Welcoming the Burn

by kenzimone

Even after all is gone, Claire finds herself a constant in the change, an unaging, unmoving force standing firm in the drifting sands of time. [50 sentences, one pairing. Mohinder/Claire]

Title: Welcoming the Burn
Author: kenzimone
Disclaimer: I wish
Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: Mohinder/Claire
Theme set: Epsilon
Rating: G–R
Summary: 50 sentences, one pairing.
Notes: Written for the LiveJournal community 1sentence. Unbeta'd. Like the last time I tried this, ordinary sentences somehow turned into run-on ones, and I apologize for completely butchering the English language. Some sentences may tie into a couple of my other fics (regarding Mohinder's power or the Post-Mortem AU!verse), though most are regular AUs (simply because of the fact that Claire is obviously not fifteen in any of them). When you review, please tell me which sentence you liked the best.

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#37 - Time
More time, that's what Mohinder needs; more time to finish his work, more time to write down his theories and half-thoughts and to perhaps get a full night's sleep (to make peace with his father's ghost and to call his mother and let her know he's doing okay), more time to save and warn and find the gifted; more time in the mornings, more time at dawn to watch Claire slowly wake – to take in the flutter of her eyelashes and the short intake of breath – more time to kiss her skin where the rising sun hits it and to take in her groggy smile ('I need to go,' she murmurs), that's what he needs; simply more time.

#47 - Harm
She strikes him once, twice, three times before he catches her flying fists and pulls her closer (crushes her against him and turns her face away – feels the wetness stain his skin where her cheek makes contact with his shoulder), supports her as she gives in, fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt, desperately clawing in an attempt to hold on; tastes the blood in his mouth now, a bitter flavor going down his throat, and looks away from the blank, lifeless stare of her father.

#07 – One
'One minute,' Bennet says, and Mohinder feels Claire's hand grip his tightly; it's not how he imagined it'd end, but that's alright (he would have imagined he'd be terrified, hysteric, pleading for his life to whoever would listen, but as the moment comes there is only perhaps disappointment, and peace (peace, and Claire)) – she's smiling now, looking at him and smiling, and he thinks he might be smiling back, and then whatever Bennet tries to say is lost in the roar of the flames and the sharpness of the light (but Claire is still tightly gripping his hand, so it doesn't really matter).

#49 - Hunger
There's a hunger burning in her belly and a fire cooling her soul – she's the battle field of warring thoughts and yearnings, and she's long since given up on trying to understand any of it – she remembers innocent kisses in her childhood bedroom, stuffed animals bearing witness to Zach's hands slowly creeping up under her shirt, his heart beating rapidly beneath her hand as she slowly pushed him away; remembers but does not mourn, and in the dark she reaches out and pulls Mohinder closer (lies open and bare and feels his heartbeat sound in time with her own (feels hands larger and stronger than a boy's push her down against Egyptian cotton)), and is sated.

#33 – Never
He whispered once (in the cover of darkness and with hands snaking up her arms) that he would never leave her, and she believed it (stupid, stupid girl), believed it with all she had (stupid, stupid girl); there is a knife at her throat now, cold steel drawing blood and cutting off her breathing, and a strange shimmer before her eyes (like the surface of a sea reflecting the sun's rays) – and the only thing in her mind is that while she'll survive this (survive again and again and again), survive and live on and fight, he never even tried to.

#02 – Cool
The weight of the band feels odd (alien), and the metal is cool against her skin; her arms are around his neck and he's lifting her off her feet and spinning her around (the world is a blur of colors, red and orange and yellow), and when he looses his footing it doesn't matter – she lands on her back in a bed of dry leaves, the smell of autumn and him encasing her world; he plucks a twig out of her hair and smiles against her lips and if anything, she wishes he'd asked her sooner.

#41 - Power
The city dies in a flash of lightning, and for a moment there is breathless silence before honking cars and sirens once again drown out the static (Claire stares out at dark silhouettes blocking starry skies as Mohinder goes through kitchen cupboards in search of wax candles); they stretch out on the bed bathed in candlelight, Claire resting her head on Mohinder's chest as his fingers trace invisible patterns on her stomach, and then they wait for the lights to flicker back on.

#22 – Mad
At times Mohinder feels like the archetype of the mad scientist of old stories; his search for the gifted leads him to many a door and into conversations with many a people (most of who find it prudent to slam said door closed in his face), and it is rarely that a day's work results in anything worthwhile – sometimes, the only thing to keep him going is Claire and her never ending questions (the light in her eyes when he explains his theories is like balm against stinging sores), and in the morning he can awake with the knowledge that there is at least one person who believes completely and whole heartedly in the work he has been appointed to do.

#48 - Precious
They all agree that when the time comes a hospital stay is out of the question, and so it falls to Peter (the only one with any real training or medical knowledge) to read up on the do's and don't's of the procedure; it's all touch and go, really, and perhaps they're lucky – in the end, the baby is safely tucked into Claire's arms (Mohinder looking slightly pale, but stubbornly still there, at her bedside), and the only real casualty is Peter (who spends the entire delivery looking quite sick, and who finally, task completed and niece safe and sound in her mother's embrace, decides it alright to collapse to the floor in a dead faint (it's a story they like to tell at Christmas, and one of his brother's absolute favorites)).

#25 – Shadow
Nathan wins the election by a landslide, and Claire finds herself the secret daughter of a president (her half-brothers call her 'Miss Claire', and her stepmother refers to her as 'the au pair' in conversations), finds herself a part of a family again, yet not the part which she might have wished; there is a party, a proper one once the family is settled in the White House, and when Claire has put her brothers to bed she sneaks downstairs and watches from the doorway as the rich and famous mingle on the dance floor, champagne in hand and an air of importance surrounding them like a glowing aura; he finds her there, looking on as her biological father twirls his laughing wife around the room, half hidden in the shadows (smiles and takes her hand and gently pull her close, sweatshirt and pajama pants against a black tuxedo, and Claire closes her eyes and rests her head on Mohinder's shoulder – inhales and lets the distorted music from behind half closed doors guide them).

#28 – Fortune
It feels like love, and Peter tells her it looks like love, too; Mohinder takes her out for Chinese food, and they walk hand in hand down the streets of New York (share a bowl of rice and try to master the art of eating with chopsticks, and once the dark falls and they step out into the cold he pulls her close and presses a kiss to her lips), Claire's fingers find a forgotten fortune cookie in the pocket of his coat, and outside of her hotel she breaks it in two, paper slip falling out and landing in the palm of her hand – stop searching forever; happiness is just next to you.

#19 - Soul
She has nightmares sometimes, bad dreams that have her waking with a silent scream scraping against the back of her throat and fists clenched tightly on cotton – she dreams about surviving nuclear holocausts, of her father's blood staining the roadside and of awakening not to find herself on a table in a morgue but in a closed coffin, hundreds (thousands) of feet underground; rarely, once in a blue moon, she dreams that she is sitting in a taxi – there's a cut on her arm, a bad one, and she needs stitches (it won't heal, not that she knows why she expects it to) – she's in a taxi, and in the rearview mirror the reflection of the driver's eyes are boring into her soul (she can't see his face, knows it, but can't see it) – she's in a taxi, and there is nothing else, and it's a dream that she fears more than the others; one which she never escapes on her own – it's Mohinder's touches that rouses her from that ambiguous Hell.

#31 – Book
The copy Zach gave her is lost to fire and ash (she never quite had time to get through it to begin with), so when she finds a full box in one of the apartment closets, it's certainly a nice surprise; it takes her a few days to read it cover to cover (a page or two on the couch after dinner, a chapter in bed (Mohinder's arm thrown across her stomach and pulling her close)), but she does it, and then she studies the black and white photography on the back of the dustcover and rises from the couch – goes to find her husband, and asks him to tel her about his father.

#40 - History
In nothing but a flash he sees a lifetime that might just be; loneliness and despair, hunger and thirst, heat and cold, death – so much death – and the cries of those left behind (the full history of a nation, a world), and he wakes to find the cool tiles of his bathroom floor leaving imprints on his face and Peter and Claire on their knees beside him (Claire shushes his questions and hands him a glass of water), and Mohinder knows that whatever it is he didn't do to make what he has seen happen, he might as well start with this – it's only a pleasant surprise when Claire doesn't break the kiss but instead pulls him closer.

#01 – Motion
'Don't stop,' she says; he smiles at her across a room full of people, and she finds herself weak in the knees; she returns his call, and they talk until the battery of her cellphone dies and leaves her with his voice echoing in her ears; he kisses her on the doorstep of her hotel, under a canopy of stars, and she wraps her arms around his neck and pulls him closer; by candlelight she eats the dinner he's made her, and if the meat is a little bit too spicy and the potatoes are undercooked, it doesn't matter in the least; he runs deft hands down her body, and she pushes up against the touch; she kisses him, and he pulls her closer; he meets skin with skin, and she feels the bed dip beneath them; 'Don't stop,' she says, and he doesn't.

#38 - Wash
The bathroom in the back of Mohinder's apartment is small, drafty and flawed – the shower head leaks, the toilet doesn't flush properly, and the cracks in the sink makes it virtually unusable – yet it is the room Claire loves the most; the things she sees and knows and does (hears, ignores and helps happen) gathers like a layer of thick grime upon her skin with every passing day, damning and ugly; in the evenings she leaves a trail of clothes throughout the apartment and retreats into the bathroom, letting the steam cloud the tiny room and the sound of the water hitting the tiled floor drown out the images burned onto her retinas (this is where Mohinder finds her, most of the nights – sometimes he joins her, and they share wet kisses in the mist, and other times he simply leaves a folded towel for her to find once she's finished washing her sins away).

#35 – Sudden
This very first thing she learns how to say is 'I love you' – Mohinder says it often enough which makes the words themselves easy to pick up and commit to memory, but it's the pronunciation that really gets her – it's not simply a completely new language, but a whole new way to speak (different tongue movements, different way to breathe, different pitch, different everything) and if Mohinder ever becomes insulted by her butchering of his mother tongue he hides it well – though there have been days where she's had to hit him a couple of times because her pronunciation of a certain word or phrase made him suddenly inhale whatever he was drinking at the moment and set him off on a grating cough of laughter.

#39 – Torn
Nathan (she can never bring herself to call him 'father' or 'Mr. President') sends his men to get her, and there is nothing she can do about it; the New York clinic is housed in a massive new building, white marble ceilings and spotless floors all twenty off stories, and the suits that picked her up at the diner bypass the long line of people waiting to be admitted and walk her past the stressed receptionists at their desks – on the sixteenth floor a man is waiting for them, an Indian man who walks like he's got the fate of the world resting on his shoulders, and Nathan's men leave them alone in a room as sterile as the rest of the building, nothing but a desk with needles and what looks like a dentist's chair occupying the whiteness (she sits in the chair and feels his hands handle her right arm (so very gentle) – listens as he pick up one of the needles and faintly hears what she thinks might be an apology and, to her surprise, her name; then there's pressure against her skin and burning, heat like nothing she's ever experienced before, and as she is torn apart she is struck by the hazy realization that nothing will ever feel right again).

#18 – Attention
Mohinder finds himself at a loss as to what to feed a lizard, much less how to properly care for one, and so it is Claire that volunteers to become the caretaker of the unwanted reptile (he gives her a key to the apartment, and she swoops in like a refreshing spring breeze; again and again he comes home to find his door unlocked and a pot of coffee waiting for him on the kitchen counter, a petite blonde lying on his couch deeply immersed in a book on terrarium maintenance, and again and again he is surprised at the way his heart skips and at the warmth that spreads through his chest whenever he does not have to find the apartment empty, dark and cold); the only time Claire does any complaining about her new responsibilities is when the time to clean the lizard's – Mohi, as Claire renames him in an attempt to lessen confusion, stroking his head and watching Mohinder through thick lashes – tank; Mohinder cannot bring himself to complain even when she ropes him into helping, because while it might be dirty and smelly and disgusting work, Claire keeps wiping at stray strands of hair falling into her eyes and ends up with green smudges covering her face, and Mohinder, in turn, ends up trying to wipe them off, and looking back he knows that it's the first time he actually looks at her, all sweaty and wrinkling her nose and wiping the back of her hands across her face, and he really wishes that the instrumental part of the two of them becoming hadn't been an unfortunately named lizard.

#12 - Wait
She hopes, and she waits; curses her captors and throws whatever food she's given against the closed door of her room, spends her days staring at the smooth steel that hasn't opened since the day she was brought here, and her nights pressing her cheek against the cold wall by the small, barred window trying to will the clouds that obscure the stars to dissipate; hopes and waits, ignores questions posed to her through the small meal slot at the bottom of her room door and fights off needles filled with strangely tinted liquids; hope and waits and does not give up, does not believe anything she's told (not the death of her father or the capture of Mohinder, not the disappearance of her grandmother or how Peter betrayed them all); waits and hopes, and on the seventy third day of her capture the steel door opens, and as she blinks against the harsh light, Mohinder steps in from out of the shadows.

#23 – Child
There's a leak, a small one (a page seven story in one of the New York rags), and in the beginning none of them thinks it'll be taken that seriously, not really, but they're proven wrong, and it strikes down amidst the less gifted (ordinary) people like a bombshell (more reports surface and headlines are made, of family members and acquaintances gone strange, pictures of amazing people hitting the covers of Time and National Geographic, a deluge of videos flooding the Internet like from a never depleting source); Mohinder's in demand now, the only real expert on the subject of these extraordinary people and the origins of their gifts, and he flies across the globe several times a week – meets with heads of states and genetic scientists, speaks at press conferences and appears on news shows – and if he sometimes wonders if all the stress and pressure and loneliness and the endlessly growing number of questions clouding his horizon are worth it, it only takes the sound of Claire's voice over a static telephone line and the baby's gurgling laughter in the background to remind him of the fact that he's making the world safe for her, and for their child.

#27 – Hide
It hides in the shadows, whatever it is you wish to call it (crush, infatuation, love, lust – she's not even sure herself anymore, though it scorches her heart and turns her inside out whenever she chooses to acknowledge it), and it's silly and stupid, because they've only ever had perfectly civil conversations in the company of others (never one on one, never been in any situation remotely intimate), and yet, once she's on the examination table and he's pressing cool metal against her chest (listening to her speeding heart), it's all she can do to try and convince herself that he's not averting his eyes from hers and that his fingertips aren't lingering slightly longer on her skin than what is considered proper (culture shock, she tells herself, though to be honest the shock is on her when he calls her father the next day and asks for permission to take her out to that small café just around the corner from their hotel (he opens doors for her and pulls out her chair and she thinks that yes, this is proper)).

#32 – Eye
Sometimes they have to create a distance, have to remove themselves from the gravity of the situation they find themselves in when the stress become too overpowering and the body count becomes too real; they have nights in, rent a movie and spend an hour or two curled up on the old couch in Mohinder's apartment (Claire likes to rest her head on his chest and let his heartbeat and the rhythm of his fingers running through her hair lull her to sleep) – but it's only a facade, a house of cards they erect and try to fool themselves with (there is no stepping away from the conflict, there is simply a brief moment spent in the motionless eye of the storm).

#50 – Believe
Claire is still young enough to remember the fairy tales her daddy used to tell her at bedtime (still clearly remembers the princesses in their beautiful gowns, the handsome and charming princes, and the valiant, loyal steeds), recalls how she used to wish for some of that magic, that kind of life – to be a princess herself some day; and maybe, just perhaps, reality hasn't completely screwed her over – she's got herself a prince charming (with ebony curls and a blinding smile) and his faithful steed (it takes a while to get used to handling, but soon enough she knows exactly how much punishment Mohinder's taxi can take), and when the doorbell rings at seven o'clock on a Friday night and she rises to her tiptoes to plant a kiss on her prince's lips (bouquet of roses in hand and faithful yellow companion parked street side just below) there's no doubt in her mind that this is all she ever wanted.

#14 – Command
They make gingerbread men for Christmas (because Molly is missing her parents and Mohinder is lost, slowly regaining his footing, and because Claire says that she wants to properly celebrate her first real white Christmas (celebrate snow that doesn't melt right away, that's several feet deep and that she can form in her hands)); she takes command over the kitchen – fills the counter with ingredients and bowls, mixes flour and eggs and sugar and seems to knows exactly what she's doing – as Mohinder looks on, rolling up his (and Molly's) shirt sleeves and prepares to do whatever she tells them to do (in the end, Claire's face is smudged with flour, Molly has eaten most of the dough, and Mohinder finds that nothing is ever as sweet as kisses stolen over a messy kitchen counter).

#08 – Thousand
There is no breeze now, no refuge from the heat (it permeates the air, sticks to her skin like the dust of the ground she crawls upon; the sand cakes healing wounds and turns the blood black, and the corners of her eyes are since long nothing but crusty layers of salt) – New York is a desert, suddenly and forcefully, and now the dunes lap at the side of the buildings; she lost him the day before, swept away by a vigorous gale, and now she digs (sand spilling through her fingers, burning and sinking, sinking) – her body will not let her die, and so she searches for him (will dig for miles and days, as long as she possesses the strength, will find him dead or alive if it so takes her one hour or a thousand days).

#34 – Sing
The words are unfamiliar, the melody exotic to her ears – she does not understand the story it is trying to tell, but if she closes her eyes that doesn't matter (she can see colors and shapes, smell the flowers of countries she's never visited); the lullaby is by Molly's request (never fully recovered, she's sickly still – nothing blood can cure, not this time around) and Claire watches from the doorway as Mohinder smooths back the stray locks of the girl's bangs upon her forehead, and then she turns off the light as he passes her by and closes the door to the bedroom – whispers her wish against warm skin at night, and shivers as a low voice breathes dreams upon her lips.

#17 – Vision
Mira believes that she has seen it all (stays in her lab and waits for the extraordinary to come to her – waits, but does not expect it to arrive); Eden tells him she has seen too much (doesn't volunteer any more information, but from the hesitance in her touch - like she doesn't want to but has been told to do so – he can't really blame her); Claire observes the world from his apartment window, and in the dark she speaks of the things she's seen and what she believes is left to see (good and bad, beautiful and ugly), and asks no one in particular how she can possibly expect to experience it all in one short lifetime – this is how Mohinder knows he loves her.

#36 – Stop
She realizes one day that Mohinder has never seen the country, never walked anything but the cement and concrete of New York, and so she makes a list (sits down and writes down everything and anything that comes to mind, all the things she wants to see and places she wants to share); in April they set off, drive across state line after state line (throw stones into the Grand Canyon, walk hand in hand around the world's largest ball of twine, and stroll through the garden of the House on the Rock) – in Arizona Claire rolls down her window and lets the breeze play with her hair, sticks her hand out through the opening and feels the wind push against her palm (Mohinder turns on the radio and hands her a bottle of water) and for just a moment she wishes that they could simply keep on going, open road and blue skies, and never once have to stop.

#16 – Need
They need her safe, no matter what she says; second time's the charm, and her father nods and then the Haitian turns and looks at him with what could be described as pity ('what about the love,' he asks – 'no,' Mohinder says, 'don't take that'), and then there are only Claire's cries and perhaps the last words he'll ever speak to her (forgotten already); later, if he finds himself waking on the floor of a strange apartment, a paper salesman by his side, a headache raging behind his eyes and a void in his chest where there should be love and need but is not, then he thinks nothing of it.

#11 – Blur
They tell no one for a full year, sharing kisses in secret and spending late nights on the phone, and when Claire decides it is time to inform her father Mohinder spends two hours assuring her that it is the right thing to do; Bennet has a mean right hook, and Mohinder figures he deserves it (though Claire is not as pure and definitely not as innocent as her father seems to think), and when the world stops spinning and his vision is no longer a blur of colors, he's helped to his feet by the man himself ('if you hurt my daughter, I will kill you') and decides to take heed of the idle threats of overprotective fathers.

#05 – Wrong
They follow the red trail for as far as they're able, but soon enough the blood merges with the sewer water and the dancing lights of their flashlights do little to help (people are dead, yet the threat is not gone – lives lost in the pursuit of innocence that has not been found); Claire never thought she'd find herself here, a high school drop out in New York, safely tucked away in her paternal (real) grandmother's mansion in the company of a professor and a small orphaned child, a Haitian with no name, a stepmother and half brothers (her father's and uncle's specters walking the hallways of her mind); never thought she'd know any other language than English whispered against her skin, inhale the scent of the Orient in the dusk or shiver beneath the ghosting touch of someone with more years of experience than she had ever seen (not just yet); she was wrong.

#03 – Young
The chasm between them is wide, wider than anything they've ever experienced before (it spans eighteen years, crosses the borders of continents and countries, the barriers of cultures and languages), and the disapproval of others makes it just as deep, a gaping hole filled with shadows; in the dark she weaves a bridge of kisses – her fingers intertwined with his, skin smooth and young and quivering beneath his touch – not because either of them has to traverse the void, but so that those who find themselves gazing out across the crevice will find that it's been long since joined.

#04 – Last
Mohinder dreams of cell division and blood, studies DNA structures in his sleep; sees time warp and twist, eras pass, the skies shift above him as changing skylines reflect humanity's progress (dreams of a woman, young and bright and fearless, braving the eroding sand of time (body refusing to break down, refusing to stop living) – sees her waiting for hope, watches as she spends an eternity looking out onto the morphing world and finds that deliverance does not arrive (finds that no one is able to take this gift upon themselves, that her chance has passed since a thousand years back, and so death with it)) – this is how, when Claire come to him with her question, he already knows the answer ('Will I ever die?' she asks; 'No,' he says, 'You will endure forever', open eyes seeing the sun grow brighter, expand, scorch and envelope the land, and the woman welcoming its burn with open arms).

#24 – Now
Mohinder finds that his father had contacts from all over the world; his e-mail account is flooded with information (links and attachments and pictures, videos and people claiming to know or be one of the evolved humans mentioned in the doctor's book) – Mohinder spends a good few hours wading through lies and exaggerations and false hopes before he stumbles upon a link that leads him to a YouTube video (feels his heart drop as he watches a young girl throw herself off a metal structure and plummet towards the ground; sees her unmoving body lie broken in the dust, and then looks on as she rises to her feet and mends herself – 'This is Claire Bennet, and that was attempt number six'); he's out the door before he really has any time to think about it, laptop tucked under his arm and jacket clutched in his hand (almost crashes into a dark haired neighbor woman walking down the hallway) – there is no time to waste; he needs to find this girl, and he needs to find her now.

#21 – Fool
Claire makes him stop at a small store just outside of the airport, and spends the rest of the journey to her parents' house stuffing his pockets full of bacon dog biscuits; he's introduced to her mother and brother, and a fluffy little orange thing that claws at his pants leg and will not rest until he squats down and runs a hand over its tiny little head ('He likes you,' Mrs Bennet cries, absolutely delighted by the fact, before scooping the dog in question up and disappearing through the front door of the house, announcing in a loud voice that dinner is on the table); at his side, Claire's smile threatens to blind them all.

#15 – Hold
Mohinder takes her to India in the beginning of October; he introduces her to his mother, a regal woman with a low, smooth voice and her son's smile, and Claire walks through the garden of Mohinder's youth; they stroll upon the cobbled streets of Channai and he holds her hand as she soaks up the sunshine and exotic lilt of the vendors' mother tongue (the same language whispered in her ear each night, hot and heavy against her skin) – he takes her to Kanyakumari, and they watch the waves roll in and lap at their bare feet (his hand tightens slightly against her own as he points out the final resting place of his father) and she realizes that here, perhaps, they can finally find peace.

#10 – Learn
Mohinder takes pride in knowing and learning, to study a science or trade or language and find himself adept at it – in a way Claire is no different from anything else, a challenge in the highest degree laid open and bare in front of him; he kisses her, and when she closes her eyes or tilts her head to the side to expose her neck he takes notes (memorizes the slope of her ribcage to her stomach, the arch of her soles and the angles of her hipbones), replays every gasp in the dark and recalls every quiver of skin – and sometimes, when Claire opens her eyes and draws him in (runs her hand down his back and bites his bottom lip), he can't help but think that perhaps she's studying him, too.

#26 - Goodbye
'Hello, Mohinder' are the first words Sylar speaks to him seven years since a trail of red marked his disappearance; Claire is on the floor, head split open, blood pooling and spreading and smelling (smelling so badly Mohinder left his study to find what the source was, to find this), and now he is pinned against the wall across the room, watching this shadow of their past extract its bloody hands out of his wife's stomach – watching the small, blue tinged thing in Sylar's palms wriggle and draw breath (not their child, not their child) and then scream – feels his knees hit the hardwood floor, the slickness of the wood as he crawls towards Claire, the warmth seeping through her still cooling skin; hears the sound of Sylar's fading footsteps as both he and the baby slip out through the open window and disappear, the latter's screams echoing into silence; hears, and can do nothing.

#30 – Ghost
Even after all is gone, Claire finds herself a constant in the change, an unaging, unmoving force standing firm in the drifting sands of time (they're gone, all of them, and though they live on in their great great grandchildren and beyond, it's not the same, will never be the same) – Hiro visits sometimes, hair streaked with silver (he's forever mobile, never staying and never belonging anywhere, anytime; lost someone, lost a lot of someones, and now he tortures himself by going back and forth between the decades and watching from afar) – sometimes she breaks down and begs him to take her with him, to take her back, but he never does; she turns three hundred and fifty seven, and suddenly there's a cure, a drug to spell her end (she takes it, tells the doctors it doesn't matter if it's in its trial stages, and by the end of the year she's gray haired and breathless, bent over and going blind) – this time, when Hiro comes, she doesn't have to ask; he takes her anyway (she finds herself on a street in Manhattan, the old city with the cars and noise and the people walking by (so, so long ago), and just feet away she sees Mohinder placing a soft kiss on her (younger, smiling) lips, ice cream in hands forgotten and melting) – 'thank you', she tells her friend, and Hiro smiles and links his fingers with hers, and then she closes her eyes and lets him take her away.

#13 - Change
Most of the time she comes as his father (holds court from the thin mattress of his bed – tells him how he failed, how he never believed and how when he finally did it was too late – rubs Chandra's wrinkled forehead with a sigh, with the air of a man with the world resting on his shoulders; from his place by the wall, chains digging into his ankles, Mohinder thinks that maybe that notion's not so far off); sometimes she comes as Dale Smither (asks him how he didn't see, why he didn't help – leans in close enough for Mohinder to smell the dried blood lining her face and wants to know why she had to die – and watches as the answer dies on Mohinder's tongue, leaving only ashes behind); rarely, oh so very rarely, she comes as Claire (doesn't say a word, just sits on the edge of his bed and looks at him – makes Mohinder want to curl into himself and away from her gaze, because he could have (should have) saved her, but he wasn't quite fast enough – doesn't have to do anything for him to create the words for himself, the guilt and the longing and the pain (like jagged pieces of glass crushed into his heart); doesn't have to, but likes to lean in close before she leaves anyway, words hot against his skin, just for good measure: 'I never loved you').

#43 – God
Mohinder does not see the fingerprint of God in the sunrise, nor in the hand of a newborn child grasping its father's finger; science can explain everything, the scattering of wavelength light off of particles in the atmosphere as well as the grasp reflex by which an infant tightly closes its fingers when pressure is applied to the inside of its hand – yet at times he doubts and wonders, like when the sun seeps in through the bedroom window and frames Claire in a glowing halo, her skin flawless and soft to the touch, if there isn't a higher power after all; it's in those weak moments that he thanks the God of western civilization for delivering her to him, and for giving him the wisdom to receive her.

#46 – Drive
A year into Nathan's first presidential term Mohinder gets into a rental car and crosses the New York/New Jersey border; in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he calls in to collect whatever vacation time he's got due, and then he turns his cellphone off and tosses it into the back seat (drives south with his window down and the radio off, mile after mile, only pausing to sleep in small motels and have breakfast/lunch/dinner at whatever roadside diner first appears on the horizon when the desire strikes) – tries to wipe his mind clean of oval offices and trial drugs and men in suits who are suddenly not acting like the person who he remembers knowing, back in the day – breathes Texan air, and finally has the spirit to chuckle at strange names of people and places emblazoned on roadside billboards; enters the Burnt Toast Diner, and returns the smile of his dark haired waitress (Sandra, her nameplate says), and for the first time in a long while lets his gaze follow a woman as she walks away from him, hips swaying from side to side (leaves Texas for home, hope again stirring in his chest, and encounters her once more years later, lifeless and ashen, blood staining oak floor red).

#44 - Wall
They keep her sedated, just like all the others; he pauses sometimes, in the hallway by the glass wall of her observation room, and watches the researchers in their white coats flock around her (tries to remember a life before this stasis, this everlasting drudgery (blood and tissue samples and DNA strands spinning into the distance), but finds that it doesn't come to him as easily as it used to) – ten years beyond, and she's a woman (limbs long and slender, skin white as ebony and head closely shaved), he's forgotten what her voice sounds like and her smile looks like; soon enough he'll stop halting by her room, will walk right past like everyone else (will stop speaking to Thompson with defiance in his voice, and burn the lock of blonde hair resting in between the pages of his late father's book) because it hurts far too much to try to remember and then discover that he's lost it all.

#42 – Bother
Her father makes an offhand remark about bachelors and their eating habits, and the next day Claire navigates through New York in search of a library – she gets the most worn book on the shelf (the most thumbed, most loved) – and spends two days practicing (frying potato straws, marinating chicken – it has to be perfect), and then she packs the groceries into a bag and leaves the cookbook of Indian recipes lying on her bed and spends most of the taxi ride trying to figure out the right pronunciation for the dish that she's committed to memory; it's all worth it, in the end, simply because of the look on Mohinder's face when he opens his apartment door and sees her standing there.

#45 – Naked
She kisses him, presses up against him and clutches at the folds of his dress shirt; he inhales the scent of vanilla and feels her tongue trace the edges of his teeth – it's naked, the desire in the air, and the hairs on the back of her neck are smooth as silk (they fall, springs of the hotel bed yielding beneath their combined weight, and if there had ever been any thoughts of Mira or Eden or the baby fat still clinging stubbornly to Claire's features, they're dispelled by a gasping hitch of breath against his skin as he filters sun tinted hair in between his fingers).

#29 – Safe
It might be a false sense of security, but it's still safety, and so Mohinder cannot deny Claire Bennet when she walks into Molly's hospital room and asks for permission to take the young girl out for an ice cream; instead, he lets go of Molly's hand when the time comes, pays the vendor and tells Claire not to call him 'Dr. Suresh' (looks up towards the same sky where Nathan and Peter Petrelli faded not a week previous, and takes in Claire's hair whipping around her face, teased by the wind – returns her smile and feels something different twist in his chest, thinks that yes, maybe there is still a future to be had in the city of New York).

#09 – King
The armies rally forth from the belly of the country, out from the shadows of the underground kingdom, and the land burns; Nathan stands strong in the face of his enemy, of the king of the rebellion, but Mohinder subscribes to no such valor – he grabs Claire's hand, and then they run.

#06 – Gentle
The virus strikes them fast, and it strikes them hard; Molly (already so weak) withers first, fades away into the twilight as Mohinder studies her blood through a lens (watches cells turn on cells and molecular structures crumble from within), and then the rest of them succumb; the world blurs and twists, and clear thoughts turn hazy like steam clinging to a pane of glass – only Claire stands firm, healing herself from the core again and again, body resisting the disease no matter how much she wants to surrender to it – and on the twelfth day Mohinder finds himself in the arms of a young woman, looking up at a face he thinks he should know but doesn't (not anymore), and then he's falling, fingertips on his forehead and gentle kiss on his lips and pleas echoing in his ears doing nothing to stop his descent.

#20 – Picture
Nothing is safe any more, and nothing is sure; they're hiding, in the suburbs of a small town this time, and Mohinder takes a picture of Claire standing in front of one of the house's bay widows, hair shining like spun gold and hand gently resting on her growing stomach; he slips the photograph into an envelope and scrawls a name and address on the front; drops it into a mailbox and imagines his mother opening it half a world away and simply knowing.