Disclaimer: If you recognise it, I don't own it.

AN: A short one off between working on Four Months Later. Takes place after An Invisible Thread, after Sylar gets his memories back.

First

Sylar never gets to have a first time with Claire.

Because he's still here. And his memories, his first time with Claire bleeds through, and Sylar can't staunch the bleeding, no matter what he does.

This is the first time Sylar's hands do what his have done. The first time Sylar's eyes fix on hers as she gasps. It's Sylar she takes vindictive pleasure in breaking with lust, and this is different, because there was never this power play with him, and Sylar almost welcomes the loss of control because she never demanded this of him. This was never important for her. Not with him. He wanted this to be cruel. Wanted hatred to war with lust. And it is, and it does, but he can't stop touching her the way he did, the way he remembers doing so many times after that first mistake.

It's almost the way he wanted it when he slit Nathan's throat. He wanted Claire to rage at him, scream at him, hurt him the way he hurt her. He expected her blows to turn to savage kisses and hate-fuelled, violent sex. He was looking forward to it. But then Matt Parkman filled his head with Nathan Petrelli and Sylar found something he hadn't expected. Hadn't suspected, even.

He found Mexico.

And how after they'd sworn they would never. Never ever. How one lapse had turned into two, and their mistake had become one they couldn't stop making, and how at some point they'd understood that it couldn't count as a mistake anymore. How they'd just given up trying to stop. Settled into their strange love. A stolen kiss for good luck is the last memory Nathan has of Claire before he goes to face Sylar.

After that, his memories become theirs.

And Sylar can't stop the bleeding.

He touches her the wrong way and memories flood them of lazy, sweet afternoons, of sweat in his hair and on her lips, of the way she trusted him, the way he loved her differently from all the others, and the tears in Claire's eyes are all the vengeance Nathan Petrelli needs.

"I can't," he says, can't help doing this. But she knows.

Sylar is Nathan's ghost.

Forgive me, he said in Mexico – to his Saviour, his mother, his daughter, Sylar never knows which.

"Forgive me," Claire says to the dead man.

And her arms come up around him, and he kisses salt off her eyelashes.

This is not their first time.