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[Two cars side by side. The red glow of traffic lights. A familiar scene from an unfamiliar point of view.

(Unfamiliar to Kavinsky, at least.)

Noah's in the passenger seat of the Camaro, warning Ronan that he has a super bad feeling about how this race is going to go. Ronan wants it too bad to care. Nothing he says is getting through. The light changes in a flash of green, time's up, and the Camaro is roaring and rattling forward and Noah grips the door handle and they're pulling ahead and-

-and Kavinsky leaves them in the dust. Noah, who isn't strictly opposed to street racing when Ronan hasn't stolen a friend's car to do it, who has thus been party to more than one race against the Mitsubishi, yells, impossible! The streetlights flicker alarmingly and go out. That bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, in the back of his mind, like he's been here before, intensifies. If they just go back now...

Now you're done, right?
.
Now you stop?
.
Stop.

Then the night horrors descend. They're tearing into the car and Ronan is driving erratically, losing control, and Noah turns side to side. Looking from the terrifying bird man on the hood to the terrifying bird man on the trunk and back again. Yelling updates. Anxiously pressing his hands to the nearest surface. He has an idea. It's not a good idea. But he doesn't know what else to do. Ronan snaps at him and he stops thinking about it and just does it.

He manifests on the hood of the moving car and latches onto the night horror, as solid as he can will himself to be, and shouts for Ronan to brake. Tangled together they go hurtling over the side and the wheels thud over them and it doesn't hurt but that's it for Noah. Stress and the exertion of the act pretty forcibly discorporates him on impact.

He's still present, barely, but he can do nothing as Ronan wrecks the car, wraps it around a telephone pole, and the second night horror closes in. It takes all his remaining energy to be a voice in Ronan's ear, imploring him to do something because he can't bear to watch him die.]

[screencaps first. attachments arriving into victor's phone, one after another. grainy screengrabs from footage that was uploaded onto the web. first person camera images, of victor in the hospital. medical charts. overdose.

and then eli's pale and pain-wretched face. blood everywhere.]

hey > babe
looks like i aint the only one wit dirt on my shirt coming out into the light

[Read: ✓✓]

[Some hours later, a real response arrives. For Victor, he cares less about the images of his attempts to kill Eli all over the network and more about the various drug-related incidents during his time in college. Context is important, but there had been something personal and private about them. Something between him and Eli and the handful of stupid medical staff he'd had to deal with.

After pacing with the matter a while, Victor has settled enough to form some words.]

So it would seem. Fortunately, the safety net I've worked up for you should cover a lot of ground.

[interesting. the reaction as much as-- more than the remark.

yeah?
guess i got myself a regular pr expert
whose skills may or may nto have been perfected thru years of needin a real good coverup job himself man cuz what the hell

I'd classify it less as PR and more as strategic endeavors.

Besides, he had it coming.

and u get to decide he did, cuz

[he is

genuinely curious.]

Classic tale of friendship and betrayal. He put me in jail for ten years, so I returned the favor in my own way.

We worked things out. He killed me, I killed him. Simple math.

[Biblical, some might say. Victor would not. It's also not simple math at all.]

[no. maybe.]

if he was here would u be tittin and tattin for all the rest of time?
io got nemeses too

[one that he's in love with, particularly. or was. it's a good time.]

He is here. Like I said, we worked it out.

What about your nemesis? Are they here? What do you do about them?

weird situation
he worked his flat irish ass off 2 get me to stop hatin him
(you know, joey didnt even meet him once in the city. what the fuck)
think it half worked
we aight right now

Only half was enough for you to make it aight?

halfs about as good as it ever gets, wit me
youll learn that
i got a little bit of issues

Don't we all.

What else do you plan to teach me about?

bulgarian
i do ass kegels & eat a diet high in fiber
axe throwin
how long my tongue is
how many nail marks it takes 2 measure ur spine
smallest car u could still get enough traction 2 get off in
what bein born feels like when u already know dyin

[huh.

interesting.

kavinsky thinks so, even as he regards the ether of his own traumatic dream begin to rise like a fog in answer. the high-pitched, thin shrill sound of friction cutting through bone. not a saw, but it sounds like one despite that. the memory of pain reverberating through his own skull, his body immobile, unable to scream--]

Czerny?

[they're in the woods. the mist that threads through the trees and blots out the sky is white, like a movie canvas, and the substance of their dreams seems to be playing out like this is some kind of shitty drive-through. no visible projector. the dream thief is holding a make-believe cigarette in his fingers. he advances on the solitary figure he sees standing there, oddly translucent.]

Yo. [he's familiar with noah's repugnance of him. has come to take it as a given, reliable and funny, but without any clearer cause then-- what. instinct? some people just look at him and know he's trouble. but this, the memory playing out with the roar of engine and snarled exchange between raven boys, is... different. counterpoint to sylar's fingers on his scalp.]

[That gruesome whirring invades his senses, violently redirects his attention in the way that death and dying so easily do. Then he's hearing his name in Kavinsky's voice, turning—and it's not the one in the white shades, white tank, white car, but the older version, now walking toward him. Noah blinks at him, dazed, presses his fingers to the side of his head. Just behind his ear.]

Kavinsky...

[He's becoming aware of the between-place, the forest, dreaming lucid in that sense now though no more in control here than he was after the crash. Aware, but- unable to avoid. His shoulders hunch defensively.]

Is that- you?

[In the memory. Obviously it's him standing there.]

I know how long your tongue is. Unless you've expressly done something to your frenulum linguae.

It's an interesting list though. The last one especially; I only know one side of it. You've got me beat there.

guess that means i cum out ahead

[:D]

gotta say
it weird how every other version of me digs a guy who wants to b alive
& wants it bad

[kavinsky's gaze shifts off the smudgy-faced boy in front of him, go up to the thickness of ghostly fog above. the scene playing out on it. jesus fucking christ.

he has half his soul cut out, most of his emotions flattened down, but that sound still gives him the fucking creeps. he can still remember the feeling of it, vibrating through his skull. the brain doesn't have pain receptors, and that had been the worst part, maybe. not the splitting agony of his skin and bone grinding down, the nausea that came from the motion channeling down to his stomach, his gut, his paralyzed limbs, but the moment the sound turned wet and the pain stopped.

there had been a long time, between the end of the pain and the end of the noise. scraping, and shit like that.

he forces his face neutral. he glances down to look at noah instead.]

And I guess that was you. In Henrietta. With Lynch.

[It's viscerally disturbing to listen to, let alone to watch. The sound makes his guts twist and sets his teeth on edge. Makes his whole body feel a little like when you bump your elbow, that same sickly tingling sensation. Noah is trying not to look, honestly, but he still catches flashes here and there. Tics of movement that draw his eye up.

God.

When did this happen?

He shivers and tucks his arms around himself.]

Yeah...

[He makes an effort to re-focus.]

When you raced. I was there a lot of times.

As opposed to what? Someone who wants to be dead? Are you trying to say you're attracted to people with the opposite desire to you or am I assuming too much?

[hmm.

right. one of the major differences with joey that victor hadn't known. didn't need to know.]

that how it works 4 u

[kavinsky's reaction is the opposite. he's deliberately blase, which is as much telling himself something as try to front where noah is concerned.

he's actually a little surprised, when he notices noah recoil. tmw dead kids have more of a soul than you do; than you ever did. there's the faintest smile at that, a wry curl at the corner of his mouth.]

How long before you and the kids figured out I was cheating?

[it's not hard to admit these days. once upon a time, joseph kavinsky had hoarded his secrets carefuly. but here they are, standing in a forest made of eerie dream energy. what's the point in pretend?]

I sort of knew and... didn't know at the same time.

[Time is tricky like that when you're dead. It wasn't until after the race that he found out Kavinsky was a dreamer, but, once he knew it, he'd always known. When he came around to those moments, he understood.

It's complicated. Noah frowns slightly and continues, skipping right over any real explanation:]

...Ronan didn't.

[At least, not until whatever happened in that blank stretch when the ley line was too tapped to allow him to manifest. Kavinsky would know better than he would.]

And I don't think the others guessed before he told them.

ic contact for maskormenace

memory glitch dream following swear-in

48 hours later;

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