heroslayer | for mad_muses: photo prompt (christmas tree)

To say the tree was in a sorry state would have been the understatement of a lifetime.

It had been trapped in a box and forgotten in a storage unit for so long that the branches had shrunk down against the cardboard, cowering in the corners as if it fear what would happen should it be discovered after all this time. The needles were bent, twisted into what looked to him to be tiny mouths full of prickly teeth, ready to defend against anyone who did find it and thought to put it up after more than three years. And layer of dust had settled upon all of it, making it look as though it had been iced in a fine layer of fake snow like some newer trees were. It was pathetic.

Looking down at it in the box, he half-wondered if he shouldn't simply drag the poor thing out back to the dumpsters behind his apartment and put it out of its misery. He could always just go buy a new tree to give to Peter, as promised. No one would really know the difference or care much, if he did. A tree was a tree, and this was embarrassing; he didn't dare show off what his childhood had withered away to. The new house or the house in the Hamptons or where ever Peter had planned on putting the second tree needed something grand, and this sure as hell wasn't it.

He made a face, soured by the fact that this hadn't quite gone as he'd wanted it to, and moved around the box to close the damn thing up, not wanting to have to look at it anymore. Something, some pang of nostalgia or rarely pleasant memory of his mother, stopped him.

Fingers curling against the cardboard, he reached a hand into the box and pulled out the crown of the tree, frowning down at it. He shook it into the container, some dust flurrying off of it lazily; the rest came away when he brushed it aside, and silently he sat it down on the chair behind him. He pulled out a branch next, and another and another until he had them all out of the box, repeating the process on each only to pile them on the chair. The base and the pole came last, and he moved to the kitchen with them, wiping them down with a damp cloth until they came clean.

The cloth, destroyed, went into the trash can; he went back into the living room.

In twenty minutes he had the tree together, the whole thing still looking pitifully thin in front of his bookshelf. He allowed it another disapproving frown, and reached to fluff out the branches, suddenly glad that there was no one here with him, feeling like an idiot. He didn't do Christmas trees -- that was Peter or Adam's department -- but here he was, his mother's decorations set up in his tiny living room.

Briefly, he considered tearing the whole thing down, banishing it back to the box, and walking away. He thought better of it when he stepped back and considered the stupid thing -- it didn't look half bad, now.

A dubious glance was shot in the direction of the case of ornaments he'd pulled out of storage along with the tree, and with a sigh, he moved towards them, pulling the lid off. These weren't in quite as bad a state as the tree and they took less time to put up than the thing itself had, all of it coming together in a matter of another few minutes. He took another step back and admired his handiwork when he finished, and immediately, three thoughts occurred to him.

The first and strangest was to wonder if his mother -- Virginia, not Angela -- would have approved of the work he'd done, in salvaging the tree. The second, was that if Claire or Mohinder rode his ass about his bothering to put it up in the first place, he'd kill them both and paint the tips of the branches in their blood. And the third, well, it suddenly looked as though he'd be going out to buy a replacement tree for Peter to uphold his end of the bargain anyway, because he was keeping this one. He'd put too much work into it to walk away now.

Muse: Gabriel Gray (Sylar)
Fandom: Heroes
Word Count: 734
Note: Based off of this picture. Bonus points to anyone who can tell me what the tree's a metaphor for. :P