The Picture on the Box

Nine: All the Pieces Fit

People always talk to loved ones who are in comas. As if their father, mother, lover or whoever can still hear them. As if they are awake and aware, and have just lost the ability to open their eyes, to move their limbs.

A coma is a gift that nature gives us, so that when the damage to our moral bodies results in a slow, lingering and painful death, to us it's nothing more than just falling asleep. When you are so badly damaged that darkness overtakes you, you can't hear, and you can't feel. You are gone. But when the people who you've left behind are too selfish to let you go, when they hook you to machines to force your lungs to keep breathing, when they feed you through tubes, and leave you lying for hours on end, floating in the abyss, aware of nothing but the nothingness—it's worse than death.

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I could still hear. If it would be better than this.

I wonder where I am. Given my history, I think it's unlikely that I would be lying in a bed, hooked to a machine, surrounded by flowers and Get-Well Soon greeting cards. Who would be visiting me? Telling me about their day? Or maybe I have been buried in the ground, or closed up in a wall behind a pile of brick. I feel like I am still here, but I have been compressed into a corner, like I've been packed away in a garage somewhere.

But then sometimes I can see her face.

And then—I am gone.

There is that moment between asleep and awake when your nightmare ends, and you can feel yourself lying in the bed. But I do not know how to open my eyes. And I can't go back to sleep.

After all this time, I thought I'd end up in Hell. Strangely I never realized how much more terrifying limbo would be.

And then—I am back.

I clench my fist. And miraculously, I hear something. Something crashes, something breaks, and then there are voices. One is a tiny, feminine gasp, and one is the roar of a man. It is my voice. It is not my voice.

I disappear again.

Why can I not just die? I gave up on waking up a long time ago. I do not even remember the last thing I remember. I have always been here.

"Sylar."

It is not my voice again. I hear it before I even remember what it is to hear again. I unfold myself from the corner I've been pushed into. I feel something—it takes me a moment to realize that I am feeling something. It is heat on my skin. But it feels wrong somehow. Not like the heat is wrong, more like the skin is wrong.

And I see her face again.

Then the feeling fades, and her face turns black and goes away, but I don't want it to. I am feeling, I am hearing, and no I am remembering. I remember her. I reach out desperately toward that face, that feeling of heat against my skin, of sweat dripping down, and I discover why my arms will not obey the signals my brain is sending—I am not alone here.

He is here, too. He is not expecting me to fight. He is strong, but he is not supposed to be here. And just as I could not get out myself, I cannot expel him either, so I stuff him down to where I was trapped. He fights, but as he fights, he dissolves and becomes a part of that which he always was.

Me.

The sensations come back in such a rush that I cannot process them all at once. The first is light, and the second is pain. My eyes—unused—burn. Then I begin to smell again. I think I smell metal, but I really smell blood. My chest is covered in it, as well as sweat, but all the wounds have closed. The smell tumbles me backwards into the familiar world of death and I remember who I am.

I am Sylar.

The ropes that tie me to this chair are easily broken, but my telekinesis leaves me dizzy, as if I had suddenly tried to run after years in a wheelchair. I catch myself on the wall, and I look around the room. It is destroyed, like a tornado has ripped through it. Everything that hadn't been tied down lies broken on the floor, next to whichever wall it had been hurled against. There is an overturned table to my left, with knives around it. Most have my blood on them. There is a broken bottle of red wine, two crushed glasses, and I can smell traces of a drug.

I can hear her heartbeat. She is in the room. The heavy oak desk is the only think undisturbed in the room. She is crouched underneath, shaking. As I come around to where she is hidden and reach down to grab her by the hair, my foot crunches down on the glass of a framed photograph. I remove my foot and I see the faces of Peter and Nathan Petrelli.

And I remember a memory that is not mine. And yet it happened to me.

This was Nathan Petrelli's house. This was Nathan Petrelli's study. She had been here when he'd come home from the office, with a bottle of wine and two glasses already poured. She'd told him that they had something to celebrate, and he'd taken a sip of the wine that she'd handed him.

It had been drugged, and he'd woken up tied to the very same chair I had woken up in. And she had tortured him. She had cut him and he had healed, and watched in disbelief as my captive mind sent his possessions hurtling toward her.

Her hands come up to grip the one I have tangled in her hair. I lift her up from the floor, and finally, I remember what has happened to me.