This is another 'M' rated chapter. However, since this chapter contains information related to the plot line all mature content has been separated out by XXXs.
March 15, 2006 - 0 days until 'Patient Zero' is discovered
"Good morning," Gabriel announced with a peck on her cheek. "Or afternoon as the case may be."
A slow smile spread across Claire's lips. "Morning." She rolled over into him, keeping her eyes closed while he propped himself up on an elbow and stroked her hair.
"We should consider food at some point today."
"Mmm. Who needs food when we can stay here all day? Just doing this." He chuckled quietly, nothing able to remove the grin from his features.
"I wouldn't mind at least indulging in a shower." Lips trailed tender kisses down her neck accompanied by a roving hand guaranteed to awaken her senses. "Maybe you wouldn't mind joining me for one?"
Dreamlike imaginings of hot water pouring down her back while seeking her partner out in the misty atmosphere with slippery soap and a cool tile wall wafted through her mind. Recollections of the sensations he had gifted her with the night before ghosted along her spine to curl in the pit of her stomach. "I could be persuaded." Claire could feel him smiling into their kiss.
"I'm sure." A gasp slipped over her lips to be swallowed by his when a tactical hand began the aforementioned persuasions. And then it was gone. Before she could understand what had happened, Claire opened her eyes to see Gabriel pulling back from her form as though he had been burned.
"What? What's wrong?" She sat upright, pulling a blanket around herself for protection from a bewildered stare that was making her more than a little self-conscious. He sat there for a long moment, opening and closing his mouth repeatedly trying to find his voice in the confusion.
"Claire… um," he rubbed his eyes free of the last vestiges of sleep. "We, um… We did… last night… didn't we?"
"Yeah." The icy hand of dread crept her system as an unpleasant dawning of understanding came over her. Her ability for regeneration would continue to heal any form of damage that her body sustained infinitely. All damage to any part of her body. She was going to betray her own self.
Figures.
"I… um… uh." Gabriel continued to stutter out his confusion for a long moment, shaking his head to clear the misunderstanding. "I know my experiences with women are limited and I've never been with a virgin before but…" His eyebrows contorted so tightly that she thought they would collide and destroy themselves. "Once that's broken isn't it supposed to stay that way?" There was a flicker behind his eyes that she wished she didn't recognize. His pupils dilated, bleeding the color from his chocolate irises until only a cold, shark-like blackness remained. Muscles were contracting on their own, priming the hunter to strike, and the arteries in his neck pulsated with increased blood flow from an accelerating heart rate.
Panic. Don't panic. Stabs of fear flooded her vascular system with adrenaline as she warred with herself internally. Fight or flight sprung up to match the activation of Gabriel's barely contained hunger. Don't scream… No sudden movements, she coached herself, slowly backing away from him and rapidly losing her control when he followed.
He was naturally tracking her eye movements between himself, the door, and any possible escape route to judge where she would flee to, completely unaware of his actions on a conscious level. It was only when her back hit the wall behind her and she knew that she was hopelessly trapped with nowhere to turn that memories of being carved open by the same monster before summoned the slightest of tears to fall over her lashes. Gabriel blinked twice at her, his facial features relaxing from their predatory stations and softening with concern.
"Claire…" Deep seated shame filled the air around him as the hunger's claws retracted. "Claire, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you feel uncomfortable."
He didn't even know he was doing it. He doesn't have any control over it…
Another tear slid down her cheek as an open sob burst forth. Gabriel was hesitant to touch her as she huddled tighter into herself and blankets against the wall. But he couldn't resist the compulsion to comfort her when her shoulders shook with silent cries. Biting his lip he curled up beside her and wound his arms around her, wounded when she flinched at the contact.
"I'm sorry," he whispered into her ear when she refused to look at him. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to scare you like that." His voice was stricken with genuine remorse. "I - I probably just didn't get it all or something."
Claire wiped her eyes and turned to look at him. "It's okay," she croaked. With a tired sigh he palmed her cheek to give her an apologetic kiss.
"I love you, Claire." She couldn't bring herself to say it back at that moment, but she opened up her nest of blankets to allow him inside and snuggled tightly into his body, carefully not reacting when his arms held her closer. The couple remained in their own personal bubble apart from the world until a chorus of growling stomachs stirred a bout of giggles that brought them out of their stupor.
Claire wandered back to her room next door while Gabriel occupied the shower. She made quick work of bathing and running a brush through her hair, anticipating a late lunch and another stretch of highway for the day plan. A not exactly subtle knock sounded at her door while she was in the middle of digging through her bag for clothing. Wrapping her robe more closely around herself, she went to answer the door with a toothbrush still hanging from the corner of her mouth.
The sight that awaited her on the other side of the barrier sent her heart into a fresh round of involuntary spasms. If her body wouldn't have prevented it she was sure that the blood could have frozen solid in her veins. "Dad?"
Noah Bennet and his partner René stood patiently in the afternoon sunshine sharing equally disappointed scowls. Her father nodded to the Haitian to wait by the door before he stepped in. "Where is Gabriel Gray?" She motioned to the room next door and after a clean sweep of the space, conveniently absent of anything belonging to him or signs of his presence, he accepted her answer.
"How did you find us?"
"The Company got a little worried when the tracking sensor that you had stuck to Gray's coat starting running out of the city. A full alert went out thinking that something had gone wrong with the mission and he was rabbiting out of town before he could get caught." Translation: they thought I failed and he killed me. "It took four search crews to find that sensor out by the water treatment facility." She let a smirk tip the corner of her mouth as she turned her back to him and rinsed out the toothpaste.
"You flushed it down the toilet didn't you?"
Maybe… "That doesn't answer the question. How did you find us?"
"Angela called me back in when you were reported missing. You're a smart girl, Claire. Keeping your pattern random so that we couldn't guess where you were going. But I know how you think. You wouldn't risk going north and running into border patrol. And I knew better than to believe you would go anywhere near a place named Virginia after what you've been dealing with for the past month," he chuckled. "That left one direction and lots of photo-recognition software. We just had to wait for a hit. Although I must say I expected you to be gone by now. I didn't think you would be confident enough to stay in one place for so long."
"And now what?"
Noah lost his superior smile at her sour tone. "How far did you think the Company was going to let you get, Claire? Gabriel Gray is a potential murderer. And even if you've somehow managed to keep him from turning into that, Angela still believes that he could be valuable to us."
"As an agent or an experiment?"
"You know that she doesn't make too many people privy to her motives, Claire. We were just given orders to retrieve the both of you, intact, at any cost. Angela wants Gray contained."
"Just following orders." Her knuckles flexed white with her grip on the bathroom counter. "They're really not going to let us go are they?"
"No. They're not."
Claire shook her, disgusted with herself for getting Gabriel tangled up in her mess, especially when he wasn't aware of it. How could she have been so foolish as to believe any kind of work for the Company could have ever been a good idea? Having known him and developed affections for Gabriel she had to blink back a tear and swallow her sob, thinking that he would have been better off had she killed him on the spot as she wanted to in the beginning. Better dead than to have the Company get their hooks in him.
"How long do we have?"
"They're giving you twenty-four hours to return him safely where he belongs. After that they'll be sending agents -"
"Spare me the details." Claire summoned back her steely hard edge that she had earned from years of fleeing government task forces, prying barbs of betrayal from her back, and fending off a half-crazed serial killer. Shoving aside her softness that Gabriel had pulled to the surface, she strengthened her resolve and faced her father as the agent that she was supposed to be. "I'll bring him back home."
"Good."
"But on two conditions."
"Claire…" Something in her armored gaze and no nonsense shift of attitude caused Noah to take a step back. Crossing his arms defiantly, he resigned, "I'm listening."
"I want to keep control of the mission and its objectives."
"You know they're not going to let that happen after you tried to run away with him -"
She stepped up to him, stretching her short stature as high as she could until giving the illusion that she could be staring the man in the eye. "I will maintain control," she commanded with a poke at his chest. "And there will be no Company agents allowed near him. I don't care if he spends his time poking around with watches or ripping skulls open - he is hands off! If a time comes where he becomes a problem, I'll be the one to deal with it. Until then, you can go back to Angela and the Company and tell them to back off because I swear to God that if I so much as think he's being tailed - I will take him. We will disappear. And you will never see or hear from us again. And you know that I'm telling the truth." Her voice was barely more than a harsh whisper by the time her point had been concluded but Noah heard every single word that she had spoken with crystal clarity.
"I can't make any promises, Claire," he scowled down at her, coming out of the shock of being strong-armed by his daughter.
"I'll bring Gabriel home. You just keep the Company off our backs."
Noah grunted in disapproval but turned for the door to leave. Pausing in his exit he sighed heavily. "Before we left, Suresh was trying to contact Brian Davis about his ability. If he's moved on from Gray… You might win just yet, Claire Bear." And then he left, leaving a draft of unbearable worry and fretful distance from hope in his wake.
She was waiting on the bed for him when he came out of the shower, blissfully ignorant of anything that had just occurred. All of his things had been gathered and neatly packed away, and the bedspread smoothed out for ease of housekeeping until the only evidence of their night together that existed was in memory. Gabriel stepped out of the bathroom covered only by a white towel that hung low on his hips, running another towel over damp hair that stuck out randomly. He shot her a beaming smile but it quickly faltered when he took in the situation and her serious expression.
"We have to go back, don't we?"
Claire nodded with downcast eyes. He came to sit on the end of the bed beside her, taking a hand in his. "Is it because of what happened earlier?"
"No," she smiled sadly. "It's not your fault. We just have…"
"Responsibilities?"
"I'm sorry, Gabriel. I really wanted this to work out."
He tilted her chin up to look him in the eyes. "I don't care where we are. Not as long as you're there." Each word was punctuated with a kiss that could steal her breath away.
The open road stretched out before them in a seemingly endless snake of black top. Claire drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, leaning despondently on her elbow against the window ledge. Gabriel listlessly flipped through the static of radio stations. "Claire, have you seen my black hoodie? I thought I left it in the backseat but I can't find it."
That's because I borrowed it to commit a felony in and then left it in a dumpster next to someone's leftover egg rolls. "Nope. Sorry."
Sunlight beat through the windows, warming her skin and sweeping her away into daydreams about far off lands where things like the Company didn't exist. A place and time where they could be allowed to live out their lives in peace. Or at least his… Claire took her eyes from the road to glance over at Gabriel. He was slouched back in his seat from dire boredom with his feet propped up on the dash and his forehead pressed against the window, chewing on a thumb nail.
He deserves a quiet life. He deserves someone that can actually give him a quiet life and not one full of being hunted down or in danger all the time. Someone that doesn't have to lie to him to protect him. Or who's crazy whacked out family won't try to manipulate him into being something that he's not.
Someone that can get old with him.
Claire pulled off the side of the rode and brought the car to a stop behind a billboard advertising the next nearest gas station and motel. Gabriel quirked a questioning brow at her when she shut off the engine and allowed her forehead to drop on the steering wheel, less than an inch from confessing the whole truth of her life to him. "Feelings are intense. Words are trivial," broke through the static of the radio. "Pleasures remain. So does the pain. Words are meaningless and forgettable."
She gave her traveling companion a long lingering gaze of appraisal. He returned in kind a look that communicated questions for her sanity when she began to laugh quietly at something in the song.
"All I ever wanted, all I ever needed, is here in my arms. Words are very unnecessary. They can only do harm."
Screw it. Screw it all.
XXX
Claire shifted in her seat to climb into Gabriel's, perching on his lap. Ignoring his questions she gave in to the moment's desire. She crushed her lips to his, lacing her fingers through his hair until he was too breathless to protest. "Pants," she commanded, dropping down to his neck.
She detached herself from him long enough to unbutton her blouse, giving his hands access to roam freely. But she needed more. Claire ripped open Gabriel's shirt in search of skin. She needed the contact, was desperate for the comfort in touch. He was entirely confused about what was happening, but most certainly aroused and unwilling to argue.
"Please, Gabriel," she begged. "Please." Claire popped the button and dropped his zipper, Gabriel taking over to pull his jeans down to his knees. His hands moved over her thighs and up her skirt, rounding over her bottom.
"Claire," he whispered her name, feeling her readiness for him. He hooked his thumbs around the sides of her panties to pull them down.
She threw her arms around his neck, pressing their bare chests together as she rubbed against him until he slipped inside of her. "I love you." Gabriel grabbed hold of her hips and pushed her all the way down onto him, giving off another full length shiver when her body attempted to repair itself around him. Claire seized his hands and pressed them together above his head, claiming his mouth while she chose her own rhythm. He bit into his bottom lip viciously watching her glide over him. Her pace was quiet, but unrelenting, edging to the brink much faster than she wanted.
Claire released his hands in favor of being able to touch him, coming to stop. "I don't want it to be over with yet." Gabriel stared up at her in awe, palming her back gingerly. "I don't want it to be over."
"Marry me."
He was in the middle of watching her fall to pieces, trembling all around him, but the look in his eyes was only of love. Only for her. He was seeing her at her worst and he still wanted her. Claire stroked his stubbled cheeks tenderly, not sure how to process the depths of emotion being reflected back at her. "I know that I don't have much. But I can work harder. I can be more. Marry me, Claire."
She pressed her lips to his, locking her arms around his neck to hug him closer. His arms wrapped around her like iron bands, dropping his head into the crook of her neck with a groan in response to her picking up movement again. She threaded her fingers in his hair, holding him, a single tear slipping down her cheek for the strip of dusty highway before them and all the uncertainty that lay at the end.
XXX
To be continued...