"Claire..." he murmured in his sleep, the word escaping his lips like a sigh. It was no longer a name, in the past eight years it had become his mantra. She was the only thing that had propelled him through his endless days. For the first three years of his imprisonment, he found her face in every watch that he fixed. Every watch in New York ticked before him, all in discord, and for the first time in his life he had the ability to fix them all. A few years previously, the watchmaker would have been positively elated to be given all the time in the world to correct erroneous timepieces, but now that he found nobody attached to their wristbands, it was somehow not satisfying in the least.

"Claire..." Again, her name, his mantra, slipped away on his breath. Peter laid his hand on Gabriel's arm and tried to shake the dream from his mind. Gabriel groggily came around, blinking, taking inventory of his surroundings. Only in his dreams had he been able to escape back into the real world, and every morning when he had awoken since he was trapped here, it took him quite a while to remember where he was.

"Are you having that dream again, Gabe?"

He was lying in bed beside Peter Petrelli. Peter Petrelli, the man whose brother he had killed, the man who had vowed to exact revenge upon him, was shaking him awake, calling him Gabe... Rubbing his eyes, Gabriel sat up and allowed reality to come rushing back to him. Eight years ago, he had gone to Matt Parkman and asked him to remove Sylar's abilities. Instead, Matt had ended up imprisoning Sylar within his own mind. Ever since, Sylar- and then eventually Gabriel, as he had come to think of himself once again, had been trapped in a realization of his personal idea of hell. He was stuck in New York City, completely and utterly alone. At first, Sylar did not even realize that what he was experiencing was simply a delusion. Matt had been complete- he had also erased Sylar's memory of the procedure he had used to create the nightmare. The last thing Gabriel remembered was going to Matt Parkman, begging him to do something, anything to relieve him of his powers. When Matt had refused, Sylar had threatened Matt's wife, Janice, and... that was all.

Sylar woke up in New York disoriented and completely confused. The only conclusion he had been able to come to was that everyone else had died. He could not figure out what had happened. Several of his theories included another special with an ability like Ted Sprague's radioactivity, or a deadly virus that nobody could survive. However, if there was a real exploding man, where was the property damage? If there was a virus, where were the bodies? Furthermore, anything that he would have been able to survive, Claire would have survived as well. After all, she was the source of his rapid cellular regeneration ability. It absolutely chafed at the edges of his mind to know there was something he was unable to figure out. After all, that was his original ability- figuring out how things worked.

Some three years later in this reality, yet apparently only three hours in the other reality, Peter had attempted to rescue him. He had borrowed Matt's power of telepathy, but once inside Sylar's mind, he himself was unable to escape. Either Sylar's mind or Matt's barrier was too strong, and Peter had become trapped as well. At first, Sylar had been sure that Peter was some sort of illusion. After three years alone, he was convinced that his mind had simply made up a copy of Peter in order to either ease the anguish of solitude or torture him with guilt. However, neither of those was the case. Peter came in insisting that Sylar was the only person who could save Peter's girlfriend, Emma, from being forced to draw thousands of people to slaughter. Sylar, of course, laughed. He was not a hero, he was not a savior, and he hadn't the slightest idea how he could become anything other than a mass murderer.

The thing he desired most in the world, other than Claire, was knowledge. Unfortunately, for many years the only way he knew to obtain new knowledge, or rather new powers, was to slaughter other evolved humans and inspect their brains. There was a hunger that burned within him that he was simply powerless to control. He certainly wished that he could live a normal life, and yes, even possibly become a hero like Peter Petrelli, the man who was standing before him, but he had no idea where to begin. His only idea had been to give up his powers completely, yet instead of Matt helping him to live the boring, average life he fantasized about, well, here he was. He supposed he deserved it. And that's where they had been for the past five years- searching for a way out of Sylar's solitary confinement.

Right. He snapped himself awake. Gabriel sat up and for the first time became fully aware of the other form next to him. Peter was lying next to him on the large bed, wearing a crumpled white under shirt and navy blue boxers. A look of concern was painted across his face, and his hand still rested on Gabriel's upper arm.

"Were you having that dream again?" Seeing that Gabriel was now considerably closer to consciousness, Peter repeated himself. Gabriel sheepishly nodded his head and grumbled a noise in the affirmative.

It was the same dream that he had practically every night. The scenario was sometimes different, but the theme was always the same. He was trying to reach Claire, but something was preventing him. In the past there had been insurmountable peaks between them, sometimes she was frozen in a tomb of ice, other times she would simply run from him endlessly and he would awake sweating and panting. This time, only a thin glass wall separated him from his beloved. She pounded on the barrier, in anguish from some unseen force. He was sure that she could not see him because her cries for help were directed at no body in particular, cast with the lilt of a hopeless victim crying not to alert someone to her capture, but only to assuage her own grief. The glass could have been shattered with a thought if only he still had his powers, yet all he could do was press himself against it and stare helplessly into Claire's tortured eyes. He could still taste her sweetness on his lips when he awoke. It was getting too real for him to bear.

Gabriel noticed that he had been holding his breath and forcefully released the air from his chest. He looked down into his friend's worried face. "Peter, thanks."

"Of course," Peter said with a nod. He propped himself up on his elbows and continued, "why don't we go knock down that wall today?"

Gabriel groaned. "Not that again. Don't you realize that we're never getting out of here? We are trapped here forever. There is no escape."

"How many times do I have to tell you, Gabe? This is not real. It's an illusion inside your own mind. There has to be a way to get out of here," Peter said. "We're not alone in New York. We're in Matt Parkman's basement, and we will get out."

"No, Peter. Not today. I don't feel like it. It's been every day for years that we've pounded away at that wall and we have made exactly zero progress. I give up."

"Suit yourself," Peter said as he rolled off the edge of the bed. As he walked out of Gabriel's room, he turned and looked back over his shoulder. "You know where to find me." He crossed the apartment and Gabriel lost sight of him as he went into his own room. When he came back into view, he was wearing the same charcoal grey long sleeved shirt and dark jeans that he wore every day. He grabbed the sledgehammer that was resting by the front door and shot one more look at Gabriel as he closed the door behind him.

Gabriel stretched back out on the bed and shut his eyes, trying to recall Claire's image on the back of his eyelids once more. He opened his eyes when he saw that his efforts were useless. He was too awake to fall back into his dream. Even though his dreams of Claire were never pleasant, at least they were something. He regretfully rubbed his arm where her face had once been tattooed. When he had shape shifted into Claire's roommate Gretchen, it had disappeared. As he yearned for some way to remember her, he wished that he had been able to keep his tattoo, Samuel's last gift to him.

He looked over at the ornate clock on his dresser. Its gold hands declared that the time was 9:57. Usually he preferred to wake up earlier, but it wasn't like he exactly had a full agenda for the day. With Peter occupied with his endless quest to tear down the wall, Gabriel had the day to himself. The first order of business was to try out his best imitation of Ronald Reagan. "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" he boomed into the empty apartment. He allowed himself exactly one chuckle at his own joke and resigned himself to figuring out a way to work an "Iron Curtain" reference into his next conversation with Peter.

The next order of business was breakfast. Of course, being nothing more than a delusion meant that neither he nor Peter actually needed to eat or sleep. Gabriel had tested this theory himself on multiple occasions when he had been unable to will himself to get out of bed for weeks at a time. However, he preferred to keep himself on a routine that was as close to normal as possible. Before Peter arrived, it was the only thing that kept him grounded in reality. Now he took solace in his rituals. He walked into the small kitchen, not bothering to get dressed. He wore nothing but a pair of snug black boxer-briefs, but this morning he was alone and could not be bothered to put on a shirt. Peter had thoughtfully turned on the coffee maker before he left, and Gabriel breathed in the bitter aroma appreciatively. He dug around in the refrigerator for a minute and pulled out the milk and a grapefruit. Momentarily he contemplated taking a swig directly from the milk jug, but he thought of Peter and instead pulled a tall glass down from the cupboard. Gabriel also retrieved a bowl and a grapefruit spoon before he sat down at the table. He was pretty sure that he did not actually own any of the fancy serrated spoons he had found in this version of his old apartment, but he did find them quite useful. He was sure that if he had owned a set, Sylar would have found a creative yet completely disturbing use for them.

As usual, he decided to forgo the sugar for his fruit. It was not self-flagellation by a long shot, but Gabriel still felt it necessary to punish himself in all of the little ways he could think of. As he carefully segmented the ruby flesh, he halfway expected to see blood pooling in the slices instead of juice. The coffee pot audibly clicked from the brew setting to the warm setting, and Gabriel rose to pour himself a mug. The mug he selected today was a hand-thrown piece that he had purchased at an art festival many years ago. It was brown with white and tan alternating stripes, and the handle was slightly lopsided, but the artist had been a pretty young girl whose smile he simply could not resist. He smiled at the memory as the brew sloshed into his mug. He dumped the last swallow of milk from his glass into his coffee and walked back into the living room.

Clocks ticked on every surface, hundreds of them echoing in near perfect harmony. But it wasn't exactly perfect, and Gabriel of course noticed this immediately. He knew he was looking for a wrist watch, and within a few moments he had found the culprit in his pile of Tag-Heuers. He had fixed this one a few weeks ago, but it had since lost half a second. He opened it up and peered at its tiny components through his tabletop magnifying glass, quickly identifying and repairing the problematic hairspring.

The mug of coffee beckoned and he lifted it to his lips and took a deep drink. Coffee was yet another thing that he missed putting sugar into. One day, if he found his way out, he might once again indulge himself in a soy latte. He placed the watch back with the others similar to it and leaned back in his chair. Gabriel ran his fingers through his thick black hair. Absentmindedly, he picked up his copy of Pillars of the Earth, untied the shoelace that held the covers to the spine, and flipped open to a specific page and began to read. "Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling that he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another..."
"...and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended," Gabriel closed his eyes and finished aloud, not needing to look back at the page to know the end of the sentence. This world that he currently occupied was certainly a finite thing, was it not? The only books that he had been able to find were the hundreds of books that he had already read. There were thousands of time pieces, but none that he had not previously repaired. The movies he found were only the handful that he had watched in his lifetime, and the only thing that aired on television was the same news broadcast from years ago, or yesterday, if Peter was really correct. When Peter appeared, there was suddenly more to choose from. Gabriel found a comic book store stocked only with issues of Ninth Wonders, and the television gained a new channel which played repeats of ER all day. Medical textbooks and multitudes of action movies appeared on his shelves.

He carefully tied the well-worn book back together and returned it to its spot on the shelf. After hundreds of reads, Gabriel was sure that he could recite the entire book beginning to end. He rose from his chair and paced the length of the room a couple of times before settling down on the soft leather sofa. The remote control was slightly out of reach, and for a moment, he attempted to pull it to his hand with his mind. Gabriel was not exactly surprised when his experiment failed, so he leaned forward to grab the remote the old fashioned way. He clicked on the TV and hit the play button on the DVD control. His favorite movie, Harold and Maude, jumped to life. Gabriel smiled, knowing that he was not the last person to watch it. Peter must have finally decided to give it a try after so many years of protesting its lack of explosions. Settling back in his seat, Gabriel finished watching the movie from the point where it had been paused.


It was nightfall when Peter returned. Gabriel was awoken by the soft click of the doorknob turning behind him. He had fallen asleep on the sofa, the television humming static. Peter flicked on the light switch and found Gabriel's eyes following him from the middle of the room.

"You've been gone all day," Gabriel commented.

"Looks like you've been asleep all day," was Peter's retort.

"I was watching a movie and nodded off-" Gabriel cast a glance at the nearest clock, which read 8:35. "-wasn't out more than a few hours," he lied. "Um, are you hungry?"

"Yeah," Peter said as he plopped down next to Gabriel on the sofa. Gabriel looked his sweaty friend over for a moment. His hair was disheveled and his shirt clung to his chest.

"No progress, huh?" It was more of a statement than a question. Peter shook his head.

Gabriel rose from the sofa, stretching his long limbs as he walked toward the kitchen. He mentally ran though the list of ingredients he needed before opening the door of the refrigerator. Long ago, he had discovered that essentially anything he thought of was available to him. That was excellent, because even though he loved to cook, Gabriel absolutely hated grocery shopping. Everything he wanted was right at his fingertips when he peered inside the door: sausage, fresh basil, red bell peppers, and an onion. He walked over to the cabinet above the stove and pulled out olive oil and pasta. He put a pot of water on to boil and turned his attention to the vegetables that needed chopping.

"What are we going to do, Gabe?" came the voice from the other room.

Gabriel was about to chiffonade the basil but paused, one hand on the rolled up basil leaves and the other holding an impossibly sharp chef's knife. He played dumb to Peter's question. "You mean, for dinner? Stop being so impatient, I'm working on it," he called into the living room.

"You know what I'm talking about. How are we going to get out of here? We've got to stop messing around and save..."

"Peter, are you kidding? We're the only ones left. Your girlfriend, what's her name again?"

By this point, Peter had walked halfway into the kitchen and was leaning one shoulder against the doorframe. "Emma. Her name's Emma," he said, exasperated.

"Right, Emma. She's gone, everyone's dead but us, can't you see? There's no way out from here." Gabriel returned his attention to the herbs in front of him.

"I can't believe that. I just can't. I'm sorry." Peter returned to the living room and landed on the couch with a soft whump.

Gabriel dumped the thin strips of basil into the pan where the sausage and onions were sizzling away merrily and followed Peter into the living room, rubbing the moisture from the herbs off of his hands and onto his pants as he walked. "Look, I don't mean to upset you, but don't you think our efforts have been wasted?" he asked Peter.

"We're doing something wrong, I know it. I just don't know what we need to do differently! The wall is the key. It's the wall from Parkman's basement." Peter sprang from the sofa and faced Gabriel intently. "It has to be our way out!" he was practically shouting.

It was Gabriel's turn to console Peter, and he closed the gap between them, pulling his friend against him. Peter resisted, not wanting comfort from his anger. "Gabriel," he protested. He pushed his palms against Gabriel's bare chest and struggled to break from his hold.

"Shut up, Peter." Gabriel tightened his vice-like grip and Peter finally gave in to the hug, slumping against Gabriel's warm body with his forehead resting on Gabriel's shoulder. Gabriel held him there for a moment before pulling back and holding Peter at arm's length, his hands on each of Peter's shoulders. "Go take a shower, okay? Dinner will be ready when you get out."

"Yeah," Peter quietly said and padded off toward the bathroom. As soon as Gabriel heard the whoosh of the shower turning on, he returned to the kitchen to finish cooking their meal.

A few minutes later, Peter emerged from the bathroom wearing Gabriel's blue terrycloth robe and rubbing his hair with a towel. He sat down at the kitchen table, noticing that while he had been in the shower, Gabriel had gotten dressed in his usual black jeans and grey button down shirt.

"Penne Rustica al Gabriel!" Gabriel said with a flourish as he pridefully placed the plate of pasta in front of Peter.

"Ah, Gabe, it smells delicious." Peter said appreciatively. Gabriel smiled and took his seat across the table. They finished their meal in silence, Peter going back for seconds and then thirds as Gabriel picked at his original red peppers distractedly.

When Peter had finally finished all of the food, Gabriel rose and took both of their plates to the sink. He dumped the remainder of his own plate of pasta into the garbage and begin to wash the few dishes.

"You cooked dinner, I'll do the dishes," said Peter, raising from his seat.

"No, no. I'll get them. You should get some rest." Gabriel said, leaving no option for discussion.

Peter nodded. "Look Gabe, do you need me to..." he trailed off, unsure of the words he could use to describe the situation.

Gabriel understood his intent, naturally. "No, I think I'll be okay tonight. Thanks though." Peter gave him a look that indicated "are you sure?" but Gabriel, not liking to be questioned, simply raised a single eyebrow in response. When Peter finally shrugged and headed toward his bedroom, Gabriel turned his attention back to his soap filled sink and diligently began to scrub the stainless steel pan.

Gabriel finished washing and drying the dishes in solitude. Now that he was alone, he allowed his thoughts to wander back to Claire. He threw the spoon he was drying back into the soapy water in disgust. In all the years he had been here, he still had been unable to forgive Matt Parkman for this. It wasn't that he was trapped in solitude, no, Gabriel felt that that was proper punishment for Sylar's wrongdoings. It was that he was sure that if he ever was able to escape, he would still have his powers. He could feel them pulsing just out of reach whenever he was at the wall. Breaking through would again give him access to the thing that caused him to become a monster, the thing that caused Claire to hate him. Did he want to escape, just to be confronted with the reality that he could never be with the one person who could truly come to understand him? She was different, not like the others. Since he had taken her power, he was truly the only person who could share that experience with her.

For the first time, something clicked within Gabriel's mind. He certainly did need to escape, because there was nobody else who would be there for Claire. Everyone she ever knew would die. Even if she did not come to love him, at the very least he could be the constant in her life. Certainly even being with someone you hated was better than being alone. Gabriel fished the spoon out of the sink and washed it again.

He finished drying the rest of the dishes and put them away in the cabinet. As he left the kitchen, he turned off the light behind him, plunging him into total darkness. On instinct, he navigated toward Peter's bedroom. It was the only room that was different from the apartment's original layout. Sometime between the time Peter first arrived and the time when he decided to speak to Gabriel, Gabriel had noticed the extra door where a bookcase had once been. Conveniently, Gabriel had a place for Peter to stay when they decided it was simply logical for the only residents of New York to stick close together. The rest of the apartment looked eerily similar to how it did when the watchmaker lived there years before.


Long ago, when Gabriel was still coming to terms with his new found powers and the hunger that accompanied them, he had returned from his errands one day and could tell someone had been in his apartment. It was only the slightest disturbances that informed him of his uninvited guest- his closet door left slightly ajar, one of his anatomy books nudged at a minuscule yet obviously incorrect angle. Not knowing who had found him or what they were after, Gabriel panicked. The fear he felt served only as validation for the monster he had become. He wished to believe that he was a good man, a victim of Elle's and Noah Bennet's manipulations and some strange mental problem that he just needed to learn to control. Gabriel was horrified at his actions and yearned for penance, yet his only instinct when threatened was to run. He could not convince himself that this was the noble action taken by an honest man. No, now he believed he really was nothing but a murderer. He immediately packed all of his belongings, tore down his map which he had spent so much time to construct, scrubbed his confessional from the walls, and fled. Sylar left Gabriel behind in the apartment that day and never returned.

When he first arrived here, in this alternate reality, the only place he could think to redeem himself was the very location that he had become Sylar. He wandered the streets before he found himself in Queens, looking for his old apartment building. Apartment 1B was strangely enough, preserved exactly as if he had never left at all. He was shocked when he opened his closet to find his old map of the locations of known evolved humans, covered in pictures and yarn. Even stranger, on the wall "FORGIVE ME" was still painted in Trevor Zeitlan's blood surrounded by a sea of "I have sinned" repeated over and over. Sylar knew that he had removed every trace of himself before walking out the apartment door for the last time, but here it was in front of him. Everything from his memories seemed to be there, even things that made no sense. Elle's pie steamed on the countertop, fresh as the day she brought it. His list of special humans, written on a notepad with "Grey and Sons" letterhead, lay crumpled in the wastebasket. Ziti bubbled away in a glass dish in his oven. A spattering of blood on the wall and a bloody handprint on the door had reappeared as well, even though he had cleaned them up long before he had finished the map.

He had scrubbed the walls again, removing all traces of his former life. He threw his anatomy texts and copy of Activating Evolution by Chandra Suresh out the window. He ripped at the map, throwing the yarn and pushpins in the trash and ripping the photographs and notes and newspaper clippings into tiny bits before throwing them in as well. He ripped down the string of lights that illuminated his closet and stepped on every last one, afterward sweeping up the glass and wires from the floor. He yanked the pie from the counter and the pasta from the oven, ignoring the shiny pink burn the hot dish created across his palm. Sylar stuffed everything into a large black trash bag and hauled it outside to the dumpster. He brushed his hands together and breathed a sigh of relief, finally ready to start his life anew.

The first thing he noticed when he returned to his apartment was the smell of peach pie wafting under the door.

"No..." he whispered as he flung open the door. The pie sat innocently on his counter, still warm and covered by a blue and white cloth. He ran to the trashcan and looked inside. His hands shook as he retrieved a white ball of paper from the bin and smoothed it out on the kitchen table. His own handwriting declared "BRIAN DAVIS 1414 BERMAN ST NY NY." Sylar in-took a sharp breath and dashed toward his closet, his eyes wide as he slammed the door open, its hinges groaning under the pressure. As the doorknob slammed into the opposite wall, Sylar backed up, unable to find his breath. The force with which he had opened the door was now causing it to slowly shut, but he had seen enough. He stumbled backward wildly for a few steps before losing his footing and falling backward to the ground. He continued to scramble away from the door as fast as he could, kicking and flailing to put as much distance between him and the closet as possible. The map still hung on the wall.

The next day he returned to the closet with a gallon of white paint, a paintbrush, and a tin of lighter fluid, his jaw set in determination. He put the books, the contents of his map, and everything else flammable and related to evolved humans in his metal trash can and doused it all with the flammable liquid. He lit a match, threw it into the trash can, and watched the fire burn until the contents were nothing more than a charred black amorphous blob. He covered his walls with white paint, first one coat, then another, then another, until not a trace of his confessionals showed through. Sylar slumped to the floor, satisfied with his efforts. He leaned against a bookshelf and allowed his eyes to shut for just a moment.

Not more than a few seconds had passed before the smell of something sweet and metallic flooded his nostrils. A viscous, warm liquid began to pool under his fingers, and his eyes flew open. He snapped his hand up to eye level and gasped at what he saw. Fresh blood dripped from his hand. It was splattered on his shirt -was he wearing this white button down with blue stripes a moment ago?- and when he jumped up, he saw that it streamed down from the wall behind him. Sylar ran to the bathroom, where he saw the blood was also sprayed across his cheek and the lens of Gabriel's glasses, which had also appeared on his face. Trevor's screams echoed in his ears as he ripped his clothes from his body. He turned the shower on and adjusted the temperature to searingly hot. Sylar frantically scrubbed his skin until it was pink and raw and the water ran clear at his feet.

It was more than a month before he decided to approach the pie. He had been forced to smell his favorite scent every day since he had returned to the apartment, yet he could only think of it as further torture on top of his solitude. Sylar had thrown the pie away every day for weeks before giving up and ignoring it as best he could. The demon pie, as he had begun to think of it, remained steaming hot no matter how long it sat on his counter. He tried leaving it out for days at a time, but it never cooled off or changed in any way. If he threw it away, it returned as soon as he averted his gaze from the counter. Sylar once stared at the same spot on the counter for three days after he threw the pie in the bin, only to have it reappear when he closed his eyes just long enough to sneeze. This time, Sylar had a new idea.

He took the pie into the living room with a fork, and sat on the floor in the same place he had originally shared the pie with Elle. When he punctured the crisp crust with the tines of his fork, sticky orangish-brown liquid bubbled up through the crevice. He raised a forkful of peach and crust to his lips, cautiously placing the morsel on his tongue. It was sweet and spicy and delicious, exactly how he remembered it. He chewed, and swallowed, and speared another bite on his fork. As he took his second bite, he contemplated how Elle would never be able to make him another peach pie. He thought back to his suicide attempt in the watch shop, which he now, for the first time, realized that she had used her power to abort. Sylar took another bite of pie. He thought of how she looked deeply into his eyes, gently caressed his face with the back of her hand, and said, "You're special, just the way you are," and he took another bite. He remembered how she taught him her power, held his hand in hers as he learned to generate and shape electricity to his will. He remembered how she had helped him learn to gain powers without killing, and he took another bite.

He thought of the way she had made love to him the day of the Eclipse, frantic, completely mindless and ecstatic, and the way he lost himself when he was with her. He thought of how she planted kisses on every surface of his body, devoured every inch of him with a hunger that rivaled his own. Even though he knew that her powers had been lost that night, in his memory he could practically feel the sparks dancing across her tongue as she drew him into her mouth. At times he found her ability redundant; her passion was an electricity in its own right. He remembered how she moaned when he bit her neck and pulled her hair, how she laid on top of him, smiling as she caught her breath. He remembered how she made him feel, like this was all he would ever need, how in that moment of singularity, he had never wanted to kill again. Then, she had wrapped her bare legs around him and fallen asleep in his arms, and now, he took another bite of her pie.

He could no longer escape the thought he had been pushing from his mind this whole time, the final image of her lifeless body on the sand moments before he set it on fire. The sound of the waves crashing on the shore, the smell of salt water and blood and lighter fluid and ozone and Elle's perfume, the taste of her body still fresh on his tongue, his senses were overwhelmed. She had trusted him, and yet Sylar had slaughtered her while she lay beneath him. He had killed her even though he already had her power, just because he felt like it. "You're hurting me," she had said, and Sylar had only replied, "I know." Tears rolled down his cheek and mixed with the peach syrup on his chin before splashing down into the pie plate. Gabriel stuffed the last bite in his mouth, choking on memories and tears and pie.