(no subject)
Why hullooooo. (:
I hope everyone is having a nice Boxing Day.
Title: Anonymous
Characters/Pairing: Sylar, hinty Petlar.
Set: Uh, Season One I guess.
Rating/Warnings: None.
Summary: Not all pictures mean everything.
A/N: Written for "Anonymous" in Unthemed No9.
He comes back with slate gray slid across his fingers, deep charcoal smudged around his thumb. His hands are the first things he notices, oddly; they always are. And a paintbrush rests lightly between his fingers, bristles coated dripping thick still with the shadowy colour. And his other fingers are scratched with coal medium, inky with splatters on his palm. And the room is quiet save for the bustling street outside, and dark save for the blind that can’t quite block the light.
He glances to the canvas in the loft, tears his eyes away to look up at his work. He scans the figures, but doesn’t spot one he recognizes.
It’s a street, the street. Some street in New York. Crowded, cut off, closeness. It’s monochrome, shades of gray decorated with clean white highlights and sweeping black strokes. Buildings tower above the hurrying figures, and their dark coat collars are turned up, their faces turned away from the wind that snatches at their hair.
Sylar’s brown eyes alight on shape after shape, probe every darkened corner as though his sight will adjust to jet-pitch paint and let him see further. There’s no blonde head of bouncing waves for a cheerleader. There’s no sleek gold of a woman with two faces, and no cropped darkness of a certain politician.
He’s ashamed to admit he looks for the outstanding trench coat of cream among the slate, and for the long black bangs that sweep over someone else’s brown eyes like his own. The mysterious Peter Petrelli isn’t on the picture. Sylar has met him when he saved the cheerleader, and he has killed him when he was with the doctor. He shouldn’t, but he knows he would recognize him again, would see him in the midst of all the tacky, drying paint if he were there. It occurs to him he shouldn’t be looking for Peter Petrelli. He shouldn’t give a damn for Peter Petrelli. Peter Petrelli is dead.
He stands back again and looks at the harsh lines, the people thrown into a deeper shadow by brickwork giants of building. Even the neon streetlights give out a dim glow, a pale gray that illuminates everything in core in a shade of lighter white.
He’s not sure what he has painted, not sure what future is laid out in front of him in the mass of bodies crushed together and somehow lonely. The picture is melancholy, aching through the shades. It is simply New York, full and lonely and cold and dark and gray and black.
Sylar chuckles, just once, to himself. It’s bitter on his lips as he drops the brush to the floor and pulls on his coat, buttons black plastic through soft gray fabric.
All he wants is to be special.
He steps out onto the streets of New York, smooth pavement underfoot and clouded moon overhead. Pushes his way through the mumbling crowds, and buries his painted hands deep in his coat pockets.
All he wants is to be special, but New York is nothing but anonymous.