Fic: Here You Are, Now - for Ladybug218
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Here you are now: the phone dangling at the edge of your fingertips and threatening to fall, your mouth slack open, your heart stopped completely. You feel like you’ve been run over again, only this time you don’t get the benefit of forgetting the actual crash. It stays with you like a movie in your head stuck on repeat.
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But there you were then, only minutes ago, even though it feels like eons: curled up in bed with a book titled The Isle of Amore, a romantic paperback which was as close to excitement and intrigue as you were getting these days. The house was quiet because the boys were out on a fishing trip with some of their non-Petrelli relatives, and you were thinking, finally, a chance to unwind. Then the phone started ringing off the hook and after staring at it for a good, long while, you decided to get things over with and picked up the receiver. You said, “Hello?”
“Oh, Heidi. What are we going to do without him?”
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Here is where you will be, if things don’t improve: wearing a dark dress and a black veil, keeping a hand on either of your sons’ shoulders and sitting stoically by while the procession moves past you and they carry Nathan to the ground. It would be crueler beyond measure if, after so many years of trying to be like Jackie Kennedy, this was how you finally accomplished the feat.
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You never let Angela know that you don’t really like her. You pretend, like half the daughter-in-laws in the world, but at the core of it, you think she’s a strange mother and a detrimental force to both the happiness of your marriage and the sanity of her sons. Peter, she coddles, like he’s an infant; Nathan, she demands from, like he’s a soldier. You, she only pays attention to when she has to, like after your accident when the press wanted your picture and maybe an interview and she spent a good four hours sitting with you at the dinner table, making sure you knew how to answer all the questions properly.
You father was a senator. Your mother was a fashion tycoon. You know how to talk to the press.
She does it again, however, while you’re still reeling from the shock of finding out the love of your life, father of your children, might actually be dead. “I know it hurts,” she declares.”I’m in pain, too. But perhaps we should sit down and talk about what we’re going to tell the media. You have to feed them something, or they’ll never leave you alone. Let’s not talk about your marriage too much, though - try to put the focus on Nathan’s career as a public servant. They want to hear about that…” You start to tune her out and then decide even that’s not worth it and just hang up.
The phone rings again twice, and you don’t care.
Nathan might be dead.
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You watch the replay on television, and you don’t know what hurts more: that you aren’t by his side right now, or that the last thing you said to him was, “You need to leave this house.” All you want is him back, wandering through the halls of the home you’ve shared with him for years, with a phone to his ear and a stack of paperwork falling from his hands. You want the wrinkle in the sheets on his side of the bed, often the only sign that he spent a couple hours lying next to you. You want the brush of his kiss against your forehead.
What you get is a pit in the center of your stomach, a gnawing pain, like there’s something trying to eat from the inside out. You get regret and frustration, because now you can’t figure out why it was so important that Nathan be somewhere else instead of home with you and the boys. Why you ever thought the separation was a good - even necessary - step. You get a long, steady stream of tears as you curl up in the sheets. Soon, very soon, you will be on your way to the hospital where they took Nathan. But for the moment, you just lay still and cry.
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You get to the hospital and Peter’s there, and Angela, and a lot of other people, and all of them are looking at each other with the hard stares of suspicion and anger and pain; they all try to pull you aside, to talk to you, to win you to their team, but you’re not interested in whatever they’re involved in: all you want is Nathan. You exercise your right as wife, and cut to the front of the line. The doctors tell you Angela Petrelli wants them to keep a list of who visits his bedside, and when, and you politely tell them where they can put that list, because you’re in charge now.
Angela may be his mother, but you’re his wife.
God gave him to her, but he chose you.
You think of when you met him - when Nathan Petrelli was a cocky soldier in fatigues, waiting in your father’s office with his boots planted on the ivory carpet, all of the hair everyone now admires him for lost to a buzz cut. He looked up at you from under long, black eyelashes, smiled and you were lost.
You think now that he can’t be lost. Not to you, not to the world, not in any way, except maybe from the worries and pain he’s been feeling lately. He’s unconscious, but the doctors say the emergency surgery went well and he has a chance. When you ask how much of a chance, they drop their heads and sigh. Not much, they admit. Not much at all.
But any is cause for hope.
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You finally get in touch with your cousin, who insists that the boys are doing fine. They are miles and miles from civilization, staying in a log cabin without a television, phone, or internet-connection; there is no way they can find out that their father is struggling with his life. You thank him, tell him you think Nathan is going to be fine, and there’s no reason to worry the boys unnecessarily.
He remembers, though, how you were on the other side of the country when your father was dying. Your mother called you immediately, and you were on a plane in fifteen minutes. You should have gotten there in time, but you didn’t. The press hounded you at the station, so much so that you couldn’t push through and by the time you arrived at the hospital, already in tears, he was dead.
You rested your head on Nathan’s shoulder at the funeral, cried into his shirt. He patted your back and kissed your forehead and promised that it would be okay. Now, you whisper sweet words into his ear and promise him the same.
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You take a bold step.
You forbid anyone else from entering the room.
When the doctors announce it, you can hear Angela’s shock, her insistence that this is ridiculous, she’s his mother. You hear Peter’s cry of frustration. “But he needs me.” “What he needs,” You tell the nurse who is adjusting his medicine, “is a break from those people. He loves them, but they’re the ones killing him. All they do is make demands on him. Expect things from him. Take. Can you imagine how stressful it is to be at the beck and call of those people out there?”
The nurse doesn’t say anything, but her eyes widen a touch and you can tell she thinks: that would be hell. You agree. The prohibition stands.
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You don’t know how long this is going to last. It could be forever. But to borrow one of Nathan’s campaign slogans, you’re in this for the long haul. And you find that as time progresses, you’re growing stronger and stronger, more able to stand up to the forces on the other side of the doors. You think that when Nathan wakes up, this will smooth over the divide between you two; this will help you two become one again, like the perfect unit you used to be. You tell Nathan this, and you think he agrees.
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Here you are now: your hands over his hand, your head held high, your heart full of strength and hope and genuine belief in goodness that Nathan sometimes calls naivety. You still worry, but you’re determined that he will get better.
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Here is where you were: a broken woman, curled up and crying, sad and afraid that the future was spiraling out of control and you had no grasp on it.
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Here is where you will be, if everything you hope comes true: kissing Nathan at the airport, while you wait for your boys to return from their camping trip, while he tells you his mother has almost forgiven you because she lost a husband and she knows how trying the experience can be. Watching him smile as he says it.
You see yourself finally becoming the name you’ve had for years. Shrugging, after, and saying, “I’m a Petrelli, too. Remember? We do what we have to do.”
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Fin