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Scene Title | Peanut-Butter & Jelly |
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Synopsis | What starts as a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich shared between friends takes a shocking twist thanks to a late news report. |
Date | January 25, 2010 |
Apartment 1407
"You know, sometimes I wonder about us."
Says a man staring intently into the bottom of a jar of grape jelly.
"Not like— us us, but like, people with abilities? I think back and I just wonder… why?"
The clattering clunk of a butterknife clicking against the sides of a plastic jar of grape jelly comes with a scoop, a slap, and then a spreading across a piece of wheat bread.
"The variation of abilities, you know? It's just wild, so many types, so many forms, it's just hard to imagine that they've managed to stay secret for as long as they did."
The other side of the bread comes down, peanut-butter squished against jelly, cut corner to corner, and then trimmed of the crust around the edges and laid out on a napkin.
"It makes me wonder about all sorts of things in history— Moses parting the Red Sea, all that sort've mystical stuff. Was that just… people like us?"
Hard soles shoes clunk across the hardwood floor, and the musing tones of Peter Petrelli's voice come to join the sound of a news broadcast playing on the small television seated in Peter's living room on a milk crate, with an old combination VCR/DVD player situated atop it. The quiet undertones of a political debate are rambling in the background as Peter settles himself down on the sofa besides his lady guest, all of her pale skin and dark hair both contrasting and matching the brown leather of his sofa.
"Here you go, Gillian."
Reaching out with one hand, Peter offers up one half of the sandwitch towards his guest. When she had called and said she was coming over, Peter promised dinner and a movie. Unfortunately for the newly moved in Peter, he still has not bothered to go grocery shopping after finishing unpacking, leaving his spacious apartment both somewhat empty feeling, and also bereft of most food.
"We'll.. go out for something later."
At least he tried.
"It's fine," Gillian says with a half smile, taking her half of the sandwich. She may find it a surprising choice of foods, but she's ate worse in the last year! And… "This is better than what we ate in Argentina," she admits, taking a bite as looks toward the television, and the political debate rambling in the background.
The clothes she wears has a 'first time worn' look. No stains or age wrinkles, nothing he'd seen her in before. A nice black and purple top, with designer jeans and a cute scarf and hat set that she set down on the couch. The heels she left behind, but most of her outfit came as a late Christmas present, to go along with the cash she got from her parents.
"It could be all those miracles were caused by abilities like… like ours. Maybe it became more promenant in the last couple decades. Cause of what the Company did, and stuff. Who knows how many people they tested their formula on. We know they tested it on a couple of us— Cat. Me…" Did he know that? She doesn't seem to think about that when she says it.
"And maybe they're more promenant just cause… there's more people in the world. Population growth, people living longer… who really knows. Could be it was rarer back then, so when stuff did happen, it stood out and made local and worldwide legends and shit."
Offering something of an apologetic smile, Peter hangs his head when mention of the Company comes up. "I'm… sorry about all of that. I mean— for what it's worth. I know it's not my fault, but my family played a huge role in what happened, and just— there's a lot of mixed feelings there still. I know you… heck, I know everyone probably doesn't want to hear it…" Peter admits as he leans back on the sofa, taking a large bite of his half of the sandwitch, stretching his legs out to rest his feet up on the upholstered footrest.
"I think… my dad might've actually had a lot of the right idea on things. I mean, he did some terrible stuff, some really terrible stuff, but the plan he had, I mean— it did work, in the end. The Formula, everything, it worked and it could've made the world a better place, if… I dunno, maybe if I'd tried to reach out to him more?"
Furrowing his brows and exhaling a tired sigh, Peter looks down at his lap quietly. "Hell, I'd be dead right now if it weren't for the Formula. For all the evil it caused," Peter looks down at his hands, one holding the half sandwich. "I dunno, sometimes i wonder if turning on my father was the right idea. If— if I shouldn't have tried to help him somehow?"
While he talks, the sandwich half she had disappears, her eyes diverting down when he talks about his father… From the way her eyes narrow, she both agrees and disagrees, and… "My family played a role in it too," she finally interjects. "Turns out I was born in the Company Facility and all that. My parents— my real parents, were Company Agents. I don't know much about them, just that… they were agents. They died in some accident, along with Cat's real parents, I guess. And that they loved me and my…" This time she does think before she continues, biting back the word that wants to follow.
"Maybe it would have turned out okay, maybe it wouldn't have," she continues, on a different part of what he had spoken about. "Sometimes your dad seemed like an okay guy, but… Remember when I told you how he sent for me, and how he wanted me to break you out of Moab, cause I could fix what they did to you, to make it so you couldn't use your powers?"
This time she settles back so she can look at him, but she doesn't throw her own feet up, and she rests a hand against her stomach. The wheelchair may not be needed, but it doesn't mean moving comes without pain.
"I saw my sister, and she told me I was doing the right thing— it was a lie. I wasn't seeing my sister. He was using her to get what he wanted from me… I just think that with him, I'd never know what was… real and what was just trying to make me do what he wanted…" Her voice trails off and she looks down again, hair falling into her face for a moment. "Doesn't matter now, cause we already fucked it up anyway."
Staring silently at the television, and the DVD case for the Adventures of Baren Von Munchausen sitting atop it, Peter seems to sink into that silence. He's not so much looking at those things, as he is staring through them, lost in thought on something related to what Gillian's said. It's only when he blinks away the cloud of consideration and turns his focus back on the brunette at his side, that he smiles at his idea. "Hey…" Peter's voice remains quiet as he leans forward, bringing his legs off of the footstool and down to rest on the floor. "We could… probably get some information about your parents, you know."
Offering a hesitant smile, Peter rests his arms on his knees, leaning his weight forward onto them as he stares down at the floor, then looks up to Gillian. "The Company's not hunting either of us right now, and I could probably talk to my mother, or Sabra, and see if I can get them to pull their files. Even if it's just their names and photographs, it's something, right?"
A smile creeps up on Peter's face as he reaches out towards Gillian, carefully brushing her hair away from her face. "What do you think?"
"I'd like that," Gillian says, closing her eyes for a moment as she thinks back on her one meeting, the only person she'd though safe to talk to. Whose voice happens to be heard in the background right this moment. There's a small laugh at the background noise, a laugh that causes a grimace. Maybe wanting to show him a comedy was a bad idea… Her eyes open as she pushes to her feet, to walk to her coat and pull out a bottle.
"I mean, I sort of know their names, but I don't know what they look like or anything like that." And she would have to dig up her notebook, that she kept while she had perfect memory… which is a little sad in and of itself. "But I don't know if I look like my mom, or look like my dad, or if I'm some freak of nature who looks like neither of them." Freak of nature probably isn't the case, but she rattles the bottle in his direction.
"Did they ever turn your water back on?" she asks, while she stays standing in her snow boots. Taking them off would have been more comfortable.
"Tomorrow." Peter notes with a raise of his brows and a frustrated noise at the back of his throat. "I've been showering over at my ah, family's house. It's weird, di dyou know Kazimir… didn't smell?" Peter's dark eyes narrow into a squint. "He honestly did not bathe, because the bacteria that would have made him smell terrible, died on contact with his body. It's some weird ecosystem of death around him, and the same thing happened to me in Argentina— except I still sweat. I guess his prior host had stopped after a while. Most of his… biological functions just arrested, like— he was petrifying inside or something. Really bizarre."
Then, eyes wide, Peter seems to just run off on that tangent. "I had dreams, Gillian, dreams of that ability from like, back in the fifteen-hundreds. A woman was burned at the stake, by someone with Francois' power. These— these abilities have been at each other's throats for centuries." Wringing his hands together, Peter settles back down against the sofa and stares at Gillian crookedly.
"Wait— why'd you ask about my water?"
"Really? I— think I heard something about that, but I didn't really understand it," Gillian says, opening the bottle of painkillers and popping two into her mouth and swallowing them dry. The bottle gets shaken as if to answer the question, until she puts it away and can speak again, "My stomach was bothering me. I can take them without, but it's a little easier to get them to go down with— and I don't have to taste it on my tongue as long."
As she steps back over, she even sticks out her tongue to make a bleh sound. The taste of pills isn't as good as it could be.
"So in your dream you were a chick? That had to be a little awkward— probably the getting burned at the stake was worse, though. Fuck, I wish I had your power again. Having regen made me such a fucking wimp when it came to pain," she says as she settles back down, vicodin getting into her system. Slowly.
"You got your power back, right? With the whole… formula of the future thing?"
There's a grimace from Peter at the question, hands folding behind his head. "S— Sort of?" He doesn't sound entirely sure. "I don't know exactly how the Formula worked, but, what I've got isn't entirely like my ability. I can copy abilities, sure, I just— I touch someone, and then I can copy their ability for as long as I like, until… I touch someone else?" Peter's dark brows crease together, and his eyes follow Gillian thoughtfully across the room.
"See, I don't know if this is how my ability used to be or— it's just kind've confusing. I didn't find out my power until- I guess I started having dreams of the future, but I never knew it was my mother's ability until recently. But did I lean it through touch, or proximity?" Peter squints, then looks down at his lap and folds his hands, a heavy sigh escaping him. "Right now I have Helena's weather manipulation… and it seems like I can only have one power at a time."
"When I had your ability it seemed to be proximity," Gillian says, but she looks thoughtfully at him for a moment, distracted from the pain of moving around by something playing through her head. "What you got— it sounds like another ability I heard about… From…" There's a pause. "Okay, you're probably going to tell me I'm over explaining again, but… When you were carried up to the roof, that wasn't me, it was one of the replicants I made. They were a little weird. They each had one ability, and I couldn't really control which one… But she had super strength. And… after you got shot and I lost your ability… she didn't disappear."
She rubs at her forehead, wishing she could have explained this without going through all of that. "She started calling herself Stef, and she knew this guy, I'm not sure what happened to him… Named Shard, the rapper guy? Anyway, that was how his ability worked. Stef explained it to me when we got together to talk."
There's a sudden pause. She realizes that she must have a thing for guys with more than one ability.
…and he talked to Helena. No, jealousy is not a good thing.
"It'll probably be easier for you to handle with just one at a time… Can you touch someone without getting their ability?" she asks, tilting her head to the side.
"The rapper?" Peter states with a quirk of one brow, "Wasn't he at Moab with us?" There's an angling of Peter's jaw to the side, thoughtful consideration given to the explanation. "I… I wish I knew how to find him, I could use some help figuring out how the ability works. Right now, yeah, I can touch someone without taking their ability. It's a conscious effort, which is strange, because it was always unconscious before."
Breathing in slowly, then exhaling a sigh, Peter looks over to Gillian. "I was wondering if maybe my— " Something catches Peter's attention on the television, drawing his attention away. His brows furrow, head quirks to the side, and he leans forward enough to grab the television remote from the arm of the sofa and turn up the volume. "Shh— " he quickly offers to Gillian with a wave of his hand near her mouth.
…missing in 2008 shortly following the disappearance of her sister Jennifer, had been wanted for questioning related to potential eye-witness events relating to the 2008 Reaper serial killings that rocked Manhattan.
Initial reports from the coroner's office indicates that Childs' death was likely caused after significant physical trauma, and the method of death has been considered a copycat killing of the notorious serial killer Sylar, matching much of the infamous Midtown Man's MO, with enough departures to make NYPD and FBI investigators consider this to be the work of a new killer inspired by Sylar's infamous killing spree that spanned the United States.
The Childs family could not be reached for comment at the time this news went public.
Staring at the face on the corner of the television screen during the news report, Peter's eyes go wide, and he turns to look at Gillian with an absolutely confused expression on his face.
At first there's nothing but silence to answer his confused expression. Her face grows pale. The knot in the back of her head that Gillian can normally hold together unravels, threatening to spill heavily into the only person present to recieve the power. The ability to control and sense the weather will expand rapidly, growing in size, flooding his senses from every direction. Sylar. She'd just finished talking about Stef, about the half of herself that she already thought was gone. The contact number she'd been given reached nothing. She's not at all surprised that she's dead… She'd not supposed to have lived to see November…
They were both living on borrowed time and…
Standing up from the couch, she stumbles away from the room, from the man in it, physically trying to put some distance between them as the tears start to appear in her eyes, but also trying to get away. "He killed her…" she chokes out softly.
Just a few days ago she was quietly mourning him, and now she feels that had been a betrayal. It had…
Seeing isn't really an option as she tries to move away from him, stumbling, not paying attention to where she's going.
"Gillian I— " Peter watches her move away, getting up to his feet as he turns to look back at the television. There's just stunned silence; abject and stunned silence as he watches the conclusion of the news broadcast. He doesn't know how to react, how he should comfort her, not when everything seems to be so very quickly spiraling out of control for her. He has to struggle not to change the temperature of the room, and when Peter's turning around, his feet are carrying him quickly over to Gillian's side.
Laying a hand on her shoulder, he squeezes gently. "Hey— c'mon, it— " It'll be alright? Is that what he's going to say? Gabriel leaves a trail of death and dismemberment in his wake, then dies and now it's up to Peter to try and clean up the emotional mess from it.
"I'm sorry…" He offers to her in hushes silence, wrapping an arm around her waist, pulling her back up to his chest, just holding her tightly. "I— I'm sorry." He's not even sure what he's sorry for— sorry that she's crying in his apartment? That doesn't sound nice.
Breath tight, almost hissed through teeth, Gillian's eyes close, tears flowing. The tension in her stomach only adds to the pain, even if she's no longer afraid of tearing her stitches. Not like she had been in the hospital, when she cried over everything that she'd lost, everything she was mounrning. "She was me," she says in a voice that squeaks a bit, so tense that it doesn't come out right.
The comfort of his body might be some help, but she turns, so she can press her face into his shoulder and chest. They were the same. With some differences. Stef would have done things differently… Stef would have handled these situations different…
And now…
Arms slide around him, fingers clinging to the fabric of his shirt. She wants more than being held. She wants to feel loved. Especially now that she's not sure if any love she's felt in the last year was real or not…
But this may be all she can get.