West Wing, South Hall 2-B
[From here.]It might be quicker to check the stuff at the end of the hall first and work his way back. That way he wouldn't have to back track in order to get into the main hall. Yeah. Yeah - the morgue was marked on his map, but there were a few rooms around it that weren't labeled at all. Morbid as the thought was, it would be practical to keep
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Everyone except for maybe Claire, but it was clear that her power wasn't strong enough to help her completely, not now. It was a terrible kind of ironic, that they'd just been talking about her limits only to be faced with them now, in the worst possible way. He watched as her body desperately tried to rebuild itself over and over and over, but it just couldn't keep up with the destructive energy that his body was producing.
When he blew up (and it was a when, not an if, now), she might not be able to take it. It might actually kill her, and that seemed worse than anything else. The lives of the others mattered just as much, of course, but he was supposed to be Claire's hero, and now he might just end up killing the indestructible girl instead of saving her.
And yet he couldn't send her away, nor could he get away from her. His body was too overwhelmed for him to even move at this point. He couldn't back away, or run, or anything; all he could do was stand and wait for the inevitable to happen, with only one thought running through his head. He'd failed.
The glowing became brighter and brighter, taking over his vision until he couldn't see Claire at all anymore. But he knew that she was there, and that was something. If he couldn't get away from her and if she refused to leave, then he could at least hold onto the fact that she was staying with him. She wasn't abandoning him, not even when her life might be in danger, not even when he was about to become responsible for far more deaths than Sylar had ever racked up.
He felt his body start to separate, turning into pure energy to the point that there wasn't even any pain; it was only heat. Heat and adrenaline, except he couldn't feel a heartbeat anymore. He tried to clench fists that were hardly there, and then felt a yell somehow tear through his throat.
And then the blast came, and everything was gone.
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The pain was excruciating. Immeasurable. It couldn't even be compared to the other brands of agony she'd put herself through -- partially because that had all been expected, and partially because this was ripping apart every individual cell of her body, or at least it felt like it. She was tearing apart from the inside out, she was sure of it, and soon enough she lost her will to cry -- or the ability. Her tear ducts were ashen and useless. She collapsed to her knees, trying to hug Peter's legs uselessly. He wasn't even tangible anymore. She tried to scream, but her vocal chords were useless, too, her throat emaciated and decaying from the radioactivity. Stubbornly, she tried to force herself closer to him, to no avail.
And then everything started crumbling. Her hearing in tact, it was the explosions she heard first -- and last. Because when it ended, and the institute had crushed her into the ground of the second floor which subsequently cracked and split and crushed into the ground level, and she started to slowly crawl out from under the rubble, there was no sound. Her skin hurt even more as it healed than it had when it was broken down, and her face and throat healed first -- quickly enough that she was able to catch the tail end of a scream of agony.
Her own screams were the only sound as her body forced itself back to gather, and she writhed in the rubble, sobs wracking her entire body the unpleasant sensations. Burning as muscles and skin and tissue knitted together, stabbing as her organs shifted back into their right place and renewed themselves. Crushing agony as she dragged her leg out from the rubble it had been pinned in.
It wasn't until she'd gotten herself back into one piece that she found the worst pain of all, though. She forced rubble out of the way with her body, whimpering at the dislocation of bones that it caused. She didn't dig particularly deep, but she didn't need to. She knew already what she'd find. Nothing. Peter's body would be gone -- disintegrated by the blast he'd created. He was gone. And so was everyone else. The doctors, the nurses, the monsters. Elle, Edward, Bella, Elena, the young Peter, Gren, every friend she'd made, every person she'd spoken with, gone.
Curling into a heap amidst the wreckage, Claire began to weep. For them or for herself, it didn't matter. She was alone now. No one was going to find her. No one even knew she was there, just as she'd never known Peter was there all that time. As the sobs consumed her, she dragged her hands down over her reddening, tear-stained face, then forced them back up to push the hair out of it, trying to find some reason to fight the onsetting hopeless, but there was nothing.
She was alone. Just like she'd always known she would be. Her fingers balled into fists, tightening in her hair and tugging at it hard enough to hurt. The pain only made her sob worse, but she didn't loosen her grip. She'd revel in it. It was the only thing that felt real enough to mean something at this point. It was all she had left in this Hell, where even Sylar's taunts over eternity had proven false.
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This raised a few soft creaks and the occasional louder noise as the remains of the institute settled further, damaged wood giving way under the weight of ruined masonry. Some of it collapsed with groaning noises that almost sounded as though there was someone trapped under there somewhere, calling for help...
Death wasn't the end of it for Peter.
The world was grey and silent, all colour leached out of it so that it seemed faded, less real somehow. It was empty as well, nothing but desolate wasteland stretching in all directions, no one in sight but Peter himself.
That was when the whispering started. It was a tangle of voices, all of them too soft and indistinct for any one to be made out above the others. But as they started to slowly become louder, some of them were easier to pick out. People Peter had known and cared about within the institute, all of whom were now dead, vaporised by his inability to keep his powers in check.
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Now, there was just an emptiness to everything. He shouldn't have been seeing or feeling in the first place; both of the sensations were dulled, but they were there. He felt as if he was floating in a dead space, and when he looked around all he saw were bits of dust being pushed around by a wind that came from nowhere. He couldn't distinguish any bodies, or even pieces of the building or surrounding area. He was surrounded by nothing, and by no one.
Was this the afterlife? Peter couldn't say for certain. Religion was something that he tended to struggle with, but either way this felt more like purgatory than anything. If he was going to end up somewhere, though, shouldn't it have been Hell? But he hadn't killed anyone on purpose, and so maybe that was why. He'd sinned, but not with real intent.
He drifted through the area, so shocked that he could barely feel. Or maybe it was just harder for emotions to manifest when you were dead. He didn't know what it was, but it was as if a nightmare that he'd been stressing over had finally come to life, and all he could do was quietly accept it for what it was.
It all felt so surreal and out of place, like it was too terrible to be true. But that was when he started to hear things. There were only snatches of people's voices, coming from all sides, barely audible. Peter tried to whip around but he only drifted further, and then the panic returned; the panic and the fear.
First was Claire's voice - "I tried to stop you" - and then Sylar's - "I always knew it would end this way." Even though he was dead, or something like it, Peter started to shiver. But he heard more and more. Sam's voice, Depth Charge's voice, Heat's voice, and they started to drown each other out as they called out for him, asking why.
"I'm sorry!" he tried to say, and he was shocked when he realized that he still had a voice. "I wasn't strong enough! I'm so sorry!" But he couldn't even see them. They were only voices, echoes of what they had once been. And he wasn't even sure if he was being heard.
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Maybe that was why, at first, she couldn't hear the groaning noise over her own sobs and self-pity. But as she tried to wipe away the black stained lines that her tears had dragged the ash into as they rolled down her face, she was sure it was really there. It wasn't her imagination, someone was down there. They had to be. Claire began to scramble, trying to gather herself up and stop looking like the pathetic mess she'd allowed herself to become. Her limbs were still creaking, skin still burning with the healing sensation even as she began to try and tug rubble away, forcing her way back downwards in the direction of the noise.
Smaller pieces of debris were moved more easily -- she wasn't by any means a weak girl, not after all the strength training required for the tumbling moves she'd learned for cheerleading, and it was helping her dead lift the rocks. No, not rocks. Chunks of building. Or what used to be a building, anyway. It didn't take long, though, before she reached a piece too big to lift. Somehow, it seemed like it was the last piece in the way between her and the noise. It sounded so much like someone who needed help, she started to try and press her palms against the stone, forcing it upwards. It budged a little, but not enough.
It was definitely, she could tell from peeking around the sides, the only stone covering where the sound was coming from. Any sound had to be good sound at this point, right? Maybe her blood could heal them if they were hurt. Maybe it wasn't all lost. God, it hurt to let herself have that hope, but she couldn't let herself believe she was really this alone. She couldn't. The aching emptiness was too much too bear. So, she pressed with her shoulder against the rock, trying to push it out of the way and ignoring the pain that came with it. At first. Finally she screamed and gave into the pain of the way the stone dislocated her shoulder and slouched to the ground, crying.
She remained there for several minutes, defeated. This close, and she was useless. As useless as ever. She could save herself, but she'd never be able to save anyone else. When it came down to it, she'd never be able to be the hero. She'd be the victim, the survivor, the most screwed up of them all, but she'd never be able to help someone who needed her. The overbearing weight of guilt sank down around her shoulders, preventing her from pulling herself up even if she'd tried. Slowly, though, as the groaning noises wore away at her psyche, she began to fumble her way back up, using the stone for support and pressing her palms to it as she rose back to her feet. She couldn't let it beat her.
"Hang in there. Just hang in there, please. I promise I'm coming, okay?" Was it even a person she was speaking to? Was she imagining it entirely? Was she really that horrified by the prospect of being alone that she'd hallucinate someone? The truth was, she was. And she was beginning to accept this, but regardless of her paranoia that it was just some hallucination, she needed to know. Needed to be sure. Slowly, with more determination, screaming still at the pain that was sent in shockwaves up through her shoulder and into her chest and ribs, she began to push at it again.
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"It's not your fault, Peter," someone suddenly spoke from somewhere behind his left shoulder. "It was all too much for you to handle, I've told you that from the beginning. You shouldn't have gotten yourself caught up in it. Wasn't the life you had enough for you? Enough for anyone?"
It was hard to tell if the speaker expected much of an answer, or if Peter could even be heard by them or if, as had happened already, turning around would only reveal there to be nothing behind him, no one there to speak to at all beyond the echoes in his own head.
But the voice certain sounded real.
It definitely sounded real, the sound of groaning and sobbing coming from underneath the huge chunk of rock Claire uselessly struggled to move. The voice of someone trapped under there, afraid, likely injured and in pain, and still unable to speak or make any noise beyond the occasional croaking sound as they tried to clear the dust and ash from their throat. But there was someone there and they were very possibly the last person alive for miles.
They coughed again as, against all the odds, the rock shifted from Claire's efforts. Not much of a shift, but it had definitely happened. She'd made something of a difference, though there was still some way to go before she could get it off whoever was trapped below it.
Assuming she could move it that far before they too died.
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And now it was expanding to people from beyond the institute: Simon and Isacc, Hiro and Ando, Claire's father, and so forth. Most of the time he could only hear a portion of whatever they were saying, but he got enough from what he did hear and from their tones to know that the main sentiment was simply disappointment, mixed with anger and fear. And all of it was justified.
But what he hadn't been ready for was to hear the one voice he should have expected all along. The second that Nathan's voice cut through the cloud of everyone else, it was as if Peter's feet suddenly found the ground, and he felt solid again. Which was a bad thing, in a way, because he didn't want to face it. And yet he could tell that his brother's voice was coming from behind him, and it was impossible not to turn around to meet it.
Part of him had expected Nathan's voice to be disembodied, like the others, and the other part had known that that wouldn't be the case. Still, taking in his brother's features after having been without him for the past while (not longer than a week, probably, but that was long in his book) was a shock he'd had no way of bracing for.
There were so many excuses he could have given, and so many ways that he could have argued back. It was practically second nature for him and Nathan by now, to argue over even the smallest things. And nothing about this current topic counted as trivial -- yet Peter knew that there was nothing he could say to excuse himself.
"I don't know anymore," he admitted with a shake of his head as he looked down at hands that had been glowing not so long ago. "When I first got those powers, I thought they were going to solve all my problems. Why did it all have to go so wrong?" But he knew he'd been looking for an easy fix, and he'd gotten anything but. As much as he wanted to believe that he would go back to his old life if it meant that it would bring all of those people back, he knew that it wasn't that easy. It didn't work that way, not even if you were a time traveler. And not when you were already dead.
No, he'd messed up, pure and simple, and the scolding he was getting was probably of his own imagination. And yet he couldn't help feeling guilty, anyway. He'd left Nathan behind, brainwashed and alone. If the blast hadn't reached far enough to kill him, too, anyway.
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Each useless shove was more discouraging than the last, but Claire wasn't allowing herself to give up hope. After more time than she cared to attempt to measure of useless shoving, she slammed her palms against the stone, simultaneously relishing in and wincing at the dull, aching burn that radiated through her palms.
"I don't want to be alone," she muttered, and then she repeated in a more desperate, tear-filled scream as she shook with the fear that she finally found herself admitting to. "I don't want to be alone!" The relief of the admission alone was enough, but the shouting had earned her some more stamina somehow. Reinvigorated her and made her more determined to beat the impossibility of the rock before her.
She backed off some, stumbling without the rubble to help support her over the cracks and uneven debris, then took a running start at it, throwing everything she had into one final, determined push, desperate to get this piece of rock out of the way and save whoever had been unfortunate enough to survive the devastation her uncle had caused.
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His hand fell away again, and he seemed to be almost fading slowly, like the echo of a dream as the morning came. It was equally difficult to make out his words as he spoke, and only snatches of them were able to be heard correctly.
"...should have known what would happen...couldn't stop..."
Then Nathan was gone entirely. But strangely, there was a door floating just behind where he had been, ever so slightly open so that a little bit of light seeped around the edges of it. And with there being nothing else other than Peter himself in the barren landscape, he didn't really have a lot of other options.
Surprisingly, Claire's final attempt at shoving the chunk of debris managed to move it again, though it was possibly the result of how much previous effort she'd put into loosening it. It didn't move too much, but enough back that its own weight tilted it at an angle giving her just enough space that she might be able to wiggle through into the area below.
Which she might want to do, as while it had seemed like there was someone trapped underneath the piece of masonry itself while she'd been struggling with it, it was clear now that she had more space that that hadn't really been the case at all.
There was a small trapdoor hidden underneath the debris. It was badly damaged and flimsy, but if someone had been in there at the time of the explosion, they may have even managed to survive with minimal injury.
Of course, with how silent the area was now - only her own breathing and the softer sounds of ash settling on the rubble - her determination to not be left along might have been too late...
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Still, he couldn't fight against them, and he only bowed his head as he took in Nathan's words. "I had no idea it would come to this. If I had, I would have never..." This was the last thing that he'd wanted. He thought that his powers would help to save everyone, so that he could make a difference, and yet all he'd managed to do was kill everyone who had been trying so hard to get out of this place, Claire included.
As he glanced up again, Nathan was already fading away. It was too fast. "Wait--" His hand shot out, but it only moved through Nathan as if he was a ghost. Before he could say another word, or even think of a way to keep Nathan there, he was already gone. And he was alone again.
Except then something else appeared in his place. Some sort of doorway, a path to... what? To death? Peter couldn't think of any other reason for it being there, and it wasn't as if there was anywhere else to go. Quietly, he took in a breath, and then drew forward to step through the doorway. This was the end. It had to be.
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Claire sank down to her knees and stared into the space beneath the rubble, palms pressed flat against the huge, hulking rock that had been a barrier between her and that space. It was too quiet. As badly as she wanted to take the heaved gasps of relief and try to calm herself down from the hysteric state, that didn't feel like it was going to happen. Her blood pressure was already spiking with fear again that she'd failed to save whoever it was that had been hiding down there.
Suffocation, maybe. Or worse. They could have been injured, burned badly enough that they were still alive but barely -- alive enough that Claire might have healed them with her blood. But, all of the uncertainty of what it was and the fear that she might be too late made her hesitate awkwardly. Even while the opposite reaction seemed more logical, to hurry and hope it would keep her from being too late, the silence made her certain enough she'd just blown it and a little wallowing wasn't going to change that.
"No," she whispered helplessly. "No, please," she started to clamber down, slinking her tiny body in the gap she'd formed and pulling on the trap door. One tug, two -- on the third, it jerked open and she quickly ducked through in hopes that the crawl space it hid would reveal a very alive person, as unlikely as that seemed.
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