A case for Nathan's fidelity

[ivyfic]

A bit of Heroes meta that's been percolating for a while. Spoilers for all of season one.

We see Nathan cheat on his wife in the show, yes. But fanon portrayals of Nathan usually show him as unfaithful to his wife or not really caring about his wife generally. I think there's a case to be made that Nathan sleeping with Niki/Jessica was an isolated incident.

First of all, the show was intentionally showing Nathan as a villain throughout the first season. Multiple times we saw him sell out his family, chose his career over his family, cheat on his wife, lie to Peter, etc.—but we later get explanations that provide extenuating circumstances for all of his actions. The classic example is finding out that Nathan has been building a case against Linderman by acting as a mole for the FBI. In light of that, it makes perfect sense that he be as high-strung and career-obsessed as he is in the beginning of the series—he's got a lot at stake.

The same is true for sleeping with Niki—there are a lot more extenuating circumstances than we are initially led to believe. Look at the facts:
-He does not seek out a liaison; Niki comes on to him.
-He does not try to coerce Niki into sleeping with him and accepts her initial rejection.
-He seems completely uninterested in continuing their relationship or having a mistress. He treats it as a one-time thing.

I, for one, believe Nathan when he tells Peter that he just needed to be with someone who didn't make him feel guilty. His wife is paralyzed. It's quite possible that she can no longer feel sexual pleasure at all. Though she could still get Nathan off, sexual relations between them would be fraught, especially since Nathan is doubly guilty of her injury—first for involuntarily losing control of the car and second for going after Linderman which instigated the whole thing.

I don't want to get into an argument about the morality of cheating under these circumstances, especially since in the show it's clear that Heidi knows about it, is hurt by it, and chooses not to believe it happened. However, Heidi's paralysis and Nathan's feelings of guilt about it do change the circumstances of his cheating and at the least make it a lot grayer an issue than it first appears.

There is, of course, a counter-argument. One, Peter immediately sees through Nathan's lie and knows he cheated on his wife. This could be because he reads his brother easily, or it could be that Nathan's done it before.

Two, Linderman chooses to send Niki after Nathan to generate blackmail material—hard to believe he would do this without any indication that Nathan would take the bait. He might have without knowing if Nathan had cheated on his wife on the assumption that most men would at least allow their head to be turned by Niki. Or it's possible that a similar ploy worked on Nathan's father and Linderman assumed the apple didn't fall far from the tree.

In any case, I think it's entirely possible to believe that up until the accident, Nathan was completely faithful to his wife.

Fanon is of course invested in Nathan being a cheater because it opens him up to other pairings. You can't slash him with anybody if he's faithful, and I haven't seen a single person want to write Nathan/Heidi.

The show is invested in making Nathan appear despicable because his dubious morality allows the end of the season to be a surprise (well, to some people). But I tend to think of Nathan as a generally moral, loyal, if ambitious person who is at the absolute worst point of his life in season one. Just compare how he acts in "Six Months Ago" towards his wife and brother with how he acts in the present. If he's villainous, it's because circumstances have put him at his weakest, not because he has always been a villain. Which of course makes him that much more interesting.

Comments

[tirtzah.livejournal.com]

Bravo. I completely agree with your assessment. Based largely on how it was played I always got the impression that Nathan loved Heidi and was faithful to her up until the accident (after all it seems that it was largely to get revenge for Heidi that drove him to oppose Linderman even more than before) and the complications in their relationship from the accident were what drove him to cheat. I also doubt that he cheated very often before Niki, if at all, as doing so would be rather risky to his political standing if word got out.

Nathan obviously doesn't have the best track record with relationships (see: Claire's mom) but pre-accident Heidi doesn't strike me as the kind of woman who would put up with her husband running around if she caught wind of a hint of it.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I have theories about Claire's mom, too... But I also have a fic about it, so I'm holding off on the meta.

[tirtzah.livejournal.com]

That's what summer hiatus is all about, the fic writing. Happy Birthday, btw.

[linaerys.livejournal.com]

I can go either way about Nathan. I think that Niki might not have been the first time he cheated on Heidi, but it might be. Peter also seems upset enough with Nathan that it could be the first time that Peter knows Nathan cheated.

I can't see Nathan having or wanting a mistress on the side, but I can see him as having slipped up before. And he doesn't seem to be the type to wallow in that sort of guilt. If he did "slip" I can see him saying to himself, "That was fun, but I don't plan to repeat it, and it needs to stay secret from Heidi." I don't see him beating his breast and swearing "never again."

I get around seeing Nathan as basically faithful by believing canon, i.e. Peter is much more important to Nathan than any family that came after. Peter predates Heidi, and whatever form his relationship with Peter takes, I think Nathan would separate it in his mind from anything to do with Heidi. This is how I justify the bro-yay *g*.

I can't slash Nathan with anyone else, though. Well, without some contortions, like prison! He reads as very very very straight to me, except for with Peter.

Excellent meta.

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

I can go either way with Nathan. It's possible to argue that his self-centeredness is of the same type as Peter Parker's: he has to put himself first because he has greater responsibilities than just to his family. In the pilot, he pretty much dismisses both Peter's and his mother's problems, but his family has Drama with a capital D. Since he's in the middle of this extremely delicate and dangerous operation with the FBI, I can see why he'd see Peter's obsession with flying and his mother's shoplifting as things they were doing to him.

I just keep thinking about that scene in "Six Months Ago." Putting aside the broyay, he seemed very in tune with his wife and happy, as opposed to in the series where he doesn't even refer to his children by name.

If he's a villain, it's in the same way Linderman is. After the accident, it seems like Nathan's been gathering power to himself in the belief that when he controls things he can make sure everything is done right. It's almost self-less, his hunger for power. He wants to be President not for the rush but so he can cause the right changes to be made. Which is exactly what has led Linderman to be what he is—gaining power so he can control events. Linderman doesn't see himself as evil, and I don't think Nathan ever will either, no matter how far down that path he goes.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

From the way Adrian Pasdar played the scenes leading up to the infidelity and after, I'd have to say he was playing it as though this was a first time thing. The chatting up he does with Niki, talking obliquely about flying and his kids and family, is all so bittersweet and innocent, it seems like he's both trying to remind himself what he has to lose by cheating and what he's already lost in that regard (notably, his parallel to Niki's fugitive-but-still-married husband is his crippled-but-still-alive wife). It was one of the very few scenes where Nathan seemed almost cuddly, he was so vulnerable there.

When Niki-as-Jessica comes back, he's bitter and sort of curt with her at the door. I saw that as disappointment that the honest connection they had wasn't consummated, not irritation that he didn't get laid. As for whether or not she would have worked as blackmail for Linderman, it seemed not to be indicative of his past at all. Linderman knows Nathan has a weakness for blondes, period, and Niki's a sob story platinum bombshell who's just right to play on his sympathies (vis a vis Claire's mom). Once they revealed that, on top of the fact that Nathan was very willing to interrupt career tracking for that life (and that Linderman had known as much), it made it hard to believe that Niki wasn't just a one-time, get-out-of-infidelity-free one-night-stand.