hackthis_archive | Heroes - What's Love Got to Do With It? (Angela, Nathan/Peter, PG)

I, uh, yeah, this has been coming a long time. I can't even lie. It's so fucked up, I had to pat myself on the back.

Heroes
Angela Petrelli, Nathan Petrelli/Peter Petrelli
Spoilers through 1.18

What's Love Got to Do With It?

Angela Rosetti married Gordon Petrelli because she loved him. Or she thought she loved him. Of course she thought he loved her too. It didn't take her very long to realize she was wrong.

Or, maybe not wrong –- maybe just mistaken.

After all, everyone makes mistakes from time to time.

*

No one prepared Angela for being a mother -- for the anxiety, the pride, the all-consuming-love, the detachment. The day that Nathan was born, Angela nearly had a breakdown in her hospital room. No one else was around because Gordon was off doing whatever he did, and the doctors were off doing whatever they did, and her sister was on her way home to her own children. They left Angela alone with this little person. This beautiful, dark-haired baby who couldn't even open his eyes yet, who couldn't see Angela cry, and rock back and forth, and wonder what the hell she was going to do, because if she let him, Nathan would make her weak. He would break her down. He was so small, so fragile, he needed her so much. She could tell by his cries. She could tell by the way he clutched at her fingers and breasts mindlessly. But Angela couldn't be needed -- she had enough problems of her own. She had her own battles to fight: appearances to maintain, mistresses to dispose of.

Angela could try to protect Nathan -- be the mother she'd never had and love him the way her parents hadn't loved her -- but that wasn't what she knew. She knew only one way and life was hard enough. Her husband was completely incompetent and unworthy and no one had told her before her marriage. Angela couldn't deal with a baby too. Nathan would have to make it on his own.

*

Nathan was who Angela made him into: independent, self-sufficient, strong, fearless -- except for scraped knees and wobbling chins and the way she would turn away when he tried to show her his bleeding elbows. She did it for his own good. He couldn't be soft. He couldn't be weak. She loved him the best way she knew how -- by not loving him at all.

*

No one was more surprised than Angela when Peter came along. She and Gordon hadn't slept in the same room for years. Nathan was in boarding school. The house in Westchester was silent except for parties and mixers and the sloshing sound of the maid mopping on her hands and knees every Tuesday and Thursday. Angela's life was planned; it was perfect and it was settled. She didn't need another child. One was plenty.

The day Peter was born, however, Angela completely changed her mind.

She thought of her husband, who spent more time talking to the gardener than he did to her, and of Nathan who only called to say he wouldn't be coming home for school holidays. She thought of dark-haired babies and scraped knees and how much she had missed out on the first time around.

Angela didn't even know how to change a diaper when she took Peter home from the hospital. She made the nanny show her everything. She got up in the middle of the night when Peter cried. At three o'clock in the morning, she walked the hall that divided her from her husband with their son drooling and sniffling on her shoulder. Gordon never opened his bedroom door to inquire what she thought she was doing. That said plenty.

*

She could have pitted them against each other -- Peter and Nathan -- and at first she tried, but it just didn't work. Nathan was too old; Peter too young. Nathan was never home, Peter only saw photographs of him. When Nathan did come home, Peter acted as though Nathan was Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny all wrapped into one.

Nathan would look at Peter's curling hair and wide eyes, shake his head, and then he would fly Peter around like he was an airplane. Nathan would play hide-and-seek in the kitchen. Nathan would listen to Peter's stories about dragons and knights and swords and invisible men that Angela thought were only for her.

At night Peter would ask Nathan to read to him, and the first time Nathan cancelled a date with Cindy Armstrong-Jones because Peter had a cold, Angela knew she had to change her battle plan.

*

If she couldn't divide them then she would unite them against everything else. She didn't quite realize they would come to consider her a part of "everything else."

*

She doesn't know when it started. She tells herself she doesn't know what 'it' is either. She just knows that one day she looked up and Peter was in Nathan's space and Nathan was in Peter's space, and it was nothing like when Peter was small. Nothing at all. They touched too much. No one had taught them that, which meant that they must have learned it from each other. She could only imagine what else they had taught each other. She didn't want to.

*

Sometimes she wonders if this is perhaps her fault for sending Nathan away. If things might have been different if Nathan had been more of a brother and less of a visitor. If she had treated him as a son instead of as a soldier to be molded. If she hadn't been the one who urged him to go to Princeton, to join the military, to see the world, to go out and spread the Petrelli name positively. To do all the things his father never did.

Gordon never did love Peter.

Angela never did love Nathan –- at least not the way he needed her too -- either.

*

Sometimes Angela looks at her sons, at the passion they have for each other, and she wonders where it comes from. They love and hate and fight violently and hurt each other over and over again -– physically, emotionally, in ways she can't even imagine -- and yet, they keep coming back for more.

They always come back for more.

She doesn't know whether to be jealous or scared or horrified or marvel that they've made it this far at all.

Sometimes she tells herself that she's wrong. That they're not involved the way she thinks they are. That they're not so hopelessly entwined and ensnared and co-dependent and horrifically fucked up -- and then she remembers that she's made them this way. She wanted them to be together. To have each other. To be loved, and love, in ways she never has.

When she thinks of her suicidal husband, and the marriage that wasn't what she thought it was, and her children who aren't who she thought they would be, she wonders if this was what was supposed to happen all along.

Maybe she's mistaken.

Maybe it's not wrong.

They're stronger together than they could ever be alone.

And sometimes you have to lie to yourself to keep from falling apart.

--end--

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