Bricks in the Wall, Chapter 82: Mistaken Identity
Title: Mistaken Identity
Characters: Peter, Sylar
Words: 350
Rating: PG
Warnings: None
Setting: The Wall
Summary: Peter questions basic reality.
"Hey," Peter said, putting his book down. "Do you think it's possible - and just hear me out here," (he'd been saying that rather a lot recently), "but is it possible that you're Nathan and that really was Sylar we burned at Coyote Sands?"
Sylar frowned at him. "How?" was all he said.
"Well, let's say they gave all of Sylar's powers to Nathan. And then a few weeks later, it got to be too much for Nathan, and realized he had other abilities, decided he was Sylar, and had an identity breakdown."
Sylar gazed steadily at Peter for a while. "You Petrellis really like the idea of fucking around with people's identities, don't you?"
"No, it's not that," Peter insisted. "It's that with abilities, anything is possible. I didn't think Nathan was you, so how would I know if you were Nathan?"
"Matt Parkman is a telepath. He would know."
"Can he be trusted?"
Sylar blinked.
"Can my mother? Or Noah?"
Carefully, Sylar said, "One would think they would have said something when their precious 'Nathan' began insisting Nathan was dead and calling himself Sylar."
Peter nodded. "Yeah, well, I didn't say this was serious. I was just thinking about it." He picked his book up again.
Sylar watched him for a moment, head slowly tilting. "How do you know Nathan ever existed at all - as long as we're posing hypotheticals?"
Peter raised his head. "You mean, like he was an invisible-friend-big-brother or something like that?"
"Yes."
Peter's brows pulled together as he thought it over. It seemed ludicrous - all the layered details, all the times people had referred to Nathan, he'd been on the news, ran for Congress - to think of all those as fictive broke his sense of reality. "I can't buy it. Who caught me when I jumped off that building?"
"Maybe you knew how to fly all along."
Peter smiled a little and found his page in the book. "That would be cool," he agreed. But I'd rather have had Nathan in my life.