I'm Broken

“That’s my ride,” he said. And then he just left her. Left her waiting in front of the Primatech Paper van. In the middle of an argument. While in the apartment across the street, a killer was being born. He hopped into a taxi and just rode off into the sunset. He wasn’t a hero, though.

She marched across the street and found herself standing at his door for the third time this week. Knowing he wouldn’t answer, she fried the lock and entered. The apartment reeked of blood. He had closed the windows, making everything darker and grayer.

She saw the cold ziti sitting on the table, uneaten. She walked into the living room, keeping her eyes ahead as not to see Trevor’s corpse, but she caught it out of the corner of her eye. She squinted, trying to purge the image from her mind but only managed to burn it into her brain. She didn’t actually get a very good look, but her brain was more than willing to supply the gruesome details.

“Gabriel,” she called, her voice weaker than she thought.

The voice that answered barely sounded like his. It was hoarse and deep, “I told you to go away.”

She was busy searching for the origin of the voice when, suddenly, he was there. Elle found herself flung against the far wall by invisible hands. There was her Gabriel, his glasses gone and his hair slicked back with sweat.

“I came back to apologize,” she said, very calmly for someone being held against a wall by a murderer.

“You’re too late. The hunger, it’s too strong.”

From this vantage point, Elle couldn’t help but see Trevor’s body. His eyes were cold and glazed over. His head just stopped a few inches above his eyes. His brain was gone, and so was the top of his head. She saw Gabriel lift his hand and felt a sharp pain on her forehead. “You wouldn’t,” she whispered, staring into his eyes, a mountain of sadness in her face.

And then she fell to the floor. He scrambled backwards until he collided with the far wall and cowered down. Elle knew she should race out of the apartment. Any sane person would. Instead, she approached him, knelt beside him, touched his shoulder, as if he hadn’t killed two people, hadn’t just tried to kill her.

“I’m broken,” he spoke, “Then you came and I was fixed. And then you broke me again.”

“I know,” she said softly, her voice cracking. “But I’m broken, too. I-I pretended to be normal, and… and I was normal. With you, I was normal.” She took hold of his hand.

His words were detached. “It’s too strong. I can’t stop myself.” His hand remained limp in hers.

She squeezed his hand. “Yes, you can. You did stop. You stopped for me.”

“It wasn’t real. It was an illusion.” He let his hand slide out of hers.

“I know. I know it was an illusion, but I liked the illusion. I liked it, too. I pretended to be like the ladies on TV and I wore pretty dresses and I said the flirty things and I smiled like a real girl and I brought you pie and I made ziti and it was all so normal.”

“I’m not normal. I’m special. You wanted me to be special.”

“You were special.”

“I’m not special. There’re a lot of people like me. They’re special, too. And I want to take their specialness.”

“Not special because of the powers,” she replied, “I see people with powers everyday. Dozens of them. You are special because you stopped being broken. I wanted to believe that you could just stop being broken, and then it would mean that I could stop being broken. That I wouldn’t hurt people and giggle about it. That I wouldn’t call people locked in cells ‘my toys.’ The only thing in the world that was important to me wouldn’t be pleasing my Daddy. I wouldn’t spend fifteen years in the same building. I could just be Elle and we could go to street theater. I don’t even know what street theater is. We could have gone and I could see what street theater is.”

“You have to leave now.”

“I don’t want to leave. I want to be unbroken.”

In his scary voice again, he told her, “Leave or I will break you. I will rip off your head and I will take your brain and I will steal your sparks. And I will cry because I got blood all over your pretty hair and your pretty face. And then there won’t be any more Gabriel. Not ever. There’s no Gabriel without his angel with the broken watch.”

Elle got up and began to walk towards the door. “Gabriel, if you ever see me again, tell me about us. I’m going back to my Daddy and he’s probably going to make me forget. He’s going to break my brain and put it back together with scotch tape.”

His head was resting on his blood-covered hands, but he lifted his head to look at her. It left a line of blood across his forehead.

She finished, “Come back to me and I’ll bring back Gabriel. I promise.”

You're Broken

She just wanted the pain to go away. Sure it was a dangerous place where mysteriously unpowered Peter Petrellis tended to be thrown out second-story windows, but even if she lost her powers, it would be worth the relief.

She electrocuted the friendly receptionist who tried to welcome her. In retrospect, the woman might have been able to tell Elle where she needed to go.

She got within ten feet of the elevator before she realized it would probably be better to take the stairs. The people in the stuck elevator would survive.

She stumbled around aimlessly on the second floor, trying to find anyone who could help. She burst into a large conference room just as another surge hit her. She collapsed and through the pain could see two men. They looked familiar; the first man was an older gentleman with dark graying hair. He kind of looked like Nathan Petrelli. No, that’s Arthur Petrelli, one of Dad’s friends. I thought he died?

The other figure kind of looked like Sylar. He looked a lot like Sylar. When he ran to her, she could see that it was Sylar. This was not the way she wanted the pain to go away. She struggled to get up, but the next surge racked her body so hard, she fell back onto the floor, shaking.

“You’re broken,” she heard his voice say.

The older man’s voice commented, “Her powers are unstable. I can fix this.”

“Dad, no.”

Dad? What’s going on? The pain overwhelmed her thoughts.

Sylar kept talking, “I can fix her.”

Elle felt her body being lifted telekinetically. Fueled by adrenaline (which didn’t help her condition), she struggled against his iron grip and let loose as powerful of a shock as she could muster. Sylar just reached around and held her by the stomach, channeling the energy.

“Shh,” he whispered, so close she could feel the breath on her ear, “I’m going to fix you. It’s going to hurt a little bit.”

A small groan escaped. She waited for the telltale pain on her forehead, but something else happened. She felt Sylar gather a large chuck of hair from the back of her head and hold it out. She felt the cutting sensation she was anticipating, but instead around the clump of hair he was holding. It was excruciatingly painful, no better and no worse than the rogue lightning in her system.

She felt him pull off that part of her scalp. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw it floating gaily to the side. Then, she felt rhythmic burst of electricity course through her and in an ornate mirror across the room, she noticed that he was poking around in her head. Surreally, she felt the pain disappear and for a moment, it was like her disconnected mind was trapped in her body.

All at once, she felt a massive discharge of electricity. But slowly she felt the electricity filling her body again. She felt sweat on the back of her neck. But it wasn’t sweat; it was blood.

“Just kill me, please,” she spoke weakly.

“No need,” he answered, still intimately close. She watched him pluck her scalp out of the air and felt him attach it back to her scalp, stimulating the pain nerves around the area all at once. Then, a strip of cloth was torn from the bottom of her sweater. He pulled a paper clip out of his pocket and used his heat power to melt it and mold it into a thin, curved needle.

“Oh, god,” she breathed. Directly by Sylar’s powers, the needle went to work sewing her scalp closed with the thread from her sweater in a long, rapid series of stitches much denser than any surgeon could pull off.

She felt him tie off the end before saying, “All done.”

She promptly passed out into what were probably his arms.

: : :

He was sitting in a chair looking like a worried family member when she awoke again with a pounding headache.

“Sylar?”

“Call me Gabriel, please.”

“I’m… I’m alive. You didn’t kill me?”

“No, I’m trying to cut back on that. Not healthy.” He attempted a grin.

She wiggled her fingers and found her lightning ability was still active. Except there weren’t any ominous fluctuations in the charge like before. “Did you… fix me?”

“Yes. You shouldn’t have those pesky overloads anymore.”

She reached for her head. He tried to catch her hand but she was able to touch the wound, causing her a flood of pain.

“You just had the equivalent of brain surgery. It’s not a smart idea to touch.”

She looked up and saw that he was still holding his hand. She yanked it away.

“You think that’s going to fix the fact that you murdered by father?”

Gabriel looked hurt. “No, I just… thought I’d do something nice.”

“Nice? You’re trying to do something nice? You’re a killer; you just don’t recover from that!”

“I guess you’re speaking from experience,” he snapped.

Defensively, she shot back, “Hey, the people I killed, I killed for a good reason. Some of them were bad people like you. And some of them were unhelpful, so I had to kill them a little bit to show them I was annoyed with them. I didn’t kill them because I enjoy it like you do.”

“You’re a sadist,” he commented plainly.

“Okay, sometimes I like to hurt people. But I’m warped. And no amount of mind-power brain surgery is going to fix that.”

“So, Ma said you were fired from the Company.”

“Ma? Did you get adopted by the Petrellis while I was gone?”

“I’m their biological son. Peter and Nathan are my brothers.”

“That whole family is screwed up.”

“Look, if you need money. Or work. Or a purpose… we have a very aggressive recruiting program for people like us with abilities.”

Elle gave him a glare that clearly showed she’d like to take his job opportunity and reduce it to a smoking lump of carbon and, while it was still hot, stick it where the sun don’t shine, but she didn’t refuse.

Gabriel put on a calm smile. “You get some rest.” He brushed the hair out of her face and kissed her on the forehead. He got zapped for his trouble, but didn’t even blink as his lip healed.

He met his father outside.

“I could have just absorbed her ability.”

“You already have her power from Peter. What’s the use?”

“She’s unstable. She’s Bob’s daughter. She’s loyal to the Company.”

“She was loyal to her father and now he’s dead. Ma rather unceremoniously fired her. And we helped her. And the kind of work we do is right down her alley.”

“You care for her.”

“I hurt her in unimaginable ways. I owe it to her to help.”

“Careful, son. Women are a wily species.”

“Don’t project your marriage troubles on me.”

“You are attracted to her, though.”

“She’s an attractive woman,” Gabriel replied evenly.

“If she’s that important to you, she can stay.” He patted his son on the shoulder and walked away, leaving Gabriel to watch as Elle practiced with her newly controllable powers, smiling.