Love you are foolish/

You're tired/
Your sleeplessness makes you a liar/

Mr. Bennet couldn't help but feel apprehensive about ringing the doorbell of this house. For one thing, the house itself seemed to go out of its way to be imposing, a monster of a socially-impressive penthouse with appropriate pillars and pilasters spread over the front like a line drawing gone berserk. This was not the main source of his concern, however—mostly, he was worried because, out of four members of the family whose house he was about to enter, he'd currently tried to kidnap two of them. Not, to his mind, a recipe for a warm welcome. Grave misgivings notwithstanding, he didn't hesitate to ring the doorbell. His little girl was in there, his Claire, and no amount of Petrellis were going to stop him getting to her.

It wasn't, as he'd hoped, Claire who opened the door. However, it was someone he recognized, Peter Petrelli, and he was glad to see Peter—not because he cared terribly much about him, but because it meant that Candice had been unsuccessful in abducting him. It meant a failure for The Company, and that made him perversely thrilled. Peter gave him a wary half-smile but didn't speak, falling back almost immediately to reveal Claire, looking the way she used to look on Christmas mornings at the sight of him.

He rushed forward immediately and folded her into his arms, hugging her tighter and tighter until there was no chance anyone could ever take her from him again, holding her away from the rest of the world. She hid her face in his shoulder, but he could tell by the way she shook that she was crying, so he kissed her on the top of her head and shushed her like he had when she was seven and had come to him to fix her skinned knees. All of his doubts and regrets and second guesses fell away, melted to nothing by the reality of holding her. She was worth it, worth his job and his tears, even worth his life, and he knew that he would do anything, kill anyone that ever tried to come between them again.

There was an acutely uncomfortable silence from Peter as he tried to politely ignore the teary reunion. "Do, um, do you want to come in?" he asked finally, moving back to make space for them to come into the entryway.

At that, they pulled apart at last, but Mr. Bennet kept an arm around Claire's shoulders as he turned. Angela and Nathan, drawn by the noise, had joined them, though Nathan was looking rather like he wanted to fly away from Mr. Bennet again.

"I hope you don't mind my intruding your home," he said graciously. "I know that we haven't always been on the same side, and that there are things I've done that have hurt your family, things that I need to apologize for. I did and still do think that these things were in the best interest of us all, but I'm sorry if they caused you undue pain. I'm very grateful for the way you've protected my little girl, and I want you to know that I'll try to repay you for that in whatever way I can."

Claire, snuggled at his side, thought it sounded strange—her dad making speeches—but she couldn't help but feel that everything would be fine. She loved her dad and she loved Peter and Nathan—how could they not like each other?

It occurred to her with the out-of-nowhere suddenness of a prairie thunderstorm that she now had two fathers. The startling thought broke over her consciousness and poured out an alarming shower of new possibilities—it was all right to have a dad and a stepdad, a father she knew and a father she disliked, but how could she reconcile two fathers that she wanted to love equally? Which had greater claim on her life? How could she possibly share herself between them?

Claude materialized out of the open air of the entryway, but Claire didn't flinch. It had been startling at first, to have an invisible man in the house, prone to appear anywhere at the most unfortunate of moments, but she'd since gotten used to it. Her father, however, tensed noticeably, jerking backwards with an expression on his face she didn't recognize.

"Claude," he said, a simple word of emotionless acknowledgement.

"Bennet," he responded, and for a moment there was such a charge of indefinable intensity between them that everyone in the room was caught up in it, straight-riveted, unable to breathe. Then: "Looks like you're a better man than they thought you were, after all."

There was a collective sigh of relief as the pressure drained out of the room, confrontation defused seconds before the bomb went off. "That means a lot," Mr. Bennet admitted honestly. "At least, coming from you."

"I still don't forgive you for shooting me," Claude added, but it was too late to do any harm—words had gone back to being just words, instead of viral weapons.

"Fair enough."

"Hey," Peter broke in, feeling that it was now safe to help smooth out the frazzled relationships, "me and Claire were playing Twister in the library—maybe we should all go in there, we have a lot to talk about."

Everyone agreed, and followed Angela's lead down the narrow hallway like a third-grade class in single file, like ducklings after their mother. They entered the library (which Claire had always privately thought looked like the library from "Beauty and the Beast", huge and fairytale-intellectual) and scattered themselves sporadically on the red plush furniture. To the surprise of those who didn't know them well, Peter and Claire went straight back to their game of Twister, kicking their shoes off and handing the spinner to Mr. Bennet, who took it with an air of fatherly resignation. His eyes met Nathan's over their heads, and they both became suddenly aware of a connection of twin spirits, a reuniting of figures poured from the same mold.

Nathan nodded slightly—nearly imperceptibly—in recognition, straightening his tie. Mr. Bennet lifted his chin in response, and then obediently flicked the arrow of the spinner. "Right foot red," he called, then addressed himself to the rest of the group. "The first and most serious problem I see is that our friend Peter seems likely to blow up New York City. Thought, anyone? Suggestions?"

"The kid and I were making good progress before you came along and scared the living daylights out of me," Claude told him, leaning his chair back on two legs. "I'd lay odds he can throttle it down, still."

"How was your organization planning to deal with him?" Nathan asked shrewdly.

"Left hand blue. I'll admit, our intentions weren't terribly philanthropic. Oh, we wouldn't have wanted him exploding any major metropolises, to be sure, but our main interest was in learning about his abilities. Vivisection wouldn't have been out of the question." Peter made a choked sound and fell out of his Twister pose, but Mr. Bennet didn't seem to notice. "Certainly, we would have killed him if he seemed to be too far out of our control. Our power inhibitors are by no means flawless."

"Right," Nathan said quickly. "Obviously not the solution we're looking for."

"I should warn you," Mr. Bennet said, "The Company is sending an agent after you and your brother."

"Thanks," Nathan said, grinning humorlessly. "We've taken care of it."

At Mr. Bennet's confused look, Angela cast her eyes up at the ceiling and explained. "Candice, I think her name is? She in the spare bedroom upstairs."

Mr. Bennet rubbed his jaw, impressed in spite of himself. "Well, that throws a wrench in things. Thompson will be expecting her call. Left foot yellow."

"And as far as he knows, he got it," Peter said, twisting himself to get his foot on the appropriate yellow dot.

Mr. Bennet connected the cryptic dots far faster than they expected, nodding thoughtfully. "Yes, you're an empath, aren't you?"

"Useful little bugger, isn't he?" Claude remarked from the other side of the room. "I made him myself."

"You seem to be a bit of a magnet for them, really."

Perking with interest, Peter accidentally elbowed Claire in the ribs, who yelled in protest and shoved him back. "Don't give me that. It's not like you can get hurt," he said to her, then turned to the more important matter. "There are other empaths? Who are they? How do they control their powers? Did any of them explode?"

"There was only one other we met—Claude was the one who found her, actually, he could probably tell you more than me," Mr. Bennet clarified. "Her name was Katie, and she was a handful."

"A lot like you, as a matter of fact," Claude said, bringing his chair back to all four legs. "It must come with the territory. Anyway, she was as screwed up as you are, abilities going off everywhere, causing all sorts of trouble. Finally, she got sent up to Linderman himself, and apparently she learned to control her powers. The explosions stopped."

"So what happened to her?" Peter asked, frozen in his last pose, game quite forgotten.

Claude shrugged. "Haven't a clue. We lost track of her after a while, and her file went up to Vegas when she did. I know she died a while back, but that doesn' t necessarily mean anything--we've got a dangerous line of work. Point is, we don't really know what finally put her on track."

There was a complicated, substantial silence as they all moved along various routes toward the same conclusion. Predictably, Nathan was the one to voice it. "You know what we need, don't you?" he asked. "We need that file."