I think… I'd like to try something different with you
And All the Stars Fell Down
By adlyb
Disclaimer: I own nothing, except these words.
AN: Hey. This took a while. I've just finished my other project, so I thought I'd try some more fic. This is a sequel to "Alone in the Night" and "Broken". It's going to run at least five or six chapters, and should be very fun. Enjoy.
I think… I'd like to try something different with you.
At first she hopes he'll at least have the decency to kill her.
His embrace is intimate. It makes her uncomfortable. When was the last time a man had held her? West? She doesn't really remember.
What she does remember is that she is ready to die. Her mission is complete, and she is ready for it all to be over. It has to be over. Because if it isn't, she doesn't know what she'll do with herself.
So much of her life up until this point has been devoted to finding and killing Mohinder Suresh. So much of her life spent with her rage, keeping company with her anguish until the feelings were living things, burrowing into her heart like maggots, clanging against her skull, a steady, hammering beat.
Without the distraction of her revenge, so large and looming that everything else was blocked out, she begins to notice what she never felt before: the weight of taking human lives, hanging off her shoulders. She looks at her manicured hands and they look red (the crimson seas incarnadine). But inside, nothing.
And now that it is over, she is tired. So tired.
Sylar wraps his arms around her, and she is ready to meet the end. Her eyes meet his, and she thinks she sees understanding there. For just a moment, she thinks he'll do as she wishes.
But this is Sylar, and he very, very rarely follows anyone else's plans.
That is when she begins to feel sick. Sick, because she realizes, right before Mohinder's apartment is gone, just gone, that he really does want to try something different with her.
She doesn't like it one bit.
…………………………………………….
The transition from one location to the next is like flipping on a light switch. So fast, no one could follow it. Except, she suspects, Sylar.
She doesn't know where they are. The walls aren't blank and the room isn't bare, but it is so nondescript, so unassuming, that she doubts she'd remember it if she were to leave now.
It's the perfect hideout for a man like Sylar.
"You're much quieter than I thought you would be," he tells her as he steps back.
The way he looks at her gives her the creeps. Like there are bugs crawling under her skin.
She doesn't respond. Does her best not to shiver when he circles around her, so that he's standing behind her, as she feels him approach her, until he is so close she can feel his breath graze across her ear as he speaks. His low voice sets the hairs on the back of her neck on end.
"Now, now, Claire. I wouldn't have gone through the trouble of bringing you here if I thought you weren't going to play nice."
He is mocking her.
She snaps. Turns on her heels and jabs a finger at his chest.
"Don't fucking toy with me, Sylar!"
He laughs, and it's the most horrible sound she's ever heard. Horrible, because he thinks this is funny.
She doesn't.
"Just do it, okay?" Her voice is tiny.
And suddenly, the laughter stops. He seems sincere when he looks at her. When his brows knit together as he studies her face.
"What exactly am I supposed to do?" he asks. He is so calm.
For just a moment she closes her eyes and she pretends. Pretends that this isn't what it is. That she is still sixteen years old and the world is still the way it's supposed to be. That she still has the luxury of kissing her father goodnight and going to late-night parties, even if they do occasionally end with her death. From where she is standing, it actually sounds pretty good.
And that's the problem: where she is standing. Because from where she is standing, she doesn't want to live anymore. She wants to be put down. She wants to stop, just stop, and be allowed to rest. To be at peace. Somehow, even knowing what death by Sylar's hands would mean, even knowing that she would be relinquishing her power to him, she doesn't care.
The only thing she cares for is to put an end to the hollow feeling in her chest. The sense that what she has done in the name of revenge should have bothered her more than it did. That the remorse she should have been feeling isn't there. It's this lack of guilt, lack of fear or any other normal reaction to death (murder) which frightens her so, so much. She's a monster.
She realizes that he is still waiting for an answer. An answer she is sure he already knows. An answer she's going to give him anyway.
Claire looks up into his black, black eyes and, with a steady voice and a raised chin, tells him, "Well, you're supposed to kill me."
…………………………………………….
"I'm supposed to kill you?"
"Yes."
"That's sort of arrogant, don't you think, Claire? Assuming that I even want your power?"
His words make her doubt herself. All these years… All these years spent hiding. First from Sylar, then from the Company, then Sylar all over again.
She remembers the dream, the dream where she is running towards Mohinder, and she's so close, so close, to him, the gun in her hand, ready to shoot, to rend, to tear, that when Sylar's hands close around her arms, all she feels is despair. In fact, she remembers every dream after that, because after that dream, there were very, very few. She remembers seeing him there, for the first time since that night in New York City, remembers realizing that she had failed. Failed because Sylar wanted her blood, and what Sylar wanted, Sylar got.
Claire's eyes narrow into slits as she glares at him (weighing him). He is calm. Flippant. And he is lying. She's sure of it.
The knowledge makes her blood boil.
She wants to get in his face about it. Wants to do something to unnerve him, push him over the edge (make him kill her so he'll stop playing this sick game with her).Get it over with. After all, he'll get his and she'll get hers. Call it even.
Sylar is only inches away from her. Too close, crowding her. Now it's time for her to crowd him.
She gets up on her tiptoes. In her too tall heels, she's almost eye-level with him.
His eyebrows raise as she leans in close. She can see his eyes lose focus, notices the way he leans toward her, and she's right there-
She slaps him, hard over his sensitive ears. Takes a sucker-punch to his nose when he clamps a hand over the side of his face.
Claire gets the reaction she is hoping for.
Faster than her brain is able to process, Sylar has her against the nearest wall. One moment she is inches away from him, the next, she is ten feet away. Pinned and helpless, prepped for death. Just the way Sylar likes it (she's seen the pictures).
He comes at her, and she sees murder on his face.
She just laughs. Notices with satisfaction that she's drawn blood. It's all over, smeared along his mouth, his jaw, blurring the details of his face. His nose is probably broken. Victory is hers. He'll have no choice but to kill her now. Sylar was never a patient man. She can't fathom him keeping her around when an instant fix is so readily available.
"Wish you had my power now, don't you?" she taunts when he makes no further moves, just stands there, looking at her.
He turns away from her then, and she watches with interest as his shoulders work, as she hears the crunchy, popping noise of him resetting the bone (a sound she knows well).
"I already told you," he calls back over his shoulder, as he starts moving toward the door, "I don't want your power."
"I don't believe you!"
Her voice is shrill as she yells back at him, before he lets the invisible bands drop from around her wrists and ankles and she is slumping against the wall. Defeated.
…………………………………………….
He leaves her alone for awhile, and she doesn't know what to do with herself. She spends the first hour waiting for him to come back and kill her. The second hour she spends sulking. For the third hour, she ignores her stomach's grumbles and wills herself to die. Shuts her eyes, folds her hands over her stomach, and lies like Sleeping Beauty, hoping the prince will never wake her up.
After the third hour, she gets impatient and decides to explore.
She tugs off her shoes, tiptoes to the door, patting herself on the back for the stealthy way her clothes whisper when she moves.
Sylar isn't the only way to die. She has lots of other options.
For example, she could fall on a tree branch. Or stick a piece of glass into her skull. The memory of her dead uncle fills Claire with unpleasant longing. She wonders if she'd be here if he'd survived Kirby Plaza. If he had ever come back to her.
So she hastens over the memory, and bets that all she has to do to in order to die is destroy her brain. It had been easy enough as a teenager.
Claire peeks out the door. There's a long hallway, with padded white carpet, just outside. She checks to see if the coast is clear. Left. Right. Her captor isn't here, and she's ready to bolt for the exit just ahead. She hopes it's the front door.
She's still considering the how-to's of dying when you're indestructible when Sylar steps back into view.
Something about his posture jogs her memory. He's leaning casually against the doorframe, blocking her exit, dressed in that damn inky black coat from earlier, his white teeth sinking into a green apple with a sickening crack. It reminds her of a portrayal of the devil in an old movie she'd seen as a child. She'd watched it with her father, on the couch in the house that no longer exists… Tears form in her eyes, and she curses herself for her weakness.
"Feeling sentimental, Claire?" His sympathetic tone is a farce. He's mocking her again.
She hates him a little bit more for it, wants to die just a little bit faster; her revenge died with Mohinder. Without him, without the thought of that kill pushing her forward, she feels frail, frightened. She misses her father.
"Why don't you just kill me already?" she snaps at him.
He laughs at her.
"Because I don't feel like it."
"You don't feel like it? Fuck! What have I been afraid of for? What did I spend my adolescence running from you for? So you can torture me with your stupid comments? Ugh!"
He's up in her face, his eyes dark and intense.
"I don't want your power, Claire."
Her voice is very low when she speaks.
"I don't believe you."
He pulls away, just a little bit, to look at her.
"Why not? Have I ever lied to you before, Claire?"
She takes the moment to look at him, to watch him as her blood simmers beneath her skin and her fingers start itching for her gun. She so wants to kill him, so wants to do him worse than she did this morning, when she lashed out at him.
That's when she notices.
His nose.
His nose is fixed. Perfect. Unblemished.
Claire screams, and faints.
…………………………………………….
She wakes up and it's dark. She's not in the same room she was in before.
It's not a bare, asylum white room. Doesn't lend itself to picturing her blood smattering the walls poetically when Sylar kills her. It's a different kind of nightmare setting. Dark, the features of the room impossible to make out other than as black, imposing shapes.
At first, she doesn't understand where she is. Doesn't understand the sudden shift in scenery. Then her hands fumble out, and she understands from the feeling of fabric under her hands that she is on a bed.
She gulps, because it must be his bed.
And then, worse, she remembers the how and the why of her newfound surroundings. The how: she passed out. The why: Sylar's nose, clearly broken a few hours ago, was miraculously healed.
Claire flails for understanding. Fights to make sense of what she'd seen. What she did know was that she wasn't dead, so Sylar didn't have her power of regeneration. That only left a few options. Was it possible… She felt sick just considering it… But was it possible that he had killed someone else with her power? She didn't want to imagine it. Didn't want to imagine anyone like her having to experience that kind of death, not when she was willing, not when she was deserving, to die by Sylar's hands.
The wires in her brain begin to spark, and she remembers that horrible dream from all those years ago.
"He could use my blood…" she mumbles to herself. She feels relieved, considering it. Perhaps… Perhaps, somehow, he'd injected himself with some of her blood. He'd been in Mohinder's apartment when she got there… It seems fully possible he'd simply raided Mohinder's fridge, took a sample… Even she feels like it's grasping at straws, though. It's unlikely Mohinder would have had her blood on hand like that.
Claire feels sick. Feels like retching. Needs to empty her stomach. She bolts upright, scrambles towards the edge of the bed, her stomach heaving.
"I'd appreciate it if you didn't throw up on my carpet."
She ignores him.
"Aw, that's disgusting," he grumbles, and she can hear the heavy sound of his hard-soled shoes as he walks towards her. It's uncomfortable, the way he comes and sits by her, puts his hand on her back and pats it. It gives her insight into what this is.
They're two serial killers, alone in an apartment and completely unsure of each other. It's absurd. She doesn't know what exactly he wants with her, and he doesn't know exactly what to do with her. She suspects he never thought this through further than kidnapping her. Stupid man.
"You done?" he asks.
She gets up and wipes her mouth on the back of her sleeve.
"Sure."
He doesn't respond. From the way he keeps his hand on her back, though, she's beginning to get an uneasy idea of what this is. What he wants it to be.
"Way to go, Claire," she whispers, so quiet her words are almost mute, her lips barely twitching.
His eyebrows raise, and she feels that sinking feeling in her stomach again, because he shouldn't have been able to hear that.
Again she feels the need to lean over the side of the bed, empty her already drained stomach. Nothing happens, but she's comforted by the mess she's made on his floor.
He's frowning this time when she resurfaces, and she almost asks him why. Luckily for her pride, he answers her question by asking his own.
"Can you get sick?"
"You would know."
He smirks, and it confirms all of her fears.
"Yeah, I would."
Claire feels satisfied, though, because he obviously doesn't. She braves another look at his nose, and regrets the action. Almost wants to break it again, just to see if it will heal. But part of her, the part that only seems to have reappeared after Mohinder's death, is afraid to confirm her suspicions.
"What are you thinking, Claire?" he asks her.
She doesn't answer in the conventional way. That would be too easy. Claire wants it rough, and Claire wants it hard, and she wants, wants him to lash out at her, because she's still holding out hope. So she snaps her hand out- his hands are around her wrist just as she gets there, collapsing the delicate bones in her wrist- wraps her sharp little fingers around his nose and yanks.
He hollers as she feels the grinding crunch of bone as it crumbles under her hands. He lets go of her wrist and cups his nose. He glares at her, for just a second, before cradling the broken bones and working to set them right.
But Claire has a better idea of what she is doing. She's already standing up, her bones already set, sliding smoothly into place, her shiny silver gun, miraculously still strapped to her hip, already drawn and aimed, by the time he takes his hands away to remove the smooth, clean lines of his unbroken nose.
Sylar isn't expecting the gun. Probably forgot all about it. Stupid thing to do, considering she's a trained assassin.
"Put the gun down, Claire."
She remembers when he killed Eden; she found the files, of course. Bawled her eyes out over that one. She was the first of her friends to disappear. Always nice to her. Power of persuasion, apparently. And Sylar never got his hands on it.
Claire flexes her fingers, shifts the angle of the gun, cocks the trigger. If she twitches her finger, just a hair, her trusty silver handgun, her father's gun, will fire. Then the game will end.
"Claire, put the gun down."
He's getting up, now. His hands are raised in a placating gesture, and he's edging towards her.
She takes a corresponding step back, towards the faint outline of a door. Wonders briefly why he doesn't just use his telekinesis. Maybe he doubts his ability to stop her from shooting the moment she feels those iron straps. She's certain she'd recognize it by now, have time to pull the trigger before he could touch her. Maybe he knows that too.
"Claire-"
"I get it."
"Get what, Claire?"
He's nervous; she can tell.
"Why you don't want to kill me. Why you don't need to kill me. Already killed someone else, huh? I guess that would make killing the cheerleader kind of pointless."
"Yeah. I guess it would." He pauses. "How'd you figure it out?"
She's on to him. Her father trained her to always suspect everyone. To trust no one, not even him. Sylar's just trying to keep her talking, trying to distract her. Looking for an opening, looking for a way to take that gun, pointed directly at her temple, away from her trembling hands.
She ignores his question. Asks her own.
"So, if you don't need me for my power, why did you take me? Why do you care if I blow my brains out? End it all?"
He looks at her.
"You'll just regenerate."
This time, it's her turn to laugh at him.
From the way he's coming at her, she knows she has to get out soon, or he'll be upon her. She knows there's no way she'd win a hand-to-hand confrontation. She has to get out, or she has to shoot, and there are no other options.
She shouldn't have laughed. It tips him off. Tells him that he's wrong. Gives him greater incentive to catch her.
Desperately, Claire tries to distract him.
"Yeah, you're probably right. But you don't care either way, do you? You're no longer interested in my power."
"Is that what this is about? This makes you feel like you're not as special? It shouldn't."
His words are too nice. It's just proof. Proof that she's fallen into some tear in reality, some crazy, alternate dimension where Sylar tries to boost her self-esteem.
She's at the doorway, now. At the door, and she's either going to escape and find some tasteful way to die, some graceful, Ophelia-style suicide, or she's going to go old-fashioned, and let her brains explode onto this intimate stranger's walls.
At the same time, she still wants to know.
"Then I want you to answer my question, Sylar. If you don't want my power, then why do you care that I have this gun pressed to my head? Hmmm?
He is slow to answer. Carefully choosing his words, she thinks.
"Because I have a different plan for you."
"I do, too. Wanna see me execute it?"
He lunges, and her decision is made. At this range, there won't be any digging the bullet out of her brain, no clean save. The mess will splatter, and there won't be any putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
…………………………………………….
He wins. Redirects the path of the gun into a wall, and she's not sure whether it's his telekinesis or him that keeps her down as he takes her gun from her.
It's a profound moment. As devastated as she is by the outcome, she understands that. The gun, the symbol of her revenge, the physical link between her and her father, is severed.
She crumples, and he catches her.
And he's holding her, whispering things in her ear she doesn't understand. All she knows is that she's stuck, stuck with everything she's done the last eight years, and that there will be no escape.
Peter would be so ashamed of her. The errant thought flits across her mind, and for once, she doesn't try to suppress it. God, she misses Peter. Misses feeling like she's not alone, like she's not a freak. Peter was the first person who understood. She blushes, even now, eight years later, because she still recalls the way he would make her heart race, the way she felt about him. Blushes, because, no matter how innocent her feelings for him were, they were wrong. Twisted. Corrupt. Incestuous.
And it was Sylar who brought them together.
She pulls back. She wants to look at him.
He let's her.
His eyes are black and his face is stubbly, and he's evil incarnate. Her match, she thinks. The hell she deserves.
It's when he's holding her that it happens. This… incredible urge to kiss him. To touch his face, his arms. Get under his skin and hold him tight.
He looks at her and smirks, and she knows that she'll stay awake tonight, trying to decipher this moment. But for now she does not think. She doesn't need to. She just responds.
Sylar's lips are upon hers, hard and fast and impossibly hot. Live flames lick up her arms as he runs possessive fingers over her skin. His touch burns her (and she would know- she's the girl who can walk through fire).
His arms are still her prison. She is still trapped.
But now it does not seem so bad. Under the tight pressure of his mouth, the graze of his sharp white teeth, she considers her cowardice, her desire to escape the sudden rush of guilt and remorse and hopeless loneliness her decisions have left her with. Under the weight of his coal black eyes, she wonders if this is hell.
Wonders if this terrible fire she feels burning through her veins will purge her soul.
