30.5 - Claire Bennet
Dec. 9th, 2007 11:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
psocopteraThis is so incredibly addictive to do. Possibly less so to read... well, look at it this way, it's sort of like an Advent calendar?
"Claire, you'll never guess what!"
Claire Bennet winced pre-emptively and fumbled the hand that wasn't holding the phone for something to grip. That excited, momentous tone of voice... it couldn't mean that -
"Lyle and Megan just called, and Megan is expecting again!"
She flinched despite having braced for it.
"She's just six weeks along but they wanted to let us know right away this time."
Claire felt something drip onto the top of her foot. She looked down and realized the thing she had found to grip was a letter opener, and she had apparently plunged it into her thigh. Damn, and she had liked these pants, too.
"Claire?"
"Uh, yeah, um, again? Really?" She switched hands on the phone and extracted the letter opener, and then stood there with it looking around, trying to figure out where to put it where it wouldn't stain.
"Claire, are you ok?
"That just seems kind of... fast."
"Well, not really," her mother said, "The kids will be just over two years apart, I think that's nice..."
"I guess," Claire said. Her leg had finished healing, why couldn't she get some self-repairing pants?
"You know, I keep wondering when you're going to get started," Sandra continued. "You're thirty now, honey, don't you ever think you should -"
Claire thought it was a very good thing she wasn't nuclear, or she would have exploded right there. She only barely caught herself from stabbing the letter opener into her other thigh.
"I know you're busy but you don't want to wait too long," and something in Claire snapped.
"You think I've never even thought about it? " she hissed. She gave up and just dropped the bloodstained letter opener back onto the counter. "You think we're just waiting? We have been trying and trying and trying. You have no idea what we've tried. S.L. and I -"
"Claire!" her mother interrupted. "You know I can't believe you still call him that." D.L. Hawkins' age-accelerated clone had turned out to share his predecessor's taste for superpowerful blondes, and they had married on top of the Golden Gate Bridge one glorious June, with Peter flying Micah in at the last minute for a tearful reconciliation - things had been pretty confused for awhile there. Claire had made the mistake of explaining to her parents that they had gotten into the habit of calling the clone the "second D.L." and it had sort of stuck even after he joined the team.
"Would you feel better about it if I told you it stood for Sweet Lips?" she says now. "But, Mom, listen, I'm confessing here: we. have. been. trying. for. years. At first we thought it was him, that he was, uh, going desolid at a crucial moment or something. But we knew because of Micah that D.L. hadn't had any genetic problems, and we gave him my blood in case there was anything physical, and, no. Then I started doing some reading, and, ok, I guess I'm pretty stupid, but I'd been having unprotected sex since I was sixteen and - "
"You WHAT? With West?"
"Uh, well, anyways, look, in all that time it had never even occurred to me that the odds of getting away with that were pretty improbable. All they ever told us in school was "wait until marriage.""
"I can see how well you listened to that," Sandra sniffs. "Claire, I know things were pretty crazy for awhile there, but..."
"That is so not the point now, and are you seriously trying to argue things are less crazy now? So we thought it must be me, and I went to see the OB/GYN, and why am I even telling you this? It was the most embarrassing experience of my life."
"Including the Cupid attacks?"
"Including the Cupid attacks. I go see this doctor, and they do the exam, and, oh, god, there's this look on her face, and she sits down and says, "now, Claire, I'm guessing by your age you went to school during abstinence-only education, but I think the reason you might be having trouble is, well, you do know that in order to conceive you need to be having intercourse?" I guess things looked, um, notably intact down there, and she thought maybe..."
"Oh my dear lord."
"And we'd been married for two years! I don't even remember what I said. But after that we started working with Mohinder, and he figured out that..."
There is a long pause.
"Honey?"
"Since a fetus is, biologically, like a parasite, my body was just... rejecting them."
Another pause.
"Maybe you just need to relax?"
Claire eyes the letter opener in temptation. One good stab through the eye... "Mom. Remember the invasion from Titan? Well, you probably don't, but trust me: I'm parasite-proof. Good thing then, not so much now."
Claire takes a deep breath and keeps talking before her mother can. "We tried looking into suppressing my power, but I'm immune to the knockdown virus, and I couldn't exactly stay handcuffed to the Haitian for nine months. Mohinder thought maybe if the fetus was homozygous - ok, this is maybe worse than the hymen thing."
"I'm all ears."
"I... sort of spent six months stalking and seducing Adam Monroe?"
"Adam Monroe the genocidal maniac?" her mother said faintly.
"He's a lot better these days!" Claire says. "I think the thing with Hana's robotic avatar was really good for him."
"You know, there was a time when I wondered if there could be something between the two of you. Before I knew about the insanity. He seemed like such a nice young man, and you had so much in common. But then you got interested in Samuel, and - "
"Ewww," Claire says, "He's four hundred years old, that "young blonde and ancient undead guy" thing didn't even work on Buffy, and that's TV. No, we had some, um, appallingly violent sex - "
"Claire! You tell your mother these things?"
"No, oh, look. It didn't work, although I think that is why he showed up to help with the asteroid. S.L. had been iffy about trying donor sperm anyways - "
"I should say so! Claire, that is no way to treat your husband. Honey, why wouldn't you just adopt? Don't you... we have always loved you as our own..."
Claire bites her lip. It's so, so hard to explain without sounding like she's rejecting her family.
"And it's worked out so well for Matt and Mohinder," her mom continues. "And, who knows, once you adopt you might even get pregnant... you know it worked for me like that."
"Yeah," Claire rolls her eyes, "And for Matt and Mohinder." Aparna Parkman was a beautiful baby, but everyone found her method of creation a little disturbing.
"We might adopt," she tells her mother, and this is more than she's ever admitted before, "But it's not like we could just go to an agency. Our identities might work ok for taxes and traffic stops, but I don't think we could pass a background check, and who knows what they might turn up when they ran our fingerprints. And anyways, we're, we're just not there yet. I am only thirty. There might still be something we can try... Elle, you know, Peter's wife, well, from the very beginning Peter's been asking if there's anything he can do, you know, he always wants to save everybody, and I think it's still really weird for him when there's something he just can't fix... anyways, last year Elle came to us and offered to be our surrogate, if we wanted. We were just floored, but we all talked about it, around and around, and eventually we decided to go for it."
"And?" Sandra hangs on this with bated breath. The whole story has been riveting, so much she never knew.
"We did enlist the Haitian, to try to get me through IVF... it turns out you can have too regular a cycle; if my powers are active, I don't suppress, stim, any of it. We tried three times, but... I never even made it to retrieval. Something always happened, I got shot or called in for a rescue or something, and needed to be able to regenerate, and then..."
"Maybe it just wasn't meant to be," Sandra says. She means to be consoling.
"Fuck that shit," Claire says. "Um, sorry, Mom. But... "meant to be"? We've changed the future how many times now, futures that Isaac or somebody painted, futures that Hiro and Peter really saw. You're not telling me there's some kind of destiny that can't be changed."
Her mom wisely changes the subject. "Why didn't you ever tell me any of this?" she asks. "Claire, I hate to think of you struggling through this without support."
Claire sighs. "I just... ever since I was sixteen, I've been bulletproof, literally. I've been... there's been nothing I couldn't take, fire, radiation, Elle's lightning bolts, acid hail, alien invaders... I thought my body could do anything. I wasn't ready for it to fail me like this. And I didn't know how to admit it, when I had always been, you know."
"The strong one," her mother says.
"The tough one, yeah. And I know you were dubious about the whole clone thing... you never said anything, but I didn't have to be Matt to hear you thinking "he's only eight years old out of that tank, can he really take care of my daughter?" So at first, when we thought it was S.L., I didn't want to add anything to that, and we just... sort of got in the habit of not talking about it."
"I'm glad you told me now," Sandra says.
Claire sighs. "So am I. Listen, Mom, I should probably get off the phone, S.L.'s supposed to be calling from this Tokyo job... um, forget I said that. My best wishes to Lyle and Megan, really. I'm... I'm really happy for them."
Sandra knows better than to push. "You take care," she tells Claire. "My best to everybody."
Claire smiles, and hangs up, and spends a few minutes thinking about a little girl with chubby cheeks and curly hair, and then goes to find some less-bloody pants. If there's one thing she can count on, it's that whatever happens will be much weirder than anything she could possibly plan on.
"Claire, you'll never guess what!"
Claire Bennet winced pre-emptively and fumbled the hand that wasn't holding the phone for something to grip. That excited, momentous tone of voice... it couldn't mean that -
"Lyle and Megan just called, and Megan is expecting again!"
She flinched despite having braced for it.
"She's just six weeks along but they wanted to let us know right away this time."
Claire felt something drip onto the top of her foot. She looked down and realized the thing she had found to grip was a letter opener, and she had apparently plunged it into her thigh. Damn, and she had liked these pants, too.
"Claire?"
"Uh, yeah, um, again? Really?" She switched hands on the phone and extracted the letter opener, and then stood there with it looking around, trying to figure out where to put it where it wouldn't stain.
"Claire, are you ok?
"That just seems kind of... fast."
"Well, not really," her mother said, "The kids will be just over two years apart, I think that's nice..."
"I guess," Claire said. Her leg had finished healing, why couldn't she get some self-repairing pants?
"You know, I keep wondering when you're going to get started," Sandra continued. "You're thirty now, honey, don't you ever think you should -"
Claire thought it was a very good thing she wasn't nuclear, or she would have exploded right there. She only barely caught herself from stabbing the letter opener into her other thigh.
"I know you're busy but you don't want to wait too long," and something in Claire snapped.
"You think I've never even thought about it? " she hissed. She gave up and just dropped the bloodstained letter opener back onto the counter. "You think we're just waiting? We have been trying and trying and trying. You have no idea what we've tried. S.L. and I -"
"Claire!" her mother interrupted. "You know I can't believe you still call him that." D.L. Hawkins' age-accelerated clone had turned out to share his predecessor's taste for superpowerful blondes, and they had married on top of the Golden Gate Bridge one glorious June, with Peter flying Micah in at the last minute for a tearful reconciliation - things had been pretty confused for awhile there. Claire had made the mistake of explaining to her parents that they had gotten into the habit of calling the clone the "second D.L." and it had sort of stuck even after he joined the team.
"Would you feel better about it if I told you it stood for Sweet Lips?" she says now. "But, Mom, listen, I'm confessing here: we. have. been. trying. for. years. At first we thought it was him, that he was, uh, going desolid at a crucial moment or something. But we knew because of Micah that D.L. hadn't had any genetic problems, and we gave him my blood in case there was anything physical, and, no. Then I started doing some reading, and, ok, I guess I'm pretty stupid, but I'd been having unprotected sex since I was sixteen and - "
"You WHAT? With West?"
"Uh, well, anyways, look, in all that time it had never even occurred to me that the odds of getting away with that were pretty improbable. All they ever told us in school was "wait until marriage.""
"I can see how well you listened to that," Sandra sniffs. "Claire, I know things were pretty crazy for awhile there, but..."
"That is so not the point now, and are you seriously trying to argue things are less crazy now? So we thought it must be me, and I went to see the OB/GYN, and why am I even telling you this? It was the most embarrassing experience of my life."
"Including the Cupid attacks?"
"Including the Cupid attacks. I go see this doctor, and they do the exam, and, oh, god, there's this look on her face, and she sits down and says, "now, Claire, I'm guessing by your age you went to school during abstinence-only education, but I think the reason you might be having trouble is, well, you do know that in order to conceive you need to be having intercourse?" I guess things looked, um, notably intact down there, and she thought maybe..."
"Oh my dear lord."
"And we'd been married for two years! I don't even remember what I said. But after that we started working with Mohinder, and he figured out that..."
There is a long pause.
"Honey?"
"Since a fetus is, biologically, like a parasite, my body was just... rejecting them."
Another pause.
"Maybe you just need to relax?"
Claire eyes the letter opener in temptation. One good stab through the eye... "Mom. Remember the invasion from Titan? Well, you probably don't, but trust me: I'm parasite-proof. Good thing then, not so much now."
Claire takes a deep breath and keeps talking before her mother can. "We tried looking into suppressing my power, but I'm immune to the knockdown virus, and I couldn't exactly stay handcuffed to the Haitian for nine months. Mohinder thought maybe if the fetus was homozygous - ok, this is maybe worse than the hymen thing."
"I'm all ears."
"I... sort of spent six months stalking and seducing Adam Monroe?"
"Adam Monroe the genocidal maniac?" her mother said faintly.
"He's a lot better these days!" Claire says. "I think the thing with Hana's robotic avatar was really good for him."
"You know, there was a time when I wondered if there could be something between the two of you. Before I knew about the insanity. He seemed like such a nice young man, and you had so much in common. But then you got interested in Samuel, and - "
"Ewww," Claire says, "He's four hundred years old, that "young blonde and ancient undead guy" thing didn't even work on Buffy, and that's TV. No, we had some, um, appallingly violent sex - "
"Claire! You tell your mother these things?"
"No, oh, look. It didn't work, although I think that is why he showed up to help with the asteroid. S.L. had been iffy about trying donor sperm anyways - "
"I should say so! Claire, that is no way to treat your husband. Honey, why wouldn't you just adopt? Don't you... we have always loved you as our own..."
Claire bites her lip. It's so, so hard to explain without sounding like she's rejecting her family.
"And it's worked out so well for Matt and Mohinder," her mom continues. "And, who knows, once you adopt you might even get pregnant... you know it worked for me like that."
"Yeah," Claire rolls her eyes, "And for Matt and Mohinder." Aparna Parkman was a beautiful baby, but everyone found her method of creation a little disturbing.
"We might adopt," she tells her mother, and this is more than she's ever admitted before, "But it's not like we could just go to an agency. Our identities might work ok for taxes and traffic stops, but I don't think we could pass a background check, and who knows what they might turn up when they ran our fingerprints. And anyways, we're, we're just not there yet. I am only thirty. There might still be something we can try... Elle, you know, Peter's wife, well, from the very beginning Peter's been asking if there's anything he can do, you know, he always wants to save everybody, and I think it's still really weird for him when there's something he just can't fix... anyways, last year Elle came to us and offered to be our surrogate, if we wanted. We were just floored, but we all talked about it, around and around, and eventually we decided to go for it."
"And?" Sandra hangs on this with bated breath. The whole story has been riveting, so much she never knew.
"We did enlist the Haitian, to try to get me through IVF... it turns out you can have too regular a cycle; if my powers are active, I don't suppress, stim, any of it. We tried three times, but... I never even made it to retrieval. Something always happened, I got shot or called in for a rescue or something, and needed to be able to regenerate, and then..."
"Maybe it just wasn't meant to be," Sandra says. She means to be consoling.
"Fuck that shit," Claire says. "Um, sorry, Mom. But... "meant to be"? We've changed the future how many times now, futures that Isaac or somebody painted, futures that Hiro and Peter really saw. You're not telling me there's some kind of destiny that can't be changed."
Her mom wisely changes the subject. "Why didn't you ever tell me any of this?" she asks. "Claire, I hate to think of you struggling through this without support."
Claire sighs. "I just... ever since I was sixteen, I've been bulletproof, literally. I've been... there's been nothing I couldn't take, fire, radiation, Elle's lightning bolts, acid hail, alien invaders... I thought my body could do anything. I wasn't ready for it to fail me like this. And I didn't know how to admit it, when I had always been, you know."
"The strong one," her mother says.
"The tough one, yeah. And I know you were dubious about the whole clone thing... you never said anything, but I didn't have to be Matt to hear you thinking "he's only eight years old out of that tank, can he really take care of my daughter?" So at first, when we thought it was S.L., I didn't want to add anything to that, and we just... sort of got in the habit of not talking about it."
"I'm glad you told me now," Sandra says.
Claire sighs. "So am I. Listen, Mom, I should probably get off the phone, S.L.'s supposed to be calling from this Tokyo job... um, forget I said that. My best wishes to Lyle and Megan, really. I'm... I'm really happy for them."
Sandra knows better than to push. "You take care," she tells Claire. "My best to everybody."
Claire smiles, and hangs up, and spends a few minutes thinking about a little girl with chubby cheeks and curly hair, and then goes to find some less-bloody pants. If there's one thing she can count on, it's that whatever happens will be much weirder than anything she could possibly plan on.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 10:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-11 12:40 am (UTC)Should I be putting more informative headers on these? I don't have a sense of whether that would be useful to anyone. And I seem to have spoiler-marked the His Dark Materials one but not this one. Hrm.