milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Sylar hasn't eaten anything, ordered by himself or not, since walking into Milliways a few days ago and finding it teeming with animals that didn't (tICk) quite sound like (ttticK) animals.

Sometimes, however, precaution only goes so far. Especially if it's precaution in the wrong direction.

During one particular long and barren stretch of highway in rural Ohio, Mohinder, with the passion of a true professor, spent fifteen minutes describing in a rapid-fire cadence how the cockroach was the pinnacle of the evolutionary ladder. Strangely enough, Sylar isn't deriving much comfort from that at the moment.

What he's doing instead is perching on a chair back, motionless save the wary twitching of his antennae, as he struggles to interpret his new senses.

[ooc: eep! I love you all, but please no more new threads. *drowns*]

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Sylar's antennae still, then twitch upward. It almost gives the impression of him looking up.

Voices have a peculiar frequency of vibration all their own. It isn't hearing, but he's beginning to figure out a rudimentary way of understanding them.

Or parts of them, at least.

He edges back a step.

She didn't move and she focused on trying to calm him, to let him know she wasn't going to hurt him. To reach out and touch him with her mind the way she'd communicated with the dolphins in her early childhood.

If Sylar still had a means of holding his breath, he would have stopped breathing.

"Get out," he snarls, antennae thrashing as he backs up further. "Stop."

He's disgustingly vulnerable as is. He won't have it become more so.

Allie frowned, and set her chin in her hand, watching him now.

"You are horridly paranoid."

She was not trying to think that he deserved being a cockroach.

The way her voice is pitched, the fact that she clearly has some sort of talent -- Sylar stills again, though his antennae keep moving as he 'listens' harder.

"I know you," he says at last. "Don't I."

It's very uncertain, far more than it would ever be if he were human.

"No, you don't know me."

Allie said very simply, her lips pursed in an almost annoyed formation.

"But you have met me once."

There's a noise, then: the cockroach equivalent of a chuckle, incongruously dangerous.

"I saw what you were," he says, venturing a step toward her. "Just as you saw what I was."

That step she thinks would be much scarier if he were towering over her and not smaller than her hand.

But, just the same, it is still felt.

"And what did you see?"

"I think what's more important."

Softer, and still with that sharp edge to it.

"Is what you saw."

"To you, maybe." Her head tilted slightly. "But then you decided my opinions were wrong about your paths, too."

"That was because they were," he hisses.

And then there's another pause.

His memory, in this body, isn't as strong: details are blurred and inconstant, like studying them through a heat haze. But he can remember that there was something else different about this one.

Something, even then, he didn't fully understand.

His antennae twitch to one side, mimicking the familiar head tilt. "You're different. Even from the way the others are. How is that?"

She thinks it's easier this way. He's smaller. It's like playing God, even when you aren't. Except he can't use his size and his scary face over her right now.

And everything in his head and his time seems distorted by whatever distorted his body.

"Same as you. It's the way I was born."

The front third of his body shakes back and forth in an oddly human gesture: no. Another short, scuttling step follows.

"There's more to it than that."

"Just like there's more in me."

He'd be smiling, if he could.

"Like what?"

Allie shook her head at the small ~~man~~ orthopterous insect.

"Another stage of evolution humanity isn't ready to grasp."

Which was so partial to why she couldn't stay among them.

After a beat of intrigued silence, that garners another small laugh, genuinely amused.

"Do you know how many others I could say the same about?" he asks her.

"You consider it a reason to look down on them." Allie said, with a frown.

Someone walks by, passing within inches of the table, and Sylar's legs shift unconsciously as he seeks out a pattern to the vibrations.

"If they're unable to grasp it," he says. "Something that simple; that clear. Then I see no reason why I shouldn't."

"Babies in their diapers can not understand algebraic functions or quantum mechanics. We do not drown them for their insolence in abject ignorance."

Beat.

"They just need time."

"Time," he snaps, "is something I don't have."

"No."

She corrected.

"It's a temporally imperative your not willing to wait for. It's a choice."

I want my son.

The last person who had said that to Sylar was Frank Black.

What did you do with my son?

Very, very softly -- and utterly furious -- he answers, "Maybe so.

"But it's a far better choice than others I've made."

And that said, he whirls around, skittering away into the shadows underneath the table.

The worst part, perhaps, she thought, as she did not push herself to her feet just yet--

He was quite right about that.

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