fic: Easy Money, 3/7
Title: Easy Money.
Rating: PG.
Characters/Pairings: Nathan, Claire, Matt, Peter/Simone + a cast of thousands.
Word count: ~32,000.
Disclaimer: Nope, not mine.
Summary: Nathan is a conman with a habit of getting in too deep, and this time is no different. While he's recklessly trying to reach the prize before anyone else, Claire attempts to keep him safe from the gangsters that are always two steps behind them, Matt tries to get the upper hand on Nathan, and Peter just wants to get married in peace.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
On Peter's first day off in weeks, he plans a wedding; his wedding. The prospect of it has been getting him through the past few weeks, but now that he's accidentally told his family, it suddenly seems really horribly real. Before it was a theory, a very pleasant theory involving eloping and a candlelit ceremony on a beach; now it's a big church wedding with his mom with a gun in her purse, Nathan romancing the bridesmaids, and Claire stealing the communion cup.
He calls Simone at midday, having decided that there was only one thing to be done. “How would you feel about moving the wedding up?”
The line crackles, and Simone's muffled voice says, 'not there, there! Quickly, come on!' Then, the line clear again, she says to him, “How moved up?”
“Like... next month? There are some really cheap deals to Australia at the moment.”
“Um.” The line crackles again, and all he catches this time is 'yes, of course we will, it's almost done'. “That's quite soon. And far. Why would we go to Australia?”
“I- I don't know. Seems nice?” He twists the phone cord around his fingers; now what's he supposed to say? This was a stupid plan.
“That- actually, yes, I think that's a really good idea.” Simone sounds distant, her words slow.
“Really?”
“Yes, but I have to go now, sweetheart. We'll have dinner later, okay? Love you, bye.”
“Love you--” too.
The line goes dead.
-
“I'm worried about Nathan.” Charlie sets her glass of milk down on the breakfast table next to Hiro's apple juice. “You know how he gets himself in trouble.”
From behind his comic, Hiro worries his lip, more over Captain America's predicament and Nathan's, true, but he does share Charlie's concerns. “I know, but what can we do? You know how he never gives up on anything until it's too late.”
Charlie chews a nail; gazing past Hiro out of the window; the Eiffel Tower winks at her in the morning sun, inviting her to settle the business she has with the owner of the Paris Las Vegas. She met Nathan for the first time when she was eighteen, after reading lots about him in Hiro's letters, and gosh, she thought he was attractive. And so grown up! He was thirty, and had one of those fancy pants new cell phones that sent text messages. She got over that pretty quick though, once Hiro and Ando were making money and Nathan was hiding from the NCIS because of some identity fraud.
It was really Claire that got her, a lil' Texas girl thrown in with the scariest family on the East Coast? Charlie feels like she has a duty of care to her, since her mama can't.
“Can we give them a little help, maybe? Just a nudge?” She pushes her glass into Hiro's gently.
“Maybe a little one,” Hiro concedes. He does worry about affecting the future and personal gain. He gives half his earnings every year to charity. It evens things out.
“Wonderful! Now, I've got to see a man about a statue of the Eiffel Tower.”
-
There is a secret place that Nathan's parents used to go when he was a child. It wasn't the weeks long trips to that his parents would go on, leaving him, and later Peter, with the staff; it was a day trip, overnight at most. Arthur or Angela, but rarely both, would say they had to 'go', and the other would nod solemnly, and Nathan would ask, 'where, dad? Where where where?', and Peter would look sad and say, 'but I don't want you to go'. Their parents just shook their heads and told them that they'd see them later.
Over breakfast, Angela leaves a set of keys and a note with an address on it on the kitchen counter. Just puts them there and leaves the house. Nathan decides that this is suspicious enough to investigate. The address is Texas, not far from where Claire used to live. It seems like an interesting coincidence - definitely suggests that his mother knows a lot more than she's letting on. He calls Peter.
Peter hangs up on him.
Nathan and Claire go without him.
“This is the place,” he says, when they land in Odessa. A dusty factory in the middle of nowhere. They approach it warily, the town being far too silent for either of their likings; Nathan isn't used to it, and Claire knows too many people in this state to feel safe out in the open like this.
“What's Primatech?” Claire asks as Nathan begins to unlock the doors. He has to wipe cobwebs from the locks.
“Got me,” he says, dragging the door open.
The piece of paper with the address on it also has some instructions: basement.
They go to the basement, and-
“Holy fucking--”
“Language.” Claire tuts.
The basement is one giant filing cabinet, shelves upon shelves of boxes and files and folders, all covered in a thick, allergy-inducing layer of dust.
“How are we supposed to find anything in this place?” Nathan murmurs, not really looking for an answer. “Oh, Ma, why do you do this to me?”
Claire stays where she is while he wanders up the rows of shelves, head craned back to look at the higher shelves. He wipes dust from the fronts of boxes to read the writing, grimacing at the grey fluff left behind on his fingers. At the other end of the room a box falls, echoing across the concrete floor. He follows the sound, walking past yet more rows and rows of metal shelves.
“Hey, look at this,” Nathan calls, and Claire follows him across the room. Kneeling on the floor, Nathan is sorting through a mess of manilla folders.
“What's this?” she asks.
“A lot of notes about some guy, Adam Monroe. 'Adam Monroe is liar',” Nathan reads off a piece of paper before handing it to Claire. 'Liar' is capitalised and underlined three times. The scrawled writing covers a receipt from 1977 for the Museum of Natural History in New York. “And here's the man himself,” Nathan says, handing her a picture. A blond man with his arm around someone just outside of the shot; there are holes through his face, as if pins had been stuck in it. On the back it says 'Christmas, 1972'.
“Hand me your knapsack,” Nathan says, having pushed all the folders back into the box. “Let's take this and go.” He stands and drops it into Claire's bag, Claire stoops dramatically, and begrudgingly Nathan takes the bag from her. It's pink with white flowers.
“I should to go to Kermit before we leave,” Claire tells him.
Nathan grimaces, and avoids her gaze as they make it out of the basement and to the front door. He lets Claire go first, then pulls the keys out and begins to relock the door.
“Nathan,” Claire repeats.
“Yes, I heard you, Claire. We can't take long, we'll lose the light.”
“Uh huh,” Claire says, a laugh held in the back of her throat. Nathan ignores it.
As they walk away from the factory, and Nathan crouches slightly so that Claire can jump onto his back, the bushes across the street shake slightly. Neither Claire nor Nathan notice, as Nathan takes off into the sky, a man placing binoculars in a bag and replacing his glasses.
-
The trailer park looks the same. A little more crowded, maybe; some of the trailers have new decorations up. It seems like a lot of people she grew up with have moved on.
She spent her formative years in this park, playing tag with her friends behind the trailers, watching her uncle shoot bottle cans off the fencing, listening to her mom's newest scheme over the dinner table. She loved this place with all her heart, and looking at Nathan now, she can see that he's still horrified by it.
She knocks on the door of number thirty six, and when there's no answer, she reaches up on her tiptoes and retrieves a key nestled in the drainpipe. Opening the door carefully, she waves Nathan back, and it's a good thing she does, too: a ball of fire hits her full in face, and she squeezes her eyes shut and holds her breath as she feels her skin smoulder and begin to heal.
“Hello, Uncle Flint,”she says, feeling, for a second, breath escape through her cheek before the hole closes.
“What are you doin' here?” he asks, not a hint of an apology about him. There are half a dozen people crammed in the trailer with them, some she recognises, and some she doesn't. There's a mess of guns and knives on the table, and when she glances back at Nathan, he looks nervous. It's faint, beneath layers of bluster and bullshit, but she's got pretty good at reading him.
“Just a visit, I'm not staying. There wouldn't be any room for me.” She takes a closer look at their faces. “Hey, Jesse. Knox.”
Knox leans back in his chair, tapping a knife against his chin. He points it at her. “Hey. You're looking good. High life's treating you well.”
“Guess so. I'm looking better than you guys, at least.”
Knox smiles, then his gaze slides to Nathan, and his smile widens. She feels Nathan shift from foot to foot. Flint notices too, and steps closer.
“You want a drink or something? Nathan?”
“No, thank you, Flint.”
Knox's smile remains as Flint narrows his eyes, and Claire wants to push Nathan out of the room, quick as possible, but she knows these guys. That would only make things a hundred times worse.
“I'll have a drink,” she says. “Flint. Flint, I'll have something.”
At length, Flint looks away from Nathan and nods. “Yeah,” he says, picks up Jesse's beer, and hands it to her.
Her first taste of alcohol was a warm beer around this table, back when she could still get drunk. There's a bubbling of homesickness in her gut as she takes a swig, eyes on Jesse. He's pissed, but he won't say anything. Meredith taught all the men in her home that if they ever even looked at her daughter funny they'd be finding themselves a new set of testicles, and her influence remains, even if she doesn't. Similarly, Claire knows that without her, the guys would make quick work of Nathan's pretty face. She fears that her influence isn't as great as her mother's, though.
Flint doesn't share his sister's, or his niece's, fondness for Nathan, not at all. Meredith always spoke kindly of him, her handsome New York boy who thought he'd rule the world, and she wasn't looking for any long term relationships other than the one with her daughter, so his absence from their lives didn't upset her. Truth told, the way she talked about her own father, it seemed like she wasn't all that keen on men, anyway.
Flint wouldn't have it, though. Some sense of chivalry, maybe, or a vicarious desire for a father that cared; when Nathan infrequently visited, gave his tiny daughter some gas station toy, Flint couldn't keep himself from laying into him. And Flint rarely used his words. Claire would sit at their table and listen to the fight, looking at the toy she'd been given from this strange man, and Jesse would say, 'fucking dads, kid, can't expect shit off them. Ain't just you.' Sometimes one of the guys would break the toy, too.
It made her feel a little better.
Now's different though, not that she can explain it to Flint; she wouldn't even be able to explain it to her mom.
“We'll leave you to it,” she says, “I'm guessing you want as few eyes on this as possible. Nathan.”
She half turns, and Nathan's already got the door open. The guys laugh. Out of his earshot, she gives the can back to Flint and says, “Back off. What would Mom say?”
“Can we go now?” Nathan asks when she meets him outside the trailer, his tone edged with anxiety. His feathers are ruffled, she can tell. He's so far out of his comfort zone.
“Let's,” she says.
-
Simone spends most evenings at Peter's. She has her own place, that great big house inherited from Charles, but she says she prefers his place, it isn't lonely like her family home. Peter gets it; she was super close to her dad, that wasn't hard to work out when he was looking after Charles, and he imagines that there was a time when living alone at the family mansion would have broken his heart. Plus, he likes how her toothbrush looks next to his.
He makes dinner while she sits on the couch and works; she speaks softly into her cellphone, held between her shoulder and her ear as she paints her toenails. He can't make out much of what she says, only the occasional, 'we're on a deadline' and 'yes, I know, Isaac'. He tries not to be jealous, Isaac is only one of her clients, and not even a very important - she sells Van Goghs and Kahlos for a living. Isaac's just some comic book artist.
By the time dinner's ready - microwaveable noodles and prawn crackers - Simone's finished her call. She clears her papers off the coffee table, and Peter catches a picture of Degas's Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter1 (he took art history courses in college, he knows about these things) before Simone slides it back into her folder.
His home phone rings as he sets her bowl down. Simone leans back on the couch, picking up the receiver from the side table. “Hello?” She pauses, flicks her eyes to Peter for a second. “Is this Nathan?” she asks.
Peter almost trips over Simone's legs to take the phone from her. “Nathan, what- what do you want?”
“Look, Pete, I know you've got principles now but I could really use your help. Can you just, just set aside whatever your problem is with me for this?”
Simone is looking at him, expression faintly interested. Peter bites the inside of his lip and keeps his tone light as he says, “That's going to be difficult right now, I'm slammed at work. Can I get back to you?” Nathan hums something uncertainly. “Okay? Great, bye.”
He lifts the phone cord over Simone's head and walks around the back of the couch to drop the phone back in its cradle. For a second, Simone is silent, as Peter takes up his bowl and sits down. Then she says, “Star Wars is about to start.”
-
“Hung up again?” Claire asks, both hands in a bowl of pancake batter.
Nathan snaps his cell closed. “Yes. I hope your hands are clean.”
She wipes her nose on her arm. “Whatever. Are you going to make your own dinner, then?”
An admonishment sticks in his throat and goes nowhere. Telling Claire off is like disciplining someone else's child; it feels like he's overstepping boundaries. He sits on a kitchen stool and watches her mix the batter with her fingers - she used to do this for 'the guys', she's told him. It makes him shudder, if he thinks on it too long. A little girl - then and now - with those men, having breakfast over a table full of guns. He hates that she grew up like that, sometimes. He hates that they had to live in a motel in Mexico because of him, sometimes. He hates that he didn't care, all the time.
His mother's shoes clicking on wooden floor let him know she's coming this way long before he sees her. When she rounds the kitchen door, she's carrying a handbag and holding a lipstick.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asks.
“I have a dinner date,” she says, clicking around the kitchen, picking odds and ends up, transferring them to her bag.
“With a man friend?” Claire pours batter into a frying pan, smiling. “Do you have a man friend?”
“He is a man, yes,” his mother says diplomatically. She pouts, applying lipstick in the reflection of a stainless steel pan.
Nathan sits up. “What about Dad?”
“What about him, darling? He's been dead for years.” She smiles in that vague way that she has, kissing him on the forehead as she passes by him. He opens his mouth to reply, but she breezes on, “I'll be back later, you can call me on my cell if you have to.”
She disappears out the door, leaving Nathan to process 'if you have to' as 'don't'. “Ma,” he shouts, a second later, “who's Adam Monroe?”
There's a pause in her clicking heels, then slowly - click, click... click - she answers, “Who?”
He pulls the photograph out of his pocket. “Adam Monroe. This guy.”
She stands out the door, faint lines wrinkling her forehead. “I don't know, Nathan. I'm sure it doesn't matter.”
“Are you sure? I found a bunch of stuff about him at that factory you sent us to.”
The wrinkles get deeper, then smooth out as she takes a breath. “I don't know what you're talking about. I'm sure it doesn't matter,” she repeats. “I'll see you later.”
Claire slaps a couple of pancakes onto a plate, squeezes a generous helping of chocolate sauce on top, and slides it over to him. “Well, that was interesting. Eat up.”
“I know what we're doing tomorrow,” he says, waving the picture at her.
-
On the Saturday mornings that Matt has off, he takes Molly to the park. He brings a frisbee, and sometimes a soccer ball, and tries to get her interested.
“You can't just stay in all the time reading,” he says, he always says, and Molly, sitting on her sweater on the grass reading a book, always says,
“I can try.”
He keep doing this, every week, every other week, because this is what his father would never do. And Matt would spend every weekend indoors, watching Starsky and Hutch and listening to his parents shout at each other - or his mother shout and his father remain cold and unreachable and distant. He wasn't there even when he was.
Molly, she's lived her whole life like this; her and her family were in witness protection after people became 'interested' in her ability, and wanted her to 'help' them out. His own father - a petty criminal with a chip the size of New York on his shoulder - terrorised her for years and, in the end, had her parents killed by a hitman. A year later he was killed in some drug deal gone bad, and Matt didn't shed a tear.
Matt doesn't know a lot about being a parent, but he knows about fear, and he knows about self esteem, and he doesn't want her life to go the way his did. So many things have happened to her already, and he just wants her to have some grain of normality, stability. Although he's really not sure if being with him isn't actually preventing said normality.
His phone buzzes in his pocket as he aimlessly bounces the ball. Molly's writing in her notebook; what, he doesn't know.
“Detective Parkman.”
“Hey, Matt.”
“Oh.” At Molly's questioning look, he mouths 'Nathan'.
“I need your help, Matt.”
“My help? There's really only one thing I can help you with, Nate, but I don't think you'd like it.”
“Well, it's really more Molly's help than yours that I need, if I'm being honest. I just wanted to make you feel useful.”
“Uh huh. And the reason why I'd care?”
“Money. Potentially a lot.”
“They're at the Hard Rock café in Times Square.” Molly's fixed him with that creepy stare that she has, hand still poised to write. “Just so that you know.”
He holds her gaze for a few seconds, caught in an unspoken game of who's going to blink first. He loses, turning back to the phone. “If you piss me off, I'm just going to arrest you,” he informs Nathan.
He can hear the smirk in Nathan's voice. “A joy to speak to you as always, Detective.”
-
Peter loves to talk. He loved university and its opportunities to talk and analyse and pick over every little thing, but even then he couldn't talk, not freely, anyway. The only rule he ever remembers being enforced in his family was this: don't tell anyone - anything. It was like Fight Club; the first rule about the Petrellis is you do not talk about the Petrellis.
So he never did, never told friends, girlfriends, Simone. Nathan would talk, but he never really said anything, and he never really said anything Peter, about anything.
That's why he talks to Dr Suresh. People think he's neurotic, but really he just wants to talk. And if he has to pay someone to listen to him and be unable to report him or the family to the police, then so be it.
“So they're trying to make me help them find some piece of paper, I don't know, I've just been hanging up on him.”
Suresh nods. “How do you feel about that?”
“What else can I do?”
“Well, Peter, you have options, don't close yourself off from them because of past problems.” Suresh makes a note in his pad, then closes it and slips it into a drawer. “I need to step out for a moment. Why don't you think things over while I'm gone? Think about... the importance of family.”
He pats Peter on the shoulder as he passes, his stride rather quick.
-
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Claire warns over her strawberry milkshake. “Getting a cop involved? Promising him money? Those are not good moves.”
“We'll be long gone by the time any money's involved.” He rips open a sachet of ketchup with his teeth, eyes lingering on the waitress who brought them their food. Claire rolls her eyes at this flagrant act of masculinity; this is how he picked her mom up in the late eighties, except her mother only paid him any attention because she thought she could get a few dollars out of him for rent.
“Where, exactly?”
“I'll work something out, don't worry.” He waves the waitress over and asks her, voice low, for another drink. He's all smiles and chuckles and eye contact.
Claire suspects he won't get far - waitresses know things about men who flirt with them, they don't fall for those tricks. Her mother taught her that, grifting across Texas, waiting for Flint to get out of juvie.
“You didn't want anything else, did you?” Nathan asks her belatedly.
She meets his gaze dully. “They're here,” she says, pointing to the door.
Matt hustles Molly across the café, steering her around the waitresses and customers. A baseball cap is pulled down low over his face, and Molly has a flowery sun hat on. She seems unamused.
“Picture,” he grunts as they come up alongside Nathan and Claire's table.
“Hi,” Nathan replies.
“Give me the picture or I'll arrest you.”
Molly sighs, shaking her head. Nathan relents as the waitress comes back with his drink, eyeing their strange group. When she's gone, he slides the now crumbled picture across the table. Molly frowns at it, squints, then shuts her eyes.
“He's in the central Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii.” She pulls out a notebook and pen, and, eyes still closed, sketches out a picture of Hawaii and its coast - Claire isn't sure of its accuracy since her schooling was less than ideal, but it looks impressive. Molly opens her eyes, stares intently at her sketch, then draws an X on the shaded ocean with two quick pen strokes. “He's swimming,” she says, handing Nathan the paper.
“You'll be hearing from me,” Matt says shortly, wrapping an arm around Molly to guide her out.
Claire and Nathan watch them go, then look at each other. “Holiday!” Claire says. “I've always wanted to go to Hawaii.”
“No, no, no. No. I probably already need thousands of dollars worth of back surgery as it is. I'm just going to go there, find out what I can, then come back. Why don't you explore the city, or something?”
She blows bubbles in her milkshake. “You're no fun.”
Claire's done all the tourist stuff in New York already; she swears that sometimes Nathan thinks that having a Texas accent equals being an uncultured hick. Which, to be honest, she's used to her advantage more than once, with him and others, but still.
The first time she came to New York, she was six, and her mom told her they were going to visit her daddy. They weren't, or at least they didn't. They visited the Petrelli mansion, though, and got turned away at the door before they even saw Angela or Arthur.
They spent a year in the city, her momma waiting tables and dating this creep, Doyle, who eventually bought her a car - shiny and red and fast, as Claire remembers it - which she promptly sold and then left the state with Claire. It was also then, in 1996, that Claire received her first birth certificate. It was real, for all intents and purposes, all its information was correct, date of birth, surname, parents. It just wouldn't ever be in the system. Better that way, her mom said. They got it cheap, even, done by another of the waitresses at the diner.
“You thank Sandra for helpin' us out,” she'd said, and Claire had shyly thanked the women, who replied that Texas girls had to look after each other.
Later her mother had said, “We only look out for ourselves, in the end, you know.”
It's a rule that Claire lived by for years, it's coloured every decision she's ever made, but now she doesn't know. Nathan's going to get into trouble, she can just feel it - he almost always does, he's terrible at putting together schemes - and she's nineteen now, she could leave him behind. She should leave him behind, that's what her mom would do.
But she hasn't, and even though he's left her here in Times Square eating an ice cream alone because she has no friends and he's in Hawaii and she'd love to go to Hawaii-- she probably won't. She has to make sure he doesn't get himself killed, after all.
She watches an ad for Coca Cola on a big screen as she finishes her ice cream. There's nowhere else for her to go, her options are sit here or go back to the mansion and hope Angela isn't looming.
“I need a hobby,” she mutters, dumping her cone in the trash. She pushes through the crowd, smacking away pickpocketing hands. Her hobby right now is going to be shopping, she decides. Not that she has any money to buy anything, of course.
She turns down West 47nd Street towards Bergdorf (she can always do with new ball gowns - one day she'll have somewhere to wear them), head down, moving fast. She doesn't get far before she feels it, that prickle of anxiety, like a frequency she's been tuned into. Brushing her hair back behind her ear, she peeks over her shoulder at the street. Her gaze is immediately drawn to a van, blacked out windows, driving at the absolute lowest end of the speed limit. Now, there could just be a celebrity in there with a very cautious driver, but she doubts it.
She veers into a shop doorway and stops, taking out her cell, which she absently fiddles with, going into the menu, looking at the calendar, her inbox. She rubs her face, spreading her fingers to glance through them. The van has pulled over, and sits there, no one getting in or out. Claire rarely believes in coincidences.
She flips her cell closed and moves on. The van follows suit. This isn't the first time she's been followed - there was that time a wronged ex chased her and her mom across the whole damn country; and that time her and Nathan fled to Mexico - and from experience she gets the feeling that it isn't just some creep, or even the cops.
Danko. A mobster that Nathan just had to double cross. If it is him, they're basically done. Emile doesn't fuck around.
The van trundles along as she weighs up her options: if she runs, then she'll definitely get caught; if she calls the police then-- well, that's a joke, isn't it?; if she leads them back to the mansion, she'll get ambushed.
“Shit,” she mumbles, hunching her shoulders forward. There's nothing to do but ride it out now. Damn Nathan.
She crosses at an intersection, her pace picking up even though she knows she can't run. They're going to get her, she realises, and probably kill her, which isn't a problem, but then they'll track down Nathan and-- fuck.
The van comes up to the intersection, speeding up as she has. Her heart pounds in her chest to the rhythm of her footsteps, and then-- a screech of tires on the road. Everyone looks, and she, heart in her mouth, follows their lead.
A car has cut the van off at the intersection, very nearly causing a crash. A woman leans out of the window, apologising profusely to a man that has exited the vehicle. He stares her down menacingly, but she seems unaware. Another man gets out of the other side and looks around, but the crowd that the incident has drawn conceals Claire, and he doesn't see as she slips away and runs all the way to the subway.
Part 4
Rating: PG.
Characters/Pairings: Nathan, Claire, Matt, Peter/Simone + a cast of thousands.
Word count: ~32,000.
Disclaimer: Nope, not mine.
Summary: Nathan is a conman with a habit of getting in too deep, and this time is no different. While he's recklessly trying to reach the prize before anyone else, Claire attempts to keep him safe from the gangsters that are always two steps behind them, Matt tries to get the upper hand on Nathan, and Peter just wants to get married in peace.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7
On Peter's first day off in weeks, he plans a wedding; his wedding. The prospect of it has been getting him through the past few weeks, but now that he's accidentally told his family, it suddenly seems really horribly real. Before it was a theory, a very pleasant theory involving eloping and a candlelit ceremony on a beach; now it's a big church wedding with his mom with a gun in her purse, Nathan romancing the bridesmaids, and Claire stealing the communion cup.
He calls Simone at midday, having decided that there was only one thing to be done. “How would you feel about moving the wedding up?”
The line crackles, and Simone's muffled voice says, 'not there, there! Quickly, come on!' Then, the line clear again, she says to him, “How moved up?”
“Like... next month? There are some really cheap deals to Australia at the moment.”
“Um.” The line crackles again, and all he catches this time is 'yes, of course we will, it's almost done'. “That's quite soon. And far. Why would we go to Australia?”
“I- I don't know. Seems nice?” He twists the phone cord around his fingers; now what's he supposed to say? This was a stupid plan.
“That- actually, yes, I think that's a really good idea.” Simone sounds distant, her words slow.
“Really?”
“Yes, but I have to go now, sweetheart. We'll have dinner later, okay? Love you, bye.”
“Love you--” too.
The line goes dead.
-
“I'm worried about Nathan.” Charlie sets her glass of milk down on the breakfast table next to Hiro's apple juice. “You know how he gets himself in trouble.”
From behind his comic, Hiro worries his lip, more over Captain America's predicament and Nathan's, true, but he does share Charlie's concerns. “I know, but what can we do? You know how he never gives up on anything until it's too late.”
Charlie chews a nail; gazing past Hiro out of the window; the Eiffel Tower winks at her in the morning sun, inviting her to settle the business she has with the owner of the Paris Las Vegas. She met Nathan for the first time when she was eighteen, after reading lots about him in Hiro's letters, and gosh, she thought he was attractive. And so grown up! He was thirty, and had one of those fancy pants new cell phones that sent text messages. She got over that pretty quick though, once Hiro and Ando were making money and Nathan was hiding from the NCIS because of some identity fraud.
It was really Claire that got her, a lil' Texas girl thrown in with the scariest family on the East Coast? Charlie feels like she has a duty of care to her, since her mama can't.
“Can we give them a little help, maybe? Just a nudge?” She pushes her glass into Hiro's gently.
“Maybe a little one,” Hiro concedes. He does worry about affecting the future and personal gain. He gives half his earnings every year to charity. It evens things out.
“Wonderful! Now, I've got to see a man about a statue of the Eiffel Tower.”
-
There is a secret place that Nathan's parents used to go when he was a child. It wasn't the weeks long trips to that his parents would go on, leaving him, and later Peter, with the staff; it was a day trip, overnight at most. Arthur or Angela, but rarely both, would say they had to 'go', and the other would nod solemnly, and Nathan would ask, 'where, dad? Where where where?', and Peter would look sad and say, 'but I don't want you to go'. Their parents just shook their heads and told them that they'd see them later.
Over breakfast, Angela leaves a set of keys and a note with an address on it on the kitchen counter. Just puts them there and leaves the house. Nathan decides that this is suspicious enough to investigate. The address is Texas, not far from where Claire used to live. It seems like an interesting coincidence - definitely suggests that his mother knows a lot more than she's letting on. He calls Peter.
Peter hangs up on him.
Nathan and Claire go without him.
“This is the place,” he says, when they land in Odessa. A dusty factory in the middle of nowhere. They approach it warily, the town being far too silent for either of their likings; Nathan isn't used to it, and Claire knows too many people in this state to feel safe out in the open like this.
“What's Primatech?” Claire asks as Nathan begins to unlock the doors. He has to wipe cobwebs from the locks.
“Got me,” he says, dragging the door open.
The piece of paper with the address on it also has some instructions: basement.
They go to the basement, and-
“Holy fucking--”
“Language.” Claire tuts.
The basement is one giant filing cabinet, shelves upon shelves of boxes and files and folders, all covered in a thick, allergy-inducing layer of dust.
“How are we supposed to find anything in this place?” Nathan murmurs, not really looking for an answer. “Oh, Ma, why do you do this to me?”
Claire stays where she is while he wanders up the rows of shelves, head craned back to look at the higher shelves. He wipes dust from the fronts of boxes to read the writing, grimacing at the grey fluff left behind on his fingers. At the other end of the room a box falls, echoing across the concrete floor. He follows the sound, walking past yet more rows and rows of metal shelves.
“Hey, look at this,” Nathan calls, and Claire follows him across the room. Kneeling on the floor, Nathan is sorting through a mess of manilla folders.
“What's this?” she asks.
“A lot of notes about some guy, Adam Monroe. 'Adam Monroe is liar',” Nathan reads off a piece of paper before handing it to Claire. 'Liar' is capitalised and underlined three times. The scrawled writing covers a receipt from 1977 for the Museum of Natural History in New York. “And here's the man himself,” Nathan says, handing her a picture. A blond man with his arm around someone just outside of the shot; there are holes through his face, as if pins had been stuck in it. On the back it says 'Christmas, 1972'.
“Hand me your knapsack,” Nathan says, having pushed all the folders back into the box. “Let's take this and go.” He stands and drops it into Claire's bag, Claire stoops dramatically, and begrudgingly Nathan takes the bag from her. It's pink with white flowers.
“I should to go to Kermit before we leave,” Claire tells him.
Nathan grimaces, and avoids her gaze as they make it out of the basement and to the front door. He lets Claire go first, then pulls the keys out and begins to relock the door.
“Nathan,” Claire repeats.
“Yes, I heard you, Claire. We can't take long, we'll lose the light.”
“Uh huh,” Claire says, a laugh held in the back of her throat. Nathan ignores it.
As they walk away from the factory, and Nathan crouches slightly so that Claire can jump onto his back, the bushes across the street shake slightly. Neither Claire nor Nathan notice, as Nathan takes off into the sky, a man placing binoculars in a bag and replacing his glasses.
-
The trailer park looks the same. A little more crowded, maybe; some of the trailers have new decorations up. It seems like a lot of people she grew up with have moved on.
She spent her formative years in this park, playing tag with her friends behind the trailers, watching her uncle shoot bottle cans off the fencing, listening to her mom's newest scheme over the dinner table. She loved this place with all her heart, and looking at Nathan now, she can see that he's still horrified by it.
She knocks on the door of number thirty six, and when there's no answer, she reaches up on her tiptoes and retrieves a key nestled in the drainpipe. Opening the door carefully, she waves Nathan back, and it's a good thing she does, too: a ball of fire hits her full in face, and she squeezes her eyes shut and holds her breath as she feels her skin smoulder and begin to heal.
“Hello, Uncle Flint,”she says, feeling, for a second, breath escape through her cheek before the hole closes.
“What are you doin' here?” he asks, not a hint of an apology about him. There are half a dozen people crammed in the trailer with them, some she recognises, and some she doesn't. There's a mess of guns and knives on the table, and when she glances back at Nathan, he looks nervous. It's faint, beneath layers of bluster and bullshit, but she's got pretty good at reading him.
“Just a visit, I'm not staying. There wouldn't be any room for me.” She takes a closer look at their faces. “Hey, Jesse. Knox.”
Knox leans back in his chair, tapping a knife against his chin. He points it at her. “Hey. You're looking good. High life's treating you well.”
“Guess so. I'm looking better than you guys, at least.”
Knox smiles, then his gaze slides to Nathan, and his smile widens. She feels Nathan shift from foot to foot. Flint notices too, and steps closer.
“You want a drink or something? Nathan?”
“No, thank you, Flint.”
Knox's smile remains as Flint narrows his eyes, and Claire wants to push Nathan out of the room, quick as possible, but she knows these guys. That would only make things a hundred times worse.
“I'll have a drink,” she says. “Flint. Flint, I'll have something.”
At length, Flint looks away from Nathan and nods. “Yeah,” he says, picks up Jesse's beer, and hands it to her.
Her first taste of alcohol was a warm beer around this table, back when she could still get drunk. There's a bubbling of homesickness in her gut as she takes a swig, eyes on Jesse. He's pissed, but he won't say anything. Meredith taught all the men in her home that if they ever even looked at her daughter funny they'd be finding themselves a new set of testicles, and her influence remains, even if she doesn't. Similarly, Claire knows that without her, the guys would make quick work of Nathan's pretty face. She fears that her influence isn't as great as her mother's, though.
Flint doesn't share his sister's, or his niece's, fondness for Nathan, not at all. Meredith always spoke kindly of him, her handsome New York boy who thought he'd rule the world, and she wasn't looking for any long term relationships other than the one with her daughter, so his absence from their lives didn't upset her. Truth told, the way she talked about her own father, it seemed like she wasn't all that keen on men, anyway.
Flint wouldn't have it, though. Some sense of chivalry, maybe, or a vicarious desire for a father that cared; when Nathan infrequently visited, gave his tiny daughter some gas station toy, Flint couldn't keep himself from laying into him. And Flint rarely used his words. Claire would sit at their table and listen to the fight, looking at the toy she'd been given from this strange man, and Jesse would say, 'fucking dads, kid, can't expect shit off them. Ain't just you.' Sometimes one of the guys would break the toy, too.
It made her feel a little better.
Now's different though, not that she can explain it to Flint; she wouldn't even be able to explain it to her mom.
“We'll leave you to it,” she says, “I'm guessing you want as few eyes on this as possible. Nathan.”
She half turns, and Nathan's already got the door open. The guys laugh. Out of his earshot, she gives the can back to Flint and says, “Back off. What would Mom say?”
“Can we go now?” Nathan asks when she meets him outside the trailer, his tone edged with anxiety. His feathers are ruffled, she can tell. He's so far out of his comfort zone.
“Let's,” she says.
-
Simone spends most evenings at Peter's. She has her own place, that great big house inherited from Charles, but she says she prefers his place, it isn't lonely like her family home. Peter gets it; she was super close to her dad, that wasn't hard to work out when he was looking after Charles, and he imagines that there was a time when living alone at the family mansion would have broken his heart. Plus, he likes how her toothbrush looks next to his.
He makes dinner while she sits on the couch and works; she speaks softly into her cellphone, held between her shoulder and her ear as she paints her toenails. He can't make out much of what she says, only the occasional, 'we're on a deadline' and 'yes, I know, Isaac'. He tries not to be jealous, Isaac is only one of her clients, and not even a very important - she sells Van Goghs and Kahlos for a living. Isaac's just some comic book artist.
By the time dinner's ready - microwaveable noodles and prawn crackers - Simone's finished her call. She clears her papers off the coffee table, and Peter catches a picture of Degas's Ludovic Lepic and his Daughter1 (he took art history courses in college, he knows about these things) before Simone slides it back into her folder.
His home phone rings as he sets her bowl down. Simone leans back on the couch, picking up the receiver from the side table. “Hello?” She pauses, flicks her eyes to Peter for a second. “Is this Nathan?” she asks.
Peter almost trips over Simone's legs to take the phone from her. “Nathan, what- what do you want?”
“Look, Pete, I know you've got principles now but I could really use your help. Can you just, just set aside whatever your problem is with me for this?”
Simone is looking at him, expression faintly interested. Peter bites the inside of his lip and keeps his tone light as he says, “That's going to be difficult right now, I'm slammed at work. Can I get back to you?” Nathan hums something uncertainly. “Okay? Great, bye.”
He lifts the phone cord over Simone's head and walks around the back of the couch to drop the phone back in its cradle. For a second, Simone is silent, as Peter takes up his bowl and sits down. Then she says, “Star Wars is about to start.”
-
“Hung up again?” Claire asks, both hands in a bowl of pancake batter.
Nathan snaps his cell closed. “Yes. I hope your hands are clean.”
She wipes her nose on her arm. “Whatever. Are you going to make your own dinner, then?”
An admonishment sticks in his throat and goes nowhere. Telling Claire off is like disciplining someone else's child; it feels like he's overstepping boundaries. He sits on a kitchen stool and watches her mix the batter with her fingers - she used to do this for 'the guys', she's told him. It makes him shudder, if he thinks on it too long. A little girl - then and now - with those men, having breakfast over a table full of guns. He hates that she grew up like that, sometimes. He hates that they had to live in a motel in Mexico because of him, sometimes. He hates that he didn't care, all the time.
His mother's shoes clicking on wooden floor let him know she's coming this way long before he sees her. When she rounds the kitchen door, she's carrying a handbag and holding a lipstick.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asks.
“I have a dinner date,” she says, clicking around the kitchen, picking odds and ends up, transferring them to her bag.
“With a man friend?” Claire pours batter into a frying pan, smiling. “Do you have a man friend?”
“He is a man, yes,” his mother says diplomatically. She pouts, applying lipstick in the reflection of a stainless steel pan.
Nathan sits up. “What about Dad?”
“What about him, darling? He's been dead for years.” She smiles in that vague way that she has, kissing him on the forehead as she passes by him. He opens his mouth to reply, but she breezes on, “I'll be back later, you can call me on my cell if you have to.”
She disappears out the door, leaving Nathan to process 'if you have to' as 'don't'. “Ma,” he shouts, a second later, “who's Adam Monroe?”
There's a pause in her clicking heels, then slowly - click, click... click - she answers, “Who?”
He pulls the photograph out of his pocket. “Adam Monroe. This guy.”
She stands out the door, faint lines wrinkling her forehead. “I don't know, Nathan. I'm sure it doesn't matter.”
“Are you sure? I found a bunch of stuff about him at that factory you sent us to.”
The wrinkles get deeper, then smooth out as she takes a breath. “I don't know what you're talking about. I'm sure it doesn't matter,” she repeats. “I'll see you later.”
Claire slaps a couple of pancakes onto a plate, squeezes a generous helping of chocolate sauce on top, and slides it over to him. “Well, that was interesting. Eat up.”
“I know what we're doing tomorrow,” he says, waving the picture at her.
-
On the Saturday mornings that Matt has off, he takes Molly to the park. He brings a frisbee, and sometimes a soccer ball, and tries to get her interested.
“You can't just stay in all the time reading,” he says, he always says, and Molly, sitting on her sweater on the grass reading a book, always says,
“I can try.”
He keep doing this, every week, every other week, because this is what his father would never do. And Matt would spend every weekend indoors, watching Starsky and Hutch and listening to his parents shout at each other - or his mother shout and his father remain cold and unreachable and distant. He wasn't there even when he was.
Molly, she's lived her whole life like this; her and her family were in witness protection after people became 'interested' in her ability, and wanted her to 'help' them out. His own father - a petty criminal with a chip the size of New York on his shoulder - terrorised her for years and, in the end, had her parents killed by a hitman. A year later he was killed in some drug deal gone bad, and Matt didn't shed a tear.
Matt doesn't know a lot about being a parent, but he knows about fear, and he knows about self esteem, and he doesn't want her life to go the way his did. So many things have happened to her already, and he just wants her to have some grain of normality, stability. Although he's really not sure if being with him isn't actually preventing said normality.
His phone buzzes in his pocket as he aimlessly bounces the ball. Molly's writing in her notebook; what, he doesn't know.
“Detective Parkman.”
“Hey, Matt.”
“Oh.” At Molly's questioning look, he mouths 'Nathan'.
“I need your help, Matt.”
“My help? There's really only one thing I can help you with, Nate, but I don't think you'd like it.”
“Well, it's really more Molly's help than yours that I need, if I'm being honest. I just wanted to make you feel useful.”
“Uh huh. And the reason why I'd care?”
“Money. Potentially a lot.”
“They're at the Hard Rock café in Times Square.” Molly's fixed him with that creepy stare that she has, hand still poised to write. “Just so that you know.”
He holds her gaze for a few seconds, caught in an unspoken game of who's going to blink first. He loses, turning back to the phone. “If you piss me off, I'm just going to arrest you,” he informs Nathan.
He can hear the smirk in Nathan's voice. “A joy to speak to you as always, Detective.”
-
Peter loves to talk. He loved university and its opportunities to talk and analyse and pick over every little thing, but even then he couldn't talk, not freely, anyway. The only rule he ever remembers being enforced in his family was this: don't tell anyone - anything. It was like Fight Club; the first rule about the Petrellis is you do not talk about the Petrellis.
So he never did, never told friends, girlfriends, Simone. Nathan would talk, but he never really said anything, and he never really said anything Peter, about anything.
That's why he talks to Dr Suresh. People think he's neurotic, but really he just wants to talk. And if he has to pay someone to listen to him and be unable to report him or the family to the police, then so be it.
“So they're trying to make me help them find some piece of paper, I don't know, I've just been hanging up on him.”
Suresh nods. “How do you feel about that?”
“What else can I do?”
“Well, Peter, you have options, don't close yourself off from them because of past problems.” Suresh makes a note in his pad, then closes it and slips it into a drawer. “I need to step out for a moment. Why don't you think things over while I'm gone? Think about... the importance of family.”
He pats Peter on the shoulder as he passes, his stride rather quick.
-
“I have a bad feeling about this,” Claire warns over her strawberry milkshake. “Getting a cop involved? Promising him money? Those are not good moves.”
“We'll be long gone by the time any money's involved.” He rips open a sachet of ketchup with his teeth, eyes lingering on the waitress who brought them their food. Claire rolls her eyes at this flagrant act of masculinity; this is how he picked her mom up in the late eighties, except her mother only paid him any attention because she thought she could get a few dollars out of him for rent.
“Where, exactly?”
“I'll work something out, don't worry.” He waves the waitress over and asks her, voice low, for another drink. He's all smiles and chuckles and eye contact.
Claire suspects he won't get far - waitresses know things about men who flirt with them, they don't fall for those tricks. Her mother taught her that, grifting across Texas, waiting for Flint to get out of juvie.
“You didn't want anything else, did you?” Nathan asks her belatedly.
She meets his gaze dully. “They're here,” she says, pointing to the door.
Matt hustles Molly across the café, steering her around the waitresses and customers. A baseball cap is pulled down low over his face, and Molly has a flowery sun hat on. She seems unamused.
“Picture,” he grunts as they come up alongside Nathan and Claire's table.
“Hi,” Nathan replies.
“Give me the picture or I'll arrest you.”
Molly sighs, shaking her head. Nathan relents as the waitress comes back with his drink, eyeing their strange group. When she's gone, he slides the now crumbled picture across the table. Molly frowns at it, squints, then shuts her eyes.
“He's in the central Pacific Ocean off the coast of Hawaii.” She pulls out a notebook and pen, and, eyes still closed, sketches out a picture of Hawaii and its coast - Claire isn't sure of its accuracy since her schooling was less than ideal, but it looks impressive. Molly opens her eyes, stares intently at her sketch, then draws an X on the shaded ocean with two quick pen strokes. “He's swimming,” she says, handing Nathan the paper.
“You'll be hearing from me,” Matt says shortly, wrapping an arm around Molly to guide her out.
Claire and Nathan watch them go, then look at each other. “Holiday!” Claire says. “I've always wanted to go to Hawaii.”
“No, no, no. No. I probably already need thousands of dollars worth of back surgery as it is. I'm just going to go there, find out what I can, then come back. Why don't you explore the city, or something?”
She blows bubbles in her milkshake. “You're no fun.”
Claire's done all the tourist stuff in New York already; she swears that sometimes Nathan thinks that having a Texas accent equals being an uncultured hick. Which, to be honest, she's used to her advantage more than once, with him and others, but still.
The first time she came to New York, she was six, and her mom told her they were going to visit her daddy. They weren't, or at least they didn't. They visited the Petrelli mansion, though, and got turned away at the door before they even saw Angela or Arthur.
They spent a year in the city, her momma waiting tables and dating this creep, Doyle, who eventually bought her a car - shiny and red and fast, as Claire remembers it - which she promptly sold and then left the state with Claire. It was also then, in 1996, that Claire received her first birth certificate. It was real, for all intents and purposes, all its information was correct, date of birth, surname, parents. It just wouldn't ever be in the system. Better that way, her mom said. They got it cheap, even, done by another of the waitresses at the diner.
“You thank Sandra for helpin' us out,” she'd said, and Claire had shyly thanked the women, who replied that Texas girls had to look after each other.
Later her mother had said, “We only look out for ourselves, in the end, you know.”
It's a rule that Claire lived by for years, it's coloured every decision she's ever made, but now she doesn't know. Nathan's going to get into trouble, she can just feel it - he almost always does, he's terrible at putting together schemes - and she's nineteen now, she could leave him behind. She should leave him behind, that's what her mom would do.
But she hasn't, and even though he's left her here in Times Square eating an ice cream alone because she has no friends and he's in Hawaii and she'd love to go to Hawaii-- she probably won't. She has to make sure he doesn't get himself killed, after all.
She watches an ad for Coca Cola on a big screen as she finishes her ice cream. There's nowhere else for her to go, her options are sit here or go back to the mansion and hope Angela isn't looming.
“I need a hobby,” she mutters, dumping her cone in the trash. She pushes through the crowd, smacking away pickpocketing hands. Her hobby right now is going to be shopping, she decides. Not that she has any money to buy anything, of course.
She turns down West 47nd Street towards Bergdorf (she can always do with new ball gowns - one day she'll have somewhere to wear them), head down, moving fast. She doesn't get far before she feels it, that prickle of anxiety, like a frequency she's been tuned into. Brushing her hair back behind her ear, she peeks over her shoulder at the street. Her gaze is immediately drawn to a van, blacked out windows, driving at the absolute lowest end of the speed limit. Now, there could just be a celebrity in there with a very cautious driver, but she doubts it.
She veers into a shop doorway and stops, taking out her cell, which she absently fiddles with, going into the menu, looking at the calendar, her inbox. She rubs her face, spreading her fingers to glance through them. The van has pulled over, and sits there, no one getting in or out. Claire rarely believes in coincidences.
She flips her cell closed and moves on. The van follows suit. This isn't the first time she's been followed - there was that time a wronged ex chased her and her mom across the whole damn country; and that time her and Nathan fled to Mexico - and from experience she gets the feeling that it isn't just some creep, or even the cops.
Danko. A mobster that Nathan just had to double cross. If it is him, they're basically done. Emile doesn't fuck around.
The van trundles along as she weighs up her options: if she runs, then she'll definitely get caught; if she calls the police then-- well, that's a joke, isn't it?; if she leads them back to the mansion, she'll get ambushed.
“Shit,” she mumbles, hunching her shoulders forward. There's nothing to do but ride it out now. Damn Nathan.
She crosses at an intersection, her pace picking up even though she knows she can't run. They're going to get her, she realises, and probably kill her, which isn't a problem, but then they'll track down Nathan and-- fuck.
The van comes up to the intersection, speeding up as she has. Her heart pounds in her chest to the rhythm of her footsteps, and then-- a screech of tires on the road. Everyone looks, and she, heart in her mouth, follows their lead.
A car has cut the van off at the intersection, very nearly causing a crash. A woman leans out of the window, apologising profusely to a man that has exited the vehicle. He stares her down menacingly, but she seems unaware. Another man gets out of the other side and looks around, but the crowd that the incident has drawn conceals Claire, and he doesn't see as she slips away and runs all the way to the subway.
Part 4