thewatchmaker: (Future Sylar)
Characters: Sylar and a few corpses
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG for ick and angst
Word Count: 1009
Prompt: 28/100 #52 Fire [livejournal.com profile] 100heroesfics
War isn't safe for children and other living things. [livejournal.com profile] scifi_muses
Notes: What happens after "I Have Become Death" from Sylar's POV. Inspired by [livejournal.com profile] dailyheroes for August 20.

I am Death

The soft tissue came first, not the bones as most people would expect. When the skin was nearly whole and featureless the nerves began firing as the muscle started to knit back together from the ashes of Costa Verde. Last came the bones, but by then I was screaming from the pain when I had no mouth to make a sound. My screams echoed in my soul, screams for my son, my child, my hope for a future…taken from me by Claire. Where my humanity had been there was nothing but darkness. Where the love for my son had been there was nothing but hatred. Where there was life there was nothing but death.


When the sounds of my cries echoed in my ears, I opened my new eyes to look on the desolation around me. Nothing could have survived the explosion. Miles of destruction surrounded me while I curled into a naked ball and cried in pain until those same new eyes ran dry. It would be the last time I cried. The last time I loved. The last time I was anything other than the bringer of death. If I survived, so had Claire and where was Peter?

I searched for something, anything that marked that Noah Gray had ever existed. Crawling on my hands and knees, digging through the blacked sand and glass where our house stood I tried to find my son. There were no toys, no scrap of paper from the pictures I had stuck to the refrigerator door, not a single lock of his soft blond hair. He as gone as if he’d never existed.

The ground was still warm when I scrambled onto my hands and feet. I could hear voices in the distance as they chattered about the bomb and the terrorists who had done it. Two hundred thousand dead, because of me, because they had killed my Noah. I staggered through the dust that clung to my feet. I walked for what felt like miles before I got to the line between life and death. I snapped the neck of the first human I found, stripping him and dressed in his uniform to cover my nudity.

Claire would go to ground. Back to wherever the hell she and her friends plot to overthrow the government or whatever it is they are doing. I’d kept out of it. I made a life. But thanks to Peter I’d been thrown back into the chaos. If there is one thing I hate it’s chaos, order and process, things working as they should, that’s how I like it.

Nathan would know where she was hiding. Who better than the father to tell me where his daughter was? He’d be easy to find. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been in the Oval Office before. I folded the shadows around me like a cloak, using them to step between where I was and where I wanted to be. Compared to the desolation I’d been reborn in the colors of the President’s office made my eyes hurt. The office was empty, out in the hallway I could hear the voices of Nathan’s staff going on about the horror of Costa Verde. But I couldn’t hear Nathan’s voice in the mix. He wasn’t in the White House, but his wife was. Tracy would know where Nathan was.

“Tracy. Where’s Nathan?” I found her getting dressed. She didn’t smile as I stepped out of the shadows in their bedroom. I didn’t expect her to. She didn’t like the idea of me being Nathan’s brother. It was damaging for his image to have two younger brothers who were so unstable.

“He’s in New York.” I can taste her frustration and anger with me. I didn’t mind. In fact I stood close enough for her to pound her fists against my chest. “You’ve fucked things up big time, Gabriel. Do you know how hard it is to cover up what you’ve done? You killed all those people!”

“I didn’t kill them. Claire did.” I grabbed her wrists, and smiled as she tried to use her freezing power on me. “I have that one too. Won’t work on me.”

“Claire isn’t a walking bomb! You are!” She whimpered as she tried to get free, but I won’t let her go. “Let me go!”

“I’m sorry, Tracy. I can’t do that. I can’t have you warning them that I survived. Hope you understand.” I let of one of her hands, and smiled as she raked her nails down my cheek. Licking at my blood as it trickled down my face; I drove my hand into her gut and grabbed a handful of her insides with a twist. She was dead before I let her body go. Blood coated my hand up to my elbow. For a moment I felt something like satisfaction, but then it was gone too.

Her cell phone would lead me to Nathan. If he was in New York, he might be with Claire, and I’d be able to kill two birds with one stone. I always did like it when they made it easy. I was too late when I slipped into Claire’s torture chamber.

There are bodies everywhere. Nathan was dead; his head cut open in a style I knew so well. Peter from the past had survived too, and he had my hunger. Good now my brother and I could both make them pay.

“I’m sorry, Nathan,” I said kneeled down next his body, pulling his head into my lap. I brush his blood crusted hair from the gash in his forehead. “I wish I could cry for you, Nathan, but I don’t have any tears left. Claire and her men murdered my son, Nathan. She let them kill, Noah. I’m all alone now, and I can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I would have let you live. We are brothers after all. Well I’d have let you live if you’d given me Claire. I wonder how many people will die before I have her.”