[ID: A digital painting of a young Peter Lukas as an Avatar of the Buried. He’s in a fetal position with walls of dirt surrounding him. In contrast to his muted yellow shirt and socks and dark blue shorts and shoes, he holds four small, smiling, pastel-coloured, stuffed rabbits in his arms. A small ray of sunlight shines on the only visible part of his face which is his closed eye and troubled brow./.End ID]
Basically what if Mama Lukas’ plan backfired and Peter fell into the comforts of the Buried instead of the Lonely? Done for the Entity Swap Mini-zine!
Elias manages to rope Peter into a proper dinner date and Peter spends thirty minutes slowly working through some mashed potatoes, and Elias thinks he’s doing this deliberately to be annoying….. but no, Peter just likes eating his food super, super slowly, since it’s something he usually does by himself, and he doesn’t mind it becoming cold and unpalatable. So Elias has to sit there for like three hours while Peter finishes everything on his plate, then at the end of the meal Peter’s like ‘oh, that was actually pretty nice :)’ and Elias wants to throttle him.
Peter, sitting at his desk in The Lonely, watching as Daisy breaks into his office and starts filling out her own employment paperwork without interacting with him once: finally, an employee who gets me
So, I gather from Peter referencing the possibility of him being able to re-attempt a ritual in centuries that he probably has an extended lifespan, like Simon. Which brings a new angle to his relationship with Simon and how Simon talks about the Lonely and the Vast and their proximity to each other. There’s certainly a great deal of loneliness in persisting for such a long time that everyone and everything you’re familiar with dies and changes around you. And Peter is clearly not a man who copes with change all that well… it feels only fitting that Forsaken would endow him with a lifespan that is both terrifying but convenient for avatar purposes.
Also: it’s kinda funny to imagine a Peter making fun of Jonah for having to go through dozens of bodies to achieve what Peter just naturally has.
I wonder, I want a poll because I need to know. How many LonelyEyes shippers think that Elias and Peter actually like each other?
I don’t think they do, but I also think it’s more complicated than them just disliking each other. As avatars, there’s a lot more value in a relationship where they don’t have the expectations of ‘liking’ someone applied to them. They can be rude and vitriolic toward each other, avoid each other, manipulate each other, use each other, hurt each other, and even kill each other, and that’s fine, because they don’t expect each other to maintain a veneer of human connection that they obviously don’t have a great capacity for (especially Peter, as a creature that is repelled by connection). They understand each other and accept each other and can find each others company agreeable sometimes and that’s enough. It works for them. It makes them comfortable being permanent fixtures in each others lives, for so long as the other lives.
I guess you could say that they like that they can be themselves around each other? But I don’t think the understood meaning of ‘like’ between people really applies to them otherwise. That’s just my take on them, though. The idea of two people magnetically seeking each other out despite their dislike appeals to me a lot.
That said, I’ve indulged in illegal soft LonelyEyes and I’ve definitely read fic that convinced me they could develop in that direction. I’ll probably write a fic like that myself one day.
I’ll always believe that the fandom re-interpretation of Elias as a flamboyant, melodramatic theater kid who wears bright green suits and eye-themed jewelry does a disservice to how funny it is that he is, canonically, a very boring man.
Currently thinking about the adjustment period when Jonah goes from James (short) to Elias (tall) and Elias!Jonah accidentally smacking his head into things because he used to be short.
He goes to grab something in the staffroom kitchen and nearly knocks himself out on a cupboard. He walks straight into a doorframe while mid-sentence with one of his staff. He tries to kiss Peter while they’re in bed and ends up slamming his head into the headboard.
Peter finds this all very amusing and remains on land just to laugh at him.
Peter is the absolute worst and best kind of villain because like
He’s insanely rich. He’s so rich his family co-owns a space station. I can’t even fathom how rich you’d have to be for that.
On top of being insanely rich, he’s also basically a demigod who can disappear people into another dimension with a thought and disappear at will and is implied to have an extended lifespan.
He has all the makings of someone too powerful to fuck with.
Instead, he’s a massive awkward weenie who openly talks about hating confrontation and tries to run the moment he gets any push-back and would rather die than continue a conversation longer than he finds comfortable.
His statement about his life has him admitting that people don’t bother to do anything about him because he’s a predictable loser who scares easily.
Summary: Elias is very well-endowed and things get unexpectedly complicated when Peter agrees to take him on.
Notes: Mostly a lighthearted LonelyEyes fic! But these two are monsters, so their relationship is… complicated, and there’s a reference to Peter’s less than stellar upbringing in the fic. Please enjoy 15k of filth and my terrible sense of humour.