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October 27, 1993
Matt doesn’t know if he’s ever made a good decision of his own volition in his life.
It was pouring down rain the day his mom kicked him out. He stopped calling after 6 weeks - after the Oriole burned down - that was 3 months ago. Matt is used to feeling like his world is painfully small. There is a kind of poetic irony that he feels trapped in a place that Statesiders still like to call the City of Dreams.
So, Matt does what he would do as a kid when his Mom was between jobs and needed him out of her hair, or when they were between living spots. Matt finds a place to hide. It’s late October now, the day was just warm enough that the rain is damn near muggy. He tried calling her from the pay phone in the Cartwright Hotel’s lobby, and the call didn’t go through.
It was raining too, back in mid July, just a few days after his birthday, that was how he met the Skylark girls.
•-•-•-•-•
July 21, 1993
Matt finds himself in either Cannery or Klets - he can’t tell which. He forgets sometimes that other corners of the city don’t have the smell of wood-pulp in the air. That streets outside of Paper Mill - outside of Grant’s Ville - aren’t littered with wood chips.
He ends up shaking - because he’s soaking wet - in the back of some club - maybe it’s a bar - did he remember to flash a fake? - Not that it was all that convincing in the first place, beset by babyface as he is - all he knows is that the whole place smells like sweat and alcohol and cigarette smoke. It’s like he’s choking on air - like he’s dry drowning. In all his shit luck, he then trips over someone else’s feet, absolutely eats shit, and lands in a face first heap on the sticky concrete floor.
But, before he knows it, a woman in a shiny, slinky, wine red dress and a massive fur coat is helping him up.
“Hey, you okay Lucky?” The woman’s voice is warm - soft - comforting. She has a wide, snaking scar across her left eye, from her brow bone, down to nearly the curve of her jaw, the undamaged eye is the color of fool’s gold.
One day he will associate Lav calling him Lucky with feeling at home.
“Huh?” His voice is nearly intelligible over the club’s blaring music. The lights make his head spin.
She taps her acrylic nails on the carton of Lucky Strikes that had fallen from his shirt's front pocket, the one that hides his stash of cash, “You alright kid?”
He hums, “Yeah. Thanks Ma’am, I’m just cold.”
The woman snorts at being called such a formal title, and takes off her coat before holding it out to him.
“Here.”
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” He tries to push it back to her.
“Listen, Lucky, it’s probably 80 degrees in this place with how many fucking people are here, and you’re shivering like a drowned chihuahua. Take the coat.”
He wraps himself up in it.
“I’m gonna smoke, you wanna join me?”
Matt fidgets under his soaked clothes and the heavy fur jacket.
The woman’s face softened, “I don’t bite, kid, I promise.”
“‘m not a kid,” He mumbles as he follows the woman out into the street.
Because he’s not, he’s 14 now, he’s not a kid, he’s not a kid. If God wanted him to still be a kid he wouldn't be alone.
She laughs again, breath turning to fog in the rapidly cooling air, “Yeah, and I’m the Queen of England.”
He watches her glow under the streetlamp, it’s maybe 40 degrees out with the misting rain and the wind chill, and she stands and smokes like it’s a bright summer day in her liquid-gleam slip of a dress. It reminds him of the dresses his Ma used to wear when she worked the casinos in Paper Mill. The rain has softened to a mist, and the neons of Starlight Avenue’s seediest clubs turn the rain slicked road into an oil spill. So, he had been wrong on both accounts, he’s in Richter Park. He breathes in the freezing air, letting it chill his lungs and burn his tongue, until it coats the gapping chasm inside of his chest. The city hums long and low. Magnus, the Magnus he’s always known, is a city of the night, that’s when it feels most itself, bright and neon fed, it bleeds a warm sort of pleased contentment as soon as the sun sets. Winter is the season of death, of which Magnus is storied in, and yet, it lives, vivid, in the dark.
The woman stamps the cigarette out under the toe of one chunky bright red leather high heel.
She digs around in her nearly comically small purse for a moment, nearly fumbling a tube of Tangee lipstick into the gutter, before she hands him a yellowed matchbook.
“You come here if you need anything, okay kid?”
Just like that, the woman walks away, as he stands under the golden light of the street lamp, still wrapped up in her fur coat.
•-•-•-•-•
July 29, 1993
The matchbook the woman had given him was for The Skylark Gentlemen’s Club.
It took him 8 days to give it a second glance. In those 8 days he had managed to develop an awful fever.
In a state of what could only be described as delirium, he waded from street corner to street corner. The phonebooks in three different phone booths had no bars by that name in their yellow pages. They were all published by St. Edgar Switchboard Co, which were always the most up to date according to Sal, and yet no luck. It took him another two booths to even think of the matchbook that had sent him on this wild goose chase in the first place, on the back of the matchbook was listed, in small, faded, print, an address. 414 Studbaker Street, Richter Park.
He had sequestered himself away in the Queen Anne, a shady hotel, one on a laundry list of hotels in the area that looked the other way at any of their patrons. It was honestly a little depressing that no one batted an eye at Matt’s presence, the Residential Hotels of Grant’s Ville had them beat at that at least. Mrs. Park, his landlady at the Oriole pitched a fit when anyone besides the residents entered the building. She also occasionally yelled at the residents for the same reason, she was a bit senile. The club, or at least its location circa 1970-something, was only three blocks away, less than he had walked in his hunt for yellow pages.
In the 10 minutes it takes him to get to the dilapidated facade of the Skylark, it feels, distinctly, like his intestines are turning into burning coals in his gut. Half of the lilac neons of the abandoned club’s sign are burnt out, the curving ’S’ hanging at an unforgiving angle. Transforming Skylark into Sylar. There’s another neon sign, in one of the second floor windows, in a not too dissimilar shade of purple, with a big light up eye that slowly blinks, the words curling around it proclaim ’Phone Psychic’.
He trudged up the stairs, the fur coat tucked under his arm, it had begun to fuse with his skin. It was truly, disgustingly hot, even for July, and the combination of sweat and fur was not a forgiving one. The old steps were slightly too steep for someone with a sick-impaired mind and a bum leg. He nearly slid straight down twice; it was a wonder that he didn’t crack his skull open, with the syrupy haze about his brain. He only remembers to knock on the door after standing there some 5, maybe 6 minutes, moments away from giving up the ghost. The half-broken squeak of the door is one that will stick in his head for eternity.
•-•-•-•-•
His last night in the Skylark he counts the cracks on the ceiling. There’s 17 cracks. There were only 15 last time.
•-•-•-•-•
January 5th, 1994
"Hey, Lucky Strike!" Lav’s voice is light, happy - home.
"Lav!"
"You got bored?" She’s a kind of incredulous he can’t help but love.
It makes him feel a bit stupid, how much he's missed her.
"I have a place."
"Would my girls and I approve?"
There have always been runaways living in the Skylark, since time immemorial. Lavender had been one of them when she was a child, and took up patronship of the place from the last girl. Right now, the only people there full time besides Lav were Marty and Sere. She and her girls look out for other people, other kids.
Everybody knows that Magnus has always had a problem with street kids. The Skylark does more than the city ever has.
"Lucky?"
He flinch-snaps to attention, "Yeah, it's up to standard."
Lav looks at him with her beautiful disbelieving cow eyes.
He holds his hands up in a show of supplication, "No creeps."
"Just remember that-"
"If I ever need you to call the psychic number and ask for a deadman's prayer or come to the Skylark."
Matt hopes that that’s the end of it. That Lav will give him an incredulous grin, and tell him whichever backdoor or window that Matt should sneak through if he wants to visit her during her performance at the Dionysus Lounge. Unfortunately, for all of his nonexistent luck, Lav's freakishly perceptive.
"You're acting shifty. What's going on?"
“I made a friend."
"Like… that weird kid at your school?"
Lav had been the one to help him find one of the last few schools in Magnus that didn't require much paperwork while still having a good English department.
"Nah, a- a girl, her name’s Nico."
Nico, who wears smudgy eye makeup somewhere between Siouxsie Sioux and Dee Snider. He sort of thinks she looks cool. He hasn't told her that though. Two nights ago, she actually bit that creep behind the diner when he made some weird remark about the two of them.
She's... incredible. Yeah, that sounds right.
He's never really had a friend before, it's nice. Lav didn't count, she’s a protector down into her blood. That's not to say he doesn't care about her, or Marty or Sere. But they were more like having estranged cousins you haven't seen in a decade. Although, somewhere in some New Jersey suburb, he's got real estranged cousins he's never met. Maybe he has met one of them, or maybe an Aunt, or Uncle, and just never realized it. A passing stranger on the street who shares half his blood. He used to think the same thing about his dad, but at least he can guess what his Ma's family looks like. She always said that the Abatangelo genetics were strong.
The only thing he knows about his dad is that he has to be ash blonde with eyes like a homeric sea, because his Ma has deep brown eyes and the hair to match and Matt certainly doesn't. If you ignore the Sandy blonde of his hair and the blue of his eyes, he'd lifted almost every other feature from his Ma. His Ma's tall for a lady, 5'6, maybe 5'7. Matt's definitely too short for his age. Ma said she's been the same height since she was 15, so he hopes that he gets a growth spurt in the next 8 months, else-wise he's screwed, because he's 14 and a half and still a few inches shy of 5 foot. Which is, quite frankly, embarrassing.
He knows one other thing, from within that vastness of all that was before him. There's an engraving on the back of the timepiece that was once his dad's, it says 'Went, We Love You'. Which makes no grammatical sense whatsoever. Even if it makes no sense, he wears it constantly, he only takes it off to shower, just like how he treats his St. Christopher medallion. When he's in the shower, he often thinks that without the watch that there’s no time. While St. Christopher was not the patron saint of children - not traditionally anyways - this did not stop his Ma from calling him the children's saint.
His Ma had insisted when he was young that St. Christopher was his saint. His feast day a week and day after he was born. He had been brought home on the feast day of St. Christopher, after spending his first few days in the care of nuns. Somehow, his Ma decided to take him back. Her plan had been to put him up for adoption, he still doesn't know why she changed her mind. The only answer she ever gave when he asked why she decided to keep him was simple, only three words;
"You were mine."