Participants:
| Scene Title | Fight To Live |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Gillian asks Helena to make a sacrifice. |
| Date | April 29, 2019 |
Cat's Penthouse
Cat is out attending to political matters, and that's left Helena to heself for a few hours. She's spending it quietly watching the television, vaguely amused and horrified by the plethora of reality shows engineered to take advantage of Evolved abilities.
Wait til she sees the 'You Too Can Be Like Helena Dean!' reality show. It's like the Who Wants To Be A Superhero? or The Apprentice shows of the past, just there's actual abilities and people try to demonstrate what good can come of their powers in staged scenerios.
Enough of reality shows. Back to reality. Not coming from her home, but Pinehearst Towers, a crack of teleportation deposits a woman in front of the penthouse door. "Thanks, Taxi," Gillian rasps to someone who has already disappeared again, a title that almost every teleporter she's met has carried at one point or another. Ever since she met her first teleporter in a bar.
Reaching into her purse, she checks her phone for the time, and then shuts it off, dropping it back down. Instead of the dress she'd worn the first night, she's in more of a business suit, mostly black, nice jacket and skirt, but still looking very different from the girl back home. A hand raises to knock.
Helena frowns a bit, perking when she hears the knock. Rising to cross the expanse of the penthouse, the first thing she does? Is check the video monitor to see who's on the other side of the door. When it's Gillian, she heaves a sigh of relief and opens up. "Oh good," she says as she opens the door to allow Gillian access. "Did Peter send you? Come in."
Relieved to see her? Gillian lets her hand drop away as the door opens, lowering it at her side. The "taxi" she used allowed her to bypass most security stuff, but she's not been living with her husband so long she has forgotten how to knock. "No, Peter didn't send me," she responds, voice rasped. The heels she wears are enough to take her an inch or two higher than normal, and she'd been taller than Windy years ago as it was. "I wanted to talk to you."
Helena blinks in confusion. "He didn't…" she says, closing and locking the door. "Okay, then um. I need to talk to you, too. Things are a big mess, and we're going to need your help. I mean - if you're willing to. I hope you are. Arthur Petrelli has no intention of sending us back."
"I figured," Gillian doesn't seem surprised by the turn of events. Either she heard enough to guess, or she easily could have guessed that he'd have such an opinion. There's a distance in her eyes as she glances away from the woman, deeper into the penthouse that belongs to a friend. One she rarely sees these days, but still a friend. They have some privacy, it would seem, at least. "I'll help send you back, don't worry about that. You don't belong here. It's not like this is the first time someone's gotten stuck ten years in the future with no way to get back on their own."
Helena blinks. "It isn't?" she asks in faint surprise. "There's more, though. We were displaced. Detainees in this timeline swapped places with us, amongst them Nathan and Edward Ray. Eight of us, eight of them and - good, thank you. Arthur's apparently killed Hiro Nakamura and Peter told me he couldn't attempt a time shift without you." She lifts her chin. "I told him I knew you'd help." For whatever reasons Gillian may have.
A lot of this she already knows about, but there's a pause when she hears that Arthur killed Hiro. Dark eyes barrow a moment, before she shakes her head. Maybe she heard the phone conversation wrong. "I think you'd remember," Gillian says, looking at the girl. Ten years is a long time, and she still remembers. It's a lot less for the blonde girl in front of her. Skipped to the last track, now she wants to go back and… "What brought me to Phoenix in the first place. Gabriel— his trip through time. To a future where we didn't stop the virus. Where that Nazi Bastard took over and controlled everything. I'll help… but you— This future won't exist anymore. Either because of you, all of you, or because of the ones who escaped. It doesn't matter." Empty dreams are empty dreams…
"We have to hope that we can change that." Helena insists. "If we do nothing it definitely won't change, so we have to try." She takes a breath. "Peter told me to go to Gabriel and enlist his help. I'm struggling with that being a good idea. I know everything's changed."
"I don't think it's a good idea either," Gillian grumbles under her breath, some bitterness in her voice. Things with Gabriel must not have ended out well. Then again she married someone else, he married someone else. Usually exes don't get along famously. But something that the no-longer-a-teenager but still young girl said makes her looks back, lips turning toward a frown. "How do you intend to… fix it? So that this future doesn't… disappear?"
"It hinges on getting back." Helena explains, moving over to the couch. "Once we're there, things will flow in their natural course. On May 18th, 2011, I'll die. Peter will grieve, work with his father, marry you, you'll have his child." Helena's jaw tightens on the last few courses of events. "We'll fall into the roles we're meant to. I'm pretty sure that even if I miss being assassinated at Stanford, death will find me in another way."
"You— " Gillian watches the other woman, eyes following her as if she's unsure if the weather princess managed to hold on to her sanity when time travel took her. "You obviously haven't learned anything." There's a hint of a yell in her voice as she moves toward the couch, hands tightening into a fist. For moments, it very much looks like she wants to punch her in the face. "There is no natural course. If there was a natural course then we'd all be dead. Of a virus. The future doesn't follow a set course— and if you're going back to become some kind of— you can't do that to him. He didn't just grieve. Your death may have saved the world, or that's what they'll tell you— but it destroyed him."
Helena's back straightens, her body becoming tense. "Gillian," she says, as calmly as she can manage, "The other night, on the roof above our heads? Peter told me that, exactly. That my death saved the world. And I asked him," she takes a breath, "I asked him if he wanted me to tell him, when I got back. How much time I had, what the circumstances were, on the small, small chance that maybe he felt the universe had fucked us enough and maybe we might be able to fuck it right back for a change. Which could, concievably, actually destroy this timeline. And he said he'd rather he didn't know. Which may just be about the pain he'd be caused either way, but an argument could be made for him not wanting to lose the opportunity to have what he does with you. Terrorists and serial killers get happy endings. I don't."
The anger doesn't leave entirely, but Gillian closes her eyes and turns away. Tremors run across her shoulders, make her head lower. The breath that escapes, easily audible, is shaking too. She's going back to die. Even with the idea that everything she has is disappearing, one piece at a time… "How long were you and Peter together, Helena?" She takes in a slow breath after the questions, turning around to face her. She's calming down, but there's heavy emotion on her face. "A couple months? I've been with him for seven years… and I know what you dying did to him. He doesn't want to know? Of course he doesn't. Because he knows it would destroy him, because it already did. If you're going back to die. Then don't take him with you."
"What are you asking me to do?" Helena's expression grows alarmed. "Are you asking me to - to give him up? When I go back?" She looks horrified at the very thought.
"If you're going back to die, then yes," Gillian says thickly, though she makes her hands untighten from the fists finally. "I've had a while to accept that everything I've grown to love isn't going to exist anymore. You think the idea of losing him terrifies you? Imagine how I feel. I'm not just losing him, but our son and… it'll be as if we never meant anything more to each other than…" That emotion breaks her voice, but she takes another breath and keeps going. "The future isn't a map that everyone has to follow. You can't possibly still believe that." Maybe she can, but apparently the augmenter has a different take on things. "If you leave him when you get back it might still break him, but may not destroy him."
"So if you're operating on the assumption that this timeline is fucked anyway," Helena breathes, "I should go back to live. To try and fight the course of time. In the chance Ray's river theory can be thwarted. Or go back to die without being able to have what time I have left with him. Which would again, change the course of possible futures." She lifts her chin. Wow, the blonde gets a clue!
The clue is gotten. Gillian's shoulders finally manage to slump, and she shifts so she can fall down onto the couch, nearby, but not so close that they're actually touching. "Everything I love is vanishing… and all I can think about is that it can't happen like this again. Because I can't possibly see how you could put him through that twice." Her eyes lower, glancing down at the rings. One hers. One… not quite. "I can't let that happen to him again. Not like that."
"Because," Helena leans back, "Everything I've been shown to this date has pushed me toward believing that some things just can't be changed. Edward Ray proved as much to me. But what if - " she pauses, "What if he lied? I mean, Arthur claimed he was insane, and he could be lying about that, but what Dr. Ray's done doesn't prove him to be much reliable, either." If she can convince herself, let Gillian convince her…"If I fight this and I live, any chance of this timeline existing is blown. You realize that? Any at all."
"I know," Gillian says, eyes on the diamonds, the white gold, the platinum of the band. Some things don't last forever. "I guess I always thought Dr. Ray was full of shit. Or maybe this isn't what was supposed to happen at all. I don't know. I'm not really thinking too much about the world at this point…" She's mourning it already. It isn't something she wants to think too much about. She's been sleeping in her son's bed almost every night since she found out they didn't have a future. Sometimes not sleeping at all, just watching him. As if she's afraid he'll disappear when she closes her eyes. "But if you're going back, then one thing that I love will still exist. And that's him. Peter."
"You're not the first person who's told me I should fight for my future." Helena says after a few long moments of sitting there next to Gillian in silence. "But I think you're going to be the last person who needs to." Her eyes dart sidelong to look at the other woman. "Peter told me to go to Gabriel for help. Said he would watch my back."
"Gabriel— I guess if anyone can understand being tossed through time, it'd be him…" Gillian admits, though the hint of bitterness hasn't left. Her hand lifts up to wipe at tears. Luckily her make up now is lighter and less smudgey. There's no big black streaks on her face. "I love my husband and I love our son…" she adds quietly again. "But all I ever wanted to do was help him, make him whole again. For a while I thought I had. For a while we were happy and… now he won't even say he loves me." Simple words. They should be simple. But the fact he can't say them, especially when the whole world may be disappearing…
"I don't know what to say." Helena finally finds, after groping for words. "Your world is ending, and I'm still jealous of you, Gillian."
"I was jealous of you when you told me you were getting married to him." Gillian confesses quietly, something she'd never told her friend that died. Jealous for the same reasons? Maybe, or maybe not. "If I thought there was a way to save this world without breaking him… I would do it in an instant. I would beg you to stay if it gave us longer together." But that won't do anything. Especially since she's unwilling to recreate the event that brought them together in the first place. "But I can't, and now I'm jealous of you again, too." Not that the her that will remain will ever have known about any of this. "When this is all over," Better to have loved and lost… "He'll never have loved me." Than never to have loved at all. And that breaks her heart too.
Zoe will know. Helena will carry the guilt of what may have been destroyed by her presence. Even if it isn't really her fault. And there's so much Helena wants to say, so much to confess, maybe share. But none of it will end Gillian's pain. So instead, the blonde turns to her friend, blinking a bit. "Do you want a drink? I want a drink."
"I shouldn't— but yes. I want a drink," Gillian has to go back to work eventually. Her hand drops into her purse to check the phone, using that to look at the time, since she no longer wears watches of any kind. The phone does the job just fine, anyway.
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