Participants:
Scene Title | The Audacity of Hope |
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Synopsis | Magnes confesses what happened with Eileen. He doesn't die. |
Date | November 10, 2011 |
Elisabeth's Room
It's a bit later in the evening, but Magnes has finally worked up the courage to show up at Elisabeth's room, knock on the door, and then say, "Okay so I have good news and bad news. Please don't freak out." He smells a bit like furnace with a hint of girl who has been trapped in a furnace.
When she opens the door to him, Elisabeth quirks an eyebrow. "Magnes…. do you understand how much I hate that phrase?" she asks him mildly. "It's almost as bad as 'we have to talk.'" She gestures him into her bitty room, which has sheet music on the walls that she hasn't taken down as yet. And because she has a concern about what he's about to tell her, she shuts the door behind him with a wary look out into the hallway. Turning to face him, she crosses her arms and unconsciously balances her weight on the balls of her feet, as if just waiting for shit to hit the fan. "Lay it on me."
"I talked to Eileen." Magnes says as he starts to nervously fidget wtih his hair. "So, the good news is that she agreed to help me with Gillian, and she even told me that I didn't have to worry about her killing anyone. She said both of these things when she didn't really have to, she didn't even have to say she'd be back."
He turns around, holding up his index finger. "Now, the bad news is that she did trick me and she escaped. I know she'll be back, Edward has someone out to bring her back. But I know she'll be back, she's not that drastically different from my Eileen, she even remembers how we met each other, she met me in this world already. You can't be that different of a person, I can see Eileen in her. She will help us, I promise you that."
The good news …. doesn't make Elisabeth look as happy as it could have. If only because Eileen had really already said the same thing to her, only she demanded proof of being able to get Eileen out of this world. So she remains warily silent, mulling the words 'she'd be back.' And then the other shoe drops.
It … might be about now, if Magnes actually understands anything about Elisabeth at all, that he might get scared.
Calmly, even as he babbles his way through the remainder of that explanation, those blue eyes are focused with a laser intensity on his face. She hasn't actually moved, but there is a sudden, very real tension in the room.
"She… escaped."
Her chin goes up and then back down, making a bit of a sideways movement as it does. As if she might be stretching the tendons at the back of her neck.
And still her voice is very quiet. "Magnes… did you inform anyone that she had escaped?"
"Well, she locked me in the furnace. I think Edward left me there for a while to teach me a lesson. He said he's taking care of it but I know she'll be back. I explained things to her, how I could get her out of here. I told her about our history together, she listened, we talked." Magnes crosses his arms, avoiding eye contact. He obviously knows she's not happy.
"What she did, tricking me, getting out, it's not something that's beyond what I'd expect her to do. But I also expect her to come back, and I know she was being honest when she said she'd help." He looks up, trying to force eye contact. "I mean it when I say I believe her."
Her own gaze never leaves his face. "I know you do," Elisabeth tells him. "Believe me… I know you believe every word that comes out of her mouth. Because you look at her and you see the woman from our world."
If her power were active, there would be a physical manifestation of just how absolutely beyond infuriated Elisabeth is. Unfortunately for Magnes, it's not. And certainly seems reasonable enough.
"Congratulations. You have once more proven to me that you are the single stupidest genius on the fucking planet," she informs him in that same calm tone.
"You had one job, Magnes. How many times did you nearly get innocent people killed back home? We talked about this, remember?" The scariest part of all might be that she hasn't yet raised her voice. Most people who know her understand that if she's YELLING at you, the crisis is over. Does Magnes know this about her?
"Do you understand that in this world, no matter how afraid of Volken she is, he's also the only family she seems to have had?" she continues, her weight shifting on her feet.
"Do you have any comprehension of how much she loves the people she considers 'hers' or to what lengths she will go to save them from Volken? For example… knowing that Volken has taken over Sylar's body and with me saying to you that in another timeline or future that was seen, she was married to him and utterly in love… does that change your mental calculation any? Do you for one single nanosecond think that she's not going to turn over everything you told her to him, in the hopes of getting him perhaps to abandon that body so that she can have him back?"
And still she is not shouting at him. She simply asks, "Or did you even consider that you could be wrong about your very fervent belief that she wouldn't lie to you to save her own skin?"
"I know that she's in love with Gabriel, Elisabeth…" Magnes raises a hand to hold his forehead, staring down as he breaks his gaze again. "And I don't know what's going through her mind, as far as Kazimir being in Gabriel. But I do know that Eileen isn't stupid, she doesn't do reckless things, she doesn't do things without a lot of calculation behind it, things that she knows would be futile."
"She'd already tricked me." he suddenly points out. "She could have left, she could have killed me, she could have done anything, but she chose to say that she'd help with Gillian, I was already locked up when she said I had nothing to worry about, that she'd be back. She's not… she's not a monster, Elisabeth."
He motions all around them suddenly, raising his head, looking a bit angry himself now. "This world is dead. I know she had a large hand in that, and I know that you think that it's too big of a mistake, the sort of mistake that you can't come back from, but that's not me, that's not how I think. I almost ate our world, I wanted to eat our world, I wanted to consume everything. And now, now? Now I'm looking at one of the few people in the world who, despite how she is, kept giving me chances, kept trying to help me make something of myself…"
He points in the general direction of the furnace room. "I have a chance to be the one to help her now, I have a chance to take her from this. This world is dead, Elisabeth, the Vanguard are a bunch of ghosts haunting this dead planet, and Eileen isn't stupid enough not to realize that. Kazimir himself would realize that if he could truly see what he's done, but being in the mind of Gabriel, it's all just a recursive loop of insanity. Eileen, though… Eileen isn't insane, she's not stupid."
"No, she's definitely not stupid. She is wicked smart," Elisabeth agrees readily. "She is wicked smart enough that unless you actually convinced her that we can do what I was trying to tell her we could do — " And she finally loses it, her voice raising to decibels that some people would not think possible with her power negated. " — SHE HAS NO FUCKING INCENTIVE TO HELP US ANYWAY! BECAUSE SHE DOESN'T BELIEVE THERE'S ANYWHERE TO GO!"
Elisabeth whips around turning her back to him, her arms crossed tightly over her body. She is visibly shaking. It takes several long moments before she turns back around to face him, still not trusting herself to unfold her arms.
"Get out of here. Go … somewhere. ANYWHERE. Away from people who you could hurt. If Edward and his security teams do not reacquire Eileen? You need to face the reality that you're going to die here. Not of the Virus. But because you brought Volken down on our heads. And you will die knowing that you personally have the blood of 200 people on your hands as a result of your own actions."
Her blue eyes are the coldest he's ever seen them — even the day that Richard Cardinal died in Antarctica, her eyes were simply dead. Right now, however, it's pretty clear that the woman has her temper on a very short leash. If he opens his mouth, it's clear that he better choose his words very carefully.
"Elisabeth!" Magnes suddenly shouts, as if out of pure frustration, then he starts to breathe a little more carefully. "I told her things that no one else here could or would know. Not unless they knew either her or were personal friends with Kazimir himself. I told her things that she shared with me, things about herself that she told me as a comfort when Kazimir was gone, because regardless of what I felt, what she felt was much worse."
"I even told her about that old beat up copy of the Art of War, Kazimir's old copy. I knew how important it was to her, and I told her that she gave it to me for my birthday. I explained lots of things like that…" He walks to one of the walls, leaning against it, still not having the best stamina for standing without his ability. "I know she believes me, and I think the moment she believed me is when she suddenly had hope. I don't know what her hope is leading her to do right now, but her belief in me gave it to her."
Elisabeth's own cold gaze, however, has no hope in it. "IF by some miracle it turns out that you're right, I'll apologize." She jerks her chin at the door, a silent reinforcement to the order to get out.
"I know this feels awful right now, but when this is all over, I hope that I'll have proven myself to you." Magnes doesn't say anything more than that, his tone a bit defeated now as he finally heads out the door.
The door is closed very quietly behind him, no slamming. And if she slumps down against it on the inside and curls up into a fetal ball and sobs until she's too exhausted to move? The walls are thick enough to keep that private.