Fic: The Future Is Something We Deserve
Title: The Future Is Something We Deserve
Rating: R
Words: 1800
Pairing: Mohinder/Sylar
Warnings: Mild sex, mention of off-screen character death
Spoilers: Nothing specific, but it's set some time after the end of Volume 2.
Disclaimer: Not my characters, not writing this for profit.
A/N: This is for aelora, who's given me wonderful feedback on other things while putting up with my complaining. Hopefully this will be sweet enough to make up for the fact that I've spent the last two evenings writing it instead of something else I owed her...
Summary: It started out as an agreement to put an end to the Company for good, but along the way, it turned into something else. And although Mohinder's finally figured out that Sylar won't really hurt him, he doesn't realize that Sylar still makes plans in secret.
Mohinder closes his eyes and sinks back onto his pillow.
He knows exactly what everyone else thinks of him, but he stopped caring a long time ago. When you can't trust anyone, it levels the playing field. It makes it easier to go along with the person whose interests most coincide with your own, even when you're terrified. But after a while, nervous cooperation turns into familiarity, which turns into comfort, which turns into something else.
Damp hair is brushed back from his forehead and he smiles.
"Aren't you cold?"
"Not yet." He doesn't need to open his eyes to know exactly how Sylar is stretched out next to him, how he's leaning over and looking down at him, but he does anyway so that he can see it again. Sylar's hand roams across his body, not arousing this time, just keeping physical contact with him. He smiles again. "I do have to get up early in the morning, if you recall."
"It's barely midnight."
He can't remember what it was like not to have this. He knows his life was completely different not that long ago, but it seems like a faded dream. There's just his work at the Company, and the work he does that the Company doesn't know about, and this, whatever this is. He still doesn't trust Sylar, not entirely. But they've slowly figured out what each other's limits are and as long as they stay within those, everything is okay. He shivers, not entirely from his drying sweat.
"Come here," Sylar says, and when Mohinder doesn't immediately comply, he actually uses telekinesis to roll Mohinder onto his side until they're pressed against each other, snaking an arm around him to hold him there.
A thought strikes Mohinder. "Why don't you ever use any of your abilities on me?"
"What do you mean?"
Mohinder slides a leg in between Sylar's before saying, "You know what I mean."
The corners of Sylar's mouth quirk upwards, and the hand on Mohinder's neck suddenly turns so cold it almost stabs with pain. Mohinder gasps and jerks, but then Sylar's mouth is there, warm lips and tongue driving it away as his fingers trail chill down Mohinder's back. "Like that?" he finally murmurs against Mohinder's earlobe.
"Yes," Mohinder says shakily. Sylar gives a noncommittal shrug.
Mohinder waits, watching him. He’s learned how to tell when there’s something trying to come out, and learned too that the best way to get it out is to refuse to react to the silence. Sylar hates nothingness between them. He’ll create noise to fill it.
“I just…don’t want anything between us,” he finally says. “If I’m touching you, I want to actually be touching you. I want you to actually feel me. I don’t want it to be about…” His voice trails off.
Mohinder realizes what he’s trying to say. He doesn’t want everything in their lives to revolve around him being special; he wants this to just be about them. The word “them” makes Mohinder feel a sudden stab of hope that he pushes away as he kisses Sylar. You idiot, he thinks. I wanted you even when I thought you were just a quiet odd musician. If you’d ever said that before, I would have told you that all I need to be happy is this.
Sylar looks up at him and smiles, but there’s something in his eyes that Mohinder can’t define that makes him nervous. He wonders what goes on inside that mind.
"There's a lot you don't tell me, isn't there?" Mohinder asks, suddenly feeling serious.
Sylar's face falls and he instantly regrets it. He touches the man's cheek and kisses him lightly, waiting to feel tension bleed out of muscles before he deepens it, a wordless sorry.
They never say they're sorry because they'd never truly believe that everything was forgiven. But deep down, it has been, and Mohinder tries to show that the only way he can.
By the time they break it off, he's getting aroused again. Sylar stares at him with an odd expression, one he's seen before. It makes him feel like a specimen, like he's being weighed and analyzed and measured.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" he asks.
“I won’t get to see you for a while,” Sylar replies. “Just storing up memories to get through the week.”
Mohinder slides a hand between them and wraps his fingers around Sylar's cock, feels him harden under his touch. Sylar closes his eyes and lets out a breath as he digs fingernails into Mohinder’s back, and it’s just perfect. It makes Mohinder wish that this could never end.
“Wouldn’t you rather do more than look?” he whispers.
* * * * * * *
Sylar watches Mohinder for a long time after he finally falls asleep, watches the steady rise-and-fall of his chest and the flicker of eyes underneath closed lids. No matter how many times he reminds himself not to underestimate Mohinder, he's still sometimes surprised by how well the man sees through him. He doesn't know what prompted that question, but he was thankful that Mohinder didn't press him. He doesn't like outright lying, and there are a lot of things he keeps to himself.
He doesn’t tell Mohinder how much he needs him.
He doesn’t tell Mohinder how hard it was to kiss him for the first time. How, despite the fact that Mohinder had gone from watching him with apprehension to just watching him, he was terrified of being shoved away and rejected again. Or how it felt, an odd mixture of relief and victory, to realize that Mohinder was kissing him back.
He doesn’t tell Mohinder that at some point this stopped being about revenge, stopped being about using Mohinder’s knowledge - using Mohinder - to destroy the people who tried to destroy him.
He doesn't tell Mohinder about the visit he paid to a certain cop. He'd have done it anyway, even without the lure of another new power - Mohinder never told him what was said when Parkman found out about their little arrangement, but for days afterwards he refused to look Sylar in the eye and shrugged off his touch. Sylar was patient and he soothed, coaxed, whispered, until Mohinder relaxed and was himself again. And then he’d paid Parkman back in full, with interest. For once he took pains to make it look believable - they found his empty cruiser parked on a rough street near his favorite diner, door ajar, small flecks of blood and signs of struggle, his empty wallet and crushed badge left in an alley a block away - and he didn't have to worry about them finding a body, since there wasn't really one left. And that ability... It hadn't taken him long to feel it, to see the myriad of possibilities coded into one seemingly simple thing. Mohinder suspected, he’d have known that even without the newfound telepathy, but Mohinder also didn’t want to believe he’d done it. All he’d had to was keep quiet and let Mohinder convince himself that he hadn’t.
He'd wanted that little living tracking device, too. The internal fight he'd had to force himself to stay away from her was the hardest he'd ever gone through, but he knew that was a fatal line to cross. It was the one thing Mohinder wouldn't be able to excuse or ignore. When he'd sudddenly found himself banned from Mohinder's apartment so the little brat could live there again, found Mohinder looking at him with fear and dread in his eyes, he'd regretted killing her guardian for a sharp second. But then he'd whispered into Mohinder's mind, and Molly had gone to live with distant relatives in California. Mohinder had explained it back to him: Molly deserved a quieter, more stable home than he could give her, deserved to have a caregiver who wasn't so wrapped up in potentially dangerous work. And... she'd be safer, he'd said, looking guiltily away from Sylar.
And Sylar had smiled gently and agreed, because it was all true, wasn't it? And then he'd had to touch Mohinder, because his fingers itched so badly from wanting.
But he wanted Mohinder more.
He doesn't tell Mohinder exactly how much information he picks up after he learns how to extend his range, block by block, till he can sit quietly in a coffee shop a half-mile from Bob's office, looking harmless behind thick glasses and a book, and glean names from the people who pass through the Company’s offices. They’re a daisy chain of connections: West Rosen, Claire Bennet, good old Peter Petrelli, Hiro Nakamura...Adam Monroe. So much hate and fear around that one, it's impossible to resist.
He doesn't tell Mohinder about the trip he took to Japan, persuading customs officials that the empty wallet he showed them contained a passport and ID, or about how easy it was to separate Hiro from his little shadow and corner him in the bathroom of some loud, garish bar. The fucking timebender got away from him - what he wouldn't give for that ability - but not before Sylar'd said two words to him. A name. Not before he'd glimpsed what he needed to know in the memories in Hiro’s panicked mind, and laughed.
The best part was that Hiro'd wrapped it all up in a box, a precious little present waiting just for him. And this time he wouldn't have to deal with overprotective psychotic paper salesmen, or the inconvenience of multiple abilities being thrown at him, to get his hands on it. It took him 97 seconds to remove the dirt over top of the coffin, 6 seconds to open it, and 2 more to TK the sharpened railroad spike straight into the middle of Adam's brain, into the sweet spot that kills even people like him. And then...
Immortality. He doesn't tell Mohinder about that.
Because that would mean having to tell Mohinder about what it's like to lie beside him as he sleeps, to listen to every heartbeat, to every soft breath, and to think that he's one moment closer to being gone forever. Four hundred years ago, he remembers Hiro thinking. And he tries to imagine centuries of life without Mohinder, every second of it carrying him farther and farther away from the man curled against his chest, and he feels sick inside.
But he’s become accustomed to getting what he wants. And he’s nothing if not resourceful.
He can alter himself. That means, theoretically, he could alter other people who are like him. But...why couldn't he change normal people, too? He just has to figure out how much differently they work, figure out where to make all the changes without causing any damage.
He doesn’t like to twist Mohinder’s mind too much. He likes the stubbornness, the disagreements, the occasional temper tantrums - putting that fire out would be like killing something in himself. But he encourages Mohinder to tell him everything he comes across in his work and his snooping, and sometimes he plants suggestions for new avenues. And when he makes trips of his own, quietly building alliances that Mohinder thinks will help them finally put an end to the Company, he sometimes stops along the way to keep an eye on one of the researchers whose papers he found of interest, to see if they’ve uncovered anything that might be useful to him, to push them down promising new trails. Separately their information might not seem to mean anything, but after he pulls it all together…
He’ll find a way to do it.
Mohinder will be angry with him, he knows, but by then it will be too late. He’ll come around, though, once he realizes the advantages it will give him. Once he realizes it means that this will never have to end. And...Mohinder deserves it, for his altruism and caring, for the way he's trusted Sylar with everything, brought some hope into his life. He deserves any gift that Sylar can give him in return for that.
He runs a thumb over Mohinder's cheekbone, across his lips. And because Mohinder's asleep and it's safe, he whispers with his mind, "I love you." And Mohinder doesn't stir, but he smiles, gently, and Sylar rests his head against dark curls and closes his eyes.
This is all he’s ever needed. And he'll do whatever he has to, to keep from losing it.