microwavelength | (no subject)

It slipped his mind it was even Saturday, most days blurred into one and he was sure his not-date with Luke had been a weird fever dream or something. What the hell even was that? He was only sure it was real when he saw the angry red mark the next day. It hadn't faded, it had stayed, a reminder that it really happened.

The heist was supposed to be easy but this one? It wasn't run by the rogues, just a small time gang and he forgot he wasn't working with professionals. They made a terrible job of breaking in and out, they attacked everyone still inside causing a major scene, they almost left half the stash behind because they forgot to check the vaults and they tripped the silent alarm on the way out.

The cops would be here any minute and there was Axel, holding a bag full of cash. The others were getting into the car and when he tried to get in, he was stopped. The big guy running this thing held up his hand before gesturing at Axel's share.

"You want in, you gotta pay for it."

Fuck. This was so the last time he pulled a heist with amateurs.

Luke always found that the more fat content in a person, the better they smelled when they were cooking. It took them longer to go, though. The screaming was always so much longer and more perverse. He watched from the corner in just a pair of jeans and a tee shirt with a utility jacket thrown on, hands in his pockets, as the guy barring the way into the car started to convulse. He took a step forward, as if Axel could offer him any help, and spit a gob of boiling blood just in front of his boot. He had a good old time writhing around before the men in the car freaked out and finally stepped on the gas.

They didn't get far. A little melting of their fuel tubes stopped their car dead. They slammed into a brick wall at about ten miles an hour. It was enough to hurt them, but not kill them.

Luke strolled up the alley to nod a little at Axel, still holding his bag of money.

"Ready?" Most of the guy at his feet was split open, like he had been stuck in an oven for awhile. "Taco Bell for dinner?"

The moment the guy started convulsing, he knew. It was a Saturday, after all. He should have seen this coming, he should have expected Luke. He convulsed, shook and his skin started to melt. It reminded him of the old horror movies he used to watch on VHS like Street Trash, where people just sort of melted. Only less colourful. He supposed being into the body horror genre made this a tiny bit less horrifying but it was still hard not to get squeamish.

There was a long trail of blood just at his shoes and behind him, the car was smoking violently, this place was a fucking mess and the cops were on their way. If they didn't leave soon, they were so done for but Axel couldn't seem to get his legs to move or his brain to catch up.

When it finally did, he blinked a few times and took some steps away from the mush of a man with his steaming organs at his feet. The corpse finally fell with an unpleasant wet sound and Axel flinched.

"Fuck." He finally said as he looked at Luke, his eyes somewhat wide. "You just -- fuck, he was like melting!"

"Melted-- Dude. Have you ever tried cooking in your life? Put a fucking roast in the oven and watch what happens. When the liquids are hot enough to boil, the steam just bursts through the skin." Luke wasn't even looking at his victim. He was frowning up at Axel who did not, again, seem to want to go to Taco Bell.

Luke loved Taco Bell. They have five dollar dinner boxes right now and you got just so much damned food. It was great. He'd need like three boxes to fill up after this, but so, so worth it.

He made sure he stopped just short of where the dead man's juices were slipping into the gutter, loose jeans hiding that he was rock hard again. There was just something about cooked flesh-- He'd never eat anyone, that was gross, but it really did get him off.

Or get him hard at least.

"Are you done freaking out? Can we go?"

"Could you not compare this to food? God, you're going to ruin meat for me. I don't want to become vegetarian, you can never get the good gummy sweets." Axel whined as he pulled a face at the body. No, he wasn't hungry and he didn't particularly want to go to Taco Bell but he sort of figured the sooner they got this trip to Taco Bell out of the way, maybe it'd be over? Maybe Luke would make new friends.

Or not-friends because apparently they weren't friends, didn't hang or have dates but it all still kept happening. Funny, that.

"I'm allowed to freak out over a cooked body." Axel ripped up his bag on cash and sighed, feeling like he wanted to puke so much but fortunately, he was empty stomached and he wasn't looking directly at it any more. "Can't you just watch horror films and jack off like a normal psycho? Trust me, it's fun. I do sometimes too. This whole melting your problems away thing is a little much. Can't you just hold back a little?"

All questions he was sure he knew the answer too. Still, he shrugged and gestured ahead. "Taco Bell?"

"Taco Bell."

Luke...well it wasn't like he was a guy of few words, he just figured that Axel liked to complain so he let him. He wasn't going to touch the watching horror films and Jack off thing-- Luke didn't do that. The body was gross. The stuff that came out of the body was gross. He just let whatever desires he felt slip away from him. His erection was already softening, and it would be better after they left the street. The cops would take care of the rest when they showed up.

The Taco Bell Luke picked wasn't much cleaner than the bar from the other night but it was a lot brighter. The bright lights didn't really make him any more handsome or do him any favors on that front. He still had dark circles under his eyes. He looked somewhat malnourished under his clothing.

He ended up ordering half the menu and dropped it down in front of Axel after he paid for it, making the kids in the back rush away from the counter to chat about how scary he had been ordering a bunch of cheesy gordita crunches.

He tore right into one of the meals, only glancing up when he realized Axel wasn't joining him. "What the hell is wrong with you?"

"I feel a little nauseous. I know. Weird, right?" The smell of cooking meat turned his stomach and he just couldn't associate now. He really hoped that connection didn't stay with him. He pulled out his phone and checked the news, just to see if anyone had reported the robbery yet. Nothing yet but apparently the road outside the jewellery store had been shut off. No shock there.

Axel sent out a few messages online, just because, and then looked over his phone at the food again, as if debating if he could handle it or not. Maybe in a few. He looked back at his phone and idly continued typing.

"I'll jump right in when I stop picturing that guys organs on the floor, steaming away." Which could take a few. Maybe he could learn to blank this shit out. "Maybe next time kill someone after I have food, it puts me off less."

Microwaves were funny things. You could cook with them, sure, but you could also use them to have your cell ping a tower or a communication satellite to transmit data for you when you weren't on WiFi. It's what CCTV ran off of. It's what radar used. All of those little tweets that Axel decided to send out, therefore, could be redirected and scanned and understood.

That's what happened when you figured out you had a power at sixteen and spent the last five years or so getting very, very good with that power.

Luke sucked up some soda and settled back against the plastic backed booth.

"What should I have done? That dude was threatening you."

"People threaten me all the time. It's part of the job. Besides, I'm smaller, weaker and annoying. I get them back. Slowly. I'm less messy with my revenge." But still just as cruel. Little tricks and traps to hold people down, to hurt them, to make them sick. The last guy who hurt him, he lost his finger in a particularly vicious finger trap. The guy before that had a bomb strapped to him... but Leonard made him disable that before it properly blew anyone up.

He shrugged his shoulder as he set his phone down and looked over at Luke, shooting him a confused look. It was all so strange.

"Why do you care anyway?" Axel leaned forward a little, a playful smile coming to his lips. "Are you starting to like me? Aww, I thought I was boring."

It was a good question, even coming from a jackass. Luke leaned back, staring at Axel over the plane of his cheeks for a moment as if sizing him up. Or maybe trying to figure out if he should just kill him and blow the place up. It was hard to tell with Luke.

But he'd found a place to shower. He'd tried to do something with his hair (just with handheld clippers, but he made an effort). The truth was that he was lonely. And most people just ran.

Axel didn't.

"So when I was ten, my dad use to play this game with me. He'd hold a piece of candy in one hand and he'd have me try to guess which hand it was in. If I was right, I'd get the candy. If I wasn't, he'd give me these." He pulled up his jacket. The cigarette burns were numerous. Impressive. "I don't like bullies."

"Behind every psycho seems to be a fucked up dad, huh? It's like psycho 101 or something." Axel hmmed a little and took in the burn marks, head tilted to the side. He'd got his own share of scars, that sort of shit happened when you got passed from foster home to foster home, never really getting attached to anyone, always getting dropped and the discipline always ranged from person to person. Some got pretty physical. Still, as he got older, he got his one silver lining to cling to. The Trickster. "Well, not all psychos. My shrink says I'm a psycho but I have the best dad. He's the greatest man alive."

He picked up his phone again and swiftly googled his dad, turning the phone around so Luke could see the pictures and the wiki article. A terrorist and a murderer, not the kind of person who could, by any measure, be a good dad. Axel was, to a degree, a very massive degree, deluded when it came to his father. Brainwashed. Groomed. He had been writing to him in prison since he was thirteen and even then, he had no idea it was his father.

He'd never had anyone and now he had a father. And his father was his hero. "He's a legend. The original Trickster. Look at that body count! He let me use the name. He's cool like that. We usually work together. We're not right now. He sort of, you know, threw me out of a moving car." Axel smiled like it was nothing and shrugged his shoulders. "He had to get away, he needed a distraction. The cops went after me instead. Pretty smart."

Taking his phone back, he looked at the article with pride. "Barely hurt. I rolled on dirt, no tarmac."

"Never heard of em," Luke said honestly, unwrapping a burrito this time. Shredded chicken. He wasn't really paying attention what he was eating. It was good. It was filling. He needed the energy. "You don't gotta show me what's on your phone, dude."

He tapped his own, and then rolled his eyes and grabbed it from where it rested on his knee under the table. It was currently processing everything that Axel was doing. All he had to do was run an app and he could split the signal to and from Axell's phone himself.

It didn't always work, they had to be close for it, but it was just one of those neat little tricks he'd learned about when being alone.

"Where's your dad at now? I'd like to meet him."

"Yeah, well, you live in a hick town, of course you haven't." Axel muttered bitterly because he had no idea how anyone could not know the Trickster. He hated this stupid town, he couldn't wait to get back to Central. Though he didn't love the idea of seeing the rogues again, knowing he'd been part of a murder. They had a lot of rules about that and Luke was crushing all of them.

He looked at the app and slowly, he raised an eyebrow. Huh. "That's... creepy. Dude, stay out of my phone."

It was private. Ish. He didn't really have much outside his public social media and all of his texting was either for hook ups or trying to co-ordinate heists. Nothing personal. Axel looked down and frowned a little, trying to not let that question bother him. "Dunno. He said he'd come back but ... look, he's busy. And even if he wasn't, I don't trust you near him. You'd melt my dad!"

"I'm less in your phone and more in your signal," Luke gloated. He couldn't help it. This guy wasn't praising his abilities, he wasn't awestruck by them but it was probably close enough. It was absolutely close enough. Luke was warming up to this guy. That might be the tacos talking, of course, but here he was, relaxing and having a normal conversation.

Would his mom be proud of him? Not that he'd ever know. After he stole the car, which she did not report missing, she moved. New life. No crazy son. He didn't miss her.

His emotions were broken. Samuel said that often enough.

"And uh...yeah. I'm gonna melt your dad. Well no. Melt? Stop it. It's not fucking melting people."

"Still in my phone no matter how you reason it. The nice thing to do is not to do it." Axel rolled his eyes, just glad there was nothing he was really ashamed of on his phone. He didn't have much shame in all honesty, he wasn't even ashamed of his dick pics from last week. He quick liked them, good lighting and everything.

Axel leaned back in his seat and crossed his arms, levelling Luke a judgemental look.

"Why are you so offended by melting? They do melt. Boil first them melt. It's like that scene in Robo Cop, you know? Where that guy gets acid on him and melts. Only there's more heat and red and blood." Axel shrugged a little. It was traumatic to watch, sure, but afterwards it was a lot easier to talk about it like it's just some dumb film and nothing more. It helped him keep that detached distance he probably needed.

"And no, you're never going near my dad. No melting anyone I like."

Trying to explain the difference between melting and cooking was probably inconsequential. Soft solids melted. Harder solids cooked. Wet solids steamed.

"If I melted people, there would just be puddles left. And there aren't." He took Axel's soda in hand and concentrated on it until it started to bubble. "Think microwave, dude. So if you want to be accurate, I'm probably still gonna microwave your dad one day. He deserves it."

And maybe whoever Axel sent those pics to. Luke didn't like competition.

"But fine. Whatever. How about I just say that if he ever pisses me off, he gets nuked?" Axel might be thinking that was fair. That 'Sylar' would never come across his dad. But Luke has latched on. Axel was sort of doomed.

"You owe me a new drink." Was all Axel took away from that demonstration as he frowned at his bubbling soda. Horrendously hot pepsi bubbling away like some kind of tar like thing? No thank you. Pulling a face, he leaned over and stole Luke's drink instead, taking a long sip from it as the other spoke about human puddles and his dad. Sharing was what friends did and he just assumed, given everything, that was where this was going. Whether or not Luke knew that. He set the drink back down and slid into his seat again.

"Not my dad. Never my dad. If he pisses you off, use your fists. Don't melt-- or whatever, burn and boil, my dad. He's important." Axel wasn't going to relent on this one. He didn't want to lose what he only just got, especially not when he was his childhood hero.

Shaking his head, he finally took some food, trying to put the idea of nuked people from his mind.

"He doesn't deserve it anyway." He looked at Luke and cocked his head to the side, clearly amused. "Careful, Sylar. You're starting to sound like you're endeared."

"I don't owe you anything," Luke frowned, noisily biting into some of the nachos without much relish. Axel wasn't ruining it for him exactly but Luke didn't understand emotions the way most people did. His mom use to think he has some form of autism until he learned to smile-- Until he figured out how fun it was to have abilities that no one else did.

He watched the slightly older man take a long drag from his soda before he rolled his eyes and went up to buy a new on. When the staff didn't present themselves, he just grabbed a cup and filled it up at the soda station himself before sitting down across from Axel.

He did not, however, make any comment about being endeared. Maybe he was. Luke was aware that he got attached. Quickly.

"So what stuff do you like to do when you're not getting yourself almost caught by the police?" He paused and tilted his head to the left. "That's a normal question, right?" He was genuinely asking.

"Yeah, that's pretty normal." Axel was amused as he took the old soda and slid it over to himself, playing around with the straw and using it to stir the ice around, idly focusing on that as he tried to think of what it was that he did. "Mostly I just make stuff. Tricks and tech, I do a lot of hacking. I'm not like a hacktivist or something, I just like to snoop. You know, looking into things like whether or not the government is hiding alien deets or if my ex is bitching about me on facebook. He is."

Axel nodded his head slowly and huffed a little. He stalked one guy once and broke into his apartment to steal his clothes and then try to seduce him and suddenly he was 'creepy'. Pfft, people.

"Otherwise I go to clubs. Drink some, meet some guys, you know how it goes." He doesn't explicitly explain but he assumes Luke would just get the point. What else did someone go to a club to meet guys for? Axel looked at Luke and smiled. "What about you, handsome? What do you do when you're not nuking people?"

He didn’t like it. There was a sour look on Luke’s face when Axel again called him ‘handsome.’ There was no eye roll, just an out and out scowl. Of course, that scowl could also be because Axel had just he told him that he cyber stalked people after making a big deal about being spied on with his phone. Or maybe because he had gotten Cherry Pepsi instead of regular Pepsi.

He set his cheek in his palm, unblinking as he watched Axel’s face for a moment. None of those ‘fun things’ sounded very fun to him.

“I don’t make plans. I just try to stay alive and kicking and under the radar.” Which he hadn’t been doing since he’d been trying to impress Axel with his abilities in wildly public manners.

Axel cocked his head to the side and frowned as Luke looked at him like that. He seemed almost off put and Axel was unsure why. What was his problem? Not a fan of Axel's productive week or did he just not like the gay thing? Either way, he didn't get too drawn in by the look, he let it pass as he ate some of his food, slow and careful, not wanting to risk making himself feel sick again. "Sounds like you have an amazing amount of fun."

There was some sarcasm to his tone but if that was all he did for fun? What a boring life. Didn't he like watch TV? Play video games? Hell, did he at least go out and do stuff? Frequent taco bell regularly or something.

"You should come to a club with me some time. I can find you a pretty girl or something." Wait. "Not to nuke! Obviously."

The next face pulled was even more rancid. Axel was going to have to take back that ‘handsome’ remark sooner or later. Preferably sooner, or else Luke might just progressively slip to uglier and uglier faces. “Too many people, too loud, too many phones and the fuck would I want anything to do with a pretty bitch?”

Looks meant nothing to Luke. He just liked interesting, out there, potentially insane people to stalk. To emulate. He couldn’t imagine Sylar actually going to a club either, so he certainly wasn’t.

“Unless you want to have fun with the sound systems…?”

There was that nasty smile again. At least it was a step up from the faces? Maybe?

Edited 2017-01-23 14:52 (UTC)

"Fuck her." Axel offered as he sipped his drink and gave Luke a frown. He just looked pissy and he didn't seem game, it wasn't very nice. He didn't like the idea of playing around with a sound system either so he just held up his hand and relented. "Forget it, we won't go and do clubs. You just keep on being you, gorgeous. Just don't be it where I like to hang."

He snorted in amusement and looked down, putting some nachos in his mouth. He licked his fingers a little and looked back up at his company.

"What's your problem? You look like I spat in your food? Is it cause I stole your drink or something?"

Lesson one, Ax. Do not tell Luke not to do something. He will do it just on principal. It wasn't that Axel wasn't allowed to to out and have fun, it's just that he wasn't allowed to do it with other people. Luke learned the hard way how it was like being second fiddle and he was going to do it right this time around.

If he decided that Axel was right for the position. If not-- Well, Luke didn't really have a ex policy. Not yet. This was his first and hopefully last attempt at getting what he wanted anyway.

Then again, Axel was being disgusting right now. Luke's eyes darkened. "Did you spit in my food?"

Not cool. He dropped the nacho he was holding immediately.

"No... why the fuck would I do that? And when would I even have chance?" Axel rolled his eyes and shook his head, finishing off his drink and giving Luke a look. He was difficult company. It was hard to be around him sometimes and it was even harder to read him. Everything could end badly at a wrong word or a dodgy thought and that left him feeling tentative.

He slid his phone into his pocket and gave the other a slight sigh. "Yeaaaah. Look, dude, you've got some issues and that's not so bad, I think it's part of your charm and all. The whole cute, psycho vibe? Not bad but I gotta head off. This was a fun date."

With mixed results but Axel really needed to go before he made a proper mistake here and got melted.

Sliding out, he smiled at Luke then paused, leaning in a little. "Huh. Did you do something to your hair? It's nice. I like it."

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Phew. Figured out how to turn layout off.

You genius!

Except it took me twenty minutes

Moderate genius!

\o/

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