Arithmetic
…
A/N: Unfortunately, I probably got facts about their childhood wrong. The discrepancies probably aren't terrible, but if they are, just pretend that it's AU.
Heroes does not belong to me.
WARNINGS (extremely vague underage sex)(slash)(MohinderSylar)(dark)
…
The wiring buzzes and the teacher drones. It's the same, everywhere. The fluorescents in the gym are humming a tune.
And isn't it queer how every gym sounds the same? The shouts echo off the walls every day. Hospitals echo like that.
Preteen years are never kind, and even less to this boy, who's arms are too hairy and who's brow is too heavy. This is middle school, after all, and appearances matter so much here. He dribbles the ball, one, two, one, two, too preoccupied with the rhythm to realize he's lost it. The opposing team jeers, his own team jeers, so he pretends he doesn't see them.
Twenty-two minutes until the next period.
Twenty-one and a half minutes until Biology.
He bustles about the court and pretends to not be counting seconds.
…
One, two, twenty-two cells in the slide. Counting is okay here. The teacher commends his attention to detail, and he commends the teacher for the same. So few people notice his talents. The students are so greasy and they grin so grotesquely, scrawling copied answers across their worksheets.
The way they fit together is so perfect- cells, not students. Perhaps those also stick together, but only by sweat and mutual savagery.
With an eyedropper he saturates the sample in salt water- he watches the liquid leech the water from the cells. The movement is so picturesque, he wonders briefly that nobody else could understand this. It is religion a thousand-fold! But everyone is blind.
Gabriel has no lab partner today.
In another school, A fly drones about the restroom. A boy watches it's lazily circle the ceiling, feeling detached. It's buzzing like the lights, it buzzes in his head. One, two, three circles, he forgets to count and starts at one again.
His curls lay in damp tangles against his neck. His face is oily with sweat. He washes his hands and his face, carefully, with too much soap. He does it again to make certain, and once more because it can't hurt, and because he can't go back to class yet.
Somebody opens the door and Mohinder hears it, but doesn't look up.
"I have to take a piss," the newcomer says, as he has to explain himself.
"I don't," Mohinder says. He isn't sure why, since he's found it much easier to ignore the boys here. "Today is dissection day."
"Yeah?"
"They cut them open."
The boy is quiet, too quiet, so Mohinder turns around. The other boy approaches the sink so quickly that Mohinder is backed into the corner. His sweaty back presses against the tiles walls, and goose bumps erupt on his bare arms. The boy looks older, stronger, and anyways he's never been good at fighting.
"Do you wanna do it?" the boy asks.
Mohinder's mind reels forward, then backwards, like a balancing act. "I- I don't want to kill them…"
"I don't mean that."
"What are you talking about?"
Fear is rising in his chest, thick and hot as the air. It's isotopic, psychotropic, ridiculous.
"You know."
But he doesn't, really. In feverish clarity he sees past the teenager and there is the fly, the fly who is no longer flying. It's face up in the sink, it's legs spasm mechanically for purchase.
He's too close now. It's stifling and it Mohinder's stomach is full of electrify. Things are falling into focus. The fly stops but his head keeps buzzing.
He can't go to class. It's making him sick to his soul, that way of turning science into a dead thing, and it's drawing the flies.
He tells himself that's why he yields as the other boy. That it's why he shudders and keens under his breath like a slut as the stranger takes him on the bathroom floor. The tile is cold but he feels like he's burning, and the other boy's on fire too, and maybe the whole school is catching now.
When it's over, they're tangled and sore, and he's wishing it wasn't over quite yet. He's sick in his bones and sick in his head.
The bell is ringing and Mohinder is alone again. He crawls to the toilet and vomits repeatedly. He doesn't count, and he's tardy for his next class. His knees are bruised and so are his insides.
He can't remember if the boy had a name.
…
Gabriel wonders if he should go after her. He decides against it, because he's emotionally and physically spent, and besides, people would talk. He closes his eyes and envisions a mental array of what he would do if he had gone after her. It comforts him.
He was... ashamed. Embarrassed. She had known he was a virgin, just another high school loser, but-
Fingernails rip open that girlish face, gouge out her eyes. Blood, the same shade as her lipstick.
She's the school slut. She'll do anything you want. He wanted nothing, but she insisted, so it's really her fault. Now they'll have another piece of him, another soft place to mutilate. The savages. How would he know how to fuck? How should he know?
Would they have told him? They'd never included him.
Slamming her face against the wall, hoping her face will collapse before the crumbling plaster does, and there's such beautiful red that he wants to sell it to a museum.
Gabriel fucks like a robot- the whole school will be saying it soon. That's what she said, as she left him in disgust. The bitch won't keep her mouth shut.
In sex, as in everything else, Gabriel is an outsider.
Six pieces of Sharon, so wide open she's more of a slut now than she's ever been, all over the sitting room. One is on a bible. The murder is leaking into the piousness, and possibly also the other way. Unlike Reese's, this tastes like bullshit.
He's thought of thirty six ways he could have killed her, and hundreds of experiments he could have done with her body.
Three, three, three hundred thirty-four and counting…
…
Sometimes Mohinder follows the boy home. Most of the time they do it on the bathroom floor like animals, because teenagers are such animals.
It's never any fun after dark so he leaves when they're done. After dark, you can forget that you're just playing.
Now Mohinder counts the paving stones of the sidewalk. It goes like this- two large, one small, two large again.
He's avoiding the question.
What question?
He didn't leave because it was dark.
One, one, two, one, one, do you love me?
Do you like me?
The answer is a resounding maybe and it's so anti-climactic. Mohinder is embarrassed for him, embarrassed that he asked, furious that he has to answer.
Affection is immeasurable. He wants to be able to pour it, count it out, label it and makes educated decisions, to hold it up to the light and name off it's chemical makeup, to make note of it's worth and weight.
Love is priceless, but doesn't priceless really means worthless?
Maybes metamorphose into nos and he forms an apology, which he stores behind his tongue. Tomorrow he will open his mouth and the words will spill out. Maybe they'll do it again, or maybe it'll end there. It seems like everyone's looking for something deeper.
Two, one, one, there are no maybes here, only science.
…
Decades later, the two are roughly the same, albeit with more facial hair and life experience. Gabriel probably still fucks like a robot, but it doesn't matter because his name is Zane now and Zane fucks like a horny scientist.
They're doing research now. SylarZaneGabriel is counting seconds again. He resents Mohinder because Mohinder never forgets his own name.
Sometimes they stop for a break, and drink tea, and sometimes they just have sex on the floor. Scientists are such animals.
Sylar wonders what he will dissect next.
Gabriel wonders where the clocks have all gone, which doesn't make any sense, but Gabriel has been insane for a long time.
This book has four hundred and twelve pages in it, of which they have read two hundred and two, which is 202 pages worth of breathing each other's air. The book is about dominant and recessive genes but ZaneSylarGabriel doesn't care.
They should be reading separate books, since Zane reads a little slower and Mohinder always has to wait before turning the page. But really, they just enjoy the closeness.
They can't seem to get close enough, even when they're on the floor.
Zane wonders when they'll be on the floor again.
Page 202, page 203, word 6, two o'clock and fourteen minutes. Ten seconds. They're both counting.
Nobody remembers what will happen at the end of the countdown, but it's not important anymore. What's important is the research/clocks/sex/science/murder. The numbers are for keeping score.
204, 205, 206 pages, and they still can't get close enough.