Petrellicest.

"Think of it as a gift," he said, touching the little boy on the forehead with his thumb. "So you can do a little good in the world before your time comes."

"A little morbid, don't you think?" Mr. Petrelli said, as his wife watched the exchange with an unreadable expression.

"He's destined for great things, Mr. Petrelli," Linderman said, ruffling the child's hair as he straightened up. "Briefly."


Nathan didn't think of it so much as saving the world as not losing Peter's respect. As doing something to actually make him worthy of it.

When he'd thought about dying in a nuclear explosion – and he had, as Clare's words ("your own brother") and his mother's certainty and Hiro's whisper ("in the future, you hated each other") ran into each other in his mind – he'd thought it would be agonising, but only for a second before his consciousness was stripped from him and oblivion came.

He awoke in a field of wildflowers, a cold breeze blowing over his naked body as the stems rubbed against each other with a rushing sound like the sea over loose shingles. Nathan opened his eyes to an unblemished blue sky, framed with nodding flower heads, that seemed to stretch on to the ends of the earth.

"I don't believe in an afterlife," he said, his voice clear in his ears. The ground soil was making his back itch and he could feel some sort of insect walking over his left forearm in an exploratory manner, possibly thinking about where to lay some eggs. It didn't seem exactly heavenly.

"It's not heaven, it's Montana," Peter said from beside him. Nathan tried to sit up, but his body protested hard and kept him pinned to the floor. He settled for straining his eyes – Peter sat cross-legged in the grass, wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt and a beatific expression as he tapped a rye-head against his mouth and his hair raked this way and that over his face in the light wind. "Stay still," Peter added, watching him with familiar concern. "You need to rest."

"I'm supposed to be dead," Nathan pointed out. He felt right through every cell the burst of white-hot light that tore him from himself and scattered him through the atmosphere like atomic rain.

"You were," Peter said calmly, brushing his hair out of his eyes to no great effect, the rye head abandoned and forgotten. "I brought you back."

"What? How – " Nathan tried to struggle up again, but it was like a thousand cold heavy hands held him down against the ground, and fighting them made him dizzy. "How did you do that? Peter, you exploded. We should both be dead."

Peter shrugged and said, "I'm indestructible," as though he was saying, "I'm Italian."

"But I'm not – " Nathan's lungs backed him up by setting him off on a coughing fit that made his eyes water. He felt woozily better when it was over, although his throat ached. The thought came to him as suddenly as the coughing had: "Linderman."

"He visited us when I was four, you remember? He came to talk to Dad about something and you were just about to go out to softball practice."

"And you absorbed …" Nathan inhaled and tasted a multitude of pollen species on his tongue like flavoured sugar. He felt if he thought hard enough he could probably identify all of them just by guessing, which … Nathan frowned. It wasn't as though botany had ever been an interest of his, never mind a strong point. "You've made changes."

"Only small ones," Peter toyed with a daisy head. "I put you back together. It took a long time. I thought maybe I should give you something to convince you didn't dream the whole thing."

"How long?"

"I didn't mind, Nathan."

"How long?"

"About ten years," Peter said easily. He might have been saying "ten minutes" for the inflection he gave it. Like he was talking about waiting for the subway, or steak to cook.

"Ten years," Nathan choked, in case he'd misheard him. He scanned as much of Peter as his prone position would allow. As far as he could see Peter looked as absurdly young as he had when he expl – when the incident occurred – and a little less tired. Certainly not he face and hair of a man who'd spent a decade rebuilding his brother from the atoms up.

"I met a lot of people with a lot of different powers while I was … finding you," Peter explained, batting a fly away from his face, "and one of the first was a hundred and fifty year old boy. He hadn't aged since he was twelve."

"It must have been hell for him buying liquor," Nathan frowned. "Did you just read my mind?"

"Sorry. Habit."

"Ten years," Nathan stared up at the unblemished expanse of blue - he still couldn't move, and straining his eyes to look at Peter was beginning to hurt them – and felt the tide of his blood moving steadily through his veins. Every bit of him felt very distinct and very new, like a shirt just put on for the first time or perhaps more appropriately the skin beneath a scab when the scab is knocked away, all pink and fresh. "Why didn't you just forget about me and move on with your life?"

"You're my brother," Peter said, the same way he'd always said it – that ringing finality, the conviction that the bonds of siblinghood overcame and explained everything. "You are my life." Nathan had always thought Peter put far too much stock in family and their Mom had partially proved it, but here he was, not dead, because Peter believed in him still. "Also," Peter said in a much less intense voice, "You did kind of save the world. Maybe I thought I owed you the rest of your life back."

"I saved the world?" Nathan muttered, a little surprised. Ever since Mom had strong-armed him he'd been thinking of himself as the one who nearly destroyed it, and what Hiro said hadn't helped at all.

"Sure it was you. Nathan, you flew into space with a human bomb in your arms and let it blow you to bits, that's kind of the definition of saving the world."

Nathan tried to sit up again and this time the pressure on his body receded enough to let him prop up on his elbows and turn his head. "Does saving the world entitle me to some clothes, too?" He gestured down at his body – his appendectomy scar was missing, he noticed, and the absence of it made him feel oddly unbalanced – and half-smiled at Peter to show he wasn't mad about being naked in a field in Montana.

"There's some back at Gert's hut. She said we can borrow the place while she's away but she wants us out before we get back.

"Who's Gert?"

"A friend," Peter said shortly, getting to his feet. They were bare, streaked with mud, and he was wearing what looked like Bermuda shorts. Hardly appropriate attire for Montana. "If Gert's still there when we get to her place you mustn't stare at her, Nathan. It upsets her." He half-crouched and offered Nathan a hand up. "I mean it. It's hard not to at first but you have to try. She's been very kind."

Nathan used his brother's hand as a fulcrum to lever himself to his feet, acutely aware of his nudity and the soil clinging to his buttocks. He brushed some of it off and tried to figure out if cupping his genital while he walked was more or less dignified than just pretending he didn't mind being so exposed. "Is … Gert's … hut far?"

Peter pointed down the hill into a shallow river valley. Just before the land got flat and level with the river sat a wooden structure the colour of molasses with a washing line just visible at the back and a tin chimney poking out of the roof. There was no road leading up to it, no road anywhere in sight.

"Good," Nathan massaged his throat, which left like someone had jammed sandpaper down it. "I'm kind of thirsty," he said, meaning to explain his impatience away.

Peter held up his hands cupped in a bowl shape, and in the flesh vessel Nathan saw water shining.

"How did you – "

"Just change the structure of the air – make water molecules out of the oxygen and hydrogen that's already there," Peter proffered the water to him and Nathan bent awkwardly, slurping cold, thin-tasting water down with haste from his little brother's hands. " – It's so simple when you realise how. It can make it rain, too."

"Simple for you," Nathan followed him down the hill, trying to keep an eye on where his bare feet fell and not catch the new soft skin of his soles on any hidden rocks or worse. Peter didn't seem to care where his feet landed, and Nathan got the obscure sense that things were moving out of his way so as not to be under them when they fell.

The hut was further than it looked, and Nathan's body was new and stiff; by the time they started up to the single door in the four walls (concrete, Peter said, clad with wood inside and out, originally belonging to some eccentric 1960s survivalist millionaire who'd drunk himself to death long before ever seeing anything like the nuclear holocaust he was so afraid of) Nathan's thighs ached and his feet were very tender indeed, and his legs were pink-marked and stinging from the slaps of the long grass and wildflowers against them.

Peter pulled the door open without touching it and Nathan hastily tried to preserve what was left of his modesty as the owner of the hut blinked at them from the doorway.

"Peter," she said, staring at Nathan. "I was just leaving."

Gert – Nathan assumed this was her – looked like a dung heap that had been allowed to fester until it developed sentience; every inch of her skin (and all of was exposed) was covered in mouldy-looking blue-grey protuberances that looked like plague buboes. Her eyes were less bloodshot and more bloodwashed, as though the vessels had all broken at once, and she stood as though she had been kicked simultaneously in the back of the knees and the neck. Gert stared at Nathan as though he was an exhibit at a very strange museum and Nathan averted his gaze quickly. "This is your brother?" Gert asked eventually.

"This is him," Peter agreed, employing an apparently irresistible combination of Petrelli charm and bad grammar. It seemed that a lot went unspoken in that sentence, and Nathan wondered just how long Peter had known Gert, what secrets had passed between them.

Gert sniffed.

"Don't break anything important," she said, slipping past them both and – Nathan started, and then felt stupid for doing so – sank into the earth like a rock into a pond. He watched the ground for a long moment, but Gert did not reappear. He realised that he was watching for bubbles, like he used to when Peter dived into a pool, and felt even more stupid.

"She's off to Colorado for a week," Peter explained, gesturing inside the hut, "visiting her boyfriend. He's in hospital. He has emphysema – I offered to help them but she won't let me near him." He pulled a strand of hair out of his eye as he led Nathan inside. "Gert's very superstitious. She thinks I'm marked with death now, and all the time I spent working on you means that anyone else I touch will – " he shrugged.

"That's insane," Nathan said, looking around the distinctly homely two-room building for some sign of clothes.

"Gert talks to earthworms. When I'm not here they're the only company she's got," Peter said. "Insane isn't even a start." He put his hand on Nathan's shoulder. "Lie down. You're still weak."

"How do you know?" Nathan asked more belligerently than he'd intended. It was always possible that Peter had acquired the ability to read vital signs by telepathy or heat-vision or something.

"Your legs are shaking," Peter pointed out.

"Shit," Nathan said, and sat down. He pulled the flannel blanket over his lap and looked around. "So. 2017." Things didn't look very different, although he guessed that was because they were in Buttfuck Nowhere, Montana. Civilisation had never kept up with the rest of the world in places like this.

"No, 2008."

"What?" Nathan frowned.

"I brought us back. About six months after I …you know," Peter said quietly. "I can bend time. And I didn't want you to be too disoriented when I brought back from – when I woke you up. 2017 is too weird for someone who just died. It's too weird for anyone."

Nathan thought about his family; six months of believing him dead must be preferable to ten years. They wouldn't have forgotten him yet. He wondered how Heidi was getting on. If she was still walking now –

"I watched her start training for the New York Marathon," Peter said with a slightly sentimental smile."

"Stop doing that."

"Sorry. She's fine, Nathan. Mom's taking care of her and the boys."

"And Clare?"

"Back with her father."

"I'm her father."

Peter shook his head. "C'mon, Nathan. Noah - Mr. Bennett – is her dad. You know that. She might have your genes but she's his daughter." He sat down on the bed next to Nathan, the warmth of his proximity like a beacon in a dark room. "How're you feeling?"

"Weird," Nathan said without thinking. "It's not normally you taking care of me."

"I'm a nurse," Peter reminded him, "it's what I do."

"How fast can you nurse me back to full health then, Peter Linderman?" Nathan asked a little sarcastically. "I need to get back to Heidi and the boys."

Peter shook his head, looking alarmed. "You can't do that."

"Can't do what?" Nathan gave his brother a dangerous look.

"You can't go back to them, Nathan. Do you have any idea how many people are looking for us? What will happen to them, to Mom, to you, if anyone has the slightest inkling we're still alive?" Peter sighed. "Lie down."

Nathan stared. "Who is looking for us?"

"All of Dad's associates, for one. All the ones who aren't dead, anyhow." Peter looked momentarily distraught and added, "Mr. Bennett's been taking a hard line in cleaning house."

"Cleaning house?"

"Dismantling the company. He has a few people – Candice, that Haitian guy, people who aren't too stable – locked up somewhere he says is secure and the rest of the company he's putting a stop to. A really permanent stop."

"Why?" Nathan recalled Mr. Bennett, a deceptively mild-looking bespectacled man, and the incredible lengths he was prepared to go to –

"To keep Clare safe," Peter said simply. "I don't think we want to get in the way. There isn't really any kind of limit to what he'd do to protect her."

Nathan swung his legs clumsily onto the bed and lay down, soft blankets dipping beneath him. It felt almost like being cocooned in silk. He hated to admit it, but he felt tired to the very skin and lying down was proving an immeasurable help.

"I'm going to get us something to eat," Peter said, standing up. "You get some more rest, let your cells regenerate properly. They're going to be doing that for a while – well, I mean they're going to be doing that constantly for the rest of your life, but they need to get up to speed first."

Nathan reached out and grabbed his brother's wrist as he passed. Peter came to an immediate halt, which was pretty funny considering all the ways he could have just carried on right on walking. Some of them would have left Nathan with his own arm intact, even. "Peter."

"I'm still here."

"Why did you do this?"

"I told you. You're my brother. You're the only family I've got I won't endanger just by talking to." Peter put his hand over Nathan's at his wrist, and gave it a friendly squeeze. "I needed you."

Nathan's laugh was a little hoarse and very sardonic. "You're about the most powerful person on the planet, Peter. You don't need me or anyone else."

Peter peeled Nathan's hand off his wrist and placed it gently back on his own chest. "Not everything is about power." He leaned down at the waist to plant an almost fatherly kiss on his brother's forehead. His lips were hot.

When he had, he paused above Nathan's face as though struck by a thought, and gave Nathan a brief and searching look before kissing gently on the mouth.

It had been a very long time since either of the Petrelli brothers had been moved to kiss each other thus – Nathan vaguely remembered his grandmother's funeral in Naples, the heavy rain turning his juvenile suit an even darker black, pulling a sobbing Peter to him under the cover of an umbrella and kissing his round child's mouth in imitation of the old lady, to quiet him – but Nathan was sure it never made his breath catch before.

Peter pulled back again and performed another deeply searching look on Nathan's eyes, his hand resting on his shoulder as light as a sunbeam. Nathan put his hand to the back of Peter's neck, meaning to bump foreheads and tell him everything was okay now; somehow his mouth found Peter's instead and this time their lips were parted, parted enough for breath to pass from one to the other and pretty soon parted enough for Nathan's tongue to bridge the gap.

His tongue-tip had touched Peter's tongue-tip when the electric jolt of blood to his groin made him pull back uneasily – but reluctantly, reluctantly – and murmur, "Christ, Peter, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean – " without taking his hand from Peter's neck. Perhaps that robbed the statement of a little of its sincerity.

Peter's only answer was to bump noses and whisper against his mouth, "I needed you back. I wanted you back," their lips grazing with each word, hot breath seeping from Peter's lungs to Nathan's. His kisses were heavy and thick, like blows to the head, but soft, soft s a girl's; and each time Peter seemed like he was yielding a little more Nathan pressed his mouth harder against them, his tongue driving deeper into Peter's mouth.

Peter scrambled onto the bed without breaking their kiss, an awkward operation of moments that involved them smacking teeth at least once and Peter elbowing Nathan in the sternum, and Nathan found himself cradling the back of Peter's head in his hands, his fingers deep in his brother's dark hair. Peter pressed his whole body against Nathan's like a blanket, rippling over him, and Nathan felt a pang of worry and shame because surely, surely Peter could feel Nathan's erect penis sticking into his stomach as he moved, rubbing over the head of it with sometimes his t-shirt and sometimes his bare stomach. Nathan felt Peter's hand on his penis – a brief, reassuring stroke – and thought to himself that of course Peter knew.

"This is wrong," Nathan muttered half-heartedly as Peter's mouth broke contact with his, moving instead to his jugular and making his pulse race even more.

"Tell me you don't want it," Peter breathed, his hand sweeping over Nathan's penis again, making him hiss and arch involuntarily.

"You know I can't," Nathan sighed, slipping a hand up the hem of Peter's t-shirt to caress his stomach, his flank, his spine; the taut skin under his fingers like velvet. "But you shouldn't – I shouldn't – "

"There's not shouldn't here," Peter said, cleaving to Nathan's touch like filings to a magnet and in the process sending white-hot sparks into Nathan's brain. "Here, now, Nathan, you can do whatever you want."

Nathan kissed Peter's neck rather feebly.

"You can do whatever you want to me," Peter added, his voice thick and low, and all at once Nathan had rolled them both over and pinned Peter to the bed. Which was ridiculous, because Peter could snap Nathan in half like a Q-tip without even trying, but he seemed content – more than content, judging by the tenting in his shorts – to let Nathan slam him down against the hard mattress like he was helpless.

Nathan's fingernails dug into Peter's shoulders from the front, like shovel blades into soft earth. He felt like an electric wire, all primed up with no idea of what he was to do, Peter's thin clothed body squirming beneath him while his brain dithered between a thousand possible outcomes.

Peter took Nathan's wrist again and dragged his hand to his throat, closing his fingers over Nathan's until Nathan was clutching Peter's neck. He took Nathan's other wrist and locked eyes with him, whispering, "do it."

"Peter …" Nathan shook his head. There was the kind of wrong where your god-like little brother brought you back from the dead, apparently for sex, and there was the kind of wrong where you, naked and aroused, kissed your little brother (who could bend time and reverse death and walk through walls but who pretended he couldn’t say "no") passionately and at length, and then there was this, which was a whole new genus and species of wrong. "I'm not going to choke you."

"I want you to."

"I can't – Peter – this really is wrong. I've spent my whole life trying to make sure no one hurt you, I can't – " Nathan muttered, but his hands tightened minutely around Peter's neck. His skin felt inviting, soft and warm, and like it would bruise at the merest pressure. Nathan realised he was staring to squeeze and forced himself to stop.

"You want to," Peter breathed, eyes still locked to his brother's. "I can see it. I can hear you thinking it, I can hear it in your blood and your heartbeat. I can smell it in your sweat."

"But I'm not going to," Nathan insisted softly, his thumb stroking absently the line of Peter's windpipe while the other pressed lightly, lightly, into the hollow at the base of his throat.

"I can make you," Peter smiled, his hands lazy in his own hair now. Nathan could feel his brother's erection against his thigh, driving his own even harder and more insistent.

"Please don't," Nathan whispered, but it was too late.

In a voice like the hand of God upon his mind, like an army chanting in time, Peter said, "choke me, Nathan. Choke me 'til I pass out or die."

Nathan's body moved like the most graceful marionette ever made, completely beyond his control; his hands tightened and Peter's breaths became ragged and short. Nathan tilted his hips against Peter's stomach as Peter's hands wound deeper into his own hair and his face began to change colour and a sound like a stuck drain came from his mouth –

NOTHING.

Nathan's hands were his own again. He snatched them from Peter's throat and used them to check his breathing. His pulse. The movement of his pupils in response to the light –

NOTHING.

Then, like a clap of thunder, Peter's gasp for air, his panicked pants off-setting a look of bliss; - he came. Nathan could feel the rush of warmth and wetness against his body – and for a moment he tried to jolt upright. Instead Peter jerked his hands from his head, cupped them around Nathan's unresisting face, kissed him slow and languorously, and fell back on the bed with a look of satiation that was so total as to be almost obscene.

"That," Peter said with a dazzling smile – Nathan was startled by how unfamiliar it looked, having been away for so long – "that was amazing."

"You died," Nathan croaked.

"Coming back to life is …" Peter looked down at the sticky mess gluing their lower bodies together with a thin veil of sodden fabric between. "It's unbelievable."

"You've done that before," Nathan said suspiciously. Peter didn't look shocked enough. He didn't seem like it had been a risk to him.

"Well, yeah."

Nathan felt something like a fist strangling him from the inside of his windpipe. His face went hot. "Who?"

"You."

"… what?"

"Future-you," Peter said, as though that explained everything perfectly. Unfortunately, it actually kinda did. "That's how I knew I was going to succeed. He's – he's used to doing that, I guess."

"Future-me strangled you to death as some sort of sex thing," Nathan said, trying to straighten it out in his head, or possibly make it sound a little less freakish. Now his preternaturally prolonged existence contained incest and time-travel and killing for orgasms, and there was still always the chance that the day could somehow get even weirder.

Peter's only answer was to peer at him through his eyelids and stroke his cheek with the tips of his fingers. Nathan turned his head instinctively and took them in his mouth for a brief kiss, let them trail from his lips wet and suggestive. His cock throbbed, his balls ached, and Nathan's heart lurched and skipped in his chest.

"Nathan," Peter murmured, raising himself up on his elbows.

"Huh?"

Peter reached down between them and – pushing Nathan gently away (either with his hand or his mind, Nathan couldn't tell) for a moment – he rolled off his sticky, ruined shorts, leaving Nathan's gaze to wander leisurely over his soft-but-not-yet-soft cock, and up over his bare belly and chest as Peter pulled his t-shirt off.

"Nathan," Peter repeated, drawing his legs up around Nathan until his knees were level with Nathan's head, "are you going to fuck me or am I going to have to use the voice again?"

"No need for the voice again," Nathan said hastily, his hard cock brushing accidentally on Peter's thigh and making them both shiver. The Voice bothered him. "I was just … I was just worried. We don't have any lube."

"We won't need it," Peter assured him, pulling his legs higher and further apart. "You won't believe the things this body can do, now."

He was right.