13
Tonight, We Dine In Hell
March 7, 2006 - 8 days until 'Patient Zero' is discovered
"I don't know what you're up to, Angela, but you need to stop," Claire hissed into the receiver of her cell phone.
"Claire, I can assure you that I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Sending Peter to give Gabriel a gold plated watch to fix? Really?"
"You know that was all Arthur's doing. And you should be more appreciative. Having a friend like Bob Bishop can be advantageous."
"You actually thought that I would appreciate that? Do you have any idea how close I came to having Peter see me there?"
"Gabriel Gray will have a lot of traveling to do in the future and it's quite difficult to manage something like that on a watchmaker's salary. As for Peter, I had already seen the interaction and knew that it would work out exactly as it was supposed to."
"Claire, hand me the screwdriver," Noah grunted. She glanced around the hall for any potential witnesses before passing the requested tool to her father.
"What do you mean he's going to be traveling?"
"That isn't important right now. I can assure you that everything will be the way it is meant to be though. And Claire? Be careful not to bleed on the carpet when you break the door knob."
"Door knob, what?" The line went dead. "She hung up on me. I can't believe she just hung up on me like that."
"We're in," Noah announced, rising to his feet and pocketing the screwdriver after finishing picking the lock to Chandra Suresh's apartment. Claire snapped her cell phone shut and stepped inside with her father directly after her, taking care to shut the door quietly behind them. Boxes still littered the corners of the dingy little space from moving and papers were strewn about chaotically on every available surface. A large map of the United States had been tacked to the wall with a few sparse pictures and lengths of yarn attached to it.
"He's already started looking for them," Claire whispered darkly.
"I'm not sure that's a bad thing, Claire Bear. If we can manage to get his attention off of Gray then he'll have someone else to focus on. What all are we looking for here?" She moved over to the map, running her fingers over the colorful strings and observing the few profile pictures that had been collected so far. Locating a somewhat fuzzy photo of Gabriel taken from a distance in the area of New York state, she ripped it from the map and removed the tack that had held it in place as though it had never existed there.
"Contact information. Phone numbers, addresses, ability research. Anything that might lead him back to Gabriel."
Noah tossed through the papers on Suresh's worn desk and thumbed through his appointment book while Claire ripped out pages of a notebook she had found in a box and flipped through the files on a small lap top. "Dad, look at this," she called him over.
"Huh," he mumbled, leaning over her shoulder to scroll down through an indexed catalogue of names for potential abilities. "That could be very useful for the Company."
"Dad, no." Noah gave her a cross look. "Claire, you work for the Company now. This isn't the kind of information you can withhold from them."
"No. I'm not going to let all these people be rounded up for 'bagging and tagging' or to be experimented on."
"Claire," he warned in his most fatherly voice.
"No," she insisted again.
"They'll be found out eventually anyways."
"That's eventually. In the mean time they're just people. People like me," she enunciated clearly to get her point across. "If my name was on this list would you just hand it over?"
"Of course not." Bennet sighed and relented. "I guess I'll have to get René to wipe my memory of this. If one of the telepaths found out that I knew about it and didn't say anything..." Claire nodded in understanding. The memory of having to watch the Haitian shoot her father for protecting her from the Company was still a little too fresh.
"I can't delete his name out of here." A cell phone rang out noisily and they both instantly reached for theirs to quiet the call.
"René?" Noah answered his. "We're almost done here... Alright. Thanks for the notice." He hung up and turned a worried look to the computer. "We don't have time for this. Suresh is on his way back now."
"I have to get his name out of here!"
"Claire, we don' t have time."
"Wait," she cried out. "Give the screwdriver." The tool was slightly too big for her required task, hindering her work, but one by one the fixtures on the bottom of the lap top fell to the side of the desk. Noah tapped his foot impatiently, glancing down at his watch where their time was running short. Claire yanked out the computer's hard drive causing the screen to flicker once and then shut down completely so that the information could not be retrieved again and held it up for him to see. "The system is on this! We'll just take the whole thing and destroy it later." The duo dashed for the door and Claire dropped the drive. In her haste to pick it back up, she lost her footing and slammed the top of her head on the bottom of the door knob hard enough to bend the metal.
"Are you alright?" Noah asked with knitted brows, watching in a bit of dazed awe as the wound almost instantly closed and flushed out into new pink skin.
"Fine. Go! I can't bleed on the carpet," she ordered, palming the side of her face where a stream of bright red blood had already stopped flowing from the gash. They managed to escape into the hall of the apartment complex just in time to hide out in a janitorial closet before Chandra strolled down the path to his doorway.
"Darn this lock," they could hear the geneticist cursing on the other side of the door.
"That was a close one," Noah mumbled under his breath, handing his daughter a handkerchief to clean the side of her face with.
"Too close," Claire quietly agreed as she wiped away the sticky residue of her blood. "We should get going. I think it's clear now." She popped her head out of the closet door to take a look and stepped out, signaling that the coast was indeed clear. "We've only got about an hour before we're supposed to meet Gabriel and I should probably get a shower in first."
"I hope this guy is worth all the trouble, Claire."
She didn't even pause to think about it. Claire turned quietly to look her father in the eye. "He is."
"I hope I wasn't supposed to bring anything," Noah grumbled, working to straighten his tie.
"Dad," she whined, automatically moving her hands to calm his fidgeting the same way she would for Gabriel. "He just wants to meet you. It's not a big deal. So don't embarrass me," she added with a pointed finger.
"All the hoops we're jumping through, you'd think this was a real relationship." Something in her eyes had him quirking a suspicious brow. "This is just work, right Claire Bear? There's a reason why we're not supposed to get too close."
"Hello." Gabriel answered the door with a nervous smile the second Claire audibly knocked, thankfully interrupting her from addressing her father's inquiry.
"Dad, this is Gabriel Gray. Gabriel, this is my father, Noah Bennet."
"It's really nice to finally meet you, Mr. Bennet," Gabriel rushed, excitedly extending his hand for a shake that Noah executed without hesitation.
"Likewise."
"Please, come in. Come in." So this is what he must have felt like when I met Virginia, Claire thought to herself as Gabriel graciously took their coats and offered drinks, carefully watching their reactions to one another.
"I'll just have coffee. Decaf, please," Noah said, taking a seat at the table.
"Gabriel?" Claire automatically flinched at the voice that came from somewhere at the back of the apartment. Speak of the devil…
"Oh the company is here!" Virginia came flitting into the kitchen, bringing the astringent scent of bleach with her to assault their noses and a moony grin plastered to her lips.
"Mother, this is Noah Bennet, Claire's father," Gabriel began introducing them all over again. "And this is Virginia Gray, my mother."
"How do you do?" she smiled after Noah, extending a weathered hand in greeting.
"Quite well," he returned with a modest shake and a sideways glance for his daughter who was just as surprised about the other woman's appearance as he was. Everyone politely ignored the antibacterial bottle that was brought out of her pocket to purge her hands with after making contact with another person.
"We didn't know she was going to be here," Claire whispered under her breath, attempting to restrain the disdain in her tone as she assisted Gabriel with getting everyone a refreshment.
"The apartment was a mess. I couldn't get rid of her," he sullenly apologized. "But with it being your father's last night in town, I thought that maybe it wouldn't hurt anything to have everyone get acquainted. Besides, we don't exactly get company that often. Look how happy she is." He cast an amused half-smile towards their parents, Noah nodding stiffly and sipping at his coffee while Virginia animatedly chatted away. A small stab of guilt struck her. Seeing his mother happy was something that made Gabriel happy as well and she couldn't deny him that.
"Claire tells me that you're the man with the plan at the Company," Gabriel stated cheerfully, taking a seat next to his mother at the table so that they could all join in the conversation. Noah, being an experienced agent of nearly twenty years never faltered in his part, smoothly laughing the modest compliment away, but Claire didn't miss his rather pointed look in her direction.
"He was the inspiration behind me joining Primatech Paper," she added with an underhanded insinuation.
"Well you know, it's not just paper that we're selling," Noah became deadly serious. "It's government paper." Gabriel swallowed thickly when he shot a sharp look in his direction.
After dinner Claire and Gabriel remained in the kitchen to clean up the dishes while Noah and Virginia retired into the living room to hold a private contest over which parent could brag about their child more. "My Gabriel tests at genius levels," Virginia arrogantly boasted.
"Really? That is impressive. Claire Bear was crowned Homecoming Queen," Noah smirked with a subtle roll of his eyes. And she's probably not going to turn into a psychopathic murderer, she could just imagine him thinking.
"Well, this hasn't been awkward or anything."
"It could be worse," Gabriel grinned, leaning in. "It could be a Sunday night dancing lesson." His low voice was velvet seduction in her ears, awarding him a not-so-brief kiss. "Do you think they would miss us if we disappeared for a few minutes?"
"Doubt it," Claire sighed.
"My Gabriel is a very special boy. He's going to be somebody of real importance someday."
"Claire is already special and important to everybody that knows her."
"He's right you know," Gabriel noted, pulling back from listening in on the other conversation. He combed his fingers through her hair, bringing them to rest on the sides of her jaw so that he could tilt her face up to look at him. "You are special." Kiss. "And important." Kiss. "Especially to me." She couldn't stop the smile from spreading across her face if she had wanted to.
"You're special to me too."
Gabriel pulled her into his arms, content to just be there, existing with her head resting against his chest and the smell of her hair lingering in his nose. "I want to show you something."
A few minutes of him leading her by the hand later, they stepped through a small maintenance hatch out onto the roof of the apartment complex. "I've never taken anyone up here before. This is completely against all the rules. And maybe a little illegal, I'm not sure," he smiled mischievously.
"Look at you, breaking all the rules and being a bad boy," she flirted back.
"It does make it a little more exciting, doesn't it?" He lead her out to the barrier wall around the edge of the roof. What seemed like an endless sea of winking lights sprawled out before them creating a brilliant orange ambience from the city below. "This is where I like to go to think," he whispered, happily basking in her silent appreciation of his secret place more than the actual view. "It's kind of powerful in a way. To be able to look down on the people out there, moving through their ordinary lives one day at a time."
"I always liked getting that feeling flying. There's nothing like the wind in your hair and the moonlight on your face like freedom. And then it hits you," Claire sighed.
"What does?"
"Being different. Being able to see the world the way nobody else can because no matter how hard you try you'll always be different from them. Isolated."
"You don't have to be." Their eyes met with a thousand complexities of unspoken questions for haunting answers and half-understandings. "Isolated," Gabriel explained, lacing the fingers of his hand with hers. "I know that feeling. To be different from everyone around you even though you're not sure why. Like you're meant for something more. Something big. I can feel it in my bones like it's calling out to me, especially when I'm with you." He chuckled darkly at the absurdity of the thought. "All of my life I've wanted to be someone else. Somewhere else. Living another life with another family. Anything but insignificant Gabriel Gray, the invisible watchmaker from Queens."
"You've never been invisible to me."
"And you never have to be alone, Claire." He started to say something else, but it didn't seem important when compared to the feeling of her curling up in his arms. Before they knew it, a comforting sway and joined hands had become a slowly revolving dance for two under overcast stars and the beat of a heart as unique as their own.
"My Gabriel is going to be President of the United States someday." Claire could have sworn that she heard Noah slip up and mutter something about "not if I can help it".
"Mom," Gabriel grumbled in a vain attempt to rein in her fantasies. They had immediately sensed the tension building between their parents upon reentering the living space and set to diffuse the situation before a full-blown argument could break out. The couple both lead their respective parents aside mouthing "sorry" to one another.
"That woman is… infuriating," Noah seethed. All traces of the smooth Company man had evaporated after less than twenty minutes alone with Virginia Gray.
"Yeah," Claire agreed with a smirking smile. "Think about how poor Gabriel feels. He's been dealing with that alone on a daily basis for the last twenty-plus years."
"I think I understand why he went insane and started killing people." She couldn't help it. The laughter came from a deep, dark place within and bubbled out over her lips before she could even hope to hold it back. It wasn't really a humorous thought, but at the same time it was. After a cross look and a reproachful glare Noah began cracking up beside her as well and all of the anxiety melted away.
"Everyone deserves a second chance, Claire Bear. I understand that now." Perhaps it wasn't exactly the blessing she had secretly hoped for, but for Noah Bennet to admit that he understood at least one of the reasons why she wanted to save Gabriel… That was a step; small, but in the right direction. "I still want you to be careful though when I'm gone. Keep both eyes open and your gun ready."
Thinking back to their earlier conversation on the roof, Claire had to agree. She didn't want to ever have to pull that trigger but her duty to their kind at large was greater than either of them. There was a beast lurking within the potential killer and it was her responsibility to keep it under close lock and key. "I will," she promised.
Noah might have lost his temper with the hair-brained woman that had raised Gabriel, but the agent was still dominate in his personality. He didn't lose a beat when Claire left his side to smooth over the situation with Gabriel and his mother. Extracting the wad of chewing gum that he had secreted away in the space between his gum and cheek, he attached a small camera to the sticky substance and covertly tossed it up onto the top shelf of a bookcase so that it would observe the entire living room and beyond. He wouldn't be able to protect his Claire Bear in person, but he could still keep a weather eye out for his little girl.
"I, uh - I'm really sorry about that, Mr. Bennet," Gabriel apologized profusely. "She can be, um…"
"Difficult," Claire finished for him.
"Yeah."
"I understand perfectly," Noah nodded and waved the concern away. "You should have met my mother-in-law. Now she was -"
"Don't talk about Nanna that way!" Claire chided, lightly smacking him on the arm for his candor towards her grandmother.
When he was ready to leave for his plane, Noah pulled Gabriel aside for a private word. "I know that you know my daughter is a very special young woman."
"Yes, Sir." Gabriel instantly tensed, wary of where the conversation could be going.
"Claire is tough. She has seen and survived things that I don't ever want to imagine for her."
"Yes, Sir." A wealth of information about the future ghosted heavily between them, both men haunted with memories that didn't belong to them. They shared a look for the patiently frustrated blonde on the sofa, wincing as she undoubtedly struggled to hold her tongue against Virginia's abusive onslaught.
"Claire is a survivor, but she can still be hurt." The two men locked gazes. "Don't hurt my little girl." His underlying threat was perfectly clear. Surprisingly however, instead of serving the purpose of intimidation as intended, the sentiment caused Gabriel's defiant temper to flare. His eyes burned into Noah's with equal intensity in a stubborn standoff.
"Dad, are you ready to go? Your plane leaves in an hour."
"Yes, Claire. I believe we're done here."
"Hey." Gabriel grabbed her arm as she was heading out the door. "Do you want me to wait up for you? Tonight?"
She glanced back towards her father heading down the hall and sighed. "It's probably best if I just stay at the hotel tonight."
"You haven't told him yet, have you."
"Have you told Virginia?" Claire tossed his judgment right back at him, crossing her arms over her chest, unmoving. His silence was answer enough. "Didn't think so. I'll see you tomorrow, Gabriel."
"Wait," he grabbed her again, spinning her around into him so that he could wrap his arms around her. "I'll miss you," he whispered into her ear, smoothing her hair away from her face.
"I'll miss you too." Gabriel leaned down, palming either side of her face and placed an earnest kiss on her lips. Claire closed her eyes for the moment, but he kept his wide open and daringly focused on Noah's furious gaze the entire time.
"I just don't understand what kind of person would do such a thing," Chandra complained to the policeman that was taking his theft report over the phone. "Things of value? No, nothing like a television. I'm not sure you understand, Sir. It was my research that was stolen. Yes, that is quite valuable. I don't know to whom. Perhaps a competing institution."
After several minutes of arguing with the officer and repeatedly spelling out his name for their documentation of the incident, Chandra sat down at his desk with a weary sigh. He tipped his steaming cup of tea in the direction of Mohinder, the lizard perched on his bookcase and gave a sullen toast. "Thank goodness I thought to make a spare," he said pulling out an USB flash drive from a drawer in the bottom of his desk where he had kept all of his findings backed up in the event of failure.
To be continued...
Trivia: In the first episode of season 3, "The Second Coming", Mohinder Suresh can be seen struggling to open the door to his apartment where his father Chandra had lived before because of a bent door knob.
In the second episode of season 1, "Don't Look Back", Eden McCain helps Mohinder find a flash drive with his father's research on it that had been hidden in the lizard Mohinder's terrarium.