the child's shadow stretched out by technosage
Title: the child's shadow stretched out
Author: technosage
Characters/Pairing: Peter/Claire
Rating/Warnings: R, for language and themes, implied m/f and m/m incest
Summary: Peter walks the broken streets of New York City trying to come to terms with what's happened. He finds an answer to a question he didn't know he was asking.
the child's shadow stretched out
by
technosage
He hadn't imagined all the cars.
Hunks of twisted metal. Porsches alongside minivans, Escorts and cabs. The Hummers fared marginally better, proof of their military descent. But even they broke open, spilled their innards like downed mecha on a battlefield in Simon and Monty's favorite anime.
Farther out, toward Long Island or New Jersey, on the expressways, and beyond the barricades that hadn't stopped anyone from seeking their lost and dying without them, they looked less like skeletons of robot warriors, and more like homeless in line at a soup kitchen with a reputation for having extra.
Hundreds of thousands of people flash-fried in an explosion twice the size of the bombs that took Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands dying of radiation poisoning, leukemia, dehydration. They'd shopped here, at the carniceria with little Rosa in tow, pigtails flying, red ribbons streaming out behind her. Worked here, on brick and marble Wall Street rubbing the bull's shiny balls for luck when they thought no one looked. Ate here, extra lean corned beef on rye at Maxie's Delicatessen. Played, learned, laughed, fucked.
But what remained to mark their passing, amidst the wreck of the City and gray charred bones, on broken streets and blocked off bridges were the cars.
When he'd dreamed of it, he'd seen them: traffic stopped on city streets while Claire ran toward him, Mohinder exited a cab he wasn't driving and Parkman waved them to a standstill. Maybe it was because there weren't any in the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only fallen Buddhas, scorched skin, and crumbled buildings. But whenever he'd tried to envision it, he hadn't seen the cars.
Now he walks among them, mobility immobilized, and thinks of immovable objects and irresistible forces. Gods and monsters.
#
He wanders the shattered streets, alone.
When he must, he flies over mountains of stony rubbish. Breathes the poisoned air and touches tainted ruins unharmed.
Paints the future in comic book colors, but sees the past in shades of gray.
All the sounds he hears are death: girders buckling on the wind; hiss and pop of buried fires and gouts of steam; clatter and smash of City shards. A surreal wasteland without scavenging crows, all that lives here scuttles close to ground and among the cracks.
God is a cockroach, Mohinder said, and here Peter sometimes wonders if he is right. Other times he feels like Lot with all his dreams turned to salt and ash.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, his ass. My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? is more like it.
#
By the sixth day, he thinks he has forgotten how to see in color, how to hear a human voice. Her footfalls, when they come, sound odd, wrong and substantial in this place of ghosts and memories.
From down the street, they reach for him. Petrelli thoughts -- his mother's steel, Nathan's determination -- merging with her desperate quest for self and warmth to share it with. It always surprises him, how familiar she feels, surprises him until he remembers.
She's his niece. Nathan's daughter, and nine years his junior besides. Not Lot's wife, nor Noah's either.
Before she rounds the corner, he bends light. Fades from sight and rises to a perch atop a fallen tower above the ruined plaza where it happened.
"I know you're here."
So he hasn't forgotten after all, but the words seem strange nonetheless. Definitive, and yet, how can she know when even he's no longer sure?
"It's not your fault." In the center of the rubble where the fountain used to be, she turns in a slow circle. Her pale shadow falls across the face of the plaza and marks it half-past never again. "You didn't do this, Peter, it wasn't you."
Her words wheel on the wind, scattering. He would chase them down, respond maybe, if he knew what to say.
Hands in the pockets of her dark jeans, now, she shrugs, squints, face scrunched against the ash and chill while she studies the cavities where he might hide.
"That's not it, is it? Nathan thinks it is. My father thinks you're going crazy with guilt and that's why you keep coming back here."
When he doesn't answer, she sighs, and dusts a skeleton-free spot to sit atop the rubble. Pin straight auburn has long since replaced the Rapunzel curls she wore when he saved her - and she saved him; its blunt ends fall in a neat line along her shoulders, couture instead of cheerleader.
He floats to another perch, one where he can see her face, and settles, careful not to dislodge anything that will alert her to his presence. There, he pulls his coat around his chest.
"She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed actually seems worried." Peter barely holds back a snort at that description of his mother. Angela Petrelli would like to think of herself that way, to be sure. "She's afraid you'll kill yourself, like your dad. I told her it'd be kinda hard, but she said I didn't know you like she does. Mohinder says maybe if we full-on destroy the part of our brains that controls our abilities, then we won't heal. Did he tell you that? I think he felt bad for me, after Molly. Like he wanted me to have some control…just in case."
He knows how to end his life. He'd figured it out before he handed her the gun - God, was it only a month and a half ago? Maybe telling her then would've been the right thing, but he couldn't take the risk she'd hesitate. He should've known better.
Claire's a Petrelli, even if in the moment, elbows resting on her knees, she looks more like a model at a photo shoot for the Red Cross or Disarmament Now!
Outwardly, she appears calm. A child staring out at the ocean, deep in thought. Inwardly, she keens. Please. Please. Don't leave me with them. A lone gull above a choppy sea.
It would surprise her, he thinks, to know that her father sometimes feels the same. Already her public face grows as polished as Nathan's and her grandmother's.
"Anyway… I don't think that's why you're here." She pauses, then pouts like she's about to blow a big pink bubble that Disarmament Now! would probably Photoshop into a mushroom cloud. "I think you're just-" An awkward shrug, then she whisks her hair off her shoulder, frustration in her movements and her thoughts. "Wondering how this could have happened.
"How She and Nathan could've let this happen."
Altars with misshapen candles, dog-eared photos, hopeful last seens and gray in memoriams. Millions of mourners the world over, all asking how, how their gods could've let this happen. Claire's voice carries bitterness for all of them.
That draws him down from his roost to sit beside her. He doesn't reveal himself, and she doesn't startle. "He tried."
"Selective evacuation." Her mouth twists, eyes go flat and mean; the ugliness of her features matches that of the idea.
"Some must be sacrificed." Borrowed words, flat and exhausted from countless conversations like this one.
"Yeah, I guess I just forgot the part where we elected them kings and queens of the universe." Her objection is equally tired, though he usually phrases it differently.
"'Don't be sanctimonious.'" He projects Nathan's voice and the illusion of Nathan holding his thumb and fourth finger to his temples. "'You were part of it.'"
Sky blue eyes flash his own usual snarling defiance back at him, but she presses her lips together and says nothing, even when he lets go of Nathan and shows himself.
They stare at each other a long time, too long, then her fingers graze the scar. "They all think you can't heal it."
"But you don't."
Claire tilts her head, tongue moistening lips that gleam seashell pink. "I think you won't let it."
"Pretty smart for a kid who just learned to drive." A kid who is his brother's daughter. But considering he's been fucking that same brother since he was her age, the hypocrisy isn't doing much to stop the urge to taste what remains of her innocence.
"Why do you do that?" She snatches her hand away. "God! You're as condescending as She is."
She doesn't want Claire to do cheerleader splits on her face. She doesn't want to bend her over the couch, flip up her little red skirt and have her ass the way Nathan has his. She doesn't jerk off to a mental flip file of Claire's little-girl pink mouth sucking him like a candy cane while Nathan fucks him wet and wide.
No, his mother is an entirely different breed of monster.
Ignoring the low thrum of arousal, he pulls a cloak of light around him and flies away. Maybe it's cruel to raise her childhood as a shield between them, but she'll thank him someday when she marries a handsome prince, a white knight like her friend Zach.
In the meantime, his penance includes her anger.
#
The next afternoon, she finds him in the plaza again. This time he stands atop an unbroken curve of the fountain rim, the long black coat pulled around him proof against dust, but not chill.
Thoughts announcing that the night has only stoked her fury, she shoves him hard between the shoulder blades, not caring that he lets her do it. "You can't have it both ways!"
Arms crossed over his chest, he turns, hovering in midair. Though he speaks no words, his eyebrow sweeps upwards, making his disagreement clear.
"No." Hands on hips, she stares him down. "You can't ask me to kill you one day, then call me a kid the next. It's not fair."
"Look around you, Claire." He bends over, closes his hand around a skull. It disintegrates, spilling through his fingers as ash. "You can stand in the blast radius of a nuclear explosion and walk away. Hell no, it's not fair."
She grabs his wrist before he can right himself. "That's not what I'm talking about, and you know it."
If he wanted to, he could fling her half a block. Carry to the height of the old Empire State Building and drop her. Pin her to ground and take her, right here amongst the dead. "Isn't it?" His hands glow with radiation; hers smoke and char around his wrist, and though her face goes white with strain, she doesn't cry out, so he doesn't stop.
"Stop it!" she yells, finally, through her tears. "Stop, Peter, this isn't you!"
"Isn't it?" he demands again, flinging her away to heal.
Lying on her side, cracked pavement at her back, she glares at him. Shakes her head as she stands. "No. It's not."
He turns away, not wanting to watch her skin uncurling. "It could've been me."
"It wasn't."
"I'm your uncle."
Her hand rests, pale and perfect, on his black-shrouded shoulder. "I know."
#
They walk the empty streets, avoiding bones and cracks like superstitious children.
Under the pale sun of a nuclear winter, their shadows cling, stunted, to their legs. His steel toes and her wooden heels ring sharp, too loud. Surreal. Crumpled steel and shattered glass form a rough rosary for indestructible fingers as they pass.
Somewhere in the long chill afternoon, she slips her hand into his and he loses count.
She has never been here, never seen it living. What was here, before? And there? Tell me, what was it like?
Images jostle and crowd, but his words fit like a beggar's coat.
He shows her. Projects little Rosa with her pigtails and her sticky red lips planting a kiss on Tia Consuela's cheek. Papaya King hotdogs with brown mustard and green relish at midtown, summer. The crowded floor at Wall Street, tickers and shouting, the closing bell and the cheers. Concerts in the park, operas at the Met, the new Greek and Roman galleries planned for decades that will never be finished. Subway cars and painters lofts, election billboards, pink neon on Broadway promoting Rent, Grease, Cats, Chicago - musicals she's never seen and now probably never will.
In front of the burned out shell of the Guggenheim, he kisses her. Her mouth tastes of grief, but the cab at her back is solid, and yellow in patches. Daffodils on a grave.
So he kisses his niece and remembers Manhattan. There are no gods in this unreal city.
Only the two of them.
Notes: Yeah, I really don't know. This is what happens when I watch Heroes, Supernatural, listen to Dishwalla, read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and look at pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all in the space of a few days.
Loosely inspired by Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars". Lyrics available here
Not precisely Kring's future timeline. Takes place December 2006, after the Congressional elections and the destruction of New York City in November.
Written for heroes_flashfic "Future Imperfect" Challenge.
Beta by the wonderful way2busymom. It would be so much more unreadable without her. All remaining ridiculousness is mine.
I would love it if feedback, if any, were left at my journal, thanks!
Author: technosage
Characters/Pairing: Peter/Claire
Rating/Warnings: R, for language and themes, implied m/f and m/m incest
Summary: Peter walks the broken streets of New York City trying to come to terms with what's happened. He finds an answer to a question he didn't know he was asking.
the child's shadow stretched out
by
technosage
He hadn't imagined all the cars.
Hunks of twisted metal. Porsches alongside minivans, Escorts and cabs. The Hummers fared marginally better, proof of their military descent. But even they broke open, spilled their innards like downed mecha on a battlefield in Simon and Monty's favorite anime.
Farther out, toward Long Island or New Jersey, on the expressways, and beyond the barricades that hadn't stopped anyone from seeking their lost and dying without them, they looked less like skeletons of robot warriors, and more like homeless in line at a soup kitchen with a reputation for having extra.
Hundreds of thousands of people flash-fried in an explosion twice the size of the bombs that took Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands dying of radiation poisoning, leukemia, dehydration. They'd shopped here, at the carniceria with little Rosa in tow, pigtails flying, red ribbons streaming out behind her. Worked here, on brick and marble Wall Street rubbing the bull's shiny balls for luck when they thought no one looked. Ate here, extra lean corned beef on rye at Maxie's Delicatessen. Played, learned, laughed, fucked.
But what remained to mark their passing, amidst the wreck of the City and gray charred bones, on broken streets and blocked off bridges were the cars.
When he'd dreamed of it, he'd seen them: traffic stopped on city streets while Claire ran toward him, Mohinder exited a cab he wasn't driving and Parkman waved them to a standstill. Maybe it was because there weren't any in the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only fallen Buddhas, scorched skin, and crumbled buildings. But whenever he'd tried to envision it, he hadn't seen the cars.
Now he walks among them, mobility immobilized, and thinks of immovable objects and irresistible forces. Gods and monsters.
#
He wanders the shattered streets, alone.
When he must, he flies over mountains of stony rubbish. Breathes the poisoned air and touches tainted ruins unharmed.
Paints the future in comic book colors, but sees the past in shades of gray.
All the sounds he hears are death: girders buckling on the wind; hiss and pop of buried fires and gouts of steam; clatter and smash of City shards. A surreal wasteland without scavenging crows, all that lives here scuttles close to ground and among the cracks.
God is a cockroach, Mohinder said, and here Peter sometimes wonders if he is right. Other times he feels like Lot with all his dreams turned to salt and ash.
Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, his ass. My god, my god, why hast thou forsaken me? is more like it.
#
By the sixth day, he thinks he has forgotten how to see in color, how to hear a human voice. Her footfalls, when they come, sound odd, wrong and substantial in this place of ghosts and memories.
From down the street, they reach for him. Petrelli thoughts -- his mother's steel, Nathan's determination -- merging with her desperate quest for self and warmth to share it with. It always surprises him, how familiar she feels, surprises him until he remembers.
She's his niece. Nathan's daughter, and nine years his junior besides. Not Lot's wife, nor Noah's either.
Before she rounds the corner, he bends light. Fades from sight and rises to a perch atop a fallen tower above the ruined plaza where it happened.
"I know you're here."
So he hasn't forgotten after all, but the words seem strange nonetheless. Definitive, and yet, how can she know when even he's no longer sure?
"It's not your fault." In the center of the rubble where the fountain used to be, she turns in a slow circle. Her pale shadow falls across the face of the plaza and marks it half-past never again. "You didn't do this, Peter, it wasn't you."
Her words wheel on the wind, scattering. He would chase them down, respond maybe, if he knew what to say.
Hands in the pockets of her dark jeans, now, she shrugs, squints, face scrunched against the ash and chill while she studies the cavities where he might hide.
"That's not it, is it? Nathan thinks it is. My father thinks you're going crazy with guilt and that's why you keep coming back here."
When he doesn't answer, she sighs, and dusts a skeleton-free spot to sit atop the rubble. Pin straight auburn has long since replaced the Rapunzel curls she wore when he saved her - and she saved him; its blunt ends fall in a neat line along her shoulders, couture instead of cheerleader.
He floats to another perch, one where he can see her face, and settles, careful not to dislodge anything that will alert her to his presence. There, he pulls his coat around his chest.
"She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed actually seems worried." Peter barely holds back a snort at that description of his mother. Angela Petrelli would like to think of herself that way, to be sure. "She's afraid you'll kill yourself, like your dad. I told her it'd be kinda hard, but she said I didn't know you like she does. Mohinder says maybe if we full-on destroy the part of our brains that controls our abilities, then we won't heal. Did he tell you that? I think he felt bad for me, after Molly. Like he wanted me to have some control…just in case."
He knows how to end his life. He'd figured it out before he handed her the gun - God, was it only a month and a half ago? Maybe telling her then would've been the right thing, but he couldn't take the risk she'd hesitate. He should've known better.
Claire's a Petrelli, even if in the moment, elbows resting on her knees, she looks more like a model at a photo shoot for the Red Cross or Disarmament Now!
Outwardly, she appears calm. A child staring out at the ocean, deep in thought. Inwardly, she keens. Please. Please. Don't leave me with them. A lone gull above a choppy sea.
It would surprise her, he thinks, to know that her father sometimes feels the same. Already her public face grows as polished as Nathan's and her grandmother's.
"Anyway… I don't think that's why you're here." She pauses, then pouts like she's about to blow a big pink bubble that Disarmament Now! would probably Photoshop into a mushroom cloud. "I think you're just-" An awkward shrug, then she whisks her hair off her shoulder, frustration in her movements and her thoughts. "Wondering how this could have happened.
"How She and Nathan could've let this happen."
Altars with misshapen candles, dog-eared photos, hopeful last seens and gray in memoriams. Millions of mourners the world over, all asking how, how their gods could've let this happen. Claire's voice carries bitterness for all of them.
That draws him down from his roost to sit beside her. He doesn't reveal himself, and she doesn't startle. "He tried."
"Selective evacuation." Her mouth twists, eyes go flat and mean; the ugliness of her features matches that of the idea.
"Some must be sacrificed." Borrowed words, flat and exhausted from countless conversations like this one.
"Yeah, I guess I just forgot the part where we elected them kings and queens of the universe." Her objection is equally tired, though he usually phrases it differently.
"'Don't be sanctimonious.'" He projects Nathan's voice and the illusion of Nathan holding his thumb and fourth finger to his temples. "'You were part of it.'"
Sky blue eyes flash his own usual snarling defiance back at him, but she presses her lips together and says nothing, even when he lets go of Nathan and shows himself.
They stare at each other a long time, too long, then her fingers graze the scar. "They all think you can't heal it."
"But you don't."
Claire tilts her head, tongue moistening lips that gleam seashell pink. "I think you won't let it."
"Pretty smart for a kid who just learned to drive." A kid who is his brother's daughter. But considering he's been fucking that same brother since he was her age, the hypocrisy isn't doing much to stop the urge to taste what remains of her innocence.
"Why do you do that?" She snatches her hand away. "God! You're as condescending as She is."
She doesn't want Claire to do cheerleader splits on her face. She doesn't want to bend her over the couch, flip up her little red skirt and have her ass the way Nathan has his. She doesn't jerk off to a mental flip file of Claire's little-girl pink mouth sucking him like a candy cane while Nathan fucks him wet and wide.
No, his mother is an entirely different breed of monster.
Ignoring the low thrum of arousal, he pulls a cloak of light around him and flies away. Maybe it's cruel to raise her childhood as a shield between them, but she'll thank him someday when she marries a handsome prince, a white knight like her friend Zach.
In the meantime, his penance includes her anger.
#
The next afternoon, she finds him in the plaza again. This time he stands atop an unbroken curve of the fountain rim, the long black coat pulled around him proof against dust, but not chill.
Thoughts announcing that the night has only stoked her fury, she shoves him hard between the shoulder blades, not caring that he lets her do it. "You can't have it both ways!"
Arms crossed over his chest, he turns, hovering in midair. Though he speaks no words, his eyebrow sweeps upwards, making his disagreement clear.
"No." Hands on hips, she stares him down. "You can't ask me to kill you one day, then call me a kid the next. It's not fair."
"Look around you, Claire." He bends over, closes his hand around a skull. It disintegrates, spilling through his fingers as ash. "You can stand in the blast radius of a nuclear explosion and walk away. Hell no, it's not fair."
She grabs his wrist before he can right himself. "That's not what I'm talking about, and you know it."
If he wanted to, he could fling her half a block. Carry to the height of the old Empire State Building and drop her. Pin her to ground and take her, right here amongst the dead. "Isn't it?" His hands glow with radiation; hers smoke and char around his wrist, and though her face goes white with strain, she doesn't cry out, so he doesn't stop.
"Stop it!" she yells, finally, through her tears. "Stop, Peter, this isn't you!"
"Isn't it?" he demands again, flinging her away to heal.
Lying on her side, cracked pavement at her back, she glares at him. Shakes her head as she stands. "No. It's not."
He turns away, not wanting to watch her skin uncurling. "It could've been me."
"It wasn't."
"I'm your uncle."
Her hand rests, pale and perfect, on his black-shrouded shoulder. "I know."
#
They walk the empty streets, avoiding bones and cracks like superstitious children.
Under the pale sun of a nuclear winter, their shadows cling, stunted, to their legs. His steel toes and her wooden heels ring sharp, too loud. Surreal. Crumpled steel and shattered glass form a rough rosary for indestructible fingers as they pass.
Somewhere in the long chill afternoon, she slips her hand into his and he loses count.
She has never been here, never seen it living. What was here, before? And there? Tell me, what was it like?
Images jostle and crowd, but his words fit like a beggar's coat.
He shows her. Projects little Rosa with her pigtails and her sticky red lips planting a kiss on Tia Consuela's cheek. Papaya King hotdogs with brown mustard and green relish at midtown, summer. The crowded floor at Wall Street, tickers and shouting, the closing bell and the cheers. Concerts in the park, operas at the Met, the new Greek and Roman galleries planned for decades that will never be finished. Subway cars and painters lofts, election billboards, pink neon on Broadway promoting Rent, Grease, Cats, Chicago - musicals she's never seen and now probably never will.
In front of the burned out shell of the Guggenheim, he kisses her. Her mouth tastes of grief, but the cab at her back is solid, and yellow in patches. Daffodils on a grave.
So he kisses his niece and remembers Manhattan. There are no gods in this unreal city.
Only the two of them.
Notes: Yeah, I really don't know. This is what happens when I watch Heroes, Supernatural, listen to Dishwalla, read T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and look at pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki all in the space of a few days.
Loosely inspired by Dishwalla's "Counting Blue Cars". Lyrics available here
Not precisely Kring's future timeline. Takes place December 2006, after the Congressional elections and the destruction of New York City in November.
Written for heroes_flashfic "Future Imperfect" Challenge.
Beta by the wonderful way2busymom. It would be so much more unreadable without her. All remaining ridiculousness is mine.
I would love it if feedback, if any, were left at my journal, thanks!