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April 2006
In the early evening hours of the twenty-sixth of April, a man named Gabriel went into his shop with the intention of killing himself. Later reports would detail the things that most would not find terribly important: the way he was dressed; the prescription he wore; the eye loupes haphazardly put in place. The isolation of this man was all in the subtext. It did not have to be spelled out.
From far away, the watch shop looked dark and uninviting, like the mouth of a cave or black hole pitched between other buildings and concrete walls. The awnings drooped with rain, sagging and useless and partially obscuring the Victorian flourish of the sign Gray & Sons scrawled across the window. Inside, a fine layer of dust covered the benches and the clocks, which had long ago stopped ticking. None of it mattered. Another detail whose significance was not lost.
Eden knew. If he killed himself at home, no one would know that he died. That's what bothered her the most: the premeditation, the decision to do this thing in his shop, knowing that the door is unlocked and someone would step in and find his body--that was what bothered her. That even though he lost the will to live, he still had the presence of mind to do the act in a way that would keep him from rotting alone for too long.
He was already dead when she found him, but a vial of blood took care of that. She cut the rope and his body dropped like a sack of concrete. The noose itself was tight, and it had taken all her effort before she was able to slide two fingers between the noose and his neck. Already she could feel that elusive shimmer, the feel of his body putting itself back together, when she managed to loosen the rope and pull it out from around his neck. His head dropped into her lap. He coughed, then curled up against her like a child.
There was not enough blood to bring him to consciousness quickly, only the scant amount all field agents are required to carry, which was just enough to heal superficial scrapes or the occasional bullet wound, so she perched on her hands and watched him sleep, still unconscious and eyelids fluttering. She was afraid to leave the man alone, afraid that once he woke up, he'd try to kill himself again. The sky outside was overcast, and through the slanted glass she could see drops of rain falling outside the store window. The name on his driver's license said Gabriel, and that to her seemed tragic.
His breathing was shallow and his hands clenched and unclenched into fists. Lowering her head above his chest, she murmured softly with her voice and eased the restlessness away.
The phone rang. She didn't answer.
xXx
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He woke up later that night, eyes wide and hands flying toward his neck.
"It's okay," Eden said. She grasped his wrists and brought his hands down to his lap. "Shh, listen to me, it's okay, it's okay."
"Where am I?" he asked. "I--I thought..."
"I found you," Eden said. Her throat tightened reflexively, ready to throw out a command should she need it. "You were unconscious. I didn't want to leave you alone."
She watched as he struggled to sit up. The blood she gave him wasn't enough to heal the bruises around his neck, and she wondered if she should have gone ahead and taken him to a hospital. "What happened?" Eden asked.
He shook his head. "I can't...."
Eden touched his hand. "Tell me," she said.
He looked up at her with wide, wet eyes. "I hurt someone," he said.
"Who?" Eden asked. "Who did you hurt?"
"It doesn't matter." There was sadness in his voice, and in his eyes, and it made Eden's heart ache.
"Then sleep," Eden said. "Sleep. You want to sleep. And when you wake up, you'll want to live."
Her words hung in the air like fog. Wordlessly, Eden folded him into her arms, resting her cheek against his hair. She held him until he fell asleep again, the long comma of his body leaning against her side. It had been a long time since Bennet plucked her out from the streets of LA, a long time since she felt the touch of a man or strained against it. Loneliness and desperation had compelled her to use her voice, to trick men into wanting her. She understood. She knew too well what that was like: to be invisible, to exist outside the world and wander the streets only half-alive. She knew what it was like to feel too much and drink too much and to have it all blotted out like a frenzied dream.
Pressing the palm of her hand flat against his back, she felt the rhythmic rise and swell of his breathing, and she murmured, quietly,
"You will not feel guilty anymore. You will realize that whatever you've done, you did it for a good reason. You will wake up and you will feel fine."
And she leaned him carefully against the workbench, winding the rope around her arm and stuffing it into her bag. Later that night, she couldn't sleep. She pulled out the rope and turned it over in her hands, thinking of the man in the shop and how he slept alone.
xXx
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October 2006
They still didn't know who he was. The days with Chandra Suresh never yielded the infamous Patient Zero, the man on whom the majority of the scientist's work was based. It wasn't until they caught him that Eden realized who he was. Documents detailing Eden's revelation did not depict the horror she felt or the guilt, or how this could have provided the impetus for the tragedy to take place the next day. All that was written, and all that was signed off on, was that she had once seen him through suicide and had never seen him again.
On the eleventh of October, 2006, a woman named Sarah Ellis shot herself in the head. Her body was found floating in a Canadian lake, eyes still open and staring sightlessly up into the sky. Newspapers would print up an account of sex and drugs and the lonely woman in the middle of it all. Mothers would read it and shake their heads, then clutch the hands of their daughters walking beside them. Then they would let the pages fall, the paper fluttering onto the street. A page will land on a puddle on the sidewalk, and men will walk across it unknowingly, footsteps falling on the picture of Sarah Ellis's face.
A/N: I wanted to write my Eden/Gabriel version of the Sylar/Elle/TEH HUNGARRR You-Made-Me-a-Killer-Biatch OT3, so yeah. Kind of different from my usual style of writing. Usually my stuff is pretty dialogue heavy, so yeah. Hopefully this doesn't suck too bad. Words in italics are Eden using her ability; Sarah Ellis is Eden's real name per "Six Months Ago."