Run where you'll be safe/
Through the garden gates/
To the shelter of/
Magnolia/
There's not much time/
The blush in the sky begins to fade/
Claire heard it first in the blast of the PA system, the unintelligible words rolling over the city from police car-mounted speakers, blunted by the walls of their house. They sent an instinctual fear through her, and instant awareness of something gone wrong, and she rushed to turn on the TV. She didn't even have to choose a channel, there it was—EVACUATION, in screen-high letters. Nuclear threat, they said, escaped terrorist, leave city immediately.
She clattered up the stairs and ran for her father, yelling, banging into the room so hard that Peter immediately pushed her back, clapping a hand over her mouth. This was the moment they'd been waiting for all day—Sylar was asleep, and it was finally safe to take off the control collar. Mr. Bennet was bending to remove it, moving as carefully as he would have with a live bomb, hands light and surgically precise. They were hoping that the Gabriel personality would immediately surface, but if not, there were two ex-Company agents standing by to plug him full of tranquilizers.
But her news was more important than science projects, so Claire shoved Peter's hand away and told them, whispering fast, "Ted Sprague is out! He escaped, he's in New York, and they're afraid he's going to blow up the whole city! They've blockaded all the bridges and they're evacuating everybody, we have to go!"
Behind them, cutting off their reaction, Sylar's eyes snapped open and he roared to life, knocking them back with a flick of his hand. They fell under the force of his invisible pressure, collapsing like dominos, swept as if before a wave as he threw them aside. Claire hit the wall with painful force and her head snapped back, everything turning instantly black like the flick of a light switch.
When she woke up, she was crumpled at the base of the wall, tangled in a heap of motionless bodies that looked like a battlefield, stretching across the room. She was the first one to revive—probably the healing thing again, she thought—and, fortunately or unfortunately, Sylar was nowhere to be seen. She sat up stiffly, pulling her legs out from under Katie just as the woman began to stir.
They came conscious in intervals, seconds from each other like a natural chain reaction, organically waking one after another. "He's gone, isn't he?" Mr. Bennet asked grimly, inspecting a bruise that was forming on his arm.
"Of course he is," Claude said. "I guess we've got our answer, though—if there's a Gabriel personality, he'd definitely been repressed."
"Right," Mr. Bennet said authoritatively. "Everyone pack your bags, we're leaving in five minutes."
"What do you mean, we're leaving?" Peter said, aghast. "What about Sylar?"
"If Sylar gets hold of Ted Sprague, he's just as dangerous as you," Mr. Bennet said sharply. "He heard us talking about Sprague, he's gone off, and now we're sitting on a time bomb, and it's ticking down every second we waste arguing about it."
"So we're just going to run away?" Peter accused.
"We're going to stay alive," Mr. Bennet said, harsh and uncompromising. "Five minutes. Be downstairs in the library."
Claire caught Peter's eyes just as he was about to object, holding them with a meaning stare. He shut his mouth and gave her a slight nod, disappearing into the hallway toward his room.
--
Mr. Bennet glanced impatiently at his watch, pacing over to the windows. "What's taking them so long?" he said, voice even but tight with tension.
They were waiting for Peter and Claire, had been waiting for Peter and Claire for some time now, watching the pour of people through the streets become less and less, turning to a trickle. Claude tapped his fingers on the bookshelf, then suddenly looked up, jerking his head toward the door in sudden realization. "You don't think they—"
Katie's eyes went wide like a deer, horror filling them quickly to the top. "They wouldn't."
A silence while they considered this, and then the conclusion: "Yes, they would," Mr. Bennet said, and they sprinted toward the stairs.
---
Katie came into Jonathan's room flushed and upset, hair in a careless disarray that made him instantly get to his feet, feeling disaster from her like a visible force. "Have you seen Claire?" she asked him frantically.
"No," he replied, concern ratcheting up at the mention of her name. "What's going—" Katie turned to leave, but he grabbed her wrist, now helplessly invested. "Tell me what's going on," he insisted.
"Sylar escaped, and Peter and Claire went after him, even though he'd heading right toward Ted Sprague. They're trying to save the world as usual, but they're going to get themselves killed this time."
"Let me loose," Jonathan said, voice low and intense like a dark bass chord.
"What? No," Katie snapped, still full of unresolved resentment for this boy she'd taken under her wing, who had turned out not to need her wing at all.
"Come on, Katie!" he said, rattling his handcuff against the bedpost. "What were you going to do, leave me here chained to the bed? I am not going to let her die! I swear, I'll chop off my own hand if you don't let me go after her."
Katie gave him an odd, searching look. "Fine," she said after a few seconds. "Let me see your cuff."
---
Sylar found him in the middle of the street, weaving between empty cars like a sleepwalker, slow and methodical, rippling with white-orange energy. Such power—it had been all he could do not to charge aimlessly in that very second. But he was a far better hunter than that. He had waited, and he had chosen his moment, and now Ted Sprague was lying at his feet, his blood dripping down the sides of taxis into bright pools of red on the asphalt.
He felt the power rush into him like being struck by a lightning bolt, dangerously potent and volatile, charging him so full he felt he must be glowing. Then he realized he was glowing, bones showing through his skin, burning up with power that roiled inside of him, and for the first time it occurred to him that he might lose control. He felt the radioactivity roar like a wild animal within him, elemental and unharnessed, tearing through him and paralyzing his limbs, bursting out from him in shockwaves that melted the cars and street signs, bending them as it was bending him, eating him like an acid and controlling him—
No. He grabbed hold of the power and savagely twisted it down, forcing it to submission as he had with dozens of other abilities. He would not be ruled. He would not be controlled. It began to subside, rebellion lost, and he was safe again, unconsumed.
He caught a flicker of motion from the corner of his eye and snapped his head around to it. He knew the faces in an instant, and he smiled—the universe was bending for him again. As if his day couldn't get any better, here were the two people he would most have wanted to see—Claire Bennet and Peter Petrelli.
--
Peter was severely creeped out by the sight of an empty New York City. Partially, it was because of the similarities to his dream, but also it was the quiet, the unnatural stillness devoid of the yelling and honking and bustling vivid life he was so used to. He and Claire were walking very close now, huddling together against the alien cityscape, shoulders brushing. He was checking his shields every few seconds, reassuring himself of their blue shimmer in the sucking, deafening silence. In the end, the emptiness helped them—they saw the lights from blocks away, not a full-scale explosion but a few ripples of radiation, enough to draw them. They could tell when they reached the site by the twisted metal and ash, and by the corpse of Ted Sprague lying in bloody mutilation against the wheels of a car.
"He's dead," Claire said blankly.
"Yeah," Peter said, and without thinking, dropped his shields.
It was like being hit by a sunbeam at first, gentle and warm, not intrusive, not noticeable. Then, the heat began to build—something was boiling under his skin, burning, and Claire was looking at him in horror. He looked down at his hands and they were glowing, looking exactly as they had in his dreams. "No," he said hysterically. "No, this isn't possible, he's dead!"
Then, in his line of sight, there was Sylar, head and shoulders above the cars and smiling as he downspiralled into Hell. The power was pouring into him now, filling every inch of him and fighting to be let free. He opened his mouth to yell at Claire, to tell her to run and get away, but he couldn't, choked by the force that was charging him from head to foot. It began to escape him in waves, bursting from him and crashing against the already-melted car frames despite all his efforts to stop it. This was it—after all the months and the dreams and the warnings, he'd lost it all, lost it to a moment of stupid inattention. He was a comet, bright destruction, a horrible screaming death for the capital of the world, a disaster unlike anything anyone had ever dreamed. He watched, helpless, as Claire threw her arms up against the waves of radiation, skin blackening where it touched, and he thought, not even she can heal from this, and the realization burned worse than the nuclear power that was eating him alive. It surged against his willpower and he went to his knees, trying with every fiber of his being not to be a bomb, not to be death, and failing, losing ground like water from a sieve—
Suddenly, there were footsteps around him, and someone was dropping to the ground, grabbing his wrists, pulling him against them. He saw Claude and Mr. Bennet, and Jonathan holding onto Claire, Candice next to Sylar, and Katie inches away from him, yelling over the explosion.
"Shield, Peter!" she was screaming. "Shield!"
Somehow he pushed through the pulsing charges racking his body, locking with her, blue shields going up from their intertwined hands, two hundred feet on every side, and the people they loved were within the bubble but he couldn't let himself think of that, had to concentrate on holding the shields that couldn't possibly hold, not against the terrible storm of nuclear chaos that was beating against them. He clung to Katie and in some part of his mind he knew they were screaming, could feel his nose bleeding and his ears, torn apart by millimeters as a nuclear explosion drove mercilessly against their shields, and his vision went black, white, red with pain as he bit straight through his lip, and it couldn't hold, they couldn't hold—
And then there was silence.
They didn't move for a long time, ash-covered statues in a dead garden. Finally, Peter tried to pull away, panic rising as he saw the destruction around them, yards of black charred ground but no people. No Jonathan and Claire, no Mr. Bennet, no Claude, no noise except the wind through the ash. He felt himself start to break, cracking under the strain of apocalypse, but Katie's hands were on the sides of his head, pulling his forehead to touch hers, murmuring quiet and soothing.
"Calm down," she was saying. "It's okay, Peter, we did it. Relax. Breathe. There's no danger. There's no world. There's only you. Breathe."
---FIN---
AUTHOR'S NOTE: The end! I'm done, with one day to spare—I turn you over to the brilliance of the real "Heroes" writers. Sorry about the horrendously tragic ending—they seem to be the only kind of ending I can write :) Anyway, it's close to canon as far as the massive character wipeout, so I hope you guys don't hate me too much.
You all have been incredible—I loved every review, every word of encouragement. I'm thinking about writing another fic once "Heroes" breaks for summer, so look for me! Thank you again!
CLARIFICATION: I've had a few questions about what, exactly happened in the end. Here's what happened: they saved New York, but everyone died…yep. Really. It's all very sad.