Written for a challenge table I found somewhere.
I don't own. Wish I did.
002. Eternal
When ten years pass, no one really notices. Buildings grow taller and rainforests disappear and the earth gets a little warmer.
When twenty years pass, most people have already forgotten the past. Everything has changed. Cars are flying and people are evil and manipulative and don't care.
By the time a hundred years has passed, there is almost no one left to remember how things were. The ones who remain are generally too old to care and were too young to remember what it was like.
Change is natural. It is how humans evolved into the dominant species on earth, and it is how we will continue to evolve, possibly into something much greater. Change is inevitable.
But in the hundred, two hundred, three hundred years that pass, something must remain from the old days, right? Something always remains.
–
He closes his eyes in Odessa, Texas and opens them in New York City. Even knowing how things were, knowing they were the same as they had been the last dozen or so times he'd been there, he was still surprised by the city.
What had once been one of the busiest cities in the world, had now been reduced to nothing. Skyscrapers as far as the eye could see were abandoned and deteriorating. The once sleepless city was dead and this fact still shocked Peter, each and every time he saw it. He could still remember, with perfect clarity, what the city had once been.
Each step he took echoed with startling loudness. Every few steps, one of his boots would splash down into a puddle of murky acid rain.
It was cold. He didn't remember it being this cold last time.
He walked for perhaps a minute more before he found himself in Kirby Plaza once more. It had been… nearly twenty years since he had last been there.
Kirby Plaza stood completely out of place in it's time. Everything was exactly as it had been the first time he'd been there, the time he'd nearly destroyed New York. Over three hundred years previous. In that time, the world had changed. But Kirby Plaza hadn't. No destruction had fallen upon the once busy market, as though there had always been someone there protecting it.
Looking to the sky, he knew there was little time. The Plaza was empty for the moment, but as soon as the sun set, things would change again.
A strange feeling suddenly came over him. Reflexes kicking in, he quickly turned and threw blue fire at the figure behind him. He wasn't quick enough to dodge the electricity that was sent at him moments before he recognized the presence.
Sparks ran through him for a never ending moment. He couldn't help but let out a laugh as the last spark exited his body with remarkable pain.
"Hello Peter," his opponent said, as an invisible force flung him into a pillar.
"Sylar," Peter greeted curtly, smirking as the stone crumbled around his enemy.
This was child's play and both quickly grew tired of it. Both dialed it up, inflicting more pain than was probably necessary.
They didn't fight because they hated each other. No. They'd given up on hate long ago. Life was far too long to hold grudges.
No. They fought for the sake of fighting. They fought, partially because it was familiar. It was the one constant in the ever changing world they could not escape.
And they fought, partially hoping it would be the last time. Hoping that this time, they would kill each other one last time and it would finally stick.
It was perhaps half an hour later that Peter found himself lying on the ground with Sylar a foot or so away. Both were exhausted beyond belief, covered in blood and wounds that healed all too quickly. Blood was spattered over the Plaza, scorch marks lines the walls and various smaller structured had been reduced to rubble. Peter had the sneaking suspicion it would all be back the way it was in the morning.
Both lay there for what feels like eternity, wishing for eternity to end, wishing for death to finally come.