plane between: chapter fourteen
Sorry for taking forever on this update; I had term papers to finish. /o\
Coming towards the end, now. maybe one or two chapters more.
Fandoms: Stuff ZQ was in
Summary: ZQ's characters are unwillingly cast into adventures that could, with some work and positive thinking, be fun and merry; if not for Sylar's adamant refusal to stay dead. Sequel to Quinto Formaggi.
Words: 5,695
Quinto Formaggi Plane Between: Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
XIV: in. his. image.
In the routine drudgery of life, there are some things to wish for. Something to break that dullness, perhaps, dragging you out of the course of events you've resigned yourself to, forcing you to deal with new, strange, unexpected realities, and find life - and find yourself - in the adventures that come along with it. It's the stuff that dreams are made of.
And Stanley wishes that he could look at this interruption this way, but his head is filled with thoughts of the Biology test in two days and how he's barely studied for it. The textbook hangs like a guilty weight in the haversack slung around his shoulder. But what Tony said was true - if he ignores this now, he'll live to regret it.
At first glance, there isn't anything particularly alien or out of the ordinary about the group of people Tony leads him towards. But then he gets close, and senses something off about them, an inexplicable something that he now recognises in Tony as well: something intrinsically foreign about the group, as though they were tourists, but so much more so. Their illness at ease is practically palpable. A couple or so of them almost look sick.
Stanley regards them warily, reading them as they approach.
The fear is a common factor, stronger in some than others. He picks out the most visibly afraid one: geeky-looking fellow, almost clinging to the brick wall, a glazed over look of trauma on his face. Tensed shoulders. Shallow breathing. He's not used to whatever this is, Stanley thinks. He's out of his comfort zone. He likes order; perhaps control, both in himself and others. Highly-strung. Perfectionist.
The man next to him seems to be a friend; he's calmer, with a quiet intensity to his unobtrusive presence. He's scared, too, but hiding it better, holding the fear under the surface, hinted at in just a slight fidgeting. Next to him is perhaps the calmest of the group - he looks almost bemused by everything. Intelligent, though, and alert, with a passive friendliness. The last guy is standing slightly apart from them. Shifty eyes, currently regarding Stanley with suspicion. Scared, too, though he's hiding it, and looks almost as though he wants to bolt and find his own way out of here.
"This is Stanley," Tony says. "He's our tour guide."
"Hi," he says, not quite knowing what he'd just volunteered for, and not quite comfortable with the sudden scrutiny he gets from the group, as though he were some strange creature to be stared at.
"Adam, Leo, Jason, Mitchell," Tony adds in quick introduction, and Stanley joins the people to the names.
"Tony says you guys want to get somewhere?" he asks.
"Yeah," Leo says. "Wells and Lake. Do you know the way?"
"There's a bus station on the next street," Stanley says. "There are maps there you could check out…"
"Sure," Tony says. "Let's go."
Adam leaves the comfort of the wall and they start walking. Stanley leads the way, casting occasional glances back at them. They seem to get more traumatised as they go along. Tony is the most okay, but there's a forced quality to it.
Stanley can almost believe that they really are from another world; or worlds, ones somehow fundamentally different from his own, where, if Tony was to be believed, a whole range of fantastical forms all fall under the category of human.
His mind reels to consider it. How do they get anything done? How do they communicate? Wouldn't different features lead to different expressions, and if so, how would they know what others are thinking, or what they're like? How do they mass produce goods like clothes if there's so much variety in shape and size to account for? Do they fall ill the same way? Are they treated with the same medicines? How would doctors know what healthy was? How could anyone be attracted to alien-looking beings; and what would it be like to have family members that didn't even look like they came from the same species…
He thinks of his mom with a hypothetical third arm and an unnaturally-angled nose, and everyone considering that normal, and his stomach churns.
There are a couple of people standing around at the bus station when they arrive.
Adam heads gratefully towards the map. Maps he can understand. They make sense. This one appears to have place names entirely in lower-case, but it doesn't matter.
*
It takes a while for him to realise that he's alone, and that he can almost feel the silence.
Louis finishes his food and the glass of water that Zach gave him, then puts down the empty plate and cup and carefully swings his legs around to get off the couch. He gingerly places a foot down and slowly stands, testing his weight. His legs hold. They still hurt, but he can walk, and the confirmation sends a wave of relief through him.
The table of food is as the others left it. He's had his fill, though, and wherever the others went off to, he doesn't expect them back soon. If ever. But Zach…
Louis makes his way in the direction he'd seen Zach go, limping a little, and listening out for any sound. Smudge and Sasan are around somewhere too, he knows, and then decides that he should probably stay away. He doubts that Smudge is yet over what happened.
He hears a noise down the next corridor, and picks up his pace.
"Zach?" he calls out; and then he turns the corner and sees him. But there's something different about his eyes and the way he moves-
"Louis," Peter gasps out. "It's Peter, I'm not Zach, something's hap-"
He jerks suddenly, and Louis takes a reflexive step back.
"What-"
"It's Sylar. Jay and I were dead but somehow he… pulled us to him, and to Zach, and-"
"What… how?"
Peter hesitates, the struggle having lessened a little. "He's…" Peter takes a breath. "Zach isn't one of us. He's the… original. He created us."
Louis just stares. It's starting to make sense, now… that feeling he had that Zach was somehow all of them…
"He's an actor," Peter continues. "He played us. And somehow, it… lets us live again through him, or someth-"
Another jerk. When it subsides, Peter's face is pale. "I… I don't know how much longer I can hold on."
"What happens when you can't?" Louis asks warily.
"Sylar takes over," Peter says. "I think. It's what happened before-"
His body throws itself against the wall, and something subtle shifts in his face. A different person. But not Sylar yet, and there's fear in his eyes-
"Zach?" Louis asks.
Zach blinks and then looks at him.
"Louis. You've got to hide me somewhere," Zach says urgently. "Before Sylar comes back. I don't know what he's going to do or make me do, but if I'm locked up or tied up then he can't use me…"
"But where…"
Zach glances around, vaguely aware of a battle going on somewhere in his head as he starts walking, Louis following alongside-
Zach pulls on a door to check. It opens outwards.
"Put me in a room and barricade the door shut," he says. "If I'm trapped in there then Sylar can't-"
Zach squeezes his eyes shut, as though fighting something off. He opens his eyes again. Still him. "When the others get back, let them know. Sylar doesn't have his own body, so he's powerless. He'll be only human, and outnumbered, and if… I have to die to kill him for good…"
Zach peters off. Louis swallows back a sudden twinge of guilt.
"You'd do that?" Louis asks.
Zach cracks a wry smile. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one."
Silence.
"Yeah," Louis finally says, hoping that not too much guilt is audible in the syllable. "I guess."
Zach's gaze is steady, looking right at him, and Louis has the uncomfortable feeling that he knows. Yet it doesn't feel like a condemnation or a patronising judgement; it's just the two of them, standing there like equals, and the unspoken comment from Zach: I was you once.
"You're a better person than you let on, Louis," Zach says quietly. "I know that."
Louis doesn't say anything, concentrating on holding his gaze and not letting anything slip.
But time is short, and Zach quickly snaps out of it.
"I'll try to get rid of Sylar any other way I can," he says, slipping into the nearest room. Louis follows after, taking his lead and dragging a table out of the room so as to block it from the outside.
"Come back in a couple of hours to let me out."
"How… would we know if it's you or Sylar?"
Zach hesitates, then: "I'll know how to prove it."
Louis nods.
Zach appraises the table. "Do you think this is heavy enough, or-"
He freezes, eyes wide in panic-
"Zach?"
Something changes in his face. A sudden calmness, and a slow grin. An eyebrow raises.
"No, the name's Sylar." He looks Louis up and down, taking in his Smudge-battered form and grabbing his still-hurting arm when Louis tries to hit out. "Who did that to you? The bisexual guy?"
"…Where's Zach?" Louis yells.
Sylar clamps a hand on his shoulder. "Quinto isn't in at the moment," he says cheerily. "And it… looks like we have a common enemy. Let's go find him, shall we?" His grin widens.
"No-"
Sylar figures he could do without him, then. He shrugs. "Suit yourself," he says. He gestures at the open door. "Get in."
"Wh-"
Sylar grabs him and shoves him in. Louis stumbles, trying to regain his balance, when Sylar slams the door shut and pushes the table across.
Louis pounds at the door. "HEY! Let me out!"
Sylar strolls off.
*
They locate Wells and Lake - or 'wells' and 'lake' as it says on the map - and the building at its corner, and a bus that stops near it.
"We don't have any money," Mitchell states, having come to the same realisation Tony had earlier.
Tony looks hopefully at Stanley, who gets a bad feeling about the imminent state of his finances.
"We'll walk," Leo says. "How much time do we have left? …Adam?"
Adam blinks, retrieving himself from the safe place in his head. "21 minutes," he says.
"It's not that far," Leo says. "We can make it."
Adam pales further at the thought of having to walk through this nightmare, and returns to the safe place in his head.
"…Look," Stanley starts, "if you really need money I can…"
"It's all r-"
"Yes," Jason says, cutting Leo off. "That would be extremely helpful, thank you."
"We'll never be able to pay him back-"
"I'm not getting stuck in this place," Mitchell says.
"Yeah, and we might get lost if we walk," Tony points out.
Adam is in the safe place in his head, and doesn't say anything, staring quietly at the map.
Stanley doesn't really know what he's doing; this is hard-earned money he's dealing with, but there's something discomfortingly strange about this group of people. And whatever they're trying to do, they seem desperate.
"You could take a cab," he says. "There's a stand behind there… some big ones that should be able to fit the five of you. It could drop you off right where you need it."
He has the sudden, fleeting thought of going along with them. Tony's request he join them as a tour guide might have been an implicit invitation to come along, but he doesn't think there'd be much need for guiding when inside a cab, and if he went along, he'd have to spend more money to get back…
"20 minutes," Adam says tightly. There's a slow panic building up inside him along with the wild conviction that something is going to go wrong and they'd be stuck here forever. Or perhaps just him. He could be unlucky that way…
Hitler, he thinks, in an involuntary fulfilment of Godwin's Law. Hitler, and all the Jews he killed. Did that happen here too? Did all of them look like me?
The others start walking and he figures some consensus must have been reached, though he hadn't been paying attention. The realisation bites. He's supposed to always be on top of things like this. He's the one who always pays attention, who knows what's going on-
They're heading towards the glass doors of a shopping mall; the local guy is saying something about a taxi stand on the other side. A new wave of panic hits Adam. Shopping malls are full of people, and even back home in his normal world it was enough to make him stay away; but here-
He swallows back the beginnings of a panic attack and tries to breathe.
Ignore them, he tells himself, as their small party heads through the doors and into the bustle. Ignore everyone and just walk, and it'll all be over in 20 minutes and everything will be fine-
-or not, he thinks. You don't know what will happen. You could miss the deadline, or end up somewhere wrong, or…
Adam allows himself a brief glance at his surroundings, shifting his gaze from the spot on Tony's shirt he had been concentrating on.
It looks like a regular mall. Could be one, if he tunes out the people - both real ones and those looking out from advertisements - and tuned out their voices and the persistent knowledge that every product he's seeing on display was designed and manufactured by hands just like his-
He goes back to staring at the spot on Tony's shirt.
Their small group provides some small comfort against the storm in his brain. Technically it shouldn't - they're physically indistinguishable from the local population - but there's some security in their shared foreignness and their shared memories of different worlds.
How do they tell each other apart? he finds himself feverishly wondering, only to sense the answer: The same way we do.
…It's just us, he thinks. On a larger scale.
And that makes it a little easier to deal with, and calms him down a little.
If we'd built a city of us. A world. Made that the new normal. This is what it would be like.
He takes in the sight of everyday people just going about their business: browsing through things, queuing at the counters, chatting animatedly.
And in a burst of clarity, he realises that he doesn't know any of these people. They're all complete strangers. Like any other collection of strangers at a mall.
He finds that if he looks at them carefully, the subtle differences emerge: the way they stand, talk, move, gesture… He picks out three young boys in the crowd as they pass through the toy section. One is cheerily and obliviously pulling teddy bears off the shelf while singing the alphabet song, and another - his brother? - is quietly engrossed with a tiny toy xylophone. The third is staring intently and somewhat angrily at the floor and trying to stomp his way through to china. Adam would probably be able to tell them apart had their parents for some reason entrusted him with babysitting.
He glances around at the local adults milling around the place, and senses the similar differences lying just beneath the surface.
It was just a matter of paying attention.
He wonders if that made people be nicer to each other, if they were always paying attention.
And, for a moment, the world doesn't seem that scary.
*
At first he bangs on the door, then remembers the table on the other side of it and takes instead to pushing against the stubborn wood, panic driving him to do so for longer than his injuries can take.
"Let me out!" Louis cries again, even though Sylar is probably far away now.
The exertion makes his head throb harder with pain, still not recovered from having a chair crashed against it. Q healed him only enough to make him walk again, and the rest of the damage sends up another broken symphony of hurt as Louis throws himself against the door, feeling the impact slam through his body. He rolls back against the door and weeps.
"Let me out…"
No one knows he's here. Just Sylar, and Louis doesn't think he'll be coming back. Images of his own death float through his mind: of slow starvation and thirst eventually taking him, left here alone on the musty carpet to draw his final breaths…
Louis gulps in air while he still can. His lungs ache. He sniffs away tears, wiping a hand across his eyes, and stumbles away from the door. Maybe there's another way out, or something he could use to help…
It's an old fashioned bedroom, almost stereotypically so, with its four-poster bed covered with heavy bedding and the archaic twisted wood of the furniture. Thick satin curtains at the windows. Louis tentatively takes a handful and draws it back, exposing windows that look clearly out onto an amorphous pinkish mist. He stares at it for a moment, then lets go of the curtains and leaves the windows, the pinkish light spilling through the curtain gap and basking the room in its deadened illumination.
Louis runs fingers along the dark wood of the closet, feeling the grain of the texture against his skin with a kind of distant wonder. He grasps the handle and slowly pulls the door open, remembering Narnia.
But it's just a closet. A few abandoned clothes hang inside.
There's a full-length mirror on the other side of the door. Louis exchanges weary glances with his reflection. He swallows, observing the damage, a little scared by how it looks worse than he thought. Several trails of dried blood run down the side of his head, amidst a mass of bruises now turning dark; and his eyes appear more frightened than he feels.
In his features he recognises the others. He sees the recently-encountered Sylar, whom he thinks has never looked this scared; he remembers Smudge bearing down on him repeatedly with his fists and the chair; he remembers Sasan, and a stolen moment gone too soon.
Louis reaches out a hand to touch the mirror and sees his reflected hand come up to meet it. His other hand goes to his head, trying weakly to smooth out hair matted with his own blood. He can almost make himself believe…
But no. Sasan would never look this pathetic. This… his reflection... it's just him, Louis Ironson, and the revulsion churns sickly in the pit of his stomach.
He drops his hand, and turns away from himself, and sees Q standing there.
*
There is nothing here, but neither is there any other place they'd rather be; and so they stay cuddling each other on the couch, basking in the silence of the room. Words would spoil the moment. But in the quiet there can be healing, and Sasan feels Smudge relaxing more and more against his shoulder as time goes by.
Sasan wonders what this place is, exactly. Some regular parallel universe, or perhaps one perpendicular to all the rest, or a different place altogether… He gets the feeling that this room - and perhaps all the other rooms - is not really part of the house, and that if he closed the door and opened it again, the scene could very well have changed. Perhaps it would bring them back to wherever this place originated, returning the dusty garden to its place beneath its original sky, and let its leaves breathe once again…
He hears the sound of soft footsteps against the floor. Sasan reflexively tenses, and then remembers that Sylar is dead; but the voice that speaks is tinged with a familiar malice:
"Holding hands? How sweet."
Sasan jerks, turning around wide-eyed to see… Zach… only something tells him it's not Zach, not really, not with that grin and the barely concealed hatred in his eyes, and is that a knife-
"…Zach?" he asks anyway, almost daring to hope. Smudge has let go of his hand and turned around with him, and Sasan sees Smudge's face darken, his shoulders growing tense in recognition-
The intruder raises an eyebrow. "Really? You think so? …It's the plaid, isn't it?"
"You're supposed to be dead!" Smudge shouts.
Sylar chuckles. "Yeah, nice try there. But I think it's my turn." He regards the knife in his hands. "And you know what the best part of this is?" he asks, sauntering closer and jabbing the point of the knife at them. "You can't hurt me without hurting your dear Zachary." He laughs.
"LEAVE ZACH ALONE!" Smudge yells, clambering over the top of the couch, falling sideways onto the floor with a thunk but picking himself up quickly, hands balled in fists, fire in his eyes.
"Smudge-" Sasan starts.
"What are you going to do, you little bisexual?" Sylar asks, both of them ignoring Sasan. "I may not have my powers in this pathetic mortal body, but I'm armed and you're not." He taps the knife. "And you'll never get rid of me unless you kill him. You won't do that, would you?"
Smudge glares at him. "I hate you," he states, and the words are wrung tight with hostility and the barest shaking of his voice.
The sight pushes Sasan to get off the false safety of the couch and join Smudge, grasping his arms from behind, murmuring his name, trying to pull him back, away, because they could still run from here-
Sylar shrugs. "Lots of people do. I'll have to work on that after I kill you, and if your boyfriend stands in the way he's welcome to join-"
"YOU DON'T HURT SASAN!" Smudge yells, and he would have lunged forward and struck out in ignorance of the knife if Sasan didn't pull him back, whispering in tremulous syllables to just leave it, they can still run, they can still get away, but Sasan feels Smudge's body trembling in front of his, muscles tensed and ready to fight, and he knows that they're the same size but Smudge somehow seems so small next to Sylar, and Sasan doesn't want to let him go-
Smudge drops his voice, still eyeing Sylar's tauntingly slow approach. "I can take him," he tells Sasan. "Let me go, I can take him-"
"No you can't."
"Sas…"
Sasan doesn't even know if they could run; Sylar is in the way between them and the door, and moving closer to the door means moving closer to him.
"You can't win," he says, loosening his grip slightly. "It's Zach, you can't hurt him…"
Smudge wrenches himself out of Sasan's arms and rushes wildly forward, wondering if he could grab the knife and-
"Smudge!"
Sylar grins. He casually meets Smudge's approach: grabbing him, raising the knife to his neck-
Smudge bites down on Sylar's arm and earns a sharp nick to his ear. He gasps in pain.
"Zach felt that," Sylar growls into his ear. "You don't want to hurt him, do you?"
Sylar looks up to where Sasan is standing, rooted to the spot in terror. Sylar raises an eyebrow. "Here to watch your boyfriend die?" he asks. "Poetic, isn't it? First you, now him. Both by my hand, though it would have been nice if you'd stayed dead. Saves me the trouble of having to do it all over again."
"SAS, RUN!" Smudge bursts out.
"Shut up," Sylar tells him.
"Don't…" Sasan says, helpless desperation in his eyes. "Please don't… don't hurt him…"
"Why shouldn't I?" Sylar asks. "He started it. How many times did you actually kill me?" he asks Smudge.
Smudge tries to glare at Sylar, then realises he's in the wrong position to do so.
"I hate you," he says again.
"I try my best," Sylar admits.
The knife scratches tauntingly against Smudge's neck, scraping a line through the blood trickling down from his ear.
Sylar looks back at Sasan. "Are you just going to stand there while I kill him?" he queries. "Waiting your turn? Or do you somehow think you have the ability to change my mind… Hey. Cheer up. You look like a kicked puppy. It's embarrassing. Someone might come by. Show some respect for that face."
"You're supposed to be dead," Sasan says weakly. "It was supposed to be over…"
"That's the beauty of second chances, isn't it?" Sylar asks. "And third ones… fourth ones… Any last words for Smudge here before I rip his neck open?"
Sasan's tear-filled eyes find Smudge's, and hold his gaze.
*
Zach tries to move, to do something, anything, but Sylar won't relinquish control, his mind an overpowering presence in his head, dragging him sadistically along for the ride. Sylar plays him like a puppet - controlling his limbs, his expressions, his tongue, and the bitter irony is not lost on Zach. The character plays the actor.
He feels Smudge grabbed tight in his arms, the knife in his hands casually running against Smudge's neck; sees Sasan standing there, completely broken; and he wants to give some sign of empathy, but Sylar keeps his eyes mockingly cold.
In their own half-coloured world, Peter and Jay watch the proceedings. Jay is weakened from his struggles to keep Sylar out, but wounds don't last long in this place.
"How is he winning?" Jay asks, face deep in concentration. "How can Sylar go against three of us and win?"
"He's powerful," Peter says. "He had all those powers back in the watch shop… maybe using them trained his mind to be stronger, or-"
"Maybe," Jay says.
"We can't let him kill them," Peter says. "There has to be something we can do-"
Jay looks around the place, lost in thought.
"How did we get here?" he asks.
Peter looks at him.
"…Sylar brought us here just by… thinking?" Jay continues. "If he could do that, couldn't we bring him back?"
"If we're not as strong-"
"But it's not about strength," Jay says. "It's about what's possible, and if it's possible to think your way here, it has to be possible to think your way back…"
"Back where, to his shop?" Peter asks. "That's his turf-"
"But we both know what it looks like, so we could imagine it-"
"But-"
"If he follows us there, he won't be here," Jay says. "…We're already dead, Peter. We don't have much to lose." He nods towards Smudge and Sasan. "I think those two do."
*
Earlier
"You," Louis says, but he's too tired to fight.
"Why the accusatory tone?" Q asks. "If it hadn't been for me, you'd be dead by now."
"If it hadn't been for you, none of this would have happened-"
Q shrugs. "Maybe. I apologise for interrupting your fascinating, joy-filled life."
"Are you happy now?"
"Define 'happy'." Q takes in their surroundings. "This is a nice room."
"Let me out," Louis says, changing tack. "Please…"
"You don't tell me what to do, Louis."
Q taps a wall. A screen expands on it to show Sylar approaching Smudge and Sasan; they're talking, but there's no sound.
"Remember our deal?" Q asks. "Someone is going to die in your place. Or maybe… two."
Louis stares at the screen, lost in the look of terror in Sasan's eyes. He goes up to the screen, palms against it as though he could will himself through, take Sasan away, soothe that scared look off his face…
"No," he says brokenly.
"You don't get to choose, Louis," Q says behind him. "You made your decision. Or have you changed your mind?"
Sasan and Smudge are whispering to each other with words he cannot hear. He feels that painful pang of loneliness again: loneliness, desire, jealousy. Sasan never whispered to him like that…
Louis closes his eyes, wetness sliding against the edges of his eyelids.
"Do you think you're ever getting out of this room?" Q queries.
Louis opens his eyes, gaze still fixed on the screen, his mouth dry. He sees Smudge run to attack Sylar and the knife go up against his neck. He sees Sasan, watching, unable to do anything.
He feels the ancient silence of this room. The door hangs heavy and immovable in a corner of his mind, weighing him down with its presence, as though wanting to trap him here forever.
"You… gave me three choices," he says, the beating of his heart tight against his chest. "You… you said that if I… died… you'd send everyone else home."
"If you died painfully… and slowly…" Q trails off. "Yes."
Louis swallows.
"You're a better person than you let on, Louis. I know that."
He remembers his reflection in the mirror and how it pales against the image of Sasan on the screen. He doesn't particularly care for Smudge's life, but he sees how Sasan reacts to it being threatened, and he's moved to care.
I could die for you, he thinks in a fit of martyring conviction and passion. I could…
But so would Smudge.
Why did it have to be me? Louis asks bitterly, question poised to the air. What did I ever do to deserve being abducted into some cruel game of life and death, manipulated against my will to hurt those I would have otherwise never wished ill on; can't they see that I had no choice… but they already hated me. They already hated me from the start, in those cells, in…
"Louis?" Q asks.
The maelstrom of thoughts peters into quiet.
You're a better person than you let on.
Silence.
"Take me," Louis finally tells Q, voice tight and shaking with forced bravado. "Kill me. Send them home. Alive."
"Really?" Q asks, raising an eyebrow. "There's no turning back on this one. And no one will ever know what an… amazing, wonderfully selfless thing you did..."
Louis remembers Zach's face before Sylar took over. That calm knowing in his eyes…
Louis blinks away a tear. "I know. Just do it. They deserve to live more than I do."
Q regards him in clinical silence.
"…As you wish," he finally says.
And Louis falls to his knees as his legs give way, screaming in pain to a now-empty room.
The curtains flap dully in the breeze, ignorant of his cries. Louis falls onto his side, twitching violently through his tears, bleeding into the carpet in the agony of his sacrifice.
*
The scene slips away, Sylar's eyes opening in sudden disorientation, losing his controlling grip.
On a whim, Peter thinks-
my office
-and he grabs onto the thought in the morphing reality, expanding it into cubicles with their desks and chairs and computers and-
The scene takes hold and grows solid around them. The place is deserted, bathed in fluorescent light. Air hums from an air-conditioner. Windows frame a dark blue sky deepening into black. Clean, shiny computers lie on desks, cold to the touch.
Jay touches a stack of papers. They rustle against each other beneath his fingertips.
Sylar is back as himself, in the same not-quite-tangible form as they are, Zach nowhere to be seen.
"What did you do-"
"No," Peter says, as Sylar's hand raises to attack; and he sees the confusion in Sylar's eyes, almost mirrored in his own, as nothing happens.
Jay stares. "How did you-"
"…I don't know," Peter says. "I think we're in my world… my mind. I… I imagined this place, and… if Sylar could take us to his shop, it looks like I can do this too. Whoever creates the construction has control."
Sylar glares. "But you don't have any powers."
"I'm a rocket scientist," Peter points out, though his voice wavers a little. "And if… teleporting around the afterlife isn't rocket science, I'm not sure what is."
"…That doesn't even make any sense," Sylar says.
Jay steps around to Peter's side, facing Sylar.
"I think we should move, don't you?" Sylar asks.
And Jay lunges out with his mind as the scene starts to shift; fighting against the greyness of Sylar's watchmaker's shop, keeping Peter's construction steady - feeding off what he sees and concentrating to keep it all there, and present - and soon the intervention stops, and the office is solid around them again.
"There are two of us," Jay says. "And we're all dead. We're even, and you're outnumbered."
"And what are you going to do?" Sylar asks. He looks around at the cubicles, raising his arms and dropping them in amused contempt. "Work me to death?"
Peter briefly considers the possibility of forcing Sylar into eternal data entry, but he doubts he'd be able to hold up the construct that long, and it seems a little too mean.
A thought strikes him, and he tentatively realises a hand, thinking out at Sylar-
-and telekinetically raises him off the ground.
"This is my world," Peter says in an awed whisper.
Sylar raises an eyebrow. "You can't keep this up forever."
"Neither can you," Jay says. He steps forward, looking up at Sylar's hovering form. A small smile fleets across his face. "Get used to it. We're in charge now."
*
He's suddenly back in his apartment.
"SAS!"
Eyes wide in panic, Smudge yanks out his ITDT, furiously pounding the buttons with his thumbs, seeing the screen stay dead-
"No…"
He turns frantically around on the spot, trying to get back to where he'd been, where Sasan was, and what if he was still there with Sylar and-
"NO!" he yells. "SAS! WHERE ARE YOU?"
Hyperventilating, he clambers onto his bed, fingers splayed against the wall as though to somehow break through-
He pounds on the wall, only to hear a frustrated return-pound from his neighbour and a yelled command to shut up.
Smudge wipes tears from his face and returns to the spot he'd appeared in, sinking to his knees, his mind and voice crying out.
"Sas…"
He curls up, trembling, and cries into his knees, hand clutching the dead ITDT, despairing for the end of normality.
*
CHAPTER FIFTEEN >>
Coming towards the end, now. maybe one or two chapters more.
Fandoms: Stuff ZQ was in
Summary: ZQ's characters are unwillingly cast into adventures that could, with some work and positive thinking, be fun and merry; if not for Sylar's adamant refusal to stay dead. Sequel to Quinto Formaggi.
Words: 5,695
Quinto Formaggi Plane Between: Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13
XIV: in. his. image.
In the routine drudgery of life, there are some things to wish for. Something to break that dullness, perhaps, dragging you out of the course of events you've resigned yourself to, forcing you to deal with new, strange, unexpected realities, and find life - and find yourself - in the adventures that come along with it. It's the stuff that dreams are made of.
And Stanley wishes that he could look at this interruption this way, but his head is filled with thoughts of the Biology test in two days and how he's barely studied for it. The textbook hangs like a guilty weight in the haversack slung around his shoulder. But what Tony said was true - if he ignores this now, he'll live to regret it.
At first glance, there isn't anything particularly alien or out of the ordinary about the group of people Tony leads him towards. But then he gets close, and senses something off about them, an inexplicable something that he now recognises in Tony as well: something intrinsically foreign about the group, as though they were tourists, but so much more so. Their illness at ease is practically palpable. A couple or so of them almost look sick.
Stanley regards them warily, reading them as they approach.
The fear is a common factor, stronger in some than others. He picks out the most visibly afraid one: geeky-looking fellow, almost clinging to the brick wall, a glazed over look of trauma on his face. Tensed shoulders. Shallow breathing. He's not used to whatever this is, Stanley thinks. He's out of his comfort zone. He likes order; perhaps control, both in himself and others. Highly-strung. Perfectionist.
The man next to him seems to be a friend; he's calmer, with a quiet intensity to his unobtrusive presence. He's scared, too, but hiding it better, holding the fear under the surface, hinted at in just a slight fidgeting. Next to him is perhaps the calmest of the group - he looks almost bemused by everything. Intelligent, though, and alert, with a passive friendliness. The last guy is standing slightly apart from them. Shifty eyes, currently regarding Stanley with suspicion. Scared, too, though he's hiding it, and looks almost as though he wants to bolt and find his own way out of here.
"This is Stanley," Tony says. "He's our tour guide."
"Hi," he says, not quite knowing what he'd just volunteered for, and not quite comfortable with the sudden scrutiny he gets from the group, as though he were some strange creature to be stared at.
"Adam, Leo, Jason, Mitchell," Tony adds in quick introduction, and Stanley joins the people to the names.
"Tony says you guys want to get somewhere?" he asks.
"Yeah," Leo says. "Wells and Lake. Do you know the way?"
"There's a bus station on the next street," Stanley says. "There are maps there you could check out…"
"Sure," Tony says. "Let's go."
Adam leaves the comfort of the wall and they start walking. Stanley leads the way, casting occasional glances back at them. They seem to get more traumatised as they go along. Tony is the most okay, but there's a forced quality to it.
Stanley can almost believe that they really are from another world; or worlds, ones somehow fundamentally different from his own, where, if Tony was to be believed, a whole range of fantastical forms all fall under the category of human.
His mind reels to consider it. How do they get anything done? How do they communicate? Wouldn't different features lead to different expressions, and if so, how would they know what others are thinking, or what they're like? How do they mass produce goods like clothes if there's so much variety in shape and size to account for? Do they fall ill the same way? Are they treated with the same medicines? How would doctors know what healthy was? How could anyone be attracted to alien-looking beings; and what would it be like to have family members that didn't even look like they came from the same species…
He thinks of his mom with a hypothetical third arm and an unnaturally-angled nose, and everyone considering that normal, and his stomach churns.
There are a couple of people standing around at the bus station when they arrive.
Adam heads gratefully towards the map. Maps he can understand. They make sense. This one appears to have place names entirely in lower-case, but it doesn't matter.
*
It takes a while for him to realise that he's alone, and that he can almost feel the silence.
Louis finishes his food and the glass of water that Zach gave him, then puts down the empty plate and cup and carefully swings his legs around to get off the couch. He gingerly places a foot down and slowly stands, testing his weight. His legs hold. They still hurt, but he can walk, and the confirmation sends a wave of relief through him.
The table of food is as the others left it. He's had his fill, though, and wherever the others went off to, he doesn't expect them back soon. If ever. But Zach…
Louis makes his way in the direction he'd seen Zach go, limping a little, and listening out for any sound. Smudge and Sasan are around somewhere too, he knows, and then decides that he should probably stay away. He doubts that Smudge is yet over what happened.
He hears a noise down the next corridor, and picks up his pace.
"Zach?" he calls out; and then he turns the corner and sees him. But there's something different about his eyes and the way he moves-
"Louis," Peter gasps out. "It's Peter, I'm not Zach, something's hap-"
He jerks suddenly, and Louis takes a reflexive step back.
"What-"
"It's Sylar. Jay and I were dead but somehow he… pulled us to him, and to Zach, and-"
"What… how?"
Peter hesitates, the struggle having lessened a little. "He's…" Peter takes a breath. "Zach isn't one of us. He's the… original. He created us."
Louis just stares. It's starting to make sense, now… that feeling he had that Zach was somehow all of them…
"He's an actor," Peter continues. "He played us. And somehow, it… lets us live again through him, or someth-"
Another jerk. When it subsides, Peter's face is pale. "I… I don't know how much longer I can hold on."
"What happens when you can't?" Louis asks warily.
"Sylar takes over," Peter says. "I think. It's what happened before-"
His body throws itself against the wall, and something subtle shifts in his face. A different person. But not Sylar yet, and there's fear in his eyes-
"Zach?" Louis asks.
Zach blinks and then looks at him.
"Louis. You've got to hide me somewhere," Zach says urgently. "Before Sylar comes back. I don't know what he's going to do or make me do, but if I'm locked up or tied up then he can't use me…"
"But where…"
Zach glances around, vaguely aware of a battle going on somewhere in his head as he starts walking, Louis following alongside-
Zach pulls on a door to check. It opens outwards.
"Put me in a room and barricade the door shut," he says. "If I'm trapped in there then Sylar can't-"
Zach squeezes his eyes shut, as though fighting something off. He opens his eyes again. Still him. "When the others get back, let them know. Sylar doesn't have his own body, so he's powerless. He'll be only human, and outnumbered, and if… I have to die to kill him for good…"
Zach peters off. Louis swallows back a sudden twinge of guilt.
"You'd do that?" Louis asks.
Zach cracks a wry smile. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one."
Silence.
"Yeah," Louis finally says, hoping that not too much guilt is audible in the syllable. "I guess."
Zach's gaze is steady, looking right at him, and Louis has the uncomfortable feeling that he knows. Yet it doesn't feel like a condemnation or a patronising judgement; it's just the two of them, standing there like equals, and the unspoken comment from Zach: I was you once.
"You're a better person than you let on, Louis," Zach says quietly. "I know that."
Louis doesn't say anything, concentrating on holding his gaze and not letting anything slip.
But time is short, and Zach quickly snaps out of it.
"I'll try to get rid of Sylar any other way I can," he says, slipping into the nearest room. Louis follows after, taking his lead and dragging a table out of the room so as to block it from the outside.
"Come back in a couple of hours to let me out."
"How… would we know if it's you or Sylar?"
Zach hesitates, then: "I'll know how to prove it."
Louis nods.
Zach appraises the table. "Do you think this is heavy enough, or-"
He freezes, eyes wide in panic-
"Zach?"
Something changes in his face. A sudden calmness, and a slow grin. An eyebrow raises.
"No, the name's Sylar." He looks Louis up and down, taking in his Smudge-battered form and grabbing his still-hurting arm when Louis tries to hit out. "Who did that to you? The bisexual guy?"
"…Where's Zach?" Louis yells.
Sylar clamps a hand on his shoulder. "Quinto isn't in at the moment," he says cheerily. "And it… looks like we have a common enemy. Let's go find him, shall we?" His grin widens.
"No-"
Sylar figures he could do without him, then. He shrugs. "Suit yourself," he says. He gestures at the open door. "Get in."
"Wh-"
Sylar grabs him and shoves him in. Louis stumbles, trying to regain his balance, when Sylar slams the door shut and pushes the table across.
Louis pounds at the door. "HEY! Let me out!"
Sylar strolls off.
*
They locate Wells and Lake - or 'wells' and 'lake' as it says on the map - and the building at its corner, and a bus that stops near it.
"We don't have any money," Mitchell states, having come to the same realisation Tony had earlier.
Tony looks hopefully at Stanley, who gets a bad feeling about the imminent state of his finances.
"We'll walk," Leo says. "How much time do we have left? …Adam?"
Adam blinks, retrieving himself from the safe place in his head. "21 minutes," he says.
"It's not that far," Leo says. "We can make it."
Adam pales further at the thought of having to walk through this nightmare, and returns to the safe place in his head.
"…Look," Stanley starts, "if you really need money I can…"
"It's all r-"
"Yes," Jason says, cutting Leo off. "That would be extremely helpful, thank you."
"We'll never be able to pay him back-"
"I'm not getting stuck in this place," Mitchell says.
"Yeah, and we might get lost if we walk," Tony points out.
Adam is in the safe place in his head, and doesn't say anything, staring quietly at the map.
Stanley doesn't really know what he's doing; this is hard-earned money he's dealing with, but there's something discomfortingly strange about this group of people. And whatever they're trying to do, they seem desperate.
"You could take a cab," he says. "There's a stand behind there… some big ones that should be able to fit the five of you. It could drop you off right where you need it."
He has the sudden, fleeting thought of going along with them. Tony's request he join them as a tour guide might have been an implicit invitation to come along, but he doesn't think there'd be much need for guiding when inside a cab, and if he went along, he'd have to spend more money to get back…
"20 minutes," Adam says tightly. There's a slow panic building up inside him along with the wild conviction that something is going to go wrong and they'd be stuck here forever. Or perhaps just him. He could be unlucky that way…
Hitler, he thinks, in an involuntary fulfilment of Godwin's Law. Hitler, and all the Jews he killed. Did that happen here too? Did all of them look like me?
The others start walking and he figures some consensus must have been reached, though he hadn't been paying attention. The realisation bites. He's supposed to always be on top of things like this. He's the one who always pays attention, who knows what's going on-
They're heading towards the glass doors of a shopping mall; the local guy is saying something about a taxi stand on the other side. A new wave of panic hits Adam. Shopping malls are full of people, and even back home in his normal world it was enough to make him stay away; but here-
He swallows back the beginnings of a panic attack and tries to breathe.
Ignore them, he tells himself, as their small party heads through the doors and into the bustle. Ignore everyone and just walk, and it'll all be over in 20 minutes and everything will be fine-
-or not, he thinks. You don't know what will happen. You could miss the deadline, or end up somewhere wrong, or…
Adam allows himself a brief glance at his surroundings, shifting his gaze from the spot on Tony's shirt he had been concentrating on.
It looks like a regular mall. Could be one, if he tunes out the people - both real ones and those looking out from advertisements - and tuned out their voices and the persistent knowledge that every product he's seeing on display was designed and manufactured by hands just like his-
He goes back to staring at the spot on Tony's shirt.
Their small group provides some small comfort against the storm in his brain. Technically it shouldn't - they're physically indistinguishable from the local population - but there's some security in their shared foreignness and their shared memories of different worlds.
How do they tell each other apart? he finds himself feverishly wondering, only to sense the answer: The same way we do.
…It's just us, he thinks. On a larger scale.
And that makes it a little easier to deal with, and calms him down a little.
If we'd built a city of us. A world. Made that the new normal. This is what it would be like.
He takes in the sight of everyday people just going about their business: browsing through things, queuing at the counters, chatting animatedly.
And in a burst of clarity, he realises that he doesn't know any of these people. They're all complete strangers. Like any other collection of strangers at a mall.
He finds that if he looks at them carefully, the subtle differences emerge: the way they stand, talk, move, gesture… He picks out three young boys in the crowd as they pass through the toy section. One is cheerily and obliviously pulling teddy bears off the shelf while singing the alphabet song, and another - his brother? - is quietly engrossed with a tiny toy xylophone. The third is staring intently and somewhat angrily at the floor and trying to stomp his way through to china. Adam would probably be able to tell them apart had their parents for some reason entrusted him with babysitting.
He glances around at the local adults milling around the place, and senses the similar differences lying just beneath the surface.
It was just a matter of paying attention.
He wonders if that made people be nicer to each other, if they were always paying attention.
And, for a moment, the world doesn't seem that scary.
*
At first he bangs on the door, then remembers the table on the other side of it and takes instead to pushing against the stubborn wood, panic driving him to do so for longer than his injuries can take.
"Let me out!" Louis cries again, even though Sylar is probably far away now.
The exertion makes his head throb harder with pain, still not recovered from having a chair crashed against it. Q healed him only enough to make him walk again, and the rest of the damage sends up another broken symphony of hurt as Louis throws himself against the door, feeling the impact slam through his body. He rolls back against the door and weeps.
"Let me out…"
No one knows he's here. Just Sylar, and Louis doesn't think he'll be coming back. Images of his own death float through his mind: of slow starvation and thirst eventually taking him, left here alone on the musty carpet to draw his final breaths…
Louis gulps in air while he still can. His lungs ache. He sniffs away tears, wiping a hand across his eyes, and stumbles away from the door. Maybe there's another way out, or something he could use to help…
It's an old fashioned bedroom, almost stereotypically so, with its four-poster bed covered with heavy bedding and the archaic twisted wood of the furniture. Thick satin curtains at the windows. Louis tentatively takes a handful and draws it back, exposing windows that look clearly out onto an amorphous pinkish mist. He stares at it for a moment, then lets go of the curtains and leaves the windows, the pinkish light spilling through the curtain gap and basking the room in its deadened illumination.
Louis runs fingers along the dark wood of the closet, feeling the grain of the texture against his skin with a kind of distant wonder. He grasps the handle and slowly pulls the door open, remembering Narnia.
But it's just a closet. A few abandoned clothes hang inside.
There's a full-length mirror on the other side of the door. Louis exchanges weary glances with his reflection. He swallows, observing the damage, a little scared by how it looks worse than he thought. Several trails of dried blood run down the side of his head, amidst a mass of bruises now turning dark; and his eyes appear more frightened than he feels.
In his features he recognises the others. He sees the recently-encountered Sylar, whom he thinks has never looked this scared; he remembers Smudge bearing down on him repeatedly with his fists and the chair; he remembers Sasan, and a stolen moment gone too soon.
Louis reaches out a hand to touch the mirror and sees his reflected hand come up to meet it. His other hand goes to his head, trying weakly to smooth out hair matted with his own blood. He can almost make himself believe…
But no. Sasan would never look this pathetic. This… his reflection... it's just him, Louis Ironson, and the revulsion churns sickly in the pit of his stomach.
He drops his hand, and turns away from himself, and sees Q standing there.
*
There is nothing here, but neither is there any other place they'd rather be; and so they stay cuddling each other on the couch, basking in the silence of the room. Words would spoil the moment. But in the quiet there can be healing, and Sasan feels Smudge relaxing more and more against his shoulder as time goes by.
Sasan wonders what this place is, exactly. Some regular parallel universe, or perhaps one perpendicular to all the rest, or a different place altogether… He gets the feeling that this room - and perhaps all the other rooms - is not really part of the house, and that if he closed the door and opened it again, the scene could very well have changed. Perhaps it would bring them back to wherever this place originated, returning the dusty garden to its place beneath its original sky, and let its leaves breathe once again…
He hears the sound of soft footsteps against the floor. Sasan reflexively tenses, and then remembers that Sylar is dead; but the voice that speaks is tinged with a familiar malice:
"Holding hands? How sweet."
Sasan jerks, turning around wide-eyed to see… Zach… only something tells him it's not Zach, not really, not with that grin and the barely concealed hatred in his eyes, and is that a knife-
"…Zach?" he asks anyway, almost daring to hope. Smudge has let go of his hand and turned around with him, and Sasan sees Smudge's face darken, his shoulders growing tense in recognition-
The intruder raises an eyebrow. "Really? You think so? …It's the plaid, isn't it?"
"You're supposed to be dead!" Smudge shouts.
Sylar chuckles. "Yeah, nice try there. But I think it's my turn." He regards the knife in his hands. "And you know what the best part of this is?" he asks, sauntering closer and jabbing the point of the knife at them. "You can't hurt me without hurting your dear Zachary." He laughs.
"LEAVE ZACH ALONE!" Smudge yells, clambering over the top of the couch, falling sideways onto the floor with a thunk but picking himself up quickly, hands balled in fists, fire in his eyes.
"Smudge-" Sasan starts.
"What are you going to do, you little bisexual?" Sylar asks, both of them ignoring Sasan. "I may not have my powers in this pathetic mortal body, but I'm armed and you're not." He taps the knife. "And you'll never get rid of me unless you kill him. You won't do that, would you?"
Smudge glares at him. "I hate you," he states, and the words are wrung tight with hostility and the barest shaking of his voice.
The sight pushes Sasan to get off the false safety of the couch and join Smudge, grasping his arms from behind, murmuring his name, trying to pull him back, away, because they could still run from here-
Sylar shrugs. "Lots of people do. I'll have to work on that after I kill you, and if your boyfriend stands in the way he's welcome to join-"
"YOU DON'T HURT SASAN!" Smudge yells, and he would have lunged forward and struck out in ignorance of the knife if Sasan didn't pull him back, whispering in tremulous syllables to just leave it, they can still run, they can still get away, but Sasan feels Smudge's body trembling in front of his, muscles tensed and ready to fight, and he knows that they're the same size but Smudge somehow seems so small next to Sylar, and Sasan doesn't want to let him go-
Smudge drops his voice, still eyeing Sylar's tauntingly slow approach. "I can take him," he tells Sasan. "Let me go, I can take him-"
"No you can't."
"Sas…"
Sasan doesn't even know if they could run; Sylar is in the way between them and the door, and moving closer to the door means moving closer to him.
"You can't win," he says, loosening his grip slightly. "It's Zach, you can't hurt him…"
Smudge wrenches himself out of Sasan's arms and rushes wildly forward, wondering if he could grab the knife and-
"Smudge!"
Sylar grins. He casually meets Smudge's approach: grabbing him, raising the knife to his neck-
Smudge bites down on Sylar's arm and earns a sharp nick to his ear. He gasps in pain.
"Zach felt that," Sylar growls into his ear. "You don't want to hurt him, do you?"
Sylar looks up to where Sasan is standing, rooted to the spot in terror. Sylar raises an eyebrow. "Here to watch your boyfriend die?" he asks. "Poetic, isn't it? First you, now him. Both by my hand, though it would have been nice if you'd stayed dead. Saves me the trouble of having to do it all over again."
"SAS, RUN!" Smudge bursts out.
"Shut up," Sylar tells him.
"Don't…" Sasan says, helpless desperation in his eyes. "Please don't… don't hurt him…"
"Why shouldn't I?" Sylar asks. "He started it. How many times did you actually kill me?" he asks Smudge.
Smudge tries to glare at Sylar, then realises he's in the wrong position to do so.
"I hate you," he says again.
"I try my best," Sylar admits.
The knife scratches tauntingly against Smudge's neck, scraping a line through the blood trickling down from his ear.
Sylar looks back at Sasan. "Are you just going to stand there while I kill him?" he queries. "Waiting your turn? Or do you somehow think you have the ability to change my mind… Hey. Cheer up. You look like a kicked puppy. It's embarrassing. Someone might come by. Show some respect for that face."
"You're supposed to be dead," Sasan says weakly. "It was supposed to be over…"
"That's the beauty of second chances, isn't it?" Sylar asks. "And third ones… fourth ones… Any last words for Smudge here before I rip his neck open?"
Sasan's tear-filled eyes find Smudge's, and hold his gaze.
*
Zach tries to move, to do something, anything, but Sylar won't relinquish control, his mind an overpowering presence in his head, dragging him sadistically along for the ride. Sylar plays him like a puppet - controlling his limbs, his expressions, his tongue, and the bitter irony is not lost on Zach. The character plays the actor.
He feels Smudge grabbed tight in his arms, the knife in his hands casually running against Smudge's neck; sees Sasan standing there, completely broken; and he wants to give some sign of empathy, but Sylar keeps his eyes mockingly cold.
In their own half-coloured world, Peter and Jay watch the proceedings. Jay is weakened from his struggles to keep Sylar out, but wounds don't last long in this place.
"How is he winning?" Jay asks, face deep in concentration. "How can Sylar go against three of us and win?"
"He's powerful," Peter says. "He had all those powers back in the watch shop… maybe using them trained his mind to be stronger, or-"
"Maybe," Jay says.
"We can't let him kill them," Peter says. "There has to be something we can do-"
Jay looks around the place, lost in thought.
"How did we get here?" he asks.
Peter looks at him.
"…Sylar brought us here just by… thinking?" Jay continues. "If he could do that, couldn't we bring him back?"
"If we're not as strong-"
"But it's not about strength," Jay says. "It's about what's possible, and if it's possible to think your way here, it has to be possible to think your way back…"
"Back where, to his shop?" Peter asks. "That's his turf-"
"But we both know what it looks like, so we could imagine it-"
"But-"
"If he follows us there, he won't be here," Jay says. "…We're already dead, Peter. We don't have much to lose." He nods towards Smudge and Sasan. "I think those two do."
*
Earlier
"You," Louis says, but he's too tired to fight.
"Why the accusatory tone?" Q asks. "If it hadn't been for me, you'd be dead by now."
"If it hadn't been for you, none of this would have happened-"
Q shrugs. "Maybe. I apologise for interrupting your fascinating, joy-filled life."
"Are you happy now?"
"Define 'happy'." Q takes in their surroundings. "This is a nice room."
"Let me out," Louis says, changing tack. "Please…"
"You don't tell me what to do, Louis."
Q taps a wall. A screen expands on it to show Sylar approaching Smudge and Sasan; they're talking, but there's no sound.
"Remember our deal?" Q asks. "Someone is going to die in your place. Or maybe… two."
Louis stares at the screen, lost in the look of terror in Sasan's eyes. He goes up to the screen, palms against it as though he could will himself through, take Sasan away, soothe that scared look off his face…
"No," he says brokenly.
"You don't get to choose, Louis," Q says behind him. "You made your decision. Or have you changed your mind?"
Sasan and Smudge are whispering to each other with words he cannot hear. He feels that painful pang of loneliness again: loneliness, desire, jealousy. Sasan never whispered to him like that…
Louis closes his eyes, wetness sliding against the edges of his eyelids.
"Do you think you're ever getting out of this room?" Q queries.
Louis opens his eyes, gaze still fixed on the screen, his mouth dry. He sees Smudge run to attack Sylar and the knife go up against his neck. He sees Sasan, watching, unable to do anything.
He feels the ancient silence of this room. The door hangs heavy and immovable in a corner of his mind, weighing him down with its presence, as though wanting to trap him here forever.
"You… gave me three choices," he says, the beating of his heart tight against his chest. "You… you said that if I… died… you'd send everyone else home."
"If you died painfully… and slowly…" Q trails off. "Yes."
Louis swallows.
"You're a better person than you let on, Louis. I know that."
He remembers his reflection in the mirror and how it pales against the image of Sasan on the screen. He doesn't particularly care for Smudge's life, but he sees how Sasan reacts to it being threatened, and he's moved to care.
I could die for you, he thinks in a fit of martyring conviction and passion. I could…
But so would Smudge.
Why did it have to be me? Louis asks bitterly, question poised to the air. What did I ever do to deserve being abducted into some cruel game of life and death, manipulated against my will to hurt those I would have otherwise never wished ill on; can't they see that I had no choice… but they already hated me. They already hated me from the start, in those cells, in…
"Louis?" Q asks.
The maelstrom of thoughts peters into quiet.
You're a better person than you let on.
Silence.
"Take me," Louis finally tells Q, voice tight and shaking with forced bravado. "Kill me. Send them home. Alive."
"Really?" Q asks, raising an eyebrow. "There's no turning back on this one. And no one will ever know what an… amazing, wonderfully selfless thing you did..."
Louis remembers Zach's face before Sylar took over. That calm knowing in his eyes…
Louis blinks away a tear. "I know. Just do it. They deserve to live more than I do."
Q regards him in clinical silence.
"…As you wish," he finally says.
And Louis falls to his knees as his legs give way, screaming in pain to a now-empty room.
The curtains flap dully in the breeze, ignorant of his cries. Louis falls onto his side, twitching violently through his tears, bleeding into the carpet in the agony of his sacrifice.
*
The scene slips away, Sylar's eyes opening in sudden disorientation, losing his controlling grip.
On a whim, Peter thinks-
my office
-and he grabs onto the thought in the morphing reality, expanding it into cubicles with their desks and chairs and computers and-
The scene takes hold and grows solid around them. The place is deserted, bathed in fluorescent light. Air hums from an air-conditioner. Windows frame a dark blue sky deepening into black. Clean, shiny computers lie on desks, cold to the touch.
Jay touches a stack of papers. They rustle against each other beneath his fingertips.
Sylar is back as himself, in the same not-quite-tangible form as they are, Zach nowhere to be seen.
"What did you do-"
"No," Peter says, as Sylar's hand raises to attack; and he sees the confusion in Sylar's eyes, almost mirrored in his own, as nothing happens.
Jay stares. "How did you-"
"…I don't know," Peter says. "I think we're in my world… my mind. I… I imagined this place, and… if Sylar could take us to his shop, it looks like I can do this too. Whoever creates the construction has control."
Sylar glares. "But you don't have any powers."
"I'm a rocket scientist," Peter points out, though his voice wavers a little. "And if… teleporting around the afterlife isn't rocket science, I'm not sure what is."
"…That doesn't even make any sense," Sylar says.
Jay steps around to Peter's side, facing Sylar.
"I think we should move, don't you?" Sylar asks.
And Jay lunges out with his mind as the scene starts to shift; fighting against the greyness of Sylar's watchmaker's shop, keeping Peter's construction steady - feeding off what he sees and concentrating to keep it all there, and present - and soon the intervention stops, and the office is solid around them again.
"There are two of us," Jay says. "And we're all dead. We're even, and you're outnumbered."
"And what are you going to do?" Sylar asks. He looks around at the cubicles, raising his arms and dropping them in amused contempt. "Work me to death?"
Peter briefly considers the possibility of forcing Sylar into eternal data entry, but he doubts he'd be able to hold up the construct that long, and it seems a little too mean.
A thought strikes him, and he tentatively realises a hand, thinking out at Sylar-
-and telekinetically raises him off the ground.
"This is my world," Peter says in an awed whisper.
Sylar raises an eyebrow. "You can't keep this up forever."
"Neither can you," Jay says. He steps forward, looking up at Sylar's hovering form. A small smile fleets across his face. "Get used to it. We're in charge now."
*
He's suddenly back in his apartment.
"SAS!"
Eyes wide in panic, Smudge yanks out his ITDT, furiously pounding the buttons with his thumbs, seeing the screen stay dead-
"No…"
He turns frantically around on the spot, trying to get back to where he'd been, where Sasan was, and what if he was still there with Sylar and-
"NO!" he yells. "SAS! WHERE ARE YOU?"
Hyperventilating, he clambers onto his bed, fingers splayed against the wall as though to somehow break through-
He pounds on the wall, only to hear a frustrated return-pound from his neighbour and a yelled command to shut up.
Smudge wipes tears from his face and returns to the spot he'd appeared in, sinking to his knees, his mind and voice crying out.
"Sas…"
He curls up, trembling, and cries into his knees, hand clutching the dead ITDT, despairing for the end of normality.
*
CHAPTER FIFTEEN >>