The whole 'sleep' command thing, of course, unfortunately, lasted for just as long as last time. And a few hours in the lake wouldn't have sat well with anybody, never mind a certain psychopath who'd just been pushed to the edge by someone he should have taken down days ago. Add to the situation some duct tape and... well. There was a very unhappy man clambering out of the lake right now.
It was lucky this was at Hogwarts... that there was The Rule. Because otherwise, he'd have died about nine times over.
At least getting out of the duct tape had been damned easy enough. to get out of. Kind of so much as a flick of the finger with that, really. And then it was climbing out of the lake, soaking from head to toe, hair dripping from its regular spikes into his eyes... His fingers clawed into the mud as he dragged himself up, and there was at least one thing that he was absolutely certain of: Susan Sto-Helit? Was definitely going to die.
Delirium couldn’t have said what she was doing out by the lake. She was only aware in passing that she was near the lake. All she knew was that Sad Guy had just clambered out of the water, and he looked even less happy than usual.
"...You're all soggy," she said, her habitual butterflies shifting to fish in sympathy.
Gravity was being treated as optional today, and as she made her way over to him her feet hit the ground only by accident. "You need to not be soggy. Here." She poked him gently in the forehead, and though it did nothing to get rid of the fact that he was cold and wet and muddy, it would at least make him think he wasn't.
Drowning wasn't fun for anybody. That's right, kids, not even for serial killers. And even with all of his powers... none of them were going to relieve the effects of that, no matter how hard he tried. He was hacking up water just like anybody would be doing with their lungs filled with water. Nearly puking up lake remnants, just like any other Average Joe. ...Pitiful.
Mud-stained fist pressed to his mouth and his shoulders shaking with the effort to get up all that water, Sylar's eyes flickered up to the person towering over him through a blurry haze of drops. Just what he needed. Somebody to watch and point and... Wait.
That was the woman from his sorting. Delirium. ...The one who'd given him the bee, and told him not to be sad. ...He liked her.
He coughed again, sitting up a little on his haunches and eying the finger starting in for his forehead and... poking him? He blinked once, furrowing his eyebrows and... he wasn't all wet and soggy anymore! Except, well, he was, but as long as he didn't think about it, that was all that
( ... )
That coughing couldn’t be a good sign, but Delirium wasn’t exactly up ons the needs of the average human body--the whole concept of oxygen eluded her at times. The force of his sudden fury hit her like a slap as he stood, and she stepped backward, the fish darting back into her hair.
"That's not very nice,” she said, reproachful. “You shouldn't destroy people--that's my brother's job.”
She looked up at him, her mismatched eyes scrutinizing his face. “Now you're not sad, but you are angry. We should fix that.” Thoughgtfully she bit her lip, and her hair shifted colors like a psychadelic sea anemone. "You need ice cream," she said decisively.
Not that even breathing was his top priority right now. Sylar wasn't one for full-out revenge, not without good prompt, and, dear God, had Susan given him worthy prompt. He was going to kill her. Maim her. Slaughter her. And he could do it in a myriad of different ways. Give her a pick as to which way he tore her limb from limb. She'd made him sleep. She'd shot him with a paintball gun. She'd duct taped him and thrown him in the lake. And now one of the few people at this school who might have given half a shit about him was here to witness the aftermath.
Kill her. Murder.
He could justify the means to her end. She had everything he wanted in one, neat little package.
Besides, he was angry. "I need to get to her. You can't fix it right now," he started to argue in turn, but his own words were echoing in his head and making him wince. He was broken. She was trying to fix it. It wasn't exactly something he couldn't sympathize with. "Ice cream," he repeated hollowly.
Delirium looked at him, her gaze flickering briefly to sadness. "You can't fix anything, she said, but you can make it less...um. I forget."
She brightened again. "But. Ice cream. It helps, you know? But not with cheese." The butterflies swooped out of her hair when she smiled, and the hair itself shifted into dozens of different shades of red and yellow and orange.
Could make it less... what? She just let the sentence dangle, and Sylar fixed her with a long stare, not really allowing himself to speak while she was trying to get her ideas across. She just left that flat, without explanation, yes, but... he was letting her.
He hadn't forgotten Susan. Like hell he was ever going to forget what she did unless he was brainwashed. But Delirium was proposing an idea that... huh. Ice cream. "I've never heard of ice cream with cheese," he commented in a flat sort of voice, letting his eyes wander to the butterflies that were flickering upward from her hair. His heart rate was slowing from its furious pound in his chest, and he paused for a few long seconds more. "It does help," he finally decided on, in a more quiet sort of voice.
Delirium was good at leaving things without an explanation, often because there really was no coherent explanation for what she said. "Cheese is made of evil," she said, nodding. "Ice cream is made of good. So are bananas."
She grinned at him suddenly, her mismatched eyes thoughtful. Idly and somewhat dreamily she drifted higher off the ground, until she was at Sylar's eye-level. "Now I'm tall, too. Come on, let's find Caketown." Delirium could be somewhat motherly, in her own schizoid way, and Sylar, she had decided, needed a mommy. Or a Barnabas, but even she didn't have a Barnabas, so clearly he wasn't going to get one yet.
It was so crazy, though, that it made sense, in some odd sort of way. He wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad thing, really, at this juncture - the woman was talking about cake being a thing of evil and how great ice cream was - but he'd just ride this out for now... follow her and listen to what she had to say.
Susan was lucky. It wasn't often Sylar let himself get distracted.
Her floating up to his level was sort of... sweet? Any other person, it would have irritated him. Some kind of mental metaphor that he would have conjured about the person thinking they were just as good as him, to be able to rise to the same height. And with Delirium, it wasn't? Why was he so different around her? "What's Caketown?" he asked with furrowed eyebrows.
"It's where the ice cream grows," she said, drifting serenely in a seemingly random direction. "This might make you sneeze."
She reached out and poked his forehead, and the grounds of Hogwarts melted into tendrils of multicolored fog. There was the impression of being squashed flat, folded out, turned into a sock, and run through a tumble-dryer, all in the space of about three seconds, and when the fog cleared the grass had turned into a kind of melty rainbow, and the landscape into something normally only found in the weirder class of LSD hallucination.
'Ice cream doesn't grow,' he wanted to correct her. So very badly. 'It's made, from dairy products, combined with sugar and sweeteners, then frozen.' It was on the tip of his tongue, even, right there to flatten her words and take her down a few notches, just to below him. That brief moment of being better than somebody was more than enough to please him, on a given occasion.
He could have corrected her. But he didn't.
Instead, he just watched her, that weird sort of look still flickering in his eyes as they fixated onto her own. Those multicolored shades that kept dipping into ever tone of the rainbow. A few seconds' pause, and he finally answered, with one, single, confident word.
"Okay."
It was then, of course, that she pressed her finger directly into the center of his forehead, and, God, he'd never felt anything remotely close to this before, what? It made him almost feel sick to his stomach, and incredibly pleased again when his feet touched back onto ground. ...At least until he opened his eyes. And... they were definitely
( ... )
Delirium smiled, a happy, vague sort of smile. "This is my Realm," she said. "my home."
Still drifting about a foot above the ground, she led him along the psychedlic grass. A clump of vivid purple flowers shifted quite suddenly into a flock of iridescent birds, soaring up into the sky. The sky here was black, with no moon nor sun nor stars; most of the light came from the trees, their twisting, multicolored branches glowing with bright phosphorus. When they crested a hill she pointed to a particularly tall tree, its boughs blooming with--sure enough--ice cream. "See," she said, "it's the ice cream tree. It has every flavor, even purple."
He was going insane. That was the only explanation for this.
Not that he wasn't already pretty nuts to begin with. Sylar reeked of mental instability at the best of times, never mind when he was paired with something he was incredibly passionate about - killing Susan, more powers, all that jazz. But this wasn't the every day, run-of-the-mill nutso. This was the real kind of crazy. The strange kind, that people paid twenty bucks a pop for on the street.
Either he was dreaming or he was stoned? What kind of explanation was that? He'd always grounded himself with rationality. Now he didn't know what the hell to do. "I..." Don't know what to say? Think you're completely insane? Think I've gone completely insane? "Don't know... what to say..."
Of course Delirium was insane. It was her job--why she existed, really. "That's okay," she said, kindly. "most people don't." Even most of her siblings were often at a loss with her--the only one who wasn't was Dream, and that was likely because his Realm and his task were often so odd themselves. "What kind of ice cream do you want?"
What kind of... right. He almost answered vanilla, before he stopped himself for a moment. Vanilla was his favorite. Had been his favorite, at least, back when he wore sweater vests and thick-framed glasses and sat in the dark and repaired watches all day. Not that he still didn't like vanilla, but it was just... so very dull a flavor.
"Anything," he murmured in a decidedly firm voice, glancing around in near awe to his surroundings. "With... sprinkles."
She grinned, and held out a hand that had been empty moments before. "Try this one," she said. It was an amalgamation that was one of her favorites--sweet cream ice cream mixed with chocolate syrup, caramel, chocolate chips, whipping cream and, yes, sprinkles. "Sprinkles make everything better. Except feet. Feet are icky." Especially with ice cream. They were worse than cheese.
She sat cross-legged on the crazy grass, the butterflies settling around her. "Why were you so angry?" she asked. It was very, very rare that Delirium got angry; sad, yes, and agitated, but not angry.
It was lucky this was at Hogwarts... that there was The Rule. Because otherwise, he'd have died about nine times over.
At least getting out of the duct tape had been damned easy enough. to get out of. Kind of so much as a flick of the finger with that, really. And then it was climbing out of the lake, soaking from head to toe, hair dripping from its regular spikes into his eyes... His fingers clawed into the mud as he dragged himself up, and there was at least one thing that he was absolutely certain of: Susan Sto-Helit? Was definitely going to die.
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"...You're all soggy," she said, her habitual butterflies shifting to fish in sympathy.
Gravity was being treated as optional today, and as she made her way over to him her feet hit the ground only by accident. "You need to not be soggy. Here." She poked him gently in the forehead, and though it did nothing to get rid of the fact that he was cold and wet and muddy, it would at least make him think he wasn't.
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Mud-stained fist pressed to his mouth and his shoulders shaking with the effort to get up all that water, Sylar's eyes flickered up to the person towering over him through a blurry haze of drops. Just what he needed. Somebody to watch and point and... Wait.
That was the woman from his sorting. Delirium. ...The one who'd given him the bee, and told him not to be sad. ...He liked her.
He coughed again, sitting up a little on his haunches and eying the finger starting in for his forehead and... poking him? He blinked once, furrowing his eyebrows and... he wasn't all wet and soggy anymore! Except, well, he was, but as long as he didn't think about it, that was all that ( ... )
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That coughing couldn’t be a good sign, but Delirium wasn’t exactly up ons the needs of the average human body--the whole concept of oxygen eluded her at times. The force of his sudden fury hit her like a slap as he stood, and she stepped backward, the fish darting back into her hair.
"That's not very nice,” she said, reproachful. “You shouldn't destroy people--that's my brother's job.”
She looked up at him, her mismatched eyes scrutinizing his face. “Now you're not sad, but you are angry. We should fix that.” Thoughgtfully she bit her lip, and her hair shifted colors like a psychadelic sea anemone. "You need ice cream," she said decisively.
Reply
Not that even breathing was his top priority right now. Sylar wasn't one for full-out revenge, not without good prompt, and, dear God, had Susan given him worthy prompt. He was going to kill her. Maim her. Slaughter her. And he could do it in a myriad of different ways. Give her a pick as to which way he tore her limb from limb. She'd made him sleep. She'd shot him with a paintball gun. She'd duct taped him and thrown him in the lake. And now one of the few people at this school who might have given half a shit about him was here to witness the aftermath.
Kill her. Murder.
He could justify the means to her end. She had everything he wanted in one, neat little package.
Besides, he was angry. "I need to get to her. You can't fix it right now," he started to argue in turn, but his own words were echoing in his head and making him wince. He was broken. She was trying to fix it. It wasn't exactly something he couldn't sympathize with. "Ice cream," he repeated hollowly.
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She brightened again. "But. Ice cream. It helps, you know? But not with cheese." The butterflies swooped out of her hair when she smiled, and the hair itself shifted into dozens of different shades of red and yellow and orange.
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He hadn't forgotten Susan. Like hell he was ever going to forget what she did unless he was brainwashed. But Delirium was proposing an idea that... huh. Ice cream. "I've never heard of ice cream with cheese," he commented in a flat sort of voice, letting his eyes wander to the butterflies that were flickering upward from her hair. His heart rate was slowing from its furious pound in his chest, and he paused for a few long seconds more. "It does help," he finally decided on, in a more quiet sort of voice.
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She grinned at him suddenly, her mismatched eyes thoughtful. Idly and somewhat dreamily she drifted higher off the ground, until she was at Sylar's eye-level. "Now I'm tall, too. Come on, let's find Caketown." Delirium could be somewhat motherly, in her own schizoid way, and Sylar, she had decided, needed a mommy. Or a Barnabas, but even she didn't have a Barnabas, so clearly he wasn't going to get one yet.
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Susan was lucky. It wasn't often Sylar let himself get distracted.
Her floating up to his level was sort of... sweet? Any other person, it would have irritated him. Some kind of mental metaphor that he would have conjured about the person thinking they were just as good as him, to be able to rise to the same height. And with Delirium, it wasn't? Why was he so different around her? "What's Caketown?" he asked with furrowed eyebrows.
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She reached out and poked his forehead, and the grounds of Hogwarts melted into tendrils of multicolored fog. There was the impression of being squashed flat, folded out, turned into a sock, and run through a tumble-dryer, all in the space of about three seconds, and when the fog cleared the grass had turned into a kind of melty rainbow, and the landscape into something normally only found in the weirder class of LSD hallucination.
Reply
He could have corrected her. But he didn't.
Instead, he just watched her, that weird sort of look still flickering in his eyes as they fixated onto her own. Those multicolored shades that kept dipping into ever tone of the rainbow. A few seconds' pause, and he finally answered, with one, single, confident word.
"Okay."
It was then, of course, that she pressed her finger directly into the center of his forehead, and, God, he'd never felt anything remotely close to this before, what? It made him almost feel sick to his stomach, and incredibly pleased again when his feet touched back onto ground. ...At least until he opened his eyes. And... they were definitely ( ... )
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Still drifting about a foot above the ground, she led him along the psychedlic grass. A clump of vivid purple flowers shifted quite suddenly into a flock of iridescent birds, soaring up into the sky. The sky here was black, with no moon nor sun nor stars; most of the light came from the trees, their twisting, multicolored branches glowing with bright phosphorus. When they crested a hill she pointed to a particularly tall tree, its boughs blooming with--sure enough--ice cream. "See," she said, "it's the ice cream tree. It has every flavor, even purple."
Reply
Not that he wasn't already pretty nuts to begin with. Sylar reeked of mental instability at the best of times, never mind when he was paired with something he was incredibly passionate about - killing Susan, more powers, all that jazz. But this wasn't the every day, run-of-the-mill nutso. This was the real kind of crazy. The strange kind, that people paid twenty bucks a pop for on the street.
Either he was dreaming or he was stoned? What kind of explanation was that? He'd always grounded himself with rationality. Now he didn't know what the hell to do. "I..." Don't know what to say? Think you're completely insane? Think I've gone completely insane? "Don't know... what to say..."
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"Anything," he murmured in a decidedly firm voice, glancing around in near awe to his surroundings. "With... sprinkles."
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She sat cross-legged on the crazy grass, the butterflies settling around her. "Why were you so angry?" she asked. It was very, very rare that Delirium got angry; sad, yes, and agitated, but not angry.
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