Rating: PG
Author: Trekker
Characters: Peter, Claire
Fandom: Heroes
Spoilers: Through early season three
Warning: Brief inhumane treatment of a prisoner.
It's January, 2010. Almost three years after Nathan's speech.
Peter teleports to exactly mile 375 on this quiet stretch of highway in Colorado and he leans against the mile marker sign, prepared to wait.
For the first time in what feels like years, he realizes he has a few minutes where he has nothing to do. Where he can just rest.
It only makes him realize how tired he is.
He's been at this for almost two months now. Stopping convoys, rescuing people, and taking them somewhere they'll be safe.
This time is different. This time, Claire's in the convoy.
Three minutes pass, and then the first HumVee comes into view. Peter waits, invisible, until they're fifty yards or so down the road, and then he shuts his eyes, concentrates, and stops time.
He walks down the shoulder slowly, too exhausted to hurry. Wet gravel crunches under his feet. There are pockets of snow left in the shadowy places in the ditch beside him. The low, gray clouds seem to be ready to drop more.
He passes the first and second Hummer and comes up to the semi. It's like a cattle truck, with a few high, barred windows in the trailer. It's plain and black, completely unmarked. No license plate, even, just a tag that says "Government: Special."
Peter carefully holds his concentration, keeping time stopped as he unlocks the cabin doors with a small push of telekinesis.
He's reaching up to pull the handle when he feels something touch the back of his neck.
In the end, it's the simple, stupid, normal human startle reflex that saves his life. He jerks away from the unexpected cold metal, and the knife slices through the side of his neck instead of the back of his head. Blood gushes and he presses his hand to the wound as he turns, but it's all too late--his concentration is blown, time resumes, and he catches the briefest glimpse of a flash of motion darting away, and then he's crushed by a Hummer going 80 miles per hour.
***
He notices two things when he wakes up. One is pain. The other is silence. Not around him, but inside his head. There are no other voices.
He opens his eyes and can make out nothing but a blur of green. His throat aches, and his chest and his... dick. Gradually, it filters through that he has a tube down his throat, a catheter, a colonoscopy bag, and some kind of wires hooked up to his chest. He can feel saliva pooling in the back of his throat, and he has to concentrate to swallow.
The government's methods for shutting down one's powers are crude, like curing a hangnail with an amputation. Turning off one's autonomic nervous system is messy and keeping someone alive in that condition is complicated. Every convoy like this has a doctor who can set up the life-support system, but Peter can't figure out why they didn't just kill him. Why are they bothering to keep him alive?
The awful possibilities settle like a stone in his belly.
The green blur before him resolves somewhat into a green tarp, apparently hung between him and the highway. One of the Hummers is parked near it, and he can see blood sprayed under the dented bumper--his own, no doubt. Two soldiers are standing by it, one of them talking into a radio. Sometimes, he hears a car woosh by--some oblivious civilian, on their way to somewhere, probably slowing down for a moment to look and wondering what the fuss along the roadside is about. Maybe thinking to themselves, 'Oh, thank god, they caught one of those monsters.' Maybe feeling a cold frission of fear and crossing themselves as the drive on.
Peter feels heavy and sluggish and cold. He's on the ground, feeling grass, grit, and broken glass underneath him, cutting into him. His hands and feet are bound behind him, so tight he can feel the cuffs cutting into the skin over the bones of his wrists and ankles. And he's naked. No one's even bothered to toss a coat over him.
He's not shivering--of course, because that's autonomic--but the awareness of the cold is rapidly becoming all-consuming. He's so cold he burns. He feels it in his guts and his bones.
Another someone's boots step into his field of vision. So, they've noticed he's awake.
He works his mouth, trying to speak, but it's hopeless between the drugs and the breathing tube, and it doesn't matter, because there isn't a chance in the world these soldiers would listen to him.
"You," the soldier over him says, and pokes his shoulder with the toe of his boot, like Peter's some slimey, unknown thing found by a small boy in a forest, "You killed some buddies of mine, back in Georgia."
I didn't, Peter thinks, but he can't say it and he knows it wouldn't make a difference. Propoganda, rumors, ghost stories.
The soldier pushes his shoulder with the sole of his boot, rolling him partway onto his back. Peter's head, barely under his control, rolls back and he can see the blurry outline of the man's young face peering out from under a helmet marked with the Department of Special Humans logo.
"Not so tough now, huh?" the kid says. "Look at you. All naked and drooling. Sick fuck."
Peter closes his eyes and lets his head drop back. Cold. So cold. Oh, god, he's cold. It hurts. The respirator hisses and clicks, and he can feel each small shock of the crude pacemaker plugged into his heart. Cold, he thinks. Please, I'm so cold. He tries to move his fingers but he can't.
"Nothin' to say?"
He opens his eyes, because the voice is closer. The soldier has dropped to a kneel beside him, peering at him with a look that's hungry and intense and wild.
Fear is a strange emotion without the adrenaline rush that ought to accompany it. It feels empty, somehow. Distant. Like it's happening to someone else.
Bad things happen to people in these convoys. Very bad things.
One of the soldiers by the Hummer has come up behind this one's shoulder, and is standing there, looming, holding his rifle across his chest.
"Hey," says a new voice. "Command says to go ahead and bring him in."
It's the third soldier, the one who was on the radio, and when Peter rolls his eyes back to see him, he can see the way he's standing, with his rifle hanging loosely from uncertain hands, but his feet spread in a stance that says he's not going to stand by while whatever was about to happen happens.
Peter realizes he's one of the good ones. One of the ones who's still trying to play by the old rules of every living thing deserving respect.
Peter wishes there were more like him.
He wishes he could still claim to be among their ranks.
***
When they reach the camp, he's chained to a bed in an otherwise-empty concrete block room, but at least they manhandle his limp and drugged limbs into a bright-orange hospital gown. It's flimsy, and the room is cool, but it's worlds better than the frozen, damp roadside.
It makes him wonder about what his people have been saying--the people he's rescued from convoys like that one, and brought to an old campground in Montana. He'd put together a collection of motor homes and trailers and tents, but there wasn't plumbing, and only a few generators. His people said that at least the government camps had food. Real shelter. Climate control. Even, reportedly, sattelite television and severely limited and controlled internet access--for inmates whose powers weren't technology related, of course.
He has three hundred and thirty-two people in his camp--men, women, and children. They're isolated from the rest of humanity, living in worse than third-world conditions, and all of his powers have thus far not come up with an effective solution to those everyday problems.
And they all have powers--or have the potential to--but it's amazing how little of those powers actually amount to anything useful. Peter has aquired from them the ability to add up ridiculously long columns of numbers, the ability to recognize any pattern instantly, enhancements of all five senses, the ability to communicate and manipulate both animals and--to a degree--plants, among many other random and sometimes downright bizarre things... Ultimately, though, out of three hundred people, only a few of them have powers that would be legitimately useful in a strategic situation, and when you get right down to it, even if all of them were willing and able to fight--which most of them are not--it would still be three hundred people against the entire combined force of the United States government.
He shuts his eyes again and thinks about Claire. How she was stuffed into one of those trucks and taken away. Locked away. Just because her body can regrow itself. How on Earth could anyone think that was right? Necessary? She's just a kid. She'd never-- He clentches his jaw in anger and feels the hairs on his arms bristle.
His eyes fly open suddenly.
Autonomic. That response is autonomic.
For the briefest of moments, a very long heartbeat, he's disappointed. His powers are back. The doctor must have done something wrong, and Peter's mind has managed to heal itself. He can fight.
That means... he has to fight.
He's so tired.
He takes a long slow breath. He almost physically pushes those thoughts away.
Then he phases through the cuffs, pulls out the tubes and the wires, and stands up. An alarm begins to blare even as he feels himself heal completely and steps up to the concrete wall.
***
He touches the wall and immediately, the layout of the whole building appears in his mind. He switches powers and homes in on Claire, finding her and the other prisoners still in a holding area, being booked. Perfect. He can still get them out.
The thousands deeper inside this facility are beyond even his powers for the moment.
He teleports in and freezes time before the guards even see him. He weaves his way through the twenty or so detainees, until he finds Claire sitting on a bench in the back, crouched forward with her hands pressed between her knees and her eyes fixed on the floor. There's a teardrop hanging, frozen, just about to fall, from the very tip of her nose. Peter kneels before her, reaches out, and catches it on his finger, wiping away the trail of wet from her warm, motionless skin.
"It's okay," he says, though she can't hear him or respond. "I'm here. I'm gonna get you out."
Then he hears a shoe scuff on concrete.
He turns just in time to see a wirey man in a DoSH uniform draw a knife.
"Can't stop me," the man says, with a grin that's lopsided and not-quite-right. "I'm the gingerbread man."
This guy must be the speedster from the highway. It doesn't matter, really.
"Why are you doing this?" Peter says. "Why are you working for them? You're one of us."
The man just laughs, a high and shaky sound, and continues to advance, step by halting step, never turning the knife away from Peter.
Peter sighs. He knows he can't concentrate enough to both keep time stopped and send this man a mental order. So he lets the man advance, lets him strike with the knife, then catches the blade with his hand--feeling it cut deep into his palm--and twists it from his grasp, feeling the rush of Niki's strength in his arm.
He has a moment's notice that he's made a terrible miscalculation as he hears a perfectly clear and perfectly coherent, "Okay, plan B," from the other man's mind, and then in a split second, the crazed gleam is gone and the speedster reaches back and yanks another knife out of a sheath at his back, and before Peter can react, the knife is deep in his shoulder and, again, the world springs into motion with a roar around him, and less than a split second later, he feels the knife plunge again, impossibly fast, in the back of his neck, but not quite right, not quite where it needs to be, but it's enough that Peter stumbles, falls to his knees on the concrete and everything is a blur, and the alarms are screaming and people are screaming and Claire is screaming and the knife slams into him again like the hand of God himself striking him and--
It happens so fast. Later he can't remember anything about that moment.
All he knows is that the next thing he remembers, he's sitting on the ground, surrounded by rubble and smoke and a horrible smell, and when he looks up, he sees a cloud blooming above him in a shape that he recognizes in his spine before he even understands it in his brain, like the way it is to see a rattlesnake or a black widow: instinctive recognition of a sign of destruction.
It's gone. The camp is gone. The prisoners are gone. Everything. Even his stupid orange gown. He's naked again, but not cold, this time. The rubble is radiating heat.
Probably the town a couple miles back is gone. At least half-gone. And that soldier who stepped in to save him from the other two. Who knows how many dead?
He did this. He did.
In between one breath and the next, he has become the horror stories that have been told about him.
Then he hears something move beside him, and when he looks, he sees flesh twisting around bones and growing--and then... Claire is there. Naked, but whole. Even her hair.
She blinks and sits up and looks around.
"Oh, my God," she says. "Oh, my God. What did you do?"
The End
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