Participants:
Scene Title | Almost Got'im |
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Synopsis | Despite their desires, Kazimir and Odessa are left without choices. An unstoppable force meets an immovable object. |
Date | January 15, 2009 |
Perfection is not an accident…
Tears flow freely as decaying screams echo of cold walls, dampened by rain pelting windows, siding, broken glass and ash-covered concrete. Knelt in stagnating vermilion, Odessa mourns the loss of what could have been. She had planned to sacrifice herself - if it came to that - to save the man whose blood now stains her dress, her shoes, and her skin. Because she wasn't sure she could choose. Now, she'll never have to. This isn't what she wanted. She thought she could protect him. She was wrong.
"Live by the sword," The voice creeps up on Odessa like some stalking viper, "Die by the sword. That's what Amato would say." Sylar's voice, but not Sylar; not in method of speech or in tone, it is Kazimir. His blackened form looms in the empty space where a throne once stood, not far from the battered corpse of Zhang Wu-Long, where Odessa kneels in overwrought pain.
Perhaps he's been there the whole time, watching, bending light around himself to mask his presence. Perhaps he was lost in his own grief and rage, and only now found a face to commiserate the loss of life with. As if commiseration will be either of their intentions.
Odessa doesn't turn to look immediately. She doesn't appear to move a single muscle - save for her eyes, which track up slowly from Wu-Long's broken form to all but burn holes into the wall opposite her. Her hands snap out to either side and the girl is no longer knelt, but standing where the base of the throne would have been. Only bloody footprints betray her movement as something other than true teleportation.
A terrible apparition of blood and grief, with her dress clinging wetly to her legs, dripping red down pale skin and onto dark shoes. Blonde hair is plastered to her face from the rain. A fallen angel made a darker sprite of vengeance by an illuminating flash of lightning, thunder echoing her fury as scorned Lilith calls to her master Lucifer. "Kazimir!"
Lips curl back, a snarl, a flicker of movement from a hand, not even telekinesis. Knuckles across Odessa's cheek, a motion so swift and so sudden once she shouts that it sends the girl's jaw angled to one side, head moving in the direction of the blow. "Calm down." He intones, voice deep and throaty as he follows through with the backhand, letting his fingers linger in the air before his hand comes down to rest at his side. "Get a hold of yourself."
Dark brows lower, eyes focused squarely on the blonde in front of him for a moment as he tucks gloved hands into the pockets of his jacket. "He's dead." The words are spit out without emotion, "Get over yourself." Dark eyes focus past Odessa to the body of Zhang Wu-Long, "Shouting isn't going to bring him back."
Odessa allows the blow to land and dabs the pads of her fingers to her lip, coming away with blood where teeth split skin. "You killed him." In her heart, she knows this. "You're the only other person with as much compulsion as I have to—" She can't even bring herself to say it. They both know their thirst for abilities, even if she's unable to obtain more for herself in the manner Sylar can. "Why?"
"I didn't have a choice." Kazimir gives her the answer, even if it's not quite the one she wants. "He wasn't trying to kill me, or betray me…" He starts to walk, casually, as if this were a polite conversation held in a parlor before dinner. "I think he was coming here to see you." There's a quiet tilt of his head to one side, regarding ashen bones. "But he saw Santiago, and… well, he figured things out. He was so, so intelligent."
Narrowing his eyes, Kazimir turns, regarding Odessa over his shoulder. "Then he tried to kill me. Maybe I could have not killed him as repayment, but… There's certain compunctions that come with my current vessel, certain insatiable desires that I simply," He looks away, "I was not prepared for." Swallowing, awkwardly, Kazimir dismisses any further concern with a cold turn of his head away from her. "Don't you have work to do? I mean, you've only got one person left now, I won't even have to choose."
Seconds of silence for Kazimir are minutes of hard contemplation for his minion. A chance to quell murderous rage. "Let Sylar go," Odessa says coldly. "You can't control him. You can't control his ability. Take me instead. You'll have all the knowledge you need to engineer the virus." She turns, rather than leave her back to the villain for too long. "The hunger will consume you. You'll lose everything."
"If I wanted you, Doctor Knutson," Kazimir shakes his head, lips curling into a smile. He never used to smile, not truthfully, but so much of who Sylar is imprints on to him, even his expressions. "I would have taken you back in Texas." He remains quiet for a few, long moments, just staring out into the darkness of the warehouse's disorganized mess. "Sylar is more useful, more powerful, for what will come after."
Finally turning around to fully regard Odessa, Kazimir looks at the young woman, then hangs his head. "You're not who or what I need, and I'll reign in his particular quirks in due time. I'll have eternity to do it in…"
"What is the point of all of this, Kazimir? Evolution is inevitable. You can wipe out all Evolved now, but it'll just come around again. What then?" Odessa's fingers don't just flex restlessly, they tremble at her sides with the effort it takes to rein in her own ability.
"You think — " He was about to say something, let something slip, but the words are stolen back behind a cage of teeth as his lips curl into a rueful snarl. "You don't need to worry yourself about my plans, Doctor Knutson, worry about what will happen to Mister Holden if you continue to be obstinate about fulfilling your obligations helping Doctor Suresh." She almost had him, "Now," one hand raises to motion to the door that leads further inside the facility. "You have work to do."
A sudden gash appears across Kazimir's chest, blood staining his now slashed shirt. It's as if it came out of nowhere. The only betrayal is the shard of broken glass - remnants of a shattered skylight - clutched in Odessa's hand, tainted with his blood. "If you touch Ethan Holden, I will cut out your wicked heart." The loss of Sylar would fade eventually, wouldn't it? "And I will trap your damned soul in the absence of time for eternity."
Without moving a muscle, save for the jerk of a hand to the wound on his chest, Kazimir wills a suddenly blunt force to strike Odessa in the forehead, blurring her vision and making her hearing go muffled for a moment, like being struck in the brow by a hammer. There's a jerking sensation, as the young woman is yanked forward off of her feet through the air by the unseen hand that grasps around her throat. "I have had enough of your posturing and threats."
The unseen hand is replaced, just as sense comes back to Odessa, by a real hand. Gloved, yes, but leather fingers pressing hard against the weight of her body suspended by her neck, "If you could kill me, you would have." A serpentine tendril of darkness rolls forth from Kazimir's raised arm, snaking up along his wrist before finding the scar at Odessa's neck, lunging inwards to hungrily penetrate the woman's throat. "I, however, can't kill you, because I need you."
Pain. Intense, hot, burning, dry, it courses through Odessa's throat like molten hot sand being poured down her neck, "Do you see where we stand? Do you see what your place is?" He sneers at that word, a term used to puppeteer Sylar's will. "Do you see who has the power here!?" His anger is made manifest in what he does to her throat, a ravaging with that serpentine coil that siphons her life from her very breath, allowing the wound on his chest seals shut with an ashen gray haze of smoke.
Pushing his arm forward, Kazimir throws Odessa down to the pallet, letting her crash down on the cloth-swaddled wood in a billowing cloud of dust. "Cry all you want, Nightingale." Her throat still burns, "No one will hear you now."
Odessa had forgotten about the effortless application of Sylar's telekinesis. It's not easy to defend against a blow you don't see coming. The woman teeters and nearly tumbles to the ground before she's snatched up and off her feet by an invisible hand - and then a very real one around her throat. She hangs limp as a rag doll even after she's no longer stunned, rather than give him the satisfaction of a struggle.
And then the pain begins. It's like burning alive from the inside out. Odessa's shrieks, shrill and terrible fill the air, echoing hollowly off the walls like the screams of the damned as her voice is taken from her. She hits the pallet with a dull crash and lays nearly motionless, save for a shift of her fingers.
Staring down at Odessa in silence, Kazimir closes his eyes and shakes his head, "Go back to work, Doctor Knutson." He turns from her prone form, moving to walk down off of the dais, stepping onto the concrete to leave his back to her. "I have someone else that needs a lesson in respect taught to them," he hesitates, smirking, "Even more than you."
He doesn't trust her to return directly to the lab, but at the same time, the tacky blood footprints he leaves on the floor across Eagle Electric might be a good sign that he may not even care anymore. Kazimir Volken is losing his mind, slowly but surely, and if something isn't done about him soon, his insanity is going to drag everyone else down with him.
Kazimir doesn't hear her rise, but the absence of her heartbeat and the trail of bloody footprints and drops from a soaked hem denote Doctor Knutson's return to the lab.
Some people require a velvet glove, others require an iron fist.
Kazimir Volken finally learned which works for Odessa Knutson.
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