Disclaimer: I own nothing, lord I wish I did. Only the original character(s) are mine.
This basically starts after "Exposed". So far there is only one difference to mention, Sylar didn't meet Luke.
This my first attempt at this so please review!! Many thanks and enjoy :)
Chapter 1
He was like a statue perched on the edge of the ancient mattress. The room they had placed him in remained generic as he made silent comparisons with all of the motels he had stayed in over the last year. On the highway he had passed a sign displaying an easily recognizable symbol; a sleeping man tucked neatly into a bed. Nearing the exit he debated the danger associated with staying in one place too long, even if it was just a night…or two… at the most.
Upon arriving at Samson Grays' home to find it empty there had been no reason to think that Government Agents, or Military Swat as the case may be, would already have been there waiting to ambush him. Sylar was not a man who could be easily surprised, but their presence had momentarily startled and distracted him to the point where they had gained fleeting success in wrangling him. Of course, he had easily dispatched them keeping only one alive to interrogate.
Agent Simpson…no Simmons. Daniel.
The man deserved a nod for loyalty as he gave up not one piece of useful information while Sylar went from limb to limb shocking him with just enough voltage to have him screaming in agony. When Sylar cut off two of his fingers the man called out to God to help him. Sylar had scoffed at him then. For more than 24 hours he took Agent Simmons apart, figuring out who he was, but not one iota of knowledge concerning his father was to be found in the inner workings of the agents mind. He left the body limp and useless on the living room recliner in Samson's home, after which he just started walking.
The lights in his room remained unused and the curtains drawn which casted a sickly yellow glow throughout the already squalid space. At the foot of the bed, in a crumpled mass, lay a black button down shirt and black slacks, buried beneath which were a pair of black shoes. An inconvenient spattering of blood had set in and left darker than dark stains, making the outfit almost impossible to wear again. He pushed out the sigh caught at the back of his throat and cringed at the uninvited memory of his mother telling him that he should wear green more often to bring out the brown of his eyes.
The temperature outside was a mild 79 degrees, but inside the room Sylar had the air conditioning cranked up as high as it would go. With most of his clothing on the floor in a bloody pile the gray tank top and black boxers he wore did little to fend off goose bumps as they started popping up on his arms and chest. A shiver cut through him as he allowed his body to free fall back onto the undisturbed comforter and pillows. While staring up at the ceiling he permitted his mind to wander.
A year ago he was a quiet watchmaker, a lonely nobody, Gabriel Gray. Had anyone taken the time to pay attention they would have realized that Gabriel had once been an unassuming, sweet, thoughtful, intelligent, shy man full of dreams, starved of approval, and of love. His awkwardness and childlike innocence provided the perfect breeding ground for high expectations when Chandra Suresh had found him, talking about abilities and being special. Gabriel had been so pleased and excited. He longed to feel validated in his excessive yearning to be not just different, but better. His mother, though loving in certain aspects of her parenting abilities, had always made Gabriel feel like he wasn't enough. No matter what he did she just wouldn't see him for him, and his father…the fact that he left told Gabriel all he needed to know about how the man felt regarding his son. After having been invisible for all of his life he thought this was his opportunity to be seen. The hunger his yet unrealized ability stimulated would soon propagate in him a feeling to replace the sentiment he had always been deprived of, acceptance.
At first, Gabriel had not realized the implications of what was happening to him. He didn't have an ability that was easily demonstrated. Gabriel had in fact assumed his talent for fixing watches and understanding their complexities was merely that, a talent. Suresh had wrongly assumed that each ability would take on some form of physical manifestation, and when Gabriel had failed to deliver Suresh decided to give up. Under the influence of rejection fueled resentment, he accused Suresh of betraying him. And he did feel betrayed. Once outside on the street, he realized he held in his hand the post-it note with the address of another "special" person, as Suresh had called him. Gabriel had wanted only to call the man, tell him to beware of Dr. Suresh, and that he wasn't going to help him just lie to him. Sylar remembered how he had gripped the receiver so tight, constricting his hand around it as the wheels turned in his head convincing himself that it would be better to explain all of it to the man in person.
Once he killed the telekinetic Brian Davis, Gabriel experienced something he never dreamed of. To look into a person's brain and know everything about them, what made them tick, he felt like a god. He took his first power that day, and by the next had allowed the guilt to nearly destroy him. The old saying that power corrupts had never been more true than in Gabriel's case. He had started out as an innocent and could have been saved. Tragically, Elle decided to follow orders rather than her heart. It was a mistake that so many have since paid the price for.
Part of him wanted to believe that he was exactly just what his mother had always told him he was, that she might finally have been proud…if she were alive. In the very beginning he remembered having been so distraught at what he feared becoming, but his exceptional ability of intuitive aptitude inspired a sense of entitlement, an unquenchable desire to understand everything. Knowledge, after all, is power and he wanted power. He fought with himself for control, but over time began to savor the exhilaration his ability gifted him. He made himself believe it was a blessing, an overdue debt for all of the self loathing he had lived with that had finally been paid. He convinced himself that the others didn't deserve what they had, so he would take it instead.
If she had just let him die…let the rope strangle the life out of him, everything would be different. Sometimes Sylar wished she had just turned around and walked out the door. It would have hurt much less never having known her instead of letting himself trust her and be grateful for her. He had thought he'd made an actual friend. A betrayal like the one Elle visited upon Gabriel was the kind that hollowed a person out for a time. But the moment he hung the rope around his neck and kicked out the chair he knew he was already hollow, unable to feel anything but emptiness. Knowing he had only been a mark, an assignment for her, it had caused a chain reaction that solidified the self destructive fear that he wasn't good enough…that he really didn't have anything or anyone except for the ability he had killed for.
The rareness of his own ability was a topic that he had never given much thought. It wasn't even until the Angela and Arthur debacle that he began to understand what his true ability was. So much time had been spent finding others like him and taking their gifts that he never considered exactly how or why he could do the things he did. Truthfully he avoided thinking about any of it. His hell was surely not a private one, but there was no reason to ponder over a stranger that might be experiencing the same sort of horror, the same hunger that he endured and in the end submitted to. The hardest thoughts were the ones that told him that if there was someone out there like him and they were able to retain their anonymity, then that person was certainly not on a killing spree to steal abilities. Gabriel never wanted to become Sylar. He never even considered that a man like Sylar could be living inside of him filling with rage and heartlessness just waiting to be on the outside. The part of him that was still Gabriel despaired over the thought of someone else having control over something he had no will to wield. The other part, Sylar, would have liked nothing more than to find the ability doppelganger, crack open their skull and find out what would make them so similar yet so different.
Now, lying in an unfamiliar room surrounded by stale air and near silence, save for the buzz of the AC, doubt crept it's way through him. His ability was extraordinary. To have access to the sort of knowledge that sat at Gabriel's fingertips was a power that only God should have. Sylar, however, was all but positive that God had turned a blind eye to him a long time ago. In the end, Gabriel lived with the cursed knowledge that part of him enjoyed being a monster.
***
The worst part about being alone was that there was no one to laugh with when life produced a rare funny moment. Olivia had always loved to laugh, since she was a child her laughter bounced off the walls and ceilings of her modest home. She hadn't been alone there; people had loved her and protected her there. But as all children do, Olivia grew up and moved away. Freedom, independence, self reliance…these were all words she had used to convince herself that one of life's greatest moments was the day she moved out on her own. Something she had thought about, indeed banked on, was how being on one's own was just another way of saying being alone.
Olivia lived in a small apartment building a few miles from Rutgers University. It wasn't a lively part of the city which had been one of the draws for her. Even after a year she hadn't decorated the apartment with any personal touches, no pictures, no artwork, nothing. The only things she had really unpacked were her books which waited, staked haphazardly all throughout the limited space, to be placed on a proper book shelf. She stood in the middle of her living/dinning room looking down at a pile of fiction fantasy novels. Stacked at the bottom were a few of the Harry Potter books. She half smiled to herself remembering how she stood in line at midnight to get her copy of the fifth book in the series.
She looked up at the window and tried to stare through the fog of dirt and debris that had caked itself onto the outside of the glass. It was sunny but not hot, thankfully. Running the air conditioner cost a small fortune, one she didn't have. Her job running a cash register during third shift at the local all hours supermarket paid barely enough to keep up with rent and food. The only view she had from her window was another building. Across the way she could make out a woman standing on the balcony of her apartment holding a baby dressed in a yellow onesy. She watched them, briefly wondering the woman's' name, and whether the baby might be a boy or girl. The child kept trying to grab a fistful of mommy's hair while she tickled its feet. Taking a deep breath Olivia crossed her arms and closed her eyes, turning away from the window and peering back into her near empty apartment. She had made no attempt to involve herself into the local community, had no friends and didn't speak to anyone unless spoken to first. It wasn't that she didn't want to make friends, she was just…hesitant.
Social grace had never been a talent of hers, and she didn't care much for large groups of people, they made her nervous. When she decided the year before to not only move out of her parents home, but to another state, she knew that making friends would be very difficult for her. Throughout childhood she had retained a small group of friends that she held dear and would have done, and often did, most anything for. They were people she knew from as young as the age of five, when things were much easier, before insecurity became a part of her vocabulary. Over time they moved away, off to college or to get married…and finally it had been her turn. She was never one to let people in, with the exception of her mother. It's accurate to say that she would bend over backwards to help a friend, but Olivia didn't make new ones easily. Most people didn't have the time or energy to climb over the walls she had put up to keep out the public at large. Then one day the public at large was all she could feel inside and making a new friend seemed an even more ridiculous endeavor.
Nobody knew she had stayed up every night during the two weeks before she left simply unable to fall asleep. She sat in her childhood bedroom staring at boxes that had slowly been filling with her belongings, and would curl around herself trying to keep everything inside right where it was, and keep anything foreign from getting in. Leaving would be hard, she knew that, heard it in her head every single day. Olivia felt safe there in her blue and yellow bedroom with the curtains blowing and the wind purring its vibrations as it passed invisible through the screen.
Her thoughts had begun to linger on the one thing she tried hardest to ignore…she quietly referred to it as her "quirk". She spoke to no one about it, indeed rarely allowed herself to think about it. The strange way her heart would accelerate when she passed through the living room as her father watched his favorite sports team lose, or how a visit with her 4 month old niece would put her in a mood so airy that she thought she might float away. The day her mothers dog had died Olivia thought she was going to throw up and die from sadness at the same time. Tina, her mother, had loved that dog for all 13 years of its yappy little life; Olivia had hated the cotton ball Pomeranian.
She knew it wasn't something everyone experienced which left her with no option except to ignore whenever it happened. But, Olivia was a bright person, not ignorant enough to think everything about her had remained unchanged. Empathy wasn't a foreign word to her considering the cherished collection of books she had accumulated over the years. She learned what little she could from books about psychics and mind readers seeking only to comfort her fears about what might be happening to her.
She had waited a year after noticing her "quirk" before making the final push at moving away. She decided on Jersey because it was far enough away to inhibit frequent visits from her family…but not too far in case she needed to go home. She could have gone anywhere and been invisible, but Newark had kind of jumped off the map at her, so that's where she went.
Olivia grabbed at her purse setting atop her only table searching for a pack of cigarettes she knew where buried somewhere beneath the junk. She reached down to the bottom feeling for the distinctive square box when she felt a sharp pinch on the tip of her ring finger. She yanked her hand out in surprise and examined the skin for any sign of a wound. A small drop of blood had formed on the tip near the nail and she moved to run it under the faucet before attempting to cover the awkward spot with a band aid. The water ran cool over her skin and trickled down to her wrist sending a small shiver up her arm. The shiver continued to travel into her shoulder making its way into her chest where it gained intensity and momentum spreading out through all of her limbs. She froze, the sensation being unmistakable.
In the year she spent living in the building she had become accustomed to the unique emotional climate of her surroundings. It was like tasting frosting without eating the cake, even thought she wasn't exactly absorbing the emotions she still felt something, just not in as much detail. She found that pushing back at the emotions as they tried to make their way inside formed a sort of layer between her and everyone else. She often thought of herself as being surrounded by a swarm of bees buzzing around waiting to get their stinger through her skin. Yet no matter the force she pushed with, when something changed she knew it right away, like a vibration in a force field.
What went through her as she rinsed her wounded finger was something she wasn't able to identify right away. She struggled to categorize what she was feeling and finally it dawned on her…determination, aggravation, anxiousness...and it was coming from more than one person. The feelings grew stronger with each passing second, panic began to snake through her limbs trying to lock them into place leaving her unable to move, but she was stronger than that. At the time she wouldn't have been able to explain it, but she was used to that. She just knew in that instant that she needed to get out of her apartment, right away! Not even bothering to turn off the water, but clever enough to snatch up her purse she scrambled for the window, knocking over several stacks of books in her haste. She yanked it open and the wood gave a stubborn moan as she forced it up as far as it would go. The fire escape led right to the alley below, four stories down. Olivia was never one for heights but tried to make the best of it by glancing up to the sky and remembering what a nice day it was outside. She heard a number of heavy footsteps in the hallway maybe three doors down. With one longing stare at the only possessions she was sad to lose she closed the window and started down the escape. A second later her door flew open and Government Agents entered, guns raised to an empty apartment.
***
Mohinder awoke to an increasingly intense itch on his nose that had been plaguing him over the last two days. His head hung down and the waves in his hair stuck to the slimy layer of perspiration that had gathered on his skin. The muscles in his neck ached beyond belief so he had abandoned constant attempts at keeping it held up hours ago. His back was curved at such an inhuman angle it felt like he might never stand upright again. Squeezing his eyes shut as hard as he could, he tried to picture any place in the world but his cell in building 26. Hiro Nakamura could teleport, and for an instant Mohinder wished his ability had been the same. While his enhanced strength and agility proved an invaluable asset in recent weeks, months even, it had been no help during the two hours he spent pulling at his chains the day before. He was sure that if he could just get them free from the floor whatever resistance waited for him outside the cell could be handled. For the time being however he remained perfectly still, covered in sweat, exhausted, itchy…and scared. Too many images continued running through his mind in a blur giving him not one moment of peace, as if he could find peace with his arms cuffed to a metal rod.
No matter what distraction he attempted to conjure he could not stop thinking about all of them; Matt, Daphne, Molly, Peter… He was racked with guilt. His silence concerning what he was now positive would be the greatest threat they had ever faced, was not some sort of attempt at hiding anything from his friends, especially something that would affect all of them in the ways it already had. What he said to Matt had been the absolute truth. Not for one second had he believed what Noah told him. He never thought that what was happening now, could ever happen.
My mistake.
The United States Government using anti-terrorism based laws to lock up innocent people out of fear, out of some misguided attempt to imprison the enemy before there was even really an enemy to imprison…it was never a possibility in Mohinder's mind. Then yesterday Nathan made it very clear that it is real, it is happening, and they would succeed. The video of Daphne strapped to a gurney was meant to soften him, play on his emotions, and it had worked too well. The entire night, while waiting for some form of unconsciousness to find him, he could do nothing but dwell on the recent past. If only he hadn't injected himself, if only he could have saved poor Nikki, if only he had been able to kill Sylar when he had the chance, if only he had believed his father, gone with him to New York before it all started maybe he could have…but his thoughts trailed off as he realized none of that mattered anymore. The worry over his declining physical condition, guilt about loosing the cure for Nikki, the cowardice he carried with him over letting a monster live…all of it was secondary to what now engulfed him.
They weren't animals to be locked up in a cage and altered. Every person with an ability was born with what they have, with the exception of a handful of people. A sneer stuck to his lips as he thought of how ironic life could be. Nathan was one of those people not born with the genetic mutation that caused abilities, His ability was synthetic. And yet he would be the one to destroy them. What Mohinder called irony, Nathan would most certainly say was his destiny.
Mohinder's arm twitched causing the chains to rattle against the smooth concrete floor. He gritted his teeth at the noise as it had endlessly mocked him during the two hours he pulled and yanked at them with all of his strength. It was not a noise he ever wanted to hear again in his life, if he was given the chance to have a life.
Nathan's offer to him echoed in his head, driving him to the brink of frustration. If he helped Nathan with the scientific aspect of his plans then Mohinder could have at least a small amount of freedom, they surely wouldn't continue to keep him locked in a room chained to the floor. But then he would just be letting himself be used, again. He was not unaware of the fact that even though he was one of the people targeted by Nathan's plans, he was valuable. The Company had known it, and Nathan knew it too. Without him, Nathan could never hope to implement phase two of his plan. Mohinder knew that rationalizing a reason to work for the Government as they hunted down his friends and put them in boxes without windows was the last thing he should be doing. But all he had ever wanted to do was help these people. And despite his now being one of them, his strongest asset had always been his background in genetics. He was quite possibly the only scientist on the planet that could attempt to do what Nathan was asking.
A murmur of voices started in the hall outside a second before the door to his cell swung open. A welcomed breeze brushed the back of his neck and he sighed. Nobody said anything and Mohinder wondered if his door hadn't just been left open to taunt him, show him how confident they were that he wouldn't be able to escape. But a few seconds later the click of an expensive pair of shoes against polished concrete could be heard coming down the hallway. The shoes rounded the corner and walked right up to him. Mohinder glanced sideways at the shiny leather, not a scuff on them, they were perfect. A trickle of sweat escaped his matted hair and slid into the corner of his eye stinging him enough to bring tears. He knew who had come to see him for the second time in two days, and he knew what he wanted. Mohinder had about 15 seconds to make a decision that would inevitably affect everything.