Heros (MYLAR)
Title: Stockholm Syndrome
Fandom: Heroes
Word Count:
Rating:
Disclaimer: Heroes characters are not mine.
Notes: Weirdly, the title for this one came first, rather than being pulled out of my arse at the last minute. Thanks to Suzy for the beta.


He had learnt from his mistakes, and this time he was cautious. About everything: the dose, the thickness of the glass, about estimating the man's capabilities. The suppressant was stronger this time, to a power of fourteen, and it came now in gas form. He'd insisted.

The funny thing was finding the answer to disrupting the communication of mutated brain cells not in the brains of those who possessed these prodigious abilities (he refused to call them mutants, the term the laboratory was beginning to favour), but in his own blood. It was as though his mother and father had produced an antithesis to bookend their daughter's abilities and illness, to complement her.

It was too bad she had died before that could happen.

Mohinder Suresh gazed passively through the triple-thickness reinforced glass at Sylar's unconscious body, restrained not only by thick mental-hospital straps but by a powerful paralysis-inducing drug, the air and his lymphatic system both flooded with the potent suppressant.

Mohinder had not been there for the capture, for the triumphant moment when a knocked-out and badly injured, sewage-slimed Sylar was dragged to the street at last on the end of a steel cable – he'd had a more important engagement (Molly Walker and Micah Hawsey were having - a joint twelfth birthday party and Mohinder had cancelled his speaking role at the genetics debate panel in Geneva to attend – he wasn't about to let The Bogeyman interfere with seeing his favourite children either) – and a year ago he would have baulked at the inhumane methods they were using to contain Sylar.

But a lot can happen in a year, both in the world and in the mind of a man, and now he simply watched and waited, as patient, still and unforgiving as a statue.

On the third day Sylar regained consciousness. His paralysis was not total, and so with the holding cell wired for sound Mohinder was treated to a half-hour non-stop stream of foul language and threats before Sylar lost both breath and consciousness.

When he came around again the man tried reasoning with his unseen audience, and Mohinder listened with folded arms and a closed face. They could not fit him with a gag, tempting though it was, for he would be subject to many interrogations and the only alternative to speech was telepathic "digging". No one wanted to put their mind near Sylar's.

On the fourth day Sylar started asking questions. The only one Mohinder answered was, "Mr. Bennett no longer runs this facility. I do," and Sylar smiled his queer little smile of anticipation into the ceiling camera. "Don't think this means you'll be having an easy time, Gabriel."

The smile vanished. "My name is Sylar."

"Your name is Gabriel. Get used to hearing it – you'll be hearing it (this actually sounds a bit, maybe a rephrase?) for a good long while now."

Sylar's discomfiting little smile returned. "I'll get out," he said with blunt confidence and a low, soft voice. "You'll fuck up."

Mohinder did not mirror the smile – his eyes glittered black and politely empty. "Not this time."

On the fifth day Mohinder turned off the power holding Sylar's restraints taut and watched dispassionately as the man battered himself unconscious against the walls of his prison. He gassed Sylar paralytic again for good measure before having him retied. "How can such an intelligent man reduce himself so easily to the level of a wild animal?" Mohinder mused as the man in question woke.

"Fuck you," Sylar spat, his eyes bloodshot and his gums blood-laced. Mohinder made a mental note to have his captive's dentistry examined.

"Only if you're very good," he said, and gassed Sylar yet again.

He had been in the cell a week and a half before he began to answer to "Gabriel".

Mohinder took a walk in the light rain that evening and spent the night reminding himself, like a mantra, that not only did observation change the thing observed, but also the one observing.

The problem with Sylar was that when he wasn't trying to kill you, he possessed a very worrying breed of awkward charm. The sly and unsettling smile eventually gave way to one that seemed quite genuine, a little apologetic, the smile of a watch-maker and a not a murderer, and it was with difficulty that Mohinder reminded himself just how many people the man had killed. And which names were listed among those dead at his hands. How he had manipulated a more naïve, trusting Mohinder in leading him to new prey. It would not do to be deceived like that again.

Mohinder did not usually find masturbation a satisfying or worthwhile use of his time, and by the time he got he to bed most nights he was too tired, but when he returned to his modest apartment (it need not be, for the money he was earning now, but it seemed wasteful to be otherwise) and peeled away his damp clothes he felt the need like a weight on him.

He fixed his eyes on a water patch on the ceiling and tried to empty his mind, but with each up stroke, down stroke, his mind's eye flickered between Sylar's devious smirk and the supposed open smile of Gabriel-the-watch-maker; when he came, hot and unexpectedly copious over his belly, it was an afterimage of both that burned shamefully on his retinas.

Contrary to his expectations, Mohinder slept well that night, and if he dreamt he did not remember what of.

In the holding cell, Sylar was once again free to roam. He had stopped trying to beat through the glass with his bare hands and had taken to drumming idle rhythms on it instead – or rhythm, rather, for there was only ever one – possibly in some sort of attempt to drive Mohinder mad.

Mohinder did not think it prudent to explain that he could shut out certain frequencies through the channels or that no noise travelled through the panes – between the second and third was a thin but perfect vacuum – when it kept his captive occupied so neatly and gave him the opportunity to observe the man's movements.

"Are you willing to co-operate in a second medical exam?" Mohinder said into the microphone.

"Second?"

"You were not conscious during the first, and it is of use to us to know how well your muscles respond to cerebral stimuli as well as to reflexive stimuli," Mohinder said carefully. It had been a mistake bringing his coffee into the observation room – the smell of it was distracting him. It had also been a mistake allowing the glass to be two-way – Sylar was peering at his face with a disinterest that was too total not to be feigned. Mohinder knew it masked a calculating sweep for information. He kept his features as smooth and blank as a wall, and thought about the fractal complexity of the lotus blossom.

Finally Sylar shrugged and got to his feet. His height still intimidated Mohinder, though he was loath to admit it. They had measured the man upon his arrival and found him exactly six feet and four inches from crown to sole, a daunting six and a half inches – a hand span – taller than Mohinder. His face would fit against Sylar's throat.

Mohinder shook the thought from him with a little surprise.

"What now?"

"Undress. Movement of the muscle groups cannot be observed through your greens, Gabriel."

For a moment Sylar simply stared at him through the glass and once again Mohinder found it necessary to deploy his poker face, his features composed in the very picture of scientific detachment while his heart, his treacherous heart, sped up and demanded he recalculate the security of the barrier between him and the man Molly had rather accurately dubbed The Bogeyman.

Then Sylar's intense gaze abated and he was undoing the rubber buttons that held his thin, antiseptic green hospital pyjamas closed. Mohinder felt something like a pressure headache growing with each fresh inch of skin exposed. He breathed more deeply, trying to disperse the weight on his cortex, and when he opened his eyes again Sylar was standing naked in an approximation of Da Vinci's famous anatomical diagram.

"Now what?"

"Turn." Mohinder indicated the direction of motion with a silver paint-marker pen.

Sylar revolved like a plate in a microwave (Mohinder had seen enough of them in the last year to know his comparison was wholly accurate), the muscles of his back, thighs, and shoulders all strangely relaxed, as though he was unfazed by being stripped naked and made to perform for his commands(?). As Sylar completed the slow pirouette Mohinder noted down his appendectomy scar, the birthmark or other discolouration over his left hipbone and (privately) the slight puffiness in his pectoral tissue, around the nipples – as though the flesh there had been made tender, irritated in some way. Mohinder wrote on the back of his hand in the silver pen (a bad habit from his college days; it wasn't as though the observation room was short on notation devices or even proper pens), review footage from cameras 5-7, check straps for abrasion.

"Can I get dressed now?" Sylar's mocking tone might have been Mohinder's imagination; then again, it might not.

"No, this examination is far from over. Please face the opposite wall and flex your deltoids."

Sylar gave him what Mohinder suspected was a deliberately vacant look. "My what?"

He indicated with indicated with the pen, inadvertently smearing silver paint over his shirt collar. "Hunch and unhunch your shoulders, then raise first one arm and then the other over your head."

Sylar did as he instructed, his back arching like a cat about to hoark up a hairball as he hunched. Had Mohinder been forced to estimate, he would have placed the man at around 12% body fat from appearance. Fortunately, the sophisticated of tests they had put Sylar through after his capture made estimation on most fronts superfluous; he had 13.54% body fat, a percentage that increased for every day they kept him immobile, presumably.

"Now what?" Sylar asked in a bored voice, his arms above his head as he cut through Mohinder's thoughts. The man began to bounce on the balls of his feet.

"Bend over and touch your toes," Mohinder said absently.

Six feet and four inches of superpowered serial killer doubled at the waist and, knees together, touched his toes with the tips of his long fingers. Mohinder noted the uneven stretching in his hamstrings, the small twitch in the back of one knee, the dark hair deepening the shadows that fell between his slightly parted buttocks …

"Are you by any chance getting off on this?" Sylar drawled, and this time the mockery was unmistakable.

It seemed Mohinder's cheeks flared and his head ducked of their own volition, "Gabriel," he said when he trusted his voice to remain steady, "you agreed to cooperate with this examination. If you have changed your mind – " he found his throat uncommonly dry, "- you should be aware that the floor you are standing on is metal and that it only takes a switch to send a very high current through that floor to knock you out."

Sylar straightened up slowly but did not turn. "And why wouldn't you just gas me again, Dr. Suresh?"

"Because," Mohinder said through carefully gritted teeth, "that wouldn't hurt you."

Later, reviewing the footage from three cameras in an effort to see if Sylar's restraints were liable to rub either a hole in his flesh or worse, through themselves, his subject's words echoed unpleasantly in the silence of his apartment. Was he getting off on this?

The apartment was already cool, verging on chilly, but Mohinder turned the ceiling fan on anyway, for the noise it made and for the faint but reassuring feeling of home. It was childish to need that comfort – he might as well buy a box of crickets and set a dehumidifier in reverse and have done with it – but nonetheless, Mohinder listened to the steady whumwhumwhum of the fan's blades as he pawed over hours of footage and fell asleep in his chair, one hand resting lightly and unnoticed in the crack between his pants’ waist and underpants.

Safely bound in new and firmer straps, Sylar lay awake on his table, in theory to answer Mohinder's questions. In practice it seemed that in the absence of a much-needed gag, Sylar was keen to be as invasive and irritating as possible; on days like this it was only possible to keep calling him 'Gabriel' when Mohinder remembered how much Sylar hated it.

"You'd have more luck if you came in here and asked me these things face-to-face," Sylar cajoled, pinned to the table even by a strap over his forehead, in addition to the powerful paralysing agent in his blood.

"Thank you, S – Gabriel, but I'm not stupid," Mohinder sighed, getting out of his seat and setting his forehead against the glass. "Although I'm starting to suspect that, outside of your two narrow and rather disparate areas of interest, you very well may be."

"Personal abuse isn't very scientific, Dr Suresh."

"Assessing your ability to learn and adapt is extremely scientific, Gabriel, and it makes up a decent part of this study. For example, how will your attitude change when I tell you that you have an implant in your heart?"

"What does it do?" Sylar's face on the ceiling-cam monitor was very still.

"At present, nothing. Should it cease to receive transmission of my vital signs from the implant in the back of my neck, however, it will cause a fatal arrhythmia." Mohinder watched Sylar's expression change only minutely as he processed this information, his thick brows twitching inward over his nose. "So, you see, killing me will also end your life. An important fact for you to consider."

Sylar sneered. "Most people would just have settled for a gold band and a priest, Mohinder."

Mohinder turned away from the window, concealing his anger against the racks of monitors. "Being facetious does not constitute cooperation."

"It's about the only pleasure I have left."

"You shouldn't have any," Mohinder said sharply. "You are here for what remains of your life because you are a murderer, Sy – Gabriel. Pleasures are reserved for good people."

He was almost waiting for Sylar to ask why he denied them to himself if that was the case, but of course with the inhibiting agent in place Sylar could only guess at his circumstances; he couldn't know about the single, narrow bed, the microwave meals, the abstemious lifestyle. For all Sylar could know he had a girlfriend and a house the size of a baseball field.

Instead, his subject smirked unpleasantly straight at the camera and began humming something. Mohinder couldn't quite place where he knew it from until he realised it was the same thing he heard Sylar tap out with his fingertips on the glass. "If you want to take them all you'll have to find some way to stop me having wet dreams," Sylar drawled. He emphasised each letter of 'wet dreams' carefully, especially the Ts.

Mohinder kept his shoulders low and relaxed and his face away from the window, both with some difficulty. "Your nocturnal emissions are not my concern," he said, affecting a loftier stance than he felt he truly occupied. His night after the walk in the rain came back to him unbidden and constricted his throat.

"You would if you knew who they featured," Sylar said, and started humming again. He added, "It's so nice that you tied us together like that, Dr Suresh. Think how much we have in common already."

Though obeying Sylar was the last thing he should be doing, Mohinder thought of the audio cassettes of Sylar's interviews with his father, the desperation as Gabriel (as he truly was back then, not this painted-on attempt to civilise a monster), tried and failed to hold Dr. Chandra Suresh's attention. Just as Mohinder had tried and failed to hold his father's attention. Perhaps there was a link there.

On the other hand, Mohinder thought, angry at having been manipulated even so briefly, when he had been pushed to one side by his father, he'd just buried himself in his studies, and later his work. He hadn't been moved to bash the doctor's head in against the side of his own taxicab.

"I have no more common ground with you than the rest of the human race," he said softly.

"Less," Sylar agreed, directing his piercing gaze directly at the ceiling camera again. "I'm a superior individual, aren't I, Dr Suresh? I'm the next stage in evolution."

"Are you? I'm not so sure." Mohinder fiddled idly with his silver paint pen. He'd found silver behind his ear yesterday, a sign that perhaps the cap was leaking.

"Your father said I was."

"My father didn't know you were socially defective," Mohinder said, applying one of his colleagues' favourite criticisms of him without irony. "He said that in the belief that you would function as a normal being, and pass on your genes." Mohinder picked up his coffee – it had ended up in the observation room again despite him telling himself to leave it behind – and permitted himself a small smile as he sipped.

Sylar's expression on the monitor was that of someone who had just been handed an unexpectedly crooked piece of the puzzle, someone who was having to alter the whole picture to fit in this new information.

"Not all mutations are successful, Gabriel – most aren't, in fact – that's why we don’t see races of eight-fingered humans and the like. For evolution to occur, the new mutation must be as successful, if not more, at allowing the individuals with it to survive to breed. And their offspring to do the same." He sipped some more of the coffee. It was Hawaiian Kona – not his usual brand – and he rather suspected he had picked up someone else's coffee by mistake. Fortuitous mistake, though; it tasted much nicer.

On the screen Sylar appeared to be greatly troubled by this new information, so Mohinder pressed his advantage. "Species that kill every one of their kind that they encounter, as you have – they set back the course of potential evolutionary change, Gabriel. They reduce the number of breeding pairs." He blew steam off the quite delicious coffee. "And as you cannot possibly hope for personal immortality, you must have turned your thoughts to what happens when all your cells wear out, yes?"

"I suppose."

"You die, Gabriel. You die, and apart from case studiesd and nursery tales, you are wholly forgotten."

"And what about you?" Sylar asked with an unpleasant glint in his eye. "Are you going to advance the cause of human evolution by standing around in a bunker drinking coffee?"

"I already have," Mohinder said, refusing to be rattled. "By taking you out of the equation."

"My skills might have been the key," Sylar pointed out.

"Perhaps. Perhaps they were intended to prevent other neurological knowledge from being lost in the face of untimely death. Perhaps you were meant as a great teacher to others like you. But you chose not to be." He sipped the coffee again. It was mostly gone now. "Unstable mutations are rarely repeated, Gabriel, especially when they do not breed. You remember Ted, I assume?"

Sylar's slow and nasty smile said that he did.

"Even if you had not decided it was necessary to remove the top of his skull," Mohinder began dryly, "he would not have passed on his abilities to another generation. His wife died – any children he had would have met with the same fate."

"Unless he bred flame-retardant babies," Sylar pointed out.

Mohinder found this unaccountably funny. As soon as the snort of laughter left his lips he was horrified – too much time interacting with the monster had evidently affected his own humanity. "I'll leave you to think about that," he said, and switched the microphone off.

The main obstacle to the progression of his studies was the MRI imaging of the brain. In order to pinpoint the location of the brain areas responsible for triggering these powers – individuals in whom the effects were not constantly in action, like young Clare Bennett – the subject needed to be scanned while conscious and utilising their abilities. So far, after Matt had refused, the Hawsey family had been as helpful as could be expected under the circumstances, but Nikki's powers were not consciously controllable (and Jessica did not like the MRI process), D.L. tended to fall through the scanner and Micah usually distracted the machine; whenever he went in, it ended up returning pictures of new trainers or whatever else Micah was fantasising about this week, rather than scans of his brain. Mohinder still had no idea how he did that.

To scan Sylar while conscious would not be a problem as such, but to allow him control of his powers even for a second was tantamount to global suicide. His purpose in this project was trickier – Mohinder knew Sylar could locate the area of the brain that triggered those changes, that was how he had acquired all these additional abilities. This conscious knowledge could advance their work by years if only he could be persuaded to divulge it.

But how could Mohinder reason with a monster? And how could he trust whatever Sylar did tell him?

"There was a spike in your brainwave activity last night," he told Sylar, without preamble. It had been a week since their evolution conversation; Mohinder thought he'd had long enough to consider his future. "Around four A.M. Do you have any explanation for that?"

"I had a good dream," Sylar said sarcastically, his eyebrows coming together over his nose as he smiled.

"Tell me about it."

"What, you're my psychiatrist now?" Sylar sneered. Mohinder had tilted his table into the upright position; the hospital pyjamas had become stuck in the restrains, riding up to reveal the black hairs below Sylar's navel.

"Right now, Gabriel," Mohinder said gravely, adjusting the room temperature to a setting too warm for his captive's comfort, "I am your everything. Now tell me about your dream. What caused this spike?"

"I dreamed about you," Sylar said with what sounded suspiciously like a derisive snort.

Mohinder took a note of this. "That doesn't seem unlikely. You have had no contact with anyone else for – " he checked himself before he finished with "nearly a month". In the bunker Sylar would have no concept of time passing, and it would not do to give him any information, " – quite a long time."

"You could absorb things through your skin," Sylar went on. He was constantly checking Mohinder's face for his reaction, probably reading his pose and tension as Mohinder read his. He was going to get nothing out of Mohinder.

"Did these objects distort my skin?"

"No, they just sank into you and disappeared."

"And were you in this dream?" Mohinder made another note.

"Of course," Sylar smiled at him; the disturbing smile, not his more human watch-maker's smile. "I killed you and stole your powers."

Mohinder couldn't help rolling his eyes a little. "I see you've made tremendous progress in your mental attitude, then," he said, his voice thick with sarcasm. "Were you able to control this new power?"

"No," Sylar frowned.

"No?"

"No. I had to revive you and ask you how you did it."

"But I was dead."

Sylar rolled his eyes this time. "It was a dream," he said in a Talking To Undergraduates And Other Idiots voice (this was what Mohinder had always thought of his version of the voice as).

Three days later Mohinder found himself breathing the same suppressant-laced air as Sylar for the first time in well over a year; the best he had been able to come up with was a lie detector test. Precautions had been taken, of course: Sylar was paralysed from the neck down not only by a staging amount of drugs but also by a neural interrupter in his spine where it connected to his shoulders, and he was so full of the suppressant that he more or less sloshed when the orderlies manoeuvred his heavy unconscious body into the chair and attached the myriad wires.

In comparison to the measures they'd taken to keep Sylar still and harmless while Mohinder questioned him, the lie-detector looked positively prehistoric, all dials and graph needles, like a Victorian seismograph. It might as well have rosary beads hanging from it for all the good it was likely to do. But it was the best they could find, and truthfully, the machine was not the purpose of the exercise – the small white hypodermic lying on the table beside Mohinder's chair was.

"Hello," Mohinder said as Sylar's eyes fluttered open and he gave the groggy stare typical of the recently-sedated. "We're having a change of pace today." He made the effort to keep his voice low and soothing, like a hypnotist.

"I can see that," Sylar mumbled, his lips apparently still numb. Mohinder thought perhaps he should not speculate too long on that matter. Sylar's lips were not his concern.

"I'm going to give you a minute to clear your head so you'll understand the questions I'm asking a little better," Mohinder said in the same soothing voice. "And I want you to know that any attempt at aggression will be met with this." Mohinder raised the little hypodermic. "Are you aware of how opiates work on the brain?"

Sylar eyed the hypodermic but said nothing.

"They work by blocking the pain receptors," Mohinder said, answering his own question, "making it impossible to be hurt. This substance was developed by the Chinese government six months ago, while you were still crawling around in the filth under New York. It does the opposite, Gabriel; it stimulates all the pain receptors at once. Do you understand?"

"It's a torture drug."

"Precisely. Without ever harming your flesh, we can make you experience pain that will make your gunshot wounds – " Mohinder gestured to his shoulder, " – seem quite tolerable."

"You have changed," Sylar said with something like admiration. "Have you been taking lessons from Bennett?"

Mohinder ignored the question and peered at his clipboard.

"I think you represented my Id," Sylar said thoughtfully.

"I beg your pardon?"

"In that dream I had, where I killed you. I think you represented my Id. The force of hedonism – "

"I know what the Id is, thank you," Mohinder did not ask by what logic he represented unfettered self-indulgence when he rationed out his microwave curries as though there was a war on and hadn't had sex since he left India the first time, and he asked instead the more interesting question, receiving the much more interesting results." When were you ever a student of psychology, Gabriel?"

"Oh, I wasn't. Zane Taylor was."

Mohinder had to choke himself with his tongue to prevent his face from lighting up like a pinball machine. "So in addition to his unusual skills you adapted some of his memories? Interesting. Were they in the same part of his brain as the elements you were trying to emulate?"

Sylar's look of dismay was alone worth the afternoon's work. He clearly realised he'd given away something important, something he might have used to bargain with (as though such a thing was possible), and with this he clammed up like a door slamming. According to the lie detector, his pulse was racing.

"Decrepit though this machine may look, Gabriel, it knows your mind as effectively as any telepathic individual might," Mohinder said, watching Sylar's eyes dart over the alarming array of wires. "So you see, I do not need you to answer, even, to get the information I require; I simply need to ask the right questions and you will betray yourself." He waved the hypodermic slowly at Sylar. "And if you do try to withhold, I will know. And this will be your reward."

"Think how easy all this would be if you just had a voice like your girlfriend did," Sylar said with another of his aggravating smirks. "You could just say, 'tell me everything' and I'd have no choice."

Mohinder frowned. "I don't follow. To which girlfriend do you refer?"

Sylar laughed. "Don't pretend you don't know. That girl with the voice that could make you do anything. You were in love with her."

"What girl?"

Sylar sighed. "Short hair. Big eyes. I think she slept with your father. She came to make me kill myself, but …" his wretched smile came back. " … I'm stronger than she thought. Or she was weaker."

"Eden," Mohinder whispered, rather surprised. My neighbour who kissed me so beautifully did not fall into the same mental category as that girl you were in love with. Perhaps she should have done.

"Was that her name?" Sylar sounded bored. "She ended up putting a gun to her own head to stop me from having what she had." He caught and held Mohinder's gaze. "Bitch," he added without great animosity.

Mohinder had jabbed Sylar in the neck with the hypodermic before he knew he was on his feet. As the rage subsided he watched Sylar begin to scream and thrash the only part of him that he could move.

After a moment or two of hoarse, animal screams, Mohinder started to remove the patched and wires from Sylar's immobile body, feeling like a cleaner bird in the mouth of a crocodile. This had not been how he'd intended for the session to go; the drug was only meant to be used as a threat at this early stage, but he supposed it would be all the more effective now that Sylar had proof that it worked.

He pushed the machine out of the cell, re-bolted the door and walked thoughtfully into the observation room. Give it maybe ten more minutes before he gassed the man out of his misery; the truly wicked thing about the drug, the feature that made it so utterly banned for use anywhere in the world outside of this bunker, was that it bypassed, inhibited, the body's natural response to acute and unbearable pain, and would not allow the victim - recipient - to lose consciousness under his or her own steam. Quite ingenious, in a horrible way.

On his way out of the bunker, Matt greeted him with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. "Sylar giving you trouble? You looked exhausted."

"Of course he's giving me trouble. It's what he does. How is little Mark?"

Matt launched into a detailed account of his son's prodigious inability to sleep ever, and Mohinder commiserated. When he got out into the parking lot and unchained his bicycle he finally relaxed; Matt spent so much time taking information from people's heads without their permission that he often forgot to stop around his colleagues. Mohinder had long since developed the habit of thinking loudly about polar bears until Matt realised what he was doing and stopped probing.

When he got home he ate the remaining half of yesterday's aloo chop cold (it was still wrapped in the plastic bag from the take out), turned the fan on even though he already had goosebumps on his arms, and spent a while thinking about Eden as the television flickered noiselessly before him.

Had he been in love with her? She had apparently liked him, liked him enough to kiss him, but he'd been preoccupied. He had always been preoccupied with one thing or another, and either that or conflicting ethics had usually been the death knell for his relationships.

After a little of this circular thinking he knew he would not sleep unassisted, and scrabbled in the decidedly unscientific mess in his bedside drawers for the pill box, sifting aside unanswered letters and a packet of three prophylactics that he didn't remember buying but which must have been acquired in a fit of extreme optimism. He took four of the pills – twice the recommended dose but still well within safe parameters – and it was only when his heart gave an unpleasant lurch and started beating like a jackhammer that he remembered what else was in the pill box.

After the second hour of lying awake with his hair racing Mohinder was getting annoyed. The trouble with having a medical doctor who would prescribe you anything you asked for – whether by name or by the more nebulous "I need to stay awake for longer. Caffeine isn't cutting it and I appear to be allergic to amphetamines" - was that one got whatever one felt one needed at the time. In large quantities.

Mohinder gave in and looked through the pill box again, with the lights on this time. He found the large round pills that looked like what he was after and subjected one to careful examination until he found the brand name stamped in the paper skin.

"One of these," his doctor had told him (his doctor was a tall, laconic red-head with the improbable name of Tomaas Mar, who had apparently exorcised the "Van De" part of his name for the same reason he'd not specialised in tropical medicine as intended: "I couldn't be assed with it"), "One of these will knock you out cold no matter what else you've taken. If you take more than two, or that 'what else' includes alcohol, you're knocked out permanently. Be careful."

If Mohinder's middle name hadn't been the masculine form of his sister's name, it would have been "Careful". He snapped the pill in two with some difficulty, and gulped half down dry, returning the other to his pill case (it had a photo of a cat on it. He couldn't remember where he'd got it but suspected his mother had sent it to him).

About ten minutes later he was plunged into a half-waking dream world where very large ape-men, Neanderthal men, strapped him to the table in his classroom back at the university and proclaimed that he would have been the next step in evolution if he wasn't afraid of girls.

Even while this was going on Mohinder's conscious mind was moved to make a sneering remark about the lack of subtlety on the part of its darker twin. He rather wished it hadn't: after that the room filled up with monkey corpses, bloated and decomposing in great detail, until he suffocated into a deeper sleep.

Understandably, perhaps, he was not feeling refreshed or rested when he awoke and found that if he really hurried and traffic was good he'd only be ten minutes late.

"You're late," Matt pointed out, pulling up behind him as Mohinder panted and wheeled his way up to the bike rack caked in drying sweat.

"So are you."

"Ah, but I'm always late. You could set your watch half an hour in front of me. Are you okay? You look … well, kinda how I feel after another night of His Tiny Lordship's yelling fits." Matt sighed. "He has learnt the word 'NO' and he likes it."

"Didn't sleep either," Mohinder said, because it sounded less pathetic than 'bad dreams' and less of a firing offence than 'substance abuse'. He chained his bike, nodded to Matt, and set off to the lab at an ungainly scuttle.

He ended up simply holding onto a cup of someone else's coffee as though it was the lifeline to sanity and salvation, counting pages in his latest report while Sylar – still and huge in the room adjacent – slept the unfairly deep and calm sleep of the unjust and conscienceless. He made it through to fifty-three pages before realising he'd miscounted somewhere and chideding himself for his uneven knowledge: create a neurological inhibiter working blind with only blood samples as a base? Done in eight months. Figure out the autonumber feature on Microsoft Word? He'd been trying since the stupid thing was introduced. Wasn't this why doctors in actual universities had grad students, to deal with menial nonsense like this –

He stopped himself. This was selfish, overcaffeinated, Western thinking. He was not a damn physicist; he did not have that level of entitlement. He would just start at the beginning again and take more time.

Half-way through his second recount (the numbers varied wildly, leaving Mohinder very grateful that the computers dealt with his important numerical data. One simply couldn't afford mistakes of this wretched magnitude – of any magnitude – in his work) Mohinder fell asleep over the table, his silver paint pen leaking over his hair from its resting place behind his ear.

He was woken three hours later by Sylar calling him a bad name from behind the glass. Mohinder sleepily considered just shutting off the sound channel and getting some more much-need rest, but that would be irresponsible.

"Abuse will get you nowhere, Gabriel," he said, disappointed to find that his voice was clouded with dreaming still. He did not sound alert at all, and Sylar noticed it.

"Bored with me already, Dr Suresh?"

"Unlike you, my friend, I have to work through the night, often. This takes its toll on the body," Mohinder looked a little forlornly over at the empty coffee mug, "and coffee can only achieve so much."

"When was the last time I drank anything?" Sylar asked, and Mohinder glanced at the IV stands surrounding his table. Yes, it had been quite some time since Sylar's digestive system had had anything to occupy it.

They seemed to catch up with Mohinder's strange slip at the same time: at any rate, Mohinder thought did I just call him 'my friend' without due sarcasm? roughly as Sylar said in an amused but slightly shocked voice, "Did you just call me your friend?"

"It was sarcasm," Mohinder lied awkwardly, plucking the paint pen from behind his ear and banging it distractedly against his upper lip to calm himself. "Why would I befriend the man who killed my father?"

"And your girlfriend," Sylar added, looking pleased with himself.

Mohinder did not correct him on either the "Girlfriend" or the level of involvement Sylar had. He simply repeated, "Why would I befriend the man who killed my father?" more to himself than to Sylar.

"Maybe you didn't love him so much," Sylar suggested. It was obvious that he was being facetious but that didn't stop Mohinder from feeling stung.

"I loved my father as much as any son can," Mohinder snapped. Sylar's words touched perilously close to the bone. How was it possible to love a man so completely immersed in his work and in his memories? Step forward, Eden.

"He didn't love you, though." Sylar's voice was a scalpel, a Listor knife under Mohinder's skin, carving below his breastbone.

"That Chinese synthetic antiopiate," Mohinder said in a low, shaking voice as he forced himself not to shout and bang on the glass in his acute and sudden fury, "comes in gas form."

Sylar took the hint and closed his mouth so hard the click of his teeth was a thunderclap over the loudspeakers. Their conversation went no further that day.

Two days later Mohinder finally cleared the use of the MRI and supervised the insertion of a second implant into Sylar's person, this time directly inside his skull. This delicate process completed, a wholly sedated and strapped-down Sylar was wheeled into the MRI suite.

"Good morning, Gabriel," Mohinder said over the loudspeakers when the room had been cleared and Sylar's heart rate reached "waking" on the monitors.

"Where I am?" Sylar's eyes roved the ceiling of the room as Mohinder switched on the conveyor. The interrupter sat on his spine once again and the suppressants coursed through his body, but even so no one would stand in the room while he was conscious.

"The MRI suite. We're going to take some pictures of your brain in its resting state, then some while you attempt to perform certain tasks."

"I'm fucking paralysed." Sylar sounded rather irate.

"That makes no difference to the impulses in your brain," Mohinder said, leaning closer to the microphone. "I know you're thinking of refusing, Syl – Gabriel, so I want you to know this: inside your skull, just inside your meninges, is a small receiver and implant. If you are uncooperative, I can release a controlled dose of the drug you so detest directly into your brain. I am sure you recall the effects."

"Fuck you," Sylar spat.

"Gabriel," Mohinder said warningly. He watched impassively as the images of Sylar's "resting" brain were recorded. His colleagues – he had forgotten the name of the black doctor, Omar something, but he came highly recommended as a neurologist – murmured at them as though surprised by the lack of deviation.

"Try to kick," Mohinder instructed.

"Kick what?" Sylar snarled from inside the gleaming white bowels of the machine. "I can't move."

"Try to kick something," Mohinder said impatiently. "A wall, a ball … my head, whatever takes your fancy."

Mohinder could not see Sylar's reaction, but he guessed there had been another of his unfriendly smiles. Shortly afterward the images of Sylar's brain demonstrated activity in the areas associated with deliberate leg movement.

"Very good," Mohinder said as the neurologists nodded over the images onscreen. "Now I want you to try using your powers."

"You want me to what?" Sylar's voice sounded loud and incredulous over the speakers. Around Mohinder the two neurologists gave him horrified looks and glanced at the door and Mohinder frowned. This lack of faith in his suppressants was a little insulting, when they had been a hundred percent successful so far. As though Sylar would never have tried to use his powers before he was asked! As though all that was needed to overturn the influence of powerful chemical suppressants was an act of will. How disappointingly superstitious for men of science.

"Do whatever it is that you have to do to utilise those prodigious abilities of yours," Mohinder said patiently.

"Why?"

Mohinder Suresh valued transparency in his work wherever possible, as far as fear of plagiarism and the strictures of government confidentiality would allow, but sometimes impatience with the human element of his work got the better of him. And he really didn't like Sylar enough to feel he owed him anything, least of all an explanation.

"Because if you don't I will release the antiopiate," Mohinder said flatly, and the neurologists looked at him in blank horror. Mohinder began to wish they weren't there; how could they, these men who spent their time dealing with digital images of the brain and never meeting the people those images came from, how could they know what was required when you worked with an insane serial killer? Fortunately he outranked them by some considerable number of rungs in the laboratory ladder.

"How are you going to know whether I'm trying or not?" Sylar asked. There was more than a hint of a sneer in his voice.

"Do as you're asked."

"Asked?"

"Gabriel, you are testing my patience and I have the button for release under my finger," Mohinder leaned close to the microphone again, too close, and his upper lip scraped on the wire mesh. The neurologists were staring again, backing very surreptitiously away from him; Mohinder actively resented their presence now. "I would very much like to leave you in considerable pain for half an hour while I go and have some fucking lunch."

"I'm thinking about squashing your heads with my mind," Sylar said in a conversational voice. The images appearing onscreen seemed to verify this, and the neurologists – thank all the many and mighty gods – were quite excited. The patterns emerging were entirely new and yet logically related to their expectations.

Now Mohinder felt obscurely proud, as though he had personally created Sylar, rather than almost accidentally uncovered some of his less-buried secrets.

"Try a different one," he instructed.

"Didn't that work?" Sylar asked, sounding as though something was troubling him. Mohinder did not relieve his apparent burden with any form of answer to his question.

"Try something else," he repeated with a little more urgency.

"Turning your blood to ice," Sylar informed him. "And your saliva and your sweat and your spunk."

"That will do," Mohinder said as the neurologists both turned to give him a searching look.

The digital images betrayed the same pattern again, the same centres of illuminated brain activity. The two neurologists (who, had they not been of different races, might as well have been twins for the amount of divergence they had from each others' opinions and the party line) made note of this and nodded to Mohinder.

"One more, different, attempt," Mohinder said, rankling a little at being nodded at in this dismissive fashion. "Try something quite physical, perhaps."

"Melting this stupid fucking machine," Sylar said. The MRI scanner beeped and threw up the same patterns and – as soon as the microphone was off – his neurologist colleagues raised a cautious cheer.

"You know what I'm thinking of now?" Sylar asked, and Mohinder realised he hadn't shut off the speaker channels. He shot a glance at the images, but they made little sense to him; an enquiring look to the neurologists resulted in an unexpected and vulgar crotch-grabbing display from the white doctor. His black partner raised a worried eyebrow, then said a little gravely:

"Some sort of sexual fantasy."

Mohinder coughed awkwardly into the microphone, switching it on. "That's quite enough," he said, and waved for the neurologists to go. "Send the orderlies down," he told them, and pressed the communication button again as they left. "I see you haven't stopped, Gabriel."

"It's an alluring image. Can you blame me for keeping it up?"

"Implant," Mohinder reminded him shortly, watching the red blush flaring on the digital images. He put the conveyor in reverse. "You will be returned to oblivion soon," Mohinder continued, hitting the communication button, scraping his lip again on the microphone.

"Then I may as well enjoy it while I can," Sylar said, his feet and ankles emerging from the machine. "Don't you want to know what I'm thinking about?"

"No," Mohinder lied as Sylar's thighs, hips and in-concealable erection came into view. He hit the gas button with a mixture of relief and, strangely, regret.

"He has strong primitive instincts," Mohinder pointed out, as his colleagues nodded wearily over their own copies of his report, and of their own findings. "And combined with our results from other study subjects this is beginning to suggest that if our friends – and enemies – with these parahuman abilities are indeed the next step in our evolution, there is perhaps a little backsliding taking place as a race. Although their capabilities spring from the brain, there is evidence that their existence is more predicated by the intuitive, bestial areas than the portions commonly thought of as cerebral or advanced." He scratched his neck-stubble absently. "Whether this is a sign we must rethink our definition of sophisticated mental construction or a sign of devolution, we cannot yet be sure." He sat, shuffling the pages (seventy-five exactly, including citations) pages of his report into a tidy oblong as the chromosome team got up to deliver their extended addition to last quarter's report.

Five hours later he finally got back to the observation room and spent a while trying to remove the inexplicable coffee stains from the front of his lab coat.

"You look like you need a day off," Matt told him as he made his way unsteadily to the bike rack under the orange glow of night lighting. "If only to deal with the beard you've goting coming."

"That would take at least a week."

"Take it," Matt suggested, getting into his car slowly and with little grace. "You must have earned it by now."

"Don't have the time," Mohinder pointed out, unchaining his bike and brushing rain from the seat, carefully avoiding the question of whether he felt he'd earned anything. "And besides, people with families – " he inclined his head to Matt, " – get first refusal."

"I didn't know we got any refusal," Matt snorted, closing the car door. He wound down the window and added, "get sleep, Mohinder. Shave. Eat a real meal sometime. It'll help."

Mohinder didn't doubt that it would, but his days never seemed to have enough hours in them, no matter how long he dragged them out. Even when they days had thirty-eight, forty hours, they weren't quite long enough to allow for things like shaving, cooking, or remembering the layout of his home.

He went through the motions; the beard came off to prevent Matt from commenting on it again and he absently rang out for food he knew he wouldn't eat. Mohinder had barely taken a bite from the Masquerading-As-Murgh-Jaipur before exhaustion knocked him out as effectively as any pill.

When he arrived the next morning with a thin crust of almond-hued marinade still adhering to his eyebrows Matt gave him a proper father-of-a-small-child lecture on work/life balances and Mohinder nodded politely and contritely and took in maybe two words.

"Another spike in your brain wave activity," Mohinder observed, doodling on the back of a lever-arch folder with his silver paint pen. "This one seems to have lasted longer. Dreaming again?"

"No," Sylar said, his smile that old ugly sly thing again. His table had been placed in the upright position in the hope that reciprocal eye-contact would render him more voluntarily co-operative, but so far it had only succeeded in making Mohinder very uncomfortable. "I was awake this time."

Mohinder gave first the recordings and then Sylar a bemused look. "The spike is identical to your dream's shape, the duration is just longer."

"I was lying last time," Sylar said lazily. Mohinder could have had his eyes shut and his back turned – he could have been behind eighty sheets of glass – and he would still have felt those frighteningly intense dark eyes crawling over him like a lecher's hand.

Mohinder reached over and turned the recorder off with an audible click. "Did you hear that?"

"Yes."

"That, my friend, is the sound of confidentiality. Tell me what you were doing or trying to do." Mohinder made a show of putting his clipboard and pen to one side.

"I was thinking about fucking you," Sylar sneered.

Mohinder sighed. "I was trying to give you the chance to co-operate with your dignity a little intact. I do not enjoy setting off potentially lethal anti-opiates in anyone's brain, and I suspect it is not an experience you are keen to repeat."

"I wasn't being flippant," Sylar said, all trace of his sneer gone, his face naked with honesty that hinted at the presence of Gabriel in him still. "That's the truth."

Mohinder favoured the Mad Professor approach to his lab coat, filling up the pockets with all kinds of useless rubbish: an Alice band for his increasingly unruly hair, a five-clip paper-clip chain, three red ballpoints all on their last legs, a sachet or so of medical lubricant for examinations, a walnut shell of uncertain age and provenance, two ticket stubs for a movie he hadn't wanted to see and which his not-exactly-date had been so enthralled by that she declined to ever see him again, and a large quantity of fluff, or possibly lint. What his pockets didn't contain was any object or substance that could make sense of what Sylar had just said.

He left the observation room, opened the external door to the holding cell and locked himself in a small room with the most dangerous living man in the Western hemisphere.

"What," Mohinder said shakily, pointing his index finger in a figure of eight that contained Sylar somewhere in its circumference, "did you just say?"

Sylar wiggled his fingers and toes and remarked with some surprise, "hey, the paralytics have worn off."

Mohinder ignored him. "What did you say, Sylar?"

Sylar's smile was slow and syrupy as molasses, a complicated melee of signals. It said at last and oh shit and what exactly is happening here? It was confused and threatening and anticipatory and something fairly base that Mohinder did not recognise.

"Tell me," Mohinder said, covering the intervening space without noticing he'd done it.

"Untie me and I'll show you," Sylar said in a rumble that was half-whisper and apparently had claws in Mohinder's primary motor cortex.

Mohinder's hands moved like glaciers on the straps. Almost as soon as Sylar was freed his hand shot out – wrenching the IV from his arm – and closed, huge and hard, around Mohinder's thin brown neck.

He might have been afraid, but Mohinder had faith in his inventions even if none of the other staff did. "Have you forgotten the implant in your heart, Sylar?" he said calmly even as he began to grow light-headed from lack of air. "Have you forgotten what it can do?"

"You can suffer a lot without dying," Sylar said, not letting up but not tightening his hand any further either. "You taught me that."

Mohinder could barely swallow. "So can you," he said gently, "and the implant in your skull is still active. Still functional. Would you like me to prove that?"

Sylar glared into his face, searching for some kind of tell that he was bluffing. Mohinder stared back, thinking of what he might come back as. A python would be fitting. A doctor again would doubtless prove just as unhealthy. Sylar let go, leaving Mohinder to stagger back and massage his crushed and abused skin.

"I can leave you in indescribable agonies in less than a minute," Mohinder reminded him.

"Then I'd better make the most of the time I've got," Sylar growled, and he moved like a gunshot – the words had only just reached Mohinder's ears before Sylar's hands had seized his head.

He was unable to form a single coherent thought before Sylar's dry-seeming mouth crammed itself clumsily over his and the weight of his body propelled them both into the padded wall.

It was not a good kiss. It was, in comparison to any other kiss he'd received in both style and skill, a bad kiss. Other kisses did not involve the scrape of three-day stubble on his shaving-tender face. Other kisses had not crushed his lips, knocked teeth hard on teeth, squeezed his head or caused him to bang his elbow. It had been a long, long time since anyone had been moved to kiss him, true, but even so he didn't remember it being so invasive, so forceful. And he didn't remember such prior kisses turning him to jelly from the neck down, vibrating with the frantic thumps of his overexcited heart.

When Sylar's mouth uncovered his he found he was panting for breath, and somehow deprived. He raised his hands to push him away - of course to push him away – and instead took a double handful of Sylar's hospital greens and pulled him closer again.

No one else had ever lifted him almost off the floor to kiss him. No one else had made his skin burn or his heart race orand his legs shake; he'd always thought such symptoms to be the province of bodice-ripper heroines, but it seemed that desperation, involuntary celibacy the and accompanying loneliness could produce a similar cocktail of physical weaknesses. It was very hard to keep thinking.

Mohinder felt Sylar's fingers dart into his lab coat pocket and his stomach swooped unpleasantly. Of course this must just have been some clever ruse to retrieve his keys. Of course, of course. A ruse which could not have worked with some other doctor, a doctor with a family and a wife and some other focus to his life besides Sylar.

But Sylar withdrew not the keys but the metallic lubricant sachets, two bubbles of water-based substance joined in the middle with a perforated hinge and each stamped with a use-by date. He held them up to Mohinder's face and smiled a smile that was half-shaken and half shake-inducing. "Aren't you the little boy scout." He pressed his mouth against Mohinder's throat, and over the static that was encroaching on his mental processes Mohinder felt the barest scrape of teeth on his skin before Sylar licked him. "You taste like how I thought you would."

"How I - ?" Mohinder struggled for air and coherency.

"There hasn't been a lot to think of in here," Sylar murmured, his hands doing something ingenious with the back of Mohinder's neck and the small of his back, the sachets of lube dangling over the edge of Mohinder's coat pocket again. "Sometimes I think about killing you," Sylar went on, his fingers creeping to the buttons of Mohinder's untucked shirt, "and sometimes I think about you underneath me in quite another way."

Mohinder undid his own shirt. His chest seemed intent on this unnecessary heaving. His brain appeared to be on strike or on a vacation on the moon for all the help it was offering him. His legs did not seem able to take his weight. And he wanted to be kissed that way again.

Sylar passed his palm over Mohinder's sternum and pushed him flat against the wall, his blessedly harsh, uncomfortable kiss coming on like a bad weather front. Mohinder made a sound – what kind he could not tell, for it was lost somewhere in the excess of saliva and the rustle of his clothes as he raised his arms and buried his overworked fingers in Sylar's thick, soft hair.

It was uniquely terrifying; not for the fear that Sylar might forget the implants at any minute and kill him as easily as a bug, although that thought swam unavoidably in the oceans of Mohinder's mind, but of how far off the chart of his experience he was travelling. This was moving to New York, culture shock layered on culture shock wrapped in worry and underlined with visceral desire: then for revenge, now for …

He paused with his hand clasping the third rubber button of Sylar's absurd hospital greens. Now for what?

"Stop thinking," Sylar muttered into his mouth, and if Mohinder wanted to protest he couldn't because Sylar's tongue had invaded and this was nothing like anyone else's kisses, ever. He undid the third button and nearly lost his footing on the metal floor as Sylar jerked the shirt and coat from Mohinder's shoulders at the same time, leaving his back naked, sweating minutely in the warm room as his skin temperature rocketed.

There was a moment of silence and stillness, like the second at the crest of a breaking wave before the roar and the foam begins, and in it Mohinder saw as clear as if he were viewing it from above: what he was doing, why he was doing it, all the consequences thereof, lined up in little avenues of possibility as though he had ever had any foresight at all.

That the next words out of his mouth were, "do it, dear gods, just do it," did him no credit as a supremely moral being, but certainly affirmed his basic humanity. And those words made Sylar shiver down the length of his black-haired spine and rub his huge body against Mohinder's in a kind of spasm, almost. How was he to argue with that?

Mohinder had always believed in respecting his lovers. In assuring a mutual bond between his intellect and the woman's mind underlay the whole sordid business of physical encounter, even if he couldn't quite get the hang of saying 'I love you' on command instead of six months (or years) too late.

Now he found he believed very fervently in the static of body hair on body hair, in the kind of slippery mess produced by two packets of medical lube and a penis that was as over-eager as it was present (he had never had occasion to think the word 'pre-ejaculate' before, but here it was, and plenty of it) and embarrassing.

He believed, a little later, very firmly in the existence of his prostate and the rightness of its contact with other persons' body parts. He believed very much in Sylar's fingers and their place in the universe, which was currently up his rectum to the third knuckle as his spine bent awkwardly against the floor and sweat dripped from Sylar's forehead onto Mohinder's stomach like the tears of a statue.

"This is what I was thinking of," Sylar said, his voice uneven.

"Just – " Mohinder's voice betrayed him, got stuck to his tonsils and failed to gain strength. " – just your fingers?" he gasped, giving the lie somewhat to the 'just'.

"I am large and you are small," Sylar pointed out, and Mohinder couldn't really argue with that. "Narrow hips," Sylar elaborated, using his free hand to stroke the side of them for emphasis, making Mohinder shiver again. "If I damage you, I can't do this again."

Like the dawning of a new sun over artic winter Mohinder realised something wholly unprecedented and shocking: Sylar didn't want to kill him. Yet, anyway. It was a strange revelation, and one he had no idea what to do with until Sylar's hand brushed the skin at the base of his penis - be reckless, Mohinder, say 'cock' - at which point it became very clear, if only because everything else in the world had blurred.

"I would risk that," Mohinder said rather breathily, hips almost cracking under the pressure of their unnatural position. He tried not to think the word "stoma" or how badly he might end up needing one.

"On your stomach," Sylar muttered, and to Mohinder's great regret those warm, long fingers slipped from him, and both of Sylar's hands (one slippery as an eel, the other rough and – but for sweat – dry) clutched at his hips as if to turn him bodily.

Mohinder rolled onto his knees, skin sticking to the metal floor, and as soon as he was steady Sylar's hand caressed the join of his thighs, the valley of his buttocks. Mohinder swallowed his next words in a pre-vocal whimper and tilted back, knowing that he spread like a flower.

It was easy, but it hurt; it hurt, but it was pleasurable; it was pleasurable but made him hiss with pain. Mohinder had never contemplated the possibility, before this bewildering sensation of something so thick and so … body-temperature (odd grammar) moving up his insides like this, that sexual activity could be so paradoxical.

Sylar said something, but the words were garbled. The tone seemed to suggest a certain possessiveness and a not-inconsiderable level of arousal. Then there was the matter of Sylar's chest brushing hard against the back of Mohinder's shoulders, which produced a feeling somewhere between dizziness and nostalgia, and opened him up even further.

Then there was the business of Sylar's hand closing snugly around Mohinder's - say it - cock, and that was pretty much it for rational human thought; from then on it was just movement, sweat, indistinct cries, the tightening of skin and blessed, blissful release …and wallowing.

By the time he regained something that could be identified as a thought, Mohinder was feeling very smeared. There didn't appear to be an inch of him that wasn't sticky. He was expecting to find Sylar gone and the keys with him; fearing it, certainly.

But they weren't, and he wasn't. Instead there was an overlarge hand resting on Mohinder's thigh, belonging to a face that was giving him a look best described as 'hungry'.

He was not vain enough to suppose he had tamed the beast, but it did appear that he'd found a way to distract him – and Sylar, too.