This chaos, this calamity/
This garden once was perfect/
Give your immortality to me/
I'll set you up against the stars/

Claire and Peter were sitting side-by-side on the couch, watching the door with such intensity that Peter was mildly afraid they might light it on fire—after all, they still didn't know all the abilities he'd acquired from Sylar; door ignition could very well be one of them.

"Remember, the instant the doorbell rings, you go into the bedroom," he reminded her compulsively.

"I know," she said with a small, tense smile. "You've told me twice already."

"Sorry," he apologized. "I'm just…nervous."

They had been up since six in the morning, both having slept fitfully with the prospect of meeting Thompson the next day. They'd tried to pretend they felt fine, glossing over their stress with a fragile veneer of forced cheerfulness; Claire had even attempted to make them pancakes, but that had ended in disaster, Peter eventually having to extinguish a small fire with his freezing ability. They had laughed about it and ordered room service, but as they day went on, their laughs had gotten more and more strained, their nerves thinned to nothing from the interminable wait. Finally, a half an hour before Thompson had said he would come, they'd given in and sat down to wait in front of the door, tension humming and crackling like static in the air.

"And you know how to use the tranquilizer?" he couldn't help asking.

"Yes, Peter," she sighed, raising the gun. "I just pull the trigger, it's not hard."

"I know," he admitted. "Sorry."

"It's okay," she soothed, giving him a quick hug. "We've got this. Everything is going to go fine."

"I hope so," he said, running a hand fretfully through his hair.

Suddenly, the nasty flat two-tone of the doorbell slammed into the silence, shattering it into a thousand pieces. Peter and Claire leapt up and sprinted in opposite directions, promptly ran into each other, and untangled themselves as quickly and silently as they could, hoping that Thompson wasn't listening terribly hard. Claire saw Peter shifting into the form of Candice as she went into the bedroom, waving a hand at her frantically as he prepared to open the door. She closed herself into the room and crossed her fingers for luck.

Peter opened the door in a calculatedly casual manner, forcing himself to be coolly analytical as he came face-to-face with Thompson for the first time. He took a mental picture—he'd had a much easier time remembering things lately, he wasn't sure why—for later reference, for the time when he would have to give a world-class representation of this man. He was slightly older but solid-looking, craggy and classical with black-to-gray hair in shades and patches. He looked entirely self-aware and mildly suspicious, eyebrows slightly raised in a seemingly permanent skepticism. Peter studied his unsmiling, incisive eyes and slashed line of a mouth, wondering if he could ever possibly imitate this man, who seemed to look straight through to faults, seeing in layers of deception.

"Thompson, hey," he said as he wrapped up his examination. "You're early. Is something wrong, or did you just miss me too much to wait?" He was pleased to find himself authentically echoing Candice's insolent tones, functioning on autopilot while he waited for his brain to kick into gear.

"Less traffic than I thought there would be," Thompson said succinctly, stepping inside. "It must be the rain."

"Oh, is it raining? I guess I wouldn't know, seeing as I haven't seen the outside of this room in five days."

Thompson sighed, looking patiently unfazed at the comment—Peter figured he was used to Candice's snarky self-absorption, if he'd worked with her at all. He'd taken a bit of a risk, talking to her superior like this, but it had been an educated guess—if there was anything he admired about Candice, it was that she was afraid of absolutely no one.

"I'm sorry, Candice," he said, not sounding sorry at all. "I know this is a criminal waste of your talents, but I assure you that these men are pivotal to what we're doing."

"Right. Pivotal."

"Which is why I was so concerned when you told me what had been going on with the younger one. Explain fully what's been happening, please, I don't think I got it fully on the phone." He strode into the room with careless command, mapping it with his eyes before he sat down.

"Sure thing," Peter said, swinging the door closed behind him. "Do you want a cup of coffee? I've got some in the kitchen."

Thompson sliced an odd look at him. "You know I don't drink coffee," he said.

Peter winced inwardly. Strike one. "No, but you should," he covered as composedly as he knew how. "You need a harmless vice, Thompson. You know, something besides kidnapping and killing people." Peter couldn't help that dig—in Candice's voice, it could go unnoticed, checking out with her natural obnoxiousness. Thompson looked at him again, that in-control inscrutable look that made Peter worry for their plan. "Okay, fine—business. So, yesterday, around two o'clock I start hearing all this noise in Peter's room. I go in there to see what's going on, and the kid is literally on the floor, shaking like an epileptic, eyes rolled back in his head and everything."

"Interesting," Thompson said.

"Whatever. Doesn't make my job any easier. Anyway, it stopped after a while, but it's happened three more times since then. I don't know much about empaths—they were always a little too touchy-feely for me—but I think he might be overloading. The control collar is probably piling it all up inside of him, stopping it up like a dam, you know? I'm hoping he'll explode, or something."

"Be careful what you ask for, Candice," Thompson said. He knows, Peter realized, he knows about the bomb. "Where is Mr. Petrelli now?" he asked authoritatively, standing up.

"In the other room," Peter lied, getting to his feet as well in order to guide Thompson through this crucial phase of their plan. "But really, enough about me—how's it going in Texas? Everything sorted out okay?"

"Not hardly. We still haven't tracked down Bennet—he seems to have vanished into thin air. The other one, Parkman, we've located—he ran straight back to his house in California, no sense of undercover at all. We'll send someone for him soon, but for now our priority is getting Primatech functional again." He turned to walk into the second room, and Peter thought now, now, now furiously to Claire, straining to hear the sound of her door opening.

There was an angry hiss of release, and then something shot past Peter to bury itself in Thompson's back. The man gave a small cry of surprise and dropped, forcing Peter to jump back several feet as he fell to the carpet. He stared up at Peter, surprise changing to terrible realization as his form ripped and rippled back to normal.

"You," he said accusingly, speech slurring as the tranquilizer drained into his system. "Clever bastard."

And then he was out.