Broken Glass: Part 3/15 - Shatter
Author: motsureru
Title: Broken Glass: Part Three - Shatter
Rating: PG-13 for serious matter? Will lead up to NC-17 in due time.
Spoilers/Summary: Everything. A continuation after Season 1, Sylar/Mohinder-centric
Word Count: 2,661
Notes: Thanks to hugh and sixth_light, my lovely betas
Teaser: “I said, did you miss me, Mohinder?”
.3 Shatter
White is the most terrifying of all colors. White blinds, white reflects, white rejects. White is light. Light takes the hand of this emptiness and bends rays on shattered glass to create prisms and puzzles to rattle the consciousness. White invades. White noise overwhelms the senses and dulls them to nothing. White is what one sees behind the eyes when pain strangles the nerves, and white is the light that either bestows grace from Heaven or ignites the fires of Hell. I want to touch the darkness, let it gently envelope my essence and absorb into it all the light the world has to offer- until they realize- Oh why, why don’t they see? Darkness holds everything inside of it. It never leaves you solitary. You’re never alone in the darkness. And so in darkness I wait.
White ceiling. Beyond fuzzy outlines and trembling eyelids there was white everywhere. It burned. Somewhere beneath his flesh a dull, aching throb was resonating through Sylar’s abdomen and chest. The lids of his eyes were too heavy to fully open and focusing on both near and distant objects was impossibly difficult. His lips were parted beneath the oxygen mask, slack in a stupor of medication. Then it hit:
White noise. The incessant beep of the heart monitor, the slow drip drip of the IV, the hiss of the respirator, the roll of bed wheels the cough of the sick the click of heels the cries of children the wails of forlorn mothers the chatter of nurses the clack of charts the flat-line of death and-
A heartbeat. A twitch of his head to the left, breathing increasing rapidly from the dissonance unresolved as it pounded ruthlessly at his ears. And in all of that cacophony was only one sweet sound: the pulse of a heartbeat at rest. With it, the ease of breath between parted lips of a sleeping figure.
Mohinder was slumped uncomfortably in the visitor’s chair to the side of the bed, back bent down and knees jutting forward inelegantly. His head bowed forward and rolled to the right side where it rest against his chest, black curls falling tenderly over his closed eyes. He was sound asleep with several empty cups on the side table. Sans the mask, Sylar might have smelled the aroma of cheap hospital brew. He might have had the mercy of another sense reeling over the other. But he didn’t.
A noise of discomfort that nearly verged upon a whimper suddenly overcame him, the torrent of uncontrollable clamor in his ears nothing short of torture. His right hand groped, fumbling against the plastic panel at his side until it found its objective.
After Sylar punched the morphine button several times, his eyes slipped closed into darkness and once more he slept in its deaf comfort.
When Mohinder woke, everything ached. There were sharp stabs in his neck, pin pricks in his right side, and sand in the corners of his eyes. He centered his chin as he lifted it and rubbed the sleep away from his eyelids, forcing himself to sit up straight. The crack crack crack of several vertebrae made him wince with a pain that seemed paradoxically satisfying. What time was it? Eight? Nine in the morning? A nurse should be coming in soon to check up on-
An empty bed.
Rumpled sheets and bloody IV needles torn from flesh. Mohinder stood with a start and panicked eyes, looking from side to side and then over the opposite edge of the bed. Nothing. Nothing but the sound of a heart monitor flat-lining to no heartbeat. To no one.
No. No!
An iron grip on his wrist spun the man around, but when Mohinder looked down, he had never been touched. It was when he looked up that he saw darkness. Ebony eyes on ebony eyes.
Sylar stood to his full height, a good four inches or so above Mohinder, and he was but a foot away- a foot that was quickly closing in. “Did you miss me?” his voice asked low, textured but seductive in the way grains of sand falling over one another against the skin felt.
Mohinder gasped in a breath and tried to back away, tried to step back, but behind him was the bed and before him was the monster. Mohinder’s heart beat relentlessly, eyes staring wide as he stared speechlessly up at the man in front of him, at the man whose gaze had him pinned and whose breath was tickling his face as he leaned down.
Sylar wore a sinister smile that spoke of the last thing all the victims before Mohinder had seen, a gaze that searched deep inside the darker man’s body for something hidden. “I said, did you miss me, Mohinder?” Formidable hands suddenly gripped the sides of Mohinder’s face, shaking him, and even though he cried out, those lips were moving in with a twisted sneer-
When Mohinder woke, everything ached. There were sharp stabs in his neck, pin pricks in his right side, and sand in the corners of his eyes. Startled, he sat forward with a short breath, blinking strongly several times to regain a sense of reality.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
There it was. Mohinder looked to the body in the bed. But when his eyes settled on the patient, he discovered they were already being met. Sylar had been watching him in silence all along. Mohinder found himself locked in place, and his eyes stared back, riveted to the gaze that had ensnared his own.
Sylar lay as before, back to the bed but with a faint incline to the mattress. The oxygen mask was slightly askew, one side unhooked and faint red marks on the skin around his ear, showing an aggravated and uncoordinated fumbling for removal. The man’s eyes were half-lidded, lips still vaguely parted as he breathed. It was hard to discern what was behind that gaze- was it quiet menace? Anger? Or merely the exhaustion of a wounded man? It could have even been pathetic, if Mohinder interpreted it that way. But right now Mohinder was more self-concerned than that, and all he thought of was how hard his heart was pounding and how. out of an ambiguous sense of pride. he refused to look away, in spite of the shame he felt knowing that Sylar could hear his discomfort effortlessly.
Mohinder wanted to speak, but he didn’t want to speak first.
Clearly Sylar felt the same.
Seconds passed, maybe even minutes. It gave Mohinder the time he needed to regain control of his heart.
“…I don’t know how you’ve survived, but I’ve come here to kill you,” Mohinder stated, the quaver in his tone emotional as he tried to reign in his conflicting feelings. His resolve felt as shaky as those words.
Sylar said nothing. He stared. He stared, and Mohinder was sure he could see the gears turning slowly in the man’s foggy mind. They clicked so slowly, but so definitively together, parts to a machine Mohinder could not possibly comprehend.
“Did you miss me?”
“…Don’t think I’ve been deceived, Sylar,” Mohinder began again, perturbed by the lack of response. “I know what you’re capable of. You aren’t some invalid in a bed- you’re a murderer! Cold-blooded and strong enough to survive a stabbing. So strong I doubt surgery even phased you!” Mohinder’s words came so quickly that there was barely a pause in them, and they grew more heated the longer he let himself run away with them. “You could have killed me as I slept. You don’t fool me. With the slightest thought you could kill me right now! Any moment! So tell me, why don’t you?” he seethed, venom in his voice and irritation barely restrained from spilling over.
Sylar’s gaze seemed to search Mohinder slowly, eyes moving over his face like a painting. His left hand began to rise slowly-
This is it…he’s going to…
-and it reached to his oxygen mask, which he peeled back carefully from his cheeks.
“Because… you’ve been sitting right there,” came the quiet response.
The answer took the breath right from Mohinder’s lungs. He expected- no, wanted- an equally vicious reply. He wanted so very badly to have justification for this powerful hatred that smoldered in his chest. The hatred that burned so low one could almost pretend it was gone… but when thoughts of his father or Zane came to mind, it flared as hotly as it had begun. But Sylar’s vague and mildly sympathetic words, voice so deep and rough like gravel from weariness and disuse, had fueled none of that. Mohinder stared in disbelief at the man, lips apart and tongue with nothing to offer in return.
“Well?” Sylar’s voice interrupted Mohinder’s thoughts. He gasped a little between breaths, like it was a great effort. “…Am I gonna live?” he asked, tone betraying faint annoyance, as though Mohinder should have told him this information earlier and was clearly being negligent now.
“-W. . …Well not if I kill you,” the man replied awkwardly, feeling his cheeks grow hot again from embarrassment. Did Sylar not feel the weight of his threat at all?
“But otherwise?” Sylar asked.
“Otherwise… you should be fine. …I think.” Mohinder rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps he was simply bad at being an intimidating person. Sylar’s relative indifference to anything he said seemed to be proof of that. Mohinder couldn’t have the cold unresponsiveness to suffering that he longed for, that perhaps he needed, as a scientist. As an enemy. “Doctor Howell… he… says your spine may be affected. You could be paralyzed.”
Sylar’s eyes trailed from Mohinder down to his own legs. He stared at them for a long moment. “…Really now.”
‘How about that? Gee, really?’ Was that honestly what a man in his position was thinking? Mohinder wondered. Sylar must have been truly insane. “Look,” Mohinder began. “I don’t think you truly appreciate the gravity of the situation you’re in.” A warning tone came now. Mohinder felt the tension in him rising again.
“What situation is that?” the man asked absently, hand fumbling clumsily again to pull off the oxygen mask from around his other ear.
“Well…” he started again, “I could kill you. At any time. Right now, even. While you’re weak and defenseless,” Mohinder explained, moving his hand outward as he said it, as if he were the professor lecturing the student.
Sylar finally succeeded in detaching the mask from his face and took a deep breath on his own. “But you just told me I could kill you any time I wanted,” he objected, closing his eyes for a moment. White noise was buzzing at his ears and he struggled to control it while he had the concentration to.
“…I…” Well yes, Mohinder had dug himself quite a hole there, hadn’t he? He stared at Sylar for a moment, watching his chest rise and fall. “Should you really be doing that? The doctors put things on you for a reason.”
“Aren’t you going to kill me anyway?” Sylar asked, lids opening and eyes rolling over to the dark man. His looks kept lingering, and it made Mohinder feel anxious. Sylar’s words were dipped in sarcasm, but tinged with a hint of aggravation most likely caused by his condition. It was almost… childish. Mohinder should not have found that mildly endearing. “So why didn’t you?” Sylar asked suddenly, breaking Mohinder’s concentration yet again. “Tell me, Mohinder. Tell me why I am alive.”
“…”
It didn’t take a fool to see the question was far deeper than the meaning on the surface.
“I… can’t tell you that,” he replied honestly, feeling his resistance, his anger, slipping slowly away. There it was again- the feeling that there was something innately pathetic, wanton even, about this man. He felt it the first time with Zane Taylor; it had been a part of Zane’s personality. But then again, Mohinder had to remind himself that Zane Taylor was a lie.
“Mohinder. I need your help, I think I’m going to do something bad.”
And yet there it had been again, as Sylar. Perhaps if it felt easier to believe in that tiny seed of good Sylar had so rarely revealed Mohinder might have felt more justified in his sympathy. Perhaps he would have thought more readily that Sylar was searching for answers just like the rest of them. He was simply using the most inappropriate methods possible. Mohinder might have slept better if he had proof of that goodness, but for now those snippets of faith were merely cracks in the glass that threatened to shatter.
“I meant what I said on the phone-” Mohinder began suddenly, caught by some wild hope of mercy. “…About you being repentant… If you’d just-”
“You said it while you dialed the police on me.”
Mohinder cleared his throat. “Y-Yes well… we didn’t part on the best of circumstances. You can’t deny that you had been lying to me for almost a week before that call. You are no better than I am.”
“No,” Sylar corrected, “You are no better than I am.”
Mohinder found what was left of his pride wounded at that, and an angry look immediately surfaced on his face. “There is an important difference between what you did and what I did!”
“We both did whatever we had to do to get what we wanted, didn’t we?” Sylar asked, lifting a shoulder and moving an elbow back as if he wanted to get up.
“There is an enormous difference between killing innocent people and lying about a phone call -for your own good!”
“What I did wasn’t wrong. It was natural selection.”
“There is nothing natural about you!” Mohinder shouted with much more force than he meant to. He took in a shuddering, frustrated breath. Sylar was silent. “I… don’t even know why I’m having this conversation. I must be absolutely mad,” Mohinder concluded aloud, turning his back to the patient on the bed and resting one hand on his hip, the other pushing through his hair.
“Argument,” Sylar corrected again. With a grunt he lifted his back from the bed on his crooked elbow and stripped back the sheets to his waist with his other hand. Tugging up his gown, he proceeded to examine the gauze taped to his abdomen. Given the proper time with Mohinder’s back turned, Sylar began to peel it away to look at the stitches to his wound. He poked at the area curiously with several fingers, moving the angry red flesh around to see, in all likelihood, how it worked.
When Mohinder glanced over his shoulder at the man’s silence, his eyes practically bulged from his head. “What in GOD’S name are you doing?!” he demanded as he turned around, voice shrill and flabbergasted.
“Now now, let’s leave Him out of this. You’re a scientist,” Sylar said absently, eyes still on the stitches. His head tilted to the side every now and then, like an inquisitive puppy’s might. The gears ticked on.
“Is there a problem in here?” The sound of a nurse’s voice chimed in from the ruckus, sounding suspicious. She stood in the doorway with arms crossed and foot tapping.
Mohinder wheeled around again, a deer in headlights. “Yes! Absolutely! He’s-“
“-got a nasty hole in my chest. Do you have a cure for that?” Sylar interjected smoothly, eyes innocent and completely serious.
The nurse gave them both a blank look for about three seconds. Then her lips frowned deeply. “If you poke into that hole, son, I’m gonna give you another one,” she said with all the menacing threat of a humorless mother. “You two sit back and I’ll let Doctor Howell know you’re awake.” The woman turned and shut the door behind herself to keep them from disturbing the other morning risers. The last they both heard as she left was some griping mutter about idiot men and their complete inability to grasp the most common of sense.
Comments and criticisms keep me motivated~ :3