038.
Nine times out of ten, in Claire's dreams, she's running. Whether it's toward something or away from it, she's made enough of a career out of running in reality that it not happening in a dream is extremely unlikely. She's fast, faster than people usually expect, and she has the benefit of not feeling the stitches that most people do, not stopping for the pain or the need to breathe. It's a dream. Claire doesn't need to breathe. She runs and runs and runs and when she finally stops she's no longer in the City, not even Costa Verde, not even Odessa, though the pathways leading to each of those places sprawl behind her like an open hand.
The twisting, labyrinthine hallways of Primatech stretch out impossibly in every direction before her. Doors and windows face her from impossible angles, twisted and contorted or blown out completely, shadows and dark red figures moving across the crack between the door and the floor, behind shattered panes of glass scorched black with fire. The only soundtrack is a hard beating sound, a bass drum or someone behind a steel door or an amplified heart beating harder and harder in her head until those broken windows and upside-down doors are rattling with the pressure, and Claire is forced to cover her ears with her hands, though it does nothing to stop the sound from resonating through her muscles and bones.
But it fades to white noise, and Claire walks, and she's fast, faster than people usually expect, navigating the halls like she knows exactly where she's going. It's not until she passes an old display case full of high school championship trophies somewhere along the third hallway that she sees she's back in her Union Wells cheer uniform, reds and whites and the same splatter of blood from colliding heavily with the tiled wall. She looks too big for it all, too far beyond it, and as she continues down the halls, checking doorways, Claire feels old injuries flare to life with each room that she passes, all of the pizazz but none of the pain that she wants. Car crash injuries, broken necks, holes through her chest, bullets spit out of her mouth, blood in the gaps between the white of her smile, all of it gone before she's able to actually register that it's there, before she's back in a familiar wardrobe with only Sylar's version of a corsage to offset her uniform. She smells fire and smoke, feels the heavy beating drumming harder in her breastbone the closer and closer she gets to it, but she keeps walking, keeps moving, keeps looking, never stops.
[ooc: open to anyone and p much anything~♥]