Title: He’s Leaving Home
Rating: G
Disclaimer:Heroes belongs to NBC and Tim Kring.
Characters: Gabriel, his mother.
Word Count: 839
Spoilers: ‘Six Months Ago’, though it’s set before that.
Summary: Gabriel tries to tell his mother that he’s moving out of the family home.

---

August is a cold and blustery month in Queens, and the loose squares of glass rattle in the window. Gabriel is quieter than usual at breakfast.

His mother must have noticed – and really, this is his mother, so how could she fail to? – and she’s broken off her usual bustle to stand too close to him and compulsively tidy his hair, making riling soothing noises and breaking his concentration. The withered hands on his scalp are irritating, like a nagging voice, like a clock with an erratic tick. She’s a worrier. She’s a cliché of a mother, and he has to fight the urge to shake her off.

Then she offers him more bacon, and when he refuses she piles it onto his plate anyway, garnished with some rebuke about needing to eat right. The annoyance is sharp and swift, but he pushes it down just as quickly: he promised himself he wouldn’t get angry with her. Not today.

“Mom, I’m nearly twenty,” he says, not looking up, and with an effort he keeps his voice mild. He isn’t provoking her, and she can’t say that he is. “I can make my own breakfast.”

She brushes this off and slides a coaster under his tea-mug. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a sad day when a mother can’t cook her son a proper meal.”

He wrinkles his nose at the fat, glistening rashers congealing on his plate. His opinion of a ‘proper meal’, just like everything else, differs wildly from his mother’s.

The reason he’s not talking is that he’s grasping for a feeling. It’s come to him now and again just recently, especially in the shop, letting him see the gears and workings of the clocks more clearly than the solid face. It would help him fit the words together into a working whole, just like the stubborn gears of a wrist watch.

But it’s refusing to come. So he just blurts it out.

“I’ve been thinking about moving out.”

There’s a sudden crash to his left – he looks up sharply and sees his mother sinking to the floor, her pale hands trembling as she clears away the shattered skeleton of a dropped glass.

Gabriel stands up abruptly, sighing – and annoyed to see her on her knees like a nobody. “Let me get that.”

The glass is well and truly broken, tiny shards glinting on the linoleum as he moves his head. A hopeless cause. And as he sweeps the pieces together, his mother’s fingers like bones are back in his hair, and her voice is close and choked.

“Now, Gabriel… let’s, let’s pretend you didn’t say that, and we can just quietly tidy up the breakfast things and…”

“No!” Gabriel shakes his mother off and rises to face her. “We can’t keep putting this off.”

“But… but it’s coming up to Christmas!” She steps forward, he steps back, his jaw tight. “You wouldn’t leave your mother alone at Christmas, would you, Gabriel?”

“It’s nowhere near Christmas,” he tells her brusquely, annoyed that she’s resorting to emotional blackmail so early in the conversation.

“And what would your father say, God rest his soul? What would…”

“He’s dead.” And Gabriel doesn’t care right now if that hurts her. “Mom, I have to get out – I’m suffocating here. When I was a kid and watched the trains – it wasn’t because I liked them, it was because I knew they were going someplace far more interesting than here, with people far more interesting than us.” He gestures around the tiny kitchen. “Look – look at us! We haven’t done anything. We aren’t anybody. We’re insignificant.”

“Gabriel…”

“And you’re always telling me I can be so much, I should go out and realise my potential – but I can’t – I can’t do that in Queens. And I’m not your little boy any more, that you can wrap in cotton wool. And I can’t live with you indefinitely. Look at us.” And sheer frustration makes him laugh a little. “We’d kill each other.”

His mother is staring at the floor, her breathing irregular. She seems almost to shrivel.

Gabriel realises with a creeping horror that she’s crying.

“Oh, no, no, mom,” he says softly, moving towards her, his hands on her arms. The anger isn’t gone, but it’s twisted round in its course, aimed now – though he hates to admit it – at himself. “Don’t, mom, please. We’ll still see each other. I’ll get a flat close by. We have telephones. Stop crying, mom, please.”

Neither of them speaks for a while, and though Gabriel doesn’t look up from his mother’s tears, the clock on the wall still pounds the long seconds into his head. When his mother finally lifts her papery face, it’s red and blotchy, and her voice is little more than a whisper.

“You’re right, Gabriel. You’re right.”

Her hands move up to his surprised face, one cold on each cheek, as though framing it for posterity.

“You’re better than all this. You have to leave, to go out and… and realise your full potential.”