fic: passage (9/10) (elle/claire)
Title: Passage (9/10)
Rating: NC-17 (language, disturbing imagery, graphic sex)
Pairing: Elle/Claire; side Adam/Elle, Adam/Claire
Timeline: Post-“ So”
Prompt: “hate” at 10_themes
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing with them
Teaser: Ten stages between one thing and the next, between lust and love.
Notes: Just so you know, a cookie to anyone who has figured out what I've been setting up in the background, ;-)
9, joy
In the months that have passed since Claire first had sex with her, Elle has learned how Claire’s body feels. The weight of her when she climbs on top of Elle, the way her skin warms and the way her body starts to tremble, the strong muscles of her arms and legs that pin her down easily in the middle of the night…
But Elle has never been on top, and the contrast is more than she expects.
She can feel Claire’s pelvis beneath her, feel hipbones digging into her thighs, and when she rocks twice, she likes the sensation it causes, repeat the motion. Beneath her, Claire’s teeth brush her bottom lip but Claire stays silent, stares up at her with carefully controlled interest.
The car is stuffy, cramped, and that’s annoying, but it doesn’t matter.
“No motel,” Elle reminds her as she spreads her fingers across a stomach, cotton warm under her touch. Claire snorts and looks away, and Elle huffs out a breath through her nose, for a moment furious by Claire sliding away again- but then calms down because Claire wants sex enough with her that she’ll take it like this.
Skimming her hands up and then back down Claire’s sides through the tank top, tracing a collarbone and finger-walking down her ribs, she breathes out a sigh when the body beneath her shifts.
“You could… like this,” she murmurs, pushing open the white shirt and starting to roll up Claire’s tank top, feeling heated at the sight of bare skin suddenly exposed in the light. “I could make you feel good,” she adds as she traces a line down a chest to cup a breast, stare at pale fingers against skin that’s somehow tanned even there.
Hell, she’s not really surprised at that thought, Claire sunbathing in the nude…
“Fuck,” she says out loud, shaken at the reaction the mental image causes, biting her lip as she circles a nipple and feels it harden further under her touch, biting more when a body arches up under her. Except then Claire’s head tilts farther back, her eyes closing more tightly. “Fuck,” she whispers, more annoyed than before because she knows Claire likes this, wants this, she can feel it.
So she ducks her head to trace the earlier touch, her tongue sweeping an easy circle as Claire’s body arches, applying a heartbeat of suction before pulling back and hearing a groan of frustration. “I said you could like this,” she starts, intending to think up a speech to drill it in, but Claire grinds her pelvis up and Elle almost jumps out of her skin.
When she draws back more to catch a breath, to think, fingers knot in her hair and nails press into her scalp, and Claire is rising to meet her.
When the Company comes apart under her father, she misses most of it.
Elle doesn’t even realize something interesting is going on until she shows up at the New York ‘containment center’ to find everyone acting like they’re scared, ignoring her in ways that are completely foreign.
When she gets to her father’s office, confused and lost because the world feels wrong, Bob Bishop looks older than he is and jumps at shadows. Instead of the usual bright smile he greets her with, there’s only a stare, something odd and unknown in the way he watches her enter his office.
“You weren’t supposed to be back yet.”
“I came back to see you.”
There, again, his eyes lifting for a heartbeat before they go back down to his computer.
Unsure of the way everyone is acting, she glances at the closed door, shifts on her feet when she looks back to her father and finds him staring at her in that way she doesn’t understand. “Is something going on?”
His fingers hover above the keyboard, something in his face twitching-
Then her father smiles the way he always does, shakes his head. “It’s nothing Dad can’t handle.”
She must still be on the shit list.
Elle has been on the shit list since she messed-up daddy’s plans with Noah and his little Claire-bear.
She knows it’s why he’s been sending her off for weeks at a time on silly little jobs that she could handle with one arm behind her back, and if she’s honest, she’s almost glad for the fact that he’s been sending her away. There are new murky things in her head since the talk with Noah in his kitchen with the dog bath, things that shift in the big black spaces in her life, and they get worse when she spends time with daddy.
So when she first gets back, she decides that the shit list is why her father is acting so… weird, that it has to be why he keeps staring at her like she’s a bug.
But it doesn’t explain why everyone else is acting so oddly.
People are scurrying around, whispering, and Elle is starting to feel like she’s being watched.
Within a few hours, she’s tense, cranky, waiting for someone to explain.
By the end of the first day back, she absently wishes Adam were still around so she could pay him a visit.
Then she finds out what her father is hiding in the building.
“You will not go near her.”
“I was just saying…”
“She’s not Adam,” her father says flatly, and she startles when he suddenly jumps to his feet, so much bigger than her that she steps back instinctively. “She is the last thing I have to hold over Noah’s head, and my plans with her have already been…” He fumbles, looks a little green. “Interrupted.”
“I thought you said Noah was going to do everything you said.”
“That was before,” her father says, staring at her like she’s an idiot, making her grit her teeth in annoyance. “Before our plans were ruined and he kidnapped Angela Petrelli. Things have changed, Elle.”
“What kind of lame psychic gets her ass kidnapped by a geek with a gun?”
Better to think of him like that than what she remembers, angry Noah who leaves her wanting to hide because he stares at her like he knows her better than she does, like he has pieces that can fit into hollow places inside her.
“All of us have weaknesses,” her father says, and she hesitates at his tone, at the anger there, because it’s not something she knows very well, used to her father walking around all smiles even when things got messy.
It makes her feel like a bad daughter, and she swallows, starts, “I’m just saying…”
But her father’s gone stony-faced and she trails off, backing away for the door.
“Elle,” he warns, and she swallows, presses her lips together.
“I won’t do anything.”
Months ago, Elle would have been acting by instinct, by her own body, but now she has experience.
Elle sucks a mark that fades immediately under a jaw, sinks her teeth into skin hard enough to make Claire hiss in pain and then smoothes her tongue over the abused flesh, and when Claire pushes up for more, she keeps going.
When she pulls a hand away from a breast to open Claire’s jeans, nails dig into her skin and somehow Claire gets a leg around her waist, tightens as she tangles fingers with Elle’s and pulls the hand back, shifting up even more.
When Elle tries to push her back to the seat, Claire only gets more upset.
When Elle takes a moment to work the tank top off her, she seems to snap. Hooks an arm around the older woman’s neck and then shivers and nods as Elle kisses her mouth and her jaw, the hollow beneath her ear. Her tongue flicks out and a neck curves under her mouth, Claire’s arm tightening to bring Elle closer.
“Okay,” she breathes against sweaty skin. “Okay. Okay- Fuck.”
She tugs at the button holding denim closed, struggles to get the zipper down.
As soon as it gives, she’s forcing fingers under cloth, the metal teeth digging into her skin meaning nothing because Claire is wet. Because there’s a little moan when Elle strokes along her slit and then another, louder, when she slides a finger inside her, draws back. Because after long months of only possessing a hazy understanding, Elle completely gets why hearing a sound like this is so exciting.
It’s different than anything else she’s heard out of Claire, and she’s the one who caused it.
When she eases Claire down this time, the younger woman goes willingly as long as Elle goes with her, not fighting the way Claire grips the back of her head to guide where her attention goes. Pinning a leg to keep Claire open, letting her teeth leave marks in the skin below a breast, Elle gets the jeans down until she can slide her knuckles back and forth between Claire’s thighs, hears the quiet panting grow louder immediately.
Her scalp stings, and she licks a bruise away as Claire mutters something, body lifting in a demand.
There’s a muffled cry when two fingers slide deep, and the reaction leaves Elle rocking against an open leg because there’s something shaky there that she can remember hearing the night Claire cried into her shirt.
Trapped by Claire’s grip, Elle fumbles for a second before she gets her balance, is able to thrust.
“Oh god,” Elle hears as she struggles to tilt her head up, feeling a pulse when she opens her mouth against Claire’s throat, feeling the grip on her scalp flutter to cradle the back of her neck. “Oh, god, like…” A hand folds around hers, guiding the quick pace she’s set. “Like that-” A groan, low and excited, a full body sound. “Elle, don’t-”
This must be what real lightning feels like, not just the curl of electricity in her bones and her veins but this kind of surge igniting everything inside her skin, so much... more than just what she's used to.
“Don’t stop,” Claire insists, her fingers slanting down beneath Elle’s hand to focus on her clit, “don’t stop-”
A thigh jerks up and the orgasm is quick, spurred on by the sounds in her ear as Elle grinds instinctively, finds the pressure she needs only to grit her teeth through her peak, infuriated by the fact that she’s come first.
“Don’t leave-” Claire clings to her, almost hysterical. “Elle-” Nails rake across her skin, dig in. “Elle-”
Her voice doesn’t break the last time.
It folds into a tiny distressed sound that comes with a body that shudders beneath Elle’s, that dies off muffled as Claire buries her face in Elle’s neck, rocks frantically and doesn’t slow down until Elle presses her down into the seat.
Then she moans, soft and a little annoyed.
Grinning at the sound, Elle draws back to find Claire staring up at her, expression murky, unsure.
The grin gets broader when she hears Claire draw in a breath as Elle slips a damp hand out of her jeans, hears her sigh raggedly when she slides that hand up to squeeze one breast on impulse. She reaches up to swipe sweaty hair from a flushed face and then Claire’s eyes close, bruising hold on Elle loosening but not letting go.
Her legs are bent awkwardly, have to hurt, and her shoulders look loose, heavy.
“Where should we go?”
Silence except for their breathing, and Elle blows where her teeth bit hard minutes before, feels a shiver.
“Home?”
“No.” Fingers rub the back of her neck, lightly yank at her hair. “No.”
“Where should we go?” Elle feels a sigh that she can’t hear, swallows when lips brush her neck and a tongue flutters against her pulse, feels a tug between her legs when Claire massages her breast through her shirt. “Claire?”
“I have a place.” Nails catch in her hair and she tilts her head back, heart thudding when Claire sucks her collarbone hard enough to make her whimper. “Before Adam showed up, I always stayed there… she says it’s mine, I was there last week…” Elle twists when a denim-covered thigh pushes between hers, fingers pulling down the neck of her shirt to blow a breath against her chest. “We won’t bake there,” she adds and Elle swallows, nods.
Realizes how suffocating it is in the car.
Claire pulls away, reaches for her tank top and shakes it out, muscles flexing as she slips it back on. She grabs the white shirt, tosses it into the front seat and climbs up past Elle to select the key, get the car started.
The car is backing out of the spot as Elle eases back into the front, rolling out of the parking lot when she gets her seat belt on and tightens her thighs. The window rolls down but a hand touches her leg, drifts up to hook a finger in the waistband of her pants- and she’s left heated as she trembles, air refusing to enter her lungs completely.
Then a thumb slips under her shirt, massaging back and forth until Elle’s tremble becomes a shake. “Claire.”
“It’s okay.” The tone is quiet, odd, but Claire glances over at her, rubs her thumb in a circle. “It’s fine.”
She doesn’t do anything, is a good girl for once- and the last minutes with daddy start with alarms.
Elle jolts in her cot when they blare through her room, jerks her pillow over her head at the sound.
In the space between the pillow and the thin mattress, there’s just blackness, the building dark.
She knows all of the sounds of the Company but this alarm is different, strange, and it keeps going, screeching through the pillow and echoing into her skull until she can only pant and wait for it to end.
It isn’t until the door crashes open that she’s jarred out of her frozen state, isn’t until someone grabs her arm and pulls her to her feet that her brain wakes up. Sparks gather between her fingers but then she trips over her feet and the person pushing her starts dragging her, lean arm locking fast around her shoulders.
And the alarm is still going.
“Let go-” It has to be her that says it, and then repeats it more hysterically. “Let me-”
Elle is jerked, lifted off her feet, and she can’t see, doesn’t even know where she is, choking on her shout when she feels fingers lock around her wrists, hot breath against her neck. She’s pulled back against a body and a rough beard scraps her cheek, and she panics.
Instincts trigger what she can’t, and then… she doesn’t know what happens.
Because even in a lifetime spent breathing electricity, Elle Bishop has nothing to compare this to.
There’s a shudder in the air, a bubble of pressure that builds and comes apart all at once, and she feels an agonized breath catch in the throat of whoever has her, and then she’s blinded, shrieking in pain at the sudden blast of light to hit her eyes after the panicked seconds being dragged through blackness.
Glass shatters, pops ringing the air, and she hits the wall like a flung doll, her palms already pressed against her face as she tries to catch her breath and then can’t. Her muscles twitch, spasm, and her attempt to get to her feet ends with her collapsing again, unable to muffle her little yelp of pain as glass cuts into her knees.
The world mutes, awful sound fading and then returning, fading a second time.
When it returns somehow louder than before, Elle can breathe again but she’s afraid to drop her hands from her eyes because they hurt too, the force of the pain something beyond what she can figure out.
The alarm is making it all worse, each shriek of noise drilling deeper into her head.
Feeling helpless, she starts dragging herself down the hall, free fingers tracing the wall and trying to listen for any sign of whoever had her. But there’s nothing, no sign of anything beyond the alarm and her panting. The pressure starts to fade in her skull but she keeps going, near tears by the time she feels a corner under her hand and then something that feels like concrete steps, forces her other hand from her eyes.
There’s a spike in her temples, goose bumps racing down her arms, but then she can see a stretch of hallway weakly lit by red, last remaining emergency light over the stairs leaving too much in shadow. She squints, looks, but she can’t see whoever had her and decides they ran off, no other explanation for it.
Legs shaking, electricity arcing weakly across her skin, she leans against the wall and starts to force herself up the stairs, slowing when she makes out noise between one blare of the alarm and another. Crashes of heavy things against walls or floors, shouts and screams-
A muffled explosion that vibrates up her legs and through her spine until she can feel her brain hum in her skull and she has to bend to catch her breath, unable to function until it fades and her muscles calm, stop the violent spasms she can feel under her skin.
When she lifts her head, the things she can hear aren't quite as loud.
She staggers, starts moving again, pushes blindly through a door that looks like it’s been kicked open.
Probably by whoever came down to grab her, she decides.
In pain, numbingly aware of what the prisoners can do to her if they see her, Elle tries to focus the electricity she can feel simmering under her surface, can only get flash and sound, nothing she can use.
But the fear is deafened by the alarm and so she keeps going.
Outside the stairwell, the noise is louder but there are lights, a steady red glow flooding the building as she makes her way down a hallway as quietly as she can. She passes an orderly that lays dead for no cause she can find, his eyes still wide and terrified. A little ways down, the medical area has been broken into, heavy metal gate melted open as a prisoner roots through the stock of medicine.
If he sees her as she staggers past, he doesn’t care about her.
Turning into the main holding area, swaying on her feet when her gaze immediately falls on a body that’s been crushed into a pile of meat, her eyes flick up to the two men standing over the body. They look focused on their conversation, like they’re debating where to go to dinner, and they haven’t noticed her- so she steps to the side, creeping to the next set of doors.
Sliding between the doors, leaving behind the two men who still haven’t noticed her, she starts off on legs that feel sturdy again, flexing her fingers in an attempt to gather electricity but only succeeding in creating dim light that flickers and dies again.
Turning a corner, she trips, stumbles, touches cold metal when she reaches down to push herself up.
On the floor there’s something that looks like the arm of a statue, gold glittering when light hits it. When she touches the part that should connect to an elbow, she comes away with blood, remaining flesh feeling stiff but still flexing when she pushes harder.
“No,” she mumbles firmly to the screeching alarm that’s now faded into the background.
Two more doors open into still-clean offices and on the third she finds her father’s empty, dark beyond the light that falls through the doorway around her. She’s about to start crying when a hand clamps over her arm, jerks her forward and then back, and the strength slowly building in her legs gives up all at once.
But it's daddy and she's near tears again, this time overjoyed.
And then she looks closer.
Above her, daddy looks awful, cheek swollen and face covered with blood, one arm hanging oddly and the other gripping a pistol shakily. And while she’s seen him holding a gun countless times, he’s never had it pointed at her. Her brain focuses on what it can and she manages a pitiful-sounding, “You’re okay” as she stares up at the pistol trained on her.
“Where did you come from?”
“I needed to know you were okay.”
“Angela used to call me King Midas,” her father mumbles, snorting a little, and now she realizes he’s leaning to the side, like he’s about to tilt. “Not as funny as it used to be,” her father adds, and pokes her painfully in the shoulder with the gun, sniffing. “After everything I did for you, the way I protected you…”
“What?”
Daddy shudders as he sniffs again, raises the gun to press it against her forehead. “They said no when I asked so I begged, that’s what I did, and this is what you do….” He takes a breath, lets it out. “How could-”
One of the blurring thoughts in her head pierces through the fog, and she’s barely aware of the little sound she makes, the way her muscles tighten as she understands what he’s saying. “I didn’t do anything-”
“Noah’s coming.” He shakes his head the way he has a thousand times. “I hate this stupid alarm.”
Her legs push and she jolts upward, frantic. “Daddy-”
The gun is somehow louder than the alarm, overwhelming as pain explodes through her body, as she’s thrown to the floor and the world snaps black, fades back dark red and hazy. There’s motion around her body, her head, and she watches as a shape steps by her and then is simply gone.
Footsteps fade down the hall, quiet sounds she makes out between one blare of the alarm and the next.
And then it’s not quiet but she’s alone, feeling like a doll as she sprawls there, muscles only able to spasm when she tries to focus her will in an attempt to roll over, somehow get to safety. She can’t lift her head, can’t pull her hair from where it feels like it’s starting to stick to the floor… she can’t even lift her other arm to poke where the bullet hit her, see how bad it is.
Elle’s alone, helpless, and the stupid alarm won’t leave her alone.
The world goes dark when she closes her eyes, looks dim when she opens them long seconds later.
Tired, she lets it go dark again.
Claire’s “place” is a sprawling apartment overlooking the ocean.
Just the outside looks expensive as Elle staggers to her feet after Claire parks in the shade of the building.
Leading Elle through the lobby and into the elevator by the hand, she looks relaxed as the car lifts, her thumb tapping absently against the back of Elle’s hand. Out of the elevator on the top floor and down the hall, Claire not releasing her as she unlocks the door and pulls Elle in with her, closing the door easily before she finally lets go.
Inside, there are bright white surfaces and shining brown furniture, deep blue breaking up the lack of color. Natural light fills the room when Claire walks across the front room to open the curtains, smiles back at Elle expectantly. “It looks expensive,” she says when she can’t think of anything else, and Claire actually snorts, rolls her eyes.
Looks so much like Claire that it’s overwhelming.
“I didn’t pick it. Although she was right, I do like it.”
“Noah doesn’t know about this?”
Claire laughs as she reaches to undo what’s left of her ruined ponytail, tosses the bright elastic band to the glass coffee table. “My father knows everything,” she says and Elle is barely listening because Claire catches the bottom of her top and peels it off, dropping it to the floor. The light is better in here than the car and Elle takes in everything she can see, the banked heat between her legs igniting again.
As she watches, Claire opens her jeans and begins to shimmy them off, her breasts swaying with the movement.
Elle is aching by the time the ruined slip of cotton is gone and Claire comes back to her, breath coming fast as she stands awkwardly where Claire let go of her hand in front of the door. There’s a kiss, a mouth slanting across hers, a tongue slipping between her lips to stroke hers, and then her shirt is lifted up.
She ends the kiss as the shirt is peeled off only because she has to, goes for another only to falter when she feels Claire’s thumb tracing along the edge of her bra, dipping a moment later to follow the touch with her mouth. The hooks at her back are undone and the cloth is pulled away, Claire straightening and kissing her as fingers get her pants open, tug them down her hips.
Claire stripping her, demanding sex, is not new.
But the moan at the contact is new, the shiver she feels when she cautiously touches Claire’s arms is new.
Palms cradle her neck to draw her closer, fingers knotting in her hair. When Claire tugs she startles at the heat that spikes down to her groin, responds eagerly when Claire uses that surprise to deepen the kiss. She reaches up to thumb the peak of a breast, and hears one of the sounds from an hour before, and this-
When Claire pulls away, starts to move towards what looks like a bedroom, Elle hesitates for a second, unsure. Then she sees the bed behind Claire, very pretty and neatly made, and she feels the surge like before in the car, shakes with it.
She moves fast, shoves Claire back until her legs hit the bed and she loses her balance. She grunts, rolls, is barely on her back when Elle slides over her without any further indecision, knees digging into the mattress as she bends to kiss her again, excited at the way Claire arches in response, hips lifting for contact.
When she pulls away because something is fluttering in her chest, Claire stares up at her, eyes wide and excited.
She can't fight her grin at the pleasure it causes, and then decides she doesn't want to anyway.
This is better than the magazines and the Claire in her head, better than everything they've been doing since she started touching Claire's leg on the couch every night.
This is new.
Rating: NC-17 (language, disturbing imagery, graphic sex)
Pairing: Elle/Claire; side Adam/Elle, Adam/Claire
Timeline: Post-“ So”
Prompt: “hate” at 10_themes
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing with them
Teaser: Ten stages between one thing and the next, between lust and love.
Notes: Just so you know, a cookie to anyone who has figured out what I've been setting up in the background, ;-)
9, joy
In the months that have passed since Claire first had sex with her, Elle has learned how Claire’s body feels. The weight of her when she climbs on top of Elle, the way her skin warms and the way her body starts to tremble, the strong muscles of her arms and legs that pin her down easily in the middle of the night…
But Elle has never been on top, and the contrast is more than she expects.
She can feel Claire’s pelvis beneath her, feel hipbones digging into her thighs, and when she rocks twice, she likes the sensation it causes, repeat the motion. Beneath her, Claire’s teeth brush her bottom lip but Claire stays silent, stares up at her with carefully controlled interest.
The car is stuffy, cramped, and that’s annoying, but it doesn’t matter.
“No motel,” Elle reminds her as she spreads her fingers across a stomach, cotton warm under her touch. Claire snorts and looks away, and Elle huffs out a breath through her nose, for a moment furious by Claire sliding away again- but then calms down because Claire wants sex enough with her that she’ll take it like this.
Skimming her hands up and then back down Claire’s sides through the tank top, tracing a collarbone and finger-walking down her ribs, she breathes out a sigh when the body beneath her shifts.
“You could… like this,” she murmurs, pushing open the white shirt and starting to roll up Claire’s tank top, feeling heated at the sight of bare skin suddenly exposed in the light. “I could make you feel good,” she adds as she traces a line down a chest to cup a breast, stare at pale fingers against skin that’s somehow tanned even there.
Hell, she’s not really surprised at that thought, Claire sunbathing in the nude…
“Fuck,” she says out loud, shaken at the reaction the mental image causes, biting her lip as she circles a nipple and feels it harden further under her touch, biting more when a body arches up under her. Except then Claire’s head tilts farther back, her eyes closing more tightly. “Fuck,” she whispers, more annoyed than before because she knows Claire likes this, wants this, she can feel it.
So she ducks her head to trace the earlier touch, her tongue sweeping an easy circle as Claire’s body arches, applying a heartbeat of suction before pulling back and hearing a groan of frustration. “I said you could like this,” she starts, intending to think up a speech to drill it in, but Claire grinds her pelvis up and Elle almost jumps out of her skin.
When she draws back more to catch a breath, to think, fingers knot in her hair and nails press into her scalp, and Claire is rising to meet her.
When the Company comes apart under her father, she misses most of it.
Elle doesn’t even realize something interesting is going on until she shows up at the New York ‘containment center’ to find everyone acting like they’re scared, ignoring her in ways that are completely foreign.
When she gets to her father’s office, confused and lost because the world feels wrong, Bob Bishop looks older than he is and jumps at shadows. Instead of the usual bright smile he greets her with, there’s only a stare, something odd and unknown in the way he watches her enter his office.
“You weren’t supposed to be back yet.”
“I came back to see you.”
There, again, his eyes lifting for a heartbeat before they go back down to his computer.
Unsure of the way everyone is acting, she glances at the closed door, shifts on her feet when she looks back to her father and finds him staring at her in that way she doesn’t understand. “Is something going on?”
His fingers hover above the keyboard, something in his face twitching-
Then her father smiles the way he always does, shakes his head. “It’s nothing Dad can’t handle.”
She must still be on the shit list.
Elle has been on the shit list since she messed-up daddy’s plans with Noah and his little Claire-bear.
She knows it’s why he’s been sending her off for weeks at a time on silly little jobs that she could handle with one arm behind her back, and if she’s honest, she’s almost glad for the fact that he’s been sending her away. There are new murky things in her head since the talk with Noah in his kitchen with the dog bath, things that shift in the big black spaces in her life, and they get worse when she spends time with daddy.
So when she first gets back, she decides that the shit list is why her father is acting so… weird, that it has to be why he keeps staring at her like she’s a bug.
But it doesn’t explain why everyone else is acting so oddly.
People are scurrying around, whispering, and Elle is starting to feel like she’s being watched.
Within a few hours, she’s tense, cranky, waiting for someone to explain.
By the end of the first day back, she absently wishes Adam were still around so she could pay him a visit.
Then she finds out what her father is hiding in the building.
“You will not go near her.”
“I was just saying…”
“She’s not Adam,” her father says flatly, and she startles when he suddenly jumps to his feet, so much bigger than her that she steps back instinctively. “She is the last thing I have to hold over Noah’s head, and my plans with her have already been…” He fumbles, looks a little green. “Interrupted.”
“I thought you said Noah was going to do everything you said.”
“That was before,” her father says, staring at her like she’s an idiot, making her grit her teeth in annoyance. “Before our plans were ruined and he kidnapped Angela Petrelli. Things have changed, Elle.”
“What kind of lame psychic gets her ass kidnapped by a geek with a gun?”
Better to think of him like that than what she remembers, angry Noah who leaves her wanting to hide because he stares at her like he knows her better than she does, like he has pieces that can fit into hollow places inside her.
“All of us have weaknesses,” her father says, and she hesitates at his tone, at the anger there, because it’s not something she knows very well, used to her father walking around all smiles even when things got messy.
It makes her feel like a bad daughter, and she swallows, starts, “I’m just saying…”
But her father’s gone stony-faced and she trails off, backing away for the door.
“Elle,” he warns, and she swallows, presses her lips together.
“I won’t do anything.”
Months ago, Elle would have been acting by instinct, by her own body, but now she has experience.
Elle sucks a mark that fades immediately under a jaw, sinks her teeth into skin hard enough to make Claire hiss in pain and then smoothes her tongue over the abused flesh, and when Claire pushes up for more, she keeps going.
When she pulls a hand away from a breast to open Claire’s jeans, nails dig into her skin and somehow Claire gets a leg around her waist, tightens as she tangles fingers with Elle’s and pulls the hand back, shifting up even more.
When Elle tries to push her back to the seat, Claire only gets more upset.
When Elle takes a moment to work the tank top off her, she seems to snap. Hooks an arm around the older woman’s neck and then shivers and nods as Elle kisses her mouth and her jaw, the hollow beneath her ear. Her tongue flicks out and a neck curves under her mouth, Claire’s arm tightening to bring Elle closer.
“Okay,” she breathes against sweaty skin. “Okay. Okay- Fuck.”
She tugs at the button holding denim closed, struggles to get the zipper down.
As soon as it gives, she’s forcing fingers under cloth, the metal teeth digging into her skin meaning nothing because Claire is wet. Because there’s a little moan when Elle strokes along her slit and then another, louder, when she slides a finger inside her, draws back. Because after long months of only possessing a hazy understanding, Elle completely gets why hearing a sound like this is so exciting.
It’s different than anything else she’s heard out of Claire, and she’s the one who caused it.
When she eases Claire down this time, the younger woman goes willingly as long as Elle goes with her, not fighting the way Claire grips the back of her head to guide where her attention goes. Pinning a leg to keep Claire open, letting her teeth leave marks in the skin below a breast, Elle gets the jeans down until she can slide her knuckles back and forth between Claire’s thighs, hears the quiet panting grow louder immediately.
Her scalp stings, and she licks a bruise away as Claire mutters something, body lifting in a demand.
There’s a muffled cry when two fingers slide deep, and the reaction leaves Elle rocking against an open leg because there’s something shaky there that she can remember hearing the night Claire cried into her shirt.
Trapped by Claire’s grip, Elle fumbles for a second before she gets her balance, is able to thrust.
“Oh god,” Elle hears as she struggles to tilt her head up, feeling a pulse when she opens her mouth against Claire’s throat, feeling the grip on her scalp flutter to cradle the back of her neck. “Oh, god, like…” A hand folds around hers, guiding the quick pace she’s set. “Like that-” A groan, low and excited, a full body sound. “Elle, don’t-”
This must be what real lightning feels like, not just the curl of electricity in her bones and her veins but this kind of surge igniting everything inside her skin, so much... more than just what she's used to.
“Don’t stop,” Claire insists, her fingers slanting down beneath Elle’s hand to focus on her clit, “don’t stop-”
A thigh jerks up and the orgasm is quick, spurred on by the sounds in her ear as Elle grinds instinctively, finds the pressure she needs only to grit her teeth through her peak, infuriated by the fact that she’s come first.
“Don’t leave-” Claire clings to her, almost hysterical. “Elle-” Nails rake across her skin, dig in. “Elle-”
Her voice doesn’t break the last time.
It folds into a tiny distressed sound that comes with a body that shudders beneath Elle’s, that dies off muffled as Claire buries her face in Elle’s neck, rocks frantically and doesn’t slow down until Elle presses her down into the seat.
Then she moans, soft and a little annoyed.
Grinning at the sound, Elle draws back to find Claire staring up at her, expression murky, unsure.
The grin gets broader when she hears Claire draw in a breath as Elle slips a damp hand out of her jeans, hears her sigh raggedly when she slides that hand up to squeeze one breast on impulse. She reaches up to swipe sweaty hair from a flushed face and then Claire’s eyes close, bruising hold on Elle loosening but not letting go.
Her legs are bent awkwardly, have to hurt, and her shoulders look loose, heavy.
“Where should we go?”
Silence except for their breathing, and Elle blows where her teeth bit hard minutes before, feels a shiver.
“Home?”
“No.” Fingers rub the back of her neck, lightly yank at her hair. “No.”
“Where should we go?” Elle feels a sigh that she can’t hear, swallows when lips brush her neck and a tongue flutters against her pulse, feels a tug between her legs when Claire massages her breast through her shirt. “Claire?”
“I have a place.” Nails catch in her hair and she tilts her head back, heart thudding when Claire sucks her collarbone hard enough to make her whimper. “Before Adam showed up, I always stayed there… she says it’s mine, I was there last week…” Elle twists when a denim-covered thigh pushes between hers, fingers pulling down the neck of her shirt to blow a breath against her chest. “We won’t bake there,” she adds and Elle swallows, nods.
Realizes how suffocating it is in the car.
Claire pulls away, reaches for her tank top and shakes it out, muscles flexing as she slips it back on. She grabs the white shirt, tosses it into the front seat and climbs up past Elle to select the key, get the car started.
The car is backing out of the spot as Elle eases back into the front, rolling out of the parking lot when she gets her seat belt on and tightens her thighs. The window rolls down but a hand touches her leg, drifts up to hook a finger in the waistband of her pants- and she’s left heated as she trembles, air refusing to enter her lungs completely.
Then a thumb slips under her shirt, massaging back and forth until Elle’s tremble becomes a shake. “Claire.”
“It’s okay.” The tone is quiet, odd, but Claire glances over at her, rubs her thumb in a circle. “It’s fine.”
She doesn’t do anything, is a good girl for once- and the last minutes with daddy start with alarms.
Elle jolts in her cot when they blare through her room, jerks her pillow over her head at the sound.
In the space between the pillow and the thin mattress, there’s just blackness, the building dark.
She knows all of the sounds of the Company but this alarm is different, strange, and it keeps going, screeching through the pillow and echoing into her skull until she can only pant and wait for it to end.
It isn’t until the door crashes open that she’s jarred out of her frozen state, isn’t until someone grabs her arm and pulls her to her feet that her brain wakes up. Sparks gather between her fingers but then she trips over her feet and the person pushing her starts dragging her, lean arm locking fast around her shoulders.
And the alarm is still going.
“Let go-” It has to be her that says it, and then repeats it more hysterically. “Let me-”
Elle is jerked, lifted off her feet, and she can’t see, doesn’t even know where she is, choking on her shout when she feels fingers lock around her wrists, hot breath against her neck. She’s pulled back against a body and a rough beard scraps her cheek, and she panics.
Instincts trigger what she can’t, and then… she doesn’t know what happens.
Because even in a lifetime spent breathing electricity, Elle Bishop has nothing to compare this to.
There’s a shudder in the air, a bubble of pressure that builds and comes apart all at once, and she feels an agonized breath catch in the throat of whoever has her, and then she’s blinded, shrieking in pain at the sudden blast of light to hit her eyes after the panicked seconds being dragged through blackness.
Glass shatters, pops ringing the air, and she hits the wall like a flung doll, her palms already pressed against her face as she tries to catch her breath and then can’t. Her muscles twitch, spasm, and her attempt to get to her feet ends with her collapsing again, unable to muffle her little yelp of pain as glass cuts into her knees.
The world mutes, awful sound fading and then returning, fading a second time.
When it returns somehow louder than before, Elle can breathe again but she’s afraid to drop her hands from her eyes because they hurt too, the force of the pain something beyond what she can figure out.
The alarm is making it all worse, each shriek of noise drilling deeper into her head.
Feeling helpless, she starts dragging herself down the hall, free fingers tracing the wall and trying to listen for any sign of whoever had her. But there’s nothing, no sign of anything beyond the alarm and her panting. The pressure starts to fade in her skull but she keeps going, near tears by the time she feels a corner under her hand and then something that feels like concrete steps, forces her other hand from her eyes.
There’s a spike in her temples, goose bumps racing down her arms, but then she can see a stretch of hallway weakly lit by red, last remaining emergency light over the stairs leaving too much in shadow. She squints, looks, but she can’t see whoever had her and decides they ran off, no other explanation for it.
Legs shaking, electricity arcing weakly across her skin, she leans against the wall and starts to force herself up the stairs, slowing when she makes out noise between one blare of the alarm and another. Crashes of heavy things against walls or floors, shouts and screams-
A muffled explosion that vibrates up her legs and through her spine until she can feel her brain hum in her skull and she has to bend to catch her breath, unable to function until it fades and her muscles calm, stop the violent spasms she can feel under her skin.
When she lifts her head, the things she can hear aren't quite as loud.
She staggers, starts moving again, pushes blindly through a door that looks like it’s been kicked open.
Probably by whoever came down to grab her, she decides.
In pain, numbingly aware of what the prisoners can do to her if they see her, Elle tries to focus the electricity she can feel simmering under her surface, can only get flash and sound, nothing she can use.
But the fear is deafened by the alarm and so she keeps going.
Outside the stairwell, the noise is louder but there are lights, a steady red glow flooding the building as she makes her way down a hallway as quietly as she can. She passes an orderly that lays dead for no cause she can find, his eyes still wide and terrified. A little ways down, the medical area has been broken into, heavy metal gate melted open as a prisoner roots through the stock of medicine.
If he sees her as she staggers past, he doesn’t care about her.
Turning into the main holding area, swaying on her feet when her gaze immediately falls on a body that’s been crushed into a pile of meat, her eyes flick up to the two men standing over the body. They look focused on their conversation, like they’re debating where to go to dinner, and they haven’t noticed her- so she steps to the side, creeping to the next set of doors.
Sliding between the doors, leaving behind the two men who still haven’t noticed her, she starts off on legs that feel sturdy again, flexing her fingers in an attempt to gather electricity but only succeeding in creating dim light that flickers and dies again.
Turning a corner, she trips, stumbles, touches cold metal when she reaches down to push herself up.
On the floor there’s something that looks like the arm of a statue, gold glittering when light hits it. When she touches the part that should connect to an elbow, she comes away with blood, remaining flesh feeling stiff but still flexing when she pushes harder.
“No,” she mumbles firmly to the screeching alarm that’s now faded into the background.
Two more doors open into still-clean offices and on the third she finds her father’s empty, dark beyond the light that falls through the doorway around her. She’s about to start crying when a hand clamps over her arm, jerks her forward and then back, and the strength slowly building in her legs gives up all at once.
But it's daddy and she's near tears again, this time overjoyed.
And then she looks closer.
Above her, daddy looks awful, cheek swollen and face covered with blood, one arm hanging oddly and the other gripping a pistol shakily. And while she’s seen him holding a gun countless times, he’s never had it pointed at her. Her brain focuses on what it can and she manages a pitiful-sounding, “You’re okay” as she stares up at the pistol trained on her.
“Where did you come from?”
“I needed to know you were okay.”
“Angela used to call me King Midas,” her father mumbles, snorting a little, and now she realizes he’s leaning to the side, like he’s about to tilt. “Not as funny as it used to be,” her father adds, and pokes her painfully in the shoulder with the gun, sniffing. “After everything I did for you, the way I protected you…”
“What?”
Daddy shudders as he sniffs again, raises the gun to press it against her forehead. “They said no when I asked so I begged, that’s what I did, and this is what you do….” He takes a breath, lets it out. “How could-”
One of the blurring thoughts in her head pierces through the fog, and she’s barely aware of the little sound she makes, the way her muscles tighten as she understands what he’s saying. “I didn’t do anything-”
“Noah’s coming.” He shakes his head the way he has a thousand times. “I hate this stupid alarm.”
Her legs push and she jolts upward, frantic. “Daddy-”
The gun is somehow louder than the alarm, overwhelming as pain explodes through her body, as she’s thrown to the floor and the world snaps black, fades back dark red and hazy. There’s motion around her body, her head, and she watches as a shape steps by her and then is simply gone.
Footsteps fade down the hall, quiet sounds she makes out between one blare of the alarm and the next.
And then it’s not quiet but she’s alone, feeling like a doll as she sprawls there, muscles only able to spasm when she tries to focus her will in an attempt to roll over, somehow get to safety. She can’t lift her head, can’t pull her hair from where it feels like it’s starting to stick to the floor… she can’t even lift her other arm to poke where the bullet hit her, see how bad it is.
Elle’s alone, helpless, and the stupid alarm won’t leave her alone.
The world goes dark when she closes her eyes, looks dim when she opens them long seconds later.
Tired, she lets it go dark again.
Claire’s “place” is a sprawling apartment overlooking the ocean.
Just the outside looks expensive as Elle staggers to her feet after Claire parks in the shade of the building.
Leading Elle through the lobby and into the elevator by the hand, she looks relaxed as the car lifts, her thumb tapping absently against the back of Elle’s hand. Out of the elevator on the top floor and down the hall, Claire not releasing her as she unlocks the door and pulls Elle in with her, closing the door easily before she finally lets go.
Inside, there are bright white surfaces and shining brown furniture, deep blue breaking up the lack of color. Natural light fills the room when Claire walks across the front room to open the curtains, smiles back at Elle expectantly. “It looks expensive,” she says when she can’t think of anything else, and Claire actually snorts, rolls her eyes.
Looks so much like Claire that it’s overwhelming.
“I didn’t pick it. Although she was right, I do like it.”
“Noah doesn’t know about this?”
Claire laughs as she reaches to undo what’s left of her ruined ponytail, tosses the bright elastic band to the glass coffee table. “My father knows everything,” she says and Elle is barely listening because Claire catches the bottom of her top and peels it off, dropping it to the floor. The light is better in here than the car and Elle takes in everything she can see, the banked heat between her legs igniting again.
As she watches, Claire opens her jeans and begins to shimmy them off, her breasts swaying with the movement.
Elle is aching by the time the ruined slip of cotton is gone and Claire comes back to her, breath coming fast as she stands awkwardly where Claire let go of her hand in front of the door. There’s a kiss, a mouth slanting across hers, a tongue slipping between her lips to stroke hers, and then her shirt is lifted up.
She ends the kiss as the shirt is peeled off only because she has to, goes for another only to falter when she feels Claire’s thumb tracing along the edge of her bra, dipping a moment later to follow the touch with her mouth. The hooks at her back are undone and the cloth is pulled away, Claire straightening and kissing her as fingers get her pants open, tug them down her hips.
Claire stripping her, demanding sex, is not new.
But the moan at the contact is new, the shiver she feels when she cautiously touches Claire’s arms is new.
Palms cradle her neck to draw her closer, fingers knotting in her hair. When Claire tugs she startles at the heat that spikes down to her groin, responds eagerly when Claire uses that surprise to deepen the kiss. She reaches up to thumb the peak of a breast, and hears one of the sounds from an hour before, and this-
When Claire pulls away, starts to move towards what looks like a bedroom, Elle hesitates for a second, unsure. Then she sees the bed behind Claire, very pretty and neatly made, and she feels the surge like before in the car, shakes with it.
She moves fast, shoves Claire back until her legs hit the bed and she loses her balance. She grunts, rolls, is barely on her back when Elle slides over her without any further indecision, knees digging into the mattress as she bends to kiss her again, excited at the way Claire arches in response, hips lifting for contact.
When she pulls away because something is fluttering in her chest, Claire stares up at her, eyes wide and excited.
She can't fight her grin at the pleasure it causes, and then decides she doesn't want to anyway.
This is better than the magazines and the Claire in her head, better than everything they've been doing since she started touching Claire's leg on the couch every night.
This is new.