It was possible you could define her tugs this way and that on the captured threads of his emotional strings as manipulation, but Melissa figured it was fair enough given that: one, he knew she was doing it; two, it was her only way of leveling the playing field; and three, he'd been the one to bring the full realization of her skill out in her anyway.

Really, that pretty much sums it up.

No, maybe need's better? Yeah, okay. I need this.




[ooc: I blame heroslayer's mun completely.]

You Are a Pumpkin Latte

You are a total homebody. You love the fall because it gives you an excuse to stay home a little more often and be cozy. Fall is your favorite time to cook a pie, read a good book, or watch your favorite movie. You're the type who prefers handing out candy at Halloween and hosting Thanksgiving at your place. You have a lot of different autumn activities, and they all take place inside the comfort of your home.

Once again, Mohinder and I get the same thing...

"When the designs are chosen with care, tattoos have a power and magic all their own. They decorate the body but they also enhance the soul." - Michelle Delio

It starts off small, though it's no youthful rebellion against her parents that drives her into the tiny shop off the beaten track where the music is quiet and the smell of clove cigarettes hangs layered over incense in the air, but a deeper need, something twisting inside of her and demanding to be let out in a way that begins to frighten her if she thinks on it for too long. She finds herself drifting, more and more often, but some things ground her, and a soft inner voice tells her this might help. Bypassing the frames holding parodies of art for drunken co-eds who might stumble in to pick out, she walks to the girl waiting by the chair with a piece of paper clutched in her hand.

"You drew this?" The girl looks up at her, with something like respect in her eyes, and Melissa nods. "What's it mean?"

"I don't know. Just something I saw in a dream."

That's a lie. Not the latter part, the former, but she doesn't want to get into discussions of faerie lore and binding magic, and pressing ink from the earth--this Earth, her Earth, her Time--into her skin.

The girl just shrugs, and gives her a smile, gesturing for her to sit and position her leg. "It's cool."

"Thanks."

The sting of the needle is as welcome as the slip of a razor blade and far more lastingly useful. She watches as it runs up her skin, over the stencil. Blood and ink well, mingling, mixing, some wiped away, some sinking deeper, and a small sigh of satisfaction escapes her lips. The other girl glances up, and they share a look that seems to bridge any words Melissa might not be able to muster, the esoterics of it unimportant for the moment of shared communion of pain and art, pleasure and exhibition.

"You'll be back." It's a prediction in a brush of skin as money changes hands, and Melissa meets her gaze again. Her blood is singing, radiating up from where power seems to pulse in a band around her ankle. She's here, rooted and solid, and looking at the ink that snakes its way up the girl's arm, embracing her skin more closely than any lover, wrapping around her neck in a colorful lariat of images providing a tether back to the ground from which they came, she shivers, and a small, triumphant smile curves her lips.

"Yes," she affirms with a nod, the words and gesture both carrying an air of defiance against the duality of her nature itself. "I will."

Misguided angel hangin' over me
Heart like a Gabriel,
Pure and white as ivory
Soul like a Lucifer,
Black and cold like a piece a lead
Misguided angel, love you till I'm dead

It's a strange feeling living inside a killer's heart.

Things get tangled up, like sheets and lines cris-crossed in the sand until you don't know where the point was you came from should you ever want to get back again. You were a mirror held up to the world, reflecting its spirit back, illuminating cracks, and seeping inside of them, a huntress of souls with the piercing fixed gaze of a jungle cat seeing more than she should, then slipping out of reach before anyone--anything--looked back.

He saw you.

Heedless of warnings Nietzsche uttered, you lingered, curious, pressing in to see what others couldn't, to meet the challenge, to satisfy your curiosity, dragging the pieces of him up he buried for a reason, examining them and reflecting them back in your eyes, heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath, so sure in your arrogance that nothing would change.

You shouldn't have let your walls down. You shouldn't have gotten caught.

He's wrapped up inside you now, permeating each of the little cracks you never looked to find inside yourself with a presence that heightens and darkens everything it touches. After years of standing apart, a remote observer with a critic's eye, you're caught in the maelstrom of what you've unleashed.

What he feels, you feel; what you feel, you learn to wield with efficient viciousness in some desperate attempt to gain back the control you once had, but he knows this game, too, and the push and pull of it is like nothing you've ever felt. You're alive, and here and real in a way you didn't know you could be and fighting the inevitable seems a waste of energy, and you don't know if that feeling is his or yours, rattling through your cells with simple surety. You try and hold on to the things of before, but yesterday's gone, and tomorrow isn't yours to know.

Now he's here, and you're here. The walls have come tumbling down, and the gods themselves should tremble at what they have wrought behind them.

Haven't we met
You're some kind of beautiful stranger
You could be good for me
I've had the taste for danger

He's different. She can tell that with one sweeping glance that brushes over him and then snaps back, lingering on his face. He wears an awful beauty with a casual grace, armoring himself with it and using it to keep the world at bay until he chooses to lure them in. Because he does lure, she's certain of it, as she studies him with a critical glance. There's a hunger in him that calls to something in her she doesn't like to recognize, but it leaps in her chest when his gaze rises from the paper he's reading to connect with hers.

There's a lot you can see in a person's eyes, and she takes a moment to really look, curious and unafraid, though she knows somehow she ought to be terrified. Surprise blossoms in his face for a moment. He isn't used to being seen. Admired, yes, but not seen, and he stares back, equally curious. A moment turns into something longer, stretching taut between them, stringing itself out like a junkie on a bender, until she's trembling inside, unused to such scrutiny, and he's frowning slightly, unable to look away.

Something vicious flickers in those beautiful eyes for a moment, and her body heats. Before she can stop herself, she's smiling, thinking for a moment that it's in welcome of whatever he's thinking of trying, and then she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror across the cafe. It's not welcome lighting her eyes so much as challenge. Like calling to like, hunger to hunger, darkness to darkness. Confusion wells, consternation shifting across her face, and he looks back, equally puzzled. The room seems to close in for a moment, the walls pressing too tightly around her, and then he's standing there, looking down at her, studying her the way she was studying him a few moments before.

"What are you?" he asks, and his voice is like wild music that's never been caught by a composer's pen.

She's always had an answer for that question, the few times it's been asked, but this time she stares back at him for a while, before slowly shaking her head. "I don't know."

He kneels, bringing them to eye-level, and his fingers are cooler than they should be as they trace lightly down her cheek. He looks intrigued. She gets the feeling that's new for him. "Shall we find out?"

There's more danger in the answer than in his eyes, of that she's sure, and a big part of her just wants to retreat away from this encounter and pretend that it, out of every strange one she's ever had, didn't happen. But his gaze is holding her captive and she wets her lips in a feeble attempt to prepare to say something.

No words come, but she manages a nod, and that seems to be all the answer he needs.

Some people might call her craving for pain a kink, a deviance, an aberration, but she doesn't know how to explain to them that it's one of the only ways she's found to stay grounded in this world instead of being pulled into another.

Sex was always something she could take or leave--a nice enough distraction if you had the time, but who did--until he taught her what it meant to crave more than just a cover shot as famous and enlightening as the "Afghan Girl."

There's blood in the air the first time she lets him take her in his arms, and the shell she wears cracks around her to let something frightening free.

Patronus Test from Dumb Spot!


Fun Quizzes | MySpace Quizzes


Your patronus takes the form of a Rabbit. A rabbit is known for being somewhat shy. Similarly, you tend to be quiet around others, especially new people. However, you are very bright and alert. You are good at reading people and know who to trust. You are also nurturing and kind. You may have trouble conjuring your patronus because your mind tends to race in the heat of a battle.

[ooc: Sylar is heroslayer and is used with lots of love & permission]

It was a lazy afternoon, the way lazy summer afternoons were supposed to go when the things that had haunted your footsteps and dreams were pushed aside for the moment in the safety of the comforts of home. What had been a stop, a few days to breathe had stretched itself out and each day Melissa expected to wake up to Sylar gone or at the least issuing some ultimatum, and each day she woke up to finding his arms still wrapped around her, holding her tight against him like it mattered where she was. She'd come back upstairs to the room they shared, tired from helping her grandfather in the fields all morning, and found him stretched out on the bed, napping. With a smile curving her lips, she stripped down to her panties and tank top and curled up next to him, molding her back to his chest as he shifted to accommodate her, intent on joining him in an afternoon nap.

Her family's reaction when they'd showed up, dust covered and bedraggled, fear and exhaustion riding them no matter how they tried to hide it, had been first surprise, then worry. She wouldn't tell them, not about the burned out shell of a building laced with bleeding ghosts or men in alleyways and the ecstasy that followed or the abandoned diner with its secrets more horrifying than she could have imagined, but they followed the traces they'd worn into her with eyes that knew her too well. Avoiding the looks that dug too deep, she said only that they'd been traveling, introduced him as her boyfriend, Gabriel, swatting him hard enough through the empathic link they'd formed that he didn't flinch too badly at the term or name, and let them fret and fuss and hurry them inside. They wanted to know where she'd been, why she wasn't in New York, why she wasn't answering her phone, what was going on, and she told more lies in the first half hour they walked in the door than she ever had in her life, comforting herself with the knowledge that it was for their protection.

Nothing she said satisfied them, but the look in her eyes quieted them, finally, and they'd set it aside for the moment, shooing them to bed, where the greatest awkwardness slipped in to the homecoming. Sylar had been quiet through the interrogation, watching them all with wide eyes, his nervous discomfort like a raw edge scraping against her consciousness until it was bleeding into her and making her just as twitchy, even when she had hoped to feel some easing in her family's presence. Melissa moved up the stairs of the farmhouse, headed to the room which had been hers since childhood. Her grandmother followed, and moved to the guest room, with a glance over her shoulder that indicated Gabriel should follow her. Her father carried her bag a step behind his mother in law, moving to his daughter's room, and pausing when she did.

Gabriel stood caught between them and their expectant looks that flew over his head and around him. There had been a silent battle of wills, then, as generational expectations clashed and Melissa proved that having stubbornness from two sides of the family trumped just one. Her grandmother finally gave an amused huff as Melissa held out a hand to Gabriel, to pull him into her room with her. Her father, who'd been perfectly welcoming downstairs, glared at the younger man as he dropped her bag on the floor, but Melissa kissed his cheek and steered him back out of the room with a very sweet, "Goodnight, Daddy."

No one had said anything about their sleeping arrangements since, though her mother had pulled her aside to have a very awkward conversation about whether or not she was being safe. She didn't seem to understand why the question sent Melissa into something near hysterics.

( The memory made Melissa smile slightly as she drifted toward sleep, snuggled close against him, welcoming the way their bodies fit together in this, the way the length of him curled around her. )

There's something else, something other, crawling inside her veins these days; something wild and feral, twisting around and pulling out the shadows in her soul as it draws her focus into the darker places behind the bright facade of buildings that kiss the sky; something that whispers secrets in her mind she never wanted to know, along with the knowledge of how to best put them to use; something that makes her wonder just who or what she's becoming under its malicious tutelage, and what will be left of who she was once it finishes and the transformation is complete.