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| Scene Title | Make Love Stay |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | Not all answers can be put to words. |
| Date | February 10, 2009 |
???
It starts with a tickle. A touch that barely brushes the hair ends along the arm. People say at times that the touch of a ghost is cold, sends chills to the core. This feels warm, humid even, almost as if the air itself gained more moisture, like a room after a hot shower.
At first everything seems dark. Like a room painted all in black. There's a glow, though, like a fluorescent light bulb, flickering in the distance. It seems to move, getting closer and closer, as the tickle moves further up the chosen arm.
Once it reaches the tattoo, there's a hint of pain, the touch becoming far more tactile, like fingernails scratching skin. A memory of getting the tattoo, maybe? The glow finally reaches far enough, illuminating skin, making the pale white surface even brighter than it should naturally be, offset by patterns of black and red visible on various portions of her body.
A shamelessly naked body.
Dark hair hangs around her face, cut off just at the shoulder, giving her no modesty at all. Tattoos which should be permenant and unmoving, don't follow laws of nature. The dragon on the side of her right breast is especially animate, shifting until both eyes are visible instead of one, mouth opening as if planning to speak, or breathe fire, or lash out and devour.
It's not a disembodied voice that speaks, though. The woman's dark lips move, "Do you know what you are?"
She's made of shapes and ideas. Pale skin. Dark hair. Tattoos. Everything else is filler, shifting details, things the eyes skim over to make their way make to those shapes and ideas. Pale skin. Dark hair. Tattoos. A wraith built of parts without substance in between, abstract and surreal. This visage is not complete, he can't find the detail without only seeing what is apparent. Pale skin. Dark hair. Tattoos.
He manages to speak. "I'm…"
His hand closes over his own marking, the moisture in the air making droplets on his own bared skin. What was his name again? Peter Petrelli? Sylar? These lies he'd been fed, they have to be lies. No, he knows what his name is.
"I'm… dreaming."
He steps closer towards the light in the distance that illuminates her, eyes tracking the shifting tattoos on her body, and then trying to find her eyes. No dice. They're there, of course, but his gaze skims over them, to take in those three parts. Pale skin. Dark hair. Tattoos.
"I'm Tavisha."
What's visible also seems to shift at times, taller one moment, short the next. Some of the tattoos are just dark shapes. Dark patches on pale skin, pale skin that barely has form. Only a few remain distinct in any form. The dragon. The watchface. The fade and blur at times, but sharpen with an intensity at others.
"Are you?" the voice asks again, calm, but with a tinge of amusement. The scratching stops, the hand moving down to brush arm hairs once again. "You've been stripped bare," she says softly, hand moving from arm to touch at his torso, his ribs, sliding upward. "Left naked. Everything taken away from you." Literal or methaphorical. It could be both. As indistinct as her facial features might be, she still moves in closer, blur and contrast. Light and dark.
"Even took your name."
The hand travels higher to start, the feeling of the fingers far more distinct than they appear. "No past. No sins. No broken hearts. All of it left behind."
Touch. That's new. And vivid. He doesn't close his eyes, doesn't think to, glances down at the hand made of more light than flesh, it seems, but feels like flesh, and bone beneath that, even the gentle scrape of fingernails is present. His hand comes up to touch her wrist, smooth down her arm, feeling her if he can't quite let himself see her, then looks up to try again to find her eyes.
"I want them back," he tells her. His other hand goes out to touch her hair, to push it back so he can study her a little easier, but the strands fall through his fingers like water, shifting only a moment. "My name. My past." And there's hesitation there, before he finishes that with, "My sins."
"Sins… and pleasures…" the voice says, a hint of amusement playing along the words. The arm feeling real. A tribal design becomes visible on the inside of her wrist, more vivid and distinct, black with red in the center. A flower, a rose. A rose that blooms a little as the fingers try to shift hair and fail. Half there. Half somewhere else.
"Whether you have everything or nothing… there's one thing that never changes…" Even though her height and body shape might seem blurry and shifty, she's shorter than him. The hand on his chest reaches out to touch his neck, rising higher, drawing him down closer to the indistinct face.
The tattoos seem to blur out again, as attention changes. Too bad it doesn't make everything else come into focus. "You're a man." Not a monster. Not a thing. "One thing that you haven't lost."
He goes through motions, slowly, as if moving through water in that strange sort of surreal that comes with dreams. Both hands wind through glossy black hair, red reflecting where the lights catch. The humidity of the room wraps around them like a blanket, and maybe in a different place, twisted sheets restrict him with warmth in the same way.
Whoever this is, he knows he has to kiss her. That's how this narrative goes. The ghost of an action suggests he pushes her against bathroom tile and steal a kiss. Water mingles with sweat and runs in thin rivulets down his back.
He stops.
"That only gets you so far," he says, a thumb brushing down the slope of her indistinct jawline. "What good is a man, without a name to call his own? Without a life?" In here, wherever here is, he barely remembers even his current situation. It's a limbo of memory, and he's aware he's holding one in his arms.
"Even with a name, everyone is someone else half the time," she says softly, as if she's said it before, repeating words more than anything else. He doesn't kiss her, but that doesn't mean she won't move in close again, leaning into his hand as she stands up a little taller. Tiptoes most likely. Or something pushing her up higher. Her height remains below him. He'll have to lean down to seal it.
"Even with everything, you lose who you are— what you want to be. And then you find something, something that doesn't disappear, that doesn't fade away. Something…" The head lowers away, as if she's looking down from his face. Hard to tell without the details. Hair falls in the way again, even with his hand there. The place where eyes should be attends to his arm. One thing remaining. A permenant mark left behind.
"That's what it means. Permanent. Can't go away. Yours."
Confusion, confusion and turmoil and the desperate need for his life back, is all these ghosts bring. But that rings with a sudden clarity, following her look down to his arm. The circular tribal tattoo draws definite lines on his skin, and then, begins to move as her's do. It rotates slowly, and then the extra coils and curves move independently.
Like clockwork.
He angles her face up again, desperately searching it, and for that moment of clarity, he sees her, sees exactly what she looks like, lips red and eyes dark and mouth twisting into something like a familiar smile. He won't remember it in the morning, but for now, he does. He closes that distance in a kiss and like all the other touches, it feels just as it should.
Clockwork. With all focus on her face, the tattoos that she has don't get near as much attention. They've snapped into place, heightened with detail as everything else pulls together. The blurred lines drop, the contrast of light and dark gains more color, warmth. The kiss deepens, passionate and enthusastic, pushing back, almost a struggle on it's own. This spirit may bring pain in some forms, confusion in others, and this may not stick, but it does try to leave an impression.
There's a hint of a whisper against his mouth as she breaks for breath, an exhale that might have been words. Perhaps she's trying to tell him her name. Or his. Or whisper some kind of affection. With his hearing, it shouldn't be indistinct at all. There's a heartbeat. Sped up, quickened. Hers or his? Or both, mingled together as one?
While part of what was said is indistinct, what follows after can be made out. She draws out of the kiss to look up at him. "Some things… never go away."
Permanent.
A gasp of waking, as if coming up for air, and reality smacks down hard. There is nothing surreal about the rough sheets of his bed, now drenched with sweat as if he'd had a fever, or the stark contrast of cold hair that whips through his lungs at that taken in breath. It's dark, and he blinks a few times, before slumping back against his bed. Slowly, distant lights from the window filter in, nighttime light pollution cast a faint glow into the room, reminding him of where he is. Not some dark, distant reality, but a makeshift bedroom in an abandoned hospital on Swinburne Island.
God, what was that dream? In the struggle to remember it, everything else floods back. Staten Island. Playing pirate. The name Tavisha, which at first, for a few seconds in the dark, sounds ludicrous, before it settles back onto him, fitting. Tavisha. That's his name.
And he can still feel her fingers on his flesh, a crawling sensation that draws a heated shiver from him, turning his head against the pillow in false agony. She told him something. What was it? What did she look like? What did she say?
He has an inexplicable impulse, drawing up his arm to observe it in the dim lighting. The tattoo, meaningless, stares back at him, and Tavisha traces it with the tips of his fingers. No, not meaningless. His.
Permanent.
 February 11th: Interrupted Isolation |
 February 11th: How Many Periwinkle Vans Could There Be? |