Participants:
| Scene Title | Pyrrhic Victory |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | The future envisioned by Colette is averted — or is it? — but at an equally terrible cost. Whether by fate or from the fallacies enabled by free will, in the end, only two walk away. |
| Date | November 8, 2010 |
In running from her future, she'd run headlong into it.
This time, roles are reversed. This time Tamara was fast enough to save Colette from the gunfire. This time, the blood is Tamara's.
This time it's real.
Blood soaks through teal shirt and the denim of her jeans, breathing still heavy and loud from just-passed exertion; yet for all of that, the hands that close around Colette's, firm but gentle as they relieve her of that cursed, necessary knife, are as perfectly steady as they've been in a thousand other situations, a thousand better times.
Skin darkened from a day's worth of grime, hair shadowed by soot, Tamara and Colette kneel near one side of the street, facing, as close together as it is possible to be. Tamara's right hand braces itself against her shoulder, fingers dimpling the fabric; her left holds that red-daubed blade, its tip gradually tilting lower and lower with each exhaled breath. Flakes of gray-black soot stick to the damp wake of a single fallen tear, yet Tamara smiles; tries to smile, the expression jinxed before it even began.
There is no way, now, for this to end well.
The knife slips from fingers that no longer need to hold it, crashing down onto pavement with a discordantly musical note. The wan smile falters and fades as Colette's red-painted hands sink to the slight space between them, attempting to plug a hole that she would give anything to make not exist. To take back. Tamara's gaze lifts for a moment, the sybil's dark gaze going to the space beyond Colette, to the charging figure who is just that much too late to change the scene. Closing her eyes, the blonde presses her cheek against the younger girl's temple, whispering three hearbreakingly familiar words.
Time only flows in one direction.
Eventually, inevitably, someday it runs out.
"I'm so sorry."
Ten Minutes Earlier
Queens
The sky is just as orange here, choked thick with black smoke that has blotted out the stars above where the raging inferno creeps across the city blocks, embers drifting through the air like snowflakes along with sooty flecks of ash that dust Colette Nichols' dark hair a charcoal gray.
An hour ago she'd been at the Brick House, an hour ago she'd tried to warn away Joanna and Tasha after the riots spilled out towards the former safe house and carnage spilled into the streets. An hour ago she started running, trying to get away and send warning to avoid Queens, avoid the fires, avoid the insanity that has riddled itself into the minds of the city's populace.
An hour ago everything started to fall apart.
Covering her mouth with one sleeve-covered hand, the teen looks back to where cars are collided with one another, windshields shattered. A police cruiser is parked up on half of the sidewalk, driver and passenger side door open, lights atop the car flashing blue and red but with no sign of the police officers themselves. Blood on one of the side windows resembles a vague handprint.
Shouting in the distance sounds like the baying of approaching hounds; unreasonable, irrational, insane rioters driven into a psychotic rage by the signal that had only been partly stopped. Their stalking shadows are cast large on buildings lit by the fires.
A cell phone is the only weapon that Colette has to her name, and not much of a one at that. Pressing the speed dial for Wireless again, Colette tries to get in touch with Tasha through Wireless' cerebral network, to warn her not to come.
«NO SIGNAL»
It was too much of a lucky break the first time. Now Tasha and her mother are headed straight into the lion's mouth, and Colette realizes just how wrong she has been. In trying to fight the events of November 8th, she has practically ensured her own involvement in them.
Creeping up on the abandoned police cruiser, Colette peers in through one open door, noticing the shotgun missing from the center console, keys still in the ignition and the radio smashed. Swallowing tightly, she straightens up and turns to look back over her shoulder, spying a tenement building burned out by a fire not belonging to the riots.
She recognizes the circular window on the street-facing corner of the top window, recognizes it as the apartment building from her vision — one she'd set fire to in some misguided attempt to prevent her own personal future. It was burned in her vision too. She always assumed it was because of the riots.
She'd written her own destiny.
It's only now that Colette's panicked eyes shift from left to right, recognizing landmarks around herself, recognizing the distant portion of street that she would soon lay bleeding on. Choking down her breath, she runs in the opposite direction, boots slamming on the concrete as her heart pounds in her chest and blood rushes in her ears.
Running towards the sounds of the shouts of rioters and riot police clashing down the road.
Anywhere is better than here.
Anywhere is no longer an option.
The confluence of intrigue, action, reaction all woven into today's events would have driven Tamara to distraction in other times; watching a multitude of possibilities wither on the vine, thousands of lives cease to be, usually merits a period of witness and a period of mourning. But not for the girl whose choices have already been picked out, planned like strategy on a chessboard; not for the sybil whose most difficult endeavor, out of all those decisions, remains ahead.
Feet slap on asphalt in a rhythm unmarred by the agony searing her side, unperturbed by the harsh labor of her breathing. The girl who rounds the corner doesn't see it, not the charred husk of the building she passes nor the cars which litter the street she runs down; dark, dark eyes focus not on the present but the ever-changing future, cataloguing, monitoring, counting. Counting steps, counting breaths, counting heartbeats.
Not so many of those left, now.
She can run faster, because her body hasn't given out yet; because muscle strain and overwork can be ignored as long as they're still moving. As long as the sybil has need to push — and she does. It wasn't supposed to be cut quite this close. What she can't do is shape lips to words, focus breath into voice; not and keep breathing, not and keep running. The running isn't an option.
Everything comes together in an instant.
It takes only an instant for everything to go completely, utterly wrong.
The cadence of someone else's running feet is easily missed beneath panicked breath and pounding heart, beneath the slightly more distant sounds of chaotic destruction. Easily overlooked, until they're right there — a presence behind Colette, fingers digging into her shoulder, Tamara pinning her own heels to the ground and hauling the younger girl around by sheer brute effort.
Colette shrieks the moment she feels hands on her shoulders, twists in the way a falling cat might. Her cell phone fumbles out of sweaty fingers, lands with a clatter, forgotten on the asphalt. One of Colette's boots clips the curb as she turns, buckling one leg in an awkward twist of joints that has her falling backwards onto the sidewalk.
The first pops of small arms fire echo from down the block, a crack of wild gunfire that is aimed at the riot police who have failed in containing the onslaught of chaos spilling from down the road. It's close now, too close, and all Colette can see as a threat is the blonde girl standing behind her, too breathless to speak, too wild-eyed to understand.
All Colette can see is the frenzied look of the rioters. In that misconception, comes realization of unfortunate futures.
"No!" Colette's voice cracks as she reaches down to her boot, towards that knife that had found its way back to her on the eve of this very turbulent day. In Colette's mind, she sees this as a warning — a knife given to defend herself when all other avenues have been shed.
Scrambling back on hands and scuffing heels, Colette manages to pull herself to her feet, knife brandished out in gleaming point as if to ward off Tamara. Tears have already welled up in Colette's eyes, horror wrought across her face. "Stop! Stop please God stop!" It's a reasonable misunderstanding. "Tamara!"
Unfortunately timed.
No time.
No time to catch her breath and explain, to pick through the hazardous minefield of words and find the few that won't just make matters worse. Thrown to the ground as well by Colette's reaction, Tamara scrapes palm against asphalt with no care for the layers of skin she leaves behind, shoving herself back upright. No time to delay, as possibilities converge, racing past in an unstoppable, irrevocable flood. She wobbles a little bit too far to one side, losing a precious fraction of a breath in forcing herself back to balance. Centering, so she can again act.
No time left to waste.
Tamara bolts forward, crossing the gap between herself and Colette in two swift strides; fey though she is, the seeress remains undeterred by the glint of cold steel. Colette can feel it pierce clothes and skin alike, the jarring grate of metal scraping bone telegraphed down its hilt into her arm. Just as vividly now is the hand that twists in the younger girl's disarrayed hair, the relentless grip on her shoulder that combines with Tamara's collapse to drag them both bodily down, knees striking pavement with painful weight. The cool drift of labored breath against her cheek is incongruously subtle.
Even as the girls fall, bullets ricochet from the building beside them; three following in quick succession, blowing bits of brick dust into blonde and brunette hair alike.
Time continues on.
Pockmarks in the concrete behind where Colette's silhouette had been serve as a keen explanation of everything without the messy need for words. Tiny craters in the concrete wall of the tenement building show the frenzied spread from an automatic weapon, one still popping off its ammunition through a cloud of black smoke. Whoever it is isn't even shooting at Colette, but the errant rounds would have found her never the less, had fate — had Tamara not intervened.
Colette's repayment for that service was four inches of cold steel in her side.
Guilt and horror make bile sting the back of her throat reflexively. The sensation of bone grinding against the edge of her knife worsening the sensation of growing nausea.
Deprived of worse, throat tight and breath lost, Colette feels moments tick by like hours, one arm wrapped around Tamara, one hand wrapped around that terrible God-forsaken knife.
By the time Colette realizes what reflexes are making her do, the knife has already slid wetly out of Tamara's side, leaving a blossoming rose of blood on her waist where it edits fabric and flesh with equal ease. Choking back a sob, Colette curls her fingers in Tamara's hair, breathlessly whispering out something against the blonde's tangled locks; tears too.
Colette's hand holding that bloodied knife shakes, a tremor running through her arm as she tries to ratioanlize what happened. Realizes what she'd been saved from and the misunderstanding of all of it.
In running from her future, she'd run headlong into it.
This time, roles are reversed. This time Tamara was fast enough to save Colette from the gunfire. This time, the blood is Tamara's.
This time it's real.
Blood soaks through teal shirt and the denim of her jeans, breathing still heavy and loud from just-passed exertion; yet for all of that, the hands that close around Colette's, firm but gentle as they relieve her of that cursed, necessary knife, are as perfectly steady as they've been in a thousand other situations, a thousand better times.
Skin darkened from a day's worth of grime, hair shadowed by soot, Tamara and Colette kneel near one side of the street, facing, as close together as it is possible to be. Tamara's right hand braces itself against her shoulder, fingers dimpling the fabric; her left holds that red-daubed blade, its tip gradually tilting lower and lower with each exhaled breath. Flakes of gray-black soot stick to the damp wake of a single fallen tear, yet Tamara smiles; tries to smile, the expression jinxed before it even began.
There is no way, now, for this to end well.
The knife slips from fingers that no longer need to hold it, crashing down onto pavement with a discordantly musical note. The wan smile falters and fades as Colette's red-painted hands sink to the slight space between them, attempting to plug a hole that she would give anything to make not exist. To take back. Tamara's gaze lifts for a moment, the sybil's dark gaze going to the space beyond Colette, to the charging figure who is just that much too late to change the scene. Closing her eyes, the blonde presses her cheek against the younger girl's temple, whispering three hearbreakingly familiar words.
Time only flows in one direction.
Eventually, inevitably, someday it runs out.
"I'm so sorry."
No. When Tasha saw Tamara running, she screamed for her mother to stop the car, not waiting for it to come to a complete stop but instead jumping out when it was still slowing. The result of tumbling out are a pair of scraped knees and palms, new holes in her jeans as her feet pound the pavement chasing Tamara, calling for her to stop. She's not slow, but she has shorter legs and her bruised knees protest with every step.
It's too similar. It's too like the vision. They should have changed enough and yet — maybe there is no such thing as free will. She's wearing different clothes, deliberately chose different clothes — it is not a pair of her ubiquitous Chucks that slap down on asphalt but her Doc Martens. Simple changes, but she hoped they'd be enough.
They're not — that much is clear when the vision that has haunted her dreams since June 10th comes to pass in front of her eyes, and she cries out. "No! Colette! Tamara!" her throat thick as she stumbles again, too late to keep this from happening. She should have never left Colette this weekend, or insisted Colette come with her — she should have known. She shouldn't have listened. She should have insisted that knife get thrown in the river, or let her mother take them on the cruise.
Should have, could have, would have — tears slide down her face as she runs the last few steps, reaching for Colette. "Get away…" she gasps out, breathless with exertion as she stares at Tamara, brows contorted in pain and confusion. "Why—?" is her only question, before gazing back to Colette, and finally down at all the blood, to see its source, to try to stop the bleeding.
Colette isn't the one that's bleeding.
That much is evident when Tamara finally slouches her weight down against Colette, and bloodied hands are pressing onto Tamara's abdomen as choking sobs erupt from Colette. Words can't be formed, just horrified and strangled noises like something a wild animal might make when in pain. Rolling Tamara off of her and looking up frantically to Tasha, Colette may well have one hand and arm covered in blood, but that is where the visions diverge.
That is where things are different.
"Oh God T— Tasha— " Colette whines as she lays Tamara down on her back on the cold concrete of the sidewalk, pressing both bare hands down over where blood is pulsing out of a wound on her side. The pop and crack of gunfire is getting closer, the shouts of rioters and the crash of breaking glass followed by a surge of flame from a thrown molotov cocktail, burning bright and orange through thick smoke.
"She was trying to save me— she was— she was— oh god make it stop, Tasha— Tasha please!" Colette's mismatched eyes are wide, her throat tight and blood seeping out between her small fingers that seem even smaller, even more helpless under the circumstances.
It was supposed to be her.
Eased down onto the coarse concrete, Tamara watches the red flow trickle past Colette's hands with a detached air, as if it were as inconsequential as spilled water. Her breathing has finally begun to slow, no longer stressed by the effort of exertion; lids droop over darkened eyes, a hint of vivid red tinging the girl's lips. She glances up to Tasha without moving her head from where it rests, then carefully slides one hand up to meet Colette's, motion slowed as if by fatigue.
Despite being the one injured, the sybil is almost entirely silent. "Here," she breathes out, the word quiet enough it could be missed, though not so the fingers that push against Colette's hands, directing position and place one small measure at a time. That seems to be about all Tamara can manage to do, as she closes her eyes, letting her head roll slightly to the side; no words forthcoming, for once neither direction nor reassurance on offer.
"Oh, God," Tasha gasps — it's not what they thought, but it's not any better this way. Her expression is one of horror and fear, and it softens to apology and remorse when she looks at Tamara, having thought the worst of her in that moment, just as she had on June 10th. "Pressure…" she murmurs, pulling off her sweatshirt and pressing it against Tamara's wound, holding her hands there as tightly as she feels is safe. "We need to find somewhere — oh, God, where's my mom…" She thought the car would have followed her, but apparently she took too many turns, and Joanna wasn't able to keep up.
A gunshot that sounds closer has her jump, looking up and behind her, as if expecting someone with a gun to be looming over them right now, to take all of their lives as they try to save this one.
"How did she not see… to warn us…" Tasha whispers, lifting a hand to brush back Tamara's hair, then peering around again to look for a safe space.
Is anywhere safe?
"We need to get off the street… it's not safe." Her arms wrap around Tamara, trying to take the weight of the other girl as she nods to the nearest building that's not on fire. "Maybe we can get in there."
"She did," Colette hisses breathily, "she did, she did." Not explaining how Tamara had tried to warn them, Colette is overwrought with guilt in the realization that the flashes themselves were the warning, of what was going to happen, but Colette's fight to try and prevent all of the events from happening had driven her here, to this street, to this moment, to this tragedy.
With her hands guided by Tamara, Colette presses down firmly on the bloody wound. It isn't much different from when Eric Doyle had been shot and she had to keep him from bleeding out on the ride from Summer Meadows. It is different in that it's Tamara laying on her back, bleeding onto the concrete.
"It's gonna'— it's gonna be okay," Colette shakily whispers as she leans down and whispers against Tamara's brow, then looks up to the building Tasha motions towards. "We— we can't s— stay here the— " Colette's words come through hiccuped sobs. "The fire's gonna spread, she— she's losing too much blood, we— she needs a doctor."
A doctor amidst the riots, a hospital that isn't overflowing with victims of violence, a needle in a fiery haystack.
Headlights begin to shine through the smoke, the sounds of gunfire is dispersing down the street where it had been coming from. A car is coming, though its shape is too difficult to make out in the haze of swirling smoke and embers that fall like snowflakes.
"Tasha!" Colette shouts, looking to the headlights. "T— Tasha stop them!" Colette's brows furrow, nose indicates the direction of the headlights even as a bright pinkish-red flare begins to suddenly burn on the sidewalk beside them, a photokinetic trick of the light to serve as a beacon.
An illusory S.O.S.
Face crumpling with similar guilt — she had cast Tamara as a villain in this story when she never was, and Tasha should have known better — the girl sobs and nods, making sure that Tamara is in Colette's grasp before wheeling away and stumbling toward the street. She flails her arms, hoping that today her scant height will work in her favor: she certainly doesn't look like a dangerous person, and might even be confused for a child, someone that needs help and isn't trying to cause harm.
"Stop! Stop! Please help!" she screams as the car approaches, even as her bloody fingers slide into her pocket for her cell phone, knowing that the signal won't go through but trying to call for her mother anyway.
Unable to even wrap one arm around Tamara for fear of moving her hands away from the injured sybil's side, tears stream down Colette's face in equal measure that blood trickles between her fingers. "Help!" Colette's voice joins in the screaming, "Please!" Her hands are trembling, warm from blood, cold from shock. Her eyes keep focusing up on the divots that the impact of bullets make in the concrete and brick nearby to where she had been standing, realizing how close to death she was.
Realizing how Tamara sacrificed herself to prevent it.
"P— Please don't go…" Colette whimpers as she hunches forward, resting her lips against Tamara's forehead, tears running down the bridge of her nose and wetting the sybil's forehead. "P— please don't go, I'm— I'm sorry— I'm so sorry please— don't leave me…" Her lips tremble, tears taste bitter against them, breath hitches in the back of her throat.
Down the street, headlights cut through billowing waves of smoke. Soon too the rumble of tires across asphalt, but the slowly approaching vehicle's silhouette is too large to be a car, too large even to be Joanna's SUV. Boxy, white, armored in the way bank trucks are. Tasha recognizes the hulking shape rolling slowly down the road the moment it cuts fully through the smoke.
It's the Institute.
As soon as Tasha realizes who it is, she's stumbling back, throwing a glance over her shoulder, fleeting and frantic. "It's the Institute… hide! Go invisible!" she cries. "I'll try to … I'll try to buy you time…" She's not Evolved. It's not her that they'll take away forever and put in a coffin or treat like a guinea pig like those people on Staten Island. Her heart pounds as she backs up to the sidewalk out of the street, to let the vehicle pass if the driver chooses not to see her.
After all, she doubts that they're actually worried about the civilians' safety. She doesn't have a gun — she doesn't have anything; the bag she'd packed is in her mother's car, wherever her mother is. She glances down at her cell phone and swallows, scrolling through quickly and deleting her father's name — the DoEA work number isn't one she wants them to find.
"No!" Colette screams when she hears the sound of Tasha's voice and sees that terrible, white van rolling into view. "Oh God! No— No you can't have her! You can't have her!" Colette's voice cracks as she screams, her hands not moving from Tamara's bloody knife wound.
But therein lies the rub. There's no way Colette can get away with Tamara and not cause her to bleed out from moving her. There's no way she can run and not kill her. It would be a pyrrhic victory, Tamara free, but at what price?
One Colette isn't willing to pay.
As the white van rolls to a stop, Tasha can't see anything through the tinted front windshield. She can hear the hydraulic hiss of the back doors levering open, the hatch back lifting up and side doors folding out as a ramp extends from the back of the van. Soon, booted feet touch down on the ground, and through the whisper-thin tracks of gray smoke, she can see silhouettes of masked men with assault rifles and flashlights.
«The call said here,» one crackles over his respirator. «Get the girl— get them all. We'll sort it out afterward.»
Hearing the voices crackling at the back of the van, Colette stares down at Tamara, her hands trembling as she presses her lips to the sybil's forehead. Three, soundless words breathlessly whispered onto her brow, three ever so important words that Colette could convey, but no longer has the voice to.
Right now, Colette is counting on one thing: That Tamara always knows what she's doing.
Snatching the bloodied knife up from Tamara's hand, Colette bolts up from her crouched position as her hands come away from the knife wound. Mismatched eyes scan the smoke, scan the dark of a fiery night, and when she collides with Tasha from behind, it's as though the two crashed through a sudden curtain of water the way invisibility washes over them both, and the way sudden blindness overwhelms Tasha.
Just how far reaching are the wiles of Tamara Brooks?
Colette is hoping further than she could have imagined.
"Shhhh!" Tasha whispers when Colette begins yelling, but then it's all moot — she can't see; she can't know that Tamara is not hidden in that cloak of invisibility, left for the Institute's mercy.
Hopefully it's mercy they'll show.
Tasha's arms wrap around Colette as she struggles to see, knowing Colette can, and letting Colette guide her. Without the sense of sight for those seconds that she is blinded, everything else seems augmented, increased to a fever pitch: the metallic smell of the blood that covers both Colette's and Tasha's hands; the pounding drum that beats against her ribcage, not in sync but in counter rhythm to Colette's that she can feel as she presses closer; the sound of the scrape of boots on asphalt and fallen leaves; the smell of smoke burning eyes and throat; finally the taste of salt on her lips from the tears that never seem to stop.
The thundering sound of booted feet drum in the dark, layered over the distant cries for help of others in just as much need. Panic is a pulse, a rhythm that matches the staccato pace of an adrenaline-surged heart. «Two of them went invisible. Possible illusionist. Pop gas, cover the area. We have one down across the street, looks injured.»
They can see her.
Colette says nothing as she clamps a bloody hand over Tasha's mouth, in the event that she tries to protest. Instead, the older teen drags her back and away from the street, towards buildings not yet consumed by the fire, towards pillars of smoke twisting up from violence not yet able to be seen.
There's no way they'll be able to make it all the way to Red Hook on foot, to evacuate with the rest of the Ferrymen. Maybe they won't even make it out of this city block alive. The future, for the first time in a very long time, is wholly unpredictable now that Tamara is gone.
Yellow-white gas begins to hiss from canisters by the time Colette and Tasha are long gone. White-clad figures in respirator masks circle around the prone blonde laying on her back on the concrete, one crouched at her side with a sterile gloved hand pressed against her wound.
Through blurry vision, Tamara can see two others approaching through the smoke, backlit by fires. Carrying an enormous black plastic care between them that vaguely resembles a coffin, lit with an array of tiny lights.
Tamara was bound for a coffin one way or another after tonight.
This one, though, at least offers a chance to open again.
Someday.
Somehow.