After stepping back from the window, Nathan carefully doesn't look at it again. The shattered glass littering the carpet reminds him of the shard Claire pulled from Peter's head, a still-painful memory that threatens to pull his thoughts toward the bomb, and what it might do to them, and what it will do to everyone else, and that way lies absolute madness.
Instead he turns away and gathers the last of his things. His mother helps him into his coat, smoothing the fabric over his shoulders, letting her hand catch his for a moment. "She'll be fine," she says warmly. "Our Claire is quite resilient."
My Claire, he thinks vaguely, but already the urge to argue with her is fading. He looks down to where her gloved fingers are curled around his own. She hasn't touched him this much in years, possibly since his infancy.
He wants to be angry about that, or at least scornful of her transparent manipulation, but he senses that in the coming months he will be pathetically grateful for whatever affection she chooses to show him. Already he's forgetting what Peter's hand feels like on the side of his face or the back of his neck; already the weight of Claire's head tucked against his chest is receding into uncertain memory. He has no illusions that he will be allowed, ever again, to experience those things.
So if Angela is willing, for her own inscrutable reasons, to pat his face gently as he holds the door open for her - Well. Nathan is not in the habit of biting the hand that feeds him.
*
They have to wait for the elevator. He thinks there's a joke to be made, about a man who can fly waiting for an elevator. Peter could make it, although he'd be as likely to expound on the moral failings of a man who can fly but chooses to wait for an elevator.
He wonders if Claire is funny.
The doors slide open, and Angela touches his elbow as she ushers him in.
*
His mind keeps replaying a jerky slide show of Claire crashing through the window, her hair whipping around as she leaped. He's dreamed of that hair for fourteen years in a recurrent nightmare that ends, always, with a halo of blond curls sparking and catching fire. In his dreams, he cries, I'm sorry I wasn't there. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
He thinks of Peter sailing blissfully off a roof in mid-town, nothing to hold him up but faith and several stories of exhaust-blued air. At least Claire was practical about it - no martyr's ecstasy in her eyes. Just three quick steps to an closed window, and a blind trust that the magic would work one more time, that the shattered bones and pulped muscle wouldn't finally put her over some cosmic limit on damages.
She can't fly, he thinks, and has to stifle a hysterical giggle. His daughter can't fly, and neither could his brother the first time he flung himself off a ten-story building, but Nathan has watched them both soar into the air with a certainty he can't muster even knowing that gravity is no longer his master.
Faith. He's never understood it, and now he never will.
*
As they step out onto the roof, a pretty female aide - Wendy? Wanda? - grabs his elbow and pulls him towards the helicopter. "They're all waiting for you," she shouts over the roar of the engine.
He stares at her. "Excuse me?"
She stands on her tiptoes to bring her mouth to his ear. "You're late! The networks are waiting for you in Nantucket." She presses a few pages of remarks into his hand. "Read those on the way!"
Angela steps gracefully into the helicopter, pulling her coat tight around her. When she's arranged she beckons Nathan.
He hesitates as the aide - Wendy, he's sure - steps back and waves. The wind from the blades whips her dark hair into her eyes, and she pushes it back in a cruelly familiar gesture. "Aren't you coming?"
She waves him off, laughing. "And miss the party? We've worked too hard for this, Congressman!"
He blinks, and she's gone, the rooftop door swinging shut behind her.
*
He turns and looks at Angela.
He doesn't know he's made up his mind until she starts screaming his name.
*
He thinks that, if he had time, he could explain about Peter, and Claire, and faith. He thinks she might understand that, without them, the future at his fingertips crumbles and turns to ash.
I love you, he mouths before he turns away, and means it. He loved them all, and it was never enough: never enough to impress them, never enough to protect them, never enough to make them stay.
Nathan is not a nice man, and doubts that he is a good one; more the point, or at least what he has believed the point to be for most of his life, he is not an important man. The headlines and the history books Linderman promised him will remain unwritten. He is surprised by how little the thought hurts. If he is remembered at all, he hopes it is by Peter, and he hopes it is like this: into the dark, quiet place where the soul resides, he shouted a final question, and the voice that answered was love.
Three quick steps, and an open sky.
As he leaps, the lights of the city shine bright enough to burn his eyes.