Chapter 7 - When Donnie Met Sylar
Sunnydale, California, 2015
Sylar choked, and retched. Whatever power the bespectacled 'wizard' had put on him had gone. He felt the thin veins of 'magic' that had been woved through his body shrinking away, muscle suddenly waking and flexing, angry.
He spun, panicked. Suddenly he wasn't in control. Suddenly he wasn't...special enough.
The figure stood across the street. A youth...an adolescent...barely beyond a child...stood, a black hood pulled over his head, a faded white skeleton etched over his clothes. A Halloween costume.
Sylar frowned. The figure turned.
His eyes were dead. Bleak, black, swirling. Sylar looked into them and felt the overwhelming truth, the truth that he could never come close to being special, to being powerful when this...when this walked and...
The figure had torn a house apart. Thrown the wizards aside, made them...go. He hadn't killed them, Sylar knew that. They had just gone. Ripped from the fabric of space itself, ripped and thrown aside.
He had done all this and he didn't seem to realise it.
He was swaying, slightly. Sylar wondered if he could see him. If he was aware of anything around him. He had looked angry before, angry when he saw the wizards...now he just looked...vacant.
He was insane. Even Sylar could see that. Whatever person, whatever sense of humanity had once existed was gone. He was spiralling, crashing. Power ebbing from him...power that dwarfed anything Sylar had, anything Sylar knew.
He was Donnie Darko. He was making the world a better place. Piece by piece.
The figure distorted, suddenly, the world wrapping in around it for one brief, rendering second. Sylar felt time stop, felt space tear and suddenly the figure was gone. Moved on, stepping into some other time, some other place, apathy slowly disintegrating morality and justice, until everything he did was just blind anger and power.
Sylar collapsed, overwhelmed. The figure had been everything. All the power Sylar could ever want. And he made Sylar distinctly un-special.
He let his eyes wander. They fell to the wreckage of Huxenbus' car. The mangled body, head scalped and sawn open, brains wrenched out, their power...their 'magic' sucked out and absorbed. Added.
Sylar grinned, slowly. He might not be all-powerful yet, but he was rising. He was progressing. That was what made him special. That was what made him special. What made him better than the figure...better than the two empty shells rotting in the hot metal cage before him.
Magic. The word the wizards used for their incredible gift. Sylar knew better. What they called magic, he called evolution. Genetics. Darwinism could explain what these wizards, with their secrecy, their contempt for the lesser humans...the unevolved, the 'Muggles', Darwinism could explain what they could not.
They had existed side-by-side humanity for centuries...carefully guarding whatever freak gene had surfaced, whatever freak of DNA had allowed them to be...so much more than everyone else. They had kept the gene, the evolution, from reaching humanity. They had restrained the flow of progress.
Sylar felt the 'magic' running through him now. Felt the power the wizards so closely guarded...and what was more, he was something else. Because he was pushing evolution forward. He was driving natural selection to its peak. His powers were multiplying by the day. By every gifted individual he met, his powers were growing. Progress.
He needed to learn about this...this magic. It wasn't so natural, so simple as the ones before. It was tainted. Humanity...wizards...had named it, categorized it, made it something you learn in school...he hesitated.
The wizards needed names for these 'spells'...if Sylar was to progress, he would need to learn these names.
He had learnt about the wizards in a diner just outside Nevada. Some drunk had gotten careless, decided to show off a little gift he had. Something about it hadn't been right. Hadn't been the same as all the other gifts he'd seen.
The drunk had used a wand.
Sylar had cornered him. Asked him questions. Learnt everything the fat waste knew about the wizarding world. Not much. The drunk had been what the wizards called a squib. Magically-impaired. A shameful anomaly for a wizarding parent to give birth to. Squibs were sent into the Muggle world to adjust, rather than let them be second-class in the wizarding world. The whole thing stank of the same fetid arrogance and contempt that Sylar saw running through the whole of the wizarding world.
What was more, the wizarding governments that sat unseen astride the 'Muggle' governments never kept record of their squibs. Forgot about them.
The drunk had learnt the odd charm. Worked hard to be something he wasn't. Reached in and found the inkling of magic that existed within him and dragged it out.
He now did spells for the smattering of coins the regulars would throw for him.
Sylar knew what it was to feel second-class. To feel unspecial in a very special world. He even mildly regretted opening the drunk's head, feasting on what dregs of power there were.
The drunk had led him to an elderly mother, an old woman in a cushy chair in some living room in uptown Chicago.
He'd been interrupted in his progress, however. Police had driven him from the house. Too many to ignore. His infamy was slowing him down.
He'd found the power he needed now. Used what the drunk had said, what he'd said about the Aurors, the wizarding 'police' from the United Kingdom. Turned the tables and cut their heads open, one by one.
He hadn't counted on their reinforcements arriving so soon. He hadn't known about Apparating. The drunk had probably forgotten about it by then.
Now he needed to refine it. To learn the names, the words, the spells. The drunk had spoken of a school, a prestigious school, an elitist academy for the wizards to send their children. It was in England, far from Sylar's notereity in the States.
A place the Aurors would never think to look.
He would go there, blend in, learn. Progress. A janitor, a groundsman...manual tasks the contemptuous wizards would never think to look at closely. From there, observe. Learn. Progress.
Sylar was going to Hogwarts.