A/N: I am posting this in chapters because one, it is long, and two, certain breaks are natural, which I think will help when reading it. But I'm still viewing it as a one-shot! Even though it's around 12k words. (I need a program that has some kind of built-in buzzer for word count because this is getting ridiculous….) Sequel to 'Brightly Dead Leaves'
Depending on how well I plan/how much I write (I have a bad habit of taking on several projects and finishing them months later, as you can see), this will either be 2/2 or 2/4 parts in the Seasons series I planned. I feel like this one made it kind of full circle but feedback please? The other two would be more *semi not really spoiler warning* plotsy.
Warning for an instance of suicide (in a later chapter, I will warn then) and generally depressive mindset.
And with that out of the way I wanted to stay ultra mega thanks to everyone reading this :3 as well as everyone that liked/reblogged the promo I did over on tumblr ages ago. You guys are the best!
Disclaimer: The only thing I own related to Heroes are the box set DVDs. If I had creative control, I would bankrupt myself to have it run on air long enough for Sylaire to become canon. I'm not even kidding. Plus some other things would happen like Pemma and Micah and his family would come back and maybe some more Noah flashbacks and we would have a semi relevant plot that would show how Peter or Hiro at least saved Caitlin but putting her in another time…. *cough*
The first thing he comprehends in the early dawn hours as the sunlight filters through the living room unevenly is that he cannot feel his skin.
They have remained here for a month now and despite the time lapse that is utterly boring in its repetitiveness, he cannot say that much has changed. She gave him the couch (the length of which is a good foot short of what he needs to lay down properly), half of the blankets she used, a politely glare-full disposition, and a very small amount of functioning trust.
Perhaps that could be counted as change. After all, now she was simply glaring at him with a mum mouth instead of hurling insults passionately. She was also not accusing him of wrong-doing every time he wandered from her side to do his own thing... Which was often. However, despite what she likely thought, he never roamed far enough to lose her; she was always in his peripheral, a sort of touchstone in this barren landscape — and maybe world, too.
The unspoken arrangement was clear: survival roommates without the warm friendship, needed company without the social sparring.
His skin awakened with a slow thrum as he clumsily rubbed his numb arms together. Sylar knew she was not awake yet because if she was she would be pestering him to stand up already. They had plans today. He yawned and sat up anyway.
Then, with a burst of sensation, his skin felt like it was being pricked by a thousand needles and the muscles running along bone, from elbow to fingertip, began to spasm and move without much rhyme or reason through a need to shake off the imbalance of nerves. It reignited the calculating control he once held. This was the fourth night in a row that the numbness had occurred, the ninth in total if he was counting properly.
Sylar was. He couldn't mistake it if he wished to. Such things were ingrained in him as much as the act of breathing.
Tossing the blankets off to pool in a corner of the worn couch, he then moved to the things he kept on the shelves of the open cabinet at the edge of the room. Boots, second shirt layer, and jacket donned, he slipped out the back door (the only one they used).
The air was drawn in slowly over his teeth and tongue, through his throat, pooling in his lungs. It was an act of precaution against the crystals hanging heavy and sharp in the air. His eyes widened, all lethargy knocked away. Throughout the entirety of the past month he had managed to sleep in three hour intervals, a wonderfully miraculous feat. When he had been by himself, he had hardly slept at all.
He wasn't adverse to admitting his being fearful of the government, of the hunting, of the people. And wasn't that a turn around? Sylar afraid of the lowly citizen working a nine to five job at a convenience store? Or fast food joint? Or even commuting in their car? But any one of them could report him — many did — and he had to keep that line, that very blurry and messy and more on the side of gray than black and white line that he had established after the tumbling slide of chaos that had become his life finally touched his conscious, a young innocent mistaken for an attacker.
All of which boiled down to one principle: he couldn't kill them.
All those that were aware were only brainwashed innocents that, in his case, were doing the justified thing in turning him in. Sylar wasn't blind to the fact that he had done horrible things. He just didn't want to be locked away like a lab rat, fed a diet of sedatives through IV with the occasional bout of consciousness if a nurse got too preoccupied in the hallway between his room and the next.
Selfish, yes. Did he care about that? No. He didn't have the luxury.
The landscape was frosted lightly, the first true sign of winter. It was only October. However, they were in a forest, in the mountains, in a northern state of America. Sylar wasn't all that surprised at the quick change of seasons.
His attention was distracted slightly when the back door creaked on its hinges and Claire emerged next to him, pulling her own coat on. She cursed at the temperature she was met with and zipped up the hoodie worn underneath. Even if the cabin wasn't anything special to look at, it was still a solid structure, providing its own meager amount of insulation from the outside.
She exhaled a long breath, casting her gaze about as clinically as he did. There was nothing to look at, though; the metaphorical coast was clear, devoid of people and animals alike. All was right in their corner of the world. For now.
"Ready?" She asked curtly. He nodded. She moved back inside.
Sylar followed her, catching the duffel bag that was thrown his way. He packed up the few clothes he possessed and a few of the things he knew about that had been left behind from the previous owner, including a busted hand-dial radio that he had fixed in under a day. It wasn't his normal area of expertise but he was a quick study. He didn't grab the blankets or anything else of that nature, things they would need if they were leaving for good; they would be back.
He walked to where the kitchen counter separated the two spaces in the main room, perching his frame against the protruding wood. It provided him the best view into the bedroom Claire was at the moment shuffling around in. She cracked her door because of him but it was never closed; in case anything happened, she told him, and he then told himself.
Not even he could believe that. She had let him stay. Him — the boogeyman, the stalker, the serial killer, the monster, the attacker of her mother and father, killer of her friend, her (resurrected) uncle, biological mother and father, and countless others whose eyes she had never landed on, though some she had, like Elle, who he knew had come to Primatech with the cheerleading blonde so many years before.
Elle Bishop. Wasn't that a lost name? It had been a long time since he had thought about her, in any case. All this time later and he still couldn't explain anything about what had happened in that situation other than she had given him hope at their touch one day and then flinched at it the next. Everything after that was a haze of inner turmoil he was too pathetic to control.
Claire opened the door fully then and he shook off the thoughts as he caught her bright green eyes. She promptly narrowed them at him, a silently still second flowing between them as she assessed his stare and him hers. Those eyes of hers would always be bright, he mused flippantly, no matter the kind of pain that laid behind them.
It was almost admirable.
She strode into the hallway and then past him, pushing outside. He watched the door get two inches away from closing completely and then he followed after her leisurely with his long legs. She stopped at the dock and cast an unreadable gaze back.
It was toward the cabin, not him. That he told himself too and that he actually managed to believe. She held no sentimentality towards him.
The closest town was 41 miles away, the forest lightening in its density considerably once they were two miles out from it. It was during days like this that Sylar couldn't manage any regret in taking Claire's ability. Maybe he was innately selfish by nature, maybe he would never feel regret the way a normal person would. All he knew was that he was able to keep walking at a brisk pace without much pain, near the same as Claire could, and that kept them together.
Intertwined fates and all that.
When stuck alone for thirty years by both consequence and your own choice, intertwining paths of any kind were as tempting as lemonade on a hot summer day in the desert.
They arrived an hour and eight minutes after sundown, meaning their trip had taken a dull thirteen hours. Any words spoken had been by him making observations about their surroundings, her occasionally acknowledging this with a peep of a sound.
Small towns never ceased to amuse him. They were in the middle of nowhere, all the residences around holding acres between neighbors, and yet there was always a half of a square mile in the dead center with closely packed buildings and street signs resembling a small city, an amusing trait to him since the activity dropped off drastically if you took five steps to the left.
He followed Claire's lead, watching her with interest as she moved in the brush around the main road, opting to emerge at the edge of the gas station a corner over.
"Remember the story?"
"Yes."
"Come on."
"Wait," Sylar said as they stood just inside the tree line. "I'll ask at the bar."
"Why?"
He shrugged. "Gas station's twenty-four hours; is anyone except the locals going to stop at the rundown bar for a drink?"
Claire sent him an approving look. "Okay."
Claire fondled the cash in her pocket as she slowly paced the convenience story, nodding a hello to the leering cashier. The cover story was unnecessary for her to use as he only repeated the bill to her without much of a friendly touch. She was left with fifteen dollars. Living stationary and isolated for so long had dwindled her 'savings', not that she had ever had much to begin with.
She carried dried-out food staples in the brown paper bag, which she promptly tossed to Sylar when she crossed the road. He was standing against the outside of the bar, looking quite proud of himself. She ignored that. "So?"
"What's this?" He only asked.
"Food."
He paused but she offered up no other explanation, crossing her arms at him. He pushed the bag under his arm. "Linda," he began in a drawl, "was more than happy to give us lost and wandering naturists a ride into town — the name's Bellmore. Oh, and she thinks we-"
"Hi!" A foreign voice greeted, pushing out of the door besides Sylar. Claire forced herself to stay still and not automatically twist her body in a defensive stance, lest it confuse — or worse, intimidate — the other woman. "You must be Claire. Give me a sec." She proceeded to lock up the all but abandoned place with a master set of a keychain. The blonde found herself slightly impressed that the woman could get it on the first key pick.
She spread her face in a smile. "You must be Linda."
"Sure am. Come on; parked around back."
They piled into the faded green Chevy truck from sometime during the seventies. Linda and Sylar were at of the doors, Claire in the middle, as the smallest always was. They were pulling onto the state road when the stranger with mousy-brown hair lit up a cigarette, taking a long drag. Sylar appeared indifferent, but Claire struggled not to cough. Her lungs weren't without their healing long enough for a sort of rapport to have built up and the smoke made them instinctively squeeze and wish to splutter.
Exhaling a clean breath and putting both hands on the wheel to turn, Linda spoke. "That must've sucked, huh, getting snowed in on your honeymoon?" Claire shot a heated glare to her companion of these last three months. "Gotta ask, why honeymoon all the way out here? We're nothin' special with those nature hotspots and what not."
"That's why we came," Sylar volunteered. "Isn't that right, Claire-bear?"
If the past thirty-five years hadn't taught her well the art of self-control and an easy fluency regarding adopting to new personas, Claire would have started all-out beating her roommate to a bloody pulp. Not once since encountering each other again had he used her dad's nickname, let alone against her. It was a shock to hear again. Coming from his taunting mouth, it pissed her off. She smiled sweetly for Linda's benefit, masking her internal turmoil. "Yeah, we wanted to see more of the, uh, hidden stuff. A lot of those other places are overrated — yes, they're beautiful, but fighting a crowd half the time kinda ruins it. Don't you agree, Gabe?"
Yes, in the absence of the apple-pie life, Claire Bennet had more than honed her vindictive side.
"Gabe?" Linda inquired after.
"Oh, yeah, Sylar's only his middle name. He thinks Gabriel's too plain."
The other woman nodded. "I get that; loads of Mary's and Susan's in my line. I was lucky. Gabriel a family name?"
"Religious mother," he said, tight-lipped. "It didn't take."
She laughed, pulling into a parking spot on the main road of the sparse town. It was made up of a dozen or so buildings, all looking sufficiently modern, a few two-stories. "This is Bellmore, population four hundred and give or take. Most of us live rural. You guys need a ride back?"
"No, that's okay. We'll call our friends to pick us up in the morning, thanks."
They piled out onto the sidewalk, Sylar still quiet. Claire turned to her companion when Linda pulled away, only to have him grip her upper arm tightly. She made no protests except for the nonverbal communication of annoyance via eye roll as he strode behind a garbage container in an alleyway nearby. "What the hell?"
"I could be asking the same," she threw back.
He growled. It did nothing to make her back down, chin up challengingly. "Don't ever call me Gabe or Gabriel again."
"Don't call me Claire-bear." A switch flicked and a fast smirk lit his face, one practically dripping with mockery. She beat him to the punch, cutting past his bullshit before he could say something that would make her too pissed off to see reason. "Get over yourself, Sylar! You want to distance yourself from your past as much as I do. So, we got a deal or not?"
He faced off with her for another minute, unreadable brown eyes against hard-standing green. A moment later, he walked away. She let him.
It was four years ago when she'd last been addressed by her loving nickname. It was not a happy moment, yet it was scarred within her mind nonetheless. That was usually the way it went, Claire was discovering. The happy moments were fleeting, something not to be hoped for but rather feared, because over time they would lose their luster and only the bullet-points of their memories would be kept, while every horrid second of something painful was intact in mint condition within the brain.
The name had come out as a gasp over the phone. He was working, shuffling fast with half a mind on something, and simultaneously lecturing her about staying behind the scenes when helping with Peter's operations. Once more, she tried telling him that since she could not be hurt permanently, why shouldn't she put that to the best of use?
She was stubborn and didn't tell him that she understood. She knew being killed was not the worst thing in the world for her. But she did not tell him that. Instead they parted ways with the ever-present 'I love you's and unresolved grudges.
Peter came back to Vancouver early a couple weeks later from who-knows-where in the states, somber with the news of her dad's passing. The funeral hadn't been an option for her.
"Looking for something?" The woman behind the checkout counter called over.
Claire fluttered her eyes, pushing the memories down firmly, finding that she had been fingering a blouse for the past two minutes. It was pretty but completely impractical. "Yeah; sweaters?"
"Two rows behind you."
"Thanks."
Methodically, she grabbed three sweaters, two new pairs of jeans, some camisoles and T-shirts, socks, a new jacket, and then stepped back into the changing rooms. She assumed Sylar was doing the same. Or, he'd… left. The blonde sat stiffly down on the corner bench provided in the half-curtained room.
Inwardly, she chided herself for being surprised at the thought. As if it would be so out-of-the-blue for him to leave. It was Sylar, the master at avoiding complications and using people for his own needs.
So why had he stayed around so long?
What if he'd used the convenience of her place to stay low? She wouldn't exactly know if he had upset some apple cart out in the real world. Maybe the story he told her the first time he came to her had been a fabrication; not completely, of course, because ever a paradox, the serial killer liked to pride himself on being selectively truthful. She couldn't see him lying about killing that kid — maybe it wasn't an accident, though? Or maybe he had meant to kill the mother, but as he said was unaware of the child's presence.
Her head hurt. Claire looked down at the cloth, wool, and jean knit pieces of clothing on her lap. And then she remembered — she only held fifteen bucks to her name. "Shit."
Stealing would be risky. Her mind raced with all the scenarios. Running out the front door would be the only option; there was no back door and she possessed no large purse to hide at least one of the items. If she ran out the front, they wouldn't be able to stay at the motel tonight. Thus, they would have to start trekking back immediately, with the darkness already mostly descended.
She may not die, but she could freeze. Besides, the coverage from the woods didn't start until at least two miles out of this place, Bellmore, and even in the forest the canopy was nearly non-existent, fall shedding the trees of their leaves and winter snow dropping branches left and right.
She hung her head. This was her luck: reliably bad.
"I only need to leave for an hour for you to have a breakdown, huh?"
He stood in the middle of the doorway, pulling the privacy sheet back around so this time it was shrouding both of them. "Sylar."
"Who else?" He lifted an eyebrow at her, dropping his gaze to her lap. "Ready?"
Claire relaxed her back against the wall with an inaudible yet visible sigh. "How much do you have left?" If he had at least a twenty, she could manage to dwindle down her metaphorical cart.
"Oh… enough." With a flourish, he extracted a two inch wad of balled-up cash from his jacket pocket.
She patted herself mentally on the back for not showing her shock. "Where did you get all that?"
Sylar smirked playfully at the somewhat hesitant tone in her voice. Absently, she thought about how she definitely liked this smirk the most. No judgment, no mockery, no malice. It was actually a tad… warming. And if she had to put up with a smirk in order to avoid his stone face, then so be it. "Gold-turning ability, remember? This town's got a pawn shop."
Sylar followed her when they left the store, gaze snapping around them. This feeling of being more or less in public once more left an uncomfortable knot in his stomach. How long would it take the military to get out here if a complaint was called in? An hour? Three? Would they have even a chance of escape if they were recognized or accidentally revealed an ability, or would the local authorities try to take them down anyway?
The questions lurked under his skin with answers he wasn't willing to recognize. Claire, to her credit, adopted the sharp eyes all on her own as well and made a purposefully casual beeline to the main street's motel.
It was a small place with two floors, outside access, and six rooms, from what he could tell. As she went in to take care of this errand as well, he peaked around, looking in windows and becoming comfortable with the floor plan. The first floor held the office, a storage room, and what was probably the residence of the person behind the front counter, if he had to guess. It looked like that kind of establishment, possessing just too much of a personal touch to be that of a mere decorator.
Sylar turned around when he sensed her coming, one eyebrow lifted in surprise at the fact that he couldn't hear her footsteps. When did she become like a cat?
"None of the rooms had connecting doors, so you're stuck on your own." She tossed him his key — a literal key and not one of those plastic cards; a true testament to its age — and he fumbled for it against his chest. Claire stood there staring at him as he pressed his thumb to the metal, appraising him.
He wondered what she was thinking about; probably wondering herself what his plan was, why he was still here, why he was staring at her. He could almost hear the thoughts. They were some of his own. Instead of calling her out on it, though, he only bid her goodnight and turned his back, mounting the staircase.
The motel had a laundry room. Granted, it was more like a closet in its size and the machines were more than ten years old, but beggars couldn't be choosers. Claire stripped to her underwear and a tank-top after locking the door, sitting on the end table pressed next to the door as the entirety of her clothes spun in the washer.
The soapy suds fell repetitively in a waterfall over the glass door, thin plastic form rattling against the dryer on one side and wall on the other. The green paint wore away to reveal plaster at one of the more exposed marks. At least the sound of the machine itself was minimal.
She unfolded the thin newspaper on her lap, lone light bulb hanging on a string casting annoyingly uneven white light about. Her dad used to read the newspaper sometimes, a thought she took a deep breath from, ignoring it with stiff shoulders. She didn't think she would be one to read it ever herself — through either desire or availability — but times changed.
World news didn't start until page 3 of the ten page paper. Uninterested in the Christmas plays advertised and the story of some young kid getting first prize in a music competition a town over, she flipped through the pages without hesitation.
The usual was reported — economy progress (all but recovered from the depression that finally hit rock bottom ten years ago), foreign affairs (another proxy war in another third world country), politics (the usual musical chairs rendition in preparation of another election). It all made her frown. Everything had a circle, following the same routines, nothing changing. If it changed, it only ever changed for the worst.
That was her experience and it was experience that managed to constantly remind her with painful memories.
On page seven she found a story about a Special. A woman, twenty-three years old, captured after working with a hacking group. No one else in the group possessed abilities so they were being tried with electronic espionage and aiding and abetting a fugitive. The state of Maine was making it their good PR case for the year, the governor giving a quote about how the people of Maine were still threatened by the people the government was daring to lax up on.
Claire had spent many years helping Peter, two decades in fact, because she wouldn't let them keep trying to hide her, wouldn't let herself fall into a pattern of relaxation into the normality of others. She wanted to fight for her rights and independence, join the fight allowing them to be themselves. She knew first hand how hard the governments truly were on people like her. At this point, extinction was as much of a concern as the governments were.
"I'm a natural progression of the species. Evolution is part of nature and nature kills. Simple, right?"
Her hands fisted, crinkling the cheap paper that couldn't be found in big cities anymore. Anger swept through her, making her shudder. His words had been right but not in the way that he had said them for. Evolution is a part of nature but it wasn't them that were killing; he had, yes, but they weren't. They were the ones being killed.
She wanted to hit something, break every last dim-witted politician's skull the way she would have with Sylar if he had just been normal and wouldn't regenerate from it. Claire threw the printing the short distance to the other wall. It wasn't satisfying at all.
The people were not as nosy as he had first assumed. Sure they watched him avidly, like a vulture waiting on a lion pack to finish their feasting, but beyond the pleasantries they largely left him to himself.
Sylar now sat at the wooden bar top, twirling the glass of whiskey in front of him, debating whether to check up on the blonde ex-cheerleader or not. It was obvious that he was not wanted in whatever process of grief she was going through the motions of. He understood that and he wasn't upset about it.
So what, then?
Maybe he was feeling surprise. It was hard to tell these days if it wasn't straight-cut annoyance or guilt.
He frowned down at the brown liquid, picking the glass up and knocking a swallow back. The smooth burn was nice, despite the fact that he would never get a buzz off of it. Pity. As Gabriel, he had never drank. The most he had was wine and never more than two glasses. He had behaved like such an old woman.
Habits he picked up from his mother, Sylar could say now with certainty. She had been his main source of socialization. It was bound to rub off, no matter how negative it had been.
He ground the heels of his hands against his eye sockets. Not even the memory of his mother could rile him up anymore. Funny how the decimated life of a person he would hunted have in any other universe now incited more emotion out of him than his own flesh and blood. Not as though his flesh and blood were anything worth a damn. A rotten group of the mentally insane, all of them.
That, however, made him smirk. Him accusing others of being certifiable. Right. He had no place to judge, but it wasn't like the right-and-wrong on the politically correct scales would influence any of his decisions.
Screw them. Screw all of them. The law-abiding hypocrites, the spying yet somehow safety-procuring government, the ignorant preachers, the brutal loved ones.
He swallowed the rest of his glass then, biting back the cough that threatened. Claire would soldier on herself and in the meantime he would leave her be. It was what she wanted, right?
He held up his hand for another round.