Guilty Conscience
Title: Guilty Conscience
Characters: Matt Parkman
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Word count: 550
Setting: Between An Invisible Thread (end of season 3) and Orientation (start of season 4)
Summary: Matt doesn’t know his own mind.
Notes: Written for terror_scifi fear fest, prompt: “Autophobia, General”.
Matt wasn’t even sure that was Sylar. Couldn't it just be his own guilty conscience? He didn’t think any portion of Sylar’s mind or soul had transferred when he’d told the man he was now Nathan Petrelli. But Matt was a human being. He’d come to hate and fear what his power did to other people. What he’d done to Sylar had begun to prey on him. Days had passed, then weeks. He’d worried. He knew Sylar wasn't as evil as he was made out to be, because Matt had seen into him (another aspect of his power that he loathed - how naked people were when he really looked at them). Matt had seen Sylar's heart, his soul, and his history, and he’d callously blotted out that identity as best he could. Stupid. Immoral. Murderer. Villain.
Now it was weeks later and he couldn't help but admit that he erased someone. He forced them out of existence, backspaced over their name and typed a new one in the space that had once said, “Sylar”. But just as he’d done it once so easily, it could still be undone. He knew that. It was within his ability. Wouldn’t that be the right thing to do? Wouldn’t that make things better and lift this weight from his chest, the one that smothered him when he tried to sleep at night?
He was scared of what would happen. He’d made mistakes before about right and wrong, but there was no one he could ask about this. No one else knew. No one else cared. He wondered what Sylar - the real Sylar - would say about losing his identity like this. Matt started playing through little scenes in his head where Sylar, snarling and raging, took his revenge on Matt, Janice, Matty … anything and everything Matt had ever cared about. Because wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t Sylar do that? What human being wouldn’t try to defend themselves?
Matt had looked into the minds of too many perpetrators at work. He’d thought at first he could be a hero that way - telling the innocent from the guilty. Reality was so more complicated than black and white. Every guilty soul had reasons, motivations, and rationalizations for their actions. Some of them were easy for Matt to dismiss, but others weren’t. Sylar’s reasons lurked in his mind. What would Matt have done, had he been given the keys to ultimate power, just like Sylar?
That thought jolted him wide awake one night, with the realization that what he, Matt, would have done was to play God, to judge sinners, and mark people right out of the Book of Names if he didn’t like them. Matt was not free of sin. He thought of all his mistakes. They nipped at him, tiny bites in the darkness, like hungry rats. He couldn’t sleep; his grip on reality loosened; his ability strained. His mind dulled, and at first that was a blessing. He couldn’t blame himself if he couldn’t think. Sleep deprivation made his head ache, but it killed his overactive imagination.
Didn’t it?
Was that really Sylar, holding little Matty - threatening, provoking, confusing? Or was it just Matt’s own conscience?