Author's Note: I'm not really sure what that title means, except that Sylar has hurt Mohinder too. (And that it's an awesome Grateful Dead song.) So the purpose of this prologue-ish thing is to set up what is different, which is not much. I was going to put this off for a while, but I told myself that if there was no Mohinder again, I would start this. And there was no Mohinder again last night! I didn't think that was going to happen. But since I still have a blank slate on his Vol. 5, I have to take advantage of that.

Disclaimer (for the entire story): I do not own Heroes. No money is being made off of this story. Please don't sue me.

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Hurts Me Too

Summary: After surviving Sylar's attack, Elle picked up the pieces of her life and tried to move on.

Spoilers Through: TBA, but so far 04x06--Strange Attractors (Although it goes AU before that, and there are no spoilers, so... We're just going to see where the Sylar storyline goes.)

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Prologue:

Halfway across, Sylar stopped cutting into Elle head, exhaling deeply. He looked down at her face, at the blood starting to trickle out of the wound on her head. When she did not move or open her eyes, he knew that she had fallen unconscious, but he could also tell that she was not yet dead. She would be soon enough. Sylar could have continued, made it final, but he pushed himself up to his feet. He did not want to do this.

He wanted her out of his life. She had done nothing but make a mess of his life. He thought he could get past that. During the eclipse, he had been so sure that they already were, but everything changed when his powers came back. It was as though a piece of him had returned, the piece that could not and did not want to change. The piece that was not willing to forgive and forget. So he wanted her and her lies and manipulations gone. He just did not want to kill her.

Looking down at her now, he could see that for all intents and purposes, she was already dead; he had already killed her. That knowledge did not bother him at all, but he could not bring himself to go any further with it. He turned away from her and walked up the beach. This was as final as he needed it to be. He did not need to watch the life leave her, did not need to see her draw her final breath.

On some level, he knew that he was relying on that slight, microscopic possibility that she could survive this. Knowing that he left her that fighting chance, that he had left it up to fate, would relieve some of that guilt that he told himself he did not feel.

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After that, Elle had vague memories of doctors and being told that something had happened, someone had found her. She floated in and out of consciousness. And then one day, she was told it was about a month after the "attack," she woke for good. The police showed up in her hospital room, asking questions that she did not want to answer. The doctor told her that retrograde amnesia was common with these types of injuries, and she relied on that to avoid the questions. But she did remember. Even if she hadn't, it would have been easy for her to identify her attacker just from the scar on her forehead.

After another month, she was strong enough to leave the hospital. The wounds had heal enough; the doctors were ready to discharge her. Before she could leave this white prison, however, the government came to take her away.

The next thing she knew, she was waking up in a large, cold room. There was some kind of box sitting on her chest, and her nose hurt from having something shoved up it. She lifted her head groggily and saw rows of metal beds filled with people in a similar position.

She turned her head to the other side and found Mohinder Suresh holding a tube connected to her chest box. "Welcome back," he said.

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Author's Note: Fair warning. This is a triangle fic, but it's not my usual triangle, so that's fun. I've also never written about Mohinder, also fun. Everything I write in this fandom is a variation on a theme, but this is a little more varied. So hopefully that works.