An Act of Finality-Sylaire-Part 1

[black_hat]

Title: An Act of Finality 
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: All characters you recognize are property of Tim Kring and NBC.
Pairing: Sylar/Claire  
Warnings: Spoilers for Season 2 of Heroes. Major character death. Original character death. Underage sex. (It may be dub-con? I don't think so, myself, but there is some context of the story that should be considered.) This is a dark-ish fic...er, IMO.
For The Backseat Challeng for-

 

[Unknown site tag]freetheelves2

Word count: 13,040
Note: This wasn't beta-ed, so there may be mistakes. Actually, this is a first time I'm posting something of this length without a beta. I read over it myself, but if there are any mistakes, you can tell me. Since the last part of this story is NC-17,  I just hope it's not an embarrassing mistake ;-). Concrit is welcomed.  I am a little skittish, so I'll be locking this entry in a week or two. It's just paranoia but remember what the Nirvana song says about the matter.

Some parts of life take forever.

 

Claire stood in the checkout line, gripping a bag of banner materials in one hand and her cell phone in the other. She didn’t mind the wait, either. The longer, the better. 

 

She wasn’t supposed to be out at Target, buying blue markers for the Homecoming Banner. But she was. Maybe it was dumb that she had volunteered to make the banner for her new school, considering how her other banner had ended up. She was under the impression that her father thought it was flat-out strange. It was such a small, normal thing, though, and she had learned to cling to those while she still could. Now, they were going to run again.

 

She had taken the family car without asking. By now, he should have figured out that she wasn’t in the house anymore and that she had disappeared. Not spirited away, as seen from the missing car in the garage, but most certainly gone. The phone remained silent.

 

Frowning, she paid for the banner and made her way to the parking lot. She wasn’t stupid. After all those forevers, she had seen first-hand how life can change in a second, but she didn't want to spend the rest of it hiding. Her car was still in its space, not burned or lightening-struck. Next stop,  drop the banner off at May’s house and then say-

 

A sharp, stabbing pain bit into her shoulder. Her legs gave out from underneath her, and the world faded from sight.

 

***

 

Claire struggled to sit up. Her entire body had that falling-asleep sensation of pins and needles.

 

“W…where?”

 

“I wouldn’t say she’s much of a threat.”

 

A woman with dark sunglasses studied her from the passenger seat. A man was driving. He was non-descript, despite the fact that he was wearing her father’s style of glasses. She decided, hazily, that the Company must select their workers from a Walking-Cliché factory that should be burnt to the ground. Behind the glasses, his eyes were deep set and he was balding. Her first instinct, as out of it as she was, had been to exchange an insult. However, the best she could come up with was ‘those shoes are a threat’ but she wasn’t even sure the woman had feet.

 

She shook her head and tried to find a clear thought.

 

Lackluster as they were, they were dangerous. They’d take her apart and bury her in a glass box away from her family, all the while having a casual conversation about the weather.

 

She crossed her arms in an attempt to look together. From the drugs, it felt like there was sawdust in her mind, hot, dry, and empty.

 

“How did you find me?” she asked, knowing the answer but hoping for a different one.

 

“Through your classmate. The girl is undergoing serious psychological evaluation as we speak. Nightmares. Constant panic attacks. Unable to walk outside without someone with her because she’s thinks a flying man will swoop down from the sky and drop her to her death. She’s also afraid of you. It was a bit of tip off.”

 

“Such a sweet girl Bennet’s raised,” the woman commented.

 

“Like you can talk. Your father raised you to be a kidnapper.”

 

“We’re here to help you, Claire. Obviously, your abilities are beyond you.”

 

She bit her lip and tried to figure out where they were, exactly. Joe, as she had named him, apparently had them on a back road with suicidal turns. As to where, she had no clue.

 

She moved her fingers, seeing if the feeling was returning to her hands. If she could be patient, it was still possible for her to escape. Whatever they had drugged her with, however, was powerful. She could hardly keep her eyes open. 

 

“Did you know she thinks that you’re going to kill her? That one day, when she comes home, you’ll-”

 

“That’s enough,” Joe interjected. Claire droped her gaze. One action and her life, the one her father had fought for, had fallen to pieces.  The numbness of the thing coursing through her was much harder to resist.

 

“He’s been behind us for a long time.”

 

She jerked, and looked outside, mentally kicking herself. The sun was half set on the horizon, its eyes half closed. She had to have been out for more than an hour.

 

“I know.”

 

Claire blinked, trying to pick up the thread of their conversation and failing. It wasn’t until the lights stared flashing in the rearview mirror that she turned around, gripping the armrest for support.

 

She blinked again. It appeared that her stolen car had found her, and was trailing behind her like a lost dog. She shook her head. No, the car looked like it had been through hell and back. It wasn’t as if the car thief was rushing to return it while he still had the chance. Plenty of people owned Nissan-Rogues…maybe.

 

Suddenly, as if reading their minds, the driver switched on the emergency flashers. He sped up behind them, and motioned frantically to a shape beside him. She squinted, not understanding.

 

“Let him pass,” Dark-glasses said, urgently.

 

“What?”

 

“His wife is obviously sick.”

 

Through the shadows, Claire could see a person, whose frame was slight and delicate, slumped against the car window, her head bobbing lightly to the bumps in the road. Joe sighed, and pulled to the side. The driver followed them, seemingly by accident. The one-lane road was too narrow to go around, so Claire assumed he had been trying to squeeze past them.

 

“Oh for—go around me, you idiot,” Joe gripped, holding his arm out the window and making cart-wheeling motions.

 

The Nissan roared past them, rocking their small car in its wake. Claire started to wave frantically at the driver for help but stopped when she saw her school’s sticker on the back. The one she had put on herself, in order to prevent her car from looking so old. It was as if she had seen a break through time. The car thief pans her van off to some stupid couple who, apparently, were drifting into the realm of the unwell, the place where Claire, the original owner, was to be spirited away.

 

“What a nut.”

 

“Oh.”

 

Dark-glasses peered back at her.

 

“It’s nothing,” Claire said, crossing her arms again.

 

“Wife, my ass,” Joe muttered.

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“No one understands commitment anymore. I’m sure that was just his one night-stand having a drug overdose.”

 

“Charming as ever, Landon.” 

 

They fell into silence. She wondered if she should inform them about Mr. Road Rage. If anything, if anything…she fought for lucidity and found an idea. More than an idea. She saw it so clearly in her mind that it was as if someone had taken a picture. When the moment was right—if she had to—she could lunge forward, grab the steering wheel, and drive this car right off the side of these turns.

 

It would be a long way down.

 

She couldn’t help but wonder if she could do it without hurting them too badly. She moved her fingers again. Better than before. The picture was now developing with sound effects. They would scream, and look at her with wild eyes, and the car would rocket down the side of the hills, sounding like metal in a trash compactor. The woman’s dark sunglasses would break.

 

Claire shivered, feeling cold. Her arms were regaining sensation as well. She gathered up the end of her sleeves, slowly, so she could maintain a good grip on the steering wheel. Her hands alone, she didn’t trust.

 

She breathed, in and out, and prayed for something to take this away.

 

The moment passed, and she slid to the middle of the backed seat.

 

“I-I’m going to be sick,” she whispered.

 

“Then be sick,” Joe said. Charming indeed.

 

“I’m serious,” she warned them. They had their attention on her, true, but that made this all the more unexpected…or so she hoped. She leaned back, closed her eyes, and counted, feigning a deep-sick stillness.

 

On the count of five. Then on ten. Then on twenty.

 

Finally, on the count of a hundred, Claire lunged forward, grabbing madly for the wheel. Dark-glasses blocked her, with surprising ease, and grabbed her wrist with syringe in hand, ready for stabbing.

 

Instead, Claire never really landed. There was a horrible, world-ending bang, and she realized she had cracked her head on the back seat window and felt, saw, knew only red behind her eyes for a moment. She was shocked, thinking that the woman had powers-probably did, sure, so dumb-and had thrown her across the car.

 

There was another sound, or sounds, loud, clear, and distinguishable only after a minute. A gunshot and breaking glass, one after another like thunder following lightening. She felt the back of her head and found it was matted down with blood.

The Nissan Rogue was crouched outside the window, pinning them to the side rail like a spider would a fly and looking in with yellow, bright eyes, illuminating everything inside. Another look told her that Joe was not moving. Dark-glasses was struggling to move and her glasses had  broken, hanging off the side of her face by her ear. Claire thought it was silly that she just didn’t take the stupid things off.

 

Something shifted, outside, and she saw a tall figure bend near the passenger window, taking casual aim with a gun. The shadow placed the barrel against Dark-glasses head in a motion she would have considered intimate, brushing stray strands of hair out of her face. Killing with kindness.

 

Glasses moved, quickly, and the gun in his hand seemed to turn an angry red. The man screamed out in pain, and she heard the metallic clatter as the gun hit the pavement. He stumbled back, and darted behind the Nissan. She recognized him by the way he moved.

 

“S…” Her mouth kept filling up with blood; it was all very unbelievable. She must have bitten down on her tongue. She grabbed Dark-Glasses by the arm, seeing that the woman was going to pursue a monster.

 

“Sylar,” Claire managed to choke out.

 

She received a wild smile in reply as the woman’s face lit up in savage glee. “Oh really. They want him alive, but accidents do happen, don’t they?”

 

Dark-glasses opened the door and slammed it shut, another pointless action in Claire’s opinion. The car groaned, sounding like the hull of a sinking ship. She reached down and picked up the gun, also seeming intimate in the motion of this dance. Claire didn’t have a clue what the hell was going on. It was as if she was stuck in an old gangster movie, in classic black and red. 

 

But she was getting out. Exit stage left.

 

As Broken-Glasses stalked around the side of the Nissan, crunching the shards of glass under her shoes, Claire edged up slowly to the front seat. She didn’t have the strength to kick out the window on her side. Joe’s side was a different story. The bullets had broken the window after going through him. It was unreal that they didn’t have bullet proof glass but considering their prey, perhaps it had never been an issue. They should rethink that one.

 

She didn’t look at Joe, couldn’t look at him. Once out the window, she’d fall all the way down the side of the jagged hill. From there, she’d run. She put her hand on the door and hissed in surprise. A shard of glass had pierced her palm, and blood welled up there and around it.

 

Then it hit her. Pain. It was the first time she had ever, ever felt anything more than a dull twinge from any injury. She couldn’t heal.

 

Claire looked down the dark precipice again. She was already halfway out the window. Fear took a hold of her, like cold hands trying to pull her downwards, and she almost slipped.

 

At that moment, she caught some dark liquid being flung at Broken-Glasses and an inferno erupted by the Nissan. Claire jerked in surprise. The woman had been a fire starter, like her mother, and the gasoline Sylar had doused her with couldn’t have hurt her. It did blind-

 

A weightless sensation poured into her veins as the car tilted from her movement and started to fall, clipping the guardrail and giving her a grand view of the entire crevice. Joe pinned her halfway out the window, and as the sun turned upside down, Claire wondered if she was going to see anything after death.

 

Because she hadn’t b.