Fic: Broken Function
Title: Broken Function
Author: Jemisard
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: 17+
Characters: Sylar, Isaac Mendez
Summary: It wasn’t many things, but he wouldn’t know what it was that made Mendez different until he eliminated what this wasn’t. Written for someone special who knows who she is.
Warnings: Somewhat AU as of the meeting between Sylar and Mendez in “.07%”. Adult themes, violence, disturbing imagery, character death (canon).
It wasn’t mercy.
Sitting across Isaac Mendez’s chest, regarding the man bleeding below him, it wasn’t mercy that motivated Sylar to lower his finger from where he had it pointed at his victim’s forehead.
The screaming stopped, trailing off into panting and pained moans. The artist’s eyes started to refocus again, but he remained silent.
It was that silence that motivated Sylar. He expected begging, begging where before he’d been silent and strong. Or maybe screaming, in terror rather than pain, but so far the only noise he’d made was when he was actually being harmed.
Or, maybe, a single poetic ‘please’ whispered from those dry lips, like a movie Sylar had seen.
But it was the silence that motivated him to do what he did. He slid his hand down to cup the artist’s neck, leaning so close that the harsh, rasping breath was warm on his skin and focused, pinching off the blood supply.
Mendez’s gaze dulled, slowly, and his eyes rolled back and his body went lax. Like death, so like death but intimately and inherently not, because the chest under him still heaved for breath. Blood pumped again when he loosened his telekinetic grip, but kept it softly holding, keeping the man unconscious.
It only took a casual flick to drag the paintbrushes out again, ignoring the spasmodic jerk of pain. And it was with his fingers that he pushed the score across Mendez’s forehead to stop it from gushing blood.
He didn’t understand why he did it. Why he stood up and to the side and hefted the artist’s body into the air with one hand and lay him down on his bed instead.
He just told himself he didn’t want a power that would drive him crazy when he turned around and left again, setting off the fire alarm as he went.
It wasn’t compassion.
Mendez lay in the hospital bed, bandages on his wrists and shins, stitches and wrapping on his head, and Sylar didn’t actually feel bad about what he’d done to the man. He felt worse about the fact they’d put him on morphine to kill the pain, another addiction blooming along the man’s nerves as he watched.
He wanted to know how something so broken functioned still. Mendez was broken, more broken than nearly anyone else he’d met, but he still kept working. He’d controlled his power and he had still faced down a serial killer in the face of certain death.
Less certain. Apparently, even Mendez could be wrong, because those paintings of his head ripped open had never happened except in both their minds when he’d sat on the man and started to work.
In thought, he’d killed him. Just in reality...
He was being watched.
He raised an eyebrow at the artist.
“Why are you here?”
He shrugged. Why was he here? He’d wanted to see if the man survived? How he was surviving?
He’d just wanted to. And what Sylar wanted, Sylar got.
Mendez’s eyes closed again. The drugs were keeping him docile. Sylar hated seeing him docile. He wanted to see him fighting again. Wanted to see how he worked despite being broken.
He wanted to see if he worked without the drugs or if that was what made him function.
His hands gestured to the drip and he advanced towards the bed.
When the nurses came to check on him, they found the bed empty and the window open.
It wasn’t empathy.
He failed to comprehend the way that Mendez screamed in fury, sweating and struggling to find coherence or cognisance. He understood in his own detached way what was technically happening. His body was detoxing from the heroin and morphine and he was trying to process the pain of his injuries and some other pain that seemed to be purely in his head.
If it had been grief, or fear, or indulgence, or pleading, Sylar would have killed him. But he never begged for the drugs he wanted, he never wept or gave up.
He raged.
He demanded. He abused and argued and even in the worst of it, he seemed to know exactly who Sylar was, but it never stopped him. Even when he was picked up and dumped in the bath and held under water for a bit too long - he just wanted some brief quiet - he didn’t stop fighting.
After three days, when he was ready to break the man’s neck just for the peace and quiet, he had finally fallen still, not passed out but actually peaceful, tired out but not broken.
He’d gone and sat next to him, watching him to see if anything about him looked different. The addiction was soothing away, leaving jagged nerves and raw spots that continued to work as part of this stubborn, shattered whole.
He’d never thought of broken as beautiful before, but Mendez reminded him of a mirror his mother had broken once and the shards had all reflected something new and wonderful in their disunity.
It wasn’t hesitation.
Sober and awake, Mendez just watched him in silence, arms and legs relaxed where he sat, on his bed and propped up against the wall. The artist couldn’t walk, the shattered bones in his shin still needed more reconstruction than Sylar could do with his telekinesis and no clear picture of what was where. His arms were better, his hands has some strength, enough to hold a paintbrush or pen but struggled to do so for long.
The three and a half inch incision on the tanned forehead fascinated him. He could see the staples holding the bone together, the stitches over the top holding the skin and muscle together. He could even see the way that it had affected Mendez’s ability to frown or glare.
He did what he could to stop the injuries getting infected or aggravated. After all, he couldn’t study how he worked if he stopped working and at some point, understanding how and why Isaac Mendez worked had become a near consuming drive.
There was a secret here, he knew it. Something vitally important. But he wasn’t sure what yet. Something beyond the way those dark eyes watched him, as though as he was reading Mendez, the man was reading him right back.
That night, Sylar ripped the phone out of the wall and went for a walk, leaving the man lying on his bed mostly asleep and still following him with that near baleful, too old gaze.
It wasn’t horror.
When he spent an afternoon trying to work out why Mendez was whispering to himself in Spanish, hands shaking and held together and seeming almost scared for the first time since Sylar had seen him.
Briefly, there has been the thought that Mendez was finally sane enough to understand that he was at the mercy of a serial killer, and he had the answers he wanted and thus it was time to polish Mendez off - not that he’d been waiting for him to fear him, but he wasn’t interesting anymore if he did.
But his voice had provoked no reaction or change and his grip on the man’s lean neck did nothing but make him whisper hoarsely. Reconsidering, he decided this was a whole new facet of broken derangement that made Mendez work and sat back to see what he would do if left alone.
What he did had been, not a shock. Not a shock, but maybe a bit surprising, even to the jaded killer. When Mendez had sighed softly, body relaxing and eyes rolling back in his head and closing, there’d been a brief thought that he’d somehow taken something and was dying but it was something else that rushed through him.
Something brilliant and raw that was stripping pieces of Mendez away and filling all those broken parts with this perfect clarity. Then his eyes had opened, perfect milky white eyes and he had stood up.
It had to be agony, but he had slowly made his way to the paints and canvases and sat himself on the work stool. Shaking and trembling hands had mixed paints and started to work, rendering visions onto canvas.
And when the paint was out of reach, he had casually dug his fingers into his injuries and continued working in his own blood until something in Sylar snapped and he had choked the man unconscious with his power.
That was when the brilliance trickled away and Sylar saw the pockmarks left on the man were this ability of his finding every crack and mark that life had left on him and eating into it like acid on metal.
It wasn’t mercy.
He felt nothing more than a vague interest in what was happening to the man that he had condemned to this. The fevers that the infections were bringing on, the weight falling off him now that the pain was too great for him to hold food, the continual pain that even the telekinesis couldn’t quite stop the body from telling his brain about.
Sometimes, there was resentment in those eyes. On odd occasion, something that might have been gratitude shone, when the power rushed back and he decided he couldn’t put up with cleaning up the inevitable blood and paint or dumping Mendez back in the bath.
He sat by his bedside, watching him as his body started to fail him. The incredible strength was still there though, determined not to go easily, not to let anyone or anything speed along the process.
He wanted to live. Despite the way his power ate his soul. Despite the pain that he was denied relief from. Despite the rends in him left by the fact that no one ever came here and his only company was the man who would have had him dead, had he not been too interesting to let die.
The bandages came off easily, there really served no purpose anymore. No amount of antibiotics would help. Death was crawling into the apartment on limbs as broken as Mendez’s, but with the same determination that the man held.
His left hand, the hand that painted, no longer responded when poked with a pin. The sight came, but could do nothing but rage in the shell that held it.
It had been weeks since Mendez had spoken a word to him. Everything that needed to be said was communicated in those expressive eyes.
“You’re dying.”
The artist blinked. He knew that already.
“It won’t be fast or easy.”
There was a vague question that Sylar put together from other reactions.
“I did this because I wanted to understand. I don’t understand, Mendez. I wanted to try and see if I could understand if I saw more.” He brushed back the long hair to better see the wound he left. “It wasn’t punishment. You’re more interesting alive. I wanted you to stay alive. But now you’re dying anyway.”
There was a small, bitter laugh.
“Tell me, Mendez. Tell me, and I’ll give you something for the pain. Answer my question, and I’ll give you what you want. The morphine,” he leant close, like he had back that first night. “Tell me why you don’t fear me.”
The pale lips parted and breathed. Even with his hearing, he almost missed the words spoken. “I’ll never tell. Only my power will ever let you know why.”
He straightened up again. Even now, broken and dying and wracked in pain, he was denying him with breaths he was too weak to make, daring him to damn himself with that accursed power for the answer he needed. He was still unafraid and still refusing to give an inch even if it meant...
“I’d be disappointed if you’d said anything else, Isaac.”
He lay a hand on that marked forehead. Isaac’s eyes closed, lips curved into a faintly smug smile as a final sigh escaped him.
Author: Jemisard
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: 17+
Characters: Sylar, Isaac Mendez
Summary: It wasn’t many things, but he wouldn’t know what it was that made Mendez different until he eliminated what this wasn’t. Written for someone special who knows who she is.
Warnings: Somewhat AU as of the meeting between Sylar and Mendez in “.07%”. Adult themes, violence, disturbing imagery, character death (canon).
It wasn’t mercy.
Sitting across Isaac Mendez’s chest, regarding the man bleeding below him, it wasn’t mercy that motivated Sylar to lower his finger from where he had it pointed at his victim’s forehead.
The screaming stopped, trailing off into panting and pained moans. The artist’s eyes started to refocus again, but he remained silent.
It was that silence that motivated Sylar. He expected begging, begging where before he’d been silent and strong. Or maybe screaming, in terror rather than pain, but so far the only noise he’d made was when he was actually being harmed.
Or, maybe, a single poetic ‘please’ whispered from those dry lips, like a movie Sylar had seen.
But it was the silence that motivated him to do what he did. He slid his hand down to cup the artist’s neck, leaning so close that the harsh, rasping breath was warm on his skin and focused, pinching off the blood supply.
Mendez’s gaze dulled, slowly, and his eyes rolled back and his body went lax. Like death, so like death but intimately and inherently not, because the chest under him still heaved for breath. Blood pumped again when he loosened his telekinetic grip, but kept it softly holding, keeping the man unconscious.
It only took a casual flick to drag the paintbrushes out again, ignoring the spasmodic jerk of pain. And it was with his fingers that he pushed the score across Mendez’s forehead to stop it from gushing blood.
He didn’t understand why he did it. Why he stood up and to the side and hefted the artist’s body into the air with one hand and lay him down on his bed instead.
He just told himself he didn’t want a power that would drive him crazy when he turned around and left again, setting off the fire alarm as he went.
It wasn’t compassion.
Mendez lay in the hospital bed, bandages on his wrists and shins, stitches and wrapping on his head, and Sylar didn’t actually feel bad about what he’d done to the man. He felt worse about the fact they’d put him on morphine to kill the pain, another addiction blooming along the man’s nerves as he watched.
He wanted to know how something so broken functioned still. Mendez was broken, more broken than nearly anyone else he’d met, but he still kept working. He’d controlled his power and he had still faced down a serial killer in the face of certain death.
Less certain. Apparently, even Mendez could be wrong, because those paintings of his head ripped open had never happened except in both their minds when he’d sat on the man and started to work.
In thought, he’d killed him. Just in reality...
He was being watched.
He raised an eyebrow at the artist.
“Why are you here?”
He shrugged. Why was he here? He’d wanted to see if the man survived? How he was surviving?
He’d just wanted to. And what Sylar wanted, Sylar got.
Mendez’s eyes closed again. The drugs were keeping him docile. Sylar hated seeing him docile. He wanted to see him fighting again. Wanted to see how he worked despite being broken.
He wanted to see if he worked without the drugs or if that was what made him function.
His hands gestured to the drip and he advanced towards the bed.
When the nurses came to check on him, they found the bed empty and the window open.
It wasn’t empathy.
He failed to comprehend the way that Mendez screamed in fury, sweating and struggling to find coherence or cognisance. He understood in his own detached way what was technically happening. His body was detoxing from the heroin and morphine and he was trying to process the pain of his injuries and some other pain that seemed to be purely in his head.
If it had been grief, or fear, or indulgence, or pleading, Sylar would have killed him. But he never begged for the drugs he wanted, he never wept or gave up.
He raged.
He demanded. He abused and argued and even in the worst of it, he seemed to know exactly who Sylar was, but it never stopped him. Even when he was picked up and dumped in the bath and held under water for a bit too long - he just wanted some brief quiet - he didn’t stop fighting.
After three days, when he was ready to break the man’s neck just for the peace and quiet, he had finally fallen still, not passed out but actually peaceful, tired out but not broken.
He’d gone and sat next to him, watching him to see if anything about him looked different. The addiction was soothing away, leaving jagged nerves and raw spots that continued to work as part of this stubborn, shattered whole.
He’d never thought of broken as beautiful before, but Mendez reminded him of a mirror his mother had broken once and the shards had all reflected something new and wonderful in their disunity.
It wasn’t hesitation.
Sober and awake, Mendez just watched him in silence, arms and legs relaxed where he sat, on his bed and propped up against the wall. The artist couldn’t walk, the shattered bones in his shin still needed more reconstruction than Sylar could do with his telekinesis and no clear picture of what was where. His arms were better, his hands has some strength, enough to hold a paintbrush or pen but struggled to do so for long.
The three and a half inch incision on the tanned forehead fascinated him. He could see the staples holding the bone together, the stitches over the top holding the skin and muscle together. He could even see the way that it had affected Mendez’s ability to frown or glare.
He did what he could to stop the injuries getting infected or aggravated. After all, he couldn’t study how he worked if he stopped working and at some point, understanding how and why Isaac Mendez worked had become a near consuming drive.
There was a secret here, he knew it. Something vitally important. But he wasn’t sure what yet. Something beyond the way those dark eyes watched him, as though as he was reading Mendez, the man was reading him right back.
That night, Sylar ripped the phone out of the wall and went for a walk, leaving the man lying on his bed mostly asleep and still following him with that near baleful, too old gaze.
It wasn’t horror.
When he spent an afternoon trying to work out why Mendez was whispering to himself in Spanish, hands shaking and held together and seeming almost scared for the first time since Sylar had seen him.
Briefly, there has been the thought that Mendez was finally sane enough to understand that he was at the mercy of a serial killer, and he had the answers he wanted and thus it was time to polish Mendez off - not that he’d been waiting for him to fear him, but he wasn’t interesting anymore if he did.
But his voice had provoked no reaction or change and his grip on the man’s lean neck did nothing but make him whisper hoarsely. Reconsidering, he decided this was a whole new facet of broken derangement that made Mendez work and sat back to see what he would do if left alone.
What he did had been, not a shock. Not a shock, but maybe a bit surprising, even to the jaded killer. When Mendez had sighed softly, body relaxing and eyes rolling back in his head and closing, there’d been a brief thought that he’d somehow taken something and was dying but it was something else that rushed through him.
Something brilliant and raw that was stripping pieces of Mendez away and filling all those broken parts with this perfect clarity. Then his eyes had opened, perfect milky white eyes and he had stood up.
It had to be agony, but he had slowly made his way to the paints and canvases and sat himself on the work stool. Shaking and trembling hands had mixed paints and started to work, rendering visions onto canvas.
And when the paint was out of reach, he had casually dug his fingers into his injuries and continued working in his own blood until something in Sylar snapped and he had choked the man unconscious with his power.
That was when the brilliance trickled away and Sylar saw the pockmarks left on the man were this ability of his finding every crack and mark that life had left on him and eating into it like acid on metal.
It wasn’t mercy.
He felt nothing more than a vague interest in what was happening to the man that he had condemned to this. The fevers that the infections were bringing on, the weight falling off him now that the pain was too great for him to hold food, the continual pain that even the telekinesis couldn’t quite stop the body from telling his brain about.
Sometimes, there was resentment in those eyes. On odd occasion, something that might have been gratitude shone, when the power rushed back and he decided he couldn’t put up with cleaning up the inevitable blood and paint or dumping Mendez back in the bath.
He sat by his bedside, watching him as his body started to fail him. The incredible strength was still there though, determined not to go easily, not to let anyone or anything speed along the process.
He wanted to live. Despite the way his power ate his soul. Despite the pain that he was denied relief from. Despite the rends in him left by the fact that no one ever came here and his only company was the man who would have had him dead, had he not been too interesting to let die.
The bandages came off easily, there really served no purpose anymore. No amount of antibiotics would help. Death was crawling into the apartment on limbs as broken as Mendez’s, but with the same determination that the man held.
His left hand, the hand that painted, no longer responded when poked with a pin. The sight came, but could do nothing but rage in the shell that held it.
It had been weeks since Mendez had spoken a word to him. Everything that needed to be said was communicated in those expressive eyes.
“You’re dying.”
The artist blinked. He knew that already.
“It won’t be fast or easy.”
There was a vague question that Sylar put together from other reactions.
“I did this because I wanted to understand. I don’t understand, Mendez. I wanted to try and see if I could understand if I saw more.” He brushed back the long hair to better see the wound he left. “It wasn’t punishment. You’re more interesting alive. I wanted you to stay alive. But now you’re dying anyway.”
There was a small, bitter laugh.
“Tell me, Mendez. Tell me, and I’ll give you something for the pain. Answer my question, and I’ll give you what you want. The morphine,” he leant close, like he had back that first night. “Tell me why you don’t fear me.”
The pale lips parted and breathed. Even with his hearing, he almost missed the words spoken. “I’ll never tell. Only my power will ever let you know why.”
He straightened up again. Even now, broken and dying and wracked in pain, he was denying him with breaths he was too weak to make, daring him to damn himself with that accursed power for the answer he needed. He was still unafraid and still refusing to give an inch even if it meant...
“I’d be disappointed if you’d said anything else, Isaac.”
He lay a hand on that marked forehead. Isaac’s eyes closed, lips curved into a faintly smug smile as a final sigh escaped him.