[Heroes/The Godfather] Redemption (Peter/Claire, Nathan/Peter, NC-17) - {Part Three}
Title: Redemption
Fandom: Heroes/The Godfather
Art: Stunningly wonderful accompanying art by eryslash (spoilery for the fic; the works are linked individually in the text but can be found all together HERE.)
Pairing: Peter/Claire, Nathan/Peter (plus minor mentions of Peter/OCs)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 10,880 (W)
Warning: Incest, underage, general violence.
Spoilers: None for Heroes (apart from some quotes you have to know the series to catch); many for The Godfather I.
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the best beta in the Net who doesn't get a title this time but a lot of random snuggly love, just because she doesn't receive as much as she deserves.
Notes: Written for the 2008 edition of heroes_bigboom. I've been happy and proud to participate. Thanks to the mods for organizing it!
More notes: This fic is a more-or-less official sequel to my fic Godblessed. They can be read independently, although I think "Redemption" makes much more sense read as a sequel than a stand alone.
Summary: May 1947. After two years, Peter Petrelli's back home from Sicily, but something's changed. Now there's Claire, Nathan's long-lost daughter that Angela decided to reunite to the family. Claire's not happy to be there; Peter's happy she is. Nathan has to deal with both.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
The dinner is not like you imagined it. You thought about a family meal, something simple and intimate like the ones you’re used to; instead it’s a huge party with the big table set in the salon, too many seats, too many dishes, too many guests and too many elegant suits. It’s an American party, even if the guests are almost all Italian. Your father’s tastes were much more severe, but Nathan has got his soft spots.
You’re seriously determined to hate him for not telling you a word about this. You appeared in the midst of the shimmering of the crystal chandelier and the jewellery, as scruffy as always, just to find the guests’ hungry eyes fixed on you. They hadn’t had the privilege yet to stick their nose into the business of the great missing one, the younger Petrelli, the veteran, the fugitive, the homicide suspect cleared of all the accusations.
Nathan quickly grabbed you by your arm and dragged you upstairs, always smiling, then pushed a tuxedo in your arms.
“You’re a bastard,” you muttered while you got dressed. “What’s this, my punishment? You’re going to try and fucking embarrass me in front of the guests telling stories about my rebellious childhood?”
“It is your punishment,” Nathan admitted, calmly. “But I’m going to settle for watching you suffer. The girls are dying to hear your war anecdotes.”
“I’ve got a couple of interesting ones…” you mutter, putting on your trousers.
“Peter,” he warns you, frowning.
You roll your eyes. “What’s this really about? Apart from spoiling my night.”
“Ma wanted Claire to start making her appearance in society.”
This gives you a strange, sudden tug at your stomach. “And you’re going to tell all like this, in front of everybody? With a party? Heidi will be dying from…”
“Don’t be an ass. Nobody knows she’s my daughter.”
“A niece paying a visit?”
“Something like that.”
You comb your hair backwards with your fingers. You think Claire doesn’t need to “make her appearance in society”; they’re not people she would like anyway. You hardly stand them, and you’ve been used to standing them for all your life.
You fight with your tie, but it’s a battle you’ve never managed to win. Amused by your struggling, Nathan moves your hands from the skew knot, undoes it and ties it again in a second.
“What else?”
“Sorry?” He looks up. His puzzlement is so genuine it could even seem true.
“Not even Ma could drag you into a party for such a thing. What else?”
Nathan purses his lips like he were considering the question, then he takes your face in his hands and leans a kiss on a side of your forehead, in a certain spot near your right temple. “I’ll be waiting downstairs. Comb that hair.” And he’s gone.
You see her at the end of the room, near the cocktails table, her hair collected in a bun on her head and her neck reclined with a languid grace that looks so new to you. Without her school outfit or her home clothes, Claire looks suddenly too adult, like your chance had passed and been lost: she’s become a woman while you weren’t watching. But then you see her lift her hand with the polished nails to her mouth and brusquely stop the movement halfway. You smile, stepping forward and putting your hand on her back.
Your thumb brushes against the bare skin above the edge of the fabric. She’s wearing a white dress that makes her look like a sugared almond.
“Hi,” you tell her, kissing her temple with more intimacy than there’s ever been. The waiter hands you a glass of champagne, that you make tinkle softly against hers. “How was the first round?”
She shakes her head thoughtfully, letting a blond curl wave along her face. “Okay, I think. Your mother informed me that now I’m your third cousin. Or was it fourth? And your Aunt Teresa keeps calling me Claretta.”
“You don’t want to know how she calls me and Nathan.” You pass your arm around her shoulders, moving two steps across the room. Nathan and Heidi are talking with a vaguely familiar guy with a cigar in his mouth. Nathan’s got his arm around Heidi’s waist. From his expression you wouldn’t ever say he cheats on her on a regular basis; from her expression you wouldn’t ever say the cigar’s smell gives her nausea. Anytime you watch them together you think she’s too much (too intelligent, too good) for him.
“Ah, Peter,” Nathan calls you, opening his lips in a strangely large smile. “Come here. Do you know Mr. Dennison? Mr. Dennison, my brother Peter. Our veteran.” He emphasizes the last word like he were really proud of it - like it had been all his idea.
You stretch your hand towards the man with a smile and no friendliness.
“The U.S. need more men like you, Mr. Petrelli,” says Dennison, and there’s a light, amused sourness in his words, sarcastic and cheerful at the same time. You’re a murderer, and he knows that. Everybody does. While you think this guy is one of the few people who dared being insolent in your family’s home, you remember who he is. He’s a journalist, an important one; he writes for the New York Journal. Your father despised him cordially - that meant he considered him a smart guy.
This is starting to become a little too much for Claire’s appearance in society.
“Home with all our pieces at their place? Yes, we’re not many.”
Dennison smiles around his cigar. He casts a glance to Claire, who’s still squeezed in the curve of your arm, and Nathan introduces her to him as “Claire Petrelli” with impeccable temper, reciting a list of kinships twisted enough to confuse you too.
“You Italians have complicated families,” Dennison comments, without glancing away from her.
“I’m American,” Claire replies.
Nathan’s smile narrows half an inch at least. “We’re all American,” he points out.
You open your mouth to ask him when exactly did he find he possessed a patriotic spirit, but Heidi precedes you, the brave and convincing copy of a smile on her mouth. “I think we could sit at the table. Honey?”
They assigned you the seat that in the important nights has always been Nathan’s, at the right hand of the Father - in this case, the Brother. For some reason, Nathan tends to look more like your father when he’s got that particular smile on his mouth, and seeing him sit at the head of the table just increases the effect. You think that around the end of the party he’ll have his facial muscles all aching, and probably his shoulders’ ones too, if he keeps them squared so hard, like he wanted to hang over the guests bigger, stronger, firmer than he is. He’s not as sure of himself as he’d like to seem. Something in the way he meticulously cuts his roast beef and then leaves half untouched in the plate tells you about a tightened stomach.
At your right, Claire’s silent and wary like a hare invited at dinner in a wolf lair. Her white neck, so shamlessly naked, has a strange effect on you. You keep thinking how easy it’d be to stretch out and kiss it - find out from the pulse in her throat how nervous she really is and how much it’s just your imagination. To pull out one by one the little hairpins that keep her hair up, to let them fall on her shoulders and its perfume spread all around. You want to kiss her again, touch her without the obstacle of fabric or suspicious relatives; you want to tell her you’d really marry her, if you could, and this time not receive a laugh as an answer.
Instead you keep chewing on your dinner, eyeing alternately her and Nathan, trying to understand what they’re thinking. It was a game you often played with your brother. There’s a tiny wrinkle between Nathan’s eyebrows; it could be that the potatoes are saltless, or maybe not.
“So, what’s the big secret?”
Nathan looks at you and doesn’t answer, then he lowers his glance to the glass slowly waving between his fingers.
“Your support’s very important to me, Peter.”
You frown. “How can I support you if I don’t know what you’re doing?”
Nathan glances out of the corner of his eye. “You know I love you, don’t you?” he tells you with an absurdly high voice, in a tone that implies that you’ve got no alternatives other than accept his love, and all the consequences.
You roll your eyes, and this seems to amuse him immensely. You’re not the only one in your family who loves annoying his brother.
Your mother, sitting at the other side of the table, has got a relaxed and perfectly at ease expression, but sometimes you feel her eyes on you. Maybe it’s got something to do with the moments when you lean towards Claire to tell her something in her ear, or maybe it’s just the usual, generic control she exercises on you. She’s never kept it hidden that you were her favourite and, at the same time, the least reliable, and you’ve often got the impression she looked at you with more than vague exasperation. But she’s always supported you more than your father (or Nathan, anyway) ever did, and you know that everything she does, she does it for the family’s good.
You wonder how much she knows. There are things you’ve told only Nathan, and other things you’ve never told anyone. There are things that, if they were known, could destroy your family. And information in your mother’s hands is like grenades with the safety lock removed, ready to explode and shred everything to pieces.
And anyway, she’s your mother. You couldn’t bear it if she hated you.
At your left, Nathan clears his throat and stands up. At the same time, Claire rests an icy hand on your knee, under the large hem of the creamy table cloth. You turn towards Nathan but squeeze it, caressing her fingers with your thumb.
“Excuse me. May I have your attention for a minute? Thanks.”
He’s got his glass full with champagne for half in his hand. He’ll drink it at the end of the speech, with a slow and thoughtful attitude.
“My family and I would like to welcome you all, and thank you heartily for the affection you’re showing to us with your presence tonight. My only regret is that my father can’t be here with us; this night would’ve meant much to him. You know, people usually laugh when I say my father was my hero.” He chuckles softly, and from the table rises a murmur of approval. “Dad always said that we had a responsibility to use what God gave us to help people. To make a real difference. Dad always made the hard choices for the greater good.” He looks down for a moment. “Lately, we’ve all had to make hard choices. Some of us lost brothers, husbands, friends. My father was murdered one year and half ago. This family...” His glance runs to Heidi, the kids, your mother, Claire, and finally you. He rests a hand on your shoulder. “... almost broke into pieces, but it didn’t. We didn’t.” He squeezes you a little stronger, looking towards your side, but without meeting your eyes. “As soon as he returned from the battlefield, barely alive, my brother Peter has been accused of homicide. What... I asked myself, what’s wrong with this Land if a man who offered his life for his Country is thanked like this? Peter was in Sicily when he knew. But what has been kept hidden so far, what has kept Peter from home so long - what I myself have known just some months ago - is that Peter barely survived a suicide attempt.”
You’ve got all eyes on you. Once maybe you would’ve liked it; now your ears are hot and the sound muffled. You open your mouth, then close it again without letting out a sound.
“This made me understand that what’s happened to us must never happen again. That we have to fight, all together, to give our children a better future; put aside our differences, embrace our common goals. This is why...” He takes a slow breath, like his decision had been really so hard.
“Peter...” Claire whispers, her hand running after yours.
“... I’ve decided to run for Congress in the next elections.”
In the (at first surprised, then more and more strong) applause following the speech, the screech of your chair against the floor is barely audible. You throw your balled napkin on the table and leave.
+
Outside it’s pouring down. You cross the courtyard moving your wet hair from your face, open your car and sit inside it, slamming the door closed. You lean your elbows on the steering wheel, threading your fingers through your hair. Son of a bitch. Bastard son of a bitch. You know I love you, don’t you? You knew he couldn’t have possibly forgiven you for the flight thing. Letting you go with a little slap on your hands? Too easy. Nathan’s punishments must leave a sign.
A red blot passes in front of the windshield blurred by the pouring rain, from left to right, and you swallow hard the knot of rage and hatred that clenches your throat. You stretch out to open the right door, and under the red umbrella Claire looks at you with hesitation and embarrassment. The hem of her dress is all soaked with rain.
“You’re bleeding.”
You watch your hand. You bruised and skinned your knuckles when you threw that punch against the wall.
“You want to go for a drive?”
She nods; she closes the umbrella and enters in the car at your side. Even if it’s cold outside, her lips are warm when she takes your hand and softly kisses your scratched fist. In the darkness she’s got such a sweet, such an absorbed expression. Her attention is all for you. She’s all for you.
“I didn’t try to kill myself.”
“I know.”
“I had no reason to do that.”
“I know. I believe you.”
“The accusations were true. It’s all true.”
She stops, but she doesn’t let go of your hand, and her grip doesn’t relent. “You...”
“Yes.”
“You killed him, didn’t you?”
“There were two.” You look at her without lowering your eyes, without feeling ashamed - without feeling anything. She must understand who you are; it’s important. “They’d killed my father.”
The rain’s noise wraps you for some second, muffling the silence. Claire keeps watching you and doesn’t talk. Eventually you free your hand from hers and rest it on her nape, leaning out to kiss her cheek and then, more slowly, the corner of her mouth. Claire passes her arm around your neck.
“You still want to go for that drive?”
“I don’t care. Really. You... I know you had your reasons.”
While you kiss her, you pull out the hairpins from her hair, letting your fingers be filled with the weight of the locks teared from her hairdo. Instinctively she moves closer, trying to fill the uncomfortable distance separating you, the distance that prevents you from having her things around yours and taking out that absurd dress, too white, too flattering, with the soaked and transparent hem glued to her knees.
You withdraw gently, removing an annoying hairpin that hangs from a lock upon her ear. In her eyes you see what once Nathan must’ve seen in yours, when you liked to beg for his love and to have him inflict it upon you like a punishment.
You let go of her and slowly, without breaking the eye-contact, move yours hands back on the steering wheel. The windows are completely steamy. You open yours, letting the fresh air and the rain drops in, and Claire puts her hair in order with her hands while you start the car.
“I’m not a good person.”
She smiles indulgently.
“I’ll live with it.”
You wouldn’t betray her. Ever.
It must’ve been in a night very similar to this - you seem to recall it rained, too - that Nathan drove you to your apartment after a family dinner (or was it a party?). Your flat was new, the floor full with boxes and the fridge empty; the lights barely worked, with yellowish, jerky spurts. One foot in the threshold and one outside, Nathan asked you if he could come in. An admirable courtesy from him, since he’d paid the first six months rent - although you didn’t know that yet.
“Make yourself at home. Something like that. Well, your home is more decent.”
“It’s your home too.”
You look at her, uncertain whether to tell her it’s not true, or to point out you actually meant her home in Texas, her family’s one. The true one. When Claire realizes what she just said, she looks at her feet and starts smoothing out the creases in her skirt, uneasy. It seems like different images blend in your mind, past and present and something blurred that might be the future. Maybe it’s just the light, and the way Claire lingers near the doorframe. Nathan lingered too, that time, but you think for different reasons.
“Do you want to...” You gesture vaguely towards the couch.
“Thank you.” She’s as rigid as a pole, with her contracted shoulders and an expression like she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. She sits at the edge of the couch like she had forgotten how calmly that very afternoon, on that very couch, she let you move her hair from her eyes and straighten the collar of her shirt.
You crouch on the balls of your feet instead of sitting next to her. With her hand in yours, you really could be going to propose to her.
“It’s alright, Claire.” You smile slowly. You raise your hand, resting it on her cheek, and she tilts her head towards your palm. “Do you want something to drink?”
“No. No, it’s... Sorry.” She covers your hand with hers, squeezing it softly. “I feel good when I’m with you. I feel... right. Safe.”
“But?” you urge her gently.
But I’m too young, it’s not the right moment, you misunderstood, I love you like a relative, you’re my uncle for Christ’s sake.
“There’s no ‘but’.” She encircles your shoulders with her arms, nestling her face in the crook of your neck, and you hear her release a light breath. When you hug her waist, pulling her closer, in a precarious balance on your feet, Claire’s face emerges leaning a long series of kisses along the bony edge of your jaw. You didn’t shave today, and when her lips reach your mouth they’re red and soft like a mellow fruit.
You pull her up with you, her body pressed against yours. For some seconds you stay perfectly still, one against each other. Then time precipitates while you waver in the room like a shapeless drunken monster, faster and faster, her heels ticking on the floor, she clinging onto you, you divided between enjoying the moment and arranging things in the best possible way. Your back bumps noisily against the wall and Claire leans her hands on your chest, creasing your shirt, seizing your collar. You reach out blindly on the wall, finding the switch under your fingers, and the flat falls in the dark.
She threads her fingers through your hair, tracing twisted paths with her fingertips on your temples. She kisses you again, and this time your hands move down from her waist to her soft hipbones, that stretch the dress’ fabric. You stand up from the wall and try to guide her with little steps towards the bedroom, but something - from the noise you’d say a bottle - makes her stumble and pushes her closer in your arms.
“Claire?”
“I stubbed my toe.”
You reach out in the dark, touching her arm and her fingers that are squeezing her ankle, but it doesn’t seem as if it hurts.
“Wait.”
You pass an arm behind Claire’s knees, the other one around her waist and lift her, hiding a smile at her surprised little cry. You hadn’t noticed she was so small. Carrying her in your arms, it seems you could fold her and put her into a box like a doll. When you lay her down on the bed, her arms stay stretched around your neck like those of a child asking for a goodnight kiss - and you give it to her.
Your tie runs hissing from your collar; you undo the first two buttons of your shirt and take off your jacket, leaning back between her arms. Claire is so light that she seems to hang in mid-air on the mattress, without sinking, without bending it. Your weight, instead, digs a trench near the bedside. While you kiss her, you put your fingers on her knee, moving the fabric away, and your thumb moves up to look for the laced hem of her stockings but then moves suddenly away, like following an afterthought.
You kneel on the floor, taking gently off one of her shoes. Her stockings are the thinnest, yet a solid barrier between your lips and her skin when you lean a kiss on her instep. With a hand you stroke the back of her leg, feeling the soft consistency of her relaxed muscle, while your lips climb up slowly, not really kissing, caressing rather, until the little mountain of her knee, where they move on the inner thigh and stop against the little clip of the white garter belt.
A white-blue light filters through the window, enlightening the creases of her skirt squeezed in your fist, her waist compressed in the candy-white dress, the line of little buttons ending abruptly before her neckline. You open the clip with two fingers and kiss the bare skin. She leans back on her elbows and holds her breath while you undo all the clips and pull the stocking down, taking it off from her foot.
“Peter...” she calls you softly while you undress her other leg. Her voice trembles a little, and a shiver adds to the tremble when you move your lips back again on her inner thigh, a little higher. Her skirt’s hem tickles your ear, threatening to swallowing you inside its warm and cozy shadow, but Claire reaches out and pulls it up, maybe to make you more comfortable, remaining even more uncovered before your eyes.
The gesture, for some reason, arouses you incredibly. You look up to meet her glance; she’s got her lower lip squeezed between her teeth and her throat tensed while she spies on your moviments. You slowly unbutton the corset of her dress, from the bottom to the top. Claire sits up to let you pull down her straps and finally take off her dress.
Underneath, her lingerie is blinding white. You rest your hands on her hips, worrying she might be trembling (you did, the first time), but she’s not trembling at all; her hands on the back of your neck are firm, her breath irregular but decisive. She kisses you, opening her mouth for you, letting your tongue invade it. When she pulls you down on the mattress, on her body, her knees move up to embrace your hips.
Her fingers slips under your suspenders and pull them down, looking gropingly for your shirt’s buttons. You help her pull out the lap trapped inside your trousers and twist your arms to have them freed from the shirt, that’s cruelly turned inside out and struck around your wrists. Too late you remember you didn’t open your cuffs, but you accept the light crack of the buttons that leap out without a regret.
In some way, in an unspecified moment, in the dark, one of Claire’s breasts escaped from the laced cup of her brassiere. You cup it in your hand and kiss it delicately, almost reverently, rubbing your tongue against the tip of her nipple. Claire releases a noisy sigh, then a light moan when you squeeze it between your lips. You pull her straps down without unfastening her brassiere and contemplate the vulgar and arousing way the lace band hangs under her naked breasts. Your trousers’ fabric rubs repeatedly against her bare legs.
With a long caress, you move your fingers down her hip, the lace side of her garter belt, then slowly inwards. The fabric is damp, and when you caresses it softly with a fingertip the stain widens; moving under your body, Claire moans something indistinct and encouraging.
(He could step in any moment. He’s got the key. As absorbed as you are, you wouldn’t even hear him open the door - let aside have the time to get dressed and pretend nothing’s happened. He could enter now, and find you with one of his daughter’s breasts in your mouth, your hand between her legs.)
You slip a thumb under her garter belt, clasping the hem of her panties and pulling it down, an inch at time, one hip then the other, moving aside to let the fabric slip to Claire’s knees and then from her ankles. The prostitutes in France were always delighted (or they pretended to be) with the care with which you undressed them. You liked them small and blond, with soft hips and a pointy chin.
You try to move down on her again, but Claire sits up and puts her hands on your chest, pressing her breasts against you. While you exchange another kiss her hands are on your trousers’ belt, they pull it, unfasten it, fight against the leather until it opens up, then attack your trousers. In a couple of seconds they’re collected around your knees, and you push Claire down on her back to have the space to take them off, quickly and with as little embarrassment as possible, getting rid of your socks too.
She’s so beautiful, with her garter belt without panties and her brassiere pulled down, and so calm and self-confident that for a second you fear she’s done it already, maybe with some Texan boy with a cowboy hat and the excuse to show her his dad’s ranch. But the thought doesn’t bother you longer than a second; you’re not like Nathan, you don’t care if she’s already done it. She chose you, now. You chose him. You chose her.
She closes her eyes when you enter her; cautiously, waiting to catch her glance, you thrust inside her. She’s tight and wet, as hot as hell but as comfortable as if she’s always been yours, and her resistance cedes almost immediately with a sudden cry of surprise, or pain, or relief. You kiss her cheek, whispering something with a voice that doesn’t sound like yours, but like the ones of other men who whispered to your ear to relax, that it was going to last just a second, that you were good - a good boy. Claire clings to you and pulls you deeper between her thighs, into the convulsive and wet darkness of her body.
He could walk in now, while you’re fucking his daughter, between the creaking of the bedsprings and the moans and the sweat; he could step in now, while you repeat something that tomorrow she’s going to remember like a precious gift; now, while you regain enough self-control not to come inside her.
But nothing happens.
Sweat dries slowly on your naked skin, gathering warm and sticky where your bodies still touch. The bed creaks when Claire curls up towards the bedside and sinks her face in the pillow, and you can’t help but watching her, in your short postcoital bliss, and wonder what’s wrong now. You pass your arm around her waist and pull her back against your chest.
“You alright?” you whisper, kissing her shoulder.
She closes her eyes and nods, bending her hand back through your hair. She’s got a blood stain on her thigh; when you reach out to wipe it, you feel a shiver cross her body from her head to her feet, like a light yet painful electric shot.
“You know I love you, don’t you?” you murmur.
She sighs, turning around to watch you in your eyes. She’s scared but determined, and you recognize something of the family trait in the way she says: “I love you” and nothing else, like this alone were enough to explain everything - and instead it never explained anything.
You kiss her forehead and think that soon she will find out by herself.
Fandom: Heroes/The Godfather
Art: Stunningly wonderful accompanying art by eryslash (spoilery for the fic; the works are linked individually in the text but can be found all together HERE.)
Pairing: Peter/Claire, Nathan/Peter (plus minor mentions of Peter/OCs)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 10,880 (W)
Warning: Incest, underage, general violence.
Spoilers: None for Heroes (apart from some quotes you have to know the series to catch); many for The Godfather I.
Thanks to: snopes_faith, the best beta in the Net who doesn't get a title this time but a lot of random snuggly love, just because she doesn't receive as much as she deserves.
Notes: Written for the 2008 edition of heroes_bigboom. I've been happy and proud to participate. Thanks to the mods for organizing it!
More notes: This fic is a more-or-less official sequel to my fic Godblessed. They can be read independently, although I think "Redemption" makes much more sense read as a sequel than a stand alone.
Summary: May 1947. After two years, Peter Petrelli's back home from Sicily, but something's changed. Now there's Claire, Nathan's long-lost daughter that Angela decided to reunite to the family. Claire's not happy to be there; Peter's happy she is. Nathan has to deal with both.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
The dinner is not like you imagined it. You thought about a family meal, something simple and intimate like the ones you’re used to; instead it’s a huge party with the big table set in the salon, too many seats, too many dishes, too many guests and too many elegant suits. It’s an American party, even if the guests are almost all Italian. Your father’s tastes were much more severe, but Nathan has got his soft spots.
You’re seriously determined to hate him for not telling you a word about this. You appeared in the midst of the shimmering of the crystal chandelier and the jewellery, as scruffy as always, just to find the guests’ hungry eyes fixed on you. They hadn’t had the privilege yet to stick their nose into the business of the great missing one, the younger Petrelli, the veteran, the fugitive, the homicide suspect cleared of all the accusations.
Nathan quickly grabbed you by your arm and dragged you upstairs, always smiling, then pushed a tuxedo in your arms.
“You’re a bastard,” you muttered while you got dressed. “What’s this, my punishment? You’re going to try and fucking embarrass me in front of the guests telling stories about my rebellious childhood?”
“It is your punishment,” Nathan admitted, calmly. “But I’m going to settle for watching you suffer. The girls are dying to hear your war anecdotes.”
“I’ve got a couple of interesting ones…” you mutter, putting on your trousers.
“Peter,” he warns you, frowning.
You roll your eyes. “What’s this really about? Apart from spoiling my night.”
“Ma wanted Claire to start making her appearance in society.”
This gives you a strange, sudden tug at your stomach. “And you’re going to tell all like this, in front of everybody? With a party? Heidi will be dying from…”
“Don’t be an ass. Nobody knows she’s my daughter.”
“A niece paying a visit?”
“Something like that.”
You comb your hair backwards with your fingers. You think Claire doesn’t need to “make her appearance in society”; they’re not people she would like anyway. You hardly stand them, and you’ve been used to standing them for all your life.
You fight with your tie, but it’s a battle you’ve never managed to win. Amused by your struggling, Nathan moves your hands from the skew knot, undoes it and ties it again in a second.
“What else?”
“Sorry?” He looks up. His puzzlement is so genuine it could even seem true.
“Not even Ma could drag you into a party for such a thing. What else?”
Nathan purses his lips like he were considering the question, then he takes your face in his hands and leans a kiss on a side of your forehead, in a certain spot near your right temple. “I’ll be waiting downstairs. Comb that hair.” And he’s gone.
You see her at the end of the room, near the cocktails table, her hair collected in a bun on her head and her neck reclined with a languid grace that looks so new to you. Without her school outfit or her home clothes, Claire looks suddenly too adult, like your chance had passed and been lost: she’s become a woman while you weren’t watching. But then you see her lift her hand with the polished nails to her mouth and brusquely stop the movement halfway. You smile, stepping forward and putting your hand on her back.
Your thumb brushes against the bare skin above the edge of the fabric. She’s wearing a white dress that makes her look like a sugared almond.
“Hi,” you tell her, kissing her temple with more intimacy than there’s ever been. The waiter hands you a glass of champagne, that you make tinkle softly against hers. “How was the first round?”
She shakes her head thoughtfully, letting a blond curl wave along her face. “Okay, I think. Your mother informed me that now I’m your third cousin. Or was it fourth? And your Aunt Teresa keeps calling me Claretta.”
“You don’t want to know how she calls me and Nathan.” You pass your arm around her shoulders, moving two steps across the room. Nathan and Heidi are talking with a vaguely familiar guy with a cigar in his mouth. Nathan’s got his arm around Heidi’s waist. From his expression you wouldn’t ever say he cheats on her on a regular basis; from her expression you wouldn’t ever say the cigar’s smell gives her nausea. Anytime you watch them together you think she’s too much (too intelligent, too good) for him.
“Ah, Peter,” Nathan calls you, opening his lips in a strangely large smile. “Come here. Do you know Mr. Dennison? Mr. Dennison, my brother Peter. Our veteran.” He emphasizes the last word like he were really proud of it - like it had been all his idea.
You stretch your hand towards the man with a smile and no friendliness.
“The U.S. need more men like you, Mr. Petrelli,” says Dennison, and there’s a light, amused sourness in his words, sarcastic and cheerful at the same time. You’re a murderer, and he knows that. Everybody does. While you think this guy is one of the few people who dared being insolent in your family’s home, you remember who he is. He’s a journalist, an important one; he writes for the New York Journal. Your father despised him cordially - that meant he considered him a smart guy.
This is starting to become a little too much for Claire’s appearance in society.
“Home with all our pieces at their place? Yes, we’re not many.”
Dennison smiles around his cigar. He casts a glance to Claire, who’s still squeezed in the curve of your arm, and Nathan introduces her to him as “Claire Petrelli” with impeccable temper, reciting a list of kinships twisted enough to confuse you too.
“You Italians have complicated families,” Dennison comments, without glancing away from her.
“I’m American,” Claire replies.
Nathan’s smile narrows half an inch at least. “We’re all American,” he points out.
You open your mouth to ask him when exactly did he find he possessed a patriotic spirit, but Heidi precedes you, the brave and convincing copy of a smile on her mouth. “I think we could sit at the table. Honey?”
They assigned you the seat that in the important nights has always been Nathan’s, at the right hand of the Father - in this case, the Brother. For some reason, Nathan tends to look more like your father when he’s got that particular smile on his mouth, and seeing him sit at the head of the table just increases the effect. You think that around the end of the party he’ll have his facial muscles all aching, and probably his shoulders’ ones too, if he keeps them squared so hard, like he wanted to hang over the guests bigger, stronger, firmer than he is. He’s not as sure of himself as he’d like to seem. Something in the way he meticulously cuts his roast beef and then leaves half untouched in the plate tells you about a tightened stomach.
At your right, Claire’s silent and wary like a hare invited at dinner in a wolf lair. Her white neck, so shamlessly naked, has a strange effect on you. You keep thinking how easy it’d be to stretch out and kiss it - find out from the pulse in her throat how nervous she really is and how much it’s just your imagination. To pull out one by one the little hairpins that keep her hair up, to let them fall on her shoulders and its perfume spread all around. You want to kiss her again, touch her without the obstacle of fabric or suspicious relatives; you want to tell her you’d really marry her, if you could, and this time not receive a laugh as an answer.
Instead you keep chewing on your dinner, eyeing alternately her and Nathan, trying to understand what they’re thinking. It was a game you often played with your brother. There’s a tiny wrinkle between Nathan’s eyebrows; it could be that the potatoes are saltless, or maybe not.
“So, what’s the big secret?”
Nathan looks at you and doesn’t answer, then he lowers his glance to the glass slowly waving between his fingers.
“Your support’s very important to me, Peter.”
You frown. “How can I support you if I don’t know what you’re doing?”
Nathan glances out of the corner of his eye. “You know I love you, don’t you?” he tells you with an absurdly high voice, in a tone that implies that you’ve got no alternatives other than accept his love, and all the consequences.
You roll your eyes, and this seems to amuse him immensely. You’re not the only one in your family who loves annoying his brother.
Your mother, sitting at the other side of the table, has got a relaxed and perfectly at ease expression, but sometimes you feel her eyes on you. Maybe it’s got something to do with the moments when you lean towards Claire to tell her something in her ear, or maybe it’s just the usual, generic control she exercises on you. She’s never kept it hidden that you were her favourite and, at the same time, the least reliable, and you’ve often got the impression she looked at you with more than vague exasperation. But she’s always supported you more than your father (or Nathan, anyway) ever did, and you know that everything she does, she does it for the family’s good.
You wonder how much she knows. There are things you’ve told only Nathan, and other things you’ve never told anyone. There are things that, if they were known, could destroy your family. And information in your mother’s hands is like grenades with the safety lock removed, ready to explode and shred everything to pieces.
And anyway, she’s your mother. You couldn’t bear it if she hated you.
At your left, Nathan clears his throat and stands up. At the same time, Claire rests an icy hand on your knee, under the large hem of the creamy table cloth. You turn towards Nathan but squeeze it, caressing her fingers with your thumb.
“Excuse me. May I have your attention for a minute? Thanks.”
He’s got his glass full with champagne for half in his hand. He’ll drink it at the end of the speech, with a slow and thoughtful attitude.
“My family and I would like to welcome you all, and thank you heartily for the affection you’re showing to us with your presence tonight. My only regret is that my father can’t be here with us; this night would’ve meant much to him. You know, people usually laugh when I say my father was my hero.” He chuckles softly, and from the table rises a murmur of approval. “Dad always said that we had a responsibility to use what God gave us to help people. To make a real difference. Dad always made the hard choices for the greater good.” He looks down for a moment. “Lately, we’ve all had to make hard choices. Some of us lost brothers, husbands, friends. My father was murdered one year and half ago. This family...” His glance runs to Heidi, the kids, your mother, Claire, and finally you. He rests a hand on your shoulder. “... almost broke into pieces, but it didn’t. We didn’t.” He squeezes you a little stronger, looking towards your side, but without meeting your eyes. “As soon as he returned from the battlefield, barely alive, my brother Peter has been accused of homicide. What... I asked myself, what’s wrong with this Land if a man who offered his life for his Country is thanked like this? Peter was in Sicily when he knew. But what has been kept hidden so far, what has kept Peter from home so long - what I myself have known just some months ago - is that Peter barely survived a suicide attempt.”
You’ve got all eyes on you. Once maybe you would’ve liked it; now your ears are hot and the sound muffled. You open your mouth, then close it again without letting out a sound.
“This made me understand that what’s happened to us must never happen again. That we have to fight, all together, to give our children a better future; put aside our differences, embrace our common goals. This is why...” He takes a slow breath, like his decision had been really so hard.
“Peter...” Claire whispers, her hand running after yours.
“... I’ve decided to run for Congress in the next elections.”
In the (at first surprised, then more and more strong) applause following the speech, the screech of your chair against the floor is barely audible. You throw your balled napkin on the table and leave.
+
Outside it’s pouring down. You cross the courtyard moving your wet hair from your face, open your car and sit inside it, slamming the door closed. You lean your elbows on the steering wheel, threading your fingers through your hair. Son of a bitch. Bastard son of a bitch. You know I love you, don’t you? You knew he couldn’t have possibly forgiven you for the flight thing. Letting you go with a little slap on your hands? Too easy. Nathan’s punishments must leave a sign.
A red blot passes in front of the windshield blurred by the pouring rain, from left to right, and you swallow hard the knot of rage and hatred that clenches your throat. You stretch out to open the right door, and under the red umbrella Claire looks at you with hesitation and embarrassment. The hem of her dress is all soaked with rain.
“You’re bleeding.”
You watch your hand. You bruised and skinned your knuckles when you threw that punch against the wall.
“You want to go for a drive?”
She nods; she closes the umbrella and enters in the car at your side. Even if it’s cold outside, her lips are warm when she takes your hand and softly kisses your scratched fist. In the darkness she’s got such a sweet, such an absorbed expression. Her attention is all for you. She’s all for you.
“I didn’t try to kill myself.”
“I know.”
“I had no reason to do that.”
“I know. I believe you.”
“The accusations were true. It’s all true.”
She stops, but she doesn’t let go of your hand, and her grip doesn’t relent. “You...”
“Yes.”
“You killed him, didn’t you?”
“There were two.” You look at her without lowering your eyes, without feeling ashamed - without feeling anything. She must understand who you are; it’s important. “They’d killed my father.”
The rain’s noise wraps you for some second, muffling the silence. Claire keeps watching you and doesn’t talk. Eventually you free your hand from hers and rest it on her nape, leaning out to kiss her cheek and then, more slowly, the corner of her mouth. Claire passes her arm around your neck.
“You still want to go for that drive?”
“I don’t care. Really. You... I know you had your reasons.”
While you kiss her, you pull out the hairpins from her hair, letting your fingers be filled with the weight of the locks teared from her hairdo. Instinctively she moves closer, trying to fill the uncomfortable distance separating you, the distance that prevents you from having her things around yours and taking out that absurd dress, too white, too flattering, with the soaked and transparent hem glued to her knees.
You withdraw gently, removing an annoying hairpin that hangs from a lock upon her ear. In her eyes you see what once Nathan must’ve seen in yours, when you liked to beg for his love and to have him inflict it upon you like a punishment.
You let go of her and slowly, without breaking the eye-contact, move yours hands back on the steering wheel. The windows are completely steamy. You open yours, letting the fresh air and the rain drops in, and Claire puts her hair in order with her hands while you start the car.
“I’m not a good person.”
She smiles indulgently.
“I’ll live with it.”
You wouldn’t betray her. Ever.
It must’ve been in a night very similar to this - you seem to recall it rained, too - that Nathan drove you to your apartment after a family dinner (or was it a party?). Your flat was new, the floor full with boxes and the fridge empty; the lights barely worked, with yellowish, jerky spurts. One foot in the threshold and one outside, Nathan asked you if he could come in. An admirable courtesy from him, since he’d paid the first six months rent - although you didn’t know that yet.
“Make yourself at home. Something like that. Well, your home is more decent.”
“It’s your home too.”
You look at her, uncertain whether to tell her it’s not true, or to point out you actually meant her home in Texas, her family’s one. The true one. When Claire realizes what she just said, she looks at her feet and starts smoothing out the creases in her skirt, uneasy. It seems like different images blend in your mind, past and present and something blurred that might be the future. Maybe it’s just the light, and the way Claire lingers near the doorframe. Nathan lingered too, that time, but you think for different reasons.
“Do you want to...” You gesture vaguely towards the couch.
“Thank you.” She’s as rigid as a pole, with her contracted shoulders and an expression like she doesn’t really know what she’s doing. She sits at the edge of the couch like she had forgotten how calmly that very afternoon, on that very couch, she let you move her hair from her eyes and straighten the collar of her shirt.
You crouch on the balls of your feet instead of sitting next to her. With her hand in yours, you really could be going to propose to her.
“It’s alright, Claire.” You smile slowly. You raise your hand, resting it on her cheek, and she tilts her head towards your palm. “Do you want something to drink?”
“No. No, it’s... Sorry.” She covers your hand with hers, squeezing it softly. “I feel good when I’m with you. I feel... right. Safe.”
“But?” you urge her gently.
But I’m too young, it’s not the right moment, you misunderstood, I love you like a relative, you’re my uncle for Christ’s sake.
“There’s no ‘but’.” She encircles your shoulders with her arms, nestling her face in the crook of your neck, and you hear her release a light breath. When you hug her waist, pulling her closer, in a precarious balance on your feet, Claire’s face emerges leaning a long series of kisses along the bony edge of your jaw. You didn’t shave today, and when her lips reach your mouth they’re red and soft like a mellow fruit.
You pull her up with you, her body pressed against yours. For some seconds you stay perfectly still, one against each other. Then time precipitates while you waver in the room like a shapeless drunken monster, faster and faster, her heels ticking on the floor, she clinging onto you, you divided between enjoying the moment and arranging things in the best possible way. Your back bumps noisily against the wall and Claire leans her hands on your chest, creasing your shirt, seizing your collar. You reach out blindly on the wall, finding the switch under your fingers, and the flat falls in the dark.
She threads her fingers through your hair, tracing twisted paths with her fingertips on your temples. She kisses you again, and this time your hands move down from her waist to her soft hipbones, that stretch the dress’ fabric. You stand up from the wall and try to guide her with little steps towards the bedroom, but something - from the noise you’d say a bottle - makes her stumble and pushes her closer in your arms.
“Claire?”
“I stubbed my toe.”
You reach out in the dark, touching her arm and her fingers that are squeezing her ankle, but it doesn’t seem as if it hurts.
“Wait.”
You pass an arm behind Claire’s knees, the other one around her waist and lift her, hiding a smile at her surprised little cry. You hadn’t noticed she was so small. Carrying her in your arms, it seems you could fold her and put her into a box like a doll. When you lay her down on the bed, her arms stay stretched around your neck like those of a child asking for a goodnight kiss - and you give it to her.
Your tie runs hissing from your collar; you undo the first two buttons of your shirt and take off your jacket, leaning back between her arms. Claire is so light that she seems to hang in mid-air on the mattress, without sinking, without bending it. Your weight, instead, digs a trench near the bedside. While you kiss her, you put your fingers on her knee, moving the fabric away, and your thumb moves up to look for the laced hem of her stockings but then moves suddenly away, like following an afterthought.
You kneel on the floor, taking gently off one of her shoes. Her stockings are the thinnest, yet a solid barrier between your lips and her skin when you lean a kiss on her instep. With a hand you stroke the back of her leg, feeling the soft consistency of her relaxed muscle, while your lips climb up slowly, not really kissing, caressing rather, until the little mountain of her knee, where they move on the inner thigh and stop against the little clip of the white garter belt.
A white-blue light filters through the window, enlightening the creases of her skirt squeezed in your fist, her waist compressed in the candy-white dress, the line of little buttons ending abruptly before her neckline. You open the clip with two fingers and kiss the bare skin. She leans back on her elbows and holds her breath while you undo all the clips and pull the stocking down, taking it off from her foot.
“Peter...” she calls you softly while you undress her other leg. Her voice trembles a little, and a shiver adds to the tremble when you move your lips back again on her inner thigh, a little higher. Her skirt’s hem tickles your ear, threatening to swallowing you inside its warm and cozy shadow, but Claire reaches out and pulls it up, maybe to make you more comfortable, remaining even more uncovered before your eyes.
The gesture, for some reason, arouses you incredibly. You look up to meet her glance; she’s got her lower lip squeezed between her teeth and her throat tensed while she spies on your moviments. You slowly unbutton the corset of her dress, from the bottom to the top. Claire sits up to let you pull down her straps and finally take off her dress.
Underneath, her lingerie is blinding white. You rest your hands on her hips, worrying she might be trembling (you did, the first time), but she’s not trembling at all; her hands on the back of your neck are firm, her breath irregular but decisive. She kisses you, opening her mouth for you, letting your tongue invade it. When she pulls you down on the mattress, on her body, her knees move up to embrace your hips.
Her fingers slips under your suspenders and pull them down, looking gropingly for your shirt’s buttons. You help her pull out the lap trapped inside your trousers and twist your arms to have them freed from the shirt, that’s cruelly turned inside out and struck around your wrists. Too late you remember you didn’t open your cuffs, but you accept the light crack of the buttons that leap out without a regret.
In some way, in an unspecified moment, in the dark, one of Claire’s breasts escaped from the laced cup of her brassiere. You cup it in your hand and kiss it delicately, almost reverently, rubbing your tongue against the tip of her nipple. Claire releases a noisy sigh, then a light moan when you squeeze it between your lips. You pull her straps down without unfastening her brassiere and contemplate the vulgar and arousing way the lace band hangs under her naked breasts. Your trousers’ fabric rubs repeatedly against her bare legs.
With a long caress, you move your fingers down her hip, the lace side of her garter belt, then slowly inwards. The fabric is damp, and when you caresses it softly with a fingertip the stain widens; moving under your body, Claire moans something indistinct and encouraging.
(He could step in any moment. He’s got the key. As absorbed as you are, you wouldn’t even hear him open the door - let aside have the time to get dressed and pretend nothing’s happened. He could enter now, and find you with one of his daughter’s breasts in your mouth, your hand between her legs.)
You slip a thumb under her garter belt, clasping the hem of her panties and pulling it down, an inch at time, one hip then the other, moving aside to let the fabric slip to Claire’s knees and then from her ankles. The prostitutes in France were always delighted (or they pretended to be) with the care with which you undressed them. You liked them small and blond, with soft hips and a pointy chin.
You try to move down on her again, but Claire sits up and puts her hands on your chest, pressing her breasts against you. While you exchange another kiss her hands are on your trousers’ belt, they pull it, unfasten it, fight against the leather until it opens up, then attack your trousers. In a couple of seconds they’re collected around your knees, and you push Claire down on her back to have the space to take them off, quickly and with as little embarrassment as possible, getting rid of your socks too.
She’s so beautiful, with her garter belt without panties and her brassiere pulled down, and so calm and self-confident that for a second you fear she’s done it already, maybe with some Texan boy with a cowboy hat and the excuse to show her his dad’s ranch. But the thought doesn’t bother you longer than a second; you’re not like Nathan, you don’t care if she’s already done it. She chose you, now. You chose him. You chose her.
She closes her eyes when you enter her; cautiously, waiting to catch her glance, you thrust inside her. She’s tight and wet, as hot as hell but as comfortable as if she’s always been yours, and her resistance cedes almost immediately with a sudden cry of surprise, or pain, or relief. You kiss her cheek, whispering something with a voice that doesn’t sound like yours, but like the ones of other men who whispered to your ear to relax, that it was going to last just a second, that you were good - a good boy. Claire clings to you and pulls you deeper between her thighs, into the convulsive and wet darkness of her body.
He could walk in now, while you’re fucking his daughter, between the creaking of the bedsprings and the moans and the sweat; he could step in now, while you repeat something that tomorrow she’s going to remember like a precious gift; now, while you regain enough self-control not to come inside her.
But nothing happens.
Sweat dries slowly on your naked skin, gathering warm and sticky where your bodies still touch. The bed creaks when Claire curls up towards the bedside and sinks her face in the pillow, and you can’t help but watching her, in your short postcoital bliss, and wonder what’s wrong now. You pass your arm around her waist and pull her back against your chest.
“You alright?” you whisper, kissing her shoulder.
She closes her eyes and nods, bending her hand back through your hair. She’s got a blood stain on her thigh; when you reach out to wipe it, you feel a shiver cross her body from her head to her feet, like a light yet painful electric shot.
“You know I love you, don’t you?” you murmur.
She sighs, turning around to watch you in your eyes. She’s scared but determined, and you recognize something of the family trait in the way she says: “I love you” and nothing else, like this alone were enough to explain everything - and instead it never explained anything.
You kiss her forehead and think that soon she will find out by herself.