Participants:
| Scene Title | Camisado |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Sit back, relax, sit back, relapse again. Odessa makes a return to the loving arms of morphine only to find herself in someone else's arms entirely. |
| Date | March 7, 2010 |
IDEK
It's evening, and finally done what he's called 'mentally recovering', Jack has finally let Mortimer know that he's not dead, and taken his body once again.
He's wearing a long greyish-green trenchcoat, going down to the blue jeans of his knees, which themselves are tucked into his black boots. He's as happy as can be, hands in his coat pockets. "'Alice' said Pooh to the young girl, 'I do believe this is Oz, oh bother'. 'Mister Pooh Bear?' Alice asked as she looked to the left, and then the right, and finally up, and noticed the shadow of a wheeler falling from the sky! 'What's that?!' 'Oh bother…' repeated Pooh."
He finishes all this, then clicks what sounds like a recorder in his pocket. "And that's chapter one of Pooh meets Alice: Adventures in Oz." After that bit of talking to himself, he glances to the ground in the alley, eyeing a seemingly stoned-out-of-her-mind woman, then hunches down with his knees bent. "I don't know how many times I have to say it, but using drugs is just asking to be possessed. Of course, being the good Samaritan that I am, and you being an attractive young lady, I guess I could take time out of writing my bestseller to help you." He flashes a toothy grin, then just stares, waiting to see what she says or does.
Walk in, take what you want, walk out.
Paying for shit is for chumps.
An addict is always an addict, even when they aren't using, and Odessa Knutson is no exception. She's always been a relapse waiting to happen, and it's happening right now. She thought she'd chosen a fairly run down area to hide in. One where she'd blend in with the stragglers and vagrants. In any other situation, she'd be doing this where she lives. But there are two problems with that. The first one being Abigail Beauchamp. The second one being Dreyfus. While perhaps Odessa wouldn't care about being evicted from the back room she's been banished to at Old Lucy's, her employer probably wouldn't be too happy to hear about it.
He probably wouldn't be too happy to know she's using again, either.
This is different, she told herself. After all, she has four broken fingers, so the morphine is medicinal rather than recreational. Though that doesn't stop her from administering a dose high enough to give her that lovely, languid feeling where pain exists, but it is something separate from her.
It does, however, stop her from noticing Jack's approach. Her head lifts suddenly, staring up with large and startled eyes from her crouch on the floor of the alley. She huddles a little tighter against the building. "Go 'way," she murmurs. "Leave me be. Don't need your help."
It also stops her from being able to stop him.
"Come on, Alice. What'd I tell you about eating things from the ground? Especially in this place." Jack pulls a phone from his pocket, seemingly texting someone, then looks back down at her. "Drugs take away our enlightenment. They let us peer into the dark reaches of reality, temporarily gain the true sight I once had, but Alice…" He reaches out to gently stroke the side of her face. "True sight isn't worth destroying yourself. But don't worry, I'll take you out of this little rabbit hole and we'll have ourselves a…"
He pauses, peering up for a moment in thought. "Well we'll get you sober at least. You're too pretty to die in an alley. Now an art show room on the other hand… but no, you're not going to die."
Wide blue eyes watch Jack's movements, each one registering a moment too late to really react to it. Odessa tilts her head slightly away from his hand as he touches her face, but she doesn't pull away completely. "I know your face," she whispers. "I saw you at…" She trails off, squinting for a better look.
Odessa leans back suddenly and shakes her head, blonde hair strewing about her face, sticking to lashes and fading lip gloss. "M'name's not Alice." It's not what she wanted to say, but thoughts aren't forming into coherent words and sentences just yet.
"We've never met, you can call me Jack. I call you Alice because you remind me of Alice. Eating things you shouldn't be eating, following your curiosity until the next thing you know, you're on a quest to find Dorothy and Christopher Robin because the Queen of Hearts has taken over Oz. Of course there's a plot twist, but…" But before Jack can finish, a black van stops at the end of the alley.
"Oh look, they're here! Let's go, Alice." Jack reaches forward to try and force her body over his shoulder so he can start taking her to the van, which has around four men in the back, each with a large red number on their helmet. 12, 37, 15, and 7. "You'll thank me later. Worst people could have found you. I met God in a bar once, played by Morgan Freeman, told me all about the time… well, I'm sure you already heard the story."
One thing Odessa can do is scream.
And she does, for all the good it does her. (Which is to say none at all.) Her hands, both broken and not, smack weakly against the man's back. Odessa never saw the sense in learning how to protect herself outside of use of her own ability, except when it allowed her to spend more time with Ethan. She doesn't remember any of what he told her now between her duress and the morphine dulling her senses. It seems like it was a lifetime ago.
She wishes she had listened better.
"Why do they always kick and scream when I clearly say I'm not gonna kill 'em? Oh, right, I'm not gonna hurt you either." Jack nods firmly, as if that were the entire problem, then lays her on a futon laying in the back of the van. He himself sits in a seat while someone slides the door closed, then the man with the 37 on his helmet gets on his knees and starts trying to check her pulse and look into her eyes while other men hold her down.
"She appears to have taken a high dosage of morphine." says 37, who sits back up while the others continue to hold her in place, and the van starts moving. "I'll need access to what we have back at the base, but she should be fine as long as we monitor her vitals while she comes down from the high."
Jack just keeps nodding, looking almost bored. "Yeah, doctor stuff. Let's do that."
Any woman's instinct when being held down by strangers is to kick and thrash and scream. "Let me go!" the blonde demands, her head swimming. "I'm not a junkie! Let me go!" Odessa distinctly remembers her own definition of not hurting someone and it really doesn't mean that no one's going to get hurt.
And she does hurt, her fingers bending awkwardly and painfully as she presses her palms flat against the futon mattress beneath her to attempt to gain leverage and push up and away from this undesired examination. How many of those has she performed? Maybe she's died and this is Hell. She always imagined it'd somehow be more fun than this. And she can't see Sylar anywhere, so this really can't be Hell. Preceding her in death (or so she's been told), it stands to reason that he should be here, too. Even if it's just to laugh at her.
"Stop!"
"Young lady," 37 says with the tone of an older doctor, someone definitely out of the age range of both Mortimer and Odessa. "I'll give you something to calm you down." And soon, she finds herself with a pin prick into her arm, suddenly fading into unconsciousness.
IDEFK
It's hard to say how long she's been asleep, but when she wakes up, she can still feel the slight haze of morphine relaxing her body. She's cleaner than she was before, and wearing a fresh white cotton nightgown. There are no windows in the room she wakes up in, and the door is metallic and sealed with keycodes and such. Jack's room has shelf upon shelf of strange clockwork invention, safes of varying sizes embedded into the walls, schematics plastered everywhere and two workspaces, one with his computer and lots of files, and the other where he works on his smaller inventions.
He's sitting in his black comfortable computer chair, across from the foot of the bed, watching her as she begins to stir. He no longer has the jacket on, just his jeans, boots, and a long-sleeved white button up shirt. She can see that his left hand is robotic, with a thin bronzed outer shell for flexibility. "Don't worry, we had women wash and dress you, I believe in giving a woman her modesty."
Modesty is something Odessa gave up shortly after realising she wasn't going to be escaping Moab Penitentiary. While she's still rather disturbed that she's just been kidnapped, it isn't as though this is prison or anything.
Though prison may be preferable.
"I don't have any money," Odessa tells Jack. "And no one will pay ransom for me." The woman sits up in the bed, drawing her knees up to her chest. "You really should just let me go."
"Money? Money is just something that sucks the meaning out of life." Jack says with that slight smile on his face as he stands, moving to sit on the side of the bed, pulling his knee up slightly so he can turn and face her. "You're here because you have a problem, because you can't find meaning in life, so you're wasting it with feeling nice and gaining temporarily enlightenment through artificial means. You're here to be cured! I'm not letting you go until I learn a few things about you, like who you are."
Odessa is taken aback by Jack's explanation, to say the least. She leans away from the man, apprehensive. "Casse-toi," is her only response, whispered low and venomously.
"That's a start." Jack laughs, suddenly laying across the foot of the bed with his hands behind his head, seemingly not having a care in the world at the moment. "Occupation? Your reason for choosing to use drugs? And perhaps you could even tell me what's missing in your life? Just relax, I'm helping you, no need to be in a rush. And right now you're in the safest room in the entire city. It'd take ten nuclear bombs to get in here! So there's no one to hurt you."
Except, perhaps, for the madman at the foot of the bed.
Slowly, Odessa shifts her weight, until she finally makes a bolt for the door, frantically pulling at the handle as though it might open for her.
Jack just lays there, watching her pull at the door. She may as well be inside a safe, really, considering this is one of the only rooms even his men can't get in and out of without him. There's the actual locks, and then there's the keycodes, and the fact that it's thick as hell steel. "So this will be one of those things where you don't cooperate and you make futile attempts at both escaping and killing me, despite the fact that I repeatedly say I'm just going to help you?" He vaguely waves his hand around the shelves in the room. "There's guns, knives, bombs, things that look like guns, knives, and bombs, but are actually other things. You can take your chances with those if you like, or we could just sit here and talk. I get to know you and help you get past this drug problem of yours. If I weren't celibate I'd say we could just skip it all and have sex, but I'm a new man! Well, one half of me is at least."
One fist pounds on the keypad, hoping to hell that one random smack will somehow trigger the right sequence and open the door. When that yields nothing, Odessa sags against the door, defeated. "Let me out," she begs without turning to look behind her. "I don't want to be here. I don't want to talk to you. And I don't want your help."
"I want you to be here, I want you to talk to me, and I want to help. We can literally be here all night until you decide to talk. Do you even know what's outside that door?" Jack laughs, as if he has the punchline of a joke at the tip of his tongue, then holds a finger up. "Around twenty men, and an even larger door. This is my bedroom, a lot quieter in here. Why don't you take a seat and tell me why you're using drugs?"
Odessa turns around and leans her back against the door, her good hand braced against the handle to keep her from sliding to the floor entirely. She holds up her other hand, all metal splints and medical tape. "It's fucking broken. I don't take drugs, I manage pain." She scowls furiously. "There. I'm not an addict," really, no, really, "so you can let me go."
"I have doctors working for me, you don't need that much morphine for a simple broken hand." Jack stands, gripping the shoulder of his shirt as he approaches her, then suddenly rips the sleeve off and throws it to the floor. He reveals just how far that robotic arm goes, far more advanced looking than anything one would see in a hospital. It's completely bronzed-colored, though one can see various types of gears, thousands, all spinning under the little openings in the thing metalic shell that protects them. "I didn't need that much morphine when I lost this!"
He slams the hand on the door next to her head, peering down into her eyes, smiling again. "I'm not a person you make excuses to, I'm not a person you escape, and I am going to help you, like it or not. It's just a matter of how easy you want to make it. So how easy are you going to make it?" he asks, as if her answer will determine the entire course of her stay.
Odessa first watches the torn-away sleeve flutter to the ground, and then watches the gears whirring and clicking away in his artificial limb, admiring the way bronze meets flesh at the elbow the way only a doctor can.
At least until the SLAM! next to her head pulls her out of her thoughts. The blonde lets out a sound that's something like a squeak or a whimper, and she shrinks further back against the unbudging door, her eyes screwing shut tightly. Her face turns away, tucking against her own shoulder in a way she's seen Eileen do before when she doesn't want to talk to someone. "Don't, please…" Odessa begs softly.
"What part of I'm not going to hurt you don't you understand?" Jack asks again, then moves to grab her unbroken wrist with his human arm, trying to force her back to the bed so they can sit. "Now tell me why you need those drugs, and don't give me crap about your broken hand or you'll be here for a long time!" He's commanding, not so much angry, just being very firm now.
It doesn't take much to drag the frail woman back to the bed. Her knees collide with the end of it and she goes tumbling down, caught only by the hold Jack keeps on her wrist. "What part of I don't want to talk to you don't you understand?" The protesting is feeble at best. When she's released, she crawls the rest of the way up onto the bed so she can huddle against the pillows and the headboard, watching her kidnapper warily.
Jack's expression suggests a growing impatience, which he seems to tries to hold back with deep breathes. Staying as sane as you can be while being insane is very difficult, and he seems to be losing that grip, bit by bit. "You're not addicted, right? And you won't talk to me."
He reaches under the bed, sitting a rather large bag of morphine on the bed, and a needle next to it, watching her. "We can sit here not talking, and you can sit here while you come down off your high, I'm sure things will get really fun then. Or you can make it easier…"
Then, out of the blue, he just smacks the needle and the bag away, reaching to grab her ankle with that bronze hand and pull her closer to him from across the bed. "Well you missed your chance for easy!" Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a sharp scalpel, staring down at her foot. "We're going to talk, or I take out my celibacy frustrations using this scalpel."
Odessa's eyes grow slightly wider when she's presented with more means to her high. She hesitates, actually considering shooting up for a moment. But a moment is all it takes for Jack to snap. Everything goes flying and Odessa's head thunks! against the headboard as she's dragged down the bed. Cotton fabric hikes up exposing a dangerous length of slender calf and thigh. Dazed, she can't quite formulate a reaction to her current predicament that isn't a groan and an unintelligible slur in French.
Jack's eyes widen as much as hers did when presented with morphine, only he's presented with thigh and suddenly releases her ankle, standing up and sliding the scalpel back into his pocket. He paces back and forward, hand on his forehead. "Resist temptation, keep the vow, my honor and word are the strongest things I have, she wouldn't respect me if I broke the vow," he says to himself as he seems to snap from psychotic break to trying not to stare at dangerously exposed flesh. There are two people having trouble going cold turkey in this room, apparently.
What kind of freak is this guy worried will respect him less if he fucks someone than cuts them up? Odessa perhaps wouldn't be surprised if she knew who that woman was, really. She shakes her head slowly, a low moan slipping past her lips as she blinks past the stars in her vision. She focuses on the pacing form in the room. "I… I won't tell her," she whispers, sliding her legs apart just a little. "I'll let you, if you'll let me go." It wouldn't be the first time she's attempted to trade sex for freedom. But this time, there's no minx hiding in her eyes. There's no playfulness or flirtation. It's a straight and apprehensive offer to barter.
"It's the principle!" Jack corrects, though his eyes are certainly glued to the offer. "You can't give your word to a woman for half a year, then suddenly go back on it! This was supposed to be proof that I could be committed." He holds his hand out dramatically, and turns his head away. "Don't tempt me! I resisted guaranteed world domination once."
Slowly, like one might behave in the presence of a wild animal, Odessa recomposes herself, pulling her gown back into place and sitting up on the bed again with her knees hugged tightly to her chest as she watches Jack kind of lose it. "Please just let me go. She wouldn't be happy if she knew you were holding someone against their will, would she?"
"I don't think she'd care. She knows I'm not right in the head." Jack glances over, sighing in relief when he sees everything in place again, and starts digging into his pocket for the scalpel. "So, where were we… Oh yeah, you were going to start talking and I was threatening to cut you up if you didn't. So go ahead, tell me when you use drugs and then we can work out why you will stop."
"You stay the fuck away from me," Odessa warns with more bravery than she feels, the fingers of her good hand flexing around the fabric of the borrowed nightgown. "You said you weren't gonna hurt me," she reminds, a tremor in her tone betraying her fear.
"Oh yeah, I did say that, didn't I?" Jack frowns and slides the scalpel back into his pocket, then takes a seat at the foot of the bed, hunching over as if she caught him in some horrible loophole. "I completely forgot I said that. But I'm still not letting you go. So we're at a stalemate."
He's quiet for a while, thinking as he leans back on his hands, staring up at the ceiling. "How about we just fuck and I give you the morphine, and we don't tell anyone this happened?"
Dark blue eyes watch Jack sag with disappointment. Part of Odessa can understand that feeling, but she's certainly glad she's not about to be vivisected.
When he makes his offer, dark blonde brows furrow. "Seriously?" Odessa's tone is incredulous, but there's a hint of hope there. Win win?
"I don't have anything against drugs, I just hate watching bored people get hooked on them. But I worked it all out in my head just now." Jack pokes his skull a few times. "If we get it on, that means you're not bored, and since I'm helping you, I think it's already to break my celibacy vow, and I'll give you the morphine since I'll be fine with the drugs again." Convoluted, but… "I'll have my doctor give you the morphine later, that way you won't OD."
Odessa looks the man called Jack up and down slowly. He's at least attractive, so it could be worse. But her stomach still knots up. The situation is less than ideal, but if she comes out of it intact, then she'll put a tally in the victory column.
"I don't need the morphine," Odessa murmurs, rising up on her knees and gathering the hem of her gown in one hand slowly. "I just want to go home."
"Well now you're just making sex sound like work." Jack says as he raises the metallic hand to rip the rest of his shirt off. One doesn't get to be the leader of a biker gang/cult without a bit of working out and training. "I know I kidnapped you and all, but work with me here. What can I do for you to make it, I don't know, fun?" he asks, looking amused.
Odessa has no idea how to answer that question. So she doesn't. Maybe it isn't work, but for her, it isn't about fun. It's about keeping her secrets and keeping her head, even if it means sacrificing a bit of her dignity. When she pulls the gown up and over he head in one practised, fluid motion, she hopes the sight of her makes him forget his question…