Disclaimer: If you recognise it, I don't own it.
Claire can't concentrate in school. The cheerleaders laugh when they pass her, but she doesn't care right now. West doesn't talk to her at all. She wouldn't have noticed, but when she catches him staring at her she realises, with a sick jolt, that he looks kind of like Peter. Dark eyes, and hair that falls into them sometimes in a way that Peter's doesn't anymore. He looks more like a Petrelli than she does.
When Claire gets home she slips into the office. Peter's lying down on the couch, reading – Activating Evolution. She didn't think they had a copy.
"I know," he says, looking up at her. "You can't tell me anything about it."
"Right."
Her parents are talking to each other in the kitchen and Lyle's upstairs. The only problem is, she doesn't know how to start. She laces her fingers together, twisting them. "Peter. About last night. I'm – I'm really sorry."
"What? Why?" He sits up, and lays the book aside.
"Because when you get your memory back you're going to hate me for it. Just trust me."
"I do trust you."
It doesn't mean that he believes her. It means something else, something that's got nothing to do with the words he said and everything to do with the way he looks at her. It makes her face hot. It sinks her stomach and turns her throat into butterflies. It drives her out of the room, because someday he's going to hate her for making him look at her like this.
Claire changes the sheets in her room, taking the dirty ones into the laundry and washing them herself, which isn't quite as extreme as burning them but is easier for her to do while maintaining the pretence that everything's normal.
But because it's so not normal, after dinner she finds herself calling Nathan's cell.
"Hello?" Pause. "Is this you again?" Shorter pause. "I told you to stop calling."
She hangs up without saying anything, and when she turns around Peter's in the doorway.
"You call someone just to hang up?"
Claire sits down on her bed, hurriedly wiping away the tears. "I guess I just wanted to hear his voice," she says quietly.
"Whose voice?" Peter demands, his expression darkening.
It takes a second for her to realise that he's not mad because she won't tell him about his brother, that he couldn't be mad about that because he doesn't even know he has a brother. He's jealous.
Of Nathan.
It'd be funny, if – well, if a lot of things. If they weren't, say, or if they hadn't. "He's a friend of mine. Sort of."
"Sort of?"
Claire doesn't know what to say.
After a long silence, Peter leaves.