Sweet December [Heroes]
Title: Sweet December
Characters/Pairings: Gabriel/Elle
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Language. Sex. S3 Spoilers (AU from Our Father)
Prompt: But don't you see? Fear has brought us together. That's the magic of Xmas. -Fry from Futurama (for prompt #11 at sylelle_chall)
Summary: Once a year, she comes.
A/N: NO PUN INTENDED. Anyway. Another prompt that wanted to kill me. There's mentions of Christmas and mentions of fear, with a little plot progression aided by not-that-graphic-but-rated-it-as-such-to-be-safe porn. So, there ya go. I wrote this like, now, so I apologize for any grammar or story fail in general.
It’s Christmas Eve and he’s sitting in his chair touching sparks together, waiting. She’ll come, he knows she will. She always does.
Skip three years back and he’s in the same apartment and the same chair, boxes piled around his feet and his head in his hands, when the door rattles with the softest of knocks, and for once he’s thankful for the loose hinges.
When he opens it she’s there, all stringy blond hair and ghostly white skin, like his blood didn’t work as well as he thought it had and she’s just some sort of Dickensian reminder of the season.
So he says cautiously, “Merry Christmas,” and she laughs in his face as she walks past him. He feels her body as she pushes by and she’s all bone and skin, and when she sits on the edge of his bed he winces at the feeling deep in his chest when her now grey eyes settle on him coldly.
“I was scared that if I didn’t come and see you, I’d start to forget why I hated you,” she says through her teeth, gripping the comforter until her knuckles are white.
“So it doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas?” he asks with a tight smile as he walks closer. Static begins to fill the air when he’s close enough to touch her and he’s too scared to reach out, like he might scare her away, even if it’s pretty much the only thing he wants to do right now.
“My daddy never let me have Christmas. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He doesn’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter because she asks if she can stay anyway. She sleeps on the floor and won’t let him touch her, so he waits until she’s asleep to brush the hair away from her forehead to see if her scar is still there.
She’s gone before he wakes up.
The next year she brings him a cheesecake and doesn’t even try to explain herself. It’s not a pie but it works, and they sit on the floor quietly staring at it like it’s a puzzle.
“I got you something too,” he mentions after they finally cut two slices off and eat them in near silence. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small and palms it, waiting for her to respond.
She just stares at her plate and shrugs, so that’s going to have to be good enough. He puts his clenched fist into her field of vision, even if doing so makes her so nervous his hair begins to stand on end, and opens his hand, palm up.
Mutely, she stares for what seems like minutes before picking up the gift delicately with two fingers. Her eyes travel down the long gold chain to where it ends with a flat gold lightning bolt charm.
“It just reminded me of you,” he says quickly, suddenly embarrassed by his stupid gift.
Seconds tick by slowly as she studies the necklace before closing her eyes and shaking her head, an exasperated sigh escaping her lips as she lets the necklace fall and clatter against the hardwood floor. “You can’t just expect…” she begins, but bites her lip and decides against continuing. Because, really, she came to him, and he thinks maybe she’s just angry that he knew she would come back.
But she puts her hand down on the floor next to him anyway, and doesn’t pull away when he intertwines his fingers with hers. Soon enough she’s tired, she says, and crawls under the blankets and pillows she has piled on the floor next to his bed. In the morning he goes to retrieve the necklace and finds it just as missing as she is.
Now go back just one year. She comes to his door soaking wet and almost crying, her hands covered in blood that she smears all over his door and wall as she runs towards the bathroom. He walks in on her scrubbing her hands in the sink with very little success.
“Elle,” he says slowly, and she ceases scrubbing to listen to him. “What did you do?”
She begins to pull her thumb towards her mouth to chew on the nail, but remembers the blood and slams her hand down against the sink, disgusted. “Bennets,” she spits, looking up at him. “I told him I just wanted to be with someone on Christmas that wasn’t you,” she continues, and he bites his tongue, “That I wanted a real, fairytale, greeting card Christmas with a family. ‘Cause I never had one.”
While she talks he reaches down and turns the water warmer, soaping his hands and placing hers between them, scrubbing softly.
She doesn’t seem to notice. “He pulled a gun on me, Gabriel,” she says, and it’s so nice to hear her say his name, even if her voice is laced with tears and even though he knows he’s just being used. “He told me to stop harassing his family and that it was my fault I didn’t have a one for myself.”
Partially his fault too, but he’s not going to say anything because she knows that already. “You should have just come here,” he says simply, scrubbing the last bits of blood off of her fingertips.
There’s no verbal response from her, just a subtle nod. She then looks up at him fearfully and whispers, “I couldn’t kill Claire, Gabriel. I just couldn’t.”
He wants to know if she means she wouldn’t die or if it means she couldn’t even try, but it doesn’t seem right to ask either question. Instead he imagines the floor of the Bennet’s Costa Verde house smeared in blood and wonders why he doesn’t feel as relieved as he should.
She tries to pull her hands away, but his grip is too tight and she stumbles as she’s yanked back. Unable to control herself, she sparks against his hands and the water pooled between them alights, burning his skin.
She cries out in pain and pulls her hand back against her chest, cradling it. “Gabriel, please,” she begs, looking at him in a familiar way. “Just, please. Don’t scare me.”
“Is it like before?” he asks quickly. “Is that why you’re back?”
Looking down at her feet, she begins to fidget and shift her weight. “No. And no. It’s not different,” she snarls, obviously sensing his intentions. “It just knows you too well to play nice.”
He clenches his fists and counts down from ten, but he only gets to eight before he snaps, “You come to me year after year. I don’t ask you to. So stop acting like your presence is a gift.”
She doesn’t have an answer for that. In fact, she doesn’t seem to have an answer for anything. There are thousands of questions he wants to ask her every time she comes back; wants to know what she does the other 364 days of the year, who she talks to, who she fucks. Hell, he’d be okay with knowing her favorite movie or food or maybe how it feels to get killed by someone you care for. How it feels to come back from the dead. So many questions, and when he finally gets the balls to ask some of them she doesn’t have a fucking answer for any. Not for him, anyway.
So instead of asking any more, because he already knows the answers, he grabs her by the wrists and absorbs the tiny sparks that snake around his fingers. Pushes his body against her and sparks her right back, and the little moan she lets escape her lips (like she’s been waiting for him to do this for three years) gives him the only answer he’s gonna need for now.
She’s all bone and sharp edges, but she feels soft and good under his hands as he places her on his mattress, still on the floor like it was the day he brought it up here. He grabs her by the hips and lifts her so she’s got her back against the wall and the sound of the impact rattles and echoes.
“Elle,” he manages to grunt through his lust, “What’s so special about the Bennets?” he continues as he pushes his hands under her sweater. She obligingly raises her hands so he can lift it over her head, and he almost swallows his own tongue when he notices under her lumpy sweater that she isn’t wearing a bra.
He runs his fingers over her bare chest, hooking his fingers through the chain of her necklace with smug satisfaction, before leaning down to kiss the space between her breasts. She half murmurs, half sighs, “Not a whole lot, now.”
Unsatisfied by her answer, he lifts his hand to grasp her neck and press her head against the wall as he reaches down with his other hand and unzips her jeans, pushing them down as far as he can with his hands and throwing them completely off with a flick of his fingers.
“Stop,” he orders, and she freezes. He shakes his head. “No, I mean stop with the bullshit and answer my question.”
She bucks her hips against him and he bites his lip to hold back anything he might say. Twisting her body, she gets her hands back against her body and uses them to tug at his shirt as she attempts to get it over his head. “I always wanted Noah Bennet to come and save me and make me his daughter too,” she says flatly, succeeding in getting the shirt off of him by burning a hole in the middle and ripping it off. “I never remembered before, how much I wanted that. As a kid. But I remember now.”
He doesn’t bother waiting, kicks his own pants off and presses against her. “He never did though, so what made you think this time would be any different, or better?” he replies condescendingly, venom in his voice.
“You of all people,” she snaps, running her fingers through his hair before grabbing it and pushing his head down between her legs, “should appreciate the idea of second chances.”
He laughs and nods his head before burning the edges of her underwear to cinders and tossing it to the side with the remainders of his shirt. She squeals when he pushes two fingers against her and then inside of her, teasing and licking and kissing until she’s frustrated and squirming under his touch.
Then he stops, kisses up her stomach to her neck, grabs her hair and turns her head so he can talk right where she’ll be sure to hear it. “Well, was it worth it?”
“Was what worth it?” she hisses, pushing her hips up and rubbing against his thigh in search of friction.
“Trying to get your fairytale,” he kisses under her ear and likes the way she moves, “and failing, of course. Was it better than coming here?”
It’s her turn to laugh now, and she sparks him just enough to give her some leverage. She gets both hands on his chest and shoves him on his back before crawling over him, and he barely has time to process the change of scenery before she guides him inside her and starts scrambling towards release against him.
“Here’s okay,” she manages to get out before collapsing against him, wrapping her arms under his armpits and quickening her pace. “But it’s not the same.”
Incensed, and slowly growing impatient, he hooks his arm around her back and throws her to the side so he is on top of her now, and he pounds into her mercilessly as she sparks and claws at his back. He stops asking questions, for now, because it’s hard to think straight when she finally reaches release and cries out his name like nothing ever changed.
He pushes into her three, four, five more times and then he’s spent as well, spilling into her like he’ll never stop, and he wonders perversely if next year she’ll come with his fucking kid on her hip for a present.
“I can do it,” he whispers into her ear after the dust has settled, her hair sticking against his face. “I can be that for you.”
She shifts a little under him, struggling to get comfortable as his body presses down against her. “Gabriel,” she grunts, “Can you move? You’re hurting me.”
“I can,” he interrupts, ignoring her. “I can be your family, your fucking fairytale, Christmas card, whatever you want,” he says like it was punched out of him.
She laughs and it crawls up her throat from her gut, low and purposeful, and she plants her hands firmly on his chest, pushing for him to get off of her. He won’t, so she sends enough electricity in him to fry his skin and stop his heart, and he’s out cold.
He wakes up five minutes later and she’s at the door, turning the knob slowly so it doesn’t make a noise, but she’s not having any luck. Her face is towards the door and he throws his arm out in her view to cut her off.
“Don’t go,” he says, trying not to beg but failing.
“Just, don’t,” she replies curtly, squeezing out the door and staring at him from the hallway.
He blurts out that he loves her clumsily, even though he’s not sure that he means it, because he just wants her to stay so badly that it’s fucking pathetic. But she doesn’t listen, or at least pretends not to, and just smiles and pats him on the cheek like he’s a daydreaming child and walks away.
So now he sits for the fourth year in a row, twiddling his thumbs, waiting. Every year it’s the same fucking song and dance, but he waits anyway. Because she’ll be back, he knows she will. She always is, and maybe this time he’ll figure out how to make her stay.
Characters/Pairings: Gabriel/Elle
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Language. Sex. S3 Spoilers (AU from Our Father)
Prompt: But don't you see? Fear has brought us together. That's the magic of Xmas. -Fry from Futurama (for prompt #11 at sylelle_chall)
Summary: Once a year, she comes.
A/N: NO PUN INTENDED. Anyway. Another prompt that wanted to kill me. There's mentions of Christmas and mentions of fear, with a little plot progression aided by not-that-graphic-but-rated-it-as-such-to-be-safe porn. So, there ya go. I wrote this like, now, so I apologize for any grammar or story fail in general.
It’s Christmas Eve and he’s sitting in his chair touching sparks together, waiting. She’ll come, he knows she will. She always does.
Skip three years back and he’s in the same apartment and the same chair, boxes piled around his feet and his head in his hands, when the door rattles with the softest of knocks, and for once he’s thankful for the loose hinges.
When he opens it she’s there, all stringy blond hair and ghostly white skin, like his blood didn’t work as well as he thought it had and she’s just some sort of Dickensian reminder of the season.
So he says cautiously, “Merry Christmas,” and she laughs in his face as she walks past him. He feels her body as she pushes by and she’s all bone and skin, and when she sits on the edge of his bed he winces at the feeling deep in his chest when her now grey eyes settle on him coldly.
“I was scared that if I didn’t come and see you, I’d start to forget why I hated you,” she says through her teeth, gripping the comforter until her knuckles are white.
“So it doesn’t have anything to do with Christmas?” he asks with a tight smile as he walks closer. Static begins to fill the air when he’s close enough to touch her and he’s too scared to reach out, like he might scare her away, even if it’s pretty much the only thing he wants to do right now.
“My daddy never let me have Christmas. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”
He doesn’t believe her, but it doesn’t matter because she asks if she can stay anyway. She sleeps on the floor and won’t let him touch her, so he waits until she’s asleep to brush the hair away from her forehead to see if her scar is still there.
She’s gone before he wakes up.
The next year she brings him a cheesecake and doesn’t even try to explain herself. It’s not a pie but it works, and they sit on the floor quietly staring at it like it’s a puzzle.
“I got you something too,” he mentions after they finally cut two slices off and eat them in near silence. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out something small and palms it, waiting for her to respond.
She just stares at her plate and shrugs, so that’s going to have to be good enough. He puts his clenched fist into her field of vision, even if doing so makes her so nervous his hair begins to stand on end, and opens his hand, palm up.
Mutely, she stares for what seems like minutes before picking up the gift delicately with two fingers. Her eyes travel down the long gold chain to where it ends with a flat gold lightning bolt charm.
“It just reminded me of you,” he says quickly, suddenly embarrassed by his stupid gift.
Seconds tick by slowly as she studies the necklace before closing her eyes and shaking her head, an exasperated sigh escaping her lips as she lets the necklace fall and clatter against the hardwood floor. “You can’t just expect…” she begins, but bites her lip and decides against continuing. Because, really, she came to him, and he thinks maybe she’s just angry that he knew she would come back.
But she puts her hand down on the floor next to him anyway, and doesn’t pull away when he intertwines his fingers with hers. Soon enough she’s tired, she says, and crawls under the blankets and pillows she has piled on the floor next to his bed. In the morning he goes to retrieve the necklace and finds it just as missing as she is.
Now go back just one year. She comes to his door soaking wet and almost crying, her hands covered in blood that she smears all over his door and wall as she runs towards the bathroom. He walks in on her scrubbing her hands in the sink with very little success.
“Elle,” he says slowly, and she ceases scrubbing to listen to him. “What did you do?”
She begins to pull her thumb towards her mouth to chew on the nail, but remembers the blood and slams her hand down against the sink, disgusted. “Bennets,” she spits, looking up at him. “I told him I just wanted to be with someone on Christmas that wasn’t you,” she continues, and he bites his tongue, “That I wanted a real, fairytale, greeting card Christmas with a family. ‘Cause I never had one.”
While she talks he reaches down and turns the water warmer, soaping his hands and placing hers between them, scrubbing softly.
She doesn’t seem to notice. “He pulled a gun on me, Gabriel,” she says, and it’s so nice to hear her say his name, even if her voice is laced with tears and even though he knows he’s just being used. “He told me to stop harassing his family and that it was my fault I didn’t have a one for myself.”
Partially his fault too, but he’s not going to say anything because she knows that already. “You should have just come here,” he says simply, scrubbing the last bits of blood off of her fingertips.
There’s no verbal response from her, just a subtle nod. She then looks up at him fearfully and whispers, “I couldn’t kill Claire, Gabriel. I just couldn’t.”
He wants to know if she means she wouldn’t die or if it means she couldn’t even try, but it doesn’t seem right to ask either question. Instead he imagines the floor of the Bennet’s Costa Verde house smeared in blood and wonders why he doesn’t feel as relieved as he should.
She tries to pull her hands away, but his grip is too tight and she stumbles as she’s yanked back. Unable to control herself, she sparks against his hands and the water pooled between them alights, burning his skin.
She cries out in pain and pulls her hand back against her chest, cradling it. “Gabriel, please,” she begs, looking at him in a familiar way. “Just, please. Don’t scare me.”
“Is it like before?” he asks quickly. “Is that why you’re back?”
Looking down at her feet, she begins to fidget and shift her weight. “No. And no. It’s not different,” she snarls, obviously sensing his intentions. “It just knows you too well to play nice.”
He clenches his fists and counts down from ten, but he only gets to eight before he snaps, “You come to me year after year. I don’t ask you to. So stop acting like your presence is a gift.”
She doesn’t have an answer for that. In fact, she doesn’t seem to have an answer for anything. There are thousands of questions he wants to ask her every time she comes back; wants to know what she does the other 364 days of the year, who she talks to, who she fucks. Hell, he’d be okay with knowing her favorite movie or food or maybe how it feels to get killed by someone you care for. How it feels to come back from the dead. So many questions, and when he finally gets the balls to ask some of them she doesn’t have a fucking answer for any. Not for him, anyway.
So instead of asking any more, because he already knows the answers, he grabs her by the wrists and absorbs the tiny sparks that snake around his fingers. Pushes his body against her and sparks her right back, and the little moan she lets escape her lips (like she’s been waiting for him to do this for three years) gives him the only answer he’s gonna need for now.
She’s all bone and sharp edges, but she feels soft and good under his hands as he places her on his mattress, still on the floor like it was the day he brought it up here. He grabs her by the hips and lifts her so she’s got her back against the wall and the sound of the impact rattles and echoes.
“Elle,” he manages to grunt through his lust, “What’s so special about the Bennets?” he continues as he pushes his hands under her sweater. She obligingly raises her hands so he can lift it over her head, and he almost swallows his own tongue when he notices under her lumpy sweater that she isn’t wearing a bra.
He runs his fingers over her bare chest, hooking his fingers through the chain of her necklace with smug satisfaction, before leaning down to kiss the space between her breasts. She half murmurs, half sighs, “Not a whole lot, now.”
Unsatisfied by her answer, he lifts his hand to grasp her neck and press her head against the wall as he reaches down with his other hand and unzips her jeans, pushing them down as far as he can with his hands and throwing them completely off with a flick of his fingers.
“Stop,” he orders, and she freezes. He shakes his head. “No, I mean stop with the bullshit and answer my question.”
She bucks her hips against him and he bites his lip to hold back anything he might say. Twisting her body, she gets her hands back against her body and uses them to tug at his shirt as she attempts to get it over his head. “I always wanted Noah Bennet to come and save me and make me his daughter too,” she says flatly, succeeding in getting the shirt off of him by burning a hole in the middle and ripping it off. “I never remembered before, how much I wanted that. As a kid. But I remember now.”
He doesn’t bother waiting, kicks his own pants off and presses against her. “He never did though, so what made you think this time would be any different, or better?” he replies condescendingly, venom in his voice.
“You of all people,” she snaps, running her fingers through his hair before grabbing it and pushing his head down between her legs, “should appreciate the idea of second chances.”
He laughs and nods his head before burning the edges of her underwear to cinders and tossing it to the side with the remainders of his shirt. She squeals when he pushes two fingers against her and then inside of her, teasing and licking and kissing until she’s frustrated and squirming under his touch.
Then he stops, kisses up her stomach to her neck, grabs her hair and turns her head so he can talk right where she’ll be sure to hear it. “Well, was it worth it?”
“Was what worth it?” she hisses, pushing her hips up and rubbing against his thigh in search of friction.
“Trying to get your fairytale,” he kisses under her ear and likes the way she moves, “and failing, of course. Was it better than coming here?”
It’s her turn to laugh now, and she sparks him just enough to give her some leverage. She gets both hands on his chest and shoves him on his back before crawling over him, and he barely has time to process the change of scenery before she guides him inside her and starts scrambling towards release against him.
“Here’s okay,” she manages to get out before collapsing against him, wrapping her arms under his armpits and quickening her pace. “But it’s not the same.”
Incensed, and slowly growing impatient, he hooks his arm around her back and throws her to the side so he is on top of her now, and he pounds into her mercilessly as she sparks and claws at his back. He stops asking questions, for now, because it’s hard to think straight when she finally reaches release and cries out his name like nothing ever changed.
He pushes into her three, four, five more times and then he’s spent as well, spilling into her like he’ll never stop, and he wonders perversely if next year she’ll come with his fucking kid on her hip for a present.
“I can do it,” he whispers into her ear after the dust has settled, her hair sticking against his face. “I can be that for you.”
She shifts a little under him, struggling to get comfortable as his body presses down against her. “Gabriel,” she grunts, “Can you move? You’re hurting me.”
“I can,” he interrupts, ignoring her. “I can be your family, your fucking fairytale, Christmas card, whatever you want,” he says like it was punched out of him.
She laughs and it crawls up her throat from her gut, low and purposeful, and she plants her hands firmly on his chest, pushing for him to get off of her. He won’t, so she sends enough electricity in him to fry his skin and stop his heart, and he’s out cold.
He wakes up five minutes later and she’s at the door, turning the knob slowly so it doesn’t make a noise, but she’s not having any luck. Her face is towards the door and he throws his arm out in her view to cut her off.
“Don’t go,” he says, trying not to beg but failing.
“Just, don’t,” she replies curtly, squeezing out the door and staring at him from the hallway.
He blurts out that he loves her clumsily, even though he’s not sure that he means it, because he just wants her to stay so badly that it’s fucking pathetic. But she doesn’t listen, or at least pretends not to, and just smiles and pats him on the cheek like he’s a daydreaming child and walks away.
So now he sits for the fourth year in a row, twiddling his thumbs, waiting. Every year it’s the same fucking song and dance, but he waits anyway. Because she’ll be back, he knows she will. She always is, and maybe this time he’ll figure out how to make her stay.