Unexpected - Heroes
Title: Unexpected
Author: mutinousmuse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,021
Spoilers and Warnings: Spoilers through the S1 finale. Warning for vaguely incesty Claire/Peter vibes.
Characters: Claire, Peter, Noah Bennet (still getting used to that!)
Summary: One month after the blast, Peter returns to find Claire.
Author’s Notes: Monumental thanks to truemyth and txtequilanights for being amazing betas, and for holding my hand as I walked directly into the special hell. Characters not mine. Obviously.
Unexpected
Claire Bennett couldn’t fly, and half the time it seemed like she was just about the only one. But when Peter Petrelli showed up in her living room alive and intact and so very clearly not blown to radioactive bits… well, she might have flown then.
When the late afternoon knock at the front door gave way to a pleased-sounding greeting on the part of her father, she was mildly curious. After all, between killing his closest business associate and moving the family to Nowheresville, U.S.A. her father hadn’t exactly been getting a lot of visitors lately. Nor, for that matter, had she. But most days she was fine with that, all things considered.
Maybe it was the Haitian at the door, she figured, eyes drifting back to the month-old copy of Seventeen magazine sitting next to her on the couch. She was halfway through the quiz - an insightfully crafted piece allowing her to explore whether or not she was “girlfriend material” - which constituted the closest thing she’d had to intellectual stimulation since the ANTM marathon wrapped up Sunday night. The second semester of her new school started in a week, and Claire was secretly (very, very secretly) looking forward to it. Just a little. Spending the final year and a half of her high school career at some hole in the wall that had little more to recommend it than the fact that none of the cheerleaders’ brains had been forcibly removed of late wasn’t exactly a thrilling prospect. Still… anything beat listening to her mother craft spontaneous odes to the sublime beauty of Mr. Muggles.
She was deciding between “My dream date involves twelve roses, a limo and a four-star restaurant!” and “Barefoot on the beach works for me!” when her hand froze mid-air. Froze, because there was a ghost in the room, and Claire only sort of didn’t believe in ghosts.
The ghost had his hands shoved in his pockets, and apparently hadn’t read the ghost manual very carefully because his hair was a little longer than it had been when she’d last seen him, which didn’t make any sense at all since ghost hair wasn’t supposed grow. At least, she was pretty sure it wasn’t.
That was the part where she flew.
Ghost-Peter staggered back a few steps as 105 pounds of cheerleader collided into his chest, but there was no hesitation in the way his arms immediately came up to crush her closer against him. He felt like Peter and he smelled like Peter (a cypressy sort of smell that Claire hadn’t been aware of committing to memory), and all evidence to the contrary, Claire pulled back a few inches away and gasped out two accusing words: “You’re dead!”
“Only a little,” Peter replied, a hint of a smile peeking out from one corner of his lips. Claire’s eyes drifted to fix on the curve of his mouth as he spoke.
“How? I saw you explode!”
“I regenerated,” he said, and Claire decided she now understood the expression about heads reeling. “You saved my life, Claire.”
She thought she felt his fingers twist into the material of her shirt a little more tightly as he spoke, and she opened her mouth to respond. Before she could find out what she was going to say, a movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.
She turned her head to meet her father’s gaze, and immediately broke away from Peter to take two steps back. She felt a brief but intense rush of guilt which she immediately shoved aside. Who wouldn’t hug a newly-resurrected uncle, she reasoned, ignoring the way the skin on her back tingled a little bit where his fingers had dug into her skin through a very thin layer of cloth.
“We thought for sure you were dead,” her father said, moving to sit down on the loveseat. Peter followed suit, lowering himself onto the couch where Claire had sat moments before. An intense wave of surreality washed over her as she took in the scene before her: Peter, recently dead, sitting casual as you please on her sofa as though he’d just stopped by on his way home from the bookstore. Or whatever type of store he liked to go to. Feeling a bit light-headed, she allowed herself to drop down onto the opposite end of the couch, unable to tear her eyes away from Peter. She’d known that she missed him, but… she realized suddenly, maybe even epiphany-like, that she had really missed him.
“Me too,” he said, and she realized he was responding to her father. “I never really thought I could live through something like that.”
“What about - ” Claire blurted, the sentence stopping as soon as it had begun. She wasn’t sure what to call the man she’d known for only a few short days before he ostensibly blew himself to bits to save an entire city.
The pained look that shot across Peter’s face answered her unfinished question. For the past month she’d assumed that Nathan - her father - was dead. Nonetheless, at this clear confirmation, her chest quickly and unexpectedly crushed in on itself and her breath lodged in her throat. A painful feeling congealed behind her eyes and she looked away, vision settling on a picture of her father - her real father, she thought harshly - standing between her and her brother on some fishing trip she’d complained about the entire time. She took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out in increments.
But Peter’s alive, a small, insistent voice in her head reminded her. Peter’s alive, it continued, and he’s sitting right here, and he’s three feet away from you. Hints of the elation she’d felt moments before unfroze, putting cracks into the hardening pain that the verification of Nathan’s death brought. She fought back the sudden but intense urge to reach over and grab Peter’s arm and shake him, just to make sure he was there - really there. She looked up to see that he was staring at her with an odd expression on his face, almost as though he could hear her thoughts, and she looked away again.
“At first we thought, maybe…” Peter said softly, his left hand reaching out to crinkle a page of her magazine back and forth as he spoke. “After DL and Parkman stabilized, we started looking. Mohinder and I. We thought maybe Nathan had flown away fast enough…” His words trailed off into ambiguity , and no one spoke for a long moment.
It was her father who broke the silence. “Parkman made it?”
Claire wondered wildly who these people were, really were, and how they all seemed to know each other. In the past month she’d been filled in on the baseball card bios of these people whose lives were inextricably connected to hers, but they were more like characters in a movie she’d seen - not real to her, like Parkman apparently was to her father. In moments like these, she felt like she was assembling a jigsaw puzzle facing upside-down.
“Everyone else made it,” Peter’s voice broke into her thoughts, and she noticed that he’d placed an uncomfortable emphasis on the word ‘everyone.’ He met first Claire’s gaze, then her father’s. “That’s the other reason I’m here.”
Eyes widening, Claire felt an icy chill spread through her gut to battle with the other emotions already swirling inside of her. “Sylar?”
Peter nodded. “There’s more, actually. Molly - the tracking system - she said there’s someone else. Someone worse than Sylar. Someone who can see her when she thinks about him.”
“Who are these people?” Claire said, vaguely away that her voice sounded a little hysterical. “I thought we won.”
“Peter, I think you’d better stay for dinner,” her father said. He stood to walk into the kitchen, stopping to squeeze Claire’s shoulder on his way out of the living room. His face had regained the tight, nervous look which he’d begun to shed over the past month, and Claire told herself very sternly that she was not going to cry. She realized then that Peter was sitting much closer to her than he had been moments ago. He grabbed her hand and leaned in to look her in the eye.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She laughed, and the noise seemed to come from somewhere else in the room. “You come back from the dead to tell me that the world is still ending, and you want to know if I’m okay?”
“I’m sorry, Claire,” he said, the words seeming to tumble out of him as though they’d been held in his mouth for a long time.
“I know it’s not your fault,” she said.
“I’m sorry for before. For not telling you that we were going to see Nathan. I’m sorry that - ”
“Stop.” The word came out harsher than she intended, and she winced.
He released her hand as though he only just realized he’d been clutching it and sat up very straight. “Sorry.”
“Just stop apologizing!” she said, and the funny-sounding laugh was there again. “It’s okay. I’m not - you were dead, and I - ”
She stopped talking and her eyes narrowed in frustration.
“You what?” Peter’s eyes seemed seven shades darker than they had any business being, and Claire swallowed tightly.
She wished very intensely that Peter hadn’t let go of her hand.
Peter went very still, the odd expression from before returning to color his features. He turned away abruptly, picking up the nearest thing to him - her magazine - and glancing down at the open page.
“What is it?” she asked, a bizarre suspicion creeping into her thoughts. “Peter?”
When he turned to face her again, though, the strange look was gone, replaced by a comical, wide-eyed stare.
“Are you girlfriend material?” he asked incredulously.
The juxtaposition - Peter, her sofa, Sylar, Seventeen - suddenly struck her and Claire felt laughter - real laughter this time - pouring out of her. Peter raised an eyebrow and shook his head, and she felt some of the Sylar-induced panic begin to drain away.
“It just so happens that I am,” she replied, grabbing the magazine from his hands and tossing her hair over her shoulder. “I think. I hadn’t quite finished the quiz when you decided to go all Dawn of the Dead on me.”
“Well by all means,” he smirked, “don’t let me keep you. If I’d known you were doing something important, I would have come by another time.” He leaned back into the cushions, crossing his arms with an air of indifference as though he hadn’t just announced that the man who had tried to slice off the top of his head was alive and well and quite possibly planning on a sequel.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said.
For a moment his face slipped, sheer exhaustion contorting his features before a quirky sort of half-grin took its place. The look passed quickly, but Claire could still see hints of it around his eyes, and at the corners of his lips.
“So let me,” he said.
She exhaled softly and then nodded, turning sideways on the couch. She propped her bare feet against his leg and bent her knees to create a writing surface, determined to chase the illusion of normality for a few more minutes before the unavoidable dinner-table conversation about psychopathic telekinetics with a taste for tissue regeneration began. And if Peter stiffened a bit as her feet made contact wit h his thigh, well, she decidedly did not notice, pouring all of her energy into the quiz.
After a few moments, she snuck a look at him, noting the almost envious expression on his face as his eyes traveled across the family photos scattered around the room. There it was again - the strange itch to touch him which she had no business feeling - and she set her pencil aside.
“Hey, Peter,” she said.
He looked over at her. “Hey, Claire.”
“I’m really glad you’re not dead.”
He smiled at her, the first actual smile she’d seen on his face since he arrived. “Me too.”
~fin
Author: mutinousmuse
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,021
Spoilers and Warnings: Spoilers through the S1 finale. Warning for vaguely incesty Claire/Peter vibes.
Characters: Claire, Peter, Noah Bennet (still getting used to that!)
Summary: One month after the blast, Peter returns to find Claire.
Author’s Notes: Monumental thanks to truemyth and txtequilanights for being amazing betas, and for holding my hand as I walked directly into the special hell. Characters not mine. Obviously.
Unexpected
Claire Bennett couldn’t fly, and half the time it seemed like she was just about the only one. But when Peter Petrelli showed up in her living room alive and intact and so very clearly not blown to radioactive bits… well, she might have flown then.
When the late afternoon knock at the front door gave way to a pleased-sounding greeting on the part of her father, she was mildly curious. After all, between killing his closest business associate and moving the family to Nowheresville, U.S.A. her father hadn’t exactly been getting a lot of visitors lately. Nor, for that matter, had she. But most days she was fine with that, all things considered.
Maybe it was the Haitian at the door, she figured, eyes drifting back to the month-old copy of Seventeen magazine sitting next to her on the couch. She was halfway through the quiz - an insightfully crafted piece allowing her to explore whether or not she was “girlfriend material” - which constituted the closest thing she’d had to intellectual stimulation since the ANTM marathon wrapped up Sunday night. The second semester of her new school started in a week, and Claire was secretly (very, very secretly) looking forward to it. Just a little. Spending the final year and a half of her high school career at some hole in the wall that had little more to recommend it than the fact that none of the cheerleaders’ brains had been forcibly removed of late wasn’t exactly a thrilling prospect. Still… anything beat listening to her mother craft spontaneous odes to the sublime beauty of Mr. Muggles.
She was deciding between “My dream date involves twelve roses, a limo and a four-star restaurant!” and “Barefoot on the beach works for me!” when her hand froze mid-air. Froze, because there was a ghost in the room, and Claire only sort of didn’t believe in ghosts.
The ghost had his hands shoved in his pockets, and apparently hadn’t read the ghost manual very carefully because his hair was a little longer than it had been when she’d last seen him, which didn’t make any sense at all since ghost hair wasn’t supposed grow. At least, she was pretty sure it wasn’t.
That was the part where she flew.
Ghost-Peter staggered back a few steps as 105 pounds of cheerleader collided into his chest, but there was no hesitation in the way his arms immediately came up to crush her closer against him. He felt like Peter and he smelled like Peter (a cypressy sort of smell that Claire hadn’t been aware of committing to memory), and all evidence to the contrary, Claire pulled back a few inches away and gasped out two accusing words: “You’re dead!”
“Only a little,” Peter replied, a hint of a smile peeking out from one corner of his lips. Claire’s eyes drifted to fix on the curve of his mouth as he spoke.
“How? I saw you explode!”
“I regenerated,” he said, and Claire decided she now understood the expression about heads reeling. “You saved my life, Claire.”
She thought she felt his fingers twist into the material of her shirt a little more tightly as he spoke, and she opened her mouth to respond. Before she could find out what she was going to say, a movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention.
She turned her head to meet her father’s gaze, and immediately broke away from Peter to take two steps back. She felt a brief but intense rush of guilt which she immediately shoved aside. Who wouldn’t hug a newly-resurrected uncle, she reasoned, ignoring the way the skin on her back tingled a little bit where his fingers had dug into her skin through a very thin layer of cloth.
“We thought for sure you were dead,” her father said, moving to sit down on the loveseat. Peter followed suit, lowering himself onto the couch where Claire had sat moments before. An intense wave of surreality washed over her as she took in the scene before her: Peter, recently dead, sitting casual as you please on her sofa as though he’d just stopped by on his way home from the bookstore. Or whatever type of store he liked to go to. Feeling a bit light-headed, she allowed herself to drop down onto the opposite end of the couch, unable to tear her eyes away from Peter. She’d known that she missed him, but… she realized suddenly, maybe even epiphany-like, that she had really missed him.
“Me too,” he said, and she realized he was responding to her father. “I never really thought I could live through something like that.”
“What about - ” Claire blurted, the sentence stopping as soon as it had begun. She wasn’t sure what to call the man she’d known for only a few short days before he ostensibly blew himself to bits to save an entire city.
The pained look that shot across Peter’s face answered her unfinished question. For the past month she’d assumed that Nathan - her father - was dead. Nonetheless, at this clear confirmation, her chest quickly and unexpectedly crushed in on itself and her breath lodged in her throat. A painful feeling congealed behind her eyes and she looked away, vision settling on a picture of her father - her real father, she thought harshly - standing between her and her brother on some fishing trip she’d complained about the entire time. She took a deep breath, held it, and then let it out in increments.
But Peter’s alive, a small, insistent voice in her head reminded her. Peter’s alive, it continued, and he’s sitting right here, and he’s three feet away from you. Hints of the elation she’d felt moments before unfroze, putting cracks into the hardening pain that the verification of Nathan’s death brought. She fought back the sudden but intense urge to reach over and grab Peter’s arm and shake him, just to make sure he was there - really there. She looked up to see that he was staring at her with an odd expression on his face, almost as though he could hear her thoughts, and she looked away again.
“At first we thought, maybe…” Peter said softly, his left hand reaching out to crinkle a page of her magazine back and forth as he spoke. “After DL and Parkman stabilized, we started looking. Mohinder and I. We thought maybe Nathan had flown away fast enough…” His words trailed off into ambiguity , and no one spoke for a long moment.
It was her father who broke the silence. “Parkman made it?”
Claire wondered wildly who these people were, really were, and how they all seemed to know each other. In the past month she’d been filled in on the baseball card bios of these people whose lives were inextricably connected to hers, but they were more like characters in a movie she’d seen - not real to her, like Parkman apparently was to her father. In moments like these, she felt like she was assembling a jigsaw puzzle facing upside-down.
“Everyone else made it,” Peter’s voice broke into her thoughts, and she noticed that he’d placed an uncomfortable emphasis on the word ‘everyone.’ He met first Claire’s gaze, then her father’s. “That’s the other reason I’m here.”
Eyes widening, Claire felt an icy chill spread through her gut to battle with the other emotions already swirling inside of her. “Sylar?”
Peter nodded. “There’s more, actually. Molly - the tracking system - she said there’s someone else. Someone worse than Sylar. Someone who can see her when she thinks about him.”
“Who are these people?” Claire said, vaguely away that her voice sounded a little hysterical. “I thought we won.”
“Peter, I think you’d better stay for dinner,” her father said. He stood to walk into the kitchen, stopping to squeeze Claire’s shoulder on his way out of the living room. His face had regained the tight, nervous look which he’d begun to shed over the past month, and Claire told herself very sternly that she was not going to cry. She realized then that Peter was sitting much closer to her than he had been moments ago. He grabbed her hand and leaned in to look her in the eye.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She laughed, and the noise seemed to come from somewhere else in the room. “You come back from the dead to tell me that the world is still ending, and you want to know if I’m okay?”
“I’m sorry, Claire,” he said, the words seeming to tumble out of him as though they’d been held in his mouth for a long time.
“I know it’s not your fault,” she said.
“I’m sorry for before. For not telling you that we were going to see Nathan. I’m sorry that - ”
“Stop.” The word came out harsher than she intended, and she winced.
He released her hand as though he only just realized he’d been clutching it and sat up very straight. “Sorry.”
“Just stop apologizing!” she said, and the funny-sounding laugh was there again. “It’s okay. I’m not - you were dead, and I - ”
She stopped talking and her eyes narrowed in frustration.
“You what?” Peter’s eyes seemed seven shades darker than they had any business being, and Claire swallowed tightly.
She wished very intensely that Peter hadn’t let go of her hand.
Peter went very still, the odd expression from before returning to color his features. He turned away abruptly, picking up the nearest thing to him - her magazine - and glancing down at the open page.
“What is it?” she asked, a bizarre suspicion creeping into her thoughts. “Peter?”
When he turned to face her again, though, the strange look was gone, replaced by a comical, wide-eyed stare.
“Are you girlfriend material?” he asked incredulously.
The juxtaposition - Peter, her sofa, Sylar, Seventeen - suddenly struck her and Claire felt laughter - real laughter this time - pouring out of her. Peter raised an eyebrow and shook his head, and she felt some of the Sylar-induced panic begin to drain away.
“It just so happens that I am,” she replied, grabbing the magazine from his hands and tossing her hair over her shoulder. “I think. I hadn’t quite finished the quiz when you decided to go all Dawn of the Dead on me.”
“Well by all means,” he smirked, “don’t let me keep you. If I’d known you were doing something important, I would have come by another time.” He leaned back into the cushions, crossing his arms with an air of indifference as though he hadn’t just announced that the man who had tried to slice off the top of his head was alive and well and quite possibly planning on a sequel.
“I know what you’re doing,” she said.
For a moment his face slipped, sheer exhaustion contorting his features before a quirky sort of half-grin took its place. The look passed quickly, but Claire could still see hints of it around his eyes, and at the corners of his lips.
“So let me,” he said.
She exhaled softly and then nodded, turning sideways on the couch. She propped her bare feet against his leg and bent her knees to create a writing surface, determined to chase the illusion of normality for a few more minutes before the unavoidable dinner-table conversation about psychopathic telekinetics with a taste for tissue regeneration began. And if Peter stiffened a bit as her feet made contact wit h his thigh, well, she decidedly did not notice, pouring all of her energy into the quiz.
After a few moments, she snuck a look at him, noting the almost envious expression on his face as his eyes traveled across the family photos scattered around the room. There it was again - the strange itch to touch him which she had no business feeling - and she set her pencil aside.
“Hey, Peter,” she said.
He looked over at her. “Hey, Claire.”
“I’m really glad you’re not dead.”
He smiled at her, the first actual smile she’d seen on his face since he arrived. “Me too.”
~fin