The Music of Our Lives - 2
A/N: raitheemohugger requested drabbles for “Girl Anachronism” (Dresden Dolls) and “Racing Rats” (Editors). Those two are most well worked into drabbles 5 and 4, respectively, but they gave the inspiration for the entire series. Each section is a 500 word drabble, and they all fit together into what I hope is a cohesive story (completely unrelated to any of the drabbles in the first Music of Our Lives fic). Please, if you want a song drabble - just let me know. I’m still willing to write drabbles like this - I really enjoy doing it :)
Next up on the agenda: finally getting back to Aft Gang Agley.
He’s never been good dealing with crying girls, and his sister is one of the worst. It seems like that’s all she ever does anymore, crying and sobbing and making him highly uncomfortable. It’s second nature now to wrap his arms around her and beg her to stop, but it’s almost worse when she does. Tears disappear in a second, leaving him holding onto a hellcat motivated by nothing other than revenge. He doesn’t exactly blame her, not anymore, but it’s not easy to deal with; he knows that Dad isn’t exactly a good guy, and that he’d shot her real father, but it’s still not easy to listen to her.
It’s worse when Dad comes back, full of apologizes and loud shouts about how he’d done it all to keep her safe, keep them all safe. He surprises Dad one night in the bathroom, and can’t stop from shrieking when the older man shoves a pistol in his face before realizing he’d almost shot his own son. Lyle’s not sure he’ll ever be able to forget the image of Dad’s bloodstained hands holding a gun trained on him; a week later, he can’t understand why he’d ever write something like that in his diary. Claire has to explain it to him, all about Dad and the Company and the forgetting man, and then it’s Claire holding him when he cries. Cries for the lost innocence, cries at the sudden realization that he doesn’t trust Dad. Claire has to hold him again, not more than a month later, when Mom collapses again after having her memory wiped clean, even after Dad had sworn to all of them that it would never happen again. They run away that night, Lyle, Claire, and Mr. Muggles, but he knows that they’ll be found. Claire tries to protect him, tries to hide the realities of their world from him, but he knows. The Company, or Dad, or one of her blood relatives will find them, and he doesn’t know what to do. He knows what she’s capable of, and he knows what could happen if the wrong people find her, but he can’t find a way to keep her safe.
It comes to him late one night, and he’s not sure if it’s his best or his worst idea ever. He rereads the files they’d stolen when they’d left; reads them over and over and over again until he knows the man as well as he knows himself. The next day he places a small ad in personals section of the biggest newspaper in New York. Hopefully the man will see it. “CB for GG. Save me, save the world. Be as consistent as clockwork, and I’ll be your cheerleader; you’ll be the most special person in the world.”
Sylar shows up at their hotel a week later, in the middle of the night when Claire’s sound asleep. Lyle doesn’t even blink as he makes his deal with the man, handing his sister over.
- - - - - - - - - -
“I hate you.” She shrieks at Lyle when Sylar throws her over his shoulder to carry out of the hotel room. “And put me down, you… barbarian!” She kicks and flails her arms, but Sylar just laughs and holds her still with telekinesis. “Lyle, help me! Don’t let him take me! Lyle, please!”
Lyle just smiles at her, a practiced version of her own sad smile, and shrugs. “It’s for the best, Claire.”
Sylar readjusts his grip on her, mentally covering her mouth and squeezing her voice box to keep her from screaming more. He pauses on his way out the door. “Remember our deal, boy. I’ll call next week, be prepared.”
He carries her out of the room before Lyle can respond, then kicks the door shut behind her. She tries to fight, but can’t; the mental hold is too strong for her to overcome. They pass an elderly couple in the hallway; she thinks for a minute that they might help her, but they just keep on going as if they hadn’t seen a thing. “Now, did you actually think I’d let anyone interrupt us?” Sylar whispers in her ear, and she feels any hope she might have had disappear. They don’t see another soul on the trek to the car, and she’s momentarily baffled when, in contrast to his previously harsh words and manners, he carefully sets her down in the passenger seat and buckles her seatbelt.
She just stares at him in disbelief when he starts the car and calmly asks “Where to, Claire-bear?”
“What the hell?” She doesn’t mean to curse, but if there ever was an appropriate time and place, this would be it.
“New York okay with you, then? Let’s go home.” He waits a minute for her response, but when one doesn’t come, he just shrugs and puts the car in gear, slowly pulling out of the parking spot and towards the motel exit.
No one says a word for the next hour, until he finally breaks. “It doesn’t have to be like this, you know. We’re going to be spending some quality time together, and it’s not going to be fun if you go mute on me.”
“Quality time?” She snaps before she realizes that she’s playing his game, that he’d purposefully antagonized her into talking. “Quality time! Are you nuts? You’re taking me somewhere to kill me, and you want to call it ‘quality time’!?”
“Kill you?” Sylar chuckles. “What makes you think that?”
“But…” If he’s not going to kill her, what is he going to do with her?
“The boy didn’t tell you, did he? We made a little deal, Lyle and I. All you need to know is that you’re safe; you’re under my protection now. That’s all you really need to know, that you’re safe as long as he keeps his end of the bargain. Both of you.”
That devious little… genius. She wonders what Lyle had to promise the man, then finds herself not caring.
- - - - - - - - - -
Once they get the arguing out of their systems, and she realizes the futility in trying to contact Peter and drawing attention to herself, they settle into a routine. Life in New York is… oddly domestic. They share a cramped two bedroom apartment with minimal conflict, except for when he has to snake the drains when her hair clogs up the bathtub or when his psychotic need for cleanliness interferes with what she views as her God-given right to mess up the kitchen while cooking his supper. He ends up wearing her attempts at home cooking a few times, and learns to keep his mouth shut when she gets that look in her eyes. During the day, she’s Lisa, the shy housewife that never once stops to talk to the neighbors as she struggles to carry their laundry up and down five flights of stairs, and he’s Gary, the mild-mannered barista at the Starbucks on the corner. He comes in at night, smelling like coffee and chocolate and sometimes covered in blood, and she never asks where he was or what he’s been doing. She just sighs, and tries to scrub the blood out of his uniform as best she can, telling him to be more careful next time. As the days pass, she finds it easier and easier to not care anymore. She’s safe, well-protected, and he treats her well; why she should care about more than that?
Once a month, and only once, he turns on the outdated computer in the corner of his bedroom and connects to his email account using the world’s slowest dial-up connection, and then disappears for a long weekend. She distracts herself with shopping, trying to keep her mind on anything other than how her brother’s turned into some sort of superpower pimp, selling men and women just like her to Sylar in return for her continued safety. It doesn’t bother her nearly as bad once she realizes that between the two of them, Lyle and Sylar have managed to take out a significant portion of the Company.
After one such weekend, he returns covered in bruises and scrapes, and it’s the first time that she realizes that there’s a chance that he might not come home one day. Cops, the Company, Noah, Peter, any random powered individual with a modicum of good luck, and he could be gone. It shakes her, and leaves him wondering what the hell is wrong with her when she crawls into his bed that night, refusing to let go of him. That particular night marks a change in their relationship, from reluctant protector and self-involved damsel in distress to something that lies fairly close to the realm of friends. He wakes in the morning, unable to comprehend what had changed and why.
His next call to Lyle is a request for a telepath; Lyle just laughs and says that he still won’t be able to understand Claire even then. Nevertheless, the next Company victim is a mindreader.
- - - - - - - - - -
Their relationship changes again the day that she pushes him into a chair and crawls in his lap, kissing him. He briefly wonders if he’s somehow to pick up pheromone manipulation power, until she manages to convince him that she’d been wanting to jump him for the longest time. Sylar’s not convinced that it’s some form of mental psychosis, a variant of Stockholm syndrome, but chooses not to worry about it as long as she keeps on kissing him like that. Lyle’s not entirely surprised to hear about the change, but he is surprised at the speed at which the relationship evolves, how not even a month later Sylar’s asking him for permission to ask her to marry him.
He carries the ring in his pocket for another month, just waiting for the right time. To celebrate another successful attack against a Company drone, she suggests dinner at their favorite restaurant, and he jumps at the opportunity. The waiter that night is new, a man neither Claire nor Sylar have ever seen before. Sylar can’t find any devious thoughts in his head, though, so he thinks nothing about taking the doctored champagne and draining it as he works up the courage to propose. The effect of the curare is almost instant, and as he slumps to the table, Claire’s screams fill his head and then he knows nothing.
When he wakes, it’s in garbage strewn in a dark alley; as he fingers the bullets that have popped out of his torso, he smirks as he realizes that they hadn’t realized that he’d figured out how to get Claire’s invulnerability without hurting her, and that they’d dumped his apparently dead body with the rest of the trash. They won’t know to be watching for him, and he plans on using that to his advantage. He has to get her back, and he’ll need every advantage he can get. His fingers clench around the jewelry box in his pocket, and he swears to himself that he’ll get her back if he has to kill every last one of them, if it takes a hundred years.
Living without her is a nightmare; he can’t sleep without her at this point since it’s too difficult to wake each morning and realize that she’d not there. For the first time in years, he falls to his knees and prays. He finds that the sun’s too bright, and he takes to only crawling out of their apartment in the dead of the night, the darkness a good match for his mood as he stalks the Company, trying to find her. Lyle spends hours on the computer, using his passwords he’d stolen from his father, searching through the Company’s computer files, finding nothing.
It takes almost a decade for him to realize that the Company wasn’t responsible. At that point that he realizes that the rats in Washington had grabbed her, she’s already been sold to the highest bidder. A century passes before he finally finds her.
- - - - - - - - - -
Sylar slaps down his money and the man behind the counter, after carefully glancing at his wrists, slides a ticket across the worn surface. He wants to laugh, as if he’d allow anyone to mark him, but he doesn’t; they don’t know him, don’t know what he is, and he’s killed everyone who can shatter his carefully built world with just a word - all except one.
Hoards of excited school children push past him; he smirks at the thought that no matter how else the world changes, some things never will. A school teacher runs after them, yelling at them to behave or she’d just sell them to this freak circus, and he has to tightly ball up his fists to keep from reacting. Ticket firmly grasped in his fist, he trails behind them, almost shaking in rage as he passes the monitors flashing bright advertisements of all manners of “freaks” on display. The last video catches his eye; it’s of a woman suspended in the middle of a cage, with the words “Be Sure to See Her Die, Every Hour on the Hour!” The next scene shows a man striking her with a whip, with the words “See the Girl Anachronism! The World’s Oldest Freak!” superimposed over the image.
It’s easier to find her; all he has to do is follow the excited crowds. He’s five minutes early, five minutes until the next show starts, and he makes sure to grab a good seat. Watching the crowd is interesting; small children, respectable matrons, prosperous businessmen, all here to watch a perpetual teenager be tortured to death. It’s enough to make him sick on his stomach, this modern day Roman circus; none of his crimes were this heinous.
The lights dim, the curtain rises; he watches as they drag Claire into the arena by her hair. Whips and bats and chains, none mar her skin for more than a minute; he jumps more at the crack of the whip than she does. It’s easy to see that she’s no longer there; years of abuse, leaving no bruises and cuts other than mental ones, have taken their toll. The crowd roars when her arm breaks, and the emcee calls out for them to give her more encouragement. Sylar steps out of the tent before he really is sick when they invite one of the school children to come shoot her. No wonder Adam had wanted to kill them all, Sylar muses, not if he’d had to watch humanity at its worse for so long.
Later that night, he sneaks back towards the animal cages, quickly locating hers. She doesn’t recognize him or his kiss, but he doubts that she recognizes anything. She doesn’t say anything, doesn’t make a sound when he carries her out of her cell, back out into life. He’d promised Lyle, promised himself that he’d find her, save her. He thinks he might have been too late; he’s not sure even he can put her back together now.