When Sylar walked into the camp of the group that had taken Claire away, he instantly felt their eyes upon him, on all sides. People stopped what they were doing when he saw him striding past. Conversations ended abruptly, mid-sentence. Children who were playing in the road left their toys and ran to their parents. Apparently, Sylar's reputation preceded him with these people, who knew him by sight.

In spite of his recent efforts to reform himself, he couldn't help but feel that old sense of satisfaction at their reaction. He had lived for being feared, thrived upon it. What he was beginning to realize now, with Peter's help, is that what he truly wanted was to be respected. And, having been neglected, intimidated, and even bullied all his life had taught him to equate respect with fear.

Now he found that old desires were difficult to deny. Walking through this crowd of people made him want to hurt them, to brutalize them so they'd recognize his power and respect it. Fortunately for those people – and for him, to a certain extent – the drive to become a different person was a match burning inside him, small yet brightly.

Sylar's eyes scanned the crowd for Claire. It had been five days since Sylar and Peter had returned to the house in Albany and found Angela dead, and since Emma had run back to them telling them the story of the people who had saved them from the agents (she had assumed federal government) that had invaded the house and attacked them.

Sylar now stood in the center of the makeshift town, surrounded by others like him who glared at him with hatred and terror. "I'm looking for Claire Bennett!" he shouted. "I know she's here. I want to see her!"

When he received no response, he held up his hand, causing the people to shrink backwards and gasp. They knew what he could do.

"Take it by force. That's your way, isn't it, Sylar?" a voice called out. Sylar turned around to see a teenaged boy with messy black hair standing a few yards away, his arms crossed in a stance of weariness and defiance. "Doesn't matter who you hurt, what you destroy. As long as you get what you want."

Sylar felt his insides tingle at the depth of the boy's words. Was it shame he was feeling? It had been so long, he wasn't sure. Still, he wasn't going to be deterred. "I didn't come here for trouble," he called to him. "Just let me see her and I'll go."

The boy smiled and shook his head in bemusement. "You just don't get it, do you, man? You don't have any power here. And you might be able to do away with one of us easily, but not all of us. So just get out of here while you still can."

Sylar felt Elle's electricity crackling at his fingertips as he held his hands at his sides.

Just then, Claire emerged from the behind the boy. She seemed thinner to Sylar, and he could tell from the red, watery look of her eyes that she'd spent a good deal of time crying. "No, wait!" As she began to walk towards Sylar, the boy tried to stop her, but she gently pushed him back. "It's okay, West." She turned and gave her former enemy a hard look. "Sylar's not here to hurt anyone."

They walked along a country road in a town called New Windsor, about thirty miles north of Baltimore. This was where Claire's rescuers had determined was the safest place to set up their temporary camp while they assessed the potential outfall of the bombing of the Watergate.

The public had naturally blamed their kind for it. The bombing was just the kind of media fodder that the conservative parties and hate groups needed. Rallies were being held all over the country – called "Celebrations of humanity." Extremist religious groups offered enthusiastic support for these rallies, recruiting youths at churches, neighborhood organizations, even right out of malls and movie theaters. Claire's previous impromtu visit on the Aaron Neil show was no longer seen as an act of goodwill, but as a smokescreen designed to let down the public's guard so that her "demonic kind" could commit acts of terrorism.

The group of posthumans that rescued Claire, led by Claude Rains, was beginning to acquire the resources needed to fight them. After seeing the lengths the government and the public would go to in order to get rid of them, she knew the only chance she had was with them.

"So why are you here?" Claire asked bluntly as they walked, and Sylar was surprised at the lack of hostility in her tone.

Sylar stopped walking and turned around to face her. "I came to ask you to come back home."

Claire smirked. "Home? There's no such thing."

"We were building a home. You, me, Peter, and Emma."

"A home? Us?," Claire questioned cynically. "Is Angela included in that happy little home, because you should know, she got killed because of me."

Sylar looked away, into the yellow and green rows of corn that lined the road. This was the moment he'd been dreading, because he didn't know how to tell Claire the truth – or if he even wanted to, in the first place.

He had stood in the shadows on the rooftop as Noah Bennett argued with Peter and Hiro about the ethical implications of their plan to wipe all memory and belief in human evolution from the minds of the general public. Truthfully, it all bored him; he could care less one way or another if humans knew about them; he knew they'd find some way of denying what was in front of them.

But then there was the explosion, in the building where Bennett, his girlfriend, and Peter should have been but weren't, thanks to Sylar's suggestion that Hiro teleport them out of there. Hardly a coincidence. Someone doesn't like them, Sylar thought with a sing-song cadence.

Noah bolted for the exit with Lauren. Hiro tried to stand in their way and got shoved viciously to the ground.

Peter helped Hiro up. Throwing Sylar a wary glance, he turned his attention to his Japanese friend. "Someone obviously wanted to stop Bennett's plans even more than we did."

"Who would do this? Who else knew?" Hiro asked.

Peter shook his head. "I don't know. But I do know that they're going to blame us for this. You need to get out of here."

"What about you, Peter?"

Peter looked again into the darkness where Sylar stood. "I'll be fine. Just go. Be safe."

Hiro nodded and disappeared in less than a second. Sylar emerged as soon as Hiro was gone. He looked questioningly at Peter's horrified face. "I hope you don't think I had anything to do with this," he chided.

Peter opened his mouth to answer, then turned and coughed raggedly into his sleeve from the smoke and heat in the air. "What are you doing here?" he asked Sylar once he'd caught his breath.

Sylar looked out over the city skyline, to where the police and fire vehicles were now congregating around the inferno of the Watergate. "Having your back in case anything went wrong. Apparently, it did. Someone had very good timing."

"Because someone knew where we would be," Peter added.

Sylar and Peter looked at each other in realization. "The girls!" Peter cried.

They'd flown back to Albany as quickly as they could after they couldn't reach Claire or Angela on their phones. By the time they got there, however, it was too late.

They could tell all the windows on the ground floor had been smashed as they approached the house, and the gate had been broken and bent by a car forcibly driving through it. Fortunately for them, no one had called the police.

Sylar entered the house first, holding up his hand to use his telekinesis if necessary. The house was still and quiet, only the faint sound of the television blaring from the sitting room. With the exception of the windows broken and a few chairs knocked down, the house was intact.

"Claire? Mom?" Peter called as he followed Sylar. "Where are they?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure if…" Sylar stopped mid sentence when he saw what was lying at the bottom of the stairway. Quickly he turned around and blocked Peter from entering.

"What is it?" Peter demanded, pushing against Sylar's extended arms. "Let me go, Sylar!"

Sylar's eyes felt heavy and strange for some reason. He realized, as he shook his head, that they were tears.

"Damn it, let me see!" Peter shouted, and succeeded in pushing away from the other man to peer into the other room.

Peter was on his knees on the floor, before he even knew how he got there. His arms were around his mother's body, and the blood that had spilled from her wound was wetting his chest and stomach. He couldn't cry, couldn't scream. He couldn't even blink. He just sat on the floor with her body, rocking it as you would a baby. Numb in his grief.

It was an hour before Sylar could disentangle Peter from Angela's body. Peter was still in such a daze that he offered no resistance when Sylar carried him up the stairs and put him to bed.

Sylar laid Angela out in one of the other bedrooms. It was bare and white, adorned only with a small twin bed, an end table, and a chair. Being on the top floor, and in an old house, this room was colder than the other rooms. It felt…ethereal, somehow. Strangely peaceful, and apart from the world.

Sylar sighed as he looked down at her. He had mixed emotions when it came to Angela Petrelli. On the surface, he absolutely reviled her. She was scheming, manipulative. She'd seen his one weakness – his desperate need to be loved – and she'd taken advantage of it by pretending to be his mother. She was unapologetic about her deceit. She'd even admitted that using people was, simply, "what she did."

But Sylar couldn't lie to himself: he had loved this woman, once. Once, very briefly, when he believed that he belonged to her. It was that brief period of loving her that had made his hatred for her burn all the brighter later on when he learned that he was nothing but a pawn to her.

There was something else, Sylar knew. There had to be. There had to have been some other reason for why he had tears in his eyes when he saw her. For most people, it would be easy to guess that it was empathy for Peter, that it was Peter he cared about and so it was his grief that Sylar had internalized.

But Sylar knew that wasn't it. He knew, no matter how he might try to redeem himself to the things he'd done, he wasn't an empathetic person. Not in that way, at least. There might come a day when he was good enough that someone could give him the love he'd craved, but he was always going to be a selfish creature at heart.

Then, like a kick to the back of the head, Sylar knew what it was.

It was Nathan.

Sylar could still feel the man in his head after all this time. He still saw glimpses of Nathan's memory, he smiled or frowned at them sometimes. Sometimes when he spoke, especially to Peter, he felt like it was a different voice coming from his lips. Now, with Angela dead, he was experiencing Nathan's grief, Nathan's pain.

He chuckled bitterly. He supposed that it was Nathan's revenge for taking his life away, that now Sylar was forced to share a part of his existence with the dead man's ghost.

Sylar realized that Angela's eyes were still slightly open, green and white glimmering from the slightly wrinkled lids. He reached out and gently touched the lids to shut them.

And that was when it hit him. The gift he'd taken from that company agent kicked in at the touch of her flesh and he was overwhelmed with memories from Angela Petrelli's life. He stumbled backward, falling to the floor and his mind was awash in the impressions he was taking in.

Fortunately for him, the earlier things from her life were like flashes of color. Little things like images of her family and friends, and places she'd been to floated past his paralyzed eyes. His mind struggled to decode it, to compartmentalize it so that it would make sense.

And then, like a butterfly touching down upon a particular flower whose nectar was known to be the sweetest, Sylar's mind brought into focus a particular memory, one of the very last experiences before Angela's death.

Sylar was seeing through her eyes. She was sitting at a table in a small café with a tall thin man with gray hair, having coffee. The sun was heavy and golden – afternoon in New York City. From the looks of it, it was before the Central Park Ferris Wheel incident, as the people around them were still moving in blissful obliviousness.

The man across the table looked world-weary and suspicious, but he also seemed genuinely happy to be with her. His blue eyes crinkled as he drank his coffee.

"So? Will you do it?" Sylar could hear Angela ask.

The man chuckled lightly. "It's quite a tall order, wouldn't you say?" He had a British accent. "Breaking into your house, pretending to be terrorists – "

"The government," Angela corrected.

"Same thing to me," the man retorted. "Duping your granddaughter into joining my group – deceit is not our way, Angela."

Sylar, as Angela, took the man's hand. "Claude, please. Claire is not safe out in this world, and she's too stubborn to understand that. She just needs guidance, that's all."

"But she has you," Claude reminded her.

Angela looked away, and Sylar could feel tears beginning to just prick at her eyes. "Not for long. That's the other part of the favor I need to ask of you. When your group breaks into the house, I…I need you to shoot me."

"What!" Claude exclaimed, then looked around when he realized a few people had heard him and were looking at their table. "Angela, this is insane," he resumed in a softer voice. "You're asking me to kill you?"

Sylar could feel Angela smile sadly and tap the side of her head. "Three months ago, before I started having the visions of the mess that's to come, I was having trouble remembering where I'd put things. I forgot how to get to my favorite theatre one night. A friend who I've known all my life called me and I couldn't remember her name. I'm in the first stages of Alzheimer's, Claude. It's manageable right now, but it's only going to get worse."

"Angela."

"No, please. Let me explain. All my life I've been a capable woman – a force to be reckoned with. I've been the woman with all the answers, who can hold her own against anyone and anything. I don't want to go out of this life a shell of a person who can't even remember her own name. While I can still make the choices for myself, I want to choose when my death will be. I want my son and granddaughter to remember me the way I am – right now."

Claude sighed. "Angela, like you've said, they're only visions. Maybe Claire will make a different choice, maybe she won't –"

"It doesn't make any difference, Claude," Angela interrupted. "This…disease is still going to take me, one way or another. If I have any choice in my matter, I want the end to be with a bang, not a whimper."

When he still hesitated, she took his hand. "You're the only one I can trust – the only one I have left. Peter will have Emma, but Claire will be all alone. Noah will pull away from her. Her mother can't help her. And I don't trust Sylar as far as I can throw him. Please…once I get her to my summer house in Albany, just come with your group and collect her. The whole experience will shake her to the point where she will come to rely on you."

Claude shook his head in amazement. "You're really serious about this. You've completely thought this through."

She nodded. "Yes. And one other thing. I want you to shoot me. Don't let anyone else do it."

He smirked. "Did you really think I'd ever let anyone else have the honor of bringing the great Angela Petrelli down? Not on your life."

Then everything went black, and Sylar found himself staring at the pocked white ceiling of the cold room.

He picked himself off of the floor, bracing himself against side of the bed. He found himself face to face with Angela's corpse.

"Huh," he grunted in disgust. "Even in death you're still pulling the strings."

Sylar had come to Maryland convinced that he'd eventually find it in himself to tell Claire the truth. Instead, he sidestepped it.

"We cremated her, Emma and I," he told her. We scattered her ashes in the ocean. Peter's in…very quiet grief. Maybe it's – it's good that the rest of the world is in such turmoil. It's given him time to retreat into himself and mourn without worrying about anything else."

Claire shook her head in disbelief. "I never thought it could happen."

"What's that?"

"You being anything other than a monster that terrorized my family."

Sylar looked down at the potholed road. "I wasn't always a monster, Claire. I was able to feel things once. Maybe I'm…just getting back to the person I was."

Claire gave a short, humorless laugh. "The things you do never go away, though. I'm learning that right now."

She seemed so small, so pale, as he looked at her on that dusty country road. She'd always been fire and gold to him before, fierce in her love and hate. Now the light had dimmed in her eyes. He knew at that moment, he'd do anything to make it shine the way it had before.

"Let me help you," he said softly.

She shook her head. "You're not the one to do it."

He narrowed his eyes, feeling the sting. "Then what am I supposed to do, Claire? How do I make it better? How do I find a way to live with myself?"

Claire put her arms around herself as the wind began to blow briskly around them. She didn't answer him right away. Finally, she said, "I think – I think what you need is to…be away."

"Away?"

"When people do horrible things, they go to prison, right? But that won't work for you – no prison can hold you. Maybe…you need to make your own prison. You need to be apart from everything and everyone. So that...by not having people around you…for a while… life is more precious to you than it ever was before."

"Claire, I was trapped in a prison with Peter for years! It was-"

"Not your decision," Claire pointed out. "Matt Parkman trapped you there. This has to be your choice, or it's not going to mean anything to you."

Sylar threw up his hands in frustration. "I don't need to be in exile! I can help people here!"

Claire walked up to him now, their bodies less than an inch from one another. She stood so close to him, he could see the flecks of gold in her irises. "Then I'll make a deal with you," Claire replied. "If you can look me in the eyes and tell me that when you arrived at our camp you weren't once tempted to kill someone and take their power, I'll leave with you right now."

When Sylar hesitated, Claire smiled sadly, knowing she was right. "Goodbye, Sylar," she told him, and turned to head back to the camp.

Sylar panicked as he watched her leave. This was his last chance to tell Claire the truth about Angela's plan – the last chance to take her back with him.

"Claire!" he called out. She stopped and turned to look at him.

"Claire, I…" he paused, and before he knew it, he was asking the wrong question. "Is there any way that you could – well, not anytime soon, I know, but maybe someday – that you could find it in you to forgive me for what I've done to you?"

Claire smiled sadly. "If you'd asked me six years ago if it could be possible that people could fly, or travel in time, or die and come back to life, I'd have said no way. But that's the world we live in now. So I guess…to answer your question…anything is possible." With that, she turned and walked away, the sound of her footsteps feeling almost deafening to him.

The morning was pale and grey when Sylar returned to the house. He looked up at the top floor, at the open shutters of the bedroom. That was where he'd left Peter when he went to find Claire, and he knew that his friend was still mourning in there. He brought his hands together, creating blue sparks of electricity that crackled and sputtered, lighting up the glum sky.

Once he'd had the vision and realized that the house hadn't been attacked by the police at all, Sylar knew it was safe for them to remain in Angela's house. Peter offered no resistance anyway. Once Emma returned and told Sylar what happened, she immediately took on the role of caregiver. When Sylar got ready to leave to try to get Claire back, she warned him gravely that it wasn't going to be easy to do.

"She trusts those people – and her old boyfriend is with them," Emma told him. "I don't think she's coming back." Emma peered in at Peter's sleeping form in the bedroom. "Maybe it's best if she doesn't."

A few minutes later, Emma emerged from the house and met him on the lawn, having seen his arrival message through the shutters.

She smiled sadly as she pulled her thin sweater closer to her. "She wouldn't come back," she said.

"No."

Emma sighed. "Oh well. Come inside, and I'll make you some breakfast." She begun to turn away, and Sylar caught her arm, making her look him in the face.

"I'm not staying, Emma. I only came back to say goodbye."

Emma frowned. "Goodbye? Wha – why?"

Sylar sighed and took her hands in his. "I don't know what Peter's told you about me, but I'm not a good guy."

"Sylar-"

"No, really, I'm not. I've done some terrible things. Especially to Peter."

"But, you're his friend. He relies on you, he trusts you. Whatever you've done, it can't be that bad."

Sylar chuckled sadly. "Peter's a good-hearted person. And he's done his best to help me, but I can't stay here. If I do, then I'm just making light of the pain I've caused. Someone…very close to me made me realize that I need to be away."

He reached into the pocket of his coat and held out an envelope to her. "This is for you and Peter. Think of it as a parting gift."

Emma gently took it from him, and looked inside. The contents made her eyes grew huge in disbelief, and she immediately pushed it at him. "Sylar, no! All this money! Where did you get it?"

"It's my life savings," he told her. "Everything that was valuable to me. I'm not going to need it where I'm going."

"But, I can't accept this! What will happen to you-"

"Shh," he cut her off, pressing the envelope into her hand. "Take it, take it. I'll be fine. Just use this to build a life with Peter. Take care of him with it. You're all he has now."

Emma's fingers closed slowly around the fragile white paper. She looked up at him, her eyes filled with tears. "Thank you so much."

He smiled at her. "Tell Peter…I'll be back someday, when he needs me." With that, he turned and walked out of the yard.

Emma stood in the grass and watched Sylar leave. The wind began to pick up, and he was nearly to the end of the block when she began to feel the lightest of drizzles on her face. Still she watched him as he walked, until he was nothing but a black spot, moving against the sky.