I am Death - Part Two

[thewatchmaker]

Characters: Sylar and Peter Petrelli
Fandom: Heroes
Rating: PG for ick and angst
Word Count: 1016
Prompt: 29/100 #29 Birth 100heroesfics
Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb: It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again. scifi_muses
Notes: What happens after "I Have Become Death" from Sylar's POV. Inspired by dailyheroes for August 20. This was supposed to be a one shot story, but Sylar had other ideas.

I am Death - Part One

Part Two

Nathan didn’t have any answers for me. No brotherly pearls of wisdom, those he saved for Peter, those were never for me. In the last four years we’d come to an understanding though, and I did love him. He was the only older brother I’d ever have, and now thanks to Claire he was gone.

Peter wouldn’t go blameless once I found him. Especially since the Peter that did this came from the past. I wished the idiot time travelers would understand that going to the past to change something doesn’t change the future. All that does is create an alternate future.


What Peter from the past had hoped to accomplish wouldn’t change the world I lived in. It wouldn’t bring Noah Gray back from the dead. It wouldn’t give me back the humanity I’d fought so hard to take back for myself. It might in his reality, but it never would in mine.

But where was my Peter Petrelli? Where was my brother? He was fanatical in his obsession with fixing the way our world turned out. It was obvious to me that he’d gone into the past and brought the other Peter to find me. So that I would show him my ability, then he too could understand how to fix things. I’d refused my brother every time he’d asked. The last time he’d stormed off, and I hadn’t seen him in close to a year.

“Where the hell are you, Peter?” I picked up Nathan’s body and put him on the gurney, pulling a blood splattered sheet over his face. It was the least and the most I could do. As my hand touched the blood, I saw where it came from. It was Peter’s. My Peter’s blood, the one with the scar on his face.

“How can you be dead?” I placed the flat of my hand on the cold steel table, next to Nathan’s head, and I watched them shoving Peter into a body bag. Watched our beloved niece, Claire, the murderer, order them to dump him in the incinerator. I let out a snort, ducked down and kissed Nathan’s forehead through the sheet. “I’ll find Pete, Nathan. That won’t kill him. I ought to know how much heat we can survive through. She’ll pay for this I promise.”

It didn’t take me long to find the incinerator in the belly of the old hospital Claire and her friends used for their base. Heat blasted my face as I tore the heavy iron door free, sending it end over end across the basement where it landed with a crash. The flames licked at my hands as I reached into them, the pain making me scream as my flesh was seared away.

“Stupid, Gabriel, stupid,” I hissed as I bent over gasping for breath through the agony of regeneration. “Let your emotions get in the way of your brain. Think. Be Sylar. Don’t be Gabriel. See how it needs to be done.”

With a snarl, I gripped the edges of the opening and sent the ice against the flames. The metal walls cracked and pinged as they went from crematorium heat to cold enough to shatter in a matter of minutes. It wasn’t long before Peter’s screams of pain and anger echoed off the inside of his iron tomb.

“Sylar!” My name was the first thing he said after climbing out of the furnace. He was naked, so I tossed a bundle of clothes at him that I’d rummaged from some rebel’s room. “What the fuck is going on? Didn’t he stop this? Didn’t Peter fix it?”

“You can’t fix this, Peter. This is our life. Didn’t I explain that to you over and over again?” I watched as he got dressed. His body whole and healthy, only the scar remains, the scar that he won’t let heal. I wondered why I didn’t have one too. If I did, it was on the inside where my soul and heart had been. “Going back in time only creates more alternate timelines. It is inevitable that our lives, such as they are, would happen no matter what you did.”

“But he took your ability?” He came and grabbed my shoulders, forcing me to look into his eyes. Peter looked away first when he saw the death in my gaze.

“He took it. I taught him to use it. Then Claire came. She and her people killed my son, Peter. They killed Noah.” I wait for tears, but I have none to shed. “They brought the Peter from the past here, and he killed Nathan, Peter. Your idiotic plan to save everyone cost me my son and got our brother killed. Happy now?”

Peter jerked away from me. I could feel the pain radiating him as much as he’d felt the fires that burned his body. “I didn’t know. Nathan? Noah. Oh God, Gabriel, I’m sorry.”

“Save your apologies, Peter. Save them for when I’ve ripped Claire’s head from her body, and destroyed her brain so she can’t come back. Maybe then I’ll accept it, but until then call me Sylar. Gabriel Gray died with his son thanks to you.” I turned around to leave. “You can either help me or not. But don’t get in my way. If you try to stop me, I’ll kill you too.”

“I was trying to save us all, Gabri…Sylar. I knew that your ability would work.” He was shouting after me as he tried to keep up. “Wait! I’ll help you. Is that what you want to hear, Sylar? Do you want me to tell you I’ll help you kill our niece?”

“Yes.”

“How are we going to do that? Do you know where she is?” He thinks that by challenging me and throwing obstacles in my way that he’ll be able to slow me down and talk sense into me. Not this time brother, Peter, not this time.

“We’ll find her, the same way she found me. Molly.” This time he doesn’t argue as I grab his arm to let the shadows take us to New York.