Heroes Fic: Territories
Title: Territories
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Sylar/Luke
Word Count: 8000
Warnings and spoilers: Vague spoilers through season 4, AU-ness of a canon-bending kind melding the Virus AU and events of season 4. Just don’t think too hard about it and you’ll be fine. Implied voyeurism, criminal behavior, and Issues.
Author’s notes: written for perdiccas for hope_in_sight. Thanks to redandglenda and jaune_chat for the beta help!
Summary: After the Shanti virus decimates the country, Luke finds himself immune and alone. Despite the freedom to do anything, he finds himself making a kind of plan.
The very worst thing about this entire situation, Luke decided, was that he was going to die a virgin.
--
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to find people. When Luke first got out of that Company hellhole in Texas and found no one alive, he’d traveled. He took a car, drove until it ran out of gas, then took another.
Early on, he saw bodies everywhere. He avoided them until he figured out the virus didn’t affect him. Whatever weird vaccine that Indian doctor had jabbed him with back in Texas had done something to him. His immunity made him bold. He scavenged for food amid bodies that lay festering in the street. A few times he stood at an intersection and shouted, “Hello!” at the top of his lungs, but no one ever answered.
--
Luke made it to St. Louis before he saw his first clean-up crew. While picking through the cigarette display at a White Hen Pantry, he heard a sound that took too long to recognize: the rumbling of a large motor vehicle. He stood frozen in disbelief while a big black truck-identical to the one government agents had held him in-passed by the window.
Breaks whined as the truck ground to a stop just down the block. The sound of voices shook Luke out of his shock. He scrambled to the window and squatted down, flattening himself against the wall.
When the voices didn’t come closer, Luke peeked carefully over the windowsill. Half a dozen men, outfitted in black bio-hazard suits and carrying semi-automatic weapons, were stuffing corpses into body bags and tossing them into the truck.
Luke jerked away from the window. These were the first people he’d seen in months, but his fear of ending up as a lab rat in a secret government facility somewhere still trumped his need for human contact.
Luke crouched below the window, hands glowing and ready with power, until he heard the truck start up and drive away.
--
On Interstate 55, Luke saw one of the black trucks lying on its side in a ditch and went to investigate. Inside, four men were dead, shot efficiently through the head. A fifth man, trapped under fallen equipment and weak and wretched in the grip of the virus, leveled a gun at Luke when he pried the door open.
“Help me,” the dying man rasped.
Luke glanced at the dead men and wrinkled his nose at the smell. “You shot them.”
“They were infected. I had to protect myself.” The man narrowed his eyes. “Are you infected?”
“No. I’m immune.” Luke watched the man’s reaction carefully and wasn’t disappointed when a feverish hunger rose in the man’s face.
“You found a cure? Give it to me.”
“It’s not, like, an antidote.” He started to poke around the wrecked van to see if there was anything worth taking. A pair of night vision goggles hung haphazardly from a broken case. Luke snatched them up while the man continued to watch him. “I couldn’t give you my immunity even if I wanted to.”
The man’s face contorted in ugly rage. His finger slid against the trigger. “Give it to me!” he screamed.
Luke lifted his hand and sent out wave after wave of power. The man’s scream morphed into a wet gurgle as his insides liquefied.
Luke clapped his hand over his mouth and nose to guard against the smell of burning plastic, sizzling flesh, and ozone of sparking machinery. He slung his new goggles over his shoulder and went back to the car.
--
In Hoboken, the Chevy Tahoe that had carried Luke since Pittsburgh sputtered and died on the side of the road. Luke couldn’t find another car whose engine would turn over, so he walked into Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel.
Luke had half expected to find civilization carrying on as usual in the city. If any place in the country would still have life, it would be New York. But there was no one.
“Hello!” Luke’s shout echoed off the impassive facades of skyscrapers and boomed back at him. The wind whistled down the empty streets, ruffling paper and other trash.
Luke threw himself down on the curb, stared up at the faded sun, and muttered, “Fuck.”
--
Luke spent his first night sleeping on a couch in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, because he hadn’t realized it would get dark so early. There was no electricity anywhere, and once the sun started to sink below the skyscrapers, the canyons between buildings lost light quickly. Luke didn’t want to be stuck somewhere unfamiliar in the dark, so he ducked into the hotel. The lobby was huge and echo-y, and pitch black once the sun had set all the way.
When he woke up in the morning, he threw blasts of his microwave power all over the place, melting décor and destroying furniture, just so he would never again have to look at the room whose shapes had loomed like boogeymen in the dark.
Luke had been to New York twice with his mom and once on a school trip, but he didn’t know his way around the city, not really. For the first few days he simply wandered, and when he got tired, he broke into a building and found somewhere to sleep. He found stores with food still on the shelves. He gorged himself on a crate of Sour Patch Kids he found in the storeroom of a 7-Eleven and spent an afternoon throwing up in the park.
Once, when he was trying out the night vision goggles, he tripped over an overturned trashcan and went crashing to the ground. Sure that someone had heard, he snatched off the goggles and ran haphazardly through the streets until he collapsed against an alley wall, panting.
No one had heard him. No cops or outraged shopkeepers would be coming after him. No angry old men would yell at him for making noise in the middle of the night. No group of older kids would chase him down and punch and kick him until he couldn’t stand.
Laughing, Luke jumped to his feet. “Yeah, that’s right! Fuck you! I don’t give a fuck!” He strode out into the street and screamed back in the direction he’d run from. “It doesn’t matter! You’re all dead, fuckers, and I’m still here! How’s it feel now! How does it feel?!”
--
On the fifth day, he broke into a loft in lower Manhattan. A painting covering a large swath of floor showed the city blowing up in an explosion: a nuclear bomb or something. Luke wondered if he could have the power to do that someday. He doubted it.
The loft held a weird mix of piled-up lab equipment, old paintings, and household stuff. On one table of supplies next to half-empty tubes and dried out brushes, Luke spotted a stack of spray paint cans.
“Sweet.”
Luke dropped his backpack on the table and went in search of a bed.
--
The novelty of going where he wanted and doing what he wanted wore off quickly. No one would berate him again, or tell him he was a failure. But then again no one would offer him advice on how to act like a master of the goddamn universe. And then there was that virgin thing.
Evading the authorities had become a natural reflex on his trek to the coast. Now that he’d made it to the city, he tried to rid himself of old habits.
Instead of hiding when he heard a new noise, he went toward it. Usually an unexplained sound turned out to be just the wind, or a damaged structure finally giving way, or sometimes a rat dragging something away to its nest.
Once he saw a dog: a mangy, skinny mutt with dirt-matted fur. It was sniffing around a pile of steaming garbage in front of a boarded-up convenience store on Avenue A. For a moment Luke watched the dog silently. He entertained visions of teaching the thing to hunt for him and of the two of them trekking through the deserted city together like in that Will Smith movie.
Luke took a cautious step closer. The dog’s head snapped up. He spotted Luke, jumped into a defensive crouch, and growled.
“Easy, boy.” Luke held out a hand and edged closer.
The dog barked furiously, and when Luke took another step, it snapped at him.
“Fuck!” Luke jumped back and pushed out a burst of energy.
The dog dropped with a pathetic yelp and lay motionless on the dirty pavement. Juices began to ooze out of splits in its skin.
Luke stood staring, his heart pounding, until he was sure the dog wasn’t getting up. “Dumb dog.” Luke brushed his hands off on his pants and walked quickly away.
--
“Shit,” Luke muttered. He wiped his hands furiously against his t-shirt, which accomplished nothing aside from spreading the paint stain.
He shook the can again. This time when he pointed it at the wall, he made sure the nozzle faced the right way. Color spurted against the gray cinderblock in an unruly arc. Luke sprayed three looping lines on the wall just to get a feel for the paint. He’d never been much of an artist. He didn’t know what he wanted to paint. Not that it mattered much, he imagined, since no one was around to see it anyway. Well, probably no one. If anyone had survived all this, he would have.
Luke stepped back up to the wall and scrawled three barely legible words. He backed off to admire his handiwork. Slashed across the wall like a scar were the words, “Sylar was here.”
--
Graffiti became a hobby and something of an obsession for Luke. He foraged whenever he saw something that looked useful or edible. He carried his supplies back to his loft. Sometimes he ate lunch-franks and beans out of a can heated up with his ability-sitting on the floor in the middle of the painting of New York blowing up. But those were chores. Tagging seemed more important.
He started carrying a can of paint with him when he went out for supplies. Whenever he saw a building or a landmark he recognized, he tagged it with his own little inside joke: “Sylar was here.” He underlined the words with an arrow pointing back toward his loft. It became his signature, and he left it everywhere: the crosswalk outside of Penn Station, the columns of that library with the lions, every single door of the Empire State Building, on the pavement in the middle of Times Square. He thought about going to Liberty Island to tag the statue there, but he couldn’t work out how to get across the water.
Sometimes leaving a tag behind felt like laying a trail of breadcrumbs that Sylar could follow to find him. Other times it felt like he was building his own memorial no one would mourn over when he was gone: carving an epitaph on a whole city full of tombstones.
--
Luke’s tags were getting more consistent and precise. Sometimes he gave one word or another an extra flourish by playing with the curve of a letter or the angle of the slant. He’d seen other, old graffiti around town and puzzled over it, wondering how those long-dead artists had made pictures and faces and elaborate scenes out of the contents of an aerosol can.
One afternoon he grabbed three cans of paint and went out to look for a place to practice. He didn’t want to work outside, as he had the sense that would ruin the citywide canvas he’d been working on. Instead, he melted through a plastic overhead door to a warehouse on Orchard Street. The place was mostly empty, but he had to shove some empty shelves out of the way to clear enough wall space to work.
He experimented with first one can of paint and then another, but he couldn’t get the scale quite right. His faces looked like cartoons, his people like stick figures. An hour or so of effort yielded only some embarrassing scribbles that looked nothing like the kind of thing he’d want someone to find. With a disgusted grunt, he sprayed over his work, blotting out his failure.
From farther inside the warehouse, he heard a rasping sound, almost like a cough. He stood perfectly still, listening. The cough didn’t happen again, but Luke could swear he heard footsteps.
“Hello?” Luke called. His voice creaked like rusted hinges. “Someone there?”
From the impenetrable shadows at the other end of the warehouse, something metal clanked and slid against the floor as if kicked. Luke gripped his spray can like a weapon.
This had to be it. Sylar was going to step into the spill of the day’s last sunlight filtering in from the street. He’d give Luke that narrow, calculating look, and then probably kill him.
Luke waited, dick throbbing, barely breathing. Finally he called out, “Sylar?”
He waited until the last of the light leached out of the building, but he heard nothing else. He fumbled his way back to the loft in near darkness, threw his painting supplies on a table, and jerked off furiously.
--
Luke used a rock to break the store window. He didn’t want to waste the batteries in the little flashlight he’d found, so he tore down the thick, dusty curtains to let in the weak afternoon light.
The first thing that caught Luke’s eye was the wide wall of porn movies. He wished to hell he knew something-anything-about electricity: at least enough to hook up a generator and get a DVD player working.
He wandered through the rest of the store, picking up something here or there to look at. He slid a bottle of lube into his pocket. A rack of skin mags stretched across the length of the store. Luke ran a finger over the body of an open-mouthed blonde on the shiny cover of a Playboy dated four months ago. Farther down the aisle his eye caught on another magazine: a well-muscled, dark-haired man stood over a pale young twink spread out on his back on a table.
Luke stared at the older man in the photo: the hair spreading over his chest, the hungry expression on his face. He snatched the magazine and bolted. He vaulted through the window he’d broken and ran two blocks, laughing the whole way.
--
Luke waited until evening fell to take his clothes off and kneel on his bed. He’d been thinking about this for hours now, and he was already hard. He opened the magazine to a page where the dark-haired man was buried to the hilt in the other guy’s ass.
Luke spread his legs and pushed a finger experimentally into his hole. His skin pulled against the intrusion, and not in a pleasant way. He eased his finger back out and reached down to the floor to grab the lube from the pocket of his pants.
The Astroglide spurted out of the bottle faster than Luke anticipated and coated his whole hand. Luke cringed for a moment before he remembered that no one had witnessed his mistake, or ever would. “Whatever,” he muttered.
This time his finger slid in easily. He clenched his muscles, enjoying the tight feel of it. He settled his knees farther apart and pushed in a second finger.
--
Luke left his mark on more of the neighborhood’s buildings. He squinted at the latest of his work in the thin morning light: “Sylar was here” scrawled untidily across the dusty beige stone of the NYPD Ninth Precinct. He thought Sylar would appreciate the disdain for authority. He drifted closer to the door of the building.
A police station. There were probably guns inside. Not that Luke knew how to fire a gun, but he could probably figure it out. Although he’d had a friend, Jeremy Beidler, in the third grade, who’d shot off two of his fingers with his dad’s forty-five. If Luke shot himself, he had nowhere to go for help. He would become just another body: dead meat stinking up this graveyard of a city.
And maybe Sylar would happen upon him, two months or two years from now, following his trail of graffiti. He’d look down at Luke and laugh at how stupidly he’d died after surviving the virus so long, and he’d congratulate himself for dumping the dumb kid when he had.
Luke decided he wasn’t interested in guns. He walked away from the police station and headed home.
--
The next time Luke went back to the store-that store-he brought back another bottle of Astroglide and a dildo. And condoms. Just in case. He got on his hands and knees again on his bed, which was rapidly becoming his favorite way to end the day.
The first push of slick plastic sent a sharp pain snapping along his nerves. His cock, which had been hard the entire way back from the store, now began to wilt.
Luke pulled the dildo out. He took two deep breaths, adjusted his position, and closed his eyes. He pictured Sylar: his big hands gripping Luke’s hips, his hard dick-his cock had to be huge-spearing into Luke. He wanted to feel that. This time when the dildo pressed into him, Luke relaxed. The full, tight feeling distracted him from the stretch and the sting.
“Sylar,” he whispered into the covers. “Yeah.”
--
Luke got new sheets for his bed at one of those girly home goods stores. The place was almost entirely intact, so Luke had a bewildering variety to choose from. He figured the ones marked as most expensive were the best-some thousand-count Egyptian cotton crap, whatever that meant-so he picked up a package of those in black. He thought briefly about getting a bigger bed, but he didn’t really have a way to get such a thing back to his loft.
He could just move somewhere with a nicer bed: there were amazing, almost palatial places sitting empty around town. Somehow, Luke didn’t like the thought of giving up his place. Besides, all his tags pointed to the loft.
He brought the sheets back and made his bed. He took the old sheets out to the street and set them on fire just for fun.
That night when he stretched out naked on thousand-count Egyptian cotton, he felt like he wouldn’t be too embarrassed to have someone spend the night at his place.
--
When Luke woke up to see a man standing in his loft, his first thought was to run. He tensed all over, fists clenched to fight, and wondered if he had time to at least put on some pants before he was killed.
At the center of the room, right on top of New York exploding in smoke and fire, stood Sylar. His hair hung in his eyes, longer than Luke remembered. He wore the same black jeans and shirt that had practically been his uniform when Luke knew him. He didn’t look sick: no bloodshot eyes or flushed skin like other people Luke had seen dying of the virus.
Sylar took a slow survey of the loft. When he finished, he turned to Luke lying naked in his bed and looked him up and down. Sylar’s mouth twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile. “Funny that you chose this place.” He said it casually, as if they were in the middle of a conversation. “I’ve been here before, but you couldn’t possibly have known that.” He paced over to a stack of old canvases Luke hadn’t bothered to examine, and brushed a hand over the one on top. “I killed the artist who painted these.” He turned and pointed to the floor, to the painting. “Right there, in fact.”
Luke shook off his paralysis to sit up and swing his legs over the side of the bed. He groped along the floor for his pants and pulled them on without looking away from Sylar. “There weren’t any bodies when I got here.”
“No, this was years ago.” Sylar kept looking at the floor. “Sort of a waste.”
“I thought you always had a plan.” Luke stood up, and considered getting a shirt. But the rest of his clothes were in a pile at the foot of the bed, and he wasn’t ready to turn his back on Sylar. Sylar, who was here in his loft, alive, talking to him. “Aren’t you supposed to know your end game before you lift a hand or some shit?”
“Yes.” Sylar’s gaze snapped to him. “Seems like you have a plan of your own. I saw your graffiti.”
“Oh.” Luke’s face heated even as he frowned at himself. His whole plan had been for Sylar to see his tags, and now that he had, Luke felt ashamed and childish. His eyes darted to the floor by the loft’s entrance, where he’d dropped his backpack with its aerosol cans. Sylar followed his gaze.
“Why did you write that?”
“Felt like it.” Luke shrugged, trying for an air of indifferent smugness but, to his chagrin, landing somewhere closer to petulant. He tried again. “I was like your apprentice, right? So if you were gone, why couldn’t I be Sylar?”
“I’m not gone.” Syalr’s thin smile unnerved Luke. “In fact.” He strode over to the door, snatched up Luke’s backpack, and pulled out the can of black spray paint. He turned around, and Luke shrank back instinctively, as if the paint could have some power greater than the ones Sylar already wielded.
“I’ve been watching you for a while.” Sylar moved toward the center of the loft, gliding slowly and silently like the predator Luke knew him to be. “I’ve seen your little games.”
Luke’s mouth went dry thinking of all the times he’d stripped naked on his bed, fingered himself hard, and called out Sylar’s name when he came. Luke’s cock twitched in exquisite terror.
“Juvenile delinquent crap,” Sylar went on. “Destructive. And yet, not totally random.” He came to a halt just over the mural on the floor and shook the spray can slowly. “You left clues. Practically a map. You wanted someone to find you. But you didn’t go looking for other survivors. Why?”
Normally Luke was an excellent liar. Perhaps not speaking to anyone for a few months had blunted his skills, or maybe he remembered how easily Sylar had always seen through his bullshit, because he simply said, “I was waiting for you.”
“That’s right.” Sylar’s smile didn’t widen, but he seemed pleased. He pulled the top off the spray can and sank into a crouch. His finger depressed the button and the paint sprayed out in a graceful arc.
Luke stumbled forward in time to see a line of black paint cut into the exploding skyline he’d come to know so well. Sylar’s hand was steady and efficient. Luke took only a second to recognize the words that were forming in a perfect imitation of his own style: Sylar was here.
Sylar underlined the tag with a single bold line instead of an arrow. He rose and took a step back to admire his work. Luke stood transfixed, staring at the familiar tag that marked the whole city. He felt now as if he hadn’t actually been painting those words at all these past months, but that Sylar had written them all using Luke as a proxy. He stumbled closer, and the words swam in his vision: Sylar was here, Sylar was, Sylar Sylar here here.
“Luke.” Someone grabbed his shoulders and sat him down on the steps by the table of broken lab equipment. His body felt too light, as if it was made of air; the only thing that felt heavy was his cock, full and hard between his legs, weighing him down. “Luke.” Someone knelt before him, breaking his line of sight to the paint-marred floor. Sylar.
“I came here from Texas,” Luke said. Suddenly it seemed important to get this out, so he spoke in a rush. “I remembered you were from New York, so I thought if I could find you anywhere it’d be here, unless you were dead, but that didn’t seem too fucking likely. I avoided the cops, those agents, everyone. I wasn’t going to get caught again, you know? And I thought if I could just get to the city, I could figure it out. I’d find you or you’d find me, even if no one else was alive in the whole fucking country. But shit, I don’t know, this place is so big, like a goddamn haystack or whatever, and for all I know you wanted me dead anyway, but that’s bullshit, because I know the way you looked at me and I’m not fucking stupid. You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t want something from me. How long have you been spying on me? I mean, you see what I’m doing here?”
Luke lurched to his feet and stumbled over to the bed, gesturing at it wildly. “’Cuz I thought maybe you were following me, but you didn’t say a damn thing, so what was I supposed to think? A guy’s entitled to jerk off in the privacy of his own home after the apocalypse, okay, and it shouldn’t matter whose name he yells or what he says, because even--.” Luke saw a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned just in time to be tackled onto the bed on his back.
“Luke.” Sylar straddled him, pinning one of Luke’s wrists with each hand. “Shut up.”
Luke didn’t move for a moment as he adjusted to the feel of Sylar’s hands on him, his legs around Luke’s waist, his weight heavy against Luke’s pelvis, and there-as Sylar leaned forward to loom over Luke-the hard line of Sylar’s cock in his jeans jutting against Luke’s bare belly.
“Oh fuck,” Luke whispered. His hips jerked up involuntarily against the solid weight of Sylar’s ass, and then his body stiffened into a taut arc as he came inside his pants.
Luke slumped, tension wrung out of him, but he didn’t dare open his eyes. He lay there gulping in desperate breaths, wondering if it was possible to die of shame, until Sylar rocked against him.
Luke wrenched his eyes open to see Sylar’s smug expression as well as the tantalizing outline of Sylar’s hard on-no, really, he must be huge-still trapped behind his zipper.
“Sorry,” Luke muttered. He tried to keep his eyes somewhere in the vicinity of Sylar’s chest-definitely not meeting his eyes.
Sylar raised an eyebrow and rolled his hips against Luke again. “How long has it been since anyone else even touched you?”
“Uh.” Luke tried to remember, but the memories of a time when other people inhabited his world had already become hazy and indistinct. Could be that the Company doctor who gave him the vaccine was the last one to lay a hand on him. “Long time,” Luke muttered.
“I see.” Sylar nodded, as if his suspicions had been confirmed.
“Hey, uh,” Luke tried. His voice cracked, so he swallowed hard and tried again. “Have you really been watching me?”
“Yes.” Sylar shifted his grip on Luke’s wrists, but otherwise remained still.
“So uh… I guess you know what… Uh…”
Sylar nodded.
“Yeah. Okay. So… Do you want to…?”
Sylar raised an eyebrow.
“You know, like…?”
Sylar just kept looking at him.
“God, quit being an asshole!” Luke struggled against his grip, but Sylar leaned his superior weight into the struggle, easily trapping Luke. With an inarticulate snarl, Luke let the heat from a dose of his power seep out of his hands.
Sylar hissed in pain but didn’t let go. Luke felt his whole body being pressed into the bed, almost crushed by the force of Sylar’s mind.
Luke relented, letting his power drain away and going lax against Sylar’s restraint.
Only then did Sylar grin and lean in closer to his ear. “Are you asking me to fuck you, Luke?”
A lustful shudder rippled through Luke’s body. His cock was already starting to harden again.
“Is that what you mean, Luke?”
Luke didn’t trust his voice, so he just nodded against Sylar’s shoulder.
“Say it, Luke.”
Luke clenched his hands into fists tightly until he got his brain under enough control to come out with something other than an unintelligible moan. “Yeah, that’s what I’m asking.”
“Then show me.” Sylar climbed off Luke to sit at the foot of the bed with his back against the wall. “Go on.”
Luke blinked at him. He took several seconds to figure it out. “You want me to…?”
“Show me.” Sylar’s voice sounded rough, and Luke experienced a jolt of pleasure at the thought that he was responsible for that. “I want to see it up close.”
Luke sucked in a breath as arousal warred with embarrassment: Sylar had seen him, had watched him get off to fantasies of getting fucked by Sylar. Luke had fantasized about that, especially after he thought Sylar might be following him. But now the prospect of Sylar actually here, regarding him coolly from a distance of three feet, made Luke hesitate. He knew he wasn’t much to look at, so he couldn’t fathom why Sylar would want to watch him do anything, especially when he was right here, begging for Sylar to use him.
Sylar must have noticed his hesitation, because he leaned his head back against the wall, closed his eyes, and pressed his hand to the front of his pants. “I saw you the day you went back to that shop,” Sylar said. “You came out with that toy, and I knew I had to follow you home. I needed to see what you had planned. It’s so dark in this damn city, but I saw enough to know I couldn’t wait much longer.” His eyes cracked open. “Show me?”
There was almost a “please” in Sylar’s question, and that’s what decided Luke. He lay back on the bed and shucked his pants, wiping off the sticky remnants of his come as he went.
Sylar sat very still, except for his hand tightening on his pants to squeeze the outline of his dick.
Luke reached into the drawer of the nightstand, which held a jumble of petty treasures. He grabbed the lube first and squeezed some of it into his hand. He was probably loose enough from the fucking he’d given himself last night that he didn’t require much prep, and suddenly Luke wanted Sylar to know that. He snatched up the dildo from the drawer and smeared his lube-covered fingers over it. He leaned back against the headboard, spread his legs, and tipped his hips up.
Sylar’s eyes darted all over Luke’s body, as if he couldn’t decide where to look. The hunger in his eyes spurred Luke on: he was well on his way to hard again. Actually having Sylar here in his bed made all his old fantasies pale in comparison. Luke’s memory hadn’t done justice to the low rumble of Sylar’s voice, the lean lines of his body, the air of menace that clung to him like a second skin.
“Fuck,” Luke muttered. He closed his eyes and pushed the slick dildo against his hole. It was a tight fit with no stretching beforehand, but there was plenty of lube, and Luke knew how to take it. He concentrated on relaxing, and exhaled one shaky breath. The dildo slid inside in a long, smooth push. Luke opened his eyes in time to see Sylar clenching his teeth, eyes fixed on the toy disappearing into Luke.
Deep breaths and momentary stillness gave Luke time to adjust. He slid the toy out and twisted it back in, establishing an easy rhythm. Luke kept the his motion slow, steady, and constant, holding Sylar’s attention like a snake charmer.“Why didn’t you say you were following me?” Luke asked.
Sylar looked up to meet Luke’s glance. His eyes were glassy, and Luke thought he just might get a straight answer. “You might have been infected,” Sylar said distractedly as his hand rubbed circles against the front of his pants.
“That doctor at the Company gave me a vaccine. I’m immune.”
“Mohinder?” Sylar leaned forward, curious.
“Maybe.” Luke shrugged. He didn’t remember the guy’s name. “But you must have figured out I wasn’t sick.” His hand kept working, sliding the toy between his legs, but he couldn’t seem to control his mouth. His words came out haltingly, interrupted by each thrust of the dildo inside him. “How long have you been following me? Before that day in the warehouse?”
“Before that.” Sylar leaned closer. His hand came forward as if reaching for Luke, but dropped to the bed instead. His fingers clenched the black Egyptian cotton. “Before.”
“That was, like, two weeks ago at least.” Luke hooked a hand over his right knee and pulled his leg up, spreading himself for Sylar’s view. “What were you waiting for?”
Sylar walked forward on his knees. He laid a hand on Luke’s spread leg, keeping him open, and dropped the other hand on Luke’s thigh like a brand. “Seeing what you’d do if left to your own devices,” he said softly.
“I can take care of myself.” Luke emphasized his point with an extra deep jab from the toy that brushed past his prostate. Luke concentrated on keeping enough active brain cells to do the talking thing. “I’ve got initiative.”
“I can see that.” Sylar knelt between Luke’s legs; his wide stance shoved Luke’s thighs wider apart. “But I came here for a reason. You need me.”
A stubborn part of Luke wanted to protest. He’d gotten across the country by himself, and he survived life in the city every day. But now, with his hard cock throbbing between his legs and his plastic toy not coming close to filling the emptiness inside of him, Luke felt he hadn’t been surviving after all. He’d only been holding on to the city tooth and nail, sending up signal flags and praying for rescue with elaborate rituals on the altar of this bed in the dark each night.
“Well.” Luke licked his lips, which were suddenly very dry. “Now you’re here…What are you going to do?”
Sylar’s hand clamped over Luke’s on the toy, pulled it slowly out of him, and tossed it aside. “We’ll do things my way.” He let go of Luke and leaned back to pull off his shirt.
Luke slumped against the headboard and watched eagerly as Sylar stripped. When at last he discarded his pants and briefs, his impressive hard-on stood proudly against his hairy belly. Luke trapped a moan behind his teeth, but the twitch of his own cock betrayed his excitement.
Sylar returned to loom over Luke, and this time he grabbed Luke’s wrists and pinned them on either side of his head while he pressed their bodies tightly together. The hard, wet push of Sylar’s cock against his thigh made Luke instinctively spread his legs. Sylar’s mouth, inches from Luke’s own, curled into a smile.
“I was perfectly content to be the last man alive until I saw that first tag of yours. Anyone else I might have killed, but when I figured out it was you…” Sylar ground against him, a sinuous press. “I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Your mouth, mostly.” He dropped his head to lick a line against the seam of Luke’s lips. “Always with a smart answer and a lie. I started to think how that mouth would feel on my cock.”
At that image, Luke’s mouth dropped open on a little gasp. Sylar pressed his advantage by darting his tongue inside and stealing a quick taste before pulling away.
“I thought about you on your knees, wrapping those lips around me. And then.” Sylar chuckled and thrust his cock against the angle of Luke’s hip. “Then I found out what you were doing at night: touching yourself. Here in your bed playing with your ass while you thought of me.” Sylar released one of Luke’s wrists to reach for the bedside drawer. A condom flew to his hand; he ripped it open with his teeth. “We’ve both been thinking the same thing, haven’t we, Luke?”
Luke nodded and squirmed helplessly. Sylar quickly rolled on the condom and leaned over Luke again. “Say it.”
“You say it,” Luke shot back.
Sylar bared his teeth in a silent snarl. He hooked his arm under Luke’s knee, shoved his leg up, and leaned down close enough for Luke to feel the heat off his skin. “You’ve been begging for me to leave my mark on you. I’m going to.”
“I’ve already got your mark all over me.” As soon as it was out of his mouth, Luke bit his lip, cursing his tendency to say too much.
Sylar just blinked at him, gears turning behind his eyes as he seemed to be rearranging his assumptions. Luke took advantage of this distraction to crane his neck up and mash his lips against Sylar’s. He slid clumsily through the kiss for several seconds until Sylar opened up and jabbed his tongue past Luke’s lips.
Sylar shifted his hips, and the blunt head of his cock bumped against Luke’s hole. Luke tried to buck up, but Sylar kept a hold on his leg, limiting his leverage.
“Say it,” Sylar growled. His dick, slick with the condom’s lube, dragged up and down Luke’s ass without breaching him. “Go on.”
“Fine. Damn. Fuck me. Take me.” He tried to reach for his own cock, straining and leaking against his belly, but found his hands pinned by an invisible force. “Sylar. Come on, man, I need this. Sylar!”
Sylar shoved forward, pushing the breath right out of Luke. He couldn’t get any air in, or maybe his lungs had forgotten how to work because his whole existence was made up of Sylar inside of him.
“Shh.” Sylar’s hand smoothed Luke’s hair. “Calm down. Relax.”
Luke found himself able to gulp in air again. His muscles un-seized, and he could lean back into Sylar’s touch. He still felt the stretch of Sylar stuffed inside him-God he was huge-but the shock had eased.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Luke rasped.
Sylar slid the rest of the way in, slowly penetrating him while Luke clenched the soft sheets and trembled with the effort of keeping his legs spread. At last Sylar stilled, sheathed all the way inside Luke. His coarsely-furred belly pressed against Luke’s throbbing cock, and his hot, rapid breath beat against Luke’s shoulder.
Luke shifted experimentally. When Sylar immediately tensed around him, he grinned. “Feel good?”
“Luke…”
Luke deliberately clamped down around Sylar’s cock, and delighted in the resulting gasp. “Come on.” Now that he finally had Sylar inside of him, Luke felt greedy and desperate for more. “Come on,” he urged.
Sylar dropped his grip on Luke’s legs and grabbed his waist. He rolled them over together, keeping himself firmly lodged inside Luke’s ass. Luke came up straddling Sylar. He looked down to see Sylar’s smug, satisfied half-smile.
“You wanted to do this to yourself,” Sylar said. “Do it.”
Luke settled into position, checking his balance. He felt good: better than good-powerful. Luke didn’t know where to put his hands, so he let them rest on his legs for now. He rose up experimentally and sank down slowly. Sylar’s cock fit smooth and slick inside of him: tight, but almost too comfortable. Luke wanted to really feel it. To reassure himself this wasn’t just another fantasy.
Luke lifted up onto his knees until just the tip of Sylar’s cock was buried inside him, then slammed down hard. Luke’s whole body tensed as if he’d been hit, and Sylar sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.
Luke tried it again, twice in quick succession. The fucking felt fantastic, yeah, but the absolute best thing was the little change that washed across Sylar’s face every time Luke moved: a twitch of his mouth or a widening of his eyes Luke had never seen before.
Luke leaned back to brace a hand against Sylar’s hairy thigh. The next time he slammed down, Sylar’s cock slid over a place inside him that sent sparks of pleasure skating up his spine. He almost lost his balance, and he stopped briefly just to get his breath back.
Beneath him, Sylar smiled as if he knew exactly what he was doing. “Again,” Sylar rasped.
Luke bounced himself up and down on Sylar’s cock, angling forward to graze that wonderful spot on each stroke. Luke’s breath came in harsh gasps as his world condensed to the feel of Sylar inside him, beneath him. He forced his eyes open so he could look down and remind himself this was real-that it was Sylar he was really fucking.
“Luke.” Sylar’s hand closed around Luke’s throbbing dick in a welcome vise. He stroked Luke in time with his thrusts, which now seemed interminably slow. Luke sped up; he frantically worked himself on Sylar’s cock. An answering increase in Sylar’s pace chased Luke towards the edge.
“Luke.” The rumble of Sylar’s voice rolled through him in every place their bodies touched. “That’s it.” His hand tightened on Luke’s cock and he thumbed over the head. “You’re mine now.”
Luke stiffened all over and let out a strangled, wordless howl. His cock jerked in Sylar’s hand, spraying stripes of come against Luke’s belly and Sylar’s, too. He swayed a moment, feeling first weightless, then dizzy. His hands clenched weakly: he barely recognized the solid feel of Sylar’s muscled chest under his fingers.
Then his world flipped sideways as Sylar rolled them again. This time he pinned Luke’s wrists and leaned over him, a solid, confining weight that sent Luke’s pulse climbing again. Sylar pounded into him, deeper now that he was in control. Luke wrapped his legs around Sylar’s back, trying to draw him in farther. Sylar’s animal grunts sent electric aftershocks through Luke with every thrust. “Sylar…” Luke’s voice sounded weak and desperate. He needed this proof of Sylar’s ownership, maybe even more than the sex itself; he had to know Sylar wanted him. “Please.”
Sylar slammed into him harder, and his rhythm began to falter. His grip on Luke’s wrists redoubled. He thrust in once more to the hilt. “Mine,” he growled. His teeth sank into Luke’s shoulder as he shuddered through his orgasm.
As the tremors began to die out, Sylar slumped over Luke. Both their labored breathing calmed gradually as they recovered. Luke clenched his muscles, reveling in the feel of Sylar’s softening cock in his ass. He’d done that. He was good enough to please Sylar.
Sylar pulled out with remarkable care and rolled away to dispose of the condom. Luke touched his hole experimentally and hissed through his teeth. He was going to be sore for sure.
Sylar shot him a sharp, calculating look that Luke met unabashedly. “It’s okay,” Luke said. “I like it.” He wanted to walk around all day with a constant reminder of how it felt to have Sylar inside him.
Luke scooted to the edge of the bed next to Sylar. “So what now?”
Sylar stood, as unabashedly naked and gorgeous as those statues at the Met that Luke hadn’t had the heart to push over. Sylar walked to the grimy window. “The city’s ours,” he said. “We can do whatever we want.”
“Yeah.” Now that that virgin situation was taken care of, it was mission accomplished as far as Luke was concerned. Sylar wanted him. More than that, Sylar accepted him. Everything from here on out was a bonus. He got up and went to join Sylar at the window. “You have something in mind?”
Sylar slipped an arm around Luke’s naked waist, intimately, like a lover would. “I’ll show you.”
--
One month later
Luke wended his way home through Central Park, carrying the bag of groceries he’d picked out from a market he hadn’t raided before. The days were getting longer now, so he wasn’t in too much of a rush to get back to the loft. Besides, there were so many different ways through the park, Luke liked exploring different ones every so often.
He kept his eyes on the skyline, already bathed in the pink light of sunset’s early stages, as he trotted across a bridge over the lake. He was almost to the far end when he stopped and turned back. He walked back to the center of the bridge and looked down. What he’d taken for some kind of city seal was really his tag: “Sylar was here” in a precise hand, underlined with an arrow pointing back to the loft.
Luke glanced around, squinting at trees on the shore and the white cast iron of the bridge’s sides. None of what he saw challenged his certainty that he’d never been here before. He smirked down at the tag. If he hadn’t written this one, then Sylar must have done it. Luke had stopped taking his paint out with him every day; there’d been no reason to keep tagging once Sylar had found him. Apparently someone had taken over his duties.
The discovery sent Luke speeding back to the loft sporting a smug grin. Sylar was already home, bent over one of the tables, tinkering with some piece of little machinery he’d been working on.
Luke dumped his groceries on an empty table, crossed his arms over his chest, and stood there, expectantly watching Sylar. “I came home through the park,” he said.
“Hm,” Sylar said. He kept his eyes on his work.
“I went over this bridge I hadn’t seen before. That white one, by Cherry Hill?”
Sylar looked up at that. To Luke’s surprise, he wore a pleased smile. “You saw my tag, then.”
“Yeah.” Luke gave him a quizzical look. “I didn’t know you were still doing those.”
“Yes.” Sylar stood and strode toward Luke. He backed Luke against the empty table and planted a hand on either side, penning Luke in. “I like to mark my territory.”
“Yeah…” Luke laughed. “But there’s no one here to see it.”
“No?” Sylar raised an eyebrow. “There’s you.” He wrapped a hand around the back of Luke’s neck. “If I could, I’d tattoo my mark all over you. As it is, I like a reminder every once in a while that this whole city-everything in it-is ours.”
“Ours,” Luke repeated. A warm feeling, almost as hot as his power, spread through him. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
“You marked it first.” Sylar gestured to the tag over the painting on the floor. “The whole city belongs to you. But you.” Sylar brushed his thumb against the nape of Luke’s neck. “You belong to me. You’re mine.”
Luke closed his eyes for a second and allowed himself to lean back into Sylar’s gentle touch. Then he looked up again. He gave Sylar a smirk and a playful shove. Sylar stumbled backward, watching him carefully. “Prove it,” Luke drawled.
And Sylar did.
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Sylar/Luke
Word Count: 8000
Warnings and spoilers: Vague spoilers through season 4, AU-ness of a canon-bending kind melding the Virus AU and events of season 4. Just don’t think too hard about it and you’ll be fine. Implied voyeurism, criminal behavior, and Issues.
Author’s notes: written for perdiccas for hope_in_sight. Thanks to redandglenda and jaune_chat for the beta help!
Summary: After the Shanti virus decimates the country, Luke finds himself immune and alone. Despite the freedom to do anything, he finds himself making a kind of plan.
The very worst thing about this entire situation, Luke decided, was that he was going to die a virgin.
--
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t tried to find people. When Luke first got out of that Company hellhole in Texas and found no one alive, he’d traveled. He took a car, drove until it ran out of gas, then took another.
Early on, he saw bodies everywhere. He avoided them until he figured out the virus didn’t affect him. Whatever weird vaccine that Indian doctor had jabbed him with back in Texas had done something to him. His immunity made him bold. He scavenged for food amid bodies that lay festering in the street. A few times he stood at an intersection and shouted, “Hello!” at the top of his lungs, but no one ever answered.
--
Luke made it to St. Louis before he saw his first clean-up crew. While picking through the cigarette display at a White Hen Pantry, he heard a sound that took too long to recognize: the rumbling of a large motor vehicle. He stood frozen in disbelief while a big black truck-identical to the one government agents had held him in-passed by the window.
Breaks whined as the truck ground to a stop just down the block. The sound of voices shook Luke out of his shock. He scrambled to the window and squatted down, flattening himself against the wall.
When the voices didn’t come closer, Luke peeked carefully over the windowsill. Half a dozen men, outfitted in black bio-hazard suits and carrying semi-automatic weapons, were stuffing corpses into body bags and tossing them into the truck.
Luke jerked away from the window. These were the first people he’d seen in months, but his fear of ending up as a lab rat in a secret government facility somewhere still trumped his need for human contact.
Luke crouched below the window, hands glowing and ready with power, until he heard the truck start up and drive away.
--
On Interstate 55, Luke saw one of the black trucks lying on its side in a ditch and went to investigate. Inside, four men were dead, shot efficiently through the head. A fifth man, trapped under fallen equipment and weak and wretched in the grip of the virus, leveled a gun at Luke when he pried the door open.
“Help me,” the dying man rasped.
Luke glanced at the dead men and wrinkled his nose at the smell. “You shot them.”
“They were infected. I had to protect myself.” The man narrowed his eyes. “Are you infected?”
“No. I’m immune.” Luke watched the man’s reaction carefully and wasn’t disappointed when a feverish hunger rose in the man’s face.
“You found a cure? Give it to me.”
“It’s not, like, an antidote.” He started to poke around the wrecked van to see if there was anything worth taking. A pair of night vision goggles hung haphazardly from a broken case. Luke snatched them up while the man continued to watch him. “I couldn’t give you my immunity even if I wanted to.”
The man’s face contorted in ugly rage. His finger slid against the trigger. “Give it to me!” he screamed.
Luke lifted his hand and sent out wave after wave of power. The man’s scream morphed into a wet gurgle as his insides liquefied.
Luke clapped his hand over his mouth and nose to guard against the smell of burning plastic, sizzling flesh, and ozone of sparking machinery. He slung his new goggles over his shoulder and went back to the car.
--
In Hoboken, the Chevy Tahoe that had carried Luke since Pittsburgh sputtered and died on the side of the road. Luke couldn’t find another car whose engine would turn over, so he walked into Manhattan through the Holland Tunnel.
Luke had half expected to find civilization carrying on as usual in the city. If any place in the country would still have life, it would be New York. But there was no one.
“Hello!” Luke’s shout echoed off the impassive facades of skyscrapers and boomed back at him. The wind whistled down the empty streets, ruffling paper and other trash.
Luke threw himself down on the curb, stared up at the faded sun, and muttered, “Fuck.”
--
Luke spent his first night sleeping on a couch in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, because he hadn’t realized it would get dark so early. There was no electricity anywhere, and once the sun started to sink below the skyscrapers, the canyons between buildings lost light quickly. Luke didn’t want to be stuck somewhere unfamiliar in the dark, so he ducked into the hotel. The lobby was huge and echo-y, and pitch black once the sun had set all the way.
When he woke up in the morning, he threw blasts of his microwave power all over the place, melting décor and destroying furniture, just so he would never again have to look at the room whose shapes had loomed like boogeymen in the dark.
Luke had been to New York twice with his mom and once on a school trip, but he didn’t know his way around the city, not really. For the first few days he simply wandered, and when he got tired, he broke into a building and found somewhere to sleep. He found stores with food still on the shelves. He gorged himself on a crate of Sour Patch Kids he found in the storeroom of a 7-Eleven and spent an afternoon throwing up in the park.
Once, when he was trying out the night vision goggles, he tripped over an overturned trashcan and went crashing to the ground. Sure that someone had heard, he snatched off the goggles and ran haphazardly through the streets until he collapsed against an alley wall, panting.
No one had heard him. No cops or outraged shopkeepers would be coming after him. No angry old men would yell at him for making noise in the middle of the night. No group of older kids would chase him down and punch and kick him until he couldn’t stand.
Laughing, Luke jumped to his feet. “Yeah, that’s right! Fuck you! I don’t give a fuck!” He strode out into the street and screamed back in the direction he’d run from. “It doesn’t matter! You’re all dead, fuckers, and I’m still here! How’s it feel now! How does it feel?!”
--
On the fifth day, he broke into a loft in lower Manhattan. A painting covering a large swath of floor showed the city blowing up in an explosion: a nuclear bomb or something. Luke wondered if he could have the power to do that someday. He doubted it.
The loft held a weird mix of piled-up lab equipment, old paintings, and household stuff. On one table of supplies next to half-empty tubes and dried out brushes, Luke spotted a stack of spray paint cans.
“Sweet.”
Luke dropped his backpack on the table and went in search of a bed.
--
The novelty of going where he wanted and doing what he wanted wore off quickly. No one would berate him again, or tell him he was a failure. But then again no one would offer him advice on how to act like a master of the goddamn universe. And then there was that virgin thing.
Evading the authorities had become a natural reflex on his trek to the coast. Now that he’d made it to the city, he tried to rid himself of old habits.
Instead of hiding when he heard a new noise, he went toward it. Usually an unexplained sound turned out to be just the wind, or a damaged structure finally giving way, or sometimes a rat dragging something away to its nest.
Once he saw a dog: a mangy, skinny mutt with dirt-matted fur. It was sniffing around a pile of steaming garbage in front of a boarded-up convenience store on Avenue A. For a moment Luke watched the dog silently. He entertained visions of teaching the thing to hunt for him and of the two of them trekking through the deserted city together like in that Will Smith movie.
Luke took a cautious step closer. The dog’s head snapped up. He spotted Luke, jumped into a defensive crouch, and growled.
“Easy, boy.” Luke held out a hand and edged closer.
The dog barked furiously, and when Luke took another step, it snapped at him.
“Fuck!” Luke jumped back and pushed out a burst of energy.
The dog dropped with a pathetic yelp and lay motionless on the dirty pavement. Juices began to ooze out of splits in its skin.
Luke stood staring, his heart pounding, until he was sure the dog wasn’t getting up. “Dumb dog.” Luke brushed his hands off on his pants and walked quickly away.
--
“Shit,” Luke muttered. He wiped his hands furiously against his t-shirt, which accomplished nothing aside from spreading the paint stain.
He shook the can again. This time when he pointed it at the wall, he made sure the nozzle faced the right way. Color spurted against the gray cinderblock in an unruly arc. Luke sprayed three looping lines on the wall just to get a feel for the paint. He’d never been much of an artist. He didn’t know what he wanted to paint. Not that it mattered much, he imagined, since no one was around to see it anyway. Well, probably no one. If anyone had survived all this, he would have.
Luke stepped back up to the wall and scrawled three barely legible words. He backed off to admire his handiwork. Slashed across the wall like a scar were the words, “Sylar was here.”
--
Graffiti became a hobby and something of an obsession for Luke. He foraged whenever he saw something that looked useful or edible. He carried his supplies back to his loft. Sometimes he ate lunch-franks and beans out of a can heated up with his ability-sitting on the floor in the middle of the painting of New York blowing up. But those were chores. Tagging seemed more important.
He started carrying a can of paint with him when he went out for supplies. Whenever he saw a building or a landmark he recognized, he tagged it with his own little inside joke: “Sylar was here.” He underlined the words with an arrow pointing back toward his loft. It became his signature, and he left it everywhere: the crosswalk outside of Penn Station, the columns of that library with the lions, every single door of the Empire State Building, on the pavement in the middle of Times Square. He thought about going to Liberty Island to tag the statue there, but he couldn’t work out how to get across the water.
Sometimes leaving a tag behind felt like laying a trail of breadcrumbs that Sylar could follow to find him. Other times it felt like he was building his own memorial no one would mourn over when he was gone: carving an epitaph on a whole city full of tombstones.
--
Luke’s tags were getting more consistent and precise. Sometimes he gave one word or another an extra flourish by playing with the curve of a letter or the angle of the slant. He’d seen other, old graffiti around town and puzzled over it, wondering how those long-dead artists had made pictures and faces and elaborate scenes out of the contents of an aerosol can.
One afternoon he grabbed three cans of paint and went out to look for a place to practice. He didn’t want to work outside, as he had the sense that would ruin the citywide canvas he’d been working on. Instead, he melted through a plastic overhead door to a warehouse on Orchard Street. The place was mostly empty, but he had to shove some empty shelves out of the way to clear enough wall space to work.
He experimented with first one can of paint and then another, but he couldn’t get the scale quite right. His faces looked like cartoons, his people like stick figures. An hour or so of effort yielded only some embarrassing scribbles that looked nothing like the kind of thing he’d want someone to find. With a disgusted grunt, he sprayed over his work, blotting out his failure.
From farther inside the warehouse, he heard a rasping sound, almost like a cough. He stood perfectly still, listening. The cough didn’t happen again, but Luke could swear he heard footsteps.
“Hello?” Luke called. His voice creaked like rusted hinges. “Someone there?”
From the impenetrable shadows at the other end of the warehouse, something metal clanked and slid against the floor as if kicked. Luke gripped his spray can like a weapon.
This had to be it. Sylar was going to step into the spill of the day’s last sunlight filtering in from the street. He’d give Luke that narrow, calculating look, and then probably kill him.
Luke waited, dick throbbing, barely breathing. Finally he called out, “Sylar?”
He waited until the last of the light leached out of the building, but he heard nothing else. He fumbled his way back to the loft in near darkness, threw his painting supplies on a table, and jerked off furiously.
--
Luke used a rock to break the store window. He didn’t want to waste the batteries in the little flashlight he’d found, so he tore down the thick, dusty curtains to let in the weak afternoon light.
The first thing that caught Luke’s eye was the wide wall of porn movies. He wished to hell he knew something-anything-about electricity: at least enough to hook up a generator and get a DVD player working.
He wandered through the rest of the store, picking up something here or there to look at. He slid a bottle of lube into his pocket. A rack of skin mags stretched across the length of the store. Luke ran a finger over the body of an open-mouthed blonde on the shiny cover of a Playboy dated four months ago. Farther down the aisle his eye caught on another magazine: a well-muscled, dark-haired man stood over a pale young twink spread out on his back on a table.
Luke stared at the older man in the photo: the hair spreading over his chest, the hungry expression on his face. He snatched the magazine and bolted. He vaulted through the window he’d broken and ran two blocks, laughing the whole way.
--
Luke waited until evening fell to take his clothes off and kneel on his bed. He’d been thinking about this for hours now, and he was already hard. He opened the magazine to a page where the dark-haired man was buried to the hilt in the other guy’s ass.
Luke spread his legs and pushed a finger experimentally into his hole. His skin pulled against the intrusion, and not in a pleasant way. He eased his finger back out and reached down to the floor to grab the lube from the pocket of his pants.
The Astroglide spurted out of the bottle faster than Luke anticipated and coated his whole hand. Luke cringed for a moment before he remembered that no one had witnessed his mistake, or ever would. “Whatever,” he muttered.
This time his finger slid in easily. He clenched his muscles, enjoying the tight feel of it. He settled his knees farther apart and pushed in a second finger.
--
Luke left his mark on more of the neighborhood’s buildings. He squinted at the latest of his work in the thin morning light: “Sylar was here” scrawled untidily across the dusty beige stone of the NYPD Ninth Precinct. He thought Sylar would appreciate the disdain for authority. He drifted closer to the door of the building.
A police station. There were probably guns inside. Not that Luke knew how to fire a gun, but he could probably figure it out. Although he’d had a friend, Jeremy Beidler, in the third grade, who’d shot off two of his fingers with his dad’s forty-five. If Luke shot himself, he had nowhere to go for help. He would become just another body: dead meat stinking up this graveyard of a city.
And maybe Sylar would happen upon him, two months or two years from now, following his trail of graffiti. He’d look down at Luke and laugh at how stupidly he’d died after surviving the virus so long, and he’d congratulate himself for dumping the dumb kid when he had.
Luke decided he wasn’t interested in guns. He walked away from the police station and headed home.
--
The next time Luke went back to the store-that store-he brought back another bottle of Astroglide and a dildo. And condoms. Just in case. He got on his hands and knees again on his bed, which was rapidly becoming his favorite way to end the day.
The first push of slick plastic sent a sharp pain snapping along his nerves. His cock, which had been hard the entire way back from the store, now began to wilt.
Luke pulled the dildo out. He took two deep breaths, adjusted his position, and closed his eyes. He pictured Sylar: his big hands gripping Luke’s hips, his hard dick-his cock had to be huge-spearing into Luke. He wanted to feel that. This time when the dildo pressed into him, Luke relaxed. The full, tight feeling distracted him from the stretch and the sting.
“Sylar,” he whispered into the covers. “Yeah.”
--
Luke got new sheets for his bed at one of those girly home goods stores. The place was almost entirely intact, so Luke had a bewildering variety to choose from. He figured the ones marked as most expensive were the best-some thousand-count Egyptian cotton crap, whatever that meant-so he picked up a package of those in black. He thought briefly about getting a bigger bed, but he didn’t really have a way to get such a thing back to his loft.
He could just move somewhere with a nicer bed: there were amazing, almost palatial places sitting empty around town. Somehow, Luke didn’t like the thought of giving up his place. Besides, all his tags pointed to the loft.
He brought the sheets back and made his bed. He took the old sheets out to the street and set them on fire just for fun.
That night when he stretched out naked on thousand-count Egyptian cotton, he felt like he wouldn’t be too embarrassed to have someone spend the night at his place.
--
When Luke woke up to see a man standing in his loft, his first thought was to run. He tensed all over, fists clenched to fight, and wondered if he had time to at least put on some pants before he was killed.
At the center of the room, right on top of New York exploding in smoke and fire, stood Sylar. His hair hung in his eyes, longer than Luke remembered. He wore the same black jeans and shirt that had practically been his uniform when Luke knew him. He didn’t look sick: no bloodshot eyes or flushed skin like other people Luke had seen dying of the virus.
Sylar took a slow survey of the loft. When he finished, he turned to Luke lying naked in his bed and looked him up and down. Sylar’s mouth twitched in what might have been the beginning of a smile. “Funny that you chose this place.” He said it casually, as if they were in the middle of a conversation. “I’ve been here before, but you couldn’t possibly have known that.” He paced over to a stack of old canvases Luke hadn’t bothered to examine, and brushed a hand over the one on top. “I killed the artist who painted these.” He turned and pointed to the floor, to the painting. “Right there, in fact.”
Luke shook off his paralysis to sit up and swing his legs over the side of the bed. He groped along the floor for his pants and pulled them on without looking away from Sylar. “There weren’t any bodies when I got here.”
“No, this was years ago.” Sylar kept looking at the floor. “Sort of a waste.”
“I thought you always had a plan.” Luke stood up, and considered getting a shirt. But the rest of his clothes were in a pile at the foot of the bed, and he wasn’t ready to turn his back on Sylar. Sylar, who was here in his loft, alive, talking to him. “Aren’t you supposed to know your end game before you lift a hand or some shit?”
“Yes.” Sylar’s gaze snapped to him. “Seems like you have a plan of your own. I saw your graffiti.”
“Oh.” Luke’s face heated even as he frowned at himself. His whole plan had been for Sylar to see his tags, and now that he had, Luke felt ashamed and childish. His eyes darted to the floor by the loft’s entrance, where he’d dropped his backpack with its aerosol cans. Sylar followed his gaze.
“Why did you write that?”
“Felt like it.” Luke shrugged, trying for an air of indifferent smugness but, to his chagrin, landing somewhere closer to petulant. He tried again. “I was like your apprentice, right? So if you were gone, why couldn’t I be Sylar?”
“I’m not gone.” Syalr’s thin smile unnerved Luke. “In fact.” He strode over to the door, snatched up Luke’s backpack, and pulled out the can of black spray paint. He turned around, and Luke shrank back instinctively, as if the paint could have some power greater than the ones Sylar already wielded.
“I’ve been watching you for a while.” Sylar moved toward the center of the loft, gliding slowly and silently like the predator Luke knew him to be. “I’ve seen your little games.”
Luke’s mouth went dry thinking of all the times he’d stripped naked on his bed, fingered himself hard, and called out Sylar’s name when he came. Luke’s cock twitched in exquisite terror.
“Juvenile delinquent crap,” Sylar went on. “Destructive. And yet, not totally random.” He came to a halt just over the mural on the floor and shook the spray can slowly. “You left clues. Practically a map. You wanted someone to find you. But you didn’t go looking for other survivors. Why?”
Normally Luke was an excellent liar. Perhaps not speaking to anyone for a few months had blunted his skills, or maybe he remembered how easily Sylar had always seen through his bullshit, because he simply said, “I was waiting for you.”
“That’s right.” Sylar’s smile didn’t widen, but he seemed pleased. He pulled the top off the spray can and sank into a crouch. His finger depressed the button and the paint sprayed out in a graceful arc.
Luke stumbled forward in time to see a line of black paint cut into the exploding skyline he’d come to know so well. Sylar’s hand was steady and efficient. Luke took only a second to recognize the words that were forming in a perfect imitation of his own style: Sylar was here.
Sylar underlined the tag with a single bold line instead of an arrow. He rose and took a step back to admire his work. Luke stood transfixed, staring at the familiar tag that marked the whole city. He felt now as if he hadn’t actually been painting those words at all these past months, but that Sylar had written them all using Luke as a proxy. He stumbled closer, and the words swam in his vision: Sylar was here, Sylar was, Sylar Sylar here here.
“Luke.” Someone grabbed his shoulders and sat him down on the steps by the table of broken lab equipment. His body felt too light, as if it was made of air; the only thing that felt heavy was his cock, full and hard between his legs, weighing him down. “Luke.” Someone knelt before him, breaking his line of sight to the paint-marred floor. Sylar.
“I came here from Texas,” Luke said. Suddenly it seemed important to get this out, so he spoke in a rush. “I remembered you were from New York, so I thought if I could find you anywhere it’d be here, unless you were dead, but that didn’t seem too fucking likely. I avoided the cops, those agents, everyone. I wasn’t going to get caught again, you know? And I thought if I could just get to the city, I could figure it out. I’d find you or you’d find me, even if no one else was alive in the whole fucking country. But shit, I don’t know, this place is so big, like a goddamn haystack or whatever, and for all I know you wanted me dead anyway, but that’s bullshit, because I know the way you looked at me and I’m not fucking stupid. You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t want something from me. How long have you been spying on me? I mean, you see what I’m doing here?”
Luke lurched to his feet and stumbled over to the bed, gesturing at it wildly. “’Cuz I thought maybe you were following me, but you didn’t say a damn thing, so what was I supposed to think? A guy’s entitled to jerk off in the privacy of his own home after the apocalypse, okay, and it shouldn’t matter whose name he yells or what he says, because even--.” Luke saw a blur of movement out of the corner of his eye, and turned just in time to be tackled onto the bed on his back.
“Luke.” Sylar straddled him, pinning one of Luke’s wrists with each hand. “Shut up.”
Luke didn’t move for a moment as he adjusted to the feel of Sylar’s hands on him, his legs around Luke’s waist, his weight heavy against Luke’s pelvis, and there-as Sylar leaned forward to loom over Luke-the hard line of Sylar’s cock in his jeans jutting against Luke’s bare belly.
“Oh fuck,” Luke whispered. His hips jerked up involuntarily against the solid weight of Sylar’s ass, and then his body stiffened into a taut arc as he came inside his pants.
Luke slumped, tension wrung out of him, but he didn’t dare open his eyes. He lay there gulping in desperate breaths, wondering if it was possible to die of shame, until Sylar rocked against him.
Luke wrenched his eyes open to see Sylar’s smug expression as well as the tantalizing outline of Sylar’s hard on-no, really, he must be huge-still trapped behind his zipper.
“Sorry,” Luke muttered. He tried to keep his eyes somewhere in the vicinity of Sylar’s chest-definitely not meeting his eyes.
Sylar raised an eyebrow and rolled his hips against Luke again. “How long has it been since anyone else even touched you?”
“Uh.” Luke tried to remember, but the memories of a time when other people inhabited his world had already become hazy and indistinct. Could be that the Company doctor who gave him the vaccine was the last one to lay a hand on him. “Long time,” Luke muttered.
“I see.” Sylar nodded, as if his suspicions had been confirmed.
“Hey, uh,” Luke tried. His voice cracked, so he swallowed hard and tried again. “Have you really been watching me?”
“Yes.” Sylar shifted his grip on Luke’s wrists, but otherwise remained still.
“So uh… I guess you know what… Uh…”
Sylar nodded.
“Yeah. Okay. So… Do you want to…?”
Sylar raised an eyebrow.
“You know, like…?”
Sylar just kept looking at him.
“God, quit being an asshole!” Luke struggled against his grip, but Sylar leaned his superior weight into the struggle, easily trapping Luke. With an inarticulate snarl, Luke let the heat from a dose of his power seep out of his hands.
Sylar hissed in pain but didn’t let go. Luke felt his whole body being pressed into the bed, almost crushed by the force of Sylar’s mind.
Luke relented, letting his power drain away and going lax against Sylar’s restraint.
Only then did Sylar grin and lean in closer to his ear. “Are you asking me to fuck you, Luke?”
A lustful shudder rippled through Luke’s body. His cock was already starting to harden again.
“Is that what you mean, Luke?”
Luke didn’t trust his voice, so he just nodded against Sylar’s shoulder.
“Say it, Luke.”
Luke clenched his hands into fists tightly until he got his brain under enough control to come out with something other than an unintelligible moan. “Yeah, that’s what I’m asking.”
“Then show me.” Sylar climbed off Luke to sit at the foot of the bed with his back against the wall. “Go on.”
Luke blinked at him. He took several seconds to figure it out. “You want me to…?”
“Show me.” Sylar’s voice sounded rough, and Luke experienced a jolt of pleasure at the thought that he was responsible for that. “I want to see it up close.”
Luke sucked in a breath as arousal warred with embarrassment: Sylar had seen him, had watched him get off to fantasies of getting fucked by Sylar. Luke had fantasized about that, especially after he thought Sylar might be following him. But now the prospect of Sylar actually here, regarding him coolly from a distance of three feet, made Luke hesitate. He knew he wasn’t much to look at, so he couldn’t fathom why Sylar would want to watch him do anything, especially when he was right here, begging for Sylar to use him.
Sylar must have noticed his hesitation, because he leaned his head back against the wall, closed his eyes, and pressed his hand to the front of his pants. “I saw you the day you went back to that shop,” Sylar said. “You came out with that toy, and I knew I had to follow you home. I needed to see what you had planned. It’s so dark in this damn city, but I saw enough to know I couldn’t wait much longer.” His eyes cracked open. “Show me?”
There was almost a “please” in Sylar’s question, and that’s what decided Luke. He lay back on the bed and shucked his pants, wiping off the sticky remnants of his come as he went.
Sylar sat very still, except for his hand tightening on his pants to squeeze the outline of his dick.
Luke reached into the drawer of the nightstand, which held a jumble of petty treasures. He grabbed the lube first and squeezed some of it into his hand. He was probably loose enough from the fucking he’d given himself last night that he didn’t require much prep, and suddenly Luke wanted Sylar to know that. He snatched up the dildo from the drawer and smeared his lube-covered fingers over it. He leaned back against the headboard, spread his legs, and tipped his hips up.
Sylar’s eyes darted all over Luke’s body, as if he couldn’t decide where to look. The hunger in his eyes spurred Luke on: he was well on his way to hard again. Actually having Sylar here in his bed made all his old fantasies pale in comparison. Luke’s memory hadn’t done justice to the low rumble of Sylar’s voice, the lean lines of his body, the air of menace that clung to him like a second skin.
“Fuck,” Luke muttered. He closed his eyes and pushed the slick dildo against his hole. It was a tight fit with no stretching beforehand, but there was plenty of lube, and Luke knew how to take it. He concentrated on relaxing, and exhaled one shaky breath. The dildo slid inside in a long, smooth push. Luke opened his eyes in time to see Sylar clenching his teeth, eyes fixed on the toy disappearing into Luke.
Deep breaths and momentary stillness gave Luke time to adjust. He slid the toy out and twisted it back in, establishing an easy rhythm. Luke kept the his motion slow, steady, and constant, holding Sylar’s attention like a snake charmer.“Why didn’t you say you were following me?” Luke asked.
Sylar looked up to meet Luke’s glance. His eyes were glassy, and Luke thought he just might get a straight answer. “You might have been infected,” Sylar said distractedly as his hand rubbed circles against the front of his pants.
“That doctor at the Company gave me a vaccine. I’m immune.”
“Mohinder?” Sylar leaned forward, curious.
“Maybe.” Luke shrugged. He didn’t remember the guy’s name. “But you must have figured out I wasn’t sick.” His hand kept working, sliding the toy between his legs, but he couldn’t seem to control his mouth. His words came out haltingly, interrupted by each thrust of the dildo inside him. “How long have you been following me? Before that day in the warehouse?”
“Before that.” Sylar leaned closer. His hand came forward as if reaching for Luke, but dropped to the bed instead. His fingers clenched the black Egyptian cotton. “Before.”
“That was, like, two weeks ago at least.” Luke hooked a hand over his right knee and pulled his leg up, spreading himself for Sylar’s view. “What were you waiting for?”
Sylar walked forward on his knees. He laid a hand on Luke’s spread leg, keeping him open, and dropped the other hand on Luke’s thigh like a brand. “Seeing what you’d do if left to your own devices,” he said softly.
“I can take care of myself.” Luke emphasized his point with an extra deep jab from the toy that brushed past his prostate. Luke concentrated on keeping enough active brain cells to do the talking thing. “I’ve got initiative.”
“I can see that.” Sylar knelt between Luke’s legs; his wide stance shoved Luke’s thighs wider apart. “But I came here for a reason. You need me.”
A stubborn part of Luke wanted to protest. He’d gotten across the country by himself, and he survived life in the city every day. But now, with his hard cock throbbing between his legs and his plastic toy not coming close to filling the emptiness inside of him, Luke felt he hadn’t been surviving after all. He’d only been holding on to the city tooth and nail, sending up signal flags and praying for rescue with elaborate rituals on the altar of this bed in the dark each night.
“Well.” Luke licked his lips, which were suddenly very dry. “Now you’re here…What are you going to do?”
Sylar’s hand clamped over Luke’s on the toy, pulled it slowly out of him, and tossed it aside. “We’ll do things my way.” He let go of Luke and leaned back to pull off his shirt.
Luke slumped against the headboard and watched eagerly as Sylar stripped. When at last he discarded his pants and briefs, his impressive hard-on stood proudly against his hairy belly. Luke trapped a moan behind his teeth, but the twitch of his own cock betrayed his excitement.
Sylar returned to loom over Luke, and this time he grabbed Luke’s wrists and pinned them on either side of his head while he pressed their bodies tightly together. The hard, wet push of Sylar’s cock against his thigh made Luke instinctively spread his legs. Sylar’s mouth, inches from Luke’s own, curled into a smile.
“I was perfectly content to be the last man alive until I saw that first tag of yours. Anyone else I might have killed, but when I figured out it was you…” Sylar ground against him, a sinuous press. “I couldn’t get you out of my mind. Your mouth, mostly.” He dropped his head to lick a line against the seam of Luke’s lips. “Always with a smart answer and a lie. I started to think how that mouth would feel on my cock.”
At that image, Luke’s mouth dropped open on a little gasp. Sylar pressed his advantage by darting his tongue inside and stealing a quick taste before pulling away.
“I thought about you on your knees, wrapping those lips around me. And then.” Sylar chuckled and thrust his cock against the angle of Luke’s hip. “Then I found out what you were doing at night: touching yourself. Here in your bed playing with your ass while you thought of me.” Sylar released one of Luke’s wrists to reach for the bedside drawer. A condom flew to his hand; he ripped it open with his teeth. “We’ve both been thinking the same thing, haven’t we, Luke?”
Luke nodded and squirmed helplessly. Sylar quickly rolled on the condom and leaned over Luke again. “Say it.”
“You say it,” Luke shot back.
Sylar bared his teeth in a silent snarl. He hooked his arm under Luke’s knee, shoved his leg up, and leaned down close enough for Luke to feel the heat off his skin. “You’ve been begging for me to leave my mark on you. I’m going to.”
“I’ve already got your mark all over me.” As soon as it was out of his mouth, Luke bit his lip, cursing his tendency to say too much.
Sylar just blinked at him, gears turning behind his eyes as he seemed to be rearranging his assumptions. Luke took advantage of this distraction to crane his neck up and mash his lips against Sylar’s. He slid clumsily through the kiss for several seconds until Sylar opened up and jabbed his tongue past Luke’s lips.
Sylar shifted his hips, and the blunt head of his cock bumped against Luke’s hole. Luke tried to buck up, but Sylar kept a hold on his leg, limiting his leverage.
“Say it,” Sylar growled. His dick, slick with the condom’s lube, dragged up and down Luke’s ass without breaching him. “Go on.”
“Fine. Damn. Fuck me. Take me.” He tried to reach for his own cock, straining and leaking against his belly, but found his hands pinned by an invisible force. “Sylar. Come on, man, I need this. Sylar!”
Sylar shoved forward, pushing the breath right out of Luke. He couldn’t get any air in, or maybe his lungs had forgotten how to work because his whole existence was made up of Sylar inside of him.
“Shh.” Sylar’s hand smoothed Luke’s hair. “Calm down. Relax.”
Luke found himself able to gulp in air again. His muscles un-seized, and he could lean back into Sylar’s touch. He still felt the stretch of Sylar stuffed inside him-God he was huge-but the shock had eased.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” Luke rasped.
Sylar slid the rest of the way in, slowly penetrating him while Luke clenched the soft sheets and trembled with the effort of keeping his legs spread. At last Sylar stilled, sheathed all the way inside Luke. His coarsely-furred belly pressed against Luke’s throbbing cock, and his hot, rapid breath beat against Luke’s shoulder.
Luke shifted experimentally. When Sylar immediately tensed around him, he grinned. “Feel good?”
“Luke…”
Luke deliberately clamped down around Sylar’s cock, and delighted in the resulting gasp. “Come on.” Now that he finally had Sylar inside of him, Luke felt greedy and desperate for more. “Come on,” he urged.
Sylar dropped his grip on Luke’s legs and grabbed his waist. He rolled them over together, keeping himself firmly lodged inside Luke’s ass. Luke came up straddling Sylar. He looked down to see Sylar’s smug, satisfied half-smile.
“You wanted to do this to yourself,” Sylar said. “Do it.”
Luke settled into position, checking his balance. He felt good: better than good-powerful. Luke didn’t know where to put his hands, so he let them rest on his legs for now. He rose up experimentally and sank down slowly. Sylar’s cock fit smooth and slick inside of him: tight, but almost too comfortable. Luke wanted to really feel it. To reassure himself this wasn’t just another fantasy.
Luke lifted up onto his knees until just the tip of Sylar’s cock was buried inside him, then slammed down hard. Luke’s whole body tensed as if he’d been hit, and Sylar sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth.
Luke tried it again, twice in quick succession. The fucking felt fantastic, yeah, but the absolute best thing was the little change that washed across Sylar’s face every time Luke moved: a twitch of his mouth or a widening of his eyes Luke had never seen before.
Luke leaned back to brace a hand against Sylar’s hairy thigh. The next time he slammed down, Sylar’s cock slid over a place inside him that sent sparks of pleasure skating up his spine. He almost lost his balance, and he stopped briefly just to get his breath back.
Beneath him, Sylar smiled as if he knew exactly what he was doing. “Again,” Sylar rasped.
Luke bounced himself up and down on Sylar’s cock, angling forward to graze that wonderful spot on each stroke. Luke’s breath came in harsh gasps as his world condensed to the feel of Sylar inside him, beneath him. He forced his eyes open so he could look down and remind himself this was real-that it was Sylar he was really fucking.
“Luke.” Sylar’s hand closed around Luke’s throbbing dick in a welcome vise. He stroked Luke in time with his thrusts, which now seemed interminably slow. Luke sped up; he frantically worked himself on Sylar’s cock. An answering increase in Sylar’s pace chased Luke towards the edge.
“Luke.” The rumble of Sylar’s voice rolled through him in every place their bodies touched. “That’s it.” His hand tightened on Luke’s cock and he thumbed over the head. “You’re mine now.”
Luke stiffened all over and let out a strangled, wordless howl. His cock jerked in Sylar’s hand, spraying stripes of come against Luke’s belly and Sylar’s, too. He swayed a moment, feeling first weightless, then dizzy. His hands clenched weakly: he barely recognized the solid feel of Sylar’s muscled chest under his fingers.
Then his world flipped sideways as Sylar rolled them again. This time he pinned Luke’s wrists and leaned over him, a solid, confining weight that sent Luke’s pulse climbing again. Sylar pounded into him, deeper now that he was in control. Luke wrapped his legs around Sylar’s back, trying to draw him in farther. Sylar’s animal grunts sent electric aftershocks through Luke with every thrust. “Sylar…” Luke’s voice sounded weak and desperate. He needed this proof of Sylar’s ownership, maybe even more than the sex itself; he had to know Sylar wanted him. “Please.”
Sylar slammed into him harder, and his rhythm began to falter. His grip on Luke’s wrists redoubled. He thrust in once more to the hilt. “Mine,” he growled. His teeth sank into Luke’s shoulder as he shuddered through his orgasm.
As the tremors began to die out, Sylar slumped over Luke. Both their labored breathing calmed gradually as they recovered. Luke clenched his muscles, reveling in the feel of Sylar’s softening cock in his ass. He’d done that. He was good enough to please Sylar.
Sylar pulled out with remarkable care and rolled away to dispose of the condom. Luke touched his hole experimentally and hissed through his teeth. He was going to be sore for sure.
Sylar shot him a sharp, calculating look that Luke met unabashedly. “It’s okay,” Luke said. “I like it.” He wanted to walk around all day with a constant reminder of how it felt to have Sylar inside him.
Luke scooted to the edge of the bed next to Sylar. “So what now?”
Sylar stood, as unabashedly naked and gorgeous as those statues at the Met that Luke hadn’t had the heart to push over. Sylar walked to the grimy window. “The city’s ours,” he said. “We can do whatever we want.”
“Yeah.” Now that that virgin situation was taken care of, it was mission accomplished as far as Luke was concerned. Sylar wanted him. More than that, Sylar accepted him. Everything from here on out was a bonus. He got up and went to join Sylar at the window. “You have something in mind?”
Sylar slipped an arm around Luke’s naked waist, intimately, like a lover would. “I’ll show you.”
--
One month later
Luke wended his way home through Central Park, carrying the bag of groceries he’d picked out from a market he hadn’t raided before. The days were getting longer now, so he wasn’t in too much of a rush to get back to the loft. Besides, there were so many different ways through the park, Luke liked exploring different ones every so often.
He kept his eyes on the skyline, already bathed in the pink light of sunset’s early stages, as he trotted across a bridge over the lake. He was almost to the far end when he stopped and turned back. He walked back to the center of the bridge and looked down. What he’d taken for some kind of city seal was really his tag: “Sylar was here” in a precise hand, underlined with an arrow pointing back to the loft.
Luke glanced around, squinting at trees on the shore and the white cast iron of the bridge’s sides. None of what he saw challenged his certainty that he’d never been here before. He smirked down at the tag. If he hadn’t written this one, then Sylar must have done it. Luke had stopped taking his paint out with him every day; there’d been no reason to keep tagging once Sylar had found him. Apparently someone had taken over his duties.
The discovery sent Luke speeding back to the loft sporting a smug grin. Sylar was already home, bent over one of the tables, tinkering with some piece of little machinery he’d been working on.
Luke dumped his groceries on an empty table, crossed his arms over his chest, and stood there, expectantly watching Sylar. “I came home through the park,” he said.
“Hm,” Sylar said. He kept his eyes on his work.
“I went over this bridge I hadn’t seen before. That white one, by Cherry Hill?”
Sylar looked up at that. To Luke’s surprise, he wore a pleased smile. “You saw my tag, then.”
“Yeah.” Luke gave him a quizzical look. “I didn’t know you were still doing those.”
“Yes.” Sylar stood and strode toward Luke. He backed Luke against the empty table and planted a hand on either side, penning Luke in. “I like to mark my territory.”
“Yeah…” Luke laughed. “But there’s no one here to see it.”
“No?” Sylar raised an eyebrow. “There’s you.” He wrapped a hand around the back of Luke’s neck. “If I could, I’d tattoo my mark all over you. As it is, I like a reminder every once in a while that this whole city-everything in it-is ours.”
“Ours,” Luke repeated. A warm feeling, almost as hot as his power, spread through him. “Yeah, I guess it is.”
“You marked it first.” Sylar gestured to the tag over the painting on the floor. “The whole city belongs to you. But you.” Sylar brushed his thumb against the nape of Luke’s neck. “You belong to me. You’re mine.”
Luke closed his eyes for a second and allowed himself to lean back into Sylar’s gentle touch. Then he looked up again. He gave Sylar a smirk and a playful shove. Sylar stumbled backward, watching him carefully. “Prove it,” Luke drawled.
And Sylar did.