Revelations: Part II

April 26, 2006

It was late afternoon before he made it to Hyatt where Claire had been keeping her room open. After the long night of searching high and low for her in the streets when she had fallen he slinked into the hotel, exhausted, frantic, and more than just a little wary of anybody looking after him. If there were people about that could make her disappear so readily what could they do to him?

Using his telekinesis to flip the lock of the appropriate door he could still remember the minor argument they had over why she would feel a need to keep paying for the place when she was living with him, but after the way he had acted when he had accidentally discovered her ability he was able to understand somewhat the reasoning behind needing her own space to escape to, even if it did continue to hurt a bit. It seemed logical that she would retreat to familiar territory if Claire were still in the area so there Gabriel went in hopes of picking up the trail again. What he found in the room however was entirely unexpected and more terrifying than he ever could have anticipated.

A thin layer of dust coated most of the visible surfaces suggesting that housekeeping had been barred from cleaning the room for some time and that visitors had been fleeting. The air was stale from lack of circulation, Claire's scent being noticeably absent, but an oddly familiar trace of cologne was fairly fresh as were the unspent bullet casings collected on the table. Hundreds of surveillance photos were scattered about being tacked to the walls and strewn over the bed. Upon inspection he had discovered that they were all of him taken from a distance with a variety of lenses and angles. The pictures followed him around Gray and Sons, to the post box, the grocery store, his favored coffee shop, Virginia's… all of his regular haunts. And then with Claire on their first date, to the movies she had wanted to see, their walks around the park and through the open windows of his apartment where they talked and kissed and fought. Someone had been watching him for a long while.

What was more unnerving though was the pile of thick folders left half stuffed into a storage box. Full documentation of all of his credit card activity, purchases, business transactions from the store, habits and personality traits comprised the cache. Even extensive testing results from the experiments that he had participated in with Chandra Suresh. Near the bottom of the stack he found a rather weathered profile that looked as though its pages had been flipped through a thousand times with notes scribbled into the margins about an operation: Salvation. Skimming across the first page he only found general information listings about his full name and date of birth with some heavily redacted references to his parentage and something about an intuitive aptitude.

Case file C004: Gabriel Gray. Weight, complexion, sex… Height 5'10"? B.S. I'm 6'1". Unique Ability: Intuitive Aptitude… Evolutionary Anomaly Class: Cerebral… Control index: 76%: biological 40, cerebral 85, elemental 45, temporal/spatial 20...

Who the hell are these people?

Gabriel supposed that he didn't have to ask why they had been keeping an eye on him. If they knew he had an ability - a potentially dangerous one at that, then it served to reason that whoever they were would want to gather as much information about him as possible. And they had certainly accomplished that. The owners of the profiles knew absolutely every detail of his life up until that point in time. But why would they take Claire and not me?

It wasn't much of leap to assume that in all of their watching someone had seen her ability in action. Perhaps when she had caught her hand in the garbage disposal, purposefully dunked it in boiling water, burnt it on the stove, accidentally cut herself or got stuck in the door; any number of occasions could have left her exposed to a trained eye. As prone to abuse as she was Gabriel had found it a wonder that he himself hadn't found her out earlier than he did. Those thoughts had left him with an even colder sense of horror. If they had seen her fall from the roof and get back up to run the way she had… If whoever was after him had come for her as well they could have taken her anywhere to never be seen again. They could be torturing her for information or experimenting on her ability, cutting her into pieces just to study how she came back together again, or worse. For all he knew she was locked away in some dank hole in the ground for the rest of her eternity and once again it all came down to being his fault because he couldn't control himself in the face of temptation.

Gabriel tried to focus past his anxieties on the task at hand. The more he knew about what they knew the better. Perhaps somewhere in all the paper he could locate clues about what was happening. Something that could detail what the plan was for him or Claire, where they had taken her, what they would do with them. Anything. He had begun to reach further into the profile to read some of the psychological analysis that they had done on him when a voice he wished he didn't recognize sounded just outside the door.

"Yes, I'm aware of the situation," Noah Bennet grumbled as he came in from the hall, carefully shutting the door behind himself. "I'm in the process of moving the files out now." Gabriel held his breath as he watched Noah's shoes shuffle about the box that he had been previously looking into from his hiding place beneath the bed next to a duffle bag stuffed with a curious amount of cash. The mattress sank down onto him when the other man sat causing him to stifle a gasp of surprise which fortunately Noah was distracted from hearing.

"She died? That never gets any easier to hear," he sighed into the phone. "Especially when its my daughter." Gabriel clamped his hand down over his mouth to silence the tear that leaked from the corner of his eye. She thought she could never die but complications… 5%. "No. Petrelli seems to think that we've got what we came for." Petrelli? A memory of a gold plated pocket watch rushed back at him. Claire had known the man - Peter, that had brought it to him. She had told him that he was her uncle which meant that she was obviously related to whoever was involved in whatever kind of mess he had gotten himself into, and it had been quite clear that there was money to be found in those lines.

"We're still not in on the whole scheme." Noah got up from his perch on the bed and bent over to grab the box of folders, placing the lid on it and picking it up." Whatever Angela has planned is big enough to keep everybody in the dark, but apparently we're supposed to be done with Gray unless we can come up with some kind of proof that…" The polished shoes shuffled away and Bennet's voice drifted back out into the hall and out of ear shot.

Gabriel rolled out from under the bed to check that the door had been locked securely behind him when Noah had left. He had maybe a few minutes to search for anything before the man returned. Dashing over to the nightstand he found a pad of paper with indentations in the top sheet marking that something had been written there recently. Grabbing the pencil beside the notepad he shaded over the markings in an attempt to read what it said.

April 18, 11:23. The day and time that he had killed Brian Davis. Panic swelled in his throat. They knew what he had done.

A business card for Primatech Paper Co. was tucked neatly beneath the phone catching his eye. Gabriel picked it up and studied the phone number listing for a moment before taking a deep breath and dialing. "Primatech Paper, this is Claudia. How may I direct your call?"

"Claire Bennet, please," he answered, summoning a steely edge to his voice.

"One moment please." The line cut out briefly with a series of clicks in the background like a wire tap tracing the location of call origination, and then it connected back to the forwarding number. It rang several times before someone picked up on the other end.

"Primatech Paper, you've reached Claire Bennet," a curt voice answered, belonging to an older woman that was most definitely not his Claire. "Hello?" the voice asked irritably when he remained silent and then promptly disconnected. Unfortunately that had been as far as he was able to investigate. At the sound of Bennet returning Gabriel had ducked into the bathroom and then slipped out of the room at the first available opportunity. He had returned several hours later in hopes of finding more, but the room had been thoroughly cleaned out. All of the pictures, files, money and guns were gone without a trace. Not even a fingerprint had been left behind as though Claire or the mysterious organization had never been there at all.

Gabriel busied himself with furiously cleaning every nook and cranny of the watch shop while he attempted to make some semblance of sense from what he knew. Claire had come into his life with false identifications and a service revolver. She had always been just a little off, like she was telling him the truth, but not all of it. Of course he had pushed all of that information away upon discovering that she was a virtually immortal fifteen-year-old. Claire and her father were clearly working for the Petrellis who were apparently heading up Primatech. He snorted at himself when he remembered the pithy remark Bennet had made at dinner about how they weren't just selling paper. It was government paper. Primatech didn't have anything at all to do with paper or selling it, but the government part stuck with him. What if they were some kind of secret branch of a shadow government involved with the tracking and research of people with evolved abilities? That would explain why they were all needlessly armed, the funding, and the strangers that followed him around. What if Claire had just been some kind of plant used to lure him out? What if everything that they had had was a lie?

And yet, she was just a kid. A kid that had made more than a few comments about how her father was the reason that she had joined the Company. Granted that it had taken her a while to warm up to him but after she had Claire's affection for him had been genuine. Gabriel remained steady in his confidence of that. She had been so ready for them to run away together and start new lives…

He didn't even notice when his fingers began to bleed from being rubbed raw by his incessant cleansing of the store's shelves. Gabriel's mind was spinning violently with thoughts about how Claire might have been pushed into becoming an agent, assigned to infiltrate his life, and then gone rogue once she had gotten close to him. But that was ridiculous. Things like that didn't happen.

But if things like that didn't happen then why did the Company have such extensive research on him? How did she know that he had killed Davis? How did she know about his use of the name Sylar? And more importantly, why were Claire and their child dead? The thought stung like a red hot poker to the heart and he reflexively flinched away from it.

Something fell out from beneath the clock he had set about scrubbing and clattered on the floor. Climbing down from his step ladder Gabriel discovered a small black box about half the size of a ring box with what appeared to be a miniature antenna. A camera. They knew what he had done because they had watched it happen.

But no. Claire hadn't known at first… Only after he had showed her the telekinesis. How? Why didn't they stop me? If she was in on it why didn't she know? Nothing fit together in a way that made any sense whatsoever and it made his head hurt to keep to thinking about it.

Gabriel held the camera out in front of him, careful to keep the lens focused on him. "I don't know who you are yet, but the only person I've ever loved is gone because of you. You took her away from me and now I'm going to hunt you. Find you. And hurt you." With vengeance in his heart he dropped the camera to the floor and took vindictive pleasure in crushing it under his foot. That had been a week ago.

The day after he had gone back to Chandra, apologizing profusely for his outburst during their last meeting and offering to show the doctor proof of his ability. All had been forgiven once Suresh had seen an undeniable example of telekinesis in action. They had excitedly agreed to embark on an adventure together to find others with evolved abilities which had given him further access to research listings. Gabriel had carefully memorized names and addresses to be copied down once he returned home. If Primatech had been keeping such close tabs on him he felt it reasonable to assume that they would also be watching for others and anybody on Chandra's listings could provide a link back to them. Noah Bennet and whoever the Angela that he had referred to was may have thought that they were done with him but he wouldn't allow them to get away so easily. Or so he thought.

Gabriel had approached a woman the next day that Suresh had thought to have an ability to camouflage herself from view. He had told her that he was an intern for a local political office being sent out to survey the opinions of residents. With a dose of charm and an easy smile he had slipped through the door and secured her confidence. They chatted amicably while he waited out any sign of the Company, but when he really began to see her instead of the use she was filling for him, things got a little more difficult.

He had been relaxing on her over stuffed couch, laughing lightly at some joke she had made and the girl was beginning to subtly work signals of attraction in his direction. Gabriel studied the way her pupils dilated slightly when looking at him and the shy half-smiles she attempted to suppress through his grin of false intentions. It wasn't long before he began to ponder the function and inner workings of her ability. How she could ionize the air around her, disturbing the atmosphere so that light actually refracted away from her body giving the impression of invisibility.

She had naively mistaken the flush in his cheeks for a blush when the heat started to course through him. The irresistible yearning within to be made whole, more complete with knowledge of her ability raked over his being like razor sharp claws. Gabriel recognized the sensation for what it was, the Hunger that called him like a siren's song to his next fix, and he was terrified to realize how easy it would be to sate. They were alone with no expected company. She trusted him. He could simply slide over to her side under the guise of a flirt or innocent kiss and have her in his grasp with very little effort.

Gabriel was instantly brought back to Brian and how he had felt with the man's blood slicking his hands, caked beneath his fingernails, and then to Claire. The woman before him may have meant something to someone much the same way as Claire had. He couldn't bring himself to cause the kind of pain that he felt to another person. He needed her power the way a man lost in the desert would need a drink of water, but he needed his focus more. Control took precedence. Gabriel had hurriedly excused himself, straining against his instincts with every ounce of will that he could muster and left her confused but unscathed. After that incident he had decided that perhaps close contact hadn't been the wisest of tactics to employ.

He rolled over so that his face was no longer buried in the carpet rug. Rubbing his eyes he let out a grunt of frustration. A strand of blonde hair stuck in the rug caught his attention. Claire's hair was everywhere and no matter how many times he swept or vacuumed or scrubbed he could never get rid of all of it. Then again he wasn't sure that he wanted to. The lasting fragrance of her shampoo that kept tangled up in her brushes and the clothing that lay scattered around the bedroom were the only proof that she had ever been there. The apartment that had only ever been a place to live before she had come along had been turned into a home while she was there and without her it just became empty. Lonely. And he was helpless to correct that. She was gone and would never come back.

The one thing that Gabriel hated more than the helplessness he felt though was the sense of being useless. He couldn't even be around the people that could provide a link to those that he had promised himself he would gain vengeance against. Not without the possibility of succumbing to his want for their power.

He jumped to his feet in a fit of irritation. Pacing back and forth for a moment while he struggled to gain some perspective the sight of his couch flooded him with the memory of the last time that Claire had been in the apartment. Gabriel could remember the warmth of her body against his as clearly as if he were still touching her. The feel of her hair as it brushed over his shoulder, the press of her lips on his and the sweetness of her sweat that had gotten caught up in the pillows. A faint spot of virginity between the cushions as constant as the shine in her smile. Somewhere in the process of recalling all the irrelevant ways that he missed her a hand flew from his side bringing with it the sound of shredded fabric. Bits of fluff floated in the air momentarily. When it cleared Gabriel was left with the view of his couch… having been neatly sawed in half.

Davis was right, he thought to himself as he stared down at the offending hand. He really didn't know who he could hurt.

Angela peered through the pane of glass into the room where Claire lay neatly wrapped in the white sheets of a clinic bed, sound asleep with the Haitian faithfully waiting at her side. "How is she?"

The doctor at her side skimmed over the top pages of the patient's chart and gave a low whistle. "She'll be fine. No long term damage I don't think. You were definitely right about the pregnancy. It's hard to say exactly how far along she is because of her ability. This is the first time we've been able to study reproduction in a female Regen. I've never seen anything like it before. Even with her ability running at half capacity... The cells are multiplying at exponential speeds that we can't even completely measure -"

Angela turned to give the man a stern, tight lipped frown that displayed just how little she cared for his personal fascination in the matter. "Sorry ma'am," he immediately apologized. "If I had to guess I'd say she's about sixteen weeks along. We're looking at maybe a four to five month gestation period."

She didn't bother to dismiss the doctor. Instead she swiped her card through the electronic lock that would grant her access to the room and stepped inside to sit beside the Haitian. Angela's eyes moved worriedly over the lines of equipment monitoring her vital signs and came to rest on the silver chain still draped around her neck. Plucking the necklace away she graced her fingertips across the engraving before turning the watch face over. She found the dial that would adjust the time and twirled the little hands about from the designated 3:51 until they landed seven minutes from midnight.

"It's time."

To be continued...