Fic: A Far Distant Future - Volume Two
CHAPTER SEVEN: Unspoken
Characters: Sylar/Claire
Summary: It's amazing what absence will do to the heart...
Rating: "R" for some violence, some blood & guts, and eventually some sexual imagery
Spoilers: Up through season 3 I guess, but this got started before season 4.
A/N: Hmm... methinks there be a bit of flirting in this chapter... well well well! I'll let YOU be the judge!!!
Disclaimer: I don't own Heroes or anything remotely related and I bow humbly before the television gods, please have mercy on me. And if I've massively screwed something up, I'd like to know.
Read Chapter Six | Read Chapter Eight
“We have to change your appearance. Ever thought of shaving your head?”
“Uhhh… not particularly, no…”
“Ever thought of what life might be like as a blonde?”
“Umm, no.”
“Red? I’ve got lots of colors -”
“Claire. Please don’t touch my head. Ever.”
“Well, Gabriel, it’s not like I have one of those silly lookin’ glasses and big-nose-moustache things lying around…”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“You’re stupid. We have to do something!”
“Here - I got something, here we go: if anyone tries to stop me, I’ll stop them.”
She glared at him menacingly.
“What. Claire, we don’t have to -”
“No, no, you’re right. That’s a great plan -”
“Forget it -”
“No, I mean, to hell with my life here, being the last person to lay a hand on your dead body and everything… You know, the dead body that’s not supposed to be up walking around ‘stopping’ people???” Her fingers made quotation marks in the air.
He sighed in resignation and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m not going to be a blonde.”
“Fine.”
Her fet piped a series of small chimes - she’d received a message. She crossed the room in three strides to dive into her purse, happy for the interruption. Retrieving the device, she discovered it was from Duncan.
‘Don’t forget to check your mail, sweetheart!’ Such a nice fake uncle.
“Hmm… you may have nothing to worry about. I might have an answer. Stay here.”
Like he hadn’t been staying right there for the past two days? He tossed his hands in exasperation before settling in to imagine what he’d look like without hair. Would he have a nice, smooth head, or weird hidden bumps and crevices?
Claire dropped her fet back into her bag which she then looped over her arm before slipping out the door. She was halfway down the corridor leading to the elevator, with the moon-like glow of the earth reflecting sunlight over her right shoulder, when its doors opened to reveal a chilling black figure. Her breath arrested in her throat and her heart stood still as he stepped, almost in slow-motion, from the lift. With lightning reflexes, she whipped her head away from him, tossing her hair, making a grand show of digging her fet from her purse.
“Hello?” she breathed her lie into the receiver, addressing a fictitious listener on the other end. She continued her false, one-sided conversation until the Shadow Man had passed her by, buffeting her body with his icy aura. After some distance had been put between them, she quietly followed.
There were many decks comprising the habitation wing, with groups of elevators connecting them, but since she was new to the station she'd been assigned to the main deck. While it was closer to the main lift that transported tenants to the rest of the wings, the units there were smaller and the population density was greater - her evenings were a bit more noisy than what the tenured employees enjoyed in their more spacious, upper-deck apartments. The gist, however, was that if the Shadow Man was looking for one singular man in the entire habitation wing, he was going to be looking for… a while. Which was why Claire was, while tucked back in an alcove designed to contain a light fixture for the hallway, horrified to watch as the strange individual walked straight up to her front door. No guessing, no pacing the long gallery of doorways like a hungry, impatient panther. He knew exactly where he was headed. She bit her lip, terrified he could still hear the air passing through her nostrils, waiting while he appeared to be memorizing every last detail of the portal separating her living quarters from the outside world - separating Gabriel from him. Maybe he was stoically employing some sort of ability that would allow him to see inside…
What was she going to do?!?
Before she could panic, he suddenly ceased his unnerving stillness to briskly turn and leave, heading back the way he’d come. She smashed herself into the corner of the alcove, desperate to become one with the wallpaper, making outrageous bargains with a god she wasn’t sure she believed in, praying he wouldn’t see her. Undeservedly blessed, she remained hidden as he paced to the elevator and stepped inside without looking back. She banished fear to instinct and made a mental note of the deck on which the elevator stopped. She now knew where not to go. She practically ran to her domicile and squeezed herself inside before the door had the chance to fully open.
“We gotta go - we gotta go NOW!”
Confused, Gabriel got to his feet but Claire was hoping the tone of her voice would’ve conveyed a bit more urgency, making him a little less sluggish. She growled in frustration as she took a large step toward him and gripped his wrist.
“Come on!”
“Where’re we going?”
“This place is compromised, I need to get you to a better hiding place, then I’ve gotta go check my mail.”
“Your… mail?” he muttered in disbelief as she yanked him forward and out the door. He didn’t really expect an answer, which was good because he didn’t get one. What he received, instead, was a elbow in the stomach as she forced him bodily into the alcove she’d used earlier.
“Stay here.”
Glancing around, she trotted ahead and pressed the button by the lift. Once the elevator that had arrived was determined to be empty, she beckoned for him to hasten down the hallway and join her inside. He complied a bit more easily this time.
“I’m going to take you to the environmental recycling and filtration unit. It’s not exactly a fun place to hang out, but it’s guaranteed to be deserted. From there we can crawl in the ducts and follow the pipework to where they hook up to the hangar decks. They’ll be servicing the shuttles and larger ships, so that’ll make it easier to… are you listening?” His expression was distracted and pained. He turned blank eyes to her and nodded without conviction. She didn’t have time to speculate over what might be tumbling around inside his head unspoken, she was too busy trying to anticipate which next move was the correct one. “… well, you get the point. The only bright side is that we don’t have long.”
Getting from the medical wing to the corridor that took them to environmental was tense - the hospital was packed with thick knots of people. Fortunately, with the recent influx in capacity, Claire was able to use the chaos to her advantage. Gabriel found himself back on another stretcher, breathing against a sheet, as she pushed the two of them through unnoticed. He was happy to abandon the ruse once they were free - he wasn’t exactly the kind of guy that enjoyed playing dead.
They eventually reached a stairwell that took them down. The heat and the thickness of the air started to become oppressive enough that the walls began to feel like they were closing in. Before claustrophobia had the chance to claim them, Claire led them through a portal that opened into a vast expanse of pipework and roiling vats. She tucked him in between some boxes that contained fuel for the boiler units, and took him by his shoulders.
“Stay here, I just need to -”
“Claire, I could’ve just shapeshifted into someone else and walked right on that ship…”
She was silent for a moment, looking up at him plaintively.
“I know, I know… I just…” She rubbed the sides of his arms. “I just didn’t want to take any chances.”
Her lie buzzed up his spine and rattled his teeth. It pricked him like a papercut under the fingernail, irritating enough to light a flame under his famous temper. Years she’d been nothing but honest with him for the sheer brutality of it, and now - now - she chooses to break the habit? If there was something she wasn’t telling him, he was going to find out what it was. Shocks lit her fingertips, causing her to rip her hands from him, taking a stunned step back.
“Wha-”
“That’s not what you wanted to say, Claire. Speak your mind.”
She balled her hands into fists and narrowed her eyelids in annoyance - her sudden defensiveness spoke volumes of the words left unsaid trying to poke through the surface. She squinted and shook her head, then huffed.
“We don’t have time for this.” She turned to leave but didn’t make it half a step before she found herself immobilized. Unfortunately, he did catch the smile she tried to hide by quickly closing her eyes. She tried so hard to convince herself that his insidious invisible grip - the one he’d used to subdue her, terrorize her, violate her - didn’t feel like a cherished embrace from an old friend. She didn’t succeed. He turned her to face him and released her slowly. He leaned back against the boxes, arms folded over his chest, one ankle crossing the other, making a grand show of waiting for her to open her mouth. She breathed a sigh of resignation.
“You’re not the only one who’s been alone a long time,” she whispered, inspecting her toes. “Seeing you… took me back to a time when… I wasn’t.” She ran her tongue over her top lip before she met his eyes. “I guess I just wanted to be able to say goodbye.” Her truth rang clear as a bell.
He felt like a shithead. He nodded his understanding, complacent to do whatever she asked of him, unwilling to cause her more grief, secretly grateful for the opportunity to see her one last time. She dug into her purse and retrieved his I.D. and paperwork - he accepted her offering.
“Hold onto these. You have a neural tap -”
“Yeah, I got it in prison -”
“Yes you did - when I get back we’re gonna update it so your info matches your I.D. I’m hoping the package I’ve got in the mail has clothes - Intelligence agents don’t exactly run around a lot sportin’ hospital scrubs,” she said, gesturing at his entirety. She gave him a final parting look before adding, “I’ll be back soon,” and then she was gone.
~*~*~
The Shadow Man left the morgue and ascended one deck, in search of this ‘Jesse’. He found the man hovering over a married couple, lying prone in separate beds that had been pushed together in an obvious attempt to conserve on space (a cloth divider had been draped across the room, partitioning it to allow for privacy while still managing to accommodate two more people on the other side). They both were clearly very sick: their skin had taken an eerie greenish hue and was dotted with an occasional blistering boil, he guessed as a result of some sort of exposure to radiation or something harmful in the decimated colony’s atmosphere. Their breaths came in short rasps and they were afraid, as evidenced by how tightly they clasped each other’s hands. Jesse Northrup, as his nametag read, sensed the additional presence in the room without looking up from the readouts he was inspecting while deftly passing his examination wand over the wife.
“Can I help you?”
In the interest of being thorough, the Shadow Man pulled a scanner from his belt, using it to attempt to locate the frequency Tami had supplied him.
“There was a shuttle shot down, Earth-side. The body of one rebel, I’ve been told, was to have been brought here for further inspection - an odd tattoo on his wrist was generating some interest.”
Jesse turned and cocked an eyebrow in curiosity. First of all, the Black Guard never traveled alone and were certainly never this… chatty, using inflections outside the normal monotone. Second of all, he hadn’t seen anyone fitting that description. Before he could voice his confusion, the Shadow Man continued.
“Tami said Rose had brought him.”
Jesse turned away from his patients in his best curmudgeonly fashion. He was a man of advanced years - thin grey hair wisped over brown spots covering his scalp, thick lenses sat at the tip of his long, crooked nose, and his stooped posture belied a youth that had seen far too many fast cars and cigarettes. He’d grown too old for patience or manners. He ripped his glasses off, flicking his oversized ears in the process.
“Look around you, you faceless pea-brain! You think, at a time like this, that this is the kind of place I want those girls bringing dead bodies?!? Like I don’t have enough on my plate already??? Got doctors of all sorts upstairs tryin’ to help these people and guys like me - the ones who do the diagnosin’, all the real work - need to be coming up with some sort of answer! This is a tragedy happenin’ here, kiddo - you think I got time for some stupid tattoo?!?” The Shadow Man gracefully replaced his scanner into its holder on his belt and folded his hands behind his back, allowing the man the opportunity to vent his frustrations. “No - I ain’t see no body, I ain’t seen no flippin’ tattoo, and I ain’t seen either one of them goddamn girls in days. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have more important things to attend to!” He returned to his duties as if nothing had happened, and gave no further indication that he was aware of his presence any longer. Silently, having already received his answer from his scanner, the Shadow Man slipped from the hospital in search of the habitation wing.
Which he found easily. People in space were so helpful. Except for Jesse Northrup. Careful not to walk into a woman talking on her fet in the corridor, he busied himself with his scanner once more as he stepped off the elevator. He wasn’t entirely surprised that he’d picked up a reading. His pulse quickened as he followed the steadily emitting frequency to the location of its source - apartment 102, residence of Rose Bennett. A thought flitted briefly across his consciousness - the last girl named "Bennett" that had known his quarry had been killed violently, having been ripped to shreds before he set her on fire. He wondered what must've happened to invoke such wrath, but didn't ponder long as it was illogical to speculate on something that'd happened so long ago. He was only one of two people in the known universe who'd remember it anyway.
He neatly packed away his device as he stood before the door, rigid with anticipation. Only the flat panel of acrylic polymer blend presented any obstacle - the chase was over. He mentally filed through all of his abilities before settling on telekinesis. With surgical precision, he began to turn the pins of the lock on the door.
And was met by a force he supposed he should’ve expected, after all, his fighting prey also possessed centuries of experience using the same gift. Sylar’s hold on the last two pins was too great - he would not allow them to budge. Unwilling to make a scene, the Shadow Man recognized it was time for another tactic: if he was unable to break in, he would have to wait them out. Certain that Sylar and his keeper, this Rose Bennett woman, would eventually require sustenance, he retreated to the lift to make his way to the commons. As he stepped out and rounded a corner into the great hall, loudly busy with milling crowds, air thick with the powerful aromas of baking breads and cooking meals, he marveled, again, over the object of his quest. What kind of girl would be foolish enough to befriend the killer? Or, better yet, what had the man done to earn the risk of her home and livelihood?
Despite the best efforts of the surrounding patrons to casually avert their eyes attempting politely not to stare, he could feel their eyes on his back tingling up his spine and across his shoulders as he took a seat near the viewport looking off into space, starkly framing the moon in the distance against a black background. He could have disabled his hooding device, that which provided the illusion of black facelessness, to enjoy a cup of coffee during his wait, but he knew he’d immediately be recognized as not truly belonging to the Black Guard and he preferred not to draw more unwanted attention to himself. An undisturbed sentinel, he settled in to watch the door.
It was then, just as his mind began to wander, that he began hearing snippets of conversation. A group of people three tables away had secured passage aboard the Zephyr, heading to a new life on a colony in the Pisces sector. Some of the survivors from the Sagittarius accident were also being transplanted there, after having vehemently protested a return to Earth. He watched as a pack of dock laborers filed into the areas where he knew food staples to be kept in cold storage. If they were ready to start loading perishables aboard the ship, it wouldn’t be long until it was in transit. He had a sneaking suspicion. Double checking his utility belt, making sure all of his implements were in place, he rose and made his way to the hangar deck.
That would be the right place to wait.
~*~*~
Tami stepped out of the shower just in time to hear her fet going crazy. She slapped a towel around herself and made a run for it, catching her caller in the nick of time.
“This’s Tami…” she breathed.
“Girl, are you out to get me???” It was Jesse.
“Excuse m-”
“What’re you tryin’ to do, sending the Black Guard up to see me in the middle of a crisis? Askin’ stupid questions about some fictitious body of all things…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Yer little black-suited friend, that’s who! Talkin’ awful loud about looking for a body in front my dying patients!”
“Jesse calm down-”
“Don’t tell me to -”
“Rose took our guy up to see you, remember? The one that had a hundred year old RFID tag? She said you guys had packed him on ice to send him on the Zephyr to Intelligence in Pisces…”
“Now, see, that’s where I get confused because I haven’t seen any body, and I sure as hell haven’t talked to Rosie…”
Why would she lie? After calming Jesse down and hanging up the call she thought back to the conversation she'd had with Rose about the peculiar body. Did the mod really have some weird sort of cockroach power? Would… would he come back to life??? After all, he’d possibly already lived that long, right? Could Rose be hiding him? She was still so new, what did anyone really know about her - did she sympathize with mods?
Was she a rebel?
~*~*~
Her first thought when she returned and witnessed what he'd been up to in her absence was 'why are men so stupid?' There before her sat Gabriel, completely surrounded by highly flammable crates of fuel, busying himself by making a sparking blue ball of lightning that hovered precariously between his fingertips.
"Nope, you haven't changed a bit, I should've suspected as much. You're trying to kill us all."
"Hmm...?"
She pointed to his surroundings. "You're playing wick to the roman candle there, chief. Gonna blow a hole out the side of the station, make us a bit more noticeable… suck a few people out into space… you know… no big deal."
He sneered at her like an adolescent. “I got it under control…” Nonetheless, he extinguished his charge without mentioning the times the sparks sometimes accidentally escaped him when he was startled or particularly emotive.
“Hold still.” She brandished an item from the bundle she carried - it looked a little like a gun used at the supermarket used to read bar codes. It was a neural tap reader. “This’ll disorient you a little for a second, but it won’t hurt. Give me your I.D.” She scanned the card before pointing the device at the back of his head, allowing it to do its job. The room tilted a bit and he lolled forward while his brain received and processed the new information. It was a sensation that was similar to the procurement of a new power, except in this instance what he’d received was a new identity - the ability to recognize the new name and the minor details that came with it. It was a few moments of raw blissful ecstasy thanks, in no small part, to his ability.
“… can I keep that thing?”
“Here,” she said, ignoring him and dropping the rest of her pile to land softly in his lap. She had, in fact, acquired new clothing. “Put this stuff on. The pants are probably way too big, as well as the shoes - Duncan usually guesses on the larger side of things-”
“Probably safer -”
“- yeah, but I think there’s a belt there, at least.”
She turned her back to him, allowing him his privacy while she opened a panel in the wall revealing access to the ducts that would provide ships like the Zephyr an atmosphere control unit pumped full of freshly filtered air. She climbed a few rungs up a ladder, scouting ahead, hoping that any labor work required for the ship’s climate would already have been completed by now, leaving the ducts unoccupied. She continued until she reached a crossroads, allowing her to climb no further, but instead would require her to choose: left or right. She twisted her head back and forth - the coast was clear. They were going to go right.
“Claire?” she heard him softly call to her from below.
“Come on up, this way.”
Slithering through the ducts was not at all unlike being a snake underground. The cramped space forced her to actively clamp down on her panic reflex, but the air was cooler than down below with a slightly earthy scent and a light current that brushed her hair to tickle her shoulders. After a few meters of letting her mind wander, she finally came to the realization that she totally had her butt in Gabriel’s face. She stopped and dropped her hips to turn and squint at him suspiciously. He came to an abrupt halt, nearly bumping into her.
“…what?”
“You’re being awfully quiet back there. I don’t like it.”
“Are you seri-”
“We established a long time ago that I can be a pain in your ass even if I’m not an immediate threat to you, right?”
“Uhhh… sure?” He gestured for her to move on. She stayed put.
She noticed, for the first time, the clothing Duncan had sent. It was a suit - a nice one. A James Bond nice one. He looked… handsome - broad shoulders squared by clean, crisp lines while the collar hugged and accentuated the smooth musculature of his throat. His short haircut was appropriate, but he could’ve used a shave.
“I’m just sayin’… no funny business back there…”
He did his best to look innocent, which was just laughable. A breathy, lecherous chuckle escaped him and he made no attempt to stop it. Some things were just too good to repress. She huffed a sigh before crawling forward and pressing on.
The sad part was, until she’d said something, his mind was completely focused on making plans: what he was going to do once he got on the ship, and from there once he’d gotten to his destination in the Pisces sector. While he really had no interest in ‘choosing a side’ and becoming a spy or whatever, he didn’t mind the idea of a steady paycheck - something that would get him on his own two feet for a while until he could figure out what he was going to do next. But no. Now all he could think about was the feminine curve of her hip as it swayed hypnotically in front of him, lulling him into some sort of hormone-driven trance. Fortunately, their forward trajectory was brought to an end once they’d reached another ladder, requiring they start climbing once again. He decided to distract himself further with conversation.
“So… you’re a coroner? How did that happen?”
“That is a three hundred year long story.”
“Wanna know what I think?”
“Nope, never have.”
“I think,” she knew he’d tell her anyway, “it’s because you like working tucked away in a basement at some job that makes you just weird enough that no one would want to know you. You like the distance it gives you. And it gives you the opportunity to abuse poor dead bodies because you’re jealous of them.”
Her foot swung out an inch from his nose.
“Oops, sorry… slipped.”
“Mmhm, yeah… So, am I close?”
She wasn’t going to talk about it. She wasn’t going to admit to it. She let her silence speak for her. They continued climbing for what felt like forever until they finally reached a hatch that opened into a huge, dark, cavernous chamber. Across the great distance they could hear a constant, whispery hum from crowds of voices. Eyes having adjusted to the dimness, the outlines of monstrous shapes began to form, filling their vicinity. They’d reached the hangar deck. Tired and aching, Claire used her remaining energy to haul herself from the duct and collapse against some spare tubing that had been used to connect the airway to the requisite parts of a ship. She flung her arms above her head.
“I don’t think these will ever work again, I swear we climbed for miles…”
Wiping sweat from his brow, Gabriel crawled out to sit next to her.
“I just still think it’s amazing you knew exactly how to get here…”
“Planned this route when I first arrived, in case I ever needed a quick escape.”
Gabriel nodded ahead of them at a large ship buzzing like an anthill with swarms of people.
“Is that the Zephyr?”
“Yup.”
He silently indicated his acknowledgement before voicing it. “Well, there ya go.” He grew awkwardly withdrawn for a moment, rubbing the back of his neck. “I, uh… I guess this is it then,” he muttered to his feet. Prepared to see her reaction, he bravely turned to face her, irrationally hoping to see something in her eyes that he knew he wouldn’t - shouldn’t.
And yet, she seemed oddly sad. She brought her arms back around and fiddled with her fingernails while she nodded slowly and somberly. “Yeah… I guess it is.”
He groaned with fatigue as he stood and offered a hand to her. “Well, let’s go.”
She gazed up at him, heaving a heavy sigh before she gripped his wrist and allowed him to pull her to her feet. Unexpectedly affected by the brief contact, they both snatched their hands away, clumsily tucking them into pockets where the feeling could be quickly forgotten… or kept. Maintaining a respectable distance, they began crossing the hangar. The time had come to say goodbye.
~*~*~
The rebel sat in the dark of the hangar. With more than a mild curiosity, he watched as the man and the young woman crawled out of a sealed air duct - not exactly an orthodox way of getting onto a ship. He briefly wondered if he should know them - if they were mods or rebel spies - but tucked the thought away, they had nothing to do with his mission.
He had one remaining charge, having already used the first on the bio-dome covering the doomed colony in the Sagittarius sector. The second was destined for the Zephyr, whose tesseract drive operated, in large part, due to a monstrous particle collider that comprised a healthy section of its lower decks. The charge would be used to interrupt the collider’s routines at a particular set of coordinates, disabling the ship where it could be found by patiently waiting rebel troops. The ship would then be commandeered, the collider would be restored, and the Zephyr would be bound back for Sagittarius where the colony’s goods and medical supplies could be recovered before any Earth Federals could get their hands them. The hostages - the three hundred men and women comprising her crew and her additional two hundred passengers - would be dealt with afterwards. Aside from sneaking access to the collider, this mission felt more like a pleasure cruise through space. He wished they could all be like this.
As if he should’ve expected any less, however, there was one slight problem. The station currently docking the Zephyr, and everyone who would board her, was currently crawling with the Black Guard. There was one in particular who had beat him down to the hangar and was monitoring all traffic coming and going from the great ship, inspecting each person with unwavering scrutiny. He was certain he was looking for him. He would need to be dispatched immediately.
~*~*~
The hanger seemed to swirl around them, busy and loud and unfocused, as they plodded reluctantly onward toward the loading dock of the Zephyr, avoiding eye contact with each other to disguise an impending melancholy sense of separation. Well, until Gabriel brushed his hand against a food crate rolling past on a cart full of crates headed for the cargo hold. Visions exploded before his eyes, occluding his sight, causing him to stop and press a hand to his forehead.
“Hey… what’s wrong?” he heard Claire call to him from what seemed like the other end of the station, so far away. While he couldn’t see her, he could feel her lead him to a wall where he leaned unsteadily against the cool, stable surface.
What he did see was another large area - this one filled with tables and patrons, and a cafeteria. He watched as the crate was lifted to join others of its kind on a stack that then began to roll out of the commons. He sucked in a sharp breath when, suddenly, he saw the Shadow Man abruptly rise from the place he’d been seated and begin to follow. It had been so long since he’d seen one of them, and still they managed to raise his blood pressure. He slid his back down the wall, knees weak, and he threaded his fingers through his hair. It was a bleak feeling, to live this long and still be hunted. He was walking into a trap, he just knew it - the thought was dizzying and made him slightly nauseous. He continued to watch the Shadow Man follow the crate down several corridors and up a couple lifts until… His vision blinked clear and he could sense Claire in his periphery, kneeling at his left shoulder. His fingers itched for a fight, body thrummed with a need for violence - urges he knew he couldn’t satisfy.
“Get up,” she hissed, “people are watching us…”
He pushed against the wall as he got his feet back underneath him, eyes frantically darting from face to face around the hangar, scanning, searching…
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“He’s here, Claire,” he whispered. “The black suit.”
“Are you sure?”
This time he looked directly into her, as if he could burn a note straight into her brain that told her exactly how sure he was. She looked away to start surveying the crowd as well, visibly shaken.
“Claire,” he began, taking a step to place himself between her and her view of the ship and it’s milling populace, making him her full focus. “It’s not safe for you to go any farther. You’ve done enough for me already.”
With his back turned to prying eyes, and Claire his only audience, he shifted his features to look like someone else - he chose his old jailor, Bob. She rubbed her elbows and peered down at her shuffling toes. She knew he now meant to go his separate way, intending for her to remain safe where she stood, and she was at a complete loss for what to say to him. She shook her head minutely before she granted him her lonely, sorrowful eyes.
“I’m, uh… well… I’m grateful to have had some company for a couple days, even if it was yours.” It was easy to slip into old, familiar banter.
He gave her a wicked, lop-sided grin that was so characteristic of Sylar, even if the face it graced was anything but. It was fleeting, however, as he ducked his eyes in thought, steeling himself and taking a deep breath before saying what he wanted to tell her.
“Earlier today… I said something to you, but you didn’t hear me and I didn’t repeat it. I…” he stammered. “I said you were a light in the darkness.” He met her face to face and moved closer, looming over her. He kept his voice quiet, private, between the two of them. “There were times when things were… hard. And sometimes, when I needed to… I thought of you. A lot. I… I think you’re a part of what saved me, Claire, and you don’t even know it. Someday, though, I will repay you for it… and everything I’ve done to you.” He backed away a couple steps, ready to leave her and begin his voyage. “I promise I will. And we both know I’m pretty good at keeping my promises.”
She smiled a sad but genuine smile before he turned and walked away. The space near her, the one that she hadn’t even been aware he’d warmed, grew cold. She had her life back to herself again - all to herself, no one else. She wasn’t going to cry, she wasn’t going to cry. She’d kept herself numb for so long she’d ignored how alone she’d become. She’d neglected her own basic human needs - rejected her humanity in its entirety. And then she’d seen his face - he’d shown up like a gift-wrapped punch in the nose who then opened up wide to reach out and give herself back to her. And yet she felt like he was taking a piece of her with him. Damn him! Damn him for slicing a knife right through her vulnerabilities one last time. She wasn’t going to beg him to stay, and she wasn’t going to follow him on that ship. But her heart was going to burst…
“Hey!” she called after him. He turned as she caught up, breathless and blushing. Her jaw worked soundlessly a bit before she spoke. “You… you taught me how to feel again. How to be lonely and how to need. I know it sounds…” she sighed, waving her hand dismissively. “But I’d forgotten these things. Can you imagine what that’s like? It’s not living, it’s existing.” She reached to squeeze his shoulder, perhaps a little harder than she’d meant to. “You’ve reminded me how to live. I think you’ve repaid me more than you know.” And I will MISS you so much… she left it unspoken like so many other things she suspected stood between them.
He nodded darkly, obviously not believing her, which was fine. She’d let him repay whatever he felt he needed to. He tugged at his bottom lip with his teeth for a moment, memorizing her face, before he said with heavy meaning, “I’ll see you later,” then turned and left. Claire remained behind, watching him go until he disappeared into the crowd.
~*~*~
The Shadow Man woke up stuffed in a shuttle craft somewhere, he suspected, still on the hangar deck of the space station. Somehow he’d been rendered unconscious and had been tied, wrists to ankles behind his back. It was agonizingly uncomfortable and more than a little irritating. He telekinetically removed his bonds and sat up, collecting some items that had left his person to become scattered on the floor, he suspected in the midst of his abduction.
Slowly, like a dissipating fog, some of his memory returned. He’d been struck by an unseen assailant - a tranquilizer dart. He supposed the shapeshifting Sylar could be responsible, either that or there were other rebels on the base, which wasn’t too terribly unbelievable. There was still the question of who was responsible for the tragedy in the Sagittarius sector and whether or not his or her whereabouts included the space station currently housing the refugees. He was pretty sure his scanner would’ve picked up Sylar’s proximity.
He reached to retrieve his fet, which had landed an arm’s length away - it was beeping maniacally with alerts from the Black Guard’s central command. There had been an incident and all deployed field agents were required to return for immediate reprogramming - there was a new objective in need of investigation.
It appeared that the Zephyr, who had departed several hours prior while he slept unaware on the cold, metal floor of his unfortunate location, had fallen prey to a rebel attack. The unthinkable had happened - a charge meant to disable the tesseract drive had actually created a weakness that compromised its structural integrity, allowing the energy created by colliding particles to flood the lower decks… where, in a fraction of a second, it met her fuel reserves for her impulse engines as well as her weaponry banks. The ship became a gigantic floating bomb. There had been no hope for her, and thankfully it had happened so quickly that no one had suffered.
There had been no survivors.
He was glad he was alone, as he unleashed an emotion he could never have shown publicly. He crashed his fist into the bulkhead, swearing loudly, snapping open bloody wounds on his hand that healed immediately. How could this have happened? How could he have come so close only to…. He’d lost everything - he’d failed.
No. He wouldn’t give up. After double checking he still had his scanner, he rushed through an open hatch to the cockpit of the shuttle. He called in a clearance code that all of the Black Guard possessed, and was granted exit without question.
He supposed his goal didn’t actually necessitate that Sylar remain alive… He was definitely going to show up at the scene of this accident.
A/N #2: And, yes, I'm working on giving Sylar a brand NEW mental complex! Fear of flying MWAHAHAHAAAA!!! Seriously, I'd have a hangup about spacecraft by now too, with his track record, wouldn't you?