[sunday_reveries] Prompts for 11/8 - 11/22
"I twisted you under and under to break you
I just couldn't breathe with your throne on my chest."
-Furnace Room Lullaby
Elle Bishop was a broken individual. She couldn’t dispute that because she couldn’t hide it. Despite her best efforts, she’d always been the kind of girl who wore her heart on her sleeve, and anybody who looked at her could see it. Contrary to what most people though though, it wasn’t the testing she’d been subjected to that had done it. As a child she’d been strapped into a chair, had electricity run through her until she’d cry and then they’d just go harder, only stopping when she passed out and even then it was only because they had no other choice. Bennet had managed to make even the elder Bishop see that reviving her only to make her endure it again was too much. Too risky. For the experiment, not for her. As far as they knew, she was the only electrokinetic out there. If something happened to her, who would they poke and prod?
But no, that wasn’t what broke her. The testing only fractured her. Made fine cracks appear in the fragile façade that was her life.
What broke her, really and truly, was the Gabriel Gray case. It wasn’t her first job as a Company agent, but it was certainly the biggest. The most important. They’d all seen the Mendez paintings, they knew what lurked within him. But Elle believed in the Company. Believed that they really wanted to help him. And maybe some small part of her thought that if she was able to save him from the darkness that threatened to overtake him, then maybe there was some hope for her. That she could be something other than the assassin her father created. She didn’t realize until it was too late that her job was to draw that monster out, and by then it was too late. She didn’t have a choice.
Even after the fact, she could pinpoint the exact moment the break was completed. It wasn’t when she was flung against the wall in his apartment. No, it was when she got back up. When she saw that look in his eyes that told her it was all her fault, because she knew it was the truth. She could have saved him, but instead she’d damned him. The good little soldier following her daddy’s orders.
Broken into a thousand tiny pieces, it was then that Elle stopped caring. Stopped seeing each individual case as a person she could potentially help, but as a job. Just something to get through in order for her to move on to the next one.
But she wasn’t ready to give up on herself just yet. Everytime another of the watchmaker’s victims was discovered she studied the casefile until she knew it backwards and forwards, kept the pictures ingrained in her memory. All of it only serving to push her that much harder. Because she was going to find him, she was going to kill him, and maybe then she’d be able to find a way to put herself back together again.
[I blame this entirely on the face that before I went to bed I was watching Elle/Sylar videos on youtube. I woke up at 4am with the idea and had to write it, even though I know I’ve written one kind of like it before. If it makes no sense….well….go back and re-read the part where I said I woke up at 4am to write it]