A/N: A little post-Valentines Day love for you. Here's 2 chapters back to back. Cheers!

Chapter 38- Know Your Enemy

Mass chaos were the only words that came to Jim's mind when he, Nathan, and McCoy beamed down to the surface of Romulan to start negotiations with the Senate. Everywhere he looked there were Romulans in the streets chanting and yelling exuberantly like a bunch of soccer hooligans. Small fires had been started here and there and some carried signs.

"Holy shit." McCoy muttered when he noticed the face of Spock plastered on one of them. He probably should have been more professional since he was in uniform and representing Starfleet and the Federation in these talks, but this was a good old fashioned lynch mob as far as he was concerned and it didn't sit well.

Nathan had never really been involved in full blown civil unrest, but it was something that the lawmakers that ran the country feared. They knew that sooner or later their largess received from lobbyists and special interest groups would come to light and what they most feared was the rising up of the populace when it became clear that they had been sold out in exchange for a house in the Hamptons for a favorable vote on an issue that was clearly not in the interest of the people they were sent to represent. The closest he had personally come to this was being in his office when some nutjob potato farmer brought a sawed off shotgun to the Capitol building and fired a few rounds over lost subsidies in an agriculture bill. Luckily there weren't many farmers in New York City, so he sat that one out and for once could honestly say he had nothing to do with it. It was all in knowing who your constituents were.

"Captain Kirk." Came a voice from among the crowd. Jim turned to see an older Romulan male dressed in robes that looked fairly official. "I am Koval, Head of the Romulan Senate. I am afraid you have chosen an unusual moment for your visit, we are not usually so excitable."

"I see." Jim nodded trying to ignore pictures of his bloodied friend's face paraded around as though they had his actual head on a stick. If anything, in the pictures he remained stoic and perhaps just a bit defiant and that made Jim feel a little better. He was still being his obstinate self, a virtual Vulcan middle finger if there ever was one, and he missed having that on the bridge.

As they made their way through the throng to the Senate building, Nathan levitated just a bit in the absence of the eclipse that was going on in other parts of the star system and he thought of Peter and how flying was one of his favorite abilities. He wasn't sure of it was because he liked the freedom it gave him or because he had taken it from the brother who he loved and looked up to, but he was determined to save him this time no matter what it took.

When Peter woke up he felt better than he had in awhile, although that wasn't saying much. At least he was rested and he had learned his lesson: no more broth. He turned his head when he heard the faint sound of metal scraping against metal and he sat up and blinked when he saw Sylar crouched by the lock on the cell door. His back was obscuring what he was doing, but Peter didn't need to be a genius to know that he was attempting to pick the lock.

"What are you doing, man?" Peter hissed in his ear after crossing the room in a few short bounds. "Are you trying to get us killed?"

"No." He calmly replied as his hands continued with the fine motor skills needed for just such a task. "I am trying to get us out of here."

Peter couldn't deny he was impressed with the due care and gentleness with which Sylar manipulated the pin he had fashioned out of what looked like a bit of wire broken off from the bowl that had contained their so called food. As he watched him work, he imagined him meticulously repairing the gears and springs in watches and wondered if that was what it looked like when he was digging around in his brain. No matter how mesmerizing, he couldn't bear the thought of it. "Hey, um…" He stammered as he tried to shake the mental image from his head, "if you lost your ability, how are you doing this?"

"I was smart before I had powers, Peter." He replied in a bored tone as he concentrated on getting the lock to spring. "My IA only really helps in novel situations and this is not novel. I have picked locks before. Structurally they are all similar, so it is only a matter of working your way past the tumblers."

Peter chuckled in amusement. "You have picked locks before? How many are we talking? More importantly, why were you picking them in the first place?" He had to admit he knew next to nothing about his nemesis, and he imagined him to be an accomplished jewel thief when he wasn't killing people.

Gabriel sighed and muttered, "I'll send you my resume when we get out if you are so worried about my qualifications."

Peter instantly knew he made a mistake. "I'm sorry, man." He said in a low voice. "You're right. At least you were working on solving the problem while I was sleeping."

Gabriel glanced back at him and shook his head slowly. "It was probably better that way. You would be useless if you were dead on your feet." Peter smirked and accepted his forgiveness. "If you must know," he continued as he worked, "clock cases that were made after around 1847 went from using a skeleton key to an actual lock. People would always bring in these old clocks for me to fix that they found in their grandma's attic or at a garage sale- without the key of course."

"So you had to pick them to get the case open to fix it." Peter nodded. Not nearly as glamorous as a jewel thief, but an honest answer nonetheless. "Someone's coming!" He hissed as he tried to push Sylar out of the way so he wouldn't get caught.

A guard slowly stalked by and stopped in front of the cage that the supposedly magic humans were being held in. he had to keep an extra close eye on them to prevent their escape, but so far they were even more pathetic than Vulcans and he saw nothing special about them. He contemptuously reached through the bars and grabbed a handful of red shirt and slammed the man's face against the bars with a resounding thud that gave him deep satisfaction- especially when red blood dripped from a cut above his dark eye. He chuckled and kept walking, almost daring them to strike him down- it would have actually been a favor since he couldn't seem to get off his post at the damn mining colony any other way but to die. But the fact that they didn't was at the same time a source of disappointment and confirmation that they were in no way special.

"Jesus!" Peter exclaimed turning Sylar to face him so he could examine the wound. He couldn't help it, it was the paramedic in him to respond to injury and his actions were so reflexive he didn't even have to think about what to do. "Sit down, let me have a look." He instructed and to his amazement, he complied. "It doesn't look too bad. Head wounds bleed like nothing else, but I don't think you will need stitches." He confirmed as he tore a swath of cloth from the hem of his shirt to make a bandage with. It wasn't the most sterile, but it would have to do.

Gabriel winced when Peter held the makeshift bandage with a good amount of pressure against the wound to stop the bleeding. "That's good," he replied, "we don't have any needles or thread."

"Something tells me that between us we could figure it out." Peter smiled. Once again he felt the need to form an alliance with his patient and unlike the female Klingon, this time he would give in because it could only help them down the road if they were a team. While he couldn't pick locks, he was good at other things that could be helpful and this was certainly one of them. "You know, I can't help but think it's funny that the reason we were chosen to go on this mission was the fact that I had medical training and you were already good at engineering. Looks like despite not having powers, our natural talents are still useful."

"I would rather have my abilities back." Gabriel said spitefully, "But in the absence of them, I will have to use what I have." As soon as Peter removed the bandage and the blood had congealed to his satisfaction to seal the wound and prevent infection, Gabriel set back to work in his attempt to pick the lock with a renewed sense of determination.

What he didn't tell Peter was that no matter how hard or fast he worked, it wouldn't matter if his painting was correct and he was starting to see how it could all come about. The eclipse wouldn't end before tragedy struck and although he knew there was no fighting the future, he had to try. Maybe Spock was right- maybe if he could keep his eyes open and watch for clues he could avoid the massacre that remained on the wall in his room.

Mohinder had a problem on his hands- a very big one in terms of scientific rigor. In studying the keryotypes, he noticed a small discrepancy that could only mean one of two things: either Sylar was secretly a hermaphrodite or the sample had become contaminated by the female tech that processed the gels and he would rather think the answer was the latter. He would like to think that if it were the former, Dr. McCoy might have whispered his discovery into his ear as a fellow doctor following his physical exam of the killer. In fact, he was fairly certain that the cranky doctor would have let it slip sooner or later and the fact that he hadn't probably meant that the sample was contaminated.

He sat in his lab for the longest time pondering what he should do. Separating the male from female signatures would be easy enough, but what of the rest of the sample? What about the mysterious extra band on the X chromosome? He could no longer say for certain that it belonged to Sylar and although he felt like crying, he knew deep down that the only ethical thing to do was to throw the entire sample away and start all over. But with Sylar off the ship and his return uncertain, it was going to be difficult to find any of his DNA. As he paced his lab, he ran his fingers through his curly dark hair and it came to him- he could search Sylar's room for samples in the form of hair that may have fallen out as he washed it or combed it!

He raced to Sylar's room, trying to act normally when others approached so as not to give away his undercover plan and unbelievably convinced a passing security guard to open the door for him in the name of medical expediency when he couldn't begin to guess what a serial killer would use for a pass code. Would he have used his birthday? The number of victims he has killed? The possibilities were endless.

He entered the room and headed straight for the bathroom to look for stray hairs, but was exasperated to find nothing- not even so much as an eyelash. He knew that Sylar took particular care with his appearance and his eyebrows alone would be a time consuming maintenance task, but he didn't imagine he would be an obsessive cleaner as well. But come to think of it, the few times he had been in his apartment he did clean up after himself rather well- unlike Matt.

The last place that he could possibly find what he wanted was his pillow. Surely a few stands would have come loose in his sleep. He bent over the neatly made bed and inspected the pillow with a squint, but alas, he found nothing and it frustrated the hell out of him. It was almost as if he could hear Sylar laughing at him from….wherever he was. He stood up and sighed, but his eyes grew wide when he noticed the painting on the wall opposite the bed.

Mohinder knew exactly what he was looking at. How could he forget being drug across the city by Peter while he tried to convince him that he knew a guy that could paint the future so long ago? What was his name….Isaac? It seemed rude considering he had taken over the dead man's loft for use as a lab, the least he could do was remember his name. Over the course of the space's use he had come to know every detail of the painting that covered the floor of New York exploding before Peter changed it to Washington.

As he took in the image of Sylar holding a badly injured Peter and Spock laying bleeding along with others he knew immediately that things would end badly. He dashed out of the room as fast as he could go- he had to find Noah and warn the away team of what was about to happen.