Fic: The Downside of Life
Title: The Downside of Life
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 713
Genre: Angst/Self-doubt
Characters: Angela Petrelli, Nathan Petrelli, Matt Parkman, Sylar, Peter Petrelli, Claire Bennet(+ mentions of ensemble)
Pairings: Paire, if you squint.
Warnings: Spoilers for 3x25, some bad images.
Summary: To live, you have to forget. You have to bury a son and your memories.
Written for the "Midnight" prompt at heroes_contest
Yay for last minute entries!
She picked the location, she picked the time. She even helped rip away the boards from the walls, placing them layer by layer down on the sandy floor, forming the bed upon which the villain now lay.
She almost found it funny. Coyote Sands; where everything had started, everything now ended. One big happy conclusion, friends, family and a murderer reunited around a campfire in the desert. No need for hotdogs and marshmallows when you have a man roasting over the flames.
And to her surprise, it was Nathan who placed the burning torch to the wood
Her boy…
The man she had seen standing in the oval office, his face on billboards, and the symbol of hope for the citizen of the United States of America. For his people. He would become everything she had ever hoped to be, someone to look up to, a leader to the masses.
But, Nathan was just a body now, filled with memories that were foreign to his mind. Glimpses of life, a skeleton of his former personality, to be filled and fleshed out with every touch of something that had belonged to the former Nathan.
He would slowly become her child.
(When she had called Sylar her son, she had never imagined how true this would become.)
This was a perfect plan; get rid of one villain, rescue a fallen hero. No more running from the government, no more running from shadows in the night. No more waking up in the middle of the night, gasping after yet another nightmare, yet another vision of a head without its top.
Life, peace, family restored. Peter had forgiven her, reluctantly at first but she had not missed the smile, crooked and too honest to be faked, and the soft caress of his hand against hers before moving on to help his niece, her struggles to evident to be sincere.
“You sure I can’t help you, mom?” Nathan had asked her, hands gently pulling on hers, trying to pull away her cramped fingers from the wooden wall paneling.
(He used to call her ma. But she refused to dwell on it. Refused to think of the killer, laying immobile outside surrounded by two useless guards, as someone other than who the body was masquerading as.)
“I’m okay,” she insisted, a crooked, broken smile her closest attempt to happiness. How could she be happy when she still saw the rage in his eyes? When she still saw Sylar’s face behind Nathan’s, as if only hidden behind a flimsy mask?
“You sure, mom?”
No she wasn’t. She had just lost a son, her eldest, her most ambitious, the one with a future. But she had been wrong to think that he could become anything remarkable, wrong to dreams those magnificent dreams of him standing in the oval office, her ruling by his side. Nathan’s future now held a body (formerly his, now just decomposing flesh. And that wasn’t him, it couldn’t be, she refused to imagine him like that) filled with maggots, rotting in a stolen grave somewhere in Albuquerque. No funeral procession, no flag, just a crying mother and a stoic Matt Parkman. And those were the only tears she would shed, the only tears she could shed. Now she would need to accept and forget the death of her first born.
It’s the only way she would be able to survive, the only way she could move forward in her life.
The old Nathan was gone, his rise had come and fallen like the sun. And now, they had the moon, fierce and bright, but no were near as brilliant as the sun.
“It’s a new beginning, mom.”
To live, she has to forget, has to seal away her memories, hiding them deeper than Matt Parkman could, ripping away the tags. She has to be violent, she has to be rash. She has to do what she has never been able to.
Before now.
. . .
Coyote sands. Midnight. Where everything began, everything shall end.
A murderer on a pyre, the flames his only judge. They found him guilty, and she found the judgment fair.
Friends and family soaking in the heat of the unusually cold desert night.
“It’s a new beginning, mom.”
Yes, it is…