Disclaimer: If you recognise it, I don't own it.
AN: I'll reply to reviews next time; sorry, but I'm too tired tonight. In this chapter: more angst and more dreams, hope you enjoy it.
8
When he gets over the shock, the first thing Peter feels is – anger. He sits down on the couch, heavily, and clasps his hands in front of him.
His knuckles are white. A small voice somewhere deep within him reacts to the anger with panic, like someone else shouting at him from a long way away, but he focuses on his hands and tunes it out.
Claire lied to him. And he's powerless, totally powerless, to do a damn thing about it. He wants to punch a hole in the wall. He wants to go upstairs and grab her, just shake her and demand that she confess, hurt her if he has to.
No, God, he doesn't want to hurt Claire. But when his fingers were digging into her wrist Peter saw something else startled into her eyes – connection – before the lie slid back down, shut her down. She still looked into his eyes, but he couldn't see her. And it was worth it for that moment, Peter tells himself, hurting her, bruising her like that. For the truth. Right?
But this thought unleashes a wave of words, images, that all come connected with the phrase save her. It's been haunting him all day, and now it rises on the shame of hurting her and the anger at her lie, and Peter hears a crack in his hand and realizes something is broken.
He tries to focus. Pulls himself together as muscle and bone shift, pull his hand back into shape. Pushes memories aside. He can't piece them together and all they're doing is worsening this awful feeling. They're fragments, and loose like this they can't entirely shake the idea from his mind – dangerous idea – that maybe he would like to hurt Claire. Slam her against a wall and see that truth, those eyes he saw the night she kissed him and didn't care, didn't care about anything at all; to grab a fistful of that glossy hair and pull her to him – kiss her so she can't deny it ever again.
Violence? The notion writhes snakelike through his mind – frightening that still, small voice inside him that begs him to calm down. Peter fixes his attention on the truth in the lie, the one thing she told him he felt was real. So, Claire's sixteen.
That must have been something Old Peter knew. But suspicion uncurls, sending cool tendrils though the anger – there has to be something else. Because Claire's age, while it does give him pause, doesn't seem to be a good enough reason to keep her and Old Peter at a distance, just friends. Peter can't remember a whole lot about his previous life, but he's pretty damn sure he never kissed any of his friends the way Claire kissed him the other night.
The lies don't add up.
That night, Mr. Butler comes to see Peter in the office.
"You said you might have something?
"Yes – no, maybe nothing. But it's a theory."
Butler inclines his head, a signal for Peter to go on.
He's unsure how to phrase it. "What if – what if I knew something, something so damaging, that I would have chosen this to protect others? Wipe out everything I am - what if I did this to myself?"
Butler leans back in his chair, his cool, grey eyes thoughtful. "That's a very insightful guess, Peter. What made you think of that?"
Your daughter's eyes. Your daughter's back, the way it looks in the moonlight.
"I'm having dreams. I can't put them together, but underneath it all is a growing sense of dread. Total dread. In the dream I'm scared, I think there's something in me that's wrong, that's so badly wrong that it could destroy lives. And I want to - " Peter concentrates, searching for the right words. "To stop it. Blot it out."
Peter looks up to see how Butler's reacting to this. He pauses for a moment, and Peter thinks that this is it, he's finally going to be told something – but the moment passes, and Butler says, noncommittally, "Sounds like the man I knew. Keep trying, something else may come to you."
He claps him on the shoulder on his way out the door.
It takes Peter a long time to get to sleep that night, and his couch isn't exactly the most comfortable bed in the house. Trying to find a position in which he can doze off, he becomes aware of fireworks – briefly – then a squeaking and a rolling, a linoleum sound. The time flashes on the digital clock, and his alarm is due to go off any minute. A painting that drips red from the bottom; a skillet; tiny shards of glass just everywhere, beautiful and he thinks, uneasily: he's got a knife.
And then the random sparking of his recalcitrant memories is gone and he's awake. On deck, on a very cold, very still night. This isn't a dream. Peter can hear voices, some loud and authoritative, some hushed; and sounds he can't identify but which speak of brisk, mechanical activity. The man beside him says, "They've done everything they can."
Claire's eyes shine with tears. She pulls her blanket closer around her, over her white nightgown – but now that Peter looks again, the garment she's wearing is a white, silk dress, an old-fashioned dress that sweeps the smooth, polished floors of the deck. Her blonde hair is swept up, and rubies dangle from her ears. "There must be something . . . another way," she pleads.
The man speaks again, maybe comforting her, but Peter isn't listening. He's looking. The man is tall and dark, bearded but groomed, his hair and moustache sleek with brilliantine. He wears a white evening jacket, and as Peter notices this he realises that he is wearing the same thing. That the women around him wear high-necked nightgowns with foxfurs, or long evening dresses and lifejackets. Peter has a terrible feeling.
The sea, he knows without looking, is perfectly still. The stars shine right down to the horizon. Water, lapping against the stars. It's so cold, he can see their breath. The tall man – Peter feels that this is his father, though when he looks past the beard he can see that the man is, at most, ten years older than him – gives him a significant look over Claire's head. As though he, too, knows.
"We have to get Claire into a boat," Peter says urgently. The tall man is already nodding. Save her, save her, fifteen hundred but not her.
"There aren't enough," she protests. But a man in a uniform leads her away. Peter can see his arm behind her back, the glint of his glasses above her head; and he can hear his soothing murmur, "This way, Miss Petrelli, no need to be frightened."
Peter and the tall man follow them to the boats, and Peter stands by the tall man as they watch Claire being lowered into the sea. Something in her upturned face makes Peter (want to) – no – remember: a woman waiting for them in Paris, a list in New York of the survivors, and the names that she would not hear.
They rise higher, and she sinks, and after a little while they can't see her tears at all.