plane between: chapter eight
Fandoms: Stuff ZQ was in
Summary: What happened after Quinto Formaggi. Sylar refuses to stay dead, everyone wishes he would, and a pseudo-omnipotent being named Q really isn't helping at all.
Words: 2,487
Quinto Formaggi
Plane Between
I: all is gray.
II: ghosts. never. die.
III: the unbearable. company. of me.
IV: history repeats. cycles forever.
V: the plans that we made
VI: sylarphobia. internalized.
VII: the needs of the many.
VIII: hell is other people.
The walls are grimy in the weak yellow light; white once, perhaps, but now a streaky beige with patches of brown that might or might not be blood. Dirt has accumulated in the grooves that cut out vague impressions of geometric shapes in the room, and the grime comes off onto Louis' fingers when he scrapes curiously at it.
On the far wall is stencilled the word 'AIRLOCK' in faded red paint.
We're dead, Louis thinks, looking at the dirt on his fingernails. He wipes it ineffectually off on the wall. We're in an airlock. It's going to open out into a vacuum and we'll each end our lives in a final gasp of asphyxiation to float eternally in the everlasting void of space.
He swallows, the panic rising in his throat. "We're gonna die," he says.
"Shut up, Louis," says that ever-annoying kid - what's-his-name, Tony? - and Louis wants to throw something at his smug little face, if not for the fact that it looks too familiar for comfort, and that he appears to have friends here.
Not like him. He doesn't know anyone, even though every instinct in his brain tells him that they are family. Closer than family. But they've never met before this, and he doesn't even know all their names.
"They wouldn't just put us into an airlock and kill us," Tony is saying. "If they wanted to kill us they would have done it back then."
Not everyone is paying attention. The guy who sacrificed most of his right arm to save them is down on the floor in a perpetual grimace of pain, one of his friends by his side trying to fashion some sort of sling; a few others are still distracted by their resident couple, and looking at them, Louis suddenly feels a pang of… something. Jealousy, hurt, pain, anger… But it passes, and he gives no more than a lingering glance to Smudge's hand clasped protectively over Sasan's.
"But it says 'Airlock'," Mitchell points out. Shifty young fellow. Louis doesn't like the look of him. "What else could it be?"
"Okaaay," Jason says. "So we're just pretending that everything is normal and the only question here is how to get out of this airlock?" He smiles.
Louis steps away from the wall. "No," he says. "No, those guys know each other, and they still haven't told us how." He moves subconsciously towards those who had been his fellow prisoners. The subtle division forms in the room. "It's not for no reason we're all here together and I'm certain they have something to do with it. It's likely in our best interests for them to provide some explanation before-"
"What for?" Tony asks, languidly, and Louis wants to strangle him. "We don't have time to talk." He hops over to the door controls. "Look, I'll just open this thing-"
"NO!" Smudge yells.
Tony shrugs and steps away. "We can't stay here forever. Sooner or later we're going to try, so we might as well do it sooner. Hey, worst case scenario, we all die."
"Open it," says the injured guy on the ground. Adam. "They're not going to kill us this easily."
"…and who is this 'they' you keep going on about?" Jason asks.
"Powerful beings who think we're fun to play with," Adam's friend says. "He's right. They don't want to kill us yet. That wouldn't be fun."
"Right," Tony decides. "…or forever hold your peace." He grabs the wheel on the airlock door, rotates it, and pushes the door open.
A draught of air rushes in. Louis grabs the nearest person in panic, then lets go of the mildly bemused Jay as the wind dies down and they look out into the inside of what seems to be a perfectly normal apartment.
"Hey, we're not dead," Jason says.
The place is eerily quiet, the sound of their footsteps absorbed by the carpet as the ten of them enter the room. The airlock door swings silently shut behind them and vanishes into another door; when Jay opens it curiously to check, he sees a perfectly normal bedroom. Other doors lie along the walls.
Across from them is a mantelpiece of polished black wood fixed against the wall over a table.
Two figures lie unconscious on the ground.
On the table is a jug of water, a gun, and a tiny flask of unknown liquid with a note attached to it.
There's a larger note propped up on the mantelpiece:
THE THINGS YOU FIND IN THIS APARTMENT ARE YOUR ONLY SUPPLIES.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SURVIVE.
*
Somewhere along the way, Leo had accepted death. There is comfort in acknowledging the inevitable. The fear is gone. Why live if not to experience life, to hope for future adventure and excitement and meaning; and he has received those things.
He stands at the fringe of the group, withdrawn into quiet introspection. Here, in this company, it lets him remember who he is.
He is the first to go forward; he sees one of the younger ones start, then fall back to watch as Leo reaches the two unconscious forms and crouches down to inspect them.
He knows the first. Sylar. He stems the rising terror - he has accepted death. He briefly looks up to the table and the gun lying there, and then realises he does not have it in him to shoot an unconscious foe.
And the next…
"Why is he here?" Sasan asks from his side in fearful concern.
"I don't know."
Leo looks over the unconscious familiar face with eyes since trained to pick up the slightest nuances of difference. Zach's face, as the rest of him, has a certain lack of polish to it: this was not someone painstakingly composed for the screen - although few of them look it, at this point - but dragged out unsuspectingly and unprepared from a rawer reality. Still breathing.
"At least he's alive," Leo says. "Sylar didn't kill him after all."
"But why is he here?" Sasan asks. "He shouldn't be involved-"
Leo stands up. "Why are any of us here?" he murmurs in response, turning his attention to the table. He picks up the flask and reads the note:
Thought you could use some help. This heals anything. A gay friend of mine snagged it off some kid in Narnia while he was in the closet. - Dem
"I don't think you can trust it," Sasan says. "That closet doesn't go to Narnia."
"I don't think we have much choice," Leo says. He takes the flask back to Adam, currently leaning against the wall with his eyes shut in pain.
The others have dispersed slightly - gone to open doors, examine the place, and finding no way out. But for the most part they hang around in a vague, uncertain crowd. Still unfamiliar with each other. They are not a team yet, and they cast occasional wary glances at the ones who are.
"Hey, check out the windows," Tony says, sauntering out of a bedroom.
"Why?" Jay asks.
Tony jerks a thumb back into the room. "There's some weird fog out there."
Jay goes in, uncertainly. Mitchell follows after.
Tony lets them be and drops down by Smudge's side. "Broke your leg?"
"Yeah," Smudge says with a smidgen of pride. "I fell off a ceiling when Sylar tried to kill me. But he couldn't."
"Nice."
Next to them, Leo uncorks the flask and drips some of its contents along Adam's ravaged right arm.
The flesh fizzles and heals: muscles knitting back together, covering bone, skin growing over-
Adam blinks his eyes open. "What-"
He sees. "Hey…"
Leo holds up the flask. "Guess it works after all."
"What is th-"
Adam's fingers catch the note and he reads it. "…huh. I thought they were trying to kill us." He looks at his healed arm in surprise; bends it, flexes his fingers, runs his other hand across the dried blood on its surface…
"So what's this about?" Adam asks, glancing around.
"Survival," Sasan says, pointing at the note on the mantelpiece.
Adam reads it. He looks at the stuff on the table. "…They want us to kill ourselves," he says.
"Yep," Sasan says. "Can I have that?" he asks, looking at the flask. Leo passes it over.
"Thanks." Sasan sits down and looks Smudge's injured leg over, wondering where to pour the liquid. He lets a few drops fall where the leg looks worst; some of the bruising goes away, but the brokenness remains.
"Maybe I should drink some," Smudge suggests.
"Maybe if you do you won't be bisexual anymore," Tony says, and hits the wall yelling as he dodges a fist.
"Ignore him, Smudge," Sasan says. "We can cure him later. Open your mouth."
Smudge lets himself fall back onto Sasan's lap and willingly opens his mouth. Sasan pours a few drops in. Smudge swallows.
"What's it taste like?" Sasan asks.
Smudge tries to find the words. "Like earwax, but nicer," he decides, and before Sasan can express his horrified disgust that Smudge knows what earwax tastes like, the leg heals, shifting back into form.
"Wow, this is useful," Sasan comments of the flask. He reaches out to grab its cork from the carpet, corks it, and slips it into his pocket.
"Are you still bisexual?" Tony asks, and tries to run as Smudge leaps to his feet and tackles him to the ground.
"Get off me! I SAVED YOUR LIFE!" Tony shouts through laughs and pain, and Smudge lowers a fist.
"Yeah," he says, getting off Tony. "But we saved yours, so we're even."
"That wasn't you, that was Adam," Tony says. "At least we know your leg works." His head falls back against the carpet. "Nice ceiling," he says. "Is that Elvis?"
Smudge glances up.
Tony grins. "Made you look."
*
Louis Ironson lets the bedroom door close slowly behind him. He glances uncertainly back through the narrowing gap and sees the others still out there. It feels kind of weird. Dreamlike, and it almost feels strange that he can't control them or their movements or know what they're thinking; and to see them interacting, talking... He turns back to the room. Inside is quiet with an absorbing silence, and the beds lie cool and inviting. Louis goes over to one and pauses by its side, running his hand over the sheets.
When the door finally brushes against the doorway and closes with a click, he feels suddenly cut off and alone. The others might just as well no longer exist in forms more than pieces of muted conversation on the other side of an infinite door. Yet there's a peace to that. Like a jittery cacophony just got silenced in his brain, no longer trying to talk over the noise and distract himself from losing his mind…
He falls to his knees before the bed and buries his face in his hands.
sometimes you dream about being swept away to another world where no one knows who you were before and you can pretend that nothing ever happened: not you, not the world, and you could be anyone and start anew and leave all that baggage in the distance and run away for good like the coward you are and have the old life vanish into pieces you'll never see again and no one will have been hurt and you can live free of that guilt and this time do a better job of existing
and wake up in a room like this, with people who understand you and know your name and will make sure that nothing bad ever happens again and give you the keys to a kingdom of your own where everything runs the way it should and people are good and easy to deal with and things make sense without need to unravel them in vain speeches that twist and turn back on themselves and have no end in better comprehension because you cannot solve problems with mere discourse; one cannot debate away the world
They're talking again, outside. Their voices come through like repeated strains of a one-sided conversation with himself, and he cycles between annoyance and abject loneliness and being enveloped with a strange feeling of security. And he has a sudden, wild vision of taking all of them and controlling them and making them bow to him and do his bidding but, no, that's ridiculous, and he shirks violently from the idea and hates himself for thinking up the twisted egotistical fantasy and asks himself why, and reels in sudden, extreme self-consciousness;
But the door is closed, and he cannot see them, and he can imagine the voices are just in his head.
Only not quite, and he just feels deeply unsettled.
"This is wrong," he rambles in soft reply through his fingers, to no audience in particular. "It's just wrong, it's not supposed to be this way-"
"Do you want to go home?"
Louis starts, hands dropping away from his face, scrambling to his feet and backing against the wall when he sees the intruder.
"I asked you a question," Q repeats.
Louis jabs a shaking accusatory finger at him. "Okay, you were not here before."
"Neither were you," Q says. "You use doors, I use other means. Let's just cut to the chase. I can get you out of here."
"What… what makes you think I want to leave?"
Q shrugs. "You have a hard enough time facing yourself in the mirror. Being around those guys must be hell for you."
"It's not-"
"Break them up, Louis," Q interrupts.
A dreaded certainty sinks in his heart. "…What?"
"You know who I mean. That happy couple out there lost in the sweet perfume of first love. Do that and I'll take you home. You won't even remember a thing." Q leans in. "And I'll see to it that you are happy."
"…You can't bribe me-"
"Oh, you know you want to," Q says. "Jealousy hurts, doesn't it? You miss that. What they have. It's been a long time since you had it. Why should they be happy when you're not?"
Louis clenches a fist. "You don't know me."
"I know enough. I know enough to know you're going to do it. I saw it in your face. Deny it all you want, Louis, but at the end all you care about is you."
"You don't know anything!"
Q watches, impassive, and waits for the outrage to die down a little. Then: "Surprise me."
He vanishes with the hint of a taunting smirk.
Louis is left on his own, again, against the wall and trembling with emotions he cannot quite define; and he sees the door and nudges it open a crack, and finds Smudge and Sasan amongst the small crowd.
And, for a long time, he just watches them.
*
CHAPTER NINE >>
Summary: What happened after Quinto Formaggi. Sylar refuses to stay dead, everyone wishes he would, and a pseudo-omnipotent being named Q really isn't helping at all.
Words: 2,487
Quinto Formaggi
Plane Between
I: all is gray.
II: ghosts. never. die.
III: the unbearable. company. of me.
IV: history repeats. cycles forever.
V: the plans that we made
VI: sylarphobia. internalized.
VII: the needs of the many.
VIII: hell is other people.
The walls are grimy in the weak yellow light; white once, perhaps, but now a streaky beige with patches of brown that might or might not be blood. Dirt has accumulated in the grooves that cut out vague impressions of geometric shapes in the room, and the grime comes off onto Louis' fingers when he scrapes curiously at it.
On the far wall is stencilled the word 'AIRLOCK' in faded red paint.
We're dead, Louis thinks, looking at the dirt on his fingernails. He wipes it ineffectually off on the wall. We're in an airlock. It's going to open out into a vacuum and we'll each end our lives in a final gasp of asphyxiation to float eternally in the everlasting void of space.
He swallows, the panic rising in his throat. "We're gonna die," he says.
"Shut up, Louis," says that ever-annoying kid - what's-his-name, Tony? - and Louis wants to throw something at his smug little face, if not for the fact that it looks too familiar for comfort, and that he appears to have friends here.
Not like him. He doesn't know anyone, even though every instinct in his brain tells him that they are family. Closer than family. But they've never met before this, and he doesn't even know all their names.
"They wouldn't just put us into an airlock and kill us," Tony is saying. "If they wanted to kill us they would have done it back then."
Not everyone is paying attention. The guy who sacrificed most of his right arm to save them is down on the floor in a perpetual grimace of pain, one of his friends by his side trying to fashion some sort of sling; a few others are still distracted by their resident couple, and looking at them, Louis suddenly feels a pang of… something. Jealousy, hurt, pain, anger… But it passes, and he gives no more than a lingering glance to Smudge's hand clasped protectively over Sasan's.
"But it says 'Airlock'," Mitchell points out. Shifty young fellow. Louis doesn't like the look of him. "What else could it be?"
"Okaaay," Jason says. "So we're just pretending that everything is normal and the only question here is how to get out of this airlock?" He smiles.
Louis steps away from the wall. "No," he says. "No, those guys know each other, and they still haven't told us how." He moves subconsciously towards those who had been his fellow prisoners. The subtle division forms in the room. "It's not for no reason we're all here together and I'm certain they have something to do with it. It's likely in our best interests for them to provide some explanation before-"
"What for?" Tony asks, languidly, and Louis wants to strangle him. "We don't have time to talk." He hops over to the door controls. "Look, I'll just open this thing-"
"NO!" Smudge yells.
Tony shrugs and steps away. "We can't stay here forever. Sooner or later we're going to try, so we might as well do it sooner. Hey, worst case scenario, we all die."
"Open it," says the injured guy on the ground. Adam. "They're not going to kill us this easily."
"…and who is this 'they' you keep going on about?" Jason asks.
"Powerful beings who think we're fun to play with," Adam's friend says. "He's right. They don't want to kill us yet. That wouldn't be fun."
"Right," Tony decides. "…or forever hold your peace." He grabs the wheel on the airlock door, rotates it, and pushes the door open.
A draught of air rushes in. Louis grabs the nearest person in panic, then lets go of the mildly bemused Jay as the wind dies down and they look out into the inside of what seems to be a perfectly normal apartment.
"Hey, we're not dead," Jason says.
The place is eerily quiet, the sound of their footsteps absorbed by the carpet as the ten of them enter the room. The airlock door swings silently shut behind them and vanishes into another door; when Jay opens it curiously to check, he sees a perfectly normal bedroom. Other doors lie along the walls.
Across from them is a mantelpiece of polished black wood fixed against the wall over a table.
Two figures lie unconscious on the ground.
On the table is a jug of water, a gun, and a tiny flask of unknown liquid with a note attached to it.
There's a larger note propped up on the mantelpiece:
THE THINGS YOU FIND IN THIS APARTMENT ARE YOUR ONLY SUPPLIES.
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SURVIVE.
*
Somewhere along the way, Leo had accepted death. There is comfort in acknowledging the inevitable. The fear is gone. Why live if not to experience life, to hope for future adventure and excitement and meaning; and he has received those things.
He stands at the fringe of the group, withdrawn into quiet introspection. Here, in this company, it lets him remember who he is.
He is the first to go forward; he sees one of the younger ones start, then fall back to watch as Leo reaches the two unconscious forms and crouches down to inspect them.
He knows the first. Sylar. He stems the rising terror - he has accepted death. He briefly looks up to the table and the gun lying there, and then realises he does not have it in him to shoot an unconscious foe.
And the next…
"Why is he here?" Sasan asks from his side in fearful concern.
"I don't know."
Leo looks over the unconscious familiar face with eyes since trained to pick up the slightest nuances of difference. Zach's face, as the rest of him, has a certain lack of polish to it: this was not someone painstakingly composed for the screen - although few of them look it, at this point - but dragged out unsuspectingly and unprepared from a rawer reality. Still breathing.
"At least he's alive," Leo says. "Sylar didn't kill him after all."
"But why is he here?" Sasan asks. "He shouldn't be involved-"
Leo stands up. "Why are any of us here?" he murmurs in response, turning his attention to the table. He picks up the flask and reads the note:
Thought you could use some help. This heals anything. A gay friend of mine snagged it off some kid in Narnia while he was in the closet. - Dem
"I don't think you can trust it," Sasan says. "That closet doesn't go to Narnia."
"I don't think we have much choice," Leo says. He takes the flask back to Adam, currently leaning against the wall with his eyes shut in pain.
The others have dispersed slightly - gone to open doors, examine the place, and finding no way out. But for the most part they hang around in a vague, uncertain crowd. Still unfamiliar with each other. They are not a team yet, and they cast occasional wary glances at the ones who are.
"Hey, check out the windows," Tony says, sauntering out of a bedroom.
"Why?" Jay asks.
Tony jerks a thumb back into the room. "There's some weird fog out there."
Jay goes in, uncertainly. Mitchell follows after.
Tony lets them be and drops down by Smudge's side. "Broke your leg?"
"Yeah," Smudge says with a smidgen of pride. "I fell off a ceiling when Sylar tried to kill me. But he couldn't."
"Nice."
Next to them, Leo uncorks the flask and drips some of its contents along Adam's ravaged right arm.
The flesh fizzles and heals: muscles knitting back together, covering bone, skin growing over-
Adam blinks his eyes open. "What-"
He sees. "Hey…"
Leo holds up the flask. "Guess it works after all."
"What is th-"
Adam's fingers catch the note and he reads it. "…huh. I thought they were trying to kill us." He looks at his healed arm in surprise; bends it, flexes his fingers, runs his other hand across the dried blood on its surface…
"So what's this about?" Adam asks, glancing around.
"Survival," Sasan says, pointing at the note on the mantelpiece.
Adam reads it. He looks at the stuff on the table. "…They want us to kill ourselves," he says.
"Yep," Sasan says. "Can I have that?" he asks, looking at the flask. Leo passes it over.
"Thanks." Sasan sits down and looks Smudge's injured leg over, wondering where to pour the liquid. He lets a few drops fall where the leg looks worst; some of the bruising goes away, but the brokenness remains.
"Maybe I should drink some," Smudge suggests.
"Maybe if you do you won't be bisexual anymore," Tony says, and hits the wall yelling as he dodges a fist.
"Ignore him, Smudge," Sasan says. "We can cure him later. Open your mouth."
Smudge lets himself fall back onto Sasan's lap and willingly opens his mouth. Sasan pours a few drops in. Smudge swallows.
"What's it taste like?" Sasan asks.
Smudge tries to find the words. "Like earwax, but nicer," he decides, and before Sasan can express his horrified disgust that Smudge knows what earwax tastes like, the leg heals, shifting back into form.
"Wow, this is useful," Sasan comments of the flask. He reaches out to grab its cork from the carpet, corks it, and slips it into his pocket.
"Are you still bisexual?" Tony asks, and tries to run as Smudge leaps to his feet and tackles him to the ground.
"Get off me! I SAVED YOUR LIFE!" Tony shouts through laughs and pain, and Smudge lowers a fist.
"Yeah," he says, getting off Tony. "But we saved yours, so we're even."
"That wasn't you, that was Adam," Tony says. "At least we know your leg works." His head falls back against the carpet. "Nice ceiling," he says. "Is that Elvis?"
Smudge glances up.
Tony grins. "Made you look."
*
Louis Ironson lets the bedroom door close slowly behind him. He glances uncertainly back through the narrowing gap and sees the others still out there. It feels kind of weird. Dreamlike, and it almost feels strange that he can't control them or their movements or know what they're thinking; and to see them interacting, talking... He turns back to the room. Inside is quiet with an absorbing silence, and the beds lie cool and inviting. Louis goes over to one and pauses by its side, running his hand over the sheets.
When the door finally brushes against the doorway and closes with a click, he feels suddenly cut off and alone. The others might just as well no longer exist in forms more than pieces of muted conversation on the other side of an infinite door. Yet there's a peace to that. Like a jittery cacophony just got silenced in his brain, no longer trying to talk over the noise and distract himself from losing his mind…
He falls to his knees before the bed and buries his face in his hands.
sometimes you dream about being swept away to another world where no one knows who you were before and you can pretend that nothing ever happened: not you, not the world, and you could be anyone and start anew and leave all that baggage in the distance and run away for good like the coward you are and have the old life vanish into pieces you'll never see again and no one will have been hurt and you can live free of that guilt and this time do a better job of existing
and wake up in a room like this, with people who understand you and know your name and will make sure that nothing bad ever happens again and give you the keys to a kingdom of your own where everything runs the way it should and people are good and easy to deal with and things make sense without need to unravel them in vain speeches that twist and turn back on themselves and have no end in better comprehension because you cannot solve problems with mere discourse; one cannot debate away the world
They're talking again, outside. Their voices come through like repeated strains of a one-sided conversation with himself, and he cycles between annoyance and abject loneliness and being enveloped with a strange feeling of security. And he has a sudden, wild vision of taking all of them and controlling them and making them bow to him and do his bidding but, no, that's ridiculous, and he shirks violently from the idea and hates himself for thinking up the twisted egotistical fantasy and asks himself why, and reels in sudden, extreme self-consciousness;
But the door is closed, and he cannot see them, and he can imagine the voices are just in his head.
Only not quite, and he just feels deeply unsettled.
"This is wrong," he rambles in soft reply through his fingers, to no audience in particular. "It's just wrong, it's not supposed to be this way-"
"Do you want to go home?"
Louis starts, hands dropping away from his face, scrambling to his feet and backing against the wall when he sees the intruder.
"I asked you a question," Q repeats.
Louis jabs a shaking accusatory finger at him. "Okay, you were not here before."
"Neither were you," Q says. "You use doors, I use other means. Let's just cut to the chase. I can get you out of here."
"What… what makes you think I want to leave?"
Q shrugs. "You have a hard enough time facing yourself in the mirror. Being around those guys must be hell for you."
"It's not-"
"Break them up, Louis," Q interrupts.
A dreaded certainty sinks in his heart. "…What?"
"You know who I mean. That happy couple out there lost in the sweet perfume of first love. Do that and I'll take you home. You won't even remember a thing." Q leans in. "And I'll see to it that you are happy."
"…You can't bribe me-"
"Oh, you know you want to," Q says. "Jealousy hurts, doesn't it? You miss that. What they have. It's been a long time since you had it. Why should they be happy when you're not?"
Louis clenches a fist. "You don't know me."
"I know enough. I know enough to know you're going to do it. I saw it in your face. Deny it all you want, Louis, but at the end all you care about is you."
"You don't know anything!"
Q watches, impassive, and waits for the outrage to die down a little. Then: "Surprise me."
He vanishes with the hint of a taunting smirk.
Louis is left on his own, again, against the wall and trembling with emotions he cannot quite define; and he sees the door and nudges it open a crack, and finds Smudge and Sasan amongst the small crowd.
And, for a long time, he just watches them.
*
CHAPTER NINE >>