The second child in a well-to-do family in Essex county, Massachusetts, Nicholas had the way in front of him clear to a good life - if the quality of life was measured in the quality of a career. He was pushed to do well in school, and he found that good grades came easily when he cared enough to work for them, and any beliefs that he was a prodigy were quickly dispelled when mathematics posed a continuing problem for him. Regardless of this, however, he remained in high standing within his classes, completing high school within the 10% of highest performing students. Although his parents pressed for him to attend Harvard like his older brother (as well as his father), he was the first in his family to rebel, instead attending Yale in Connecticut to study criminal justice (with a minor in political science), and subsequently enrolling at the Yale Law School, completing his university education in the expected time of 7 years, in 1987. Rather than stay in Connecticut or return to Massachusetts, he instead relocated to Syracuse, New York, not only because it was a close approximation to his hometown, but also feeling that there, he could make a name for himself in spite of his father and brother, both of whom had become successful lawyers back home.
He became a junior partner at a small practice and worked without great incident for two years. In 1989, three significant events took place, the first of which was a former client offering him an adjunct teaching position at Cornell University, which led to him teaching two classes in criminal law during the Fall semester. The second event was his realization that he had, somewhere along the line, become especially good at analyzing human emotion, and while he was nothing close to "feeling the pain of others", he was able to, with a little concentration and some careful wordplay, get a "feel" for someone else's mood. It's very possible that this skill - little more than a collection of old, well-known mentalist tricks - is what allowed him to forge a friendship with the otherwise "lone wolf" Judah Demsky, one of his students, simply by being one of the few at Cornell who could "figure him out." It also helped him professionally, and gradually turned him toward criminal defense, when he quickly learned that with the right line of questioning, he could make witnesses uncomfortable during cross-examination, forcing them "into the corner" without breaking any rules.
The third event was his representation in court of Virginia West, whom he would begin a relationship with after the suit was settled in her favor and marry the following year. In 1991, the Spring of which marked Nicholas' last semester as a professor at Cornell, the couple moved to New York City, where Nicholas began his own practice, specializing in criminal defense, the revenues from which provided them with more than enough to live well in the city, which proved to be important when Virginia discovered later that year that she was pregnant. The following year was marred when Nicholas received news of the death of Judah's sister Leah, but brightened with the birth of his daughter, Erica. Unfortunately, this proved to be the beginning of Nicholas' unraveling.
In mid-1998, six-year old Erica was enrolled in private dance lessons, both her parents agreeing that she seemed to have a natural attraction to dancing and they ought to try and encourage development of her skill. Her instructor was Charity Gosselin, whom Nicholas found to be both charming and irritating at once. He took an immediate liking to this paradox and set his downfall in motion when he began having an affair with her the same year. His wife became suspicious when his normal schedule became increasingly disrupted. In 1999, evidence gathered by a private detective, and much more infuriating, a full-faced confession from Charity, found him served with divorce papers and then in civil court, where he found himself out of his element and completely at fault with no excuse. Needless to say, he lost badly, with Virginia receiving full custody of Erica, four-fifths of their possessions (not including the practice) and the family dog (which by that point, was simply adding insult to injury). As it was more her fault than the P.I.'s that he was now divorced, it was three months before Nicholas would even speak to Charity again - but eventually he warmed up to her again. A year later, in 2000, Nicholas found himself stepping into trouble again with a second marriage, this time to Charity.
Despite being married to a younger, more energetic woman, Nicholas found himself less happy, for although Charity proved to be much more interesting than Virginia (as well as the fact that having a home, job and being in what appeared to be a stable relationship gave him to foot-hold needed to receive joint-custody of his daughter), she also proved to be more neurotic and demanding. Several attempts to conceive another child met with failure and were further aggravated after they purchased a town home in the Upper East Side, and Charity was repeatedly convinced she heard voices in the hallway adjacent to their bedroom. Although he himself never heard anything, he would investigate on the nights when she could not ignore them (which usually put her enough at ease to sleep), but when even that stopped working, he allowed her to bring in a priest to exorcise the "malevolent spirits" she was certain were haunting them. When that failed, Charity moved temporarily into a hotel; neither of them liked the arrangement (nor did Erica, who at the very least, found it silly), but it was the only way that Charity could rest enough to work. Hoping to do something good, Nicholas invited Charity's brother, Jean, down from Montreal to visit. It was during this stay that Jean let Nicholas in on the secret that there was a history of mental illness on their mother's side of the family. Concerned now that there might be a very real threat to Charity's health, he took her to a doctor and had several tests performed to determine the source of her "confusion". Nothing turned up that could have accounted for her behavior, and when Charity discovered what Jean had told Nicholas, she ordered him back to Canada and refused to speak to him from that day forward. Finally, pushed to the breaking point, Nicholas found himself in another extramarital affair as a means to escape - if only temporarily - from his wife's increasingly erratic behavior.
Unlike his previous foray, he did not find himself served with divorce papers. Rather than hire a P.I. to confirm her suspicions, Charity confronted him directly one year into it, and he elected to deny any involvement with another woman. Knowing that Charity still suspected (in large part because she was visibly trying that much harder to be the wife she thought he wanted), he saw his mistress less and less not only out of a feeling of guilt, but also because, in his eyes, his wife seemed to love him more than he loved her, consistently going beyond what she really should have had to in order to make the marriage work. Coupled with her increasingly erratic behavior and repeated attempts at suicide, Nicholas broke off the relationship with his mistress altogether and swallowed down whatever uncertainties he felt about his life, deciding that if Charity would put so much effort into being the wife he wanted, when it was obviously killing her, he would put in just as much effort into being the husband she needed. Much like his grades in school, their relationship improved again when he cared enough to try and for a time, both of them were happy, although her behavior continued to become more unpredictable over the years and reached a point where Erica didn't feel safe living with them. He arranged for his daughter to spend more time with her mother in the beginning of 2004, and his timing for this decision could not have been better. In the beginning of 2004, everything came crashing down.
When Nicholas returned home from his office one evening, he immediately rushed into the bedroom in response to Charity screaming, finding her in hysterics. His reward for trying to calm her down was to be stabbed three times with a pair of scissors. To this day, he doesn't know how the situation resolved itself, only that he somehow managed to subdue his wife and nearly crawl to the phone (completing forgetting that he had a cellular phone in his pocket). Both of them were rushed to the hospital when a neighbor called the police, and it took two surgeries before the damage could be repaired enough to allow Nicholas to heal on his own. Charity was another matter; the doctors told him, after several weeks, that his wife was a paranoid schizophrenic who had suffered a psychotic episode, claiming to have seen terrible things around her, and claiming also that her husband was some kind of monster; the skittish behavior Nicholas had described to them was an obvious warning sign, especially given her family history. Once again, Nicholas plummeted into depression, this time from guilt, believing that if he'd just tried harder from the start, things would have been different. He also could not shake the feeling that the whole mess was his fault, convinced that his philandering and constant catering to his wife demands had been slowly driving her insane. It would account for her increasingly erratic behavior as she found herself pulled further and further into a living hell. He made the difficult decision to have his wife committed to a psychiatric hospital in the hope that she could be cured, if by nothing more than distance from his influence. When he was well enough to be discharged, he decided that he would better serve the world by doing something "worthwhile". Closing his private law practice, he became a public defender, intent on serving someone other than himself in the world.
Even several months after the incident, Nicholas found his life suffering terribly. He was not sleeping close to as much as he needed to, and when he was able to sleep, suffered from persistent nightmares and became a hopeless insomniac. The master bedroom had been made once since the incident and had been left that way; trying to sleep in it caused severe anxiety attacks. Although he put on the bravest face he could for Erica, he finally decided (with a little pushing from Judah, whom Nicholas had reestablished contact with just before the incident) to have himself examined, and after several sessions with a psychiatrist, it was determined that he was suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. He was prescribed antipsychotics and began to undertake cognitive therapy to treat his condition, and while his personality did not recover, his nightmares became infrequent and he was able to take his life back under control. In November of 2006, he was fortunately not in New York City when the bomb exploded, instead having traveled with Erica to the McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts on a regular visit to his wife. Erica's mother was not so lucky; her body was recovered several months after the explosion in the rubble of the apartment complex where she lived in Midtown Manhattan. Nicholas' spirits fell when he heard the news, but they lifted again when Nathan Petrelli announced the existence of the Evolved the following February. At once, Nicholas had his answer; Charity wasn't crazy when she said she saw the things she did because she actually was seeing them (as far as Nicholas was reaching with this conclusion, it was all he needed to explain Charity's problems and, most importantly, put the blame somewhere other than on himself). By the time he arrived back at McLean, however, he found that he was unable to see her, and became very loud and aggressive when he felt that the reasons why were unsatisfactory. In the end, he saw himself out when he realized that he wasn't going to get any answers, preempting any attempt by security to remove him. On his way out, one of the doctors at the institution pulled him aside and, feeling it was her obligation, told him what had really happened: the hospital's director had turned Charity over to Homeland Security. Silently smoldering, Nicholas thanked her and returned home.
Although he desperately wished to file suit against Homeland Security and demand what they knew about Charity under the Freedom of Information Act, he knew that anything he tried would be effectively groundless. He also knew it would call attention to him and, knowing that DHS was already engaging in illegal activity, feared that he might vanish as well. There was also Erica to consider, and Nicholas could not ignore the fact that he was the only close parental figure left in her life. Deciding he couldn't do anything without putting himself and his daughter in undue danger, he kept quiet on that matter. However, he did not keep quiet about the hysteria surrounding the Evolved, rapidly becoming an activist and using his initial fifteen minutes not only to speak in support of the Evolved, but to verbally attack blanket sections of the public when he heard reports of mob violence. He continued to work as a public defender, but his cool facade began to show cracks now and then when the accused was Evolved, sometimes cross-examining witnesses with an unnecessary viciousness that began earning him verbal reprimands. When he was finally threatened with contempt, he calmed down, deciding that he was making himself a target. His therapist decided, however, that he did not need a higher dosage of his medication, instead recommending that he take up a hobby. He began to produce a bi-weekly podcast on his home computer, using a blog to vent his frustrations at the world at first and little else, until he began to attract a small following of perhaps a hundred New Yorkers, which he suspected were more interested in the podcasts for entertainment rather than information. Nevertheless, he began to incorporate actual news items and gave his take on different events, and especially how they pertained to the law and to civil rights.
He became especially outspoken in July of 2007, this time against the passage of the Linderman Act, calling it the "greatest violation of human rights in recent history" and trying to enlist the help of the ACLU in having it declared illegal and unconstitutional. No suit was ever filed and the Act stood uncontested. Giving up in the federal arena, Nicholas turned his attentions fully on New York, where his attempts to rally support for the Evolved met with near complete failure, although he continued to be visible and vocal on the matter. One year after Nathan Petrelli's announcement, Nicholas received two letters from McLean: one informing him that Charity had passed away suddenly from a brain aneurysm, and an anonymous note strongly suggesting that it would be best for him to keep quiet and let Homeland Security deal with the Evolved, instead of making life harder for everyone else. It was at this time, also, that he began to keep a gun inside his home in the event that Erica would need to use it. When PARIAH began bombing government facilities, Nicholas was interviewed by a local news station allegedly to gather his opinion on the matter as a pro-Evolved activist. When instead the interviewer suggested that he supported the actions taken by the terrorist group, Nicholas countered with the on-air question, "Are you fucking stupid?", before removing his microphone and walking off the set. Nevertheless, he supported the formation of SCOUT as an important step towards catching the real villains instead of "burning witches".
He has remained a fairly successful public defender, although he has not been big in the public eye as of late. Most recently, he has been in contact Rupert Carmichael regarding his plans for changing public opinion of the Evolved, as Nicholas' ability to gather media attention (as well as his blog audience) is an invaluable tool. Although the media campaign may involve an amount of lying and stretching of the truth, the end goal for Nicholas is to bring the hammer down on Homeland Security, and if that will take a little bit of lying, he's comfortable with that.
