I have fixed the patreon link that leads to my old pateron account that dont have this fanfic .
Chapter 9: The Quarterback
Brody Mitchum had the kind of face that got away with things.
Square jaw, symmetrical features, the effortless tan that came from spending four hours a day on a football field in West Texas. Letterman jacket worn with the casual authority of someone who'd been told since freshman year that he was the best thing to happen to Union Wells athletics, and who had no reason to doubt it. He moved through the school hallways the way certain animals moved through territory — unhurried, aware of the space he occupied, confident that the space would accommodate him.
I'd been watching him for two days. Not openly — just tracking his patterns the way I tracked everything else in this school. Who he talked to. Where he lingered. The particular way he positioned himself near Claire's locker during passing periods, leaning against the wall at a distance calibrated to look casual and repeated enough to be deliberate.
The meta-knowledge was specific about Brody Mitchum. In canon, he was the reason Claire discovered her regeneration couldn't protect her from everything — because Brody's threat wasn't physical in the way a quarry fall was physical. He'd cornered her. The show had been careful about the language but the implication was ugly and Claire had responded by crashing his car with both of them inside, walking away from the wreck while he didn't. The aftermath got complicated — Claire's dad got involved, the Company got involved, Brody ended up mind-wiped and transferred.
In this timeline, Brody hadn't made his move yet. But the setup was building. The party invitation. The pointed questions Jackie was carrying on his behalf. The way he watched Claire with the focus of someone selecting rather than admiring.
Friday morning. Before first period. I found Claire at her locker and said what I'd been constructing since Thursday night.
"Hey. Quick thing." I leaned against the next locker, casual, keeping my voice under the hallway noise. "You know Jamie Orosco? Her older sister graduated two years ago — she works at the DQ on 42nd?"
"I know Jamie. Not the sister."
"Jamie told me something about Brody. Said her sister was at a party his junior year — this would have been two summers ago — and Brody cornered a girl upstairs. It didn't get — the girl got out, but Jamie said it was bad enough that people talked about it."
Claire's hands stopped moving inside her locker. She didn't turn to look at me. "Who was the girl?"
"Jamie didn't say. The sister wouldn't give the name."
"And Jamie told you this because...?"
"Because I asked. I saw Brody watching you in the parking lot yesterday and it didn't sit right."
Now she turned. The expression on her face was layered — not the fear I'd expected, or the gratitude, but something harder. Assessment. She was weighing the information the way she weighed healing data, looking for the methodology behind the conclusion.
"You asked Jamie Orosco about Brody Mitchum because you saw him looking at me in a parking lot."
"Yes."
"That's a lot of steps for a look."
"The look was enough."
Claire closed her locker. The metal sound was neutral — not the firm closure she used when she was angry, not the careless push of a good mood. Controlled. "I appreciate you telling me. I do. But I'm still going to the party."
"Claire—"
"I'm going to the party because half the cheerleading squad is going and because I can take care of myself and because one secondhand story about a girl whose name nobody will give isn't evidence. It's a rumor."
She was right. That was the problem. I'd constructed the warning on the thinnest possible foundation — a fabricated chain of gossip built on knowledge I couldn't reveal — and she'd weighed it and found it wanting. The seed was planted, but it was sitting on rock, not soil.
"Just don't let him isolate you," I said.
Claire's eyebrows rose half an inch. "Isolate me?"
"Get you alone. Away from the group. Upstairs, in a car, anywhere that's not where the crowd is. Stay with Jackie. Stay with the squad."
"You sound like my dad."
The comparison hit harder than she intended. I let it land and didn't flinch.
"Your dad would have a point," I said.
She studied me for two more seconds. Then she shifted her bag on her shoulder and walked toward first period, and the hum of her regeneration faded down the hallway, and I stood at the lockers knowing the warning was insufficient and having no way to make it stronger without revealing things that would end every conversation we'd ever have.
[Union Wells — Computer Lab, 1:45 PM]
The monitors died in sequence.
I was in the library two hallways over when the power surge hit, but I didn't need to be in the room to know what had happened. The Evo-Sense spike was sudden and violent — Andy's crackling signature jumping from background noise to full-volume scream, a jagged peak that hit my chest like a physical impact even through two walls and a hundred feet of hallway.
By the time I got to the computer lab, the door was open and students were filing out with the dazed expressions of people who'd just watched six screens go dark simultaneously. A thin haze of ozone hung in the air — the unmistakable smell of electrical discharge, sharp and chemical. Mrs. Petrovsky was standing at the front of the room telling everyone to leave their bags and proceed to the hallway in an orderly fashion while she called maintenance.
Andy was the last one out. He moved like someone trying to be invisible, shoulders hunched, hands deep in the pockets of his oversized hoodie. His face was white. The Evo-Sense reading was still elevated — not the screaming peak of the surge but a sustained agitation, like a motor running too hot.
I intercepted him at the stairwell.
"Park," I said. "After school. Same bench."
"I can't—" His voice was thin. "The grounding thing isn't working."
"It's not supposed to fix everything. It's a release valve. You need more practice."
"I was practicing." He pulled a hand from his pocket and held it up. The fingertips were bright red now, worse than yesterday, and there was a faint tremor running through all five fingers — not nervousness but current, visible as the slightest ripple in the flesh. "I discharged this morning. I discharged at lunch. I touched the metal railing outside the gym for two minutes straight. And then I sat down in the lab and the screen froze and I got frustrated and the whole row just — popped."
"Emotional trigger. The grounding works for ambient buildup, but a sudden emotional spike bypasses it."
"So what do I do? Never get frustrated? Never get angry? I'm fifteen — I get frustrated eight times before lunch."
He had a point. The grounding technique was a band-aid on a wound that needed stitches. Andy's power was growing faster than passive discharge could handle. What he needed was real training — controlled output exercises, emotional regulation paired with power regulation, someone who understood the mechanics of evolved abilities well enough to build a structured program. What he had was a junior with a composition notebook and an internet cover story.
"Meet me at the park," I said. "Three thirty. We'll try something different."
Andy looked at me with eyes that were simultaneously old and young — old with the weight of something no teenager should carry, young with the desperate hope that someone might actually help.
"Okay," he said. "Three thirty."
He walked down the stairs and the Evo-Sense signal faded with distance, and I stood in the stairwell and ran the math that mattered: six monitors in a computer lab. An ozone smell strong enough to linger. Mrs. Petrovsky calling maintenance, which meant a work order, which meant documentation. Electrical anomalies in a school building within the monitoring zone of a Company agent's adopted daughter.
If Primatech's field team hadn't flagged Andy Delgado yet, they were about to.
[Union Wells — Parking Lot, 3:15 PM]
Claire found me before I could get to my truck.
"I'm going to Brody's party tomorrow night," she said. Statement, not question. "Jackie's picking me up at seven."
"Okay."
"Are you going?"
I hadn't planned on it. Parties weren't part of Zach's social portfolio — the original Zach was a film kid, not a party kid, and showing up at Brody Mitchum's house would be conspicuous enough to draw attention I didn't want. But Claire was asking, and the question underneath the question was are you going to be there, and the Brody timeline was active, and Andy's text was already sitting in my pocket.
"I'll be there."
"Good." She didn't explain why it was good. She didn't need to. The conversation from this morning — the warning, the secondhand story, the instruction not to be isolated — was still between us, a thin wire of tension neither of us had cut. Claire trusted her own body completely. Trusting other people's intentions was a different category.
She walked to Jackie's car. I pulled out my phone.
Andy: something else happened. the streetlight outside my building went on and off three times when i walked past. its not even dark yet.
I typed back: park bench, 3:30. well work on emotional triggers
The reply came fast: ok
Then, thirty seconds later: actually never mind. ill figure it out. dont want to make you late for whatever
I stared at the message. Never mind, I'll figure it out. The exact words of someone who knew they were becoming a burden and had decided to stop asking. The words that preceded every quiet withdrawal, every unanswered text, every kid who stopped showing up because the embarrassment of needing help outweighed the terror of going it alone.
I typed: I'm coming. 3:30. don't leave
Then I drove to the park and spent forty-five minutes teaching Andy Delgado how to push current into the earth through the soles of his sneakers while standing, so he could discharge during class without anyone noticing. His first three attempts sent sparks across the rubber soles and singed the grass. The fourth attempt worked — a clean, silent discharge that brought his Evo-Sense signature down to the quietest reading I'd measured from him.
"That's it," I said. "Breathe out when you push. Match the rhythm."
Andy did it again. The grass barely moved. His hands were steady for the first time in a week.
"Zach." He was looking at the ground where the grass was slightly brown from his earlier attempts. "Are there other people like me?"
"Yes."
"A lot?"
"More than you'd think."
"Are you—" He stopped. Reconsidered. "Never mind."
I didn't answer the question he hadn't asked because the answer was complicated enough to collapse under its own weight, and because a sedan with tinted windows had just driven past the park's south entrance at the speed of someone looking, not traveling.
I might have imagined it. The car didn't slow, didn't stop, didn't circle back. Just a sedan on a public road passing a public park. But Odessa was Primatech's backyard, and the math on Andy's electrical events was adding up fast — three neighborhood blackouts, a school computer lab, and now scorched grass in a city park — and the Company's field teams weren't stupid. They were thorough, methodical, and very, very good at finding people who didn't want to be found.
"Same time Monday," I said. "Practice the sneaker technique between now and then. Morning and night. And Andy — keep the surges small. If something big happens, go outside and put your hands in dirt. Don't try to hold it in."
"Okay." He looked at the burned grass and managed something that was almost a smile. "Thanks."
I drove home with two appointments mapped across Saturday night — Brody's party at seven, and the knowledge that three blocks from Andy's apartment, the streetlights were still flickering in the early dusk.
My phone buzzed at a red light. Claire: see u tomorrow at brody's. bringing the stopwatch just in case lol
I put the phone down. Tomorrow night I'd be at a quarterback's house party watching for a predator in a letterman jacket while three miles across town a fifteen-year-old kid with electrical hands tried to sleep without blowing a transformer.
The Nissan's engine idled rough at the light. It always did — the truck was twenty years old and held together by habit more than engineering, and the idle had been bad since I'd started driving it. I tapped the gas to keep it from stalling, and the light turned green, and I drove south through an Odessa that was getting darker earlier now as October deepened toward November.
Toward Homecoming. Five weeks out. The clock was running and every day I spent coaching a kid the show never mentioned was a day I wasn't spending on the event that would put Sylar in Claire's school with a hunger that body counts couldn't satisfy.
But Andy's text was still on my screen — never mind, I'll figure it out — and I couldn't unknow what that phrase meant, any more than I could unknow the date of Jackie Wilcox's scheduled death or the name of Claire Bennet's biological father.
Some knowledge was like that. It didn't give you options. It gave you obligations.
Author's Note / Promotion:
Your Reviews and Power Stones are the best way to show support. They help me know what you're enjoying and bring in new readers!
You don't have to. Get instant access to more content by supporting me on Patreon. I have three options so you can pick how far ahead you want to be:
🪙 Silver Tier ($6): Read 10 chapters ahead of the public site.
👑 Gold Tier ($9): Get 15-20 chapters ahead of the public site.
💎 Platinum Tier ($15): The ultimate experience. Get new chapters the second I finish them . No waiting for weekly drops, just pure, instant access.
Your support helps me write more .
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/fanficwriter1