A Note From Lara: I'm such a crazy stalker Peter fangirl that I don't usually write Syelle, even though I love it. But I was having this conversation about Sylar and Elle in one of my forums, and it sparked off this idea in my head, and I just couldn't get by without writing it down. So here it is- my first exclusively Syelle fic. It's just pretty much an AU version of the conversation between Sylar and Angela in the Volume 3 finale. I don't really think it does my original idea justice, but there was so much Elle death-angst I may as well add my own little piece to the pile.

He could hardly control the rage that bubbled through his blood like fire in his veins. They had used him, turned him into a tame animal on a leash. He didn't know how he had been so easily fooled by their lies. But he supposed he should have known, when Arthur sent him into that cell where she was chained. It was exactly the same trap he had fallen into the first time they'd come after him; he should have known better. But now she was dead, and his false father was as well.

Sylar approached the woman who had started this whole nightmarish treason. A slow smirk crossed his face as he observed her. She was powerless against him- Angela was a dreamer, nothing more. He circled her once, an invisible hand holding her lazily in her seat for as long as he wished to examine her.

"Why?" he asked. Nothing more- she knew what he was talking about.

She smiled, a bold move in such a delicate situation. "Because we couldn't stop you, so we needed to be able to control you."

Truth.

He sighed inaudibly, watching the back of her head. Dreaming the future... a useful power, as he'd lost Isaac's ability when Hiro stabbed him. It called to him... But no. He wanted to draw this out, and make her suffer the way he had suffered. This was going to be slow. No head-slicing.

"I don't expect you to understand," she said, condescending. It enraged him, but he held onto his temper- barely. "I suppose you wouldn't know what it's like to see your children suffering and be unable to do anything to stop it. When that other Peter came back from the future, I knew I had to do something to control him. And you were the first person I thought of."

Truth. Again.

Sylar didn't want to kill her while he was still getting truth from her- he wanted her to tell him more lies. There was more to this if she lied to him. "You should have left me alone," he said. "You should have always left me alone. I was harmless. I'd have stayed harmless, if no one had come along to goad me into killing again. But it's over now. The fruit of your labor has come home." He smiled sardonically, and he sensed, rather than saw her shudder. "It's just down to you, now. Your husband is dead. Bob Bishop is dead, and so his daughter--"

Her face drained of all color. "You killed Elle?" Angela gasped, interrupting him.

He couldn't help it- he flinched at the name. He had loved her, and she had betrayed him, just the way everyone he cared about did in the end. She had never truly loved him, and this made him ashamed- to have loved, and not been loved back. He had just been a door mat, a means to an end. Just like Gabriel Gray had been his whole life. He hated it.

It was Angela's turn to ask now. "Why?"

"Because she lied to me. She knew you weren't my mother, and she never told me," he said, knowing that the pain that was eating him up showed clear in his voice, and hated that too.

Angela shook her head slowly. "No. No, she never knew. As far as Elle was aware, Arthur and I truly were your parents. I took great lengths to make sure she thought you were a Petrelli."

Truth.

The little hum in the back of his mind that he had expected to indicate a lie never came, and it nearly knocked him off his feet. Elle had not known? She hadn't betrayed him? Did that mean all the rest of it had been real, too? That she really had felt for him what he felt for her? Oh god, and he had killed her...

And right then, revenge didn't matter. Nothing mattered except the fact that he had killed the one person who truly had loved him. Who hadn't cared that he was damaged goods, because she was, too. And now she was gone, forever. He had destroyed the best part of himself with her.

He untied Angela. "Go. Find your daughter, find Bennet, and get out." She didn't question it.

Sylar watched on the monitor screens until he was sure that the Bennet/Petrelli/Gordon family had cleared the building. Then he used his telekinesis to blow the handles off every gas pipe within mental reach- meaning every single one in the building. He closed his eyes, breathing the raw scent of the gas, waiting until the air was rank with it. He gripped onto one metal pipe amid the masses lining the walls and ceiling.

And then he filled his hands with electricity, sending a massive charge through his body and shooting down the pipe. The gas ignited, sending Primatech up in a fireball that filled the night with an eerie orange glow. A piece of cinderblock swirled through the air, and inside the inside the inferno, a telekinetic pull drew it from its trajectory and towards a very different target. It lodged itself in the back of his skull, and the burns across his skin stopped healing. He dropped to the floor. It hurt. He hadn't expected that. It hurt a lot. But through the blackness that crept over his vision, another light shone.

"Elle...?" he whispered, and then his head slumped back against the floor. Gabriel Gray, once known as Sylar, was dead.