FIC: "A Game for Fools," NC-17
Title: A Game for Fools
Author: Sinope (eponis)
Pairing: Peter/Nathan
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: (read if you don't mind being spoilered) Het sex, genderfuck
Word count: ~6700
Summary: A year after Nathan loses Peter in battle, a campaign volunteer with a secret shows up at his office.
Notes: This is for scribblinlenore, who gave the prompt "'Why' can be the hardest question, so Nathan tries not to ask it." for the Peter/Nathan Spring Hiatus Fic-a-thon. I hope you enjoy. Many, many thanks to linaerys, who coordinated the fic exchange and gave wonderful beta-reading assistance.
If you're losing, when you know you made the rules,
Must be playing a game for fools.
-- "Game for Fools," Mara Carlyle
December, 2007.
The only remarkable thing about the girl who joins the campaign in December is an uncanny resemblance to Donna from the West Wing -- at least, that's what Nathan's aides tell him. When Michael introduces her to Nathan, after a long day of speech-making and hand-shaking, he only has the time to get her name -- Anna -- and ask her why she wants to help the presidential campaign of an unknown congressman. "Because you're going to be nominated for vice president, and you're going to win," she says, meeting his appraisal with chestnut-brown eyes under her golden eyelashes. Nathan feels his skin prickling at the gaze; she's watching him so intensely it feels like she's seeing far beneath his skin.
Probably just another campaign aide infatuated with power, he finally concludes, but gives her another quick once-over. She's got gorgeous cock-sucking lips. Bemused, and too busy to contemplate that kind of diversion, Nathan shakes her hand and shows her out the door. It's a week before he even has cause to think about Anna again.
The frustrating thing about working a campaign largely staffed by volunteers is that inspirational speeches only go so far toward keeping the office functional during the holidays. It's Christmas Eve -- Heidi's going to kill him for staying this late -- and when Nathan emerges from his office, the only other person in sight is Anna. He closes the door behind him, and she looks up. He's expecting her to look startled, or tired, or perhaps just curious; instead, she's giving him another of those unsettling stares, as if she's been waiting all evening just to meet his eyes. A curtain of white-blonde hair shrouds half of her face, and she tucks it back over her ear with an automatic movement that seems oddly familiar. Nathan shapes his mouth into a polite smile, breaking the uncomfortable moment. "Don't you have somewhere to be on Christmas Eve, Anna?"
"Not really," she shrugs. "Anyway, it's not like anyone else is here to staff the phones."
"If anyone tries to call us at seven o'clock on a Christmas Eve, they can deal with an answering machine. Go home."
"Yes, sir," she says with a hint of a smile. She closes down the document she'd been working on, shuts down the computer, and pulls on her coat, all without looking at Nathan.
He watches each action, intrigued. She's not his type -- pale and washed-out looking, except for those dark eyes -- but something about her slender fingers and the line of her mouth is sending blood straight down into his cock. He forces himself to look away and pull out his cell phone to call for his car, before she notices him staring. "All done?" he asks, once the car is on its way, and she nods.
Outside, Christmas Eve decided to assert itself in a foggy rain, streaked with sharp, half-frozen precipitation. Nathan stands under an awning away from the rain, watching his car navigate through the glacially slow traffic, while Anna turns and walks away down the unsheltered sidewalk. "Hey," he calls after her. "You're not going to walk home in this weather, are you?" When she turns to look at him, and she's drenched in water but smiling brightly, Nathan starts to wonder whether they should do better psychological screening on their volunteers.
"I'll be fine," she says. "I live just around the corner."
Nathan sighs. "Come here," he says. "Get in the car." He opens the door as soon as it reaches the curb, sliding in without waiting to see whether Anna's following. A moment later, she steps in beside him, damp but not shivering. Her hair clings to her like streams of water, flowing down her face.
She tells her address to Nathan's driver-cum-bodyguard, and the car sets off, inching down a street clogged with last-minute shoppers and rain-drenched pedestrians. There's uncomfortable silence for a moment, punctuated by the patter of water dripping from Anna's hair onto the leather interior. Nathan searches for something to say. "So what were you doing before you decided to join the good fight?"
"Traveling, mostly," she says. "I'd been working as a nurse, but I discovered it wasn't really me. So I did the twenty-something thing, wandered the globe to try to figure out who I was and what I could do with myself." She meets Nathan's eyes briefly. "I know it's a cliché, but I finally realized that what I really needed was to come home."
For a moment, she looks so much like Peter that it kills Nathan. He looks out the window. "My brother was a nurse, too."
"Oh." She hesitates for a moment. "I'm sorry to bring it up."
"Don't worry about it. It's been over a year; I can't expect to avoid everything that reminds me of him." At least it keeps me from forgetting him, he mentally appends.
Anna turns and makes an abortive movement, as if she's about to take his hand, but thinks better of it. "You cared for him a lot."
"Yes," Nathan says. "I did."
The car stops, and she looks out the window. "This is my stop, I guess. Thank you for the ride."
"Have a Merry Christmas," he says in automatic response.
"You too." Anna smiles back slightly, then steps out of the car and hurries to the building.
He wouldn't have noticed anything if he hadn't been watching her go, or if it hadn't been raining. When she steps through a puddle and doesn't make a splash, though, something pings in Nathan's head, and he looks more closely. She's fumbling in her purse for her keys in the dim light, and her high heels are hovering half an inch off the ground.
Nathan blinks, and the moment passes; Anna's stepping into the building, her feet firmly grounded on the entrance mat. A trick of the light and too little caffeine, he decides, and starts thinking about whether a flower arrangement will be enough to make Heidi forgive him for missing Christmas Eve dinner.
Over the course of the next month, Nathan's too busy to think much about anything but his polling numbers. Iowa passes by, and then Nevada; Nathan's never had much hope of a true lead, but he's getting good publicity from the press, and that's what matters for his goals. He's met Obama for a couple of breakfasts, reassured Hillary of his New York loyalty, and phone-conferenced with John, Chris, Dennis, and Joe, just to be safe. He reads the same stump speech a hundred times, until he only has to glance at the teleprompter to fill in the carefully chosen regional jokes. Anna hovers at the edge of his consciousness, a slender blonde figure bringing coffee for his aides or press releases to reporters, and slowly he convinces himself that what he saw on Christmas Eve was merely a trick of the streetlights.
One night, during the week between New Hampshire and South Carolina, he's relaxing with a glass of scotch and reviewing the next day's schedule with Michael. Abruptly, he asks, "What do you think of Anna?"
"Works hard. Doesn't mingle much with the other volunteers. Liberal enough that she's not here because of your politics." Michael says all this without hesitating, running his finger down the day planner.
"Why's she here, then?"
He shrugs. "Personal attachment? Youthful idealism? Nothing better to do?" He looks up and gives Nathan a warning glance. "Whatever you're thinking, sir, it can wait until after the election. The Republicans have a bounty for proof of marital indiscretions so high that I wouldn't even blame the volunteers for spilling everything they knew. And they will know."
"Of course." Nathan shakes his head, focusing back on his campaign manager. "Tell me again who I'm meeting for lunch?"
The next day, Nathan discovers that Michael's reassigned Anna to the New York team, keeping her out of his whistlestop tour. He doesn't even bother complaining; it's exactly the kind of proactive caution that he hired Michael for in the first place. Besides, he's got too much on his mind to think about sex, beyond brief faceless fantasies at night to relieve the tension. The campaign is what matters.
It's the night of "Hyper Tuesday," as the networks are dubbing it, and the polls aren't favoring New York's scions. Hillary won her adopted state, of course, and Nathan managed to finish a strong third at home. Everywhere else, though, Democratic voters seem to be ranking optimistic youth over experienced moderation. Edwards is giving Hillary a run for her money throughout the South, but the real winner is Obama, riding a wave of favorable media to unexpectedly strong success.
Nathan's a distant fifth or sixth in most states, but the polls all say it's because of obscurity, not negative public perceptions. That's enough of a victory to merit celebration, so he treats the staff to a round of Sam Adams, thanking them for their hard work. At 10 PM, Michael pulls him into the office, grinning. "Obama's staff just called. He wants to meet with you tomorrow morning."
They meet in a café near the Newark airport; Barak's still glowing with his victory, telling a story about the little girl in LA who gave him her good-luck baseball cap. Nathan's been around plenty of politicians, of course, but the man's charisma still blows him away each time he looks Nathan in the eye with an open smile that says You could be part of this dream, too. They talk on two levels: a dance of congratulations and policy goals to reassure each other of their mutual ambitions, with a pragmatic undercurrent of polling data and strategies to win independents and conservatives. Nathan walks away confident that even if he didn't clinch the VP nomination yet, he's in a damn good position for it.
He arrives back in his New York headquarters, ready to thank his campaign staff and head home for a few days with the family. When he steps into the office, he can tell that the staff's heard the VP rumors; everyone rushes to congratulate him, and his office overflows with red-white-and-blue balloons and bouquets.
On his desk, surrounded by perfect glass vases, is a shoebox. Intrigued, Nathan steps over and opens it, revealing two ordinary shoes -- shiny, black leather Oxfords, in his own size. Perfect, practically stereotypical politician's shoes, with no gift wrap or identifying card.
There's a rap on the doorframe; Nathan looks up to see Anna proffering a paper take-out coffee cup. "You wanted coffee?"
"Thanks," he says, trying to remember when he told that to Michael. He takes a sip, expecting the usual harsh richness of the corner Starbucks, and almost chokes when his mouth fills with the creamy, delicate sweetness of a well-prepared latte. He looks at the label under his hand and sees Ninth Street Espresso -- the place where Peter used to drag him all the time. Nathan lowers the coffee, carefully scans the room for the nearest bodyguards, and looks Anna in the eye. "How did you know what to get?"
She's looking at him so sadly, with an odd half-smile quirking her lips. "Someone I loved used to tell me that everyone's entitled to their secrets," she says.
All at once, everything clicks: the hovering, the shoes, the familiar brown eyes. Nathan speaks slowly, deliberately, a statement instead of a question. "You've been leaving hints for me the whole time, haven't you."
In that instant, everything stops. Phone lines go silent. Balloons float unmoving in the air, like stiff plastic balls. In the sudden stillness, Nathan steps forward, and Anna steps toward him, and suddenly the air shimmers and she's Peter, alive and uninjured and not at all dead. Letting out a deep, choking sigh, Nathan pulls Peter into his arms and embraces him, clutching Peter tight against his chest and whispering thank God and I missed you into his hair. The words become kisses, warm and needy, pressed against his forehead and cheeks and eyes, everywhere but Peter's mouth, and Nathan doesn't ever want to let go.
Gradually, he pulls himself away, hands still tight on Peter's shoulders, and tries to blink his eyes clear. "You let me think you were dead for a year," he says. "We had a goddamn funeral, Pete; Claire couldn't stop crying for weeks. Where the hell did you go?"
"I never lied to you," Peter says. "I went traveling. Barcelona, Cairo, New Delhi, Buenos Aires -- anywhere that I thought they couldn't find me. You're safe, because Linderman's got you under his thumb, but they know I'm too dangerous for that. They would've killed me -- I don't know how, but they would have found a way."
Nathan can't even say anything to that, so he tugs Peter close again, feels the familiar warmth of his body. "I know I shouldn't have come back," Peter says, bitter and low. "Matt Parkman is still out there somewhere, and if he listens in to your thoughts at the wrong time, we're both screwed. But I couldn't do this alone. I'm sorry."
"It'll be okay," Nathan says, and calms his breath. Comforting Peter is something he can do -- something normal, something he hadn't realized how deeply he missed. He guides Peter over to the loveseat in the corner of his office, and sits him down with Nathan's arms still wrapped around him. Nathan gestures at the frozen people through the office window. "How long can you maintain this?"
Peter shrugs. "Long enough; I've been practicing. It stops working when I fall asleep, that's all."
Nathan nods and looks at his brother, drinks in the sight of him. Peter's grown his hair back, so it falls shaggy over his eyes again, but the scar Sylar left hasn't faded. Even more unsettling, though, is the look in Peter's eyes. Before, he might have blushed or looked away awkwardly from Nathan's examination, perpetually the little kid in his big brother's presence. Now, he watches him with a quiet calm that almost makes Nathan wonder if he spent the last year in a Zen monastery.
A thousand questions are flooding Nathan's head, all clamoring to be answered as quickly as possible, but Nathan tells himself, we have all the time in the world. They look at each other, silent, almost as still as the other figures in the room, until he can't bear it. He takes Peter's hand tight in his own, interlaces their fingers, and says, "Don't ever leave me again."
When Nathan leaves for the Virginia primary, two days later -- the nomination's a done deal, but Virginia's a swing state, and his aides are reminding him that he needs all the campaigning he can get -- he personally asks Michael to send Anna with the team. He's got plenty of excuses prepared, but in the end, all it takes is a hard stare and the statement, "I'm not going to make you lose the election over a girl, Michael. Give me some credit."
And that's a good thing, because staying in New York wouldn't have stopped Peter; he would've just flown to Virginia every day, Nathan knows, regardless of the risk of being seen. Sometimes, though, he still doubts his decision to bring him. Peter's been scrupulous about avoiding any unprofessional behavior, but the kid's young; even with his new confidence, he can't always hide the way his eyes light up and follow Nathan, wherever Nathan's in the room. (Of course, Nathan only knows this because he's watching "Anna" most of the time, too, but at least he's learned to be discreet about these things.) Nathan knows that Michael's suspicious, but there's nothing he can say, because nothing happens, nothing at all. Peter freezes time before he visits Nathan, without fail, until Nathan begins to recognize the subtle, abrupt silence of time stopping around him even before he feels his brother's hand on his shoulder. Their conversations feel surreal, detached from the pressure and busyness of the election, floating in a transitory world in which only Nathan and Peter exist.
The day of the election, Nathan's up by five in the morning to get to a breakfast in Fairfax, and three hours of sleep aren't enough to keep the shadows from his eyes. He fights his way out of bed, fueled by the promise of caffeine, and of course it's one of those days when everything goes wrong: Michael gets food poisoning, the caterers bring lunch two hours late, so all the volunteers are cranky, and Wonkette decides to point out an article by a no-name Nevada journalist that questions Linderman's role in campaign contributions. By midnight, he doesn't even care how many percentage points he's losing Virginia by; he thanks the team for their work, walks calmly to his hotel room, and collapses in bed. He wakes up to a knock on the door.
The clock reads past two in the morning, so Nathan doesn't bother to do more than half-straighten his shirt and swipe a hand through his hair. He peeps through the door, and it's Peter -- Peter as himself, which means that it's safe to let him in. Nathan opens the door, forcing his face into a smile. "Pete, I'd love to talk to you now, but I've got a wake-up call coming in three hours, so if we could talk some other time --"
"It's okay," Peter interrupts. "I know you're busy, all right? I just thought you could use some extra sleep." He holds up a handful of magazines -- U.S. News, but Nathan could swear he sees Cosmo peeking out the bottom -- and looks up at Nathan with those brown eyes he can't refuse. "I promise I'll read quietly and leave you alone. As long as I'm awake, I can give you a few extra hours to sleep. Nobody has to know."
"Fine," Nathan says, and closes the door behind Peter.
Nathan's still half awake, but he's feeling more self-conscious with Peter's cool eyes on him. He kicks off his shoes and heads into the bathroom, where he brushes his teeth and strips down to his undershirt and pyjama pants. By the time he finishes, Peter's relaxing in a chair, flipping through magazine pages with idle interest. His eyes flicker over Nathan appraisingly, so quickly Nathan wonders if he imagined it, before he returns to his reading.
Well, if that's how he wants to play this, Nathan's too tired to do anything but accept the offer of rest. He slides into bed, switching off all the lamps but the one beside Peter, and lies on his side, his back to his brother. He can still feel Peter's gaze on his skin, soaking through the thin fabric, and he becomes conscious of his cock responding reflexively to the late hour. Go to sleep, he tells himself, and he does.
Nathan's dreams are a jumbled darkness of whispers and loss, but the scene he wakes to is familiar enough. He's nestled against a lovely young thing, a blonde with her face buried in pillows, and the alarm is going off. After slamming his hand down on the snooze button, Nathan turns back to his companion, automatically kissing the base of her neck and sliding one hand around her waist as he tries to remember who she is. He didn't drink that much last night, but he doesn't remember taking a girl home --
-- and that's when everything slams into place. "Anna -- Peter," he hisses fiercely, and jerks away from her body.
"Mmm?" she says sleepily, rolling over, and God, but she has gorgeous breasts, round and taut with tight nipples poking through her thin t-shirt. They're porn star breasts -- which is probably what Peter modeled them on, actually -- but as soft and supple as the real thing, and the fact that it's Peter's eyes looking out from over them isn't diminishing Nathan's hard-on.
"What the hell are you doing in my bed?" Nathan whispers. This is one conversation he'd really prefer that his aides didn't overhear, and the hour's late enough that they could come by any minute.
She yawns, stretching and tensing her muscles, which makes her breasts perk up and her hips brush against Nathan's legs, and this is going somewhere very wrong very quickly. "I'm sorry," she says, not very convincingly. "I stayed up for a few hours, but I was really tired, and I just meant to nap for a few minutes. I'll leave without being seen, don't worry."
Before sliding out of the bed, she kisses him on the cheek, and even though Nathan can't tell any difference between that kiss and the ones he and Peter have always given each other, it takes every fiber of early-morning willpower he possesses to keep himself from flipping her over and returning the kiss with heat and urgency. She's wearing nothing but lacy panties on the lower half of her body, and Nathan's mind teems with all the things he could do with that tight, round ass. This is Peter, he reminds himself. Peter.
Anna watches him with half-lidded eyes as she pulls on the rest of her clothes, and Nathan can't help but wonder if she -- he -- knows exactly what's going through his head. All the more reason to get her out of here as quickly as possible.
"I'm going, I'm going," she says, in a voice that sounds flirtatious where Peter would've sounded cranky. Just before she opens the door, Nathan feels the slight wrench of Peter stopping time again -- so she won't be seen walking out of his room, he supposes, and he's grateful for the precaution. "I'll see you later," she says. Her smile looks fond and slightly wistful.
She does see him later. That night, and the next, he hears a knock on the door around midnight; each evening, Peter slips in, and each morning, Nathan wakes up next to Anna. He'd complain, but he's feeling better-rested than he has since his Hawaii vacation with Heidi five years ago, and he's grown accustomed to the warmth of not waking up alone.
Two days after Virginia is Valentine's Day; Nathan calls Heidi from Cincinnati and listens to her thank him for the diamond bracelet that arrived from Tiffany's. He makes a mental note to reward the aide who picked out for her.
When Peter arrives, that night, Nathan feels hollow and restless. "Nobody saw you, right?" he asks.
Peter shakes his head with a wry smile. "Nobody saw me, Nathan; I made sure to stop time before I even left my room. I'm not going to endanger you or myself like that." Nathan feels a strange sense of vertigo, just for a moment; he's still not sure how to deal with a Peter who's comfortable reassuring him. "I finally figured out what's important for me," Peter says, softly, "and I'm not going to risk losing it."
"All right," Nathan says, and he exhales in a slow breath. If he stays awake much longer, he'll start worrying about Heidi, and that's something he doesn't want to think about right now. Neither is the unsettling worry that Peter, this new Peter, wouldn't insinuate himself into Nathan's life like this for no reason. Peter was never interested in politics before, beyond the extent to which they took Nathan away from him. For now, Nathan clears his mind of thoughts and falls asleep quickly. At least at the end of his dreams, his last thought whispers, he'll have someone to hold.
He wakes before the alarm, and Anna's asleep beside him, carelessly beautiful as she dreams.
Later, Nathan will tell himself that everyone's inhibitions are weak when they're half-awake. Now, though, he simply buries his face in her pale-gold hair, breathing in the unsettling mingled scents of feminine shampoo and Peter's skin. She's already lying against his body, but he shifts his weight so they're spooning, his arm around her waist and his chest against her back. It's been too long, he thinks, since he could hold someone like this, feel a body at peace next to him. Touching her hair turns to kissing it, and soon his lips are moving downward, leaving gentle touches on her neck and nearly-bare shoulder. His fingers skim her stomach, feeling each contour of muscle through the scant cotton; he barely shies away from her breasts and panties, careful to keep each touch individually innocent. Part of him feels like he's falling over a precipice, and the other part feels like he's finally mapping the geography of home.
"Don't stop," she murmurs, but the words are enough to jolt Nathan fully into reality.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have -- that was --" he begins.
"It's all right," she says. "I like feeling you close."
Nathan closes his eyes. "That's what worries me."
He rolls out of bed, even though he's got a half hour before he has to be up, and takes a long, hot shower. The water pulsing over his muscles doesn't do much to distract him from some deeply inappropriate thoughts, but when he steps out, Peter is gone.
Nathan's secret -- the one that Linderman's been frighteningly quick to exploit -- is that he doesn't deal well with temptation. It's only natural, he supposes; fortune granted him wealth, intelligence, and charisma, and Heidi's accident was possibly the first time in his life that he couldn't get what he wanted.
He's always been good at carefully choosing his desires, though. It would be foolish to hope for the presidential nomination this time around, but he wants vice president, and he'll have it. A committed mistress would endanger him politically, but disposable pleasures when he's away from home can't hurt anyone. He's never hesitated about taking a woman to bed before this; but then, he always used to select women who'd be happy with a night of companionship and an unfulfilled promise to call. Nathan's pretty damn sure that Anna doesn't fit in that category.
What's hard, he thinks as he lies in bed one night, watching Peter read, is that Peter and Anna are tangled up with each other in a way that Nathan can't quite extricate. He's always been aware that his brother's an attractive man, in an aesthetic sort of way, but the thought of Peter's cock -- of cock, period -- does nothing for him. But all he has to do is think of Anna's careful awkwardness as she walks on high heels, the way her breasts quiver when she leans over to pick up a stack of filing folders, and he's hard and hungry in a way that has everything to do with the mine, all mine he feels for Peter and nothing to do with a blonde stranger.
Nathan closes his eyes briefly, trying to drive the thoughts away, and when he opens them, Anna's sitting in Peter's chair. She's wearing her work clothes, conservative slacks and suit jacket over a silk blouse, and her lips are a wet, pale pink. Anna crosses her legs slowly, fabric sliding between her thighs in a soft hiss. Carefully, without breaking eye contact with Nathan, she pulls off her jacket and slips off her high heels.
"What are you doing?" Nathan asks, cautious.
"What do you think?" A smile twitches on her face, but her eyes -- Peter's eyes -- are dead serious. "You've been thinking about it ever since you met me. Believe me, I want it too." And then she's sliding her blouse off her head with a move so comfortably sexy that Nathan can't connect it with Peter, and that's a good thing, because she's wearing a lacy black bra that displays her breasts, round globes with hard, barely-concealed nipples. Her hair spreads over her bare shoulders, pale against her paler skin; this isn't Peter, Nathan tells himself, and she steps across the room and crawls onto the bed, climbing on top of him and trapping him between those flawless long legs.
Somewhere deep in his throat, Nathan can hear himself groaning a deep note of need. Tugging her closer and soaking in the heat of her skin, he kisses her. Gone is the delicate exploration of the past few nights; he's exploring her mouth with his tongue, learning the hot, wet taste of her, while his hands scrabble over her body to touch and clutch her skin.
"I've wanted this for so long, Nathan," she says, breath coming fast and hard. She places one last kiss on his mouth and slides downward, playfully licking the now-noticeable tenting in Nathan's pants, and starts to tug down the zipper with her teeth. Nathan's about to tease her for the porn cliché -- incredibly arousing though it may be -- when she finishes unzipping him and slides his dick out of his boxers and into her mouth.
If he's ever seen anything more gorgeous than Anna's lips circling his cock while she gazes up at him with Peter's brown eyes, Nathan can't think of it right now. He bucks upward into her, lost in the wet, slick suction as she bobs her head up and down and caresses his balls. "That's -- really good," he manages to get out, and she continues for a few more strokes before withdrawing from him with a smile.
"Good." She clambers up to kiss him again on the mouth, her lips damp and swollen, before tilting her head and whispering in his ear. "I'm going to fuck you now. I'll slide down onto your dick, clench my pussy around you, and ride you until you cum hard. I want to see your face gasp and moan when you pump your load into me, Nathan. We're the only people awake in the world right now, and I want to hear you."
They're the kind of words that Nathan's never heard come from a real woman's mouth, and they send desire tingling through each pore of his skin. He can feel the damp spot soaking through her panties, rubbing back and forth over his pants, and all he can do is nod his head. That's enough, though, because she's sliding off the rest of her clothing in smooth confident movements. She lowers herself onto him, slick and tight, and leans forward to kiss him as she begins to ride him, up and down in tight gasping motions. She's whimpering words into his ear, feels amazing and wanted this for so long and love feeling you inside me, but it's only when she bites his earlobe and sighs Nathan that the bright-red pain triggers his orgasm, making him arch and groan aloud and empty himself into her.
"I love you," she says softly, lowering herself to rest on his chest, his softening penis still inside her.
And Nathan's good at this kind of moment, good at deflecting and avoiding that phrase, but this time he doesn't doubt his answer at all. "Love you too," he says, and tries not to say Peter.
Sex with Anna, Nathan discovers, is the most addicting habit he's ever formed. When they return to New York, they can't fuck at night, so instead Peter will freeze time in the middle of the day, anywhere and everywhere that Nathan goes -- bent over the couch in Nathan's office, pressed up against the smooth glass windows of the building, even stretched out over the counter at Starbucks, frozen green-aproned baristas only inches away. Nathan can feel himself becoming reckless, obsessed even, but he's always meticulous about keeping every action around other people above suspicion. It's only when Peter stops time that they let themselves touch each other at all.
Even then, though, his actions observe careful boundaries. Though he and Peter spend more time together than ever, Nathan quells the recurring impulses to kiss and touch him the way he touches Anna. Peter is his brother, and Anna is -- Anna. As long as it's only her, he tells himself, he's not fucking his brother. The excuse, slim as it is, works well enough to help him avoid thinking about it.
Weeks pass, until he doesn't even need to remember the excuse much any more. Nathan's living a double life; in one world, he's a model politician, subject of a Time Magazine cover article, "Our Next Vice President?", but in the other world, he's becoming so consumed with Anna and Peter that he's beginning to forget who's the possessor and who's the possessed.
Nathan's at a fundraising banquet one evening, home in New York, a long dinner with mediocre food and worse company. The press are all over him at this point, though -- Obama just let it slide in an interview that Nathan's his leading choice -- so Nathan smiles and chats and makes patriotic comments about bringing home the troops.
Halfway through the meal, he excuses himself to use the restroom. The men's room is deserted; he finishes his business, washes his hands, and is reaching for a paper towel when he feels the subtle click of time stopping. Peter appears out of thin air, leaning against the nearest wall, and Nathan raises an eyebrow. "How long, exactly, have you been an invisible voyeur in the men's room?"
Peter quirks his lips into a slight smile. "Too long." In a flicker of light, his image dissolves into Anna's; this time, she's wearing a pale green cocktail dress that barely covers the necessary bits of her body, and Nathan's already hard. "I've been thinking all evening about how good you feel when you're fucking my cunt," she says. "Remind me?"
Nathan smiles, low and hungry, and lifts her bodily to sit on the sink countertop, hiking up her skirt and spreading her legs wide. She's slick and ready as always, moaning when he rubs his thumbs over her nipples, and he's buried deep in her and thrusting into her with long, relentless strokes, when a flash burns into his eyes.
Then another, bursting onto his vision, and Nathan's pulling his pants back up and turning his back before his conscious brain even registers camera and photographer. He stares at Anna, wondering what the hell happened, how time started moving again, but before he can say a word she's running past the photographer and out of the restrooms, covering her face. So instead Nathan turns to the photographer. "Get the hell out of here," he says. He can afford bravado; after this hits the press, it'll be all he'll have left.
The next morning, each newspaper headline seems intent on outdoing the others. "Petrelli Petting Pictures," "Nathan's Naughty Secret," "Congressional Sex Scandal: Caught on Film!" -- they splash across the top of every paper on the newsstand, accompanied by photos of him and Anna in a state of dress that decreases in inverse proportion to the newspaper's tawdriness. Last night, Nathan had the Discussion with Heidi that he swore fifteen years ago he'd never have, and he tried not to listen as Heidi gave the boys the "your classmates are going to say mean things about your daddy and me, but remember that you're a Petrelli" talk. The sun's been up for a while, but he's still lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and reflecting on possibilities. Linderman hasn't called yet, but Nathan doubts he's too worried; it would be unlike the man not to have at least one of the other candidates in his debt. What he's going to do to Nathan is an entirely separate question.
The hum of traffic drifting in through the window of the guest bedroom where he's been exiled falls silent. It takes Nathan a moment to notice, but when he does, he sits up sharply and sees Peter leaning against the closed door, watching him. "What do you want, Pete?" he asks wearily.
"Just to talk." Peter shrugs. "You're probably really upset at me, but I figured you'd feel better if you could get it out of your system."
Nathan doesn't say anything. He shifts over, so he's sitting on the edge of the bed, and pulls on last night's shirt, buttoning it up methodically. Peter's slip wasn't accidental, he's sure of it, but "why" can be the hardest question, so Nathan tries not to ask it.
When Nathan's shirt is buttoned and silence falls over the two, Peter speaks again. "What do you think love is?"
Nathan rolls his eyes at the non sequitur. "Caring for somebody. Providing for them. Giving them whatever makes them happy. Please don't tell me that you're going to pull some kind of psychotherapy bullshit on me right now."
Peter shakes his head. "I'm not, and you're wrong. Those things are nice, but they aren't love. Love is wanting something to be yours so much that you'd do anything to get it." He pauses and takes a deep breath. "I love you, but you loved your campaign."
"So you decided you'd take it away from me?" Nathan says, his skin shivering.
"I'm not the villain, Nathan; you know that." Peter walks over to the bed and sits next to him, meeting his eyes with that unnaturally calm gaze. "I believe in you, and I believe that deep down, you wanted to love your family more than your campaign. But Linderman took that choice away from you -- he made it so that protecting your family meant devoting yourself to your campaign -- and I think that you just forgot that the campaign was never supposed to be the ultimate goal."
"You tricked me."
"I tricked you to help you escape from Linderman. He can't threaten your family just because the press caught you screwing around, and you'll have time to rebuild your political base and win on your own timetable." Peter leans over and kisses Nathan's neck, resting on his shoulder for a moment. His lips feel just as soft as Anna's. "I love you."
"I love you too, Pete," Nathan says, his voice raw. "But I wish you hadn't done that."
"You'll forgive me eventually," he says, and then he's kissing Nathan on the lips. Peter, his brother, is kissing him, and the strangeness of stubble rubbing against Nathan's jaw twists and tangles in his mind with every breathless moment pressed up against Anna. "Let me touch you," Peter says, his voice so soft that Nathan can almost pretend it's Anna's.
Peter slides his arm downward, unzips Nathan's pants, and slips his hand inside, stroking Nathan in a rhythm that's become as familiar as breathing, these past weeks. If Nathan closes his eyes, buries his face in Peter's hair, and breathes in the scent of his skin, he can pretend that this is Anna, imagine away the hard length pressing into his thigh. Soon, he feels himself hardening, responding to warm fingers and the mental image of taut curves, until he's thrusting up into Peter's fingers with each stroke.
"This is me, Nathan," Peter whispers in his air, breath hot and low. "You're here, with me, and I love you. Don't go anywhere else."
Nathan shudders, but he's too aroused now to stop, even with Peter's insistent reminders of male and brother. Peter's strokes become faster and less gentle, joining and amplifying Nathan's rhythm, until Nathan's clenching his eyes shut and making choked whimpers from deep in his throat, so close to orgasm he can taste it, like iron-tang on his tongue.
"Come for me, Nathan," Peter breathes, his other hand gripping Nathan's thigh. And there's no real choice about it at this point; helpless and gritting his teeth, Nathan comes.
Peter lets go of him gently, wiping off his hand on a bed sheet before giving Nathan a tight hug. "Things will work out, I promise," he says. "I'm so glad that you're back where you belong."
finis.
Author: Sinope (eponis)
Pairing: Peter/Nathan
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: (read if you don't mind being spoilered) Het sex, genderfuck
Word count: ~6700
Summary: A year after Nathan loses Peter in battle, a campaign volunteer with a secret shows up at his office.
Notes: This is for scribblinlenore, who gave the prompt "'Why' can be the hardest question, so Nathan tries not to ask it." for the Peter/Nathan Spring Hiatus Fic-a-thon. I hope you enjoy. Many, many thanks to linaerys, who coordinated the fic exchange and gave wonderful beta-reading assistance.
If you're losing, when you know you made the rules,
Must be playing a game for fools.
-- "Game for Fools," Mara Carlyle
December, 2007.
The only remarkable thing about the girl who joins the campaign in December is an uncanny resemblance to Donna from the West Wing -- at least, that's what Nathan's aides tell him. When Michael introduces her to Nathan, after a long day of speech-making and hand-shaking, he only has the time to get her name -- Anna -- and ask her why she wants to help the presidential campaign of an unknown congressman. "Because you're going to be nominated for vice president, and you're going to win," she says, meeting his appraisal with chestnut-brown eyes under her golden eyelashes. Nathan feels his skin prickling at the gaze; she's watching him so intensely it feels like she's seeing far beneath his skin.
Probably just another campaign aide infatuated with power, he finally concludes, but gives her another quick once-over. She's got gorgeous cock-sucking lips. Bemused, and too busy to contemplate that kind of diversion, Nathan shakes her hand and shows her out the door. It's a week before he even has cause to think about Anna again.
The frustrating thing about working a campaign largely staffed by volunteers is that inspirational speeches only go so far toward keeping the office functional during the holidays. It's Christmas Eve -- Heidi's going to kill him for staying this late -- and when Nathan emerges from his office, the only other person in sight is Anna. He closes the door behind him, and she looks up. He's expecting her to look startled, or tired, or perhaps just curious; instead, she's giving him another of those unsettling stares, as if she's been waiting all evening just to meet his eyes. A curtain of white-blonde hair shrouds half of her face, and she tucks it back over her ear with an automatic movement that seems oddly familiar. Nathan shapes his mouth into a polite smile, breaking the uncomfortable moment. "Don't you have somewhere to be on Christmas Eve, Anna?"
"Not really," she shrugs. "Anyway, it's not like anyone else is here to staff the phones."
"If anyone tries to call us at seven o'clock on a Christmas Eve, they can deal with an answering machine. Go home."
"Yes, sir," she says with a hint of a smile. She closes down the document she'd been working on, shuts down the computer, and pulls on her coat, all without looking at Nathan.
He watches each action, intrigued. She's not his type -- pale and washed-out looking, except for those dark eyes -- but something about her slender fingers and the line of her mouth is sending blood straight down into his cock. He forces himself to look away and pull out his cell phone to call for his car, before she notices him staring. "All done?" he asks, once the car is on its way, and she nods.
Outside, Christmas Eve decided to assert itself in a foggy rain, streaked with sharp, half-frozen precipitation. Nathan stands under an awning away from the rain, watching his car navigate through the glacially slow traffic, while Anna turns and walks away down the unsheltered sidewalk. "Hey," he calls after her. "You're not going to walk home in this weather, are you?" When she turns to look at him, and she's drenched in water but smiling brightly, Nathan starts to wonder whether they should do better psychological screening on their volunteers.
"I'll be fine," she says. "I live just around the corner."
Nathan sighs. "Come here," he says. "Get in the car." He opens the door as soon as it reaches the curb, sliding in without waiting to see whether Anna's following. A moment later, she steps in beside him, damp but not shivering. Her hair clings to her like streams of water, flowing down her face.
She tells her address to Nathan's driver-cum-bodyguard, and the car sets off, inching down a street clogged with last-minute shoppers and rain-drenched pedestrians. There's uncomfortable silence for a moment, punctuated by the patter of water dripping from Anna's hair onto the leather interior. Nathan searches for something to say. "So what were you doing before you decided to join the good fight?"
"Traveling, mostly," she says. "I'd been working as a nurse, but I discovered it wasn't really me. So I did the twenty-something thing, wandered the globe to try to figure out who I was and what I could do with myself." She meets Nathan's eyes briefly. "I know it's a cliché, but I finally realized that what I really needed was to come home."
For a moment, she looks so much like Peter that it kills Nathan. He looks out the window. "My brother was a nurse, too."
"Oh." She hesitates for a moment. "I'm sorry to bring it up."
"Don't worry about it. It's been over a year; I can't expect to avoid everything that reminds me of him." At least it keeps me from forgetting him, he mentally appends.
Anna turns and makes an abortive movement, as if she's about to take his hand, but thinks better of it. "You cared for him a lot."
"Yes," Nathan says. "I did."
The car stops, and she looks out the window. "This is my stop, I guess. Thank you for the ride."
"Have a Merry Christmas," he says in automatic response.
"You too." Anna smiles back slightly, then steps out of the car and hurries to the building.
He wouldn't have noticed anything if he hadn't been watching her go, or if it hadn't been raining. When she steps through a puddle and doesn't make a splash, though, something pings in Nathan's head, and he looks more closely. She's fumbling in her purse for her keys in the dim light, and her high heels are hovering half an inch off the ground.
Nathan blinks, and the moment passes; Anna's stepping into the building, her feet firmly grounded on the entrance mat. A trick of the light and too little caffeine, he decides, and starts thinking about whether a flower arrangement will be enough to make Heidi forgive him for missing Christmas Eve dinner.
Over the course of the next month, Nathan's too busy to think much about anything but his polling numbers. Iowa passes by, and then Nevada; Nathan's never had much hope of a true lead, but he's getting good publicity from the press, and that's what matters for his goals. He's met Obama for a couple of breakfasts, reassured Hillary of his New York loyalty, and phone-conferenced with John, Chris, Dennis, and Joe, just to be safe. He reads the same stump speech a hundred times, until he only has to glance at the teleprompter to fill in the carefully chosen regional jokes. Anna hovers at the edge of his consciousness, a slender blonde figure bringing coffee for his aides or press releases to reporters, and slowly he convinces himself that what he saw on Christmas Eve was merely a trick of the streetlights.
One night, during the week between New Hampshire and South Carolina, he's relaxing with a glass of scotch and reviewing the next day's schedule with Michael. Abruptly, he asks, "What do you think of Anna?"
"Works hard. Doesn't mingle much with the other volunteers. Liberal enough that she's not here because of your politics." Michael says all this without hesitating, running his finger down the day planner.
"Why's she here, then?"
He shrugs. "Personal attachment? Youthful idealism? Nothing better to do?" He looks up and gives Nathan a warning glance. "Whatever you're thinking, sir, it can wait until after the election. The Republicans have a bounty for proof of marital indiscretions so high that I wouldn't even blame the volunteers for spilling everything they knew. And they will know."
"Of course." Nathan shakes his head, focusing back on his campaign manager. "Tell me again who I'm meeting for lunch?"
The next day, Nathan discovers that Michael's reassigned Anna to the New York team, keeping her out of his whistlestop tour. He doesn't even bother complaining; it's exactly the kind of proactive caution that he hired Michael for in the first place. Besides, he's got too much on his mind to think about sex, beyond brief faceless fantasies at night to relieve the tension. The campaign is what matters.
It's the night of "Hyper Tuesday," as the networks are dubbing it, and the polls aren't favoring New York's scions. Hillary won her adopted state, of course, and Nathan managed to finish a strong third at home. Everywhere else, though, Democratic voters seem to be ranking optimistic youth over experienced moderation. Edwards is giving Hillary a run for her money throughout the South, but the real winner is Obama, riding a wave of favorable media to unexpectedly strong success.
Nathan's a distant fifth or sixth in most states, but the polls all say it's because of obscurity, not negative public perceptions. That's enough of a victory to merit celebration, so he treats the staff to a round of Sam Adams, thanking them for their hard work. At 10 PM, Michael pulls him into the office, grinning. "Obama's staff just called. He wants to meet with you tomorrow morning."
They meet in a café near the Newark airport; Barak's still glowing with his victory, telling a story about the little girl in LA who gave him her good-luck baseball cap. Nathan's been around plenty of politicians, of course, but the man's charisma still blows him away each time he looks Nathan in the eye with an open smile that says You could be part of this dream, too. They talk on two levels: a dance of congratulations and policy goals to reassure each other of their mutual ambitions, with a pragmatic undercurrent of polling data and strategies to win independents and conservatives. Nathan walks away confident that even if he didn't clinch the VP nomination yet, he's in a damn good position for it.
He arrives back in his New York headquarters, ready to thank his campaign staff and head home for a few days with the family. When he steps into the office, he can tell that the staff's heard the VP rumors; everyone rushes to congratulate him, and his office overflows with red-white-and-blue balloons and bouquets.
On his desk, surrounded by perfect glass vases, is a shoebox. Intrigued, Nathan steps over and opens it, revealing two ordinary shoes -- shiny, black leather Oxfords, in his own size. Perfect, practically stereotypical politician's shoes, with no gift wrap or identifying card.
There's a rap on the doorframe; Nathan looks up to see Anna proffering a paper take-out coffee cup. "You wanted coffee?"
"Thanks," he says, trying to remember when he told that to Michael. He takes a sip, expecting the usual harsh richness of the corner Starbucks, and almost chokes when his mouth fills with the creamy, delicate sweetness of a well-prepared latte. He looks at the label under his hand and sees Ninth Street Espresso -- the place where Peter used to drag him all the time. Nathan lowers the coffee, carefully scans the room for the nearest bodyguards, and looks Anna in the eye. "How did you know what to get?"
She's looking at him so sadly, with an odd half-smile quirking her lips. "Someone I loved used to tell me that everyone's entitled to their secrets," she says.
All at once, everything clicks: the hovering, the shoes, the familiar brown eyes. Nathan speaks slowly, deliberately, a statement instead of a question. "You've been leaving hints for me the whole time, haven't you."
In that instant, everything stops. Phone lines go silent. Balloons float unmoving in the air, like stiff plastic balls. In the sudden stillness, Nathan steps forward, and Anna steps toward him, and suddenly the air shimmers and she's Peter, alive and uninjured and not at all dead. Letting out a deep, choking sigh, Nathan pulls Peter into his arms and embraces him, clutching Peter tight against his chest and whispering thank God and I missed you into his hair. The words become kisses, warm and needy, pressed against his forehead and cheeks and eyes, everywhere but Peter's mouth, and Nathan doesn't ever want to let go.
Gradually, he pulls himself away, hands still tight on Peter's shoulders, and tries to blink his eyes clear. "You let me think you were dead for a year," he says. "We had a goddamn funeral, Pete; Claire couldn't stop crying for weeks. Where the hell did you go?"
"I never lied to you," Peter says. "I went traveling. Barcelona, Cairo, New Delhi, Buenos Aires -- anywhere that I thought they couldn't find me. You're safe, because Linderman's got you under his thumb, but they know I'm too dangerous for that. They would've killed me -- I don't know how, but they would have found a way."
Nathan can't even say anything to that, so he tugs Peter close again, feels the familiar warmth of his body. "I know I shouldn't have come back," Peter says, bitter and low. "Matt Parkman is still out there somewhere, and if he listens in to your thoughts at the wrong time, we're both screwed. But I couldn't do this alone. I'm sorry."
"It'll be okay," Nathan says, and calms his breath. Comforting Peter is something he can do -- something normal, something he hadn't realized how deeply he missed. He guides Peter over to the loveseat in the corner of his office, and sits him down with Nathan's arms still wrapped around him. Nathan gestures at the frozen people through the office window. "How long can you maintain this?"
Peter shrugs. "Long enough; I've been practicing. It stops working when I fall asleep, that's all."
Nathan nods and looks at his brother, drinks in the sight of him. Peter's grown his hair back, so it falls shaggy over his eyes again, but the scar Sylar left hasn't faded. Even more unsettling, though, is the look in Peter's eyes. Before, he might have blushed or looked away awkwardly from Nathan's examination, perpetually the little kid in his big brother's presence. Now, he watches him with a quiet calm that almost makes Nathan wonder if he spent the last year in a Zen monastery.
A thousand questions are flooding Nathan's head, all clamoring to be answered as quickly as possible, but Nathan tells himself, we have all the time in the world. They look at each other, silent, almost as still as the other figures in the room, until he can't bear it. He takes Peter's hand tight in his own, interlaces their fingers, and says, "Don't ever leave me again."
When Nathan leaves for the Virginia primary, two days later -- the nomination's a done deal, but Virginia's a swing state, and his aides are reminding him that he needs all the campaigning he can get -- he personally asks Michael to send Anna with the team. He's got plenty of excuses prepared, but in the end, all it takes is a hard stare and the statement, "I'm not going to make you lose the election over a girl, Michael. Give me some credit."
And that's a good thing, because staying in New York wouldn't have stopped Peter; he would've just flown to Virginia every day, Nathan knows, regardless of the risk of being seen. Sometimes, though, he still doubts his decision to bring him. Peter's been scrupulous about avoiding any unprofessional behavior, but the kid's young; even with his new confidence, he can't always hide the way his eyes light up and follow Nathan, wherever Nathan's in the room. (Of course, Nathan only knows this because he's watching "Anna" most of the time, too, but at least he's learned to be discreet about these things.) Nathan knows that Michael's suspicious, but there's nothing he can say, because nothing happens, nothing at all. Peter freezes time before he visits Nathan, without fail, until Nathan begins to recognize the subtle, abrupt silence of time stopping around him even before he feels his brother's hand on his shoulder. Their conversations feel surreal, detached from the pressure and busyness of the election, floating in a transitory world in which only Nathan and Peter exist.
The day of the election, Nathan's up by five in the morning to get to a breakfast in Fairfax, and three hours of sleep aren't enough to keep the shadows from his eyes. He fights his way out of bed, fueled by the promise of caffeine, and of course it's one of those days when everything goes wrong: Michael gets food poisoning, the caterers bring lunch two hours late, so all the volunteers are cranky, and Wonkette decides to point out an article by a no-name Nevada journalist that questions Linderman's role in campaign contributions. By midnight, he doesn't even care how many percentage points he's losing Virginia by; he thanks the team for their work, walks calmly to his hotel room, and collapses in bed. He wakes up to a knock on the door.
The clock reads past two in the morning, so Nathan doesn't bother to do more than half-straighten his shirt and swipe a hand through his hair. He peeps through the door, and it's Peter -- Peter as himself, which means that it's safe to let him in. Nathan opens the door, forcing his face into a smile. "Pete, I'd love to talk to you now, but I've got a wake-up call coming in three hours, so if we could talk some other time --"
"It's okay," Peter interrupts. "I know you're busy, all right? I just thought you could use some extra sleep." He holds up a handful of magazines -- U.S. News, but Nathan could swear he sees Cosmo peeking out the bottom -- and looks up at Nathan with those brown eyes he can't refuse. "I promise I'll read quietly and leave you alone. As long as I'm awake, I can give you a few extra hours to sleep. Nobody has to know."
"Fine," Nathan says, and closes the door behind Peter.
Nathan's still half awake, but he's feeling more self-conscious with Peter's cool eyes on him. He kicks off his shoes and heads into the bathroom, where he brushes his teeth and strips down to his undershirt and pyjama pants. By the time he finishes, Peter's relaxing in a chair, flipping through magazine pages with idle interest. His eyes flicker over Nathan appraisingly, so quickly Nathan wonders if he imagined it, before he returns to his reading.
Well, if that's how he wants to play this, Nathan's too tired to do anything but accept the offer of rest. He slides into bed, switching off all the lamps but the one beside Peter, and lies on his side, his back to his brother. He can still feel Peter's gaze on his skin, soaking through the thin fabric, and he becomes conscious of his cock responding reflexively to the late hour. Go to sleep, he tells himself, and he does.
Nathan's dreams are a jumbled darkness of whispers and loss, but the scene he wakes to is familiar enough. He's nestled against a lovely young thing, a blonde with her face buried in pillows, and the alarm is going off. After slamming his hand down on the snooze button, Nathan turns back to his companion, automatically kissing the base of her neck and sliding one hand around her waist as he tries to remember who she is. He didn't drink that much last night, but he doesn't remember taking a girl home --
-- and that's when everything slams into place. "Anna -- Peter," he hisses fiercely, and jerks away from her body.
"Mmm?" she says sleepily, rolling over, and God, but she has gorgeous breasts, round and taut with tight nipples poking through her thin t-shirt. They're porn star breasts -- which is probably what Peter modeled them on, actually -- but as soft and supple as the real thing, and the fact that it's Peter's eyes looking out from over them isn't diminishing Nathan's hard-on.
"What the hell are you doing in my bed?" Nathan whispers. This is one conversation he'd really prefer that his aides didn't overhear, and the hour's late enough that they could come by any minute.
She yawns, stretching and tensing her muscles, which makes her breasts perk up and her hips brush against Nathan's legs, and this is going somewhere very wrong very quickly. "I'm sorry," she says, not very convincingly. "I stayed up for a few hours, but I was really tired, and I just meant to nap for a few minutes. I'll leave without being seen, don't worry."
Before sliding out of the bed, she kisses him on the cheek, and even though Nathan can't tell any difference between that kiss and the ones he and Peter have always given each other, it takes every fiber of early-morning willpower he possesses to keep himself from flipping her over and returning the kiss with heat and urgency. She's wearing nothing but lacy panties on the lower half of her body, and Nathan's mind teems with all the things he could do with that tight, round ass. This is Peter, he reminds himself. Peter.
Anna watches him with half-lidded eyes as she pulls on the rest of her clothes, and Nathan can't help but wonder if she -- he -- knows exactly what's going through his head. All the more reason to get her out of here as quickly as possible.
"I'm going, I'm going," she says, in a voice that sounds flirtatious where Peter would've sounded cranky. Just before she opens the door, Nathan feels the slight wrench of Peter stopping time again -- so she won't be seen walking out of his room, he supposes, and he's grateful for the precaution. "I'll see you later," she says. Her smile looks fond and slightly wistful.
She does see him later. That night, and the next, he hears a knock on the door around midnight; each evening, Peter slips in, and each morning, Nathan wakes up next to Anna. He'd complain, but he's feeling better-rested than he has since his Hawaii vacation with Heidi five years ago, and he's grown accustomed to the warmth of not waking up alone.
Two days after Virginia is Valentine's Day; Nathan calls Heidi from Cincinnati and listens to her thank him for the diamond bracelet that arrived from Tiffany's. He makes a mental note to reward the aide who picked out for her.
When Peter arrives, that night, Nathan feels hollow and restless. "Nobody saw you, right?" he asks.
Peter shakes his head with a wry smile. "Nobody saw me, Nathan; I made sure to stop time before I even left my room. I'm not going to endanger you or myself like that." Nathan feels a strange sense of vertigo, just for a moment; he's still not sure how to deal with a Peter who's comfortable reassuring him. "I finally figured out what's important for me," Peter says, softly, "and I'm not going to risk losing it."
"All right," Nathan says, and he exhales in a slow breath. If he stays awake much longer, he'll start worrying about Heidi, and that's something he doesn't want to think about right now. Neither is the unsettling worry that Peter, this new Peter, wouldn't insinuate himself into Nathan's life like this for no reason. Peter was never interested in politics before, beyond the extent to which they took Nathan away from him. For now, Nathan clears his mind of thoughts and falls asleep quickly. At least at the end of his dreams, his last thought whispers, he'll have someone to hold.
He wakes before the alarm, and Anna's asleep beside him, carelessly beautiful as she dreams.
Later, Nathan will tell himself that everyone's inhibitions are weak when they're half-awake. Now, though, he simply buries his face in her pale-gold hair, breathing in the unsettling mingled scents of feminine shampoo and Peter's skin. She's already lying against his body, but he shifts his weight so they're spooning, his arm around her waist and his chest against her back. It's been too long, he thinks, since he could hold someone like this, feel a body at peace next to him. Touching her hair turns to kissing it, and soon his lips are moving downward, leaving gentle touches on her neck and nearly-bare shoulder. His fingers skim her stomach, feeling each contour of muscle through the scant cotton; he barely shies away from her breasts and panties, careful to keep each touch individually innocent. Part of him feels like he's falling over a precipice, and the other part feels like he's finally mapping the geography of home.
"Don't stop," she murmurs, but the words are enough to jolt Nathan fully into reality.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have -- that was --" he begins.
"It's all right," she says. "I like feeling you close."
Nathan closes his eyes. "That's what worries me."
He rolls out of bed, even though he's got a half hour before he has to be up, and takes a long, hot shower. The water pulsing over his muscles doesn't do much to distract him from some deeply inappropriate thoughts, but when he steps out, Peter is gone.
Nathan's secret -- the one that Linderman's been frighteningly quick to exploit -- is that he doesn't deal well with temptation. It's only natural, he supposes; fortune granted him wealth, intelligence, and charisma, and Heidi's accident was possibly the first time in his life that he couldn't get what he wanted.
He's always been good at carefully choosing his desires, though. It would be foolish to hope for the presidential nomination this time around, but he wants vice president, and he'll have it. A committed mistress would endanger him politically, but disposable pleasures when he's away from home can't hurt anyone. He's never hesitated about taking a woman to bed before this; but then, he always used to select women who'd be happy with a night of companionship and an unfulfilled promise to call. Nathan's pretty damn sure that Anna doesn't fit in that category.
What's hard, he thinks as he lies in bed one night, watching Peter read, is that Peter and Anna are tangled up with each other in a way that Nathan can't quite extricate. He's always been aware that his brother's an attractive man, in an aesthetic sort of way, but the thought of Peter's cock -- of cock, period -- does nothing for him. But all he has to do is think of Anna's careful awkwardness as she walks on high heels, the way her breasts quiver when she leans over to pick up a stack of filing folders, and he's hard and hungry in a way that has everything to do with the mine, all mine he feels for Peter and nothing to do with a blonde stranger.
Nathan closes his eyes briefly, trying to drive the thoughts away, and when he opens them, Anna's sitting in Peter's chair. She's wearing her work clothes, conservative slacks and suit jacket over a silk blouse, and her lips are a wet, pale pink. Anna crosses her legs slowly, fabric sliding between her thighs in a soft hiss. Carefully, without breaking eye contact with Nathan, she pulls off her jacket and slips off her high heels.
"What are you doing?" Nathan asks, cautious.
"What do you think?" A smile twitches on her face, but her eyes -- Peter's eyes -- are dead serious. "You've been thinking about it ever since you met me. Believe me, I want it too." And then she's sliding her blouse off her head with a move so comfortably sexy that Nathan can't connect it with Peter, and that's a good thing, because she's wearing a lacy black bra that displays her breasts, round globes with hard, barely-concealed nipples. Her hair spreads over her bare shoulders, pale against her paler skin; this isn't Peter, Nathan tells himself, and she steps across the room and crawls onto the bed, climbing on top of him and trapping him between those flawless long legs.
Somewhere deep in his throat, Nathan can hear himself groaning a deep note of need. Tugging her closer and soaking in the heat of her skin, he kisses her. Gone is the delicate exploration of the past few nights; he's exploring her mouth with his tongue, learning the hot, wet taste of her, while his hands scrabble over her body to touch and clutch her skin.
"I've wanted this for so long, Nathan," she says, breath coming fast and hard. She places one last kiss on his mouth and slides downward, playfully licking the now-noticeable tenting in Nathan's pants, and starts to tug down the zipper with her teeth. Nathan's about to tease her for the porn cliché -- incredibly arousing though it may be -- when she finishes unzipping him and slides his dick out of his boxers and into her mouth.
If he's ever seen anything more gorgeous than Anna's lips circling his cock while she gazes up at him with Peter's brown eyes, Nathan can't think of it right now. He bucks upward into her, lost in the wet, slick suction as she bobs her head up and down and caresses his balls. "That's -- really good," he manages to get out, and she continues for a few more strokes before withdrawing from him with a smile.
"Good." She clambers up to kiss him again on the mouth, her lips damp and swollen, before tilting her head and whispering in his ear. "I'm going to fuck you now. I'll slide down onto your dick, clench my pussy around you, and ride you until you cum hard. I want to see your face gasp and moan when you pump your load into me, Nathan. We're the only people awake in the world right now, and I want to hear you."
They're the kind of words that Nathan's never heard come from a real woman's mouth, and they send desire tingling through each pore of his skin. He can feel the damp spot soaking through her panties, rubbing back and forth over his pants, and all he can do is nod his head. That's enough, though, because she's sliding off the rest of her clothing in smooth confident movements. She lowers herself onto him, slick and tight, and leans forward to kiss him as she begins to ride him, up and down in tight gasping motions. She's whimpering words into his ear, feels amazing and wanted this for so long and love feeling you inside me, but it's only when she bites his earlobe and sighs Nathan that the bright-red pain triggers his orgasm, making him arch and groan aloud and empty himself into her.
"I love you," she says softly, lowering herself to rest on his chest, his softening penis still inside her.
And Nathan's good at this kind of moment, good at deflecting and avoiding that phrase, but this time he doesn't doubt his answer at all. "Love you too," he says, and tries not to say Peter.
Sex with Anna, Nathan discovers, is the most addicting habit he's ever formed. When they return to New York, they can't fuck at night, so instead Peter will freeze time in the middle of the day, anywhere and everywhere that Nathan goes -- bent over the couch in Nathan's office, pressed up against the smooth glass windows of the building, even stretched out over the counter at Starbucks, frozen green-aproned baristas only inches away. Nathan can feel himself becoming reckless, obsessed even, but he's always meticulous about keeping every action around other people above suspicion. It's only when Peter stops time that they let themselves touch each other at all.
Even then, though, his actions observe careful boundaries. Though he and Peter spend more time together than ever, Nathan quells the recurring impulses to kiss and touch him the way he touches Anna. Peter is his brother, and Anna is -- Anna. As long as it's only her, he tells himself, he's not fucking his brother. The excuse, slim as it is, works well enough to help him avoid thinking about it.
Weeks pass, until he doesn't even need to remember the excuse much any more. Nathan's living a double life; in one world, he's a model politician, subject of a Time Magazine cover article, "Our Next Vice President?", but in the other world, he's becoming so consumed with Anna and Peter that he's beginning to forget who's the possessor and who's the possessed.
Nathan's at a fundraising banquet one evening, home in New York, a long dinner with mediocre food and worse company. The press are all over him at this point, though -- Obama just let it slide in an interview that Nathan's his leading choice -- so Nathan smiles and chats and makes patriotic comments about bringing home the troops.
Halfway through the meal, he excuses himself to use the restroom. The men's room is deserted; he finishes his business, washes his hands, and is reaching for a paper towel when he feels the subtle click of time stopping. Peter appears out of thin air, leaning against the nearest wall, and Nathan raises an eyebrow. "How long, exactly, have you been an invisible voyeur in the men's room?"
Peter quirks his lips into a slight smile. "Too long." In a flicker of light, his image dissolves into Anna's; this time, she's wearing a pale green cocktail dress that barely covers the necessary bits of her body, and Nathan's already hard. "I've been thinking all evening about how good you feel when you're fucking my cunt," she says. "Remind me?"
Nathan smiles, low and hungry, and lifts her bodily to sit on the sink countertop, hiking up her skirt and spreading her legs wide. She's slick and ready as always, moaning when he rubs his thumbs over her nipples, and he's buried deep in her and thrusting into her with long, relentless strokes, when a flash burns into his eyes.
Then another, bursting onto his vision, and Nathan's pulling his pants back up and turning his back before his conscious brain even registers camera and photographer. He stares at Anna, wondering what the hell happened, how time started moving again, but before he can say a word she's running past the photographer and out of the restrooms, covering her face. So instead Nathan turns to the photographer. "Get the hell out of here," he says. He can afford bravado; after this hits the press, it'll be all he'll have left.
The next morning, each newspaper headline seems intent on outdoing the others. "Petrelli Petting Pictures," "Nathan's Naughty Secret," "Congressional Sex Scandal: Caught on Film!" -- they splash across the top of every paper on the newsstand, accompanied by photos of him and Anna in a state of dress that decreases in inverse proportion to the newspaper's tawdriness. Last night, Nathan had the Discussion with Heidi that he swore fifteen years ago he'd never have, and he tried not to listen as Heidi gave the boys the "your classmates are going to say mean things about your daddy and me, but remember that you're a Petrelli" talk. The sun's been up for a while, but he's still lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and reflecting on possibilities. Linderman hasn't called yet, but Nathan doubts he's too worried; it would be unlike the man not to have at least one of the other candidates in his debt. What he's going to do to Nathan is an entirely separate question.
The hum of traffic drifting in through the window of the guest bedroom where he's been exiled falls silent. It takes Nathan a moment to notice, but when he does, he sits up sharply and sees Peter leaning against the closed door, watching him. "What do you want, Pete?" he asks wearily.
"Just to talk." Peter shrugs. "You're probably really upset at me, but I figured you'd feel better if you could get it out of your system."
Nathan doesn't say anything. He shifts over, so he's sitting on the edge of the bed, and pulls on last night's shirt, buttoning it up methodically. Peter's slip wasn't accidental, he's sure of it, but "why" can be the hardest question, so Nathan tries not to ask it.
When Nathan's shirt is buttoned and silence falls over the two, Peter speaks again. "What do you think love is?"
Nathan rolls his eyes at the non sequitur. "Caring for somebody. Providing for them. Giving them whatever makes them happy. Please don't tell me that you're going to pull some kind of psychotherapy bullshit on me right now."
Peter shakes his head. "I'm not, and you're wrong. Those things are nice, but they aren't love. Love is wanting something to be yours so much that you'd do anything to get it." He pauses and takes a deep breath. "I love you, but you loved your campaign."
"So you decided you'd take it away from me?" Nathan says, his skin shivering.
"I'm not the villain, Nathan; you know that." Peter walks over to the bed and sits next to him, meeting his eyes with that unnaturally calm gaze. "I believe in you, and I believe that deep down, you wanted to love your family more than your campaign. But Linderman took that choice away from you -- he made it so that protecting your family meant devoting yourself to your campaign -- and I think that you just forgot that the campaign was never supposed to be the ultimate goal."
"You tricked me."
"I tricked you to help you escape from Linderman. He can't threaten your family just because the press caught you screwing around, and you'll have time to rebuild your political base and win on your own timetable." Peter leans over and kisses Nathan's neck, resting on his shoulder for a moment. His lips feel just as soft as Anna's. "I love you."
"I love you too, Pete," Nathan says, his voice raw. "But I wish you hadn't done that."
"You'll forgive me eventually," he says, and then he's kissing Nathan on the lips. Peter, his brother, is kissing him, and the strangeness of stubble rubbing against Nathan's jaw twists and tangles in his mind with every breathless moment pressed up against Anna. "Let me touch you," Peter says, his voice so soft that Nathan can almost pretend it's Anna's.
Peter slides his arm downward, unzips Nathan's pants, and slips his hand inside, stroking Nathan in a rhythm that's become as familiar as breathing, these past weeks. If Nathan closes his eyes, buries his face in Peter's hair, and breathes in the scent of his skin, he can pretend that this is Anna, imagine away the hard length pressing into his thigh. Soon, he feels himself hardening, responding to warm fingers and the mental image of taut curves, until he's thrusting up into Peter's fingers with each stroke.
"This is me, Nathan," Peter whispers in his air, breath hot and low. "You're here, with me, and I love you. Don't go anywhere else."
Nathan shudders, but he's too aroused now to stop, even with Peter's insistent reminders of male and brother. Peter's strokes become faster and less gentle, joining and amplifying Nathan's rhythm, until Nathan's clenching his eyes shut and making choked whimpers from deep in his throat, so close to orgasm he can taste it, like iron-tang on his tongue.
"Come for me, Nathan," Peter breathes, his other hand gripping Nathan's thigh. And there's no real choice about it at this point; helpless and gritting his teeth, Nathan comes.
Peter lets go of him gently, wiping off his hand on a bed sheet before giving Nathan a tight hug. "Things will work out, I promise," he says. "I'm so glad that you're back where you belong."
finis.