Heroes Fic: Angel of Death (6/6)
Title: Angel of Death (6/6)
Author: MrsTater
Characters & Pairings: Gabriel Gray, Angela Petrelli, Elle Bishop; Sylar/Elle
Rating & Warnings: R for language and sex
Format & Word Count: completed WIP; this chapter is 3090 words
Summary: Elle returns to the Company with a tempting offer for Gabriel. Can he refuse and still give her what she wants? [Alternate Universe after episode 3.5, "Angels and Monsters"]
Author's Notes: Please forgive me for being so long in concluding this story! I got waylaid by the holidays, and ever since then life's been a bit of a whirlwind with very little fanfic time. It meant a lot to mean in the meantime that several of you commented to ask if I was going to finish it, and I hope this chapter is worth the wait. At least the fic finally lives up to the R-rated sex warning. ;) Though this is an AU fic, I've borrowed the empathic element of Gabriel's power from the show because I love it so much, especially in regard to his relationship with Elle. I've taken some liberties with it, though, to fit the story. The poem quoted in the chapter is John Donne's The Canonization, which I hope you'll all read in full if you haven't before, as it's a fantastic poem. Many thanks to the awesome Godricgal for giving this a read-through, as I was a bit panicky about whether the situation (and the sex!) worked!
And without further ado, the chapter. :)
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V |
VI
"You don't have to seduce me, you know," Elle says, and then sinks her front teeth into the pitted red flesh of a strawberry.
It's just about the sexiest thing Gabriel's ever laid his eyes on, the young woman stretched out on the turned-down sheets and duvet, like a golden-haired angel perched on billowing clouds; glory seems to shine all around her from the light of the bedside lamps. Though Gabriel has to admit that angels are typically depicted strumming harps and singing praise to God rather than sensuously nibbling at fruit and saying, "I was going to sleep with you anyway."
Lounging beside her on the bed, propped up on thick down pillows, Gabriel's voice catches in his throat as he watches her lips find the edge of her champagne flute. He tugs at his collar, loosening his tie as his gaze follows the line of her neck as she tilts her head back to drink...
But Elle doesn’t drink. She lowers her glass. Her eyes, crackling blue like her electricity, level on him; her bangs, swept over to one side, reveal a raised eyebrow.
"Unless you're not seducing me," she says. "Are the strawberries and champagne just another charge to the Company? Like the room?"
She's teasing him -- Gabriel recognizes the telltale glint in her eye, the quirk at the corner of her mouth. But there's a tautness in her voice, too, as if she's holding back from him.
With King Midas for a father, Elle is accustomed to the best of everything, and this hotel room, an atrium penthouse suite, is definitely the best Broadway has to offer. But what Elle is not accustomed to, Gabriel realizes, is anything being the best for her.
The cold, heavy fingers of sadness grip Gabriel's heart and stomach and twist: even as Elle stands boldly before Death, she holds out hope that someone in life will do something good for her, for once, that someone will... love her. How pathetically desperate must she be to place that hope in him? And yet...that he has the chance to make something good...to love...
Does he love Elle?
The grasp on his insides relaxes, leaving Gabriel with the sensation that everything in him has turned to mush, been made new; he is some primordial ooze waiting to take shape, to evolve into a higher form, perhaps, than he has ever wished he could be.
Do I love Elle?
He gazes at the young woman in the midnight blue dress, her hair disheveled from his hands running through it, her lips still puffy and flushed from their heated kisses in the diner.
He thinks he could be in love...
The thought makes his neck prickle, his hands sweat, his throat go dry, his heart pound crazily, out of tempo, like a timepiece gone all haywire.
He throws back his glass of champagne, closing his eyes as the fizz bubbles down to his stomach until all goes still and silent within him. Then he sets his glass on the bedside table, rolls to lay on his side, and rests his hand on Elle's hip.
"Maybe the champagne's for me," he says, fortified and mellowed enough by the alcohol and the cool silk of Elle's dress beneath his fingertips to be honest.
"For you?"
"For my nerves," Gabriel quickly amends, as her eyes start to bend. "I feel like it's prom night."
Elle's gaze darts sideways as she drinks her champagne, then returns to his to confess, "I never had a prom night."
"Neither did I." Though his reasons for not having one are slightly more pathetic than Elle having spent her child locked away from the world. "There was a girl I...would have liked to get a hotel room with." His neck prickles, and warmth floods his face. "But girls don't go to prom with the watchmaker's son." Realizing he sounds like he's throwing himself a pity party, he lightens his tone. "Anyway, I could only have afforded the kind of hotel room that charges by the hour. Unlike this..."
"Which charges $49.50 for strawberries and champagne?"
"Exactly," says Gabriel, chuckling softly. He withdraws his hand from Elle's hip and sits up to pour them each a second glass of champagne.
"So this girl you wanted to take to the prom..." Elle says, shifting to recline beside him against the pillows when he returns with their drinks. Gabriel inhales sharply as she sits thigh-to-thigh with him, her dress hitching up high enough as she crosses her stockinged legs that he can see a tantalizing hint of lace at the top, and the gleaming clasp of a garter. Taking a drink, he forces himself to look up at her face, and concentrates very hard on her words.
"Did you memorize poetry for her?"
Face going warm, Gabriel can't meet Elle's laughing eyes, though he does grin as he looks away. "Maybe."
"What poem?" Elle's fingers wrap around Gabriel's tie, pulling him to look at her.
"I can't remember," he answers. It's the truth; he doesn't remember the poetry, doesn't remember the girl's name, doesn’t even remember her face. His old high school crush is like a fading dream in the light of the here and now, where Elle's name is the only one whispered over and over in his mind, her lovely face before him, so close he can feel her quick, shallow breaths against his face, the only face he can see, or ever wants to see.
Or kiss.
He leans in and brushes his lips across her cheekbone, feeling, as he lingers against her soft, sweetly perfumed skin, Elle's responding shiver. He chuckles low and nuzzles at her, but her small hand on his chest pushes him back.
"You remember my poem, don't you?" she says playfully.
Gabriel leans into her and nips at her earlobe, tasting the salt of her skin and the metallic tang of her earring. "I thought you said I didn't have to seduce you."
"You don't," Elle replies, her shoulder arching up to nudge him away, though the flush of her cheeks, her smile, and her bright eyes belie her. "But you do have to entertain me."
"More like embarrass myself in front of you," Gabriel mutters.
But he takes another fortifying drink, clears his throat, draws a deep breath, turns to Elle, and, before he can psych himself out, blurts:
"Call's what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it--Elle, what the...?"
The last are not the words of John Donne, and they are muffled by Elle's lips as she locks her fingers behind Gabriel's neck, pulling herself against him as she kisses him deeply, without preamble.
"I haven't even gotten to the good parts yet," Gabriel manages to protest between kisses that he thinks might be sparking a little.
"A hot guy's reciting poetry to me in bed in a penthouse suite," Elle replies, her fingers unknotting his tie; she tugs it free of his collar, tosses it aside, and sets to work on the buttons of his shirt. "That is the good part."
Gabriel doesn't argue with her, but allows her to push his shirt off his shoulders and then, when she tugs at the hem, he peels off his own undershirt. Finding her mouth again, he can't help but make low sounds of approval as her hands slide up and down over his bare chest and arms, tracing the contours of his muscles. At one point she breaks the kiss to look at him and giggles girlishly, clearly delighted by what she sees, which at once fills Gabriel with the sensations of adolescent light-headedness and an ego more inflated than any power trip has made him.
"You're pretty buff for a geeky watchmaker," she says.
"I am a supervilliain," Gabriel replies, ducking his head to kiss his way down her neck, which vibrates with her laughter until his tongue finds the hollow of her throat, at which point he feels her indrawn breath and her vocal chords rasping his name. There's a request in the way she says Gabriel, a plea -- almost, even, a prayer. It emboldens him to kiss her still lower, and as his lips graze the pale rise of a breast above her satin dress and his hands cup her curves beneath the clinging silken fabric, the sparks fly.
Literally. Gabriel cries out as the electricity jolts his neck, and Elle apologizes, her eyes huge and her flush of passion deepening into embarrassment.
"I was afraid that would happen. I didn't mean to, I swear! Sometimes I just lose control--"
Gabriel silences her with a kiss. "Don't be sorry. I'm starting to like it, you know."
He means it. Though the shock hurt a little at the time, it lingers now as a pleasant tingle through his body, which seems to have made him more alert, heightened his senses to everything there is to see and here and taste and touch and smell about Elle. He rubs his fingers over her breasts, listening to he swish of her dress fabric as he slides his hand along her side. The zipper is cold beneath his fingers as they close around it; he feels each give of the zipper's teeth, releasing the fabric, as he tugs the mechanism downward to reveal that she is not, as he suspected, wearing a bra.
Swallowing hard as he takes in her full round breast in profile, he remembers what undergarments Elle is wearing; his fingers abandon stroking the side of her breast to push up the hem of her dress until his fingers are resting on Elle's hot skin above her stockings, tickled by the lace of her garter belt and... oh God, she's not wearing any panties, either.
Gabriel is so hungry now, he can't forestall this any longer. He rolls Elle onto her back and positions himself above her, and his anxiety that she is ready for this is alleviated when she immediately shimmies out of her dress. She reaches to undo the garter belt, too, but Gabriel stops her with a hand over hers. She grins, wantonly.
"A stocking man, are you?"
"Apparently." It comes out a little more brusquely than Gabriel means it to, but speech is really beyond the realm of his control now, with Elle lying there, all pale skin and pink nipples and black lace and nylon stockings. She is lithe limbs and full curves compacted into a petite body with the power to stop Gabriel's world. He would stop it, if he had that power; he knows there could never be any moment more perfect than this one, and he'd like to live in it forever. She's so beautiful, but more than that, she knows what he's done, what he was, and trusts him not to hurt her. For he's sure now that Elle doesn't want to die, whatever she says -- not till she's been loved.
Which is why he hesitates now, not quite trusting himself.
Since her electricity rippled through him, the hunger has been mounting within him. As strong as the desire to settle himself in the cradle of her thighs and bury himself in her warm body is his urge to penetrate her skin and skull and probe the inner workings of her brain until he can find out how she does that...His eyes rake over her body to settle on the scar on her forehead. He pushes back her bangs and, for a long time, stares. The longer he stares, the pale white line begins darkens to pink...then red. Sticky blood red.
Gabriel closes his eyes. He leans over her, brushes a feather-light kiss to the scar. He cannot kiss it away, but he does so as a symbol to her, a symbol to himself, that he won't violate her trust, or his own.
"I'm not a pants woman," says Elle suddenly, and begins to unbuckle his belt, unfasten his pants. Which is the most convincing symbol of all. Gabriel's self-doubts flee as he kicks off the remainder of his clothing and Elle pulls his hips down into hers.
Anxiety returns, momentarily, as he starts to press into her. Elle is so small, he much larger. And it's only been a few days since he threw her through a door, he remembers, noting the purple-rimmed greenish bruises stair-stepping along her ribcage. He doesn't want to hurt her again. But she's kissing him again, sucking at his lower lip, and he swears her tongue sparks when it meets his, so that it's his grunt that drowns out Elle's as he pushes inside her.
"Are you trying to kill me?" he asks in the breathless moment afterward, as they lay still and staring at one another, growing accustomed to the feel of their bodies so intimately entwined with another's for the first time.
Slowly, a grin hitches across Elle's face as her lower muscles flex around him, eliciting another groan as he bites his lip to keep from going over the edge before they've even started.
"Only metaphorically," she says, coyly, raking her fingers through his hair and sending more little jolts of electricity through Gabriel's scalp that are slightly stronger than static and strangely therapeutic and invigorating.
He begins to move in her...out of her...and it seems to Gabriel that his old life is passing away and he's being escorted into a heavenly plane of existence by this angel beneath him...around him...Elle's legs wrap around his waist, her heels pressing into the small of his pack, pulling him in deeper still, burying him.
Another jolt passes between her hands and his shoulders, but this time it is Elle who cries out, breaking their kiss to clench her teeth -- Gabriel assumes, to regain control over her powers. Loving the thought that it's him who's making her lose control, he kisses her ear, then whispers that it's okay, he doesn't mind. His own control is slipping -- this is his first time with a woman, after all -- and, sensing that Elle is nearing the edge, too, he draws upon what worked on her earlier, and begins to recite:
"So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
"We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love... "
Elle cries out, then, coming with muscles contracting and relaxing around him in a rapid flutter, like the frantic wings of a moth. What carries Gabriel with her is another pulse of electricity that seems to radiate from his core -- though he knows that's ridiculous; it's Elle's power, not his.
But it occurs to him that, joined as they are, two becoming one, her powers are his, in a way, just as his are a part of her...
This is special, he thinks as he falls, panting, against her, resting his head in the sweat-slicked valley between her breasts, her heart pounding against his ear.
"I'm the only man in the world who's ever had sex like that," he manages to say between gasps for breath. He watches his index finger touch her nipple, as fascinated by the way it hardens, aroused, at his touch as he ever was by the inner workings of a timepiece. Smiling, he pushes up on his elbows to gaze down at her. "Because I'm the only man in the world who's ever had sex with you."
Judging from the small smile that dances across her lips, Elle seems to take this as a compliment. But the grin slips away, and her eyes peer quite seriously at him from beneath her bangs as she says, "If you're talking about the electricity, that wasn't me."
Gabriel slips out of her. "What do you mean, it wasn't you?"
"I know when electricity comes out of me. It didn't that time."
"You could have been distracted. I mean, we were--"
"I know," Elle repeats. "It was you."
"But I can't...I don't have..." Gabriel rolls onto his back and flexes his fingers.
Blue sparks crackle and jump between them.
"I'll be damned," Gabriel murmurs, then laughs. "I slept with you, and I got your ability! That's amazing, Elle, do you realize what this means?"
Elle holds up her own handful of sparks to mirror his, but stops short of touching their fingers together. "I think I'd prefer you kill people for powers instead of sleeping with everyone in sight."
Though Gabriel chuckles at Elle's characteristically flippant words, he doesn't miss the vulnerability in her eyes -- which he takes as another sign of how far he's come, that he's not so obsessed with this new ability that he loses sight of everything else.
"Don't worry."
He extinguishes his electricity, as much as he'd like to experiment with it, and brushes Elle's tousled, damp hair out of her face, most fascinated with the ability he's cultivating of being able to understand another human being's most intimate emotions.
"It's not the sex...well, not only the sex," he adds, grinning like a schoolboy in a state of mingled pride and disbelieve that he actually just did that, with her. "It's the empathy."
Elle closes her eyes and leans her cheek into his hand as he uncurls his fingers to cup her face. "And what does that mean?"
The words of the poem Gabriel just recited so easily echo in his mind, but his tongue feels suddenly thick and sluggish. He has to answer her, though, and honestly; it would be wrong to withhold his heart from her when he's seen hers.
He moistens his lips, and swallows.
"It means I love you."
His heart hangs, suspended and motionless, in his chest during the eternal moment that Elle stares back at him, silent, unreadable. Then, just as panic is about to set in, she pushes him onto his back and straddles him.
"Then kill me again, Angel of Death."
It's a request Gabriel is only too happy to fulfill.
Again and again.
The End
A/N: I cannot thank all my readers and reviewers enough for all the support and encouragement you've given me throughout the posting of this fic. Obviously if you comment to this chapter, Gabriel will recite the poem of your choice to you -- in the location of your choice, of course. ;)
Author: MrsTater
Characters & Pairings: Gabriel Gray, Angela Petrelli, Elle Bishop; Sylar/Elle
Rating & Warnings: R for language and sex
Format & Word Count: completed WIP; this chapter is 3090 words
Summary: Elle returns to the Company with a tempting offer for Gabriel. Can he refuse and still give her what she wants? [Alternate Universe after episode 3.5, "Angels and Monsters"]
Author's Notes: Please forgive me for being so long in concluding this story! I got waylaid by the holidays, and ever since then life's been a bit of a whirlwind with very little fanfic time. It meant a lot to mean in the meantime that several of you commented to ask if I was going to finish it, and I hope this chapter is worth the wait. At least the fic finally lives up to the R-rated sex warning. ;) Though this is an AU fic, I've borrowed the empathic element of Gabriel's power from the show because I love it so much, especially in regard to his relationship with Elle. I've taken some liberties with it, though, to fit the story. The poem quoted in the chapter is John Donne's The Canonization, which I hope you'll all read in full if you haven't before, as it's a fantastic poem. Many thanks to the awesome Godricgal for giving this a read-through, as I was a bit panicky about whether the situation (and the sex!) worked!
And without further ado, the chapter. :)
Part I | Part II | Part III | Part IV | Part V |
VI
"You don't have to seduce me, you know," Elle says, and then sinks her front teeth into the pitted red flesh of a strawberry.
It's just about the sexiest thing Gabriel's ever laid his eyes on, the young woman stretched out on the turned-down sheets and duvet, like a golden-haired angel perched on billowing clouds; glory seems to shine all around her from the light of the bedside lamps. Though Gabriel has to admit that angels are typically depicted strumming harps and singing praise to God rather than sensuously nibbling at fruit and saying, "I was going to sleep with you anyway."
Lounging beside her on the bed, propped up on thick down pillows, Gabriel's voice catches in his throat as he watches her lips find the edge of her champagne flute. He tugs at his collar, loosening his tie as his gaze follows the line of her neck as she tilts her head back to drink...
But Elle doesn’t drink. She lowers her glass. Her eyes, crackling blue like her electricity, level on him; her bangs, swept over to one side, reveal a raised eyebrow.
"Unless you're not seducing me," she says. "Are the strawberries and champagne just another charge to the Company? Like the room?"
She's teasing him -- Gabriel recognizes the telltale glint in her eye, the quirk at the corner of her mouth. But there's a tautness in her voice, too, as if she's holding back from him.
With King Midas for a father, Elle is accustomed to the best of everything, and this hotel room, an atrium penthouse suite, is definitely the best Broadway has to offer. But what Elle is not accustomed to, Gabriel realizes, is anything being the best for her.
The cold, heavy fingers of sadness grip Gabriel's heart and stomach and twist: even as Elle stands boldly before Death, she holds out hope that someone in life will do something good for her, for once, that someone will... love her. How pathetically desperate must she be to place that hope in him? And yet...that he has the chance to make something good...to love...
Does he love Elle?
The grasp on his insides relaxes, leaving Gabriel with the sensation that everything in him has turned to mush, been made new; he is some primordial ooze waiting to take shape, to evolve into a higher form, perhaps, than he has ever wished he could be.
Do I love Elle?
He gazes at the young woman in the midnight blue dress, her hair disheveled from his hands running through it, her lips still puffy and flushed from their heated kisses in the diner.
He thinks he could be in love...
The thought makes his neck prickle, his hands sweat, his throat go dry, his heart pound crazily, out of tempo, like a timepiece gone all haywire.
He throws back his glass of champagne, closing his eyes as the fizz bubbles down to his stomach until all goes still and silent within him. Then he sets his glass on the bedside table, rolls to lay on his side, and rests his hand on Elle's hip.
"Maybe the champagne's for me," he says, fortified and mellowed enough by the alcohol and the cool silk of Elle's dress beneath his fingertips to be honest.
"For you?"
"For my nerves," Gabriel quickly amends, as her eyes start to bend. "I feel like it's prom night."
Elle's gaze darts sideways as she drinks her champagne, then returns to his to confess, "I never had a prom night."
"Neither did I." Though his reasons for not having one are slightly more pathetic than Elle having spent her child locked away from the world. "There was a girl I...would have liked to get a hotel room with." His neck prickles, and warmth floods his face. "But girls don't go to prom with the watchmaker's son." Realizing he sounds like he's throwing himself a pity party, he lightens his tone. "Anyway, I could only have afforded the kind of hotel room that charges by the hour. Unlike this..."
"Which charges $49.50 for strawberries and champagne?"
"Exactly," says Gabriel, chuckling softly. He withdraws his hand from Elle's hip and sits up to pour them each a second glass of champagne.
"So this girl you wanted to take to the prom..." Elle says, shifting to recline beside him against the pillows when he returns with their drinks. Gabriel inhales sharply as she sits thigh-to-thigh with him, her dress hitching up high enough as she crosses her stockinged legs that he can see a tantalizing hint of lace at the top, and the gleaming clasp of a garter. Taking a drink, he forces himself to look up at her face, and concentrates very hard on her words.
"Did you memorize poetry for her?"
Face going warm, Gabriel can't meet Elle's laughing eyes, though he does grin as he looks away. "Maybe."
"What poem?" Elle's fingers wrap around Gabriel's tie, pulling him to look at her.
"I can't remember," he answers. It's the truth; he doesn't remember the poetry, doesn't remember the girl's name, doesn’t even remember her face. His old high school crush is like a fading dream in the light of the here and now, where Elle's name is the only one whispered over and over in his mind, her lovely face before him, so close he can feel her quick, shallow breaths against his face, the only face he can see, or ever wants to see.
Or kiss.
He leans in and brushes his lips across her cheekbone, feeling, as he lingers against her soft, sweetly perfumed skin, Elle's responding shiver. He chuckles low and nuzzles at her, but her small hand on his chest pushes him back.
"You remember my poem, don't you?" she says playfully.
Gabriel leans into her and nips at her earlobe, tasting the salt of her skin and the metallic tang of her earring. "I thought you said I didn't have to seduce you."
"You don't," Elle replies, her shoulder arching up to nudge him away, though the flush of her cheeks, her smile, and her bright eyes belie her. "But you do have to entertain me."
"More like embarrass myself in front of you," Gabriel mutters.
But he takes another fortifying drink, clears his throat, draws a deep breath, turns to Elle, and, before he can psych himself out, blurts:
"Call's what you will, we are made such by love;
Call her one, me another fly,
We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,
And we in us find th' eagle and the dove.
The phoenix riddle hath more wit
By us; we two being one, are it--Elle, what the...?"
The last are not the words of John Donne, and they are muffled by Elle's lips as she locks her fingers behind Gabriel's neck, pulling herself against him as she kisses him deeply, without preamble.
"I haven't even gotten to the good parts yet," Gabriel manages to protest between kisses that he thinks might be sparking a little.
"A hot guy's reciting poetry to me in bed in a penthouse suite," Elle replies, her fingers unknotting his tie; she tugs it free of his collar, tosses it aside, and sets to work on the buttons of his shirt. "That is the good part."
Gabriel doesn't argue with her, but allows her to push his shirt off his shoulders and then, when she tugs at the hem, he peels off his own undershirt. Finding her mouth again, he can't help but make low sounds of approval as her hands slide up and down over his bare chest and arms, tracing the contours of his muscles. At one point she breaks the kiss to look at him and giggles girlishly, clearly delighted by what she sees, which at once fills Gabriel with the sensations of adolescent light-headedness and an ego more inflated than any power trip has made him.
"You're pretty buff for a geeky watchmaker," she says.
"I am a supervilliain," Gabriel replies, ducking his head to kiss his way down her neck, which vibrates with her laughter until his tongue finds the hollow of her throat, at which point he feels her indrawn breath and her vocal chords rasping his name. There's a request in the way she says Gabriel, a plea -- almost, even, a prayer. It emboldens him to kiss her still lower, and as his lips graze the pale rise of a breast above her satin dress and his hands cup her curves beneath the clinging silken fabric, the sparks fly.
Literally. Gabriel cries out as the electricity jolts his neck, and Elle apologizes, her eyes huge and her flush of passion deepening into embarrassment.
"I was afraid that would happen. I didn't mean to, I swear! Sometimes I just lose control--"
Gabriel silences her with a kiss. "Don't be sorry. I'm starting to like it, you know."
He means it. Though the shock hurt a little at the time, it lingers now as a pleasant tingle through his body, which seems to have made him more alert, heightened his senses to everything there is to see and here and taste and touch and smell about Elle. He rubs his fingers over her breasts, listening to he swish of her dress fabric as he slides his hand along her side. The zipper is cold beneath his fingers as they close around it; he feels each give of the zipper's teeth, releasing the fabric, as he tugs the mechanism downward to reveal that she is not, as he suspected, wearing a bra.
Swallowing hard as he takes in her full round breast in profile, he remembers what undergarments Elle is wearing; his fingers abandon stroking the side of her breast to push up the hem of her dress until his fingers are resting on Elle's hot skin above her stockings, tickled by the lace of her garter belt and... oh God, she's not wearing any panties, either.
Gabriel is so hungry now, he can't forestall this any longer. He rolls Elle onto her back and positions himself above her, and his anxiety that she is ready for this is alleviated when she immediately shimmies out of her dress. She reaches to undo the garter belt, too, but Gabriel stops her with a hand over hers. She grins, wantonly.
"A stocking man, are you?"
"Apparently." It comes out a little more brusquely than Gabriel means it to, but speech is really beyond the realm of his control now, with Elle lying there, all pale skin and pink nipples and black lace and nylon stockings. She is lithe limbs and full curves compacted into a petite body with the power to stop Gabriel's world. He would stop it, if he had that power; he knows there could never be any moment more perfect than this one, and he'd like to live in it forever. She's so beautiful, but more than that, she knows what he's done, what he was, and trusts him not to hurt her. For he's sure now that Elle doesn't want to die, whatever she says -- not till she's been loved.
Which is why he hesitates now, not quite trusting himself.
Since her electricity rippled through him, the hunger has been mounting within him. As strong as the desire to settle himself in the cradle of her thighs and bury himself in her warm body is his urge to penetrate her skin and skull and probe the inner workings of her brain until he can find out how she does that...His eyes rake over her body to settle on the scar on her forehead. He pushes back her bangs and, for a long time, stares. The longer he stares, the pale white line begins darkens to pink...then red. Sticky blood red.
Gabriel closes his eyes. He leans over her, brushes a feather-light kiss to the scar. He cannot kiss it away, but he does so as a symbol to her, a symbol to himself, that he won't violate her trust, or his own.
"I'm not a pants woman," says Elle suddenly, and begins to unbuckle his belt, unfasten his pants. Which is the most convincing symbol of all. Gabriel's self-doubts flee as he kicks off the remainder of his clothing and Elle pulls his hips down into hers.
Anxiety returns, momentarily, as he starts to press into her. Elle is so small, he much larger. And it's only been a few days since he threw her through a door, he remembers, noting the purple-rimmed greenish bruises stair-stepping along her ribcage. He doesn't want to hurt her again. But she's kissing him again, sucking at his lower lip, and he swears her tongue sparks when it meets his, so that it's his grunt that drowns out Elle's as he pushes inside her.
"Are you trying to kill me?" he asks in the breathless moment afterward, as they lay still and staring at one another, growing accustomed to the feel of their bodies so intimately entwined with another's for the first time.
Slowly, a grin hitches across Elle's face as her lower muscles flex around him, eliciting another groan as he bites his lip to keep from going over the edge before they've even started.
"Only metaphorically," she says, coyly, raking her fingers through his hair and sending more little jolts of electricity through Gabriel's scalp that are slightly stronger than static and strangely therapeutic and invigorating.
He begins to move in her...out of her...and it seems to Gabriel that his old life is passing away and he's being escorted into a heavenly plane of existence by this angel beneath him...around him...Elle's legs wrap around his waist, her heels pressing into the small of his pack, pulling him in deeper still, burying him.
Another jolt passes between her hands and his shoulders, but this time it is Elle who cries out, breaking their kiss to clench her teeth -- Gabriel assumes, to regain control over her powers. Loving the thought that it's him who's making her lose control, he kisses her ear, then whispers that it's okay, he doesn't mind. His own control is slipping -- this is his first time with a woman, after all -- and, sensing that Elle is nearing the edge, too, he draws upon what worked on her earlier, and begins to recite:
"So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.
We die and rise the same, and prove
Mysterious by this love.
"We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tomb or hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love... "
Elle cries out, then, coming with muscles contracting and relaxing around him in a rapid flutter, like the frantic wings of a moth. What carries Gabriel with her is another pulse of electricity that seems to radiate from his core -- though he knows that's ridiculous; it's Elle's power, not his.
But it occurs to him that, joined as they are, two becoming one, her powers are his, in a way, just as his are a part of her...
This is special, he thinks as he falls, panting, against her, resting his head in the sweat-slicked valley between her breasts, her heart pounding against his ear.
"I'm the only man in the world who's ever had sex like that," he manages to say between gasps for breath. He watches his index finger touch her nipple, as fascinated by the way it hardens, aroused, at his touch as he ever was by the inner workings of a timepiece. Smiling, he pushes up on his elbows to gaze down at her. "Because I'm the only man in the world who's ever had sex with you."
Judging from the small smile that dances across her lips, Elle seems to take this as a compliment. But the grin slips away, and her eyes peer quite seriously at him from beneath her bangs as she says, "If you're talking about the electricity, that wasn't me."
Gabriel slips out of her. "What do you mean, it wasn't you?"
"I know when electricity comes out of me. It didn't that time."
"You could have been distracted. I mean, we were--"
"I know," Elle repeats. "It was you."
"But I can't...I don't have..." Gabriel rolls onto his back and flexes his fingers.
Blue sparks crackle and jump between them.
"I'll be damned," Gabriel murmurs, then laughs. "I slept with you, and I got your ability! That's amazing, Elle, do you realize what this means?"
Elle holds up her own handful of sparks to mirror his, but stops short of touching their fingers together. "I think I'd prefer you kill people for powers instead of sleeping with everyone in sight."
Though Gabriel chuckles at Elle's characteristically flippant words, he doesn't miss the vulnerability in her eyes -- which he takes as another sign of how far he's come, that he's not so obsessed with this new ability that he loses sight of everything else.
"Don't worry."
He extinguishes his electricity, as much as he'd like to experiment with it, and brushes Elle's tousled, damp hair out of her face, most fascinated with the ability he's cultivating of being able to understand another human being's most intimate emotions.
"It's not the sex...well, not only the sex," he adds, grinning like a schoolboy in a state of mingled pride and disbelieve that he actually just did that, with her. "It's the empathy."
Elle closes her eyes and leans her cheek into his hand as he uncurls his fingers to cup her face. "And what does that mean?"
The words of the poem Gabriel just recited so easily echo in his mind, but his tongue feels suddenly thick and sluggish. He has to answer her, though, and honestly; it would be wrong to withhold his heart from her when he's seen hers.
He moistens his lips, and swallows.
"It means I love you."
His heart hangs, suspended and motionless, in his chest during the eternal moment that Elle stares back at him, silent, unreadable. Then, just as panic is about to set in, she pushes him onto his back and straddles him.
"Then kill me again, Angel of Death."
It's a request Gabriel is only too happy to fulfill.
Again and again.
The End
A/N: I cannot thank all my readers and reviewers enough for all the support and encouragement you've given me throughout the posting of this fic. Obviously if you comment to this chapter, Gabriel will recite the poem of your choice to you -- in the location of your choice, of course. ;)