Fandom: Heroes
Pairing: Sylar/Mohinder
Summary: Three variations on the theme of 'memory'.
Notes: Indirectly inspired by the Haitian Memory Challenge. Titles shamelessly borrowed from T.S. Eliot. This was written before 1x19 '.07%' aired, and contradicts later canon.
I forgetful snow
Sylar always rings twice. He doesn't know if Mohinder understands the joke, or if he ever knew it to begin with, or if he might once have known and now forgotten; but Sylar always rings twice, and Mohinder always opens, and none of them speak of it.
"Don't open, if it doesn't ring twice," Sylar had told him on the first day. "Quickly, one after another. That's me. Don't open for anyone else."
In reality, no one else ever rings. Mohinder works most of the day in the small lab in the corner of the living room, and Sylar idles, reading, and sometimes walks down to the city by the lake for supplies. Sylar counts and remembers the days they have spent here, alone together; he no longer knows if Mohinder does, and he doesn't ask.
Today, when Mohinder opens, Sylar is standing with his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket, his head and shoulders covered in a thin layer of snow. Mohinder chuckles and reaches out with both hands to brush it away, and Sylar ducks a little, letting the smaller man brush his fingers through the wet hair.
The cabin is difficult to heat up. "Go soak in hot water," Mohinder says, and sends Sylar to the bathroom while he adds wood to the fireplace.
It's not that Sylar, crouched before the tub with water running beside him, doesn't hear Mohinder coming. There are steps on the soft carpet, fingers vacantly tracing the lines of the dresser in the hall. It's not that he couldn't have hid, or locked the door, or distracted Mohinder in some way, telling him to get a book, or to check if they have more cream. He doesn't.
"Tea or coffee?" Mohinder asks, standing in the doorway. His white teeth are almost blinding in the light from the bathroom.
Sylar's arms are painted in red halfway up to the elbows. His shirt, now discarded on the floor, bears marks of splashes of something that used to be red, now slightly oxidized and brown like dry rocks in the summer against the white fabric. Water disappears down the drain, washing blood.
Some part of him, Sylar thinks, takes pleasure in this moment: the confusion, the frantic attempt in those intelligent eyes to make sense of what is before him, and sometimes the realization that crosses Mohinder's face. He knows that if he tries he will be able to recall exactly how many times this has happened, but he won't. First, tenth, hundredth. Sometimes, Mohinder runs. Sometimes he doesn't. It doesn't make a difference.
They stare at each other, seconds ticking away in Sylar's mind. Suddenly Sylar sees something breaking behind those eyes, and a trail of blood runs from Mohinder's nose to his lips, wetting them before falling to the carpet in vivid red drops.
"What," is all Mohinder says. He reaches up and touches his mouth, fingers smudging the blood. His legs then refuse to support him anymore, knees giving under, and Sylar steps forward to catch him, wet arms soaking Mohinder's shirt and the blood from Mohinder's nose running down his bare chest. Mohinder shakes, as if from the cold. Sylar cradles Mohinder's head in his hands and kisses his temple.
"Who are you, who are you, who are you--" Mohinder is mumbling, almost a chant.
"Shh, shh," Sylar says; "I will fix you." And he does. They sleep tangled in a heavy web of sheets and blankets, and when they wake, the house has been buried under a feet of snow. They stay inside for a week.
II a handful of dust
We will meet again at the counter in a diner in Texas, the setting sun behind us and a baseball match on the TV; you will sip a thin cup of coffee and glance at your watch once in a while, and I will eat my baked beans and absently worry about the clockwork being three minutes and 17 seconds behind.
My hair will have grown longer, and you will be wearing glasses. You won't know my name. I won't remember yours.
"Didn't these guys win the World Series in 2007?" the fat cook with greasy fingers will ask you, not taking his eyes off the TV. "I used to remember these things."
You will look up from your coffee, slightly startled. "I wouldn't know, sorry," you will answer.
"Not a baseball fan?"
"Yes, well no, but it's ... it's just this funny thing that I have," you will say, grinning, like you really do find it amusing more than anything else, not disturbing, nothing much out of the ordinary. "I don't have any memory of those months. Amnesia. The doctors never did find out why."
I will drop my fork to the floor.
It will be such a coincidence. "What are the odds!" you will say and laugh, a beautiful sound that will echo in the empty diner. And I will follow you when you exit, walk with you to your rental car, and I will speak of fate, of karma, I will ramble, because I have never met anyone like that, like me, missing those exact same months, and you will nod, saying yes, it does seem unusual and even somewhat, well, special. But then you will chuckle, shake your head, and shrug it off.
Because you will still be you, and that's who you are.
I will crouch in the sand, slightly disappointed, and grab a handful of sand in a gesture of frustration. You will look worried but the expression will be soon gone, because I will smile up at you, and you believe people, you believe what they choose to show you. You will glance at your watch again.
"I'm sorry, I have an appointment at five, I was killing time here--I really must go."
I will nod, and watch you, watch your hand as it opens the door of the car, watch you squint your eyes in the orange sun, watch your hair dance in a whiff of air.
"Goodbye," you will say, and smile; and the sand will slip from between my fingers, again and again and again.
III death by water
"This is something that happened to me a long time ago, a few months before I set up this shop and maybe even before you were born: I don't know if they tell you this in history class these days, whether they even consider it important enough, but maybe you know that there was a--when was it, 2003? 2004? or maybe it was even later--that there was a small sort of catastrophe here, in New York City, nearly unabated, I think actually the center of it was a few blocks down from here, to the West, and anyway it killed some dozens of people and laid a few buildings in ruin.
"It wasn't anything unusual at the time, or so they told me. The doctors, they didn't really know why, but they thought maybe the source of the explosion, which they had no idea what was and to the best of my knowledge they still don't know, but they thought it had given off some sort of shockwave, maybe, I don't remember what exactly they called it--I fix timepieces, I'm not a scientist, really--and they said that it had probably done something to our brains. These people they were mostly policemen, fire fighters, I think I was the only civilian that had been brought in; we had all lost our memories.
"No, I still don't remember anything before that day. You get used to it, I suppose, when it's all you have: hard to miss something you never remember having.
"The policemen and the fire fighters, they all went back to their families--with more or less success, I heard--but they told me my parents had died years ago and that I had no siblings or relatives that they could find, so there I was, feeling like I had been spit into this world a fully-grown baby, six-feet-four and unable to pee on my own. I was in my late twenties, maybe early thirties, blank as a paper and stalled in a void.
"There was a man. There were many men at the hospital, yes, but this one wasn't a doctor ... or maybe he was, but he never wore white; he would come in just wearing a pair of jeans and a shirt, and he would run tests. Not unpleasant ones. Blood samples, electrodes to the temple, simple things.
"He said to me one day that I was cured. I didn't understand what he meant, because I still couldn't remember anything, not even my name aside from what they had told me it was, but he said I could leave, walk out the door and do whatever I wished to do.
"I told him I had no idea what I was going to do, what I was going to spend the rest of my life doing, and after a long, uncomfortable silence, he told me that I might enjoy 'fixing things'. That's how he put it. 'Like furniture?' I remember asking, quite bewildered because you can see my hands, all white and pudgy soft, and even without any memory I knew they weren't a craftsman's hands. The man then let out a sigh, I now imagine he might have tried to laugh, right then, and failed, and he said, 'Maybe watches.'
"So here I am.
"I don't remember the man's name, which is a terrible thing. But I do remember the look in his eyes. It must have left an impression on me, clearly, seeing as it's the only thing about him I remember with any accuracy, so I wish I could describe it to you, but the look, it was most notable in not having any features at all, and how do you describe that? It went beyond clinical detachment, I knew clinical from the doctors and nurses who surrounded me twenty-four seven; he was empty, I suppose you could say, like someone had opened him up and scraped out everything inside that made him human, and clumsily sewn him back together. He would twitch, rather than smile or frown, as if the stitches pulled at his skin when he tried.
"I never found out what it was that was so bad about the world that it made him look like that. But sometimes, when he wore a shirt and had left the top button open, I saw pale pink strokes of scar tissue running across his collar bone, probably starting at his stomach or chest, and up the side of his neck, and I thought ... I thought maybe they had something to do with it. I didn't ask. I didn't want to be invasive. I sometimes wish I had, but that's because I know now what later happened; I never knew what drove him to do what he ended up doing, though, although I suppose, I guess--
"--there you go, told you it wouldn't take more than ten minutes; I took the liberty to calibrate the balance wheel too, you were losing some time--
"--where was I? Oh, yes, but there really isn't much left to say. He came to visit me once, a few months after I had left the hospital. He came in, and I had a customer right then so he stood right inside the door, behind where you're sitting now, and just gazed at me, waiting.
"'How,' I think he said, when we were alone in the shop and I had said hello; I waited for the words that might follow, but nothing came. I assumed he had come to ask me how I was doing, and that the 'how' was an attempt at it, and I told him the shop was going well. He seemed to have nodded. Then I remembered, finally, that he had been the one to recommend me this profession. So I told him thank you. And I told him I was happy.
"A jolt went through him. It was so fierce, I worried he might somehow have been electrocuted right there on the spot. And as I was about to open my mouth to ask him what was wrong, he spun on his heels and ran out of the shop. I was shocked, muscles paralyzed for some seconds just from how sudden this had all happened, but when I could move I followed him out the door, not bothering to close it behind me. He was clearly out of himself.
"I spotted him a few hundred feet away and spurted. He ran, across the traffic nearly getting run over, ignoring car horns and the cries of men and women he shoved aside on his way; he ran blindly, I imagine, he was certainly nowhere near coherent at that point; he ran east, to the bridge. I called out to him, maybe I remembered his name at this point or maybe I just yelled 'hey', and I noticed another jolt run through him and he stopped for just one moment.
"Then, he began to crawl over the railings. Stumbling, because you could see even from where I was standing that his body was shaking uncontrollably. And of course there were other people on the bridge and they stopped and looked, some of them screaming in horror, some calling out to him, some asking for the police. He didn't stop. It can't have taken him more than half a minute to reach the very edge.
"He stood there, jacket flapping in the wind, arms slightly outstretched, only the heels of his shoes resting on the steel frame. He looked back once, and only once, and when he saw me his face--contorted, in a grim grimace, sort of a death mask, and it was the first time I saw anything resembling emotion cross his face, and then, oh--
"He jumped."