Woman, how divine your mission
Here upon our natal sod!
Keep, oh, keep the young heart open
Always to the breath of God!
All true trophies of the ages
Are from mother-love impearled;
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
--William Ross Wallace, What Rules the World
It wasn't the first time she'd pretended this monster was her son. But the fact that she had to pretend he was her first born, her Nathan, made it one of the hardest things she had ever done.
Against the backdrop of numerous sins and crimes, betrayals and horrors that made up her past, a statement like that might cause one to wonder about Angela Petrelli's memory. Sadly, her recollections were as sharp as ever. It honed the sharp and jagged edge of pain that dominated her new life with her "son". It dangled in front of her nose sharp, vivid images of the child she'd bourn, the boy she'd raised, the man she'd watched emerge from her home. The man she'd held a final time, sobbing and clutching his still body.
Yet sometimes it was the memory of her own black deeds that did her the most damage. Late at night, when such things gnawed at her soul, the feeling would slip into her heart like a knife that the hell she now lived was no less than she deserved.
Maybe, if she allowed the tears to come to her eyes they might blur the world before her and she could forget. She didn't dare. To act like a woman in mourning was to alert her son—her brilliant, perceptive, calculating son—that something was wrong. If she allowed those tears, they could just as easily wash the illusion away.
She'd had that dream, once. Nathan had come to her through her tears, to hold her, to give her comfort. But where the moist runnels of her sorrow fell on him, things began to warp and blister, bleed and run like paint until the monster lay exposed before her. Coal black eyes, blood-red mind, and a razor smile promising her pain had only begun. A real dream, she told herself, a simple nightmare hiccupping the day's concerns to the dreamer at night. She told herself this was so. She begged.
So she buried her grief beneath every smile, every wave, every success and failure, every memory of Nathan she could managed to conjure, and let it rot deep underground. It was just enough. Just enough and she could smile, and wave, and succeed and fail, and pretend that her heart wasn't underground. Like him. Rotting deeply.