Title: Reality
Rating: R
Spoilers: Parasite, .07 Percent, and some references to Company Man downward.
Pairings: Isaac/Claire, implied Zach/Claire, and if you wanna squint, Peter/Claire.
Genre: romance, drama, angst
Warnings: Character deaths, an adult with a (slightly) underage, semi-graphic sex.
Summary: Written for the
mature_heroes Quickie contest. Her world boiled when New York City melted, his crumbled a long time before, and its pieces vanished in New York's flames.
Disclaimer: Were I to own Heroes, even uttering a phrase like 'no one is safe' could endanger your job ;)
AN: Originally it was supposed to BE quick...and then there was this back story that cropped up that demanded to explain the PWP....Gah. My mind hates me.
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Reality
"Are you sure?"
His voice was cold, uncaring, with a lingering unspoken 'so?', as if she'd just mentioned the phone book boy was late. She couldn't see his face from the way his long locks of hair fell into his face as he looked down at his art book, but his fingers digging into the starched cloth lining of the notebook betrayed him.
She opened her mouth to speak, but found her mouth too dry to utter words, so only nodded in silence. Was she sure? Was she sure? Damn right, she was sure. She had seen them incinerated in front of her eyes. She had incinerated with them. By all rights, she should be dead.
If this world had any mercy, any justice, she would be. Almost ten million people had died because she couldn't save them. Because she couldn't save him.
He had said everything would be all right, that he could control it...and his friend, Hiro, had promised that they were 'heroes' and would save them. Her father had just smiled and told her there wasn't anything to worry about.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
She fought back a dry sob, and felt a sudden intense irritation at Isaac's lack of response, as if he was okay, so none of it mattered.
"Aren't you..." She trailed off momentarily as her words stuck in her dry throat, before she forced them out. "Aren't you going to say anything?"
"What do you want me to say? 'I'm sorry New York City has been reduced to a slab of radioactive rock?' That everything I fought for, everything I sacrificed..."
He looked up from his book finally, and she nearly took a step backwards at the intense pain shining in his brown eyes that glistened with tears, his lips pressed tightly together to hold in all the unmanly emotions that seemed so eager to tumble out of him.
"I lost the woman I loved, my work, my home, everything." He shook his head. "I nearly lost my life in a vain attempt to prove...to...stop the bomb, save the world."
She closed her eyes and moved to sit a respectable distance away from where he sat on the edge of his bed. For a long while she didn't say anything in the heavy silence that settled around the shabby motel room he had moved to, on the other side of the country from the man hunting him, in the hopes that they could save him.
Maybe it was only stalling the inevitable. All they'd done was push the explosion a week after when Hiro had predicted it. Why should 'they', when all that was left was her and Isaac, be able to stop this?
Her stomach twisted sickeningly, feeling empty and...and...hopeless and lifeless. Everything in her was hollow, everything in this world was hollow now. She could never go back to the family she grew up with, and now the only other people who had accepted her, loved her, were dead.
And still she lived...without purpose, without any true substance or life in her anymore. If she were to run into Sylar now, the only thing that could fuel her resistance would be sheer spite.
She looked over at the last person in the world who even knew for certain that she still existed.
"You're not the only one who gave up...who lost everything." She said softly, eyes turning toward the art on the paper he was staring at.
He snapped the book shut before she could get more than a glimpse of orange and yellow. "I know."
She studied the woolen rags around her legs which she liked to pretend were proper shorts, that she had picked up from a thrift shop.
The silence was unbearable. Her mind flashed through a thousand memories she wished the Haitian were still around to remove. Empty streets, morbid imprints in the stone that were once people, silent ruins of statues and monolithic ruins that might have once been buildings.
She had been at the very edge of the blast, driving out of town with her blood mother, who had come up to see her, and was taking her to Virginia on vacation in her van.
She had watched with a strange calmness as explosion flashed by her window every time the van rolled another time, crunching up like a discarded can.
Her eyes moved up again to look at his still form. What ghosts haunted his blank stare, she could not imagine.
"I'm--"
"Don't." He cut in quickly.
She sighed, refusing to lapse into silence again, desperate to hide from the memories of burned, twisted faces, forever frozen in gazes of terror and anguish. "What are you going to do now?"
His face turned slightly to meet her gaze, sardonic smile twitching on his lips. "He wasn't in New York, so I don't see how anything's changed with my plans. What about you?"
She frowned, and looked back at her threadbare clothes. She had nothing more to do, no where to go. No one to see. As pathetic and ironic as it was, this man she had barely seen longer than it took to say 'This guy painted you, so Peter could save you', was the last sane thing she had left in this world.
A few tears fought their way free at the notion that her definition of 'sane' had been reduced to something like this. Oh what she would give up to be home, to be in her father's arms in the couch, crying in earnest but with no understanding of all the people killed in the blast.
What she wouldn't do just to forget and be normal, to be daddy's little girl, a stupid, oblivious, small-minded cheerleader worrying about her grades and whether the girls were talking behind her back.
She hadn't realized she was sobbing until she felt a strong arm pull her rather awkwardly toward warmth. His smell was tangy and acrid from lingering paint and stress, and his coarse white shirt was unfamiliar and strange to her cheek.
And yet...he was warm...real...alive. He was the last tiny little link, the only thing in all of existence that proved her last three months had been anything more than a fleeting fantasy, a ghostly memory.
He said something not completely coherent, voice as stiff and awkward as the arms encircling her, and she buried herself further into his solid, warm, living, painful reality.
Somewhere in the back of her mind she felt a twinge of guilt at so freely taking the meager comfort he offered, when he had to feel the same empty hopelessness as she did--everything he had ever known had been ripped away from him, and all he had done was try to help people.
What had she ever done but what she wanted for herself?
Hesitantly, she brought up her arms to return his makeshift embrace. She could feel him tense for a few moments, before he rested a noticeably damp cheek on the top of her head, and squeezed her tighter.
It was funny, sad, ironic, and perhaps strangely fitting that she, he, they found themselves in such a situation, fighting for solace, warmth and comfort in such a simple gesture between two people who barely bothered to recall each others' names.
She pulled away from him after a moment, and met his gaze, so terribly sad and alone and vulnerable.
"I don't...I don't have anything to do." She responded to his earlier question. "Or anywhere to go."
He frowned silently, and broke the gaze, looking at a faraway wall, eyes clouding with ghosts and memories (but not how they did when seeing the future).
"You..." He shrugged noncommittally, arms falling to his sides. "I've got room for another person, if you've really got nowhere else to go."
She smiled softly, eyes burning with newfound tears. They were two of a kind now. Remnants of a world now gone, ripped away from the life they should have lived, the deaths rightfully theirs. They would never be whole again, never complete, never truly real.
There was a flicker of surprise in his gaze as her lips brushed against his callous, almost chapped ones. Several days' stubble scratched at her chin as a hand slipped through her tangled hair, and encouraged her closer to him.
She wasn't even sure why she had decided to kiss him...no. No, that wasn't true. She knew why...it was the desperate desire, the need for whatever paultry stability, what phantasmic illusion of safety he could give her.
She could only assume the reason behind the insistent kiss he returned, the bold, rough tongue roaming her mouth without a pause to consider how improper--illegal--all of this was fast becoming, lay in a similar feeling.
Everything about him was rough, coarse, harsh. He had been hardened by a life she couldn't fathom, toughened by working menial jobs to earn enough to eat for the night. He was nothing like Zach or Peter, not soft, not gentle, not terribly kind.
As her breath was forced out of her--and the kiss broken--by the headboard of the bed crashing suddenly into her back, she couldn't quite force herself to believe she would have wanted him to be.
He didn't say anything to her, dark eyes burning through her as he returned her gaze for a few long moments, but then, they had spoken no more than a hundred words before this whole mess, so why should that change now, just because everything that was their worlds had burned away?
The moment could have lasted a minute or an hour, but it did not seem long before he broke her gaze and plunged burning lips to her collar, palms sliding under her cheap shirt, leaving a trail of goose bumps in their wake. His mouth broke away long enough to rip her shirt over her head and fling it away, before descending on her not-quite-fully-developed breasts.
A wheezing, desperate gasp dragged out of her as she arched into his ungentle touch. A thousand thoughts, potential protests, flittered on the edge of her consciousness as her nimble hands scrabbled to level the playing field with his paint-splattered tee, but all she could hear was the screaming needwantmusthave echoing in her mind, straining to forget this last horrifying week, and remember what the old world felt like.
There was a time she would have loved the freedom to stare at the sight of a bare man as fit as he, but now was no time for endearments or pregnant pauses, this was not love, not even lust. She understood that completely.
She cried as he entered her, not from anything physical. His hair was oily and nearly as tangled and mussed as her own, his mouth tasted of salt and ash and anguish.
The presence of friction usually created heat, warmth, pleasure, pain, heartache, bliss, memory. Smiling faces flashed through her mind, empty reassurances, soft, kind embraces.
A low, guttural groan brought her mind from ethereal recollections, and her gaze were captured by the dark brown globes above her, pinning her to the bed more than any hands on her wrists.
Her own breath came in short, shrill gasps as his rhythmic, brutal thrusts sent shudders through her. White warmth crept into her vision as memories melted away into realherenowwarmbliss.
In the few moments she felt suspended over the abyss of forgetfulness that would be completion, she found the way his expression contorted with his own precarious proximity to living again for a few short moments fascinating.
The choked noise that escaped his clenched teeth was beautiful, real. He was real, so close, pulling her inside himself and yet filling her more than ever. She knew him in a way no one would ever know him again, she knew the nervous fidgeting gaze he cast over her, as he nursed the wounds that still left nasty red marks on his wrists now. She knew him when his world existed, perhaps not when it was whole (but then hers had not been for some time, either).
More than just a lingering memory of a world consumed in flames, they were bound together. No one would ever know them like they knew each other, no one could. And in some small way, that made him hers.
A scream ripped from her throat as the beautiful bliss she had been so desperately searching for pulled her in without warning, sending spasms throughout her small frame, and pushing him right into whatever he had been searching for as well.
His breath was heavy and uneven in her ears as he collapsed into the bed next to her, and pulled her back flush against him, hiding his face in her hair. She thought he might have said something softly then, but her attention was caught by the sketchbook that lay open on the floor.
A brilliant dawn covered most of the page, colors breathtaking and beautiful, hanging over the ruined city of New York, but what caught her eye most were the pair of ragged survivors, golden and dark, hands intertwined in silence, and facing toward the rising sun over the broken skyline with an undeniable resolution.
There will be a tomorrow for us after all.
End
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AN: Just to be clear, Nikki/D.L./Micah were in Nevada at the time, Sylar was last seen in the vicinity of Texas, and Matt & Ted were in NY.