"Ow!" Nathan yelled, jerking his arm away from Peter. "Why don't you just cut my arm off with a chainsaw and get it over with!"
Peter pulled the arm back patiently, not taking his eyes off the wound he was cleaning. "Please stay still, sir, I am a registered nurse," he said, deadpan.
"Shut up," Nathan retorted, reassured that Peter was relaxed enough to make jokes—that meant his arm must not be too badly injured.
"Seriously, though, it looks like it's going to be fine," Peter told him, starting to wrap clean white gauze around Nathan's bicep. "It went straight through the muscle, didn't hit any blood vessels or anything. It's going to hurt like crazy for a while, but if you don't mess with it, it'll heal right up."
"What about you, Pete?" Nathan asked. He'd been watching Peter closely ever since they'd gotten back to Hana's apartment, his mind overlaying the image of his brother with cuts across his skin and burn marks at his neck over Peter's every move. He wondered if he would ever be able to look at Peter again without seeing that memory—it wasn't the kind of thing one forgot. "You're okay, right?"
"I'm great," Peter said, carefully not meeting his eyes as he tied the bandage. "I'm Magic Miracle-Gro Boy, remember?"
"That's not what I meant," Nathan persisted, concerned not for the state of Peter's bruises but for the new shadows in his eyes, the jaded, injured slant of his shoulders.
Peter tore off the extra gauze, tossing it to the side. "There you are, good as new," he said brightly. "I am officially done."
"And officially evasive," Nathan said, irritated.
"Never say that having a nurse in the family isn't useful," Peter said, breezing past Nathan's insistent prods. "Who needs a hospital when you've got me?"
Nathan gave him a half-meant smile, barely even trying to make it real. Now that he had Peter back, Nathan was finding it harder and harder to accept the sacrifices he'd made. Choices that had been so straight-line easy now rubbed and vexed, no longer seeming so smart now that he had the consequences to deal with. There was an overhanging miasma of what have I done? about his thoughts, and he was increasingly unsure that he'd taken the right path. Sometimes, it got so bad that he wanted to snatch up the phone, call Linderman and beg for the power back, sacrifice Peter, sacrifice everyone and climb over their dead bodies to the Oval Office that was so featured in his dreams of late. He still wasn't sure that he wouldn't.
Through the clear glass porch door, he saw Peter walk out on the deck and hug Claire from behind, surprising her with the little bursts of affection he was so good at. Nathan tried not to admit it, but he felt a little jealous. Peter was a person born with a huge amount of love, all stocked up inside him and ready for deployment. Conversely, he'd also been cursed in his life to have remarkably few people to love: Nathan, his mother, Simone. There were times when Nathan had though he might explode, literally burst all to shrapnel with all the carefully contained, little-used natural wellspring of care and compassion. He used to compensate by being warm and kind to incidental acquaintances, charming complete strangers and making their days.
Now Peter had someone else to love, and in some irrational way it made Nathan feel as if there was less affection available for him, who had so little of love in his life to start with. He was jealous, and it made him spiteful and petty, inclined to explode with as little notice as Krakatoa or Pompeii. He'd been staying away from everybody, Claire especially, so that they might not be harmed by the eventual (inevitable) eruption. She was still so fragile and bendable, barely teenage with no foundations yet, only hormones and tentative relationships. Nathan was convinced now that he shouldn't be one of those relationships—he was so acid-caustic and damaging, nearly lethal to anyone who didn't know how to deal with him. She didn't need that. She had a father already, and he was a thousand times better at it than Nathan could ever be. She had her father and she had Peter—the last thing she needed was him.
He wondered about her, as he watched her on the porch, laughing so that he could hear her even through the glass, acting like a high school girl should for the first time in days. He wondered how she stood it, the deaths and the capsized chaos, the people and places that flew past her like a low-budget backdrop and usually never came back. He wondered what she had done in a former life, to be saddled with this existence of destiny and drama, men trying to kill her and worlds hinging on her. She must have had some terrible karma stocked up somewhere, if you believed in that sort of thing. Nathan didn't.
Nathan heard Mr. Bennet come up behind him—he'd gotten better at that, lately, what with the high-stress, twitch-inducing situations he'd been thrust into on a regular basis. In this house full of former spooks and sharks, he needed the heightened senses, or he would have gone crazy with people popping up from nowhere.
"What do you need, Bennet?" he asked, still watching Peter and Claire tease and laugh and pretend that life was not terrible. Perhaps Mr. Bennet felt jealous, too—he'd always been close to his daughter, and it was clear to anyone that there was nobody that Claire adored and idolized more than Peter. Nathan understood why: he made her feel as if things were normal, as if every new horror was an adventure and that she could always come back to him and he would hug her even if there was blood on her hands. It was a uncle-best friend-father-brother relationship that was rare and pure and probably the only thing keeping them both sane. There would never be a substitute for that.
"We need to talk," Mr. Bennet told him in that special sucked-dry tone he had, the one that said that he simply didn't care about anything and would shoot you in the face without a second thought.
"So talk," Nathan said emotionlessly, determined not to bleed if Mr. Bennet wasn't going to.
"No," Mr. Bennet clarified patiently. "All of us."
"Ah, you mean one of those War Council powwows," Nathan said, wondering if Mr. Bennet could see his sour expression reflected in the glass. "Gotcha."
"Go tell Peter and Claire, and I'll get Hana," Mr. Bennet prompted. "I'll meet you in the living room."
Nathan felt the order like a physical blow, near-unbearable for someone who was used to issuing the commands, and especially for someone who feared they may never issue them again. He told himself that Mr. Bennet hadn't meant it like that—he was simply another like Nathan, used to taking charge in a world full of people who wanted desperately to be told what to do. He went to slide open the back door, then paused, not wanting to break up the only bit of unattacked, unadulterated happiness that Peter and Claire were likely to have for some time. He realized that Mr. Bennet had probably set it up this way on purpose, leaving it to Nathan to be the breaker of their moment of sunlight.
Whether he had or he hadn't, there was nothing for it—Nathan pulled to door open and went out to pull them back to reality.
---
"What do you mean, you lost them?" she asked Linderman, looking very much like she wanted to smile or laugh, but had just enough respect for him to hold it back.
"Jessica," he said with a sigh that had been getting all too frequent use in the last few days. "This is a complicated business that I run. We deal with extremely unstable elements on a regular basis, and there isn't a great deal I can do about that. We have nearly a fifty percent loss rate, even on a good day—there's simply not any predicting what these people will do."
"I know that," Jessica said, thumbing through the glossy eight-by-ten pictures. "I just don't understand how you lost so many of them all at once. Looks like someone pulled an Ocean's Eleven on you."
"I suppose you could say they did," Linderman said tiredly. "Now, as you can see, I'd really prefer most of them back alive, except for the ones I've marked, who are the most dangerous and should be killed on sight."
Jessica's fingers paused their flipping, stopped on a profile halfway through. "Petrelli, huh?" she said interestedly. "Any relation to our favorite Congressional candidate?"
"His brother," Linderman confirmed. "He's the priority, actually. I was in the middle of some rather important testing with him, and he's also a very useful piece of blackmail."
"For Nathan?"
"Yes. I still have hopes that Nathan can be salvaged, despite all this. I could, of course, simply choose another man to push to the top, but I've invested a lot of time and energy in Nathan, and I'd rather not give up on him just yet. He was always so perfect for my purposes—if I'd created him myself, I couldn't have made him better. Besides, I'm not sure any of us have a choice—a very reliable source tells me that Nathan will be in the White House. If that's true, I'd like to be the one putting him there."
"Whatever," Jessica said, not listening and not bothering to hide it. "I'll get your runaways, Mr. Linderman."
"See that you do."
---
"So spill, Bennet," Hana said with her usual painful directness. "What's this about?"
They were gathered in the central room, slightly cramped in the small area, which only made sense considering the apartment was meant for one person. Peter had found that getting this group together in one room was like seating guests at a wedding—Nathan couldn't be next to Claire or Mr. Bennet, Claire couldn't be next to Nathan, Hana couldn't be next to Mr. Bennet, it was all very complicated. Soon they would be needing embossed place-markers.
"Well," Mr. Bennet said slowly, organizing his mental notecards, trying to decide where, exactly, the beginning was. "All of you, except Hana, should remember where this all started—why we went after Linderman in the first place."
"You mean, because he's evil?" Peter asked blankly, completely unable to see Mr. Bennet's point.
"No," Mr. Bennet said patiently. "I mean, the reason we planned to infiltrate his offices—the file."
"Oh, yes," Nathan said, reflective-sardonic. "We did have some kind of a plan, didn't we? Funny how these things turn out."
"While we were in the casino," Mr. Bennet continued. "I had an encounter that I haven't yet told any of you about. I ran into Katie."
There was a vacant silence. "Who?" Claire said finally.
"Katie," Mr. Bennet repeated more loudly. "I mentioned her to you once—she was the empath that Claude and I had previous contact with, the woman whose file we've been trying to find. We believed her to be dead, but obviously, she isn't. When I said I ran into her, I meant it literally—she walked straight through your shield, Peter, right into me."
"Another empath?" Peter gasped, looking as if someone had just told him that unicorns were real. "Seriously?"
"No, Peter, he's just joking," Nathan said, annoyed. "Of course, seriously."
"Well—where is she? Did you talk to her? Did you see where she went?" Peter asked, questions tumbling over each other like a clown-car pileup in their haste to get out.
"My guess would be that she's been in Linderman's custody all this time," Hana said astutely. "When we broke you out, there was a lot of…collateral escaping going on. We couldn't stop it all."
"We need to find her," Peter said, getting up as if he meant to dash off that second, making the low-roofed room seem instantly smaller as he stood.
"Be my guest," Mr. Bennet said. "I agree that it's fairly crucial for us to find her, considering that she may be the only one who really knows how to control this empathic ability. However, I've been considering it and I can't come up with any way to do it. If you can think of a way to find her, by all means, find her."
"Fine," said Peter, meeting Mr. Bennet's eyes with a cool, trademark-Petrelli stare. "I will."
---
AUTHOR'S NOTE: 100 reviews, woohoo! Have I told you guys yet that I love you? Because I do—I really do.