Gabriel Gray (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
watchmakers_son) wrote2007-12-26 12:40 am
watchmakers_son) wrote2007-12-26 12:40 am
How to Stop an Exploding Man
"Sylar!"
Sylar spins around -- staggers, really, his vision blurred and steps clumsy from Peter's blows. With each breath he draws, he can taste blood. Hiro Nakamura's face wavers in and out of focus. "You," he rasps.
There's far more he means to say than that, and even more that he means to do. But time is starting to hitch and stumble, like pieces dropped and missing, and it isn't until Nakamura is halfway across Kirby Plaza in a kamikazi charge that Sylar realizes those hitches aren't the other man's doing. It's because his own body isn't working right.
He tries to take a step back or lift his hand in defense. Before he can start, it's too late.
This is how Isaac thought I'd --
You will die, and when you do, it will be alone, and no one will mourn your passing --
The sword hits its mark, and Sylar gasps, choking, before he crumples to the ground.
That isn't how it ends.
If a piece is of suitable or interesting craftsmanship, you don't do something as foolish as let it end. That's the point of professions like the watchmaker: to repair instead of abandon, fix instead of throw away. They do this even when the repair is a thoroughly complicated one.
(Clean-up crews wash the long trail of Sylar's blood off of Kirby Plaza. His body is nowhere to be found.)
Take a digital watch versus a mechanical one, for instance. If you know enough about the latter, you can build it as easily as placing the pieces, adjusting and readjusting them until they fit. The former, on the other hand -- all of its wires and transistors, feeding power through the body to make it run -- in some ways, it's quite like a human being, complexity and all.
Circuitry does have one key advantage over cogs, though: the ability to be reset. A simple interruption of that electrical current can clear so many ailments in a digital watch, coaxing the flow of energy back onto its proper course after it misfires. It's the easiest of all repairs for that sort of timepiece, and it's often the most effective.
(Underground, they lay him flat, cleaning the stab wound, stitching the damaged organs. He's alive, but barely. Still breathing, but only just.)
The problem, of course, lies in what you lose. All of those little presets you've accumulated so your watch functions exactly how you'd like it to function. All those alarms, and dates, and times.
You're forced to start all over again.
(As they do, one of them grips his arm, far from gently, and injects a needle's worth of cloudy liquid into his IV.)
Sometimes, though, that's the price you pay if you want to fix something.
Sometimes it's the only true way to make things work again.
(And sometimes, of course, it's little more than scientific curiosity that makes us wiggle a bent paperclip into the small depression on the side of the watch, pressing down hard enough to activate its reset mechanism. And better this be done with an object that's already damaged than one that is still intact.)
Tick. Tick.
Ti --
Sylar spins around -- staggers, really, his vision blurred and steps clumsy from Peter's blows. With each breath he draws, he can taste blood. Hiro Nakamura's face wavers in and out of focus. "You," he rasps.
There's far more he means to say than that, and even more that he means to do. But time is starting to hitch and stumble, like pieces dropped and missing, and it isn't until Nakamura is halfway across Kirby Plaza in a kamikazi charge that Sylar realizes those hitches aren't the other man's doing. It's because his own body isn't working right.
He tries to take a step back or lift his hand in defense. Before he can start, it's too late.
This is how Isaac thought I'd --
You will die, and when you do, it will be alone, and no one will mourn your passing --
The sword hits its mark, and Sylar gasps, choking, before he crumples to the ground.
That isn't how it ends.
If a piece is of suitable or interesting craftsmanship, you don't do something as foolish as let it end. That's the point of professions like the watchmaker: to repair instead of abandon, fix instead of throw away. They do this even when the repair is a thoroughly complicated one.
(Clean-up crews wash the long trail of Sylar's blood off of Kirby Plaza. His body is nowhere to be found.)
Take a digital watch versus a mechanical one, for instance. If you know enough about the latter, you can build it as easily as placing the pieces, adjusting and readjusting them until they fit. The former, on the other hand -- all of its wires and transistors, feeding power through the body to make it run -- in some ways, it's quite like a human being, complexity and all.
Circuitry does have one key advantage over cogs, though: the ability to be reset. A simple interruption of that electrical current can clear so many ailments in a digital watch, coaxing the flow of energy back onto its proper course after it misfires. It's the easiest of all repairs for that sort of timepiece, and it's often the most effective.
(Underground, they lay him flat, cleaning the stab wound, stitching the damaged organs. He's alive, but barely. Still breathing, but only just.)
The problem, of course, lies in what you lose. All of those little presets you've accumulated so your watch functions exactly how you'd like it to function. All those alarms, and dates, and times.
You're forced to start all over again.
(As they do, one of them grips his arm, far from gently, and injects a needle's worth of cloudy liquid into his IV.)
Sometimes, though, that's the price you pay if you want to fix something.
Sometimes it's the only true way to make things work again.
(And sometimes, of course, it's little more than scientific curiosity that makes us wiggle a bent paperclip into the small depression on the side of the watch, pressing down hard enough to activate its reset mechanism. And better this be done with an object that's already damaged than one that is still intact.)
Tick. Tick.
Ti --