DISCLAIMER: I don't own Heroes, NBC does. Note: Constructive criticism is okay, but please don't flame. It's a little slow to start, but it'll get more pacey probably in the next chapter, which will be added whenever it's finished. Thanks!

DREAMS

Chapter One: Mister Stranger Man

There was a building, somewhere near the middle of a crowded city. People scurried past it, too wrapped up in the hustle and bustle of daily life to even notice it. Perhaps if someone had noticed this particular building, they'd have asked themselves what went on inside it, or maybe they'd have even had enough nerve to go in and investigate.

If they had, their eyes would have met with a sight that was not unlike any other corporate building's interior, with information desks, elevators and restricted-access doors everywhere. Employees hurried off to perform their various menial tasks. The casual observer would have been pacified by this, if not utterly bored, and walked out again (preferably before they had to speak to the very large and disgruntled-looking security officer that was heading their way). But someone a bit more inquisitive, someone who not only knew of the proverb 'never judge a book by its cover' but truly believed with every fibre of their being that you should not, in fact, judge a book by its cover, would not have given up on this mysterious building so easily. They would have lured an employee, by some means, into a secluded area of the floor, knocked them out with a half-brick that'd been very conveniently acquired somewhere outside and stolen their pass-card.

Through the most heavily-guarded and therefore most tempting restricted-access door, they'd have immediately found themselves in an elevator headed, unlike all the other elevators that were open to the general public, down. Puzzlement would briefly befall them, as they are clever and had previously stolen the building layout from some poor civic worker (the half-brick had come in handy there, too). There isn't supposed to be a basement, they'd think, before becoming consumed once again by curiosity. A short walk down a sterile, blindingly-white corridor and through a door marked 'Do not Enter: Medical Personnel Only' would reveal a space rather like a police interrogation room. It was split through the middle by a thin wall, in the centre of which was a huge sheet of glass. On the entrance side were a desk, a couple of chairs and some screens with very complicated medical-type readouts on them. The glass's other side would be the interesting thing, though; the second half of the room contained only one piece of furniture, a white slab which was obviously meant to be a bed of some sort, on which a blonde-haired teenage girl lay. She'd been strapped down with thick restraints and various cords and wires that lead to an identical set of readout-screens were attached to her. She was unconscious, but thrashing about (insofar as that's possible for someone so efficiently restrained) as though she were in immense pain. Her eyes moved underneath their lids, frantically jumping back and forth, glancing at some unseen terrors.

A man was standing by her, watching her intently. He was old-ish, slightly round and very balding. He also was very unkempt; the field of scruffiness he generated would be strong enough to crumple nearby aircrafts. Over his everyman's clothing he wore a white coat and an ID badge that identified him as Maury Parkman. The girl on the bed-slab let out a small shriek. Maury smiled smugly, apparently very proud of himself, though it wasn't clear what for.

At this point, the observer would have been knocked on the back of the head by the door opening and been found by another roundesque older man, this one with glasses and the name of Bob, who would immediately summon security, have the observer taken away, and later yell at the guards for not having done any proper actual guarding because they let the intruder into the building in the first place.

Then he would turn to the glass, chat with Maury Parkman as to the nature of how things were going, and stare at the girl for several minutes afterward. We finally found her, he'd think to himself, grinning like a fox who's bagged a particularly stealthy rabbit. Claire Bennet is finally ours.

Some time before this would happen, Peter Petrelli, who'd only very recently discovered that his name was Peter and even more recently that his surname was Petrelli, sat gripping the arms of his seat and trying to avoid looking out the window next to him. He was also trying to avoid hearing the small girl, name of Trisha, who sat imperiously on his right.

He was on a plane, bound from Ireland to New York City, and Trisha, who'd been on three different plane rides by herself and was therefore an expert, was explaining to Peter the source of every single suspicious noise the plane made.

'And that noise, that's the wings shifting, 'accause the plane's turning a little bit,' she was saying, seeming not to notice the expression of frozen, ice-cold horror that Peter wore. 'And that noise…oh, that's funny. I've never heard that noise afore.'

Peter Petrelli, usually quite a kind, docile young man, was suddenly seized by a very largely unstoppable urge to hurl the child out an airlock. Then he decided to resort to reason.

'Look,' he gasped at Trisha, 'can you please not tell me about the noises? I don't like flying and you're really not helping me, okay?'

The little brown-haired girl looked up at him with eyes as wide and bright as stars, gave him a huge, beaming smile and said, in the tones of one talking to a distressed animal, 'Don't worry about it, Mister Stranger Man, I'll tell you about all my plane trips instead!' She seemed extremely proud, like this idea had been a stroke of pure genius. Peter groaned and leaned his head back, staring at the roof of the fuselage; it was plush and red. He must have been on a plane ride before, he reasoned, to get from the United States to the United Kingdom, but he couldn't remember it and decided that he'd rather not. The poor man felt sick as it was, without having to know about all the terrible mystery sounds that were present on this flight but not on the last one.

Peter didn't realise that the girl, who absolutely made him feel at every second as though his plane was about to hurtle out of the sky in a burning, crashing, fiery mass, was one of many people the world over who expertly frightened the horse apples out of people like Peter, all the while not believing they were doing anything wrong. They were called, in some small circles of airplane-fearers, People Who Make it all That Much Worse. But Peter wouldn't let this girl, or the gut-wrenching terror she instilled in him, deter him from his mission. He'd woken up in a shipping container in Ireland several weeks ago with no memory of where he'd been or who he'd been before then, but he was beginning to have dreams. In the night, mostly in that half-conscious time between sleep and waking, he'd see people and places that he couldn't remember but felt certain that he knew them. The majority of them were blurred, except for the faces of two people, one male and one female. The male was slightly older than he, with short brown hair and a very square, political jaw. The female was young, blonde and pretty, with a sad smile. These people were his Past, and he wanted to find them, so that he could also find Peter Petrelli, the man he'd been. New York seemed as good a place as any to start looking.