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“Some days are short
Some days are longer
I sold my skin
I sold the skin that I’m in for a plan
My out of style is coming back
I’m bored but I’m excited”
-Matthew Good Band, My Out of Style is Coming Back
Gabriel Gray was invisibility cloaked in black-rimmed glasses and scratchy sweater vests.
Hunched over and head bowed down, he judged from the protective confines of his own sphere. He felt worthier than the life he was born into. Uncomfortable within its perimeters, he secretly prayed for an escape route to present itself. Until then he bid his time by controlling it—to perfection.
If time was a human construct—which it was—then Gabriel wielded it with the vengeful deliverance of a god. Time did as it was told: drawn out, cut short, it yielded to the commands demanded by his fingers and remained his most loyal and constant companion. It did not regard harshly the less than constant progression of his life, rather time settled comfortably around him, submissively at his side.
“Patience is a virtue,” his mother would say, although what she was patiently waiting for was never clear to him. Perhaps she believed his father would return one day, the symbolic pack of cigarettes in his hand. Or maybe she suspected her own end would arrive sooner rather than later. Either way Gabriel heeded the proverb until Chandra Suresh walked into Grays and Sons, the unsuspecting future accessory to the most incredible turn of Gabriel’s life.
It was fitting that destiny should enter, searchingly, into Gabriel’s realm, drawing him out enticingly. The culmination of introspective years had bred both complacency and the steadfast belief that he would never grovel for greatness—it would find him.
Still, Chandra’s arrival was met with reserved suspicion. Gabriel knew better than to show his hand too soon. His early life as an outsider with an unapologetically eccentric mother prepared and reinforced his cynical countenance. Being tricked into false acceptance by a well delivered con, whether it be by a pack of his Neanderthal peers at school or an Indian gentleman professing scientific theories indicative of a new world order, was an issue of concern that Gabriel always stepped around guardedly.
On the outside looking in one had the benefit of seeing the bigger picture and the allowance to not be nice for the sake of good manners. After all, if no one expected you to be like them then it was harder to pigeonhole you with preconceptions.
In Chandra’s case Activating Evolution was not only the skeleton key but the new testament for a belief system that rang of truth through Gabriel’s tightly wound body. They spoke of exquisite potential, unique and virtually unparalleled. He tasted the words ‘chosen one’ on the tip of this tongue, but it was for more than a genetic anomaly yet to be found. Chandra had come to speak of his family in India and in scattered offerings had revealed the traumatic loss of his daughter, Shanti, who possessed Chandra’s raison d’etre. But it was unrealized. Added insult to injury was found in the fact that his son, Mohinder, was absolutely normal, un-fascinating.
Two birds with one stone, Gabriel imagined himself as the kid Chandra so desperately clung to. Special, open to the journey of discovery and very much alive. It was everything that Gabriel least deserved and the hint of more over the horizon fed his growing appetite. But a test lay before him demanding he prove how far he was willing to go. Chandra’s respect came at a price; there was nothing unconditional about it. There was no currency in goodwill and Chandra’s attention was easily diverted.
When faced with the prospect of being tossed aside again, by a father, by someone who should never turn away, Gabriel took a stand. He refused to be ignored and in the process of being heard was recreated, reborn, reincarnated.
I baptize thee Sylar, in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the—
He was the heightened exemplification of the human experience. He tasted the ridges of every granular, inhaled the aromatic cacophony that bled from explosively vibrant colours, and danced steps in enticing movements that skirted light and shadow.
He was a god amongst men.
It was a skin he wore well and the journey of self-determination was sweetly alluring. The power he dreamed of was even greater in reality and the apex glowed in the expressions before him that cried of dread and panic. Where Sylar had once been driven by the need for respect he found being feared far more rewarding. It ensured a certain quickness of action on the part of those who realized that surrender was not an option it was an inevitability.
As an amalgamation of evolution, God, and destiny, he was the right hand man of the universe. Those who did not fulfill the role bestowed on them by birth were dead ends to the future of the human race. Even though Sylar quantified it as those who did not want to properly nurture their ability, the shrugged off truth was that not surviving an encounter with him was as good as any excuse for him to deem who was worthy—short answer: no one. It was within his natural born right to eliminate the cancer while ensuring no loss of a newly tasted power.
Sylar learned to relish the shoes he stepped into. It was a heady mixture not for the faint of heart. Chandra had ultimately proved to have a weak constitution, nowhere near as ready to stand at the precipice of tomorrow as he initially believed.
Letting him go, releasing Chandrea permanently was as much an act of love as revenge. As the father Sylar had never known (twice removed, in fact) Chandra was only capable of bringing him so far. Despite the feared separation anxiety, backed behind feelings of disgust, willful ignorance and pain, it was a story as old as time. The son always surpassed the father. It was the way of the world. If Chandra showed him the future that stretched out before him, he also tried to erect barriers of deniability against it. But once unleashed from the self-imposed prison he had resigned himself to, Sylar would not be contained. Kill or be killed? As if it was even a choice.
To be the person he always wanted to be he shrugged off the superficialities of a life best forgotten. ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ It was a powerful sentiment except for what it implied. To whom was responsibility owed? To oneself? That was whom it should refer to, but he knew the sentimental and hackneyed response. What did others offer in return besides wanting to impose their own limited expectations to dilute what should be pure and exhilarating brilliance? Sylar owed it to himself to press forward and with apologies of uncertainty out of his system he eyed the future with great vigor.
Sylar was collected imposition. With a knowing look beneath carefully unkempt hair, he walked a stride made up of driven steps and strong lines. He was sharp angles and constructed scruffiness. He was calculated indifference. Sylar was a chameleon masquerading as a man. Any man. Whatever it took to get what he deserved.
Crossing paths with Mohinder was fortuitous. Bad timing for Mohinder, of course, but for Sylar it was as if the universe was rewarding him most handsomely. After all, what were the odds that across the doorway of a man who was essentially a stranger to them both, two pieces of a greater puzzle would snap into place without warning, expectation or preparation?
In retrospect Sylar should have guessed at the probability of such an occurrence. In many ways he felt he knew Mohinder already based on Chandra’s confessions, the ones that softly lilted like lullabies telling Sylar that he was the better son, the one Chandra would have been proud of. And though the man he met certainly carried an obvious cross of vulnerability in his curious, surprised expressions and nervously hesitant steps, he was not at all the fragile creature Sylar had pictured.
Where Sylar had imagined lack of depth, he instead found introspection. Where he believed weakness of conviction to be, he was greeted with a tenacious strength of wary open mindedness. Quickly Sylar was forced to reevaluate the role he needed to play. His survival demanded it.
Survival, as it turned out, had its irony. When push came to shove in the face of tumultuous discovery, the genuine nature of one’s self became all the more prevalent. The creation of ‘Zane’ that Sylar came up with may have been a tad maladjusted, in clothes that neither Gabriel nor Sylar would consider fitting, but he was also the unexpected middle ground between the two. Confident yet yearning, he was amused but not without wonder, reserved and aggressive, contemplative, risk-taking. Sylar found extreme comfort in the midst of the most precarious illusion.
The biggest ruse was the most honest.
It also meant that the fallout was the most momentous. Sylar came close—too close—to a premature end. And how had that happened? How had Mohinder found the crack in his impenetrable armor? Sylar should have killed him in return. Why he didn’t was not something he gave deep thought to until much later. Maybe the act of mercy, beat in alongside punches and telekinetic incisions, was a reminder of the controlled power that coursed through Sylar’s blood. Maybe he couldn’t bear to rid himself of the one person who reminded him of his fallibility. Or maybe it was far more simple in the remote chance that he actually liked Mohinder and found in him someone who understood him better than he knew himself, and vice versa.
No matter the reasons, re-embracing the rushed thrill of being Sylar—no excuses, no apologies—was a welcome reprieve from stuttered steps that cracked underneath the pressing weight of human connection. The final push, the beginning of the next act, unfolded beneath the half-truth, ‘you can’t go home again.’ Of course you could, but home was never in the same place. A final glimpse of the four walls that closed Gabriel in and he annihilated it with a defensive thrust through the heart. Sylar moved with purpose through boundaries and amateurish protective measures.
Even when he was powerless he embraced being Sylar and only called upon the name Gabriel as part of his grand plan. The name came to represent a past he wanted to escape with as little trouble and limited scarring as possible. Despite being the same man, he treated it as a well-worn costume, better packed away. In the form of Gabriel he would have reflected on his past. Sylar, on the other hand, valued only the future. Living in the perpetual state of ‘what if?’ lit the nerves through his body with anticipation. He liked having unequaled control over the array of possibilities that guided him towards his future. The odds were always in his favour.
But Mohinder had clawed his way in under Sylar’s skin like a splinter that appeared to be no more than a minor irritation yet could prove deadly if it was not dealt with. In those moments an internal struggle battled out. More often than not Sylar won out but victory only lasted as long as Sylar kept Mohinder at bay, out of sight, out of mind.
The trials and tribulations that made up his days twisted his mind through loops. In retrospect, with enough distance in place, Sylar was impressed with both the effort against him and the theory-turned-fact that his life was the wonderfully respectable mess of complications as he always dreamed it to be.
The further he moved away from where he had started, the closer he orbited the nexus. Sending Luke away—his protégé, wannabe apprentice, useless hanger-on with potential (much like himself) if not for his disgusting lack of creative thinking (all flash with little substance)—was supposed to be a definitive act, a final marker on the way to uncovering the key to who he was and, subsequently, who he was always meant to be.
But goodbyes were subjective and the reality of coming face-to-face with the prophetic essence that unconsciously informed very tiny step he took from birth to the present day did not provide the answers he desperately sought. The tenuous line between what he had given up and what had been claimed in its place drew forth a startling conclusion. He was neither Gabriel nor Sylar, at least not one fully to the ultimate dismissal of the other. He was the purgatory middle, hovering between two worlds (maybe more) in possession of a conscience (if he would allow it to breathe) that extended from the core of self-awareness he had tried (successfully for a time) to deny.
On his own again he had (too much) time to ruminate on meanings. Things were only made more complicated and clear when the fluctuating forms he tread in were forced to converge. That alone came as a result of a (begrudgingly) necessary deflation of his self-reliance. He justified the internal compromise with the understanding that strength lies in knowing when to reach out to (use) others. It was to his own benefit that he brokered a tentative deal (unknown to anyone else), dressed up between them as an alliance of powerful allies, with Nathan. While Sylar was the brute but invisible strength that the Senator needed to ensure his political hand and Nathan offered him his hearts desire for more powers and unrivalled greatness, Sylar waited and watched.
As Nathan moved further away from those who would care, as he succumbed to his own treacherous manipulations, the trap was set. Becoming Nathan turned into a catch 22. It was the furthest thing to being Gabriel and yet it brought him the closest to who he really was.
In Nathan’s skin his power was magnified on a metaphoric scale. He could render policies like prophesies while basking in the admiration, and deflecting the horror, of an enraptured public. He was almighty, as he always should have been.
But the past had a funny way of outrunning him.
Where Mohinder had first been forced by Nathan to work towards the administrations detainment and control of Specials, he eventually found his own will to accept the terms. Worth noting for Sylar was how Mohinder’s turnabout had come only after Sylar slipped into his new skin. He told himself that Mohinder knew the difference and was responding to him, but the truth was somewhere in between.
Working closely with Mohinder was an interesting perk for Sylar when he first took over Nathan’s life. He had the chance to see Mohinder through new eyes and, in return, be seen through the same prism. He was struck again by the man he had known long before; a man whose life he had very much come to value. Selfish reasoning was still at hand but not out of ascending to god-like heights. He wanted Mohinder alive for himself, entrenching in time and space the companionship that had always existed beyond the grasp of his fingertips.
Together they rarely spoke of Sylar specifically. Sylar chalked it up to being that dark presence that loomed like a guillotine over Mohinder’s life. It was a good reminder for Sylar that he must not slip up. Still, late night conversations in the Oval Office or Mohinder’s lab were an overwhelming drug of intimacy and Sylar lowered bits of his wall as he relished in being able to talk with someone so freely. But he was very careful. He had worked too hard to come undone due to something as base as friendship.
Increasingly, however, Sylar wondered if he was too lax. On a handful of occasions, in the middle of a comfortable but drawn out silence, he had looked up to find Mohinder watching him contemplatively with focused but soft eyes and a slight indentation of deep thought across his forehead. Their eyes would meet and Mohinder would offer him a nonchalant closed mouth smile before looking elsewhere and changing the subject.
It worried Sylar only so much as he knew it was easy to underestimate Mohinder, but mostly he was overcome by the chance that Mohinder was as drawn to him. He knew that his version of Nathan in front of others on his staff was different than the Nathan he shared with Mohinder in private. Mohinder’s Nathan was decidedly more like Zane in that he struck this exact balance. Without too much preparatory thought, Sylar slipped back into that persona—himself—with Mohinder.
And Mohinder did not recoil or plead indifference. He was at ease, if not (curiously) antsy. It confused Sylar while at the same time it ran his imagination in a myriad of directions. As much as he kept it capped he could not help when one or two wayward thoughts ran away.
One night, long after a particularly combative day of debates with his staff over allowing a media crew into one of the detainment centers for some controlled publicity, he was finally alone with Mohinder in the Oval Office trying to unwind. Half sitting on the front edge of his desk with his arms folded across his chest, very much the image of Nathan, he watched under a tense brow Mohinder sitting on the sofa, tiredly removing his wire-rimmed glasses and pressing the bridge of his nose with his index finger and thumb of his left hand, like a relief pressure point.
In Sylar’s minds eye he saw Mohinder look over his way and slowly stand up. With a short stride Mohinder closed the space between them and Sylar noticed the glasses, still in Mohinder’s right hand, transform from thin silver wire rims into thick black ones, like the pair he wore when he still made a living fixing timepieces.
Mohinder stopped in front of him and Sylar met his unflinching stare. Mohinder’s face gave nothing away. Without breaking their gaze he saw Mohinder raise the glasses and turn them around. Sylar held steady, besides his pounding heart, summersaulting stomach, and first beads of ticklish sweat forming at the bottom of his hairline on the back of his neck, and observed Mohinder holding the glasses by the earpieces and lifting them to his face.
Gently, Mohinder pushed them snugly into place, the cool edges dragging along the sides of Sylar’s face and eventually resting on his nose. Even with the touch of Mohinder’s fingertips across the tops of his ears and then the sides of his face as he fixed the angle of the glasses, Sylar’s attention did not drift from the serious expression on his face, from Mohinder’s crinkled eyes to his slightly parted lips as if willing his concentration to not be swayed.
Mohinder dropped his hands to his sides and leaned back, but did not step away. Sylar held his breath and wondered if Mohinder was telling him he knew the truth and, if so, whether his cover was blown to high hell. After a nervous pause Sylar was surprised to see Mohinder smile and say, “There, that’s better,” before turning around and walking to the door.
Although Sylar preferred to pass the daydream off as a judgment of Mohinder slowly, unknowingly, being reeled in by him again, it was difficult to deny what it said about himself. That his fear of discovery was tied up with Mohinder not only at the helm but ultimately accepting him was as intriguing as it was troubling. The simple sliver of thought that he had even considered Mohinder not turning on him rumbled weakness but he could not stop the seed of it from implanting itself in his brain.
If he played his cards right he could manage the best of both worlds. Maybe the real him that walked the line between bold extremes was the answer he had been seeking all his life. It was no longer about plausible deniability (completely writing off one existence for the other) but melding the two.
Without being able to say for certain if he was right Sylar knew one thing without a doubt. It was worth the test.