Games They Play (heroes fic)
Title: Games They Play
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,166
Disclaimer: I own not a thing.
Summary: Mohinder and Elle face harsh realities of working for the Company.
A/N: This was written for the lovely widestance75 using her prompt: Confusion.
The jeep they had taken here only has enough gas to get them back. They hit the gas station halfway home, fill up and keep on going. Any detours, any single trek off the previously coordinated route could potentially strand them in the middle of nowhere-desert on every side and no water in any direction, not even cactus.
Still, Mohinder maintains an irrational need to get out of the building and drive, or walk, just move.
When Elle comes up behind him and trails one small hand up to his ass, the thought seems substantially more rational.
“Hey.” She beams.
“Elle.” His reply is short-clipped and cold--an embodiment of his mental state.
Not an hour ago, he had received a call from her father.
“God, I’m so bored out here.” Elle grabs Mohinder’s elbow, turning him to face her, “Could you maybe...oh, I dunno,” her grip tightens, “get us that formula now?”
Mohinder stares at her almost blankly before registering the words, “What? No! We only finished it an hour ago. It’s incubating.”
The orders had been too sudden for him to respond, the battery of his phone dying shortly after. Spending the following several minutes cursing at it in Tamil, Mohinder was shocked when he finally looked down and saw his hand trembling.
A hand is on his arm now, shooting small bolts into his muscles so that he shudders and comes back to the present, where Elle bats those big eyelashes and asks: “Does it really have to?”
“Unless you wish for the whole of New York to blow up, I suggest you allow it to, yes.” He pulls his arm away, wishing the tingling would go away.
When he finally meets her eyes she is giving him that classic look, the one that says she wants what she wants and she’ll get it if she has to use every bit of force to do so.
Mohinder swallows, says, “It will only be another hour, surely you can amuse yourself till then.”
Voice bitter and hard, Bob’s orders had fought their way to Mohinder’s ears through static and bad reception. That had not eased the depth of their meaning, or the reaction they brought.
“Hmm…” Elle once more reaches for Mohinder, and the motion has come to him so many times over the past few months that he finds himself unflinching, “How to waste an hour…?” suggestive, her voice is like a trigger, and the tension built up in his systems is the bullet.
“I have to go, Elle. There was a phone call.” He says loudly, forcefully.
Elle’s face looks nothing short of shocked, reaching for him again she starts asking, “Wh--”
“Elle, please!” and Mohinder takes off in the other direction.
To hear a man order a hit on his own daughter-to receive a call telling you to kill a young woman you’ve worked with for nearly half a year (however deceptive your end of that partnership may have been)--was absolutely unacceptable. It reminded him why he had joined the Company in the first place, and why he had to stop it.
Practically jogging down the halls, a pale and upset sight in his rumpled suit, Mohinder internally berates himself for all the ideas he had come to accept--all the horrid time he spent considering a legitimate job with the very people he was supposed to be taking down. They were no better than Sylar. True, Elle was a sadistic sociopath, murdering people before his very eyes with no reason on more than one occasion. But to order her death instead of helping her, or even locking her away-to have the call come from her own father-
Mohinder arrives at the door to the garage, and slides his card through the lock. It opens with a sweet sequence of clicks and thunks.
Inside is the Jeep, gas tank all filled and waiting.
Mohinder doesn’t hear it until he’s walked to the driver’s side. But it’s there.
From the other side of the car, up the small cement stairs, Elle holds out a handful of charged lightning-completely prepared to send it his way. Carefully, he lifts both arms up high, his vulnerability laid out on the table.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Her voice is hostile.
Feeling a bit unhinged himself, Mohinder tries: “Your father wanted me back early. He said--”
“You’re lying!” She shouts, and he lays flat on the hood of the car to avoid all the charges she sends his way.
“Elle, please, listen to me! I have to go, I have--”
“Daddy said we did this mission together. He said we could only drive here and back. Why are you going back? Is this another test? Am I supposed to stop you Mohinder?” By now she’s descended the stairs, and leans with a foxy grace over her side of the hood to meet his eyes, “Because I will stop you, Mohinder.” Her fingers glow with unchecked bolts.
Mohinder’s collar feels entirely too tight. As he slowly straightens, he reaches up to pull at it before he thinks better of the motion. Instead, his hands go into his pocket, easing Elle’s eager attack off by assuring her “It’s my phone. It’s dead. Bob said they needed me back-something about the patients we injected with the virus.”
“Oh.” Quite as quickly as she had begun trying to kill him, Elle brightens and kills the electricity.
In three easy strides, she’s rounded the car to meet him and planted one very heavy kiss on him. She pulls back only to mutter, “Well, why didn’t you say so, handsome?”
At this point, Mohinder is just trying to get in the car, let alone get out: “I didn’t say so,” carefully wrapping his hands around hers, “because they only need me. You’re going to stay and wait for the formula to finish incubation.”
Elle’s face considerably darkens. Her pretty blue eyes lock with his, intimidating, “You’re leaving me here?”
Oh God, yes, yes he is.
“You can phone your father once they’ve finished all the tests.” He tries to pull her hands down to her sides before her ability manifests, but he can see from a slight glow on her face that he’s already too late. “He’ll send a helicopter. The moment he gets your call, they’ll come out.” Backing away while he maintains his grip, Mohinder tries to remember if the Jeep’s unlocked. He doesn’t think it is.
“What am I supposed to do for hours until then?” voice laughing a bit, Elle is very near livid, “I’m supposed to what-wander around this place and amuse myself while daddy has you saving the world?”
“Well, strictly speaking, it’s only a few people.” Mohinder interjects. Immediately afterwards, he shuts his eyes, the argument sounding foolish even to him.
When he opens them he’s relieved to see that Elle appears far too upset to notice the mistake.
Instead, she stalks over to the car door, yanks it open and shoves a very shocked Mohinder inside. “Fine. Go. And when you get back,” to emphasize her point, she thrusts a fistful of unchecked electricity into Mohinder’s face, “you can tell Daddy that if he wants the formula--” she stands now, breathing to calm herself a bit--a move that honestly renders him speechless.
She finishes “you tell him to come and get it personally.”
The door slams shut and Mohinder--now exactly where he wants to be--watches the young woman take a few breaths before she stalks back around the stairs.
When Bob had called he had sounded casual, as though telling a man he barely trusted to shoot his daughter in the head was a nonissue. With all the trouble she’d caused the past year, Mohinder could have understood drastic actions. He did not understand homicidal ones.
Mohinder shakes his head, starting a bit when the car roars to life, and he looks over to see Elle standing by the door. Her hand is still extended towards him, little bolts entwining her palm.
He should be driving away now, grateful for her jumpstart, but he pauses to stare at her.
She only turns to go, leaving him to finish the lie, abandon her and be done with the Company. It’s a bit ironic how she’s sent away her last hope. Though, he supposes it’s less ironic than sad.
Bob Bishop had asked very calmly if Mohinder understood what he was being asked. He even had the audacity to ask with great sarcasm whether or not “the good doctor thought he could handle a real job.”
The urge to stay passes just as quickly as it has snuck up, and Mohinder puts the car into gear, speeding out the entrance without another glance back.
He only has to drive and drive and drive till he reaches the nearest city. Swapping cars, he’ll get one that they cannot trace. Eventually he’ll find his way back to New York.
Ideas of Molly’s smile and all the Chinese he can order upon his return, sends a new sense of excitement through him.
He presses the gas pedal harder, kicks up dust and heads farther into the desert.
---- ---- ---- ----
Elle Bishop stalks down the halls. Her shoes make clack-clack sounds against the generic, shiny tiles. The urge to scuff them up and ruin their perfect surface is great, but she pushes it down by focusing on their pattern.
Mohinder isn’t coming back. She knows. She also knows what she will do to those scientists now that her moral compass has up and abandoned her here.
Daddy will be so ecstatic to hear that the formula’s finished ahead of schedule it will make up for all those horrible mistakes she’s made this past week. He may even take back a few of those threats, spewed out during disappointed lectures she pretends he didn’t mean. She’s finally done something right now.
So confident is she, that she feels nearly positive he won’t mind losing a few employees. And if he does, it still won’t matter.
Elle has some very heavy frustration to work out.
---- ---- ---- ----
It is not a lonely drive back because Mohinder does not think about how alone he really is. He instead thinks about his family’s reaction, debates what he will tell Noah, and occasionally--without meaning to-- he thinks of Elle.
He wonders if she didn’t know. Or if she honestly did not, then he wonders why she took the time to help him.
Occasionally his fingers wander to his lips.
The landscape blinds him after a time. Speeding fast enough he can turn it into a blur so steady and monotone that he sometimes doubts he is moving at all.
But he is making good time, and with the windows down he cannot even hear the engine as it sputters and protests, bringing him to a stop.
Between curses in his native language, Mohinder eyes the dashboard.
None of the dials look anything short of normal. His odometer even tells him that he is about halfway home already.
Speedometer had of course been rising and falling with the gas pedal, and the fuel gage is-
Mohinder lets out a shocked noise-choked down as far as dignity can manage.
The fuel gage, so damn simple, has read full this entire time. Not once in the past 500 miles or so has it fallen or risen. It has been constant, like the heat and his guilt.
There was never enough gas to get them home. Or rather, to get him home; they’d baited him into this. With another four miles to the nearest gas station, a distance he knows he cannot walk on the small amount of water in his system, and with the Company so cleverly deciding to build this formula in a horrid-cactus free-area, Mohinder is prepared to bet that in about five hours he can expect a helicopter. Yes, they would wait until just before sundown, just before things began to cool off.
He wonders if Elle was in on this. But Bob couldn’t possibly understand how Mohinder would react to the order. Mohinder had been careful, had worked his way back into the Company like a worm-lying through his teeth--letting them think he really was as dedicated as the Company psychologist had been paid to tell them he was.
No, Elle is only alive now (presumably) because Mohinder left without putting that damn bullet in her skull.
The bastards set them both up; he had been the one to walk into it.
And he had been so close.
A switch of cars, a hotel, another few miles and Molly would have been hugging him. He would have been home.
Mohinder Suresh lays his head down on the steering wheel, and weighs his very few options, wondering who will be in the copter that comes to finish him off.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,166
Disclaimer: I own not a thing.
Summary: Mohinder and Elle face harsh realities of working for the Company.
A/N: This was written for the lovely widestance75 using her prompt: Confusion.
The jeep they had taken here only has enough gas to get them back. They hit the gas station halfway home, fill up and keep on going. Any detours, any single trek off the previously coordinated route could potentially strand them in the middle of nowhere-desert on every side and no water in any direction, not even cactus.
Still, Mohinder maintains an irrational need to get out of the building and drive, or walk, just move.
When Elle comes up behind him and trails one small hand up to his ass, the thought seems substantially more rational.
“Hey.” She beams.
“Elle.” His reply is short-clipped and cold--an embodiment of his mental state.
Not an hour ago, he had received a call from her father.
“God, I’m so bored out here.” Elle grabs Mohinder’s elbow, turning him to face her, “Could you maybe...oh, I dunno,” her grip tightens, “get us that formula now?”
Mohinder stares at her almost blankly before registering the words, “What? No! We only finished it an hour ago. It’s incubating.”
The orders had been too sudden for him to respond, the battery of his phone dying shortly after. Spending the following several minutes cursing at it in Tamil, Mohinder was shocked when he finally looked down and saw his hand trembling.
A hand is on his arm now, shooting small bolts into his muscles so that he shudders and comes back to the present, where Elle bats those big eyelashes and asks: “Does it really have to?”
“Unless you wish for the whole of New York to blow up, I suggest you allow it to, yes.” He pulls his arm away, wishing the tingling would go away.
When he finally meets her eyes she is giving him that classic look, the one that says she wants what she wants and she’ll get it if she has to use every bit of force to do so.
Mohinder swallows, says, “It will only be another hour, surely you can amuse yourself till then.”
Voice bitter and hard, Bob’s orders had fought their way to Mohinder’s ears through static and bad reception. That had not eased the depth of their meaning, or the reaction they brought.
“Hmm…” Elle once more reaches for Mohinder, and the motion has come to him so many times over the past few months that he finds himself unflinching, “How to waste an hour…?” suggestive, her voice is like a trigger, and the tension built up in his systems is the bullet.
“I have to go, Elle. There was a phone call.” He says loudly, forcefully.
Elle’s face looks nothing short of shocked, reaching for him again she starts asking, “Wh--”
“Elle, please!” and Mohinder takes off in the other direction.
To hear a man order a hit on his own daughter-to receive a call telling you to kill a young woman you’ve worked with for nearly half a year (however deceptive your end of that partnership may have been)--was absolutely unacceptable. It reminded him why he had joined the Company in the first place, and why he had to stop it.
Practically jogging down the halls, a pale and upset sight in his rumpled suit, Mohinder internally berates himself for all the ideas he had come to accept--all the horrid time he spent considering a legitimate job with the very people he was supposed to be taking down. They were no better than Sylar. True, Elle was a sadistic sociopath, murdering people before his very eyes with no reason on more than one occasion. But to order her death instead of helping her, or even locking her away-to have the call come from her own father-
Mohinder arrives at the door to the garage, and slides his card through the lock. It opens with a sweet sequence of clicks and thunks.
Inside is the Jeep, gas tank all filled and waiting.
Mohinder doesn’t hear it until he’s walked to the driver’s side. But it’s there.
From the other side of the car, up the small cement stairs, Elle holds out a handful of charged lightning-completely prepared to send it his way. Carefully, he lifts both arms up high, his vulnerability laid out on the table.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Her voice is hostile.
Feeling a bit unhinged himself, Mohinder tries: “Your father wanted me back early. He said--”
“You’re lying!” She shouts, and he lays flat on the hood of the car to avoid all the charges she sends his way.
“Elle, please, listen to me! I have to go, I have--”
“Daddy said we did this mission together. He said we could only drive here and back. Why are you going back? Is this another test? Am I supposed to stop you Mohinder?” By now she’s descended the stairs, and leans with a foxy grace over her side of the hood to meet his eyes, “Because I will stop you, Mohinder.” Her fingers glow with unchecked bolts.
Mohinder’s collar feels entirely too tight. As he slowly straightens, he reaches up to pull at it before he thinks better of the motion. Instead, his hands go into his pocket, easing Elle’s eager attack off by assuring her “It’s my phone. It’s dead. Bob said they needed me back-something about the patients we injected with the virus.”
“Oh.” Quite as quickly as she had begun trying to kill him, Elle brightens and kills the electricity.
In three easy strides, she’s rounded the car to meet him and planted one very heavy kiss on him. She pulls back only to mutter, “Well, why didn’t you say so, handsome?”
At this point, Mohinder is just trying to get in the car, let alone get out: “I didn’t say so,” carefully wrapping his hands around hers, “because they only need me. You’re going to stay and wait for the formula to finish incubation.”
Elle’s face considerably darkens. Her pretty blue eyes lock with his, intimidating, “You’re leaving me here?”
Oh God, yes, yes he is.
“You can phone your father once they’ve finished all the tests.” He tries to pull her hands down to her sides before her ability manifests, but he can see from a slight glow on her face that he’s already too late. “He’ll send a helicopter. The moment he gets your call, they’ll come out.” Backing away while he maintains his grip, Mohinder tries to remember if the Jeep’s unlocked. He doesn’t think it is.
“What am I supposed to do for hours until then?” voice laughing a bit, Elle is very near livid, “I’m supposed to what-wander around this place and amuse myself while daddy has you saving the world?”
“Well, strictly speaking, it’s only a few people.” Mohinder interjects. Immediately afterwards, he shuts his eyes, the argument sounding foolish even to him.
When he opens them he’s relieved to see that Elle appears far too upset to notice the mistake.
Instead, she stalks over to the car door, yanks it open and shoves a very shocked Mohinder inside. “Fine. Go. And when you get back,” to emphasize her point, she thrusts a fistful of unchecked electricity into Mohinder’s face, “you can tell Daddy that if he wants the formula--” she stands now, breathing to calm herself a bit--a move that honestly renders him speechless.
She finishes “you tell him to come and get it personally.”
The door slams shut and Mohinder--now exactly where he wants to be--watches the young woman take a few breaths before she stalks back around the stairs.
When Bob had called he had sounded casual, as though telling a man he barely trusted to shoot his daughter in the head was a nonissue. With all the trouble she’d caused the past year, Mohinder could have understood drastic actions. He did not understand homicidal ones.
Mohinder shakes his head, starting a bit when the car roars to life, and he looks over to see Elle standing by the door. Her hand is still extended towards him, little bolts entwining her palm.
He should be driving away now, grateful for her jumpstart, but he pauses to stare at her.
She only turns to go, leaving him to finish the lie, abandon her and be done with the Company. It’s a bit ironic how she’s sent away her last hope. Though, he supposes it’s less ironic than sad.
Bob Bishop had asked very calmly if Mohinder understood what he was being asked. He even had the audacity to ask with great sarcasm whether or not “the good doctor thought he could handle a real job.”
The urge to stay passes just as quickly as it has snuck up, and Mohinder puts the car into gear, speeding out the entrance without another glance back.
He only has to drive and drive and drive till he reaches the nearest city. Swapping cars, he’ll get one that they cannot trace. Eventually he’ll find his way back to New York.
Ideas of Molly’s smile and all the Chinese he can order upon his return, sends a new sense of excitement through him.
He presses the gas pedal harder, kicks up dust and heads farther into the desert.
---- ---- ---- ----
Elle Bishop stalks down the halls. Her shoes make clack-clack sounds against the generic, shiny tiles. The urge to scuff them up and ruin their perfect surface is great, but she pushes it down by focusing on their pattern.
Mohinder isn’t coming back. She knows. She also knows what she will do to those scientists now that her moral compass has up and abandoned her here.
Daddy will be so ecstatic to hear that the formula’s finished ahead of schedule it will make up for all those horrible mistakes she’s made this past week. He may even take back a few of those threats, spewed out during disappointed lectures she pretends he didn’t mean. She’s finally done something right now.
So confident is she, that she feels nearly positive he won’t mind losing a few employees. And if he does, it still won’t matter.
Elle has some very heavy frustration to work out.
---- ---- ---- ----
It is not a lonely drive back because Mohinder does not think about how alone he really is. He instead thinks about his family’s reaction, debates what he will tell Noah, and occasionally--without meaning to-- he thinks of Elle.
He wonders if she didn’t know. Or if she honestly did not, then he wonders why she took the time to help him.
Occasionally his fingers wander to his lips.
The landscape blinds him after a time. Speeding fast enough he can turn it into a blur so steady and monotone that he sometimes doubts he is moving at all.
But he is making good time, and with the windows down he cannot even hear the engine as it sputters and protests, bringing him to a stop.
Between curses in his native language, Mohinder eyes the dashboard.
None of the dials look anything short of normal. His odometer even tells him that he is about halfway home already.
Speedometer had of course been rising and falling with the gas pedal, and the fuel gage is-
Mohinder lets out a shocked noise-choked down as far as dignity can manage.
The fuel gage, so damn simple, has read full this entire time. Not once in the past 500 miles or so has it fallen or risen. It has been constant, like the heat and his guilt.
There was never enough gas to get them home. Or rather, to get him home; they’d baited him into this. With another four miles to the nearest gas station, a distance he knows he cannot walk on the small amount of water in his system, and with the Company so cleverly deciding to build this formula in a horrid-cactus free-area, Mohinder is prepared to bet that in about five hours he can expect a helicopter. Yes, they would wait until just before sundown, just before things began to cool off.
He wonders if Elle was in on this. But Bob couldn’t possibly understand how Mohinder would react to the order. Mohinder had been careful, had worked his way back into the Company like a worm-lying through his teeth--letting them think he really was as dedicated as the Company psychologist had been paid to tell them he was.
No, Elle is only alive now (presumably) because Mohinder left without putting that damn bullet in her skull.
The bastards set them both up; he had been the one to walk into it.
And he had been so close.
A switch of cars, a hotel, another few miles and Molly would have been hugging him. He would have been home.
Mohinder Suresh lays his head down on the steering wheel, and weighs his very few options, wondering who will be in the copter that comes to finish him off.