Participants:
| Scene Title | Neither and Both |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | S̷͖̟̫͔̯̐̓́̃͘ō̶̹̹͛͠m̷̨̹̩̯͐̽̕è̷̱͋͑̏t̷͚͉͔̺̿͋̈́̋ḧ̸̯́͒͝ͅį̷͖͖̝͛̅̓͘͜ņ̴̬̜̘͛̓̅̓ğ̴̛̘̪̜͊ ̶̪̅̂̔͝į̴̧͇̯́͛s̷͚̯̳̃͊ ̵̗͍̫̤͗̾̋͜ŵ̴̺͔̜̻̙̿̓͌ṙ̴͚͆̊ö̵͈́̍n̶̝̋͊̓͠g̷͖̼̮̞͚̎.̸̥̥̠̀̆͐̚͠ |
| Date | October 16, 2008 |
«…presented their findings to a closed-door hearing earlier today.»
The rumbling of an engine sounds like some great lion, stirring in his den on a pile of bones.
«Following the hearing, Secretary Lujan confirmed that the government would move forward with the Open Network Security Act, underlining the President’s commitment to protecting national infrastructure.»
The blood is so red, it is the color of a candy apple, sweet and sticky to the touch, with a hard and crunchy interior.
«Swiftly following the signing of the Open Network Security Act, President Dole appointed Pete Hemmer as the chief of the newly formed Department of Infrastructure Securities.»
She has never tasted a candy apple, but they look so good in the movies.
«Wall Street took a dive following the news, with widespread plunges across telecommunication companies dealing with the nascent World Wide Web.»
The projector reel keeps turning, even though the film reel inside has run out
«Some pundits are calling this the deathblow of the Internet, while many more see tighter control on internet access a necessary precaution against terrorism in light of the Diablo Canyon incident.»
slapping against the reel with a constant flip
«To dive deeper into today’s news we’re joined by former White House tech advisor Walt Mossberg.»
flip
«Walt, thank you for joining us tod—»
flip.
Somewhere
11:17 am
The murmuring voices of a radio alarm clock slowly pull Odessa from a deep sleep.
“Ace, what the fuck?” she murmurs as she rolls over, reaching to swat at her partner and finding only empty mattress on the first attempt. “It’s too early for news.” That’s something they digest with coffee and toast. When he doesn’t respond or cause the droning to abate, she opens one eye.
Then the other.
Hot sunlight dapples her bedroom, spilling through partly-open blinds. Directly in front of her, blearily coming into focus, is a wall calendar that shows stylized print of a man in a suit holding a bottle of brandy and bushel of cherries while the words CHERRY MAURICE CHEVALIER are stenciled across the side at a jaunty angle. On the calendar below, July 7th is circled in red marker with “DON’T FORGET” written in the middle.
The year on the calendar reads, deliriously, 1997.
Odessa sits up quickly and looks around. This is not her house and her husband is not in bed next to her. She looks down and finds herself dressed in an oversized nightshirt emblemized with the bright yellow visage of Woodstock from Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. She runs her fingers through her hair, pulling a strand forward to check the color of it and finding it to be as blonde as expected. Her heart races. She doesn’t have her ability anymore, so experiencing her life non-linearly shouldn’t be possible anymore.
The covers are thrown back so that she can swing her legs over the side of the bed unhindered. Getting to her feet, she moves to the window to peek between the slats of the blinds. She doesn’t have the gangly limbs of an awkward teenager, so she surmises quickly this isn’t a suppressed memory newly making its way to the surface.
With a deep breath in, in the hopes of calming herself, she reaches out with her senses, searching for sign of anyone nearby.
Odessa is left wanting in search of her ability. That alone is enough to fill her with unease. Worse, the city outside the window is as unfamiliar as the bedroom. It’s not particularly large, she can see the arid skyline beyond the low-set cityscape. It feels like somewhere in Arizona, maybe Nevada or—her stomach turns—Utah.
Shifting her focus, Odessa can see herself reflected in the glass of the window. She recognizes herself. Not the face of Ourania Pride but the face she left behind: Odessa Price. The adult version of herself that survived the Civil War. Not the fresh-faced young woman still at the Company. This certainly wasn’t a repressed memory, which made it all the more wrong.
Quickly scanning the studio apartment, Odessa feels it at once familiar and unfamiliar. There are elements to it that ring true. The decor is distinctly hers. The bedroom is just partitioned off from the rest of the house by a folding screen. The living room has a throw rug of rich brown shag. The couch is low-set and lovingly old. A record player sits idle by one end of the sofa and a milk crate full of albums tucked away below it. The kitchenette has—
—a formica table.
The same one her foster parents had.
Odessa feels dread trickling up her spine, like insult being added to injury via inversion of gravity. This isn’t the weirdest scenario she’s ever encountered, which is in itself just the sort of thing that’s utterly laughable if not for the fact that she’s in the middle of it with no idea as to how or why. She’ll laugh about it later. Maybe.
A shudder runs through her as she looks around for signs that anyone else lives here, and for a purse or wallet, hoping to find an ID or literally anything else that will tell her about where she is.
Even in the dreams brought on by the ange, Gabriella Milos, she never looked properly like herself. The version of herself she never admits out loud that she misses horribly. Not since that night out with—
“Oh, fuck.”
«Arthur Petrelli»
The name comes over the alarm clock radio. Odessa had entirely tuned it out until then. She misses a few moments of context as her brain whips from one shocking moment to the next before catching on to the rest of it:
«—to include new oversights for all federal investigations. Secretary Petrelli then doubled down on the FBI’s commitment to bringing all members of the hacker group responsible for the Diablo Canyon incident to justice. An investigation which has so far been unable to produce a suspect.»
As if the radio broadcast wasn’t enough, the sudden ring of a cordless phone mounted on the wall by the kitchenette adds to the chorus of noises and thoughts rattling around in Odessa’s mind.
“I’m gonna throw up,” Odessa mutters to herself, feeling a sense of vertigo. This isn’t just a potential jaunt through time, but potentially another alternate she’s not been aware of ‘til now. She tries to sort through the jumble of memories that aren’t hers, but reside in her brain all the same, trying to pick through what’s Destiny’s in the hope of finding a correlation to her world. At least that would (mostly) lock down one variable.
She stares at the phone and wonders what happens if she answers and doesn’t sound like whoever she’s meant to be. What happens if she doesn’t answer the phone? Taking a breath to steel herself, she strides over and pulls the butter yellow phone off its mount. She flips up the antenna on the base station out of some decades delayed habit of muscle memory and resumes her search for some kind of identifier.
She gets an idea.
Depressing the soft plastic button labeled Talk, she holds the phone to her ear and says nothing, only listening.
Silence, at first. The awkward silence of a dead line. But whatever jumble of thoughts Odessa was trying to sift through are swept off the table of her mind after the person on the other end speaks up:
«Kara?»
Her hand trembles.
«Are you there?»
English with a notable French accent. Unmistakable.
What?
What?
Odessa’s lashes flutter as she’s overcome, feeling faint. She draws in a deep breath. “Ah, oui,” she replies in a shaky voice. “Pardon, the connection seems to have some interference.” She considers, but does not attempt to mimic the sound of static with her voice. “I can’t hear so well. Who is this?” She needs more information. She needs to feel less like she’s going to start sobbing.
«Ta mère.» Juliette says with mild exasperation. «I can hear you fine on my end. Did you sleep through your alarm again?»
It’s such an ordinary conversation. A mundane mother-daughter chat. Surrounded by all of this.
Tears spring from the wells of Odessa’s eyes. “Maman? Quelque chose ne va pas.1” To say something is wrong is an understatement. “Où es-tu? J'ai besoin de ton aide.2” She sniffles loudly, her voice a tremulous thing. “I’m scared,” she tells her in plain English. “Mom, please help me.”
«Kara? Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas?»3
Static floods the line, an ebb and flow of crackling hisses like crashing waves on a distant shore.
«Ka—a»
The static grows louder, crackling at the maximum volume for the phone. But the noise continues, it exists outside the phone as a bass-filled sonorous hum that vibrates through the floorboards of Odessa’s home, rattles the windows, makes the lights flicker. A light blooms outside the windows, chromatic and iridescent. Electricity crackles and snaps across the faucet in the kitchenette, on the stovetop, dances across the cordless phone’s antenna.
Something is happening.
“Maman? Maman!” Odessa curses at first that she’s not on a corded landline where she could just toggle the receiver to try and clear the connection. This is what she gets for pretending there was interference on the line in the first place. She slaps the phone against her palm several times and brings it back to her ear. “Allo?”
Her eyes lift to look toward the windows when she realizes it isn’t the phone. Or not just the phone. “…Merde-moi.4”
With a shriek, she drops the phone and dances back a step, then to one side and the other. How do you get away from the floor? “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Wait.
She’s seen this.
“No, no, no!” She remembers protocol for hunkering down during tornadoes in the midwest and runs for the bathroom, hoping to find shelter there, only to skid to a stop just before reaching for the doorknob. “Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!”
Where the hell do you go when you know all hell is breaking loose and how it ends? Odessa decides to crawl under the bed and hope it’s heavy enough, bulky enough, awkwardly shaped enough to keep her protected.
The alarm clock radio hisses loudly as the chromatic lights in the sky shimmer and shift. They paint stained-glass colors on the floor, drifting into the shadows of the under-bed safehaven Odessa has made. The phone, visible on the floor in the distance, continues to crackle and sputter…
…but the climax never arrives. The sound plateaus but does not die off, the vibrations do not abate, but the house is not ripped out of its foundations nor is it whisked off to Oz. It is a Pink Floyd Laser Light Show at eleven o’clock in the fucking morning outside.
Across the floor Odessa hears the static crackle-pop of a voice on the other end of the phone.
It’s not her mother.
Odessa stares at the phone in wide-eyed horror, tears streaked down her face that she doesn’t even realize are there. Closing her eyes, she breathes deep and counts to three before lunging out from under the bed to scramble for the phone. “Who are you?!” she shouts, unsure if it’s safe to reach for it again.
She does. Long enough to smash the button for the speaker.
«We’re sorry, your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please hang up and try the call again.» The phone then emits a series of irritating, melodic beeps, and then begins dialing a call without any input on her end.
The light outside becomes pervasive, flooding through the windows. It bathes the walls in a kaleidoscope of colors, scintillating in constantly shifting geometric shapes with blurry edges. There is a static electricity in the air, making the tiny hairs on her arms stand on end, making every surface crackle and pop like touching a doorknob on a cold winter’s day.
Odessa’s eyes scan back and forth wildly in front of her, as though she might see the voice on the other end of the line. Recognition requires a beat to kick in and spark the realization that she’s hearing a recorded operator. Scrambling to her feet again, she nearly stomps on the phone on the floor in panicked frustration, until she registers the touchtones kicking in.
Her eyes still frantically roam the space, but this time focused in on her actual surroundings, and not somewhere in a distance she can’t see. There must be something she can interact with, or some means of escape. It comes to her — one of those rubber circles she’s always used to help open stubborn jars. If she’s standing in the shoes of another version of herself, then surely she’s left one of those laying haphazardly out on the counter as she always has. With that, she can hopefully grab the handle of the door to fling it open and get the fuck out of this deathtrap.
Still listening for the phone, she makes her move.
Kitchen drawers are tricky things. The Schroedinger’s cat of cabinetry. You never really know what’s going to be in a junk drawer until you open it, and perhaps if you’ve manifested it enough it’ll be precisely what you’re looking for.
When Odessa opens the drawer for the rubber grip mat, she finds the SLUSH-O branded tool right next to a pack of hair ties and clothes pins. By then the phone has ceased its ringing, and a voice that isn’t pre-recorded comes floating like haunting music down the corridors of someone else’s memory.
«Uh, hello?»
Familiar and unfamiliar at once. A voice Odessa heard in a dream, or maybe a movie. She sounds just as confused as Odessa is in this kaleidoscopic moment in time.
Odessa snatches the circle of textured rubber out of the drawer and shoves it closed.
Only to pull it open again quickly to snatch up a couple hair ties and slam it once more.
Hearing the voice, she turns sharply to the phone and walks back over to it, snatching it up and staring at it, bewildered. “Please don’t hang up. I’m in trouble and this is apparently the number that dialed in an emergency.” What is happening?! “Who— Who am I speaking to? My name is—” She halts just as she starts to sound out the O. “Kara.”
«I’m sorry.» The voice on the other end of the line says, followed by her voice sounding like it’s coming from down a long corridor, echoey and distant. «I won’t hang up but I don’t … I’m just a person.» Not an emergency services line. «I’m Erin. I’m a botanist.»
Why does that name—
voice
sound so
«Hi, Kara. I’m worried you have the wrong number?»
Everything in Odessa’s heart of hearts tells her no. This is not the wrong number. This is the right number. It cannot be any other number it has to be this one.
But why?
«Kara, are you still there?»
Odessa’s brow furrows as she listens to the sound of Erin’s voice over the cacophonous calamity all about her. “Yes!” she’s quick to shout when she realizes she’s had the question asked of her. Who is she?
“Erin. It’s okay that you’re just a person, a botanist.” She lets out a breathy laugh, tinged with her terror. “I’ve always thought botany is really cool. Where are you located? What city?” The things that run through a person’s head in times of crisis, even life and death, are incredible, random, and often don’t make sense.
“Does the name Odessa mean anything to you? Or Juliette?” Her voice shakes nearly as bad as her hands, tears clouding her vision again as she surveys the room, wondering if she’s about to die. If this time would be for the last time.
Maybe the one who’s accompanied her on her previous vision journeys will be waiting for her wherever it is that someone like her might end up in a situation like this. That would be a consolation.
She should be so lucky.
Lucky.
“You're so lucky that we seem to need you alive to avoid absolute calamity.”
No. Odessa’s never been lucky.
«You mean like the city in Poland?» Crackles over the phone, the edges of the receiver crumbling into fractal whorls of light. «Or the Shakespeare play? I–» A clicking noise comes over the receiver.
No, Odesa is in Ukraine.
No, that’s Othello.
Blinking, the blonde lets out a breathy laugh, her nerves beyond frayed. She’s about to utter a correction when—
«I am a man of action, it is true. In a world of terrible inaction, I think.» A familiar man’s voice briefly sputters over the phone, a ghost of moments past. Michel Valentin.
But it is quickly replaced by the other woman’s, Erin. «No. I don’t think so. Should I? I get the distinct sense that I’m…» Now she sounds afraid, too. «That something is wrong here. Where are you? I’m in New York, and I don’t…»
The voice trails off, even as the walls of Odessa’s cell begin to close in on her. The bare concrete, the shag carpet, the little cot, the low set Swedish table with a record player sitting on it. A vinyl copy of the Chicago soundtrack propped up against a lava lamp.
Pop.
Six.
Squish.
Uh-oh.
Odessa’s eyes widen when she hears that familiar voice. Michal? she almost asks. The familiar lilt of it creates a great pain in her chest that she can’t afford to dwell on. It can’t compete with the growing terror anyway. “Something is wrong.” That much she’s certain of. “I think I’m in Utah. Raffil Township.” Things start to shift and change and with a desperation, she blurts into the receiver, “Erin, quickly, what year is this?”
When she turns her head, she half-expects to see the dreary halls of Level 5 and hear the sounds of once-polished, now-soiled dress shoes on its floors.
Rapid clicking comes from the other end of the phone, like someone tapping a pen on the receiver. But the phone isn’t connected to anything, the cord dangles disconnected like it always has. Just a prop, like giving a child one of those plastic phones they can drag around that has the little bouncy balls in it. That kid isn’t calling anywhere. Neither is Odessa.
The wave of sensation coming over her is like draining warmth, a hot flush evening out. She’s coming down from something. Maybe it’s what’s in the syringe she stole from medical that’s tucked under her pillow. Maybe it’s something more innocuous, like a cold.
A single datura sits in a frosted vase by her bedside. Maybe she’s allergic to them.
Odessa glances over at the flower and the ghost of a smile graces her lips, unbidden and without realization, at some half-forgotten memory. For a moment, there are bright motes of light in her vision, just pinpricks like distant stars, before she drags a hand over her face and rubs at her eyes to clear it all away.
Slowly and carefully, she pushes herself up to sit, then lifts her pillow to see if her prize is still securely tucked away, or if she accidentally administered herself a dose in her sleep — which would be upsetting. Worse than if she’d done it by intent and simply couldn’t recall.
There’s a part of her mind that expects what remains in the syringe to look like soy sauce, but it doesn’t. It’s clear. That flush might just be good old opioids. Something cloudy in the back of her mind clears, and she can’t recall why she expected it would be black. Can’t think of a drug that is.
If you are not happy here, then something needs to be changed.
Sabra’s words from their chat yesterday come floating back to the surface.
You have to walk before you can run.
Patronizing. She’d been out and free before. Resentment stirs like acid reflux in her gut. They were going to assign an agent to her for walkies. Like she was a teacup poodle that needed to be held on a close leash. No, that definitely is morphine in the syringe. Or was. It kept all this down.
There’s a lingering sense of fog as Odessa disentangles herself from the sheets and swings her legs over the side of the bed, bare feet touching down on the rug laid out on the floor. The dream — nightmare? — she just woke up from lingers, too. She steps over to the wardrobe to pull her favorite grey sweaterdress free of its hanger. It feels like a warm hug when she wears it.
Or, at least, it sounds like what she thinks a warm hug should feel like. She’s read books where people seem normal and happy.
She’s been happy, hasn’t she? Hasn’t she been happy here until recently? Her own space, no one looking over her shoulder while she does her work — important work — and research, interesting cases to puzzle over…
But no blue sky, no green grass, no yellow sunshine…
She’s valued here, though, isn’t she? Sure, it’s dangerous out there, but the agents do the work above while she toils away below, all working toward the same goal, to end the same problems. They need her, and she needs their resources in order to be successful.
The world is sick, and she can heal it.
Dr. Knutson’s mouth turns down in an unhappy frown. She can’t heal anything stuck down here, so far below ground and away from everything. Away from everyone who could help her.
Thoughts flickering to Adam, then to Sylar, she worries for them, their conditions. Shouldn’t she be out there? Looking for them? They like her. — Well, they know Adam does. They aren’t supposed to know about Sylar. As far as anyone’s concerned, he attacked her handler and she miraculously got away. Not the best first day out by their standards, but she found it fascinating.
Passing through the door that leads her to private space, she glances about and considers what’s truly hers, and what would she really miss if she left it all behind in the pursuit of freedom. The tweed-upholstered loveseat in front of the glass-top coffee table (with its own less than pleasant memories attached to it) and the shag carpet? No. Certainly not the polished wood desk and the corded phone that allows people to interrupt her. The harpsichord? Yes, but she can’t exactly take that ridiculous thing with her. None of those things really belong to her anyway.
Eyes flit to the turntable and the small collection of records stored in the stand its set on. Those, yes. Those may not be hers either, but she’ll gleefully steal them when she absconds again. If she absconds again. She’s got it good here, doesn’t she? And now that they know she’s unhappy, surely they’ll treat her even better. Maybe she can settle down and be happy again here.
On Level 5.
But there are stars out there. Paris is out there, and Adam’s told its lights shine just like those stars. And he’s promised to take her there! Moreover, there’s oceans and mountains and desert and— Utah? Where the heck even is that?
That is the question, isn’t it?