existentialism on prom night, Heroes-style
I was talking to astridthemighty about the TV show Heroes S3 finale the other day, and I said something about philosophical stylings of the existential kind. This was just an idea that struck me for a fandom I'm not really involved in. It's probably a one-time thing, but I really wanted to write it.
Title: Gears Grind Down to Rust
Summary: Three to six months after the S3 finale. More and more lately, Nathan feels like he’s not himself.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Depressing themes, incestuous undertones if you really squint (but no more than the show’s canonical subtext), MAJOR SPOILERS for the season three finale.
Disclaimer: Heroes and its affiliated characters do not belong to me, I make no claim upon their rights or profits, and the following work of fiction is not connected to the show in any way.
<> <> <>
More and more lately, Nathan feels like he’s not himself.
He can’t quite put his finger on it, can’t even grasp it enough to explain it to himself. It reminds him of the day before a cold kicks in, when you wake up and know something is wrong but don’t know what yet, you just feel like your body is off-kilter somehow.
Sometimes, when he goes to scribble a memo to his staff, he picks up the pen with his left hand and starts writing without thinking. Most of the time, the wrong-handed writing comes out as a messy spider’s scrawl. Sometimes it comes out as somebody else’s neat block printing.
His life is almost perfect right now, or the closest it’s been for years. He’s a US Senator, the man who’s been trying to kill his loved ones is finally dead, he’s working to right his past blunders and with the new legislation he doesn’t have to worry about ever making the same mistakes again. But his skin feels like it’s sitting wrong on his bones.
He’s aware of the way different vocabulary rolls off his tongue every now and then, strange diction or strange pronunciation that he never had a habit of using before. He finds himself calling Peter by nicknames he never gave him. When he reads over his speeches, he spots the occasional word that he would never use. He can never remember his thought process for choosing the odd word, never even remembers actually choosing that word, and he crosses out all the things he doesn’t mean to write and puts in what he does.
He can’t cross out his dreams, though, and those throw him for a loop more than any vocabulary word ever could. Nathan has bizarrely vivid dreams, so real that they have to be about past experiences, only he knows for a fact that he never experienced them.
His brain tricks him sometimes, trips over itself and leaves unexplainable five-minute gaps in his memory. The blank spots blend so seamlessly with his consciousness that he wouldn’t even know that he’s lost any time, except lately he’s become hypersensitive to the passing of the minutes. He doesn’t care about clocks. All his life, he has never cared about clocks, only keeps the analogue ones around because they look more stately in his office than digital ones would. But now, when he walks by a clock, he sometimes gets the urge to stop and look at it more closely, and he doesn’t know why, doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
Mostly, though, he’s aware of the constant presence of that instinctive feeling he gets when he walks into a room and everyone else knows a secret he doesn’t.
<> <> <>
Angela tells him on a Tuesday.
Nathan is sure it’s a Tuesday because Monty has soccer practice on Tuesdays, and he spends all day wondering if Heidi would let him watch from the sidelines. He wouldn’t even say hi or anything, not if Heidi doesn’t want him to-he just wants to see his kids so bad, one glimpse of their smiles would be enough. He knows he’s lost any right to ever have them again, Monty and Simon and Heidi, but he thinks maybe he can try to at least earn back a small place in their lives.
His mother argues that he shouldn’t see them. He doesn’t understand her reasoning, and he doesn’t understand the intermittent headaches he keeps getting, the way his vision greys out at the edges sometimes and he has to sit down and when he opens his eyes again, he’s in a different room of his office and his mother is huddled in the furthest corner far far away from him.
Angela scrutinizes him with the level, studied gaze only she is capable of. Her lips are a thin line, and she tosses her head once, firmly, the way she does when she’s made a decision.
“Nathan, dear. There’s something I need to tell you.”
Afterwards, after the denials and melodramatics and yelling and tears, Nathan phones Bennett to check. It’s not like Angela hasn’t pulled off stranger schemes. He phones Bennett, and when Bennett picks up Nathan doesn’t say hello, he just asks “Who am I?”
And Nathan knows it’s not a ploy when Bennett doesn’t have to ask him what the hell he means. Bennett only says “I’m sorry.”
<> <> <>
Sometimes, he catches Peter looking at him like he’s mourning a dead man.
He thinks Pete knows.
<> <> <>
Your whole life is a hallucination-you’re actually someone else. Nathan tells himself this in the mirror and he can’t help laughing. It’s like an essay question from his mandatory Introduction to Philosophy class back in college, the class he thought was a complete waste of time because when the hell would he ever need to apply existentialist theory in real life? Guess the joke’s on him.
He tells his reflection that it’s not his true reflection, and he laughs until his breath hitches dangerously close to a sob.
Ironically, he does some of his best work when he’s not really himself anymore. He governs the way he’s always wanted to govern, exemplifies leadership instead of corruption. He earns Peter’s forgiveness and finally acts like as the big brother he’d always meant to be. He voluntarily chooses not to see his sons again, or Claire either, just in case he becomes a hazard, and it’s probably the single most unselfish thing he’s ever done for his kids.
Nathan wonders if his body had some inherent limitation that made it difficult for him to be a good person. Or is it because he’s not a good person at all? Is he doing a better job at it now because he’s actually someone else?
It makes no sense. IT MAKES NO SENSE, he screams to his empty bedroom, and if he thinks he hears a sinister chuckle in reply then that makes no sense either.
He tries to ignore the ticking of his bedside clock.
<> <> <>
Nathan’s afraid of dying, which he guesses is kind of stupid because they tell him he’s already dead.
Or is he? What does it mean, to be alive? He has the same thoughts and desires he’s always had, the same cells and DNA. The same heart pumps the same blood through the same veins, the same memory of Pete’s first word comes to him without effort, the same remorse for all the things he’s done pile onto the same shoulders when he tries to sleep at night. But does he have the same soul?
Is his soul already in Hell, a few steps faster than the rest of him, just waiting for his mind to join it? Or is his soul the real him, the real Nathan who’s already in the afterlife and who knows nothing of this still-living version of him? Nathan’s not sure he believes in souls, thinks of course this is the real him-but then again Matt Parkman made him think that.
He tells all of this to Peter, even the embarrassingly gushy bits about being afraid of death. He tells Peter because he’s losing himself more and more now, whole hours at a time. There are blank spots in his days, when he guesses Sylar...or is it himself? When either Sylar or the real him, he doesn’t know which one, takes over and crowds Nathan out into oblivion.
He tells Pete, and Pete looks at him the same way he did the first time Nathan forgot to come home for his birthday. Nathan remembers seeing Pete’s heart break all over his face-and then he wonders if he actually remembers it, or if it’s just Matt making him think he remembers it.
But Pete’s also heaving a huge sigh of relief, telling Nathan he’s glad he knows because he wasn’t sure how much longer he would’ve been able to lie to him. “Now I know you know and you know I know,” he says, displaying the Petrelli eloquence he didn’t inherit, “It’s all out in the open. Now we can talk about it.”
So he talks about it, to Peter, every night, either by phone or in person. Neither of them say a thing to Angela. It helps and it doesn’t help. Nathan’s glad to know Pete still thinks of him as him, but this makes it so much harder to tell Pete that he doesn’t think he’ll be him much longer.
“You’ll always be my brother,” Peter tells him, voice rough. His arm’s around Nathan’s shoulders and his nose is buried in Nathan’s hair, a complete role reversal.
Nathan tries to explain that no, not always. Not at breakfast this morning, when he looked down at a full plate of toast, blinked, and looked back to find an empty plate with the bloody traces of a rare steak, a knife in his left hand instead of his right and his toast in the trash. He can feel himself floating away in bits and pieces, and sometimes he thinks he can feel himself as Sylar.
“It’s just your imagination,” Pete says, refusing to let go of him.
Lately, Nathan sometimes sees (or imagines he sees, if Peter insists) in a weird mental double-vision. Sometimes, he looks at a photograph and sees it through his own eyes, with all the associated feelings and memories the photograph evokes; but at the same time, he can see it as someone else’s photograph, depicting a scene he knows about but did not actually experience.
The foreign thoughts feel just that: foreign. But what if they start feeling more and more like his own? What if he doesn’t go straight from Nathan to Sylar, like an on-off switch? What if he spends time in a transition period of Nathan-becoming-Sylar, where he remembers two sets of childhoods simultaneously, knows he should love his family but doesn’t anymore?
Peter hates it when he talks about becoming Sylar, Nathan knows he does. But Nathan needs to know that his loved ones are prepared, because at any given moment he could stop caring about whether they’re prepared and just want to kill them. Nathan perpetually fears his future self.
Peter hates it because he knows it’s inevitable.
<> <> <>
Nathan wonders if Sylar will remember being him.
He hopes not. He wants to be a real person, not an absurd memory in a sociopath’s head.
<> <> <>
He has a nagging urge to make sure his last words are for Peter, just in case. He texts him with a simple “I love you” before Sylar tells him to go to sleep.
<> <> <>
Peter flies to Nathan’s condo the second he receives the message on his phone. He crashes bodily through the balcony window, potential witnesses be damned.
He finds Sylar in his brother’s bed.
-end
Endnotes: inspired by Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. I’m fascinated by the idea of a person being fully aware of losing who they think they are, being unable to stop it, and being aware that they can’t stop it. I’d be thrilled if the next season went that way with Nathan’s characterization, but I know Heroes isn’t really that kind of show.
Title: Gears Grind Down to Rust
Summary: Three to six months after the S3 finale. More and more lately, Nathan feels like he’s not himself.
Rating: PG
Warnings: Depressing themes, incestuous undertones if you really squint (but no more than the show’s canonical subtext), MAJOR SPOILERS for the season three finale.
Disclaimer: Heroes and its affiliated characters do not belong to me, I make no claim upon their rights or profits, and the following work of fiction is not connected to the show in any way.
<> <> <>
More and more lately, Nathan feels like he’s not himself.
He can’t quite put his finger on it, can’t even grasp it enough to explain it to himself. It reminds him of the day before a cold kicks in, when you wake up and know something is wrong but don’t know what yet, you just feel like your body is off-kilter somehow.
Sometimes, when he goes to scribble a memo to his staff, he picks up the pen with his left hand and starts writing without thinking. Most of the time, the wrong-handed writing comes out as a messy spider’s scrawl. Sometimes it comes out as somebody else’s neat block printing.
His life is almost perfect right now, or the closest it’s been for years. He’s a US Senator, the man who’s been trying to kill his loved ones is finally dead, he’s working to right his past blunders and with the new legislation he doesn’t have to worry about ever making the same mistakes again. But his skin feels like it’s sitting wrong on his bones.
He’s aware of the way different vocabulary rolls off his tongue every now and then, strange diction or strange pronunciation that he never had a habit of using before. He finds himself calling Peter by nicknames he never gave him. When he reads over his speeches, he spots the occasional word that he would never use. He can never remember his thought process for choosing the odd word, never even remembers actually choosing that word, and he crosses out all the things he doesn’t mean to write and puts in what he does.
He can’t cross out his dreams, though, and those throw him for a loop more than any vocabulary word ever could. Nathan has bizarrely vivid dreams, so real that they have to be about past experiences, only he knows for a fact that he never experienced them.
His brain tricks him sometimes, trips over itself and leaves unexplainable five-minute gaps in his memory. The blank spots blend so seamlessly with his consciousness that he wouldn’t even know that he’s lost any time, except lately he’s become hypersensitive to the passing of the minutes. He doesn’t care about clocks. All his life, he has never cared about clocks, only keeps the analogue ones around because they look more stately in his office than digital ones would. But now, when he walks by a clock, he sometimes gets the urge to stop and look at it more closely, and he doesn’t know why, doesn’t know what he’s looking for.
Mostly, though, he’s aware of the constant presence of that instinctive feeling he gets when he walks into a room and everyone else knows a secret he doesn’t.
<> <> <>
Angela tells him on a Tuesday.
Nathan is sure it’s a Tuesday because Monty has soccer practice on Tuesdays, and he spends all day wondering if Heidi would let him watch from the sidelines. He wouldn’t even say hi or anything, not if Heidi doesn’t want him to-he just wants to see his kids so bad, one glimpse of their smiles would be enough. He knows he’s lost any right to ever have them again, Monty and Simon and Heidi, but he thinks maybe he can try to at least earn back a small place in their lives.
His mother argues that he shouldn’t see them. He doesn’t understand her reasoning, and he doesn’t understand the intermittent headaches he keeps getting, the way his vision greys out at the edges sometimes and he has to sit down and when he opens his eyes again, he’s in a different room of his office and his mother is huddled in the furthest corner far far away from him.
Angela scrutinizes him with the level, studied gaze only she is capable of. Her lips are a thin line, and she tosses her head once, firmly, the way she does when she’s made a decision.
“Nathan, dear. There’s something I need to tell you.”
Afterwards, after the denials and melodramatics and yelling and tears, Nathan phones Bennett to check. It’s not like Angela hasn’t pulled off stranger schemes. He phones Bennett, and when Bennett picks up Nathan doesn’t say hello, he just asks “Who am I?”
And Nathan knows it’s not a ploy when Bennett doesn’t have to ask him what the hell he means. Bennett only says “I’m sorry.”
<> <> <>
Sometimes, he catches Peter looking at him like he’s mourning a dead man.
He thinks Pete knows.
<> <> <>
Your whole life is a hallucination-you’re actually someone else. Nathan tells himself this in the mirror and he can’t help laughing. It’s like an essay question from his mandatory Introduction to Philosophy class back in college, the class he thought was a complete waste of time because when the hell would he ever need to apply existentialist theory in real life? Guess the joke’s on him.
He tells his reflection that it’s not his true reflection, and he laughs until his breath hitches dangerously close to a sob.
Ironically, he does some of his best work when he’s not really himself anymore. He governs the way he’s always wanted to govern, exemplifies leadership instead of corruption. He earns Peter’s forgiveness and finally acts like as the big brother he’d always meant to be. He voluntarily chooses not to see his sons again, or Claire either, just in case he becomes a hazard, and it’s probably the single most unselfish thing he’s ever done for his kids.
Nathan wonders if his body had some inherent limitation that made it difficult for him to be a good person. Or is it because he’s not a good person at all? Is he doing a better job at it now because he’s actually someone else?
It makes no sense. IT MAKES NO SENSE, he screams to his empty bedroom, and if he thinks he hears a sinister chuckle in reply then that makes no sense either.
He tries to ignore the ticking of his bedside clock.
<> <> <>
Nathan’s afraid of dying, which he guesses is kind of stupid because they tell him he’s already dead.
Or is he? What does it mean, to be alive? He has the same thoughts and desires he’s always had, the same cells and DNA. The same heart pumps the same blood through the same veins, the same memory of Pete’s first word comes to him without effort, the same remorse for all the things he’s done pile onto the same shoulders when he tries to sleep at night. But does he have the same soul?
Is his soul already in Hell, a few steps faster than the rest of him, just waiting for his mind to join it? Or is his soul the real him, the real Nathan who’s already in the afterlife and who knows nothing of this still-living version of him? Nathan’s not sure he believes in souls, thinks of course this is the real him-but then again Matt Parkman made him think that.
He tells all of this to Peter, even the embarrassingly gushy bits about being afraid of death. He tells Peter because he’s losing himself more and more now, whole hours at a time. There are blank spots in his days, when he guesses Sylar...or is it himself? When either Sylar or the real him, he doesn’t know which one, takes over and crowds Nathan out into oblivion.
He tells Pete, and Pete looks at him the same way he did the first time Nathan forgot to come home for his birthday. Nathan remembers seeing Pete’s heart break all over his face-and then he wonders if he actually remembers it, or if it’s just Matt making him think he remembers it.
But Pete’s also heaving a huge sigh of relief, telling Nathan he’s glad he knows because he wasn’t sure how much longer he would’ve been able to lie to him. “Now I know you know and you know I know,” he says, displaying the Petrelli eloquence he didn’t inherit, “It’s all out in the open. Now we can talk about it.”
So he talks about it, to Peter, every night, either by phone or in person. Neither of them say a thing to Angela. It helps and it doesn’t help. Nathan’s glad to know Pete still thinks of him as him, but this makes it so much harder to tell Pete that he doesn’t think he’ll be him much longer.
“You’ll always be my brother,” Peter tells him, voice rough. His arm’s around Nathan’s shoulders and his nose is buried in Nathan’s hair, a complete role reversal.
Nathan tries to explain that no, not always. Not at breakfast this morning, when he looked down at a full plate of toast, blinked, and looked back to find an empty plate with the bloody traces of a rare steak, a knife in his left hand instead of his right and his toast in the trash. He can feel himself floating away in bits and pieces, and sometimes he thinks he can feel himself as Sylar.
“It’s just your imagination,” Pete says, refusing to let go of him.
Lately, Nathan sometimes sees (or imagines he sees, if Peter insists) in a weird mental double-vision. Sometimes, he looks at a photograph and sees it through his own eyes, with all the associated feelings and memories the photograph evokes; but at the same time, he can see it as someone else’s photograph, depicting a scene he knows about but did not actually experience.
The foreign thoughts feel just that: foreign. But what if they start feeling more and more like his own? What if he doesn’t go straight from Nathan to Sylar, like an on-off switch? What if he spends time in a transition period of Nathan-becoming-Sylar, where he remembers two sets of childhoods simultaneously, knows he should love his family but doesn’t anymore?
Peter hates it when he talks about becoming Sylar, Nathan knows he does. But Nathan needs to know that his loved ones are prepared, because at any given moment he could stop caring about whether they’re prepared and just want to kill them. Nathan perpetually fears his future self.
Peter hates it because he knows it’s inevitable.
<> <> <>
Nathan wonders if Sylar will remember being him.
He hopes not. He wants to be a real person, not an absurd memory in a sociopath’s head.
<> <> <>
He has a nagging urge to make sure his last words are for Peter, just in case. He texts him with a simple “I love you” before Sylar tells him to go to sleep.
<> <> <>
Peter flies to Nathan’s condo the second he receives the message on his phone. He crashes bodily through the balcony window, potential witnesses be damned.
He finds Sylar in his brother’s bed.
-end
Endnotes: inspired by Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. I’m fascinated by the idea of a person being fully aware of losing who they think they are, being unable to stop it, and being aware that they can’t stop it. I’d be thrilled if the next season went that way with Nathan’s characterization, but I know Heroes isn’t really that kind of show.