Fic: Sad And Sunshine Days (Heroes)
Pairing: Mohinder/Sylar
Rating: light NC-17
Spoilers: first season
Disclaimer: These characters aren't mine.
Summary: Sylar likes to watch Mohinder's dreams.
- - -
Sylar likes to watch Mohinder’s dreams.
They’re not comprehensible - dreams never are. They don’t mean anything profound; they’re not expressions of Mohinder’s subconscious desires. But he likes to watch, anyhow.
There’s a soft touch to Mohinder’s dreams - a strange, ethereal quality that Sylar’s don’t have. Even if the dreams are grotesque, insane, or just nonsensical, Mohinder’s reactions stay the same. There’s a truth, inside him, that Sylar would give anything to touch.
- - - -
Now, Mohinder dreams of climbing a mountain.
Sylar follows, soundlessly, invisibly - without presence - as Mohinder wanders through the snow. Here, the trail will be almost impossible to pass, because of the mud; here, the trail turns dry and open, like a desert, surrounded by tangles of thorns.
In the strange way of dreams, the world shifts, rotates, somehow. Sylar watches as Molly starts climbing with Mohinder - as Molly has, suddenly, always been climbing with Mohinder.
“I’m tired,” she complains, and the two of them stop, in a tavern, crowded, set precariously on stilts against the mountain’s edge.
Sylar recognizes too many of the people inside. There, Noah Bennet, pouring a drink at the bar. And the dark-skinned man, the one who drained Sylar’s powers from him. The woman, Eden, alive and well near the hearth.
The details are blurry; the images have a strange not-quite-there quality about them. And even though Sylar can tell who they are, he can’t tell what they’re feeling, who they’re looking at. Not unless Mohinder focuses on them.
“Will you come with us?” Mohinder asks Peter Petrelli, a soft confusion in his tone.
“No,” says Peter, with a laugh. “The performance is about to start.”
Mohinder glances to the wall - to the stage, now. A stage with a rich red curtain. Someone has re-arranged the rows of tables and chairs into concert seating.
Mohinder wanders backstage, through a dressing room, through high stacks of tables and chairs. He pushes out of an exit door, and he’s not on the mountain anymore. It’s a wide, open stretch of asphalt, an endless parking lot.
Mohinder, carefully, shuts the door behind him.
He wakes up before he finds the mountain again.
- - - -
He could change Mohinder’s dreams - but he doesn’t.
It’s not that Sylar is afraid to use his powers. It isn’t. He’s never been afraid of anything. It’s just that he doesn’t want to disturb the balance of it all.
- - - -
Sylar doesn’t really live, these days. Seeking out other evolved humans seems like such an ordeal, a huge, impossible task that he finds himself reluctant. He hesitates, thinking of the effort it would cost him, the energy, the pain.
And instead, then, he feeds off the scum of the earth. Steals to make his way. Moves aimlessly through the dredges of the world, looking only for another chance to sleep.
When he finds it, he doesn’t waste time. He reaches out, towards the mind that he knows so well, and he pulls himself inside.
And he watches.
- - - -
Mohinder doesn’t dream much of Sylar’s face, his actual appearance. When Sylar is a presence, in his dreams, it’s more like a threatening fog, an invisible, unbeatable evil, lurking just behind him. Ready to slaughter everything he knows.
Sylar doesn’t like to watch those dreams. He doesn’t like to see Mohinder run, hide, his heart fluttering in his chest, half-overwhelmed by panic. Mohinder is defenseless, in dreams.
He wishes Mohinder didn’t dream like that.
- - - -
Sylar breaks into a hotel room, after a family of four checks out, and he takes a long shower, as hot as he can make it. It steams off his skin, trails in rivulets and waterfalls and sheets down his body.
He feels better, afterwards.
- - - -
The world doesn’t even matter to him, anymore. He lives outside of it, in a strange, in-between delusion of redemption. The only things that are real, to Sylar, are the illusions of the one man in the world who hates him the most.
- - - -
Mohinder dreams of entrapment.
He’s trapped in comfort, of course. There’s a bed, dressed in warm colors. A shelf of books. Plenty of room.
Only, he can’t leave.
Mohinder doesn’t even seem to respond to it. He moves around the cell, again and again, as though he expects a doorway out to appear; Sylar aches for something, anything, to ease Mohinder’s suffering.
He feels it, the instant he takes control; the room turns brittle, no longer softened by the edges of fantasy. He slips inside, like moving sideways though a waterfall.
Mohinder turns towards him slowly, with a dread that Sylar desperately, desperately wants to stop.
“No,” Mohinder whispers, and he backs away, flattening against the wall, “no,” and it’s almost a plea.
“It’s me,” says Sylar, softly, “it’s Zane.”
Mohinder shivers. “Zane?”
“Zane.”
“Zane is Sylar.”
“I’m just Zane.” Sylar moves towards Mohinder, cautiously, slowly. As though he were calming a wild animal. “The real Zane.”
Mohinder’s breathing starts to even; Sylar steps forward, again, until he could just reach out and touch -
No. No, this is wrong.
“Wake up,” he says.
- - - -
Sylar struggles, silently.
It has to be a violation. A violation of the worst kind. He’s reaching inside Mohinder’s mind, and maybe it was wrong when he was just watching, but it has to be even more wrong if he’s stepping in, changing things.
But, oh god, he had one taste of it, and he had Mohinder’s eyes on him, not in hate, not in fear, and he just wants - he wants -
- - - -
In Mohinder’s dream, he’s organizing papers. Putting them in order. Sylar watches him try - but his eyes slip, the papers re-arrange themselves. The numbers never add up.
Mohinder falls behind his desk, his head in his hands.
Sylar slips in before he knows what he’s doing.
“Mohinder,” he says, taking Mohinder’s hands.
“Zane,” says Mohinder, in half a protest, pulling away, annoyed at the interruption.
“It’s all right,” Sylar tells him. “They can wait until morning.”
Mohinder’s eyes are wide and worried - uncertain.
“Is there anywhere else you want to be?” asks Zane.
“What do you mean?” asks Mohinder, with a laugh.
“Where would rather be?” asks Sylar. “If you could be anywhere but here.”
“I don’t know,” and then, “India, I suppose?”
Sylar can sense it - what Mohinder wants to see, where he would go. “Let’s go, then,” says Sylar.
When he reaches out his hand, Mohinder takes it.
- - - -
It becomes all Sylar can think about. It’s Mohinder - just Mohinder. If he’ll be having a nightmare when Sylar finds him; if Sylar can brighten his dreams, make him just a little bit happier. If he’ll ever figure it out - and this, Sylar thinks of with a mix of anguish and terror. Because Mohinder would reject him an instant, and everything would be over.
But, the next moment, Sylar is nearly giddy with his own power, with the thought that tonight he’ll touch Mohinder and maybe Mohinder will touch him and it doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic or even important, so long as it’s Mohinder.
- - - -
Sylar helps Mohinder clamber up the rock face, pausing on a thin ledge. “You want to keep going?”
Mohinder looks up, shading his eyes against the sun. “We can make it to the top. I’m not tired.”
“Neither am I,” says Sylar.
- - - -
The whole universe is open - more possibilities than there are seconds in an eternity, and Sylar doesn’t know how he and Mohinder could ever explore them all.
- - - -
Mohinder leans his head back, on Sylar’s chest, his eyes drifting towards the ceiling.
Sylar, his heart in his mouth, slips a hand under Mohinder’s shirt, stroking the smooth skin underneath.
“Am I safe?” asks Mohinder, softly. “Here, am I safe?”
“Yes,” Sylar tells him.
Mohinder sighs, and he turns his head, resting his cheek on Sylar’s shoulder. “It’s been a long time,” he whispers.
“I’d never hurt you,” Sylar blurts, on impulse.
Mohinder shifts up, and he has a strange, conflicted expression on his face.
“What is it?” asks Sylar.
“You look like him,” says Mohinder.
And Sylar wakes up.
- - - -
They’ve been wandering for hours - through a ruined city, some of the buildings still hot to the touch.
“You’re not him, are you?” asks Mohinder. “Zane, I mean.”
Sylar stops, in his tracks, transfixed by dread.
“You’re Sylar.” Mohinder takes a shuddery breath, then another. “You’re Sylar.”
Sylar steps forward, takes Mohinder’s hands in his. “It doesn’t change anything,” he says, almost begs, and Mohinder’s eyes drag up to his, torn.
“It does.”
“It doesn’t.”
“How could it possibly?” Mohinder forces out, through tongue and teeth.
“Because I love you.” Sylar’s voice breaks, but yet, somehow Mohinder is closer to him than they’ve ever been, trapped away, like this, in a place that’s not even real…
Mohinder flattens a palm against Sylar’s chest, weakly. “You can’t,” he protests.
“Mohinder, please,” Sylar whispers.
Mohinder’s hand tightens in Sylar’s shirt. “Don’t do this to me-”
“It’s already done,” Sylar hisses, and he tugs Mohinder in, kisses him - and Mohinder kisses back, with a strange, intimate hesitation, like some part of him wants this so much that the rest of him can’t help but give in.
His mind is clouded, with the jarring, conflicting impressions - the blood-heat of Mohinder’s mouth under his tongue, of Mohinder’s fingers digging into his neck, of the silent, destroyed city all around them. It’s just enough and it’s too much and it’s everything he possibly could have dreamed of, but-
It’s Mohinder who pushes him up against the wall, then, his teeth catching Sylar’s lip, his hand slipping past the waistband of Sylar’s pants.
“Mohinder,” gasps Sylar, and Mohinder doesn’t respond, just to growl a “shut up,” to slide his palm against Sylar’s erection.
The sensation is shocking. Sylar doesn’t really understand how to cope with it - he could break away from the dream, end it at any second, change their surroundings, manipulate it until Mohinder is at his mercy but oh god, oh god, he can’t think. He didn’t expect that the lucidity of the dream could be turned against him, this way.
He comes with heart-stopping intensity, shivering to pieces, muffling the noise of release into Mohinder’s neck.
Mohinder retreats, backs away, and Sylar straightens up.
“This isn’t real,” says Mohinder.
Sylar twists, with his mind, and Mohinder wakes up.
- - - -
Sylar has never done it, this way. His quest has always been about achieving powers, and each new one is a triumph, a new cause for celebration. And he hates thinking that the death of that little Indian boy would have been without purpose.
It takes time; but, finally, he doesn’t have the power of dreams any longer.
- - - -
Out in the sunlight, Sylar takes a long breath. He can feel the vastness of the world, all of the sudden. He’s dwarfed by it - so small, he doesn’t even know how he can exist.
Wrapping a coat around his shoulders, he starts the search for his next victim.
Rating: light NC-17
Spoilers: first season
Disclaimer: These characters aren't mine.
Summary: Sylar likes to watch Mohinder's dreams.
- - -
Sylar likes to watch Mohinder’s dreams.
They’re not comprehensible - dreams never are. They don’t mean anything profound; they’re not expressions of Mohinder’s subconscious desires. But he likes to watch, anyhow.
There’s a soft touch to Mohinder’s dreams - a strange, ethereal quality that Sylar’s don’t have. Even if the dreams are grotesque, insane, or just nonsensical, Mohinder’s reactions stay the same. There’s a truth, inside him, that Sylar would give anything to touch.
- - - -
Now, Mohinder dreams of climbing a mountain.
Sylar follows, soundlessly, invisibly - without presence - as Mohinder wanders through the snow. Here, the trail will be almost impossible to pass, because of the mud; here, the trail turns dry and open, like a desert, surrounded by tangles of thorns.
In the strange way of dreams, the world shifts, rotates, somehow. Sylar watches as Molly starts climbing with Mohinder - as Molly has, suddenly, always been climbing with Mohinder.
“I’m tired,” she complains, and the two of them stop, in a tavern, crowded, set precariously on stilts against the mountain’s edge.
Sylar recognizes too many of the people inside. There, Noah Bennet, pouring a drink at the bar. And the dark-skinned man, the one who drained Sylar’s powers from him. The woman, Eden, alive and well near the hearth.
The details are blurry; the images have a strange not-quite-there quality about them. And even though Sylar can tell who they are, he can’t tell what they’re feeling, who they’re looking at. Not unless Mohinder focuses on them.
“Will you come with us?” Mohinder asks Peter Petrelli, a soft confusion in his tone.
“No,” says Peter, with a laugh. “The performance is about to start.”
Mohinder glances to the wall - to the stage, now. A stage with a rich red curtain. Someone has re-arranged the rows of tables and chairs into concert seating.
Mohinder wanders backstage, through a dressing room, through high stacks of tables and chairs. He pushes out of an exit door, and he’s not on the mountain anymore. It’s a wide, open stretch of asphalt, an endless parking lot.
Mohinder, carefully, shuts the door behind him.
He wakes up before he finds the mountain again.
- - - -
He could change Mohinder’s dreams - but he doesn’t.
It’s not that Sylar is afraid to use his powers. It isn’t. He’s never been afraid of anything. It’s just that he doesn’t want to disturb the balance of it all.
- - - -
Sylar doesn’t really live, these days. Seeking out other evolved humans seems like such an ordeal, a huge, impossible task that he finds himself reluctant. He hesitates, thinking of the effort it would cost him, the energy, the pain.
And instead, then, he feeds off the scum of the earth. Steals to make his way. Moves aimlessly through the dredges of the world, looking only for another chance to sleep.
When he finds it, he doesn’t waste time. He reaches out, towards the mind that he knows so well, and he pulls himself inside.
And he watches.
- - - -
Mohinder doesn’t dream much of Sylar’s face, his actual appearance. When Sylar is a presence, in his dreams, it’s more like a threatening fog, an invisible, unbeatable evil, lurking just behind him. Ready to slaughter everything he knows.
Sylar doesn’t like to watch those dreams. He doesn’t like to see Mohinder run, hide, his heart fluttering in his chest, half-overwhelmed by panic. Mohinder is defenseless, in dreams.
He wishes Mohinder didn’t dream like that.
- - - -
Sylar breaks into a hotel room, after a family of four checks out, and he takes a long shower, as hot as he can make it. It steams off his skin, trails in rivulets and waterfalls and sheets down his body.
He feels better, afterwards.
- - - -
The world doesn’t even matter to him, anymore. He lives outside of it, in a strange, in-between delusion of redemption. The only things that are real, to Sylar, are the illusions of the one man in the world who hates him the most.
- - - -
Mohinder dreams of entrapment.
He’s trapped in comfort, of course. There’s a bed, dressed in warm colors. A shelf of books. Plenty of room.
Only, he can’t leave.
Mohinder doesn’t even seem to respond to it. He moves around the cell, again and again, as though he expects a doorway out to appear; Sylar aches for something, anything, to ease Mohinder’s suffering.
He feels it, the instant he takes control; the room turns brittle, no longer softened by the edges of fantasy. He slips inside, like moving sideways though a waterfall.
Mohinder turns towards him slowly, with a dread that Sylar desperately, desperately wants to stop.
“No,” Mohinder whispers, and he backs away, flattening against the wall, “no,” and it’s almost a plea.
“It’s me,” says Sylar, softly, “it’s Zane.”
Mohinder shivers. “Zane?”
“Zane.”
“Zane is Sylar.”
“I’m just Zane.” Sylar moves towards Mohinder, cautiously, slowly. As though he were calming a wild animal. “The real Zane.”
Mohinder’s breathing starts to even; Sylar steps forward, again, until he could just reach out and touch -
No. No, this is wrong.
“Wake up,” he says.
- - - -
Sylar struggles, silently.
It has to be a violation. A violation of the worst kind. He’s reaching inside Mohinder’s mind, and maybe it was wrong when he was just watching, but it has to be even more wrong if he’s stepping in, changing things.
But, oh god, he had one taste of it, and he had Mohinder’s eyes on him, not in hate, not in fear, and he just wants - he wants -
- - - -
In Mohinder’s dream, he’s organizing papers. Putting them in order. Sylar watches him try - but his eyes slip, the papers re-arrange themselves. The numbers never add up.
Mohinder falls behind his desk, his head in his hands.
Sylar slips in before he knows what he’s doing.
“Mohinder,” he says, taking Mohinder’s hands.
“Zane,” says Mohinder, in half a protest, pulling away, annoyed at the interruption.
“It’s all right,” Sylar tells him. “They can wait until morning.”
Mohinder’s eyes are wide and worried - uncertain.
“Is there anywhere else you want to be?” asks Zane.
“What do you mean?” asks Mohinder, with a laugh.
“Where would rather be?” asks Sylar. “If you could be anywhere but here.”
“I don’t know,” and then, “India, I suppose?”
Sylar can sense it - what Mohinder wants to see, where he would go. “Let’s go, then,” says Sylar.
When he reaches out his hand, Mohinder takes it.
- - - -
It becomes all Sylar can think about. It’s Mohinder - just Mohinder. If he’ll be having a nightmare when Sylar finds him; if Sylar can brighten his dreams, make him just a little bit happier. If he’ll ever figure it out - and this, Sylar thinks of with a mix of anguish and terror. Because Mohinder would reject him an instant, and everything would be over.
But, the next moment, Sylar is nearly giddy with his own power, with the thought that tonight he’ll touch Mohinder and maybe Mohinder will touch him and it doesn’t have to be sexual or romantic or even important, so long as it’s Mohinder.
- - - -
Sylar helps Mohinder clamber up the rock face, pausing on a thin ledge. “You want to keep going?”
Mohinder looks up, shading his eyes against the sun. “We can make it to the top. I’m not tired.”
“Neither am I,” says Sylar.
- - - -
The whole universe is open - more possibilities than there are seconds in an eternity, and Sylar doesn’t know how he and Mohinder could ever explore them all.
- - - -
Mohinder leans his head back, on Sylar’s chest, his eyes drifting towards the ceiling.
Sylar, his heart in his mouth, slips a hand under Mohinder’s shirt, stroking the smooth skin underneath.
“Am I safe?” asks Mohinder, softly. “Here, am I safe?”
“Yes,” Sylar tells him.
Mohinder sighs, and he turns his head, resting his cheek on Sylar’s shoulder. “It’s been a long time,” he whispers.
“I’d never hurt you,” Sylar blurts, on impulse.
Mohinder shifts up, and he has a strange, conflicted expression on his face.
“What is it?” asks Sylar.
“You look like him,” says Mohinder.
And Sylar wakes up.
- - - -
They’ve been wandering for hours - through a ruined city, some of the buildings still hot to the touch.
“You’re not him, are you?” asks Mohinder. “Zane, I mean.”
Sylar stops, in his tracks, transfixed by dread.
“You’re Sylar.” Mohinder takes a shuddery breath, then another. “You’re Sylar.”
Sylar steps forward, takes Mohinder’s hands in his. “It doesn’t change anything,” he says, almost begs, and Mohinder’s eyes drag up to his, torn.
“It does.”
“It doesn’t.”
“How could it possibly?” Mohinder forces out, through tongue and teeth.
“Because I love you.” Sylar’s voice breaks, but yet, somehow Mohinder is closer to him than they’ve ever been, trapped away, like this, in a place that’s not even real…
Mohinder flattens a palm against Sylar’s chest, weakly. “You can’t,” he protests.
“Mohinder, please,” Sylar whispers.
Mohinder’s hand tightens in Sylar’s shirt. “Don’t do this to me-”
“It’s already done,” Sylar hisses, and he tugs Mohinder in, kisses him - and Mohinder kisses back, with a strange, intimate hesitation, like some part of him wants this so much that the rest of him can’t help but give in.
His mind is clouded, with the jarring, conflicting impressions - the blood-heat of Mohinder’s mouth under his tongue, of Mohinder’s fingers digging into his neck, of the silent, destroyed city all around them. It’s just enough and it’s too much and it’s everything he possibly could have dreamed of, but-
It’s Mohinder who pushes him up against the wall, then, his teeth catching Sylar’s lip, his hand slipping past the waistband of Sylar’s pants.
“Mohinder,” gasps Sylar, and Mohinder doesn’t respond, just to growl a “shut up,” to slide his palm against Sylar’s erection.
The sensation is shocking. Sylar doesn’t really understand how to cope with it - he could break away from the dream, end it at any second, change their surroundings, manipulate it until Mohinder is at his mercy but oh god, oh god, he can’t think. He didn’t expect that the lucidity of the dream could be turned against him, this way.
He comes with heart-stopping intensity, shivering to pieces, muffling the noise of release into Mohinder’s neck.
Mohinder retreats, backs away, and Sylar straightens up.
“This isn’t real,” says Mohinder.
Sylar twists, with his mind, and Mohinder wakes up.
- - - -
Sylar has never done it, this way. His quest has always been about achieving powers, and each new one is a triumph, a new cause for celebration. And he hates thinking that the death of that little Indian boy would have been without purpose.
It takes time; but, finally, he doesn’t have the power of dreams any longer.
- - - -
Out in the sunlight, Sylar takes a long breath. He can feel the vastness of the world, all of the sudden. He’s dwarfed by it - so small, he doesn’t even know how he can exist.
Wrapping a coat around his shoulders, he starts the search for his next victim.