You already know I'm not Kripke, so why would you think I'm Tim Kring? Honestly.
AN: So, it's only been a few weeks that 'Heroes' season 2 has been showing on the BBC, and the third one, my sister jumped up and pointed at the screen and yelled: "HEY! That's the kid in Asylum!' and thus this fic was born. Title from Oasis.
The roads we have to walk are winding
Sometimes, the boy who was once called Gavin thinks that it he'd just kept quiet about the asylum, his parents would never have moved them all to California.
On the other hand – their son can fly. What's a ruin full of ghosts compared to that?
He has nightmares, sometimes, about the man with the horn-rimmed glasses, about being in the asylum with him, about ghosts with their faces torn away holding him down while the man does – something to him. He can never quite remember those parts.
The smart-ass in him tells himself that's just a defense mechanism, a way to cope.
Occasionally, Claire is there too, watching as they tear him apart, laughing as he screams and struggles. She reminds him of Kat sometimes; but where Kat was open, friendly, fun-loving, he's only seen glimpses of that in Claire. There are edges to her, sharp corners he could cut himself on. She's wary, closed-off, distrustful of him even though they are essentially the same in their differences.
But then he catches a glimpse, a flicker, a snippet of the girl she's meant to be, and every time, he falls a little further.
When it's really bad, when it all gets too much, when he's woken from a nightmare screaming and sweating and he can't bear to live like this anymore, when he feels trapped and smothered and buried under so many secrets he can't even see daylight, has trouble remembering which of his names is really his own… that's when he finds a quiet place to sit, and pulls out his cell phone.
He tells himself it's stupid, it's childish, they've changed their numbers by now, forgotten about him, would laugh at him if he tried to tell them what's happened to him since they saved him the way they did.
And yet. And still. He sits, and scrolls through his contacts list till he finds the number, a long string of digits identified as theirs only by two simple initials.
Hello?
Hey, it's Gavin. From Illinois? The asylum? I know you probably don't remember…
Sure I do. The kid with the shotgun-wielding girlfriend. How you two doin'?
Well, I… not so good. We live in Cali now, actually, and well, something's… something's going on.
Our kind of something?
Hard to say.
You'll have to give me your address, kid.
He sits, and stares at the tiny screen, the string of numbers, the two letters. He never presses the call button, though. Just imagining the conversation is comfort enough.