I own nothing, ya’ll. I wish I did, but it’s Kring and Co’s, so I’m just borrowing.

Chapter Eight

“Father’s Day”

Peter Petrelli and Claire Bennet

Peter’s Apartment, Lower East Side

Peter had become accustomed to Claude’s snark, as well as the older man’s tendencies to stop by whenever he felt like it. Hell, maybe it was because Nathan exhibited the same types of behavior. What Peter had yet to experience was both at the same time, with a whopping heap of livid yelling on top of it.

“What the bloody hell did you do to my pigeons!” Claude bellowed, after blowing through Peter’s front door.

Claire heard the one-sided yelling from Peter’s bedroom, and poked her head out of the door. Peter was pinned up against a wall by his lapels by an invisible force, which Claire knew, from the voices, had to be Claude. Plus, this was a position that he held his pupil in a good 60 of the time. Claire nonchalantly made her way into the living room, yawning and waiting for the men to settle their daily spat.

“They’re not your pigeons,” sighed Peter irritably, “and I let them go so they wouldn’t get hurt.”

Claire saw Peter relax against the wall, and realized that Claude must have let him down. The front door closed supposedly on its own, and the girl heard footsteps trotting over to the middle of the living room.

“’Ello, dear,” he said more gently towards Claire. She smiled, looking nowhere in particular, as not to make herself look stupid trying to find an invisible man.

“So, what,” Claude was snapping again, rounding on Peter. “You let the birdies go, but what about the cages? They were unrecognizable!”

Peter looked sheepishly at his feet. “I got upset and it just sorta happened…”

A punch-the third punch in their whole time together, in fact- came from Claude and hit Peter in the jaw so hard that a loud craaaack echoed throughout the foyer. Claire slumped lazily into a chair. Normally, she’d be putting her own skin on the line trying to protect Peter from Claude’s rawness, but she had taken a new view on things. It was tough love the man needed, after all. She hadn’t been afraid to show it last night, and it had ended up bringing him back to reality.

Besides…he was indestructible.

“My birds don’t have any place to stay, I’m stuck, and your Simone lady’s gonna be calling you on the telephone for vandalism,” Claude paced the room, shaking his head in disdain.

“Will you stop worrying about the birds?!” cried Peter, waving his arms around, frustrated. “They’re birds, it’s New York, and they’ll find a home! And I doubt Simone’s going to be calling the police, for a million different reasons. It’s not a big deal, the cages were falling apart anyway-,”

Claude cut him off. “Shut your trap, lad. I don’t want to hear you anymore until you have something mildly intelligent to say. And no, Emc2, Carl Sagan quotes, and poking at your brother doesn’t count.”

Poking at your brother. Nathan’s call! Claire’s memory was suddenly jogged. She had forgotten to mention Nathan’s voicemail to Peter the night before. In her defense, after seeing the nurse swagger out of the shower soaking wet and in nothing but a towel, Claire justly thought that remembering her own name would be a strain.

Peter himself had been apprehensive before (back in the beginning, he was so afraid he was going to look like a pervert that he felt uncomfortable even touching Claire on the arm), but now that he and Claire were friends, his sheer manly instinct was to show off, get an inkling of what she thought of his lean, wiry form.

Seriously hoping that Peter hadn’t taken a peak inside her less-then-innocent thoughts at that moment, Claire distracted herself with tossing Peter her Sidekick. After booting it up, he found that there was indeed a message from his brother’s cell in the voicemail box.

Neither Claire nor Claude could hear what Nathan’s message ranted about, but from Peter’s constantly shifting expression, it was obviously not what any of them wanted to hear.

“Hey, Pete. I know this is Claire’s phone, but you can’t splurge for voicemail, apparently. Will you get yourself an answering machine, already? Honestly. Besides that, Suresh called me today. He’s got a little problem with getting the cure worked out. I…well…I stole a hairbrush from the bathroom the day before yesterday, when I visited you. I tried to steal your DNA for the cure, even if you said no. I’m sorry, Peter, it’s something I’ve gotta do. I’ll explain more later. For now, I…took home the wrong hairbrush. I think it was that girl you’re with, it’s hers. Now, Mohinder sill needs your DNA. I’ll come by tomorrow to get it. And…remember our deal Peter.”

Peter hung up glumly. “What, has ‘goodbye’ become overrated, Nate?” he muttered.

“What did the dolt want?” asked Claude, who was investigating a bottle of sparkling wine on Peter’s corner wine table.

Her friend made an unhappy noise. “I figured out why your hairbrush is missing. Nathan took it to Suresh, because he thought it was mine. He tried to steal my DNA and give it the scientist, so they could start working on a cure. But, obviously, since he grabbed the wrong brush, Mohinder has the wrong DNA, and Nathan’s coming back today to get some of mine.”

“Stole it?” exclaimed Claire incredulously. “Your own brother; who does he think he is?”

“Uh, he is Nathan Petrelli, my overly ambitious and selfish asshole of a brother,” Peter grumbled. “But I guess I have to give it to him. We have our deal and all.”

Claude’s ears perked up from the alcohol that was distracting him. “Deal? Cure? What did I miss?”

Peter explained in the shortest way possible about the deal that he’d made with Nathan: his power for Claire to meet her real father, Lewis Rushton. Claude nearly dropped the wine.

“Your powers? You can’t give up your powers!”

“I have to,” replied Peter bluntly. “It could be just as well. With me powerless, New York could be saved.”

Claire loathed talking about this. The past couple days, she had been content to keep the deal, and the upcoming apocalypse on the backburner of her mind. She’d never lived in the moment so much in all her seventeen years. Now, she was involuntarily reminded that Peter was coming close to his death, he’d be losing his powers soon, and she may or may not get to se her real father.

For some reason, Lewis Rushton barely seemed important anymore. The whole world had revolved around Claire finding the man, but her search had been halted with a big stop sign and a smack in the face. What if Nathan was just leading Peter on, trying to get his little brother to take the cure on good faith, when there was nothing but lies behind the fake alligator smile?

“But what if it’s not you that explodes? What if it’s Gabriel, or some other guy? What if it’s an actual bomb? They’ll need all of your powers to stop it!”

Peter was momentarily stunned at the care that Claude had been masking for their impending situation. It lifted his spirits a bit; the hermit wasn’t so stoic after all.

“Claire’s father,” Peter groaned. “It’s important to her; I promised her we’d find him.” He found that his breathing was more constrained, and it was harder from him to talk. Whether it was fatigue or two metahumans with him in the room at the same time, it wasn’t making him feel pleasant at all. The oddest thing was, it was like he could sense them there. Closing his eyes, Peter still could feel exactly where Claude and Claire were standing. He could saw a sort of glow coming about their general shapes in his insightful mind.

“It’s not that important anymore,” announced Claire, standing up from the clothed chair and walking over to him. “It’s not meaningless, but it’s not worth what you’d have to do. You need you powers. We need them.”

“And did you ever stop to think that maybe your bro’s just tossing you bread crumbs, and leadin’ you to the gingerbread house, only to cook you up and stab you in the back?” Claude pointed out, saying exactly what Claire was thinking.

“If that was some long way of saying that Nathan’s lying to me, then no,” Peter said crossly. “He’s family; he wouldn’t do that to me.”

“Coming from he who just said that the man was a selfish arsehole,” Claude sighed.

“I know what he is,” snapped Peter tiredly, “but that doesn’t make him a traitor. This is big, he’d never betray me. Take away my powers? He knows I’ve always wanted them, why would he…”

Even Claire could tell that Peter was simply trying to convince himself that it couldn’t be so. That the older brother he’d looked up to all his life could never turn Judas on him. Never use the cure as venom.

Isaac Mendez and Matt Parkman

215 Reed Street, SoHo

Nine times out of ten, Isaac hated to see a cop walk through his doors. The former heroin addict shivered just thinking about all the close calls he’d had with the authorities. The only way he’d been able to stash away his supplies was because of his paintings; warnings that told him not a second too soon about the police officers in the elevator.

This one was different though. According to Officer Parkman, or just Matt, as he liked to be called, the mysterious Bennet had become an ally. His story seemed oddly similar to Isaac’s own account: a kidnap, the man with the horn-rimmed glasses, the paper company that was anything but, and of course, the duel hatch marks on both mens’ necks. Isaac had a much more pleasant experience than Matt (who had spent the whole time strapped to a table in a very blue room), but both the artist and the officer had winded up working for Bennet. Isaac had been given orders to find Peter for some unknown reason, and Matt tagged along on the road with the bespectacled man, hot on the trail of Sylar.

“One day, our plan backfired,” Matt explained grimly, while checking out some of Isaac’s arts. “We were too close to Sylar. He found us, he kidnapped Bennet, and he got away.”

“Where is he now?” said Isaac, brushing back his long hair with his chiseled fingers.

“I dunno. I thought you could help me locate him. Bennet said that if anything happened, I was to come to Manhattan and see you.”

Isaac exhaled, rifling through some of his canvases to see if anything resembled his collaborator. Yet most of them were just of New York cityscapes, emptiness, or perhaps the famous cheerleader that Peter had saved at Homecoming.

“I’m sorry,” proclaimed Isaac in his slight Brazilian accent. “But I have nothing here that can help you.”

Matt sat in a paint splattered chair, defeated, until a small painting on the other side of the room caught his eye.

“Hey…what’s this?”

Isaac shrugged. “I think it’s the cheerleader. Eden said her name was Claire.”

Matt had no clue who Eden was, but the name Claire struck a chord. “Claire Bennet? That’s Bennet’s daughter, and yeah…she was the cheerleader. And then Peter Petrelli…”

He gently took down the hanging canvas and set it in front of himself and Isaac.

“I need to talk to her,” breathed Matt. “Tell her about her dad. She might know something, where he’d go. She might be like us. And if that’s the case, then we need to keep her safe.”

Mendez took a closer peek at his work. “This is somewhere here in New York. I’ve been searching for Peter, but she might have come up on my…radar.”

“Peter? You know him?”

Matt tried to listen to Isaac’s thoughts, but it was all in Portuguese. Weird, thought Matt. I never really considered that before. I guess this power doesn’t come with a translator.

“Slightly. We met through someone else. He’s been missing though. Bennet told me to find him.”

“So it looks like Claire’s in New York, and Peter’s profile said he was from around here too,” Matt deduced. “She’s gotta be crashing with him. He saved her life; she could put her trust into him. The only thing I don’t get is why she ran away in the first place.”

“Maybe she just wanted to see Peter,” smirked Isaac slightly, sensing some possible hero-worship.

“She definitely wanted to see him at the jail,” Matt agreed. “That confirms it; she has to have an ability. I know he does, he could read minds like me.”

Isaac’s young face was slashed with frown lines. “Read minds? No, he could do what I could do.”

“Claire and Peter were both scratchless, yet their blood was everywhere,” mused Matt, stroking the stubble that was starting to appear after several frantic days of neglect.

“Peter died at Homecoming,” said Isaac, catching Matt’s wavelength. “I painted it, and the cheerleader dying too. How are they both still alive? All of my paintings have come true.”

“Healing,” whispered Matt. “Peter fell off a ledge, according to Claire. That was a five story fall, and he landed…he must have died but…he did what she could do!”

“I have Peter’s cell phone number,” declared Isaac rushing around his studio, trying to find the slip of paper he had scribbled it on. “You need to call him right away, ask about the girl.”

Right as Isaac plucked the sticky note off the wall that was his “address book,” his home phone rang.

“Hello?”

“Mistah Eesack?!” cried a thick Japanese accent.

“Hiro? Yes it’s me.”

“Ando and I have the sword!” Hiro told him excitedly. “We had help from Ando’s stripper girlfriend. She throws men into wall like they are nothing!”

“Fantastic,” beamed Isaac genuinely. “Teleport here, okay?”

“Well,” Hiro said apprehensively. “I tink it be safer to take plane. Every time I teleport-o, I end up in another time, or another country. Sometimes both.”

“Can you get a flight to arrive today?”

“I tink so. Stripper Girlfriend has money. She said she buy tickets for us. First class!”

“Great. Call me when you get in and take a taxi to the studio.”

“Byei-byei Mistah Eesack!”

“Goodbye, Hiro.”

Matt took the yellow scrap that Isaac handed him, as well as the phone (which he noticed was covered in paint like most things in the apartment). Taking a deep breath, he plunged himself back into Peter Petrelli’s life.

Peter, Claude, and Claire

Peter’s Apartment, Lower East Side

It couldn’t have been clearer then a sunny day that Nathan would force feed the cure down Peter’s throat, but Peter was still in absolute denial. Claire wished she could have seen the look on Claude’s face, from his exasperated huffs.

“Listen, your mate’s not gonna find anything about Claire’s dad, anyway.”

Peter’s brow knitted. “Why not? Nathan’s got connections; he could find anyone. He could find anyone’s tombstone.”

Claude rubbed his eyes. “He’s not to be found, by any of them at least. It’s impossible. Lewis Rushton cannot be hunted. If you don’t get info from the kiosk that is yours truly, you’ll never get any answers.”

“Well tell us!” Peter blurted out angrily. “Where can I find him, why’d he leave Claire, where is he?”

Even Claire could hear Claude’s thick swallowing.

“You already have found him, mate.”

Peter and Claire both had the same gut feeling as to where this was going. Claire closed her eyes, waiting for the words to wash over her like a sudden downpour.

“My name has never been Claude Raines. It’s Lewis Rushton. I’m Claire’s father.”

Even with the anticipation, even with the predicted knowledge, Peter still couldn’t help but stare at Claude, shaking his head in disbelief. What was Claude to say about his family, when the man himself abandoned his own daughter?

On the other hand, he could be lying altogether.

“No,” began Peter. “You’re lying. You’re just saying that so I’ll break the deal with Nathan and you can get your way.”

Claire gave Claude, or Lewis, really, the benefit of the doubt, and began firing questions about her mother. It was half-initiation, half-desperation, and Claude was about to bring the roof of Peter’s theories straight down.

“Your mum is a fire starter,” reminisced Claude. Claire’s feet couldn’t support her anymore, and she fell into a nearby chair, a couple feet away from Peter. Peter felt it as an appropriate time for Claire to be able to actually see her father, so he lightly touched his roommate’s wrist. Claude materialized into Claire’s vision.

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier?” Claire said softly with discontent in her tone. “Why have you just been acting like some homeless thief? What happened to you?”

Claude scoffed. “You think I’d make a nice ol’ Daddy-O? I haven’t got anything to give you, nothing to provide you with. And I’m invisible, Claire! I can’t exactly take you shopping for prom when you can’t see me, now can I?”

“I wasn’t asking for a shopping buddy, I was asking for answers,” sniffed Claire.

Peter was still hearing this whole conversation hollowly, as though his ears were clogged. Sensing Claire’s anguish, he gripped her shoulder with his free hand.

Claude began explaining the whole story of how he came to be invisible, ended up with Meredith, and worked at Primatech Paper with Claire’s foster father. Apparently, Meredith had been his first pupil, a woman he kept in hiding from the notorious Company. Eventually, they broke the unwritten teacher-student romance rules, and bam! Little Claire was on the way. But then the Company had found out about Claude’s secret student, shooting him (and assuming he died from it), and going in to Meredith’s apartment to take her and her baby away. The injuries had left Claude permanently invisible, and he used his gift for his last honorable deed: to get Claire out of the burning building and setting her out of harms way.

“You didn’t take me? You just left me?” Claire was not crying, however. She was used to being hurt by now.

“I’m so sorry, dear. But look at me; I’m invisible, I couldn’t take you, and I thought Meredith would come out of the building and pick you up. I had no idea Primatech had gone there to bag her.”

Claire seemed to mull over his story for a few seconds, absorbing it all as fact. She looked up at Claude.

“Come here.”

Slowly, Claude approached Peter and Claire until he stood a foot and a half in front of them. In a flash, Claire had gone from Peter’s wrist, to Claude’s embrace.

“I should have tried harder, I know, love,” he choked into her hair. “But there was no way, and I thought you were safe…”

Peter watched on, slender hand resting across his mouth as it often did. His insides tightened and he promised himself he wouldn’t get sensitive about the father/daughter moment, yet he was finding it hard to push off pure elation. These past couple days had made him feel cold, his heart hardened and an unexplainable numbness consuming him. This moment was opening his eyes, allowing him to finally feel again.

Claire was studying his jubilant expression. “You look happy,” she commented. “It’s about time.”

Peter beamed back, and winked, making Claude’s eyebrows shoot skyward. He coughed suggestively and shot Peter a murderous look, before settling his eye line on Claire in a protective gaze.

Feeling his cheeks redden, Peter looked away just in time to see a bright light flashing on his silenced cell phone. Reaching over and looking at the caller ID, he groaned.

MENDEZ, ISAAC.

So much for his happy mood.