A/N: Okay I'll fess up - there's gonna be parts of this that are a tad confusing. I promise I'll explain, I just am a sick little puppy who enjoys building on the confusion to come sweeping in like a superhero with my Mighty Bomb of Explanation!!! It's a nasty little ego-stroking thing, you have my sincerest apologies.
I don't own Heroes or anything remotely related and I bow humbly before the television gods, please have mercy on me. Rated "M" for language, some violence, some blood & guts, and eventually some sexual imagery. And please review! If I've massively screwed something up, I'd like to know =D
2) Three Hundred
*** three hundred years later – yup, that's right, I said three hundred ***
Claire stood in front of the mirror. She was going to be late to work but she didn't care. There had been other jobs before, and there would continue to be other jobs whether she wanted it or not. Being late today wasn't really going to matter in the grand scheme of things. Wait... there was a 'grand scheme'? Son of a bitch.
In her apathy, she poked her breasts. Nope, still firm. She pulled at the skin on her face, tinged somewhat grey in the energy-efficient lighting - nope, no signs of any wrinkles. No crow's feet, no lines of any kind. Just the same body, same skin, same hands, same feet, and same eyes, puffy from lack of enthusiasm. Same, same, same. Except her name.
She was two weeks into this new life as Rose Bennett (it'd been a century since she'd used the moniker so she figured it was a safe little piece of nostalgia) and she hadn't quite gotten her space legs yet. Throwing on her robe and toweling down her new strawberry locks, she'd almost convinced herself that a small breakfast might go a long way toward combating the nausea that came as a result of adapting to semi-weightlessness. Her co-worker, Tami, had told her it'd take a few weeks aboard the space station to get completely over it, but she would and it was totally normal. She didn't dare explain to Tami how abnormal she was. Not in this day and age – not if she didn't want to live the same way the other abnormals did: in a camp on a broken, struggling planet.
Given the nature of her current profession… she thought maybe eggs were ill-advised. She opted for some dry toast while she watched a news video come over satellite about a colony in the Sagittarius sector. Something about its environmental controls had failed, leaving its population no other choice but to evacuate on no notice lest they be subject to the planet's toxic atmosphere. It wasn't the first failed venture out in the suffocating vacuum of space – the story failed to capture her interest. She was late enough.
Twenty minutes later she had left the habitation wing and was winding through a covered walkway that framed a stunning view of the Earth. She paused at the same place she did every morning, placing her hand on the railing, watching her breath fog against the tempered plexi-cement. She tried to remember the long-forgotten feel of an old dilapidated shuttle quaking all around her, tossing her around like a flapjack in a frying pan, as it surrendered itself to gravity, but the passage of time robbed the sensation from her. Eventually she'd give up this daily routine but she wasn't quite ready yet.
A pair of figures passed behind her. She turned to watch them and caught the eyes of Paula, a tall blue girl who owned what appeared to be a small storm cloud that followed her wherever she went. She was being escorted by her case worker and she wore an armband that signified she was there outside of the camps on a work release. She thought for a moment something in the blue girl's expression said that she knew Claire wasn't who she claimed to be, although she wasn't one hundred percent positive Paula's ability had any precognitive quality to it. As far as she knew, she was just a weather witch who was working with technicians in Water Treatment and Recycling. Once they had disappeared, she rubbed her arm where her own armband should've rested… but didn't.
She'd had to live her life very carefully to be accepted as a regular, baseline human, essentially fooling the system. She paid attention when co-workers started calling in sick, and made sure to randomly take sick days herself. Occasionally she'd donned bloody band-aids and concocted convincing stories. She never let people get close enough to her to discover the truth, which was fine because that was exactly how she wanted it, and had been living it for the past three centuries. She liked life by herself – it was simple and painless. And no matter what, she never ever ever got hurt on the job.
Moving on, she entered the med-bay and took the elevator to the basement.
"Do you like coffee?" Claire heard Tami's voice call from the cold room as she walked into the morgue. For the third time in the past two weeks she marveled over how an immortal like herself could choose to spend forty hours a week surrounded by death. She wondered if she was becoming obsessed.
"Uhh, yeah, I guess so," she responded.
"Good, because I brought you one! Real, fresh-ground stuff. None of that standard issue, instant crap they put on the boats."
"Wow, that's great… and don't they like being called ships?" It was hard not to like Tami. She knew because she'd been trying.
Tami was everything Claire wasn't. She was a staunch, ultra-religious Catholic. Knowing she'd see the end of the universe, Claire wasn't exactly convinced she'd meet God there. Tami also possessed a hugely bigoted hatred of all things homo sapiens modulensis, or what had been termed "modulars", shortened to just "mods" – in essence, people like Claire. Well, not really, but sorta. And only if Tami knew the truth. Which she didn't, because Claire was never going to get hurt at work. Ever, ever.
All that aside, however, Tami treated everyone she met like family. She was warm, generous, and made it her personal mission that Claire never ate her lunch alone. She held nothing back when it came to tales of her by-gone, wilder days and she was more than patient when Claire's newness at the job was sometimes unfortunately exhibited.
"What've we got today?" Claire asked, noting that four of their tables were occupied. A small giggle escaped her at the tiny flash of memory – she had once woken up on one of these tables, long ago, her skin peeled away and pinned beside her, her organs hanging in a scale across the room. She's woken up after she'd grown new ones.
"Somethin' funny?" Tami asked, joining her. "Here, got cream and sugar, just in case. Wasn't sure how you'd take it."
"Just cream, thanks." Blonde and bitter. Hmph. "It's nothing. Who're these guys?"
"Another group of rebel scumbags, hijacked a supply freighter headed out to one of the colonies. Can you believe it? The men and women on that boat… families'll never see 'em again. I mean, what the hell – don't my tax dollars pay to give those damned mods a home of their own where they won't hurt no one? But that ain't good enough, they gotta attack the colonies now. They get those dumbass injections for free, did you know that?" Here she goes again… "But if my kid gets sick, I gotta pay out the nose to keep 'em well. Damn mods don't even know what it's like to pay rent…"
"You don't have any kids, Tami." And these guys are pretty dead too, Tami. And mods have families too, Tami – just no freedom.
"I know, I'm just sayin', hypothetical," she answered, pulling the sheet back on one of them. The newly exposed body was pale and blue. She passed an examination wand over him, starting from the head and working down. She said it was more efficient starting there because it made her job move a bit quicker – most of the cadavers they received met their end from head injury, case solved. The rest was preparing the body for transport back to Earth to where it could either be claimed or cremated. Claire was silent while Tami started her recorder and began making the requisite notations that would accompany the body to its final destination. She set herself to the task of scrubbing down and preparing her work station.
"Hmm, couple lungs full of water. This guy drowned. Means he survived the crash."
"I thought they were -"
"They didn't make it too awful far. Got shot down by the Japanese – touched water off the coast of Australia."
"So why are they here?" And out came the bountiful patience for the newbie.
"Oh sure! Well, things are still hot down there, right? Got enough troubles of their own. We're a neutral location, so they figure they ship the bodies here for processing and avoid any nasty altercations."
Claire didn't think they were so neutral, but who was she to judge. Every day she spent here she felt more like an imposter, but living with it was preferable to the alternative. She only had to stick around for a couple decades before she could move on and be some other false baseline human. Maybe she'd make it to one of the colonies. They were still fledgling – not much more than space stations, like the one on which they stood, and some exploratory outposts on newly discovered exo-planets, fighting to thrive under expensive and occasionally faulty bio-domes. She knew her chances for anonymity were drastically less solid in areas where the population density was lower, but she couldn't help the instinctual drive to put as much distance between herself and her fears as possible. Forever was long enough – forever spent in a camp was out of the question.
"I'm done with notation, if you wanna get started – won't have to worry about me talkin' over you," Tami interrupted her train of thought. She quit staring off in space and yanked at the sheet in front of her while her co-worker took a peek at one of the other bodies.
"Wow, Rose, come take a look. Never seen a tattoo like this before." Claire set down her recorder, but snapped on a pair of long gloves. She swiveled her hips around the corners of the tables until she'd met Tami by her side. She held the arm of the body, jutting out from beneath the sheet. Shiny black ink in the form of what appeared to be an old barcode adorned his wrist, presenting someone who hadn't been born a century ago (like Tami) with somewhat of an enigma. Claire couldn't stop the words from passing her lips before she'd breathed them.
"A prison tattoo."
"You know what this is?"
Startled that she'd let the admission slip, she did her best to backpeddle an explanation.
"Oh, I, uh… I saw some documentary about 'em on satellite, the old tattoos have RFID tags underneath 'em. They were used before the neural taps were invented."
"But he's got a neural tap, too – I checked all these guys before you got here this morning."
Claire didn't hear a word she said over the quickening of her pulse.
"Isn't it weird?" she continued. "How would he get such old technology?"
Claire didn't want to say it. Tami said it for her.
"I mean, it looks real. Do we have anything that picks up RF? I wanna check it! How cool! You think he's the kind of mod that has an extra long lifespan or something?" She turned to make her way to their supply closet in a flurry of curious excitement, anxious to see if they had anything that would determine the validity of Claire's claim. "Or at least until he drowned, right? So much for your weird little cockroach power, eh buddy? Do you think that thing's authentic? Like, he got it a hundred years ago or more?"
Claire had heard enough. Once Tami had disappeared into the closet, she gulped down her apprehension and clenched a fist into the fabric of the sheet. She closed her eyes and counted to three. She ripped it away.
When Tami returned, Claire fought desperately to paint a mask over the recognition that had misted over her eyes and sunk a choking knot in her throat.
"Wow, he's cute… for a mod," Tami muttered while peering over her shoulder. "Young. Too young to be wearing a centuries old prison tattoo…"
There he was. Three hundred years she'd walked the earth alone. Two hundred and eighty years since he'd been moved from the old Federal Prison (which was now a parking lot and a high-rise apartment complex, and that was after it had spent a significant amount of time as nothing more than a crumbling ruin). After that he'd completely been lost. She'd had no idea how he'd ever find her. She'd convinced herself she didn't want him to. She'd resigned herself to never seeing him again, and had done so decades ago. She loved life alone – really, she did – and didn't need his wicked humor and perverted glare thank you very much. She hadn't realized how thick the layer of ice on her heart had grown until she set her eyes on his dark brows and predatory, albeit blue-lipped, mouth and it cracked – just cracked. She'd never wanted to feel like this again. She missed this feeling so badly. Three hundred years and he just pops up, like waving a magic wand. Like a bottle tossed in on the tide. Her fingers itched to touch him, to be sure he was real. The knot in her throat dropped like a stone into her stomach when she reminded herself that what she was really looking at was his dead body. How was she going to fix that…
Claire hid her face by rubbing her hand over it. She stepped away and plodded absentmindedly to her coffee. From behind her she could hear a strange buzzing, popping noise. Turning to its source she discovered Tami had procured some sort of device she was circling over Sylar's cold, grey wrist.
"What's that?"
"One of the newer neural tap readers – it picks up a greater range of frequencies. Thought maybe it'd get a hit. This puppy's real, Claire."
Yeah, no shit. Claire began to formulate a plan.
"Think Jesse upstairs'll want a look at him? See if he can find anything else archaic and weird?" Jesse was a pathologist who usually preferred to work on the living aboard the station, although occasionally they'd called on him in certain cases of interest. Cases like this.
"I dunno if I'd want to waste his time, he's pretty busy with the influx of survivors we got last night from that colony in Sagittarius, checking out what exposure to that atmosphere did to 'em."
"But what if this guy really does have some kind of weird cockroach power? What if abilities like his are being handpicked for rebel missions? Wouldn't someone want to know why? I'm just sayin', I think this guy needs a little more investigation. He seems… special."
"You can give it a shot if you want to. When you get sent back down here – and you will – Number Two'll still be waitin' for you, and you can prep yer boyfriend there after that."
Holy crap if she only knew how insanely laughable that statement was.
"Deal," she smiled, switching on the hovering mechanism for Sylar's table-top, floating his body out the door and down the hall to the service lift. She did not, however, take him to see Jesse. Instead, they disembarked the lift two decks up in a small, rarely-used maternity ward. Apparently there weren't a lot of people having babies in space. She pulled him into a dark abandoned room and locked the door behind them. Securing him to the table dock, she began to scour the room for standard first response equipment that every room would contain. She successfully located an oxygen kit and a defibrillator. She placed the mask over his face and turned on the flow controller for the small unit that filtered pure oxygen from the atmosphere like a set of gills – the plastic around his nose and mouth flared with fog for an instant when the conditioned gas met the temperature differential of the ambient air. She lightly gripped the sheet covering him and folded it down to his navel, then placed the adhesive defibrillator pads on his chest and abdomen. Shoulders tense, having no idea what to expect, she delivered him a giant shock that seemed to jerk his already stiffening body.
Recognizing she needed to vacate the water from his lungs, she placed the device to the side. CPR and First Aid courses had been required by her job, and she knew the best way to make this happen was through repetitive compression. She crawled onto the table, straddling his waist, and she placed the heels of her palms against his breastbone, trying to ignore how cold he felt underneath her. Resolute, she took a deep breath and began her task.
*pound*pound*pound*pound* "Come on…" *pound*pound*pound*pound* "Come ON…" *pound*pound*pound*pound* "Come on, wake up…" *pound*pound*pound*pound* "Wake UP you son of a bitch.." *pound*pound*pound*pound*
After fifteen minutes of backbreaking work she was exhausted, sore, and gasping for air without even so much as a gurgle from him to show for it. She pressed her hands to her face before dragging them through her hair in frustration. She wanted to cry but her pride wouldn't let her. She wouldn't admit defeat, she wouldn't give in to loneliness, and she wouldn't cry over Sylar. Something fierce within her snapped and she raised both fists over her head.
"I said WAKE UP you asshole!!!!" she screamed as she slammed them down into his chest. She raised them and pummeled him again and again, ignoring the pressing ache in the small of her back and taking for granted that the corridors outside were truly void of an unintended audience. "You NEVER died when I wanted you to – you're NOT dying NOW!" Pulling herself together, she resumed her chest compressions the orthodox way before giving up and leaping off of him. She retrieved the defibrillator and seared him with another spine-arching jolt.
"WAKE UP YOU PIECE OF SHIT!!!"
She shocked him again, mind reeling with ways to convince herself that she didn't smell charred flesh. Empty and hopeless, trembling from the exertion, the defibrillator left her fingers to clatter on the floor. She weakly stumbled backwards into a comfortable waiting chair and began to sob uncontrollably, despite her wish for control, sucker-punched by a long-repressed and bitter sense of loss.
"How… how can you leave me? You're not supposed to… not like this…"
She ripped her body out of the chair and flung it at him.
"I fucking hate you - you hear me?!? I FUCKING HATE YOU!!! You're doing this on purpose, aren't you? You've always known - known just how to make me feel weak, make me feel dirty for missing you - and you just LOVE it don't you!!! You're just rolling in your grave!!! Well, FUCK YOU!!!"
She began to slap his bare skin with her open hands.
"FUCK YOU!!! I don't want you! I don't need you - I don't need anyone!!!"
Her open hands balled into punching fists with bruising knuckles.
"I'm just fucking FINE without you!!! I know you can hear me you piece of shit..." her voice trailed off to a choked whisper as she threw her arms around his middle and pushed her forehead into the soft arch under his ribs.
"Please... please don't leave me all alone... please... I was wrong, I admit it, I'm sorry. I need you," she choked, "I don't wanna be alone... please wake up... please..."
His belly beneath her suddenly spasmed. She almost wasn't quick enough to jump out of the way when suddenly he sat up, losing his balance to crash to the floor. Pandemonium ensued as the oxygen mask was ripped from his face, the momentum sending the filtering unit flying. The table skidded several feet with a loud honk and he landed on his hands and knees, gagging and spewing, ejecting a fountain of water from his lungs. The shock tore her feet from beneath her. Numbly, she unconsciously began to crawl toward him. He fell over, tangling himself in his sheet, unruly limbs thrashing stiffly in an effort to escape some unseen terror. She could see reflected in his eyes he was reliving those final, panicked moments before he succumbed to a watery death. His mouth was open in a hoarse, silent scream. And then she was before him and he saw her – he shone with recognition and complete unabashed astonishment. She was sure the face she gave him wasn't much different.
"Claire…" he mouthed as he reached a shaking blue arm toward her. She slid her fingertips against his frigid hand. "…missed you…"
"I know," she responded. She'd known for a long time, hundreds of years, and had even told him as much once.
Her thoughts scattered when a shaft of light blazed from underneath the door. They had company. Taking his hand more firmly, she tugged him to his unsteady feet. He clutched the drooping sheet around his waist.
"Come, quickly – up here!" she whispered frantically, putting her shoulder into helping him back onto the table. She straightened the sheet over him as fast as she could, engaging the hovering mechanism. "I know you're cold, but you have to stay as still as possible." She pulled him out of the room and directly into the path of Lou, the security officer typically on duty during her shift.
"Jeeesus, Rosie, yer gonna give me heart failure – what're you doing up here?"
"Being a typical lost new girl… trying to take this guy to see Jesse but got all turned around…"
"Ahh, he's down another floor, girl!"
"Figures… guess I better move. They got pepperoni pizza in the commons today – me and Tami gonna see you there for lunch?"
"Maybe, you know I can't resist lunch with the living dead girls. We'll see. You take care, now!"
"See ya!"
She collapsed against the wall of the lift after the door slid shut behind them. Sylar pulled the sheet away from his face.
"Living dead…?" his lips stated.
"Yeah, I know. This place is a million laughs."
"We're not going down."
"No. No we're not."
The lift opened up onto the walkway she'd taken from the habitation wing earlier that morning. Holding the door while it pulsed against her hand, she leaned far into the corridor and thanked her lucky stars it was empty. It'd fill up closer to lunchtime.
"I know this is gonna be hard, but we have to move quickly. Do you think you can?"
He nodded mutely, and didn't look too awful certain.
She drug him stumbling behind her, praying he didn't trip over the corner of the sheet that was currently wrapped around him like a toga. She nearly dislocated her shoulder when he came to an abrupt stop as the Earth came into view.
"Not now!" She yanked harder and he complied. Ducking into her domicile, she briskly locked the door behind her.
"I don't have long, people are gonna notice I'm gone – come with me. We need to warm you up."
She led him from the front room – a living area containing a tv, a sofa, and two chairs, and a small kitchenette with mini-fridge capable of providing snacks and small meals. She stopped short of her bedroom and dressing area to turn him into the restroom facilities. Her cube-shaped shower had a small tub at the bottom which she began to fill with steaming hot water.
"Get in," she directed as she averted her gaze, applying her attention to the small cupboard above the toilet where she had stashed a few towels and washcloths. Returning, she kicked the sheet aside and knelt by the tub. He sat with his knees drawn up to his chin, teeth chattering and body convulsing with shivers, blessedly warm water beginning to pool around him. She dipped a washcloth under the faucet and smoothed it over his shoulders, cascading rivulets down his back. He closed his eyes and a sigh escaped him. She clamped her lips together in an attempt to suppress a smile.
When the tub had reached its capacity she turned off the faucet but continued her ministrations. Using his knees as a pillow, his eyes remained closed and the pallor of his skin began to take on a more healthy pink hue. Noticing his rate of breath had deepened, she remembered every death she'd experienced over the past three centuries – the first thing she always wanted to do was sleep, her body requiring the rest while it performed the arduous task of repairing itself. She reached over and retrieved her long, blue robe hanging from a hook behind the door, spreading it wide as she stood.
"Come on, buddy. You can't sleep here – ironically, you could drown."
Oh yeah, a million laughs. He gave her a weary but incredulous expression as he braced his hands on the wall, not quite trusting his legs to hold him as he rose. He wound the robe tightly around him, still shivering upon meeting the cooler air. Claire came at him from behind with a towel, standing on her tip toes to meet his height, ruffling his short dark hair into soft damp spikes. Rubbing her hands vigorously up and down his arms, trying to make heat from friction, she guided him back into the living area where he folded himself up on her sofa. By the time she'd made her way to her bedroom to procure a pillow and a spare blanket he'd fallen asleep. He mumbled something incomprehensible as she stuffed the pillow under his head. Once she was sure she had the blanket tucked tightly around him and he was completely swaddled with no pink skin exposed, she returned to the hovering table waiting for her in the lift, wholly preoccupied while trying to concoct a cover story and – most importantly – a plan.
~*~*~
No one paid the Shadow Man any notice as he stepped off the embarkation dock from the Zephyr and into the chilly, dry atmosphere of the space station. He wasn't the first of his kind to be seen skulking around in search of their typical quarry. It wasn't unusual for him to be here: the scuttlebutt over the failed bio-dome in the Sagittarius sector was that the equipment was compromised due to sabotage – mod sabotage. The likely culprit could still have been hiding amongst the terrorized survivors. His agenda, however, was quite different in that it was a secret shared with no one. There was also the fact that he was an individual, and not a cloned hive-mind following biologically programmed imperatives communicated through a chemical means. His directive was not to seek and contain rogue mods or known rebels – names on a list passed down through a regular chain of command – not like the others. He was searching for one very particular man, one who had gone missing for nearly three hundred years, one who had been aboard an ill-fated vessel destined to carry supplies and labor personnel to a far away colony – the very one that had experienced a violent take-over only to be shot down somewhere in the inky blue Pacific.
The Shadow Man remembered the day it happened. He'd kept a routine – once every ten years from the date Sylar had disappeared he used an old ability that had finally been returned to him. In the beginning he'd started with an atlas, but over time his method had evolved to include the use of star charts and a holographic projector. Sometimes he used a push pin, other times an ink pen or his finger. More recently he'd begun to use a laser pointer because, let's face it, they're neat. Until that day, however, the result had always been the same: his senses were completely silent – Sylar was nowhere to be found which meant he was either dead, lost outside the sectors of known space, or deep underground. And then, like magic almost exactly two hundred and eighty years later, he reappeared in a mod camp near Lawrence, Kansas.
Because technically Sylar wasn't a modular, the security personnel had no idea what trouble they held within their walls. Sylar's emancipation had been nothing short of explosive and entirely composed of diabolical and intelligent design, however there was a missing quality that spoke volumes about the changes the man had experienced during his hiatus from the world: the body count was inexplicably low. It was as if tender attention had been paid to this detail. Like… he was turning over a new leaf. Regardless of the fact that the Shadow Man's ability never lied… the person he'd found was not Sylar.
And now that he'd finally tracked him to a place from which he could not easily escape – he'd finally have him in his grasp – a small part of him was anxious to see exactly what he'd become. And why.
A/N #2: Okay, I can hear you asking - what the hell are "modulars" and how are they different??? Off to start the Next Chapter of Awesome Explaininess and Futuristic Mumbojumbo!!!!