, he isn’t frostbitten yet—he wakes up in something that is probably a forest (a very snowy forest), but he can’t be entirely sure because he has no idea where the hell he is. Are there forests where he is? There are forests in lots of places. Most of the places you can go have trees of some kind here and there. Specifically pine trees? Also common. Forest does not narrow it down much. Snow might—snowy forests, right, those are less common than regular forests? So this probably isn’t in Africa or South America or Australia. Could be Europe. Could be North America, though probably not in the more southern regions. Could be Asia. Could be Antarctica but probably isn’t because he isn’t actually dead from the cold yet. So: Europe, North America, Asia—that still covered a lot of territory. This isn’t going well.

When is it, for that matter? He knows the months and the seasons, but he doesn’t know which one it is. Fall or winter, probably, given the snow, but if he’s in the Himalayas or Scandinavia there might be snow year-round. He isn’t entirely sure. He is sure that it’s pretty damn cold, no matter where or when he is, and finding shelter would be a good idea. He looks down. Finding clothes would be a good idea too. He still has some—sort of—well, they had been clothes at one point, probably, but now they were charred and mostly nonexistent. Charred equaled fire. Had he come from a fire? That isn’t important. He needs to—he tries to get up and he winces, because moving hurts, and there’s a painful heat underneath the cold. It’s too dark to see anything properly, but it looks like—he’s pretty sure skin isn’t supposed to be that color. Fire, then. Some kind of plane crash? He remembers a burst of light and heat—

He needs to get up. He needs to get out of the cold. He can think about where he is and how he’d gotten there later, when he has the luxury of doing so, when he isn’t…but it hurt. It hurts and he’s tired and he doesn’t know where or when or who he is and it doesn’t seem like such a bad thing, really, to just slip away, because there isn’t much to slip away at all. Nobody would miss a man who doesn’t exist.

But there’s a noise, and there are footsteps—uneven footsteps, like the person doesn’t know where they’re going—the footsteps grow faster as they near. There’s a hand on his shoulder and another one underneath his back, helping him up, and yes, that does hurt a fair amount, but he’s less concerned about that at the moment.

A face comes into view. It’s still too dark to make much out, but it looks like a boy—well, maybe a bit older than that. Hair obscures half of the boy’s face, but the other half looks either worried or confused (possibly both, given the circumstances).

“Do you—are you okay?” the boy asks, glancing over the burns and the charred clothing.

“It doesn’t feel like it,” he replies, hoarsely, because his mouth and throat feel dry and almost cracked—it must be from the fire.

“Okay—there’s…I don’t know. There has to be a city or a cave or something. Unless this is Russia or Canada or some other place with isolated snowy regions, but, uh, I don’t really want to think about that…” The boy trails off. “Do you know where we are? I don’t…I can’t remember.”

“Nice to know I’m not the only one,” he says, wincing as he tries to sit up as best he can. “Except it isn’t, really. Who are you?”

The boy frowns. “I can’t remember that either. I don’t suppose you—”

He shakes his head.

The boy’s shoulders slump. “So neither of us knows where or who we are, other than that it’s someplace snowy and we’re…”

“Mostly naked,” he says, finally getting a closer look. “Well, the mostly only applies to me.”

“I was wondering about that. But you look—you look like something happened to you, like you were in a plane crash or something.”

“That’s one of my theories, yeah.”

“And I just look…” the boy gestures helplessly. “Normal, except I don’t have any clothes. I’m not burned. So what happened to me?”

“I don’t know,” he says, wearily, “but we should get somewhere where we aren’t going to die from exposure soon.” He looks over the horizon. “If we walked, maybe we’d find…something. I don’t know. We need to try, at least.”

The boy nods. “Can you walk? You don’t really look like…”

“If you help me up, maybe.” His legs don’t look as burned as the rest of him. His arms and chest hurt like hell, though.

The boy gingerly lifts one of his arms over his shoulder and stands up, slowly, using the other arm to support him. His chest feels like it’s on fire but his legs seem relatively okay with it, so he can stand, at least. That is good. Moving? Moving isn’t that hard, actually. Maybe the burns aren’t as bad as they look? Not that he had really gotten a good look at them. On further examination, they look more red than anything else. Like a sunburn, really. A very bad sunburn. No horrible scarring. Well, he can walk. He doesn’t think he would be able to walk if he had third-degree burns all over his body. But he really, really doesn’t think he can have gotten a sunburn in a snowy forest at night.

The boy pauses. “I don’t think walking is a good idea. Wind-chill or something. If you walk, you generate a breeze…I don’t know how I know that.”

“Do you have any better ideas?” Maybe the boy knows these things, but he doesn’t. Everything about this seems strange and unfamiliar. He can imagine the concept of snow, and cold, but putting them together into such extremes doesn’t feel normal. Maybe he’d lived in Arizona.

“There’s…” The boy thinks about it. “People can dig caves out of snow. It stays warm inside. I don’t know why. But I think it takes a while, and we don’t exactly have anything to dig with.”

He looks around. “There are tree branches, aren’t there?”

“Only the smaller ones are on the ground, and we wouldn’t be able to break off one big enough, I think. But—branches are a good idea? You can make a tent out of them.”

Something seems wrong with this plan. “So we make some kind of shelter and we wait for what, exactly? I don’t think anyone knows we’re out here. We’ll have to get moving eventually.”

“We can rest, though,” the boy protests. “And it’ll be a little warmer when it’s daylight.”

The boy does, in fact, have a point. He feels tired and sore all over, and not entirely because of the burns—given the darkness, he might have been awake for a long time before this. And anything that can conceivably make things less cold sounds like a very, very good idea. “Okay,” he says. “Any idea how to go about doing that?’

They do manage to find a sizable number of promisingly thick-needled branches. Arranging them into a tent-like object is harder, because the boy does not in fact have any idea how to go about doing that, but eventually they have something that sort of looks like it might conceivably provide some protection if they pray a lot. It’s better than nothing. Somewhat.

They settle into it with a minimum of discomfort, aside from when a branch scrapes against his shoulder, causing him to hiss in a distinctly undignified manner, and it is sort of less freezing. The wind is blocked off, at least. He wonders if they actually can survive the night this way, but he can’t think of any other options, so he’s not going to complain about it.

There isn’t a whole lot of room, but neither of them seems especially bothered by that; body heat would only add to their chances. It’s nice, anyway, to have the contact. It’s a reminder that there’s somebody else sharing whatever the hell is going on. And warmth, too. Warmth is good. The boy isn’t all that cold, actually.

The boy hooks an arm around him and rests his head against his shoulder, and he’s surprised that the burns don’t react much to that; it might be the cold, or the relatively soft and even pressure, but whatever it is, he doesn’t give a damn. He doesn’t know how well he’d known the boy before this, or if he’d known him at all, but the boy feels familiar, so probably he had. He wonders if the boy thinks he’s familiar, too; it might explain the apparently automatic affection. They’d known each other, then. It’s a nice thought.

Eventually, he rests his own head against the boy’s, and they both lapse into sleep. His last thoughts before drifting off are vague concerns about if they were going to wake up—but he’s beyond caring about that.

On the Subject of a Lack of Knowledge Leading to Contentment