seriousfic (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seriousfic) wrote2009-01-17 12:23 pm
seriousfic) wrote2009-01-17 12:23 pm
Heroes fic: Claire/Elle/Peter (written for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tacky_tramp for <use
You know, I could go on with the header, but I think I'll just let the recipient speak for herself.
Title: Family, and other things you can't rely on
Fandom: Heroes
Threesome: Elle/Claire/Peter (and it's been AU un-incested for the easily squicked)
Rating: ADULT BECAUSE MY GOD IT'S FULL OF SEX DELICIOUS PORN OM NOM NOM
Why this shit fucking rocks: So you know how Heroes is always sort of awesome when it shows us some dark, angsty, post-apocalyptic future where Claire's a badass brunette and Peter has a rockin' scar and everyone is so deliciously unhappy you could scream? This fic is like that! I'm too giddy right now to figure out exactly where it departs from canon -- I guess shortly after the Season 3 premiere? -- but Claire is miserable and Elle is a sociopath and blessing of blessings, Peter is NOT THE FOCUS OF THE FIC, and they have lovely painful herosex again and again. The prose is fabulous.
Claire remembers a snippet of a dream, cooking in a gingerbread house, before she woke up to her family burning alive. The firemen called it a miracle that she’d survived. If they’d known she slept through the clothes burning off her body, they’d probably have called it something closer to the mark.
Elle collected her at the funeral. It could’ve been a dozen of the men her father had captured, or none of them. That made for a simple arrangement, Claire’s help for the killer. The long, slow nights; lying in bed as Elle delighted herself by burning Claire and watching it heal, trying to trick each other into feeling something… that was a different deal. A more primal one. Don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.
It would, of course, be the one Elle broke.
***
It was a dry summer night, the kind Elle lived for. She could feel the lightning just begging to be used, carried on the wind like sex and violence. No one knew she could do that, because she hadn’t told anyone but her father, and Elle was happy to let him take that secret to the grave.
Claire couldn’t see the lightning, but she could see Elle, both tenser and more relaxed than she’d been on the car ride over. Elle enjoyed the apprehension she provoked in Claire. It made her feel like a predator, instead of just a freak.
Their shack in the middle of nowhere was the only one that could spot the other shack in the middle of nowhere where Elle said a radioactive was holed up. He could shoot microwaves out of his palms. And Elle could find out if he’d set the fire. All Claire had to do was watch.
“This is fun,” Elle said sarcastically, fiddling with the rabbit ears on the TV. A spark down the antenna fully dissolved Conan O’Brien into static. With a frustrated groan, Elle flash-fried the TV and went to get her coat.
It was the only thing she could’ve done that would’ve stopped Claire from looking out the window at the house across the creek. “Where’re you going?”
“Anywhere there’s alcohol.”
“We have beer in the cooler.”
“And someone to drink it with.”
“I’ll drink with you,” Claire said quickly. She couldn’t be alone with that man, even if they were in separate houses.
Elle crossed her arms in that smug way that demanded someone either punch her in the face or ‘prove it’. “This I have got to see.”
The beer tasted as bitter as it had when she’d stolen a can from her dad’s freezer and split it with Lyle, but after a gravity-defying term in her stomach, she felt herself leveling out between mourning her family and still being alive. It put tears in her eyes, but didn’t let them down her cheeks.
Another beer took care of that. She didn’t cry or sob, she just felt a deeper state of numbness take her. A wetness that might’ve been tears crawled down her heart-shaped face.
“God, you’re depressing.” Elle shotgunned a can, then showed Claire what it would look like struck by lightning. “My dad had his skull melon-balled, you don’t see me crying about it.”
“It’d happen if you had a heart.” Claire was really surprised that didn’t shut Elle up. Claire was drunk.
“You have a gift, something that makes you special,” Elle spat, “and all you do with it is wish you were normal. Normal’s just as fucked as us, you just die easier.”
“My ‘gift’ is that I can’t feel anything!”
Elle tapped her empty bottle of Wild Turkey against the wall a few times before breaking it. Claire couldn’t look away from the new sharp edges, so promising… “I can make you feel anything.”
Claire didn’t take long to consider it. “I don’t wanna get blood on my blouse.” She began pulling it over her head. “I picked it out with Mom.” It got stuck coming off. She stopped trying when she felt something warm and wet and tingly touch her belly, work its way down.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked, wishing she could be indignant instead of merely curious.
Elle didn’t answer, but Claire felt her skirt fly up and her panties burn away. Then nimble fingers with long nails invaded her pussy, bringing little pinpricks of pain along with pleasure. She gasped, more from the scratches than the masturbation. She’d done enough of that since Peter had come into her life for a little fingering, no matter how skilled, to be no surprise.
“Get that fucking rag off so I can look you in the eyes while I fuck you.” Elle’s voice was an altogether different timbre, one Claire could imagine her using to terrify compliance out of a prisoner. She pulled her blouse all the way off, leaving her in a white K-mart bra, to see that Elle now had a large piece of the glass bottle held in her teeth like a commando’s knife.
Claire could only watch, the inside-out blouse still sticking to her arms, as Elle leaned down and swiped the glass across Claire’s belly just as she added a third finger to Claire’s pussy.
“Holy shit,” Claire muttered. She could feel it. Distantly, filtered, but it was coming along with the pleasure for the ride.
“Think you’re the first healer I’ve fucked?” Elle asked, spitting the glass out on Claire’s belly. She picked it up again with tongue and clenched teeth, and drew another line, right below Claire’s breasts. Claire’s legs spasmed and she felt distinctly wet, virginal. She was too eager for this, too out-of-control, and Elle was just about the last person she wanted to be her first, but how could she stop this?
With the hand that wasn’t currently fucking Claire, Elle pulled at the bra and sent a charge through it. Claire caught the shockwaves of it like a blast of cool air. Not enough pain, too much pleasure, and if she’d only resisted Sylar a little longer than she could’ve felt pain, could’ve warned everyone instead of dreaming of Hansel & fucking Gretel. Elle was like Sylar, dark and sinister, but Claire could use her. Be used. Her choice.
“Do it.” Claire wiggled her hips. “Come on. Do it.” It came out slurred and slow, but Elle got the message. She flicked the glass edge across Claire’s areola, and the dripping blood tinkled off her nipple. Claire exhaled in desperate relief and when Elle came up like a cobra to Claire’s charmer, she met the kiss without restraint.
The glass cut into the corners of her mouth as their lips fought… not soft or gentle like a boy, but as hard as the fingers curling inside her. It hurt, it hurt like heaven. Elle reared back, licking her lips, and fished the glass out of Claire’s mouth before kissing her again. This time, her tongue agitated the cuts on the inside of Claire’s cheeks, swirling with the pleasure from deeper in her body until Claire felt like a tornado, warm air and cool air twisting together until there was only the storm.
“Made you feel something,” Elle smirked as Claire orgasmed.
***
It kept going like that for two months. By the end of the first, Elle didn’t even have to get Claire drunk anymore.
The microwave oven wasn’t the guy.
***
It wasn’t just Claire who felt pain. Elle insisted on it, and that was the part Claire was least comfortable with. She didn’t care what Elle did to her, but doing it to Elle felt wrong.
It wasn’t just being called a bad girl and getting spanked like some bad porno. Elle wasn’t satisfied until she was trussed in Primatech-issue handcuffs, beaten with a collapsible baton like a criminal. She was only happy when she was bruised.
The only thing wronger than that was how much Claire liked rubbing on the balm afterward… or staying so close to the pain that she could almost feel it pass through her.
She was enviously watching a bruise fade, its pain frozen in the aspic of the world, when her phone rang. It was Peter.
“Your father…” he stopped. Started again. “Nathan’s dead.”
***
They’d half given up hope of finding the killer anyway, just being together for the sake of not being alone. When Claire announced she was going to the funeral, Elle packed her things.
***
Without sex, there wasn’t much to talk about. It was a two-day drive and in the hotel room, they watched the TV until all that was on was hairy porn from the seventies. They fell asleep to that. When Claire woke up, Elle was already showered.
“But,” she said, apropos of nothing, “he wasn’t really your father.”
“I know,” Claire said, dead-voiced.
“Never makes a difference, does it?” Elle sighed.
“Thanks for—“
“Stop.”
***
Claire wondered if they were at the right funeral. The pastor kept talking about duty and service and when she realized they only thought of him as a politician, not as a flying man, not as her dad, just as some guy, she almost burst out laughing in the middle of the church. Angela gave the eulogy. When she saw Peter leaving, Claire followed.
It was a rich man’s graveyard, full of ornate statues and bordered by crypts. Not being able to face the body, Peter looked down into the open burial plot. They were alone, only Claire there to see him float a few inches on the ground.
“I can still feel him, inside me, when I…” Peter drooped back down to Earth. “But he’s not.”
At times like these, her father, her other father, hell, maybe both of them, would focus on the solutions instead of the problems. “They said it was radiation?”
“Stopped his heart cold.”
“Could he have set a fire to cover his tracks?”
“That’s how the police found Nathan. The smoke.” Peter paused, pulling at his black suit like it was distinctly uncomfortable. “He wasn’t my brother. The Company took kids with abilities from their parents, put them with agents to be raised, just like you and Elle. Nathan and I, we were just the pick of the litter.”
Electricity arced between his fingers and Claire didn’t have to ask what he was feeling.
***
It was useless arguing against him. Peter needed to be part of things, and even if Claire didn’t want him to see what she’d become, Elle was ambivalent enough for Peter to force his way in.
They took Nathan’s car. Better gas mileage, more space. Peter relinquished the passenger seat to Elle, who looked knowingly over at Claire as they rattled down the highway. Peter fell asleep after a long melancholy, head back on the rest, legs wide, arms tucked in across his chest.
“Would you fuck him?” Elle asked, out of the blue.
Claire wasn’t horribly surprised to find she didn’t have an answer.
***
Claire thought Peter, at least, would impose some sense on things. She and Elle still hadn’t touched since the funeral, and there were other ways to get people to talk than torture. But seeing Peter force his way into another radioactive’s mind, she didn’t see much of a difference from torture. And looking at Elle, she could see the other woman’s answer was yes. She wanted him, more now that he was corrupt than when he was corruptible.
She went to the hospital to check on the latest dead end in their search, waiting for him to wake from the coma Peter’s intrusion had left him in. When she got back to the motel, Peter and Elle were fucking. They were saying things too, horrible things, and Claire wasn’t that sheltered but she knew there were things you said when you were making love and things you weren’t even supposed to think.
Elle made him beg, both for more and to stop, and Elle was equally deaf to both pleas. She just grinned and bore down on him, saying “that’s more like it, you little bitch, you know you fucking love it.” He did. Claire hated that he did, but he did.
In the pale light of the cheap lamps, she could see everything. It was the first time Claire had really seen Elle naked, not half-dressed or wrapped in bedsheets or obscured by the dark. She had a surprising amount of scars, not in quantity, just in size and ferocity. One could almost have been from a shark attack. Claire ached to know what it felt like.
Light flickered between them, white-hot, and Claire had to squint to see that Elle was pouring electricity into his bare chest, he was bunching it into the muscles of her back with white-knuckled fingers. It wasn’t until they came that the darkness finally wrapped them up.
***
“So how was it?” she asked the next time she and Elle were alone, packing up what they’d left in the kitchenette. She summoned up all the bitchiness a cheerleader could and Elle brushed it right off.
“Fantastic. You should try it sometime.”
***
There was no discernible reason to fuck him. She didn’t love him, anymore than she did Elle. She trusted him, to be him at least, the same way she trusted Elle to be Elle. They were who they were, nothing else, and she liked that at least some people were who they said they were. And he was handsome.
The weirdest thing was how easy it was, how good it was. She sat down next to him, her spaghetti-strap top seeming brazenly obvious next to his muscle tee, and they talked. Conversation was impossible with the dead censoring every word. It made its way to Elle, the liveliest thing in their world.
“Sometimes you just need to feel something,” he said, sensing her unspoken question.
“But why her?”
“I can’t put anyone else in danger. If the Company knew there was something close to me, they would use her to get to me.”
“No.” She took Peter’s hand and she was a slut and a whore and she put in on her thigh. “Why her and not me?”
He looked at her, barely recognizing her now with the dyed hair and the dark eyes, the smile that was slow to come, if ever.
“I’ve never been with a man,” she admitted. She kissed his arm, bare and prickled with hairs that were longer and wirier than anything on Elle’s body. She could drive herself crazy, making comparisons, noting differences, wondering why they were the only two people she’d ever fucked.
He wasn’t stopping her. He was looking at her like he’d thought about it and touching her like he’d wanted it and when he forced her hands over her head and against the wall, not only couldn’t she stop him, she didn’t want to.
“It’ll hurt,” he said, while never slowing down his ruthless dismemberment of her clothes. He never took off anything when he could just rip it open and that made Claire feel wanton, electric.
“No, it won’t. Elle already… she had this thing she put on like a belt… just fuck me.”
It was satisfying, fucking unbelievably satisfying, that he didn’t treat her like a little girl or something fragile. He used her, like she’d already been used, and holding him afterward was romance enough. For now, there was his cock, thinner than she’d expected, but long as well. She didn’t suck it, didn’t know how and didn’t want him to know that she didn’t know how, but she jerked it off like she’d sometimes done with five-date boyfriends and he liked it enough that he had almost come by the time she let go. But they both knew they hadn’t gone that far for him to come in her hand.
She licked her hand. It tasted funny, but it made him turn a nice shade of red, and she took off what was left of her clothes, and then she sagged against the wall on both hands, cute little ass shoved out at him. It took her a moment of feeling the cold wallpaper against her front before she realized what more he needed.
“Please, Peter, make me feel good, I need this…”
“You don’t have to say those things,” he said, ever the innocent.
“Then shut me up.”
He didn’t turn her around before he fucked her. He took his sweet time easing it in and he kissed the nape of her neck like it was an erogenous zone, which, maybe it was, because that felt so good it almost hurt, but in the end, he gave her what she needed. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Feeling him inside her didn’t hurt like it did with Elle.
She could live with that.
***
“Him too, eh?” Elle asked, the next time they were alone. Claire felt sore the only place she could, in her mind, and so all she did was nod.
The really surprising thing was that it was an honest question. Elle squeezed her hand in solidarity before pumping a little voltage into it, just to remind her.
***
It got easier. Not the sex, that was never hard, but the hunt. Geiger counters to track them if they ran, a portable chemical shower and Claire’s blood if they resisted. But the easiest part was when Peter pinned them down and reached into their head. Claire now knew what Elle saw in him. She saw it too.
“It’s not her,” Peter said of the last one, an Asian woman that looked like someone’s grandmother, reluctantly letting go of her mind. “But she knows who it is.”
***
He’d sent Grandma a letter. It was full of words like ‘revenge’ and ‘payback’ and Elle dismissed it as clichéd garbage except for the penmanship, which she could use to track him. Claire read it over and over again, though. He was happy. He was glad of what he’d done. Only Peter’s hand on her shoulder kept her from exploding. She wanted pain again, more of it than ever before, but not hers.
No, not hers at all.
***
Time skips and lunges like a cheetah running down prey. The car ride is over in a blink, sex with Peter is a brief flare of nervousness and doubt, then the killer is cornered, his words so much unnecessary foreplay. He was the oldest of them to be taken away from his parents. Old enough to still remember, old enough to hang onto the memories through the drugs and the brain-washing and, finally, powerful enough to do something about it. It was never about Nathan. It was about the Petrellis’ son, and Noah Bennett’s family.
Tumors swell and shrink in Claire like air bladders with leaks. She walks through the flames and, when it’s just him and her and the gun, she doesn’t listen to him telling her how they’re on the same side. She shoots him, again when he’s still standing, and again when he won’t stop moving. Only he keeps moving, and by the time they wrestle the empty gun out of her hands and leave his body for the fire to reclaim and the sirens to engulf, she’s convinced that he’ll never stop moving.
Claire sleeps for fifteen hours, feeling the same nothing she did when her family died.
***
She knows what she wants, what she needs, because for once they’re the same. More. The adults are celebrating their victory as only Elle can, the blonde burning against him like a sword against a grinding wheel. Both of them come out sharper, and Claire can see everything but the weaponry dropping away from them. This time she doesn’t shy away with mumbled apology, or watch with a numb interest. This time she takes one step forward, then another, then another. She’s not wearing any underwear beneath her cheerleading ensemble: her fashion statement is fuck you.
Peter doesn’t see her, but Elle does, and something in her smile is triumphant. If she’s won something, Claire doesn’t care what it is.
God, she wants this. She wants to be carefree like them, grown-up like them, found like them. She wants power and laughter and she wants to be fucked, wants to run away even if there’s nothing left to run from. She puts a hand on Peter’s back, feeling the hunger in the unyielding muscles. He’s stronger than he looks under all the layers he wears, his musculature understated but firm, powerful. He looks at her, maybe starts forming words about why they shouldn’t – it’s over now, she’s his brother’s daughter, he’s so much older and she doesn’t want this – only she’d rather have them than anything anyone could say was right. Boys her own age, white picket fences, dates in the back-row of a movie theater… they probably disgust Elle too, now.
It doesn’t take him long to give in, and Elle giggles to see the tiny blonde jerking him around, over her, into her. They fall onto the unveneered particleboard dresser of their motel room and knock the ice bucket onto the carpet as they do it. He pushes her skirt up, and his hands are shockingly soft, and Elle leans on Peter’s back as he enters her, oh, it feels so different outside the haze of the hunt. It’s like a curtain has fallen off the world and now she can feel it, really feel it, hurting her just enough to be interesting. Or maybe it’s just that Elle’s smiling at the sight of him sliding in and out of her. It feels good to have her best friend’s approval, although Elle is the first bestie who knows what Claire tastes like.
And Claire is surprised by how loud she is, squeals and grunts ringing in her own ears as if they have to get out to make room for Peter. He’s never been with her this much, not that that makes any sense, but when she puts her arms around his shoulders he’s almost hot enough to burn her and he must feel it too.
Fingers, warming with electricity, cup her face. Claire’s head is pulled back by a second hand in her hair and Elle kisses her upside-down. Claire can see the other woman’s breasts, clad only in the crazy shadows thrown off by the energy at play, and she wants them like she wants the soft skin of Elle’s belly and the cool shade between her legs. Even though Peter’s still inside her. She wants it all.
Claire nips at the inviting hollow of Elle’s throat, tasting sweat, and Elle gets the message. She crawls up onto the dresser, which is asking for mercy in creaks and groans, and Claire is able to sink her teeth into Elle’s breast when she kisses Peter, electric hand running through his hair to reveal the baby-pink of his scalp. She lets go of Peter because he’s arching up anyway, holding her body down as he fucks it, devouring Elle as she curls against him. After an eternity, Elle throws a leg over Claire’s head and she can smell the very flavor of the heat coming off her sex, demanding and cruel. She salves it.
Elle moans into Peter’s mouth, which is just so fucking satisfying Claire doesn’t have words for it. Her nipples are chafing against what her top is made out of, cheap and scratchy whatever it is, and all her clothes feel nasty and sweaty and sauna-hot. She pulls at them as best she can with two people fucking her, but multitasking isn’t her strong suit because Elle will twist her nipple savagely if she stops licking and there’s no fucking way she’ll stop rocking her hips against Peter for one damn minute.
Elle is bored with kissing Peter now, Claire’s good luck, because she rips open Claire’s top with enough electricity that Claire feels it in her bones (Peter makes a slight sound, not protest and not disgust, but surprised and intrigued and Claire wonders if her tits have anything to do with it). Elle never has time for subtlety and tonight is no exception, because her fingers dig in and it’d hurt if it didn’t feel so good. Claire gets that damned urge to say thank you, which she actually did one of their first times to Elle’s never-ending amusement.
Peter is moving in that hurdy-jerky way he does when he’s about to come, like a machine shorting-out, and the wooden dresser won’t stop creaking either and Elle is so wet that it’s pinging all five of Claire’s senses. And Claire, Claire can feel the biological process of her own approaching orgasm with the intimacy only someone who’s felt their own wounds heal a thousand times can know. It’s just like a wound healing, the pitch of dopamine, the sundering of injury, the dragging satisfaction of smooth unbroken skin once more. Even as she thinks it, it happens, and it’s closer to pain than any of the substitutes she and Elle have worked out over the months. It hurts. It hurts perfectly.
Peter comes, and she’s hyper-aware of the warmth splashing inside her. After the twin suns of that, Elle’s is almost a disappointment. She wails and is a little more wet and falls down against the both of them, panting like she was just saved from drowning. They stay like that a minute, Elle fallen across Claire to rest her face on Claire’s thigh, Peter crushing both of them only he’s boyishly light and it’s just his soulful deep breaths pushing down on them.
“Thank you,” Elle says with supreme sarcasm, and great, now it’s an in-joke.
They part with a series of sticky noises that almost make Claire jump, they seem so loud. Claire’s ruined uniform droops nearly all the way off, and she makes an idiosyncratic attempt to keep it on before she just lets it fall and leave her bare, wet cunt and blushing skin and the little pale spots no one can see where scars should be.
“Dirty little bitch,” Elle says, pulling Claire against her side like gal-pals with something Claire recognizes as affection. They fall into the bed and Peter, looking bone-tired, sinks onto the second bed. The dresser has been rocked off-center, one edge pressed digging into the plaster wall, the other pointing past the TV at the drawn blinds. Claire wants to do something, hide the evidence, push the dresser back against the wall and open the windows, but she lets Elle hold her and pet her like any of it is at all normal.
***
The next morning Peter was damp from the shower, wearing slacks and a long-sleeved cotton shirt layered over the muscle shirt she can see ghosted under it, and Claire wanted him like nothing else exists. Elle hadn’t dressed yet, but she was packing, and it would take Claire far too long to realize she wouldn’t mind if someone stopped her.
Instead she watched and finally found the voice to ask why.
“This is getting old, isn’t it? We’re not going to be the Brady Bunch here. Two girls, okay, yeah, sure, we don’t shave our heads or listen to Team Dresch or kiss where kids can see us, we can get by; and you and him, who gives a fuck when the guy’s older? It’s creepy, but that’s sort of a self-correcting problem, now isn’t it? But all three of us? That doesn’t happen in the real world. I’ve spent my whole life chasing people who grow razor blades out of their skin and I still know that. Maybe she,” spat at Claire, “doesn’t know better and maybe you,” raged at Peter, “don’t want to know better, but I’m not gonna live long enough to waste time on mistakes.”
“Stop her,” Claire whispered, maybe to Peter, maybe to herself.
“Where will you go?” Peter asked.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. I’ve put in enough time hurting people for other people’s crusades. I’m gonna cash in some of daddy dearest’s old Swedish bank accounts and kick back Muay Thais someplace where people don’t… die everyday.”
“And what’ll we do without you!?” Claire cried, losing decorum like blood.
“Not my problem, princess.” She pulled clothes on over her bra and panties. It went quick when she only paused once. She slammed her suitcase shut and the lights flickered, then she headed for the door. “You’re in my way, sunshine.”
Peter got out of it.
“Say something!” Claire insisted, thinking it would be something classy, adult, a lovely haiku like ‘come back’ or ‘this door will always be open’ or ‘we won’t forget you.’
“Goodbye.” Said with lightning sizzling under his fingernails.
Elle said an answering jolt play between her fingers before she shoved her way into the stairwell and was swallowed up by the sound of the shutting door.
Peter shut the door, sat down on the bed, the lightning dying off in his hand like it’d hit ground.
“We’re going after her, right?” Claire asked, throwing herself to the ground between his knees in something that was far too much of a stumble to be a come-on.
“Yeah,” he said, and Claire wished she could’ve known if it were a lie.
***
They make a go of it. She cuts her hair short and he takes her to movies, restaurants, ballgames. And after they make love, Claire gets on the computer and sends an e-mail to Elle’s account. Elle never writes back. After a while, it becomes almost a diary.
And after a longer while, Elle writes back. It’s short, typed at such haste that there are stupid typos like ‘ot’ instead of ‘to’. It’s a cry for help, not so much as a smiley-face to offset the dire warnings of villains and acts of terror. Even so, stupid little girl she is, Claire has to hide her smile as she goes to tell Peter. They’re going to see Elle again.
It’s fucked up, but it’s her life.
Title: Family, and other things you can't rely on
Fandom: Heroes
Threesome: Elle/Claire/Peter (and it's been AU un-incested for the easily squicked)
Rating: ADULT BECAUSE MY GOD IT'S FULL OF SEX DELICIOUS PORN OM NOM NOM
Why this shit fucking rocks: So you know how Heroes is always sort of awesome when it shows us some dark, angsty, post-apocalyptic future where Claire's a badass brunette and Peter has a rockin' scar and everyone is so deliciously unhappy you could scream? This fic is like that! I'm too giddy right now to figure out exactly where it departs from canon -- I guess shortly after the Season 3 premiere? -- but Claire is miserable and Elle is a sociopath and blessing of blessings, Peter is NOT THE FOCUS OF THE FIC, and they have lovely painful herosex again and again. The prose is fabulous.
Claire remembers a snippet of a dream, cooking in a gingerbread house, before she woke up to her family burning alive. The firemen called it a miracle that she’d survived. If they’d known she slept through the clothes burning off her body, they’d probably have called it something closer to the mark.
Elle collected her at the funeral. It could’ve been a dozen of the men her father had captured, or none of them. That made for a simple arrangement, Claire’s help for the killer. The long, slow nights; lying in bed as Elle delighted herself by burning Claire and watching it heal, trying to trick each other into feeling something… that was a different deal. A more primal one. Don’t hurt me, I won’t hurt you.
It would, of course, be the one Elle broke.
***
It was a dry summer night, the kind Elle lived for. She could feel the lightning just begging to be used, carried on the wind like sex and violence. No one knew she could do that, because she hadn’t told anyone but her father, and Elle was happy to let him take that secret to the grave.
Claire couldn’t see the lightning, but she could see Elle, both tenser and more relaxed than she’d been on the car ride over. Elle enjoyed the apprehension she provoked in Claire. It made her feel like a predator, instead of just a freak.
Their shack in the middle of nowhere was the only one that could spot the other shack in the middle of nowhere where Elle said a radioactive was holed up. He could shoot microwaves out of his palms. And Elle could find out if he’d set the fire. All Claire had to do was watch.
“This is fun,” Elle said sarcastically, fiddling with the rabbit ears on the TV. A spark down the antenna fully dissolved Conan O’Brien into static. With a frustrated groan, Elle flash-fried the TV and went to get her coat.
It was the only thing she could’ve done that would’ve stopped Claire from looking out the window at the house across the creek. “Where’re you going?”
“Anywhere there’s alcohol.”
“We have beer in the cooler.”
“And someone to drink it with.”
“I’ll drink with you,” Claire said quickly. She couldn’t be alone with that man, even if they were in separate houses.
Elle crossed her arms in that smug way that demanded someone either punch her in the face or ‘prove it’. “This I have got to see.”
The beer tasted as bitter as it had when she’d stolen a can from her dad’s freezer and split it with Lyle, but after a gravity-defying term in her stomach, she felt herself leveling out between mourning her family and still being alive. It put tears in her eyes, but didn’t let them down her cheeks.
Another beer took care of that. She didn’t cry or sob, she just felt a deeper state of numbness take her. A wetness that might’ve been tears crawled down her heart-shaped face.
“God, you’re depressing.” Elle shotgunned a can, then showed Claire what it would look like struck by lightning. “My dad had his skull melon-balled, you don’t see me crying about it.”
“It’d happen if you had a heart.” Claire was really surprised that didn’t shut Elle up. Claire was drunk.
“You have a gift, something that makes you special,” Elle spat, “and all you do with it is wish you were normal. Normal’s just as fucked as us, you just die easier.”
“My ‘gift’ is that I can’t feel anything!”
Elle tapped her empty bottle of Wild Turkey against the wall a few times before breaking it. Claire couldn’t look away from the new sharp edges, so promising… “I can make you feel anything.”
Claire didn’t take long to consider it. “I don’t wanna get blood on my blouse.” She began pulling it over her head. “I picked it out with Mom.” It got stuck coming off. She stopped trying when she felt something warm and wet and tingly touch her belly, work its way down.
“What are you doing?” Claire asked, wishing she could be indignant instead of merely curious.
Elle didn’t answer, but Claire felt her skirt fly up and her panties burn away. Then nimble fingers with long nails invaded her pussy, bringing little pinpricks of pain along with pleasure. She gasped, more from the scratches than the masturbation. She’d done enough of that since Peter had come into her life for a little fingering, no matter how skilled, to be no surprise.
“Get that fucking rag off so I can look you in the eyes while I fuck you.” Elle’s voice was an altogether different timbre, one Claire could imagine her using to terrify compliance out of a prisoner. She pulled her blouse all the way off, leaving her in a white K-mart bra, to see that Elle now had a large piece of the glass bottle held in her teeth like a commando’s knife.
Claire could only watch, the inside-out blouse still sticking to her arms, as Elle leaned down and swiped the glass across Claire’s belly just as she added a third finger to Claire’s pussy.
“Holy shit,” Claire muttered. She could feel it. Distantly, filtered, but it was coming along with the pleasure for the ride.
“Think you’re the first healer I’ve fucked?” Elle asked, spitting the glass out on Claire’s belly. She picked it up again with tongue and clenched teeth, and drew another line, right below Claire’s breasts. Claire’s legs spasmed and she felt distinctly wet, virginal. She was too eager for this, too out-of-control, and Elle was just about the last person she wanted to be her first, but how could she stop this?
With the hand that wasn’t currently fucking Claire, Elle pulled at the bra and sent a charge through it. Claire caught the shockwaves of it like a blast of cool air. Not enough pain, too much pleasure, and if she’d only resisted Sylar a little longer than she could’ve felt pain, could’ve warned everyone instead of dreaming of Hansel & fucking Gretel. Elle was like Sylar, dark and sinister, but Claire could use her. Be used. Her choice.
“Do it.” Claire wiggled her hips. “Come on. Do it.” It came out slurred and slow, but Elle got the message. She flicked the glass edge across Claire’s areola, and the dripping blood tinkled off her nipple. Claire exhaled in desperate relief and when Elle came up like a cobra to Claire’s charmer, she met the kiss without restraint.
The glass cut into the corners of her mouth as their lips fought… not soft or gentle like a boy, but as hard as the fingers curling inside her. It hurt, it hurt like heaven. Elle reared back, licking her lips, and fished the glass out of Claire’s mouth before kissing her again. This time, her tongue agitated the cuts on the inside of Claire’s cheeks, swirling with the pleasure from deeper in her body until Claire felt like a tornado, warm air and cool air twisting together until there was only the storm.
“Made you feel something,” Elle smirked as Claire orgasmed.
***
It kept going like that for two months. By the end of the first, Elle didn’t even have to get Claire drunk anymore.
The microwave oven wasn’t the guy.
***
It wasn’t just Claire who felt pain. Elle insisted on it, and that was the part Claire was least comfortable with. She didn’t care what Elle did to her, but doing it to Elle felt wrong.
It wasn’t just being called a bad girl and getting spanked like some bad porno. Elle wasn’t satisfied until she was trussed in Primatech-issue handcuffs, beaten with a collapsible baton like a criminal. She was only happy when she was bruised.
The only thing wronger than that was how much Claire liked rubbing on the balm afterward… or staying so close to the pain that she could almost feel it pass through her.
She was enviously watching a bruise fade, its pain frozen in the aspic of the world, when her phone rang. It was Peter.
“Your father…” he stopped. Started again. “Nathan’s dead.”
***
They’d half given up hope of finding the killer anyway, just being together for the sake of not being alone. When Claire announced she was going to the funeral, Elle packed her things.
***
Without sex, there wasn’t much to talk about. It was a two-day drive and in the hotel room, they watched the TV until all that was on was hairy porn from the seventies. They fell asleep to that. When Claire woke up, Elle was already showered.
“But,” she said, apropos of nothing, “he wasn’t really your father.”
“I know,” Claire said, dead-voiced.
“Never makes a difference, does it?” Elle sighed.
“Thanks for—“
“Stop.”
***
Claire wondered if they were at the right funeral. The pastor kept talking about duty and service and when she realized they only thought of him as a politician, not as a flying man, not as her dad, just as some guy, she almost burst out laughing in the middle of the church. Angela gave the eulogy. When she saw Peter leaving, Claire followed.
It was a rich man’s graveyard, full of ornate statues and bordered by crypts. Not being able to face the body, Peter looked down into the open burial plot. They were alone, only Claire there to see him float a few inches on the ground.
“I can still feel him, inside me, when I…” Peter drooped back down to Earth. “But he’s not.”
At times like these, her father, her other father, hell, maybe both of them, would focus on the solutions instead of the problems. “They said it was radiation?”
“Stopped his heart cold.”
“Could he have set a fire to cover his tracks?”
“That’s how the police found Nathan. The smoke.” Peter paused, pulling at his black suit like it was distinctly uncomfortable. “He wasn’t my brother. The Company took kids with abilities from their parents, put them with agents to be raised, just like you and Elle. Nathan and I, we were just the pick of the litter.”
Electricity arced between his fingers and Claire didn’t have to ask what he was feeling.
***
It was useless arguing against him. Peter needed to be part of things, and even if Claire didn’t want him to see what she’d become, Elle was ambivalent enough for Peter to force his way in.
They took Nathan’s car. Better gas mileage, more space. Peter relinquished the passenger seat to Elle, who looked knowingly over at Claire as they rattled down the highway. Peter fell asleep after a long melancholy, head back on the rest, legs wide, arms tucked in across his chest.
“Would you fuck him?” Elle asked, out of the blue.
Claire wasn’t horribly surprised to find she didn’t have an answer.
***
Claire thought Peter, at least, would impose some sense on things. She and Elle still hadn’t touched since the funeral, and there were other ways to get people to talk than torture. But seeing Peter force his way into another radioactive’s mind, she didn’t see much of a difference from torture. And looking at Elle, she could see the other woman’s answer was yes. She wanted him, more now that he was corrupt than when he was corruptible.
She went to the hospital to check on the latest dead end in their search, waiting for him to wake from the coma Peter’s intrusion had left him in. When she got back to the motel, Peter and Elle were fucking. They were saying things too, horrible things, and Claire wasn’t that sheltered but she knew there were things you said when you were making love and things you weren’t even supposed to think.
Elle made him beg, both for more and to stop, and Elle was equally deaf to both pleas. She just grinned and bore down on him, saying “that’s more like it, you little bitch, you know you fucking love it.” He did. Claire hated that he did, but he did.
In the pale light of the cheap lamps, she could see everything. It was the first time Claire had really seen Elle naked, not half-dressed or wrapped in bedsheets or obscured by the dark. She had a surprising amount of scars, not in quantity, just in size and ferocity. One could almost have been from a shark attack. Claire ached to know what it felt like.
Light flickered between them, white-hot, and Claire had to squint to see that Elle was pouring electricity into his bare chest, he was bunching it into the muscles of her back with white-knuckled fingers. It wasn’t until they came that the darkness finally wrapped them up.
***
“So how was it?” she asked the next time she and Elle were alone, packing up what they’d left in the kitchenette. She summoned up all the bitchiness a cheerleader could and Elle brushed it right off.
“Fantastic. You should try it sometime.”
***
There was no discernible reason to fuck him. She didn’t love him, anymore than she did Elle. She trusted him, to be him at least, the same way she trusted Elle to be Elle. They were who they were, nothing else, and she liked that at least some people were who they said they were. And he was handsome.
The weirdest thing was how easy it was, how good it was. She sat down next to him, her spaghetti-strap top seeming brazenly obvious next to his muscle tee, and they talked. Conversation was impossible with the dead censoring every word. It made its way to Elle, the liveliest thing in their world.
“Sometimes you just need to feel something,” he said, sensing her unspoken question.
“But why her?”
“I can’t put anyone else in danger. If the Company knew there was something close to me, they would use her to get to me.”
“No.” She took Peter’s hand and she was a slut and a whore and she put in on her thigh. “Why her and not me?”
He looked at her, barely recognizing her now with the dyed hair and the dark eyes, the smile that was slow to come, if ever.
“I’ve never been with a man,” she admitted. She kissed his arm, bare and prickled with hairs that were longer and wirier than anything on Elle’s body. She could drive herself crazy, making comparisons, noting differences, wondering why they were the only two people she’d ever fucked.
He wasn’t stopping her. He was looking at her like he’d thought about it and touching her like he’d wanted it and when he forced her hands over her head and against the wall, not only couldn’t she stop him, she didn’t want to.
“It’ll hurt,” he said, while never slowing down his ruthless dismemberment of her clothes. He never took off anything when he could just rip it open and that made Claire feel wanton, electric.
“No, it won’t. Elle already… she had this thing she put on like a belt… just fuck me.”
It was satisfying, fucking unbelievably satisfying, that he didn’t treat her like a little girl or something fragile. He used her, like she’d already been used, and holding him afterward was romance enough. For now, there was his cock, thinner than she’d expected, but long as well. She didn’t suck it, didn’t know how and didn’t want him to know that she didn’t know how, but she jerked it off like she’d sometimes done with five-date boyfriends and he liked it enough that he had almost come by the time she let go. But they both knew they hadn’t gone that far for him to come in her hand.
She licked her hand. It tasted funny, but it made him turn a nice shade of red, and she took off what was left of her clothes, and then she sagged against the wall on both hands, cute little ass shoved out at him. It took her a moment of feeling the cold wallpaper against her front before she realized what more he needed.
“Please, Peter, make me feel good, I need this…”
“You don’t have to say those things,” he said, ever the innocent.
“Then shut me up.”
He didn’t turn her around before he fucked her. He took his sweet time easing it in and he kissed the nape of her neck like it was an erogenous zone, which, maybe it was, because that felt so good it almost hurt, but in the end, he gave her what she needed. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Feeling him inside her didn’t hurt like it did with Elle.
She could live with that.
***
“Him too, eh?” Elle asked, the next time they were alone. Claire felt sore the only place she could, in her mind, and so all she did was nod.
The really surprising thing was that it was an honest question. Elle squeezed her hand in solidarity before pumping a little voltage into it, just to remind her.
***
It got easier. Not the sex, that was never hard, but the hunt. Geiger counters to track them if they ran, a portable chemical shower and Claire’s blood if they resisted. But the easiest part was when Peter pinned them down and reached into their head. Claire now knew what Elle saw in him. She saw it too.
“It’s not her,” Peter said of the last one, an Asian woman that looked like someone’s grandmother, reluctantly letting go of her mind. “But she knows who it is.”
***
He’d sent Grandma a letter. It was full of words like ‘revenge’ and ‘payback’ and Elle dismissed it as clichéd garbage except for the penmanship, which she could use to track him. Claire read it over and over again, though. He was happy. He was glad of what he’d done. Only Peter’s hand on her shoulder kept her from exploding. She wanted pain again, more of it than ever before, but not hers.
No, not hers at all.
***
Time skips and lunges like a cheetah running down prey. The car ride is over in a blink, sex with Peter is a brief flare of nervousness and doubt, then the killer is cornered, his words so much unnecessary foreplay. He was the oldest of them to be taken away from his parents. Old enough to still remember, old enough to hang onto the memories through the drugs and the brain-washing and, finally, powerful enough to do something about it. It was never about Nathan. It was about the Petrellis’ son, and Noah Bennett’s family.
Tumors swell and shrink in Claire like air bladders with leaks. She walks through the flames and, when it’s just him and her and the gun, she doesn’t listen to him telling her how they’re on the same side. She shoots him, again when he’s still standing, and again when he won’t stop moving. Only he keeps moving, and by the time they wrestle the empty gun out of her hands and leave his body for the fire to reclaim and the sirens to engulf, she’s convinced that he’ll never stop moving.
Claire sleeps for fifteen hours, feeling the same nothing she did when her family died.
***
She knows what she wants, what she needs, because for once they’re the same. More. The adults are celebrating their victory as only Elle can, the blonde burning against him like a sword against a grinding wheel. Both of them come out sharper, and Claire can see everything but the weaponry dropping away from them. This time she doesn’t shy away with mumbled apology, or watch with a numb interest. This time she takes one step forward, then another, then another. She’s not wearing any underwear beneath her cheerleading ensemble: her fashion statement is fuck you.
Peter doesn’t see her, but Elle does, and something in her smile is triumphant. If she’s won something, Claire doesn’t care what it is.
God, she wants this. She wants to be carefree like them, grown-up like them, found like them. She wants power and laughter and she wants to be fucked, wants to run away even if there’s nothing left to run from. She puts a hand on Peter’s back, feeling the hunger in the unyielding muscles. He’s stronger than he looks under all the layers he wears, his musculature understated but firm, powerful. He looks at her, maybe starts forming words about why they shouldn’t – it’s over now, she’s his brother’s daughter, he’s so much older and she doesn’t want this – only she’d rather have them than anything anyone could say was right. Boys her own age, white picket fences, dates in the back-row of a movie theater… they probably disgust Elle too, now.
It doesn’t take him long to give in, and Elle giggles to see the tiny blonde jerking him around, over her, into her. They fall onto the unveneered particleboard dresser of their motel room and knock the ice bucket onto the carpet as they do it. He pushes her skirt up, and his hands are shockingly soft, and Elle leans on Peter’s back as he enters her, oh, it feels so different outside the haze of the hunt. It’s like a curtain has fallen off the world and now she can feel it, really feel it, hurting her just enough to be interesting. Or maybe it’s just that Elle’s smiling at the sight of him sliding in and out of her. It feels good to have her best friend’s approval, although Elle is the first bestie who knows what Claire tastes like.
And Claire is surprised by how loud she is, squeals and grunts ringing in her own ears as if they have to get out to make room for Peter. He’s never been with her this much, not that that makes any sense, but when she puts her arms around his shoulders he’s almost hot enough to burn her and he must feel it too.
Fingers, warming with electricity, cup her face. Claire’s head is pulled back by a second hand in her hair and Elle kisses her upside-down. Claire can see the other woman’s breasts, clad only in the crazy shadows thrown off by the energy at play, and she wants them like she wants the soft skin of Elle’s belly and the cool shade between her legs. Even though Peter’s still inside her. She wants it all.
Claire nips at the inviting hollow of Elle’s throat, tasting sweat, and Elle gets the message. She crawls up onto the dresser, which is asking for mercy in creaks and groans, and Claire is able to sink her teeth into Elle’s breast when she kisses Peter, electric hand running through his hair to reveal the baby-pink of his scalp. She lets go of Peter because he’s arching up anyway, holding her body down as he fucks it, devouring Elle as she curls against him. After an eternity, Elle throws a leg over Claire’s head and she can smell the very flavor of the heat coming off her sex, demanding and cruel. She salves it.
Elle moans into Peter’s mouth, which is just so fucking satisfying Claire doesn’t have words for it. Her nipples are chafing against what her top is made out of, cheap and scratchy whatever it is, and all her clothes feel nasty and sweaty and sauna-hot. She pulls at them as best she can with two people fucking her, but multitasking isn’t her strong suit because Elle will twist her nipple savagely if she stops licking and there’s no fucking way she’ll stop rocking her hips against Peter for one damn minute.
Elle is bored with kissing Peter now, Claire’s good luck, because she rips open Claire’s top with enough electricity that Claire feels it in her bones (Peter makes a slight sound, not protest and not disgust, but surprised and intrigued and Claire wonders if her tits have anything to do with it). Elle never has time for subtlety and tonight is no exception, because her fingers dig in and it’d hurt if it didn’t feel so good. Claire gets that damned urge to say thank you, which she actually did one of their first times to Elle’s never-ending amusement.
Peter is moving in that hurdy-jerky way he does when he’s about to come, like a machine shorting-out, and the wooden dresser won’t stop creaking either and Elle is so wet that it’s pinging all five of Claire’s senses. And Claire, Claire can feel the biological process of her own approaching orgasm with the intimacy only someone who’s felt their own wounds heal a thousand times can know. It’s just like a wound healing, the pitch of dopamine, the sundering of injury, the dragging satisfaction of smooth unbroken skin once more. Even as she thinks it, it happens, and it’s closer to pain than any of the substitutes she and Elle have worked out over the months. It hurts. It hurts perfectly.
Peter comes, and she’s hyper-aware of the warmth splashing inside her. After the twin suns of that, Elle’s is almost a disappointment. She wails and is a little more wet and falls down against the both of them, panting like she was just saved from drowning. They stay like that a minute, Elle fallen across Claire to rest her face on Claire’s thigh, Peter crushing both of them only he’s boyishly light and it’s just his soulful deep breaths pushing down on them.
“Thank you,” Elle says with supreme sarcasm, and great, now it’s an in-joke.
They part with a series of sticky noises that almost make Claire jump, they seem so loud. Claire’s ruined uniform droops nearly all the way off, and she makes an idiosyncratic attempt to keep it on before she just lets it fall and leave her bare, wet cunt and blushing skin and the little pale spots no one can see where scars should be.
“Dirty little bitch,” Elle says, pulling Claire against her side like gal-pals with something Claire recognizes as affection. They fall into the bed and Peter, looking bone-tired, sinks onto the second bed. The dresser has been rocked off-center, one edge pressed digging into the plaster wall, the other pointing past the TV at the drawn blinds. Claire wants to do something, hide the evidence, push the dresser back against the wall and open the windows, but she lets Elle hold her and pet her like any of it is at all normal.
***
The next morning Peter was damp from the shower, wearing slacks and a long-sleeved cotton shirt layered over the muscle shirt she can see ghosted under it, and Claire wanted him like nothing else exists. Elle hadn’t dressed yet, but she was packing, and it would take Claire far too long to realize she wouldn’t mind if someone stopped her.
Instead she watched and finally found the voice to ask why.
“This is getting old, isn’t it? We’re not going to be the Brady Bunch here. Two girls, okay, yeah, sure, we don’t shave our heads or listen to Team Dresch or kiss where kids can see us, we can get by; and you and him, who gives a fuck when the guy’s older? It’s creepy, but that’s sort of a self-correcting problem, now isn’t it? But all three of us? That doesn’t happen in the real world. I’ve spent my whole life chasing people who grow razor blades out of their skin and I still know that. Maybe she,” spat at Claire, “doesn’t know better and maybe you,” raged at Peter, “don’t want to know better, but I’m not gonna live long enough to waste time on mistakes.”
“Stop her,” Claire whispered, maybe to Peter, maybe to herself.
“Where will you go?” Peter asked.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. I’ve put in enough time hurting people for other people’s crusades. I’m gonna cash in some of daddy dearest’s old Swedish bank accounts and kick back Muay Thais someplace where people don’t… die everyday.”
“And what’ll we do without you!?” Claire cried, losing decorum like blood.
“Not my problem, princess.” She pulled clothes on over her bra and panties. It went quick when she only paused once. She slammed her suitcase shut and the lights flickered, then she headed for the door. “You’re in my way, sunshine.”
Peter got out of it.
“Say something!” Claire insisted, thinking it would be something classy, adult, a lovely haiku like ‘come back’ or ‘this door will always be open’ or ‘we won’t forget you.’
“Goodbye.” Said with lightning sizzling under his fingernails.
Elle said an answering jolt play between her fingers before she shoved her way into the stairwell and was swallowed up by the sound of the shutting door.
Peter shut the door, sat down on the bed, the lightning dying off in his hand like it’d hit ground.
“We’re going after her, right?” Claire asked, throwing herself to the ground between his knees in something that was far too much of a stumble to be a come-on.
“Yeah,” he said, and Claire wished she could’ve known if it were a lie.
***
They make a go of it. She cuts her hair short and he takes her to movies, restaurants, ballgames. And after they make love, Claire gets on the computer and sends an e-mail to Elle’s account. Elle never writes back. After a while, it becomes almost a diary.
And after a longer while, Elle writes back. It’s short, typed at such haste that there are stupid typos like ‘ot’ instead of ‘to’. It’s a cry for help, not so much as a smiley-face to offset the dire warnings of villains and acts of terror. Even so, stupid little girl she is, Claire has to hide her smile as she goes to tell Peter. They’re going to see Elle again.
It’s fucked up, but it’s her life.