Okay, first off, I know. Second- Yes, I'm alive, and no, I was not on a round-the-world paddleboat expedition. I mean, I could tell you I was, and I considered it, but I'm pretty sure you'd know something wasn't right.
Several of you urged me to update via your reviews or through the PMs, and one person even e-mailed me. I'd like to apologize to you guys most of all. :(
My resolve from here on out is to update once a week until this fic is completed. Fellow fanficcer SydneyAlice tells me she does this despite her schedule, and I know lots of busy Heroes F F writers do so as well, so I know I ought to be able to do it, barring some crazy weekend cram session. However, I do receive the results of an exam tomorrow, and so I throw myself upon your ample mercy and ask you to be kind as the Sylar/Molly verbal-and-psychological sparring ensues. :)
Micah Sanders sleeps the deep, mid-afternoon sleep of the aged.
It's ridiculous, given the advances of technology, how easy it is to breach the security of someone's home. Sylar melted the lock with one hand and fried the alarm system with the other. It took about three seconds altogether. Now he's sitting comfortably in the high-backed leather swivel chair before the old man's personal computer.
Sylar has refrained from waking Micah—not out of politeness, but because, as he expected, the contact information provided in his "protected" documents is rather limited. Names are included, though sometimes only a surname preceded by a title such as Ms. and, once, Sir. There is the odd grainy photograph from a newspaper or an ancient-looking high school yearbook shot. Ages are not listed. Some internet addresses, but no telephone numbers. There are no physical locations.
Clearly such meagerness is intentional. Micah lived through Danko, after all. Well. Micah lived through Sylar. So far, anyway. Knowledge can be so deadly, so destructive in the wrong hands. Not everyone wants to help. Some people just want to cut you down or carve you open.
If Sylar wakes the man now, all sorts of unpleasantries will arise. If he doesn't kill or otherwise incapacitate Micah, he runs the risk of having him raise the alarm at Molly's rest home somehow. And he's getting nowhere without Molly; he knows that. Micah sees himself as some sort of shepherd, and, laughable as that may be, he'll die before willfully sending any amongst his flock to the slaughter. In the mind of a hero, the only sacrificial lamb is oneself. So it's all in the hands of the wife. Those hands so miraculous with pins and thumb tacks . . .
Precious Molly.
Precious Molly for precious, maddening Claire. Sylar would make the trade without a thought. Hell, he'd see it as a rare bargain, and he imagines Micah must know that.
How precious is she, Micah? he wonders. If he doesn't find what he's looking for soon, he may have to wake the man up despite his misgivings and ask that very question. Precious enough for you to help me protect what's precious to me?
Fortunately, he doesn't have to ask. He finds it: a name, first and last included. No picture by the brief description.
From the bud of his lips, a smile blossoms like a poisonous flower.
Leslie Laughlin.
The Sleepless.
[] [] []
Nurse Branson pops her head into the room, the rosy-cheeked face beneath her mousy fringe as sunny as the yellow wallpaper. She eyes the frail, waste of a woman in the bed, which, despite its frill and many pillows, is unmistakably a hospital bed. The woman is fully dressed, half-sitting on top of the covers, staring out the window at the grounds as if she might be considering an afternoon stroll.
"Hello, Molly," greets the nurse, ever chipper as she pushes the door open with her ample hip and steps aside to allow entrance to the equally portly person at her back. "D'you feel like some company? This man says he's flown in all the way from Cali to visit you."
"I brought you some chai," iterate the long-dead lips of Matthew Parkman. "Extra honey, skim milk—just like Mohinder makes it. He couldn't get away from the lab, but he told me to tell you he'll swing by in a few days. Oh, he says hello, by the way."
Matt passes Molly the disposable cup. The cloudy tea inside smells like baking gingerbread cookies, the scent permeating the underlying antiseptic odor of the rest home. She flicks her eyes toward Branson, who excuses herself with a nod and an offer to return should she be needed. Molly waits for the door to fall shut before turning her attention to Matt.
"Thanks," she says.
Her voice is brittle with age, but the smile she affords him leads him to wonder whether it holds any recognizable hint of the dreamy child of yesteryear. He wouldn't know, of course. He made her scream, made her cry—never made her smile.
"Now . . ." She takes a small sip of her tea, testing its temperature. "Why don't you remove that mask before I come over there and rip it off your head like a paper bag?"
Dreamy child, indeed. Well, he admires her nerve.
"I'm sorry," Sylar apologizes, lapsing smoothly into his own form. "I was trying to make this easier for you."
Molly almost regrets having her cataracts removed when she flinches at the sight of her personal childhood monster. Taking him in from the top of his dark head to the tip of his black-shoed toes, she realizes she has embellished upon him over the many, many years since she last saw him.
His brow, heavy as it is, seems paltry compared to the rectangular black lines her imagination bestowed upon him. And his eyes, she sees, are brown—not maroon with bloodlust. As for his teeth—well, she can't see his teeth, but she must assume that his incisors, however large, are not quite the fangs she has made them in memory.
His hands, at least, are as she remembers them. Clawed. Not visibly, no, but she knows he could cut her into four pieces with one vicious swipe.
She lowers her gaze. Looks at the surface of the tea. Mohinder's tea.
Sylar is glad the drink is lukewarm when the cup all but explodes against the wall a few inches to his right. He leaps, started, and sidesteps hastily into the overstuffed arm of the chair that must accommodate Micah during his many visits, but he's not quick enough to avoid a plentiful splattering against his face and shoulder.
"It wasn't poisoned," he grouses, rubbing tea out of the ridge in his ear with his sleeve.
"That's for profaning his memory," Molly informs him, baring her teeth even as she massages her arthritic shoulder. "You don't deserve to wear his face. You . . . you don't deserve to wear his socks."
As if he enjoyed smothering himself with Parkman's pudgy, permanently self-righteous visage. As if he could somehow conceive of coveting the man's socks. He raises a brow.
"I thought you were . . ." How did Rutherford put it? "Um—'not quite right.'"
"You thought that?" she asks disbelievingly. "You thought I wasn't quite right?"
"I was told that."
"By whom?"
Whom. He likes that. He fears Claire will have their child talking like a Texan, born and raised. The adages she occasionally comes out with are even worse than her lax grammar. He once expressed a hope that she would someday learn to put the books back into the shelf with the spines in proper upright position, and she responded by telling him to wish in one hand, babe. It was his fault, really, for making the remark during one of her recent mood swings; nevertheless he was torn between distaste at the implied remainder of the sentence and pleasure that she had used a term of endearment, albeit in a crude, sarcastic fashion.
So his one true love is a cynical, quasi-suicidal hick locked in a valley girl's body. It's okay. As long as she stays, it's okay.
He should call . . . His thumb dips into his pocket, snakes over the phone.
Molly clears her throat, snapping him out of it.
"Oh—" He takes a moment to recall the question. "The man you sent to me."
"Claire's husband?"
"Robert Rutherford, yes," Sylar replies tightly. He doesn't like calling him Claire's husband. He doesn't like hearing him called that. When people call him that, Sylar has a strong, itching urge to make them take it back. Using any means necessary.
Molly can see the malice on his face. Slowly, she shakes her head.
"You killed him, didn't you?"
Oddly, Sylar's features brighten at the cold accusation.
"No!" he denies with sudden cheerfulness, as if this is an achievement, and Molly ought to be pleased with him. "No, I paid him a visit just yesterday, actually. He's fine. He's . . . He's in good health. I didn't do anything to him. You know. Physically."
That bit of cruelty with Sharon was mercy, really. He could have cut them both into pieces fit for a dog the late Mr. Muggles' size. They're both still breathing. Walking. In and out, one step at a time . . .
In his mercy, he smiles at the knowledge that Rutherford is still suffering.
"I'm not afraid of you anymore," Molly asserts, misreading him.
He wipes the mirth from his face. Get a grip.
"Good," he replies in avid earnest, strategically overlooking her lie. "I don't want you to fear me. I want you to help me."
"Help you . . ?" Molly shakes her head, looking him up and down as if he's covered in slime, sticky with mired bugs and microscopic bacteria. "Why would I help you?"
That's a stumper. He chews on his lip for a moment before hitting on what he thinks should be a promising tact:
"Did you and Micah have any children?"
"You stay away from my family," she hisses immediately in return, a valiant mama cat bristling at the approach of a slavering, sadistic canine.
"You know . . ." Sylar begins with an exasperated sigh, dropping his shoulder blades back against the wall, "not every single thing that comes out of my mouth is a threat. I was going somewhere with that question."
"Well, get there," the old lady advises.
He takes a deep breath.
"Claire is pregnant," he begins bluntly, ready to bare all—to relate his business to this frail mortal—if it means she'll help him. Well—if she'll help Claire.
The mama-cat claws retract even as the sagging skin on Molly's face seems to tauten.
"What did you do to her?" she demands.
Sylar winces, and his fist tightens convulsively.
"I didn't do anything to her," he snaps, offended. Why do people just assume that? As if she could never possibly be with him of her own free will. Because that would just be crazy, what with him being so dastardly and repulsive and the black-hearted human incarnation of evil and all that. "Her sorry goddamned husband left her, you know—I guess he didn't tell you that when he came begging for my address. No. But of course you helped him, didn't you? Heroes . . . You would."
He scoffs, disgusted, and strides restlessly back and forth at the foot of Molly's hospital bed, stopping short in the corner to avoid the chair. Agitated, he can't imagine sitting at the moment.
"She called me, you know. Because she had no one else."
"She had—" Molly opens her mouth to protest, to make all the usual assertions of friendship and loyalty and to spew that there-for-you bullshit that helplessly ordinary people like to shower over one another in moments of awkward emotion. He does her the courtesy of cutting her off before she embarrasses herself.
"I saved her—you know how rash she can be. And I took her in, gave her a place to stay—"
With you, Molly supplies silently, knowingly.
"—time to think . . ."
About you.
"We've been living together ever since—and for your information?" He turns on her as if she had spoken to contradict him. "We're quite happy. I mean—we've got our own home, we've got the . . . the baby on the way . . ." He shrugs and winds down with a shameless, matter-of-fact, "We're practically married."
"Practically? Did you forget you could just puppet her down the aisle?"
"No puppeting involved," he smirks. He only wishes he were the one pulling the strings.
"Not of the literal sort, you mean," Molly argues. "Maybe you didn't use the invisible threads, but what about the figurative ones?"
"Figurative?" He raises a brow.
"You're painting yourself as some sort of philanthropist. You saved her. Took her in." Molly takes a beat, and then rattles off, "Seduced her. Impregnated her. Your generosity is humbling, oh, yes. You've got her good and locked in now, haven't you? Now you can play with her all you want, take her out and twirl her around and then put her up again till the next time you're bored. Well, she's a person, not a plaything!"
"Ha!" Sylar laughs harshly. "Are you serious? I seduced her? Did you really—? All right, whatever you say . . . That's always been the big misconception, hasn't it, the way you all see Claire as this innocent little girl. With her—pom poms and—and teddy bears and little fluffy dogs. Well, she's not. She never was, really, not even before I got hold of her."
Crashing that boy's car . . . God, the exhilarating, borderline erotic thrill that gives him, even now. It's probably a good thing she didn't lay that one on him a long time ago. He would have been showing up nights demanding bedtime stories about it. Tell it again, Claire-just one more time. Pretending he didn't want her, wasn't at all bothered by her marriage, would have been rendered impossible.
Molly is staring at him, disdain inked liberally into the wrinkles around her mouth.
"You still don't believe me," he sneers, meeting her eyes.
Now she averts her gaze. A bitter sort of melancholy overtakes her face.
"I believe you," she acknowledges after a moment, morose and reluctant. "I always knew this would happen, if it went on long enough. I just . . . I thought it would take longer. Maybe ten or twenty years after you became the last man on earth. I guess I . . . estimated wrong."
Overestimated. That's what she's saying, really. Overestimated Claire. He can hear it, unspoken, in the subtle contempt of her tone. And it angers him, both for himself and for Claire, because he knows that this is what she fears: being judged by the true, the just, the unfailingly noble. And not by her own merits, no, not by her own actions, but by the company she keeps. Being judged alongside him. Damned beside him. All that invisible blood on his hands rubbing off wherever he touches her . . .
"You have no right to judge Claire," he growls. Any of you—you're all exactly alike. His eyes are narrowed, his face flushed. Electricity crackles at his fingertips, and he reminds himself that this woman is old and frail and off-limits. "Me, fine. I'm used to it. I scoff at it. But not her."
She'd never get used to it. It's just not in her nature, and maybe he's glad. It's what makes her different from Elle, who died, after all, for being so very similar to himself, who took his place when in the tangle of his self-love and self-loathing, he could not take his own life. Damaged goods, indeed.
"Claire Bennet has tried to be heroic for well beyond the span of her natural life," he points out. "Won't you people allow her to have anything for herself, or does she have to wait until every single one of you is dead to finally start living her life?"
There's a second of silence once he finishes extolling the virtues of his pretty, pregnant counterpart.
"My god," says Molly, and her tone is level but incredulous when she marvels, "You actually think you're in love with her. Don't you?"
His lip curls.
"I am."
I think, therefore I am. That's the philosophy, after all. It seems logical enough. Apparently, Molly doesn't concur.
"You can't even feel love." Her tone might be pitying were it not so patronizing. "You might think you do, but that's only because you wouldn't recognize it."
That cuts a little. Maybe because there's always the possibility she's right. How is he supposed to know something is real if he can't feel it on his fingers? Think, sure, he thinks he knows, but how does he know?
"Well, whatever I can feel, I feel it for her," he states honestly. It's all he has. Surely that makes it worth something.
For a moment, Molly dares to allow herself to contemplate what it must mean to be on the receiving end of such . . . affections. Which spawns her next query:
"And what does she feel for you?"
That cuts rather deeply.
"She . . ." Sylar shrugs and shifts his eyes before he begins to prattle: "I mean, I . . . I'm reliable. I'm necessary. Because I can do things nobody else—literally nobody else—can do. Things for her. She likes that. And I can buy things for her, she—well, actually, she doesn't like that as much, but . . . you know, when the baby comes, I think she'll feel differently. Babies are so expensive."
Molly stares at him for a long moment.
"That had absolutely nothing to do with what I asked," she informs him, as if he weren't fully aware of the fact.
Sylar finds the clock. Follows the second-hand for half a revolution. For such a nice rest home, the clock is junk. One of those generic department-store deals, ornately patterned to disguise its worthlessness. God, he hates those. There's no artistry in them; they aren't heirlooms, just cheap plastic utensils, like disposable picnic forks. They break, or the battery dies, and people don't even bother. Just toss it out and buy another one. Well, screw you, too.
"What is it you love about Micah?" he asks slowly, eyes tracing the contours of the sub par timepiece. "I mean . . . what did he do, all those years ago, to make you fall in love with him?"
This is going a little too far. Molly isn't about to taint the sanctity of her love for Micah by allowing the Bogeyman to dissect it for salvageable parts. So, with a dry bite in her tone, she replies:
"The usual. Flowers. Candy. Going twenty-six years without taking a single human life."
He flicks his eyebrows upward. Twenty-six years. Damn.
That's a long time.
"Is she still in New York? Claire? Is she still at Mendez's old place?"
His tone is successfully casual, the question seemingly uttered almost absently as he continues to peruse the clock. Molly isn't the least bit fooled. She's seen it so much in her work with troubled youth, that feigned detachment blanketing the acute inward focus of the frightened and the injured.
"Let me check," Molly replies, suddenly and inexplicably generous.
Surprised at her unforeseen compliance, he snaps to follow her motions as she reaches out to pull the single drawer on her night table. From its shallow depths she pulls an oversized atlas, as old and tattered as any pirate's map in a blockbuster film. He cannot look away as she rattles through its pages, and so he simply crosses his arms over his chest, nostrils flaring slightly, the tiny ticking of the dimestore clock pounding in his ears like the beat of a diseased heart.
She retrieves a pin now. Alternating between impatient and apprehensive, he bites unconsciously at his thumb nail and wars to stop himself from snapping at her to hurry up and tell him before she dies of natural causes . . . or to blurt Never mind, forget it—forget I asked.
Then it's too late for either action, for any action at all. The atlas is open, the pin is inserted. The word is—
"No." Molly shakes her head, shrugging her age-wasted, knobby shoulders. "No, she's nowhere near there." She glances up at him with an expression of cool curiosity. "Why? Is that where you left her?"
He doesn't answer. He can't answer. There's a hot, syrupy soup of disappointment welling up in his chest, and he can't form words.
God. For a moment, he's devastated. Lost. Doesn't know what he's doing here, if he's not here for Claire. Doesn't know what he's doing, period. Probably, he should kill somebody. Maybe he'll feel like it in a minute. He takes a stride into the corner. Sits down hard in the arm chair—and leaps up a second later.
"You're lying!" he realizes, a curious mixture of outrage and sweet relief straining his voice. The tingling sensation is there, after all, buried somewhat beneath the greater pressure of the knee-jerk pain that overwhelmed him at once. "Why would you say that? Why lie about something like that? What's the point?"
Molly exhales sharply—not quite a laugh, but close.
"I wanted to see your face." There's gratification, contentment at the hurt she dealt him, dulled only by his too-quick recovery.
Well, then. Sylar never really wanted to kill Molly when she was a little girl. Not just for the sake of it, anyway.
He sort of wants to now.
"You will help me," he says, voice dropping to express a deadly certainty. From his pocket, he withdraws and unfolds the set of papers he printed nearly an hour ago. Holding it up, he informs her, "Straight from dear Micah's files. You know, I didn't catch him at home, but I could always go back for a lengthier visit. He'll probably be wondering who melted his doorknob."
Allowing the threat to sink in, he steps closer, looming over her like a long black shadow. Mean-spirited, yet possibly justified, happiness waning, she tries to keep her chin steady.
"Imagine the irony," he says. "When I tried to kill you, I just wasn't quick enough. Now I'm trying not to, and here you sit, practically begging me to cut you open and pull it out of you."
She flinches reflexively at the flick of his hand, eyes squeezing shut. Beside her, she hears the soft tap of the papers landing on the flowered spread.
"Now . . . Could you please give me this man's location, Molly? It's the last time I ask. And to be fair, I did say the magic word."
Trembling openly now, Molly lifts her lids and looks at him fully, admirably honest in her fear and her hatred.
"I go mad every now and then," she states.
"We all go a little mad sometimes," Sylar returns, then smirks at the irony when her face registers little familiarity with the quote. "Sorry—sometimes I forget how young you are."
Molly shakes her head, hand sliding out across the spread to feel for the file.
"I go mad," she repeats, "really, truly batshit crazy sometimes, just thinking about you. I go back to that day . . . and it's like it's real."
Her voice catches; there's a strangled sob back there, born in a hidden cupboard and now decades old, rising to burst like a bitter soap bubble in her throat.
"Why can't I go mad now?" she wonders. "When you're really here, when there's no Matt or Mo to protect me, no Micah to wake me up and hold me and kiss it away—why can't it happen when I need it?"
This lament ends on a note of grinding fury at the injustice of it all, and Sylar shushes her, glancing behind him toward the door as he seats himself beside her, crinkling the sheets, as he extends a warm hand from which she cringes.
"How do you know it isn't?" he reasons, pushing an ash-colored curl behind her ear. He exerts no physical power over her, and yet she is entirely rigid. "How do you know I'm here at all? You've got no reason to fight this, you know—no cause for guilt. I mean, it's like Rutherford said—"
And he allows his index finger to drift to the center of her forehead, where he taps ever so gently, dropping his voice to a soothing whisper.
"You're not quite right."
The fingertips of his left hand nudge the file into her fingertips, and she accepts it, defeated.