(no subject)
[nick / name]: Tiffany
[personal LJ name]: arcesso
[other characters currently played]: none!
[e-mail]: live.infamy [at] gmail.com
[AIM / messenger]: to boldly trek
[series]: Heroes
[character]: Elle Bishop
[character history / background]:When Elle was 6 years old, she accidentally set her grandmother’s house on fire.
At 8, she caused a blackout in four counties in Ohio. So, she was taken to Hartsdale, NY because her mother was sick of dealing with her and wanted to shove her off on Bob, where she would spend the next 16 years in the Company's prison facility. Under Dr. Zimmerman's suggestion, Bob began testing the extent of Elle's abilities, encouraging them to push her well past her breaking point. During a brief point, she escaped and ran away by blasting her own father. She headed to an arcade where she made the games go on the fritz with her ability, racked up a million tickets and got the lightning bolt necklace she always wears. Noah Bennet retrieved her courtesy of some rubber dishwashing gloves and a lot of determination.
She spent her 9th birthday in a glass room with an IV of Lithium in her arm for her efforts. She has never been on a date, or a roller coaster, or gone swimming. She threatened to kill the psychologists who diagnosed her as a sociopath with paranoid delusions. How much time was spent as an inmate versus as an agent of The Company is unknown, but she was experimented on at the behest of her own father for years. The Haitian has removed any specific memories of this experimentation, but it was enough to turn her into the sadistic lunatic that she is today.
Her first chronological assignment that we know of us one in which she is partnered with Noah Bennet to observe Gabriel Gray, prior to his identity switch to Sylar. After preventing his suicide, she develops a bond with him that keeps him from feeling the desire to kill. However, the Company orders that she and Noah provide Gabriel with a list of people with abilities so that they can witness his ability in action. Elle tries to refuse, realizing she has feelings for Gabriel, but is strong-armed into going along with it. She appears to feel some guilt over helping create Sylar.
After further work with the Company, including stalking Claire and trying to see if she manifests an ability around Homecoming, though most of her other stuff's done off-screen, she is charged with taking care of Peter and making sure that he takes his medication while he is “checked in” to the Company’s facility, and she develops an attachment to him to the extent that when he escapes with Adam, she shocks him and sets him on fire as he escapes. She is also charged with recovering him, and follows him as far as Ireland when her father makes her come back because she killed Rick, the man who Peter was staying with.
When she returns to the states, she is kidnapped by Noah Bennet and West as collateral for Claire’s return, where she is strapped to a chair with her feet in water to prevent her from using her ability. Noah informs Elle of the experimentation her father died on her and while she doesn’t appear to believe him at the time, the way she later treats her father shows that maybe she does acknowledge that Noah’s explanation makes sense. The exchange is made and Elle zaps West and Claire as they fly off, but Noah shoots Elle before they can recover Claire. Bob reams her for not being able to capture Claire, causing Elle to try and capture Sylar (powerless at this time) in an attempt to make up for it. She fails to do so, but saves Molly Walker, Mohinder Suresh and Maya Herrera in the process.
She then goes to get Noah Bennet’s help, but runs into Sylar who had just killed her father. He tries to take her ability, but she knocks him out with an exceptionally large burst of electricity. The electricity also allows for the escape of all of The Company’s prisoners, a transgression for which Angela Petrelli fires her.
Her powers began to backfire on her and Daphne found her, suggesting that she go to Pinehearst because they would know what was wrong with her and be able to fix it. Cautious and doubtful, Elle instead chose to instead head for London. When the overload got too tough to handle, she contacted Claude Rains and stayed with him for a while. When that went awry, she invaded the Bennet home in hopes of finding Noah because he "always seemed to be the one with the answers". Since Noah isn't present, Elle convinces Claire to simply come to Pinehearst with her instead to get the answers. On the way, they become besties, and then Elle ditches Claire and Peter because she's also a dumb bitch when she hears Pinehearst can remove abilities.
Unfortunately, Pinehearst's idea of removing her abilities is to lock her away in a dark room in old school shackles and throw Sylar into the room with her. She electrocutes him until he forgives her for what he did to him, and she forgives him for killing her father. Sylar acquires her ability through "empathy" and she teaches him how to use it. They then get sent on a mission to pick Claire up. The two show up at the Canfield house in Costa Verde and a confrontation during the Eclipse, which removes all of their abilities, ends in Claire getting shot and Elle and Sylar passing out on the floor with no cheerleader in custody. Elle relocates Sylar's shoulder and they have sex on the floor because... the mission is fucked anyway and it's Heroes and Arthur predicted it earlier.
Noah starts trying to kill them and they flee to a grocery store. Noah hunts them to the grocery store and Sylar locks Elle in a ghetto lift while he fights Noah off, and eventually gets his neck slit and Elle sobs forever. But, Sylar comes back because it's the end of the eclipse. They go to the Bennet house and hold Sandra hostage -- I'll be pulling Elle from en route to the Bennet House. However, Hiro Nakamura comes in out of nowhere and teleports them out just as Sylar was about to kill Noah so they could escape with Claire.
They arrive at a beach where Sylar kills Elle, saying that he can't change what he is.
[character abilities]: Elle has the ability to create and manipulate electricity in varying voltages -- from a spark to a full on electrical surge. It comes out in the form of blue sparks. At various times in the series, we see that this ability is a double-edged sword, because while it's extremely powerful as an offensive weapon, the current running under Elle's skin also means she can't really handle being exposed to water. If she uses it when wet, it'll backfire and conduct in the water to shock her instead of her target. Not only that, but when she suffers excessive trauma such as the death of her father and subsequent attack by Sylar in season 3, her shocks "built up" and caused her constant pain due to intermittent shocks that don't have an outlet. She can control it to be anything from a huge burst of electricity to a sharpshot.
Aside from that, she has standard Company training in handguns, escape and general espionage.
[character personality]:Elle is said to be a cautionary tale of what would happen to the heroes if they had been aware of their powers since birth. The experimentation and subsequent memory loss led her to become sadistic and exceptionally infantile. Her psychological profile brings to light her dependency and inferiority issues, both results of her daddy issues. She has the emotional capacity of a child, since she was raised in a facility, shut away from the world and anywhere that she might develop in a normal social manner, which has lead to fit throwing and putting her father on a pedestal. She has a tendency to develop shallow, affectionate attachments to all of the men she meets - Peter, Mohinder, and Gabriel - which mirror, though to a lesser degree, this insatiable desire to live up to her father's expectations and get his commendation. On top of this, she has zero regard for personal space and actually seems to get joy out of forcing herself into the bubbles of others, particularly the inmates of Hartsdale.
While she's been diagnosed as a sociopath with paranoid delusions, a diagnosis that's not altogether off-base, she does have a few deeper emotions - she feels guilt about being a part of turning Gabriel Gray into Sylar, and she feels guilt when she abandons Claire at the Pinehearst institute after Claire had shown her such kindness, but she generally suppresses these feelings because, in the end, her own self-preservation comes first. She's an open book for the most part and doesn't hold back her feelings, always loudly complaining or becoming aggressive or overly cheerful. The only time she shows real restraint is around her father and Angela Petrelli - her father because she wants to please him, and Angela because she's the new boss of the Company and Elle wanted to play the good, controlled operative so she could continue working there because it's all she's known. She has, though minimal, some extent of respect for authority that has been drilled into her by her life as a company girl.
She's a natural cynic and pessimist, and she thrives off sarcasm and adrenaline. She creates excitement in missions even if it costs them some ease in completing it, generally by using her ability excessively. Accompanied by her flippancy with her ability is a desire to prove herself, this often leads to her throwing a fit when she gets undermined. Elle doesn't handle rejection or change well, so even though Noah got her to begin doubting Primatech, she wished to remain with them because it was all she knew.
Interestingly, while she has an undying devotion to her father while with The Company, she still appears to know between right and wrong and a desire to do right, despite being labeled a sociopath by various psychologists. When she gets assigned to the Gabriel Gray case, she tries to back out several times, narrowly avoiding telling Noah that she doesn't have it in her to turn this good, nice person to killing someone else when he's obviously torn up about it. So, at least to some extent, she has the capability for empathy, though in this case, since it was an isolated incident, it can be inferred that it was because she saw something of herself in Gabriel. The Company was trying to turn a good man into a killer, just like they'd done to her with their experimentation and sealing her off from the world. She wanted to save him from that fate to save herself, on some level. She still carries a lot of this guilt around with her, though she tries to shove it off and fill her sociopath diagnosis by acting like it doesn't bother her.
She also has a lot of bitterness towards anyone who got the opportunities she didn't while they were younger, but it pretty much gets summed up into one big ball of hate and thrown at Claire Bennet, who is the epitome of getting everything she never had. She has a family that loves her, as opposed to her mom that got sick of her, shoved her off on an unloving father, and then died shortly after. She has opportunities -- a social life. She's well-liked. She's this bubbly, happy, mind-numbingly heroic cheerleader. And Elle is just a continuous disappointment to her father.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: After Sylar kills her in 3.11.
[journal post]:[ There's some fumbling going on with the communications device, but when she finally gets it turned on, all that can be hurt is the frustrated rumble in the back of her throat. ] You wanna know what I hate more than all the stupid cheerleaders in the world? Teleporters. So, fess up, you little troll. Not that I don't appreciate the save from Glasses and Boy Wonder, but I'm getting a little sick of the crappy scenery.
Not to mention the fact that you screwed up my phone so only this crappy one works -- what's the deal with that, anyway? I've got people to call, okay? And this thing isn't working right. [ People like her daddy, who's going to be very mad if she gets home late. Crap. ]
[third person / log sample]:Well, Bennet was fucking pissed. Wasn't that just her luck. She did one thing right in her whole stupid life and it just made everyone mad. All she heard from him the entire ride back was how disappointed her father was going to be and it just made her shoulders slump and her gut twist further, but she wouldn't look at him -- wouldn't let herself get upset. He wasn't allowed to see her upset because she wasn't supposed to even feel disappointment. That was what the doctors meant when they called her a sociopath, right? They thought she couldn't feel anything.
If only. If only this didn't have to fucking hurt so much. Knowing what her dad was going to say to her when he found out she'd done the stupid thing and interrupted Gabriel, tried to stop it. It didn't matter that she'd been too late, because it meant she'd screwed up the mission and it meant Daddy was going to be so upset with her. She wasn't going to live up to his expectations. She never would -- and by now you'd think she'd realize that she never could, but that wasn't going to happen. She was always going to be striving for his approval like an idiot.
Pulling up at Hartsdale took forty minutes. The traffic in the city hadn't been bad for a weekday, and HRG always drove like a total psycho when he was pissed -- and she could tell from the way he was white knuckling the steering wheel that he was. When they reached the facility, she clambered out of the car and beelined for the door, trying to get back to her room for at least a second before she got totally reamed. Noah moved past her and into her father's office. Some shouting went on, the only part of which Elle could decipher being that Noah was appalled by the lack of professionalism she'd shown -- that he'd expected Eden to train her better -- and that he needed a partner who wasn't going to throw everything down the drain at the last minute.
Outside the door, Elle sucked in a deep breath, calming herself down as she tried not to let herself start crying. She didn't need to see his face to know how Bob was going to react, didn't need to know that she had to be composed and perfect and fully capable of explaining by the time she went in there, but …
She couldn't. Not really. It wasn't as simple as saying she'd seen so much of herself in Gabriel that she had to believe he was better than she was -- that they weren't all doomed to make the same crappy mistakes she had made and find it that easy to kill people. She didn't want to see Gabriel become the monster they were shaping into. She didn't want to be responsible for making him like her. But, now she was, and there was nothing that could be done. And now they were going to be responsible for keeping an eye on him and stopping him if it came to that.
He'd probably wind up on level 5 -- would she, she wondered, if it weren't for her dad running the Company? Was it where she belonged? Was it fair? Questions and doubts, she'd learned, were the same as disobedience -- she'd figured that much out when Noah shoved her jacket her way and suggested she become a freaking waitress -- like that was ever gonna happen. So, instead of letting herself harbor that guilt, she forced herself to be exactly what all the doctors had decided she was anyway.
Impassive. Empty. Unfeeling. Maybe that would be easier.
She wiped frantic tears out from under her eyes as she heard Noah approaching, shooting him a venomous look as he came out, lips curling in a sneer as he walked away. Bob's voice came from inside the office, patronizingly requesting that she go inside. Hands balled into fists, resolve firm, she complied, shutting the door behind her and forcing the explanation out of her lips before she had even fully turned back to face him.
"Daddy, I know you're mad," she started, but Bob didn't let her get further.
"Mad? Elle, do you have any idea what you've done? You jeopardized the whole mission for the sake of your own selfishness. Noah's informed me of the situation --" Of course he had. Elle forced herself not to let her expression sour, though her jaw clenched visibly. Fuck you, too, Glasses. "We both think you should take a break before we send you anywhere new. See what else you can learn from Eden, understand what results we're looking for."
And understand that she wasn't allowed to get attached. That's what he was really saying.
"I don't want to have to worry about you going soft again, you understand me? You're better than that." Better than what? Better was being a heartless bitch? Oh, big freaking deal, so she let herself get close, let herself forget that he was a target and think of him as someone she could save instead of ruin, they'd still figured out how he did his freaky brain thing. And after a petulant hesitance, she decided this was a fair enough argument to give her dad, though her pitchy voice, wrought with the distress the whole situation had racked her with, seemed to draw away from any semblance of maturity that the argument might have.
"Well, I obviously didn't jeopardize it too much if you still got what you wanted! I mean, you saw the tape we got, right? Of what he did to Trevor's brain -- that's what you needed, you should be happy!" Happy that some poor guy's life was ruined because Elle didn't want to be a waitress. And somehow, Gabriel -- the one who was still alive -- was the only one she felt sorry for. Brian Davis, Trevor Zeitlan -- their lives were useless enough. Disposable. She'd never thought twice about them. Maybe she was a sociopath. Maybe she was selfish. Maybe it had nothing to do with Gabriel himself at all, but with her instead.
Maybe she just didn't want to watch her own corruption repeat itself in a mirror before her very eyes and of her very own accord.
Her dad, of course, wasn't impressed with the argument, but it was what she'd been expecting. The lecture was over soon enough, though, because he predictably didn't want to look at her, and she begrudgingly lurched back towards her cell with exaggerated steps and some serious moping, dragging her fingers along the glass pane of Adam's as she passed it. His displeasure at seeing her dropping by was enough to bring a smile to her face, even if the rest of the day had sucked entirely.
[personal LJ name]: arcesso
[other characters currently played]: none!
[e-mail]: live.infamy [at] gmail.com
[AIM / messenger]: to boldly trek
[series]: Heroes
[character]: Elle Bishop
[character history / background]:When Elle was 6 years old, she accidentally set her grandmother’s house on fire.
At 8, she caused a blackout in four counties in Ohio. So, she was taken to Hartsdale, NY because her mother was sick of dealing with her and wanted to shove her off on Bob, where she would spend the next 16 years in the Company's prison facility. Under Dr. Zimmerman's suggestion, Bob began testing the extent of Elle's abilities, encouraging them to push her well past her breaking point. During a brief point, she escaped and ran away by blasting her own father. She headed to an arcade where she made the games go on the fritz with her ability, racked up a million tickets and got the lightning bolt necklace she always wears. Noah Bennet retrieved her courtesy of some rubber dishwashing gloves and a lot of determination.
She spent her 9th birthday in a glass room with an IV of Lithium in her arm for her efforts. She has never been on a date, or a roller coaster, or gone swimming. She threatened to kill the psychologists who diagnosed her as a sociopath with paranoid delusions. How much time was spent as an inmate versus as an agent of The Company is unknown, but she was experimented on at the behest of her own father for years. The Haitian has removed any specific memories of this experimentation, but it was enough to turn her into the sadistic lunatic that she is today.
Her first chronological assignment that we know of us one in which she is partnered with Noah Bennet to observe Gabriel Gray, prior to his identity switch to Sylar. After preventing his suicide, she develops a bond with him that keeps him from feeling the desire to kill. However, the Company orders that she and Noah provide Gabriel with a list of people with abilities so that they can witness his ability in action. Elle tries to refuse, realizing she has feelings for Gabriel, but is strong-armed into going along with it. She appears to feel some guilt over helping create Sylar.
After further work with the Company, including stalking Claire and trying to see if she manifests an ability around Homecoming, though most of her other stuff's done off-screen, she is charged with taking care of Peter and making sure that he takes his medication while he is “checked in” to the Company’s facility, and she develops an attachment to him to the extent that when he escapes with Adam, she shocks him and sets him on fire as he escapes. She is also charged with recovering him, and follows him as far as Ireland when her father makes her come back because she killed Rick, the man who Peter was staying with.
When she returns to the states, she is kidnapped by Noah Bennet and West as collateral for Claire’s return, where she is strapped to a chair with her feet in water to prevent her from using her ability. Noah informs Elle of the experimentation her father died on her and while she doesn’t appear to believe him at the time, the way she later treats her father shows that maybe she does acknowledge that Noah’s explanation makes sense. The exchange is made and Elle zaps West and Claire as they fly off, but Noah shoots Elle before they can recover Claire. Bob reams her for not being able to capture Claire, causing Elle to try and capture Sylar (powerless at this time) in an attempt to make up for it. She fails to do so, but saves Molly Walker, Mohinder Suresh and Maya Herrera in the process.
She then goes to get Noah Bennet’s help, but runs into Sylar who had just killed her father. He tries to take her ability, but she knocks him out with an exceptionally large burst of electricity. The electricity also allows for the escape of all of The Company’s prisoners, a transgression for which Angela Petrelli fires her.
Her powers began to backfire on her and Daphne found her, suggesting that she go to Pinehearst because they would know what was wrong with her and be able to fix it. Cautious and doubtful, Elle instead chose to instead head for London. When the overload got too tough to handle, she contacted Claude Rains and stayed with him for a while. When that went awry, she invaded the Bennet home in hopes of finding Noah because he "always seemed to be the one with the answers". Since Noah isn't present, Elle convinces Claire to simply come to Pinehearst with her instead to get the answers. On the way, they become besties, and then Elle ditches Claire and Peter because she's also a dumb bitch when she hears Pinehearst can remove abilities.
Unfortunately, Pinehearst's idea of removing her abilities is to lock her away in a dark room in old school shackles and throw Sylar into the room with her. She electrocutes him until he forgives her for what he did to him, and she forgives him for killing her father. Sylar acquires her ability through "empathy" and she teaches him how to use it. They then get sent on a mission to pick Claire up. The two show up at the Canfield house in Costa Verde and a confrontation during the Eclipse, which removes all of their abilities, ends in Claire getting shot and Elle and Sylar passing out on the floor with no cheerleader in custody. Elle relocates Sylar's shoulder and they have sex on the floor because... the mission is fucked anyway and it's Heroes and Arthur predicted it earlier.
Noah starts trying to kill them and they flee to a grocery store. Noah hunts them to the grocery store and Sylar locks Elle in a ghetto lift while he fights Noah off, and eventually gets his neck slit and Elle sobs forever. But, Sylar comes back because it's the end of the eclipse. They go to the Bennet house and hold Sandra hostage -- I'll be pulling Elle from en route to the Bennet House. However, Hiro Nakamura comes in out of nowhere and teleports them out just as Sylar was about to kill Noah so they could escape with Claire.
They arrive at a beach where Sylar kills Elle, saying that he can't change what he is.
[character abilities]: Elle has the ability to create and manipulate electricity in varying voltages -- from a spark to a full on electrical surge. It comes out in the form of blue sparks. At various times in the series, we see that this ability is a double-edged sword, because while it's extremely powerful as an offensive weapon, the current running under Elle's skin also means she can't really handle being exposed to water. If she uses it when wet, it'll backfire and conduct in the water to shock her instead of her target. Not only that, but when she suffers excessive trauma such as the death of her father and subsequent attack by Sylar in season 3, her shocks "built up" and caused her constant pain due to intermittent shocks that don't have an outlet. She can control it to be anything from a huge burst of electricity to a sharpshot.
Aside from that, she has standard Company training in handguns, escape and general espionage.
[character personality]:Elle is said to be a cautionary tale of what would happen to the heroes if they had been aware of their powers since birth. The experimentation and subsequent memory loss led her to become sadistic and exceptionally infantile. Her psychological profile brings to light her dependency and inferiority issues, both results of her daddy issues. She has the emotional capacity of a child, since she was raised in a facility, shut away from the world and anywhere that she might develop in a normal social manner, which has lead to fit throwing and putting her father on a pedestal. She has a tendency to develop shallow, affectionate attachments to all of the men she meets - Peter, Mohinder, and Gabriel - which mirror, though to a lesser degree, this insatiable desire to live up to her father's expectations and get his commendation. On top of this, she has zero regard for personal space and actually seems to get joy out of forcing herself into the bubbles of others, particularly the inmates of Hartsdale.
While she's been diagnosed as a sociopath with paranoid delusions, a diagnosis that's not altogether off-base, she does have a few deeper emotions - she feels guilt about being a part of turning Gabriel Gray into Sylar, and she feels guilt when she abandons Claire at the Pinehearst institute after Claire had shown her such kindness, but she generally suppresses these feelings because, in the end, her own self-preservation comes first. She's an open book for the most part and doesn't hold back her feelings, always loudly complaining or becoming aggressive or overly cheerful. The only time she shows real restraint is around her father and Angela Petrelli - her father because she wants to please him, and Angela because she's the new boss of the Company and Elle wanted to play the good, controlled operative so she could continue working there because it's all she's known. She has, though minimal, some extent of respect for authority that has been drilled into her by her life as a company girl.
She's a natural cynic and pessimist, and she thrives off sarcasm and adrenaline. She creates excitement in missions even if it costs them some ease in completing it, generally by using her ability excessively. Accompanied by her flippancy with her ability is a desire to prove herself, this often leads to her throwing a fit when she gets undermined. Elle doesn't handle rejection or change well, so even though Noah got her to begin doubting Primatech, she wished to remain with them because it was all she knew.
Interestingly, while she has an undying devotion to her father while with The Company, she still appears to know between right and wrong and a desire to do right, despite being labeled a sociopath by various psychologists. When she gets assigned to the Gabriel Gray case, she tries to back out several times, narrowly avoiding telling Noah that she doesn't have it in her to turn this good, nice person to killing someone else when he's obviously torn up about it. So, at least to some extent, she has the capability for empathy, though in this case, since it was an isolated incident, it can be inferred that it was because she saw something of herself in Gabriel. The Company was trying to turn a good man into a killer, just like they'd done to her with their experimentation and sealing her off from the world. She wanted to save him from that fate to save herself, on some level. She still carries a lot of this guilt around with her, though she tries to shove it off and fill her sociopath diagnosis by acting like it doesn't bother her.
She also has a lot of bitterness towards anyone who got the opportunities she didn't while they were younger, but it pretty much gets summed up into one big ball of hate and thrown at Claire Bennet, who is the epitome of getting everything she never had. She has a family that loves her, as opposed to her mom that got sick of her, shoved her off on an unloving father, and then died shortly after. She has opportunities -- a social life. She's well-liked. She's this bubbly, happy, mind-numbingly heroic cheerleader. And Elle is just a continuous disappointment to her father.
[point in timeline you're picking your character from]: After Sylar kills her in 3.11.
[journal post]:[ There's some fumbling going on with the communications device, but when she finally gets it turned on, all that can be hurt is the frustrated rumble in the back of her throat. ] You wanna know what I hate more than all the stupid cheerleaders in the world? Teleporters. So, fess up, you little troll. Not that I don't appreciate the save from Glasses and Boy Wonder, but I'm getting a little sick of the crappy scenery.
Not to mention the fact that you screwed up my phone so only this crappy one works -- what's the deal with that, anyway? I've got people to call, okay? And this thing isn't working right. [ People like her daddy, who's going to be very mad if she gets home late. Crap. ]
[third person / log sample]:Well, Bennet was fucking pissed. Wasn't that just her luck. She did one thing right in her whole stupid life and it just made everyone mad. All she heard from him the entire ride back was how disappointed her father was going to be and it just made her shoulders slump and her gut twist further, but she wouldn't look at him -- wouldn't let herself get upset. He wasn't allowed to see her upset because she wasn't supposed to even feel disappointment. That was what the doctors meant when they called her a sociopath, right? They thought she couldn't feel anything.
If only. If only this didn't have to fucking hurt so much. Knowing what her dad was going to say to her when he found out she'd done the stupid thing and interrupted Gabriel, tried to stop it. It didn't matter that she'd been too late, because it meant she'd screwed up the mission and it meant Daddy was going to be so upset with her. She wasn't going to live up to his expectations. She never would -- and by now you'd think she'd realize that she never could, but that wasn't going to happen. She was always going to be striving for his approval like an idiot.
Pulling up at Hartsdale took forty minutes. The traffic in the city hadn't been bad for a weekday, and HRG always drove like a total psycho when he was pissed -- and she could tell from the way he was white knuckling the steering wheel that he was. When they reached the facility, she clambered out of the car and beelined for the door, trying to get back to her room for at least a second before she got totally reamed. Noah moved past her and into her father's office. Some shouting went on, the only part of which Elle could decipher being that Noah was appalled by the lack of professionalism she'd shown -- that he'd expected Eden to train her better -- and that he needed a partner who wasn't going to throw everything down the drain at the last minute.
Outside the door, Elle sucked in a deep breath, calming herself down as she tried not to let herself start crying. She didn't need to see his face to know how Bob was going to react, didn't need to know that she had to be composed and perfect and fully capable of explaining by the time she went in there, but …
She couldn't. Not really. It wasn't as simple as saying she'd seen so much of herself in Gabriel that she had to believe he was better than she was -- that they weren't all doomed to make the same crappy mistakes she had made and find it that easy to kill people. She didn't want to see Gabriel become the monster they were shaping into. She didn't want to be responsible for making him like her. But, now she was, and there was nothing that could be done. And now they were going to be responsible for keeping an eye on him and stopping him if it came to that.
He'd probably wind up on level 5 -- would she, she wondered, if it weren't for her dad running the Company? Was it where she belonged? Was it fair? Questions and doubts, she'd learned, were the same as disobedience -- she'd figured that much out when Noah shoved her jacket her way and suggested she become a freaking waitress -- like that was ever gonna happen. So, instead of letting herself harbor that guilt, she forced herself to be exactly what all the doctors had decided she was anyway.
Impassive. Empty. Unfeeling. Maybe that would be easier.
She wiped frantic tears out from under her eyes as she heard Noah approaching, shooting him a venomous look as he came out, lips curling in a sneer as he walked away. Bob's voice came from inside the office, patronizingly requesting that she go inside. Hands balled into fists, resolve firm, she complied, shutting the door behind her and forcing the explanation out of her lips before she had even fully turned back to face him.
"Daddy, I know you're mad," she started, but Bob didn't let her get further.
"Mad? Elle, do you have any idea what you've done? You jeopardized the whole mission for the sake of your own selfishness. Noah's informed me of the situation --" Of course he had. Elle forced herself not to let her expression sour, though her jaw clenched visibly. Fuck you, too, Glasses. "We both think you should take a break before we send you anywhere new. See what else you can learn from Eden, understand what results we're looking for."
And understand that she wasn't allowed to get attached. That's what he was really saying.
"I don't want to have to worry about you going soft again, you understand me? You're better than that." Better than what? Better was being a heartless bitch? Oh, big freaking deal, so she let herself get close, let herself forget that he was a target and think of him as someone she could save instead of ruin, they'd still figured out how he did his freaky brain thing. And after a petulant hesitance, she decided this was a fair enough argument to give her dad, though her pitchy voice, wrought with the distress the whole situation had racked her with, seemed to draw away from any semblance of maturity that the argument might have.
"Well, I obviously didn't jeopardize it too much if you still got what you wanted! I mean, you saw the tape we got, right? Of what he did to Trevor's brain -- that's what you needed, you should be happy!" Happy that some poor guy's life was ruined because Elle didn't want to be a waitress. And somehow, Gabriel -- the one who was still alive -- was the only one she felt sorry for. Brian Davis, Trevor Zeitlan -- their lives were useless enough. Disposable. She'd never thought twice about them. Maybe she was a sociopath. Maybe she was selfish. Maybe it had nothing to do with Gabriel himself at all, but with her instead.
Maybe she just didn't want to watch her own corruption repeat itself in a mirror before her very eyes and of her very own accord.
Her dad, of course, wasn't impressed with the argument, but it was what she'd been expecting. The lecture was over soon enough, though, because he predictably didn't want to look at her, and she begrudgingly lurched back towards her cell with exaggerated steps and some serious moping, dragging her fingers along the glass pane of Adam's as she passed it. His displeasure at seeing her dropping by was enough to bring a smile to her face, even if the rest of the day had sucked entirely.