Fic: Heroes - "Gravesites" - PG - Sylar/Claire
Title: Gravesites
Author: Claramata
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairings: Sylar/Claire, mentions of other characters
Warnings: Character deaths
Word Count: 1,412
Author’s note: Written as an attempt to write something longer than a drabble. Unbetaed, and I’m not particularly fond of how it turned out, particularly because it’s pretty cliché in this pairing.
The first time Claire sees him in twenty years, she’s standing next to her father’s fresh grave. Noah Bennet’s tombstone proclaimed him to be a “devoted father and good man”, and Claire thought it to be both the overstatement of the century and a downright lie. None who truly knew Noah could deny his devotion to his adoptive daughter, but few would think to call him a good man. Until the end of his days, he’d lived in the hazy world between good and evil that Claire had come to realize was the real world.
She hadn’t been able to go to his funeral. Too many people were starting to notice that Claire was perpetually eighteen; her skin forever smooth and flawless, and she couldn’t take the risk of being discovered by one of the mourners who did not know of her “condition”. She traced over her father’s name engraved on cold stone and closed her eyes, remembering warm hugs and all the times he’d thrown himself into danger to protect his indestructible daughter. “”Stupid old fool,” she whispered, “why’d you do that?”
“I think he’d say he did it out of love, the twisted bastard,” a voice colder than the granite of the headstone said behind her. Claire froze in place, her eyes snapping open. She knew immediately to whom that voice belonged. She turned around, her face twisted by the anger and hatred she felt for this man. He looked exactly as he had the last time she’d seen him, calculating brown eyes and dark hair, a little bit of stubble on his chin.
“You’re one to talk, at least my father had reasons for the blood on his hands,” she said firmly, her voice not gaining in octaves, determined not to yell while standing so near her father’s grave. Sylar merely chuckled.
“So do I.”
“Okay, not crazy reasons,” Claire’s blood was pumping pure adrenaline now, and every sensible part of her told her to run from this man, but Claire had become accustomed to ignoring that rush of instinct time and time again, so she stood her ground.
“If you want to argue about your father’s sanity, you really don’t think I’m the best person to try and convince, do you?”
“Doesn’t matter, one day I’m going to find where you moved that damn spot.”
Sylar just smirked at her, “you can try, but I sincerely doubt you’ll find it.” With that she was flung back, and when her head hit the gravestone with a deafening crack, the world faded around her.
When she awoke, Sylar was nowhere to be found.
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The next gravesite he met her before was Angela Petrelli’s. Claire had little love for her calculating biological grandmother, but a small piece of her was compelled to find the woman’s monument, a good deal more elaborate than her father’s had been, like the post-mortem equivalent of a penthouse or something. Claire looked at the stone, which had Angela’s picture inset into it and just shook her head.
She saw a flash of movement, something dark, out of the corner of her eye and turned around sharply to find Sylar behind her. He wasn’t looking at her, his eyes focused on the grave of the woman he’d once thought was his mother, the woman who not long after revealing her lie, had orchestrated the destruction, or rather suppression, of his psyche. This was one grudge that Claire could not hold against the madman standing before her.
“What are you doing here, Sylar,” she asked hesitantly, bracing herself for another telekinetic blow like the one she’d received the last time they’d met. Sylar simply looked at Claire, his eyes narrowing.
“I still have some of his memories, you know,” and he tapped at his temple, as if to indicate where, exactly, a last vestige of her biological father survived. “I hate her, and if you weren’t here I’d probably be doing some rather unpleasant things to desecrate her grave, but part of me still thinks of her as ‘Ma’,” he said softly.
“Why are you telling me this.” Claire tilted her head to the side and stared into his brown eyes, a little shinier than the last time she’d seen him, more appropriate for a funeral.
“I… don’t know,” was the only answer she received before the man turned and walked away.
Claire didn’t follow, didn’t try to find where he was hiding and kill him as he slept, she just watched him go.
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The last grave that Claire met with a monster before was her brother’s. Lyle had lived a good life, a long, healthy, normal life, and had died quietly in his sleep while she sat beside him. She’d offered him her blood, but he’d looked her in the eyes and shook his head as much as he could with out bothering the tubes or oxygen. He’d looked to the far wall across from his hospital-style bed then, at a framed photograph of a much younger version of him with his arms around a woman holding a child, and smiled faintly as his eyes fluttered shut for the last time.
Lyle had been the last one left who remembered her when she’d been young. Claire hoped that there was an afterlife so that he could be happy with his wife, but a part of Claire, a rather large part, wanted to stomp on the ground and scream at her brother about how much of an ass he was. How much he’d hurt her by leaving her alone. How she had no one left now because he couldn’t stand to live. Neither could she, but Claire didn’t get to age and die like a normal person. She’d never get to learn if Lyle was happy somewhere with the rest of Claire’s family.
“You’re here, aren’t you,” Claire said softly when she heard a crunch behind her. Sylar could have snuck up on her if he wanted, she knew that, so obviously he wanted her to hear his approach.
“Yeah, but I don’t have anything nasty, or particularly emotional to say about this one, never knew him,” he said, his footsteps coming still closer, until he was standing right behind her. Claire could practically feel his body heat.
“Then why are you here,” she asked carefully as she turned to face the one person who’d survive the end of the world with her. Too bad he was a monster. “Here to revel in my pain?”
Sylar smirked, “Something like that,” he leaned down and before Claire could react he was kissing her. She stood, wide eyed for a moment as he nibbled on her bottom lip ever so slightly and brought his arm around her to pull her against him. For an instant, Claire wanted to close her eyes and give in to it, the heat flooding her body and the feel of him.
Then she remembered who this man was, what he’d done, that she shouldn’t be thinking of him as a man. She moved in his arms and pulled away from the kiss, he allowed it, but tightened his grip on her waist when she tried to move away, and suddenly it wasn’t just his arms holding her in place, a hidden force kept her muscles firmly locked. He leaned down so that his lips were next to her ear and whispered, “I came, beautiful, because I wanted to use that pain to my advantage.”
“You sick fuck,” she gritted out through her teeth. Sylar kissed her ear and she felt a small bit of heat flaring from her belly, she gritted her teeth and slanted her eyes to look at her enemy. He chuckled lightly, his breath caressing her ear, and she shivered involuntarily.
“Are you just figuring that one out now, princess? Never took you to be that slow on the uptake,” Sylar said, his voice lower than usual, but still mocking. He straightened to his full height, towering over her, but kept his arms around her. He smiled and she felt a rush of relief as the control of her limbs returned to her. She struggled out of Sylar’s grasp without much of a fight, and ran from him.
He watched her go, dark eyes on the retreating figure of his indestructible beauty. Eventually she would give in to him, maybe after another grave.
Claire’s niece was special, wasn’t she? Maybe it was time to see what made that girl tick.