Disclaimer; Nope, don't own. Sorry.
The Games We Play
The first instinct is to run.
Fight or flight. It's something that's embedded in us, whether we want it there or not. We fight. Or we run. Oh, of course, there's the usual dilly-dallying around in-between, with a thick curtain of morals and rights thrust around our heads with a suffocating air about it, but in the end that's what it boils down to. You either flee like a coward or stand up for yourself like a fool. In either case, your life is on the line.
Unfortunately, Mohinder has chosen the latter. That is, he's chosen to run.
The darkness is as suffocating as the aforementioned morals, blanketing the geneticist as he runs through the maze of trees and stark bushes, distinctly without foliage. These aren't evergreen, for sure, and its winter and so the fresh green of the forest cannot camouflage him from the predator that pursues him, weaving blindly through, skeletal branches whipping and grabbing at a bare torso like monstrous fingers and snagging in Mohinder's hair. One such limber branch snaps back to scratch across his cheek, spilling blood.
Unfortunately for him, the overpowering scent of it is enough to send the beast into a frenzy.
His breath is loud in his ears, and his muscles burn, needing oxygen even though he's sucking it in like crazy to increase his speed, desperate to make it out of the woods and into the assumed safety of civilisation. And all the while, there's the feeling of something ominous breathing down his neck, the increasingly fast footsteps indicating that Mohinder's stalker is gaining on him, hot on the trail of his scent.
It's only then does he notice that the woods are silent as the grave. No wind howls between the boughs. No animal rustles in the safety of its nest. And he continues running, blind, unable to see, surrounded in nameless shapes and shadows.
Tripping over a fallen branch Mohinder lands on his chest, the breath knocked out of him, leaving him wheezing on the ground with his face pressed against the moist earth. The whites of his eyes are visible to the beast, stark and wide with fear... as if the stench of the latter isn't enough for the predator to know.
"I've found you." The beast says simply, voice filled with a dark amusement and an odd kind of elation, elation that causes adrenaline to pump through Mohinder's veins. "You can't run forever. I'll always find you." The hot, rough pad of a thumb presses to the tender wound on the geneticists' cheek, tracing it carefully and he flinches. It stings, but it isn't the pain that he's flinching away from.
"Mohinder... come home."
That voice... it's so very persuasive. Deep and dark and promising, and instead of being filled with anger at Mohinder's near-escape, it's merely amused. As if this is all a game of cat and mouse. Mohinder knows that he can't win. He can't escape. And yet he continues to play this little game of theirs, this strange race to see if his captor will come for him after the evening's pleasure. "I don't have a choice, do I?" He murmurs, resigned.
"No. But yet you run anyway." Sylar cocks his head to one side, a smile twitching onto his lips. Not that Mohinder can see it in the overpowering darkness, but it's apparent in his captors' voice.
Strong arms lift up the Indian from his resting-place on the ground, and the heat of a chest to his back reminds him that running now is utterly pointless. Foolish. And the warm tickle of breath on his uninjured cheek only serves to point out to poor clueless Mohinder that their little arrangement is... agreeable. Mutual.
"Yet you still play this game with me." Husky words in his ear that curl around his brain like some kind of drug, and Mohinder leans back into that hold, drowsy. "Yet you still love me." The closeness and the persuasive tone of Sylar's voice causes Mohinders sense of right and wrong to become encased in a heady fog, gooseflesh rising on the nude, chilled flesh of his torso.
Sylar... always knows which buttons to press. What to say. What to do. Sylar is a god.
And so what can Mohinder do but give in?