Participants:
| Scene Title | Man In The Mirror |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | After being thrown down a well, she needs a hero and he hates those but she's pretty. |
| Date | April 3, 2018 |
It's impossible to tell the time of day through the sun struggling in around the covering and its eclipse shadow over the well. In the near darkness, Eve's eyes adjust to the shadows, and so maybe the slight brightness of encroaching noon day is just a trick, and likewise, the way it starts to dim. Soon, that seam of light is down to a paper thin edge, offering nothing but can indication of how far away the rest of the world is from where she exists, now, at the bottom of the well.
Her body adapts to the cold, too. She stops shivering. Strange warmth prickles the tips of her fingers.
This isn't a good sign.
But what is a good sign is the sound that finally breaks through the loneliness. The scrape of metal and stone is very slight, but such a departure from the wet silence all around her that it might as well be vibrating down the stone walls around her, rippling in the dark water. Above, a crescent sliver of light widens, struggling and overcast but almost piercing in contrast to the thick shadows it penetrates like a knife. There's another scrape, and it opens wider.
"Where have all the good men gone and.. where are all the gods.."
A hoarse voice can be heard echoing from the bottom of the well. It's tired, hard to fall asleep when you're freezing cold and your leg is broken. She's in pain.. but it's numb now. That might not be good.. Teeth chattering, Eve rocks back and forth slightly as she takes another bite of her Snickers bar, mouthful as she sings the next lines, "Where's the street-wise Hercules to fight the rising odds.. isn't there a white knighttttt," her head drops forward, hair hanging in a wet curtain around her heart-shaped face, pale gray eyes are bloodshot. They had been since the gas had been released even hours later.. her skin still burned, her throat hurt. "Upon a fiery steed."
Eve's hand goes up to the sky with the pinch of light left, "Late At night, toss and I turn and I dream of what I.. need.."
The seer takes a deep breath, her expression one of doubt. Maybe this will be her new home, temporary home that is. "I NEED A HER- OH!" The woman stops her singing to stare up at the well opening, it's well.. opening. "Oh Yoo-hoo! I need a hero!"
With one last, louder scrape, and a womf of sliced air, the covering is suddenly flipped loose. The opening above is just white, until her eyes adjust to that, and she can see tree branches outlined against the grey sky, the contours of the clouds. And them, a familiar face, as Gabriel Gray steps to the very edge, and sinks into a low crouch with the confidence of someone who isn't frightened of a straight 20 foot drop, or his balance failing him.
"You should know something about me, Eve," he says, his voice soft, but funneled easily down the tunnel of stone without much effort. "It's that I hate heroes."
He's hard to read, from down there. The open book he'd been in the living room of his cottage in Maine is snapped closed, for the moment, his study intent, nothing concerned or frantic in his posture, the normal cues that indicates someone responding to a friend in distress. But the other thing she must know by now is that he's always been a little cruel, even to those he loved.
"And I hate you Dad."
The woman grumbles as she blinks and covers her eyes before allowing them to adjust to the sudden light. "Gabriel! Oh wow what an awesome surprise! I was thinking about you," obviously with her current circumstance. Pale gray eyes close and she nods her head though, he's there. A friend, that has a mask on his face right now but Eve understands. That's not an always thing, their bonding in Maine.
Though she wishes they were just smoking a joint in Maine right now. "Maybe I should have just stayed in Maine with you Jazzhands." There's a sigh, "I think I just became Oracle." Theres a moan of pain and the woman is clutching her leg, her bag of tricks sits on that structure. She's had time down here, the consider things, people.
There's been a mantra, 'Hamson', Sibyl, Adam. Over and over in her head, when the negation fully wears off these names will join the echoes that usually rebound in her head. "How'd you know?" Her voice is hoarse and weak, she munches on more of her candy bar.
His composure fractures, just a little. Jaw firm, eyes flinty, silence weighted. Gabriel looks aside, then, like you do when you're gathering your wits or your patience. As her question drifts up, he just says, "I have eyes everywhere.
"What are you doing?" Now, the echo of his voice has a little accusation. It isn't fierce, like he might be over vulnerable prey normally. Offended, maybe. Confused. Maybe his feelings are hurt. "With my dad."
"Would you believe me if I told you that I didn't originally know it was him when I saw him at the auction?" Her tone is honest, she's not lying to her friend and her expression mirrors his. She's confused about it all, though she guesses she understands more than she thinks.. "well he ambushed me outside my car and demanded I tell him someone who could regenerate. I couldn't give him Claire's name." She says that with an upturned lip, the thought makes her stomach roll. "So I gave him Adam Monroe's name instead but he was too lazy to go to Hong Kong for his immortality."
"So, I lied and gave him the name of someone I hate." Gabriel and everyone else knows that there aren't many people who make that list. "Then he got back before I was ready, well I was ready.. but for tomorrow." That's when her package was arriving, she knew she should have ordered it with express shipping.
"I tired, I really did. To not step all up in it." But she had.
More weighty silence. Birdsong whistles in the trees, unseen from her angle, the world reduced to a moon with a man in it. Finally, he takes in a breath, and eases up to stand, and then he moves.
In fact, he jumps.
It's more than a little shocking, the dense weight of a 6'1" man, all limbs and black coat and solid bones, suddenly pitching himself feet first down the narrow cylinder carved into the earth. Even if he lands clear of her, without striking the walls on his way downwards, his landing with surely jostle and heave whatever she's landed on in the bottom, but before Eve can brace for impact, his form liquefies into black shadow, the flip of his coat becoming a streaming, inky tendril as the rest of him collapses into an amorphous swathe of darkness.
He fills the space in his descent, and Eve is swallowed by darkness. And then physically, literally, swallowed by darkness as her body is assimilated into that mobile inky shadow, growing twice in size as she becomes a part of it. The first thing that disappears is the pain, and then any control over her own physicality, and then her vision returns to her, stranger than before. She sees with a much wilder, wider scope, blurred at the edges, and she sees the circle above of the well grow in size as she and Gabriel both travel back upwards, scaling the wall.
The entire world falls into focus as they emerge on the edge of the ground, and Gabriel steers them away, keeping low, a black puddle of shadow swimming across the grass, around trees, away and away and away.
It all passes by in a blur.
By the time Gabriel gives them both back their physical bodies, not too much time has passed, but enough that the sky is a little darker than it was, heading solidly into twilight. They haven't left Staten Island yet, and the smell rust and low tide hits Eve immediately. She sits on dry earth, in amongst overgrown saltgrass, facing out towards where the rust-covered hulls of the Staten Island boat graveyard sit half-submerged in the shallows of the beach. And her leg hurts.
Next to her, Gabriel has also come back to his own body, sitting with his knees bent, arms in a loose bracket around them.
"He's not lazy," he says, first.
That shock of seeing Gabriel jump down into the well is followed by a wide eyed stare in awe of the swirling darkness that he becomes and she closes her eyes as it surrounds her giving herself over to the dark, it would have been happening anyway so why fight it in a panic? Eve has never felt these sensations, seen in this fashion and it is exciting but the circumstances that have led her to being here are still raging in her mind.
Hamson, Sibyl, Adam Monroe.
The mantra sticks as they travel, something for the woman to focus on.
When she is returned to her body and all the physical sensations that come with it, there's a light sigh in relaxation as she sinks into the ground. "I peed after awhile and I really didn't wanna drink too much of the water after that."
Tangling her hands in her heavy wet mane of midnight dark hair. "Well I understand dying and feeling desperate but it's hardly my fault." For once anyway, "He said you played with your food," Eve scoffs and sets her bag down on the ground beside her. "I didn't like that, you seem to be a rather sensible eater in my opinion." There's a sigh and Eve looks up towards the night sky. The feeling in her leg is achy, she's gonna have to get that looked at. The coloring, the look of her leg it's just all sorts of off.
"Thanks for allowing your eyes to see me." It's said quietly as the woman ponders.
Hamson, Sibyl, Adam Monroe.
Chatting to her and playing at aloof while she was stuck down the well was petty cruelty; that Gabriel is ignoring the fact she is probably in a lot of pain as well as dehydrated and running solely off Snickers bars is more the negligence of someone who is very tough to kill, who has lived alone for a long time, who doesn't really think about those things. He is watching the sea hugging the ships, anyway. This is a place he comes. A place he used to go to.
"We both like the hunt," he says, a verbal shrug in his usual monotone. "He needs weaker prey because he's dying. Sometimes I play. Used to. It's been years."
He reaches, plucking a long stalk of saltgrass from the earth. He loops it, idly, a fidget. He's shaved his face at least once since she last saw him, shadow growing back in. He's at that point where Eileen would be telling him he needs to get his hair cut, and it's unstyled, now, falling at brow, slick with sweat and Staten Island moisture. His proud brow is furrowed at the centre. "How did you learn who he was? That we're connected."
If Eve takes offense to Gabriel's petty behavior or negligence it's not visibly noticeable. Eve neglects herself so when someone else does it's hardly any different than usual. That she might chalk up to difficult upbringing, murderer for a father. "No offense to your pops but you have finesse." Samson was more like a hammer, just slamming things into place or out. The hammer approach was something that Eve really liked though, just smack em with the hammer before anything else happens. "You, haven't in a while. Do you remember our first bargain? You spared a life in my name. Thanks for that." Because she understands how hard back then that must have been for him. There's a measured look given to the water in front of them and she closes her eyes for a moment.
"Richard Ray was very afraid of your daddy. Said your father killed him and four others for their abilities. I'm not sure how many serial killers fit that description. But.. it didn't take too much work to put those fuzzy pieces together."
"Adam is a warrior but he is.." she doesn't say just a man. It's true but until she's able to put every single man down in their rightful place (in her eyes) she would rather not get into the specifics of her views then. "I have a feeling your father will continue until one of us is dead." She was already compiling a plan for the next time she saw the man, well the plan hadn't changed much since a couple days ago but she would have the necessary supplies very soon.
"Stop— "
But Gabriel closes his mouth rather than carry that sentence to its finish, a wolfish turn of his head like a warning snap before this movement, too, is aborted. The curve of his shoulder is a little petulant, defensive, and between his fingertips, he splits the blade of grass like a zipper. A minor shake of his head. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what she calls Samson Gray in reference to him — it won't make it any less real, or any more real.
He lets the blade of grass, now sundered, flutter from his fingertips with a dismissive flick. "What was supposed to happen tomorrow?"
Silence envelopes them, eyes are downcast as she just listens to the nature around them. Pictures a bird here, raccoon there. Eve thinks for a moment on Gabriel's question. "I was going to throw him down a proverbial well. I suppose great minds we think alike!" She raises a hand to look at her dirty pruny fingers, "Out of self defense. He was suppose to come to me in an alley or something.
He had the first time but apparently he was supposed to again. "He was bidding on negation medicine in the auction. But when I released the negation gas I have, he didn't let it wash over him. Why but the injection then?"
The seer sounds confused. It doesn't make much sense in her eyes.
"Seriously?"
Gabriel raises an eyebrow, tipping a cynical look sidelong. "A syringe of adynomine is medicine. A canister of negation gas is in violation of the Geneva Protocol. He avoided the gas to protect himself from you." He turns back to his fidgetting, plucking at the saltgrass, a little impatience translated through these minor actions, the furrow in his brow. "He bid on the adynomine to protect himself from himself, probably.
"So, what, were you trying to kill him?" There's no accusation in that question. There's also another question hidden within it. Is she going to try again?
The speak of protocols gets a wave of her hand, we’re talking serial killers here. “It’s what I had on hand.” That’s isn’t a lie either, she’s staring out towards the sky with a curious expression. Words of needing protecting from yourself resonate with Eve and she tilts her head, pale hands going to dig in the dirt around her. She’s been locked away to protect herself from herself and she’s done things in order to keep her more exquisite behavior at bay. None of those felt right. “What if he could get it taken away? His gift?” It’s still such a thing, a curse still which is something that Eve can also understand but she shrugs lightly. “That might feel horrible.. But if he’s afraid of himself. Ahhh, this is a toughie Jazzhands I’m not sure if I’m going to be able to give a good answer, nuts all aloose.” She knocks her head and lets it swing over to the other side so that she’s facing away from her friend. “I would have tried to help him,” she tries to help everyone most times due to the other person’s horror at how she decides to help.
“Well!”
…
“He started it. A girl’s gotta do what she can to survive through the day, mistakes were made all around.” That’s one way to put it.. “If he comes for me again what am I to do?” There’s a thought in her head and she grins as she whips her face back towards Gabriel, “Do you remember when we first met!? Not the time that you stabbed in me in the tummy or when you tricked us as Mohinder. Bravo.. I don’t think I ever properly sang your praises for that shindig.” chefkiss “I asked you to spare someone, you even did!” Fond memories, yes. “Maybe you speak with him, tell him to leave me alone. I won’t need to think of ways to involuntary manslaughter in self defense.” Brow furrows and she looks up to the side again, that wasn’t worded right..
"If he tries to kill you," Gabriel says, grass blade looped around a knuckle, "you should definitely try to kill him back."
And he is certain he'd like Eve to come out the victor.
But he's not sure she would. As she relates memories, he listens in his usual far away sort of way. He remembers that deal. He remembers hunting. How it all seemed like a big fucking game, like the world was a playground. It still sort of feels that way, a touch removed from reality, and his heart lurches as it so often does when his mind thinks its way in that direction. He swallows, and shakes his head a little, like he's saying no. But he doesn't say no.
"How did he look?"
“I’ll try my best, shortsighted still even with the woo wooo,” a twirl of her finger in the air and she clicks her teeth together. Eve taps her fingers to her chin. She thinks of him and how he looked. “He looked broken. Like he was ready to sleep, tired.” She knows that feeling too, she’s finding herself sympathizing more and more with the Old Dragon. “I felt bad,” a pale hand flings a bit of dirt out in front of her. “For how he looked, how he felt. It was radiating off of him particularly. All that emotion.”
A glance at the dirty hands as she shudders. The feeling of being negated is strong, she had been in the thick of it. Her skin was itchy and she rubbed at it absently, her head oddly clear. But she felt fear at the lack of those whispers and the echoes. Instead just memories that could still drive you mad but that pulse in her head, in the middle of her chest. It was gone.
Wrapping her arms around herself and rocking backwards and forwards, she twitches from her leg. Eve should have it looked at. “You should really talk to him, I think it could help.”
Something about Gabriel's presence seems to shrink in on itself, but he doesn't articulate why. What he doesn't need to put into words is that he's reluctant to have anything to do with Samson Gray, because that's all his silence seems to radiate.
"He killed my mother," he says, after a moment. "He loved her, I know. It was a mistake. They were fighting because he wanted to get rid of me. Pawned me off to his brother, for money, to keep me safe, to convenience himself, it doesn't matter. I never knew about that, not for a long time. Eventually, his brother walked out on me too, left me with my mom who could barely look after herself, let alone a kid. Took him three decades to want to make it right."
It's a lot of information to just say, but it's what happens when you go digging in someone's past.
"Anyway," he's saying, "those aren't the kinds of things you just take back. I don't know that I can help him. That I owe him anything. Someone in this world should get what's coming to them, right?"
Silence. And the troubled woman has a frown on her face at the story, a tragic one. Her heart hurts and she wants to reach out and give him comfort, even when she’s in as much pain as she’s in. Numb or not, blinking she rubs her forehead.
“I’m so sorry Gabriel. Parents are still people, unfair to the children but it’s a fucked in the head truth,” Her frown deepens and she pulls at a flyaway strand of hair, yanking it out and wrapping the long strand around her fingers. “You don’t owe the devil shit but your back,” rubbing her ear into her shoulder she continues to wrap her hair around her fingers faster still. “I believe in karma, she does arrive when she wants but the timing is always impeccable..sometimes.. He’ll get what’s coming to him.” Not always when you’re being thrown down a well but Eve was crossing her fingers that some of the good she’s done would lend her some favor in the karmic war. Maybe she didn’t have any. Good karma. Imps cause chaos.
“You left me a gift, thank you. The desert,” it’s not often she gets paintings from the future as a gift. It’s nice.
It's hard to believe in one man's salvation when you don't entirely believe in your own, but there is such a thorny nest of complication that it's hardly that simple to begin with. When Eve changes the subject, Gabriel is glad for it, a knot of tension easing from the middle of his back.
He makes a sound at the back of his throat, acknowledgment, a you're welcome.
"I figured it might make sense to you," he says. The implication being, it didn't to him. "And if not, maybe it would eventually, or to someone else. It's been a while since I thought about the future."
“If not for me then someone else but I like dry, hot places. Shawls to cover the face, the snakes!” there’s a chuckle and she moans in a low tone as her leg nudges a little and she feels a jolt of pain through her body starting from her leg. Eve braces herself and continues to nod trying to focus on something else besides the pain. “I won’t be on going on any adventures anytime soon,” there’s a bit of a pout as she regards her leg with a narrowed gaze. She was a active person and being laid out was a big fear of the woman’s and not something she’s faced with often. She’s had to be patched up and on bed rest before but this was going to make her movements more difficult. She was already feeling the itch to do underneath her skin.
“Thank you again, for saving me.”
Gabriel, too, looks down at her leg, then back to her face, as if trying to decide if he ought to do something about it, within the scope of his abilities. No healing is available to him, nothing that can offer a significant fix or wouldn't just wind up worse, but he could take the pain away. Doesn't, in the end. Pain is important, and certainly will be when she eventually has a doctor look at the break.
He draws his heels in, discarding the tattered saltgrass he'd been worrying in his hands.
"I'm assuming you don't want the butcher in the Rookery setting the break," he says, wryly. "I can take you to the shores of the mainland, if you have a means of contacting someone who can help you from there."
“No no, butchers won’t do. I need some more bacon though,” said in a somber tone, Eve is .hungry. “I can call someone from over there, yeah.” She was weary of calling any of her friends, this was something she wasn’t proud of. Her pride hurt at the injury and being duped by a.. crone. Reaching a hand out as if to grip a rope leading up to the stars the woman exhales loudly. Her head was beginning to throb, she needed food and clean water. She needed to be home. She wasn’t sure she was safe anywhere though, a shiver passes up her spine.
An owl hoots, early rising and the sound carries over the surface of water echoing out to them. If there was a plan to be hatched it wasn’t on the forefront of Eve’s mind for now, she needed rest.
The journey over will be only be more exhaustion, but at least it will be painless — and not to mention, a little fascinating. Once again, Gabriel disappears into the featureless mass of shadow he became when he first retrieved her, and once again, drags her into that same embrace, a cohabitating of single form that Eve is powerless to control. They slither together over coastline, and then finally they hit the water, its chill abstracted from true sensation, just recognised for what it is.
He moves under water, when they feel the vibrations of patrolling boats. Above them, the surface of the Narrows bends the lights that spill down from these boats, and they pass by silently, unseen.
By the time they get to the mainland, night shrouds the sky. Eve is expelled from the shadow mass — gently, anyway — on the shores of Brighton Beach. It's a desolate place, and perfect for minor Sylar-esque activity to go unnoticed. Behind her, Eve can see the silhouettes of demolished buildings and construction equipment, all empty and dark for the evening. She is also, apparently, by herself once again, as the black shadow she knows to be Gabriel Gray disappears out of sight. It's an improvement on Staten Island, for an injured woman to be alone.
But not by much.
However, she hears a soft hooting as a nocturnal bird lands on some fencing nearby. Even if he can't be seen, he is only hanging back, otherwise keeping watch to ensure no one tries to finish what Samson Gray began.