It's Been Fun

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clara2_icon.gif sarisa_icon.gif

Scene Title It's Been Fun
Synopsis Sarisa Kershner's plan comes to an end.
Date October 6, 2011

Washington D.C.


In the late hours well past nine at night, street traffic in D.C. is still steady. Rows of headlights and tail lights bloom mutedly through the gauzy curtains covering tall windows. Lounging on an L-shaped leather sofa, Sarisa Kershner stares into the glow of a laptop open in her lap. Several boxes of Thai takeout sit on the glass coffee table beside her, along with paper dossiers of the Presidential cabinet, members of the supreme court, and the House.

This brownstone at 1301 Potomac Ave in Washington D.C. is officially leased to Adelaide Vaughn, a military therapist working for the Department of Defense on a critical assessment of Evolved in combat zones. In truth, the lavish, split-level residence has been the base of operations and hideaway for an insurrection against the United States Government for roughly nine months, and Sarisa Kershner its denmother.

Across the open living room, a dimly lit kitchen is residence to Clara Francis, the time-manipulating woman roped into Sarisa’s mad grasp for power. Pouring herself a glass of wine, Clara leans back against the countertop, listening to the muffled sounds of traffic outside. “Big day tomorrow,” Clara notes with a raise of one brow. “First meeting with the Joint Chiefs about pulling the trigger on international FRONTLINE deployment. The Iraq business sounds like it shook out well.”

Clara looks over her shoulder, setting the wine bottle down. Sarisa looks askance at Clara, cracking a smile that says I shouldn’t be so happy though also clearly indicates but I am. “We’re moving mountains, one pebble at a time. By this time next year, we might actually be in a position to infiltrate the President’s cabinet.”

Clara comes padding over, barefoot and with a second glass of wine in hand. “Mr. Gray’s the real deal, isn’t it?” She hands one glass to Sarisa, then settles on the arm of the sofa beside her, eyeing the laptop. “You’re picking out a suit for him?” Clara looks at the catalog website open, then side-eyes Sarisa. “He’s not— I don’t know— he’s not a puppy you put in a sweater-vest.”

“Isn’t he though?” Sarisa cracks a smile, and the two women share a knowing laugh with one-another. On the thought of Gabriel, Sarisa withdraws a phone from its spot wedged between the cushions and checks her recently calls: nothing.

“Has he been around?” Clara asks, noticing Sarisa checking her phone. Shrugging it off, Sarisa tucks the phone away.

“He said something about checking out a man named Stephen Borrowdale a few days ago, I figure he’s off hunting again.” Sarisa says it in the way someone might about an outdoor cat, as if Gabriel would bring a mouse back to their doorstep. “I don’t imagine he’ll be much longer.”

He’s very efficient.

Moving to sit opposite, Clara swirls the wine in her glass with a seesaw tip of her hand, her focus on Sarisa even and unbreaking. "I have to admit," she says, "I'm kind of surprised. He never struck me as a long game kind of guy. He could barely stay in the same room for long unless literally half-dead. How do you stop him from getting, you know."

She drags her long hair back from her face as if it irritates her.

"Antsy."

Cracking a smile, Sarisa reclines some and tilts the laptop screen part way closed in her lap. “He’s still human,” she admits with a raise of one brow and a lopsided smile and a knowing look fired to Clara. “I mean, he has a knack for figuring things out, you know? He’s— ah— very intuitive?” Sarisa’s teeth toy at the bottom of her lip, and the implication is quite obvious.

“I mean, it’s —” Sarisa waves one hand in the air as if to dismiss some of the scandal. “It’s not like I keep him trapped between my thighs when he isn’t working, but… you know,” she flicks a look to Clara and then pushes the screen of her laptop back open. “We have our needs.”

Clara tips Sarisa a look down her nose — oh, you, it seems to say — and that focus lingers even after Sarisa has redirected her gaze down at her screen. She sips her wine, and licks it off her teeth, leaning forward to setting it down on the table.

"I just mean," she says, her tone a little insistent, "all these plans. Cabinet within a year. Meetings and sweater-vests. You're not worried he's going to… I don't know. Take this into his own hands."

She raises her eyebrows, and points, smiling a little crooked. "And not like that. I mean like he might want more from you than just a front row seat. With his kind of power, with his kind of ambition, he could be anything." Her crooked smile has evened out, fixed and sharp. "He could even be president."

“Well, I mean…” Sarisa slides the laptop off of her legs and sets it down on the coffee table. “That’s sort of the idea, but these things take time to do right.” Pushing up from the couch, she reaches up to run her fingers through the back of her hair and shake it out. “It’s like, I suppose there’s some kind of baking analogy in there,” her eyes narrow momentarily, “you have to be patient, or it’ll be all cocked up.”

The corners of Sarisa’s mouth twitch into the semblance of a smile, and she walks across the living room and to the kitchen across the way, talking over her shoulder to Clara. “Being smart only gets you so far in Washington, at least for long. Allen Rickham was smart, but he didn’t know how to play the game.” With a tug, she pulls open the refrigerator and leans down, looking for something. “Nathan Petrelli was smart, and a smarter version of him pulled the rug out from under his feet.”

Making a soft aha sound, Sarisa pulls out a bottle of chilled white wine and sets it down on the counter, looking across the open space to Clara. “Mitchell is smart enough to not say anything,” comes with one brow raised as she wiggles the already opened cork out. “Sylar would need to know who to trust, who to kill, when to kill them, and how to not get caught doing all of that.” Casually, she pours herself a glass and finishes the bottle, then begins to saunter back over to the sofa and Clara.

When she clears the distance, Sarisa offers it out to Clara. “She doesn’t drink red,” is stated flatly, eyes narrowing ever so slightly.

Clara's expression empties. Steels again, into something else, and she rises to her feet, taking the glass of wine. Smoothing away a trace of condensation already forming on the exterior.

"People change. Their tastes, their hearts, their minds."

She manages to write that smile back into place as she then takes a long, cool sip of wine, considering Sarisa all the while. She ticks up one eyebrows. "Do you want to see her? One last time."

Stupid arrogance has Sarisa’s spine straight and expression tight, as if she were scolding a dog that misbehaved or a child that had done poorly on an exam. “Of all… the stupid and short-sighted things you could have done. We—” Sarisa's slides her tongue over her teeth. “We needed her. Not — not just her ability, we needed her as an individual.”

Sarisa’s lips downturn into a frown. “Unless you can be in more than one place at a time, you've gone and screwed everything up. Now… now D.L. is going to have to work double time to…” She doesn't realize what's happening yet. That not only is Clara gone, but D.L. as well. It's like a round of layoffs at a company that's become too fat.

Sternly, Sarisa's raises one hand in an exasperated gesture. “If you had a lick of sense in your head you— “

Fast as a viper, Clara's hand closes around Sarisa's throat, an ordinary needling strength in her fingers that dig right in. They know where to go, not only to restrict breathing, but also to put a dull, tingling pressure that seems to climb up the sides of Sarisa's face and make her vision swim before the need to breathe even becomes a factor.

Skin to skin, the vision is really the only vision that could possibly come next.

In reverse. Clara's body flung akimbo over her own bed, scarlet on white, the top of her skull missing and discarded.

Clara's wide-open fear as a male hand grabs over her face, covering her mouth, forcing eye contact while she's pushed into her room. Held down, while the skin along her brow begins to split, and her eyes lose focus. The feel of gnashing teeth and vibrating screams under slick palm. The terrible sound of sawing bone. And something else: the smell of fear, which apparently, smells very sweet, and it makes him strong.

Sarisa sees herself. Poised like a picture. Careful not to step within range of her eyeline. In that brief flicker of knowledge, she knows that Sylar remained in this frozen moment for a long time.

Thinking.

She feels the wall thump behind her, and the hand around her throat has both lessened its grip and also changed: rough fingers, broader palm. Had she gotten this close to Clara before now, she might have smelled him, too, unwashed and feral. As the present moment comes back to her, he's there, bristled at the chops, tall, crowding her in.

"It occured to me," he says, his breath warm at her hairline, a baritone growl, "that I'm going to need one last thing from you if our plan's gonna ever work. You get that, right? You don't mind."

At first there wasn’t panic in Sarisa’s expression at the hand around her throat. Her eyes were wide but more out of surprise than anything. But after the psychometric vision, after she sees that this isn’t just some fun game, terror quickly washes over Sarisa’s face. Her mouth opens, threatening to reason, but then she pulls both of her legs up and kicks as hard as she can at Sylar’s midsection. It does almost nothing to him. She brings her legs up again, kicks a second time and tries to lever herself away and his grip is still adamant.

Face turning red, eyes bulging, Sarisa swings a leg up over Sylar’s arm in an attempt to make her weight topple him over. It’s how she bested Daiyu Feng and — he holds her weight with impossible strength. Her leg twists, trying to break the ligaments between bicep and forearm. She strains, jaws clenched, neck tight. She pulls her leg back again, a strangled noise rasping from the back of her throat, and pushes her foot out to kick at his neck.

Panic. It smells wonderful. Like blood on snow, like burning cinnamon, like salt and sun. The hand around Sarisa's throat, at the moment realisation hits her, does not squeeze — it just becomes as firm as an iron collar, holding her in place. Super strength makes steel cables of his muscles and ligaments, pours concrete into his bone marrow. His mouth parts as if to taste her fear and breathe it in whole, and this quickly widens into a wolf's grin, all teeth, as she begins to fight.

He's never been this way with her before. This godlike, this unmoving, this impervious and inflexible. But then again, she's never truly been afraid of him until this moment.

His other hand catches her leg, and she will hear him laughing as she's torn from the wall and then thrown, deliberately awkward so that when she crashes into furniture, it won't be so easy for her to just flip back onto her feet. "Oh, Sarisa," he says, making a lazy, confident approach. "For what it's worth, I gotta say you've never disappointed me. Not in the ways that matter."

There’s a snap of bone and a strangled scream when Sarisa hits the coffee table, flips head over heels and collides with an armchair and breaks off one of its legs. Glass shatters on the floor, wine sinks into the decorative white carpet staining it pink. Dapples of darker red join it. “Stop,” Sarisa rasps, pushing herself up onto one arm, where the other is twisted in a direction that implies it may never be used again.

For the first time in a long time, there’s genuine fear in her eyes. “Sylar, stop.” She doesn’t know how to reason with him anymore, doesn’t know how to impress upon him her value. She drags herself to the side, waits a second, and then strips a duct-taped gun out from below the toppled armchair and unloads the entire clip into his chest. Three of the bullets just ricochet into the walls, the remainder drop like flattened nickles onto the floor after they fell out of the bottom of his shirt.

She lurches, mouth wide, tears in her eyes. Her mistake is realized.

At the barrage of bullets, Sylar stops only to brace against it, and to watch. His fingertips feel the circular burn marks where they pierced his shirt, at the smooth, unbroken flesh beneath it, and he looks up across at her like he's expecting she might be impressed.

She's terrified. Same thing.

There's nothing boyish or innocent in his smile, but there is the distinct impression that whatever game they were playing before has reached its final stage, like Sarisa is still playing in kind, and he knows he's winning. Unfortunately, the thunder-strikes of her gun are going to draw a faster sort of attention than just the muffled thumps and crashes of their fight prior, so he's gonna have to speed this along.

He steps nearer, snatching one of her ankles, effortlessly dragging her close over splintered wood and broken glass until he can crouch over her. One hand pins down her arm, and the other grips her face. She could search all day for a flicker of remorse, but even his delight has tapered away, and all that's left over now is

nothing.

The emptiness of someone who was never someone to begin with. An idea. A figment. And now, he has everything he needs, for which he says, "Thank you," and, "I had fun."

The pain begins at her left temple, and starts to crawl across her brow in a growing crown of pressure and blood. There's a dull snap as bone cracks.

Sarisa’s horrified screams reverberate through her building, through the yard beyond, and through the delicately set house of cards that was her entire plan, come crashing down.

A waste of time.

A waste of life.


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