Disclaimer: not mine
Spongeboy
Peter Petrelli is a sponge, for the lack of a better term; a sort of symbiotic parasite. He has no merit on his own, but innumerable ability within his grasp.
All he has to do is want.
So he has the powers of a dozen men, half a dozen women, alive and dead and in assorted states between. It makes him fated, in some sort of way. It makes him special. It also makes him a thief. He tells them all he's using his powers - theirs, honestly, but it's not like they're counting, at least not all of them - for good, for better, for the better good of the world.
It makes him sound altruistic; of course, he is. It's what he's wanted. He's always gotten what he's wanted.
Only more. This time, he got more.
Peter's never been asked which of his borrowed powers is his favorite – and he does consider them borrowed, because he doesn't like thieves, though his pockets are deep and his fingers are sticky and jealous. He doesn't really think about it, but one day, after all this, after he's finally saved the world from everything, someone will probably ask, curious, bright eyed and unassuming: Which does he like best, this man of infinite variety? Which would he keep above all others and which could he never do without. No choosing his osmosis, they'll tease, because that's like wishing for more wishes.
This won't shock him, though he'll not have thought of it. He'll offer regeneration, because it is most useful, because it has saved him more cat lives than times he has ever landed on his feet. He'll propose invisibility, because his life now is the perpetual public function he's always hated; he'll joke about telekinesis, because who doesn't want to be able to use a fallen TV remote without touching it? He'll even smile grimly, and murmur about nuclear bones and atomic bloodcells, because they're, when it ended, what kept him to his quarry of heroism.
He won't choose flying, not because the next inquiry would be who the flying man is and where he'd met him, but because he'll have learned to design his excuses by then, shape and elucidate the prettiest lies before ever falling back on the truth.
Because that is the truth. It was all Peter'd ever wanted, because it was all he's always wanted. To fly with the flying man.
To fly with his brother.
Nathan has always been drawn to high places; it is in his nature, or at least in his blood. Then too, perhaps, in his blood lay dormant the ability to take him there. In his mind's eye behind the veils of dreaming, Peter had seen his brother, kicking at the air, palms flailing into nothing. And though Nathan has everything else: the job, the image, the fabrications and the life, Peter had known inexplicably that this was one thing he would not let his eternally more deserving brother keep for himself alone.
This was one place Peter would not let Nathan go alone, because though he'd rejected the trappings of the structured life, the enchanted, glamorous, howling life, it was because he did not follow, was given the alternative and chose not. He'd never be limited from his brother by ability, only choice, and the consequences of it.
Because these are the consequences he wants. Because even when Nathan claws his way out of this city, this country, this life, out of this terminally insufficient excellence, he'll still have to climb his way through the skies and clouds before he can circle amongst the suns. That's fine by Peter, because he's never liked any of Nathan's pretenses much anyways. All Peter's ever wanted was to keep himself close enough besides him, to watch, to marvel as Nathan draws the light from between the stars.