A/N: Apologies for the delay between updates! Life's been a bit unkind in regard to fanfic time, but y'all really motivated me to write the next chapter. Thanks very much for your support of this story, even though it's obviously quite different from the way Sylar/Elle is unfolding on the show. Someday I'll write a canon-compliant version. For now, though, I hope you enjoy this chapter, and I'll do my best to get the next one up in a more timely fashion.
Part III
The electrician, hired to repair the shorted-out lock on Gabriel's door -- Mervin, according to the embroidered patch on his olive green work shirt -- presses a purple bouquet into Gabriel's hand, then, red-faced, glances around the corridor to be sure no one witnessed the questionable scene.
Gabriel blinks at the flowers in disbelief. "These aren't hyacinths." He looks up at Mervin, frowning. "I asked you to get me purple hyacinths, Mervin. In fact, I paid you to get me purple hyacinths." With a pair of solid gold pliers. "These are carnations."
Mervin shrugs. "They're purple. Purple flowers are purple flowers, right?"
"Wrong." Gabriel speaks deliberately, in clipped syllables, struggling to control his rising temper. "Purple hyacinths are apology flowers. Purple carnations are for capriciousness."
The electrician, already reasserting his heterosexuality by tinkering with the wiring in the box outside the door, casts Gabriel a skeptical look around the door frame. "What's that?"
Gabriel sighs heavily, removes his glasses, and rubs the bridge of his nose. "Nothing." He really doesn't feel like giving a workman a vocabulary lesson. "Only florology."
The fact that Mervin lifts his eyebrows and says ooo-kay in a drawn out tone lessens Gabriel's disappointment somewhat, if not his guilt that he's using Elle's father's ability in this way. There's every chance that Elle, like the electrician, will think purples flowers are purple flowers, and won't know that these represent capriciousness, or that he's applying that attribute to her.
Even if it is actually quite an apt description of Elle...
He'll give them to her anyway, Gabriel resolves, putting on his glasses again and inspecting the bouquet. It's not nearly as elegant hyacinths would have been, but people who are restricted to the confines of company headquarters can't be choosers. He thanks the electrician for running his errand for him, then heads downstairs to the infirmary, confident that the purple flowers will at least brightened Elle's drab, institutional green and off-white hospital room.
Approaching the room, however, he starts to feel less sure of himself as the plastic sheath around the flower stems grows moist in his clenched fist. With his enhanced ears he hears rather than feels the too-quick palpitations of his heart; heat prickles from his collar into his cheeks when a voice in his mind whispers that carnations are the awkward offering of a shy watchmaker's son who is far from being the cool kid at school. It occurs to Gabriel that what ought to trouble him now is what Elle will make of her father's killer bringing her flowers, but that thought is so far overshadowed as to be nonexistent by his fear of the beautiful blonde laughing at the hopes of the geek. Beauty and the geek? Does beauty ever choose the geek? Or if she does, does she stay? Not that these carnations are meant to represent any such desire in regard to Elle, who, if she has her way, definitely won't be staying.
And, apparently, that doesn't just apply to Elle's wish to depart this life. On the hospital floor, Gabriel finds the door to her hospital room open and Angela standing just inside the room overseeing the nurse helping a fully-dressed and disgruntled-looking Elle gingerly take a seat in a wheelchair.
"What's going on here?" Gabriel asks over the nurse's reassurances that Elle only has to ride in a wheelchair until she's been escorted out of the hospital ward. He grows even more self-conscious as Elle and Angela both turn and eye the purple carnations in his hand.
Particularly the latter, who arches an eyebrow. "I might ask you the same question."
Gabriel lowers his hand to his side, vainly attempting to hide the bouquet. Thankfully, before he can clear his throat or form words with his suddenly parched lips and tongue, Angela answers him.
"Elle's being discharged."
"Discharged?"
"Ironic, isn't it," says Elle, "for a girl who's pretty highly charged." She curls her fingers and sends off a rolling wave of blue sparks between them.
Tearing his eyes away from the tantalizing bolts of lightning rippling from human flesh instead of from charged cloud to charged ground, Gabriel looks in disbelief at his mother, who's rolling her eyes at Elle's joke.
"She's seriously injured!"
Angela pats his cheek with her manicured hand and says, "Don't be such a worry-wort, dear, it's only a few cracked ribs. They only kept her overnight for observation because of the concussion."
Elle's pale face and dark-rimmed eyes don't minimalize the pain of cracked ribs, but her voice holds only her usual defiance. "Your mom's not kicking me out again. I get to stay here until my ribs heal. Or until you kill me, whichever comes first."
"That's not exactly what I said," says Angela, hand falling to her side as her eyes narrow on Elle, "and I'll thank you not to repay my generosity by turning my son against me."
"I thought after Nathan you'd be used to it by now."
There's more Gabriel's being kept in the dark about than he knew, he realizes. What's happening with Nathan -- the older brother he hasn't yet met, or even heard much about, beyond the fact that he was elected to Congress, but fell short of the political heights his mother had so hoped he would reach? Does Nathan's betrayal have anything to do with Angela's recent fears? Is he a powerful nemesis?
The one thing Gabriel does know is that he's not going to get any answers from her. Not yet, anyway.
"Where will Elle be staying?" he asks. "I'd be happy to take her to her room."
This plan is, of course, fine with Elle, but Gabriel is slightly surprised when, as he brushes past the nurse to stand behind Elle's wheelchair, that Angela doesn't protest. Not that he's not used to people doing what he wants, but Angela is the first in a very long time -- since Virginia Gray -- for whom the reverse is true. She agrees to let him escort Elle upstairs, again casting a wary eye over the Gabriel's.
Maybe, he thinks, feeling nauseated, she really does hope he'll kill Elle. And who knows, depending on what she has to say about his family, maybe he will...just this once...So he can experience the rush of power -- literally -- as he generates electricity from the tips of his own fingers. Not the fingers of a watchmaker...the fingers of--
"What's with the flowers?" Elle's voice disrupts his delusions of grandeur, and Gabriel realizes with a start that they are alone. Once again, he feels much more like the awkward schoolboy with an impossible crush than a person capable of amassing every power on earth for his own.
"Oh." He thrusts the bouquet over Elle's shoulder, not meeting her eye as she cranes her neck to look up at him. "These are for you."
"What for?"
For a second, Gabriel panics that Elle knows what purple carnations represent. Then he chances a glance at her and sees that all the harshness her face took on when she was sparring with Angela has been wiped away with an innocence and disbelief and a faint glow of happiness that makes him wonder whether she's ever been given flowers before.
He moves around in front of her so she won't strain her ribs twisting in the chair. "Because you're in the hospital."
"For the moment."
"And because I'm sorry."
"For what?" She lifts an elbow, cocks her head, eyeing him up like a cat playing with a mouse before a kill.
Gabriel, for reasons unbeknownst to himself, plays along. "For putting you here. And for upsetting you yesterday."
Elle pushes herself out of the wheelchair, wincing in pain.
"You should sit--"
"I can walk." She does, straight out the door, pausing with one hand on the jamb to glance suggestively over her shoulder. "Flowers are nice, but they're not going to make it all better. You know what will."
Gabriel follows her down the silent, sterile infirmary corridor. Her stride is reduced to a hobble, she's clearly in pain; he wishes he'd insisted her using the wheelchair.
"I'm not going to do that," he says. "Yet."
"Yet? Finally, progress."
"I want you to tell me about my brother."
"Which one? I know lots about Peter. We spent a lot of time together when he was staying here."
Something about the way she talks about Peter, and spending time with him, makes the hairs on the back of Gabriel's warm neck stand with the mortified jealousy of a geek overhearing the cheerleader he secretly longs for talking about the jock she wants. He reaches around her, careful not to let his body brush against hers, and punches the up button.
"Nathan."
"Oh, I get it. You're not quite the mama's boy you want me to think you are. It'll make you feel better about your own doubts to know why big brother doesn't trust her."
If he didn't already know Elle's ability, Gabriel would think hers is telepathy. Her powers of perception are impressive -- though he's not about to give her leverage over him by acknowledging it.
"How do you know I'm not sizing up Nathan as a potential enemy?"
"Because he flies. Not much he can do with that to hurt your mother. He can't even drop a grand piano or an anvil or anything on her head, because he doesn't have super strength."
"My brother can fly?" That old longing every child has to fly seizes him. To break free of gravity, to soar through the sky, to be high above everyone else on earth, where he should be... "What a special gift."
"Yeah -- if the Wright brothers had known you could make flight in a test tube, they wouldn't have bothered with airplanes."
The elevator arrives, and as the doors glide open, Gabriel steps aside for Elle to enter first. "What do you mean?"
"The Company used to give people powers."
"What?" Gabriel squeezes onto the elevator as the doors slide shut again. "How?"
"I thought you knew how everything worked."
Elle smirks at Gabriel as she punches the button to level two, the same floor on which his room lies. It occurs to him that he doesn't know where exactly they're going, and as the elevator ascends, he asks where Elle will be staying. She informs him the room across the hall from his is the one she occupied her whole life. All her things are still there. Gabriel's stomach reacts strangely to the information -- it's like the hunger, but also not like. He can't quite pinpoint it, but he knows being in such close proximity to Elle is going to be temptation. He presses himself against the wall, placing as much distance between their bodies as he can in the confines of the elevator.
"You were telling me about the Company," he says, "and my brother's ability."
"I don't know how they give people powers," Elle tells him. "I just know that they can. They did it to Nathan."
"How do you know?"
"He found me and told me. Him and this blonde who turns things to ice."
"I can do that," Gabriel says absently, but doesn't demonstrate. "Nathan wasn't born special, but they made him special."
"Yep."
"They can make anyone special?"
"I guess. Do you know how much you say special? You should try expanding your vocabulary. Get one of those word-a-day-calendars or something."
Gabriel ignores her, his mind racing with possibilities. Was his ability given to him? If so, he might be saved -- the hunger might not be his nature at all. Not that he relishes the idea of being a Frankenstein's monster...
The elevator lurches to a halt, chiming as the doors open to reveal the familiar corridor of level two. Elle starts to disembark, but in a swift motion, Gabriel catches her elbow, pulls her back inside the elevator, pushes the button to close the doors again, and stands in front of them, blocking Elle's exit.
She backs away from him, warily -- a reflex, not a conscious action, as there's a gleam in her eye, too. She thinks he's going to kill her now, wants him to kill her, but nonetheless is afraid; Gabriel knows because he hears the sudden rapid staccato of her heart, the shallowness of her breathing. Her fear is beautiful and exciting, grips him at his core and makes the hunger more acute. The familiar rush of the sense of total power he has over her sweeps through him, though instead splitting her forehead with his telekinetic abilities, he'd like to touch her, to trace soft lips with the pad of his fingertip...
"If everyone's special," he interrupts his imaginations, "then no one will be special."
"Not everyone. Nathan won't be, if he can help it."
"Nathan doesn't want his power?" It's unthinkable to Gabriel that anyone would wish power away. It would be like wishing your thumbs away.
"I don't want mine, either." Elle says. "I want you to have it."
She approaches him, blue eyes sparking. Gabriel's dart down to her lips again. He swallows, averts his gaze, and sees her hands. Electricity crackles between her fingers like brilliant dew-covered spider webs, lethal to the wriggling insect Gabriel feels like pressed to the elevator wall.
"Did they give you your power?" he asks.
Elle shakes her head and grips the steel handrail that runs along the perimeter of the elevator; Gabriel jolts, brushing against her slight frame, as the metal conducts a current from Elle to him.
"Worse," she says. "They did experiments."
Gabriel listens in fascinated horror as Elle tells him of her own father leading the charge -- no pun intended -- in using her as a human lightning rod.
"I was born special, but not special enough. He tried to make me better, but he made me worse. And then he didn't want me. So he used me. He didn't care whether I lived or died -- that's why he sent me after you."
The lights in the elevator flicker; Gabriel wonders if the power's surging all over the building. He wants that control -- imagines himself literally holding all the power of New York City in his hands. That would make him special...He could be President, like Virginia always wanted; surely Angela, the mother of one politician, would like to see that, too.
But even as Gabriel eyes the scar on Elle's forehead, imagines opening her, braving the shockwaves of that power transferring itself into his body, he makes no move to grant the death wish. For Elle's life story might be his own. He knows what it is not to be special enough...Just a watchmaker...His birth mother didn't want him. She couldn't have, or she wouldn't have given him up for adoption. Why? So many times he's opened his mouth to ask Angela, only to clamp his lips shut again, unable to bear the likely rejection, fearing what he might do if he cannot accept what he hears.
"If you want to die," he asks, "why don't you kill yourself?"
The lights stop flickering as Elle withdraws her hand from the railing. She looks very young and small and powerless clutching her carnation bouquet, the gift of a playground suitor.
"It has to be you."
"Why?"
Elle just stares at him, her eyes pleading, her features etched with the agony that must have contorted her face as she was strapped to a table, tens of thousands of volts of electricity poured into her petite body. He thinks of how she looked when he tried to take her power, hears her tortured screams as her power, as well as his, betrayed her body.
How can she offer herself to him? Is that pain less than what she endured at the hands of her father? Can some lives be fates worse than death? Instead of murder, can killing be mercy?
He didn't want me...I wasn't special enough.
Suddenly Elle's inner workings become clear to him.
"Because you'd die knowing someone wants you."
The blue eyes brim, and for a second, Gabriel thinks Elle will crumple, envisions himself holding her, stroking her hair, kissing her all over until she stops hurting. But then the corners of her lips jerk upward into a smirk, and the vulnerability vanishes.
"You really do know how everything works, watch boy." Her hand hovers over the open door button. "So...Have I convinced you to play Gabriel, the Angel of Death in some traditions?"
She's making fun of his erudition; despite the context, Gabriel can't help but shove his hands into his pockets and duck his head and chuckle at himself with her. "After what happened last time, you can't think I'm stupid enough to play with electricity in a metal box?"
"Good point." Elle opens the elevator doors and steps out into the corridor, Gabriel at her heels. She turns to him with her arms spread wide. "Fire at will."
"Not right now," Gabriel says, laying a hand on her shoulder and gently turning her in the direction of her room. "I need to think about this."
"Lucky for you, I'm not a limited time offer."
"Is that on the infomercial?"
"Yep. Playing twenty-four hours on the Sylar Shopping Network."
"Gabriel. And you know the only reason anyone ever buys things from those channels is because the salesgirls are cute."
Realizing what he's said, his face goes red -- though not as deeply flushed as hers does after she says, "Sex sells." She cringes. "Oh God, I'm so not hitting on you--"
"Of course not," Gabriel reassures her. "It was just a joke."
A joke which, nonetheless, puts a goofy grin on Gabriel's face and makes him stand and replay over and over in his mind after Elle escapes into her room and draws the blinds. Until he's interrupted by he brusque Brooklyn accent of Mervin the electrician, at work behind him.
"Guess she didn't like the carnations, huh pal? Those cynthias--"
"Hyacinths."
"Whatever. Sorry I didn't get those other flowers if they would've got you laid."
"That's okay. Red roses are for passion."
"Passion. Heh. If you want some of them, I'll get you some for a gold wrench."
Gabriel stares at Elle's door, an idea forming as her words echo in his mind. Sex sells. "I'll remember that."
After all, he has a hunger to feed -- though not a hunger for Elle's power.
But first, he thinks, striding back toward the elevator, he has a few details to work out with his mother.
A/N: Reviewers will get a bouquet of dark pink roses from Gabriel -- which means "thank you," of course. ;)