A Sylar Christmas Carol-The Ghost of Christmas Present
When he came to, Sylar found himself on the floor, clutching the small throw rug that lay beside the bed. Sylar heard happy singing once more. "Damn, you just won't let a guy sleep!" This time, it was much louder than at his previous awakening. A light shone from the living room, glaring into the bedroom. "Alright, alright, you win." He got up off the hardwood floor, and walked into the living room, where he saw an Asian man sitting amongst a pile of food, as if he were preparing for a great feast.
"Hello, Brain-Man!" shouted the Japanese man, smiling broadly.
Sylar found his face familiar, as familiar as the first spirit had been. He remembered the ability the Asian man had, control of time and space. It was something he had wanted for a very long time. He raised his hand, forefinger pointing, and...nothing happened. Sylar rolled his head and closed his eyes. Not again. "Are you the Ghost of Christmas Presents?" he asked snidely.
The spirit frowned. "I am the Ghost of Christmas Present....Present!" He stepped out from the pile of food, to stand before a smirking Sylar. "Do not act so smart, Brain-Man. We are going to see how others of your acquaintance are spending Christmas Day. Come with me, if you please."
"I do not please, but I guess I have no choice. I will not hold your hand though!" he said, taking a step back.
"Alright, take hold of my sleeve then," the spirit said, then scrunched his eyes tightly. The room began to spin around them, until they were standing in front of a small apartment building.
"Where are we?" Sylar asked, not being familiar at all with this place.
"We will go inside and see." The spirit again closed his eyes, and the pair appeared inside a small apartment living room. Sylar instantly recognized the two people within. It was his old nemesis Noah Bennet and his daughter, Claire. They were standing in the kitchen, Noah digging in the fridge while Claire was making hot cocoa.
"Dad, two scoops, or three?" Claire was stirring chocolate powder into one cup.
"Three," Noah replied, smiling. "I've got the whipped creme." He held the can in one hand, as he took her cup in the other. Squeezing the button, he made a circle of whipped creme atop the steaming cocoa.
"More, Dad!"
"Ok, it's your waistline," he remarked.
Claire smacked her father's arm, laughing. She placed three teaspoons of chocolate powder in his cup, stirred in hot water and gave it to him to top off with the whipped creme. She took her own cup and sipped, getting some of the frothy stuff on her nose.
Noah rubbed it off, then leaned forward to kiss Claire's nose.
Impulsively, she hugged him around his waist. While he held her with one arm, she said, "I wish Mom could be here."
"And Lyle," he reminded her.
"Oh, alright, Lyle too. Can't you call her, Dad?"
"She won't come."
"She came for Thanksgiving! Why not Christmas. She isn't seeing Doug anymore. Please?"
Noah looked down at his little girl, only she wasn't a little girl anymore. She was a woman, a woman who was in college, and out on her own. "Ok, Claire-Bear, I'll call her. No promises though, so don't get your hopes up."
Claire waited while Noah dialed her mother. She listened while he spoke with Sandra, asking her to join them for dinner this evening. He nodded, and then hung up. He turned to his daughter, and placing his hands on her shoulders, said, "I'm sorry, Claire, she's busy."
"With what? Why didn't you let me talk with her?" Tears threatened to well up in her eyes.
"This was your fault, Brain-Man. If you had not pretended to be Claire's mother when you went to see Mr Bennet, making him believe his wife wanted a divorce, they would still be together. Now, the family is apart."
"Noah Bennet deserved it for everything he did to me," Sylar said, trying to justify his actions.
Noah hugged his daughter. Then he pulled back, announcing, "I have something for you." He went to the table that held a small fake tree, and pulled out a prettily wrapped box, giving it to Claire.
She opened it, and removing the paper from inside, pulled out a smaller box. She looked up at Noah, smiled quizzically while opening that one. Inside she saw a pair of what looked like diamond earrings. Not large, but still, if they were... "Diamonds, Dad? Can you afford this? Maybe you should take them back." She held out the box, knowing her father hadn't had any luck finding another job.
"Claire...," he said, clasping her hands more tightly around the box. "...you're a young woman now. I got these for a sort of a ...coming-of-age symbol. I am so proud of you. After all you've been through, you are still.."
"What, Dad, sane?" They both chuckled, and hugged each other once more. "Thanks! I'll cherish them always."
"How can they be so happy, when they have so little? Then Daddy Bennet goes and drops a small fortune on something he can't afford. Momma Bennet isn't around. It's ridiculous to be that happy." Sylar couldn't even remember being happy in a way that didn't involve people dying.
"Maybe they need each other, and that's all they need," the spirit said. "Come. I want to show you the true impact you will have on this family. In a future you cannot have foreseen, your actions will all but destroy the love these people have for each other."
When Sylar touched the spirit's robe, he felt the now familiar whirlwind spinning around him, until at last, he found himself in a vast green park-like setting. Headstones and small mausoleums dotted the landscape.
"A cemetery?" Sylar, for all his killing, hated cemeteries. Off in the distance, he noticed a man with a young blonde woman. It was Noah Bennet. Next to him, dressed in black, stood Claire Bennet, virtually unchanged by the passage of time. Sylar walked over to stand next to them. Looking down at the same headstone they were looking at, he saw that the names on it covered two plots, one for Lyle Bennet, the other for Sandra Bennet. "The wife and kid died?"
"Yes, in an automobile accident," the spirit responded.
Sylar watched as Noah, looking much older than when he last saw him, held Claire against him. She was holding a poinsettia in her hand. Tears dripped down her cheeks, even as she rubbed her eyes. Sylar's empathy, born of his taking Claire's ability to regenerate, enabled him to sense her grief. But when he looked into her eyes, he saw a hardness there. She placed the red-leafed plant on the graves, and stepped back. When Noah tried to put his arm around her shoulder, Claire pulled away and walked to the curb, entering a car that was parked there.
Noah looked sadly at both graves. "I'm so sorry, Sandra. I never meant for this to happen." He turned, and walked towards the waiting car.
"What happened?" Sylar asked, turning on the spirit.
"Noah Bennet tried to reconcile with his wife. You took great pleasure in interfering once more. Sandra Bennet was fleeing her husband with her son, when they were hit by a semi-truck. They died instantly."
"What did I have to do with making her run away?" Sylar didn't know if he wanted the answer, but he asked just the same.
The spirit hesitated. Then he said, "You became Noah Bennet, and tried to hurt her."
Sylar's eyes narrowed. Why would he have wasted his time meeting with her, since his true satisfaction had come from destroying the Bennet family? Noah was the one whom Sylar had wanted to suffer the most. Had he, Sylar, become so bored as to want to take that a step further? Making Sandra fear her husband? And what about Claire? For whatever reason, he and Claire were tied to one another in a way he had not felt with any of his victim's. Maybe that was because he had let her live.
"Claire will leave her father, and move far away. She will live her life as a self-trained assassin. Her existence will be one without family, without love. You will have taken away everything that had meaning for her. If these shadows of the things to come remain unchanged, Claire will die."
Sylar jerked around to face the spirit. "Die! How does she die?"
"She will become a killer herself, and someone will find out a way to stop her by destroying her."
"But she can't die. She's like me, a regenerative." To Sylar, death had become something he doled out, but it was not anything he would have to experience himself. It should have been the same for the former cheerleader.
"If these shadows remain unchanged, she will die!" the spirit repeated emphatically.
Sylar lowered his head, thinking on the words he just heard. He had no family. He had lost everything that meant anything to him. Now he seemed to want everyone to suffer as he suffered. The pain of loss was just as great when he was responsible for that loss. There had been times, he admitted, when he felt something other than the hunger, the desire to kill. He had felt needed when he worked with Noah as an agent for the Company. He felt belonging when he thought that the Petrellis were his family. And then he had nothing, nothing but the overwhelming desire to control and hurt and kill.
"One more stop in the present time before I leave you," the spirit announced. With Sylar holding his sleeve, the cemetery faded, and the pair appeared in another home. Sitting by a large Christmas tree was a man, a woman and a young toddler. Sylar knew these people as well as anyone. He had lived in the man's head for longer than he cared to remember.
"Parkman! That loser.....what, don't tell me he's having a happy family Christmas," Sylar uttered in a sarcastically mocking tone. "So he made up with that sexy wife of his. I wonder she didn't leave him long ago." He watched, as the Parkman's played with their boy next to the brightly lit tree. Matt Parkman would lean over to his wife, Janice, and kiss her. Then he would offer a small toy to their son, one they had obviously opened early.
While he was inside Parkman's body, Sylar could have been a husband to Janice, and a father to Matty. But his desire to find his body took precedence over everything else. He didn't bother to experience anything of the family life he never had.
"Time to go, Brain-Man. There is one more spirit you must meet with tonight. He will come of his own accord, in his own time." The spirit held up his arms, and shouted "Yatta!" Then he faded into darkness.
"No, wait! It was to be at 300am. That's what Danko told me." Sylar felt the darkness envelope him. No light shone, no warmth was felt as before, when he was with the other spirits. He had never felt so alone. He started choking, unable to draw air into his lungs. He felt himself fall, as if the very ground beneath him had vanished. When he finally hit bottom, he looked around. It was still dark, dark as ink. When light did begin to infiltrate his surroundings, Sylar noticed a shadow in front of him. The shadow moved towards him. For the first time in his entire life, Sylar felt true, unadulterated fear.
A/N: I have made a few changes to try and clarify the jump from the present to the future. As in the real story, the Ghost of Christmas Present does jump forward a bit to show Scrooge that Tiny Tim will die, unless things change. Hope this helps.
Thanks to all my reviewers, and especially to Brenda B for your ideas. Only two more parts left. I hope to have the last part posted on Christmas Day, as the story ended for Scrooge, on Christmas Day.