Participants:
| Scene Title | Wanting |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | A confusing man asks a confused woman what it is she wants from her life. |
| Date | September 17, 2009 |
Speakeasy Hotel and Casino - Room 101
There is character to the room, if in the way that 'character' carries negative connotations. The paint is peeling off the skilful wooden moulding, the carpet is faded and the bedding looks old and tired. The painting hung behind the bed is so old as to be retro and the bathroom sports a clawfoot tub and a pedestal sink. Both leak and have hard water stains. The whole place carries a faintly musty smell, though it's clear the staff have attempted to keep it at least somewhat clean. The sheets are stain-free and the bathroom is always stocked with little bottles of toiletries. The windows are thin and let in a fair amount of traffic noise. The one good thing is that the old radiator keeps the room toasty warm in winter.
Room 101 doesn't have much, and its tenant didn't bring much to it either. And now, it's down three bottles of stolen hotel shampoo. Thanks, Hilton and Days Inn. A pale green dress is draped over the back of a chair, deep purple heels are tucked away under. The blanket lies in a heap on the floor at the foot of the bed, having been kicked away as the occupant slept.
Beneath the off-white sheets, Odessa sleeps soundly. Dark curls cling wetly to her face and neck, a towel laid over the pillow keeps it from getting damp. She looks peaceful, and one has to wonder how often that really happens. On the nightstand, a capped syringe lays next to a bottle of morphine, both are yet unused. The woman stirs, tugging the sheet around her frail form a little tighter with bandaged fingers.
The sound of the door unlocking from the outside is a quiet one, the hinges don't creak and the man entering the room doesn't make much noise. Just the soft brush of shoes on the carpeted floor. Pushing the door shut, Peter Petrelli looks down to the at first unfamiliar figure tangled up in the bed. His gloved hand lingers on the doorknob, brows furrow, and blue eyes move to the syringe on the night stand. The consideration of just leaving again ends there, and Peter's darkly clad form moves across the room, around the foot of the bed and towards the nightstand.
Blue eyes focus down on Odessa, brows knit, and then drift to the syringe. One gloved hand moves down, plucking it up with two fingers, rolling it around in his palm before sliding it into the breast pocket of his jacket. The bottle comes next, placed in the same spot inside of his suit coat, shoulders squared as he huffs out a quiet sigh.
"Wake up," he says flatly, brows still furrowed in such a way that creases the scar cutting across his face, "wake up."
It's been a while since Odessa was roused from sleep by voices. It takes a moment for it to register as real, rather than spoken in a dream. Finally, blue eyes flutter open with a sleepy, unintelligible murmur. "You said I could sleep here," she says defensively, as the sheet is pulled up to her chin to cover her underwear-clad form. "Change your mind?"
"No." Blue eyes move to the empty night stand, then back again. "I just wanted you to know I took your drugs." Peter's eyes drift from the nightstand to Odessa's covered form, then up to her darker shade of blue. "You won't be getting them back as long as you're here, so you can score a fix somewhere else." Sliding gloved hands into his pockets, Peter lets his head tilt to the side slowly. "Alternately, you could sign yourself up for the rehab program at St. Luke's so you can be of use to someone rather than a fix-craving junkie."
The words come off without bitterness or sharpness, just that very terse and disinterested tone that Peter had used that morning. "Now that we're caught up," he adds, moving towards the leather armchair nearby, "I want to ask you a few questions."
"Rehab," Odessa responds flatly. "I'll have you know, that was my last." She waves vaguely toward the empty nightstand. She fluffs the pillow up behind her back, looking slightly perturbed, but she doesn't give that look to Peter. "Going cold turkey isn't easy."
When she does look up again, Odessa's expression is amused, her lips twisted into a smirk. "Ah." She breathes in deeply through her nose. "I thought I could smell a setup." A huff of laughter. "Okay, go ahead and ask."
"Spoken like an addict," Peter notes with a faint smile as the creak of leather comes as punctuation to his words. Sinking down into the chair, he crosses one leg over the other, folding his hands in his lap. There's a moment of quiet where Peter considers his options, breathing in deeply before slowly exhaling a breath thorugh his nose, one hand coming up to rest his head against. "You were a doctor and a scientist for the Company, and— " he hesitates, searching for the proper noun, "Kazimir had you perform research and testing alongside Mohinder Suresh on the Shanti Virus…" Peter's brows rise slowly, "I want to know if you have any experience in nuclear physics."
It isn't like Odessa denied her dependence. "What? Now you want me to engineer a bomb so we can just blow the whole world away rather than watch it die a slow death from a plague?" You. Kazimir. Those eyes make it hard to see past Volken to Petrelli. "No experience in the field, no. What do you have in mind?" She shrugs one shoulder. "I assume you have something in mind, and I assume you want it to involve me somehow, or you wouldn't be asking."
"No," Peter notes with one brow raised, "I have no intention of doing that…" There's a hesitation as his brows crease together and lower, blue stare wandering the carpet. "But since you can't help, you don't get to know. Next question;" one gloved finger raises into the air, followed by another marking the second question. "Do you know who was responsible for the destruction of the Company facility in the Bronx? It was blown to pieces months ago, and now I read in the newspaper they're turning it into a parking lot."
Peter shrugs his shoulders, exhaling a sigh, "I'm curious who had the resources and expertise to pull of a job like that, because it wasn't Ethan or his people." But from the sounds of it, Peter might be in the market for someone with that measure of skill.
Odessa scowls. Since she can't help, she doesn't get to know? That's just mean. "No, I don't know who blew up the building. Wish I'd known it was going to happen, I'd liked to have gotten my harpsichord out of there." It seems a serious sort of lament, but she doesn't let the disappointment linger. "Next question?"
"What do you want?" Now that one isn't even fair. Peter's brows both raise as he poses the question, not even missing a beat. His head tilts to the side, gloved hand moves over his mouth as he braces his chin on his palm, fingers tapping on his lips as blue eyes drift up and down the dark-haired woman. There's no context he offers her either, just a blanket question, broad and open-ended without any possible meaning of what he might want to hear.
Then again, maybe that's the point.
"A lot of things." Odessa leans forward slowly, eyes growing just a touch wider as she wraps the sheet around herself and crawls toward the foot of the bed. Toward Peter. "What are you offering me?" Her lips curve upward into a mischievous grin, flashing pearly teeth.
Peter leans back in the chair as Odessa crawls forward. "I'm not offering you anything. But I want to know what you want, so I can start to understand why you're doing what you do. As far as I know the Company's in shambles," which is on the other side of correct, more so standing on the front lawn of wrong, "and they aren't ever going to accept you back, especially not after your breakout from Moab. What I want to know, is what do you want." He looks around the room, waving with one hand at the papered walls and water stains.
"Is this what you're aspiring towards? Is there something more?" Dark brows crease together into a stern expression, "something more than your drugs?"
The grin fades as Peter speaks, but the spark in her eyes is still alight, if a darker shade. "I never wanted this," she says of her drugs. "That's how they kept me there. Kept me locked up. It's just so much easier to keep using than it is to quit." There's no illusions, no excuses. This is how it is. "It's not like I've got a family, or friends. Who cares? What do you care?" The smirk returns and Odessa sits on the edge of her bed. "How about you, Petrelli? Volken. Whoever you think you are today. What do you want?"
Peter wags his finger back and forth in the air chidingly, "You didn't answer my question." THere's a tensing of his brows as he leans forward in his chair again. "You gave plenty of excuses why you can curl up and get wasted, because you don't have anyone, nobody cares about you, woe is Odessa." His voice takes on a graveley tone, and slowly he leans back into the chair with a creak of the leather again. "Tell me what you want."
Odessa climbs out of the bed and stretches her fingers up toward the ceiling, rocking her head from one side to the other, working out the kinks. She gives her back to Peter and takes a couple steps away from the bed, she lets the sheet drop into dingy white a pool about her ankles. A bra strap is adjusted absently.
So much for modesty. A darkly curious glance is cast over her shoulder to Peter as her hair is tousled with her fingers. "Why do you want to know? What do you gain from knowing what I want? Tell me that, and I'll tell you. I'll even tell you the truth."
"Everyone's motivated by wants, needs…" Peter's gloved hand comes up to rest on his chin. "Gabriel is motivated by his desire for power and understanding. Eileen is motivated by her need for a father figure. Ethan is motivated by his need to be a father to someone. Everyone has motivations, desires, something that drives them. Once you understand that, you can better understand how to work with them." Or, were he to choose different wording, control them.
"I want to know what motivates you, so I can know if we can work together." Peter's dark brows rise when he makes that statement. "But if you'd rather just… be alone," he nods towards the door to the rented room, "you're free to get dressed and walk out any time you'd like."
"I'm not all woe is me," she addresses belatedly, since it still seems to be an issue. She reaches skyward again, this time rising up on tiptoe. "I'm not stupid, either. Nobody's ever seen me as a friend, only as a means to an end. It kind of tinges a girl's worldview. It's all about how can you help me, and what do you want in return, you know."
Odessa turns around and faces the man dead on without shame. Spending time in prison might have something to do with that. "Yeah, I'm a junkie. I want to get off the drugs. Oddly enough, it's not a the top of my list of priorities. It gets in the way, but I'm still functional." She does not get dressed, and she does not walk out. She sways slightly, slinging one arm around her midsection and resting against her hand the opposite elbow, curling a strand of damp hair about her finger. "The truth is, I can take whatever I want." She holds up a finger and amends quickly, "Any material thing that I want. The problem is, I haven't the faintest clue what it is that I want to take. I used to think it was money and jewellery. But what do you spend money on when you can take anything you please? So, that was no good." Never mind that decision was made for her when she was hauled off to Moab.
Odessa taps her chin thoughtfully, perhaps an intentional mimicry of the man in the chair. "You wanna know what motivates me? So do I. Hard to be motivated when you haven't got a goal. I wanted freedom. I've got that. I wanted friends. Already covered that, there's no such thing." She rolls her eyes toward the ceiling as though the answers might rain down from the fire sprinklers. "The way things were before Phase Three," she murmurs, knowing that something behind those blue eyes knows exactly what she's talking about. "That was the closest I've ever been to happy. I had companionship, I had freedom, I had safety. Sure, the world was scary, and dangerous, but it was exciting, too. It was nothing and everything that I hoped it would be." She smiles fondly, speaking more like a teenage girl discussing a crush. "And I got to study my favourite subject." Her shoulders hunch up and the whimsy fades when they drop back down.
"Now, I haven't got any of that. I may not have the world figured out just yet, but I'm an awful quick study." The hand resting at her ribcage moves now to rest on her hip. "I just want a kindred spirit. I don't need a friend, just someone who gets it. Someone to share it all with me." All things told, she had to talk so endlessly just to come to this conclusion. "That's what I want."
Inclining his head forward and pinching the bridge of his nose as a quiet groan slips out from his lips. He looks up, blue eyes half lidded after listening to that tirade, leaning back in his chair and breathing a heavier sigh as his head tilts to the side. "So all that hostility, neediness, and frustration boils down to you wanting someone who understands?" Dark brows lift in a well there you go expression, then settle down to a more neutral expression.
"It's not me," he clarifies, in case there was any doubt. "But it's good to know, good to understand." Peter's lips creep up with a crooked smile as he pushes himself up to his feet, the leather protesting loudly at his movements. Once upright, his hands come down to rest in the pockets of his slacks, brows tensed as he looks to Odessa again. "What about Adam?"
Odessa's lighter brows hike upward, disappearing beneath dark bangs. "What about Adam? He's the worst user of all. I have no use for him beyond material needs." And that fact that the woman who lives upstairs has agreed not to kill her if she keeps an eye on him. "Sylar understood," she says simply. The use of the name is so deliberate, it has to stem from more than just basic habit.
She steps forward, bare feet silent on faded carpet. It feels strange to her. Alien. She reaches up to trace the lines of his jacket. "You aren't Petrelli, but you aren't Volken." The need to know and to understand that drove Odessa for so long is overriding the lingering hatred she held. "Tu es nouveau," she intones gently.
"I'm not the one you should be speaking French to," Peter notes with a crooked smile. "And no, I'm not Kazimir, and I'm not… entirely Peter either. I guess you could say one is bleeding into the other, it's kind've like a gestalt." One brow goes up slowly, "You should sleep, and then decide if you're going to knock over a convenience store for more drugs, or go down to St. Luke's…"
He sidesteps her, much like he sidesteps her question, moving towards the door with a few broad strides, coming to stop once his hand has settled on the brass knob of the door. There's a pause, head tilting to the side and blue eyes turning towards Odessa. "I'll be back tomorrow," says the man coming in during the middle of the night, "don't wait up for me."
Odessa lets her fingertips drag along the man's chest as he moves away. She smirks at his back. "I'll be here," she promises. "Bring home some dinner, won't you?"
It's hard to say what motivates Doctor Knutson, but it's a safe assumption she's found a new goal.
"I don't think you'd like what I have for dinner," Peter explains with a dishonest smile, turning the knob and opening the door slowly, "and you're not my pet…" he adds as he steps out into the hall, lingering as blue eyes stay settled on Odessa, brows furrowed, "fill your own dish." And the door slams shut, leaving Odessa Knutson with the one bit of company that she never welcomes…
Herself.