Fic: A Far Distant Future - Volume Two

[vespaer]

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: Homecoming (Part One)
Characters: Sylar/Claire
Summary: It's amazing what absence will do to the heart...
Rating: This chapter is "NC17" fer sure, y'all - just sayin'.
Spoilers: Up through season 3 I guess, but this got started before season 4.

A/N: Omg... the last chapter! I'm not gonna cry! I'm not gonna... *sniff*... cry. Please enjoy and thank you - ALL of you - for sticking with me on this ride, I can't tell you how much it means. This has been a labor of love and would've gone nowhere without you. So, anyhoo, on with the show and keep your eyes peeled for an epilogue and a new multi-chapter I hope to get started this week. (Chapter split in two due to size)
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.

Feeling more than just a little like his namesake, an angel of war, Gabriel the Herald (Osiris, Lord of the Afterlife) took inventory as he brought around his fearsome arm, dancing in a dangerous arc of beautiful destruction. One - he hated being chased. A lifeless head rolled away from a falling, black-suited body that would never chase him again. Two - he hated being manipulated, or lied to. Like, by the last few people in which he risked placing his precious, tentative trust - one of which was currently warming a cage lining the wall, unknowingly grateful for his benevolent if not reluctantly practiced mercy. Three - he hated being drugged. He deftly dodged darts, collars, and blinking mechanisms spewing poisonous gas as he hacked open the chest of a flamethrower who missed him with every attempt to incapacitate him. Four - he hated being shot. A menacing, wolfish, smirking growl briefly lit his features as he turned, pushing to create space and flinging searing flashes of scorching energy to pummel into his enemy, and he felt the cold heft of the only deadly firearm in the room press against the small of his back where it was tucked into the waistline of the pants he’d… borrowed from an unconscious Mike. He howled with terrifying fury when he carelessly tripped into retaliating fire - something electric razed across his skin and temporarily paralyzed him, almost creating a detrimental domino effect that would keep him from regaining control of the fight. As he toppled forward into proper balance, parrying a clawed swipe from a lycanthrope that was allowed to move closer than he would’ve liked, he seized the opportunity to turn events back into his favor and he remembered number five - he hated being electrocuted. He found the previous culprit and dispatched him with bloody, cold indifference.

When he was the last living thing standing, he took a moment to calm his heavy, exerted breath and survey the halo of gore around him, wiping a shaking hand across his sweating brow. Over the buzzing whir of Belinda’s waiting portal and the sound of footsteps alerting the approach of round number two, he heard Mike groan back to life off to his right.

“There’re gonna be more than suits,” the man warned quietly, grimacing as he noticed his distinct lack of clothing.

“Why would you tell me?”

“Look at me, buddy… I’m disarmed and in my freakin’ underwear… what else have I got to lose? Certainly ain’t my dignity…” They both knew that wasn’t true - he was responsible for saving the lives of potentially millions. If there was anything he did have, it was dignity. “I ran a trace on your black-suited friend’s fet number… found him here, after we knew he was on Leo. He had to have come over on the same ship, but other than a handful of agents and a small army of the Guard… there was no one else. And then I remembered that one… from the gym… and I knew we were dealing with an imposter. I instituted an order that would reveal him. All available hands were sent to his location, but I knew that whatever this was, it was all about you. So I broke rank and came down here instead. It sounds like everyone else is starting to catch on. You should probably jump down that rabbit hole while you still have a chance. They might not be shooting tranqs.”

Mike was right. Nothing they’d worked so hard to achieve was going to be worth anything if they didn’t get away. He turned to his old partner one last time, but he didn’t know what to say.

“Maybe we’ll meet again someday, under better circumstances,” the other man supplied to fill the awkward void.

Gabriel nodded firmly. “I hope you get to go home and see your kids soon,” he replied as he backed away and disappeared through the purple hole.

He rematerialized on the other side just in time to catch a fainting Belinda.

“I’m okay,” she muttered weakly as he tucked a shoulder under her arm give her proper support, even if that wasn’t exactly what Sylar had in mind for the girl. They were engulfed in a cacophony of sound, ranging from shouts to shots fired to the discharge of various offensive abilities. Looking around, he took note of their surroundings - she’d transported them to a large hangar… at the space port in Carver City. They were in a restricted area which had gotten them embroiled in an altercation with security and had also drawn the unwanted attention of a few screaming civilian bystanders, but the Feds hadn’t had a chance yet to arrive. The sooner they could hijack a ship and break orbit the greater their chances of success. “Olivia said this is where the Feds house some of their subsidized transport ships,” Belinda whispered. “I think she said there was one available in bay C3, but I didn’t know how to get there.”

“That’s alright, we’ll get it figured out,” he told her, hauling her to a protective barrier of cargo crates. He stepped away as Olivia pulled back to greet them, the small handgun she’d been able to procure from a fallen guard having run out of ammo.

“We’re not gonna be able to hold this position,” he told Peter as he crept up behind him, sorry to distract him from telekinetically shielding their compatriots as they fought to defend themselves.

“I know, I just don’t know where to go, and I’ve been kinda preoccupied…”

“Olivia says there’s a ship in bay C3 - I can keep a shield up if you wanna start probing some minds.” Have fun with that, Pete. That was an ability Gabe could truthfully say Sylar had never coveted. Peter only nodded before ducking down behind the looming tower of boxes. With the relative ease of centuries of experience, Gabriel pushed his arms out in front of him then spread them wide, creating a formidable and impenetrable invisible wall - one that prograded, knocking the crouching and firing uniformed officers off of their feet to roll away, scraped across the floor by the force. He could sense the other telekinetic, the one he’d seen earlier, picking weapons away, creating a safer distance between them and their handlers. Plumes of flames, balls of light, and booming sonic explosions filled the space left empty by the retreating cavalry, accentuating the point while doing no further damage.

“Whatchoo got, Petey?”

“Shhh shhhh …” he hushed impatiently in response, waving a finger in the air. He replaced it back to his temple, and a vein started to pop across his forehead. “Don’t let them get so far away, it gets tough to hear them.”

“Pffff, why didn’t you just say so?” He slung out a ghostly lasso, yanking a singular security officer to land, howling, at their position. Olivia joined them and, very businesslike, pressed the barrel of her gun to the back of the man’s ball-capped head, immobilizing him in surrender. He didn’t have to know the thing wasn’t loaded.

“Please, I have a wife and kids, don’t -”

He was interrupted the moment Peter seized his hands around the man’s face.

“Just show me what I want to know,” he murmured, closing his eyes in concentration. After a few moments of tense stillness he smiled. “Three bays - just three bays down, north of us, that’s all the further we have to go - we can make it!”

“That’s not very far, I can take us,” Belinda offered, with a bit more color to her cheeks as she slowly pulled herself to her knees.

“No, Lindy,” Olivia interrupted, “we can go on -”

“Seriously, that’s a piece of cake, I can do it. Really.”

“Sleep,” Peter told the officer before gently laying his limp body on the floor. “The quicker the better, guys. I say let her try.”

Gabriel reinforced his barrier as the refugees retreated and Belinda drew a circular opening in the air. He released his hold when he was the last to step through, turning to tell the girl, “You must think you’re pretty damned useful or something, huh...” She smiled as she followed him and the hole cinched shut behind them.

They were all smashed together on the other side, pinched between stacks of more crates. Without taking the time to wonder what was inside such a heavily piled payload, Olivia and Gabriel elbowed their way toward the cockpit.

“If you can wrench open those hangar doors, I can take ‘er out,” she told him.

“Please, give me something hard.”

Gabriel waved goodbye to the rapidly converging herd of security personnel as they collectively drew up short, some skidding from the abrupt change in momentum, evident fear written across their faces as they saw the craft lurch backward, afraid that they’d be sucked out into the vacuum of space if they didn’t seal the inner hold immediately. He spared them by telekinetically drawing shut the aperture that separated the bay from the rest of the station. He turned to face the outer doors and smiled at the stars twinkling invitingly on the other side. Home was out there - no longer an intangible concept stoked by a fevered and inventive imagination… no longer an instrument used for self-pitying torture, but real. Real and waiting, sunny and warm, smelling like fresh roses and lilac. He held both hands out before him and pulled them apart, taking the doors with them. The inky depths presented themselves, offering an invitation they did not refuse.

~*~*~

“They give you a rough time, Agent Hornberg?”

Mike jerked, startled by the commanding voice, and looked up straight into the formidable, if not slightly scary, purplish complexion of his statuesque, perpetually-angry, red-headed boss.

“You could say that, Director, given my present… circumstances.”

He didn’t need to gesture, indicating his current state of incarceration and undress, but he did anyway. It was an oddly reflexive human habit. Another agent, no one he’d met before, released him from his cage and brought him a lab coat to drape around him like a blanket.

“Well, I hate seeing that happen to one of my best operatives,” Director Scott continued with a dualistic tone of voice. “Calls are coming into dispatch from spaceport security over in Carver City. They’re saying that a massive group of over thirty mods just showed up - out of thin air - in the middle of a hangar bay, inciting a massive riot. They’re attempting to make off with a ship.”

Mike cast his eyes to the ground, avoiding the man’s penetrating gaze while he attempted to button up the modest garment. He knew what he was after. Tesseract drives merely created carefully calculated ‘divots’ in space between pairs of coordinates, drawing them close to each other - flying the ship, in the conventional sense, was not really a necessity once its mass was no longer affected by gravitational pull. Oftentimes coordinates were programmed remotely, and they were always stored - onboard in the vehicle’s computer and additionally in Central databases (assuming they weren’t just as tampered with as the Central laboratory turned out to be… and he would guess that they were). The Director wanted to know where they were going. But… why ask him?

“If you like, sir, I can place a call down to data warehousing, and -”

“That’s not gonna do you any good, Agent, they’re not going anywhere - they took the wrong kind of ship. They’re sitting ducks unless they try to pull into the space station to hijack yet another vehicle of some kind.”

This yanked Mike’s attention away from the front of his coat.

“But… then -”

“What I’d like to know, Agent, is where they were thinking they were going to go.”

And that was it right there. Coordinates were always stored onboard in the vehicle’s computer. He wanted the coordinates that were stored in the computer he’d salvaged from Gabriel’s stolen transport on Leo. He considered his dilemma for a fraction of a breath. One the one hand, if he complied, his career record stood a greater chance of remaining untarnished. He had no guarantee that Gabriel and his band of refugees would be attempting to escape to that particular location. On the other hand, what if he was wrong? What if that’s exactly where they were going to go? And the things Gabriel and the false Guard had said… Thoughts of a galaxy living in peace clouded his mind… perhaps he could cash out his pension and open a bakery, maybe in a little suburb near the mountains outside of Ashton… What sense did it make to allow them to walk out the front door only to send the cavalry to meet them at the gate?

“Sir, I haven’t had the chance yet to file my official report,” he began to formulate his lie, “but all I found in the memory banks of the Leo transport’s motherboard was a log of the last few messages sent to and from the communications array. Some of the board was damaged during the resulting confrontation after the transport touched down,” which wasn’t exactly untrue, “corrupting the rest of the data. Sadly, I couldn’t get it to read. I’m sorry I couldn’t be much more help. Perhaps I could offer to interrogate the prisoners once they’re brought in for questioning?”

“Indeed, I think that would be most helpful, Agent.”

~*~*~

“Uhh, Liv? Where’re you taking us?” Peter’s voice cut through a backdrop of relieved murmuring and nervous laughter. Even Gabriel had allowed himself the brief moment of victory, watching the planet recede behind them, heedless of the myriad hard lessons his long life had taught him to the contrary.

“Where do you think, Peter?” There was a slightly panicked note to her voice that plucked at Gabriel’s ears and set him on edge. He hadn’t quite heard the fat lady yet…

“Because it looks - and I’m not assuming anything here, alright, it just looks - like you’re taking us toward the space station.”

“Peter. Really? Have you completely forgotten the plan? Look around you, all the crates??? This isn’t a ship, honey, it’s a freakin’ cargo shuttle. Remember? We pop in, we pop out, we’re a couple feds transporting a section of mods to a new facility, we take the shuttle to the ship at the station, and we jet out of dodge before anyone knows anything is up - yes? But NO, that’s too easy. You - yes, YOU - had to go and get caught!”

“So,” Gabriel interjected, “what you’re saying is -”

“What I’m saying is that there are no tesseract drives on this vessel. We either fight it out on that station and hijack a ship the violent rebel sort of way, or we aren’t going anywhere.”

Of course. The fat lady hadn’t even started warming up. Gabriel could feel the artificial gravity working on his jaw as he and Peter stood and stared at her dumbly. To be honest, it wasn’t that he objected much to the ‘violent rebel’ part, but he didn’t want to scare the new people.

“Oh my god, Liv!” Peter cried indignantly. “Why wouldn’t you get us on a different ship?!?”

“Because, honey, Carver City is just a port - the station is where all the ships are!!!”

“So why didn’t we just telep-”

Hushed triumph turned into frightened cries as the craft was jarred by an unseen force, tossing people over each other as they scrambled to get away from heavy toppling boxes upset by the sudden wild rocking.

“What the hell was th-”

They were knocked about again and then a third time. The three locked eyes before Peter crawled around the co-pilot’s console to peer at a sharp angle out of the viewport. A cloud of drones and a handful of heavier fighter-craft were pouring from the station on a pursuant course.

“Oh hell…”

“That good, huh,” Gabriel replied, grasping at the bulkhead as the vessel was nailed again. “I don’t know about you, but I was thinking we weren’t quite screwed enough yet, you know, ‘cause I really like it a little harder up the ass. Just a preference.” He whirled at the sudden clamor of frenzied shouts accompanied by the scathing sound of a sickening hiss. Fear numbing his limbs, he retreated a few steps into the cargo hold to discover the cement-secreting mod applying his… talent to a nasty breach in the hull before they lost too much air.

“Sylar!” Peter yelled for him. “We need a containment field around this ship! NOW!”

Sure, if he could keep a shuttle intact upon atmospheric re-entry he could deflect a few explosions, right? No problem. He dropped to his knees for stability, extended his arms at his sides, and closed his eyes. He let his innate ability tunnel his focus, feeling along the outer edges of the hull, forcing all other stimuli to drop away. He pushed back against anything that pushed against him, particularly projectile weaponry.

He was nearly interrupted by Olivia’s startled shriek as she watched three drones zip past the fragile viewport, attempting to slice its surface with red hot lasers, their energy rippling across the transparent surface of Gabriel’s hopefully impenetrable shield. He could feel every electron burst, and he grit his teeth as his mind believed his skin was burning. His eyes watered from exertion and pain as he tried to ignore the bombs pummeling against his spine and ribs.

“Peter,” Olivia called, “I have an idea! Do you remember the coordinates? If so, I can pull them up on the holo-display’s star chart and Belinda can -”

“Belinda’s not taking us anywhere,” Peter replied, pointing to the girl where she sat oblivious to current events, crammed unconscious up against the bulkhead thankfully out of the way. A red stain had begun to appear across her abdomen - her sutures had obviously ruptured and she was in need of immediate medical attention.

“Fuck! What are we gonna -”

“No problem.” Peter pivoted to swivel himself next to her where he knelt and smoothed one hand over her shoulder, adding her ability to his already bursting piggybank of powers. “I know where we need to go, I know the coordinates.”

He stood and flung an arm toward the viewport, blinking as the buzzing drones continued their blinding assault and his eardrums were popping under the considerable raucous din, and he muttered to himself the same thing he’d heard Belinda repeat countless times.

“I guess I’m, uh… drawing a big ass door or something…”

A bright purple dot fizzled into existence in the distance.

“Peter, it needs to be bigger -”

“I’m working on it! Like I’ve done this a million times or something, good grief…”

“Quickly Peter!” Gabriel cried from where he’d made his final stand. “Fuck!!! Before I run out of skin - NOW!!! Oh my GOD!!! Do it NOW!”

…Skin? Unsure of what the loon was going on about, he concentrated on… spinning. Like pizza crust… and who was the loon now… but the faster it spun, the larger it got. He applied more force with every revolution, terrified to think about what would happen if the thing spun out of control. Would it supernova? Eat up the whole universe? Or… was there a limit to how big he could make it? He wasn’t sure what frightened him more.

“It’s working, Peter,” Olivia breathed next to him, he hadn’t felt her get so close. “Keep going - we could almost fit through…”

She gasped and jumped in surprise when the piloting console sparked wildly and detonated into careening, scorching red sparks - Gabriel was losing strength rapidly, one of the lasers had broken through.

“No NO!!! Fuck! Peter - I can’t fly the ship!!! The circuitry, it’s been cut - I can’t span across!”

“Sylar, do you think you can push us through?”

He didn’t receive a response.

“Sylar!”

He heard the man grunt as he tried to form a panting reply.

/“No friction… nothing to push against…” Another explosion blasted against the hull, sending people and cargo to sway alarmingly off balance. “OH! Nevermind!” He pushed against it. He bellowed with agonizing strain as they slowly began to inch toward the portal.

“What about the drones?”

“Won’t… go through… signal… gets lost…”

“Come on come on come on come on…” Olivia whimpered, fingers crossed and white-knuckled under her trembling lips. Reflected against the plexi-cement she could see the apparitions of two larger ships undocking from the station behind them, no doubt being sent to blast them from the heavens, bit by bit. And while the things were gargantuan and sluggish, if they didn’t get moving…

She didn’t release her breath until they were on the other side and the air collapsed around her with a sudden deafening absence of sound, save for the muted cries and soft moans from their human cargo. Her breath shuddered and hitched in her throat - she wasn’t one who cried easily but the vision before her, combined with the aftershocks of their narrow escape, ripped the emotion unwillingly free.

It was like it was made of glass - the sphere swirled with colors so breathtaking they couldn’t possibly belong in nature. Beside her, Peter slumped into the pilot’s chair, resting a heavy elbow on the ruined console. Somewhere distantly behind they heard Gabriel’s heavy form fall forward, heard the fleshy slaps of his palms hit the deck.

“Are… are we there? Are we safe?” Olivia openly sobbed.

“Sagittarius, that clever bastard… he took us to fucking Sagittarius.”

“Didn’t it blow up? Forever ago?”

“Wouldn’t that mean it’s deserted?”

Olivia was happy to concede the point, trailing disbelieving fingertips down the pane, shaking with adrenaline and desire.

~*~*~

“I can’t believe we got this close but we’re still so far away…”

Voices called to him, dragging him mournfully back to consciousness. Gabriel rolled his face against the scratchy surface of a packing crate, dutifully supporting his weight as he helplessly leaned into it. He couldn’t wait until he could get back on that warm beach with a cold drink and a naked Claire and he could forget all about these worthless fucking spaceships for a while…

“I know… it’s cruel to just sit here and be able to look at it, but not be able to get any closer…”

“How much longer do you think we have until we run out of air?”

Oh god, seriously?

“I dunno… there’s a lot of us…”

“I could fly it if I could get the computer to talk to the engines, but the connections have been severed in so many places, I’m not sure I can find them all… and we have no materials…”

“Maybe he could push the ship again!”

The thought speared him with a white hot shot of pain.

“You heard him earlier - space has no friction. There’s no opposing reaction - he’s got nothing to push against.”

“Maybe if I open up the patch I made over here on the hull breach, the escaping atmosphere would -”

“NO!!!”

“No, don’t do that!”

“Are you crazy?!?”

“It was just an idea…”

“I can find where it’s broken,” Gabriel finally groaned, rubbing his face and scrubbing fingers through his mussed hair. He backed his way up the bulkhead until he got his feet underneath him, pitching forward unsteadily before Peter firmly grasped his shoulder.

“Easy, take it easy.”

The room spun a little before eventually righting itself, allowing him to walk a more certain path to the cockpit.

“Even if you could,” Olivia told him as he approached, “I’m not sure how we’d fix it - these crates are filled with textiles and food goods, medical supplies… not so much with the wiring and the soldering guns…”

“Actually,” spoke a heavily muscled black man, “I think I can help with the wiring.” He moved through the parting crowd to join her. At her side, he reached a tentative hand toward her head. “If you’d allow me…” She held unflinchingly still as he plucked a couple hairs from her crown. Holding them before her eyes she watched with desperate amazement as he transformed them into something decidedly more… metallic. The tiny rods glistened in the glow of the cruelly mocking planet outside the viewport. “I’m an alchemist.”

“And wow, look at this,” Gabriel replied, slightly chafed that he didn’t first think of the ability he’d taken from Elle’s father. He channeled his old victim’s daughter instead, presenting his fingertips as a zapping arc of energy danced between them. “I’ve got a soldering gun. We’ll be back up and running in no time.”

“Provided we don’t run out of air.”

“Peter. Shut up.”

Gabriel sprawled himself on the deck and gingerly began to remove the paneling underneath the console. His tremendous insight followed each individual path to its proceeding component system and the requisite bus controllers, memorizing intersections and tracing conduits as they were redirected. While he was busy devising a mental blueprint of the necessary repairs, the alchemist, whose name was Boli, began accepting hair donations from ladies with longer locks while the cement-secreting mod, who called himself Jack, set himself to the task of braiding and coating the new wires. He smiled for the first time he could remember, having always been ostracized, even amongst his own kind, for possessing a somewhat off-putting ability. He’d never guessed that something most would consider frankly revolting could ever come in handy, let alone lifesaving.

After a good twenty minutes of watching Gabriel’s lower torso and legs twist and writhe as he repositioned himself in the cramped space, wincing as he hissed having singed his own flesh a couple times on some live connections, Olivia clapped in elation when the familiar winding hum of the engines sent vibrations through the hull and up her spine through the bottoms of her feet. Gabriel carefully extracted himself and stood, brushing himself off with smug satisfaction.

“Oh,” he heard her sudden inhalation. “I remember you! Yeah! You crashed a plane in the Missouri River by the Kansas City Downtown Airport - I tranqed you in my living room!”

His eyes widened little as he drew a hand across the back of his neck, looking for any way to change the subject…

“Yeah! And then we wrestled your sorry butt into the back of my roommate’s car and that blonde girl - Claire - she hauled you off to some hotel - oh yeah!” She turned to face her lover. “I remember her now Peter!”

“Yeah… things’ve changed… oh wow, look at that.” A blinking green button on the communications array had legitimately captured Gabriel’s attention. “Never seen it do that before…”

“Do what,” Peter asked as he leaned in to have a better look. “Hmm, well… let’s push it and see what it does.”

“What - are you nuts?!? No way! Dude, why don’t we just get down to the planet, and then we can -”

“Sylar, don’t be a pussy. Green’s not a bad color, it’s a good color - it might be important.”

He could almost smell the sea foam. His patience was slipping and he was getting cranky. People didn’t like him when he was cranky.

“Pete. ‘Good color?’ Really? Look, the ship’ll fly just fine without it, it can’t be that impor-”

“Then why is it blinking like it’s trying to get our attention???”

“Do you know? Know what it’s like to explode? In space? Because I do, and -”

“I agree with him,” Olivia interrupted. “It’s making its presence known for a reason. We should push it.”

Fuck.

“Just when I thought we weren’t gonna die I’m suddenly clinging to life again…” Gabriel muttered as he wandered away, praying his intuition was wro-

Crisp, crackling static filled the hold. And then, a divinely delicate ringing harmony, her voice hung between his ears like a favorite lingering song.

“Louisa? Are you upstairs? Can you get one of the guys to come help me with this basket - it’s heavy!”

He whipped around and flung out his arm, narrowly colliding with the surrounding bodies, and he smashed his hand down hard on that damned infernal blinking green button… but the voice that fell from his lips was little more than a stunned whisper.

“…Claire?”

~*~*~

With no more uncharted territory to occupy her restless mind, Claire turned, instead, to housework. She retreated to the downstairs portion of the mansion to avoid her roommates, who were all becoming equally agitated with the redundantly close quarters and the increasingly dismal prospect of ever being able to leave. She’d suggested to them they perhaps plan a shuttle trip, just to get them out of the house - an idea that was met with much wholehearted approval. So, as she sequestered herself, humming happily in the relative quiet while she dwindled her way through a couple loads of laundry before moving off to fiddle with a lovely room-length wine cellar, the rest of the planet’s paltry populace put their heads together around the dining room table, eagerly discussing what supplies to take, which direction would be their heading, and whether or not it would be wise to consider an overnight stay. The last thing she’d heard before the door shut behind her was Arturo lamenting over the lack of a proper weather forecast. Claire guessed there was proper instrumentation inside the lighthouse to grant him his wish - she’d head there in a little while after she’d enjoyed just a little more alone time.

The first time they’d been down in this section of the house they’d been surprised to discover that the objects comprising the space had been coated with more dust than toxic residue, the bulk of both residing in the honeycomb shapes of the impressive rack of bottles. A tune floating through her head matching the rhythm of the spinning laundry unit, she settled herself securely on her ladder, removing the glass containers from their holes which she then doused with sterilizing chemicals. The eighth bottle she pulled gave her a pause. It was nearly one hundred years old - sealed as tightly as the day it was corked… and it was a pinot noir. She read those two words, lightly inked in gold on the label, over and over.

It was true, she hadn’t appreciated the sultry liquid when she was seventeen, new to the world and unrefined as sugar cane (and the situation in which she’d been exposed to it hadn’t been… ideal), but she wanted to think that several centuries went a long way toward maturing the palate. And while she had a healthier appreciation for a robust cabernet, or even a smoky shiraz picked late from a harsh climate… the pinot was Gabriel’s favorite. Her rag dropped from her fingers and slapped wetly on the floor and she cursed under her breath. Instead of rushing down to retrieve it, she hesitated, drawing her thumb over the fading picture printed on the paper, smearing a clean trail through a small haze of grey fuzz.

She pressed the neck of the tapering cylinder against her lips, cool and musty - the exact opposite of the man whose mouth haunted her waking dreams. He’d been warm, fresh, and delicious, but she couldn’t help herself. She kissed the cold glass tenderly all the same - it connected her with him, it was a link. It meant something.

Feeling like laundry and dusting were no longer so satisfying, and thinking perhaps she might head to the lighthouse after all, perhaps to enjoy a glass of wine, she descended and stuffed the beloved bottle deep into her linen basket where it could withstand a safe ride up the stairs. She piled on an even greater mound of items just finishing their cycle in an attempt at efficiency, but found she could no longer lift her load.

She never dreamed in a million years that when she called upstairs for help she’d hear his voice answer her.