Parallelism
Title: Parallelism
Characters: Nathan Petrelli, Peter Petrelli (no pairings, no slash)
Rating: G
Warnings: None
Word count: 800
Setting: Preseason. Peter is in his late teens. Nathan is nearing thirty.
Summary: Peter is a defiant young man growing up under the heel of an authoritarian father who has a supernatural power (unknown to his sons) to compel obedience. Nathan tries to counsel Peter to take the easy way out, but Peter refuses.
Notes: Inspired by chapter 13, “Being Charismatic” of The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense. And by means2bhuman saying I needed to work on Peter’s backstory, family interactions, and formative events that made him the man he is.
“Come on, Pete. Pay attention. Listen up.”
“Parallelism,” Peter said in a bored voice, slouched in his chair and staring up at the ceiling like this was just too much to bear. Really, he could be doing just about anything else that was more interesting and appealing than being grilled by his brother about rhetoric.
“What?”
Peter looked at Nathan, lazily ticking off points on one hand. “’Come’, ‘pay’, ‘listen’. Three commands, same structure, verb then whatever. But for the perfect cadence, you should have left my name out of it, ‘attention’ has too many syllables, and you’re mixing your sensory whatevers.”
Nathan smiled slightly. “Good! Okay, that’s what we need. It wasn’t what I meant, but I can work with that. How would you reframe it so it was better?”
Peter lifted his brows in mock disbelief and then looked away. “Come on, Nate!”
“I’m serious.”
He sighed heavily and didn’t give it a moment’s thought. “Why would I explain to you how you can best persuade me to do things?”
Nathan gave that slight smile again. Peter was painfully naïve, but he wasn’t actually stupid. If you could look past the demeanor and see what kind of person Peter really was, he was fairly sharp - at least by Nathan’s yardstick. Their father knew that, which was why he wasn’t going to buy that Peter just didn’t understand the lessons he’d been given. “Listen,” Nathan said, settling in close and confidentially, in a move that made Peter suspicious because it was as taught, trained, and premeditated as the verbal maneuvers Nathan was trying to impress upon him. “You know what the deal is here. You have to be able to show Dad that the reason the tutor says you didn’t pay attention was because you already knew all that stuff. Otherwise, he’s going to be pissed and he’s going to make you pay attention and do it all over again. You know how Dad is.”
Peter tipped his head forward, staring levelly at Nathan, his lips thin and eyes narrowed. Of course he knew how his father was. How could he possibly have forgotten, since he saw the man at the head of the table every night for dinner? If anything, Nathan was the one who didn’t know what it was like to be constantly under someone’s hyper-critical, never-satisfied eye, to be found wanting at every turn, and never allowed to forget that you were either an accident or an afterthought, but definitely not the perfect Petrelli son that his older brother was. No, Nathan wasn’t there for the comparisons or the insinuations. Peter didn’t hold any of them against Nathan. He blamed the one saying them, but there wasn’t a thing Peter could do about it … directly.
Nathan looked at him for a long moment, then sighed. “That’s it, then, isn’t it? You’re stewing for another fight with him. I should have known.”
“He can’t make me do anything, Nathan,” Peter insisted, and there was a raw tone to his voice that Peter hated to hear. It was desperate. It was afraid. Because when he faced his father and defied him, he always ended up doing whatever his dad told him to do. He always lost and that was so galling. It wounded him every time and made him doubt his own sanity. Surely he should be able to disobey if he really wanted to, right?
Nathan ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “You know what I don’t get here, Peter? You know the information. You’ve paid attention. You’re smart.”
“’Are intelligent,’” Peter said absently, looking away.
Nathan looked at him sharply, then said quietly, to himself, “You know the information; you’ve paid attention; you are intelligent.” He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s my point. Exactly.”
Softly Peter said, “It wouldn’t work as a contraction. You need that extra syllable in there, along with the stress to give the closing phrase the right impact.” He made a dismissive wave of his hand with the statements.
“Yeah,” Nathan said distantly, looking down at his little brother. He didn’t understand the battles Peter chose to fight when it was so much easier just to follow orders. He wondered if he’d made a mistake years before when he’d defended Peter to his father, persuading their old man not to send Pete off to military school to drum some discipline into him. Nathan had thought then that it would have been a disaster and broken Peter’s spirit to be forced to live his life by someone else’s dictates. Now, looking at the mutinous young man before him, he suspected that might have been kinder than what Peter was getting instead.