Participants:
| Scene Title | Harboring A Wanted Fugitive |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Kaylee asks Gillian to take a leap of faith with her. When Asami steps from the shadows, together they all discover a new facet to her ability. |
| Date | January 16, 2021 |
Petrelli Mansion, East Upper Manhattan
“Shit, she’s here early… just… wait right here,” Kaylee says to Asami quietly, before shutting the french doors into the kitchen. They had been dealing with breakfast before the doorbell rang. Since Kaylee had given her staff some much needed paid time off, she’d have to answer the door herself.
Kaylee was nervous about this meeting.
While she trusted Gillian, she was still a member of the law enforcement community and Kaylee was harboring a wanted fugitive. However, she was also certain that her friend wouldn’t be so fast to arrest Asami once she heard what Kaylee had to say.
Fate had brought the pair someone who could lead them to some desperately needed answers.
When the door opens for Gillian, Kaylee offers her a smile, though her attention was on the area behind her. Clearly, making sure Gillian showed up alone, before the door was opened to her. “Thank you for coming and I’m sorry for the urgency and last minute. I know getting a last minute sitter can be rough.”
Pulling off her gloves, Gillian looks both tired, and concerned all at the same time. She had hurried over as soon as she was able to let the nice old lady next door into her apartment to watch over Nate when he woke up. “Eleanor was already awake, thankfully, and so she agreed to just stay in my apartment until I came home. Nate gets along with her pretty well, though he thinks he’s old enough to stay on his own for a few hours.” It’s obvious that she doesn’t agree with this idea, but that’s not really going to come up. She’d already asked the nice older woman to make sure he had an actual breakfast and didn’t stay in bed till noon.
Only downside is he might drink some coffee, but she couldn’t stop that if it happened.
“Are you okay? It sounded urgent?” She sounds concerned, glancing around a little as if suddenly worried that— someone might be watching. She’d been paranoid the last few months, and had often felt like someone had been watching. But it was probably her imagination.
Except that she also knew that, in certain places, someone most definitely was always watching.
In this case, the watcher is physical. Asami left her plate and slunk over to the closed door, listening through it. Her hand rests on the delicate handle, very carefully easing the door open just enough to peek through the crack between doors. Tense, she looks back over her shoulder to the patio outside the door on the other side of the kitchen.
Just in case.
Then she returns to eavesdropping.
“Girls and I are fine,” Kaylee says almost off-handedly, closing the door and offering to take Gillian’s coat to hang. She looks like she hasn’t managed any sleep, there are rings around her eyes and her hair is a mess even pulled back into a ponytail.
Whatever is bothering has kept her up most of the night.
“Though full disclosure, I might be pulling us into something over our heads, but… you’re the first person I could think of to call about this.” Meaning she trusts Gillian the most. Kaylee doesn’t move further into the house, not yet. She stands there in the foyer with her friend, looking a bit fidgety. “I might have found a lead to our case,” she finally admits softly, “Peter and Nathan’s but… I need you to not freak until we’ve explained everything.” We?
Kaylee studies Gillian’s expression, watching her reaction. “Most importantly, I need you to trust me.”
It’s not really the we part that draws Gillian’s attention at first, but the Peter and Nathan’s case part. That makes her straighten a little, even as she feels relief that Kaylee and the girls are all okay. There was some strange stuff happening lately, and she wasn’t sure what to make of a lot of it still, but there was one thing that she knew— “I’ve been trying to learn more for a while but I’m always afraid that someone was watching me… I know we’re not the only ones looking into what happened to them…”
Someone else had accessed the file and not put everything back in the correct order. It hadn’t been her. It hadn’t been Kaylee. She didn’t know who it had been.
Perhaps it had been whoever the mysterious picture had come from, but someone who had given a warning of caution should have been a little more cautious. “I actually was having someone help me a little, too. But…” she trails off. “Who’s helping you?”
The longer Asami looks, the more she notices something… off.
She blinks hard, hoping to clear whatever's fogging over her eyes, but it's more than in her eyes. It lives in her gut, primarily. It's a sense she can't put her finger on, and yet, at the same time…
Her arm on the door shifts, and the joint creaks as it opens slightly more, revealing her profile. Only then does the glaze over Asami's eyes shift, and she takes in a sudden breath. Her teeth touch together in the beginnings of a grimace, but she doesn't make it further than that. Instead, she pushes the door out gently the rest of the way, making sure her hands are clearly visible. One on the door, and one held slightly out from her side to prove she's not hiding anything. Her eyes go from Gillian, to Kaylee, to back again.
And Asami can't for the life of her shake the look of concern she has, like there's terrible news neither of them have been told. "Hi," she offers up awkwardly.
“Well…” Whatever Kaylee was going to say, is interrupted by the creak of the kitchen door. She glances back just in time so see Asi steps out, Kaylee is quick to step between the two with her hands instinctively held up at Gillian.
“She met Violette!”
Kaylee blurts out the words so quickly she startles herself. Eyes widened, she continues, nervous, “Asami met her.. S-s-she….” She stumbles to a stop and takes a calming breath, “Gillian something very weird is going on an-an-and we need your help, just as much as you and I need her connection to this Violette person.” It was hard to get her thoughts organized.
She trusted Gillian, but she was also scared for Asami. What if Kaylee had been wrong? Hands start to lower as she asks the woman who was just like family to Kaylee, “Hear her out?”
Gillian’s breath catches in her throat. But she doesn’t immediately reach for her phone or try to turn and run. She doesn’t even back away immediately. It’s surprising to see Asami—, but then that name draws her eyes back to Kaylee. “She’s met Violette,” she repeats as if making sure she heard that correctly. Is that why she was suddenly— is that—
“There’s something very wrong going on here, Kaylee. I don’t— is it safe to even be here with—” She can’t help but wonder if someone was listening if they were watching. If that shadow was lurking somewhere in the darkness, waiting to move. “Of course I’ll hear you out. Especially if you’ve got a lead on…”
On the case that has haunted the two women in this room for almost as long as they’ve known each other.
"Nowhere's safe," Asami confirms softly, lacking the nerves Kaylee does about the encounter. In fact, now that she's out in the open, she's drawing closer to the other two at a measured pace, looking from one to the other. "But I think— the system might be drowning under a number of strange happenings right now. OPTICA is always watching, but there's enough unusual happening right now that maybe…" She begins to furrow her brow, speaking more to herself than either of the other women as she draws nearer, even as she fixes a look on Gillian in particular. "Maybe that's why Violette said it's safer to stay in the city. Too much raw data to help fixate on… any…"
To say the smaller woman is behaving abnormally at this point would be well-within the realms of truth. She peers up the several inches of difference between her and Gillian and into her eyes like she's trying to look through them.
Compelled. Fascinated.
She takes in a breath not possibly large enough to cover the surface area of the strangeness of her behavior. "I'm— sorry, but what did you lose?" Asami blinks hard again, her hands beginning to lift from her sides. She shakes her head because maybe lose isn't the right word, but… "Something's wrong."
Remembering herself but also not able to stop herself, either, she looks for a moment to Kaylee with a look for apology— her eyes widening a little when she sees again that thing she'd not noticed before in Kaylee as well— before swiveling back to Gillian. "Do— do you mind if I take a look at you for just a moment?"
Asami's hands continue to lift, very gently, very cautiously, but very clearly meaning to frame Gillian's face with them and stare deeply into her.
“I know something wrong is going on… There are so many weird things going on, for me… for the girls. And Asami….” How did she explain the fact she saw the woman fly? Kaylee trails off and doesn’t complete that as Asami starts talking.
Something was definitely wrong, Kaylee’s brows furrow when she turns to look back at Asami’s approach. If she hadn’t seen the other woman do miraculous things, she would have thought she was going crazy.
That doesn’t stop Kaylee from leaning away from the woman as Asami looks at her and Gillian. She starts to ask the woman if she’s okay, but something stops her. Curiosity. “What…?” What was going on? She doesn’t have the nerve to ask, turning her attention to Gillian to see if she’ll trust her.
While Gillian didn’t exactly know Asami, she did know of her. But the sudden lack of personal space still has her stepping back a little in surprise as she suddenly feels worried about— was there something on her face? Did she smear her lipstick on her teeth? There were a few things that came to mind immediately, but probably none of them came close to whatever it was that the wanted woman was actually seeing. “I haven’t lost any— thing? Recently…” Those present already knew what she had lost— but that had been years ago. So many now. It felt like ages ago.
She almost forgot what Peter sounded like sometimes. If it wasn’t for pictures and tapes and other things, she wonders if she would have by now. She sometimes wondered if she really remembered how she felt about him. Or if she just remembered how she felt now. That she loved him because of Nate and because of the absence of him.
She sometimes admired Kaylee for being able to hold a torch for Nathan for as long as she had. “What’s going on?” she asks, looking past Asami toward Kaylee, but no longer backing up at least, even if she’s definitely— surprised by the woman’s sudden desire to hold her face in her hands.
If there was even an answer Asami could give. But there isn’t. What she’s doing isn’t a conscious choice, it’s a compulsion—addictive—as she clutches Gillian’s head in her hands and stares deep into the blonde’s eyes. Gillian sees staring back at her, not Asami’s deep brown eyes, but the wild eyes of a woman possessed.
A woman with gold eyes.
I̶͙̋͝ ̸̦̪́̑̎c̶̭͒̐̀â̸͈͕̄ͅn̶͙͍̳͗͋͝ ̴̟̞̠̅͊f̵̞͕̻̆i̸̱͙͑̔ẍ̷̩́̈́ ̷͚̲̈ÿ̷̭͖́͗ö̴̜̻͜͝u̷̢͎̙͋̒.̴̰̒
Gillian hears Asami’s voice in her mind, a reverberating echo of dozens of voices with Asami’s the most prominent. A terrible sensation rises in the middle of Gillian’s chest; jealousy, anger, resentment, loneliness, abandonment. Tears stream down her cheeks and it feels like her skull is going to split from the pressure Asami is putting on it. Her heart aches.
And then it burns.
Gillian is engulfed in a pillar of fire that rises up toward the ceiling. Asami recoils from the flames on reflex, falling backwards onto her hands and heels as she watches the woman in front of her spontaneously combust. The fire gouts up and off of Gillian, but she does not scream in pain. Fear absolutely, but then silence.
For as the flames die down to a low crackle, she is unscathed. The ashen remains of her clothing, what wasn’t polyester and rendered to blackened plastic, crumbles to the floor.
Asami's eyes widen, drinking in the flame even as she lifts one hand up like to shield herself from the heat. She feels the scorch on her hands, the color of Gillian's pyre reflecting in eyes that fade back to brown. She lets out an incredulous laugh as she scoots further back.
"I'm sorry…" But even that has a wonder to it, fascinated as she is by the transformation that's come over the woman she just met. She looks down to Gillian's feet as she self-extinguishes, to the scorch surrounding her on the floor. "I didn't think that…"
Didn't quite think that she'd do that.
Asami lets out another laugh, as broken as it is delighted. Her expression crumples in on itself immediately after as her wonder is replaced with something slightly less than horror as the weight of what she just did hits her next. "Oh my god."
When Gillian bursts into the flame, Kaylee’s jumps back with a shriek of fear. Trying to get away from the burning woman the heiress stumbles and falls on the floor, but she doesn’t stop there scrambling backward on heels and hands. She only stops when her back hits one of the entry tables.
Then all she can do is stare wide eyed at her flaming friend. “Gillian!?!?” Those wide blue eyes turn to Asami with fear. “W-w-what did you do to her?!? Asami what did you…? she practically shouts with terror, but the flicking of flames grabs her attention again.
Kaylee looks back to Gillian in time to see the flames dying. What surprises her is that Gillian is fine and not a walking corpse. Her mouth is agape until she notices… her clothes… “Oh god… your clothes.” The nudity is enough to get the heiress off the floor to grab the nearest coat and wrap the woman in it.
There are tears falling when Kaylee checks her friend over, “Y-y-you’re okay… oh g-g-gawd… please, please Gillian… tell me you’re okay.” Even if she can see it, she needs to hear it. There was only one person that understands her pain and it would kill her to lose Gillian and the hope she brings with knowing her.
One moment, Gillian was burning hot— now she’s cold. Too cold. Cause she’s suddenly not wearing anything. Where exactly her clothes went, she’s not entirely sure, because when one is in the middle of a storm they do not always see the storm around them, and that was true for the blazing fire that had taken over her for a moment. “What— what the fuck.”
It was rare that she swore, but sometimes it called for it. And this was one of those times. But she’s speaking, she’s breathing, and she’s shivering a little as Kaylee checks her over and wraps her in a coat that gives her some warmth and modesty once again and causes her to blink in confused tears as she glances up.
She doesn’t even know why she’s crying, why she had been crying— what had been—
“What happened? What did you do? What— what did—” Some part of her knew, even as she remembered those eyes. That voice in her mind. “What did you do to me?”
Asami only shakes her head as she comes back to her feet. "I… pulled it back into place. What you were missing. S… Suddenly, I could see it, and I just… I had to fix it."
Try as she might, there's no further words that come to describe the experience for her part. If she's aware just what entered her voice, she doesn't reflect on that overly. This is a miracle, not a horror, something they should celebrate rather than…
Realizing herself, Asami suddenly holds up her hands again in a more defensive measure than before. "Listen, I'm sorry, but I only gave you what's yours. I—!" She full-stops rather than begin another stammer, her eyes quickly going from Kaylee to Gillian and then back again, her attention sticking a little too long on Kaylee.
She blinks hard and looks away, taking one of those hands she's holding up to run it through her hair. "Kaylee, maybe I— was just too overwhelmed with everything last night, but I um— I see it in you, too. The…" Her hand remaining in the air makes a slight twisting gesture, like something just needs to be nudged back into place.
With sudden purpose she announces, "Violette called it negation. What was being done to me— what I think was being done to you, too, Gillian." Asami looks to the barely-clothed woman with an unveiled need for her to understand. "I slipped from it somehow— that's why there's the bogus manhunt. I didn't steal anything except the ability to do this."
“Don’t,” Kaylee hisses viciously before she can stop herself, physically cringing from Asami’s outstretched hand and steps out of reach. She’s clearly scared… terrified in fact after watching Gillian literally burst into flames in front of her. “Don’t touch me,” her voice trembles despite herself.
Before Kaylee can say anymore, a stench of smoke reaches her nose. Oh no! When you have a burning woman in the middle of your foyer, something is bound to get burned. Kaylee’s head snaps up to look at the ceiling. “Shit!” With the flooring and furniture smoldering, the room would quickly fill the air with smoke, and set off the fire alarm waking the dead.
Lucky for them, the entrance to the building has a very high ceiling.
“Asami,” Kaylee says sharply. “You can fly… get the fire alarm before it goes off. FAST. Or else we’ll have every emergency service rolling up to my front door.” It was Asami’s fault anyhow! It was a different sort of panic setting in now… them being discovered. Leaving Gillian wrapped in the warmth of the coat, the heiress rushes for the kitchen and the fire extinguisher she knows is under the sink. That fire won’t put out itself.
“Why is there fire…” Gillian asks as if dazed, unsure exactly where the fire came from. Or why she’s not burned. Or where her clothes are. Or why she smells smoke and why it doesn’t really bother her? As she says this, her hand comes up toward her face to look at it, as if entranced by the soot marks on her fingertips, the melted remains of her gloves. Even her ring looks as if it took some damage, but not quite enough to melt it thankfully.
“Did I—” She can’t finish it, because what she wants to ask sounds completely insane. Seeing shadowy figures was one thing, she could dismiss it as lack of sleep, as seeing things because of the picture that she had been given. She had explanations.
There were no explanations for what just happened. “She can what?” she asks, looking between Kaylee and Asami, blinking through eyesight that still seemed to shimmer slightly. Due to the tears, not the heat this time.
Asami's childlike wonder is gone with Kaylee's loss of trust. The sheen leaves her eyes, replaced with something more like herself. The call to order is well-timed, giving her some way to prove her use again. "Got it," she says to Kaylee's request, looking up at the wall-mounted fire alarm high in the foyer. She lifts one leg like she means to step on the air itself, embracing the sinking sense she gets when she lowers it back down.
And then she lifts, both feet leaving the ground as she hovers high enough to wrench the fire alarm out of its place. She turns the puck over in her hand, thumbing the back of it open. The little piece of plastic hiding the battery clatters to the ground below in her rush to get it loose, but the battery itself is yanked free before the device gets to any kind of screaming.
She continues to hover mid-air, gesturing with the alarm before more awkwardly suggesting, "I'll go get the ones in the next rooms, too, to be sure." Asami shoves the pieces in the pocket of her hoodie, tender hands touching the wall to guide her down to a point she can float into the next room, like an astronaut in a lack of gravity.
That's the only comparison that makes sense, given people aren't supposed to fly.
As soon as she's clear, Asami wastes no time in getting out of sight to complete the task she said she would. It's as much to be of use at this point as to give Gillian and Kaylee the space they needed to process what just happened better.
Returning with the extinguisher, Kaylee uses it to douse the fire working on devouring an antique entry table and the wood flooring. “Good thing Angela isn’t around,” she says once she’s sure it’s thoroughly doused and a window is cracked to let the smoke out. “She’d probably freak.”
Turning to look at Gillian, Kaylee feels that worry again. “You did,” she finally confirms, setting the fire extinguisher down, but close enough… just in case. “I… I don’t know what Asami did, but…” A nervous laugh escapes her, still a little shell shocked.
“I need a drink…how about you?” Kaylee asks Gillian. A second later she rethinks that and adds, “Maybe we shouldn’t… not sure my curtains could take you becoming a fire breather, too.” Which is followed by another laugh… if she didn’t she might start crying again.
This time because she feels guilty for her reaction to Asami.
At first, Gillian’s about to say ‘God, yes’. She could use a drink. But as Kaylee comments of fire breather she has an immediate second thought and makes a face. “Maybe water, then.” Lots of— water. Extra water. With water on the side. And a fire extinguisher handy. “And a shower. And clothes.”
She looks down at her hands again, wondering if she’s going to burst into flames again, and tries to picture the Petrelli house in her mind. “Is this real? Are— I’m not hallucinating am I? I’ve seen things and…” Maybe she’s hallucinating. Maybe this is something that she’s imagining. Maybe…
But she just saw Asami— float? Fly?
She really wants that drink. “Is this going to happen again? Can you turn it off?” She suddenly asks Asami, as she seems to have accepted that— no, she’s not insane. That something was happening.
Another fire detector shorn of battery is in Asami's hand when she floats back in. Landing isn't her strong suit yet, so she hovers, feet inches off the ground. But when asked if she can turn it off, her confidence sinks harder than her nerves keep her aloft, and only barely avoiding rolling her ankle, her soles meet the floor again.
"I didn't even know I could do that until just now," is more apology than an outright no, but it still serves as one. "Whatever you were feeling just now— if you focus in on that type of feeling, if you remember… if it's anything like what I can do, it'll come back to you." Asami dips her head momentarily, turning the fire detector over between her hands.
"You said you've been seeing things, too?" she ventures cautiously. "People who aren't there for anyone else?" A quick look is flashed to Kaylee, and then back to Gillian. "Because if you have, you're not alone. And— now?" Asami dares a small step forward again to stress the seriousness of it. "You doing what you just did— if anyone finds out about that potential in you, th-that it's awoken now, you'll— you'll likely be the next person on primetime news. They'll do anything to cover the existence of people like us up, if Violette can be believed."
No, more than that— "If what happened to me can be believed."
Clutching the fire extinguisher, Kaylee glances at Asami, when she senses the woman looking at her. Her gaze drops to the floor for a moment, feeling a sense of uncertainty. Finally, she looks up this time at Gillian.
“Remember, a few months ago when I got a lot of testing done, I told you I was worried about a cancer scare?” Kaylee asks her. “It’s partially true, but I really started seeing.. and still see a little boy… who I know in my heart is my son. I thought I was going crazy.” Grimacing because it sounds so weird outloud.
Still Kaylee continues, not wanting it all to come from someone else, “Jac says she and Brynn saw a woman stretch like taffy and disappear. Jac even came home once in tears cause everyone in the school, including teachers, acted like she didn’t exist. Something's off… and with Asami’s…” what does she call it? “Whatever that is and you bursting into flames, something feels really wrong with the world.”
Brows furrow and Kaylee suddenly murmurs something about getting the water and turns to retreat for the kitchen. It was clear she was completely overwhelmed. Though once there, she sits heavily on a barstool with the extinguisher clutched tightly to her chest.
Kaylee might need a moment.
All of this information hits Gillian like a rock, sending a sinking feeling in her chest. Violette was involved. People were being erased and gotten rid of. Asami had been named a criminal of some kind. She hadn’t known her well, but she had known her as a fencing instructor for Jac Petrelli, and she had considered sending Nate to her soon, as the boy had asked more than once. But she had been so tied up in this mystery that she hadn’t really considered it fully.
But what if—
“I saw shadows,” she explains after a moment. “Like strange shadows. Like old movies flickering. But I thought it was just nerves.” She had been doing something she wasn’t supposed to, looking at pictures she hadn’t been supposed to. “Someone had accessed their drug tests,” she says out of nowhere. “Nathan and Peter. Like they were looking for something in the tests. They weren’t in the right place in the archives. The archivists put everything in a specific order and that was in the front— what if someone was checking to see if there was something— if they had— what if they were—” What if they were like—
Like them? “Violette was trying to get me to see something. What if that’s what it was? What if they were— different. And what if that’s why…”
Why they were gone.
Kaylee's retreat into the kitchen leaves Asami struggling to figure out how to juggle all of this at once. The shorter woman places a hand on Gillian's still-warm bicep ultimately, beginning to shepherd her toward the kitchen. Toward Kaylee again, so they can all collectively take a breath before figuring out what to do next— first of all being getting Gillian stripped of residue and into proper clothes again.
"If they were?" Asami's voice is full of sympathy. "Then yeah. Yeah, maybe they were silenced before they had the chance to show anyone else. Maybe v.ir— maybe Violette does know. We can try to find her again."
"For now… we gotta worry about what's in front of us first."
She looks to Kaylee, her eyes sticking to her again before she's able to tear them away and look back to Gillian. "We gotta make sure you're not going to flambée yourself the moment you leave the house." Asami lets out a small laugh, cracking the beginnings of a grin. What else can she do? But she grows solemn a second later, squeezing Gillian's arm supportively.
"We have to make sure you stay safe too."