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| Scene Title | Drawing Lines |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | In which both sides prepare for battle. |
| Date | November 24, 2010 |
”Lulled in the countless chambers of the brain, our thoughts are linked by many a hidden chain; awake but one, and in, what myriads rise!”
- Alexander Pope
A set of impossibly long, winding, wooden stairs lead up from the basement into a kitchen that hasn't been redecorated since the 1970s. The appliances, save for the stark white refridgerator, are mustard yellow, and the blacksplash is a strange combination of striped wallpaper bearing a fruit print. The floor is covered in a floral linoleum - large pink roses set in an avocado field. The wood - trim, cabinets, and even the scrollwork round table and chairs, has been stained to look darker than it actually is.
Reuben sits across the table from Delia as she drinks her hot chocolate out of a paisley mug big enough to make soup in, drumming his fingers on the table. He's been looking around him anxiously ever since they climbed out of the basement and he made her the drink using the ancient faux-wood microwave. "Hurry up," he says after a moment, glaring at her. "We have to get the ogre before he wakes up and finds us and sticks us both back in the dungeon or, or, or, EATS us."
Sluuuuuuuurp
Sllllluuuuurrrrrrrppppp
Delia's not exactly the quietest drinker of hot chocolate. Her exaggerated sips are punctuated with a smacking of lips and a long aaaaahhhh at the end of each one, creating a little song of sounds. While it's not the best hot chocolate she's ever taste in her life, it's tastier than she's had in a long time. Especially lately where she's been on a diet of nothing.
The news about the sleeping ogre and being eaten cause the giant mug to slip out of the little girl's hands as she starts twists her head toward the boy. Her tight little curls bounce and then wiggle as they settle into place, her already large eyes made even wider with fear. "Nuh uh!" The protest is a little too loud and echoes through the otherwise silent kitchen. "Ogres don't eat queens! They eat knights and princesses… and goats!"
"SHHH!"
Reuben leans forward, pressing a finger against his lips as he tries to quiet the girl with a sound that itself isn't exactly productive. "You're not queen until we get the ogre and I retake my castle. That was the deal." He stands then, slipping off the chair with only the smallest of scrapes of the legs against the flooring.
He pulls his blue Polo shirt down in a strong gesture, something that looks amiss on a young child. "We have to build an army. But I know where my soldiers have been locked up. I need you to help me get them out."
The little girl's eyebrows shoot into a very displeased vee as the instructions are given. "You said when I got the chains off… It's not fair! You can't always change the rules…. I'm te— " But there's no one to tell, except the ogre.
The front of her little white sundress is stained with numerous drips of hot chocolate that didn't quite hit her mouth. Noisy and messy drinker, apparently. Pushing herself off her chair, she lands with her two bare feet in the puddle of hot drink that she just dumped all over the floor. A grimace forms over her dainty features as she picks one foot off the floor and then trades it off for the other, shaking the mess off of her toes.
"Can I have a unicorn? Do you have a unicorn soldier? Can it be mine?"
"It's my castle," Reuben says firmly, eyeing the mess the little girl has made. As troublesome as she's proving to be, he needs her. "You can be queen after we defeat the Ogre. And…I don't know if there is a unicorn. If you find one, you can keep it." Hopefully that will satisfy her, if only for now.
He starts toward the archway that leads from the kitchen to the rest of the house, pausing momentarily to wave her along. "Come on. Don't be suck a slow-poke, or I'll have to make you the Queen of Slugs and Snails."
Seemingly satisfied with that answer, Delia totters after Reuben. "I bet there's a bajillion-gazillion unicorns and I'm going to ride all of them and they'll pull my carriage and they'll all be my best friend." Nevermind that Reuben said thay the two of them would be best friends, unicorns are better. They have horns.
With her head hung, the little scowl on the redheaded girl's face as she's threatened with a new and different kingdom speaks plainly what words can't. She doesn't even have a crown either. Keeping only a few steps behind Reuben as he leads the way, she's doesn't dawdle too much to pick at the wallpaper or peel some of it off along the way.
When the paper tears under the tiny girl's fingers, the storm outside picks up new strength. The wind howls, knocking closed shutters against windowsills and buffeting the house as if to pick it up and fling it elsewhere. Reuebn spins on his heel to stare at Delia for a moment before he casts his wary gaze upward.
As quick as it began, the storm settles back into it's constancy, but Reuben's ire doesn't abate.
He reaches out to grab Delia's arm, and while he doesn't hold her tightly enough to hurt her, his grip is firm. He pulls her down the hall, past what appears to be a dining room and into a grand foyer dusty and tattered from neglect. A staircase spills onto the floor, leading up to a second floor and a balcony that curls around two sides of the room. But when Reuben dashes for it with Delia in tow, he doesn't head for the steps, but a small space behind it, shadowed and somewhat secret.
"Shh," he whispers, his eyes still wide as he listens, his ears seeming to grow just slightly larger as he strains to hear. "Don't make any noise."
Delia stop picking at the wallpaper as soon as the storm mounts in intensity. Following Reuben's gaze toward the ceiling, her lower lip trembles and her eyebrows tweak upward at the inner edges in worry. "I-is the ogre waking up?" she whispers quietly. Already her eyes are filling with tears formed of pure terror. If there were any doubts in her mind before about vanquishing their foe, they've been quashed.
Running along behind him, the smaller of the two redhead children's feet pat along the floor leaving a sticky trail of dried chocolate milk behind her. The only sound she makes is that of the contents of her makeshift pack, jangling on her back. When he stops in the shadowy cupboard, all of her noise, even breathing, ceases.
Just in time for thunder to rumble outside, and for the chains on the door to shake.
Elsewhere…
She's been wandering.. wandering and wandering. And now she's just sitting in the hallway right next to her bedroom door. Sighing, she puts her head in her hands and stomps her feet on the floor. Frustrated. "I love you, but you're being overbearing!" she yells loudly for her father to hopefully hear and then she's up against the wall and making her way into her bedroom where she lays on the bed and stares up at the ceiling.
"How can I help, if I'm stuck here dad? Whose gonna take care of you?" Molly Walker is feeling pretty defeated. Brushing a few strands of blonde hair out of her eyes, she looks over at the mirror hanging on her wall. "I know you try your best to protect me.." she says softly before sitting up in the bed and then leaving to go and look out the window.
"That isn't your job."
The voice that answers Molly is one she hasn't heard in over a week's time, but one she's begged for. Visible as the faint, ghostly reflection in the window pane, he stands in the doorway to the hall, dressed not in his suit and tie, but in a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, with a button-up shirt hanging open over top. The gray is gone from his hair, but he looks as tired as Molly's ever seen him, and worry pales his face. "To take care of me," he says with a slight lift of his eyebrows. "That isn't your job. And yeah, I try my best." He looks away from her, over his shoulder to the hall beyond, as if something were waiting to leap from the shadows.
Outside, the rain drums against the window, and distant thunder peals across the sky.
Beneath the Grand Staircase…
Reuben sits as still as a statue, his pale eyes moving systematically across what little of the ceiling he can see beyond the small cupboard beneath the stairs. Several minutes pass, or seem to pass, before he looks at Delia and speaks again, but he still lifts a finger to his lips.
“He knows I got out,” he whispers, a thread of guilt woven in his words. “We have to be extra super special ninja careful now, okay?” He slips out of the door then, creeping along the side of the stairs until he can peer through the railing to the other side of the room, where, set in the crimson red walls and set off by rich drapery that might, at one point, have been gold, is a large set of doors.
Reuben nods toward them. “The army is in there. But I betcha it’s locked. He always locks it. We gotta find the key.”
The little girl gives her counterpart a grimace before she looks at the door and then back to him. “Where do we find it? This house is too big to find one key.” A hopeless expression sets itself onto Delia’s face and she huffs and slides down the paneling to sit on the floor.
Drawing her legs up to hug them against her chest, she rests her little chin on her knees and looks up at Reuben with a hangdog look. “I don’t have a key in my bag… I just have other things.” A great many other things, none of them being a key. Not that she knows of. Lowering her lids to shadow her eyes partway, she begins to think and then gasps, looking up at the boy.
“I know!” Her exclamation comes a little too loud and she claps both of her hands over her mouth. Waiting a moment or two, she moves them just enough to cup her lips and whispers, “We need to find a closet… inside the closet we can find a skeleton… the skeleton will have a key.”
“No we don’t, stupid,” Reuben retorts, his face screwing up with boyish disgust. “You’re thinking of a skeleton key. That’s a key that opens anything. Not a key that a closet skeleton has. Stupid.” He rolls his eyes and sighs, both gestures heavily exaggerated. He peeks back toward the doorway, then up the stairs.
“It’s important, so it’ll be with all the other really important stuff,” he thinks aloud. “The only other room down here is the dining room. And the library. Those aren’t where you keep important things.”
Which would imply they have to go up.
Back on the third floor…
"You don't take care of yourself." So someone has too and since Kay isn't around.. The teen places a hand to the glass, continuing to look outside. "Where are you?" she asks with a hint of a frown. It's the voice and man she's been screaming, but she can't turn around to him. She won't. Maybe if she just looks at him through the window pane, he'll stay there. But if she turns, he'll vanish. Maybe she's finally gone crazy inside of here.
"I.. I'm so mad at you." She says, shoulders shaking as her hands curl into fists. "I.." Molly shakes her head and beats the wall next to the window with a fist. Her eyes wide as she stares at her father's reflection. "You can't keep doing this.. disappearing for months for work and then coming back and wanting to place me on lockdown and.. you just need to be in my life. No more leaving."
"I thought you had friends in the city," Matt says with a shake of his head, his tone giving away his reluctance to speak on his subject even as he deftly avoids the one about his personal health and well being. But in a place like this, no subject is completely unavoidable. "You can come to D.C. It'd be safer there. We can get you set up in a real school, even, if that's really what you want. But I have to work, Molls. I have that job too."
He sighs, shoving his hands into his pockets and looking at his feet. "Look, when this is all over, we'll talk. I promise. But right now, I need you to go home. It's…something's wrong, and I don't want you to get hurt."
"I have friends in the city dad, it's not about that!" She wheels around to face the man and kind of tilts backwards and forwards for a moment, dizzy. She really did think he was going to disappear. "No, we came to New York for a reason. I'm tired of moving around. You get a office here, or you find another position. Jeez, why can't we just go away, haven't we been through enough?" Molly sounds exasperated and she throws her hands up.
"You're trying to save the world and you're losing your daughter. No gift, no trip to get ice creams or burgers can change that." Molly looks at her father, sadness in her eyes. "I just want you to be present, my brother wants the same I'm sure." She then leans against the wall and holds herself.
Reuben and Delia
“You’re so mean, I bet that’s why the ogre chained you up and didn’t eat you… because you’re a meanie and you’d taste like sour lemons.” Pushing herself up off the floor, Delia brushes off her dress and quite unlike a ninja, begins to stomp up the stairs.
One by one, she climbs, holding onto the rail tightly for support. When she reaches the halfway point, she pauses and looks up the rest of the way and breathes a soft sigh. The expulsion of air results in her shoulders sagging and her entire demeanor looking pitiful and tired. “I don’t wanna climb anymore, I like my idea better…”
…which blinks the pair of them inside a room that looks like it’s been plucked from a hard-boiled detective novel. The letters on the door read E-I-C-F-F-O, and are peeling on the frosted glass. The walls are covered with maps, some more zoomed-in and detailed than others, but all bearing thumbtacks laden with photographs, notes on scraps of paper, and strings.
The desk in the middle of the room is covered in files, as are the tops of the two filing cabinets that flank it. Unlike the other rooms in the house so far, this one has the least amount of dust. The lamp on the desk is even still turned on, and the files spread across the blotter detail personages such as Rupert Carmichael, Claire Bennet, and Melissa Peirce.
Reuben doesn’t react to the sudden change of scenery at first. He stands there, wide-eyed with wonder, as if this were the first time he were ever in this particular room. “That’s so cool,” he says with a whisper that draws a grin across his features. “I dunno why you wanna be queen. You’d make a great general.”
“Generals are old and fat and ugly old men with fat and ugly… Like you.” Delia flounces into the room and jumps up into the office chair. Using the desk as leverage, she swings it around and around in a dizzying circle. When it stops her head wobbles a bit and her eyes cross and uncross before she straightens out. “That was fuuuuuuunnnnn…”
No time for more office chair games, she sits behind the desk with a stern look on her face and grabs a pen to balance between her nose and lip like a mustache. “Secretary,” she commands mimicking her best version of a deep man voice. “I need you to get me hot chonklit… and a piece of cherry pie.” Then she takes the pen off her lip and begins doodling on the top of the desk, first her name, then a picture of a flower and some hearts, then a large stickman beside a small stickgirl with curly hair. “This is my giant, he could eat the ogre.”
“Yeah, but you’re giant isn’t here,” Reuben says, brushing aside Delia’s games. He moves around to the desk and starts opening drawers and digging through them, throwing out the larger items so he can get to the smaller ones. That’s when a clunky, snub-nosed revolver lands on the blotter, right on top of Delia’s drawing.
The house groans, settling in it’s foundation but sounding for all the world like it’s answering Reuben’s frenzied quest with a laugh. On this second floor, the windows aren’t shuttered, and Delia can plainly see the night sky shrouded with clouds and the rain as it hits the window in steady sheets.
“We need to find that key,” he says, determination making his face pinken as he slams one drawer shut to open another one. “Help me look!”
Delia’s hands wrap around the revolver and she points it first at the window, then looks into the barrel as she squints one eye shut to get a good view. Seeing nothing interesting at all, she puts the gun down, accidentally squeezing the trigger and firing off a shot at the wall.
The bang and crash of glass as a picture is knocked from its place only to fall to the floor causes her to jump and freeze in place. Her large eyes wider than they’ve been since the threat of ogre eating begin to water and a high pitch squeal erupts from her tiny frame as she begins to cry. She throws her arms down onto the blotter and curls her head into them and sobs as though the world was ending.
Helping Reuben? Not even a thought as she wails, soaking the blotter with snot and tears.
As if the sound of gunfire weren’t loud enough, the storm outside rages in response, with lightning cracking across the sky and thunder barreling in it’s wake. Reuben, like the house, quivers, his eyes snapping from the evidence of the bullet in the wall and the ceiling. He tugs open the last drawer, and inside, buried beneath a tangle rubberbands and string, lies a large iron key.
“It’s okay,” Reuben says even as the storm outside makes it hard to hear. “I’ve got the key - we can go now! Shhh! You’re only gonna make it worse by crying! Only babies cry. Are you a baby? Stop it!”
But, of course, Reuben’s words aren’t the sort to ease a child’s fears, only exacerbate them. And so Delia cries, and cries, and cries, and cries…
Matt and Molly
"Fine." She goes to sit on the bed and she folds her hands in her lap. "We have a lot to talk about dad, it isn't so simple." Tears well up in Molly's eyes, "And excuse my language, you can ground me if you want. I mean the real ground me, not the stick me in your brain ground me. But.. you're being an ass." She looks at her father and then closes her eyes. She knows that's not exactly respectful to say to your parent but.. they aren't exactly a normal father-daughter duo.
But closing her eyes doesn't do what it would if Molly were in her own body. Instead, she is only assaulted with a montage of similar conversations. With Janice. With Kaydence. Even past conversations with Molly herself. This script is far from new - Matt's played this game more than a few times, and each time, he's lost.
"I'm sorry," Matt's voice echoes. "I love you, and I'm proud of you, but you aren't Mattie." There is a pause, and when she hears it again, Matt's voice sounds further away. "Stay safe, kiddo."
When Molly opens her eyes, she's not in her bedroom at Dorchester Towers. She's lying in bed at Redbird Securities, an IV needle in her arm. From the way the light peeks through the bars on the window, it must be nearing afternoon. There is a chair pulled up next to her bed, where Claire Bennet is seated.
"I hate you." She says groggily as she wakes up and looks around the room. No.. not the needles! She quickly sits up and touches her face and then her arms and then her legs. "Finally."
"I.. ughhhh!" she screams in frustration and then coughs a bit. "Oh." She says and blinks before.. "CLAIRE!!" She leaps out of bed and knocks the IV over as she leaps for the girl in the chair. "Oh my god! My dad needs to see a shrink."
Glancing up from the magazine, Claire freezes in mid page flip in time to get a teenager in her lap. "Oof." The periodical is dropped in favor of wrapping arms around the teen. "Careful Molly! You tear that IV out and Abby will have my head." Her finger ease the pull of the IV on the girls arm.
Only once she's sure Molly is safe from losing the IV, does Claire relax. "Honestly, Molly… I think most of us anymore could use a good shrink." A small smile is given to her roommate.
"Well I don't need it anymore." She says as if to say, Silly Claire. But then the clairvoyant is hugging Claire tightly and scooting back to her bed. "You won't believe the things I saw in my dad's head. I mean.. it freaked me out! And.." now she remembers, "And I can't get to him.. no matter what I do."
Looking out the window, Molly thinks back to being inside her dad's head. She's not sure when she'll talk to her father again. A frown crosses her lips as she ponders this.