cautionarytale | 133 [voice]

[Elle was in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the bathtub. She'd changed out of Sylar's shirt and into a tank top as soon as she'd found herself back on the barge, but was still wearing the shorts she'd taken from the store, and her feet were bare, and though the bullet wound seemed to be gone, her left leg was covered in blood. She was carefully unwrapping the bandage from her thigh when Howie knocked.]

"I said leave me alone!" [she shouted. She didn't want to deal with him right now.]

"No, Elle." [He said calmly and carefully through the door,] "I just want to talk to you. Five minutes, nothing else. If you don't let me in, I'm coming in. Come on, let me in."

[He leant against the door, so he could be heard without having to really shout.]

[Elle grunted in frustration. She didn't want to see Howie: she knew what he'd say, and she didn't want to hear it. Plus, she'd have to walk to the door, and she wasn't quite used to the idea of walking not being excruciatingly painful.

After a moment of annoyed debate with herself, she stumbled to her feet, limping out of habit until her leg relaxed and she could walk, more or less steadily, to the door.]

"Five minutes," [she snapped, pushing the door open for him.]

"Thank you." [He stepped inside, hoping she might relent on the five minutes once they got talking, but mainly he just wanted to know if she was alright, and what happened.

He took one look at her leg and then back up at her,] "Are you bleeding? Are you alright, Elle?"

"I'm not bleeding anymore." [She headed back into the bathroom and sat back down on the edge of the tub.] "I kinda died. Again. Guess you get a free pass on injuries when you do that."

[She went back to unwrapping the bandage. Though the bullet wound was gone, a lot of the blood and dried and stuck to the bandage, and peeling it off was like tearing off a bandaid. It didn't really hurt, but it wasn't pleasant.]

"Oh. I'm... I'm sorry, Elle." [He winced a little when she was pulling off the bandage, even if he could tell it didn't really hurt, it looked like it should, and followed her into the bathroom, and idly went about finding her a cloth and running it under the tap for her,]

"What happened?" [He presumed, from the injury, that she'd bled to death, but that wasn't really what his question was about.]

"Sylar killed me." [She took his question at face value, because she didn't want to go into any more detail than the bare essentials of what he'd done.

She dropped the bandage on the floor. There was a square of gauze directly over where the wound had been, glued to her skin with dried blood. She bit her tongue to keep from showing any signs of pain or discomfort as she peeled it off.]

[He was a little unsurprised it was Sylar, but that was his general impression of the other inmate more than anything. He watched her carefully, and handed her the damp cloth in his hand before asking anything else.]

"Why? How did he end up doing that?"

[He wanted to know what happened before he addressed the obvious issue in her post.]

"He's a killer, it's what he does." [She looked up when he held the cloth out to her, and took it from him gingerly. Part of her was so on-edge, her nerves so frazzled, that she didn't completely trust even Howie.] "It's what we do."

[She pressed the cloth against the outside of her thigh, trying to moisten some of the dried blood before scrubbing it off.]

[He shook his head softly, and leant back against the sink,] "No, Elle, people have reasons for killing. Even killers."

[He guessed this went back to her initial statement, and there were two things he thought about saying. Instead of picking between them, he just went for both,] "Only by believing nothing can change do you make it true. It might sound kind of cheesy, but it's true."

[He paused, then asked the second, much more important question,] "How did you think he'd changed?"

[She wrung the bloody cloth out into the tub and went back to rubbing it down her leg.]

"It doesn't matter," [she murmured.]

[He shook his head,]

"It does matter. It's obviously affected you, so it matters."

"Let me make the judgement call on this one, sarge. It really doesn't matter."

[Howie paused,] "Then at least tell me why it doesn't matter, because it seems like a big deal to me."

"It doesn't matter because he didn't change. There's no point in getting all misty-eyed about what might have been. He couldn't change. I couldn't change. We're damaged goods."

[She was just repeating things that Sylar had said, but they were true, weren't they? As much as she wanted to believe she could be happy, normal even, it was becoming increasingly obvious - like it wasn't before, she thought bitterly - that good things weren't in the cards for her. Every time she went home, everything, no matter how bad it had been before, only got worse.]

"I'm a badguy. I can't change that."

"No, I don't believe it. Nobody was born a bad guy, and nobody can't change. It's..."

[He frowned and looked down at the floor,] "It's just a way of avoiding responsibility. A massively subconscious one, perhaps, but saying 'I can't do any better' is just... not taking any responsibility. And I know you can, Elle, I know you can decide to do things for the right reasons. I've seen you do it." [They might not have been the right thing at the time, but the reasoning was pretty sound.]

"But you believed he changed, didn't you? What convinced you? Please, tell me, Elle, I... please."

"It's not about better." [She was tired of trying to be better and never quite getting there. She'd never been good enough, and just the word 'better' annoyed her, but this was about something else.] "It's about what I am."

[She squeezed the cloth tightly in one hand, wringing as much blood from it as she could. It was mostly dry now, but she stubbornly kept scrubbing her leg with it.]

"I'm sick of trying to be something I'm not for..." [Her hair fell messily across her face, blocking him from her sight.] "I don't even know why."

"Elle, what you are doesn't automatically define whether you do bad or good things."

[He frowned, and pushed himself up from where he was leaning on the sink, reaching over and putting his hand over the one where she had the cloth,] "That's not going to help, give it here a second." [It was a minor distraction, and he went back to his original point,] "It's not about trying to be something you're not. It's about trying to find that part of you which does, and has, made right decisions, and... believing that you've got a capacity for that too. Who we all are is defined by our ability to change as much as it is staying the way we are. Nobody is damned and nobody is saved. Someone turned you into a bad guy. You weren't born like that. I'm not trying to make you a hero, Elle. I'm trying to... show you the value in having a moral code. You don't have to bound into buildings and save everyone, and that kind of thing. But you also don't have to hurt people."

[Elle flinched at his touch, but let him take the cloth. She raised her head, shaking her hair out of her eyes and frowning up at him.] "Do you like me?"

[He took the cloth and ran it under the tap, rinsing the blood out, before handing it back to her,]

"Yes, I do. I... don't like everything you do, but I like you."

[He paused,]

"But it shouldn't be about my approval."

[She turned her attention back to washing the blood off her leg.] "Can you just... not lecture me for a while?"

Edited 2011-05-05 01:30 (UTC)

[He paused, and felt a little guilty that she'd just come back and he still managed to fall into lecture mode first. He was trying not to do that,]

"Alright, Elle. I'd... still like to know what happened. Just because I'm concerned, not to lecture."

[The lecturing thing was especially difficult, as he had a tendancy to lecture people he liked, let alone those he didn't.]

"I told you what happened: Sylar killed me." [She'd gotten most of the blood off, but she still didn't feel clean. She wanted to take the longest shower of her life and then... not have to face things.]

"I know, but... how did that come about?" [He leaned back on the sink, mainly just worried about her, more than anything else.]

"He realized that he's a killer and he couldn't change," [she said wearily. She didn't want to talk about all the sordid details of what had led up to her death.]

"So..." [She made a slicing noise and a cut-off motion across her throat.]

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