maskormenacelogs | O8 👶 you don't seek murder like this often

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O8 👶 you don't seek murder like this often

WHO: Gabriel "Sylar" Gray, Elliot Alderson, Jesse Pinkman & Joseph Kavinsky
WHERE: Maurtia Falls & surrounding areas
WHEN: February 2017
WHAT: revenge screaming
WARNINGS: Up to NC-17 for prose-written violence I guess? Substances/poisoning, torture, etc.

closed to elliot alderson;

[it's two in the morning and kavinsky is at home. one of. his apartment. 'home.' close enough.

as homes go, kavinsky's is a boyish monstrosity. a man cave stretched out into a full three rooms, and on a spectacularly ridiculous budget. his flatscreen tv takes up most of one wall. the wireless subwoofer speakers look like cell towers stationed throughout the lacquered floor, if people tended to balance tumblers of half-finished liquor and Cokes and spent ashtrays on top of cell towers. the pool table folds out of the fucking wall, and it's only half out this evening, a stolen stop sign jammed into the nook. the tv is blaring some stupid show about guns. there is an inexplicable knife sticking out of the black leather sofa.

he's staring at his cellphone, but in reality, he's listening for the door. despite appearances, the first activity is actually closely tied to the other. also related: he has a handgun shoved down the back of his pants and a grenade in his pocket.

just in case.]

closed to gabriel "sylar" gray & eventual jesse pinkman;

[the bake shack is not maurtia falls' finest, but its a cut above the neighboring options. the diner has a fairly standard menu. tuna, blt, blt with avocado, buffalo chicken, chicken fingers, grilled chicken, parmesan chicken, chicken, cheddar and broccoli, that kind of thing. the food tends to be a little fresher than most of its counterparts, thanks to some shady dealings, and they occasionally take inspired liberties with such additions as cilantro and white pepper on the daily specials. the service is above average. slightly higher, if you happen to have television experience and handsome eyebrows.

the waitress has been crushing on him awhile. she probably isn't the one who put the blood in his coffee.

either way, she's already sashayed away by the time the effects start to kick in. an instant's fatigue. and then the room starts to spin in sylar's vision. the waitress' ass swerves into a sickening perpendicular, the second before she disappears around the corner of the counter. in the kitchen, there will be someone there to grab her, cover her mouth, shove some money in the pocket of her short-shorts. they'd paid the cook twice as much.

the sunshine coming through the window feels overbright. gabriel still has strength in his hands, a shade of lucidity to his thoughts, but it's fading on him fast even as neon spots start to crawl into his vision.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ The restaurant seems to tip sideways, and Sylar squeezes his eyes closed. Oops. Oops, this should not be happening. Oops.

The chicken salad in front of him seems to slide off the table, except it doesn't, that's just him tipping almost all the way over before a hand comes down on the flat of his table. There is no waiting for this to pass, apparently, hauling himself out of his chair. If he can make it outside. Into a cab. Run. Scurry.

Or swerve, a bit, weaving between tables and chairs as he flinches against the sunlight. Is an indiscreet sight, over six foot tall and dressed in his usual severe black, but pretence of fitting in is pushed to the wayside in favour of getting out.

Like any predator worth its salt, he knows he's being hunted. ]

Morning, bitch.

[kavinsky's voice wallows in and out of clarity, which can only be partially attributed to the fact that he's standing behind sylar. off to the side, a little. he'd parked himself near the restroom for the last few minutes, the small hallway going on and out from the back parking lot. he had emerged in an appropriately dramatic fashion. it's the kind of drama that's deliberately low-key. he's even wearing jeans. (he's always wearing jeans.)

higher-key: he's holding a taser in one tattooed hand. it gutters with light and energy when he presses his thumb on the button. tactically speaking, he should probably be hitting sylar with it right now, but he's got priorities. 1) drama.

2) giving jesse the opportunity to come around from the other side, unseen, and hit him with amplification.]

Did you wonder how this felt? [he asks,] when you did it to me?

[maybe he means the taser. he might also mean-- being hunted across maurtia falls, the intent of the other unknown. kavinsky presents his smarmiest cokehead smile.]

[Revenge is really one of the sweetest pleasures in life. For some reason, people like to act as if it's not. Sure, it can go horribly wrong sometimes, but that's the nature of horribly wrong. When it goes right, god does it go right. For example: This, now, as Jesse turns the corner to come up behind Sylar and gets a perfect view of Kavinsky triumphant, taser in hand, while his enemy drools all over himself. That's a thing of beauty. Jesse's heart swells with pride.

There's a horror-movie creak-creak that announces Jesse's arrival, as he's pushing along a rusted dolly from the stock room with leather-gloved hands. Professional. He's been trained by only the best kidnappers. Who wants to haul a big guy like Sylar out to the car with his skinny arms alone? Not this guy.

The effect of Jesse's power augmentation comes on like a wave of nausea. It's a godsend to most imPorts, a superhero refreshment, so it's interesting to him that he's weaponizing it now. Where most people feel Jesse's intention strengthening them, Sylar will be feeling the precise opposite, all the power seeping out of him as if a nullifier just walked in.

Jesse stops a couple feet behind Sylar, and the squeaky wheels stop, too. The three of them have about ninety seconds for the drama to play out before they get too close to tempting fate. Jesse's gaze flicks from Kavinsky to Sylar to the door in constant rotation. There's a gun tucked into his waistband, gangster-style, in case he really needs it. Kavinsky's got it handled, though. That's his boy.]

[ It's not a surprise to see Kavinsky, even if flashes of Sarissa had glimmered through his thoughts on his way out. Maybe a relief. He can handle a skinny kid with a taser better than he could a team of blackbagging police, even as his sight is beginning to swim, even if he has to plant a hand against the wall to keep himself standing upright.

He bares his teeth. ]

Don't need to. I saw the whole thing.

[ Squeaky wheels. He turns enough to see Jesse, and the juddering dolly wheeling towards him, and the gloves, just as he feels one weakness trade out for another. He feels negation in his brain, his thought process, his constantly analytical mind becoming slow and halting and filling in with white noise. Strength draining out of his muscles like a bleed. It puts his hackles up more profoundly than the poison, than the snap of the taser.

That little trickle of fear follows a torrent of anger, and he launches himself wild and clumsy for the door. All he needs is to get out of range. Disappear. Relying more on his sheer size than any hope of being swifter or stronger, he goes shoulder low to knock people aside and maybe, maybe, avoid the bite of the taser. ]

Edited 2017-02-10 03:26 (UTC)

[nnNOPE

kavinsky fires the taser. he also laughs at the same time-- a crazed edge to it. in milgram's study of obedience, they found a lot of the participants who wound up applying fatal levels of electric shock to their unseen victim laughed when they did it. speculations ranged from psychopathic malice to hysterical anxiety.

for kavinsky, it's a little bit of column a, a little bit of column b, as the silver darts flash out under the afternoon sun and nip into the fabric of sylar's coat. power surges. baby lightning snaring out in razor wire lines and teeny zig-zags, fork-tongued, and painfully white-blue bright despite the sunshine. sylar drops like someone shorted his body out from under him, but once he's on the floor, he dances, his spine throwing itself into parabolas. in the privacy of his experience, agony stretches a forty seconds out into annihilating minutes.

kavisky's hands are shaking a little afterward. he doesn't know why he'd thought he might die. it's not like he used to be averse to the fucking concept, you know?]

Edited (removed last few lines, had clearly!! misunderstood some aim discussion nm me) 2017-02-10 05:36 (UTC)

[ Oops 2: The Oopsening.

The electrical current hits him like a truck and he goes into a freefall, landing on the floor somewhere that seems very far away, abstracted, before muscles seize and shake him. He's felt pain, since he sliced Kavinsky's head open like a melon, but effective pain, injury, is a new shock to the system. There's blood in his mouth by the time his consciousness winks about before he can do much else. Think much else. Form regrets, you know.

And a small trickle of blood springs from the edge of an eyebrow from where his face bounces off the concrete floor. ]

Edited 2017-02-10 06:50 (UTC)

[It's Jesse's turn to step forward now that Sylar's out. He drags the dolly over to to Sylar's sprawled form and bows down to haul the thing onto the bed. All these long limbs, so floppy. Jesse zip-ties his hands and ankles to make the process slightly easier and bunches Sylar up until he fits right.

Then he's back on his feet, glancing over to Kavinsky. The kid looks pale. Jesse doesn't touch him, but he speaks gently:]

You okay? You good to clean up while I pack this up?

["This" being Sylar, of course. Less than a minute now. If an APB's going out, it'll be going out soon.]

[kavinsky blinks sharply, like he'd forgotten to do it for too long and now his retinas feel dried out and jacked up. he never stopped moving, but there's a weird flurry about the way he nods and says,] Yeah duh, [then starts to get going again, like some part of him had gone away from himself and only just now returned, summoned by the pragmatism of jesse's request. he needs to denature the proteins of the blood in the coffee, wipe down the cup.

he keeps thinking sylar's going to wake up again. or jesse will open his mouth and the next words out will be in the wrong voice, sylar's voice, because he killed a shifter, maybe, or somebody who can move the very bones of reality like billy can, the glow of his power will be red, and kavinsky shouldn't have revealed the secret weaknesses of his abilities after all and the ouroboros of his mistakes and wrongly laid trust closes in around him just in time for

nah none of this happens.

what actually happens is they get sylar in the van and drive. kavinsky behind the wheel, jesse focusing his power on the body in the back, sticking him with a hypo full of tranquilizers while they have him out and depowered. it's not a long drive if you like driving, an hour to put them outside of maurtia falls and then a couple more to wind out into the trees and the hills.

by the time sylar comes to, he's in a basement, a very atmospheric yellow lightbulb swinging from the ceiling. he's cuffed and collared to a sturdy metal chair. there's a slender iv tube wrapped around the heavy strap of leather on his neck, to go with the needle taped on his arm. the contents of the tube are red. jesse's blood. the dampening effect of his 'reversed' nullification is still there, but pulled back just enough for the 'reversed' poison to do its trick, the plastic bag hanging on a stand just behind him. in front of them, there's a boy.

kavinsky's playing on his phone, but he notices it when the older man wakes up. the light from the small flatscreen limns kavinsky's features in blue light. the tattoos across his fingers are new.] Hey, [he says.] Your ex narced you out. You're fuckin' famous, man. You can't trust bitches. You should know that.

[ From the depths of drug-induced unconsciousness, Sylar emerges. Not quite in control of himself enough to wake and give no impression that he has, his feet scuff against the floor, and his next exhale is ragged. He grimaces, white teeth in the yellow-tinged gloom, shoulders coiling up under his shirt.

Cuffs clang under a pull of tension.

It takes him a moment to remember the events that led up to this moment, squinting at a blur towards Kavinsky and the ghostly blue of his face. Up at the lightbulb. Down, then, to the faint itch-pressure of the needle burrowed into his skin, and that ribbon of plastic red winding up and behind.

It's practically nostalgic. So much that he smiles -- grins, even, because it can only form out of a sort of mania, obviously. His laugh is breathy, guttering low in his chest. It subsides, registering words. Sarissa. The network. Had to happen eventually. ]

You want my autograph, [ he invites, grimacing a little at the way his voice sounds. Rasping, slightly broken, his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth. ]

Yeah. [kavinsky's eyes thin. his pupils are huge. it's not really because of the darkness, though that is there.] But I'm not gonna give you a fucking pen.

[in case that seems too friendly, he slaps gabriel with his free hand. it doesn't hurt that much. kind of your starter bdsm kind of a gesture, open-palmed, with just enough pressure that gabriel can feel the heat crawl up through the numbing haze of disorientation. it won't even leave a mark. probably, other things will leave a mark, later! this kind of seems like that kind of situation right now. gabriel's watched/been in enough television about torture to get the gist of the next phase of this kidnapping scenario.]

You might fucking kill somebody with it, man.

[he looks down at his phone again, lookng at sarissa's name in the report. remembering when he came to the house and saw her body over there, and in the other direction, the stringy mess of her severed scalp, rooted into the tidy round bowl of its skull segment sitting all the way over there. all the blood, followed by all of sarah's rage. she would have been even angrier with him, if she'd known that he knew. he's known for months, and as much of a prick as he is, he is very much aware that being fucked off at sarissa for choosing her family a little bit is no excuse for sitting on the truth of her murder. of doing nothing to stop it.

he smiles anyway. like the faces of snakes are permanently shaped to smile.]

What'd you take from her?

[ There's a soft grunt out of Sylar at the slap, kind of like you'd get out of a dog for teasing it. The slow trickle of blood into his system feels like poison, making every source of light bleed trails of movement when his eyes flicker.

He settles back into his restraints without having realised he'd pulled them all taut with a shudder.

It's still funny. Cliche. Like a riddle. If he can't undo the cuffs, can't access his own powers, his only means of escape is through Kavinsky, and so there is a certain evaluative quality to his squint. ]

Not her heart. She gives that up too easy.

[ Not to him, really. Divided into pieces, like bread broken amongst disciples. ]

What's in the IV, Joseph?

[kavinsky allows himself to be evaluated. it makes him uneasy, but he doesn't let it on, and not that he'd know it but sylar's enhanced hearing is dampened like everything else today. instead, jesse's the only one who can hear the queasy uptick of kavinsky's heart in his chest.

he doesn't think so much of dying anymore, but when he remembers, he remembers very badly.]

Bleach and heroin. Did you fuck her?

[he wonders if anybody's ever done experiments about killing imports before. you know, to really make sure they'll always come back. at what point does statistics say you're supposed to give up? five times? ten? he wonders how realistic an option bleach and heroin are, and then his heart begins to hit with something differen than fear itself.]

[ If everyone is going to answer questions with non-responses-- ]

Does it matter?

[ Sylar twists a little in his chair, an attempt to visually follow the path of the plastic tubing, unable to get a sense of where it disappears behind him as leather and metal stops him short. He turns his attention back to Kavinsky. This kid, honestly.

(He isn't immune, his own heart going at an odd tempo. This kid has something dripping into Sylar's veins that is making him weak. A monkey with a gun is still a monkey, and still has a gun.) ]

You don't strike me as a romantic. Or like a very interested friend. You knew it was me that killed her, and what'd you do about it, Joseph.

[that's very true, and it hits a nerve. but kavinsky's a weird kid. there's nothing spontaneous about him losing his shit. he doesn't cry, he doesn't kick anything, flail, blink, start to sweat in any visible way under the greasy basement light. his narrow face goes dead like someone popped the power cord. there's only the vaguest shift to his elbow that suggests some kind of visceral reaction was contending for performance.

but then he stomps on sylar's dick, which seems pretty visceral.

they're both sitting down on chairs the same height, so it's not too much of a reach. he just has to pick up his foot, raise his knee, bring it down. a solid shove of impact, like he's smushing a glass for a chuppah ceremony. mazel tov!

the boy doesn't miss a beat, talking right over the inevitable pounding of blood in sylar's ears.] Do you wanna do that, or the tazer, or like. [he skids his chair back again after, straightening his skinny legs out.] Alternate. Variety, the spice of life. [a beat.] I could also dump Sriracha on your junk, if you wanna get literal.

[ Even for someone who, outside of his powers, has a freakish tolerance for pain, there's stoicism, and then there's someone stomping your penis.

Gabriel's body folds in half about as far as restraints permit, a compulsive shudder, with a sound like he's been gut punched, air expelled from his lungs, gasped back in. Hysterically, he is hit with the unfairness of the situation, because he didn't play with his food that much. Not like with Sarissa, anyway.

And that was different.

He relaxes his hands when he realises they've made tight fists. Just. ]

Do you remember [ he says, once he thinks his voice will be even, not just for the kick that transpired but for whatever comes next as a result of his speaking, relentlessly ] when I broke into your house? Three laptops every room, cold pizza in the fridge. White and glass, drugs and toys. It was so hollow, so-- unimaginative, for all that power.

Even now, you don't know what you're doing.

[it doesn't escape kavinsky that the guy whose dongle he just kicked is trying to upset him. it doesn't surprise him. jesse had talked to him about torture a little; explained what made people compliant, what would control them, get them to do what you want. in the explanation, kavinsky had learned several things. first, that jesse has seen some shit— more of a lesson reinforced than new information.

also, that sylar was not going to be compliant, controlled, or do much that kavinsky wanted. they had no photographs of loved ones to put up on the wall. or even particular tasks to demand of him. no threats to leverage except for those on his person, and when backed into corners, animals such as they— all three of them-- become predictable. the only way you'd think otherwise is if the expectation is for a person to behave reasonably and with transparency in front of his captors during a hopeless kidnapping situation.

he kicks sylar in the d again anyways. what else is there to do, really.]

If I was gonna start grinding my heel in, [kavinsky shakes out his leg after.] You prefer clockwise or counterclockwise? More attention to the balls or the head? I'm open to suggestions.

[ The second strike is worse than the first, pain expressed in caveman grunt that sounds more confused in its anger than injured, and this time, sass isn't quick to crop up as Sylar concentrates instead on keeping his nausea down. In that time, he reflects;

He's been kidnapped by an idiot.

And a friend. The idiot was with a friend. Sylar remembers, suddenly, that there had been another person, but it's not information he can do much with in the moment as he sweats, and forces himself out of the half-curl he would only like to complete into a proper fetal circle until that dull ache growing up into the pit of his stomach subsides completely. ]

You could be more, [ he says. Voice ragged, or getting there. ]

Sarissa has bad judgment, [kavinsky explains. at some point, he stood up and started walking around, his attention shifting off sylar and onto things that sylar can't see. maybe the friend. it's hard to tell, after he wanders into the periphery of sylar's vision.] Not sure she'd get it clotheshangered in time. This country and preventative care, man.

[there's a friction sound, a click. hard objects on metal. i could guess would say there's a small table just behind and to the right of sylar, maybe a gurney. you know, standard issue surgical stainless steel, need something to carry my diabolical torture implements and i don't want to have to burn it for stains after type fare. kavinsky emerges the next moment, heading back to his chair. he plonks himself down with the abandon of a young person settling onto the couch with 3 x bags funyuns after a long day's college classes to watch some mtv.]

Check it out. [he holds up his prizes! one is a syringe of clear blue fluid. if sylar had seen any of the runoff underneath his shirt, during that weird and wild hallucination months ago, it's that color, or close enough. the other is a bonesaw, small, with an ergonomically friendly handle for maximum bonesawing comfort.

sylar knows what that is.]

Preference for order. Take two.

[at the distance, he can't tell kavinsky's hands are sweating. he wonders if he should've done more cocaine.]

Have you ever jumped off the edge of a sky scraper?

[ Hackles up. Backed into a corner. That brain melting potion on one side, the silver teeth of the saw grinning at him from the other. ]

It's the last thing I did before I killed her the first time. There's like this [ teeth pale in the yellow-dim gloom, bared, beneath eyes that glint ] primal rush, this obliterating certainty of death. One second, I know what I'm doing, I know what will happen, and the next it's just. Blind panic. Almost ecstatic.

And then I lived.

[ He looks again at the items, then back at Kavinsky. Eyebrows twinging upwards. ]

Dealer's choice.

[kavinsky stares at the man who killed him. he thinks about dying pretty often himself, so it's a fairly significant topic to raise actually! evem when you set aside the specifically murdery experiences. after sylar, the second leading cause of kavinsky's death is kavinsky himself, so.]

Do you know how you wanna die? If it'd stick.

[kavinsky apparently decides on the poison. he slides off the chair, puts down the bonesaw. if the chair were about two feet closer to sylar, he could probably grab it, but two feet is a long way when you're tied to a metal chair and being terrorized by weirdly colored fluids. kavinsky goes for the iv bag, and it seems like a certain former nurse, recent mafia boss, idiot's-friend apprised him of how to do the thing. he gets the tube loose, chews off the needle cap, and starts to fill her up.] Jumping off the roof is just fucking dramatic, [says the young man who did himself on july 4th with a gigantic fire dragon that one time.]

[ If Sylar were interested in playing Kavinsky's game, he would have chosen the saw. Damage can be healed, one way or another. Pain endured. He doesn't like things getting in his head. But he doesn't protest, even if he watches Kavinsky's progress out of the corner of his eye, even if his mouth is going dry.

He settles that look on the bonesaw. Just sitting there. ]

Ropes break. [ Or their support beams snap, but let's not get too specific, now. God his dick hurts. ] Guns jam, and it's kind of sad, to me. Like putting a lame animal down. Gravity is certainty. And what's wrong with being dying dramatic, if you've only ever lived quiet?

[ The hand with the needle in its arm stretches, flexes, unconscious anticipation. He swallows for saliva. ]

How about you?

[the basement is getting fuzzy, but that might just be panic. derealization is a symptom of panic. kavinsky caps the syringe and plugs the iv back into the bag.

the tube wiring down to sylar's arm is turning a weird color. clear-blue and red blood don't mix too well, in terms of if you were going to attempt to paint a masterpiece with only those two colors. they mix in funny strands like a barber's pole. winding down, down, down into the great vein in sylar's arm. kavinsky had not been responsible for the insertion of that needle, of course.]

Don't be an asshole, [he says.] You already know I got a thing about getting killed by shitty dickprint monsters. [he punctuates his point by punching sylar in the side of the head. not a lot of weight behind it. just enough to move the older man's head a couple of inches, spin his brain about before it settles into its new bath.]

[ Bap. Sylar flinches, expression resolving more into a scowl in its resolution as he swerves a look back to ~Joseph~. ]

Right, [ he roughs out. More a growl, now, sandpapery and quiet. Swallows again. ] We should do it again sometime.

[ That twining of colour is not the kind of thing you want to see going at a regular drip into your blood stream. He'd already been feeling like hammered shit and now that pounding of his head seems to be taking on a different pitch, a whine. ]

[the light gets brighter, except it intensifies in a way that fails to bring out more detail in the walls or the barren concrete floor. instead, they get blurrier. cones firing-- misfiring inside sylar's eyes. hot pain crawls into his arm, but it's dim and far away; a lower concentration of satya's toxins than the dose that kavinsky had fired into his chest once upon a city.]

If you wanna be a dream thief, you'd better keep my dead.

[but kavinsky's voice loops and turns and comes out of the ceiling at a funny angle. he isn't there anymore. his abandoned metal chair crease into a blur, stretching, the pitted metal compacting into a blur, before it abruptly snaps back into shape. four legs on the floor, the back squared off and flat.

sarissa theron is sitting in it. dark ponytail and frown, her little incisors hidden away. she doesn't look as small now as she does when she's standing up, but that might be because he's still hunched from the faraway echo of penile agony.] I was thinking about shortening 'Sylar' down for a pet name, [she says.] But 'Sylo' sounds like I'd fiddle your knob and sheep feed would come out. Probably should've figured we were doomed.

[ A few hard blinks doesn't get rid of her, though it does make his vision wobble, and snap back into focus, queasy-like.

Looking at Sarissa feels like he's having a staring competition with the lightbulb hanging over head, but at the same time, it's the only reliable thing in the room. The veins in his arm feel like they're full of fire, and fireworks -- like hers -- hiss and spit in his vision. ]

You'd be funnier if you didn't make everything into a fucking joke, [ he says, without ire. Sound advice, for a woman who's not there. ] Anyone ever tell you that.

[there's a pause as sarissa soaks up the insult. not deterred-- ever-- of course-- pshh-- but acknowledging sylar's complaint. she's considerate that way in the presence of a dude fresh out of torture. or just not a psychopath. one of her little bunny clone incisors peeks out a moment, then fades. her eyes look sad.]

You'd be funnier if you stopped murdering people, [Sarissa answers eventually.] But I'm pretty sure you shouldn't need anybody to tell you that, mate.

Have you got an endgame? I'm not trying to be funny. And I'm not talking about Kavo, or even this... [she looks around. the room seems emptier than before. not as dirty. mostly because he's lost all the details in his vision and his body is trying to turn itself out, getting away from the toxins flowing through his veins.] Wherever we are. He's just a kid. Worse comes to worse, you'd come back this go-around. Best case scenario after that, this shit will only get worse.

[ His heart feels like its slipped like a fish upstream, into his brain, pounding away at the forefront. In moments, his dark shirt is darker with damp. He would prefer his hallucinations quiet, but even an awareness about the unreality of the situation doesn't stop him from answering it. A philosophical perspective. He's also insane.

And dying, maybe. He shudders against his restraints in an effort to not do that. ]

You know the story about the frog and the scorpion? And the river.

[ He gives a canine shake of his head, eyes closed against the sight of his ex, sharp in the foreground of a nightmare Gaussian blur or painful light, eyeball-sucking shadow. ]

No river, here. Scorpion can do whatever it wants.

[he'd asked her to be serious. maybe that's why she is now, setting her feet apart. leaning forward, elbows on her knees. her eyes are unblinking, or maybe he's just missing it in the queasy blur of his vision.]

There's always a river, arshole. The bloody story's about being out-of-control, not doing what you fucking want.

[a beat.]

Unless this bondage bullshit is what you were after. [not so serious. possibly she's just mad about having been murdered. twice.] Look at me. [she pushes his thigh, and the pain reverberates down to his groin. somewhere in the real world, kavinsky kicked him again, and asked jesse if the healer is able to go all the way up to the kitchen and get him a beer and still hold the killer down with his power.] You don't think this is going to end well. And it's not going well if it doesn't end, either.

[ The kick gets a response this time, no chance of bracing himself, disoriented, over-exposed -- it's a raw bark of pain, and a full bodied flinch as if to pull his knee away from Sarissa's reaching hand.

But he looks at her, her face floating on a surface of vertigo. ]

It's about nature, [ is growled out, a little strangled against the leather gripping his trachea. The way rottweilers sound at the end of their chain. In his head, to his ears, it sounds sharper than it does in real life. In real life, it sounds borderline incoherent, saliva-specked. ] About doing what you want, being out of control, 'cause there's nothing else left.

[ He rests his head backwards, chin tipped up, trying to catch his breath. ]

I thought about giving you that story, [ is a little clearer. He seeks out the shape of Kavinsky in the room. Talking into empty space. A void. ] But it sounded, you know. [ He swallows, roughly. ] Like a line.

You know you're a fucking mess when the only thing you say that isn't a line is the one thing that sounds like it. [but she's not unsympathetic, taking her hand away. she seems less real for a moment, a shade too pale and a few inches taller, muddled into the uncertain space between reality and nightmare and legitimate trauma.

it's quiet awhile apart from the chatter of artificial static in sylar's ears, the wall paint dribbling like human melt once upon a time in hiroshima and lurching towards his chair, vanishing next into a burning snap of electric white. that's kavinsky putting a flashlight in his eyes. but it's sarissa's face he sees after, and her hand on the side of his neck.

(kavinsky checking the tape is sitting right. that beer made his fingers cold. he's scooted in closer than he'd dared before, leaning up between sylar's knees.)

but it's sarissa who asks:]

Did you ever try to fight it?

[ His pupils are broad, black discs in his head, unseeing and dazzled. There is a kind of sudden awareness of another person in his space, like sensing electricity in the air or a shift in current in water. Cold fingers against skin that is very warm. ]

I tried to die, [ he says.

Doggish, Sylar chases that touch. They hadn't been together so long to make physical intimacy an instinct, but he recalls, vividly, speculative questions in close proximity, conversations heavy enough to be spoken in whispers, and lifting his face to her hand. It's more swoony than smooth, nudging into skinny, cool wrist, chasing affection like a phantom. ]

[incredulity on kavinsky's face. it might be a trick, but he feels reassured with jesse there, not that the healer's presence negates the tricks themselves but he'll make them a lot less effective.]

What'd you use?

[a thumbnail goes into the side of the apple of sylar's throat, too blunt to cut, too wide to pierce. he's thinking about hitting the serial killer again, but something about this seems more interesting than that. his chair screeches an inch closer on the concrete below. sarissa's eyes blink at sylar, fringy and dark and sad for him, even though she should wish it had stuck.]

[ His pulse is racing at an abnormal rate, even if the rest of him seems slack, seem low and lost. ]

Gravity. Remember.

[ His voice is barely above a purr, slipping deeper into this weird in between space of reality and full blown drug-induced psychosis. It's warm and dark here, and there is a hand of sharp tenderness on his throat. He can almost imagine Angela Petrelli's precise red nails stroking back his hair as he lies flat, and strapped down, just like this.

But it's not her he's thinking about, it's Sarissa. And it's not even really Sarissa. It never really was. ]

I showed up early, with the sidewalk. Pulverised into ash. Grey all over. God, you were scared for me. I had it, though. [ His hands jerk against his restrains, like he's forgotten they're there. The action aborted. ] You. Your attention.

[ Wetness gathers in the corners of his eyes, making them darker. ]

Didn't help.

[after all this time, it hadn't even once occurred to kavinsky, not once, that gabriel had truly cared for sarissa in any way. it'd obviously been part of the long con, his final objective to obtain her powers. precise. calculated. the same methodical approach with which he'd broken into each of kavinsky's homes, and brought a nullifier device in the end.

for some reason, it makes kavinsky angrier. the moisture thickening sylar's eyelashes.]

Help? [his fingers dig deeper. yank the collar back and to the right, skewing sylar's head off-axis. in the same motion, kavinsky scoots off the edge of his own chair, pops neatly onto sylar's lap. thighs crosswise thighs. he's whole inches taller than sarissa, but nearly as light. not that it would matter. sarissa looks angry all of a sudden; in that warm, sanguine lovely way that sarissa does everything that a sarissa will do.

her eyes flash fire. her teeth grit. her cute little incisors are showing.]

No part of you really thought that cutting open somebody's brain is attention-seeking. Why are you crying? What makes you think you've got anything to cry about?

[ His world seems to constrict, diminishing from the vague shadows thrown from the lightbulb, the boundaries of the room, reducing now into some weird little thimble reality that takes up only the space of the chair he is secured to and the too-warm presence of a person sitting in his lap.

The leather at his throat constricts like a hand when its pulled taut. ]

I thought it might be different, [ he gravels out. ] Here. With you. It wasn't. I wasn't.

[ As far as crying goes, this seems more like he's allergic to feelings in place of having them, with tears producing themselves and forming skinny, glistening tracks out from the corners, streaking ear-wards.

Incidentally, he is deeply aware of unglamourous penis pain and associated pressure, just as much as the cut of leather around his throat, and the lovely brown of Sarissa's eyes, the soft shapes of her mouth -- even when she's mad. ]

You're hurting me.

Sorry, mate. Can't make vegemite without wringing the tears out of a fucking onion.

[but that isn't something sarissa would actually say. not under these circumstances. and nor is it something that kavinsky says, more of the banal eggs and cake type, out loud, but it gets lost in the translation of static in the canals of his ears, of particle light moving like a wave hitting the rods and cones in sylar's eyes at the wrong angles and spinning off into the polluted, fractured mess of his brain.]

Hey, Sylar. Hey.

[it's a fragmented echo. minutes have passed. more than that? time is an unevenly burning candle, melting lumpy and malformed over the unwitting fingers of the dizzy young man struggling to read by its light. no more pressure dragging the collar at gabriel's throat; less dark, curly hair netting the slender shoulders hunkered down under gabriel's nose. and the familiar sweetness of sarissa's deodorant replaced by the acrid undertone of axe body spray.

the fragrance favored by all true villains.

one-note and tinny, a shrill whine fills the concrete room. he's heard it before: a small blade rotating at high velocity. when kavinsky looks up, he's kavinsky again. neon green, but kavinsky nonetheless.

but it's sarissa's voice who says,] Maybe you need to try harder.

[ The fantasy feels like it has his brain on a torsion spring, pulling it back in every time he begins to spin away. Joseph Kavinsky is remembered only as his face presses out from the haze like he's surfacing.

God, what has he even been saying? Doing?

He gives a full-bodied twitch of revulsion when Sarissa's voice slithers out from between Kavinsky's less cute teeth. The bony weight on his thighs feels like a paralytic, and metal whines and clinks as fisted hands make a valiant attempting at wrenching fastenings from fixtures.

It takes him a second, then, to realise that that dull buzz-whine is coming from somewhere external, not just his own brain. ]

[kavinsky laughs. the sound seems slightly dislocated, but this time, it's his laugh, snaky and low in the air. boy register. kind of hard to hear, though, under the shrill pitch of the saw.] Cooperate, shithead, [he says.] I just want one.

[his pupils are blown out huge. as big as sylar's. you could excise their eyeballs and switch them and they'd look the same. a tiny, millimeter-thin brown ring hugged tight around black, light-eating pits of myopic darkness. kavinsky had thought about doing it sober, in order to remember. in order to know what he was doing, maybe. but all of the motivating factors, seriously considered, merely made him want to do cocaine more.

and well. when a cokehead wants to do cocaine, a cokehead will do cocaine.

the blade bites into sylar's finger. and it's anticlimactic, really. the shouting and terror and accidental tears, which only then register the reality— that none of the ones that sylar had shed earlier had been false. the rattle of wood and metal. kavinsky watches the finger-bone splinter and then pop with a strange detachment, and then finds himself watching himself with an even stranger detachment. like he's standing out to the side of them. regarding the spectacle in third person. a cameraman.

it's some stupid movie shit. not quite the music videos that kavinsky used to stylize his life after. a different genre. the creepy clinch of male bodies in the chair, fluids and bolted steel and bald concrete everywhere. jesse off in the back. screams that aren't. pleasure.

distantly, he thinks that he looks kinda hot. good job, he tells himself. you'll always have that going for you.]

[ Sylar howls.

It's not dignified. He is rarely dignified, actually, so maybe it means something that what was happening prior to this moment and prior to the injection of psychoactive drugs was not about stoicism and more about not giving a fuck what ultimately becomes of him. The howl, though, is animal and raw, and kind of delayed. It's when bone splinters that no amount of disassociation can smother out pain, even little bones like this.

He stops screaming when he passes out, neck loose in collar and sprawls like only the bits that are strapped in are keeping him from slithering out into a pile on the floor.

By the time the last of skin and tendon is snapping loose, his expression is almost at peace. ]

[ Elliot is himself when he shows up, modern clothes and bushbaby eyes, which probably sucks for Kavinsky because that's not the half that really likes him. Still, in this weird chess game he's playing with Mr Robot the goal has become to capture pieces before they can be used by the opposition. One takes an interest, and so does the other. And hen it escalates.

Probably this is the escalation.

He's unarmed, doesn't own a gun or have any particular powers that can stand in a gun's place. Stands for a moment outside with his eyes closed, hand against the doorframe, wrestling with some internal tiger. Then he decides fuck it and flicks the first domino in the chain, lets himself in (even if he has to pick the lock just to prove he can). ]

Yo, man.

[ Like he's here to do drugs with a friend and not aid and abet a crime. He comes over to the pool table and tugs it violently all the way out of the wall, swings his backpack off his shoulders and starts to unpack his supplies, assemble them with the intense concentration of a sniper putting together their rifle. ]

[dramatic? anticlimactic? kavinsky sits up when the door opens. he gets that far! but there's not much to do after that besides stare at the nerd move his shit around and then start. to. assemble a computer, or something, without so much as a word. kavinsky doesn't actually know enough about geek culture to make an appropriate insult. league of legends, counterstrike, all the particulars of tournaments are beyond him.

he stares at elliot putting a power plug into the wall, and then he finally stands up.]

You have no fucking manners, you know that? [demands the most reliable source of social etiquette information available in the local universe. kavinsky stalks over to the technopath, looking him up and down, then a brief frown at the backkpack. the hand grenade is making a funny bulge in kavinsky's pocket, but he doesn't do anything with it. instead, kavinsky starts toward the refrigerator next.] Does the Down's Syndrome savant want a fucking drink?

[ Elliot glances over at that. His air of faint judgement at every stupid aggressive thing Kavinsky says is much more effective in person than it is over the internet. Though for all that he acts like he's generally disgusted, he's also here, was also stalking K's browsing habits. So. ]

Sure.

[ Not bothering to protest that he isn't impaired/savant (mostly true) or even ask what it is Kavinsky is gonna serve him.

He is absolutely the most disappointingly anticlimactic person. Hands busy, mechanics clicking into place. Shoulders relaxing slightly as time passes without his presence here being pointed out for the weirdness it is. ]

[promptly, kavinsky presents the older man with a gin and tonic that's. basically mildly fizzy gin. it sits on the edge of the pool table without a coaster because kavinsky doesn't care, and then he walks a few semi-circles back and forth behind the technopath. studying him with interest. he'd snap a photo with his phone, but it's become fairly evident that elliot would make short work of such a footprint. diddling him where he stands sounds like it wouldn't work out in his favor, so.

so.

about ten minutes later, kavinsky winds up standing in the blur of technopath's peripheral vision with an analog camera in his hands. classic polaroid. black, boxy in his tattooed fingers, a big ol' flashbulb at the top. he levels the lens on elliot's profile, though the frame is wide enough to capture the equipment all about him, too. one, two, three.

click.

the flash erupts white light through the apartment. it might be enough to get elliot's attention.]

[ It does.

Elliot looks up, turning half way around all startled. Bush baby eyes wide. His first paranoid thought is that Kavinsky is documenting him doing something illegal and this is the start of some bullshit blackmail, though he's not sure the angle was right to catch his screen in the shot. There's still— it's still a lot. ]

What the fuck, man,

[ Waspish, flat. He notices his drink, which he hasn't touched up until now, and immediately downs half of it in one go, lids fluttering closed as the burn of it warms through him. Alcohol isn't anywhere near morphine but it's still pretty good.

That done, he puts the glass down and steps forward. ]

I'm gonna need you to give me that film.

[ So he wasn't wrong in thinking a digital file would have just been wiped asap. ]

[kavinsky cackles.

well: it's more of a giggle to be fair, but don't tell anybody that. he steps backward, the coke in his veins rendering the motion into a spider-limbed scuttle. the big grin on his face reframes it into childish antics. apart from, you know, the context of criminal conspiracy to kidnap, to torture.]

Leave a guy something to fap too if you're just gonna fucking sit there. [his bare feet squish into the leather of the couch, sinking backward steps into it. he pulls the forming photograph out of the slot, flappety-flapflap-flaps it, pinched between his fingers. dancing out of reach. it is fairly obvious he's trying to get chased. so elliot, maybe don't give him what he wants. no? yes?] God.

How fucking selfish can you be? Here I am, about to do all the fucking heavy lifting.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

O8 👶 you don't seek murder like this often

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all teh powerpozes

sneakin in smol tag and then he's out

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tw torture begins!! also kavinsky used the b-word :( lmk if this needs editing guys

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cw sexual vulgarity ... she warned, hilariously, in this log

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cw abortion joke

cw suicide references

tw more suicidal ideations suicidal ideations all day and all night

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a little more impressionistic, lmk if not ok!

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hi sorry hi

np hi hi (cw ableism)

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cw thoughts about sexual harassment!

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