What do your friends think of you?
"Galileo" - Indigo Girls
(...That's a bit eerie)

If someone says, “Is this okay?” You say?
"Sleep Together" - Garbage
(Um, okay. No comment)

How would you describe yourself?
"If You're Gone" - Matchbox 20
(*sighs*)

What do you like in a guy/girl?
"Universe & U" - KT Tunstall
(Yeah, okay. Still eerie, but in a good way)

( Probably should have included lyrics for some of my obscure musical tastes... )

Her skin itches, and her scars burn, and she wonders if she should just yield to the desperate yearning and give up trying to contain whatever power it is within her that's always crying out for more.

If you woke up one morning and found me in your bed, what's the first thing you'd think or say?


ooc: Indicate verse where necessary. ;-)

The minutes it took them to get from the ballroom to the room upstairs seemed some of the longest of Melissa's life. For a few excruciating heartbeats she'd been convinced there was going to be bloodshed in the flash of the colored lights, painting the pastels of the wannabe fairy court a vivid red. She'd smacked a hold on Sylar as fast as she could with an ease of long practice, and reached out to try and calm Peter who was harder on first try, but seemed less inclined to immediate murder at least.

The immortal made her head hurt, but he seemed amused, mostly and not in need of controlling, so she focused on the other two.

By the time they'd moved from the room, she was trembling a little in the effort to channel their emotions and focus them into something less frantic. Maybe it wasn't fair, but there were innocent bystanders. In the room, she sank onto the bed, starting to tuck her feet up under her until she remembered how short her skirt was and the level of immodesty such a posture would cause. Instead she just went for one, fist pressing into her lap to press the filmy little skirt down, and glanced between the three men.

Adam would have killed for a cigarette, just for something to do with his hands. Whatever the girl was doing--and, oh, she was doing something--he wasn't sure he wanted to know, watching her as warily as he was watching Sylar. Her he didn't know, she was the unknown. The killer he'd studied from afar, had wanted to bring this about, this meeting, this opportunity.

None of them deserved to keep running. But, god, he needed something to do with his hands. He settled for reaching to run fingers down Peter's back, checking to see how he was, really, to see if he was about to freak out on him or not.

[ooc: Sylar is heroslayer and Peter is hadtobeahero and both are used with the permission of their muns. Adam is changehistory and mine to use and abuse for purposes of this fic. Idk what the song fully has to do with it, either, but that's what came. Companion piece to this.]

You don't know about my past, and
I don't have a future figured out.
And maybe this is going too fast.
And maybe it's not meant to last,

But what do you say to taking chances,
What do you say to jumping off the edge?
Never knowing if there's solid ground below
Or hand to hold, or hell to pay,
What do you say,
What do you say?

What the hell had convinced her to ask him if he wanted to come with her to this thing, Melissa couldn't say. It was frivolous, it was ridiculous, it was foolish in the extreme. They were being hunted by Petrelli and his goons. She'd gone running off with a serial killer on the heels of a story that she couldn't ever publish because she was going to end up dead before anyone would listen, thanks to the good Senator, and that was just if she didn't manage to piss her boyfriend off enough one night that he lost his temper and broke his new toy for good.

God alone knew how any of this was going to end, but she had to take a leap of faith somewhere in there. Had to believe it was going to be okay. They couldn't live their lives like hunted animals. They had a right to exist, had a right to be, and with what they'd been through, what they'd seen, what they'd learned...it hadn't been enough, or maybe it had been too much, their respite in the mountains. But every second put her family in danger, and running was the only option, but she was so very, very tired of running. It wasn't his fault. They'd have come for her alone, just because of what she was, and she knew that.

So why in God's name had she drug him to Baltimore, right outside their freakin' headquarters, for a damn masquerade and convention?

Because she was tired of playing rabbit to the hound. Tired of being afraid. She was feeling reckless, something that had been growing inside of her from the moment she pulled the glass from his head and watched him come back to life before her eyes. Everything she'd done since then had been a risk--she'd taken him home, gone on the road with him, taken him to bed, taken him to her parents. She'd lied, she'd helped him kill, she'd washed away any sense of who she might have been before and she didn't know who it was that she'd become. Home hadn't helped, not really, not when she felt herself falling into a role that wasn't hers. The more she opened herself up to her ability, the less she felt like she fit within the bounds of human society.

And so here they were on the fringes, playing at being something more than, if only for a couple of fantasy-filled days. His skeptical gaze told her more than enough about his opinion about her idea, but he was here, and she was here, and she threw herself into the convention with a dedicated mania, intent on losing herself to find herself, opening up more than she had before--to him, to those around, to the feel of the others in the crowd longing for something more.

I just want to start again,
And maybe you could show me how to try,
And maybe you could take me in,
Somewhere underneath your skin?

What do you say to taking chances,
What do you say to jumping off the edge?
Never knowing if there's solid ground below
Or hand to hold, or hell to pay,
What do you say,
What do you say?

( She felt it when the air shifted, when her mood spilled into those around her, reaching out. )

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.