Title: To Envy The Dying Man
Author: Savage Midnight
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: I don't own 'em. Kring does. Yes, I'm jealous.
Summary: Claire tries to remember. Peter tries to forget.
Author's Note: Huge thanks to my betas, Aly, for picking up on the little things I didn't and giving me the confidence to continue this, and Kitty, for keeping her eyes open to mistakes.

---

Part I

She doesn't know when it happens and nobody notices until they dig out the old family albums. Mohinder tries to distinguish the hows, whens and whys of the situation, but the answers he finds are incomprehensible to Claire and she stops trying to understand after a while. She knows all she needs to know -- that somewhere along the line her cells stopped growing and started dying, and from that moment on her body was constantly healing itself, never becoming less than it was, but never becoming more, either -- and that's enough for her.

She doesn't really think about what it means for her, for them all. Claire has always been about the here-and-now and the future is something to worry about later. So even when she knows, nothing really changes. And because nothing changes, it doesn't matter that she isn't changing, either.

--

Nobody notices after a while. She gets used to adapting her wardrobe, her hairstyle, even her make-up, and she smiles at those that comment on her timeless beauty. She has one of those faces, you see, an ageless bone structure and fresh features that will never really change, even without her abilities. And it's never really about how she looks. It's the way she carries herself, the way she talks and what she talks about. It's not that careless confidence of youth, but that refined kind of confidence that you grow into, that you learn.

And that's how she gets by. Even though she isn't changing, everything eventually changes around her. It's subtle. Her dad's hair is getting a little greyer, her mom is starting to look a little tired, and Lyle is growing up faster than she is and showing bizarre signs of maturity.

Things happen the way they're supposed to when you're growing up. She falls in love with West and then she falls out of love with him. She moves on. So does he. She attends college and she graduates and then she gets a job. And then another. She lives with friends and then she lives alone and somewhere along the way she learns how to function in the real world. She figures out how to make ends meet, to pay her rent and her bills, to do her own laundry and cook her own meals, to book her own dentist appointments and make her own bed. Little things she took for granted once.

Most of the time she forgets. Like most people who don't realise they've changed until someone else points it out, she barely notices that her features aren't shifting. It's a familiar face that stares back at her from the mirror every morning and she's never sure what else she's expected to see.

Sometimes, though, when she takes a minute to think about it, she wonders what she will do when she's forty. Because she knows it won't be normal for a forty-year-old to have this face. But those are rare moments that barely come around.

After all -- Claire is all about the here-and-now. The future can wait.

--

It happens around Peter's thirty-fifth birthday. At least, that's when they notice it.

It's been a while since he's seen Claire, a while since he's thought about her past the abstract. He hasn't needed to use her ability in the last few years and so it isn't until he sees her next that they all figure out exactly what her ability means for him.

He's gained a few crows' feet since the last time he saw her, and there are grey strands in his hair. Nothing much, but enough to mark the passing of time. It's not until Claire, still looking barely twenty, turns up at his birthday party with a gift clutched in her hands, that his mind flashes back to memories of his niece as she had been and still was.

And it's right there, in front of his family and friends, that Peter changes from a middle-aged man into the fresh-faced twenty-something Claire once knew.

--

Mohinder tries to find ways of explaining it. After all, Claire argues, if her ability works the same way for them both, then why does she look like a college freshman while he still looks like a grown man, albeit a younger one than he should be?

He tests out a few theories, tries to explain it in such a way that she and Peter are able to understand. Something about the process of development and decay, that Claire already had her ability when the process of development was complete, that her body was constantly resetting itself to that particular stage in her body's structure. Peter, on the other hand, having acquired this ability far beyond the stage of development, would find that it worked differently in his case. His body did not need to return to the stage in which the process of development was complete; it simply needed to reset itself to the stage before the process of decay began.

"This process," Mohinder explains, "usually occurs around the late-twenties, early thirties. So whenever Peter uses your ability, his body immediately reverses any damage made by the decaying process and reverts him back to a twenty-something man."

Peter doesn't take the news well. He disappears for four days.

When he returns, he can barely look her in the eye.

--

After a while they both try to forget and she respects his unspoken wish for her to remain an abstract presence in his life. He moves on in a way she can't; the aging process kick-starts itself again and in a few years the crows' feet and grey hairs are back. But the damage is already done; he reaches forty and still looks barely past his thirties.

He still has a luxury she will never possess; he's able to move with the passing of time, albeit at a delayed pace, while she is forced to watch it go on without her. With it comes the inevitable loss of her innocence, made worse by the fact that the tiredness within her doesn't match her bright exterior. She tries to unite the two but only ever seems to succeed temporarily.

What was once the here-and-now becomes the future at last and Claire finds herself falling further and further behind.

--

By the time Peter turns fifty -- and that's how she marks the passing of time these days, by counting birthdays that aren't her own -- her mom is riddled with cancer. Sandra can barely get out of bed in the morning and sometimes Claire wonders what it would feel like for her body to know that kind of weariness. But even as she's approaching her forties, she still moves with the same grace and energy she did when she was eighteen.

That's when she starts feeling afraid.

Her mom passes away before Claire's fortieth birthday and she's forced to watch her dad collapse in on himself. This is normal, she knows, for children to grow up and grow old and watch their parents die. But she knows now that she will witness more than her fair share of death and that this lifetime will only be one of many. There's something wrong in that, something unbearable about the knowledge, and that's what really makes her break.

--

She keeps pictures of Peter in a shoebox under her bed. She takes them out sometimes, just to trace the way time has changed him. There are a scant few back from when she first knew him, stolen away from the Petrelli home after her temporary induction into the family. Here is the face of a childhood hero staring back at her, a face she misses more and more as the years go by.

There is one -- and only one -- of them both, uncle and niece together, and she remembers pushing for this photo after Peter's miraculous resurrection, desperate for solid proof that what they had shared had existed.

Thereafter, each photo shows a distinct leap in time. She is glaringly absent from each, a testament to Peter's need to forget, to no longer remember, and to grow old naturally along with his family. And in each picture he succeeds. Despite losing eight years on his thirty-fifth birthday, he still manages to push the years forward, and Claire watches him change before her eyes, growing older and older, slowly and gracefully. New faces appear in the photos. A girlfriend, then a wife, a baby girl, then another.

The evidence is right there, when she stares at a picture of her sixty-year-old uncle flanked by two Petrelli girls that look no older than Claire, that Peter has managed, somehow, to forget her face.

This is the day she learns how to hate him.

---

Her dad manages to hold on longer than she thought he would and she realises in those days that she spends by his deathbed that he's been holding on for her. She and Lyle are the only ones left and her brother isn't far off being an old man himself. She has another two decades, maybe three, before she's lost everyone.

And that's why he holds on, struggles to the very end. He doesn't want his baby girl learning how to cope with loss, learning how to adapt in a way her body can't. It isn't a lesson anyone should have to learn.

He forgets that she doesn't have a choice. Losing everyone won't kill her, though she knows one day she will wish it would. And that's what scares her. Not the dying, not the loss, but the knowledge that she will never be able to follow them, that she will always be left behind, again and again and again.

And that's why, when people ask if she's afraid of dying, she shakes her head. She wants to tell them the truth sometimes, that she's more afraid of living than dying, but she doesn't.

Nobody wants to hear that kind of darkness from an eighteen-year-old.

--

After her dad passes away, she disappears. She spends eight years in England, four in Ireland, six in Prague and seventeen in Australia.

She does everything and nothing, and she realises time moves slower when it lasts forever.

--

By the time she returns to the States, everyone she knows is dead and buried. She's forgotten how old she should be or how long ago she should have died. She keeps calendars and diaries stored away, snippets of information scrawled on and within them, just in case she forgets.

That's another thing she's grown afraid of these days. Forgetting. She tries not to let the years blur together, to become insubstantial, but it happens sometimes.

It's happening more and more lately. With her family and friends gone, she's beginning to struggle. Memories are harder to make and quicker to fade. New friends aren't hard to find but hard to keep, and she's never managed to find one able to look past the facade and see beneath, to understand that she possesses an old soul in the literal sense.

She tries, though. She isn't that close to giving up that she's going to succumb to a lifeless existence, floating through the years without ever really feeling their presence. Maybe in another lifetime or two it won't matter if she disappears altogether, but for now she just wants to try, if only for a little while.

So she goes back to college and studies something new, something different. She lives alone this time, off-campus, but she drags herself out to coffee with her classmates occasionally, joins the literary magazine and attends bad poetry readings, goes on dates with boys and sometimes men. And she keeps reminders of all these little memories in the shoebox under her bed.

--

She's curled up against his tombstone the next time she sees him, tall frame and boyish features the same as she remembers from a lifetime ago.

He's been dead a decade but Peter has never been able to stay that way. She thought him gone for good this time, thought her absence was needed so he could grow up, grow old, and die surrounded by his family. But he's here now, no longer the sixty-year-old man he became, but the young hero she met in a hallway in Odessa once upon a time.

She let go of her hatred a long time ago, even before she learnt that Peter was dying, but now it blooms within her at the sight of his face. Anger tightens her muscles until she's no longer curled, but coiled, hands becoming tight, white fists. She can't bear to look at him, to see all that she has sacrificed so he could die a natural death, a death he has once again cheated. She hates him for all that he has been able to be -- a husband, a father, a man -- while she has never been able to be anything more than a woman trapped in a girl's body. She hates him for cutting her out, for leaving her to crawl through the years alone while he made a family for himself.

She hates him for a lot of things, but mostly she hates him for forgetting her so easily.

--

He looks at her like he's not sure whether she's going to fix him or break him. It seems she's capable of both and that's always been the problem.

She understands all too well. She only hates him now because she loved him once. Still does, because he had been the one to save her all those years ago. But he's also the man that damned her just the same and forgiveness has nothing to do with love.

He's caught between taking a step forward and turning around and walking away. He's trying to figure out whether it's worth it, the damage she will cause if she becomes a part of his life again, or the damage she will cause if she doesn't. It hurts, that he has to weigh his options like this, that she's been relegated to a list of pros and cons but she understands. She understands a lot of things these days.

It doesn't make her any less angry. It makes her furious because he gets to choose. She's never been able to do that, will never be able to do that, and that hurts more than his indecision.

It's enough to make her fight for it, her right to choose. And she tears that control from his hands by being the one to walk away.