Fic: In the Name of the Son (2/3)
Title: In the Name of the Son (2/3)
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: Heroes
Characters & Pairings: Sylar/Elle, Noah Gray
Rating & Warnings: R for language, sex, violence, mentions of abortion and sadism, character death
Format & Word Count: WIP, this chapter weighs in at 5712 words
Summary: You make a turn onto the highway in the opposite direction of the path of flight you planned together last night. "Everything is going to change." [AU]
Author's Notes: Sorry for the delay between updates. I thought I'd get this out much sooner, but RL has been determined to keep my fanfic time to a minimum. This was supposed to be just a two-parter fic, but this chapter got long, so I cut it off, and there will be one more chapter. Hopefully ready sooner than this one! This fic is the result of thinking about episode 3x04 and just how it was that Sylar ended up being (apparently) a single dad living in the Bennet house, and this is the result. The story takes place in that alternate future, so basically everything after the car rental scene in "Eclipse" didn't happen. :) Many thanks to Godricgal for her magnificent beta work. I hope y'all enjoy. I hunger for feedback like Sylar hungers for abilities. Except I won't, you know, cut open any heads to get it. ;)
Part One |
Part Two
You make waffles on Sundays, after Mass, and serve them to Elle in bed, on a tray with fresh-squeezed orange juice, a carafe of hot maple syrup, a vase with flowers purchased from a street vendor on your way home, and a prenatal vitamin. More often than not, waffles in bed lead to other things in bed, instigated by Elle dabbing, slathering, or pouring syrup onto some part of your body or other and licking it -- or sucking it -- languorously off. Since you transferred your healing ability to her and the morning sickness left her, especially since she entered her second trimester, her appetite for sex has been almost insatiable as her appetite for waffles.
Your marriage is far from perfect -- you wish she'd go to church with you, for one thing, because it could help her make peace with her past and give her some perspective on her future, as it's done for you -- but it's easier to believe in wedded bliss when someone wants you as frequently and fully as Elle wants you. And it's not all down to hormones. She wants sex, without question, but she also wants you, wants you to want her in return, needs to know that it's for more than as the mother of your child. You like that you can give her what no one ever has before, so you don't press her about church, and you don't begrudge her the extra sleep on Sunday mornings that her body needs in order to accommodate the child growing within her. Especially since she gets up early on the other six mornings a week to work with you in the shop.
There's not much for her to do in the shop, but she does manage the front for you when there are customers, and keeps the books and dusts the display cases when there aren't. Or joins you in the back for a lesson in the basics of watch mechanics and repair -- or, more often, pulls you out of sight behind the cabinets containing watchmaking tools for a quickie.
The first time she did this, you were a little scandalized -- it was business hours, and the back room isn't closed off from the main shop -- but you were also more than a little turned on by the spontaneity and the risk factor. Once, a customer came in while Elle straddled your lap, she topless, you still wearing your sweater vest and shirt but with your pants pooled around your ankles. Surprisingly, the near public sex had the opposite effect as a cold shower, and the memory of it is enough to make you hard now: Elle's breasts and belly pressed against you in an attempt at concealment, her teeth biting down on your shoulder to silence her cries as she came, your lungs burning from holding back ragged gasps as you exploded beyond control. Rather than making you more discreet about your behavior in the shop, the experience only whets your appetite for illicit sex.
Luckily for you, watch shops aren't exactly hubs of commercial activity, and Elle is not quite seven months pregnant, horny, and also shares your exhibitionist streak. Or maybe it's that you've both found a new outlet for expressing yourselves without the use of your powers.
"Has anyone ever told you you're dead sexy when you're hunched over, concentrating on really detailed work?"
At Elle's voice from the edge of the room divider, your furrowed brow relaxes as a grin tugs at the corner of your pursed mouth. Without looking up from the wristwatch that is the focus of your concentration, a Rolex that went through a washing machine, you reply, "When you do all your really detailed work in the back room of a watch shop, not many people see you to notice."
"Then maybe we should move your workbench up front," Elle says, stepping further into the room. "Right up against the window. It'll attract more business."
"Is that so?"
"Oh yeah. Women will be breaking their watches on purpose to come see the hot watchmaker. It's a total waste for you to be stuck back here in this dark room."
Standing beside your chair now, she ruffles your hair, disheveling the carefully combed side part, raking her fingernails over your scalp in a way that makes it impossible for you to even pretend to concentrate on the Rolex. You set down your tools, swivel in your chair, and rest your hands on either side of the baby bulge.
"Thank you for coming up with a plan to grow the family business," you tell her, grin widening as you feel a solid kick or punch or flailed elbow against your palm. You don't remark on it to Elle, who doesn't seem as fascinated by the baby's movements are you are -- probably because she feels them constantly. "I'd love for Gray and Sons to be able to support me and my son--"
"If it's a boy, you mean." She plucks your glasses with their various magnifying attachments off the bridge of your nose and puts them on, blinking her magnified eyes owlishly.
"And if he shares my looks," you concede, "since your plan's contingent on hot watchmakers."
There is so much you want to say at this point: to speculate which of you the child will look like or what features might be combined from you both; to joke that if it's a girl, you'll have to change the name of the shop to Gray and Daughter; to discuss names that are currently in the running for each gender. But you pursue none of these threads of conversation, as experience has taught you that Elle isn't much for speculation, joking about, or naming the baby. "It's too soon," she always says, even though each prenatal checkup reveals mother and baby to be in perfect health. You take Elle's reluctance to mean that she's still adjusting to all these changes, or that she's afraid of jinxing the pregnancy.
So you bear with her patiently, though you hope that soon it will no longer be too soon. More than anything, you want to tell her about the dream you had of a blond-haired, brown-eyed boy, and you'd like to ask how she'd feel about Robert if it is a boy, want to tell her you've been thinking it would be nice to honor her father that way. For a girl you like Angel. Not for your mother, but for your first memory of Elle, your golden-haired angel with a broken watch.
That hair now cascades over her shoulders, thick and lustrous as you've read women's hair becomes during pregnancy. And beneath those strands rise rounder, fuller breasts than her petite pre-pregnancy figure allowed. Desire must be evident on your face, because suddenly Elle stops goofing off with your glasses and covers your hands on her belly with her own. You're only too willing to let her slide your hands upward to curve over her breasts, though you sense that she does so less from arousal than from jealousy.
"I think you'd be sexier if you bent over other detailed work than watches," she says. "So you'd better clear off your workbench."
Hands occupied with her breasts, it crosses your mind that this might be a ruse to get you to use telekinesis after seven months without powers, but you shake off the thought. Elle has been the model of restraint in regard to use of power -- with the exception of the few times you've caught her watching a cut from her razor or a kitchen knife or the edge of a paper heal with a little too much fascination for you to be convinced it was accidental. And in all fairness, you did that after you first acquired the healing ability, too. And worse.
You've got to stop being so paranoid. Just because few of Elle's waking thoughts revolve around the baby doesn't mean she's out to destroy the life you're building for your child. Just because you hunger to wield your power doesn't mean she also struggles for self-control.
Removing one hand from her breast, you sweep a clear space on your workbench, then return to her with a hunger for her ample curves, cupping her ass to pull her to stand between your knees.
"I take it you have something in mind?"
Elle's arms encircle your neck as she leans in, pausing only the barest fraction of a centimeter from your mouth so that her breath kisses you when she says, "I'm gonna jump your bones, Mr. Gray."
"Can you jump with that belly?"
Though her eyes narrow underneath her bangs, Elle doesn't back away at your teasing. "I'd hurt you for that, except you'd like it."
As you've exercised self-control with powers, you've also reined in the impulse to be a little rough with her during sex. It helps that Elle hasn't been giving you shock treatment as foreplay, though that's prompted her to find more creative ways to mix pain with pleasure.
Maybe it's the rasp tingeing her voice, or maybe it's because you're in the shop, or maybe it's both, but today you can't resist her. Fingers pressing hard into her ass, you growl out, "Go ahead."
Closing the gap between you, Elle bites your lower lip, sucking at it as she rakes her teeth across. The skin breaks but knits itself together again almost instantly, though not before the tang of blood pricks your taste buds. Just a tease, but enough.
In a single movement you stand and hoist Elle off her feet. The swell of her midsection prevents her from hooking her legs around you as she used to, so her arms hook around your shoulders, fingernails clutching at your back, boring into you but barely noticeable through your sweater vest. You stumble around the chair, which you kick out of the way; it thumps against the cabinets as you plonk Elle down on the workbench. Immediately she hikes the long skirt of her maxi dress up around her waist and rocks back on her hips to shimmy out of her blue cotton panties. Heart rate spiking at the flash between her legs, you lunge for her, capturing her lips in a plunging kiss as your fingers fly to unbuckle your belt and unzip your slacks.
Elle is perched at the edge of the workbench, resting on her elbows and ready. You push into her warmth without a hint of tentativeness, and her grunt doesn't compel you to delay your thrusts or ask whether she's okay. You think only of the bare backs of her thighs pressed against your skin, slightly sticky with sweat as body temperatures rise with this exertion in the un-air conditioned shop, of her calves gripping either side of your torso, of her palms slapping your hands where they rest on the surface of the workbench, of the creak of the wood beneath her weight as you rock in and out of her, of her face, flushed and panting, peering at you over the mound of her stomach, of her heels kicking at the small of your back when you drop over her to push the spaghetti strap of her dress off her shoulder to expose one full breast and suckle the hard brown knot of her nipple. You lick the salty beads that tremble in the valley of her breasts, the dips of her collarbones, the hollow of her throat, and you don't even attempt to delay climax, not because you're in a race against time till the next customer arrives, but because Elle's muscles are tight around you and she's already bucking and calling out your name amid profanities, so you come with her.
She sits, panting, atop the workbench, her wavy hair damp with sweat and frizzy with the day's humidity, as you pull up your pants. "Holy shit!. Pregnancy's almost worth it for the mind-blowing sex."
A chuckle rumbles in your chest as you lean in to kiss her softly, slowly, making up for not having done so before. "Be careful saying things like that, Mrs. Gray. I might just decide to keep you pregnant."
Elle scowls as you help her slide off the workbench. She rubs the small of her back with her palms. "As soon as this kid pops out, I'm popping birth control pills."
The smile falls from your lips as they part to say that breast-feeding mothers shouldn't be on the pill, but you bite your tongue just in time to sidestep potential post-coital disaster. You haven't even discussed breast feeding, or any kind of feeding, yet you realize this is deeply important to you.
Filing it away for another time, when Elle is ready, you smile and force a teasing tone even though your words are not joking.
"Birth control? But I'm Catholic!"
Elle's snort is muffled by the jangle of a bell as the customer who laundered his Rolex strides through the door. You grab the watch and, on your way up front, pause to murmur in Elle's ear.
"So close. Maybe next time we'll get caught."
You never do get caught in the act again, mostly because you don't get many chances to get caught. At first you hardly notice; the change in your sexual activity happens so gradually. A decline from every day to every other day is still more sex than the average couple has, and definitely 100% more than you were having before you were with Elle. Even when two or three or four days begin to slip by without sex and you can't help but notice the decline in Elle's sex drive, you don't think it's indicative of anything other than the fact that she is well into her eighth month of pregnancy and it's almost impossible for her to get comfortable doing anything, much less during sex. And with mere weeks to go until your child enters the world, there's a lot more to think about than your sexual needs.
Which is what you assume Elle is thinking when she tells you on the slow walk home from work one evening, "I think it's time for me to stop coming to the shop."
"I'll miss having you with me all day," you say, and she smiles wearily, "but I agree, it's time you were at home, getting the apartment ready for the baby. The nursery--"
Elle's smile vanishes as she sucks in her cheeks, a look of aggravation you recognize instantly. You stop walking, pull her off the sidewalk at the front steps of an apartment building. She keeps her head down, jaw working as she grinds her teeth.
"Elle, what did I say?"
"You don't get it."
"What don't I get?"
She jerks her head up, lightning in her eyes. "My back hurts. My feet hurt. I have heartburn, and I always have to pee. I want to quit work so I can rest, not so I can do more work!"
"Of course I don't expect you to--"
"You'd understand if you had to spend ten minutes being pregnant, but you had your ten minutes of fun eight months ago. I didn't choose this, you know. I never would have chosen this. I'll never choose it again."
You don't make another attempt at repeating your interrupted offer of helping with the with the heavy lifting. Instead you stuff your hands into your pockets, knowing that your touch is the last thing she wants at this moment, and duck your head.
"I'm sorry," you say, trying not to think about how much you feel you deserve an apology for the things she just said. "I should have thought before I opened my mouth. You're right, I can't understand what this is like for you." You meet her eye. "But I appreciate it."
It seems like such an impersonal thing to say to your wife, and it's in that moment you realize your sex life has only given you the illusion of closeness in your marriage. You've never been farther apart from her than you are now, not even when she betrayed you by bringing Trevor Zeitlan over for dinner. She never would have chosen this. Obviously she means the baby. Does she mean you, as well? And would you have chosen her, if not for the child? Is it Elle you want, or only your child?
"Whatever." Elle crosses her arms over her chest, but they brush her belly, which deepens her scowl as she quickly unfolds them, as if she can't stand any more contact with the baby than she has with it by being pregnant. "If you really appreciated what I'm doing for you, you'd use one of your powers so I don't have to walk home."
"I don't have flight. Or teleportation."
"No, but you have telekinesis."
At the image of yourself walking down the sidewalk, Elle hovering next to you above the concrete, you're a little amused. And more than a little tempted. Thanks to Nathan Petrelli, those abilities are commonplace, so it's not as if anyone would think twice about a levitating woman. You broke your own no abilities rule to cure Elle's morning sickness; surely it couldn't hurt to use an ability to cure her heartsickness, to bridge the gap between you and save your marriage -- all for the child, of course.
Thinking of the child clears your head.
"Why use telekinesis for what you can do with the hands God gave you?"
"Gabriel!" she squeals as you sweep her up in your arms. But she doesn't protest further as you carry her the rest of the way home.
You're painting the nursery sunshine yellow. In part because there isn't a window in the tiny second bedroom of the apartment, and you don't think a baby should sleep in a dark, gloomy room, but largely because Elle still hasn't let the doctor tell the sex of the baby, and your choices for a gender neutral nursery are yellow and green. Elle doesn't like green, though you know this because you gave her a green sweater for Christmas which she returned, not because she offered any input into the decoration of the baby's room, so yellow it is.
Frankly, you're leery of painting, lest Isaac Mendez's ability take over despite your resolve not to use your powers and reveal a future you are increasingly afraid to see.
Not that you can see much of anything when the light bulb buzzes, rattles in the fixture, and then burns out. Along with every other light and electronic device in your apartment. And the apartment building, if the pounding on the floor beneath you and the muffled cursing through the walls are any indication.
As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can just make out Elle's curving silhouette in the doorway before a crackling ball of electricity in one hand illuminates her with cool blue light -- and, ironically, tints the yellow painted wall behind her green.
But you're not in the mood to appreciate irony.
"Elle," you grind out between clenched teeth, holding the paint roller over what you hope is the paint tray; your enhanced hearing picks out the drips of paint into the plastic pan. "We've been through this. Just because you're pissed off at me doesn't mean you need to short circuit the whole building. The neighbors aren't going to keep buying that you're running the hair dryer and the microwave at the same time."
The sparks jump from one hand to the other.
"How else am I supposed to get your attention? When I short-circuited our apartment, you just lit candles and kept right on assembling the crib."
The sullenness in her tone is too much for your patience.
"I don't know, Elle." Your voice drips with sarcasm as the paint roller drips paint. Your fingers open on the handle, and the roller falls with a splat in the paint pan, flecking paint on the drop cloth and your pants, and you advance on her. "You could try talking to me, like normal couples."
"We are not a normal couple!" The crackling balls of electricity in Elle's hands flare as though powered by her rising volume. "We're sadists and sociopaths and thieves and murderers, and it's insane to pretend we're just a boring watchmaker and his sweet little fifties housewife with a baby on the way!"
The lightning is so close to her belly that your stomach flips over sickeningly. You grab her hands, absorbing the shocks as you draw them away from the baby. It's been so long since you've felt this power that your hands and arms tingle unpleasantly and start to go numb, as if you've stuck metal into a socket.
"Nobody's pretending," you retort. "I am a watchmaker."
Elle shakes her head, hair whipping about her face. "This isn't you. The glasses, the hair, the sweater vests--"
"This is the Gabriel Gray you met."
"But I didn't marry Gabriel, I married Sylar! You're a monster, not an angel!"
You release her hands and stumble back from her, knocking over the paint tray as realization hits you with almost physical force:
Elle didn't choose you because she saw the good man you used to be and thought you could be him again, be a good husband to her; she chose you because she didn't want to be alone, and you were as fucked up as her, and gave her an excuse to stay that way.
Nine months of carefully practiced control amount to nothing in that instant of rage. Your eyes narrow, and your hand shoots out, pinning Elle to the wall like an insect on a foam display board in an elementary school science project. The tips of her pedicured toes only just touch the floor. A ragged gasp emits from her throat as her hands fly up to it, struggling to pry loose the clamp of invisible fingers, sparking uselessly, her bolts of electricity too weak to reach you, but you tighten the telekinetic grip on her neck, imagining in the dark the round bruises mottling her pale skin, healing and then darkening again, a physical re-creation of the emotional affliction she's done you over the past days, weeks, months...no, years. From the moment you met her. She made you this way, this thing torn between angel and monster. It's always been her...
She spends a precious breath to croak out, "Please...don't...wife..."
Her play to your relationship has no effect on your sympathy. Obviously her marriage vows were all a lie. Even if they weren't, family means nothing to you. You killed your mother.
And anyway, Elle seems to have forgotten the simple fact that she can't die. Not by strangulation, anyway.
"Gabriel," she wheezes, blue eyes rolling back in a face tinged the same color. "The baby--"
Instantly your hand opens, and Elle crumples to the floor, coughing, gulping in air that rushes, whistling and rattling, into her tortured lungs. The mother might heal, but the child... You don't know about the child, whether loss of oxygen will damage or kill him, and it sickens you that you didn't think about him before now, lost control after so many months of fighting the hunger, simply because Elle goaded you. Probably she didn't even mean any of it. It could have just been the hormones talking. And now she'll be terrified of you, and leave, take the child away from you before you ever see him...
Oh God. You feel like you did after you killed Brian Davis, want to lock yourself away in the back room and paint Father, forgive me on the walls in blood.
"Elle..."
You sink to your knees beside her, reach out a trembling hand, hesitate a moment before placing it on her belly.
The baby kicks your palm. Thank God. A chastisement you'll gladly accept.
"I'm sorry," you whisper, not sure whether to the child or to Elle. Hot, sticky tears slide down your cheeks, and you make no attempt to wipe them away. "I'm so, so sorry. It'll never happen again. Just...please don't leave..."
"Leave?" She looks up through sweat-matted hair and continues, the hoarseness disappearing from her voice with every word as she heals, smiling, "Why the hell would I leave when we're finally starting to have some fun?"
Fun, not even by Elle's definition, does not describe the next few weeks in the apartment. In fact, you can barely stand to be there, leaving every morning before Elle wakes to attend Mass before opening the shop, going out after close to buy baby things, locking yourself in the nursery to arrange and re-arrange your purchases until Elle shuts off the TV and retreats to bed and you can have the couch.
You're not really sure why she stays -- probably for much the same reasons that you don't walk out on her: she's never lived on her own, and she's nine months pregnant. The difference, though, is that she's looking out for herself, and you're looking out for your child.
You'd like to believe that part of you still hopes she'll have the baby, see how perfect it is, and fall in love with you both, but, as you confess to the priest, you're not sure you really care what Elle does, so long as she doesn't fall in love with only the baby and take it from you. Or take it from you out of spite. As she has, on a number of occasions, threatened to do, which is one of the main reasons you avoid her as much as possible, to deprive her of the satisfaction of wielding this power over you. You're not worried about her carrying through with these threats before she delivers, so you ignore her phone calls and texts.
Until you get one in the middle of confession that says, Water broke. Get your ass home, followed shortly after by another that says, OMFG! Contractions!
Sin and penance are the furthest things from your mind as you leap to your feet in the confessional, knocking your head on the top of the booth. Laughing at the pain, you lean toward the grille and tell the priest, "My wife's in labor! I'm going to be a father, Father!"
"Bless you, my son. I will pray for the safe delivery of your child and the grace of the Virgin for your wife," he replies, and omits doling out penance -- perhaps anticipating that the ordeal of Elle in labor will be more than enough to try your soul.
Heart pounding, you sprint out of St. Anselm Roman Catholic Church and hail a cab. When you give the driver your address, he raises his unibrow at you in the rearview mirror. "But that is only a block away."
"We're picking up my wife, then going to the hospital. She's having a baby!"
The grin is slung off your face as the cab driver, who'd just begun to merge into the traffic, slams on his breaks; another taxi's horn wails as it swerves just out of the way of rear-ending the vehicle.
"I will not be having a baby born in my taxicab!"
You start to explain, but quickly realize you're neither getting through to the driver that Elle's not having having the baby, or reassuring him that there's not a chance she won't. Your cell phone vibrates in your pants pocket, and without even looking at it, you know it's Elle wanting to know why the hell you're not home already.
Grinding your teeth and exhaling slowly through your nose, you touch the front passenger headrest and then turn it to gold. "My kid's born in your cab, I'll buy you a new one."
The driver changes his mind about a baby being born in his taxi. When you've collected Elle, the drive to the hospital takes longer than you think it should, as if the driver is going out of his way to make this happen. Not knowing of your bribe, Elle accuses him of taking the longest route to the hospital to rack up a bigger fee. Though, in fairness, it is morning rush hour.
Luckily for your vow not to use your powers, Elle doesn't have the baby in the cab, in the middle of a bumper-to-bumper New York City Street. That might have been preferable, you think, when she's still laboring long past lunchtime. There is nothing of the grace of the Virgin in the way she curses you with every contraction, shocking your hand as she clings to it, her powers out of control, which angers more than frightens the medical staff as the lights and monitors in the room flicker off and on. When the whole maternity ward and neonatology units lose power for nearly five minutes, they threaten to administer drugs to inhibit her powers, but Elle protests about her healing ability.
"I'll get her under control," you say, anxious about how the largely untested drugs might affect the baby, as well as the electrical current running haywire through Elle's system.
Though pushed to the limits of your patience and ragged after seven hours of this, you keep control over yourself and draw upon every ounce of empathy you still posses for this woman. It's so difficult to care about anyone but the child, but you gain mastery over the mother's powers nonetheless. A moment later, the doctor declares that the baby's head is crowning.
You continue to hold Elle's hand and coach her through the contractions, as you learned to do in the Lamaze classes she refused to attend with you, but with an awareness that you are not present in this birthing room as a mere spectator to your wife's labor. Despite the constant groans and screams and profanities streaming from her, Elle recedes as you watch the misshapen yet perfect infantile head, which seems to be covered with as much pale hair as goo, emerge from the V of her thighs. She may be pushing your child from her body, but you are witness to its entrance into the world. You feel its rhythm within you as you have always felt the steady pulse of time.
There is a neck. First one shoulder, then another. Two arms with hands and ten tiny fingers curved into claws, poised even in the first moments of life to fight for the right to survive. A rounded belly with a thick cord protruding from where the navel should be. And, between the thighs--
"A boy!" your cry rings out in the delivery room in duet with the baby's wail, and just as the baby's legs and feet slither out from Elle's body, you leave her side to see him up close. "Looks like we don't have to change the lettering on the shop window. Gray and Sons watchmakers endures for another generation!"
The nurse chuckles and hands you a pair of scissors, indicating the umbilical cord. "I'll expect you to snip that with a watchmaker's precision, then."
You do, and then bend to pick up the writhing infant protesting the loss of his warm, close world. You cradle him to your chest, not minding the mucous and blood and other viscous matter staining the front of your paper gown. It's not the first time you've bathed in blood and this, more than Communion, makes you feel as though you've been washed clean.
Only after you release him to the nurses to be bathed and diapered do you remember Elle. Turning to her, you ask, "What are we going to call little Mr. Gray?"
Your smile falls from your lips as you watch her swat away the medical personnel who have just assisted with helping her expel the afterbirth and are getting her cleaned up. With no hint that she's just been through the trauma of giving birth, she swings her legs over the side of the bed and hops down from the high mattress.
"Mrs. Gray!" cries a nurse. "You need to rest so you can heal--"
"I'm already healed," Elle cuts her off, knocking shoulders with the nurse en route to the curtained off space where you helped her change into her hospital gown hours ago. "I'm special," she sneers at you before ducking behind it. "And I don't give a shit about what you call the brat, because I'm not going to be there to hear it."
Though you expected Elle to leave you, her pronouncement nonetheless catches you off-guard. Here, in the very room where the violently beautiful primordial miracle of birth played out, is not where you expected this scene to occur. She hasn't even glanced at the baby. Where is her biological imperative to care for her offspring? You would kill for your son; the hairs on the back of your neck stand as you watch other people manhandle him, and you didn't carry him within you for nine months. Elle really isn't normal. Or special. You're glad she doesn't want to be a part of your son's life.
Emerging from behind the curtain in her flowing maxi dress, which drags on the floor now that there's less belly to fill it out, she wrenches the rings off her hitherto swollen ring finger and chucks them at you. You duck, and they hit the stainless steel sink behind you with a ping.
"The baby was the only one you ever wanted, wasn't it?"
"Elle, I..." You stop, and do not deny it, nor hang your head in shame at the truth
"I never wanted either of you," Elle says. "So we're even."
Once upon a time, this kind of rejection would have prompted you to kill her, kill everyone party to your humiliation. Now you feel nothing at all for her, for anyone in this room, except your nameless infant son who is placed once more in your arms and gazes up at you with fuzzy adoration in his hazel eyes as you bottle feed him.
Well -- maybe you feel a little pity for Elle, whose heart is as empty as her womb.
In your arms you hold true love.
To be continued...
Author: MrsTater
Fandom: Heroes
Characters & Pairings: Sylar/Elle, Noah Gray
Rating & Warnings: R for language, sex, violence, mentions of abortion and sadism, character death
Format & Word Count: WIP, this chapter weighs in at 5712 words
Summary: You make a turn onto the highway in the opposite direction of the path of flight you planned together last night. "Everything is going to change." [AU]
Author's Notes: Sorry for the delay between updates. I thought I'd get this out much sooner, but RL has been determined to keep my fanfic time to a minimum. This was supposed to be just a two-parter fic, but this chapter got long, so I cut it off, and there will be one more chapter. Hopefully ready sooner than this one! This fic is the result of thinking about episode 3x04 and just how it was that Sylar ended up being (apparently) a single dad living in the Bennet house, and this is the result. The story takes place in that alternate future, so basically everything after the car rental scene in "Eclipse" didn't happen. :) Many thanks to Godricgal for her magnificent beta work. I hope y'all enjoy. I hunger for feedback like Sylar hungers for abilities. Except I won't, you know, cut open any heads to get it. ;)
Part One |
Part Two
You make waffles on Sundays, after Mass, and serve them to Elle in bed, on a tray with fresh-squeezed orange juice, a carafe of hot maple syrup, a vase with flowers purchased from a street vendor on your way home, and a prenatal vitamin. More often than not, waffles in bed lead to other things in bed, instigated by Elle dabbing, slathering, or pouring syrup onto some part of your body or other and licking it -- or sucking it -- languorously off. Since you transferred your healing ability to her and the morning sickness left her, especially since she entered her second trimester, her appetite for sex has been almost insatiable as her appetite for waffles.
Your marriage is far from perfect -- you wish she'd go to church with you, for one thing, because it could help her make peace with her past and give her some perspective on her future, as it's done for you -- but it's easier to believe in wedded bliss when someone wants you as frequently and fully as Elle wants you. And it's not all down to hormones. She wants sex, without question, but she also wants you, wants you to want her in return, needs to know that it's for more than as the mother of your child. You like that you can give her what no one ever has before, so you don't press her about church, and you don't begrudge her the extra sleep on Sunday mornings that her body needs in order to accommodate the child growing within her. Especially since she gets up early on the other six mornings a week to work with you in the shop.
There's not much for her to do in the shop, but she does manage the front for you when there are customers, and keeps the books and dusts the display cases when there aren't. Or joins you in the back for a lesson in the basics of watch mechanics and repair -- or, more often, pulls you out of sight behind the cabinets containing watchmaking tools for a quickie.
The first time she did this, you were a little scandalized -- it was business hours, and the back room isn't closed off from the main shop -- but you were also more than a little turned on by the spontaneity and the risk factor. Once, a customer came in while Elle straddled your lap, she topless, you still wearing your sweater vest and shirt but with your pants pooled around your ankles. Surprisingly, the near public sex had the opposite effect as a cold shower, and the memory of it is enough to make you hard now: Elle's breasts and belly pressed against you in an attempt at concealment, her teeth biting down on your shoulder to silence her cries as she came, your lungs burning from holding back ragged gasps as you exploded beyond control. Rather than making you more discreet about your behavior in the shop, the experience only whets your appetite for illicit sex.
Luckily for you, watch shops aren't exactly hubs of commercial activity, and Elle is not quite seven months pregnant, horny, and also shares your exhibitionist streak. Or maybe it's that you've both found a new outlet for expressing yourselves without the use of your powers.
"Has anyone ever told you you're dead sexy when you're hunched over, concentrating on really detailed work?"
At Elle's voice from the edge of the room divider, your furrowed brow relaxes as a grin tugs at the corner of your pursed mouth. Without looking up from the wristwatch that is the focus of your concentration, a Rolex that went through a washing machine, you reply, "When you do all your really detailed work in the back room of a watch shop, not many people see you to notice."
"Then maybe we should move your workbench up front," Elle says, stepping further into the room. "Right up against the window. It'll attract more business."
"Is that so?"
"Oh yeah. Women will be breaking their watches on purpose to come see the hot watchmaker. It's a total waste for you to be stuck back here in this dark room."
Standing beside your chair now, she ruffles your hair, disheveling the carefully combed side part, raking her fingernails over your scalp in a way that makes it impossible for you to even pretend to concentrate on the Rolex. You set down your tools, swivel in your chair, and rest your hands on either side of the baby bulge.
"Thank you for coming up with a plan to grow the family business," you tell her, grin widening as you feel a solid kick or punch or flailed elbow against your palm. You don't remark on it to Elle, who doesn't seem as fascinated by the baby's movements are you are -- probably because she feels them constantly. "I'd love for Gray and Sons to be able to support me and my son--"
"If it's a boy, you mean." She plucks your glasses with their various magnifying attachments off the bridge of your nose and puts them on, blinking her magnified eyes owlishly.
"And if he shares my looks," you concede, "since your plan's contingent on hot watchmakers."
There is so much you want to say at this point: to speculate which of you the child will look like or what features might be combined from you both; to joke that if it's a girl, you'll have to change the name of the shop to Gray and Daughter; to discuss names that are currently in the running for each gender. But you pursue none of these threads of conversation, as experience has taught you that Elle isn't much for speculation, joking about, or naming the baby. "It's too soon," she always says, even though each prenatal checkup reveals mother and baby to be in perfect health. You take Elle's reluctance to mean that she's still adjusting to all these changes, or that she's afraid of jinxing the pregnancy.
So you bear with her patiently, though you hope that soon it will no longer be too soon. More than anything, you want to tell her about the dream you had of a blond-haired, brown-eyed boy, and you'd like to ask how she'd feel about Robert if it is a boy, want to tell her you've been thinking it would be nice to honor her father that way. For a girl you like Angel. Not for your mother, but for your first memory of Elle, your golden-haired angel with a broken watch.
That hair now cascades over her shoulders, thick and lustrous as you've read women's hair becomes during pregnancy. And beneath those strands rise rounder, fuller breasts than her petite pre-pregnancy figure allowed. Desire must be evident on your face, because suddenly Elle stops goofing off with your glasses and covers your hands on her belly with her own. You're only too willing to let her slide your hands upward to curve over her breasts, though you sense that she does so less from arousal than from jealousy.
"I think you'd be sexier if you bent over other detailed work than watches," she says. "So you'd better clear off your workbench."
Hands occupied with her breasts, it crosses your mind that this might be a ruse to get you to use telekinesis after seven months without powers, but you shake off the thought. Elle has been the model of restraint in regard to use of power -- with the exception of the few times you've caught her watching a cut from her razor or a kitchen knife or the edge of a paper heal with a little too much fascination for you to be convinced it was accidental. And in all fairness, you did that after you first acquired the healing ability, too. And worse.
You've got to stop being so paranoid. Just because few of Elle's waking thoughts revolve around the baby doesn't mean she's out to destroy the life you're building for your child. Just because you hunger to wield your power doesn't mean she also struggles for self-control.
Removing one hand from her breast, you sweep a clear space on your workbench, then return to her with a hunger for her ample curves, cupping her ass to pull her to stand between your knees.
"I take it you have something in mind?"
Elle's arms encircle your neck as she leans in, pausing only the barest fraction of a centimeter from your mouth so that her breath kisses you when she says, "I'm gonna jump your bones, Mr. Gray."
"Can you jump with that belly?"
Though her eyes narrow underneath her bangs, Elle doesn't back away at your teasing. "I'd hurt you for that, except you'd like it."
As you've exercised self-control with powers, you've also reined in the impulse to be a little rough with her during sex. It helps that Elle hasn't been giving you shock treatment as foreplay, though that's prompted her to find more creative ways to mix pain with pleasure.
Maybe it's the rasp tingeing her voice, or maybe it's because you're in the shop, or maybe it's both, but today you can't resist her. Fingers pressing hard into her ass, you growl out, "Go ahead."
Closing the gap between you, Elle bites your lower lip, sucking at it as she rakes her teeth across. The skin breaks but knits itself together again almost instantly, though not before the tang of blood pricks your taste buds. Just a tease, but enough.
In a single movement you stand and hoist Elle off her feet. The swell of her midsection prevents her from hooking her legs around you as she used to, so her arms hook around your shoulders, fingernails clutching at your back, boring into you but barely noticeable through your sweater vest. You stumble around the chair, which you kick out of the way; it thumps against the cabinets as you plonk Elle down on the workbench. Immediately she hikes the long skirt of her maxi dress up around her waist and rocks back on her hips to shimmy out of her blue cotton panties. Heart rate spiking at the flash between her legs, you lunge for her, capturing her lips in a plunging kiss as your fingers fly to unbuckle your belt and unzip your slacks.
Elle is perched at the edge of the workbench, resting on her elbows and ready. You push into her warmth without a hint of tentativeness, and her grunt doesn't compel you to delay your thrusts or ask whether she's okay. You think only of the bare backs of her thighs pressed against your skin, slightly sticky with sweat as body temperatures rise with this exertion in the un-air conditioned shop, of her calves gripping either side of your torso, of her palms slapping your hands where they rest on the surface of the workbench, of the creak of the wood beneath her weight as you rock in and out of her, of her face, flushed and panting, peering at you over the mound of her stomach, of her heels kicking at the small of your back when you drop over her to push the spaghetti strap of her dress off her shoulder to expose one full breast and suckle the hard brown knot of her nipple. You lick the salty beads that tremble in the valley of her breasts, the dips of her collarbones, the hollow of her throat, and you don't even attempt to delay climax, not because you're in a race against time till the next customer arrives, but because Elle's muscles are tight around you and she's already bucking and calling out your name amid profanities, so you come with her.
She sits, panting, atop the workbench, her wavy hair damp with sweat and frizzy with the day's humidity, as you pull up your pants. "Holy shit!. Pregnancy's almost worth it for the mind-blowing sex."
A chuckle rumbles in your chest as you lean in to kiss her softly, slowly, making up for not having done so before. "Be careful saying things like that, Mrs. Gray. I might just decide to keep you pregnant."
Elle scowls as you help her slide off the workbench. She rubs the small of her back with her palms. "As soon as this kid pops out, I'm popping birth control pills."
The smile falls from your lips as they part to say that breast-feeding mothers shouldn't be on the pill, but you bite your tongue just in time to sidestep potential post-coital disaster. You haven't even discussed breast feeding, or any kind of feeding, yet you realize this is deeply important to you.
Filing it away for another time, when Elle is ready, you smile and force a teasing tone even though your words are not joking.
"Birth control? But I'm Catholic!"
Elle's snort is muffled by the jangle of a bell as the customer who laundered his Rolex strides through the door. You grab the watch and, on your way up front, pause to murmur in Elle's ear.
"So close. Maybe next time we'll get caught."
You never do get caught in the act again, mostly because you don't get many chances to get caught. At first you hardly notice; the change in your sexual activity happens so gradually. A decline from every day to every other day is still more sex than the average couple has, and definitely 100% more than you were having before you were with Elle. Even when two or three or four days begin to slip by without sex and you can't help but notice the decline in Elle's sex drive, you don't think it's indicative of anything other than the fact that she is well into her eighth month of pregnancy and it's almost impossible for her to get comfortable doing anything, much less during sex. And with mere weeks to go until your child enters the world, there's a lot more to think about than your sexual needs.
Which is what you assume Elle is thinking when she tells you on the slow walk home from work one evening, "I think it's time for me to stop coming to the shop."
"I'll miss having you with me all day," you say, and she smiles wearily, "but I agree, it's time you were at home, getting the apartment ready for the baby. The nursery--"
Elle's smile vanishes as she sucks in her cheeks, a look of aggravation you recognize instantly. You stop walking, pull her off the sidewalk at the front steps of an apartment building. She keeps her head down, jaw working as she grinds her teeth.
"Elle, what did I say?"
"You don't get it."
"What don't I get?"
She jerks her head up, lightning in her eyes. "My back hurts. My feet hurt. I have heartburn, and I always have to pee. I want to quit work so I can rest, not so I can do more work!"
"Of course I don't expect you to--"
"You'd understand if you had to spend ten minutes being pregnant, but you had your ten minutes of fun eight months ago. I didn't choose this, you know. I never would have chosen this. I'll never choose it again."
You don't make another attempt at repeating your interrupted offer of helping with the with the heavy lifting. Instead you stuff your hands into your pockets, knowing that your touch is the last thing she wants at this moment, and duck your head.
"I'm sorry," you say, trying not to think about how much you feel you deserve an apology for the things she just said. "I should have thought before I opened my mouth. You're right, I can't understand what this is like for you." You meet her eye. "But I appreciate it."
It seems like such an impersonal thing to say to your wife, and it's in that moment you realize your sex life has only given you the illusion of closeness in your marriage. You've never been farther apart from her than you are now, not even when she betrayed you by bringing Trevor Zeitlan over for dinner. She never would have chosen this. Obviously she means the baby. Does she mean you, as well? And would you have chosen her, if not for the child? Is it Elle you want, or only your child?
"Whatever." Elle crosses her arms over her chest, but they brush her belly, which deepens her scowl as she quickly unfolds them, as if she can't stand any more contact with the baby than she has with it by being pregnant. "If you really appreciated what I'm doing for you, you'd use one of your powers so I don't have to walk home."
"I don't have flight. Or teleportation."
"No, but you have telekinesis."
At the image of yourself walking down the sidewalk, Elle hovering next to you above the concrete, you're a little amused. And more than a little tempted. Thanks to Nathan Petrelli, those abilities are commonplace, so it's not as if anyone would think twice about a levitating woman. You broke your own no abilities rule to cure Elle's morning sickness; surely it couldn't hurt to use an ability to cure her heartsickness, to bridge the gap between you and save your marriage -- all for the child, of course.
Thinking of the child clears your head.
"Why use telekinesis for what you can do with the hands God gave you?"
"Gabriel!" she squeals as you sweep her up in your arms. But she doesn't protest further as you carry her the rest of the way home.
You're painting the nursery sunshine yellow. In part because there isn't a window in the tiny second bedroom of the apartment, and you don't think a baby should sleep in a dark, gloomy room, but largely because Elle still hasn't let the doctor tell the sex of the baby, and your choices for a gender neutral nursery are yellow and green. Elle doesn't like green, though you know this because you gave her a green sweater for Christmas which she returned, not because she offered any input into the decoration of the baby's room, so yellow it is.
Frankly, you're leery of painting, lest Isaac Mendez's ability take over despite your resolve not to use your powers and reveal a future you are increasingly afraid to see.
Not that you can see much of anything when the light bulb buzzes, rattles in the fixture, and then burns out. Along with every other light and electronic device in your apartment. And the apartment building, if the pounding on the floor beneath you and the muffled cursing through the walls are any indication.
As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can just make out Elle's curving silhouette in the doorway before a crackling ball of electricity in one hand illuminates her with cool blue light -- and, ironically, tints the yellow painted wall behind her green.
But you're not in the mood to appreciate irony.
"Elle," you grind out between clenched teeth, holding the paint roller over what you hope is the paint tray; your enhanced hearing picks out the drips of paint into the plastic pan. "We've been through this. Just because you're pissed off at me doesn't mean you need to short circuit the whole building. The neighbors aren't going to keep buying that you're running the hair dryer and the microwave at the same time."
The sparks jump from one hand to the other.
"How else am I supposed to get your attention? When I short-circuited our apartment, you just lit candles and kept right on assembling the crib."
The sullenness in her tone is too much for your patience.
"I don't know, Elle." Your voice drips with sarcasm as the paint roller drips paint. Your fingers open on the handle, and the roller falls with a splat in the paint pan, flecking paint on the drop cloth and your pants, and you advance on her. "You could try talking to me, like normal couples."
"We are not a normal couple!" The crackling balls of electricity in Elle's hands flare as though powered by her rising volume. "We're sadists and sociopaths and thieves and murderers, and it's insane to pretend we're just a boring watchmaker and his sweet little fifties housewife with a baby on the way!"
The lightning is so close to her belly that your stomach flips over sickeningly. You grab her hands, absorbing the shocks as you draw them away from the baby. It's been so long since you've felt this power that your hands and arms tingle unpleasantly and start to go numb, as if you've stuck metal into a socket.
"Nobody's pretending," you retort. "I am a watchmaker."
Elle shakes her head, hair whipping about her face. "This isn't you. The glasses, the hair, the sweater vests--"
"This is the Gabriel Gray you met."
"But I didn't marry Gabriel, I married Sylar! You're a monster, not an angel!"
You release her hands and stumble back from her, knocking over the paint tray as realization hits you with almost physical force:
Elle didn't choose you because she saw the good man you used to be and thought you could be him again, be a good husband to her; she chose you because she didn't want to be alone, and you were as fucked up as her, and gave her an excuse to stay that way.
Nine months of carefully practiced control amount to nothing in that instant of rage. Your eyes narrow, and your hand shoots out, pinning Elle to the wall like an insect on a foam display board in an elementary school science project. The tips of her pedicured toes only just touch the floor. A ragged gasp emits from her throat as her hands fly up to it, struggling to pry loose the clamp of invisible fingers, sparking uselessly, her bolts of electricity too weak to reach you, but you tighten the telekinetic grip on her neck, imagining in the dark the round bruises mottling her pale skin, healing and then darkening again, a physical re-creation of the emotional affliction she's done you over the past days, weeks, months...no, years. From the moment you met her. She made you this way, this thing torn between angel and monster. It's always been her...
She spends a precious breath to croak out, "Please...don't...wife..."
Her play to your relationship has no effect on your sympathy. Obviously her marriage vows were all a lie. Even if they weren't, family means nothing to you. You killed your mother.
And anyway, Elle seems to have forgotten the simple fact that she can't die. Not by strangulation, anyway.
"Gabriel," she wheezes, blue eyes rolling back in a face tinged the same color. "The baby--"
Instantly your hand opens, and Elle crumples to the floor, coughing, gulping in air that rushes, whistling and rattling, into her tortured lungs. The mother might heal, but the child... You don't know about the child, whether loss of oxygen will damage or kill him, and it sickens you that you didn't think about him before now, lost control after so many months of fighting the hunger, simply because Elle goaded you. Probably she didn't even mean any of it. It could have just been the hormones talking. And now she'll be terrified of you, and leave, take the child away from you before you ever see him...
Oh God. You feel like you did after you killed Brian Davis, want to lock yourself away in the back room and paint Father, forgive me on the walls in blood.
"Elle..."
You sink to your knees beside her, reach out a trembling hand, hesitate a moment before placing it on her belly.
The baby kicks your palm. Thank God. A chastisement you'll gladly accept.
"I'm sorry," you whisper, not sure whether to the child or to Elle. Hot, sticky tears slide down your cheeks, and you make no attempt to wipe them away. "I'm so, so sorry. It'll never happen again. Just...please don't leave..."
"Leave?" She looks up through sweat-matted hair and continues, the hoarseness disappearing from her voice with every word as she heals, smiling, "Why the hell would I leave when we're finally starting to have some fun?"
Fun, not even by Elle's definition, does not describe the next few weeks in the apartment. In fact, you can barely stand to be there, leaving every morning before Elle wakes to attend Mass before opening the shop, going out after close to buy baby things, locking yourself in the nursery to arrange and re-arrange your purchases until Elle shuts off the TV and retreats to bed and you can have the couch.
You're not really sure why she stays -- probably for much the same reasons that you don't walk out on her: she's never lived on her own, and she's nine months pregnant. The difference, though, is that she's looking out for herself, and you're looking out for your child.
You'd like to believe that part of you still hopes she'll have the baby, see how perfect it is, and fall in love with you both, but, as you confess to the priest, you're not sure you really care what Elle does, so long as she doesn't fall in love with only the baby and take it from you. Or take it from you out of spite. As she has, on a number of occasions, threatened to do, which is one of the main reasons you avoid her as much as possible, to deprive her of the satisfaction of wielding this power over you. You're not worried about her carrying through with these threats before she delivers, so you ignore her phone calls and texts.
Until you get one in the middle of confession that says, Water broke. Get your ass home, followed shortly after by another that says, OMFG! Contractions!
Sin and penance are the furthest things from your mind as you leap to your feet in the confessional, knocking your head on the top of the booth. Laughing at the pain, you lean toward the grille and tell the priest, "My wife's in labor! I'm going to be a father, Father!"
"Bless you, my son. I will pray for the safe delivery of your child and the grace of the Virgin for your wife," he replies, and omits doling out penance -- perhaps anticipating that the ordeal of Elle in labor will be more than enough to try your soul.
Heart pounding, you sprint out of St. Anselm Roman Catholic Church and hail a cab. When you give the driver your address, he raises his unibrow at you in the rearview mirror. "But that is only a block away."
"We're picking up my wife, then going to the hospital. She's having a baby!"
The grin is slung off your face as the cab driver, who'd just begun to merge into the traffic, slams on his breaks; another taxi's horn wails as it swerves just out of the way of rear-ending the vehicle.
"I will not be having a baby born in my taxicab!"
You start to explain, but quickly realize you're neither getting through to the driver that Elle's not having having the baby, or reassuring him that there's not a chance she won't. Your cell phone vibrates in your pants pocket, and without even looking at it, you know it's Elle wanting to know why the hell you're not home already.
Grinding your teeth and exhaling slowly through your nose, you touch the front passenger headrest and then turn it to gold. "My kid's born in your cab, I'll buy you a new one."
The driver changes his mind about a baby being born in his taxi. When you've collected Elle, the drive to the hospital takes longer than you think it should, as if the driver is going out of his way to make this happen. Not knowing of your bribe, Elle accuses him of taking the longest route to the hospital to rack up a bigger fee. Though, in fairness, it is morning rush hour.
Luckily for your vow not to use your powers, Elle doesn't have the baby in the cab, in the middle of a bumper-to-bumper New York City Street. That might have been preferable, you think, when she's still laboring long past lunchtime. There is nothing of the grace of the Virgin in the way she curses you with every contraction, shocking your hand as she clings to it, her powers out of control, which angers more than frightens the medical staff as the lights and monitors in the room flicker off and on. When the whole maternity ward and neonatology units lose power for nearly five minutes, they threaten to administer drugs to inhibit her powers, but Elle protests about her healing ability.
"I'll get her under control," you say, anxious about how the largely untested drugs might affect the baby, as well as the electrical current running haywire through Elle's system.
Though pushed to the limits of your patience and ragged after seven hours of this, you keep control over yourself and draw upon every ounce of empathy you still posses for this woman. It's so difficult to care about anyone but the child, but you gain mastery over the mother's powers nonetheless. A moment later, the doctor declares that the baby's head is crowning.
You continue to hold Elle's hand and coach her through the contractions, as you learned to do in the Lamaze classes she refused to attend with you, but with an awareness that you are not present in this birthing room as a mere spectator to your wife's labor. Despite the constant groans and screams and profanities streaming from her, Elle recedes as you watch the misshapen yet perfect infantile head, which seems to be covered with as much pale hair as goo, emerge from the V of her thighs. She may be pushing your child from her body, but you are witness to its entrance into the world. You feel its rhythm within you as you have always felt the steady pulse of time.
There is a neck. First one shoulder, then another. Two arms with hands and ten tiny fingers curved into claws, poised even in the first moments of life to fight for the right to survive. A rounded belly with a thick cord protruding from where the navel should be. And, between the thighs--
"A boy!" your cry rings out in the delivery room in duet with the baby's wail, and just as the baby's legs and feet slither out from Elle's body, you leave her side to see him up close. "Looks like we don't have to change the lettering on the shop window. Gray and Sons watchmakers endures for another generation!"
The nurse chuckles and hands you a pair of scissors, indicating the umbilical cord. "I'll expect you to snip that with a watchmaker's precision, then."
You do, and then bend to pick up the writhing infant protesting the loss of his warm, close world. You cradle him to your chest, not minding the mucous and blood and other viscous matter staining the front of your paper gown. It's not the first time you've bathed in blood and this, more than Communion, makes you feel as though you've been washed clean.
Only after you release him to the nurses to be bathed and diapered do you remember Elle. Turning to her, you ask, "What are we going to call little Mr. Gray?"
Your smile falls from your lips as you watch her swat away the medical personnel who have just assisted with helping her expel the afterbirth and are getting her cleaned up. With no hint that she's just been through the trauma of giving birth, she swings her legs over the side of the bed and hops down from the high mattress.
"Mrs. Gray!" cries a nurse. "You need to rest so you can heal--"
"I'm already healed," Elle cuts her off, knocking shoulders with the nurse en route to the curtained off space where you helped her change into her hospital gown hours ago. "I'm special," she sneers at you before ducking behind it. "And I don't give a shit about what you call the brat, because I'm not going to be there to hear it."
Though you expected Elle to leave you, her pronouncement nonetheless catches you off-guard. Here, in the very room where the violently beautiful primordial miracle of birth played out, is not where you expected this scene to occur. She hasn't even glanced at the baby. Where is her biological imperative to care for her offspring? You would kill for your son; the hairs on the back of your neck stand as you watch other people manhandle him, and you didn't carry him within you for nine months. Elle really isn't normal. Or special. You're glad she doesn't want to be a part of your son's life.
Emerging from behind the curtain in her flowing maxi dress, which drags on the floor now that there's less belly to fill it out, she wrenches the rings off her hitherto swollen ring finger and chucks them at you. You duck, and they hit the stainless steel sink behind you with a ping.
"The baby was the only one you ever wanted, wasn't it?"
"Elle, I..." You stop, and do not deny it, nor hang your head in shame at the truth
"I never wanted either of you," Elle says. "So we're even."
Once upon a time, this kind of rejection would have prompted you to kill her, kill everyone party to your humiliation. Now you feel nothing at all for her, for anyone in this room, except your nameless infant son who is placed once more in your arms and gazes up at you with fuzzy adoration in his hazel eyes as you bottle feed him.
Well -- maybe you feel a little pity for Elle, whose heart is as empty as her womb.
In your arms you hold true love.
To be continued...