Fandom: Heroes
Title: Face in the Crowd
Spoilers: 1.9
Summary: She feels her father’s hands on her shoulders, but she’s numb to the real world, seeing instead the death of a hundred thousand dreams play out before her eyes.
Claire doesn’t get zits. 
Title: Face in the Crowd
Spoilers: 1.9
Summary: She feels her father’s hands on her shoulders, but she’s numb to the real world, seeing instead the death of a hundred thousand dreams play out before her eyes.
Claire doesn’t get zits.
She doesn’t really notice until her lab partner asks her what kind of face wash she uses.
“Your skin's always so perfect!” the girl enthuses, staring at Claire’s face with barely-concealed envy.
Claire just shrugs and turns back to her notes, but she tucks the conversation into the corner of her mind to pull out and examine later. Because, the truth is, Claire doesn’t use any special face wash.
When she gets home, Claire drops onto her bed, staring up at the ceiling as she unfolds the realization that she can’t remember the last time she had a zit. Not only that, the split-ends that had plagued her when she was in the eighth grade – tearing through every product on the market, desperate for the smooth, silky hair she saw on the high school girls who ran the summer cheerleading camp – are also gone, disappeared alongside the reading glasses she used to loathe and the fear of a pimple emerging the night before the school dance.
It’s not as dramatic as being able to jump off a building or throw herself in front of a car and walk away, but this kind of unthinking physical perfection would have been just as momentous to the girl Claire had been before her DNA set-off a time bomb that rocked her very foundations.
But now, after that, she hadn’t even noticed, and a part of her wonders what else she's missing.
--
Her mother is on her yearly spring cleaning kick, where she resolves to rid the house of all the junk and clutter stuck in the back of closets and corner of drawers. She worked assiduously for two hours but has, predictably, collapsed into a chair with a glass of lemonade, sweaty and frustrated and one closet away from abandoning the project altogether.
A mandatory part of this ritual, which Claire never gets out of no matter how quickly her mother tires of the endeavor, is going through all of her old clothes and tossing whatever she doesn’t wear anymore into a growing pile by the door for Goodwill.
When Claire laughingly pulls on the frothy, carnation pink dress she wore to her first high school semi-formal three years ago, she expects it to be too short, too tight, unwearable.
But the zipper slides up without any resistance, and Claire stares at herself in the mirror in surprise. She’s waiting to hear from colleges but she fits into the dress the same way she did when agonizing through her first round of high school finals.
Feeling unaccountably unsettled (some girls, after all, would kill to fit into the clothes they’d worn three years ago), she drops to her knees and pulls out the box of photo albums she keeps under her bed. She flips through the one with the roses on the cover until she finds a picture from the night of the Jingle Bell Ball. She’s standing by the stairs of her home in Odessa, wearing the dress, hair perfectly curled, glitter on her cheeks and Josh Whitaker’s arm around her waist.
Claire slips the photo from its plastic sleeve and stands close to the mirror, holding the photo up as her eyes dart from the picture to her own face, her mouth going dry as she processes what she’s seeing.
They’re the same.
Exactly the same.
--
It’s many weeks and rounds of testing later when the doctor her father trusted with his little girl calls them to his office for the results. Claire watches his lips move as he breaks the news to them without hearing the words, like an explosion of silence has gone off in her head, insulating her from the truth.
She feels her father’s hands on her shoulders, guiding her up out of her chair and steering her back to their car, but she’s numb to the real world, seeing instead the death of a hundred thousand dreams play out before her eyes.
--
When the acceptance letter from Stanford comes a month later, she closes her eyes on the fine prickling of tears she feels and throws the letter away.
Already people are starting to comment on how young she looks. If she goes to college nearby – coming home for weekends and Lyle’s regional basketball final and Dad’s birthday – it could draw unnecessary attention to her family. And she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if they had to uproot their lives on her account again.
“I got into Brown,” she announces at the dinner table, trying to inject as much enthusiasm into the words as she can.
“Well that’s just great, honey,” her mother says, pausing in her distribution of lasagna to rub an encouraging hand across her shoulder.
Her dad looks up at her with the quiet, evaluating look she’d feared. “What about Stanford?”
She doesn’t meet his eyes, knowing he’ll see right through her. Staring down at her plate, hoping he takes her evasion for disappointment, she shakes her head.
“I’m sorry, Claire,” he says.
She nods, glad to be able to tell the truth. “Me too.”
--
She lies when she gets to Brown, tells them she graduated a year early. Just turned seventeen. She hopes that with that seed planted early on, she’ll be able to get through her four years of college with no one noticing she looks the same as she did the day they started.
She has a lot of hopes hanging on this, maybe the last essential life experience her ability will allow her to have, and she’s determined to make the most of it.
--
The summer before junior year Claire cuts her hair short and dyes it chocolate brown. She takes to wearing big sunglasses and high heels, her bright colors put away in favour of black and variations of grey.
Please, she thinks, just two more years.
--
Claire crams every romanticized, cliché element of the college experience she can into those last years. She begs her way into classes with the most renown professors, studies in the library until two in the morning, surrounded by empty coffee cups and piles of books like she used to see in the movies, goes to parties and drinks sangria made in a dorm bathroom until dawn, leads a water balloon fights on the quad during the last week of finals, and takes day trips with her friends to New York City to gossip and shop.
The slow march of time towards graduation feels like a death sentence hanging over her, and when the day finally comes, she bites her lip so fiercely beneath her smile as she poses for photos in her cap and gown that she tastes blood.
Most of her friends move to New York, which is why she decides to go to Austin. She misses Texas, and no one knows her there, which she knows is important now.
Her friends don’t realize that when she says she’ll keep in touch, what she really means is goodbye.
--
She wants to get a real job, work her way up, become the boss someday; but, ironically, having nothing but time means she knows she’ll never get past entry-level. Much good that fine, expensive degree will do her, she laughs bitterly to herself.
She decides to become a temp, and her father agrees it’s probably the best course of action. She can pass for someone old enough to be doing the job, and she’ll never be in any one place long enough to raise suspicion. Indeed, she’s at her first job for almost three weeks before the soul-crushed person in the cubicle next to her realizes she isn’t Sheila.
--
She likes Austin, but when her neighbor knocks on her door one day and asks to speak to her mother, she knows it’s time to move on. Claire Bennet’s driver’s license says she’s twenty-four, but the cashier at the grocery store still refuses to sell her a bottle of wine.
She goes to Denver, because she’s never lived in the mountains before, and she thinks she might enjoy it. Seems as good a reason as any. It snows the day she arrives, and she watches in awe from the bedroom window of her postage-stamp apartment as the snow covers everything, making the dingy street she lives on now look clean and pretty, sparkling in the sun.
She’s at a local convenient store that night buying milk and bread and a few necessities when she sees a kid no older than she looks buying a six-pack. The cashier doesn’t bat an eye at the kid’s ID, so Claire puts down her quart of milk and follows him into the parking lot to find out where he got his fake. He asks her out as he scribbles down the number for her, not knowing he’s just a child in her deceptively old eyes, and she feigns interest until he hands the number over.
In Denver, twenty-four-year-old Claire Bennet becomes nineteen-year-old Claire Barrette, and, for awhile, she doesn’t look back.
--
Two years and out becomes Claire’s rule. Sometimes, when she finds a place she likes or she’s particularly weary of the life her genes have wrought, she stretches it to three. In Chicago, where she meets David, it becomes four.
But it doesn’t last.
It can’t.
--
Claire is bored to her bones. Learning a new city provides some excitement, but the new streets and shops quickly fade to routine, like the endless filing and copying and faxing she does in a hundred identical, mindless offices.
She dyes her hair red in Philadelphia, just for a change. And she decides not to go by Claire this time. Instead she’s Samantha. Then in Tampa, she’s Wendy.
The more bored she gets, the more outrageous her new names become.
Alexis in Baton Rouge.
Maybelle in St. Paul.
Svetlana in Portland.
In Santa Fe, she dies her hair purple and calls herself Sunshine.
It amuses her, for awhile. Until she realizes there’s no one to get the joke.
--
After Santa Fe, news of the “Specials” – she loves that euphemism – goes public, along with a scheme for identifying and registering them that is more terrifyingly Orwellian than anything her father could have imagined, which makes her almost glad he hasn’t live to see it. Claire can no longer afford to court attention, and she goes back to her natural hair color for the first time since college.
She gets pulled over for speeding one afternoon and calmly hands her fake – Clara Brown, 18 – over to the officer who approaches her window. She’s been making her own IDs for years now, and she’s practically elevated forgery to an art form.
But the officer squints at the license, picking at the corners with his fingers and turning it towards the light to examine it more closely. She feels her heart beat a little faster. When she was younger, it would have been from fear; now she’s just irritated the man is questioning her perfect craftsmanship.
“This is good,” he finally says. “Where did you get this?”
Claire blinks. “Excuse me?”
“This is the best fake ID I’ve ever seen,” the officer says, leaning against her door as though they’re old friends. He doesn’t seem like he’s about to arrest her, and Claire is, against her will, a little mollified by the praise. She feels her pulse slow to a normal rate.
“What are you using it for, cigarettes?” he continues.
“Not… exactly,” she says.
“If we forget this speeding ticket,” he says, “could you get me one?”
As it turns out, the officer – Gordon – has a son who’s just been entered into the system as a Special, which means all of his identification has been marked to indicate his new status. Gordon’s wife wants to take the boy out of the country, back to her childhood home in Sweden where the government is less invasive, but the boy needs a clean passport to travel out of the States.
This is how Claire ends up in the fake ID business, hiding Specials from a government that’s increasingly hostile towards them. She temps during the day and locks herself in her bathroom-cum-dark room at night with the pile of photos Gordon sends her every week.
She never feels the need to dye her hair after that.
--
When Claire gets the call, she turns off the stove without bothering to remove the pasta she was preparing for dinner and jumps into her car, redlining it all the way to La Jolla.
“Excuse me, miss,” the nurse at the ICU station asks when she comes flying out of the elevators, eyes red and weak from two solid days of driving, demanding a room number. “Are you family?”
“I’m his great-niece,” she says. “Claire Bennet.”
It’s the first time she’s had her real name on her tongue in almost fifty years, and she feels her lower lip tremble dangerously at the thought.
Lisa is on her as soon as she steps through the door to the room, her fingers clutching Claire into a hug, the hospital smell in her hair and her clothes overpowering. They’ve never met in person before – it was too risky for Claire to come to the wedding –
but she holds onto the woman as though she’s the last thing in the world she recognizes.
“Oh Claire,” Lisa says, and Claire again feels a strange rush at the sound of her name. “I’m so glad you made it.”
“How is he?” she asks, turning from Lisa to stare at Lyle.
It was always a shock to see her little brother growing into an old man when they met up over the years, but nothing could have prepared her for the sight of him lying in a hospital bed, his skin grey and wan, hooked up to machines and tubes and drips. She felt her knees weaken beneath her and sank into a chair by his side, taking one of his papery hands in her own.
“The heart attack was massive,” Lisa says. “They think it’s just a matter of time now.”
Claire looks down at where their skin touches. Her hands are still soft and strong and unmarked, but his are bony and thin with a long scar next to his index finger that she doesn’t know how he got. She feels her jaw tighten with the unfairness of it all. Her baby brother.
Her vision blurs as tears fill her eyes, and she drops her head, rubbing her forehead against his skin.
At the funeral three days later, Lisa holds onto her arm as though it’s all that’s keeping her standing. As they walk back to the car after watching Lyle’s casket lowered into the ground, she remarks on how much Claire resembles her grandmother.
“Lyle always kept a picture of his sister in his wallet,” she says. “He didn’t talk about her very often, but he loved her so much.”
Claire tries to swallow around the heart in her throat. “She loved him, too.”
--
After that the years begin to blur into one another, and Claire no longer bothers to count. She moves on whenever she gets the first suspicious look from coworker or when she’s grown sick of every restaurant in town. She’s lived in every state now except Alaska; she never did like the cold.
Gordon dies, and she goes to his funeral, lingering at the back of the church and the edge of the crowd at the reception to avoid having to explain who she is. She is oddly determined to meet his son, though, and approaches the man after the service. Despite not knowing who she is, he speaks politely with her in a lightly-accented voice and doesn’t pull away when she reaches out on impulse to hug him.
Gordon trained his own successor in the Specials Railroad, as they had jokingly called it. He’s a young deputy fresh out of the academy named Mark, and she meets him for coffee as a formality. All she wants is to be able to put a face to the name she’ll be working with; she doesn’t expected his unaffected charm and friendly manner to punch through the walls she’s spent a century cultivating.
“So, um, Claire,” he says, looking down at his coffee cup with sudden shyness. “Would you like to go out sometime?”
She conceals her grin and asks, “Aren’t we out now?”
“Yeah, good point,” he says, flustered. “But I meant, you know, a non-work kind of out.”
She clamps down on the instinctive rush of yes! she feels screaming through her veins. She knows better by now. “I don’t think that would be such a good idea.”
“Why, the age difference?” he asks.
“There’s that.”
“Well that doesn’t bother me,” he said. “If it doesn’t bother you. I mean, I know I’m a lot older than you, but you seem really mature for your age and… what?”
Claire’s not sure if she wants to laugh or cry. “Gordon didn’t tell you about me?”
“Only that you make the IDs for the railroad,” he says, eyes narrowing. “What am I missing?”
When Claire haltingly explains, sure that this means the end of the first thing to touch her citadel heart in years, he simply shrugs and says he likes older women too.
--
She has forty-four years with Mark, and she only realizes that she spent the century before him in an agony of loneliness once that pain is gone. He loves her so much that he doesn’t mind their Bedouin existence; having to pose as uncle and niece, then father and daughter, then grandfather and daughter; or her refusal to have children she knows she’ll only outlive. He willingly gives up for her the dreams that she had snatched away by her treacherous DNA, and maybe if she had loved him better she wouldn’t have let him.
But she couldn’t have possibly loved him any more.
After watching Mark die, the same way she watched her mother, her father, Lyle, Gordon, and too many cats and houseplants to count wither away and leave her, something inside of Claire finally breaks.
She had curled up next to him on their bed, watching his last laboured breaths, clutching his hand in hers as though she could keep him there with her if she held on tightly enough.
But she couldn’t, and now that he’s still and quiet she reaches into the drawer of her bedside table and pulls out the pistol she’s been hiding there ever since Mark came home from the hospital, determined to die in his own bed.
She lays the gun down on the comforter between them, staring at it and running her fingers over the curve of the handle as she remembers a conversation long dead and buried.
“Right through the back of the head. You know the spot.”
She’s been thinking about this moment ever since the doctor came back with the word cancer on his lips. One bullet, in the right place, will finally end this.
She picks up the gun, testing its weight, imagining darkness and peace, when the shrill ring of her phone jolts her from her thoughts.
She covers her face with one hand, discovering her cheeks wet from tears she hadn’t even realized she was crying, and wages an internal war with herself. She knows it’s Harper on the other end of the line with a story about some kid who’s been flagged by the system and who needs to get out of the country fast, and she knows if she answers it, she’ll have to do something about it.
With a great sigh, Claire rolls over and grabs the phone. The gun goes back into the drawer, where she knows it will stay.
At least for now.
--
She’s in Prague, after finally putting her passport-making skills to use for herself. She needed to go somewhere she had never seen before, be surrounded by people who didn’t speak her language and wouldn’t notice her as she walked down the street. The airline had a deal to Prague, and something inside of her responded to that name, the mystery of it. She figured it was about time she tried to see the world.
It’s beautiful. More beautiful than she could have imagined, with the river twisting through the city and the castle sitting on the hilltop, overlooking them all. She’s in love with it: the narrow cobblestone streets, the crowds of tourists she can disappear into, the incomprehensible musical chatter of Czech all around her.
On her third morning in the city, she’s sitting on a bench with a croissant and a cup of coffee, listening to a busker play some piece of classical music she doesn’t recognize on his violin. It’s early, but already the tourists are out, coming and going over the bridge towards the castle in droves, and she watches them idly as she finishes her breakfast.
When the crowd on the bridge parts and she spots him for the first time, she’s sure she’s imagining it. There are a hundred thousand ways this can’t be real, not least of which being that he’s just as heartbreakingly beautiful as the first day she saw him.
But then he sees her too and stops in his tracks, staring at her with wide brown eyes she’d never dreamed of seeing again as she stands, the rest of her croissant tumbling forgotten from her nerveless fingers.
She doesn’t realize they’ve both started running until they crash into each other, limbs tangling, his arms holding her tight as she presses her face against his neck, trying to breathe him in until he fills her up.
He whispers her name – her name – into her hair, and her heart seems to beat out his as though it’s finally found a reason for perservering all these long, lonely years.
Peter.
-the end.
-the end.
Current Location: Main Street
Current Mood: 
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