Limbo
Title: Limbo
Characters: Nathan, Sylar.
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: DARK! Suicidal thoughts, implied canon character death, shapeshifting fun, depression, hallucinations, mentions of masturbation. Overall Sylar's psychosis.
Word count: ~2, 850
Summary: Nathan realizes he is not Sylar.
Written for heroes_contest one-shot challenge #35 "I Am Sylar"
A/N: Thanks to my lovely, free bird beta ;) game_byrd.
A/N #2: Inspired by amles80's comment about "Taking 'I Am Sylar' literally" which apparently (given this fic) means writing the opposite.
Limbo. That’s what this was. Stuck between hell and the hand basket already en route.
Being Nathan, being himself, wasn’t so bad. He’d had to apologize and explain his ass off, publically humiliate himself for being “outed” to the President and the government. But he was alive; still in politics; he still had his brother and mother and his secretary and office. Getting a new apartment had been a necessary evil - he didn’t live with Heidi or the kids anymore. In fact, they hardly ever crossed his mind. They were better off without him anyway; they were well taken care of.
Aside from that, he liked his job: money, spotlight, power…He liked it more than he had a few months ago. Maybe he liked it in a different way. Maybe things had more perspective now. His goals had shifted or something. It was not a bad life. It came with lots of perks.
There was a flip side to that coin.
Waking up was painful sometimes. Like, melt your bones and rearrange your skin kind of pain. Sometimes when he woke his face would hurt like a sinus infection, but worse. Sometimes he felt his skin almost…rippling and he would dash to reflective surface and prod at his skin. He always saw his own face, normal, scarred, Italian, the better side of fifty - no sags or undue wrinkles. Except sometimes, he would catch glimpses of…someone else with dark hair and a longer face, darker eyes and stubble. Those glimpses and that face scared him for reasons he could not explain. It had his heart leaping into his throat.
His voice sounded foreign to him at times. In the morning, he had an enviable rough, rasping baritone that managed to still sound smooth. It sounded a bit familiar, just on the edge of his consciousness. He wondered if he was losing his hearing or hallucinating (not for the first time). Then after breakfast it would snap back to the slightly accented New Yorker voice he’d always known. It was always worse after he’d been asleep. He’d startled Elizabeth several times with a snarling growl after she’d woken him from accidental naps.
Some days his teeth would feel bigger or have different angles to them - the ridges on his molars were different and how his teeth fit together would change almost day to day. It made chewing a challenge. His taste buds were an absolute mystery; his appetite soared and peaked. He got the strangest looks on business lunches from those who knew him and his tastes better than he did.
Sometimes he would gesture and move objects across the room, feeling some pleasurable hum in his brain when he did, and a sense of satisfaction. That damn coffee cup…It was like an instinct or some creepy habit he didn’t know he had (coupled with the supernatural). The worst was when the airy touch brushed against his skin. It wasn’t warm and alive, it wasn’t usually a whole lot of anything, just pure pressure. Sometimes it would tickle him, pinch or slide over him so casually he wouldn’t wonder if it wasn’t Kelly Houston or Meredith, back from the dead to haunt him. That was enough to give him goose bumps. In his quieter moments, Nathan wondered if it wasn’t something from inside himself, so well it seemed to do his bidding, the desire going unspoken - scratching some itch he didn’t know he had.
Sometimes he would bump into furniture, stumbling, catching himself, opening doors, picking up an object, touching it, holding it, handling it, whatever…and he would get a mental soap-opera trip about….everything. Things, people and events he didn’t know would suddenly play out in his head - all of it random, possible (if improbable at times) and realistic. It would shut him down and catch him unawares each time. There was no way this was some kind of new hyperactive imagination he’d somehow developed. He got strange looks for those lapses, too, which didn’t help.
Sometimes his mind played Boggle Thesaurus with bits of machinery or anatomy and he wasn’t sure which was worse. They were definitely things he knew nothing about, not even in the Navy had he learned so much about machines. These were tiny machines, needing delicate tools and handling. Hearing every clock within half a fucking mile, he exaggerated, was ridiculous. Definitely a sign of insanity. If it wasn’t one now, it was going to be a sign of insanity very soon.
Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick-tick…all day long.
No normal person could handle that!
Sometimes he would zone out, staring at his watch or his clock - he refused digitals - until his heart rate and breathing synched up, calming down, holding his focus. He was always grouchy to be interrupted, a shock to his system to be pulled away.
And talk about mood swings. He snapped at Elizabeth and coworkers alike, the phone ringing made him want to blast it (he’d caught his hand extending towards it a time or two with no intention of picking it up), people asking his name just pissed him off; he could hear the casual lies people said when they spoke to him - the useless, simpering flattery. He was irrational - hanging onto his point in a conversation or in personal thought that made no logical sense, but emotionally he couldn’t separate it. His had ego inflated if that was at all possible; compliments would calm him, but would trigger him to anger if he suspected they were false. He had his share of childish, angry outbursts from this.
Those were all things he could have otherwise handled, with or without therapy and medication. He’d had weirder things happen, seen weirder things, too. After all, limbo was not meant to be a place where people remained forever. Every soul had a time limit on it and if that person couldn’t find redemption or figure out how to play the hand dealt them, then they would begin their journey to their ultimate destination. Nathan felt sure waking up in the Antarctic would shock him less most days than these bizarre, inexplicable happenings, but that was not to be the end of it.
His depression got worse. Pure hopelessness and loneliness abounded. He was surrounded by people every day and all he could feel was the silence and solitude. It felt like a punishment. He could detect the judgment. It made him feel like even more of a freak - flying, all the weird stuff, now this? He felt wrong, unnatural, inhumanly, monstrously wrong. Suicide became a frequent thought. He wouldn’t be missed, he felt too far buried in a hole, felt like he’d been screaming his lungs raw forever but going unheard. He suspected that feeling would continue going unheard forever, too. That he had no friends, real ones, to talk to made his situation that much worse. He disgusted himself and he felt that everyone else felt that way about him as well - disgusted. Disgraced. Disappointed. They expected more of him and no matter how hard he worked, he could not satisfy.
He ignored his libido as best he could - he didn’t think he could handle an intimate interaction, anything sexual caused him mental fits now and masturbating seemed…well, different than he remembered. What he needed mentally to get off was just sick. There was no way that stemmed from his own mind - where else could it possibly come from? What he needed to get off when touching himself was almost painful it was so rough and he’d never handled himself that way before. It was like Nathan didn’t know his own body anymore and that freaked him out.
He hated sleeping at home and hated sleeping alone even more. Not only did he not want to sleep for fear of waking up in pain with someone else’s body parts and thoughts; Nathan didn’t want to sleep for fear of ghosts hovering around his shoulders. Sometimes it was more than one ghost, but the majority was a single (he didn’t know how he knew this) male presence - entirely hostile and judgmental. It got so bad he could *feel* the spirits lingering around his body; their eyes followed him everywhere. That alone made him run for company. He would call Elizabeth in for nothing tasks, for reconfirmation of something obvious, something he’d just told her so he could have someone else in the room to drive away the specters. Elizabeth thought he was losing his marbles. He probably was, but the Petrelli way was to ignore those inconvenient types of reality.
That said, his paranoia went off the charts. He would see threats, weapons, opportunities in everyday objects, in people he’d known for years. The slightest inflection in a voice, a question became an interrogation he dreaded and had to avoid, any kind of look made him wary and on edge. His stress and tension sky-rocketed. He found his muscles cramping from holding himself too tightly - his muscles were always tense, his neck’s turn radius felt like a Batman suit.
His body was possessed of a remarkable stamina that was able to maintain him for a long time - days then weeks passed while he fought a silent, schizophrenic battle with his own sense of reality. But even that began to break down. It was his brain that turned on him - burning and itching and aching and thrumming. Whatever migraines he’d thought he’d suffered before were put to shame. It felt overloaded,
overfull, too aware. He felt like Atlas - knowing too much and unsure of how to use the knowledge, carrying the world around on his shoulders by himself. There was no one to understand the very concept of his problems.
He couldn’t distract himself; the quiet made him think things. Horrible, nauseating, slimy, dark things. Murderous things. Violent things. The shock of those thoughts told him that they weren’t his thoughts. Nathan had never done those things. He may have thought of them, sure, some of them; but he’d never done them, not even in declared, socially-accepted national war. This wasn’t military-related PTSD. These visions were like…flashbacks, memories. They were clear and vivid and real, complete with muscle memory - all his senses agreed that his body had done these things, had lived those events but it didn’t match up with anything he consciously remembered - it didn’t fit in with his life. The hands and body he saw when these visions went through his head were not his. No, the fingers were too long, the hands and wrists too darkly hairy to be his, the body was way too tall and thin. He began to detach from his own life.
But he didn’t detach from the nightmares; those were the worst. Nathan found that his body would lock up and force him to sleep through the entire showing. Brutal, bloody, evil deeds in those night-terrors. He remembered feeling dreadful, cruel things that had never happened to him. The state of mind it projected onto him made his teeth hurt, it made him nauseous. It made his skin crawl and burn with sweats. Filthy desires from a mind so tortured and black it hurt. It was painful and it pressed on him sometimes to the point where he was almost overwhelmed. It felt like being in a submarine as it sunk, knowing that, soon, the pressure would implode him.
The nightmares began to affect his moods at work. He had difficulty focusing. His mind would be randomly hijacked to pursue a foreign train of thought. Abilities in general - hosts of abilities he didn’t possess - they became an obsession in his spare time; his mother (sometimes a strange women he didn’t even know came to mind as did her really annoying voice); the name Elle or Matt (Parkman?) or Noah all distracted him, usually filling him with thoughts of vengeance for things he couldn’t name.
Then he found out; that visit to Matt at the hospital: he - Nathan - was dead. He no longer existed. This was Sylar’s body. The voice, the hands and body, the memories and impressions, the urges…They all matched Sylar. He felt relief in a rush. He had an answer. Something made sense in his fucked up world. Of course that meant his world went up in flames, but the knowledge was a comfort. And for all of a few hours that comforted him until he was presented with his future and he was forced to make plans for it.
Hard on the heels of relief were feelings of displacement or body-snatching. He was using Sylar’s body of all the disgusting things - these were a murderer’s hands even if they looked like Nathan’s own sometimes. He felt unfairly judged and contaminated, damned alongside the killer.
That was frightening: his potential. Made worse with Peter this close, never knowing if he’d suddenly snap and try to take the kid’s life or worse, his brain. He didn’t want to…but he did want it. The end result began to outweigh the means. All the slipping into the dark, the deep end, off the cliff of sanity made too much sense now. He could feel a cold, hard, dark ball of lust building in his chest. The rage burned brighter and hotter, activated much easier now. He could hear the thrum of a heart, the firing of specialized neurons, the song of an ability…And he wanted it all for his own.
After that realization, Nathan saw his life flash before him, every brush with death and the impressions from those events - pain, his last thoughts and final wishes, the fade to black. This wasn’t a new thing, death. This was the real last curtain call. His indestructible body allowed him to feel drained now. He could feel the mental strain of being left outdoors in the elements for months, half-starving, sleep-deprived as he truly was, isolated and abandoned, neglected, used and forgotten. He wasn’t slow or deluding himself this time.
It was like the world lost color. Bleak, sharp, emotionless but for pain he couldn’t pinpoint. The ground under his feet was dangerously unstable. All that was left was the guessing game of when it would crumble and send him plummeting into Hell.
His life (which wasn’t really even his life) was gone, career down the drain, family that was too busy or too crazy and dangerous to be with, an ex-wife and kids he couldn’t see, didn’t want to see. He had no future or plan. No one cared when Nathan Petrelli dropped off the grid, when he died, how he lived and what he suffered. In light of his reality, death looked appealing. He found he wasn’t resisting the idea the way he always thought he would - that Petrelli God-complex of immortality.
He would find it satisfying to teach his mother a lesson and deprive her of her band-aid fix. He would not mind screwing up her social life and force her to explain what had happened to her son as best she could, just to save face. He knew she’d lie, but it would kill her on the inside. If she could allow him to die and replace him so easily, with Sylar of all people, then she deserved every ounce of pain the thought of hugging the shared body caused. She’d called him ‘son’ yet she cringed from him and avoided him like the plague. He hoped it made her skin crawl with the knowledge. He hoped she had nightmares.
After all, he had to live the nightmares. But even though he wanted that, he didn’t want it enough to actually do it. Not when faced by the prospect of a skin- and thoughts-deep, all-out battle with Sylar…without resolution. Having his soul torn in half every time Sylar rose up from sleep - from the pits of whatever mental banishment Nathan could sometimes confine him to, from whatever depths or shadows he inhabited; it was torture. It was painful, losing control of his life minute to minute and watching powerlessly as it was controlled and fucked over by a sadistic killer with a grudge. There would never be any more ‘living his own life, making his own choices.’ Jekyll and Hyde. If he fought this there would only be two monsters intertwined for the rest of Sylar’s body’s unnatural life. It was just too much to contemplate, too much to endure.
I’m not him. I am not Sylar.
It didn’t take long, the fight was so grueling. Sylar seemed more mentally fit or able to take the hits. The psychopath was stronger, prepared to wait him out and Nathan just couldn’t compete. Didn’t want to. Death and depression swallowed everything. Sylar had something - his body - to fight for. Nathan had no such motivation.
Even if he won, he knew his own family would forever be cowering and spitting the name “Sylar!” under their breath, treating him like a leper, never letting him from their sight…His family was okay with him dying, since he couldn’t save himself or be saved. And it was then Nathan made peace with death and whatever followed.