Black Ice (Part 1)
Heroes stuff. I blame forsquilis, ibroketuesday, and the rest of the TWoP Sylar thread.
TITLE: Black Ice (1/2)
AUTHOR: barhaven
CHARACTERS: Sylar, Peter, Candice (gen)
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: Early season 2.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: After the "powerless!Sylar should have met up with amnesia!Peter in volume 2" idea came up in the Sylar thread over at TWoP, I couldn't let it go. This was the result. The lovely forsquilis was kind enough to beta. She wrote a different variation on the same idea over yonder, and I highly recommend it.
Part 2 is here.
____________________________________________
The storm screams around him, blinding and biting and impossible, and he can't make himself believe it isn't real.
Not after those hours upon hours spent chained in the dark with only his own frantic breaths, useless struggles, and quiet heartbeats to fill the void.
Not with his wrists aching from hours of fighting against a set of handcuffs.
Not with amnesia turning the confinement from unbearable to hellish, battering his mind with attempt after attempt to dig out memories, only to be denied every time.
Not after that wave of dizziness seized him, a violent sense of relative movement like being pushed from a mad carousel. Invisible tendrils grasped and clawed and fought to drag him in a hundred different directions, until he feared they'd tear him to pieces as punishment for some selfish crime he can't remember.
He didn't care what awaited at the end of that freefall through a storybook rabbit hole, as long as he wasn't in the dark any more.
Anywhere but here.
And now he is.
There's no sudden landing, no bone-shattering impact. The ground is simply there under his feet - why did he so honestly expect it to be anywhere else? - and the world floods through his deprived senses. His dark, nowhere prison is gone, transformed into the softer, natural darkness of night. His arms move freely now, and only the raw red marks on his wrists prove he was ever restrained at all.
That's where the improvements end.
In all those hours chained in the dark without name or memory, he hadn't considered that there was anywhere worse he could find himself. Now the stale, thick air has been replaced with raw talons of ice, raking at him without mercy, cutting through his clothes with diamond-blade ease. Snow whips in howling, maelstrom spirals, and stings with such a beautifully cruel indifference.
It's abundantly clear that reality has no reservations about destroying his naïve assumptions. It seems to take a vicious glee from dragging him out of one hell and straight into another.
Before he can even begin to fathom how he got here, he's staring down a wash of headlights and the scream of car brakes over black ice.
He reacts. Instinct throws him to one side. He hits the snow-streaked asphalt painfully hard, bracing himself for the collision.
It never comes. The car veers, missing him by the barest few inches. It skids as the driver fights to maintain control, then churns up a wake of snow and icy gravel as it grinds to a stop on the shoulder of the road a short distance ahead.
The near-miss takes a moment to register. He remains crouched on the ground, adrenaline-quick breaks fogging in the frigid air.
It's still impossible to muster any hope that this is a bad dream. The cold is too biting. The wind has too much of a flesh-numbing sting. The icy asphalt is too solid under his aching hands and knees. The snow pelting him and soaking through his clothes is too much of an insignificant detail for a dream to bother emphasizing.
The car door is thrown open, and dry radio static drifts across the road. There are quick footsteps, his rescuer rushing over to where he's trying to drag himself to his feet.
'Rescuer.' It's an automatic assumption in his mind. Of course this person will help him. If they wanted to, they could have driven away already.
“H-help...help me,” he manages. Only when he moves to wipe the snow from his eyes does he realize how hard he's shivering. “Please, I don't know how-”
He trails off as he looks at the stranger.
“You-?!” the man hisses.
What about me? he wonders.
Then a tire iron smashes into the side of his head, and darkness eagerly reclaims him.
_____
How could that have possibly been so easy?
Sylar stares at the bloody mess sprawled at his feet, numb with equal amounts of cold, hate, and shock. Blood drips freely from the tire iron. A few more drops next to the stain pooling gently across the snow-swept asphalt.
There has to be a catch. A trick. No amount of coincidence could be this malicious.
No, he reminds himself, it absolutely could. From the moment he woke up in that isolated Company facility a few days ago, things have only found ways to get worse. His sole stroke of luck was the one that allowed him to escape: he hadn't been quite as sedated as the Company agent thought he was, and guns weren't much use against a bone saw to the back of the head.
Everything since has been a parade of futility and frustration. It's been days of walking and driving through endless cold and snow with only a few short hours of daylight. He still feels like he'll never be warm again. That damn sword wound - sword wound! - in his chest is a constant source of pain. The memory gap between Kirby Plaza and now is an uncomfortable dark spot, like a shadow on an x-ray. It promises something worse waiting to be found, but there are enough distractions to render that mystery a moot point for now.
If he's going to run into anyone in the middle of nowhere, of course it would be Peter fucking Petrelli.
Sylar prods the bleeding, unconscious Peter with one snow-caked boot. It turns into a vicious kick to Peter's ribs that sends the man rolling sideways, giving a glimpse of the odd burn marks on his shirt. His hair is shorter than the last time Sylar met him. That makes it easier to see the blood and clinging clumps of snow caking the side of his head.
Sylar leans closer, shields Peter's head with one arm to keep the blizzard's barrage at bay. The headlights of the stolen car point off into the roadside trees, a million tumbling snowflakes streaking past like TV static. Not ideal lighting, but it's enough that he doesn't have to root around for the flashlight he saw in the trunk when he dug out the tire iron.
If only there had been a gun tucked away back there. A knife, maybe. Even a hatchet wouldn't go astray. However far he's made it since escaping, it isn't far enough if he's already stumbling across people who want him dead.
The tire iron crashes down again.
Again.
Again.
Each wet crunch of flesh and bone flecks his coat with bloody little fragments of Peter Petrelli, but he can't take a single bit of satisfaction from it.
His powers are gone. It always comes back to that, and every other misfortune and pain and frustration pales in comparison. Whatever the reason and whoever is to blame, everything is gone. All of it. That leaves him nothing. Hollow. Powerless. Angry. Vulnerable. Gabriel.
The last few days have given him ample motivation to kill anyone and everyone who had a hand in him winding up like this. Even now, his missing powers are still a phantom limb. Whenever he tries to TK something into his hand, or wonders why he can't hear as well as he should, it tears the wound fresh all over again. At his lowest points, he's bitterly wondered if he'll have to resign himself to being Gabriel Gray once more. There's no possibility that fills him with more revulsion. No one, not the Company or the enemies he's made in the last few months, could conceive of a worse fate then forcing Sylar to live every day for the rest of an insignificant life, knowing what he's lost.
Peter makes a wet, blood-choked sound deep in this throat. The damage is already being undone, as quick as the blizzard is covering up the swerved tire tracks. Bone crunches and slides, reforming Peter's shattered face and sealing his fractured skull shut once more. Flesh stretches back into place, weaving seamlessly shut until there's only blood stains to show for it.
“What the hell are you even doing here?” Sylar demands as if Peter could hear him. His hand aches as he grips the makeshift weapon tighter, fingers tinged red and raw from the touch of frostbite a few days past. “Were you the best they could do? If it's not that 'company' trying to vivisect me, it's people like you deluding yourself into thinking you're being a hero.”
There are two more vicious, bone-splintering, blood-splattering blows before he lets the tip of the tire iron droop down to thunk against the pavement.
Cathartic, but ultimately useless. Even unconscious, Peter's body sets to work healing itself as if nothing happened.
That wonderful, perfect invulnerability. The power Sylar has been cheated out of time and again. The sword wound seems to ache harder out of spite, and he wonders if all this exertion has made it ooze through the bandages again.
Sylar reaches out with his free hand, and probes the most gaping of Peter's head wounds. Flesh and bone squirm under his fingers, sparking a shiver of anticipation.
He overheard things before he escaped that Company facility. About his injuries. The multiple surgeries. Misplaced confidence that he was no longer dangerous.
Insinuations that his abilities are so deeply broken - 'neutralized', as they so infuriatingly phrased it - that even acquiring new ones will be impossible.
Well. One way or another, he can't let Peter wake up to hunt him down, powers blazing. It's the perfect time to find out.
The last few days haven't given much cause for blind optimism, but this unexpected complication isn't without its up sides. If his own abilities are well and truly gone, he could do worse than inheriting Peter's. He's only seen Peter display a handful of powers, but suspects the man has so many more squirrelled away in that brain of his.
Worst-case scenario, it doesn't work and Peter dies. What a fucking tragedy.
A smile crosses Sylar's face for the first time in days.
Opening Peter Petrelli's skull will be like Christmas.
_____
Sylar tries.
And tries, and tries, and tries. If he's going to accept failure, it's not going to be for lack of effort.
After he dragged Peter to the car to get out of the blinding snow, he crouched outside the open back door to have enough room to work. No other cars have come along the snow-stained road - only the desperate or reckless would be driving tonight - but it hasn't mattered anyway. Drifting snow covered the blood stains on the pavement within a few minutes.
Eventually, Sylar's bloody hands pull back from Peter's head. He snatches up the tire iron again, and it's tempting to smash it down until his arm hurts.
Desperation and hatred goad him on, but futility cuts through: Peter is healing too fast. Even if he could pry far enough into the man's skull before it healed over, removing a brain is no easy task. They don't just fall out like spaghetti from a pot. Telekinesis made it easy - it made a lot of things easy - but now? He had the luxury of time with Brian Davis in his watch shop, not to mention the luxury of convenient, sharp tools. Now he has little more than blunt force trauma and his bare, numb hands. If he had a knife, he could do this quickly. If he had an axe, he could smash his way through Peter's skull easily. If he had a gun, he might be able to do enough damage to render the healing a moot point. But that wonderful and infuriating power, the one thing he needs, the one thing that would make this entire miserable ordeal worthwhile...
It's sitting right there, and even if he could acquire it, Peter's body is healing faster than he can work. Peter will heal, and heal, and fucking heal. No matter how bloody Sylar's hands become, he'll never leave square one. And Peter won't stay unconscious forever.
As Sylar leans in for another stubborn attempt, a sound cracks across the highway. From out of the blizzard, the twin barbs of a taser gun whip toward him.
It's his obsessive preoccupation with Peter that saves him. If he'd given up on his prize a second sooner, the taser's wires would have bitten squarely into his neck. One little moment, one mistake, and the months or years that followed could have been a haze of experiments and needles and torture, spent too drugged into oblivion to even think about escape.
But he moves, and the taser's wires miss their mark. One dives past him entirely, a bare inch away from his neck, and collides with the side of the car. The other brushes against his jaw, slapping him with a painful surge of electricity that tears a surprised scream from his throat before he can stop it.
Sylar jerks away from Peter, and he's back on his feet in a second.
“You should have made the first shot count,” he sneers. He touches his jaw where the taser glanced him. It aches fiercely in response. How could he have been distracted enough not to notice someone sneaking up on him with a damn taser gun?
He squints through the curtains of snow in search of his attacker, but sees no one. The only vehicle is his stolen car, still idling. Still buzzing quiet static from the speakers. He'd been wandering from AM to FM in search of a station with decent reception, cut short when he slammed on the brakes to avoid the figure in the road. A faint “...comfort me at the right time, everything's gonna be alright...” slides through the white noise on ludicrously calm chords.
Even above the howl of the wind and the static-chewed radio, he doesn't need his enhanced hearing to detect the sound of a gun being cocked.
Close. Too close.
So close that, if he can't see the person wielding it, that has to mean they have some kind of ability to-
...oh, fuck.
Once again, pure luck saves him. The wind sends snow drifting in a particularly fierce, stinging barrage, and it's just enough to throw off his attacker's aim as he lunges away from the car. The explosion of a firing gun - a real one this time, not a taser - tears through the storm, over the garbled “...make me do anything you want...” hissing from the radio. The shot rings deafening in his ears, but the bullet hits asphalt.
A second shot, and this one nicks the fabric of his coat. Sylar darts to the side of the road.
He plunges off the edge of the snow-streaked highway, down the steep roadside incline. Frozen gravel slides loose underfoot, and dead, brittle weeds brush past his legs with every step.
Another shot rings out. The bullet bites a splintered chunk from a tree, inches away.
He doesn't get to appreciate that third near miss, because he doesn't look back to see it. He hits the tree line, the forest swallows him up, and he's running blind.
_____
“-have to speak up, I can't- Because it's the middle of nowhere and the middle of a fucking blizzard. The reception sucks.”
Consciousness returns, reluctant and sluggish. Peter blinks blood from his eyes, and wonders why he's not dead.
“Yes. Mm-hm. No, it's being taken care of. Well- What? How am I supposed to know? Ask your daughter, I hear he was her pet for the last few months. I just thought you should know about the...complication.”
Someone is talking. His first desperate hope is that it might stir his memories back into existence. He's sorely disappointed when the mental void stays as stubbornly empty as ever.
“I know that- Look, I know- I KNOW that, Bob! For Christ's sake, I did get the e-mail. I'll bring them both in. No big deal. I know, I know: 'Peter slipping away was bad enough, but the last thing we need is a killer like Gabriel Gray running free.' I heard you the first time.”
The last of the ache in his head ebbs away, and he looks around. He's lying in the back seat of a car, staring out the open door at the wisps of snow that snake across the road like sand.
“Yeah. Fine,” the voice - a woman's voice - finally sighs. “I'm taking a vacation after this. Someone else can freeze their ass off babysitting a murderer.”
Peter looks toward the front seat. Windshield wipers creak gently over the salt-and-dirt-stained glass, and... There. A woman is just outside, leaning against the hood as she snaps her cell phone shut. It disappears into a pocket on her skimpy winter jacket, and she walks around to the open car door.
The frigid night reaches deeper into his bones every second. Of all the things to think about, he finds himself wondering why she doesn't seem cold.
“Who are you?” he manages numbly, and realizes he can taste blood.
He looks down. If he thought nothing else could shock him this evening, something is apparently determined to prove him wrong.
Blood. There's blood all over the car seat. Smeared on his shirt. Splattered on the edge of the open door. Pooled on the snow-streaked asphalt outside, or what little of it hasn't been covered over already. A glimpse at the rearview mirror reveals a veil of red streaked across his face, smeared through his hair...
He tries to jerk back, but he's handcuffed to the car door. Memories of those hours locked in the dark are suddenly all too vivid.
A sly smile twitches over the woman's lips.
“My name is Michelle,” she says, casual as if she'd just slid over to sit beside him at a bar. “I'd love to chat, cutie, but I have a bit of a situation right now. Nice that you've recovered, though. That means this shouldn't do any long-term damage.”
Before Peter can even open his mouth, he's assaulted by pain. It surges, wracking his body into convulsions, tearing a long, hoarse scream from his throat as he slumps back to the blood-soaked car seat.
When he's able to focus enough to look up, the woman is holding some kind of... What is that? A gun? How? He didn't see her reach for anything. It's like it simply appeared in her hand.
“Sorry,” she says, smiling down at him with perfectly fake concern. “It's a bitch, I know. But I need you quiet until I get back. This won't take long.”
He can't find enough coherent thought to reply. He can't even find a voice to scream again when she draws a different gun, aims down, and sends three bullets tearing into him.
_____
He's being hunted.
In one way or another, Sylar has felt that way for days. The time spent walking across miles of frozen nowhere brought him face to face with some of the local wildlife before he finally managed to reach something approaching civilization, but that was nothing next to the raw force of the elements. The cold itself turned predator out here, biting through his clothes and flesh, eating him alive. At times he'd pushed on by forcing himself to focus on the pain from his sword wound, simply because it took his mind off freezing to death.
Still, it's that shadowy company's motives that have kept him on edge, kept him moving to put as much distance between himself and this place as possible. He didn't glean much information before he escaped, but there were fragments in his captors' hushed discussions, even in the evasive non-answers to his angry questions before they'd attempted to sedate him again. Broken powers or no, someone in that organization's ranks has a suspicious, twisted interest in his well-being to invest so much time and effort into repairing his wounds. Too much to let him simply walk away.
They'd come looking for him, he suspected. And he's just been proved right.
He keeps running long after he leaves the road behind, the forest passing in a blur of tree trunks and whipping branches and spiralling snowfall. The snow is deeper here, hiding the roots and stumps and rocks eager to trip him. Whenever old snow cracks underfoot, he has to fight for every bit of ground. His sword wound burns every step of the way. Every last one of his stitches has to be torn by now.
He trips then, or stumbles, or his legs simply decide to give out. One second he's running, the next he's collapsed to his knees in a snowdrift, clutching his abdomen with one hand and the bloody tire iron in the other. His chest stings with every gulped breath of frigid air, and his throat aches with the effort of biting back pain.
There's a trickle of moisture between his numb fingers. There's so much of Peter's blood on his hands that he's not sure if it's snow, or if it's blood and pus weeping through his coat.
In the distance, shots ring out.
Then it's quiet again. Just his pained breaths fogging before his eyes, the storm coiling around him, and the creak of branches heavy with snow.
Sylar looks around. Trees loom on all sides, pole-thin trunks of evergreens stretching up toward the storm, spilling into a canopy of sparse needles and trailing, brittle moss. The ground under his feet could be a trail, but the only thing to prove it is that the snow isn't so deep as to be impassable. The only reason he can guess which direction he came from is because he can see his own footprints slashed through the snow. Even as he watches, the wandering drifts are rapidly wearing that away.
Sylar pushes himself back to his feet, pulls his hands into his sleeves a bit for some small measure of warmth, and glares into the trees. He's met with the nagging, irrational sense that they're glaring back.
“Well?” he snaps, struggling to suppress shivering that surges every time the cold knifes through. “Are we going to do this all night, or are you going to show yourself?”
There's no answer. Just more snow, more wind, more creaking branches.
“So, what is your ability?” he goads. “Invisibility? I once met someone who thought he could beat me with invisibility. I killed him with a piece of glass.”
Sylar waits, and watches, and suppresses the urge to shout his frustrations into the uncaring storm.
Who is he trying to fool? If his pursuer is working for the people who brought him to this godforsaken place to begin with, they could be laughing their ass off at his bluff.
Every second, every step, every breath brings constant reminders of how easy things would be if he had his powers. That ambush on the highway? They were just bullets, for God's sake! There was a time when he could have stopped them dead in the air. He could have heard his attacker coming long before they ever got a shot off. He would have killed them without breaking a sweat, added one more power to his collection- No, he wouldn't, because he wouldn't even be here in the first place!
Reality has made it abundantly clear that it doesn't care. He's broken, and injured, and vulnerable, and lost. Now he's been tricked, he's strayed from the path, and something is coming for him.
Sylar stares defiant through the trees, listening for signs of pursuit. He catches only imagined sounds and shapeless things darting at the corners of his vision. Phantasms brought on by paranoia and pain and the storm's malice, wasting his attention with figments and monsters when there's a real threat to worry about.
If there's anything there at all, it's hiding among the Jabberwock impossibilities. Ghosts and monsters and distractions from his own mind, all cunning and infinite hunger, whiffling and burbling through tulgey wood. There's a real threat amongst them somewhere, but without his abilities, he has no vorpal blade to wield against it.
He's running again, then. Slapping branches aside, half blind with snow stinging his eyes, pine needles and dead branches scratching across his face and bare hands, and damn it, why didn't he put his gloves on before he got out of the fucking car-!
Sylar runs, and he is followed.
_____
Storm wind and music-tainted static drift across the road. They nearly drown out the soft, muffled sound of spent bullets sliding free and dropping to the bloody floor of the car.
Death reluctantly loses its grip, and Peter bolts upright with a choked gasp.
The handcuffs are rattled against the car door, pulled and twisted in a half-conscious reenactment of his struggles in the dark those long hours past.
Then his wrists slide free - slide through - as if the metal handcuffs are no more substantial than water.
Outside the car, footsteps lead off into the trees.
_____
Something is leading him astray.
At first Sylar is too distracted with exertion and pain to notice, but the subtle tickle of disorientation is growing too strong to ignore. Even as he runs and weaves and stumbles onward, the path seems to waver and double back on itself. The trees writhe and shift imperceptibly, a creature with consciousness and purpose herding him along. It leaves confusion trailed across his awareness. Membrane-thin, but very tangible.
Something isn't right, his analytical mind insists.
As much as he's resisted succumbing to paranoia, resented the childish illusions the storm brings out to haunt him...
This time he believes it. Movement, feeling, thought, sight, sound... The more he pays attention, the more it feels they're not quite in sync, like a video with its soundtrack a fraction of a second off.
Then, in the time it takes to put one foot in front of the other, the world melts away.
Sylar comes to a dead stop.
In the space of a second, the sheets of snow and clutching branches disappear, and featureless walls take their place. The snowdrifts underfoot fade to concrete. The dark and stormy night brightens around him, until it glares painfully fluorescent. Confused information floods across his senses, forcing away his perception of the cold and the sensation of the pelting snow. There's a distant notion that they're still there. It's more that his brain is being forced to ignore them and accept something else in their place.
“Stop it,” he hisses at whoever happens to be listening.
If they hear him, they aren't intimidated. The last of his new surroundings melt into place, and he's suddenly very, very far from the blizzard.
Familiar walls stand around him. Stark concrete on three sides, under his feet, over his head, the final wall fitted with a window of bulletproof glass. Featureless sterility. A grey blanket trails off the edge of the thinly lined slab that serves as a bed, coiling at his feet. Nothing in this room is built with comfort in mind; it's built to be a cage. To reduce the most dangerous of the dangerous to prisoners and lab specimens.
He knows this room. When you're trapped for days to be tested, drugged, and experimented on, it's hard to forget.
This time there's no Bennet looking down on him from behind the safety of the glass. In his place there's a redheaded woman Sylar's never seen before, smirking from the other side of the viewing window.
“Relax, honey,” she says. “If you keep this up, it'll take two more surgeries to patch you up again. Wasn't eight enough?”
Sylar glances down, and sees that it isn't just his location that's changed. His clothes have been replaced with that familiar, chafing, Primatech-issue white, and there's only cold concrete against his bare feet.
Or so it seems. Nothing feels right. There's a tangible weight pressing against his senses, shapeless and squirming and hidden. There's a nagging sense that this is a stage, something is demanding his attention from behind the curtain, but he can't pull it aside to see. So for now, he has no choice but to make do with whatever its painted backdrops and wooden props see fit to substitute for reality.
“What did you do?” he demands.
“I thought a change of scenery would be nice,” she says with a shrug, as if she's simply changed a TV channel. “I hate snow. My name is Michelle, by the way. But I wouldn't worry about-“
“I don't care what your fucking name is,” he hisses, taking a threatening step closer to the glass that separates them. “I asked what you're doing.”
“Would it kill you to show some gratitude to the person who saved your life?”
“Oh, right.” Sylar cocks his head to one side for a sneer. “Thanks for trying to shoot me. I'm so glad you care.”
“I wasn't shooting to kill. Besides, that's not what I meant. Maybe a little, 'Golly, Michelle, thanks for pulling me off Kirby Plaza! Not bleeding to death sure means a lot to me!'”
Sylar blinks, and his sword wound aches viciously at the memory. “You dragged me off Kirby Plaza?”
“It's okay,” she continues with a playful little frown, “I know gratitude isn't your strong point. Kind of picked up on that. You're not dead of blood loss, sepsis, or a collapsed lung, and the first thing you do is try to kill the people who are helping you. Did your mother teach you manners? No wonder you murdered her.”
“'Helping' me?” Sylar ignores Michelle's attempt to hit a sore spot, and flings a hand out to gesture at the cell around him. “Capturing me, you mean.” Sylar mirrors her smirk from a moment before. He points at the glass between them, tracing a slow horizontal line with his index finger, aching for his telekinesis. “How long do you really think you can keep me here, Michelle? Other people have tried. Find the ones who are still alive and ask them how it went.”
“It's for your own good.” If the sudden conviction on Michelle's face is fake, it's very convincingly fake. “The people I work for want to help you, Sylar. That's what we do; we help people. You almost died from that sword wound. It took us months to repair as much of the damage as we did.”
“So you did what any hospital could have done.”
“You'd be dead anyway if we hadn't kept your survival a happy little secret. Do you remember Noah Bennet? Mohinder Suresh? The only reason you're alive is because all the people you've ticked off think you're dead. But you know that, hm? Looks like a certain someone already found you. Funny, we were wondering what happened to him.”
“Petrelli works for your company now?” If Peter does work for them, it hasn't done anything for the man's competence. He apparently missed the 'not getting your head bashed in by the person you're supposed to be capturing' part of Company orientation.
“Not exactly 'works for'," Michelle says with a slight eye roll, giving she and Sylar one lone sentiment they can agree on. "But Peter is a...person of interest.”
Sylar shrugs indifferently. “Take him. He'll bleed his heart all over you for saving his life.”
“He's just a bonus, honey. You're the prize. If the wrong people find out you're alive, you're not going to stay that way for long with your powers gone. If you'd calm down and let me-”
“My powers...?” The question is heavy with promises of sharp objects and long screams to anyone who had the least bit to do with his current condition. “What did you people do to me?”
“What makes you think we did anything?”
“Educated guess,” he sneers. He kicks the coiled grey blanket at his feet. “The last time I was in this cell, it was on Bennet's watch. His idea of 'helping me' was to take my powers away and have a hole drilled in my skull.”
“You did try to murder his daughter. Funny how some people can hold a grudge over a little thing like that.”
When Sylar's glare darkens, Michelle sighs as if she's dealing with a petulant child.
“So your powers are gone. Must have been your injuries,” she says with a shrug. “From what I heard, the doctors were too busy intubating you and stopping the internal bleeding to worry about whether you'd still be able to move things with your mind.”
“So why did you save me?” he snaps. “Everything I worked for is gone! I can't even-!”
He stops mid-sentence as Michelle's form flickers before his eyes, fading into something very familiar.
“What's the matter?” a black-coated Sylar mocks him from the other side of the glass, a perfect mirror of how he looked that night at Kirby Plaza. “Do you miss being the villain already, Gabriel?”
Sylar throws himself toward the window.
Just before he can slam his hands against the glass, things...distort. The world shifts around him, like an image shuddering from a jammed film projector. Disorientation squirms cold across his mind-
And just like that, he's back in the middle of the cell.
Michelle stands at the window once more. She gives him a wicked, playful little finger-wiggling wave.
“This isn't real,” Sylar says. He can't prove it, but saying it out loud steels his certainty.
Michelle smiles.
“You want to see something real, honey?”
Again, there's that subtle little squirm against his senses. When he looks down, his breath catches in his throat.
There's blood. A lot of it. So much of it, soaking though the white Primatech prison clothes, smeared like a murder scene (and he knows a thing or two about those) along the floor and bed. Blood seeps crimson through the t-shirt, stains his hands far more than Peter's managed to, smears at random like he's been dragged through an abattoir, all the way to the puddle of red pooling at his bare feet.
The blood is all oozing from a single source; his sword wound. The t-shirt is torn apart perfectly, laying the gash bare. This isn't the half-healed injury that's been gnawing slow agony for the last few days. It's torn wide, angry and raw and fresh as the moment he was stabbed, blossoming blood and squirming with a sickening, wet sound every time he takes a breath. If he could see his back, he's certain he'd see an exit wound to match it.
“This isn't real,” he hisses. The words hide how much effort it's taking not to clamp his hands over the wound, that instinct to staunch the bleeding he's convinced he feels.
It's not real. It's not fucking real. Sylar is certain of that, as certain as he is that Michelle is doing this somehow. She's putting images and lying sensations into his head, or making him hallucinate, or plucking at memories... Something.
He stalks forward, raising his bloody hands to pound them against the glass, as if throwing enough rage and effort behind it will miraculously break the illusion or bring his powers back.
Futility is quick to reprimand him. There's that familiar lurch, that disorienting jolt as the world twists neatly around him like a möbius strip-
And he's back in the centre of the cell again.
Despite himself, a greedy little whim in his mind marvels at her ability. He aches to wipe that smirk off her face, tear her brain apart, and make her power his own.
Michelle seems to see a hint of that creeping hunger. She taps a finger against the glass with the look of someone teasing a caged animal. A bitter reminder that she isn't the least bit intimidated by him. This familiar cell probably isn't real, no more real than the blood or her smug theatrics, but he's trapped as completely as if it were.
“Relax,” Michelle tells him, giving him another playful smile for his trouble. “I'll tell you a secret, handsome: your abilities are more than a little broken. You won't be reacquiring powers any time soon, no matter how many heads you cut open. I'd tell you that you might as well get used to it, but by tomorrow, you're going to forget the last few days ever happened. And if my employers are feeling very, very generous, your little stunt won't make them change their minds and have you dissected alive.”
There's finality in that statement. When Michelle raises her arm, a gun has appeared in her hand. She's done playing with him, and he's out of places to run.
“This is going to hurt,” she says cheerfully. “Kind of...a lot. Be glad you won't remember it, honey.”
She aims.
Then an explosion tears through the air, and the ground splits open under Sylar's feet.
Michelle is knocked off balance. Whatever her ability is doing to him, it's thrown off along with her.
Even as Sylar throws himself to one side to escape the unsteady ground underfoot, the cell and the blood melt away. In the time it takes to blink, he's suddenly back in the blizzard, landing in a kneeling crouch against the snow-drifted ground.
Disorientation fades, and he's staring out across a windswept stretch of flat, treeless terrain, snow howling across the waste with the sting and ferocity of a sandstorm. A sharp crack echoes across the emptiness, like the splintering snap of hollow bones. It vibrates in the air, trembles under his feet. A heavy, inexplicable dread stirs in him, one that that has nothing to do with the imminent threat of capture.
He glances down, and realises that he's still holding the bloody tire iron in one hand. Between the numbness in his fingers and Michelle's illusions tricking his senses, he'd forgotten he was clutching it.
Sylar looks around, and sees just how thoroughly Michelle's powers warped his perception. She's standing far off to the side, nowhere near where he thought she was. If he'd tried to attack her a moment before, he might as well have been blind and deaf for all the good it would have done.
But now...
He might not have his powers. But when it comes to defeating illusions, Sylar doesn't need a vorpal blade to do the work of a tire iron.
The world begins to writhe around him again as he rushes at her, but he clings to reality with vicious determination. The illusion flickers in and out, storm to cell and back again, clawing for purchase in his mind.
Michelle aims the gun. Sylar is faster.
The tire iron connects perfectly with the side of her head, and the sound it makes has never been sweeter.
Illusions crumble to dust as Michelle crumples to the ground. Despite himself, Sylar is already itching to see what prize her brain might yield for all his trouble and pain and indignity. Unlike Peter, the arrogant bitch can't heal her way out of it. Even if he can't take her ability, he'll damn well enjoy trying.
Sylar never gets the chance. Another explosive shock tears through the storm. Those gut-wrenching cracks echo again, louder this time. As the ground splits and heaves under his feet, he sees it for what it is:
Ice.
The ice crumbles away. He's falling, trying to grab hold of something, and finds nothing but snow and empty air until he hits the water.
The shock of the cold water is agonizing, ravenous. His body reacts, instinctively gasping greedy breath after greedy breath, but none of them are enough. He reaches for the edge of the ice, scrabbling for a handhold to pull himself out of the water before his limbs go too numb to function-
Then another burst of energy flashes out of the storm. Raw agony seizes his body in one crippling, nerve-searing flash, blinding him, making him oblivious to the explosions that follow, and then-
_____
...it's cold.
Thoughts and senses lie scattered, jigsaw fragments strewn at random. His mind automatically sets about fitting the pieces together. He's good at that.
Something's wrong.
Is this another trick, like forest turning labyrinth, or the cell? That woman and her illusions won't stop him. He's lost, and powerless, and fighting people who want him dead or worse. But he's a survivor. Evolution's chosen. He's escaped capture before. He's escaped death so many times that it might as well stop trying. He can survive this.
Something else.
What? The damn weather? Please. A blizzard doesn't scare him. Not so long ago he was the eye of the metaphorical storm, and destiny whips and coils in a maelstrom around him. Once he had enough power to level a city. He'll have it again if - when - he gets his abilities back. He's just-
I'm dying.
Sylar's eyes snap open.
He can't see a thing. But he doesn't need to see to know that he's underwater.
The cold is all razors and knives, flaying him without mercy as he jerks in the icy water. He looks around frantically, searching for something - anything - to orient himself. There's no sense of up and down, just the tug of the current trying to pull him this way and that.
How long was he out? A few seconds? His lungs are already screaming for air, shuddering with his efforts not to gasp again and again. He needs to breathe, and his body doesn't care that his next breath will be a lungful of icy water.
It feels like an eternity before he thinks he sees a part of the liquid darkness that's slightly paler than the rest. It's as much of a beacon as he's going to get.
For a moment, he can't even tell if he's moving. His body is so unresponsive, so seized with pain and cold and fatigue. His clothes feel so heavy now. His chest aches with the effort of holding what remains of his breath. He's fighting his own body as much as the water as he closes the distance, reaches toward the pale-
And slams into an unyielding ceiling of ice.
No...
Sylar moves, turns around as much as he's able, looking desperately for a glimpse of where he broke through the surface, seeing only the dirty underside of the ice overhead. The dark water might as well be a blindfold.
NO!
Lungs burn for air as he pushes himself in random directions, fighting against the invisible hands of the current scrabbling to latch on. He couldn't have been dazed for more than a few seconds! The hole in the ice has to be close! He could find it if he could just fucking see something!
As he slams the heels of his palms against the ice, he can't hold his breath any longer. It escapes his lungs in one screaming rush, muffled by the greedy black water. He tries to bite down as the last of the air escapes, stave off that instinct to gasp for breath, but it's only a matter of time before his body gives in or his throat seizes.
I'm dying.
He's very certain about that. One last twist of the knife, one final insult. All his powers lost, and the only advantage he has left to him is the ability to comprehend just how screwed he is.
For an instant, he's furious that he didn't die back in Kirby Plaza. A sword through the heart instead of the lung, rightly defeated by those destiny had gathered, swallowed up in apocalyptic fire...
Instead, he's going to die here. Nowhere. Drowning in a cage of ice, lost to some pathetic imitation of that lowest, most torturous circle of Dante's Hell.
If his body is ever recovered, it will be nothing but a nameless, faceless forensic mystery. There will be no clue as to who he was or why he was here, nothing but a broken watch on his wrist that means nothing to anyone else. There will be nothing to prove he was ever significant.
He won't die as Sylar.
He won't even die as Gabriel Gray.
Sylar fights, and rages, and searches, and pounds against the ice. All equally frantic. All equally useless.
He reaches for abilities he knows are lost to the void, and he doesn't care because he has nothing else left. He claws for even a scrap of telekinesis to shatter the ice. Just one little burst of nuclear fire to sear a hole above and save him.
He's never needed his powers more than he does now. One power, one second... That's all he needs. That's all. Just a tiny reserve, an echo of his true potential, another curare-drip miracle... God, anything, ANYTHING!
He gets nothing.
It isn't long before his body betrays him further. As hard as he resists, traitorous reflex eventually wins. He's finally forced to gasp for breath, and his lungs flood with frigid water.
I'm dying.
He wonders if he should be afraid. He's fairly certain he should, but there's still more anger than fear. He has to survive, can't accept any other scenario, and part of him is baffled that reality isn't accommodating that.
Was he ever afraid to die? Or could he just not abide it being an...unimportant death?
For a long time, he continues to struggle. Or imagines he does. Maybe his body stopped responding a long time ago, and that frantic indignation has been quietly exhausting itself in his mind.
He can't tell. He barely wonders. Things are slipping away, one fragment at a time. Soon his last shreds of consciousness will fade, too.
At that thought, there's a desperate need to resist. He grabs, clumsy and blind, clutching at intangible things that slip away like fog, searching for something that will hold back the dark a while longer.
Eventually, he catches one plain little realization: he can't feel the cold quite so much now.
That's...
That's nice. He's tired of being cold.
_______________________________________
( On to part 2... )
TITLE: Black Ice (1/2)
AUTHOR: barhaven
CHARACTERS: Sylar, Peter, Candice (gen)
RATING: PG-13
SPOILERS: Early season 2.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: After the "powerless!Sylar should have met up with amnesia!Peter in volume 2" idea came up in the Sylar thread over at TWoP, I couldn't let it go. This was the result. The lovely forsquilis was kind enough to beta. She wrote a different variation on the same idea over yonder, and I highly recommend it.
Part 2 is here.
____________________________________________
The storm screams around him, blinding and biting and impossible, and he can't make himself believe it isn't real.
Not after those hours upon hours spent chained in the dark with only his own frantic breaths, useless struggles, and quiet heartbeats to fill the void.
Not with his wrists aching from hours of fighting against a set of handcuffs.
Not with amnesia turning the confinement from unbearable to hellish, battering his mind with attempt after attempt to dig out memories, only to be denied every time.
Not after that wave of dizziness seized him, a violent sense of relative movement like being pushed from a mad carousel. Invisible tendrils grasped and clawed and fought to drag him in a hundred different directions, until he feared they'd tear him to pieces as punishment for some selfish crime he can't remember.
He didn't care what awaited at the end of that freefall through a storybook rabbit hole, as long as he wasn't in the dark any more.
Anywhere but here.
And now he is.
There's no sudden landing, no bone-shattering impact. The ground is simply there under his feet - why did he so honestly expect it to be anywhere else? - and the world floods through his deprived senses. His dark, nowhere prison is gone, transformed into the softer, natural darkness of night. His arms move freely now, and only the raw red marks on his wrists prove he was ever restrained at all.
That's where the improvements end.
In all those hours chained in the dark without name or memory, he hadn't considered that there was anywhere worse he could find himself. Now the stale, thick air has been replaced with raw talons of ice, raking at him without mercy, cutting through his clothes with diamond-blade ease. Snow whips in howling, maelstrom spirals, and stings with such a beautifully cruel indifference.
It's abundantly clear that reality has no reservations about destroying his naïve assumptions. It seems to take a vicious glee from dragging him out of one hell and straight into another.
Before he can even begin to fathom how he got here, he's staring down a wash of headlights and the scream of car brakes over black ice.
He reacts. Instinct throws him to one side. He hits the snow-streaked asphalt painfully hard, bracing himself for the collision.
It never comes. The car veers, missing him by the barest few inches. It skids as the driver fights to maintain control, then churns up a wake of snow and icy gravel as it grinds to a stop on the shoulder of the road a short distance ahead.
The near-miss takes a moment to register. He remains crouched on the ground, adrenaline-quick breaks fogging in the frigid air.
It's still impossible to muster any hope that this is a bad dream. The cold is too biting. The wind has too much of a flesh-numbing sting. The icy asphalt is too solid under his aching hands and knees. The snow pelting him and soaking through his clothes is too much of an insignificant detail for a dream to bother emphasizing.
The car door is thrown open, and dry radio static drifts across the road. There are quick footsteps, his rescuer rushing over to where he's trying to drag himself to his feet.
'Rescuer.' It's an automatic assumption in his mind. Of course this person will help him. If they wanted to, they could have driven away already.
“H-help...help me,” he manages. Only when he moves to wipe the snow from his eyes does he realize how hard he's shivering. “Please, I don't know how-”
He trails off as he looks at the stranger.
“You-?!” the man hisses.
What about me? he wonders.
Then a tire iron smashes into the side of his head, and darkness eagerly reclaims him.
_____
How could that have possibly been so easy?
Sylar stares at the bloody mess sprawled at his feet, numb with equal amounts of cold, hate, and shock. Blood drips freely from the tire iron. A few more drops next to the stain pooling gently across the snow-swept asphalt.
There has to be a catch. A trick. No amount of coincidence could be this malicious.
No, he reminds himself, it absolutely could. From the moment he woke up in that isolated Company facility a few days ago, things have only found ways to get worse. His sole stroke of luck was the one that allowed him to escape: he hadn't been quite as sedated as the Company agent thought he was, and guns weren't much use against a bone saw to the back of the head.
Everything since has been a parade of futility and frustration. It's been days of walking and driving through endless cold and snow with only a few short hours of daylight. He still feels like he'll never be warm again. That damn sword wound - sword wound! - in his chest is a constant source of pain. The memory gap between Kirby Plaza and now is an uncomfortable dark spot, like a shadow on an x-ray. It promises something worse waiting to be found, but there are enough distractions to render that mystery a moot point for now.
If he's going to run into anyone in the middle of nowhere, of course it would be Peter fucking Petrelli.
Sylar prods the bleeding, unconscious Peter with one snow-caked boot. It turns into a vicious kick to Peter's ribs that sends the man rolling sideways, giving a glimpse of the odd burn marks on his shirt. His hair is shorter than the last time Sylar met him. That makes it easier to see the blood and clinging clumps of snow caking the side of his head.
Sylar leans closer, shields Peter's head with one arm to keep the blizzard's barrage at bay. The headlights of the stolen car point off into the roadside trees, a million tumbling snowflakes streaking past like TV static. Not ideal lighting, but it's enough that he doesn't have to root around for the flashlight he saw in the trunk when he dug out the tire iron.
If only there had been a gun tucked away back there. A knife, maybe. Even a hatchet wouldn't go astray. However far he's made it since escaping, it isn't far enough if he's already stumbling across people who want him dead.
The tire iron crashes down again.
Again.
Again.
Each wet crunch of flesh and bone flecks his coat with bloody little fragments of Peter Petrelli, but he can't take a single bit of satisfaction from it.
His powers are gone. It always comes back to that, and every other misfortune and pain and frustration pales in comparison. Whatever the reason and whoever is to blame, everything is gone. All of it. That leaves him nothing. Hollow. Powerless. Angry. Vulnerable. Gabriel.
The last few days have given him ample motivation to kill anyone and everyone who had a hand in him winding up like this. Even now, his missing powers are still a phantom limb. Whenever he tries to TK something into his hand, or wonders why he can't hear as well as he should, it tears the wound fresh all over again. At his lowest points, he's bitterly wondered if he'll have to resign himself to being Gabriel Gray once more. There's no possibility that fills him with more revulsion. No one, not the Company or the enemies he's made in the last few months, could conceive of a worse fate then forcing Sylar to live every day for the rest of an insignificant life, knowing what he's lost.
Peter makes a wet, blood-choked sound deep in this throat. The damage is already being undone, as quick as the blizzard is covering up the swerved tire tracks. Bone crunches and slides, reforming Peter's shattered face and sealing his fractured skull shut once more. Flesh stretches back into place, weaving seamlessly shut until there's only blood stains to show for it.
“What the hell are you even doing here?” Sylar demands as if Peter could hear him. His hand aches as he grips the makeshift weapon tighter, fingers tinged red and raw from the touch of frostbite a few days past. “Were you the best they could do? If it's not that 'company' trying to vivisect me, it's people like you deluding yourself into thinking you're being a hero.”
There are two more vicious, bone-splintering, blood-splattering blows before he lets the tip of the tire iron droop down to thunk against the pavement.
Cathartic, but ultimately useless. Even unconscious, Peter's body sets to work healing itself as if nothing happened.
That wonderful, perfect invulnerability. The power Sylar has been cheated out of time and again. The sword wound seems to ache harder out of spite, and he wonders if all this exertion has made it ooze through the bandages again.
Sylar reaches out with his free hand, and probes the most gaping of Peter's head wounds. Flesh and bone squirm under his fingers, sparking a shiver of anticipation.
He overheard things before he escaped that Company facility. About his injuries. The multiple surgeries. Misplaced confidence that he was no longer dangerous.
Insinuations that his abilities are so deeply broken - 'neutralized', as they so infuriatingly phrased it - that even acquiring new ones will be impossible.
Well. One way or another, he can't let Peter wake up to hunt him down, powers blazing. It's the perfect time to find out.
The last few days haven't given much cause for blind optimism, but this unexpected complication isn't without its up sides. If his own abilities are well and truly gone, he could do worse than inheriting Peter's. He's only seen Peter display a handful of powers, but suspects the man has so many more squirrelled away in that brain of his.
Worst-case scenario, it doesn't work and Peter dies. What a fucking tragedy.
A smile crosses Sylar's face for the first time in days.
Opening Peter Petrelli's skull will be like Christmas.
_____
Sylar tries.
And tries, and tries, and tries. If he's going to accept failure, it's not going to be for lack of effort.
After he dragged Peter to the car to get out of the blinding snow, he crouched outside the open back door to have enough room to work. No other cars have come along the snow-stained road - only the desperate or reckless would be driving tonight - but it hasn't mattered anyway. Drifting snow covered the blood stains on the pavement within a few minutes.
Eventually, Sylar's bloody hands pull back from Peter's head. He snatches up the tire iron again, and it's tempting to smash it down until his arm hurts.
Desperation and hatred goad him on, but futility cuts through: Peter is healing too fast. Even if he could pry far enough into the man's skull before it healed over, removing a brain is no easy task. They don't just fall out like spaghetti from a pot. Telekinesis made it easy - it made a lot of things easy - but now? He had the luxury of time with Brian Davis in his watch shop, not to mention the luxury of convenient, sharp tools. Now he has little more than blunt force trauma and his bare, numb hands. If he had a knife, he could do this quickly. If he had an axe, he could smash his way through Peter's skull easily. If he had a gun, he might be able to do enough damage to render the healing a moot point. But that wonderful and infuriating power, the one thing he needs, the one thing that would make this entire miserable ordeal worthwhile...
It's sitting right there, and even if he could acquire it, Peter's body is healing faster than he can work. Peter will heal, and heal, and fucking heal. No matter how bloody Sylar's hands become, he'll never leave square one. And Peter won't stay unconscious forever.
As Sylar leans in for another stubborn attempt, a sound cracks across the highway. From out of the blizzard, the twin barbs of a taser gun whip toward him.
It's his obsessive preoccupation with Peter that saves him. If he'd given up on his prize a second sooner, the taser's wires would have bitten squarely into his neck. One little moment, one mistake, and the months or years that followed could have been a haze of experiments and needles and torture, spent too drugged into oblivion to even think about escape.
But he moves, and the taser's wires miss their mark. One dives past him entirely, a bare inch away from his neck, and collides with the side of the car. The other brushes against his jaw, slapping him with a painful surge of electricity that tears a surprised scream from his throat before he can stop it.
Sylar jerks away from Peter, and he's back on his feet in a second.
“You should have made the first shot count,” he sneers. He touches his jaw where the taser glanced him. It aches fiercely in response. How could he have been distracted enough not to notice someone sneaking up on him with a damn taser gun?
He squints through the curtains of snow in search of his attacker, but sees no one. The only vehicle is his stolen car, still idling. Still buzzing quiet static from the speakers. He'd been wandering from AM to FM in search of a station with decent reception, cut short when he slammed on the brakes to avoid the figure in the road. A faint “...comfort me at the right time, everything's gonna be alright...” slides through the white noise on ludicrously calm chords.
Even above the howl of the wind and the static-chewed radio, he doesn't need his enhanced hearing to detect the sound of a gun being cocked.
Close. Too close.
So close that, if he can't see the person wielding it, that has to mean they have some kind of ability to-
...oh, fuck.
Once again, pure luck saves him. The wind sends snow drifting in a particularly fierce, stinging barrage, and it's just enough to throw off his attacker's aim as he lunges away from the car. The explosion of a firing gun - a real one this time, not a taser - tears through the storm, over the garbled “...make me do anything you want...” hissing from the radio. The shot rings deafening in his ears, but the bullet hits asphalt.
A second shot, and this one nicks the fabric of his coat. Sylar darts to the side of the road.
He plunges off the edge of the snow-streaked highway, down the steep roadside incline. Frozen gravel slides loose underfoot, and dead, brittle weeds brush past his legs with every step.
Another shot rings out. The bullet bites a splintered chunk from a tree, inches away.
He doesn't get to appreciate that third near miss, because he doesn't look back to see it. He hits the tree line, the forest swallows him up, and he's running blind.
_____
“-have to speak up, I can't- Because it's the middle of nowhere and the middle of a fucking blizzard. The reception sucks.”
Consciousness returns, reluctant and sluggish. Peter blinks blood from his eyes, and wonders why he's not dead.
“Yes. Mm-hm. No, it's being taken care of. Well- What? How am I supposed to know? Ask your daughter, I hear he was her pet for the last few months. I just thought you should know about the...complication.”
Someone is talking. His first desperate hope is that it might stir his memories back into existence. He's sorely disappointed when the mental void stays as stubbornly empty as ever.
“I know that- Look, I know- I KNOW that, Bob! For Christ's sake, I did get the e-mail. I'll bring them both in. No big deal. I know, I know: 'Peter slipping away was bad enough, but the last thing we need is a killer like Gabriel Gray running free.' I heard you the first time.”
The last of the ache in his head ebbs away, and he looks around. He's lying in the back seat of a car, staring out the open door at the wisps of snow that snake across the road like sand.
“Yeah. Fine,” the voice - a woman's voice - finally sighs. “I'm taking a vacation after this. Someone else can freeze their ass off babysitting a murderer.”
Peter looks toward the front seat. Windshield wipers creak gently over the salt-and-dirt-stained glass, and... There. A woman is just outside, leaning against the hood as she snaps her cell phone shut. It disappears into a pocket on her skimpy winter jacket, and she walks around to the open car door.
The frigid night reaches deeper into his bones every second. Of all the things to think about, he finds himself wondering why she doesn't seem cold.
“Who are you?” he manages numbly, and realizes he can taste blood.
He looks down. If he thought nothing else could shock him this evening, something is apparently determined to prove him wrong.
Blood. There's blood all over the car seat. Smeared on his shirt. Splattered on the edge of the open door. Pooled on the snow-streaked asphalt outside, or what little of it hasn't been covered over already. A glimpse at the rearview mirror reveals a veil of red streaked across his face, smeared through his hair...
He tries to jerk back, but he's handcuffed to the car door. Memories of those hours locked in the dark are suddenly all too vivid.
A sly smile twitches over the woman's lips.
“My name is Michelle,” she says, casual as if she'd just slid over to sit beside him at a bar. “I'd love to chat, cutie, but I have a bit of a situation right now. Nice that you've recovered, though. That means this shouldn't do any long-term damage.”
Before Peter can even open his mouth, he's assaulted by pain. It surges, wracking his body into convulsions, tearing a long, hoarse scream from his throat as he slumps back to the blood-soaked car seat.
When he's able to focus enough to look up, the woman is holding some kind of... What is that? A gun? How? He didn't see her reach for anything. It's like it simply appeared in her hand.
“Sorry,” she says, smiling down at him with perfectly fake concern. “It's a bitch, I know. But I need you quiet until I get back. This won't take long.”
He can't find enough coherent thought to reply. He can't even find a voice to scream again when she draws a different gun, aims down, and sends three bullets tearing into him.
_____
He's being hunted.
In one way or another, Sylar has felt that way for days. The time spent walking across miles of frozen nowhere brought him face to face with some of the local wildlife before he finally managed to reach something approaching civilization, but that was nothing next to the raw force of the elements. The cold itself turned predator out here, biting through his clothes and flesh, eating him alive. At times he'd pushed on by forcing himself to focus on the pain from his sword wound, simply because it took his mind off freezing to death.
Still, it's that shadowy company's motives that have kept him on edge, kept him moving to put as much distance between himself and this place as possible. He didn't glean much information before he escaped, but there were fragments in his captors' hushed discussions, even in the evasive non-answers to his angry questions before they'd attempted to sedate him again. Broken powers or no, someone in that organization's ranks has a suspicious, twisted interest in his well-being to invest so much time and effort into repairing his wounds. Too much to let him simply walk away.
They'd come looking for him, he suspected. And he's just been proved right.
He keeps running long after he leaves the road behind, the forest passing in a blur of tree trunks and whipping branches and spiralling snowfall. The snow is deeper here, hiding the roots and stumps and rocks eager to trip him. Whenever old snow cracks underfoot, he has to fight for every bit of ground. His sword wound burns every step of the way. Every last one of his stitches has to be torn by now.
He trips then, or stumbles, or his legs simply decide to give out. One second he's running, the next he's collapsed to his knees in a snowdrift, clutching his abdomen with one hand and the bloody tire iron in the other. His chest stings with every gulped breath of frigid air, and his throat aches with the effort of biting back pain.
There's a trickle of moisture between his numb fingers. There's so much of Peter's blood on his hands that he's not sure if it's snow, or if it's blood and pus weeping through his coat.
In the distance, shots ring out.
Then it's quiet again. Just his pained breaths fogging before his eyes, the storm coiling around him, and the creak of branches heavy with snow.
Sylar looks around. Trees loom on all sides, pole-thin trunks of evergreens stretching up toward the storm, spilling into a canopy of sparse needles and trailing, brittle moss. The ground under his feet could be a trail, but the only thing to prove it is that the snow isn't so deep as to be impassable. The only reason he can guess which direction he came from is because he can see his own footprints slashed through the snow. Even as he watches, the wandering drifts are rapidly wearing that away.
Sylar pushes himself back to his feet, pulls his hands into his sleeves a bit for some small measure of warmth, and glares into the trees. He's met with the nagging, irrational sense that they're glaring back.
“Well?” he snaps, struggling to suppress shivering that surges every time the cold knifes through. “Are we going to do this all night, or are you going to show yourself?”
There's no answer. Just more snow, more wind, more creaking branches.
“So, what is your ability?” he goads. “Invisibility? I once met someone who thought he could beat me with invisibility. I killed him with a piece of glass.”
Sylar waits, and watches, and suppresses the urge to shout his frustrations into the uncaring storm.
Who is he trying to fool? If his pursuer is working for the people who brought him to this godforsaken place to begin with, they could be laughing their ass off at his bluff.
Every second, every step, every breath brings constant reminders of how easy things would be if he had his powers. That ambush on the highway? They were just bullets, for God's sake! There was a time when he could have stopped them dead in the air. He could have heard his attacker coming long before they ever got a shot off. He would have killed them without breaking a sweat, added one more power to his collection- No, he wouldn't, because he wouldn't even be here in the first place!
Reality has made it abundantly clear that it doesn't care. He's broken, and injured, and vulnerable, and lost. Now he's been tricked, he's strayed from the path, and something is coming for him.
Sylar stares defiant through the trees, listening for signs of pursuit. He catches only imagined sounds and shapeless things darting at the corners of his vision. Phantasms brought on by paranoia and pain and the storm's malice, wasting his attention with figments and monsters when there's a real threat to worry about.
If there's anything there at all, it's hiding among the Jabberwock impossibilities. Ghosts and monsters and distractions from his own mind, all cunning and infinite hunger, whiffling and burbling through tulgey wood. There's a real threat amongst them somewhere, but without his abilities, he has no vorpal blade to wield against it.
He's running again, then. Slapping branches aside, half blind with snow stinging his eyes, pine needles and dead branches scratching across his face and bare hands, and damn it, why didn't he put his gloves on before he got out of the fucking car-!
Sylar runs, and he is followed.
_____
Storm wind and music-tainted static drift across the road. They nearly drown out the soft, muffled sound of spent bullets sliding free and dropping to the bloody floor of the car.
Death reluctantly loses its grip, and Peter bolts upright with a choked gasp.
The handcuffs are rattled against the car door, pulled and twisted in a half-conscious reenactment of his struggles in the dark those long hours past.
Then his wrists slide free - slide through - as if the metal handcuffs are no more substantial than water.
Outside the car, footsteps lead off into the trees.
_____
Something is leading him astray.
At first Sylar is too distracted with exertion and pain to notice, but the subtle tickle of disorientation is growing too strong to ignore. Even as he runs and weaves and stumbles onward, the path seems to waver and double back on itself. The trees writhe and shift imperceptibly, a creature with consciousness and purpose herding him along. It leaves confusion trailed across his awareness. Membrane-thin, but very tangible.
Something isn't right, his analytical mind insists.
As much as he's resisted succumbing to paranoia, resented the childish illusions the storm brings out to haunt him...
This time he believes it. Movement, feeling, thought, sight, sound... The more he pays attention, the more it feels they're not quite in sync, like a video with its soundtrack a fraction of a second off.
Then, in the time it takes to put one foot in front of the other, the world melts away.
Sylar comes to a dead stop.
In the space of a second, the sheets of snow and clutching branches disappear, and featureless walls take their place. The snowdrifts underfoot fade to concrete. The dark and stormy night brightens around him, until it glares painfully fluorescent. Confused information floods across his senses, forcing away his perception of the cold and the sensation of the pelting snow. There's a distant notion that they're still there. It's more that his brain is being forced to ignore them and accept something else in their place.
“Stop it,” he hisses at whoever happens to be listening.
If they hear him, they aren't intimidated. The last of his new surroundings melt into place, and he's suddenly very, very far from the blizzard.
Familiar walls stand around him. Stark concrete on three sides, under his feet, over his head, the final wall fitted with a window of bulletproof glass. Featureless sterility. A grey blanket trails off the edge of the thinly lined slab that serves as a bed, coiling at his feet. Nothing in this room is built with comfort in mind; it's built to be a cage. To reduce the most dangerous of the dangerous to prisoners and lab specimens.
He knows this room. When you're trapped for days to be tested, drugged, and experimented on, it's hard to forget.
This time there's no Bennet looking down on him from behind the safety of the glass. In his place there's a redheaded woman Sylar's never seen before, smirking from the other side of the viewing window.
“Relax, honey,” she says. “If you keep this up, it'll take two more surgeries to patch you up again. Wasn't eight enough?”
Sylar glances down, and sees that it isn't just his location that's changed. His clothes have been replaced with that familiar, chafing, Primatech-issue white, and there's only cold concrete against his bare feet.
Or so it seems. Nothing feels right. There's a tangible weight pressing against his senses, shapeless and squirming and hidden. There's a nagging sense that this is a stage, something is demanding his attention from behind the curtain, but he can't pull it aside to see. So for now, he has no choice but to make do with whatever its painted backdrops and wooden props see fit to substitute for reality.
“What did you do?” he demands.
“I thought a change of scenery would be nice,” she says with a shrug, as if she's simply changed a TV channel. “I hate snow. My name is Michelle, by the way. But I wouldn't worry about-“
“I don't care what your fucking name is,” he hisses, taking a threatening step closer to the glass that separates them. “I asked what you're doing.”
“Would it kill you to show some gratitude to the person who saved your life?”
“Oh, right.” Sylar cocks his head to one side for a sneer. “Thanks for trying to shoot me. I'm so glad you care.”
“I wasn't shooting to kill. Besides, that's not what I meant. Maybe a little, 'Golly, Michelle, thanks for pulling me off Kirby Plaza! Not bleeding to death sure means a lot to me!'”
Sylar blinks, and his sword wound aches viciously at the memory. “You dragged me off Kirby Plaza?”
“It's okay,” she continues with a playful little frown, “I know gratitude isn't your strong point. Kind of picked up on that. You're not dead of blood loss, sepsis, or a collapsed lung, and the first thing you do is try to kill the people who are helping you. Did your mother teach you manners? No wonder you murdered her.”
“'Helping' me?” Sylar ignores Michelle's attempt to hit a sore spot, and flings a hand out to gesture at the cell around him. “Capturing me, you mean.” Sylar mirrors her smirk from a moment before. He points at the glass between them, tracing a slow horizontal line with his index finger, aching for his telekinesis. “How long do you really think you can keep me here, Michelle? Other people have tried. Find the ones who are still alive and ask them how it went.”
“It's for your own good.” If the sudden conviction on Michelle's face is fake, it's very convincingly fake. “The people I work for want to help you, Sylar. That's what we do; we help people. You almost died from that sword wound. It took us months to repair as much of the damage as we did.”
“So you did what any hospital could have done.”
“You'd be dead anyway if we hadn't kept your survival a happy little secret. Do you remember Noah Bennet? Mohinder Suresh? The only reason you're alive is because all the people you've ticked off think you're dead. But you know that, hm? Looks like a certain someone already found you. Funny, we were wondering what happened to him.”
“Petrelli works for your company now?” If Peter does work for them, it hasn't done anything for the man's competence. He apparently missed the 'not getting your head bashed in by the person you're supposed to be capturing' part of Company orientation.
“Not exactly 'works for'," Michelle says with a slight eye roll, giving she and Sylar one lone sentiment they can agree on. "But Peter is a...person of interest.”
Sylar shrugs indifferently. “Take him. He'll bleed his heart all over you for saving his life.”
“He's just a bonus, honey. You're the prize. If the wrong people find out you're alive, you're not going to stay that way for long with your powers gone. If you'd calm down and let me-”
“My powers...?” The question is heavy with promises of sharp objects and long screams to anyone who had the least bit to do with his current condition. “What did you people do to me?”
“What makes you think we did anything?”
“Educated guess,” he sneers. He kicks the coiled grey blanket at his feet. “The last time I was in this cell, it was on Bennet's watch. His idea of 'helping me' was to take my powers away and have a hole drilled in my skull.”
“You did try to murder his daughter. Funny how some people can hold a grudge over a little thing like that.”
When Sylar's glare darkens, Michelle sighs as if she's dealing with a petulant child.
“So your powers are gone. Must have been your injuries,” she says with a shrug. “From what I heard, the doctors were too busy intubating you and stopping the internal bleeding to worry about whether you'd still be able to move things with your mind.”
“So why did you save me?” he snaps. “Everything I worked for is gone! I can't even-!”
He stops mid-sentence as Michelle's form flickers before his eyes, fading into something very familiar.
“What's the matter?” a black-coated Sylar mocks him from the other side of the glass, a perfect mirror of how he looked that night at Kirby Plaza. “Do you miss being the villain already, Gabriel?”
Sylar throws himself toward the window.
Just before he can slam his hands against the glass, things...distort. The world shifts around him, like an image shuddering from a jammed film projector. Disorientation squirms cold across his mind-
And just like that, he's back in the middle of the cell.
Michelle stands at the window once more. She gives him a wicked, playful little finger-wiggling wave.
“This isn't real,” Sylar says. He can't prove it, but saying it out loud steels his certainty.
Michelle smiles.
“You want to see something real, honey?”
Again, there's that subtle little squirm against his senses. When he looks down, his breath catches in his throat.
There's blood. A lot of it. So much of it, soaking though the white Primatech prison clothes, smeared like a murder scene (and he knows a thing or two about those) along the floor and bed. Blood seeps crimson through the t-shirt, stains his hands far more than Peter's managed to, smears at random like he's been dragged through an abattoir, all the way to the puddle of red pooling at his bare feet.
The blood is all oozing from a single source; his sword wound. The t-shirt is torn apart perfectly, laying the gash bare. This isn't the half-healed injury that's been gnawing slow agony for the last few days. It's torn wide, angry and raw and fresh as the moment he was stabbed, blossoming blood and squirming with a sickening, wet sound every time he takes a breath. If he could see his back, he's certain he'd see an exit wound to match it.
“This isn't real,” he hisses. The words hide how much effort it's taking not to clamp his hands over the wound, that instinct to staunch the bleeding he's convinced he feels.
It's not real. It's not fucking real. Sylar is certain of that, as certain as he is that Michelle is doing this somehow. She's putting images and lying sensations into his head, or making him hallucinate, or plucking at memories... Something.
He stalks forward, raising his bloody hands to pound them against the glass, as if throwing enough rage and effort behind it will miraculously break the illusion or bring his powers back.
Futility is quick to reprimand him. There's that familiar lurch, that disorienting jolt as the world twists neatly around him like a möbius strip-
And he's back in the centre of the cell again.
Despite himself, a greedy little whim in his mind marvels at her ability. He aches to wipe that smirk off her face, tear her brain apart, and make her power his own.
Michelle seems to see a hint of that creeping hunger. She taps a finger against the glass with the look of someone teasing a caged animal. A bitter reminder that she isn't the least bit intimidated by him. This familiar cell probably isn't real, no more real than the blood or her smug theatrics, but he's trapped as completely as if it were.
“Relax,” Michelle tells him, giving him another playful smile for his trouble. “I'll tell you a secret, handsome: your abilities are more than a little broken. You won't be reacquiring powers any time soon, no matter how many heads you cut open. I'd tell you that you might as well get used to it, but by tomorrow, you're going to forget the last few days ever happened. And if my employers are feeling very, very generous, your little stunt won't make them change their minds and have you dissected alive.”
There's finality in that statement. When Michelle raises her arm, a gun has appeared in her hand. She's done playing with him, and he's out of places to run.
“This is going to hurt,” she says cheerfully. “Kind of...a lot. Be glad you won't remember it, honey.”
She aims.
Then an explosion tears through the air, and the ground splits open under Sylar's feet.
Michelle is knocked off balance. Whatever her ability is doing to him, it's thrown off along with her.
Even as Sylar throws himself to one side to escape the unsteady ground underfoot, the cell and the blood melt away. In the time it takes to blink, he's suddenly back in the blizzard, landing in a kneeling crouch against the snow-drifted ground.
Disorientation fades, and he's staring out across a windswept stretch of flat, treeless terrain, snow howling across the waste with the sting and ferocity of a sandstorm. A sharp crack echoes across the emptiness, like the splintering snap of hollow bones. It vibrates in the air, trembles under his feet. A heavy, inexplicable dread stirs in him, one that that has nothing to do with the imminent threat of capture.
He glances down, and realises that he's still holding the bloody tire iron in one hand. Between the numbness in his fingers and Michelle's illusions tricking his senses, he'd forgotten he was clutching it.
Sylar looks around, and sees just how thoroughly Michelle's powers warped his perception. She's standing far off to the side, nowhere near where he thought she was. If he'd tried to attack her a moment before, he might as well have been blind and deaf for all the good it would have done.
But now...
He might not have his powers. But when it comes to defeating illusions, Sylar doesn't need a vorpal blade to do the work of a tire iron.
The world begins to writhe around him again as he rushes at her, but he clings to reality with vicious determination. The illusion flickers in and out, storm to cell and back again, clawing for purchase in his mind.
Michelle aims the gun. Sylar is faster.
The tire iron connects perfectly with the side of her head, and the sound it makes has never been sweeter.
Illusions crumble to dust as Michelle crumples to the ground. Despite himself, Sylar is already itching to see what prize her brain might yield for all his trouble and pain and indignity. Unlike Peter, the arrogant bitch can't heal her way out of it. Even if he can't take her ability, he'll damn well enjoy trying.
Sylar never gets the chance. Another explosive shock tears through the storm. Those gut-wrenching cracks echo again, louder this time. As the ground splits and heaves under his feet, he sees it for what it is:
Ice.
The ice crumbles away. He's falling, trying to grab hold of something, and finds nothing but snow and empty air until he hits the water.
The shock of the cold water is agonizing, ravenous. His body reacts, instinctively gasping greedy breath after greedy breath, but none of them are enough. He reaches for the edge of the ice, scrabbling for a handhold to pull himself out of the water before his limbs go too numb to function-
Then another burst of energy flashes out of the storm. Raw agony seizes his body in one crippling, nerve-searing flash, blinding him, making him oblivious to the explosions that follow, and then-
_____
...it's cold.
Thoughts and senses lie scattered, jigsaw fragments strewn at random. His mind automatically sets about fitting the pieces together. He's good at that.
Something's wrong.
Is this another trick, like forest turning labyrinth, or the cell? That woman and her illusions won't stop him. He's lost, and powerless, and fighting people who want him dead or worse. But he's a survivor. Evolution's chosen. He's escaped capture before. He's escaped death so many times that it might as well stop trying. He can survive this.
Something else.
What? The damn weather? Please. A blizzard doesn't scare him. Not so long ago he was the eye of the metaphorical storm, and destiny whips and coils in a maelstrom around him. Once he had enough power to level a city. He'll have it again if - when - he gets his abilities back. He's just-
I'm dying.
Sylar's eyes snap open.
He can't see a thing. But he doesn't need to see to know that he's underwater.
The cold is all razors and knives, flaying him without mercy as he jerks in the icy water. He looks around frantically, searching for something - anything - to orient himself. There's no sense of up and down, just the tug of the current trying to pull him this way and that.
How long was he out? A few seconds? His lungs are already screaming for air, shuddering with his efforts not to gasp again and again. He needs to breathe, and his body doesn't care that his next breath will be a lungful of icy water.
It feels like an eternity before he thinks he sees a part of the liquid darkness that's slightly paler than the rest. It's as much of a beacon as he's going to get.
For a moment, he can't even tell if he's moving. His body is so unresponsive, so seized with pain and cold and fatigue. His clothes feel so heavy now. His chest aches with the effort of holding what remains of his breath. He's fighting his own body as much as the water as he closes the distance, reaches toward the pale-
And slams into an unyielding ceiling of ice.
No...
Sylar moves, turns around as much as he's able, looking desperately for a glimpse of where he broke through the surface, seeing only the dirty underside of the ice overhead. The dark water might as well be a blindfold.
NO!
Lungs burn for air as he pushes himself in random directions, fighting against the invisible hands of the current scrabbling to latch on. He couldn't have been dazed for more than a few seconds! The hole in the ice has to be close! He could find it if he could just fucking see something!
As he slams the heels of his palms against the ice, he can't hold his breath any longer. It escapes his lungs in one screaming rush, muffled by the greedy black water. He tries to bite down as the last of the air escapes, stave off that instinct to gasp for breath, but it's only a matter of time before his body gives in or his throat seizes.
I'm dying.
He's very certain about that. One last twist of the knife, one final insult. All his powers lost, and the only advantage he has left to him is the ability to comprehend just how screwed he is.
For an instant, he's furious that he didn't die back in Kirby Plaza. A sword through the heart instead of the lung, rightly defeated by those destiny had gathered, swallowed up in apocalyptic fire...
Instead, he's going to die here. Nowhere. Drowning in a cage of ice, lost to some pathetic imitation of that lowest, most torturous circle of Dante's Hell.
If his body is ever recovered, it will be nothing but a nameless, faceless forensic mystery. There will be no clue as to who he was or why he was here, nothing but a broken watch on his wrist that means nothing to anyone else. There will be nothing to prove he was ever significant.
He won't die as Sylar.
He won't even die as Gabriel Gray.
Sylar fights, and rages, and searches, and pounds against the ice. All equally frantic. All equally useless.
He reaches for abilities he knows are lost to the void, and he doesn't care because he has nothing else left. He claws for even a scrap of telekinesis to shatter the ice. Just one little burst of nuclear fire to sear a hole above and save him.
He's never needed his powers more than he does now. One power, one second... That's all he needs. That's all. Just a tiny reserve, an echo of his true potential, another curare-drip miracle... God, anything, ANYTHING!
He gets nothing.
It isn't long before his body betrays him further. As hard as he resists, traitorous reflex eventually wins. He's finally forced to gasp for breath, and his lungs flood with frigid water.
I'm dying.
He wonders if he should be afraid. He's fairly certain he should, but there's still more anger than fear. He has to survive, can't accept any other scenario, and part of him is baffled that reality isn't accommodating that.
Was he ever afraid to die? Or could he just not abide it being an...unimportant death?
For a long time, he continues to struggle. Or imagines he does. Maybe his body stopped responding a long time ago, and that frantic indignation has been quietly exhausting itself in his mind.
He can't tell. He barely wonders. Things are slipping away, one fragment at a time. Soon his last shreds of consciousness will fade, too.
At that thought, there's a desperate need to resist. He grabs, clumsy and blind, clutching at intangible things that slip away like fog, searching for something that will hold back the dark a while longer.
Eventually, he catches one plain little realization: he can't feel the cold quite so much now.
That's...
That's nice. He's tired of being cold.
_______________________________________
( On to part 2... )