Title: Patient Zero
Author:
themaskedmckayRating: Gen
Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: None
Characters: Sylar
Words: 771
Disclaimer: Characters do not belong to me.
Summary: Sylar's ability manifests itself. It is not his canon ability.
Author's Notes: Written in response to
this request over at
hereoswhatif.
It had started innocuously enough. An elderly lady had come into the shop looking to have her antique cuckoo clock repaired. Gabriel had been slightly bothered by her presence but couldn't figure out why.
As he worked he found he was more and more distracted by her... sexually. He felt flushed and to his eternal shame he was getting hard watching the tiny, blue-haired woman poke about his shop.
Finally he could take no more of her presence and announced he would need to work on the clock overnight and could she please pick it up in the morning?
He locked the door behind her and closed up shop.
That night he couldn't get her out of his head and felt almost compelled to seek her out.
But he resisted. Only someone completely maladjusted and creepy would stalk someone, right?
The next morning he had a splitting headache and his temper was decidedly off. He ate his breakfast, a poached egg on dry toast, and quickly finished repairing the cuckoo clock.
He was just finishing his second cup of tea when she came for her clock. He... could sense her before he heard the chime of the bells above his door. Flustered and grouchy he quickly conducted his business with her and tried to ignore how appealing her liver-spotted skin and old lady smell was.
"I would have thought your husband would be here to carry this for you," Gabriel said, desperate to cut across her small talk and distract himself from what secrets her conservative, rose-coloured cardigan might hide.
She blinked at him then laughed, "Oh! Oh no, honey! I never married! Couldn't stand the touch of a man."
Still giggling to herself she tottered out the door with her clock leaving a bewildered Gabriel behind her.
He tried to concentrate on his fiddly, pet project, the Sylar watch, but his headache was getting worse and to add to his pile of woe that second cup of tea had suddenly given him the urge to move his bowels.
Stumbling into the bathroom he glanced at himself in the mirror and did a double take. In the middle of his forehead was a raised, red bump the size of a quarter. It was the largest pimple he'd ever seen!
He tried squeezing it, in the back of his head he was horrified at what might come out, but it was hard instead of squishy and it hurt to touch it.
His guts rumbled and he quickly sat down to do his business, leaving the enormous pimple alone for the moment.
An uncomfortable but surprisingly odour-free ten minutes later he wiped himself clean and stared at the toilet paper in his hand. It had come away bright blue. BLUE!
He stood up and turned around to look in the toilet bowl and it looked like someone had poured half a dozen different cans of paint in the water.
H-had that come out of HIM?
At that moment, the headache that had been increasing in intensity all morning suddenly peaked and he doubled over, clutching at his forehead. His hand came away covered in blood.
With his pants still down around his ankles he stumbled over to the mirror. The enormous pimple on his forehead had burst and there seemed to be a sharp bone fragment protruding through the skin.
His blood ran cold. Should he call an ambulance? He'd never, ever, heard of an illness like this and he was quite well-read on the topic.
Using a washcloth he cleaned up as much of the blood running down his face as he could then pulled out his first aid kit. Meticulously he crafted a doughnut out of the gauze and fabric in the kit and treated the bone fragment like an impalement injury; placing the doughnut around the protruding bone and taping it in place with surgical tape.
Now that the 'pimple' had burst, his headache had subsided. He pulled up his pants and walked slowly into the little office in the back of his store to use his old laptop to scour the Internet for information about his ailment.
When Chandra Suresh entered Gray & Sons he had been expecting to find a relatively normal human being whom he would have to convince of his theories.
Instead, he found a young man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, desperate for any explanation of the changes happening to his body. The foot-long, spiral 'horn' extending from his forehead was only the most obvious symptom; he could also detect virgins and he defecated in rainbow hues.
Chandra had found his Patient Zero.