regenerated | and then she'd say, 'it's okay, i got lost on the way, but i'm a supergirl and supergirls don't cry'

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and then she'd say, 'it's okay, i got lost on the way, but i'm a supergirl and supergirls don't cry'

Up until now, everything's been easy. As strange as it might be for most people to imagine, Claire Bennet's leap off the Compound has been the best thing that's happened to her yet on Tabula Rasa. Maybe it isn't the healthiest— after all, where the leap from the Compound was supposed to help her shed that mask, come face to face with all that fate's laid on her, now it's only granted a wish that she's held tightly to for months. All of a sudden, it's the lies that have become truth. She no longer has to think about the ideas her mind's brushed over in past months, wondering if invincibility comes with everlasting life, if wrinkles will never make it to her face, caused by smiles or frowns. The prospect itself is still one that chills her to the bone, lingering in the shadows of her thought, Claire realizing better than anyone else that there will come a day when she returns to the United States, when being a cheerleader is no longer an option, when her dad will come and take her into his arms, family man that he is. She'll have to search for Peter, for Nathan, for anything remaining of the two of them. But for now, one choice has been switched for another, and it feels pretty good.

She's probably driven the people at the clinic mad. Claire keeps on trying to pull off her bandages, keeps on running gentle hands over her injuries, relishing the way that the pain is different each time. This process is healing. Not reversing, not erasing all trace of what's happened, but instead an imperfect process that leaves her slightly fractured, slightly weak, all of the things that a girl her age is supposed to be. The bruises that she sees all over her skin might be about the most beautiful thing she's seen and felt in a long time, her eyes wide with amazement at the human body, that imperfect state of being and how it adapts. It's almost hard to keep the lie in place, with the way her lips spread into a smile at the slightest provocation, how laughs catch in her throat now because her lung hasn't healed enough to be used at full force.

But she can't hide on her own forever. Can't use fatigue as an excuse when all the doctors can see that her eyes are practically dancing. It's time for visiting hours. This is what she's been dreading.

Because somehow, she doesn't think that most people will believe her if she tells them this is the happiest she's been in almost a year. And honestly, she's not even sure if she should.

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The stress of the previous day woke Edmund up, it seemed, from something of a waking dream that had clouded his thoughts for the past few weeks. But that had been yesterday. Yesterday had been panic and fear and desperate prayers that he wouldn't have to lose someone again so soon. It had been jarring and left him quite literally shaking, but now, though he felt awake, he felt tired, too. It felt as though the emotions of yesterday -- of all the past few weeks really -- had been too much for him and, though he felt it all now, he wasn't prepared to feel them all.

He sat down beside Claire's bed regardless of that tiredness, visible in the corners of his eyes and the slight pallor of his skin that made his freckles stand out even more. He couldn't shut these things off now which meant he couldn't ignore them either.

"Don't do that ever again, Claire," Edmund said quietly. "Please."

Most memories faded. Some, within days. Some, even within minutes. The first time that Claire had hurt her hand, back during that scuffle with Jackie, all she remembered of that was red. The first time she'd shown Zach what she could do, all she could remember was the feeling of falling, like a bird who'd lost its wings, panic rising and escaping in her through a scream. Driving Brody into a wall had been rage. Escaping from Sylar in the school, that had been terror. But what Claire remembered of that night, when she'd taken her leap off of the Compound, was just Edmund. The look in his eyes, at least twice as terrified as her own, and the sound of his voice, thin and shaking. Watching him step into the room seemed to reinforce all of that. She pressed her lips together, not saying a word, merely watching as he sat himself right down next to her bed, probably more loyal of a friend than she deserved.

Stifling the sob that rose in her throat, Claire reached a hand out, wondering if he'd take it. "I'm... so sorry," she managed to choke out, face flushed from the effort. "It won't happen again. I swear."

He took her hand, of course, without even a moment's hesitation. Any anger that should have been burning inside of him was drowned out by the fear, the worry, the still heavy grief. Edmund probably needed to hold her hand just as much as she needed him to take it. Her hand was small compared to his and not nearly as strong as it should have been, but it was warm and alive. Edmund felt cold all over these days, and that little bit helped.

"You have to be more careful," he said, his fingers gently squeezing hers. "Why were you even up there? And so close to the edge?" It didn't make sense to Edmund, who only stood at the edge of things to see what was beyond or to prove (to himself or to others) that he could. Claire had been alone and the edge of the Compound roof wasn't anything magnificent.

"Because..." Claire felt her breath quicken, felt every inhale grow shallow as she tried to figure out how best to express all of the thoughts that had passed through her mind in the days before, in the seconds she'd lingered up by the edge of the building. The problem was, the story needed days, perhaps even weeks to work through, impossible to sum into a few short words, though Claire sorely needed them. She needed not to have to focus on the negativity. To let the blood out, quick, painless, simple. Closing her eyes, she licked her lips and shook her head.

"You know how I once talked about how there was once another me on the island? And how that made me feel... weird, scared even? Part of that is because I've had this secret," she began, opening her eyes again, gaze falling on Edmund. "One that I've kept pretty low so far. Back home, if I took a dive like that, nothing would have happened. I've jumped from greater heights and had no trouble at all. And part of me thought I could have that again, here."

She looked away, though her hand remained tightly clasped around Edmund's.

"They say magic disappears here, but I wasn't sure that what I had was magical. Felt more like a curse than anything else, recovering from every injury, healing in seconds."

He didn't understand what she meant at first. How could he, when the only out of the ordinary things Edmund knew were magic? But the specifics or science of it, Edmund realized as those subdued feelings bubbled up hot inside him, didn't matter.

"You did it on purpose," he said, voice still quiet but hard now, without that uncertainty of feeling from before. He didn't want to rage and didn't, because a logical part of his mind did understand that Claire was confiding something in him, something that she had kept tightly under wraps out of fear. And Edmund knew how stupid fear could make you. But that didn't make things any easier to hear. "You nearly killed yourself on purpose."

Somehow, the more subdued reaction was worse. Whether it was an effort made for her part, or just the conclusion that getting all up in arms wouldn't help anyone, Claire wished that Edmund would just go all out. Make it clear if he was angry, confused, surprised, sad— maybe her family had just been demonstrative enough that Claire was spoiled in that respect, but it had been so rare in her life to come across someone she could hardly read at all in the moment. The only person she could remember presenting more of a conundrum was Angela Petrelli.

But she set a pretty high bar.

"Well, not... so much with the killing part, but yeah, I jumped on purpose," Claire said quietly, taking careful, measured breaths. "I didn't think all this would happen, otherwise I wouldn't have done it."

"How could you be so stupid?" The words came hurtling out before he could stop them. In retrospect, maybe he would have asked the same question in kinder words, but with all the hurt swelling up inside of him, he couldn't pick and choose his words with that much care. They remained out of his reach in a murky sea of thoughts.

"Everyone else on this island lives without their magic. What makes you think you're so special?" It wasn't a rhetorical question. It was one he wanted he answered. But he didn't think she had an answer, or at least not a satisfactory one. And there was something systematic about his line of questioning, a series of logical steps that she had so recklessly skipped over. "There's an alien on the Council who's human now. Why would he change and you wouldn't? A simple visit to the doctors would have at least given you an idea, but did you do that? If you really thought nothing would happen, why did you do it in the first place? Because then it looks like arrogance, Claire. Doing something just because you can. And I don't think you're like that. So do you really hold your life in so little regard that you're willing to lose it on a test?" His hand shook minutely in hers, but he didn't once pull away. "I know you don't trust easily, Claire, but I didn't think you were that foolish."

"Because what I could do wasn't magic," Claire immediately replied, feeling frantic, unsure whether or not she was simply making excuses for herself, or if she had real grounds on which to defend herself. More and more, as visitors filtered in, Claire just felt increasingly stupid. All of the people telling her rational thoughts that she should have run through, that things like this were meant to be taken in steps, that if there was even the slightest touch of suspicion in her mind that she wouldn't escape completely unscathed, that it had heavy implications on the state of her mind. With Edmund more than with others, though, she'd quickly realized the way it must have affected him, the change in his behavior markedly different than he'd been as of late, his pale skin made even more so with fear, perhaps with anger as well. Claire didn't want to think about how it must have felt, finding her on the ground, hardly able to breathe, and yet she did, and suddenly it felt like she couldn't quite capture the air in her lungs, forcing her to take a few measured breaths as her free hand wiped at the corners of her eyes.

"The whole point was that what I could do, it was, there was science behind it. And you still see the rules of physics working here, don't you? I don't know, I— I couldn't go to the doctors, you don't understand. If I still healed, if the doctors saw that, maybe it'd end up just like it did back home." Claire started to feel herself shiver as she shook her head vigorously.

"Aliens aren't magic, Claire. Superheroes aren't all magic. Yet they're in the same boat as the rest of us," Edmund argued, keeping his voice restrained no matter how much he wanted to rage. Shouting never, ever helped an argument. "That's not what makes you special, Claire."

He expelled a great lungful of air and held tighter to her hand, not trying to crush her but needing a moment to get his thoughts under control. Edmund looked up again, shaking his own head faintly. "What happened back home, Claire?" he asked. "What are you so afraid of? Someone trying to kill you again?"

"I— I know, I was stupid, I get that, okay?" Claire replied in turn, her voice strained as she tried to keep the volume down, even though she felt a familiar burning sensation at the corners of her eyes. Everything was so clear in retrospect, the logical fallacies she'd run through, the sense that she'd lacked, all in the name of trying to figure out... what, exactly? Who she was? What she was?

Or was it just trying to run back to the feeling of control she'd finally achieved back in Kirby Plaza?

Shaking her head, Claire took a shuddering breath, laying back against her pillows, heavily, her breath coming out in a hiss through her teeth. "My uncle and my biological father, I don't know if they survive, back home. I watched both of them shoot up into the sky, I saw an explosion with my own eyes, and that's when I showed up here. My trip home, I thought I could change it, but it was the same colors spilling over the sky. And still no answers."

"It's not just being stupid, Claire," he said. Although Edmund was glad that she seemed to understand now the error of her ways, he did not want her to walk away from this incident with simply that in mind. Edmund had walked out of the White Witch's clutches with an awareness of how stupid he had been, but so much more as well. "That helpless feeling? That terror and loneliness you felt watching your family disappear? That's what you've brought down on all your friends here. Not because you were stupid but because you didn't trust us enough to help or to even say anything.

"We're not meant to know all the answers, Claire," Edmund said. His tone had cooled now, from sympathy and from his own weariness. He didn't have it in his heart to be angry for long; it was fear that fueled that anger, and talking to Claire, having her whole though bruised beside him eased that. "No more here than at home. We only think we know more at home because we're used to it. But you can't see it all on your own. You need other people if you want to try to figure anything out. I'm sorry you don't know what happened to your family, Claire, and I'm sorry you couldn't do anything to change it. But going about figuring it out on your own is only going to lead to this," he said, looking pointedly down at the hospital bed.

Every last word was fair. More importantly, ever last word Edmund said was true. Falling from the Compound was far from merely an act of stupidity or oversight, it bled right into a selfishness and self-centered mentality, one that all people had to some degree, but with an added level of carelessness that seemed so unforgivable in retrospect. Claire took a deep breath, feeling it shake, a pain driving into her ribs, and it was enough for the tears to spill over again, the blonde helpless to stop it all. The best she could do was to raise her free hand to block her face from view.

She wasn't trying for forgiveness, or pity, or to pull at the sympathy that Edmund could surely provide her.

"I won't— I won't do it ag— gain," she breathed, trying for deep gulps of air as she simply shook her head, tiredly, unable to quite piece all of her thoughts together. "I jus' wanna move on. I just..." Her head fell back against the pillow as Claire continued to shake her head from side to side, as though the movement alone could clear the air.

"Don't, don't," Edmund said, unconsciously echoing his own orders from earlier, to not move so, to keep calm. He couldn't see her face for her hand, but he cupped her cheek despite it. The tears felt damp under his palm, giving him a pained expression, but he tried to calm and steady her.

"I didn't mean to get you this upset, Claire. I'm sorry," he said, his voice all gentleness and concern now. He didn't regret a single word, but perhaps he should have waited to say them. Too late to take it back now; he could only stay by Claire through the aftermath. "Just breath. Don't talk. It's alright."

She didn't try to speak as Edmund cupped her hand in his palm, too overwhelmed with a fresh slew of emotions. Gratitude, fear, shame, everything mixing together in a way that only left her feel like she was drowning, somehow, no way to get a breath of air, and as it wasn't the first time in the past few months she'd felt that way, Claire knew that the best thing to do was just to ride it out until she felt a little more functional.

"God, it's not your fault," she finally managed in a soft murmur, shaking her head as he apologized. "It's really... just that there's so much going on, and I know I brought it on myself, but. I don't—"

Feeling her breath start to grow thin again, she shook her head, pausing for a few seconds before adding, "Thanks."

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and then she'd say, 'it's okay, i got lost on the way, but i'm a supergirl and supergirls don't cry'

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