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Chapter Seventeen

“Sunday School For The Special”

Columbus Park

New York

The day after Claude’s unenthusiastic acceptance to Peter’s pleas, Niki, Matt, Peter, Hiro, Isaac, and Claire were all sitting Indian style like school children in the park. They formed a sort of semi-circle away from the beaten path, while Claude stood in front of them awkwardly. Peter, of course, was the only one that could see him, while the five others were still looking around expectantly.

“Here,” Peter cleared his throat, taking hold of Claire and Hiro’s hands. “If you’re all linked to me, I can pass on my invisibility. Then you’ll be able to see Claude.”

His comrades gawkily complied, and Matt pinkened at taking the hands of the two beautiful blonde women he was flanked by. Nevertheless, it worked. Claude materialized in front of their eyes, looking tired and bored. Peter shot his mentor a smirk.

“You may begin.”

Claude clapped his hands together and shrugged. “Er…hello. I’m Claude Raines. At the whelp’s request, I’m gonna teach you how to control your abilities a little more. Because as I’ve heard it, you’re a dense bunch of bumbles and if the world rests in your present hands…we’re all in a bloody lot of trouble.”

Peter rolled his eyes and Claire showed no emotion, but the other four that weren’t so used to Claude’s sardonic nature looked around sheepishly.

“Basically,” Claude continued, “you’re fighting a murderer and an exploding man. Quite a lot of weight for six simpletons. And if you don’t follow my instructions, you’re gonna end up murderers yourselves.”

“Some of us have already been there, done that,” grumbled Peter miserably. Unfortunately, Claude heard him and started on a frustrated rant. Isaac avoided Peter’s eyes studiously.

“Oh God in heaven, you’re not still on about that, are you? Sure, don’t let it happen again, but let the past go! And stop thinking you’re all alone and martyrish. Everyone? Raise your hand if you’ve ever killed someone, will you?”

Out of all seven of them, Hiro was the only one that didn’t raise his hand. Peter shot Claire an incredulous look. She lowered her arm a notch and cocked her head uncertainly.

“Well, almost. I tried to kill Brody and he’s an inch away from death. Does that count?”

Peter sighed and then looked questioningly at Matt and Niki, then turned to Isaac.

“I’m a cop. Don’t look so shocked.”

“Jessica’s killed a couple dozen people,” Niki muttered shamefully.

“Heroin addict with a gun,” was all Isaac released.

Claude looked satisfied at the motley crew. “See? Now that we’ve got that established, I’d like to ask everyone your names and your powers. You first, the one on the end.”

“Isaac Mendez,” the Hispanic man introduced himself. “I can paint the future. I used to be alright at it, but I only painted really important things while I was high. Now that I’ve…been off the drugs…for the most part…the stuff I’m painting is in the not too distant future, and it’s meaningless. Hiro and the dinosaur was pointless. All of the paintings I worked on to find Bennet. I don’t know what’s happening. I paint better when I shoot up.”

“Painting the future,” murmured Claude. “That’s a new one. First off, don’t go back to the drugs. You’re perfectly capable of painting whatever you want without them. If superheroes needed powder and pills to make their powers work, that would kind of defeat the purpose of being super, now wouldn’t it? Who’s next?”

Hiro nodded politely and pushed his glasses up his nose. “My name is Hiro Nakamura. I bend time...and-a space.”

Claude stroked his beard, interested. “Interesting. That’s what Peter told me. So, have you gotten a good control on that yet?”

Shrugging, Hiro responded with, “I can stop-o time good, and teleport-o….okay. I sometimes end up in the past, or the future, but I get to the place that I’m trying to go. It is the time that I have trouble with.”

“Hmmm,” mused the invisible man in turn. “That shouldn’t be too difficult, mate. I’ve never worked with a breed like you before, but I suspect that more focus and practice is all it will take.”

Hiro bowed his head neutrally again, thanking Claude for his advice. After skipping Peter and Claire, who respectively already had his control for the most part and had a power that her body used automatically, Claude moved to Matt Parkman.

“I’m Matt, and I can read thoughts,” announced Matt flatly. “It gives me pretty bad headaches though, and I can’t really control it. It mostly just comes and goes.”

Claude looked down at him nonchalantly. “I’ve met a lot of mind readers. In fact, there are a lot out of there that have a knack for it without it being encoded into their DNA. You’ve got no notion of your potential, Matt. You can do more then just read minds.”

“And…how would that be?”

“That’s what I’m going to tell you about in time, if you’d give stop being so impatient,” Claude snapped. “I think I’ve got a second poodle over here, I swear…”

“The world’s going to hell in five days, Claude,” Matt pointed out bluntly. “You might want to hurry it up a bit.”

Biting back a retort, Claude moved to his last pupil. “And you love. What can you do?”

Niki moistened her lips and gave a helpless smile to her teacher. “Uh…I don’t think I have one. And if I do, I need that cure that Peter was talking about.”

Peter cringed. He promised Niki that he’d visit Mohinder, but there had been no time. He made a mental note to drop by Suresh’s apartment sometime later that day.

Claude kneeled down, and met Niki at eye level. Perhaps it was her beauty, good heart, or her fragileness, but every one of them seemed to soften their personas around the young mother. Niki was the kind of woman that looked as if she would break in two if you touched her hard enough.

“What can you do, dear?”

Niki gazed skyward, eyes glistening slightly. She barely felt the comforting squeeze that Matt gave her hand, but it still gave her the strength to carry on. These people were like her. They genuinely wanted to help her, not fix her. She hadn’t felt so cared about in a long time, save for Micah looking to her for protection and love.

“It’s not what I can do,” she said quietly. “It’s more...what happens to me. Whenever I look in a mirror, and lately, I don’t even have to do that…she comes. Jessica.”

Peter adjusted his seating and tried to hear her better. Matt and Hiro knew most of Niki’s deal, but the rest of them had yet to learn anything about the blonde.

Claude crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. “Who’s Jessica?”

“My sister,” whispered Niki. “She was killed by our dad when she was eleven.”

Even Matt hadn’t been informed on the way that Jessica had passed away, and he shook his head sympathetically. The others, however, had no idea that Jessica was even a real person. Peter and Claire had just assumed that, however sweet Niki was, she was still crazy.

“But this isn’t her,” added Niki hurriedly. “My sister would never do this stuff. She was loving, and warm, not a killer like this Jessica. My alter-ego, or personality, or whoever she is…she can rip people apart with her bare hands. Maybe that’s what I can do…I dunno.”

“Do you think that Jessica, another personality, is a way of dealing with the fact that you have super-strength?” Claude suggested. Niki silently shook her head, and after a few moments, gave an explanation.

“No, she’s real. When she’s…in my body, I guess, I’m trapped in the mirror. I can see what she’s doing, I just can’t get out.”

“So,” concluded Claude, “you can still see her and you’re still aware, but you’re out of your body?”

Niki pursed her lips, defeated. “I know, it sounds so impossible. Nobody else can explain it either.”

But Claude seemed to be onto something that Niki wasn’t. “Wait. Did Jessica have any unfinished business? Any resentments?”

Clueless, Niki gaped speechlessly. “She was killed when she was just a kid. And…she....s-she took all of the beatings that were meant for me. Jessica- the one in the mirror- said me…after I told her that I was in control, because she was a part of me…she said ‘No, it doesn’t work like that anymore.’ Does that mean something?”

“Precisely,” agreed Claude, rising to his feet again. “It all fits perfectly. I think I just figured out your power.”

The group in front of him met his illuminated eyes with blank, confused, stares. Claude tried to ignore the slowness of his pupils.

“Niki, if my guess is correct, then you can channel the dead.”

Niki met Matt’s bemused glance her way, and then turned back to Claude. “Excuse me?”

Claude paced the grass, waving his arms around as he explained. “The souls of the departed can possess your body and go about their merry way, trying to do what they couldn’t when they were living.”

Matt spoke up on her behalf. “Hold the phone. If Niki’s sister was loving, then why’d she be a killer if she’s the real Jessica? Why is she trying to ruin Niki’s life?”

It took Claude a moment to come up with a hypothesis for that particularly good note.

“Jessica has been boiling in the afterlife for what, Niki how old are you?”

“Thirty-two. Jessica was four years older than me.”

“Alright, so for…twenty-five years, Jessica has been sitting wherever her soul is, fuming and seething because she died so young. Brutally as well, by the way you described her death. And though I’m sure she loves you, all that anger may have led her to believe that because she took the beatings for you- and I really don’t mean to upset you, love; - that…she thinks it may be your fault that she died.”

Niki swallowed her tears at Claude’s suggestion. It was a new layer of guilt to be pressed down upon her thin body. Then again, what was one more? Like Matt had said, the world was going to end in five days. She had to be strong. Mirror Jessica always told her how weak she was, and maybe this was why. Jessica thought, deep down, that she had to take the beatings because Niki was too feeble. In Jessica’s mind, Niki’s weakness had put her in the grave.

No wonder Jessica was trying to either ruin her sister’s life, or violently act out a good intention of making Niki learn to be stronger. 

“What about super strength?” piped Hiro from the other end.

“It’s highly likely that Jessica had manifested that as her ability, and when you channel a mutant, you also take on their ability for that time that they are possessing you.”

“How do I control her?” asked Niki firmly, with a new resolve.

“I’m not an exorcist, Niki,” Claude answered with uncharacteristic kindness. “The only thing I can teach you how to do is to invite other souls in.”

“Invite them in? Why would I want to do that?”

“The souls of the dead can be very useful, you know,” the British man pointed out wisely. “Imagine channeling Einstein or King Tut, or-,”

“Tammy Gallagher,” Peter interjected out of the blue.  His six companions all frowned towards him.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” groaned Claude. “How’s that going to help anything? Tammy’s not exactly the type that liked to be disturbed.”

“Gee, that reminds me of someone,” Peter said overzealously, arching an eyebrow at Claude. “You two must have been best friends, huh?”

Claude glared at his immature Anakin, as Claire took a peek at Peter, slightly disconcerted. He’d mentioned nothing about this woman, and they talked about everything. He had a right to his privacy, but this really wasn’t a big deal, was it?

“Who was she?” Claire asked her father. Claude gave the “class” the short version of what he explicated to Peter the prior day. Tammy was a mimic, she’d gone on a payback mission, and ended up dead.

“Do you think she still has the abilities she’d absorbed?” Matt questioned. “Like if Niki channeled her, would she have Tammy’s archive, or just the empath ability?”

For the umpteenth time that day, Claude had no answer. “I’ve never dealt with this before. It’s hard to say. To the day she had died, Tammy had absorbed my invisibility, foresight, she could talk to animals, she claimed to ‘see how things how they really are’ which was something I never quite understood. There were a handful of others, but she didn’t have a collection nearly as big as Peter. Metahumans seem to be flinging themselves at him from every direction.”

“That’s a lot of powers,” Peter tried to say nonchalantly, but Claude and Claire caught the particularly hungry glint in his eyes. The love to his left nudged his elbow lightly and squeezed his hand, trying to silently remind him of his purpose. Yet that yearning did not tame as much as it usually did. Peter only masked it by kissing their intertwined hands and giving Claire a reassuring smile. The girl was not fooled though, and she reminded herself to try distracting him extra hard after class was dismissed.

“If I channel Tammy,” Niki started to inquire slowly, “will she hurt innocent people?”

“She’s an atom bomb, that Tammy,” Claude admitted. “I think she would listen to me, though. We’d just have to tread carefully.”

“Two of us that powerful would definitely help out the effort to take down Sylar,” Peter added. “If she’s an empath, she’d absorb all of Sylar, Matt, Hiro…everyone’s powers, as well as her previous ones. She’d probably be more powerful than me.”

“Yeah, but if Niki took on all those powers at once, wouldn’t she collapse?” Matt noted uneasily. Niki’s expression was also one of apprehension.

“She has to try,” Peter countered stubbornly. “We need all the power against Sylar that we can get.”

“But not everyone is exactly as experienced at this as you, Peter,” Matt snapped back, starting to raise his voice.

“That’s why we’re here!” Peter yelled back. “I’m trying to help you!”

“Are you really trying to help us, or are you just trying to use us to save your girlfriend?!”

“Stop!” cried three voices in harsh unison. One was Hiro, who looked dejected, the second was an annoyed and distraught Claude, and the last was Claire, half-tearful, half-adamant.

“So you don’t care if Claire dies?” Peter seethed back, trying to control his temper.

“Of course I do!” Matt said honestly, in a more civil tone.  “But we have to find a way that’s gonna be safe for all of us. You can’t go around choosing who’s expendable and who deserves to be saved.”

It was natural for Matt, the policeman, the protector of everyone, to have such an opinion.

“He’s right Peter,” Claire concurred, turning her soft eyes upon him. “It’s not worth it.”

Peter took a long time before tearing his gaze away from hers and mumbling an apology.

“I-I can try,” declared Niki into the New York afternoon air. “If Claude teaches me how to do it right, I’ll try to get Tammy to help us.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

“Speaking of ‘us’, I guess there’s someone I still need to talk to about this whole thing,” Peter recalled aloud, a slight grimace on his face. “My brother, Nathan.”

“Nat-an Pethtrelli!” hoorayed Hiro, raising his arms in a Y without letting go of Isaac or Peter. The two men neighboring             him exchanged weary glimpses, the first hint of amiability ever shared between Peter and Isaac.                                                                                                               

“Did he say Nathan Petrelli?” The color drained from Niki’s already fair complexion. “He’s your brother?”

Peter wasn’t so shocked. “He’s a politician. You’ve probably seen him around.”

“Yeah…” Niki let him believe. She wasn’t about to advertise the fact that Jessica had made her sleep with that very same Nathan Petrelli. Meeting the congressman-wannabee again wasn’t something Niki was too thrilled about. Sure, he’d said some flattering things…before he realized that she’d only spent the night with him to get Linderman a nice piece of blackmail on him.

But wait a second…how was Nathan “one of us?” If Nathan was like them, then he had much bigger problems to cover up then affairs and non-family values.

Claude tiredly grumbled a ‘class adjourned’ and his crew of superfreaks let go of their neighbors’ sweaty palms. Most of them stood and went their separate ways, but Isaac timidly walked over to Peter, who was standing alone.

“Simone,” was the first word out of Isaac’s mouth. Oh God, where is this going, thought Peter, exasperated. But what the artist said next was not what Peter expected to hear in the least.

“After all this is over...if we’re still all alive…I’m gonna have some sort of funeral for her, and…I think you should come.” Isaac’s black eyes were dead serious and his offer authentic. The selflessness of the peace offering made Peter’s heart break. It would be greedy to go to such a funeral. Inappropriate, and careless.

“I shouldn’t,” stammered Peter, shaking his head. “I don’t deserve to.”

“It was a mistake, Peter,” Isaac said quietly. “I know you loved Simone. You didn’t want this to happen to her any more then…then I did.”

Peter’s mouth hung up slightly, wordless. “W-Why are you doing this?” he asked, not understanding for the world why Isaac was being so generous. They’d never really liked each other, and now Isaac had every right to hate him with a damnable potency. Peter almost raised the question if Isaac was high, but figured that would be much too rude.

“It’s what Simone would have wanted,” Isaac replied simply. Peter couldn’t take it anymore. He bowed his head, unable to look at Isaac, and sniffed back tears. Isaac gripped Peter’s shoulder briefly, before letting go and moving to leave.

“Think about it, Peter,” he stated finally, and then left the other man alone with his thoughts.

Claire, who was conversing with Hiro during Isaac’s truce, approached her friend and touched his arm.

“Hey; what was that about?” she asked sensitively, recognizing Peter’s thoughtfully morose aura.

“Isaac offered me something very kind,” Peter plainly said, drawing her into his strong arms. “He asked me to go to Simone’s funeral.”

“Oh, you have to go,” Claire exclaimed as soon as the words were out of his mouth. She brought her palms to his chest and rested her cheek in the space between them. Peter absently stroked her back, twirling her golden curls around an index finger.

“I don’t know if I can face that,” Peter confessed darkly.

“You’d kick yourself for life if you don’t. You know you will.”

“Mmm,” Peter acknowledged, pulling away just enough so that he could see her face. “You’re right.” He slid his hands from behind her body and up to cup her face, before leaning down and ever so gently brushing his lips across hers. It was actually the first time they’d shared a kiss since the first time in Central Park. Claire was snaking her palms up his chest, coming close to wrapping her arms around his neck.

“Petrelli!” came a loud bark from behind them. Rolling his eyes, Peter gave Claire one last, sensual tug on her bottom lip before coming up and addressing Claude.

“Yeah?” He rejoindered, a comfortably smug look on his face. Claude had a wrinkled nose and a look of disgust on his face.

“Do it in private, or don’t do it at all!” He snapped, referring to the awkwardly stomach churning sight of his apprentice making out with his daughter.

Claude continued. “Honestly Claire, if he so much as gives you the eye like he wants to get in your pants, you tell me! I’ll put him in his place!”

“I think I’m already in my place, thank you,” Peter smiled, looking pleasantly down at Claire’s arms encircling his waist. Unfortunately, Claire chose in that moment to pull away and go hug Claude, which only earned Peter a snarky smirk from his tutor.

“What happened to all of the encouragement?” Claire faux pouted, looking up at her father. Claude sighed.

“Careful what you wish for,” he grumbled, gently pushing his daughter back into Peter’s arms. Grinning, Peter leaned into kiss her again, enjoying these light moments to the fullest whenever he could get his hands on them. By the time they broke apart again, Claude had left them. The others had departed as well, sure to be off towards lunch or their living arrangements. Peter and Claire were standing alone in each other’s arms, and it was somehow more serene then the night they first kissed.

“Do you think Claude will ever warm up to it?” Claire asked him quizzically, running a finger down his jaw line. Peter’s lips turned upward into his one-of-a-kind crooked smile.

“He already has.”

*