Sylar is out the door in under five seconds. Claire first catches up, and then outruns him, dashing toward the figure that stands waist-deep in the tide. Sylar is slower, more cautious. A terrible kind of destiny hangs over the beach, imbuing it with electric humidity.
Claire comes to a stop at the edge of the water. She blinks at Noah's kidnapper, unable to complete the process of recognition for a moment. It's been a long time, and she's frantic with worry.
"Joshua?" she recalls at last.
Sylar knew him right off. He's Peter Petrelli to an earnest tee. J the stray, turned rabid . . .
"Hi, Claire." In Joshua's arms, Noah shifts as though he would strain toward his mother's voice. He babbles; Joshua bounces him tenderly to shush him. "It's beautiful—this."
Joshua nods toward the baby's head. The compliment lacks warmth. More terrifyingly, the compliment lacks any element of humanity. This could be anything, a dog, an object.
"Beautiful like you," he adds. "Do you remember that first day we met in New York? I felt like I knew you already."
"I know," Claire tries to say, but her voice is sticking in her throat. His manner is so odd, not at all like that first day. Peter Petrelli is dead all over again.
He turns his eyes to Sylar.
"I followed you."
"You what?" Sylar can barely believe what he's hearing. Joshua looked much the worse for wear the last time he saw him, and that was in a pharmacy in New York. He never expected to see him again. "Followed me? From where?"
"From the time you left New York, almost. I was a couple murders behind you at first, but I caught up. I couldn't let you know, so I didn't even try to stop you. I made hard choices, and they paid off. You led me straight to Claire. And this."
"Joshua," Claire intercedes. Stricken by the new the danger in her old friend, she raises her hands in a placating gesture. She keeps her voice low, steadying the waver that wants to creep into it. "Joshua, talk to me. Tell me what's going on, okay?"
"Sickness," he answers curtly. "Sickness is what's going on. Everybody's catching it. Haven't you noticed? Somebody's got to make the medicine, Claire. Somebody's got to be the hero. I wasn't ready when Kay needed me. I'm ready now."
He utters it like a threat. Claire's heart is in her throat. Her son is reaching a pudgy hand toward her. She reaches back, but he's so far away. Inches and feet and yards that feel like miles.
"Look . . ." She shakes her head, fumbling desperately for the words that will return Noah to her arms. "I know we hurt you, but I never meant to. I swear that to you, Joshua. On my son's life I swear it. I liked you. You helped me."
"And you helped me. You blessed me. You didn't mean to, obviously. When he went into my mind—" With loathing, Joshua tips his head toward Sylar. "—he unlocked this ability I have."
"You have an ability?" Claire gapes.
"I went to Texas like you told me. I saw that man, Sanders. I talked to him, I told him all about my plans—how I was going to save the world. And you know what he said? He said I should see a shrink."
Joshua laughs bitterly and shakes his head.
"Like everybody else, he told me to see a shrink. Like I'm the crazy one. Like I'm the cancer eating the world. I told him I'd seen enough shrinks in my life to know what this one was going to tell me, but he said I was wrong, that this guy was different, so I went."
"Did—did it help?" Claire asks, as if she's really curious about his well-being, as if the answer is not clearly a big, whopping No, Ma'am.
"I never saw the shrink," he continues. "When I got there, a man was just leaving. A patient. I asked him what his deal was, and guess what?"
She shakes her head, bewildered in her terror.
"He didn't have a deal. He was just a normal guy. No special power, nothing. Just a guy who lost someone he loved, in such an abnormal way that he couldn't talk about it with a normal shrink."
Ohhh . . . fuck. Sylar's heart hammers a bit harder when he realizes just whom Joshua encountered in Texas—Rutherford, still reeling from Sharon. And Sylar begins to understand what information must have pushed the boy to follow him here. It's my fault. This is my fault.
"Turns out he knew both of you. And it turns out your little love story," Joshua molds the word as if he defiles it by applying to them, "was sicker than I ever imagined. You seemed so innocent, Claire."
Shaking his head, trembling to act, Sylar steps forward, but only to speak:
"She is innocent, Josh. If you talked to Rutherford, you know I'm the one—"
"Don't."
His grip on Noah grows tighter, more ominous, so that the baby squirms in discomfort. In his periphery, Sylar sees Claire squirm, too. He knows that her mind, everything about her, is caught up with her child's. Again, he damns himself, This is my fault.
"She brought you there," Joshua reminds him. "You went to Texas to get her, and then you went back again, because she—?" He points at Claire, eyes still fixed on Sylar. "Was pregnant. And somebody had to pay for what you two were going to bring into the world. My world. Didn't they?"
"Joshua!" Claire pleas, a moan creeping into her voice. "He's just a little baby! Look at him . . ."
Sylar and Claire look at him, a miniscule human being, fussing to leave the tense arms of the stranger and return to his home at Mother's breast. Like any other infant, he has no cognizant notion of what's happening, no way of understanding what is on the verge of happening.
Joshua does not look at him. Instead, he counters:
"Look at him? Look at you. Look at all the monsters people have created, all down through history, just doing what people do naturally. And you two aren't even natural."
He shakes his head and runs his fingers meditatively over the baby-powder scented scalp.
"This is just a mutated form of your separate diseases, combined into one. A supervirus."
Claire shakes her head and tries to swallow the lump in her throat. It's massive and won't go down. Maybe it's her heart.
"Tell me something first," she tries. Her eyes are wide, pleading—beautiful. She wants him to be drawn into them, like he was in New York. "Just tell me—do you really want to save the world? Or is this really about wanting revenge?"
"Wanting isn't a part of it."
"But do you?" she nearly shouts, frenetic. "Because if you do, you start with one person! A baby, Joshua! And if you can't get your mind around that, then you've got no business saving anything. If you can't do that, then this is just revenge."
Joshua's features shift into a contemptuous and vaguely patronizing smile. Claire knows that her words haven't even touched him. In horror, she watches him move those smiling lips, voice his final words:
"I am gonna save the world. Right now."
Claire lurches forward, but Sylar stands stone-still. He feels frozen. In response to his inaction, another voice joins the fray:
"Do it! Kill him, god damn it, kill him now!" hollers Gabriel, nearly in Sylar's ear—and quite literally in his head.
The baby, Sylar thinks, lips moving in wordless calculation.
"The baby what?" Gabriel demands, frantic. "He's got our baby! Cut the bastard's head off, hand Noah to Claire, and we'll have a look inside, but you've got to do it now!"
Shawnda said the baby spells disaster, he reminds his counterpart. What if I do the wrong thing?
"What if the baby spells disaster because you stand there like an idiot? God, if I had a rock—if I were solid—I'd do it myself." As he speaks, he searches the white sand, as though he has half a mind to try it, anyway.
Okay, Sylar nerves himself toward action, as Claire splashes into the water. Okay.
As he raises his finger, Joshua raises his hands. The boy's palms turn upward while Noah's tiny, wriggling body splashes into the ocean. A nearly imperceptible, invisible pulse radiates from where Joshua stands in peaceful, meditative pose.
No! Sylar mouths, breathless, while Claire screams the word. Sylar cuts across Joshua's face with more blind, driven force than he has ever employed. He swipes at a diagonal—and deeply. One ear and the top half of Joshua's crown parts company with his body, slips sideways, and plops into the drink.
"Yes!" Gabriel grunts brutally, but Sylar can only whisper, "No," again.
No, no, no.
It all happened so quick. Too quick. The motion, the murder, the pulse.
Oh, god, the pulse.
Sylar forces every ounce of his concentration into his telekinesis. He pulls, searches, pulls at Noah's body to bring it from the water. He can't get a grasp on anything solid. He can't find his child.
Claire is below the azure surface before Joshua's synapses have stopped firing. She bursts out, gasping for breath, blond hair plastered to her face, as her former friend's corpse slumps down to join her. A red, watery cloud billows from his open skull.
"Help me!" Claire yells toward the beach. One more sharp inhalation, and she's back beneath the surface. The water burns her wide eyes. This can't be happening. Her son is drowning, dying. It can't turn out like this. Only . . .
Only it has before. All those other times with Rutherford . . .
Every life I ever made, she thinks, digging in the water like she'd dig through the loose topsoil in a new grave. What a joke. An old, tired joke: forcing immortality upon her and killing everything she holds dear. A curse set upon her. A punishment. For something she did in a former life, maybe. But what could she have done to warrant this? What?
She comes up again with a gasp that is more like a sob. And back under, this time without taking a proper breath. Why should she? She won't drown.
But now Sylar is with her in the shallows, working his fingers into her scalp, gently forcing her to surface.
"Claire, he's not in the water." Bending, he wraps his arm around her waist and lifts her backward, upward, her short legs clearing the water as she kicks to return to her hunt. "Claire, he's not in the water."
"Don't tell me that," she says, kicking him again, flailing back with her fists as he carries her. "Don't you fucking tell me that!"
But she knew it already. She felt the pulse, too. She twists out of Sylar's hold and drops to the sand. Her sobs become a ghastly cacophony.
Sylar has heard Claire scream before—many times, in fact—but not like this. God, she sounds like a banshee, and Claire should never in any way remind him of death.
She's on her knees, bent upon herself with her arms hugging her abdomen, wailing as if something has been torn out of her, something far more crucial than her brain. Brains are trivial, suddenly. Somehow.
Daunted for the first time in his life, Sylar looks to Gabriel for answers. But the watchmaker stands looking toward the spot where Joshua's decapitated body bobs like a cork. Behind his glasses, his eyes are stunned, incredulous. He staggers into the water and pokes at the exposed brain swelling out of Joshua's skull, as though there might be a solution inside.
Claire's screams stop all at once. Her hand shoots up. She makes a fist around Sylar's jeans pocket and pulls hard. He drops down, facing her.
"I don't know what he did," she confesses, her voice raggedy. "But you do. You can find it out, and then—you can do it to me. You can send me wherever he sent Noah. Make me disappear, Sylar. Do it for our son."
She sees the horrified hesitation in his big, brown eyes. Now is not the time for weakness. Baring her teeth, she places a palm on either side of his face and holds his gaze forcefully. Begs him roughly, with tears streaming down her face.
"Please, you have to. If he's somewhere—if he's anywhere—I need to be there! Please, please—please, okay? If you love me?"
That. Sylar fights himself. No, no—not that. Anything but losing Claire. A year was long enough. Thirty was torment. Forever is . . .
No. No, not that. He won't do it. But he won't betray her, either, in this most crucial of moments. He won't abandon Noah to that grim forever.
He knows what he has to do.
The watchmaker catches wind of his plans and splashes hastily back from the ocean.
"Don't you dare," Gabriel warns him with a strong note of panic. "She's not thinking clearly. She's crazy with grief. I said don't you dare! We had one baby. We can have another one. All she needs is us, and that clinches it."
Sylar doesn't want to fight him on it. He wants him to make sense. But one baby does not equal another baby. Claire might be shit with math, but she'll never fall for that one.
"Sylar!" Claire's fingertips press into his jaw; she shakes him. "Every second you wait is a second he's alone out there! Be the father your father wasn't! Do right by your son!"
He gasps. His arms are around her; her chest is flush with his.
"I will—I will, I promise. Just—one thing first, okay?" He proceeds in a rush, before he can lose the audacity to ask for such a thing at such a moment. "Just say you love me first, just one time, just once so I can have that, just something to take, you know?"
He feels her wet lashes flutter rapidly against the shell of his ear, and wonders if she even heard him. Then, her voice, low and rasping:
"I did. I loved you. Longer than I knew. Even when you were just this psycho, you were my rock, and I loved you for it. And then later I loved you the other way, in New York, I mean. I didn't know I could love one man so many different ways, you want to know the truth. Isn't that stupid? You must've been right, I never did grow up."
He cups the back of her head as she speaks, closes his eyes. He wants to savor her sentiment, and then savor what comes after, like candy melting too quickly on his tongue, knowing it will soon be gone and there is no more.
And he gets it. Her use of the past tense does not escape him. She loved him, might even love him still, were it not for Noah. The world has ended for her, and all softer feelings have flown into the universal vacuum. Now she is alone in the black void, in the tiny space where her son was, she and her grief.
Gabriel fumbles at Sylar's fingers, but he's incorporeal and utterly helpless as he watches.
"I love you, Claire," Sylar says as he places his palm against her forehead.
Love is about compromise—give and take. Truth be told, taking her memories is the best thing he will ever give her. His heart is breaking. He only wants it to be over, and then it is, and he wants it back.
Claire's lashes flutter again, and he can feel her fingers working on his shoulders. His musculature is different from Rutherford's, leaner, not what she's expecting. She takes in her surroundings all at once, wrenches from him like an evil witch wrenching out his heart, and gazes into his face with a sublime mixture of horror and bemusement.
"Where am I?" she asks him, never stopping to wonder how on earth her voice got so gravelly. "What have you done?"
He doesn't answer. Something in his face, some haunted shadow, impresses her with an even greater disquiet. She actually shrinks from him, loose fists curling up instinctively before her chest as though she might need to fend him off.
"Get away from me, Claire," he finally says. "Run away, like you do."
"What have you done?" she demands in broken tones, even as she rises to take his advice.
"It's part of what we are—you running," he comments. But he can't chase her anymore, and that finally breaks the idealistic daisy chain he's built up in his mind over the decades. There is no we anymore.
"What—?"
"GET AWAY FROM ME!" he screams. With his telekinesis, he knocks her back on her bottom. Then she is up and turning from him, running up the beach, pretty and perfect and perfectly gone.
Laboriously, Sylar gets to his feet. There is nothing wrong with him—he's as healthy as an undying man could hope to be—but his whole body hurts, and his gait is slow, stiff. He feels like the old man he ought to be.
When he gets into the water again, the salty liquid seems to oil his joints. Or maybe it's the bloody sight of his last kill, that sense of hungry purpose stealing over him once more. He has his grim, gory work to do. When both pieces of Joshua are heaved upon the beach, he settles down to do it. This work was enough for him once, years and years ago. Surely it can be some comfort to him in his last moments.
As he works, Gabriel distracts him to an almost ridiculous degree, huffing, puffing, and pouting childishly. From time to time, he makes morose declarations dripping with self-pity:
"I always knew I'd die alone."
By the time Sylar unravels the boy's ability, the watchmaker's antics are getting old.
"Not alone," he reasons with an attempt at optimism, scrubbing his fingertips clean with a handful of sand. He doesn't even care that he's talking to himself anymore. Who else is he going to talk to? "You're coming with me."
"I don't want to go with you! We could have taken Claire!"
Breathing shallowly, Gabriel scoops up a fistful of sand and hurls it with such rage that his glasses drop pitifully before him.
"God damn you!" Gabriel curses him, his voice wildly uneven. "You do this every time! Every—single—time a girl likes us, you take her to a beach, and you fucking ruin it."
"Gabe, are you trying to make me laugh?" Any other time, he'd have to laugh longer, harder, for his eyes to be this wet.
"She wanted to come!" Gabriel screams, snatching his glasses back and staggering to his feet.
"She wanted her son back!" Sylar shouts, fed up with his angry, sickened sniveling. He squeezes his eyes shut, trying to calm himself, to calm Gabriel. "Look. I don't know if we can come back from this."
"Oh, well, that makes it even better—now we'll just be stuck God-knows-where forever without any—"
"Gabriel, I don't know if there's anywhere to come back from, okay? I'm not doing that to Claire. She wasn't supposed to die. You and I are different. We stole it."
"Yeah, well . . ." Gabriel fights for a new tact and finally snags one: "Let's talk about what you've done to Claire, since you brought it up. Where's she going to go now? She probably doesn't even have a clue where she is!"
"She'll get back to Texas, somehow," he answers with controlled confidence.
Gabriel appears stricken.
"Back to Rutherford?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Probably."
"And what's he going to say about it?"
"How the hell do I know?" That's a sore spot, and he rolls his head on his neck in a vain effort to banish the painful tension building in his shoulders. "Sounded like Sharon's history now. And Micah's dead, so no one will be there to tell Claire exactly how she wound up here. Maybe it'll be like . . . nothing ever happened."
"That's not even fair to her. You know it isn't."
Of course it's not, but what can he say? In this instance, unlike so many others, the lie may be preferable to the truth. He can still feel her screams, her pleads, like shards of glass inside his head. Now he knows what it's like, being cut into.
God . . . is this his comeuppance?
"You believe in divine punishment, right, Gabe?"
"Fuck you, that's what I believe in." But the rage is seeping out of his voice, leaving only a quiet weariness.
"All you wanted was to be special. I wanted Claire." He shrugged. "We got it. For a little while, you know. That's more than most people ever do."
"Excellent. That's just excellent," Gabriel returns, nodding bitterly. The unattractively styled part in his hair has come unslicked. Strands of black hair strew his forehead. "A little while. What a great big success we were. And now it's gone."
"That's life."
With a sigh, the watchmaker drops down beside Sylar. They sit shoulder to shoulder. Joshua Gallo's body lies before them, forming a Welcome mat into the mystery of Beyond.
"So what now?" Gabriel asks.
"We do right by our kid," Sylar decides. "I think we can do that."
He is surprised by the confidence he feels, and he turns to look at Gabriel, to impress him with the unforeseen truth of the words.
"I honest to god think we can do that."
Watchmaker. Serial killer. A good father. Who knew?
Together, they stare out at the ocean, that great, endless blue shroud. A beautiful thing to look at, almost as beautiful as the face of their beloved cheerleader when she smiles. Sylar thinks it's a fine sight, a perfectly acceptable last sight. He refrains from blinking as he lifts his hands, intent on taking it with him into the deeper, blacker waters called eternity.
A/N:
R.I.P. Josh, aka Fake Peter. You were originally intended to be a cute little homage to Paire. I never meant to dement and finally kill you. :(
There will be an epilogue.