What God Has Touched
Deep south. Butte La Rose or also Butte A La Rose. Where you sit on your porch and rock in your chair at night, listening to the various night creatures sing, move, hunt and live. Deep south, where crayfish boils, alligator etouffe and drawled out words are the norm. Deep south where Baptism is strong and if one can give the gift of sight, turn the blind into seeing, the crippled into walking, heal a wound with only the laying on of hands, it's a precious gift, a commodity that is fiercely guarded.
Abigail Beauchamp was such a commodity. Raised in the deep south, Louisiana is her home. Where you keep a shotgun near the front door and occasionally you might get a gator that goes walking across your lawn. Where the local church is small, everyone knows everyone's business, and if you miss a day of church, well, they come looking. Going since the week after she was born, Abigail looked, walked, talked, acted no different than anyone else in that town. Who could know that deep within the young woman as she grew from precocious and perky blonde toddler to young woman, that her genetics, or the mutation in it, would play a big part in her future. Puberty brought big changes to the Beauchamp household. Like a switch just turned on. A bird with a broken wing within the small town where the Wal mart that's open all day and night is the hangout. One minute it's fighting being picked up, and a few minutes later, the wing was slowly moving back into place, bone mending, muscles repairing and soon taking flight back to the sky and whence it came. All before her eyes. By sheer luck it wasn't seen by her parents but with such occurrences happening frequently within the house like her mother's cut on her hand from cooking healing a little more faster than it should have taken, it was only time before they began to have an inkling of something different with their daughter.
A blessing from God! The were wary at first. Maybe she was lying to get attention? Providence took over, and while splitting wood for their stove, stocking up for the winter, the axe slipped and sliced into her fathers leg. All was forgotten about what their only daughter could do, father yelling and pale, mother running for the phone and the ambulance. Abigail though, strode forward and held her father tight, hands placed over the wound and while she hummed a little psalm, what happened with the bird, happened to her father. Of course the Ambulance came, but left soon after when it was apparent that there was no injury. The Beauchamp family was quick to cover everything up for now. Unsure of whether to reveal this blessing, or to keep it quiet for the moment. Time, they though, would give the answer. And prayer.
And keep it quiet they did, for quite a period of time. If a member of their congregation was sick, they would visit and if it was coincidence that the person was feeling better by the end of the visit, well, it was just that. Their fear for the invasion of their privacy and the fear that someone might mistake the gift as something other than the gift kept them as a whole keeping the gift under wraps. This led to a very sheltered young teenager even more so than being in the boonies of Louisiana. Katrina would change all that. No evacuation for them, they would find that they could weather it well enough. The aftermath though. Theirs was a charitable family, and it wouldn't do good to not go do what they were capable of doing, of lending help when so many were in need. Into the area they went, to New Orleans to lend aide where they could, pass out water, blankets, supplies, the whole of her church who were able. Again there, she put her gift to work, discreetly. Most thought she was just comforting them, holding hands, singing psalms or just praying quietly with them all the while ailing what ill's there were. Thank god that her gift of healing was not something fast but gradual. Some thought it was odd at how good they felt, rested and refreshed once she left, but to the best of their knowledge, it was just the good spirits of those about her and them. nearly a month they stayed there, helping, working. The upside to being home schooled is that your education can be done anywhere. So loathed were her parents to let her be amoung those who might discover.
More time passed, life settled into it's sedate and steady pace till the day of the explosion in New York. A devastating occurrence and much like Katrina, something that the Beauchamp family could not walk away from. But, not something they could just go to. This wasn't something local, this was at the north end of the country. There was debate and fights within the family and one morning they woke up to find Abigail gone. Seventeen and she was gone, hightailed it to, they suspected, to the source of devastation.
Indeed, she had gone there, enough money saved to get her on a bus headed up there, or as close as she could and hitching the rest of the way. The need to do something, anything, other than sitting there and watching people hurt when she could take the hurt away. Which she did. Discreetly, carefully. No parents to distract people, just herself this time, she had to carefully pick and choose, when she managed to volunteer to help with the various aide agency's.
And in New York is where she's been for the last few years. She managed to find a job waitressing, a rundown little apartment in a not so nice area. With the exposing of the evolved, and the bill passed, Abigail was one of the evolved who opted to hide what she could do. Not for fear of persecution, but for fear that her life would not be her own. That her gift would condemn her to a life of constantly being brought before people, and used. The loss of free will. So she hides her gift, careful to not touch people and if she does, not for too long. She's accepted who she is, the seemingly shy southern young woman, a waitress in a small corner restaurant, with a little secret, that some day, won't be so secret.
Neither Here Nor There
Her gift didn't remain too much a secret too long. A few people catching on to the quick healing of wounds, hand massages that made you feel better than ever before and outright witnessing of miracles of the divine variety - Or even evolved variety - brought her to the attentions of people both good and bad. She briefly flirted with membership in Phoenix but her refusal to limit who she healed made it clear that she needed to leave lest she bring trouble down around their necks.
She became known as the red cross of New York in certain circles. If you were hurt, you could go to her. No person was turned away. It made her a target for less than kind and unsavory characters. She also became a target for getting information out of seeing as she tended to not lie. Sylar tried a few times to get a crack at her ability to heal - can you blame him? - and eventually there was an agreement made during a week of amnesty that he would be welcome to take it, when the time was right. She somewhere along the way ended up registering too after healing the wrong person at the wrong time.
She picked up more than a few good friends along the way and a new job working in a bar. Events passed that culminated in the participation of the events surrounding the destruction of the Vernaza-Narrows bridge and the fulfillment of a promise made many years ago by someone else. This lead to questioning by Homelands Security but not incarceration. The upside to telling the truth, albeit with pointed questions that skirted around some things.
Not long after, unsavory types working on information passed to them by some cops about her whereabouts and her ability that landed her in Staten Island, kidnapped and healing fighters in an underground evolved fight ring. Unmentionable things were down, but the same people who owed her for her help in their times of need, stepped up and she along with others were released from their captivity.
She lives a more not so naive life these days, accepting help a little more readily when she needs it. A run in with Tyler case while behind the bar has lead to drastic life changes for the blonde, a brief brush with blue hair and learning that maybe, perhaps, she really was God's special snowflake when the loss of her ability seems to have become permanent and that she is unposessing of the Suresh Linkage Complex. The gene that makes an evolved, evolved. Abby is also learning to live life as a not so gifted person, get herself unregistered and discover that she's more than just a healing ability. She's a real person.
Lost And Forgotten
At the age of five, fate, divine providence or just plain luck/ill luck brought Abigail into the proximity of an badly injured man who was being hunted by another man that she would come to meet in the future. Sure of his fate and upon the prediction of another person that she would know further down the road, Francois Allègre who also went by the name of Francois Allen transferred the ability to heal to the young girl when she stumbled across him during one of her many ventures away from the backyard of the little white house in the woods. The same as had been done to him so many years ago by a soldier. She unwittingly became a player in a battle that had been going on for years that would ultimately lead to a clash between good and evil, right and wrong in which good prevailed and evil vanquished.
She doesn't remember this man who changed her life at so young an age and saved her from certain death by telling her to run, and condemned her to take the life a man in the future and to her own life of longevity. She only remembers a snippet of the song he sang and even that is attributed to her mother and not him. How much of her being and demeanor is influenced by him and his ability is unknown, but she fulfilled the communal destiny that those who possessed this particular brand of healing were tasked with and eliminated Kazimir Volken from the face of the earth. Only time will tell now that the job is done and the gift has been passed on, albeit prematurely.
