(no subject)
Well.
Here we go.
Part One (Wherein Everything Begins).
Pairing: Peter/Nathan gen (so far).
Rating: PG.
Wordcount: 5,102.
Notes: Pre-show. No spoilers.
Chapter 1: February 1980 - June 1988
When Nathan Petrelli was eleven, his parents told him he was going to have a little brother or a little sister.
“Which?” he asked, not really caring, but honestly wanting to know so he’d be prepared. A sister would be kind of cool, like having a secret entry into the mysterious world of girls (a world that, since his female classmates were starting to reach That Stage, he was now willing to acknowledge as perhaps being an interesting one), and a brother would be like, well, having a brother, someone to play with, someone to talk to. Whichever it was, he was sure he could handle it.
His parents told him they didn’t know yet, which he wasn’t sure he believed (how could they not know? Wasn’t it something moms just knew? Ma knew everything), but he accepted that he would just have to wait and see. Not being prepared for something this big was a little upsetting-he liked being prepared, he always asked his teachers what they were going to study next, he always wanted to know the answer to every question before it was asked. What would he do with a sibling? He supposed he would find out when it actually showed up.
---
When Nathan was almost twelve, his parents came home from the hospital, his mom glowing and exhausted and his dad merely awkward, and his-brother very small and very loud. He didn’t know what to do (which was terrifying), but his mom asked him if he wanted to hold him, and he said yes because he didn’t know what else to say. He took the baby carefully, praying silently and frantically that he wouldn’t drop him, and why wouldn’t his brother shut up? And then his brother did, stopping the long wail and staring up at him. His brother’s eyes were much like ordinary eyes, maybe, but they zeroed in on him like there wasn’t anything else in the room worth looking at, and that was…different. He felt at once mesmerized and trapped, so he handed his brother back, and the wailing resumed.
So he had a brother; okay, a brother was fine, he could handle a brother. Maybe having a brother was a little scary, but he could be responsible for a brother. He liked being responsible, too; he always volunteered to lead any group he was in and he was one of the few kids on the Student Council who actually did anything. Being responsible for a little brother didn’t seem so bad.
“Does he have a name yet?” he asked, watching the screaming bundle of blankets tentatively.
His name’s Peter, his mother said, smiling.
Peter.
---
When Nathan was fourteen, he had just started high school and he was becoming increasingly aware that his parents’ expectations for him had just increased tenfold; there had only been so much he could do in middle school, but now he could take classes that mattered, do things that would affect his prospects for college, and from the sound of it, none of this was going to be particularly enjoyable. He didn’t complain, though, because they had always told him he was going to be important, and they wouldn’t say that unless they thought he could be, so clearly he was capable of handling this.
Peter was two years old, and constantly asking questions about anything and everything that came to mind. He hadn’t quite gotten to “why is the sky blue?”, but Nathan was sure it wasn’t a long way off.
While it was certainly distracting to have a two-year-old follow him everywhere he went (as long as it was in the house-when he got in the car to go to school, the nanny would usually have to distract Peter with some book or toy or something), he didn’t mind the attention; it was nice to know that he was the center of someone’s world. Besides, Peter was a suitable distraction from school. It didn’t matter that there was a history test tomorrow (not that he hadn’t studied for it or thought he was going to have trouble with it, but it was still nice to have it matter less) when Peter was latched onto his leg and demanding to know what elephants were.
“Elephants,” he said, hoisting Peter up and moving him to the crook of his arm, “are very large, grey animals. Have you seen one?”
“There’s a picture,” Peter said, very seriously, “in the book.” There were a lot of books, but Peter always referred to each of them as the book; whichever book it was, it was obviously the most important one at the moment.
“Then why do you need to know?” Nathan asked. “Doesn’t the book explain it?”
“Says elephants have trunks,” Peter said, wrinkling his nose. “Doesn’t say what elephants are.”
“Well, elephants are…” He wracked his brain for something Peter would conceivably want to know. “Very smart, and very strong, and they live in Africa. Or India. Do you know what India is?”
“Where elephants live?” Peter asked.
He suppressed a laugh. “That about covers it, yeah.” A thought came to him. “They have elephants at the zoo, you know. Do you want to see one?”
Peter looked at him hopefully. “Can we?”
“I’ll go call the driver,” Nathan said, grinning. Peter threw his arms around Nathan’s neck and made indecipherable happy noises. Nathan ruffled his brother’s hair and decided to convince Ma to get one of those zoo memberships-clearly, they were going to need one.
---
When Nathan was sixteen, Peter started going to preschool, and wasn’t that just the most fun day ever. Daycare had been one thing, preschool was another; Peter cried and clung to his mother’s leg like he was being dragged off to Torture Camp. Nathan was thoroughly sick of it (he was sick of a lot of things these days-teachers who didn’t understand that he was obviously better than the other students, the unpleasant realization that his parents wanted him to get a job now on top of a class load that was surely going to kill him under the sheer weight of all the textbooks, the girl on the cheer squad who, when he had asked her out, had said no, to him, how could she could have said no to him, he was everything a girl could want-but he tried not to show it), so he pried Peter away, looked him in the eye, and said, quite seriously, “Pete, if you don’t ever go to school, then I can’t talk to you any more, because you’re a Petrelli and if a Petrelli doesn’t make something of himself then he’s not worth talking to.” Peter shut up-maybe because of what he said, maybe because of the way he said it, maybe because it was him saying it. That afternoon, Peter came back from preschool with breathless, incoherent tales of how amazing it was (“they’ve gotta hamster an’ then we played tag an’ they gave me a cookie”), and Nathan had to hold back a smile.
---
When Nathan was eighteen, he went to college. He couldn’t stay at home-the University of Pennsylvania (he’d heard all the jokes, dealt with all the questions about why Harvard didn’t want him, but it was an Ivy League school and he insisted it had a good pre-law program) was a bit of a commute from Manhattan, and even if it had been right next door he would’ve taken a dorm room anyway, because he had decided if he had to live in the same house as his mother any longer then he was going to seriously hurt himself. (It wasn’t that he didn’t understand and in fact agree with her insistence that he was going to be someone important someday, it was just that she seemed to have a very exact and definite view of what said important person would be like, and any time he was just a little bit off, she forced him back into line. He wanted to impress her. He just wanted to do it on his own terms.) Peter was not very understanding about this.
“Why?” Peter whined, sitting resolutely in the middle of Nathan’s bedroom.
“It’s just something you do when you grow up,” Nathan replied, calmly, placing a well-folded shirt into his suitcase. “It’s another kind of school. Like how you’re going from preschool to kindergarten. Kindergarten’s a different building, isn’t it? And it’s further away. Ma has to drive you a little longer.”
“Ma’s not driving me,” Peter said, sullenly. “Amy is.”
Nathan took a deep breath and reminded himself that it was probably better for Peter to be raised by a succession of nannies and nurses, because they’d sure as hell do a better job than his actual mother would. “Anyway, after a while, school gets to be really far away. And then you have to live there, because it would take too long to drive every day.”
“Are you coming back?” Peter was so quiet Nathan hardly heard him, and he stopped packing, turning to look at his little brother.
“Hey,” he said, softly, “why do you think I wouldn’t be? Of course I’m coming back. And I’ll call, I promise. I’ll send you a postcard if you want.”
Peter didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: “Can I go with you?”
Nathan knelt down next to his brother and ruffled his hair. “Tell you what, when spring break rolls around, I’ll take you to the campus for a few days. You like that idea?” Peter nodded uncertainly, possibly because he wasn’t entirely sure what a spring break was.
“What’s bothering you, anyway?” Nathan asked. “It can’t just be me leaving.”
Peter looked at him. “It is. ‘m gonna be all alone. Amy doesn’t know how to play cards.”
He sometimes regretted teaching his brother the basics of poker-the kid may not have had the best poker face, but he was damn good at figuring out tells. Nathan looked at the floor, sighed, and drew his little brother into a hug. Peter immediately attached himself like a leech. Hoo boy.
“Peter,” Nathan said, trying to be as soothing as possible, “I’m not leaving you. I told you I’d be back, and I will. I’ll be back for Thanksgiving, okay? And Christmas, and in the spring, and then I’ll be back all summer. You can get by without me for a little while, can’t you?” He instantly regretted mentioning the summer-he wouldn’t be back then, he would have an internship at a law firm which also happened to be in Pennsylvania. When you really wanted to get away from your mother, you planned ahead for it. But there would be summers in the future.
Peter sniffled and pressed his head against Nathan’s shoulder. “Don’t want you to go.”
Nathan exhaled slowly. “I have to, Peter. The sooner you accept that, the sooner you’ll feel better.”
“But it feels bad!” Peter wailed.
Nathan extricated himself from the hug as best he could and returned to his suitcase, leaving his brother collapsed on the floor. “Get used to it, Peter.”
“Nnnh,” said Peter, his face firmly planted in the carpet.
---
When Nathan was nineteen and three-quarters, and had come home for a total of two Thanksgivings, two Christmasses (Christmassi?), one spring break, and the first three days of what did not look to be a very enjoyable summer, Peter had just graduated from the first grade, and was very, very proud of this.
“Nathaaaaan!” he yelled, tackling his brother’s legs and nearly knocking him over, “I got a diploma! It’s like yours! It has my name on it and everything!”
Nathan looked at it dubiously. “They give diplomas for passing first grade now? Jesus.”
“Don’t say that,” Peter said, very seriously. “Mrs. Adams says taking the Lord’s name in vain is a terrible sin.”
Nathan looked at his brother. “And who, exactly, is Mrs. Adams?” he said, raising an eyebrow. “One of your teachers?”
“No, she’s Elizabeth’s replacement.”
“Elizabeth. Right.” The last time he had been home-scarcely two months ago-it had been Phyllis. He knew Peter wasn’t the kind of kid who drove nannies away, but he suspected his mother might be. “She makes you call her Mrs. Adams?”
“She’s not very nice,” Peter said, wrinkling his nose. “She’s really old. And she won’t let me have soda.”
Nathan pinched the bridge of his nose wearily. “Tell you what. Let’s go get you a soda right now, okay? We can go to McDonald’s or Dairy Queen or someplace.” He winced. He probably shouldn’t have mentioned Dairy Queen.
Peter’s eyes widened. “Can we get ice cream?”
Nathan considered this. On one hand, if Mrs. Adams didn’t allow an excess of sugar, she probably had a good reason for it. On the other hand, if Mrs. Adams was making Peter miserable, his mother would probably see that as a good excuse to fire her. Which he had already decided was probably the best course of action.
“Yeah,” he said, grinning. “Banana splits on me, bro.”
Peter beamed so brightly he thought the kid was going to explode.
His parents, Nathan reflected, probably would not be overly fond of this excursion-fast food restaurants were not Places Petrellis Went. Well, Ma might be okay with it, if it made Peter happy. She was getting better at that. (With Peter, at least. With Nathan she was the same as ever, but with Peter, she almost didn’t seem to care what happened, so long as he was happy and safe.) But Dad was worse than Ma in a lot of ways, particularly when it came to Maintaining Standards. Dad was the one who wanted his sons to be lawyers. (Peter would not make a very good lawyer. Of this, Nathan was certain. And so was Ma, apparently.) Dad was the one who hadn’t let Nathan go to public school-not that he was especially unhappy about that. (Peter was going to public school. Ma had had a long talk with Dad about this.) Dad had already planned every aspect of Nathan’s future, down to the kind of woman he would marry-“a good girl, someone from a strong background. None of the girls you know.” (Nathan had been dating an English major named Cindy at the time. He was not, admittedly, broken up about the idea of not marrying her.) He didn’t begrudge his father for any of this, though-Dad only wanted the best for him. And he was getting it. Maybe it wasn’t always easy, but he could deal with that.
But Peter’s future was mostly unplanned. When it came to his younger son, Dad didn’t seem to know what to do. Thus the long string of nannies, thus the occasional bursts of attention mixed in with large periods of hardly seeming to know he was there. Peter, perhaps, didn’t have to measure up so much. Nathan could have been bitter about this-and it was sometimes very easy to fall into that-but instead he was content with the idea that, if things kept going the way they were, his brother wouldn’t have to go through what he did.
The restaurant (he almost didn’t want to call it that) was noisy and crowded, and his shoes stuck to the floor. Peter loved it.
“Look!” Peter cried, grabbing Nathan’s hand and tugging him over to the counter. “They’ve got an ice cream with brownies! And marshmallows!” Nathan eyed the picture of the distressingly- and excessively-topped concoction. It loomed back at him.
“Are you sure you don’t want just a banana split?” he asked, looking back down at Peter. “It’s got chocolate too. And…fruit.” In truth, he wasn’t sure that something with three scoops of ice cream would be any healthier than the brownie monstrosity, but the banana had to count for something, right?
“Brownies,” Peter insisted.
Nathan sighed inwardly. “Brownies it is.”
Ten minutes later, Peter had somehow finished the entire thing. Nathan was still picking away at his split (he had remained steadfast in his belief that something with a banana in it had to be at least sort of good for you). He watched his brother with a kind of amazement. “Are you okay, Peter?”
“Yeah, ‘m fine,” Peter mumbled unconvincingly. He looked a little green.
“Well,” Nathan said, getting up and relocating their plastic dishes to a nearby trash can, “shall we go back home? I think that’s enough ice cream for one day.”
“Can we play Scrabble?” Peter asked, brightening. “Ma got it for me!”
“Did she now!” Nathan said, raising an eyebrow and smiling despite himself. “Well, sure, why not. But I should warn you, I’ve been told I have an excellent vocabulary.”
“Yeah, I know, I looked at one of your books from school,” Peter said. “What’s defeasance mean?”
It did not take years, or even months, for Nathan to look back on that day fondly; for Nathan Petrelli, nineteen and a half years old and already on his way to being a carbon copy of his bitter and depressed father, a day spent eating ice cream and playing board games was an occasion worth remembering as soon as it was done.
---
Chapter 2: September 1988 - August 1990
When Nathan returned to school the following September, he signed up for NROTC. He hadn’t told anyone that half the reason he went to the University of Pennsylvania was because the program was right there, and he certainly hadn’t told his parents that it was something he wanted to do. To be honest with himself, he wasn’t entirely sure it was something he wanted to do-it’s a good experience, he told himself. It will prepare you more for life than any law course. It’s less likely to kill you than the Army.
It will piss off your mother like nothing else.
There was indeed a guilt match with his mother, but his father was angry too, which made him uneasy. He didn’t want Dad to be unhappy with him. They actually flew down to convince him not to do it. He knew they had a good reason for it-well, Ma didn’t want him to die (and ruin his chances of being the next DA), and Dad, who had actually been in a war, didn’t want him to die or go through the same things he had. Nathan brought up the point that joining the Navy during peacetime was not going to be particularly similar to Vietnam. This did not do very much to dissuade them. It hurt, a little, that Dad was so upset with him-but Dad just didn’t want him to die, that was all. He could understand that. Ma, though, Ma was furious. She said she would cut off his tuition if he continued-and, god, he didn’t understand that at all, didn’t they want him to be a lawyer?-but Dad did manage to get her to back down. When they finally left, he called home, secure in the knowledge that neither of them would pick up the phone.
A woman’s voice answered. It was-whoever the current nanny was.
“Hi-Margaret,” he guessed, and when she didn’t correct him he had to assume he’d got it right. “It’s Nathan. Can I talk to Peter?”
She said she would go get him. There was a brief silence, and then: “Hi, Nathan!”
“Hi, Pete. Look, you probably noticed that Dad and Ma were really mad when they left to come see me, right?”
Peter sounded nervous. “Yeeah…they said you were gonna get yourself killed? You’re not going to do that, are you?”
Nathan sighed. “No, Peter, I’m not. I’m going to-you know those GI Joe tapes I got for you?”
“Yeah!”
“It’s like I’m getting taught how to do that. Only it’s a different group. They don’t fight, um, COBRA. It is dangerous, and that’s why Dad and Ma are mad. But it isn’t dangerous now. It’s sort of…preparing me for when it will be dangerous. Do you understand that?”
A pause. “I guess so.”
“Good. Because they’re going to be angry about this for a long time, but I don’t want you to get all worried. I’m going to be okay. This is just something I have to do.”
Peter didn’t say anything.
“Peter?”
“I don’t want you to die.”
Nathan almost laughed. “I’m not going to die. You don’t need to be worried, all right? I’ll be fine. I’ll call you later, okay? I’ll call you every week if you want. And I’ll be home for Thanksgiving. You’ll see.”
Peter seemed at least a little mollified by this. “Okay. Every week. You said so.”
“I did, didn’t I.” He considered that that may have been a mistake, but it didn’t really matter-he couldn’t fix it now. “I gotta go now, Peter. Talk to you later.”
“G’bye-you said so!”
When Nathan put the phone down, he was smiling.
---
Nathan did, in fact, call every week. Peter was constantly thrilled to hear his voice. He found himself looking forward to the conversations-Peter had an endless supply of stories about school and weekends and what the other kids were like and how the other kids had pets, Nathan, why can’t we have a dog or even a cat because cats are good too or Kari has a chinchilla, Nathan, what’s a chinchilla and why can’t we have one? all told as enthusiastically and rapidly as possible. It was a nice distraction from homework. Peter had homework, too, and frequently asked him for help on it; Nathan was all too happy to guide him through the perils of the multiplication table or the proper use of commas, but he insisted that Peter should memorize all the state capitals on his own. (This was because Nathan had very little idea what any of them were.) It was a far cry from the stressful and demanding challenges of foolishly taking sixteen credits in one quarter plus training, and he was very grateful for the break.
One day, when Nathan asked Peter what had happened at school that week, Peter hesitated and mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like “got in a fight”. Nathan was surprised and not particular happy to hear this.
“Did you get hurt?” he asked, wincing at the memory of the fights he’d gotten into as a kid-not many, really, but that was only because he won most of them and the other kids stopped picking on him after that. Nevertheless, they hadn’t been fun. Another mumble, this time more along the lines of “yeah”.
“How badly?”
Mumble, indecipherable.
“How badly, Peter?”
“…broke an arm.”
Nathan inhaled sharply. Christ. “Why the hell did you do that? Haven’t you been paying attention when teachers tell you not to get into fights?”
“He was picking on Eliza,” Peter said, defensively. “She was crying.”
“Then you should have told a teacher, Peter. Don’t risk your own safety because it seems like a good idea at the time.”
Peter made a pained noise. “But he was hurting her!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Nathan said, firmly. “You shouldn’t get yourself hurt. The next time something like that comes up, stop and think about what you should actually do, okay? Don’t listen to your impulses, Peter. They’ll only get you into trouble.”
“Fine,” Peter muttered.
Nathan paused. It wasn’t going to help, but it would be interesting to know-“Did you win?” he asked, trying to be casual about it.
“No,” Peter said, unhappily. Another pause. “But he did stop picking on her.”
It was fortunate, Nathan decided, that you didn’t have to hide a smile when you were on the phone. He managed to change the subject. “So, how’d you do on that math test you were talking about last time?”
“Great!” Peter said, the fight instantly forgotten. “I got a B+ and I remembered what you said about all the nines being reversed and Mrs. Hollister gave me a sticker and-”
Nathan settled back into the comfortable buzz of Peter’s incessant voice. Having a little brother-no matter how occasionally stupid said little brother might be-made up for a lot of things in life, he decided.
---
Nathan graduated college in 1990. His father wasn’t really talking to him any more, which stung like nothing else and left him feeling guilty and undeserving. His mother was, but her every word was laced with suggestions of maybe you should rethink where you’re going and is this what you think you’re supposed to do? When the Gulf War finally and officially began, he was still in training-he wasn’t deployed. He wasn’t really sure how he felt about that. His family, however, was thrilled.
He was home from Pensacola, just for a while, before he moved on from Pre-Flight to Primary and relocated to Milton-he wondered what he was supposed to do on a vacation. There weren’t any classes, any tasks, any things that needed doing at all. Most of the time he found himself staring out the window, thinking about the next stage of training (and when he’d be back in the sky, learning how to do something important, something that really mattered). Ma just wanted him to stay around for Peter. He was a bit surprised by that, really. Somewhere along the line, Ma had gotten…better. Not good, but at least concerned about things other than his success, and the latest nanny (Katerina) had lasted for nearly five months so far. (Not that Peter really needed a nanny anymore; for Christ’s sake, the kid was almost eleven.) She asked him questions, sometimes. How was he doing (fine), was he seeing anyone (no), did he know that she was always there to talk (what?). She’d been like that since Meredith.
It hurt to think about Meredith.
He decided he didn’t want to think about Meredith.
Peter, ten years old, once the shortest boy in his class, was now tall enough to accidentally knock over the Italian blown-glass pitcher on top of the antiques cabinet. Nathan helped him clean it up and promised that if anyone noticed (it would be Ma, not Dad), he’d take the blame for him. If he didn’t, he was relatively sure Peter would either blame it on the maid and suffer horrible guilt for weeks or accept responsibility and suffer whatever punishment Dad thought was sufficient. Neither of these things particularly appealed to Nathan.
Sometimes he wondered if responsibility could be like a drug. At NAS, he was in training to be a flight officer-maybe he wasn’t an officer yet, but he knew he would be eventually, and he knew eventually he would be an officer during combat, and then for just a few people, he would be the most important person in the world. Everything would be up to him. No room for error. Be responsible, be in control, and maybe they’d be alive the next day. I will be responsible for peoples’ lives. I cannot break. Therefore, I won’t. Taking care of Peter was like that, had always been like that-no matter what was going on in his life, there was always the safety of knowing that someone depended on him. If he could control someone else, he could control himself. That worked, right? And it wasn’t like it was hurting Peter, right? The kid needed someone to look after him. He could stop it when Peter didn’t need him any more. He could. He would.
But then Peter asked him if he wanted to play Street Fighter, and he forgot all about that train of thought, and spent the rest of the afternoon getting beaten up by pixels.
That brief period of summer, when he was still at home and Peter was out of school, was the best one of his life, better than the ones he’d had as a kid when summer was magic and he wasn’t expected to do anything besides keep his grades up and avoid fights, because everything is better when viewed through the lens of nostalgia and now he was living nostalgia. There weren’t any forests near where they lived, and there definitely weren’t any creeks, but it felt like a Boy’s Own fantasy adventure anyway; everything was an epic journey to defeat an evil monster and rescue whoever needed rescuing. (Which was sometimes one of Peter’s friends, but Peter’s friends never seemed very comfortable with the idea of playing with A Grown-Up, no matter how much Peter insisted that brothers didn’t count, so it was usually some made-up person, except for the one time it was Nathan. Nathan had been a bit weirded out by that.) Peter always had some great battle of good versus evil to play out-sometimes wholly his creation, sometimes ripped wholesale from whatever he’d been reading lately. (For Peter’s birthday, Nathan had bought him both The Lord of the Rings and Ender’s Game, and he never regretted it, if only for the sheer entertainment value.)
It was late, and they’d been playing Risk for what seemed like the entire day-did Peter never get tired of this? Not that he was complaining, of course; it was great to be able to spend a day doing nothing. But surely Peter would want some time on his own eventually, right?
“Hey, Peter,” Nathan said, moving a cavalry unit from China to Siam. “We’ve been spending a lot of time together the past few weeks, haven’t we?”
“Yeah,” Peter responded, pursing his lips in concentration. “You better not be going after Indonesia. Australia’s mine.”
“Far be it from me to interfere with your fixation on the Southern Hemisphere. But what I meant was, aren’t you getting tired?”
Peter looked panicky. “It’s not that late! I don’t have to get up early tomorrow!”
“Of me, Pete.”
Now Peter just looked confused. “Huh?”
“Don’t you want to spend more time with your friends? They probably miss you.”
“Nah,” Peter said, casually, examining his armies. “They’ll see me when school starts.”
Nathan rubbed between his eyebrows. “You’re completely okay with spending all of your time with me?”
Peter looked at him blankly. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
For a moment, Nathan thought-this can’t go on forever, I don’t think this is normal-but he pushed it away.
“No reason,” he said, smiling. “Are you sure about Australia? Because I think I might just have enough to try something…”
Peter’s expression became defiant. “Oh, you will not. I will end you.”
He did. Nathan didn’t mind.
Part two.