Fall was always left in your eyes/
Just a fleck of yellow light/

Like the sunrise/
Like the twilight/

Peter could feel Linderman across the glass before he even looked up—the man had great presence, personal energy almost amounting to a kind of a stage charm, a subtly aggressive projection of self. "Good morning, Peter," he said pleasantly. "I hope you and your roommate have been getting along?"

Peter glanced across the room at Sylar, who was sitting on his bed with his legs crossed, looking meditative and glassy-eyed. "Oh yeah," he said sarcastically. "We're best friends, we've been braiding each other's hair and everything."

"Now that's Nathan talking," Linderman said thoughtfully. "I recognize the anger."

"You don't know anything about my brother."

"I beg to differ, Peter. You of all people should know how interested I am in your family."

"If you mean it's your hobby to tear us to pieces, I could agree with you," Peter said bitterly.

"I assure you that everything I've done has been for the eventual good of us all," Linderman told him in the tone of a teacher imparting a spectacular moral. "I understand that it's difficult to see the whole picture when you're painted into it, but you must trust to the artist's hand, Peter."

Peter laughed humorlessly. "You sound exactly like my father. At least now I know where he got it."

"Ah, your father," Linderman said, sounding regretful. "I am sorry about how that ended—he was very adept at hiding his depression from me."

"You're sorry?" Peter said furiously, moving as close to the glass as the chain would let him. "You destroyed my father, latched onto him like a parasite and ate everything he had in him, until there was nothing left for his wife or his children or even himself. He died because you destroyed every part of him that was alive—you killed him, and now you're trying to do the same thing to Nathan. I can see what you're doing, Mr. Linderman, and I'm telling you that I'm not going to let it happen."

"Oh, no?" Linderman asked, warmly amused. "And what are you going to do about it, locked in a vault in Las Vegas? One of the reasons I'm glad we got hold of you, Peter, is because you're such a distraction to your brother. Nathan has a very important role to play in the future, and he only seems to be able to make the appropriate decisions if you're not around to talk him out of them. If Nathan is to survive the next five years, he needs to lose his conscience, and quickly."

"World peace through moral depravity?" Peter snorted. "Sounds like a great campaign slogan."

"Someday you'll understand," Linderman said, unruffled. "That is, if you're still around. You're only the second empath we've ever got our hands on, and I admit I'm very curious about how this ability of yours works."

"That makes two of you," Peter said scornfully, nodding to Sylar. "Between you and Mr. Evolution over there, there's not going to be anything left of me—and let me tell you, that will not make my brother happy."

Linderman simply smiled that so-sincere smile of fatherly concern. "I brought you boys some food," he said, sliding two plexiglass trays through to their cell with an automated whirr. "Eat something, would you?"

Peter watched him go, feeling distinctly ineffective—it wasn't in his nature to be angry at all, and it was very difficult to sustain fury against someone who didn't seem to mind anything he said. He took the tray of food and stared at it unhappily. He wasn't hungry, and he didn't see any other use for the things they'd given him—he supposed if he got really desperate, he could commit ridiculous, messy suicide with the plastic fork. Or perhaps he could throw the lightweight plastic tray at Sylar if the man bothered him again.

He glanced at Sylar, who seemed busy fiddling with the bolt of his cuff (there wasn't any chance of prying it loose, Peter had tried) and sighed quietly to himself. Maybe not.

---

Peter woke up in the middle of the night with a hand over his mouth and a knee on his chest, driving him so hard into his cot that he could feel the nails through the thin mattress. He snapped instantly from sleep to wakefulness, adrenaline flash-flooding his veins with the first sight to Sylar's eyes, glittering like a cat's out of the dark. He rolled himself off the bed, managing to land squarely on Sylar's ribs despite the fact that it nearly dislocated his wrist to do so.

Peter saw two problems with this scenario: first, that he was chained to the wall, while Sylar appeared to be free, and second, that Sylar was about half a foot taller than him and a lot more angry. Without their respective abilities in the mix, it was a whole different story, and Peter was starting to have serious doubts about the ending. .

Sylar pushed him off and scrambled to his feet, jumping at Peter with a barely-human snarl. Peter, who had learned self-defense—if nothing else—in his training with Claude, punched him solidly in the mouth and sent him stumbling back. He recovered all too quickly and came at Peter again, this time managing to wrap a hand around his throat and slam him back into the wall. Peter blacked out for a split second as the back of his head hit the stone, then came back to silent, struggling life, scrabbling with his free hand to release Sylar's hold on his throat.

Finding that nothing short of a crowbar would make the killer let go, and quickly running out of air, he opted for a different strategy, slamming his elbow into the side of Sylar's head. The man hissed in pain and backed away, but only for a moment—before Peter could stop him, the hand was back around his throat, crushing his windpipe with no handy Claire regeneration to fix it. This is hopeless, Peter thought desperately. I'm half-blind, one-handed, can't move more than two feet in any direction—I am very dead.

Suddenly, the lights snapped on, searing Peter's vision back to yellow stripes, and there were black-clad men in the cell, dragging them apart seconds before Peter lost consciousness altogether. Abruptly able to breathe again, he fell back against the wall, coughing, as one of the men stabbed a tranquilizer into the thrashing, struggling Sylar. Candice, looking less than spectacular for once in an overlarge sweatshirt and just-rolled-out-of-bed hair, stalked into the cell just as he was going limp, eyes still bright with thwarted menace.

"Dammit, I told them," she yelled. "What did I tell them? Why don't they listen to me?" She turned on one of the black-clad commandos, seeming to tower over the muscular man, ten feet added by her withering told-you-so rage. "Get Sylar into another cell, I don't care what Linderman says. And figure out how he got loose!"

The man saluted, military-crisp, and Candice walked over to where Peter had semi-collapsed on his bed. "Are you okay?" she asked, her voice oddly worried. What the hell? Peter thought wildly. She's not concerned about me, is she? He looked sharply up at her, but her face only showed skepticism and annoyance, and he gave up the situation for hopelessly crazy.

"Um," he said. "Yeah. I'll be fine."

"Good," she said brusquely, suddenly sharp and businesslike. "Mr. Linderman wouldn't have been happy if you were damaged. Our specialists flew in today, and they want to start the testing tomorrow morning."

Seeing the way he flinched, not quite able to hide his fear, she reached down and patted him on the cheek. "Sleep tight," she said.

---

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Thank you SO MUCH, everyone who's been reading and reviewing—your nice words are my fuel to keep writing :)