Day 50: Sun Room (4th Shift)

[ninelivesonce]

The Sun Room was dark when Taura re-entered it; her eyes adjusted quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid one of the 'techs coming over to talk to her.

"Were you going to join us for the movie, Kitty?" she asked, waving a hand at what appeared to be a 2-D projector screen.

"Movie?" This was, apparently, the wrong question to ask, as the woman's face fell into a moue of practiced disappointment.

"You can't keep doing this to yourself, Kitty." Doing what, exactly, was something 'Kitty' was evidently supposed to know. Then the screen flicked on, and some sort of advertisement was playing while a staffer adjusted the volume. Oh. The term was unfamiliar, but entertainment hadn't changed that much.

"I mean, er, what movie is it?" Taura rumbled, keeping her voice low so as not to interrupt. That must have been the right question; the woman brightened back up and started explaining.

"King Kong!" she said, clearly expecting a reply. Then she sighed, and continued. "It's about a giant ape, brought back from an exploration," she began. "It's also a love story -- oh, just trust me. It's a classic."

"The ape falls in love?" That sounded a little outré, at least by Institute standards of entertainment. Not by Jacksonian ones, but those Taura had been just as pleased to leave behind.

"Oh, nothing like that. Well, the ape does fall in love -- but it's just a beast. Why, Fay Wray doesn't even come up to its waist." Taura blinked at her again. What did height have to do with it, anyway? She was leaning, just a little, without even realizing it. Perhaps looming would be a better word. The 'tech blinked back, and then finally the penny dropped. "Oh...oh. Maybe it wouldn't be to your taste, dear." And with that, she scurried off to adjust a chair that was already facing the screen quite adequately. Taura sighed, and slipped through the gathering crowd to the bulletin board.

[Zack]

Comments

[darwinism]

Oh, Sylar was fully aware of what could happen when the lights went off. Blood, gore, torture... if anyone was well-versed in the routines of this place, it was him, and he wasn't lying when he said that he had much bigger fish to fry than some screwed-up teen, healing powers notwithstanding. There was a certain... discomfort in seeing Claire Bennet, or anyone else he'd been forced to face last night, but discomfort couldn't kill a man, not like a mutant freak of nature or some surgeon with a god complex.

Sylar slowly rubbed at his temple a little harder, but that was his only show of weakness. He smirked calmly as he leaned away from Claire, glancing over her face as if to gauge it as a whole.

"Learning from the best," he murmured, almost appreciatively. "I... admire that, Claire."

But he was sure that she didn't, and that was the important thing here. His smile widened as made the hand at his temple into a fist and jerked his thumb back at the nurses.

"And I'm sure that your father admires them. With all the abduction and torture... must be like a home away from home for you."

If Bennet was really gone from here, then he was probably a sore spot, and given what Sylar had read in the Company files before Mohinder's return to his apartment, good ol' Noah wasn't exactly an active member of the organization anymore. Possibly to shield his daughter? The protectiveness he'd shown back in Odessa had definitely been that of a caring parent, but in that case, why the hell had he entered his line of work in the first place? Had he been blackmailed when Claire had first manifested? From what Sylar could tell, he was a true believer in the Company's cause, but people did change – just not all that often, and not all that surprisingly. Still, it was a mystery Sylar hadn't really thought on, and given the key figures involved, the subject could maybe do with a little more... investigation.

[autophoenix.livejournal.com]

The way he said it made her want to throw up. As if that was anything knew. Everything Sylar did made her want to throw up, even when he was saving her life. That was probably the worst part. It was like he thought he could get away with all of this; like he thought that they were suddenly similar in some way. Like he could talk about their humanity and their shared experiences. Like he understood her in some way.

But, he didn't. And whether he'd looked inside her head, or … felt her pain or taken her ability or not, he never would understand, because he was a monster and he deserved to really feel the pain he'd caused her. But not through sympathy. Not through fake apologies. He deserved to feel it by having it happen to him. The disgust in her expression made her jaw shake and her face twitch, contorting slightly in sheer detest.

"Don't you dare talk about him." Yeah, so, he'd fucked up. Majorly. Being Sylar's partner, betraying him, all of it. But, her father was still miles ahead of Sylar in her books and she wasn't going to let him sit here and try to backseat father her again. She'd had enough of that on the drive home only a couple days ago. "What he does? What they do? None of it's as bad as what you've done. People make mistakes. People follow orders that they shouldn't and make bad decisions. You? You're not even a person. You're a monster. You always will be, and I'm not going to rest until I see you dead."

Talk about a sore spot. She walked right into that one, honestly, and it didn't even seem to occur to her. She was too busy fuming about the fact that she was this close and she couldn't even throw herself a few chairs over and strangle him. As if it would work. As if he would feel anything. So, she just continued, furious but still hissing all of her threats in a low growl for the sake of the rest of the rest of the institute as well as for the sake of privacy and not drawing attention, something she'd never quite mastered but continued to strive for.

"So, you can keep your admiration. I'll just take your head on a stick."

[darwinism]

Sylar might've been hearing Claire's words, but he wasn't reacting much to them, instead staring at the movie screen in front of him and thinking a little harder on the info that she'd so graciously spilled for him. Speaking about her father and the Company in present tense, huh? Bennet must've still been working for them after all, at least in some capacity, which meant that either Mohinder's files had been designed to keep him out of the loop or Claire didn't come from the same point in time as Sylar did. Maybe from before Kirby Plaza? Or... maybe after. Claire was throwing around a lot more anger than fear, which meant long-term coping, which meant the passage of time.

Then again, there were other factors at play here, like Bennet being a conniving bastard and the times that Sylar had already encountered Claire around the Institute. The only way to know what was in her pretty head would be to prod deeper, trip a couple more triggers. Claire wasn't thinking straight right now; she was throwing Sylar's words back in his face, which meant that if he hit on the right topic, she'd babble on about it as if by command. The trick was to keep her here, keep her stupid, and keep her seeing red.

Given what he'd seen so far, he didn't think it'd be particularly hard.

"Shhhh," he hissed, pressing a finger to his lips. He glanced at her with exaggerated indignation and then gestured at the screen. "You're ruining the movie."

If she thought Sylar wanted her to shut up, she'd keep talking. If she thought she wasn't getting to him, she'd work at it more. Beautiful.

"Besides," he added nonchalantly, draping his arm back over the seat next to him and letting a arrogant smirk touch his lips. "We're the same, me and him. We... collect people, study them, find out how they work. And you. Well..."

He turned deliberately to face Claire, fixing his gaze on hers.

"You're his perfect little rat in his perfect little cage."

His eyes wandered almost leisurely to her forehead and brought a finger to his own, drawing a line across it.

"And I can't even imagine the things he's seen in that perfect little head."

[autophoenix.livejournal.com]

And she'd been doing so well, too.

For all of his taunting, pretending her words didn't mean anything, and about her dad and the company and the movie and all of those similarities the he liked to latch onto, she managed to keep a straight face. She even managed to let her rage remain at a low boil while he had the audacity to shush her. But the one thing she couldn't stand for was watching him sit there and pretend like he didn't know exactly what was up there. She wasn't going to sit there and let him scare her with something that he'd already done, something he'd have no reason to do again.

That was one thing he couldn't hold over her head. Because he'd never be able to hurt her again. No one could. She couldn't feel enough to really get hurt.

The worry about making a scene was pushed to the back of her mind. It didn't matter how much she wanted to stay below the radar here, because she'd rather strangle Sylar at this point and the nurses should just be grateful she didn't go for the throat. Instead, she just planted a hand on the seat between them and leaned across, no longer bothering to keep her voice down as she swatted his hand away from his face with her free hand.

"You think because he … humors you that you're the same? Don't kid yourself. He's nothing like you," there was an unspoken concession that her dad wasn't all that much of a hero, either, though. A kind of nuance in her growled tone that indicated that he still hadn't made it back into her good books. But, that was the best Sylar was going to get on the subject.

"My dad's not the one who cut it open. You should know better than anyone what's up there, right? It's too bad you don't remember, because you're not getting another look." Her speech was rushed and heated, and immediately afterward she got to her feet and stomped away, the sheer haste of her flight from the chair causing it to screech loudly over the tile floor. One of the nurses tried to stop her to talk to her, but she was trying to get out of the room before the furious tears that were already threatening to fall from her cheeks. She was bound and determined not to let Sylar see them.