Title: These Things I've Done
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mime
Summary: HRG has done everything to protect his family... and this is no exception.


Noah rakes a hand through his hair, idly musing that he needs a trim. Searching for paintings and trying to take down a company he's now bound to has left little time for simple pleasures, like Sandra's well trained hands as she cuts his hair, gently massaging his skull as Claire and Lyle bicker playfully at the table. He knows he has to live through memories now, the white on grey of his cell leaves little else except the stark reminders of all that he's lost.

He keeps things from Claire, when he returns home to Costa Verde. It's something familiar, but the predisposition to keep her his little girl is only secondary to his need to keep her alive. So he buries the truth in little white lies, and says that she's right and it is his fault, though he's not sure whether it's the strange sensation of rising from the dead or he's actually repentant. He can't dwell on this now, not when he sees his own wife forcing back tears, far stronger than he'd ever dared give her credit for.

It's only when he returns to New York that he receives his first assignment, and although he'd expected it'd be something heinous nothing can prepare him for what he hears. It's almost biblical, really, or something that Ovid might have written, if adoptions were more common in Ancient Rome.

He has to kill Nathan Petrelli.

In Odessa, Texas, not Ukraine, and he forces down the urge to laugh at the irony of it all. Nathan had promised to kill him, once, before either of them knew the other's role in their daughter's life, and now both of them had to die to save her. He feels his soul rotting from within, knowing full well that when Claire finds out, she always does, she'd never forgive him.

It's a far worse sentence than Nathan faces.

But he suits up anyway and drives down the familiar roads as he's done thousands of times before, fingering the cool metal of the gun lying haphazardly in the passenger seat. Pausing, Noah looks up and prays that God will forgive him for the things that his daughter will not and exhales, making sure to lock the door.

He thinks of Claire's smile and a time when her biggest fear was Jackie Wilcox's wrath and of Elle and the sad desperation in her eyes as she forces fragments into some semblance of a life as he removes the safety and fires.

Three bullets, one for Sandra, one for Lyle and one for Claire. Everything he's done has been for his family, and this is no exception.