SYLAR

Sanity calms, but madness is more interesting.
-John Russell


Why is everyone so quick to dismiss me as... what's the right term? A raving fucking lunatic?

Everything is just assuming with them. Assuming the only reason I do the things I do is because I'm a crazy person. Assuming I've killed all those people because I possess some kind of a multiple personality disorder or something. Sylar isn't really the same entity as Gabriel, right, Mr. Gray? He's just a figment of your inner psyche, a way to hide from your past with your overprotective mother and your anxiety disorder concerning a need to be special, right? Nothing therapy and meds can't fix. Why, we can fix you, we can make you normal again.

Sanity is something people all grasp for with grubby little fingers, I'm not sure why. Sanity is normalcy, and why anybody would strive for mediocrity is beyond me. Sanity is boring. Normal is boring. Normal is a white picket fence and a nine to five job, one partner of the opposite sex and two point five kids. Why would anybody want to be some kind of goddamn statistic?

I can't stand normal.

Crazy is way more fun.


Muse: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray
Fandom: Heroes
Words: 189

Ignorant men don't know what good they hold in their hands until they've flung it away.
-Sophocles

The things I take from people... they never did deserve in the first place.

God, just looking back at them, it's almost disgusting. Brian Davis didn't want what he had. He asked me to help him get rid of it. That he wanted to be normal, just like everybody else. Who would willingly ask for that? Blending in. Being like everybody else. It's so... mediocre. So useless. Why wouldn't somebody aspire to be the best they could be?

I wanted what Brian Davis was keeping all to himself.

I wanted to be special.

Is it so wrong that I helped speed nature along a little bit to achieve that? After all, that whole... nature kills, so what I am doing is something natural... thing I've been trumpeting. It wasn't going to correct its own error anytime in the near present. I was just taking matters into my own hands, is all. I appreciate what I've takenbeen given.

If I sound smug... well. I might have reason.


Muse: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray
Fandom: Heroes
Prompt: Quote
Word Count: 162

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
-William Hazlitt

It's entirely ironic now, when I look back on it.

Mediocre student. All A's and B's in school but never really anything spectacular enough to appeal to those flashy schools everyone was striving towards. Harvard. Yale. Dartmouth. Columbia seemed nice to me. Not too big of an aspiration, but then not too little of one either. Not that my mother would have let me leave. After dad was gone, I was hardly allowed to leave the room without her permission.

Not that I could have anyway. You needed to continue the watch business, Gabriel. You needed to live up to your father's expectations. You needed to further Gray and Sons, pass that along to your child some day, so you could have a whole damn family line of fucking watchmakers.

How futile.

It was like I always knew. Especially on the slow days. Nothing to think about or concentrate on, other than the Sylar watch I had been fixing for seven years. Nothing to think about, other than what could have been. I knew I was always meant for something greater. Something bigger. Something important. Maybe I just needed that little nudge in the first place, from a certain Chandra Suresh. A little... thick. But he did help me realize my potential. Just what I could do.

In retrospect, I suppose there could have been better ways of thanking him than bashing his skull in, that fascinating sound just when his vertebrae gave way.

Then again, he had said that he had more important endeavors to concentrate on.

Stupid man.

If only he knew.

Muse: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray
Fandom: "Heroes", the TV series
Prompt: the included William Hazlitt quote

To build may have to be the slow and laborious task of years. To destroy can be the thoughtless act of a single day.
-Sir Winston Churchill


His first ones... they were easy to recognize.

It was particularly the Walker family, the two parents. Father, frozen alive with his Fruit Loops still halfway to his mouth. Head chopped open with nothing to speak of left inside. Mother, pinned to the wall with her own freaking cutlery, probably a wedding gift from a particularly well-of aunt or uncle. There might have been a few lamps in there, or even a spatula or two. There's nothing more insulting than being murdered with something normally used for flipping burgers at McDonald's.

Sylar's first murders were easy to identify, and no, despite popular belief, not just for the regular modus operandi that the papers kept talking about, that particularly nasty cuts across the forehead, brains removed and what have you. Not everybody was capable of receiving such an honor, after all. Didn't want to waste precious time removing the ice cream cake from the box when there hadn't been any frosting on it to begin with. Even the ones after, still with the 'brain theft', things were neat. Precise. Like he took his time.

But, no, not right away. It was obvious Sylar hadn't spent his time on his first kills, they were so brutal. So fast and quick and destructive, they were practically temper tantrums. Like he'd just gotten bored for the day, because he wasn't allowed to go to the park. A bored kid, just testing how many times it took Chandra Suresh's head to slam against the glass of his cab window before there was that satisfying snap of vertebrae. Like he was holding the magnifying glass over the ant hill and watching little Molly Walker squirm for a while underneath, just testing how long until she burst into flames on her own.

Just for a moment as he stood up on that rooftop, peering down at his new toy, bursts of radioactivity flaring out from his fingertips, like those quick bursts of anger he'd felt back in the old days, he thought of them all. Brian Davis, the Walkers, Chandra. That man with the tractor trailer, and the six-back of beer bottles. Without thinking, without planning, without plotting out his every last move.

Destruction, the lot of them.

125 Across the Universe bases

Teasers:
002. 057. 099.


( Tune in, turn on, drop out, drop in, switch off, switch on, and explode. )

( Monster Hospital, can you please release me?/You hold my hands down, I've been bad./You hold my arms down, I've been bad./I've been bad, I've been bad. )

Contents are pretty NSFW, sex and such!

( It was at first as/If they were shadows/Shimmering visions/By the light of the dancing flame/Bodies in motion/The sound of the ocean/Came into vision/On the night of the dancing flame )

It's a needle, you tell yourself. Only a needle.

People underestimate just how much pain goes into a spinal tap. In a usual case, a spinal needle is inserted, usually between the lumbar vertebrae - L3/L4 or L4/L5 - and pushed in until there is a 'give' that indicates the needle is past the dura mater, which is the outermost of the three layers of the meninges surrounding the brain and spinal cord. The stylet from the spinal needle is then withdrawn and drops of cerebrospinal fluid are collected. The procedure is ended by withdrawing the needle while placing pressure on the puncture site.

In a usual case.

Most patients are asked to lay on their side and curl in order to expose the spine. Most patients aren't duct taped to a wooden chair and penetrated with a needle that's just been taken from a rusty metal tackle box, giving the patient an automatic doubt as to the sterility of the procedure.

Most patients are given a localized anesthetic, and somebody holds their hand as the needle is inserted. It dulls the pain. It hurts, not so much, though. Not so much as if a doctor had jammed the needle right into the spinal column without so much as another second of warning.

The needle is normally inserted into the lumbar vertebra. Hence... lumbar puncture. The lower the puncture, the lower the risks of paralysis, I believe. A cervical vertebra tends to be a large no-no. The risks in a routine lumbar puncture can lead to epidural bleeding, even paraplegia. Risks are doubled, tripled when the injection sight is closer to the brain stem. An attending should be nearby, the patient should be relaxed and calm...

I could be paralyzed right now.

A fraction of a centimeter, to the left or the right. If the dorsal spinal cord had been punctured. If there was poor flow, bloody flow, and he hadn't been paying attention to what he was doing. Mohinder was acting like he wouldn't have cared, but he would have. The kind of weight on your conscious of killing a person... Can you imagine what it would be like to have the consequences of your actions staring you in the face every day? At least my victims are buried.

I'm going to take a sample of your spinal fluid, he'd told me. And it's going to hurt, he added, with that twist of malice in his whisper that I prided myself on using so many times.

You might actually do some good before you die, he'd said. As if I had achieved nothing. As if this wasn't a risk for him at all. Just a needle into my neck to further his father's research. Nothing to him. I was nothing to Mohinder but a fucking pincushion.

I could be paralyzed.

I could be in a wheelchair.

I could have been better off dead right now.



Muse: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray
Fandom: Heroes
Prompt: Whisper
Words: 479

Title: Put the Needle On It
Pairing: Mohinder/Sylar
Rating: NC-17
Words: 649
Warnings/Notes: Hints of dub-con >>; Written for The Porn Battle, on a whim! So sorry if it sucks XD


( Dirty hands // is what I demand // let the music make you rise up // put // the needle on it // I'll tell you where I want it // C'mon and spin me on it // all my freaks say )

( Lying on your bed // waiting for something to happen // all the while knowing you were meant for something better // feeling it // wanting it // but, uh // how much can you take // before you snap? )


Prompt: therapy
Muse: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray
Fandom: Heroes
Words: 1593

I'm on a money-making mission, but I party like a rock star.

Flying down 20, looking good in my... hot car?

Who writes this stuff?

All I can conjure is the idea of monkeys. Hundreds of little monkeys, who haven't quite grasped the concepts of grammar, spelling, or proper sentence structure. They just type away, not entirely sure of what they're attempting to say, what mission they hope to accomplish. Resulting in sentences like... 'they fine in they hot bra', and catchy beats.

And yet it's been all I have been listening to as of late. Notorious B.I.G. Dr. Dre. Ghostface Killah. Not the type of music you'd expect, coming from little old Gabriel Gray and his timepiece restoration. It's not even the kind you'd expect from Sylar, with the all-black-clothing look and the scruffy hair.

Classical music, perhaps, for the former. Maybe even some older lounge music, like his mother listened to.

And for the latter... Cannibal Corpse? Nine Inch Nails? Metallica!

Just... not rap music. Not lyrics talking about 'nailing bitches' and 'smacking that', which just sounds cruel and unusual coming out of my mouth. Awkward, even. But my iPod is filled, to the brim. With The Game, Eve, Timbaland, all that you can think of.

Dale Smither was right. It's all that blocks everything out. The millions of heartbeats, breaths, footsteps, whispers. From a ten mile radius, practically. All sounding as if they were screaming into my ear. I've learned to control it. It doesn't stop the headaches. It certainly doesn't stop people's hearts from beating, their footsteps from falling. Their breaths from making their chests rise and fall.

A little boy just fell off his bike and skinned his knee down the street. A couple of newlyweds are having their fifth argument of the day about the dishes in the sink. Michelle, the teen girl with no friends in the apartment building one block over, has been listening to the newest Linkin Park album on repeat. She's crying. The little boy is crying. The wife is crying. Constant drivel.

I hate it.

Prompt: Party Like a Rockstar by Shop Boyz
Muse: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray
Words: 336