Is that how that works? ( Peter asks, in a distant daze, glancing back at snowdrifts and quaint fairy lights and an inexplicable scent of holiday spices. under normal circumstances he might agree — shared hallucinations are rather unlikely. if he's having some horrible nightmare, though, some random and well meaning projection of his subconscious seeing the same specter of Christmas might make a certain amount of sense.

Peter doesn't shy from the touch, and it does ground him at least a little. trying to shake the panicked refusal of his reality to be more agreeable to understanding it. granted he can't think of a scientific explanation for what they're seeing, but, he never will if he just blocks out the entire thing as a hallucination. )

Okay. We shouldn't go through it, right? That sounds like a way to run into a brick wall. Like Looney Toons. ( he doesn't want to be the Wile E. Coyote of Californian Stepford. also, Peter isn't sure he wants to deal with Christmas, even when it isn't spooky and sudden and spontaneously appearing in places it shouldn't be. so he definitely doesn't want to deal with it when it is all of those things. )