ways_infirmary | (no subject)

What there is, however, after a moment: the sound of running water.

There's a smaller room partitioned off from the rest of the infirmary to help maintain sterility. Most of the medical equipment is in there; so are some of the sinks.

On the edge of that particular doorframe is a crooked smear of orange paint.

"I was wondering if you'd be the one to show up." Quiet, just above the splashing water.

He turns toward the sound, and takes a step toward the inner door.

And stops moving as he sees the smear, livid as a bloodstain in the dim recessed light.

Oil paint's viscous, tacky like congealed blood, and some of it, Sylar notes in an abstracted way, has already begun to dry into hard flakes. The vision had lasted longer than he'd thought.

He scratches at a streak of yellow across the ridge of his knuckles before dipping his hands back under the faucet.

It's not blood.

He knows that voice. He's heard it in this room before.

"Sylar."

He pauses midway through rubbing away splotches of red that are scattered along his fingertips. (Those ones, he's noticed, are blood.) A beat passes, then Sylar cocks his head to the side.

"I can hear your heart racing," he murmurs. With care, and without looking up, he begins to touch the fingertips of his right hand against one another: index to thumb, middle to thumb, ring to thumb. "Am I making you nervous, Dr. Tam?"

His heart is racing.

The only thing stopping him from walking out of the infirmary and calling Security is the fact that he can't see whether there's anyone else in the smaller room with Sylar.

A step closer. Another.

"What if someone else had answered the page?"

"I would have asked them to find you."

More fitful scratching. Orange paint now, dug out from underneath his nails, the same shade as the smudge on the doorframe.

"Or left to find you myself."

Another step, bringing him around the edge of the doorframe to see the dark figure standing at the sink, with his back turned.

"If you wanted to speak to me in private, you might have left a note."

His voice is glacially calm, and only a little stiff.

"There'll be other doctors along momentarily."

It snaps out in a sudden panic: "No -- "

Sylar finally whirls around, water dripping off of his hands and the faucet still running behind him.

Perceptions of age are so often carried off in behavior. There was a time once when he was quiet and unassuming enough to appear several years younger; another when he toyed with his sleeves and spoke like Zane Taylor and seemed like he couldn't have been more than a year or two out of college.

Standing before Simon, the desperation, the outright fear in his wide eyes doesn't even make him look like a man approaching twenty, let alone thirty.

"Please." Only marginally calmer. "I need to talk to you."

Simon takes a step back when Sylar turns, and freezes.

The abrupt shift in demeanor isn't reassuring in the slightest.

(His heart rate's gone up again.)

"About what?"

"Something's going to happen." He lifts his hands, glancing down at them. "I've seen -- "

A small, self-possessed part of him bristles in disgust at the tiny quavering thread that shakes the last word. Sylar tightens his hands into fists as if physically trying to grasp it, steady it.

"All of New York," he continues softly. "Manhattan, leveled; gone." Looking back to Simon, "Complete devastation, and it's all going to be my doing."

A cold calm voice says in the back of Simon's mind, he's insane.

The same voice, or a similar one, says just as coldly: That doesn't mean it isn't true.

"You're sure that's what you saw?" he asks, working hard to keep his voice level.

He could tell the truth, how memory stops existing as much as the rest of reality, how there is no real way to tell for sure, save by looking at the pictures left behind.

Sylar could just as easily tell the other truth, too. The one he sees. The one he knows.

"It wasn't just me." He's gone back to trying to scrape the color off of his palms; green and white paint mounds up on his fingernails. "I'm only the most recent. The painter, the agent, they both saw it, too. They contributed their own parts."

Sylar exhales in a sharp noise that verges on a breathy, bitter scoff.

"Even if they weren't perfect. He didn't see it all -- there'll only be one of us by the time it happens."