In Good Company 1
In Good Company
Ficfest prompt: Elle ends up following orders to the letter. Gabriel never sees her ability. After setting him up to kill Trevor, the Company detains Gabriel. Gabriel becomes one of the top agents in the Company. What happens when he runs into Elle again?
Rating: PG 13 for now
Ship: Sylar/Elle
AN: Beataed by the awesome Emmy/martinigirl, as always.
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Prologue
All evening, Elle has felt the smile frozen on her face, the forced effort to maintain a wide-eyed, joyful façade hardening her features to a stiff mask.
She is partly angry with herself for feeling so jittery and ineffective. She is doing what she was born for, and she has made the decision to stick to her orders and stop self-doubting. So what if, for the first time, someone trusted her? It’s her job to break that trust, and if Gabriel really wants to be better, he will never know the extent of her betrayal.
The trick is to just keep smiling.
“Oh, I invited someone to join us. I hope you don’t mind,” she explains, ignoring the uneasy feeling burning in the pit of her stomach. “Its open,” she calls out and Trevor Zelten appears in the doorway, attired in a way that makes Elle want to roll her eyes heavenwards in annoyance.
They sure have fixed Trevor up for the occasion. He looks like one of those Goth bad boys that inspire in nerds like Gabriel a sense of being threatened.
Such meticulousness from her colleagues bothers her, even if it technically aims to make her job easier.
“Yeah, I’m Trevor. We spoke on the phone?”
“I’m Elle,” she parrots, voice light although she feels more and more like a stupid puppet, putting the ziti down on the stovetop and walking toward the other room, gesturing toward her dinner date. “And this is Gabriel. I thought you two should meet. Trevor has an ability, too.”
“An ability? I don’t understand.”
Gabriel shakes his head, obviously upset and disappointed, and Elle feels like the evil cheerleader who pulls the cruel joke on the shy outcast in those teen movies she loves to watch.
“Don’t be mad, but I got Trevor’s number off that list you had. I really think it’s important for you to get to know people like yourself. I mean, alcoholics can’t do it alone. Trevor, why don’t you show us what you can do?”
Yes, this definitely feels like one of those jokes to her, and it is little consolation that she is not doing more than reciting a few very banal lines to provoke Gabriel.
The way Trevor’s gaze is seizing her up, checking her body out like Gabriel is not even there, like he is nobody to fear or take into account, although this is his home…
Well, that will make up for her passivity, you can bet on it.
“Okay,” Trevor acquiesces, looking around the little apartment with transparent distaste, before focusing on her again.
Death-wishing idiot, she thinks as the boy raises his arm, closes his hand to form it into a gun and cockily shoots one of the jelly glasses on the table. Gabriel jumps a little as the glass shatters and Elle simulates an affected gasp of admiration.
Trevor keeps his show up, all while she keeps hoping it will be over soon, cooing “That is so cool,” and “Gabriel, isn’t that special?” at appropriate intervals.
But Gabriel is not reacting at all, and that makes her irrationally relieved, proud even.
Perhaps he will prove her right and Bennett wrong, maybe she won’t compromise him at all.
With that spirit, Elle livens up and plays the giddy, oblivious simpleton some more as she insists that Trevor keep demonstrating his ability.
She praises and praises until Gabriel chokes “That’s great,” his eyes lucid and a little wider.
“It’s so special,” she breathes out gleefully, baiting her target with perverse eagerness, even while her whole body is screaming against every gesture and word. “Let’s see it again.”
There is, after all, a side of her that has always enjoyed walking the edge of the precipice.
She moves toward the kitchen for more glasses, but Gabriel explodes first.
“You think he’s so special?” he glowers to Elle, fury snaking into his tone and his dark gaze, twisting his visage into something animalistic and unrecognizable. “I bet he can’t do this.”
An invisible, violent force slams Trevor against the wall and scatters books off their shelves on the floor.
As the future victim’s legs dangle in the air, Elle doesn’t feel any compassion for him. Trevor looks pathetic and helpless like that, and Elle was taught to look down on weakness, not to have sympathy for it.
She speaks in his favor anyways. “Gabriel,” and in her tone there’s a warning she silently wills the watchmaker to heed. She has never wanted to see him lowering himself to this.
“I think you need to leave,” his voice is different, too, and Elle can sense the obscure appetite interlaced into it, the intensity of the intent animating it. ”Now.”
It stings as if he is the one betraying her, and in a way, he is. She just betrayed him first.
“Gabriel, don’t!” she demands, tempted to aim a bolt of electricity at his back when he doesn’t respond at all.
She might do it, she might try to explain, beg him to leave with her and never look back.
But suddenly she doesn’t recognize him anymore, not like the timid man she has grown so fond of in so little time. Suddenly it feels like it’s too late to do anything, and she doesn’t understand why she is not just following the protocol. The protocol requires that she remove herself from the scene immediately, so she turns on her heels and complies.
Agents will take down Mr. Gray in a moment or two.
Part 1
Sometimes Elle suspects she is not quite as insane as her many psychiatrists led her to believe.
She has been labeled as a ‘sadistic sociopath with paranoid delusions’ for so long that she often finds herself acting out to fit the role, only so she will truly live up to a reachable standard.
She will admit she’s a pathological liar- she lies often and with a passion, occasionally for no better reason than her own enjoyment. Lies are easy and pretty and entertaining. But mostly, lies do wonders to fill the blank spaces in her memory, or to fill her up so she can feel more substantial.
She doesn’t like people much either, but then her experience with them has not been very thrilling. Or extensive… she never went to a real school, never had any real friends, and she accidentally killed most of her family when she was too young to remember how it felt to have a proper one.
Still, she has had her daddy and more doctors and scientists and human toys than a child could count. That should make up for it, right?
Sure, she enjoys killing and torturing…mostly because it makes her feel so powerful, like a goddess, not helpless like any useless lab rat. Plus, she never grasped very well the difference between when life is sacred and when it isn’t. The Company is kind of sketchy over that point, but what does it matter?
Done is done, dead is dead and Elle was never one to waste tears over spilt milk.
It’s the part about her presumed paranoid delusions that puzzles her the most, in her diagnosis. In order to be delusions, they should be utterly unfounded, after all. But if Elle never trusts anyone, it’s with good reason. Her line of work makes paranoia a necessity more than an option.
Manipulation and suspicion are her daily bread, and she is proud she can dish out as well as she receives. She was well-trained that way.
And maybe once upon a time she thought it was the flaw inside her mind that made her trust in daddy so brittle and so desperate at once, but today she knows better, courtesy of some snooping around her personal files after a subtle barb from Bennett.
For a father, the hardest thing is seeing his child in pain. For most fathers, at least.
Still, Elle knows there’s something wrong and rotten within her. A visible fault that makes Daddy sigh in disappointment, before ranting about how much better she might exploit her potential if only she tried harder, if only she was more focused.
Daddy often looks through her, like a careful enough scrutiny could reveal where the failure resides and how he can eradicate it, like she is a blade to be sharpened.
Yes, there must be something defective inside the beautiful package known as Elle Bishop, because even good old Glasses sometimes slips and indulges her with a weird feeling behind his sharp gaze, in between sadness and pity. He looks at her differently than her father, more gently maybe, but that’s nearly worse. Glasses looks at her like she is a waste, something that perhaps could have been precious and unique but has ended up uselessly broken.
Elle studies her reflection in the mirror sometimes and marvels at the hollow alien quality it retains in her eyes.
There, somewhere among that smooth surface, Gabriel Gray once found an angel.
An angel with a broken watch.
Elle doesn’t regret much of the things she has done, and she has no illusions about her morality, but she regrets what she has done to Gabriel. She regrets bringing out the killer in him, having shattered his dreams of being special even without his cursed gift.
Sometimes she imagines she could come back, do everything differently. She would tell him the truth, would confess about her mission and her power, would seduce him in running away with her.
Or maybe she would just stop him from killing Trevor and would scream to him to escape.
Details, really, but it’s the small things that make a difference in the end. She wishes -conveniently, she will concede to it- that she had done anything, anything different than following her orders to the letter and allowing the Company to take him.
Not because Gabriel was innocent and deserved better, but because he made her feel innocent and good and whole. She wishes she could have retained that mirage of beauty and salvation she has only ever seen reflected in his eyes.
It’s a selfish desire, but then Elle is nothing if not selfish.
Her choices did well for him: five years after, he is no more a pitiful, repressed, old-fashioned dork scared shitless of both himself and life. Far from that.
He is one of their top agents. Controlled, smart, resourceful, ruthless. Seemingly loyal to the Company once the multiple-personality disorder got out of the way.
Elle heard throughout the grapevine wonderfully chilling things about his exploits.
Daddy is endlessly pleased with the weapon he has become.
By every logic, Elle should be proud. She did her duty as a good daughter and as a loyal employee, and the result was brilliant.
Yet when she remembers that night, the fury of jealousy and betrayal twisting his pleasant visage into something feral, she doesn’t feel accomplished or aroused.
She feels…guilty and she has no idea why.
She has never been his angel; he only saw in her what he wanted to see. Perhaps she could have lived with that pretty lie, she could have played the part until it became real. Perhaps not. Perhaps he could have adored just as much the real her, if she had shown it to him. He surely had been desperate enough to.
She still likes wondering about all that, once in a while.
No harm in that, no ulterior motive. Daddy made sure they were kept apart since Gabriel has been operative - his assignments are never in New York unless she is elsewhere, and she has been elsewhere often- but he could not have bothered.
This hybrid between the old Gabriel and Sylar holds no interest to her. Why should he?
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It has taken years to find a balance between his two personalities, but once he reached that stage, they both feel equally pathetic to him.
Gabriel, mama’s boy who secretly longed for perfection, but was too much of a coward for his ambitions. So secretly filled with self-loathing
Sylar, the animalistic embodiment of all that Gabriel was afraid to face and embrace in himself.
Today, they call him ‘integrated’ and say he has succeeded in assimilating both his alternate egos inside his psyche.
The truth is, he does not feel like Gabriel or Sylar anymore. He has not Gabriel’s religious faith and attitude towards suffering any more than he has Sylar’ s asphyxiating urge to become God.
Ironically enough, now that the Company feeds periodically good powers, now he is near to invincibility, now that his ambitions are satisfied… he doesn’t feel complete at all. He just feels hollow.
Yet he is good at what he does, excellent even. He must be, because without a purpose to work toward, it would be so very easy to give in to the hunger.
And if he was to give in, he would eventually become just like his biological father. That’s the last thing he wants, and he would do anything to avoid it.
It’s been years but he still remembers so well those last two specials he killed, the very first ones the Company has handed to him. The empathic old woman, so vaguely resembling his mother, and the psychometric girl, Melanie something…
He remembers the stuffed animals they gave him afterwards, the ones his real father had done, so he could see firsthand those dangers in being resistant to treatment.
What a horrible, necessary torture it had been.
Yet he has learnt all that he had to, has mastered the art of both shutting out the unbearable empathy and using it to steal new abilities.
Truthfully, empathy or not, he still feels this insuperable divide between other people, this impossibility to truly communicate. The difference is that now he sees the fault in himself, the flaw stopping him from forming real human connections. Simply, he is unable to look at another and perceive them as anything alike to himself.
And until this fails to remain true, until he can fix himself completely, he will need the Company to contain him and ground him, regardless of his personal loathing for this dependency.
Lately, he feels more and more like one of those dark, empty, dank rooms where no one bothers entering to open a window and let the sunlight in, the stale air out.
Noah Bennett, his partner, doesn’t trust him, and with good reason. Gabriel won’t ever forget what the other man has done to him, how the other man has seen him at his weakest.
Someday a chance for revenge will come along and he will not let it pass. It doesn’t make a difference that Noah was following orders, that Gabriel has played a similar role to bag and tag sweet, repentant Maya, in complete absence of remorse.
It only matters that revenge gives him something to look forward to. A sliver of passion.
Some days, it’s hard to look at Noah and not ask about her. Elle, if that was even her actual name.
He hasn’t seen her since that last time, but he knows she is an agent and so they could easily meet again. Well, unless she gets herself killed first.
He can’t yet decide whether that would be good or not.
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