(no subject)
Title: Define Dangerous
Characters: Sylar, Claire.
Spoilers: Up to Season 2.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2525
Chapter: 5/?
Previously: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4
Summary: While escaping the Company, Sylar meets up with someone from his past. Together, they must piece together some semblance of normality after years of captivity. Future AU.
The sun was bright that afternoon, too bright for the trouble that was swarming within that city. As Sylar neared the hotel, he noticed one of Primatech's nondescript black vans. It bared no markings, no license plates either but there was no mistaking where it came from.
Sylar slowed down and ducked into a nearby Starbucks coffee shop. After running the whole way back to the hotel, he finally took the time to formulate a plan. Through the shop's window, he surveyed the situation. Half a dozen men dressed in business suits exited the van and wasted no time before heading into the same hotel Sylar and Claire were checked into, marching in like they owned the place. It hadn't taken Primatech long to find them.
Well, no, Sylar thought, it hadn't taken them long to find Claire. It would be hard for her to get past them and escape but Sylar, on the other hand, could leave now. He could walk down the street, catch a cab and disappear before Primatech spotted him. He grit his teeth, fighting both the urge to charge in there like the cavalry and the other that told him to clear out and save himself.
He eyed a Starbucks cup, sitting on the counter, waiting to be picked up and paid for by a customer. Calling it over to him by the sheer power of his mind, Sylar watched to see if it would work this time. There was no point rushing into trouble if his powers didn't work anymore.
The cup sailed into his hands easily and he took a sip. The cinnamony cappuccino went down smooth, delighting his taste buds. Sylar wondered idly if he might find someone, someday with an advanced taste power he might be able to steal. Then he remembered some of the meals they had served him while being imprisoned within the company and thought better of that idea.
“Might as well.” He shrugged, coming to his decision. As long as he was secure that his powers were working again, at least for time being, there were few people who stood a chance of stopping him from getting what he wanted. Right now, for some reason he couldn't explain, what he wanted was Claire safely and quickly out of that building.
Before leaving the coffee shop, he tossed the paper cup away. It pounded noisily onto the bottom of the trashcan. The door jingled as it open and shut behind him. Determination driving him on, Sylar left and began walking towards the hotel. This was crazy and went completely against his survival instincts but he found himself enjoying every minute of it. He stood outside the hotel for a moment, savoring the calm before the storm.
Then Sylar thrust his hand at the door and it flew off its hinges, coming to a rest sideways on the road a few feet away. Traffic halted and people stopped to stare at the spectacle. They were probably already explaining it away in their minds as a trick of the light or a scene from some movie, though no cameras were around. Ordinary humans, Sylar knew, could create the most elaborate stories to excuse the impossible away and make it somehow probable.
He entered the lobby to find five Primatech guards camped out in the lobby. They all turned as one, alerted to the entrance of a new player in their game. There was no one else to be seen, no employees or guests, which was probably for the best. If they were smart, they'd left once the Primatech squad arrived.
Almost immediately, their guns were pointed at his head. All of them were aiming to shoot; this wasn't a game but it was rather fun nevertheless. Sylar laughed as he found himself questioning whether he was walking into an ambush or had become the ambusher himself. Probably both.
“Gabriel Gray. Stand down.” One of them spoke in a commanding tone and Sylar decided that he would be the first to die. The man pointed at him with the gun and then towards the floor. “On your knees, now!”
“I don't think I want to do that.” Sylar only scoffed and took a step forward, egging them on. Then he held out his hand, freezing the man who had dared to order him around where he stood. After freezing completely through, the guard fell to the floor with a clunk. One of his arms cracked off when it hit the floor, shattering like an icicle off a building. “See, that's much more enjoyable.”
The others cocked their guns, but Sylar was able to hold them off with his telekinesis. The second-in-command raised his voice. No matter how loud his voice got though, it still shook with fear. His troops looked ready to run. “I repeat: Stand down!”
“I've come for the girl,” Sylar told them raising his eyes towards the elevators. Claire was up there still and there was no amount of force they could use that would stop him from getting her out. Prepared for a fight, Sylar told them. “I'm not leaving without her.”
With no real plan in her head except escape, Claire ran out of her room seconds after receiving the phone call. There was no one on her floor yet but she knew there were guards downstairs waiting for her. She wished she knew how many, though even one was enough to terrify her into action.
Ducking into the stairwell, she ran up the cold, cement steps, taking them two at a time. Claire was certain that if she could only make it to the roof, she could think up a better plan than waiting until they came to collect her in the hotel room. She wondered if her regenerative powers were good enough to save her life if she jumped off the building. They weren't up to par yet but she couldn't think of any other way out of there.
When Claire climbed two floors up towards the roof, she heard the metal clank of the door on her floor. It opened and shut. Before Claire could move, a man was leaning over the railing, two stories below her, pointing his gun up the stairwell. “We're taking you back into custody. Do not attempt to fight back, as that will only lead to a quite messy, unfortunate death. Do not attempt to talk back to us or give any officer of the company any lip. Anything you say can and will be used against you once we get you back to Primatech.”
“Please don't do this,” Claire cried as she raised her hands. Even with all her regenerative powers, she still couldn't move once Primatech decided to force their hand. The gun wasn't even the scariest part. It was the way they talked to her, the tone of their voice and the demands they made on her. The man climbed the flight of stairs quickly. When he reached her on the stairs, he pointed to the floor with his gun. She knew the drill. Getting on her knees, Claire held her hands behind her back as he placed the cuffs on her wrists. “I'll do anything you want, but please--”
“Did you not hear the part about not speaking back?” He hauled Claire to her feet, patting her down for weapons of any sort. “Your kind poses a threat to the rest of humanity. What would you think of a person who knowingly let a danger like yourself run around loose instead of locking you up where you belong?”
“I'm not a danger.” She shot back, surprising both herself and the guard. Silencing herself, Claire bit her tongue but anger boiled up inside her. She found herself unable to shut up and knew that her insolence was all Sylar's doing. It was that fear of being smothered back inside the mental cage they'd placed around her that caused her to speak up.
He wasted no time and punched her across the face, leaving no bruise as her cheek healed instantaneously. “You are whatever I say you are, do you understand me?” Grabbing her hair, the guard gestured down the stairs. “Now walk! There's a car waiting for us outside. I know you're a smart girl, so let's think about this carefully: there's a large group of innocent bystanders downstairs. I have a gun. I'm not a big fan of collateral damage but if I need to in order to keep the rest of the world safe, I will shoot every single person in this building.”
“Is that what you people thought of my mother and my brother? They were only collateral damage?” Claire fought back and dug in her heels, as he prodded her down each step. “They got in the way and the company took them out, just like that?”
“If need be, that's what we do. I am sure in that case, the means justified the ends.”
Coming to the end of the staircase, the man opened the door to the lobby, dragging her with him as he entered. Claire pushed into the carpet with her feet and even tried kicking the man a few times in the leg. Nothing slowed him down. Nothing except finding his coworkers dead inside the lobby.
Sylar was standing in the middle of a group of suited guards, all of them sprawled across the floor. The rest of the tourists and hotel employees had already fled the room. He stepped over one of the bodies, a woman he'd killed moments ago. Energy still swirled around his hand as he narrowed his gaze and lowered his voice, “Claire, are you okay?”
Relieved to see the calvary had finally arrived, Claire nodded.
The man held her close to him, tightly pressing the gun to her head. “Don't move, Gabriel, unless you want me to blow her brains out. I don't think she'll be able to regenerate from that.” A laugh came from Sylar's side of the room. Then the man's gun jerked away from Claire, resting against the man's own temple. “Wait.. what-- what are you doing?”
“She's just a kid.” Sylar eyed him with disgust, “Why don't you go blow your own brains out?”
The shot fired, sending pieces of the man's head across the back wall. Claire screamed, as she felt his hold over her suddenly drop. She looked down at the body of her captor, lying at her feet. It wasn't until Sylar came over and melted the handcuffs that she was able to overcome the shock of the moment.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” She shook, finding comfort as she burrowed herself into Sylar's chest. He wrapped his arms around her. It was only an automatic, involuntary movement, other than that he had no idea what to do with this girl who was now clinging to his waist.
Taking care of someone like this was completely foreign to him. He didn't quite know what to say or how to hold her. He smoothed his hand over her hair, willing the girl to stop crying and tried to find the right words. Her spoke with a voice that seemed to come from someone else. “It's okay, Claire. It's going to be okay.”
After a moment, the closeness began to get to him. He wasn't good with gentle things, with tears and that pout her lips went into when they quivered. It was all too confusing and he didn't know how to fix what was broken here, what had broken inside her. Instead, Sylar chose to hide in the more immediate aspects of the moment and the need for action. Eager to be free from the entanglement, Sylar extracted himself from her embrace and prodded, “Come on. We need to leave before the cops show up.. or worse yet, more Primatech employees.”
He grabbed her hand and started in the direction of the lobby doors, stepping through pools of blood that leaked from the corpses. One body was pinned to the wall, pencils stuck in him like a corkboard. Another was frozen solid, pieces of his arm and legs crumbling off into icy dust. Yet another two had the tops of their heads removed, brains leaking out like worms from a split tin can. The last had been melted down into a fine goo which Claire was now standing in with her bare feet.
She was still dazed and unyielding, holding him back. She always seemed to be holding him back and for some reason, he always let her. “You killed them. You killed them all, didn't you?”
This was not the reaction he had expected. It caused him to stop in his tracks, yanking his head back to look at her like she had finally lost it. Everything he had done was in her benefit, for her sake even. They would have killed her, or worse.
With a roll of his eyes, Sylar spoke to her like she was a child. “Would you have rather I let them hunt you down and capture you again? Is that what you want-- cause let me know, and the next time someone comes after you, that's what I'll do.” She said nothing in reply, so he let the conversation drop. With a light jerk of her hand, he pulled her towards the doors. “Can we go now?”
There was no further discussion on the topic, which was the way Sylar wanted it. What he had done was necessary for his and Claire's survival. No argument anyone could make would make him feel regret for his actions. That was an emotion felt only by weaker members of his species, those that didn't last long in the wild nature of this world.
“Where are we going?” Claire asked as they ran across the road, darting between cars. “Do you even have a plan?”
“I always have a plan, Claire. It's kind of my natural ability.” Sylar replied as he stopped in front of a Nissan Rogue that was parked on the side of the road. He brought his hand back and then smashed through it's driver's side window. Reaching through the broken glass, he unlatched the lock. Opening the door, he brushed glass off the seat. The skin around his knuckles was raw and bleeding, but Sylar ignored the pain and let Claire in through the passenger side door.
She hopped into the car, shutting the door quickly behind herself. Meanwhile, Sylar went to work figuring out the mechanics of the car. He broke through a panel of the car near his feet, pulling out different colored wires and cords. This should be like getting a watch to work, making the right pieces fall into place. Touching a red wire to a blue one, Sylar felt the car's engine roll over and its gears working together.
“We'll hit the road, get out of this city and then..” he thought about it for a moment before everything fell into place in his mind. His eyes narrowed as the thought became clearer. “Then I need to visit an old friend.”
..to be continued..
Characters: Sylar, Claire.
Spoilers: Up to Season 2.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2525
Chapter: 5/?
Previously: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4
Summary: While escaping the Company, Sylar meets up with someone from his past. Together, they must piece together some semblance of normality after years of captivity. Future AU.
The sun was bright that afternoon, too bright for the trouble that was swarming within that city. As Sylar neared the hotel, he noticed one of Primatech's nondescript black vans. It bared no markings, no license plates either but there was no mistaking where it came from.
Sylar slowed down and ducked into a nearby Starbucks coffee shop. After running the whole way back to the hotel, he finally took the time to formulate a plan. Through the shop's window, he surveyed the situation. Half a dozen men dressed in business suits exited the van and wasted no time before heading into the same hotel Sylar and Claire were checked into, marching in like they owned the place. It hadn't taken Primatech long to find them.
Well, no, Sylar thought, it hadn't taken them long to find Claire. It would be hard for her to get past them and escape but Sylar, on the other hand, could leave now. He could walk down the street, catch a cab and disappear before Primatech spotted him. He grit his teeth, fighting both the urge to charge in there like the cavalry and the other that told him to clear out and save himself.
He eyed a Starbucks cup, sitting on the counter, waiting to be picked up and paid for by a customer. Calling it over to him by the sheer power of his mind, Sylar watched to see if it would work this time. There was no point rushing into trouble if his powers didn't work anymore.
The cup sailed into his hands easily and he took a sip. The cinnamony cappuccino went down smooth, delighting his taste buds. Sylar wondered idly if he might find someone, someday with an advanced taste power he might be able to steal. Then he remembered some of the meals they had served him while being imprisoned within the company and thought better of that idea.
“Might as well.” He shrugged, coming to his decision. As long as he was secure that his powers were working again, at least for time being, there were few people who stood a chance of stopping him from getting what he wanted. Right now, for some reason he couldn't explain, what he wanted was Claire safely and quickly out of that building.
Before leaving the coffee shop, he tossed the paper cup away. It pounded noisily onto the bottom of the trashcan. The door jingled as it open and shut behind him. Determination driving him on, Sylar left and began walking towards the hotel. This was crazy and went completely against his survival instincts but he found himself enjoying every minute of it. He stood outside the hotel for a moment, savoring the calm before the storm.
Then Sylar thrust his hand at the door and it flew off its hinges, coming to a rest sideways on the road a few feet away. Traffic halted and people stopped to stare at the spectacle. They were probably already explaining it away in their minds as a trick of the light or a scene from some movie, though no cameras were around. Ordinary humans, Sylar knew, could create the most elaborate stories to excuse the impossible away and make it somehow probable.
He entered the lobby to find five Primatech guards camped out in the lobby. They all turned as one, alerted to the entrance of a new player in their game. There was no one else to be seen, no employees or guests, which was probably for the best. If they were smart, they'd left once the Primatech squad arrived.
Almost immediately, their guns were pointed at his head. All of them were aiming to shoot; this wasn't a game but it was rather fun nevertheless. Sylar laughed as he found himself questioning whether he was walking into an ambush or had become the ambusher himself. Probably both.
“Gabriel Gray. Stand down.” One of them spoke in a commanding tone and Sylar decided that he would be the first to die. The man pointed at him with the gun and then towards the floor. “On your knees, now!”
“I don't think I want to do that.” Sylar only scoffed and took a step forward, egging them on. Then he held out his hand, freezing the man who had dared to order him around where he stood. After freezing completely through, the guard fell to the floor with a clunk. One of his arms cracked off when it hit the floor, shattering like an icicle off a building. “See, that's much more enjoyable.”
The others cocked their guns, but Sylar was able to hold them off with his telekinesis. The second-in-command raised his voice. No matter how loud his voice got though, it still shook with fear. His troops looked ready to run. “I repeat: Stand down!”
“I've come for the girl,” Sylar told them raising his eyes towards the elevators. Claire was up there still and there was no amount of force they could use that would stop him from getting her out. Prepared for a fight, Sylar told them. “I'm not leaving without her.”
With no real plan in her head except escape, Claire ran out of her room seconds after receiving the phone call. There was no one on her floor yet but she knew there were guards downstairs waiting for her. She wished she knew how many, though even one was enough to terrify her into action.
Ducking into the stairwell, she ran up the cold, cement steps, taking them two at a time. Claire was certain that if she could only make it to the roof, she could think up a better plan than waiting until they came to collect her in the hotel room. She wondered if her regenerative powers were good enough to save her life if she jumped off the building. They weren't up to par yet but she couldn't think of any other way out of there.
When Claire climbed two floors up towards the roof, she heard the metal clank of the door on her floor. It opened and shut. Before Claire could move, a man was leaning over the railing, two stories below her, pointing his gun up the stairwell. “We're taking you back into custody. Do not attempt to fight back, as that will only lead to a quite messy, unfortunate death. Do not attempt to talk back to us or give any officer of the company any lip. Anything you say can and will be used against you once we get you back to Primatech.”
“Please don't do this,” Claire cried as she raised her hands. Even with all her regenerative powers, she still couldn't move once Primatech decided to force their hand. The gun wasn't even the scariest part. It was the way they talked to her, the tone of their voice and the demands they made on her. The man climbed the flight of stairs quickly. When he reached her on the stairs, he pointed to the floor with his gun. She knew the drill. Getting on her knees, Claire held her hands behind her back as he placed the cuffs on her wrists. “I'll do anything you want, but please--”
“Did you not hear the part about not speaking back?” He hauled Claire to her feet, patting her down for weapons of any sort. “Your kind poses a threat to the rest of humanity. What would you think of a person who knowingly let a danger like yourself run around loose instead of locking you up where you belong?”
“I'm not a danger.” She shot back, surprising both herself and the guard. Silencing herself, Claire bit her tongue but anger boiled up inside her. She found herself unable to shut up and knew that her insolence was all Sylar's doing. It was that fear of being smothered back inside the mental cage they'd placed around her that caused her to speak up.
He wasted no time and punched her across the face, leaving no bruise as her cheek healed instantaneously. “You are whatever I say you are, do you understand me?” Grabbing her hair, the guard gestured down the stairs. “Now walk! There's a car waiting for us outside. I know you're a smart girl, so let's think about this carefully: there's a large group of innocent bystanders downstairs. I have a gun. I'm not a big fan of collateral damage but if I need to in order to keep the rest of the world safe, I will shoot every single person in this building.”
“Is that what you people thought of my mother and my brother? They were only collateral damage?” Claire fought back and dug in her heels, as he prodded her down each step. “They got in the way and the company took them out, just like that?”
“If need be, that's what we do. I am sure in that case, the means justified the ends.”
Coming to the end of the staircase, the man opened the door to the lobby, dragging her with him as he entered. Claire pushed into the carpet with her feet and even tried kicking the man a few times in the leg. Nothing slowed him down. Nothing except finding his coworkers dead inside the lobby.
Sylar was standing in the middle of a group of suited guards, all of them sprawled across the floor. The rest of the tourists and hotel employees had already fled the room. He stepped over one of the bodies, a woman he'd killed moments ago. Energy still swirled around his hand as he narrowed his gaze and lowered his voice, “Claire, are you okay?”
Relieved to see the calvary had finally arrived, Claire nodded.
The man held her close to him, tightly pressing the gun to her head. “Don't move, Gabriel, unless you want me to blow her brains out. I don't think she'll be able to regenerate from that.” A laugh came from Sylar's side of the room. Then the man's gun jerked away from Claire, resting against the man's own temple. “Wait.. what-- what are you doing?”
“She's just a kid.” Sylar eyed him with disgust, “Why don't you go blow your own brains out?”
The shot fired, sending pieces of the man's head across the back wall. Claire screamed, as she felt his hold over her suddenly drop. She looked down at the body of her captor, lying at her feet. It wasn't until Sylar came over and melted the handcuffs that she was able to overcome the shock of the moment.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god,” She shook, finding comfort as she burrowed herself into Sylar's chest. He wrapped his arms around her. It was only an automatic, involuntary movement, other than that he had no idea what to do with this girl who was now clinging to his waist.
Taking care of someone like this was completely foreign to him. He didn't quite know what to say or how to hold her. He smoothed his hand over her hair, willing the girl to stop crying and tried to find the right words. Her spoke with a voice that seemed to come from someone else. “It's okay, Claire. It's going to be okay.”
After a moment, the closeness began to get to him. He wasn't good with gentle things, with tears and that pout her lips went into when they quivered. It was all too confusing and he didn't know how to fix what was broken here, what had broken inside her. Instead, Sylar chose to hide in the more immediate aspects of the moment and the need for action. Eager to be free from the entanglement, Sylar extracted himself from her embrace and prodded, “Come on. We need to leave before the cops show up.. or worse yet, more Primatech employees.”
He grabbed her hand and started in the direction of the lobby doors, stepping through pools of blood that leaked from the corpses. One body was pinned to the wall, pencils stuck in him like a corkboard. Another was frozen solid, pieces of his arm and legs crumbling off into icy dust. Yet another two had the tops of their heads removed, brains leaking out like worms from a split tin can. The last had been melted down into a fine goo which Claire was now standing in with her bare feet.
She was still dazed and unyielding, holding him back. She always seemed to be holding him back and for some reason, he always let her. “You killed them. You killed them all, didn't you?”
This was not the reaction he had expected. It caused him to stop in his tracks, yanking his head back to look at her like she had finally lost it. Everything he had done was in her benefit, for her sake even. They would have killed her, or worse.
With a roll of his eyes, Sylar spoke to her like she was a child. “Would you have rather I let them hunt you down and capture you again? Is that what you want-- cause let me know, and the next time someone comes after you, that's what I'll do.” She said nothing in reply, so he let the conversation drop. With a light jerk of her hand, he pulled her towards the doors. “Can we go now?”
There was no further discussion on the topic, which was the way Sylar wanted it. What he had done was necessary for his and Claire's survival. No argument anyone could make would make him feel regret for his actions. That was an emotion felt only by weaker members of his species, those that didn't last long in the wild nature of this world.
“Where are we going?” Claire asked as they ran across the road, darting between cars. “Do you even have a plan?”
“I always have a plan, Claire. It's kind of my natural ability.” Sylar replied as he stopped in front of a Nissan Rogue that was parked on the side of the road. He brought his hand back and then smashed through it's driver's side window. Reaching through the broken glass, he unlatched the lock. Opening the door, he brushed glass off the seat. The skin around his knuckles was raw and bleeding, but Sylar ignored the pain and let Claire in through the passenger side door.
She hopped into the car, shutting the door quickly behind herself. Meanwhile, Sylar went to work figuring out the mechanics of the car. He broke through a panel of the car near his feet, pulling out different colored wires and cords. This should be like getting a watch to work, making the right pieces fall into place. Touching a red wire to a blue one, Sylar felt the car's engine roll over and its gears working together.
“We'll hit the road, get out of this city and then..” he thought about it for a moment before everything fell into place in his mind. His eyes narrowed as the thought became clearer. “Then I need to visit an old friend.”
..to be continued..