Can't Give Up (Noah/Angela, Claire)
Title: Can’t Give Up (Years of Longing, 6/7)
Fandom: Heroes
Rating/Genre: G/romance (het), fluff
Characters/Pairing: Noah Bennet, Claire Bennet; Angela/Noah
Summary: Angela spent one evening of love with him, and then she left. But Noah refuses to give her up, not now, after all these years, when they can finally be together - if they want to.
Word count: 1 811
Spoilers/Warnings: No
Notes: Sequel to Breakfast In Bed (pg, 1 547 words).
Noah felt his apartment getting narrower, as if his thoughts were eating all the space in there. He had hardly been out at all for days, except to grab something to eat from the hot-dog stand around the corner.
He tried to figure out why Angela left like that. She didn’t really give him a reason. All she said was “I can’t do this”, and she looked at him as if he was supposed to understand.
Well, he was no damn telepath; he didn’t understand. He understood simple things like “I love you” or “I don’t love you anymore”, or “Remember your obligations to the Company” - but getting an “I can’t” thrown in the face the morning after the most amazing and loving sex of his entire life; that he could not understand.
What was a man supposed to do when faced with a mystery, a challenge?
Well, find an answer, of course! Noah had spent his entire adult life finding solutions to problems - admittedly, emotional mess-ups were not his strong suit, but he realized that he had to try to trust his instincts after all.
Noah got dressed and started walking randomly across the city, hoping that the fresh air - as fresh as it could ever get anyway - would somehow help him clear his thoughts.
He fantasized about finding René; he could enter Angela’s mind and take out her memory of those words; “I can’t do this”… Or if his old Haitian friend couldn’t be found, even Matt Parkman could probably do something similar…
No. That wasn’t helpful at all, thinking things like that. Manipulating Angela would do no good. In fact, that would only make things worse. Angela was not supposed to be manipulated into trusting him, and she wasn’t supposed to be talked into loving him. That would be terribly wrong.
No, he would simply have to show her that he loved her much enough for her to trust the stability of their feelings.
Noah shook his head in desperation and mumbled frustrated curses through his teeth, unaware of the suspicious glances by-passers shot at him. He just walked.
Randomly? Yes, that’s what he thought, but after all, there was nothing much random about his instincts; they were trained to be precise, unfailing. Noah’s work had been all about making the right decisions in the right moments, and that skill was burnt so deeply into his backbone that his feet could make the right decision for him even when his mind pretended to be elsewhere.
The morning was gone since long, noon was passed by hours. Noah’s feet were starting to yell at him that the only smart thing to do was to sit down - and also, he was perhaps not as fit anymore as he used to be, although it pained him to admit it - and what better place to sit than where he could watch Angela’s apartment?
That’s where his feet had taken him, that’s where he knew that he had to go. It was obvious to him that she wasn’t going to come to him. She had never done it before; she wouldn’t start now.
So he was just going to sit there for a little while and rest his tired feet, and figure out how to make things right again.
But what was that? Noah was tired, but not that tired. His eyes alerted him; he would never become so inattentive that he didn’t notice his own daughter coming.
Claire pressed the buttons of the entryphone, but no one seemed to answer because no one opened. So, Angela was not at home. Claire turned around, and she saw him.
So that was one thing he hadn’t thought about. He hadn’t thought about watching from a place where he couldn’t be watched. So much for no planning and all instincts.
There was nothing to do but to walk right up to Claire and give her a big hug.
‘Hi, Claire-bear, what are you doing here?’
‘I came to see Angela, obviously…’
‘About what?’ he asked quickly before she could return the question.
‘About things. Private things.’
Noah raised an eyebrow and looked at her as if she was playing a silly child’s game.
‘Oh, I see - like in “none of my business” private things?’
Claire smiled and nodded her head.
‘You used to tell me everything’, he complained.
‘Yeah’, his daughter replied, ‘and I also used to play with teddy bears.’
Then he remembered something. It was a weekday - like Wednesday, or maybe Thursday.
‘Don’t you have classes or something, Claire?’ He smiled teasingly. ‘Playing hooky, huh, Claire-Bear?’
‘I don’t have classes every day, dad’, she said, and Noah couldn’t think of anything more to ask her except the first question all over again, but she was quicker.
‘So, what are you doing here, dad?’
‘Wait, so you mean that you get to ask me that, but I can’t ask you?’
‘Yeah, exactly. Consider it payback for all the times when you didn’t tell me things when I was younger.’
‘What kind of “things” do you mean?’ he said in the same playful tone of voice, but she fixed him with her big eyes, like she was getting serious.
‘Like the fact that I’m adopted, or that I have an ability, or the existence of other people like me…’
‘Claire’, he begged, ‘please. Let’s not go there.’
‘Okay’. She sighed. ‘I don’t care about that any more anyway. But I just want you to talk to me like I’m an adult, dad.’
‘Okay then’, Noah said, looking up and down the street.
Cars were passing by, no one walking. No Angela anywhere in sight.
‘I wanted to talk to Angela about love and trust.’
Claire’s eyes went wide.
‘You came to talk to her about mom?’
‘No’, he sighed. ‘It’s over between your mom and me, Claire. It’s really over, and I’m not going to talk to Angela about your mom.’
‘About what, then?’
So Noah told her. If his daughter wanted him to talk to her like she was an adult, then fine. He did that. He talked to her about the last of all the adult secrets he had been keeping from her forever.
The short and dead-ended fling he had had with Angela before he even met Sandra. The fling that became dead serious. The unspoken words, the looks and the silent connection between them when they were both married; the game they played that none of them knew about the other one’s feelings. The constant struggle to forget about her.
And then he told Claire that she was the only thing that kept him from bursting, the one who kept his two personas - the Family man and the Company man - together.
‘So I was the reason why you couldn’t get over Angela?’
‘Um…’ Noah ran his fingers through his hair. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that you were the only one who was somehow part of both my worlds. And you know; Angela, she was there when you were given to me…’
Claire was silent. She slowly bit on her lower lip as if she tried to remember how that happened. Noah knew that she had no actual memories from the time she was a baby, but he knew that Hiro Nakamura had once taken her back to that day.
‘I didn’t see her’, she said, ‘but I guess that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t there. I guess that maybe Angela wanted to be there so she could make sure that they really gave me to the right man. The good man.’ She shuddered. ‘I hate to think that I could have been given to someone else…’
‘But you weren’t.’ Noah smiled. The good man.
‘But’, she said and her voice was very small, ‘I always believed… that through all of this, no matter what you did, you really loved mom…’
‘But I did. In a way, I really did, I just… always loved Angela too, differently. And now? Maybe I don’t love her more now than I did before, but maybe I can love her better, and… stronger.’
The afternoon was silently turning into night. Claire said nothing. Noah looked at her and wished, not for the first time, that he could read her mind.
How ever strange it was for him to say those words out loud - to talk of his love for a woman who was not his wife or his daughter, to tell another person this life-long secret, that yes he loved Angela Petrelli and needed to keep her in his life - it must be just as strange, or perhaps more, for Claire to hear him say it.
Her ideas, her dreams, of her perfect happy family must be stretched to the limit now; fallen apart, little by little and a little more with every year and with every new secret that came out in the open.
‘We are still the same family’, he tried, ‘we’re just grouped together a little differently, that’s all.’
Could she understand him at all? Did she have that much understanding of the word “love” yet to see that he was not a bad person - or at least not the worst of persons - for having loved two women in his life? But perhaps that really made him a bad person?
‘So now what?’ she asked. ‘Did you come here to tell her that you want the two of you to be together? How do you know that Angela wants the same thing?’
‘I don’t. I can only hope. You see, Claire-Bear… I never really thought that it would come to this. I’m surprised as well, to be this close to her finally… I met Angela one day last week. Completely by chance, but we spent the whole evening together. We had a few drinks, we had dinner, we talked. About everything, or so I thought. And then, we went to my place…’
Claire’s eyelids fluttered, she looked above his shoulder, and he decided to stop there.
‘And next morning’, he concluded, ‘she surprised me - no, shocked me - by saying that we shouldn’t, that she couldn’t do it - that’s all. But I… I know that we could make it work. I just refuse to let it end like this!’
Noah fixed his eyes upon his daughter as if he dared her to contradict him, but she didn’t.
‘I’m telling the truth’, he persisted, ‘when I say that I love somebody. You’re my daughter, Claire - you believe me, don’t you? If you don’t, you who have spent your whole life with me, then how can I make her believe me?’
‘I don’t know, dad.’ Claire patted his arm. ‘I guess you’ll just have to ask her what she really wants and make her believe that you can give that to her…’
‘Oh yeah? What if she doesn’t even want to talk to me? And what am I going to say?’
‘Oh dad’, Claire said gently, and finally, she smiled a little, ‘I can’t tell you that. What are you, eleven years old or something? You just have to talk to her… And look…’
Claire nodded towards a taxi that slowly approached them and stopped just as Claire spoke.
‘Angela is here now… She can see us; I guess that she wouldn’t stop and come out if she didn’t want to talk to you.’
And Angela stepped out of the car.
.
Fandom: Heroes
Rating/Genre: G/romance (het), fluff
Characters/Pairing: Noah Bennet, Claire Bennet; Angela/Noah
Summary: Angela spent one evening of love with him, and then she left. But Noah refuses to give her up, not now, after all these years, when they can finally be together - if they want to.
Word count: 1 811
Spoilers/Warnings: No
Notes: Sequel to Breakfast In Bed (pg, 1 547 words).
Noah felt his apartment getting narrower, as if his thoughts were eating all the space in there. He had hardly been out at all for days, except to grab something to eat from the hot-dog stand around the corner.
He tried to figure out why Angela left like that. She didn’t really give him a reason. All she said was “I can’t do this”, and she looked at him as if he was supposed to understand.
Well, he was no damn telepath; he didn’t understand. He understood simple things like “I love you” or “I don’t love you anymore”, or “Remember your obligations to the Company” - but getting an “I can’t” thrown in the face the morning after the most amazing and loving sex of his entire life; that he could not understand.
What was a man supposed to do when faced with a mystery, a challenge?
Well, find an answer, of course! Noah had spent his entire adult life finding solutions to problems - admittedly, emotional mess-ups were not his strong suit, but he realized that he had to try to trust his instincts after all.
Noah got dressed and started walking randomly across the city, hoping that the fresh air - as fresh as it could ever get anyway - would somehow help him clear his thoughts.
He fantasized about finding René; he could enter Angela’s mind and take out her memory of those words; “I can’t do this”… Or if his old Haitian friend couldn’t be found, even Matt Parkman could probably do something similar…
No. That wasn’t helpful at all, thinking things like that. Manipulating Angela would do no good. In fact, that would only make things worse. Angela was not supposed to be manipulated into trusting him, and she wasn’t supposed to be talked into loving him. That would be terribly wrong.
No, he would simply have to show her that he loved her much enough for her to trust the stability of their feelings.
Noah shook his head in desperation and mumbled frustrated curses through his teeth, unaware of the suspicious glances by-passers shot at him. He just walked.
Randomly? Yes, that’s what he thought, but after all, there was nothing much random about his instincts; they were trained to be precise, unfailing. Noah’s work had been all about making the right decisions in the right moments, and that skill was burnt so deeply into his backbone that his feet could make the right decision for him even when his mind pretended to be elsewhere.
The morning was gone since long, noon was passed by hours. Noah’s feet were starting to yell at him that the only smart thing to do was to sit down - and also, he was perhaps not as fit anymore as he used to be, although it pained him to admit it - and what better place to sit than where he could watch Angela’s apartment?
That’s where his feet had taken him, that’s where he knew that he had to go. It was obvious to him that she wasn’t going to come to him. She had never done it before; she wouldn’t start now.
So he was just going to sit there for a little while and rest his tired feet, and figure out how to make things right again.
But what was that? Noah was tired, but not that tired. His eyes alerted him; he would never become so inattentive that he didn’t notice his own daughter coming.
Claire pressed the buttons of the entryphone, but no one seemed to answer because no one opened. So, Angela was not at home. Claire turned around, and she saw him.
So that was one thing he hadn’t thought about. He hadn’t thought about watching from a place where he couldn’t be watched. So much for no planning and all instincts.
There was nothing to do but to walk right up to Claire and give her a big hug.
‘Hi, Claire-bear, what are you doing here?’
‘I came to see Angela, obviously…’
‘About what?’ he asked quickly before she could return the question.
‘About things. Private things.’
Noah raised an eyebrow and looked at her as if she was playing a silly child’s game.
‘Oh, I see - like in “none of my business” private things?’
Claire smiled and nodded her head.
‘You used to tell me everything’, he complained.
‘Yeah’, his daughter replied, ‘and I also used to play with teddy bears.’
Then he remembered something. It was a weekday - like Wednesday, or maybe Thursday.
‘Don’t you have classes or something, Claire?’ He smiled teasingly. ‘Playing hooky, huh, Claire-Bear?’
‘I don’t have classes every day, dad’, she said, and Noah couldn’t think of anything more to ask her except the first question all over again, but she was quicker.
‘So, what are you doing here, dad?’
‘Wait, so you mean that you get to ask me that, but I can’t ask you?’
‘Yeah, exactly. Consider it payback for all the times when you didn’t tell me things when I was younger.’
‘What kind of “things” do you mean?’ he said in the same playful tone of voice, but she fixed him with her big eyes, like she was getting serious.
‘Like the fact that I’m adopted, or that I have an ability, or the existence of other people like me…’
‘Claire’, he begged, ‘please. Let’s not go there.’
‘Okay’. She sighed. ‘I don’t care about that any more anyway. But I just want you to talk to me like I’m an adult, dad.’
‘Okay then’, Noah said, looking up and down the street.
Cars were passing by, no one walking. No Angela anywhere in sight.
‘I wanted to talk to Angela about love and trust.’
Claire’s eyes went wide.
‘You came to talk to her about mom?’
‘No’, he sighed. ‘It’s over between your mom and me, Claire. It’s really over, and I’m not going to talk to Angela about your mom.’
‘About what, then?’
So Noah told her. If his daughter wanted him to talk to her like she was an adult, then fine. He did that. He talked to her about the last of all the adult secrets he had been keeping from her forever.
The short and dead-ended fling he had had with Angela before he even met Sandra. The fling that became dead serious. The unspoken words, the looks and the silent connection between them when they were both married; the game they played that none of them knew about the other one’s feelings. The constant struggle to forget about her.
And then he told Claire that she was the only thing that kept him from bursting, the one who kept his two personas - the Family man and the Company man - together.
‘So I was the reason why you couldn’t get over Angela?’
‘Um…’ Noah ran his fingers through his hair. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that. I mean that you were the only one who was somehow part of both my worlds. And you know; Angela, she was there when you were given to me…’
Claire was silent. She slowly bit on her lower lip as if she tried to remember how that happened. Noah knew that she had no actual memories from the time she was a baby, but he knew that Hiro Nakamura had once taken her back to that day.
‘I didn’t see her’, she said, ‘but I guess that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t there. I guess that maybe Angela wanted to be there so she could make sure that they really gave me to the right man. The good man.’ She shuddered. ‘I hate to think that I could have been given to someone else…’
‘But you weren’t.’ Noah smiled. The good man.
‘But’, she said and her voice was very small, ‘I always believed… that through all of this, no matter what you did, you really loved mom…’
‘But I did. In a way, I really did, I just… always loved Angela too, differently. And now? Maybe I don’t love her more now than I did before, but maybe I can love her better, and… stronger.’
The afternoon was silently turning into night. Claire said nothing. Noah looked at her and wished, not for the first time, that he could read her mind.
How ever strange it was for him to say those words out loud - to talk of his love for a woman who was not his wife or his daughter, to tell another person this life-long secret, that yes he loved Angela Petrelli and needed to keep her in his life - it must be just as strange, or perhaps more, for Claire to hear him say it.
Her ideas, her dreams, of her perfect happy family must be stretched to the limit now; fallen apart, little by little and a little more with every year and with every new secret that came out in the open.
‘We are still the same family’, he tried, ‘we’re just grouped together a little differently, that’s all.’
Could she understand him at all? Did she have that much understanding of the word “love” yet to see that he was not a bad person - or at least not the worst of persons - for having loved two women in his life? But perhaps that really made him a bad person?
‘So now what?’ she asked. ‘Did you come here to tell her that you want the two of you to be together? How do you know that Angela wants the same thing?’
‘I don’t. I can only hope. You see, Claire-Bear… I never really thought that it would come to this. I’m surprised as well, to be this close to her finally… I met Angela one day last week. Completely by chance, but we spent the whole evening together. We had a few drinks, we had dinner, we talked. About everything, or so I thought. And then, we went to my place…’
Claire’s eyelids fluttered, she looked above his shoulder, and he decided to stop there.
‘And next morning’, he concluded, ‘she surprised me - no, shocked me - by saying that we shouldn’t, that she couldn’t do it - that’s all. But I… I know that we could make it work. I just refuse to let it end like this!’
Noah fixed his eyes upon his daughter as if he dared her to contradict him, but she didn’t.
‘I’m telling the truth’, he persisted, ‘when I say that I love somebody. You’re my daughter, Claire - you believe me, don’t you? If you don’t, you who have spent your whole life with me, then how can I make her believe me?’
‘I don’t know, dad.’ Claire patted his arm. ‘I guess you’ll just have to ask her what she really wants and make her believe that you can give that to her…’
‘Oh yeah? What if she doesn’t even want to talk to me? And what am I going to say?’
‘Oh dad’, Claire said gently, and finally, she smiled a little, ‘I can’t tell you that. What are you, eleven years old or something? You just have to talk to her… And look…’
Claire nodded towards a taxi that slowly approached them and stopped just as Claire spoke.
‘Angela is here now… She can see us; I guess that she wouldn’t stop and come out if she didn’t want to talk to you.’
And Angela stepped out of the car.
.