stumbling on their last mile, in a self inflicted exhile

Buffy spent most of the night sitting in the kitchen, going through news articles.

She didn't do this when he first got here. She knew the way the internet can skew things, and honestly -- she was more interested in having the backup than anything else. He said he wanted to help. He helped. He learned and took cues, and he didn't give her an overly creepy vibe, so she trusted that. And now, with how that conversation went from zero to intense in a matter of seconds, she wasn't entirely sure that she should have.

He was a killer. He was a killer, who was once again claiming that he was trying to redeem himself, and she wasn't entirely sure what to make of that.

She paged through the newspaper articles regarding Sylar, one after the other, just watching as the kills got more and more graphic, until she eventually had to close the screen. It all turned her stomach. She had been face to face with a killer before, but the look in it’s eyes was demonic. It was supernatural, which meant the rules were simple—you kill it before it kills you. It wasn’t a person anymore, it was a thing. Unless it had a soul, there was no redemption for them. They just were what they were.

Sylar was a whole different beast. He was human—powers or not, he was. He wasn’t some kind of monster where a demon had taken his place, which meant that she couldn’t simply kill him, and be done with it. He had a soul—but regardless of that soul, he had still done evil things. He had made the wrong choices, but he was out of her jurisdiction. Besides, she wasn’t entirely sure she could kill him, and not just because he had regeneration as an ability. Somewhere along the way, he had become her friend, and suddenly, it was Angel all over again—she was blindsided by the strong person on her side, and didn’t dig into his past because she didn’t want to, until she had to, and what she saw disgusted her.

At the same time, however, he was human. He had a soul, and he was working to redeem himself. He was trying to atone for his mistakes, and she wasn’t entirely sure she could turn him away. Not after how she had fought for Angel, for Spike. If anything, he stood more of a chance than they did, because there wasn’t a soul to lose. There was still a nature to fight, but Sylar’s soul was his own, and didn’t have a demon trying to force it out. At the same time, there were still too many questions. Too many things that she didn’t have answers for, and that the articles couldn’t answer. Only someone who knew Sylar could, which meant that she needed to talk to the one person who knew him better than anything.

Peter.

Sylar hadn’t given her a last name, which meant Googling a point of contact was probably out. She could probably ask Giles to look—start with Peter in New York City, and work their way through, but there was a much more direct route that she had been avoiding . It wasn’t right, and going through his phone, going behind his back to do this probably wasn’t going to win her any favors, but she had to know.

And his phone was sitting right there on the counter.

It was about three AM when she finally caved and picked it up. There weren’t a lot of numbers with names attached to them, which made finding Peter fairly easy. She dialed the number into her own phone, before hitting ‘send’ and making her way out of the room. She wanted at least a small amount of privacy for this—no need to worry the other girls if she didn’t have to. She closed the door to the downstairs bathroom behind her, before moving to sit on the edge of the tub, listening to the phone ring as she did.

All she had to do was wait for someone to answer.