Only By the Night, 7/11
title: only by the night (7/11)
fandom: heroes
pairing: elle bishop/claire bennett
rating: T
summary: You know that I could use somebody.
Notion.
(I just wanted to know if I could go home.
Been rambling day after day, and everyone says they don’t know.)
Elle holds the sharp paper edges of the card between her thumb and forefinger. It’s curled and burnt on one side from a sudden flicker of electricity that escaped her palm. She’s stared at the name for so long it’s just a string of ink and impressions now. Just dots and dashes. She presses a little harder and the card bends beneath the pressure, a tiny crease forming beneath the words, a little imperfection on the clear white.
She feels the energy creeping back between her bones. She hasn’t called it, hasn’t clenched that strange little muscle that isn’t really a part of her at all but still singes white-hot volts through her fingers. She hasn’t asked for it but the lightning curls right beneath her skin, cutting through bone and nerve and she has to shove the card into her pocket to save it from the fire.
Elle’s hunched over, her palm flat across the monitor and pushing more electricity than a power circuit could hold. The lamps are flickering around her, shooting flashes of eerie light across her face that wrestle with the blue glow of her energy. She’s pathetic like that, aching from exhaustion and sickly pale when she hears familiar footsteps falter at the door.
She sucks in a breath. Forces a smile onto her face. By the time she turns in her chair, she looks almost as healthy as she ever was.
Elle shoulders her bag once again, but it’s quick to slip back down her slender shoulders and drag against her arm. She sighs and her throat sparks with tightly controlled energy. She needs a release, quickly. She needs to stay drained because otherwise she’s gonna have more trouble than she can currently handle. She’s already running on empty, already halfway dead.
It takes her a few seconds to find something suitable and empty. When she slides into the phone booth, there’s blue lines arcing across her fingertips. She forms a fist and they shift, circle around her curled knuckles. She flattens her right hand and presses it firmly against the side of the phone. The light reveals the bags heavy under her eyes.
There’s a noise, almost a hum but crackling with something less natural, that escapes with the electricity. Her eyes stay alert, looking for anyone who might notice the strange colors escaping a phone booth, anyone with more curiosity than she finds normal. She looks like a drug addict or a terrorist, someone hiding where they shouldn’t be, where they never should have gone. She’s always where she shouldn’t be. Her nerves are always on end, skin prickling. Always out of place.
A minute passes, until she’s shaking on the outside, quaking on the inside. She can’t take much more of this. She doesn’t have room to think anymore, just time to act, just time to react. Spitting lines and forcing steps. Just time to move forward to the one place she must have been heading all her life.
Elle slips back into the walkway between a group of tourists and a pregnant lady, her bag still hitting against her arm. The woman shoots her a glare and Elle sneers.
"Off your hormones?" She brushes past, trying so hard not to slip a little shock the woman’s way.
She clenches her muscles and sucks in a breath, forces it back out. She’s somewhere beyond tired. She’s somewhere beyond sane, but she’s so used to being there that another step in the wrong direction can’t even faze her.
She steps into warm sunshine and squints.
Claire hasn’t stopped glaring since she first saw Elle- except, maybe, that gasp of surprise when Lyle doused the older girl, sent her reeling with sparkling explosions behind her eyes- but Elle searches for a shade of kind in the blue, anyway, a sheen of tender. She’s looking because she never figured out how to stop and she knows Claire knows she’s looking and she just.
Cannot stop.
For the first time in weeks her heart is calm in her chest. Her fingers are wrapped around the edge of her chair and her teeth are grinding against each other, but the beats beneath her breast are steady and assured. She is not. She is burning in pain and it’s becoming familiar.
She finds the softness she’s searching for after a few slipped sentences, after a few broken stares. They’re accidental, they’re running away from her, they mean something. Her shields have melted into her.
"What if there’s something wrong with all of us and they can fix it?" Claire asks, and she’s running off the same fragile, naïve hope that Elle harbors, something Mr. Bennet never would have encouraged. But there’s the card, tough in Elle’s palm, and there’s the fear that their powers are betraying them. The knowledge that they aren’t in control. It’s surreal that Claire is sitting across from her, gorgeous and just as scared.
"You’re fine. You’re perfect." Elle assures her, almost carelessly. Claire hasn’t lost that vague sense of being untouchable, she’s still strong and far away and Elle can see the barrier in the air. She’s sure if she reached out her fingers would bump a solid plate.
"No, I’m not." Claire insists, and now her eyes are harsh again. "Whatever’s happening to you, it’s happening to me, too." Elle frowns.
"You’re still healing aren’t you?" There’s only the slightest anxiety. She’s tasting the power that comes from having Claire at her side. It makes her strong and it makes her brave and it makes her a little stupid.
"Yeah. But I can’t feel pain." She hesitates, a quiet pause that Elle hears like a stutter. "And I think it’s only a matter of time before I can’t feel anything at all."
"You can’t feel pain." Elle says, and she stands up, sucks air in through her teeth. Resists the urge to laugh. "I wish I had your problems, cheerleader." Claire stands, ready to argue, ready to defend, but Elle meets her eyes. "My body is screaming." She breathes. "I’m in agony." There’s electricity in her eyes and it’s crackling through her pupils, it’s staining her skin.
"Go with me." Claire says, suddenly. She doesn’t step nearer but she might as well have. Elle feels the barrier crack, like it did so many weeks ago, like it will every time they’re near. "If there’s a chance these people at Pinehearst can help us, we’ll go together." Claire says quietly. They stand, staring, hesitant.
"All right, Dorothy. Then we’re off to see the Wizard."
(I got a notion that says it doesn’t feel right.
Got the answer in your story today.)
Elle picks out the airplanes from the blue sky. She traps them in her vision and details their path to the ground, eyes dropping when the wheels thunk against the cement and lifting in slow reverence as they crawl toward the sky. She doesn’t quite believe that any of them will succeed- she expects them to pinwheel from the air, crashing and rolling until they explode, scraps of metal and tiny suitcases ricocheting past the golf carts on the landing strip, blazing into the short grass.
She feels trapped by the big glass windows but she doesn’t say anything about it to Claire. Pushing her thoughts through her mouth has never been her strong suit- not when it comes to the things she wants to say. Her thoughts don’t make sense. They spin circles that no one else can follow, they crawl back over each other in some twisted dance and she hasn’t met anyone who can follow the beat.
Claire’s silent, anyway, her lips a straight line cutting across her pretty face. Elle tries not to stare but she really wants to touch. She wants to lace their fingers together, so tight it almost hurts, stroke small knuckles and familiar fingers, wants to lure Claire into the bathroom and plant kisses along her bare collarbone. She wants skin and fire, but- for the first time in her whole life- she doesn’t want to hurt Claire.
She wants everything but to hurt Claire.
She’s staring, again. She hasn’t learned to stop. Another airplane roars to life and her eyes flick toward the window instinctively, to watch for a fiery crash or a shuddering clunk. She’s not scared of the plane running into them, she’s planning for it. She watches as it tilts toward the heavens, cutting through thin clouds and chasing cautious sea gulls. Then it’s out of sight, a blink on the horizon, a dash of black. She looks back over at Claire just in time to catch the young girl’s blue eyes staring into her own.
Elle almost blushes.
"What?" She asks, bypassing tact. Claire’s eyes flick away, facing the window but too wide to be believed. Elle waits, shifting her gaze along Claire’s set jaw, tracing the line of her neck. The younger girl never answers.
Their plane is called and Claire steps up and away without glancing back, but Elle sees slanted eyes and a darting gaze when they pass through gate. It rumbles through the electricity beneath her skin, this want she can taste, can feel spark at the air. She’s blinded herself to the memories but they swell in the background and promise things she’d forgotten she ever wanted.
Claire gives her the window seat. Their legs brush softly and Elle turns away, shielding the haze in her eyes.
The clouds begin to break apart and she waits for them to hurtle toward the ground.
(I got a notion that says it doesn’t feel right.)
They don’t speak when they walk into the hotel room with two tiny beds. Claire just tosses her stuff onto a chair and mutters something about going to get food.
"Good, I’m starving." Elle says, reaching back to tie up her hair. Claire shoots her a glance but Elle’s face stays blank. The younger girl just sighs and digs into her duffel. Elle does the same, searching for the cash she nicked off an Australian tourist at the airport, her fingers passing over fake passports and euros slipped between her shoes.
When Claire slips out of the door Elle follows just as quickly. She gets another look but she figures that it’s worth it.
They end up at a cheap Mexican place about a block down the road. It’s all green lights and fake stucco, red and blue patterns strung across the walls, and their waiter’s hair is dripping with gel. It smells better then anything Elle can imagine and she sits across from Claire, hitting her feet against the back of the booth and looking down at her menu. Sometimes, she flicks her eyes up and steals a glance, and she has an unsettling feeling that Claire is doing the same thing.
Reaching -sneaking- her hand across the table, she grabs a chip and aims toward the salsa. Her eyes stay glued to the glossy finish of the wood, suddenly nervous in this unknown territory with a sullen Claire and a twitch aching between her veins. She munches slowly and her eyes curve a path upward.
It’s becoming unsurprising to find Claire staring at her like the younger girl’s never seen a person before.
Claire’s eyes are half-glazed, almost unnatural with something Elle wants so badly to define. Elle reads their ache like a favorite novel, like a fact because it’s burned into her own gaze, like there’s a law against it. She reads Claire because they are like the same person, they are like lovers who split too early on. She was what Claire is. They are lovers who split too early on. They aren’t the same person, and she’s lucky for that.
The look in Claire’s eyes has killed her appetite, but she’s still hungry, in a way that makes her brash. Her feet stop swinging and her eyes almost narrow, but she grabs hold of her dirty intentions and bites back suggestive words.
Claire does it for her.
"Let’s just go." The blonde says, and her movements aren’t rushed. She stands up and waits.
Elle is quick to follow.
(So don’t knock it, don’t knock it.
You been here before.)
It’s the same sort of bland hotel room and the same sort of mind-reeling intoxication with each other but there are lines now. There are patterns and habits and too much familiarity. It’s not new, but they could fool each other into thinking it is. Fingers trail, hands coast. Elle puts her forehead against Claire’s shoulder, tugs her closer, presses her into a wall.
It’s late and quiet, and their breathing echoes. The bed squeaks and a spring pokes Elle’s knee so that she shifts and she’s off balance and then Claire is on top, hands skimming lower and mouth growing possessive. Elle arches beneath her, body curving as a slender line of electricity rams into Claire’s chest. The other girl shudders, tenses, and Elle forgets what to do.
"I’m sorry. I’m sorry." She says, scrambling backwards and hitting the wall, clothes in messy disarray. Her face crumples and she’s so distressed that she loses Claire’s eyes. Then, Claire’s hands are on her shoulder, a soft kiss pressed into her neck.
"It’s okay." Claire murmurs. Her hands glide lower, her body moving forward. "It’s okay." Elle doesn’t relax for a moment because she’s twisted the whole moment, she’s hurt someone she didn’t want to and that never happens. She’s spun out. But Claire is pushing Elle’s shirt higher and her mouth is fire on Elle’s quivering belly and it’s surprising how fast the anxiety fades away and how easily Elle’s fingers slip through Claire’s curls.
They twist and spin and electricity escapes Elle’s pores but Claire can’t feel it anyway. They’re bathed in short spurts of blue light and it’s pain and ecstasy like Elle’s always been used to, except. There’s no malice, no cruel undertones, just twpeople and a compromise and a continuation. Just two people and a constant.
fandom: heroes
pairing: elle bishop/claire bennett
rating: T
summary: You know that I could use somebody.
Notion.
(I just wanted to know if I could go home.
Been rambling day after day, and everyone says they don’t know.)
Elle holds the sharp paper edges of the card between her thumb and forefinger. It’s curled and burnt on one side from a sudden flicker of electricity that escaped her palm. She’s stared at the name for so long it’s just a string of ink and impressions now. Just dots and dashes. She presses a little harder and the card bends beneath the pressure, a tiny crease forming beneath the words, a little imperfection on the clear white.
She feels the energy creeping back between her bones. She hasn’t called it, hasn’t clenched that strange little muscle that isn’t really a part of her at all but still singes white-hot volts through her fingers. She hasn’t asked for it but the lightning curls right beneath her skin, cutting through bone and nerve and she has to shove the card into her pocket to save it from the fire.
Elle’s hunched over, her palm flat across the monitor and pushing more electricity than a power circuit could hold. The lamps are flickering around her, shooting flashes of eerie light across her face that wrestle with the blue glow of her energy. She’s pathetic like that, aching from exhaustion and sickly pale when she hears familiar footsteps falter at the door.
She sucks in a breath. Forces a smile onto her face. By the time she turns in her chair, she looks almost as healthy as she ever was.
Elle shoulders her bag once again, but it’s quick to slip back down her slender shoulders and drag against her arm. She sighs and her throat sparks with tightly controlled energy. She needs a release, quickly. She needs to stay drained because otherwise she’s gonna have more trouble than she can currently handle. She’s already running on empty, already halfway dead.
It takes her a few seconds to find something suitable and empty. When she slides into the phone booth, there’s blue lines arcing across her fingertips. She forms a fist and they shift, circle around her curled knuckles. She flattens her right hand and presses it firmly against the side of the phone. The light reveals the bags heavy under her eyes.
There’s a noise, almost a hum but crackling with something less natural, that escapes with the electricity. Her eyes stay alert, looking for anyone who might notice the strange colors escaping a phone booth, anyone with more curiosity than she finds normal. She looks like a drug addict or a terrorist, someone hiding where they shouldn’t be, where they never should have gone. She’s always where she shouldn’t be. Her nerves are always on end, skin prickling. Always out of place.
A minute passes, until she’s shaking on the outside, quaking on the inside. She can’t take much more of this. She doesn’t have room to think anymore, just time to act, just time to react. Spitting lines and forcing steps. Just time to move forward to the one place she must have been heading all her life.
Elle slips back into the walkway between a group of tourists and a pregnant lady, her bag still hitting against her arm. The woman shoots her a glare and Elle sneers.
"Off your hormones?" She brushes past, trying so hard not to slip a little shock the woman’s way.
She clenches her muscles and sucks in a breath, forces it back out. She’s somewhere beyond tired. She’s somewhere beyond sane, but she’s so used to being there that another step in the wrong direction can’t even faze her.
She steps into warm sunshine and squints.
Claire hasn’t stopped glaring since she first saw Elle- except, maybe, that gasp of surprise when Lyle doused the older girl, sent her reeling with sparkling explosions behind her eyes- but Elle searches for a shade of kind in the blue, anyway, a sheen of tender. She’s looking because she never figured out how to stop and she knows Claire knows she’s looking and she just.
Cannot stop.
For the first time in weeks her heart is calm in her chest. Her fingers are wrapped around the edge of her chair and her teeth are grinding against each other, but the beats beneath her breast are steady and assured. She is not. She is burning in pain and it’s becoming familiar.
She finds the softness she’s searching for after a few slipped sentences, after a few broken stares. They’re accidental, they’re running away from her, they mean something. Her shields have melted into her.
"What if there’s something wrong with all of us and they can fix it?" Claire asks, and she’s running off the same fragile, naïve hope that Elle harbors, something Mr. Bennet never would have encouraged. But there’s the card, tough in Elle’s palm, and there’s the fear that their powers are betraying them. The knowledge that they aren’t in control. It’s surreal that Claire is sitting across from her, gorgeous and just as scared.
"You’re fine. You’re perfect." Elle assures her, almost carelessly. Claire hasn’t lost that vague sense of being untouchable, she’s still strong and far away and Elle can see the barrier in the air. She’s sure if she reached out her fingers would bump a solid plate.
"No, I’m not." Claire insists, and now her eyes are harsh again. "Whatever’s happening to you, it’s happening to me, too." Elle frowns.
"You’re still healing aren’t you?" There’s only the slightest anxiety. She’s tasting the power that comes from having Claire at her side. It makes her strong and it makes her brave and it makes her a little stupid.
"Yeah. But I can’t feel pain." She hesitates, a quiet pause that Elle hears like a stutter. "And I think it’s only a matter of time before I can’t feel anything at all."
"You can’t feel pain." Elle says, and she stands up, sucks air in through her teeth. Resists the urge to laugh. "I wish I had your problems, cheerleader." Claire stands, ready to argue, ready to defend, but Elle meets her eyes. "My body is screaming." She breathes. "I’m in agony." There’s electricity in her eyes and it’s crackling through her pupils, it’s staining her skin.
"Go with me." Claire says, suddenly. She doesn’t step nearer but she might as well have. Elle feels the barrier crack, like it did so many weeks ago, like it will every time they’re near. "If there’s a chance these people at Pinehearst can help us, we’ll go together." Claire says quietly. They stand, staring, hesitant.
"All right, Dorothy. Then we’re off to see the Wizard."
(I got a notion that says it doesn’t feel right.
Got the answer in your story today.)
Elle picks out the airplanes from the blue sky. She traps them in her vision and details their path to the ground, eyes dropping when the wheels thunk against the cement and lifting in slow reverence as they crawl toward the sky. She doesn’t quite believe that any of them will succeed- she expects them to pinwheel from the air, crashing and rolling until they explode, scraps of metal and tiny suitcases ricocheting past the golf carts on the landing strip, blazing into the short grass.
She feels trapped by the big glass windows but she doesn’t say anything about it to Claire. Pushing her thoughts through her mouth has never been her strong suit- not when it comes to the things she wants to say. Her thoughts don’t make sense. They spin circles that no one else can follow, they crawl back over each other in some twisted dance and she hasn’t met anyone who can follow the beat.
Claire’s silent, anyway, her lips a straight line cutting across her pretty face. Elle tries not to stare but she really wants to touch. She wants to lace their fingers together, so tight it almost hurts, stroke small knuckles and familiar fingers, wants to lure Claire into the bathroom and plant kisses along her bare collarbone. She wants skin and fire, but- for the first time in her whole life- she doesn’t want to hurt Claire.
She wants everything but to hurt Claire.
She’s staring, again. She hasn’t learned to stop. Another airplane roars to life and her eyes flick toward the window instinctively, to watch for a fiery crash or a shuddering clunk. She’s not scared of the plane running into them, she’s planning for it. She watches as it tilts toward the heavens, cutting through thin clouds and chasing cautious sea gulls. Then it’s out of sight, a blink on the horizon, a dash of black. She looks back over at Claire just in time to catch the young girl’s blue eyes staring into her own.
Elle almost blushes.
"What?" She asks, bypassing tact. Claire’s eyes flick away, facing the window but too wide to be believed. Elle waits, shifting her gaze along Claire’s set jaw, tracing the line of her neck. The younger girl never answers.
Their plane is called and Claire steps up and away without glancing back, but Elle sees slanted eyes and a darting gaze when they pass through gate. It rumbles through the electricity beneath her skin, this want she can taste, can feel spark at the air. She’s blinded herself to the memories but they swell in the background and promise things she’d forgotten she ever wanted.
Claire gives her the window seat. Their legs brush softly and Elle turns away, shielding the haze in her eyes.
The clouds begin to break apart and she waits for them to hurtle toward the ground.
(I got a notion that says it doesn’t feel right.)
They don’t speak when they walk into the hotel room with two tiny beds. Claire just tosses her stuff onto a chair and mutters something about going to get food.
"Good, I’m starving." Elle says, reaching back to tie up her hair. Claire shoots her a glance but Elle’s face stays blank. The younger girl just sighs and digs into her duffel. Elle does the same, searching for the cash she nicked off an Australian tourist at the airport, her fingers passing over fake passports and euros slipped between her shoes.
When Claire slips out of the door Elle follows just as quickly. She gets another look but she figures that it’s worth it.
They end up at a cheap Mexican place about a block down the road. It’s all green lights and fake stucco, red and blue patterns strung across the walls, and their waiter’s hair is dripping with gel. It smells better then anything Elle can imagine and she sits across from Claire, hitting her feet against the back of the booth and looking down at her menu. Sometimes, she flicks her eyes up and steals a glance, and she has an unsettling feeling that Claire is doing the same thing.
Reaching -sneaking- her hand across the table, she grabs a chip and aims toward the salsa. Her eyes stay glued to the glossy finish of the wood, suddenly nervous in this unknown territory with a sullen Claire and a twitch aching between her veins. She munches slowly and her eyes curve a path upward.
It’s becoming unsurprising to find Claire staring at her like the younger girl’s never seen a person before.
Claire’s eyes are half-glazed, almost unnatural with something Elle wants so badly to define. Elle reads their ache like a favorite novel, like a fact because it’s burned into her own gaze, like there’s a law against it. She reads Claire because they are like the same person, they are like lovers who split too early on. She was what Claire is. They are lovers who split too early on. They aren’t the same person, and she’s lucky for that.
The look in Claire’s eyes has killed her appetite, but she’s still hungry, in a way that makes her brash. Her feet stop swinging and her eyes almost narrow, but she grabs hold of her dirty intentions and bites back suggestive words.
Claire does it for her.
"Let’s just go." The blonde says, and her movements aren’t rushed. She stands up and waits.
Elle is quick to follow.
(So don’t knock it, don’t knock it.
You been here before.)
It’s the same sort of bland hotel room and the same sort of mind-reeling intoxication with each other but there are lines now. There are patterns and habits and too much familiarity. It’s not new, but they could fool each other into thinking it is. Fingers trail, hands coast. Elle puts her forehead against Claire’s shoulder, tugs her closer, presses her into a wall.
It’s late and quiet, and their breathing echoes. The bed squeaks and a spring pokes Elle’s knee so that she shifts and she’s off balance and then Claire is on top, hands skimming lower and mouth growing possessive. Elle arches beneath her, body curving as a slender line of electricity rams into Claire’s chest. The other girl shudders, tenses, and Elle forgets what to do.
"I’m sorry. I’m sorry." She says, scrambling backwards and hitting the wall, clothes in messy disarray. Her face crumples and she’s so distressed that she loses Claire’s eyes. Then, Claire’s hands are on her shoulder, a soft kiss pressed into her neck.
"It’s okay." Claire murmurs. Her hands glide lower, her body moving forward. "It’s okay." Elle doesn’t relax for a moment because she’s twisted the whole moment, she’s hurt someone she didn’t want to and that never happens. She’s spun out. But Claire is pushing Elle’s shirt higher and her mouth is fire on Elle’s quivering belly and it’s surprising how fast the anxiety fades away and how easily Elle’s fingers slip through Claire’s curls.
They twist and spin and electricity escapes Elle’s pores but Claire can’t feel it anyway. They’re bathed in short spurts of blue light and it’s pain and ecstasy like Elle’s always been used to, except. There’s no malice, no cruel undertones, just twpeople and a compromise and a continuation. Just two people and a constant.