Snow won't stick to the weeping willows/
Summer was painted on our skin/
And those secrets hidden in our childish lips/
They would die for a kiss/

"I've heard you two have been very clever," Claude said, looking down on Peter and Katie like a particularly crabby sort of schoolteacher.

"Oh, we have," Peter said. "You should definitely give us gold stars."

"I'll be the decider of that. I'm finding it difficult to believe that you could do anything worthy of even half a star. Show me," he commanded.

His students exchanged surreptitious, unsure looks, and then began staring down at their hands like they'd just seen them for the first time, watching them intensely until they began to glint with faint subtle shielding. Katie held her hand up triumphantly for Claude's scrutiny, proudly watching her fingers flash gunmetal-blue under the lights. He took her wrist and pulled it toward him, inspecting her skin with an air of skepticism. "You're sure this works?"

"Absolutely positive," Katie assured him. "Peter practically danced a tango with Ted Sprague and there was no apocalypse whatsoever—not even a small one."

"Hmm," he said. "I suppose you think this puts you out of danger, then?"

"Well, yeah," Peter said unconcernedly.

"You know why you think that? Because you're an idiot."

"Aren't you sweet," Peter said, nearly immune to Claude's verbal assaults by now, just barely able to feel the sting of his sarcasm. I wonder what that means about me. Had he become less sensitive? He'd never been exactly thrilled about being a walking target, heart bleeding all over his sleeve; on the other hand, he'd always loved the way he could relate to people in an instant, make them feel comfortable and make them smile. He didn't want to lose that. He liked people—even Claude, most of the time.

"No," Claude said. "I'm not, and it's a good thing for you. The reason you two aren't dead right now is because you are very, very lucky. Ted Sprague is still alive, thanks to your bad aim, and I'm betting you've used up all your luck, so it's about time you actually fixed your problems. You," he said, pointing to Katie, "can incorporate abilities and blend them into yourself like they're nothing, but you can't hold under pressure. You," he said, turning his attention to Peter, "have great reaction, can take anything and keep going, but when it comes to keeping control of abilities you're a bloody mess. Now, I wish we could look at this as a cute little Jack Sprat partnership, but we can't. If either of you falls apart for so much as an instant, it's goodbye New York."

"So what do we do?" Katie asked in a small voice.

"You're both empaths," Claude said. "Two empaths in the same place at the same time, it's practically a miracle, and it's not likely to happen again—I think you'd better start acting like a team."

Without thinking, Katie reached out and took Peter's hand, lacing her fingers through his. "We can do that," she said firmly.

Claude stared at their intertwined hands for a long moment, suddenly making them both incredibly aware of touching each other. Peter's mind went into convulsions, fighting a swift violent civil war over whether he should pull away from her. The outcome was surprisingly quick and clean—he wanted to hold her hand, so he did. If he simply didn't allow himself to think it past that level, he seemed to be able to cope. He met Claude's eyes with the defiant expression he'd invented solely for this man, the "don't tell me what I have to do" expression, the "people I love are not distractions" expression. Claude gave an infinitesimal shrug and bulldozed onward, running over top of the potential drama with unusual discretion.

"Here's what we're going to do. I need you two to learn to mesh with each other, to overlap your abilities and plug each other's holes. This will work great with shielding, what with it being all pretty blue sparkles," he said sardonically. "But we need to work on your individual problems as well, Peter's control and Katie's durability."

"Let me guess," Peter said. "It has something to do with hitting me really hard."

"I'm definitely leaning that way," Claude said testily. "I'm feeling particularly like hitting you today."

"Wait a second," Katie said. "I have a better idea." They broke from their half-serious sparring to bring their attention to her, Peter interested and relieved, Claude automatically disbelieving. "Meditation."

"Meditation," Claude said flatly.

"Yes," she said firmly. "Meditation. That's how Linderman got me out of my own crazy downspiral, stopped me blowing things up on accident—he taught me this Indian-based meditation technique, I've actually worked on it with Peter a little bit. I don't know if it's going to save the world or anything, but it certainly helped me."

"Right, then," Claude said decisively. "You take Peter for an hour or two, but don't feel like you have to bring him back, we probably won't miss him. I need to go talk to Bennet about something that's just occurred to me—that is, if he hasn't gotten eaten by Sylar yet."

"You still haven't figured out what to do about the collar?" Katie asked curiously.

"Bennet and I were all for shooting him in the head and living with our curiosity, but you damned soft buggers would object, wouldn't you?"

"Stridently," Peter affirmed. "But don't worry—someday we may become so desensitized that we, too, can talk about shooting people in the head with perfectly straight faces."

Claude gave him an odd, snarky smile. "I've really had a bad influence on you, haven't I?"

"Oh yeah," Peter said vehemently.

Katie grabbed Peter by the collar and began dragging him out of the room. "Stop winding him up," she scolded Claude. "I have to get him to relax for the next two hours."

Claude glanced at the expression on Peter's face, the way he stared at Katie like she was something wonderful and miraculous, a goddess or a lover. He raised an eyebrow. "Good luck with that."

---

Of all the people he could have imagined would walk into his room, Jonathan wouldn't have thought it would be Claire—never in a million years, never within a hundred feet. But there she was, outlined against the closed door with her hair falling across her cheek, looking harsh and strange and beautiful.

"Hi," he said, bewildered and suddenly, ambiguously guilty.

"Don't say that," Claire said sharply. "We are not on a 'hi' basis."

He dropped his head into one hand, the mere sight of her like nails being driven into his skull. "Of all the gin joints in all the world," he mumbled.

"What?"

"Nothing," he said immediately, "it's just—"

"Casablanca," she said in an odd tone. "I know."

"Claire," he said, still looking down at his knees, one normal, one swathed in white bandage. "What do you want?"

"I want to know what's going on here," she said. "I want to know where we stand, so I can stop fretting about some kind of awkward scene that may or may not happen."

"Where we stand," Jonathan said slowly.

"Yes," Claire said grittily. "Where do we stand, Jonathan? Why do I feel like I'm breathing water every minute you're in this house, drowning on something I can't see? Why do I feel like some crazy ex-girlfriend, why do I feel like we've broken up when we were never going out in the first place?"

He forced himself to look up at her, then regretted it as her eyes blazed smoldering craters into him. "Come here," he said. She just looked at him, burning him back to essence and painful honesty. "I can't move, I'm chained to the bed. I'm not going to bite you, Claire, just come here." She took a few wary steps forward, fully willing to bolt if he made any sudden movements. "Sit down," he commanded, and she folded to the carpet so that she was inches away from him, tense and mistrustful but several miles nearer than he ever thought she would be again.

Before she could escape, as she surely would have if she knew what he intended, his free hand lashed out and hooked around the back of her neck, pulling her forward into a terribly inevitable kiss. It was short and violent and searing, feeling more like a sudden internal hurricane than a kiss, a mad tangled tearing of emotion bursting through the surface with destructive ferocity. He jerked away from her and she fell back, gasping, flushed to the roots of her hair and the whites of her eyes.

"What the hell was that?" she asked furiously.

"You wanted to know where we stand," he said, trying to steady his madly whirling vision. "That's where we stand, Claire—that's what it's going to be like with me, every second of every minute of every damn day. It's going to be fantastic and exciting and it's going to hurt, it's going to be a jump out of a plane without a parachute, a really fun suicide where we splatter ourselves all over the ground in the end. I'm a jerk, Claire, and I'm all wrong for you."

"What made you think I wanted to be with you?" she said bitingly, irrationally wounded and desperately confused. "I'm sixteen, Jonathan! I'm not in love with you! As a matter of fact, I hate you! I can't stand you at all!"

"Then why are you here?" he asked sharply, and she was silent, wordlessly white and red like a live coal. "You've got your answer, Claire," he told her finally. "Get out of here before you do something you're going to regret."

She looked like she wanted to scream, like she wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, or kick him or kiss him or kill him with her bare hands. Instead, she simply turned away, military-crisp with level square shoulders, and she walked out of the room. She slammed the door behind her.