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The waves are calm, as they rise and fall against the sand of the beach. It makes soft noises as it moves — nothing indicative of conscious presence; even as Peter steps into the water, it makes no noise to acknowledge him. Nature never notices if Peter's there, though no one else notices either. Peter doesn't know how that makes him feel.
He strains to remember a time when he was noted, was acknowledged — though he knows that would make him feel weird, wrong, like his skin's too tight, lungs are too big, filled with a too-abrasive almost-panicked heat—
Peter thinks of earlier today, when the family had gathered, had led him to the basement. How strange it was to have their eyes on him, however disinterested they were.
He left them behind in the basement, though. Or perhaps they left him behind.
Peter's explored the house before, when he was young and unaware that if he searched he might actually find people. He and Judith and Aaron had ran around the house — though quiet, as not to be noticed — and familiarized themselves with the environment, had played games. (Peter thinks about what happened when they were discovered to be playing games with one another and shivers; it's probably just the cold). The three of them found every room, every nook and cranny.
They found a basement — old, stone walls, too-wet, too-cold for the summer it was. It was normal, insofar as Peter knew what normal meant. Their parents — or maybe not, maybe it was someone else, the faces seem so blurry, now — had caught them there. Had separated them, locked them in their rooms — much colder than usual, too cold to be natural. The days of that punishment seemed to last an eternity, though it feels indistinct now. Peter does remember wondering if he might be forgotten there, if he would die of starvation in a room too-quiet and too-cold. he didn't. (After that, Peter kept to the outdoors and avoided all of his sibling like the plague. Not for any particular reason. He just missed England's clouded gray skies. His siblings were too annoying for him anyways.)
The basement wasn't a basement today though. Perhaps the basement had never been a basement. It was a frigid wasteland now. Too cold, too muted with soft whites and mushy browns.
Idly, Peter wonders if it was his family that turned the basement to a not-basement or Peter. He wonders if they sent him away or if he left out of his own volition.
Unwillingly, Peter collapses into the snow; the cold seems to burn his skin. A hot shoot of distress rises in his throat, but it fades as quickly as it came.
Strangely, Peter thinks about what happened to his siblings — to Aaron and Judith and Lydia and Clara — how the went away, never to be seen again, never spoken of. Forgotten. He wonders if they would want to be remembered, his first thought of them in years, really, one he wanders from pretty quickly.
Peter doesn't think he would want to be remembered, if he could choose.
The cold seems to seep up into his clothes, his skin, his bones. It seeps higher, deeper to something small, deep within him — the feeling of heat, panic of being left, abandoned. It all feels like it goes numb with frost bite. The quiet question he's always ignored: what happens if I die here washes away like a paper bag in a stream.
Peter closes his eyes and enjoys the acceptance of it. The feeling that became numb now grows into an almost painful sort of pleasure. Freezing hands under warm water.
Distantly, Peter can hear water. Waves as they rise up against the shore, then recede. He finds his body picking itself off the cold ground that isn't so cold anymore -- perhaps because he is cold now, so it simply feels like nothing.
He certainly feels like nothing.
Peter thinks about what is is to be abandoned, forgotten. An icy breeze blows past him and he is too cold to feel anything at all. He walks forward until he is on the dull white beach. He doesn't stop, and steps into the sea, and doesn't stop there.
Idly, he wonders if he will drown. If he'll get hypothermia first. Wonders if he will feel the pain of death over the numbness. Wonders if being forgotten will make him so numb it will give him the bite of that painful sort of pleasure.
Peter hopes it does.