June, 2006

"Ah, Peter! Just the man. Come over here. Already off your shift?"

Peter reluctantly followed Nathan through the office building mid-town that now served as his brother's campaign headquarters, through a vast number of desks, Vote Petrelli banners, ringing telephones and a babble of noises all around him.

"Sort of." Peter stepped aside to let a man carrying a towering pile of folders pass, and sighed. "Margaret died this morning."

"Margaret?" Nathan asked, distracted.

Peter threw him an irritable look. "Margaret. The old lady with final stage Alzheimer's that I've been caring for for the last four weeks. That's why I got off early. Look – I just needed someone to talk."

Nathan finally turned round and seemed to see him for the first time. "Ah," he said, clearly uncomfortable. "I'm sorry, Pete." He seemed to grope for something considerate to say. "She… she was the first person that died under your care, eh?" They reached Nathan's office, and his brother ushered him through the door.

"Yeah." Peter realized it had been wrong to come here, of all places. He didn't offer any more.

Nathan motioned for him to sit. "I, uh, I guess it gets easier over time, doesn't it?" he said, "Not getting too attached."

Peter's irritation grew. "It's my job to get attached, Nathan." It had definitely been the wrong choice to see Nathan just now. Just to make it that much clearer, an assistant knocked once and stuck her head in without waiting for an answer. "Mr. Petrelli, you have a phone call from Mr. Linderman. I'm putting him through on line 1."

Nathan's smile froze slightly as he half-glanced at Peter and reached across to the phone to answer it. "Thanks, Emily. – Hold it for a second, Peter, will you? – Yes? – Mr. Linderman, this isn't the best of – yeah. Yeah, I know. Can I call you back in ten minutes? Thank you. Yeah, good-bye."

Peter stared at Nathan. "What did he want?"

Nathan drew a hand across his face. "I know what you're thinking, Pete, but—"

"No, you don't, because I don't have a clue what's going on. Unless you—" Peter broke off as the answer struck him, and he quickly turned to look around himself, took in the office, the building, the employees, the banners. He gave Nathan an incredulous look. "He's – financing your campaign?"

Nathan laid both his hands flat on the desk before him. "Yes, Peter. Running for congress is expensive. I couldn't have borne all the costs myself, so I needed… investors."

Peter still couldn't believe what he was hearing. "And you went to Linderman? Nathan, he's the reason why your wife's in a wheelchair – we were gonna give disposition against him—"

"Yes, and he was also one of our father's closest friends who offered help almost as soon as I had signed up for the campaign," Nathan cut across him. "Look, Peter, I know what you're thinking, but this…"

"You're damn right," Peter replied.

"I needed money, and he gave me money," Nathan said sharply. "That's the point. You see a problem. I see a solution."

"This isn't about financing your campaign, Nathan," Peter said, in disbelief. "It's about selling your soul."

"God, man, gimme a break here, okay? I get it, Pete – it's your job to get attached, right? Well, it's mine not to. In the end, what does it matter where the money comes from? – Sit down."

Peter, who had risen to leave, sat back down again, his face dark. He didn't speak.

"Look, the reason I was gonna talk to you – I got a fundraiser tonight, and I want you to be there." They both realised this was not the best moment for Nathan to ask something of Peter.

"A fundraiser?" Peter repeated, ignoring the look on Nathan's face that told him he already saw the joke coming. "Linderman's been that stingy?"

Nathan got up from his chair and walked around the desk to where Peter sat, putting his hands on Peter's shoulders. "Pete, when we first talked about this, you said you were gonna support me. Right?"

"Yeah," Peter said darkly. I didn't know what lengths you'd go to in order to get what you wanted, though.

"So, I need you to be around tonight. Same as Ma. My managers suggested it, and I think it's the right idea – you know, family values and all that."

Peter raised his eyebrows. "Family values."

"Pete – listen. We live in different worlds, you and I. You can get away with being nice all the time in your own little world. Being righteous, being noble, all of that. Me, I fight in a totally different theatre of war. Nice guys finish last. Right?"

"Right," Peter said, completely unconvinced.

"Good. Can I count on you tonight?"

"Can I just be righteous and noble, or does that go against your campaign strategy?" Peter said testily.

Nathan gave him the smile Peter kept seeing on busses and advertisement walls these days as he clapped him on the shoulders. "That's the boy."

.

.

December, 1989

Christmas, 1989 was one of the times in his life that Nathan wished had never happened.

At the best of times, a Petrelli Christmas was a rather formal affair, including dinner parties that Peter hated because he wasn't allowed to attend, and Nathan hated because he was forced to attend. It was the time of the year when expectations ran highest, which TV, postcards and popular folklore proclaimed to be a time of peace and happiness, and reality never really was able to compete with that, even in good years. That year, it was about as bad at it got.

Nathan returned from his Navy base in Texas on the 23rd, just in time for Peter's tenth birthday and, incidentally, just in time to witness the death of Harvey, the family cat, who was found dead on the living-room windowsill after quietly passing away during the night.

Harvey had been an old cat – sixteen or seventeen, but that was no comfort at all to Peter, who was devastated for the remainder of the holidays. When Arthur, fed up by his younger son's refusal to see anything good in either his birthday or Christmas, proposed to buy him another cat as soon as possible, Peter was nothing but appalled, shouting you couldn't just replace a dead cat like a broken light bulb, and spent most of the next few days in his room.

This gave Nathan the opportunity to bring up the courage to discuss the matter with his parents that occupied most of his waking moments these days. Bringing up the courage took him until late on the 25th. His mother's Christmas carol records had fought a losing battle against CNN; with a US invasion in Panama as well as the Eastern European countries getting rid of their communist leaders in more or less bloody ways, the television was finally running almost all day.

As the photo of a shot Romanian dictator flickered across the screen and Arthur Petrelli was in comparatively high spirits due to the apparent death throes of Communism in Europe, Nathan felt safe enough to bring up the matter of a girl in Texas being pregnant with his child.

He had seen his father truly angry only a couple of times in his life; he had never seen him speechless. He remembered the CNN commentary about the Romanian revolution as being the only sound in the room, as both his parents stared at him, a vein twitching in his father's face, and the strangely calm, almost knowing look on his mother's face.

Nathan had been resolved not to let himself be shouted down, but as Arthur found his voice again, he stood not a chance. Arthur called him a disgrace to the family, to the Academy, to the Navy, to the world at large, and ended up leaving the house to go for a walk, before Nathan had managed to say another word.

Nathan looked after him, thunderstruck, and then turned helplessly to his mother. Angela reached for the remote control and first turned off the TV, for which Nathan was infinitely grateful. He thought he must have seen four dead Ceausescus in the past twenty minutes.

"Who knows of this?" she asked without preamble.

Nathan swallowed. "Just Meredith and I. I – don't think she's told anybody yet."

"No doubt you've given this some thought," Angela said, her face still completely unreadable.

"Yes. I – I'm not going to leave her alone with this. I'll help her – I love her, and I—"

"For God's sake, Nathan." Angela cut him short and got up abruptly, standing at the window with her back to him. "Stop this nonsense. You're twenty-two; you don't know a thing about love."

His first impulse was to tell her that she'd been twenty-one when she married Arthur; but then he realised that this was probably the most foolish thing to say just then.

"You're really going to throw everything away for some girl who was smart enough to get you in bed?" she asked. Nathan wanted to say that it hadn't been like that – not entirely like that – but she went on, "If this came out, you'd have to leave the Academy, it would forever be a stain on your career. Oh, yes, Nathan, I know you. But this is not the time to get noble. I'll talk to your father when he gets back. First and foremost, this girl needs to be convinced that she'll keep quiet. And you will not have anything else to do with this. Let me and Arthur handle it."

Nathan cleared his throat. "When you say you're going to convince her…" he began, but once again, his mother cut him off.

"The less you think about this unfortunate business, the better for you. No, Nathan, I won't let you deal with this. I'm sure your father can have you transferred somewhere else if he talks to the right people, just to have you out of harm's way. You're not going to see her again."

Nathan didn't protest. A small part of him was still insisting that he'd got himself into trouble and he should be the one who got himself out again, but the larger part was relieved that matters had been taken out of his hands.

"You'd better not be around when Arthur comes back," Angela said. "Make yourself invisible until tomorrow. I'll talk to him." She turned around to look at him again. "Nathan – there's something else you should know about your father. We thought we shouldn't tell either of you, but now I think it's time for you to know. Arthur hasn't been well recently. This summer – that was not a heart attack."

"Not a heart attack?" Nathan replied, dumbfounded. Just when he had thought that this could not possibly get any worse, he found new catastrophes just waiting to be stumbled upon.

Angela slowly sat down on the armrest of the armchair he was sitting in, and looked at him intensely. "He survived a suicide attempt. He has a severe depressive disorder, Nathan. Has had it for years now, although we thought that he had it under control."

Nathan stared down at her hand caressing his forearm. "Depression?" he asked, aghast. He'd had no idea. Suddenly, the silence in the room seemed to bring down the walls on him, and he almost found himself wishing that the documentary was still running.

Angela continued to hold his eyes. "Your father and I have known this for a very long time now, but it has become worse recently. For his sake – let me handle this. Keep out of this completely. Do you understand?"

Nathan nodded slowly.

"And don't, ever, tell Peter. You've seen him when the cat died. This kind of disorder can be genetic. We don't want him to know that depression might run in the family. Can you keep this secret? For your father's sake, and for Peter's?"

Nathan nodded again.