Title: Empty Memory
Genre: Romance / Angst
Rating: T
Pairing: Sylar x OC
Spoilers: N/A
Summary: You will forget. To remember any portion of it, any word, will cause you pain, terrible pain, growing more terrible as you fight to remember.
Word Count: 1,483
Warnings: Weird timeline.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Summary is from Star Trek: The Original Series.
A/N: I am pretending Heroes: Reborn doesn't exist.
We all imagine ourselves as the agents of our destiny, capable of determining our own fate, but have we truly any choice in when we rise, or when we fall? Or does a force larger than ourselves bid us our direction?
After he asks her a series of endless questions about people that she doesn't know, about places she has never been, about things she doesn't remember, she is thrown in a cell. It is nice, she supposes, as prisons go, with a glass door and sterile looking floors and walls. But a prison is still a prison and she doesn't deserve to be here, she hasn't done anything.
"Let me out of here! Please!" She bangs on the door hoping to shatter it, but it only bruises her fists and hurts her arms. "Please," she sinks to the ground sobbing, but no one comes, no one answers. There is only silence and the ticking of a clock.
The ticking eases something inside of her, makes her take a deep, shaky breath to calm herself. It is a soothing sound, like a memory from a dream, like when you hear someone hum a song that you suddenly remember that your mother used to sing to you. But it doesn't change the fact the she is trapped her, for what she doesn't know, for how long she doesn't know. She doesn't know who took her or understand the things they want to know.
She wants to go home.
But a small, brief part of her, asks to what? She lives in a two bedroom apartment by herself. She does not have any family, or friends save the few people she knows from the coffee house. She has no pictures of her entire life. The furthest back she can remember is… she doesn't know. How do you age your memories? She doesn't remember being a child, or a teenager though. There's no memory of any off those things. And the part of her that is wondering what she would leave her to, wonders if there is something that she doesn't remember, that these people do…
"Are there people here yet?"
Gabriel sighs for the tenth time and looks up from the book he's fiddling with to stare at the bathroom door in exasperation. "Yes, there are. They are probably wondering why the person who's birthday party they came to isn't down there yet."
"Everything has to be perfect!" Her voice is muffled by the door and he hears a few things clatter around on the counter. "It's not every day you turn sixteen, you know!"
He rolls his eyes. He remembered – that had been three years ago for him. All he'd gotten was a part-time job sweeping up the floor in his father's watch shop, he wasn't allowed to touch the merchandise unless he snuck in after hours.
"Is Tommy here?"
"I don't know, why?" He frowns. Tommy is a good for nothing – the local heart throb of the neighborhood. Seventeen and worldly to Evie, but a punk kid to Gabriel. As Evie steps out of the bathroom, she answering him, but he doesn't hear a single word. His mouth falls open.
To him, Evie has always been the girl next store. The cliché plotline to every movie. Though he's known before that she was cute – big brown eyes and freckled cheeks, a dimple on one side when she smiled too wide. But he forgot things like that because he always remembered the time she ate so many cookies she threw up and the time she got her hair stuck in a barbed wire fence and cried when he cut it out. But she had always seemed too much younger than him to label as 'beautiful.'
But now she wearing a mid-thigh length black dress, belted at her small waist with a bright pink ribbon. Her shoulders are bare to his gaze, and the long line of her legs that end in matching pink heels. Her hair is soft and tousled in a 'just rolled out of bed' manner that he finds incredible appealing. She hasn't put on much makeup, thank God, but her lips are glossy with something that makes his eyes focus on them intently until he realizes she is clearly waiting for an answer.
"What?"
She fidgets. "I mean, I just – if it was my first, it would be, you know – awesome. But what if I'm bad at it?"
His mind tries to catch up with her words. Her first – they were talking about Tommy – "Your first what?" He doesn't recognize his own voice and is surprised to realize that he is… angry.
She blinks. "My first kiss." She furrows her brow at him. "What did you think – actually, never mind, I knew what you thought. I'd be offended, but I'm trying to ask you for a favor."
A favor? She wanted him to help her kiss that asshole kid from two blocks up, the same one that chased old lady Johnson's cat up a tree? "I don't think – "
"Come on, Gabriel!" She abruptly sitting on the bed beside him, so close he can count her eyelashes. "I don't want to mess up, so I'd rather practice before hand!" His face must convey his confusion, because she continues. "I mean, - you must have kissed girls before, I thought," He watches with fascination as a blush appears on her cheeks, spreading down her throat and collarbones. He wondered how far – "I thought you could teach me… how…" She's mumbling at the end, red as anything, and avoiding his eyes.
For some reason, he'd avoided thinking about it. When he'd realized years ago that he was happy she hadn't kissed any of the silly boys from the neighborhood, he'd forced the thought from his mind intensely. He didn't have the right to think about her that way – she was his best friend!
And – and – he had never kissed anyone either. There weren't many girls here that were clamoring to kiss the weird son of the watchmaker who was friends with a fifteen – now sixteen – year old. It had never, not once, bothered him before.
But – but –
He could be her first. A sleeping beast uncoiled in his chest, stretching its limbs and yawning awake and rumbling with… possessiveness. He could be the first person to ever press his lips to hers. No one could ever take that away from him. It is not nervous energy that surges through him at the thought – but anticipation.
As he reaches out to her, he has a brief flash of thought that he might be bad at this, but then he tilts her chin up and leans down, and no – there is nothing more right than this.
Her lips are soft as flower petals. When they open as she gasps, he doesn't waste the opportunity, but slides he tongue into her mouth to twine tentatively with hers. When he feel the lightest brush of her hands against the nape of his neck, he hums in contentment at the feeling and reaches out with his own arms to pull her into him, one hand at the back of her head to tilt her upwards, so he could tilt his own head and slant his mouth downwards.
Her fingers curled in his hair, nails the lightest brush and he wishes he could purr in pleasure at the sensation. He lets his own nails drag just so down her scalp and she moans, a sharp, surprised sound, and Gabriel smiles against her mouth.
He pulls away in a teasing brush of lips and lets his eyes slide open, pupils pinpricks as he stares at her. Her eyes are still closed. She's panting, her cheeks flushed, her lips reddened and thoroughly kissed. "You're – " She swallows thickly, eyes fluttering open. "You're a really good kisser."
His chest swells and he can't help the purely male streak in him that makes him say, "Better than Tommy."
She blinks and it takes her a moment to remember what he's talking about. "I – yeah, probably." She staring at him strangely, but she hasn't pulled away from the circle of his arms.
When a loud burst of conversation from downstairs flares, he knows someone will come up looking for her soon. So he stands, pulling her with him so they can go join the party. But he can't stop himself from leaning down and kissing her once more, trying to sear the memory into his mind, into hers.
