fic + wallpaper = double bonus!
Listening to Trocadero at work while not actually concentrating on work, eventually produced these. I know full well the song is a Red vs. Blue tribute, but it ended up assigning itself to Claire and inspiring some bloody weird little caprices of the mind.
Title: A Girl Named Tex
Author: losertini
Fandom: Heroes
Genre: Scenes from an Alternate Future.
Characters: Badass!Claire, Peter/Claire at the end
Rating: PG
Summary: There was a perfectly good reason it was Tex and not Claire.
Half the new kids, it seemed, had place names. The more they’d increased in number, the more difficult it was to permanently assign names to faces-and nobody wanted to rely on impersonal descriptors like “Hey, you, pyrokinetic kid” or “Freak girl with the bug glasses.” So there was Michigan, and Bellevue, and Enid (from Oklahoma, which might well have been her real name anyway), and T.C., short for Truth or Consequences, who was actually from Alamogordo but insisted with a gap-toothed grin that this was a much cooler alias.
The older ones, the ones who’d been around from the beginning, who ran the show, all were afforded the dignity of their first names-or last names, in Suresh’s case, not being crazy about the way Mohinder invariably got shortened to “Mo”. ‘Course, the Big Three were usually just “The Big Three,” unless you had occasion to address them directly. Only then did they become three separate entities-Peter, Hiro, and Tex.
Tex was an exception to the place-name rule-it was always “Tex,” not Claire, she’d be sure to remind you. Tex wasn’t the sole representative of the Lone Star State (at least not since that Austin girl joined up a year ago), but the name was fitting enough. Tex had, somewhere along the line, developed a passion for the steel and was remarkably proficient in all manner of semi-automatic weapons, some of which were just this side of legal, and earned nothing more than a defeated head-shake from Matt, who insisted that his already strained clout with the Feds only stretched so far.
She was utterly fearless, something she’d proven on more occasions than one had fingers, but perhaps most memorably when she’d taken seventeen carving knives to the chest, all directed by a flick of Sylar’s wrist, that were intended for a cowering Molly Walker-and then just pulled them out afterward, casually, as if they were nothing more than pesky splinters, and tossed them clattering to the floor. If she’d been respected before, it had been that incident that made her revered-at least among Molly and the other kids, who always uttered the name “Tex” in hushed tones, as if the single syllable were too sacred to say out loud.
Tex was the loose cannon, the “Regulator”, the one who’d altogether too enthusiastically run into a burning building, a gas station explosion, or a cascade of bullets with someone else’s name on ‘em, and come out punched full of holes, covered in singe marks or bloodstains, and still have a shit-eating grin on top of it all.
And who thankfully never had to answer to any inquiries about why it was Tex and not Claire, because nobody was brave enough to ask the question in the first place.
The truth of the matter was, in Tex’s mind, Claire Bennet was still the cheerleader who stuck her fingers in the tub of frosting whenever she and her mother made cupcakes; who had a veritable United Nations of teddy bears congregated on her bed; who still looked up to her father with sheer adoration and believed his days were full of nothing more than long boring business meetings on paper production.
And she didn’t dare confuse that girl-that naïve and innocent specter of the past, a blissfully ignorant relic of a time before that very last Homecoming-with the woman she’d become.
So Tex it was-with one exception.
It was only behind closed doors, when she’d shed her battered clothing and stowed away the Glock in a drawer; when she’d shampooed dried blood out of her hair until the water ran pink, staggering out of the shower to sink gratefully onto the bed. Only when she leaned back into Peter’s embrace, slumping against his bare chest and letting her eyes drift shut; when he lowered his lips to the shell of her ear and whispered, in a voice that had no intention of letting her sleep, “Claire…”
…then, she didn’t bother to correct him.
Clicky for wallpaper:
Totally cheated on this, by the way. Traced over an existing screencap of Hayden and just improvised the clothes & gun. Bloodsplatter brushes came from here, and the font is Dirty Ego.
Lyrics are, of course, from "A Girl Named Tex" by Trocadero; you can find the song for download via their site. (Their whole album is great, and not just for the country-tinged-indie-rock crowd.)
Title: A Girl Named Tex
Author: losertini
Fandom: Heroes
Genre: Scenes from an Alternate Future.
Characters: Badass!Claire, Peter/Claire at the end
Rating: PG
Summary: There was a perfectly good reason it was Tex and not Claire.
Half the new kids, it seemed, had place names. The more they’d increased in number, the more difficult it was to permanently assign names to faces-and nobody wanted to rely on impersonal descriptors like “Hey, you, pyrokinetic kid” or “Freak girl with the bug glasses.” So there was Michigan, and Bellevue, and Enid (from Oklahoma, which might well have been her real name anyway), and T.C., short for Truth or Consequences, who was actually from Alamogordo but insisted with a gap-toothed grin that this was a much cooler alias.
The older ones, the ones who’d been around from the beginning, who ran the show, all were afforded the dignity of their first names-or last names, in Suresh’s case, not being crazy about the way Mohinder invariably got shortened to “Mo”. ‘Course, the Big Three were usually just “The Big Three,” unless you had occasion to address them directly. Only then did they become three separate entities-Peter, Hiro, and Tex.
Tex was an exception to the place-name rule-it was always “Tex,” not Claire, she’d be sure to remind you. Tex wasn’t the sole representative of the Lone Star State (at least not since that Austin girl joined up a year ago), but the name was fitting enough. Tex had, somewhere along the line, developed a passion for the steel and was remarkably proficient in all manner of semi-automatic weapons, some of which were just this side of legal, and earned nothing more than a defeated head-shake from Matt, who insisted that his already strained clout with the Feds only stretched so far.
She was utterly fearless, something she’d proven on more occasions than one had fingers, but perhaps most memorably when she’d taken seventeen carving knives to the chest, all directed by a flick of Sylar’s wrist, that were intended for a cowering Molly Walker-and then just pulled them out afterward, casually, as if they were nothing more than pesky splinters, and tossed them clattering to the floor. If she’d been respected before, it had been that incident that made her revered-at least among Molly and the other kids, who always uttered the name “Tex” in hushed tones, as if the single syllable were too sacred to say out loud.
Tex was the loose cannon, the “Regulator”, the one who’d altogether too enthusiastically run into a burning building, a gas station explosion, or a cascade of bullets with someone else’s name on ‘em, and come out punched full of holes, covered in singe marks or bloodstains, and still have a shit-eating grin on top of it all.
And who thankfully never had to answer to any inquiries about why it was Tex and not Claire, because nobody was brave enough to ask the question in the first place.
The truth of the matter was, in Tex’s mind, Claire Bennet was still the cheerleader who stuck her fingers in the tub of frosting whenever she and her mother made cupcakes; who had a veritable United Nations of teddy bears congregated on her bed; who still looked up to her father with sheer adoration and believed his days were full of nothing more than long boring business meetings on paper production.
And she didn’t dare confuse that girl-that naïve and innocent specter of the past, a blissfully ignorant relic of a time before that very last Homecoming-with the woman she’d become.
So Tex it was-with one exception.
It was only behind closed doors, when she’d shed her battered clothing and stowed away the Glock in a drawer; when she’d shampooed dried blood out of her hair until the water ran pink, staggering out of the shower to sink gratefully onto the bed. Only when she leaned back into Peter’s embrace, slumping against his bare chest and letting her eyes drift shut; when he lowered his lips to the shell of her ear and whispered, in a voice that had no intention of letting her sleep, “Claire…”
…then, she didn’t bother to correct him.
Clicky for wallpaper:
Totally cheated on this, by the way. Traced over an existing screencap of Hayden and just improvised the clothes & gun. Bloodsplatter brushes came from here, and the font is Dirty Ego.
Lyrics are, of course, from "A Girl Named Tex" by Trocadero; you can find the song for download via their site. (Their whole album is great, and not just for the country-tinged-indie-rock crowd.)