Fic: Bonnie and Clyde
TITLE: Bonnie and Clyde
Characters: Sylar/Claire
Summary: A response to Morlockiness's Heroes Fic Meme, prompt "Claire, imprisoned"
Rating: PG13 for a little language
Spoilers: Show's canceled, it's a moot point *sniff*
A/N: I got a tad too busy for the fic-a-thon, sadly, but this little gem popped an idea in my head that wouldn't let go =D I hope you folks enjoy!
Disclaimer: I don't own Heroes or anything remotely related and I bow humbly before the television gods, please have mercy on me.
Claire wished she’d have blown her hair dry. The harsh, icy prick suffusing the atmosphere from the punishing kind of air conditioning typical of classrooms and government buildings turned each wet strand into a frozen razor blade bleeding biting cold straight through her skin, plastering her dampened shirt uncomfortably across her back. She was too old and tired to be anything more than bemused by her circumstances - those which several uniformed officers had tried multiple times to impress upon her were severe enough to very much warrant her earnest consideration - but it was hard to take them seriously when she knew she’d still be walking around, breathing, eating, sleeping and sinning long after this old jail cell was nothing more than dust, tinted red with iron as it pushed up wild flowers in a vacant field. She knew - she’d seen it happen before.
Her only regret was that she’d stepped out of the house for a few items at the store - bread, milk, cereal, peanut butter, laundry detergent, and photosynthesizing refill cells for her personal solar power generator and environmental filtration system (lovingly termed a SPOG, they’d been a legally required household staple for sixty years) - and had done so fresh out of the shower and, naturally, without her phone. She’d been forced to attempt making contact with friends and coworkers by pulling phone numbers out of her aging, fading memory, muddling and confusing Jackie with a Nancy she’d known in a previous life, and switching Nina’s digits with a seventy-five year old boyfriend who might’ve actually been off by only one digit, but the cops weren’t going to let her sit there and dial any more. So, in apathetically accepted defeat, she sat with her elbows pitting her knees on a hard, scratchy cot behind bars painted the same color as the walls, contemplating the tile as she was bored and unable to post her own bail, letting her hair like icicles scrape across her dripping back.
The sad thing was… she had the money. She had lots of money. One didn’t live as long as she did without raking up a healthy savings account that ended up getting invested wisely in a moderately aggressive profile where it was allowed to mature for what appeared to be generations. The last time this’d happened she’d been lucky - she’d been out shopping with two girls from work, after which they’d stopped for dinner. She’d accessed her credit account frequently enough that day to arouse suspicion, and had been arrested shortly after dessert. Thankfully, not before - the cheesecake had been heavenly. Well, she supposed she wasn’t lucky in that she’d lost her job, but Rachel had been kind enough to help her withdraw the hefty sum she’d needed to purchase her tentative freedom… and oddly no one had any questions about why an angelically youthful clerical worker from Knoxville, Tennessee would have any need for a lucrative Swiss bank account. She was also lucky in that her case had been dismissed due to lack of sufficient evidence - even old electronic files eventually had to disappear, as big as solid state disks got nowadays they still weren’t infinite in their storage capacity.
The point was… she hadn’t been alone that time. This time she was.
But maybe… maybe that wasn’t so bad. She’d gotten through college as a minor celebrity, but found her prospects thereafter unfairly limited on account of the witty repertoire of titles she hadn’t quite been able to shake off: The New York City Leaper (which was uncomfortably close to ‘Leper’), The Un-Undead Girl, The Girl Who Couldn’t Fly, The Girl Who Could Really Stick a Landing, and, her favorite, Zombie Princess of Power. Just to name a few. Meanwhile all around her history had been repeating itself… because of her. Like African Americans and homosexuals before her, people who lived publicly as ‘Specials’ became the targets of deadly violence and hate crimes, and those atrocities were followed by inhumane politics that breached basic civil rights and liberties. She’d made one fateful jump and ostracized everyone else like her.
When graduate schools began to deny her admission, making excuses navigating around the poorly concealed truth that they didn’t want her within ten feet of their institutions dropping the property value, that’s when she knew she had no choice. Her father and Micah invented Sarah Connor for her (she couldn’t help it, she felt like the mother of a futuristic rebel movement) and then she gracefully pirouetted with all the aplomb of a seasoned ballet dancer right out in front of a semi truck doing eighty miles per hour down the middle of the New Jersey turnpike, smearing her body a bloody, pulpy, grisly unsurvivable mile and a half before she could no longer be recognized as a human being. Her funeral had been a production that rivaled the expense and preparation of a Broadway play, and even her brother had the clever skill enough to whip out a few convincing tears. After that, everyone moved to new locations and life started over as… normal as it had ever been before.
But then there had been that time at the diner, where she’d waitressed, when she’d placed her hand squarely and unmistakably onto the searing, stainless steel surface of an extremely busy hamburger grill. Fortunately they’d been in the middle of the dinner rush; she’d been able to convince the shift manager she could drive herself to the emergency room. She hated wearing bandages… they felt so… foreign. And then there had been the time, when she worked for a doctor’s office no less, that she’d cut her hand on a broken glass left unattended in the sink in the break room over lunch. She still didn’t know what she would’ve done if it hadn’t been April Fool’s Day.
There though… in that cell… there were no eyes. No one watching, no one cared. It was the first place on earth where she could finally be exactly who she was.
And who she was was very lonely.
Her palms had been mushing her cheeks into her eyelids when a silky voice spared them the abuse.
“Social security fraud… that’s a pretty hefty offense for such a young girl.”
Damned straight, why else would she be freezing her ass off in a splotchy, smelly old jail cell in freakin’ Birmingham, Alabama - the veritable heart of ‘Good Ol’ Boy’ country - in July??? And who the hell was he calling ‘young’?!?
“Yeah, that’s what I’m hearin’. Sure is.” Still… there was no need to be confrontational about it. Wouldn’t do her a whole lot of good. To keep her good humor, she ducked her chin away from the tan-clad police officer, in his jingling, pleated pants and shiny shoes, shuffling a cocksure swagger that made her skin crawl with a vulgar shot of alarm. The bars separating them were no good if he had a key.
“Shouldn’t a girl your age be more concerned with, I dunno,” (what was his obsession with her age?), “boys and parties and school? Things like that? What would you want with a one hundred year old dead woman’s identity?”
There was an unequivocal hint of mirthful, mocking amusement to his strangely unaccented tone that she wouldn’t expect from an authority figure trying to chide her. Nervous, and the being kind of girl that rode roller coasters with her eyes open because she wanted to see the bumps life gave her as they came, she turned to face the man. The dainty muscles under her eyes contracted as her scrupulous gaze narrowed - the way one arm snaked up a bar to brace his long, languidly leaning body, the predatory smirk that parted his hungry lips as his temple warmed the cold rod of iron, the avian, raptor-like set to his hunter’s eyes, all of these things were distinct. And familiar. She’d know them anywhere, regardless of the visage that so laughably failed to disguise them. He was bound to catch up to her eventually… of course it had to be here.
“Take off your mask, you look ridiculous,” she told the old killer.
“I know he wasn’t Deputy Marshall,” Sylar replied, his features rippling like fleshy pudding before they reverted to the ones she’d spent years trying to forget, even after his bizarre alliance with her uncle and after that his notorious activities as an underground crusader for the liberation of oppressed Specials. Characteristically, his methods hadn’t changed much. He was a double-edged sword. “I’ve been told he’s ‘sexy for his age,’ but his personality has certain… quirks I’d rather not risk adopting.”
“Oh yes, the masses thank you for that.”
“This guy was a bit more dull.”
“And this conversation is boring already, congratulations.”
It was amazing how convincing the clearly insane could be when pretending to be stable - he continued without even the slightest trace of being perturbed.
“You’re a hard girl to find.”
“Exactly. Why were you looking?”
“Okay, I’ll go easy on you because I know it’s been a long time, but we’ve had this conversation before. Don’t you think it’s a shame that two completely identical people should be walking around out there, the only living proof of the other’s existence, avoiding one another???”
“You’re kidding, right? This again? You really believe all that shit about ‘both abandoned, both adopted, both -’”
“Both immortal? Come on, Claire, don’t tell me you’ve never seen ‘Highlander’,” he grinned at his obscurely ancient reference.
“So you’re here to kill me then? Do it quickly, I’m in misery.”
“Gimme a break, Little Bear, you know I stopped all that. Worked hard to.” She wasn’t going to admit that ‘hard ’ was a righteous understatement. “Besides, Highlander had a bitchin’ sword… that I must’ve left in my other pants.”
“Duncan McLeod would be so proud…”
“Hey, don’t get pissy with me - you’re the one in jail.”
“I’m not pissy, it was a crappy analogy, and seriously we couldn’t be more different, so would you please just give that up?”
“Yeah, it’s true, you’re right - we’re different.” Acerbic with stinging sarcasm, he lightly rapped the knuckle of his right index finger over his pensively pursed lips. “I got over my fascination with dead people long ago, years spent in solitude. And yet here you are at this place in your life, in solitude no less, just beginning a, uh… huh, that’s funny… a fascination with dead people,” he clapped brightly. “Yes, absolutely we are very different people. Couldn’t be any less the same.”
“Oh, yeah? I dunno, how about this one: your fascination with dead people involved the actual process of killing them, whereas my fascination with dead people is just a means to an end for things like, let’s see, maybe a job? Or, how about a bank account, or a way to renew my driver’s license? Yes, yes, you’re absolutely right, the similarity is startling!”
“You could’ve just called me, Claire, I could’ve gotten you those things.”
“Call you? You want me to call you?!? Is that why you’re here?”
“Oh come on, Claire, don’t be stupid - I came to get you out of here!”
“You mean, you went through all this trouble to find me just to… oh my god...” Never before in her long, long life had a tension headache split through her skull so rapidly. “Look, I’m sorry to disappoint you, so don’t go all ballistic on me, but I don’t want to get out of here.”
“Excuse me?” He pressed his incredulous expression as far as he could between the bars, pressing for proximity as if seeing her more closely would reveal to him some nuance betraying her obvious joke that he’d missed from a distance. Even after all this time he still wasn’t fabulous at reading people and had a tendency to occasionally miss small subtleties. “Are… are you messing with me?”
“No! No, I’m not messing with you - look around! I mean, there have to have been times when you’ve thought you should be in here, right? With everything you’ve done?”
“That was a long time ago, Claire,” he defended darkly.
“Whatever. Look. Sitting here right now, I’m not stressing over whether or not I’ve done a good job fudging my picture onto some piece of identification. I’m not getting carded getting into a bar wondering if I got the UV layer on straight, or if the BIOS on my RFID tag has been flashed properly because my counterfeit equipment is old and I’m not sure I know how to maintain it well. Hell, I’m not even sure I know how to use it well! Or more than that - I’m not watching every little step I take! I’m not afraid to get behind the wheel of a car because someone’s gonna see me walk away from an accident without a scratch! There are no cars in here! I’m not afraid to get hurt - I’m not afraid to be a freak - everyone in here’s a freak! Gabriel,” the use of his real name meant business, “I could get shanked in the middle of the night and I’d probably never even wake up - do you realize that? And I don’t even care! I’m not moving around all the time, trying to get used to different names, hoping I haven’t moved to the same town as my real identity’s great-grandson, someone who might actually notice. I’m not getting arrested at the grocery store anymore - hell, I don’t even have to buy food, don’t even have to cook! They’ll feed me! I can just stop everything and sit in one place - do you know that I’ve NEVER done that? In my whole life?!? Why would I want to let go of that?”
“Because prison isn’t your freedom, Claire, and freedom isn’t your prison. It’s you.”
“Wha…? That doesn’t even make any sense.”
“Yes it does, Claire, you deserve better than -”
“Than what - peace and quiet?!? That much is obvious. Look - I understand that you probably feel you have a lot to make up to me, and you’d be right, you DO. But you’re gonna have to find some other way - I’m not coming with you, alright? So go away!”
Numbed by rejection, he backed away from the bars and let his ineffectual hands hang loosely at his sides.
“You know this sentence isn’t gonna last forever…” he murmured sullenly. “What’re you gonna do then?”
“I don’t know. Honestly, I don’t even care - I’m just happy for the rest. So… yeah. There you go. Bye.”
“Fine,” he ground through gritted teeth, “that’s what you want? Have it your way. Bye.”
He shapeshifted back into the body of a police officer Claire prayed was still alive, despite his protests that he lived his life to the contrary, and he stalked away awkwardly on legs that were a tad shorter than those to which he was accustomed. She tried to revel in his absence, but only managed to wring her hands and twitch unnervingly as the residue of his sticky presence began to slowly wear off. She’d learned many brutal lessons over the course of her myriad wayward travels, the first being never to take anything for granted. Another was that Sylar never took no for an answer.
“No. No, that’s bullshit,” he sneered as he stomped back into view, just as she’d predicted. His patience with the barrier having far exceeded its already tenuous limit, he sliced a hasty hand through the air and the bars terminating the end of her cage bent in the middle creating a gaping hole through which he easily walked.
“Oh god…” she sighed, embarrassed by how the wreckage could be so trivial to him, before her reddened face landed in her open palms.
“No. I came here to get you out and that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”
“You do realize you’re talking about kidnapping now…”
“Claire,” he admonished as he came to parade rest before her, hands clasped innocuously behind his back yet still incapable of portraying the illusion that he wasn’t a frustratingly unstoppable force, “you’re not here because you want freedom or rest or whatever, you’re here because you’re lonely -”
“That’s a nice opinion -”
“You came here because you MADE YOURSELF alone, and now you can’t tear down your wall. You came here to rationalize your loneliness - to give in to it. And now you’re it’s prisoner.”
“Who the hell are YOU to tell me what…” The words died in her throat when his posture shifted in a way she could never have possibly anticipated in a million years. Preceded by a minute tug at his pant legs, he lithely lowered his knees to the ground in a fluid motion, his face open with an astronomically rare guileless sincerity as he knelt before her. She felt like she’d been teleported to Mars. Immobile with shock, she didn’t resist when he gently folded her hands within his own. Having always viewed him as something reptilian or as some clockwork, robotic malfunction, she was surprised by their warmth.
“Please, just once, listen to me… admit that maybe I might actually know what I’m talking about this time. I’ve been here before, Claire. Please. Nothing good can come from you being in here.”
“Why do you care?”
“Because… yeah… yeah, it’s true, I owe you, but that’s not all. I… Okay. Look, alright? You’re right. Okay? You happy? We’re not the same.” He tilted his head toward the confluence of their shyly clinging fingers, just enough so that feathery strands of unruly black hair tumbled to tangle their tips amongst his thick eyelashes. The appearance of his pink tongue’s darting tip indicated he didn’t quite know where to start. “In spite of our similarities - which you have to agree there are some - we… we ended up so different…”
“You’ve told me this before -”
“You’re everything I wish I was.”
“You wish you were a short, blonde woman?”
“Dammit Claire, this isn’t easy, okay?!? So just stop it and listen. You were safe. You were loved. You had a family. I was never able to figure out how to make those things happen - I’m still trying. But those people have fallen behind you, and now you’re throwing it all away like it could never happen again and it’s wrong.” And he knew a thing or two about wrong. “What you’re really doing here is turning belly up, trying to convince yourself that since you can’t beat it, you actually like being alone, and you’re celebrating how there’s no one in the world close enough to you to hurt you, and you’re laughing at the rest of us while we suffer and you don’t when really… Claire, you are. And you’re just letting it make you even more detached. I’ve been through this, I know. I let it make me a monster. Haven’t you ever wondered what could make a man a killer? This is it. It’s pain. And I’m here because I’m not going to let it do the same thing to you.”
Her pride choked her throat so he couldn’t hear her muted gulping sobs, and it clamped her eyelids shut before she showed him any of her tears. She never wanted him to see them again, there was no way she was going to give him the satisfaction. But then her traitorous mouth double-crossed her.
“You, you,” she hiccupped, failing disastrously in her efforts not to cry, “you know those big houses on the waterfront over in Vestavia Hills?”
“Honestly, Claire, I’m not from around here -”
“I always wanted to live in one of them - I wanted to watch baby geese in the spring time, and -”
“Oh hell, don’t cry, I didn’t want to make you cry, damn…”
“And I wanted a hot tub and a flower bed, and maybe a game room in the basement or a home theatre or something. I have the money for one of those houses - have the money for all of that. But what’s the point if I’m going to live there alone?” Like a stressed levee she broke as a sweeping current of flooding images - dashed hopes and unrealized dreams - swam across her vision like running mascara. “And what’s the point of waking up next to someone if I’m only going to watch him grow old and die?!?”
A puff of air kissed her dampened cheeks as he sighed, straightening and lifting their joined hands so he could use his thumbs to wipe the gathering moisture away. An indignant hot streak within her wanted to pull away, old habit still seeking the sick and malevolent underlying his actions whether it existed or not, but she found she lacked the energy… or maybe she was as desperate for primal human contact as he claimed she was.
“I know how you feel,” the words rang down her spine with the conviction of biblical truth, “and you aren’t going to find those answers rotting in jail. Come with me, let me take you out of here. You don’t have to do this alone. Maybe…” he faltered, hesitating at a peculiar loss for words, “maybe I can make you happy.”
Their fists landed heavily in her lap, and her racing heart fed her a fleeting slideshow of open fields, vast oceans, and a wide, hanging sky blowing a breeze she could almost smell. If she were a bird, she could just fly away…
“So, let me get this straight. You’re asking me to run away with you.”
He swallowed against boyish fear.
“Yes.”
“Like Bonnie and Clyde.”
“Yeah, like Bonnie and Clyde… except without the dying.”
“Run away. With YOU.”
She saw his tongue again as his rapier temper grazed it over a gleaming line of exposed teeth.
“Yes, ME, I know.”
“And you don’t think that’s a little crazy…?”
His eyes grew steely and his upper lip threatened to curl - his fragile, porcelain exterior hardened with the seasoned efficiency of someone who’d mastered the art of stamping out emotional reactions, like hurt, before they ever reached his expression.
“Yeah, Claire, because you’re doing so well and all… Maybe something crazy is exactly what you need.”
Echoes of whispering forests and wind-swept sand dunes tugged insistently at her subconscious - there was still a whole world out there - a whole universe - that didn’t bear her footprints. She could just leave - just get up and walk right out with him… all she had to do was say ‘yes’. But where to start?
“Alright, Mr. Genius, tell me this: we exit this building right now, and you’re harboring a fugitive, you’re in as much trouble as I am. We’ll have to keep running.”
“I know… at least for what, forty years? Fifty? That’s nothing - a vacation. They’ll give up eventually.”
“So where’re we gonna go? Where won’t they look for us? Yay, let’s go ‘vacation’ in what, Greenland? Antarctica?”
“I was thinking someplace that still doesn’t quite like Americans, you know, like the Middle East? North Korea? I think Cuba is still a little miffed at us too, and that’s one big tropical island.”
“Sylar, we’re Americans.”
“Don’t be dense, Claire, that’s not all we are. We’re invincible, super-powered Americans.”
It became very plain to her that every futile argument would be as expertly rebuked as the last because ultimately… he was right. No matter how she felt about seafood, whether she wanted an oyster or not, the world was hers. It wasn’t going anywhere, and it sure as hell wasn’t gonna go to her, nor would it even meet her halfway. Her life was about finding her own feet, and the will to keep trudging the directions in which they pointed. The lesson this experience taught her was about not giving up. Putting a little faith in her knees, letting go of the man in front of her - this old demon, seeker of forgiveness, pupil and teacher - she managed to stand on her own.
“Alright, fine. I’ll go with you. You have a plan to get us out of here?”
A wicked snarl lit his face (as close to elated joy as he was ever going to get) as he rose and pulled a gift from beneath his belt, behind his back.
“Naturally,” he purred, slapping the solid, purposeful weight of the .40 caliber Smith & Wesson into her unoccupied hands.
“Ughh, oh my god…” she groaned when her investigating gaze landed on the stripe of blood that still coated the handle… and now her small fingertips. All she had to do was size him up with an accusing glare.
“What?!? I didn’t kill him! I just… well… he’s unconscious.”
It was too late. She no longer possessed the luxury of being able to ask herself, ‘dear God, what have I gotten myself into…’. She’d already made her stand - it was time to ride the wave and see where it might lead. Maybe the monkeys in the South American rain forest would love her for who she was while she was living in some guerilla-warrior style, fortified and camouflaged, Swiss Family Robinson tree house or something.
“Fine. Whatever.” She pulled back the slide mechanism but prayed she’d never need to pull the trigger. “Let’s blow this popsicle stand."
And never once did they ever look back.