Doctor Who / Heroes: A Flash of Green (or, Save the Time Lord, Save the World)
Title: A Flash of Green (or, Save the Time Lord, Save the World)
Author's Name: artemis_rain
Recipient's name: pie_is_good
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG (or K+, depending on which rating system you use)
Characters: Nine/Claude, Peter Petrelli, Mr. Bennett, mentions of others from Heroes and a brief OC appearance.
Warnings: Angst… that’s about it. Could be considered Peter/Claude if you choose to read it that way.
Author's notes: This story requires a fairly in-depth knowledge of Heroes canon, and contains some MAJOR HEROES SPOILERS. If you haven’t seen season 1 up to “Company Man,” read at your own risk! Also, the only stuff I know about the Time War is what Nine and Ten have mentioned, so I’m making assumptions based on that. Sorry if they don’t match with classic canon.
He is truly the last.
Alone, in a strange body, in the aftermath of the most devastating battle space-time has ever seen, there is only one place he can think of to go.
The planet he has cared for, the people that he has tended like a gardener does his flowers, surely they would take him in.
Because there is no place in the universe now or ever that he could call home.
His people are dead. So dead they never even existed, except in his memories. The Daleks share their fate, but that is of little comfort. Even knowing he is the last, he can no longer call himself a Time Lord. The very concept ties his hearts in knots. The words themselves, the idea, serve only as a reminder of things that once were, and will never be again.
When he’s quiet, he can hear the very fabric of space and time keening at their loss. The universe is falling apart slowly, right in front of his eyes, and he is powerless to stop it. The whole race of Time Lords could repair this damage, but one man alone is every bit as useless as he feels.
The sound of infinite cosmic grief grows from the silence to invade the noise of his existence until no sound is loud enough to drown it out, and he must either run or go mad.
So he takes his TARDIS and hides on a lonely rock with the only race he ever loved as dearly as his own.
But things are so very different. Something has changed for the people of this little planet, tucked away in a forgotten corner of their dusty galaxy. The light has gone out of their eyes. The lively and beautiful race he had walked among, from which he had selected so many wonderful companions is now the selfish, greedy and cruel waste of existence he never believed they could become. He wonders if the Time War changed them, or just changed him.
But he has experienced no joy in traveling since the extinction of his people. Perhaps the no joy of routine and familiarity would be a welcome change.
So he puts away the TARDIS, rents an apartment in New York under the name Claude Raines, intending to be every bit as invisible as his namesake, and dives headfirst into the muck and filth and shit that used to be his garden, hoping for a flash of green.
After a year living among the tiny, insignificant inhabitants of the planet, he comes to realize two things.
One: The human race is more wretched than he ever knew.
And two: The twenty-first century is when everything changes.
***
The first sign he sees of the evolutionary advancement of humanity is on a dreary Tuesday morning in the lecture hall of the small community college that employs him.
He teaches basic computer skills to absent-minded adults. Not the mysteries of time and space, not the undiscovered laws of physics, not scientific concepts that could turn an intellectual mind inside-out, not the cultures of ancient civilizations from the lips of one who has experienced them in all their glory. The man who knew those things is gone.
On this particular Tuesday, Mr. Cohen, a forty-something refrigerator repairman, asks him a question in fluent Latin. The stunned apology is in Japanese. After three more tries, he arrives back at English, and the class rolls their eyes at his little joke.
Looking at the man’s bewildered face, Claude knows the truth.
The next day, Cohen’s seat is empty.
He comes back two days later with marks on his shoulder and a complexion the colour of spoiled milk, swearing up and down that aliens abducted him for use as a translator, and would be back any day to either use him again or kill him.
And Claude knows it has begun.
***
It’s exciting, for a time; the feeling that he could once again be part of something as big as he was, so long ago. Exciting, and frightening. After living among the humans, convincing them and himself that he was every bit as average as they were, it’s almost impossible to take that first step back into the TARDIS, into the life he’d almost forgotten. The slow and cautious stroll towards the Chameleon Arch and the power it would bestow upon him is one of the most difficult walks of his life. Even still, the temptation to use the machine to become fully human, to leave his old life behind forever, is great, though he knows to do so would be to betray his people. He has come only to make a minor change, an addition, to his biological skill set.
After living so completely as a weak and puny ape, wallowing in the filth that has become of his second-favorite world, the act of growing larger, more important, more powerful, is like taking a first step towards waking from a cherished nightmare of his own creation into a reality of hell. As a human, he had no use for galaxies and heroes and Time Lords. As a gifted human planning to invade and take down a major organization specializing in hunting and abducting innocent people for its own use, he was treading that much closer to the ragged hole left by the ancient and powerful race no one remembers, to the universe’s groans of anguish, and to the infinite well of grief which consumed the heart of the man he once had been.
He grants himself the power to turn invisible, as a nod to his namesake.
***
Infiltrating the Company is easy. For all his wit and seeming intelligence, Thompson is a fool underneath, taken in so quickly by his willingness to help out, and by the potential uses for his ability. He is promptly partnered with an unremarkable pawn named Bennett, and throws himself into the tasks set before him: to hunt down the gifted, as per the wishes of the Company, and to shelter them from harm, as per the demands of morality. The hard part is not the integration of the two tasks, as he had thought, but rather keeping the Company from finding out. With the people and the power at their command, there is so little they can’t discover.
Treachery and deceit become routine, and he is enveloped by the feeling of helping people, healing the world, one tiny soul at a time, basking in the thrill that comes from betraying the Company. Routine becomes bone-deep, and he barely notices when “gifted humans” become “people like me.” When Bennett, friend and enemy in one, invites him over for a family dinner, Claude meets little Claire and vows to protect her with his last breath, and feels only a faint whisper of memory from a time when he could have done so much more.
***
The boy is so young, so innocent, and Claude’s heart is far too open. He watches as the boy dismantles toy after toy in his peaceful home, unaware of the figure hiding in the sunlight by the open window, picking apart each tiny gear, each wire, each motor, studying them with a fascination never seen in children so young, and putting them back together again, better than ever. Sometimes he combines them to make new toys, new gadgets that work in such intricate ways that Claude is awe-struck by the level of understanding the boy has of such things. No older than ten, and there is no mechanical mystery he cannot solve.
And there’s something else, too. A feeling he can’t deny of great potential, power and importance. This boy means something. Something more than the others. In his average house, with his average parents, something remarkable is growing. Something wonderful.
This one, he can’t turn over to the Company. This one, he can’t protect from inside.
He knows what he has to do.
When it’s over, he doesn’t have to spy on conversations to know he’s been discovered. Everywhere he turns feels like mistrust.
When Bennett is ordered to kill him, he has to work to keep from laughing. The man may be a puppet, but he is a friend, and the attachment he’s formed with his daughter guarantees sympathy for people like Claude. For people like them, him and Claire both.
He climbs into the car without hesitation. Regardless of whether or not the man can pull the trigger, Claude knows he has won.
The Company will never find little Gabriel, and that is all that matters.
***
The bullet sends lightning flashes of soul-deep agony skittering through his body, but it is the betrayal that breaks him.
He barely has the sense left to acknowledge the irony of being stung by that particular sin, after what he’s done.
Bennett checks the bridge, peering over the side as though he might spot an invisible body at the bottom of the river. He doesn’t check the arch or the criss-crossing beams separating the bridge from the fatal stretch of space below it.
When the car speeds away, Claude wraps his shirt around his shoulder to stop the bleeding, and cries, and hates.
***
He can’t go back to his old apartment. They would know, the Company, and they would come for him. There’s nowhere he can go to hide, and so he goes everywhere. Hiding in plain sight, he follows people into their homes, sleeps in unused corners, steals food off of plates and money out of wallets. Silent and invisible, he exists in the world a greater part of it than ever before, and yet completely unknown.
And the people he sees, he despises. They have identities and families and love, and they take it all for granted with their selfish, deceitful, gassy ways and he hates them for it. For pissing on the very thing he can never have. Fifteen years of living separate from the world, of seeing it more clearly than ever before, steeps him in bitterness and disgust until he is full from the whisper of his breath to the marrow of his bones.
He never tries to help anymore, never sees anyone worth the effort.
At night, he sometimes dreams of a time when he loved this planet with both his hearts; when the Company would have trembled, an insect before his power; when he would heal, and fight, and make people better than they were.
He never remembers them when he wakes.
***
Peter Petrelli changes everything.
The poor, pathetic puppy-dog of a man, following after him like a lost poodle begging for scraps, with the eyes and clothes and hair of a godawful poet, is his undoing.
Because Peter is important; more important than anyone Claude has ever met, and it stirs something familiar inside him.
Because Peter is good, because Peter loves like he doesn’t realize what a sick joke love is.
Because Peter wants to save the world. Not one life here or there, one precious little soul at a time, but the whole lot, even if it kills him.
Because he throws Peter off a thirty storey building, and still the boy comes back.
And as he laughs, heaping abuse on the poor pathetic man and pushing him harder and farther than anyone deserves, a part of him rejoices, because Peter is so much more than Claude could ever be, and yet that feels wrong somehow; as though Peter could make Claude better than he is, as though he shouldn’t even have to try.
And because something about the boy is so incredibly, indescribably green.
***
Claude is a coward. Sometime during the last fifteen years, the spark of courage he must have had in order to betray the Company, has faded and died.
He storms out of Peter’s apartment, hands and guts knotted up in fear and paranoia, looking around as though someone might be watching him; him, the invisible man.
But the Company is looking for him again, and they won’t give up until they find him, and he can barely remember why.
A part of him knows not to blame Peter for bringing this on, but the boy is easy to resent, easy to push away because of one simple fact:
Not only does Peter want to save the world; he wants to save Claude, too.
Because Peter sees something in him that he can’t even see in himself, and isn’t that just like an empath?
Claude can deal with bitterness and resentment, but he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with love.
But something about it is familiar. He must have loved once, at least once in his life. What about his parents, his childhood?
Where did he grow up? Who was his family? Why didn’t he know? Why hadn’t he ever wondered?
Did the Company take these memories from him? Would they do the same to Peter if they caught him?
But it can’t happen. He knows this with absolute certainty, and is startled by the force of his own conviction. Peter has to be saved, at all costs. Peter is special.
Peter is hope; he is power. Peter is going to save the world, or destroy it. A small action on his part could affect the fate of humanity.
And he reminds Claude of someone. Someone from a half-forgotten dream. Someone who had the power to dictate the destinies of galaxies. Someone who would gladly die to save a sad, pathetic race that would never know or thank him. Someone who had suffered, but could love, and could see the beauty in the world through the eyes of others, of companions like children, fascinated by every little thing.
The man with no past shakes his head to clear it, and more images come rushing back. Fear and danger and confidence and an ability to see beyond simple sight.
Did he used to be this person?
Did he see so much of time and space that almost nothing was new and unknown? Did he walk among people who were strange and wonderful beyond any human’s imagining? Did he act as a force for good in a universe of confusion and chaos?
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows the answer.
Saving the world is nothing new; he’s done it a hundred times before.
Peter reminds Claude of a Time Lord.
***
Standing in front of the tall blue box, key gripped tightly, too tightly, in one hand, the Doctor gazes at the door, the last vestiges of his human life drifting away like paper boats on the tide.
No matter how much it hurts, how desperately he wishes things could be different, he is the last of the Time Lords.
And he knows what he has to do.
Peter and those like him will do all they can for this world, but there is an entire universe out there that has been neglected for far too long, bearing wounds that have bled and grown with no one to heal them.
One Time Lord remains, and the job he faces is impossible and endless, but he will do it or die trying.
Finally, he will make things better.
***
End.
Author's Name: artemis_rain
Recipient's name: pie_is_good
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG (or K+, depending on which rating system you use)
Characters: Nine/Claude, Peter Petrelli, Mr. Bennett, mentions of others from Heroes and a brief OC appearance.
Warnings: Angst… that’s about it. Could be considered Peter/Claude if you choose to read it that way.
Author's notes: This story requires a fairly in-depth knowledge of Heroes canon, and contains some MAJOR HEROES SPOILERS. If you haven’t seen season 1 up to “Company Man,” read at your own risk! Also, the only stuff I know about the Time War is what Nine and Ten have mentioned, so I’m making assumptions based on that. Sorry if they don’t match with classic canon.
He is truly the last.
Alone, in a strange body, in the aftermath of the most devastating battle space-time has ever seen, there is only one place he can think of to go.
The planet he has cared for, the people that he has tended like a gardener does his flowers, surely they would take him in.
Because there is no place in the universe now or ever that he could call home.
His people are dead. So dead they never even existed, except in his memories. The Daleks share their fate, but that is of little comfort. Even knowing he is the last, he can no longer call himself a Time Lord. The very concept ties his hearts in knots. The words themselves, the idea, serve only as a reminder of things that once were, and will never be again.
When he’s quiet, he can hear the very fabric of space and time keening at their loss. The universe is falling apart slowly, right in front of his eyes, and he is powerless to stop it. The whole race of Time Lords could repair this damage, but one man alone is every bit as useless as he feels.
The sound of infinite cosmic grief grows from the silence to invade the noise of his existence until no sound is loud enough to drown it out, and he must either run or go mad.
So he takes his TARDIS and hides on a lonely rock with the only race he ever loved as dearly as his own.
But things are so very different. Something has changed for the people of this little planet, tucked away in a forgotten corner of their dusty galaxy. The light has gone out of their eyes. The lively and beautiful race he had walked among, from which he had selected so many wonderful companions is now the selfish, greedy and cruel waste of existence he never believed they could become. He wonders if the Time War changed them, or just changed him.
But he has experienced no joy in traveling since the extinction of his people. Perhaps the no joy of routine and familiarity would be a welcome change.
So he puts away the TARDIS, rents an apartment in New York under the name Claude Raines, intending to be every bit as invisible as his namesake, and dives headfirst into the muck and filth and shit that used to be his garden, hoping for a flash of green.
After a year living among the tiny, insignificant inhabitants of the planet, he comes to realize two things.
One: The human race is more wretched than he ever knew.
And two: The twenty-first century is when everything changes.
***
The first sign he sees of the evolutionary advancement of humanity is on a dreary Tuesday morning in the lecture hall of the small community college that employs him.
He teaches basic computer skills to absent-minded adults. Not the mysteries of time and space, not the undiscovered laws of physics, not scientific concepts that could turn an intellectual mind inside-out, not the cultures of ancient civilizations from the lips of one who has experienced them in all their glory. The man who knew those things is gone.
On this particular Tuesday, Mr. Cohen, a forty-something refrigerator repairman, asks him a question in fluent Latin. The stunned apology is in Japanese. After three more tries, he arrives back at English, and the class rolls their eyes at his little joke.
Looking at the man’s bewildered face, Claude knows the truth.
The next day, Cohen’s seat is empty.
He comes back two days later with marks on his shoulder and a complexion the colour of spoiled milk, swearing up and down that aliens abducted him for use as a translator, and would be back any day to either use him again or kill him.
And Claude knows it has begun.
***
It’s exciting, for a time; the feeling that he could once again be part of something as big as he was, so long ago. Exciting, and frightening. After living among the humans, convincing them and himself that he was every bit as average as they were, it’s almost impossible to take that first step back into the TARDIS, into the life he’d almost forgotten. The slow and cautious stroll towards the Chameleon Arch and the power it would bestow upon him is one of the most difficult walks of his life. Even still, the temptation to use the machine to become fully human, to leave his old life behind forever, is great, though he knows to do so would be to betray his people. He has come only to make a minor change, an addition, to his biological skill set.
After living so completely as a weak and puny ape, wallowing in the filth that has become of his second-favorite world, the act of growing larger, more important, more powerful, is like taking a first step towards waking from a cherished nightmare of his own creation into a reality of hell. As a human, he had no use for galaxies and heroes and Time Lords. As a gifted human planning to invade and take down a major organization specializing in hunting and abducting innocent people for its own use, he was treading that much closer to the ragged hole left by the ancient and powerful race no one remembers, to the universe’s groans of anguish, and to the infinite well of grief which consumed the heart of the man he once had been.
He grants himself the power to turn invisible, as a nod to his namesake.
***
Infiltrating the Company is easy. For all his wit and seeming intelligence, Thompson is a fool underneath, taken in so quickly by his willingness to help out, and by the potential uses for his ability. He is promptly partnered with an unremarkable pawn named Bennett, and throws himself into the tasks set before him: to hunt down the gifted, as per the wishes of the Company, and to shelter them from harm, as per the demands of morality. The hard part is not the integration of the two tasks, as he had thought, but rather keeping the Company from finding out. With the people and the power at their command, there is so little they can’t discover.
Treachery and deceit become routine, and he is enveloped by the feeling of helping people, healing the world, one tiny soul at a time, basking in the thrill that comes from betraying the Company. Routine becomes bone-deep, and he barely notices when “gifted humans” become “people like me.” When Bennett, friend and enemy in one, invites him over for a family dinner, Claude meets little Claire and vows to protect her with his last breath, and feels only a faint whisper of memory from a time when he could have done so much more.
***
The boy is so young, so innocent, and Claude’s heart is far too open. He watches as the boy dismantles toy after toy in his peaceful home, unaware of the figure hiding in the sunlight by the open window, picking apart each tiny gear, each wire, each motor, studying them with a fascination never seen in children so young, and putting them back together again, better than ever. Sometimes he combines them to make new toys, new gadgets that work in such intricate ways that Claude is awe-struck by the level of understanding the boy has of such things. No older than ten, and there is no mechanical mystery he cannot solve.
And there’s something else, too. A feeling he can’t deny of great potential, power and importance. This boy means something. Something more than the others. In his average house, with his average parents, something remarkable is growing. Something wonderful.
This one, he can’t turn over to the Company. This one, he can’t protect from inside.
He knows what he has to do.
When it’s over, he doesn’t have to spy on conversations to know he’s been discovered. Everywhere he turns feels like mistrust.
When Bennett is ordered to kill him, he has to work to keep from laughing. The man may be a puppet, but he is a friend, and the attachment he’s formed with his daughter guarantees sympathy for people like Claude. For people like them, him and Claire both.
He climbs into the car without hesitation. Regardless of whether or not the man can pull the trigger, Claude knows he has won.
The Company will never find little Gabriel, and that is all that matters.
***
The bullet sends lightning flashes of soul-deep agony skittering through his body, but it is the betrayal that breaks him.
He barely has the sense left to acknowledge the irony of being stung by that particular sin, after what he’s done.
Bennett checks the bridge, peering over the side as though he might spot an invisible body at the bottom of the river. He doesn’t check the arch or the criss-crossing beams separating the bridge from the fatal stretch of space below it.
When the car speeds away, Claude wraps his shirt around his shoulder to stop the bleeding, and cries, and hates.
***
He can’t go back to his old apartment. They would know, the Company, and they would come for him. There’s nowhere he can go to hide, and so he goes everywhere. Hiding in plain sight, he follows people into their homes, sleeps in unused corners, steals food off of plates and money out of wallets. Silent and invisible, he exists in the world a greater part of it than ever before, and yet completely unknown.
And the people he sees, he despises. They have identities and families and love, and they take it all for granted with their selfish, deceitful, gassy ways and he hates them for it. For pissing on the very thing he can never have. Fifteen years of living separate from the world, of seeing it more clearly than ever before, steeps him in bitterness and disgust until he is full from the whisper of his breath to the marrow of his bones.
He never tries to help anymore, never sees anyone worth the effort.
At night, he sometimes dreams of a time when he loved this planet with both his hearts; when the Company would have trembled, an insect before his power; when he would heal, and fight, and make people better than they were.
He never remembers them when he wakes.
***
Peter Petrelli changes everything.
The poor, pathetic puppy-dog of a man, following after him like a lost poodle begging for scraps, with the eyes and clothes and hair of a godawful poet, is his undoing.
Because Peter is important; more important than anyone Claude has ever met, and it stirs something familiar inside him.
Because Peter is good, because Peter loves like he doesn’t realize what a sick joke love is.
Because Peter wants to save the world. Not one life here or there, one precious little soul at a time, but the whole lot, even if it kills him.
Because he throws Peter off a thirty storey building, and still the boy comes back.
And as he laughs, heaping abuse on the poor pathetic man and pushing him harder and farther than anyone deserves, a part of him rejoices, because Peter is so much more than Claude could ever be, and yet that feels wrong somehow; as though Peter could make Claude better than he is, as though he shouldn’t even have to try.
And because something about the boy is so incredibly, indescribably green.
***
Claude is a coward. Sometime during the last fifteen years, the spark of courage he must have had in order to betray the Company, has faded and died.
He storms out of Peter’s apartment, hands and guts knotted up in fear and paranoia, looking around as though someone might be watching him; him, the invisible man.
But the Company is looking for him again, and they won’t give up until they find him, and he can barely remember why.
A part of him knows not to blame Peter for bringing this on, but the boy is easy to resent, easy to push away because of one simple fact:
Not only does Peter want to save the world; he wants to save Claude, too.
Because Peter sees something in him that he can’t even see in himself, and isn’t that just like an empath?
Claude can deal with bitterness and resentment, but he hasn’t the faintest idea what to do with love.
But something about it is familiar. He must have loved once, at least once in his life. What about his parents, his childhood?
Where did he grow up? Who was his family? Why didn’t he know? Why hadn’t he ever wondered?
Did the Company take these memories from him? Would they do the same to Peter if they caught him?
But it can’t happen. He knows this with absolute certainty, and is startled by the force of his own conviction. Peter has to be saved, at all costs. Peter is special.
Peter is hope; he is power. Peter is going to save the world, or destroy it. A small action on his part could affect the fate of humanity.
And he reminds Claude of someone. Someone from a half-forgotten dream. Someone who had the power to dictate the destinies of galaxies. Someone who would gladly die to save a sad, pathetic race that would never know or thank him. Someone who had suffered, but could love, and could see the beauty in the world through the eyes of others, of companions like children, fascinated by every little thing.
The man with no past shakes his head to clear it, and more images come rushing back. Fear and danger and confidence and an ability to see beyond simple sight.
Did he used to be this person?
Did he see so much of time and space that almost nothing was new and unknown? Did he walk among people who were strange and wonderful beyond any human’s imagining? Did he act as a force for good in a universe of confusion and chaos?
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows the answer.
Saving the world is nothing new; he’s done it a hundred times before.
Peter reminds Claude of a Time Lord.
***
Standing in front of the tall blue box, key gripped tightly, too tightly, in one hand, the Doctor gazes at the door, the last vestiges of his human life drifting away like paper boats on the tide.
No matter how much it hurts, how desperately he wishes things could be different, he is the last of the Time Lords.
And he knows what he has to do.
Peter and those like him will do all they can for this world, but there is an entire universe out there that has been neglected for far too long, bearing wounds that have bled and grown with no one to heal them.
One Time Lord remains, and the job he faces is impossible and endless, but he will do it or die trying.
Finally, he will make things better.
***
End.