Night 56: M21-M30 Hallway

[human_sponge]

Dinner had seemed to pass by too quickly, while night had come on quietly, with just the click of the door opening. Nonetheless, Peter had managed to get his new duffel bag packed with all of the medicine, syringes, and medical supplies that he might need without it being too heavy to manage. He still had to carry his shovel in his other hand,

Comments

[7_to_midnight]

"A few days..." Sylar echoed, trying to wade through the mental molasses that had situated itself somewhere between his ears and over his memory. Sylar might suspect most other people who knew him to be a mass-murdering psychopath, of lying to him and exploiting any potential vulnerability, but... the wonderful and pathetic truth about Peter was that he was too much of an idiot to realize the potential.

Sylar wasn't, though. He tried to school the pain in his features into a smirk rather than a grimace, sinking his fingers into the doorframe and his heels into the ground. His disorientation was starting to go - slowly - and he was beginning to make out Peter's features and equipment more clearly. It figured he was still toting around that damn shovel like an AK-47, and it figured that it still actually posed a threat.

He shook his head and pressed a hand to his temple in a way that he hoped looked casual rather than extremely deliberate. He rubbed, slowly, keeping his eyes on Peter, a familiar grounding point to focus his thoughts and vision on - a constant.

God. Peter Petrelli. The most annoyingly reliable thing in his life these days. He wondered for the billionth time what kind of joke of a hell he'd been thrown into.

"Sorry to disappoint," he said, curling his lip and chancing a step forward. He realized that he was going through the motions of scaring Peter away and realized suddenly that he wasn't sure if he wanted to be left alone in the dark without someone to gloat at. He stopped, crossed his arms, tried to prove himself capable of standing by his damn self. "So. What'd I miss? A person you made promises to here, a person you let die there..."

[human_sponge]

As much as Sylar was trying to pass his actions off as normal, Peter had been trained to look for signs of something being wrong in patients. He could tell that the man was either in some sort of pain -- centered around his head, he was guessing, considering the lack of balance and focus -- or that, like his first guess, there were drugs involved. It wasn't the sort of thing the man would necessarily recover from immediately.

Which meant that, if he was lucky, he could take control of his situation. Part of him wanted that to mean that he could just walk away and leave Sylar in the dust, but he knew that his foe was too persistent to allow that to happen.

Still, he wasn't willing to waste his night standing around in this hall, especially considering that he'd lost nights to the killer before. Peter's grip tightened around his shovel when Sylar moved toward him, but that slight reaction was the only sign of nervousness that he displayed. He'd realized by now that Sylar didn't pose that much of a threat here, but he also wasn't looking to get shocked by the power he'd picked up from Elle.

Damn. Elle. Where had she been?

Of course, it didn't help when Sylar moved on to mention broken promises and death, and Peter scowled, suddenly finding the anger and frustration to move. He shoved past the other man and down the hall, calling over his shoulder. "Do you really expect me to tell you?"

[To here.]