Like Vines, we intertwined/
Carelessly growing up and growing old/
Life was on our tongues/
It tasted heavenly, so good/

"I'm falling asleep," Peter announced.

Katie's eyes snapped open, twin slits of crackling celadon green. "You are not," she said. "We've only been sitting for thirty seconds."

"I am so," Peter insisted. "I'm trying to listen to my heartbeat like you told me, but every time I do, my body goes 'hey, what a relaxing beat, and also mind-numbingly boring! I think I'll go to sleep.'"

"Believe me, Peter," she said. "The situations you'll use this in will be significantly less than boring—you're lucky I'm letting you learn it in quiet closed room, instead of throwing rocks at you or something."

"You're right," he admitted. "You're a much nicer teacher than Claude."

"Also prettier," she added archly.

"That too," he conceded with a shade too much conviction. "Much prettier."

"Try it again," she said briskly, closing her eyes and settling back on her heels. "Relax. Bring your consciousness outside yourself."

"You sound just like someone from a movie," he murmured, only half-aware of what he was saying. "A fairy princesses, or one of those mysterious enchantresses with the voices like smoke and fog and streams after breakup."

"You're an observer," she continued unbroken. "You're outside of your body, and nothing can hurt you. Listen to the beat of your heart. It is the most important thing in the world—concentrate on it. There is nothing but the steady pumping, no sound and no world and no danger. There is nothing but your heartbeat."

"See, this is the part where I have the problems," Peter interrupted ungracefully. "My mind absolutely will not focus on my stupid heartbeat."

"All right," she said, defeated. "Let's try something else." She grabbed his hand and pressed it against her own heart, just below her collarbone. "Do you feel that? Count the beats in one breath—five on the inhale, five on the exhale. Come on," she insisted, "count with me."

"One," he said reluctantly, and she joined in with her light mezzo-soprano, "two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five."

"Relax," she said as he counted. "Breathe. There's no danger. There's no world. There's only you. Breathe." Suddenly, he stopped counting; she opened her eyes and found him staring at her, watching her unabashedly with his eyes full of something she didn't quite want to identify.

"God, you're beautiful," he said in the tone of a museum patron, hushed and admiring. Before she could reply to this (what could she say? She'd never been in this situation before), he said: "Let me take you to dinner tonight."

She pushed his hand away from her chest. "Peter, we can't."

"Why can't we?" he asked, slightly petulant. "Is it against the rules? Well, you know, we were the ones who made those rules up. Apparently, we wanted to be miserable, but I've changed my mind. Let's just try, okay? If either of us has mental breakdowns, I swear we can stop—it's just, I'm starting to think that maybe we're stronger than we thought we were."

"No," she said. "I mean, we can't. We can't go out of the house, we'll get arrested or something."

"Oh," he said, deflated. "Well, screw that. We've been out of the house, we've been hundreds of miles out of the house, and we saved the world, remember? We can even go to a movie instead—it'll be really dark and everyone will be too busy making out to even notice us."

"Your control has gotten better," Katie admitted. "And Nathan's not around to drag us back…"

"Believe me, we won't see him until tomorrow morning, one way or another. Nobody else will stop us, either, they're all too busy with Sylar. We can even tell Claire what we're doing, in case they freak out."

"Okay then," she said with a bright sudden smile. "You're on."

---

"This movie sucks," Peter said, loudly enough that people three rows away turned to glare.

"Yeah," Katie said more quietly. "I can pretty much predict everything that's going to happen from here. I could write this script in my sleep."

"You want to get out of here?" he asked.

"Please."

Once they were outside the theater, Peter remarked, "I guess it's our fault for choosing a scary movie, isn't it? I mean, after skull-chopping serial killers and radioactive crazy men, what could Hollywood possibly make that would scare us?"

"Exactly," Katie agreed. "They should be getting us to write their movies, we've seen it all." They walked out into the city dusk, and Peter put his arm around Katie and pulled her in, shielding her from the night. She looked up at him, and past him to the buildings behind him where they smashed against the sky, blocking out whole swaths of stars. "I love this about New York," she said lazily, locking his maple-brown eyes with hers. "The way it never really gets dark, with all the signs and lights everywhere—it just goes to grayish half-night and stops, stays in six o'clock stasis until dawn."

"That's New Yorkers for you," Peter grinned. "Absolutely determined to squeeze every minute out of the day that we can. Mere mortals might let the sun dictate their lives, but not us. We know what we want and we find a way to get it."

She smiled and opened her mouth to answer, and suddenly went rigid in his arms

He felt a sticky dampness at her shoulder blade and then there was blood on his hands, two spreading patches of blood dying her shirt to red, and her eyes were going out and she was falling back in horrible ironic déjà vu.

"No," he said numbly as she slid from his arms to the pavement, her dark hair fanning out onto the cement. "No, no, no, this is not happening! Not again!"

He looked up and saw Candice there, circling toward them, looking like a destroying angel with a gun in each hand. She raised her right hand and squeezed off a shot, but the bullet froze midair inches away from Peter, slamming into a wall of telekinesis and white scorching anger. With a violent sweep of his hand, he sent her smashing into the wall, squarely between two movie posters with a look on her face that could have given any of the horror starlets a run for their money. She felt a small spine tingle as he walked toward her with his eyes like burning cigarette ash, blazing from the inside, combusting and imploding with repeat tragedy.

"What, are you going to kill me, Peter?" she said, managing to sound cocky and condescending, entirely in control.

"You think I won't?" His voice surprised him when he heard it, coming out rough, torn on its own anger.

The air and the wall twisted, blurring, turning her into a dark-haired-green-eyed-gold-skinned Katie Ramira. "No," she said. "I really don't think you will."

Behind them, he heard a sudden burst of violent coughing—he turned to see Katie sitting up, looking surprised and breathless but alive. In an instant he was down on the pavement next to her, arms around her and holding her to him so tightly that he couldn't breathe but he didn't care, and he was getting blood all over the front of his shirt but he didn't care. "I didn't think you would heal," he saying, words tumbling over each other, incomprehensible. "You've never healed before, I didn't know if you—God, Katie, I thought you were dead."

"It's okay," she said soothingly, wrapping an arm around his neck and hugging him back, assuring him that she was, indeed, warn and animate and alive. "I'm fine. I'm okay. What happened?"

Abruptly thrown back into reality, he turned to where he'd left Candice at the wall. But that had been seconds, minutes ago and, of course, she was gone.

---

"I've figured it out," Claude told them.

Katie and Peter sat looking up at their mentor, hands scrubbed and clothes changed, playing innocent so hard that halos were nearly visible over their heads. They'd both agreed that it would be best not to tell anyone that they'd snuck out of the house like rebellious teenagers, and especially not the results of their disastrous date. It was likely that, if Nathan and Claude and Mr. Bennet were to hear of it, they would never be allowed out of their rooms again, much less the house.

"Oh," Katie said pleasantly. "What have you figured out?"

"How to keep you two from turning the Big Apple into applesauce."

"Really?" Peter said. "Well, we've always been open to not dying."

"That's part of it, actually," he commented. "All your indulgent melodrama aside, there's actually very little chance that you would die, even if everyone else did. If you've acquired this radioactivity, you've also acquired the ability to survive it, otherwise Ted Sprague would have been a pile of ash long before this."

"That makes sense," Katie agreed.

"So," Claude continued, "if you were to throw a shield around yourselves, a sort of bubble, you could potentially contain a nuclear blast without getting hurt at all."

"Gee," Peter said. "I'm flattered that you have such a high opinion of our talents, but you've got to be kidding. You seriously think we can hold a nuclear explosion inside of a shield?"

"It's a hell of a lot better than the alternative," Claude said. "It wouldn't be as hard as you think. If you throw the shield around a large area, say, two hundred feet on all sides, it would give you far more of a chance."

"Why?" Peter asked blankly.

"It's all to do with surface area and blast radius and things," he said. "It's very technical, we'll explain it to you when you're older. Point is, the blast will be weakened and spread out enough by the time it hits you that you've got a good chance to stop it there, if you're working together."

"You know, I bet we could," Katie said happily. "Of course, the best plan would be just to not explode in the first place, but at least now we have a back-up option."

"They've got Sprague on pretty heavy lockdown in DC, but I doubt we've seen the last of him," Claude pointed out. "Now, I want you two to practice making that kind of shield-bubble, meshing with each other—"

Suddenly, the door flung open and Claire burst in, brimming with uncontained joy. "He won!" she yelled at them.

"What?"

"He won! Nathan won the election!"

--

Nathan felt like he was standing on top of the world, bigger than everyone and everything, feeling the planet turn under his feet. He kept going back to look at the numbers, the thousands who had voted for him, each of them like a personal validation of his worth. He wanted to call up a dozen people and yell the news at them, rub it in their faces—his opponent, Linderman, his mother-in-law, that girl who had turned him down in the tenth grade. Ha, he wanted to tell them, look at me, I'm the king of the world—or at least of New York. An entire state had just turned their keys over to him, trading him authority for smiles and promises, and it was an addictive alcoholic rush.

This, he knew, was the moment he would hol in his mind for the rest of his mind, the memory he would replay when things went wrong, the story he would tell his grandchildren over and over until they were sick of it. This was a victory like nothing he'd ever experienced, so far beyond student council and court cases, a massive cosmic win. He was high, he was indestructible, he couldn't be stopped now.

He walked onstage to the blended roar of cheers, sucking in the energy of the crowd like a plant in the sun. He made it halfway to the podium before he saw Heidi. She was standing beside the microphone, smiling harder than any toothpaste commercial he'd ever seen, dazzling but demure, the perfect cardboard wife. He missed only a single step, driving himself through the shock with sheer willpower until he made it to the center of the stage.

He leaned to kiss her on the cheek, whispering, "So does this mean I'm forgiven?"

"No," said. "Maybe. Congratulations."

He took her hand, squeezed it, and began his victory speech.