Author's Note: I think occurred to me that he (no spoilers) could be Rebel, but I didn't go in that direction because how would he bring Elle back? Or I ignored the most obvious person. You decide. Anyway, it's AU; different Rebel. Now, while it is AU from 03x18—Exposed, I'm going to incorporate what I want from later episodes and ignore what I don't. Hopefully I'll make it clear what I'm keeping in. (This chapter is a good example.)

Spoilers for 03x19--Shades of Gray

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Chapter 4:

Once Sylar was gone, Elle turned to look at the kid standing next to her. She had no idea what to do with a teenage boy. She wondered if having him around would make Sylar more likely to take her with him when she caught up with him or less likely. Sylar seemed to be protective of the boy with the whole "don't let him be reckless" thing. She felt like she used to be better at making these decisions before her brain was all muddled by death.

She pulled out her cell phone to text Rebel. She had left everything else she had in the car she used to get to the abandoned restaurant, but at least she had the presence of mind to keep her phone in her pocket. As she waited for Rebel to respond, she addressed Luke. "We're not going to get very far on forty dollars. We might as well eat. Are you hungry?"

Before he could respond, she got a text. It told her to stay put. "Excellent," she murmured sarcastically.

Luke spoke up. "I am actually a little hungry."

"Good." Elle headed for the entrance. "Let's see how long we can stretch out a meal before they kick us out."

The restaurant was an informal, seat yourself kind of place. Elle slid into a corner booth. "If anyone asks, you're my stepson."

The waitress came, handed them menus, and was gone without a word. Elle looked around. The restaurant was not very crowded; they would probably be okay for a while, unless federal agents showed up. She had picked a spot facing the door so that she could watch for them.

Luke leaned across the table. "Why your stepson?"

Elle picked up the menu and held it in front of her face. "Because you're not old enough to be my boyfriend, and I don't know you well enough to pretend you're my brother. Cousins or anything else like that might inspire questions, and I don't know how good you are at thinking on your feet."

"So, what are you going to tell me about Sylar?"

Elle thought about ignoring him, but if she decided that she needed the kid, then she was going to wish she had been nicer to him. She lowered the menu a little. "Look, all that talking and the Gabriels, that was just to annoy Sylar, but I can't really tell you anything about him. We kind of worked together; that's about it."

Luke shook his head like he was disappointed in her. "No, it's not. First of all, you did something to him that made him hate you, and then there was something about him down on his knees begging you to forgive him. That's a little more than co-workers."

Elle thought that part about Sylar on his knees sounded good, and she tried to remember when that was. "Oh, he wasn't begging me for forgiveness. He was telling me to forgive myself. He was—He was forgiving me for what I did. But he doesn't want me to talk about that, so I'm not going to."

"But you worked together. That means he worked for the paper company."

Those weren't questions, but Elle felt the need to answer him anyway. "Briefly. But as much as I liked annoying Sylar before, I don't want to do anything that's going to make him too mad. So I'm not going to..." She trailed off as she stared at the door. She looked back at Luke and realized she should throw him something. She lowered her voice considerably and leaned forward. "Okay, I'll tell you this one thing. You remember that Arthur and Angela Petrelli lied about being his parents? Well, during that time, he worked for them. But it wasn't just about his parents. He wanted to be a hero, and that's why I believe that eventually, he'll do what Rebel wants."

Luke knitted his eyebrows. "I don't get that from him at all. I don't see him as particularly heroic."

"You have to look beneath the surface. The most important thing to realize is that he doesn't think that what he does is wrong. Sometimes he does, but mostly he's convinced himself that it's okay because of evolution or because his victims don't deserve their abilities. Or because they lied. Like I said, he's a total hypocrite. But he likes feeling powerful, special, like he's important. He likes thinking that we need him." She sat back, thinking about what she had just said. "And we do. We need him a hell of a lot more than he needs us. With Peter out of the way, this is his chance to be even more special. I don't think he's going to pass that up."

"Who's Peter? Remember, I don't know anyone that you know."

"Right." Elle realized that she needed to stop throwing names at him. "Peter was--" She saw that the waitress was coming back. "I'll start at the beginning, right after we order."

Even though Elle was starving, she ordered a small meal and forced herself to pick at it while she told the story. She would not be able to tell Sylar that she lost her appetite or that food had no taste anymore, because it was not true. But if Luke told him, he would not know that. She found a little pleasure in the knowledge that she had found a loophole in the lie detecting system. Now she was going to have to keep the kid around for sure, in order to filter her lies through him.

Sylar left his father's house feeling satisfied. It had not gone exactly how he anticipated, but he had gotten what he wanted, a chance to hurt the old man. His father was going to die, and it was going to happen in a much more painful, drawn out process than Sylar could have imagined.

Before his father tried to paralyze him and take his abilities, he had really gotten to Sylar with all that talk of the hunt being meaningless and the life being disappointing. Sylar had been ready to learn from the one person who understood what he was going through. That all changed when his father tried to kill him. In the car, the one thing that stuck with Sylar was his father's claim that he did not remember killing Sylar's mother, and it hit Sylar in an unexpected way. He did not want to end up like his father, a sad miserable man. And Sylar was going to live longer, possibly forever if he understood the stories correctly. Sylar could not change the fact that he picked easy targets; they were all easy to him. He was not sure how to stop himself from having an unsatisfied life. But he could change the trajectory of his life with regard to Elle. He could remember that he killed her. It could matter to him that he kill her. He could fix her, and that would absolve him of that murder, the one that mattered. Then he could walk away, and no matter how meaningless and disappointing his life became, he would know that he had done something differently than his father.

They managed to drag out lunch longer than Elle expected. It probably had a lot to do with the fact that she was eating so slowly. Finally, after about three hours, the waitress told them that if they were not going to order anything else, they needed to wait outside.

Elle had not heard anything from Rebel, so she pulled out her phone again. She knew that Rebel always had a plan, and she knew that being in rural Montana would limit his ability to help her, but she was down to less than twenty dollars, and it was getting close to sundown. Although she did not let Luke see it, Elle was starting to panic a little. If Rebel did not get them money in the next hour, she was going to have to rob someone, which was something she generally tried to avoid. She pretended to be casually texting, but what she typed was much more frantic.

She was about to ask Luke if he wanted to learn how to hotwire a car, but then she saw a tan truck coming down the town's main road. It was generic looking truck; there were probably a dozen of them in that town, but as she watched it approach, she became more convinced it was Sylar. The truck slowed down and puled into the small parking lot.

Now that she could see through the glass, Elle walked over to the truck. Sylar rolled down the window and said, "I was just coming back for a hotel room. I didn't expect you two to still be here."

Elle did not believe him. She had nothing to base this on but a gut feeling that he came back for them. "Well, I'm glad you're here because I told the waitress that I was waiting for my husband, and she was a little suspicious. I think that if you don't let us get in the car now, she might call the cops." She turned to Luke. "Get in the car," she said as though she did not know what he was waiting for.

Sylar watched Luke approach, and he did not do anything to stop him. "What did you do to make the waitress suspicious?"

While Luke had the door open, Elle hurried around to the other side to get in the passenger's seat before Sylar could drive away without her. Once she was buckled in, she answered him. "I spent three hours eating lunch. And god knows what she overheard. The kid asks a lot of questions."

"Could you just once call me by my name?"

Elle was sure that she had, at least once, called Luke by his name, but she realized that she did call him kid more than anything. "Oh, yeah, and I called my stepson 'kid' the whole time. That probably made me look like a horrible stepmother. There was lots of suspicious stuff really."

Sylar pulled out of the parking lot, and Elle could not tell what he was thinking. He drove for about three minutes and parked in front of a motel. "I'm guessing you still don't have any money."

Elle shrugged. "Nope."

Sylar thought about this. "All right, here's what we're going to do. I'll pay for you to stay here tonight, and in the morning we can talk about what we're going to do next."

He said it like he had just come up with that plan, but Elle still had a feeling that he had already decided to help Rebel. It was barely evening, and it did not really make sense for Sylar to stop here for the night. It would be better for him to change cars and keep driving. There was always the possibility that he still intended to leave without them, but then why would he have come back at all. Elle tried to run through all the possibilities she could think of. Helping Rebel seemed to be the most likely, but it was best to be prepared. She realized that both Sylar and Luke were staring at her. "Sounds great," she said.

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