Sylar left as soon as they released him, and made it no more than four hours with Maya and Alejandro before another gas station door opened on Milliways. He nearly closes it again; it's catching sight of the grass through the lake door window, the pale tinge of frost he doesn't remember being there four hours ago, that finally coaxes him inside.

Stopping at the bar just long enough to murmur out a request for Earl Grey, Sylar takes his mug to the nearest open booth and settles in.

Every now and then, his fingers skate over his throat: no longer visibly bruised, but faintly aching nonetheless.

Sylar tries to leave Milliways more than once.

The door's visible, but doesn't yield when he tries to open it. (It's inconvenient, but it makes sense: if he arrived without a door, of course he'd have to leave without one.) The forest...he's deliberately avoided the outside, knowing it puts him at a disadvantage. When he finally gathers his energy and begins to walk, he's deposited back on its edge within twenty minutes.

That happens four times. On the fifth, when he swipes his hand along a tree trunk to catch his balance, the bark feels warm and damp with condensation. He looks up to a canopy rippled with flat palm leaves and smiles, with no relief or satisfaction.

It's as Dr. Suresh said once: not all progress might be welcomed, but it must be undertaken for the sake of survival.

( Read more... )

The next time he opens his eyes, Sylar's face to face with the silent thunderclap of a star going nova.

He freezes. Blinks once. Lifts his hand, cautious and slow, without stepping back. The sleeve of his thin cotton shirt slides back an inch as he presses light fingertips to the Observation Window; it's like touching a sheet of ice, and narrow white circles of fog instantly appear around his fingers.

It's disorientingly quiet.

He's standing up, though, he realizes. And nothing hurts.

Thoughtful, Sylar brushes his fingers through the condensation. It squeaks faintly as the patterns warp and streak away. As he turns around, the lights flicker above him, and for half an instant

the floor's just as cold, there are bars across the window, there is --

When they steady again, it's far too bright, and the walls...he doesn't think they were that pale.

He can't be sure.

Crossing into another world feels no different from crossing into his own. It's late afternoon, the sun hanging low in the sky but not truly setting yet; water keeps dripping from his clothes as he steps onto the porch and lets the back door of Frank Black's house swing closed.

For whatever reason, they've painted it a garishly bright yellow. Sylar eyes the outer wall, then skates his fingers over the doorframe as he pauses, listening for --

There. Childishly high sobs from around the corner.

With a smile, he lifts his fingers away and begins to follow them.

Dusk's settling over the lake. It's been much colder lately, but Sylar's aware of it as a distance: objective observation rather than subjective experience.

He wears his coat anyway. It's a comfortable weight, an extra layer of protection over his stomach.

And for once, apparently, the forge is occupied.

"Zuko."

[From here.]

Take your hand. Tighten it into a fist, as hard as you can. Hold it.

Keep holding it.

Hold it even as the muscles seize up, fingertips starting to tingle from lack of blood, cramps spreading down your entire arm and into your shoulder; hold it without the slightest change in pressure, knowing that if you let go -- even for a second -- you might bleed to death.

Add in the searing pain from the wound itself every time he moves or so much as breathes, and it may be understandable why Sylar's progress through the bar is labored at best.

He's several feet from the front door when a loud clatter catches his attention; he turns his head, watching Kaylee slam open the lake door with a gurney in tow.

He's still watching when the white-haired doctor sprints into the infirmary.

[to be refined/edited further as time goes on and I get more feedback, but for now...]

Gabriel Gray is twenty-four years old and has been on the run for the past three.

The Millennium Group found him when he was sixteen, two years away from graduating high school and planning, in lieu of college (though planning isn't quite the right word; coerced, in his mind, would be better), to apprentice himself to his father at the family watchmaking shop. Peter Watts was the first to show him what he really was, what his talent -- his gift, Watts insisted -- could do. "Men have killed each other for the chance to know how the world works," he said, "but you, Gabriel -- you can see it all around you without even trying."

Gabriel left Queens with him a week later. Within the safety of the Group, one collection of tutors helped him finish his high school education. Another honed his less conventional strengths.

He was shown the sick and the dying, taught to recognize human maladies on sound alone. He saw the other people like him that the Group would contact, train, and utilize; he learned to see each of their talents and know those powers better, oftentimes, than they knew them themselves. (And if there was jealousy there, in seeing men who could fly or turn invisible with a thought -- and there was -- he learned to squash it quickly. Men would kill for his ability. No matter what they could do, what he could do was useful, important, and unique among all of theirs. The Group needed him, Peter said. They needed what he could do.) He recognized the patterns and worked to piece them together.

One of those patterns was an art gallery.

Sometimes, the people the Group would find were too old, too young, or simply more useful as guinea pigs. One in particular wasn't much older than Gabriel; they'd figured out how to make his ability manifest almost a full decade ahead of schedule. Gabriel saw that, too, when he walked into the room for the first time to see him slopping paint onto a canvas: the way the parts fit easily but had been pushed to their limits like an overclocked engine.

Every single painting was bright red with fire.

And Gabriel was good at putting the pieces together. When he looked away, back toward the people hovering in a silent cluster behind him, he could see how there were some in the Group who wanted this to happen, who believed it was the only way and would see it brought about at any cost. (In the Bible, they say, the angel Gabriel is the one who heralds the apocalypse. You are important, Watts had told him. We need you.)

So he kept silent and lied if need be, saying he just needed a little more time to figure out the last nuances of the paintings' meaning -- up until the moment the Roosters seized complete control and began to root out the ones who opposed them.

That was when Gabriel started running.

Eventually, the Group fell apart. The millennium came and went without incident. But they say the one cannot know the hour or day of the end's arrival; sometimes, not even the year.

It's 2002 now. Members of the Group are beginning to reassemble themselves.

And once again, they're looking toward the paintings of an exploding man and a fireball over the New York City skyline, quietly making plans to guide the world into a brighter future.