The Arms of an Angel

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Scene Title The Arms of an Angel
Synopsis Molly tries to make a new friend.
Date January 5, 2013

St. Luke's Hospital


Molly has heard tales of the girl at the end of the hall. Small. Sickly. The one with the dead father and a mother who self-identifies as a mail order bride from Bulgaria and speaks no English by choice. The one with an ability neither the doctors at St. Luke's nor the officials studying at Pinehearst have been able to name.

She is, of course, curious. Cautious, too, as she wanders through the halls of the hospital with a visitor's badge bearing Pinehearst's bold, brassy logo. It not only gives her confidence, but also access to rooms that are off-limits to the public. Rooms like the one at the end of the hall.

BLACK, SIBYL reads the chart tacked to the door.

No stranger to hospitals or labs or tests.. Molly's curiosity is coupled with a kinship she feels for another little girl taken in by a powerful company. The mystery surrounding her makes the girl even more alluring of a subject in Molly's mind.

Blue eyes are wide as they check the hall before turning the knob of the door quietly to peek in. Dirty blonde hair is loose and free as the teen slowly looks. Dressed in a dark blue shirt and skirt ensemble, her converse sneakers are a statement to her fathers who didn't think they matched her attire. Here goes nothing. She slips inside before finally whipping around to face whatever is in the room.

The room is what Molly might expect: sparsely furnished, with only the bed and a solitary metal chair positioned beside it.

The chair sits empty. The bed does not.

She's young, maybe seven or eight years old, with a wan complexion and dark circles under eyes that had been closed until she heard someone open the door. Thin slivers of pale blue appear beneath her fair lashes, fluttering upon waking.

Plastic tubes snake out from under the blankets and circle around a spindly IV pole feeding fluids directly into her blood.

"Mama?" she asks the room. "Mama? Tova ti li si?"

There's a scary flashback for Molly when she rounds on Sibyl laying there like that. That was her.. with the shanti virus so many IVs.. Bloodwork, studying of her ability even when it was not accessible due to the virus. Her heart pounds in her chest as she thinks she hears Thompsons's breath on her ear. Shuddering, the teen moves forward as Sibyl speaks. A lost mother. She can also relate to that. "No, no.. not Mama." But maybe a friend?

"They keep you here alone all day? That must be boring.. and scary." She doesn't try to talk down to the girl. Everyone does that to her still sixteen or not. She tries to seem.. normal. As she walks up closer to the bedside. "Are you feeling okay?" She mentally slaps herself because when thinking on if she would be okay in this situation.. she wasn't.

Molly looks nervous as she comes to kneel by Sibyl's bedside, taking in all that's in front of her with a sad expression on her face.

Sibyl's field of vision comes into focus around the same time Molly enters it. "Iskam maika mi," she tells the older girl. "Ne se chuvstvam dobre."

The steady chirp of the room's EKG machine drones in the background, accompanied by the lines on its graph, measuring the stability of the patient. A glance at the screen doesn't look like anything out of the ordinary to Molly.

"Are you an angel?" she asks, in English.

Questions in another language make her smile softly at the memory of her first visit to India with Papa Momo to visit his family. She misses India. There's a frown before she's shaking herself out of that brief pleasant memory to regard Sibyl with a amused expression. "Nah," placing a hand on Sibyl's arm to squeeze it gently.

"The only angel I see here is you." Said softly, her eyes trail over to the EKG screen before returning her gaze to the little girl. "My mama used to say the Angels always would protect me, no matter what. Maybe you have angels protecting you."

Too bad the Angels didn't protect her mother herself.

Molly's hand on Sibyl's arm must provide her with some measure of comfort, because it draws a shaky but languid sigh from the child's lungs. "Kharesvam te," she says. I like you.

It seems strange to Molly that the officials at Pinehearst would keep this one locked away, or speak about her in the same sort of tone reserved for people who enjoy handling dangerous snakes. She looks like a sallow porcelain doll, half-sunken into her pillow, greasy blonde hair strung out in a halo around her.

"Stay," Sibyl implores Molly. "Ne iskam da si trŭgvash."

The teen still doesn't understand what Sibyl is saying in that other language but she understands stay, something she had pleaded with Matt and Mohinder to do on many occasions. They were busy men keeping the world safe. She understood that but when thinking about where she needs to be Molly can't find a good reason to leave this girl. Why did everyone act like they were afraid of her?

Rubbing her thumb over the back of Sibyl's hand, she dips her head and smiles. "I don't have anywhere else I have to be." Trying to be warm and gentle towards the young girl she doesn't sense outright fear from Sibyl, she's so cute. Molly finds herself wishing she could bring Sibyl home to play with her and Ella. The girls were older sure but hanging around other kids had to be better than leaving her locked up in her hooked up to all these machines.

"Would you like to hear a story?"

Beep, beep, beep goes the EKG machine. It's steadily picking up speed and momentum, but such details suddenly seem unimportant to Molly. She feels a strange sensation instead, one of deep yearning, quiet but persistent. Her breathing slows. The edges of her vision begin to grow hazy and dark, like what happens at the horizon line during the final minutes of a sunset.

She's intellectually aware of a distinct absence of fear, which she'll have time to reflect on later.

If there is a later.

Suddenly she doesn't care if there is.

"Yes," says Sibyl. "Please."

"Hm.." Blue eyes close halfway and then flutter open all the way open again, placing both hands now on the bed to steady herself but she smiles still. "There once was a farmer's daughter who lived far away from here, she lived by a beach and the waves would crash on the rocks and the shore. The rhythm echoing deep in her bones she felt like, it was paradise." A sad look as Molly continues, "But one day that farmer and his wife were taken away and never to be seen again. The little girl was so scared and all alone, she kept calling out in her mind for help and guess what.. an angel appeared. A real live one, this was was name-"

She can’t remember the angel’s name.

That, too, is unimportant. Everything seems to be, except for the slow exhalation of her breath, which is growing more and more drawn out with every round she cycles through her lungs. It feels like it should be more difficult than it actually is.

What turns out to be the real challenge is keeping her eyes open. Molly’s lashes are drooping and heavy. She leans into the side of the bed, one shoulder slanted against Sibyl’s pillow.

Something tugs at her center at the same time a small, reassuring hand comes to rest on her cheek. She feels herself begin to unravel like a ball of yarn, the wool thread that is her lifeforce drawn out from the cavity of her chest to be collected by the emptiness that resides inside of the bedridden child’s.

Come, she hears Sibyl’s voice say, even though her lips aren’t moving. Come.

“I..” Molly’s face softens and it looks like she's ready for bed. “I..” She can't seem to get her words out and her head lolls to the side, blonde hair falling into her eyes as she tries to open them again but she's failing too. What is this?

The tug elicits a gasp from the teenager who is thoroughly confused by this but she still doesn't mind it. Come? Blue eyes half lidded. The clairvoyant trembles. She wants to pull away? No, no she doesn't. She wants to lean in closer.

I’ll come. All the telepathy conversations.. if Sibyl is receiving then she would hear Molly’s thoughts, thrown out there. Slipping out from the back of her mind. I’ll come.

Sibyl’s answer transcends language, transcends sound, spoken or otherwise. The last of the thread, Molly’s lifeforce, unspools, and she’s enveloped in blackness. She feels like she might be floating, or maybe she’s sinking — down, down, down, into a place that’s defined only by the absence of anything except for the knowledge that she isn’t the first person to have descended here.

Others have come before her. Names and faces that she lacks the ability to bring into focus because she no longer has eyes to do so. No mouth to scream. No hands to reach out into the endless expanse, which is rapidly closing in on her as she ceases to exist.

Her last sense to go is her sense of hearing. While she might not be able to scream, someone else is. It sounds like it’s coming from very far away. So does the EKG machine’s chatter, its rising squeal, the distant bang of the IV pole overturning—

Molly, says a new voice. Molly, stay with me.

Another tug and sensation comes flooding back to the teen. Her eyes snap open and she sucks in a sharp, shuddering gasp that tears into her lungs against her will. She’s all the way on the other side of the room by the door, flung open by someone else during the brief period of time she was out. Arms gather her quaking body into the warmth of that person’s chest as they slump down against the wall together. A chin protectively tucks Molly’s face away from the sight of St. Luke’s medical staff swarming around Sibyl’s bedside.

“I have you,” the same voice says out loud, wracked with the same tremors that are juddering through both their bodies. A nurse with a tangle of dark hair that smells like musky perfume and cigarettes holds her tight while orderlies pin Sibyl down to the bed and administer a sedative to put her back under.

“It’s going to be all right.”

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That gasp and watering of her eyes is all Molly can focus on and.. that voice. Eyelids flutter and Molly clings to that nurse’s body as her body shakes and her mind tries to compute what just happened. “So dark.. it was so dark.. there..” that feeling of having herself.. her whole self yanked from her body. It stays with her and the young woman tries to turn to look back at Sibyl. “What.. is she?

That tone that people use to talk about Sibyl? As if she's something dangerous to be locked away. Molly has quickly adopted it in her rasp of a voice. “What?” Blue eyes are wide with fear and she feels herself drowning in that dark hair and the smell of cigarettes and musky perfume.

She remembers how her Grandma Ida’s house smelled, musky perfume. It smells like home..

Eileen looks down at the top of Molly’s head. Her heart is beating hard and fast enough that the teen can feel it through her scrubs and the oversized wool cardigan she wears over them. “We don’t know yet,” she whispers against Molly’s crown as one of the orderlies pulls a curtain around Sibyl’s bedside, blocking their view of what’s happening on the other side.

“What about the other one?” a doctor asks. “The Pinehearst girl?”

“Gray has her. She’s alive.”

Eileen gently takes Molly by the shoulders to create enough distance between them for her to brush blonde curls away from her face and check the dilation of her pupils at a glance. “Something about her ability,” she tries to explain. “It’s like a back hole star for psychic energy. She almost swallowed you up.”

Her vision is still spinning and she's not fully hearing everything. She's returning back to being fully aware although she feels drained. And then that name. She knows that name, it's a common name. There shouldn't be any relation obviously and when she finally has her vision clear and can understand what the woman is saying to her. Psychic energy black hole? What?

Blinking blue eyes they take in the face of Eileen Gray and yes, she knows the woman works here but no she didn't expect to run into her.. her eyes widen and her breath is caught in her chest. Having trouble breathing Molly begins to panic and flails her arms out, pinwheeling before she hits the wall of the room with her back. She looks over Eileen’s shoulder to make sure he isn't there.

Her mind going a million miles a minute, maybe she doesn't realize who Molly is. Maybe she can play this off. Molly is not sure.. her body shakes. Is that a pair of eyebrows in the corner?

Eileen clambers to her feet, clutching at the door frame to aid her ascent. The expression on her face is one of sympathy rather than of confusion, but she does not pursue the girl. Raises her free hand, instead, and extends it out to her. “You’re safe,” she tells Molly, “you’re safe.”

She must not be thinking about Gabriel at all in this moment; her mind is fixated on putting the teenager, who is understandably upset, at ease. “She can’t hurt you now. A telepath can fight another telepath, sometimes. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She hasn’t recognized her. Maybe she doesn’t even know that she should.

“She can't,” her voice shakes as she answers Eileen’s comforting words. Tears begin to streak down the girl's face.

So stupid, coming here. Snooping around a potentially dangerous little girl, running into Eileen. How could she have known? Maybe you should have been more vigilant idiot. The anger at herself outwardly expresses itself as a choked sob as Molly backs up again though she has no more room to go and so the only way out is forward.

Past Eileen.

“But Sylar can.”

And the teen is shouldering past Eileen with a look of terror on her face, tears streaming down her face. Sobs escape her as she barrels through the door and makes her way down the hall. Getting out of there, she feels like she's stuck back in that black hole she just escaped. A piece of her wishes she had stayed, faded.

Not yet mom and dad.


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