Participants:
| Scene Title | Fucking Stab Me in the Heart Forever |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Magnes asks after Gillian Childs. |
| Date | December 11, 2011 |
The Lucky Lady
Magnes shows up to the Lucky Lady with Intent to Talk. He heard that Eileen, or, well, Munin is here. He spots her drinking, and despite everything, his heart does skip a beat, but he shakes his head. He has the strength of Elaine, he doesn't need those old feelings.
He takes a seat at her table, he already previously told Isabelle not to interfere with this little meeting, and Brenda is already sitting a series of moonshine shots on the table. "I'm involved with someone now, so, don't try to pull what you did before, okay? I'm immune now."
Shaking his head, he immediately shakes a shot. "So, let's talk about Gillian."
Across the table, Munin fixes Magnes with a lazy catlike stare, green eyes dark beneath the shadow cast by their lashes. A leather jacket two or three sizes too large for her compact frame hangs off her narrow shoulders, but her arms aren’t in the sleeves; she rests them on the table in front of her, showing off thin wrists and long fingers that end in nails she’s fastitudously picked all the dirt out from under.
Rather than detangle her matted hair, which was tacky with soot and filth the last time he saw the Vanguard operative, she’s opted to shear most of it off, leaving her with a smart-looking bob that cuts off several inches above her stubborn little chin.
She rolls gin around in the glass she’d already been holding and considers the two shots of moonshine between them.
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
"I'm trying to get you less wild, so we can have a proper conversation. I'm so used to you being calm, British, saying some Kazimir wisdom before we get some work done." Magnes crosses his arms, then just sort of stares at her. "I've seen the things that he's done. He told me, when he was in Peter's body, not to forget that he's the bad guy. I think I understand that, but even so… I also understand the things he gave me as a person. I understand that he gave you to me, as someone who helped me grow a lot in life."
"Eileen… Munin…" He sighs, and reaches to take a shot. "I want to save people, I want you to help me save people." he says, very sincerely, before wrinkling his nose at the moonshine.
Munin tips back the contents of her glass to drain it and sets it down on the table with a pointed clink. “Fine,” she says, and trades the empty glass of gin for the remaining moonshine shot.
She raises it. “To saving people.”
It’s not the worst thing to toast to. Without missing a beat or even the slightest hint of hesitation, she downs the shot and curls her fingers around the glass so tightly that it threatens to splinter between the dense knit of her knuckles. She makes a horrible, strangled sound at the back of her throat at the same time she discards it.
“Fuck,” she roughs out. Her other hand drags a thumb along her lower lip, maybe to make sure she still has feeling in her face. “Ray’s right. I don’t know where Childs is, but I was telling you the truth when I said I’d help you find her.”
"You have your birds, you should be able to do a lot. I think some people might be reluctant to trust you, I might be the only person here who trusts you. I believe in you, I've always believed in you, and I believe you when you say you'll help us find her." Magnes leans his elbows on the table, staring at her. He can't help but stare, she's still Eileen, but he shakes his head. "You should go to Cardinal, I think. I heard that him and Peyton have a plan. But I don't want you to do it without saying I talked to you first. I don't know how much that'll carry, maybe I need to talk to him first, I don't know, but…"
He's getting ahead of himself. "Sorry, wait, did you already have a plan?" it suddenly hits him to ask.
Munin angles her head sideways in a cant like she’s unsure if this thought is occurring to Magnes in real time, or if he’s just toying with her the same way she toyed with him back in the incinerator.
Magnes takes his shot, then just starts coughing, slamming his fist into the table a few times. "So…" he speaks with a ragged tone. "Do you have a plan already?"
“I go back to Kazimir,” Munin says. She holds up a finger: Wait, correction. “You and I go back to Kazimir together. I tell him I convinced you to turn on the Hub, that you freed me. Killed Ray.”
She pauses, lapsing into an uneasy silence when Brenda returns to collect all three empty glasses. To occupy her hands and the time, she fishes out a package of cigarettes from inside her jacket, thumbs open the lid, and offers one to Magnes.
“The Vanguard hasn’t been able to infiltrate your little hidden fortress,” she says once Brenda has sashayed away again. “Ray can continue to operate as usual, but it would be— smart, if we staged it. Invite some of your mouthier people to his funeral rites. It sells the story if they catch anyone topside later.”
Regardless of whether or not Magnes accepts the cigarette, she takes one for herself and steers it into the corner of her mouth. She delicately pats down her jeans in search of a lighter. “He has Childs,” she says around the cigarette. “Kazimir. You need to get close.”
Magnes stares at Munin for a long few moments. His thoughts… they seem to get a little distant, and his eyes shift down to the table. "I'm not afraid to go to Kazimir. Most everyone here probably thinks of him as some sort of terrifying god on Earth. I've fought Gabriel, I know not to underestimate Gabriel. I don't know all that he can do here, but I know that he can do enough. And I know how Kazimir is, the Kazimir I knew… I'm not afraid."
He stands up, and holds his hand out to reject the cigarette. "If this is what we have to do, then I'll do it. I trust you with my life, Munin. And Kazimir… he always admired my ability, I don't know why. I don't know if that'll make him feel the need to kill me, dealing with Gabriel's impulses. But…"
He plops back down, groaning, swinging his head back to stare at the ceiling. "This… I guess this is what we have to do. This is the way out. And if it comes down to it… well, whatever happens, happens."
“I like your philosophy.” Munin, lighter secured, cups her hand around her cigarette. Flame gleams red-gold between her fingers. It snaps off again, and she returns both lighter and battered package of cigarettes to her jacket for safekeeping.
She might be slightly inebriated because it takes her two attempts.
“They’re just men,” she says, taking a drag from her newly-lit cigarette. “Both of them. Sylar, Kazimir.” She jabs the glowing point at Magnes. “You, also.”
"People forget that. They see this virus, and they think of all this death as Kazimir's aura. But Kazimir is a man. And you've loved Gabriel in every timeline I've ever heard of, so I know that you understand Gabriel is a man more than anyone." Magnes reaches a hand out for her, nodding. "I know that you aren't her, but… I'm sorry for how I've been. I know that I haven't been great. Whatever happens, I just want you to know that I always cared, no matter how awkward and stupid I was with all my love confessions and trying to kiss you."
Munin flinches away from Magnes’ touch. There’s the temptation to scoot her chair back, but she fights it, soaking up the cigarette smoke clouding around them instead, and works her lower lip between her teeth. She makes a gesture that Brenda interprets as another round of gin, please, make it neat.
“Tell me about the other timelines,” she says, “the ones where you think I love him.” Gabriel. Sylar. Whatever he likes to be called. “Does he love me back, or is it the same as it is here?”
Unrequited, she means.
"Well, where I'm from, you both definitely love each other. And you taught me to be more tolerant of Gabriel's… urges. I wanted to kill him at one point, because he tried to take my ex girlfriend's ability when we were fighting robots and stuff. Well, I was fighting robots, I don't know what they were fighting. Long story." Magnes shrugs, and shakes his head. "But anyway, you two had a pretty crazy relationship, I never really understood it, but it was clear you both loved each other."
Then he sits up as they wait for the shots to come, shots that aren't awful, and considers other timelines. "There's the one where I was like, a cop. I don't know the whole story, but it's some future where we all got our shit together. 2019 or something. Me and Gabriel were police partners, I was a big part of your life, hanging around your house a lot I think. I didn't hear a lot of details, but you two were married."
Brenda returns with a glass of gin for the Englishwoman and something murkier for Magnes that looks like it might be some sort of a cloudy bourbon. The good news is that it isn’t a shot, so he has the luxury of nursing it. The bad news is that it doesn’t have any ice.
“I didn’t think I was the marrying kind,” Munin says, hefting the gin. The details seem to have softened her edges some, but she still lacks his Eileen’s gentleness and the prolonged, searching eye contact that would have been accompanied by physical touch.
Or a smile.
This Eileen doesn’t smile, unless it’s to show her teeth.
“I didn’t think he was, either,” she amends. “We had a connection, and then we didn’t. Simple. It was brief and wonderful. I saw the best of me reflected him, the best of him reflected in me. That’s all.”
"I wish I could make you happy somehow. You deserve to be happy, no matter what anyone says." Magnes doesn't look happy, he just stares at her with the look of someone watching a person they care about go through a lot of difficult shit. "You know that when we get out of here, we're friends, right?"
“You don’t decide who gets out,” says Munin. She sips from her gin. “Neither do I.”
Magnes suddenly slams his fist against the table when she says that, his look dead serious. "I'll rip this entire universe apart and send every star flying into oblivion if it means getting people out of here."
“The ones who live, or the ones who die?” Munin asks Magnes. “Because people will die. You could die. Don’t forget: you’re just a man. Muscles wrapped around bone, connected at the joints with tissue that starts to rot the minute that heart of gold in your chest stops beating.”
Ash flakes off the tip of her cigarette. She has no tray to tap it into, so she opts for the dingy floor. “I stay. Your world, wherever it is— It already has an Eileen Ruskin, a Gabriel Gray. Sylar is mine. As you said, what happens, happens.”
"Kazimir is in him. Why are you staying?" Magnes asks, his demeanor softening again, taking a sip of his drink. "To punish yourself? The idea that you can change him? The love of your father?" He realizes that it's a bit too late to shift his wording around, as the implications hit him, but, well…
“No.” Munin traces the tip of a finger along the rim of her glass, cigarette pinched between its neighbors. “This is what I do, Varlane. I look for the good in men who don’t have much of it and convince them they could do better, and then they get hurt, or they die, or they disappear into themselves.”
She isn’t paying herself a compliment. Self-loathing is on full display as she curls her lip and snubs her cigarette out on the table. “I look for the good in other people because I’m not.” Her eyes rise to meet his, and this time she attempts to hold his gaze from behind that protective shadow cast by her lashes. “You might think the Eileen you know is,” she says, “but she’s only better at pretending than I am.”
"Is that why you… her, was so… nurturing to me? To nurture in me what you don't believe you have in yourself?" Magnes asks, a genuine look of something like sympathetic sadness in his eyes. He almost reaches out again, but he stops, he knows she doesn't like it, he just rests his hand in the middle of the table, staring at her.
"Eileen…" he uses her name, and reaches his other hand to wipe his eyes before any tears can have a chance to fall. "I don't care how good you are, or aren't… you're a person. We've been through so much together. I don't know what you were thinking exactly, I don't know why you gave me so many chances, why you kept coming back despite my reputation for screwing things up, but…"
He bites his bottom lip, as if to suppress even more emotion. He stands, and walks around the table to her, staring down at her. "Eileen, no. I'm not going to die, I'm not disappearing into myself, I'm not going anywhere. You're not staying here. I'm going to kick down this fucking universe and you're going to be happy, goddamnit!"
He motions around, as if to indicate, well, everything. "This is not for you, you're not going to be some emotional martyr, you're not going to be some broken bird. I'm taking you back, you and the other Eileen can mope around for all I care, but you're damned well going to fucking try, and it's not going to be here, in a fucking wasteland, with a Mexican Nazi inside the body of your emotionally unavailable fucking crush!"
Taking a breath, finally, he finishes, "I don't care if you have to be a stripper like my Eileen, you're going to live a life, goddamnit!"
It happens so fast, like a cobra striking, or the instant between a flash of lighting and accompanying peal of thunder when the storm is right on top of him. Munin’s glass is cast aside, discarded onto the floor in a hundred different twinkling pieces with her spent cigarette. She lurches across the table and grabs a fistful of Magnes’ shirt, dragging him up and forward.
A knife gleams at his throat, edge poised at his jugular so that he feels its chill on the next breath he takes in, whether it’s voluntary or not. She turns the weapon just enough for a red line to appear on his neck where it draws beading blood to the surface.
“You don’t decide,” she says again, gin and cigarette breath rolling over him in a cloying wave. “It’s not about the stupid school girl crush, it’s not about my dziadzio, or you, or any of these people. It’s about accountability. Mine.”
Her grip on his shirt goes slack and she shoves him back down into his seat. “I was born in this world and I helped Kazimir destroy it,” she spits. “I’ll die here in what’s left. That’s not something you get to take away from me.”
Her booted feet connect with the floor. Glass crunches under their soles. “Fuck yourself, Varlane.”
Magnes grips his neck when he's dropped back down into his seat, and then tears pretty much immediately begin to stream down his cheeks. At first it might seem like pain from his wound, but then he looks up at her, frowning with an intensely different kind of pain. "So I just… I have to let you stay here and die? Just so you can punish yourself?"
He stands, now, and kicks the chair back hard enough for it to tilt back and slam against the floor. "I didn't know you well enough, Eileen, I really didn't. I didn't know you just… fucking hated yourself so much, and couldn't accept when people love you! You made mistakes, I get it, but there are people who fucking love you, in multiple fucking worlds, and one of those people is me!"
Stomping towards the door, he grabs it, and looks back one last time. "Die if you want, but it's going to fucking stab me in the heart forever, because I'm never going to forget you. No matter how many of you I meet, I'm never going to forget you."
And then he's out, slamming the door behind him.