There are a great many things about this situation that should be refreshing, if not an outright relief. Being welcomed, needed, instead of ignored or left on read or told frankly to fuck off. Finding, for the first time, solid (or in this case, liquid) proof that he's not just the crazy son of an even crazier crackpot. Having someone actually sitting next to him in the passenger seat, instead of behind him giving irritable directions and complaining about the cab fare.
Mohinder tells himself these things, because the prospect of finding enough things to talk about for the thirty-three hours Mapquest says this trip will take is suddenly making him squirm inside. He wouldn't have thought, until he actually met someone with an ability, that he would need anything but that as a topic of conversation, but...there's only so far one can get on so you can melt toasters?
(There are so many things he wants to know about that, though. Is it only metal? It can't only be metal; he'd seen that half-dissolved cordless phone and other puddles too brightly-colored to be anything but plastic, but how does the ability distinguish between materials, and can it be taught to do more? What does it feel like? What do Zane's parents think? Can he tell them? All of these questions and more, and that sharp dark intensity in Zane's gaze from the moment he'd answered the door makes Mohinder certain he'll get answers.)
Maybe it's Chandra's neglectful influence, or maybe it's just years of discouraging evidence, but Mohinder can't quite bring himself to believe anyone would want to talk to him for very long without trying to find a way out. And there won't be one of those on I-94 unless Zane wants to hitchhike home.
But there's no sense being pessimistic about it. Mohinder is not quite self-aware enough to recognize that his brain is trying preemptively to sabotage his emotional state before a breakthrough this promising can turn out to be a crushing disappointment, but he knows enough to cut it off at the pass before it can get worse.
"I think I'll leave the music selection up to you," he says, with a smile that manages to be more teasing than self-deprecating. "You are, after all, the expert. Pick whatever you like."
No one looks at Sylar the way Mohinder does for very long. In his three decades of life, Sylar can count those people on just one hand. He’s not sure his mother counts, since she is not in awe of him as much as she has used him as a surrogate husband since his father left them. Mothers always think you’re special anyway. Chandra Suresh had been the first person to see his genuine potential and cultivate it, but only after he showed results. Elle seemed hellbent on saving him from those results before she saw the monster within. And maybe that’s genuinely it. Doesn’t count. Killed. Chased away. It’s a bad track record.
Unlike Mohinder, Sylar is buzzing with excitement. He’s been on long journeys before. Bettering himself takes time and it takes effort. The way can’t be easy for it to matter and he can say with certainty that it’s been far from easy since the start of it. Freeing abilities from people to whom they are wasted on is not simply a gathering task. He’s managed to hit a fifty percent success rate in his hunting. There’s been set backs. Being captured and studied had been a pretty big one, though until a few days ago, he’d been about to come up on a wall. He’d only gotten a few names from Chandra and he’d been at the end of that list before Mohinder called to save him.
The journey had also done a lot of the heavy lifting on shaping the way Sylar needed to be. He’d already discarded the weak willed Gabriel Gray persona in favor of the stronger, more unique Sylar, but that is a personality best kept in the shadows. It is for whispering, for fearing, for hiding and for hunting. It is not for the world at large. No. Sylar needs to rest and wait so that they don’t have a repeat of the Molly Walker and Claire Bennet fiascos. He needs to be Zane Taylor now, nervous and cautiously curious. Mohinder can not know who he truly is or his meal ticket will end up just as dead as his father. And no one wants that. Not when Mohinder is the key to all future quests. Not when Mohinder keeps looking at him the way he does. Sylar never wants that to stop.
It takes a moment for ‘Zane’ to look up, as if just realizing that he’s being spoken to. The expert…?
Oh.
Right.
Zane Taylor is a musician.
Zane pulls at the sleeves of his coat and tucks his chin against his chest, laughing under his breath. “Uh, could we…. Would it be all right to talk? I don’t have anyone else I can talk to about this…. And I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve got so many questions. And-and maybe you don’t have the answers. But we could find them. Together…? Like I was saying, I really feel like this is destiny.” It’s more than just unlocking his potential to be the pinnacle of humanity. Mohinder and he have always been meant to meet. He’s everything Chandra could not be and, more than that, Sylar believes he will be easily manipulated. He just needs to work a little on that. “I uh…. I’d love to know more about you, Doctor.”
For all Mohinder doesn't want to think of himself as the needy, fragile, easily-manipulated liability his father had always led him to believe he was, Sylar's right. That question, simple as it is, pierces a long way through whatever layers of armor Mohinder has assembled since he arrived in New York.
(His father might have scoffed at the idea that Mohinder was capable of surrounding that soft, un-stonelike heart with any armor at all; even his mother might have given him that quiet, pitying look he hates so much, but Mohinder wants to think he's cultivated something for them to be proud of since he left India.)
But much like nobody looks at Sylar the way Mohinder has today, with bright-eyed incredulity and easy, free, delighted smiles to see his ability in action--nobody ever says they want to know more about Mohinder. Nobody says that and means it. Even Mira, on their early dates, had seemed a bit more mercenary about it than this. Maybe Zane unnerves him a little when he puts on that unblinking gaze and lays the 'destiny' schtick on with a trowel, but it's not really any more flowery or extravagant than the metaphors that Suresh father and son alike enjoy using in their writing and their lectures, and Zane seems to be a well-read man as well as an artist.
"Me?" Guarded, but the note of hope there is audible. "I'm not the one who can liquefy solid objects with my mind, Zane."
“Until a few days ago, I couldn’t either.” It’s not a lie and the smile Zane gives to Mohinder is as reflective of the sunshine spewing one’s that the other man has been giving him all afternoon. “I was just a normal guy living a normal life. I ate tuna sandwiches and read books…” oh. “And I wrote songs no one was ever going to listen to. But you? You found me. You called me and it all became clear. I’m not going to lie, Doctor Suresh. I was in a bad state for a little while there. But you came. I was scared and you came and you don’t want to cut me open for science experiments.”
He needs to pull back on the reigns because he can feel himself starting to babble. Babbling is what Gabriel does and he will not let Gabriel into any new persona.
Zane presses his generous lips together before he reaches up to buckle himself in. Safety first. He needs to stick to the excited but neurotic playbook he gleaned for himself in the brief time he spent in Real Zane’s company. When he’s heard the name Suresh, when he’d known Chandra’s son was on his way, he’d had to adapt.
There’s just some kinks to work out.
“And you’re from…. England? With that accent…. Sounds like you’ve lived a pretty amazing life studying people like me.”
Mohinder tries not to wince at Zane's phrasing, cut me open for science experiments, so much blunter about the dangers out there and closer to the truth than the tactful warning he'd tried to give earlier without traumatizing the poor man. Best not to elaborate, then. He'd been considering it, but--no. Sylar can't get to them on the road, in any case--and if he can, they'll both be as dead as Chandra in his torn-apart cab, so what's the point of bringing it up?
(Is he being irresponsible here? Is Zane actually going to be any safer from Sylar, in the company of a man completely powerless to protect him? Has Mohinder only endangered him further?)
This train of thought is distracting enough to keep him from mulling over the timeline Zane is presenting, or trying to reconcile any details of it, and he surfaces from it only when asked a direct question.
"From Madras, actually. Southern India. It's a wonder I haven't frozen solid in weather like this." Not that his body isn't valiantly trying to. The gloves, they do nothing.
"I wish I could say I've spent my life doing this kind of work. It's all quite a new development for me. My father was the one who came up with all of this--the algorithm, the List, the very theory. I've just inherited it. A few months ago, I thought this was all just science fiction."
Mohinder is just another son grasping at the straws discarded by his father. Gabriel Gray knows something of that problem but Sylar was born out of thought and truth and Zane…. He decides that Zane didn’t have a troubled youth at all. His nerves come from his artist’s mind and he’s not so much a loner as a musician with social anxiety that goes away on the stage and the recording booth but crashes hard from time to time when he’s out of his element.
Crafting Zane is much more fun than crafting Sylar. The tick of the clock and the need to prove his uniqueness, to be the very best, the pinnacle of all evolution, that’s what birthed Sylar. He hadn’t had a say. It just happened. Is happening. Ever new ability adds a facet. And how beautiful those facets are making him become.
Zane breathes out of his nose and he decides not to ask the racist question about the accent. Maybe Mohinder learned English from a Londoner. Maybe he went to school there. Chandra’s English had been different but Zane likes this man’s voice better. It’s soft. It’s easy to sink his teeth into.
Playing with his cuffs again now that he’s got Mohinder’s attention, Zane shifts his eyes from the road ahead to the side mirror and then briefly to Mohinder’s profile. He knows he has a staring problem, but he can’t help it. He wants to know and understand everything. He still loves how much he can see without the glasses on.
”It must be fun working with your dad, though. And don’t sell yourself short! You’re the one who called me. You’re the one who came to see me. You’re the one who made science fiction into science fact. Not him.”
Chandra Suresh had never been a man to give two shits what anyone thought of him, or his research, or his accent. Mohinder, ever in his shadow, had been obliged to fend for himself a little more. And even in a city like Chennai that professes not to care about wealth or class or lingering colonial influence, an English accent gets you faster service in tea shops and more of a smile in the process. It doesn't keep Mohinder's cab passengers from making loud, nasty assumptions as soon as they see his name and picture on the license, but it does tend to shut them up once he speaks.
Science fiction into science fact. He likes that. It gets a little chuckle out of him, with one of those easy smiles Zane's been so good at prompting. (He likes the rest of that sentiment, too. You're the one who did that. Not him. But he still has enough guilt and filial piety left in him to feel ashamed of enjoying that.)
"He's dead, actually." Awkward, but at least he's more tactful about it now than when cheerfully telling Peter Petrelli to direct his questions toward the urn on the table. "I can't say he was much fun as a colleague when he was alive, either, but he had his moments."
...okay, so maybe not that much filial piety. It comes and goes. Mohinder does, at least, have the decency to look regretful after a moment.
"Look, I'm sorry. This isn't...the best time for small talk about my father. What about you? Are your parents still around? Will you want to show them your ability?"
He’s staring again. Zane can feel his eyes straining as they lock onto Mohinder’s face when he speaks about Chandra’s death. “I’m…. I’m really sorry,” he says when the silence drifts by a beat too long. He longs to hear more about it, though. What did Mohinder feel? What did he think when he found out? What happened to Chandra? Is he back in India? Is he buried? The thought had shifted into thoughts about the others.
Chandra had been a fairly normal death as far as deaths go. What did the do with the Walkers? Did they need to defrost one? How long did it take to clean up all of the blood from the other? He thinks about this in snippets, never a fully clear thought and never with anything more than curiosity. He’s not sorry for what he did. Lions do not grieve over their prey. They kill to continue to exist and he does the same.
Well. Mostly. Chandra had been an exception there in the end.
He’d like to linger there but Mohinder has other ideas. It takes an effort not to roll his eyes and instead to think back on Zane’s home. There had been photos there of the same people. Some likely friends, some certainly family.
“My parents are both around. Divorced, remarried. My dad lives out West and my mom is in New York.” Gabriel. “Upstate. Upstate New York. You just missed the fall foliages. It’s really pretty up there,” he covers, and clears his throat. “I uh…. I don’t know what they’d think. I can feel the molecules in the objects I touch vibrate and I can make them… stop. Break apart. I’m not sure how useful that is for party tricks.”
The self depreciation just feels wrong. Sylar fan think of a lot ps uses for a melting ability but none are for Mohinder’s tender ears.
The staring has not been lost on Mohinder, though he hasn't been able to take his eyes off the road for very long at a stretch. He just doesn't know why Zane keeps doing it. It's not the usual kind of lingering gaze Mohinder is accustomed to; it's less like Zane finds him attractive and more like the man wants to see straight through him like a clear plastic anatomical dummy.
But Mohinder is a scientist through and through, no matter what his father may have thought, and he can get on board with that kind of interest. It doesn't occur to him that Zane might be unduly interested in what he says about his father--he doesn't link the staring to his commentary about Chandra's death at all. Why would it interest Zane, or anyone? He hasn't said anything at all about the gory details that might inspire more intrigue; for all his passenger knows, Chandra might have had cancer, or keeled over from a heart attack. Things happen.
He understands self-deprecation, has it down to a fine art, but he doesn't want to hear it now either. Not when Zane's the first person here whose ability he's actually gotten to see. Not when he has the kind of genetic profile--special, unique, of worth--that Mohinder could only dream of having himself. And not when there is an infinite number of potential uses for that ability, and Mohinder can probably think of some fascinatingly gross and gory ones on his own if Sylar's been told he's too fragile to hear such things.
"First of all, I don't know what kind of parties you're going to, but just the demonstrations you've given me so far are incredibly impressive. Anyone would agree. It's only for safety reasons that you should be keeping a low profile with them right now. Secondly--" He pauses to take an exit, gathering his thoughts and sorting through the sheer number of questions he has.
"Even if the molecular dissolution only works on certain materials, which is already an 'if,' who says there's a limit to the scale of it? You've had less than a week of practice and you can already melt something the size of a fairly large lamp. In time, who's to say you couldn't demolish a building?"
Surely no harm could ever come of encouraging something like that.
"Honestly, though, I'm more excited to see if you can learn to extend it to other materials. When we stop for the night, if you don't mind, I'd love to play around with it."
How is it that he is once again taken in by a Suresh? The last had hurt him so badly when all he had tried to do was please him. This one is much more earnest, so much more vibrant, and all Zane can focus on is how sad it will be when Mohinder’s light goes out. It makes his throat feel like it’s filling with saw dust and he tells himself that he needs to be more mindful. He killed Chandra before he’d gotten everything he needed. Mohinder’s his last hope.
The joke is surprising, though Zane thinks it shouldn’t be. Mohinder is close to his age, maybe a touch older, and academia has not yet fully jaded him to life. He has a spark in him that makes Zane smile, and so Zane allows himself to feel it, to really absorb it.
It primes him for the words that follow. Mohinder says he’s impressive. He says he can grow his power. He is encouraging him to perhaps branch out into what can only be called as destructive possibilities.
He likes it. He really likes it.
“There’s—“ Zane shifts the seatbelt over his chest so he can turn, long legs bending. “We aren’t on any specific schedule right?” He’s fed the hunger. The constant ticking is lower than usual. It will come back, the need to rip apart and to learn and to absorb, but for now it’s a whisper and not a demand. “And honestly, we didn’t really plan too well for this. Did you have lunch? We could stop for lunch.” Especially if lunch meant he could try dissolving the silverware after.
Damn. If only he could show Mohinder how much more of him there is!
Edited (That’s what I get for being fancy on a phone tag. ) 2023-01-09 02:05 (UTC)
It's nice of Zane to frame this whole strange and impulsive situation as something they'd failed to plan well, together, even if it's true. Mohinder had left Brooklyn at dawn with three days' worth of his warmest clothing stuffed into a bag, a few kits for DNA swabbing, and pretty much nothing else except his laptop. And here they are on their way to fucking Montana. The only thing in his stomach right now is a bowl of cereal, a tall scorched medium roast from a drive-thru Starbucks, and Zane's watery cup of Earl Grey.
And still, he's hungrier for scientific advancement right now than he is for actual food.
"There's no reason we can't take a break, no." He scans the signs along the road for anything that looks like a promising turn-off, but really, he'll eat almost anything if it gives them an excuse to park so that he can get a better look at all of this. Besides which, he wants to be able to look Zane in the eye while they talk. The conversation feels like it deserves better now than to be conducted while Mohinder is busy staring at someone else's tacky bumper stickers.
It feels absurd to feel proud in any way of a man he's literally just met, but when he remembers how shaky and frightened Zane had sounded on the phone, and compares it to how calm he'd sounded as he described his epiphany, and how eager he sounds now, Mohinder doesn't know how to feel anything but a sense of admiration. If he feels any unease or curiosity about why Zane's voice sounds different in person, he chalks it up to the phone connection and his own faulty perception. "Probably best if we avoid the Cracker Barrel, but otherwise--"
Whatever this next rest stop has, he'll take it. He turns off, heartbeat thrilling with anticipation.
Though Cracker Barrel is the kind of place he thinks Zane likes, Sylar is pleased when they pull off of the highway and into the lot of a family owned diner with its red and white striped awning and sheet metal exterior. This feels much better. It’s familiar, the true marking of a road trip. He starts all of his stalking at a greasy spoon with a piece of homemade pie and a strong cup of coffee and so this just feels fitting.
Zane holds the door for Mohinder as they step out of the cold. A waitress directs them to seat themselves and Zane hits up the table by the window. He sits so that the sun shines behind him, casting shadows on his face that not even the fluorescent lighting overhead can completely dash away. The green vinyl seats are worn. His chair is a little off balance. The frosted glass brick partitions are chipped.
It’s perfect.
Zane shrugs off his coat as the waitress comes over to take their orders. He already knows what he wants before even glancing at the menu. “Do you have cherry pie? Or peach? And might as well bring over a pot of coffee. It just smells so good.”
Tone it down, he tells himself.
A sheepish look covers his eyes. “I…. Doctor Suresh, I just want to apologize. And thank you. For bringing me. I wouldn’t normally do this. I just feel like, together, we can do anything. And—“ he pulls at the long sleeve shirt’s cuffs he’s wearing, allowing all of his awkwardness to express itself in a gush of sincerity. “I’m just so happy to make a difference.”
Mohinder has only ever seen diners like this on television before. It's not the sort of place he ever finds himself in back in New York, where his solitary routine involves takeout food and bodega groceries. It's not somewhere he would think to eat by himself, without company, but--now, for once, he has company, and that makes all the difference.
Zane's overenthusiasm when ordering--overconfidence, even--doesn't register as odd. It feels of a piece with the cheery sunlit atmosphere, the promise hanging in the air. But Mohinder does find himself ever so slightly distracted by Zane's backlit features, surprised by their sudden angularity. He hadn't seemed this...sharp, in the car. They haven't known each other long enough for there to be such a thing as familiar or unfamiliar, and yet the difference is noticeable.
But only for a moment, until that awkward sleeve-tugging brings Mohinder back to what he's come to expect. He feels almost guilty about his inclination to be exasperated with Zane's overwrought gratitude, but what is he supposed to say? He's glad to be of help, glad Zane appreciates this, glad they can be of benefit to each other, but Mohinder has had too many lessons on stoicism drilled into him over the course of his life to be comfortable with displays this open. He smiles, a bit thinly, and glances aside.
"I don't know what you think you have to apologize for," he says, when he can make his tone sound kind and friendly again. "And please, Zane, it's perfectly fine to just call me Mohinder. I can't spend days in a car with someone calling me 'Doctor' the whole time."
Though being all over the place is a benchmark for someone with manic depression, that is not the sort of person another can feel at ease being around. It’s much too jarring and while Mohinder believes he needs him, all it will take it one slip up for Zane to be dumped and for his new prize to find another. He can not let that happen.
Zane Taylor can not be a babbling fool. He can not occasionally allow Gabriel to seep in. He has to camouflage Sylar. It’s a lot, even for him, when he’s so new at the persona game.
There needs to be rules. A style guide. So, for instance, Zane Taylor can get a little strange when he’s nervous and excited. Layer it. He is otherwise shy, but wanting so badly to connect to people. More. He’s recently come to terms with the fact that he can do remarkable things and he wants to help other people like him.
And now, to cover up any lingering awkwardness, he has to make this personal for Mohinder so that he can wriggle his way in and manipulate the man as he needs to.
So Zane rubs the back of his neck, and hunches his shoulders forward, eyes lifting towards Mohinder’s face. He’s easy to look. All attractive people are. Zane Taylor could find him to be so in more than just the general sense of the word, which would add that personal twist to explain why his behavior is extra awkward and erratic around him. The attention given to him by Mohinder has him a little on edge, because the one giving it to him has such beautiful eyes and an accent you could swim in.
There. Parameters set. Now Zane needs to just play inside the sandbox he’s generated for him.
“Mohinder— I”m— Oh. Was about to apologize again.” He laughs, and then leans back when the waitress arrives with the coffee and a slice of pie. Mohinder’s meal will take longer to prepare. “I eat a lot of pie when I’m nervous,” he confides in the geneticist. “You make me a little nervous. I mean, you can’t help it. You’re….” He trails off purposefully. “And all of this is out of my comfort zone. There’s so many out there feeling like I did. And still do. The responsibility to take care of that…. It’s a lot.”
He pours them both some coffee and then commands himself to shut up, eyes looking expectantly at his traveling companion like a gobsmacked puppy.
All right. This, at least, is more familiar ground for Mohinder. He might look like a disgruntled deer in headlights when someone--anyone--is waxing poetic about his moral or professional virtue, because he has so little experience with that kind of praise even if he did think he deserved it--but it's not quite so mystifying to realize that Zane just thinks he's handsome. Even the waitress had found an excuse to brush her hand against his shoulder while clarifying a slightly unnecessary number of things about his turkey club order. Mohinder can work with this.
(As if he hasn't been pushing appreciative thoughts out of the back of his mind for hours about Zane's startlingly long limbs, the way Mohinder has to tilt his head back to talk to him every time they're outside of the car. As if the black-hole intensity of Zane's eyes isn't as intriguing as it is unnerving.)
It makes him feel all the more like an asshole for his impatience, but he'd like to think--or hope, at least--that he hadn't been as obvious about that as he actually was. And he can make up for it, if he tries. More visibly relaxed already, he reaches across the table to give Zane's wrist a firm, friendly squeeze. The shift in atmosphere isn't exactly calculated, not deliberate manipulation, but there's something second-nature to Mohinder about leaning into someone's interest and letting his gaze seem a little more conspiratorial, his smile more teasing, his voice lower and warmer. Hell, it works on Nirand.
"It is," he says. "It is a lot. But you said it yourself, Zane, and you were right. Who better than you to show these people they're not alone, and give them hope? We've got this."
Zane's presence does lend Mohinder much-needed extra credibility, for as long as he wants to keep providing it. And Zane himself had said it--they're not on any particular schedule. They can take as long with this as they please.
There it is, Zane thinks with pleasure, the payoff of setting his character is already apparent. He resists the urge to slowly tilt his head in amusement as he sees Mohinder relax. It is very difficult for the corners of his lips not to turn up when the other man’s personable reflexes kick in. There’s a dangerous twinge of delight in the back of his head from his own cleverness. He uses it to let his eyes drop to Mohinder’s hand over his sleeve and he follows it up with a clearing of his throat.
Unlike Mohinder, Zane’s knowledge base on how to flirt comes from television and movies. He’s never held interest in relationships and has never once pursued one. It had not been important to the goals his mother had set for him and any mention of a woman in his life, even if she had been just a customer, led to jealousy and the cold shoulder from her.
Luckily, his strange translation of flirting with an attractive person whose praise he does genuinely enjoy just rolls into the Awkward Zane Taylor act. He does not try to touch Mohinder in return, and simply waits until his hand is free to dig into the pie.
Once his plate is clear, Zane pushes it towards the edge of the table and sets the fork down on the vinyl seat cushion of the chair between them. It is, for the most part, out of sight, but there’s still a rather heady feeling of doing something naughty in public about the gesture. “You said you were curious about what this could be. I’ve melted half of things. Particular parts of things. Did you want me to try something else?”
Despite Mohinder’s hand no longer resting on his wrist, Zane still feels the tingle of it. That’s… strange. Almost concerning.
Mohinder doesn't let the touch linger, because they are still barely acquaintances, and because this is still about science more than anything else, and because they are in public in Nowheresville, Virginia. And he does not, as he would if he were being more deliberately flirtatious, request or steal a bite of Zane's pie. But his mood still seems distinctly improved.
Noticing the surreptitious fork theft, he glances quickly around to make sure nobody else saw it, but when he's satisfied of that, his smile shares that scandalized-but-wicked little thrill. He ought to feel guilty, honestly, but--it's just a fork. And it's For Science.
"Very much so," he says, "but not in the middle of a restaurant. I only wish we could take some things with us besides that fork. If we could somehow get our hands on something made of glass, and something ceramic--I should think those might be the easiest materials to move on to from what you can already do, but it's just a hypothesis."
The plates are ceramic, and the windows are glass even if the cups they're drinking from are plastic, but there's no way Mohinder can think of to spirit any of those out of the diner without getting caught.
"Maybe," he muses, "if one of us 'accidentally' breaks a plate, we can keep the shards and just offer to pay for it. But we can't exactly do the same with the window."
The tingle has turned to an itch, and now Zane has determined that it came not from Mohinder’s hand as it has from the need to show Mohinder what else he could do. Melting is fine and dandy for a weekday afternoon but shattering or freezing could be so much more fun. And telekinesis…
When is the last time he stretched that muscle? He’d been using it since the day he’d acquired it, but in the hours that have passed since he’d met Mohinder Suresh in person, he’d not once been able to tap into that ability. The more he thinks about it, the more he wants to use it. Mohinder’s gleefulness at some petty thievery turns the itch into a ticking against the inside of his skull.
He isn’t sure what the doctor is suggesting as the noise drowns him all. All he sees is his mouth moving.
And that’s when the waitress returns to plunk down Mohinder’s sandwich and to clear away some plates. “Can I get you another slice, hun,” she asks, as if she wasn’t younger than both men.
Food always draw s Sylar back to himself and he slips back into Zane like a glove. His smile returns. “Would it be too much trouble? Cherry this time?”
“Cherry? You got it,” she says with a laugh and leaves the men alone again while she dishes up more sugar and whipped cream.
Zane turns back to Mohinder and lets his smile fall. “We could stop at a gift shop. There’s got to be shot glasses or mugs,” he suggests. Stealing feels too Sylar to him. And Sylar needs to sleep or this could all end far too abruptly.
"Oh--one for me too, please," he asks, before the waitress can depart, because he's definitely feeling ravenous enough by now to keep up with Zane in the pie department. Sylar's distraction, as before, goes over his head--it's easy to assume Zane's just preoccupied with trying to work out logistics too.
And the solution he proposes is a hell of a lot simpler than whatever Mohinder was trying to finagle. (The quick disappearance of that smile makes something twinge very faintly in the back of his mind, a tiny little that's odd flag, but it's gone as soon as it came.)
"A gift shop? Like an airport gift shop? Do you have those just...lining the motorways here?"
Maybe he'd been more right than he realized when he'd told Nirand what a weird country America was.
Pulling on Zane’s smile is easier this time. Wearing this personality is easier the more he does it and Sylar settles back into watching and waiting in the background.
Zane gives Mohinder an amusing, half confused face. “Sort of…?” he trails off into a question, picking at the hem of his sleeves. “There’s always lots of trinket stores along highways. So when people stop because they need to use the bathroom, there’s little things for them to buy too. Usually there’s coffee and snacks and things that have the state or the milepost written on them for collectors. It’s capitalism at work.”
The pie comes over, two extra large slices for the cute men at the waitress’ table, and as there is a new fork tucked into the side of the filling of each, Zane doesn’t retrieve the fork he’d left on the seat.
“Couldn’t we do that? Pick up shot glasses or postcards at every place we stop. You know. To remember the trip by.” Sylar usually comes away with his own souvenirs, of course. He’s never been one for trinkets. His own collections have always been so carefully curated and steered clear of clutter and useless baubles.
It makes sense, put that way, when the whole idea of a road trip seems to be such a quintessentially American thing. Mohinder's still been thinking of it as a combination of business and research, even as he lets himself be tentatively excited at the idea of company, even friendship, to break up the monotonous loneliness that most of his tenure in America has been.
(He imagines, for a moment, doing this with Eden: the wry little jokes she'd have made, the things she would have made him break out of his comfort zone and try, the way she'd have listened to him even if he'd rambled. He doesn't know what's quicker to drop the smile off his face now--the reminder that she's dead, or the certainty that this imagined road trip would have been nothing like what he's picturing, because nothing he thought he knew about her was real anyway. But it's all still recent enough for the what-could-have-been ache to feel raw, and it hurts that he'll never actually know. Is it really worth developing yet another relationship for Sylar to come along and take from him, if the bastard wants to?)
"Seems like a bit of a waste, if you're going to melt them." It's harder to keep his tone upbeat now, but he forces himself to do it anyway, because none of this is Zane's fault. Zane doesn't deserve to be made to feel as if he's done anything wrong. "But that might actually make them a better souvenir than if they were intact. We'd have to find another way to label them." There, now he's capable of teasing again. The sandwich is helping.
If Zane notices, and he does not because pie is life and he’s trying not to equate cherry red with another sort of red, there is no overcast look on his face. Mohinder has been coming off as the stoic and academic sort, with his brief moments of joy at seeing his theories come to task. There is likely a great deal that goes on beneath that mop of curls and Zane, interested as he is, has decided not to press. Mohinder responds to him better as the nervous and excitable sidekick. Not the intellectual companion.
And fair. There are things Mohinder can do and understands that Zane simply does not have the education to. No amount of picking through Mohinder’s brain will give him the knowledge he would need. Perhaps someone out there has that particular gift though.
The thought is enough to make him salivate.
“I can make Christmas ornaments and we can have them engraved!” he says, leaning maybe a bit too hard into the Zane As Excitable Sidekick. At least he doesn’t state that he can do the engraving himself, though.
As the check is settled up (he insists on paying as he is well aware that Mohinder may not have a form of income and likely has no familial wealth), Zane settles his elbow on the table and rests his chin on it. His other hand reaches beneath the plasticy tablecloth, towards Mohinder. He holds the scientist’s eyes, but his fingers never reach the slimmer man. They’ve stopped on the fork still settled on the seat between them. There’s a mischievous smirk on his plump lips and his eyelashes flutter slightly.
The fork has turned into a puddle, no longer resting on the center of green vinyl seat cushion, but dripping down the sides.
Mohinder takes the Christmas ornament idea as a joke, and it makes him laugh, just a little. He's got his wallet halfway out before Zane jumps on the check, and he doesn't protest. Nirand might complain about having to shepherd Mohinder's sheltered upper-middle-class rear through Chennai's seedier neighborhoods so he doesn't get mugged, but he's still paying New York City rent on an associate professor's savings and a cab driver's salary, and he's probably going to have to beg Yelena to let him keep the latter once he gets back.
He doesn't understand, at first, what Zane's getting at with that held gaze--thinks, initially, that it might be some more forward flirtation, and okay, yeah, he can get on board with that, but--
Only when there doesn't seem to be any kind of physical contact forthcoming does he look under the table, and then he understands, instantly, before the fork even has time to dissolve. Something about doing this in public, where anyone could see it, where the look on Zane's face could give the wrong impression just in and of itself, where the evidence will be left pooling on the floor after they're safely back on the road, feels almost obscene.
This time, Mohinder's laugh is almost breathless.
"We'd better."
He leaves an extra ten dollars behind on the table as an apology to the owner whose upholstery they've ruined, a last little gasp of conscience, because the way he clasps Zane's shoulder on the way back to the car makes it clear that he has no problem at all with what just transpired.
Mohinder could blind someone with that smile, Zane thinks, holding onto the gurgle in his stomach to explore later. Gabriel is almost desperate to feel it again, which, no. No, Gabriel is dead or on his way to be dead so doesn’t get to feel a fucking thing. This war on himself is almost enough to ruin the euphoria he feels at being bad in the open, but the hand on his shoulder brings Zane back to the childish moment of bliss. He nearly races Mohinder back to the car and climbs inside the passenger seat. They should have used the restroom before they left but there will be another eventually. And they’ll have to stop anyway for their future Christmas ornaments.
Sitting back in the seat, Zane clicks the seatbelt back into place, his smile large as he plays back Mohinder’s laugh. He likes the thought of having a friend to share these sorts of hijinks with. Showing off for someone just makes having abilities so much more worthwhile.
Yes, there are all sorts of people hunting him, but he’s escaped them all. He feels invincible. The sophomoric parts of his brain are all lit up and while they will betray him in the end, he doesn’t fight it.
By the time the coffee and pie and whatever it was Mohinder called a sandwich had finished their jobs of nourishing them, Zane spots a travel center. He points at the sign enthusiastically. “Let’s get some gas, hit the head, and get some pieces of Americana to melt tonight.”
It feels like his good mood will never end. It’s a dangerous way to be.
Mohinder likes this version of Zane, warmed up and in his element and confident. Maybe all it takes is a little time and encouragement, or maybe it is the influence of his ability, the certain knowledge that he's special, the control he's already developing over what had so unnerved him earlier this week.
Mohinder finds himself wondering, idly, what Zane is like onstage. This confidence must be a part of him that comes out in other circumstances, after all, for him to have sought a performance-related career, even if he's not a frontman. Maybe he can look up some videos of Zane's band once they've got wi-fi again--though where they're going, that might be a tall order. It's hardly as relevant right now as Zane's power is, in any case. Who needs grainy YouTube videos when he can just ask Zane to melt something and watch him grin like that in person?
He's more than glad to stop by the time Zane finds one of these weird kitsch bazaars, for all of those reasons, and he pulls in without hesitation. "All right. You go scout out anything you feel like you can work with, and I'll meet you inside once I'm done filling up. Be creative. You know your ability better than I do, but it can't hurt to push yourself a little."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Road Trip
Mohinder tells himself these things, because the prospect of finding enough things to talk about for the thirty-three hours Mapquest says this trip will take is suddenly making him squirm inside. He wouldn't have thought, until he actually met someone with an ability, that he would need anything but that as a topic of conversation, but...there's only so far one can get on so you can melt toasters?
(There are so many things he wants to know about that, though. Is it only metal? It can't only be metal; he'd seen that half-dissolved cordless phone and other puddles too brightly-colored to be anything but plastic, but how does the ability distinguish between materials, and can it be taught to do more? What does it feel like? What do Zane's parents think? Can he tell them? All of these questions and more, and that sharp dark intensity in Zane's gaze from the moment he'd answered the door makes Mohinder certain he'll get answers.)
Maybe it's Chandra's neglectful influence, or maybe it's just years of discouraging evidence, but Mohinder can't quite bring himself to believe anyone would want to talk to him for very long without trying to find a way out. And there won't be one of those on I-94 unless Zane wants to hitchhike home.
But there's no sense being pessimistic about it. Mohinder is not quite self-aware enough to recognize that his brain is trying preemptively to sabotage his emotional state before a breakthrough this promising can turn out to be a crushing disappointment, but he knows enough to cut it off at the pass before it can get worse.
"I think I'll leave the music selection up to you," he says, with a smile that manages to be more teasing than self-deprecating. "You are, after all, the expert. Pick whatever you like."
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Unlike Mohinder, Sylar is buzzing with excitement. He’s been on long journeys before. Bettering himself takes time and it takes effort. The way can’t be easy for it to matter and he can say with certainty that it’s been far from easy since the start of it. Freeing abilities from people to whom they are wasted on is not simply a gathering task. He’s managed to hit a fifty percent success rate in his hunting. There’s been set backs. Being captured and studied had been a pretty big one, though until a few days ago, he’d been about to come up on a wall. He’d only gotten a few names from Chandra and he’d been at the end of that list before Mohinder called to save him.
The journey had also done a lot of the heavy lifting on shaping the way Sylar needed to be. He’d already discarded the weak willed Gabriel Gray persona in favor of the stronger, more unique Sylar, but that is a personality best kept in the shadows. It is for whispering, for fearing, for hiding and for hunting. It is not for the world at large. No. Sylar needs to rest and wait so that they don’t have a repeat of the Molly Walker and Claire Bennet fiascos. He needs to be Zane Taylor now, nervous and cautiously curious. Mohinder can not know who he truly is or his meal ticket will end up just as dead as his father. And no one wants that. Not when Mohinder is the key to all future quests. Not when Mohinder keeps looking at him the way he does. Sylar never wants that to stop.
It takes a moment for ‘Zane’ to look up, as if just realizing that he’s being spoken to. The expert…?
Oh.
Right.
Zane Taylor is a musician.
Zane pulls at the sleeves of his coat and tucks his chin against his chest, laughing under his breath. “Uh, could we…. Would it be all right to talk? I don’t have anyone else I can talk to about this…. And I’ve been reading a lot. I’ve got so many questions. And-and maybe you don’t have the answers. But we could find them. Together…? Like I was saying, I really feel like this is destiny.” It’s more than just unlocking his potential to be the pinnacle of humanity. Mohinder and he have always been meant to meet. He’s everything Chandra could not be and, more than that, Sylar believes he will be easily manipulated. He just needs to work a little on that. “I uh…. I’d love to know more about you, Doctor.”
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(His father might have scoffed at the idea that Mohinder was capable of surrounding that soft, un-stonelike heart with any armor at all; even his mother might have given him that quiet, pitying look he hates so much, but Mohinder wants to think he's cultivated something for them to be proud of since he left India.)
But much like nobody looks at Sylar the way Mohinder has today, with bright-eyed incredulity and easy, free, delighted smiles to see his ability in action--nobody ever says they want to know more about Mohinder. Nobody says that and means it. Even Mira, on their early dates, had seemed a bit more mercenary about it than this. Maybe Zane unnerves him a little when he puts on that unblinking gaze and lays the 'destiny' schtick on with a trowel, but it's not really any more flowery or extravagant than the metaphors that Suresh father and son alike enjoy using in their writing and their lectures, and Zane seems to be a well-read man as well as an artist.
"Me?" Guarded, but the note of hope there is audible. "I'm not the one who can liquefy solid objects with my mind, Zane."
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He needs to pull back on the reigns because he can feel himself starting to babble. Babbling is what Gabriel does and he will not let Gabriel into any new persona.
Zane presses his generous lips together before he reaches up to buckle himself in. Safety first. He needs to stick to the excited but neurotic playbook he gleaned for himself in the brief time he spent in Real Zane’s company. When he’s heard the name Suresh, when he’d known Chandra’s son was on his way, he’d had to adapt.
There’s just some kinks to work out.
“And you’re from…. England? With that accent…. Sounds like you’ve lived a pretty amazing life studying people like me.”
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(Is he being irresponsible here? Is Zane actually going to be any safer from Sylar, in the company of a man completely powerless to protect him? Has Mohinder only endangered him further?)
This train of thought is distracting enough to keep him from mulling over the timeline Zane is presenting, or trying to reconcile any details of it, and he surfaces from it only when asked a direct question.
"From Madras, actually. Southern India. It's a wonder I haven't frozen solid in weather like this." Not that his body isn't valiantly trying to. The gloves, they do nothing.
"I wish I could say I've spent my life doing this kind of work. It's all quite a new development for me. My father was the one who came up with all of this--the algorithm, the List, the very theory. I've just inherited it. A few months ago, I thought this was all just science fiction."
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Crafting Zane is much more fun than crafting Sylar. The tick of the clock and the need to prove his uniqueness, to be the very best, the pinnacle of all evolution, that’s what birthed Sylar. He hadn’t had a say. It just happened. Is happening. Ever new ability adds a facet. And how beautiful those facets are making him become.
Zane breathes out of his nose and he decides not to ask the racist question about the accent. Maybe Mohinder learned English from a Londoner. Maybe he went to school there. Chandra’s English had been different but Zane likes this man’s voice better. It’s soft. It’s easy to sink his teeth into.
Playing with his cuffs again now that he’s got Mohinder’s attention, Zane shifts his eyes from the road ahead to the side mirror and then briefly to Mohinder’s profile. He knows he has a staring problem, but he can’t help it. He wants to know and understand everything. He still loves how much he can see without the glasses on.
”It must be fun working with your dad, though. And don’t sell yourself short! You’re the one who called me. You’re the one who came to see me. You’re the one who made science fiction into science fact. Not him.”
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Science fiction into science fact. He likes that. It gets a little chuckle out of him, with one of those easy smiles Zane's been so good at prompting. (He likes the rest of that sentiment, too. You're the one who did that. Not him. But he still has enough guilt and filial piety left in him to feel ashamed of enjoying that.)
"He's dead, actually." Awkward, but at least he's more tactful about it now than when cheerfully telling Peter Petrelli to direct his questions toward the urn on the table. "I can't say he was much fun as a colleague when he was alive, either, but he had his moments."
...okay, so maybe not that much filial piety. It comes and goes. Mohinder does, at least, have the decency to look regretful after a moment.
"Look, I'm sorry. This isn't...the best time for small talk about my father. What about you? Are your parents still around? Will you want to show them your ability?"
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Chandra had been a fairly normal death as far as deaths go. What did the do with the Walkers? Did they need to defrost one? How long did it take to clean up all of the blood from the other? He thinks about this in snippets, never a fully clear thought and never with anything more than curiosity. He’s not sorry for what he did. Lions do not grieve over their prey. They kill to continue to exist and he does the same.
Well. Mostly. Chandra had been an exception there in the end.
He’d like to linger there but Mohinder has other ideas. It takes an effort not to roll his eyes and instead to think back on Zane’s home. There had been photos there of the same people. Some likely friends, some certainly family.
“My parents are both around. Divorced, remarried. My dad lives out West and my mom is in New York.” Gabriel. “Upstate. Upstate New York. You just missed the fall foliages. It’s really pretty up there,” he covers, and clears his throat. “I uh…. I don’t know what they’d think. I can feel the molecules in the objects I touch vibrate and I can make them… stop. Break apart. I’m not sure how useful that is for party tricks.”
The self depreciation just feels wrong. Sylar fan think of a lot ps uses for a melting ability but none are for Mohinder’s tender ears.
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But Mohinder is a scientist through and through, no matter what his father may have thought, and he can get on board with that kind of interest. It doesn't occur to him that Zane might be unduly interested in what he says about his father--he doesn't link the staring to his commentary about Chandra's death at all. Why would it interest Zane, or anyone? He hasn't said anything at all about the gory details that might inspire more intrigue; for all his passenger knows, Chandra might have had cancer, or keeled over from a heart attack. Things happen.
He understands self-deprecation, has it down to a fine art, but he doesn't want to hear it now either. Not when Zane's the first person here whose ability he's actually gotten to see. Not when he has the kind of genetic profile--special, unique, of worth--that Mohinder could only dream of having himself. And not when there is an infinite number of potential uses for that ability, and Mohinder can probably think of some fascinatingly gross and gory ones on his own if Sylar's been told he's too fragile to hear such things.
"First of all, I don't know what kind of parties you're going to, but just the demonstrations you've given me so far are incredibly impressive. Anyone would agree. It's only for safety reasons that you should be keeping a low profile with them right now. Secondly--" He pauses to take an exit, gathering his thoughts and sorting through the sheer number of questions he has.
"Even if the molecular dissolution only works on certain materials, which is already an 'if,' who says there's a limit to the scale of it? You've had less than a week of practice and you can already melt something the size of a fairly large lamp. In time, who's to say you couldn't demolish a building?"
Surely no harm could ever come of encouraging something like that.
"Honestly, though, I'm more excited to see if you can learn to extend it to other materials. When we stop for the night, if you don't mind, I'd love to play around with it."
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The joke is surprising, though Zane thinks it shouldn’t be. Mohinder is close to his age, maybe a touch older, and academia has not yet fully jaded him to life. He has a spark in him that makes Zane smile, and so Zane allows himself to feel it, to really absorb it.
It primes him for the words that follow. Mohinder says he’s impressive. He says he can grow his power. He is encouraging him to perhaps branch out into what can only be called as destructive possibilities.
He likes it. He really likes it.
“There’s—“ Zane shifts the seatbelt over his chest so he can turn, long legs bending. “We aren’t on any specific schedule right?” He’s fed the hunger. The constant ticking is lower than usual. It will come back, the need to rip apart and to learn and to absorb, but for now it’s a whisper and not a demand. “And honestly, we didn’t really plan too well for this. Did you have lunch? We could stop for lunch.” Especially if lunch meant he could try dissolving the silverware after.
Damn. If only he could show Mohinder how much more of him there is!
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It's nice of Zane to frame this whole strange and impulsive situation as something they'd failed to plan well, together, even if it's true. Mohinder had left Brooklyn at dawn with three days' worth of his warmest clothing stuffed into a bag, a few kits for DNA swabbing, and pretty much nothing else except his laptop. And here they are on their way to fucking Montana. The only thing in his stomach right now is a bowl of cereal, a tall scorched medium roast from a drive-thru Starbucks, and Zane's watery cup of Earl Grey.
And still, he's hungrier for scientific advancement right now than he is for actual food.
"There's no reason we can't take a break, no." He scans the signs along the road for anything that looks like a promising turn-off, but really, he'll eat almost anything if it gives them an excuse to park so that he can get a better look at all of this. Besides which, he wants to be able to look Zane in the eye while they talk. The conversation feels like it deserves better now than to be conducted while Mohinder is busy staring at someone else's tacky bumper stickers.
It feels absurd to feel proud in any way of a man he's literally just met, but when he remembers how shaky and frightened Zane had sounded on the phone, and compares it to how calm he'd sounded as he described his epiphany, and how eager he sounds now, Mohinder doesn't know how to feel anything but a sense of admiration. If he feels any unease or curiosity about why Zane's voice sounds different in person, he chalks it up to the phone connection and his own faulty perception. "Probably best if we avoid the Cracker Barrel, but otherwise--"
Whatever this next rest stop has, he'll take it. He turns off, heartbeat thrilling with anticipation.
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Zane holds the door for Mohinder as they step out of the cold. A waitress directs them to seat themselves and Zane hits up the table by the window. He sits so that the sun shines behind him, casting shadows on his face that not even the fluorescent lighting overhead can completely dash away. The green vinyl seats are worn. His chair is a little off balance. The frosted glass brick partitions are chipped.
It’s perfect.
Zane shrugs off his coat as the waitress comes over to take their orders. He already knows what he wants before even glancing at the menu. “Do you have cherry pie? Or peach? And might as well bring over a pot of coffee. It just smells so good.”
Tone it down, he tells himself.
A sheepish look covers his eyes. “I…. Doctor Suresh, I just want to apologize. And thank you. For bringing me. I wouldn’t normally do this. I just feel like, together, we can do anything. And—“ he pulls at the long sleeve shirt’s cuffs he’s wearing, allowing all of his awkwardness to express itself in a gush of sincerity. “I’m just so happy to make a difference.”
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Zane's overenthusiasm when ordering--overconfidence, even--doesn't register as odd. It feels of a piece with the cheery sunlit atmosphere, the promise hanging in the air. But Mohinder does find himself ever so slightly distracted by Zane's backlit features, surprised by their sudden angularity. He hadn't seemed this...sharp, in the car. They haven't known each other long enough for there to be such a thing as familiar or unfamiliar, and yet the difference is noticeable.
But only for a moment, until that awkward sleeve-tugging brings Mohinder back to what he's come to expect. He feels almost guilty about his inclination to be exasperated with Zane's overwrought gratitude, but what is he supposed to say? He's glad to be of help, glad Zane appreciates this, glad they can be of benefit to each other, but Mohinder has had too many lessons on stoicism drilled into him over the course of his life to be comfortable with displays this open. He smiles, a bit thinly, and glances aside.
"I don't know what you think you have to apologize for," he says, when he can make his tone sound kind and friendly again. "And please, Zane, it's perfectly fine to just call me Mohinder. I can't spend days in a car with someone calling me 'Doctor' the whole time."
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Zane Taylor can not be a babbling fool. He can not occasionally allow Gabriel to seep in. He has to camouflage Sylar. It’s a lot, even for him, when he’s so new at the persona game.
There needs to be rules. A style guide. So, for instance, Zane Taylor can get a little strange when he’s nervous and excited. Layer it. He is otherwise shy, but wanting so badly to connect to people. More. He’s recently come to terms with the fact that he can do remarkable things and he wants to help other people like him.
And now, to cover up any lingering awkwardness, he has to make this personal for Mohinder so that he can wriggle his way in and manipulate the man as he needs to.
So Zane rubs the back of his neck, and hunches his shoulders forward, eyes lifting towards Mohinder’s face. He’s easy to look. All attractive people are. Zane Taylor could find him to be so in more than just the general sense of the word, which would add that personal twist to explain why his behavior is extra awkward and erratic around him. The attention given to him by Mohinder has him a little on edge, because the one giving it to him has such beautiful eyes and an accent you could swim in.
There. Parameters set. Now Zane needs to just play inside the sandbox he’s generated for him.
“Mohinder— I”m— Oh. Was about to apologize again.” He laughs, and then leans back when the waitress arrives with the coffee and a slice of pie. Mohinder’s meal will take longer to prepare. “I eat a lot of pie when I’m nervous,” he confides in the geneticist. “You make me a little nervous. I mean, you can’t help it. You’re….” He trails off purposefully. “And all of this is out of my comfort zone. There’s so many out there feeling like I did. And still do. The responsibility to take care of that…. It’s a lot.”
He pours them both some coffee and then commands himself to shut up, eyes looking expectantly at his traveling companion like a gobsmacked puppy.
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All right. This, at least, is more familiar ground for Mohinder. He might look like a disgruntled deer in headlights when someone--anyone--is waxing poetic about his moral or professional virtue, because he has so little experience with that kind of praise even if he did think he deserved it--but it's not quite so mystifying to realize that Zane just thinks he's handsome. Even the waitress had found an excuse to brush her hand against his shoulder while clarifying a slightly unnecessary number of things about his turkey club order. Mohinder can work with this.
(As if he hasn't been pushing appreciative thoughts out of the back of his mind for hours about Zane's startlingly long limbs, the way Mohinder has to tilt his head back to talk to him every time they're outside of the car. As if the black-hole intensity of Zane's eyes isn't as intriguing as it is unnerving.)
It makes him feel all the more like an asshole for his impatience, but he'd like to think--or hope, at least--that he hadn't been as obvious about that as he actually was. And he can make up for it, if he tries. More visibly relaxed already, he reaches across the table to give Zane's wrist a firm, friendly squeeze. The shift in atmosphere isn't exactly calculated, not deliberate manipulation, but there's something second-nature to Mohinder about leaning into someone's interest and letting his gaze seem a little more conspiratorial, his smile more teasing, his voice lower and warmer. Hell, it works on Nirand.
"It is," he says. "It is a lot. But you said it yourself, Zane, and you were right. Who better than you to show these people they're not alone, and give them hope? We've got this."
Zane's presence does lend Mohinder much-needed extra credibility, for as long as he wants to keep providing it. And Zane himself had said it--they're not on any particular schedule. They can take as long with this as they please.
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Unlike Mohinder, Zane’s knowledge base on how to flirt comes from television and movies. He’s never held interest in relationships and has never once pursued one. It had not been important to the goals his mother had set for him and any mention of a woman in his life, even if she had been just a customer, led to jealousy and the cold shoulder from her.
Luckily, his strange translation of flirting with an attractive person whose praise he does genuinely enjoy just rolls into the Awkward Zane Taylor act. He does not try to touch Mohinder in return, and simply waits until his hand is free to dig into the pie.
Once his plate is clear, Zane pushes it towards the edge of the table and sets the fork down on the vinyl seat cushion of the chair between them. It is, for the most part, out of sight, but there’s still a rather heady feeling of doing something naughty in public about the gesture. “You said you were curious about what this could be. I’ve melted half of things. Particular parts of things. Did you want me to try something else?”
Despite Mohinder’s hand no longer resting on his wrist, Zane still feels the tingle of it. That’s… strange. Almost concerning.
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Noticing the surreptitious fork theft, he glances quickly around to make sure nobody else saw it, but when he's satisfied of that, his smile shares that scandalized-but-wicked little thrill. He ought to feel guilty, honestly, but--it's just a fork. And it's For Science.
"Very much so," he says, "but not in the middle of a restaurant. I only wish we could take some things with us besides that fork. If we could somehow get our hands on something made of glass, and something ceramic--I should think those might be the easiest materials to move on to from what you can already do, but it's just a hypothesis."
The plates are ceramic, and the windows are glass even if the cups they're drinking from are plastic, but there's no way Mohinder can think of to spirit any of those out of the diner without getting caught.
"Maybe," he muses, "if one of us 'accidentally' breaks a plate, we can keep the shards and just offer to pay for it. But we can't exactly do the same with the window."
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When is the last time he stretched that muscle? He’d been using it since the day he’d acquired it, but in the hours that have passed since he’d met Mohinder Suresh in person, he’d not once been able to tap into that ability. The more he thinks about it, the more he wants to use it. Mohinder’s gleefulness at some petty thievery turns the itch into a ticking against the inside of his skull.
He isn’t sure what the doctor is suggesting as the noise drowns him all. All he sees is his mouth moving.
And that’s when the waitress returns to plunk down Mohinder’s sandwich and to clear away some plates. “Can I get you another slice, hun,” she asks, as if she wasn’t younger than both men.
Food always draw s Sylar back to himself and he slips back into Zane like a glove. His smile returns. “Would it be too much trouble? Cherry this time?”
“Cherry? You got it,” she says with a laugh and leaves the men alone again while she dishes up more sugar and whipped cream.
Zane turns back to Mohinder and lets his smile fall. “We could stop at a gift shop. There’s got to be shot glasses or mugs,” he suggests. Stealing feels too Sylar to him. And Sylar needs to sleep or this could all end far too abruptly.
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And the solution he proposes is a hell of a lot simpler than whatever Mohinder was trying to finagle. (The quick disappearance of that smile makes something twinge very faintly in the back of his mind, a tiny little that's odd flag, but it's gone as soon as it came.)
"A gift shop? Like an airport gift shop? Do you have those just...lining the motorways here?"
Maybe he'd been more right than he realized when he'd told Nirand what a weird country America was.
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Zane gives Mohinder an amusing, half confused face. “Sort of…?” he trails off into a question, picking at the hem of his sleeves. “There’s always lots of trinket stores along highways. So when people stop because they need to use the bathroom, there’s little things for them to buy too. Usually there’s coffee and snacks and things that have the state or the milepost written on them for collectors. It’s capitalism at work.”
The pie comes over, two extra large slices for the cute men at the waitress’ table, and as there is a new fork tucked into the side of the filling of each, Zane doesn’t retrieve the fork he’d left on the seat.
“Couldn’t we do that? Pick up shot glasses or postcards at every place we stop. You know. To remember the trip by.” Sylar usually comes away with his own souvenirs, of course. He’s never been one for trinkets. His own collections have always been so carefully curated and steered clear of clutter and useless baubles.
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(He imagines, for a moment, doing this with Eden: the wry little jokes she'd have made, the things she would have made him break out of his comfort zone and try, the way she'd have listened to him even if he'd rambled. He doesn't know what's quicker to drop the smile off his face now--the reminder that she's dead, or the certainty that this imagined road trip would have been nothing like what he's picturing, because nothing he thought he knew about her was real anyway. But it's all still recent enough for the what-could-have-been ache to feel raw, and it hurts that he'll never actually know. Is it really worth developing yet another relationship for Sylar to come along and take from him, if the bastard wants to?)
"Seems like a bit of a waste, if you're going to melt them." It's harder to keep his tone upbeat now, but he forces himself to do it anyway, because none of this is Zane's fault. Zane doesn't deserve to be made to feel as if he's done anything wrong. "But that might actually make them a better souvenir than if they were intact. We'd have to find another way to label them." There, now he's capable of teasing again. The sandwich is helping.
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And fair. There are things Mohinder can do and understands that Zane simply does not have the education to. No amount of picking through Mohinder’s brain will give him the knowledge he would need. Perhaps someone out there has that particular gift though.
The thought is enough to make him salivate.
“I can make Christmas ornaments and we can have them engraved!” he says, leaning maybe a bit too hard into the Zane As Excitable Sidekick. At least he doesn’t state that he can do the engraving himself, though.
As the check is settled up (he insists on paying as he is well aware that Mohinder may not have a form of income and likely has no familial wealth), Zane settles his elbow on the table and rests his chin on it. His other hand reaches beneath the plasticy tablecloth, towards Mohinder. He holds the scientist’s eyes, but his fingers never reach the slimmer man. They’ve stopped on the fork still settled on the seat between them. There’s a mischievous smirk on his plump lips and his eyelashes flutter slightly.
The fork has turned into a puddle, no longer resting on the center of green vinyl seat cushion, but dripping down the sides.
“Shall we?”
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He doesn't understand, at first, what Zane's getting at with that held gaze--thinks, initially, that it might be some more forward flirtation, and okay, yeah, he can get on board with that, but--
Only when there doesn't seem to be any kind of physical contact forthcoming does he look under the table, and then he understands, instantly, before the fork even has time to dissolve. Something about doing this in public, where anyone could see it, where the look on Zane's face could give the wrong impression just in and of itself, where the evidence will be left pooling on the floor after they're safely back on the road, feels almost obscene.
This time, Mohinder's laugh is almost breathless.
"We'd better."
He leaves an extra ten dollars behind on the table as an apology to the owner whose upholstery they've ruined, a last little gasp of conscience, because the way he clasps Zane's shoulder on the way back to the car makes it clear that he has no problem at all with what just transpired.
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Sitting back in the seat, Zane clicks the seatbelt back into place, his smile large as he plays back Mohinder’s laugh. He likes the thought of having a friend to share these sorts of hijinks with. Showing off for someone just makes having abilities so much more worthwhile.
Yes, there are all sorts of people hunting him, but he’s escaped them all. He feels invincible. The sophomoric parts of his brain are all lit up and while they will betray him in the end, he doesn’t fight it.
By the time the coffee and pie and whatever it was Mohinder called a sandwich had finished their jobs of nourishing them, Zane spots a travel center. He points at the sign enthusiastically. “Let’s get some gas, hit the head, and get some pieces of Americana to melt tonight.”
It feels like his good mood will never end. It’s a dangerous way to be.
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Mohinder finds himself wondering, idly, what Zane is like onstage. This confidence must be a part of him that comes out in other circumstances, after all, for him to have sought a performance-related career, even if he's not a frontman. Maybe he can look up some videos of Zane's band once they've got wi-fi again--though where they're going, that might be a tall order. It's hardly as relevant right now as Zane's power is, in any case. Who needs grainy YouTube videos when he can just ask Zane to melt something and watch him grin like that in person?
He's more than glad to stop by the time Zane finds one of these weird kitsch bazaars, for all of those reasons, and he pulls in without hesitation. "All right. You go scout out anything you feel like you can work with, and I'll meet you inside once I'm done filling up. Be creative. You know your ability better than I do, but it can't hurt to push yourself a little."
He doesn't think he needs to tell Zane that.
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