They left the next day. This time the trip took them fourteen hours. Claire's mood was snappishly short, something he wasn't sure could be properly attributed to her paranoia or grief. He kept his distance a dozen steps behind her.
Sylar hadn't meant to do it. Truly, he had not. However, there was some relief in returning to the cabin and it had relaxed him to a startling point that he had not even realized he had used the ability until the unfamiliar name bounced around inside his head.
Vicki Masters.
He peered at her but the mask over her face was as firm as ever. Sylar couldn't stop looking at her, though. Watching her. The name had been accompanied by feelings of grief, regret, anger, love. All of them curled into one massive complex that reminded him of his feelings towards his mother, except it was different — much different.
His relief with the cabin was a very simplistic reaction. It was familiar to Claire and upon doing a check on it and through the surrounding woods, she visibly relaxed. With her sitting on the attic stairs, book in hand, he leaned against the back window, form mostly lost in the shadows caused by her candle. He leaned his head against the wall now, watching her.
She had told him the first week, after he asked her why she pulled down the stairs and rested on them like that, that it was for flexibility. If they were ambushed, she had easy access to the attic and from there through its lone and shut-up window. It looked boarded up from the outside and she could use it to start running while no one was watching.
She had told him this with a mechanical voice. It was a system she had no doubt thought over several times. He bet she had dozens of escape routes in mind every time she walked around, sat down, opened her eyes from sleep. More than he had, probably, given that she had inhabited this place longer.
For some reason he found it hard to picture her like that — like an analytical person. Their interactions as Sylar and Claire had been minimal, granted, but as Nathan and Claire? Those had been plentiful and while like everything else Petrelli and Bennet it had been full of awkward moments and lacking in a certain closely familial feel, it had at least been similar. Oddly comfortable. Thinking he was Nathan, he had put as much effort into that relationship as she had and that truly was saying something considering how desperately she had wanted to connect to her biological family, even after their epic levels of dysfunction disappointed her.
Claire was an emotional person. Intelligent, persistent, quick? All yes. It was the emotion that drove everything in her being, though, no matter whatever she had been through, whatever mantra she told herself, and he was certain that she did tell herself one every night if the mask he was seeing her wear, even when she thought she was alone, was something to go by.
Staring at her now, how easily she was curled up, one foot underneath her thigh while the other was dangling off the side, he pondered on how much of it was genuine and how much of it was practiced. Did her body actually relax or did she adopt the posture of one that was, when in truth she was as taut as a bowstring? Stressed from memories, some possibly relating to the name he had accidentally uncovered?
There was no doubt. It was the latter.
"Stop it."
"What?"
"Staring. It's creepy."
He snorted. She raised her head. Sylar walked over to the side of the pull down staircase, resting his hands on either side of her knees. She almost twitched in what would no doubt be annoyance at the action but refrained from acting childishly. She closed her book and clasped her hands on top of it instead.
"What?" She was the one to ask this time.
He smirked at her at first, lazily, line of sight rested on the book in her hands. Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll. "Interesting choice."
She said nothing.
He knew the book and at the thought of its theme, lifted his head, mouth no longer curved. His fingers twitched for something he couldn't name, but maybe he didn't want to. "You knew her," he stated.
Claire's eyebrows furrowed. "Who, Alice?" She attempted to joke.
"Vicki Masters."
Her eyes flashed at the name, face turned plain once more. Always impassive, always closed off, always so incredibly fake. She kicks him then, right in the throat, and he stumbles back, wheezing in a deep breath, stopping himself before he clutches at his throat like every other pitiful being would.
"Don't you ever use your abilities on me again."
Sylar stands there as she opens up her book and continues reading, simultaneously wanting to attack her and admire her for that, thoughts interrupted by a young face that flashes in his memory when he lets his thoughts delve for a second too long into the possibility of killing her, thinking that it wouldn't matter because she would wake with a shuddering breath an hour later. He winces then.
She doesn't look up as he walks outside.
The lake is icing over at the edges, no more than a few inches but enough to warn him from touching the water. He would still feel the pain of its freezing temperature. He almost tempts it, welcomes it. Almost. With a deep breath, he sits on the edge of the dock, losing track of the hours until the sun begins to rise over the horizon.
"Woodpecker."
"Where?"
"Two o'clock."
Claire turned her head in the proper direction too late, only managing to catch a flurry of brown wings going around the trunk he had caught the bird nesting in. If she said 'nesting' he would likely frown and point out why that was wrong.
It was a week after their trip through the woods and to the neighboring town. The leaves were long past falling, winter approaching steadily, and now snow lay lightly upon the canopy of bare branches overlapping above them from a slight misting the night before. A handful of seconds later, the tell-tale pounding from a certain bird started up.
"Huh," she commented simply.
Their walk continued on in silence for the next hundred yards until Sylar's keen sight wielded something else and he pointed out a fox hole. She murmured another throwaway comment, attention lingering on it a little longer than polite as she found herself interested by his running commentary, the innocent knowledge he possessed.
The habit was peaceful to him, same as the walks were for her; she had no doubt about that. She wasn't exactly sure why but she accommodated it, joining him. Maybe she did because he did the same with her, one of the few instances where their time in a shared space didn't end with at least one feeling upset. At the cliff edge he rattled off a lazy spiel about the migration patterns of eagles and how, if they stayed long enough, they might catch sight of some returning to the area. She didn't outwardly react to the staying comment, nor to the 'we' he used, but it left her feeling heavy somehow.
She hadn't been part of a 'we' in a long time. And Sylar? Well, he was Sylar. She deflected instead, as she did best now, by asking, when they moved back into the tree line, "How do you know all this stuff?"
He licked his lips, hesitating. Sylar had kept his distance for the past couple of days, since the kicking incident. It served him right, having this kind of wariness regarding her. He had read her mind without warning and there was no way she wanted to talk about Vicki with him. However, she was glad to find he actually responded to her instead of crawling back into his bipolar-like shell. "As Gabriel, my life was lacking socially — not surprising," he added with a fair amount of self-loathing.
Claire frowned, knowing that feeling herself. She had been a social butterfly in school, at least before discovering her ability, but it was the self-loathing that she understood. She had always wanted to do more but she had only happened once and while it had lasted for a while, she had eventually messed up, causing terrible repercussions for others beside her. Because she was the cheerleader, the catalyst — no one would let her be touched by anything except the guilt that had the ability to drown her whole.
He released a dry chuckle which did nothing to suppress the emotion he had accidentally let out. He only shrugged then and she straightened a little more. "So I read a lot. Most fiction's boring. After the classics, I moved on to science. It was my outlet."
"Did you have any friends?"
"None," he cut off quickly in a clipped tone.
That's the end of that. Claire felt more guilt, if that was possible, and took sudden interest in the frost-covered ground in front of them as he lengthened his strides. She told herself she was letting the serial killer go off by himself on another tantrum; it was leagues from how she truly felt, impulses denied because of their ludicrous nature. He wasn't the one deserving of pity; neither of them were.
Smoke was everywhere.
It suffocated him, constricting his throat, making his lungs spasm, and he felt genuine panic for the first time in a long while. He actually couldn't remember how long. The hallway materialized and instinctively, he ran. A door pushed open on his right and he gave it a wide arc, forearm in front of his mouth. He heard hacking. It sounded like someone was dying. He couldn't tell if that was him or the person grabbing the fire escape near him.
He moved to the stairs. The place was practically deserted and he bound down them. A ghost of a form passed above him on the steps. With a simple thought, he slammed the door open to the outside and gulped in the tangy air of the city.
The shadow passed behind him. He swept his arm back. He touched nothing but the ability was so engrained in his body, had been since a week after he acquired it, that he didn't have to. The person hit the wall next to the door and collapsed. He gripped his knees, coughing. Wild-eyed, he could find no one around in the alley.
His vision hazy, he approached the person. He could steal the agent's radio, keep track of the movements until he lost them a couple miles away, maybe ambush them and kill them if they turned out to be part of only a small group. He doubted that. They had known all about who he was this time.
His breath caught. There was no armor, no padding, no helmet.
A woman, long hair singed, face matted with blood against the wall. He flipped her without touching her.
A boy. Red hair, tanned looking skin. A boy with gray eyes opened, irises unmoving.
Sylar woke with a cough, sitting up from the nightmare when a hand pressed forcefully against his shoulder. He reacted instinctively, gripping the wrist of the stranger. The bones popped as he rolled over, hooking a leg behind their knee and landing on top of them, pushing them into the hard wood floor, pinning them down.
His vision adjusted in the dark and as soon as he saw the person's face, saw her, he let go of her wrist as though it had burned him, shame flooding through his veins. His stunned mind kept him from rising. "Claire?"
She blinked once, nearly unfazed from the whole thing. "Think you could get off?"
He bit his lip and then rolled over. They laid on their backs next to each other for a humiliating moment and silence descended like a fragile beast, encompassing the space. Sylar exhaled.
Claire stood then, gracefully extracting herself from the sheet that managed to entangle both of their legs. "Wait," he called, sitting up on his elbows. She turned around. "What were you doing?"
She folded her arms across her chest. "Giving you another blanket. It sounded like you were in hypothermia," she said dully.
He looked down at her feet and to the sheet. Sylar sat up, bunching it as he extricated himself from it as well. "Just a dream," he said flippantly, standing and shoving the sheet back to her.
She took a step back and turned around, unreadable look in her eyes, hands far away from taking it. "Keep it."
He didn't.
Claire discovered this when she woke at the sound of the first dawn bird's song, spotting the stained white sheet lying across her form. It was arranged almost perfectly, too, and she wanted to ask herself why she hadn't woken up when he had no doubt stood next to her, but that was an answer she would never get outside of speculating. Speculating she would not do.
He was sipping on a cup of tea, looking out at the whiter-still lake that she loved, and didn't move when she approached. Claire stopped a few feet behind him. "Did you sneak into my room last night?"
The accusatory start to the day only made him glance over his shoulder. "I gave you the blanket back. I told you — I don't need it."
"I was trying to be nice," she retorted immediately, making his eye twitch.
Spinning around then, he regarded her with narrowed eyes. "I don't care about you being nice, Claire."
"Then what?" What do you want here? Why do you stay here? She almost added, but didn't.
"Honesty!" He snapped and she stared at him uncomprehendingly. He wanted honesty? Sylar wanted honesty? Had the earth moved on its axis without her realizing it? "You've never had walls with me, that's why I came to you. But you're building them now!" Sylar shook his head. She bristled at the action, at him judging her, trying to control her. "Trust me, Claire, I know where that road ends."
She turned her back on him, intent on ignoring him for the day, maybe week. She had not yet decided, only knowing that she couldn't look at him a second longer while her throat felt so constricted, mind so confused, skin so flushed. "You don't know anything."
He snorted. "Keep telling yourself that."
Claire slammed the bedroom door on him for the first time.
