Chapter Five: Family Comes First

Your faith like the pain
Draws me again
She washes all my wounds for me
The darkness in my veins
I never could explain
And I wonder, if you ever see
Will you still believe?

"Falls on me," Fuel

大阪市 - 日本

Osaka, Japan

May, 2009

It was early at night in New York; Claire Bennet was dialing her father's cell phone number, Matt Parkman was humming a song for a serial killer's benefit and two men in black were parking their car in front of their targets' home.

On the other side of the world, however, the sun was just about to make its appearance over the Namba district, in the city of Osaka. The bright neon signs and billboards of Dotonbori Street – which had been made world-famous by inspiring hundreds of cyberpunk movie scenarios, ever since Blade Runner – were still flashing, but there were barely any people walking along its pre-dawn paths.

The restaurants and shops were nearer to their opening hours than they were to their closing ones, and the only activity in the area came from the food and drink suppliers of said restaurants, as they delivered fresh fish, meat and alcoholic drinks from the local markets and fishing port.

The brand-new Nissan GT-R was an anomaly in that picture of serenity. Its turbo V6 VR38 engine howled with a roar that was akin to high-powered chainsaw, one so big that could only be wielded by a giant or a god, as it sped alongside the canal that gave name to the street.

The high-performance car reduced its speed only as it abandoned the road parallel to the canal, it then it made its way between the buildings and finally came to a halt right in front of the Kani Dokaru restaurant and its famous six-and-a-half-meters tall mechanical crab. The engine revved a couple of times and finally died down, when its driver switched it off.

The right side door opened and a young man emerged from the interior. After closing the door, he stood with the car behind him, looking up at the giant crab on the building's wall.

Hiro Nakamura shook his head in wonder at his own country's quirkiness and, pointing with the remote over his shoulder, locked the Nissan and engaged its alarm.

Carrying a small box of carved wood under his arm, Hiro ignored the restaurant and its incongruent announcement and walked around his car – well, it wasn't really his, it was a loaner from the Yamagato Industries car pool – and then he crossed the street towards an unmarked and apparently inane warehouse on the other side.

There would be nothing remarkable about that construction, a time-worn two-storey structure crammed in between a traditional sushi restaurant and a fashionable nightclub, if it wasn't for the fact that it was truly not remarkable at all. In such a tourist-oriented area as Dotonbori Street, that building was the only one that no visiting foreigner – or Japanese national, for that matter – would be interested in.

Which made it all the more stranger that there was a small fleet of luxury cars parked right in front of the warehouse's door. A flashy red Audi R8 was surrounded by two black and heavy-looking Mercedes-Benz sedans, with after-market chrome wheels.

Hiro arched his eyebrows at the cars as he stopped briefly by their side on his way to the building's entrance. Like in any other young male in the world, there was a bit of a car nut in him and to any third-party observer, he could easily be doing so in order to admire their elegant bodyworks.

Actually, what was really grabbing Hiro's attention were the tiny stickers on the tinted windows of the cars. They labeled them as being made of Lawman Class-III glass. Bulletproof.

'Interesting,' the Japanese time-shifter thought mildly, resuming his stride towards the door as he clutched the small box to his chest.

A building that drew no attention, cars that would draw all the attention in the world and a young man that craved for one and had learned to live with the other. There was such a dichotomy there, that somebody could easily write a haiku about it. His father probably would.

Whoever owned the Audi, Hiro pondered, was an attention-seeker. Maybe. Or maybe he just thought that the image such a vehicle projected was important. Just like he had done when choosing the GT-R from the selection of different cars he had been offered instead of a more conspicuous one.

That was also why Hiro was wearing a leather jacket and had taken his glasses off today. It was hard to give the impression of being a tough guy with his round and boyish face, and the people he was about to meet was of the kind that preyed on the weak and the helpless.

Images. Façades. Masks.

There was an old Japanese proverb that Hiro suddenly remembered as he was about to knock on the door. 'All men have three hearts: a false one in the mouth for all the world to see, a second in his breast for his special friends and family and his true one, which is known to him alone.'

Hiro often wondered – especially after his short stint in 17th century feudal Japan – which his heart and his face truly were. Did he have a warrior's heart and wore an office drone's mask, or was it the other way around?

But those were the kind of introspective questions for which he had no time at that very moment. He knocked on the door.

The tiny camera mounted on the top right corner of the doorframe and its blinking red LED told Hiro he was being observed, but there was no immediate answer to his call. The young man waited for a couple of minutes, shifting on his sneakers-clad feet and humming under his breath.

Finally, there was noise from the other side – heavy feet coming down a wooden staircase – and the door opened inwards. Now, being of a bit on the short side, Hiro was accustomed to raising his head in order to look his interlocutors in the eye. He did the same this time, but when the door opened he found himself looking straight into a wall of white silk.

A wall of white silk, he realized as his eyes crept upwards and upwards, that was the chest of the hugest man he had ever come across in his whole life.

The man was no less than 6 feet 3 inches tall, and so wide he occupied the whole width of the doorway and then some. If he hadn't been a sumo wrestler earlier in his life, the man surely had earned his wages demolishing buildings with his bare hands.

"Nani ga hoshii desu ka?" the man inquired to know what Hiro wanted, with a voice that was like rocks rolling down a mountain.

"Haroo. Watashi no namae wa Nakamura Hiro," Hiro introduced himself, bowing courteously as he swallowed a big lump in his throat. "Watashi wa koko ni imasu kawari ni chichi, Nakamura Kaito."

The mountainous man considered the spiky-haired younger one for a few seconds, his lower jaw rotating as he obviously pondered if to let him come in, or squash him like a bug. Giving him a pleasant – if nervous – smile, Hiro presented the box of carved wood he carried in his hands. "I bring a present."

Arching an eyebrow, the man reached for the box, but Hiro quickly took a step backwards and kept it out of his reach. "My most sincere apologies, but this present is intended for Ryuichi Tatsumoto-sensei. And only for him."

With a grunt, the man nodded and – although obviously unhappy about it – turned around and retreated within the building. He warned Hiro over his shoulder, "Step where I step."

Hiro accepted the cryptic invitation and followed him inside. Behind the door, which the young man closed as he noticed the steel plank reinforcing it on the inner side, a narrow wooden staircase led upwards.

So narrow was the passage indeed, that the mountain of a man had to walk almost sideways not to get stuck. The stairs creaked and whimpered under his 13-size shoes while Hiro wondered what would happen if he dared to put one foot off the exact place where the man laid his.

He had the mental image of the staircase breaking under his weight and himself falling into a pit with sharpened sticks at the bottom.

Well, the part with the medieval-type death was probably just the product of his hyperactive imagination, but Hiro was pretty sure that somebody who didn't know the particularities of the building and wanted to come in uninvited – say, for example, a group of policemen charging in with arrest warrants – would have a more than hard time just to make it to the second storey.

Finally, they arrived at the second floor and the mountainous man started to walk faster, forcing Hiro to almost jog in order to keep up. They were welcomed by screaming men fighting each other.

The entirety of the second floor was a single open space with the ceiling of the building supported by columns. On one side, there were several cheap tables and chairs – garden furniture mostly – where five near-naked men were terribly busy counting large piles of money with the help of electronic banknote counters and ancient-looking abacus. They were being watched over by other two men, these ones in cheap shiny suits, that held not-so-shiny machine-guns in their hands.

Hiro and his guide passed near them on their way and the young man briefly darted his eyes to the scene. The five naked men – their backs and shoulders full of the colorful and intricate tattoos that marked them as Yakuzas – didn't deviate their attention from their task, but one of the armed men leaned his finger on the trigger of his weapon and motioned for him to move along.

Rolling his eyes, Hiro complied. His father's errands surely took him to the most interesting places.

Then, they arrived at last at the source of the screams and the fighting. In the farthest part of the building, a tatami mat had been set up; the huge doorman stopped at its edge and commanded Hiro to do the same with a grunt and a gesture of his hand.

On the tatami, four large men in full kendo armor fought a fifth individual. This one, unlike his sparring partners, was only wearing cotton pants, barefoot and naked from the waist up. His back, shoulders and arms down to his wrists, were covered in the same exquisitely detailed tattoos as the money-counting gangsters. Kami demons and fire-spitting dragons depicted scenes of pain and destruction all over his sweat-pearled skin.

He was in his early forties, with short hair black as a raven's wing and body that possessed zero fat and muscles so well defined that they seemed to have been sculpted on him.

Ryuichi Tatsumoto, Oyabun of the Nagakima Yakuza family. The head honcho, so to speak, and the man Hiro Nakamura had come to see.

There was very little Hiro actually knew about the man on a personal level. He was one of the youngest men ever appointed as Oyabun; or what in the West would have been called a street boss, or capo. Tatsumoto-san was a Yakuza styled more in the fashion of Western gangsters than the Japanese crime lords of the past: ruthless, extremely dangerous and with very little patience and a great deal of contempt for the old and traditional ways.

If you failed him, said the rumors, you wouldn't placate his anger by cutting off your own finger. More likely, you could expect your body to be found in any dark Osakan alley with a bullet in the back of your head.

Drugs, prostitution, illegal gambling, racketeering...there were very few dirty businesses he hadn't managed to put his fingers in. And to top it all off, Hiro could observe at that very moment, the guy was a top-notch sword fighter and martial artist.

Tatsumoto stood in the center of the tatami, surrounded by the four fully armored men. These were good fighters too, it was easily noticeable, and didn't attack him like in bad kung-fu movies – one by one – but in synchronized and well-patterned waves. Yet, the tattooed man seemed to be more dancing than fighting as he used his bamboo shinai sword to parry some of the offending blows, dodged others and waltzed his way between his foes. He delivered brutal kicks to the men's unprotected legs and slashed left and right with his weapon, striking them with blows to the head so powerful that would have been lethal had the men not been wearing their traditional protective gear.

The air was heavy with the smell of sweat, and the fighters' kiai war cries were deafeningly unnerving. Hugging the wooden box to his chest, Hiro let his eyes roam away from the tatami for a brief moment. There was something else that captured his attention. On the other side of the fighting mat, against the far wall, there was a heavy safe. It was as tall as himself, and its door seemed to be firmly locked.

That safe was his target.

"Yameh!!" Tatsumoto commanded his sparring partners to stop, raising a hand. There were several groans coming from the men, surely in relief, and they immediately fell to their knees. They left their bamboo swords in front of them as they took their helmets off.

Hiro gulped and licked his lips, as the Oyabun looked at him with questioning dark eyes. "Who is this?" the swordsman asked the mountainous man.

"A visitor for you, sensei," the doorman rumbled.

Hiro bowed respectfully and repeated the same words he had told his massive guide minutes before. "Greetings, honorable Tatsumoto-sama. My name is Hiro Nakamura. I come in representation of my father, Kaito Nakamura-sama."

Retrieving a towel from the floor, the Japanese gangster used it to soak the sweat away from his body as he walked towards Hiro. He seemed sincerely amused, and chuckled as he spoke. "This is an unusual place for the son of Yamagato's CEO to take a stroll. Or is it that you just got lost, little man?"

Standing tall, although still several inches shorter than Tatsumoto, Hiro looked straight into his eyes. "As I said, I come on my father's behalf. He has learnt that you have...come into possession of a certain property of his. My honorable father is very interested is regaining it."

Which was, more or less, like saying that Tatsumoto had stolen something from Kaito and he wanted it back, but more carefully worded.

The Yakuza crime boss laughed deeply. He clicked his fingers at the mountainous man and the vassal put his hand under his jacket. Hiro's eyes went wide, already imagining a gun pointed at his head. Instead the huge thug only produced a silver cigarette case and a lighter that he offered to his master.

Shaking his head, Tatsumoto got out an American cigarette from the case and lit up. He blew a cloud of smoke towards the young man, making him cough, and smiled like a viper. "I had heard that Kaito-sama was the kind of man that liked to do business himself. Maybe I misunderstood?" He turned to his men, grinning. "Maybe the old tiger's claws are no longer so sharp?"

It was one thing not wanting a dangerous gangster to get pissed at you, and a very different one to just let him insult your father like that. Hiro considered his words before answering and finally said, "My father is a very busy man, and his time is quite valuable. He does not waste it upon menial tasks."

Oh, but how funny it always was to run an errand for Kaito Nakamura. Visit interesting places, meet dangerous people and spit at them right in the face. Sometimes, Hiro missed the days when all that was expected of him was to put in 8 hours a day of inane programming in a featureless cubicle.

Tatsumoto's viperish grin didn't falter, but his gaze narrowed. He kept on smoking slowly, and holding the shinai on his left hand. "Does the cub have claws too, then?" He took a step towards the younger man, towering over him at less than an arm's length. "Or is that just the tough-guy talk that you have learnt in the States, young Hiro? And yes, I know where you live nowadays."

Dropping all pretense that he respected the man, Hiro presented the carved wooden box to the gangster. "This is for you. It's what my father wants to exchange for his property."

The two men held a brief contest stare until, nodding, Tatsumoto threw his half-consumed cigarette to the floor. He made a point of killing the ember with his bare foot, smiling all the while and holding the younger man's stare.

"Very well, then. Let's see what old Kaito is ready to pay to get his shit back." He roughly grabbed the box from Hiro's hands and walked away from him. "It's funny if you think about it, you know? I got paid to arrange for that piece of crap to get stolen from his office, and now I get paid to give it back...what the hell is this!?"

Tatsumoto had opened the box while walking away towards the safe on the other side of the tatami. He then turned around mid-way, a mask of anger falling over his face. He showed the open box to the younger man. It was empty. "Is this some kind of joke, Nakamura?"

Hiro's mouth was dry. Visit interesting places, meet dangerous people, spit in their faces and then break their balls. "It is no joke, Tatsumoto. What you stole from my father is rightfully his. He doesn't see any reason why he should pay anything to get it back."

The gangster's face was twisted in rage and for a second, the younger man was sure the Oyabun was about to bite his head off. Then, surprisingly, he burst out laughing. "You... you...you really crack me up, Hiro Nakamura! And your father's pretty funny too!"

"I have already told you, this is no joke."

"It isn't?" Tatsumoto's grin was a maniacal one now. "For your own good, it had better be, young Hiro. Because you see, if it is not, that means you are in big trouble. Your father may not pay a single yen to get his property back, but…how much would he pay for you?"

That was a really good question for which, unfortunately, the young time-bender had no answer.

Once upon a time, Hiro would have been overwhelmed by the situation. He would have been on the verge of tears, certain that he would die and trying to find his way out of the building with a terrified smile and a babbling plea. He would have been wishing somebody would come to his rescue, somebody more intelligent and brave than himself. He would have thought of Ando, but deep down prayed for his father.

But that would have been the Hiro of long ago. The one before Charlie. Before Sylar and Kirby Plaza. The one before Kensei and Yaeko.

And he was no longer that boy. He was a man.

"You have only two options now, Ryuichi," Hiro said, a boyish grin on his round face as he consciously insulted the gangster by calling him by his given name. "One, you give me my father's property and I leave peacefully. Two..."

He let the sentence hanging, and Tatsumoto bit the hook. "Two?"

"You make me have to take it from you."

The Yakuza capo glared at him for a couple of silent seconds. There was no longer a grin on his face, and his eyes seemed to be housing a storm. If there had been any true amusement at the younger man's antics before, it was now completely gone. Tatsumoto turned to the mountainous man. "Takeshi?"

"Yes, sensei?"

"Cut off one of his ears, and send it to his father," Tatsumoto ordered, coldly and without any passion in his voice, just as if he was ordering his subordinate to go and fetch him some noodles. He turned back to Hiro. "It's been a pleasure, young Hiro-san. Give my regards to your father, if you ever see him again."

As the head honcho gangster retreated, the young man arched his brow. "I guess that means it's going to be number two?"

Tatsumoto looked at him over his shoulder. "You can bet your ass it is."

Hiro rolled his eyes. "Tai-pinch."

And that was when things turned weird. At least for the Yakuza crowd.

Takeshi, the mountain of a man, was already reaching for the enemy with one hand that was large enough to grab Hiro's entire head in its grasp, when the young man unleashed his time-bending power.

The flow of time slowed its pace to a crawl for everyone in the room but Hiro himself. He could have gone the whole nine yards and halted it completely, but the true objective of this mission was not to retrieve Kaito's stolen goods. It was to teach Tatsumoto a lesson.

You mess with the man, and the man messes with you.

Suddenly, everything and everybody was moving at half speed. Takeshi's left arm was reaching for Hiro in slow motion, his grunt turned into a distorted, reverberating groan as his right one disappeared under his jacket. The young man spun and easily dodged it, delivering a hatchet-like blow to his exposed wrist with the edge of his own hand.

Now, there was a funny fact about fighting in a time-altered environment. Time, space and motion, like Einstein had theorized once, are all relative. To Hiro's point of view, everybody was moving ridiculously slowly, but to the Yakuza crowd it was the young man who was doing so twice as fast.

And the strength and energy delivered by a physical strike is a simple mathematical equation: the weight of the impacting object multiplied by its speed. The result: the thug's wrist bones splintered like they were made of dry and cracked wood.

Even before Takeshi could scream in agonized pain, Hiro hit him again. This time, a well-placed kick to the back of his right knee brought the large man down. His right hand was reappearing from beneath his jacket, carrying a massive Desert Eagle handgun. Everything was happening so fast from his point of view that he hadn't even realized he was having his ass royally kicked from here to tomorrow.

Hiro grabbed the large pistol's barrel and twisted it with all his strength. After a short struggle, the Takeshi's fingers gave up and the time-bender ripped the weapon out of his grasp with a new sound of crunched bones.

With a 360-degree spin, Hiro slammed the butt of the Desert Eagle on Takeshi's temple and he let time resume its normal flow. The mountainous Yakuza fell face-first to the floor, unconscious, and Hiro faced Tatsumoto and his gang of armored swordsmen. These were so surprised by all that had happened, that they hadn't even tried to stand up from their knelt-down positions.

Nobody, in fact, had moved a muscle.

Calmly, Hiro unloaded the pistol in his possession before tossing it aside. He looked at the open-mouthed crime boss with as much coolness as he could muster. This situation, he thought, required some witty remark from his part. But for the life of him, Hiro couldn't think of anything smart enough to say. How did Spider-man manage to retain his grace under fire?

"I like my ears where they are, thank you very much," he finally said. Hiro immediately regretted it, feeling it was the lamest line ever since 'what noise does a toad make when hit by a lightning?'

"Get him!" Tatsumoto roared. The swordsmen grasped their shinais and stood up, shouting in anger as they ran towards the young man.

Behind him, the men with the machine guns also started moving closer, abandoning their watch over the astonished accountants.

'Why is it nothing's ever easy?' Hiro thought with an inner sigh.

He rushed forward as he once again bent time to his will. He leaned down mid-step to retrieve Tatsumoto's discarded towel from the floor and then let the armored foes surround him. They had been in such a rush to attack him that none of the Yakuza members had put their helmets back on, and their heads and faces were exposed.

Grinning, Hiro held the wet towel by one of its corners and spun it until he turned it into an improvised whip. He nimbly dodged the slow blows from the swordsmen left and right, and let his homemade weapon fly, slapping the men's faces with it.

Although he was causing more confusion and embarrassment than actual pain, after a few instants of this, the armored fighters lost all attack discipline and allowed the young time-shifter to start using their superior numbers to his own advantage.

When one man tried to hit him with a downwards strike, Hiro easily avoided the bamboo blade and whipped the towel around his head until he could grasp the other end of the fabric with his free hand. With the man captured like this, he pulled hard and sent him flying against a second attacker. The two of them crash-landed on the floor turned into a shapeless pile of moving limbs.

Hiro then faced the third man, whipping his towel again as he wrapped it around his enemy's shinai. With a new hard yank, he tore the sword from the man's grasp and sent it spinning in the air.

Forcing time to go even slower, the young man charged forward and then jumped. He kicked the man with both feet on his armored chest, his speed so fast to the other man's point of view that his chest plate cracked under the impact and his body was sent flying backwards.

The time-shifter fell on his back, speeded the time flow a little bit and let his previous foe's still spinning shinai land neatly on his hands. Parrying the final swordsman's strike in the nick of time, Hiro spun on the floor and hit his opponent in the back of his calves with so much strength that the man's legs were swept off the floor. The foe went down on his back as well, right alongside Hiro but in the opposite position, head to his feet.

Both men tried to stand up, but the younger one had time on his side – pun fully intended – and had no problems hitting the Yakuza member on the head with his borrowed sword and rendering him effectively unconscious.

Five down, three to go.

Hiro smoothly jumped to his feet and faced the gangsters with the machine-guns. He fearlessly charged against them as they aimed their guns at him. Just as they pulled the triggers, the young man reduced the time flow to a tenth of its normal speed. And then he went all Keanu Reeves on their asses.

Time was so slow from his perspective that when the bullets emerged from the men's Uzis, Hiro could see the conical shock-waves they created on their way. He then danced between the nearly-stilled projectiles, dodging them easily, until he stood between the two Yakuza bullies.

Turning around, the time-shifter dropped his bamboo sword – which seemed to float as it phased into the 'real' time flow – and reached for the men's machine-guns. He took hold of the long ammo clips protruding from the Uzis' grips and slid them out of the weapons, unloading them.

Then, using the long metallic bullet boxes as if they were fighting sticks, he proceeded to give the two men a serious beating. He slashed left and right, striking the gangsters in their faces, arms and torsos, and moving so fast from their point of view that he was nothing more than a blur of movement and pain.

Hiro dropped the ammo clips as he allowed time to flow back at its normal speed around him. As the two gunmen fell to the ground bruised and moaning in pain, he hooked the shinai – which still hadn't even touched the floor – with his foot and kicked it up to neatly grab it by its handle.

He confidently walked towards Tatsumoto, who was standing in the center of the tatami – actually, the only figure who was not lying on the fighting mat either unconscious or groaning in pain – with mouth agape.

"How...how?" the Yakuza capo's lips opened and closed like the mouth of a fish out of water. "What are you? A demon?"

"I'm the best at my job," Hiro grinned, quoting none other than Wolverine himself. "But what I do, it's not nice."

"What?"

"Forget it," Hiro rolled his eyes. He raised his sword, challenging the gangster. "Tell me, Ryuichi: don't you wish now that you'd chosen option number one?"

With a roar of anger, Tatsumoto tightened his grasp on his own sword and attacked the younger man. He didn't make it even as far as becoming a serious threat, though.

This time, it was space that Hiro folded. He teleported right behind his enemy just as he was about to deliver his strike, and whacked Tatsumoto in the back of the head. He did it again as Tatsumoto turned around to face him. And once more after that.

Unfair advantage? Definitely. But like the old saying goes, in love and war everything's fair.

Again and again, the young evolved human blinked in and out of the space-time continuum, disappearing from the path of the Yakuza leader's bamboo blade and reappearing at an apparently random position in Tatsumoto's blind spot. Hiro mercilessly beat the tattooed gangster down until the man fell to his knees, exhausted and unable to even hold his sword.

Hiro materialized in front of him, his shinai leaned on his shoulder. There was an expression of merry smugness on the young man's face, but it was calculated, not real. His eyes showed no joy at what he had just done.

Tatsumoto gathered enough strength within himself to look up defiantly at the enemy. "You will burn in hell for this, demon."

"Don't I know it," Hiro grunted. With a kiai of his own, the young man delivered a powerful blow to the gangster's head and rendered him senseless.

As Tatsumoto slumped down on the floor, the young Nakamura-san turned his attention to the large safe on the other side of the tatami. He considered it for a few moments before turning to the only people still conscious in the building apart from himself.

Frowning at the accountants – who were cowering behind their money piles with flabbergasted expressions – he asked, "Who knows the combination to the safe?"

As one, the near-naked men pointed at Tatsumoto's sprawled body.

"Anyone else?"

The men shook their heads in denial.

Hiro's shoulders slumped down as he sighed, "Tai-pinch!"

---O---

En route to Bayside, Queens, New York
May, 2009

Red and blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, the two NYPD police cruisers blasted through the traffic of the Queensboro Bridge. They were escorting a third car, an unmarked Crown Victoria with license plates identifying it as property of the U.S. Federal government. Like the defensive line of a varsity football team, they opened up and led the way for the other car through the ongoing rush hour traffic and towards Queens.

Special Agents Matt Parkman and Audrey Hanson shared the grim interior space of the dark blue Ford. Neither of them were eager to break the tense silence, but for the sake of their partnership – or whatever was that they had – Matt made an effort and asked out loud, "Penny for your thoughts?"

Audrey snorted. "Funny you should say that, considering you can have them for free."

Matt wasn't sure where the hostility was coming from, and quite frankly he didn't have much patience for it right now. "You know I would never do that. If you have something to say, Audrey, just say it. I thought we were past the silent treatment, considering our circumstances."

"Our circumstances are…" she sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose. "Matt, our circumstances are not important right now."

"Then what?"

"What?" the female agent was shocked. "Matt! We're rushing through the city, lights on and sirens blaring, because somebody put out a hit on an 18-year-old girl who can't be physically harmed and a vegetative young man that has the ability to become a walking thermonuclear bomb. I'm sorry if all… this sometimes overwhelms me."

"Well, what do you expect me to do? You have a brother with two boys in Michigan, if he called you saying there was a big problem with one of your nephews, and he needed your help, wouldn't you drop everything to do so?"

"That's not what I mean and you know it," the blonde woman gave him a cross look. "What worries me isn't your reaction to the problem, but the problem itself. What would have happened if Petrelli had exploded when he was attacked? What if he had been shot and, I don't know, blown up?"

"He's not a literal nuclear bomb, Audrey," Parkman said condescendingly, which angered her.

"No, but like I said he can become one. And you guys have kept him in a nursing home all these years like he was some regular Joe, watched over just by his barely-adult niece."

"Yeah, because what you did with Ted worked out so much better," he retorted with poison in his voice.

Audrey's face fell and Matt cursed under his breath, frustrated. That had been a low blow and he had regretted it immediately. "I'm sorry. I, ah…I'm really sorry. That was totally uncalled for."

"You can be a real asshole sometimes, you know that?" she said slowly, and sighed.

Yeah, he already knew. But knowing didn't make it any easier to correct such a flaw. Like knowing he was about two steps away from becoming an alcoholic didn't stop him from reaching for the bottle of Jack Daniels when the nightmares came at night.

"Audrey, think about it. What other option did we have?" Matt asked slowly. His partner just stared at him, figuring the question was mostly rhetorical.

They – meaning the whole merry band of misfits Parkman now called family – had discussed Peter Petrelli often and in depth. Never in front of Claire, of course, for they knew what her reaction and opinion would have been on just about anything regarding the young empath. "We couldn't just dump him inside a cargo container and drop him into the middle of the sea," Matt added.

"What about trying to get help from somebody with the resources and knowledge on how to deal with him?" the female agent asked, now somewhat placated.

"Like who, the Company? We're trying to stay away from those people as much as we can."

"Like the government, Matt," she rolled her eyes. "You know, the people you and I work for?"

Now it was time for him to chuckle without real mirth. "I might be an asshole, Audrey, but you're incredibly naïve."

"Am I?" the woman arched her brow, not really offended but not wanting to let him get off the hook that easily. "Why? Because I trust in our elected officials to do the right thing now and then?"

"Hell, yeah! If the government ever found out about our existence, they'd round everyone up and either make us work for their own interests in the name of national security, or lock us up where we would never be found again."

"You've been watching your X-Files DVD collection far too much, Matt."

The male Fed shook his head, smiling sadly. Parkman was tempted to tell his partner about that would-have-been future Hiro and Ando had experienced, where he was an amoral henchman serving the President about two and half years from now, but the former LAPD cop knew Audrey would never believe that tale. Some things Hiro had told him, even Matt himself had trouble believing. "Audrey, it's not that far-fetched if you think about it. Take Molly, for example."

"Molly?" Audrey frowned. The little girl was one of the very few members of Matt's surrogate family she was truly endeared to. And she was pretty sure that was the exact reason why her partner was using her as an argument point. The sneaky bastard. "What about her?"

"She's a sweet kid, isn't she? A little girl, an innocent despite everything she's gone through. And so brave too, not many kids would have recovered after something like that, what with her whole family being murdered and all…"

"I was there, and I know the kid's history," Audrey gave him a slit-eyed look. "Your point is?"

"That she can locate anyone, anywhere, just like that," Matt clicked his fingers. "That easy, you just give her a name, or a picture, and she can point out where that person is anywhere in the world to within a one-inch radius. How valuable would that be for the government? I mean, she would need less than a minute to find Osama bin Laden. But what if she fell into the wrong hands? What if, oh I don't know, say the Mafia grabbed her after they learned of her ability from one of their moles in the government, and they forced her to reveal the location of everyone in the witness protection and relocation program?"

Audrey was a bit confused at her partner's tirade, "Are you trying to convince me of something?"

Matt shook his head. "All I'm saying is, maybe you're right; it might be a good idea to contact the government and put her and her abilities at their disposal. But what if you're wrong?"

Audrey said nothing, and just waited for him to go on. Although she was not sure she liked where he was going anyway.

"The thing is, you know, she is just a twelve-year-old kid. A little girl who doesn't really understand about things like the greater good or national security and all that shit. She just cares about getting good grades at school, having a list of Pokèmons better than Micah's and maybe one day meeting Justin Timberlake. But damn it, that's not really important, not in the grand scheme of things, so let's sacrifice it all in the name of the red, the white and blue, Mom's apple pie and the American way of life. Put her under a microscope and let her become part of the peace effort. Risk Molly going crazy so that the rest of America can stay safe and free."

Parkman was growing more and more passionate in his speech as he ranted on. His partner let him continue, but avoided looking straight at him. She noticed though that his hands had tightened on the steering wheel so much that his knuckles had turned white.

"And while we're on the subject, hey, why not toss Micah in as part of a package deal. Better to make him hack into our enemies' databases than to risk having him screw with ours whenever he feels like it. And Claire too, let's poke and probe her until we can add her regeneration power to all the grunts in the Marines. Why not put her in a cage and cut her open until the pharmaceutical industry can figure out how to make millions from the riches they're sure to develop from her DNA? That has to be good for the country, surely?"

"Alright, alright, I get it," Audrey stopped him as Matt gave her a furrowed look.

"No, Audrey, you don't," he insisted. "Because we're people, damn it. Human beings, not virus samples. But if the secret gets out, you'll see those people in charge of running the country the same way I do; cold and grey machines that'll see us only as tools or threats. And in the name of the people the government will act accordingly, like it always does."

"Well, in that case, maybe you guys should start doing something about it," the blonde agent argued. "Before somebody else does."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I've heard Suresh's technobabble just like you have. I know that there are more and more of you being found with every passing day," Audrey said intensely. "The nutty professor is always ranting about that. If you ask me, it's only a matter of time until somebody does something really spectacular and stupid, and maybe it'll happen right in front of a news camera too. And when that takes place, the cat will be well and truly out of the bag and hiding won't have accomplished squat. Hell, I'm surprised there hasn't already been some kid showing off how he can shoot laser beams out his eyes on Jerry Springer."

"He's too busy with his dysfunctional, interracial and/or nazi families to be bothered with something like that," Parkman said, without a flicker of amusement on his face.

Audrey chuckled, but she didn't seem amused either. "All I'm saying is that eventually, you won't be able to stop it from happening. Not if all the stuff I've heard is true. But you might be able to control how it happens, Matt. First impressions are important, it depends on you if the general public's one about you guys is Molly Walker or some dude blowing up half of Manhattan."

Shrugging, Matt conceded there was a good deal of reason in her words. "Hiro would agree with you. He still argues that we should wear spandex and masks, and give ourselves silly codenames like something out of the Justice League or whatever."

Their eyes met for a brief instant, and the secret lovers established an unspoken truce between them. Matt clicked his tongue as he returned his attention to the road. "Don't even think about it."

But there was the image, clearly and intentionally projected by her mind: Matt Parkman, heroically posing in blue tights with a big 'P' on his chest.

Audrey laughed and this time, finally, there was true mirth in her voice.

Matt sighed in resignation. "So, are you into role-playing and stuff? I never guessed you'd be that kinky, babe."

---O---

Osaka, Japan

May, 2009

Hiro descended the fragile staircase of the Yakuza hideout with his father's property under his arm. He had needed many minutes of brainstorming, sitting cross-legged in front of the safe box and with time fully halted around him, until the proverbial light bulb switched on over his head.

Standing up, he had placed his hands on the door of the safe and, concentrating, teleported himself and the door – and just the door – half a meter away from his current position.

Satisfied at his own ingenuity, Hiro had dug into the contents of the safe box, discarding money, guns and drugs until he found what he had been looking for: a tiny jade sculpture of Buddha, about five inches tall, wrapped in a cotton cloth and stolen from his father.

That same figurine he carried now under his arms as he walked out of the building.

As he crossed the door on his way out, the young time-shifter retrieved his glasses from the interior pocket of his jacket and put them on. His whole demeanour changed in the next heartbeat after the spectacles were perched on his nose. His shoulders slumped slightly, his steps became shorter and he carried himself not with the ease of a well-trained fighter but with the slight hesitance of an office drone.

Superman was gone, and Clark Kent was answering the phone now.

Hiro couldn't help but to frown, though, when he noticed the large limo parked in the middle of the road and which was cutting off access to his car. Hiro thought he maybe should feel some surprise when the rear door of the elongated car opened and his father stepped out, but to be honest he didn't. Not really, anyway.

"Father," he greeted the well-suited man, with a small bow of respect. "I have retrieved your property."

"Well done, Hiro," Kaito Nakamura said, accepting the bundled figurine from his son's hands. "Once again, you endow the Nakamura name with pride and honor."

Nice and respectful words, but said with the man's usual detached coolness. Hiro would have liked them more if they had been accompanied with a hug or maybe a pat on the back. But Kaito-sensei didn't move to close the distance with his son and neither did the young man. Hiro's relationship with his father had been like that for as long as he could remember and not even the events of two years before, nor all that had happened afterwards, had done much to improve that situation.

At least, Kaito now claimed to be proud of him, didn't pressure him to follow his footsteps in the company and gave him the freedom to spend most of his time in America with his second family. If the price for all that was to get a call now and then from the man and a request to run some kind of strange errand like the one today, well, it was quite cheap in Hiro's opinion.

"I'm happy I was of service to you, Father," he nodded politely. "If you don't require anything else of me, I will return home."

If the elder Nakamura thought anything of his son calling New York 'home' so off-handedly, he said nothing about it. However, he raised a hand to stop Hiro from going anywhere. "Wait. If I've come here instead of waiting for you at my office, it is because I got a call from Ando-san. He is looking for you."

"Ando?" Hiro arched his eyebrows with alarm.

If his best friend had called his father for a non-work related reason, it only could mean there was some kind of problem going on. The young man got his own cell phone from his pocket and had a look at it. He had silenced and turned the vibration off not to get distracted during his mission, thinking that surely nothing bad could happen in the hour or so that it would take him to fulfill his endeavours.

Talk about Murphy's Law and all that.

Indeed, there were several missed calls from Ando's number and Hiro had to make an effort not to curse in front of his father.

He looked at the older man, "Do you know what is happening?"

"Apparently there is a situation with your American friends, and they need your help. Ando-san didn't inform me of the details, but it seems young Miss Bennet suffered from some kind of attack."

"Cheerleader Claire?" Hiro couldn't prevent his voice from raising a few octaves. It had been years since his young Texan friend had been involved in cheerleading, but she would always be that for him. "Is she alright? Is she hurt?"

"Considering her special nature, in order I would say most likely yes and probably not," Kaito answered calmly. "Ando said her father requested for you to meet with him and help him and Professor Suresh to make it back to New York as soon as possible."

A tiny voice inside Hiro's head warned him of how strange it was that his honorable father was wasting his valuable time acting as messenger between him and his friends. Like he had told Tatsumoto earlier, Kaito was not a man used to getting his hands dirty with menial tasks. And it worried him a bit, as Hiro knew that Kaito Nakamura always had a good reason for everything he did. He was not a man prone to irrational or emotional acting.

"Father..." Hiro said warily, not really knowing how to approach the subject. "Is there anything you want to tell me?"

Once again, if Kaito was puzzled he didn't let his face show it. "I'm afraid I don't understand you, my son."

The time-bender sighed, licking his lips more nervously than he wanted to admit. "If the Company has anything to do with this..."

"I severed all ties with that group long ago, Hiro," the elder man interrupted him. "I wouldn't know it if they were indeed responsible."

Hiro couldn't repress a bitter chuckle, "Father? One of these days, I will grow tired of being kept in the dark this way."

This time, the son's defiant words caused the father's eyes to narrow. "Go to your friends, Hiro. They need you now."

They held gazes for a few seconds and, as usual, it was Hiro who eventually broke apart. There was a strength about his father that always intimidated him. He wondered if one day he would get over it. If maybe one day he would be the intimidating one.

Given the memories of what he might have become, the Hiro that had gotten killed when he and Ando had gone five years into the future, the young man was actually scared that would be the case indeed.

"Hai, Nakamura Kaito-sama," he bowed again, effectively ending the conversation.

"Nakamura Hiro!" his father called the young man as he walked away to his car. Hiro stopped and looked at the CEO with downcast eyes. "You truly do make me proud of you."

Not really knowing what to say, Hiro only nodded again before getting behind the wheel of his Nissan.

Once inside the car, the young man retrieved his phone again and was about to call Ando when the blackberry started buzzing in his hand with the One Piece theme as a ring tone. The LCD display announced he had just received a multimedia message from his dearest friend, and Hiro quickly opened it.

'Hiro, this comes from Mohinder. Racine, Wisconsin. Hurry up. See you in NY.'

There was a file attached to the message and the time-bender quickly downloaded it. It was a JPEG file, a picture of the exterior of a motel and an empty parking lot, probably taken with the professor's phone camera. Hiro looked at the picture until he had it completely memorized, and then returned his cell to his pocket.

Holding the steering wheel with both hands, the young man concentrated deeply, breathing in and out and clearing his mind from anything that was not the image of the motel and the empty parking lot.

His face cringed as he let his power pour through his pores. His knuckles turned white around the wheel of the Nissan. He folded time and space to his will.

One second, Hiro Nakamura was sitting inside the GT-R in the middle of Osaka, Japan. Then he disappeared without even the plink! of a exploding soap bubble.

The next, he materialized into existence – car and all – across the world, in the outskirts of Racine, Wisconsin. Outside the motel where Noah Bennet and Mohinder Suresh had been spending the night.

The two men were already waiting for him outside the building, their suitcases packed and ready. Rolling down the window of his car, Hiro offered them a wide smile.

"Gentlemen!" he greeted them cheerfully. "Somebody asked for a taxi?"

---O---

Kaito Nakamura observed his son's vanishing act before climbing into the rear of his limousine. The unseen driver in the front started the engine as soon as the door was closed and the elongated vehicle began to roll its way back to the airport. From there, they would get on a private flight to Tokyo and they would be at the Yamagato headquarters in an hour.

There was a third figure in the car, though. A young woman sat in the rear, across Kaito and facing backwards. She seemed upset, and the CEO allowed himself the rare pleasure of a smile as he looked at her.

"Something is bothering you, Kimiko?"

His daughter – Hiro's sister and future CEO of Yamagato Industries – shook her head in wonder. Unlike her brother, she was as tough on the outside as she was in the inside. A life in the usually male-only corridors of power of the Japanese industrial world had forced her to be like that.

Although that didn't mean she didn't have a passionate heart or housed a sincere love for her family. It was just that she was a practical player of the corporate game.

"I don't understand these games you play with Hiro, Father," she said bluntly, as Kaito opened the small fridge with which the limo was equipped. "You contracted that gangster Tatsumoto to steal that figurine from your office – anonymously, of course – and then you sent Hiro to retrieve it without telling him it was you who had it stolen in the first place. Sometimes I wonder if you obtain some kind of perverse pleasure from messing with his head."

Pouring himself a good dose of American bourbon, a guilty pleasure he had acquired from his old friend Arthur Petrelli, the CEO smiled at his daughter. He also retrieved a Cuban cigar from the humidifier on top of the fridge and rolled it between his fingers.

"I don't play games, Kimiko-chan," he said patiently. "Neither it is my intention to mess with his head. The only pleasure I derive from these... tests, is the pride I feel every time your brother proves to me that he is the man we need for what is coming."

"What is coming..." Kimiko shook her head again. "Hiro's right. One of these days, your riddles and veiled truths won't be enough to satisfy him any longer. They do not satisfy me now."

Kaito gulped down a mouthful of bourbon before bringing the cigar to his lips. Holding the Buddha figurine in his hands, he flipped its head open and used the lighter inside its jade body to light up the rolled tobacco. He relaxed on his plush seat, his head enveloped by a cloud of blue-grey smoke, and tossed the figure aside carelessly.

"When that day comes, my beloved daughter," he whispered softly, "I will know that Hiro is finally ready to accept his destiny. And when that happens, we'll all probably wish that none of us had to deal with the burden of such knowledge."

Kaito turned his stare away from his daughter, and Kimiko understood he didn't wish to pursue the subject any further. She complied, as tradition and respect demanded of her, but was obviously not pleased about it.

The old man – and Kaito was indeed feeling older and older with each passing day – gazed through the tinted window at the world outside. It had already dawned and the streets were filling up, becoming a blur of chaotic activity.

A man like him didn't have the luxury of many moments of quiet and tranquility like this one. They were sparse, far and few in between. And, as was usual for him, they were haunted by the words of a dead man.

Another of his old friends was speaking to him, from the dark depths of his memory and his soul. Charles Deveaux's voice resounded in Kaito's head, clear as it had been so many years before, when he had addressed the rest of their group of twelve.

'There's a storm coming our way, people. It's not here yet; it hasn't still caught up with us. But there are already dark clouds in the sky.'

---O---

Bayside, Queens, New York

May, 2009

"I'm coming, I'm coming!" Claire yelled at whoever was ringing the bell at the main door.

Wrapping herself tightly in her fluffy pink bathrobe, the blonde teenager ran down the stairs and across the hall. She took a second to compose herself – to little avail, considering she was barefoot and her hair was dripping wet and untamed from the shower she had just taken – and checked the main door's safety chain.

She curled his fingers around the grip of the compact Glock in her bathrobe pocket before opening the door slightly. "Who's there?"

"Papa and Mama Bear," Matt Parkman grinned through the narrow crack allowed by the safety chain. "Can Goldilocks come out to play?"

"Matt!" the young Texan brightened up at her surrogate uncle's arrival. She quickly opened the door and let the Federal agent and his partner come in. He lost no time and enveloped her into a hug so fierce that he lifted her from the floor a couple of inches.

"Oh my God! Thank you for coming, guys!" Claire gushed.

"Pleasure is all ours, sweetheart," he smiled, finally depositing her lithe frame on the floor. "Are you alright?"

"I've had better days," Claire made a face, not really knowing how to answer the question sincerely. "I'm better now that you're here, though."

She stepped aside, and held the door open for the two Feds to come into the house. As the female one passed by her side, she greeted her with a simple, "Hello, Audrey."

"Claire." The other blonde gave her a tight if friendly smile. There was no animosity between them or anything like that, but they just didn't have the close relationship the Texan girl shared with Parkman. Agent Hanson had always seemed to make a point of staying just outside the circle formed by their merry band of misfits.

Outside on the street, Claire noticed the two NYPD cruisers with their red and blue lights on. One of them parked right in front of the Bennets' lawn while the other started to circle the block, probably to do the same at the other side of the house.

"You brought along the cavalry or something?" the young woman inquired with arched eyebrows, as she closed the door.

"No sense in taking any risks until we know for sure what's going on," Matt said. "The cops will watch the house, at least for tonight. And don't worry about your mom and Lyle, either. I spoke with D.L. while we were on our way here. Niki and him are taking care of them and the kids."

"I thought though, they had a gig tonight?" the Texan frowned.

Matt shrugged. "Family comes first."

"And talking about family, where's Mr. Petrelli?" Audrey asked as Claire led them to the kitchen.

"Sleeping in my bed, he's pretty much exhausted," she sighed candidly. Because the younger blonde had her back turned to them, she didn't notice the mildly shocked stare exchanged by the two agents. "Do you guys want a coffee or something?"

"Coffee's alright," Matt said, still a bit puzzled.

It wasn't as much the image of Peter napping in his ten-years-younger niece's bed as it was the fact that Claire had felt the subconscious need to tell them it was her bed that he was using, that bothered him. Parkman finally shook his head, thinking he was probably just reading too much out of such a simple sentence. It was either professional suspicion or he was spending too much time in the minds of psychopaths and criminals for his own good.

"I know Matt likes it black and without sugar, what about you, Audrey?"

The female agent was about to answer that she was alright when she caught her partner's meaningful stare. He didn't need to project his thoughts in her head for her to understood he was asking her to play nice. "One sugar for me, please."

"Your father's trying to get Hiro to do a 'beam me up, Scotty'," Matt told the young woman as Claire started brewing coffee and boiling water for tea. "If they can't find the little fella, he'll have a Yamagato jet to ferry Mohinder and him to JFK ASAP. He'll give us a ring anyway."

Claire nodded absent-mindedly, as she readied the mugs, spoons and all. Now that backup was here, and she didn't need to be on edge, all the exhaustion from this day was crashing down upon her like a ton of bricks. She wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep.

Although her bed was already in use, she suddenly realized.

Well, there was enough room in there for two, wasn't there?

The thought alone caused a rush of blood to creep up her cheeks and her hands almost to drop the mugs while she was placing them on the kitchen table. She chastised herself for her own silliness, remembering she was standing next to a telepath. She knew Matt would never violate the privacy of her mind apropos, but she also knew that sometimes he couldn't help catching somebody else's thoughts if they were projected very intensely.

"Let me help you with that," Audrey said kindly. "You must be feeling pretty tired right now."

"You have no idea," Claire smiled softly at her, wrapping herself tighter in her bathrobe. "Thank you."

"Claire, why don't get yourself in some warm clothes?" Matt suggested. If he had caught a glimpse of her inner turmoil, his pleasant face didn't show it. "We'll talk afterwards, okay?"

"Yeah, that's a good idea," the Texan nodded with a somewhat conscious smile. "You help yourselves, alright? Mi casa es su casa."

"Don't worry, we'll attack the fridge in a second," Matt grinned at her as she retreated back to the upper level of the house. When the former cheerleader was out of hearing range, the Fed turned to his partner. "Thanks for that, Audrey."

"For what?" she frowned, pouring steaming coffee for Matt and herself. She seemed genuinely confused.

"For not going all Elliott Ness on her straightaway," Parkman accepted the mug from her.

Audrey shrugged, brushing it off. "No sense in making her all antagonistic right from the get-go." She remembered the first time she had interrogated the young blonde all those years back in Texas. She could be a stubborn little piece. "But you understand this is really serious, don't you? Six dead people are not something you can just sweep under the carpet."

Apart from D.L. Hawkins, they had already had a very tense conversation with a police captain from the Long Island Department. The officer hadn't been very happy about the Federal intrusion in a local matter, right when they were on their way to speak with their main witness, and prime suspect.

They had had SAC Wayne's support on this merely as a personal favor from the man. Matt knew that support could vanish at any given moment if the heat got too high for the Bureau. It was, in short, a very narrow tightrope they were walking here.

"We need to speak with the CSU, see what they've got by now," he said, meaning the Crime Scene Unit, the NYPD's scientific unit – and not CSI, like the TV show incorrectly claimed. "Tomorrow morning we'll visit to the scene ourselves."

Audrey nodded in agreement. "Right now though, the most important thing is getting a statement from Claire and Petrelli. You know what they say about first versions: they're the ones that count."

Their conversation was suddenly interrupted when Mr. Muggles made a reappearance. The little dog walked into the kitchen, yapping and demanding attention. He went towards Audrey, but the female agent gave him a mean stare and the Pomeranian stopped dead in his tracks. Curling his tail between his rear quarters, the dog shivered for a few seconds before turning 180 degrees and running away.

Matt chuckled, sipping his coffee. "Well, there's another thing they say: animals and children can sense evil."

The blonde's mean stare turned to her partner, and Matt quickly stopped laughing.

---O---

Racine, Wisconsin

May, 2009

While Mohinder and Mr. Bennet loaded their stuff into the trunk of the GT-R, Hiro was busy stuffing himself with chocolate and candy bars from the motel's vending machine. He still felt a little lightheaded from his last space-time jump, but he was confident he could pull a new one and take them all to NY in a few minutes.

Although his time and space-bending powers had not evolved in the sense Matt Parkman's had – there was nothing new to his teleporting and time-bending abilities – his control over them had improved so much that he could now perform stunts like the ones that had allowed him to take down the Yakuza crowd earlier in the day. Teleporting long distances, or getting exactly to the point in time and space that he wanted instead of a random one was now fairly easy to him, as long as he had a clear mental picture of his destination.

The only problem was how much energy he used to jump. Stopping, slowing or speeding time up didn't require much – as long as it was for a short period – but the longer the distance in time and space that he teleported, the weaker he was rendered. Ditto, it depended on him being the only one jumping or if he was carrying others or, current case as example, a whole damn car along for the ride.

Adrenaline was a good fuel, he had found out, but it diminished his precision. Overloading himself with sugar and calories worked best.

And as a plus, Hiro now had an excuse for indulging himself in chocolate and junk food, something over which his Battojotsu and Aikido senseis would have had a stroke if they ever found out.

He was munching a whole Mars bar and washing it down with greedy gulps of Gatorade when Noah Bennet approached him. "We're ready when you are."

"Phust ah pheconth," the young Japanese nodded around a mouthful of chocolate.

"It's okay if you need a little more time," the older man said, although it was plainly obvious he was aching to get back to New York as soon as possible. Shifting to Japanese, he added with a small bow, "I thank you for your help, Hiro-san. My whole family is in debt with you. Domo arigato."

It always amazed Hiro how flawless the American man's Japanese accent was. His own English had improved exponentially thanks to the two years he had been living in New York, but his accent was still thick as hell and he was more comfortable in his mother tongue, switching to it by default when he spoke with Ando.

"There's no debt here, Noah-san. Your family is my family," he said and bowed ceremoniously. A small burp escaped his lips when he stood up and he blushed violently. "Whoops! I think I overkilled with the chocolates."

Bennet couldn't help a small smile. "Do we get going then?"

"Definitively."

Mohinder closed the trunk of the car and walked around it. When his taller partner opened the single passenger's door and slid the seat forward to let him in, the Indian professor frowned a little bit. "Are you sure about this, Hiro? Wouldn't it be safer to teleport just the three of us? We can always return later to collect your car and the luggage."

"No, I pretty much have this under control," the Japanese opened his own door and slid behind the steering wheel.

"What do you mean by 'pretty much'?" Mohinder's worry only increased.

Hiro shrugged nonchalantly as the other two men got inside. "Well, I could always make a mistake. We might reappear miles away from our intended destination. Maybe on some rail tracks, right in the path of an oncoming freight train. Or something worse. This is not an exact science, you know."

The professor's eyes went wide like saucers. Silent and mechanically, he reached for his safety belt and locked it in place.

"Hiro..." Bennet admonished him with a fatherly shake of his head. "Don't mess with Mohinder's head, please. He doesn't do stress well."

"There's nothing wrong with my stress levels!" the aforementioned man said with a high-pitched tone. "And what in Vishnu's name does 'or worse' mean?"

Hiro simply giggled and curled his fingers around the GT-R's wheel. "There we go! To the infinite, and beyond!"

"Beyond? I don't wanna go beyond anywhere!" Mohinder protested. But Hiro was already clenching his face and his pleas fell on deaf ears.

Half a heartbeat later, the space-time continuum folded upon itself and they vanished from the motel's parking lot.

---O---

Bayside, Queens, New York

May, 2009

Just as suddenly as they were lost into oblivion, the daring trio returned to corporeal existence halfway across the continent.

It was dark in New York, but the street lights provided good enough illumination for Noah to check they had indeed arrived at his house. In the rear seat, Mohinder was moaning something in Punjabi while running his own hands over himself to check all his limbs were correctly attached to the rest of his body. At the older man's side, Hiro had taken his glasses off and was wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He was pale and seemed exhausted, proving Bennet's suspicion that he had overtaxed himself with so much dimensional-jumping.

There was something wrong with his view from the house, though. Noah suddenly realized he was looking at it from behind.

Bennet rolled his window down and looked outside. After a couple of seconds, he sighed dismayedly, "Oh, sweet baby Jesus."

"What?" the Indian professor's alarm returned tenfold. "Is there something wrong?"

"Yes, actually there is," the older man grunted. "We're in my goddamn backyard. My wife's gonna kill me when she finds out how we've ruined her lawn."

"Oh, my goodness," Mohinder was turning several shades of green. "I'm going to vomit."

"Not in the car! It's brand new!" Hiro exclaimed, fighting a wave of nausea himself.

It was then that the night turned into day, as high-power light was focused on the car and its occupants. Angry male voices screamed at them from outside, "NYPD! Freeze! Let's see your hands! Don't move! Don't move!"

Instinctively shielding their eyes from the blinding beam with their hands, the three men in the car did as they were told. It was plain obvious by the sound of guns being cocked that they were being aimed at by things more dangerous than a police-issued car-lamp.

"Mohinder, whatever you do, don't start puking now," Noah warned the man behind him.

The Indian professor didn't say anything. He was too busy trying to stop himself from messing his pants. He really hated these kinds of situations.

The rear door of the Bennets' household opened violently, and Matt Parkman and Audrey Hanson emerged from it with their sidearms out and ready. The male Fed shouted, "FBI! Nobody move a...what the fuck?!"

The three men inside the car turned their heads towards him at once. Hiro gave him a small, self-conscious grin and waved a hand. "Sorry, Agent Matt, I kind of missed the mark."

Sighing, Matt lowered his handgun and holstered it back on his hip. He gave a sideways glance to his partner. "Any good ideas to explain this, uh, rationally?"

"I don't know. Aliens did it?" Audrey shrugged, still with her Glock up and aiming at the three newcomers. "Or maybe we could just shoot all of them and leave the explanations for the report."

"Don't tempt me..." he half-growled, walking towards the cops as he pondered what in the name of God he could tell them. He doubted it would sound believable...

Hell, the aliens story sounded better and better with every step he took.

---O---

Peter is back at that endless beach, and once again he is a lost boy dressed in white.

He hasn't changed that much, if he thinks about it. He remembers now, but he still doesn't understand what is expected of him, what his destiny is or even if he has one at all.

This barren world without a name has changed during his short absence, though.

There's no more sun in the sky anymore to give him a sense of direction and hope. He wants to believe that is because the sun lives now within him. Because he remembers Claire, and her warmth is all he needs to keep on going.

It is dark night, and a cold wind blows in from the infinite ocean. Waves crash angrily on the shoreline and the sand is flying everywhere, stinging his exposed face and getting under his clothes.

Peter raises a hand to protect his eyes as he walks towards the sea, thinking that the sandstorm will be less annoying over there. There are no moon or stars and by all means he should be blind as a bat; and yet he can see perfectly, in spite of the darkness and the grains of sand making his eyes water.

This doesn't surprise him. After all, this is a world of his own creation. Whatever this is – his mind, his soul or his heart; or maybe all together – it's a landscape of his own design, and he should know it like the back of his hand.

It never dawns on him though, that he doesn't truly know himself. Never has, actually.

He looks for his friend as he walks along the shoreline, letting the salt water crash around his ankles. It's ice-cold, but he has Claire in his heart.

Peter is calm about that notion. He understands it and realizes just what it does imply, because it's in dreams that masks are stripped away and the truth is often revealed. He just wonders if he'll remember that when he wakes up.

He finally sees the reclining chair in the distance, and the form of Charles lying on it. His hat is tipped down over his face and the old fishing rod is still nailed into the sand at his side, with the line lost into the dark ocean.

A smile forms on his lips, and Peter hurries his stride. "Charles!" he calls his old friend. "Charles! Wake up, you crazy old man!"

He is happy, because his friend is still here to give him advice, maybe even to guide him. He hasn't even realized until now how much he has missed him. Hasn't even understood how scared he has been that he would never see him again.

When Peter reaches his side, Charles hasn't moved an inch. So the young man in white leans down to shake him by the shoulder.

"Charles, wake up! I have things to-"

But the old black man does not wake up. Instead, he tilts lifelessly to the side, his straw hat flipping off his head and falling down at Peter's feet...along with the sliced-off cap of his skull.

Eyes wide in horror, the young man can't stop staring at the gruesome image of Charles Deveaux's empty cranium. He feels his own feet backtracking from the scene of their own volition, his eyes moistening with silent tears and his head shaking in denial. But he can't stop looking.

He crashes against something in his retreat, a soft yet hard surface. Peter stumbles and falls to the wet sand on his hands and knees. Ocean water surrounds him, drenching his clothes and chilling him to the bone.

He doesn't feel his niece's warmth from inside anymore.

It's only as the young man raises his eyes, still on all fours, that he realizes that hard and soft surface he has collided with is actually another person.

A person that stands tall in front of him.

Peter's crying eyes go up, over long legs encased in white jeans and a lean but muscular torso covered in a white wife-beater that is streaked with red splatter across the chest. They go up, to the man's face. To the short dark hair, the bushy eyebrows and deep, malevolent eyes that are nothing but pools of night. To the strong jaw and its perpetual five o'clock shadow. To the blood tinting the smirking, deranged, smug, smart and cruel smile formed by his mouth.

Like a mouse cornered by a hungry cat, Peter Petrelli is paralyzed in front of Sylar...

His smile only falters when his tongue darts out to lick the traces of blood from his lips. Then it returns, and stays there as Sylar says, "Welcome back, little Pete. We missed you."

...and like the mouse, Peter can only do one thing as the fear subsides and his survival instincts kick in.

He scrambles to his feet and runs for his life.

Sylar doesn't give chase, though. He only laughs – maybe at the futility of Peter's actions, maybe at the madness of it all – and his laughter stabs through the night like it is made of sharp broken glass.

"You can run all you want, but you can't hide!" the killer shouts at him, with true mirth in his voice. "I'm a part of you now, Peter! And I always will be!"

The young man runs and runs. He runs away from Sylar and his laughter, away from the sea and into the sand storm. He runs so fast that his tears streak down the corners of his eyes and slid over his temples. He runs so hard that his heart seems to explode and his lungs are ablaze with liquid fire. He runs until his legs turn into rubber and he falls down again, alone and lost in the middle of the blinding storm.

He lies there, his body rocked by powerful sobs. He lies there and doesn't find the strength to pick himself up.

Minutes pass, or maybe they are hours or even days. He can't know. He has no more measurement of time than the thundering beating of his own broken heart.

Peter raises his head after an entire age of loneliness. He is kneeling on the sand, sitting on his own legs as the storm rages around him.

Through the tears, he sees the silhouette of a man walking towards him. He thinks it's Sylar at first, finally coming to release him from his pain. But he is wrong, he realizes as the man grows closer and his figure gains definition through the flying sand.

He is not as tall as the deranged power-stealer, and his clothes – although white as well – are different. And he, this new man populating his nightmare, is even more dangerous to him than Sylar could ever dare to be.

Nathan towers over him, not uttering a word. His body encased in a spotless suit – white as the driven snow – looms at an arm's length, so close he could wrap his hands around his neck and strangle him without even having to lean down that much.

Peter doesn't know why he thinks his older brother would want to do that to him. Or maybe, he knows all too well, but doesn't want to accept it. He wishes he could read the expression on his face, but he can't because half of Nathan's handsome features are gone, replaced by a hideous radiation burn. His left eye is yellow and sightless, his flesh is charred and raw and he can even see some blackened bone where his muscles have been consumed and ripped off.

The young man shivers, his lower lip trembling. "I'm sorry," he whispers hoarsely. "I'm so sorry, Nathan..."

His brother finally moves to reach for him and Peter doesn't make any effort to avoid his grasp. His left hand, as burnt and ravaged as that side of his head, goes slowly for his face, growing larger and larger, obscuring his vision until everything becomes dark.

---O---

Peter woke up with a violent shake of his body. There was a scream lodged at the back of his throat, but his lungs were so empty of air he couldn't release it. Instead, he whined like a dying animal while his whole body rattled in a feverish convulsion.

That was a bit strange in itself, a tiny part of his mind realized, because ever since he was a kid, he had awoken from his night terrors screaming at the top of his lungs.

Other children would have gone to their parents in search for protection and reassurance after a bad dream. Maybe they would have asked the parental units to sleep with them for the rest of the night. But other children were not sons to Arthur and Angela Petrelli.

Peter had screamed as a little kid because he unconsciously knew that would have called the attention of somebody. Nathan, if he was lucky, or a nanny if not. Someone that would have gone to his room and told him there were no monsters hidden under the bed or in the closet. That the morning would come soon and he would wake up alive. Nathan would have kissed his forehead – he was always tender and understanding in those moments. He would have tucked him in and told him he would keep an eye on him for the rest of the night, and beat up any monster that dared to try and hurt him.

All that had ceased once he'd hit puberty. Nathan had gone to Harvard first and then joined the Navy, and his parents had deemed it not seemly for the hired help – the female hired help – to stay in the bedroom of a young man who was no longer a child. His father, especially, had told Peter he had to stop acting like a baby and start getting stronger, like his brother.

But Peter had never been able to stop screaming.

This night his voice had failed him though, and Peter felt like he was drowning in the unreleased scream.

The images of his nightmare – if a nightmare it had been – came rushing back into his head, with the intensity of a lightning bolt. In reverse motion, he relieved everything: Nathan, Sylar, Charles' corpse, the sandstorm...all in the space of a nanosecond.

But the memories didn't stop there. They kept coming in painful waves, like the ones crashing on the shoreline of his mentally-created desert. Flying into the sun, the conversations with Charles and his advice, the endless walk across the arid dunes...

Everything, he remembered everything.

It exploded inside his mind like the Big Bang, sending scalding knives of thought that burned Peter's synapses from the inside out. His head thundering with the mother of all migraines, the empath fell back onto the pillow as he brought his hands to his pulsating temples.

The voices were yelling the screams he couldn't release. They were tearing his mind apart.

Charles was saying, "Is it impossible for you to believe there's a part of me that was left behind in you?"

Sylar was laughing, "I'm a part of you now, Peter! And I always will be!"

Nathan didn't say much, but his yellowed eye stared at him accusingly, more burning than all the radiation generated by an exploding nuclear man.

And Peter Petrelli?

He was crying, sure that he was going to lose his sanity at any moment.

---O---

"Dad!!" Claire shouted while running from the house.

No matter how incongruent the situation was – with the brand new Nissan settled on the backyard's lawn dangerously close to her mother's flowers, the cops, the Feds, the greenish Indian man and the fast-talking Japanese guy – Claire ignored it all and made a beeline for her father, practically jumping in his arms as the tall man turned around and smothering him in a bear hug.

"Claire! Oh!" Noah Bennet couldn't help but chuckle as he found himself almost thrown to the ground by his daughter's onslaught. He hugged her back, and kissed the top of her golden head. "It's alright now, Claire bear. I'll take care of everything, I promise."

She wished she could believe him, but a tiny part of her knew his words were only wishful thinking. There were things that not even her strong father could fix. He could only patch them up and pray that the wheels of normal life would keep on turning for just a little bit longer.

But Claire found comfort in his embrace anyway, and in the reassurance of his presence. Without releasing him, she turned her head and let it lie on his chest as she greeted the rest of the newcomers. "Hey there, Mo. Thanks for coming."

Mohinder, who was making an effort to ignore his still unstable stomach, nodded at her. "Anytime, my dear."

"What's wrong with him?" she whispered at her dad. "He looks a bit rough around the edges."

"Travel sickness," Bennet shrugged. "He's a big sissy."

"You do know that I can hear you from here, right?" the professor half-growled at them, not really taking offense at their playful tone.

Claire giggled, finally letting her father go as she moved towards Hiro. "Onii-chan!"

"Cheerleader Claire!" the young Japanese male enveloped her in a warm embrace and they kissed each other on the cheek. "What kind of mess have you gotten yourself into this time?"

"Is that the kettle calling the pot black?" she arched an eyebrow at Hiro. Claire stroked with his biker-like jacket. "Hey, I like your new look. Very knight in shining leather."

Hiro blushed a little, and pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose to hide it. "Well, you know, I was coming to help a damsel in distress. I had to look the part, and you won't let me wear spandex."

The blonde shook her head. "Nope. Won't have my big brother looking like a reject from the Yatta Boys."

Hiro was rolling his eyes as Matt interrupted them. "Hey, just so you know, this is over. I managed to save the day, as usual."

Noah Bennet saw that the cops were going back to their respective cruisers – the two guarding the front of the house had quickly joined their colleagues after being called on their radios – shaking their heads and looking generally upset about the whole situation. "How did you do it?"

"The Force can have a strong influence on the weak-minded," Parkman said ominously.

"Matt," Audrey warned him, "geek alert."

"Okay, so I just turned the entire situation against them," Parkman sighed, giving his partner a sour stare. "Told them I was pissed because they never even noticed you driving into the backyard, and that I would have to make a really strong effort not to report them for incompetence."

"But they saw us appearing out of thin air," Mohinder frowned.

"Yeah, right. As if they'd ever admit that to anyone?" Matt shook his head in denial. "Because something like that's impossible, y'know. It goes against all known laws of physics, and if any of them dares to claim otherwise, they may as well be kissing their badges goodbye the moment they say it."

Claire grinned at him, "You sneaky little bas-"

"Claire..." her father admonished her before she could finish the word. "Shall we go inside? There's a lot we need to discuss."

Everybody agreed and they quickly moved into the house via the back door. They were all already inside when one of them backtracked his steps to the backyard. His face a serious mask of determination, Hiro aimed at his car with the remote control and engaged the anti-theft system, making the turn signals flash and the alarm squeak at once.

Once he was satisfied, the young Japanese hero grinned and returned into the Bennet house, closing the door behind him.

---O---

Peter came out of his niece's bedroom feeling like something the cat had dragged in, and with both his mind and his heart submerged in a turmoil of conflicted thoughts and feelings that clashed head-on with the physical sensations of his body.

He was ashamed of having fallen asleep in Claire's bed, both because, well, it was her bed and because he was supposed to be taking care of her and not flying off to la-la land. He was also confused by this very feeling, not really knowing when and how he had decided to appoint himself as the young woman's protector.

Having slept for barely half an hour, Peter knew he could just lean against the wall and be snoring again in a matter of seconds. But at the same time, he was so scared of his dreams – if dreams they were – that he didn't dare to get the least bit comfortable. The mere idea of going back there was enough to send an ice-cold shiver down his spine.

And to top it all off, Peter had just found out that he was so hungry he could eat an entire horse, saddle and all.

He was about to descend down the stairs and look for Claire, when he heard voices coming from the lower floor. He stopped dead in his tracks, his fingers on the banister and one foot already up and ready to walk down the first step.

The sounds were muffled and barely audible. Peter couldn't make out a word, so he did what everybody does in such a situation: he frowned and leaned his head to the side, listening intently. As if that had ever worked for anyone!

Well, just another surprise for the young Petrelli male: it did work for him. All too well, to be honest.

Peter was vaguely aware that he had a whole range of powers coded into his DNA courtesy of his nemesis, Sylar. Back when Claire and he were on the run, he had thought about it – not for long, to be honest, as he was more worried about preventing himself from exploding and keeping his niece safe at the time – and realized that he had probably absorbed the stolen abilities when he'd faced the maniac at Mohinder's apartment. But Peter had assumed that, as he had no idea just what those abilities might be, he wouldn't be able to consciously use them.

Like many other assumptions lately, this one seemed to be proving itself wrong.

Peter's nightmare-induced migraine hadn't improved very much and when his hearing became acute enough to perceive the drop of a pin on a carpeted floor from 100 yards away all of a sudden, Peter felt like somebody was hammering a railroad spike through his brain. And doing so with the blunt end first.

He couldn't repress a groan, and held his temples in pain as the voices from the first floor came to him like the screams from a flock of banshees.

Claire, her usually soft Southern twang turned into a murdering gunshot echoing through his ears, said, "Those are some cool wheels you got yourself there, onii-chan. When are you gonna let me take them for a spin?"

"When? Mmm, how about the 5th of never?" answered an accented voice that Peter recognized as Hiro Nakamura's. Although his English sounded so much better than the last time he had come across the young Japanese man, it still came to him at a criminally loud volume.

"WHAT!?" 'Oh, Claire, please have mercy on me, don't yell!' "C'mon, Hiro, you know I'm a great driver!"

"For a demolition derby, maybe," a new male voice added to the conversation. Peter had no trouble identifying it as belonging to Mohinder Suresh's.

Claire replied, "Oh yeah, now that's great. I'm being criticized by a guy that could only hold his cab-driving job for a week and another guy who just got his license 6 months ago. For your information, I was in a high-speed car chase today, and I managed to do alright, thankyouverymuch!"

Hiro sounded amused, "And how is your car after that high-speed car chase?"

"..."

"I rest my case, your honor."

There were several laughs all around, and the sounds of people getting comfortable, coffee being poured and soda cans being popped open. Even the clanking noise of a teaspoon running circles inside a china mug was almost enough to send Peter's mind into meltdown. He could hear their breathing, their steps on the carpeted floor, the beating of their hearts inside their chests...

Dear God. It was killing him.

The copycat tried to gain control over this newly manifested power of his, because Peter was starting to feel seriously tempted to look for something sharp to stab himself in the ears with. Not that such a remedy would help very much, of course, as Claire's regeneration power would heal that up almost immediately.

Unless he somehow managed to kill himself...he would get some peace out of that, at least.

It chilled Peter right down to the marrow of his bones to realize how easily the idea of suicide had come to him, and how comforting it was.

Petrelli took a deep breath in, and tried to concentrate. Ignoring the roaring sounds in his head as best he could, he focused all his energy into the task. He accepted the power, let it flow though his veins without fighting it. As he had discovered once – while falling down a certain building with thoughts of a cheerleader in his head – he shouldn't reject his abilities, but embrace them. Make them solid, so to speak.

He pictured a radio in his head, willed himself to be that radio – if that made any sense – and focused on its volume dial. He turned it down little by little. The dial was numbered from 10 to zero, and Peter gently spun it anti-clockwise. 10, 9, 8, 7...

The sounds around him started to fade. He could no longer hear the house's structure settling down on its foundations. The water running down the pipes became distant and then disappeared. The heartbeats of the people downstairs receded into oblivion.

...6, 5, 4...

He could still hear their clothing slide on the fabric of the sofas and couches in the leaving room when they sat down. He could figure out who was wearing shoes and who had sneakers on by the noise they made on the carpet. Mohinder might be getting a cold because his nose was a bit clogged when he breathed in. Mr. Muggles was chowing on some dog food from his dish. Mercifully, it wasn't made of crackers.

Peter let his mind's dial settle at '2'.

Their voices were still clearly audible to him, but now at a tolerable level. It was now like he was sitting with them downstairs and he didn't have to make an effort to understand their words, even if they were being whispered.

His headache...well, he would need a truckload of aspirin to live it down. A few shots of Scotch wouldn't be bad, either, but at least suicide seemed now just the most extreme of options.

Peter unleashed a sigh of relief, letting his face sink into his hands. He briefly wondered why he didn't just stand up and join the rest downstairs. It would be the easiest thing to do, and eventually a necessary and unavoidable one as well.

Nevertheless, he remained sitting down at the top of the stairs, listening. Eavesdropping was not polite, but if he joined them he was scared he would feel like... like what?

'Like an outsider,' he suddenly realized. 'Like an intruder.'

It had been bad enough all the years he had felt exactly like that with his own family. But the Petrelli manor had been such a cold environment to live in, that he had never felt he was losing something by not being in and of the inner circle formed by his parents and his older brother.

Of course, there had been a longing for things to change when he had seen the way in which other children were and acted around their parents, but more than wanting himself to be accepted in such a way, Peter had always wished for his own family to be different. To be like them.

Like the family downstairs.

Because they were a family. Five minutes into the conversation and he had no doubts that it was love what gave warmth to their words and took the sharpness off their jokes and teasing.

There was love in Hiro's witty remarks about Claire's driving. There was love in Matt Parkman's off-hand comment about giving both of them tickets for speeding and lousy parking. There was love in Mohinder's offer to chauffer them around, as long as they paid him an expensive cab fare. There was love in Noah Bennet's groaning voice when he wondered out loud why he hadn't stopped at adopting with Lyle.

And above all, there was so much love in Claire's laughter that Peter felt his heart bleed and cry in pain.

His niece – by blood and nothing else, he now realized more than ever – had a loving family.

And what did he have?

A long-buried father, a scheming megalomaniacal mother, a dead brother who still was angry at him for letting him die in the first place, and the soul of a killer living somewhere in the dark corners of his mind.

Peter honestly started to wonder if waking up from his coma had been such a smart idea after all.

---O---

"Enough with the tomfoolery, people," Noah Bennet said once everybody was comfortably sitting in the living room. He had let the conversation drift away because he had wanted his daughter to relax and feel at ease before asking her to tell them the detailed story of what had happened today. He knew it was not going to be easy for her. "Claire bear, please, tell us what happened, and don't skip on any of the details."

"Shouldn't we get Peter for this too?" Mohinder asked from his seat. "It would be interesting to learn his side of things as well."

"You don't question two witnesses at the same time, professor," Audrey spoke for the first time in minutes. She was the only one not sitting down, and the one farthest away from the rest. As usual, she preferred to stay on the periphery of the group, on the outside looking in. Her shoulder leaning on the room's doorway and her arms crossed over her chest, she added, "If you do that, they always interrupt and correct each other. In the end, all you get is what they think the other thinks they saw."

"And besides, he's resting now," Claire said adamantly. "He had a pretty rough awakening, and I don't want him to be disturbed."

Mohinder arched his eyebrows and shrugged. He knew that in all things related to Peter Petrelli, it was the blonde young woman who laid down the law. In his mind, though, he worried for her a little bit. With Peter out of his coma now, the young man would want to take over the reins of his own life, and the professor wasn't sure Claire understood that completely.

But that was a matter of thought for later, and he centered his attention on the young woman again.

Claire had already changed by the time her father and the rest made their untimely appearance. She was now wearing some white cotton slacks and a small striped T-shirt, with her petite feet encased in warm woolen socks. The Texan girl laid on the living room's couch, with her back leaned on Hiro's lap, who was sitting on one of the ends of the sofa. The young Japanese man embraced her midriff with a protective arm while he held an open can of isotonic drink in his other hand.

In spite of the intimacy of their position, there was nothing couple-y about their demeanour or their states of mind. Claire called him 'onii-chan' often – big brother in Japanese, a term of endearment she had learnt from the many anime movies they had watched together – and that was exactly how she felt about him.

Hiro, on his part, had found in the young Texan girl the little sister his own had never been. Claire was playful confidante and secret accomplice to his hijinks and his – for want of a better word – new career as a super-hero in training. Kimiko would have never been able to understand it – and him – the way this blonde girl did. He loved and knew that he was loved by his sister, but they simply looked at life through eyes that were just too different.

Hiro sometimes thought that there was too much of Kaito in his sister, and not enough in himself.

"So, where do you want me to start?" Claire asked with a sigh, finding comfort both in her friend's embrace and the warmth of the mug of tea she held over he belly.

"Start at the beginning," Matt told her with a smile. "Don't leave anything out, and remember we're right here with you. You don't have anything to be scared of."

The girl gave him one of her trademark small smiles. "The beginning, huh? Well...once upon a time, there was this pretty blonde girl, and she was the fairest one in all the land..."

---O---

Peter listened how Claire recalled their misadventures of the day for the benefit of her friends and family. He felt awful, for he wanted to join his niece downstairs and offer her his support during this hard moment, but he was unable to summon the minimal required strength to even stand up.

There was an invisible barrier at the end of those stairs and he was not sure he could cross it. Or maybe, Peter thought, he was just scared of what would happen if he dared to do so.

Life is all about change, and Petrelli had always considered that a good, and necessary thing. Without change, there comes stagnation and eventually death. Like a wise man once said, a society that never changes becomes pyramid builders at best, extinct at worst.

But Peter wasn't truly proud or happy about the changes he had been going through lately. He had seen the manifestation of his powers as a sign of wonder, but look at how all that had all turned out. Nathan was dead and his life was practically in ruins. And he...

Peter was starting to feel really worried about himself. Not for his own safety or sanity, but worried about what he could do or become.

If...if an echo of him– Peter refused to use Sylar's name – was indeed somehow, somewhere inside his mind and soul...if he wasn't completely dead and gone after Nathan had sacrificed himself that way...

Peter might be a danger to others. Might be a danger to Claire.

Maybe, the wisest thing to do would be to put distance between them. Disappear somewhere where he could be alone and not be any danger to anyone. Maybe...

Claire arrived at the part of her tale where he had woken up from his vegetative state. Her uncle heard her explaining how he had beaten the two thugs with his powers and...and then, she simply skipped over how he had pinned the second of them to the ceiling with his telekinesis and had been about to scalp him alive, Sylar style.

Peter arched his eyebrows, surprised. He doubted very much the young woman had forgotten about that particular moment, as she had been recalling everything else with precise detail so far. But why would she keep his actions hidden from her friends and family?

The only reason Peter could think about was that she had realized herself there was something disturbingly wrong with him, and she hadn't wanted anyone else to know. Claire knew and she was protecting him.

He hid his face between his hands again, at a loss for words and thoughts.

---O---

"...and that's when I called you, dad," Claire finished her story. She was exhausted, having needed the good part of an hour to tell it all – well, almost all. Hiro sensed this and squeezed her tightly with the arms he still have wrapped around her.

Planting a kiss on the crown of her golden head, the young Japanese male whispered, "Way to go, cheerleader Claire. Just like Wonder Woman." Claire giggled and affectionately squeezed his arm back.

Noah Bennet leaned back on his armchair, his shoulders slumping down as he brought a hand to cup his jaw. He pensively tapped his chin with one finger as he carefully considered what his daughter had said.

What she hadn't said worried him a little. The former Primatech employee knew his adopted offspring well enough to suspect by her mannerisms that she had kept something to herself, and he had the impression it was a something that had to do with Peter Petrelli. He let it pass for the time being though, as he also trusted in her judgement the same way.

"Claire, you did very well in a very difficult situation. I'm very proud of you," Noah finally said, leaning forward and reaching for her with one hand. The blonde girl smiled candidly – although the gesture didn't reach her eyes – and squeezed his hand. Bennet turned to Matt. "What do we know of these men?"

"Audrey spoke with the Long Island police," Parkman looked at his partner.

The female FBI agent produced a small notepad from the pocket of her jacket and flipped its pages until she arrived at her last entry. "There were two separate crime scenes, with three bodies in each. It seems our bad guys were with the Westies, Irish crime gang from Hell's Kitchen. I understand Nathan Petrelli gave them a hard time back when he was with the DA's office."

"Could be we're just looking at a simple revenge scenario here," Matt ventured. "It seems one of these guys, Tommy something..."

"Thomas Sean Gunn, a.k.a. Tommy-Gun, a.k.a. Tommy Twofingers," Audrey provided, reading from her notes. "Apparently that was how many fingers he left unbroken when he visited somebody who owed him gambling money."

"Right," Matt nodded. "Nathan put his older brother in jail, and he died there. Maybe he wanted payback. One brother for another."

Mohinder started to say, "So he was after Pe-"

"Wait, wait, wait," Claire interrupted him before he could finish. She stood up from her laying position to face Audrey. "Did you say there were six bodies?"

She had only seen three men in the car, plus that Tommy guy, plus poor Samantha the nurse...Claire was good enough at maths to add up to five.

"Yeah," the older woman checked her notes again. "There were three men in the car which, by the way, exploded after you left. The three of them were so severely burnt that they'll have to be identified by their dental records. Good job there, guys."

'Audrey, turn the sarcasm down a notch, will you?' Matt warned her telepathically.

Rolling her eyes, Hanson continued, "There were other three bodies in the house. The aforementioned Thomas Gunn and two civilians, one Samantha Liefeld and one Martha Ellis, both workers at the resting home, both dead by gunshot trauma."

"Martha?" Claire whined like a wounded animal. Tears were rushing to her eyes and her lower lip trembled as she spoke. "Martha's dead?"

"Uh, yeah. I'm, I'm sorry..." Audrey said, sincerely taken aback by the emotional teenager. "Did you know her?"

"She...she...she was my friend," the Texan sobbed still not believing it possible that kind Martha was dead. "She was married with two kids; she showed me photos of her family all the time. She...she was a nice person! She didn't deserve to die!"

"Hardly anyone does," Hanson said, while looking at her partner for help. She was not exactly the right kind of person to deal with victim support.

Matt immediately stood up but he was beaten to the mark by Bennet, who rushed to hold his daughter's shoulders. "Claire, it's okay. We'll sort this out, we'll fix it, I promise."

"Stop saying that!" Claire angrily shouted. She couldn't know it, but upstairs, Peter stood up. "I'm not a child anymore, damn it! You're always saying that you'll fix everything, but you can't, dad! It's like Jackie all over again and it will happen again, and again and again! There'll always be somebody after me, and people like Martha will always pay the price!"

"You don't know that they were specifically after you," Mohinder said. "You heard what Audrey and Matt said, this might have nothing to do with the Company or your powers at all."

"Oh, c'mon, Mohinder, that's bullshit. And you should know it!" The blonde shrugged her way out of her father's embrace. "I was the first person in the line of fire when those assholes came into Peter's room, and you heard me say how they just ignored me right at that moment. They went for Samantha instead. If they wanted to kill Peter without any witnesses left alive and they didn't know anything about the way I can heal, why the hell didn't they just shoot me first? I'll tell you why, because they either knew it would amount to nothing, or because they wanted me instead. Alive and kicking. They wanted me and they killed Martha and Samantha to get me. And if Peter hadn't woken up, I would be their captive right now."

Stunned by her logic and outburst, nobody dared to argue her point. Claire let her gaze go from one to another, and found that only her father and Hiro were able to return it. The rest seemed to be too ashamed even to look at her in the eye, like it was somehow their responsibility. But it wasn't. It was hers.

"How many more?" she whispered with her voice broken by tears. "How many more people are going to die for me to stay alive?"

"Claire..." Noah tried to reach for her again but the young blonde dodged his grasp, turning around and running out of the room as fast as her legs allowed her.

Blinded by tears and not really knowing what she was doing and where she was going, Claire made it in the general direction of her room. She wanted to be alone; she wanted to cry herself into stupor and oblivion.

But Peter was already running to intercept her, taking two steps at a time on his way down the stairs. He let his niece crash into him right at the bottom of the staircase. He didn't yield nor stumble when she collided with him and instead, he just wrapped his arms around her and held her tightly to his chest.

Claire broke down in his embrace, her petite body rocked by powerful sobs as her uncle hugged her so strongly it was like he wanted to bury her deep within himself. "It's okay, it's okay," he soothingly whispered in her ear, one hand rubbing circles on her back, the other lost in her golden hair as he held her head to his chest. "I'm here, Claire, I'm here. I'm not going anywhere..."

Peter was not sure who he was talking to, if it was to his niece or to himself. Then her arms went around him as she hugged him back and all thoughts escaped his mind like a black ship sailing for the distant horizon. There was only this moment, the young woman in his arms and the overwhelming compulsion to protect her no matter what.

Peter let himself relax, sunk his face in her hair and breathed in the scent of all that was Claire Bennet. And suddenly Petrelli knew with perfect clarity that he would die before allowing her to be hurt again. Not because of destiny, not because of fate, not because of blood...he was willing to die for her.

Just for her.

Claire's family and friends followed her into the hall and saw the young man and woman embracing like the world was about to end. They saw them and shared meaningful stares, but nobody dared to say a word.

It was not until Claire calmed down and Peter raised his eyes – puffy and wet with unshed tears of his own – that Noah Bennet walked closer and laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Hello, Peter," the man with the horn-rimmed glasses said with a sad smile. "It's been a long time. Welcome home, son."

---O---

Somewhere near Boulder, Colorado

May, 2009

Dawn was still peaking over the Rocky Mountains, but Doktor Stronghein had been already up and working for two hours by then. The man's energy and drive were more than remarkable for somebody of such an advanced age, although anyone that even minimally knew the German scientist wouldn't bat an eye at the sight of his wiry frame bent over a microscope.

Pretty much, he'd spent his whole adult existence between the walls of a laboratory. He'd never been married and had never had any children. Science was all that he cared about, all that he loved – if somebody like him could house such an emotion. In a sense, science was his wife and their offspring lived inside too many test tubes and petri dishes to count. And what a productive marriage theirs was! His only regret – if any – was that his was such a secret field of work that he would probably never achieve the kind of world-wide adulation and respect he deserved.

"Anything interesting?" Stronghein heard somebody enquire behind him.

As he recognized the man's voice, the doctor didn't bother to raise his icy eyes from the microscope. Paul Windsor was his assistant at the Company's lab, a very competent man that the German found insufferably high-spirited at any time of the day.

"That depends on what your notion of 'interesting' would be, my young freünd."

At 55, Windsor could hardly be considered young and the two men were hardly friends in any sense of the word, but the newcomer made a point of ignoring the veiled sarcasm. "Mr. Caine is here, he's asking about you. And, uhhh…"

Sighing, Stronghein finally stopped looking through the microscope and turned on his stool to face the other man. At the same time, he let his reading glasses fall from where they were perched at the top of his snowy white head and onto the bridge of his nose. "Maybe my grasp of American English is not as good as I thought. What does 'uhhh' mean, Paul?"

"He has a man with him," Windsor said, carefully selecting his words as he held a clipboard against his chest, as if for protection. "Mr. Caine says that he's, ah, he's a candidate for the treatment, and as such he's scheduled a session in half an hour. Preparations are already under way."

"Oh!" Stronghein simply arched his brow. His soulless blue eyes moved away from his assistant – much to the relief of said assistant – and got lost in thought for a few moments.

The doktor was not a man prone to bursts of rage. Far from that, he seemed to live in a perpetual state of clinical detachment, as if everything and everyone around him was nothing but an endless experiment he had to impartially observe, analyze and document. But that didn't mean he was Mr. happy-go-along while his lab and his project got hijacked by men who only used calculators for adding their benefits up. Still, Stronghein had the serenity of mind to realize he needed said men as much as they needed him. Science – his kind of science, at least – didn't come cheap.

"Michelangelo painted for the Pope, after all," the German said to himself as he stood up from his stool.

"I beg your pardon?" Windsor frowned deeply.

The older man ignored his confusion and reached for the clipboard he was holding. "I gather this is the curriculum vitae of our new test subject?"

"Oh, yeah, and he's a real dish. On a scale of one to ten – ten being scum, and one being that stuff that forms between your toes if you don't shower often enough – he ranks about a minus seventeen. If you want my opinion, that is."

Stronghein hadn't asked for it, so he didn't bother to comment. Instead he read from the file out loud. "Mr. Ronald Lee Lipski, from New York. Thirty-one, Caucasian, mmmm, he seems to be in an excellent physical condition. Although his mental one looks like it's a completely different matter. 'The Central Park Stalker', really?" The German scientist chuckled without humor. "America's fascination with the dark side of its own dream is something that never ceases to amaze me. It's like you need to turn everything into a celebrity contest."

The doktor stood up and moved towards the door. "I gather Mr. Caine is overseeing the preparation of the test subject, ja?"

Windsor had known the other man for long enough time to realize the futility of even trying to meander around the truth. Plus there was the fact that he let his native German show up here and there, which was a clear sign of his annoyed state of mind. "Surgery Room 3."

"Danke, Paul. Will you put these samples back into the refrigerator? Then prepare for the next round of experiments scheduled today."

"Sure thing, Dr. Stronghein. Do you want me to look for you afterwards?" The assistant moved to comply with his boss' request as he spoke, gathering the petri dishes.

"Nein, nein, this won't last that long. I am fairly sure."

The good doktor left the laboratory and walked with decided steps in the direction of the surgery rooms, all the while rhythmically tapping his thigh with the clipboard. On his way through the dull corridors, he mostly ignored the greetings of those he came across, if anything just answering with a grunt the very few of his fellow researchers he actually felt some shred of respect for.

Foster Caine was, as Stronghein expected, waiting in the preparation area just outside the surgery room. Dressed in an impeccable grey suit, the shorter, bearded man barely darted a glance at his entrance before his attention went back to the scene taking place in the surgery room itself. There, a deeply sedated Ronald Lee Lipski was being strapped to a surgery table by a couple of green-robed nurses, while two men in equally green scrubs got the instruments for the upcoming operation ready.

"Morning, doc," Caine greeted the older man. "Thanks for finding the time to attend to this little matter."

"Herr Caine," Stronghein nodded slightly. "It's very kind of you invite me. Especially considering it is my research that we're talking about."

"Please, Heinrich, we're too old to start acting like prima donnas, aren't we?"

There was something about the businessman that unnerved Stronghein deeply, and he had always wondered what it was exactly. Not even Adolf Hitler had come close to making him feel so uneasy. Maybe, Heinrich sometimes pondered, it was because the long-dead Führer had been a bona fide lunatic, and Caine wasn't.

In any case, the German scientist knew which side of his bread was buttered, and he also knew when it was time to get upset and when it wasn't. He licked his lips, narrowed his cold blue eyes and stood at the shorter man's side, looking through the window into the surgery room.

"I have two questions," he said.

Caine nodded. "Shoot."

"I've been reading over Mr. Lipski's profile. He seems to be quite the celebrity; right now, the media has its eyes on him." The doktor watched as the assistants in the room finished their preparations and hooked up Lipski to an IV and several monitors and computers that would monitor his vitals. "Don't you think his choice as a test subject poses an unnecessary risk to our work?"

"The acquisitions department did a good job with him," Caine explained. "You don't need to worry about the media, Heinrich. It so happens that after he confessed to several rapes and murders last night, somebody in the New York Department of Corrections jailed him in a general population cell instead of placing him in isolation as requested by the DA's office, before he was transported to the penitentiary on Riker's Island. There was a fight during which Mr. Lipski was stabbed by an inmate. Regretfully, he died on his way to hospital."

"I presume there's been a body swap then, ja?"

"Absolutely. As we speak, Ronald Lee Lipski is being cremated." Caine motioned for the sedated man at the other side of the window with a disdainful movement of his head. "That man in there? He's nobody. He has no birth certificate, no driver's license, no social security number… there's not even a record anymore of the charter flight that brought him here from Newark. He does not exist."

"But why him?" Stronghein insisted. "It sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go to for a simple test subject."

The bearded man shrugged. As an explanation, he simply offered, "He's AB+."

"Oh," the German scientist arched his brow, mildly amused. He already knew it, of course, having read the man's profile. But he had wanted Caine to say it aloud.

Lipski was AB+, he had one of the rarest blood types in the world. It was the same one as his agonized dying son Benjamin.

"I guess that answers my second question as well," he smiled. "Why even bother with the test anyway, if you already know it's going to be a complete failure?"

"Are you sure of that?"

"Without a fresh sample?" Stronghein made a face like he was considering it, although both knew he was not really. "Yes, I would say so. The plane is going to crash and burn, the train is going to derail, or any other colorful analogy you Americans like to use. We need that girl, Foster. We need her blood, her spinal fluid, her brain… without her to extract a fresh DNA sample to be replicated, this is just a waste of time."

After a second of consideration, the doktor added, "Although…"

Caine sighed, his patience running short. "Although what?"

The older man shrugged. "You know, there is another DNA source available."

"He's off-limits and you know it." Caine was tired of the same old argument regarding the man now known as Adam. "I'm not going to start a shooting war with Bob Bishop's department. The risks from messing with that balding idiot and his...prize captive are just too high."

"Too high even for your son's life?"

It was like he had slapped the businessman in the face with a leather glove. Caine blanched for a couple of seconds and he almost lost his temper, but he recovered admirably and gave the older man a cool glare. "This is not just about my son, Heinrich. Remember what we're trying to accomplish here."

"Oh, but I do remember, mein freünd," the German scientist grinned, lizard-like. "I just wonder sometimes if you do."

"We're all set and ready," a voice coming through the room's speakers drove both men's attention from their conversation to the scene taking place in the surgery room.

Caine and Stronghein turned their faces to the window. On the other side of the glass, the nurses and the assistants had just gone out of the room and had been substituted by four men in airtight biohazard suits. Two of them were armed with compact H&K G36K assault rifles while the third pushed a wheeled tray that carried a state-of-the-art electronic bypass machine.

The fourth man – wearing the same hermetic garb with a Plexiglas faceplate and an autonomous oxygen tank – was also pushing the same type of gurney as his colleague. His, though, was being used to transport four large cylindrical containers. Half of them were full of a syrupy reddish substance, while the rest held a nearly transparent fluid.

While the two armed men held their positions on both sides of the door and the other two started getting their equipment ready, Caine and Stronghein sat down to observe the procedure.

The German scientist explained what the men in the biohazard suits were doing, mostly because he was already bored and he knew how Caine had heard it all before. "The first step is to connect the subject to the bypass machine. We extract his blood and mix it with an irradiated serum in a high-speed centrifugation system. This way, the blood will return to his body and spread the serum all throughout his vascular system. The serum will bond at a sub-cellular level, corrupting and weakening his DNA. It is like a battering ram; it opens the way for the second phase."

"That red stuff," Caine nodded.

Stronghein had to make an effort not to roll his eyes. "Ja. The red 'stuff' as you call it so accurately, is our custom-built virus. Effectively, it will rewrite the subject's genome, substituting a large part of what is commonly called 'junk DNA' – non-active genes – with a new replicated gene sequence. One that is fully active."

"The problem is," Stronghein continued, "that we are playing this by ear, I believe you call it. We know which part of the junk DNA must be substituted, but we're not 100 sure if the new gene sequence is correctly coded, because we don't have an active sample we can copy it from."

The businessman frowned. "What do you think will happen if it is not?"

The German scientist opened his hands, making a 'who knows?' gesture. "The results have been too unpredictable so far to hazard a guess. Most likely, the subject will experience a lethal mutation that will kill him within minutes. A couple of times we've obtained…other results."

"You had success once," Caine affirmed, without looking at him.

"That was a long time ago," Stronghein frowned, suddenly uncomfortable. "It was a different project, with different objectives and a different procedure. And as you know, I wouldn't say it was completely successful either. Not as we expected it to be, at least."

Actually, in the German doktor's opinion, the Janus Project had been successful beyond his wildest dreams, just not in the way his employers had desired it to be. And being so short-sighted as such people were, they hadn't been able to see beyond their preconceptions and accept that fact.

But all that was now in the past. The present was Ronald Lee Lipski's anesthetized body strapped to the table and his veins being pumped full of the miraculous solution that would either turn him into a demi-god or kill him in the most horrible of ways. Stronghein personally didn't doubt which outcome it would be, but he humored his employer nonetheless.

He knew that what Caine wanted was a worst-case scenario, and surely that was what Lipski was going to give him.

They needed a full hour to pump the sedated serial killer full with the contents from the cans, following the process described by the German scientist. When that part was finished and the needles were withdrawn out of Lipski's body, Stronghein produced an old-fashioned stopwatch from the pocket of his lab coat and signaled the men inside the surgery room.

"Surgery room number 3 sealed," announced the disembodied voice of the operation's controller through the speakers. "Ventilation system engaged. Commencing verification of the patient´s development."

Stronghein clicked his stopwatch as one of the doctors in the biohazard suits gathered a scalpel from the equipment tray and leaned its sharp point on Lipski's breastbone. With a steady and decided hand, the doctor sliced down the serial killer's chest, opening a long gash down to the man's bellybutton that started to bleed profusely as soon as the flesh was bitten by the sharp blade.

Caine and Stronghein watched calmly. They had a general view of things through the glass window and a detailed one thanks to the computer monitors spread around the room they were sitting in.

Nothing seemed to happen at first. Then, when the doktor's stopwatch reached the 30-second mark, the wound on Lipski's chest started to knit itself together.

"It's working. He's healing," Caine said breathless, his eyes wide in hope. His companion only gave him a cool stare and said nothing.

"Subject's vital signs are stable," said the impersonal voice of the controller.

One of the doctors in the surgery room wiped the blood off the patient's chest with a sponge, so they could have a clearer view of the self-healing wound. The flesh had closed, but there still was a visible reddish line where the gash had been mere instants before, like a recent scar.

Stronghein checked his chronometer. Forty-five seconds.

Lipski's eyes flew open. His pupils were so dilated that there was almost no sign of his blue irises. His whole body started to shake on the table, and he was only prevented from falling by the straps binding him. The scar on his chest turned an angry scarlet.

"Subject entering convulsive state. Heart and breathing rate accelerating. Vital signs becoming unstable."

Fifty seconds. Ron Lipski started to scream louder than any of his victims had ever done.

The scar on his chest reopened and large quantities of organic material oozed out of the gash, solidifying as they came in contact with air. It was like he was growing a tumor out of his body.

"What's going on?" Caine asked his companion with a deep frown.

Without raising his gaze from the face of his stopwatch, Stronghein answered, "His body doesn't understand it has already healed the damage, so it continues on with the process. And on, and on. He regenerates more and more tissue, even when it is not needed."

One minute. Lipski's body arched on the surgery table until the straps binding him reached their tensile limit. There were large globs of reddish-purple tissue sprouting all over his skin. Lipski's scream died into a gurgle as his tongue swell like a balloon within his mouth. His eyes bulged out, about to burst.

"Oh, for God's sake," Caine said with disgust. This wasn't what he had to hoped to see. He moved to the intercom and pressed the speak button, "Put him out of his misery, will you?"

One of the armed men in the airtight suits immediately moved to Lipski's deformed body. He shouldered his automatic rifle, cocked it and leveled its barrel at the agonizing serial killer's head.

"Too late for that!" Stronghein almost laughed with a sing-song voice, just as the man opened fire on the other side of the window.

Lipski's head blew apart like water balloon, splattering all around him with blood and gore. That didn't stop the convulsions of his body, though.

"Subject's vital signs are off the scale. Cellular activity is also off the scale," the impersonal controller's voice announced. "Warning: mutation in progress."

"What the fuck-?" the businessman's eyes went wide like saucers.

Lipski's bonds snapped free as his body experienced a brutal and uncontrolled growth of tissue. His flesh erupted with large bulbous external tumors that burst open with oozing pus and blood, only to solidify into new appendages that shook and flapped like tentacles. His limbs grew longer and thicker, hands and feet losing definition.

At one minute and thirty seconds, there was little that resembled a human being on the surgery table.

Free of his straps, the growing mass of deformed flesh lashed out with its newly formed limbs – which now resembled the tentacles of a creature out of a H.P. Lovecraft nightmare. He/it hit the man with the machine gun across his torso and sent him flying across the room, until his body crashed against the far wall.

"What the hell is going on here?" Caine turned to the German scientist, with a panicked expression on his bearded face.

"Evolution, mein freünd. That is what is happening." There was a gleam in his cold blue eyes. Genius and madness wrapped up into one. "Survival of the fittest, Foster. Fascinating, ja?"

One of the doctors in the surgery room made a dash for the door, only to found it tightly locked. The creature sent a long snake-like appendage flying towards him, which nimbly wrapped itself around the man's neck. The doctor was lifted off his feet, his throat crushed under muscles too big and strong to be fought against. His vertebrae snapped as if they were matchsticks as his biohazard suit-encased body was shook around like a rag doll.

One minute, fifty seconds.

The other doctor screamed. The other armed man opened up automatic fire. It was like shooting a body made of water.

"The simplest lifeform is usually the most adaptable one," Stronghein explained calmly, now watching the scene through the window with great interest. "No internal organs, no conscious mind, no will but the one to survive…"

The creature used the corpse of the first doctor as a battering ram and crashed it powerfully against the window, as its body kept one growing to the point it was now spreading down the surgery table. The reinforced glass withheld the first assault, but neither Caine nor Stronghein had many doubts that would be the case for much longer.

A second tentacle-like appendage speared towards the man with the machine gun, impaling him through his chest with an explosion of blood and flying bone splinters. He was dead in less than an instant.

"Do something!" Caine demanded. "End this now!"

Sighing, the German scientist pushed with his feet against the floor and let his chair roll towards the intercom. With perfect calm, he spoke into the microphone, "Burn it."

There was a hissing noise and, all of a sudden, the room at the other side of the window became a raging inferno. Somebody screamed, probably the only living human left in the surgery room, as the concealed sprinklers in the ceiling started spraying the whole interior of the stance with liquid fire.

"Next generation thermite plasma," Stronghein explained as he absent-mindedly clicked his stopwatch to a halt. "It's like napalm at 2000˚ Celsius, the only thing hot enough to burn everything in there down to a sub-cellular level. Ah, I wouldn't stay close to the glass, if I were you."

Caine took a step back, horrified. The man's screams died soon, but something kept on moving inside the thick rain of fire. A tentacle hit the glass repeatedly, but more and more weakly each time. There was a screeching noise coming from the creature that had once been Ronald Lee Lipski. It was like…like…

No, Foster Caine couldn't find the words to define that inhuman sound. But he knew it would plague his nightmares for the rest of his life.

The inferno lasted only for thirty seconds, but to the bearded businessman it was almost a lifetime. Stronghein spoke again to the intercom, "That's enough, Rolf. Danke."

The ventilation system in the surgery room kicked in immediately after the thermite plasma was cut off, clearing the interior of the room of smoke and gasses. There was not much to see afterwards. The corpses of the four men in the biohazard suits were charred beyond recognition, barely human shaped at all.

Of the thing that had been Ronald Lee Lipski…there was not much left. And what there was…well, it would have to be scraped off the floor and the walls with a spatula.

Sighing, Stronghein stood up from his chair and walked close to his employer. The man in the business suit turned to him, his face a mask of horror. The German scientist looked down at him for a few seconds before simply slapping him in the chest with Lipski's clipboard file. "Next time you want a presentation, speak to me first, ja? It will save a lot of time and resources."

Stronghein simply left Caine there, looking through the window in aghast as he held the clipboard to his chest.

The doktor returned to his laboratory, checked that Windsor – his assistant – had put everything back into the fridge as ordered and picked up the phone. "Sally?" he called his secretary. "I'm going to be in the lab for a few hours. Would you be so kind to bring me some sandwiches and a cup of tea? Yes? You are adorable, liebchen. Oh, and if Mr. Caine calls…tell him I'm busy."

Humming an old German song from his childhood, Stronghein hung up the phone and moved back to the fridge where he kept his samples. He snapped a couple of latex gloves on, opened it and retrieved a sealed transparent container from its interior.

He observed what was inside the hermetically sealed box through its plastic lid. It was a tiny pinky toe, so small that it had to belong either to a child or a petite woman. It was probably the second, judging by the remains of pink polish still coloring the nail. It was so cleanly cut, that whoever had mutilated it off the rest of the body it had belonged to had probably used some large scissors in order to do the job.

Still humming, Stronghein placed the container on the table and resumed his work.

---O---

To be continued…