who| Heidi and Nathan Petrelli what| Birthday gifts, continued. where| The Hyperion; LA when| October 27; Evening rating| TBA status| Thread; In-progress and incomplete.
While it might have occurred to Heidi to emplore Elaine to simply bring it back from their time line, there was something altogether satisfying about outbidding harvardfreek_6669241 on the only burgundy Harvard sweatshirt circa the time Nathan had attended the Ivy League that wasn't besot with sweat stains or other disturbing additions to it's appearence added by time. 'Almost pristine' was close enough to be accurate, she thought as she extracted the sweatshirt from it's mailer. Her hands would soon see to taking care of that, and a perfect starting point would be better than one with the traces of someone else's life attached.
Aging a sweatshirt more than a decade in a week was not an easy task(Particularly when fog and sidewalks-turning-to-hellfire kept getting in the way.). Still, she was determined to see it done, and loaded two handfuls of bricks into the back seat before she headed for the heavy-duty laundromat across town.
Over the next several days, patrons of self-service laundry establishments across LA found themselves treated to all manner of alarming clangs and clatters as the woman with the dark hair who had dumped bricks or gravel or two packages of economy-sized lugnuts in with one sweatshirt sat in a chair against the wall and complacently read her way through a paperback novel. When the sweatshirt was broken in and faded a satisfactory degree, she went about replicating the signs of personal wear-and-tear. A few teabags in every third wash, a stretched bit of seam on the left, and after consulting Sarah for tips without speficying the reasons, sandpaper to wear down the neck and wrist banding, and a wire brush to create fuzzy patches as best she remembered them.
There were other marks; a faded sharpie line on the underarm from Simon's artistic toddler years, a small hole in the right shoulder that had been patched from the inside, and a singed drawstring from one of his many attempts to cook her breakfast during the honeymoon. She was once again greatful for Elaine having brought her scrap books from New York; as while her memory served to be accurate yet; she had forgotten just how worn one of the cuffs had been.
She washed it one last time while Nathan was preoccupied with adjusting to his new office, and the clock in the laundry room read Ten PM when she pulled it out of the dryer. It had to be warm still when she reached him, so she made quick work of shedding her shirt, shimmying out of the skirt, and pulling the sweatshirt on. Over the (reduction of) clothing went a similarly just-dried blanket. Heidi listened outside the door for five seconds before deeming the hallway clear, and made a break for the stairs. She had to duck around one up the second floor corners as the elevator doors opened and someone headed in the (thankfully) opposite direction. She slapped the birthday bow onto the blanket at the office door, and knocked twice.
"Nathan?" She called as she slipped inside the office, not risking either the remaining dryer heat or the absence of other hotel-dwellers to hold out.