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It's a regular caravan that shows up at Metropolis today.

Vehicle One: The Coraline, a modifies pick-up truck being driven by everyone's favourite bloodthirsty pirate, with a distinctly anti-killing ex-Robin in the passenger seat. The ghost of a teenage girl is technically sitting on the roof of the cabin, but sometimes she pokes her head in to interrupt the boys in their conversation.

Vehicle Two: A 1967 Chevrolet Impala, the only one blaring out tunes, while the driver and his blonde passenger sit in relative silence, not having much to say to each other.

Vehicle Three: A Porsche, containing one carefully prepared hunter and one blind woman who prides herself on not needing any preparation. The conversation in that one is a little more lively, even containing the occasional laugh from the girl.

It's a ridiculous procession, considering they don't really know where they're going. But Jack has all six of his senses peeled, looking for a young teenage girl of Chinese origin who isn't a young teenage girl of Chinese origin.

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You know what? Sylar has missed provoking this kind of visceral, obvious reaction in people. He's missed people seeing what he can do and not just shrugging it off. He's missed this kind of power.

The smile on his stolen face is really not a good one -- a kid allowed to play at last crossed with the sneer of Ozymandius crossed with a tiger staring down a wounded deer -- but whatever oh-so-witty retort he had lined up for Jo is abandoned in favour of yelling, screwing closed his eyes and throwing up his arms to protect his face from the real Jubilee's counterattack.

Ow. Frelling ow. That's really a lot less fun from the receiving end.

"How'd you like it, asshole?" Jubilee whoops, just before
The salt bullets pass through Jubilation's upper arm as if they were made of air. and hit the ghost of Jubilee firmly in the chest.

She screams, and dissipates
The fireworks ease off suddenly.

"Dean!"

This is about when Sam fucks the half-assed plan they'd had in the first place in favor of answering his brother. He skids into the room, finds Dean and Jo on the floor, and decides to think about it later.

He lifts his arm, hand centered on Jubilee's body and fingers spread and concentrates hard.

As the lights in his face vanish, Sylar tries in vain to blink the afterimages out of his stinging eyes. Just seconds later, though, there are the noisy footsteps of Sam's arrival and a wrenching, blinding pressure, as if something is reaching in through the back of his skull and groping around to dislodge him.

It doesn't take a genius to work out what's going on.

Sylar swears, his breath rasping in his throat, and clings to Jubilee's body with every shred of will he can possibly muster. Then, temporarily entirely solid, he aims an angry, desperate punch at the place where he judges Sam to be from what shapes he can see and the sound of the man's entry.

There's a problem here, and it's the same problem Sam had pointed out time and time again with Dean - Sylar is not a demon. He knows what that feels like, how to differentiate between the demon and the true person inside the body, knows how to pull one with minor damage to the other. But Sylar doesn't feel like a demon exactly, doesn't feel like he belongs entirely either, which means Sam has to concentrate even harder, focus-

Which is interrupted a bit when he's punched in the shoulder.

His concentration wavers while he reacts, letting out a shout of pain and then lifting his arm again. He's pulling again but there were several seconds where Sylar would have been perfectly able to pull himself together a bit.

Dean, still on the floor, is ...

just staring at Sam.

THERE ARE GOING TO BE WORDS AFTER THIS, SAM, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON D:

Jo's look is hard, but there's a startlingly grim lack of surprise to it. Though the lack of it doesn't make her face anymore friendly.

(The sound she's hearing could easily be a tree.

Somewhere not far enough away.)

"Focus, Sam!" Jo snapped through gritted teeth. "We need her in one piece. We've got the rest."

And then judging the sound of steps and the sound of the girl gasping while she became solid, more than her own ability or inability to see, Jo plunged head long like a battering ram at where she thought the girl most likely was.

Sylar intends to make full use of those several seconds: he stumbles towards the table that Dean knocked over, ready to grope for a large, heavy ornament with which he can hit Sam again. What with one thing and another, this movement carries him straight into Jo's advance.

It's unexpected and kind of painful.

The obvious reaction is to phase, to minimise the impact and to stop her from grabbing him. And because of the surprise, and because of the distraction of hanging grimly onto the stolen body, he doesn't realise until a second too late that doing this while already falling is a rather bad idea.

Sylar vanishes through the carpet.

But hey, when he recovers his wits and re-materialises two and a half storeys down, wouldn't it just be the perfect movie-sequence escape if his fall gets broken by a well-placed bed?

Irrelevant. He hits the floor.

And just seconds after her hits that floor, the door is kicked in hard, and Jack storms in.

"Here!" he shouts, and bears towards her. He's had time to think, and he reckons that if he wastes no time in putting the boot in, backing off, then hitting again, he can keep the body in pain and keep it from 'phasing'. At least until Sam gets here.

Contrary to appearances, he's not happy with having to beat up a pubescent girl.

When he lands, Sylar can hardly think for the pain stabbing through his hip and shoulder and head and throughout his entire body. So there's a horrible grinding noise of pain in his throat, and a sick feeling in his stomach, and they only get louder and worse when he's kicked and when his attempt to scramble away results in a sensation in his hip like being pounded with a mallet.

Come on, the guy just fell three storeys onto a hard floor.

He ain't going anywhere.

Good. Because while Sam might have been able to barrel through his broken concentration and gotten himself together again, now he has to run out the door and down the stairs with a blinding headache blurring his vision.

Oddly enough, it isn't Jubilee, but Jo that's making him rush and focus. Or at least, her words.

Meanwhile, outside:

Leah didn't stay exactly by the cars, sorry Sam. He told her a few things before, and she listened.

She's been tracking a perimeter around the building, using her cane to make sure she can keep it to her right, all the time letting a steady trickle of salt out of the bag she prepared before.

She even kept it up after the gunshot, but only picked up the pace to make it back to the cars.

That Jo manages to knock the girl down into the ground doesn't stop the concluding fact that following it Jo does a face plant into the floor once the girl goes straight through it.

The sickening smack and the swearing that followed would be just that happening.

Jo might be rethinking that part about not damaging the girl's body (a little) as she shoved her own back up into a crouch, doing her best to shut out the pain entirely.

She felt for her gun, as she glanced over at Dean, "You still alive over there?"

"Pissed off. Fine. Let's move!"

Beat.

"You okay?" As they're running for the door.

The pounding of their shoes down the hall after the other sounds loud in her ears. She did her best not to consider rubbing her face or shoulder were they sang.

"Nothing a hot shower and bullet ridden body won't solve."

Now that the mindlessness of the initial shock has worn off, Sylar is uncomfortably aware that he needs to get the hell out of here for reasons other than his current world of hurt.

Jack's boot, plus every bone and muscle down Sylar's left hand side, has other ideas.

He's not going to give them the satisfaction of crying, goddamnit, but his eyes are wet with pain and anger and willpower alone can't keep him from yelling raggedly.

It is about now that Dick swings in this window, having come down the outside way, and finds ... Jack beating up on Jubilee.

D:

No, it's Sylar. He has to remember this. Damn it.

UNHAPPY DICK IS UNHAPPY WITH THIS, JACK, AND WILL REMEMBER YOUR FACE.

It is, indeed not Jubilee in there.

Jubilee is behind Dick, floating by his shoulder, and grouching.

"Being shot really hurts."

Sam stumbles his way down the stairs at about this time and skids to a stop in front of Jack and Sylar.

-and into Jubilee, yelping with surprise at the cold. Plus side: the shock of it gets his head together long enough to plant his feet and lift his hand again.

Sylar's eyes focus for a second on Sam and his pose, and sharpen in panic.

Unfortunately, his redoubled effort to stand up only results in the further protest of his injured muscles, and he only succeeds in lifting himself slightly before rolling over and shouting in pain.

"You're not--" clenched teeth-- "taking this body."

For Jack rather than anyone else, the experience is rather like hearing a grown man's voice coming out of the mouth of a little girl. And yet at the same time, nothing like that, because it's still Jubilation's voice.

He steps towards Dick, partly to show submission to the girl's brother, and also partly so Dick then has the choice not to look at what's happening to the body in question.

"We're not," he says, smirking dryly

"You're giving it back," Dick says flatly. He nods to Jack in appreciation of the gesture, but - he still needs to see. He needs to know.

"Now."

"Yeah, go Wingman!" Jubilee punches the air. And her fist passes through Dick's shoulder.

Today? Today has not been a fun day for Sylar. He thought he'd finally gotten a grip on things, gotten some degree of control over his own life, but no; in a minute, much as it hurts him to admit it, he won't have even this injured body.

But if he could get rid of the man with the power to rip him out of it--

Wait.

Sylar's gaze snaps over towards Sam. His expression is a wide-open one of fear and surrender, but his expression is a lie.

He can take control of this situation. If he relaxes his hold on the girl's body, and braces himself not to fight against the next expelling force he's sure is coming, then the problem might just solve itself.

It's like when you're a kid, bored in class, playing with a rubber band. You stretch it and stretch it, preparing to launch it across the class room and then all of a sudden, totally on its own, it snaps from the pressure and usually hits you straight in the eye and hurts like a bitch.

That's what it's like, pulling and pulling and suddenly having a spirit snapping free.

Sam gasps and reels back but it's-- it's wrong, there's no smoke, just the sensation of pulling, and there's nothing creeping down and through the floorboards. There's no sense of elation, not even vaguely, because he has no idea what just happened and he's physically exhausted.