May 2007, Grounds for Divorce

[ellectrical]

The door to Elle's room is identical to every other on the third floor of the Hartsdale Facility; a plain shade of gray with a steel handle that won't turn unless a code is entered into the keypad on the wall next to it. Her code was never difficult to guess, but no one had ever been stupid enough to break into her room, even if they knew which door was hers.

When Elle steps out of this door, every fluorescent light inlaid in the ceiling is working entirely, and the movement at the end of the hall is only a tall man in a suit whom she can identify on sight by his stupid, spiked blond hair. Nothing looks off, and it bothers her more than it would have if one of those bulbs would just flicker already. Her heels crack more than click against the white tile floor as she heads quickly for the stairs, and her father's office one floor up.

This is the first indication of something wrong – the lights on the keypad are dark, and the wood door is very slightly ajar. Elle doesn't hesitate. She slips off her black heels, leaving them against the wall so that she can approach silently. But as she curls one hand around the side of the door, holding it to herself like a shield as she pulls it back just enough to look into the room, Elle can't stop herself from calling out –

"Daddy –"

She shuts up the moment the room comes into view. With one sharp look back over her shoulder, Elle steps into the office and slams the door.



That feeling – the stomach is twisting apart, lungs painfully tight, it's not true yet but it will be, but it will be – Elle only discerns it as though someone were whispering what it should be like in her ear; only a ghost of what she should be feeling. Sunlight pours in through the unshattered mullioned windows on the other side of the room. The books are in the case, in the same neat order. The two pillows on the sofa haven't been moved, the gramophone, cello, and old symphony records are untouched in their place in the corner.

A couple of objects on her father's desk are overturned. The file folders from the far shelf are strewn onto the carpet: photographs, dossiers, maps, newspaper articles, mission reports. Her toes brush one of the folders as she steps forward: Bishop, Elle. Still empty.

The leather chair behind her father's desk is turned away, its high back facing her. She doesn't call out to him again. The ghostly feeling nears being sick, but she only curls her fingers against her palm, and continues forward steadily, in no rush as she rounds the desk and makes her way to the windows, to face the chair.

My girl's tougher than that.

Elle Bishop doesn't scream.



Peter Petrelli said, You didn't have to kill Ricky.

Even the phantom of any feeling is gone when it becomes true, but Peter's words fill her mind like a tune you can't get rid of as she stares at her father's body – it's the kind of dead you can't come back from, when the head has been cracked open and emptied out like a soft-boiled egg. His eyes are closed, and thin trickles of still-drying blood creep down from where she can see the thin, jagged line of his skull. The lips are slightly apart – unlike so many others, Elle doesn't know what his screams must have sounded like. She can tell that the wound is too quick and precise and blooded to have been done with the struggle of any sort of weapon. He would have been easy, restrained, his ability completely useless. His fucking glasses aren't even broken. That's the end.

When I think about all the hard work I put into raising you.

He's only left her alone. Again. You didn't have to kill Ricky.

And all Elle can think is, No. I really didn't.

Not for that.



Elle isn't looking at the body anymore. Her eyes have lowered to the desk, to the long, slender drawer just beneath its polished wood surface, the kind of drawer that would normally hold pencils and pens and bottles of white-out. It's been left untouched, the chair and her father pushed up against it. She looks up – the door to the office is still closed.

There were a few other agents, none of whom she thought much of; they'd probably just get in her way. There was the building's security, which Elle's mind quickly relegated as completely useless. The upper level cells were almost entirely empty. And there was Level Five.

Whether she liked it or not, there was only one person in the Facility whom Elle could stand to think of going to right now. Maybe the only person who, if she couldn't trust him, she could at least trust that he would take Sylar as their common enemy. That is, of course, if he was still alive.

With no more hesitation, Elle slips off her suit jacket, and drops it on the floor. It's a sleeveless blue shirt underneath, and, just for a moment, she twiddles the silver chain around her neck as she stares at the obstructed desk drawer. It only takes another glance at her father for Elle to stop dawdling. She puts her hand one of the arms of his chair, and pushes him to the side, toward the shelf now emptied of its file folders.

A couple of her fingers brush his hand. His skin is still warm.

Elle returns to the desk, and yanks open the drawer. There are no pens, pencils, or white-out inside. The weapon of choice for normal Company agents is the gun she decides on, and lifts out of the drawer.

One of us -

She looks over it once, checks the clip, and pulls back the safety.

- and one of them.

The drawer is slammed shut again, and Elle doesn't give her father's body another glance as she walks back around the desk, and heads for the door.