Sorry about the long wait for update. My muse seems to have developed a serious case A.D.D. Anyways, thanks to everybody that left reviews. You're all awesome! These chapters I may or may not go back for editing depending on what level of detail you guys like because they felt a little rushed to me. Feel free to leave me some feedback about what you think.
Revelations: Part I
April 26, 2006
"Surprise," he smiled.
"Gabriel, this is amazing." He watched her eyes widen with awe as she took in the rooftop dreamscape that he had created for them. Finding the case of twinkling Christmas lights on clearance had been the easy part. Untangling them all and then winding dozens of the strands about the small area in the wee morning hours before she had woken however, was another complication entirely of itself. And then there had been the ludicrous tipping of the building's maintenance man to help him set out the champagne so that it was cold without the ice being all melted by the time they got there. At least the arrangements for the flowers and their delivery had already been made a week prior; and the necklace, he gave himself an internal pat on the back for that one. The piece wasn't any sort of finely tuned time keeping machine as he was used to generally dealing with but he still considered it to be one of his finest works having spent countless hours hunched over a work table using all manner of tools available to manipulate the delicate silver until it was just right. There was also the matter of important news to share with her as well as the small fortune being contained in his pocket. Two weeks of planning and deliberating over every minute detail would finally come to fruition.
"There's a few things that we need to talk about," he started, taking her by the hand and leading her to their seats. She giggled when the champagne cork popped allowing a froth of bubbles to fizz over the side of the bottle. Gabriel took his time filling their glasses, mulling over the best approach for what had to be said. With a heavy sigh he began to explain. "Claire, there's something that I've been keeping from you."
The joyous smile slowly faded from her mouth to be replaced by a fretful little crinkle of worry between her eyebrows. Claire kept her sharp eyes trained on him with keen focus as she lifted the glass to her lips for a sip only to be surprised when he extended a hand to stop the motion. She relinquished the glass to him easily enough with a questioning look.
"I'm sorry. You can't actually have any, Claire." He paused for a dramatic effect before letting slip a mischievous smile. "It wouldn't be good for the baby."
Claire's mouth was left hanging slightly ajar as her eyes slowly widened, continuing to grow larger in surprise until he was seriously concerned they might fall out. "Baby?" she managed to whisper incredulously after a long minute of processing the information. "I'm…?" Gabriel nodded in the affirmative.
"I wanted to wait to tell you until…" He withdrew the black velvet box from his pocket and slid it over the table to her. Claire glanced back and forth between him and the box, took a deep steadying breath and lifted it into her trembling fingers. A tear fell down the slope of her cheek when she cracked the case open to take in the slim silver band hidden within, adorned with a modest but brightly faceted star cut diamond. Every last penny he had left from the Petrelli pocket watch had gone into the ring.
"Claire… All of the secrets and the misunderstandings, all the idiotic arguments and the parents… I don't care about any of it. I love you and nothing else matters. And now we're going to have a baby. Together. I'm not just asking because of that either," he swallowed thickly, struggling to keep his nerve, "but I want us to be a family. A real one." What I never had. "Marry me, Claire. Please?" he added as an afterthought to the command.
Her hand brushed over her stomach protectively as she listened to his proposal. Gabriel couldn't help but become more nervous with every second that ticked by without an answer. His heart was hammering away at his chest and his palms broke out with sweat reeling over another potential rejection when Claire nodded timidly, slowly creeping a smile out that lit into a grin more brilliant than all of the lights surrounding them. "Yes."
"Yes?" He didn't dare to hope that he had heard her correctly.
"Yes, I'll marry you," she clarified excitedly. "Yes! Yes! Yes!" Gabriel didn't have time to relish the moment before Claire leapt out of her chair and onto his lap sending them toppling over with the force of impact. "We're having a baby!"
That was the way it should have been. All breathless kisses and giggles of delirious happiness. And that's where it should have ended but it never did.
"Claire, there's one more thing I need to show you." Not that he wanted to. He had to. It was an imperative that she know every aspect of him; the good and the bad and be able to accept all parts as an equal whole. Otherwise it could never be real.
Gabriel rolled himself to a sitting position. Cautiously glancing between Claire and one of the glasses left on the table he slowly extended his hand. Reaching outward into space he curled a set of invisible fingers around the base of the glass and beckoned it towards him. She watched with wide eyed surprise as the glass twitched in place for a second before jumping off the end of the table to shatter on the rooftop only a foot away. "Still needs some work," he grumbled to himself.
"Gabriel…" His attention snapped back to the girl at his side. "You're… special." Claire was staring at the hand that he still held aloft with awe. "You're like me. Gabriel, you're just like me."
"Special." Somebody. Something more than just a watchmaker. She nodded, beaming her smile that was only meant for him. "Now we can be special together with our family. Forever."
Sensations of heat flushed across his face and down his neck, throughout his body until it tingled in the tips of his fingers and toes. Gabriel could feel his pulse picking up speed allowing blood to flow more quickly into his tensing muscles, saturating his system with adrenaline. His eyes automatically tracked the fluctuations in Claire's facial expressions, her physical reaction to his presence, all the subtle twitches of nerves and frantic darting of her eyes, compiling the data for near instantaneous analysis. Every detail from her rigid pose to the droplet of sweat pushing its way through the skin of her brow line told him that she knew what was about to happen and that he could calculate the probabilities of her next movement.
"I just need to see how it works. I just need to… understand." He couldn't be sure exactly when it happened. When his train of thought derailed from the giddiness of the moment, of being able to be completely himself with her, for her, and the acceptance that came. Gabriel sensed that somewhere in the dark recesses of his brain the information had been forming for a while before suddenly presenting itself the way it had with Davis. The thought that it had always been there even occurred to him briefly.
He wanted to find reason in the compulsion; to give it a name, to create a tangible force out of the drive that would give him something to deny. It was as if there a hole in his being burning with the intensity of white hot flame just beneath the skin that could only be quenched by filling the void - making himself more complete. It was as if he were on the verge of death from prolonged starvation and the cure to all of his maladies were being dangled just out of reach. Gabriel was… He felt… Hungry.
The need to fight his dark urges was there, coiling in the pit of his stomach like venom and straining against the pull of muscle and bone, binding him in the constriction of his own body so that his movements were unnaturally forced. But he was already past the point of no return. Gabriel was screaming bloody murder on the inside, pounding clenched fists against an invisible wall, and for all his efforts to combat the barrier his own body was spiraling out of his control. He was being swallowed by an instinct more futile to resist than the need to breathe.
"Run," he managed to choke out from between teeth gritted so tightly that traces of blood leaked from the gum line. Gabriel watched Claire swivel around on her hip so that she could spring her to feet with fluid ease that would never come to a body without preternatural protection against structural strain. She wouldn't have even felt the pain when he knew that the tendon in the right calf tore slightly before instantly sewing itself back to perfection.
Claire rushed to the maintenance door that would allow her exit from the monster and before he could even think about the action his hand reacted, extending outward into the space that she occupied, twining invisible fingers around her body and jerking her violently backward so that she landed with a harsh thud on her backside. She scrambled backward, giving him a wide berth upon noting that he was subconsciously shadowing her every movement in anticipation.
"I just need to see. Just once. I know how now, Claire. I can do it fast. You can't die and… And you won't even feel the pain. You'll just piece yourself back together like always and everything will be fine. I think I can even do it without hurting the baby." What was it that he was really saying? Did he just hear himself ask for her permission to tear her apart? To allow him to figure out what made her internally tick?
What he said was true. Gabriel knew for certain that he could complete the procedure and put her back together before her body succumbed to the trauma or blood loss. Claire really wouldn't feel any pain. And with her regenerative properties the probability of any harm coming to child inside of her weighed less than 5% approximating for undeterminable variables of complication.
5%? 5%! Variables? Did I seriously just put my unborn progeny's life at stake for 5%? Did I just seriously consider breaking Claire - my Claire - bashing her head open because she won't feel it? God help me. Please. God, oh, God, please stop me.
But it would be so easy to just give in.
They were only a few minutes away from cleansing relief. Gabriel would be out of pain. Claire would be free of him as if nothing had ever happened. They could live happily ever after. Together forever. In and out. Three maybe four minutes. Five tops. And then it'll be over. Last time. I promise I just need one more time and that's it. Never again. Just this once. God, no. No! If only he could just get one little peek at her hypothalamus.
Claire stood with her back to the wall, frantically looking between him and the street below for any chance of escape. "It doesn't have to be this way," she cried when he took another rigid step towards her. "Gabriel, you can control it. You can fight this."
"I can't."
Another strangled step forward and Claire made her decision. Gabriel ran after her when she hurled her body over the wall of the rooftop and out into the empty space of air that rushed past her on the way to the pavement. Telekinetic hands shot out to grip her, but as always, she slipped through his untrained fingers. The descent was slowed a bit but not enough to calm the sickening crack of bone when her body slammed into the street.
"No!" Gabriel flailed about as if he were falling after her only to smack face first into the floor. One of his neighbors pounded on the thin wall for quiet subsequently ushering him back into reality. "She's not dead. She's not dead," he chanted to the carpet rug. "I didn't kill her," he whined through the hot sting of tears.
Every night since he had helplessly watched her plummet from the roof Gabriel had fallen asleep on the couch, unable to bring himself back to the bed that still smelled like her without the courtesy of having Claire hiding within its sheets, and drifted off into the same gut wrenching nightmare. Night after night he had to stand by and watch her fall over and over and over again because whether or not he had actually lifted a finger against her it was his actions that had put her blood on his hands.
He had tracked her that night, running after the Primatech van that had appeared as fast as he could until it inevitably fell out of sight and then following random droplets of blood and his own disembodied intuition. Claire had made it almost twelve city blocks before running into the corner of a little loan office promising cash advances against payroll checks. A strand of her hair had stuck to the brick, waving listlessly in the breeze, telling him about how she had rested her head against the surface. Thin whites scratches drifted down the side with a small smear of blood. She had clung to the building for support before losing her balance and clawed her way down breaking a nail in the process. Three brown dots of dried blood in a small concentrated area told him that she hadn't been able to stand in place for long until she fell. And then a faint pinkish smear indicated where Claire would have been laying until moved. That was where the trail went miserably cold.
Gabriel scouted every square inch of the block surrounding the area looking for anything that might have been a clue about her movements from that point on, but there was nothing left except for a light patch of tire rubber most likely belonging to the Primatech van. He took little solace in knowing that she hadn't been stranded there for long, most likely unconscious as there were no signs of any further struggle.
The evidence that haunted him the most though was the blood itself. All of Claire's wounds would have been healed by the time that she had gotten there and since he had found no evidence of succeeding injury since her fall he was left with only one conclusion. Pure, violent shame had ripped through him for not thinking about the welfare of the baby before. He had been in such a state of shock over Claire and the maddening helplessness that came with not knowing what had happened to her that it hadn't even occurred to him until he was staring at it.
So many nights had been spent just watching her sleep. Studying her. Gabriel knew that with her specific ability carrying a pregnancy to term would be difficult but could be done. Her body would initially register an invading body as a threat and work to destroy anything foreign in order to protect itself. Of course, regenerative or not she was still a fully functional woman designed by nature to have the ability to bring about life. Once her body recognized her own genetic coding working in the mix it would reverse action, pumping out heavy doses of hormone to combat normal settings and even partially shutting down the regeneration in order to avoid harming what was essentially itself. At least until an injury drastic enough to take precedence came along.
With the height and velocity that she had fallen Claire had sustained enough physical trauma to instantly kill anyone else. An internal override would have immediately gone into effect, shifting the full force of her ability back into focus for survival and inadvertently circumventing all protective efforts from the child. Assuming that her body would have kept it safe from the abrupt impact, in the aftermath the baby would have been left alone in a figurative battle field of hyperactive lymphocytes. Unless her ability could be shut down again there was no hope for survival.
In one fell swoop of poor self control he had managed to ruin his life. He had killed an innocent man. Pushed over the edge the one person in all the world that returned his love and trust. Directly contributed to the death of his own unborn child. And for what? So he could gain the ability to levitate coffee cups?
Look at me. I can bend spoons with my mind. Aren't I special? Too bad there's no one left to care about how special I am now.
He couldn't even run to his mother like a scared little boy looking for help. Virginia had yet to speak to him again since the day he had thrown her out of the apartment for calling Claire a whore, and he had yet to forgive her for it enough to seek her out either. He had sunk as far into the darkness as was possible looking upward for any trace of solace from rock bottom.
Gabriel Gray had fallen.
To be continued...