TM #254 What was the longest day of your life?
There was no running water. The stove ran on propane. In a way it was a relief. It meant supplies had to have been brought in. Somehow there was a way to the cabin. Either through plane to car, there had to be a way in. A way in meant a way out.

The mug felt heavy in his hand. Despite the smilie face that tried to make things bright and cheery, he suspect the cheap thing had a high lead count. He found that amusing. It was deadly in more than one way as he swung it at his captor's head.

She fell, going down fast and heavy as the remnants of the mug hung limply from his hand. Dropping to his knees, teeth clacking together and Sylar tasted blood. He'd bitten through his tongue but he didn't care. He cared about finding it. It had to be there. Cutting through skin and bone with nothing more than broken shards of pottery. Giving in and using the thick base to hit at her head over and over again until the skull caved, spidering like a windshield caught by a stray rock.

Picking out the bits of bone through the blood and tissue. Heedless of the blood that trickled over the floor, soaked into the knees of his pants. Sylar didn't care about that. He didn't care how the shards of bone dug into his fingerpads, cutting until his blood mingled with her own. Even when the skull was open he continued to root through her brain, nimble fingers going numb against the pain. A pain borne not only of physical ailments, of the pain that shot through his side and the cuts that marred his hands. A pain borne of failure.

A cried out against the pain, anger and panic mingling in that moment. This couldn't be real. He couldn't even hear the ticking. He couldn't feel the hunger that had eaten at him for months. At one time he'd wanted to be free of it, to be done with the hunger and the desire and the need to do whatever it took to know and learn and consume knowledge like some devoured chocolate after a diet. At one time he'd wondered what life would be like without it. Now he knew.

The world was silent, painful so and even his screams couldn't drown that out.

Blood on his clothes, staining his fingernails even after washing time and again from bottles of spring water, it stained the floor and dried there as her body set into the tight lines of rigor mortis and death. She was dead. Forgotten and ignored. She meant nothing to him now. Less than nothing. She couldn't even be counted as one he remembered nearly fondly, if only for the ability they'd reluctantly given him.

More important was the torn stitches in his side from where the sword had run him through. Most important was finding a way from where ever he was back to New York, back to Suresh. Suresh would know what to do, he'd be able to fix whatever they'd done to him. It couldn't be that hard. Even bleeding and looking as ill as he felt, it couldn't be that hard to get back to New York.

Then Sylar had stepped outside.

There was nothing but green, verdant jungle as far as he could see. With his normal hearing, hearing that was so inadequate that it may well have been a form of deafness, he could hear nothing but birds crying and the chatter of animals. He could near nothing but the sound of desolation and lonliness.

Throwing back his head he screamed. A cry of pain and of rage. It was the sound of a wounded animal a moment before it killed one last time. The sound of an angel when they realized they had fallen to Earth, cast from the glory of heaven.

Gabriel, angel or not, had fallen, and he had yet to realize just how far he had to go to return to the glory of his own personal Heaven.