Messages At The Well

Participants:

eve_icon.gif gabriel_icon.gif

Scene Title Messages At The Well
Synopsis Gabriel's precognition leads him to a friend in need.
Date March 23, 2019

The Well

The Fucking Well.


It started with a painting of a well. The weeds dead around the circular black shape embedded into the ground, black paint drips on the floor along with red, a great mass of crimson lights dances above the sealed entrance of the waterhole. Waves of equally blood colored lightning strikes out on the canvas. It's familiar to Gabriel Gray, a place his father, dead lover and friend converged. Something was pointing him back there.

It's here at The Well on Staten Island with the last rays of sunlight beginning to fade away that the man would see it, a blood red glow from his painting except it's currently zooming around the space around the Well leaving smoke and scorch marks in its wake, a crack of lightning as the not subtle at all energy moves and pulsates in the air. The metal filings inside flash and shiver as they twist in that iridescent light. It's a strange place for Eve to come too but ever since she's gotten back to the city she's been drawn to the places where bad things had happened to her.

Maybe she's hoping for a vision though she knows it's not possible, the weirdness that is her current situation leaves her wanting to explore more, musing over the decisions she made in her life to place her here, now and again.

Some might say, she's fucked.

It isn't often, anymore, that Gabriel Gray shows his face, and he's become so used to wearing others — some memorable, some far less distinct — that as he comes to stand in the open, as himself, he feels slightly naked, or like a layer of skin has been peeled away. The wind on his face feels raw, the clothes on his back more textured, and are also just a little too big for him. The sleeves of his jacket reach his knuckles, and the cuffs of his jeans are frayed and fold up under the heels of his boots.

Black hair, getting wilder than he normally tolerates, is swept back from his face from a harsh wind coming in from the east, left over from a winter overstaying its welcome. He's fifty feet back from the well, and he sinks down into a crouch as he squints at the strange pulsating energy that wraps around that space.

Ready to spring away. Disappear.

But not yet.

A shudder to the left and a bob to the right as the energy tries to do something. Twisting in itself roaring with power untamed the destructive force settles practically on top of the well, smoke curling upwards where lightning strikes. The smell of burning and iron is swept away by the wind, tendrils of the crimson cloud sweep away too but they buzz back. The metal filings inside vibrate as the cloud begins to take shape amidst the gusts whipping around.

Slowly the shape of a woman appears, wrapped in layer upon layer of red no visible body able to be seen. A warped and rewound scream is high pitched, piercing through the overwhelming sounds of nature. The figure cries out as her mouth becomes fully formed and pale skin smacks into place covering the crimson light rapidly and leaving a athletic woman with wild raven dark hair on hands and knees, heaving on the ground next to the well. Her nude body breaks out into a sweat even though she's in the middle of winter. Pain streams across her and her vision swirls. Eve has had better days but tonight she's in more pain. Coughing the former seer crawls forward gripping the edge of the well to drag herself to her feet. "Ahhhhh."

Stepping on tip toes as if she's trying to reach the sun (she was recently hurled towards the sun and that was an experience) Eve then looks down into that dark abyss and grimaces, "Hellloooooo?" She'll never lose her eccentric ways but she closes her eyes as a look of sadness washes over her. "Water water, three three three."

Gabriel didn't make it this far by being an incautious person.

No, that's not true. It was the phenomenal cosmic powers that have kept him whole, for sure, shielding him from stupid and reckless mistakes.

But all the same. Suspicion warred with curiousity keeps him in place for the time being as he watches this strange entity forming into — really — the only shape it could, given where they are. His head tips, senses keyed in to watching the pale, dark-haired figure half tip herself into the well, and slowly, he rises up to stand. Stands to walk.

At least three different powers keyed up and ready, invisible finger on the trigger.

Around them, the air starts to thicken. There had already been the thinnest veil of fog in wisps around the tree line, but now it grows, becomes opaque, whorls through the air to form something of a loose wall in a wide, wide circle around them.

Fog thickening and creating a barrier of sorts has Eve's head snapping up, whipping her head sending raven hair flying. A trail of crimson lightning hops up along her arm to her shoulder before fizzling out, the woman opens her eyes slowly revealing eyes glowing the same shade of that cloud that had become her natural form. She feels the tension and pulling of her molecules at themselves always wanting to separate but Eve keeps a lid on the change.

"Hello?" Her rasps rings out this time intentional, is there someone there? The woman's back bunches at her shoulder blades sending her whole body into a shudder as a wave of pain pings in her every nerve. "Three. Three. Three. You've gone mad Eve! Mad I tell ya!" Snorting to herself she sags against the cold rock of the well reaching to feel something besides heat and pain. She hadn't been able to enjoy a smoke in a while and she'd give anything for… rumblerumble.

Looking down at her exposed pale stomach the woman rubs it absently, "Time to hunt." Eve had almost gotten frying rabbit down to the right temperature to eat.

Well.

That's definitely Eve Mas.

He concentrates for just a moment, and the world freezes. Eve, holding her naked belly. The fog, mid-roll. Pure silence makes his ears whine as he stops the progression of time while her eyes are trained away from him, and he moves in closer to get a better look at the frozen run off of strange red energy that is likewise frozen as it hiccups off her skin.

That old, old spark of curiousity. The kind that turns into something else as less answers present themselves without cracking open a skull or two. Older and wiser, it's the kind of spark he can tame.

For Eve, there is no frozen moment. She is alone, and then she isn't, as Gabriel enters her periphery as if from nowhere, time resuming around them as he continues on a path around the well, observing her more than simply looking at her. While she has changed on a molecular level, Gabriel is as she remembers. Mostly. He is almost clean shaven, for the first time in a while. His hair has grown longer.

"Hello," he replies.

Half leaping into the air the woman moves her hands from her belly to her chest as she whirls around and sees… "Jazzhands!!" All pretense of modesty is thrown to the wind as she throws herself to hug him and closes her eyes, "You're here! Where have you been? Your hair is longer! Have you been hiding in plain sight?" The stream of questions are fired off rapidly and the pale woman sighs in relief. "So much has happened, Bird. Bird." The joy of the reunion is broken for Eve by the memory of all that had happened, so much of it the two hadn't been able to discuss. Lightning ripples down her back and a few sparks bounce from her to Gabriel. A tiny burn hole marking itself by the smoke that rises from it and Eve leaps back then.

"Ah ah, sorry watch out. I'm not the same." That point is obvious but it always felt good to recount verbally events to friends even when it was plain as day what was going on. Eve's arms go to her middle and she holds herself as she tries to distance herself from the pain the curls and uncurls beneath her skin. "Some might say I leveled up." A snort but a dark look enters Eve's eyes, "Some might say I lost an advantage." Another snort this one half hearted, sheepish. It's an oops. This wasn't what she imagined would come. "Not sure if I saw it. I think I always knew They would take me. It told me to look in the mirror."

The echoes of the future may be gone but the way Eve processes information has forever been changed by her former ability. Also her delivery of said information. "Three. Three," waving that number of fingers in the air frantically, she's been trying to say it. "Three times dead, three times alive. Not sure there's a fourth in my future. Threads are murky. Rivers run dry. The tit has no more milk. It's powder."

Stop calling me Jazzhands.

Is not what Gabriel says, but there's a winch and tip to his brow that communicates he might like to. However: bigger fish to fry.

As Eve speaks, Gabriel is looking at her still. The nakedness of her body is almost entirely inconsequential, the meagre fog not doing much to cover her up so much as cover them both up from the possibility of random strangers — and, perhaps, stop her from darting off too easily — and instead he watches sparks of energy, the way the air reacts to the heat of her, the twinges of muscles and facial expression as she fights for control.

Control. Something old and serpentine uncoils itself deep in his brain. He ignores it.

"What happened?"

"I exploded. I found that thing. The thing I told you about. The thing that's tethered to Adam. I thought it was a god. It still could be. It's our Mother and Father. It's the First of us." Rubbing her temples she sits on the cold surface and rocks forward. "In New Mexico, the high desert, high noon. Bang bang. The Crossing, the thing that Bird was trying to stop. It happened anyway," there's no pride in it and she doesn't try to hide how she was involved. "Some things are necessary. Just gotta follow Sometimes. Paths twists, it's all fine. That thing, the First. It came through with them, it killed people. It took me over I don't.." she stops and looks confused.

Red lightning leaps like a sprite into the air and she tries to catch it with slender pale fingers just barely missing it the glow illuminating her fingers still. ""I remember feeling pain. I remember being not there in the facility. Sunspot." the faint memory of being naked in the blazing heat on the edges of her mind but that hasn't lasted for long. "I came here. I flew here. Oh Jazzhands have you flown? Of course you have! It's… out there. Whoa."

Reveling in her current situation never lasts that long either because she's frowning not to soon after. "Now I'm broken. I can't stay together. I can't stick them together. My pieces. People always say I lost my marbles, now they won't even stay in my hands." Those hands of Eve's shake the veins glow faintly, an outline of a spider like network of crimson silk underneath ghostly pale flesh. Control, what she always lacked but needs now. "No more visions, no more spooks. Just a ruined land where dreams use to live. I'm free. I am also, confined." But only if she looks at it that way. Her human life was a curse. Maybe not having to talk not having to really be was nice for a change.

At some point during her spiel, Gabriel sits down. Knees bent, elbows wrapped around them, hand gripping wrist — like he's being told a story. What he's looking at reminds him of Tyler Case, and Ted Sprague, and Peter Petrelli, of weird magic that fights against the fragile mortal trappings it's fueled by and only barely inhabits. He's always — always — prided himself of being made of sterner stuff than them, than everyone.

What his multitude of powers don't do to his body, they make up for in other ways. Maybe one day he'll evaporate too.

Hard not to think of the woman in front of him as already dead. Like a restless spirit whose unwillingness to cross over to another plane of existence fuses itself to material atoms and kicks open cupboard doors and rattles windows and resolves a human face only in fits and starts. Ascended, yet anchored. Or as Eve put it: free, yet confined. He's seen that before too.

Gabriel rolls his shoulders beneath his jacket, mind turning to the matter of Mothers and Fathers. But asking her for more information feels like it'd turn up more questions than answers, so he focuses instead on;

"How'd you come back together the first time?"

A hum is the immediate reply to Gabriel's question it rumbles deeply from within her and is amplified of sorts by the crackling of energy around her, swaying in place rocking on her hands. "Mmmm. I felt like I was pulling on pieces of me, pieces-no trying to catch all of myself with a net. Gotta catch em all. I think that net is my cloud.."

"Am I a Squirtle?" Or maybe.. "A Jigglypuff…" She did seem to drone on and on and on.

Snapping out of it by virtue of shaking her head vigorously, "Sorry," thudthud. Knocking on her head with a fist, "Still Get weeewoooo weeewoooo." Eve's mouth drops open and she considers. "Have you ever had a gift like mine?" She had already known what it was to have a gift that was all consuming. What ability wasn't? Some might be considered that more than others and it was Eve and Gabriel's luck to end up with these types of gifts.

"I wanna learn control."

A moment later she hums the melody line to 'Creep' by Radiohead.

"I could make recommendations." He digs his heels in a little into the cold earth, still sitting and watching and now listening, too, to the new timbre of her voice. "Soul searching. Meditation. Practice makes perfect."

The beginnings of a smile are there, and gone again, Gabriel closing his eyes and concentrating. Everything changes around them. Old Midtown Manhattan sprawls out around them, way back when in the adolescence of the apocalypse, when it had only suffered a couple of disasters. Tall abandoned buildings, the husks of looted cars. Under her feet, Eve feels hard road through the heels of her boots. Her naked body is now clothed in something familiar, and although she can't see it, Gabriel sees her as a younger version of herself.

He, too, looks a little less worse for wear. Ink black hair, cut shorter and combed, black clothing with only rubble-dust greying the hems of his trousers, his face clean shaven and smooth of the subtle wrinkles that have since begun to develop around his eyes, his mouth. Around them, the city street is illuminated in moonlight. They danced here, once. This is memory, but also immersive illusion, a fragment of the past overlaying the present.

And as for Eve, she no longer sees or feels strange energy crackling off her skin, even if that internal struggle to stay together does not disappear.

"Sometimes it's a feeling, or a memory, or an idea. I think that's why I called myself 'Sylar'. It was someone I could decide to be, someone powerful, someone in control. If I had nothing else, I had that name."

A look of bewilderment comes over Eve as the landscape changes and soon the place she use to call home is here around her, she's thankful she doesn't have the ability to construct such an thing, she might stay longer than you should. "Oh what a trip!" Hopping to her feet with a cry of joy as she spins around, "We weren't so shabby hm?" Shaking out her hair and twisting the heel of her boot into the ground. That dance was a memory she would never forget. The strange way their friendship even began, Eve was/is persistent.

"What a name it was but Gabriel. You're an angel!" Spreading her hands outwards as she dances over to Gabriel's. Nodding her head to an non existent tune. "A memory, idea.. The Murder Imp wouldn't be a good one." No no but her friends words have her pondering. "I can do it, I promise. When I slipped I can get back up, better than Humpty Dumpty," a grimace of pain and she thinks. "Thank you. Can I ask for help sometimes? I like to explore on my own, push and stretch myself but someone with an eye for gifts! Your brain is so special."

The thought of a mosaic naturally makes her think of Peter and Eve is looking down at the ground as she nears Gabriel and holds out her hand, "I have to ask you. How are you? Really? Is your head okay? Is your heart a knocking? I've been worried!"

Gabriel considers her hand, knowing the kind of energy pulsing and thrumming beneath the veneer of the illusion he maintains — but he takes it anyway, allows her to help him to his feet. The quality of the questions has him hooding his eyes, a little, thoughtful. Knowing.

"Head on straight," he says. "Heart still beating. I'm doing swell."

It doesn't sound entirely dismissive when he says it out loud. It's not a bad state to be in, compared to other states he's experienced in the past, even the recent past. Even the intensity of this illusion, plucked from clear memory, can't quite disguise the shift in him since that night they first met — that manic energy is either gone or suppressed or perhaps simply absorbed more cohesively into the strange fabric of his personality.

He tips a look up at the sky. His illusions have their limits, but a trick of perception makes it seem as though it's that same cloudy twilight from before. "Can't say the same about literally everything else. What's it mean for us, that mommy and daddy are home?"

Being helped up has a pleasant smile on Eve's face and she nods her head in thanks as she searches the illusion and her friends face. Trying to feel out a lie, they are both good at lying though Eve strives to be honest with Gabriel. One liar/trickster to another, a code she likes to think and while his manic energy may be all but gone. Eve's has never left the building.

Sweeping her legs along with her as they move "Put together, suave. I see I see." Gabriel's willingness to go there about the Entity almost makes her raise her eyebrows in surprise but instead she masks it with a light grin full of whatever it is she's feeling inside besides pain, a weird grin. "Mommies and daddies come home after being gone for so long. They come back to a house in disaster." The last bit uttered in the dramatic fashion of homemaker whose just discovered too much lint in the corner of the kitchen. "I didn't open the door for them but I didn't stop them either. Sometimes you gotta so you can." That's that for her except, "I will need your help, not sure when." It's a favor in the beginning stages of being asked but, "You have other things to worry about right now." Patting his hand softly.

Cloudy twilight reflects in her eyes and Eve smiles openingly still but it's actually a frown another moment later, her mood as fluid as ever. "Have you seen her?"

Gabriel gives a barely there nod at her barely there request. His interest is there, kindled, which is not a terrible sign, for the once suicidally apathetic.

But his expression changes with her change of topic, a guardedness that betrays more than it conceals. He doesn't avoid the question, though. He says, "I've seen her," and before Eve can get her hopes up, whatever those hopes are, "I'm watching." Distant, in other words. A wolf roaming the borders of a farmstead, not yet willing to make its presence known.

"Watching is good." Eve likes to watch and everyone knows it. She notices that guardedness and she tries her best not to lean as her trickster self but instead as one of Gabriel's friends. "What's the harm in talking to her?" The question seems innocent though she knows it's loaded, the branches of choices and outcomes before them. Their dance like a swinging pendulum over that subject. The issue is direct but they are skating the surface.

Eve draws away, the rupture of pain that comes from her center reminds her this is an illusion. A snapshot of time, again she looks down at her hands.

"It could be very nice." It could also be very bad. But love is worth that, those stakes. "Is she doing okay?"

"I don't know."

Gabriel also looks down at Eve's hands, and slowly, the illusion begins to fade. The hard concrete becomes soft ground, and Eve can feel that she has no heeled boots on her feet, even if she can still see them. Muddy twilight turns into grey afternoon, and the air begins to smell of forest and the stagnant well, instead of that strange, storm-like scent of the ruins. The ghosts of buildings linger, but are mingled now in the fog he's created.

He does not confess to talking to her, to Eileen. It would be too easy for someone like Eve to find him, he thinks, in the anonymous faces of Providence. He's already burned one identity. He can only afford so many of them.

"She's changed, but not into Eileen."

Not quite. This isn't damning — he's gone through enough fucking state changes not to begrudge someone he loves one of her own. It's about determining the nature of the change that determines whatever happens next.

As the illusion becomes less life like and more of a shadow of that memory Eve closes her eyes savoring that moment, when she opens them again they glow that ruby red and she squints as Gabriel gives his very vague answer. She knows the way of the vague answer but she doesn't press really on that nerve, except she kinda does.

"Something new could be exciting, fulfilling. It must still have some of the familiar attached. You'll know soon enough." Eve has faith in that, "There's no universe that Otter Eyes and Lynette aren't intertwined. It's our destiny of sorts, we circle the drain with the same people, same hearts. Your pack," red lightning dances between her fingertips and her attention goes there like a moth to flame. "There's a wolf there, a hybrid that might be worthy." Of course she's worthy they're soulmates in Eve's eyes. "I stan this coupling. Bird and I have our own issues but we'll figure them out."

After Gabriel and Eileen figure out theirs.

"I have a tiny favor. It's the color gold." Eyes avert to the well. A change of subject too, if Gabriel takes it.

Gabriel will take it because he is far more inclined to listen to Eve on the topic of Eileen than he is to speak — mostly because there isn't much yet that he can say that he's certain about. Nothing that Eve doesn't already know, either.

Perhaps he would express reluctance, the same way he'd tried to wall off his family history from the prophet, but that would require Eve to behave predictably. At the moment, Gabriel can't even predict for how long she'll be able to hold her form, and where she will go or what she will do when she eventually collapses into that strange, radioactive cloud.

"What about it?"

"The thing I warned you about. Golden eyes." She doesn't go into more detail for fear of the belief they give. "Free, free, came with my friends. Somewhere here." Circling her finger in the air to indicate this world. The woman leans away as she whimpers from a sharp pain in her gut. It's almost that time again, it's always too soon. Eve sighs at herself.

"If you see anything stranger than our usual song and dances will you tell me?" The dark haired woman looks nervous, "I'm not sure how your gift reacts to something like that," or Peter's. Eve can't help but think of her fallen friend whenever she's around Gabriel. "Something more than a mosaic." The woman looks even more nervous, "I know you have better things to deal with but I think it's connected, to Bird. Ancient entities.. there's a link. Be careful." Eve doesn't say much more for a while. Just sitting in the grass. "I do wonder what would happen if you read it, like understood as you do." Maybe that could give some answers.

It's reaching but with no hard evidence on this thing that's all she's got so far. "Just if you see Golden Eyes. I…" Eve looks away guilt written across her face. "I didn't stop it from coming here. I knew it would happen, even before Bird's warning. I.." Wrestling with herself mentally and physically trying to stay together, bright red lines crack along her skin over her face and arms, wild light shining underneath. "I just had to believe all of us together could stop this. Could end it once and for all."

Eve has always been a little bit of a hippie.

Gabriel's attention switches off her face, her eyes, to look at the energy crackling along her skin. You don't need his ability to see the instability of hers, the coming collapse. Impatience makes the line of his jaw harder, brow drawn and tense, as if all he wants to do is reach his hands inside of her soul and correct thing that's broken.

He has more questions, but he already knows she either doesn't have the answers, or won't be around long enough to give them.

"I'll come back here," he says. "You can leave messages. I'll get them."

No indication as to where he is going next, who he will be. He has to be more careful, this time. He also doesn't verbalise acceptance of her request, but this offer of contact stands in as such.

Nodding her head hurriedly Eve dances back with bare feet, dancing around the edge of The Well with hair flying and face full of pain. He was a friend, he would help. He would watch Bird. That was two friends out there with information, tales from Eve. From the cracks in her skin a fine red mist seeps out, wafting out and then wrapping around her arms and then legs and the stomach. "Out of time. Out of place. Out of body. See you Jazzhands." Her rasps calls out weakly through clenched teeth.

Her face is the last thing that's to go. Her arms wave in the air and she tips her head back and screams, that scream stretches out and twists and mutates as her corporeal form explodes. Wind shifting from the force. Eve isn't sure where her mind goes when this happens or her but it's no longer there.

In the air not far from Gabriel a glowing withering nimbus of crimson energy hums with power. The metal fillings contort and twist in a frenzy. Buzzing with activity. She wishes she could speak. That she could thank Gabriel but Eve had an idea of how to repay her friend back. One day. For now she hovers there before zipping up to the sky and off in the distance.


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