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apocalypsosTitle: second verse, same as the first
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Nathan, Hiro, Claire
Summary: The man who comes back a split second later isn’t Hiro Nakamura.
Author's note: Yeah, I'm still stuck on my Claire theory. Heh. :)
*
second verse, same as the first
*
Nathan’s grandfather had a pocket watch, a beautiful gold timepiece that still smelled vaguely like pipe smoke if you closed your eyes and took a deep enough breath. Since he’d passed it on to his eldest grandson, Nathan had barely let it see the light of day. It felt too much like a keeper of secrets, like a Pandora’s box cast in gold. It was too damn real.
The second everything falls apart and he realizes what has to be done, Nathan Petrelli smashes the face with a rock to stop it and passes it to his best friend.
“Take this,” he says. “So you don’t forget when to come back.”
The space beside him empties in a heartbeat.
Nathan lets go a shuddering breath, and blinks.
*
The man who comes back a split second later isn’t Hiro Nakamura.
Well, he is, but if you ask Nathan that’s not really the point.
*
It’s Claire who says something first, but she worries about him more than the others do.
The camp in Central Park’s gone quiet now that it’s late, only a few of them still awake to guard the perimeter. As if there’s anything to guard, Nathan thinks bitterly, or anything to guard them from. The city is a ghost town, and the sky above tints the ruins around the park an ominous shade of red. The radiation’s long since dissipated, the work of a few of their number doing the job clean enough, but the normal humans outside the city limits aren’t tempted to take the chance they’re wrong and for some reason the sky still glares down at them angry and crimson.
The city is theirs now. No one on the outside’s gunning to reclaim it.
It’s not the prettiest place in the world, obviously, but no one’s trying to kill them here.
The man who used to be Hiro Nakamura practices at night, when everybody has gone to sleep and he doesn’t have an audience. Well, a large audience, in any event.
Nathan looks down on the man crisscrossing the grassy area far from their encampment, the gentle flicker of firelight from the other side of the park reflecting off his blade. There is speed there, and grace that wasn’t present before he‘d left. Nathan doesn’t recognize much of the kid he knew, and maybe he sort of wishes he could hear the kid call him “Flying Man” with a smile in his voice but he isn’t about to admit it.
“He knows you’re up there,” Nathan hears in his earbud, and winces. Micah had insisted from day one, holding up the earbud and a cheap dollar-store walkie-talkie and saying, See? We can always get in touch with you with this.
Nathan hadn’t really wanted to know how the kid had managed it, but he’d taken it.
The shadows make it difficult to spot the person on the other end of the frequency, but once he recognizes the accent he knows what to look for. “Don’t exactly blend in with the birds up there,” she says.
There’s a smile in her voice that warms a soft spot in his chest, and he grins in response.
He lands on a walkway not far from the spot he’d been spying on, the sound of a blade slicing through the air carrying over to them. Claire grins when she sees him, lowering the walkie-talkie to her lap. The bench she’s sitting on is hidden well, tucked away in a shadow, and the dark clothes she’s wearing hide her well.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” he says, settling down next to her on the bench.
She shrugs. “It’s not going to kill me, is it?”
She’s watching him, studying him like she’s never seen him before, but he’s gotten used to it. He imagines it’s the same way with him, that she catches him staring at her every so often, recognizing the same tilt to the head, the same eyes, the same wicked look in their eyes when they’re about to raise a little hell.
Nathan’s not sure either one of them will ever get over that.
“You should ask him to show you how to do that,” she says, tilting her chin towards the grassy area nearby.
Nathan frowns. “What for? I don’t need to know how to use a sword.”
“Bet you said the same thing about that,” Claire says. She gives a pointed look to the gun at his hip.
“Yeah, well, flying isn’t exactly a defensive ability.”
“So it can’t hurt to learn that, either.”
It suddenly strikes Nathan that he hasn’t heard it yet, what the clash of steel on steel really sounds like, what the kid looks like fighting a real person and not just a ghost warrior carved in the air.
“He’s been gone for years,” he says. “I don’t know --”
Claire nudges him in the side with her elbow, flashes him a wide easy smile and says, “You’re not going to give up that easy, are you?”
*
The next day after his nightly flyover, Nathan heads over to the field, hands stuffed into his pockets as he walks as close to the action as he dares.
He trusts the kid. Even when he’d first held the sword with thrilled and knowing eyes, first showed it to Nathan with a jubilant smile, Nathan had trusted him with it. He can always push off from the ground if the blade gets too close, but that won’t be a problem.
He just knows.
At first he thinks he hasn’t been noticed, hasn’t been heard over the din of the imaginary battle going on before him. But then the kid says, “It took you long enough,” in clear and well-practiced English and Nathan freezes behind him.
The kid looks over his shoulder with a smile.
Not as giddy, not as energetic and wild, but …
It’s Hiro.
Even if it doesn’t feel like him, even if years gone by in an instant and hair grown long and experience gained have changed him, it’s Hiro.
Nathan tries not to shudder and forces a smile.
“Aren’t you tired yet of practicing alone?” he asks.
Hiro lowers the blade in his grip. “I don’t exactly have my pick of dueling partners here, do I?”
It still throws Nathan, not having to correct his pronunciation, not needing to piece together the broken English Hiro had steadily worked on fixing from the moment his powers had clicked on. He has the sudden urge to ask Hiro what he did first, go back and perfect his grasp on the language or get a firm handle on his abilities or learn how to use that sword of his with the deadly precision Nathan’s watched him display for days now.
Clearing his throat, Nathan says, “How about a student?”
Hiro’s smile returns. Not the same smile Nathan is used to, but he’ll take it.
*
Nathan finds the gift on his cot the next day after the strategy session.
The sessions take all morning, every morning. They all play their parts. Hiro gives them knowledge, Isaac gives them warnings, Claire gives them hope. Nathan’s job is overhead surveillance.
By the time the sessions end Nathan’s usually got a headache, Hiro’s gone an eerie sort of silent, and Micah’s talking to his mother nonstop as they leave the tent to keep her focused.
Sometimes Claire follows him to his tent, the dark space just as empty and small as hers is. She sits down on his cot, fiddles with the edge of his blanket. Tries to get him to talk about nothing, about everything.
Tell me about my brothers, she says. My grandmother. Politics. What your favorite food is. Tell me about Peter.
Nathan never tells her to leave. He just talks.
The way the boys used to giggle like they were dying when Heidi did her impression of a chimpanzee. Mom’s ridiculous shoplifting incident, which is funnier in retrospect. Wanting to fly and fearing the cameras. Never being able to step away from a bowl of linguini unless the chef stopped filling it.
Peter. Jesus, he doesn’t shut up until sundown that day, makes Claire laugh and makes her cry and feels guilty about both.
But this time it’s not Claire.
It’s just a sword, an honest-to-God sword, something Japanese with swirls and symbols carved into the metal that Nathan doesn’t recognize. He’s not exactly a weapons expert. It’s not like he’d know.
What he does know is the handwriting on the note, the loopy girly swirl he‘s learned by heart.
I only broke both of my ankles climbing through rubble for this baby, so you better make it worth it.
*
“Again.”
Hiro paces behind him, calm and measured and maybe even a little terrifying. The sweat slides down Nathan’s back as he crouches on the ground, soaks his hair and clothes. They have a guy who can control plants and the grass flourishes even with the sky like it is, so soft and thick he’s tempted to sink into it and pass out. His muscles feel like they’ve been set ablaze, and it hurt to breath as if his lungs have been seared.
It strikes him that just because he can fly faster than the speed of sound doesn’t mean he can’t still have a heart attack young.
“Again,” Hiro says.
“Give me a minute,” Nathan snaps back.
His chin drops to his chest as if all of the muscles in his neck have stopped working. He hears Hiro kneel before him before he sees him.
“They’re not going to give you a minute, you know.”
Nathan wants to argue that, common sense wanting him to snap that he’s never going to need this in real life anyway. But he can’t. He’s shot three men dead already. He’s beaten someone into unconsciousness. He’s carried his own brother above the clouds, dropped him and raced back to the world below to save as many as he could before Peter, too swollen with growing radiation to siphon Nathan’s flying ability, fell to the streets below.
If he were smart, Nathan thinks bitterly, he would have flown sideways rather than up.
A whole fucking ocean devoid of people to be had, and he could have saved an entire city.
Some fucking hero.
He gives Hiro a jerky nod, staggers to his feet and raises the sword in his hands.
*
“How’s it going?”
Claire plops down beside him on the grass, passes him a bottle of ice cold water. They have one guy back at camp who can purify water and a woman who can alter the temperature of things. He’s guessing she owes them both a favor, however small. People around here like to save their strength just in case.
“Well,” he says after a gulp of water that practically makes him choke, “I can’t feel my legs and I think my arms have melted.”
“That’s going to make it hard to hold the sword.”
She smiles at that, and he can’t help but smile back.
Nathan takes another swig from the water bottle, staring across the practice field. Hiro sits cross-legged in the grass, eyes closed, off in his own world and yet more in this one than Nathan feels. The ruins of the city swim around him on occasion, like they’re not even there, like a nightmare hidden behind waves of heat off the remaining pavement.
His attention shifts at a hiss of breath next to him, and he glances over to see Claire lift the pad of her thumb from the edge of his blade.
Blood wells from her skin and disappears in the same instant. “Jesus, give me that,” he says, taking the sword from her hands.
“Nathan, calm down,” she says. “I’m okay.”
She holds up her hand, unmarred and healthy.
It doesn’t matter. The part of him that used to go numb when the boys would go near plugs in the wall or stumble and fall stays cold for hours.
*
Matt pulls him aside a week later after the morning session.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asks. “You tiring yourself out every day like this?”
Nathan hasn’t gone to get the sword from his tent yet, and his hands itch as if anxiously anticipating the weight of it in his grasp. “I have to do something with my free time,” he says with a grimace.
He can tell from the concerned look in Matt’s eyes what he’s thinking. That if he weren’t practicing the sword with Hiro he’d be doing the same thing he’d been doing with every free moment he’d had since the explosion. He’d fly over the city for hours and around the crater that’s Peter’s makeshift grave like he’s circling a drain. He’d go back to his empty tent and he’d stare at the canvas over his head until it blurred. He’d talk with Claire while taking a step back and stare at her for too long and wonder what he’s supposed to do with the only family he had left.
“If you ever want someone to talk to,” Matt says.
Nathan cuts him off before he can go on. “I’ll dig a good shrink out of the rubble.”
“C’mon, Nathan.” Matt does that soft-spoken puppy-dog thing he’s gotten pretty good at that usually weakens everybody’s resolve and gets them to talk. Mostly, it just gets on Nathan’s nerves. “You sure this is really going to help any?”
Nathan turns around and heads toward his tent without a word.
Let the armchair therapist pluck the goddamn answer from his brain, Nathan thinks, and clenches his fists at his side.
*
“Again,” Hiro says.
And Nathan pushes himself to his feet.
“Again,” Hiro says.
And Nathan wipes the sweat from his forehead and raises his sword.
“Again,” Hiro says.
And Nathan reminds himself that the next time he pushes off from the ground will feel like a full-body massage in comparison, that his muscles will relax all over as if they’ve been the only thing holding him down.
*
He takes Claire back to Texas one day, needing the break and willing to take the chance. Their faces are well-known, plastered all over like they’re goddamn criminals instead of the only people keeping the planet from total destruction.
He wears a ballcap, glasses and jeans. It helps more than he thought it would.
She can’t show him Odessa, makes comments that make it sound like she wouldn’t even if she could. But she’ll take Texas any way she can get it, and if it means shopping in Dallas or walking along the Riverwalk she’s happy.
He tries not to think of the end of the day, when they have to go back, when they have to report on what they’ve seen and what they’ve heard like the spies that they are. He pretends the whole world is normal, and one day he’d gotten a phone call from some woman at an adoption agency somewhere asking him if he’d like to meet his long-lost daughter, and when he can he buys a plane ticket and flies down to Texas to spend the weekend with her.
“God, I’ve missed this,” she practically croons to her chocolate ice cream cone, and downs the whole thing so fast he’s surprised she doesn’t get brain freeze.
You know, before he remembers she can’t.
*
The sky is dark and the others are asleep, and maybe that’s why Nathan dredges up the nerve to ask.
“How long were you gone?”
Hiro opens his eyes to look back at him, and Nathan wants to pretend he’s the Hiro he first met at that crappy little diner, that the even stare that scared many a political opponent would make him cower and bend. But this Hiro doesn’t so much as flinch. His sword is at his back and his body is strong, and he is not afraid. Not of this, not of Nathan.
“Does it matter?” he asks.
“No. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to know.”
“Long enough,” Hiro says.
Nathan frowns. “Thanks for that complete non-answer,” he says dryly.
Hiro’s smile feels brittle and weak, like it’d crumble under the weight of anything too heavy. “I practiced my English and learned the sword. That should be enough for you to know.”
“It isn’t,” Nathan says, “but nice try.”
Hiro nods at that, reaches into his pocket and removes something he holds out for Nathan to take. He doesn’t need the dim light from the other side of the park to recognize his grandfather’s watch, the broken remnants of it, the cracked glass and the still face frozen at a familiar time.
It’s tarnished, a couple of years worth of it at least, and Nathan’s tempted to ask if he cleaned it while he was away but doubts it.
He takes it back without a word, slips it into his own pocket and stares up at the sky for a moment.
He feels the yearning tug in his chest like a physical thing, like he’s already being pulled away from the ground, and he takes a deep breath to steady himself.
“Again,” he hears.
Hiro blocks his line of vision, stands between him and the sky, and holds out his hand. Nathan takes his hand, lets Hiro pull him to his feet and wills himself not to keep pulling away from the grass until he’s miles above the ground.
He raises his sword, and Hiro raises his.
In the distance Nathan could swear he hears hoofbeats tearing up the ground and battle cries in another language.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Nathan, Hiro, Claire
Summary: The man who comes back a split second later isn’t Hiro Nakamura.
Author's note: Yeah, I'm still stuck on my Claire theory. Heh. :)
second verse, same as the first
*
Nathan’s grandfather had a pocket watch, a beautiful gold timepiece that still smelled vaguely like pipe smoke if you closed your eyes and took a deep enough breath. Since he’d passed it on to his eldest grandson, Nathan had barely let it see the light of day. It felt too much like a keeper of secrets, like a Pandora’s box cast in gold. It was too damn real.
The second everything falls apart and he realizes what has to be done, Nathan Petrelli smashes the face with a rock to stop it and passes it to his best friend.
“Take this,” he says. “So you don’t forget when to come back.”
The space beside him empties in a heartbeat.
Nathan lets go a shuddering breath, and blinks.
The man who comes back a split second later isn’t Hiro Nakamura.
Well, he is, but if you ask Nathan that’s not really the point.
It’s Claire who says something first, but she worries about him more than the others do.
The camp in Central Park’s gone quiet now that it’s late, only a few of them still awake to guard the perimeter. As if there’s anything to guard, Nathan thinks bitterly, or anything to guard them from. The city is a ghost town, and the sky above tints the ruins around the park an ominous shade of red. The radiation’s long since dissipated, the work of a few of their number doing the job clean enough, but the normal humans outside the city limits aren’t tempted to take the chance they’re wrong and for some reason the sky still glares down at them angry and crimson.
The city is theirs now. No one on the outside’s gunning to reclaim it.
It’s not the prettiest place in the world, obviously, but no one’s trying to kill them here.
The man who used to be Hiro Nakamura practices at night, when everybody has gone to sleep and he doesn’t have an audience. Well, a large audience, in any event.
Nathan looks down on the man crisscrossing the grassy area far from their encampment, the gentle flicker of firelight from the other side of the park reflecting off his blade. There is speed there, and grace that wasn’t present before he‘d left. Nathan doesn’t recognize much of the kid he knew, and maybe he sort of wishes he could hear the kid call him “Flying Man” with a smile in his voice but he isn’t about to admit it.
“He knows you’re up there,” Nathan hears in his earbud, and winces. Micah had insisted from day one, holding up the earbud and a cheap dollar-store walkie-talkie and saying, See? We can always get in touch with you with this.
Nathan hadn’t really wanted to know how the kid had managed it, but he’d taken it.
The shadows make it difficult to spot the person on the other end of the frequency, but once he recognizes the accent he knows what to look for. “Don’t exactly blend in with the birds up there,” she says.
There’s a smile in her voice that warms a soft spot in his chest, and he grins in response.
He lands on a walkway not far from the spot he’d been spying on, the sound of a blade slicing through the air carrying over to them. Claire grins when she sees him, lowering the walkie-talkie to her lap. The bench she’s sitting on is hidden well, tucked away in a shadow, and the dark clothes she’s wearing hide her well.
“Shouldn’t you be asleep?” he says, settling down next to her on the bench.
She shrugs. “It’s not going to kill me, is it?”
She’s watching him, studying him like she’s never seen him before, but he’s gotten used to it. He imagines it’s the same way with him, that she catches him staring at her every so often, recognizing the same tilt to the head, the same eyes, the same wicked look in their eyes when they’re about to raise a little hell.
Nathan’s not sure either one of them will ever get over that.
“You should ask him to show you how to do that,” she says, tilting her chin towards the grassy area nearby.
Nathan frowns. “What for? I don’t need to know how to use a sword.”
“Bet you said the same thing about that,” Claire says. She gives a pointed look to the gun at his hip.
“Yeah, well, flying isn’t exactly a defensive ability.”
“So it can’t hurt to learn that, either.”
It suddenly strikes Nathan that he hasn’t heard it yet, what the clash of steel on steel really sounds like, what the kid looks like fighting a real person and not just a ghost warrior carved in the air.
“He’s been gone for years,” he says. “I don’t know --”
Claire nudges him in the side with her elbow, flashes him a wide easy smile and says, “You’re not going to give up that easy, are you?”
The next day after his nightly flyover, Nathan heads over to the field, hands stuffed into his pockets as he walks as close to the action as he dares.
He trusts the kid. Even when he’d first held the sword with thrilled and knowing eyes, first showed it to Nathan with a jubilant smile, Nathan had trusted him with it. He can always push off from the ground if the blade gets too close, but that won’t be a problem.
He just knows.
At first he thinks he hasn’t been noticed, hasn’t been heard over the din of the imaginary battle going on before him. But then the kid says, “It took you long enough,” in clear and well-practiced English and Nathan freezes behind him.
The kid looks over his shoulder with a smile.
Not as giddy, not as energetic and wild, but …
It’s Hiro.
Even if it doesn’t feel like him, even if years gone by in an instant and hair grown long and experience gained have changed him, it’s Hiro.
Nathan tries not to shudder and forces a smile.
“Aren’t you tired yet of practicing alone?” he asks.
Hiro lowers the blade in his grip. “I don’t exactly have my pick of dueling partners here, do I?”
It still throws Nathan, not having to correct his pronunciation, not needing to piece together the broken English Hiro had steadily worked on fixing from the moment his powers had clicked on. He has the sudden urge to ask Hiro what he did first, go back and perfect his grasp on the language or get a firm handle on his abilities or learn how to use that sword of his with the deadly precision Nathan’s watched him display for days now.
Clearing his throat, Nathan says, “How about a student?”
Hiro’s smile returns. Not the same smile Nathan is used to, but he’ll take it.
Nathan finds the gift on his cot the next day after the strategy session.
The sessions take all morning, every morning. They all play their parts. Hiro gives them knowledge, Isaac gives them warnings, Claire gives them hope. Nathan’s job is overhead surveillance.
By the time the sessions end Nathan’s usually got a headache, Hiro’s gone an eerie sort of silent, and Micah’s talking to his mother nonstop as they leave the tent to keep her focused.
Sometimes Claire follows him to his tent, the dark space just as empty and small as hers is. She sits down on his cot, fiddles with the edge of his blanket. Tries to get him to talk about nothing, about everything.
Tell me about my brothers, she says. My grandmother. Politics. What your favorite food is. Tell me about Peter.
Nathan never tells her to leave. He just talks.
The way the boys used to giggle like they were dying when Heidi did her impression of a chimpanzee. Mom’s ridiculous shoplifting incident, which is funnier in retrospect. Wanting to fly and fearing the cameras. Never being able to step away from a bowl of linguini unless the chef stopped filling it.
Peter. Jesus, he doesn’t shut up until sundown that day, makes Claire laugh and makes her cry and feels guilty about both.
But this time it’s not Claire.
It’s just a sword, an honest-to-God sword, something Japanese with swirls and symbols carved into the metal that Nathan doesn’t recognize. He’s not exactly a weapons expert. It’s not like he’d know.
What he does know is the handwriting on the note, the loopy girly swirl he‘s learned by heart.
I only broke both of my ankles climbing through rubble for this baby, so you better make it worth it.
“Again.”
Hiro paces behind him, calm and measured and maybe even a little terrifying. The sweat slides down Nathan’s back as he crouches on the ground, soaks his hair and clothes. They have a guy who can control plants and the grass flourishes even with the sky like it is, so soft and thick he’s tempted to sink into it and pass out. His muscles feel like they’ve been set ablaze, and it hurt to breath as if his lungs have been seared.
It strikes him that just because he can fly faster than the speed of sound doesn’t mean he can’t still have a heart attack young.
“Again,” Hiro says.
“Give me a minute,” Nathan snaps back.
His chin drops to his chest as if all of the muscles in his neck have stopped working. He hears Hiro kneel before him before he sees him.
“They’re not going to give you a minute, you know.”
Nathan wants to argue that, common sense wanting him to snap that he’s never going to need this in real life anyway. But he can’t. He’s shot three men dead already. He’s beaten someone into unconsciousness. He’s carried his own brother above the clouds, dropped him and raced back to the world below to save as many as he could before Peter, too swollen with growing radiation to siphon Nathan’s flying ability, fell to the streets below.
If he were smart, Nathan thinks bitterly, he would have flown sideways rather than up.
A whole fucking ocean devoid of people to be had, and he could have saved an entire city.
Some fucking hero.
He gives Hiro a jerky nod, staggers to his feet and raises the sword in his hands.
“How’s it going?”
Claire plops down beside him on the grass, passes him a bottle of ice cold water. They have one guy back at camp who can purify water and a woman who can alter the temperature of things. He’s guessing she owes them both a favor, however small. People around here like to save their strength just in case.
“Well,” he says after a gulp of water that practically makes him choke, “I can’t feel my legs and I think my arms have melted.”
“That’s going to make it hard to hold the sword.”
She smiles at that, and he can’t help but smile back.
Nathan takes another swig from the water bottle, staring across the practice field. Hiro sits cross-legged in the grass, eyes closed, off in his own world and yet more in this one than Nathan feels. The ruins of the city swim around him on occasion, like they’re not even there, like a nightmare hidden behind waves of heat off the remaining pavement.
His attention shifts at a hiss of breath next to him, and he glances over to see Claire lift the pad of her thumb from the edge of his blade.
Blood wells from her skin and disappears in the same instant. “Jesus, give me that,” he says, taking the sword from her hands.
“Nathan, calm down,” she says. “I’m okay.”
She holds up her hand, unmarred and healthy.
It doesn’t matter. The part of him that used to go numb when the boys would go near plugs in the wall or stumble and fall stays cold for hours.
Matt pulls him aside a week later after the morning session.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asks. “You tiring yourself out every day like this?”
Nathan hasn’t gone to get the sword from his tent yet, and his hands itch as if anxiously anticipating the weight of it in his grasp. “I have to do something with my free time,” he says with a grimace.
He can tell from the concerned look in Matt’s eyes what he’s thinking. That if he weren’t practicing the sword with Hiro he’d be doing the same thing he’d been doing with every free moment he’d had since the explosion. He’d fly over the city for hours and around the crater that’s Peter’s makeshift grave like he’s circling a drain. He’d go back to his empty tent and he’d stare at the canvas over his head until it blurred. He’d talk with Claire while taking a step back and stare at her for too long and wonder what he’s supposed to do with the only family he had left.
“If you ever want someone to talk to,” Matt says.
Nathan cuts him off before he can go on. “I’ll dig a good shrink out of the rubble.”
“C’mon, Nathan.” Matt does that soft-spoken puppy-dog thing he’s gotten pretty good at that usually weakens everybody’s resolve and gets them to talk. Mostly, it just gets on Nathan’s nerves. “You sure this is really going to help any?”
Nathan turns around and heads toward his tent without a word.
Let the armchair therapist pluck the goddamn answer from his brain, Nathan thinks, and clenches his fists at his side.
“Again,” Hiro says.
And Nathan pushes himself to his feet.
“Again,” Hiro says.
And Nathan wipes the sweat from his forehead and raises his sword.
“Again,” Hiro says.
And Nathan reminds himself that the next time he pushes off from the ground will feel like a full-body massage in comparison, that his muscles will relax all over as if they’ve been the only thing holding him down.
He takes Claire back to Texas one day, needing the break and willing to take the chance. Their faces are well-known, plastered all over like they’re goddamn criminals instead of the only people keeping the planet from total destruction.
He wears a ballcap, glasses and jeans. It helps more than he thought it would.
She can’t show him Odessa, makes comments that make it sound like she wouldn’t even if she could. But she’ll take Texas any way she can get it, and if it means shopping in Dallas or walking along the Riverwalk she’s happy.
He tries not to think of the end of the day, when they have to go back, when they have to report on what they’ve seen and what they’ve heard like the spies that they are. He pretends the whole world is normal, and one day he’d gotten a phone call from some woman at an adoption agency somewhere asking him if he’d like to meet his long-lost daughter, and when he can he buys a plane ticket and flies down to Texas to spend the weekend with her.
“God, I’ve missed this,” she practically croons to her chocolate ice cream cone, and downs the whole thing so fast he’s surprised she doesn’t get brain freeze.
You know, before he remembers she can’t.
The sky is dark and the others are asleep, and maybe that’s why Nathan dredges up the nerve to ask.
“How long were you gone?”
Hiro opens his eyes to look back at him, and Nathan wants to pretend he’s the Hiro he first met at that crappy little diner, that the even stare that scared many a political opponent would make him cower and bend. But this Hiro doesn’t so much as flinch. His sword is at his back and his body is strong, and he is not afraid. Not of this, not of Nathan.
“Does it matter?” he asks.
“No. Doesn’t mean I don’t want to know.”
“Long enough,” Hiro says.
Nathan frowns. “Thanks for that complete non-answer,” he says dryly.
Hiro’s smile feels brittle and weak, like it’d crumble under the weight of anything too heavy. “I practiced my English and learned the sword. That should be enough for you to know.”
“It isn’t,” Nathan says, “but nice try.”
Hiro nods at that, reaches into his pocket and removes something he holds out for Nathan to take. He doesn’t need the dim light from the other side of the park to recognize his grandfather’s watch, the broken remnants of it, the cracked glass and the still face frozen at a familiar time.
It’s tarnished, a couple of years worth of it at least, and Nathan’s tempted to ask if he cleaned it while he was away but doubts it.
He takes it back without a word, slips it into his own pocket and stares up at the sky for a moment.
He feels the yearning tug in his chest like a physical thing, like he’s already being pulled away from the ground, and he takes a deep breath to steady himself.
“Again,” he hears.
Hiro blocks his line of vision, stands between him and the sky, and holds out his hand. Nathan takes his hand, lets Hiro pull him to his feet and wills himself not to keep pulling away from the grass until he’s miles above the ground.
He raises his sword, and Hiro raises his.
In the distance Nathan could swear he hears hoofbeats tearing up the ground and battle cries in another language.
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Date: 2007-01-26 09:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 10:20 am (UTC)Amazing. I love this Nathan; quite lost, but still resolute and strong.
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Date: 2007-01-26 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 03:54 pm (UTC)“Take this,” he says. “So you don’t forget when to come back.”
'Kay, I pretty much started flailing at "best friend" and never stopped. Oh, NATHAN.
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Date: 2007-01-26 04:30 pm (UTC)I like the idea of Hiro going back and learning the sword. I can't help but think that he might have BEEN the man who originally owned it... :) I love the differences you describe when he comes back...I love how everything's harder, but there's still hope.
Beautiful, thank you.
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Date: 2007-01-26 05:03 pm (UTC)This story, while fantastic and lovely in it's descriptions and yay Claire!, is a nightmare that I hope does NOT come true.
I mean, you killed Peter! He blew up and made NYC a radioactive wasteland. And Niki...she's insane? I *love* Niki!
(You got the love, right? Because I did love the story..I just hope it never happens like this.)
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Date: 2007-01-26 05:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 05:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 07:05 pm (UTC)Thanks for writing.
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Date: 2007-01-26 08:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 08:23 pm (UTC)you are so close, so careful, with your characterizations. it's a joy to get to know them through your eyes.
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Date: 2007-01-26 10:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-27 01:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-27 02:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-27 03:44 am (UTC)(Re: the pocketwatch thing - Did you happen to watch Pan's Labyrinth?)
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Date: 2007-01-27 05:20 am (UTC)Stuff like this makes me take another look at the characters, their possibilities and I love it.
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Date: 2007-01-27 10:12 pm (UTC)I keep being amazed at the things you can do to canon, twisting it around and nudging it into a new and unexpected direction and building it up and up so it feels so real, so plausible, so affecting.
The idea that Nathan is Claire’s father is so stunningly awesome, OMG.
That Hiro leaves and comes back a split-second later someone else is haunting and inexpressibly sad (and I love how you used the watch to connect the beginning of the story to the end).
If I think too long about what happened to Peter, I may start crying, so I won’t, but I just had to say that I love how you explained it—I love how Nathan blames himself for killing a city, and I love that before starting training with Hiro he would circle Peter’s grave for hours, would stare at the walls of his tent, broken and aimless, and that Claire and Hiro drag him out of that.
I love that Nathan and Claire keep being amazed at the similarities between them, and that Nathan tells her all about their family, and that seeing her get cut, even though see heals a moment later, makes him go cold for hours.
I love the detail and thought you’ve so obviously put into this post-Peter world; how people with powers have converged together this abandoned city, living how they can, doing what they can.
I love that their world has been turned upside-down and they’re coping; that Nathan learned how to use a gun and had to use it, that Hiro and Nathan train with swords for the battles that are to come, for the way the rest of the world runs almost normally, but how the people in this makeshift little group in NYC can never return to that—not really.
Lovely, lovely work, as always.
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Date: 2007-02-06 03:59 am (UTC)END SPOILER
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Date: 2007-01-28 05:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-29 04:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-07 05:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 03:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-10 08:08 am (UTC)Beautiful work - going into the mems.
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Date: 2007-02-11 05:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-10 06:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-20 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-06 06:54 pm (UTC)Perhaps that was because I lack the ability to express how much I adored this story. Your portrayal of these characters feels incredibly real and poignant. Three years on, where the show has deceived and disappointed me time and again, I'm still as touched and amazed reading this.