Jiminy Cricket - Heroes - Mohinder/Sylar
Title: Jiminy Cricket
Pairing: Mohinder/Sylar
Word Count: 3222
Rating: PG-13
A/N: Written for writing_rainbow. This is an AU from S1, presuming that Mohinder chose to help Sylar when he phoned him in The Hard Part.
Summary: Sylar had been in prison for two years before Mohinder found the strength to visit him.
This room reminded him of a school cafeteria. There were cheap tables and plastic chairs, forced smiles and couples making out inappropriately. The air smelled of stale food, cleaning fluid and - masked beneath it all - the stomach-turning scent of vomit. Mohinder did not want to be here. Not at all. Not ever.
He sat in the uncomfortable seat he'd been led to and watched the door with unflinching intensity. This was not what he'd anticipated when he'd decided that the time had come to visit the prison responsible for keeping Sylar safely under lock and key. He'd thought it might happen behind a thick pane of glass that it did in the movies - but apparently Sylar had exhibited nothing but good behaviour in the two years that had passed since he handed himself over to the authorities. He'd earned himself a little trust.
Good behaviour... Mohinder found the very idea in conjunction with Sylar to be almost laughable. These people truly had no idea of who - or what - they were dealing with.
His heart froze in his chest when Sylar appeared. Even with a prison guard on either side of him and his hands locked in cuffs, the simple menace of Sylar's appearance was not lessened. The bright orange jumpsuit looked ridiculous on most prisoners; on Sylar it was hardly noticeable.
He walked over to the table Mohinder sat at, past the pair who were kissing obnoxiously. There was still an overconfident swagger to his gait. Nothing at all, it would appear, was enough to convince Sylar that he was not in fact the king of the world.
Sylar sat down. With only a flimsy table between him and a murderer, Mohinder didn't flinch. Too much had happened in recent years for him to be twitchy around monsters.
"My my," Sylar said, his voice emotionless but threaded with amusement. "Isn't this a surprise..."
"I thought I ought to come."
"It's been two years." Sylar smiled. Charming. "Two years in this place, Mohinder. Even my mother has stopped visiting."
"You have a mother?" He didn't mean to sound quite so shocked.
"Everyone has a mother," Sylar said. His eyes were dark as he watched him, human and reptilian at once. "Why are you here?"
Mohinder answered with a speed and ease that startled him. "I wanted to see you."
"I'm touched." The level of sarcasm was poisonous.
"I needed to see it for myself - to confirm it."
"You came to see the freak behind bars," Sylar translated for him. Mohinder made no attempt to correct or contradict him: it would have rang hollow. "You know that I could break out of place whenever I wanted."
Statement.
"And yet you haven't," Mohinder observed. "It's remarkable, really: self-enforced imprisonment. Why?"
"It's the right thing to do." Sylar smirked. "If I leave this place, then what I saw in my painting might happen. I'm not as bad as you think."
"You're a serial killer. You're exactly as bad as I think," Mohinder countered, but some of the hatred had been sapped from his voice. Two years was a long time.
"I haven't killed a single person since I've been in here," Sylar said - eyes bright as if that was something be proud of instead of something normal and sane. "You said this was the right thing to do. I'm earning forgiveness."
"Some things cannot be forgiven."
"All things should be." Sylar leaned forward and his hands moved, connected at the wrists, to hold onto Mohinder's. Despite the sick twist in Mohinder's stomach, he didn't pull away. "All sins can be atoned for."
"You murdered my father," Mohinder said - the trump card in his set. "How do you propose to 'atone' for that?"
Sylar watched him, dark eyes almost black like an imp or a demon. "I'm doing what you said to do. If you think it's pointless, maybe I should leave right now. When I think of all the powers out there, Mohinder, all just waiting for me to get my hands on them..."
Mohinder glanced at the prison guards, at their weapons. He didn't say a word. His hand still hadn't slipped away.
"Do you really think they could stop me?" Sylar asked. Exhilarated. Giddy. "Why don't we try it and find out?"
"Don't," Mohinder said before a split-second had passed. He was tense; couldn't even move. "Please. Don't."
Sylar's smirk made him want to leave, but he stayed on the spot. He was terrified that Sylar would follow him if he tried to go - because there was no denying that Sylar would easily be able to do so, if he decided to.
Sylar relaxed and pulled his hands back to his own side of the table, resting his palms against the tabletop. "Okay," he said, his dark eyes bright once more with mirth. "See? All you had to do was ask nicely."
He was teasing him, mocking him, but as Mohinder searched his face was any sign of logic he thought that perhaps what Sylar had said was true. "You handed yourself in because I told you to," he said. It was far from being a question.
Sylar didn't drop his gaze for an instant. "Yes."
"And you stay here for the same reason."
"Yes." Sylar still looked amused as the pair of them watched each other - he was waiting for Mohinder to ask the next question and reach the logical conclusion, Mohinder thought, but he wouldn't give him the satisfaction of saying it aloud.
All the same, his mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was the closest he could offer. "Thank you."
Sylar waved the thanks away with a flicker of his fingers. That gestured was almost enough to make Mohinder's blood boil again. "There's no need to thank me, Mohinder. You're my Jiminy Cricket, aren't you?"
"What?"
"I don't have a conscience of my own, yet you seem to have an over-inflated sense of right and wrong. I believe that's why fate brought us together in Montana - to balance one another. I can't be a good person, I don't want to be, but because of you I can save the world."
He spoke with the passionate intensity of a political leader and leaned forward again: close, too close.
"You can deny it all you like. Please, go right ahead - I find it endearing. Deep down, I know you can feel the connection here too. You feel responsible for me, for the 'monster' your father created.
"Don't talk about my father."
He carried on as if Mohinder hadn't said a word. "And you're right. You are responsible for me. You have been since the moment you turned up on Zane Taylor's doorstep. Do you know why I didn't kill you there and then?"
"You needed me." Mohinder leaned back as far as he could go without his chair toppling over. He needed space. "I had information that was useful to you."
"I could have found it myself without your help. You are alive, because I decided to let you live."
"How magnanimous of you..." Sylar had to be lying, bluffing; he knew better than to believe a single word the killer said.
"You and I were born to do great things together." Sylar smiled. It was a gentle expression, something that he wouldn't have previously thought that Sylar was even capable of. "I think you know that too. Why else would you come to visit me here?"
"I thought it would be good for me," Mohinder said. "Closure."
"And has it been good for you?" Sylar's smile twisted into a much more familiar smirk.
Mohinder looked away from Sylar and didn't answer: he didn't have an answer, or at least not one that he liked. No closure greeted him here. No resolution.
"I think I'd better leave now," Mohinder said. He stood up. "Thank you for agreeing to meet with me."
He couldn't say that it had been good to see him. The lie would be too easily pierced.
"I'll see you soon," Sylar said. He didn't stand up or say goodbye - and Mohinder didn't look over his shoulder as he made a hasty retreat.
*
One month later, he visited again.
He didn't know why. After leaving last time he had vowed never to set foot in this building's shadow ever again - and yet here he was, in the same soulless visiting room, waiting for the same monster.
This time, when Sylar's figure darkened the doorway, he was in a different state altogether. His face was a blossoming mish-mash of colours: purples, yellows, browns, even greens flowered on his skin. There were red cuts and a split lip, but when his dark eyes lighted on Mohinder he still managed to smile.
He took the seat opposite Mohinder. The chair legs cried out as they scraped along the floor. "I wondered when you'd come again," he said.
"What happened to your face?" Mohinder asked.
The poor bruises seemed to beg for a soothing touched, but he restrained himself with a strict reminder that this was still Sylar.
"I was beaten," Sylar said.
"I can see that." He could also see that Sylar had deliberately avoided giving him a straight answer. "Why?"
"I'm in a prison, Mohinder. We don't spend our days hugging." He smirked, but winced as his split lip caused him pain.
Mohinder forced himself not to respond to that: although the sight of a human being hurt in the way that Sylar was tugged at the heart strings he knew better than to accept it at face value. There was an ulterior motive. There always was. "And you didn't fight back? You let them hurt you?"
"I'm not a killer any more," Sylar answered, so calm that he managed to make Mohinder more angry, "and I can't imagine that you would have approved."
"I wish you'd drop that," Mohinder said. "Pretend that you care what I think... It's bizarre, simply bizarre."
"Why?"
"Pardon?"
"Why is it bizarre?" Sylar watched him with passive disinterest. "You're the first person in a long time to show any true faith in me. You say that I'm a monster but you know it's not that simple. You liked me when you thought I was Zane. We could have been friends: we might have been more."
Mohinder tried not to think about what might have happened if he hadn't discovered the deception when he had. Their budding friendship, a faked connection, had been intense - and Mohinder knew that he had been an easy target, so eager and relieved to have met somebody who actually believed him. Sylar had had an easy job taking advantage of his resources. Given a little more time, Mohinder shuddered to think of what else he might have taken.
His jaw clenched and he shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course not," Sylar agreed sarcastically. "Not that it matters. Whether you think it's bizarre or not, I've adopted you as my new moral compass. 'What would Mohinder do'? I doubt I'll be founding a religion on it any time soon, but it's served me well so far."
"And you think I'd want you to let yourself be attacked without defending yourself?"
"Don't you?" Sylar watched him and Mohinder felt himself under a microscope.
"I don't think you should allow yourself to be beaten up when you have the resources to defend yourself," Mohinder said with careful consideration. If he said the wrong thing, people might get hurt; they might even die.
The power in his words when they steered Sylar's actions was dizzying: intoxicating.
"Okay," Sylar said, with the faintest incline of his head. "Then I won't."
Simple as that.
With a sense of unease, Mohinder was left to wonder what exactly he had just unleashed.
*
He found out the following month when, once more, he turned up during the prison's visiting hours.
"Gray's not seeing anyone today," the disinterested guard behind the desk informed him.
"Pardon?" Mohinder asked. "What does that mean?"
"He's in solitary. Put a few of the other prisoners in the hospital. One of the guards too."
"He..." The meaning was immediately clear to Mohinder: this had happened because of him. Words had unknown power, and with the simple instruction to Sylar to protect himself, Mohinder's words had landed several men in hospital.
"Still, with Gray's background who would be mad enough to take him on, right?" the guard said cheerfully enough, with a flash of a smile that was altogether too bright and too false. "You can come back next week if you'd like. Sorry for the trouble. You a friend of his?"
The guard looked sceptical and Mohinder supposed that he had every reason to be: Sylar did not have 'friends'. Mohinder couldn't imagine his ego ever tolerating one for long, although he thought that perhaps that might have been different when he was young. Imagining Sylar as teenager or even a child felt dirty, as if he was prying where he wasn't welcome.
He offered the guard a dull and dim smile. "Just someone from the past," he answered.
And, now, with unwelcome worry in his gut, he wished that he had stayed in the past rather than emerging into the present.
*
"I didn't tell you to start picking fights," he argued when he was next able to actually visit Sylar. "For God's sake..."
"I'm in prison," Sylar said with a smirk of amusement. "What did you expect me to do? I either stand up for myself and beat them, or I don't and am beaten in turn. There is no middle path."
Mohinder's jaw clenched. He wanted to believe that there was always a peaceful way to resolve such matters, and perhaps before his father had died he would have still been able to see the world in such a light. His views had changed since then; he had changed. His rose-tinted spectacles had been smashed underfoot.
"Perhaps prison is not the best place for you," he said, the words sticking reluctantly in his throat. Restlessly, his fingertips tapped against the tabletop. He could hear the other prisoners talking to their loved ones at neighbouring tables - but what he was most aware of was Sylar's black gaze. "Would you kill people if you were released?" he asked.
Sylar's expression was carefully unreadable: alien. "What do you think?"
Mohinder swallowed and wished that he didn't know the answer. His conscience burned. "If I tell you not to, you won't," he answered.
Statement. Question. Fear.
Sylar's mouth twisted into a smirk. "I'd say you're a fast learner, Mohinder, but it's taken you years to realise this."
Mohinder stared at Sylar with evaluating eyes, but Sylar was able to meet his gaze without flinching: he didn't squirm once. "Why?" Mohinder resorted to asking with a frustrated sigh.
"I've told you this before. I have no moral compass of my own, so I'm going to borrow yours."
"That isn't true. You know right from wrong, Sylar; you just don't care." He knew it was a minute distinction, but for him it was important. "So, again: why?"
Sylar leaned forward across the table and Mohinder moved back, sitting flat against the back of his chair. "I want to prove to you that I can be a good man. You believed in me once. I need to show you that you were right not to try and turn me in yourself."
Mohinder didn't truly believe him - or, at least, he didn't believe that that was all there was to it. "Then maybe prison isn't where you are supposed to be," he suggested awkwardly. He felt like a criminal himself as he suggested it, as if the words themselves were turning his soul black. Sylar stared at him in a way that made his skin crawl. He looked down at the tabletop and realised that he couldn't stay in this place for another second. "I need to go," he announced, standing up so sharply that it was a wonder that his chair didn't fall over.
Sylar didn't rise with him or make any attempt to persuade him to stay. He rested comfortably in his seat and nodded. "I'll see you soon," he said.
A threat or a promise: either one sent shivers down Mohinder's spine.
*
At midnight, his front door opened. Mohinder heard the squeak of the hinges and the sound of footsteps. His thumping heart said that he knew exactly who this was: his instincts had known all along, had been waiting for it, and now the anxious waiting that had kept him awake all night was over.
He sat up in bed and turned the lamp by his bedside on, casting dim light and soft shadows through the room in time for him to see the door open.
There was no sense of shock or even surprise when he saw Sylar standing there. He still wore his bland prison clothes but they didn't serve to mute him at all. Danger still burned like a physical force.
"Sylar," Mohinder said, but he had nothing to follow it up with.
Sylar took a step further into the room, away from the door and closer to Mohinder. "We never finished our conversation," he stated. Mohinder thought that his voice sounded nervous: husky. "You said I don't belong in prison. Where do I belong?"
There was no answer to that, and spitting out, 'Six feet under,' hardly felt appropriate when Sylar had taken him on as a misguided moral master. "I don't know," he had to say, though it pained him to admit his ignorance.
Sylar reached the bed and the mattress dipped under his weight as he sat down at the side. Mohinder didn't try to rush away or grab a weapon, but he didn't know whether that was because of a sense of resignation or because he didn't believe that Sylar would hurt him any more.
"I'm here," Sylar said decisively, and even though Mohinder wanted to be able to argue with him, he couldn't. "I belong here."
Mohinder thought of the atrocities that Sylar had caused and of the murder of his own father. Blood and grief. Sylar had ruined so many peoples' lives and Mohinder didn't know if he even felt remorse.
He thought of the years that Sylar had willingly spent in prison and of his unnervingly earnest claims that he had taken on Mohinder's morals as his own. An attempt at redemption - didn't that mean something? Wasn't that supposed to mean something?
Without feeling like he was fully in control of his actions, Mohinder shuffled over to the far side of his bed. It was a single bed with only enough room to comfortably fit one, but as he edged to the side he found that he could create just enough space for Sylar too.
Sylar lay down and neither of them spoke, finding that words were unnecessary. Words led to anger; to arguments and fights and bloodshed. Words were bad for them. Lying beside him, facing him, Sylar reached out. His fingertips traced the features of Mohinder's face and drank in the softness of his skin; his hands were cold. Mohinder didn't dare to breathe or move, drowning and burning all at once in the freezing fire of Sylar's gaze. He relaxed, unwillingly, and together they fell asleep while his bedside lamp was still on to chase the darkness away.
Pairing: Mohinder/Sylar
Word Count: 3222
Rating: PG-13
A/N: Written for writing_rainbow. This is an AU from S1, presuming that Mohinder chose to help Sylar when he phoned him in The Hard Part.
Summary: Sylar had been in prison for two years before Mohinder found the strength to visit him.
This room reminded him of a school cafeteria. There were cheap tables and plastic chairs, forced smiles and couples making out inappropriately. The air smelled of stale food, cleaning fluid and - masked beneath it all - the stomach-turning scent of vomit. Mohinder did not want to be here. Not at all. Not ever.
He sat in the uncomfortable seat he'd been led to and watched the door with unflinching intensity. This was not what he'd anticipated when he'd decided that the time had come to visit the prison responsible for keeping Sylar safely under lock and key. He'd thought it might happen behind a thick pane of glass that it did in the movies - but apparently Sylar had exhibited nothing but good behaviour in the two years that had passed since he handed himself over to the authorities. He'd earned himself a little trust.
Good behaviour... Mohinder found the very idea in conjunction with Sylar to be almost laughable. These people truly had no idea of who - or what - they were dealing with.
His heart froze in his chest when Sylar appeared. Even with a prison guard on either side of him and his hands locked in cuffs, the simple menace of Sylar's appearance was not lessened. The bright orange jumpsuit looked ridiculous on most prisoners; on Sylar it was hardly noticeable.
He walked over to the table Mohinder sat at, past the pair who were kissing obnoxiously. There was still an overconfident swagger to his gait. Nothing at all, it would appear, was enough to convince Sylar that he was not in fact the king of the world.
Sylar sat down. With only a flimsy table between him and a murderer, Mohinder didn't flinch. Too much had happened in recent years for him to be twitchy around monsters.
"My my," Sylar said, his voice emotionless but threaded with amusement. "Isn't this a surprise..."
"I thought I ought to come."
"It's been two years." Sylar smiled. Charming. "Two years in this place, Mohinder. Even my mother has stopped visiting."
"You have a mother?" He didn't mean to sound quite so shocked.
"Everyone has a mother," Sylar said. His eyes were dark as he watched him, human and reptilian at once. "Why are you here?"
Mohinder answered with a speed and ease that startled him. "I wanted to see you."
"I'm touched." The level of sarcasm was poisonous.
"I needed to see it for myself - to confirm it."
"You came to see the freak behind bars," Sylar translated for him. Mohinder made no attempt to correct or contradict him: it would have rang hollow. "You know that I could break out of place whenever I wanted."
Statement.
"And yet you haven't," Mohinder observed. "It's remarkable, really: self-enforced imprisonment. Why?"
"It's the right thing to do." Sylar smirked. "If I leave this place, then what I saw in my painting might happen. I'm not as bad as you think."
"You're a serial killer. You're exactly as bad as I think," Mohinder countered, but some of the hatred had been sapped from his voice. Two years was a long time.
"I haven't killed a single person since I've been in here," Sylar said - eyes bright as if that was something be proud of instead of something normal and sane. "You said this was the right thing to do. I'm earning forgiveness."
"Some things cannot be forgiven."
"All things should be." Sylar leaned forward and his hands moved, connected at the wrists, to hold onto Mohinder's. Despite the sick twist in Mohinder's stomach, he didn't pull away. "All sins can be atoned for."
"You murdered my father," Mohinder said - the trump card in his set. "How do you propose to 'atone' for that?"
Sylar watched him, dark eyes almost black like an imp or a demon. "I'm doing what you said to do. If you think it's pointless, maybe I should leave right now. When I think of all the powers out there, Mohinder, all just waiting for me to get my hands on them..."
Mohinder glanced at the prison guards, at their weapons. He didn't say a word. His hand still hadn't slipped away.
"Do you really think they could stop me?" Sylar asked. Exhilarated. Giddy. "Why don't we try it and find out?"
"Don't," Mohinder said before a split-second had passed. He was tense; couldn't even move. "Please. Don't."
Sylar's smirk made him want to leave, but he stayed on the spot. He was terrified that Sylar would follow him if he tried to go - because there was no denying that Sylar would easily be able to do so, if he decided to.
Sylar relaxed and pulled his hands back to his own side of the table, resting his palms against the tabletop. "Okay," he said, his dark eyes bright once more with mirth. "See? All you had to do was ask nicely."
He was teasing him, mocking him, but as Mohinder searched his face was any sign of logic he thought that perhaps what Sylar had said was true. "You handed yourself in because I told you to," he said. It was far from being a question.
Sylar didn't drop his gaze for an instant. "Yes."
"And you stay here for the same reason."
"Yes." Sylar still looked amused as the pair of them watched each other - he was waiting for Mohinder to ask the next question and reach the logical conclusion, Mohinder thought, but he wouldn't give him the satisfaction of saying it aloud.
All the same, his mouth twitched. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was the closest he could offer. "Thank you."
Sylar waved the thanks away with a flicker of his fingers. That gestured was almost enough to make Mohinder's blood boil again. "There's no need to thank me, Mohinder. You're my Jiminy Cricket, aren't you?"
"What?"
"I don't have a conscience of my own, yet you seem to have an over-inflated sense of right and wrong. I believe that's why fate brought us together in Montana - to balance one another. I can't be a good person, I don't want to be, but because of you I can save the world."
He spoke with the passionate intensity of a political leader and leaned forward again: close, too close.
"You can deny it all you like. Please, go right ahead - I find it endearing. Deep down, I know you can feel the connection here too. You feel responsible for me, for the 'monster' your father created.
"Don't talk about my father."
He carried on as if Mohinder hadn't said a word. "And you're right. You are responsible for me. You have been since the moment you turned up on Zane Taylor's doorstep. Do you know why I didn't kill you there and then?"
"You needed me." Mohinder leaned back as far as he could go without his chair toppling over. He needed space. "I had information that was useful to you."
"I could have found it myself without your help. You are alive, because I decided to let you live."
"How magnanimous of you..." Sylar had to be lying, bluffing; he knew better than to believe a single word the killer said.
"You and I were born to do great things together." Sylar smiled. It was a gentle expression, something that he wouldn't have previously thought that Sylar was even capable of. "I think you know that too. Why else would you come to visit me here?"
"I thought it would be good for me," Mohinder said. "Closure."
"And has it been good for you?" Sylar's smile twisted into a much more familiar smirk.
Mohinder looked away from Sylar and didn't answer: he didn't have an answer, or at least not one that he liked. No closure greeted him here. No resolution.
"I think I'd better leave now," Mohinder said. He stood up. "Thank you for agreeing to meet with me."
He couldn't say that it had been good to see him. The lie would be too easily pierced.
"I'll see you soon," Sylar said. He didn't stand up or say goodbye - and Mohinder didn't look over his shoulder as he made a hasty retreat.
*
One month later, he visited again.
He didn't know why. After leaving last time he had vowed never to set foot in this building's shadow ever again - and yet here he was, in the same soulless visiting room, waiting for the same monster.
This time, when Sylar's figure darkened the doorway, he was in a different state altogether. His face was a blossoming mish-mash of colours: purples, yellows, browns, even greens flowered on his skin. There were red cuts and a split lip, but when his dark eyes lighted on Mohinder he still managed to smile.
He took the seat opposite Mohinder. The chair legs cried out as they scraped along the floor. "I wondered when you'd come again," he said.
"What happened to your face?" Mohinder asked.
The poor bruises seemed to beg for a soothing touched, but he restrained himself with a strict reminder that this was still Sylar.
"I was beaten," Sylar said.
"I can see that." He could also see that Sylar had deliberately avoided giving him a straight answer. "Why?"
"I'm in a prison, Mohinder. We don't spend our days hugging." He smirked, but winced as his split lip caused him pain.
Mohinder forced himself not to respond to that: although the sight of a human being hurt in the way that Sylar was tugged at the heart strings he knew better than to accept it at face value. There was an ulterior motive. There always was. "And you didn't fight back? You let them hurt you?"
"I'm not a killer any more," Sylar answered, so calm that he managed to make Mohinder more angry, "and I can't imagine that you would have approved."
"I wish you'd drop that," Mohinder said. "Pretend that you care what I think... It's bizarre, simply bizarre."
"Why?"
"Pardon?"
"Why is it bizarre?" Sylar watched him with passive disinterest. "You're the first person in a long time to show any true faith in me. You say that I'm a monster but you know it's not that simple. You liked me when you thought I was Zane. We could have been friends: we might have been more."
Mohinder tried not to think about what might have happened if he hadn't discovered the deception when he had. Their budding friendship, a faked connection, had been intense - and Mohinder knew that he had been an easy target, so eager and relieved to have met somebody who actually believed him. Sylar had had an easy job taking advantage of his resources. Given a little more time, Mohinder shuddered to think of what else he might have taken.
His jaw clenched and he shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course not," Sylar agreed sarcastically. "Not that it matters. Whether you think it's bizarre or not, I've adopted you as my new moral compass. 'What would Mohinder do'? I doubt I'll be founding a religion on it any time soon, but it's served me well so far."
"And you think I'd want you to let yourself be attacked without defending yourself?"
"Don't you?" Sylar watched him and Mohinder felt himself under a microscope.
"I don't think you should allow yourself to be beaten up when you have the resources to defend yourself," Mohinder said with careful consideration. If he said the wrong thing, people might get hurt; they might even die.
The power in his words when they steered Sylar's actions was dizzying: intoxicating.
"Okay," Sylar said, with the faintest incline of his head. "Then I won't."
Simple as that.
With a sense of unease, Mohinder was left to wonder what exactly he had just unleashed.
*
He found out the following month when, once more, he turned up during the prison's visiting hours.
"Gray's not seeing anyone today," the disinterested guard behind the desk informed him.
"Pardon?" Mohinder asked. "What does that mean?"
"He's in solitary. Put a few of the other prisoners in the hospital. One of the guards too."
"He..." The meaning was immediately clear to Mohinder: this had happened because of him. Words had unknown power, and with the simple instruction to Sylar to protect himself, Mohinder's words had landed several men in hospital.
"Still, with Gray's background who would be mad enough to take him on, right?" the guard said cheerfully enough, with a flash of a smile that was altogether too bright and too false. "You can come back next week if you'd like. Sorry for the trouble. You a friend of his?"
The guard looked sceptical and Mohinder supposed that he had every reason to be: Sylar did not have 'friends'. Mohinder couldn't imagine his ego ever tolerating one for long, although he thought that perhaps that might have been different when he was young. Imagining Sylar as teenager or even a child felt dirty, as if he was prying where he wasn't welcome.
He offered the guard a dull and dim smile. "Just someone from the past," he answered.
And, now, with unwelcome worry in his gut, he wished that he had stayed in the past rather than emerging into the present.
*
"I didn't tell you to start picking fights," he argued when he was next able to actually visit Sylar. "For God's sake..."
"I'm in prison," Sylar said with a smirk of amusement. "What did you expect me to do? I either stand up for myself and beat them, or I don't and am beaten in turn. There is no middle path."
Mohinder's jaw clenched. He wanted to believe that there was always a peaceful way to resolve such matters, and perhaps before his father had died he would have still been able to see the world in such a light. His views had changed since then; he had changed. His rose-tinted spectacles had been smashed underfoot.
"Perhaps prison is not the best place for you," he said, the words sticking reluctantly in his throat. Restlessly, his fingertips tapped against the tabletop. He could hear the other prisoners talking to their loved ones at neighbouring tables - but what he was most aware of was Sylar's black gaze. "Would you kill people if you were released?" he asked.
Sylar's expression was carefully unreadable: alien. "What do you think?"
Mohinder swallowed and wished that he didn't know the answer. His conscience burned. "If I tell you not to, you won't," he answered.
Statement. Question. Fear.
Sylar's mouth twisted into a smirk. "I'd say you're a fast learner, Mohinder, but it's taken you years to realise this."
Mohinder stared at Sylar with evaluating eyes, but Sylar was able to meet his gaze without flinching: he didn't squirm once. "Why?" Mohinder resorted to asking with a frustrated sigh.
"I've told you this before. I have no moral compass of my own, so I'm going to borrow yours."
"That isn't true. You know right from wrong, Sylar; you just don't care." He knew it was a minute distinction, but for him it was important. "So, again: why?"
Sylar leaned forward across the table and Mohinder moved back, sitting flat against the back of his chair. "I want to prove to you that I can be a good man. You believed in me once. I need to show you that you were right not to try and turn me in yourself."
Mohinder didn't truly believe him - or, at least, he didn't believe that that was all there was to it. "Then maybe prison isn't where you are supposed to be," he suggested awkwardly. He felt like a criminal himself as he suggested it, as if the words themselves were turning his soul black. Sylar stared at him in a way that made his skin crawl. He looked down at the tabletop and realised that he couldn't stay in this place for another second. "I need to go," he announced, standing up so sharply that it was a wonder that his chair didn't fall over.
Sylar didn't rise with him or make any attempt to persuade him to stay. He rested comfortably in his seat and nodded. "I'll see you soon," he said.
A threat or a promise: either one sent shivers down Mohinder's spine.
*
At midnight, his front door opened. Mohinder heard the squeak of the hinges and the sound of footsteps. His thumping heart said that he knew exactly who this was: his instincts had known all along, had been waiting for it, and now the anxious waiting that had kept him awake all night was over.
He sat up in bed and turned the lamp by his bedside on, casting dim light and soft shadows through the room in time for him to see the door open.
There was no sense of shock or even surprise when he saw Sylar standing there. He still wore his bland prison clothes but they didn't serve to mute him at all. Danger still burned like a physical force.
"Sylar," Mohinder said, but he had nothing to follow it up with.
Sylar took a step further into the room, away from the door and closer to Mohinder. "We never finished our conversation," he stated. Mohinder thought that his voice sounded nervous: husky. "You said I don't belong in prison. Where do I belong?"
There was no answer to that, and spitting out, 'Six feet under,' hardly felt appropriate when Sylar had taken him on as a misguided moral master. "I don't know," he had to say, though it pained him to admit his ignorance.
Sylar reached the bed and the mattress dipped under his weight as he sat down at the side. Mohinder didn't try to rush away or grab a weapon, but he didn't know whether that was because of a sense of resignation or because he didn't believe that Sylar would hurt him any more.
"I'm here," Sylar said decisively, and even though Mohinder wanted to be able to argue with him, he couldn't. "I belong here."
Mohinder thought of the atrocities that Sylar had caused and of the murder of his own father. Blood and grief. Sylar had ruined so many peoples' lives and Mohinder didn't know if he even felt remorse.
He thought of the years that Sylar had willingly spent in prison and of his unnervingly earnest claims that he had taken on Mohinder's morals as his own. An attempt at redemption - didn't that mean something? Wasn't that supposed to mean something?
Without feeling like he was fully in control of his actions, Mohinder shuffled over to the far side of his bed. It was a single bed with only enough room to comfortably fit one, but as he edged to the side he found that he could create just enough space for Sylar too.
Sylar lay down and neither of them spoke, finding that words were unnecessary. Words led to anger; to arguments and fights and bloodshed. Words were bad for them. Lying beside him, facing him, Sylar reached out. His fingertips traced the features of Mohinder's face and drank in the softness of his skin; his hands were cold. Mohinder didn't dare to breathe or move, drowning and burning all at once in the freezing fire of Sylar's gaze. He relaxed, unwillingly, and together they fell asleep while his bedside lamp was still on to chase the darkness away.