This fic is rapidly coming to a close, if you can believe it. 4 more chapters or so, and I think I can call her quits. I'm kind of excited to move onto other projects. I might even play around with Amazon Kindle's self publishing possibilities. Superfun. Anybody have any experience there? Yes? No?

So, bit of a short chapter here, as Claire tries to tie up a loose end before Sybrows gets back from Cali. Next chapter is all Sylar/Claire, all the time, I promise. ;) Should be along pretty quickly, too.

In fiction, the departed linger to tie up the loose ends of their lives before moving onto whatever beautiful secrets await them in the next world. Claire knows that she does not have this luxury, would not have it even if it were fact. What she needs to do, she must do now—or never. Her unfinished business will die before she does.

How much easier it would have been to meet with Joshua Gallo if Sylar had not burned his telephone number in a fit of jealousy, damn it. How impossible to be with a man who wants her so badly, yet can't bring himself to trust her for the time it takes to work a shift in a coffee shop.

Still. Claire sighs, able to acknowledge, at last, that she hasn't exactly made herself trustworthy. Maybe she isn't trustworthy. It's an uncomfortable conclusion to come to, after so many years, and she shies from it.

The long way to Joshua is far more arduous than a mere call would have been. There's the trip to The Chocolate Chipped Mug, the last café she had ever dreamed of visiting again, and the argument with its owner, Frank. She has to practically stalk Joshua's older cousin around his shop in order to get him to listen to her, and he even threatens to have her escorted from the premises in police custody. Bullheaded and completely unafraid of being arrested—just how long would it take Sylar to dismantle a jail cell?—she persists, breaking him down bit by bit. Finally, he pulls her into the back, waiting on Sean, the barista, to make his way out of earshot with two steaming mugs and a plate of cake before turning to her with a grim, jowly face.

"Listen up close," he advises her. "Now, normally, I don't like sticking my nose where it don't belong. Josh is a grown man, and god knows I can't keep him away from girls like you."

"Girls like me?" Claire's nose wrinkles somewhat as the distaste she hears in the phrase.

"Oh, sure." Frank emits an unamused chuckle. "Little blond beauties—you twist him around your pinky finger with a sad story and a watery smile, and suddenly he's your case worker and your admirer. Kid's been like that ever since that crazy son of a bitch shot his sister, and it's got him into trouble more times than a nice guy like him deserves. But you don't care about that."

"I don't know anything about that!" Claire protests. "And the only reason I'm here is because I do care. You think I wanted to come here?"

"All I know," says Frank, overriding her, "is you did a bigger job on him than any girl before you." He brings his face closer, glaring. "That boy has gone around the bend, and it started as soon as he got back from chasing after you that day I let you go."

"Frank . . ." Claire remembers seeing Joshua in the pharmacy, how haggard and disoriented he appeared. "I swear to god, I never meant—"

"Don't tell me you didn't mean to," Frank said. "I don't care. You're not getting anywhere near my cousin again. I owe his mama that much, I guess. Now—out you go."

He gestures toward a door that leads into a back alley, and he turns to go. Claire takes a deep breath and tries one more time:

"I know what happened to him, Frank. I know why he's like this. Please—please just give me a chance. I can help him."

Hands on his hips, Frank regards her in an unflatteringly scrutinizing manner, as if he is looking at a spider and trying to decide whether to squash it or keep it around to take care of flies.

"He comes in here about once a day," the older man relents, grudgingly. "And that's where you'll talk to him. Here."

"Thank you, Frank."

He merely grunts, but Claire grins widely, blissful to be granted this chance at redemption.

However, in her meeting with Joshua, as they sit at the counter while the television flashes unnoticed over their heads, Claire hits a rather significant snag:

"That's really thoughtful of you, Claire," says Joshua, the man who now looks not so much like Peter but those dark, prophetic paintings of Peter, "but I don't want your help. What's happened to me has made me . . . more than I was."

Claire shakes her head, uncomprehending.

"What do you mean?" she asks slowly.

"Well, see, I'm on the verge of something," he answers, sitting forward as if he's been dying to discuss it with someone. His bangs flop over one eye like a curtain. "Something really remarkable. You know, when I woke up in that alley, your face was the first thing I saw, but at the same time, it wasn't your face. In that moment, I knew, I just knew that I was looking at Kay, at her—I don't know, her ghost or her angel. However you want to see it."

"And Kay . . . she was your sister, right?"

"More or less." He shrugs as if it's not important. "But you know, Claire, as much as I know that it was your face I saw, there's this part of me that keeps insisting . . ."

He trails off and smiles that crooked grin that makes him look more like her Peter.

"Something blessed me that day. I mean, I don't know why, I don't think I deserved it . . . Hell, I know I didn't. But I can make a difference now, Claire, and I will. You just wait. This world is going to change."

Claire can't keep the knowing laugh from escaping her lips.

"Don't tell me—you're gonna save the world."

"Yeah." He nods happily, and when she only laughs again, he joins her in a slightly befuddled manner, oblivious to her unspoken pity, and prods, "What?"

"Nothing." Claire can't help it. She just can't not see Peter when she looks at Joshua. She can't not like him. "It's just, you remind me of somebody, too."

"Maybe we knew each other in another life," he suggests teasingly.

"Eh . . . I only ever had the one." Claire removes a notepad from her purse and scribbles a name and number on it. "Look, Pe—um, Joshua. This man here—" And she rips the paper loose and pushes it toward him across the counter. "If anybody knows anybody who can undo what's happened to you—"

"I told you, I don't want it undone."

"I know, and that's great if you feel that way. But if you even want it explained—if you just need to talk to someone who understands—you can't go wrong calling this man. Shit, I've called him so many times I've lost count."

"Well . . ." Joshua pulls the paper to him without even flicking his eyes over it, and Claire fears he may be a lost cause. So much for redemption. "Thank you, Claire. Your concern is touching."

"Sure."

Frank pokes his head out from the back to ascertain, Claire supposes, that she hasn't spirited Joshua away to unknown territories for use in slave labor. Joshua notes the spying, and he suppresses a chuckle, sipping at his coffee.

They share one of those private, in-joke moments she used to enjoy so much with Peter. Those moments made her feel so real and normal, and it's a shame that a voice from the television finally seeps into her consciousness, ruining it.

"Famous—or should that be infamous?—billionaire socialite Leslie "Lestat" Laughlin has been discovered dead in his L.A. nightclub, in what appears to be a grisly homage to—"

Claire's head snaps up—

"Jo has the details. Jo?"

—and her eyes lock on the television, where a reporter is failing to mask her excitement at breaking a new celebrity murder case. She catches snatches of it only, her brain working too fast for the program, which seems decades—indeed, eons behind.

"Widely known that he fancied himself a vampire," she hears, and, "partly decapitated," and, "hearkens back to an unsolved series of murders that shocked the nation and mystified agents for years back in the early," and, "not allowing news teams inside the club, but I'm told there are no signs of a struggle," and, "have even suggested that Laughlin arranged it himself in order to fulfill a lifelong fantasy, but one has to ask oneself, would anyone—even a person as eccentric as Laughlin—actually pay to be murdered in such a painful, horrific fashion? I don't think so, Rick."

Good question. Rick doesn't think so, either.

He did pay, though, Claire thinks over the newly begun roaring in her ears. Sylar got exactly what he wanted. And now he's coming home. To you.

Welcome back, sweetheart.

"People are sick," Joshua remarks. He has followed her gaze.

"Yeah." Numbly, fingers fumbling, Claire shoves her pen and notepad into her purse, zipping it up and standing.

"I mean literally," he says, chin in hand. "It's a disease."

Claire leaves as if fleeing a crime scene. She feels she is doing exactly that. Because, she realizes, Sylar didn't get what he wanted at all. He got what she wanted.

I'm a murderer, she thinks.

Maybe it really is catching.

[] [] []

Joshua Gallo is intrigued by Claire Bennet. She looks like Kay, yes, and she's quite beautiful, but he can't kid himself. This goes beyond a sexually charged hero complex, accusations of which Frank has long leveled on him. He decides to follow her little trail of bread crumbs, to go to Texas and see this man—he checks the slip of paper—Rutherford. Joshua is quite sure he needs no help, but maybe he can find out more about her there, more about himself.

Anyway, he'll probably need to get out of New York after he visits Jansen.

Jansen resides in the state prison, convicted of the murder of Kay Gallo and the attempted murder of her stepbrother. Prison hardens the weak, but Jansen was always a hard man, and it seems to Joshua as if prison has made him less substantial. Sanded him down, somehow.

Across the metal table, Jansen is highly remorseful. He is also mildly accusatory, blaming Joshua in part. More than anything, however, he seems miserable, and so Joshua listens without interruption or denial.

"I loved her," Jansen says, winding down. His dark eyes swim, and he seems to look past Joshua, beyond the solid, cinderblock walls. "I don't think I even knew I loved her. I'd give anything to have told her before she died—before I killed her . . . God. Isn't that the most selfish thing?"

When he has finished, Joshua raises his hands and focuses wordlessly.

Jansen disappears.

Unfortunately, so does the armed guard supervising the visit. Oh, well. There must always be sacrifices in the war of good and evil.