Choco_cherries: Cracked Lightning

[lirazel]

I'm never going to get over my mad love affair with choco_cherries.

Title: Cracked Lightning
Fandoms: Angel/Heroes
Characters/Pairing:  Charles Gunn/Elle Bishop
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 300
Prompt: Run
Summary: He's done making excuses.

What is it about these girls and their electricity?  Two girls in all the world with this curse, and somehow he manages to find his way to both of them. 

Gwen had been understandable.  Fred had just broken his heart, and Gwen was there and she saw him and let him help her (be the hero, the way he’d wanted to for Fred, though he quickly learned that he was nothing but the muscle, never the champion): he’d wanted to give her something that was really hers in return. 

Elle is inexcusable.  He’s lived with evil pressing in around him all his life: he knows darkness when he sees it (even W&H’s fluorescent lights couldn’t disguise it).  And maybe she isn’t that far gone yet, but she’s racing along the razor-sharp dividing line between dark and light, her eyes tinged with crazed lightning that threatens to burn him (and the whole world) alive (he’s not naïve enough to think she won’t tumble over the edge and take him with her). 

But the sparks on her lips make it so easy to forget (forget losing Alanna and Cordy, Wes and Fred, forget Illyria and his signature on a page and Gilbert and Sullivan lyrics still bouncing around in his head even after he sheds the suits and ties, forget that night in the rain, in the alley), and the pain is his penance (Spike tried to tell him that what happened to Fred wasn’t his fault, but anyone who spends five minutes around the vamp knows just what a shit liar he is.  Besides, Angel can't meet his eyes anymore, and that tells Gunn all he needs to know). 

And she sees him when she looks at him, and that’s what he wanted all along.

He’s done making excuses for that.