Title: Bad Things

Genre: Television

Series: Heroes

Characters: Claire Bennet, Peter Petrelli

Spoilers: Volume Four-Fugitives (all)

Rating: R/Mature

Summary: There were some days she got hurt just to see him fix her again.

Prompt: Feel

Word Count: 1351

She couldn't catch her breath, it was always just out of her reach dancing on the edges of her fading vision. Her blood was warm and thick where it slid slowly down her side, soaking the thin cloth of her shirt until she felt claustrophobic in the confines. She could hear Peter moving around the apartment, his long limbs jostling things as he searched for something, but more than that she could hear her own heart echoing dully in her head. Claire smiled through the pain and found herself tapping her nails along the table beneath her, following the beat in her head, the sounds of drums pounding out a primal rhythm.

"Claire?"

He startled her from her thoughts and she lost the rhythm, the pain flooding back into her consciousness. She smiled grimly and could imagine what she looked like. The scrapes had healed minutes ago, but the blood and dirt still stained her face. "Yes, Peter?"

Claire could tell how stressed he was, his face pale and drawn tight over the bones. She didn't like asking him to do this, but there was no one else. He wouldn't let her do it herself and her father was too far away to get here in time. Already her flesh was healing over, a small tight scar forming around the wound. As it was, Peter would have to reopen it anyways.

"Are you ready?" His voice shook just a bit on the words but Claire knew it wasn't the act itself that was rattling him. It was his having to do it to her. Were she a random stranger on the street, someone he didn't love, someone he wasn't supposed to protect, he'd have no problem doing his job and helping them heal. She nodded slowly, making sure to move no muscles in her shoulders or chest lest she stretch one of the muscles in her side and send the bullet deeper into her body than it already was.

Claire realized, not for the first time, that Peter didn't realize how pain affected her. Claire understood that for some pain was something to be avoided, that it shaped their lives with fear and they'd do anything to avoid it. She understood that but she didn't feel that. She still felt pain, the sharp, the dull, the deep, the shallow. She felt them all and she delighted in them. She liked it when her knees trembled and her body shivered, when her body automatically shied away from the source of the ache before she forced it towards it. When agony danced across her skin like ties binding her down and she strained against the binding instinctively. She loved that her body did things she couldn't explain and couldn't stop, like a sleeping creature inside her that awoke only when provoked.

Peter's rough fingertip traced the outside of the small bullet hole in her side and Claire bit her lip to keep from making any untoward sounds. Unwittingly Peter was a participant in a game that Claire had always kept to herself. In the beginning, with the recordings and the various attempts to see if she could die or heal any hurt, she hadn't realized what she was doing, not really. It'd been an experiment and she'd forced her mind to separate from what her body was feeling. Later, the shock of pain became a comfort, something to help focus her mind and thoughts when the world was spinning around her too quickly to grasp.

It was sometime post-Costa Verde, post-West, post-any semblance of a normal life that Claire realized that her body had begun to react to pain differently. It'd started after Sylar had taken her ability to feel pain. Being deprived of the sensation had renewed Claire's interest in it, returning her to a mentality she'd formed when she'd first realized what she could do. Suddenly, the smallest things like papercuts, to the larger things like falling off a cliff, were fodder for Claire's curiosity. It was with the return of the solar eclipse and her brush with death and subsequent return of all sensation that things changed so drastically. All pain was now dulled by pleasure, by a new intimate regard for something she'd missed so desperately.

Claire kept her thoughts about the sudden development in her sexual tastes to herself. She didn't discuss them with her mother, much as she wanted to. Her mother and father already had far too much on their minds. There weren't any other females in her life she could turn to, and she was not discussing her burgeoning sexuality with her biological father or uncle. Not even if said uncle was peripherally involved in that awakening.

She did have thoughts about it, though. Thoughts that had led idle fingers to searching out digital information regarding her unique situation so Claire did know that she wasn't entirely unusual in this aspect. It was the question of 'why' that most percolated in her thoughts. Was the sudden twist to her reception of pain due to a natural evolution of her appetites, or was there an outside influence? Had Sylar, inadvertently, while poking around in her brain changed something? Did his surprising attraction to her have anything to do with it?

Peter used a scalpel to reopen the quickly healing opening in her side and a small trickle of blood thickened on her taste buds as her teeth broke the skin on her inner lip (it healed all but instantly). It reminded her, though, that there was no use in that line of thinking because Sylar was dead. Peter had killed him and saved the world. That made her smile, even with the pain and pleasure warring in her womb and curving her back. Peter made a soft comforting noise and set aside the scalpel to reach for the tweezers. The smooth glide of the cold instrument into her torn flesh caused her small, abused body to jerk violently and Peter used one hand to restrain her. His palm was cool and stable against her stomach as he used his superior strength to keep her from moving. The small trembling of her muscles as they clenched around the tweezers caused erratic sparks of pinching sensations along the path of the bullet. With every centimeter he forced the tweezers further into her body her muscles clenched tighter. Withins seconds she was a tightly wound ball of agony and nirvana. The smallest movement, wind shifting her bangs across her feverish forehead, a shifting of Peter's fingers on her bared stomach, was a vibrant stroke of paint on a blank canvas, a flash of light behind her closed eyes.

Peter swore under his breath as his search for the small projectile continued. Claire could feel the tips of his instrument moving inside her, searching for the bullet, scraping roughly against the bone of her rib. She could almost hear a grating sound vibrating through her body as the metal connected, again and again. Claire tilted her head so that she could see his face from the corner of her eye and fought not to smile again. Most people didn't smile while their uncle tortured them trying to find a stray bullet.

Peter let out a hiss of satisfaction as he finally grasped the small column of metal that was causing all the trouble. The soft tugging on the edges of the track it'd created strummed chords of nerves in parts of Claire that Peter had no business inadvertently accessing. Claire's entire body hummed with energy, bouncing from muscle to muscle until it felt like she could scream from the burn of it. She didn't, though, she kept quiet, biting her lip and tongue to keep the sound from escaping. Her face was sweating and red from the effort and she knew where Peter assumed the intent of her restraint.

Peter mistook the muffled sound for relief of a different sort and it was just as well. If he knew the real reason she kept getting hurt, then he wouldn't play doctor with her anymore, now would he?

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