DVD Commentary, III: Family Ways (Heroes)
Oct. 26th, 2007 07:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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12_12_12 for commentary, Family Ways was my first post-season 1 finale story. I usually avoid writing stories I know are bound to be jossed by later canon, but like much of Heroes fandom, I couldn't resist trying out several scenarios possible after the s1 finale. My two others were Illusions, aka The Twisted One, and Through a Glass Darkly, aka The One Which Amazingly Still Isn't Jossed, Err, Kringed. (Mostly because it uses a trip to a canon AU and time travel as a McGuffin.) Family Ways, a Claire pov, could be subtitled The One About Grief.
In the end, Claire insists that they take Peter with them to Texas.
This story started whencadesama during a conversation said the Bennets should take Peter with them post-finale and expose him to normal family relationships. She meant this as a happy story, I assume, but my imagination promptly went another way. Incidentally, as mentioned when I first posted the story, I didn't think Nathan was dead. I know my genre, and no dead body on screen means in 90% of all cases no dead person. However, I assumed Peter and Claire would not know he survived. (In other words, I got it exactly reversed to what actually happened. *g*) In any case, I wanted to write about Peter reacting to Nathan's death, and Claire reacting to that and the entire Petrelli family mess. Hence the following scenario. One more thing, regarding Claire and Peter, so you don't go into the story with wrong expectations: I don't 'ship them. I do like their relationship, but I don't see it as romantic, though Claire probably crushed on Peter somewhat when she first met him, which given that she is a teenager and he was a mysterious and kind good looking stranger who showed up to save her life is completely understandable. On the other hand, I don't think Claire ever registered as a woman with Peter, neither before or after they found out they're related; he sees her as a kid. Which doesn't mean he doesn't take her seriously as a human being. He likes and trusts her, and she's a symbol of hope to him.
It had taken the little girl, Molly Walker, to find him. He is healed, completely, but he didn’t talk, not with her or her father or anyone else. Dr. Suresh suggests they should bring him to his mother.
I don't think anyone doubted whether Peter would survive, which made the coyness of the early s2 publicity about whether or not this was the case somewhat funny.
“No,” Claire says sharply. Dr. Suresh opens his mouth and closes it again. Turning to Claire’s father, he says: “Well, shouldn’t at least someone tell Mrs. Petrelli that he’s, well, alive? And that the Congressman is…”
Peter raises his head, glares at him and walks away. Claire goes after him; behind her, she hears her father tell Dr. Suresh that he just elected himself to the job.
Poor Mohinder. As if showing up at Angela Petrelli's to tell her her son is dead once isn't enough.
They part ways with the others soon after that, and use the coordinates Molly gave them to track down Lyle and Mom. Peter is in the back of the car her father rented, still silent, and Claire counts his breaths for a while, to be sure he was still alive.
I figured Noah B. would use Molly to figure out where Sandra and Lyle were before leaving New York with Claire; I won't be suprised if s2 reveals once we get the inevitable flashback episode that this is how they reunited.
She remembers Ted Sprague and what it had felt like, standing next to a man while he turned their house into ashes. Claire regenerates, but her body feels pain as intensely as it did before she could do that, and her body remembers. Skin burning, hair burning, and there is nothing to breathe but fire. When Nathan turned around to look at her before going to Peter, she could see he knew this was waiting for him.
I don't think Nathan ever counted on surviving when showing up on Kirby Plaza. From the moment he made up his mind re: Peter and the explosion, whenever you want to put that moment, he was ready to die. Also, when rewatching certain s1 episodes, it struck me how the theme of burning alive is connected to Claire. It's what she starts to do when walking through fire in the pilot, it's what Nathan asssumes she and Meredith did until learning otherwise in Run!, it's what Claire does and survives in Company Man. That last exchange of looks between Nathan and Claire before he turns back to Peter in the finale is open to so many interpretations. Here Claire makes one of them.
She still has no idea what she thinks about Nathan, but when she listens too long to Peter’s silence, that is what she feels, every time. Being burned alive.
I don't think Claire has any idea how she feels about Nathan post-s1 finale. IMO there was only a brief time, i.e. during Run!, when she unambigously wanted him to be her father, because back then her relationship with Noah was strained to the breaking point due to what was happening with Sandra and all the secrets and mysteries. And of course that ended in her being painfully disappointed without even meeting Nathan. Post-Company Man, Noah was reaffirmed in the father position completely, but she had to leave him temporarily, and in New York Nathan behaved as awkwardly and hesitant around her as she did around him and wanted to send her away to Paris; being capable of breaking down when believing Peter was dead on one day and dealing with shady Thompson whom she knew to be the enemy the next. She tried to solve this by deciding Nathan was uncaring and the enemy, full stop, and that she had a good father, Noah, and a bad father who wasn't really one anyway. And then Nathan confused her again with savingNew York the world - and her from shooting Peter - by sacrificing his life.
So she tries not to do it too often, and talks with her father about future plans instead. He says they need to go back to Odessa once Mom and Lyle are found; the Primatech building there is full of secrets no one should have, and now that the Company is breaking down, anyone could grab them. Anyone usually meaning nobody good, and Claire nods.
The main reason why I had the Company breaking down and Noah Bennet going back to Odessa in order to take over so no one else does was because I wanted to focus on the family dynamics without having to explain why they weren't on the run. Also, it meant I didn't have to come up with a new setting.
Mom and Lyle are found in due course, and Mom is the one to make Peter come out of his silence, once she’s done with fussing about Claire and telling Dad how worried she’s been. It’s not when Mom makes him eat soup at the next inn they can find, no, or when she asks Dad whether he doesn’t think Mr. Muggles deserves a medal for remaining with them through everything; it’s when she passes out right in front of them, Claire has a moment when she freaks out, remembering Mom in the hospital, and Lyle actually screams, probably remembering the same thing. Peter, voice calm and not at all rusty from disuse, says he’s a trained nurse, checks Mom’s pulse, pupils and asks about her medication. Then he improvises something with the salt on the table to bring her to.
Obviously, Peter shut down completely after the explosion and Nathan's death. I thought it would make sense if the first thing to jolt him out of this somewhat was someone in medical distress; being a trained nurse sticks with you, and it's a part of his personality. (Sidenote: which is why the scene where he bandages Caitlin in Lizards made me feel somewhat smug.) Moreover, I didn't want Sandra's condition to be entirely forgotten; the hint about the way she died in 5YG seems to indicate that the doctor in Unexpected was right and there were long term damages by what the Haitian did to her.
Later on, he talks with Dad about memory losses, and somehow this ends up as the official justification for Peter living with them; taking care of Mom, as a nurse. He does that, he talks with her, and with everyone else, but not in the way she remembers him talking. The passion, the urgency is gone. Instead, he sounds, well, professional, and Claire knows she should find that reassuring and definitely better than his silence, but she doesn’t.
He is going through the motions, to quote a certain other show. But he's still emotionally shut off.
He never looks up to the sky. Not once.
Her father offers to teach him more about his powers, and Peter, utterly polite, says this sounds like a good idea, and he would like to learn, but he doesn’t have any powers left. He uses the letter opener on Dad’s desk for a demonstration; there is a thin trickle of blood across the palm of his left hand, and it doesn’t heal, not at all.
He still has all his powers, but he's unable to access them. He'd have to allow himself to feel in order to; after all, he's an empath.
Dad says nothing to this, but he tells her later that it has to be psychosomatic; no one’s power ever disappeared, and he has been watching and testing people with powers for longer than she’s been alive. That’s another thing Claire doesn’t want to think about; what Dad did to people like her. She tells herself it’s the Company’s fault, and he only wanted to protect her by cooperating, but if he joined the Company before she existed, that wasn’t always true.
I might write a separate story about this, but otoh it looks like the show itself will deal with it in the second season, which makes me happy, because I was afraid post-Company Man, it wouldn't be brought up anymore; the thorny issue of our Mr. Bennet's backstory with the Company and Claire being confronted with it. So far, I think she did deal with it with just that reasoning - anything bad Noah did was the Company's fault, not his, and motivated by his wanting to protect her, and so no one can blame him, certainly not her. Which requires completely ignoring the fact Noah joined the Company several years before being given Claire, and a lot of other things, but then, if you love someone, you make those kind of mental compromises.
At any rate, Dad keeps telling Peter about telekinesis, about pyrokinesis, about precognition, and Peter listens, but with the same distant, polite expression he has most of the times, and he never tries to do anything.
Dad never mentions the power of flight, though. Maybe he doesn’t because they never had someone to study who possessed it,
As opposed to Isaac, I'm clearly not psychic. Claire certainly isn't.
and maybe he doesn’t because it might be what makes Peter change again, and he thinks Peter not using his powers is better for everyone, in the long term. There is nothing to stop Claire from mentioning it, of course. Nothing but the memory of not pulling the trigger. If she had; if she had done it when Peter asked her, the first time… but she doesn’t really wish that. She had aimed for his skull, to be absolutely sure it would work, and he couldn’t have recovered from that, not with his brain matter splattered everywhere. He’d have died.
Sometimes she wonders whether he hates her for that; for not killing him before Nathan arrived.
This is a core idea for this story: that Claire is afraid Peter blames her for not shooting - and that she also can't wish she had done, can't wish for an outcome that has Nathan alive but Peter dead. Incidentally, since this is a often debated topic: I think if Claire had shot Peter in the head, he would have died permanently, for the reason named above - brain matter destroyed means no more regenerating. If she had hit him anywhere else, this wouldn't have resulted in the same thing that happened to her when Matt shot her, it would have resulted in Peter exploding right then and there, a la Ted in Company Man when Thompson shot at Ted. And she certainly wasn't in a position to organize a tranquilizer gun, which in any event would just have postponed, not stopped the whole matter.
Sometimes she’s angry with Peter, and there is no way to show it, because there is nothing he does or says that is wrong, that she could justify getting upset about. She just wants to yell at him and wants him to yell back. She wants to say that she has given him her family, a real family, not that horrible travesty of it in New York, and why wasn’t it enough, didn’t they talk about using their powers for good before, and where had that gone?
If you're around someone sunk into depression and grief, you're not sympathetic all the time. You're angry as well. In Claire's case, there are even more burdens, because of the entire complicated Petrelli family structure she stumbled into. As I said, she tried to deal with it by deciding Petrellis bad, Bennets good, and Peter as her friend should be a honorary Bennet, but at the same time she's increasingly aware that this isn't how it works.
But she’s silent, and sneaks out to climb to the roof of the new house they’ve moved in to. The sky is clear and entirely smog free here, unlike New York, and she remembers the gun in her hand, replaying the scene again and again, and yet she can’t make it go differently, because she doesn’t truly want to, she doesn’t want to make that exchange, and she’s afraid Peter knows that, too, and hates her even more for it.
When she found out Nathan could fly, she had wondered, just for a moment, whether he would take her flying if she asked, and then reality had caught up with her. Claire thinks about flying and jumps, but falling for a few seconds before her body hits the ground isn’t flying at all. She feels her bones knit together again and knows that she, at least, is alive.
And we're back to not just Claire being confronted with Peter's grief for Nathan but with her own unresolved feelings for Nathan as well.
One evening they all play monopoly, and Claire gets into an argument with Lyle about whether she passed when she should have gone to jail. It’s a relief, arguing with Lyle, something utterly and completely normal and true, right until she looks up and finds Peter watching the two of them with a wistful smile. It’s the first one, and she’s both glad and angry again in a way that mystifies her.
Watching siblings spar has obvious resonance for Peter. And Claire realizes why that is the case. Claire's "why do you keep running back to him?" in Landslide and her insistence, "he doesn't care about anyone" in the season finale, as well as her seeing Peter call Nathan as a betrayal: it's not just because of an understandable confused distrust of Nathan - given what she knows - at this point, but because Nathan means that much to Peter. (Possessiveness runs in the Petrelli veins, and yes, that includes Claire.)
In a way, it’s a relief when Angela Petrelli shows up, because it gives Claire someone she can and wants to be angry with.
I loved the scenes between Angela and Claire, and wanted to explore that relationship a bit as well.
Angela is as she remembers, sharp and elegant, black costume, pearls, and of course she picked a moment to arrive that had Claire’s father being at Primatech, where he’s busy taking over and reorganizing so that no one else does. Claire’s mother looks slightly overwhelmed, and Claire feels fiercely protective. Peter has been told to go on a walk with Mr. Muggles just an hour before Angela’s arrival, so he should be back any minute now.
“You’re not welcome here,” Claire says, and her mother looks shocked at her tone. Angela doesn’t; neither does she move from the couch she has just regally sat down on.
Of course, Claire isn't a Bennet at all in her encounter with Angela here. Which she is about to realise.
“I am not here to take you away, Claire.”
“As if you could.”
“You have made your choice quite clear, and I respect it,” Angela continues as if Claire hadn’t spoken. “I have come to see my son. My only surviving son.”
She turns to Mom, and a careful shade of vulnerability creeps into her voice.
“I have lost my husband and my older son within less than three quarters of a year. Surely, Mrs Bennet, as a mother you understand. I need to see Peter.”
Like all the best manipulators, Angela isn't lying in order to manipulate. Not that she's incapable of it if the truth won't do, but here it does. She's telling the truth. She's also very deliberately and without shame pushing buttons that will get her waht she wants.
Mom did get a brief summary of events in New York, but Claire hasn’t gone into details about the Petrellis, and now she wishes she had, because it looks like Dad didn’t, either. Mom immediately looks sympathetic and understanding.
Because she has no reason to think of Angela as anything but a bereaved mother. This is what patronizing Sandra gets you, Noah and Claire.
“You haven’t done a very good job of keeping them safe,” Claire says, deliberately using the words Angela had said to her father on the phone, “have you.”
“Claire!” Mom exclaims. Angela looks at her, dark eyes not unlike those of either of her sons widening just a little. The edges of her mouth curve slightly upwards.
“Oh,” she murmurs, “oh, Claire, we are family.”
And that’s the horrible thing; Claire knows exactly what she means. She doesn’t want to, but it’s there, and it has no place in this living room with Mom who is good and kind and the best mother anyone could hope for.
I'm not saying biology is destiny; Claire can make a choice not to behave like a Petrelli, and in most cases, she does. Just not in this particular encounter. And Petrellis are really really good at deliberately hurting each other.
Then Angela’s expression changes, and Claire, turning around, knows Peter has come through the backdoor. He stands still and stares at his mother. Mr. Muggles races to Mom who picks him up and, in a tone of unmistakable relief, tells her dog he needs to be fed immediately. In the kitchen. Where she tries to drag Claire to, too.
“But…”
“She is his mother,” Mom says in a tone that is unexpectedly sharp for her. It’s on the tip of Claire’s tongue to say “you have no idea”, but this is Mom, and there are things you don’t say to Mom if you love her. Besides, it’s an Angela phrase.
"You have no idea," is what Angela says to Claire in their debate about choices in 0.07#%.
Nothing keeps her from listening through the door, though, even if she can’t see their expressions.
And thus the author gets around describing Peter's and Angela's facial expressions and body language during this first post-explosion encounter. Oh, and post-vision of Charles Deveaux.
“You knew,” Peter says, and there is the emotion Claire has missed from his voice all these weeks, and now she wonders whether she really wants it back. “All this time. You knew, Mom.”
He can't be indifferent towards Angela. Neither of her sons can, and certainly not Peter.
“I want you to come back with me to New York, Peter.”
“Why?” he asks, and Claire holds her breath, wondering if Angela would really dare to make a declaration of maternal love. Angela’s voice does retain that shade of vulnerability she had earlier, but it’s mostly even and matter-of-factly.
“For one thing,” she says, “Heidi has finally agreed that he’s not missing, and there will be a funeral service. Do you really want the boys to go through that without you? Nathan’s sons? Speaking of the boys, there is their future to consider. Given that you seem to think the fact I tried to spare your brother and yourself the knowledge of certain circumstances as long as I could was a wrong decision on my part, well, who do you suggest should tell Simon and Monty? Heidi? And…” Her voice slips up, just a little. With another woman, Claire would suspect she had started to cry.
“I miss you.”
Again, Angela? Manipulates with the truth. For another example of how she does this with Peter, check the second episode of season 1, the hospital scene where she tells him a) he's her favorite son, and b) his father committed suicide. She's sincere AND trying to push buttons at the same time.
There is a silence beyond the door. Claire has her hand on the handle when her mother pulls it away again. “Honey,” her mother whispers, “this is between mother and son. You’d be furious if anyone interrupted you and your father, too. Now come here and help me feed Mr. Muggles.”
“Heidi deserves the truth,” Peter says, sounding a bit muffled, and Claire hopes that didn’t mean he is hugging Angela. “And the boys.”
Moving Claire into the kitchen meant I didn't have to decide whether Peter would hug Angela or not.*g*
She thinks of the glimpses she had gotten: the woman in the wheelchair with her dark hair and blue eyes arriving, and the two sons. Nathan greeting them.
There’s my girl… guess what I have for you?
It’s not like she wanted him to be her father. She already has a father. The best. And yet seeing him with his two sons had been worse, in a way, than the time when she heard him tell Meredith he didn’t want Meredith to call her back.
If she hadn't seen Nathan capable of caring, she could dismiss him entirely. But she's seen him going to pieces over Peter's dead body, she's seen him openly and easily affectionate with his sons. Just not with her. And she feels somewhat guilty for even wanting him to be that way with her, no matter how infrequently she wanted that, because she sees it as a betrayal of Noah.
Stupid to think about that now. Angela was a bitch, but the horror of it was, she had a point. Several, in fact. And Peter…
“But I won’t go back with you. There can’t be a funeral if there is no body, Mom,” she hears him say, and is relieved enough to finally join her mother and Mr. Muggles.
Peter being in denial about Nathan's death while simultanously feeling guilty for same: as I said, I got it reversed, obviously.
Peter’s voice, adding something more about Heidi and those two children who were and yet weren’t Claire’s brothers, gets drowned out by Mr. Muggle yapping at her, and so does Angela’s reply, which is pitched lower still.
After Angela has gone, Claire finds Peter working in the garden. Mom wanted a flower bed, so she had bought fertilizer. The way Peter picks up the still sealed sacks without effort seems to be just a little bit stronger than human, but maybe she’s imagining things. Then he goes for a shovel, and starts digging.
I rewrote that brief passage about digging three times. It was supposed to indicate the beginning return of Peter using powers, but Yahtzee pointed out she couldn't see how one could dig supernaturally strong, so Claire notices when he picks up the fertilizer. Those things are heavy!
“So,” Claire says. He looks at her, really looks at her and teaches out to brush hair out of her face she hadn’t been aware of.
He does that twice in s1, once in .07% and once in Landslide; he's responding to her own grief, guilt and confusion in the way he did before the explosion.
“I’m glad you’re alive, you know,” he says, and it’s only then that she recalls the cop, Matt Parkman, could hear people’s thoughts, and the implications of Peter meeting him. Except that Peter’s powers were not supposed to be working anymore. “And back with your family. They’re great people. All of them.”
“You don’t want to stay,” Claire says. She can’t read thoughts, but she thinks she has started to decipher Petrellis.
“It’s a good family,” he says. “But it’s not mine.”
Leaving aside that the Bennets have their own set of family problems - all that mindwiping business comes to mind, no pun intended - I don't think Peter can do wholesome family life for a long time. He is a Petrelli.
She doesn’t say “but you told your mother you didn’t want to go back with her, and didn’t she leave without you?” She doesn’t ask “so does that mean you’re going to visit your sister-in-law and her sons, but not Angela?”
Instead, she says: “Wait here. I want to show you something.”
Going to her room and pulling it out of the chemistry textbook where she put it, because even nosy Lyle would never look there, is quickly done, and she manages to get back to the garden without being intercepted by her mother, who had made ominous noises about needing to talk about Claire’s behaviour during Mrs. Petrelli’s visit. Peter hasn’t moved, and the wrongness of that hits her, once again. It’s as if he’s in a cell again, like during their second meeting, only one with invisible bars. She hands over what she has taken during her first night in the Petrelli mansion, stolen because she wanted to and because she knew, even then, that once she left she probably would not go back there, no matter what anyone promised.
“There were so many photos of the two of you,” Claire says, hesitatingly, “but I liked this one best.”
That wedding photo. It's in this story, too! I feel so canonical. And no, I don't know what that photographer was thinking, either.
There they were, arms around each other, smiling into the camera. My two boys getting along for a change, Angela had said, and Claire hadn’t been able to turn her eyes away from the photograph, recognizing Peter from Odessa, and next to him the man she hadn’t seen more than a few seconds, leaving and entering Meredith’s trailer.
Peter looks at her, takes the photograph, and she thinks she can see it; a ripple going through him, as if he’s not really there but a hologram projected from somewhere. For a moment, she’s afraid he’s going to go invisible on her. Instead, he takes a deep breath. There are tears in his eyes, the tears that the explosion had seemingly burned out of him, and he falls on his knees on the earth he has just cut into far too fiercely, but finally, for the first time since she found him, he looks up to the sky.
12_12_12 for commentary, Family Ways was my first post-season 1 finale story. I usually avoid writing stories I know are bound to be jossed by later canon, but like much of Heroes fandom, I couldn't resist trying out several scenarios possible after the s1 finale. My two others were Illusions, aka The Twisted One, and Through a Glass Darkly, aka The One Which Amazingly Still Isn't Jossed, Err, Kringed. (Mostly because it uses a trip to a canon AU and time travel as a McGuffin.) Family Ways, a Claire pov, could be subtitled The One About Grief. In the end, Claire insists that they take Peter with them to Texas.
This story started when
cadesama during a conversation said the Bennets should take Peter with them post-finale and expose him to normal family relationships. She meant this as a happy story, I assume, but my imagination promptly went another way. Incidentally, as mentioned when I first posted the story, I didn't think Nathan was dead. I know my genre, and no dead body on screen means in 90% of all cases no dead person. However, I assumed Peter and Claire would not know he survived. (In other words, I got it exactly reversed to what actually happened. *g*) In any case, I wanted to write about Peter reacting to Nathan's death, and Claire reacting to that and the entire Petrelli family mess. Hence the following scenario. One more thing, regarding Claire and Peter, so you don't go into the story with wrong expectations: I don't 'ship them. I do like their relationship, but I don't see it as romantic, though Claire probably crushed on Peter somewhat when she first met him, which given that she is a teenager and he was a mysterious and kind good looking stranger who showed up to save her life is completely understandable. On the other hand, I don't think Claire ever registered as a woman with Peter, neither before or after they found out they're related; he sees her as a kid. Which doesn't mean he doesn't take her seriously as a human being. He likes and trusts her, and she's a symbol of hope to him. It had taken the little girl, Molly Walker, to find him. He is healed, completely, but he didn’t talk, not with her or her father or anyone else. Dr. Suresh suggests they should bring him to his mother.
I don't think anyone doubted whether Peter would survive, which made the coyness of the early s2 publicity about whether or not this was the case somewhat funny.
“No,” Claire says sharply. Dr. Suresh opens his mouth and closes it again. Turning to Claire’s father, he says: “Well, shouldn’t at least someone tell Mrs. Petrelli that he’s, well, alive? And that the Congressman is…”
Peter raises his head, glares at him and walks away. Claire goes after him; behind her, she hears her father tell Dr. Suresh that he just elected himself to the job.
Poor Mohinder. As if showing up at Angela Petrelli's to tell her her son is dead once isn't enough.
They part ways with the others soon after that, and use the coordinates Molly gave them to track down Lyle and Mom. Peter is in the back of the car her father rented, still silent, and Claire counts his breaths for a while, to be sure he was still alive.
I figured Noah B. would use Molly to figure out where Sandra and Lyle were before leaving New York with Claire; I won't be suprised if s2 reveals once we get the inevitable flashback episode that this is how they reunited.
She remembers Ted Sprague and what it had felt like, standing next to a man while he turned their house into ashes. Claire regenerates, but her body feels pain as intensely as it did before she could do that, and her body remembers. Skin burning, hair burning, and there is nothing to breathe but fire. When Nathan turned around to look at her before going to Peter, she could see he knew this was waiting for him.
I don't think Nathan ever counted on surviving when showing up on Kirby Plaza. From the moment he made up his mind re: Peter and the explosion, whenever you want to put that moment, he was ready to die. Also, when rewatching certain s1 episodes, it struck me how the theme of burning alive is connected to Claire. It's what she starts to do when walking through fire in the pilot, it's what Nathan asssumes she and Meredith did until learning otherwise in Run!, it's what Claire does and survives in Company Man. That last exchange of looks between Nathan and Claire before he turns back to Peter in the finale is open to so many interpretations. Here Claire makes one of them.
She still has no idea what she thinks about Nathan, but when she listens too long to Peter’s silence, that is what she feels, every time. Being burned alive.
I don't think Claire has any idea how she feels about Nathan post-s1 finale. IMO there was only a brief time, i.e. during Run!, when she unambigously wanted him to be her father, because back then her relationship with Noah was strained to the breaking point due to what was happening with Sandra and all the secrets and mysteries. And of course that ended in her being painfully disappointed without even meeting Nathan. Post-Company Man, Noah was reaffirmed in the father position completely, but she had to leave him temporarily, and in New York Nathan behaved as awkwardly and hesitant around her as she did around him and wanted to send her away to Paris; being capable of breaking down when believing Peter was dead on one day and dealing with shady Thompson whom she knew to be the enemy the next. She tried to solve this by deciding Nathan was uncaring and the enemy, full stop, and that she had a good father, Noah, and a bad father who wasn't really one anyway. And then Nathan confused her again with saving
So she tries not to do it too often, and talks with her father about future plans instead. He says they need to go back to Odessa once Mom and Lyle are found; the Primatech building there is full of secrets no one should have, and now that the Company is breaking down, anyone could grab them. Anyone usually meaning nobody good, and Claire nods.
The main reason why I had the Company breaking down and Noah Bennet going back to Odessa in order to take over so no one else does was because I wanted to focus on the family dynamics without having to explain why they weren't on the run. Also, it meant I didn't have to come up with a new setting.
Mom and Lyle are found in due course, and Mom is the one to make Peter come out of his silence, once she’s done with fussing about Claire and telling Dad how worried she’s been. It’s not when Mom makes him eat soup at the next inn they can find, no, or when she asks Dad whether he doesn’t think Mr. Muggles deserves a medal for remaining with them through everything; it’s when she passes out right in front of them, Claire has a moment when she freaks out, remembering Mom in the hospital, and Lyle actually screams, probably remembering the same thing. Peter, voice calm and not at all rusty from disuse, says he’s a trained nurse, checks Mom’s pulse, pupils and asks about her medication. Then he improvises something with the salt on the table to bring her to.
Obviously, Peter shut down completely after the explosion and Nathan's death. I thought it would make sense if the first thing to jolt him out of this somewhat was someone in medical distress; being a trained nurse sticks with you, and it's a part of his personality. (Sidenote: which is why the scene where he bandages Caitlin in Lizards made me feel somewhat smug.) Moreover, I didn't want Sandra's condition to be entirely forgotten; the hint about the way she died in 5YG seems to indicate that the doctor in Unexpected was right and there were long term damages by what the Haitian did to her.
Later on, he talks with Dad about memory losses, and somehow this ends up as the official justification for Peter living with them; taking care of Mom, as a nurse. He does that, he talks with her, and with everyone else, but not in the way she remembers him talking. The passion, the urgency is gone. Instead, he sounds, well, professional, and Claire knows she should find that reassuring and definitely better than his silence, but she doesn’t.
He is going through the motions, to quote a certain other show. But he's still emotionally shut off.
He never looks up to the sky. Not once.
Her father offers to teach him more about his powers, and Peter, utterly polite, says this sounds like a good idea, and he would like to learn, but he doesn’t have any powers left. He uses the letter opener on Dad’s desk for a demonstration; there is a thin trickle of blood across the palm of his left hand, and it doesn’t heal, not at all.
He still has all his powers, but he's unable to access them. He'd have to allow himself to feel in order to; after all, he's an empath.
Dad says nothing to this, but he tells her later that it has to be psychosomatic; no one’s power ever disappeared, and he has been watching and testing people with powers for longer than she’s been alive. That’s another thing Claire doesn’t want to think about; what Dad did to people like her. She tells herself it’s the Company’s fault, and he only wanted to protect her by cooperating, but if he joined the Company before she existed, that wasn’t always true.
I might write a separate story about this, but otoh it looks like the show itself will deal with it in the second season, which makes me happy, because I was afraid post-Company Man, it wouldn't be brought up anymore; the thorny issue of our Mr. Bennet's backstory with the Company and Claire being confronted with it. So far, I think she did deal with it with just that reasoning - anything bad Noah did was the Company's fault, not his, and motivated by his wanting to protect her, and so no one can blame him, certainly not her. Which requires completely ignoring the fact Noah joined the Company several years before being given Claire, and a lot of other things, but then, if you love someone, you make those kind of mental compromises.
At any rate, Dad keeps telling Peter about telekinesis, about pyrokinesis, about precognition, and Peter listens, but with the same distant, polite expression he has most of the times, and he never tries to do anything.
Dad never mentions the power of flight, though. Maybe he doesn’t because they never had someone to study who possessed it,
As opposed to Isaac, I'm clearly not psychic. Claire certainly isn't.
and maybe he doesn’t because it might be what makes Peter change again, and he thinks Peter not using his powers is better for everyone, in the long term. There is nothing to stop Claire from mentioning it, of course. Nothing but the memory of not pulling the trigger. If she had; if she had done it when Peter asked her, the first time… but she doesn’t really wish that. She had aimed for his skull, to be absolutely sure it would work, and he couldn’t have recovered from that, not with his brain matter splattered everywhere. He’d have died.
Sometimes she wonders whether he hates her for that; for not killing him before Nathan arrived.
This is a core idea for this story: that Claire is afraid Peter blames her for not shooting - and that she also can't wish she had done, can't wish for an outcome that has Nathan alive but Peter dead. Incidentally, since this is a often debated topic: I think if Claire had shot Peter in the head, he would have died permanently, for the reason named above - brain matter destroyed means no more regenerating. If she had hit him anywhere else, this wouldn't have resulted in the same thing that happened to her when Matt shot her, it would have resulted in Peter exploding right then and there, a la Ted in Company Man when Thompson shot at Ted. And she certainly wasn't in a position to organize a tranquilizer gun, which in any event would just have postponed, not stopped the whole matter.
Sometimes she’s angry with Peter, and there is no way to show it, because there is nothing he does or says that is wrong, that she could justify getting upset about. She just wants to yell at him and wants him to yell back. She wants to say that she has given him her family, a real family, not that horrible travesty of it in New York, and why wasn’t it enough, didn’t they talk about using their powers for good before, and where had that gone?
If you're around someone sunk into depression and grief, you're not sympathetic all the time. You're angry as well. In Claire's case, there are even more burdens, because of the entire complicated Petrelli family structure she stumbled into. As I said, she tried to deal with it by deciding Petrellis bad, Bennets good, and Peter as her friend should be a honorary Bennet, but at the same time she's increasingly aware that this isn't how it works.
But she’s silent, and sneaks out to climb to the roof of the new house they’ve moved in to. The sky is clear and entirely smog free here, unlike New York, and she remembers the gun in her hand, replaying the scene again and again, and yet she can’t make it go differently, because she doesn’t truly want to, she doesn’t want to make that exchange, and she’s afraid Peter knows that, too, and hates her even more for it.
When she found out Nathan could fly, she had wondered, just for a moment, whether he would take her flying if she asked, and then reality had caught up with her. Claire thinks about flying and jumps, but falling for a few seconds before her body hits the ground isn’t flying at all. She feels her bones knit together again and knows that she, at least, is alive.
And we're back to not just Claire being confronted with Peter's grief for Nathan but with her own unresolved feelings for Nathan as well.
One evening they all play monopoly, and Claire gets into an argument with Lyle about whether she passed when she should have gone to jail. It’s a relief, arguing with Lyle, something utterly and completely normal and true, right until she looks up and finds Peter watching the two of them with a wistful smile. It’s the first one, and she’s both glad and angry again in a way that mystifies her.
Watching siblings spar has obvious resonance for Peter. And Claire realizes why that is the case. Claire's "why do you keep running back to him?" in Landslide and her insistence, "he doesn't care about anyone" in the season finale, as well as her seeing Peter call Nathan as a betrayal: it's not just because of an understandable confused distrust of Nathan - given what she knows - at this point, but because Nathan means that much to Peter. (Possessiveness runs in the Petrelli veins, and yes, that includes Claire.)
In a way, it’s a relief when Angela Petrelli shows up, because it gives Claire someone she can and wants to be angry with.
I loved the scenes between Angela and Claire, and wanted to explore that relationship a bit as well.
Angela is as she remembers, sharp and elegant, black costume, pearls, and of course she picked a moment to arrive that had Claire’s father being at Primatech, where he’s busy taking over and reorganizing so that no one else does. Claire’s mother looks slightly overwhelmed, and Claire feels fiercely protective. Peter has been told to go on a walk with Mr. Muggles just an hour before Angela’s arrival, so he should be back any minute now.
“You’re not welcome here,” Claire says, and her mother looks shocked at her tone. Angela doesn’t; neither does she move from the couch she has just regally sat down on.
Of course, Claire isn't a Bennet at all in her encounter with Angela here. Which she is about to realise.
“I am not here to take you away, Claire.”
“As if you could.”
“You have made your choice quite clear, and I respect it,” Angela continues as if Claire hadn’t spoken. “I have come to see my son. My only surviving son.”
She turns to Mom, and a careful shade of vulnerability creeps into her voice.
“I have lost my husband and my older son within less than three quarters of a year. Surely, Mrs Bennet, as a mother you understand. I need to see Peter.”
Like all the best manipulators, Angela isn't lying in order to manipulate. Not that she's incapable of it if the truth won't do, but here it does. She's telling the truth. She's also very deliberately and without shame pushing buttons that will get her waht she wants.
Mom did get a brief summary of events in New York, but Claire hasn’t gone into details about the Petrellis, and now she wishes she had, because it looks like Dad didn’t, either. Mom immediately looks sympathetic and understanding.
Because she has no reason to think of Angela as anything but a bereaved mother. This is what patronizing Sandra gets you, Noah and Claire.
“You haven’t done a very good job of keeping them safe,” Claire says, deliberately using the words Angela had said to her father on the phone, “have you.”
“Claire!” Mom exclaims. Angela looks at her, dark eyes not unlike those of either of her sons widening just a little. The edges of her mouth curve slightly upwards.
“Oh,” she murmurs, “oh, Claire, we are family.”
And that’s the horrible thing; Claire knows exactly what she means. She doesn’t want to, but it’s there, and it has no place in this living room with Mom who is good and kind and the best mother anyone could hope for.
I'm not saying biology is destiny; Claire can make a choice not to behave like a Petrelli, and in most cases, she does. Just not in this particular encounter. And Petrellis are really really good at deliberately hurting each other.
Then Angela’s expression changes, and Claire, turning around, knows Peter has come through the backdoor. He stands still and stares at his mother. Mr. Muggles races to Mom who picks him up and, in a tone of unmistakable relief, tells her dog he needs to be fed immediately. In the kitchen. Where she tries to drag Claire to, too.
“But…”
“She is his mother,” Mom says in a tone that is unexpectedly sharp for her. It’s on the tip of Claire’s tongue to say “you have no idea”, but this is Mom, and there are things you don’t say to Mom if you love her. Besides, it’s an Angela phrase.
"You have no idea," is what Angela says to Claire in their debate about choices in 0.07#%.
Nothing keeps her from listening through the door, though, even if she can’t see their expressions.
And thus the author gets around describing Peter's and Angela's facial expressions and body language during this first post-explosion encounter. Oh, and post-vision of Charles Deveaux.
“You knew,” Peter says, and there is the emotion Claire has missed from his voice all these weeks, and now she wonders whether she really wants it back. “All this time. You knew, Mom.”
He can't be indifferent towards Angela. Neither of her sons can, and certainly not Peter.
“I want you to come back with me to New York, Peter.”
“Why?” he asks, and Claire holds her breath, wondering if Angela would really dare to make a declaration of maternal love. Angela’s voice does retain that shade of vulnerability she had earlier, but it’s mostly even and matter-of-factly.
“For one thing,” she says, “Heidi has finally agreed that he’s not missing, and there will be a funeral service. Do you really want the boys to go through that without you? Nathan’s sons? Speaking of the boys, there is their future to consider. Given that you seem to think the fact I tried to spare your brother and yourself the knowledge of certain circumstances as long as I could was a wrong decision on my part, well, who do you suggest should tell Simon and Monty? Heidi? And…” Her voice slips up, just a little. With another woman, Claire would suspect she had started to cry.
“I miss you.”
Again, Angela? Manipulates with the truth. For another example of how she does this with Peter, check the second episode of season 1, the hospital scene where she tells him a) he's her favorite son, and b) his father committed suicide. She's sincere AND trying to push buttons at the same time.
There is a silence beyond the door. Claire has her hand on the handle when her mother pulls it away again. “Honey,” her mother whispers, “this is between mother and son. You’d be furious if anyone interrupted you and your father, too. Now come here and help me feed Mr. Muggles.”
“Heidi deserves the truth,” Peter says, sounding a bit muffled, and Claire hopes that didn’t mean he is hugging Angela. “And the boys.”
Moving Claire into the kitchen meant I didn't have to decide whether Peter would hug Angela or not.*g*
She thinks of the glimpses she had gotten: the woman in the wheelchair with her dark hair and blue eyes arriving, and the two sons. Nathan greeting them.
There’s my girl… guess what I have for you?
It’s not like she wanted him to be her father. She already has a father. The best. And yet seeing him with his two sons had been worse, in a way, than the time when she heard him tell Meredith he didn’t want Meredith to call her back.
If she hadn't seen Nathan capable of caring, she could dismiss him entirely. But she's seen him going to pieces over Peter's dead body, she's seen him openly and easily affectionate with his sons. Just not with her. And she feels somewhat guilty for even wanting him to be that way with her, no matter how infrequently she wanted that, because she sees it as a betrayal of Noah.
Stupid to think about that now. Angela was a bitch, but the horror of it was, she had a point. Several, in fact. And Peter…
“But I won’t go back with you. There can’t be a funeral if there is no body, Mom,” she hears him say, and is relieved enough to finally join her mother and Mr. Muggles.
Peter being in denial about Nathan's death while simultanously feeling guilty for same: as I said, I got it reversed, obviously.
Peter’s voice, adding something more about Heidi and those two children who were and yet weren’t Claire’s brothers, gets drowned out by Mr. Muggle yapping at her, and so does Angela’s reply, which is pitched lower still.
After Angela has gone, Claire finds Peter working in the garden. Mom wanted a flower bed, so she had bought fertilizer. The way Peter picks up the still sealed sacks without effort seems to be just a little bit stronger than human, but maybe she’s imagining things. Then he goes for a shovel, and starts digging.
I rewrote that brief passage about digging three times. It was supposed to indicate the beginning return of Peter using powers, but Yahtzee pointed out she couldn't see how one could dig supernaturally strong, so Claire notices when he picks up the fertilizer. Those things are heavy!
“So,” Claire says. He looks at her, really looks at her and teaches out to brush hair out of her face she hadn’t been aware of.
He does that twice in s1, once in .07% and once in Landslide; he's responding to her own grief, guilt and confusion in the way he did before the explosion.
“I’m glad you’re alive, you know,” he says, and it’s only then that she recalls the cop, Matt Parkman, could hear people’s thoughts, and the implications of Peter meeting him. Except that Peter’s powers were not supposed to be working anymore. “And back with your family. They’re great people. All of them.”
“You don’t want to stay,” Claire says. She can’t read thoughts, but she thinks she has started to decipher Petrellis.
“It’s a good family,” he says. “But it’s not mine.”
Leaving aside that the Bennets have their own set of family problems - all that mindwiping business comes to mind, no pun intended - I don't think Peter can do wholesome family life for a long time. He is a Petrelli.
She doesn’t say “but you told your mother you didn’t want to go back with her, and didn’t she leave without you?” She doesn’t ask “so does that mean you’re going to visit your sister-in-law and her sons, but not Angela?”
Instead, she says: “Wait here. I want to show you something.”
Going to her room and pulling it out of the chemistry textbook where she put it, because even nosy Lyle would never look there, is quickly done, and she manages to get back to the garden without being intercepted by her mother, who had made ominous noises about needing to talk about Claire’s behaviour during Mrs. Petrelli’s visit. Peter hasn’t moved, and the wrongness of that hits her, once again. It’s as if he’s in a cell again, like during their second meeting, only one with invisible bars. She hands over what she has taken during her first night in the Petrelli mansion, stolen because she wanted to and because she knew, even then, that once she left she probably would not go back there, no matter what anyone promised.
“There were so many photos of the two of you,” Claire says, hesitatingly, “but I liked this one best.”
That wedding photo. It's in this story, too! I feel so canonical. And no, I don't know what that photographer was thinking, either.
There they were, arms around each other, smiling into the camera. My two boys getting along for a change, Angela had said, and Claire hadn’t been able to turn her eyes away from the photograph, recognizing Peter from Odessa, and next to him the man she hadn’t seen more than a few seconds, leaving and entering Meredith’s trailer.
Peter looks at her, takes the photograph, and she thinks she can see it; a ripple going through him, as if he’s not really there but a hologram projected from somewhere. For a moment, she’s afraid he’s going to go invisible on her. Instead, he takes a deep breath. There are tears in his eyes, the tears that the explosion had seemingly burned out of him, and he falls on his knees on the earth he has just cut into far too fiercely, but finally, for the first time since she found him, he looks up to the sky.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-26 03:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-26 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-10-26 03:38 pm (UTC)Part 1
Date: 2007-10-26 04:47 pm (UTC)One more thing, regarding Claire and Peter, so you don't go into the story with wrong expectations: I don't 'ship them. I do like their relationship, but I don't see it as romantic, though Claire probably crushed on Peter somewhat when she first met him...he sees her as a kid. Which doesn't mean he doesn't take her seriously as a human being. He likes and trusts her, and she's a symbol of hope to him.
That's pretty much how I see them, too. And the crushing from Claire's side was apparently intentional, according to a recent interview with Tim Kring. He said he just didn't realize that it would work a little too well. Heh. But even though their chemistry is kind of ridiculous, my favorite part of their relationship is the familial connection, the instant "click" of recognition and connection, the way they help each other.
Poor Mohinder. As if showing up at Angela Petrelli's to tell her her son is dead once isn't enough.
This is really why I want to see Mohinder and Peter interact in Season 2. They don't have the heat of Nathan and Peter or Mohinder and Sylar, but they had a nice, quiet connection, and I felt kind of gipped that we never saw Mohinder's reaction to Peter's resurrection after 0.07%.
Obviously, Peter shut down completely after the explosion and Nathan's death. I thought it would make sense if the first thing to jolt him out of this somewhat was someone in medical distress; being a trained nurse sticks with you, and it's a part of his personality. (Sidenote: which is why the scene where he bandages Caitlin in Lizards made me feel somewhat smug.)
That was a great, great moment--and with the virus storyline, it gives me hope that the writers will return to Peter's nursing this year.
This is a core idea for this story: that Claire is afraid Peter blames her for not shooting - and that she also can't wish she had done, can't wish for an outcome that has Nathan alive but Peter dead. Incidentally, since this is a often debated topic: I think if Claire had shot Peter in the head, he would have died permanently, for the reason named above - brain matter destroyed means no more regenerating.
Your insight into Claire's conflicted feelings here is wonderful, and makes me even more impatient to see her realize that Peter's alive now. I also agree that Peter would have died permanently. Though maybe it would have been better if the show had been more explicit about this.
Like all the best manipulators, Angela isn't lying in order to manipulate. Not that she's incapable of it if the truth won't do, but here it does. She's telling the truth. She's also very deliberately and without shame pushing buttons that will get her waht she wants.
Yup. Same goes for Peter. Only most of the time (i.e. when he's talking to anyone who isn't a Petrelli) he doesn't even realize he's in manipulator mode. Which makes him even more effective.
It's interesting that he shifts into Petrelli mode with Claire (lying to her in the finale) after he finds out that she's family. A nice little touch from the writers.
Re: Part 1
Date: 2007-10-27 08:00 am (UTC)Peter and Mohinder: actually, I can see why they didn't waste time on Mohinder reacting to Peter's (first) resurrection (not much point in terms of the larger story), but it might have been useful to include a throwaway sentence that indicates Peter was told Mohinder delivered his dead body to the Petrelli residence. Because otherwise, you're left with the implication that the last thing Peter knew, Mohinder was in the process of getting bloodily played with by a demented serial killer ("I'm not done with him yet"), and couldn't care less whether this resulted in Mohinder's gory death. For the record, I do think someone told him how he ended up back at home and he concluded from that Mohinder must have escaped Sylar's clutches and didn't need rescuing/burial. Which still leaves good old Mohinder a distinct non-priority where Peter is concerned. Not that between Claire's arrival and the sense the explosion is coming closer, Peter doesn't have other things to worry about, but you know, it still undeniably shows Mohinder didn't really register with Peter all that much.
(Sidenote: I think this is the flipside of Peter's ability to instant-bond with everyone. He also very quickly lets go of people, unless they're family. Which presumably is why in all those hospital scenes, we don't see a pal of his around, and why during his graduation party his apartment is packed with people but he has the intense talks with his
brotherfamily.)Re: Part 1
Date: 2007-10-27 02:17 pm (UTC)Not that between Claire's arrival and the sense the explosion is coming closer, Peter doesn't have other things to worry about, but you know, it still undeniably shows Mohinder didn't really register with Peter all that much.
Heh. Poor Mohinder. His crush is unrequited! But yeah, I do think that maybe Angela told Peter how he ended up back at home, but I can see why that might have been cut or excluded from the ep.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-26 04:50 pm (UTC)I love it when Claire shows her Petrelli side. Especially when she doesn't want to recognize or admit it.
He can't be indifferent towards Angela. Neither of her sons can, and certainly not Peter.
It'll be interesting to see how Peter behaves to Angela, meeting her for the first time after his vision on the Deveaux rooftop. He might be angry, but I agree that he won't be indifferent. I don't think indifference is possible for Peter, anyway.
Peter being in denial about Nathan's death while simultanously feeling guilty for same: as I said, I got it reversed, obviously.
I'm still curious as to why they did this, because with Nathan continually looking after Peter and grieving over him in Season 1, I expected a reversal.
That wedding photo. It's in this story, too! I feel so canonical. And no, I don't know what that photographer was thinking, either.
Hee hee hee. I love how the photo crops up here, there, and everywhere.
no subject
Date: 2007-10-27 08:11 am (UTC)Why no reversal: presumably because they wanted to do the amnesia storyline with Peter, not Nathan, and an amnesiac Peter can't grieve. Incidentally, I still think they won't be able to resist using a crucial moment from the Dark Phoenix Saga in X-Men (from the comics version that is, NOT the movie version, which is quite different), to wit, the one early on in the Dark Phoenix arc where Mastermind has successfully made Jean Grey believe she's someone else via false memories, and then overplays his hand by trying to make her kill Scott Summers, at which point Jean's true memories break through. My current guess that the amnesia will hold until and during Peter's first reencounter with Nathan, which will be in a situation where Parkman Senior and/or a third party via Parkman Senior will try to make him make kill Nathan, and then we'll have the big dramatic breakthrough.
Photo: you know, I feel seriously tempted to write a "five places the wedding photo didn't show up yet" crack fic.*g* And considering we have seen at least three different versions of the wedding photo so far - the "before", "after" and the recent on in Nathan's Peter shrine where Peter has taken his arm and is whispering to him, which one do you think Claire pinched?
no subject
Date: 2007-10-27 02:22 pm (UTC)I just hope we get a scene. There's so much going on that I'm afraid it's going to get tossed by the wayside. I love the Nathan and Angela scenes in both seasons, and I enjoyed the Peter and Angela scenes we got in S1 as well--partly because their dynamic is so different. I want more.
My current guess that the amnesia will hold until and during Peter's first reencounter with Nathan, which will be in a situation where Parkman Senior and/or a third party via Parkman Senior will try to make him make kill Nathan, and then we'll have the big dramatic breakthrough.
Oh, that would be interesting, and could work so well if they handled it right. Me wants.
And considering we have seen at least three different versions of the wedding photo so far - the "before", "after" and the recent on in Nathan's Peter shrine where Peter has taken his arm and is whispering to him, which one do you think Claire pinched?
I think Claire might have taken the "Before" one. Firstly because Peter's really smiling broadly in the pic, (unlike the After), and looking out of the photo (unlike the Shrine pic). Secondly because it's the first one she saw (she's looking at it in the Petrelli mansion in 0.07%. Hayden's little smile in that scene is lovely).