Chapter 23- The Pretender
Sylar could tell by the slight shift in his personal center of gravity that the ship was in motion. Just for a moment he felt anxiety about traveling away from the Earth, his home if he ever really had one, to go who knew where. All he knew was that it more or less sealed his fate of being held captive aboard to him what amounted to a floating office building.
Normally this would have been the moment that he would have formulated a plan- the most likely being stealing the shuttlecraft he had levitated in the dock to go back to Earth. Naturally it would have taken some advanced planning and studying because even though he was more or less brilliant, he couldn't just hop in, take a glance around and fire it up. He had never flown anything before although he understood the mechanics of it on some level. That was what he would normally do, but not this time. This time he didn't care that he was being thrown across space at what he could only assume was some incredibly fast speed because he had another exit strategy: teleportation. Soon it wouldn't matter where he was, he could escape in the blink of an eye to any time or place of his choosing thanks to Peter's panicking about his own condition.
He chuckled softly to himself: Peter the great and merciful one. The man who was determined to save the world didn't have the fortitude to accept his fate when it came down to it. Not so much of a hero after all if he was willing to trade the safety of not only the world, but the entire history of mankind for his own miserable and pathetic life. Honestly, Sylar didn't know what he was holding on for. It wasn't like he really had much to live for. His family were a pack of piranhas that had tried to eat him alive time and again, his job of scraping human remains off the streets of New York had to suck, he had no one to go home to at night in his crappy apartment, and even those he thought were his friends would turn in him just as he was doing if they had half a chance. The more the thought about it, the more he realized how much they had in common except for one thing: he didn't give a damn about any of it while Peter very much did. Sylar had no delusions about the greater good of humanity or the basic morality and good intention of others the way Peter did. Although he didn't understand why Peter would persist in his beliefs in the face of repeated evidence to the contrary, for the moment it worked in his favor. If he was hoping that he would have mercy and not take all that was rightfully his out of some moral obligation, he was sadly mistaken.
Sylar made his way to the sickbay to work on his pet project. Already his aptitude was tingling with glee at the prospect of having a real challenge. It wasn't that he really gave a damn about Peter's wellbeing, it just happened to coincide with his interests and as Spock said, sometimes others accidentally benefited from his own agenda. He could live with that so long as he got what he came for; he had been dying to know how Peter's ability worked ever since he met him in Mohinder's apartment, how it seemed so easy for him to acquire powers while it took a little more work on his part. Sylar knew he had a second option for getting them aside from sawing off the top of people's heads, but it was laborious and time consuming although he did enjoy the stage acting it required to make someone believe that he truly cared when in reality he was just waiting for them to give it up so he could kill them. It was a new skill he was crafting and it seemed to work well on Maya- she bought the act hook line and sinker.
When he arrived in sickbay, the medical staff nearly groaned at the sight of him but he ignored it and made his way to Peter's bed at the back of the room. He pulled the privacy curtain and tossed the chair Nathan had occupied toward the head of the bed and sat with an exaggerated heavy sigh while he smirked at his patient. "Peter Petrelli. How long I have waited for this." He breathed giving him a light tap on the head as though he were patronizing a small child. The monitors above beeped slightly faster, prompting him to smile broadly. "This was your choice, there is no backing out now. A deal's a deal, Petrelli."
He was momentarily distracted by the curtain as it jerked backwards revealing the agitated face of Dr. McCoy. "What the hell are you doing?" He demanded checking his patient for any sign of undue harm.
"What he asked me to do." Sylar responded coolly. "I am here to set him straight as he requested, to free him from the hell he is stuck in."
"How congenial of you." McCoy growled. "But as he is my patient, I will be sticking around to make sure you don't kill him."
Sylar chuckled at the doctor's determination. "You mean just like the way to tried to stop me from cutting your throat along with the others? If I wanted to kill him, there would be nothing you could do about it." He taunted. "But, if you feel compelled by the Hippocratic oath to observe, suit yourself."
McCoy so badly wanted to unleash a verbal tirade that could peel paint off a wall, but this was serious business and he forced himself to stick to the task at hand. "Will you be needing any supplies?" He asked all but grinding his teeth.
"I don't think so." Sylar shrugged. "But then again, it is not like I have ever done this before."
"I thought you have!" McCoy spit out. "That was why you are some kind of expert at this!"
Sylar slowly lifted his eyes and sarcastically replied, "I am. I have just never done this with the goal of the person surviving. It is usually quite the opposite for me."
"Sweet Jesus." McCoy hissed. "Why the hell am I going along with this? You are about to cut his head off and do…God knows what and I am just going to stand here and watch. What the hell is wrong with me?"
"I could open you up and take a look when I am finished with Peter if you like." Sylar offered with an evil grin as he raised his hand to make the first cut across Peter's forehead.
McCoy watched in morbid fascination as Sylar somehow managed to make a neat incision through the bone with nothing but a pointed finger. Peter's monitors went wild as his heart rate almost tripled and all of the blood drained from his face as well as from the cut, making small rivers of scarlet that streamed past his temples and into his eyes. McCoy momentarily felt helpless. He couldn't give Peter pain medication because he didn't know if he needed a regular dose or an elephant size as it took to keep Sylar under. At any rate, he knew that there were no nerve endings in the brain, so soon the pain would end. As he watched the monitors closely for any sign of cardiac arrest or systemic failure, he wondered how much of it was just a fear reaction.
When the skull plate had been cut away, Sylar took a seat behind Peter's head and gently raised his hands to tentatively touch the exposed gray matter. There was something viscerally disgusting about it all to McCoy, the battle hardened surgeon who had witnessed far too many horrific injuries in his time to have been bothered by an exposed brain, but he very much was. Sylar carefully and slowly slid the tips of his fingers along the bumps and groves of Peter's parietal lobe, the place where sensory integration takes place and jumped back. "Don't fight, Peter." Sylar warned before placing his hands back where they were.
He closed his eyes and concentrated hard, the way he used to when he listened to a watch that was falling behind by a fraction of a second and then it came to him: the sense that he could feel the broken ladder of Peter's damaged DNA. His aptitude had detected the misaligned base pairs, but the damage was not complete; like a symphony he could hear some of the cells keeping time while others were off by one note. He was no geneticist, he would leave the technical explanations to Mohinder, but all he knew was that he had found the source of Peter's dysfunction and he knew he could repair it as he would gears with broken teeth if he could just coax all of the moving parts into functioning in harmony as a whole. The problem with his aptitude was that it didn't always bother to explain how systems worked, he occasionally had to just take it on faith that he was right and this was one of those times.
He took a deep breath and imagined realigning the mismatched base pairs carefully with microscopic tugs of telekinesis until they once again fit together snugly. He knew he didn't have to fix every wayward cell, the body had a very efficient way of passing along the message as it were. He only had to repair the mainframe and the rest of the hardware would follow. He took his time and with the patience and finesse he used to use as a watchmaker, gently he rearranged and straightened until like tuning a radio the background sound of Peter's personal orchestra went from crackling static to clear, melodic music.
From the outside, McCoy noted the almost trance like state and hazy milky film that glossed Sylar's dark eyes. He couldn't even begin to guess what exactly the madman was doing, but Peter's vitals slowly and surely began to strengthen. McCoy reached out and rubbed his knuckles along Peter's sternum, a painful and noxious stimulus that he didn't respond to previously, but this time he made a slight groaning sound and weakly tried to move away. He then scanned him with a tricorder and compared it to his baseline data he had supplied for testing. While not dead on, he did seem to be moving toward his more functional readings. All of his vital systems were beginning to run at a more efficient pace and he seemed to be coming out his coma.
Once Sylar was satisfied that he had restored enough of Peter's previous functionality to say he held up his end of the bargain, he moved his hands toward Peter's frontal lobes in search of the seat of his ability. In his experience, this is where he was most likely to find the goods as it took volition and forethought to use an ability in order to achieve the desired outcome. He searched with determination, but found nothing. He knitted his thick eyebrows and muttered, "You are different, aren't you? If you don't have to think about using your powers, how do you do it?" He thought about it and smiled gently. "Of course, you are the touchy feely emo type." He reluctantly pushed his fingers deep into the divide between the two hemispheres of his brain in order to get to the deeper structures that regulated emotion. He wasn't expecting what came next.
If anyone would have asked Sylar what happened, he would have described it as a jolt of white hot lightning that traveled up his arms and shot out his eyeballs in a steady stream. McCoy just would have shook his head and pleaded ignorance regarding the whole event, but all he could say for sure was that Sylar nearly fell out of his chair with a look of shock and horror on his face. He also would have added that it was pretty damn funny, but only of Sylar wasn't around to hear him say it.
Sylar was fairly certain he had done it on purpose, although there was a chance that Peter just naturally carried around an emotional a-bomb in his skull in the form of his amygdala. What he was certain of was that he suddenly felt tainted with emotional residue, but also infused with new additions to his arsenal. Satisfied with a job well done, he held Peter's skull plate in position long enough for it to adhere and heal on its own much to the confusion of Dr. McCoy. No matter how many times he witnessed rapid regeneration it would always seem like voodoo to him. Sylar quickly washed the blood from his hands and stuck around long enough for his patient to begin stirring before he bowed out quietly.
It was only a matter of minutes before Peter reached up lazily to wipe the sticky blood from his dull, hazel eyes and they fluttered open to look around the room. "Peter?" McCoy called checking his now nearly normal vitals. When Peter turned his head to squint at him of his own volition, McCoy yelled at a tech. "Go get Nathan and Noah. Tell them Peter is awake!" He returned to his patient and excitedly asked, "How are you feeling?"
A slow smile spread across Peter's face and he cleared his throat, but only managed to whisper, "Like I've had my head cut open." He struggled to pull himself into a semi-reclined position, but kindly turned down all efforts of help from the staff. He was just sore from lying in one spot and a little weak from shock, he knew this from his training and it was important for him to do as much for himself as he could. It was funny how he had no problems always giving to others and caring for them, but he made a very poor patient himself because he wasn't used to being coddled. Well, that was all but Nathan who had the paradoxical habit of slapping him in the face and then hugging him to make the pain go away.
"I can't believe he did it." Peter mumbled running his fingers over his forehead lightly where the now vanished incision had been made. "I didn't think he would be able to fix everything like that, but he did."
"You'll have to send him a thank you card and maybe a nice wine basket." McCoy grumbled as he gave Peter a quick neurologic exam to be sure he was indeed intact. "God knows what he was doing with your brains. He could have really screwed something up in there for all we know."
"But he didn't." Peter protested. "I just know it. He had the perfect chance to rewire everything, but I feel fine."
"Peter!" Nathan shouted as he sprinted toward his brother stopping only to wrap him in a tight embrace that nearly took his breath away. "Thank God you are awake, Pete. I was so worried about you." Nathan held Peter's face in his hands and his large brown eyes softened to a degree that he had never quite seen before. "Pete, were you really awake all that time?" He asked in a low, worried voice.
Nathan's eyes nearly broke Peter's heart because for the first time in a very long time he was looking into the eyes of his big brother the way he used to when they were younger. The last time he saw those eyes was when Nathan had chased off a pack of bullies that had beaten him mercilessly on the playground. The boys were older than he was and he wasn't physically strong enough to defend himself. All he could do was curl into a ball to deflect the kicks and punches that rained down like hail until they suddenly stopped and he peeked out from under his arm to see Nathan standing over him, muscles flexed like some superhero from a comic book. When the boys were gone, Nathan helped him up and asked if he was alright with those same baleful eyes. He felt the same now as he did then: he didn't want to tell him the truth because he knew that there was nothing Nathan ever wanted more than for everything to be ok. Or if things weren't fine that he could somehow fix it. But there were just some things in life that he couldn't fix, some pains that he couldn't touch and just as he did then, Peter simply lowered his eyes in response. Nathan let out a heavy sigh and rested his forehead against Peter's in defeat and whispered, "I'm sorry, Pete. I never wanted this to happen to you."
"I know." Peter replied giving him a pat on the shoulder. He had already forgiven him long before then.
"Welcome back." Noah smiled slyly as he approached. "Did everything go according to plan?"
"I think so." Peter nodded with determination.
Nathan looked from Peter to Noah and asked, "Plan? What plan?"