Work Text:
Breathe.
Inhale. Exhale.
The steady beat of the heart in his chest is soothing to Mohinder, the gentleness of its muffled sound, of it pumping blood and plasma through his body. Its soothing quality is merely a pale caricature of what he really wants. What he craves. What the geneticist yearns for is the warmth of a body pressed against his own and of the intimate conversation that follows, murmured softly within the dark familiarity of a bedroom, of a life that he hasn’t led and yet wishes for.
Sylar is imprisoned in a cell. Whether it is one of steel bars and concrete walls, or of the intricate designs of his own scrambled mind... Mohinder Suresh cannot say, cannot comprehend.
Breathe.
Inhale. Exhale.
When night falls, Suresh prays.
The act of it is at once private and open, his chest fit to bursting with words that he somehow cannot express, feelings that his logic cannot fathom. That aching in his heart, is it love? Love in its exquisite torture, stabbing him with its prying fingers, daggers to his soul.
Sleep is a blessing, threading through his head, soft and heavy with cotton wool, softening the hard edges of his empty bed. It’s a fog on his brain, a doorway into his subconscious, and Mohinder welcomes it with open arms. Arms which long to embrace yet are pushed to rest at his sides, useless, bearing the weight of desperation and loneliness and betrayal. Feelings that shouldn’t affect him, yet do.
So who can blame him? Who can curse Mohinder when he settles into the embrace of dreams, when the ethereal arms that wrap around him become solid, belonging to those of the enemy? The subconscious rules over all, here, and here is where it all is laid bare, naked.
Mohinder is but a babe in arms, here.
Sylar’s lips are at once soft and unyielding against his temple, promising countless things. “When you awaken, you won’t remember,” Sylar murmurs, words a temptation. “When you awaken, all will be as it was, doctor. But here, with me, you can’t escape.
Here, I can devour your soul.”
Serpentine, those hands caress him and ease the way. Slick with sweat and tears, Sylar slides his way into Mohinders body, physically, mentally... tearing down the barriers that protect the fragility of the geneticists mind.
Sylar finds the delicate, silken web of Mohinders mind a thing of beauty. Strange and alien, yet evoking a sense of... something... something he doesn’t quite understand. An ache in a murderer’s chest which spreads through into the marrow of his bones and seeps into the corruption seated there. It nudges its way along his veins until it reaches the black void that is his heart, and suddenly, that frozen thing inside his chest begins to beat.
“Why aren’t you fighting me?” He’s almost disappointed that his beloved Mohinder doesn’t fight. That their odd little game won’t continue here, in the subtle fog of a dream.
“Why indeed?” Mohinder replies, lips twitching, smile bewitching, “why indeed?”
“Let me. Let me feed off of you. Let me touch you... for just a moment... Mohinder... allow me this. Just this.” And the ghostly fingers touch him, move along the sinew and bone, and they heal. Where before the digits had been instruments of evil, tools in which bloody disasters had culminated, there is now healing.
Just this once, Mohinder can let go; his fathers’ death, the torture, the betrayal, the pain. The knowledge of being so unjustly used by a man that perhaps with time he could’ve come to love... it all melts away. It means nothing. It is nothing. All there is, is the heat of being taken, and of Sylar’s body pressed against his own, loving in a way that belongs only in dreaming.
For such a thing cannot occur in reality.
For now, the silken web of his thoughts become one with Sylars’, Gabriels’, entangling and fusing, more intimate than even the physical touch of a body, more private and sensual than the slide of fingertips over vulnerable eyelids, tender.
And when Mohinder awakens, it’s not his fault if his cheeks are stained with the evidence of tears.
It’s not his fault at all, for, you see, it was all just a dream.
Just a dream.