Title: The Right Thing
Author: HopefulNebula M or R or whatever. See the warnings.
Summary: Claude gets bored and goes to a bar, and finds more than he expected.
Disclaimer: If I owned Heroes, I'd be on strike. I'm not, so I don't.
Spoilers: Through "Company Man." Takes place a few months after the last flashback.
Warnings: Non-explicit mention of rape, some violence and strong language. Some male admiration of male ass. (I couldn't resist.) Everyone gets what's coming from them, but moral greyness still abounds.
/\/\/\/\
When he'd started working for the Company, Claude had genuinely believed he was doing the right thing. He was helping people discover their potential and saving the innocent from poorly controlled abilities. He was saving the world.
When he left--insofar as a person can leave the Company--he was certain he was doing the right thing. If the person he'd been helping hadn't picked up healing skills from someone, he would have taken their standard "retirement package" for the right thing. And now here he was, hiding in plain sight as the cliché went, and all he had to do was stay dead.
And he hated it.
It wasn't that nobody knew who he was; that had been his life for so long that being well-known would be worse for him. It was that he wasn't doing anything. At least he had been doing some good before his "retirement." Now he was sleeping in abandoned apartments and stealing food from supermarkets. Oh, how the mighty have fallen. He wanted to help someone.
He settled for going to the first bar he found. If he could do nothing else, he could still get drunk. And for free, at that.
It was as good a hiding place as any: so loud and crowded that he doubted anyone would have seen him if he had been visible. Better yet, the room's collective attention was fixed on the televisions that were showing all the sports channels available in New York City.
Claude pushed over to the Rangers game that was showing in the far corner. It was quieter, sure, but at least here he could breathe. Besides, hockey players had cute asses. Football players wore too much padding.
The game itself passed without incident. He'd stepped on a few toes whilst sneaking around the bar to get a couple of bottles of beer, but he didn't think anyone noticed or cared, and if they did they weren't making anything of it. At any rate, he had his Guinness, and that made him considerably less depressed. The trouble was, he now needed rather desperately to pee. It took far, far too long for the toilets to clear out enough for him to go without drawing attention, but finally, finally there were only two others at the urinals. If he used a stall and didn't flush, he figured he'd be fine.
The others were talking like they were still in the bar, and since voyeurism was second nature to him, Claude listened in on their conversation.
"So she kept saying no, right? And you know I can't take rejection," the first guy said.
"Yeah, you're just so sensitive," came the reply. Claude couldn't see them, but he could swear he could feel the second guy rolling his eyes. "So what did you do?"
"I told her, 'well, the least you can do is let me buy you dinner,' you know, and she finally said yes just to shut me up. So, I took her out. Not here, though. One of those places the chicks dig, with all the crap on the walls and shit. And I bought her food and everything. And she still wouldn't bite. So, I went up to the bar and brought her another drink. She didn't even finish it, she was just so tired by then, you know?"
Claude didn't like this at all.
"You didn't..."
"I did. Stole it from work. No telling it's in there after you put it in, unless you test for it. So I take her home, and she falls asleep in the car. What's a guy supposed to do, such a pretty piece of ass falls asleep in your car like that? Besides, I brought her up to her place after. She woke up in her own bed."
"Guess some girls just can't hold their ketamine," the second guy laughed.
Oh, that was it. Claude couldn't stand it, couldn't watch invisibly as these two mouthbreathers stood there so smugly discussing one man's rape of an unconscious woman.
And so he struck. Invisibly, he grabbed both men's collars, bringing their heads together and enjoying the thunk of their skulls connecting. Probably nothing in there, so it echoes, he thought. In his fiercest, scariest voice, the one he'd had ample experience using in his "bag and tag" days and affecting the American accent he'd learned from all his years here, he spoke.
"I hope you're proud of yourselves."
"Jesus, Gary, how much did we have to drink?" the second guy asked. Before Gary could answer, Claude's fist connected with the speaker's jaw. He let go of their collars and shoved down on their shoulders.
"Shut up and listen. And get down." They didn't move. He shoved again, a little harder, and they sank. Claude grabbed a fistful of Gary's greasy hair as he went down, and pulled. "Really, I hope you're proud of yourselves."
"Hey, man, I got laid, she probably thinks she was sick or wasted--"
Smack.
Claude had always found a sick kind of satisfaction in the reactions people had to the punches they couldn't see. This time, it was doubly satisfying purely for its righteousness.
"Wrong answer," he snapped. Claude locked the bathroom door with the hand that wasn't holding Gary's hair. "That's better. Now, Gary. Do you have a sister?"
"Yeah," Gary spat.
"Good. As soon as I finish here, I'm going to find her, drug her, and have my way with her."
"You do and I'll kill you. She's seventeen."
'But it'll be okay, right? She'll be unconscious. She won't know a fucking thing--she'll just wake up with a nasty hangover and no idea what happened."
"OK, OK, I get it. Now beat me up already or get the fuck out so I can go." This earned him a kick.
"Oh, what brains. And what balls. Or haven't you noticed you're having your ass handed to you by someone you can't even see?"
"I'm drunk. These things happen." Another kick, to Gary's buddy this time.
"And another thing that's going to happen. I am going to take your wallets. I am going to get your names and addresses, and you are going to give me the name and address of the woman you raped. Make sure you get it right the first time, because I'll know where you live. Both of you. And you can't catch what you can't see. And while I'm doing this, neither of you are going to move a muscle, because if you do, you're going to be waking up on this floor." Claude took first Gary's wallet, then the other guy's--evidently, he was named Steve--and took their drivers' licenses. Then he searched for information on Gary's workplace, just for good measure.
Pausing only to remove the flyer advertising guitar lessons from the nearest stall, he took the miniature pen clipped to Steve's wallet and copied all the relevant information down. He even made sure to keep the pen and paper visible, to add to the creepiness factor.
"And the girl?" he asked when he was done. He passed the paper to Gary, who wrote everything he remembered down. "Not bad, for a drunk memory. I hope for you're sake you're right." He pocketed the paper.
"Dude, you're a fucking ghost," Steve said. Evidently being spared the brunt of the threats had emboldened him. "You probably don't even really exist. What's the worst you can do?"
"This." Rather than hurting the men again--despite his threats, he wanted them conscious--he took both fine leather wallets and dropped them into the nearest toilet. "You don't ask a question like that to the man who's holding your wallet. Also, I can and will be following you out of here and watching your every move for quite a while. You even think of doing anything like that ever, ever again and I'll know about it, and it won't be your wallets that sink. You'll never hear the end of me. And neither will the police. I hear rapists get special treatment in prison," he threatened. He gave them each one last hard kick, for good measure.
While the guys were on the ground, Claude took the opportunity to make his exit. Though he wouldn't be following them as closely as he'd let on, he still had some phone calls to make: one to the girl, and one to the veterinary clinic where Gary worked. He hoped they'd pay attention. But either way, he had Gary and Steve afraid, and he was certain neither of them would think about sex the same way again. If he had prevented another rape, he had done good. And nobody would believe them if they talked about the invisible man who'd beaten them, anyway. Even so, he figured he'd be better off leaving town for a year or two, just to be safe. After he made the phone calls. And despite the danger he'd put himself in, he smiled. Who said doing the right thing had to mean being seen?