Participants:
| Scene Title | I'm Elisabeth Fucking Harrison |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Gay best friend vs. political and personal terror of the entire world. (This title is all Teo's fault.) |
| Date | August 12, 2009 |
Dorchester Towers: Elisabeth's Apartment
This is a pretty standard two-bedroom apartment, although the occupant has gone to some effort to make it her own. Although the carpet is the ubiquitous beige, the walls are painted a soft rose-gray mauve shade, giving the main living space warmth. A dark gray sectional sofa sits in the living room facing an entertainment center that contains a state-of-the-art stereo system and a less upscale television setup. A coffee table sits in the curve of the sectional, and floor lamps bracket the ends of the furniture. The dining area hosts a four-seater square oak table and chairs, with the table generally host to a slew of mail and papers. An oak sideboard against the wall has candles on either end of it and a glass bowl with a fake arrangement of flowers. A small wine rack sits next to the sideboard, home to no more than nine bottles. The kitchen is small, but functional, painted a soft yellow color with a transparent blue glass backsplash. Off the living room are two bedrooms, one of which has the door closed and the other appears to be a home office. Its walls are a soft shade of green, and it contains a desk with a high-end computer setup and a bookcase stocked with textbooks.
When Teo texted and said he had something she should see, Elisabeth sent back a text that said, Meet you at my place. He knows where her door is. It'll put off her departure for Massachusetts a little, but she's got the day off to handle that run anyway. When she lets him in, she's got an odd, assessing expression on her face and she looks strained. It's been a rough morning already. The scent of fresh coffee permeates the apartment — she stopped off and picked up a couple of extra large mucho grande cups. "Hey," she offers in greeting, standing aside to let him in.
"Buongiorno." Teo has a hat on. Baseball cap, its brim tugged low over his histrionically expressive brow. His eyes peer out from underneath the semi-circle of shadow a little furtively, but the smile that comes out afterward does so without reserve, cheeks split and eyes crinkling into semi-circles.
Through some conspiracy of genetic legacy great enough to rival the discovery of the Evolved, he smiles the same at twentyish-thirtyish-six as he did when he was six years old. "You look good, under all the freakish leering." He bobs his head, comes in, tugging the thing off his head. "Your place looks the same," he observes, a little blankly. He still finds it hard to believe; that she might stay in one spot for three years, or ten.
"Looks the same as what?" Elisabeth doesn't know that ten years from now she moved upstairs, and though the colors changed some, the same basic decorating in her place applied. "Picked you up a cup of coffee, if you want it." She locks the door behind him and smiles at the sheer size of his grin, she can't help it. "I'm not leering. Just…. got a lot on my mind right now."
Fewer toys, paint mark missing from the wall where she'd had to cover over some inscrutable piece of art that Cameron had put up using some inscrutable medium that she had preferred not to discuss with her old friend, and grown increasingly stubborn about, as he nettled to know. Chicks. Teo slides his fingers off the wall, folds his hand shut again, blinks sidelong to see the coffee that she had been offering. Nice. "Grazie." Ass-crack of dawn, and all.
He closes his fingers around the proffered cup and lifts it, once, in a toast, extricates himself from Ghost's memories one by one. A little foolishly, he jogs a haphazard finger around his head, indicating some interchangeable corner of the ceiling, the placement of the door. "Looks the same as last time. Um." Rallying to the subject change, he lifts his eyebrows. "What's on your mind?"
There's a hesitation in the blonde's response, her blue eyes study him closely. "Many many things," Elisabeth finally says quietly. If she were a telepath instead of an audiokinetic, he might swear that she was reading his mind. "Although most of the travelers don't speak of what they saw in the future much — and believe me, I think it's a wise plan. A tiny amount of information about the future is seeming to become pretty deadly for all of us at this point — I cannot imagine my life ten years from now without you in it." She pauses, looking around her apartment without realizing what it is that he saw when he looked. "Teo… your future self knew me. Knew… who I became. Norton has…. said some things to me that are… things I'm not sure I want to know. And even if I did want to know, I couldn't really ask him." She bites her lip and looks at him.
"Tell me… just a little bit about what my life was like there? Tell me what your future self knew of my kid." she asks finally. "I'm …. " She chuffs a soft laugh. "I'm having a little bit of a crisis of faith, wondering if we've done anything right lately."
This is some kind of insidious illusory trick. Verse lives, and he's crouching under the kitchen counter, besieging this weakened psychic's mind with one of the most tactless telepathic ambushes that any incarnation of Teo has ever experienced. A frown notches his brow, eyes going momentarily, uncharacteristically opaque as his gaze marches the sculpture of the woman's face, threatens to angle nonchalantly off her shoulder and veer through the window to examine something stupidly irrelevant like— the weather, but he doesn't.
And the next moment, it's just Teo blinking out of baby blues again, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, and Teo rubbing the top of his head, ruefully, grimacing slightly as he chances to revisit memories that, perhaps understandably, he would rather leave behind. Three, seven, nine seconds, and he finally exhales. "You were still a cop. Um— still living here. Piano in the other room for the kid to practice on.
"A boy," he adds, a little belatedly and sheepish knowing that's one of the things people tend to want to hear first. Boy or girl. "Name's Cameron. Blonde as the sun is yellow, smart as a fuckin' tack. Doesn't pick fights, but finishes 'em. Talks really fast. I mean, I talk pretty fast, but this kid had like a sixth of m— his— future-me's lung capacity, and—" there's a motion of his hand through the air, fingers firing forward. "I think you had to use your audiokinesis to keep up. He wanted for no material or spiritual need, except maybe the dumb shit to teach him humility.
"You were— a— would be," he settles on, finally, uncertainty etching lines around the sincerity in his silly puppy face, "a good mom."
One would think all of that would be good news, right? Not really so much. Elisabeth is silent through his recitation, and then merely nods slightly. "Thank you," she says quietly. Her reasons for asking she leaves entirely out, simply meeting his face. "I think maybe you're one of the few besides the current-time analogs who is stuck not just guessing about what that future would have been but knowing. And I cannot imagine how difficult it is to be stuck in this time when you're from that time, knowing that it's just not there anymore because we've changed….. everything."
She reaches up to rub her forehead, running a hand through her blond hair distractedly. "I hope…. God, I hope for all our fucking sakes, Teo…." Her expression crumples slightly, but she shoves it back down and meets his eyes with uncertain blue ones. Her hope that what we're doing — what we've done — isn't the wrong thing easily read in her face.
Teo'd had objection here, all ready to go: I'm not from the future! I'm Teodoro Laudani, and I've never killed in cold blood in my life, never would, and I have made the decision to reject vengeance in favor of friendship, heroism, justice, and all the right reasons. Unfortunately, that would, in part, be a lie, and the face isn't one he could bring himself to lie to, even if the real irony of that situation is that he could if he really were the man she's implying he still is.
He remembers his coffee now. Looks down at the sculpted plastic of its lid, and shuffles his other hand onto it, pries the edges loose with a damp-lipped sound of loosening, partly because he really needs to drink and partially because it's something to do, a fidget to occupy his hands while his head grapples with the magnitude of the question. "He came back— Ghost.
"Other-me, the guy from the future— he came back here to save Helena, Alexander, and the others, from Petrelli's conspiracy. He did a lot of horrible things to make that happened. He killed a lot of enemies, and after he ran out of those, he started killing his friends. Arthur Petrelli's dead in two timelines, thanks to his contributions. In the future, I was… kind of crazy, I think everyone knows that, but he did have…" Teo's brow furrows, teeth whiting his lip for a brief instant. "A— point?
"He believed the future would be all right without Petrelli. He was aware that after all the polish wore off the world that the tyrant made out of this one, the ugliness on which it was founded would rot through, and prove to the public the Evolved are the exact toxic, self-serving, omnipotent monsters they should've feared all along. Yes, a decade into the future that he came from is probably a brighter place than the year 2019 we're going to have, but two decades in? Three? God knows, we might have been in World War III with amplification drugs turning twelve-year-olds into nuclear warheads, everyone we knew and loved dead. The technology was in development.
"It's not simple." And that's not the answer she wants to hear, Teo knows. He takes a swallow of brew, lifts his head without raising his eyes off the glossy meniscus of drink. Then, in a feeble attempt at humor, "Or if you want, I could lie to you."
Elisabeth watches him and smiles very faintly. "He came back…. and left you to live with memories of a life you won't have." Which is all she meant when she implied that it had to be hard — that he's living with memories, regardless of whether they're his or his older analog's — of a time and place his older self couldn't go home to. Now maybe it's not a place he wanted to go home to, but … it can't be easy to be stuck out of time, either. "And I understand the reasoning, I just… wonder if anything we've done is going to make things better in the long run. By altering one event, we've set others in motion that …. are potentially far worse. Like a prison full of Tier 3 Evo criminals loose around the globe. One of them in a position to make beachfront property out of 34th Street." Her tone is quiet. "So no… it's not simple. There are no easy answers." She tilts her head and looks at him. "And I'm tired of being lied to — by omission or by actual words. So don't do that, or you'll find yourself slapped into next week. I'm kind of on a hair trigger right now," she admits softly. "Thank you, though… for answering my question." About the boy. "I didn't want to bring it up with Norton, we're…. very awkward lately."
"I warned Phoenix proper before we went to Moab. I had my reservations, and I went anyway. Now I get to harbor a shitload of regrets." Teodoro Laudani would. That would be his approach toward most things in life.
Next week is one week closer to where Ghost came from, technically. That might not be so bad, though the parody of squeamish on Teo's expression implies thatttt he's having a hard time convincing himself. It fades to serious the next moment, and he drops his gaze to the floor, glances across to the pristine plateau of the carpet.
"Something happened," he announces, finally, his feathers smoothed, if not his mood, overall. "I mean, I appreciate the whole, uh, abstract… existential curiosity thing you have going with this mysterious line of questioning, but. I mean, I've known you a little while and that's a little too fucking wishy-washy to have you by the short and curlies, signora." Teo was always one for poetry, too. He swings a long stride toward the couch, digging his head into a gesture of invitation.
She slants him a Look. The one he remembers from Washington Irving … or maybe from the occasional rowdy fight. It's the 'you're stepping over the line, mister' eyeball. But she brings her coffee and moves to set it on the end table, then plop into the couch. She debates how much to say and then finally says it out loud. The thing she's been fearing most for a week now. "I think I might be pregnant," she says quietly, baldly. "And it's not Norton's. And it's not two years from now. And it…" She bites her lip. "I don't want to know for sure. Cuz… if I am…. it changes everything, Teo. And it hurts my best friend in ways I cannot begin to fathom." She sounds weary. "Not to mention, there's the stress of telling your lover 'oh guess what, babe, apparently the birth control failed.' And … I'm not… somebody's mother!" She shoves a hand through her hair again. "I'm not looking for a guy to marry so I can settle down and raise kids! I'm …. a cop. And … whatever the fuck else this is. Terrorist? Vigilante? Rebel? I don't have a word for this."
But the line is right here and Teo is definitely standing behind it. Sitting behind it, rather. His knees out in a sprawl, shoulders wedged down into the corner of the couch's generously-stuffed embrace, his old habit of failing at proper use of furniture already twitching at his muscles and nerves, restless as a cat kept in a box. He does, however, settle enough to listen properly, rerouting excess energy into picking at the round edge of his coffee cup and the hemming of the couch cushions. Of course, both hands go promptly dead when Liz finally comes out with it, and he almost drops his coffee all oer himself.
Yes, maybe he should've seen that coming, but he's a man: unwanted pregnancy is as often the misappropriated point of paranoia as overlooked when it's staring him as obviously as the nose on Elisabeth's face. His eyes pop huge in his head and his jaw swings a fraction of an inch to the left, fails to close around the monosyllabic expletive of incredulity he'd intended to say. He winds up lifting a forefinger, and jabbing the air in some effort to punctuate or find purchase in the slippery slope of shock. "First of all," he says, swallowing. "First of all—
"Seriously?"
Uh-huh. Just what a woman wants to hear when she blurts out her darkest fear. "No, Teo, I'm fucking lying to you just to get a rise out of you," Elisabeth fires back at him sharply. "God, yes, *seriously*. You think I'd joke about something this absolutely terrifying? I mean… Christ… it's one thing for that lot to come back from the future with knowledge and let it slip that oh, by the way, you had a kid. I knew that. In the abstract. A couple of years from now, and … well, that fucking future didn't exist anymore, right? So while intellectually, I understand that it all changed, it wasn't even fucking real to me to start with! But I do understand that Norton's going through some serious shit over it all, and … sometimes I think just seeing me makes all that worse or something. Especially now that we've been … kind of weird for a while." She grimaces at Teo. "He found out about Cardinal…. not the sex part, though I do think it tweaked him, but the key part." As in, she gave the thief a key to her place. She heaves this huge sigh and just …. stops. The words have nowhere to go.
"Okay, okay." Teo puts up his hands in surrender, lest he get his face blendered off with a supersonic wave blast of audiokinetic wrath. Not that he had really thought so, just. "Sorry." It's an ignoble mumble, as he rubs rough fingers up and down the bridge of his nose, scratches the crook of his brow with his thumb. "Okay, uhhh… so: it's shitty timing.
"You're not in that place in your life," or whatever it is women say when they have a surprise bun in the oven, "the boys are getting into cock-fights over you— or the sentiment's there, even if they respect your lifestyle decisions enough to back the fuck off before making real asses of themselves. I… I—" Teo lets go of his face, finally, and his voice loses a fraction of that nasal quality. His coffee cup is empty by the time he tosses it down on the table, with a rattle and scuff of cardboard on glass. "Liz.
"I know the future that I— he— Hel came back from doesn't exist anymore, but that doesn't mean you can't pull off what you did then here, either. You're still Elisabeth fuckin' Harrison, and if there's a person who's half you growing in there—" he glances down at the flat of her stomach, brows twitching a fractioned inch of an incline. Absurdly, this reminds him of being thirteen. "You'll take care of it. And him or her. Y'know?"
There is a long moment of parsing all that Teo just said, and a pair of bright blue eyes just sort of stare at him. "Cockfights?" she asks dumbly. "Nobody's getting in cockfights over me, that's just stupid." And then she starts to giggle. She can't help it. "I'm Elisabeth fuckin' Harrison…. like I'm all that and a bag of potato chips too!" Okay. Yeah. Lack of sleep, stress, any number of things are adding to this reaction on her part, but at this point, all she can do is giggle insanely. "Elisabeth fuckin' HARRISON, man. I am."
And there's a waggle of an index finger and she very dramatically points at herself as she says that last. With a roll of the head on her neck to punctuate it, thankyouveryfuckingmuch.
This time, when Teo pushes down the corners of his mouth and makes a long face, there is the distinct hint of laughter raw behind his eyes. She isn't the only one who's been short on sleep and too many any number of other things.
"Look," he says, scowling. "Look, so English is my second language." Not that that has anything to do with anything, of course: Teodoro is well-educated and enamored of languages enough that his words wind up too textbook correct, somehow, almost as often as he hurls expletives about. "Don't make fun. I'm trying to be nice, and you're just—" he motions at the mean face she has strapped onto the front of her head right now, petulantly. "You're being an asshole."
Shaking her head, Elisabeth shoves out of her corner of the couch and comes over to lay her head on Teo's shoulder, still giggling. "I'm sorry," she replies. "I'm not, I swear. You just…. I sounded like I should be an action figure or something." It brings on another spate of giggles, and she hugs the Italian boy tightly. When she feels his arms go around her, she buries her face in his shoulder for a long time. And when she finally draws, back her eyes are wet. "Thank you. For having that much faith in me," she whispers, meeting his gaze. "Cuz I'm scared to fuckin' death."
A shrug nudges up under the woman's chin, comfortably companionable. Despite his perpetual initial awkwardness, he hugs her back, and it only takes a second or two to fit properly. Aww. Friendship. It occurs to him, obscurely, that this is also kind of gay, but that seems a lot better than various and sundry of the alternatives.
"I heard there were action figures," he says, somewhat irrelevantly, peering down at her. Teo isn't really sure why he said that, of all things, but it's what pops into his head at the sight of those heartbreaking baby blues. "And a comic book franchise. I think you skipped it because you didn't want your kid bringing lunchboxes to school with you on front and getting, uh, weird attention or something." He wedges a pause in, a set of fingers turned clumsy from gentleness on her hair. "You're welcome."
And that just makes her chuckle again. "Don't tell me shit like that," Elisabeth instructs him with a grin. Sometimes, just a little bit of laughter can lighten a dark mood very dramatically. Besides… at least she's not crying all over him this time — and if it's a little gay, well…. if the shoe fits…. "So… you came by with intel, not to deal with my personal drama. Whatcha got?" she asks. Cuz after all, she still has to go to Cambridge today.
And this would be precisely the style in which she had conquered the various and sundry trials of motherhood and career advancement in 2019. A few minutes spared for tears where tears were due, bolstering spirits, a practical approach to motherhood, and then she'd switch tracks to asking after the evidence box in the space of time it takes most people to draw a ragged breath. Teo's grinning. He stops grinning before Elisabeth thinks to ask him what the Hell he's grinning about, straightens his face, and nods, once.
"Got it onto a disc. Lemme get it." Reaching in under his hoodie, he unearths a square CD case from some unimaginable place. Neither cover nor label are visible, only iridescent circles glinting off the underside of the disc. He pops it with a thumb, follows the instructive point of her forefinger to the DVD player set underneath the television.
"Two cameras, a couple bugs. Hana did us a favor and crapped it into a roughly coherent timeline, screen divided up into two and dubbed over where appropriate. I heard there isn't much left of the den or the thugs who were working in it, but— I guess…" he thumbs the player shut again, the disc receding neatly, locking into place. The light in the miniature display blinks. "Worst comes to worst, Staten's short another few lunatic murderers."
"As if that is a bad thing in the grand scheme of things right now," Elisabeth mutters. If he mentioned what he was grinning at, she might actually find some comfort in that idea. At the moment, it's all about diverting — because if she doesn't have time to dwell on it, the looming panic attack is staved off for another hour. Of course, her reluctance to find out for sure what's going on is something best left alone too for now. She finding her way through a multitude of emotions right now. Best thing for it… focus on work. And there's a metric ton of the stuff to do. Picking up her own coffee cup, tepid as the beverage now is, Elisabeth settles into her corner of the couch again and watches the images play out on the screen silently.
Amidst the sift of breeze through battered window frames and the occasional bustling rustle of feathers that represents local bird life: real activity. A door opens in the distance, dead wood over dead wood in its arthritic creaking and muffled thump. Boots scuff and creak in single file. Hard to tell how many pairs. Two? Three?
Someone stifles a cough. Dusty in there.
Metal slides smooth over broken glass and termite eaten wood. There's one click, then several more. The shutter and reset of a camera. Quiet that doesn't feel awkward so much as it feels enforced.
"Can you get a clear shot?"
A hoarse voice finally unsettles the silence, bone dry as the floorboards that protest his presence underfoot. Familiar, perhaps, to those who've had the pleasure of speaking with 'Charlie' over the phone.
The second voice is younger and deeper. Also male but less distinct. Not much more to be discerned than that.
"Negative. Perspective's all off. I can see a wall and part of the floor. No movement."
"…I think I see a kid." This voice is younger still. Younger and slightly baffled, like he's not entirely sure it's a kid, or what it's doing way the hell out here if it is one.
"Is that a problem for you, soldier?" Charlie again. He sounds skeptical now. Shouldn't have to ask, and there's a rustle of fabric of the sort that tends to accompany the checking of a watch.
"No sir."
"You think they're any less of a threat when they have big blue eyes and button noses?"
"No sir."
"See anything else?"
"Not from this angle. Sir."
A sigh filters out into the shadows, tailed closely by an oppressive beat of silence.
"Then pack it up."
The 'yes sir,' that belongs there goes unspoken, but there's a hint of hustle to the series of shuffling movements that follow. Equipment's being packed up in a series of automatic motions - a bolt draws heavy back out of a rifle chamber, casting a cartridge out into the warmth of a waiting glove. A zipper zips, then they're moving. All the boots that filed in file right back out again, and in the space of a few minutes, Phoenix has acquired a glimpse of what, exactly is digging around in their trashcans in the dark.
The last of the camera's staticky image fades its reflection off Teo's eyes, and he finally remembers to blink. He's squatting in front of the television, arrested where he was, hadn't even succeeded in getting back to the couch.
"Well," he says. "Shit."