Painless
Title: Painless
Rating: R (language and sex)
Pairing: Claire/Sylar
Spoilers: Up to 3.02
Notes: Since Heroes canon is veering so close to the bad place, I figure - why not? This story is similar in structure to a really good Paire fic I read a while back. Apologies if it borrows more than I remember.
Three months since he's become immortal, and the overhead lights shudder and go out, plunging Level Five into pitch darkness. Flashes of red and blue illuminate the long hallway like a strobe, along with a shower of sparks as Hiro's sword narrowly misses Adam Monroe and cuts into a mass of cables instead. Jesse is fighting with Peter Petrelli, while Knox has Parkman on his knees. He has just smashed Elle into a wall with a simple flick of his hand, and suddenly, Claire stands in front of him. He sticks out a hand to freeze her in place (what could she think she's going to do to him now, silly girl?), but he is momentarily shaken by the look in her eyes. It isn't hatred, or fear. It's desperation.
"You have to fix me."
He cocks his head to the side and smiles as she strides toward him. "Hello, Claire."
"You did something to my brain. You have to fix me," she repeats, now close enough to reach out and touch. She looks as if she is about to cry as she stares him down, but there's a steely edge to her voice.
"Claire!" someone else shouts, far across the facility.
She refuses to look away.
In a fraction of a second, Nathan swoops down and grabs her. A steel beam comes crashing from the ceiling, and they are lost in the chaos.
Seventeen years since he's become immortal, and he would have heard her footsteps behind him regardless of whether or not he'd killed a woman named Dale what already seems like a lifetime ago.
"Hello, Gabriel." Her voice is calm, resigned.
He turns to face her, calculating what this means. She looks different somehow - not a day older, of course - but the cut and color of her clothing are more mature.
"I'm sorry about your father," he says.
Claire's face remains passive, but her eyes betray her. He has guessed correctly.
"So you have Noah Bennet's files," he presses on. "Interesting reading? Find out some fun facts about yourself?"
"Nothing more than I'd already guessed. You, on the other hand..."
"You know my name. How terrifying." He smiles. "How was the funeral?"
Something in her face changes. "Kill me," she whispers, still as stone. "Let me feel again, or kill me."
He stalks toward the open door, but as he passes her, he bends down slightly to whisper near her ear.
"You can't die."
Forty four years since he's become immortal, and he recognizes her instantly, even as a dyed brunette. She's working for the government now, wearing one of their specially designed superhero suits. He wonders if her mission is to kill him. She wouldn't be the first they'd sent. She won't be the first to fail. She will, however, be the first to return home in a single piece.
"Gracias," he mutters to the bartender who slides the drink over the sweaty counter. The glass snaps directly into his hand and the ice clinks, already cracking in this intolerable heat. He is drunk, or as drunk as one can be in a body that constantly repairs itself. He downs the drink in a single go, before it has time to become watered down.
"Hello, Claire."
She smiles as she sits on the stool next to him. "That's a name I haven't heard in quite a while."
"Drink?" he asks. She nods, and he motions for the bartender to get them both one. As she takes hers, murmuring her thanks in Spanish, he raises his glass. "To Peter Petrelli."
She pauses for a moment, and he wonders if she's going to launch herself at him, destroying the little bar in the process. Not that that would be difficult.
Finally, she raises her glass. "To Peter Petrelli."
Peter, in true Petrelli fashion, has managed to save the world one last time by killing his past or future self. Sylar has never heard the full story, but it seems to matter little - either way, Peter Petrelli has ceased to exist. And now the last remaining member of the Petrelli family sits one seat from him, in this tiny bar, in this tropical, third-world hole of a country.
"So which is it to be today?" he asks, as the bartender pours them each another. "Are you here to kill me, or beg for me to "fix" you?"
"Why can't it be both?"
He is surprised when she slides her stool closer and leans in to kiss him, tasting and smelling of rum. He has imagined this day would come - the inevitability of being two of the few people who will never die makes it likely to happen at some point in eternity - but the reality of it is a very different matter.
Back in the little shack management charmingly refers to as a "bungalow", she pushes him onto the bed. He is so much more powerful than she. He could turn this to his advantage in so many different ways. He could freeze her with his mind and walk away, leaving her to make embarrassed excuses to her government when they find her half-dressed in his room. Somehow, he can't find it in himself to do anything but lie back and let her have her way with him.
At first she holds herself above him at arms' length, slowly lowering her body until she is hovering an inch from him. Her thighs brush against his as her arms quaver, her chest nudging him, cleavage dangerously close and tantalizing. He shudders, unable to deny the growing bulge in his pants, unable to look away from her face as she smiles in cold triumph.
She is rough, cruel to his body, knowing whatever pain she inflicts upon it, he cannot feel; knowing whatever wounds she causes will heal. He tastes the blood in his mouth as she bites his lower lip, her nails scratching deep gouges down his chest. Pleasure but no pain - who could ever hate such a gift, no matter the intent?
She crouches over him, forcing herself onto him before she's ready. She's tight, and raw, and comes all too soon. As she falls forward, her dark hair spilling across his face, he's left gasping for air, his hips twitching as if to protest her sudden lack of motion. She rolls off him in disgust, pulls on her pants, and leaves before he has time to recover. The bed sheets are striped with sunlight from the gaps between the rotting boards and spotted with their mingled blood. It doesn't matter. The maids in this dump have cleaned up far worse before.
Fifty two years since he's become immortal, and he can't believe he's borrowed a super villain scheme straight from Marvel Comics in order to get her attention. As the cable car shudders precariously in the breeze and a new generation of heroes swarm nervously below, he wonders if it's enough.
As if on cue, she steps out from the metalwork of the Queensboro Bridge, and he almost loses his grip on the cable.
"Was it good for you?" is the first thing he says to her.
At first she looks confused. As she catches his meaning, she rolls her eyes, looking like the eternal sixteen year-old she is. "No, Gabriel," she says. "It wasn't."
"Any tips for next time?" he quips, letting the cable slip another six inches. Below, the people in the cable car scream.
"Aside from not just lying there like you couldn't believe your luck? Sure, I'll give you a tip." She saunters across a girder toward him. "It needs to hurt."
"Claire, Claire, Claire... still angry after all these years. It's not good to hang on to your guilt." The cable car sinks a bit further toward the choppy East River.
"I'm the one who's hanging on?" She's talking faster now, and he notices her eyes flick toward the small metal box full of people - New Yorkers, tourists, who honestly cares? "You kill anyone - special or not - who gets in the way of your plans. But for whatever twisted little reason, you feel it's your duty to fix the unbreakable girl - to take away her one last thread of mortality."
He laughs in disbelief. "You think I did it for you, Claire; to help you or hurt you? You always were wrapped up in your own little world - typical cheerleader. No... it was far simpler to do the work in your head before transferring it to mine."
She stops walking. A familiar crease forms between her eyes as the wind whips her blonde curls across her face. "But you could have changed me back."
He sighs, resorting to the plaintive sing-song tone he's used with so many victims over the years. "Now why would I bother to do that?"
Her eyes flick away again, and this time he turns to see two of the new heroes barreling toward him. The flying one grabs the cable a split second after he's dropped it, and the impossibly strong one tackles him, forcing him off the bridge. As he falls toward the river, wrapped tightly in the strong girl's clutch, he realizes Claire already knows all this. She figured him out years ago.
One-hundred and thirty six years since he's become immortal, and he spots her from his seat in the window of the last Manhattan Starbucks. She is walking down the sidewalk with a dark-haired man, arm-in-arm and laughing. It disconcerts him greatly when they walk by, and Peter Petrelli nods to him.
Sure, Peter Petrelli has been dead and gone over ninety years. But time travel fucks with much more than the way events play out. He isn't surprised when she searches him out the following day. They sit on a bench in Washington Square Park and feed the pigeons, newly imported from Europe. A strain of avian flu wiped out all of New York's original flock a few years earlier, and London, Paris, and Rome have each donated hundreds of their birds in a show of unity with the current, powers-lenient US government.
"That's the last time I'll ever see him," she says. She turns to him, eyes wide but free of any tears. "Gabriel... I need to know I'm still human."
He tears off a piece of bread, smashing it between his fingers to form a hard pellet of dough, and pelts it at the closest pigeon. "You're not human. You're special."
One-hundred and seventy eight years since he's become immortal, and they're playing black hats and white hats again. It's been like this on and off for the past forty years. Somehow he finds it hard to work up the energy to truly pummel a person who has a spare key to his apartment.
Two-hundred and fifty one years since he's become immortal, and he stands in the ruins of the Seattle Deportation Center, no longer aware if he's a villain or a hero this week. He still murders people, leaving their heads cracked open and their brains mysteriously absent. Somehow, when those people are corrupt government officials, bent on exterminating certain subsets of their own citizenry, the good guys don't seem to mind. So here he is, fighting alongside them. One of the sleek new airskiffs whizzes by, training its spotlight on him. Half-blinded, he aims a nuclear blast at one of its rotors, and the airskiff disintegrates over Puget Sound.
"Sylar!"
She never calls him Gabriel in front of anyone else, as though it would be a betrayal. She is pointing to the incoming aircraft the honorable Nakamura family has sent to rescue them.
He sends another ray of destruction toward the advancing enemy forces as it lands, and the rag-tag group of American heroes rushes toward the aircraft as if it were their only hope.
Which it probably is.
He and Claire are the last ones aboard. A young girl with a round face, looking absurdly like her great-great-great-however many times-grandfather, grins and salutes them from the cockpit. He rests his head against the body of the craft, the unexpected reminder of his age crashing down on him, though his body isn't a day older. In the darkness, Claire finds his hand. Together, they watch the lights of Seattle fade in the distance.
Three-hundred and fifteen years since he's become immortal, and she still bleeds every time they make love, and he asks her if it isn't better not to feel some things. Her answer is always the same.
Five-hundred and ninety three years since he's become immortal, and there are still hotels along the River Seine. A half-formed image surfaces in his mind - the Paris skyline, trapped in a snow globe on a shelf in a tiny Queens apartment. The Eiffel Tower no longer stands, victim to irreparable rust during the century of quarantine, but the rest of the city remains greatly unchanged.
They are gentle with one another, like a pair of old lovers who have fallen deeply into comfortable patterns, which, he supposes, they are. He kisses her belly and she lazily runs a hand through his hair, the golden sunlight painting their naked skin. Contrary to the desk clerks' disapproving stares, they haven't had sex in years, though they are both now fluent in French, and many other languages.
He knows she has similar meetings with Adam Monroe. He can't find it in himself to fault her for it. Immortality can be lonesome, and the poor bastard has a good half-millennium on both of them.
He knows they have a son. She's never said a word about it to him, but fifty eight years ago, he walked into a store specializing in antique timepieces to be greeted by a proprietor with his height and dark hair, and her wide green eyes. The name on the business card - Noah Peter Gray - had merely confirmed what he'd already expected.
He knows she would stay, if he finally chose to give her the thing she wants most. She no longer asks, and he's thankful for it.
He knows it will take the rest of eternity to admit to himself that he'd known exactly what he was doing when his fingers had slid across the surface of her brain, tweaking a miniscule bunch of receptors, and left her to heal painlessly on the Bennet’s coffee table.
He knows that they have eternity, and if given the chance, he would do it again in a heartbeat.
Rating: R (language and sex)
Pairing: Claire/Sylar
Spoilers: Up to 3.02
Notes: Since Heroes canon is veering so close to the bad place, I figure - why not? This story is similar in structure to a really good Paire fic I read a while back. Apologies if it borrows more than I remember.
Three months since he's become immortal, and the overhead lights shudder and go out, plunging Level Five into pitch darkness. Flashes of red and blue illuminate the long hallway like a strobe, along with a shower of sparks as Hiro's sword narrowly misses Adam Monroe and cuts into a mass of cables instead. Jesse is fighting with Peter Petrelli, while Knox has Parkman on his knees. He has just smashed Elle into a wall with a simple flick of his hand, and suddenly, Claire stands in front of him. He sticks out a hand to freeze her in place (what could she think she's going to do to him now, silly girl?), but he is momentarily shaken by the look in her eyes. It isn't hatred, or fear. It's desperation.
"You have to fix me."
He cocks his head to the side and smiles as she strides toward him. "Hello, Claire."
"You did something to my brain. You have to fix me," she repeats, now close enough to reach out and touch. She looks as if she is about to cry as she stares him down, but there's a steely edge to her voice.
"Claire!" someone else shouts, far across the facility.
She refuses to look away.
In a fraction of a second, Nathan swoops down and grabs her. A steel beam comes crashing from the ceiling, and they are lost in the chaos.
Seventeen years since he's become immortal, and he would have heard her footsteps behind him regardless of whether or not he'd killed a woman named Dale what already seems like a lifetime ago.
"Hello, Gabriel." Her voice is calm, resigned.
He turns to face her, calculating what this means. She looks different somehow - not a day older, of course - but the cut and color of her clothing are more mature.
"I'm sorry about your father," he says.
Claire's face remains passive, but her eyes betray her. He has guessed correctly.
"So you have Noah Bennet's files," he presses on. "Interesting reading? Find out some fun facts about yourself?"
"Nothing more than I'd already guessed. You, on the other hand..."
"You know my name. How terrifying." He smiles. "How was the funeral?"
Something in her face changes. "Kill me," she whispers, still as stone. "Let me feel again, or kill me."
He stalks toward the open door, but as he passes her, he bends down slightly to whisper near her ear.
"You can't die."
Forty four years since he's become immortal, and he recognizes her instantly, even as a dyed brunette. She's working for the government now, wearing one of their specially designed superhero suits. He wonders if her mission is to kill him. She wouldn't be the first they'd sent. She won't be the first to fail. She will, however, be the first to return home in a single piece.
"Gracias," he mutters to the bartender who slides the drink over the sweaty counter. The glass snaps directly into his hand and the ice clinks, already cracking in this intolerable heat. He is drunk, or as drunk as one can be in a body that constantly repairs itself. He downs the drink in a single go, before it has time to become watered down.
"Hello, Claire."
She smiles as she sits on the stool next to him. "That's a name I haven't heard in quite a while."
"Drink?" he asks. She nods, and he motions for the bartender to get them both one. As she takes hers, murmuring her thanks in Spanish, he raises his glass. "To Peter Petrelli."
She pauses for a moment, and he wonders if she's going to launch herself at him, destroying the little bar in the process. Not that that would be difficult.
Finally, she raises her glass. "To Peter Petrelli."
Peter, in true Petrelli fashion, has managed to save the world one last time by killing his past or future self. Sylar has never heard the full story, but it seems to matter little - either way, Peter Petrelli has ceased to exist. And now the last remaining member of the Petrelli family sits one seat from him, in this tiny bar, in this tropical, third-world hole of a country.
"So which is it to be today?" he asks, as the bartender pours them each another. "Are you here to kill me, or beg for me to "fix" you?"
"Why can't it be both?"
He is surprised when she slides her stool closer and leans in to kiss him, tasting and smelling of rum. He has imagined this day would come - the inevitability of being two of the few people who will never die makes it likely to happen at some point in eternity - but the reality of it is a very different matter.
Back in the little shack management charmingly refers to as a "bungalow", she pushes him onto the bed. He is so much more powerful than she. He could turn this to his advantage in so many different ways. He could freeze her with his mind and walk away, leaving her to make embarrassed excuses to her government when they find her half-dressed in his room. Somehow, he can't find it in himself to do anything but lie back and let her have her way with him.
At first she holds herself above him at arms' length, slowly lowering her body until she is hovering an inch from him. Her thighs brush against his as her arms quaver, her chest nudging him, cleavage dangerously close and tantalizing. He shudders, unable to deny the growing bulge in his pants, unable to look away from her face as she smiles in cold triumph.
She is rough, cruel to his body, knowing whatever pain she inflicts upon it, he cannot feel; knowing whatever wounds she causes will heal. He tastes the blood in his mouth as she bites his lower lip, her nails scratching deep gouges down his chest. Pleasure but no pain - who could ever hate such a gift, no matter the intent?
She crouches over him, forcing herself onto him before she's ready. She's tight, and raw, and comes all too soon. As she falls forward, her dark hair spilling across his face, he's left gasping for air, his hips twitching as if to protest her sudden lack of motion. She rolls off him in disgust, pulls on her pants, and leaves before he has time to recover. The bed sheets are striped with sunlight from the gaps between the rotting boards and spotted with their mingled blood. It doesn't matter. The maids in this dump have cleaned up far worse before.
Fifty two years since he's become immortal, and he can't believe he's borrowed a super villain scheme straight from Marvel Comics in order to get her attention. As the cable car shudders precariously in the breeze and a new generation of heroes swarm nervously below, he wonders if it's enough.
As if on cue, she steps out from the metalwork of the Queensboro Bridge, and he almost loses his grip on the cable.
"Was it good for you?" is the first thing he says to her.
At first she looks confused. As she catches his meaning, she rolls her eyes, looking like the eternal sixteen year-old she is. "No, Gabriel," she says. "It wasn't."
"Any tips for next time?" he quips, letting the cable slip another six inches. Below, the people in the cable car scream.
"Aside from not just lying there like you couldn't believe your luck? Sure, I'll give you a tip." She saunters across a girder toward him. "It needs to hurt."
"Claire, Claire, Claire... still angry after all these years. It's not good to hang on to your guilt." The cable car sinks a bit further toward the choppy East River.
"I'm the one who's hanging on?" She's talking faster now, and he notices her eyes flick toward the small metal box full of people - New Yorkers, tourists, who honestly cares? "You kill anyone - special or not - who gets in the way of your plans. But for whatever twisted little reason, you feel it's your duty to fix the unbreakable girl - to take away her one last thread of mortality."
He laughs in disbelief. "You think I did it for you, Claire; to help you or hurt you? You always were wrapped up in your own little world - typical cheerleader. No... it was far simpler to do the work in your head before transferring it to mine."
She stops walking. A familiar crease forms between her eyes as the wind whips her blonde curls across her face. "But you could have changed me back."
He sighs, resorting to the plaintive sing-song tone he's used with so many victims over the years. "Now why would I bother to do that?"
Her eyes flick away again, and this time he turns to see two of the new heroes barreling toward him. The flying one grabs the cable a split second after he's dropped it, and the impossibly strong one tackles him, forcing him off the bridge. As he falls toward the river, wrapped tightly in the strong girl's clutch, he realizes Claire already knows all this. She figured him out years ago.
One-hundred and thirty six years since he's become immortal, and he spots her from his seat in the window of the last Manhattan Starbucks. She is walking down the sidewalk with a dark-haired man, arm-in-arm and laughing. It disconcerts him greatly when they walk by, and Peter Petrelli nods to him.
Sure, Peter Petrelli has been dead and gone over ninety years. But time travel fucks with much more than the way events play out. He isn't surprised when she searches him out the following day. They sit on a bench in Washington Square Park and feed the pigeons, newly imported from Europe. A strain of avian flu wiped out all of New York's original flock a few years earlier, and London, Paris, and Rome have each donated hundreds of their birds in a show of unity with the current, powers-lenient US government.
"That's the last time I'll ever see him," she says. She turns to him, eyes wide but free of any tears. "Gabriel... I need to know I'm still human."
He tears off a piece of bread, smashing it between his fingers to form a hard pellet of dough, and pelts it at the closest pigeon. "You're not human. You're special."
One-hundred and seventy eight years since he's become immortal, and they're playing black hats and white hats again. It's been like this on and off for the past forty years. Somehow he finds it hard to work up the energy to truly pummel a person who has a spare key to his apartment.
Two-hundred and fifty one years since he's become immortal, and he stands in the ruins of the Seattle Deportation Center, no longer aware if he's a villain or a hero this week. He still murders people, leaving their heads cracked open and their brains mysteriously absent. Somehow, when those people are corrupt government officials, bent on exterminating certain subsets of their own citizenry, the good guys don't seem to mind. So here he is, fighting alongside them. One of the sleek new airskiffs whizzes by, training its spotlight on him. Half-blinded, he aims a nuclear blast at one of its rotors, and the airskiff disintegrates over Puget Sound.
"Sylar!"
She never calls him Gabriel in front of anyone else, as though it would be a betrayal. She is pointing to the incoming aircraft the honorable Nakamura family has sent to rescue them.
He sends another ray of destruction toward the advancing enemy forces as it lands, and the rag-tag group of American heroes rushes toward the aircraft as if it were their only hope.
Which it probably is.
He and Claire are the last ones aboard. A young girl with a round face, looking absurdly like her great-great-great-however many times-grandfather, grins and salutes them from the cockpit. He rests his head against the body of the craft, the unexpected reminder of his age crashing down on him, though his body isn't a day older. In the darkness, Claire finds his hand. Together, they watch the lights of Seattle fade in the distance.
Three-hundred and fifteen years since he's become immortal, and she still bleeds every time they make love, and he asks her if it isn't better not to feel some things. Her answer is always the same.
Five-hundred and ninety three years since he's become immortal, and there are still hotels along the River Seine. A half-formed image surfaces in his mind - the Paris skyline, trapped in a snow globe on a shelf in a tiny Queens apartment. The Eiffel Tower no longer stands, victim to irreparable rust during the century of quarantine, but the rest of the city remains greatly unchanged.
They are gentle with one another, like a pair of old lovers who have fallen deeply into comfortable patterns, which, he supposes, they are. He kisses her belly and she lazily runs a hand through his hair, the golden sunlight painting their naked skin. Contrary to the desk clerks' disapproving stares, they haven't had sex in years, though they are both now fluent in French, and many other languages.
He knows she has similar meetings with Adam Monroe. He can't find it in himself to fault her for it. Immortality can be lonesome, and the poor bastard has a good half-millennium on both of them.
He knows they have a son. She's never said a word about it to him, but fifty eight years ago, he walked into a store specializing in antique timepieces to be greeted by a proprietor with his height and dark hair, and her wide green eyes. The name on the business card - Noah Peter Gray - had merely confirmed what he'd already expected.
He knows she would stay, if he finally chose to give her the thing she wants most. She no longer asks, and he's thankful for it.
He knows it will take the rest of eternity to admit to himself that he'd known exactly what he was doing when his fingers had slid across the surface of her brain, tweaking a miniscule bunch of receptors, and left her to heal painlessly on the Bennet’s coffee table.
He knows that they have eternity, and if given the chance, he would do it again in a heartbeat.