![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apocalypsosTitle: they don’t make ‘em like they used to
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoilers: “Distractions”
Summary: Fifteen years ago they were young and idealistic, and maybe that was their problem from the start.
*
they don’t make ‘em like they used to
*
The doorman must think he’s in the weirdest book club on the planet. On Mondays and Thursdays people start showing up around seven, casually striding through the front doors with friendly but purposefully bland smiles.
The pretty Southern girl with the baby comes in around six-thirty laden down with dolls and bottles of water and changes of clothes just in case, as if she planned for six knowing full well she’d be late for seven. The young man with the glasses always walks in precisely at seven as if he’d been waiting outside for the hands of his watch to move into position. Sometimes there’s a brash British kid with questionable hygiene, and sometimes the door stays open too long after someone else comes in and the doorman mutters about oiling the hinges.
Ben was the one who suggested the paperbacks tucked into their pockets, their purses. Read them when you get a chance, he’d said. You never know when we might need a cover story.
Meredith thought he was being paranoid, but after someone tried to snatch the baby from her stroller she’d committed Jane Eyre to memory like Nathan had only seen before with his phone number the first time they’d met and the many meanings of their daughter’s babblings.
Things are coming down to the wire. Even she can appreciate that.
*
His mother calls in the middle of a meeting once, while Simon’s up to his ankles in the fridge looking to rescue Nathan’s last beer and the baby’s alternately touching Lou’s dark skin and sucking her thumb as if she expects her tiny fingers to come back covered in chocolate.
“Are you coming over for dinner this Sunday?” she asks.
“I can’t, Mother.” Meredith raises her head, cocks an eyebrow, and Nathan gives her a warning look to keep her quiet. “Study group. You know how it is.”
His mother makes a ’hmph’ on the other end of the line. “Your brother’s decided he’s going to join the Peace Corps when he graduates,” she says. “You really should come over for dinner one of these days, if only to hear Peter turn into a flower child twenty years too late.”
“Law school doesn’t exactly leave me with a lot of free time.”
“This isn’t free time, this is family time,” his mother says, then sighs and adds, “Your father wouldn’t mind seeing your face around more, you know.”
The last time Nathan saw his father it was past the business end of a barrel of a gun. He’s sure his father’s forgotten all about that. Lou’s good at what he does.
“I’ll bet,” Nathan says.
The baby toddles up to him, grabs at his khaki pants with chubby hands and babbles.
He cuts off the phone call and sweeps her into his arms, and the smile on his face as he swings his baby girl through the air is the most genuine one he’s managed in weeks.
*
The schematics Ben gets for them couldn’t be more detailed if they had the arrangement of the pens in the cup holders drawn in. Nathan thinks Ben might even have been tempted to do it, too, all the way down to the Ninja Turtles pen some guy in shipping and receiving boosted from his little boy.
Nathan knows how it is. Cheerios mysteriously end up in your pockets. Tiny hair clips only big enough to hold a single blond curl fall out of your briefcase. You get used to it.
“This is where we get in,” Ben says, pointing to a door that’s supposed to lead to an executive bathroom.
Simon glances across the table and says, “Where I get in, you mean.”
The two of them silently glare at one another, and Nathan can almost feel Meredith sighing behind him. They never have gotten along, the straight-laced intern at the justice department, the slovenly drifter. Nathan never says it out loud but Meredith once told him she thinks Ben’s just bitter Simon’s ten times cleverer than he’d ever be without Lou’s phone number in his pocket, and Nathan had to agree.
“Now, boys,” she says, moving closer to get a better look. “We’ll all get a chance to go in with guns blazing.”
“Or something kind of like it,” Nathan mutters, and she winks at him.
*
When they first met he drove her around the countryside on the weekends, blonde curls trailing behind them as she tilted her head back to laugh at the sky and lit her cigarettes with a snap of her fingers.
Now when they drive anywhere it’s in the convertible, the baby in her lap playing with the ends of her ponytail and Meredith’s hand warm and comforting in his.
If they need to escape, if they’re followed, he wants to be able to grab his family in an instant and taste the safety of the sky.
*
Lou is the one you tell secrets to, the quiet one. He never tells, he never talks about what you don’t want him to speak of. If Simon’s the street corner philosopher, Lou is the sidewalk psychiatrist. For a shiny quarter and a sandwich he’ll let you pace in front of him for hours, letting off steam like an angry tea kettle.
“If he finds out,” Nathan starts, but Lou cuts him off.
“He already has. Twice now. I’ve fixed it both times, haven’t I?”
Nathan jerks his head in a tight nod, hands on his waist. He walks back and forth across his hardwood floor, dodges legal textbooks and notepads, news clippings and scattered highlighters. All the appropriate props for an overwhelmed law student.
“I don’t know what my father will do if he finds out he has a granddaughter,” he says. “Especially one whose parents …”
Nathan thinks of flames rising from fingertips, of feet that don’t touch the ground.
He has a headache, and he’s pretty sure it’s not going away anytime soon.
Lou tilts his head, his gaze sharp and steady. “I will keep an eye on your father,” he says. “On the girl. On them both.”
In Nathan’s head Meredith is screaming into the phone at him, yelling that someone tried to take their daughter, saying something about the thug not even stopping before dashing into traffic with their baby in his arms and the blast of fire she’d aimed at his back when she’d thought there’d been enough chaos to cover it.
“I‘ll make sure she stays safe,” Lou says.
Nathan believes him. Lou’s loyal like that.
*
He doesn’t want his daughter to know only of his ability what she gleans from when he sweeps her into his arms at the first sign of danger and flies away. He wants her to see the beauty in it, not the easy escape route.
When Meredith’s got work and his day is devoid of classes, Nathan cuddles the baby in his arms and pushes off from the roof, heading out for parts unknown with his daughter kicking her feet happily and pointing at the sights below them.
He points out the zoo, cows wandering in the fields of dairy farms.
He flies her to Canada and shows her Niagara Falls and she claps in his arms at the sight.
He holds her tight as he skims the air over the ocean, arms clasping her firmly as she giggles with glee.
His little girl falls in love with the world from up above, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
*
During Nathan’s classes Simon makes a habit of sneaking in and distracting the hell out of him. Nathan never argues or tells him to stop acting like a mischievous child, simply gets a chair in the back of the room to keep everyone from seeing his pen moving on its own.
Simon writes out dirty limericks and bad jokes, waiting for Nathan to embarrass himself by laughing at nothing in front of his stodgy professors.
Once on Halloween he wraps himself in bandages and walks right into Nathan’s classroom, removing the gauze in one long strip without preamble.
The other students and the professor fled the room in a near-panic complaining about ghosts they didn’t believe in, but Nathan just crossed his arms and scowled.
“Smooth move, Claude Rains,” he’d said.
Simon had just shrugged in between chuckles. “You people never get my sense of humor,” he’d said.
But today he walks right through the open door of the classroom, cutting through the drone of Professor Langdon’s lecture with long stiff strides, and heads right up to Nathan’s desk. He snatches the pen from Nathan’s hand and scribbles, It’s time in the middle of Nathan’s notes on tort law, and Nathan practically leaps from his seat like it’s on fire.
“Mr. Petrelli!” the professor snaps, but Nathan doesn’t even flinch as he walks out. Some things were more important that tort law.
Like, say, the fate of the world.
*
Fire doesn’t scare him anymore.
It hasn’t scared him since Meredith first lit the candles on their romantic Italian dinner with her fingertip, since she ignited the fire in the cabin they’d rented one weekend with one simple mental push.
That’s why he’s a second too late, he thinks, hearing the cries of his baby girl from the depths of it.
That’s why he thought she was safe, even here, even now.
Just long enough to insure she wasn’t.
*
“We failed, didn’t we?”
He doesn’t expect Lou to tell him as much, not with that familiar look on his face as he bends over Nathan’s body. Nathan can feel the cement under his back, the sharp dig of the stones in his skin, but the ground is far too cold now and the air is much too silent.
Ben lied to us, Nathan thinks, one of the few things he can do without a wave of pain and nausea rolling over him. Damn it, Bennet was supposed to be one of us.
Lou just smiles down at him softly and puts his warm palm on Nathan’s forehead.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You won’t remember to feel guilty about it.”
It takes all of his strength to reach up and tighten his fingers around Lou’s wrist, to make himself heard in action first.
“Leave me my daughter,” Nathan says. “Take everything else, but at least leave me that.”
Lou’s silent for the longest of moments. “You’re a good man, Nathan Petrelli,” he says in that thick melodious accent, then massages Nathan’s temples with his fingertips briefly before adding. “I meant what I said about keeping your daughter safe.”
Nathan parts his lips to ask what he means by that, but then the world -- his world -- goes black, and he never gets the chance.
*
Sometimes Nathan Petrelli thinks he is being followed.
He is just a law student, no one of any real consequence, no one until he passes the bar and starts tearing his way through the political arena like he‘s always dreamed of doing. He studies like crazy and behaves like a monk to make up for the research time he wasted on that last girl he dated. He answers the phone when his little brother calls and suffers through another bothersome world-saving idea like working in a soup kitchen or volunteering at an old folks home.
He goes to Sunday dinner at his parent’s home, can’t stop smiling when his father claps him on the shoulder and says he’ll be President some day.
His last two years of school may feel like a hazy blur, but he thinks he would remember doing something worth keeping tabs on him from the shadows.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
Spoilers: “Distractions”
Summary: Fifteen years ago they were young and idealistic, and maybe that was their problem from the start.
they don’t make ‘em like they used to
*
The doorman must think he’s in the weirdest book club on the planet. On Mondays and Thursdays people start showing up around seven, casually striding through the front doors with friendly but purposefully bland smiles.
The pretty Southern girl with the baby comes in around six-thirty laden down with dolls and bottles of water and changes of clothes just in case, as if she planned for six knowing full well she’d be late for seven. The young man with the glasses always walks in precisely at seven as if he’d been waiting outside for the hands of his watch to move into position. Sometimes there’s a brash British kid with questionable hygiene, and sometimes the door stays open too long after someone else comes in and the doorman mutters about oiling the hinges.
Ben was the one who suggested the paperbacks tucked into their pockets, their purses. Read them when you get a chance, he’d said. You never know when we might need a cover story.
Meredith thought he was being paranoid, but after someone tried to snatch the baby from her stroller she’d committed Jane Eyre to memory like Nathan had only seen before with his phone number the first time they’d met and the many meanings of their daughter’s babblings.
Things are coming down to the wire. Even she can appreciate that.
His mother calls in the middle of a meeting once, while Simon’s up to his ankles in the fridge looking to rescue Nathan’s last beer and the baby’s alternately touching Lou’s dark skin and sucking her thumb as if she expects her tiny fingers to come back covered in chocolate.
“Are you coming over for dinner this Sunday?” she asks.
“I can’t, Mother.” Meredith raises her head, cocks an eyebrow, and Nathan gives her a warning look to keep her quiet. “Study group. You know how it is.”
His mother makes a ’hmph’ on the other end of the line. “Your brother’s decided he’s going to join the Peace Corps when he graduates,” she says. “You really should come over for dinner one of these days, if only to hear Peter turn into a flower child twenty years too late.”
“Law school doesn’t exactly leave me with a lot of free time.”
“This isn’t free time, this is family time,” his mother says, then sighs and adds, “Your father wouldn’t mind seeing your face around more, you know.”
The last time Nathan saw his father it was past the business end of a barrel of a gun. He’s sure his father’s forgotten all about that. Lou’s good at what he does.
“I’ll bet,” Nathan says.
The baby toddles up to him, grabs at his khaki pants with chubby hands and babbles.
He cuts off the phone call and sweeps her into his arms, and the smile on his face as he swings his baby girl through the air is the most genuine one he’s managed in weeks.
The schematics Ben gets for them couldn’t be more detailed if they had the arrangement of the pens in the cup holders drawn in. Nathan thinks Ben might even have been tempted to do it, too, all the way down to the Ninja Turtles pen some guy in shipping and receiving boosted from his little boy.
Nathan knows how it is. Cheerios mysteriously end up in your pockets. Tiny hair clips only big enough to hold a single blond curl fall out of your briefcase. You get used to it.
“This is where we get in,” Ben says, pointing to a door that’s supposed to lead to an executive bathroom.
Simon glances across the table and says, “Where I get in, you mean.”
The two of them silently glare at one another, and Nathan can almost feel Meredith sighing behind him. They never have gotten along, the straight-laced intern at the justice department, the slovenly drifter. Nathan never says it out loud but Meredith once told him she thinks Ben’s just bitter Simon’s ten times cleverer than he’d ever be without Lou’s phone number in his pocket, and Nathan had to agree.
“Now, boys,” she says, moving closer to get a better look. “We’ll all get a chance to go in with guns blazing.”
“Or something kind of like it,” Nathan mutters, and she winks at him.
When they first met he drove her around the countryside on the weekends, blonde curls trailing behind them as she tilted her head back to laugh at the sky and lit her cigarettes with a snap of her fingers.
Now when they drive anywhere it’s in the convertible, the baby in her lap playing with the ends of her ponytail and Meredith’s hand warm and comforting in his.
If they need to escape, if they’re followed, he wants to be able to grab his family in an instant and taste the safety of the sky.
Lou is the one you tell secrets to, the quiet one. He never tells, he never talks about what you don’t want him to speak of. If Simon’s the street corner philosopher, Lou is the sidewalk psychiatrist. For a shiny quarter and a sandwich he’ll let you pace in front of him for hours, letting off steam like an angry tea kettle.
“If he finds out,” Nathan starts, but Lou cuts him off.
“He already has. Twice now. I’ve fixed it both times, haven’t I?”
Nathan jerks his head in a tight nod, hands on his waist. He walks back and forth across his hardwood floor, dodges legal textbooks and notepads, news clippings and scattered highlighters. All the appropriate props for an overwhelmed law student.
“I don’t know what my father will do if he finds out he has a granddaughter,” he says. “Especially one whose parents …”
Nathan thinks of flames rising from fingertips, of feet that don’t touch the ground.
He has a headache, and he’s pretty sure it’s not going away anytime soon.
Lou tilts his head, his gaze sharp and steady. “I will keep an eye on your father,” he says. “On the girl. On them both.”
In Nathan’s head Meredith is screaming into the phone at him, yelling that someone tried to take their daughter, saying something about the thug not even stopping before dashing into traffic with their baby in his arms and the blast of fire she’d aimed at his back when she’d thought there’d been enough chaos to cover it.
“I‘ll make sure she stays safe,” Lou says.
Nathan believes him. Lou’s loyal like that.
He doesn’t want his daughter to know only of his ability what she gleans from when he sweeps her into his arms at the first sign of danger and flies away. He wants her to see the beauty in it, not the easy escape route.
When Meredith’s got work and his day is devoid of classes, Nathan cuddles the baby in his arms and pushes off from the roof, heading out for parts unknown with his daughter kicking her feet happily and pointing at the sights below them.
He points out the zoo, cows wandering in the fields of dairy farms.
He flies her to Canada and shows her Niagara Falls and she claps in his arms at the sight.
He holds her tight as he skims the air over the ocean, arms clasping her firmly as she giggles with glee.
His little girl falls in love with the world from up above, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.
During Nathan’s classes Simon makes a habit of sneaking in and distracting the hell out of him. Nathan never argues or tells him to stop acting like a mischievous child, simply gets a chair in the back of the room to keep everyone from seeing his pen moving on its own.
Simon writes out dirty limericks and bad jokes, waiting for Nathan to embarrass himself by laughing at nothing in front of his stodgy professors.
Once on Halloween he wraps himself in bandages and walks right into Nathan’s classroom, removing the gauze in one long strip without preamble.
The other students and the professor fled the room in a near-panic complaining about ghosts they didn’t believe in, but Nathan just crossed his arms and scowled.
“Smooth move, Claude Rains,” he’d said.
Simon had just shrugged in between chuckles. “You people never get my sense of humor,” he’d said.
But today he walks right through the open door of the classroom, cutting through the drone of Professor Langdon’s lecture with long stiff strides, and heads right up to Nathan’s desk. He snatches the pen from Nathan’s hand and scribbles, It’s time in the middle of Nathan’s notes on tort law, and Nathan practically leaps from his seat like it’s on fire.
“Mr. Petrelli!” the professor snaps, but Nathan doesn’t even flinch as he walks out. Some things were more important that tort law.
Like, say, the fate of the world.
Fire doesn’t scare him anymore.
It hasn’t scared him since Meredith first lit the candles on their romantic Italian dinner with her fingertip, since she ignited the fire in the cabin they’d rented one weekend with one simple mental push.
That’s why he’s a second too late, he thinks, hearing the cries of his baby girl from the depths of it.
That’s why he thought she was safe, even here, even now.
Just long enough to insure she wasn’t.
“We failed, didn’t we?”
He doesn’t expect Lou to tell him as much, not with that familiar look on his face as he bends over Nathan’s body. Nathan can feel the cement under his back, the sharp dig of the stones in his skin, but the ground is far too cold now and the air is much too silent.
Ben lied to us, Nathan thinks, one of the few things he can do without a wave of pain and nausea rolling over him. Damn it, Bennet was supposed to be one of us.
Lou just smiles down at him softly and puts his warm palm on Nathan’s forehead.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You won’t remember to feel guilty about it.”
It takes all of his strength to reach up and tighten his fingers around Lou’s wrist, to make himself heard in action first.
“Leave me my daughter,” Nathan says. “Take everything else, but at least leave me that.”
Lou’s silent for the longest of moments. “You’re a good man, Nathan Petrelli,” he says in that thick melodious accent, then massages Nathan’s temples with his fingertips briefly before adding. “I meant what I said about keeping your daughter safe.”
Nathan parts his lips to ask what he means by that, but then the world -- his world -- goes black, and he never gets the chance.
Sometimes Nathan Petrelli thinks he is being followed.
He is just a law student, no one of any real consequence, no one until he passes the bar and starts tearing his way through the political arena like he‘s always dreamed of doing. He studies like crazy and behaves like a monk to make up for the research time he wasted on that last girl he dated. He answers the phone when his little brother calls and suffers through another bothersome world-saving idea like working in a soup kitchen or volunteering at an old folks home.
He goes to Sunday dinner at his parent’s home, can’t stop smiling when his father claps him on the shoulder and says he’ll be President some day.
His last two years of school may feel like a hazy blur, but he thinks he would remember doing something worth keeping tabs on him from the shadows.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-02-06 11:01 pm (UTC)