He looks up and stares at her for a moment when she apologizes- it's not surprise, exactly. Nearly anyone who would hear that story would be shocked. However, he was expecting it to be followed up with 'but do you really think that explains everything you've done? Does that make up for it?' There's no reason for someone to feel this sorry for something they didn't do themselves.
"Thank you," he replies sincerely, his voice quiet in order to match hers. He hopes, idly, that he hasn't broken her already, because while that's one of the harder stories to listen to, what he'd done...well, it wasn't any less violent. He decides to try and keep going until she might find her voice. That's what this is mostly supposed to be, anyway, right? At least at first. He talks and she listens.
"I went looking for my father eventually, to try and figure out where I went so wrong. I thought family might tell me. Neither my uncle or my father apologized- my father didn't even remember who I was. Of course, he had the same ability as me--" He stops suddenly, and sits up in his chair (he hadn't realized he'd been sinking into it. "Wait. Have I told you about abilities?"
Digestion is not a quick process for Emma Pillsbury and at the moment her processing has slowed to a near stop. There is too much to know and too much of that knowing involves directly bending her thoughts to the point of complete, utterly, and unforgivably changing the last vestiges of her own truths. Things like this should not happen to people if for the simple fact that then they make people like Gabriel Sylar.
She wonders about unfairness and the way her heart palpitates most uncomfortably.
"No," she answers because it is the bare minimum of a reply, because she can still continue trying the impossible task of ordering her internalization while fitting herself to the role she so brashly advertised the other day. Her hands previously on the desk have dropped to being folded in her lap and they thread tightly, almost painfully. "Do you think," her shoulders are stone statue stiff, "Do you think that...um...that those are important to..." she bows her head and then forces herself to look up again. "...to who you are?"
Of course, he tamps that down fairly quickly, knowing how tense she is right now. But he can't help it, the question has such a resounding answer. He bites his lip for a moment, trying to figure out how to put it. "I'd say that they are the single most important thing defining who I am today. In fact, I seemed to spend most of my recent years trying to define myself entirely by these abilities."
His eyes flick up to her, and he makes sure his voice is soft and quiet, and as far from accusatory is possible- before he speaks. "We can stop here, though, if you'd like. I think I just covered more than most people would in several sessions. I'm fine with taking things slow- after all, I've got all the time in the world."
His claims of patience are, of course, a total lie. However, he doesn't want to overload Emma on the first day, not enough to scare her off completely from this. He's hoping he hasn't already crossed that line.
The laughter makes her jump. Literally. This gives way to shaking she hides by keeping her hands busy and turning her head as if she is looking at different things with new interest, only to actually stand up when he speaks to her, making several rounds in the office itself before pausing near a bookshelf. She leans and tries not to make it look obvious as to how much she may or may not be letting it support her as she folds her arms softly in front of her.
"Well, um, yes, there...no, wait," she holds up her hands suddenly. "Not, 'yes' as in stopping, it's just, I'm not sure that, uh," she gestures without direction, brow furrowing as only it does when one is grasping for words one cannot immediately find. "...you might be thinking of it a bit differently than I...than I meant." There, she manages, barely, and then presses both palms together though not in prayer so much as she does so to then point them at Gabriel Sylar, as if she is directing herself toward him. "I mean that, if, okay, you say you think that you spent a lot of time defining yourself by these, these abilities, right?" She nods for him. "But what I wanted more to know is, what I meant, was....are they important to who you are now. Not how they made you or...didn't make you but how they define you." Pause. "Right now." And she blinks, holding her breath and hoping some of that made sense even as she looks away and walks stiffly behind her desk again, sitting a bit heavily.
Any smile left over from the laughing dies off at her words. It's not a question he wants to think about, much less answer. It's so much easier to think about what had happened, rather than how he is right now.
After a very long pause, he shakes his head. "They're the only good parts about me," he says quietly, with a sigh. He's looking down at the desk again, instead of keeping eye contact. "I've done a really good job of destroying everything else."
"I see," she says with all the quietness of a page turned or a pencil line drawn across paper and watches him go from smiling to not smiling to avoiding all in the space of a glimpse. It is a fast change and it speaks of backing up in some ways and standing stock still in others, but she makes no assumptions, nodding just once and letting the silence get comfortable with them before she breathes--maybe a little too deeply--and speaks again.
"Well," and she pauses because it is like she has to regroup after every exchange of sentences. "I think that you...if you really want to..." and here she stops rather than pauses, her brow furrowing again as she cuts herself off. "Actually, okay, how about this: what do you want? Do you...want forgiveness? Or to be different than you are in some...way? Do you want something else entirely?" The motivations of this kind are most important and she knows she's been remiss in not addressing them more quickly, but that she is still in this office with him at all is so very nearly as much as she can manage.
He doesn't answer her for a long time, instead frowning thoughtfully at his hands. He was almost embarrassed to answer this one, knowing that what he wants is going to sound not only stupid, but impossible.
So he starts with the easier surface reason. "I want to stop destroying everything I come into contact with," he says, still staring at his knuckles. His hands are laced together and those knuckles are white with how hard he's squeezing. He looks up at Emma, finally, and that face just reminds him more. Maybe that's why he decided to open up so quickly- the memories were too strong. "I don't want to be alone."
He tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling, forcing back the stinging in his eyes. "I've always felt alone, always separate. And a time traveler told me once that I die alone, as well. I made that- it wasn't true." Peter and Claire were both there. He wasn't alone, they were there, even if they were there to kill him. "But I still feel..." It was nearly impossible to describe. "If I had that connection to people, if I wasn't so separate from everyone, maybe I wouldn't be so...insane."
I see reiterates itself in her head but not aloud, aware of how patronizing repetition can fast become. When he leans away she watches with renewed acuteness, her own eyes widening a little when she notes the recognizable motion of a person willing something to leave them; perhaps the instinct to break apart. His words travel through a series of loops and while she follows their patterns she also follows the tones that wrap around them, her hands lifting from her lap to the desk edge again, her features unsmiling but not unkind.
She has options here, too many, so she goes with her own instinct, tries to treat the situation--if only for a moment--as if the terrible things this man has done do not exist and the problem presented is the problem itself and not necessarily the person. This is faulty but it is coping and it may be the only way that Emma can make it through to another session with Gabriel Sylar. For her own sake she must compartmentalize to the point of separation and she does it thoroughly, silently, a slapdash reconstruction.
"I can sympathize...with that," she confesses. "No one wants to be alone," and she feels a strain at her mouth that confuses her until she realizes it is the barest of smiles. Separate. Separate. Separate. "And it's true that everyone needs someone. Admittedly for some people it's just a handful of others but, you know, some people need much more than that. If you...if you've never had either one, then it could very well be that things are possible that...that you don't even know of, if you could...could integrate yourself in such a way that would allow you to try." What she does not mean is 'be normal' and what she does mean has no simple phrasing to suffice, but she bows her own head now, fingers lacing together again.
"But from what you're saying...what you mean, what this is sounding like to me is," and she levels wide eyes at him, pointed and calm for the first time. The separation is thorough. "...you just want to be normal."
He watches her closely as she speaks, but the last revelation causes him to glance at the ground and to the side, before finally looking up at her.
"Yes," he admits, now wringing his hands. "I thought that if I couldn't be normal, I could at least be exceptional. And then I became a murderer. But- all I wanted-" I just wanted Chandra to be happy with me, proud of me. All I wanted was for someone to say I was impressive, or maybe even just okay.
He swallows as he remembers. "There was someone here that promised to take away one of my abilities, the most harmful one. Mine. But she never ended up doing it. I didn't realize it before, but- I'd probably be better without it." He speaks about it as if this were blasphemy. However, now that he's considered it, he thinks it might be true.
The wringing of his hands alerts her as much as the grasping tone of his voice, as if half of what he means to say is still caught up between his mouth and his mind. She is familiar enough with that problem. Still, she keeps her own silence as he continues, making mental checks and question marks where appropriate and her brow arches automatically, a tilt of her head in conjunction with it as she folds her hands once then again with the other hand overlapping, bowing her head.
"Well," this is her default precursor to just about anything, "They say that there are some people who...who lack a moral code most people keep common between them. These people tend to be the, you know, serial killers, and um, arsonists, and so on. They make their own kind of idea of what is acceptable and what isn't, without adhering to regular ideas about good and bad---right, and wrong. But that doesn't seem to be you." And she pauses because she needs to breathe more than anything before going on, one hand gesturing very slightly, almost as if it simply wants to keep from being still. "You have remorse, or..." she hurries not to assume, "Something like it, or you want to have it, at least, or, well, these are just things I'm guessing, observing, off the top of my head." Almost, she sounds apologetic and she can feel herself ticks away from a heart attack. Her nerves have handicapped her over the years and she's let them, to an extent, so she breathes again, slower, forcing down a calm. Lower lip worried under teeth for a second, she then looks up with the suddenness of a bomb dropping---a delicately spoken, vaguely agitated, redheaded, clean-oriented, wishes-more-and-more-every-second-she-was-dreaming...bomb.
"I think you should find something else to do." She catches how blank that sounds and adds, "You know, um, not different from killing---well no, definitely different from that but what I mean is that you know that. I mean different from, from watch...fixing or making, whatever it is you...were doing. With watches. Pick something new. Something fresh, like, uh, a reinvention." At this point she knows she is more than way in over her head for the fiftieth time and she winces without realizing she does so, and it is almost like saying this is the best I can come up with for now when she glances away, standing up to tend the orchid on a lower shelf.
"They say when one door closes, another opens. But, maybe, sometimes, what you need is..." she prunes a leaf with scissors from goodness knows where. "...what you need, maybe, is something more like a window. Or a completely different house of doors and windows." Her metaphors always seem to be lacking, but she tries, digging her heels down into the carpet like a ship weighing anchor in the middle of an ocean.
"Something else?" It's both a novel idea and something he's not sure he can even consider. The attention paid to Emma lessens considerably as he tries to figure out the possibilities. He was only ever good at watchmaking, but it was all he tried. But- he shakes his head.
When he speaks however, he sounds uncertain, perhaps even timid. "Timepiece restoration is the only- the only thing I've done my whole life, I don't know what else will-" He cuts himself off as other possibilities, other exacting, precise careers present themselves. There's plenty here that will distract that compulsion for gaining knowledge, isn't there? "Even if I could pick something, do you think I'd be able to get someone to hire me?"
He lets out a slightly nervous chuckle and shakes his head, almost as if he'd rather not have Emma answer that one. He doesn't want this little bit of a door to get slammed in his face already, to pull from Emma's metaphor. "So you think that going back to my roots- that might not have been the best move, then? I needed something different?"
"Thank you," he replies sincerely, his voice quiet in order to match hers. He hopes, idly, that he hasn't broken her already, because while that's one of the harder stories to listen to, what he'd done...well, it wasn't any less violent. He decides to try and keep going until she might find her voice. That's what this is mostly supposed to be, anyway, right? At least at first. He talks and she listens.
"I went looking for my father eventually, to try and figure out where I went so wrong. I thought family might tell me. Neither my uncle or my father apologized- my father didn't even remember who I was. Of course, he had the same ability as me--" He stops suddenly, and sits up in his chair (he hadn't realized he'd been sinking into it. "Wait. Have I told you about abilities?"
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She wonders about unfairness and the way her heart palpitates most uncomfortably.
"No," she answers because it is the bare minimum of a reply, because she can still continue trying the impossible task of ordering her internalization while fitting herself to the role she so brashly advertised the other day. Her hands previously on the desk have dropped to being folded in her lap and they thread tightly, almost painfully. "Do you think," her shoulders are stone statue stiff, "Do you think that...um...that those are important to..." she bows her head and then forces herself to look up again. "...to who you are?"
Who you were.
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Of course, he tamps that down fairly quickly, knowing how tense she is right now. But he can't help it, the question has such a resounding answer. He bites his lip for a moment, trying to figure out how to put it. "I'd say that they are the single most important thing defining who I am today. In fact, I seemed to spend most of my recent years trying to define myself entirely by these abilities."
His eyes flick up to her, and he makes sure his voice is soft and quiet, and as far from accusatory is possible- before he speaks. "We can stop here, though, if you'd like. I think I just covered more than most people would in several sessions. I'm fine with taking things slow- after all, I've got all the time in the world."
His claims of patience are, of course, a total lie. However, he doesn't want to overload Emma on the first day, not enough to scare her off completely from this. He's hoping he hasn't already crossed that line.
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"Well, um, yes, there...no, wait," she holds up her hands suddenly. "Not, 'yes' as in stopping, it's just, I'm not sure that, uh," she gestures without direction, brow furrowing as only it does when one is grasping for words one cannot immediately find. "...you might be thinking of it a bit differently than I...than I meant." There, she manages, barely, and then presses both palms together though not in prayer so much as she does so to then point them at Gabriel Sylar, as if she is directing herself toward him. "I mean that, if, okay, you say you think that you spent a lot of time defining yourself by these, these abilities, right?" She nods for him. "But what I wanted more to know is, what I meant, was....are they important to who you are now. Not how they made you or...didn't make you but how they define you." Pause. "Right now." And she blinks, holding her breath and hoping some of that made sense even as she looks away and walks stiffly behind her desk again, sitting a bit heavily.
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After a very long pause, he shakes his head. "They're the only good parts about me," he says quietly, with a sigh. He's looking down at the desk again, instead of keeping eye contact. "I've done a really good job of destroying everything else."
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"Well," and she pauses because it is like she has to regroup after every exchange of sentences. "I think that you...if you really want to..." and here she stops rather than pauses, her brow furrowing again as she cuts herself off. "Actually, okay, how about this: what do you want? Do you...want forgiveness? Or to be different than you are in some...way? Do you want something else entirely?" The motivations of this kind are most important and she knows she's been remiss in not addressing them more quickly, but that she is still in this office with him at all is so very nearly as much as she can manage.
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So he starts with the easier surface reason. "I want to stop destroying everything I come into contact with," he says, still staring at his knuckles. His hands are laced together and those knuckles are white with how hard he's squeezing. He looks up at Emma, finally, and that face just reminds him more. Maybe that's why he decided to open up so quickly- the memories were too strong. "I don't want to be alone."
He tilts his head back and stares at the ceiling, forcing back the stinging in his eyes. "I've always felt alone, always separate. And a time traveler told me once that I die alone, as well. I made that- it wasn't true." Peter and Claire were both there. He wasn't alone, they were there, even if they were there to kill him. "But I still feel..." It was nearly impossible to describe. "If I had that connection to people, if I wasn't so separate from everyone, maybe I wouldn't be so...insane."
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She has options here, too many, so she goes with her own instinct, tries to treat the situation--if only for a moment--as if the terrible things this man has done do not exist and the problem presented is the problem itself and not necessarily the person. This is faulty but it is coping and it may be the only way that Emma can make it through to another session with Gabriel Sylar. For her own sake she must compartmentalize to the point of separation and she does it thoroughly, silently, a slapdash reconstruction.
"I can sympathize...with that," she confesses. "No one wants to be alone," and she feels a strain at her mouth that confuses her until she realizes it is the barest of smiles. Separate. Separate. Separate. "And it's true that everyone needs someone. Admittedly for some people it's just a handful of others but, you know, some people need much more than that. If you...if you've never had either one, then it could very well be that things are possible that...that you don't even know of, if you could...could integrate yourself in such a way that would allow you to try." What she does not mean is 'be normal' and what she does mean has no simple phrasing to suffice, but she bows her own head now, fingers lacing together again.
"But from what you're saying...what you mean, what this is sounding like to me is," and she levels wide eyes at him, pointed and calm for the first time. The separation is thorough. "...you just want to be normal."
Her tone says enough: correct me if I'm wrong.
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"Yes," he admits, now wringing his hands. "I thought that if I couldn't be normal, I could at least be exceptional. And then I became a murderer. But- all I wanted-" I just wanted Chandra to be happy with me, proud of me. All I wanted was for someone to say I was impressive, or maybe even just okay.
He swallows as he remembers. "There was someone here that promised to take away one of my abilities, the most harmful one. Mine. But she never ended up doing it. I didn't realize it before, but- I'd probably be better without it." He speaks about it as if this were blasphemy. However, now that he's considered it, he thinks it might be true.
Reply
"Well," this is her default precursor to just about anything, "They say that there are some people who...who lack a moral code most people keep common between them. These people tend to be the, you know, serial killers, and um, arsonists, and so on. They make their own kind of idea of what is acceptable and what isn't, without adhering to regular ideas about good and bad---right, and wrong. But that doesn't seem to be you." And she pauses because she needs to breathe more than anything before going on, one hand gesturing very slightly, almost as if it simply wants to keep from being still. "You have remorse, or..." she hurries not to assume, "Something like it, or you want to have it, at least, or, well, these are just things I'm guessing, observing, off the top of my head." Almost, she sounds apologetic and she can feel herself ticks away from a heart attack. Her nerves have handicapped her over the years and she's let them, to an extent, so she breathes again, slower, forcing down a calm. Lower lip worried under teeth for a second, she then looks up with the suddenness of a bomb dropping---a delicately spoken, vaguely agitated, redheaded, clean-oriented, wishes-more-and-more-every-second-she-was-dreaming...bomb.
"I think you should find something else to do." She catches how blank that sounds and adds, "You know, um, not different from killing---well no, definitely different from that but what I mean is that you know that. I mean different from, from watch...fixing or making, whatever it is you...were doing. With watches. Pick something new. Something fresh, like, uh, a reinvention." At this point she knows she is more than way in over her head for the fiftieth time and she winces without realizing she does so, and it is almost like saying this is the best I can come up with for now when she glances away, standing up to tend the orchid on a lower shelf.
"They say when one door closes, another opens. But, maybe, sometimes, what you need is..." she prunes a leaf with scissors from goodness knows where. "...what you need, maybe, is something more like a window. Or a completely different house of doors and windows." Her metaphors always seem to be lacking, but she tries, digging her heels down into the carpet like a ship weighing anchor in the middle of an ocean.
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When he speaks however, he sounds uncertain, perhaps even timid. "Timepiece restoration is the only- the only thing I've done my whole life, I don't know what else will-" He cuts himself off as other possibilities, other exacting, precise careers present themselves. There's plenty here that will distract that compulsion for gaining knowledge, isn't there? "Even if I could pick something, do you think I'd be able to get someone to hire me?"
He lets out a slightly nervous chuckle and shakes his head, almost as if he'd rather not have Emma answer that one. He doesn't want this little bit of a door to get slammed in his face already, to pull from Emma's metaphor. "So you think that going back to my roots- that might not have been the best move, then? I needed something different?"
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